The Cult
Jūnō was worshipped wherever Roman women lived, and her calendar was theirs. Every Kalends was hers — the flāminica, wife of the flāmen Diālis, made offering to her in the Regia on the first of each month — and the Kalends of March was the Mātrōnālia, when married women processed to the Esquiline temple of Jūnō Lūcīna to pray for their marriages and their children. On the Nōnae Caprōtīnae in July, female slaves feasted beneath the wild fig tree, a rite archaic even to the Romans themselves. Her great sanctuaries anchored whole cities: at Lānuvium, Jūnō Sōspita's sacred snake was fed by a maiden while Roman magistrates came down each year to sacrifice; on the Aventine stood the Rēgīna carried from Veii; and on the Arx, Monēta's temple kept Rome's mint beside the goddess of warning, her sacred geese still kept in the precinct — an alarm that had become a liturgy. Votive deposits at Lānuvium and Falerii record a continuous clientele from archaic Latium onward.