Abundantia

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Abundantia is the Roman personification of abundance — of plenty, prosperity, and the good fortune of having enough. She belongs to the large family of abstractions the Romans gave faces and altars to: qualities and benefits treated as divine and depicted as women, alongside Fortuna (luck), Concordia (civic harmony), and Pax (peace). Her name is simply the Latin word for abundance, and the line between the noun and the goddess is never quite drawn.

She is known far more from images than from worship. There is little evidence of an organized cult with temples and priesthoods; what survives is her presence in poetry and, above all, on the coinage of the empire. Roman emperors struck coins bearing her figure as a public claim — that the reign was a time of plenty, that the grain reached the city, that the treasury and the harvest held. In that role she shades into Annona, the personified grain supply on which Rome depended, and borrows the iconography of Ceres and Fortuna. Her constant attribute is the cornucopia, the horn of plenty, tipped to pour out fruit and coin; often she is shown emptying it, the gesture of bounty given rather than merely held.

The horn itself carries an older story. Roman poets traced the cornucopia to the broken horn of a river-god, or to the goat that suckled the infant Jupiter, a horn thereafter filled forever with whatever its holder desired. Ovid, recounting such tales, lets Copia — plenty — stand as the figure who issues from it. The personification was thus a literary and artistic device as much as a cultic reality: a way of making a public good visible, nameable, and worth thanking.

The figure had an afterlife the Romans would not have predicted. In medieval Europe a goddess or spirit called Dame Abundia — also Habonde, domina Abundia — appears in the writings of churchmen and in the Roman de la Rose: a benevolent night-traveling lady who, with her train, was said to visit houses and bring increase to those she found in order. Clerics such as William of Auvergne reported the belief in order to condemn it as superstition, which is most of why it is recorded at all. Whether this Abundia descends directly from the Roman personification or is a later folk creation that drew her Latin name toward an existing figure of plenty is debated; the names converge, but the chain between them is not firm.

What persists across the long distance between imperial coin and medieval night is the same simple idea wearing different clothes: that having enough is not only a fact of the harvest but something a person might address, picture, and hope to keep on the right side of. The figure outlasted the cult that never quite formed around her, carried by the image of the horn alone.

→ Related: Silvanus · Middle Ages