Carmenta

Summary

Carmenta is a prophetess from Arcadia and the mother of Evander, who became for the Romans a goddess called on at childbirth, with a festival in January and a gate in the walls of Rome that bears her name. In Ovid's Fasti she is a woman who, when the god's fire entered her soul, sang prophetic verse; she foretold the troubles that awaited her son and herself, and when he was exiled with her from Arcadia and wept, she told him: check your tears and bear your fortune like a man; you were not banished for a crime, an offended god drove you out; Cadmus, driven from Tyre, endured the same and settled an exile in Greece, and every land is a homeland to the brave as the sea is to the fish.

When their ship entered the Tiber, Carmenta saw the bank and the scattered huts; she stood at the stern with streaming hair, stopped the steersman's hand, stretched her arms to the right bank and stamped three times on the deck, and Evander could hardly hold her back from leaping ashore. Then she said: hail, gods of the promised land, and hail, land that will give new gods to heaven; shall stately walls hide these hills, and shall the whole earth take its law from this spot? Trojan ships will come, and a woman will be the cause of a new war. Then she called to her grandson: Pallas, why do you put on those fatal arms? And she foretold Aeneas carrying Troy's sacred things and his father, the house of Augustus, and her own worship at lasting altars. Fasti 1.497–542. She told her son that Hercules would be made a god and that a great altar would be raised to him on that spot, and when Hercules killed Cacus, Evander recognised him by his mother's prophecy. Livy says the people of that district revered Evander because he brought them the wonder of writing, and revered him still more because they held his mother a goddess who foretold the future, before the Sibyl came to Italy.

Hyginus says, in his chapter on the first inventors, that Hermes brought the Greek letters to Egypt, Cadmus took them from Egypt to Greece, Evander in exile from Arcadia brought them to Italy, and his mother Carmenta changed them into Latin letters, fifteen in number.

Her festival, the Carmentalia, fell on 11 and 15 January. Ovid tells that the women of Rome used to ride in carriages called carpenta; when this was taken from them they refused to bear children, the senate restored their right, and two festivals of Carmenta were set up so that boys and girls would be born. No leather may enter her shrine, so that her fire is not defiled by the skins of slaughtered beasts. Two names are invoked with her: Porrima, who sings of what is past, and Postverta, who sings of what is to come. Fasti 1.617–636. Plutarch says some take Carmenta for a Fate presiding over human birth, which is why mothers honour her, and others for Evander's Arcadian prophetess, who uttered oracles in verse and so was called Carmenta, since carmina is the Roman word for verses, her own name being Nicostrate.

The idea her stories turn on is that Carmenta says what will come out before it comes out: she tells her son what he will meet in exile, tells the land what it will become, tells Hercules that he will be a god, and stands by the mother at childbirth. Her speech is in verse, which is why the Romans trace her name to carmen, the chanted song and sacred formula. Then spoken words are turned into written letters, and she becomes the one who gives the Latins their alphabet.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue on a reading proposed on the method, since the project's essays do not read it. Carmenta comes from carmen, song, as Ovid himself says. De Vaan says carmen was canmen, with the first n changed to r to avoid two n's, -men is a suffix and the root is can-, the verb canō, to sing or chant. That leaves k and n, which we read as kahana: the kāhin in the Arabic dictionaries is one who pronounces on the unseen and tells what will happen, and the soothsayers spoke in rhymed prose, sajʿ. Carmenta in Virgil is "the soothsaying prophetess, who first sang" Rome's future, and in Plutarch a prophetess who spoke her oracles in verse. The Arabic h stands where de Vaan sets a laryngeal in the Indo-European verb *kh₂n-, to sing.

Linguistic Root

De Vaan derives carmen from canmen and gives the Salian hymn, the song the priests of Mars sang while carrying the shields that fell in the reign of Numa, as the oldest witness of the verb canō. For the Indo-European root he hesitates between *kh₂n-, with a laryngeal between k and n, and *kan- without one, which he says would not be Indo-European. If the first is right, the word began with three letters, k, a throat sound and n, the letters of kahana in order. Throat sounds do not survive in Latin, as the Juthoor tables say for ʿ, ḥ and kh, and Latin c answers Arabic k.

Tāj al-ʿArūs gives kahana lahu, he pronounced on the unseen for him. Ibn al-Athīr says the kāhin deals in reports of what will happen in time to come and claims to know secrets, and al-Fattanī says the soothsayers made their sayings attractive with rhymed phrases that pleased the hearers. In Hebrew kōhēn is the priest who serves the altar. So in Arabic the word is knowledge of the unseen spoken in measured words, and in Hebrew service in the temple, and Carmenta has both: she prophesies in verse, and she had a priest of her own at Rome. The limit of the reading is that the Latin verb means to sing and the Arabic to tell the unseen; they meet in the measured speech in which the unseen is told. Plutarch gives another Latin explanation, from carens mente, "out of her mind", for the frenzy that seized her when she prophesied.

Key Mythic Narratives

The gate and the altar

Evander walks Aeneas over the Palatine and shows him Carmenta's altar and the gate the Romans call the Carmental Gate, which Virgil calls an ancient honour to the soothsaying nymph who first sang of the future of Aeneas's descendants and the glory of Pallanteum. Through this gate the Fabii marched to the battle in which they perished, and the Romans came to call it the Wicked Gate.

Themis in Dionysius

Dionysius says Evander was the son of Hermes and an Arcadian nymph whom the Greeks call Themis and say was inspired, while the early historians of Rome call her in their own language Carmenta; the Arcadians chose the Palatine on her advice and built the temple of Lycaean Pan in the Lupercal cave at her direction.

Two Carmentes

Lewis and Short report from Varro that the Romans worshipped two Carmentes under particular names, Postverta and Prorsa, the backward-looking and the forward-looking; in Ovid they are Postverta and Porrima, who sing of what is to come and of what is past.

Symbolic Reading

The Roman rereading essay does not read Carmenta, but it reads the founding myths as a coded history of the city: Romulus as military force, Vesta as the sacred land. On that reading Carmenta is the city's memory before there was a city: a foreign woman who stands on the Tiber bank and says what will rise on it, and gives its people letters to write with. Her festival belongs to women and childbirth, so the birth of a child and the birth of the city meet in her.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The goddess of writing in Sumer is Nisaba, goddess of grain and of writing, "chief scribe of An", and scribes closed their tablets with "Nisaba be praised". Carmenta is like her a woman who joins writing to fertility, but Nisaba keeps accounts and records, while Carmenta carries letters and prophesies.

Hyginus's chain begins with Hermes, the Egyptians' Thoth, scribe of the gods; passes through Cadmus, whose Phoenician companions, Herodotus says, taught the Greeks their letters; and ends with Carmenta. Ovid himself sets Evander's exile beside Cadmus's exile from Tyre, so in both stories the letters travel with exiles.

Carmenta's part at childbirth is like that of the Egyptian Taweret, who guards mother and child, though Taweret is drawn as a pregnant hippopotamus and drives evil away from the birth, while Carmenta has no image in the texts but her voice prophesying. Plutarch makes her a Fate of birth, as the Moirai allot a man his portion on the day he is born. She belongs with the culture heroes who give people writing.