Abundantia

← Encyclopedia

A coin leaves the mint at Rome, or at Antioch, or at one of the moving frontier workshops that followed an emperor on campaign. On its reverse stands a woman in a long gown, and from a curved horn cradled in her arm she pours a fall of fruit, ears of grain, and coin toward the ground. Around her runs a single word: ABVNDANTIA. She is not a portrait of anyone, and she is not, in any ordinary sense, a goddess with a house. She is the Latin word for having enough, given a body and set to work as a promise. Abundantia is one of the purest cases in Roman religion of an image that flourished while the cult behind it never quite formed — a deity whose entire biography can be told from the things she holds.

Peter Paul Rubens, “Abundance (Abundantia),” c. 1630, with the overflowing horn that is the figure’s constant emblem — National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Noun and goddess

Abundantia belongs to the large company of divine abstractions the Romans gave faces and names to: qualities, benefits, and conditions of public life treated as powers and depicted, almost always, as standing or seated women. The line of such figures is long — Fortuna (luck and the turn of chance), Salus (safety and well-being), Concordia (civic harmony), Pax (peace), Victoria, Liberalitas (the emperor’s open-handedness), Pietas, Providentia. They were not a foreign import dressed up in Latin. The instinct that makes a Roman pour a libation to the spirit of a doorway, a boundary stone, or a granary is the same instinct, raised to the level of the state, that turns abundance itself into someone to whom thanks might be addressed.

What sets Abundantia apart even within this family is how little daylight there is between the word and the figure. Abundantia is simply the common Latin noun for plenty, overflow, more-than-enough. When a poet or a die-cutter personifies it, nothing is added to the vocabulary; the abstraction wears its own name unaltered. The same word can mean, in one line, a good harvest, and in the next, the lady who embodies it, and Latin rarely forces the writer to decide which is meant. She is, in this respect, less a character with a story than a condition with a posture — and the posture, the emptying of the horn, became her whole identity.

The image without the cult

The most striking fact about Abundantia is the imbalance between how often she appears and how little she was worshipped. There is no securely attested temple of Abundantia at Rome, no priesthood, no festival in the calendar bearing her name, no body of inscriptions recording vows paid to her by private people in the way thousands paid them to Silvanus or to Fortuna. Where the older Italic powers are known from cult — buried altars, grove-feasts, votive offerings — Abundantia is known almost entirely from two media that do not require a temple at all: poetry and the imperial coin.

This makes her a good test of what a Roman “deity” could be. She is real in the public imagination and on the most widely handled object in the empire, and at the same time she has almost no footprint on the ground. The personification could be invoked, pictured, and trusted without ever being the object of an organized rite. The horn did the work that an altar would otherwise have done.

Abundantia on the coinage

It is the coinage that carries her. From the first century of the empire onward, Abundantia became one of the standard reverse types by which an emperor advertised the material condition of his reign. The message of such a coin is direct: under this ruler there is enough — the grain has reached the city, the treasury is full, the harvest has held. The legend most often reads ABVNDANTIA AVG or ABVNDANTIA AVGVSTI, “the abundance of the emperor,” locating the bounty not in nature or in the gods generally but in the person of the princeps as its guarantor.

The visual grammar is consistent across two and a half centuries. Abundantia stands, sometimes is seated, and tips her cornucopia downward, letting its contents spill — grain, fruit, occasionally coin — often over a modius, the measuring-vessel for grain, or simply toward the viewer. The emptying is the point. A held horn says only that wealth exists; a poured horn says that it is being given out. On some types she sets a foot on the prow of a ship, or stands beside one, fixing the abstraction to the concrete machinery on which the city fed: the grain fleets that crossed from Egypt and Africa to the harbor at Ostia.

A radiate (antoninianus) of Gallienus (reigned 253–268) with Abundantia emptying her cornucopia on the reverse — Portable Antiquities Scheme, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The cataloged coin record runs across a long line of reigns. Abundantia appears under emperors as far apart as Trajan, Antoninus Pius, Caracalla, Elagabalus, Severus Alexander, Gordian III, Trajan Decius, Gallienus, Tetricus, Probus, Carus, Numerian, Carinus, Diocletian, and Galerius — the American Numismatic Society’s survey of her coin types gathers the corpus across these centuries. She becomes especially common in the turbulent third century, precisely when actual abundance was least assured and the claim of it most needed: the more uncertain the grain supply and the currency, the more useful a figure who could promise plenty on the very coins whose silver was being quietly thinned. Under Trajan (reigned 98–117) one type shows her enthroned upon a heap of cornucopiae after the conquest of Dacia, binding the wealth taken in war to the wealth distributed at home through the alimenta, the imperial scheme that maintained Italian children. The personification of plenty thus became part of the standing language in which emperors presented victory and provision as a single continuous benefit flowing from themselves — the pattern the historian Carlos Noreña traces across the western coinage, where benefit-personifications such as Annona, Salus, and Fortuna circulated as the advertised ideals of empire.

Shading into Annona; borrowing from Ceres and Fortuna

Because she was an abstraction rather than a sharply bounded person, Abundantia bled easily into the figures nearest her. The closest neighbor was Annona, the personified grain-supply itself — not abundance in general but the year’s corn, its shipment, measure, and distribution to the people. On coinage of Nero the two were brought together and at times effectively equated, Abundantia standing in for the same harbor-and-granary realities that Annona named more technically. Both were, in the phrasing used of these benefit-figures, virtues caught in the act: powers shown doing the work of provision at the dock where the grain came in. The difference is one of register. Annona is the supply line; Abundantia is the surplus that the supply line, working well, produces.

Her iconography she largely took from older and grander goddesses. The cornucopia and the ears of grain are the attributes of Ceres, the great Italic goddess of the corn; the cornucopia paired with a rudder or a wheel is the signature of Fortuna. Abundantia carries the horn without the rudder, the grain without the agricultural cult, drawing on the established visual vocabulary of plenty without owning any single element of it outright. She is, almost by design, a composite — assembled from the emblems of her neighbors to say one thing they each say partly. In the Greek-speaking East and in Egypt the same abstraction wore a Greek name, Euthenia, the personified plenty of the Nile-fed land, and the two ran in parallel without merging.

The horn and its older story

The single object that defines her — the cornu copiae, the horn of plenty — is older than any Roman personification and arrives carrying its own myths. Two accounts dominate, and the Roman poets repeated both without troubling to choose between them.

In the first, the horn comes from a goat. The infant Jupiter, hidden from his father on Cretan Ida, was suckled by a she-goat (or by a nymph, Amalthea, who owned her). The goat broke one horn against a tree; the nymph gathered it up, wreathed it with fresh herbs, filled it with fruit, and carried it to the child’s lips — and the horn thereafter yielded whatever its holder desired. Ovid tells this version in the Fasti, his calendar-poem of the Roman year, where it explains the rising of the star Capella, the She-goat, in early May.

In the second, the horn comes from a river. Ovid gives it in the Metamorphoses: the river-god Achelous, fighting Hercules for the hand of Deianira, changes shape to escape and becomes a bull; Hercules wrenches off one of the bull’s horns, and the Naiads take the broken horn, heap it with fruits and flowers, and so make the horn of plenty. In the telling, Ovid lets Copia — Plenty herself, another name under which Abundantia is sometimes known — stand as the figure who issues from or fills the horn. That a single object could be explained at once by a goat on Crete and a wounded river-god in Greece, with no felt need to reconcile them, is characteristic. The horn mattered as a thing that pours without end; its pedigree could be told more than one way.

Sandro Botticelli, “Allegory of Abundance” (Copia), c. 1480–1485, pen and wash — British Museum, London, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The medieval night-lady: Abundia, Habonde, domina Abundia

The figure had an afterlife the imperial mints could not have predicted, and it is here that Abundantia becomes genuinely strange. In the high medieval West there appears a being called Abundia — also domina Abundia, “Lady Abundia,” and in French Dame Habonde — who travels by night. She is no longer struck on coins by an emperor; she is reported by churchmen who wished the belief gone, and by one great vernacular poem.

Louis Petitot’s stone allegory of Abundance (1846) on the Pont du Carrousel, Paris, carrying the same cornucopia centuries after the Roman mints — photograph by Jebulon, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The fullest clerical account comes from William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris, who died in 1249. In his vast theological survey De universo, composed in the late 1230s, he describes a belief current among ordinary people: that certain dominae nocturnae, “ladies of the night,” led by a domina Abundia or by one called Satia, enter houses after dark, eat and drink what has been set out for them — yet the food and drink are found undiminished in the morning — and, if pleased with what they find, leave prosperity and increase behind them; if a house has nothing ready, they pass it by in disdain and it goes without their blessing. William derives the name straight from abundantia and treats the whole practice as idolatry, a folly to be condemned. It is precisely his wish to condemn it that preserves it: the night-lady survives mainly as a thing the clergy described in order to forbid.

The same figure walks through the Roman de la Rose, the most influential French poem of the age. In the continuation written by Jean de Meun around 1275 — the long work begun by Guillaume de Lorris a generation earlier — she is Dame Habonde, one of the bonnes dames, the “good ladies,” and the poet remarks that as much as a third of the people held that they themselves traveled out with her in spirit by night while their bodies lay still at home. The belief was neither marginal nor short-lived. A line of churchmen and canonists had been describing night-traveling women and their leaders for centuries — back through Caesarius of Arles in the sixth century and the canon tradition that condemned women who imagined themselves riding out at night, down through later collectors of church law. As late as 1457 the cardinal and philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, as bishop of Brixen (Bressanone) in the Italian Alps, dealt with two old women of the Val di Fassa who spoke of a bona domina they called Richella — a bountiful lady of the Abundia type, whom Cusanus assimilated to the society of Diana; they were treated as apostates. The good lady of plenty had become, in the eyes of authority, a matter for the courts.

Whether this Abundia is the Roman Abundantia in late disguise is genuinely unsettled, and the registers must be kept apart. That the names share a root is plain: Abundia is abundantia worn down, and William himself drew the etymology. Beyond the name, the functions rhyme — both are figures of household increase and the gift of enough. But the chain between them is not documented. A continuous descent would have to pass through nine or ten centuries of which the goddess herself leaves almost no trace; it is at least as defensible that medieval people, working from the living Latin word and from older strata of belief in benevolent night-spirits, generated a new figure and let her drift toward the Latin name that fit her so well. Scholars of the medieval night-cult complex — the dominae nocturnae, the “good ladies,” the spirit-journeys later absorbed into the imagery of the witches’ sabbath, studied by Carlo Ginzburg and others — set Abundia within a wide European family of such ladies rather than deriving her cleanly from one Roman ancestress. The names converge; the genealogy does not close.

A goddess made of a gesture

What holds Abundantia together across the long distance from the third-century antoninianus to the lady of the Roman de la Rose is not a body of doctrine or a remembered rite, because there was never much of either. It is one motion, repeated: a horn turned downward and let pour. She could be carried for two and a half centuries on the coinage of an empire, and then walk for two and a half more centuries through the houses of medieval France, on the strength of that single image — a figure who needed no temple because she had a gesture that said everything she was. The Roman who weighed her coin and the peasant who set out bread for her at night were asking the same thing of the same picture: that the overflowing horn, once shown, might keep on giving. A goddess carried by an emblem rather than a cult is a fragile thing, easily mislaid — and what kept this one in circulation, mint after mint and house after house, was simply that the horn she tipped poured out the one thing a hungry world could never have its fill of looking at.

→ Related: Silvanus · Middle Ages · Fortuna · Jupiter · Pax · Salus · Consus · Juturna · Anna Perenna · Ancient Roman Religion · Roman Empire · Roman Republic · Roman Rite