The Ara Pacis Augustae

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In 13 BCE the Roman Senate voted to build an altar for a peace that had not, strictly speaking, arrived through fighting anyone in the room. Augustus was coming home from three years in Hispania and Gaul, and the Senate wanted the moment marked permanently. What they built was not a battle memorial. It was the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace, a low marble precinct wall wrapped entirely in relief carving, enclosing an altar for sacrifice at its center.

Walk around the wall and the message repeats in different registers. The long north and south sides carry a processional frieze: the imperial family itself, priests, senators, all shown walking together toward the sacrifice, ordinary Romans made into a religious procession in stone. Acanthus scrollwork, dense and continuous, wraps the lower half of every wall, nature itself rendered as ordered and abundant as the peace the altar claims. And on the short east and west walls, four separate panels place the whole scene inside myth: Roma the goddess of the city, a fertility goddess usually called Tellus or Pax, Romulus and Remus nursed by the she wolf, and a bearded man in priestly robes, sacrificing.

That last panel has usually been read as Aeneas, the Trojan ancestor the Julian family claimed as their own, arriving in Italy and giving thanks. Whether that reading is the whole story is worth its own separate telling.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

For most of the last century, one panel of the Ara Pacis Augustae has had a settled identity. A bearded man in priestly dress stands with two young attendants, preparing to sacrifice a sow, and the standard reading has named him Aeneas, the Trojan hero whose arrival in Italy the poet Virgil made into Rome's own founding epic. The identification fit Augustus perfectly: the Julian family claimed descent from Aeneas, son of the goddess Venus, and putting him on an altar celebrating the emperor's own peace read as a natural piece of dynastic messaging.

In 2001, the classical art historian Paul Rehak published a peer reviewed challenge to that reading in The Art Bulletin. Rehak went back to the panel and to the Roman texts around it and argued the figure is more likely Numa Pompilius, Rome's legendary second king, credited in Roman tradition with founding the city's state religion and with establishing the very fetial sacrifice ritual the panel appears to show. Rehak's case rests partly on symmetry: the altar's other western panel shows Romulus and Remus, the warlike founder and his brother, nursed by the she wolf. A panel showing Numa, the peaceful, religion founding king, would balance that panel exactly, pairing Rome's warlike origin against its peaceful one, a symmetry the Aeneas reading does not supply.

Neither reading has driven the other from the field. Museum labels and general references still lean toward Aeneas, the older and more widely repeated identification, while Rehak's argument continues to be cited in specialist literature on the monument. The atlas holds both figures, and states the disagreement as what it is: a real, unresolved scholarly question about one panel of Roman religious art, not a settled fact either way.