Fortuna

Fortuna is a cult figure more than a mythic character. Roman writers describe her temples, her festivals and the honours paid to her. They tell almost no adventures and give her no family. The one story that clings to her concerns Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome, and the temples he founded for her.

Ovid meets her on 24 June, the festival of Fors Fortuna. He calls the Romans to celebrate on the Tiber's bank, some on foot and some by boat, and to come home merry with wine (Fasti 6.771-784). The common people worship her, he says, because the founder of her temple rose from humble rank. Slaves worship her because Servius was born of a slave woman (Fasti 6.771-784). In Ovid's account the king's father was Vulcan and his mother the captive Ocresia of Corniculum (Fasti 6.569-636).

The love story explains a puzzle in Servius's temple, where a statue stood hidden under layers of cloth. Ovid gives three reasons and admits he is unsure which is right. In the first, Fortuna loved the king. She was ashamed that a goddess should lie with a mortal, so she entered his house by a small window. That is why the gate is called the Fenestella, the Little Window. Of all men, Servius was the only one for whom she was not blind (Fasti 6.569-584).

The second reason is grief. After the murder of the gentle king, the people wrapped his statue in robes because the sight of it increased their sorrow. The third is the crime of his daughter Tullia, who drove her chariot over her father's body. The statue of Servius is said to have covered its eyes and cried out that its face must be hidden. Fortuna herself forbade anyone to move the robe and spoke from her temple. The day the statue is uncovered will be the first day that modesty is cast to the winds (Fasti 6.585-636). Ovid adds that the temple once burned, but the fire spared the statue (Fasti 6.569-636).

Plutarch tells a related tale in Greek. Servius, he says, attached himself to Fortune and bound his rule to her, until people believed she visited him through a window later called the Porta Fenestella (On the Fortune of the Romans 322f-323a). Plutarch reports that Servius built her a temple on the Capitoline, now called Fortuna Primigenia, and another of Fortuna Obsequens, and founded most of her other titles (On the Fortune of the Romans 322f-323a). The list includes a Private Fortune on the Palatine, a Virgin Fortune, a Fortune of Good Hope and a Men's Fortune beside the altar of Venus of the Basket. Her cult, on this reading, grew from many shrines rather than one story.

Fortuna's best-known cult in the early Republic belonged to women. Livy tells how the matrons of Rome went to Veturia, the mother of Coriolanus, and to his wife Volumnia. They persuaded Veturia to plead with her son, and he withdrew the Volscian army from Rome. In thanks, Livy says, a temple was built and dedicated to Fortuna Muliebris, the Women's Fortune, as a memorial of their deed (Ab Urbe Condita 2.40.12). Plutarch adds that the statue, once consecrated, spoke and told the women of the city that they had dedicated it by the holy law of Rome (On the Fortune of the Romans 318f-319a).

Ovid records a second women's cult. On the Kalends of April, Roman women burn incense to Virile Fortune in the warm-water baths, where all strip and their blemishes show. Ovid says she hides the flaws from the men (Fasti 4.133-162). Horace turns the goddess into a poem of power and dread. He addresses her as the goddess who rules Antium, able to lift a mortal from the lowest step or turn proud triumphs into funerals (Odes 1.35.1-4). The poor farmer prays to her, and so does the sailor on the Carpathian sea, and Dacians, Scythians, Latium and kings' mothers fear her (Odes 1.35.5-14). Grim Necessity walks before her with nails and wedges in her bronze hand (Odes 1.35.17-20). Hope and Faith follow her, but the faithless crowd and false friends leave when she departs (Odes 1.35.21-28). Horace also asks her to keep Caesar safe on his way to the far Britons (Odes 1.35.29-30).

Cicero and Pliny supply the idea that Fortune is blind. Cicero says Fortune is not only blind herself but usually makes blind those whom she embraces, and that a fortunate fool is intolerable (De Amicitia 54). Pliny the Elder says that in all places and at all hours Fortune alone is invoked and named. She is praised and blamed, and worshipped with abuse. Most people, he adds, think her blind, fickle, uncertain and a supporter of the unworthy (Natural History 2.22).

Plutarch argues that Fortune helped make Rome great. He says Virtue made Romulus great, but Fortune watched over him until he became great (On the Fortune of the Romans 321b). In his Gallic siege story, Rome's Fortune raised the alarm through the sacred geese kept at the temple of Juno (On the Fortune of the Romans 325c). He observes that the Romans built splendid, ancient shrines to Fortune but none for Wisdom or Prudence. He says Ancus Marcius, fourth king after Romulus, built the first (On the Fortune of the Romans 318e-f). Livy gives another Fortuna temple with a clear date. Publius Sempronius vowed a temple to Fortuna Primigenia in battle against Hannibal in the Croton countryside (Ab Urbe Condita 29.36). It was dedicated on the Quirinal hill ten years later by the duumvir Quintus Marcius Ralla (Ab Urbe Condita 34.53).

Boethius gave Fortuna her medieval image. In the Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison in the early sixth century, Lady Philosophy tells him that Fortune has not changed. Change is her nature, and she keeps her constancy in her very inconstancy. Boethius calls her the blind goddess and her face changeful (Consolation of Philosophy 2, prose 1). Philosophy asks whether he would stop the turning of the wheel. If it stood still, she says, it would cease to be the wheel of Fortune (Consolation of Philosophy 2, prose 1). In prose 2, Fortune answers in her own voice. She says she turns the wheel and delights to see the high come down and the low ascend (Consolation of Philosophy 2, prose 2).

Machiavelli, in the early sixteenth century, takes the goddess into politics. In chapter 25 of The Prince he says fortune may rule half our actions but leaves the other half, or a little less, to us. He compares her to an impetuous river that floods the plains but can be held by dikes and banks built in quiet times (The Prince 25). He concludes that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, since fortune is a woman who is mastered by force (The Prince 25).

Nothing in the ancient passages checked for this page describes a blindfold. Cicero, Pliny and Boethius call Fortuna blind, and Ovid says she was not blind for Servius. The blindfolded image belongs to later art.