Victoria (mythology)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, had no myths of her own. That absence is the most striking thing about her. Every culture that has ever fought a war seems to have conjured a divine patron of triumph, a god or goddess who tips the scales. Greece had Nike, complete with a rich mythology. Rome had Victoria, who arrived as essentially a borrowed name and grew into something far more politically charged than her Greek predecessor ever was.

  How does a goddess with no stories of her own become one of the most politically loaded figures in the Roman Empire? And what happens when the most powerful empire on earth tries to take her altar away?

• 2. Borrowed from the Greeks

  ›

  During the first Punic War, Roman soldiers fighting alongside Greek allies encountered Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. She was well established in Magna Graecia and on the Greek mainland, worshipped and storied. The Romans gave her a new name and brought her home.

  Victoria arrived, then, not as an original Roman creation but as a translation. Around the same period, Roman war-deities began receiving the epithets victor, meaning conqueror, and invictus, meaning unconquered. Victory as a divine concept was clearly becoming more central to Roman religious thinking. By the late republican and early imperial eras, Victoria had grown into a widely venerated goddess, honored both alongside other deities and in her own right.

  One ancient goddess sometimes linked to Victoria is Vica Pota. Scholars treat her as entirely separate, because she is almost certainly too ancient for her imagery to have been shaped by Nike. Victoria is also one of several Roman deities connected to the Sabine goddess Vacuna. These tangled associations hint at how Roman religion absorbed and reorganized older traditions around newer, more politically useful figures.

• 3. Temple and Images

  ›

  In 294 BC, Victoria received a temple on the Palatine Hill. That building served practical purposes well beyond worship. It stored war-booty, and for a time it housed the statue of the goddess Magna Mater while her own temple was still under construction. Victoria also had several other shrines scattered across Rome.

  Her cult images carry a very specific visual message. She appears as a winged woman stepping forward, balanced on a globe, holding aloft a wreath or a palm branch. Neither the wreath nor the palm branch is a symbol of war; both represent triumph and the peace that follows victory. Other images show her human-sized, driving a triumphal war-chariot. Still others place her in free-standing statuary, standing on the right-hand palm of a much larger figure, either Jupiter, Mars, or Roma, the divine personification of the Roman state itself.

  In Imperial-era Timgad, the phrase victoria victrix, meaning conquering victory, was used to credit Imperial successes. That phrasing, a doubling of the concept of victory upon itself, shows how the goddess had become a kind of divine endorsement for Roman power abroad.

• 4. The Senate Altar and Its Removal

  ›

  Octavian placed an altar to Victoria in the Senate-house in 29 BC. From that moment, sacrifice to Victoria before every Senate meeting became standard procedure, an essential act before the empire's highest deliberative body could conduct its business.

  When Christianity gained ground in the Roman Empire, the Senate-house altar became a flashpoint. The emperor Gratian, in 379, refused to take the traditional title of pontifex maximus, the head of Roman state religion, and cut off state support for traditional Roman rites and deities. Then in 382, he had Victoria's altar removed from her temple at the Curia Julia.

  This was not the first such removal. The emperor Constantius II had taken the altar away before, and it had been returned after protests. But Gratian's removal was different. Despite anger and anxiety that reached officials at the highest levels of the empire, the altar was not restored. A ritual that had anchored every Senate session for more than four centuries was simply gone.

• 5. Winged Victories and Angels

  ›

  Separate from Victoria as a cult deity, winged figures representing victory appear throughout Roman official art. These are not full goddess figures but what the Romans understood as the spirit of victory, usually appearing in pairs, hovering near the tops of compositions, or filling the triangular spandrels on either side of an arch.

  Pairs of winged victories fit almost perfectly into those architectural spaces, flanking circular elements framed by rectangles. They became standard features of triumphal arches and similar monumental designs. After the Christianization of the Roman Empire, these winged figures did not disappear. They gradually shifted in meaning and evolved into depictions of Christian angels, carrying the visual vocabulary of Roman triumph into the new religious framework. A form born to celebrate military victory ended up populating the art and architecture of a religion built around very different ideas of power.