Vegoia

Vegoia is the voice behind part of the Etrusca disciplina, the body of revealed lore that told the Etruscans how to found a city, site a shrine, read lightning and — the part that survives best — set and keep a boundary. Her prophecy was copied into the Roman land surveyors' handbooks, where it warns in vivid terms what befalls the man who moves a boundary stone. She is variously called a sibyl, a prophetess and a nymph, and she appears on a mirror as Lasa Vecuvia. The surviving text is dated by scholarship to about the time of the Social War, which dates the document rather than the figure.

Domains

• prophecy
• boundary

Powers

• to lay down the religiously correct method of founding cities and shrines and of fixing boundaries

Sources

• The prophecy of Vegoia, preserved in the corpus agrimensorum of the Roman land surveyors.
• Reference article 'Vegoia', on her role in the Etrusca disciplina; scholarly discussion dating the prophecy to the period of the Social War.