La Fortuna populi Romani e l’ascesa egemonica di Roma fra tradizione antica e riletture moderne

By focussing on literary references to Fortuna populi Romani, especially those found in historiographical contexts from the late Republic until late Antiquity, it is possible to detect not merely a good example of the Romans’ aptitude to deify abstract concepts through allegorical personifications, but also of their tendency to imagine and represent one specific Fortuna occupied in supporting the Roman people in both civic and military conflicts. Furthermore, this conception of the particular role played by Fortune in favour of the Roman people – which sometimes recalls more general and traditional topics, such as the identification of the causes of Rome’s greatness as well as the determination of the primacy of Virtue or Fortune in relation to Rome’s imperial hegemony – seems to survive with different perspectives throughout the Modern Age, thanks, among others, to Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Gibbon. In this vein, in addition to sources stating that both Virtue and Fortune joined force to assure Rome’s rise in power, significant passages can be found showing a progressive reduction of the importance attributed to Fortune in the construction of the Roman Empire, thus demonstrating the use of different paradigms and methodological approaches to the study of the history and the growth of empires, which replace the need to explain the success of Rome as being due to religious abstractions such as the classical Fortuna populi Romani.