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SUMMARY: This paper examines the cultural workings of the Latin term pulvinar in its rhetorical, literary, and material contexts. The aim is to illuminate the term's specific meanings and to assess its broader symbolic or ideological point. Three uses constitute the central focus of this essay: 1) the "lectisternium," 2) the "sacred-marriage bed," and 3) the Pulvinar ad Circum Maximum ("temple" at the Circus Maximus). The essay draws from scholarship on public representations of the domestic sphere and on emperor worship in order to understand the term as a vibrant and sophisticated cultural emblem in the early Empire.
INTRODUCTION
What precisely did the Latin term pulvinar signify? The question harbors more narrowly a lexical problem (what is the referent in a particular context?) and more broadly a cultural one (how was pulvinar symbolically or socially significant?). The answers are bound up with an often contradictory set of modern and ancient habits of thought. For modern observers the paucity and the complexity of the material and lexical records have hindered understanding. But ambiguity was also part and parcel of the term's usage and message. What pulvinar meant was difficult to extricate from the competing ritual and symbolic associations it was meant to evoke. Semantic differences often become visible only upon consideration of the ideological or rhetorical contexts in which the pulvinar was typically implicated by design. Nevertheless, the available evidence paints a fascinating and well-rounded picture of the pulvinar, a capacious emblem in the cultural repertoire through which sanctity, legitimacy, and power were constructed and construed.
THE MEANINGS OF PULVINAR
Most of the meanings of pulvinar may be divided as follows: 1) divine couch, 2) sacred marriage-bed, 3) sacred edifice or space (similar to aedes, fanum, or templum), including the Pulvinar in the Circus Maximus, and 4) lectisternium (a sacrificial meal for a god). Given the wealth of religious objects, spaces, or practices designated by pulvinar, caution is warranted in regarding "divine couch" as the basic definition. Despite the ranging lexical entry in Forcellini (1865) and the discussion of pulvinar in Wissowa's (1924) RE article "lectisternium," the OLD's primary definition fails to recognize anything beyond a physical seat (either religious or honorific), thereby occluding other basic meanings.1
Pulvinar seems to derive from pulvinus, a cushion...