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In Dr. Rendel Harris’s Cult of the Heavenly Twins, he tells us of a pair of Italic deities, Picumnus and Pilumnus, the Castor and Pollux of Italy. I recalled Pilumnus in the Aeneid, but had no recollection of his association there with Picumnus. But if Virgil used the name Pilumnus for the pair, as Horace did Pollux, I felt sure that I should at once find the pair named in Servius’s scholium to the verse. So I turned to the verse where he first names Pilumnus:

Luco tum forte parentis

Pilumni Turnus sacrata valle sedebat. (Aen. 9. 3-4.)

If Picumnus and Pilumnus are the Italian Castor and Pollux, then a grove sacred to Pilumnus will be sacred also to Picumnus, and Servius’s note runs: Parentis Pilumni. Pilumnus et Pitumnus fratres fuerunt dii. Horum Pitumnus usum stercorandorum invenit agrorum—unde et Sterculinius dictus est—, Pilumnus vero pinsendi frumenti: unde et a pistoribus deus colitur. Quidam Pilumnum et Pitumnum Castorem et Pollucem accipiunt: nonnulli laudum deos: Varro coniugales deos suspicatur.

But Servius calls the brother of Pilumnus Pitumnus, and not Picumnus. Virgil knows Picus, but he knows nothing of Picumnus, and the only source of information about Picumnus of which I know is Nonius Marcellus’s Compendiosa Doctrina (p.518,M.): Picumnus et avis est Marti dicata, quam picum vel picam vocant, et deus qui sacris Romanis adhibetur. Virgil’s name for the bird and god in question was certainly Picus, of which Picumnus may have been a later and corrupt form. And of Nonius’s citations four identify Picumnus with Picus, and only one: idem Iuris Pontificii Lib. III; Pilumno et Picumno, associates him with Pilumnus; and even here Lucian Müller tells me that the codices give Picum and that Picumno is Bentley’s emendation. Bentley is following a second note of Nonius (p.528,M.): Piluminus et Picuminus di praesides auspiciis coniugalibus deputantur; and on this note seem to rest the corrections by Roscher, Wissowa, and Aust of Pitumnus in Servius to Picumnus. Ettore Pais retains Servius’s spelling, rightly as it seems to me, for it is repeated four times in his commentary, a work far freer from blunders than Nonius’s Doctrina. Of all the authorities Leonhard Schmitz cites in his article on Picumnus in Sir Wm. Smith’s Dictionary of Mythology not one gives us the name Picumnus; and the article hardly seems an honour to English scholarship.

Can we derive the name Pitumnus? Has it any connexion with the function assigned him by Servius, the usus agros stercorandi? Servius tells us that the pilum or pestle, used in early times to pound the grain to prepare it for cooking, took its name from Pilumnus; but it was the other way, as we know. Pilumnus got his name from pilum. And Pitumnus gets a second name, Sterculinius from stercus ‘dung’. Nor is it hard to see how the name Pitumnus is derived. Take the Greek ψίθυρος ‘false’; it is a dissimilation of ψύθυρος, from a reduced form of the root we have in ψεύδω. So Pitumnus is plainly a dissimilation for Putumnus ‘the stinking god’, from the root we see in pŭter, of which we have a strong form or guna in pūtidus. We need not wonder that Virgil had no room in his Epic for such a name; we might as well expect to find the verb ‘to puke’ in the Paradise Lost.

But we see from Nonius that the name Picumnus was used for Picus, the bird and the god. It is probable that this name was connected with Pilumnus, as appears from Nonius’s second note. Some related that Danae, after landing in Italy, married Pilumnus, and bore him a son called after her Daunus, the father of Turnus. So that we have the following genealogies:

Pilumnus—Daunus—Turnus

Picus —Faunus—Latinus.

The association of Latinus and Turnus in Italian legend leads to an association of Daunus and Faunus, whence a rhyme association arises, which extends to Pilumnus and Picus, forming from Picus the second name Picumnus. That Picumnus, the corruption of Picus thus produced, was later confused at times with Pitumnus, seems not unlikely.

We meet Pilumnus again in:

Cui Pilumnus avus, cui diva Venilia mater (Aen. 10. 76);

and again in:

Pilumnusque illi quartus pater (10. 619),

where the quartus puzzles Servius, who thinks of this Pilumnus as the avus of the Pilumnus mentioned in v.76. But it seems more likely that both Virgil’s avus and his quartus pater refer to the same Pilumnus, who is, strictly speaking, the tertius pater, according to the usual form of the legend. In:

Poscit equos gaudetque tuens ante ora frementes,

Pilumno quos ipsa decus dedit Orithyia,

Qui candore nives anteirent, cursibus auras (Aen. 12. 82-4)

the analogy of the white steeds of Castor and Pollux leads us to believe that Pilumno stands for Pilumno et Pitumno. Of course, as horses live only about thirty years, these could not be the same horses that Orithyia gave Pilumnus, but were descendants of them. Servius thinks the story a figment. How could Orithyia, born in Attica, and carried off to Thrace by Boreas, give horses to Pilumnus in Italy? In his note to Aen. 7. 410 he tells us that Danae came to Italy alone; in the note to Aen. 8. 345 we read that she came to Italy accompanied by two sons, whom she had of Phineus, Argos and Argeos, and held the place which is now Rome. In some families it is not so much the sexus as the genus that tends to variation. In Minos’s line the taurus plays an important part; think of the nuptials of Europa, and the incest of Pasiphae. In the household of Boreas and his son-in-law Phineus this seems true of the horse. In the Iliad we read of the three thousand mares of Erichthonius, with whom Boreas falls in love as they graze and:

αἱ δ’ ὑποκυσάμεναι ἔτεκον δυοκαίδεκα πώλους (20. 225).

Possibly Argos and Argeos, ‘white’ and ‘whitey’, whom Danae brought with her from Phineus, were the white horses sent by Orithyia. Servius identifies this Argos with the Argos whose death gave its name to the Argiletum according to some.