Ara Pacis

Ara Pacis Augustae, the "Altar of Augustan Peace", as reassembled

Ara Pacis:Detail of the processional frieze showing members of the Senate (north face)

Ara Pacis: Processional frieze showing Augustus as high priest of Rome, accompanied by members of his family(south face)

Ara Pacis: the Tellus panel

The Ara Pacis Augustae (Latin, "Altar of Augustan Peace"; commonly shortened to Ara Pacis) is an altar to Peace, envisioned as a Roman goddess. It was commissioned by the Roman Senate on 4 July 13 BC to honor the triumphal return from Hispania and Gaul of the Roman emperor Augustus,^[1] and was consecrated on 30 January 9 BC by the Senate to celebrate the peace established in the Empire after Augustus's victories.^[2] The altar was meant to be a vision of the Roman civil religion. It sought to portray the peace and fertile prosperity enjoyed as a result of the Pax Augusta (Latin, "Augustan peace") brought about by the military supremacy of the Roman empire, and act as a visual reminder of the Julio-Claudian dynasty that was bringing it about.

The Altar

The Ara Pacis stood within an enclosure elaborately and finely sculpted entirely in gleaming white marble, depicting scenes of traditional Roman piety, in which the Emperor and his family were portrayed in the act of offering sacrifices to the gods. Various figures bring forth cattle to be sacrificed. Some have their togas drawn over their heads, like a hood; this signifies that they are acting in their official capacity as priests. Others wear laurel crowns, traditional symbols of victory. Men, women, and children all approach the gods. Themes of civil peace are linked to themes of the dynastic Julio-Claudian claims, and the importance of religion as a civilizing force, in rites of which some were consciously being revived for the occasion, according to Augustus himself.

The Altar is universally recognized as a masterpiece, the most famous surviving example of Augustan sculpture; the life-sized figures in the procession are not idealized types, as are typically found in Greek sculpture, but rather portraits of individuals, some of them recognizable today.

G. Karl Galinsky pointed out^[3] that the sculpture of the Ara Pacis is primarily symbolic rather than decorative, and that its iconography has several levels of significance. Studies of the Ara Pacis and similar public Roman monuments traditionally address the potent political symbolism of their decorative programs, that emphasizes dynastic and other imperial policies. The Ara Pacis is seen to embody without conscious effort the deep-rooted ideological connections among cosmic sovereignty, military force and fertility that were first outlined by Georges Dumézil,^[4] connections which are attested in early Roman culture and more broadly in the substructure of Indo-European culture at large.^[5] It has been suggested by Peter Holliday^[6] that the Altar's imagery of the Golden Age, usually discussed as mere poetic allusion, actually appealed to a significant component of the Roman populace. The program of the Ara Pacis addressed this group's very real fears of cyclical history, and promised that the rule of Augustus would avert the cataclysmic destruction of the world predicted by contemporary models of historical thought.

The figures

The long friezes of the Ara Pacis (the North and South Walls, so called today because of the modern layout) contain figures advancing towards the West who participate in a state of thanksgiving to celebrate the Peace created by Augustus. These figures fall into four categories: lictors (men carrying fasces, bodyguards of magistrates); priests (three of the four major collegia — Pontifices, Septemviri, and Quindecemviri): women and children (generally from the imperial family, represented in portraiture); and attendants (a few anonymous figures necessary for religious purposes).

In addition there are two or three non-Roman children, who may be guests (or hostages) in Rome. Their identification by their non-Roman costume and their participation in the ceremony advertises to all that Rome is the center of the world, and that other nations send their young to Rome to learn Roman ways, so great is Rome's reputation.

The ceremony took place in the summer of 13 BCE, but not necessarily on 4 July, when the Senate voted to build the Ara Pacis.

The east and west walls

The East and West walls each contain two panels, one well preserved and one represented only in fragments.

The East Wall contains a badly preserved scene of a female warrior (bellatrix), possibly Roma, apparently sitting on a pile of weapons confiscated from the enemy, thus forcing peace upon them by rendering them unable to make war. This scene has been reconstructed based on coins that depict such a seated Roma. When the monument was being reconstructed at its present site, Edmund Buchner and other scholars sketched what the panel may have looked like. This interpretation, though widely accepted, can not be proved correct, as so little of the original panel survives.

The other panel is more controversial in its subject, but far better preserved. A goddess sits amid a scene of fertility and prosperity with twins on her lap. Scholars have suggested that the goddess is Italia, Tellus (Earth), Venus, or Peace (other views also circulate). Peace (Pax Augusta) makes the most sense since the entire scene depicts the benefits of peace, and the monument is the "Altar of Augustan Peace," not the "Altar of Italy" or "the Altar of Earth." The exact identity of the goddess remains debated, however.^[7]

The West Wall also contains two panels. The fragmentary panel called "The Lupercal Panel" apparently preserves the moment when Romulus and Remus were discovered by Faustulus the shepherd, while Mars looks on.

The better preserved scene depicts the sacrifice of a pig (the standard sacrifice when Romans made a peace treaty) by an old priest and two attendants. A century ago this scene was identified by Johannes Sieveking^[8] as the moment when Aeneas, newly arrived in Italy, sacrificed a sow and her piglets to Juno, as told by Vergil and others. This identification was enthusiastically accepted by scholars at once. In the 1960s, Stephan Weinstock challenged this identification (and the very identity of the entire monument), citing numerous discrepancies that Sieveking and his followers had failed to notice between Vergil's version and the panel. Subsequently, Paul Richardson proposed,^{[citation needed]} and Paul Rehak later published ^[9] an alternate identification of the scene as Numa Pompilius, the Roman king associated with Peace and the Gates of Janus. This new interpretation is slowly gaining ground among scholars.

North wall

The North Wall has about 46 extant or partially extant figures. The first two foreground figures are lictors, carrying fasces (bundles of rods symbolizing Roman authority). The next set of figures consists of priests from the college of the Septemviri Epulones, so identified by an incense box they carry with special symbols. One member of this college is missing in a gap.

After them follows the collegium of the Quindecemviri Sacris Faciundis, also identified by the incense box carried by a public slave among them. Although the name suggest this college has exactly fifteen members, the size of the college has grown to 23, among whom Augustus and Agrippa appear on the South Frieze. The other twenty-one members are present here. Two very badly damaged figures in the middle are split by a gap. From photos the gap appears to affect a single figure, but as Koeppel and Conlin have proven, in-site examination reveals that one is a foreground and the other a background figure.

The last portion of the North Frieze consists of members of the imperial family. Many scholars identify the veiled, leading figure as Julia, daughter of Augustus. Since Julia appears on the South Frieze, it is more likely that this figure is Octavia Minor. Other figures in the entourage might include Marcella (a daughter of Octavia), Iullus Antonius (a son of Mark Antony), and two boys and a girl of the imperial family. An additional youth wearing Hellenistic Greek style clothing suited to a Hellenistic prince is sometimes identified as Gaius Caesar in the guise of a camillus.^[10] As Gaius Stern observes in his dissertation from an overlooked passage in Plutarch, the camillus was an adolescent attendant of the Flamen Dialis.^[11] Stern claims this figure is not Gaius Caesar, but Ptolemy of Mauretania representing Africa, along with the German boy (Europe) and the Parthian prince (Asia).^[12]

Conservation

The Altar was originally located on the northern outskirts of the city,^[13] on the west side of the Via Flaminia, in the northeastern corner of the Campus Martius, a formerly open area that Augustus developed as a complex of monuments; the Ara Pacis Augustae stood in the flood plain of the river Tiber, where it became buried under four metres of silt over the centuries.

Recovery and Excavation

The first fragmentary sculptures were rediscovered in 1568 beneath the basilica San Lorenzo in Lucina, and have found their way to the Villa Medici, the Vatican, the Uffizi and the Louvre. In 1859 further sculptural fragments were found under Teatro Olimpia, part of the Peretti Palace in via in Lucina, close to the Italian Parliament Building and the sculptures were recognized as having belonged to the same monument.

In 1903, when Friedrich von Duhn recognized that the reliefs belonged to the Ara Pacis, known from Augustus' memoir, a request was sent to the Ministry of Public Education to continue the excavations. Their success was made possible by the generosity of Edoardo Almagià, who, as well as giving his permission for the exploration, donated in advance whatever should be discovered underneath the palace and made an ongoing financial contribution to the expenses of the excavation.

By July of that year, it became clear that the conditions were extremely difficult and that the stability of Teatro Olimpia might well be compromised.

When about half the monument had been examined and 53 fragments recovered, the excavation was called to a halt. In February 1937, the Italian Cabinet decreed that for the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Augustus, the excavations should recommence, using the most advanced technology. Seventy cubic metres of ground under what was by then the Cinema Nuovo Olimpia were frozen, whilst the altar was extracted.

In 1938 Benito Mussolini built a protective building for the Altar, as it had been reconstructed by Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo, near the Mausoleum of Augustus (moving the Altar in the process) as part of his attempt to create an ancient Roman "theme park" to glorify Fascist Italy.^[2]

There is now a new cover building on the same site as Mussolini's, designed by American architect Richard Meier.^[2] The new building opened in 2006 to controversy.^[2] Nicolai Ouroussoff, of the New York Times described the new building as "a flop".^[14] The presiding right-wing mayor Gianni Alemanno, backed since July 2008 by culture undersecretary Francesco Maria Giro said he would tear down the new structure.^[15][16][17]

See also

• Imperial cult

References

Further reading

• Conlin, Diane Atnally 1997. The Artists of the Ara Pacis: The Process of Hellenization in Roman Relief Sculpture (Studies in the History of Greece and Rome University of North Carolina Press)
• Peter J. Holliday, "Time, History, and Ritual on the Ara Pacis Augustae" The Art Bulletin 72.4 (December 1990:542-557) doi:10.2307/3045761
• Rossini, Orietta 2006. Ara Pacis, Milan, Electa/. ISBN 8837043791

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ara Pacis

• Official web site of the Ara Pacis Museum of Rome
  • English version
• Samuel Ball Platner, A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome: Ara Pacis
• official web site of the Ara Pacis Museum in English
• Browser with high-quality images
• Several pages with photos of the sculpture
• "Roman Power and Roman Imperial Sculpture"
• concerning Meier's museum housing the Ara Pacis
• Article from the New York Times, September 25 2006, "An Oracle of Modernism in Ancient Rome" by Nicolai Ouroussoff
• Description from Richardmeier.com: Ara Pacis
• Ara Pacis Museum.com: Reference website devoted to the Ara Pacis and the Ara Pacis Museum
• labelled photographs of each panel of the Ara Pacis

Coordinates: 41°54′23″N 12°28′32″E / 41.90639°N 12.47556°E / 41.90639; 12.47556