Janus (mythology)

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Janus statue
Coin with Janus head
Temple of Janus on a sesterce of Nero
Janus Arch

Janus (Latin Ianus ) was the Roman god of the beginning and the end. He is one of the oldest Roman gods and part of the original Roman mythology . He is a purely Roman god and has no equivalent in Greek mythology . His cult was well known in Rome, but was also found in some Roman colonies, such as Croatia on the Adriatic.

myth

His origin is indeterminate, various legends describe him as a child of Saturnus and Entorias .

He is said to have ruled as king over Lazio in the golden age and lived on the Ianiculum . It is also said that he took in Saturnus fleeing from Jupiter . Venilia is said to have been his wife. His daughter Canens was married to King Picus of Laurentum .

Ovid also tells of Cardea , who was originally a nymph in the grove of Helernus on the Tiber. She played a game with her admirers, whom she sent ahead to the place of a rendezvous, only to slip away from them as soon as they let them out of their sight. But that didn't work with the double-faced Janus, and so Cardea had to surrender to him. Janus gave her control over thresholds, door hinges and door handles in gratitude.

A mythical tale by the pseudo-Plutarch makes him the brother of Entoria , who was placed under the stars by Saturnus.

presentation

The earliest images of Janus (on the coins that Servius Tullius had minted ) show him with a double face, looking forwards and backwards, hence the nicknames Geminus (“the double”), Bifrons (“the two-faced”), Biceps (“the Two-headed "). He appears four-headed on Hadrian's coins , hence Quadriformis ("the four- faced") and Quadrifrons ("the four-faced"). The most frequent depiction of the god, however, was possibly based on the Greek model of certain images of Hermes and Apollo , the double herms , that is, double-headed. The so-called Janus head is therefore a symbol of ambivalence (something is "Janus head" = something is "pointing from two opposite sides"). According to a very common depiction, Janus counted 300 stones in his right hand and 65 stones in his left hand, which indicates the division of the year into 365 days. In other pictures he had a staff in his right hand and one or more keys in his left, symbolizing the violence of the guardian of the gates of heaven, the mover of the hinges of the universe, the unlocker and locker of the sky, the clouds, the land and the sea (hence Claviger, Clusius, Patulcius).

Janus embodies winter in allegorical depictions of the four seasons.

In Republican times, the head of Janus appeared on the obverse of the 1 As coin.

In Croatia, more precisely in Dalmatia, a votive tablet of Janus was found, confirming the cult there. The votive tablet of Quintus Valerius Philipus was found in Palanka and dedicated to Janus. An aedicula with a triangular gable field and corner acroteries is shown. In the center Janus is depicted in deep relief. He is shown head-on, barefoot, next to an altar, and standing in counter post. On a thick neck are two bearded Janus heads facing in opposite directions with different physiognomies. The god wears a pallium that only covers the hips and part of his left arm, over which the end is hung. In his right hand he holds a patera and in his left arm a cornucopia, a unique and unusual attribute of Janus.

meaning

Janus was originally a god of light and sun, the male counterpart of Jana or Diana , and only gradually became the god of all origins, the beginning and the end, the entrances and exits, the doors and the gates, the father of all things (also of the sources) and of all gods. Its name belongs to the same family of words as ianua , the Latin word for door and ianus for any unlocked arched passage. The month of January is named after him. All calendar dates that symbolized beginnings (so-called calendar dates ) were dedicated to him. The feast of Janus, the agonium , was celebrated on January 9th of the Roman calendar.

Janus symbolizes the duality in the eternal laws, such as creation / destruction, life / death, light / darkness, beginning / end, future / past, left / right, etc. He is the realization that everything divine always has an adversary . Both sides of the duality always elude an objective evaluation and are therefore neither good nor bad.

Janus was also revered as the inventor of agriculture, civil law, and worship. Janus was of particular importance for companies for which he was supposed to provide protection and support. In the case of sacrificial acts , the invocation of Janus began. He acted as a mediator between humans and gods.

cult

The most important sanctuary of Janus was the Temple of Janus in the Roman Forum . The construction of this temple was attributed to the legendary King Numa Pompilius , who is said to have instituted the service for Janus in Rome. Since Augustus , at the latest , who invoked older customs, it became customary to open the gates of the temple when Rome started a war and to close them when the conflict was victorious. The last emperor who is said to have opened the gates of the Temple of Jan is Gordian III. (238 to 244 AD).

The so-called Janus Arch in Rome is not a sanctuary that was consecrated to Janus, but a secular building ( quadrifrons ) that was wrongly interpreted as the Temple of Janus during the Renaissance .

Reception in the visual arts

Poussin's dance of life
Rubens Janus Temple

Janus was rarely depicted in the visual arts of modern times. A column with a Janus head appears on the left in Nicolas Poussin's “Dance of Life” (around 1638, Wallace Collection , London), a composition of various allegories of the time. In a similar context, Janus appears as a figure with two heads, one youthful and one senile, in the "Triumph of History over Time", a fresco by Anton Raphael Mengs (1772–1773, Vatican Library , Rome),

Two paintings by Louis de Boullogne (1681, Amiens , Musée de Beaux-Arts) and Charles André van Loo ("Auguste faissant fermer le temple de Janus", around 1750, Amiens, Musée de Beaux-Arts) marked the closure of the Janus Temple by Augustus on the subject. A painting by Peter Paul Rubens (1635, Hermitage , St. Petersburg ) shows a more allegorical representation of the same process .

Modern reception

The term Janus is also used in cases of Diprosopus ( Janus cat) or Siamese twins (Janiceps) when the affected person has two faces. Saturn's moon Janus was named after the Roman god on September 30, 1983 by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) . In cryptanalysis , the man-in-the-middle attack is also referred to as the Janus attack after the god .

Janus is also an alias for the villain Two-Face in the DC Comics .

In physics, the term Janus particles describes (nano) particles that are coated on two or more sides and have different physical properties on these sides.

The word Janus is used in linguistics (same word with opposite meaning).

In German administrative law one speaks symbolically of "Janus-faced" when an authority acts for two different legal entities. This applies in particular to the district offices (or the “ district administrator ”), which in most countries are both the district authority (as a municipality) and the lower state administrative authority (of the respective country).

literature

Web links

Commons : Janus (Mythology)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Macrobius Convivia primi diei Saturnaliorum 1, 7, 19-22.
  2. Ovid Metamorphoses 14.333–336
  3. Ovid Fasti 6, 101-130.
  4. ^ Pseudo-Plutarch • The Parallela Minora. In: Parallela Graeca et Romana purported to be by Plutarch as published in Vol. IV of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 193. University of Chicago , accessed on June 8, 2013 (English).
  5. Janus-headed in Duden
  6. Mirjana Sanader: The Janus cult in the provinces of the Roman Empire with special consideration of the iconography of two reliefs from Dalmatia and Dacia. In: Cristina-Georgeta Alexandrescu (ed.): Cult and Votive Monuments in the Roman Provinces. Proceedings of the 13th Internaţional Colloquium on Roman provincial art: Bucharest - Alba Iulia - Constanţa, 27th of May - 3rd June 2013. Mega, Cluj-Napoca 2015, ISBN 978-606-543-592-6 , pp. 139-148, online , accessed June 28, 2017.
  7. ^ Ovid Fasti 1, 318.
  8. Steve Granick, Shan Jiang, Qian Chen: Janus particles . In: Physics Today . 62, No. 7, 2009, pp. 68-69. bibcode : 2009PhT .... 62g..68G . doi : 10.1063 / 1.3177238 .
  9. ^ Georg Fuchs: The district administrator. Career paths, position, conduct of office and understanding of office. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2012, pp. 83-84.
  10. ^ Eva Menges, Robert Keller: The VwGO in cases , Verlag W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2010, Rn 46.