As you read this, I’ll be somewhere along the Niobrara River in northern Nebraska, paying homage to Jim Harrison, Mari Sandoz, and Crazy Horse. In the view that everyone needs a break, I’d like to revisit the very first pieces I wrote for World Bookcase, which follow, accompanied by a brace of new pieces.
January, that month of new beginnings, is the province of the Roman God Janus, whose name comes from the Latin word meaning “gateway” or “archway.” Janus had a habit of looking over his shoulder at where he came from, a backward stretch that is not hard to do with the open view an archway provides. The god of gates and doors as well—his title was janitor, a word that has since lost its oomph—Janus was once a very powerful presence in the Roman pantheon, with a temple devoted to him at the place where the Roman and the Julian forums met at the end of a long road populated by brothels, bars, and bookstores, things that I suppose go together, at least if you take a point of view learned from François Rabelais. The conjunction apparently offended high-minded Romans, though, so that a few hundred years on, during the early empire, the temple, built by Rome’s second kind, was torn down. No one is exactly sure where it once stood. What we do know, to trust Plutarch and some of the other ancient Roman historians, was that the gates of the temple were closed in times of peace and open in times of war. It tells us something about the nature of Rome that the gates were closed only once over the course of hundreds of years.
Gates, doors, porticos, archways, and other entrances were important in the religion of ancient Rome. Borrowing from the Etruscans, the Romans assigned household gods to such charged places, the lares and penates. These minor deities could be impish, or they could be quite scary, as with a medusa head that once guarded the entrance to the ancient Etruscan city of Veii. I keep a laminated postcard of that medusa at the door of my office, figuring that if it was good enough for the ancients, it might prove useful in warding off latter-day evils.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to World Bookcase to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.