For other uses of Epona, see Epona (disambiguation)
In Gallo-Roman religion, Epona was a protector of horses, donkeys, and mules. She was particularly a goddess of fertility, as shown by her attributes of a patera, cornucopia, and the presence of foals in some sculptures (Reinach, 1895). And H. Hubert was widespread in the Roman Empire between the first and third centuries CE.

Etymology of the name
Benoit found the earliest attestations of a cult of Epona in the Danubian provinces and asserted that she had been introduced in the limes of Gaul by horsemen from the east. This suggestion has not been generally taken up.
Although the name is in origin Gaulish, dedicatory inscriptions to Epona are in Latin or, rarely, Greek and were made not only by Celts— an inscription to Epona from Mainz, Germany, identifies the dedicant as being Syrian of the funereal symbolism of the horseman with the serpent-tailed("anguiforme") daemon, which he established as a theme of victory over death, and Epona; both he found to be belated manifestations of Mediterranean-influenced symbolism, which had reached Gaul through contacts with Etruria and Magna Graecia. Benoit compared the rider with most of the riders imaged around the Mediterranean shores.
Perceptions of native Celtic goddesses had changed under Roman hegemony: only the names remained the same. As Gaul was Romanized under the early Empire, Epona's sovereign role evolved into a protector of cavalry (Oaks 1986:79-81). The cult of Epona was spread over much of the Roman Empire by the auxiliary cavalry, alae, especially the Imperial Horse Guard or equites singulares augustii recruited from Gaul, Lower Germany, and Pannonia. A series of their dedications to Epona and other Celtic, Roman and German deities was found in Rome, at the Lateran (Spiedel, 1994). As Epane she is attested in Cantabria, northern Spain, on Mount Bernorio, Palencia (Simón).
A bizarre euhemerist account of the birth of Epona that does not reflect Celtic beliefs can be found in Plutarch's life of Solon: Giambattista Della Porta's edition of Magia naturalis (1589), a potpourri of the sensible and questionable, remarks, in the context of unseemly man-beast coupling, Plutarch's Life of Solon, in which he "reports out of Agesilaus, his third book of Italian matters, that Fulvius Stella loathing the company of a woman, coupled himself with a mare, of whom he begot a very beautiful maiden-child, and she was called by a fit name, Epona..."

Iconography

Link, from The Legend of Zelda series games, rides a horse named Epona in three installments: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (2000), and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (2006). See also