Twenty miles east of Rome, the hill town of Palestrina is built on top of a Roman sanctuary so large that the town's medieval streets simply follow its terraces. Nobody realised the full scale of it until Allied bombing in 1944 stripped away the buildings covering the upper levels and exposed ramps, colonnades and a hemicycle climbing the hillside in stages to a small round temple at the summit. This was the sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste, and in the second and first centuries BCE it was among the largest religious complexes anywhere in Italy.
An oracle worked by a child
What people came for was the sortes — lots. Cicero, who is scathing about the whole business, describes the mechanism carefully enough to reconstruct it: oaken tablets inscribed with ancient letters were kept in a chest of olive wood, and when a consultation was made a boy drew one out after they had been shuffled.
He also reports the foundation story, which he regards as nonsense and repeats anyway. A local man named Numerius Suffustius was told in repeated dreams to split a particular rock; he was mocked for it, did it, and the lots flew out. On the same day honey is supposed to have flowed from an olive tree nearby, and the wood of that tree was made into the chest.
Cicero then notes the thing that makes the passage valuable: whatever he thinks of it, the shrine is crowded, magistrates consult it, and the practice is thriving. A sceptic's account of a functioning oracle is better evidence than a believer's.
A goddess who is her own grandmother
Primigenia means firstborn, and Praeneste's dedications produce a theological knot that ancient writers noticed and could not untie. She is called the firstborn daughter of Jupiter — and she is also shown and addressed as the nurse of the infant Jupiter and Juno, with an inscription from the site dedicating to Jupiter as a child in her lap.
Mother of the chief god and daughter of the chief god, in the same sanctuary, at the same time. Roman religion was not a system that required this to be resolved, and nobody at Praeneste appears to have tried.
Chance in the Roman calendar
Her Roman cults are older than the Greek personification of Tyche and are attributed by tradition to Servius Tullius, the king born of a slave woman, whom Roman writers described as Fortuna's favourite and in some versions her lover. The archaic sanctuary in the Forum Boarium, excavated beneath the church of Sant'Omobono, holds sixth-century BCE temple remains associated with Fortuna and Mater Matuta and is among the oldest identifiable sacred structures in the city.
Fors Fortuna, on 24 June, belonged to the people at the bottom. Her temples lay across the Tiber, and Ovid describes crowds going downriver by boat, garlanded and drunk, on a holiday that slaves and freedmen could take. Servius Tullius's supposed origin made a goddess of unpredictable elevation particularly theirs.
Later Republican Rome multiplied her further: Fortuna Huiusce Diei, "the Fortune of This Day", got the round temple that still stands in the Largo Argentina, vowed by a commander at the battle of Vercellae in 101 BCE — the surviving colossal head and foot of her cult statue are among the most striking objects in the Centrale Montemartini museum. Augustus added Fortuna Redux, the Fortune of Safe Return, with an altar voted for his homecoming in 19 BCE, and provincial towns raised temples to Fortuna Augusta, including one at Pompeii.
The wheel, the rudder and the ball
Her attributes are unusually legible. The rudder means she steers events. The globe or ball means the position is unstable. The cornucopia means she also gives. The wheel means it turns, and it turned into one of the most durable emblems in European art.
The blindfold, which everyone now assumes is ancient, mostly is not. Latin texts occasionally call Fortune blind as a figure of speech, but the blindfolded Fortuna of paintings and playing cards is largely a medieval and Renaissance development. Ancient images generally show her sighted, which makes a different point: she is not indiscriminate, she is unaccountable.
Not the same job as Tyche
Greek Tyche is important above all as the fortune of a city — Antioch's Tyche with her mural crown and the river at her feet is the classic image, and hers is a civic personification of the Hellenistic period. Fortuna reaches back into archaic Latium with genuine cult, an oracle and festivals for particular social groups, and she operates on individuals as much as on states.
Plutarch wrote an essay asking whether Rome's empire was owed to fortune or to virtue, which is not an idle exercise: Romans genuinely argued about how much of their success was luck, and Fortuna is where that argument was conducted.
Boethius, and the wheel that never stopped
In about 524 CE, awaiting execution, Boethius wrote the Consolation of Philosophy, in which Fortune appears in person to explain that turning is what she does and that anyone who accepts her gifts has accepted the terms. That book was translated into nearly every European vernacular — by Alfred the Great, by Chaucer, by Elizabeth I — and it carried the rota Fortunae into the whole of medieval thought, with kings shown rising and falling on the rim of a wheel in manuscript after manuscript.
From there: the thirteenth-century Carmina Burana poem "O Fortuna", now inescapable through Orff's setting; Shakespeare's "fortune's fool"; the tarot's Wheel of Fortune card; the Lot of Fortune still calculated in horoscopes; "Lady Luck"; and a television game show watched by tens of millions of people who are, technically, invoking a Praenestine oracle every weeknight.
Questions that come up about Fortuna
Was the Praeneste oracle used for state business?
The Roman Senate consulted the Sibylline Books rather than Praeneste for official prodigies, and there is a report that in 241 BCE the consultation of the Praenestine lots by a magistrate was rejected as improper. The sanctuary's clientele was enormous but largely private and Italian, which is part of why its scale surprises people — it is a monument to individual anxiety rather than state religion.
What is the difference between Fortuna and Fatum?
Fatum, "that which has been spoken", is fixed and belongs to the language of oracles and destiny; the Parcae spin it. Fortuna is variable and can be petitioned. Roman writers use the two loosely and philosophers argued about their relation, with Stoics tending to absorb chance into providence and Epicureans denying design altogether. There is no single Roman doctrine to report.
Is the great mosaic at Palestrina connected to the sanctuary?
The famous Nile mosaic, showing Egypt from the cataracts to the delta with labelled animals, comes from the lower complex at Praeneste and is usually dated to the late second or early first century BCE. Its relationship to the Fortuna cult is disputed — proposals range from a hall of the sanctuary to a civic basilica floor — but it is contemporary with the terraces and gives a vivid sense of the wealth behind the building programme.
Why does she appear so often on imperial coinage?
Because she was the safest possible message. An emperor's coins advertising Fortuna Redux or Fortuna Augusta claim divine favour without claiming divinity, and they work equally well after a victory, a journey or a recovery from illness. She is among the commonest reverse types across three centuries, so that by sheer count of surviving specimens her portrait circulated further than that of almost any other Roman deity.