Description (pls. 1–3, 13)

At center the emperor Augustus (pl. 19) sits on a throne on top of a low dais, a footstool under his feet. The emperor is turned at a slight three-quarter angle to his right, but the dais and stool project straight out from the relief ground. The front faces of these two supporting "boxes" are engraved with a rectangle to give the effect of a raised border. The throne is of no known standard or "real" type: it has the basic structure of a sella curulis, with a typical heavily fringed seat cover, but each bowed leg consists of a heavy arc of green wood, trimmed to leave visible branch scars.

Augustus, bareheaded, wears tunic, toga, and patrician boots (note the markings on his front right foot). His left arm is bent at a right angle close to his side; in his hand is a short cylindrical object, a scroll (rotulus ). He extends his slightly flexed right arm, a globe in his outstretched hand, toward the goddess approaching from his right. Augustus sits at ease, his legs slightly spread and his left foot pulled back. The part of his toga that would normally be pulled around and thrown over the left shoulder has

been allowed to fall across his lap in a heavy swag of drapery, its end coiled back over the left thigh to fall between the legs; the arrangement exposes his upper torso.

The emperor is flanked at either side by a group of standing figures; at the head of each group a divinity moves directly toward him. An outer figure at each end (Roma, Gaul) is in very high relief, so that when the scene is viewed head-on (pl. 2) these form a prominent static frame for the action around Augustus in the center. From our left to right, the subsidiary figures are Roma and the Genius of the Roman People and Venus attended by a young Amor on the left of Augustus, and Mars and a group of some seven provincial/national personifications on the right. The figures will be described in this order (on the personifications, see chapter 3).

Roma faces center, turned at a three-quarter angle, her weight on her outer (right) leg, balanced in this position by a now missing lance clasped in her raised right hand. Her left foot is raised and set on a small weapon pile; her left arm is held down along the body, the hand clasping the hilt of a sword hanging from a baldric slung from the right shoulder, its sheath thrust up and behind by the weight of her arm. The elements of the weapon pile are hard to distinguish because the cup is damaged at this point (note how Roma's left calf is flattened and torn); the piece underfoot is perhaps a helmet, that leaning behind the foot a shield or a body cuirass. The goddess is clad Amazon-style: high boots, a tunic belted well over the knee and girded again over the overfold, leaving the right breast bare. A mantle is bunched on her left shoulder and wound from behind about the left forearm; in clenching her sword hilt against her inner thigh, she has caught up the tunic to bare most of the upper left leg. Besides lance (missing) and sword, her armament includes a triple-crested helmet.

Roma's companion is the Genius of the Roman People. His stance is fully frontal, but his head is turned to Roma in profile view. His lower body is rendered in very low relief to accommodate the Amor before his legs; his upper body and his attributes are in much higher relief. The god is seminude: a mantle bunched on his left shoulder is brought around to cross his lower body, forming a skirt stretched in place from his left wrist, over which its other end hangs. His coiffure is singular: long and very curly hair, bound by a fillet and knotted behind the head in a chignon, with heavy bunches of loose curls next to the face. The god extends both arms down and outward: the right hand proffers a patera (libation dish) with a raised central boss, the left hand steadies the end of a long, slender cornucopia cradled against the left shoulder. From the top of this cornucopia spill bunches of fruit, a small pointed object (a wheat spike?) jutting

from the top; a shallow groove run its length, and a raised band binds the horn just under its lip.

Immediately below and before the Genius is a very young Amor in high relief. The winged and naked godling follows his mother Venus toward Augustus, his stance echoing hers: swaying forward with the weight on the left leg, the right leg and foot trailing behind, an object proffered before the figure-in this case, a shell dish held up in the left hand. Since Amor dangles an alabastron in his right hand, the arm relaxed at his side, the dish will hold perfume as a liquid gift, already poured out. Note the fine modeling of his features (though the head is slightly worn) and of the thick curls clustered around his head below the smooth hair cap; the feathers of his short wing(s) are engraved with equal care, and even the flutes of the tiny shell dish are clearly delineated (det., pl. 19).

Last, Venus heads this flanking group. She moves toward Augustus with a little winged Victory in her outstretched hands, in order to place the Victory on top of the globe that the emperor extends in her direction; her fingertips already almost touch the globe. The goddess steps forward with her weight on the left leg, her right leg trailing; her legs are in three-quarter view, her upper body twisted away in profile view. She wears a long, filmy chiton, girt at the waist, that clings to her torso in flattened ribbon folds and falls down over the tops of her smooth slippers; the right shoulder strap has slipped over the top of her shoulder and down onto the upper arm, although both breasts are still covered. Over this chiton she wears a voluminous mantle, which is bunched on the left shoulder and looped about her body in a great roll of drapery falling to the outer hip and caught up again over her (hidden) left forearm to fall in a long swag almost to her feet. From the loop of rolled drapery, the mantle depends in a skirt about her legs, leaving the hem of her chiton visible. Venus' long hair is caught back in a chignon under a high, peaked crown; below this crown her hair is pulled back off her brow in thick, wavy masses (see the central view of the cup face).

The little Victoria in Venus' hands should be thought of as animate in its own right, not just an inanimate object like the Genius's cornucopia or Amor's vessels. She floats on tiptoe, the right leg back, as if just alighting in Venus' hands in answer to a summons; her wings are still up and slightly spread, and her long, belted chiton is blown back in a mannered curve off the lower (right) leg. She extends a tiny laurel wreath on her own scale toward Augustus, a completely detached little "doughnut" of silver; she carries a long palm branch over her left shoulder (engraved on the relief ground).

On the other side of Augustus, to his left, a young and beardless Mars moves forward in a pose mirroring that of Venus, but with more rapid step, as indicated by the swirling of his tunic and mantle. His head is turned back, thus affording a full-face view, toward the group of personifications who follow him as their leader. "After" Venus has done with crowning Augustus' globe, he will usher them in front of the emperor. The god is fully armed, with lance, sword, helmet, cuirass, and greaves; wear and damage make it unclear whether he is barefoot or shod, but the raised edge of a greave seems to be visible over his left ankle. The Corinthian helmet has a high, flared crest, flanked by attached wings (see the central view of the cup face). The cuirass is in one piece, smooth and molded to the body, reaching low on the hips, with a raised lower edge (late Republican/early imperial type). Mars wears a Roman general's cloak, the paludamentum ; fastened at his throat with a round-headed pin, it blows back over his shoulders on either side to frame his torso in its billowing folds. A thin, knee-length tunic, worn under the cuirass, swirls about his thighs. Both arms are bent and pulled back: a lance is loosely couched in the right hand, while the left hand rests on the hilt of a sword, which hangs in its sheath from a belt slung from the right shoulder.

The personifications following Mars (fig. 18) are massed in a kind of tilted half-cylinder arranged in a front and a back rank of three figures each; behind the back rank at the far right of the scene there seems to be a seventh figure, in very low relief—one can see the curling hair on the back of its head, and the outline of collar and shoulder. The three in front, and the near figure of the back row, are visible to the extent that their distinguishing attributes can be read; the other two figures in the back row are indicated by heads in very low relief—the face of the middle figure is hidden—and have no visible distinguishing attributes. All seven figures are female; the outermost figure of the first row wears male dress, but its coiffure (long hair bound in a chignon) shows it to be female like the rest, who wear feminine attire. The seven are shorter than Mars almost by a head, indicating subordinate status; the two outer figures of the front row, who are most visible, clearly show deference by a slight bowing of their heads, and the open-palmed gesture of the outermost seems to indicate some acquiescent response to Mars' attention. While this group does, then, show attention and deference to Mars, none display any of the canonic signs of grief (i.e., humiliation), such as standing chin in hand. The group is "about to" move after the god, for they stand quietly while he is already in motion. Chapter 3 treats the individual attributes of the group:

Africa (front row, back figure, elephant cap), Asia (?) (center), Gaul (front row, outermost figure, in high relies, and Spain (back row, outermost).