The Story of Juturna, Goddess of Fountains

At a Glance

Central figures: Juturna, a nymph of Latium who became goddess of fountains and springs; Jupiter, who took her and granted her immortality; Turnus, her mortal brother and king of the Rutulians.
Setting: Latium and the banks of the river Numicius, in the age when Aeneas arrived in Italy; the sources are Virgil’s Aeneid (Book XII), Ovid’s Fasti, and Varro’s antiquarian lists of Roman water cults.
The turn: Jupiter desired Juturna and, after she fled him, enlisted the other nymphs to prevent her escape; he took her and compensated her with dominion over all flowing waters and eternal life.
The outcome: When her brother Turnus faced Aeneas in single combat, Juturna intervened to delay the duel, but Jupiter sent a Fury to drive her back; Turnus fell, and Juturna plunged into her own spring, unable to die and unable to save him.
The legacy: A sacred pool called the Lacus Juturnae stood in the Roman Forum at the foot of the Palatine, where the state drew water for official sacrifices and where the Dioscuri were said to have watered their horses after the Battle of Lake Regillus.

The spring rose between the Temple of Castor and the slope of the Palatine, and it never went dry. In high summer, when the Tiber shrank to a yellow crawl and the aqueducts ran thin, the pool called Lacus Juturnae still held clear water, cold enough to sting the hand. Priests drew from it for sacrificial rites. Generals washed their faces in it before triumphs. Ordinary people, too, dipped clay cups into its surface and drank, though no one could say exactly why the water tasted different from other water - cleaner, older, as if it had been underground a long time.

The Romans knew a goddess lived in it. Her name was Juturna, and her story was not a happy one.

The Nymph of the Numicius

Juturna was born mortal, or nearly so - a nymph of Latium, daughter of Daunus, sister to a prince named Turnus who ruled the Rutulians from their hill town of Ardea. She lived near the river Numicius, that small stream in the coastal plain south of Rome where the old Latin towns clustered and where treaties between peoples were sworn over sacrificial pigs. The springs she tended fed into the river, and the local farmers knew her as the presence that kept the water flowing even in drought.

Jupiter noticed her. This was never fortunate. He came after her in whatever form he chose - the sources do not specify, though Ovid in the Fasti gives the account with characteristic brevity. Juturna ran. She dove into her own streams, hid among the reeds, moved from spring to spring across the marshlands of Latium. Jupiter, not accustomed to being refused, called on every water nymph in the region. He told them to block her passage, to close the banks against her, to refuse her shelter in their pools and rivers. One by one the nymphs obeyed, because one does not defy the king of the gods over another nymph’s trouble.

Juturna had nowhere left to go. Jupiter took her.

The Compensation

Afterward - and this is the Roman detail, the transactional element that separates these stories from their Greek equivalents - Jupiter offered payment. He made Juturna immortal. He gave her numen over all springs and fountains, all moving fresh water in Latium and eventually in Rome itself. She would never age, never sicken, never die.

Juturna accepted, or did not refuse, which in the vocabulary of Roman religion amounted to the same thing. She descended into her springs and became the thing she had hidden in. Water was her body now, and her consciousness ran through every fountain that bore her name. The farmers at the Numicius still poured offerings to her. A shrine grew beside the spring.

It was an adequate arrangement - the sort of divine contract Romans understood - until the war came.

Turnus at Laurentum

Aeneas arrived in Latium with his Trojans, his household gods, and the promise of a kingdom. King Latinus offered him his daughter Lavinia. Turnus, who had been promised Lavinia first, would not accept the insult. He raised the Rutulians and their allies and went to war.

Juturna watched from her waters. She was a goddess now, bound to no mortal calendar, but Turnus was still her brother. When the fighting settled into a single combat between Turnus and Aeneas - the duel that would decide everything - Juturna could not stay in her spring.

Virgil gives her a long scene in Book XII of the Aeneid. She disguised herself as Turnus’s charioteer, a man named Metiscus, and drove the chariot herself, wheeling Turnus away from Aeneas whenever the Trojan closed in. She broke the terms of the truce. She stirred the Rutulian ranks back into fighting when the single combat should have settled the matter. She did everything a goddess of water could do on a dry battlefield - and it was not enough.

The Dira

Jupiter sent one of the Dirae - the Furies who served as his enforcers - down from Olympus in the shape of a screaming owl. The bird dove at Turnus’s face, beat its wings against his shield, filled his ears with a sound like tearing metal. Turnus staggered. His sword broke. He looked for another weapon and found nothing.

Juturna recognized the bird for what it was. She knew, in that moment, what Jupiter’s compensation actually cost. She was immortal. She would watch her brother die and go on existing. She could not follow him to the kingdom of the manes, could not join the shades, could not even grieve as mortals grieve - with the knowledge that grief ends.

She spoke - and Virgil gives her the words, the only speech a water goddess makes in the entire Aeneid:

What can I do now, Turnus? What is left to me? By what skill can I hold your daylight open? Can I set myself against this thing? Now, now I leave the battle lines.

She tore the ribbons from her hair and threw herself into her spring. The water closed over her. On the field, Aeneas drove his spear through Turnus’s body, and Turnus died, and the war was over.

The Pool in the Forum

Centuries passed. Rome grew from a cluster of huts on the Palatine to a city that swallowed all of Latium and then all of Italy. Juturna’s spring migrated with the city’s growth - or rather, the Romans found a spring at the foot of the Palatine, in the Forum itself, and named it for her. The Lacus Juturnae became one of the sacred water sources of the state.

After the Battle of Lake Regillus - the fight that secured the young Republic against the Latin League, around 496 BCE - two horsemen appeared at the pool, watered their horses, and washed the dust of battle from their faces. They were recognized as Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, and their temple was built adjacent to Juturna’s spring. The pool and the temple shared the same precinct, and for generations the Lacus Juturnae served as the place where official Rome drew water for its most solemn rituals.

Juturna was there, in the water, the whole time. Immortal, as Jupiter had promised. Unable to die, as Jupiter had arranged. The spring never went dry.