Page "Diana (mythology)" Paragraph 26

Diana was worshipped at a festival on August 13, when King Servius Tullius, himself born a slave, dedicated her temple on the Aventine Hill in the mid-6th century BC.

Being placed on the Aventine, and thus outside the pomerium, meant that Diana's cult essentially remained a foreign one, like that of Bacchus ; she was never officially transferred to Rome as Juno was after the sack of Veii.

It seems that her cult originated in Aricia, where her priest, the Rex Nemorensis remained.

There the simple open-air fane was held in common by the Latin tribes, which Rome aspired to weld into a league and direct.

Diana of the wood was soon thoroughly Hellenized, " a process which culminated with the appearance of Diana beside Apollo in the first lectisternium at Rome ".

Diana was regarded with great reverence by lower-class citizens and slaves ; slaves could receive asylum in her temples.

This fact is of difficult interpretation.

Georg Wissowa proposed the explanation that it might be because the first slaves of the Romans must have been Latins of the neighbouring tribes.

However in Ephesus too there was the same custom of the asylum ( ασυλιον ).