Anzotica
Anzotica was the leading goddess of the Liburni, the seafaring people of the northern Dalmatian coast, and is most securely attested at Aenona (modern Nin in Croatia). The Liburnian pantheon was overwhelmingly female and intensely local, and Anzotica stands at its head as a goddess of love, beauty and fertility. Excavations on the peninsula by the Nin lagoon recovered a votive inscription bearing her name together with a sculpture assimilating her to the Roman Venus; from this the syncretic name Venus Ansotica was coined, expressing the fusion of an indigenous Liburnian goddess with the classical deity of love. Later scholarship has read the associated statue-group as an image of fertility, universal creation and motherhood, deepening the picture of Anzotica as a generative coastal mother-goddess rather than a mere provincial copy of Venus.
Domains
- love and beauty
- fertility and motherhood
Powers
- to quicken fertility, desire and new life
Epithets
- Venus AnsoticaJohn Wilkes, The Illyrians (The Peoples of Europe), Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 244-247 (secondary)
Sources
- Anzotica is the principal goddess of the Liburnian town of Aenona (Nin), a deity of love and fertility whom Roman dedicants equated with Venus under the name Venus Ansotica.: John Wilkes, The Illyrians (The Peoples of Europe), Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 244-247 (secondary); R. Matijašić & F. Tassaux, 'Liber et Silvanus', in Ch. Delplace & F. Tassaux (eds.), Les cultes polythéistes dans l'Adriatique romaine, Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2000, pp. 65-117 (secondary)