Concordia- Roman GodDeity"Goddess of Harmony"
Titles & Epithets
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Description
When patricians and plebeians finally shared power in 367 BCE, Camillus vowed her first temple. Whenever Rome tore itself apart, Concordia's shrine at the foot of the Capitoline was where the Senate gathered to declare that unity had been restored.
Mythology & Lore
Camillus's Vow
For over a century, Rome's plebeians had fought for the right to hold the consulship. When the Licinian-Sextian laws finally opened the office to them in 367 BCE, Marcus Furius Camillus vowed a temple to Concordia in the Forum. The gesture was pointed: the man who built it was a patrician, and the reconciliation it celebrated had been forced on his class. Livy records the vow as an act of public piety, but the temple's location told its own story. It stood at the western end of the Forum, at the foot of the Capitoline Hill, where the Senate could see it every time they descended to public business.
The Temple at the Forum's Edge
Concordia's temple became the stage where Rome performed its reconciliations, even the fraudulent ones. In 121 BCE, the consul Lucius Opimius killed Gaius Gracchus and three thousand of his supporters, then rebuilt Concordia's temple with public funds. Someone scratched graffiti on the new façade: "A work of discord made this temple of Concord." Plutarch preserved the line. The Senate met there anyway.
Cicero chose the same temple for his Fourth Catilinarian oration in 63 BCE, arguing before the assembled senators that the conspirators deserved death. The setting was deliberate: a speech about saving the republic, delivered in the building Rome raised whenever the republic cracked.
Tiberius rebuilt the temple between 7 BCE and 10 CE, rededicating it as Concordia Augusta. He filled it with Greek sculpture and paintings. Ovid praised the restoration in the Fasti and cast it as Augustus's peace made permanent after generations of civil war. The building became part museum, part senatorial meeting hall. When the Senate gathered there under the emperors, they sat among bronze and marble that had nothing to do with Roman agreement and everything to do with Greek plunder.
Hearth and Marriage
Concordia Maritalis governed the harmony between husband and wife. Ovid mentions her feast day on the calendar, and Roman wedding ceremonies included prayers for the couple's concordia. Anniversary celebrations honored her specifically. On imperial coinage, she appeared as a seated woman holding a patera and cornucopia, and emperors struck her image to mark dynastic marriages or to signal that quarrels within the imperial family had ended. The coin type outlasted belief in the goddess herself.