Fig. 4.1 The pediment of the temple of Quirinus on a late first century A.D. (Height 0.31m.)
Roman religion continued under the empire to be a key set of practices which permitted reflections and debates on Roman identity. In part these reflections picked up earlier preoccupations. Roman religion, as we have seen with the building of temples at Rome, had always been closely linked with the city of Rome and its boundaries.1 In part the reflections respond to new political imperatives. Under the first emperor, Augustus, the restructuring of a number of religious institutions resulted in changes within Rome, and, more widely, in the empire. It is these that we explore in this chapter, focussing at the same time on the new social and political régime of the end of the first century B.C., when Rome returned to the government of an autocracy: a monarchy in all but name. The assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. had been followed by a series of civil wars in which the supporters of Caesar first defeated the party of his murderers (led by Brutus and Cassius), then turned on each other. Finally in 31 B.C. Octavian (Caesar’s nephew and adoptive son) defeated his former ally Antony at the battle of Actium and secured what they had all been fighting for – control of Rome and, with it, the Mediterranean world. The reign of Octavian (under the title of ‘Augustus’ that he used from 27 B.C.) was a crucial political turning point in Rome’s history. Although it would later be remembered by some as the reign that witnessed the birth of Jesus (son of God, prophet or common criminal – as different people would see him), for most Romans it was the period when Rome reverted to one man rule. Most of the political institutions of the Republic remained intact (the senate continued to meet and to be of crucial importance; the old republican offices – consul, praetor and so on – were still keenly sought); Augustus’ own watchword was ‘restoration’ not ‘revolution’; but all the same there could be no doubt that Rome was now controlled by the emperor. How then did Augustus’ new deal impact on the traditional religion of Rome?2
The importance of the religion of place during this period is illustrated by an episode from Livy’s History, written in the early 20s B.C. After the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 B.C., there was a proposal that the Romans should migrate to the newly conquered town of Veii, rather than rebuild Rome. Livy put in the mouth of the Roman general Camillus a striking rejection of this proposal, which emphasized the religious foundation of the city, the necessity for the ancient cults to be located in Rome within its sacred boundary: ‘We have a city founded by the auspices and augury; there is not a corner of it that is not full of our cults and our gods; our regular rituals have not only their appointed places, but also their appointed times.’3 This speech articulated issues of contemporary significance for Augustan Rome.4 There had been fear that Caesar would move the capital from Rome to the East, a fear that was revived by Antony’s alliance with Cleopatra. Augustus, however, was to promote Rome as the heart of the empire. Camillus’ re-establishment of the ancestral rites is here made neatly to foreshadow the religious activity of Augustus himself and his argument about the indissoluble ties between Rome and its cults encapsulates the preoccupation of the imperial age with place. This stress was not an innovation of the Augustan age, but it was particularly emphasized in the writing of the period. Indeed the new political order was conceived and imagined by the Romans within the physical and symbolic setting of the city of Rome.
This chapter will explore some of the religious implications of that preoccupation, from the emphasis on the sacred boundary of the city (the pomerium) to the reconstruction of many religious buildings in the city under Augustus and to religious rituals centred on the history and mythology of Rome itself. It will focus largely on the Augustan period, though the subsequent history of various key institutions will illustrate how the new system provided a framework for the rest of the imperial period.5 The chapters that follow will emphasize later periods, extending our investigation of the Augustan system to consider: the religious self-definition of the Roman élite, the significance of official cults in the life of the city of Rome, the ‘popular’ and ‘oriental’ religions of Rome, and the relationship of Rome to the outside world.
The Augustan restructuring of the earlier republican system was represented at the time as ‘restoration’: just as Augustus had ‘restored the res publica’, so also he had ‘restored traditional cults’ – reviving the rituals that had faded away, rebuilding the temples that had fallen down, filling the priesthoods that were vacant. Modern scholars have often held that this view was indeed broadly correct. They have diverged from the Augustan perspective mainly to argue that, since the decline was real, the Augustan revival could only be artificial; meaningful religious energies – so that argument goes – were located in other contexts (‘Oriental cults’ or, later, Christianity).6
This orthodoxy now seems very fragile – for the early empire as much as for the late Republic. If, as we have argued, a simple model of ‘decline’ is misleading for the age of Cicero, then so too is a simple model of ‘revival’ for the age of Augustus, for it tends to obscure the extent of change and restructuring in the system. On the other hand, like ‘decline’, the Augustan stress on ‘restoration’ need not be treated merely as a cunning obfuscation; rather it was a highly loaded religious term, offering a crucial way of relating the Augustan present to its republican past.
One important aspect of the religious changes of the early principate was the development of rituals which focussed more directly on the emperor himself, especially after his death. These are normally described in modern accounts as ‘the imperial cult’, treated as a striking innovation, and placed in a separate category from ‘the restoration of religion’. But, as we shall show, these imperial rituals can more helpfully be seen as part of the general ‘restructuring’ of religion at the time – drawing on the longstanding traditions of Rome, though increasingly focussing on the person of the emperor himself. In fact, as we have already seen in the last chapter (and will return to below), even the apotheosis of the dead emperor was as much rooted in ‘tradition’ as it was a radical innovation of autocratic rule – and inevitably problematic for that reason.
The sources for this chapter are rich and diverse. For the Augustan period there is an abundance of contemporary writing. In addition to the great poets whose perspectives have always figured in discussion of Roman religion (Virgil, Horace and Propertius), there are three major writers whose works are more rarely exploited – at least, as a means of throwing light on this period of religious history. Livy published the first five books of his History of Rome (covering the period from the origin of the city to its sack by the Gauls in 390 B.C.) in the early 20s B.C., at the beginning of the Augustan principate. We have already seen, in exploring the earliest history of Roman religion, how the concerns of Livy’s own day influence his treatment of the distant past.7 In this chapter we shall focus explicitly (as we did briefly with the speech of Camillus) on those topical concerns which inform his narrative. Likewise Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Roman Antiquities lays great emphasis, in its first two books, on the founding of rites which continued from the time of Hercules, Romulus or Numa down to the author’s own day. Dionysius lived in Rome from 30 B.C., and published Book I of his Antiquities in 7 B.C. Whatever the value of the work as a factual record of early Rome, as a repository of Roman myths it is invaluable evidence for an Augustan perspective on the past – all the more interesting because of the particular standpoint of Dionysius himself. Not only was he a Greek from Asia Minor, writing in Greek to explain Roman history and culture to a Greek audience, but he was also trying to argue that Rome was by origin a Greek city, and that it had preserved many of the best aspects of Greek culture that had been lost by his own degenerate contemporaries: a vivid illustration of the complex ‘multicultural’ debates that characterized the Graeco-Roman world at this time.8 Thirdly Ovid’s Fasti, a poem composed perhaps between A.D. 4 and 8, though revised subsequently, is a dazzling, often witty, account of the calendar and festivals of the first six months of the Roman year (the second half of the year and of the poem is missing). The Fasti presents a huge array of stories that tell of the origins of the various festivals, a welter of explanations for the different ceremonies: it is a unique reflection on the religious practices and mythology of the Augustan age.9
Among later authors, important information is found in Suetonius’ biographies of emperors (written in the 120s A.D.), and in the surviving parts of Cassius Dio’s vast Roman History (written in the early third century A.D.).10 Yet just as Livy’s account of early Rome sheds as much light on the period in which it was written as on the historical period that is its subject, so with these later writers we constantly face the possibility of anachronism: in referring to the Augustan period, they inevitably reflect the concerns of their own day. In fact Dio sometimes slips into the present tense when discussing religious changes of the Augustan principate (as well as more strictly constitutional reforms); and he highlights festivals and ceremonies (for example, the Augustalia in honour of the emperor himself, or the sacrifices established at the altar of Rome and Augustus at Lyons) that are still practised in his own day.
Alongside all these very different books, texts survive inscribed on bronze or stone, that once stood on religious buildings or that offered public, official records of religious events and ceremonies. Augustus’ account of his Achievements (which includes his record of temple restoration) is such a document – one copy (now lost) was inscribed on bronze pillars outside Augustus’ Mausoleum in Rome; the main text we have was found inscribed on a wall of the temple of Rome and Augustus in Ankara. Another (which we discuss below) contains an elaborate record of the ceremonies of the Saecular Games that took place in 17 B.C., including details of the animals sacrificed and the words of the prayers spoken on the occasion by Augustus and the other participants. Not only is this valuable evidence for religious activity; the public display of such documents is itself an important part of religious ideology. Inscriptions are, in fact, one distinctive part of the material and archaeological evidence for religion at Rome – from temples and altars to coins and dedications. None of the main Augustan temples has been preserved complete (and we rely on a combination of archaeological and literary evidence to fill out our conception of them). But what survives of the religious monuments of the Augustan city offers, as we shall see, an unrivalled opportunity to explore the physical fabric of religious cult and ideology.11
Roman mythology never existed – or so it has often been claimed. We have already discussed in chapter 1 the theory that in the earliest period of Rome there were no gods as such, only primitive powers undifferentiated by personal attributes. This is closely related to the theory of Rome as a ‘mythless’ society; for if there were no gods, then it follows that there could be no stories about their deeds and adventures, or their dealings with humans – the stock-in-trade of what we think of as ‘myth’. Only gradually, so the argument goes, as these powers were replaced by anthropomorphic gods, did Rome acquire some sort of mythology in the last centuries B.C., largely under the influence of Greece with its huge repertoire of myths.12
Other theories hold that Rome’s native mythological tradition was somehow ‘lost’, or ‘forgotten’. So, for example, we have seen it to be a central tenet of Georges Dumézil’s work on early Roman religion that there once had been a Roman mythology, parallel to that of other Indo-European peoples. The corollary of this is that it was swamped by the influx of Greek mythology in the middle Republic.13 Others have suggested that the native traditions of Roman myth did survive in the popular culture – plays, songs and folktales – of Rome and Italy right up to the imperial period; but that it is now almost entirely hidden from our view, being marginal to the élite writing (with its roots specifically in Greek literature and Greek cultural models) that survives from Rome.14
There are many complicated issues involved here: not least, the very definition of Roman mythology, what counts as a ‘myth’ in any culture, and how far we can ever think of any system of myth as just an ‘alien import’. But even without entering into such theoretical questions, the modern denial of Roman mythology does seem almost perverse. After all, the public imagery of late republican and Augustan Rome was largely mythological; the early books of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus are full of mythological stories about early Rome; Ovid’s Fasti consists very largely of descriptions of festivals and their associated myths. These writers would have been perplexed to be told (as is implied in much modern work on the subject) that their myths were either trivial or merely foreign imports, and so of little significance for Roman culture and religion.15
Like all of Roman culture, Roman mythology was inevitably a complicated amalgam: it included adaptations or borrowings from Greek myth as well as ‘native’ Italic traditions. It is fruitless to attempt to distinguish precisely between these different strands; and it would be to miss the point of the complex cultural interactions that had characterized Roman culture from its earliest history to suggest that simply because the origin of a particular story can be traced to Greece, that story could somehow not count also as Roman. On the other hand, ancient writers themselves did sometimes choose to stress the difference between Greek and Roman myths current in the early empire. It is a crucial fact that Roman mythology, however strongly influenced it may have been by the Greek repertoire, could be portrayed as distinctively different from its Greek counterpart.
So Dionysius of Halicarnassus commends Romulus, whom he holds responsible for the establishment of Roman religion, for following ‘the best customs in use among the Greeks’, while rejecting ‘all the traditional <Greek> myths concerning the gods, which contain blasphemies and calumnies against them’.16 Dionysius implies that Rome lacked three standard Greek contexts which might have perpetuated such improper stories: theogonies, with their accounts of gods fighting for sovereignty (as when Zeus overthrows and imprisons his father Kronos); an epic and theatrical tradition which could show gods involved in warfare with mortals or bound in subjection to them (as when Apollo in Homer’s Iliad serves as herdsman to king Laomedon); and ritual contexts involving dying gods or the promiscuous participation of men and women (such as the mysteries of Persephone or Dionysus). Even when new cults were officially introduced to Rome from Greece and elsewhere, he says, the Romans did not take over the ‘mythical clap-trap’ associated with them.
When Dionysius praises Romulus, and Roman religion of his own day, he is writing in the context of a longstanding debate in Greece about the propriety, or impropriety, of mythology. He is not offering an objective analysis of the character of Roman myth; he is drawing a loaded opposition between Roman and contemporary Greek culture, suggesting (paradoxically to us) that it is now the Romans who are the true and proper Greeks – representing Greek culture stripped of its degenerate aspects. All the same, it is important to note that an educated Greek could portray Roman mythology as quite different from the traditional Greek stories about their gods. This stands in sharp contrast to modern theories about the profound Hellenization of Roman religion in the middle and late Republic; and to modern claims that Roman mythology was nothing other than a set of translations from the Greek.
Roman myths were in essence myths of place. Greek myths too related to specific cities and territories, but at the same time they were regularly linked to wider Greek, or Panhellenic, mythology. In general Roman myths do not have such a wider context. Rather, the sites and monuments of the city of Rome dominate Roman mythology – from the grandeur of the Capitoline Hill to the ancient hut of Romulus still lovingly preserved on the Palatine into the imperial period.17 These myths recounted the history of the area of Rome itself, from earliest times to the Augustan age; as in Virgil’s Aeneid, when Aeneas, guided around the future site of the city, visits so many landmarks that were to memorialize key moments in the growth of Rome through the centuries.18 In fact, vivid tokens of this history were incorporated in the cults of Rome: the mysterious shields of the Salian priests, for example, included a shield that was said to have dropped to Rome from heaven in the reign of Numa.19
Dionysius devotes the whole of his first book to the earliest populations of the area around the site of Rome, especially the Arcadians, who were themselves (significantly for Dionysius’s multi-cultural tale) Greeks by origin. The Arcadians were responsible for consecrating ‘many precincts, altars and images of the gods and instituted purifications and sacrifices according to the custom of their own country, which continued to be performed in the same manner down to my day’.20 The most striking of these was the cult of Hercules, who passed through the area on one of his labours and throttled a local bandit, Cacus. Evander, king of the Arcadians, wanted to offer divine honours to Hercules, knowing that he was destined for immortality. Hercules himself performed the initial rites and asked the Arcadians to perpetuate the honours by sacrificing at the very spot each year with ‘Greek rites’. The altar at which Hercules sacrificed ‘is called by the Romans the Greatest Altar [Ara Maxima]. It stands near the place they call the Cattle Market [Forum Boarium] and is held in great veneration by the inhabitants.’21
The ritual of this altar was, and is, the subject of learned debate. The Greek nature of the sacrifices practised there was a puzzle. For Dionysius, it was telling evidence for his theory that Rome was originally a Greek city – neatly illustrated by the story of Evander and Hercules. But the further peculiarity, that women were barred from the altar, attracted a host of explanations in its own right. A Roman historian of the second century B.C. explained the ban through a story that the mother of Evander and her women were late for sacrifice.22 Varro, on the other hand, told that the priestess of the Bona Dea (whose shrine lay near the Ara Maxima) refused to allow Hercules to drink from the goddess’s spring, and so Hercules banned women from his altar.23 These accounts show how wide-ranging the implications of place could be. When the antiquarians, historians and poets of the late Republic and early Empire speculated on the myth and ritual of this particular cult site at the Ara Maxima, more was involved than the simple physical location of the cult. In this case, ideas of place lead straight to demarcations of gender, that is to rival claims about the religious place of women.24 Stories of Rome situated the Roman system of cultural norms and practices.
Many Roman myths refer to the founding and early years of Rome. One myth, which is worth considering at some length, linked the festival of the Parilia to the founding of the city and the creation of its sacred boundary, the pomerium. Ovid devotes over a hundred lines of the Fasti to this ancient rural festival, designed to purify the sheep and cattle by calling on the god (or goddess – the sex of the deity was uncertain) Pales.25 He starts by assuring the reader of his personal credentials: ‘I have often myself borne along, with loaded hands, the ashes of the calf and the beanstalks, the sacred materials of purification. To be sure, I have myself leapt over the fires arranged three in a row, and the moist laurel has sprinkled its drops of water over me.’26 The long description that follows seems to fall into two parts. First, the urban festival (whose details pick up the rituals in which Ovid claims to have participated): ‘Go, people, and bring from the virgins altar the materials of purification. Vesta will provide them; by Vesta’s generosity you will be pure. The blood of a horse will make up those materials, together with the ashes of a calf; the third ingredient will be the empty stalk of a hard bean.’27 Next, Ovid moves on to the rural festival of purification of sheep and cattle: ‘Shepherd, purify your well-fed sheep as dusk first falls. First sprinkle the ground with water and sweep it with a broom’ and so on. If we are right to distinguish these two versions of the festival in Ovid’s account, it is still hard to compare the two since the description of the rural festival is much fuller than his account of the urban one. Yet it is interesting that in drawing this distinction Ovid may be reflecting the religious theories and categories of Varro, who insisted on the distinction between the public and private festivals – a distinction which may largely overlap with that between the urban and the rural.28
Ovid goes on to discuss the origins, and hence significance, of the festival. The Parilia, like any Roman festival, permitted a multitude of competing explanations.29 Ovid offers no fewer than seven: (i) fire is a natural purifier; (ii) fire and water were used together because everything is composed out of opposing elements; (iii) fire and water contain the source of life, as in the symbolism of exile and marriage; (iv) the festival alludes to Phaethon and Deucalion’s flood, an explanation Ovid doubts; (v) shepherds once accidentally ignited straw; (vi) Aeneas’ piety allowed him to pass through flames unscathed; (vii) when Rome was founded, orders were given to transfer to new houses; the country folk set fire to the old houses and leaped with their cattle through the flames. Ovid appears to favour the last interpretation (‘Is it not nearer the truth...?’ he writes), stressing that the ritual still happens (‘it continues even now, on your birthday, Rome’).
Ovid develops his favoured interpretation by recounting the story of Romulus and the city’s foundation, a story to which we shall return in the context of Augustus. Romulus chose the time of the celebration of the Parilia to found Rome. He marked out the lines of the wall of the new city with a furrow, praying to Jupiter, Mars and Vesta; Jupiter responded with a favourable augury. Romulus then instructed one Celer to kill anyone who crossed the walls or the furrow, but Remus, his twin brother, in ignorance of the ban, leaped across them and was struck down by Celer. In this version, the Parilia, the founding of Rome, the creation of the pomerium and the killing of Remus all interconnect.30
In backing this interpretation Ovid was in good company. Though modern scholars have in general been happy to treat the Parilia as a genuinely primitive pastoral ritual which survived into the metropolitan world of imperial Rome,31 most of the ancient evidence we have associates the festival with the birth of Rome. The earliest surviving Roman calendar (dating from the last years of the Republic) marks against the entry for the Parilia ‘Rome founded’, and this association appears to become even stronger as time goes on. When news of Julius Caesar’s decisive victory in the Civil Wars at Munda in 45 B.C. arrived in Rome at the time of the Parilia, the coincidence was exploited in favour of Caesar, the new Romulus: games were added to the festival, at which people wore crowns in Caesar’s honour.32 And the Romulan theme became dominant in A.D. 121 when Hadrian chose the date of the Parilia to found his new temple of Venus and Roma; the festival continued to have lively celebrations, but was now known as the Romaea: the Festival of Rome.33
The Parilia provides a vivid example of the productivity of interpretations of Roman festivals. Ovid revels in the many ways the festival could be seen: in terms of natural science (fire as a natural purifier); philosophy (fire and water as opposing elements); Greek myths (Phaethon and Deucalion); accident (chance fire caused by shepherds); Roman myth (Aeneas and Troy). But it is much harder to plot how the favoured interpretation may have changed over time, or to show that (or when) any particular view of the origin and meaning of the festival faded or dropped away. Ovid’s privileging of a historicizing interpretation of the Parilia, which at the same time links the festival with the site of Rome, is strongly characteristic of the late Republic and early Empire – as we have seen in the contemporary accounts of Hercules and the Ara Maxima. And it is clear enough, in broad terms, that this connection of the festival with Rome’s foundation became more emphatic. But such an association may itself incorporate old ideas of the purification of herds, or re-workings of those ideas. So for Ovid, the ancient festival which marks the foundation of Rome also evokes a primitive pastoral golden age lodged at the very origins of the imperial city.
The pomerium is another important aspect of the Roman myth of place. The story of the twin brothers, Romulus and Remus, concerns not only the creation of the city but also that of its sacred boundary, the cause of fateful conflict between the twins. When they disputed which of them was to found the new city, the issue was settled by augury: Remus on the Aventine hill saw six vultures; but Romulus on the Palatine saw twelve. The myth insisted on the exclusion of the Aventine from the boundary of the pomerium, emphasizing that it was a place apart from Rome proper, even if closely related to the city’s sacred enclosure. And at the end of this episode, the killing of Remus underlined the sanctity of the city’s boundary, dearer than any brother. The myth presents a definition of Rome.34
The pomerium had a physical presence too. In the imperial period it was clearly marked by massive blocks of stone, 2 m. tall and 1 m. square.35 Placed wherever the line of the pomerium changed direction, the precise distance in Roman feet between each marker stone was indicated on the stone itself and all the stones were numbered in sequence along the line of the pomerium. These huge markers embody the self-aggrandizement of the emperors who set them up; the republican pomerium had been precisely defined along its route, though not so aggressively, and no markers of any kind survive before the imperial period. The stones also ensured that there was no uncertainty about the line of the boundary, as well as allowing it to be re-placed from time to time, changed and extended.
There had been three alterations during the Republic to what was supposedly the original pomerium of Romulus; and in the imperial period extensions were carried out by Claudius and Vespasian. These took the area enclosed by the pomerium up from 325 hectares to 665 (under Claudius) and 745 hectares (under Vespasian). So too, when a dyke was built to control the Tiber floods, Hadrian ensured that new boundary stones were erected directly above the old ones; and in A.D. 271–5 Aurelian built the walls then necessary for Rome’s defence closely following, it seems, the line of the pomerium. Such extensions are not primarily the result of the physical growth of Rome’s population and the material need for more urban space. For most of Rome’s history the pomerium was a sacred boundary, which did not even claim to mark the edge of the built-up area of the city. The extensions were linked rather to the connection between the boundary of the city of Rome and the boundary of Roman territory as a whole. Thus the historian Tacitus refers to an ‘ancient custom’ which allowed those who had extended the empire also to extend the pomerium; and the marker stones of Claudius (conqueror of southern Britain) and Vespasian (conqueror of more of Britain and part of Germany) include the formula: ‘having increased the boundaries of the Roman people, he increased and defined the pomerium’. The right to extend the pomerium was sufficiently important to be listed specifically in the powers granted to Vespasian at his accession – parading a connection between the power of the emperor, military success and Rome’s sacred space.36
The boundary was also reinforced at time of crisis. Following dire portents, the pontifices purified the city with solemn lustrations, moving round the circuit of the pomerium. For example, in A.D. 43 the discovery inside a temple on the Capitol of a horned owl, a bird considered to be particularly inauspicious, led to the lustration of the city.37 The significance of such lustrations is vividly depicted in Lucan’s epic on the civil wars at the end of the Republic, written in the mid-first century A.D. He describes at length a lustration of the city ordered by an Etruscan prophet after Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, as the city waited in panic for him to march on Rome. ‘He orders a procession of the frightened citizens all around Rome: the pontifices, to whom the rite was entrusted, purify the city-walls with solemn ceremony, and move around the furthest limits of the long pomerium. Behind them comes the lesser throng...’38 This particular occasion may well be a poetic invention, but it remains a vivid reflection of the religious ideology of the imperial period. Rome could never allow another Remus to cross the pomerium; at times of threat the boundary had to be purified and strengthened.
The pomerium continued in the early empire (as we have seen in the republican period) to be a significant dividing line between different types of human activity and between different types of human relations with the gods – though some of the rules were adapted to accommodate the emperor and the new régime of politics. Civil authority had traditionally been defined and limited by this sacred boundary. So, for example, in the Republic the powers of a tribune of the people had been restricted to the area within the pomerium; when in 30 B.C. Octavian was given some of the powers of a tribune (particularly to aid those who appealed to him), these powers were likewise restricted to the area within the sacred boundary. Even then, however, an extra mile outside the pomerium was added to his patch; and soon, when he was given full ‘tribunician power’ in 23 B.C., the spatial restriction was entirely dropped. All emperors who followed him enjoyed the same power, unrestricted by the pomerium. 39
In the Republic, the pomerium had been a crucial dividing line between different types of political activity. One of the main assemblies, the so-called ‘tribal assembly’ of the Roman people, had been able to meet only within the pomerium. The formal reason for this was religious: it was only within the sacred boundary of the city that the auspicia– the favourable signs from the gods that were necessary before any assembly – could be received by civil magistrates. The other main assembly, the ‘centuriate assembly’, which had been defined in military terms, had only been able to meet outside it.40 These popular assemblies lost ground in the first century A.D., with the shift in executive power towards the senate and emperor; but their meetings were still bound by the old rules of place. This aspect of Roman self-definition was retained – or embalmed. Augury and the science of auspicia, meanwhile, continued to be important under the empire: a list of auguries between the years A.D. 1 and 17 survives on stone, and augures, who were the priests responsible for the interpretation of the auspices, as well as for maintaining the pomerium itself, were appointed until the end of the fourth century A.D.41
Military authority at Rome, as the rules about the holding of assemblies show, was also traditionally defined in terms of the pomerium. The basic rule was that this authority lapsed when a commander crossed the pomerium: civil and military power were entirely separate; the area within the sacred boundary was so outside the sphere of military power that a general could not even enter it without laying that power down. The only regular exception to this was the ceremony of triumph – though it was only on the very day of his triumph that the general could enter the city, waiting outside the city with his army until that moment. In celebrating their triumphs emperors sometimes made a show of following these ancient rules. When Vespasian, for example, celebrated his victory over the Jews he spent the night before the triumph outside the pomerium, so as to start the triumph by crossing it at the Triumphal Gate.42 Here a sense of traditional propriety blends with a self-conscious, propagandist display of religious scrupulosity.43 Such a gesture of respect for the old sacred boundary is akin to Augustus himself banning Egyptian rites within the pomerium– so ‘restoring’ (or maybe ‘inventing’) a principle that the worship of foreign gods should not occur within the sacred boundary of Rome.44
Inevitably, however, the emperor’s power altered the conceptual distinction between the ‘civil’ and the ‘military’ spheres: unlike republican magistrates, emperors exercised authority in both those spheres simultaneously. Under Augustus, complex constitutional arrangements were worked out to parade the legitimacy of this new state of affairs. From 23–19 B.C. he held so-called ‘proconsular imperium’ which (exceptionally) was deemed not to lapse when he crossed the pomerium, and from 19 B.C. Augustus, and later emperors, held in addition ‘consular imperium’, which meant that they now had formal power applicable both inside and outside Rome. This creative combination of traditional republican categories of power legalized the emperor’s command of troops inside Rome – though the camp of the Praetorian Guard was located, tactfully (or mock traditionally, some might argue), just outside the pomerium. Some emperors even appeared in the city in military dress.45 The consequences of this extended beyond the political sphere. The combination of civil and military power in the hands of the emperor meant that the pomerium, as a religious boundary, ceased to exclude the military. Thus in 2 B.C. the god Mars received for the first time a temple within the pomerium.46
In one area, however, even emperors proved no exception to the traditional rules of the pomerium. The ancient prohibition on burial within the pomerium was reaffirmed on several occasions up to the fourth century A.D., and seems to have been generally observed by emperors themselves. Julius Caesar had been voted in advance the special privilege of a tomb inside the pomerium, but in the end his ashes were buried in his family tomb. Other imperial cremations and burials in the Campus Martius seem to have been sited deliberately outside the pomerium. Trajan’s burial was an exceptional case. He had died in the East after conquering Parthia, and his ashes were brought into Rome in triumphal procession and placed in the base of his column – which stood within the pomerium. But this anomaly was explained and (plausibly or implausibly) justified by an allegedly traditional right of those who held triumphs to be buried within the city.47
Much of the writing of the early empire emphasizes the importance of maintaining Roman religious traditions. This concern for the proper performance of religious rites is highlighted by Valerius Maximus’ Memorable Deeds and Sayings, a compilation of stories and anecdotes drawn from republican history, dedicated to the emperor Tiberius. The first chapter deals with religion, quoting cases of religious practices being maintained even in the face of severe difficulties, of punishment meted out to those who ignored the claims of religion, and of the correct response to instances of ‘superstition‘. So, for example, he briefly tells the story of a Vestal Virgin who allowed the sacred flame to go out, thus raising suspicions of her own unchastity; she was cleared by the aid of the goddess herself and a miraculous rekindling of the flame.48
Another index of the energy put into the organization of religion in the early Empire is the production of books on religious law. Traditionally, sacred law had been the special preserve of the priestly colleges. But from the second century B.C. various priests published books on the subject; and in the second half of the first century B.C. those who were not themselves priests – antiquarians, jurisconsults and various religious experts – wrote further treatises.49 This activity quickened in the early Empire. Antistius Labeo wrote On Pontifical Law in at least fifteen books; Ateius Capito On Pontifical Law in at least six books, On Law of Sacrifices and On Augural Law; Veranius On Auspices and Pontifical Questions.50 These treatises codified the basic framework of sacred law – and became themselves a venerated part of Roman religious tradition. This venerable status may account for the fact that, as far as we know, no further books were written on the subject, despite the fact that leading jurists were often members of priestly colleges.
Poets too emphasize the need to pay particular attention to religion. As we saw in the last chapter, Horace, writing in the early 20s B.C., associated the recent travails of Rome with religious neglect.51 This is a typical Augustan perspective on recent history, closely paralleled in Livy’s writing on early Rome. Both writers ascribe Roman disaster to neglect of religious tradition;52 but equally the Augustan poets present Rome’s future as lying in the hands of one man, with new and unprecedented power in the city.53 It is to his revolutionary position, and to the religious innovations and adaptations brought about through him, that we turn in the rest of this chapter – starting with the implications of the name he assumed in 27 B.C.: Augustus.
Victory against Antony gave Octavian such dominance over Rome that his official Roman name, Imperator Caesar, seemed no longer adequate to represent his exceptional status: some people proposed that he be called Romulus, as if to style him the second founder of Rome.54 Others thought that this was too regal a name, as well as carrying the taint of fratricide in the story of Romulus’ murder of his brother Remus. There was, besides, the uncomfortable tradition (as we have seen) that Romulus had been murdered by the senators – a story which had particular resonances with the death of Julius Caesar, Octavian’s forerunner, adoptive father and closest role-model. An alternative proposal won the day. From 27 B.C., he was officially re-titled Imperator Caesar Augustus. Like ‘Romulus’, the name Augustus’ indicated that the bearer was uniquely favoured by the gods for the service of Rome. The story was told that when Octavian was campaigning for his first consulship in 43 B.C. six vultures appeared, and when he was elected six more appeared; this auspicy, with its echo of the myth of Romulus, indicated that he too, like Romulus, would (re)found the city of Rome.55 This theme was maintained in the invention of the name ‘Augustus’, a word previously known only as an epithet (used particularly of places) with the meaning ‘consecrated by augures’. As a name it evoked not only the favour of the gods, but also the auspicy that marked the founding of Rome. Yet ‘Augustus’ in no way proclaimed regal status, and as a new name had no unfortunate past.56 In other respects, however, Romulus featured prominently in the religious imagery of Augustus, who in 16 B.C. rebuilt the temple of Quirinus – a god identified since the late Republic with the deified Romulus. The original decoration of this temple no longer survives, but a fragment of a later relief depicts the pediment of the temple (Fig. 4.1).57 The whole composition is focussed on the taking of augury. At the centre is a lattice-work door, which probably alludes to the entrance into the auguraculum, the rectangular space within which augury was carried out. To the left of the door are Victory, Mars, Jupiter, and a female god with cornucopia, perhaps Pales, the deity after whom the Palatine was named. To the right are Mercury, a female deity (Bona Dea?), Hercules, and another female figure (?Murcia, associated with the Aventine). This fine collection of deities is impressive enough, but the important point is that these gods are connected with Romulus and Remus. At either end of the pediment they sit as augures, watching for a sign from heaven. In the top centre and to the left are the vultures seen at the founding of Rome. All but the deity on the far right look towards the seated Romulus on the left, and the birds are flying in his direction. Though divine favour was to point towards Romulus, the twins are shown acting together.
There may be a conscious attempt here to depict Romulus and Remus in fraternal harmony; just as, in the Aeneid, Virgil has Jupiter prophesy that ‘Quirinus with his brother Remus’ will give laws to Rome.58 But no representation of this pair, however united, could repress the stories of fratricide and Romulus’ assassination by his senators. Horace writing in the late 30s B.C., condemning the likely renewal of bloodshed in the civil wars, turns the murder of Remus explicitly into the origin of civil strife – so making the violence of citizen against citizen as old as the city itself, and defining Rome as a doomed cycle of fratricide: ‘A bitter fate pursues the Romans, and the crime of a brother’s murder, ever since blameless Remus’ blood was spilt upon the ground, to be a curse upon posterity.’ Ovid, by contrast, suggestively exposes the impossibility of reconciling the different interpretations of the role of Romulus. In his account of the Parilia, he appears to exonerate the founder. He makes Romulus say to Remus, pacifically: ‘There is no need for strife. Great faith is put in augury; let us try the birds’ (i.e. augury); and, as we have seen, he blames the death of Remus on his ignorance of Romulus’ prohibition and on the action of a henchman, Celer. But this version is also neatly undercut by Ovid himself, with his appeal to the god Quirinus to help with the telling of the tale – so making it clear that this is a partisan version of events, Romulus’ side of the story, derived from the deified Romulus himself.59 Different readers would have found this problem reflecting on Augustus in different ways, as he tried to be a new ‘improved’ Romulus, with the embarrassing stains laundered away. But however precisely interpreted, the poets show how Roman myth remained an important medium for the conduct of Roman politics and religion.
Augustus also ‘revived’ traditions associated with another king of Rome, Servius Tullius (the sixth king), in reorganizing the structure of the city. In doing so, he created a series of analogues, on a small local scale, to the reformed religious organization of the state as a whole. In the system that was originally created (according to Roman tradition) by Servius Tullius, the city had been divided into four regiones (districts) – each subdivided into a number of vici (wards); and, within the vici, at every crossroads there were shrines to the Lares, where annual sacrifices were offered. In the late Republic the colleges responsible for the cults at crossroads in the city had become a focus for political protest and Julius Caesar had attempted to suppress them; but Octavian gave theatrical performances in every ward of the city in 29 B.C. to celebrate his triple triumph, and on other occasions. Meanwhile the cults themselves seem to have continued in the early Augustan period.60
In 7 B.C. Augustus divided Rome into fourteen districts and 265 wards.61 This reorganization transformed the cults of the wards: from 7 B.C. onwards they became cults of the Lares Augusti and the Genius Augusti. Their traditional celebrations were also changed. To the old festival of the Lares on 1 May was added a new celebration on 1 August, when the magistrates took up office, probably in honour of the Genius Augusti.62 The significance of these new cults is clear enough in outline, if not in detail. The Lares (usually translated, all too automatically, as ‘household gods’) were ancient but obscure deities, seen by some ancient writers as the deified spirits of the dead.63 On this interpretation, the Lares Augusti would be the emperor’s ancestors, and the Genius Augusti, the Spirit of Augustus himself. In other words, the public ward cults now consisted of cults that had previously been the private cults of Augustus and his family, located within his own house.64
The new cults involved building a shrine at the crossroads in each ward. The best known example is a modest monument in marble, just 2.80m. by 2.38m., with a flight of five steps running up to the shrine, which sheltered images of the Lares Augusti and the Genius Augusti. In front of it stood a small altar (54 cm. high) (Fig. 4.2).65 The sculptured reliefs on some of the other extant altars attempt to display the connections of past and present, city and ward. Thus the most elaborately carved example shows, on the two smaller sides, a sacrifice performed by the ward magistrates, and the scene (made famous by Virgil’s epic) of Aeneas’ discovery of a sow on his arrival in Italy; and on the two larger sides, Victory with the shield of Virtue awarded to Augustus and the apotheosis of Caesar (Fig. 4.3). These reliefs are clearly similar in some respects to the iconography of ‘official’ Augustan art; but the (often crude) style of their carving, and the wide range of scenes chosen to decorate the altars, are distinctive. They suggest that, though Augustus devised the cults of the Lares Augusti and of his Genius for the wards, and presented statues of the gods to them,66 the specific arrangements and the designs of the altars were the responsibility of the local officials.67
Fig. 4.2 A reconstruction of the shrine of the Lares at Compitum Acili, Rome.
The Augustan reorganization of the ward cults gave the emperor a place throughout the city of Rome. The shrines continued to be repaired (and used) through the third century and still feature in the catalogues of Roman monuments compiled in the fourth century.68 The cults were not a transient Augustan phenomenon, but played their part in permanently reorienting Roman religion under the Empire. The creation of the new wards took the emphasis on place to every corner of the city; here we see the emperor inserted within a religious framework that incorporated the whole city, by creating an opportunity for local participation in the creation of imperial Rome’s new mythology.
Augustus held priesthoods only at Rome itself. So far as we know he took no religious office outside the capital; but there he gradually accumulated membership of all the major priestly colleges, becoming pontifex in 48 B.C., augur in 4l–40B.C., quindecimvir sacris faciundis in c.37B.C., and septemvir epulonum by 16 B.C. To mark this cumulation of priestly offices a coin was issued in 16 B.C. featuring the symbols of each of the four priesthoods.69 In addition, Augustus was made a member of three of the lesser priesthoods: frater Arvalis, sodalis Titius and fetialis. Portraits of the emperor, both on coins and on statues, frequently showed him veiled in a toga, in the stance of sacrifice. In fact, from this period on, virtually no one else is depicted on a Roman public monument conducting sacrifice: Roman religion was becoming tied to a particular person as well as to a particular place.
Fig. 4.3 The Belvedere altar, Rome, 12–2 B.C. (a) Sacrifice at ward altar, by ward magistrate (on right); an attendant (on left) proffers two images of the Lares Augusti as recipients of the cult; (b) Aeneas’ discovery of the sow which portended the successful foundation of Alba Longa – the city which the Romans regarded as the precursor of the city of Rome itself. The figure on the left may be a prophet. The story was told by Virgil (Aeneid III.389–93, VIII.42–8, 81–5), and is also featured on the Ara Pacis (4.3c); (c) Victory with the honorific shield awarded to Augustus in 27 B.C. The inscription reads: ‘The senate and people of Rome to Emperor Caesar Augustus, son of divus (Julius), pontifex maximus, hailed imperator <gap> times, consul <gap> times, with tribunician power for <gap> years’. The altar was put up many years after the award of the shield and those who commissioned it never completed (or did not know) the details of Augustus’ titles at the time, (d) The apotheosis of Caesar (?), observed by Augustus on left and by Venus (?) and Augustus’ heirs on right. (Height 0.95 m., width 0.97 m., depth 0.67 m.)
In the Republic it had been extremely unusual for anyone to hold more than one major priesthood. Julius Caesar had been both pontifex and augur, but Augustus went way beyond even Caesar’s precedent; and his management of the imperial family established the cumulation of priestly offices as a privilege of emperors and their heirs only.70 When Nero was adopted by Claudius in A.D. 50, coins were issued with the same four symbols as had appeared on Augustus’ coins and a legend indicating that Nero had been co-opted as an extra, supernumerary, member of the four major priestly colleges, by decree of the senate.71 This co-optation into four colleges simultaneously was an innovation, and it marked Nero out as Claudius’ chosen heir, setting a precedent for the future as a way of designating the emperor’s successor. But at the same time the emperor and his heir were staking a claim to embrace all religious activity in Rome.
The first two of Augustus’ offices, augur and pontifex, are worth considering here; we shall return to the quindecimviri sacris faciundis later. The lituus, the augures’ ceremonial staff that had become the symbol of the priesthood, was regularly featured on the coinage of Octavian in the 30s B.C.72 This was one of the ways in which Octavian, like other republican leaders, emphasized that his military authority was properly founded on religious observance. But after his victory at Actium he stressed the peaceful overtones of the office of augur. In 29 B.C. Octavian took the so-called ‘augurium salutis’. This was an augural ceremony that could be carried out only at a time when no Roman forces were fighting – to ascertain whether it was propitious for the consuls even to ask the gods to grant safety to the state. It was, in the extravagant words of an official inscribed record, the ‘greatest augury by which the safety of the Roman people is sought’. In fact, we know of only two occasions when it was attempted before 29 B.C. – in about 160 B.C. and during Cicero’s consulship in 63 B.C. But it is treated by ancient writers as a venerable tradition revived by the emperor, another aspect of the ‘restoration’ of religion at the beginning of the principate. It was at least a ‘tradition’ that was maintained: an inscription records seven performances between A.D. 1 and 17; and Tacitus notes another occasion under Claudius in A.D. 49.73
The key priestly office was that of pontifex maximus. Augustus had been a member of the pontifical college since 48 B.C., but in 44 B.C., on the assassination of Caesar, it was Lepidus (then in alliance with Octavian and Mark Antony, in the so-called ‘second triumvirate’) who was appointed head of the college. Augustus did not remove Lepidus from office, even when he was disgraced. But with a dramatic display of restraint, in the name of the traditional proprieties of priestly office, he waited until the death of Lepidus in 13 B.C. before being elected pontifex maximus in 12 B.C. In his own account of his Achievements, he laid great emphasis on the popularity of his election: ‘such crowds poured in from the whole of Italy for my election as are never recorded at Rome before’. The date on which the election occurred was even celebrated by an annual festival, and it is noted in Ovid’s Fasti.74 Augustus’ election to this office (and also, as we shall see, his transformation of it) proved to be of central importance in the restructuring of Roman religion.
The pontifex maximus was traditionally obliged to live in an official house, which stood in the Forum adjacent to the precinct of the Vestal Virgins; even Julius Caesar conformed to this rule. Augustus, on the other hand, was unwilling to give up his own house on the Palatine, though he found ways to recognise the obligation that he should live in a public, official residence. Initially, he made a part of his own house public property; but subsequently (A.D. 3), after a fire destroyed the house, he rebuilt it and made it all public property.75 This was more than a technical evasion of (or genuflection towards) an inconvenient regulation. It signalled an important step in the redefinition of the office of pontifex maximus, as well as a new alignment between that priestly office and the goddess Vesta.
Far from leaving the cult of Vesta behind, Augustus’ displacement of the residence of the pontifex maximus to the Palatine reaffirmed, and even intensified, the connection with the goddess. Just under two months after Augustus became pontifex maximus there was dedicated ‘an image and [shrine] of Vesta in the house of Imperator Caesar Augustus pontifex maximus’.76 The old shrine which contained the sacred flame and an array of secret objects remained in the Forum, but the new shrine inside Augustus’ house on the Palatine had radical implications for his position as pontifex maximus. The closeness of the relationship between Augustus and Vesta was stressed by contemporary writers. They told, for example, that it was Aeneas who had brought the fire of Vesta with him from Troy to Italy, and Romulus (himself the son of a Vestal, by the god Mars) who had transferred the cult from Alba Longa to Rome – so linking the origin of the cult with the mythical forebears of Augustus.77 They sometimes claim actual kinship between Vesta and Augustus, as when Ovid prays, ‘Gods of ancient Troy, the worthiest prize to him who bore you, you whose weight saved Aeneas from the foe, a priest descended from Aeneas handles divinities related to him; Vesta, you must guard his person related to you.’78 Augustus was thus connected to Vesta both by blood and by the deeds of his ancestors.
Fig. 4.4 A relief on a base now in Sorrento represents the cult of Vesta, perhaps in its new location on the Palatine. On the right, Vesta enthroned, pouring a libation, flanked by two female figures – possibly other goddesses. She is approached by a group of five Vestals, headed no doubt (in the lost central section) by the sixth Vestal and perhaps by Augustus as pontifex maximus.
Beyond the curtains (which indicate that this is an indoor scene) is visible, on the right, the round shrine of Vesta in the Forum, with the Palladium within – showing that the main scene is not taking place there; also visible are statues of a bull and a ram; and, on the left, columns of an Ionic temple, maybe that of Apollo on the Palatine. There are three other scenes not illustrated here. On the right side of the base are Apollo, Latona and Diana, modelled on the cult images in the temple of Apollo. On the left side, in front of the house of Augustus, Mars led by Cupid and (probably) Venus approaching perhaps the numen of Augustus. On the rear, Magna Mater. (Height 1.17m., max. width 1.90m., max. depth 1.20m.)
The creation of the shrine on the Palatine was an important stage in the formation of a peculiarly imperial residence, with particular religious resonances. Though in some ways Augustus’ house continued to be just one among many aristocratic residences on the Palatine, it was also now transformed into a palace – a palace shared between the emperor, Vesta and (as we shall see below) Apollo. So Ovid again writes, ‘Vesta has been received into the house of her kinsman; so have the senators rightly decreed. Apollo has part of the house; another part has been given up to Vesta; what remains is occupied by Augustus himself … A single house holds three eternal gods.’79 But there were further implications. Not only could the pontifex maximus now be called ‘priest of Vesta’;80 not only had Vesta now been relocated in a new imperial setting; but even more crucially the public hearth of the state, with its associations of the success of the Roman empire, had been fused with the private hearth of Augustus. The emperor (and the emperor’s house) could now be claimed to stand for the state.
The new relationship with Vesta is just one aspect of the transformation of the office of pontifex maximus. It is striking that in his biography of Augustus, Suetonius groups his major religious reforms under the heading of the emperor’s role as pontifex maximus, – even though some are demonstrably earlier than his assumption of that office.81 But, even if inaccurate in detail, Suetonius was in essence correct. For Augustus had established a new conception of the office of pontifex maximus, which did give it an overall religious authority in the state and a preeminent capacity to introduce religious reform.82
The pontifices were, if with the augures, the most prestigious priestly college of the Republic. The pontifex maximus enjoyed considerable prestige, and the office was keenly fought for; but he was technically (and in practice) merely head of one of the priestly colleges, with no general authority over any other college or over ‘religion’ more generally.83 This situation, however, was already beginning to change with the emergence of dynasts in the late Republic and (particularly clearly) in the dictatorship of Julius Caesar. In 44 B.C., for example, it was decreed that Caesar’s son or adopted son should become pontifex maximus after him – suggesting that it was being seen not just as ‘chairmanship’ of a priestly college but as a (hereditary) part of Caesar’s autocratic power.84 That certainly is how it developed with Augustus. After his election to the office, it was impossible for anyone but the emperor living on the Palatine to be pontifex maximus. All subsequent emperors took up the position soon after their accession and regularly featured it among their official titles. In short, it became a keystone of the religious system. So Dio stresses in his account of the reign of Augustus (in the middle of a series of reflections on the nature of the emperor’s power that clearly also draws on circumstances of the third century A.D.): ‘From the fact that they are enrolled in all the priesthoods and moreover can grant most of the priesthoods to others, and that one of them, even if two or three emperors are ruling jointly, is pontifex maximus, they control all sacred and religious matters’.85 From 12 B.C. onwards, for the first time, Roman religion had a head.
The traditional senatorial priesthoods retained their prestige during the early Empire, and the prestige of some was actually increased by Augustus.86 Partly no doubt because these priesthoods, unlike magistracies, were held for life, they were eagerly sought; partly too because the number of positions available meant that (even though in the first two centuries of the Empire it was not possible for a senator to be a member of more than one of the four main colleges) only a quarter to a third of senators, and a half of all consuls, could become priests. The younger Pliny published among his correspondence a letter proudly responding to a friend’s congratulations on his appointment to the college of augures: ‘the priesthood is an ancient and religious office, which has an especial sanctity in that it is held for life’;87 and some senators saw membership of one of the priestly colleges as the pinnacle of their career, ranking higher than being praetor or consul.
Appointment to a priesthood, however, now depended in part on the patronage of the emperor. Cassius Dio says that in 29 B.C. Octavian was allowed to appoint priests even beyond the regular number, a principle which continued (he writes) to his own day.88 Not that such appointments were necessarily overtly autocratic. Augustus and later emperors were members of all four priestly colleges, and could exercise their patronage through influence on traditional priestly elections. All the same, there was little doubt in whose gift priestly office ultimately lay. In an earlier letter addressed to Trajan, Pliny explicitly asks the emperor for the grant of a priesthood, ‘the office either of augur or of septemvir, both of which are now vacant’.89
Nevertheless, despite keen competition for most priesthoods, two offices caused particular problems. The office of flamen Dialis had been vacant since 87 B.C., until Augustus as pontifex maximus had the post filled in 11 B.C.90 It remained subject to unique restrictions and taboos, many of which must have made the priesthood unattractive to potential holders – and which (as we have seen) had caused conflict between flamines and pontifex maximus more than a hundred years earlier. It may have been in response to the unattractiveness of the office that Augustus made certain changes to the rules, or (as Tacitus has his successor Tiberius put it) ‘altered certain relics of a primitive antiquity to the modern spirit’.91 The full details of the changes are lost to us, but the priest was now allowed to spend more nights outside Rome (the previous rule had prevented him spending more than two nights away) and there seem also to have been changes in the status of his wife.92 The debates over the restrictions continued beyond Augustus’ reign. In A.D. 22, one flamen Dialis argued that he should be allowed to leave Rome to govern a province; earlier bans imposed by pontifices maximi had been the result of private feuds, while now that the pontifex maximus was also the supreme person, he was above such motives. Tiberius, however, as pontifex maximus ruled against such a radical change (using, according to Tacitus, the earlier minor reforms of Augustus as an argument against any such major departure from precedent). When this flamen died, Tiberius argued that the restriction of the office to those married by the archaic, and now rare, ceremony of confarreatio should be lifted. The senate, to whom the matter was referred, decided that no change was necessary, and the son of the old flamen was chosen to replace his father. Tiberius himself, meanwhile, introduced a law to remove more of the legal restrictions on the flamen’s wife.93
Augustus also attempted to solve problems over the appointment of Vestal Virgins. On one occasion when a Vestal had died, he found senators were reluctant to put their daughters forward as candidates (girls were normally chosen for this priesthood between the ages of six and ten). According to Suetonius, Augustus swore that if any of his granddaughters had been of the appropriate age, he would have proposed them. But he also increased the privileges of the Vestals, including special seats in the theatre; later, distinguished imperial women sat among the Vestals in the theatre.94 We do not know how successful such official encouragement was; nor is it clear how the closer links between the imperial house and the cult of Vesta affected the priesthood and its popularity. But Tacitus writes that under Tiberius two senators vied with each other to have their daughters chosen as Vestal Virgins; and the office remained in high prestige through the third into the fourth century.95
The Vestals, in fact, accumulated new, imperial functions in addition to their traditional ones. In the Republic they had been present with the other priests at the grand funeral of Sulla and it was voted that with the pontifices they should every five years offer up prayers for Caesar’s safety.96 After the battle of Actium the Vestals headed the procession which greeted the returning Octavian; they were present too at the dedication of the Ara Pacis, and with the magistrates and priests were responsible for the annual sacrifices there. (They are represented on the small, inner frieze on the altar itself.) The Vestals were even put in charge of the cult of the deified Livia.97 So, while Vesta gained a new shrine on the Palatine, the Vestals gained a concern for the emperor and his family – still further linking the emperor to the hearth of Rome, and to the favour of the gods for Rome which that hearth symbolized.
The history of the Arval Brothers illustrates the extent and nature of changes in priesthoods in the imperial period in all its complexity. We know almost nothing about the Arvals’ activities during the Republic. Although their sanctuary on the outskirts of Rome is attested archaeologi-cally from the third century B.C., the only literary reference to them before the imperial period is in Varro’s work On the Latin Language. There he explains that they perform rites to make the crops grow and that their name (fratres Arvales) comes either from sowing (ferendo) and fields (arvis), or from the Greek fratria or brotherhood. Octavian became a member of the college and, perhaps in 29 B.C., placed the body on a new footing.98 Significantly, in the imperial period the name was explained differently. The nurse of Romulus had twelve sons, but one died and Romulus himself took his place, calling himself and the others ‘Arval Brothers’.99 This myth entirely suited a college which included Augustus, the new Romulus.
The revived college inscribed a record on stone of its membership and of the ceremonies it carried out year by year (notably its three-day festival held in May in honour of Dea Dia, an obscure deity known only from these inscriptions). The extensive fragments that have been discovered in their sanctuary run from 21 B.C. to A.D. 304, and are the fullest extant record of any of the priesthoods of Rome.100 The lists of Arval members that we can reconstruct from the inscribed record allow us to explore in detail the changing patterns of recruitment to the priesthood. So, for example, from its first Augustan appointments to the end of Nero’s reign, the college was of considerable distinction, with members drawn from the most prominent members of the senate. Thereafter it went through a series of changes. At times (under Vespasian, Marcus Aurelius and Caracalla) those recruited to the college were no less distinguished than those elected to the four major colleges, while at other times the Arvals seem to have been drawn from the middle ranks of the senate which could not expect consulships or major priesthoods.101 The detailed records of the Arvals allow us to detect (more fully than for any other priesthood) a complex and changing history of patronage and recruitment to the college, which may be related to the needs of the emperor to conciliate opponents and honour allies.
The inscribed records of the Arval ceremonies also demonstrate the extent to which the ancient (or allegedly ancient) cults of Rome were restructured round the figure of the emperor. The main festival of Dea Dia herself was never adapted to include any sacrifices or rituals specifically focussed on the emperor (even if he was sometimes present in his capacity as priest), but he and his family did become the focus of a range of quite separate ‘imperial rituals’ performed by the college. Throughout the Julio-Claudian period, the Arval Brothers made annual vows and carried out sacrifices ‘for the emperor’s safety’, and they offered sacrifices to mark imperial birthdays, accessions, deaths and deifications – or sometimes to celebrate the suppression of a conspiracy against the emperor, or his safe return to Rome from abroad. Their sanctuary of Dea Dia also included a Caesareum, a ‘shrine of the Caesars’ containing imperial statues. In general, however, the sacrifices they performed for the emperor did not take place in the sanctuary of Dea Dia, nor (at least from the mid first century A.D.) did they involve sacrifices to her. Their ‘dynastic’ sacrifices in the Julio-Claudian period took place mainly on the Capitol or at the temple of the deified Augustus, and from the Flavian period onwards exclusively on the Capitol. The deities involved were the Capitoline triad, Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, Salus publica, and deified members of the imperial house, as well as the Genius of the living emperor and the Juno of the empress.
After A.D. 69, at the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, there were changes in the rituals of the Arvals. The annual vows for the emperor’s safety remained a regular element in their ritual calendar throughout their history, but from the late first century their records show no more regular sacrifices to the divi;102 imperial birthdays were no longer celebrated; and sacrifices for occasional events (such as the discovery of plots or the commemoration of imperial victories) became much less common. In fact, the proportion of the recorded Arval rituals with a direct imperial reference dropped from two thirds or even three quarters under the Julio-Claudians to a quarter or even less in the second and third centuries A.D. Again we do not know exactly how to explain this change (nor, for that matter, can we be certain that the inscribed records of the priesthood are an accurate record of all the rituals that were actually carried out); but we can glimpse here something of the process by which traditional priests became involved also in ‘imperial rituals’, and the changing patterns of those rituals over time. Suetonius’ apparently simple reference to Augustus’ ‘restoration of ancient cults which had gradually fallen into disuse’103 should not blind us to the fact that ‘restoration’ entailed a radical shift in focus.
The building or rebuilding of temples is another aspect of the restructuring of the religious system around the person of the emperor. As we have seen, Augustus himself records in his Achievements that he repaired eighty-two temples in 28 B.C. alone; and he names fourteen other temples in Rome that he built or restored during his reign. This account of temple-building is interspersed with references to his work on other, secular buildings, such as the senate-house, theatres, the water supply and a road104 – as if this temple construction was to be seen simply as part of the republican tradition of victorious generals and other senators carrying out building works in the city. There was, however, a profound difference. While senators continued to erect some secular buildings during the reign of Augustus, after 33 B.C. only Augustus and members of his family built temples in Rome. This may have been a generous shouldering of responsibility for temples in Rome on the part of the emperor. But, even if so, it had clear political and religious consequences. On the one hand, senators (now excluded from their traditional opportunity for display in the capital) increased their munificence to their native cities in Italy and elsewhere. On the other, temple building placed the emperor and his family in a unique relationship with the gods, increasing the importance of the emperor and permitting a novel prominence to his female relatives (who were also associated with these building schemes).105
The reign of Augustus is a crucial period for temple building; in contrast to the following fifty years, when only two new state temples were built. Moreover all the state temples built in Rome in the Augustan period, or immediately afterwards, refer directly or indirectly to the emperor. Two were dedicated to a deified member of the imperial house (divus Julius, divus Augustus). Three relate to victories on the part of the emperor (Apollo, Neptune, Mars Ultor). Two stress imperial virtues (Concordia, Iustitia). One (Jupiter Tonans) was dedicated by Augustus in thanks for his narrow escape from a thunderbolt. In addition some of the old temples rebuilt by Augustus gained new, imperial, associations. Three temples built or rebuilt by Augustus may be taken as exemplary of this new focus: Magna Mater, Apollo and Mars Ultor.
The temple of the Magna Mater on the Palatine was a well-known peculiarity in the late Republic. It had been built originally shortly after introduction of the cult of the goddess from Phrygia in 204 B.C., and was rebuilt by Augustus around 2 B.C., and probably restored again following a fire in A.D. 3.106 We have already seen some of the ambivalences of this cult: an element of ‘foreign’ barbaric exoticism within the city, at the same time as it held an established position within the ‘official’ cults of the city. These ambivalences remain. The cult retained all kinds of ‘Phrygian’ peculiarities, not only in its flamboyant priesthood, but also in religious claims and mythical traditions: Ovid, for example, refers to Magna Mater holding precedence over the other gods (who were her children), and describes the offering to her of herbs, which the earth once grew without human labour – so apparently sacralizing the most primitive stage of human existence before the Greek Ceres introduced cereal cultivation.107 But in the Augustan period the specifically Roman, even imperial, aspects of the goddess became increasingly emphasized. Her Phrygian homeland was strongly associated with the Trojan origins of Rome: according to Ovid again (telling the story of the goddess’s arrival at Rome during the Hannibalic War), she had almost followed Aeneas from neighbouring Troy to Italy but ‘realized that Fate did not yet require her power for Latium’, so waited five hundred years till she was summoned by a Sibylline Oracle; and in Virgil’s Aeneid Magna Mater appears as a protectress of Aeneas on his journeys. When Augustus rebuilt the temple, he made a particular show of the venerable antiquity of the cult of the goddess: he built the temple not in marble (the material of almost all his new building projects) but in traditional tufa – blocks of coarse local stone and the material of most of the earliest temples at Rome.108
Near the temple of the Magna Mater on the Palatine, and directly adjacent to his own house, Augustus built a temple of Apollo on what had been his own land. The site had been struck by lightning in 36 B.C., a sign (or so at least it was interpeted by some religious experts) that the god himself had chosen this particular spot. Augustus promptly made it public property, consecrated it to Apollo, finally dedicating the temple itself in 28 B.C. The temple was one of the grandest in the city with lavish sculptural decoration: statues of Danaus and his fifty daughters, the Danaids, between the columns of the portico in front of the temple; ivory carvings on the door, showing (on one side) the killing of Niobe’s children by Apollo and his sister Diana, and (on the other) the expulsion of the Gauls from Delphi; inside the temple, statues of Apollo, Diana and their mother Latona, works (originally brought to Rome as booty) by three of the finest Greek sculptors of the fourth century B.C.109 It quickly became a major religious focus. The ancient Sibylline Books were transferred there from the temple of Jupiter, probably in 23–19 B.C. (it was, after all, under inspiration from Apollo that the Sibyl herself was said to prophesy).110 And it was one of the settings for the rituals of the Saecular Games, held in 17 B.C., to which we shall return below.
The location of the temple is very striking. The earlier temple of Apollo was in the Circus Flaminius, outside the pomerium. Augustus not only moved his cult inside the sacred boundary of the city; but he brought the god effectively into his own house – as Ovid aptly recalled with his reference to ‘a single house <that> holds three eternal gods’. This complex of divine and human residence (emperor’s palace, shrine of Vesta and temple of Apollo) was without precedent in Rome, and clearly evoked the divine associations of Augustus.111
This temple also signified a shift in the character of Apollo at Rome. Previously his main role had been as a healing god, of no particular prominence; now he was to be central to Augustus’ new Rome. The iconography of the sanctuary prompted all kinds of connections between Apollo and the new imperial régime.112 So, for example, the statues of the Danaids recalled not only their righteous action in killing the impious sons of Aegyptus, but also the dedication of a temple to Apollo by Danaus after he won the throne of Argos (an analogy perhaps with the establishment of Augustan monarchy). Similarly the doors of the temple, in highlighting the punishments meted out by Apollo to those who disobeyed him (Niobe, the Gauls), evoked the role of Apollo at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C., where it was said he had helped Augustus to defeat (and punish) Antony and Cleopatra. Significantly Augustus also founded a temple of Apollo on the outskirts of his new city of Nikopolis (‘Victory City’, near Actium), with a prestigious Panhellenic four-yearly festival of Actian Apollo, which was still being celebrated over 250 years later.113
The third major Augustan temple, which was later described by Pliny the Elder as among the most beautiful buildings in the world, is a classic example of the complex interrelationship between innovation and tradition, restructuring and continuity, that characterizes most of the religious developments of the early principate. The temple of Mars Ultor (as we have already seen, the first temple to the god of war within the pomerium) formed the centrepiece of Augustus’ new forum, built next to the forum of Caesar and dedicated in 2 B.C.114 Plans for the temple originated in a vow Augustus allegedly took in 42 B.C., when he defeated the murderers of his father. But the emphasis on Mars as the ‘Avenger’ also evoked Augustus’ vengeance on the Parthians in 20 B.C.; the standards lost by Crassus in his defeat at the hands of the Parthians were recovered and placed in the innermost shrine of the temple. This allusion to contemporary achievements against foreign foes was reinforced by the military functions prescribed for the temple from its foundation. Military commanders were to set off from the temple, the senate was to meet in it to vote triumphs, and victorious generals were to dedicate to Mars the symbols of their triumphs.115 Military glory was to be displayed in a setting which explicitly evoked the emperor’s authority.
The design of the forum and temple articulates the relationship between Augustus, the gods and Rome. Augustus was referred to overtly only by the prominent dedicatory inscription with his name on the architrave, and by a statue which stood in the chariot in the centre of the forum; but his presence lay behind (and helps to make sense of) the iconography of the whole complex. The cult statue of Mars Ultor stood, next to the recovered standards, on a podium in the apse at the far end of the temple – a figure which alluded both to Augustus’ piety in avenging Caesar and to his military success against the Parthians. There was also, almost certainly, a statue of Venus (perhaps standing on the podium next to Mars Ultor, or more likely in the main part of the temple) – recalling Augustus’, and Caesar’s, descent from the goddess herself. Many scholars have believed (though the evidence for this is much less clear) that there was a statue of divus Julius too, a further parade of Augustus’ divine forebears.116 On the pediment were Mars, Venus and Fortune; Romulus as augur and the personification of victorious Roma flanked them, and on either side were representations of the Palatine, the site of Romulus’ augury, and the river Tiber (Fig. 4.5). All these figures could be seen as mythical analogues for Augustus’ own victories and restorations of Rome. In the porticoes on either side of the temple stood a balancing series of statues depicting Augustus’ dual ancestry. On one side was Aeneas, the descendant of Venus, dutifully carrying his father from the flames of Troy (echoing Augustus’ own filial piety), and flanked by his descendants, the kings of Alba Longa and the Julii (Augustus’ family line). Facing this series was a statue of Romulus, the son of Mars, victoriously bearing the armour of an enemy king whom he had slain in battle, and round him other figures of Roman republican history, celebrated mainly for their military prowess. In all there were about 108 statues, each with a brief inscription itemizing their distinctions. To these famous predecessors and ancestors, stretching back to Aeneas, Romulus and through them to Venus and Mars, Augustus was here proclaimed as the heir.
These new religious images were, of course, much less straightforward than such a brief description might suggest. We have already noted the potential ambivalence of the figure of Romulus in Augustan image-making. Here again the stress (for example) on divine descent that is so evident in the sculptural programme might itself have raised some uncomfortable questions for a cynical viewer: Romulus was, after all, the son of Mars by a Vestal Virgin, who was bound on pain of death by a vow of chastity... Besides, more generally, the obvious innovations in Augustan religion might sometimes seem to conflict with the claims about the restoration of ancestral practice. The new temples of Apollo and of Mars Ultor did actually take over functions that had traditionally been part of the cult of Jupiter Optimus Maximus: the Sibylline Books were moved to the Palatine, and some military functions to the Forum Augustum. And Suetonius’ biography of Augustus describes a dream in which Jupiter Optimus Maximus complained to Augustus that worshippers were being diverted from his own temple by the emperor’s new shrine of Jupiter Tonans nearby.117 The story goes that Augustus deferentially pointed out that Jupiter Tonans was merely the doorkeeper of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Such a line of argument would at least be consistent with his various displays of devotion to the traditional Capitoline cult: he rebuilt the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus after it had been destroyed by fire; he made lavish offerings there to Jupiter; and the annual vows for the emperor’s safety were always performed on the Capitol. It is impossible now to judge overall how awkwardly, or how smoothly, the new temples were integrated into the religious life of Rome.
Fig. 4.5 The pediment of the temple of Mars Ultor on a relief of the mid first century A.D. The temple is seen in the background of the main subject of the relief, which is a state sacrifice. (Width 1.22m.)
One of the main events of Augustus’ reign was the celebration of the Saecular Games in 17 B.C.118 This occasion is uniquely well documented in a variety of surviving sources: ranging from the Sibylline oracle ordaining the procedures to the inscribed record of the games, and the hymn of Horace sung at the festival. From this material we can reconstruct in some detail the programme of events at the festival, and detect some of the ways in which this traditional republican festival (whose earliest celebrations we discussed in chapters 1 and 2) was both preserved and transformed under Augustus and his successors.
The games were, as we have already seen, tied to one particular spot in the city, in the north-west Campus Martius beside the Tiber at an altar known as the Tarentum (or Terentum); and it was here that the inscribed records of the ceremonies were later set up. From at least the first century B.C. onwards, this location was explained by the story – set in Italy’s mythic past – of a man called Valesius, who lived in Sabine territory near to Rome, and of his efforts to obtain a cure for his children who had fallen grievously sick. He was told by the gods to take them to Tarentum and to give them water from the Tiber to drink, heated up on the altar of Dis Pater and Proserpina, the gods of the underworld. He took this to mean that he should go to the Greek colony called Tarentum, in the ‘instep’ of Italy; so he set out on what was to be a long journey – putting in for the night by the river Tiber on the Campus Martius and drawing water from the river (which he heated on a makeshift hearth) for his thirsty children; and they woke up the next morning miraculously cured. It turned out that this spot on the Campus Martius was also called Tarentum and that there was an altar of Dis Pater and Proserpina lying buried under the place where he had built his hearth. In thanks for the cure Valesius established three nights of sacrifices and games.119
The Saecular Games of Augustus were tied to this same traditional place; but in other respects they differed substantially from their republican predecessors, notably in their focus on the emperor himself and his son-in-law and heir, Agrippa. Although, as we have seen, the details of the early celebrations of this ritual are hard to reconstruct, it seems clear enough that the priesthood of the quindecimviri were in overall charge of proceedings. Formally that arrangement continued in 17 B.C. Augustus and Agrippa were themselves members of this college, and they played their traditional roles within it; Augustus, for example, initiated the celebrations by writing to the board of priests in his capacity as one of its four ‘presidents’. But in the festival itself they almost seem to have taken control, beyond that of any other priest. Agrippa himself was just an ordinary member of the board, but the other three ‘presidents’ stood aside in his favour. Together, Augustus and Agrippa seem to have led the ritual, the emperor alone offering the nocturnal prayers, and his heir joining in those spoken by day. He also seems to have ended each prayer with a petition ‘for me, my house and my household’. This was a traditional prayer formula,120 but in Augustus’ mouth the old words acquired a new dynastic resonance. Besides, the hymn specially composed by the poet Horace for the celebrations, and sung on the third day by a choir of twenty seven boys and twenty seven girls, stressed the central importance of Augustus: ‘May the illustrious descendant of Anchises and Venus obtain the help of you gods whom he worships with white oxen, superior to the enemy, merciful to the prostrate foe.’ The Saecular Games had acquired a new focus.
It seems very likely that the rituals themselves were also transformed. Even if our ideas of republican proceedings are in large part conjectural, some elements of the ceremonies recorded on the inscription appear distinctively Augustan. The preliminary distribution of torches, sulphur and asphalt to (it is claimed) the entire free population of Rome is reminiscent of the attempt to create widespread participation that we saw in the cult of the Lares Augusti. There may well also be a conscious link here with rituals of purification in the festival of the Parilia: just as that festival was connected with the original founding of Rome, so the Saecular Games marked the regular rebirth of the city. The incorporation of the new temple of Apollo on the Palatine is also striking: this was one of the locations where the quindecimviri took in offerings of crops and gave out the materials for purification, and where on the third day sacrifice and prayer were offered to Apollo and Diana and the saecular hymn was first sung.
There was also a significant change in the deities associated with the festival. The fragment of Varro which refers to the foundation of the Games mentions only Dis Pater and Proserpina. There is, however, no mention of these particular gods in the inscribed record of the Augustan festival – where they seem to have been replaced by the Fates, the Goddesses of Childbirth (Ilythiae) and Terra Mater (Mother Earth) in the night-time celebrations, and in the day-time celebrations by Jupiter, Juno, Apollo and Diana. It is these deities too who form the focus of Horace’s hymn. That is to say, instead of an emphasis on the gloomy gods of the Underworld, marking the passing of an era, the Augustan games marked the birth of a new age. And the fertility of Mother Earth (one of the prominent images also on the Augustan Ara Pacis – see Fig. 4.6) can be understood to be guarded by the Fates and the Goddesses of Childbirth.121
Fig. 4.6 ‘Earth’ on a relief from the Ara Pacis, Rome (much restored in the sixteenth century). In the centre, a female figure with two children and pomegranates, grapes and nuts on her lap; in front of her a cow and a sheep. On the left, a female figure flying aloft on a swan (?), and on the right, another female figure on the back of a sea creature. The central figure clearly represents notions of fertility (human and agricultural), set between images of sky and sea. The iconography is much debated; but – as this relief forms one of a pair (of which the other is certainly a personification of Rome) – it seems very likely that we are dealing with earth’ or ‘fertility’ in the sense of Italy. For the design of the Ara Pacis see 4.3c, and fig.7.2b for a provincial adaptation of this relief. (Height 1.55m., width 2.44m.)
The theatrical displays of the festival (the ludi proper) also help reveal the different layers of tradition and innovation that made up the celebrations.122 There were two quite different sorts of these ‘games’. The first is described as follows: ‘when the sacrifice was completed, games were celebrated by night on a stage without the additional construction of a theatre and without the erection of seating.’ This continued into the following day, but there were in addition ‘Latin games in a wooden theatre which had been erected on the Campus Martius next to the Tiber’. This second type of games reappeared in the seven days of games that followed (and closed) the festival. These took three forms and were held in three locations: those held in the theatre in the Campus Martius; the Greek shows in the Theatre of Pompey and Greek stage plays in the theatre in the Circus Flaminius. The first type of games, without theatre and without seats, was avowedly primitive (and maybe unpopular; at least, they were not repeated in the seven days at the end of the festival). But they recall one version of the origin of the festival as a whole. Varro’s remarks on the foundation of this ritual are, in fact, drawn from his work (now lost) on the origin of theatrical performances in Rome, which he associated with the introduction of what he calls the ludi Tarentini (that is the Saecular Games). Those who had read their Varro knew that quaint games of this type had to be incorporated into the new structure.
More generally, appeals to religious tradition served to legitimate the rituals and organization of these, distinctively Augustan, Games. The inscription records the consultation of ‘ancient books’, perhaps the archives of the quindecimviri, for details on how to finance the Games (though it also records that no such information was found); and advice on the performance of the rituals was sought from the jurist and expert in religious law, Ateius Capito.123 And the main shape of the rituals was provided by a Sibylline oracle, still preserved among the fragments of Phlegon, a Greek historian writing in the second century A.D. Shortly before the Augustan celebration the Sibylline oracles were purged of spurious items and deposited beneath the statue of Apollo in the new temple on the Palatine, and perhaps in the process this oracular text, enjoining quite new rituals, was ‘discovered’ or ‘re-discovered’. It could be an ancient text but the fact that it appears to recommend so conveniently the specifically Augustan form of ritual has suggested that it was an antiquarian product of the Augustan age, incorporating or imitating earlier material; so, for example, the hopes expressed in the oracle, as well as in the prayers delivered at the celebrations themselves, for the obedience of the Latins to Rome made little sense under the empire (centuries after any hostility between Latins and Romans) – and were probably drawn from earlier republican material, or consciously mimicking it, to give an antique flavour to the text.124 The ‘ancient books’, legal expertise and the Sibylline oracle combined to create and sanction the new rites.
The timing of the celebrations also received due authority combined with a fictitious tradition. We have already seen in chapters 1 and 2 that the only surely attested republican celebrations took place in 249 and 146 B.C. How far there was an established regular cycle of Games at that period is quite unclear; but those dates would suggest (if anything) a normal interval of about a hundred years.125 In the Augustan period, however, following the Sibylline oracle (and Varro), a cycle of 110 years was accepted as authentic; and a sequence of earlier republican games was ‘established’, beginning in 456 B.C. These were added after 17 B.C. to the official Calendar inscribed in the Roman Forum, creating a new history of the Games which ignored the two earlier attested celebrations. Even so, some puzzles remain. The cycle of 110 years would have authorized games in 16 B.C. rather than 17 B.C. and there is no really satisfactory explanation for the discrepancy.126
The Augustan games formed the model for all subsequent celebrations. Claudius celebrated games in A.D. 47, receiving censure from modern scholars for his self-interested and politically convenient choice of date, which does not fit the Augustan cycle. In fact the choice of A.D. 47 may have been justified by the fact that it was 800 years from the foundation of Rome; and a cycle of 100 years was a legitimate alternative (indeed the surviving Greek text of Augustus’ Achievements (wrongly) translates saecularis as ‘every hundred years’). Thereafter Domitian celebrated the games in A.D. 88 (six years ahead of the Augustan cycle) and Septimius Severus in A.D. 204 (back on the Augustan calculations). Both Domitian’s and Severus’ games followed the Augustan procedure extremely closely. There were of course some changes (a new hymn was written for 204, when the emperor and his family were also somewhat more prominent), but the basic structure of events was unaltered.
To add to the complexity, a second cycle of games was also established under the Empire.127 Taking its lead from Claudius’ celebration of Saecular Games 800 years after the foundation of Rome, games were also held in the following two centuries (A.D. 148 and 248). These were not counted in the official numbered sequence of Saecular Games and, in A.D. 148 and 248 at least, the ritual was quite different. The Tarentum seems to have been displaced in favour of rites in front of the temple of Rome and Venus, known as the Temple of the City, and the date was probably changed to 21 April, the birthday of Rome. These anniversary celebrations, which developed from the Augustan framework, mark the emergence of a new consciousness of the importance of the city of Rome – and of the importance of the emperor within it.
The religious position of the Roman emperor was dominant within the city; his authority was pervasive, but also strikingly diffuse. There was no one major ceremony, such as a coronation or new year’s festival, at which the emperor himself was – as emperor – the leading actor; nor did any one religious ritual sum up his religious status and role.128 Rather, a range of rituals developed which clearly associated the emperor with the gods or linked him with religious institutions and ceremonies; in a variety of different ways he became incorporated within the religious framework of the city (in much the same way as he had been associated with the cult and sanctuary of Vesta). From 30 B.C. games were celebrated every five years by one of the colleges of priests, or by the consuls, in fulfilment of vows to the gods that had been taken for Augustus’ health. In 13, 8 and 7 B.C. special votive games were held in thanks for his safe return to Rome. In 28 B.C. Augustus’ name was inscribed in the hymn of the Salii by a decree of the senate; this ancient hymn (by the late Republic almost incomprehensible even to the priests themselves) continued to be sung in the twice yearly Salian rituals, but now the name of Augustus must have rung out to listeners clear as a bell amongst the arcane and venerable mumbo-jumbo.129 Even in private, libations might be offered to Augustus at banquets, while images of Augustus and members of his family stood in household shrines, sometimes tended by associations of ‘worshippers of Augustus’.130
The numen, or divine power, of Augustus also received public honours in Rome. Although, strictly speaking, there was no official public cult in the city of the living Augustus as a god, Tiberius did dedicate (probably in A.D. 6) an altar on the Palatine next to the house of Augustus, at which the four main priestly colleges sacrificed to his numen.131 Numen was not shared by ordinary people, and (unlike the Lares Augusti) had no resonances in traditional family cult of ancestors. The establishment of its official cult signalled that the emperor himself, in person, was not actually receiving cult due to the gods – and, at the same time, signalled that of course there was very little that separated Augustus from the gods. There must have been, in other words, all the difference (and yet almost none at all) between worshipping Augustus himself and worshipping his numen.
Ovid’s Fasti neatly encapsulates the presence of the emperor throughout religious ritual, cult and myth. Interspersed with accounts of traditional festivals (such as the Parilia), Ovid mentioned every official festival of Augustan significance, such as the founding of the Ara Pacis or the establishment of the cult of the Lares Augusti.132 The poet has often been accused of flattery, or (alternatively) of subversive irony at the emperor’s expense. But nonetheless his preoccupations closely reflect the emphases of the developing state calendar. Augustus, in fact, recurs in all kinds of religious contexts through the Fasti: the mother of the Arcadian king Evander prophesies the rule of Augustus and his family; battles of Caesar and Augustus are recorded on otherwise blank dates as well as the closing of the temple of Janus that followed on the establishment of the Augustan peace; the disappearance of one temple leads to mention of Augustus’ programme of temple restoration. The emperor’s presence is even signalled, paradoxically, by absences and omissions. At the introduction to the sixth book, Ovid offers three explanations of the etymology of the month of ‘June’ and pleads his inability to decide between them; but he makes no mention of the ‘obvious’ etymology, from Junius Brutus, the liberator of Rome from the kings and ancestor of that other Brutus who had killed Julius Caesar. The suspicious reader might well imagine here that Ovid is using such a glaring omission precisely to draw attention to the story he does not mention. But even if so (and we cannot know how ancient readers took it), it is yet another indication of how, and in how many different ways, the emperor and his achievements were a constant presence throughout the poem – just as they were in the ritual calendar itself.133
Emperors after death were seen in sharper divine focus.134 The official cult of Caesar offered one obvious model for Augustus and subsequent emperors. Though some honours, as we have seen, were probably voted for Caesar in his lifetime, it was their consolidation after his death that became decisive for subsequent practice. In 42 B.C. the senate passed the official consecration of Caesar, including the building of a temple; in 40 B.C. Antony was inaugurated as the first flamen divi Julii (an office to which he had been appointed in 44 B.C.), and Augustus began to call himself divi filius. Finally, in 29 B.C. Augustus appointed a new flamen in place of Antony and dedicated the temple to Caesar, an event celebrated by lavish contests. The temple dominated the south side of the Forum Romanum and formed the backdrop for public speakers using the new tribunal in front of it.135 The posthumous status of Caesar was thus assured. Valerius Maximus, writing under Tiberius, told the story of divus Julius appearing to Cassius, one of his murderers, at the battle of Philippi, to tell the ‘tyrannicide’ that he had not actually killed Caesar because his ‘divinity’ could never be extinguished; and elsewhere Valerius prayed by Caesar’s altars and temples that his divinity would favour and protect the human race.136
After his death Augustus was promoted to the divine status long held by Caesar – a transition that was, inevitably, as predictable and smoothly managed as it was (in the usual paradox of apotheosis) outrageously unbelievable. The expectation was expressed in his lifetime that he would ascend to his rightful place in heaven, and immediately after his death Augustus was duly made a divus. His funeral, cremation and burial in the Mausoleum were grand versions of the traditional funeral of the Roman nobility; but afterwards a senior senator (who was said to have been handsomely rewarded for his pains, to the tune of a million sesterces, by Augustus’ widow Livia) declared on oath to the senate that he had actually seen Augustus ascending to heaven. As a result, in the words of the official state calendar, ‘on that day heavenly honours were decreed by the senate to the divine Augustus’. The main ‘heavenly honours’ were a temple built between the Capitol and the Palatine, a flamen, who was to be a member of Augustus’ own family, and a priestly college of sodales Augustales, comprising leading members of the senatorial order. Augustus, like his ancestor Romulus, went to join the gods.137
In this area too the practices of the Augustan age established the basic framework which prevailed for the rest of the imperial period. Emperors and members of their families were given divine honours by vote of the senate only after their death and then only in recognition of the fact (so the official version went) that they had, by their merits, actually become gods. The Augustan system marks a change from the tone of the period of the civil wars after the death of Caesar when Octavian was commonly thought to have held a dinner party of the Twelve Gods, himself appearing as Apollo – dangerously straddling the border between fancy-dress and blasphemy. In addition, official coins from the mint of Rome of the early 20s B.C. showed Octavian as Apollo, Jupiter and Neptune, and the original plan for the great new temple of the Pantheon (‘All the gods’) was that it should be named after Augustus and have his statue inside it.138
After 27 B.C., Augustus no longer employed such imagery; and accounts of the reigns of his successors suggest that those norms remained in place. In most cases it is impossible now to reconstruct exactly how any individual emperor negotiated the delicate boundary between (god-like) humanity and outright divinity; but Roman historians regularly use accusations (right, wrong – or, no doubt, often exaggerated) that an emperor was claiming the status of a god as a symbol of his utter transgression of all the rules of proper behaviour. So it was recounted that Gaius Caligula, after a popular start to his reign, began to make assertions of his own personal divinity: he is said to have sat between the statues of Castor and Pollux in the temple in the Forum, showing himself to be worshipped by those who entered; he wore the clothing or attributes of a wide range of deities, and established a temple to his own godhead.139 For his biographer all this demonstrated that Gaius was no longer emperor or even king, but monster; and stories of Gaius’ reign (however exaggerated) survived as a warning to subsequent emperors not to destroy the Augustan norms. Thus Claudius, Gaius’ successor, seems to have made a show of reverting to the maintenance of ancestral Roman customs. According to his biographer, ‘he corrected various abuses, revived some old customs or even established some new ones’. For example, he always offered a supplication when a bird of ill omen was seen on the Capitol, and in making treaties he recited the ancient formula of the fetiales.140 But even he became the subject of a witty (and cruel) satire, mocking the ludicrous process of his apotheosis.141
This basic pattern of paraded transgression and reassertion of the Augustan norm seems to have repeated itself from the first century A.D. into the third century. After the excesses of Nero, who sought to rival various gods, came the down-to-earth Vespasian, who on his deathbed (so it was said) made a joke about his own apotheosis.142 His younger son, Domitian, on the other hand, (though in many respects he was a strong traditionalist) is said to have demanded to be addressed as dominus et deus noster, ‘our master and god’.143 And a century later Commodus identified himself so closely with Hercules that he had Hercules’ lion-skin and club carried before him in the street and converted the great Colossus (an enormous statue, originally erected by Nero, and later giving its name to the nearby ‘Colosseum’) into a statue of himself as Hercules. All this is reported with horror by the eyewitness senatorial historian Cassius Dio.144 Throughout the imperial period, the religious norms established under the first emperor continued to provide a framework within which religious action or transgression might be defined and judged – as we shall see further, both inside and outside the city of Rome, in the next chapter.
1 Above, pp. 87–91. Studies of place, boundaries and identity: J. Z. Smith (1978), (1987); Mol (1976), (1985).
2 The politics of the reign of Augustus: Wells (1992) 49–78; Crook (1996).
3 V.52.2; cf. above, pp. 53–4 (the rescue of the Vestals’ sacra from the Gallic sack).
4 Liebeschuetz (1967). Livy’s perspective in general: Levene (1993); above, pp. 8–9; 76–7. Map 5 for Veii.
5 Augustan religion: Nock (1934); Liebeschuetz (1979) 55–100; Kienast (1982) 185–214.
6 Warde Fowler (1911) 428–51; Latte (1960a) 294–311; but see Scheid (1990b) 677–732.
8 Gabba (1991). In contrast with Polybius, who had argued for the difference between Romans and Greeks, Dionysius has a new question: who are the Greeks or Romans? Roman institutions as originally Greek: for example, Roman Antiquities VII.72.1–13 = 5.7a (above, p. 40).
9 It is not certain whether Ovid never wrote about the remaining six months of the year, or whether the books have not survived; for a review of the problem, Newlands (1995) 3–6. The Fasti and Roman religion: Schilling (1969); Miller (1991); Phillips (1992); Scheid (1992a), with Feeney (1991) 188–249 on his Metamorphoses. The Fasti as a ‘subversive’ poem: for example, Hinds (1992); but see Feeney (1992).
10 Suetonius: Wallace–Hadrill (1983). Cassius Dio: Rich (1990) 1–20.
11 For the social and physical context of the changes in Rome, below, pp. 245–312; Zanker (1988).
12 Wissowa (1912) 9; Latte (1926); Rose (1950) 281: ‘It is as certain as any negative historical proposition can ever be that Rome had no myths, at least none of a kind which could possibly associate themselves with cult.’ Horsfall in Bremmer and Horsfall (1987) 1–11 and Graf (1993) discuss generally the ‘absence’ of Roman myths. See above, pp. 10–11.
13 Briefly Dumézil (1970) 47–59 (with pp. 14–16 above); also Koch (1937) (with review by Syme (1939)).
14 Wiseman (1989).
15 Grant (1973) is the best introduction. For more radical views, see Beard (1993) and Feeney (1998) ch. 2. Habinek (1992) argues the crippling of Roman studies by the romanticizing of things Greek; as here by the stress on the primacy of Greek myth.
16 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities II.18–20 = 8.7a. He may here be following Varro. Cf. Gabba (1991) 118–38; Borgeaud (1993).
17 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities I.79.
18 Aeneid VIII.18–369.
19 Above, p. 1; Salian shields carved on a gem stone: 5.4b.
20 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities I.33.3.
21 Ibid. I.40. Cf. Wissowa (1912) 273–5, Steinby (1993–) III.15–17. Winter (1910) and Bayet (1926) 127–54 elucidate the different versions of the story; Coarelli (1988) 61–77 notes the Greek design of the altar (Map 1 no. 21). Virgil too incorporated this story into his ‘history’: Aeneid VIII.267–79, as did Ovid (Fantham (1992)).
22 Origin of the Roman Race 6.7, from Cassius Hemina; cf. Plutarch, Roman Questions 60.
23 Macrobius, Saturnalia I.12.28. Propertius IV.9 follows Varro’s account, not without a sense of humour.
24 This perspective persisted through the imperial period. An inscription of the early third century, probably put up near the altar, commemorates the offering of the solemn sacrifice which Hercules had established at the time of Evander: ILS 3402.
25 Deity: Ovid, Fasti IV.820; Plutarch, Romulus 12. Testimonia on the Parilia: Degrassi (1963) 443–5; 5.1a. The name of the festival Parilia/Palilia, was supposed to be derived from the name of the deity Pales. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities I.88.3 is uncertain whether it predated the foundation of the city.
26 Ovid, Fasti IV.725–8 = 5. la.
27 Fasti IV.731–4 = 5.1a.
28 Rural festival: Fasti 735–82 = part 5.1a. Public and private: Varro, quoted by scholiast on Persius I.72.
29 Cf. above, pp. 50; 53; Beard (1987).
30 Fasti IV.833–48. There was another version of the killing of Remus: Livy I.7.2; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities I.87.2. The myth: Bremmer in Bremmer and Horsfall (1987) ch. 3; Wiseman (1995); Hinds (1992) 113–49 argues for ambivalence in Ovid’s presentation.
31 Wissowa (1912) 199–201; Scullard (1981) 103–5. This view fails to exploit the differences between the urban and the rural festivals. Dumézil (1969) 283–7 and (1970) 380–5 uses the festival to illuminate a cognate Indian deity.
32 Weinstock (1971) 184–6. Propertius IV.1.19–20 notes that the ritual had become more elaborate.
33 Athenaeus VIII.361 ef = 5.1c; Beaujeu (1955) 128–33; below, pp. 257–8.
34 The execution of those who damaged city walls was justified in Roman law by the story of Remus: Justinian’s Digest I.8.11 (Pomponius). Introduction: Andreussi (1988); Liou-Gille (1993); Plutarch, Romulus 11.1–4 = 4.8a; Lugli (1952–69) I.116–31. Roman preoccupation with space: Rykwert (1976); Meslin (1978) ch. 2; Grandazzi (1993). Cosmological models for towns (in Nepal and India): Pieper (1977); Barré et al. (1981); Gutschow (1982). Until the time of Claudius the Aventine hill was outside the pomerium.
35 Extent of pomerium: Maps 1–3; Labrousse (1937); Poe (1984); Boatwright (1987) 64–71. Illustration of marker: 4.8c. The area enclosed by the pomerium was almost exactly that covered by the early third century A.D. official map of Rome, though the pomerium itself was not marked.
36 Extensions: Tacitus, Annals XII.23–4 = 4.8b; Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights XIII.14.3; 4.8c. The Augustan History claims that Augustus, Nero, Trajan and Aurelian extended the pomerium, but see Syme (1978b); Boatwright (1986). ILS 244.14–16 (trans. Braund (1985) 110–11), citing Claudius as precedent.
37 Pliny, Natural History X.35; owl as an omen: X.34 = 7.3b(ii). Cf. Tacitus, Annals XIII.24, Histories I.87.1, IV.53, with Wissowa (1912) 391. Such lustrations maybe the origin of the alleged festival of the Amburbium: Wissowa (1912) 142 and n. 14; Scullard (1981) 82–3.
38 Lucan I.584–604, quotation from 592–6. Propertius IV.4.73 describes a threat to the boundary (by Tarpeia) at the Parilia, ‘the day the city first got its walls’.
39 Cassius Dio LI.19.6. Cf. Suetonius, Tiberius 11.3.
40 Taylor (1966) 5–6; Magdelain (1968) 57–67; Magdelain (1977); Catalano (1978) 422–5, 479–91; Rüpke (1990) 29–57.
41 Auguries: CIL VI 36841 (trans. in part, Braund (1985) no.774). Pomerium: Wissowa (1912) 534 n. 2; Labrousse (1937) 170 n. 1. For what might be an augur dealing with an Augustan comitium, Torelli (1975) 111–16, 131–2.
42 Josephus, Jewish War VII.123. For the Younger Drusus, Tacitus, Annals III.11.1, 19.4; for Trajan, the relief from Arch of Beneventum, Hassel (1966) 19–20 and pls. 15, 17.
43 Vespasian was, of course, hardly following the traditional rules to the letter; he had already entered the city when returning from campaign – he went out only to spend the night before his triumph outside the pomerium.
44 Most scholars believe that the principle existed throughout the republican period, but it was at least enhanced under Augustus: Nock (1952) 213; Ziolkowski (1992) 265–96. Egyptian rites: below, p. 230.
45 Alföldi (1935) 5–8, 47–9.
46 Below, pp. 199–20. There was already within the pomerium a temple to Quirinus, who was associated with Mars, and Varro ‘recorded’ a primitive cult of Mars on the Capitol. Cf.Scholz (1970) 18–33.
47 J.-C. Richard (1966).
48 I.1.6.
49 Above, pp. 112–13, 153.
50 Schulz (1946) 40–1, 80–1, 89–90, 138.
51 Horace, Odes III.6, with Jal (1962). Temples had been neglected by the rich in favour of their private luxury: Odes II.15.17–20; Satires II.2.103–4. Against the decline thesis see above, pp. 11–12; 117–19 and ch. 3 passim.
52 Compare Virgil, Georgics I.501–2. Horace parallels the fate of Troy with that of Rome: Odes III.3.
53 Virgil, Georgics 1.498–501. Horace, Odes I.2 with Bickerman (1961) and Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) 34–6.
54 Suetonius, Augustus 7.2 and Cassius Dio LIII.16.7–8, with Scott (1925).
55 Obsequens 69; Cassius Dio XLVI.46.1–3 gives six plus twelve. Suetonius, Augustus 95 and Appian, Civil Wars III.94 give twelve only and treat them as a different type of auspicy.
56 Suetonius, Augustus 7.2, drawing on the Augustan writer Verrius Flaccus, also used by Festus, p. 2 L; Ovid, Fasti 1.608–16. Cf. Gagé (1930); Erkell (1952) 9–39; Dumézil (1957).
57 Map 1 no. 2; Hommel (1954) 9–22; Koeppel (1984) 51–3; Wiseman (1995) 144–50. In the original temple the senate had erected in 45 B.C. a statue of Caesar: Cicero, Letters to Atticus XII.45.3, XIII.28.3. On the Forum of Augustus, below, pp. 199–201.
58 Aeneid I.292–3 (cf. Georgics II.533). This fraternal harmony was a way of evoking the end of civil war that had marked Rome from the beginning. Weinstock (1971) 261 on this repeated ‘concord’ theme.
59 Horace, Epodes 7; Ovid, Fasti IV.813–14. Cf. on Romulus, Wagenvoort (1956b); Koch (1960) 142–75; Weinstock (1971) 175–99; Grant (1973) 101–47. Harries (1989) 170–1 and Hinds (1992) 142–8 detect equivocation in Ovid’s account. Elsewhere, Ovid is very critical of Romulus.
60 Above, p. 139. Boyancé (1950); Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities IV.14.4; Degrassi (1965) 269–71.
61 Wissowa (1912) 167–73; Alföldi (1973) 18–36; Liebeschuetz (1979) 69–71; Kienast (1982) 164–6; Fraschetti (1990) 204–73.
62 Ovid, Fasti V.129, 147–8; Suetonius, Augustus 31.4; Niebling (1956) 324–5. Three viciseem to have been reorganized not in 7 B.C., but in 12, 9 and 6 B.C.
63 Festus p. 108 L; Arnobius, Against the Gentiles III.41 (= Varro fr. 209 (Cardauns)); statuettes, 2.2a.
64 The only precedent for the Lares Augusti is a solitary dedication from Gallia Cisalpina (ILLRP 200, 59 B.C.), but the popular veneration of the Gracchi and Marius Gratidianus seems to have taken place at the neighbourhood shrines (above, p. 144). For the relation between these cults and Augustus’ cult of Vesta see below, pp. 189–91. Whatever the exact reasoning the political conclusion seems inevitable.
65 E. Nash (1968) I.290–1; Steinby (1993–) I.314–15. Full publication: Colini (1961–2); Tamassia (1961–2). Further details: Dondin-Payre (1987). Cf. Holland (1937); Hanlein-Schäfer (1996) 74–81. Another altar with inscription: ILS 9520 = 8.6a.
66 Degrassi (1963) 96; Ovid, Fasti V. 145–6; Palmer (1990) 17.
67 Zanker (1969); (1970–71); Panciera (1987) 73–8; Zanker (1988) 129–135. For example, one altar (the ‘Belvedere Altar’) seems to have combined the figure of ‘Victory’ and the honorific ‘Shield of Virtue’ (both in the senate house and both characteristic parts of ‘official’ Augustan iconography) to create the figure of Victory bringing a purely military shield.
68 Panciera (1970) 138–51; (1980); (1987) 61–73. AE (1975) 14: an attempt to avoid the duties of vici magister, which involved games with venatio (hunting displays). Fourth century catalogues: below, p. 382.
69 RICI2. 69, nos. 367–8. Cf. RICI2. 73, no. 410, 13 B.C. Gagé (1931); also Bayet (1955). Zanker (1988) 126–8 and R. L. Gordon (1990b) stress the emperor as the archetypal sacrificer.
70 Weinstock (1971) 28–34; Lewis (1955) 23, 94–101. The rules of republican priestly office-holding: above, pp. 103–5.
71 RICI2. 125, nos. 76–7 (= 8.5a(ii)), 129, no. 107 (A.D. 50–54). For the history of this type see B. M. Coins III.xl–xliii.
72 Gagé (1930).
73 Revival: Suetonius, Augustus 31.4; Cassius Dio LI.20.4. Repeated: CIL VI 36841 (trans., in part, Braund (1985) no. 774); Tacitus, Annals XII.23.1. Performed in 160s B.C.: above, pp. 110–11. The semantic link with ‘Augustus’: above, p. 182.
74 Augustus, Achievements 10.2 = 8.5b; Degrassi (1963) 420; Ovid, Fasti III.415–28.
75 Possible Caesarian rebuilding in the vicinity of the temple of Vesta: R. T. Scott (1993) 169–74 (Map: 4.7). Augustus: Cassius Dio LIV.27.3; LV.12.4–5. In 36 B.C. Octavian had been voted a house at public expense: Cassius Dio XLIX.15.5. Cf. Weinstock (1971)276–81.
76 Map 1 no. 14. Degrassi (1963) 452. The restoration of the word ‘shrine’ on the inscription is controversial, but see Guarducci (1971). There was already a ramp linking the old temple of Vesta to the Palatine: Steinby (1993). See also Fig. 4.4.
77 Aeneas: Virgil, Aeneid II.296, 567; Ovid, Fasti 1.527–8, III.29, VI.227; Metamorphoses XV.730–1; Propertius IV.4.69; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities II.65.2. Romulus: Plutarch, Romulus 22; Dionysius II.64.5–69 argues at length for the alternative that Numa established the cult in Rome.
78 Fasti III.423–6. Cf. Fraschetti (1990) 331–60; Feeney (1991) 205–24.
79 Ovid, Fasti IV.949–54. Cf. Wiseman (1987).
80 Ovid, Fasti III.699, V.573; Metamorphoses XV.778, retrospectively applied to Julius Caesar. In the third and fourth centuries the pontifices were also known as pontifices Vestae: RE VIII.A.2, 1760.
81 Augustus 31. Modern scholars sometimes say that in 12 B.C. Augustus became ‘head’ of Roman religion, a pagan equivalent of Archbishop of Canterbury, Chief Rabbi or Pope; and so they are inclined to date his religious reforms to the period after 12 B.C Wissowa (1912) 74; Wilhelm (1915); Liebeschuetz (1979) 70.
82 The political implications of the charge are clear in the debate in A.D. 22 about the office of flamen Dialis: below, p. 193.
83 Beard (1990); above, pp. 20–1; 54–6.
84 Cassius Dio XLIV.5.3.
85 Cassius Dio LIII.17.8. From the mid second century onwards emperors sometimes shared their political powers with prospective heirs.
86 Below, p. 194 (revival of Arval Brothers).
87 Pliny, Letters IV.8.
88 Cassius Dio LI.20.3. Augustus, Achievements 25.3 notes that of the 700 senators who supported his rise to power about 170 were, or became, priests. Scheid (1978), (1990b) 201–14; Millar (1977) 357 n. 15 on first cumulation of major priesthoods. The four colleges were paraded on the Ara Pacis: 4.3b; above, Fig. 1.3 (flamines); Zanker (1988) 120–3.
89 Pliny, Letters X.13.
90 This ‘gap’ in the flaminate: above, pp. 130–1.
91 Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights XL15.14 (= 8.1b). Tacitus, Annals IV.16.3. Cf. Rohde (1936) 136–7.
92 Tacitus, Annals III.71.3; Gaius, Institutes I.136, fragmentary. Cf. Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights X.15.14 and 17 (= 8.1b) for other changes.
93 Tacitus, Annals III.58–59.1, 71 (A.D. 22); IV.16 (A.D. 24). Cf. Domitian’s permission for a flamen Dialis to divorce his wife: Plutarch, Roman Questions 50. Earlier arguments about the selection of the flamen Dialis: Livy XXVII.8.4–10 = 8.2d; above, pp. 106–8.
94 Suetonius, Augustus 31.3, 44.3. Tacitus, Annals IV.16.4; Cassius Dio LIX.3, 4, LX.22.2. In fact no imperial daughters were ever appointed as Vestal Virgins.
95 Tacitus, Annals II.86. Cf. IV.16.4: a grant of two million sesterces to a new Vestal, presumably in addition to the traditional salary. Nock (1930), though he cannot prove an increase in prestige in the third century; 8.4b (inscriptions honouring Vestals).
96 Appian, Civil Wars I.106; II.106.
97 Ara Pacis: Ryberg (1955) 41, 43, 51–2, 71–4 (cf. 4.3a n. 1); Cassius Dio LI.19.2; Augustus, Achievements 11–12. Livia: Cassius Dio LX.5.2. Part of the inner frieze is illustrated: 6.1a.
98 Map 4 no. 70; Varro, On the Latin Language V. 85 (= 8.1a). Scheid (1990b) 679–732. Cf. Saulnier (1980) and Wiedemann (1986) for reorganization of the fetiales; above, p. 133.
99 Pliny, Natural History XVIII.6; Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights VII.7.8, quoting Masurius Sabinus (floruit Tiberius-Nero) who drew on earlier historians.
100 A new edition of the inscriptions is forthcoming (ed. Scheid); extracts, 4.5, 6.2; Lewis and Reinhold (1990) II.516–19. For the fluidity of the record, Beard (1985), with comments of Scheid (1990b) 66–72, 431, 617, 732–40. The record inscribed on stone was presumably based on archival documents kept on paper by the priests.
101 Scheid (1975); Syme (1980); Scheid (1990a).
102 This change might be connected with a development in the function of the sodales Augustales and other imperial priesthoods in Rome itself, who may have taken over sacrifices to the divi previously carried out by the Arvals.
103 Suetonius, Augustus 31.4.
104 Achievements 19–21. Cf. Eck (1984) 136–42. Wissowa (1912) 596–7 lists the new temples, though that to Neptune was probably a restoration; in general: Gros (1976); Zanker (1988) 65–71, 102–18, 135–56; Purcell (1996).
105 All temples ‘would have fallen into complete ruins, without the far-seeing care of our sacred leader, under whom the shrines feel not the touch of age; and not content with doing favours to humankind he does them to the gods. O holy one, who builds and rebuilds the temples, I pray the powers above may take such care of you as you of them’: Ovid, Fasti II.59–64. Cf. I.13–14, Livy IV.20.7, Suetonius, Augustus 29–30; above, pp. 121–5. Temple building by Livia: Purcell (1986) 88–9; below, p. 297. Temple building by later emperors: below, pp. 253–9.
106 Map 1 no. 13. The arrival of the goddess: above, pp. 96–8. Date of repair: Syme (1978a) 30. See generally Lambrechts (1951); Boyancé (1954); Bömer (1964); Wiseman (1984).
107 Ovid, Fasti IV.367–72 with Brelich (1965).
108 Fasti IV.251–4, 272. Virgil, Aeneid II.693–7, IX.77–9, X.252–5.
109 Map 1 no. 14; Steinby (1993–) I.54–7. The archaeological remains have not yet been properly published. Lightning: Suetonius, Augustus 29.3; Cassius Dio XLIX.15.5. Grandeur: Propertius II.31; Pliny, Natural History XXXVI.24, 25, 32. Very little of this sculpture now survives; but there are several ancient descriptions of it, as well as representations (on later sculpture panels and on coins) of some of the individual pieces. For representation on the so-called ‘Sorrento base’: above, Fig. 4.4.
110 Gagé (1931) 99–101; (1955) 542–55.
111 However, the excavator’s claim that a private ramp linked Augustus’ house to the terrace of the temple is implausible: the difference in levels is too great. Ovid: above, p. 191.
112 Liebeschuetz (1979) 82–5; Zanker (1983); Kellum (1985); Zanker (1988) 65–9, 85–9, 240–5; Lefèvre (1989). The alleged restoration of the earlier temple by Sosius in 34–32 B.C.(Map 1 no. 33) in fact took place under Augustus: Gros (1976) 211–29; Steinby (1993–) 1.49–54.
113 Gagé (1936a); Sarikakis (1965).
114 Map 1 no. 9. Described in Ovid, Fasti V.545–98; Pliny, Natural History XXXVI.102. Location within pomerium: above, p. 180.
115 Suetonius, Augustus 29 (= 4.2c); Cassius Dio LV.10.2–3. Cf. Bonnefond (1987).
116 Plan and reconstruction: 4.2; Zanker (n.d); Koeppel (1983) 98–101; J. C. Anderson (1984) 65–100; Kaiser Augustus (1988) 149–200; Zanker (1988) 183–215, 256–7; Alföldy (1991) 289, 293–7; Fishwick (1992b) 335–6; Steinby (1993–) II.289–95. Romulus: Degrassi (1939). A relief from Carthage has been used to argue that there were three cult statues in the temple (Mars, Venus and divus Julius); for discussion of this possibility, see below, p. 333 fig 7.2 (caption).
117 Suetonius, Augustus 91.2.
118 Above, pp. 71–2; 111. Pighi (1965) reprints the sources; 5.7b is the Augustan inscription. There are two new fragments of the inscription in Moretti (1982–84). La Rocca (1984) 3–55 speculatively discusses the Terentum (Map 1 no. 37); Manzano (1984) gives the numismatic evidence.
119 Zosimus II.1–3 (and Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings II.4.5). Versnel (1982) 217–28 discusses the relation of the story to the Roman family of the Valerii.
120 This formula, a restoration in the inscription, appears in Cato, On Agriculture 134, 139, 141. It is used by the matrons: Augustan acta line 130 (restored) = 5.7b; Severan acta IV.12 = Pighi (1965) 157.
121 Varro in Censorinus, Birthday 17.8 (= Pighi (1965) 37–8).
122 Erkell (1969). Theatres: Map 1 nos. 34–35.
123 Ancient books: Moretti (1982–4). Ateius Capito: Zosimus II.4.2.
124 Phlegon, On the Long-lived 5.2 = FGH 257 F 37 = Pighi (1965) 56–7 (trans. Braund (1985) 296–7); Zosimus II.6 also quotes the oracle. Diels (1890) 13–15; Gagé (1933a) 177–83; Momigliano (1938) 625, (1941) 165.
126 For earlier plans to celebrate games in 23 B.C., Virgil, Aeneid VI.65–70, 791–4, with Merkelbach (1961) 91–9. One explanation of the discrepancy is that it was the result of disagreement over the precise year of the foundation of Rome.
127 Gagé (1933b), (1936b). Non-performance in A.D. 314, below, p. 372.
128 For such ceremonies elsewhere, Cannadine and Price (1987).
129 Cassius Dio LI.19.7 with Weinstock (1971) 217–19; Augustus, Achievements 9.1; Palmer (1990) 14–17. Salii: Augustus, Achievements 10.1; Cassius Dio LI.20.1; Quintilian, Education of an Orator I.6.40–l = 5.4c. The same honour posthumously for members of the imperial family: Crawford (1996) I.37 and AE (1984) 508 IIc (trans. Sherk (1988) 63–72); Tacitus, Annals II.83, TV.9.
130 Cassius Dio LI.19.7; Petronius, Satyricon 60; Ovid, Fasti II.637–8; cf. Horace, Odes IV.5.31–2; Ovid, Letters from Pontus IV.9.105–110; Tacitus, Annals I.73.2. Cf. Santero (1983).
131 Map 1 no. 14. Degrassi (1963) 401, restored with dating of Alföldi (1973) 42–4. Location: Wiseman (1991) 55, 57, 109. For examples from outside Rome see below pp. 354–5. See Fishwick (1969) for the distinction between genius and numen.
132 I.709–22; V. 129–46.
133 Prophecy: 1.529–36. Battles: IV.377–84, 627–8. Janus: 1.281–8. Temples: 11.55–66. June: VI. 1–100; Macrobius, Saturnalia I.12.31.
134 Price (1987); Arce (1988); Fraschetti (1990) 42–120; above, pp. 140–9 on Caesar; 9.3; 4.7 for Roman Forum. For Romulus as precedent cf. above pp. 4–5; 141–2; 182–4 and 2.8a.
135 Weinstock (1971) 385–401.
136 Memorable Deeds and Sayings I.8.8; 6.13.
137 Witness: Suetonius, Augustus 100.4; Cassius Dio LVI.46.2. Calendar: Degrassi (1963) 510. Temple: Fishwick (1992a); Steinby (1993–) I.145–6. Sodales: Price (1987) 78–9. Below, pp. 348–62, on the provinces.
138 Suetonius, Augustus 70. Coins: Burnett (1983) discussing Sutherland and Carson, RIC I2 nos. 270–272; cf. Zanker (1988) 40–2. Pantheon: Cassius Dio LIII.27.3 with Coarelli (1983b) and Fishwick (1992b); below, p. 257.
139 4.7 (map of Forum); Suetonius, Caligula 22, 52. Cf. Philo, Embassy 78–113, Cassius Dio LIX.26–8.
140 Suetonius, Claudius 22, 25.5. Cf. Tacitus, Annals XI.15 on haruspices; below, p. 228.
141 Seneca, Apocolocyntosis (9 = 9.2c).
142 Nero did not seek lifetime deification in Rome: Griffin (1984) 215–19; though as we shall see several times in the course of this book, the boundary between being like a god and outright divinity is very hard to draw. Vespasian: Suetonius, Vespasian 23.4.
143 Suetonius, Domitian 13.2; Pliny, Panegyric 2.3, 52.2.
144 Statue: 2.8c; Cassius Dio LXXIII.15–22. Cf. Beaujeu (1955) 400–9. Elagabalus, below, pp. 255–6.
