Fortuna

The two great Italian sanctuaries of Fortuna were oracular, and the oracle worked by lot. At Praeneste, modern Palestrina, she was Fortuna Primigenia, the first-born, and Cicero records both the founding story and the procedure: oak tablets inscribed with ancient characters were kept in a chest of olive wood, and a boy drew one at random for the enquirer. Cicero is dismissive of the practice, and admits in the same breath that the shrine was crowded regardless. The sanctuary was enormous, a series of ramped terraces cut into the hillside on a scale that still dominates the town, and it was among the largest religious complexes in Italy.

At Antium the Fortunae were plural, two sisters whose images were said to move in order to give their answers, and Horace addresses the goddess of Antium in an ode that treats her as the power before whom rulers and peoples alike tremble.

At Rome she carried a long list of cult titles, each attaching her to one particular thing: Fortuna Publica for the people, Fortuna Redux for a safe return from campaign, Fortuna Huiusce Diei for the fortune of this day, Fortuna Muliebris and Fortuna Virilis for women and for men. The festival of Fors Fortuna on the twenty-fourth of June was a popular occasion kept with boats on the Tiber and a good deal of drinking, and it belonged to slaves and freedmen as much as to anybody.

The attributes of Fortuna are a set of statements about instability. The rudder says that she steers. The globe or ball says that she cannot be stood on. The cornucopia says that what she brings can be good. The wheel says that whatever the position is, it is temporary. In Greek she is Tyche, the same power, who acquires a mural crown as the personified luck of a particular city, and the Tyche of Antioch, seated with a river god at her feet, became the model for civic fortune figures across the Hellenistic east.

The cult ended and the wheel did not. Boethius, writing in prison in the sixth century while awaiting execution, gives Fortuna a speech in the Consolation of Philosophy in which she declines to apologise: turning the wheel is what she does, she never promised otherwise, and the man now at the bottom accepted the ride when he was at the top. That passage, far more than any Roman altar, is why the medieval west drew the Rota Fortunae obsessively, a wheel carrying a king rising, reigning, falling and crushed beneath, in manuscripts, on cathedral rose windows and in the Carmina Burana.

The tarot trump called the Wheel of Fortune is a late descendant of the same image, and the ordinary English phrase about a wheel of fortune has now outlived every temple she ever had by some fifteen centuries.

Sources Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price with The Consolation of Philosophy (De Consolatione Philosophiae)Boethius