page_title: Pietas
section_title: As goddess
hierarchical_section_title: Pietas / As goddess
context_page_description: Pietas, translated variously as "duty", "religiosity" or "religious behavior", "loyalty", "devotion", or "filial piety", was one of the chief virtues among the ancient Romans. It was the distinguishing virtue of the founding hero Aeneas, who is often given the adjectival epithet pius throughout Virgil's epic Aeneid. The sacred nature of pietas was embodied by the divine personification Pietas, a goddess often pictured on Roman coins. The Greek equivalent is eusebeia.
  Cicero defined pietas as the virtue "which admonishes us to do our duty to our country or our parents or other blood relations." The man who possessed pietas "performed all his duties towards the deity and his fellow human beings fully and in every respect," as the 19th-century classical scholar Georg Wissowa described it. Cicero suggests people should have awareness of our own honor, we must always attempt to raise the honor of others by our dignified praise, such praise, admiration and honored actions must be beyond all our own desires, as Cicero said, we must choose our actions and words with respect to our friends, colleagues, family or blood relations.
context_section_description: Pietas was the divine presence in everyday life that cautioned humans not to intrude on the realm of the gods. Violations of pietas required a piaculum, expiatory rites.
  A temple to Pietas was vowed (votum) by Manius Acilius Glabrio at the Battle of Thermopylae in 191 BC.
  According to a miraculous legend (miraculum), a poor woman who was starving in prison was saved when her daughter gave her breast milk (compare Roman Charity). Caught in the act, the daughter was not punished, but recognized for her pietas. Mother and daughter were set free, and given public support for the rest of their lives. The site was regarded as sacred to the goddess Pietas (consecratus deae) because she had chosen to manifest her presence there. The story exemplified pietas erga parentes, the proper devotion one ought to show to one's parents.
caption: Flavia Maximiana Theodora on the obverse, on the reverse Pietas holding infant to her breast.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image ExifOffset": "90", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "500", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "246"}