Epona

Epona is a Gaulish horse goddess, the protector of horses, mares, foals, donkeys and mules, and of the people who worked with them, and she holds a unique distinction among Celtic deities: she is the only one to have been taken fully into the official religion of Rome, given a place in the Roman calendar with a feast day of her own, on the eighteenth of December. Her name derives from the Gaulish word for horse, and she is regularly depicted seated among horses or foals, or riding side-saddle on a mare, often holding a dish of grain, fruit or a cornucopia, signs of the fertility and abundance she was also thought to bring. Her cult, originating among the horse-rearing Celts of Gaul, spread widely through the Roman world, carried above all by the cavalry: Roman mounted troops, and especially the auxiliary units recruited from Gaul and the Germanies, adopted her as their patroness, and she was honoured in the stables of the army from Britain to the Danube, sometimes with a small shrine set up where the horses were kept.

Because of this military following, dedications and images of Epona are found across a great swathe of the empire, making her one of the best-attested of all Celtic deities. She protected the animals on which agriculture, transport and war all depended, and through her association with horses she was drawn also toward ideas of fertility, sovereignty and, in some interpretations, the passage to the otherworld. Epona is a striking case of a native Celtic goddess who not only survived the Roman conquest but was embraced by the conquerors and carried by their armies to the far corners of their world.

Two Latin authors give Epona a kind of testimony no state inscription can: they describe her cult as an ordinary, everyday thing rather than an officially sponsored one. The satirist Juvenal, writing in the early second century CE, mocks the superstition of stable hands who paint a small image of Epona on a stable wall or post, a detail he tosses off precisely because it was common enough to need no explanation for a Roman audience. Apuleius, in his novel The Golden Ass, has his narrator, transformed into a donkey, notice a little shrine to Epona set into a pillar of his stable, freshly garlanded with roses, tended not by priests but by the ordinary grooms who worked there. Together these throwaway details, mockery from one writer and quiet observation from the other, show a devotion practiced at the level of the stable floor, far below the formal calendar entry and cavalry dedications that mark her more official cult.

Epona's surviving images also show a distinctively Gaulish habit that sets her apart from most Roman deities: she is frequently carved not once but three times in a single relief, three identical or near identical goddesses seated side by side among their horses. Multiplying a deity's image this way was a broader convention in Gaulish religious art, seen also in the triple mother goddesses known as the Matres or Matronae, and its meaning is still debated, whether it intensified her power, expressed a triad of related but distinct functions, or reflected some other native convention no surviving text explains. Whatever it signified, the tripled Epona is a reminder that even a goddess absorbed wholesale into Roman state religion kept a visibly Gaulish way of being shown.