01 · The stories
Myths & defining acts
Told by Ovid: Pomona cared only for her orchard and rejected every rustic god who wooed her, until Vertumnus, able to change shape, came to her as reaper, herdsman, soldier and fisherman, and at last as an old woman who praised Vertumnus's devotion and warned her against scorning a faithful lover; then he resumed his young form and won her.
02 · Sacred lineage
Family & relations
Purely Roman, with no genealogy in the mythographers. Courted by several woodland gods and finally married to Vertumnus, god of the changing seasons and of gardens.
03 · Places of devotion
Abode & sacred sites
A walled orchard of her own, which she tends carefully and keeps closed to suitors; the countryside of Latium; a sacred grove (the Pomonal) on the road to Ostia.
04 · Two traditions
Greek & Roman perspectives
Pomona
No Greek cult or equivalent at all - she is one of the deities Roman writers cite as distinctively Italian.
No direct Greek equivalent
A native Italian numen of orchard fruit, old enough to have her own minor priest (the flamen Pomonalis), the least of the fifteen flamens; no fixed festival date is recorded.
05 · Extensive analysis
A closer reading
Pomona is one of the small, specialised, thoroughly Roman deities that governed a single narrow slice of country life - in her case the fruit and nut trees of the orchard and the skilled work of pruning and grafting that keeps them productive. She has no myth-cycle and no dramatic personality in the Greek manner; she is closer to a sacred job description, with her own minor state priest to prove her antiquity. Her one story, the courtship by the shape-shifting Vertumnus, is a literary charmer supplied by Ovid.
06 · Sources
From the archive
Text from Gods · greek_roman_gods, row 49. Imported 10 September 2026.