Literature

Victoria was the the deified personification of victory in ancient Roman religion. Victoria first appears during the first Punic War, as a renaming of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. Nike would have become familiar to the Roman military as a goddess of Rome's Greek allies in the Punic Wars. She was worshipped in Magna Graecia and mainland Greece, and was a subject of Greek myth. Around this time, various Roman war-deities begin to receive the epithet victor (conqueror) or invictus (unconquered). By the late republican and early imperial eras, Victoria had become a popular civilian and military goddess, both in association with other deities and in her own right.

The depiction of the goddess sacrificing a bull became a popular motif on Campana reliefs. 'Campana' reliefs take their name from Giampietro Campana, Marchese di Cavelli (1808-1880), a prolific collector of Greek and Roman art, who had a number of these reliefs in his collection. Campana reliefs were often made from moulds, from which several copies of the same scene could be taken, and then finished by hand. For a similar example see, The British Museum, London, inventory no. 1805,0703.307, and The Louvre, Paris, accession no. Cp 4085.