Tutilina

Tutilina (also Tutelina, Tutulina)[2] was in Roman religion a tutelary goddess, apparently responsible for protecting crops brought in during harvest time.

Representation of Tutilina (mis-spelled CVCVLINA) with winnowing shovel in a sixteenth-century Flemish tapestry[1]

Etymology

The meaning of the name is sometimes given as 'protectress',[3] but uncertainty as to the vowel-lengths (which may moreover have been different in different writers' usages) leaves the etymology of the name subject to debate.[4][5]

Role in Republican Roman belief

Marcus Terentius Varro's fragmentary text De lingua Latina mentions that one Porcius said that the earlier Roman poet Ennius 'coluisse Tutilinae loca' ('dwelt in the locality of Tutilina').[6] This indicates that Tutilina gave her name to part of Rome; Otto Skutsch argued specifically through a close analysis of the passage that there was a Porta Tutilinae ('Gate of Tutilina') in Rome's walls,[4] and that this name was perhaps an earlier name for the Porta Capena.[7] Another work by Varro, the fragmentary Satirae Menippeae, mentions that Tutilina could also be invoked during a siege.[3][8] Pliny the Elder's Naturalis historia, Tertullian's De spectaculis, and Macrobius's Saturnalia all attest to statues of three goddesses, including Tutilina, in the Circus Maximus. Tertullian (c. 155–c. 220 CE) was a Christian, and his De spectaculis explored whether Christians should attend such spectacles and the circus or theatre. His description of the Circus Maximus says:

Every ornament of the circus is a temple by itself. The eggs are regarded as sacred to Castor and Pollux by people who do not feel ashamed to believe the story of their origin from the egg made fertile by the swan, Jupiter. The dolphins spout water in honor of Neptune; the columns bear aloft images of Seia, so called from sementatio ['sowing']; of Messia, so called as a deity of messis ['reaping']; and of Tutulina, so called as "tutelary spirit" of the crops.[9]

Reception

Augustine of Hippo's De civitate Dei mentions Tutilina alongside other gods and goddesses in a passage complaining about the number of pagan deities:

how is it possible in one passage of this book to record all the names of the gods and goddesses that they were scarcely able to find room for in the huge volumes in which they divided up the services of the deities among the departments, assigning each to his own? They did not reach the conclusion that they should put some god in charge of all their land, but assigned fields to the goddess Rusina, mountain peaks to the god Jugatinus, hills to the goddess Collatina, and valleys to Vallonia. Nor could they even find a single Segetia who was worthy to be entrusted once for all with the grain in the fields (segetes), but as long as the seed was under ground they chose to have the goddess Seia in charge, then when it was above ground and moving toward harvest, the goddess Segetia, and when the grain was harvested and stored away, they gave the goddess Tutulina the job of guarding it safely.[10]

In his Summa predicantium, composed in the 1360s, John Bromyard named a demon who had since the thirteenth century been reputed to introduce mistakes into people's psalm-singing as Titivillus (and who later came to be seen as a demon who causes scribal errors). Other sources include such spellings as Tintillus, Tantillus, Tintinillus, Titivilarius and Titivilitarius. André Vernet argued that this name originated as a masculine variant, Tutilinus, of Tutilina, invented by medieval scholars on the basis of their knowledge of this pagan goddess through Augustine's City of God.[11]

Tutelina Mill, Great Welnetham, built in the nineteenth century, shares its name with the goddess.

See also

References
  1. Edith Appleton Standen, European Post-Medieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2 vols (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985), I 50.
  2. Tertullian, Disciplinary, Moral and Ascetical Works, trans. by Rudolph Arbesmann, Emily Joseph Daly, and Edwin A. Quain, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, 40 (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1959), p. 67 (fn. 8).
  3. Georges Dumézil, Camillus: A Study of Indo-European Religion as Roman History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 248 (citing De spectaculis ch. 8.3), ISBN 9780520028418.
  4. O. Skutsch, 'On Three Fragments of Porcius Licinus and on the Tutiline Gate', Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 17 (1970), 120–23.
  5. J. Loicq, review of G. Dumézil (G.), Fêtes romaines d'été et d'automne, suivi de Dix questions romaines, Revue belge de Philologie et d'Histoire Année, 55 (1977), 524–27 (p. 527).
  6. https://www.loebclassics.com/view/varro-latin_language/1938/pb_LCL333.153.xml?readMode=reader pp. 152-53.
  7. Otto Skutsch, H. D. Jocelyn, Jan Hendrik Waszink, Ennius (Fondation Hardt, 1972), p. 165; ISBN 9782600044103
  8. Roger D. Woodard, Myth, Ritual, and the Warrior in Roman and Indo-European Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 212; ISBN 9781107022409.
  9. Tertullian, Disciplinary, Moral and Ascetical Works, trans. by Rudolph Arbesmann, Emily Joseph Daly, and Edwin A. Quain, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, 40 (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1959), p. 67 (citing Tertullian chapter 8, verse 3, Pliny 18.2.8, and Macrobius 1.16.8); ISBN 9780813211404.
  10. Quoted from Valentina Arena, 'The God Liber and Republican Notions of Libertas in the Late Roman Republic', in ‘Libertas’ and ‘Res Publica’ in the Roman Republic: Ideas of Freedom and Roman Politics, ed. by Catalina Balmaceda, Impact of Empire, 37 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 55–83 (p. 57, citing De civitate Dei IV.8) ISBN 9789004441699 doi:10.1163/9789004441699_005.
  11. André Vernet, 'Titvillus, "Démon des copistes"', Bulletin de la Société nationale des Antiquaires de France (1958-59), 155-157.
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