Clitumnus

Clitumnus is the god of the springs that feed the river Clitunno in southern Umbria, and the best-described local cult in Roman Umbria thanks to a letter of Pliny the Younger. Pliny saw an ancient temple at the source, with the god standing in a toga, an oracle that answered by lots, and a bridge across the stream dividing water too sacred to bathe in from water where bathing was allowed; the many small shrines around the spring each had their own god. Suetonius records that Caligula turned aside to the sacred grove of Clitumnus before his German expedition, and Propertius knew the grove too, so the cult is attested independently of Pliny. Pliny calls the cult image Iuppiter Clitumnus, and the sanctuary is conventionally the temple of Jupiter-Clitumnus; the registry keeps him as a local Umbrian god of the water, records the Jupiter identification as an identification made in the sources, and gives him no invented river-god genealogy.

Domains

• rivers
• prophecy

Powers

• to answer enquirers by lots at his spring, and so to foretell what is to come

Epithets

• Iuppiter Clitumnus

Sources

• Pliny the Younger, Epistles 8.8.
• Suetonius, Caligula 43 — the visit to the sacred grove of Clitumnus before the German expedition.
• Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, s.v. 'Clitumnus, Temple of Jupiter-Clitumnus, Umbria, Italy'.