Fortuna

← Encyclopedia

Fortuna was the Roman goddess of chance — the power that grants and withholds, raises and ruins, with no regard for desert. Her name shares a root with fors, the Latin word for what happens by accident, and the Romans worshipped her in that double character: as the giver of increase and good outcome, and as the sheer unpredictability that no offering could finally bind.

The cult was old, and Roman tradition pushed it back to the regal period. It credited the early king Servius Tullius — himself a man of obscure birth raised to the throne, and so a fitting client — with founding several of her shrines, including a temple in the cattle market by the Tiber. Her greatest sanctuary lay not in Rome but at Praeneste, in the hills to the east, where a vast terraced complex housed an oracle: lots, the sortes Praenestinae, were drawn by a child from a chest of inscribed oak tablets, and the answer a worshipper received was held to be the goddess speaking. The site drew petitioners for centuries, and its ruins remain among the most ambitious religious architecture of the Roman Republic.

Fortuna wore many epithets, and each named a sphere she governed: Fortuna Primigenia, the firstborn; Fortuna Muliebris, of women; Fortuna Redux, who brought a traveller or an emperor home safe; Fortuna Publica, the luck of the Roman people itself. Her common attributes carried the idea plainly — a cornucopia for the abundance she could pour out, a ship’s rudder for her steering of events, a globe or a wheel for the instability beneath every gift. The Greeks had their own such figure in Tyche, and the two were freely identified as Greek and Roman thought converged; how far the Roman goddess simply absorbed the Greek one, and how far she had always carried this meaning, is a question the sources leave open.

It was the wheel that outlived the cult. As Rome’s gods receded, the rota Fortunae survived as an image rather than an object of worship — most influentially in Boethius, the sixth-century philosopher who, awaiting execution, set Fortune turning her wheel as the figure of everything the world can give and take back. Through him the wheel passed into medieval art and verse, a fixture of cathedral windows and moral poetry, where kings rode up one side and fell down the other. In that tradition the goddess had become a lesson. What the Romans had honored as a genuine power, to be courted with temples and consulted by lot, the later tradition kept as a warning about the things that cannot be kept.

→ Related: Vesta · Hercules · Divination