Men with Gods

There is firm evidence that by the beginning of the first century B.C. Republican notables were not at all shy about putting up public monuments that showed them in the presence of divinity. The corpus of extant Republican sculpture is practically nonexistent, even though we know from literary and epigraphic references that Rome was packed with honorific monuments put up for and by the aristocrats of the day. There are in fact only two monuments with relief decoration from purely honorific (i.e., not funerary) monuments: the massive San Omobono base^[80] and the so-called Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus, whose reliefs are in Paris and Munich.^[81] Both were bases for honorific statuary. As the San Omobono base (ca. 75–75 B.C.) has allegorical and symbolic decoration only, it does not supply evidence to make my case; the Paris-Munich friezes are another matter.

Recovered from the area of the Circus Flaminius, near the temples of Mars and Neptune, the friezes were marble revetments for a four-sided rectangular statue base: three sides (Munich, Glyptothek 239) depict a sea thiasos, the wedding of Poseidon and Amphitrite; on the fourth side (Paris, Louvre inv. 975) a censor celebrates the sacrifice at the lustrum that officially closed a completed census (fig. 27).^[82] This principal face honored the censor who commissioned the monument, whose statue would have stood directly above,^[83] and the panel was cut in Rome of Italian stone; the

sea thiasos friezes, however, made of East Greek marble, once decorated something else, from which they were removed and recut to fit the Republican base.^[84]

The Circus Flaminius, where the base stood, was from its building in the late third century B.C. a site for monuments erected from the manubiae (spoils) of Republican triumphatores . Up to Augustus' time the temples and porticoes ringing the Circus were all put up from such spoils to commemorate the personal victories of Republican aristocrats. The site was apt; the Circus was the arena where a triumphator assembled his booty, readied his exhibits, and then mustered the triumphal procession preparatory to crossing the pomerium into Rome. The sea thiasos frieze is primarily manubiae of a triumph, selected as the content fit for a naval triumph. Only one late Republican figure celebrated a sea triumph and conducted a censorship that closed in a lustrum, the orator Marcus Antonius, grandfather of the triumvir; he triumphed in 100 B.C. over East Mediterranean pirates and held his censorship in 97 B.C.^[85] His statue base proclaimed that he had reached the pinnacles of achievement both as general and as civilian magistrate:^[86] it showed him as censor, framed by spolia from the coasts that fell under the imperium of the sea command that brought him a triumph.

The monument is thus dated to the very early first century B.C. On the Louvre panel (fig. 27) Antonius (head, restored) exercises his duties as censor in mundane terms—except that the place that should be held by his fellow censor is held instead by Mars, who waits with Antonius as his comrade for the arrival of the sacrificial animals. This monument of the 90s B.C. predates any "excesses" of Sulla or Pompey, let alone of Caesar, Antony, or Augustus; in effect it gives censorial benediction to such self-glorification! Though Mars on the Louvre panel does not overtly interact with any of the "real" Romans around him, he acts by placement as a special companion to Antonius, with whom he seems to converse; he fills the place of a human, the other censor, in the rite narrated, and Antonius is on his scale.

Such monuments were probably common in Republican Rome; out of the two honorific monumental bases to survive from Republican Rome, one turns out to be a documentary relief incorporating a divine figure as "cocensor" and divine comes of the honorand (and its depiction of the census can be shown to go back to Latin images 200 years older).^[87] The influence of such paradigms can be read in a monument in the same genre erected at Ostia (fig. 26) by a local priest who had given Pompey the happy omens for his sea campaign, which ended in victory in 62 B.C..^[88]

On it are (left to right) a schematic representation of the miraculous finding in the sea of the cult statue of the Ostia Temple of Hercules, where this relief was found; next, the (togate) boy employed for the rite of sortition accepting the sortes from Hercules, facing him across an altar; last, Pompey (missing) or one of his generals taking a tablet holding this oracle from the priest who dedicated the monument, C. Fulvius Salvis, haruspex (Etruscan priest) of Hercules' Ostian oracle, who is accompanied by the small boy from the previous scene. At far left a little Victory moves to crown the missing general.

This Pentelic marble relief shows Neo-Attic influence in its figure style,^[89] and it echoes Greek votive reliefs where worshippers approach a figure of a divinity. It is, however, quite different from the Greek votive genre, in that it presents an episodic narrative, moving from right to left, which is centered on the glorious deed of the dedicator as much as on the god himself; also, in this narrative the god is shown physically interacting with the human protagonists. The relief echoes, in a humbler extraurban setting in the immediate neighborhood of Rome, the kind of reliefs and paintings in the capital that displayed the deeds of triumphatores .^[90] Pompey's own coinage referred to the oracle celebrated in this panel;^[91] it is easy to imagine that the ingenuous donum of C. Fulvius echoed a relief or painting made for Pompey's own triumphal celebrations, as a result of which he struck a coin type about this oracle (boy with lot, inscr. SORS) and spent manubiae to dedicate a temple to Hercules in the Forum Boarium.

The transformation of Greek votive conventions to Roman commemorative art can be definitely set in the late second century B.C., documented by the oldest extant depiction of a Roman sacrifice, ca. 130-100 B.C. These pedimental sculptures, brightly painted terracotta in the old Republican Romano-Etruscan mode, were excavated on the Via S. Gregorio in a hollow between the Palatine and Caelian hills. Those of its hundreds of fragments that could be pieced back together make up seven figures (Rome, Pal. Cons.):^[92] three large (life-size) divinities, a slightly smaller togatus, and three victimarii, smaller yet;^[93] the animal victims were a steer/cow, a smaller steer or calf, and a sheep. At center a goddess (head restored) sat upon a profiled base set at a three-quarter angle (on its exposed face something heavy and round, such as a metal disc or clipeus, was once mounted). The goddess is oriented right, leaning upon her right arm, her head turned left back over her shoulder. At right a smaller goddess stood in an exaggerated contrapposto sway, left arm down, right arm bent at the elbow, looking also to our left; flanking the central goddess on our left was Mars, wearing a Hellenistic-style cuirass over a tunic,^[94] oriented also

left, his weight on the right leg. The three victimarii all stand fronting the viewer, two at least looking to our left. Last, the togatus, in the toga exigua, faces three-quarters to our right, his right forearm extended, holding something or gesturing. This figure has been placed correctly at left of the divine group, looking toward them, the target of their attention and of the attention of the victimarii . It is not yet the moment of sacrifice, for the togatus 's head is still unveiled,^[95] and the victimarii simply usher the victims along.^[96] The togatus is in the act of saluting the three divinities, who all look at him to receive the salute.

It is a cliché that this pediment quotes the conventions of Hellenistic and fourth-century votives, in the characteristic Hellenistic terracotta style of mid-Republican Italy, strongly tinged by the Neo-Attic trends that start to work in the mid-second century B.C.^[97] A good specific parallel for the core composition of this pediment is an Athenian monument of ca. 400, period and place relevant to the Roman pediment's figure style. This is one of the two main faces of the monumental votive amphiglyphon set up by Telemachos, founder of the Athenian Asklepieion, who shortly after commissioned a copy that at some unknown date was brought to Italy. On this panel, the center was held by a goddess (Hygieia) seated in three-quarter view upon a projecting orthogonal object (a trapeza? ) and looking back over her shoulder to a standing male divine companion (Asklepios). In the mirror image of the Roman, on the left in the togatus 's place was the similarly posed Telemachos, his right arm bent and the forearm raised in prayerful salute.^[98]

Context, as well as composition, is likely echoed in the Roman version—that is, commemoration of the patron's construction of the sanctuary for which the piece was made. This votive composition has been fused with a very Roman theme, the sacrificial procession; it was slotted into a standard Italic pediment structure, where the center is taken up by a triad of divinities, but keeps the seated female and standing male group of the Greek votive. Adaptation is not just evidenced in the switch to Roman costume and the addition of Roman subsidiary figures; it can also be seen in the relation between worshipper and gods. Those on Telemachos' votive ignored their worshipper, but the Roman gods all direct their attention to the approaching togatus, just like his own attendants. While this interaction can be seen on some Greek votives, what is startling is the context of the Roman assemblage. This is not a votive stele; it is for a pediment, and thus for a shrine. The Roman builder of a sanctuary fused a standard Italic epiphany pediment with a Greek votive composition, to make a documentary image that showed his own achievements. This

seems shocking; if, alternatively, the protagonist is a patron's ancestor or a legendary figure, it still startles. Even if it were to show a safely legendary king like Numa, for instance, instituting the original rites of the deities shown, it would be striking in its use of contemporary visual terminology instead of the "mythicizing" depictions of, for example, Romulus (who was a god) in action upon the Temple of Quirinus or Temple of Mars Ultor pediments. The derivation from exemplary votive compositions, however, leads me to believe that very probably this pediment does present the living Roman who put up the structure. As the shrine went up in the Campus Martius, it is likely to have been erected ex manubiis as a personal monument of achievement.

The Via S. Gregorio pediment gives us then the background to the Paris census relief (fig. 27), as to the later, Augustan Sorrento base (fig. 15a). It shows the first steps in Roman assimilation of Greek votive compositions; it also demonstrates how a significant transformation was made at the initial contact, so that a Greek model was thoroughly Romanized in composition, setting, and content. It is a very short move from this pediment, where Roman aristocrat and gods commune on a monumental scale, to the calm assumption of divine comradeship on the slightly later honorific basis.

Even if the pediment shows not a contemporary but a legendary Roman, such a monument would have accustomed the Roman eye to seeing contemporarily clad figures acting on such a plane. Already on a signet of the mid- to late second century B.C., contemporary with the Via S. Gregorio group, a Republican imperator had himself portrayed with a divine entourage; on a large glass paste in Copenhagen, Roma follows as honor guard a knight (much larger than she!) leading along his horse on foot.^[99] It is a very fair assumption that by the end of the second century at the latest contemporary triumphal paintings would have shown Roman victors in similar allegorical compositions; for such triumphal images, mixing documentary and panegyric motifs, were certainly executed in monumental relief in and around Rome in the first century B.C.^[100]

On a damaged relief in the Vatican Museum, an assemblage of divinities gathered to celebrate the adventus of a sea commander, who may himself have figured in the missing portions of the panel; the piece may be for Pompey.^[101] On a Republican relief from Selinus (fig. 10) a general in linen cuirass and fantastic boots is flanked by Venus and Victory and crowned by the latter;^[102] this must have been executed by or for someone like one of the Aquillii, a Roman with an active Sicilian clientela . Undated, it is

well paralleled by one of the Pompeian issues from Spain of 46–45 B.C., on which a general facing outward (very rare in coinage) is crowned by one of two Spanish cities flanking him.^[103] On a large exedra relief from a triumviral general's grave (P. Ventidius Bassus?) in the Campus Martius, fragments show that the victorious imperator stood in the "Alexander with lance" pose inherited from the victory iconography of Hellenistic kings, to receive the submission of Celtic and Oriental prisoners; he was backed not only by a Roman soldier but also by a seminude hero or personification carrying a lance.^[104]

Most striking of all, as preserving a full composition, is the panel on a monumental sella curulis tomb monument from the Caelian (fig. 3) (now lost, known from drawings and engravings), datable to around the mid-first century B.C.^[105] The panel shows the submission of a female personification evidently of a place or people to a victorious general, who is crowned by the Genius of the Roman People as Roma on his other side (holding out a globe?) seems to introduce the kneeling gens; the alien setting is delineated by a walled city at left and a river god at right under a hillock from which springs a lion.^[106] (The triumphal motif is carried through in the Tritons who shoulder tropaea under the seat.)

Now, two of the three relief monuments described have an assured funerary context. A piece executed for a living imperator, the Antonian Aquileia dish (fig. 17), is based in part on this kind of triumphal panegyric.^[107] Like the Roman sacrifice scenes, it also draws on and then transcends the conventions of Classical Greek votive reliefs. It conflates the sacrificant gazing on his goddess with Triptolemus, centers his figure and makes it the largest, and interjects the iconography of Roman sacrifice (taking incense from an Amor-camillus, across a garlanded altar). In its ponderation and its placement vis-à-vis the altar, this figure indeed resembles the censor of the Paris panel (fig. 27). On the other end of Augustus' reign is the main relief of the Sorrento base, which purports to document a procession of Vestals led by Augustus to the Temple of Vesta. At the exact center Augustus pours a libation over a flaming altar, as Vesta (flanked by attendant goddesses) reaches out a hand to him from her throne (fig. 15a). The goddesses are all indeed bigger than the humans, including the imperial pontifex —but he in turn is markedly bigger than all the other humans in the scene! The hierarchic scale of proportions, the location in real urban topography at Rome, and the centering of the composition on its pious and magisterial patron all recall strategies used on the Paris census. Augustus' relationship to divinity here might at first seem

more "modest" than on the BR cup; yet, on the other hand, the vividly realized architectural setting asserts the immanent reality of Augustus' rapprochement with Vesta where the BR tableau keeps to an idealized sphere of symbolic reality.

By 42 B.C., public coinage caught up with these trends to show a living human actively saluted by his divine comes . On an issue put out by Q. Cornuficius (fig. 32) to celebrate his augurship, he stands with his augur's lituus, togate and capite velato, crowned with a wreath by Juno Sospita.^[108] A Roman magistrate and priest is actively saluted by a patron divinity, a definitive step in the direction of the BR cup panel, where Augustus is actively saluted by Venus and Mars. A single generation spans the audience for this coin image, Augustus' Actium coin, and the date close to that of the Ara Pacis (13–9 B.C.) and Tiberius' triumph of 8/7 B.C. that is proposed for the three documentary panels of the BR cup pair. Cornuficius' coin (fig. 32) does not celebrate one of the grand dynasts of the period like Caesar or Pompey, whose propaganda images are often dismissed as atypical examples of megalomania. This image was put out by a "run-of-the-mill" Roman noble on his own account and shows the acceptance of such imagery in a wider conceptual sphere. Just so, the "megalomaniac" innovation of Caesar that his coins should include his own portrait was casually repeated by his staunchly conservative opponents Brutus and Cassius after they assassinated Caesar in opposition to his "megalomania."

Of course, another class of public images from Republican Rome portrays a living subject in real terms in the presence of divinity: the coin images that show a given triumphator riding in a procession in his quadriga, attended by the goddess Victoria (figs. 104–5).^[109] A triumph was an extraordinary event, but not a rare one, in Republican experience; a Roman senator or common citizen had a good chance of seeing one every few years in the first century B.C., before Octavian's accession. We know that during the actual celebration of his triumphal entry into Rome and procession to the Capitol the triumphator was felt to enjoy a special charisma, to be invested to some extent with the aura of Jove himself. It is in this belief, we must assume, that Republican nobles would show themselves in the presence of divinity while riding in the triumphal quadriga, even at a time when portrait busts of living Romans were still avoided on coinage as inappropriate to a Republican style of leadership.^[110] As with the examples discussed above, we should associate such images with a time when in fact the individual power seeking endemic to the Roman aristocracy was beginning to undercut the Republican system; to an Augustan

audience, however, they would seem like artifacts of a genuinely Republican system. The decoration of triumphal arches and public places (e.g., his Forum) by Augustus with freestanding quadriga groups in which he was accompanied by Victory (fig. 105) would not have seemed at all alien;^[111] the avoidance of this kind of triumphal iconography in the triumph scene on BR II:2 has its own peculiar implications. Once again it is evident that the BR allegory goes beyond its extant predecessor images in the sense of evolution rather than invention.

Finally, there is the depiction of contemporary human beings as divinities or as beings moving in the divine sphere. Two issues from the civil war period depict a historical individual as a divinity, one posthumous, the next a portrait from the individual's lifetime. Issues of Sextus Pompeius from Spain and Sicily (ca. 45 B.C.), which imitate early Roman Janus-and-ship asses, render "Janus" as a double portrait of Sextus' dead father, Pompey, crowned with the inscription MAGNUS (fig. 33).^[112] Only a few years later, in 41 B.C., an aureus of C. Numonius Vaala portrays a contemporary female as Victoria (RRC 514/1; Rome mint; fig. 34). The winged bust has no inscription; her coiffure is an extremely detailed rendering of a contemporary nodus style, with braids wrapped about a chignon, and her features are highly particularized in a dry and "veristic" treatment—she even has a slight jowl. The wings signify that this is Victoria. I do not know other Republican or Augustan coin busts of a female divinity or abstraction with a contemporary Republican female coiffure. This seems a portrait, which would explain the omission of an inscription labeling this "Victoria"—perhaps it is Octavia.^[113] (If one knew more about the political career of the otherwise obscure moneyer, one could more surely nominate a specific prominent woman of the period.)

These coin images of the 40s link up with another commemorative practice at Rome, the placing of self-portraits within the cella of a temple in the capital. This Hellenistic regal practice of making oneself a sunnaos theos with the temple's divine occupant, as did Demetrius Poliorketes, for example, at the Parthenon, was imitated already in the middle Republic by Scipio Africanus; he put his own portrait in the cella of Jupiter in the very Capitolium, where it remained well into the second century A.D. (App. Hist. Rom. 6.23). Caesar had his statue put in the Temple of Quirinus; in the Temple of Clementia his statue was intended to actually clasp hands (dextrarum iunctio ) with the divinized virtue (App. BCiv. 2. 106); and he had his own statue carried side by side with that of Victoria in procession (this goes back to pompe ceremonies of kings like Philip II of Macedon). Now, Augustus is known to have made a point of publicly forbid-

ding some similar honors to himself within the city of Rome, as when he rejected Agrippa's stagy proposal to put Augustus' portrait in the Pantheon (fig. 124) in the company of the divus Caesar, Venus, and Mars. He just as publicly, however, issued instructions that he could and indeed ought to be worshipped as a sunnaos theos throughout the East (it should be noted that already a temple of Caesar and Nike stood at Tralles before Pharsalos; Plut. Caes. 47.1) in temples that had Latin, as well as Greek, dedicatory inscriptions. From 36 B.C. his statues stood in temples all over Italy (App. BCiv. 5.132); he actively organized imperial cult associations in the West and even attended the dedication of his own cult at Lugdunum; and finally, temples to Augustus and Roma sprang up throughout Italy in his lifetime with his full approval.

The rejection of such cult or implied cult in Rome was in fact an ostentatious rejection of an existing Republican option. In Rome itself Augustus formally instigated and encouraged something with no Republican precedent, that the plebs Romana organized into city wards should worship his Genius and his Lares;^[114] at least one cult altar from Italy (Tarentum) actually has a composition very similar to that of the cup (fig. 31), a Venus-Augustus-Victory triad.^[115] And Augustus sidestepped, as it were, the mechanism of becoming a sunnaos theos (putting one's portrait into a cult temple, as he did for his doctor Musa)^[116] by physically linking his own home on the Palatine with his temple of Apollo there, to make Apollo's and Augustus' houses wings of the same complex.^[117]

It has been demonstrated that an observer of Augustus' own day would have been exposed to good Republican precedents in public art for the kind of visual panegyric seen on the cup panel. If our hypothetical observer noticed any difference, it would have been one of degree and not of kind. The presence of such monuments would have given the legitimacy of tradition to the public display of such an image by Augustus, even if he greatly expanded on the tradition by upping the number of divine participants in a given scene. Public images of the emperor enthroned and togate have been seen to have been erected in Augustus' own day in the city of Rome; statue groups where the emperor or another Roman noble was honored with a portrait surrounded by ethnic personifications have been shown to have an Augustan pedigree as well.

I have tried to make clear why the allegory BR I:1 is no less likely to replicate an officially sponsored and officially displayed image from the city of Rome than the other three cup panels. The Republican monuments described evidently arose in a climate in which men of superior achievement claimed a special relationship with divine powers; thus Sulla and

Pompey were precursors to Caesar and Augustus in claiming Venus as a special patron or divine comes (cf. also figs. 10, 28). This kind of thinking has obvious roots in the propaganda of Greek monarchs from Philip II of Macedon onward. Republican Romans may have picked up this kind of thinking from their exposure to the East, but in the late Republic such concepts had become part of the natural vocabulary of Roman thought.^[118] Even the architectural building programs of Republican triumphatores can be seen to depend on such concepts, as it became traditional to spend a portion of one's manubiae on a temple to the divinity to whose special patronage one attributed one's victory.

This conceptual framework is explicitly delineated in late Republican political oratory as well, in Cicero's speeches. Cicero quite often applied the adjective divinus (godlike) to the persons, achievements, and qualities of individuals whom he praised to the Senate. He even went so far as to call a fellow noble a god, deus, expressing his gratitude to Lentulus: "parens ac dens nostrae vitae, fortunae" (Red. Sen. 8; cf. Red. Quir. 11, 18, 25; Sest. 144). Such language startles, in public oratory by a speaker of noted conservatism and staunch adherence to "old Republican" virtues. Particularly interesting are the Philippics; as these postdate Caesar's assassination, one might expect Cicero in his support for that blow against superbia to have avoided such language. Yet he salutes Brutus' "divina atque immortalis laus" (10.3.7) and "divina virtus" (10.5.11) and Sulpicius' "paene divina scientia" (9.5.10). The 1Vth and Martian legions are "caelestes divinasque," led by the "divinus adulescens" Octavian (5.11.28), who is a special agent of Jupiter with "divina mens" and "virtus" (3.2.3) (cf. 4.1.3, 2.4, 7.3. 10). Just so, Cicero's wish to divinize his dead daughter compares well with the spontaneous conferral of godhead on the dead Caesar by the plebs and soldiery. Though other oratory does not survive, it is plain that the kind of language I describe must go back to the late second century at least—such panegyric is already satirized by Plautus and Caecilius,^[119] indicating that the Paris census (fig. 27), for example, was analogous to the public rhetoric of its day.

Once we recognize how even Cicero spoke in such terms in the heat of emotion or in the studied award of public praise, the origins of the political theologies of Caesar and of Augustus become more clear, as natural developments from past and present norms. The Republican background explains propaganda of Augustus' own day, and the message of the "minor" arts produced at his court. Horace acclaimed Augustus as a "praesens divus" commanding on earth just as Jupiter commands in heaven (Carm. 3.5.1); Ovid expanded on that formulation—Jupiter has Augustus rule

earth for him: "pater est et rector uterque" (Met. 15.858–60). Horace celebrated the worship of Augustus throughout Italy, which in fact existed. At the evening libation after meals Horace observed, "te mensis adhibet deum, / te multa prece, re prosequitur mero / defusa pateris" (Carm. 4.5.32f.); the people had made such demonstrations already for Marius a century earlier (Plut. Mar. 27.5).^[120] Vergil built the entire proem of Georgic 3 around the conceit of a cult to Augustus with a grand temple and portico complex, with games in his honor. Compare Agrippa's proposal to worship Augustus in the Pantheon; Augustus carefully refused, and substituted Caesar for himself, but he certainly arranged for Agrippa to make the proposal before the Senate in the first place.

Such panegyric was translated into visual images like the Gemma Augustea (fig. 16) made at court. We often class such poetry and art as "private," distinct from publicly erected commemorative; we cannot compare public oratory because none survives from Augustus' day, but it is hard to believe that Ciceronian language did not continue in use to salute Augustus publicly. It should be remembered that panegyric poetry and luxury objects like gems and silver were not totally private in our sense of the word. Poetry was read aloud, and luxury objects displayed, in one's home, to an audience; and this audience consisted of one's peers as well as one's inferiors (see the Introduction on the function of the cups). The uppermost classes of Rome attended the supper parties and readings where such panegyric products were displayed; and these were the only classes about whose reaction to his "divinization" Augustus had to worry. It was out of deference to their feelings that he carefully modulated the chords of the symphony of adulation that he conducted so skillfully—but, to extend the metaphor, he never told the orchestra to stop playing. Indeed, this class joined in the music making itself: picture, for instance, a reading of Horace's ode to Augustus as Hermes, son of Maia (Carm. 1.2), staged in the Villa Farnesina house, whose ceiling stuccoes depict Octavian as Novus Mercurius with a caduceus (fig. 35);^[121] Such domestic imagery^[122] paraphrased monuments like the publicly displayed Jupiter-Octavian herm portrait (figs. 21–22) that was depicted on Octavian's Actian victory coinage.^[123]

As for monumental commemorative relief or painting from Rome, the only extant Augustan example is the Ara Pacis. All talk of Augustus "avoiding" kinds of public images is in fact based on this one monument—already in 1955 Ryberg warned against this approach!^[124] Yes, there Augustus is in a set of procession friezes restricted to humans; and Mars,

Venus, Roma, and Aeneas are in separate panels (fig. 71). Yet their very association with the procession friezes proclaims Augustus' divine ancestry and uniquely favored position as the gods' agent, superior to that of any living mortal.^[125] The multiplication and juxtaposition of pictorial zones on every available surface seem to be a basic esthetic structure in the entire altar complex; to infer from this compositional structure some unwritten law that in all public images Augustus was not to share a compositional frame with anyone but humans is as illogical as to infer that he was not to be shown in a frame with vegetation because it is confined here to the "myth" panels and to the socle zone under the procession frieze. "Special agency" defines Augustus' role on the BR panel, as on the altar: as Augustus is togate, he is an analogue to Jupiter, not his incarnation. Just so, on the Gemma Augustea (fig. 16) Augustus holds a lituus, which shows him to be a favored interpreter of Jupiter's commands, not their author. Altars^[126] and dedications^[127] for Augustus throughout Italy document the impact of the monuments^[128] and poetry produced at court.^[129]

In fact, Augustus did pose as Jupiter's chosen intermediary in public ritual in the city of Rome. At the celebration of his triumph of A.D. 8 in A.D. 12, Tiberius mounted to the Capitolium, as specified in triumphal rite, to lay his laurels on the lap of Jupiter Capitolinus: but first, he fell at the knees of Augustus and did him homage in a totally unprecedented public ceremony that made Augustus a kind of pseudo-Jupiter, giver of victories (Suet. Tib. 20), just as he appears on the Gemma Augustea (fig. 16).^[130] Apposite here is Augustus' transfer of age-old rites of Jupiter to his own Forum Augustum and Temple of Mars Ultor, built on land he had purchased himself Since the legendary days of Romulus Romans had deposited the spolia opima in Romulus' Temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol; now spolia opima were to be put in Augustus' Temple of Mars Ultor. Since the foundation of the Republic, consuls setting out on campaign had sacrificed and announced their vows (nuncupatio votorum ) to Jupiter at the Capitolium; now those vows were to be announced in Augustus' Forum at the Temple of Mars Ultor, before the statue of Augustus sharing his triumphal quadriga with Victoria (Dio 54.8).

Given such evidence from the Republic, and the facts of Augustus' own public stance, I do not see how one can assert that Augustus would have shunned the public display of an image like the BR allegory panel in the city of Rome. Why worry about shocking by innovation, when even the traditional funerary monuments of magistrates and generals showed compositions and motifs so similar? As the other three panels of the BR cup

pair manifestly copy a group of monumental reliefs put up in the city of Rome, I believe that the allegory BR I:1 copies a relief from the same group of monumental prototypes. No solid evidence, in composition or iconography, exists to disprove this thesis; the artistic parallels for single figures and for groups derive overwhelmingly from the repertoire of "state" imagery and public commemorative rather than from the decorative arts traditions.