Di nixi

In ancient Roman religion, the di nixi (or dii nixi), also Nixae, were birth deities. They were depicted kneeling or squatting, a more common birthing position in antiquity than in the modern era. The 2nd-century grammarian Festus explains their name as the participle of the Latin verb nitor, niti, nixus, "to support oneself," also "strive, labor," in this sense "be in labor, give birth."Varro (1st century BC) said that enixae was the term for women in labor brought about by the Nixae, who oversee the types of religious practices that pertain to those giving birth. In some editions of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a phrase is taken as referring to the birth goddess Lucina and her counterpart collective, the Nixi.

A statuary group of three kneeling nixi or nixae stood in front of the Temple of Minerva on the Capitoline Hill. These had been brought to Rome by Manius Acilius Glabrio among the spoils seized from Antiochus the Great after his defeat at Thermopylae in 191 BC, or perhaps from the sack of Corinth in 146.

In the iconography of Greek myth, the kneeling pose is also found in representations of Leto (Roman Latona) giving birth to Apollo and Artemis (Diana), and of Auge giving birth to Telephus, son of Herakles (Hercules). While the ancient Greek gynecologist Soranos had disapproved of giving birth on one's knees as "painful and embarrassing," he recommends it for the obese and for lordotic women, that is, those with a concave curvature of the lower back that would tilt the uterus out of alignment with the birth canal.

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