The Myth of Cloacina, Goddess of the Sewers

At a Glance

• Central figures: Cloacina, goddess of the Cloaca Maxima and purification; Titus Tatius, Sabine king who co-ruled Rome with Romulus; the Sabine and Roman women who ended the war between their peoples.
• Setting: Rome, from the earliest years of Romulus’s city through the age of the kings and into the Republic; the valley between the Palatine and Capitoline hills, where the great sewer ran beneath the Forum.
• The turn: After the Romans and Sabines made peace through the intercession of the stolen Sabine women, both peoples purified themselves with myrtle branches at a site in the marshy lowland - and the shrine they built there became sacred to Cloacina.
• The outcome: The shrine endured for centuries, sitting directly above the great drain that Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus would later build into the Cloaca Maxima. Cloacina’s domain expanded from ritual purification to guardianship of the sewer itself and the cleanliness of the city.
• The legacy: A small open-air shrine - the Sacrum Cloacinae - stood in the Forum near the Basilica Aemilia well into the imperial period. Her image appeared on Republican coins. The Cloaca Maxima still runs beneath Rome.

The war was already over when the real work began. Roman men and Sabine men stood in the marshy ground between the Palatine and Capitoline, still bleeding, still armed, and the women who had forced the truce - seized from their Sabine families, married now to Roman husbands, holding infants fathered by their captors - moved between the lines. The dead lay where they had fallen. The mud stank. And someone, one of the priests perhaps, or Titus Tatius himself, called for myrtle.

They needed purification. Not forgiveness - Romans did not think in those terms - but a ritual cleansing that would allow two peoples who had just been killing each other to share a city. The myrtle branches were cut. The two sides faced each other across the wet ground, stripped their armor, and performed the rite. Pliny records the act plainly: they purified themselves with myrtle, and the place where they did it became sacred. The numen that presided over that cleansing had no face, no family among the Olympians, no story of birth or marriage. She was simply Cloacina - from cluere, to cleanse.

The Myrtle and the Marsh

The valley between the hills was not yet the Forum. In Romulus’s time it was a swamp, fed by streams running down from the Quirinal and the slopes of the Capitoline. Water pooled there. Reeds grew. The ground squelched underfoot and bred fevers in summer. It was exactly the kind of place where Romans felt the presence of a numen - not a god with a marble temple and a feast day, but a power that inhered in the water, in the act of washing, in the boundary between foul and clean.

Cloacina took root there because that was where the purification happened. Titus Tatius, according to the antiquarians, either built or consecrated the first shrine on the spot. It was modest - an open-air enclosure, barely more than a sacred boundary marker. But it sat at the exact point where the low ground collected the runoff from the surrounding hills, and this accident of geography would determine everything that followed.

The myrtle itself mattered. Venus claimed the myrtle too, and later writers sometimes identified Cloacina as an aspect of Venus - Venus Cloacina, the purifier. Pliny thought the connection was real. Others were less certain. What is clear is that the myrtle branches used in the rite after the Sabine war were not decorative. They were functional. Myrtle was credited with cleansing properties, the ability to drive out pollution from the body and from sacred ground. The women who had stopped the battle were themselves agents of purification, standing between two contaminated armies. Cloacina received the act and held it.

The Great Drain

Two centuries passed. The shrine stayed where it was while Rome grew around it. The swamp did not drain itself. It festered. It flooded after heavy rain, and the stagnant water bred disease and filth that no amount of myrtle could address.

The solution came from the kings - not the early Latin kings of Romulus’s line, but the Tarquins, who built like Etruscans. Tarquinius Priscus, the first Etruscan king of Rome, began the project. His grandson Tarquinius Superbus - the last king, the tyrant - finished it, driving the Roman people to forced labor in the tunnels until they cursed his name. The result was the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer, an arched stone channel wide enough for a cart to pass through, running from the low ground of the Forum down to the Tiber.

It drained the swamp. It carried away waste, rainwater, offal from the markets, runoff from the baths and latrines. And it ran directly beneath Cloacina’s shrine.

The coincidence - or the inevitability - transformed her. She had been a goddess of ritual purification, of myrtle branches and the cleansing of warriors after battle. Now she became the goddess of the sewer. Not symbolically. Literally. The Romans did not see this as a demotion. The Cloaca Maxima was one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in the city. Without it, the Forum would have remained a fever marsh. Without it, Rome could not have grown. The drain was the precondition for civic life, and the numen that guarded it was performing essential service - as essential as Vesta guarding the flame or Janus guarding the door.

The Sacrum Cloacinae

The shrine survived the expulsion of the kings. It survived the Gallic sack in 390 BCE. It stood in the Forum near the Basilica Aemilia, small and old and open to the sky, while grander temples rose on every side. Visitors to Rome sometimes walked past it without understanding what it was. There was no cult statue in the usual sense - just the sacred enclosure, marking the spot.

But the Romans did not forget her. During the Republic, Cloacina’s image appeared on coins minted by the gens Mussida. The coins showed two female figures standing on a platform that represented the shrine, one of them holding what appears to be a flower. The minting was a deliberate act of civic memory - someone in the family claimed connection to the cult, or to the site, and wanted it recorded in silver.

The aediles - the magistrates responsible for public works, markets, streets, and drains - would have overseen whatever rites the shrine required. Maintaining the Cloaca Maxima was part of their duty, and Cloacina’s goodwill was part of that maintenance. When the sewer backed up, when floods pushed the Tiber’s waters back through the drain and into the Forum, the Romans understood this as more than an engineering failure. The numen of the place had been disturbed. Something was out of order.

What Ran Beneath

The sewer outlasted the Republic, the emperors, the invasions. Agrippa expanded it under Augustus, reportedly sailing a boat through the tunnels to inspect the stonework. Later emperors repaired and extended the system. The original Etruscan arches held. Cloacina’s shrine eventually disappeared - the sources go quiet, the stones were absorbed into later construction - but the drain kept running.

What the Romans understood, and built a goddess to embody, was simple enough: a city lives or dies by what it does with its waste. The numen of the sewer was not a joke or an embarrassment. She was the invisible precondition, the force that kept the Forum dry, the markets clean, the fevers at bay. Every Roman who walked across the paving stones of the Forum walked above her domain and owed her something, whether they stopped at the old shrine or not.

The Cloaca Maxima still empties into the Tiber. The water still runs.