The Tale of Pomona and Vertumnus

At a Glance

Central figures: Pomona, a wood nymph devoted to the cultivation of fruit trees and orchards in Latium, and Vertumnus, the god of seasons and change, who could shift his form at will.
Setting: The orchards and cultivated lands of Latium in the age before Rome’s founding, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book XIV.
The turn: Vertumnus, having been refused by Pomona in every shape he tried, disguises himself as an old woman and gains entry to her walled garden, where he argues for his own cause through the cautionary tale of Iphis and Anaxarete.
The outcome: Vertumnus drops his disguise and stands before Pomona in his true form; she accepts him without resistance, and they are joined.
The legacy: Vertumnus received a statue and a shrine on the Vicus Tuscus in Rome, where offerings were made during harvest season, and Pomona’s name persisted in the cult title of her own flamen - the flamen Pomonalis, one of the minor priesthoods of the Roman state.

Pomona did not care for the wild places. She carried no hunting spear, wanted nothing from the rivers, avoided the uncultivated woods where other nymphs ran barefoot with Diana. Her country was the orchard. She worked with a curved pruning knife - the falx - and she used it the way a sculptor uses a chisel: cutting back what grew wrong, grafting what might grow better, training branches along frames until the trees bore fruit so heavy the limbs needed propping with forked sticks.

She had walled her garden. That is the detail Ovid gives, and it matters. The wall was not symbolic. It was a boundary, a line between the cultivated and the wild, and Pomona kept it shut. No satyr crossed it. No Silvanus. No Pan - though all of them tried. She admitted no one who could not account for himself at her gate, and she had no interest in anyone who came courting.

The Suitors at the Wall

They came anyway. The field gods and forest gods of Latium pressed their cases with the persistence of men who believe refusal is negotiation. Silvanus appeared with pine boughs. The satyrs made noise at the edges of her land. Priapus, whose cult was garden-bound and who might have had the best claim to common ground with her, tried more than once and was turned away each time.

Vertumnus wanted her worst of all. He was a god of turning - the turn of seasons, the turn of fruit from green to ripe, the turn of a year from planting to harvest. His numen lived in change itself. He could become anything: a reaper carrying a basket of grain, a vine-dresser with stained hands, a soldier, a fisherman. He used every shape he had. He came to Pomona’s gate as a ploughman and praised her trees. He came as an ox-driver and left gifts of apples at her threshold. He came as a harvester with a sickle through his belt, and she let him admire the orchard from outside the wall but would not let him stay.

None of these faces worked. She spoke to each of them politely, accepted the compliments on her grafts, and closed the gate.

The Old Woman in the Garden

Vertumnus tried one more shape. He wrapped himself in a woman’s mantle, put a cloth over his head, stooped his back, and leaned on a stick. An old woman. He hobbled to the gate and called out that he had come to see the famous orchards of Pomona, and Pomona - who would admit a grandmother where she would not admit a god - let him in.

He walked the rows with her. He touched the fruit. He praised a particular tree where Pomona had grafted a new variety onto old rootstock, and the praise was genuine because Vertumnus understood seasons and he understood what it meant for a graft to take. Then, as if casually, the old woman looked up at an elm tree that stood at the orchard’s edge with a grapevine trained along its trunk. The vine heavy with clusters. The elm holding it upright.

You see how the vine clings to the elm? the old woman said. Without the tree, the vine would lie flat on the ground and bear nothing. Without the vine, the elm would stand here bare. They are better together.

Pomona said nothing.

The Story of Iphis and Anaxarete

The old woman pressed further. She told a story - the kind that old women in Latium were expected to tell, which is why the disguise worked as long as it did. She told Pomona about a young man named Iphis who had loved a girl named Anaxarete in the city of Salamis on Cyprus. Iphis was lowborn. Anaxarete was noble and hard. He begged, he wept, he hung garlands on her door, he lay on her threshold through cold nights. She laughed at him. She called him ridiculous.

Iphis hanged himself from the beam above her doorway.

His funeral procession passed beneath Anaxarete’s window. She looked down - not in grief but in curiosity, the way one watches something that does not concern her. And Venus, who does not forgive that kind of coldness, turned Anaxarete to stone where she stood. Her body hardened from the feet upward. Her eyes froze open. The statue still stood in Salamis, the old woman said, in a temple of Venus called Venus Prospiciens - Venus Who Looks Out - because the stone girl’s gaze was still fixed on the street below.

Do not be like her, the old woman said. There is a god who loves you. Vertumnus. He tends the same seasons your trees obey. He is not some forest creature who will trample your grafts. He will guard what you guard.

Pomona listened to all of this without answering.

Vertumnus Unmasked

The old woman stopped talking. The afternoon was quiet. Then Vertumnus dropped the disguise. The stooped back straightened. The mantle fell. The stick clattered on the ground between the orchard rows.

He stood in front of her as himself - young, bright-faced, with the look of a field in late summer when everything is ripe at once and the light comes through the fruit trees at a low angle. Ovid says he looked like the sun breaking through clouds, and then says the sun went back behind the clouds again because it was not needed. The god was bright enough.

Pomona looked at him. Ovid gives her no speech. He says only that she felt desire equal to his - mutua vulnera sensit - and that no force was necessary. The wall stayed standing. The gate stayed open. Vertumnus walked through it as himself and stayed.

The Vicus Tuscus

Rome remembered both of them. Pomona’s cult was small but official: the flamen Pomonalis ranked among the fifteen minor flamines of the Roman priesthood, charged with the rites of orchard fruit. Her shrine was the Pomonal, somewhere in the agricultural territory outside the old city walls, though its exact location is lost.

Vertumnus fared better in the city proper. His statue stood on the Vicus Tuscus - the Etruscan street that ran from the Forum toward the Tiber - because the Romans said his worship had come to them from the Etruscans. Propertius wrote a poem in his voice: the statue speaking to passersby, boasting of its ability to become anything. Horace mentioned the same statue, old and weather-beaten, standing at the corner where the merchants set up their stalls. Offerings came at harvest time - fruit, naturally, the first pickings of the season laid at the statue’s base.

The wall around Pomona’s garden is not mentioned after the marriage. Whether she kept it standing or let it fall, Ovid does not say.