Mamurius Veturius

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Mamurius Veturius was a legendary blacksmith at the time of the Roman king Numa Pompilius , on whose orders he is said to have made eleven copies of the holy shield ( ancile ) that floated down from heaven . As a reward, his name was then included in the Carmen Saliare , the cult song of the Salier priesthood . The elegiac Properz also ascribes the creation of a bronze statue of the god Vertumnus to him.

Since Mamurius Veturius first appeared towards the end of the 1st century BC BC is mentioned in the sources, it is possible that the figure represents a construct from the late Republican or Augustan period. The name could have been invented to interpret the no longer understandable formula Mamuri Veturi in Carmen saliare aitiologically as the vocative of a personal name. However, there were still members of the gens Veturia , ie the family of the Veturians, in Rome during the imperial period , whose oldest representatives date back to the 6th century BC. Can be traced back. It cannot therefore be ruled out that they had kept written records from ancient times which they deliberately made public in the course of Augustus' restorative policy. The relatively late appearance of Mamurius Veturius in the surviving sources therefore does not necessarily speak against a historical core of the legend or the possibility that a person with this name actually existed in the early Roman period.

In late antiquity there was the so-called mamuralia , a kind of winter driving in which a man dressed in fur was driven out of the city. Research has not yet been able to determine whether this festival was related to Mamurius or whether the similarity of the names is purely coincidental.

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literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Properz 4,2,61
  2. ^ Johannes Lydos De mensibus 4.49