The Story of Picus and Circe

At a Glance

• Central figures: Picus, king of Laurentum and son of Saturn, famed for his beauty and his gift of augury; Circe, the sorceress-goddess dwelling on the promontory later called Circei; Canens, a nymph of Latium and Picus’s wife, whose voice could move trees and stones.
• Setting: The forests and hills of Latium, near Laurentum and the coast south of the Tiber, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book XIV).
• The turn: Circe, consumed by desire for Picus, conjures a phantom boar to lure him deep into the woods alone, then demands his love; he refuses her for Canens’s sake.
• The outcome: Circe transforms Picus into a woodpecker, and his companions - who threaten her - into beasts; Canens wanders the Tiber’s banks searching for her husband until she wastes away and vanishes entirely.
• The legacy: The woodpecker remained sacred in Roman augury, called picus Martius - the bird of Mars - and was consulted by augurs reading the flight of birds for signs of divine will. The place where Canens dissolved was said to have taken her name.

Picus rode a war-horse the color of dark wine. He carried two hunting spears and wore a cloak clasped with gold at the shoulder, and when he rode through the forests around Laurentum the people who saw him pass said he was the most beautiful man in Latium. He was Saturn’s son, or so the old genealogies claimed - descended from the god who had once ruled that land during the age the Romans later called the Golden Age. But Picus cared less for ancestry than for two things: the hunt and the woman waiting for him at home.

Her name was Canens. She was the daughter of Janus and the nymph Venilia, and her voice was the reason anything in Latium bothered to bloom. When she sang, rivers slowed. Rocks shifted in their beds. Birds forgot their own songs and listened to hers. Picus had married her, and by every account the marriage was good.

The Boar That Was Not There

One morning Picus rode out to hunt boar in the dense woods south of the Tiber. His companions fanned out through the trees on foot, beating the undergrowth with staves, while Picus ranged ahead on horseback. The forest was old growth - oaks older than any settlement in Latium, their canopy so thick the light underneath was green and dim.

Circe was in those woods. She had come down from her promontory on the coast to gather herbs - the strange plants she needed for her work, the ones that grew only in deep shade. She saw Picus pass between the trees. She stopped gathering. She watched him ride, the horse moving at an easy canter, the gold clasp catching what light broke through, and something turned in her that would not turn back.

She made a boar. It was not real - it was air shaped like a boar, dense enough to leave tracks in the mud, convincing enough to draw a hunter’s eye. The phantom broke from the undergrowth and ran, crashing through bracken and fern, and Picus heard it and wheeled his horse and followed. It ran deeper into the forest. It ran where the trees grew too close together for a horse, and Picus dismounted and went on foot, spears in hand, pushing through branches, chasing the sound of something heavy moving through dead leaves.

The boar dissolved. The forest was silent. Picus stood alone in a clearing he did not recognize, breathing hard, holding his spears, and Circe stepped out from behind an oak.

Circe’s Demand

She did not bother with gradual approaches. She told him what she wanted. She told him she was a goddess, daughter of Sol, mistress of every herb and root and transformation that the earth contained, and that she desired him, and that he should desire her in return.

Picus said no.

He said it plainly. He told her he belonged to Canens, that no other woman or goddess would replace her, that this was not a negotiable matter. He said it the way a Roman would later say it - as a statement of binding obligation, a thing already settled, not open to persuasion.

Circe asked again. Her voice changed. There was an edge in it now, the sound of someone not accustomed to refusal.

Picus said no a second time.

The Woodpecker

She struck the ground with her staff. She turned east and then west. She called on names that the forest had not heard spoken aloud - names from before the settlements, before the plowed fields, from the time when Latium was all forest and the only law was what grew and what devoured. She spoke three incantations and sang three songs, and the clearing filled with a darkness that had nothing to do with clouds.

Picus felt his body contracting. His arms drew inward. His fingers fused and flattened and hardened into something that was no longer flesh. Feathers broke through the skin of his neck and back - not softly, not gradually, but all at once, like a garment being pulled over him from the inside. His cloak’s gold clasp became a streak of color at his throat. His face narrowed and lengthened into a beak. His legs thinned to black wires gripping the bark of the oak where a moment before he had been standing upright.

He was a woodpecker - crested, sharp-beaked, hammering at wood. The picus that would later bear his name, the bird Roman augurs watched when they read the skies for signs from the gods.

His companions came crashing through the trees looking for him. They found Circe instead. They threatened her - drew swords, demanded to know where their king had gone. She turned them into animals. Different animals for different men: wolves, boars, bears. They scattered into the undergrowth on four legs, unable to speak, unable to find their way back to Laurentum.

Canens on the Tiber

Canens waited. She waited through the afternoon, through the evening, through a night with no horse returning to the stable and no husband crossing the threshold. By morning she knew something had gone wrong. She left the house and went looking.

She walked the banks of the Tiber. She walked downstream toward the coast and upstream toward the hills. She called his name. She sang - not the songs that moved rivers and stones, but something smaller and more desperate, the sound of a woman calling one name into trees that did not answer.

For six days she walked. She did not eat. She did not sleep, or if she slept it was only in collapsed moments at the water’s edge, her face against the mud. On the sixth day her body began to thin. Not in the way of hunger - in a different way. She was becoming less solid. Her edges softened. Her voice, which had always been the most substantial thing about her, grew faint, and then fainter, and then it was only a vibration in the reeds along the bank.

She dissolved. She became nothing - or she became the place itself. The Romans later said the spot along the Tiber where she vanished carried her name, though the exact location was lost to time even before Ovid set the story down.

The Bird of Mars

The woodpecker lived on. It lived in every forest in Latium, hammering its quick percussion into oak and ash, and the Romans held it sacred. They called it picus Martius - the bird of Mars - because Picus had been Mars’s kin through Saturn’s line, and because the bird’s sharp, relentless striking reminded them of something martial. Augurs watched its flight. When a picus appeared on the left during the taking of auspices, it meant something. When it appeared on the right, it meant something else. The bird carried weight far beyond its size.

In the old genealogies Picus was listed among the earliest kings of Laurentum, father of Faunus, grandfather of Latinus - the same Latinus who would one day receive Aeneas on the shore and offer him his daughter Lavinia. The bloodline ran from Saturn through a woodpecker to the founding of Rome itself. The Romans did not find this strange. A king could become a bird. A wife could become a sound. What mattered was that the line continued, that the auspices were taken correctly, and that the gods - even the angry ones, even Circe with her staff and her herbs - could not break what pietas had bound.