Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia
Reconstruction

The sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia was an ancient Roman, religious complex in Praeneste (now Palestrina, 35 km east of Rome) founded in 204 BC by Publius Sempronius Tuditanus. The temple within the sanctuary was dedicated to the goddess Fortuna Primigenia, or Fortune of the First Born.[1] Parents brought their newly-born first child to the temple in order to improve its likelihood of surviving infancy and perpetuating the gens.

The remains of the sanctuary still standing today date to the dictatorship of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, around 80 BC.[2] Sulla commissioned the monumentalisation of the sanctuary to give thanks to Fortuna and commemorate his victory over Gaius Marius, the son of the famous Roman general and 7-time consul. The inspiration for this feat of integrated urbanistic design lay not in republican Rome but in the Hellenistic monarchies of the eastern Mediterranean, such as the sanctuaries of Delos and Kos.[3] Praeneste foreshadowed the grandiose Imperial style of the following generation.[4]

Sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia
Opus sectile floor

The sanctuary of Fortune occupies a series of five vast terraces, which, resting on gigantic masonry substructures and connected with each other by grand staircases, rise one above the other on the hill in the form of the side of a pyramid, crowned on the highest terrace by the round temple of Fortune, today incorporated into the Palazzo Colonna Barberini.[4] This immense edifice, probably by far the largest sanctuary in Italy, must have presented a most imposing aspect, visible as it was from a great part of Latium, from Rome, and even from the sea.

The goddess Fortuna here went by the epithet of Primigenia ("Original"), she was represented suckling two babes, as in the Christian representation of Charity, said to be Jupiter and Juno, and she was especially worshipped by matrons.[5] The oracle continued to be consulted down to Christian times, until Constantine the Great, and again later Theodosius I, forbade the practice and closed the temple.

Features of the temple influenced Roman garden design on steeply sloped sites through Antiquity and once again in Italian villa gardens from the 15th century. The monument to Victor Emmanuel II in Rome owes a lot to the Praeneste sanctuary complex.

The Palazzo Barberini occupies the upper part of the sanctuary with the theatre
Mosaic of Fish in the Cave of the Fates

See also

References

  1. ↑ Hornblower, S., Spawforth, A., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford, New York, 606.
  2. ↑ Coarelli, Filippo, I Santuari del Lazio in età repubblicana. NIS, Rome, 1987. Pages 35-84.
  3. ↑ F. Coarelli. "Architectura sacra e architectura privata nella tarda repubblica." In Architecture et Societe: de l'archaisme grec a la fin de la Republique romaine. Coll. Ecole Francaise, 66 (Rome/Paris) 191-217
  4. 1 2 Roth, Leland M. (1993). Understanding Architecture: Its Elements, History and Meaning (First ed.). Boulder: Westview Press. pp. 217–8. ISBN 0-06-430158-3.
  5. ↑ Described by Cicero, De divinatione 2.85; R. Joy Littlewood, "Fortune," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome (Oxford University Press, 2010), vol. 1, p. 212.

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