![]() ![]() ‘Behold me, I am Laverna! I say this of the lord’s complaint of me. Jove demanded an explanation from her and in reply she showed her body to all present and it was indeed a very beautiful body, but it did not have a head. He told how Laverna had defrauded him and promised by her head to repay him by the allotted time. Jove and the others all laughed and called upon the great lord to next make his petition to them. Her body vanished leaving just her head floating in the air. ‘Behold! He says I swore by my body, but I have no body!’ Standing before him and the other gods she answered in a very strange way which entirely astonished Jove and the assembled divinities. Jove asked her what she had done with the property of the priest whom she had sworn with her body to repay in the allotted time. The gods heard his complaint and the goddess Laverna was summoned before them to answer. The great priest and the great lord went together to the assembly of gods and goddesses to voice their complaints. Once again, Laverna sold the castle, the land and everything on it lock, stock and barrel, leaving nothing at all of any value. The great lord was completely taken in by her and agreed the deal. This time she promised with her head as surety to pay him in six months the full value of the castle and estate. She went to a great lord and persuaded him to sell her a castle with a great estate. Now, Laverna was not satisfied with defrauding the great priest and hatched another scheme. On the day when payment was due she was nowhere to be found and the great priest never received a penny in payment and no new temple. ![]() In that time Laverna was very busy selling up all his houses, land, livestock and assets until she had sold everything of any little worth. He gave her his estate thinking he would be paid its full value and get a free temple in the bargain. The great priest was completely convinced. She told him that as surety for the proposal she would swear on her body. Furthermore, at the end of that year she would pay in full for the estate and he would also get the temple for free. She proposed he sell his estate to her and she would build on it within one year a great temple. One day it happened that she changed herself into the form of an extremely beautiful priestess and visited a great priest and proposed a bargain with him. Most of the time she could be found mingling with vagabonds, scoundrels, pickpockets and thieves, living in the dark and hidden places of human society. She was not well known by the other deities as she tended to keep herself to her own wicked ways, rarely spending time in heaven among them. Therefore, Virgil gave the following explanation, “Of all the ancient gods and goddesses in the history of Rome, Laverna was the most cunning, the most mischievous and the most deceitful. The Emperor looked puzzled telling the poet he had never in his life heard of such a deity. Indeed, it also reminds me of the goddess Laverna of whom no one could ever tell if she was all head, or all body, or in fact both.” It reminds me of those types of fish where it is difficult to know the head from the tail, or if they are all head, or all tail. ![]() "One day a fox entered a sculptor’s shop, And found a marble head, when thus he spoke: ‘O Head! there is such feeling shown in thee By art-and yet thou canst not feel at all!"Īfter a little thought Virgil gave the following answer, “Well now, it is very difficult for me to tell whether or not it is all introduction or all conclusion. The Roman Emporer asked Virgil what he made of the following verse from Aesop’s Fables. It is retold here from The Unpublished Legends of Virgil by Charles Godfrey Leland. The following example shows just how devious she could be while revealing how the great Roman poet, Virgil, answered a tricky question posed by the Emperor. ![]() Of all of the gods of Rome perhaps one of the strangest and most devious was the goddess Laverna. ![]()
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