The Augustan Empire 43 BC

The religious fervour is striking, and, as we shall see, left its mark on the character of the Augustan Principate. But not all the monumenta of the period were sacred: we may cite the dedication of the ambitious reconstruction of the Basilica Paulli in 34 and the rebuilding of the Villa Publica by Fonteius Capito. These were more than matched by Octavian and Agrippa: the former restored the Porticus Octavia and - with great display of modesty - the complex of Pompey's buildings nearby. A key moment was the aedilate of Agrippa in 3 3 b.c., a freak itself for an ex- consul, in which he devoted himself to works which were at once popularis, in that they could be seen as utilitarian benefactions, and potent demonstrations of power, power over Nature, power to alter the landscape. The reworking of the world beneath the hanging city was carried out with great display, Agrippa inverting nature by going along the duct of the restored Cloaca Maxima in a cart. The aqueduct-system was overhauled, and a whole new aqueduct, the Aqua lulia, added to the system and the Aqua Virgo perhaps planned.¹⁰ We hear an echo of the great triumphal inscriptions of the dynasts, with their enumerations of conquered cities, in what seems to be a quotation from Agrippa's own res

' Gros 1976 (f 397) 107, the temple of Divus Iulius as 'une sorte de manifeste architectural'. Apollo Sosianus: La Rocca 1980-1 (f 459). Apollo Palatinus: Lefevre 1989 (f 466). On the Corinthian order, Wilson-Jones 1989 (f 622); Gros i976(f 397) 197-234. Zanker on building, 1988 (f 653) 42-31. Gallus fragment: Anderson, Parsons, and Nisbet 1979 (в 4).

¹⁰ Shipley 1931 (f 571) with Boethius 1934 (e 6); Roddaz 1984 (c 200) 145-57.

gestae-, 'he made 700 cisterns, and 500 fountainheads besides, and 130 water-towers, very many of them lavish in ornamentation; and on those works he set 300 bronze or marble statues, and 400 marble columns — and all this in the space of one year. He added, in commemoration of his aedilate, games which were held for 59 days, and 170 occasions to use bath houses, without charge' (Pliny, HN xxxvi.121; Peter HRR 11 p. 64).

So even before Acdum the victorious party was in the ascendant, already beating the other triumpbatores at the game that was being so earnestly played with the city's architecture. After the victory the style remained; restraint, whether of means or modesty, was over. The dedications of the temples of Divus Iulius (29) and of Apollo Palatinus announced the triumphant outcome of the epoch; and on the Campus Martius rose a complex of monuments which outdid Alexandria and Antony forever in their regal oriental splendour. The first is the trophy itself, the obelisk dedicated to Alexandria's god, the Sun, to commemor­ate the city's subjection in the centre of the gigantic sundial which was the work of the citizens' scientific genius. The second, immediately adjacent, is the artificial mountain on the Tiber's bank, dominating the approaches to Rome by road and river, in a man-made nature of gardens, which was to be Augustus' resting-place and memorial, the Mausoleum. The third, likewise, has a significance which is overtly dynastic and monarchic: the Pantheon of Agrippa, in which images of Augustus and Agrippa enjoyed a divine context in a building whose siting and design seems to have been designed to recall the apotheosis of the city's first Founder, Romulus. The Greekness of the nearby artificial lake and of the hot baths which adjoined it was obvious; the luxury was almost more than Egyptian.¹¹

But the mood did not last, or Rome might have been transformed by a.d. 14 into the most remarkable instance of all that was most grandiose in hellenistic taste. It was after the buoyant mood of the early twenties, restored peace, sole power, family harmony, that the style of Augustan planning for the monuments of Rome changes. The 'Crisis in Party and State' of 23—19 may be the main explanation. Just as the most careful symbiosis of the novus status with old constitutional forms begins at this moment, so the type of building and of architecture becomes more 'democratic' and less Asiatic in its florid extravagance. Some of the themes of the earlier phase are developed - the popular utilitarianism, the religious atmosphere, the beautification of the city with public suburban benefactions, which we shall investigate. But the magnificence of the monarchic princeps, the hubrisdc luxury and the grandiloquence of style, these disappear. Contrast the archaizing polychrome alien glories

¹¹ Buchner 1982 (f 306) the sundial; on the Pantheon, Coarelli 1983 (f 333).

of the complex of Apollo Palatinus with the sober mix of Athenian and old Roman in the temple of Mars Ultor, which formed the centre-piece of the greatest project of the later part of Augustus' rule, the Forum Augustum.[934]

Augustus continued to enjoy the best of both worlds. His own house on the Palatine could with justice be regarded as modest by the standards of the day, and it was not until the reign of Nero that a great purpose- built palace complex dominated the Palatine (the platform, like that of an enormous villa, whose substructions remain beneath the Farnese Gar­dens, and which supported the pavilions and peristyles of the complex misleadingly known today as Domus Tiberiana). But it was not wholly a private house; Augustus made it over to the People to satisfy ritual requirements when he became High Priest in 12 B.C., and these religious connotations helped produce an ambiguity as to where his living- quarters stopped and the public buildings began. A hearth-temple of Vesta was part of the monumental approach to his moderate abode which was inseparable from the splendour of the porticus of the complex of Apollo Palatinus. When the Senate met in that temple, although the impropriety of meeting in the house of the princeps was avoided, symbolically that was indeed what they were doing. The grand row of ancient houses of patrician magistrates which lined the Via Sacra as it rose onto the slopes of the Palatine from the Forum until it was obliterated by the fire of a.d. 64, which forever wiped out this display of the antiquity of the Roman aristocracy, could now be regarded as leading up to the front door of Augustus' ambiguous home.[935] Their honours now consisted likewise not in contributing to the monument a of Rome but in being subordinated to Augustus' new creations. When a prominent consular died in a.d. 56 this is how his outstanding honours were described: 'three triumphal statues, one bronze in the Forum Augustum, two marble in the new temple of the Divine Augustus; three consular statues, one in the temple of the Divine Julius, a second on the Palatine inside the Triple Gate, a third in the Precinct of Apollo in sight of where the Senate meets; one as Augur, at the Regia; one on horseback at the Speaker's Platform in the Forum; and one sitting in a curule chair in the Theatre of Pompey, in the Colonnade of the Lentuli' (AE 1972, 174). The regime now had total control of the symbolic topography of the public space of the inner city; eight years after this display private space followed suit in the aftermath of the fire. But the Golden House, cutting a swathe through the city, for all its conceits and sheer offensive bulk, only made obvious a takeover of the city by the Caesars that had already happened when Augustus died.

Rome's periphery had undergone various evolutions with the changes in the nature and size of the population and the availability of wealth and food. One of the most striking was the tendency for the greatest men in the state to accumulate suburban property which they could convert into extraordinarily luxurious display-grounds for their wealth. The voca­bulary was the same as we have seen in the buildings of the triumviral period — changing the face of nature, cultivating paradox. The proximity to seething Rome of evocations of the coast or countryside or wilderness was the most enjoyable feature, to emphasize which they called these estates 'kitchen gardens', horti. Even if the most extravagant Baroque taste of these whimsical pleasure-palaces was to be a creation of the first century a.d., they had already by this period attained considerable magnificence; in Augustus' own camp C. Maecenas was the creator of a particularly lavish example on the Esquiline.¹⁴ The real singularity of Nero's Domus Aurea lay in extending inwards to the very heart of Rome the most opulent of these estates ever seen. By that time, the prestige attaching to the ownership of these pleasure-palaces was considered too great for anyone except the princeps. Claudius' reign had seen the fall of two great senators whose horti were thought to have contributed to their doom, and the suburban estates of the imperial patrimony had become a principal residence of the ruler from Caligula onwards.

Now the tone of this private luxury was, as we have seen, very close to the monarchic assertiveness which Augustus at first practised. So it was dangerous in the hands of other primores - and led many of them, in the reigns of Augustus' successors, to disaster. Nor was it, for the reasons outlined, even appropriate for the princeps himself. Augustus chose the path of benefaction as an alternative, and encouraged expenditure on more open public recreation places, not wholly different in their aesthetic language, but not exclusive or politically sensitive. The proastion of the hellenistic city had long been a potential place for this kind of architec­ture, and the repertoire of public walks, plantings, porticoes and waterworks had been tapped by Pompey and Caesar, whose admission of the populace into his own suhurbanum in Transtiberim (across the Tiber) foreshadowed Augustus' activity in this area. A formal suburb of this kind was designed to be the location of the ceremonies of arrival and departure which had developed their standing during the Republic and became a feature of the public life of the principes (for an Augustan

¹⁴ For borti Purcell 1987 (p 52), 1987 (f 51); gardens of Maecenas, Hauber 1990 (e j8).

example Dio lvi.i.i); it also provided a chance to pose as a second founder, building a new city alongside the old, as Hadrian was later to do at Athens. For Strabo the effect of the very numerous buildings of Augustus and his circle in the Campus Martius was to produce a suburb more beautiful than the city (v.3.8 (235-6C)). The process, again reminiscent of Caesar, was to make over to the public formally a building created on private land by private contract, as Dio makes clear in discussing the works of Agrippa; the effect was to tone down the unpleasant associations of luxus Ьу_ч making it a benefaction to all Romans, a sign of their status in the world. When Augustus demolished the house of Vedius Pollio, a byword for opulence, and Livia built a porticus there instead, the moral message was very clear. As early as 60 b.c. we find the son of the dictator Sulla pampering the plebs with baths and free oil as well as games and banqueting (Dio xxxvn.51.4). Nero's great gymnasium on the Campus Martius, expanding the Baths of Agrippa with a complex which set the tone for the later imperial Thermae, made explicit the Hellenic associations of this gesture. Part of what made luxury desirable was that it had the cachet of Greek civilization. But it was being made available not just to the ruling class, but to all inhabitants of the imperial city. We notice too that even Maecenas' horti seem first to have been accessible to the public and, second, to have had the purpose of reclaiming a frightful polluted stretch of suburban land for public and salubrious use.¹⁵

Thus it was that the prevailing architecture of Augustan Rome is not the concrete and vault, arch and terrace native to Rome and Italy, but the less boastful and more relaxed sequences of squares, courts and colon­nades which the forty years of Augustan rule extended across much of Rome. Thus it was also that the utilitarian note was struck, in buildings like the Market of Livia, another of the improvements to the Esquiline fringe of the city. The old provision market of Rome, the Macellum, had had strong associations with the commercial with luxurious profit- making freedmen and over-indulgent customers, and the replacement of part of its district with the new Forum Augustum may have been the occasion for the new building and its banishment to the fringes of the city. Roman pragmadc utilitarianism is such a cliche, however, that we forget to notice the significance that it has in the actions of the first princeps. Rather than taking it on trust, we should attempt some explanation of what Augustus' attitude and intentions may have been in this field.

To attempt this, we need to move beyond the subject of large-scale

¹⁵ For Rome's proastion, Purcell 1987 (f 5 z); on Agrippa's work, Roddaz 1984 (c 200) 231-305; for Nero's gymnasium, Tamm 1970 (f 591).

public building. Across the years of Augustus' Principate there are many other moments at which the affairs of the city as an enuty received deliberate attendon. Some such spirit may be discerned in the role played by Maecenas during Octavian's absence in the triumviral period and in the diacheirisis ('administration') of the city offered to Agrippa in 21 (Dio liv.6.5); and, with greater certainty, in the evoludon of a position of city prefect. During the Cantabrian War Messalla Corvinus took up this office, which was adapted in typical fashion from the immemorial practice of appointing a deputy for the consuls when they celebrated the Latin Festival on the Alban Mount: that he resigned it almost at once suggests that, for all that, the duties were quite unprecedented (Tac. Ann. vi. 11). The experiment was tried again in 13 в.с. when Statilius Taurus became prefect, and from then on proved a great success. Like all Roman 'administrators', the city prefects spent most of their working time in judicial activity, with a particular reference to the unruliness of life among the urban populace: as Tacitus describes the officer's brief, he was 'a consular who could compel obedience among the slave element and the part of the citizen body which had the nerve to be riotous if there were no risk'.¹⁶

This involved the management of military personnel. As Ulpian, writing in the third century on the duties of the city prefect, puts it (Dig. 1.12.1.12) 'he often has to maintain soldiers on guard-duty to preserve quiet among the populares and for keeping him informed about what is happening where'. If there was a 'revolution' in the way Augustus ran Rome, it was in the making available to the relevant magistrates a larger and better organized body of manpower than had been available before. This transformed the executive capacity of the state in the city, even if the efficiency of the decision-makers was not particularly enhanced. Tradi­tionally, the executive resources of the magistrates were limited to their apparitores and personal dependents; there are signs that Augustus left his mark on the decurial system by which these staffs were organized. But it was in the imposition on Rome of military units, the 1,500 men of the three cohortes urbanae, associated with the city prefect, and the cohortes praetoriae responsible directly to the princeps and, until Sejanus had built the great fortress on the Viminal outside the City, billeted around the urban area, that the revolution was really effected. The sources for the history of the early Empire time and again display these soldiers as the principal agents of state authority. An important side-effect of the establishment of these cohorts was to provide a prestigious channel by which Italians might move to Rome and rise in the social scale, a

¹⁶ For the urban prefect, see Vitucci 1956 (e 136). Police duties, Nippel 1988 (a 71); Echols 1937-8 (d 187). Urban violence under the Principate: Moeller 1970 (c 376).

formalization of a common social pattern which was already in existence. Scores of thousands of Italians came to experience the life of Rome and convey its tendencies to their home towns through this machinery.¹⁷

Similar in its effects was the establishment of the city watch, the cohortes vigilum, by a series of steps which started with a force of 600 slaves set up in 22 B.C., when Augustus was surveying the city with a censor's eye (Dio Liv.2.3) and which were complete at a strength of 3,920 men by a.d. 5 5. Fire prevention, by means of brute force rather than technology, through the destruction of Rome's flimsy structures in the path of the fire with hooks and levers, was their principal duty. They were also, importantly, of help in maintaining order in other ways. Again, their praefectus came to play an increasing part in the running of the city; he too became a judge with considerable competence. Recruitment to the vigiles, limited as it was at first to the freedman population (later it rose in social prestige), also played an important part in the society of the city.¹⁸

The same spirit of the organization of manpower can also be seen in the regulation of the private familia owned by Agrippa for the mainten­ance of the aqueducts in 11 в.с. as a public institution. Further, the changes which we can dimly perceive in the management of the collegium fabrorum tignuariorum, the association of the building industry in Rome, may belong in this context. They adopted a parapolitical structure of some elaboration^ and their own era dating from 7 B.C.; a parallel also for the organization of the city districts which is discussed below.¹⁹

The first sign that Augustus would involve himself in the running of the city was his tackling the question of corn distribution and the annona in 22 B.C. Here he had Pompey's precedent clearly behind him.²⁰ But most of the changes came in the decade after his return from Gaul and led up to the triumphant moment when he opened the Forum Augustum and was declared pater patriae, in 2 B.C. We find the senatusconsultum on the aqueducts in 11; an innovatory series of procedures for defining and maintaining the banks of the Tiber; concern for other public boundaries, and for the management of roads; the first establishment of the vigiles; the division of the city into fourteen regiones in 7 в.с., when the reform of the compita and vici which formed the smaller subdivisions of the city also took place. Also from that moment attention was paid to the boundary of the city, resulting in the ornamental rebuilding of the ancient city gates, though it probably did not involve a ritual extension of the sacred boundary, the pomerium.^2x

Purcell 1983 (f 49); 1991 for movement to Rome. Durry 1938 (d 185).

Reynolds 1926 (e 108); Rainbitd 1986 (e 104); Freis 1967 (d 190).

" Pearse 1976-7 (в 261); Royden 1988 (f 58). ²⁰ Rickman 1980 (e 109) 60-6 and 179-85.

,²¹ Boatwright 1986 (e j). City gates: Platnet and Ashby 1929 (e 95) sw. 'Arcus Crispini et Lentuli', 'Arcus Dolabellae et Silani'; Nash 1968 (e 87) s.v. 'Arcus Dolabellae et Silani', 'Arcus Gallieni'.

These changes were not dramatic innovatory reforms based on policy. They were modified and evolved over the years. The delineation of the Tiber is a good example. A republican procedure, unused since 54 b.c., was deployed by the consuls in 8 B.C. and in 7 b.c. by Augustus himself; in a.d. 15 Tiberius changed the system again, with the appointment of a permanent board of curatores on the model of the body which saw to the aqueducts.²² So these urban decisions are a matter of trial and error, but they do clearly have a general coherence, chronologically, and in that they all concern the good order of the city itself.

The wishes of the inhabitants of Rome were not without their political significance as Augustus knew from his experience of the triumviral period: it was amply confirmed. It may have been unwise for him to absent himself from the city so much in the years 27—24; certainly violence continued throughout the period, reaching a peak in 22, when the Senate was barricaded inside the Curia, and was not just a response to the natural disasters of famine, fire, pestilence and flood (see especially Dio liii.3 3.4—5; liv. 1.1—2). The affection and favour of the people gave one Egnatius Rufus the base from which to attempt an illegal transfer from being praetor to the consulship in 19 b.c. His benefaction had been a successful fire-fighting programme, and he was only suppressed with difficulty.²³ Again in a.d. 6 the activities of P. Plautius Rufus, who built on the miseries of the people from famine and fire with a revolutionary pamphlet campaign, clearly constituted a serious political threat to the regime (Dio lv.27.1—3; Suet. Aug. 19). Not surprisingly, there is a clear link between particular crises and the various stages of Augustus' evolving solutions — impetus from outside was the normal source of governmental action in Antiquity. But Augustus' pose as the heir of Caesar — and indeed, by the time his Principate was at an end, of Clodius too - was relatively tardy compared to the vigour with which he cornered the market in military gloria, stabilizing legislation, and traditional pietas. So although his attention to the affairs of the city was not without its prudential, straightforwardly political aspect, we need not take such an attitude to be central to Augustus' response.

The tone of our principal sources for Augustus' activity, the Res Gestae, Suetonius and Dio, suggests that some ideal for the correct presentation of the city and its inhabitants was behind Augustus' measures — a general cura Urbis as it had come to be formulated by the end of the Republic. Augustus' boast about brick and marble has more to do with the overall effect of the changes which he had made at Rome than with the creation of individual triumphal monumenta, however spectacu­lar. And considering what was available, the sumptuous regal display of individual magnificence was not at the centre of Augustan building

²² Le Gall 1953 (e 73). ²³ Lacey 1985 (c 150); for famine, Garnsey 1988 (a 33) 218-22.

projects after the middle of the twenties в.с. Instead there is a sense of decency and good order and good government, of responsibility, tidiness and justice about the new arrangements, which is reminiscent of the prescriptions of Cicero about how a city should be managed, and indeed has a long literary tradition. There is a flavour of the administra­tive sections of the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens in the care taken to distribute duties among competent authorities, and the same language of good public order and the right kind of official to maintain it is prominent in the descriptions of cities across the empire by Augustus' younger contemporary Strabo. The advantage of seeking such a back­ground to the 'administrative reforms' of Augustus is that it saves us from the implausibility of attributing to Augustus either a reformer's zeal for a new policy, of which otherwise both he and his successors can be seen to have been almost entirely in default, or the intention of establishing a bureaucratic apparatus for solving technical organiza­tional problems which seems on the evidence of the experience of the next hundred years to have been — if that were its aim — a singular failure, and which would also, in any case, be hard to parallel in the ancient world. And instead of this isolated specimen of bureaucratic creativity, hard to swallow and digest, we get a glimpse of a coherent, if rather optimistic, attitude to what befits a city which rules the world in the setting which Augustus had created for it.²⁴

It is most important to this argument not to separate the 'hardware' of aqueducts and river banks and fire prevention from the people who moved in and around it. The remodelling of the res publico, moreover, had to include the populus and so could not avoid a social dimension: Augustus' Roman legislation concerned both the city and its inhabitants, and the regulations on manumission and the duties of the freedman should be seen alongside not just the corn distributions but also the maintenance of the roads, the laws on the height of buildings, and the provision of public spectacles. The intention was decency in behaviour and setting for the citizen of Rome, whose correct physical place in the polity on display in the theatres was laid down by the lex lulia theatralis, and whose entitlement to the pleasures and conveniences and rights of a citizen of Rome was publicly to be made plain by the wearing of the toga.²⁵ This is why the burden of the Augustan legislation fell most heavily on the freedmen whose presence and activides actually made Rome what it was. We do not have to assume a long-lasting free poor to

Purcell 1986 (d 107), for the assumptions of ancient administration; also Nicolet 1988 (a 69) advocating a much more positive view of the possibilities of ancient bureaucracy. Note that the benefits could, in general, be taxable; revenue was raised from Rome under the Empire in significant quantities, Le Gall 1979 (d 142).

Rawson 1987 (f 5 6). By a noteworthy development, as the citizenship spread, the toga seems to have become characteristic of Roman citizens at Rome, and declined elsewhere: Mart. x.47.5; 51.6.

whom Augustus was showing favour, while the liberti were systemati­cally coerced. The plebs ingenua of one generadon derived from the plebs libertina of previous ones. The city population was in many ways the plebs libertina\ the freeborn poor were despised as regularly and thoroughly by the Roman elite; and the largesses, the entertainments, the paramilitary garrison, the correct definition of public and private land, the water supply and the rules and privileges of the magistri vicorum were all part of a single attitude of defining how the Urbs and its people should best comport themselves. The 'Relief of the Vicomagistri', with the four magistri in charge of a city-district, in the shorter clothing (stolae) which shows their lowly status, self-consciously clutching the lares of their street in religious conclave with the group of aloof senators in their full togas, is the monument of this age.²⁶

The populace was not entirely mute. From its expressive moments in the time of troubles a tradition of involvement in the doings of the elite continues through, and indeed does much to characterize, the whole Julio-Claudian period. Some have, however, argued powerfully to the contrary. 'Thepopulus, decimated or terror-stricken, had disappeared in the whirlwind of civil war. All that was left were power-obsessed leaders on the one hand and a brutish multitude on the other, the centurion's sword and the irrational hero-worship of the urban plebs. Rome had already become the Empire.'²⁷ A city is people, not architecture; was Rome transformed in the terms of this ringing description during the Augustan age, or are there rather more continuities than historians of the Republic, gloomy about the demise of the institutions of liberty, traditionally accept?

Those who have wished to make the fall of the Republic the turning- point also of the history of the plebs Komana have usually done so for two reasons. The first is the 'golden age' view that there was at some stage in Roman history a moment when 'none was for a party; then all were for the State; then the rich man helped the poor and the poor man loved the great'. Even the 'revolution of violence' which the ancient historiogra- phical tradition saw in the age of the Gracchi is mostly a construct of that tradition, and in any case is the result of change in the behaviour of the elite, not in that of the populace at large. As far back as our meagre evidence can be made to extend, we find the two salient characteristics of the life of the city, first the instability and insecurity in the precarious and passionate life of the urban nucleus caused by the constant process of exchange by which families and individuals on short and long time- scales moved in and out of Rome, and second the immemorial paradox between the constitutional inferiority which guaranteed the domination

Freedmen in Augustan Rome: Treggiari 1969 (f 68) 75-6; 244-5.

Nicolet 1980 (a 68) 552.

of the oligarchy and a real tradition of free expression, political engagement and actual practical influence. To this second tense dialogue the forms of personal power enshrined in the practice of the Principate were not alien; it made all the difference in the world to a junior patrician senator if the greatest men in the state had the position of Augustus or Vespasian rather than that of Cicero or Scipio Aemilianus; to the men and women of the Roman street the difference was much less palpable.[936]

The second ingredient in the traditional view of the final elimination of some democratic tradition is the constitutional moment at which the comitia centuriata were deprived of the reality of their electoral activity, directly after the accession of Tiberius in a.d. 14 (Tac. Ann. 1.15, cf. 81). This must be taken seriously: it was not a cosmetic change, a procedural recognition of a long-established reality. Augustus had found it necess­ary to enact legislation against ambitur, Caligula (Dio lix. 20.3) found it at least symbolically eloquent to reverse the change which ushered in the sole Principate of Tiberius. The process of election was not abolished; it was formally continued in the senate-house and a strong element of competition remained.[937] The comitia centuriata, moreover, continued to meet in the Saepta lulia on the Campus Martius; their activities maintained some political consciousness of a constitutional kind, to judge by the association of Sejanus with an irregular assembly of some kind in the stone record of a speech to an assembly of the tribes (ILS 6044). Whether it is correct to see in Julio-Claudian times a surviving thread of public political behaviour which can be associated with the programmes of the populares of the end of the Republic remains uncertain. Certainly the behaviour of the supporters and opponents of Tiberius seems quite frequently to have a nuance which derives from the thought-world of that epoch.[938] It is hard not to see the move of a.d. 14 alongside the various other attempts by which Tiberius seems to have been determined to enhance the standing of the Senate and senators in the polity, and to read it as a judgment that the electoral function was too important for the crude and foreign plebs to be involved in.

To that extent, then, this is indeed the moment at which the Senate finally won the age-old 'struggle of the orders'. However, although the comitia centuriata had represented power for the small groups who dominated it, and provided a spectacular opportunity for the display of popular enthusiasm and dislike through less organized means than the vote, it had rarely been a means of effective participation in politics for the plebs. Moreover, that informal participation survived, since the comitia continued to meet - hence one aspect of the Sejanus affair. Indeed it not only survived, it burgeoned. Enactments, to give one example, of a.d. 5, 19 and 21 - before and after, that is, the movement of the voting part of the election to the Senate — gave the display of favour by the thirty-five tribes at these occasions a respectable institutional link with the ordines of equites and senators, and a symbolic link with the fortunes of the domus Caesarum in the creation of centuriae linked with the names of the untimely dead of Augustus' household.[939] As late as a.d. 69 it was expedient for an emperor to proclaim the unity of Senate and plebs in supporting him at a formal contio (Tacitus Hist. 1.90.2). Maybe this^ worked too well: in a.d. 29 Tiberius had to respond with an edict to the agitation of the plebs on behalf of their imperial favourites, the family of Germanicus. Illicit contiones, like the public meetings of the past, were happening, and the princeps had to claim to the Senate that 'his majesty as imperator was mocked' (Tac. Ann. v.4—5, 'imperatoria maiestas elusa'). No mean success for the people.

The coming of the Principate enabled the personal attachments of the populace to become more stable and more deeply felt, richer as they were in raw material. So it is that, for example, the women of the domus Caesarum came to play a prominent part in the relationship between establishment and urban populace. The standing of Livia, the Iuliae, or Antonia or Claudius' daughters in the public eye is a phenomenon which could only be dimly foreshadowed in the Republic.[940] Similarly, the admiration felt and vigorously expressed for Gaius Caesar, Germanicus or Britannicus gives the impression of constituting a more developed personality-cult than the equivalent in the last years of the Republic; the projection of the personalities of the Principate offered new opportuni­ties for the allegiance and disapproval of the urban populace which were abundantly taken up. The metaphor of language is a helpful one for the range of exchanges possible between the plebs and the rulers of Rome; with the Augustan Principate the richness and flexibility of that language became greater than it ever had been before.[941]

This process was closely linked with the steps which Augustus took to appropriate for himself the topography of the city, through the architec­tural initiatives which we have examined; and the chronology of the res publico, through his manipulation of the notion of history and, most important, of the passage of the months and years. The Roman calendar, with its slow progression of measured feasts and rites moving through the seasons and processionally among the temples and sacred places of the city and its neighbourhood, and recapitulating the progression of Rome's history, triumphs, deliveries and commemorations, as it did so, offered a wonderful opportunity for the self-presentation of the princeps and his family, and for the involvement of the populace. Caesar had done some exploration in this area, but the real harnessing of the potential of the calendars is an Augustan phenomenon. The great moments in the rise of Octavian to power, the dates of his life and career, the significant moments in his rule and in the lives of his relatives are inserted through the calendars first into the history of Rome, second into the divine life of the city — and we need postulate no cynicism on the part of Augustus and his advisers — third into the space of the town, with temples, altars, arches and statues, and fourth, and most relevant to our theme here, into the daily, yearly experience of the ordinary populace. So well did he succeed that the Feriae Augustae, the greatest dynastic feast of all, were still distracting the Romans from their Christian duties in the summer in the eighth century, and even though the feast has in an effort to clean it up since been postponed a fortnight and made to celebrate the Assump­tion, its name at least still remains, Ferragosto, the summer festival of Rome today.³⁴

In the sections that follow we shall explore in more detail the nature of the 'occasions' which received their significance from being included in the Fasti. How did they provide a setting for dialogue between the princeps and the people? And what was the nature of the exchange and what its purpose? Let us begin with the 'purely religious'.

There has been an unfortunate tendency to omit the observance of public religious rites when considering the activities of the first principes, perhaps fuelled by a suspicion that such observance was somehow a sham, a perfunctory obedience to tradition. This is not the place to scrutinize the practicality of assessing the theological orientations of the Roman elite; it is enough to insist that the amount of time devoted to public cult by the primores at Rome was considerable, and that this provided the centre of the visibility of these people to the population of the city at large. Much of the activity was routine, and only finds mention in the sources when it was made singular by some other occurrence or observation. Augustus had a habit of sleeping at a friend's house as near as possible to the scene of a religious ceremony which involved a dawn start, because he disliked early rising (Suet. Aug. 78); on the morning of his assassination Gaius had just happened to be sacrificing a flamingo (Suet. Calig. 5 7) when he was splashed with blood; Claudius performed obsecratio in the Forum Romanum to counter ill omen in a ceremony ³⁴ Licbcschuctz 1979 (f 174) 79-81; Price 1996 (f 201).

which we are explicitly told involved the populus, though the princeps felt it proper to exclude the 'herd of artisans and slaves' (Suet. Claud. zz)\ the omen of Galba's fall (Suet. Galba 18-19) involved a whole set of public religious acts all of which were clearly closely scrutinized for the kind of significant accident that did in fact occur - as when on New Year's Day 69 his garland fell off during the sacrifice and the sacred chickens flew away as he took the auspices. Not only did these activities inevitably take up a considerable amount of the emperor's dme and attention; but they are, more importantly, part of a continuous dialectic of interpretation between actor and audience, both parties explaining and expounding the meaning they prefer in the unfolding interplay of casual circumstances and prescribed cultic behaviour. It is necessary to insist that these exchanges are indeed mutual. If we had only the literary evidence we might, odd as it would seem, see the religious acts of the elite as mindless posturing and inane traditionalism. But the reciprocity is very clear from the evidence of epigraphy and archaeology. The altars, the statues, the ex-votos, the buildings, offered by a very wide range of Romans, are the contribution made by the audience to the exchange, an assurance of complicity, engagement and loyalty to the relationship, a loyalty which far transcends mere political obedience.³⁵

The dialogue of public religion is the matrix which held together the highly disparate elements of Roman society; I cannot establish that this entails theological sincerity, but the dialogue very certainly mattered.

The religion of the city was quite literally urban: bridges, slopes, statues, fountains and especially crossroads had their appropriate rites. In 7 в.с. Augustus reconsidered the oppressive legislation which had controlled the activities of the local assemblies which practised these rites and celebrations - the 'uncountable associations cobbled together from all the filth and slavery of the city', as Cicero had called them (Pis. 9). Magistri and ministrioi the crossroads cults of each of the two or three hundred vici or local districts of Rome were now regularly appointed; the games which they performed were made legal again; the moment was given historic recognition by the establishment of an era which began with the measure of 7 B.C.; imperial generosity provided decoration for the shrines from the loot of Greece, Apollo the Sandalmaker and - well- suited to the voluptates of the people - Jupiter the Tragic Actor (Suet. Aug. 5 7). The magistri were suitably inspired. Smart new sacella in the latest taste for the lares of each district rose over the next years, the dedication-inscriptions reflecting the sincere blend of old and new and the combination of real religiosity with a sense of the civically appropri­ate: 'To Mercury, to the eternal God Jupiter, to Juno the Queen, to Minerva; to the Sun, the Moon, Apollo and Diana; to [Anno]na, Ops,

³⁵ Examples: Zanker 1988 (f 635) chs. 6-8.

Isis and Pietas; to the Divine Fates: that it may go well, propitiously and prosperously for Imperator Caesar Augustus, for his [power] and that of the Senate and People of Rome, and for the Nations, at the propitious beginning of the consular year of Gaius Caesar and Lucius Paullus [a.d. 1] — Lucius Lucretius Zethus, Lucius' freedman, dedicated this Augus­tan Altar at the command of Jupiter. Victory of the People! Health in Seed-sowing!'[942] The Augustan religious changes were no sterile revival­ism, but a part of the adaptability and creativity inherent in Roman religion.[943] On a more informal level the inscriptions of Rome show us how tutelary divinities were found for other new arrivals in the urban landscape as the imperial benefactions and building-projects progressed; the Bona Dea Veneris Cnidiae 'Good Goddess of the Venus of Cnidus', that statue being a well-known imported masterpiece, is a nice example. The Genius of the Corn Warehouses of Galba and the Venus of the Gardens of Sallust are further cases of how traditional responses were made to the new imperial complexes as much as to the tangled matrix of the unreformed city. 'You believe that there are gods to the places in the city - or even that the places themselves are gods', a critic of paganism was to say (Tert. Ad. Nat. 2.15).

Similarly, the new institutions of the imperial house were inserted into the traditional repertoire of Roman religiosity. The creation of the sacerdotium sodalium Augustalium on the model of the Titiales (Tac. Ann i. 54) in a.d. 14 did this at the top end of the social spectrum, interestingly adapting for the senatorial and equestrian elite a title which had already become current (at least since the last decade в.с.) among the poorer inhabitants, especially freedmen, of the Italian towns. The association of the ordines with the transformed state cult cannot, despite an influential view, be held to have excluded the poor and opened the way to religious influence from outside Italy. The new observances were important to the plebs too.³⁸ Nor was this limited to the self-consciously plebeian occasion like the compitalia: we should take into account also such occasions as their ludi founded by Livia within the familia Caesaris to commemorate Augustus, at which buffoons and actors performed, as much as on the great public occasions. Across the world of the Roman spectacles, the boundary between the religious and the entertaining cannot be clearly drawn by us any more than it could have been by the Romans themselves.

Augustus had been careful to involve the populus in the ludi saeculares, whose prescriptions ordain various forms of participation; but it need not be thought that this was unusual. The people were an important agent in Roman religion, not a passive congregation. The spates of individual vota and sacrifices which marked special occasions — such as the 890 days of obsecrationes decreed by the Senate for Augustus (RG 4) — are examples of this participation: and the involvement of the audience in the ludi is part of the same phenomenon. Thus the various expressions of opinion and demonstrations of disapproval or loyalty with which the audience in the theatre or the amphitheatre interrupted and adapted the words of the performers are not to be seen as a breaking for political purposes of a polite formal barrier of decorum between stage and cavea, but as part of a relationship of communication which goes both ways.

The presence of the populus Romanus at public spectacles, as at other religious rites, constituted a civic assembly. Ovid describes a popular rite in terms deliberately chosen to evoke the simple homespun life of Rome before its urban fabric grew so complex and monumental; 'On the ides of March is the jolly festival of Anna Perenna, above Rome and the Tiber and not far away from its bank. The populace comes and drinks, scattered at ease among the herbage, each person reclining with his partner. Some hold out in the open, a few set up tents, some build a bough-house out of branches, others use giant reed for stiff columns and stretch out their togas on top. Whatever they do, the sun and the wine heat them up... they sing all that they have picked up in the theatres and mime uninhibitedly along with the words' (Fast. 111.523-42). The displays which the upper-class authors deride as the voluptates of the populace were embellishments of simpler festivals, given to show the status of donor and beneficiary. This is more easily seen if the other aspect of the religious assembly, the communal meal, is compared. These meals had increased in popularity in the late Republic (Varro, Rust. 111.2.16), especially in the context of the triumphs of the dynasts. They were the object of censorial control by Augustus in 22 в.с. (Dio liv. 2.3), and became a monopoly of the princeps-. as such they became a familiar part of life in Rome:

iam se, quisquis is est, inops, beatus,

convivam ducis esse gloriatur.

whoever he is, poor but happy, his boast is that he has been the guest of our Leader.

(Stat. Sib. 1.6.44-5 o)[944]

The porticus-zrchitcctuie which was described above owes something to the need to be able to accommodate such occasions.

The spectacula likewise demanded more and more lavish settings: even when such buildings were temporary they could be fantastically extrava­gant, like the theatre built by Aemilius Scaurus as aedile in 58 b.c. The great sequence of permanent structures - Pompey's Theatre, Caesar's Circus Maximus, the Theatre of Marcellus, and that of Balbus, Augus­tus' naumachia and Statilius Taurus' Amphitheatre, Gaius' Circus Vatica- nus, Nero's Amphitheatre, Vespasian's greater Flavian Amphitheatre, Domitian's Odeon and Hippodrome, and Trajan's Circus Maximus — is a vivid reflection of the process.[945]

These buildings, above all the theatres, were political buildings as they had always been in the Hellenic world. To have statues or dedications in the theatres was a rare sign of achievement (cf. Tac. Ann. iv.7). This political life of the theatres was one of the many inheritances of Rome from Campania where urban politics had long been volatile and permanent buildings for both theatrical and gladiatorial spectacles were part of the repertoire of public architecture. The Romans were well aware of the resemblances between the orator's address in the Forum, the priest's sacred activity in the sanctuary, and the actor's performance on the stage - all witnessed and shared in by thousands of observers. We can set the long hostility towards permanent theatres, and towards providing seats at the spectacula, beside the great length of time it took before the comitia were given a permanent architectural setting - on the eve of their electoral emasculation.[946] The long series of responses to 'theatralis licentia' and 'immodestia histrionum' - expulsions, military presence, executions, prohibitions, warnings — should be compared with the ever vigorous campaign against the involvement of the men and women of the senatorial and equestrian orders in the performance of spectacula, which proves conclusively how much they wanted to be involved, and what was at stake. These occasions are not outlets,de mieux, for repressed political activity: the old formal political acts had been a single facet of an age-old political tradition which continued fervendy and wildly in the public life of the face-to-face society. Indeed, when the relatively restrained formal politics of the Senate became completely overshadowed by Augustus' novus status, plebs and elite alike found an oudet for their various anti-establishment feelings in an expansion of the politics of the spectacle.[947] Finally, we may observe that the princeps himself constituted one of the main objects of spectacle; at triumphs, the formal entrances and exits from the city, and going about his daily business — or in attendance at other shows, himself nominally in the audience, but in reality an actor among actors.

There is no need here to rehearse the very long list of examples of the responses of emperors to the people at the games. Three typical examples are: the attack on Pompey by Diphilus in July 59 b.c. when the crowd took up the line 'it is by our wretchedness that thou art Great'; the moment when the audience mocked Galba by singing over and over again the passage from the Atellan farce 'Onesimus has come in from the country'; and, most memorably of all, the pastiche with which Datus the actor joked about Nero's murders of Claudius and Agrippina.⁴³ It would be wrong to take these as some form of resistance, as 'demonstrations' in the modern sense. Certainly the extent to which they were organized by the elite as deliberate disruptions must have been minimal - the difficulties would have been enormous, though we do hear of the managers of claques, like Percennius who fomented the Pannonian mutiny in a.d. 14. More importandy the absence of political pro­grammes even among the elite will have made it more difficult to build up continuous agitation: high politics were too mutable. On a more general level some perennial preferences and distastes there were, which are examined below, both the 'political' and the more selfish. But it is not enough to regard the urban populace as 'primitive rebels' living 'in an odd relationship with its rulers, equally compounded of parasitism and riot'. It is noteworthy that the poor of the city do not seem to have developed a counter-culture of the sort found in the Islamic cities of the Middle Ages, rich in criminal confraternities. The activities of the populates which the city prefect had to watch so carefully (above, p. 793) were very closely related to the legitimate forms of behaviour of the political elite.⁴⁴

This is because the plebs was not parasitic; and its violence was not solely devoted to attaining selfish ends. The plebs was not wholly or even mostly dependent on state-managed largesse. Its economy was more vigorous than that. The benefits which the plebeians enjoyed were not charity to keep them alive, but a bonus to denote their status. Part of that status-symbolism was a degree of political licence, which stood beside the lavishness of the games and the grandeur of the buildings. The survival of that licence did credit to the princeps too, and was one of the elements in the presentation of Rome to the rest of the world as its uniquely favoured capital.[948] In return it elevated the emperor who could manage the relationship high on a wave of hysterical popularity which could not be managed anywhere else. But the violence of the invecdve and the cruelty of the wit involved in the exchange alongside the popularity are not wholly negative; there is an atmosphere of the licensed jester about the relationship, a curious pleasure in the luxury of being powerful enough not to need to mind or be diminished by scurrilous attacks. The anonymous buffoon who described himself on his tomb as 'in words and in dumb-play a mime of the emperor Tiberius; the man who first discovered the trick of imitating barristers' (ILS 5225) may have operated 'underground' but it is more likely that his art was part of the world of modish inversion and peculiar paradox which the elite of the Julio-Claudian empire found the height of luxury.[949] The emperors periodically found that the attacks had gone too far; but although some performers therefore suffered, their like remained a permanent part of the inevitable relationship of emperor with people in the gloriously hectic atmosphere of the most populous place in the world.

Within the phenomenon of this freedom of utterance various strands can be isolated. A consciousness of the tone of the political world of the elite is one: hostility to conspirators and traitors, and also to thz delatores, or to individuals like the praetorian prefect Cleander under Commodus, is conspicuous. We are reminded that other senators and equites had public roles to play too; it will not do to represent the politics of Rome as being just a dialogue between plebs and princeps. The insecurity and danger of the political elite were things of which the populace was aware. Still more do they have a sense of the wrongs of the imperial family itself; the imperial women, above all, were objects of general affection and sympathy. Already we find the crowd in the Forum making it impossible for the triumvirs to reject the daring protest of Hortensia against an attempt to distrain on the resources of the noblest and richest women of the state (App. ВС iv.5.32-4; Val. Max. vin.3.3). Their affection for Augustus' daughter and granddaughter is also very striking, and perhaps not wholly to be explained by the civilitas and popularity of their male relatives. For if Agrippina the elder gained in favour by association with her husband, and she was certainly highly popular, it is hard to explain politically the touching sympathy of the plebs for the tragic fate of Nero's wife, Claudius' daughter Octavia: Tacitus (Ann. xiv.60-4) recounts their dismay at the princeps' dismissal of her, and their enthusiastic response to the false rumour that he had changed his mind.

'They rushed to climb the Capitol without delay, and - belatedly - gave worship to the gods. Down they threw the statues of Poppaea; those of Octavia, borne shoulder-high, they decked with flowers and set up in Forum and temples'. The agitation was serious enough to provide Octavia's enemies with a believable case that her continued liberty and presence in Italy was a perpetual threat of civil war; at the same time, we are told, claiming that the rioting had been the work of'clients and slaves of Octavia arrogating to themselves the name of plebs'. There was indeed a real political component: the plebeians who shouted Nero's praises in 68 when he made his grand return to Rome from his Greek tour, demolishing the city wall to enter a city garlanded and full of lamps and incense (Dio LXii.20.4), in only months were joining in the round of hysterical sacrifice and merrymaking, dressed in caps of liberty like freed slaves, to commemorate his suicide (ibid. Lxin.29.1). Within a year 50,000 had died in the civil war which ensued (ibid. lxiv. 19.3).

In the end much of this popular feeling proceeds from the complex self-presentation of the domus Caesarum which we examined above; but this ingredient of sympathy for the underdog, the young and the helpless, with its sentimental flavour, is something separate. Marcus Oppius, who saved his father's life during the proscriptions, had been elected aedile in 37 в.с. on the wave of public approval, which even collected contributions to allow him to bear the expense. A group of wanted malefactors put on masks and made a theatre-show of adding their bit to the whip-round, in a revealingly dramatic and public way (Dio xlviii. 53.4). When Oppius died and was lionized even in death the Senate responded with significant spite. There are various other cases; we might cite the 'assembly of plebeians which verged on a riot' which formed to show solidarity with the condemned household of Pedanius Secundus, doomed because he had been murdered by a slave (Tac. Ann. xiv.42) or the pity they felt for elephants because of their appealing tricks in the arena on another well-known occasion. In a.d. 24 popular violence prevented a well-known prosecutor from proceeding with a case against his father (Ann. iv.29).

The plebs could also show conspicuous favour to the powerful, but that is less surprising. In one memorable instance, their humorous sentimentality combined with their loyalty to the domus Caesarum. 'Crows too have their share of esteem, as has been demonstrated by the moral attitude of the Roman plebs, or rather by their outrage. During the reign of Tiberius a young crow, hatched in a nest in the temple of Castor and Pollux, flew down to a cobbler's opposite, in the process winning the owner's approval, apart from anything else, as a religious bird. The crow quickly became familiar with human discourse, and every morning would fly along the Forum to the rostra, and would greet first Tiberius and then Drusus and Germanicus by name, and then the generality of the Roman crowd passing by. It would then return to the shop. The tenant of the next cobbler's, as ever jealous of his neighbour, or, as he preferred to put it, incensed by the droppings which stained the shoes he put out on display, killed the bird. The plebs went wild. The man was hustled out of the regie and before long made away with; for the fowl a funeral was put on with the most enormous elaboradon, the bier decked out and carried between two negroes, with a flute player walking in front, garlands of every kind, all the way to the pyre which they had built at the second milestone of the Appia in the Campus called that of Rediculus... this was done on 28 March in a.d. 35' (Pliny, HN x.i2if). The public availability of members of the domus Caesarum - even if, given the date, it will be their effigies that received this unusual obeisance — is noteworthy. Germanicus is the prime example of a popular hero, but we may compare the delirious welcome to Rome of his son Caligula — 'star', 'chicken', 'baby', 'nurseling' they called him at his ceremonial arrival in the city, his adventus — and their defensive 'protection' of Claudius against his senatorial opponents. Titus later enjoyed the same approval — 'shortlast- ing and ill-omened' as Tacitus gloomily calls it.

Naturally enough, a strong streak of self-interest can be seen in the plebs' attitudes. Concern over prices and the availability of reasonably priced food — and drink — features prominently. It was the final blow for Nero's cause in 68 that a ship containing fine sand for a race-track docked from Alexandria at a moment when food was low and grain expected. But the riot over wine-prices which Augustus dismissed (Suet. Aug. 42.1) with an allusion to Agrippa's aqueducts shows that the demands are not only about subsistence. While it made economic sense to free slaves to qualify them for the annona (as in 56 B.C., when Pompey had to draw up a register of such recipients, Dio xxxix.24.1), that did not mean that a provision for the desdtute was being abused. The eager interest in the availability of commoda is part of the insatiable quest for the signs of status to which we have constantly referred and reflects appreciation of the provision of games, baths, beast-hunts, subsidized food, largesses. The building projects of the principes were triply useful: as a source of employment, for what they provided in a practical sense, and as a display of magnificence.[950] We see throughout the imperial period, accordingly, a steady escalation of the quality of the annonal food distributions and in the lavishness of the public buildings of the city. As Augustus saw, the grain dole might not be essential to the survival of the city, and it might not be a desirable thing to pamper the modey plebs — but even if he abolished the annona 'it could at any time be restored through ambitio' (Suet. Aug. 42.3). Ambitio, the pursuit of political support through the dealing out of favours, is the key to the world of partem et circenses. The vast population visible in Rome was the constituency which supported the early prittcipes. Once they had ensured that they had no rivals in its support, it provided them, in return for the status their attentions gave it, with a visible position of ascendancy in the capital of the world which remained one of the key ingredients in their political position. That that ascendancy was in some sense freely granted by a free people was an important myth, because of the Roman past and because of the sensitivity of the interplay between the notions of freedom and subjec­tion across the empire as a whole, especially in the East; and it was in the pursuit of that image of co-operative mutual freedom that the dialogue between plebs and princeps, with all its seeming disadvantages for the latter, was allowed to continue, indeed actively encouraged. The plebs was on display too, and the occasions such as the famous welcome given to the Armenian king Tiridates were meant to show off not just the luxury of Nero's court, which could be done in private, but something more unusual — the intricacy and reliability of the relationship between the ruler of the Roman world and the teeming cities of his homeland: the populousness is part of the point (Dio Lxn.3.4), but the nature of the relationship, the element of freedom, is also significant.⁴⁸

Cities, not city: it is important to remember that we are in fact not dealing with just the city of Rome. The social forms characteristic of the plebs in the first century в.с. had developed in a wide region which embraced both Rome and the wealthy and populous centres of Campa­nia, and the milieu continued to exist for a very long time. Nero's display for Tiridates began at Puteoli, where Caligula's extravagant regal exhibition of a great procession along a temporary bridge across the sea had also been set. It was in Campania that Tiberius in a.d. 27 was overwhelmed by the 'assembling together of the inhabitants of the cities', so that he resolved to escape to Capri (Tac. Ann. iv.67). In the next year he was visited not just by the Senate but by 'magna pars plebis' (Ann. iv.74). Theprincipes spoke to and reproved, favoured and checked, the people of these far-flung cities as they did the people gathered in Rome. An anecdote in Suetonius' life of Vitellius (12) gives us a glimpse of how the social contexts intermeshed. Vitellius' boyfriend and freed­man Asiaticus decamped from Rome after their first amour and was later found employed in a cookshop at Puteoli, whence he was forcibly returned to Rome and his patron's favours. The audience of the princeps' display in Campania overlapped considerably with that which he

⁴⁴ For the display of population see also Mithridates at Tac. Ann. xii. z i, or Tiberius on the way to the tribunal 'conspicuous for the gathering of people from every side', Ann. 11.34.

addressed in Rome; and the same is true of Ostia from the Julio-Claudian period on, and throughout of the old seats of Roman villeggiatura\ Praeneste, Tibur, Tusculum and Andum. Quite apart from the slow currents of emigration, the people of our study were prepared to travel distances which surprise us for entertainment. They were quite at home throughout the region of the city. In a.d. 69 the populace, in a characteristic episode, poured out to the north up the Via Flaminia to meet Vitellius' legions on their adventus (Tac. Hist. 11.88). At the village of Saxa Rubra the princeps was treating the army to an epulum, at a safe distance from the city and with convenient imperial properdes provid­ing the necessary resources. But the plebs could not resist from teasing the soldiery with its 'vernacula urbanitas' and a massacre ensued. Similarly, the scores of thousands killed or maimed when the amphith­eatre at Fidenae collapsed in a.d. 22 were not the population of that dormitory-town of the Urbs (Tac. Ann. iv.62); and the vast and disappointed audience of Claudius' attempt to drain the Fucine Lake did not derive from the villages and hamlets of the central Apennines (ibid. xii. 5 6). From Campania the evidence shows clearly that people would go anywhere in the area for games, from Cumae and Capua to Pompeii and Nuceria; and on a handy table of market-days from that region all the local centres, even when they are 65-80 km apart, are present — and so is Rome itself.[951] The nature of the spectacles was to gather people like this; we have already insisted on the resemblance between the religious assembly at a spectacle and the political assembly of the same citizen- body, and it is important to remember that in the background of these great concourses in Roman Italy lies the dispersed citizen statuses of the middle Republic and before. Federal assemblies and their religious aspects underlie many of these imperial institutions, from the gods who are propitiated to the type of place where the gathering is held. A calendar of the end of the fourth century a.d. from Capua still shows how the fesdvals of the year wandered from significant place to significant place across the social landscape of the region (ILS 4918).

Nevertheless, the effect of the institution of the Principate was to increase the privileges of the part of the population which was present in the vicinity of the city of Rome. The republican aristocracy had spread its interests widely; the emperors needed an imperial city to be the locadon and symbol of their power.[952] It is not without significance that some at least thought that they might not choose old Rome for the job, and that from the second century onwards, they came increasingly to take other places as their long- or short-term bases. By that dme the Creadon of the imperial city was complete, so that many of the effects of the two centuries which we have been discussing proved remarkably tenacious. The appearance of the city and the notion of its privileges were two particularly long-lasting consequences. But the distribution of the evidence makes it dangerous to assume that the social patterns of the period from Sulla to Claudius lasted beyond the Severan period. The examination of Rome in that period and its relations with Italy, when the princeps was no longer there nearly so much, must be left for another occasion.

THE PLACE OF RELIGION: ROME IN THE EARLY EMPIRE

S. R. F. PRICE

Roman religion had always been closely linked with the city of Rome and its boundaries. The restructuring of a number of religious institutions in the Augustan period resulted in changes within Rome, and, beyond it, in the empire. The importance of the religion of place is illustrated by an episode from Livy's History of Коте, written in the early 20s b.c. After the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 b.c., there was a proposal that the Romans should migrate to the newly conquered Veii, rather than rebuild Rome. Livy put in the mouth of the Roman general Camillus a striking rejection of this proposal, which emphasized the religious foundation of the city, the necessity for the ancient cults to be located in Rome, and the significance of Rome's sacred boundary, the pomerium (v. 52). Camillus' speech articulated issues of considerable topical importance.¹ There had been a fear that Caesar would move the seat of empire from Rome to the East, a fear that was revived by Antony's dalliance with Cleopatra. Augustus, however, was to promote Rome as the capital of the empire. Camillus' re-establishment of the ancestral rites neatly foreshadows the religious activity of Augustus himself and his argument about the indissoluble ties between Rome and her cults encapsulated the preoccu­pation of the imperial age with place and the associated issue of boundaries (see below, Section I).

Stress on the religious site of Rome was not an innovation of the Augustan age, but it did increase in this period and it formed the content within which the new political order was placed (see below, Section II). The Augustan restructuring of the earlier system was represented at the time as restoration: ancient cults had faded away, temples had fallen down, priesthoods were vacant. The 'restoration of the res publico' by Augustus necessarily involved 'restoration of the traditional cults'. Scholars used to hold that this view was indeed correct: religion, in decline in the late Republic, was revived under Augustus. They diverged from the Augustan view in arguing that, as the decline was real, the revival could be only artificial: meaningful religious energies were located in other contexts ('oriental cults' or, later, Christianity).² This old

¹ Liebeschuetz 1967 (pi7j). ² Warde Fowler 1911 (f 253); Latte i960 (f 170).

812

orthodoxy now seems very fragile. Religion in the late Republic is best seen as suffering from disruption, not decline, while preoccupation with revival ignores the extent of change in the system.³ But Augustan stress on restoration need not be treated as a cunning obfuscation. The age was fundamentally concerned to relate the present to the past.⁴

There were also rituals which focused more directly on the emperor himself, especially after his death. These are normally described as 'the imperial cult', and placed in a separate category from the 'restoration of religion'. But if the 'restoration' is to be seen as a restructuring around the person of the emperor, the rituals which alluded more specifically to him also belong in the context of restructuring (see below, Section III). Even the apotheosis of the dead emperor may be seen as rooted in 'tradition'.

The city of Rome also has to be located in the context of the empire (see below, Section IV). Roman cults were replicated outside Rome, in Italy and in the provinces in the army and colonies. Though the relations of the empire to Rome are normally seen in terms of'the imperial cult', it is again necessary to stress not direct worship of the emperor, but the range of other Roman cults.⁵

The social and physical context of the changes in Rome in the Augustan period merits discussion. Rome was an enormous city, with a population which may at times have approached 1 million people, and yet the principal holders of religious offices were members of the Senate, which numbered around 600 in all. Does this mean that we are dealing with an official religious system which held no meaning in the popular religion of the city? In fact, the opposition between 'official' and 'popular' religion is somewhat deceptive. Official and popular manifes­tations are simply different aspects, on different levels, of a continuum of religious institutions and practices. Upper-class leadership does not mean that the system lacked significance for the lower classes, and we shall see some signs of the penetration of the Augustan system among the poorer citizens. But the population of Rome did not consist wholly

On the Republic see Scheid 1985 (p 217); North, САН vii.2², ch. 12; Beard, САН ix², ch. 19. On the Augustan period see Nock 1934 (p 192). Liebeschuetz 1979 (p 174) 5 5-100, Kienast 1982 (c ij6) 185-214.

In addition to Livy, Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. (published in 7 в.с.) is invaluable for its perspective on the past (cf. Gabba 1982(6 56); Schultze 1986(8 161)). Ovid's Fasti, perhaps composed in a.d. i- 4 but with later revisions, is a systematic account of the festivals of the first six months of the year. Despite the existence of two modern commentaries (J. G. Frazer, London 1929; F. Bomer, Heidelberg, 1958), the poem has been unjusdy neglected in religious histories of the period (cf. however Schilling 1969 (f 219); Fauth 1978 (f i j j)). Most of the relevant inscriptions are in ILS. Coarelli 1983 (f 116) offers a guide to the archaeological evidence; Nash 1968 (e 87) illustrates the major monuments. There are two collections of texts in English translation: Grant 195 3 (p 149) and 1957 (f i 50); see also M. Beard, J. North and S. Price Religions ojRome 2 (Cambridge, 1966). The main works of reference are Wissowa 1912 (f 241) and Latte i960 (f 170).

For such cults see Liebeschuetz, САН xi².

of Roman citizens. Those of different ethnic groups, including some freedmen from the East, maintained cults from their places of origin. (See below, Section V.) However, it is very difficult to see how far the lower classes drew upon the Augustan religious system in constructing their own worlds.

i. myths and place

Roman mythology, according to the traditional view, never existed: only under the influence of Greece in the last centuries в.с. did the gods acquire some kind of mythology.⁶ A contrasting view holds that there was indeed a Roman mythology, which was in strict harmony with the mythology of the Vedic Indians, the Scandinavians or other Indo- European peoples, but that it was mainly swamped by the influx of Greek mythology in the middle Republic.⁷ The outcome of both views for the imperial period is the same: the current mythology was an alien import without much significance for Roman religion, and thus works on late republican or early imperial religion have little or nothing to say about mythology.⁸ The paradox is that the early books of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus are full of mythological stories about early Rome, while Ovid's Fasti consists entirely of descriptions of festivals and their associated myths. These authors would have been perplexed to be told that their accounts were trivial foreign imports.

The Roman mythology current in the early Empire was very different from that of other peoples, including, surprisingly, the Greeks. The myths did not form a cosmogony like that of Hesiod, and several major deities, including Jupiter and Mars, do not take part in any divine adventures. Indeed the Greek Dionysius of Halicarnassus commends Romulus, whom he holds responsible for the establishment of Roman religion, for following 'the best customs in use among the Greeks', while rejecting traditional Greek myths which contained calumnies about the gods.⁹ There had long been a debate in Greece about the propriety of certain myths, and Dionysius praises Romulus, and Roman religion of his own day, in the light of that debate. In the eyes of an educated Greek, Roman mythology was quite different from the traditional Greek stories

Wissowa 1911 (f 141) 9; Latte 1926 (f 169); H. J. Rose, Mnemosyne 4th ser. 3 (1930) 281: 'It is as certain as any negative historical proposition can ever be that Rome had no myths, at least none of a kind which could possibly associate themselves with cult.' The traditional view also held that in the earliest period there were only primitive powers, undifferentiated by personal attributes. This is a separate issue, on which see North, САН vn², ch. 12.

See briefly Dumezil 1970 (f 124) 47-39, and also Koch 1937 (f 162) (with review by R. Syme, JRS 29 (1939) 108-10). Sabbatucci 1970-2 (f 210) discusses the general issue of the 'loss' of Roman myths.

* Grant 1973 (f i 51) is the best introduction. See also Horsfall in Bremmer and Horsfall 1987 (f 105) ch. i. ⁹ Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 11.18-20.

about their gods, contrary to the modern theories about the profound hellenizadon of Roman religion in the middle and late Republic.

Roman myths were in essence myths of place. They recounted the history of the area of Rome itself, a history that extended without interruptions or Dark Ages to the Augustan age and of which there were living tokens in the cults of Rome. Dionysius devotes the whole of his first book to the earliest populations of the area, especially the Arcadians, Greeks by origin, who were responsible for consecrating 'many precincts, altars and images of the gods and instituted purifications and sacrifices according to the custom of their own country, which conti­nued to be performed in the same manner down to my day'.[953] The most striking of these was to Hercules, who passed through the area on one of his labours and killed a local bandit, Cacus. Evander, king of the Arcadians, wanted to offer divine honours to Hercules, knowing that he was destined for immortality. Hercules himself performed the initial rites and asked the Arcadians to perpetuate the honours by sacrificing at the spot each year with Greek rites. The altar at which Hercules sacrificed 'is called by the Romans the Greatest Altar (Ara Maxima). It stands near the place they call the Catde Market (Forum Boarium) and is held in great veneration by the inhabitants'.[954]

The ritual of this altar was the subject of learned debate. The Greek nature of the sacrifices was satisfactorily explained by the story of Evander and Hercules, but there was a further peculiarity: women were barred from the altar. Various explanations were offered. A Roman annalist of the second century B.C. seems to have explained the ban through a story that the mother of Evander and her women were late for sacrifice.[955] Varro offered a different account: the priestess of the Bona Dea (whose shrine lay near the Ara Maxima) refused to allow Hercules to drink from the goddess' spring, and in turn Hercules banned all women from his altar.[956] The myth and ritual of the Ara Maxima were the subject of lively interest on the part of antiquarians, historians and poets of the late Republic and early Empire. Their accounts exemplify the focus of Roman myths on a particular place, and the elaboration of that focus in the Augustan age.[957]

The majority of Roman myths refer to the founding and early years of

Rome. So, for example, a myth related to the festival of the Parilia, the founding of Rome and the creation of its sacred boundary. According to Ovid, there was an ancient rural festival designed to purify the sheep and cattle by calling on the goddess Pales, from whose name that of the festival was derived.[958] Ovid goes on to describe the festival, in two parts. First, the contemporary urban festival, in which he says he had often taken part. 'I personally have often brought in handfuls the ashes of the calf and the beanstalks, pure means of expiation. I personally have leaped over the flames ranged three in a row, and been sprinkled with water by the moist laurel bough.'[959] After this, Ovid moves on to the rural festival of purification of sheep and cattle. 'Shepherd, you purify your well-fed sheep at fall of twilight, first sprinkle the ground with water and sweep it with a broom' and so on.¹⁷ His account of the rural festival is much fuller than of the urban one, but he makes clear that the two do differ (there is no blood of a horse or ashes of a calf in the rural festival). In drawing this distinction Ovid is (allegedly) following the evidence of his own eyes, and also the work of Varro, who insisted on the distinction between the public and private festivals, that is the urban and the rural.¹⁸

Ovid goes on to discuss the origins and hence significance of the festival. The Parilia, like any Roman festival, permitted a multitude of competing explanations.¹⁹ Ovid was faced with no less than seven: (i) fire is a natural purifier; (ii) fire and water were used together because everything is composed out of opposing elements; (iii) fire and water contain the source of life, as in the symbolism of exile and marriage; (iv) the festival alludes to Phaethon and Deucalion's flood, an explanation Ovid doubts; (v) shepherds once accidentally ignited straw; (vi) Aeneas' piety allowed him to pass through flames unscathed; (vii) when Rome was founded, orders were given to transfer to new houses; the country folk set fire to the old houses and leaped with their cattle through the flames. Ovid favours the last interpretation, commenting that it happens 'even to the present day on the birthday of Rome'.

Ovid elucidates his favoured interpretation by recounting the story of Romulus and the foundation of Rome, a story to which we shall return in the context of Augustus. Romulus chose the time of the celebration of the Parilia to found the city of Rome. He marked out the lines of the wall of the new city with a furrow, praying to Jupiter, Mars and Vesta; Jupiter responded with a favourable augury. Romulus then instructed one Celer to kill anyone who crossed the walls or the furrow, but Remus, in ignorance of the ban, leaped across them and was struck down by

Celer. In this common version, the Parilia, the founding of Rome, the creadon of the pomertum and the killing of Remus all interconnect.[960]

In making his choice of interpretation Ovid was in good company. Though modern scholars are generally happy to treat the Parilia as a genuine, primitive agricultural ritual which survived into imperial Rome,²¹ our only extant pre-Julian calendar marks against the entry Parilia 'Roma condita', and the association of the Parilia with the foundation of Rome only became more orthodox. When news of his decisive victory at Munda in 45 в.с. arrived in Rome at the time of the Parilia, the coincidence was exploited in favour of Caesar, the new Romulus: games were added to the Parilia, at which people wore crowns in Caesar's honour.[961] And the Romulan theme became dominant in a.d. 121 when Hadrian chose the date of the Parilia to found his new temple of Venus and Roma: the festival continued to have lively celebrations, but became known as the Romaea.[962]

The Parilia provide a perfect example of the way that competing interpretations of Roman festivals changed. The Parilia could be seen in all sorts of ways, as Ovid shows: in terms of natural science (fire as a natural purifier); philosophy (fire and water as opposing elements); Greek myths (Phaethon and Deucalion); accident (chance fire caused by shepherds); Roman myth (Aeneas and Troy). But the interpretation already offered by the pre-Julian calendar was the one Ovid favoured: that the festival was connected with the founding of Rome. For Ovid the ancient festival, at which Rome was founded, evokes the incorporation of the primitive golden age into the structures of imperial Rome.

The privileging of one, historicizing interpretation of the Parilia, which connects the festival and the site of Rome, is characteristic of the late Republic and early Empire. One might compare the contemporary accounts of Hercules and the Ara Maxima. Of course, since the early second century в.с. there had been 'histories' of Rome, which focused on the achievements of the Roman state, but, so far as we know, the preoccupation of Livy with the place of Rome is new, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus was able to recount Roman 'history' in a connected sequence from Hercules to Aeneas to Romulus to Camillus and so on to the present. Roman myths pertain almost exclusively to the site of Rome; the story of Romulus and Remus concerns the creation of the city and its sacred boundary.

/. The pomerium

The importance of Rome's pomerium was manifold. At the mythical level, the conflict between Romulus and Remus over the foundation of the city was settled by the sight of six vultures by Remus on the Aventine and of twelve by Romulus on the Palatine: the Aventine was not included within the pomerium until the time of Claudius. And the killing of Remus was justified by his violation of the boundary of the new city.[963]

In the imperial period the pomerium was clearly marked by massive blocks of stone, 2 m tall and 1 m square.[964] Placed wherever the line of the pomerium changed direction, the precise distance in Roman feet between each marker stone was indicated on the stone itself and all the stones were numbered in sequence along the line of the pomerium. The markers ensured that there was no uncertainty about the precise line of the boundary, and no excuse for error. There had been various republican alterations to Romulus' pomerium but the extensions carried out by Claudius and Vespasian were the only ones in the imperial period; they took the area enclosed by the pomerium up from 325 ha to 665 and 745 ha respectively. In addition, when a dyke was built to control the Tiber floods, Hadrian ensured that new boundary stones were erected directly above the old ones. The right to extend the pomerium was sufficiently important to be specifically listed in the powers granted to Vespasian at his succession.[965] Such extensions were justified by a precise connexion between the boundary of Rome and the boundary of the Roman empire. The actual marker stones of Claudius and Vespasian include the formula: 'having increased the boundaries of the Roman people, he increased and defined the pomerium[966], and this was the generally accepted reason for the extension of the pomeriumP The pomerium was thus intimately bound up with the ultimate boundary of the Roman people.

The boundary was also reinforced at time of crisis. Following dire portents, thepontifices purified the walls with solemn lustrations, moving round the circuit of the pomerium. For example, the appearance on the Capitol in a.d. 43 of a horned owl, a bird considered to be particularly inauspicious, led to the lustration of the city.[967] The significance of such lustrations is vividly depicted in Lucan's epic on the civil wars. He describes at length a ficddous lustradon of the city along the line of the pomerium after Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon.²⁹ Lucan's retrojecdon of a contemporary pracdce is a perfect reflection of the preoccupations of the imperial period. Rome could not allow another Remus to cross the pomerium-, at times of threat the boundary had to be purified and strengthened.

As in the republican period, the pomerium continued to be a significant dividing line, though some of the rules were redefined to accommodate the emperor. These changes foreshadow the more extensive alterations to be discussed in the next section. In one area, however, even emperors were no exception. The ancient prohibition on burial within the pomerium was reaffirmed by various emperors until the fourth century a.d. and seems to have been generally observed. And emperors them­selves, with the solitary exception of Trajan, to whom we shall return (below, p. 820), were buried outside the pomerium. Indeed Claudius and Vespasian deliberately refrained in their extensions of the pomerium from including the area of the Campus Martius used for imperial cremations and burial.

Civil authority in the Republic had been defined and limited by the pomerium. The popular legislative assemblies could meet only within the pomerium-, the favourable signs from the gods {auspicia) which were preconditions for the assemblies could be received by civil magistrates only within the pomerium.³⁰ With the shift in functions from the popular assemblies to the Senate and emperor, the significance of the assemblies waned in the first century a.d. but augury (i.e. the interpretation of auspicia from heaven) continued to be important: a list of auguries between the years i and 17 a.d. happens to survive on stone, and augurs were appointed until the end of the fourth century a.d. The augurs were the priests responsible for the interpretation of auspicia and for maintain­ing the pomerium itself.³¹ The powers of a tribune of the people were likewise limited by the pomerium-, when in 30 b.c. Octavian was given the powers of a tribune to aid those who appealed to him, they were restricted, in traditional manner, to the area within the pomerium and up to one Roman mile outside. But subsequently, with the grant of the tribunician power in 23 b.c. emperors ceased to be restricted by the pomerium.³²

Military authority, which was traditionally valid only outside the pomerium, was partially redefined for the emperor. In the celebration of

Luc. 1.5 84-604. Prop, iv.4.75 describes a threat to the boundary (by Tarpeia) at the Parilia, 'the day the city first got its walls'.

Magdelain 1968 (f 180) j 7-67; Magdelain I977(p 181); Catalano i978(f 110) 422-j, 479-91.

CIL vi 56841 (auguries); Wissowa 1912 (f 241) jj4 n.2 and Labrousse 1957 (e 68) 170 n.i (pomerium). For an augur dealing with an Augustan comitia, see Torelli 197J (в 291) 111-16,1J1-2.

Dio li.19.6. Cf. Suet. Tib. ii.j.

triumphs emperors continued to follow the ancient rules. When Vespa­sian celebrated his victory over the Jews he spent the night before the triumph outside the pomerium, so as to start the triumph by crossing it at the Triumphal Gate.[968] The anomalous burial of Trajan within the pomerium is explained by the rules for a triumph. The ashes of Trajan, who had died in the East after conquering Parthia, were brought into Rome in triumphal procession and placed in the base of his column. Justification was found in an allegedly traditional right of those who held triumphs to be buried within the city.[969]

The scope of the emperor's imperium, which by now was broader than merely military authority, was redefined. From 23 B.C. onwards, emper­ors held imperium, both within and outside the pomerium,[970] They thus had command of troops in Rome, though the praetorian guard was actually stationed just outside the pomerium. Some emperors even appeared in the city in military dress[971] and in 2 в.с. Mars received for the first time a temple within the pomerium (below, p. 833). With the combination of civil and military power in the hands of the emperor, the pomerium ceased to exclude the military sphere, but it continued to be of central importance as the boundary of Rome. We turn now to other transforma­tions of the traditional system as part of the establishment and definition of autocratic rule.

ii. the re-placing of roman religion

The Augustan period is conventionally viewed as one of restoration or renovation of traditional cults plus the addition of ruler cult. This dichotomy of restoration and innovation is quite false. The ancestral cults of Rome were not simply restored; they were restructured. Ruler cult in Rome was not a simple innovation; many aspects of it were deeply traditional. Thus the distinction between the two types of cults disap­pears. There were major changes in Rome in the Augustan period, which affected senatorial priesthoods and state temples; at the lower level, the ward cults; and the Secular Games. At the centre was Augustus, sometimes seen as the new Romulus, and round him the whole religion system was restructured.

The concern for the proper performance of religious rites is illustrated by a book entided 'Memorable Acts and Sayings', which devoted the first chapter to religion.³⁷ The work, dedicated to Tiberius, notes examples of ancestral maintenance of religion even in the face of severe difficulties, of punishment meted out to those who ignored the claims of religion, and of the correct response to cases of superstidon. These paradigmatic anecdotes neatly encapsulate the importance placed in the imperial period on the maintenance and even reinforcement of Roman religious practice.

An index of the energy put in the early Empire into the organization of religion is the production of books on religious law. Traditionally, sacred law had been the special preserve of the various priestly colleges, but from the second century в.с. various priests published books on the subject, and in the second half of the first century B.C. others also, both juriconsults and antiquarians, wrote further works. Jurists continued to write such works in the early Empire. Antistius Labeo wrote 'On Pontifical Law' in at least fifteen books, Ateius Capito 'On Pontifical Law' in at least six books, 'On Law of Sacrifices' and 'On Augural Law'; Veranius 'On Auspices' and 'Pontifical Questions'.³⁸ These treatises codified the basic framework of sacred law and made subsequent work unnecessary; after the early first century a.d. we hear of no further books on the subject, despite the fact that some leading jurists were also members of priestly colleges. The legal works of the Augustan and Tiberian periods are a neglected aspect of the religious and intellectual achievement of the age.

The need to pay particular attention to religion is stated by poets in the early 20s в.с. Horace, in an Ode composed before 28 в.с. associates the recent travails of Rome with religious neglect. This poem is sometimes used as evidence for the decline of religion in the late Republic, but it of course does not support that thesis.³⁹ Horace is here reflecting and creating an Augustan perspective on the previous period. Just as Livy, writing on early Rome, explained her misfortunes at the hands of the Gauls by religious neglect, so Horace is seeking to account in traditional fashion for the turmoil and near disasters of the previous generation.⁴⁰ The solution, in the eyes of both Horace and Virgil, lay in the hands of one man.⁴¹ Octavian, or to use his official Roman name, Imperator Caesar, held such a position of prominence that in 27 в.с. some proposed that his name should be changed to Romulus, as the new founder of Rome.⁴² But others thought that Romulus was too regal a name and one that carried the taint of fratricide, and an alternative proposal won the

^M Schulz 1946 (f 690) 40-1, 80-1, 89-90, 138.

Hor. Carm. hi.6, with Jal 1961 (f 158). Temples had been neglected by the rich in favour of their private luxury: Carm. 11. ij. 17-20; Sat. и.г. 103—4. Against the decline thesis see Beard, САН ix², ch. 19.

Compare Virg. G. 1.501-2. Horace parallels the fate of Troy with that of Rome: Carm. 111.3.

Virg. G. 1.498-101. Hor. Carm. 1.2 with Bickerman 1961 (f 96) and Nisbet and Hubbard 1970 (в 4i)adlot. ⁴² Suet. Aug. 7.2 and Dio liii.16.7-8, with Scott 19ц (f 222).

day. His official name henceforth was Imperator Caesar Augustus. Both names indicated that the bearer was uniquely favoured by the gods for the service of Rome. The story was told that when Octavian was campaigning for his first consulship in 43 в.с. six vultures appeared, and that when he was elected six more appeared; this auspicy indicated that like Romulus he would (re)found the city of Rome.[972] This theme was maintained in the choice of the name 'Augustus', a word which was used of all places consecrated by augurs. The name carried evocations of the founding of Rome, without using the name of an actual king of Rome, and of the peculiar favour of the gods for its bearer.[973]

Augustus also awarded honours to the first founder of Rome. In 16 в.с. he rebuilt the temple to Quirinus, who had become identified in the late Republic as the deified Romulus. A fragment of a later relief depicts the pediment of the temple.[974] In the centre stand Victory and Mercury, with Jupiter and Hercules on either side, and beside them Vesta, Mars and Venus. This fine gathering of Augustan deities is impressive enough, but the important point is that these gods are connected with Romulus and Remus. They are at either end of the pediment sitting as augurs, and in the top centre are the vultures seen at the founding of Rome.

The depiction of both Romulus and Remus reflects an Augustan emphasis on fraternal harmony. The myth of Romulus presented above (pp. 816-17) simply gave one, Augustan, version of the myth, but there were other, earlier versions of the story with very different emphases. Horace, for example, condemned the renewed bloodshed in the civil wars, in the late 40s or early 30s B.C.: 'A bitter fate pursues the Romans, and the crime of a brother's murder, ever since blameless Remus' blood was spilt upon the ground, to be a curse upon posterity'. By contrast with this version, Ovid makes Romulus say to Remus: 'There is no need for strife. Great faith is put in birds; let us try the birds', and, as we have seen, he blames the death of Remus on his ignorance of Romulus' prohibition and the action of Celer.[975] Romulus himself is guiltless, the travails of Rome are ascribed to the sin of Laomedon, and Augustus can thus be seen as the new founder of Rome.

Augustus subsequently undertook a major administrative reorganiza­tion of the city, which created local analogues to the reformed religious system of the state. In the earlier system, ascribed to Servius Tullius, there were four regions and shrines to the lares at every crossroad, where annual sacrifices were offered. In 7 b.c. Augustus divided Rome into fourteen districts (regiones) and 265 wards (wV/).[976] The importance of the wards lay primarily in the area of cults.[977] In the late Republic the colleges responsible for the cults at crossroads in the city had been a political danger and Caesar had attempted to suppress them, but, perhaps in 29 b.c. (among other occasions), Augustus had given theatrical perfor­mances in every ward of the city to celebrate a quadruple triumph, and the cults themselves seem to have continued in the early Augustan period.[978]

The Augustan reorganization transformed the cults of the wards: from 7 b.c. onwards they were of the Lares Augusti and the Genius Augusti. The traditional celebrations were also changed. To the old festival of the lares on 1 May was added a new celebration on 1 August, when the magistrates took up office, presumably in honour of the Genius AugustiThe lares were ancient, but obscure beings, seen by some ancient writers as the deified spirits of the dead.[979] If this interpretation were dominant, the Lares Augusti would be the imperial ancestors, and the Genius Augusti, the Spirit of Augustus himself. The ward cults now consisted of cults previously located within the house of Augustus.[980]

The new cults involved building a shrine at the crossroads in each ward. The one excavated example is a small monument, 2.80 m by 2.38 m, with a flight of five steps running up to the shrine, which sheltered images of the Lares Augusti and the Genius Augusti as well as a small altar.[981] The reliefs on the various extant altars are of great interest. The most elaborately carved altar shows, on the two smaller sides, a sacrifice performed by the ward magistrates, and Victory with the shield of Virtue awarded to Augustus; and on the other two larger sides, Aeneas with the Laurentian sow and the apotheosis of Caesar. These reliefs clearly relate to the iconography of official Augustan art, but their style of carving and the wide range in the iconography of the altars is very important. Though Augustus handed the cults of the Lares Augusti and of his Genius over to the wards,[982] the actual arrangements and the designs of the altars were the responsibility of the local officials.[983]

The Augustan reorganization of the ward cults placed the emperor within the life of the city of Rome. The shrines continued to be repaired (and used) through the third century and indeed still feature in the fourth-century catalogues of Roman monuments.[984] The cults were not a transient Augustan phenomenon. The running of the cults of a ward lay in the hands of the four annual magistrates, who were mainly ex-slaves, aided by four slave officials. They were responsible for the festivals, including the local games (ludi compitalicit), and the names of the magistrates were inscribed, just like the names of the consuls, on official lists (beginning in 7 в.с.). The public functions and forms of the magistracies gave a real status to the ex-slaves, who were debarred from holding state or municipal office. The Augustan system was not simply a sop for the senatorial class; it incorporated the emperor throughout the city and down to a lowly level of society. The ward cults are symptomadc of the changes in Roman religion under the Empire. Place continued to be important; indeed the creation of the new wards marks an increased emphasis on place. And within that framework the emperor was inscribed.

/. Priesthoods

The imperial focus on Rome continued in the sphere of priesthoods. Augustus, who held priesthoods only at Rome, gradually accumulated membership of all the major priestly colleges, becoming pontifex in 48 B.C., augur in 41—40 B.C., XVvir sacris faciundis in c. 37 B.C., and Vllvir epulonum by 16 в.с. To mark the cumulation of offices a coin issued in 16 в.с. featured the symbols of each of the four priesthoods.[985] In addition Augustus was also a member of three of the lesser priesthoods: frater Arvalis, sodalis Titii and fetialis. To hold more than one major priesthood was extremely unusual in the republican period. Caesar was both pontifex and augur, but Augustus went beyond even Caesar's precedent. Cumulation was established as a peculiarly imperial privilege; only emperors and their heirs held office in plurality.[986] When Nero was adopted by Claudius, coins were issued with the same four symbols as had appeared on Augustus' coins and a legend indicating that Nero had been co-opted as a supernumerary into the four priestly colleges by decree of the Senate.[987] The co-optation into four colleges simultaneously was an innovation here, but it set a precedent for the later designation of the emperor's heir. The emperor and his heir embraced all religious activity in Rome. As a result, Roman religion was tied to a particular person as well as a particular place.

The first two of Augustus' offices, augur and pontifex, are worth consideration here: we shall return to the XVvirisacrisfaciundis later. The lituus, the symbol of the augurs, was regularly featured on the coinage of Octavian in the 30s B.C.[988] Octavian, like other republican leaders, emphasized that his military authority was properly founded on religious observance, but after Actium he stressed the peaceful over­tones of the office of augur. In 29 в.с. Octavian took the augurium salutis, at a time when no Roman forces were fighting; this was the 'greatest augury by which the safety of the Roman people is sought', in the words of an official record. Though the augurium salutis is treated as a tradition revived by Augustus, the practice had been carried out only once before (in 63 B.C.). The 'tradition' was, however, kept up subsequently.[989] In the early years of Augustus' career the office of augur had considerable importance, and later emperors continued to hold the office, but its significance was subsequently overshadowed by another priesthood.

Augustus had been pontifex since 48 B.C., but in 44 в.с. Lepidus was deviously appointed pontifex maximus in place of Caesar and held the office until his death in 13 в.с. Augustus gave considerable emphasis to the popularity of his election as pontifex maximus in 12 в.с. The date on which the election occurred was celebrated by an annual festival; and noted in Ovid's Fasti.[990] The event was indeed of central importance in the restructuring of Roman religion.

The pontifex maximus was traditionally obliged to live in an official house, which was in the Forum; even Caesar conformed. Augustus was unwilling to give up his own house on the Palatine, but followed the rule about the public house. Initially, he made a part of his own house public property and subsequently (a.d. 3) after a fire destroyed the house he rebuilt it and made it all public property.[991] Augustus also maintained, or rather enhanced, the connexion between the pontifex maximus and the cult of Vesta. The republican official house of thepontifex maximus was adjacent to the precinct of the Vestal Virgins and among other responsibilities he oversaw the cult of Vesta by the Vestals. Just under two months after Augustus becamepontifex maximus there was dedicated 'an image and shrine of Vesta in the house of Imperator Caesar Augustus pontifex maximus' .^M The old shrine which contained the sacred flame and various secret objects remained on the Forum, but the creation of the new shrine in Augustus' house on the Palatine allowed a rearticulation of the position of pontifex maximus.

The relationship of Augustus to Vesta was much closer than that of any republican pontifex maximus. It was expressed by contemporary writers in two ways. First, by the stories of the origin of Vesta. Augustan writers stated that Aeneas had brought the fire of Vesta with him from Troy to Italy and that Romulus had transferred the cult, which his mother had served, from Alba Longa to Rome.[992] Secondly, they assert an actual kinship between Vesta and Augustus. In the words of Ovid, 'Gods of ancient Troy, the worthiest prize to him who bore you, you whose weight saved Aeneas from the foe, a priest of the line of Aeneas handles your kindred divinities: Vesta, you must guard his kindred head.'[993] Augustus was thus connected to Vesta both by blood and by the deeds of his ancestors.

The creation of the shrine on the Palatine was an important stage in the formation of a peculiarly imperial residence. What had been just one of many residences of the republican nobility on the Palatine was transformed into a palace. 'Vesta has been received into the house of her kinsman; so have the senators rightly decreed. Apollo has part of the house; another part has been given up to Vesta; what remains is occupied by Augustus himself ... A single house holds three eternal gods.'[994]Rather than Augustus going to live in the public residence near the shrine of Vesta he shared a house with her and Apollo (below, p. 832). The pontifex maximus could now be called 'priest of Vesta'[995] and Vesta had been replaced in a new imperial setting. The public hearth of the state, with its associations of the success of the Roman empire, was now confused with the private hearth of Augustus; in turn the private cult of the imperial Lares and the Genius of Augustus was established in all the wards of the city.

The new relationship with Vesta is one aspect of the transformation of the office of pontifex maximus. Scholars sometimes say that in 12 B.C. Augustus was appointed head of Roman religion, a pagan Archbishop of Canterbury or Pope, and they are inclined to date his religious reforms to the period after 12 в.с.[996] This attitude goes back to antiquity; Suetonius (Aug. 31) groups a series of religious reforms under the heading of Augustus as pontifex maximus, though some are demonstrably earlier. This conception of the office was the one established by Augustus, not the one current in the late Republic. Thepontifices were, with the augurs, the most prestigious priestly colleges of the Republic, but they had distinct spheres of operation and the pontifices did not wield general authority over the augurs or the other priestly colleges.[997] Thus in the Republic the pontifex maximus was merely head of one of the priestly colleges. This changes with the emergence of dynasts in the late Republic. Caesar became pontifex maximus in 63 B.C., and had begun to convert the office into something new. Thus, in 44 в.с. it was decreed that his son or adopted son should become pontifex maximus after him.[998]The intrigues which led to the election of Lepidus rather than Octavian are hardly surprising. After the election of Augustus it was impossible for anyone but the emperor living on the Palatine to be pontifex maximus and all subsequent emperors took up the position soon after accession (usually in March) and regularly featured it among their official titles. Augustus had gradually accumulated membership of all four principal priestly colleges and was not hindered at all by Lepidus, a political nonentity. But once the office of pontifex maximus was in Augustus' hands, it did become the keystone of the religious system. 'From the fact that they are enrolled in all the priesthoods and moreover can grant most of the priesthoods to others, and that one of them, even if two or three emperors are ruling jointly, is pontifex maximus, they control all sacred and religious matters.'[999] From 12 B.C. onwards, for the first time, Roman religion had a head.

Under the guidance of Augustus, who increased the privileges of some priesthoods, the senatorial priesthoods remained extremely presti­gious. Augustus noted that he had rewarded 170 of his senatorial supporters in the civil war with priesthoods and Dio says that in 29 в.с. Augustus was allowed to choose priests even beyond the regular number.⁷³ But despite Augustus' powers, the number of non-imperial members of the main four priestly colleges remained stable. As these priesthoods, unlike magistracies, were held for life, competidon was fierce. For the first two centuries of the Empire it was not possible for a senator to be a member of more than one of the four main colleges. Indeed only a quarter to a third of senators (and a half of all consuls) could become priests. Some senators saw membership of one of the priestly colleges as the pinnacle of their career, ranking higher than being praetor or consul.

There were however problems with the appointment to two of the priesthoods. The case of the flamen Dtalis is a clear case study in the flexibility of'tradition'. The office offlamen Dialis had been vacant since 87 b.c., though the rites themselves had continued to be performed by the pontifices until Augustus as pontifex maximus had the post filled in 11 b.c. The flamen Dialis remained subject to unique restrictions: for example, 'the feet of the couch on which he sleeps must be coated with a thin layer of clay, and he must not sleep away from this bed for three nights in succession, and no other person must sleep in that bed'. But Augustus 'altered certain relics of a primitive antiquity to the modern spirit'.⁷⁴ The full details of the changes are lost to us, but the priest was now allowed to spend more nights outside Rome and there seem to have been changes in the status of his wife.⁷⁵ The debates over the restrictions continued. One flamen Dialis argued that he should be allowed to leave Rome to govern a province; Tiberius as pontifex maximus ruled against such a radical change. When this flamen died Tiberius argued that the restriction of the office to those married in an archaic and now rare manner should be lifted; this proved unnecessary as there was a suitable candidate, but some legal restrictions imposed on his wife were removed.⁷⁶ These changes in the rules governing the office of flamen Dialis are among the best examples of the malleability of Roman religious pracdce.

There had also been problems over the appointment of Vestal Virgins, which Augustus attempted to solve. He increased the privileges of the Vestals, including special seats in the theatre; later, distinguished imperial women sat among the Vestals in the theatre.⁷⁷ Many senators were reluctant to put their daughters forward to be Vestal Virgins (Vestals served for thirty years and subsequent marriage was unusual), but Augustus swore that if any of his granddaughters had been of the appropriate age, he would have proposed them. Such official encourage-

Gell. NA xi.15.14. Tac. Am. iv.16.5. Cf. Rohde 1956 (f 207) 136-7.

Tac. Алл. ш.71.3; Gai. Inst. 1.136, fragmentary. Cf. Gell. NA x.15.14 and 17 for other changes.

Tac. Am. 111.58—59.1,71 (a.d. 22); iv. 16 (a.d. 24). Cf. Domitian's permission for a flamen Dialis to divorce his wife: Plut. Quatst. Яот. 50 = Мог. 276E.

Suet. Aug. 31.3, 44.3. Tac. Ann. iv.16.4; Dio Lix.3.4, Lx.22.2.

ment proved to be successful. Under Tiberius two senators vied with each other to have their daughters chosen as Vestal Virgins and the office remained in high prestige through the third into the fourth century.⁷⁸

The Vestals in fact accumulated new, imperial functions in addition to their traditional ones. In the Republic they had been present with the other priests at the grand funeral of Sulla and it was voted that with the priests {pontifices) they should every five years offer up prayers for Caesar's safety.⁷⁹ After Actium the Vestals headed the procession greeting the returning Augustus; they were present at the dedication of the Ara Pacis and with the magistrates and priests were responsible for the annual sacrifices there. The Vestals were even put in charge of the cult of the deified Livia.⁸⁰ While Vesta gained a new shrine on the Palatine, the Vestals gained a concern for the emperor and his family. The emperor was thus further linked to the hearth of Rome and its tokens of the farmer of the gods for Rome.

The Arval Brethren illustrate in more detail the extent and nature of changes in priesthoods in the imperial period. They held a shadowy position among the numerous priesthoods of the Republic, but their sanctuary is attested archaeologically from the third century в.с. Augustus became a member of the college and, perhaps in 29 b.C., placed the body on a new footing.⁸¹ Our only republican literary source on the Arvals explains that they perform rites to make the crops grow; their name (fratres Arvales) comes either from sowing (ferendo) and fields (arvis), or from the Greek fratria or brotherhood. By contrast, in the imperial period the name was explained differently. The nurse of Romulus had twelve sons, but one died and Romulus himself took his place, calling himself and the others 'Arval Brethren'.⁸² This myth entirely suited a college which included Augustus, the new Romulus.

The revived college proudly inscribed a record of its ceremonies and membership. The extensive fragments that survive run from 21 в.с. to a.d. 304 and are the fullest extant record of any of the priesthoods of Rome.⁸³ The membership of the college was of some distinction from its first Augustan appointments to the end of Nero's reign. Thereafter the members were generally drawn from the middle ranks of the Senate

" Tac. Ann 11.86. Cf. iv.16.4: a grant of 2 million sesterces to a new Vestal, presumably in addition to the traditional salary. ⁷⁹ App. fiC/v. 1.106; 11.106.

Ara Pacis: Ryberg 1955 (f 209) 41, 43, j 1-2, 71-4; Dio Li.19.2; RG 11-12. Livia: Dio Lx.5.2.

Scheid 197j (f6i) 331-66; 1987 (f 2i8)Cf. Saulnier 1980 (f 215) and Wiedemann I986(f 237) for an Augustan reorganization of the JetiaUs.

Varro, Ling. v. 85. Pliny, HN xviii.6; Gell. NA vn.7.8, quoting Masurius Sabinus {floruit Tiberius-Nero), who drew on earlier historians.

Texts mainly in Henzen 1874(8 242) or ILS 229-30, 241, >026-48. See in general Beard 1985 (p 91) with translation of selected documents.

which could not expect consulships or major priesthoods.[1000] The records of the Arvals' ceremonies demonstrate clearly the extent to which the ancient (or allegedly ancient) cults of Rome were re-structured round the figure of the emperor.

The central, three-day fesdval of the Arval Brethren was in honour of Dea Dia, an obscure deity known only from these inscriptions. The festival was somewhat fluid, at least in the way it was recorded, but it never included imperial sacrifices. The emperor and his family were the focus of a range of quite separate sacrifices. There were annual vows and special vows for the emperor's safety, sacrifices to mark imperial birthdays, accessions, deaths or deifications, sacrifices because of the discovery of a conspiracy against the emperor or because he had returned safely to Rome. There was also in the sanctuary of Dea Dia a shrine to the emperors (a Caesareum) which contained imperial statues. But sacrifices for the emperor were never in the sanctuary of Dea Dia and almost never involved sacrifices to her. The vows were taken on the Capitol to the Capitoline triad, Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, and the other sacrifices were offered in various locations in Rome (mainly on the Capitol and at the temple of Divus Augustus) to the Capitoline triad and other deities, to the deified emperor and empress, to the Genius of the living emperor and the Juno of the empress.

After a.d. 69, with the exception of one offering to the Genius of the emperor and to the divi as part of a special ceremony of expiation in a.d. 224, there were no regular sacrifices to the divi not sacrifices for imperial birthdays.[1001] But sacrifices for special imperial events continued and vows for the emperor's safety were regular throughout the period. The records of the Arval Brethren thus demonstrate the range of religious activity focused on the emperor that was performed alongside their 'traditional' cult. Talk of 'restoration of ancient cults which had gradually fallen into disuse'[1002] should not blind us to the fact that 'restoration' entailed a radical shift in focus.

2. Temples

The building or rebuilding of temples is another aspect of the restructur­ing of the religious system around the person of the emperor. Augustus was proud of his speed in repairing eighty-two temples in 28 B.C. and of building or repairing fourteen temples in Rome during his reign, but his account of the temples is interspersed with references to his work on other, secular buildings, such as the Senate-house, theatres, the water supply and a road.⁸⁷ That is, Augustus presented his temple construction within the tradition of building works carried out by victorious generals and other senators. There was, however, a profound difference. While senators continued to erect some secular buildings during the reign of Augustus, after 3 3 в.с. only Augustus and members of his family built temples in Rome. Senators, now excluded from their traditional oppor­tunity for display in the capital, increased their munificence to their native cities in Italy and elsewhere. This shouldering of responsibility for temples in Rome increased the importance of the emperor.⁸⁸ Temple building placed the emperor in a unique relationship with the gods.

Almost all the nine state temples built in Rome between the death of Caesar and the accession of Vespasian refer directly or indirectly to the emperor. Two were dedicated to the officially deified ruler (Divus Julius; Divus Augustus). Three relate to official victories (Apollo; Neptune; Mars Ultor). Two stress imperial virtues (Concordia; Iustitia). One (Jupiter Tonans) was dedicated by Augustus in thanks for the fact that a thunderbolt just missed him. Only one (to Egyptian Isis) has no overt imperial associations, and may not be a real state temple. The reign of Augustus is the crucial period for the establishment of this imperial focus of temple building. Seven of the nine new temples date to his reign: in addition, some of the old temples rebuilt by Augustus gained new associations. Three temples built or rebuilt by Augustus may be taken as exemplary of the new system: Cybele, Apollo and Mars Ultor.

The temple of Cybele on the Palatine was a familiar peculiarity in the late Republic. The cult of the Mother of the Gods, introduced to Rome from Phrygia in 205 B.C., was noted for its barbaric exoticism. Even in Augustan Rome, at the festival of Cybele eunuchs preceded the goddess through the streets banging drums and clashing cymbals. But the goddess became in the Augustan period more Roman and more imperial. Her Phrygian homeland was now associated with the Trojan origins of Rome; according to Ovid, she almost followed Aeneas from neighbouring Troy to Italy but awaited a later date. Already in the Aeneid Cybele appears as a protectress of Aeneas on his journeys, and implicit association with Augustus was strengthened when he rebuilt the temple.⁸⁹

" RG 19—21. Cf. Eck 1984 (d 39) 136—42. Wissowa 1912 (f 241) 596-7 lists the new temples, though that to Neptune was probably a restoration; see generally Gros 1976 (f 397).

^a All temples 'would have fallen into complete ruins, without the far-seeing care of our sacred leader, under whom shrines feel not the touch of age; and not content with doing favours to humankind he does them to the gods. О holy one, who builds and rebuilds the temples, I pray the powers above may take such care of you as you of them': Ov. Fast 11.59-64. Cf. 1.13-14, Livy, iv. 20-7. Suet. Aug. 29-30.

¹⁹ Fast, iv.251-4, 272. Virg. Aen. 11.693-7, ix.7-9, x.252-J. The rebuilding may pre-date 2 b.c., with subsequent restoration after a fire in a.d. 3: Syme 1978 (в 179) 30.

The goddess herself gained prominence as the annual washing of the image took place from the early Empire onwards not in the temple, but after a grand procession down the river Almo, where the goddess had first arrived in Rome. In the Republic, though the praetors had overall responsibility for the sacrifices and games, no Roman citizen could take part in the festival and the priests and priestesses were Phrygians, but in the imperial period the rule changed and Roman citizens could become priests and priestesses. It was even possible to honour Drusilla posthu­mously with a festival modelled on the festival of Cybele.[1003] The cult retained 'Phrygian' peculiarities - Cybele held precedence over the other gods, her children, and the offering to her of herbs, which the earth once grew without human labour, sacralizes the most primidve stage of human existence before the Greek Ceres introduced cereals[1004] - but they obliquely emphasized the antiquity and pre-eminence of Rome.[1005]

Adjacent to the temple of Cybele on the Palatine, Augustus also constructed a temple of Apollo, which with the temple of Vesta framed his own house. On the advice of haruspices he made public the part of his property which had been struck by lightning in 36 b.c., dedicating the temple itself in 28 B.C. The temple was of considerable grandeur, featuring statues of the Danaids in the surrounding colonnade, ivory carvings of Niobe and the Gauls on the door and statues of Apollo, his mother and sister inside the temple. These three cult images were indeed the works of three of the finest Greek sculptors of the Classical period.[1006]

The location of the temple is very striking. As Apollo was a Greek god, his earlier temple was outside the pomerium, in the Circus Maximus. Augustus moved his cult in, and made Apollo, who had previously been a healing god of marginal importance, central to his new Rome.[1007] The complex of Augustus' house and the two temples, to Vesta and Apollo, which was without precedent in Rome, subtly evoked the divine associations of Augustus. The iconography of the temple of Apollo, which highlighted the punishments meted out by Apollo to those who disobeyed him, reflects Augustan preoccupations. Apollo had helped Augustus to defeat Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 b.c., and Augustus rebuilt the sanctuary of Apollo at Actium, founding presti­gious games (and Nicopolis) there.[1008] The new temple at Rome also received (probably in 23-19 b.c.) the ancient Sibylline Books from the temple of Jupiter which recorded the utterances of the prophetess under the inspiration of Apollo.⁹⁶ And the focus of the Secular Games on Apollo and Diana (below, pp. 835-6) shows how Apollo had become a symbol of the new age.

The third major Augustan temple, which was later described as the most beautiful building in the world, is the summadon of Augustan religious restructuring. The temple of Mars the Avenger formed the centrepiece of Augustus' new Forum, built next to the Forum of Caesar and dedicated in 2 B.C.⁹⁷ This was the first temple to the god of war within the pomerium and its locadon in the centre of Rome reflects the profound changes of the Augustan period in the rules governing the emperor's imperium.⁹⁸ Though the notion of the temple went back to a vow Augustus took in 42 B.C., when he defeated the murderers of his father, the emphasis on Mars as the Avenger also evoked Augustus' vengeance on the Parthians in 20 в.с.; the standards lost by Crassus were recovered and placed in the innermost shrine of the temple. This allusion to contemporary achievements against foreign foes was reinforced by the military functions prescribed for the temple. Military commanders were to set off from the temple, the Senate was to meet in it to vote triumphs, and victorious generals after the triumphs were to dedicate to Mars the symbols of their triumphs.⁹⁹ Thus military glory could be displayed only in a setting which explicitly evoked the emperor's authority.

The design of the Forum and temple ardculates the relationship between Augustus, the gods and Rome, without directly glorifying Augustus.¹⁰⁰ Augustus was referred to overtly only by the dedicatory inscription on the architrave, and in the chariot which probably stood in the centre of the Forum, but the whole complex evoked him. The cult statues in the temple were of Mars, Venus and Caesar, referring both to Caesar's (and Augustus') descent from Venus, and to Augustus' piety in avenging Caesar. On the pediment were Mars, Venus and Fortune; Romulus as augur and victorious Roma flanked them, and on either side were representations of the Palatine, the setting of Romulus' augury, and the river Tiber. Augustus' own victories and restorations of Rome had here their mythical analogues. In the porticoes on either side of the temple stood balancing series of statues depicting Augustus' dual ancestry. On one side was Aeneas, the descendant of Venus, dutifully carrying his father from the flames of Troy (echoing Augustus' own filial

* Gage 1931 (f 142)99-101; 1933 (f 146), 342-33.

" Described in Ov. Fast. v. 545-98; Pliny, HN xxxvi.102.

" There was already within the pomerium a temple to Quirinus, who was associated with Mars, and Varro 'recorded' a primitive cult of Mars on the Capitol. Cf. Scholz 1970 (f 221) 18-33.

" Suet. Aug. 29; Dio Lv.io.2-3. Cf. Bonnefond 1987 (f 293).

¹⁰⁰ Zankern.d. [e. 1968] (f625); Koeppel 1983 (f454л)98-101; Anderson 1984(e 2)65-100. For Romulus sec Degrassi 1939 (в 223).

piety), and flanked by his descendants, the kings of Alba Longa and the Julii. Facing this series was a statue of Romulus, the son of Mars, victoriously bearing the armour of an enemy king whom he had slain in battle and round him other figures of Roman history, celebrated mainly for their military prowess. In all there were about 108 statues, each with a brief inscription itemizing their distinctions. To these famous pre­decessors and ancestors, stretching back to Aeneas, Romulus and through them to Venus and Mars, Augustus was the heir. The place of Rome, evoked by their achievements and by the representations of Palatine, Tiber and Roma herself, was now restructured around the figure of the emperor.

The restructuring connected with the temples of Apollo and Mars Ultor was not however because of animosity towards the existing cults. Both new temples did received functions previously part of the cult of Jupiter Optimus Maximus: the Sibylline Books were moved to the Palatine, and some military functions to the Forum Augustum. But Augustus himself rebuilt the Capitol and made lavish offerings to Jupiter. And the annual offering of vows on behalf of the emperor was always performed in the Capitol. The old system had now increased in complexity with the integration of the new temples into the life of Rome.

ĵ. Secular Games

The celebration of the Secular Games in 17 в.с. neatly sums up the workings of religion under Augustus and the subsequent persistence and transformations of the Augustan system.[1009] These games are uniquely well documented in a variety of sources: the Sibylline oracle ordaining the procedures, the inscribed record of the games, the hymn of Horace sung at the festival, and other scattered sources. The main location for the games was in the north-west Campus Martius beside the Tiber at an altar known as the Tarentum (or Terentum), where the records of the games were later set up. A story circulated from at least the first century в.с. onwards that in archaic times one Valesius, hoping to save his children from plague, was told by the gods to sail down the Tiber to Tarentum, a Greek colony in the 'instep' of Italy, and give his children water from the altar of Dis Pater and Persephone. Putting in at night at the Campus Martius, he gave water to his thirsty children, who were miraculously cured. He had unwittingly drawn water at a place called Tarentum from the altar of Dis Pater and Persephone, and in thanks for the cure Valesius established three nights of sacrifices and games.¹⁰² The Secular Games of Augustus were thus tied to this mysterious place.

The Augustan celebrations, however, differed substantially from any republican predecessors. Augustus and his heir Agrippa played leading roles, though not without traditional justification. Augustus, long a member of the XVviri, the board responsible for holding the games, initiated the celebrations by writing to the board as one of its four presidents. But in the festival the other three presidents stood aside in favour of Agrippa, an ordinary member of the board. Augustus himself offered the nocturnal prayers, and, with Agrippa, the diurnal ones. He also ended each prayer with a petition 'for me, my house and my family'. This was a traditional prayer formula,¹⁰³ but in Augustus' mouth the old words acquired a new resonance: it was in the same year that he adopted the sons of Agrippa as his ultimate heirs. The hymn sung on the third day alluded to the central importance of Augustus: 'May the illustrious descendant of Anchises and Venus obtain the help of you gods whom he worships with white oxen, superior to the enemy, merciful to the prostrate foe.' The old religion of place had acquired a new focus.

The celebrations themselves were also transformed. The preliminary distribution of torches, sulphur and asphalt to the entire free population of Rome (line 65; cf. line 8) had not been part of earlier Secular Games, but as with the cult of the Lares Augusti, there was an attempt to create widespread participation. The model for this general purification of the people of Rome was the Parilia; we recall Ovid's description of the purification by fire (above, pp. 816-17). As the Parilia was connected with the original founding of Rome, so the Secular Games marked the regular regeneration of Rome.

At the second stage of celebrations there were major changes to the old practices. The nocturnal rites remained, but Dis Pater and Perse­phone were replaced by the Fates, the Goddesses of Childbirth and Mother Earth, and three day-time celebrations were added, to Jupiter, Juno, and Apollo and Diana. Instead of a focus on the gloomy gods of the Underworld, marking the passing of an era, the Augustan games marked the birth of a new age. The fertility of Mother Earth, one of the themes on the Ara Pacis, was guarded by the Fates and the Goddesses of Childbirth. A prominent role was also played by 110 mothers, one for each year of the saeculum, and a chorus of boys and girls. The new temple of Apollo on the Palatine (above, pp. 832-3) was also incorporated: it

^,(B Zosimus, ii.1-3 (and Val. Max. 11.4.5). Versnel 1982 (f 232) 217 28 discusses the relation of the story to the Valerii.

^1(D The formula appears in Cato, Agr. 134,139,141. It is used by the matrons: Augustan acta line 130 (restored); Severan acta iv.12.

was one of the locations where the XVviri took in offerings of crops and gave out the material for purification, and where on the third day sacrifice and prayer were offered to Apollo and Diana and the saecular hymn was first sung.

The games are also worthy of comment.¹⁰⁴ They too reveal different layers. During the three days of the festival proper there were two quite different sorts of games: 'at night games were held after the sacrifices on a stage without a theatre and without seats'. This continued into the following day, but there were in addition 'games in a wooden theatre which had been built in the Campus Martius by the Tiber'. The second type of games formed the seven days of games that closed the festival; these were held in three locations, the theatre in the Campus Martius; the Greek musical games in the Theatre of Pompey and Greek theatrical games in the theatre in the Campus Martius. The first type of games, without theatre and without seats, was avowedly primitive (and un­popular - it was not repeated in the seven days at the end of the festival). Varro, writing on the origin of theatrical performances in Rome, associated them with the introduction of the ludi Tarentini.¹⁰⁵ Those who had read their Varro knew that quaint games of this type had to be incorporated into the new structure.

The rituals and their organization were based on traditional sources. The 'ancient books', perhaps the records of the XVviri, were searched for details (none was forthcoming on how to finance the Secular Games) and the organization of the rituals was in the hands of the eminent jurist Ateius Capito (above, p. 821), but the main shape of the rituals was pro­vided by a Sibylline oracle. Shortly before the Augustan celebration the Sibylline oracles were purged of spurious items and deposited beneath the statue of Apollo in the new temple on the Palatine (above, pp. 832­3), and perhaps in the process the oracle enjoining quite new rituals was discovered. In fact the oracle was probably an antiquarian product of the Augustan age, incorporating earlier material. Both the oracle and the prayers hope for the future obedience of the Latins to Rome, a notion that made little sense under the empire, and which must have evoked the troubles of the second century в.с.¹⁰⁶ The 'ancient books', legai expertise and the Sibylline oracle combined to create and sanction the new rites.

The timing of the celebrations also received due authority. The only well-attested republican celebrations were in 249 and 146 B.C., with a cycle of 100 years.¹⁰⁷ But, following the Sibylline oracle (and Varro), a cycle of no years was accepted as authentic and a sequence of earlier

¹⁰⁴ Erkeli 1969 (p i jo). ¹⁰⁵ Ap. Censorinus, D.N. i7-8 = Pighi 196) (в 26}) 57-8.

•Об Dicls 1890 (f 120) ij-15; Gage 1953 (f 143) 177—8}; Momigliano 1941 (p 189) 165 and Momigliano 1966 (л 64) 625.

¹⁰⁷ Censorinus, D.N. citing Varro and Livy. Censorinus gives 146 B.C.; Livy, Epit. 49 gives 149 в.с.

republican games was established, beginning in 456 в.с. These were added after 17 B.C. to the official Calendar. This new history of the games, which ignored the two earlier authentic celebrations, authorized games in 16 b.c.; the puzzling choice of 17 b.c. is perhaps because of disagreement over the precise year of the foundation of Rome.¹⁰⁸

The Augustan games formed the model for all subsequent celeb­rations. Claudius celebrated games in a.d. 47, receiving censure from modern scholars for his self-interested choice of date, but we tend to forget that a.d. 47 was 800 years from the foundation of Rome and a cycle of 100 years was perfecdy reasonable (indeed the Greek translation of Augustus' Res Gestae (wrongly) translates saecularis as 'every hundred years'). Thereafter Domitian celebrated the games in a.d. 88 (six years ahead of the Augustan cycle) and Septimus Severus in a.d. 204 (exactly on the Augustan calculations). Both Domitian's and Severus' games followed the Augustan procedure extremely closely. There were of course some changes (a new hymn was written for 204, when the emperor and his family were also somewhat more prominent), but the basic structure of events was unaltered.

A second cycle of games was also celebrated under the Empire.¹⁰⁹ Taking its lead from Claudius' holding of Secular Games 800 years after the foundation of Rome, games were also held the following two centuries (a.d. 148 and 248). These were not counted in the official numbered sequence of Secular Games and, in the latter two cases, the ritual was quite different. The Tarentum seems to have been displaced in favour of rites in front of the temple of Venus and Rome, known as the Temple of the City, and the date was probably changed to 21 April, the birthday of Rome (above, p. 817). These anniversary celebrations, which developed from the Augustan framework, mark the emergence of a new consciousness of the importance of the city of Rome. While under the Republic such anniversaries of the foundation of Rome are unheard of, in the imperial period, the Secular Games, within which the emperor was inscribed, achieved a new importance.

iii. imperial rituals

The religious position of the emperor was thus central and pervasive but also diffuse. There was no one major ceremony such as a coronation or new year's festival at which the emperor was the leading actor, nor did any one religious ritual sum up the religious position of the emperor.¹¹⁰ Rather, a range of rituals incorporated the living emperor. From 30 в.с.

¹⁰* For earlier plans to celebrate games in zj B.C. see Virg. Лея. vi.65-70, 791—4, with Merkelbach 1961 (p 187) 91-9. ¹⁰⁹ Gage 1935 (p 143л), 1936 (f 145).

¹¹⁰ For such ceremonies elsewhere see Cannadine and Price 1987 (p 109).

games were celebrated every five years by one of the colleges of priests or the consuls in fulfilment of vows for Augustus' health; and in 28 в.с. Augustus' name was inscribed in the hymn of the Salii by a decree of the Senate.¹¹¹ His birthday was celebrated publicly, as we have seen in the case of the Arval Brethren (above, p. 830), and at banquets public and private libadons were made to Augustus.¹¹² Images of Augustus and members of his family stood in household shrines, sometimes tended by 'worshippers of Augustus' organized on the model of private associations.¹¹³

Though there was no straightforward cult of the living Augustus in Rome, his numen, or divine power, did receive public honours there. In a.d. 6 (probably) Tiberius dedicated an altar at which the four main priestly colleges sacrificed to the numen of Augustus.¹¹⁴ Numen was not shared by ordinary people, and had no resonances in family cult, which makes the establishment of an official cult in Rome the more striking.

Ovid's Fasti neady encapsulates the invisible presence of Augustus. Interspersed with accounts of traditional festivals (such as the Parilia), Ovid mentioned every official festival of Augustan significance, such as the founding of the Ara Pacis (1.709-22) or the establishment of the cult of the Lares Augusti (v. 129-46). Ovid has often been accused of poetical flattery, but in fact he merely reflects the emphases of the official state calendar. In addition, Augustus recurs in other contexts: the mother of Evander prophesies the rule of Augustus and his family (1.529-36); battles of Caesar and Augustus are recorded on otherwise blank dates (iv. 3 77-84,627-8); and the closing of the temple of Janus because of the Augustan peace (1.281—8); the disappearance of one temple leads to mention of Augustus' restoration of temples (11.55—66). Iⁿ addition various interpretations reflect Augustan interests: Ovid's account of the establishment of the cult of Venus in Rome, in conflating two temples, ascribes the cult to Claudius Marcellus in 212 B.C. (iv.863-76). In earlier sources the first cult of Venus was established in Rome in 215 B.C. and not under the instigation of Marcellus, but Marcellus was the illustrious ancestor of Augustus' nephew and intended heir, who received high praise in Virgil (Aen. vi.855-6). Ovid also worked by suppression of awkward information. He offers three explanations of the etymology of 'June' and pleads his inability to decide among them (vi.i—100), but he makes no mention of the 'obvious' etymology, from Junius Brutus, the

^1,1 Dio li.19.7 with Weinstock 1971 (f 235) 217-19; RG 9.1; Salii: RG 10.1; Dio li.20.1. The same honour posthumously for members of the imperial family: EJ² 943.4—3 and AE 1984,308 lie; Tac. Ann. II.83, iv.9.

Dio li.19.7; Petron. Sat. 60; Ov. Fast. 11.637-8; cf. Ног. Car т. iv.5.31-2.

Ov. Pont, iv.9.105-10; Tac. Ann. 1.73.2. Cf. Santero 1983 (f 214).

lltalxiii. 2, p. 401, restored with dating of Alfoldi 1973 (f 83)42-4. For examples from outside Rome see below, p. 845. See Fishwick 1969 (f 133) for the distinction between Genius and numen.

liberator of Rome from the kings (Macrob. Sat.i. 12.31); after all, another Brutus had killed Iulius Caesar. The emperor and his achievements were formally celebrated throughout the year and his presence recurs throughout Ovid's Fasti, but there was no single, central religious institution devoted to the living emperor.

Emperors after death were seen in sharper focus.¹¹⁵ The official cult of Caesar offered the obvious model for Augustus and subsequent emperors. Though some honours were probably voted for Caesar in his lifetime their posthumous consolidation was decisive for subsequent practice. In 42 B.C. the Senate passed the official consecration of Caesar, including the building of a temple; in 40 b.c. Antony was inaugurated as the first flamen divi lulii (an office to which he had been appointed in 44 B.C.), and Augustus began to call himself divi filius. Finally, in 29 B.C. Augustus appointed a new flamen in place of Antony and dedicated the temple to Caesar, an event celebrated by lavish contests. The temple dominated the south side of the Forum Romanum and formed the backdrop for public speakers using the new tribunal in front of it. The posthumous status of Caesar was thus assured. Valerius Maximus, writing under Tiberius, related that Divus Iulius appeared to Cassius at Philippi, telling him that he did not actually kill Caesar as his divinitas could not be extinguished; and elsewhere Valerius prayed by Caesar's altars and temples that his divinity would favour and protect the human race (1.8.8; 6.13).

The transition of Augustus to the status long held by Caesar was smoothly managed. The expectation was expressed in his lifetime that he would ascend to his rightful place in heaven, and immediately after his death Augustus was made a divus. The funeral, cremation and burial in the Mausoleum were merely grand versions of the traditional funeral of the Roman nobility, but afterwards a senior senator declared on oath to the Senate that he had seen Augustus ascending to heaven. As a result, in the words of the official state calendar, 'on that day heavenly honours were decreed by the Senate to the divine Augustus'.¹¹⁶ The main 'heavenly honours' were a temple, a flamen, who was to be a member of Augustus' own family, and a priestly college of sodales Augustales, leading members of the senatorial order. Augustus, like his ancestor Romulus, went to join the gods.

The practices of the Augustan age established the basic framework which prevailed for the rest of the imperial period. Emperors and members of their families were given divine honours only after their death and then only in recognition of the fact that they had, by their merits, actually become gods. This Augustan system marks a change from the tone of the triumviral period when Octavian was commonly

¹¹⁵ Price 1987 (fioo). ¹¹⁶ lit,1/xm.2, p. 510.

thought to have held a dinner party of the Twelve Gods, himself appearing as Apollo, and when he erected a statue of himself on the Palatine in the guise of Apollo. In addition, official coins from the mint of Rome of the early 20s B.C. showed Octavian as Apollo, Jupiter and Neptune, and the original plan for the Pantheon was that it should be named after Augustus and have his statue inside it.¹¹⁷

After 27 B.C., Augustus no longer employed such imagery and his successors generally upheld his norms. There were, of course, some changes within the system. The Genius, or guardian spirit of Augustus had not entered the state calendar in his lifetime, though it had been honoured, mainly by freedmen, at the crossroads shrines in Rome (above, p. 823). Tiberius resisted oaths by his Genius, but Gaius despotically enforced them and they became standard from the reign of Nero or at least Vespasian.¹¹⁸ For example, the official regulations for two towns in Spain enjoined an oath by Jupiter, various deified emperors and the Genius of the reigning emperor (Domitian).¹¹⁹ Official sacrifices by the Arval Brethren to the Genius of the reigning emperor (or the Juno of the empress) are also to be found from Nero onwards. Such honours to the Genius were not an imperial peculiarity. Every man had his own Genius, and every woman her Juno, who received offerings at birthdays and also featured in oaths. But this was essentially a family matter and, despite the existence of a cult of the 'Genius of the Roman People' by the first century B.C., official cult of the Genius of the emperor was slow to develop. The subordination of state to emperor implied in the public celebration of a family cult was only gradually acceptable.

The one major rejection of the Augustan norms in this period was by Gaius who, after a popular start to his reign, began to make claims to personal divinity. He is said to have sat between the statues of Castor and Pollux in their temple in the Forum, showing himself to be worshipped by those who entered; he wore the clothing or attributes of a wide range of deities, and established a temple to his own divinity.¹²⁰ Such behaviour was completely unacceptable in Rome. For his biographer it demonstrated that Gaius was no longer emperor or even king, but monster, and memory of Gaius' reign (however exaggerated) survived as a warning to subsequent emperors not to destroy the Augustan norms. Thus Claudius, by temperament a conservative with antiquarian interests, reverted to the maintenance of ancestral Roman customs. According to his biographer, 'he corrected various abuses, revived some

^1,7 Suet. Aug. 70. Coins: Burnett 1985 (f 108), discussing Sutherland and Carson, R 1С 1 nos. 270—2. Pantheon: Coarelli 1985 (f 116) on Dio liii.27.3.

¹¹⁸ Tiberius: Dio LVii.8.3; LVin.2.8. Gaius: Suet. Calig. 27.3; cf. ILS 192, Dio Lix.14.7.

^1,9 ILS 6o88.i.30, 6089.iii.15. Cf. Weinstock 1971 (p 235) 201-6,212-17.

¹²⁰ Suet. Calig. 22, 52. Cf. Philo, Leg. 78-113, Dio Lix.26-8.

old customs or even established some new ones'. For example, he always offered a supplication when a bird of ill omen was seen on the Capitol, and in making treaties he recited the ancient formula of the fetial priests.[1010] Concern for the maintenance of the Augustan system recurs throughout the imperial period.

IV. ROME AND HER EMPIRE

The relations between Rome and her empire, to which we now turn briefly, reinforced the transformations visible in the religious system of Rome itself. These relations are normally analysed specifically as the spread of the imperial cult throughout the empire. That is, the worship of the Roman emperor is seen as the cement of empire. In fact, there was no such thing as 'the imperial cult', and in some important contexts imitation of the transformed system of Augustan Rome was of far greater significance than direct worship of the emperor.

Italy formed the core of the empire. All the freeborn population of the peninsula up to the Alps had been Roman citizens since the time of Caesar. Italy was not a province; it was not subject to Roman taxation, but remained in principle a collection of self-governing communities. But the authority of the religious institutions of Rome extended to Italy. The scope is neatly illustrated by an incident under Tiberius, when the equestrian order in Rome vowed a gift to the temple of Equestrian Fortune for the health of Livia, only to realize that there was no such shrine in Rome itself. But a temple was discovered at Antium, where the Senate decided that the gift could be placed, 'since all rituals, temples and images of the gods in Italian towns fall under Roman law and jurisdic­tion'. The case suits the tone of the imperial period. Expulsions of undesirables were normally from both Rome and Italy, and the Roman college ofpontifices gave permissions to Italians on the repair of tombs or the moving of corpses.[1011]

The unique position of Italy is visible most clearly in the calendar. There survive, often in small fragments, forty-four calendars dating to the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius (and one from the early first century B.C.)[1012] Of thirty-eight calendars whose original location is known, twenty-five come from Rome itself, the others from towns in Italy, and only one from elsewhere, a colony in Sicily. The level of detail given in these calendars varies greatly, but all differ from earlier, Italian calendars and all are mutually compatible. They give no festivals peculiar to their own city, but only differing selections from the official festivals of the city of Rome. Towns in Italy, unlike those in the provinces, chose to adhere publicly to the official Roman religious calendar.

Even Italy, however, did not follow all the Roman rules. Some towns preserved their own religious institutions from pre-Roman days, even burying the dead within the town, which was impossible at Rome.[1013]The ancient towns nearest Rome, who had been Rome's 'Latin' allies in the republican period, shared some of Rome's most particular practices; they claimed indeed that Rome had adopted them from the Latins. Thus Alba Longa, Lavinium, Tibur and other Latin towns had one or more of the following: flamen Dialis, Vestal Virgins, rex sacrorum and Salii.[1014] The Salii and the rex sacrorum (and, once, the flamen Dialis) are also found in a few towns in northern Italy, but otherwise these offices appear almost nowhere else in the Roman empire. In addition, there was in the early empire a new flowering of (allegedly) ancient cults emphasizing the ancestral ties between the Latin towns and Rome.[1015] For example, at Lavinium, where there was no settiement in the late Republic or early Empire, Italians of equestrian rank from Claudius on held a priesthood which continued the cult of the Lavinian Penates, participated at ceremonies of the Latin League on the Alban Hill, and renewed the treaty with Rome. In the second century a.d., with the renewal of civic life at Lavinium, local men began to hold the office, which is attested until the middle of the third century a.d. The Latin towns demonstrate in an extreme form the similarities between the religious practices of Rome and Italy.

Outside Italy replications of Roman practices were normal in the early Empire in two, related contexts: the army and colonies. The body of men which stood most clearly for Rome in the provinces was the legions, made up of Roman citizens, and with a religious life that was predomi­nantly Roman. There was an official Roman calendar for both legions and auxiliaries that specified the year's religious festivals. The third- century archives of an auxiliary cohort, Twentieth Palmyrene, stationed on the Euphrates frontier included a copy of this calendar, which demonstrates how the restructured religious system of Augustan Rome was, in a modified form, repeated in the army.¹²⁷ On purely internal grounds it seems certain that the document is a third-century version of a calendar first issued to the legions under Augustus and subsequently also to the auxiliary forces. The first type of celebrations are in honour of the gods of Rome: Mars Pater Victor, the Quinquatria, the Neptunalia,

Salus. The circus-games in Rome founded by Augustus at the dedication of the temple of Mars Ultor in 2 b.c. were marked in the calendar, as was the festival of Vesta, another deity patronized by Augustus. The birthday of Rome was added to the calendar under Hadrian (perhaps replacing an earlier celebration of the Parilia). Secondly, there were the celebrations in honour of the reigning emperor, his family and pre­decessors. We cannot reconstruct the original version of the calendar, but there is no reason to think that there would have been few such entries. The marking of transient Augustan events, which were certainly celebrated in Rome, may easily have been pruned to make way for events of more contemporary relevance. But the birthdays of all the deified emperors and the eight deified empresses whose cult was still officially observed in Rome at this time remained in the calendar. (In fact only fifteen birthdays appear on the extant part; the others will have been in the missing section(s).) Only those deified empresses whose cult was no longer celebrated in Rome certainly do not appear on the Dura calendar. In other words, there is probably a complete correspondence between those honoured in the army and those honoured by the Arval Brethren in Rome. There were also commemorations of the accessions of at least five previous emperors, going back to Trajan, and of two other events in the reign of Septimus Severus; the legitimacy of Severus Alexander was thus strengthened by these ties to the Antonine dynasty to which Septimius Severus had linked himself. There were celebrations on at least four occasions of events in the life of the current emperor, all of which would have been in place under Augustus: for example, his first consulship and his appointment as pontifex maximus.

The structure of the Dura calendar is thus identical in type to the religious system of Rome itself. There were the festivals in honour of the gods, some of which now had clear imperial associations, and there were the celebrations of emperors past and present. Not that there was any opposition between the two: on 3 January vows were taken for the safety of the emperor and the eternity of the empire with sacrifices to the Capitoline triad. This was the religious system officially enjoined on the army. Nock argued that there was no official desire to see the soldiers worshipping the gods listed in the calendar rather than any other gods,¹²⁸ but this conclusion does not follow from the fact that officers and men also worshipped other gods. Rome chose to replicate its own religious system as the official basis of the Roman army.

Roman colonies were the other principal context in which the Roman religious system was replicated. This is hardly surprising as the colonists in the late Republic were landless citizens from Rome and in the early

^m Nock !9)2(f 193) 223. MacMullen 1981 (f 179) 110-11 also denied that there was an official Roman religion of the army.

Empire were ex-soldiers who received land in return for their service. The regulations for the Caesarian colony at Urso in southern Spain provide our clearest evidence.[1016] The extant copy of the regulations consists largely of the original rules, but with some additions of the Augustan period, and it was inscribed in the later first century a.d. The peculiarly Roman nature of Urso thus continued to provide a framework for her identity a century and more after the foundation of the colony, and may have been of particular importance at a time when other Spanish towns received another, subsidiary Roman status. The foundation of the colony began with rites that echoed those of the foundation of Rome itself. The auspices were taken and the founder ploughed a furrow round the site, lifting the plough where the gates were to be. The act was commemorated by cities on coin issues a century and more later.[1017] The boundary of a colony, the equivalent of Rome's pomerium, was indicated by large marker stones; within it no burial could occur nor monuments to the dead be built; and the land immediately within the pomerium was public land which could not be expropriated even by the council.[1018]Then the professional land-surveyors could proceed. One expert wrote that many surveyors positioned their sextant, after the taking of the auspices, perhaps in the presence of the actual founder, and oriented their land divisions in accordance with the direcdon of the sunrise.[1019]

The colony at Urso celebrated its major games in honour of the Capitoline triad (sect. 70-1). This is the earliest evidence for the cult of the triad outside Italy and strongly suggests that Urso had an actual Capitolium. The building of a Capitolium, modelled on that at Rome, was certainly carried out at the creation of some early imperial military colonies. Both Cologne and Xanten in Lower Germany have Capitolia dating after their elevation to the rank of colony; the former was built not long after Cologne became a colony in a.d. 50; the latter was built perhaps 70 years after Xanten became a colony under Trajan, but in this case the entire town was rebuilt and work proceeded slowly. The great temple of Baalbek was begun in the Augustan period at a time when the town received some Roman colonists. Some of the design is purely Roman and the expenses of construction (128 monoliths of Egypdan granite) strongly suggest imperial financing. But the cults were a blend of Roman and Syrian: Jupiter Opdmus Maximus Heliopolitanus, Venus and Mercury.[1020]

The priestly colleges, of pontifices and augurs, were established in colonies (and municipia) on Roman lines,[1021] and some of the actual rituals of the colonies were also expressly modelled on Rome. Two colonies founded (or refounded) in the middle of the first century в.с. illustrate the point. Narbo in southern France dedicated an altar to the numen of Augustus in technically accurate religious formulae. Some of the precise reguladons were spelled out; 'the other rules for this altar and inscrip­tions shall be the same as those for the altar of Diana on the Aventine'. The colony of Salona on the Dalmatian coast used almost identical formulae in dedicating an altar to Jupiter Opdmus Maximus. This procedure is again strictly Roman, with a local pondfex reciting the words in advance of the presiding magistrate. The same details are given and the remainder are to follow the rules for the altar of Diana on the Aventine.[1022] The temple of Diana on the Aventine hill in Rome was of great antiquity - allegedly founded by Servius Tullius c. 540 в.с. as a sanctuary common both to Rome and her Latin allies; inscriptions in archaic lettering certainly existed in the sanctuary down to the Augustan period.[1023] This set of rules was not only ancient; it also governed the relations between Rome and the outside world, and was thus a singularly appropriate model for use in Roman colonies. The colonies made reference to Rome not only in the generation after they were founded (or refounded), but, in the case of Salona, some 170 years later. For some colonies at least, Roman rules provided a continuing framework for their religious identity.

Communities and associations not made up of Roman citizens did not seek to replicate the Roman system, but responded to Rome in their own fashions. In the East, Greek towns maintained their traditional religious systems, worshipping their own selection of the Olympic pantheon, as Pausanias was to describe in the second century a.d. They also commonly chose to establish cults of the living Augustus, somedmes in the context of their ancestral cults. For example, in one Macedonian town a local citizen volunteered to be priest of Zeus, Roma and Augustus, and he displayed extraordinary munificence in the monthly sacrifices to Zeus and Augustus and in the feasts and games for the citizens.[1024] The text is a clear illustration of the integration of the worship of Augustus within local religious and social structures. In the Latin West too towns below colonial status sometimes established cults of the living Augustus, which did not correspond to practice in Rome but did express their position in the Roman hierarchy.¹³⁸

The associations in both East and West which united these towns at the provincial level also established cults that referred to Rome. The pracdce began in the East when the Greeks of Asia and Bithynia-Pontus were given permission in 29 b.c. to establish cults of Roma and Augustus. Similarly the assembly of the province of Syria also acquired a priest of Augustus and games.¹³⁹ The Greeks thus expressed, in an endrely acceptable manner, their subordination to Rome. In barbarian areas of the West, which had just been conquered (as the Romans hoped), the Romans felt it appropriate to encourage similar institutions. For example, in north-west Spain soon after the Augustan conquest a governor established three altars to Augustus which were probably to serve as centres for three peoples in the north-west area; or, the three provinces of Gaul conquered by Caesar were united in 12 b.c. in a single provincial assembly at Lugdunum at an altar of Rome and Augustus, dedicated by Drusus, Augustus' step-son.¹⁴⁰ In the case of more 'civilized' western provinces, provincial cults were slow to appear, and followed strictly Roman models. In the two long-established Spanish provinces, after Augustus' official consecration in Rome, temples to the deified Augustus were built, with priests of the same name (flamen) as in Rome.

The place of religion was the city of Rome. Myths recounted aspects of the Roman past and related to features of Roman topography; individual festivals and cults were founded at a particular time and particular place. For example, the Ara Maxima was established at the time when Hercules passed through the area and the festival of the Parilia was associated with Romulus and the creation of Rome. Emphasis on the places at which cults had to be celebrated went together with an emphasis on the importance of a boundary round the site of Rome. At the Parilia Romulus defined a line, the pomerium, round the new city which was of crucial importance to Augustan consciousness of place, within it lay the key cults of Rome and only within it were civil auspices possible. Outside the pomerium were foreign cults, the sphere of military authority, and the burials of the dead.

The religion of place was adapted to accommodate the figure of the emperor, Augustus, seen as the second Romulus, and he expressed his religious position through the traditional priesthoods, through temple building, and through the celebration of the Secular Games. Though the individual elements had earlier parallels, their combination was novel and resulted in a new and remarkably coherent system centred on the emperor. The religion of place was now restructured round a person.

¹³⁹ Dio li.20.6-7. Syria: AE 1976, 678; I Magnesia 149.

^I<0 Spain: Tranoy 1981 (e 244) 327-9. Gaul: Livy, Epit. 139. See further Fishwiek 1987 (f 137) 97-168.

But it is misleading to categorize this as 'the imperial cult'. The term arbitrarily separates honours to the emperor from the full range of his religious activities, and it assumes that there was a single institution of cult throughout the empire. Within Rome, honours to the emperor have to be seen in the light of his holding of religious office, while outside Rome it is wrong to look only for honours to the emperor. In the context of the army and colonies, real clones of Rome, the copying of other Roman religious practices was at least as important. And when, as in Greek towns, religious honours to the emperor were of considerable significance, they were not replications of Roman honours. Indeed the Roman system was not designed to be replicated (except in the army and colonies). Its principal features were specific to the site of Rome, and the growing emphasis on those features served to distinguish Rome from other towns and to express the peculiar position of Rome as the capital of the empire.

THE ORIGINS AND SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY»

G. W. CLARKE

i. origins and spread

Renewal and reform movements in Palestinian Judaism are well repre­sented in the first-century generations preceding the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple a.d. 70; they flourished in a religious context which lacked sharply defined doctrines and practices, where there was no clearly accepted orthodoxy or authority. Not only was there a range of distinguishable sects (the most notable being, of course, the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Essenes — but there were a number of others, most prominent among which was the 'Philosophy of Judas' with his politically active followers, the Sicarii and Zealots);² there was, in addition, a bewildering array of individual ascetics, prophets and preachers who frequently drew in great crowds and commanded dedicated followings.³ What they often shared in common was a passion for the Torah and the Temple but what often distinguished them was their precise definition, in ritual practice, of purity and sacrifice. Messianic expectations were in the air - but they were by no means shared equally by all, nor was there even agreement on the nature of those messianic hopes.⁴ Ethical debate went hand-in-hand with debate over ritual and ceremony, diet and custom, oral law and written law, the interpretation of the Torah; it was all part of the same process of drawing the boundaries between purity and pollution, holiness and sin, in defining for Israel the will of God. Doctrinal debate there certainly was,

I have chosen a few generally non-controversial features of the ministry of Jesus: for these one is necessarily reliant upon the evidence of the synoptic gospels (composed in their present form near or generally after the destruction of the Temple, the chronological terminus of this study). But for the most part I have preferred to follow as far as possible the contemporary witness of Paul and his associates (supplemented, unavoidably, by the additional testimony of Acts). That way I hope to eschew as much as I can the anachronistic perceptions of the early Christian past (embedded in the Canon as it became later formed) as Christianity developed its own self-awareness and its own sense of separate identity and sought legitimation for those developments in its preferred accounts of its past.

Josephus (Vit. 10) experienced all three major sects 'in order to select the best'. Some of the smaller sects are registered by /я/ет-д/wHegesippus ap. Euseb. Hist. Etc!. 4.12.7, Justin, Dial. 80, not to mention the Qumran sectarians. On the Philosophy of Judas see Schiirer 1979 (e 1207) 11 j98ff.

Some examples are to be found in Joseph. Vit. 11, BJ, 11.4. iff (5 5 = A] xvii. 10. j ff (271 ff); BJ 11.15.4 (258 ff) = AJ xx.8.6 (167 f). ⁴ See Schiirer 1979 (e 1207) 488ff ('Messianism').

848

especially centred on the after-life, immortality and resurrection, but the debates at least shared the same religious and cultural preoccupations.

Into such a religious context with its ferment of debate and diversity fit the movements of John the Baptist (urging a renewal of Israel in the wilderness and a new passage through the 'sea' of the Jordan), and of Jesus of Nazareth round about a.d. 30 (Christian sources being at pains, somewhat apologetically, to subordinate the former to the latter). Jesus' central activities of teaching in the synagogues, attending the Temple services, keeping the festivals - and disputing with other teachers (especially represented, at least in later tradition, as sharpening his views against those of the Pharisees) — these place him in the mainstream of contemporary religious occupations. And his central concerns fit com­fortably into the continuing debate within the Judaism of the day, often characterized as they are with reformist tendencies: concerns for Temple purity and cleansing (Mark ii-.ijff, Matt. 21:1 if, Luke 19:45ff, John 2:i4ff), concerns for intentional purity in worship as well as in morals (e.g. Matt. y.ziS), concerns for the purity of the person (casting out of demons/curing the sick), concerns for love of neighbour (extended even to loving one's enemies, Matt. 5:43ff), concerns for regulating the sexual code of behaviour (with a restrictive view on divorce, Matt. 5:31 £, 19: jfF), concerns for giving primacy to moral (as opposed to ceremonial) law (Mark j-.ifF(healing on the Sabbath)). The carpenter from Nazareth in Lower Galilee, with his chosen inner circle of fishermen (that is to say, drawn roughly from the 'small tradesman' class⁵) could certainly bluntly reject Mammon and outspokenly condemn the snares of riches (e.g. Matt. 6:24 = Luke 16:13), but this did not prevent him from fraternizing with wealthy tax-gatherers, worldly sinners, women of ill-repute and Gentiles⁶ (and other social outcasts). For what he fervently preached was the urgent need for repentance before the impending eschaton¹ and the people to whom he spoke his message were not just the Torah- observant: sinners, the unrighteous, had even greater need of his call. There is an increasingly catholic sense of the definition of'the children of Abraham', the true Israel who might enter upon the kingdom, and a continuous debate with contemporary 'Judaisms' about the sufficient and necessary conditions for entering upon that kingdom (now envi­saged as so nigh). These are lines of debate which eventually opened the way to 'Gentile Christianity': did the twelve disciples come symbolically to represent the twelve tribes of this new Israel so soon to enter upon that

Compare the story recorded by Hegesippus ep. Euseb. Hist Etc!. rn.20.1fT (descendants of Jesus' family in the time of Domitian are small-holding farmers).

Examples of contact with Gentiles are Mark 7:25!? (cf. Matt. ij:22ff), Matt. 8:jff (cf. Luke 7: iff).

Was the scandalous prophecy of the destruction of the Temple intended as an indication of this coming End?

Map 2i. The eastern Mediterranean in the first century a.d. illustrating the origins and spread of Christianity.

kingdom? But what Jesus demanded of his chosen disciples was a renunciation of family and worldly goods, a single-minded dedication and a proselytizing zeal to spread the word (e.g. Mark io:28ff) which ensured that his movement did not remain confined just to sympathetic families and pious followers within Lower Galilee and Jerusalem even after his ignominious death (c. a.d. 30): their conviction of his resurrec­tion became the decisive confirmation of his messiahship. The move­ment from these local Palestinian origins began to spread.

The Pentecostal scene in Jerusalem, as depicted in Acts 2:9ff, has Peter preaching to Jews who have gathered in Jerusalem from the Diaspora. There are 'Parthians, Medes, Elamites; inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judaea and Cappadocia, of Pontus and Asia, of Phrygia and Pamphylia, of Egypt and the parts of Libya around Cyrene; visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes,⁸ Cretans and Arabs ...'. This appears to be telling us in general terms that in the view of the writer the Christian message would be disseminated via these sojourners back to Rome and to the regions of the eastern Mediterranean beyond the Aegean (and to the islands of the Mediterranean) as well as along the north African littoral as far as Cyrenaica. After all, there were present at this scene 'devout Jews drawn from every nation under heaven' (2:5). But our information on the processes of this dissemination is fugitive and haphazard, leaving us with very little confidence in conceptualizing accurately the size and social configuration of the Christian communities formed down to the Flavian era. We can, of course, trace the work of one such emissary, viz. Paul, and whilst aware that his growing special sense of mission to the Gentiles will have dictated particular routes and contacts, particular missionary targets, we have basically to be content to take his missionary journeyings (their precise chronology and itineraries do not matter for this exercise) as roughly symptomatic of the types of community and area where Christian groups (in however minimal a gathering) became established in the first forty years after the death of Christ.

Indicative, however, of our general ignorance are Egypt and Cyrene, mentioned in Acts but lacking, in fact, any specific Pauline connexion.⁹ Legend (but legend only) was required in later time to provide an

⁸ The relative frequency of the appearance in the New Testament corpus of 'godfearers' (but more rarely 'proselytes') suggests awareness of the significance to the Christian movement of those non-Jewish sympathizers located more to the margins of Jewish communities. Among many discussions Schŭrer 1986 (e 1207) i6off, Reynolds and Tannenbaum 1987 (e 1198) esp. 48ff, Goodman 1989 (d 132) 42f.

' Later, the Muratorian Canon (purportedly of the middle of the second century) can register a palpably fictitious epistle of Paul to the Alexandrians (PL 3.191 f). There occurs incidentally in the Pauline following the learned Jew, Apollos of Alexandria (Acts 18:24), as well as the converted Jews from Cyrene (Acts 11:20) with whom Paul and Barnabas laboured at Antioch (Acts 11:22?, 13:1-3: their number presumably included the Lucius of Acts 13:1).

apostolic-period pedigree for 'the Alexandrian churches'.¹⁰ And despite geographical proximity to Jerusalem, despite second-century papyrolo- gical evidence for the remarkably early and remarkably penetrating spread of Christian literature between the Delta and Upper Egypt,¹¹ and despite the inherent likelihood that the Christian message would have found some sympathetic hearers, however few, in the region (given the well-documented Jewish communities of Cyrenaica and Alexandria, displaying a fair degree of permeability with their hellenistic cultural context),¹² despite all these factors we cannot go any further without blind conjecture. And we have to compound that conjecture with the surmise that such nascent Christian communities, still identified as Jewish, suffered virtual annihilation along with their parent communi­ties in the later Jewish revolt under Trajan a.d. 115—17. And being without Pauline details also, we are similarly ignorant of Christian penetration into the land of the Arabs, let alone into the territory east of the Euphrates, among Medes and Parthians (despite the considerable Jewish Diaspora).¹³ Paul seems to claim to have sojourned for some 'three years' in 'Arabia' (elastic term) according to Gal. i:i7f, but this could well have been in one or other of the southern hellenizing cities of the Decapolis (and the failure of churches in the area to claim Pauline foundation suggests that the sojourn may not even have been primarily missionary in intent).¹⁴ Even so, we know the land was destined soon to become a richly Christianized area: already in the northernmost city of the Decapolis, Damascus, Christians were to be found in the Jewish community before the time of Paul's conversion (Acts 9'.2ff),¹⁵ that is to say, in the course of the thirties. This chance glimpse is a salutary reminder of our overall ignorance. Elsewhere in Syria proper (to which Damascus technically belonged)¹⁶ we are relatively well informed about the rich and flourishing, as well as confidendy independent, community established in the far north of the province, in the great urban complex of

¹⁰ Thus, inter alios, Eus. Hist. Etc!. 11.16.1, 2.24 (Mark the evangelist) along with the legendary Acta Marci: by the early fourth century a martyrium (with tumba, coemeterium and sanctuarium) could be located in Alexandria in Mark's memory (Acta Petri, PC 18.461,462,464) and was a site for later pilgrimage, Pallad. Hist. Laus. 45.4. (Philoromus).

¹¹ See Roberts 1979 (f 206).

Note especially (on Cyrenaica) Liideritz 1983 (в 250), cf. Applebaum 1979 (e 775), and (for Alexandria) the life and work of Philo (Schŭrer 1987 (e i 207) 111.2 Sot)ff) and more generally CP] и (i960).

The legends of Abgar and of Thaddaeus' mission (e.g. Eus. Hist. Eccl. 1.13,11.1,6f) reflect the spread to Edessa and into Mesopotamia but it is well to remember that such spread was to be erratic in character (e.g. Carrhae, nearby to Edessa, was long to be a largely pagan stronghold, Theodoret Hist. Eccl. iv. 15, Egeria 20). » On Pella see below.

Some notion of the size of the Jewish community can be derived from Josephus' figures for those claimed to have been slain in the Jewish revolt a generation later. BJ 11.561 (10,500), vn.368 (18,000).

In Paul's day (2 Cor. 2:32) Damascus had been under an ethnarch of the Nabataean king of Arabia, Aretas IV: by imperial concession?

Antioch (on the Orontes), thanks again to the Pauline connexion, for Paul seems to have spent some twelve years or so 'in the regions of Syria and Cilicia'according to Gal. 1:21, 2:1 (cf. Acts n:2jf, 13:1,15:35) — this should include most or all of the decade of the forties. Notoriously, Antioch is depicted by Paul (Gal. 2: iff) as well as by the author of Acts (1 i:2off) as the fons et origo of 'Gentile Christianity': here the process of Christian self-identification is declared to have its beginning. But as for the rest of the country we have to be content to know that there were brethren of Gentile origin in Syria itself besides Antioch (Acts 15:25, cf. 15 -.41) - but whether these were to be found scattered among the village communities typical of the settlement pattern of the Syrian countryside or in the great Syrian cities like Apamea, Epiphania or Beroea we simply do not know.[1025] All we can say is that if Paul was involved in their foundation[1026] his practice was beyond doubt to bring his missionary efforts to bear on urban areas of concentration, particularly where (if we follow the narrative of Acts) there were Jewish synagogues (and Gentile Jewish-sympathizers). Certainly the Syrian Christian communities were soon to prove to be a rich source of extra-canonical texts.

By contrast, Palestine itself has more in the way of details recorded, not unnaturally given the nature of our evidence. But where we can, by means of incidental information, flesh out 'the churches in Judaea' (Gal. 1:22, cf. i Thes. 2:14, Acts 11:29 ('the brethren dwelling in Judaea'), we happen to find predominating the seaboard cities and ports (with their mobile and mixed populations, strongly under the influence of - if not dominated by - hellenistic culture) such as Sidon (Acts 27:3), Tyre (Acts 21:4), Ptolemais (Acts 21:7)- and Phoenicia in general (Acts 11:19,15:5) - Caesarea (Acts 10, 21:8) and Joppa (Acts 9:56, 9:42^ ю:2з).[1027] In Caesarea, in fact, the procurator's headquarters, we are presented with an emblematic cameo, the miraculous conversion of Cornelius (a god- fearer), a centurion of the cohors Italica, symbol of Gentile authority (Acts 10) - along with his household (10:2, io:44ff). But whilst our chance information certainly highlights such hellenized cities we cannot exclude the smaller towns and village communities dispersed throughout Gali­lee, Judaea and Samaria - in fact we have specific mention of villages in Samaria (Acts 8:25) evangelized by Peter and John following on the missionary activities of Philip and a more general scattering of preachers of the Word through the country districts of Judaea and Samaria in the aftermath of Stephen's death (Acts 8:1, 8=4,11:19, cf. Acts 15:3 (Paul and Barnabas travelling among the followers, through Samaria)). We can be precise only about the town of Lydda (close to Joppa), Acts 9:33, 9:35, on the road from Joppa to Jerusalem, and the coastal plain of Sharon, Acts 9:3 5, during a missionary tour of Peter's; inland Galilee, figuring so prominendy in Christ's own mission, fades completely from our view (but note Mark 15:7 hinting at continuing evangelization: 'He [the risen Lord] will go on before you into Galilee and you will see him there'). Indeed if we are to judge from the cases where Chrisdanity failed to establish itself with any significant presence even by the early fourth century - in, for example, such major inland towns as Sepphoris or Tiberias, Epiph. Adv. Haeres. 30: n[1028] - then we must surmise that resistance could be strong, if not complete, in some of the more tradidonal Jewish towns and cides: we would do well to take with caution such jingoistic passages as Acts 21:20 ('myriads of believers among the Jews') and regard the following in Palestine as neither particularly numerous nor evenly distributed: agreed, our sources force us to view the expansion as basically an urban phenomenon but we must allow for at least some haphazard establishment in the countryside also. Even so, the holy city of Jerusalem is the focus of attention in our sources, firstly under the leadership of James, the brother of the Lord (Acts 15:13, Gal. 2:9), succeeded, according to tradition, by Simeon, son of Clopas, a cousin (Eus. Hist. Eccl. 111.11, cf. iv.22.4). In Acts we are carefully provided with staggered statistics emphasizing the regular but spectacular growth of the church in the city, presented as the centre of Christendom: in 2:41 some 3,000 converts are added in a day, 2:47 sees daily increases, by 4:4 the numbers have reached about 5,000, there are more by 6:1, 6:7 attests to further rapid additions (including a large number of the priests), and general growth is recorded in 9:31 and yet again in 12:24, and by 15:5 we find some of the Pharisees are believers. So it comes as no surprise that in 21:20 it can be claimed that many thousands among the Jews have become believers. We do hear of (dissatisfied) Greek-speaking Jews (from the Diaspora?) in 6: iff and it is Paul (it is emphasized) who talks and debates in Jerusalem with the Greek-speaking Jews in 9:28 - but these are pointedly exceptional, leaving us with the clear and deliberate impression of an overwhelm­ingly Jewish-Christian community, predominantly Hebrew-speaking, in which the many thousands among the Jews who have become believers are also 'all zealots for the Law' (Acts 21:20). Any Gentile converts are allowed to be visible only outside Jerusalem (Acts 10) and are made to be a cause for astonishment to Jewish believers from Jerusalem (Acts 10:45, n:2ff) and for scandal (Acts 15:5): we are left in no doubt that until the 'Apostolic Decree' any such Gentile converts were obliged to submit to circumcision and to 'the observance of the Law' (Acts 15:1, 15:5) - however that was interpreted. We cannot go beyond the picture thus provided for us - and for what it is worth, the enigmatic Epistle of James (virtually a Jewish document) accords.²¹ And it also accords with the whole tendency of Acts that despite the claims of growth for the Jerusalem church, the church in Antioch, with its clear­headed and divinely sanctioned Gentile mission, is represented as the more enterprising and the more prosperous (Acts 11129): that may well have been the case.

So far we have been pressing into service for the most part the testimony of the Acts of the Apostles, itself composed possibly several generations after these events and composed moreover with a disarming tendency to telescope events and with a sharply focused historicizing agenda. From now on Paul himself, along with his associates and disciples, become our almost exclusive guide together with that (decepti­vely and tendentiously coherent) narrative of Acts. That is to say that we rely on the Paul of the seven indubitably genuine letters — though some of these may already be themselves composite documents (1 Thess., 1 Cor., 2 Cor., Gal., Rom., Phil., Philem.). The post-Pauline or deutero- Pauline epistles (2 Thess., Eph., Col. including the Pastorals, 1 Tim., 2 Tim., Titus) provide, on the whole, merely general and corroborative testimony.²² And, notoriously, even of Paul's own missionary work we can glimpse but a partial view (though with some locations - such as Corinth - fortuitously visible to us under a disproportionately searching light). Thus even though Paul spent so long in the vicinity of his home city of Tarsus and its province of Cilicia - apparently some dozen years at least, Gal. 1:21, 2:1 - we are entirely without details of the centres of population he may have visited, of any success his mission may have had, let alone knowing with whom.²³ All we can say is that the Cilician churches are linked closely with Syrian Antioch. They share in the Pauline attitude towards Gentile salvation, their congregations defini­tely include Gentile Christians (Acts 15:23, cf. 15:41). If we move on westwards around the coastline in Pamphylia we find preaching only at

Consult, for example, Evans 1970 (p 132) 264^

The Pastorals, for example, yield Corinth (2 Tim. 4:20), Troas (2 Tim. 4:: 3), Ephesus (1 Tim. 1:3,2 Tim. 1:18,2 Tim. 4:12), Miletus (2 Tim. 4:20) and Galatia (2 Tim. 4:10) - all otherwise attested. But they do record, additionally, Nicopolis (Titus 3:12), Dalmatia (2 Tim. 4:10) and Crete (Titus i:j): on these see below.

Three syggeneis ('kinsmen') of Paul's are sent greetings in Rome (from Corinth), Rom. 16:7, 16:11 (Andronicus, Junia[s], Heroidion) and three further syggeneis in Corinth send greetings to Rome, Rom. 16:21 (Lucius, Jason and Sosipatros). Are they fellow-Cilicians? Throughout I assume - though this is far from uncontested - that Rom. 16 is an integral part of the original letter to the Romans.

Perge (Acts 14:25,cf. 13:13), but for Lycia or Isauria we know nothing. Inland, however, in the Roman province of Galada we reach Pauline country. In Lycaonia we encounter (in Acts) three cities. At Iconium (Acts 14:1—6, 21), a large number of converts are recorded among the Jews and Greeks as the result of a visit by Paul and Barnabas to the synagogue: the 'Greeks' are manifestly, in some sense, already 'god- fearers' (Acts 14:1). At the neighbouring town of Lystra (to the south west of Iconium) Paul and Barnabas are depicted amidst an initially adoring and enthusiastic native audience (Acts i4:8ff), with stalwart converts (Acts 14:20), and at Derbe (to the south east of Iconium) they are seen winning 'many converts' (Acts 14:21).²⁴ It is worth noting that this missionary journey of Paul and Barnabas included the surrounding country (perichoros) of these cities (Acts 14:6) and that they are able to report back to Antioch how God had 'opened up the gates of faith to the Gentiles' (Acts 14:27). Whilst this is all information carefully patterned for our benefit, it is worth registering that the mission seems to have reached tribal areas (and not only Jewish communities within hellenized cities — which could, indeed, boast of Roman colonial status). The return journey recorded in Acts 16:1—5 by Paul and Silas sees further increases.

In Pisidia we have instanced Antioch only (Acts 13:14!?), where Paul is made to address (successfully) in the synagogue a mixed audience of Jews and Gentile godfearers (Acts 13:26, 43).²⁵ Further northwards we have the journey 'through the Phrygian and Galatian country' towards Bithynia. No towns are specified and (though it is an insoluble conun­drum) Paul's 'Galatians' may well refer to tribal communities and villages in this area²⁶ (rather than to the hellenized cities included in the Roman province of Galatia to the south and west). We have to allow that Pauline converts were not confined to such cities - though (to our knowledge) he would appear to have been most effective within them. As for Phrygia, though Acts is unspecific, we can reasonably rely on the three churches of the Lycus valley mentioned in the Letter to the Colossians, viz. Colossae (Col. 1:2), Laodicea (Col. 2:1, 4.12—17, cf. Apoc. 3:14ff) and nearby Hierapolis (Col. 4:13, 16)- and there may have been other communities (Col. 2.1). At the time of writing Paul is depicted as never having visited the congregations (Col. 2:1) but the

Timothy is one named Christian, from Lystra (of mixed Jewish and Greek parentage), Acts 16:1—3 (² Tim. 1:5 purports to record further family details): Gaius is another (Acts 20:4), from Derbe.

Paul had made straight for Pisidian Antioch (via Perge) from Cyprus. Did the converted proconsul of Cyprus, Sergius Paulus, provide Paul with entree into the colony (the family of Sergius Paulus having close links with that city)?

The addressees of the Letter to the Galatians were once Gentile pagans, now tempted to revert to pagan ways (Gal. 4:8—11) and under pressure to submit to circumcision and other observances of the Law (e.g. Gal. у.гЯ). They did not easily fit with the Gentile godfearers and the Jews characterized as the converts (say) at Iconium or Pisidian Antioch.

churches are declared to have been founded (Col. 1:7-8) and supported (Col. 4=7ff) by his associates:[1029] the addressees appear inclined to some form of Jewish-hellenistic syncretism (Col. 2:8, 15ff).

But further northwards again, in Bithynia and Pontus, we must remain in ignorance of any establishment, Paul being (mysteriously) thwarted of reaching there (Acts. 16:7). But the later evidence of 1 Pet. i: i (addressed to the elect dwelling in 'Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia') as well as of Pliny, Ep. x.96.6 (Christian converts of over twenty years' standing in Pontus - that is, dating back to the eighties) is indication enough that evangelization cannot have been long thwarted.[1030] Likewise for Cappadocia, to the east of Galatia. We need to recall that Jews from Pontus and Cappadocia are represented as witnesses at the Pentecostal scene in Acts 2:9.

It is clear that down towards the Asia Minor seaboard Paul made the great cosmopolitan city of Ephesus, the province's metropolis, his headquarters for missionary work along the Aegean littoral, whether in person or through his now growing following of associates (as in the Lycus valley).[1031] We see him first at Ephesus on a brief visit (on his way back from Greece to Syria, in the early fifties) sounding out the vigorous and sizable Jewish population (Acts 18:i9f). By the time he returns by the overland route (i.e. via Galatia and Phrygia) in about the mid-fifties we are given to believe that the Alexandrian Jew Apollos has already made converts in the synagogue (Acts i8:24ff). But Acts is careful to establish that they have been imperfectly instructed, they are without the Holy Spirit — and they number but a dozen (Acts 19:1—7): it is Paul who is shown to bring the full Faith. Acts is also at pains to emphasize that the Pauline mission was aimed initially at the Ephesian Jews but after three months of Jewish resistance and hostility, Paul opened his message (in the lecture hall of Tyrannus) to a more general audience and eventually it was heard by 'all the inhabitants of the province of Asia, Jew and Greek alike' (Acts 19:10), to the discomfiture of both diehard Jews (the story of the seven sons of Sceva, Acts 19:1 jff) and diehard Greeks (the story of Demetrius and the silversmiths, Acts 19:23!!). Whilst Acts declares a missionary period of some two years, with evangelizing 'not only at Ephesus but also in practically the whole of the province of Asia' (Acts 19:26, cf. 19:10), we are not given details of other locations but we do learn, incidentally, of Christian communities at the ports of Miletus (Acts 20:15ff, cf. 2 Tim. 4:20) and of Troas (Acts 2o:5ff, 2 Cor. 2:12, cf. 2 Tim. 4:13). The focus remains for us Paul, and his work at Ephesus.