The Story of Fortuna, Goddess of Luck
At a Glance
- Central figures: Fortuna, goddess of luck and chance; Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome, born a slave and raised to the throne; Ancus Marcius, fourth king of Rome.
- Setting: Rome during the regal period, particularly the Palatine and the Forum Boarium; sources include Plutarch’s De Fortuna Romanorum, Ovid’s Fasti, and Varro’s antiquarian writings.
- The turn: Fortuna chose Servius Tullius - a boy born into slavery in the royal household - and marked him with fire seen by Queen Tanaquil, binding the goddess’s favor to Rome’s most improbable king.
- The outcome: Servius Tullius rose from servitude to kingship, reorganized the Roman state into classes and centuries, and built the first temple to Fortuna in the Forum Boarium, establishing her as a civic deity rather than a mere spirit of chance.
- The legacy: The temple of Fortuna in the Forum Boarium stood for centuries; the annual festival on the eleventh day before the Calends of July honored her, and a veiled wooden statue inside the temple was said to have been dedicated by Servius himself.
The flame appeared on the sleeping boy’s head. It did not burn. It sat above his hair like a crown made of nothing solid, orange and steady, throwing light across the nursery walls of the palace on the Palatine. A servant screamed and reached for water. Tanaquil, wife of King Tarquinius Priscus, caught the woman’s arm and held it still.
She watched the fire. The boy - Servius, son of a captive woman from Corniculum, born into the household as property - slept through it. When he woke, the flame vanished. Tanaquil said nothing to the servants. She said a great deal to her husband.
The boy would be educated as a prince.
The Goddess Who Entered Through Doors
Fortuna was not like Jupiter or Mars. She held no fixed territory in the sky, no legions, no inherited sphere of cosmic authority. The Romans understood her as something stranger and more unsettling: the force that decided which way a thing fell. A tile from a roof. A battle. A birth. She turned her wheel, and what had been high went low, and what had been low rose.
She had many faces in Roman worship. Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste, where her great sanctuary sprawled across the hillside with its oracular lots - wooden tablets drawn from a chest by a child’s hand, the future decided by a toddler’s grip. Fortuna Virilis, invoked by women in the men’s baths on the Calends of April, asking the goddess to hide their flaws from their husbands’ eyes. Fortuna Muliebris, who had her own temple on the Via Latina, built after the women of Rome persuaded Coriolanus to turn back his army. Fortuna Redux, who brought travelers home. Fortuna Bona, Fortuna Mala - the Romans did not pretend luck came only in one kind.
But the Fortuna who mattered most to the city’s political memory was the one who walked through a window.
The Window on the Palatine
Plutarch tells it plainly in his De Fortuna Romanorum: Fortuna entered the house of Servius Tullius through a window. Not the door. The window. The detail is specific and strange enough to be old, older perhaps than the literary sources that preserve it. A goddess of chance does not knock. She does not ask permission from the ianitor at the threshold. She comes sideways, through an opening no one thought to guard.
Servius was her favorite. This was the Roman tradition’s firm claim. She loved him, or she chose him - the Latin sources do not always distinguish between the two. What mattered was the result. A slave’s son sat on the throne of Rome. He married the king’s daughter. When Tarquinius Priscus was murdered by the sons of Ancus Marcius, Tanaquil concealed the king’s death long enough for Servius to take power, and the transfer held. No civil war. No contested succession. Fortuna’s hand was steady that day.
Servius ruled for forty-four years. He built the first walls that enclosed all seven hills. He organized the Roman people into classes based on wealth - the census, the comitia centuriata, the machinery that would outlast the monarchy and serve the Republic for centuries. And he built Fortuna her temple.
The Temple in the Forum Boarium
He placed it in the Forum Boarium, the cattle market between the Palatine and the Tiber, near the round temple that some later Romans attributed to Hercules. The Forum Boarium was where commerce happened, where goods changed hands, where fortune in its most literal sense - profit, loss, the price of grain - shaped daily life. Servius understood what he was doing. Fortuna belonged where outcomes were decided.
Inside the temple stood a wooden statue of Fortuna, veiled. The veil was important. Varro records that the statue was never unveiled in public ceremony. Some said the veil was Servius’s own dedication, a mark of the intimacy between the king and the goddess - that their bond was private, not for the crowd’s eyes. Others said the veil meant something harder: that luck’s face cannot be seen. You feel her effects. You never see her coming.
The statue held a rudder in one hand and a cornucopia in the other. The rudder steered; the cornucopia poured. Fortuna could direct your course or fill your stores, and she could do neither, and she chose when.
The Wheel and the Blindfold
Later Roman writers gave Fortuna her wheel - the rota Fortunae - and sometimes a blindfold, though the blindfold came late and may owe more to Greek philosophical influence than to old Roman cult practice. The wheel was the essential image. It turned. You rose on it or fell. Your position at any given moment told you nothing about your position in the next.
Roman generals understood this. Before a triumphus, the victorious commander rode in his chariot through the streets of Rome with a slave standing behind him, holding a golden crown above his head and whispering: Respice post te. Hominem te memento. Look behind you. Remember you are a man. The slave’s whisper was Fortuna’s theology compressed into seven words. Today you ride. Tomorrow the wheel turns.
Servius himself proved the point. His own daughter Tullia conspired with her husband, Lucius Tarquinius - later called Superbus - to overthrow him. Servius was murdered. Tullia drove her carriage over her father’s body in the street. That street was called the Vicus Sceleratus, the Street of Crime, for as long as Romans remembered it. Fortuna’s favorite, killed by his own blood. The wheel had turned.
The Eleventh Day Before the Calends
Each year, on the eleventh day before the Calends of July - the twenty-first of June by modern reckoning - the people of Rome honored Fortuna. The temple in the Forum Boarium was the center. Freedmen and freedwomen came in particular numbers, because Fortuna was the goddess of those whose station had changed. She had lifted Servius from slavery. She could lift them. She could also, of course, send them back down.
The offerings were modest. Wine, incense, garlands on the wooden doors of the temple. No suovetaurilia, no grand procession. Fortuna’s worship had the quality of a private bargain made in a public place - each petitioner standing before the veiled statue with a specific, unspoken request. Luck is personal. You do not announce what you need from it.
The temple burned and was rebuilt and burned again across the centuries. The statue survived longer than the kings, longer than the Republic, into the age of the emperors, who had their own complicated relationships with Fortuna. Augustus kept a golden image of her in his bedroom. Tiberius trusted no one, not even the goddess. Nero thought he had her permanently on his side. The wheel corrected each of them in turn.
The veiled statue is gone now. But the Forum Boarium is still there, between the Palatine and the river, where cattle were once sold and fortunes were once made and lost in a morning.