Euthenia

thumb|Euthenia depicted in a garden, tempera on linen wall hanging (first century AD), Metropolitan Museum of Art 1984.178. Euthenia () was the Greek name for a personification of abundance. As the Greek equivalent of either of the Roman goddesses Annona or Abundantia, she appeared on the coinage of Roman Imperial Egypt. She was associated with Nilus, the Greek god of the Nile, and was syncretized with the Egyptian goddess Isis. There are no ancient literary sources for the goddess. She is known all most entirely from her iconography. ==Role== Euthenia was, from the reign of the Roman emperors Augustus through Commodus, the Greek name used for a deified personification of abundance, particularly the abundance of wheat associated with the flooding of the Nile. The Ancient Greek common noun euthenia ("prosperity, plenty, abundance") like the Latin annona, was used to refer to the grain-supply, and the deified personification Euthenia, was used on Roman coins in the Greek East as the Greek equivalent of either of the Roman divine personifications Annona or Abundantia. Here her role seems to have been to associate the abundance of the food supply with Roman rule of Egypt. The management of the food supply in Egypt, and it's magistrate, was called the euthenia and the eutheniarchos, respectively.

She had no mythology or cult of her own. She was considered to be a consort of Nilus, the Greek river god associated with the Nile. Because of the identification of the Egyptian god Osiris with Nilus, Euthenia became syncretized with Osiris's consort Isis. ==Sources== All early sources for Euthenia are iconographic. Perhaps the oldest of these is found on the Tazza Farnese (mid-second century to first century BC?), where the syncretized Isis-Euthenia is depicted reclining on a sphinx holding up two ears of wheat in her right hand. Otherwise the oldest sources for Euthenia are found on the Roman Imperial coinage of Augustus in Alexandria Egypt, from the last decade of the first century BC. Euthenia is also named in a votive dedicatory inscription from Anazarbus in Cilicia dated to the first or second century AD.