THE FORUM AUGUSTUM
The audience that read Propertius' poetry witnessed during the principate of Octavian—known after January 16, 27 B.C.E. as “Augustus”—a particularly fierce grappling with tensions among cultural elements evident in Rome's representation of itself; consciously or unconsciously, they brought that intensified awareness of their culture's internal contradictions to their reading of the Propertian corpus.[3] As Paul Zanker's analysis of the imagery of Augustan Rome shows (surveying not only monumental architecture, but the myriad humbler vignettes that emblazoned coinage, rings, and other quotidian objects), the public vision of the empire that Augustus' regime offered her citizens was an attempt to coax a totality from the division and incoherence of Roman cultural identity. Augustus' efforts to impose unity upon Rome's eclectic heritage are most purely evident in the Forum Augustum, the great colonnaded square containing the temple of Mars Ultor (“Mars the Avenger”) that was built on the emperor's personal property ( privato solo)[4] as an expression of his own ideas and emblazoned with a decorative program designed
The Forum's very attempt to integrate the various parts of Roman mythic history—principally the myth cycles of Romulus and Aeneas—accentuates the tensions and contradictions within Rome's image of itself inherited from the past. For example, the Forum's alcoves symmetrically balance the famous image of Aeneas fleeing the burning ruins of Troy, carrying his father on his shoulders and leading his son Ascanius by the hand, against the figure of Romulus, hoisting on his shoulder the enemy commander's armor to be dedicated as spolia opima.[8] The juxtaposition, as Zanker points out, makes good enough sense as images of pietas[9] and virtus[10] respectively—except that Aeneas' protective loyalty toward his family throws into sharp relief Romulus' singular affront to such loyalty. Romulus founded the honor of the spolia opima when he killed King Akron of Caenina; the king had himself tried to avenge an infraction against pietas, namely the abduction of Caenina's women that Romulus engineered on the occasion of Rome's first Consualia.[11] The criteria that elevate both Romulus and Aeneas to venerable status cannot logically be reconciled.
Equally odd is the iconographic lifting of Romulus' counterpart, Aeneas and his family, above the logic of time and place. While Ascanius appears in the costume of a Phrygian shepherd, Anchises sports the garb of a Roman priest, and Aeneas wears Roman armor with the elaborate footwear appropriate only to a Roman patrician (an apparent reference to his status as progenitor of the noble Julii). Categories of foreigner and native, past and future, secular and sacred, noble and commoner jostle each other uneasily in this forcible blend of what Troy's exiles were with what they became.
And yet the Forum's parade of notables who articulate this divergent history— Aeneas, the Alban kings, and the Julii on one side, opposite Romulus and his fellow triumphatores,[12] the summi viri[13] of Rome's past, on the other—frame Augustus' controlling presence, implied by his triumphal chariot that commands the very center of the forum. Though the Senate dedicated this quadriga to Augustus as “father of the country” ( pater patriae) after the Forum's completion, Augustus' obvious pride in the chariot and its inscription[14] shows that the Senate's inspiration fit his own vision of the Forum as an image of Rome's future—a harmonious “golden age” of peace that he himself had wrought and continued to preserve. Zanker argues cogently that the images of the Forum are carefully orchestrated to support Augustus' implicit claim to the power to unify the diverse threads of Roman identity, by uniting in his bloodline the peaceful and fertile heritage of Venus (his mythical ancestor, through Aeneas) and the martial heritage of Mars (from whose son Romulus he, like all Romans, claimed descent). Augustus surpasses Romulus' virtus, the
Yet Augustus' presence as the greatest of the triumphatores and generals who line the Forum's colonnades—a preeminence implied by his centrally-placed triumphal vehicle—ironically underlines the desperate need to overcome the centrifugal forces adumbrated, not only in the odd contradictions of Rome's mythical progenitors (Venus and Mars, Romulus and the Aeneadae), but in the Forum's gallery of history's great Romans. Mortal enemies line up together in the statue niches of the Forum's alcoves: Sempronius Gracchus with Scipio Aemilianus Africanus,[15] Marius with Sulla, Pompey with Lucullus.[16] Moreover, some of these imperialists evoke a social ethos and history specifically inimical to Augustus' strategic exaltation of his clan, the gens Juliorum, above all others in his conspectus of the Roman past, and to the monarchic and dynastic ambitions intimated in the assimilation of the Julians to the Alban kings in the north colonnade. For example, Scipio Aemilianus' enmity toward Sempronius Gracchus' son, Tiberius Gracchus the tribune, evidently stemmed from fear that Tiberius' proposed agrarian reforms were but instruments of demagoguery designed to advance their author's popular influence well beyond that of his oligarchic peers.[17] Similar alarm apparently motivated the summus vir Caecilius Metellus Numidicus' vigorous opposition to the “demagogues” Glauca and Saturninus.[18] When, on the other hand, the power that demagoguery seeks so avidly comes to rest nolens volens in the hands of another summus vir, M. Furius Camillus, he manifests a diffidence equally out of tune with Augustan ambitions. Though appointed dictator more than once (five times, according to Plutarch), Camillus assumed this office with reluctance, eager to lay it aside at the earliest opportunity.[19] He receives praise for always exercising his authority in common with his compeers, even when the power to propose and dispose was his alone.[20] By contrast, the Forum makes clear that Augustus' ambitions do not lie in the direction of a self-effacing equality with his peers.
I have lingered upon this description of the Forum Augustum in order to highlight the contradictions that shape the conceptualization both of Roman identity and of the state that shaped that identity. Assuredly some, if not all, of these contradictions existed before the principate and endured afterward, but the tensions they exert upon Romanitas[21] are greatly dramatized and hence the more forcibly impressed upon Rome's consciousness precisely through the principate's brave but futile attempts (like the Forum Augustum) to reconcile them out of existence. This consciousness of identity in tension conditions the audience for whom Propertius writes; accurately and precisely understanding the mechanism by which it operated is crucial to our fully understanding his poetry.