A winged Victoria and a hand of Mars turned up in a lost Roman temple in Hesse

A nearly complete torso of Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, with her wings, palm branch and laurel wreath still visible, has come out of the ground beside the Kapersburg Roman fort near Rosbach vor der Höhe in Hesse, Germany. Beside it lay a hand that may belong to a statue of Mars, and both lay in the foundations of a rectangular temple about five metres long in a forest patch that storms had cleared.

District archaeologist Kai Mückenberger, who works on the Roman frontier in Hesse, put it simply after the walls came into view: this is a temple.

A temple five metres long and the gods inside it

The structure is small. Hessenschau’s report of September 27 describes walls roughly 50 centimetres thick around a smaller central chamber, and says Mückenberger found no fourth wall, which suggests one open side, probably closed by a wooden gate or grille. A surrounding foundation points to a covered walkway around the chamber, the arrangement classicists call an ambulatory temple.

Beyond the Victoria and the possible Mars hand, HeritageDaily’s account lists animal fragments and a votive stone bearing a Latin inscription that specialists have not yet read. The pairing of a victory goddess and a war god is unsurprising at a military frontier, and the reports date the sanctuary to the third century AD, when Kapersburg still sat inside Rome’s frontier system in Germania.

Later reports describe the building more firmly as a temple of Mars and call the Victoria a statuette. The WBG magazine’s write-up of the dig counts two inscribed votive stones. Reporting on the first announcement speaks of one, and the sources have not reconciled the difference, so the stone counts and the Mars dedication are best held loosely until the inscriptions are published. Finestre sull’Arte, an Italian art-news site, repeats the Mars attribution and the pair of stones, and places the temple firmly inside the vicus, the civilian settlement, and not the fort.

The village that grew up around Kapersburg

The temple was found in the fort’s civilian village, known as the vicus, and not inside the walls. The fort, according to the German Wikipedia entry, was a small auxiliary post of about 150 soldiers, laid out in mortared stone over roughly 1.6 hectares and abandoned around the middle of the third century as the Roman frontier collapsed. It belongs to the Upper Germanic-Raetian Limes, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2005.

Until recently only one building outside the fort was known, its bathhouse. Inside the walls, the German Wikipedia entry lists the foundations of a headquarters building, a grain store and a commander’s residence, and the fort’s own bathhouse is remarkably well preserved. Then drought and bark beetles killed the forest and storms cleared a patch about 200 by 300 metres, roughly 100 metres from the fort’s eastern gate. An earlier Hessenschau feature quoted excavation technician Manuel Pieper explaining that soldiers were not the only residents: their families lived in the village too, and estimates there run to 600 or 700 inhabitants against a garrison of about 160.

Katharina Grießhaber of the Saalburg State Museum, who took part in the fieldwork, told Hessenschau that finding Roman walls so beautifully preserved was exceptional. Mückenberger, who leads the dig with Pieper, has said the team is looking at the site only “through a keyhole”, and that the settlement, which housed several hundred people for about 150 years, has barely been opened.

A forest floor that kept its layers intact

The WBG magazine quotes Mückenberger on what makes the site unusual: preservation layers “unmatched in Hesse”, he said, because agriculture never touched them and the forest preserved everything. Excavation there began in 2024 and continues through 2026, run by hessenARCHÄOLOGIE, the state archaeology service, together with the Frankfurt University seminar for the provincial Roman world.

Such preservation matters most for what was left behind afterward, since ploughed sites usually lose exactly those thin, late layers. According to Finestre sull’Arte, the team also recovered a late-antique fibula, a brooch, and hand-made pottery beside the temple. They point to people using the place after the Roman army left, perhaps local Alamanni, and the reports treat that as the first archaeological trace of post-Roman activity at Kapersburg, still needing investigation.

The jewellery gives the temple a second life. Hessenschau reports that the sanctuary appears to have kept receiving visitors into the late Roman period, well after the garrison was gone.

The question that decides how much the find can say is on the votive stone. Its Latin inscription is still untranslated, and Hessenschau notes it could reveal the Roman name of the settlement that grew up around Kapersburg. If it does, a village that has been known only by the name of its fort will finally have one of its own, and the temple will have its dedicator.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.