page_title: Novensiles
section_title: Divine redundancy
hierarchical_section_title: Novensiles / Divine redundancy
caption_attribution_description: Scene from Vergil, Aeneid, 3.147: The penates call Aeneas to leave Cretes for Italy.
context_page_description: In ancient Roman religion, the dii Novensiles or Novensides are collective deities of obscure significance found in inscriptions, prayer formulary, and both ancient and early-Christian literary texts.
  In antiquity, the initial element of the word novensiles was thought to derive from either "new" or "nine". The form novensides has been explained as "new settlers," from novus and insidere, "to settle". The enduringly influential 19th-century scholar Georg Wissowa thought that the novensiles or novensides were deities the Romans regarded as imported, that is, not indigenous like the di Indigetes.
  Although Wissowa treated the categories of indigetes and novensiles as a fundamental way to classify Roman gods, the distinction is hard to maintain; many scholars reject it. Arnaldo Momigliano pointed out that no ancient text poses novensiles and indigetes as a dichotomy, and that the etymology of novensides is far from settled. In his treatise on orthography, the 4th-century philosopher Marius Victorinus regarded the spellings novensiles and novensides as a simple phonetic alteration of l and d, characteristic of the Sabine language.
context_section_description: The proliferation of deities among the Romans was mocked by the Church Fathers:
  The inability of Romans of the classical period to explain just who were the di Indigetes and di Novensiles caused Christian apologists no end of amusement, and the whole project of classifying gods was denounced by Tertullian in a question: 'Shall I run through them individually, as many as they are, and as great: the new, the old, the barbarian, the Greek, Roman, foreign, captive, adopted, private, public, male, female, rustic, urban, naval, and military?'
  Tertullian took a euhemerizing approach in explaining why the gods of the Romans kept multiplying; they were all, he said, merely people (homines) with birthplaces (civitatibus, in quibus nati sunt) and tombs (sepulti). Arnobius, similarly attempting to demonstrate the logical flaws in the Roman conception of divinity, offers what is perhaps the most extended discussion of the novensiles in any extant source, and lists seven authorities whose explanations of their identity strike him as mutually exclusive. Several other sources, he notes, say that the novensiles are people (homines) who have become divus, "divine" or "deified'; among these divi are Hercules, Romulus, Aesculapius, Liber, and Aeneas.
caption: According to some sources, Aeneas (shown here with the Penates in a 4th-century illustration) was one of the novensiles
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