Fortuna Equestris, Aedes

Temple vowed and dedicated in the 2nd c. B.C. near the *Theater of Pompey in the *Campus Martius; no archaeological remains are extant and its exact location is a matter of debate. Q. Fulvius Flaccus vowed the temple in 180 B.C., when his Roman cavalry bravely turned the tide in a battle against the Celtiberians (Livy 40.40.10, 44.9), and dedicated it at the end of his term as censor on 13 August 173 B.C. (Livy 42.10.5; Degrassi, Inscr. Ital. 13.2, 494-95). Vitruvius locates it near the stone theater (3.3.2: Fortunae Equestris [sc. aedis] ad theatrum lapideum); since he wrote before the mid-20s B.C., this could only have been the *Theatrum Pompeium. Pietilä-Castrén, following Coarelli (1981), theorizes that this temple stood N of Pompey’s theater and was destroyed when Agrippa built the *Stagnum Agrippae. Richardson offers a different theory: in A.D. 22 the Equestrian Order importuned Tiberius to help them locate a Temple of Equestrian Fortune where they could make votive offerings on behalf of Livia’s failing health (Tac., Ann. 3.71.1); Richardson suggests that, since the lack of an appropriate shrine in Rome appears to be a new problem, the temple had been destroyed only very recently, perhaps in the fire of A.D. 21 that severely damaged the Theatrum Pompeium (Tac., Ann. 3.72.4, 6.45.2). Finally, a notice from Obsequens (16) indicates this temple was at one end of a portico connected to the Temple of *Iuno Regina, which lies SE of the Theatrum Pompeium; assuming the portico followed the line of the river and/or the Circus Flaminius, we might comfortably locate the Temple of Fortuna Equestris to the S of the theater as well. On this evidence, then, the temple is assumed not to have been located N of the theater, where the Stagnum would have replaced it in the last quarter of the 1st c. B.C., but S of it, where it was destroyed in A.D. 21; it is cautiously indicated in that area on our map.