CHAPTER 7

Theologies of Arrival in the Res Gestae

As discussed in the previous chapter, the form and placement of the Res Gestae strongly hint at Augustus' claims to be both a new founder of the city and a god. This chapter examines the content of that inscription more closely to show how Augustus used Rome's rich repertoire of images and ideas related to arrival to support these claims. The emphasis on Augustus' role as city refounder is combined with a programmatic use of arrival scenes to articulate the process of Rome's restoration and the evolution of his position therein. References to arrivals occur at both the opening and closing of the inscription. The inscription begins with Octavian's appearance at Rome with troops he had raised on his own initiative (RG 1) and ends with mention of his triumphal quadriga in the Forum of Augustus (RG 35). The framing of the inscription by these images of arrival suggests that the narrative structure of the whole draws on the form of a ceremonial procession of civic entry like the triumph or a Hellenistic royal parousia, which begins with an initial arrival and concludes at a destination of a significant ritual-civic space in the city.

As an arrival text, the RG implicates its reader into a cultural process that unfolds in a series of arrivals culminating in the full restoration of the Republic, the birth of a new age, and the apex of Augustus' personal career.¹ Key stages in that process are Augustus' celebrated returns to Rome and the altars voted in connection with them. The inscription reshapes the memory of these returns and thus the significance of the altars, thereby becoming a new key for reading the Augustan landscape of Rome through the lens of the inscription's extended adventus-triumphus. Thus the RG is not just a theology; it is a theology constructed around the image of arrival and written onto the landscape of the city through its textual procession. Indeed, the RG simultaneously depicts the apotheosis-epiphany of the god Augustus chronologically through the progression of his career and spatially into the heart of the city in the Forum of Augustus. In this way, the inscription is more fully parallel with Caesar's silver tablets than is first apparent. In fact, in the way the RG constructs the refounding of the city and the emergence of a new god as interrelated phenomena, it is more conceptually ambitious than Caesar's silver tablets and akin to the golden stele of Zeus Triphylius.

From early on, Augustus seems to have been well aware of the immense potential of arrival ceremonies. His political career opened with his first adventus at Rome after the assassination of Caesar.² At that time, although he was a young man of eighteen years on his way to the city to take up his inheritance, he crafted his journey to Rome so as to follow the path laid down by past successful commanders and governors who had returned to Rome from the East.³ Although he started his journey at Lupiae for security reasons, he staged his first formal arrival at Brundisium and then made his way to Rome. That arrival at Rome was the first of many. On his road to political supremacy, Augustus would engage in almost every kind of arrival practice in the late-republican repertoire. He celebrated ovations and triumphs and even successfully invaded the city with an army, as had Sulla and Caesar before him.⁴

Augustus' career was bound to be highly controversial and in need of some deft recasting in order to insure the approbation of future Romans. Fortunately for him, his final victory over Antony in the civil war and his long reign as the first princeps afforded him the opportunity to shape his arrival practices and their representations in such a way that both ritual and text might satisfy expectations concerning a restored Republic, even as it influenced those expectations. Augustus' long career also afforded him the opportunity to reshape the memory of his own arrivals so as to persuade others of the legitimacy, impact, and significance of his rule. Through these processes, Augustus played an instrumental role in laying the groundwork for an imperial ceremonial in which the arrival of Rome's leading figure, the emperor, evolved to assume greater significance and more layers of meaning.⁵

Octavian's adventus and ovatio of 36 laid important foundations for such future developments. Over time, the emperor's adventus would come to subsume elements of the triumph, along with its associations with Victoria, Fortuna, and the commander's felicitas. It also incorporated the notion of the divinely appointed savior of Rome that had developed over the course of the first century BCE.⁶ As discussed in chapter 1, Sulla's autobiography was an important milestone in the evolution of the image of the savior traveling a path that had been cleared by the gods for the purpose of birthing a new age for Rome both at home and as imperial hegemon. Cicero later depicted his patron Pompey in similar terms and then adapted such an image to his own needs by turning himself into a civilian-statesman savior of the city in his conflict with Catiline. Augustus consciously drew on this tradition as he conceptualized his own role and mode of self-representation. This self-fashioning is evident in the composition of his own autobiography, which drew on the model of Sulla's memoir.⁷ The influence of Cicero's self-depiction as the civilian-statesman (as opposed to military commander) who returned from exile to save the city also impacted Augustus' formulation of his own image as an arriving savior. Perhaps Cicero's example as a statesman returning from exile impressed on Augustus the wisdom of looking outside of the realm of Rome's martial culture to find an appropriate mythological model for his arrival, in King Numa (a model that will be explored further in chapter 8).

The composition of his Res Gestae provided Augustus one final opportunity to shape posterity's view of his earlier career and its arrival ceremonies up to 2 BCE. According to this vision, Rome, Italy, and the Roman Empire had found in its princeps a savior who set the known world, as governed from the caput rerum of Rome, on a safe, stable, and enduring course.⁸ The RG also presents Augustus' final vision of his advent into Roman history, which began with wresting Rome from a factio, as Caesar had before him, and which reached its apex in his acceptance of the honorific title pater patriae, which was inscribed below his triumphal quadriga in the Forum of Augustus.⁹

The Arrivals of the Princeps

Few treat the Res Gestae as a literary text.¹⁰ Its terse language has not inspired a wealth of literary analysis. Yet the text was deliberately constructed to guide its reader through a historical and spatial tour of Augustus' career in a multi-layered narrative filled with references to Rome's history and landscape. Whether it is to be considered literature or not, the RG demands in-depth analysis of the kind usually reserved for literary texts. Operating on multiple levels simultaneously, the text presents the reader a princeps who emerges as the culmination of history at the time of the dedication of the Forum of Augustus.¹¹ It will be helpful to employ the device of an imaginary traveler to envision the inscription's blend of historical and physical journeys.

A traveler arriving in Rome on the north side on the Via Flaminia would have been easily induced to read the Res Gestae inscription erected before the Mausoleum of Augustus.¹² Those who knew of the life of Augustus would have quickly recognized that the document begins with his arrival at Rome with two legions in the autumn of 44, when he declared his intention to achieve his father's honors.¹³ They would have also noticed that the text refers to a series of monuments leading into the heart of the city of Rome at the Janus Quirinus and the Forum of Augustus. This progression of monuments draws the reader into an imaginary procession into the city, where he or she can relive with the princeps the celebration of cultic honors that, in this account, greet Augustus upon his arrivals, ending in the three closings of the Gates of Janus.

Having embarked on this imaginary procession, the traveler could then continue down the Via Flaminia to one of the altars mentioned in the RG, the Ara Pacis Augustae.¹⁴ There the traveler would again be drawn into a procession, this time depicted on the northern and southern faces of the outer walls surrounding the altar.¹⁵ If the traveler were to walk down to the Horologium, he or she could see two stone reliefs on the western face of the Ara Pacis, one on either side of the entrance. The northernmost of the two, facing away from the city, was a depiction of Romulus and Remus suckling at the she-wolf. The southernmost panel depicted Numa sacrificing.¹⁶ The stone reliefs of the Lupercal and Numa sacrificing on the western side of the Ara Pacis Augustae may have inspired the thematic organization of the first thirteen chapters of the RG, thus relating the first two stages of the career of the princeps to Rome's founder, Romulus, and second founder, Numa.¹⁷

As will be discussed shortly, the subject matter of these chapters seems to have been manipulated to form a succession of themes that matches predominant characteristics of the reigns of these two kings as elegantly contrasted by Livy:¹⁸ Ita duo deinceps reges, alius alia via, ille bello, hic pace, civitatem auxerunt. Romulus septem et triginta regnavit annos, Numa tres et quadraginta. Cum ualida tum temperata et belli et pacis artibus erat civitas (“And thus two kings in succession, each in his respective way, the former in war, the latter in peace, increased the state. Romulus reigned thirty-seven years, while Numa reigned forty-three”).¹⁹ In using the word auxerunt, Livy has alluded to Augustus. Similar to Livy's description of the reigns of these two kings, the Res Gestae opens with chapters focused on war, victory, and its rewards (chapters 1–4) and then moves on to more peaceful and religious concerns (chapters 9–13). Ramage noticed that the development of themes in the RG corresponded well with the order of virtues in the clupeus virtutis.²⁰ Caesarian-Romulean virtues of clementia and virtus shift to Augustan-Numan virtues of iustitia and pietas. The correspondence is not perfect. Chapter 2, after all, celebrates the pietas of Augustus in avenging the murder of Caesar. Still, clementia and virtus arguably predominate in the opening chapters, just as iustitia and pietas come to the fore in the later chapters of the opening sequence. Torelli noticed a similar progression in Augustus' mention of the Ara Fortunae Reducis and Ara Pacis.²¹ First, one reads of the Ara Fortunae Reducis, which more clearly references themes of the commander's fortune, victory, and triumphs. Then comes mention of the Ara Pacis, which appropriately ties together the reditus in 13 and the closure of the Gates of War.

Romulus and Caesar at the Opening of the Res Gestae

The northernmost of the two western panels on the Ara Pacis is sometimes called the Lupercal and recalls Rome's early beginnings in the arrival of the babies Romulus and Remus, carried on the currents of the Tiber, to the Palatine Hill, where a grown Romulus, having avenged his grandfather Numitor, would found the city.²² The placement of this panel further from the city center resonates well with the fact that Rome's founding story is one of migration, which leads to revenge and liberation. Likewise, the Res Gestae opens with Augustus' account of his arrival on the scene to liberate the Republic: annos undeviginti natus exercitum privato consilio et privata impensa comparavi, per quem rem publicam a dominatione factionis oppressam in libertatem vindicavi (“At the age of nineteen, I raised an army on my own volition and at my own expense, through which I freed the Republic from the oppression of a faction”). Here Augustus alludes to Caesar's own claim to have freed the Republic (et populum Romanum factione paucorum oppressum in libertatem vindicaret), but he also appears to be alluding to Livy's account of the plight of Rhea Silvia and the twins:²³ Sed nec di nec homines aut ipsam aut stirpem a crudelitate regia vindicant: sacerdos vincta in custodiam datur, pueros in profluentem aquam mitti iubet (“But neither gods nor men freed the woman herself or her offspring from kingly cruelty: the priestess, being bound, was taken into custody, and he ordered the infant boys to be sent into the river's current”). Lacking divine or human aid to free the twins from the royal cruelty of Amulius, the Vestal is imprisoned, and her children are thrown into the Tiber. The assistance they need, however, will come in the form of the grown twins themselves, who will avenge Numitor and lay claim to their birthright by founding Rome. Augustus' expression a dominatione factionis…vindicavi references both Caesar's language and Livy's (a crudelitate regia vindicant).

If one supposes that Augustus was alluding to Livy's account of the persecution of Rhea Silvia and her children, the matter-of-fact statement regarding Augustus' age at the time of the Battle of Mutina takes on a new significance. In this light, annos undeviginti natus not only evokes the young Romulus who avenged his grandfather; it also alludes to the divine paternity of Augustus.²⁴ Just as Romulus is the child of Mars, who is featured prominently in the Lupercal relief, Augustus is the child of a divine parent: either Caesar or Apollo or both. Interestingly, whereas Livy alludes to the future vengeance of Romulus during an account of Romulus' infancy, Augustus does precisely the opposite in alluding to the circumstances of his conception and birth while he recounts his liberation of the Republic as a continuation of Caesar's work.

Chapter 2 recounts that Augustus exacted revenge of his adoptive father's murder by exiling and waging war against Caesar's murderers: qui parentem meum interfecerunt, eos in exilium expuli iudiciis legitimis ultus eorum facinus, et postea bellum inferentis rei publicae vici bis acie (“These men who murdered my father, I thrust out into exile after seeing to their punishment for this villainy in legitimate court proceedings”). This narrative of exile and revenge once again evokes the life of Romulus, but it does so in a way that emphasizes the legality and legitimacy of Augustus' actions. Amulius' exile of the infants Romulus and Remus is characterized as cruelty in Livy. Augustus' exile of Brutus and Cassius is represented as vengeance by law (expuli iudiciis legitimis ultus eorum facinus). Romulus and Remus used stealth and deception to deal with their usurping great-uncle; Augustus twice defeated in battle the men who had attacked the Republic (bellum inferentis rei publicae vici bis acie). Finally, as one who exacts vengeance (ultus), Augustus associates himself with the deity depicted on the Lupercal relief, Mars, whom Augustus, in pursuing his own act of vengeance for the murder of his father, called Mars Ultor.²⁵ Augustus' reading of the Lupercal relief therefore also points toward Rome's new center, the Forum of Augustus, with its Temple of Mars Ultor, which he later situates as the end point on the Res Gestae's itinerary, in a passage that evokes Ennius' description of Romulus as pater of Rome.²⁶ As Augustus writes, the name pater patriae was inscribed under his quadriga in the Forum of Augustus.²⁷

The evidence previously marshaled favors the view that in the opening two chapters of his Res Gestae, Augustus reached far back in time, beyond the historical circumstances in which he first emerged as a public figure (the freeing of the Republic and avenging of his father's death), to relate these events, by way of allusion, to the birth of Romulus and his revenge against his great-uncle Amulius for the usurpation of his grandfather's throne. The latter events in Romulus' life both occurred before the founding of Rome, and they result from those depicted in the Lupercal scene depicted on the Ara Pacis' west face. The theme of vengeance (ultus eorum facinus) in chapter 2 of the RG corresponds with the image of Mars in the Lupercal scene: there Mars, facing toward the city and dressed like a commander in his paludamentum, invites the viewer to follow him into the city all the way to the Forum of Augustus, where the Temple of Mars Ultor stands imposingly on the far end. Appropriately in keeping with this martial theme, chapter 4 of the RG recounts the ovations and triumphs of Augustus, which were voted to him for his many victories terra marique: Bis ovans triumphavi et tris egi curulis triumphos et appellatus sum viciens et semel imperator (“Twice I celebrated ovations, three times I led curule triumphs, and twenty-one times I was hailed imperator”). The reference to the triumph after the opening Romulean chapters of the RG raises in the reader's mind Romulus' role as the founder of the triumph and the first to dedicate the spolia opima.²⁸

Thus far, this argument has endeavored to show that the opening four chapters of the Res Gestae evoke the career of Romulus, who appeared on the left-hand relief on the west face of the Ara Pacis. It would be easy to say that the opening of the RG is Romulean in that it deals with matters of war, but the evidence is more compelling than that. In referring to his first act of patriotism in liberating the state, Augustus alluded to Livy's account of the birth and expulsion of Romulus, which also appeared in the Lupercal scene on the Ara Pacis. His further references to Mars Ultor and allusions to Romulus draw the reader along this particular strand of Augustan theology, all the way to the journey's conclusion at the quadriga in the Forum of Augustus in the text's last chapter.²⁹ Through such gestures, Augustus constructed an ideological itinerary that related his career with a Roman landscape of his own making, presented in chronological layers going back before the Romulean foundation of the city. He did more than that, however: his itinerary in narrative incorporated monuments that, like the RG, exploited themes of foundation and arrival. The reliefs on the north and south faces of the Ara Pacis, as viewed from the Via Flaminia, invite the traveler-viewer into its procession, while the west and east faces take this same person on a trip through Roman history and from a state of war to a state of peace—the progression that both the RG and the altar celebrate.

Numa and Janus in the Res Gestae

Our imagined traveler, having read the reliefs on the Ara Pacis' west face, would start his or her journey in the time of Romulus and then continue into the city in the reign of Numa. The Res Gestae, too, shifts from Romulean themes to those more closely associated with Rome's second king, especially religion and peace. Chapters 9–13 in particular treat the religious honors accorded to Augustus in connection with his reditus from Syria and his reditus from Spain and Gaul. The same passage is replete with institutions established originally by Numa, which is surprising considering that, in the past, Augustus' return from Spain had been quite fittingly used to compare the emperor to Hercules.³⁰ Hercules was once the symbol of Italian unity under Augustus; now, in the RG, Numa becomes the new symbol of unity.³¹ These chapters further stand out for the author's investment in narrating the returns and detailing the honors he received in connection with them. Structurally, the number of ovations (two) and triumphs (three) reported in chapter 4 balance numerically the two arrivals and three closings of the Gates of Janus in chapters 9–13.³² Consider, however, the amount of space allotted to each. The ovations and triumphs are reported in a short period. The author provides no specific detail or narrative to help his reader contextualize them historically. Like enumerated acclamations on an imperial coin, these honors are non-descript in the brevity of their reportage. The returns of 19 and 13 and the closings of the Gates of Janus, by contrast, merit three full chapters. The reader is treated to details that provide each of the returns a historical context. The honors connected to these returns are novel, elevating the princeps to a unique status as chief priest of Italy and near deity.

Why did Augustus choose to dwell on the returns of 19 and 13 BCE? There had been other magnificent returns, and these returns in the teens were, at the time they occurred, practically non-events in that Augustus stole secretly into the city instead of enjoying a hero's welcome.³³ As we saw in the previous chapter, his return to Rome after the victory over Sextus Pompey in 36 was remarkable and far more consequential than these later examples. The return in 36 was the first occasion on which the Senate and the people of Rome paraded out of the city to escort Augustus back. On that occasion, he had entered the city as the son of Apollo, fresh from his victory over the son of Neptune. As in 19 and 13, Augustus had received new religious honors in 36, which set a precedent for the honors described in RG 9–12. In 36, Augustus had declared the end of civil war and promised the return of the Republic. Appian considered Augustus' victory in 36 sufficiently significant to end his history of the civil war there. Despite all of this, the year 36 receives minimal attention in the RG. The ovation celebrated on the occasion of the Ludi Plebeii is just a number in chapter 4—one of two ovations. The victory itself is depicted as the sweeping away of pirates, not the conclusion to civil war that it was billed as at the time.³⁴ Likewise, in 29, the Senate decreed, in addition to a burgeoning collection of honors, an apantêsis of all the populace of Rome to greet Augustus, which he refused.³⁵ Still, when Augustus did return to the city, all its citizens offered sacrifice, including the consul Valerius Potitus. Dio reports, οὗτος οὖν δημοσίᾳ καὶ αὐτὸς ὑπέρ τε τοῦ δήμου καὶ ὑπὲρ τῆς βουλῆς ἐπὶ τῇ τοῦ Καίσαρος ἀφίξει ἐβουθύτησεν: ὃ μήπω πρότερον ἐπὶ μηδενὸς ἄλλου ἐγεγόνει (“It was [Potitus] who publicly and in person offered sacrifices on behalf of the Senate and of the People upon Caesar's arrival, a thing that had never been done in the case of any other person”).³⁶ Dio's language seems to derive from an official decree; it is echoed in the reference to the embassy of 19 BCE that Augustus cast as an apantêsis in RG 12 (qui honos ad hoc tempus nemini praeter me est decretus). His triple triumph would shortly follow.

Augustus did not deem it desirable to draw attention to these civil war victories in an extended narrative. Focusing on the year 19 was a better choice for a number of reasons. First, 19 was a significant year in the history of the Roman triumph. In that year, Balbus was the first non-Italian to celebrate a triumph.³⁷ He may also have been the last person outside of the imperial family to triumph.³⁸ Second, Augustus was offered a triumph in 19, but he turned it down. He would instead accept other honors in place of the triumph, including the Ara Fortunae Reducis. The Senate also decreed that his return in 19 be commemorated henceforth by an annual sacrifice by the priests and Vestals. In retrospect, these honors would be seen as significant markers in the evolution of imperial ceremonial. Through the lens of the RG, which elides the military significance of the events in favor of these cultic honors, Augustus' return in 19 takes on the appearance of the dawning of a new era in which the princeps could return in peace and in which such an occasion would be celebrated by state sacrifices.

The effect is one of Augustus' fashioning. The reality was far less tidy.³⁹ At the time, the Senate and the people honored Augustus because he had brought home the legionary standards that Crassus and Antony had lost to the Parthians. While Augustus did refuse the triumph he was offered, he still promoted the feat as one of great military significance. The altar that honored his return in place of the triumph was dedicated to Fortuna Redux, a goddess responsible for bringing Roman commanders and troops safely back to the city.⁴⁰ On coins of the year 19, Fortuna appears in her guise as Victrix; the man she brought victory, Augustus, appears on the other side, wearing a laurel crown. The slogan signis receptis graces numerous issues.⁴¹ It is understandable why the trumped-up military associations of a “victory” conjured from diplomatic hardball and posturing would later be elided. Augustus goes further in reshaping the memory of 19, however, by covering up trouble at home in the form of the illicit candidacy and death of Egnatius Rufus as well. He transformed the embassy begging him to take up the consulship and return to the city into an honorific embassy voted to him as a novel honor on the model of the Hellenistic extra-urban royal reception.⁴² In other words, the RG turns the return of 19, which was tangled in dubious claims of military achievement abroad and corresponding civil upheaval at home, into a stately reception that is capped off by cultic honors. Indeed, Augustus' account of these events is an anachronistic portrait of a well-developed imperial adventus, which unfolds with grace and ease. Likewise, the return of 13, which followed military action in Gaul and Spain, is marked by the honor of the Ara Pacis and more cultic trappings.⁴³ The emperor glosses over the messiness of military endeavors, however successful, with the stately phrase prospere gestis rebus. He focuses on the Vestals, priests, magistrates, and senators giving united thanks to the gods for his return. In this passage of the RG, the Rome to which Augustus returns is one where Pax reigns because of his presence, more than one where the martial pacification of provinces is celebrated.⁴⁴

In this section of the RG, Augustus' artful suppression of the military actions that prompted the honors marking his returns in 19 and 13 reinforces the sense that these advents belong to a new, peaceful era.⁴⁵ This reshaping of the memory of these returns was fitting for a passage of the RG that may have been inspired partly by the right-hand relief on the western face of the Ara Pacis, with its depiction of Numa sacrificing a sow to seal the first treaty struck in accordance with the Fetial Law.⁴⁶ The Numa on this relief seems to be facing out away from the city and toward the Mars figure in the Lupercal relief. If treated as one continuous scene, the two figures and the altar in front of Numa recall the king's founding of the Ara Martis in the Campus Martius. In this reading, Numa is welcoming Mars to his new home in campo. The placement of Numa and the altar on the south side of the west face is perfect for evoking the founding of the Ara Martis, since this altar was located south of the Ara Pacis, near the Villa Publica, east of the Capre Palus.⁴⁷ A purported law of Numa, reported in Festus, describes the purpose of the Ara Martis: to receive the sacrifice of secunda spolia before the celebration of a triumph.⁴⁸ Opposite the Numa of the Ara Pacis' west face is Pax on the east face.⁴⁹ Around the corner from him, on the south face, stands Augustus. This arrangement brings together Numa, Pax, and Augustus on the side of the monument that is oriented toward the city.⁵⁰ Augustus capitalized on this arrangement by structuring the Res Gestae in a way that complemented this arrangement: Numan themes follow the Romulean and present an image of Augustus in a peaceful Rome of his making.

After passing the Ara Pacis, our imagined traveler might be eager to see the next point on the RG's Augustan itinerary, the Janus Geminus in the Forum Romanum.⁵¹ Like the Ara Martis, referenced in the Numa relief of the Ara Pacis, the Janus Geminus was a Numan foundation.⁵² Livy's account of the latter situates Numa's closing of the Gates of Janus directly after he had formed treaties and alliances with all his neighbors. Thus the Ara Pacis' scene of Numa sacrificing the sow in conclusion of such a treaty points forward to the closing of the gates too.⁵³ In the RG, the mention of the Ara Pacis clearly anticipated the third closure of the Gates of Janus, which perhaps occurred in 8 BCE.⁵⁴ The structural form of the Ara Pacis draws on both the form of the augural tabernaculum and the shrine of Janus, which may have been viewed as a prototypical auguraculum with the god as its augur.⁵⁵ Thus the Ara Pacis' very appearance pointed back to the two honors that most pleased Augustus after his conquest of Egypt: the closing of the Gates of Janus and the taking of the augurium salutis.⁵⁶ Our traveler's imaginary procession through the RG, therefore, leads us from the Ara Fortunae Reducis, to the Ara Pacis, and then finally to the Janus Geminus, which, as an auguraculum and templum, represents a kind of symbolic center place from which the world is ritually and spatially organized. The progression of these three monuments may also reference the three spolia discussed by Varro and Plutarch.⁵⁷ The Ara Fortuna Reducis, voted in honor of Augustus' return with the recovered legionary standards, indirectly commemorated the dedication of these standards to Jupiter in anticipation of their placement in a Temple of Mars Ultor to be constructed on the model of the shrine of Jupiter Feretrius, repository of the spolia optima.⁵⁸ The Ara Pacis, as previously argued, alluded strongly to the Ara Martis, where the secunda spolia were, according to a lex Numae, supposed to be dedicated. The same law stipulated that the spolia tertia were to be dedicated to Janus Quirinus.⁵⁹ Augustus' concern with numerical balance in the RG is evident in the balance between the number of ovations and triumphs, on the one hand, and the combined number of events at the Ara Fortunae, Ara Pacis, and Janus Quirinus, on the other. By referring to the three times the Senate decreed the closing of the Gates of Janus, Augustus may have further presented himself as having achieved a numerical balance with Varro's three spolia.

In addition to combining the auguraculum and templum, the Janus Geminus represents a kind of structural, ritual, and conceptual gateway. Ancient speculation made Janus a gate for profectio and adventus in early Rome.⁶⁰ In public prayer, he was the god to whom one appealed before all other gods.⁶¹ Chronologically, he came to represent the hinge of the year, while in spatial and cosmic terms, he was not only the four cardinal points but also the gateway of the rising and setting sun.⁶² Most interesting in a discussion concerning Augustus' self-representation in the RG is the euhemeristic image of Janus the god-king of primeval Rome, who received Saturn when the latter sought refuge in Latium.⁶³ This image parallels beautifully the reception of Mars by Numa as alluded to on the west face of the Ara Pacis. In Janus one can find a primeval center place, a ritual center where the will of the gods is discerned, the portal through which departures and returns occur, and the god-priest-king who officiates and participates in all of these activities, as well as being an object of cult himself. Such an image is eminently applicable to Augustus. Augustus chose to make the Janus Geminus the culmination of the series of landmarks in these chapters because, regardless of the precise outlines of his knowledge regarding this monument, he saw immense potential for working it into his own Numan theology in the RG. Indeed, the weakness of the evidence for Augustus' third closure of the Gates of Janus suggests that he stretched reality in order to make events conform to a numerically elegant and ideologically useful schema.⁶⁴

Augustus Censorius

The aforementioned narrative procession appropriately takes place after an account of Augustus' censorial activities—a record of the ritual actions that constitute the human community of Rome arranged in its various orders.⁶⁵ The census ended with a procession into the city.⁶⁶ Thus the account of Augustus' censuses is placed where one should expect it—before peaceful processions into the city. It should also be noted that, before reporting his censuses, Augustus takes three chapters to stress the fact that he did not accept any magistracy that was contra morem maiorum.⁶⁷ Indeed, he reports that he declined both the dictatorship and a curatorship over laws and morals. After stressing this idea, he proceeds to tell us about the positions and priesthoods with which he wants to be associated. The first on that list, triumvir, is precisely the kind of magistracy he claimed he did not accept. Nevertheless, Augustus implicitly asserts that this position was not contra morem maiorum. In keeping with the progression of themes from Romulean to Numan, the list goes from the martial triumvirate to princeps senatus and a list of priesthoods. As will be argued shortly, the position of princeps and these priesthoods are the devices that mark the Numan phase of Augustus' career as presented in the RG.

In terms of a political theology of arrival, Augustus wanted his reader to know, before he conducted the census and entered the city peacefully, that his position with regard to the city was neither novel nor smacking of regal power. This is a testimony to his care with regard to the legacy of Caesar, whose ovation of January 44, directly after the symbolically censorial Feriae Latinae, had been marred by perceptions of regal associations. Augustus' decision to report his recusatio of honores contra morem also evokes the Republican exemplum of Genucius Cipus, which was recounted in the introduction to this monograph.⁶⁸ After his profectio from the city, Cipus discovers that horns have sprung from his forehead. When the haruspex in his retinue interprets this sign to indicate that his return to the city will result in his ascent to kingship, Cipus chooses exile instead of imposing kingship on Rome once again. One is reminded of Sulla at Tarentum, when the haruspex Postumius interpreted a crown-shaped liver as portending his success in his invasion of Italy and war against the Cinnans.⁶⁹ During the ovation of 44, Caesar's statue was crowned with a diadem. In reporting the magistracies he declined, Augustus placed the word dictaturam at the very opening of the chapter, emphasizing his rejection of the legacy of Sulla and Caesar on this point. He may have even had the exemplum of Cipus in mind when he composed his account in such a way that the issue of non-traditional magistracies was raised directly before his symbolic procession into Rome as censor.⁷⁰

Since this account of censuses was intentionally placed between the martial and peaceful arrivals of the Res Gestae, it will be useful to consider them before we proceed to a closer examination of the theological and ideological aspects of the returns of Augustus. Augustus' exercise of censorial powers to revise the senatorial roll and perform the lustrum addressed a noticeable deficiency of the civil war period—the failure to complete a census. The consulship of Pompey and Crassus in 70 had been the last time that a successful census had taken place.⁷¹ The result of the census of 70/69 was a grand swelling of the citizenship, thanks to a large influx of Italians, some of whom had probably been waiting to be enrolled since the time of the Social War.⁷² When disaster struck Rome in the form of flood, famine, and pestilence in the winter of 23, Augustus responded by planning to celebrate the inauguration of the new saeculum followed by a census in 22.⁷³ Augustus' censuses were more than just a powerful signal of the resumption of normal Republican practices in the RG. The performance of the census was symbolically related to the inauguration of a new age. As Augustus closes chapter 8, he goes so far as to identify explicitly this dawning age as his own saeculum (ex nostro saeculo).

The rationale for associating the census with a new age is evident. The census was not a merely bureaucratic exercise. It had real impact on the apportionment of power within the state. The person responsible for the enrollment of many new citizens potentially acquired a pool of voting resources for future elections and legislation.⁷⁴ A large change in the composition of the citizenship could thus greatly impact the balance of power in a highly competitive aristocratic environment. The census, however, was not just about the practicalities of political power. It was also an institution that defined Roman identity within a framework of religious ritual.⁷⁵ This ritual had the basic form of a rite du passage, in that the Roman people gathered outside the sacred boundary of the city according to tribe and then, after the census and lustrum, were led back in procession into the city as citizens organized by century, with the changed composition of the Roman populace representing a kind of new identity.⁷⁶ New citizens would join old in a community which was shared with Rome's gods, a development that brought these gods greater honor. The census thus not only pertained to questions about the very nature of Rome in its social and political organization; it also reflected the state of its relationship with the gods. Additionally, the healthy city was well ordered, with its citizens assigned to their proper sphere of privilege, responsibility, and moral value.⁷⁷ The higher orders in particular were closely scrutinized for their moral rectitude; those who were deemed unworthy could be ejected from the Senate or the number of those knights who had the public horse.⁷⁸ The logic that informed these practices included some notion of the importance of decision makers, magistrates, commanders, and key religious actors exhibiting the kind of upright behavior that would be indicative of respect for the gods on whom Rome relied for continuing success.⁷⁹ Therefore, the censor, although he did not bear imperium, was considered to hold one of the highest honors of all, since, ostensibly, such a responsibility would only be delegated to those who were deemed to have impeccable judgment and an irreproachably upright life.

It is thus not surprising that Augustus would place such a strong emphasis on his exercise of censorial powers in revising the senatorial roll and conducting several censuses. The ritual constitution of the identity and organization of the community of Roman citizens through the census process expressed precisely the kind of restoration of Rome at which Augustus had aimed. It is perhaps surprising that he should emphasize that he had done so consulari cum imperio, especially since evidence from outside the RG shows that he actually performed the first of these censuses with a grant of censorial power.⁸⁰ In fact, he may have done so for all of his censuses, but he does not refer to censoria potestas in the RG. Cooley concludes that Augustus concealed his censorial power “because he felt uncomfortable being seen too openly as censor to Rome's upper classes.”⁸¹ This suggestion finds support in Augustus' increasing sensitivity regarding the perception that he was monopolizing positions of power. By the time he composed the RG, the dissatisfaction this had caused in the Senate was clear to him. At the same time, it is not clear that it was more advantageous to appear to depart from tradition, particularly in a context where Augustus was emphasizing his adherence to it. Imperium had not been the direct authority under which censuses had been conducted, since censors did not hold that power. That Augustus stresses his holding consular imperium when conducting these censuses thus appears to be a real innovation in the census, but one that was perhaps necessary under the circumstances, since both the censorship and the census had become increasingly politicized and thus contested.⁸² Was it, however, actually an innovation? According to Livy, the first censors were appointed in 443 BCE, yet Servius Tullius, Rome's penultimate king, had first instituted the census roughly a century before.⁸³ After the kings, consuls presided over six censuses.⁸⁴ The first of these men, Valerius Poplicola, participated in the banishment of the king Tarquin the Proud and replaced L. Tarquinius Collatinus in the consulship.⁸⁵ He also celebrated the first Republican triumph. As Suolahti observes, the consuls of the early Republic who performed the census were all of a similar type: among their distinctions qualifying them for the honor of holding the census were that they tended to come from prominent patrician gentes, hold the dictatorship or multiple consulships, and celebrate triumphs.⁸⁶

Augustus fits comfortably in such a group, so perhaps, knowing the history of the censorship, he chose to emphasize his consular imperium in what was, after all, an archaizing gesture. He may have even meant to make a deliberate point of connecting his first census with the birth of the Republic. This idea is supported by Augustus' drawing of attention to the fact that he conducted his first census as consul when Marcus Agrippa was his colleague. Before that time, Augustus had held a sole consulship, ruling on the basis of the grant of imperium that he had received as triumvir.⁸⁷ In taking a colleague in the consulship, Augustus sent a strong signal that the Republic was returning to normalcy; and by raising the memory of the first Republican census in the Res Gestae, Augustus identifies the holding of a census in a Rome where two consuls preside with the rebirth of the Republic. To do so, however, he has to massage the facts by claiming that his first census was conducted through his consular imperium instead of the censoria potestas, as had actually been the case.

Still, Augustus depicts his second census as having been conducted without a colleague. The holding of the census alone evoked the monarchy, particularly its founder Servius Tullius. Servius' institution of the census was an act very much in the spirit of an earlier king who figures prominently in subsequent chapters of the RG, Numa Pompilius. Livy writes of Servius' conscious aim to establish the census in emulation of Numa by setting in place an institution similar to those of Numa in its salutary effects on society.

Adgrediturque inde ad pacis longe maximum opus, ut quemadmodum Numa divini auctor iuris fuisset, ita Servium conditorem omnis in civitate discriminis ordinumque quibus inter gradus dignitatis fortunaeque aliquid interlucet posteri fama ferrent. censum enim instituit, rem saluberrimam tanto futuro imperio, ex quo belli pacisque munia non viritim, ut ante, sed pro habitu pecuniarum fierent; tum classes centuriasque et hunc ordinem ex censu discripsit, vel paci decorum vel bello.⁸⁸

[He then embarked on the greatest project of peace, so that as Numa had been the author of divine law, so, too, could posterity proclaim the fame of Servius as the founder of every distinction and order in the state, through which the differences in degree of dignity and wealth become manifest. For he established the census, a most salutary institution for an empire that would one day be so great, through which they would procure supplies for war and peace not one man at a time, as before, but by condition of wealth. He then assigned men to their classes, centuries, and this order by means of a census, as was fitting for either peace or war.]

The comparison goes further, since the lustrum that caps off the census is a religious institution very much in the spirit of Numa's inventions, which used fear of the gods as a tool for maintaining control. As he begins to describe the celebration of the lustrum, Livy mentions the Draconian law that scared Romans into participating in the census: censu perfecto quem maturaverat metu legis de incensis latae cum vinculorum minis mortisque, edixit ut omnes cives Romani, equites peditesque, in suis quisque centuriis, in campo Martio prima luce adessent (“The census was completed, which he hastened through fear of a law passed concerning the unregistered carrying penalties of bonds and death, and he decreed that all Roman citizens, knights and infantrymen, each in his own century, should come to the Campus Martius at dawn”).⁸⁹ The law was designed to get all Roman citizens gathered at dawn on the field of Mars to participate in the ritual purification, or lustrum, that closed off the census. Augustus' use of the term lustrum to refer to one of his censuses evokes Numa.⁹⁰ Indeed, his variatio in using censum populi…egi and lustrum…feci in that particular order is designed to evoke the two halves of the ritual separately, thereby drawing his reader's attention to the purifying aspect of the latter. His use of the first-person singular pronoun, though typical of the inscription, takes the collegial censorship and returns it to its monarchical roots.⁹¹ It should also be recalled that as they prepared to conduct the census, the censors set down their curule chairs next to the Ara Martis, an altar with strong Numan associations referenced in the Ara Pacis.⁹²

Augustus' performance of the census was an act of not only ritual renewal but also chronological renewal.⁹³ The phrase ordinarily employed to express this act was lustrum condere, an archaic expression whose literal meaning is obscure but that seems to have been associated in the Late Republic with the closing out of the census period.⁹⁴ Augustus here avoids the expression lustrum condere, preferring censum populi…egi and lustrum…feci. His is an interesting choice in that, by not using lustrum condere, Augustus does not associate his censuses with the end of a chronological census period, which is understandable, given the fact that his censuses occurred not every five years but, rather, in 29 and 18 BCE and 14 CE. It is perhaps mistaken to think that the Romans viewed either the census or the lustrum as strict chronological markers, especially in the first century BCE, when there were large gaps of time between censuses. Instead, terms like lustrum and saeculum connote time as ritual process, not strict calendrical time as moderns conceive of it. This more flexible view of time was perfectly in line with the traditional relationship between certain festivals and the Roman calendar, wherein some rituals and ceremonies were celebrated within a window of time or order of procedures according to tradition, not at precisely the same moment every year. In this category belong the feriae conceptivae.⁹⁵

This is not to say that the terms lustrum and saeculum did not yet have any chronological significance. The interesting question for the Augustan Age is the implications that were bound up in these terms. Do these terms represent beginnings, endings, or both? Lucretius used the phrase condere saecula to indicate the end of a period of time: proinde licet quod vis vivendo condere saecula (“Therefore you may wish to close out generations by living on”).⁹⁶ Here the poet speaks in reference to those whose deaths set the end of the saeculum. Still, saecula condere could have quite the opposite meaning in Augustan literature; it might instead be used to indicate the beginning of an age. Thomas saw in this ambiguity a possible note of subversion in Vergil's reference to the Golden Age (aurea saecula condere); in other words, according to a Lucretian-intertexual reading, Augustus would close, rather than open, a Golden Age.⁹⁷ It is possible that Vergil is here playing on the slippage between the sense of condere in “founding a city” and in “completing an age,” in precisely the way that would be most advantageous to Augustus, the princeps who, by becoming a conditor, would save Rome from a possible end by establishing for it a new beginning.⁹⁸ Apposite is the placement of the Res Gestae before the Mausoleum of Augustus, where it evoked the connection between tomb and founder in colonial founder cult, as did the golden stele in Euhemerus' Hiera Anagraphê.⁹⁹

It is important to note that Aeneid 6 would have followed the publication, between 27 and 25 BCE, of Livy's first pentad, wherein the historian laid down his pioneering conception of conditores—Rome's multiple founders.¹⁰⁰ According to this Livian concept, which includes not only the founders of the city but also the originators of institutions therein, one can yet be a founder of Rome after the initial ritual act of city foundation. A founding, as an inaugural event, opens a new age as much as or more than it closes an old one. Vergil's conflation of the two senses of condere suits the Augustan Age perfectly and thus supports a celebratory reading of Vergil's reference to the foundation of the Golden Age. The Vergilian and Livian concepts of foundation and time contributed to Augustus' representation of his censuses in the Res Gestae, which long postdated the publication of both works. Augustus' avoidance of the word condere in his reference to performing the lustrum is conspicuous. Despite the fact that the word conditor does not appear in RG 8, the chapter's contents prompt the reader to consider Augustus a founder in his restoration of the Republic and his role in passing laws and establishing exempla for posterity.¹⁰¹ Further chapters contain the many institutions and practices that justify considering Augustus a new founder of the city in the Livian mold.

A Conspicuous Absence: The Secular Games

The same ideas of foundation and the renewal of time also emerge in the celebration of the Secular Games in 17 BCE, which Galinsky has likened to the performance of the lustrum.¹⁰² It is odd that Augustus does not mention his Secular Games in chapters 8–13 of the Res Gestae, which recount events that happened both before and after the celebration of these games, especially since he had called this period his own saeculum in chapter 8. Instead, these games are reported in chapter 22, where Augustus lists other games and spectacles he offered the people: pro conlegio XV virorum magister conlegii collega M. Agrippa ludos saeculares C. Furnio C. Silano cos. feci. Reference to the lustrum may have been a way of evoking the same idea of renewal without disrupting his overall organizational schema. Obviously, as Galinsky observed, the association fits. The saeculum either was a period close to a century or was marked by the death of the oldest living person of a generation.¹⁰³ According to secular doctrine, each city was allotted by the Fates a certain number of saecula—a limited life span.¹⁰⁴ Thus, like the lustrum, the saeculum marked a greater division of time, but one that was less precise than momentous and ritually significant. During the First Punic War, the Romans conducted the Ludi Tarentini, rites of Dis and Proserpina perhaps first conducted at the time in order to cultivate ties with Magna Graecia.¹⁰⁵ These games later came to be associated with the transition from one saeculum to another. To close out a census period with a lustrum—a purification of the people—was symbolically akin to closing out a saeculum through the celebration of the Secular Games.

Augustan scholars set out a new history of the Secular Games to accommodate his design of holding the fifth iteration of them in 17 BCE.¹⁰⁶ Augustus intended that his Secular Games should be considered as the rebirth of Rome, perhaps drawing on Varronian scholarship on palingenesis.

Marcus Varro ponit in libris, quos conscripsit de gente populi Romani, cuius putavi verba ipsa ponenda. Genethliaci quidam scripserunt, inquit, esse in renascendis hominibus quam appellant παλιγγενεσίαν Graeci; hac scripserunt confici in annis numero quadrigentis quadraginta, ut idem corpus et eadem anima, quae fuerint coniuncta in homine aliquando, eadem rursus redeant in coniunctionem.¹⁰⁷

[Marcus Varro, in his work On the Origin of the Roman People, wrote words I thought ought to be quoted verbatim: “Certain astrologers,” he said, “have written that there exists a rebirth of men which the Greeks call palingenesis, which is accomplished after a period of 440 years, such that the same body and the same spirit, which were once joined together in the person, may return again into their former union.”]

This 440-year astrological period of rebirth coincides closely, though not exactly, with the Augustan calculation of the chronological space between the first celebration of the Secular Games in 456 and Augustus' planned celebration. So, although Varro himself had passed away in 27, his chronological calculations were used to set the date of the various Secular Games from their first celebration under the Republic up to the planned celebration in 17/16. Thus, particularly under Augustus, secular doctrine found ritual expression in ceremonies aimed at renewing and perpetuating the state.¹⁰⁸ Of special interest here is the harmonization of the idea of the saecula with this Greek idea of palingenesis, here through a Pythagorean teaching concerning the cycle of the human soul that is attributed to certain astrologers.¹⁰⁹ It may even be the case that Augustus and his scholars wanted to assert the special nature of these Secular Games as marking a rebirth not just of the political order but also of the very Roman people itself. According to Valerian family legend, Manius Valesius used hot water to heal his children at Tarentum in a series of events that led to the foundation of the Secular Games. As evidence of the antiquity of this Italic symbol of the renewal of time, Versnel proffers several fourth-century images showing children bearing the name Maris or Mars being immersed in boiling water.¹¹⁰ He argues that all of these rituals should be viewed as symbolic of rebirth or rejuvenation such as one sees in rites of passage. Certainly, this would perfectly fit the Augustan theology of the Secular Games proposed here.

The year 17 BCE marked the birth of Lucius Caesar, whose father, M. Agrippa, is mentioned as Augustus' colleague in putting on the Secular Games.¹¹¹ Since the oracle pointed to the celebration of the new saeculum in 16, not 17, it could be that the games were deliberately moved to coincide with Lucius Caesar's birth.¹¹² Perhaps Lucius, according to the teachings to which Varro refers, was considered or represented to others as the reincarnation of some earlier Republican figure—an idea familiar to readers of the Aeneid.¹¹³ Hopes may have focused on Lucius as a fulfillment of the predictions of Eclogue 4, wherein the birth of a child marks the descent of a new breed of men from heaven: iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto. / tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum / desinet ac toto surget gens aurea mundo, / casta fave Lucina (“Now a new generation is sent down from the lofty heaven. / Holy Lucina, please favor this child in his birth, by whom the Age of Iron will first come to an end and a Golden People will arise over the entire earth”).¹¹⁴ The notion that Augustus was opening a new saeculum that would usher in a new kind of Roman generation lends additional significance to his emphasis on the censuses he performed, since the citizens he would add could be deemed to belong to this Golden People.

Although Augustus did not report the Secular Games in chapters 9–13 of the Res Gestae, those who knew Augustus' history would have recalled their celebration in 17 BCE. The Secular Games fit the underlying theme of Roman foundations in the early chapters of the RG, because the founding of the cult itself was deeply implicated in the lore of the city's and the Republic's beginnings. It also touched on much of the same thematic material as the legends of Numa, particularly in the story of the king's securing of imperium for himself and Rome.¹¹⁵ The story of the Sabine Valesius' migration to Rome and celebration of the first Secular Games, which dealt with the salvation of Valesius' children from a divinely sent pestilence through the performance of rites to Dis and Proserpina, likewise evokes Numan themes.¹¹⁶ According to the logic of the translation of a gentilicial cult into a state cult, the rejuvenating effect of the rites of Dis and Proserpina upon Valesius' children, which secured the continuation of his household and led to a change in his name from Valesius to Valerius (appropriately from valêre, “to be well”), translated into a cult with rejuvenating effects on Rome and its people.¹¹⁷ Thus, just as Varronian scholarship anticipated, the Secular Games brought about a rebirth of the people and the city. The chapter following the references to Augustus' censuses reports the Senate's institution of quinquennial vows by the consuls and priests for Augustus' health (valetudo), as well as continual private and municipal petitions to the gods for the same.¹¹⁸ So, even though the Secular Games do not appear in these chapters, where one would expect them according to chronology, the themes of foundation and renewal are expressed in the performance of the lustrum and in subsequent chapters, through the rites instituted to secure the valetudo of the emperor.

Still, it is rather surprising that the Secular Games do not appear in this sequence of chapters but, instead, follow in chapter 22, since the rejuvenation of the people suggested by Augustus' use of the term lustrum is thematically connected with the vows taken for the emperor's valetudo. This absence becomes even more striking once one considers the importance of ruler cult in the chronological schema of Varro. Taylor long ago pointed out the importance of ruler cult in Varro's De gente populi Romani, which documents, in accordance with the doctrine of euhemerism, the many past monarchs who received divine cult at their tombs in recognition of their great deeds.¹¹⁹ These examples came in response to Cicero's complaint in the First Philippic against the mixing of divine and funerary cult in the deification of Caesar.¹²⁰ The concern with chronology thus went hand in hand with the controversy over ruler cult. Varro's contribution to that discussion would also have included the timing and purpose of the Secular Games, since the events that prompted his writing also included the haruspex Vulcatius' announcement of the closing of the ninth and opening of the tenth saeculum as signaled by the appearance of the astrum Caesaris.¹²¹ Varro's scholarship obviously contributed to the calculation of the timing of Augustus' Secular Games, but so, too, may his interpretation of their origins have contributed to the Augustan understanding of the games' significance. Varro elsewhere comments that the word tarentum was used of the tomb of Acca Larentia in the Velabrum.¹²² Having identified the cult of Acca Larentia on the Velabrum as a funerary cult, Varro, in using the word tarentum, opens the way for interpreting the cult of Dis and Proserpina in the same way.¹²³ While Varro's argument was initially made to support the deification of Caesar, it was later put into use for the construction of Augustus' ruler cult. This development of Varronian doctrine would bring together concepts of the renewal of time and the Roman people in the Secular Games with the deification of the ruler as expressed on Augustus' funerary inscription. Subsequent disappointments in the life of Augustus, like the deaths of his grandsons, the exiles of his daughter and granddaughter, and continued political intrigue, perhaps tempered the claim regarding the rejuvenation of the Roman people. The impact of these unexpected disappointments is reflected in the final form of the RG by the reporting of his grandsons' deaths in chapter 14, directly after the closings of the Gates of Janus, and by the deferral of the Secular Games until chapter 22.

The censuses of Augustus stand on the cusp of two thematically distinct units of the RG. The content of the first two chapters is reminiscent of two significant arrivals in the career of Rome's founder, Romulus, in that it alludes both to his first arrival at the Palatine as an infant exile and also to his emergence as the avenger of his grandfather Numitor, who would then return to the Palatine to found the city. The narrative of Romulus, like that of Augustus, featured miraculous birth, righteous vengeance, success in warfare, and the gathering of citizens to Rome, to name but a few similarities. While Augustus is not identical to Romulus, he certainly follows in the tradition of other late-republican dynasts, such as Sulla and Caesar, in substantively emulating the achievements of Romulus. The portrait of Augustus is yet more complex. In addition to alluding to Romulus, it also draws readers' minds back to the first census conducted in the young Republic by Valerius Publicola, a man who, like Augustus, helped to save the city from tyranny.¹²⁴ This points forward to the next unit of the RG, which is characterized by numerous allusions to Rome's second king, Numa Pompilius.¹²⁵ Valerius and Numa are similar figures in that both men were ethnically Sabine and were associated with important Roman religious institutions, the former through his descent from Valesius, the founder of Rome's Secular Games.¹²⁶

In chapter 8 of the RG, the reader sees the full arrival of the restored Republic. The unsettled period of irregular magistracies is left behind in chapters 5 and 6. So, too, is the triumvirate of chapter 7. Augustus marks the date of this renewed Republic by his first post-Actian consulship with a colleague, Marcus Agrippa.¹²⁷ The consulship of Augustus and Agrippa represents a return to normalcy and the opening of the Augustan age. Indeed, Augustus explicitly refers to his own time as his saeculum (ex nostro saeculo) as he closes out the chapter, thereby identifying himself as the “man of the saeculum” in the tradition of Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, and Caesar. This new age witnesses the advent of a new Augustan people (the gens aurea of Eclogue 4.9?) in the creation of new patricians, new senators in the lectiones senatus, and new citizens in the censuses reported in the same chapter.¹²⁸ The arrival of this new Republic is on the pivot point between the martial arrivals of chapter 4 and the peaceful returns coming up in chapters 10–12. To leave behind the turbulent times of civil war, Augustus will now focus on the cultic aspects of his arrivals in the upcoming chapters and transition to a new emphasis on his similarity to Numa Pompilius.

Epiphany of Augustus the God

In switching the association of the returns of 19 and 13 from victory and triumphal arrival to peaceful reditus, Augustus synthesized elements of Roman religion and Hellenistic ruler cult. This section and the following one will treat separately those elements of a more Hellenistic flavor and the more uniquely Roman aspects. It should be understood, however, that the text of the Res Gestae presents the reader one linear journey in time and space that goes through the second decade of Augustan rule after Actium and an itinerary that leads to the Janus Geminus.

Presenting Augustus as a victorious liberator and grand benefactor, the RG follows the logic of Hellenistic ruler cult as it unfolds in the exchange of benefactions and honors in arrival celebrations. Beginning in chapter 9, Augustus focuses on the cultic honors the city extended to him.¹²⁹ The Senate decreed that the consuls and priests should take vows for his good health every four years.¹³⁰ Cicero had already drawn a connection between the salus of the ruler and that of the state in his Pro Marcello in 46 BCE.¹³¹ Here in the RG, however, the relationship is formalized in cult. In fulfillment of these vows for Augustus' health, priests and consuls celebrated games.¹³² Furthermore, private citizens and municipalities offered prayers for his good health, the municipalities doing so at public feasts.¹³³ Beginning in chapter 10, Augustus' name was also incorporated into the Salian Hymn, and a law decreed that he should be permanently sacrosanct and hold the tribunician power for life. Chapter 10 closes with the election of Augustus as pontifex maximus, which brought all of Italy to Rome to vote in support of his candidacy.

As has been observed elsewhere, chapter 9 of the RG includes Augustus' most explicit reference to an unprecedented form of ruler cult extended to him: the performance of games in honor of his health vivo me, that is, during his lifetime.¹³⁴ The usual pattern in Roman practice was that games might be celebrated in honor of the deceased, or a living person, like a general, might celebrate games to a god or gods in fulfillment of a vow.¹³⁵ It was under Sulla and then Caesar that the victory games became closely associated with the person of the victor as a yearly celebration of the god who brought a particular commander his surpassing success.¹³⁶ Here Augustus takes the element of a particular historical victory out of the equation and instead depicts himself as the focus of vows undertaken by officials of the state for his personal welfare, the fulfillment of which would lead to games devoted to his salus.¹³⁷

This cultic arrangement was closer to Hellenistic ruler cult than any prior religious institution of the Roman state. Yet it still fell short of an explicit deification of the princeps. In the context of general Roman religious conservatism, however, it did not fall too short: by referring to games in honor of his valetudo while he was alive, Augustus was drawing attention to the similarity of this practice to (and its distinction from) the games for the departed (dis manibus), a category of divine beings in Roman religion. At the same time, the inclusion of his name in the Salian Hymn, which is reported in chapter 10 of the RG, placed Augustus on par with Hercules, a figure who was known to have joined the company of the gods and was worshiped with divine, not merely heroic, honors at the Ara Maxima.¹³⁸ This form of cult is memorialized in the Aeneid, where Evander introduces Aeneas to the cult of Hercules and tells him the story of Hercules and Cacus.¹³⁹ In mentioning his inclusion in the Salian Hymn, Augustus was drawing attention to a cultic honor that pointed clearly to the appropriateness of his deification in recognition of his great deeds in the very chronological context in which they occurred. Nevertheless, the deeds themselves are sublimated in these chapters.

Chapter 12 of the RG recounts one of the more conspicuously Hellenistic honors accorded to Augustus. A resolution of the Senate decreed that the leading men of the city should be sent out to Campania to meet Augustus. In the Greek version of the RG, the vocabulary used to describe this group (ἐπέμφθησάν, ὑπαντήσοντες) is customary for the ritual surrounding the visits of Hellenistic kings and other dignitaries at poleis.¹⁴⁰ Augustus points out that no one had been voted such an honor before him¹⁴¹—a significant fact in a culture where honorific ceremonial performance was so politically important that the honor of a triumph could be blocked for years by one's enemies.¹⁴² In the Late Republic, honors could concretely transform into position and power. This particular honor placed Augustus in a new relationship with Rome—one that was more akin to a monarch than a magistrate. In the Greek text of the RG, one gets the sense that Augustus' relationship with Rome is analogous to the outside ruler's (e.g., Roman governor, dynast, or king) relationship with a Hellenistic polis.¹⁴³

The passage occludes the reason for the embassy, which, when considered in its full historical context, takes on quite a different cast. Far from being a simple congratulatory honor, the embassy to Augustus was sent specifically to address a crisis in the city. The consular elections for 19 BCE had been frustrated by the attempt of Egnatius Rufus to run for the consulship before he was eligible.¹⁴⁴ Rufus and his followers rioted in opposition to the consul's decision against Rufus' candidacy, and the tumult resulted in Rufus' imprisonment and death.¹⁴⁵ The people refused to elect a second consul, so envoys were sent to ask Augustus to take up the second consulship. Augustus refused and instead appointed one of the envoys, Quintus Lucretius, to fill the empty consulship.¹⁴⁶ In the RG, Quintus Lucretius is identified as the consul, but no reference is made to either the crisis or Augustus' appointment of the man. By identifying Lucretius as consul without reference to the context, Augustus increased the level of honor attached to the embassy, since the rank of greeters at an adventus reflected on the prestige of the person being welcomed. Additionally, Augustus emphasized that his adventus reception met him all the way in Campania (a great honor in itself) and that the embassy was decreed by the Senate (an unprecedented honor). These elements added up to an adventus of the highest honor for the princeps. Had Augustus accurately described the historical context of the embassy, it would only have diminished the reader's impression of its honorific value. Furthermore, Augustus was probably not eager to advertise that there was still, at this point in his career, sufficient political instability at Rome to prompt others to seek him out to fill the consulship or to appoint someone else. A Republic without functional elections is not a respublica restituta. One of the aims of this section of the RG is to impress on the reader the settled state of the Republic under Augustus' leadership.

Later in the same chapter, Augustus recounts elements of his reception at Rome upon his return from the provinces in Spain and Gaul.¹⁴⁷ Again the military context is suppressed in favor of promoting the image of an honored princeps in a settled empire. According to his own depiction, Augustus returned from his provinces just as any governor ideally would, having managed affairs successfully (prospere gestis rebus). In honor of Augustus' return, the Senate decreed that an Ara Pacis Augustae should be consecrated on the Campus Martius and that the magistrates, priests, and Vestal Virgins should perform annual sacrifices there on the anniversary of his return. The Ara Pacis Augustae was one of the most significant of Augustan monuments, and it has received a wealth of scholarly attention.¹⁴⁸ Its mention at this point in the RG provides a nice geographical symmetry with the Ara Fortunae Reducis, which represented the princeps' return to Rome by way of the Via Appia from settled eastern provinces, a choice that is altogether appropriate given the prevalence of Tyche as a symbol of imperial success in the Greek East. The Ara Pacis Augustae represents the princeps' return from settled provinces in the West on the Via Flaminia. Each altar stands along the traditional entry itinerary for the commander or governor who returned from those respective regions. Represented on the Ara Pacis, closer to the center of the city than the armed Roma, is the goddess Pax, and Numa is her companion, on the opposite side of the altar. As the second in the pair of goddesses receiving an altar, Pax more emphatically signals Augustus' complete pacification of the entire oecumene. While it would be incorrect to say that the Ara Pacis primarily represents the pax of the civil sphere, the textual framing of the goddess Pax in the RG diminishes the military associations of the goddess. In this way, the Ara Pacis of the RG is more congenial to a Numan context and highlights the religious peace of the settled state.

Election of the Pontifex Maximus

Augustus intermingled the more novel aspects of his honors with a dominant focus on Roman priesthoods and powers, including his election to the supreme pontificate and the grants of sacrosanctitas and tribunicia potestas. In the exchange of honors and benefactions between ruler and city in a Hellenistic context, the ruler could be granted citizenship as a way of honoring him and providing him a symbolic presence in local politics.¹⁴⁹ How much practical, daily participation in the city would be expected of him is another question. Augustus' relationship with Rome was much different; honorific grants of special powers to him would have very immediate consequences. As discussed in chapter 5, Augustus was granted tribunician sacrosanctity in 36 as part of the honors he had received in recognition of his victory over Sextus Pompey and saving the city from famine.¹⁵⁰ The grant may have come in response to calumny against him during the crisis of his conflict with Sextus, or it may have been extended in lieu of the sanctitas of the position of pontifex maximus, which he declined to take from Lepidus.¹⁵¹ Tribunician sacrosanctity was founded on a plebeian oath to support the inviolability of the tribune such that anyone who harmed the tribune would be considered sacer (i.e., accursed to Jupiter), meaning that anyone could slay the offender with impunity and that the offender's property would be confiscated and dedicated to the cult of Ceres on the Aventine.¹⁵² The princeps accepted a grant of tribunicia potestas in 23 BCE—the year he had initially planned to celebrate the Secular Games. This grant gave him all of the powers of the tribune, including, importantly, the rights to convoke the Senate, propose legislation, and protect the people from magisterial abuse.

Given that these grants occurred in 36 and 23, before the advents that Augustus recounts in these chapters, one is prompted to inquire into the reasons for reporting them in this context. One possible reason is the partly religious nature of the tribunate, which is here being coupled with the pontificate as yet another way in which Augustus embodies sacred authority. Another reason may be the proposed relationship between the Ara Pacis and the tribuneship. The reach of Augustus' intercessio tribunicia was spatially symbolized by the placement of the Ara Pacis (mentioned in RG 12) one mile from the pomerium—the same place where the magistrate's military imperium terminated as he returned to the city.¹⁵³ Augustus also reports his election as pontifex maximus out of chronological order. Augustus did not become pontifex maximus until 12 BCE, when the death of Lepidus had opened up the position once again.¹⁵⁴ Augustus makes a point of describing how, although Lepidus had obtained the office illegitimately (at least in Augustus' view), Augustus had refrained from taking up the priest's office until the death of its prior occupant. More important than this display of religious scruple, however, is the description of all Italy (cuncta Italia) coming to vote for Augustus in his election as pontifex maximus. This is surely an exaggeration, although a number of prominent citizens undoubtedly made the effort to come to Rome to vote for Augustus.¹⁵⁵ That his election to the supreme pontificate was a matter of some significance outside of Rome is attested in the Fasti Praenestini, which records the festivities of local magistrates and citizens celebrating the event.¹⁵⁶

One can look at this pairing of tribunician powers and the pontificate as representing popular support for Augustus in a sacred role in two different spatial spheres: within Rome and throughout all Italy. Viewed in this light, the tribunician role of the emperor seems to relate to his activities within Rome—the tribune's sacrosanctity and his potestas, after all, only extended to the first milestone outside the city, while the supreme pontificate, at least as Augustus constructs it in the RG, has the appearance of a kind of priesthood at large for all Italy.¹⁵⁷ The depiction of a huge gathering from all of Italy coming to Rome to vote for Augustus complements the earlier account of censuses in chapter 8. Having enrolled millions of new citizens, many of them Italians living outside of Rome, Augustus is now recognized and thanked by these clients in his election as pontifex maximus. The princeps depiction of this gathering thus also reaches back in time to recall the census of 70 as arranged by Pompey and Crassus. There, Pompey presented himself as a champion and exemplar of the upwardly mobile Italian knight. Here Augustus appears as the chief priest of a new cuncta Italia. The gathering of cuncta Italia to Rome to vote for Augustus also evokes the image of Cicero being welcomed home from exile by all communities along his route on the return journey to Rome.

There is yet something wanting in this interpretation of Augustus' organizational schema for reporting his tribunician powers and privileges and his election as pontifex maximus. One further key to understanding the schema's significance may be Augustus' reference to his father (pater meus), Caesar, as having held the priesthood before him.¹⁵⁸ As mentioned earlier, Augustus makes this reference to indicate, not so subtly, that the position was his by right of inheritance. The Senate had decreed in 44 BCE that any son of Caesar, whether natural or adopted, should inherit the chief priesthood from him.¹⁵⁹ Antony had instead shoehorned Lepidus into the position in order to gain Lepidus' loyalty.¹⁶⁰ So perhaps one purpose for Augustus' allusion to the fact that he had every right to be pontifex maximus but had defied popular sentiment in not summarily replacing Lepidus after the triumvir's betrayal in Sicily and, even after the latter's death, had sought election to the position was to show both his patience and his extreme caution in observing all the appropriate formalities and navigating the sensibilities of the most demanding senatorial critics.

But there is more to the Caesar reference than this. Caesar is brought up four times in the RG. Two of these occur in the chapters presently under discussion. The first time, in chapter 2, deals with vengeance for the crime of Caesar's murder, which was both a matter of personal obligation and state interest because of the blatant illegality of the assassination. This second reference in chapter 10 is important because it concerns a position of sacred authority that Caesar passed down to his heir by senatorial decree. By forgoing that claim of right by inheritance in favor of relying on popular vote, Augustus' deferral of entering the chief priesthood has something of the flavor of a recusatio regni, such as the one Caesar himself engaged in during the January 44 ovation. As discussed in chapter 4 of the present study, Caesar's joke to defuse the royal acclamation was founded on an earlier statement he made during his aunt Julia's funeral: Amitae meae Iuliae maternum genus ab regibus ortum, paternum cum diis inmortalibus coniunctum est. nam ab Anco Marcio sunt Marcii Reges, quo nomine fuit mater; a Venere Iulii, cuius gentis familia est nostra (“My aunt Julia's maternal line descends from kings, her paternal line mingled with the immortal gods. For the Marcii Reges, her mother's name, are descendants of Ancus Marcius; the Julii—my family is of this line—are descendants of Venus”).¹⁶¹ In saying that he was not Rex but Caesar, he was correcting the crowd's reading of his performance. The procession from the Alban Mount to Rome had not been intended to signal his bid for the monarchy; it had instead commemorated the original immigration of the Julii to Rome after the fall of Alba Longa by the arms of Tullus Hostilius.

In RG 10, Augustus alludes to the second part of Caesar's statement about his ancestry from the laudatio of Julia: est ergo in genere et sanctitas regum, qui plurimum inter homines pollent, et caerimonia deorum, quorum ipsi in potestate sunt reges (“There is in this line both the sanctity of kings, who are exceedingly powerful among men, and the majesty of the gods, whose power rules the kings themselves”). Here Caesar asserts that the inheritance belonging to his aunt and, implicitly, to him is the sanctitas of the kings and the caerimonia of the gods, the latter of which seems to rival royal power. In chapter 10 of the RG, Augustus' tribunician sacrosanctitas recalls the sanctitas regum of Caesar's oration, and the election to the supreme pontificate evokes the caerimonia deorum. While the sacrosanctitas of the tribunes is founded on an oath of the plebs, Caesar's sanctitas possesses a congenital quality—it passed down through the family. Caesar's view is unusual, however, since it was usually thought that sanctitas was bestowed by inauguratio.¹⁶² Thus things and people that were inaugurated possessed sanctitas. The Vestal Claudia was able, through her sanctitas, to prevent a sacrosanct tribune from interfering with her brother's illicit triumphal procession.¹⁶³ Clearly the two qualities were similar enough that they could operate in the same sphere and with similar force, although sanctitas arguably trumped sacrosanctitas because of the assumed superiority of inauguration over the plebeian oath. By referring to his sacrosanctitas and following it up directly with reference to his tribunicia potestas, Augustus prefers the image of people's champion over the sanctitas of his Julian inheritance.¹⁶⁴

Augustus' account of his election as pontifex maximus corresponds with Caesar's reference to the family's caerimonia deorum, or “majesty of the gods.” This correlation depends on the double sense of caerimonia, which not only means “majesty” but also, in a more concrete sense, refers to the sacred rites of the state, which were overseen by the pontifical college.¹⁶⁵ Many of these rites had come to Rome from Alba Longa. Caesar's reference to these caerimonia was already freighted with both senses, in that he not only referred explicitly to the divine parentage of Aeneas but also indirectly invoked the transplantation of Trojan cult onto Latin soil through Aeneas' guardianship over the Penates. These Penates and the Palladium were entrusted to the care of the Vestal Virgins, who fell under the authority of the pontifex maximus. Timaeus is our earliest source for the presence of the cult of the Trojan Penates in Lavinium, so it is likely that Julius Caesar included their cult in the sacred inheritance of his family through his reference to the caerimonia deorum in his laudatio funebris for his aunt Julia.¹⁶⁶ Augustus' account of his election to the supreme pontificate thus carries the sense of a rightful restoration of his Julian inheritance, no doubt partly because the Senate had decreed in 44 that any son of Caesar, whether natural or adopted, should inherit the post from him.¹⁶⁷ That an election had made him pontifex maximus was proper, according to Augustus' argument, because the city was thus entrusting the caerimonia deorum to the care of the family whence they originated. Although Antony and Lepidus had interfered in this arrangement, Augustus now resumed the familial duty of overseeing the Trojan cults and other caerimonia of Rome in accordance with the will of the people of all Italy.¹⁶⁸ Also, as pontifex maximus, he was inaugurated and thus possessed sanctitas in addition to his sacrosanctitas.

In his name, however, Augustus already possessed an association with augury and inaugurated spaces, which provided him a unique symbolic sanctity.¹⁶⁹ It is thus important to recognize that the references to his sacrosanctitas and the supreme pontificate are not intended to explain how it is that he came to possess holiness (although it does allude to the circumstances).¹⁷⁰ Rather, the presentation of these facts adds to the overall impression of sanctity that is introduced by the first appearance of his name in the RG. At the same time, his enumeration of these attributes allowed him to allude to Julius Caesar's theology of personal power, which Caesar referenced in his aunt's funeral and his January 44 ovation. On the latter occasion, Caesar had sought to quell suspicions that he desired kingship by reenacting his family's migration to Rome at the destruction of Alba Longa. Caesar was emphasizing not his royal heritage but his patrician senatorial heritage, and he did so in a way that defined patrician identity as open-ended. Just as Caesar's own family had become patrician, so, too, others were granted patrician status by Caesar at the time. Caesar had granted Octavian's family patrician status in 45.¹⁷¹ Augustus eventually took up his Caesarian inheritance of pontifex maximus, but he worked more deftly in yoking together images of universal consensus and entitlement. Like Caesar, he cultivated a sense of his sanctitas, albeit through means that possessed a broader appeal, and he emphasized the broad support in Italy for his cura over the caerimonia deorum, so that his position would more clearly appear to be the will of all and not simply a familial entitlement.

There is a much grander overarching schema at work here, however, than the reference to Caesar's personal theology. Augustus made use of Caesar's theology creatively and with an eye to crafting his own theological statement. The particulars of Augustus' claims depended concretely on his adoption, but in broader terms, his success hinged on his ability to justify his own position independent of Caesar. This strategy is clearly present in the Res Gestae, where Augustus briefly and unobtrusively alludes to Caesar's career and his own relationship with Caesar but stresses, above all, his individual achievements. Augustus could not simply point to Caesar as the sum total of his own argument for legitimacy. Neither could he simply co-opt Caesar's performances. Each Roman elite male depended, in the final analysis, on his own performance as the bedrock justification for his position in Roman society and politics, as well as his legacy. Thus, in crafting his own personal theology of power, Augustus situated his deeds in a mythological framework that predated and therefore transcended Caesar. At the opening of the RG, he did this by alluding to Romulus. He connected his career after the civil war with the legend of Numa Pompilius.

1. Elsner's discussion (1991, 52) of the implication of the viewer into the cultural process of the Ara Pacis is pertinent to the reader's experience of the Res Gestae: “In looking at the altar Roman viewers did not simply see images of a sacrifice that once happened. They saw a cultural process in which they became involved.” Galinsky (1998, 35) writes of Augustan art's “intentional multiplicity of associations and their determination by the beholder who thereby becomes an active participant.” The readers of the RG became involved in the arrivals of Augustus that are described in its first thirteen chapters, which also influenced their experience of the Ara Pacis and the Forum of Augustus.

2. Suet. Aug. 8.2; D.C. 45.3; Nic. Dam. Vit. Caes. 18. For a detailed discussion of Octavian's initial arrival in 44, see Toher 2004, 174–84.

3. On commanders' returns from the East, see Sumi 2005, 35–41. Sumi notes, “On his return journey, Flamininus seems to have established what would become the traditional route of a commander returning from the east. He landed in Brundisium and marched through Italy in a manner that, Livy tells us, had the appearance of a triumphal procession (prope triumphantes), with Flamininus at the head of a column of soldiers, the spoils of war being conveyed behind.” See Liv. 34.52.2. The young Octavian took the precautionary measure of first landing at Lupiae instead of Brundisium, allowing him to gather intelligence on the prospects of an enthusiastic reception at that traditional stop on the commander's route.

4. Sumi 2005, 125–31; Southern 1998, 22–32; Gotter 1996, 56–65; Gowing 1992, 59–64; Alföldi 1976, 46–49; Syme 1939, 114–15; Becht 1911.

5. On Augustus' advents and triumphs, see Benoist 1999, 149–51; 2005, 36–49; Sumi 2005, 121–262; Lehnen 1997, 63–66; Lacey 1996a, 39–56.

6. Vows were made for the emperor's salus in anticipation of his profectio and were fulfilled upon his safe return. These practices are documented in the Acta Fratrum Arvalium. See Gradel 2002, 20–22; Henzen 1874.

7. Thein 2009, 87–109; Wiseman 2009, 111–23.

8. On the Res Gestae, see Cooley 2009; Ridley 2003; Ramage 1987; Brunt and Moore 1967.

9. Augustus' statement in RG 1 about freeing the Republic from the domination of a faction (rem publicam a dominatione factionis opressam in libertatem vindicavi) is very close to the wording of Caesar's own claim to have freed the state from a faction in Civ. 1.22.5: ut se et populum Romanum factione paucorum oppressum in libertatem vindicaret. See Rich 2010, 176.

10. The assumption that the RG is not literature is ubiquitous, but a recent example illustrates the issue. In a discussion of the structure of sovereignty in early imperial Rome, Lowrie (2005, 42), turning to the Res Gestae, remarks, “At this point, I have moved outside of literature, but not outside of representing media.” The object in raising this issue is not to argue for the literary quality of the RG but to suggest that such gestures of classification can and do impact the text's interpretation.

11. Velleius (2.100.2) describes the dedication in terms that communicate well its spectacular and commemorative nature.

12. See map 1.

13. Cic. Att. 16.15.4; App. BC 3.41–42; D.C. 45.12.4–6; Sumi 2005, 161–68.

14. RG 12. On the Ara Pacis Augustae, see LTUR 4.70–74. In the present book, see map 1 for the location of the Ara Pacis and figure 4 for a picture of the altar.

15. For a sampling of the vast bibliography on the processions depicted on the Ara Pacis, see Ryberg 1949; Kleiner 1978; Billows 1993; Stern 2006.

16. The identification of both scenes is admittedly problematic. The Lupercal is extremely fragmentary. For a discussion of the evolution of the Lupercal's identification, see Stern 2006, 172. Sieveking (1907, 187) first proposed that the bearded, togate figure identified here as Numa was, in fact, Aeneas. Pollini (2012, 242–47) argues in favor of that view. Richardson first suggested that the figure was instead Numa at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in 1978 at Seattle, Washington. I thank Prof. Jim Anderson for the preceding information. The late Paul Rehak (2001, 190–208; 2006, 115–20) argued in favor of Richardson's hypothesis in great detail. The view of Richardson and Rehak is adopted here. Pollini's objections are substantive, but the author was unable to check those that require autopsy of the monument. Pollini's identification of the altar's temple of the Penates as proleptic and anachronistic but nonetheless consistent with a representation of Aeneas is an interesting solution but is not without its problems. Stern (2006, 406–16) follows Rehak's position on the identity of Numa but interprets the figures in the small temple as the Penates. See figure 2 for the Numa panel.

17. Suetonius (Aug. 7.2) reports that someone suggested the possibility of Octavian taking the name Romulus before he settled on Augustus. Galinsky (1998, 84) observes, “Augustus was both Numa and Romulus.”

18. Liv. 1.21.

19. Galinsky (1998, 282–83) sees the values of Livy and Augustus converging in the idea that the stable Republic required a balance of the virtues of Romulus and Numa.

20. Ramage 1987, 74–100.

21. Torelli 1982, 27–29.

22. On the childhood of the twins and founding, see Liv. 1.4–7; D.H. 2.76–87; Plu. Rom. 2–10. On the Lupercal scene, see Stern 2006, 172; Rehak 2006, 113–15.

23. Liv. 1.4.

24. Starr (2009) has made the same connection. On late-republican dynasts as the new Romulus, see Alföldi 1951, 190–215.

25. On the discovery of the head of Mars under Palazzo Fiano-Peretti in 1859, see Moretti 1939, 4; Stern 2006, 172. Roller (2007) has argued that the Mars Ultor was actually vowed by Marc Antony.

26. Enn. Ann. 2, fr. 1: O pater, o genitor, o sanguen dis oriundum…Rehak (2001, 114) identifies the Mars of the Lupercal scene as the “eponymous divinity of the Campus Martius.” This suggestion is attractive, since this Mars faces Numa, the king who dedicated the Ara Martis on the Campus Martius. The present reading approaches the problem through the RG, which takes into account the further development of the dedication of the Temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus.

27. RG 35.

28. Plu. Rom. 16.5–8. Although he does not credit Romulus with the first triumph, Livy shows the king celebrating the first spolia opima (1.10) and later (1.16) shows him holding a review of his army at Caprae Palus on the Campus Martius after his victory of Veii: his inmortalibus editis operibus cum ad exercitum recensendum contionem in campo ad Caprae paludem haberet. The Caprae Palus was located near the Ara Martis, where, according to Varro (Fest. 204 L), the secunda spolia were to be dedicated. This location was also close to the Villa Publica, where the census would later be held. The military review, then, takes on something of the image of both a proto-triumph and a proto-census. In the midst of Romulus’ military review, a thunderstorm blows in, clouds envelop Romulus, and he disappears. Livy thus connects this Romulean proto-triumph to the founder's apotheosis.

29. Augustus refers to Mars in RG 12, 21, 29. He alludes to Romulus in RG 1 and 35 and by way of the temples of Jupiter Feretrius and Quirinus, and he lists the Lupercal among other structures he built in RG 19. On the latter, see Cooley 2009, 186–87. Cooley notes the significance of the juxtaposition of the Temple of the Divine Julius and the Lupercal in this passage. In 44, Iulii joined the Quinctilii and Fabii to make the third sodality of luperci. The honor immediately fell into abeyance. See Cic. Phil. 13.31; Suet. Jul. 76.1; D.C. 44.6.2. On the end of the luperci Iulii, see Wissowa 1912, 559; Kienast 2001, 8 n. 46.

30. Hor. Carm. 3.14.

31. As Morgan (2005) argued, Horace (Carm. 3.14) employed the image of Hercules to stress Augustus' role in uniting Italy. The comparison of Hercules and Augustus is explicit in the opening stanza: Herculis ritu modo dictus, o plebs, / morte venalem petiisse laurum / Caesar Hispana repetit Penatis / victor ab ora. See also Nisbet 1983, 112–14.

32. Ridley (2003, 97–98) notes, however, that the expression ovans triumphavi seems to be an attempt to raise the number of triumphs to five. The ovation thus becomes a form of triumph, which is not altogether inaccurate when viewed through the modern treatment of the subject. Augustus might have simply enumerated five triumphs. This suggests that the balance of triumphal celebrations with the returns and closings of Janus was quite deliberate.

33. Dufraigne 1994, 41–42; Benoist 2005, 42. For the unceremonious, nocturnal return in 19, see D.C. 54.10.4. For Augustus' avoidance of a welcome celebration in 13, see D.C. 54.25.3–4. Suetonius (Aug. 53.2) writes of Augustus' general preference to avoid crowds sending him off or receiving him, leading him to depart and return at night. See also Lacey 1996a, 45–48.

34. RG 25.1: mare pacavi a praedonibus. eo bello servorum qui fugerant a dominis suis et arma contra rem publicam ceperant triginta fere millia capta dominis ad supplicium sumendum tradidi. The deliberate juxtaposition of bello and servorum suggests that this was a servile war like the war against Spartacus, a most insulting way to dispense with the memory of Sextus Pompey. See Cooley 2009, 214. By referring to the suppression of pirates and servile war together, Augustus implicitly compares himself with Pompey the Great and asserts his superiority. See Flugmann 1991, 311.

35. D.C. 51.19.2–21.2. Lehnen (1997, 64) attributes this refusal of the honor of the apantêsis to Augustus' desire to avoid Hellenistic royal pomp. Although culturally marked, such a welcoming embassy was not necessarily novel. Recall that L. Postumius Albinus had ordered Praeneste to provide him one in the early decades of the second century BCE. What was novel was the conferral of the honor by senatorial decree. Furthermore, since Romans had been attending the profectiones and reditus of magistrates for centuries, Lehnen must be mistaken in his interpretation of Suet. Aug. 53.2 as indicating that Augustus' general desire to avoid welcoming and departure ceremonies was evidence of the same fastidious avoidance of Hellenistic pomp. Suetonius' language does not appear to support such a reading: non temere urbe oppidove ullo egressus aut quoquam ingressus est nisi vespera aut noctu, ne quam officii causa inquietaret. See also Carter 1982, 176.

36. D.C. 51.21.2 (trans. Cary).

37. Desanges 1957, 5–43. Pliny (Nat. 5.36) calls our attention to the fact that Balbus was the first non-Italian to triumph.

38. Beard (2007, 301–2) raises Suetonius' (Aug. 38.1) reference to the fact that Augustus' reign saw more than thirty iusti triumphi to show that Balbus' triumph may not, in fact, have been the last celebrated by someone outside the imperial family.

39. Benoist (2005, 43–44) describes this difficult period: “Certes, le contexte politique de ces années 19–13 estil de nature à expliquer les embarras du prince, ou du moins sa volonté de refuser toute manifestation par trop ostentatoire de son pouvoir. Contestation des élites, comme le prouvent les difficultés de recrutement de certains magistrats, crises ponctuelles entraînant la colère populaire (famines et crues du Tibre), qui s'exprime notamment par la volonté d'obtenir du prince l'acceptation de pouvoirs exceptionnels, le régime peine encore à trouver un équilibre à la fois institutionnel et politico-social.”

40. On the Ara Fortunae Reducis, see LTUR 2.275; NTDAR s.v. Fortuna Redux, Ara; MAR s.v. Honos et Virtus, Aedes (Ad Portam Capenam), 138.

41. Van der Vin 1981, 122.

42. RG 12. For a recent discussion of the affair of Egnatius Rufus and bibliography on the issue, see Phillips 1997, 103–12. On the recasting of the embassy, see Ridley 2003, 180–81.

43. RG 12.

44. The characterization of Pax as pacification by force is, of course, the version celebrated in Verg. A. 6.852–53 and on the Ara Pacis, where armed Roma sits on a pile of weapons in the northeast panel. As will be discussed shortly, although Augustus explicitly refers to this parta victoriis pax in RG 13, he distances himself from the victoriae at that point. For the distinction between pax civilis and parta victoriis pax, see Weinstock 1950, 45–46. On pax civilis and its relationship with concordia in particular, see Jal 1961, 210–31. On martial pax, see Woolf 1993, 171–94. On Augustus' ideology of war and peace, see Gruen 1985, 51–72.

45. Benoist (2005, 45) sees the representation of these two returns as more consequential than Caesar's triple triumph in 29 in the formation of the Principate.

46. Rehak 2001, 197; 2006, 118–19. On Numa as the originator of the Fetial Law and its rites, see D.H. 2.72.1–3; Plu. Num. 12.3–7; Cam. 18.1.

47. NTDAR s.v. Mars, Ara. On the location of the Ara Martis, see Welin 1954.

48. Fest. 204 L: Pompili regis legem…secunda spolia, in Martis ara in campo solitaurilia utra voluerit caedito. This law is also transmitted by Plutarch (Marc. 8.5). On the spolia opima, see Versnel 1971, 306–12; Flower 2000b.

49. De Grummond 1990; Claridge 1998, 187; Rehak 2001, 123. The proposed identities of this goddess are numerous. Galinsky (1992) views the image as polysemic. See figure 3 in the present book.

50. Grimal 1983, 135.

51. LTUR 3.92–93; NTDAR s.v. Ianus Geminus. For recent discussion of Augustus and Janus, see Lange 2009, 140–48.

52. Liv. 1.19.2; Plin. Nat. 34.33.

53. Liv. 1.19.4: clauso eo cum omnium circa finitimorum societate ac foederibus iunxisset animos.

54. On the three closings of the Gates of Janus, see Suet. Aug. 22. Syme (1979, 202–4) argues for a date in 8 or 7 BCE. Rich (2003, 356) has argued that there may not have been a third closing.

55. R. Taylor (2000, 8) seems to question the association of the Janus Quirinus and the Ara Pacis because of a lack of consistency in poetic representations of Janus as a custos Pacis. The Gates of War sometimes keep war out (Hor. S. 1.4.60–61; Ov. Fast. 1.279–81); at other times (Verg. A. 1.293–96; Ov. Fast. 1.121–24), they keep bloody war in the shrine, to prevent it from bursting out into the city. A lack of consensus among poets, however, would not prevent Augustus from coming down on one side of the issue. On Janus and his temple as augur and auguraculum, see Holland 1961, 24–25; Torelli 1982, 33–35; R. Taylor 2000, 11–25; Rehak 2001, 196.

56. The latter was an augural ceremony that could only be conducted when no Roman armies were fighting. Its purpose was to determine whether it was propitious to ask the gods to grant the state safety. Cf. Suet. Aug. 31.4; D.C. 51.19.2–3, 51.20.4. Beard, North, and Price (1998, 1:100 n. 145) suggest that Plu. Aem. 39.3–4 refers to the same ceremony, performed at the end of Aemilius Paullus' life. Cf. Liegle 1942.

57. Fest. 204 L; Plu. Marc. 8.5; Serv. A. 6.859.

58. In 19, Augustus ordered that a temple to Mars Ultor be built. Contemporary coins such as BMC 704, minted at Pergamon, show a small round sacellum that must have approximated the shrine of Feretrius. This temple, however, was never built. See Simpson 1977, 92–93.

59. For the places of dedication as prescribed by the commentaries of Numa, see Plu. Marc. 8.5.

60. So Ovid (Fast. 1.279–80) has his Janus claim: ut populo reditus pateant ad bella profecto, / tota patet dempta ianua nostra sera. Cf. also Serv. A. 1.294: ideo autem Ianus belli tempore patefiebat, ut eiusdem conspectus per bellum pateret, in cuius potestate esset exitus reditusque; id enim ipsa significat eius effigies praebentis se exeuntibus et redeuntibus ducem. hunc autem olim Numa Pompilius fecit, cuius portas regni tempore clausit. Rüpke (1990, 139–40) argues that the Janus Geminus was the original gate through which the army mustered in the Forum Romanum. When the gates were open, it signaled a state of war and the beginning of the muster.

61. He is invoked first in the Salian Hymn. See Var. L. 7.26. Macrobius (1.9.9) indicates that the invocation of Janus first was a regular practice: Ianum…volunt…invocari primum, cum alicui deo res divina celebratur, ut per eum pateat ad illum cui immolatur accessus, quasi preces supplicum per portas suas ad deos ipse transmittat. See Taylor 2000, 11.

62. Macrobius (1.9.9) writes of Janus as the sun, but the text he presents seems, rather, to indicate Janus' function as the portals of dawn and dusk: Ianum quidam solem demonstrari volunt, et ideo geminum quasi utriusque ianuae caelestis potentem, qui exoriens aperiat diem, occidens claudat. As portals of dawn and dusk, located presumably on the horizon, the cosmic Janus would be a gateway between worlds, an idea that is similar to the twin gates of the underworld as portrayed in Verg. A. 6.893: sunt geminae belli portae.

63. Vergil (A. 8.355–58) describes Janus as the first monarch to settle in the area of Rome on the Janiculum; Ovid (Fast. 1.235–38) recounts Janus' reception of Saturn after Jupiter had expelled Saturn from his kingdom. These views presuppose a euhemeristic understanding of the god. Macrobius (1.9.2), quoting Xenon's Italicon, preserves a much more explicitly euhemeristic account of Janus. Xenon's Janus is given divine honors because of his benefactions in protecting houses.

64. See n. 54.

65. RG 8.

66. Var. L. 6.93: censor exercitum centuriato constituit quinquennalem cum lustrare et in urbem ad vexillum ducere debet.

67. RG 5–7.

68. V. Max. 5.6.3; Ov. Met. 15.565–621; Plin. Nat. 11.123.45.

69. Plu. Sull. 27.4; August. C.D. 2.24. The location of this omen is suggestive. Tarentum, otherwise known as Taras, was a colony of Sparta. Sparta was traditionally ruled by two kings. The people of Tarentum called on Pyrrhus of Epirus to invade Italy and save them from expanding Roman power in the early third century.

70. Marks (2004, 113 n. 18), in writing of Ovid's version, has cautioned against assumptions regarding the poet's purpose and the legacy of Caesar. The present reading focuses instead on Augustus' own concern with his image as he entered the city. This concern, which is readily apparent in the RG, made the story of Cipus a timely topic for exploration as a poetic subject and an exemplum in the early Principate. Marks (108–13, 120–28) reads Ovid's Cipus as pointing to the futility of worrying about the crown or its absence, since Romulus had claimed Rome as spear-won land at the foundation of the city, rendering any attempt to avoid kingship ultimately doomed.

71. See the discussion in chapter 3. Augustus was unable to complete a census using regular censors in 22 (D.C. 54.2.1–2).

72. Livy (Per. 98) appears to have transmitted a record of nine hundred thousand citizens at the census of 70/69 BCE.

73. D.C. 53.33.4–5. [Acro.] ad Carm. Saec. 8 mentions that pestilence might prompt the celebration of the Ludi Tarentini: cum Roma pestilentia laboraret, ex libris Sibyllinis iussum est, ut Diti Patri ad Terentum stipes mitteretur. On the plans for a 23 BCE celebration of the Secular Games, see Merkelbach 1961, on Verg. A. 65–70, 791–4; Syme 1939, 339; Mattingly 1934, 162–63. Mattingly argues in favor of 22. Devices to mark the advent of the new saeculum included the so-called second settlement. See CAH X² 85–87. Augustus laid down his eleventh consulship on July 1, making it clear that he would no longer fill the office. He was invested with tribunicia potestas; his imperium became maius. He was offered the censorship for life in 22, but he declined and appointed P. Aemilius Paulus and L. Munatius Plancus to the censorship. Cf. D.C. 54.2.1. Wiseman (1969, 63) thinks it likely that tension between these censors prevented the census' completion.

74. Lintott 1999, 115–20; Drummond 1998, 197–98; Nicolet 1980, 48–88.

75. Varro (L. 6.86–87) provides an account of the commencement of the census, which involved the reading of auspices in the sacred area set aside for the ritual; the herald's pronouncement of the summons, including a prayer for the success of the census; and the anointing of censors, scribes, and magistrates with myrrh and balsams. On issues of religion and identity in the census, see Simón 2006, 157–65.

76. Var. L. 6.93: censor exercitum centuriato constituit quinquennaliem, cum lustrare et in urbem vexillum ducere debet.

77. Nicolet 1980, 51–52.

78. Baltrusch 1989.

79. Cic. Dom. 1.1–2: cum multa divinitus, pontifices, a maioribus nostris inventa atque instituta sunt, tum nihil praeclarius quam quod eosdem et religionibus deorum immortalium et summae rei publicae praeesse voluerunt, ut amplissimi et clarissimi cives rem publicam bene gerendo religiones, religiones sapienter interpretando rem publicam conservarent.

80. Inscr. Ital. 1.254–55: idem censoria potest. lustrum fecer. See Astin 1963, 226–35. Scholars dispute the precise authority by which Augustus performed the censuses reported in the RG. For discussion and bibliography, see Ferrary 2009, 105–7.

81. Cooley 2009, 140.

82. Wiseman 1969, 65–67.

83. Liv. 10.47. For Servius Tullius and the census, see D.H. 4.16.1–22.2; Liv. 42.4–43.11.

84. D.H. 5.20.1, 5.75.3, 6.96.4, 9.36.3; Liv. 3.3.9, 3.24.10. On consuls holding the census, see Suolahti 1963, 143–66.

85. Suolahti 1963, 146–47. The priority of Valerius in the number of consuls who conducted the census is also interesting because of the role that his ancestor Valesius played in instituting the Secular Games during the quest to heal his children, who had been afflicted with illness by the gods.

86. Suolahti 1963, 143.

87. Lacey (1996a, 35) argues that because Augustus never put down his imperium, this claim was legitimate: “[T]here has been an interminable debate on the date at which the triumvirate ended with a view to establishing whether Octavian's whole position was based on an illegality or not. But the debate, I suggest, is a complete waste of time, because, though magistracies always had a terminal date attached to them, they did not terminate until the magistrate had been succeeded or brought his imperium formally to an end.”

88. Liv. 1.42.4–5.

89. Liv. 1.44.1. Cf. Cic. Caec. 99.

90. Wiseman (1969, 62–65) argues that the term lustrum was often a synonym for census. While this is obviously the case here as well, it does not fully answer the question of why both terms are used.

91. The importance of two censors is evident in the fact that the death of one censor could scuttle the entire census. See Liv. 24.43.4. The death of the censor Publius Furius prevented the completion of the lustrum. His colleague, Marcus Atilius, resigned.

92. Liv. 40.45.8: comitiis confectis ut traditum antiquitus est censores in campo ad aram Martis sellis curulibus consederunt. Interestingly, this passage was followed by the approach of an embassy of principes senatorum and a speech by Q. Caecilius Metellus beseeching the two censors to put aside a personal feud in order to conduct the census successfully.

93. By the time of Augustus, rituals like the lustrum were subjected to learned speculation. In the case of the lustrum, it has been suggested that the ritual reflected the cosmic order and the continuation of the sun's beneficial effects on the community. See Koch 1933, 23–26; Szabó 1939, 135–60; Baudy 1998, 244–46.

94. Ogilvie 1961, 32–33.

95. Var. L. 6.26; Ov. Fast. 1.659–60; Fest. 55 L; Macr. 1.16.6.

96. Lucr. Nat. 3.1090; Thomas 2001, 4–5.

97. Thomas (2001, 6) translates, “This is the man, this is he who you are frequently told is promised to you, Augustus Caesar, offspring of a god, who will again close out ages of gold in Latium” (emphasis mine).

98. Livy (4.20.7) specifically identifies Augustus as a founder: templorum omnium conditorem ac restitutorem.

99. On the role of the founder's tomb in colonial founder cult, see Malkin 1987, 189–218.

100. Miles 1997, 120 n. 35: “The term conditor in its various inflections occurs only twenty-two times in Livy's extant work. With one exception, it is used always, whether in the singular or plural, to refer either to the founder(s) of a city (most often Rome) or to the founder of one or another specifically Roman institution.”

101. RG 8.5: legibus novis me auctore latis multa exempla maiorum exolescentia iam ex nostro saeculo reduxi et ipse multarum rerum exempla imitanda posteris tradidi.

102. Galinsky 2007, 77: “The underlying idea clearly was that of a historical marker and of an extended lustrum or periodic occasion for purification; the regular Roman lustrum, which also marked the election of censors, was every five years. Accordingly, the ritual centered on the gods of the Underworld, Dis (Pluto) and Proserpina, who had to be propitiated in various ways.” Poe (1984, 59) comments, “The function of the Secular Games was lustral.” On the Secular Games, see also Pighi 1962; Weiss 1973; Brind'Amour 1978; Moretti 1982–84; Hall 1986; Zanker 1990, 167–72; Galinsky 1998, 100–106; Rehak 2001, 26–28; Miller 2009, 270–75.

103. Censorinus DN 17.5: quo die urbes atque civitates constituerentur, de iis, qui eo die nati essent, eum, qui diutissime vixisset, die mortis suae primi saeculi modulum finire, eoque die qui essent reliqui in civitate, de his rursum eius mortem, qui longissimam egisset aetatem, finem esse saeculi secundi.

104. Hall 1986, 2567–69.

105. Liv. Per. 49; [Acr.] ad Carm. Saec. 8: bellum adversus Kartaginenses prospere geri posse, si Diti et Proserpinae triduo, idest tribus diebus et tribus noctibus, ludi fuissent celebrati et carmen cantatum inter sacrificia. hoc autem accidit consulibus P. Claudio Pulchro L. Iunio Pulchro. See also Censorinus DN 17.8.

106. Schnegg-Köhler 2002, 156–64.

107. August. C.D. 22.28; Taylor 1934a, 105–6. Lipka (2009, 148) perceptively picks out Augustus' theological aims in contrast with those of Sulla and Caesar in their victory games: “While Sulla and Caesar had intended to mark their own achievements and by extension that of their gens and its foundress, Venus, Augustus wanted to signal a new era. While Sulla's and Caesar's actional frame were the Civil Wars, Augustus' perspective was Roman history in its entirety…. Augustus set out to anchor his Games deeply in the Roman past, reaching back to the beginning of Roman democracy and out to the Greek world.”

108. Hijmans' argument (2004, 201–24) that the celebration signaled aeternitas, or the perpetual continuation of saecula, does not contradict this view. Indeed, the anxiety over the end of Rome would have prompted the assertion of this aeternitas.

109. For Varro's interest in astrology and Pythagoreanism, see Sarton 1993, 311–12. According to Censorinus (DN 21), Varro proffered the idea that human time was divided into three parts: the first division spanned from the appearance of men to the first flood in the time of Ogyges, the second from the flood to the first Olympiad, and the third from the first Olympiad to his day. This system is also used in structuring De gente populi Romani, which begins with the flood.

110. Versnel 1993, 323–24.

111. RG 22. Wiseman (1987, 25) offered a number of options for the ancestry of Agrippa, including Marsic and Assisian. Cf. Cairns 1995, 215–17.

112. The oracle for the games is preserved in Zos. 2.6. See Beard, North, and Price 1998, 1:205 n. 126.

113. Verg. A. 6.724–51. A serviceable candidate for his earlier incarnation would be the consul P. Valerius Volusi Publicola, the consul of 460, whose heroic charge against Appius Herdonius and death in the vestibule of the Capitoline Temple was described in Homeric terms by Livy (3.18). As Forsythe (2006, 205) argued, the Herdonius episode was fashioned according to the more recent memory of Saturninus' seizure of the Capitoline, which ended in his surrender to the consuls Marius and L. Valerius Flaccus.

114. 7–10. Du Quesnay (1999, 297) has pointed out the similarity between Vergil's image of the new generation coming down from heaven (caelo demittitur alto) and Cicero's suggestion, at De imperio 41, that Pompey was sent down from heaven (de caelo delapsum). Cf. Clausen 1994, 120–21, 132.

115. Plutarch (Num. 20.3–6) describes the time of Numa as a veritable Golden Age. See Betz 2009, 45–46.

116. V. Max. 2.4.5; Zos. 2.1.1–3. Palmer (1990, 29 n. 87) suggests that Phlegon may be Zosimus' source.

117. Zosimus (2.1.1) sees the function of the festival as curative: συντελεῖ δὲ πρὸς λοιμῶν καὶ φθορῶν καὶ νόσων ἀκέσεις. See n. 73 on the connection between pestilence and the celebration of these ludi.

118. RG 9.

119. Taylor 1934b, 222–24.

120. Cic. Phil. 1.13; Taylor 1934b, 225.

121. Serv. ad Ecl. 9.47.

122. Var. L. 6.23–24 (Vetter, 1957): Larentinae, quem diem quidam in scribendo Larentalia appellant, ab Acca Larentia nominatus, cui sacredotes nostri publice parentant ante diem VIIII Kal. Ian. post Saturnalia sexto die, qui atra dicitur dies ad locum dictum tarentum Accas Larentinas. [24] hoc sacrificium fit in Velabro qua in Novam Viam exitur, ut aiunt quidam ad sepulcrum Accae, ut quod ibi prope: faciunt diis Manibus servilibus induti vestibus sacerdotes. See Watkins 1991.

123. Watkins 1991, 135–48. Watkins proposes ancient Indo-European roots for the association of funerary cult at the tarentum with the regeneration of time. This may or may not be true, but its truth is not necessary for Varro to formulate a similar speculation.

124. For the census conducted by Publicola in 508, see D.H. 5.20.

125. Numa's relationship to the census has been mentioned. Livy characterizes the institution of the census by Servius as a Numa-like initiative. Also, the censors set their curules sellae next to Numa's Ara Martis as they prepared to conduct the census. See pp. 220–21.

126. Valerius' son would appeal to the people's fear of the gods—a Numan device—when trying to rally them to dislodge the would-be tyrant Herdonius from the Capitoline (Liv. 3.17.3).

127. RG 8.1: in consulatu sexto censum populi conlega M. Agrippa egi.

128. Cooley 2009, 138–39. Augustus increased the number of patricians in 29 through the lex Saenia. See D.C. 52.42.5. His lectiones senatus occur in 29 (D.C. 52.42.1), 18 (54.13.1), and 13 (54.26.3). Some confusion exists over the discrepancy between the number of lectiones that Augustus and Dio enumerate. Augustus reports three, while Dio reports five. Cooley discounts the fifth on the grounds that a commission, not Augustus himself, carried it out. Concerning the lectiones of 13 and 11, Astin (1963, 227–31) has argued that Dio described a single process started in 13 and ended in 11, while Rich (1990, 205) takes the position that Dio was simply mistaken about 13. Dio's chronology seems hopelessly confused, however. His dates of lectiones, censuses, and closures of the Gates of Janus simply cannot be harmonized with the information Augustus provides us in the RG. My suggestion is to privilege Augustus over Dio and place the paired census and lectio that Dio reports under the firm date that Augustus provides for his second census, 8 BCE. These events are thematically connected to the return in 13, because of their association with the dedication of the Ara Pacis and the closure of the Gates of Janus that both Mommsen (1883, 50) and Syme (1979, 202) date to 8/7.

129. André (1993, 110) called this process the “sacralisation” of Augustus.

130. RG 9.1: Vota pro salute mea suscipi per consules et sacerdotes quinto quoque anno senatus decrevit.

131. Cic. Marc. 22; Weinstock 1971, 170–71; Winkler 1995, 42. In the Pro Balbo (16), Cicero makes a similar claim regarding Pompey, which is of further interest in its parallels with the RG. It is here that he uses the Hellenistic formula terra marique in reference to Pompey's victories. Cicero jokes in Att. 12.45.3 that he would rather have Caesar's statue reside in Quirinus' temple than that of Salus. On Salus, see also Clark 2007, 253–54, 266; Winkler 1995, 16–35.

132. RG 9.1: Ex iis votis saepe fecerunt vivo me ludos aliquotiens sacredotum quattuor amplissima collegia, aliquotiens consules.

133. RG 9.2: Privatim etiam et municipatim universi cives unanimiter continenter apud omnia pulvinaria pro valetudine mea supplicaverunt.

134. Scott 1932, 284–87.

135. For the first gladiatorial munus in honor of the deceased in 264 BCE, see Liv. Per. 16. For other instances of funeral games, see Liv. 23.30, 39.46, 41.28. See also Wiedemann 2002, 5–6. On victory games in the Middle Republic, see Plin. Nat. 8.16–17; V. Max 2.7.13–14.

136. See Bernstein 1998, 314–50.

137. On Salus and the dynast during the Late Republic, see Weinstock 1971, 166–69, 172; Winkler 1995, 16–36; Moralee 2004, 17–18; Noreña 2011, 141.

138. Cooley 2009, 147. In Livy, Romulus' role in the founding of the Ara Maxima's cult foreshadows his own deification. See Levene 1993, 131–33.

139. For a literary description of the Ara Maxima's cult, see Verg. A. 8.280–307.

140. Aug. Anc. 12.1; Cooley 2009, 71.

141. RG 12.1: qui honos ad hoc tempus nemini praeter me est decretus.

142. Pittenger 2008.

143. Aug. Anc. 12: δόγματι συνκλήτου οἱ τὰς μεγίστας ἀρχὰς ἄρξαντες σὺν μέρει στρατηγῶν καὶ δημάρχων μετὰ ὑπάτου Κοΐντου Λουκρητίου ἐπέμφθησάν μοι ὑπαντήσοντες μέχρι Καμπανίας, ἥτις τειμὴ μέχρι τούτου οὐδὲ ἑνὶ εἰ μὴ ἐμοὶ ἐψηφίσθη.

144. D.C. 54.10.1–4; Vell. 2.91.3–92.5; Badot 1973, 606–15; Phillips 1997, 103–12; de Jonquieres 2004, 273–90; Cooley 2009, 153–4.

145. Vell. 2.91.4.

146. D.C. 54.10.1–2.

147. RG 12.2: cum ex Hispania Galliaque, rebus in iis provinciis prospere gestis, Romam redi, Tiberio Nerone Publio Quinctilio consulibus, aram Pacis Augustae senatus pro reditu meo consacrandam censuit ad campum Martium, in qua magistratus et sacerdotes virginesque Vestales anniversarium sacrificium facere iussit.

148. An exhaustive bibliography will not be provided here. See, e.g., Toynbee 1961, 153–56; Holliday 1990, 542–57; de Grummond 1990, 663–77; Rose 1990, 453–67; Elsner 1991, 50–61; Galinsky 1992, 457–75; Stern 2006.

149. On honorific grants of politeia by Greek cities of the Hellenistic era, see Dmitriev 2011, 105–6. Such grants were not, of course, limited to monarchs. Lamia granted politeia to the poetess Aristodama in 218/17. See Dittenberger 532.

150. CAH X² 68–69.

151. Bauman 1981, 179–80.

152. Liv. 3.55.6–7; D.H. 6.89.; Forsythe 2006, 171.

153. On the reach of Augustus' intercessio, see D.C. 51.19.6. On the significance of the placement of the Ara Pacis, see Torelli 1982, 29–30.

154. On the significance of Augustus' restraint in taking up the position of pontifex maximus, see Ridley 2005, 275–300.

155. This expression may owe something to an earlier boast of Cicero at Pis. 3: me cuncta Italia, me omnes ordines, me universa civitas non prius tabella quam voce priorem consulem declaravit.

156. Inscr. Ital. 2.121, 420–21.

157. On the geographical reach of the tribune's sacrosanctity, see Badian 1996, 195–96. Zecchini (2001, 137–46) argues that in refounding Carthage, Caesar used his authority as pontifex maximus to overcome the religious taboo connected with the site. If so, this application of the authority of the supreme pontificate outside of Rome could have served as a precedent for Augustus' broader conception of the office here in the RG.

158. On Caesar's election as supreme pontiff, see Plu. Caes. 7.1–4; Suet. Jul. 13, 46; D.C. 37.37; Pelling 2011, 159–60; Gruen 2009, 23; Wardle 2009, 102–3.

159. D.C. 44.5.3; Cooley 2009, 149–50. Cooley (150) writes, “Augustus is clearly implying here that, in his guise as Julius Caesar's adopted son, he was the one who should have been appointed in 44 BC, not Lepidus.”

160. Lepidus had acquired the post in 44 BCE, when Antony had the election of the pontifex maximus transferred from the people's assembly to the college of pontiffs. See D.C. 44.53.6–7; Scheid 1999, 3–4.

161. Suet. Jul. 6.1; Butler and Cary 1982, 49–50.

162. Linderski 1986, 2249–50 n. 407c.: “sanctus and sanctitas were the augural concepts;…according to the augural theory the sanctitas was bestowed by the act of inauguratio: the res sanctae were the res inauguratae.” Cf. Valeton 1892, 338–54. Festus (358 L) reports that the Etruscan libri rituales provided for the sanctification of altars and temples (areae aedes sacrentur), and he mentions the sanctity of the wall (qua sanctite muri). Cf. Paul. ex. Fest. 2 L: Augustus locus sanctus ab avium gestu, id est quia ab avibus significatus est, sic dictus; Ov. Fast. 1.609–10: sancta vocant augusta patres, augusta vocantur / templa sacerdotum rite dicata manu.

163. Wildfang 2006, 91–92. Wildfang follows Bauman (1992, 47) in viewing Claudia's actions as an innovation on the passive holiness (sanctitus) of the Vestals. Thanks to Claudia, future Vestals would be more assertive in their role in a manner that approximated tribunician sacrosanctitas. Some degree of caution regarding the word sanctitas is in order. Santi (2002) discusses the linguistics of its polysemy. Cicero (Cael. 13.32) spoke figuratively of matronarum sanctitas as a kind of informal inviolability that sprang from matronly virtue. On the maiestas and sanctitas of matrons, see Boëls-Janssen 2008.

164. On the tribunicia potestas, see Jones 1951, 115; CAH X² 68–69.

165. Wagenwoort 1956, 84–101.

166. Gruen 1992, 29.

167. D.C. 44.5.3.

168. Cooley 2009, 150.

169. Festus 2 L; Ov. Fast. 1.609–10.

170. It is nevertheless interesting and no doubt intentional that the report of his sacrosanctitas precedes the supreme pontificate in correct chronological order and that the former was granted at a time when the people urged Augustus to replace Lepidus as pontifex maximus. Viewed in this light, the grant of sacrosanctitas may be interpreted as a kind of substitute for the sanctitas he implicitly refused by not replacing Lepidus.

171. Suet. Aug. 2.1.