Dea Roma: The City as a Goddess

The Greeks of Smyrna invented her.

In 195 BCE, the city of Smyrna — a prosperous Greek city on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey — established a cult to the goddess Roma. Rome was not yet an empire in any formal sense, but it had defeated Hannibal, it was pushing into the Greek East, its legions were visible in every direction, and the Greek cities of the East had learned from centuries of experience with powerful empires that the new power required theological acknowledgment.

They gave Rome a goddess. Not a god, not a hero — a goddess. The armed, helmeted, seated figure of the city personified, wearing armor that reflects her martial character, seated on a rock or on a pile of weapons that signifies her dominance, looking outward with the calm of supreme confidence.

This is Roma.

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The iconography is fixed from the beginning.

Roma is consistently depicted in armor: the crested helmet of a warrior, a shield leaning against her seat, sometimes a short sword, sometimes a spear. She wears a short military tunic that leaves one breast bare — the Amazon warrior gesture. She is seated, which is the posture of divine authority. Her right foot rests on a globe, or on a pile of captured armor, or on the seven hills of Rome.

She is beautiful and militarily formidable simultaneously. The beauty is not incidental: it connects her to Venus, whose divine patronage of Rome is continuous from Aeneas forward. Venus gave Rome its divine bloodline; Roma embodies Rome’s divine achievement. They are the same power at different stages of Rome’s story.

The Roman Senate, when told about the Smyrna cult in 195 BCE, was cautious. Romans did not generally worship living things or abstractions in the way the Greeks did; Roman piety was more specific, more directed at particular divine persons with particular functions. They allowed the cult but did not enthusiastically promote it.

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The Greek East enthusiastically promoted it without Roman help.

By the late Republic, almost every major city of the eastern Mediterranean had a temple to Rome and the Roman people, often combined with Augustus after the Principate was established. The logic was political and theological simultaneously: the city that rules the world must be divine, and the divine favor that makes the city powerful must be honored if you want to benefit from it.

This is not mere flattery. It is the application of standard polytheistic logic: identify the power that affects your life, determine its divine nature, establish the appropriate cult, maintain the relationship. Rome is the most powerful entity in the world; therefore Roma is divine; therefore you build her a temple and honor her.

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Hadrian builds the largest temple in Rome.

The Temple of Venus and Roma, dedicated by the Emperor Hadrian in 135 CE, is the largest temple ever built in Rome — and one of the largest in the ancient world. It has two back-to-back cellae: one facing east toward the Colosseum, housing the cult statue of Venus Genetrix (Venus the Mother, ancestress of the Julian line and of Rome); one facing west toward the Forum, housing the cult statue of Roma.

The two goddesses look in opposite directions from the same temple. Venus looks toward the past — toward Troy, toward Aeneas, toward the divine origin of the Roman people. Roma looks toward the Forum — toward the present political reality of Rome’s power, the city as it exists, the eternal achievement.

Hadrian designed the temple himself, and the famous story about it involves the architect Apollodorus of Damascus, who had worked for Hadrian’s predecessor Trajan. Apollodorus looked at Hadrian’s plans and said the cult statues were too large — if the goddesses stood up, they would bang their heads on the ceiling. Hadrian had Apollodorus exiled, then executed.

The statues were built as Hadrian designed. Whether they were too large for the space is still debated by scholars of ancient architecture.

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The temple’s ruins are still visible in Rome.

The platform is still there. The columns were largely removed for reuse in medieval buildings. The two apses that housed the cult statues are visible — the east apse converted to a church, Santa Maria Nova, the west apse open to the sky. The temple platform stretches along the Via Sacra between the Colosseum and the Forum, the largest footprint in the sacred center of Rome.

Roma is still there. The city that is the goddess is still the city of the goddess. The eternal city is eternal because the Romans — and the Greeks before them — understood that some things deserve to be called divine not because they are supernatural but because they are, in human experience, equivalent to the divine: permanent, powerful, present in every direction you look, the ground on which every other human achievement rests.

Aeterna Roma. Eternal Rome.

The phrase was on the coins. It was on the temples. It was in the prayers. It was the one theological claim the Romans made about themselves that they were most confident was simply true.