Dynasty and Empire in the Age of Augustus "d0e182"

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Introduction

Aims and Methods

This study fills a long-standing gap in Roman studies as the first comprehensive examination of the skyphos pair commonly known as the Boscoreale Cups, or the Boscoreale Cups of Augustus and Tiberius (one of my aims is to see that Tiberius' brother Drusus henceforth comes to mind also when the cups are mentioned; see chapter 8). Excepting one recent article on one panel of one of the cups, after the initial publication in 1899 no one has explored the cups' relief decoration in any depth.^[1] Discussion of individual scenes, and of the program of the cups as a pair, has been cursory, subordinate to other investigative goals, and unbacked by rigorous visual or iconographic examination. Indeed, it is fairly plain that one reason the cups' iconography is so little known is that many cursory surveys supply only one shot of each cup face, omitting a good two-thirds of each scene; many more give one shot only to illustrate both cups.^[2] Many published references to the cup pair make it plain that their authors have not looked beyond such an abbreviated visual record.^[3] The Augustus cup, especially the center shot of its allegorical panel, is most popular in general surveys, and correspondingly in the scholarly literature.^[4]

Because it is generally taken for granted that some at least of the four decorative panels copy monumental prototypes—that is, imperial state reliefs—the cups figure briefly in many surveys of Roman relief as well as of Roman silver, as in many general handbooks on Roman art. This (usually) implicit premise is seldom developed. The date assigned to the cups, or to their postulated monumental sources, ranges from the reign of Augustus to that of Claudius. Early datings based on iconography are contested, for instance, by scholars who see the style as Claudian but look at

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the height of the relief work rather than at figure style. There has been little or no interchange between iconographers and stylistic historians of Roman relief, on the one hand, and silver specialists, on the other. Indeed, although every beginning student of Roman art is taught that the Boscoreale Cups are somehow important, the advanced student can seldom say exactly why.

The answer to the why of the cups' importance is basically very simple: they are iconographically rich and stylistically superb. They document one of only two cycles of Roman imperial state reliefs to survive from the entire Julio-Claudian period, the other being the Ara Pacis; and they supply the only surviving nonfragmentary examples of a genre not common even among the Julio-Claudian fragments, that is, scenes that are not solely processions on foot in the manner of the Ara Pacis friezes. By thorough comparison with the canons of official representation, as they can be reconstructed from late Republican and Imperial coinage, relief, and commemorative sculpture, the cups are shown here to copy a unified set of monumental relief panels. All four of the cup scenes depend on these monumental panels, including the well-known and problematic allegory of Augustus as world ruler. This study not only verifies the "monumental prototype" hypothesis once and for all; it embraces the implications of that hypothesis: this is a book about a Julio-Claudian imperial state monument. I would hope that after this study no comprehensive study or exhibition on the Age of Augustus would ever again overlook the cups. In exploring their iconography and compositions, I have ended by feeling as if I had been given the miraculous chance to write the first monograph analysis of, say, the Ara Pacis reliefs . . .

Whether or not my readers become fully convinced of my dating of the cups and of their prototypes—both Augustan, before Tiberius' "exile"—this study should interest not only art historians but also historians, an audience not much exposed to the cups in the literature of its own discipline. I hope that the cups will now become as familiar as the Ara Pacis or the Gemma Augustea to historians of imperial image making.

The four sides of the Boscoreale Cups are decorated in high relief with political and historical subjects. This itself is noteworthy: the four panels are unique among extant Roman silver, where figural representation seems generally to have confined itself to mythological subjects. Literal historical narrative, what I call documentary narrative, was not the usual province of any luxury art (silver, gems, figured pottery, domestic wall painting and stucco). Overt political allegory is more common in the imperial luxury arts, especially gem work, and on military paraphernalia,

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but the allegorical panel on the Augustus cup has no real parallel in the extant silver corpus. The only piece remotely comparable is the problematic Aquileia dish (fig. 17), on which Antony in the character of Triptolemus (?) sacrifices to Demeter, attended by various mythological figures. However, this tableau—a portentous conflation of Neo-Attic and Hellenistic court styles—has no narrative impact to speak of compared with the Boscoreale, or BR, allegory.^[5]

Some Arretine ware does hint at lost silver with allegorical political imagery, as this fine molded pottery imitated the shapes and decorative vocabulary of vessels in precious metal. Such political images are, however, as rare in the vast Arretine corpus as in silver, and the extant examples seem themselves to depend on compositions (especially statuary groups) formulated originally for imperial state monuments (figs. 65–67). (Significantly, the politico-allegorical Arretine fragments are Augustan, which agrees with an early Julio-Claudian date for the BR cups.) None of the schemata preserved by ceramics, though, approach the BR allegory in iconographic or stylistic complexity, nor do they have any narrative content to speak of; none pretend to depict historical "reality" transpiring before our eyes.^[6]

The unique status of the cups qua decorated silver hampers all stylistic analyses based solely on comparison with other surviving metalwork.^[7] Not only the subjects represented but also the figure types used are unparalleled in luxury metalwork. The relief style employed has struck silver specialists as distinct from other figural relief styles in the genre of decorated silver.^[8] The only aspect in which the cups can genuinely be compared with other silver is in the working of the medium itself: that is, the decoration of drinking cups with a shell of silver worked in repoussé (beaten out from behind) to produce very high relief decoration. Comparison with other Roman silver avails little in explaining the style or iconography of the cups' decoration and is useless for construing an exact date.^[9] As discussed in appendix A, this taste for very high relief decoration in silver (and, one might add, in decorative marble work) can be observed elsewhere in Augustan art, especially in the surviving repertoire of floral and vegetal themes (cf. fig. 1).

This leads me to state a major premise: to date the cups, one must begin with iconography, including under that heading not only content (e.g., Venus Genetrix) but also the forms in which the content is expressed (e.g., a particular figure type of Venus Genetrix). Iconography in this sense is inextricably involved with "style," overlapping to a greater or lesser degree with characteristics usually discussed under the heading of purely

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formal aspects of the execution of individual figures. Also falling under both headings (iconographic and stylistic) is the analysis of compositional schemes, narrative and symbolic groupings of two or more figures; in such schemes the figures can have a fixed iconographic significance of their own, or the identities of the figures involved can change while maintaining stereotyped groupings that have expressive or esthetic value. Although such analysis by means of compositional iconography is common in other areas of art history (e.g., the Kurt Weitzmann "school" on medieval and Byzantine manuscript illumination), up to now I. S. Ryberg's Rites of the State Religion in Roman Art has stood alone as a sustained effort to apply such a mode of analysis. Finally, there is iconography in its most restricted sense: the identification of individual figures by means of their attributes and (in the case of real persons) their facial features. Such portrait identification (in this case, of Augustus and his stepsons Drusus the Elder and Tiberius) places the cups in time and provides the starting point for their interpretation; iconography in all its senses will permit the cups to be situated within an evolving artistic tradition, where real stylistic affinities to official art tie the cup representations to the middle Augustan period.

This investigation follows the structure of the cups, considering each of the panels in turn. "Panel" means one of the four sides of the two cups, demarcated by the placement of the cup handles; each panel constitutes a distinct composition narrating a distinct event, real or imagined. I begin with the Augustus cup, BR I: BR I:1 (allegorical narrative) shows the bestowal and confirmation of Augustus' world rule, including homage by a group of ethnic personifications (chapter 1); on BR I:2 (documentary narrative) Gallic leaders sponsored by Drusus the Elder hand over their children to Augustus' fatherly protection (chapter 3). The Tiberius cup, BR II (documentary narrative), shows the precampaign sacrifice (nuncupatio votorum ) and triumph of 8-7 B.C. of Drusus' brother Tiberius (BR II:1 and 2; chapters 5 and 6). Next I investigate echoes of the BR cups in two later monuments, the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum and the Ludovisi sarcophagus (chapter 7); their demonstrable dependence on the iconography and compositions of the BR cups shows that the cups' own monumental prototypes continued to stand in Rome and to influence later imperial art into the third century A.D. And I discuss the status of Tiberius and Drusus in ancient and modern sources, in order to set the BR cups in their proper context as documents of Augustan succession policy, touching on key genre compositions in Augustan propaganda and on the nature of the BR cups' monumental prototype (chapter 8). In con-

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clusion I provide final statements on the date and visual sources of the BR cups' decoration, and on the themes and program of the cup pair. The text closes with appendices on the cups' relation to Roman silverworking and on K. Schönberger-Münch's 1988 dissertation analysis of the cups.

To identify the participants and explain the action and themes of each panel, I range over many new or problematic aspects of Roman art, politics, and religious rite. So, the allegorical panel BR I:1 is treated in two chapters: the second discusses special problems in the depiction of Augustus, the seated togate honorific type, its association with ethnic personifications, and the association of "real" with divine figures in Republican and Augustan art; it includes a lengthy excursus on the so-called Anaglypha Traiani and the Hadrianeum province-emperor group. The third chapter discusses the political iconography of ethnic personifications in the Republic and early Empire, distinguishing modes of depiction to track the depiction of corporate groups. Chapter 4, devoted to BR I:2, explores the practice of "son-giving" by non-Roman elites to the Republican state and to Augustus; the evolution of rapidly stereotyped compositions to express Augustus' new message of dynastic inheritance of rule; and the political mandate of Drusus the Elder in Gaul for Augustus, critical portions of which are reconstructed on the basis of visual evidence (especially this cup) that supplements gaps in the textual record. Chapter 5 discusses the BR victim-slaying composition (the "Pausias motif"), explains the rite of nuncupatio votorum, and outlines Augustan modes of architectural depiction in decorative and monumental relief. Chapter 6 explores the role in actuality and art of the servus publicus, who makes a unique appearance in the triumph of BR I:2, and reconstructs military styles for displaying awards to show that Gallic auxiliaries accompany Tiberius' procession.

Thorough analysis of the iconography of these four scenes shows that the cups were made in the lifetime of Augustus before Tiberius' accession in A.D. 14, indeed before his exile in 6 B.C., copying a set of monumental reliefs commissioned by or for the emperor and his heirs in the city of Rome. These reliefs (which can be linked to the Ara Pacis) were made around the time of Tiberius' triumph awarded in 8 and celebrated in 7 B.C., associating with Tiberius' gloria projects completed by his brother Drusus shortly before Drusus' death in 9 B.C., both brothers acting under the auspicia and to augment the glory of the emperor Augustus. The date mandated by political iconography is supported by stylistic evidence; the purely artistic aspects of these panels, from small details to broad spatial and compositional structures, have multiple correspondences in the extant

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corpus of late Republican and Augustan imperial art. Miniaturization of a public monument is no anomaly in this age—the inner altar of Augustus' Ara Pacis (13-9 B.C.) is itself a radically miniaturized version of the great Hellenistic royal altars of Asia Minor (Pergamon, Priene, Miletos).^[10]

Because the cups, like much Roman art, describe political reality and historical event, I would naturally have to touch on historical problems. This text, however, aims at more than art history backed by bare historical outline: the cups are valuable historical documents in their own right and deserve to be so included in the historical debate on policy and practice in the Age of Augustus. Most obvious is the contribution of BR I:2 (see chapter 2): this panel and its comparanda describe an historical event known from no surviving text, a carefully staged "happening" connected on the one hand with Augustus' policies in Gaul and on the other with the political role of Drusus the Elder as one of Augustus' prospective heirs before his untimely death in 9 B.C. The Tiberius cup and the program of the cup pair help to illuminate the place of the brothers Tiberius and Drusus in Augustus' dynastic schemes prior to Drusus' death and Tiberius' self-imposed exile in 6 B.C., a place often slighted and misunderstood. The nature of Augustan propaganda about such dynastic schemes is itself a significant historical fact; the BR cups are valuable and legible examples of such propaganda. Finally, the allegory BR I:1 and its ethnic personifications (thoroughly examined for the first time), in apposition to the "son-giving" scene of BR I:2 and to the Tiberius cup, delineate a particular Augustan form of benevolent imperialism and illuminate the Augustan dialectic of pax and bellum .

History of the Cups

The Boscoreale Cups originally belonged to a hoard recovered in 1895 of 109 pieces of gold and silver plate and a cache of coins belonging to the owners of a wine-producing villa rustica on the southeastern slopes of Vesuvius near the modern village of Boscoreale.^[11] The hoard was placed in an empty cistern in the wine cellar of the villa when its owners fled before the eruption of A.D. 79. Although some care was evidently taken to store all the more precious articles on hand in the wine cellar, the eruption itself intruded on the final packing; various domestic artifacts were left behind in the rooms above, and the corpses of several persons who did not flee in time were found at the site.

The eruption of A.D. 79 is thus a terminus ante quem for the manufacture

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of all artifacts from the site. The contents of the hoard are an assemblage accreted over three-quarters of a century, valuable documentation of the taste and needs of a prosperous Roman family owning a vineyard cum summer retreat; I know no study of the hoard as such a document of taste, although such a study would be worthwhile. The pieces of plate range from soup spoons and shellfish forks to very elaborate pieces meant for display rather than use, like the famous Africa dish. Many of the finer pieces can be assigned by style and iconography to the reigns of the first two emperors, ca. 20 B.C. to 40 A.D.; this accords with the coinage sequence, an unbroken series from Augustus to Domitian dominated by well-worn issues of Augustan and Tiberian date. Thus the family who owned the hoard seems to have established its prosperity under Augustus. A set of salt dishes in the hoard are inscribed with what may be the name of a freedman of Octavian manumitted between 44 and 27 B.C.^[12] A pair of dishes have portrait emblemata, which might be classified as imagines clipeati, of a late Republican or early Julio-Claudian man and wife.^[13]

The hoard has many other drinking cups (pairs and singletons),^[14] but "the Boscoreale Cups" commonly denotes the pair discussed here. By the time of the eruption the cups were well worn, with whole pieces of the relief decoration torn away. They must have been preserved as sentimental and artistic heirlooms; practicality and the desire to set an elegant service would otherwise have led to the cups' being melted down for reuse of the silver. The family probably owned a more accessible summer residence closer to the coast, not associated with a working farm, where more up-to-date metalwork would have been displayed for grander entertainment and where the stock of cash on hand would have included newer issues of a better weight; the vessels of the Boscoreale hoard seem to have been relegated to what we would call home use.

The Boscoreale hoard is now displayed in the Louvre and includes since 1991 the Augustus and Tiberius cups. These, with four other pieces, had been retained for his private collection by Baron Edouard Rothschild when that nobleman donated the rest of the hoard to the Louvre, and when he underwrote the hoard's publication by P. Héron de Villefosse in the 1899 issue of Monuments Eugène Piot . In the years intervening the cups have been further damaged; the results for the Tiberius cup are not too serious, but the scenes on the Augustus cup have been significantly mutilated. Fortunately, Héron de Villefosse published excellent plates and a detailed physical description of both cups. The descriptions of the four panels that open four of my chapters are based on the visual and textual documents of 1899, and this book is primarily illustrated like all previous

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scholarship (except the 1991 museum republication), with reproductions of the 1899 plates.^[15] These remain the only record of the cups in their original modern state of preservation. In 1991 I was able to check my critical descriptions against what is left of the cups' relief shell.^[16] The heavy damage to the Augustus cup is especially lamentable. Many details crucial to this inquiry are now irrecoverable.

The history of the Boscoreale hoard has recently become more clear, though the history of the historical cups remains problematic. The account in the 1899 publication is that the Villa "Pisanella" property was excavated under state auspices beginning in 1895, and that the excavation staff stole the hoard in spring of that year. The laborer who first opened the cistern where the hoard was cached is supposed to have concealed the find, and then with his foreman to have smuggled the hoard out of Italy. More recently, a fuller account has been published, as the Italian archeological service took a critical interest in the historiography of the find. The villa rustica where the hoard was cached, near the modern village of Boscoreale, was located on private property belonging to Vincenzo da Prisco; he was able to sell the hoard and the other villa finds to the antiquarian Canessa, who handled the export and eventual resale of these finds. These events were made possible by the lack, at the time, of effective legislation governing the conservation of Italy's archeological patrimony; the case caused much scandal in Italy and was in fact the catalyst for the formation of the first effective legal barriers against such archeological "rape."^[17] When the hoard went on the market, the Louvre was approached for the then enormous sum of 500,000 francs (I revert here to the 1899 account). When the museum could not meet this price, single pieces began to be sold off. At this point Edouard Rothschild stepped in and bought the hoard for the Louvre, on the stipulation that it go on permanent display; he bought back the dispersed pieces, save for the female emblema dish, which the British Museum refused to sell back. The baron did reward himself by retaining six pieces, including our two cups, although he had all these pieces included in Villefosse's 1899 monograph. In 1986 a new catalogue of the hoard was brought out in popular format by François Baratte, curator in the Louvre's Départment des antiquités grecques et romaines; when the generosity of the current Rothschild owners joined the cups to the Louvre collection, Baratte republished them—with the first color plates!—in the first issue of the new museum journal (Revue du Louvre 1 [1991]).

What happened to the Boscoreale Cups between 1899 and 1991? No author after Héron de Villefosse seems to have viewed them firsthand, or

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made an effort to do so.^[18] They dropped out of sight, and the scholarly consensus by the 1970s was that they had been mislaid by the close of the Second World War and that the Augustus cup might have been destroyed.^[19] As Francois Baratte informs me, the Rothschild family believes that the cups never left family control; they did, however, pass through a period when they were vulnerable to damage. From firsthand examination of the cups, two points emerge. For some unspecified period they were stored or passed around in such a way that previous damage was exacerbated, that is, holes already torn in the relief shell widened around their edges; this is the nature of the damage on the Tiberius cup, and it conforms to the twentieth-century "legend" of that cup's continued existence. The second point is that one of the cups, the Augustus cup, fell prey to vandalism—not the complete destruction of its "legend," but active mutilation all the same. Great swathes of silver have been torn off the core on both sides of this cup, as if someone had absentmindedly peeled a label from a beer bottle; this may be accidental damage. However, in at least one place one can see that someone has cut crudely around the outlines of figures in high relief, as if to detach as a keepsake one figure at a time: such crude shear marks are clearly visible around the missing officer who stood behind Augustus on BR I:2, and the neat rectangular tear in front of Roma on BR I:1 may also demonstrate such clipping. Now that the Quedlinburg Itala has resurfaced in the family bank vault of a World War II officer, one can perhaps hope that a kitchen shelf or jewelry box somewhere holds a torn silver scrap with odd little people on it . . .

The Cups in Context

Pairs of drinking vessels are as typical in finds of Roman silver as single vessels.^[20] They belonged to that part of a Roman silver service called the argentum potorium, which embraced a variety of vessels and implements useful or necessary to the ritual of communal drinking; the Boscoreale hoard is itself exemplary of such a set.^[21] Two cups instead of one imply use in a particular manner: the owner is drinking with a friend and wishes to share a matched set of cups. Such convivial drinking, at a meal or simply at a drinking session, was an integral feature of cultured life in Greece from the High Archaic period on and from at least the second century B.C. was a standard feature of cultured Roman practice as well. At such drinking bouts friends were meant to speak as well as drink, on a topic either elevated or merry; in any case witty conversation was the

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goal. Paradigmatic is of course Plato's Symposion, both event and text; a perhaps less oppressively uplifting sort of occasion may be imagined from the Hellenistic poet Phalaikos' mock epitaph for his friend Lykon, as a host memorable both for the charm of his own speech and for the scintillating conversation at any drinking bout over which he presided (Greek Anthology, vol. 1, no. 6, Loeb edition).

The host and his guest(s) might let the conversation take its own course, but they might as easily set their topics guided by an outside stimulus, whether the reading/singing of poetry or prose or the contemplation of artwork in the host's dining room. That category included drinking cups.^[22]Ekphrasis on decorated vessels, expounding on the decorations dramatic or moral content, was a topos of Hellenistic and Roman poetry; various extant drinking cups themselves imply such attentive conversation. It is with this (generally unexpressed) premise in mind that so many authors take cups with mythological subjects to be veiled allegories or satires on Julio-Claudian court politics. Such hypotheses are unprovable; there are enough good examples of "didactic" cups without this suspect class.^[23]

An exemplary text is an epigram written by Antipater of Thessalonika to accompany the gift of a cup pair to his friend and patron L. Calpurnius Piso (Gow and Page, Greek Anthology, 2: 541). In paraphrase: I send you two bowls, each a perfect hemisphere (cf. the profile of Megarian bowls), one engraved with the constellations of the southern sky and the other with the constellations of the northern sky, making two halves of the celestial globe; drink and empty yours so that you can [turn it over and] look at the figures, throw away your Aratus for you have the phainomena before your eyes. A parallel Augustan reference to such gift giving is preserved by Plutarch (Mor. 207): Maecenas gave Augustus every year a silver patera (phiale) for a birthday present. The Hellenistic poet Aratus of Soli was famous for setting in verse a complete astronomical guide, the Phainomena; extremely popular in the early Empire, it was translated into Latin by the young Germanicus. Imputing interest in such a work implied a high level of education and culture; the decoration of Antipater's cups (given, and presumably commissioned, in Rome) served also this taste for serious learning as an adornment of leisure and pleasure. The use to be made of the cups is clear: Piso is to drink, and then discuss the star map on his cup with the drinking companion who holds the pendant cup. Note especially that the two cups are fully meaningful only when paired, as their decorative programs constitute distinct and complementary portions of a greater whole. This is obvious, for instance, on the skyphoi decorated

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with the Twelve Labors of Hercules, three to a side and six to each cup;^[24] in most or all Roman cup pairs, the decoration sets up a game of compositional and semantic correspondence and antithesis, from one side to another and between vessels.^[25]

An exemplary parallel in silver to Antipater's epigram is furnished, from the Boscoreale hoard, by a pair of beakers decorated with animated skeletons (MonPiot 5 [1899]: pls. vii–viii). Skulls and skeletons, in model form and on drinking vessels, gems, and mosaics, were typical adjuncts to the late Republican and early imperial feast, a reminder to "drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will be as these." In a unique twist, on the Boscoreale beakers^[26] the skeletons impersonate a gallery of famous poets, tragedians, and philosophers engaged in various "real" and allegorical activities; detailed inscriptions label the philosophers and their attributes, and by some a "spoken" phrase sums up his literary or philosophical stance. These parody the moralistic portrait assemblages that decorated aristocrats' libraries and gardens; they could be evoked without parody, as on the early Julio-Claudian Berthouville cup, where philosophers and poets conversed with the Muses and characters from their works.^[27] Most of these unnamed sages can still be recognized from their known portrait types, as ancient spectators were expected to do in compliment to their artistic, as well as literary, connoisseurship. One can imagine the owner of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum resting from earnest researches in the dense Epicurean texts recovered from his library by indulging in comic relief while showing off his erudition over his wine with such a pair of cups, laughing at their parody of Epicurus among others.^[28]

The Boscoreale Cups of Augustus and Tiberius functioned like the cup pairs described above: they were meant to be observed carefully and discussed knowledgeably by the owner and his friends, who would muse over details as well as over the general themes of the decoration. Each cup can be read as having a discrete historical story and political theme—one features Augustus on either side, the other Augustus' stepson Tiberius; one shows Drusus the Elder, Tiberius' brother; the other, Tiberius. Though each cup can be enjoyed singly, the two are obviously pendants, which give up the fullness of their message only in apposition; this is a major premise of my analysis.

This particular cup pair was meant to stimulate not a literary discussion but a discussion of the historical glories and campaigns of the Augustan house; the owner must have enjoyed historical memoirs like Caesar's campaign accounts and the German wars of Pliny the Elder, as well as the poetry and philosophy relevant to the other cup pairs in his collection.

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This (so far) unique commission to copy a public monument onto a pair of drinking cups must have had some bearing on the personal experiences of the original owner.^[29] It is most likely that he received or commissioned these cups because he had served on the staff(s) of the brother generals celebrated here for their related commands in northern Europe;^[30] think of an educated member of the Roman gentry like Velleius Paterculus, whose family made its fortune serving Augustus and his heirs (cf. the Augustan grounding of the BR hoard discussed above), and whose gratitude combined with his historical interests in the writing of history on behalf of his general Tiberius.^[31] A tie between the original owner and the cups' images would account for their preservation in damaged state by the owner's descendants^[32] (the display of time-damaged art was an affectation of the nobility in regard to portraits and trophies of their ancestors).^[33] It is because cups like these were meant to be carefully examined and discussed that an undertaking like mine is justified; if Antipater's cups could stand in for the endless hexameters of Aratus, the length of my excursus on a pair of silver cups does not seem uncalled for.