5—
The Sacrifice of Tiberius

Description

This panel (pls. 7–9, 15) shows the sacrifice of a steer before the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, elevated on a platform of masonry at far right (see pp. 215–16 n. 16 for damage after 1899). The sacrifice is celebrated by the imperator Tiberius, at left before a portable tripod-altar (foculus ), attended by a flute player, lictors, and others. At right two popae have wrestled the victim into position for the slaying; a third attendant swings an axe back for the fatal stroke as a fourth crouches by the steer's neck with a knife ready to stick the victim after it has been stunned.

The Sacrifice in Armor

F. Kleiner in 1983 used BR II:1 to launch an analysis of sacrifice scenes in armor in general, tying all such depictions to Aeneas iconography. His case needs to be addressed.

Kleiner held that a depiction of a sacrifice in armor would have evoked for the Roman spectator the image of Aeneas, because the only text reference is Vergil Aeneid 12.166–221, describing a sacrifice performed by Aeneas "sidereo flagrans clipeo et caelestibus armis."^[1] However, Aeneid 8.639–41 describes another armed sacrifice, made by Romulus and Titus Tatius to conclude a foedus with one another: "Post idem inter se posito certamine reges / armati Iovis ante aram paterasque tenentes / stabant et caesa iungebant foedera porca" (Romulus and Tatius sacrificed in armor, holding paterae, at the altar of Jupiter, by sticking a pig simultaneously). This sacrifice is described as "depicted" on the very Shield of Aeneas, which we are told in book 12 he carried at his sacrifice in armor. The

context of Aeneid 12.166–221 is that Aeneas and Latinus sacrifice jointly to seal their alliance with one another, just as Romulus and Tatius do in the passage adduced here. The sacrifice in armor as described in the Aeneid, therefore, does not function as an attribute peculiar to Aeneas: rather, this iconography is mandated by a particular politico-religious rite, the foedus and/or coniuratio .^[2]

The iconography of the armed sacrifice should be seen as broadly Italic, and Vergil's word pictures belong to his "Italicizing" strain. There was a freestanding sculpture group of the joint sacrifice by Romulus and Tatius that stood on the Sacra Via near the Temple of Jupiter Stator (itself reputedly founded by Romulus) toward the foot of the Capitoline Hill (Servius ad Aen. 8. 639–41); this or a similar group seems to have existed already in the Republican period, when it was the probable model for many coniuratio scenes: two warriors stick a pig with their swords as part of the religious ceremony by which military oaths of alliance were taken. Since this fetial rite included a sacrifice, not only of the pig but of other victims, it belongs to the category of sacrifices paludatus or "in armor."

Images of the rite first turn up on the gold staters of the Second Punic War (fig. 96); the type is used again in Rome in the later Republic (137 B.C.).^[3] In the private sphere it occurs on gems and glass pastes up into the later first century B.C. (fig. 95).^[4] We have a sure case of this rite being employed in the historical period of the late Republic, and being so depicted: the Italian forces of the Social War minted a type with a number of warriors on either side of the pig all sticking the unfortunate victim with their swords at once, signifying a pact of alliance between all the anti-Roman contingents.^[5]

The armed sacrifice and its depictions were therefore not avoided in Republican Rome and Italy. The BR panel showed the imperator Tiberius performing another recognizably fetial rite involving military oath taking, though not the pig sticking associated with the foedus or coniuratio ; his is the taking of vows to Jupiter at the outset of a military campaign (see below).

The Imperator

The imperator is in extremely high relief (pls. 7–9). His head has been torn away, but as Tiberius is recognizably the triumphator on the other side of the cup, he can be identified in this companion panel with certainty—on BR I also each panel centers on the same person, Augustus. Tiberius wears

full Roman dress uniform: heavy boots (caligae ), greaves, a fitted body cuirass bordered with short tongues (pteryges ) over a tunic protected by a skirt of leather strips, a paludamentum draped from the shoulders. He balances a lance on his left shoulder; his right hand, now missing, would have held out a patera toward the foculus^[6] to which he turns.

The figure type corresponds to that used for the cuirassed Octavian in the post-Actium CAESAR DIVI F. coin series: weight shift to the left, right foot trailing, lance on the left (weight-bearing) side, with a mantle draped from the shoulders to fall straight down behind the figure, leaving the right arm free for action—here a rhetorical gesture, on the cup a sacrificial act.^[7] The coin type is acknowledged to depend on an actual cuirass statue (or statue series) erected for Octavian's Actian triumph;^[8] it differs from the Primaporta Augustus (fig. 64), whose weight is on the right leg with an arm up on the "free" left side (and whose paludamentum is wrapped around the hips). The BR-Actian coin figure type surfaces again, for instance, for the (image of a) statue of Germanicus on a Caligulan dupondius commemorating his triumph of A.D. 17 (SIGNIS RECEPTIS DE VICTIS GERM),^[9] a statue erected in connection with his triumph or with the triumphal monuments posthumously decreed him.

Kleiner felt that the BR sacrifice takes place outside of Rome, because Tiberius wears both "defensive" armor (lorica ) and "offensive" armor (spear) and would not have worn this particular combination in Rome.^[10] No ancient evidence suggests that body armor was understood not to be a sign of aggressive power. In Roman art it seems to signify simply that someone is a man of war who can/did/will exert successful military force. Few cuirass statues survive from the capital to inform us of norms of accoutrement, but Augustus certainly placed cuirassed portrait statues in his Forum—spectacularly "offensive" was the armed Romulus carrying off the spolia opima, the focus of one of the two exedrae.^[11] A statue erected in the Forum at Praeneste of M. Anicius, for events of 216 B.C. (siege of Casilinum), was cuirassed and togate (Livy 23.19.18); in this context, clearly, a cuirass simply designates a warrior (in contrast to the civilian toga).^[12] Caesar must have been cuirassed in the portrait on the Rostra voted him in 46 B.C., showing him as a victorious siege breaker in a mural crown (Dio 44.4f.)—not a cuirass with defensive significance! There is rich documentation for cuirassed^[13] and/or spear-bearing statues in Rome,^[14] sometimes incorporated in battle groups.^[15]

Kleiner also wished the BR II sacrifice to take lace in the field, to supply a pendant to BR I:2 (Drusus panel). Although the two scenes are palpably analogous, this analogy is structured by visual markers and by

basic iconographic and familial links. The cuirassed Tiberius corresponds to his brother imperator not only in status (general under Augustus' auspices ) but also visually. Each, in paludamentum and smooth cuirass, stands at the left of his panel and essentially makes an offering toward center right—Drusus offers the fruits of his success to Augustus; Tiberius makes a sacrificial offering to Jupiter Capitolinus. Augustus on BR I, in turn, is himself invested with the aura of Capitoline Jove, as in Ovid's grand climax to the Metamorphoses: "pater est et rector uterque" (15.860).

The Capitolium and Augustan Architectural Representation

The cup shows a tetrastyle temple with no side colonnade on a high substructure of ashlar masonry (pl. 9, 23). A long garland is suspended from the corners of the architrave, its ends hanging down on either side of the temple facade. In the pediment is an eagle upon a globe, which identifies the structure as the Capitolium, for the eagle of Jupiter commanding the orbis terrarum could designate no other god than Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Note the great care that has gone into the symbolism of this scene, rendering this tiny detail so as to be legible. It is fitting that this aspect of Jupiter should be stressed on a cup depicting triumph and the prayers connected with it; the symbolism matches the allegory of BR I:1, where Augustus holds a globe in his own hand; and the eagle, Jove's agent, as instrument of domination, is a metaphor for Augustus in relation to Jove and Augustus' stepsons in relation to himself. Though this detail is tiny, I do not think I read too much into it: since the artist could have put a laurel wreath here, much easier to carve and with its own triumphal associations, the choice of this particular symbol must have been deliberate. On the monumental relief postulated as prototype, such a detail, suitably picked out in paint/metal, would have been very noticeable.

The BR Capitolium is a simplified image of the monument, evocative of such sensory data as its dominance of the Capitoline hill, its massive foundations, and its basic form, rather than an exact rendering of the temple architecture; the Capitolium itself had a hexastyle porch with three rows of columns and side colonnades. This kind of abbreviation of architectural detail is typical of small-scale architectural representations in Roman art, as a legion of frustrated scholars of the numismatic corpus of architectural images could testify.^[16]

Republican coin images of the Capitolium offer instructive parallels. M. Volteius' denarii of ca. 76 B.C. (fig. 97)^[17] use the same scheme of a

tetrastyle facade and a symbolic attribute of Jupiter in the tympanon, here the lightning bolt. On the coin the temple's identity is further confirmed by the careful rendering of the three doors of the triple cella. This is actually a good, careful image; the next Capitolium type, on denarii of Petillius Capitolinus (37 B.C.), gives more "real" detail (six columns on the facade, attempt to show actual pedimental and akroterial sculpture), but it is a much worse image of the temple, very crudely cut and esthetically unappealing.^[18] The BR artist has tried not only to show the temple but to convey its presence on the rocky eminence of the Capitoline hill; compare the denarii of C. Considius Nonianus of ca. 63/62 B.C. showing the Temple of Venus on the mountain of Eryx with its ring walls below (fig. 98).^[19]

I do not affirm that the BR representation draws directly on numismatic conventions. Rather, the comparison shows how late Republican and early imperial artists in Rome found similar solutions to the problem of creating an evocative, recognizable architectural image on a very small physical scale. This brings up a point that helps to date the BR cup scene and its prototype: that is, the small scale on which the Capitolium is represented on the cup; for the artist, quite easily, could have enlarged the temple facade to use it as an architectural backdrop for his human figures; this is in fact how architecture is characteristically treated in Roman historical relief from the Villa Medici reliefs (fig. 9) (Tiberian/Claudian) into late antiquity. The same tendency is observable on imperial coinage beginning under Caligula with the first type to show human action (emperor and entourage) in an event (sacrifice) in front of a temple, here shown as a facade behind the figures, reaching slightly higher than the participants' heads.^[20] The confident execution of this new numismatic convention indicates its derivation from monumental relief conventions, as illustrated by the late Augustan Sorrento base (fig. 15) and the Tiberian Villa Medici fragments (the Caligulan coin supports a pre-Claudian date for these).^[21] Together, the coin and the extant sculpture point to a late Tiberian or Caligulan start to this distinctive way of combining human figures with an architectural representation. This argument means that the BR scene cannot be later than the Augustan or early Tiberian period.

In fact, there is a direct parallel to the BR compositional scheme in the field of monumental relief, and this parallel helps to fix the BR composition firmly in the Augustan period. The Aeneas panel of the Ara Pacis (fig. 99)^[22] incorporates the Temple of the Dii Penates into the composition exactly the way the Capitolium is incorporated into the BR sacrifice: the

temple stands on a high stone outcrop at the far edge of the panel (here, left) to frame the action, so that the sacrificant faces toward the temple and its gods view his sacrifice to them; it is physically very small, set near the top of the relief field; it is shown in flattened three-quarter view, in contrast to the frontal representations of Republican and imperial coinage and of most imperial relief, and its side and front share a single horizontal ground line; its drafted ashlar masonry is carefully delineated on the side of the building, larger than to actual scale, with no side colonnade. The prevalence of this convention is apparent in the late Republican/Augustan "Grimani reliefs" from Praeneste, four panels that each show a particular animal curled up before a landscape outcrop; the barn in the sheep panel (fig. 101)^[23] is rendered as if it were a temple, along the lines described.^[24] Another Augustan "bucolic" relief employs the convention in a sacrificial context: the Munich "peasant panel" (fig. 100) shows an old man on his way to a sacrifice, with a chapel of Priapus on a crag at upper left, the statue of the god appearing in the doorway, much as the Dii Penates appear at their door in the Aeneas panel (the similarly rendered crags have already been remarked).^[25] The Praeneste relief seems to reflect an earlier stage in the motif or convention where the building shown is not quite as small in proportion to the human figures, so "elevated" or "far," and in which it is not yet used so explicitly as a framing element. To this earlier phase belongs the Bern Dionysiac cock-sacrifice relief,^[26] which locates a temple of our type in the background cityscape near the center, a temple of similar proportions to the Praeneste temple-barn; the convention survives in an early imperial decorative relief with dramatic masks from Pompeii.^[27] The Ara Pacis, or perhaps more correctly its atelier, may in turn have influenced bucolic/sacro-idyllic decorative relief manufacture, if it is right to date the Munich panel by the evolution of its rock forms from those of the Aeneas panel.^[28]

Such reliefs are echoed in the later first century B.C. and early first century A.D. on Dionysiac silver (amphora from Gaul,^[29] Casa del Menandro skyphos^[30] ) and on intaglios with idyllic and Bacchic subjects (usually worship).^[31] Quite significant are two superb gems in Vienna that narrate monstrous mythic slayings, datable to the later first century B.C. On one (fig. 103) a temple of Diana hovers at left over the dying Actaeon as he is torn by a hound; the scene is ironic, for such little temples otherwise indicate a deity being worshipped by the human in the foreground—here Actaeon himself is the sacrifice to the image in the doorway. The substitution of a temple for the "living" goddess recalls the Ara Pacis panel, where the Penates are anachronistically indicated as cult statues in a

temple.^[32] On a superb large sardonyx (fig. 102) (by Philon)^[33] Theseus escapes from the Labyrinth, its mouth a masonry arch in a construction of Cyclopean blocks in three-quarter view, upon a rocky cliff, he looks back to where the dead Minotaur sprawls half out of the dark gate, having crawled in his death throes. The proportions, perspectival structure, and detailing of masonry are those of my architectural motif, and the artist's transposition of these conventions to a mythic "Dark Tower" is proof of their strength. Complex allegories on luxury vessels in silver and precious stones also utilized the motif. On the early Julio-Claudian Berlin cameo vase (fig. 7) from a court workshop, such a temple at left frames the symbolic narratives;^[34] similarly, on an early imperial beaker from Berthouville an allegorical tableau about the Isthmian Games^[35] is framed by the actual Temple of Aphrodite atop Acrocorinth.^[36]

We have then an artistic convention of the late first century B.C./early first century A.D.: temples of those gods involved in the main event appear very small, in three-quarter view, elevated at one edge of the composition on a built or natural outcrop.^[37] The especial narrative locus seems to be sacrifice and/or worship, being performed or about to be performed. This convention might be thought to have originated in landscape painting, especially sacro-idyllic landscapes, which typically incorporate shrines; but in fact there are few parallels in the surviving corpus of wall painting and none in the related stucco compositions. Several panel paintings in the first century B.C. show flattened three-quarter-view temples or pedimented buildings to one side, in either a mythical narrative (e.g., Boscotrecase),^[38] a sacrificial tableau (e.g., Palatine house of Augustus),^[39] or an epiphany (e.g., Boscoreale Venus) (fig. 4).^[40] In these panels, however, the scale of the buildings relative to the human actors is more "correct"—they do not generally appose large foreground figures with small buildings, as does relief. The House of Augustus panel, significantly, is most similar; note an epigram by the contemporary Antipater of Thessalonika that describes a similar compositions.^[41]

The tendency has been to attribute the origins of reliefs like the Grimani reliefs, and the bucolic genre characteristics of the Ara Pacis end panels, for example, to a lost school of Hellenistic landscape painting centered in Alexandria. Conveniently, no examples of such painting survive to disprove this thesis. If the Republican bucolic and sacro-idyllic reliefs indeed derived from a Hellenistic painting genre, one would expect their Greek craftsmen to have produced such work also in the Hellenistic East; however, there is not in fact anything comparable from the Eastern Mediterranean.^[42]

It seems clear that by the Augustan period the framing temple on a crag is a convention of marble relief, not of any dominant mode of painting; its roots are in the architectural conventions of Republican sacro-idyllic decorative relief.^[43] From this genre (with many other aspects of "domestic" decoration) the motif was assumed on the Ara Pacis into the sphere of monumental commemorative relief.^[44] Indeed, it may have been its use on the Ara Pacis which transformed it into a consciously deployed framing device, set firmly to one side of a picture, rather than being located vaguely in the middle or slightly off center. Some such step was the necessary precondition for its use in narrative historical compositions like those of the BR cup and the Berlin vase. Already in the Augustan or Tiberian period, the Sorrento base (fig. 15)^[45] has elements of the "stageset" background of the type described above on the Caligulan coin. This use of architecture as a backdrop screen, familiar from Hellenistic relief, painting, and engraving (e.g., Praenestine cists), was at some point in the Tiberian period to become the dominant mode.^[46] The temple-on-a-crag motif had limited temporal parameters, from ca. 50 B.C. through the reign of Augustus (its Antonine revival does not concern us); its use in historical commemorative and the exact correspondences in scale and detailing between the BR sacrifice and the Ara Pacis Aeneas panel (fig. 99) are close enough to date the cup (prototype) very near the altar complex (13-9 B.C.). As I have already shown how BR I:2 is closely tied to the Ara Pacis in its content, iconography, compositions, and date, this further link between the Ara Pacis and the cups is not surprising. The artistic interdependence of the cup panels is highlighted by the fact that they have significant artistic parallels with the same major monument.

The Victim Group

The "Pausias motif" was the name ascribed to this particular victim group scheme (pls. 8–9) by O. Brendel in 1930, when he collected examples and pointed to its ultimate dependence on a prototype in (Greek) painting. Brendel suggested a bull sacrifice by the artist of the fourth century B.C. Pausias, which ended up in the porticoes of Pompey's theater. The example on the BR cup is the first known representation of the group, and it is also the best. Up until the Trajanic period, this victim-slaying composition was the only one used in official relief in the capital to document the moment in a sacrifice when a bull or ox was about to be killed; although alternative renderings were introduced into the Trajanic repertoire

(none of the many slayings on Trajan's Column use the motif), the "Pausias motif" continued to be employed through the Severan period.

The scheme is native to large-scale imperial commemorative relief: from the Valle Medici reliefs through the Severan arches in Rome and Leptis Magna, it appears in the relief friezes of state monuments either erected in the capital or put up elsewhere in the Empire by state commission and manifestly executed by, or under the direction of, artists from the court ateliers in Rome. The extant examples are a version in a newly reconstructed relief from Augusta Emerita/Merida,^[47] which is probably Augustan;^[48] an early Julio-Claudian relief fragment in Padua;^[49] the early Julio-Claudian Temple of Mars Ultor relief (fig. 9a);^[50] a Julio-Claudian relief at Rome (Antiquarium Forense);^[51] a passage relief on the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum (fig. 92);^[52] the Hadrianic Vota Publica relief in the Uffizi (fig. 94);^[53] a late Antonine or early Severan panel in the Louvre, which is generally miscalled a triumph;^[54] a relief of Antoninus Pius known from a 1644 drawing;^[55] an attic relief (triumph) of the Arch of Septimius Severus at Leptis Magna;^[56] the two mirror-image predellae of the passage reliefs of the Arch of the Argentarii erected for Septimius Severus in Rome;^[57] a third-century Roman relief in the Villa Medici.^[58] (A relief fragment from Antium is too battered to date; the sacrifice takes place before a temple facade.)^[59] As one would expect, the motif eventually is used in the state coinage; appearing first in Domitian's ludi saeculares series of A.D. 88 (fig. 90),^[60] it is consistently employed for vota publica emissions from Hadrian to Caracalla, making some last sporadic appearances under Gordian and Gallienus.^[61]

Like other topoi of state art this victim group turns up on humbler monuments commissioned by local magistrates, indeed already on the Augustan "Altar of Manlius,"^[62] dedicated by his clients to the deceased C. Manlius, censor perpetuus of Caere; at the same level of patronage is a Julio-Claudian limestone relief in the Palazzo Venezia.^[63] Compare the version in a set of limestone documentary reliefs at Narbo made for local notables (sacrifices and civic audiences),^[64] and an Algerian triumphal relief of the late third century A.D. from the Forum at Philippeville.^[65] It is garbled on a Trajanic altar to Neptune in Turin^[66] and on a marble relief in Padua.^[67] Last, in accord with its prominence on imperial monuments and coins it enters the vocabulary of stock scenes that decorate the so-called imperator, or generals', sarcophagi of the late second and early third centuries (fig. 93), where it is employed in the nuncupatio votorum scene that is the central motif in this group of sarcophagi (see below).

In its appearances in the state arts (relief and coinage), and in private

monuments like the sarcophagi, the "Pausias motif" is associated with vows and/or triumph. The use of this motif on the BR cup is one of the surest indicators that this cup panel (and by implication the other cup panels) depends directly on monumental relief prototypes, for the cup gives the fullest and best rendering of this victim group incorporated into a scene of sacrifice. Since, obviously, none of the later state monuments were inspired by a silver skyphos, they and the cup share separate and parallel descent from an Augustan prototype. And this prototypical Angustan relief must have adorned a monument of considerable esthetic impact commemorative significance, and public prominence for it to have exerted such a strong influence on imperial monumental art for at least two centuries.

Having sketched the history of the motif, it is time to turn to the group itself. In its fullest form, that on the BR cup, the group consists of a steer, two victimarii at its head, and a popa swinging a mallet down on its brow. One victimarius kneels in front of the bull, facing left, and twists its head down, grasping its left horn in his right hand and catching at its muzzle with his left; the other victimarius kneels on the far side of the bull, facing the first attendant, with a triangular knife in his right hand ready to stick the animal in the throat as soon as it has been stunned by the popa's axe or mallet. On the cup, this is a group full of emotional and visual tension. The bull wrestles back on its hind legs, its forelegs splayed and braced against the forces pulling its head forward and down; the popa is at the height of his swing, just about to bring his malleolus crashing down; the two victimarii, crouched and coiled in tense expectation, look up for and shy away from the path of the impending stroke. The composition is characterized by dynamic tension in three dimensions: the bull projects diagonally out into the foreground, the arc of its muscular neck framed by the triangle of human figures, while to the plunging arc and bowed masses of the bull and victimarii is opposed the swinging countercurve of the upraised mallet and its implied downward rush.

Structurally, the group of figures can be mapped onto a tilted set of axes intersecting at right angles. This is a typical structure in Hellenistic painting, mosaic, and narrative relief, as is the expenditure of formal concern on a group of servants or assistants busying themselves in the vicinity of more important persons. Compare, for instance, the foreground group of boat builders in the tableau of the sorrowing Auge on the Telephos frieze, another artful arrangement of servitors around a large, cleverly foreshortened object.^[68] (The fourth servant bending vaguely behind the BR bull belongs to such a Hellenistic group composition and was quickly

dropped as otiose in the Roman relief tradition.) Brendel was struck by the group's correspondence to Pliny's description of a fourth-century painting of an immolatio boum (bull sacrifice) in the Portico of Pompey, which had been transferred to Rome from Sicyon in 56 B.C. by M. Scaurus. Pliny (HN 35.126) focused his admiration on the way in which the artist, Pausias, had demonstrated his mastery of diagonal foreshortening in painting a very large bull that truly seemed enormous, plunging toward the spectator ("cum longitudinem bovis ostendi adversum eum pinxit, non traversum, et abunde intellegitur amplitudo"). Among contemporary wall paintings after Hellenistic compositions, compare the bull depicted in the version of the Punishment of Dirce from Pompeii VII 4,56^[69] with the transversum beast looming over the Paris census panel. The manipulation of relief planes in order to convey mass and motion in depth that we see in the best renderings of the BR victim group does look very painterly; Pliny's admiration was undoubtedly founded on that of many others ("Eam primis invenit [sc. Pausias] picturam, quem postea imitati sunt multi, aequavit nemo"); the painting itself hung in a prominent and well-frequented spot; and it came to Rome at about the right time (56 B.C.) to be picked up in relief by an Augustan artist employing a bit of erudite quotation and showing off his own skill at equaling the potential of painting working in a different medium. A firm connection between Pausias' immolatio boum and the BR victim group is unprovable, but one can correlate the late Republican and early imperial taste that admired compositions like Pausias' (and the work of other Greek painters in a similar vein) with contemporary relief sculpture like the BR cup.^[70]

As soon as, created, the BR group began to be quoted as the formula for victim sacrifice, and in the process of transmission it was often stylized, that is, radically flattened and abbreviated. The group may be switched from right to left; the knife bearer may be dropped; sometimes even the other victimarius is omitted, so that the bull seems to bow and stretch its neck of its own accord (auspicious, this); a figure may be interposed between the bull and the spectator (by moving the popa or inserting an onlooker), thus breaking up the line of the bull's back; and, as the scene gets pushed into massed crowd compositions, often only the very forepart of the animal is depicted, projecting from the crowd.^[71] In other words, the tension and visual qualities that recommended the original relief composition tend increasingly to be ignored in later and mechanical reuse of the scene. It is ironic that if indeed the BR group depends on Pausias' painting as described by Pliny, images of Pliny's own day would have shown the group in a form that would have made Pausias shudder.

This process of stylization has already set in on the Temple of Mars Ultor relief (fig. 9a), where the composition has already been abridged to be slotted into a more crowded scene. The hind part of the bull is hidden by a togate flute player; other togate figures behind fill the relief ground over its back; the two crouching victimarii are in strict profile to either side of the bull's head. The whole group has been stilled and flattened. If Brendel had known only this version, I doubt that he would have jumped to the analogy with Pausias, yet this is one of the fuller and esthetically more satisfying of the later renderings. In the group's next official appearance, Domitian's ludi saeculares type (fig. 90), showing the sacrifice of 1 June at the Capitolium (BMCRE II, 393, no. 438), it has been further reduced to a single victimarius grabbing at the bull's head, the popa swinging his axe, and the bull's head and forelegs. Moreover, the group has been shifted over to the far right of the scene and has been miniaturized in scale, in order to accommodate the rendering of the emperor and his entourage taking up the center and right of the field. The victim group is on the same reduced scale in relation to more "important" figures the next time it is used; on a passage relief on the Arch of Trajan at Beneventum (fig. 92) it is set at the far right of a long, crowded composition focused on the emperor sacrificing at center left. The original full version must still have been visible to be copied directly, however, because after a century or so of "pictographic" versions, a fuller rendering resurfaced in the Severan Arch of the Argentarii passage reliefs. Here the victim-slaying group was relegated to a separate, tiny predella -like panel under each of the two main passage reliefs, repeated in mirror image under much larger panels showing an imperial family altar group.

The BR victim group, then, stands at the head of a long sequence of monumental commemorative relief images. The conditions of its reuse prove that a common prototype included the whole of the BR panel composition. That is, the "Pausias motif" has not been borrowed on its own from the monumental corpus for use on the cup, but rather the whole sacrifice scene, here a unified composition, was copied from a similarly unified composition. The readiest corroboration for this supposition is supplied by a series of late imperial sarcophagi.

The six sarcophagi extant in this series span the Antonine age.^[72] They are now called Feldherr -, generals', or imperator sarcophagi (fig. 93). The front panel celebrates the life of the deceased in a strictly ordered triad of exemplary scenes, from left to right: the deceased as general receives the submission of beaten barbarians and makes a nuncupatio votorum before the Capitolium, and the deceased and his wife join hands in marriage (or per-

form a sacrifice together). As has long been recognized, the unvarying sequence of episodes does not describe an ideal life in strict chronological sequence, for to put marriage at the end of such a hypothetical cursus would be ridiculous. Instead, the scenes seem to be exemplary of cardinal virtues manifest in the subject's character and actions: clementia, pietas, and concordia, with military virtus evoked in the rendering of the first two.^[73]

All five fully preserved sarcophagi of this group employ for the central scene both "halves" of the BR panel: in the central scene, at left a paludatus imperator sacrifices at an altar, at right is the BR victim-slaying group, and the Capitolium up on its rock is fitted in as well, behind and above the victim-slaying group and the altar of sacrifice. Gabelmann has shown how the submission scenes in these and other sarcophagi depend on monumental state relief, just as P. G. Hamberg proved the dependence of the battle scenes that characterize another group of "biographical" sarcophagi on monumental prototypes;^[74] clearly, the nuncupatio composition entered the sarcophagus repertoire by the same route. What this motif depends on is the prototype of the BR cup panel, probably by way of a Trajanic or Antonine reuse of the whole scene in which the imperator was put into a typical late imperial version of field dress without cuirass and in which the Capitolium facade was slightly enlarged and its identifying pedimental decoration made into a corona triumphalis . These two details appear on all five of the sarcophagi of the group, even when they vary points such as the rendering of the central altar (solid vs. tripod).^[75]

Nuncupatio Votorum

Three main questions concern the sacrifice scene on BR II:1. The points previously at issue^[76] are the following: Is the sacrifice scene of BR I:1 part of the same triumphal ceremony as the procession on BR I:2, or is it a votive sacrifice separated in time from the triumphal procession? If so, where is the sacrifice to be understood as taking place, and with what official Roman ceremony should it be linked? And having settled these problems, how should one interpret the relationship between the two panels of this cup?

It is generally agreed that in fact the sacrifice scene is not supposed to be the sacrifice at the end of a triumphal procession, and this is easily proved. The triumphator did not change into armor at the end of the procession;^[77] his lictors did not change from tunic and toga into tunic and paludamentum, nor did they discard their laurel branches and insert axes

into their rod bundles. These are the points at which the triumph and sacrifice panels vary, for in the sacrifice the celebrant is in armor, the lictors are in military costume and unlaureled, and one has an axe bound into his rods.

Why, then, do others call the two scenes episodes from one triumph ceremony? Confusion seems to have arisen for two reasons. One is a deliberate effort by the artist to connect his two scenes visually and thematically in some way, while the other is accidental: for many modern viewers of the photographs of the cup, the triumph scene seems to catch the eye first, and as the victim at the head of the triumph procession appears to move around the cup and the lictor at far left of the sacrifice looks over his shoulder, one is led to consider the sacrifice as the culmination of the triumph. Thematically, the two scenes are indeed connected: the sacrifice takes place in front of the Capitolium in honor of Jupiter Capitolinus, while the bull at the head of the triumph procession is going to be sacrificed to the same deity and in the same place, for the Capitolium was where every triumph ended up. The artist took pains to highlight this link, for at the far right of each scene is the same visual detail: the fastigium (head ornament) on the triumphal victim is identical to the Capitolium pediment, for it is triangular, has the same relief ornament of an eagle on a globe, and is garlanded in the same manner. Clearly, the artist tried to lead his patron's eye around the cup from left to right—but where is the starting point?

The sacrifice at Rome of a bull to Jupiter Capitolinus by an imperator in armor can only be a votive sacrifice performed at the outset of a campaign. This is the nuncupatio votorum, the announcement to Jupiter of vows to perform further sacrifices and give thanks to the god at the successful completion of the campaign in question; these preliminary vows themselves were sealed with a bull sacrifice. When generals returned to Rome they did indeed sacrifice on the Capitoline to Jupiter, but they did so in the toga they donned to reenter the city. This thesis about the nuncupatio votorum needs to be argued at some length; although some cursorily identify the BR sacrifice as I do,^[78] others read the scene differently, as in the most recent literature in English on the BR cup.^[79]

Two aspects of the sacrifice scene have proved problematic. One is the question of location. The Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus at right seems meant to localize the scene as well as to identify the recipient of the sacrifice; many assume, however, that magistrates with a military command (imperium ) had always to wear the toga instead of military costume (togatus instead of paludatus ) while they were inside the city pomerium, so that

this general cannot actually be sacrificing at the Capitolium.^[80] A second problem was raised by Kleiner, who asserted that until ca. A.D. 200 representations of sacrifice in armor were avoided in Roman art; he knows no other pictorial or literary description until the Antonine period, excepting depictions of Aeneas and a single reference in the Aeneid .

As demonstrated above, it is not the case that sacrifices in armor were avoided, or rather, one should say the sacrifice paludatus, for this is the term used to designate appearance in military, as opposed to civilian, garb, and it means to wear tunic and paludamentum (military cloak) instead of tunic and toga. Whether or not a general puts on a cuirass under his splendid paludamentum purpurum is beside the point. We can see this in the canon of submissio scenes^[81] where barbarians are judged by an imperator: reliefs and sarcophagi use a paludatus imperator with or without cuirass interchangeably. As Festus says, under the term paludati, "in libris auguralibus significat, ut ait Veranius, armati, ornati. Omnia enim militaria ornamenta paludamenta dici." Once we look for the sacrifice paludatus and not just for the sacrifice "in armor," it is easier to find comparanda for the BR depiction; the record gives no grounds for asserting that representations of the paludatus sacrifice were avoided in the Republic or early Empire.

If we accept that topographic references are put into Roman historical relief to be just that, signs precisely indicating the scene of action, then J. Pollini's solution might tempt: the sacrifice takes place outside the pomerium, but immediately outside it at the foot of the Capitoline hill. Kleiner thought that perhaps the sacrifice was meant to be taking place in the field in northern Europe, as a pendant to the "hostage" scene of BR I:2, this, however, would entail rejecting everything that we think we can infer from topographic references in Roman art as indicators of the scene of an action.^[82]

The two problems are to be solved together by exploring the rite of nuncupatio votorum . What did that rite mean? It was part of the ancient and regular tradition that governed the actions of a high magistrate with imperium (a consul or a praetor) who was to set out from Rome to take up his provincial command and/or set out on campaign. For a consul, the regular sequence of actions was as follows.

At the beginning of his term of office the consul dons his toga praetexta at home ("apud penates suos"), then pays his respects at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus; then he sees and consults the Senate, then proclaims the Latin Festival and offers to Jupiter Latiaris at the Alban Mount. Auspicatus by this last sacrifice, he then goes again to the Capitol: "profectus in Capitolium ad vota nuncupanda paludatus inde cum lictoribus in

provinciam iret" ("He should proceed paludatus with his lictors to take up his command, having gone to the Capitol to proclaim his vota, " Livy 21.63.7ff.). For any commander setting out on campaign, the mos maiorum is to set out from the city "properly, vows proclaimed on the Capitol, with paludate lictors" ("secundum vota in Capitolio nuncupata, lictoribus paludatis," Livy 41.10.7). Praetors leave for their provinces in the same way: "They depart paludati with their vows announced" ("paludatique votis nuncupatis exeunt," Caes. BCiv.iv. 1.6). To omit this ritual was a serious matter that brought down the wrath of the Senate and could provoke near mutiny in an army (Livy 21.63.7ff. and 22.1.6, to 217 B.C.; 41.10.5–13, to 177 B.C.). To "abrogate" the ritual by sneaking back into the city improperly the night after, as Verres did, was matter for grave censure (Cic. Verr. 5.13.34); to molest, let alone curse, a general proceeding out of the city in this rite was a terrible affront and portent (i.e., Crassus' profectio in 55 B.C.: Plut. Crass. 16.3–6; Dio 34.39.6).

It was natural that this ceremony should be taken very seriously, for in the nuncupatio the imperator sacrificed "pro imperio suo communique re publica" (Cic. Verr. 5.13.34), seeking to put the ruler of the gods under an obligatio to grant success in the exercise of his imperium to himself and to the Roman state. Livy provides an exemplary text at 45.39.10ff., a speech in which Servilius moves to award a triumph to L. Aemilius Paullus in 167 B.C.: it is to the gods, not only to men, that a triumph is due, for your ancestors in every magna res started with the gods at the beginning and came back to them at the finis : "consul proficiscens praetorve paludatis lictoribus in provinciam et ad bellum vota in Capitolio nuncupat; victor perpetrato bello eodem in Capitolium triumphans ad eosdem deos, quibus vota nuncupavit, merita dona portans redit."

Whether or not this text is exemplary of habits of thought and behavior in 167 B.C., it is a clear and dogmatic explication of the theology of war and triumph as seen by a writer of the Augustan period who was read and respected by the educated elite of his own time and who was in close touch with the imperial household, not least as a trusted educator of its younger members (tutor to the young Claudius: Suet. Claud. 5.41). Indeed, this text of Livy's reads like a program for the cup BR II: as we shall see in the discussion of the triumph panel, it could stand as a literary outline for that particular scene as well.

As scholars have noted, the extant sources are unclear as to the exact moment when a general changed his toga for the paludamentum, his dress uniform.^[83] We do know that on a general's return he changed his armor for a toga before he entered the city boundary, and refusal to do so was seen

as a terrible moral affront to the SPQR at least to the end of the Julio-Claudian period. (Cf. Suet. Vit. 11: the sense of this episode is that Vitellius is about to treat Rome as if it were a captured city by entering with his forces under arms.) Texts on the civil conflicts of the Republic are full of references to the distaste, even terror, evoked by the presence or threatened presence of soldiery in arms within the city.

However, this has nothing to do with the ceremony of the nuncupatio votorum . First of all, to explain the revulsion at an armed adventus: a general came back to Rome and put down his imperium before entering the city, putting on the toga to mark his resumption of civilian status; to stay armed was thus an affront to law as well as to decency. The nuncupatio, on the other hand, was performed by one who had just been granted imperium while in Rome and was about to go off and exercise it—the armed dress that was the token of imperium was appropriate in this case. Second, the paludati in this ceremonial included only the general and his lictors; note that such a party, within the Forum Romanum, is depicted on the Anaglypha Traiani records-burning panel and the Arch of Constantine oratio relief (figs. 38, 36) (announcement of benefits). There is no indication in any source that the army was in the city with the general; in fact there is every indication to the contrary. The way that the texts speak of this ceremony is that the imperator performs this rite in Rome as the necessary prelude to leaving the city to go out and join his legions mustered somewhere else, often quite far away (e.g., Brundisium, the staging point for Eastern commands). Moreover, the Crassus episode proves that the general left alone, i.e. without any troops inside or near the pomerium: Crassus was totally defenseless before the angry crowd that menaced him, and had to call on the popular Pompey to escort him personally in order to calm the mob, while the tribunes who tried to lay hands on him were restrained only by other tribunes who were pro-Crassus. No one would have menaced Crassus in this way had his soldiers been present or nearby; they cannot even have been near the pomerium, or the tribune Ateius Capito would never have dared to stage his curse ceremony right at the city gate through which Crassus was to pass. This is one of the very occasions when we are told that the imperator joined his legions only at Brundisium, their embarkation point for the East.

The nuncupatio votorum, then, took place without any of the threatening aspects of an imperatorial adventus turned into a march into Rome. We are also told that a primary aspect of the proper profectio nuncupatis votis was that the general's lictors (and the general himself) had to be paludati . It is absurd to think that the little contingent trotted from the Capitolium to

the city gate and then stopped, pulled off their togas, and put on cloaks while the lictors took their rods apart to tie them back up again with axes inside, all this in the middle of the crowd drawn up to watch them go.^[84]

To recapitulate, the proper way for a consul or a praetor with proconsular imperium to leave Rome to take up an army command was to sacrifice on the Capitolium in the nuncupatio votorum and march straight out of the city paludatus, accompanied by lictors who were also paludati . I think there can be no question that the party were dressed in military costume at the nuncupatio itself. The BR cup panel must be a nuncupatio votorum because that is the only ceremony that could possibly account for the depiction of a group consisting of an armed imperator and lictores paludati, but no soldiers, sacrificing at the Capitolium. The cup in turn becomes our first pictorial document from the Republic and early Empire for this particular ceremony. The seeming lacuna in the pictorial record, which bothered Kleiner, is not in itself proof of any historical facts, especially given the relative paucity of surviving Roman historical narrative; with all our precise knowledge about the conduct of the censorial registration of military classes at the lustrum, we have only two surviving pictorial records,^[85] the Paris census panel (fig. 27) and a Praenestine cist lid!^[86]

It is very difficult to know in fact what subjects were or were not avoided in Republican historical relief or painting since so little is left.^[87] For the early Empire the situation is similar: the monuments that we have do not show any profectio or adventus of an emperor commanding an army. In the first century many emperors left the work of command to other generals whom it would be difficult to imagine them having celebrated in state relief—Caligula for Cassius Chaerea? Nero for Corbulo? Domitian for Agricola? Emperors who did take the field as imperator, like Caligula at the Rhine, Claudius in Britain, or Domitian in Dacia, have left behind nothing but a few debated fragments of the monuments that once celebrated their campaigns. The only generals who got any triumphal monuments in Rome after Augustus were those who belonged to the nucleus of the imperial family: Drusus, Tiberius, Gaius, and Lucius under Angustus; Germanicus and Drusus the Younger under Tiberius; Titus and Domitian under Vespasian, and so on. And of these monuments, again, even when we have other evidence for them, almost nothing exists, certainly not their sculptural decoration. It is no accident that, as Kleiner observed solely as an iconographic fact, the sacrifice "in armor" (paludatus ) becomes a more common subject under the later, soldier emperors.

In any case there are pictorial records for the nuncupatio besides the Augustan BR version. On the Cività Castellana base (figs. 28–30) a Re-

publican general (or Romulus or Aeneas) performs some nuncupatio ceremony; the Temple of Mars Ultor relief (fig. 9a) seems a Julio-Claudian depiction. The Louvre extispicium relief once ornamented the Forum of Trajan: the emperor lacks in the surviving fragments, but a paludatus lictor stands by as the bull's entrails are examined after the slaying, and Victory arrives to mark the "future" success read in the omens as a group of togati (including Hadrian?) gesture before the doors of the Capitolium.^[88] Also, two sacrifice scenes on the Column of Trajan show the imperator paludatus sacrificing by cities to mark individual stages of his Dacian campaign, making vota before attempting a particular military thrust.^[89] The rite turns up again^[90] on Tetrarchic monumental relief on the Arch of Galerius at Thessalonika, where prior to Galerius' Parthian campaign the cuirassed Galerius and Diocletian in a paludamentum sacrifice before Jupiter;^[91] in this later age of multiple imperial capitals, the facade behind probably represents Antioch.^[92] Finally, the private "generals'" sarcophagi discussed above deliberately echo the themes of monumental imperial art (fig. 93); here an imperator paludatus, sometimes with a spear, as on the BR cup, performs the nuncupatio votorum before the Capitolium as the victim is slain, in the BR slaying composition. The surviving pictorial evidence on the nuncupatio votorum thus ranges from the very beginning of the Empire through its last phase, with examples from both the monumental and private spheres. The relief depictions, finally, provide a context for certain isolated freestanding commemorative portraits. The so-called Mars of Todi, a votive portrait of ca. 400 B.C. of the Italian general Ahal Trutitis performing a libation barefoot, seems to be the earliest visual commemoration of the nuncupatio;^[93] perhaps even the Primaporta Augustus (fig. 64) announces the omens at the end of a nuncupatio, solemnly inaugurating all present and future campaigns under his perpetual auspices .