Janus

"Then wars shall cease and savage times grow mild, / and Remus and Quirinus, brethren twain, / with hoary Faith and Vesta undefiled, / shall give the law. With iron bolt and chain / firm-closed the gates of Janus shall remain. / Within, the Fiend of Discord, high reclined / on horrid arms, unheeded in the fane, / bound with a hundred brazen knots behind, / and grim with gory jaws, his grisly teeth shall grind."

January is named after Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and doors.

In the ages of victory, as often as the senate decreed some distant conquest, the consul denounced hostilities, by unbarring, in solemn pomp, the gates of the temple of Janus. Domestic war now rendered the admonition superfluous, and the ceremony was superseded by the establishment of a new religion. But the brazen temple of Janus was left standing in the forum; of a size sufficient only to contain the statue of the god, five cubits in height, of a human form, but with two faces, directed to the east and west.

[K]nowing that the minds of the people, rendered ferocious by a military life, would never accommodate themſelves to the practice of theſe [principles of justice, laws, and morals], during the continuance of war, he [Numa Pompilius] reſolved, by a diſuſe of arms, to mollify the fierceneſs of their temper: with this view, he built a temple to Janus, near the foot of the hill Argiletum, which was to notify a ſtate either of war or of peace: when open, it denoted that the ſtate was engaged in war; when ſhut, that there was peace with all the ſurrounding nations.

"I'll tell you what we can do," cried her persevering patroness; "we can go as masks, and Lady Juliana shall know nothing about it. That will save the scandal of an open revolt or a tiresome dispute. Half the company will be masked; so, if you keep your own secret, nobody will find it out. Come, what characters shall we choose?" / "That of Janus, I think, would be the most suitable for me," said Mary.

We find ourselves once again sitting in Committee of the Whole House to vote a war subsidy. The present occupants of the Treasury Bench are determined that so long as they retain their places the Temple of Janus shall not be closed.

Janus, with his two heads, his mystery, his depiction as both laughing and serious, and the obvious parallel this forms with the masks of attic tragedy and comedy would make him a double of the two-headed man, the conjurer, and an associate of the trickster in folk comedy as well.

Good reviews look both backward and forward; an argument could even be made that one must look backward in order to discern the way forward, that backward and forward are two sides of the same research coin. Nowhere is such a Janus-like perspective more apparent than in the current set of reviews.

Janus cat, Janus particle

But other categories of word-play have not been researched extensively or systematically. Among the latter is the type of word-play known as polysemous parallelism, or more commonly, Janus parallelism. The latter term was coined by Cyrus Gordon to describe a literary device in which a middle stich of poetry parallels in a polysemous manner both the line that precedes it and the line which follows it.