Cloacina was the Roman goddess associated with the city’s sewers, drainage, and purification.
Her name derives from cloaca, the Latin word for a sewer or underground drain. She presided over the Cloaca Maxima, Rome’s major drainage channel, which began as a natural stream before becoming an engineered part of the city’s infrastructure. Romans also treated moving water as sacred, helping explain the religious importance attached to sanitation and purification.
Cloacina was later identified with Venus as Venus Cloacina, often translated as “Venus the Purifier.” A small shrine stood in the Roman Forum above the Cloaca Maxima, near the Basilica Aemilia. This association can cause confusion: Venus is connected with the shrine and epithet, but Cloacina is the distinctive name for the sewer-and-purification goddess. Her worship is already attested in Plautus’s comedy Curculio, written in the early 2nd century BCE.