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Origin and history

The so-called "Janus" temple is a Celto-Roman-inspired cultural building located in Autun (Saône-et-Loire), northwest of the ancient city of Augustostodunum. Built probably in the late 1st or early 2nd century, it is part of a vast sanctuary occupied since Neolithic times. Its remains, including two 20 m high walls, reveal a square cella and peribol foundations. The wrong attribution to Janus dates back to the 16th century through a fantasy interpretation of the toponym La Genetoye (place planted with junipers).

The site, which has been searched since 2012, has yielded traces of a Latenian and Augustian occupation, suggesting an early cultural role in the choice of Autun as the capital of the Eduans. The temple, abandoned in the early Middle Ages, was reused as a defensive work, explaining its exceptional state of conservation. Ranked among the first French historical monuments in 1840, it illustrates Gallo-Roman architecture with its periphery gallery and its interior niches, although the venerated divinity remains unknown.

Recent excavations (2013–2019) have confirmed the existence of two concentric peribols and a nearby theatre, the Upper Verger, revealing a periurban Sanctuary. The walls of the cella, in small sandstone apparatus, have exterior niches for statues and openings at 13 m high. A central edicle, now extinct, probably occupied the sacred space. The site, marked by an ephemeral military presence in the third century, bears witness to the romanization of local cults.

The historian Pierre de Saint-Julien de Balleure (XVIth century) is at the origin of the name "the temple of Janus", based on an erroneous etymology of the name Genetoye. Jacques Gabriel Bulliot's surveys (1871) and René Goguey's aerial surveys (1976) allowed the sanctuary to be mapped. Magnetic campaigns (2009) and contemporary excavations clarified its organization, including thermal baths and auxiliary buildings, while highlighting its early abandonment after the third century.

The cella, with a quasi-square plane (16.80 × 16.35 m), was covered with a four-paned roof and paved with dry opus. Four inner arcade niches, now bent, and a cul-de-four niche opposite the entrance suggest a statuary cult. The exterior gallery, supported by columns, follows the pattern of the temple of Vesone in Périgueux. The peribolus, whose exact dimensions (75 × 50 m) remain uncertain, delineated the sacred one, redeveloped in Roman times.

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