For the Romans, Hope—Spes—was a goddess. In her best attested guise, she represented the collective hopes of Rome as a state and political community. A temple to Spes was built in the city’s bustling vegetable market (the Forum Holitorium) around the middle of the third century BCE. The worship of “divine qualities” like Spes expanded during this period as Rome’s conflict with Carthage, its great rival to the south, heated up.[1] Rome’s stone temple to Hope, most likely erected at the initiative of Aulus Atilius Calatinus, a two-time consul (258 and 254 BCE) and triumphant general, was a material expression of the city’s military ambitions. It embodied Rome’s hopes for empire, whose fulfillment was predicated on conquest. The city’s inexorable territorial expansion over the centuries following the temple’s dedication must have been understood as the manifestation of the goddess’s blessing upon Rome. In this “official” context, Spes had little to do with the personal dreams of individual Romans.

When Rome’s republican system of government collapsed and power became concentrated in the person of the emperor, the state cult of Spes took on a new valence. The imperial system constructed the emperor as a god-like savior, whose rule guaranteed the safety and security of his people. Under this new ideology, Rome’s hopes became focused on the singular figure of the emperor and his glorious leadership. Many emperors issued coins featuring depictions of the goddess Spes opposite portraits of themselves or their heirs, identified as Spes Augusta, “Augustan” hope, a form explicitly defined by its association with the emperor, or Spes Publica, the “collective” hope of Rome as a political community. These forms of Spes imply not only hope for the emperor’s success but also an expectation that his accomplishments would bring about peace and prosperity for his subjects and secure the continuation of his dynasty.

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In Latin texts, the word spes is sometimes used in a figurative sense to refer to children, understood as the embodiment and fulfillment of the hopes of their parents.[2] In a long speech praising the emperor Trajan (reigned 98–117 CE), Pliny the Younger associates spes closely with the bearing of children. Pliny suggests that one of Trajan’s great accomplishments was presiding over a baby boom, made possible in part because the emperor’s leadership has offered to his subjects a hope, or indeed an expectation, of freedom (spem libertatis) and safety (spem securitatis).[3] Spes is viewed here as a benefaction offered by the emperor to his populace: it is only possible to hope, to trust in the future and thus reproduce, because the emperor has created the conditions to do so.

The hope that these “official” forms of Spes provided was only available to those who stood to benefit from the Roman imperial project. They obviously had little to offer those who resisted or resented Roman dominance. Yet there was always much more to Spes than her role in propaganda. Even with the might of the Roman state behind it, hope could not be reduced to a mere tool of empire. Uprisings against Roman rule, like Boudica’s revolt in Britain in 60 CE or the Jewish rebellions in Judea of 66 and 132, were founded on hopes for a radically different social and political order, even though Rome’s violent reprisals prevented them from being realized.

The version of Spes worshipped in Minturnae, a coastal Italian town partway between Rome and Naples, must have been quite different from the hegemonic form promoted by Rome and its emperors. During the first century BCE, a college of twelve slaves was regularly elected to serve as the administrators (magistri) of the goddess’s local cult.[4] In this office, they were responsible for maintaining a small shrine and preparing a new stone altar, which was inscribed with their names. They may also have organised festivals celebrating Spes with competitions and performances.

In legal terms, the magistri of Spes were the personal property of their owners, subject to the ever-present threat of legally sanctioned violence at their hands. But they probably still had legitimate cause to hope for something better, eventually. Manumission was relatively common in the Roman slave system, usually bringing with it admission to citizen status, at least for individuals who worked in skilled professions like education or medicine. Occasionally, well-connected former slaves could become spectacularly wealthy.[5] We can only speculate how the enslaved people of Minturnae might have imagined and worshipped their version of Spes. It is a fair assumption, however, that the hopes that gathered around this version of the goddess were quite different from those that defined the imperial goddess venerated in Rome’s vegetable market. The “official” cult of Spes proclaimed Roman dominance as divinely ordained, while the Spes of Minturnae hints at the more personal dreams of Rome’s enslaved masses. 

If Minturnae’s cult of Spes provides one glimpse at alternative conceptions of hope in the Roman world, Christianity spread a radically new approach to the idea across the empire, offering its followers the hope of an eternal salvation which superseded Rome’s authority in the earthly realm. The prophet Jeremiah had already declared the Jewish god to be “my hope on a day of suffering” (spes mea … in die afflictionis in the Latin Vulgate).[6] In the texts of the New Testament, the Christian god is identified as a “god of hope” (deus spei) and, more directly, as “our hope” (spei nostrae).[7] As in Roman imperial propaganda, Christianity channelled hope toward a singular divine figure. But the universalism of Christian hope rendered it, at least in principle, accessible to all, not just those in a position to benefit from the Roman imperial project. Indeed, the nature of Christian hope empowered its earliest adherents to actively resist the prevailing Roman worldview by refusing to recognize the divinity of the emperor. Martyrdom narratives are central to early Christian history, glorifying a devotion to faith even at the cost of terrestrial life, buoyed by a kind of hope bound not to the temporal power of Rome but to the transcendent promise of personal salvation.

In the end, the hope of salvation offered by Christianity overwhelmed the narrower formulations of Spes associated with the imperial cult. At the same time, the church itself developed ever closer connections to the Roman state, profoundly undermining the anti-imperial posture of early Christianity. Once Rome had adopted Christianity as its state religion, it began to redefine Christian spes in terms compatible with empire. Although Constantine I (reigned 306–337 CE) was famously the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, explicit symbols of the religion were almost never included on his coins.[8] One of the only exceptions is a bronze coin minted at his new eastern capital, Constantinople, where a chi-rho monograph of Christ accompanies the legend spes publica, now well along in its process of transformation from a goddess into a more purely abstract concept.

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Today, six columns from Rome’s pagan temple to Spes still stand, long ago incorporated into the wall of a Christian church. This architectural palimpsest renders the religious transformations of late antiquity unusually visible. It stands as an obvious image of the persistence of hope as a central idea within both Roman paganism and Christianity. But it is also suggestive of the way in which hope has always been embedded in structures of power and meaning which have been unable to fully contain it. In the Roman empire, hope underpinned both imperial domination and principled resistance. Spes, as both goddess and idea, exemplifies the fundamental ambiguity and flexibility of hope, a force shaped by power yet also capable of imagining its undoing.
 

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