Spes

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Spes was the Roman personification of hope — the Latin word spes itself, elevated into a goddess and given an altar. She belonged to a distinctive feature of Roman religion: the cult of abstractions, in which qualities a community wished to secure for itself — safety, faith, harmony, victory, hope — were worshipped as divine powers in their own right, with temples, priests, and festival days.

Her worship in the city is old. A temple to Spes stood in the Forum Holitorium, the vegetable market by the Tiber, and tradition connected its founding to the First Punic War of the third century BCE; it burned and was rebuilt more than once across the centuries, which is itself a measure of how long the cult endured. In art she took a settled and recognizable form: a young woman stepping lightly forward, lifting the hem of her robe with one hand and holding out a flower — usually a bud not yet open — in the other. The image is exact to the idea. Hope is the thing not yet arrived, carried toward something still ahead.

The Romans did not, in the main, treat such figures as characters with myths. Spes had no developed story, no parentage worked into the poets in the way the great Olympians did; she was a power addressed and propitiated rather than a person narrated. What scholarship establishes is the function the cult served. To make hope a goddess was to make the community’s confidence in its own future a public, sharable, religious fact — something to be renewed at an altar rather than merely felt.

Under the emperors that civic meaning narrowed to a sharper point. Spes Augusta, “the hope of the imperial house,” appears repeatedly on Roman coinage, where the goddess advances with her flower across the reverse. The hope in question was usually dynastic: the survival of the line, the existence of an heir, the promise that the order would continue past the present ruler. Hope here was statecraft as much as sentiment — a quality the regime needed its subjects to hold, and advertised that it had earned.

Spes also kept a quieter, more private life. The same word named the personal hope a Roman might carry for children, for a harvest, for recovery from illness, and her shrines drew that kind of devotion alongside the official calendar. In this 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. The cult faded with the rest of the old Roman gods, but the word it had once raised to divinity outlived its altars, and outlived the empire that put it on its coins.

→ Related: Salus · Vertumnus · Anna Perenna · Portunes