William Warde Fowler

“ That Juno was especially a deity of women, and represents in a sense the female principle of life, is seen in the fact that as every man had his genius, so every woman had her Juno; and the goddess herself may have been a development of this conception. The various forms of her cult all show her in close connexion with women. As Juno Lucina she was invoked in childbirth, and on the 1st of March, the old Roman New Year’s day, the matrons met and made offerings at her temple in a grove on the Esquiline ”

“ In the Aeneid, for example, her policy is antagonistic to the plans of Jupiter for the conquest of Latium and the future greatness of Rome; though in the fourth Eclogue, as Lucina, she appears in her proper rôle as assisting at childbirth. It was under Greek influence again that she became the wife of Jupiter, the mother of Mars; the true Roman had no such personal interest in his deities as to invent family relations for them. ”