Barbarian Babies
This scene misleads many. What discussion it has received explains that it shows the leaders of a newly conquered tribe handing over their children as hostages for continued good behavior; it has been likened to the few extant depictions of similar scenes, which date from the second century A.D. on:[11] one of the panel reliefs of Marcus Aurelius (fig. 83)[12] and a genre of late imperial sarcophagus depictions (fig. 93).[13] On these, disheveled, cowering, anguished victims submit themselves with their offspring to a stern imperial general who is armored and victorious.[14] The barbarians are surrounded by Roman soldiers and abase themselves,[15] the armed emperor is aloof, and the barbarians' expressions when visible are anguished and dismayed. When the physical format permits, the emperor is put up on a very high tribunal so that the foreigners are physically distanced from him and humiliated.
To casually group the Boscoreale depiction with these submission scenes is wrong.[16] The foreigners here are sponsored by a Roman officer who physically cherishes their children, a motif not seen in the submission scenes;[17] the adults are composed and serene, not disheveled and an-
guished, and those who are not bending to hold their children stand at dignified ease; the posture of those who do have to bend is not proskynesis or a pure grovel but is explained by the fact that they assist their children; the young children themselves greet the emperor joyfully, for wide smiles are apparent on their faces, and when they reach out to Augustus they seem to wish to be taken up by him, not to be pleading with him in fright and terror; the emperor himself is in the toga of peaceful civil administration and not in the cuirass of a conquering general, and he greets them with an affable openhanded gesture of welcome.
These are not newly conquered, formerly hostile savages, Vergil's superbi debellati, but a friendly people, loyal to Rome. The infants depicted turn up elsewhere in Augustan art (see p. 101 below); they are being transferred to the authority of Rome and Augustus to be brought up in honor under the emperor's aegis, perhaps even at the imperial court, as future Romanized leaders of their people. I propose that this panel shows the primores Galliarum before Augustus in Gaul in 13 (or 10) B.C. at Lugdunum. Before covering the historical evidence, I review the visual comparanda, which, together with the cup and its prototype, show that this event was heavily, though briefly, publicized by Augustan state propaganda. This visual evidence is extremely important, for it documents an event to which we have no direct testimony in any surviving textual source. Both my parallels are from the corpus of state art—monumental commemorative relief in Rome and imperial coinage minted for Rome and Gaul.
The Ara Pacis
On the north procession frieze (fig. 76) a young foreigner (figs. 76–77) has been inserted into the Roman crowd at the head of the group belonging to the imperial domus ; he stands between the members of official priesthoods, who head the procession, and the matron (the emperor's daughter Julia), who leads the imperial household group. On the south wall (figs. 78–80), at the very same point, another young foreigner of a different type clutches the toga of Agrippa, immediately preceding the emperor's wife Livia, who heads the imperial household group. This manipulation of the altar's visual structure (fig. 71) makes plain that these two young foreigners have the same status and function, as is the case with groups (imperial family, priests) and individual figures (e.g., Livia and Julia) that are symmetrically placed elsewhere in the procession friezes. The expense of such care on their placement also indicates that they were
meant to be noticed; compare the so-called silentiarii, each a veiled woman facing the spectator with a finger to her lips, who on either side of the altar wall mark the point where the spectator passes the front of the holy altar hidden from view within.[18]
First, the child on the north wall (figs. 76–77): this is one of the Boscoreale children. This is a fat-checked toddler in an armless tunic[19] that leaves his lower buttocks bare, wearing a heavy torque with twisted ring and round finials, and a smooth bracelet above the right elbow; his wavy hair, braided along the parting at the back of the head,[20] lies flat along the skull, curling loosely to his shoulders behind. Tripping forward on one foot, he dangles by the left hand from the right hand of the togate Roman behind him; with his right hand he tugs at the toga of the Roman in front of him, his head craned back, smiling up at the giant whose attention he wishes to attract.
One has only to look at the two representations side by side to see that the Ara Pacis child belongs to the group of infants from the cup scene and that his figure is a conflation of the two toddling children in the foreground on the cup panel. His head is that of the foremost BR infant—coiffure, features and expression, and tilted-back angle (pl. 20); his gestures combine those of the child holding onto Drusus' hand (pl. 21) and those of the foremost child who reaches up and out; he is the same size and age and, like them, cannot walk unsupported; his tunic has the same distinctive short cut, which covers only the top of the buttocks. His tunic is fastened at the shoulders instead of having sleeves, but this is paralleled by Gallia's gown at Lugdunum Convenarum.[21] This sleeveless tunic (better suited to a hot climate?) is not Greco-Roman, and its length is still distinctive; the bare legs and feet appear on a Gallic toddler in a later Julio-Claudian grave relief at Nîmes for a Gallo-Roman patron.[22] His foreignness and his high status are both marked by the heavy jewelry on so young a child, the torque of foreign (Celtic) type,[23] the bracelet worn in Gallic fashion.[24] The fact that he is not a Roman is signaled immediately by the absence of the bulla (protective amulet) worn by all the Roman children on the altar just as it was worn by all Roman children in real life.
E. Simon was the first to point out that this child and his pendant on the south wall are not Romans, identifying them as foreign princelings. Because she did so quite briefly (and did not note the clinching parallel with the Boscoreale cup panel),[25] her views have often been ignored and even ridiculed.[26] Yet even without the cup parallel it should have been evident that this child is no Roman, let alone a Julio-Claudian prince (he is often identified with Lucius Caesar).[27] The Roman children on the altar
wear the bulla and are swaddled in adult-style drapery, the males with short hair; even the youngest, who clutch at their elders' hands and clothes, stand solidly on two feet with good Roman gravitas —no naked buttocks among these imperial offspring.[28] The fine 1990 article by C. B. Rose, whose researches have run parallel to mine, has already started to drive home acceptance of the proper identifications in literature on the Ara Pacis;[29] singing in chorus, perhaps such voices will finally prevail.
The child on the south wall (figs. 78–80) standing between Agrippa and Livia is somewhat older than his counterpart—seven or eight years old, perhaps. He presses close to Agrippa, clutching at the folds of Agrippa's tunic with one hand, looking back toward the figures in procession behind him. His dress is also distinctive: a knee-length tunic tied low on the hips (the two ends of the belt are visible beneath the overfold) and curious ankle-high shoes with a three-lobed flap falling from the top of the shoe, like the flap of a golf shoe. He too wears jewelry, and no bulla —rather a torque, different from that worn by the BR child, a smooth ring with bullet-shaped finials that meet and join. His long sausage curls, falling to the shoulder, are bound by what is either a thick headband or the thickened edge of a head cap (the latter would explain the smoothness of the hair over this band, which contrasts with the thick curls below it). His features are markedly different from those of any other child on the frieze, a pudgy and pear-shaped face with rather gross lips and a flat, bulgy nose; contrast the delicate face of the young camillus Gaius Caesar on the north wall (fig. 76). Behind this child is a woman marked as a non-Roman noble again by jewelry (earring) and also by the diadema (cloth band) that binds the hair pulled back under her laurel wreath.[30] She will be the child's mother from his native land; she places a hand on the boy's head and looks down at him. The general dress and appearance of this boy and the woman's diadema place him as coming from the Hellenized East; as his hair and clothing are Oriental, and the woman's diadema is in origin a Macedonian royal token, one thinks of a Greco-Oriental monarchy.
Who exactly are these two young foreigners? The Ara Pacis was voted to Augustus on the occasion of his return to Rome after having reorganized Gaul and Spain, as he himself tells us in his Res gestae (12.2), and the BR child on the altar is to be connected with this. The presence of Drusus on the cup indicates that the children being handed over there are Gauls, for Drusus never exercised any imperium in Spain. This BR child then must have come to Augustus from Gaul. The Eastern child is shown closely linked to Agrippa. We know that Agrippa returned to Rome at the
same time or shortly after from a complementary tour of organization in the kingdoms of the East, having most notably worked in the client kingdoms of Pontos,[31] Commagene, and the Bosphoros; the child with him must be a princeling of one of these Oriental dynasties.[32]
Can this Eastern prince be further identified? The torque could be worn by Asian dynasts[33] and hence figures in the contemporary iconography of Attis, as on the Hildesheim dish;[34] his mane of sausage curls and his facial physiognomy recall numismatic portraits of the kings of Pontos and the Bosphoros.[35] Key are this child's distinctive shoes, characterized by a three-lobed flap that falls over the floppy bowknot that secures the soft shoe. Shoes that have a floppy bow and some kind of flap over the top of the foot were recognizably Eastern, for they occur on Augustan images of Parthian captives.[36] But in none of these does the flap cover the bow in this way or take this distinctive outline (flared, scalloped in three convex lobes). This otherwise unique footwear turns up on a pair of late Republican decorative bronze lamp holders (ca. 40-20 B.C.) (fig. 81), epicene boys who wear a fantastic version of the royal costume of Commagene; their figured tiara,[37] sash, voluminous leggings and tunic, though draped in Roman Neo-Attic style (matching the dancing pose),[38] resemble chiefly Commagenian royal sculpture at Arsameia (Nimrud Dagh).[39] The distinctively draped mantle, pinned at the right shoulder and given an elegant flip over the left, also turns up at Arsameia; the best preserved royal likeness there, on the dexiosis relief of Antiochus and Hercules, has shoes tied with a similar bow; their upper flaps, though upright, are still decoratively marked, here by tooling.[40] The Ara Pacis boy, then, like his Gallic counterpart, can be seen to wear a child's version of an adult ethnic costume, adapted for Rome and its heat (his tunic is still unusually voluminous, though belted now in Greco-Roman fashion).
The bronze pair in New York and Baltimore shows that the iconography of the Ara Pacis boy was recognizable around the Mediterranean in the later first century B.C. Though the costume of the bronzes has some parallels in Roman depictions of Asia and Armenia,[41] it is closest to that of Commagene, and the diadem on the boy's princess-mother firmly locates the pair outside Armenia in such a Hellenized realm.[42] If the bronzes are indeed from Alexandria,[43] they should be connected with the court of Antony and Cleopatra, where royal children from around the East were (forcibly) assembled; the investiture ceremonies for Antony and Cleopatra's children (Plut. Ant. 54.7–9; Dio 49.41) document that court's knowledgeable interest in the historical range of Hellenistic royal panoplies.
Historical circumstances confirm what the visual evidence suggests,
that the Ara Pacis prince and his mother are from Commagene. There are but two queens with whom Agrippa involved himself on Augustus' behalf of northern Asia, Dynamis of Pontos[44] and Iotape I of Commagene. Dynamis of the Bosphoros, granddaughter of Mithridates Eupator, was married off in 14 B.C. to Polemo of Pontos to unify their kingdoms, and her ties of amicitia with Livia and Augustus are documented epigraphically;[45] however, she died shortly after 14 B.C.[46] and had no attested male issue. Iotape, on the other hand, is a candidate with documented offspring who was also bound by ties of friendship to the imperial house.[47]
Daughter of Artavasdes of Media Atropatene, Iotape as a very little girl (Plut. Ant. 53.6: eti mikran ousan ) was summoned to Antony's court in 34/33 B.C. to be betrothed to his son Alexander, then six years old; after Actium her father, who had taken refuge with Augustus, was given her back—she is one of the two Alexandrian hostages whom Dio singles out (54.9.3) by name, as an example of Augustus' benevolence. When she was married off to Mithridates III of Commagene, certainly at Augustus' and Agrippa's behest, she would have been perhaps fifteen to seventeen years old, as the marriage must have taken place at Mithridates' accession as a minor in 20 B.C.[48] Their son Antiochos III of Commagene died in A.D. 17 (Tac. Ann. 2.42.5), leaving a son and a daughter, who in A.D. 38 had a young son of her own. Antiochos must have been born very soon after Iotape's marriage, for even if aged thirty-six (20 B.C.–A.D. 17) he will have married, propagated, and died at a relatively young age. This Antiochos received Roman citizenship at Augustus' hands, not Agrippa's (his sons were entitled to the nomen Iulius ). If indeed his father's death and his own accession fell in 12 B.C.,[49] then we can see his inauguration as the culminating event of Agrippa's sojourn in the East. The historical and the visual evidence combined seem to prove that we see on the Ara Pacis Iotape I of Commagene (in the diadem that her granddaughter was represented as wearing)[50] with her son Antiochus III at Rome, where this prince was taken under Augustus' wing and given Roman citizenship. If Antiochus at this point was indeed fatherless, then Augustus' role as substitute pater will have been even more meaningful; that this "willing" obses was presented by the princess who as a little girl had been restored to her own father by Augustus will have deepened the resonance of the occasion. Indeed, Iotape's very presence suggests that Antiochus' father is now dead; for the BR cup scene suggests that the sponsor parent, if present at all, should be male.
Weinstock once questioned the identification of the remains we know as the Ara Pacis with the historical altar, asking rather acerbically where
one could see any reference to pax in the sculptured decoration.[51] With the identifications made immediately above, his question can now be fully answered—the foreign children on it are the pacati . Pax to Romans of the late Republic and early Empire had two distinct and complementary meanings. With reference to one's fellow Romans, it implied the absence of civil war, a wholly desirable antithesis to a wholly detestable exercise of arms, akin to the modern moral exaltation of peace. Indeed, this civil concord is implicit in the procession friezes as a whole, which show the harmonious rejoicing of the Roman aristocracy and priesthoods, together with and linked to the united imperial domus . Pax with reference to non-Romans meant undisputed acceptance of Roman authority with respect to subject and client peoples, as well as formal treaty-bound relations with total foreigners; in Roman terms, what Augustus and Agrippa had each been up to was pacification in its fullest sense (see the discussion of pax at pp. 105–6 in chapter 4 in reference to the Ara Pacis personification frieze). The two elite children on the altar are the visible emblems of the flourishing of pax due to Augustus and his agents at work in the Empire beyond the SPQR.[52]
The pair of children express the worldwide range of that pax, summing up in their persons the Eastern and Western poles of the oikoumene —all four cardinal points are there, in fact, in the apt setting of the Western child on the north wall and the Eastern child on the south wall (fig. 71). The artist's desire to set up this metaphor by means of antithetical placement was evidently strong enough to override other iconographic considerations: that is, with Agrippa and Drusus placed on the south wall for other reasons, the BR infant, whose presence would be more easily understood by the spectator if he accompanied Drusus, as the Eastern child accompanies Agrippa, is removed from his own sponsor as we know him from the BR cup and put on the other side of the complex.[53]
Pax in the imperialistic sense, it should be noted, did not imply as its antithesis armed violence as an absolute evil, in the same way as inter-Roman pax . Military virtus exercised by the Roman armies was what made pax possible for Rome's subjects, threatened by the regrettable but inevitable treacheries of barbarians outside the frontiers.[54] So it is that we see Drusus on the altar paludatus, as he is on the BR cup, itself a scene expressive of pax in a military setting; a Roman would find no discrepancy in such a collocation of peace and arms.
The altar and cup princelings, then, are emblems of imperial pax spread through the oikoumene . There are further parallels between the structuring of the Ara Pacis complex and the Boscoreale cup: both couple abstract and
particular references to peaceful imperium . In the altar complex, the children in the friezes are the particular examples that locate in real historical event the abstract reality of the lower frieze on the inner altar (figs. 71–72). This showed an assemblage of numerous provincial/ethnic personifications representing the peoples of empire, located on a frieze below the sacrificial relief frieze now visible on the altar block. The cup BR I is similar: the allegory also has a group of ethnic personifications, doing homage to a benevolent Augustus, in a timeless abstract statement of Roman world rule under Augustus' leadership, while the audience scene locates the operation of that rule in a particular historical context.
Also, both monuments emphasize the fruitfulness of imposed pax for the subject peoples themselves and tend to link the representation of children to the representation of Amor. The grouping of Amor and the Genius of the Roman People on BR I:1 is echoed in the group Drusus-alien child on BR I:2; this is brought out by the physical resemblance between the Gallic children and Amor, a chubby infant of the same age who also proceeds toward the emperor with an arm held up. In the altar complex, the foreign children are treated with the same inclusive affection as the Roman children in the frieze, and their very presence symbolizes present and future sharing by the peoples of the oikoumene in the blessings of pax symbolized by the burgeoning garden carpet encircling the walls of the complex; further, the BR child, like the very little Roman children in the frieze, is visually analogous to the baby Amores on the lap of Venus/Terra Mater on one of the four great entrance panels of the complex wall (fig. 74). Infants in a paradise garden including land and sea, nursed by the mother of all and the mother of the gens Julia, these twin Amores are a comment on the hopes and faith placed in the children who are such a key part of the Ara Pacis procession, themselves including the children of the gens Julia and the children "of all."[55]
This thematic emphasis on children, the younger the better, links the cup and altar programs, and in each case the theme is deliberately set. On the carefully planned altar this would seem obvious. On the cup, note that the BR group includes an adolescent youth (who may stand for more such youths); the artist has put his main emphasis on the foreign infants when he could have concentrated on a different age grouping (compare the grouping father/adolescent, though in a sadder vein, on the Antonine panel relief). Altar and cup obviously depend on a shared prototype for their depictions of the BR children; both partake in an observable and uniquely Augustan tendency toward the portrayal of babies and very little children.[56]
All these sophisticated and distinctive thematic links between the cup and the altar complex are too close to be entirely coincidental, and indicate a close temporal connection between the altar and the pairing of scenes on BR I. One last feature links BR I:2 to the Ara Pacis: the representation of Drusus on the altar. He is shown as a young general, the only armed figure in the entire procession, dressed in tunic, paludamentum, and caligae, instead of the toga and patrician sandals (fig. 78).[57] This not only enhances the theme of peace guarded by arms delineated above; it is also means that Drusus here is an agent for Augustus' military virtus at large in the world, complementing Tiberius' position as consul and Augustus' adoptive son Gaius' position as priest (camillus on the north wall with his mother Julia).[58] The combination of Drusus unexpectedly appearing as a young general alongside one of the BR children in the same procession strongly recalls the cup panel. In fact, the parallel extends beyond these two single figures. The compositional unit within the south altar frieze in which Drusus is framed is a mirror-image version of the sophisticated framing group seen on the cup, much as the niche wall of figures enclosing Angustus on the cup is paralleled by the group heading the south altar frieze. Drusus stands "between" a back wall of standing figures and a kind of front "parapet" of foreground figures of descending height, that is, made up largely of children; once recognized on the cup panel (see p. 161 in chapter 7), the more subdued (and reversed) version of this spatial construct on the Ara Pacis emerges to the attentive eye. This compositional unit is then indisputably a device of Augustan historical relief, firmly bound to the iconography of Drusus imperator as the patron of the Boscoreale children in connection with Augustus' projects for the pacification of Gaul.
Lugdunum Aurei
a. Aureus: obverse, bust of Augustus; reverse, bearded barbarian left, in a cloak fastened on the right shoulder, holding up a very small child stretching out its arms to Augustus at right, togate, seated on a sella castrensis on a high tribunal (CNR IV, cat. 129)
b. Aureus: obverse, laureate head of Augustus, inscribed AUGUSTUS DIVI F.; reverse, bearded barbarian left, in tunic and cloak, holding up a child, as before, to Augustus, as before, except on a low tribunal/dais, inscribed IMP. XIIII (fig. 87; BMCRE I, pl. 12.13–14)
Augustus' fourteenth acclamation as imperator dates these issues to 8/7 B.C. but the reference can only be to the event on the BR cup, which
predates these coin issues from the Lugdunum mint (Drusus died at the beginning of 9 B.C.). The date of issue means that they are part of a larger series that came out for Tiberius' triumph of 8/7 B.C., directly referred to on other types of the series. (Compare the apposition of the panel BR I:2 and the triumph of Tiberius on the companion cup BR II:2.)
The coin type represented in these two variants is unique in Roman coinage:[59] no other coin type from the Republic or the Empire shows a barbarian offering a child, or even shows the emperor togate receiving the submission of a non-Roman in a military setting. Given the closeness in time to the Ara Pacis (13–9 B.C.), a definite quotation of the BR scene in official art, I think that there is no doubt that this unique type is a deliberate abbreviation of the cup panel. This abbreviation boils down the composition to a confrontation between the emperor and the foreigner, keeping all the cup's essential elements: the emperor is togate on a sella castrensis and uses the same openhanded gesture of greeting and acceptance; the barbarian has a dignified posture (standing) and presents a child to the emperor; the child is extremely small and holds out its hands to the emperor. The better type is certainly (b ), which has the key inscriptions and gives Augustus his laurel; it is also more like the BR panel in showing the emperor on a very low dais, and so more approachable to the foreigner, who is thus allowed closer and given higher status. The foreigner's costume is also given in more detail (tunic and cloak) than on (a ) (cloak only).
For the less-perfect rendering of (a ) the artist turned without thought to earlier representational canons for victory images that put the Roman victor on a very high dais or tribunal, distanced from the suppliant, and to conventional images of beaten barbarians shown as half-naked. The basic composition of such canonical submissio scenes, where the suppliant generally kneels, accords with textual descriptions of the real-life stage management of such formal submissions, such as the surrender of the Cauchi to Tiberius in A.D. 4, narrated by Tiberius' officer Velleius Paterculus (2.104–3.106); the canonical submission type, available at least since the time of Sulla (fig. 50),[60] has been modified on this Lugdunum coinage in the same way and to the same thematic end as rex datus types, which give the foreigner being honored by Rome greater dignity, depicting him standing erect.[61]
This issue has been rightly compared to earlier triumphal issues commemorating Drusus' and Tiberius' victories for Augustus, issued from Lugdunum 15-12 B.C. (IMP. X) (figs. 115–16); for it is clear that the compositional structure or template of these earlier types in the Lug-
dunum IMP. (#) series was the direct inspiration for the structure of the later "baby" issues. In the coinage of 15-13 B.C., the standing figure(s) at left is (are) cloaked general(s), Drusus alone or with his brother, and he (they) offer not babies but laurel branches. While this parallel has been used to show that the type of 8/7 B.C. has something to do with victory and is therefore a submission,[62] it illustrates instead my interpretation. The non-Roman offering his baby is cognate with Augustus' honored stepsons offering their gifts of victory to an appreciative emperor; if one places any interpretive weight at all on the compositional borrowing, one must see the non-Roman also as a valued subject offering a gift to an appreciative emperor. This image certainly is connected to victory, but in the sense explored above in relation to the Ara Pacis, and with historical reference to Gaul's role in Drusus' and Tiberius' German campaigns, discussed below.
The Lugdunum coinage of 8/7 B.C., then, shows the BR event being advertised by means of the most wide-reaching organ of propaganda available to the state. The Ara Pacis is a parallel reference to this event, designed for an audience of the Senate and People of Rome; the coinage of the Lugdunum mint served Rome's money needs, but it also served the Roman armies and native inhabitants of Gaul and the Rhine frontier. The coin image, in other words, was made to be seen by the very armies who served with Drusus and Tiberius, in one of whose camps the cup shows this event to have taken place, and it was also designed for the Gauls, whose elite are depicted handing their children over to Augustus' protection.[63] A very good parallel is provided by the Augustan triumphal arch (ca. 20–10 B.C.) at the entrance to Glanum in southern Gaul: as P. Gros has shown,[64] on one main panel (fig. 85) a "good" Gaul in Romanized dress (his fringed sagum draped as a toga)[65] leads by a chain a "bad" savage Celt (German); on the facing panel Gallia Triumphans[66] supervises another captive. Here is the same association of Gallic support with Roman imperialism, designed for a Gallic audience as much as for a Roman one. An early imperial cuirass statue (Swiss priv. coll.)[67] uses similar imagery in what is obviously a Roman triumphal context: a "good" Celt in a sagum decorates a trophy, beside which stands a bound savage barbarian. All these images are meant to honor the real historical circumstance that Roman expansion into Germany depended in fact on the loyalty and active support of the Gauls, as dutiful taxpayers and fighting men; thus a Gallic officer walks in Tiberius' German triumph on BR I:2. This "good" and "bad" Celt imagery helps to document a broader Augustan context in which foreign contributions to Roman power were now honored by
Rome, and is the visual analogue to Claudius' famous paean to the Gauls in the Lugdunum bronze tablet; the Glanum arch must commemorate these very campaigns of the Claudii Nerones.
The visual comparanda for BR I:2 (cup, Ara Pacis, coinage) together form a complex describing a unique event by means of unique imagery. The complex offers us something like a perfectly controlled experimental group in which to observe how a given political event was singled out, on account of its contemporary political significance, to be commemorated and broadcast in a variety of artistic media, public (altar and coinage) and private (the silver cups themselves). In examining how Augustan propaganda is constructed here we can see two different phenomena or processes in operation. One is the invisible (to us) hand of some guiding organ of state (emperor and/or minister) directing and synchronizing the artistic propagation and dissemination of official imperial policy over a vast geographic expanse, aimed at every level of imperial society. The other is an artistic phenomenon, the process by which an image that narrates history can be established, expanded, abbreviated, quoted, according to the demands and limits of a given visual context. Abbreviation, as on the coins, and quotation, as on the Ara Pacis, indicate in their turn that the artists responsible thought that such allusions would work . That is, they depended on such symbols, in themselves containing incomplete information, to evoke, without recourse to verbal explanation, some pre-existing knowledge of image or event from an audience. The BR cup scene reproduces the original detailed and largely self-explanatory artistic narrative, produced to commemorate some event of major political significance. It was the knowledge both of this event and of its iconography that permitted figures isolated from the larger context to function as carriers of meaning on Augustus' altar; and where the altar invests most heavily in the figures of the children in themselves, the coins celebrate the transaction between the childrens' fathers and their ruler, appropriately enough for an image disseminated not least in the native territory of those represented.
Now, it is obvious that the imperial die cutters and sculptors did not borrow from a little silver cup. The kind of abbreviation we see on the altar in particular is evidence that the cup itself was not based directly on the altar depiction, for in borrowing, figure types tend to be conflated (as two BR children are into one Ara Pacis child) or moved out of direct informational context (as Drusus the general is separated on the altar from the child he sponsored), rather than the other way around. Rather, the cup panel, altar, and coin type all derive separately from a common source,
which they all use to different effect. This source can only have been a large-scale imperial monument with a relief (or possibly a painting) narrating the BR event, a monument that I think we can assume the BR panel reproduces faithfully. It is possible (see p. 51) that the Lugdunum coin image itself does not directly abbreviate a two-dimensional prototype but rather records a freestanding statue group related in context and chronology to the Ara Pacis and cup depictions. Like other public commemorative monuments in Rome, the prototype would have had an accompanying inscription giving further information. To hypothesize the occasion of its commission, we need to know more about the occasion it depicted.