Roman goddess of flowering plants who, in Ovid's calendar of rites, touched Juno with a magic flower from the gardens of Olenus so that the queen conceived Mars with no father — a Roman variant of Ares' birth answering Athena's head-birth.1
Ovid tells the tale in his Fasti for the Roman month of May. Juno, stung that Jupiter had brought forth Minerva from his head without a mother, sought counsel from Flora, goddess of flowering fields. Flora touched the queen with a wondrous flower from the gardens of Olenus, and Juno conceived Mars with no father at all.2⚖
The Greek genealogical spine in Hesiod and Homer makes Ares son of Zeus and Hera; Ovid's Flora preserves the fatherless Roman variant for Mars alone — a secondary tradition attested only in the Ovid lens, not in Hesiod or Apollodorus.3⚖
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the spine ignites as you read · hover a bond on the card — every mention of them lights in the story