Abstract
The ritual of invoking the gods of an enemy city in order to deprive the enemy of their support in war is attested only a few times in Roman history. All of these cases date from the Republican period, the fi rst of which is described by Livy in his story of the capture of Veii by the Romans after a long siege in 396 BC. The use of evocation to invoke the Carthaginian goddess Tanit, whom the Romans associated with Juno Caelestis, is also mentioned by Macrobius in his account of the capture and destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. Furthermore, an inscription discovered at Bozkir in 1970 mentions a vow made by Publius Servilius Vatia at the capture of Old Isaura in 75 BC, which is close in form to the rite of evocation. However, the listed sources concerning this ritual date back to diff erent eras and are poorly consistent with each other. Several attempts have been made by scholars to question the historicity of the evocatio deorum rite in general or its use in the specifi c case of Veii. The fact is that the details of the rite in Macrobius and Verrius Flaccus do not quite correspond to how Titus Livius describes the transfer of Juno Regina from Veii. However, one cannot ignore the fact that Roman grammarians had at their disposal a signifi cant corpus of monuments that are lost to us and, in particular, Macrobius gives a double reference, indicating as the primary source of his description a certain Furius (presumably Lucius Furius Philus, an author of the 2nd c. BC, who could well have had access to materials from the priestly archives). The purpose of this article is to try to fi nd additional arguments in support of the traditional point of view, as well as to demonstrate the historicity of the use of evocation in the case of Juno Regina of Veii.
Keywords
Roman history, Republic, Roman religion, evocatio, Veii, Juno.