Portunalia: the god hidden inside the word "port"
Every port I ever sailed into carried a name older than it knew. On the seventeenth of August the Roman calendar keeps a small, quiet festival called the Portunalia, for a god most people have never heard of and yet name a dozen times a day without noticing. He is Portunus.
He is the god of harbors, doors, keys and gates. His name and our word "port" grow from the same Latin root, portus, the harbor, the way in from the sea. The Spanish puerto and puerta, the harbor and the door, come down from the same place, along with portal, and the porter who still keeps one. A whole family of ordinary words, and a god sitting at the root of them.
He is shown with a key, and sometimes with an anchor, and the two say the same thing from different sides. The key opens the harbor, which is a kind of door, swung wide to let a ship in off the water or closed against the weather and the night. The anchor is what you do once you are safely through it. You drop anchor when you have arrived, when the crossing is behind you and the ground beneath the water is holding you still. A key and an anchor are both, in the end, about coming safely in. That threshold, between the open sea and safe harbor, is exactly where he stands.
On his day the Romans threw keys into the fire for luck, in what the old accounts call a solemn and rather mournful little rite. The heavy iron keys of antiquity came out of the flame unharmed, where a modern key would only warp and never turn a lock again, so those who keep the day now tend to pass a key through incense smoke instead. The prayer is the same. The key survives it.
His reach is not only symbolic. Before he watched the open water he may have guarded the warehouses where Rome kept its grain, which feels right, because the harbor he is most tied to was the one that fed the city. At Portus, the great artificial harbor beside Ostia that Emperor Trajan enlarged into an enormous hexagon, the grain ships came in from Egypt and North Africa, and from there the wheat moved on to the citizens who lived by the dole. A god of the harbor was, in a real sense, the god of whether Rome ate that month.
Portus sits about an hour up the coast from Civitavecchia, the port every cruise crew knows as the long doorway to Rome. I have stood on more than one open deck watching that coastline lift out of the haze at dawn, and never once thought that the water under us had carried a name and a keeper for over three thousand years before we arrived.
The Greeks knew a version of him too. Virgil and Ovid folded Portunus together with Palaemon, the boy once called Melicertes, who was carried into the sea by his mother and came back altered, a small god who watches over harbors and sailors in trouble. His mother the Romans called Mater Matuta, goddess of the morning. Follow the thread far enough and the keeper of every harbor turns out to be a child of first light, which pleases me, since first light is the hour you most often raise land.
None of this is only history. The old gods still have people who keep their days, and the Portunalia is one that comes quietly round each August. Those who follow the Religio Romana, the reconstructed Roman faith, mark it as they mark the rest of the old calendar. This year the community of Nova Roma is keeping it as part of a larger gathering in Pannonia, in the Roman city of Savaria, modern Szombathely in Hungary, and at Apulum in Roman Dacia, where the Portunalia is honored alongside the Nemoralia of Diana and the rites of Hercules Invictus across the middle of the month. Reconstructed legions and cohorts take part, the festivals are presided over by their officers, and the old forms are followed with real care. The god is not being remembered. He is being kept.
But you do not have to keep his festival for him to be relevant to you. His work never stopped. Every day, ships still raise the old Roman shores. Ferries cross to the islands, cargo comes into the same harbors that fed the empire, cruise ships turn toward Civitavecchia and Naples and Barcelona and Piraeus at first light.
Anyone who has stood at a rail and watched land resolve out of the haze, and felt the small private relief of nearly being in, has felt the thing Portunus is the god of. The harbor reached. The crossing behind you. The door about to open. He asks nothing of the modern traveler, but there is something worth pausing on in the fact that the safe arrival we now take for granted once had a name, and a keeper, and a day.
So on the seventeenth a key is passed through the smoke, and Portunus is asked for the thing seafarers have always asked of him. A safe harbor at the end of the crossing, and a little luck for everyone still out on the water, coming home in the dark and trusting that a light will be there. Three thousand years on, at the root of every "port" we say without thinking, the old keeper of harbors is still at his post.
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