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Fontus or Fons (: Fontes, "Font" or "Source") was a god of wells and springs in ancient Roman religion. A Roman festivals called the Fontinalia was held on October 13 in his honor. Throughout the city, fountains and Puteal were adorned with garlands.Stephen L. Dyson, Rome: A Living Portrait of an Ancient City (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), p. 228. Described by Varro, De lingua latina 6.3: "The Fontanalia is Fontus, because it's his holiday (dies feriae); on account of him then they toss wreaths into fountains and garland " ( Fontanalia a Fonte, quod is dies feriae eius; ab eo tum et in fontes coronas iaciunt et puteos coronant). Festus also mentions the rites (sacra).
Fontus was the son of Juturna and Janus.Arnobius, Adversus Nationes 3.29. Numa Pompilius, second king of Rome, was supposed to have been buried near the altar of Fontus (ara Fontis) on the Janiculum.Cicero, De legibus 2.56 and De natura deorum 3.52; Samuel Ball Platner, The Topography and Monuments of Ancient Rome (1904), p. 488. William Warde Fowler observed that between 259 and 241 BC, cults were founded for Juturna, Fons, and the Tempestas, all having to do with sources of water.William Warde Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People (London, 1922), p. 285, with a speculation that this was a response to the Roman navy of the First Punic War. As a god of pure water, Fons can be placed in opposition to Liber as a god of wine identified with Bacchus.As when two characters argue over which holds imperium in Plautus's Stichus, line 696ff.; Thomas Habinek, The World of Roman Song (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 186.
An inscription includes Fons among a series of deities who received expiatory sacrifices by the Arval Brothers in 224 AD, when several trees in the sacred grove of Dea Dia, their chief deity, had been struck by lightning and burnt. Fons received two .Mary Beard, J.A. North, and S.R.F. Price, Religions of Rome: A Sourcebook (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 152. Fons was not among the deities depicted on coinage of the Roman Republic.Michael H. Crawford, Roman Republican Coinage (Cambridge University Press, 1974, 2001), p. 914.
The Fonteia gens claimed to be Fontus' descendants.
In the cosmological schema of Martianus Capella, Fons is located in the second of 16 celestial regions, with Jupiter, Quirinus, Mars, the Lares, Juno, Lympha, and the Novensiles.Martianus Capella, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury 1.46 online.
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