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Augustine, The City ofGodviS<br />

2.2 Deities of different types<br />

that oversaw the Roman wedding and the consummation of marriage. The<br />

passage (intentionally) makes the divine involvement look absurd. But there is<br />

in fact no reason to suppose that the deities listed here played any significant<br />

part in everyday Roman religious experience. Most of them are not known<br />

from any other source. Augustine may well have found them all collected in<br />

the work of some pagan scholar - as part of an academic exercise in theology,<br />

rather than as any reflection of everyday practice.<br />

Other extracts from Augustine's critique of pagan deities are given at 13.9.<br />

See further: Vol. 1, 227, 261, 310; Warde Fowler (1911) 158-64; Dumczil<br />

(1970) 33-8\<br />

When a man and a woman are joined in marriage the god Jugatinus is called in. That may be tolerable. But then the bride has to be led home. So the<br />

god Domiducus is called in too. And to keep her<br />

at home, there's the god Domitius. To see that she stays with her husband, the goddess<br />

Manturna is thrown in as well. Is anything more needed? Spare<br />

our human modesty! Once some decent privacy has been arranged, just let the natural<br />

urge of flesh and blood do the rest. Why is the bedroom packed with a crowd of deities,<br />

when even the bride's attendants withdraw? The reason for this crowd is not to increase<br />

our concern for modesty by their imagined presence, but so that with their help the bride<br />

may lose her virginity without any difficulty - even though she has the weakness of the<br />

female sex and the timidity of any novice. That's why the goddess Virginiensis turns up, and father-god Subigus

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