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.