Spes

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Rome worshipped its own best wishes for itself. Alongside the named gods of sky and field and hearth stood a second order of divine powers — not persons with histories but qualities a community needed and could not guarantee: fides, faith; concordia, harmony; salus, safety; victoria, victory; libertas, freedom; pietas, duty; and among them spes, hope. These were given altars, priests, dedication days, and temples of stone, addressed in the second person and asked to be present. Modern scholarship has labeled them personifications, abstractions, or virtues; Anna Clark, in her 2007 study Divine Qualities, argues that none of those words quite fits — that cult did not merely decorate an idea already fixed in the Roman mind but gave the quality a definite tone, a place to be claimed and contested, and that a quality became “Roman” through the very act of being worshipped, appropriated, and argued over. Spes belongs to this distinctively Roman institution within Roman religion. The Greeks knew elpis and could speak of it as divine, but they built it no temple and kept it no festival; Rome alone raised hope to a goddess and gave her an address by the river.

A power, not a person

Spes was the Latin word spes itself, elevated and given a body in marble and on coin. She had no developed myth — no theft, no quarrel, no wandering, no parentage worked into the poets as the great Olympians had theirs. There is no story of Spes because she is not the kind of being a story is told about. She was a power addressed and propitiated, invoked at the altar and asked to attend, rather than a character narrated. What the cult secured was not a biography but a function: to make hope a goddess was to make a community’s confidence in its own future into a public, sharable, religious fact — something renewed at a shrine on a fixed day rather than merely felt in private. The diffuse and fragile thing each Roman carried for the harvest, the unborn child, the recovery of the sick, was given a single name, a single face, and a single house in the city, where it could be approached on behalf of everyone at once.

The temple in the vegetable market

Her worship in the city is old, and it stood in two places under two names. The elder, the Spes Vetus — “ancient Hope” — gave its name to a whole district on the eastern edge of the city, the place called ad Spem veterem near the later Porta Praenestina (now the Porta Maggiore), where the roads to Labici and Praeneste forked; tradition reached its founding back to the early fifth century BCE. The qualifier vetus, “old,” was attached precisely to keep this shrine distinct from the younger and more famous temple that the Romans built downriver.

That younger temple stood in the Forum Holitorium, the vegetable market hard by the Tiber, on the flat ground where the city’s produce came ashore. Its founding is tied by tradition to the First Punic War of the third century BCE: it was the work of Aulus Atilius Calatinus, twice consul (in 258 and 254 BCE) and a triumphant general, who vowed it in the long Carthaginian struggle and saw it raised in stone — a war goddess of a quiet kind, hope vowed in the middle of an attritional sea-war that Rome could not be certain of winning. The siting was apt. Spes, in her oldest layer, was a power of growth and increase, of fruitful gardens and fields before she was anything civic; to give her a house among the market-stalls of the holitores, the vegetable-sellers, set the goddess of the not-yet beside the daily traffic in things that ripen.

The temple’s later history is a chronicle of fire and rebuilding, and the chronicle is itself the measure of how long the cult endured. It was damaged, restored, struck by lightning, and burned — most severely in the fire of 213 BCE — and each time raised again; restorations are recorded across the Augustan, Tiberian, and Hadrianic periods, the cult of hope outlasting four centuries of accident. The building did not finally vanish so much as change its dedication: the small Republican temple of Spes was one of three packed side by side in the Forum Holitorium, and the medieval church of San Nicola in Carcere was raised over and through them, swallowing their columns into its fabric. Several columns of the temple of Spes still stand embedded in the church’s southern flank — the goddess of the future preserved, fittingly, by being built into something that came after.

The church of San Nicola in Carcere, Rome, raised over and through three Republican temples of the Forum Holitorium, including the temple of Spes whose columns survive in its southern flank. — Jebulon, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

The flower not yet open

In art she took a settled and instantly recognizable form, and the form is an argument in itself. She is a young woman stepping lightly forward, almost on tiptoe, caught in the act of advancing; with one hand she lifts the hem of her long, light robe to keep it from dragging — the gesture of someone moving, not standing — and in the other she holds out a flower, characteristically a bud not yet open, or just at the point of opening. The image is exact to the idea. Hope is the thing not yet arrived, carried toward something still ahead: the forward step is futurity, the raised hem is motion toward it, and the closed bud is the promise withheld, the flower that contains the fruit but has not yet become it. Where a flower appears, the old reading runs, there is hope of fruit to come. The type descends from the Greek kore, the archaic statue of a standing girl in festival dress holding a flower or a bird, and Rome borrowed the figure and fixed its meaning: the maiden on the threshold of her own ripening became hope made visible.

Bertel Thorvaldsen’s “The Goddess of Hope” (1817), a neoclassical revival of the archaistic Spes type — the stepping pose, lifted robe, and held-out flower bud — in the Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen. — Hansjorn, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

That iconography sat atop an old agricultural and domestic devotion. In her earliest character Spes was close to a garden goddess — the hope of fertile ground, then of abundant offspring, then of prosperity in general — and she was invoked at the two thresholds where a household stakes its future: at births and at weddings, the moments when a family commits itself to a tomorrow it cannot see.

Spes Augusta: hope as statecraft

Under the emperors the civic meaning of hope narrowed to a sharper and more political point. Spes Augusta — “the hope of the imperial house” — appears again and again on Roman coinage, where the goddess advances with her flower across the reverse, her stepping figure and lifted hem now carrying a dynastic charge. The bronze sestertii of Claudius show her so, draped and advancing left, the flower in her right hand, the skirt gathered in her left, beneath the legend SPES AVGVSTA; the same figure recurs across the imperial centuries under the variant titles Spes Publica, the hope of the state, and Spes Romanorum, the hope of the Romans. The hope in question was most often dynastic in the narrow sense: the survival of the line, the existence of an heir, the promise that the order would continue past the present ruler and that the succession was secure. When succession faltered — as it did catastrophically in the year of four emperors — the recovery of stable rule was advertised in the same coinage; hope was a quality the regime needed its subjects to hold and announced, in metal, that it had earned. Hope here was statecraft as much as sentiment, the abstraction conscripted to do the work of reassurance for an empire.

The quieter devotion, and Salus

Spes never left her older and more private life behind. The same word named the personal hope a Roman might carry for children, for a good harvest, for recovery from illness, and her shrines drew that kind of devotion alongside the official calendar — the dedications and small offerings of people hoping for ordinary outcomes, set down at the same altars the state used for the fortunes of the dynasty. Inscriptions attest her honored both publicly and privately, the two registers running side by side. In this domestic key she stood close to Salus, the goddess of safety and well-being, with whom she was sometimes paired — two figures for the two things a household most wanted to keep: to be safe now, and to have something to look toward. She belonged, too, to the wider company of the deified qualities — to Fortuna, who governed the turn of luck, and to Pax, the peace a war-weary state learned to worship as a power — and her cult ran through the whole arc of Roman religion, from the Republic that vowed her temple in a desperate war to the Empire that stamped her on its succession.

The qualities and the historical record

What can be said about Spes with the most confidence is what the documentary record itself attests, and the registers of that record are worth keeping apart. As a matter of dated history, the cult of the divine qualities expands sharply in the middle Republic, in step with Rome’s wars against Carthage and its rivals: the temple of Spes in the Forum Holitorium was one of a cluster of foundations to such powers vowed by commanders in the field and built in the city in thanksgiving or in the hope of relief. Salus had her temple vowed on the Quirinal in the early third century; Concordia, Victoria, Fides, Mens, and others received their public houses across the same decades and the next. Scholarship reads this not as a sudden invention of new gods but as a moment when the language of public benefit and collective confidence found a fixed ritual form — when the things a city most wanted to be true about itself were given somewhere to be asked for. That a quality could be vowed in a war and raised in stone tells us how concretely the Romans took the religious standing of these powers: they were not figures of speech with altars attached but, in the practice of the cult, full members of the worshipped order, given the same sacrifices and the same calendar as the older gods.

How a Roman of the late Republic or the Empire actually understood the goddess he addressed at her altar is harder to recover, and here the record thins into inference. The cult had its critics within the tradition’s own intellectual life — the philosophically minded were capable of asking whether a quality of mind was the right kind of thing to sacrifice to — and later Christian polemic would point to the worship of abstractions as a sign of pagan confusion, multiplying gods out of the contents of the human heart. Such arguments are themselves part of the afterlife of the cult and not a neutral account of it; they tell us how Spes looked to those who had decided against her, not how she was held by those who kept her festival. What the inscriptions and the calendar attest directly is narrower and surer: that on the first of August an offering was due, that men and women left dedications to Spes for outcomes they wanted, and that the city maintained her house for four hundred years.

Hope on the coinage of the empire

The numismatic record is where Spes is most abundant and most legible, because the coin gave the abstract quality a caption. From the Julio-Claudians onward her stepping figure with its flower and gathered hem becomes a standard reverse type, attached to a legend that fixes whose hope is meant. Under Claudius the sestertii read SPES AVGVSTA and tie the goddess to the prospects of the ruling house; later issues vary the formula — Spes Publica, the hope of the commonwealth; Spes Romanorum, the hope of the Romans — and the same advancing maiden serves all of them, the iconography stable while the political referent shifts. The reverse type was especially useful at the dynastic seams of an imperial reign: at the proclamation of an heir, the birth of a prince, the accession of a new ruler, or the recovery of order after civil war, when what the regime most needed to broadcast was that there was a future and that it was provided for. To put Spes on the coin was to assert, in the most widely circulated medium the ancient world possessed, that the order would hold — that the bud the goddess carried would, in time, become the fruit of a stable succession.

The record and its readers

The modern understanding of Spes rests on three kinds of evidence held in balance. The first is the topographical and antiquarian record of her temples, assembled in the standard reference gazetteers of ancient Rome — the identification of the aedes Spei in the Forum Holitorium, the separate Spes Vetus on the eastern approaches, the founding by Atilius Calatinus, the fires and restorations — and confirmed by the physical survival of the temple’s columns in the church of San Nicola in Carcere. The second is the numismatic evidence, vast and explicitly captioned, where the legends SPES AVGVSTA, Spes Publica, and Spes Romanorum let the coins speak their own meaning. The third is the interpretive work of recent scholarship on the divine qualities as a class. Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, in their two-volume Religions of Rome (1998), set the worship of qualities like Spes within the broader rhythm of Roman cult and its imperial transformations; Anna Clark’s Divine Qualities: Cult and Community in Republican Rome (2007), reviewed in detail in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, mounts the fullest single argument for treating these powers not as inert allegories but as living centers of religious and political contest, the very ground on which Romans defined what they hoped to be. Read together, they recover Spes as the cult understood her — not a decorative figure but a power the city kept, vowed in war and renewed every August.

She is, in the end, the one goddess defined entirely by absence — by what is owed and not yet paid, awaited and not yet here. The other powers of the Roman rite named things a worshipper could possess: safety held, victory won, faith kept, peace concluded. Spes alone named the gap before possession, the open interval in which a future is still being decided. Her flower is held forward and never opens because the moment it opened it would no longer be hope but harvest, and the goddess would have nothing left to be. She keeps the bud closed on purpose. That is the whole of her: a step taken toward what has not yet come, frozen at the instant before arrival, a deity who exists only so long as the thing she promises stays just out of reach.

→ Related: Salus · Vertumnus · Anna Perenna · Portunes · Fortuna · Pax · Ancient Roman Religion · Roman Republic · Roman Empire · Roman Rite · Summanus · Consus · Abundantia