Benevolent Imperium

Are the Boscoreale personifications to be classed with the images of pure dominance described above? There is an element of such a tone in their depiction, but it is not the only way in which one should interpret them. Key here is the fact that the peoples shown are all provinces already incorporated in the Empire, as far as one can tell from the three that can be named—Africa, Gaul, and Spain. The works of Augustan art, major and minor, that celebrate Augustus' personal victories almost always include or emphasize his victories in the East over Parthia and Armenia; the signal omission here of any figure in mitra, or Persian cap, means that this figure group is not an emblematic catalogue of major Augustan victories. Instead, they are an emblematic catalogue of peoples now administered by Rome under Augustus, which by including East and West and North and

South sum up the oikoumene governed by the emperor as symbolized by the globe in his hand. Also, there is a fairly standard iconography for full-length figures who symbolize domination itself as their primary function, used in the absence of an inscription: a provincia capta acknowledges its humiliation by sitting or standing head in hand, slumped in dejection. These provinces stand, showing some deference, but they do not make any of the standard signs of grief, compare and contrast the provinces on the Augustan cuirass statue from Primaporta and Amphipolis, or on the Arretine ware described above, all images celebrating military victories (figs. 64–67).^[120]

It is also the case that this scene must be read as one of a pair of scenes on one cup—indeed, with reference also to the second cup. Within the cup group, the main visual emphasis is on the outermost province, Gaul, the one in highest relief. This is true when one focuses on the group by itself; also, when the cup is viewed head-on (pl. 2) to focus on Augustus, the scene is then framed in a peaceful confrontation between Roma and this province, who is thus the first explanatory figure visible as "comment" on the globe in Augustus' hand. This figure also wears the dress of the barbarians on the other side of the cup, where some kind of submissive audience between Augustus and a foreign people takes place; thus the personification and the entire group in which it holds pride of place have to be interpreted in light of the scene on the other side of the cup.

Second, the other cup, to which the first must somehow be appropriate, shows the triumph of Tiberius, whose triumphs were over peoples of western Europe. The linkage with the second cup fits the "dominance" view outlined above. The comparison with the other side of this cup, however, does not. There (BR I:2) the little children being handed over to Augustus are joyful, emblems of a benevolent imperialism in which those ruled are delighted at Roman guidance and are valued by their rulers. These overtones of joy accompanying rule are also present in the other half of this very scene: Roma tramples the weapons of war underfoot, fertility gushes from the Genius's cornucopia, Amor pours perfume with his bow laid aside, Venus herself brings a promise of peace and concord, and it is she rather than Mars who is given first place in the pair of processions converging on Augustus' throne. Augustus himself, finally, is not enthroned as a general but in the toga of peaceful civilian administration; he does not sit on a camp stool but on a fantastic symbolic seat that expresses the peaceful burgeoning of tamed nature, analogue and result of political harmony, for the scat is carved from tree branches as if in some rustic grove. This mode of illustrating the feats of Tiberius and Dru-

sus could hardly differ more from commemorations in the "triumphal" mode, like the city gate at Saepinum built under Tiberius' supervision from both brothers' German manubiae, that is, with the same historical reference as BR II: its great central inscription, which simply states the donation, is flanked by emblematic German captives stripped to the waist, bound, upon high pillars.^[121]

What, then, is the answer? The answer is that two things at once are going on here. The submission of the oikoumene and prosperity for the oikoumene are celebrated at one and the same time. Romans can take pride in having subdued the world, as Jupiter can take pride in being mightiest of the gods, and Augustus can take pride in being the greatest of all imperatores; those parts of the world with any sense will realize that it is to their advantage to submit, and if they properly acknowledge Roman superiority in the persons of Augustus and his agents, they will be cared for as Jupiter cares for those who avoid hubris/superbia . Moreover, Roman triumphs over unregenerate foreigners actually protect those already under Rome's rule: consider, for example, Caesar's pretext for his wars against the Germans of the Rhine, that they were undertaken to protect the Gauls he had been busy subduing; and consider the Gemma Augustea, where the personification Oikoumene acknowledges Augustus' saving of lives with a corona civica at the occasion of a triumph of Tiberius, with bound captives shown in the exedra below the main scene (fig. 16).

In Roman eyes, there would be no contradiction between the two messages, no sense of schizophrenia.^[122] War is wonderful because it assures pax, and pax is wonderful not only for the victors but, in the victors' eyes, for the pacati as well.^[123] This is the message of the primary Augustan statement on pax, the Ara Pacis. There (as discussed below with reference to BR I:2), on the outer friezes, one of the BR infants is paired with an Oriental princeling to express at once the homage of East and West to Augustus' rule and the participation of East and West in the blessings of that rule (figs. 71, 76–80). On the inner altar of the Ara Pacis was a set of images that are the primary parallel to the BR province group, a frieze with personifications of all the peoples under Roman rule (fig. 72), the whole crowned by another frieze representing worship of pax /Pax sponsored by the emperor.^[124] Exactly like the BR group, these females were variously in symbolic and in ethnically explicit dress, masculine and feminine.^[125] Lined up in a long frieze, they stood frontally, turning their heads to one another, like paratactic figure series on the monumental Hellenistic altars whose form is quoted here. They even share generic figure types—the BR Gallia on the cup has an exact match in stance and costume in one

of the altar figures!^[126] The Ara Pacis seems to have been the model for the later Jullo-Claudian relief, also from the Campus Martius, that was reused on the Arcus Novus (fig. 12), a fragment of a similar paratactic frieze composition preserving a pair of females in male and female ethnic dress posed frontally in conversation.^[127]

The altar complex and the cup both make explicit visually that the Augustan ideology of pax was physically manifest in Augustus' actual journeying to those provinces, as H. Halfmann interprets these progresses; for the BR allegory is paired with a scene of Augustus among his non-Roman subjects, and the Ara Pacis is primarily a commemoration of just such a successful trip (quite possibly the same one).^[128] The peoples ruled by Rome are lesser, but without them there would be no Empire: they have their own place, and their own potential worth in the scheme of things. So Vergil coupled his paean to Augustus' world rule (Aen. 6.791–800), which was to bring the Golden Age back to Latium (792f.), with an exhortation to his own people to rule, but to rule justly and well: "tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento/—hae tibi erunt artes—pacisque inponere morem,/parcere subiectis et debellare superbos" (6.851–53).^[129] Rome does a favor to her subjects in imposing the mos pacis on them.^[130]

Of course, this formulation is all from the point of view of the rulers and not of the ruled. Images of submissive and grieving subject peoples are probably nearer the case as far as the feelings of the subjects themselves go. What we are interested in here, however, is the interpretation that the rulers put on their own rule. The kind of corporate image of empire that we see here and the comparanda for it are part of the evidence for the Romans' becoming self-conscious of their role as heads of an empire; one of the burning issues of modern scholarship on the Republican age of expansion revolves around this very point of whether/when the Romans deliberately set out to become an imperial power and thought of themselves not as simply fighting ad hoc individual campaigns. Whatever the original motive forces behind Roman expansion, it is certain that by the first century B.C. the Romans had learned to think of themselves as rulers of a diverse but unified world and to find images for that reality in their art. The significance of what I call corporate images can best be appreciated by contrast with the other sorts of images that Romans used to express the fact of empire, unitary or binary allegorical symbols.

To begin with, there is the personification of the oikoumene . This Hellenistic term signifies the known inhabited world; its Latin equivalent is orbis terrarum . For educated Romans the two would have been interchangeable terms, and so I also tend to use them as interchangeable. I

prefer to use oikoumene when describing a Roman perception of the Empire as a political unity of omnium gentium; orbis terrarum is a physical metaphor describing the globe of earth on which the peoples of the known world live. A personified oikoumene, like that seen on the Gemma Augustea, evolved as part of the vocabulary of Hellenistic royal panegyric and is documented already in the Diadoch period: a painting in Athens of Demetrios Poliorketes of ca. 290 B.C. showed him striding over a representation of the oikoumene (Duris, FGrH 76, frag. 14; Eust. Il. 5.449). Compare the famous "Apotheosis of Homer" panel, where the poet is crowned by Ptolemy IV Philopator as Chronos and by his wife Arsinoe as a mural-crowned Oikoumene, to symbolize their establishment of Homer's cult at a Homereion in Alexandria (fig. 58); the panel itself documents the physical transmission of imagery to Italy, for it was found near Bovillae.^[131] The globe, as a symbol of the world, and so of world rule, was far more popular in Roman art than in Greek art,^[132] and I think that this is partly to be explained by the fact that it is a visual translation of the Latin orbis terrarum .

Romans in the Republic would have seen such images in the Hellenistic East, and many of their artists were Greeks from that world. The educated class that commissioned works of art would also have been exposed to the kinds of panegyric poetry of which, for instance, the "Apotheosis of Homer" seems to be a visual translation (the poet who commissioned the panel figures in it at upper right as an honorific statue of himself, see fig. 58).^[133] Images of the oikoumene in Rome may have already been formulated by Pompey; they are extant from the Augustan period, as on Augustan court cameos (a genre itself in the Ptolemaic court tradition) such as the Gemma Augustea (fig. 16), where Oikoumene crowns the emperor, and the Vienna cameo fragment (fig. 18), where Venus-Oikoumene in a mural crown brings a little Victoria to the emperor. The personification Oikoumene may have figured in the plan for a monument voted Caesar by the Senate on his return from Africa: Dio describes it as a statue of Caesar striding over an image of the oikoumene (43.4.6), though we do not know if he names the Hellenistic female personification or translates from the Latin terms of the commission the Latin orbis terrarum, which would have been figured as a globe. In any case, it is clear that this statue of Caesar quoted the monument of Demetrios Poliorketes, which would have been known to the educated class of Caesar's day from visual acquaintance or from literary references. Its inscription, calling Caesar hemitheos, also drew on the conventions of Hellenistic royal panegyric; thus Theocritus apostrophized Ptolemy II as world ruler in Idyll 17, a poem

that exercised much influence on later panegyric and that would have been read in Rome (especially given the fashion in the late first century B.C. for such Alexandrian works).^[134] Sculptural images that show a deity or hero with one foot on the globe are extant from the early Empire; consider the Ostia cult statue of Roma (Augustan or early Tiberian) and the Mars at the center of the pediment of Augustus' Temple of Mars Ultor (2 B.C.) (fig. 9b), which is quoted in the figure of Augustus on the Claudian Ravenna relief (fig. 8).^[135] The post-Social War coinage of 70 B.C. already shows Roma with her foot upon a globe (fig. 51a; RRC 403), and Mars on the Paris census (ca. 100-90 B.C.) has his foot on a globe also (fig. 27).

A globe or a personified Oikoumene differs in conception from a corporate image of empire. While such corporate images have roots in Greek descriptions of their own associations of cities, as metaphors for rule such corporate images seem to be very much a Roman device. Both Roman borrowings and creations document a rich ferment in the Roman iconographic tradition, as Romans looked for visual images to explicate their new self-consciousness of empire. A good parallel instance to the Roman transformation of corporate images is the varied visual translation of the common Latin periphrasis terra marique to denote worldwide sway: see, for example, the Gemma Augustea, where Okeanos and Ge sit behind Augustus (fig. 16); Venus on the Ara Pacis, flanked by nymphs of land and sea (fig. 74); the Augustan Cherchel cuirass decoration (fig. 5), where the Apotheosis of Caesar is set over a pair of Tritons whose attributes make them spirits of land and sea.^[136]

The globe, the personification Oikoumene, and terra marique images have a simple unitary or binary allegorical structure. Corporate images take us deeper into Roman political thinking, because they try to describe a political as well as a physical reality. As documented in the description above of monuments like Pompey's and Augustus' porticoes, corporate images can be used as unambiguous symbols of domination. In this they are like the Republican and early imperial texts on the orbis terrarum, which hail Roman domination of that entity (e.g., Cic. Herenn. 4.13, Imp. Pomp. 53, Mur. 22, Cat. 4.11, Sull. 33; and Augustan poetry: Verg. Aen. 1.278–82; Hor. Carm. 4.15.13–16; and Ovid [see Bömer's commentary on Fast. 1.590–911). Even corporate images that stress domination, though, show at least some interest in the individual existence of the peoples ruled.

Images of domination bulk large in Roman political imagery, as in the arts of most imperial powers. But it is always interesting for a student of the history of ideas to find rulers trying to project an image of that rule

that describes something more than a purely exploitative link between themselves and their subjects, even if this is only an occasional theme. Hence the importance of personification groups like those on the BR cup or on the inner altar of the Ara Pacis, or the use as symbols of the ruled of "adopted" children, on BR I:2 and in the friezes of the Ara Pacis (see chapter 4). These Augustan images describe a benevolent imperium, a pax that includes non-Romans as something more than pacati in the shape of opponents forced by military defeat to make peace. The modern viewer might follow Tacitus ("They make a desolation and call it peace" Agr. 30.5) and classify such propaganda of benevolent imperium as hypocritical, but to dismiss it as such ignores the fact that an ideal does not have to be wholeheartedly espoused to influence the policies that affect conditions for an empire's subjects. For instance, we really do not know whether Cicero took the Sicilians' case against Verres out of anything more than a desire to score points in Roman political infighting, however much he professed sympathy for the exploited provincials and tried to win the jury to the same point of view; and when he did win his case, we have no idea whether or not his jury condemned Verres out of a sincere belief in such noble sentiments. The fact remains that it turned out a good thing for the Sicilians themselves that such an ideal should be espoused, and it signaled the growing political maturity of Rome as administrator of an empire.

It is in the late Republic that we begin to find extant the political formulations that are the background for the lines of book 6 of the Aeneid quoted above.^[137] On pages 77–78 I described a small, but discrete, class of coin images that commemorate a Roman leader's defense and succor of peoples covered by his imperium, noting that at least one of these images (71 B.C.) undoubtedly reflects freestanding commemorative statuary (figs. 52–53, 56). Apposite texts are first supplied (as so often) by Cicero (Off. 2.26–27, Rep. 1.37), who speaks of Rome's rule as a patrocinium for the weak, an idea picked up in Livy (30.42.17), to cite one example.^[138]Patrocinium, the exercise of the formal institution of patronage, implies the superiority of the patron, but it also implies that the patron has duties toward his clients, who are to be commended as good and worthy clients when they properly support their patron. Thus official art provides images like the Pompeian forces' coinage lauding their Spanish allies (figs. 55, 57); compare the parade of foreign clients for Aemillus Paullus' funeral procession, carrying his bier and hailing him as euergetes and soter (Plut. Aem. 39.4.5). Senatorial monuments in Rome, like those for Rufus and P. Aelius Lamia at the tail end of the Republic, could "freeze" such a

display of foreign clientela in stone in perpetuity; their typically bilingual inscriptions show that such monuments sought to address both the rulers and the ruled, on behalf of noble patron and loyal Greek city-state alike. The ways in which this ideal is stressed on the other side of the BR cup are discussed in chapter 4. In the allegory here it is not as strongly emphasized, but it is there: the way in which Augustan rule is formulated here is a far cry from the Primaporta Augustus (fig. 64) with its Gaul and Spain and from the depiction of Egypt/Africa on the gem that shows a heroized Octavian treading on her head—these are depictions whose sole message was domination.^[139]

The BR province group gives us some hint of the lost Augustan monuments from which Hadrian must have derived inspiration for his province series (cf. chapter 2, p. 51f.), the numismatic sequence of individual personifications, and the great assemblage of personifications in monumental relief designed for his own temple (fig. 70; plan 125). In these works from the second century A.D., the intent to recognize the contribution of the constituent parts of empire is more obvious; we can now see that this intent has its roots in the propaganda of the first emperor, however we rate the strength of that connection. It was Augustus, because he was an individual triumphator on a new, worldwide scale, who was able to consummate the shift in Roman imperialistic thinking from provincia as a sphere of individual achievement to provincia as a well-administered province. The new conceptions of empire "required to be known and mentally represented";^[140] Roman thinking demanded that these conceptions find a formulation in material culture as well. Under this impetus Augustus formulated from Republican visual discourse an enduring artistic rhetoric of imperialism, at once active and inclusive, aggressive and benevolent.