The gens Potitia was an ancient patrician family at ancient Rome. None of its members ever attained any of the higher offices of the Roman state, and the gens is known primarily as a result of its long association with the rites of Hercules, and for a catastrophic plague that was said to have killed all of its members within a single month, at the end of the fourth century BC. However, a few Potitii of later times are known from literary sources and inscriptions.[1]
The story of the Potitii is inextricably intertwined with that of the Pinarii. According to legend, Hercules came to Italy a generation before the Trojan War, and was received by the families of the Potitii and the Pinarii. He instructed them in a form of worship by which they honoured him for generations. The priesthood of this cult was carried out exclusively by members of these two families, as a sacrum gentilicium—the sacred duty of a particular gens.[2][3][4] Michael Grant suggests that the worship overseen by these families was originally introduced to Italy by the Phoenicians, and was devoted to one of the Phoenician gods, who afterwards became assimilated with Hercules.[5]
The position of the Potitii in this cult was superior to that of the Pinarii, who were excluded from partaking of the entrails of the sacrifice, supposedly because they had arrived late to the sacrificial banquet given by Hercules. The two families are said to have carried out their religious obligations for centuries, as hereditary priests of Hercules, until the period of the Samnite Wars, at the end of the fourth century BC.[2][3]
In 312 BC, Appius Claudius Caecus, during his censorship, attempted to persuade the Potitii and the Pinarii to instruct the public slaves in these rites. The Pinarii refused, but the Potitii accepted Claudius' offer of 50,000 pounds of copper.[6] Niebuhr explains that Claudius' intention was to introduce the worship of Hercules, formerly sacra privata, into the religion of the Roman state, thus making them sacra publica. However, because no flamen could be appointed for a foreign god, it was necessary to entrust the rites to slaves.[7][8]
For their impiety, Hercules sent a plague that carried off the entire gens in the span of thirty days; twelve families and thirty grown men perished, and Claudius himself was struck blind, which is how he obtained his cognomen.[i][6][9][10][11][12][13] There is some uncertainty as to the chronology of this legend; Claudius could hardly have been blinded during his censorship, as he went on to be consul in 307, and again in 296 BC, and was then nominated dictator in 292 and 285. Niebuhr suggests that the Potitii may instead have died in a terrible plague that struck Rome in 292.[7]
The disappearance of an entire gens was extraordinary; together with the fact that no magistrates or other important Potitii are mentioned in surviving records, this has led some historians to suspect that they were not in fact a distinct gens, but instead a branch of another patrician family that became extinct around the period of the Samnite Wars, such as the Valerii Potiti, whose surname, Potitus, might have been mistaken for a nomen, Potitius. However, the ancient historians unanimously describe the Potitii as a gens.[5] There are also a few indications that some Potitii survived the destruction of the gens. Cicero mentions a Publius Potitius who lived in the first century BC, and others are known from inscriptions.[ii][14]
The Potitii are the focus of the novels Roma and Empire, by Steven Saylor. These novels follow the history of Rome, up to the reign of Hadrian, and concern the fortunes of the Potitii and Pinarii, through the passing down of a family heirloom. As depicted by Saylor, the Potitii who suddenly died were in fact murdered, a clever and ruthless killer poisoning them one by one and never being discovered.