Salus

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Salus was the Roman goddess of safety, well-being, and health — the divine guarantor of the soundness of the state and, later, of the body. Her name is the ordinary Latin word for safety and good condition, and like a number of Roman deities she began as that abstraction made a person: the welfare of Rome itself, addressed and honored as a power.

Her oldest cult was civic rather than medical. A temple to Salus stood on the Quirinal Hill, vowed during the Samnite wars and dedicated at the start of the third century BCE; the building was famous in antiquity for its wall paintings, and later writers remembered it chiefly for the augurium salutis, an annual augury that could be taken only in a year when Rome was at peace, asking the gods whether it was permitted to pray for the safety of the people. In that form Salus belonged to the same family as Spes (Hope), Victoria, Concordia, and the other personified goods of the commonwealth — qualities the Romans treated as real beings on whom the city’s fortune depended.

The medical sense grew up alongside the civic one. As Roman religion absorbed Greek forms, Salus was identified with Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health and daughter of the healer-god Asclepius. Through that identification she acquired Hygieia’s iconography: she is shown on imperial coinage as a seated woman feeding a serpent that rises from an altar, the snake being the creature sacred to healing cults. The legend on such coins — Salus Augusta, Salus Publica, Salus Augusti — ties the goddess to the safety of the emperor and the empire, so that the older political meaning and the newer bodily one ran together: to pray for Salus was to pray at once for cure and for security.

Scholarship treats Salus less as a developed mythological figure than as a case study in how Rome personified its values. She has no body of stories, no genealogy of her own beyond the borrowed parentage of Hygieia, and almost nothing that could be called myth; what survives is cult, temple, coin, and the machinery of public vows. That very thinness is part of what makes her characteristic of the Roman religious imagination, which was content to honor a quality directly without dressing it in narrative. The resemblance to Greek Hygieia is real and was felt by the Romans themselves, but the two are not simply the same goddess: Hygieia was always health of the person, while Salus carried, from the beginning, the weight of an entire people’s continued existence. The serpent on the coin and the augury taken in years of peace point back to the same wish, kept under two names.

→ Related: Spes · Vertumnus · Portunes · Consus · Anna Perenna