Fama

Roman A minor goddess who spread rumors, mixing truth and lies, and who also spread strife and disagreement. She was perhaps only the personification of the human trait of spreading rumor and gossip. When Fama, speaking in many voices, spread her rumors in the realms of the gods, Jupiter cast her out, sending her to live among humans where she found it easy to spread harm and evil. The Greeks knew her as Ossa, or Pheme. The Roman poet Virgil described Fama in great detail. He said she had thousands of eyes and mouths and that she could fly between the Earth and the heavens. Her palace had many openings through which the false messages she spoke could pass to be spread over the Earth. Scholars suggest that Virgil himself, or Greek poets too, may have created this goddess, basing her features on little more than their ideas for the forces that cause rumors.