Juno

(European mythology)

In Roman mythology, the queen of heaven and wife of Jupiter. Her origin is obscure, but she seems to have been an Italian mother goddess. At Rome she was worshipped along with Jupiter and Minerva. As the genius of womanhood, she ensured fecundity, childbirth, and marriage. The month of June, once called Junonius, was considered to be the most favourable month for weddings. At Veii, an Etruscan city, Juno had the second name Regina, ‘queen’. Later she was identified with the Greek goddess Hera.

Jūno, in Roman religion, the wife of Jupiter; she was an ancient and important Italian goddess, resembling the Greek Hera with whom she was identified, closely associated with the life of women, hence sometimes connected with the moon, with fertility, and with the sanctity of marriage. She had many distinctive names indicating her various attributes, e.g. Lucīna, ‘she who brings [the child] to light’, as the goddess presiding over child-birth, or Opigena, ‘who brings help to women in childbirth’. But she also became a goddess of the state; as Juno Regina (‘queen’) she forms one of the Capitoline triad with Jupiter and Minerva. She had one Roman myth related by Ovid: being annoyed at the birth of Athena without a mother, she determined to produce a child without a father; at the touch of a herb produced for her by Flora, she became pregnant and bore Mars, the god of war. (In Greek myth Hera, the wife of Zeus, is also the mother of Arēs, the god of war, but Zeus is the father; the child she produces without male assistance is Hephaestus.) The Roman story may have been invented to explain the important festival of the Matronalia, confined to women, on the first of March, the month dedicated to Mars. ‘Moneta’ was another of her titles, perhaps meaning ‘remembrancer’ (i.e. the goddess should remember her previous favours to Rome). The temple of Juno Moneta stood on the northern summit of the Capitoline hill; it had been vowed during a war in 345 BC and dedicated in the following year, and was said to have replaced an older shrine where the sacred geese had been kept (the geese perhaps being originally kept for divination); see MANLIUS CAPITOLINUS. An adjoining building contained the Roman mint: thus from moneta is derived the word ‘money’. See also LIBRI LINTEI. There was a temple to Juno in the Campus Martius and another on the Aventine. The latter was dedicated in 392 BC by M. Furius Camillus, the conqueror of Veii, who placed in the temple a wooden statue of Juno brought from the captured city. For Juno in the sense of a woman's tutelary spirit see GENIUS.