ABSTRACT
Over the course of the middle Republic, Feronia Diana had also had more and more to do with Artemis’ twin Apollo, culminating in their formal pairing in cult in the notionally Greek lectisternium of 217 BC. Diana’s association with the wilds and with mountainous areas is very prominent in Latin poetry, as for example Catullus’ description of her as ‘mistress of mountains and verdant woodlands, hidden glades and resounding rivers’. Concepts of sovereignty are bound up in the story concerning her temple on the Aventine hill, in which the Romans gained by trickery Diana’s blessing of empire. Under Augustus, Diana was also strongly affiliated to the worship of the Lares, another cult heavily marketed by the emperor – and another nod to domesticity and civilisation, in this goddess supposedly of the wilderness. Worshippers themselves constructed and reconstructed a god like Diana, building a flexible and adaptive deity who answered to their immediate religious requirements.
