Commentary: Individual and Group Iconographies

To sum up to the action of the scene, the emperor Augustus, attended by Roma and the Genius of the Roman People, is enthroned to receive the attentions of the patron gods of Rome and of his own Julian clan, Venus and Mars. Venus brings Victoria to crown the globe in Augustus' hand, symbolizing that she grants and recognizes Augustus' rule over the world. She is attended by Amor with an alabastron bringing a libation to honor this festive occasion. Mars leads in a group of provincial/national personifications, who represent in their own persons lands ruled by Rome, to pay homage to the emperor upon his assumption of triumphant world rule.

Of the four scenes that decorate the BR cups, this one alone fits the norms that seem to govern the minor arts in the Greco-Roman period in general and the Augustan period in particular. That is, its style and composition are not only Greek but strongly classicizing—the preferred stylistic mode in the Augustan period—and the scene alludes to political reality by means of symbolic representation, not through literal-minded documentation of an actual historical event. This is also the only one of the four scenes that would really seem suitable to decorate the curving shell of a drinking vessel: the placement of figures within the composition sets up a structure that operates almost entirely in one sandwiched plane, instead of trying to give an illusion of "real space," which would be at odds with the formal unity between the object and its adornment (compare the scene on the other side of this cup). Greek art in all periods preferred tacit to open commemoration of historical reality in major as well as minor arts, particularly so in relief sculpture, which is why the genre of narrative historical relief was one of the few artistic genres left almost completely open to Roman innovation. In both the minor and the major arts, Roman patrons never openly shunned political depictions, but Roman taste, also, seems generally to have felt that considerations of decor in regard both to theme and to treatment made scenes like BR I:1 preferable in the sphere of the decorative arts to scenes like BR I:2 and BR II:1 and 2. Because of this, BR I:1 finds many more parallels in the Augustan minor arts for its general composition than do the other scenes, and its very mode of representation—political allegory—has many parallels in

such minor arts where the narrative mode of the other scenes finds few or none.

This division between the major and minor arts has another aspect, one that is very significant for our final conclusions as to the sources for the illustrations on these cups. A very strong case can be made for deriving the three other scenes (BR I:2 and BR II:1 and 2) from a prototype in the form of monumental relief or painting in the capital, and for looking at them as almost exact copies of that prototype, which can be dated with some certainty to Augustus' own lifetime (see especially chapters 2 and 3). Most scholars would not immediately refer BR I:1 to such a monumental prototype on the grounds of mode of presentation and content; the iconography of BR I:1 does not fit modern views as to what was "possible" in public imperial commissions under Augustus because it shows him in such close association with divinity. The modern rule is that Augustus followed late Republican norms in avoiding public depictions that set him too near the level of divinity, although this kind of artistic panegyric was not shunned in imperial commissions in the private, minor arts any more than it was shunned by his poets in their "unofficial" writings. For example, Augustus would no more have referred to himself as a praesens divus in a speech before the Senate than Horace would have expected to discomfort either his patron or his wider audience with such language in his poetry.^[1] On the other hand, because of their close thematic interdependence I would prefer to derive all four scenes from a single prototype assemblage. In fact, this kind of representation is not without parallels in late Republican or Augustan public commissions (see pp. 35f. and 56f. below). If we ultimately accept that the allegory BR I:1 was not invented for this cup but was copied from such a public monumental commission, a significant addition will have been made to the discussion of Augustus' image and policy.

Because the figures in this scene require so much discussion individually, the commentary in this chapter has been structured to give ease of reference at the cost of narrative continuity. The analyses that support my identifications follow in discrete sections: Roma and the Genius, Venus, Amor, and Mars. The conclusion addresses the triad Mars-Augustus-Venus to introduce chapter 2, devoted to Augustus.

Roma and the Genius of the Roman People

The fact that these two figures converse (note the Genius's turned head) next to one another indicates that they are to be understood as an inter-

dependent pair (see pls. 1–2). A pair that consists of a goddess in Amazon costume and a young, half-naked god can be identified in two ways: as Roma and the Genius or as Honos and Virtus. When Honos and Virtus first appear in monumental relief in the Flavian period (see fig. 107) they can still easily be confused with Roma and the Genius of the Roman People, or GPR.^[2] When M. Bieber in 1945 set about disentangling the two pairs in later imperial art,^[3] she never renamed the BR pair, but others imitated her revisionism with regard to the cup without using her actual criteria,^[4] and those who stuck by Roma and the GPR never sufficiently argued their case to quell dissent.^[5] It is worth setting the record straight.

First, the attributes of neither figure fit an Honos and Virtus identification. Honos always wears a laurel crown, as he embodies noble achievement; both Honos and the Genius can carry a cornucopia, but only the Genius carries, and always carries, a patera (Honos bears lance, scepter, or palm).^[6] As the BR figure is uncrowned and carries a patera, he must be the Genius of the Roman People. As for Roma and Virtus, both Amazon goddesses: in the entire Roman artistic corpus, only Roma appears with the weapon pile she has here, sitting or standing on or by it.^[7]

Second, a methodological point: one should identify a figure by looking at comparanda from the period in question and the periods preceding it, in this case at Republican and Augustan images, turning to comparanda of a much later date only as a last resort. Only in this way can one be reasonably sure of reading the ancient political message of a given piece as its intended audience was expected to read it, conditioned by its previous artistic experience. In the Republic the only image of Honos and Virtus as a pair is as busts on a Republican issue of 70 B.C. (RRC 403) (fig. 51).^[8] This coin is predated, however, by an extremely widely struck denarius series of ca. 89 B.C. issued by P. Cornelius Lentulus on which Roma and the Genius are paired as on the cup, facing front, while the Genius crowns Roma (CRR 86).^[9] Indeed, an issue of 75 B.C. (RRC 337) has the exact figure type used over fifty years later for the BR Roma, including the detail of the way the left hand bearing down on the sword hilt catches up Roma's tunic on her left thigh; the only difference is that a wolf's head takes the place of the weapon pile underfoot (fig. 2).^[10] There are, all through the late Republic, a very large number of Roma representations on gems (private images) and coins (official images), showing Roma with the Amazon costume or the weapon pile or both, as on the cup. Virtus and Honos appear singly only once more in the Republic—Virtus (RRC 401) in 71 B.C. in a different helmet from that of the double-bust issue, Honos (RRC 473. 1–2a–3) in 45 B.C. under special circumstances. Honos

in both Republican instances wears a laurel crown, as the embodiment of honor, and not the plain fillet or diadem worn always by the Genius (as on the cup) and, under the Genius's influence, by the Flavian Honos.^[11] Last, their busts figure individually in a series put out in 19/18 B.C. by a descendant of the moneyer of 71 B.C., for Augustus' recovery of the Parthian standards and return to Rome. Honos is inscribed; Virtus, in a helmet with side feathers, is identifiable as his pendant. This isolated Augustan visual reference has nothing to do with the BR Genius and Roma (whose helmet is different from that of Virtus); it is highly specific to the circumstances of Augustus' humiliation of Parthia,^[12] which is omitted in the BR allegory of world rule.

The Republican coin images of the GPR and of Roma are especially significant, as their iconography must have been assumed to be readily familiar to a Roman audience, promulgated officially and disseminated among the populace. They must ultimately depend on commemorative sculpture and paintings, of a kind now lost. In the Augustan period itself, an impeccable monumental parallel most certainly existed: an allegorical panel of the Ara Pacis (13-9 B.C.) showed the GPR in attendance on Roma (figs. 71, 73). Roma was depicted in a knee-length garment, seated on a weapon pile; the Genius, at her left, carried a cornucopia and turned his head toward her in converse as on the cup.^[13] (Compare the pediment of the Temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum Augustum, dedicated in 2 B.C., shown on the Valle Medici relief, where Roma sits on a weapon pile; fig. 9b).^[14] A late Republican tomb relief at Rome already showed a general crowned by the Genius and facing Roma (fig. 3)^[15] in a composition treating homage by an ethnic personification; as the Ara Pacis complex (fig. 71) incorporated also the "peoples of empire," there seems to be a consistent iconographic system in the second half of the first century B.C. that matches Roma and the Genius with the homage of ethnic personifications.

It is worth discussing the respective cults of Honos, Virtus, Roma, and the Genius a little further. The relationship of cult practice to the dissemination of iconography is in this case paradoxical. The joint cult of Honos and Virtus was initiated ca. 205, when M. Claudius Marcellus appended a temple of Virtus to an existing shrine to Honos at the Porta Capena that had been set up ca. 233 by Fabius Vernicosus Cunctator; Marcellus set up his shrine so that one would now have to pass through the precinct of Virtus to enter that of Honos, making a nice ethical/ideological point. The most famous aedes of Honos and Virtus was an architecturally note-

worthy temple built for Marius by a Roman architect ca. 103; it may have stood on the Capitoline or on the Sacra Via at the site of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina.^[16] The cult statues to which the 72 B.C. issue may refer are probably those of this temple. Later, following the precedent of Marcellus and Marius, Pompey put shrines to Honos and to Virtus by the Temple of Venus Victrix in his theater complex in the Campus Martius. This profusion of shrines might make one wonder why the divine pair Honos and Virtus are represented but once in the official arts in the Republican and early imperial period—after all, there was only one shrine to the Genius of the Roman People and no temple to Roma in Rome at all.

One should remember that all these shrines represent the expenditure of triumphal manubiae on the cult of divine abstractions appropriate to such an occasion, more a way for the victorious military patron to say something about his own achievements than the expression of reverence for a deity already receiving continuous worship. All, except Marius' shrine, were outside the pomerium, which may indicate that the deities concerned were not in general considered official members of the Roman pantheon. We do not know much about their scale save for Marius' temple. Perhaps Honos' and Virtus' late appearance on the coinage means that few, if any, of the pre-Marian shrines had cult statues that directly represented the deities of the precinct; in the late first century B.C. Augustus could dedicate a precinct to a similar abstraction (Pax) with no cult statue. In any case, Honos and Virtus do not become prominent in the arts until the Flavian period, and even then they occur in monumental relief principally in triumph depictions as attendants of the emperor (cf. fig. 107, Arch of Titus), now the only triumphator permitted; this is still ad hoc allegorical reference as in the Republic.^[17]

With Roma, the reverse occurs—there is representation in the arts but no cult in Rome. The cult of Dea Roma was a Greek invention, initiated and observed to express loyalty to the city-state that now dominated the Eastern Mediterranean; the Romans seem to have taken eagerly to this figure as an emblem when they wished to make a visual statement of political fact about their own urbs, once the Greeks had given them the artistic language in which to do so. As for the Genius of the Roman People: although the Cornelii Lentuli probably did not invent him, that gens did take a special interest in the deity; he appears on three different coin issues sponsored by members of the clan between 100 and 70 B.C. (e.g., fig. 44).^[18] The god had a shrine in the Forum by the end of the Republic (cf. Dio 47.2.3, 50.8.2), but we cannot be more precise; he ap-

pears on the Ara Pacis, thus in the period 13-9 B.C. (figs. 72–73), and shared the Augustan worship on the Capitol of Venus Victrix, to whom the cup links him.^[19] He turns up next in the civil war issues of A.D. 68. This Genius is the collective version of the private genius of each person and gens, the Roman religious counterpart to the Greek formulation of the Dea Roma.

To judge by the dates for Honos' shrine and the Republican coins, the Augustan emphasis on this divinity in the context of the Ara Pacis, and the fact that this deity is next taken up by coinage in the Neronian civil wars, it might be that official reference to the Genius was often ad hoc, like reference to Honos.^[20] That is, it could be a kind of exaltation of the collective and an affirmation of its integrity, not only in terms of imperial domain (see above, p. 20) but also in response to felt civil tension and discord, either in the event or in the aftermath. On the Ara Pacis, pax insofar as it refers to Rome in the Roma-GPR panel means cessation of civil war, a great gift from Augustus to the Romans; on Domitian's Cancelleria reliefs the pair Roma-Genius may have had similar connotations, apt for Flavian propaganda.

Venus with Victory and Amor

These identifications are easy. Of interest here are the specific figure types selected for use and their associations, and the meanings conveyed by the situation of these figures vis-à-vis the others in the composition.

Venus

This Venus (pls. 1, 2, 3) derives from a well-known Roman figure type, a Neo-Attic creation of the late Republic incorporating sculptural conventions of late fifth-century and early fourth-century Athenian "Rich Style."^[21] Its salient features are a chiton with slipped strap that clings to the torso in flattened ribbon folds and a mantle draped from the left shoulder so as to form a heavy roll of drapery at hip level that bares the upper curve of the right hip, while a single layer of cloth wraps the lower body down to or near the ankle. Venus can wear instead of a chiton a Roman woman's tunic, belted at the waist, with full loose sleeves reaching nearly to the elbow; this variant is a slightly later adaptation of the original type to a conception of Venus that is more decorous and matronly, for use in contexts where sensuality as a distinguishing feature of the goddess was to be elided. In an alternative and independent type, the goddess's torso is

naked, but she retains the distinctively draped mantle forming a heavy roll at the hips; Venus Genetrix/Victrix is so depicted on Caesarian coinage and at Boscoreale (see below).

In the Roman sphere, Venus mantled in this way is Venus Genetrix: that is, the avatar of Venus that was first made an object of cult by Julius Caesar. She was given exemplary form by the cult statue that Caesar commissioned from the prominent Neo-Attic sculptor Arkesilaos for his temple of Venus Genetrix (Pliny HN 35.155–56), centerpiece of his new Forum Julium (plan 122). This Venus was Venus Victrix as well, the patroness of Caesar's success;^[22] Romans were used to thinking of Venus as a goddess of victory, by virtue of her status as consort to Mars, and as the mythic cycle that credited the founding of Rome to Aeneas and his people became more widespread, she was seen as a goddess having a very personal and motherly interest in the fate of her son's people and thus was linked more closely in the Roman imagination to Mars, "father" to the Romans as parent of Romulus. By the late second century B.C. (we do not know how much earlier) the clan of the Julli claimed direct descent through the Alban kings from a son "Iulus" of Aeneas, and thus descent from Venus herself. Caesar went public, as it were, with this claim and established a cult that at once honored the goddess as mother to all the Roman people and pointedly singled out his own family status as favorite son, special mediator of the goddess's favors to the Roman people.

Venus Victrix had been worshipped as a giver of success to Rome in her battles with foreign enemies; she had already been claimed as a special patroness by successful Roman conquerors, such as Sulla, the Epaphroditos, and Pompey. When he "trumped" Pompey's theater-temple to Venus Victrix with his Forum, Caesar celebrated Venus as genetrix not only to claim divine descent as well as sponsorship: it gave him a way to laud his success in the sphere of civil war, success that could not be openly celebrated in Rome in the same way as could the slaughter of foreigners. Lucretius' prologue to his great De rerum natura would by this time have been firmly embedded in the consciousness of upper-class Romans: it invoked Venus, as the great genetrix of the natural world, to grant Romans the gift of peace, the cessation of the murderous civil wars already raging; her power to do so, like her power to give victory, was based on her special relation to Mars, for she could persuade him to stop slaughter. Caesar thus celebrated himself as a special agent of the goddess for the resolution of civil strife.

This aspect of the goddess as genetrix did not necessarily color patronage of her cult by emperors later in the first century A.D., but naturally it

was still very strong in the reign of Augustus, who embedded the cult firmly in the political theology by which he justified his own special status in the state, as Caesar's son and avenger on the one hand and as the man who had ended civil war on the other. This political theology pervades the visual arts and building programs of the Augustan period; its most famous paradigm, combining the two themes just described with the attribution to Venus Genetrix/Victrix of responsibility for successful conquest,^[23] is of course the Aeneid .

Caesar had already started building the Temple of Venus Genetrix; besides completing it in Caesar's name, how was Augustus to make plain his own sponsorship of Venus' cult? He did so by including her in the two greatest temple projects of his reign, in association with her divine consort Mars, whose worship in a "personalized" form Augustus elaborated along the lines of Caesar's veneration of Venus. Best known is the later of these two temple projects, the inclusion of Venus in the cult group inside and in the pedimental group outside of the Temple of Mars Ultor, dedicated in 2 B.C. as the centerpiece of Augustus' Forum, itself an obvious pendant to Caesar's Forum (fig. 122). Indeed, to get into Augustus' Forum one had to pass through the colonnades of Julius' Forum from the precinct of Venus Genetrix into the precinct of Mars Ultor (echoing the kind of deliberate accretion of temples that established a joint cult of Honos and Virtus, described above). Well in advance of the Temple of Mars Ultor, however, the Pantheon was consecrated in 25 B.C. and dedicated in 19 B.C. (plan 124). Its central triad consisted of Venus, the divus Julius Caesar, and Mars (Dio 53.27.2–3);^[24] statues of Augustus and its builder, Agrippa, in the foreporch framed the door, and to an approaching spectator would have framed the central statues seen through the door.^[25]

There is no firm evidence for Arkesilaos' statue or for the Venus in either the Pantheon or the Temple of Mars Ultor; we have only a later imperial relief (fig. 9b) depicting the pediment of the Temple of Mars, on which the goddess can be distinguished wearing mantle and chiton/tunic, with a baby Amor perched on her right shoulder, herself standing at the right hand of the central Mars.^[26] We also have from outside the capital reliefs from Ravenna (fig. 8)^[27] and from Algiers (fig. 6),^[28] the first showing Venus in a loose tunic with an Amor on her shoulder, the latter grouping Venus in a chiton with a bearded Mars.^[29] The Ravenna relief shows Livia as Venus Genetrix; contemporary and similar to it is a freestanding portrait of Antonia, wife of Drusus, from an imperial portrait group at Baia.^[30] These figure types are taken (correctly) as early Julio-Claudian

echoes of major sculpture groups in the capital, and subsidiary monuments and works of art with Venuses on them are grouped with one or the other in a long modern debate that has tried to reconstruct (a ) Arkesilaos' cult statue and (b ) the cult statue in the Temple of Mars Ultor.^[31]

The problem is that the reliefs differ from each other,^[32] as well as from the representations on the Cherchel cuirass statue (fig. 5)^[33] and the Boscoreale cup,^[34] to name the best comparanda —chiton/tunic, Amor on shoulder/off shoulder,^[35] these four variables occur in differing combinations.^[36] We have no idea whether Augustus would have preferred that the pediment group on his Mars temple differ from the cult group inside—which is to say that the diagnostic value of the known pediment group is ambiguous. Meanwhile the important cult triad in the Pantheon, like the BR Venus-Mars group, seldom or never enters the debate, even though its Venus-Mars-Divus Julius seems the most appropriate model for the Cherchel cuirass group, for example.^[37]

I do not propose to solve the problem of the sculptural prototypes for Julio-Claudian relief depictions of Venus. It suffices to say that the BR Venus, though Neo-Attic enough, does not match any of the previously posited replicas or depictions of important Venus statues, as no Amor sits on her shoulder (figs. 9b, 8; Temple of Mars Ultor, Ravenna),^[38] and she wears the slipped-strap chiton and not the sleeved tunic (fig. 8, Ravenna). Indeed, the BR Venus' pose and Amor's placement are determined by the action of the broader scene; one cannot tie her down to a single freestanding prototype. Also, she must be considered in relation to the Mars who is her counterpart here as elsewhere, and he is not the bearded middle-aged Mars Ultor of the Pantheon and the Forum Augustum temple.

Victoria

The figure type of this Victory follows a traditional Greek formula for depicting an alighting Nike, going back to fifth-century models like the Nike of Paionios at Olympia or the Nike in the hand of the Parthenon cult statue—striding stance, blown-back chiton, wings back and slightly spread rather than folded. The point to this Victoria is that she is about to be placed on top of the globe in Augustus' hand: the group about to be constituted is the Victory-on-a-globe group (fig. 20) that Octavian set up inside the Curia Julia (plan 122)^[39] to celebrate his victory at Actium over Antony and Cleopatra. The group proclaimed the world dominion of Rome guided by the senatorial order in that it was set up to preside over

the deliberations of the Roman Senate; in an equally pointed way, it proclaimed the world rule just won by the young Octavian, "son" of the divus Julius in whose name the Senate house had been rebuilt by Octavian. The Senate, then, was to guide Rome under the auspices of the Julian clan, a truth they were literally forced to enter and to behold (exiting the chamber, they were of course struck by the view of the facade of the temple of the divinized Caesar and below it the altar marking his funeral pyre).

The significance of this Victory group was that assigned to the battle of Actium itself: at once a smashing conquest of Rome's foreign foes and the deathblow to the cycle of civil wars begun again with Caesar's death. The group was not a new commission but an "Old Master" taken from Tarentum in South Italy; perhaps it was meant to be seen as an Italian Victory. Immediately famous, the group remained for centuries a stock figure symbolizing Roman world rule, losing special reference to Augustus. However, here at the beginning of the Principate, a Victory with palm and wreath on a globe would have meant the Actium group, with all its associations particular to Augustus' own career. This kind of playful and sophisticated visual reference, where a famous monument is depicted being "consummated," occurs elsewhere in Augustan official imagery (see the Conclusion).

Amor

The association of Amor with Venus is hardly surprising, nor (in Roman eyes) is his presence in a composition about rule and victory.^[40] He is after all Venus' divine offspring, and his presence emphasizes her role as genetrix and highlights Augustus' status as her mortal descendant. The divine son is here to bestow honor on his mortal cousin, following his mother's example: he is not offering to Augustus, but rather with his patera and perfume jug he is seen as about to pour out his own particular blessings, to grace the occasion with "the sweet smell of success" (pl. 17).^[41] Note that Amor is shown as particularly youthful; in Greek contexts and sometimes in Roman art he can as easily be shown as an adolescent or as a youth. Showing him as a baby in Venus' company often seems a way to emphasize Venus' nurturing aspect, thus the baby Amor on Venus' hip versus the stripling Amores visible in the distance, in the Caesarian fresco at Boscoreale (fig. 4);^[42] thus too the Hellenistic type of a little Eros at the goddess's shoulder (cf. figs. 10, 28–29) was extremely popular in early Julio-Claudian representations.^[43]

Erotes/Amores hovering about a scene with various sorts of vessels are

an old stock motif of Hellenistic boudoir scenes; the motif has been transposed here to a more serious context.^[44] Erotes of similar type (especially the little round wings) in procession, one with an alabastron and an oinochoe, appear on a central Italian terracotta of the third century B.C.^[45] (In actuality, little boys miming Eros/Amor attended late Hellenistic and late Republican nobility, including Livia and Octavian at their wedding: Dio 44, 48.3.)^[46] Bustling Amores had entered the world of political art, via their association with weddings, in the panegyric painting of Hellenistic monarchs like Alexander (the Wedding of Alexander and Roxanne: Lucian Herod. 5). Amor's shell dish and alabastron were originally connected with Venus as patroness of love and marriage. Amor pouring into a phiale from an alabastron was a common earring pendant into the late Hellenistic period, especially in Italy,^[47] and one workshop specialized in Amorini with shell dishes;^[48] a fine example occurs on an early Hellenistic bracelet at Alexandria.^[49] Amor's role on the cup is paralleled in a late Republican version from Rome of a Hellenistic royal marriage painting, the Aldobrandini Wedding:^[50] a nymph pours perfume from an alabastron into a shell dish for a mortal bride sitting with Venus (fig. 13). Compare the Amor who attends the coupling of Mars and Venus with an alabastron on a Julio-Claudian skyphos pair from the Casa del Menandro.^[51]

In later Latin usage concha, "shell," was current to designate vessels used to pour and receive water.^[52] Already in the Hellenistic period in Italy the nymphs of the goddess of love were associated with shell dishes^[53] and alabastra on a class of bath paterae^[54] from central Italy;^[55] the bowls were set into a stylized shell hinge, and a nymph, sometimes holding an alabastron, functioned as handle.^[56] The bath of Venus or Diana might be attended by an Amor laving water from a shell dish in the late Hellenistic and early imperial compositions that must have inspired these scenes on Hadrianic sarcophagi^[57] and Flavian grave altars;^[58] compare lamps of the first century B.C.-first century A.D. where the goddess crouches alone using a shell dish.^[59] In the Hellenistic and imperial periods, numerous terracotta and bronze figurines from Italy and the Mediterranean document Amorini with shell dishes and/or alabastra.^[60] Wherever there is a broader figural context, these occur in association with Aphrodite's bath or toilette.^[61]

The BR Amor derives figurally and conceptually from this mixed Hellenistic and Republican background, with its strongly Italian character. In this iconographic tradition Aphrodite's son and nymphs might very well mingle, in court art and celebration, with favored rulers and aristocrats;^[62] such banquets and marriage paintings are quoted on the grave altar of a

Flavian private citizen, where Amor with shell and alabastron alights on the banquet couch of Q. Socconius Felix and his wife, a unique introjection in an ordinary funerary banquet scene.^[63] Significant on the BR cup is the shift of such Amor imagery into the sphere of outright political allegory dealing explicitly with conquest, hegemony, and politico-religious ritual. This is paralleled elsewhere in Augustan art, implicitly on the Ara Pacis (whose twin Amotes on Venus' lap (fig. 74) are analogues to Romulus and Remus and the children in the procession friezes; see p. 106 below). If the Trajanic reconstruction of Venus' temple in the Forum Julium copied the Caesarian/Augustan decoration, then the Augustan temple had a frieze of Amores readying Venus' bath and playing with the weapons of Mars.^[64] More explicitly, Amor attended Augustus in public monuments in Rome, as in the original of the Primaporta Augustus (fig. 64) made for Livia's suburban villa,^[65] as a Roman general who, like the BR Augustus, wears thoroughly mortal (albeit splendid) costume.^[66]

The Aquileia dish (fig. 17) shows that the "politicization" of Amor imagery is rooted in the propaganda war between Caesar's heirs; here a heroic Antony sacrifices to Demeter, assisted by two Amores and Psyche (symbolizing his three children).^[67] A parallel case is that of Amor with a large alabastron, who figures in rare love scenes, as on the Casa del Menandro skyphos; the only parallel in stone is an early Julio-Claudian monumental panel from Rome (fig. 12) reused on the Arcus Novus.^[68] Here Venus, holding (probably) a Victory, inscribes Augustus' clipeus virtutis, flanked by nymphs who personify the oikoumene, as a tiny Amor flies down with an alabastron toward his mother; the iconography of the shield and pillar group at censer (Augustus' clipeus in the Curia) (cf. fig. 11) dates it to the reign of Tiberius or Augustus.^[69] The thematic narrative (Venus ceremonially creates a symbol of rule for the emperor) is very similar to BR I:1, and the deployment of such an Amor in such a political allegory demonstrably links the BR composition to monumental relief. One can safely say that the "domestic" Amor motif was transformed under Augustus into a part of public commemorative vocabulary. Monumentalization of "domestic" imagery and theme is prominent in Augustan public monuments,^[70] and it is always interesting to light on another example.

A point on style can be made here. Save for the massed group of personifications at far right, which itself forms a single "character," this Amor is the only participant forced into overlap with another figure; this is handled by setting him against the neutral ground of the drapery of an

adult figure behind, whose lower body shades off into low relief so that Amor can be modeled as fully as possible. This is reminiscent of the handling of similar child figures in the friezes of the Ara Pacis (cf. figs. 76, 78). Whenever possible, the children in these friezes are made to stand between the adults around them, slotting them into the interstices. But when for lack of space or other (iconographic) imperatives they have to be shown against the lower bodies of the adults, they are similarly silhouetted against a drapery plane parallel to the relief ground, and the relative heights of the planes of relief are juggled in the same way.^[71]

Venus and Emperor Compositions

To sum up, Venus as victrix and genetrix brings Victory / the Augustan Victory to her mortal son, followed by her divine son. Augustus' peaceful world rule—note that he wears the toga, not armor—is attended by love and fertility. Venus' role in the scene is parallel and pendant to that of Mars on the other side of Augustus.^[72]

To the architectural complexes described above as comparanda should be added the Ara Pacis, with its pendant panels containing Roma, the Genius, a syncretistic Venus, and Mars;^[73] besides these, some other examples from the major and minor arts are worth citing. The two finest Augustan cuirass statues, the Primaporta Augustus (fig. 64) and the Cherchel statue (fig. 5) (marble copies after bronze originals) associate images of conquest with Amor (Primaporta statue support) or Venus with Amor (Cherchel cuirass): this would seem then to have been one of the standard motifs available in the creation of such imperator portraits. The Primaporta statue's bronze prototype would have had the same little Amor, though not needing support; this dolphin rider complements the cuirass imagery to refer to victory by sea as well as by land and to refer also to Augustus' particular great sea victory, the battle of Actium.^[74]

The Cherchel statue was not until lately so widely known, though its cuirass decoration is as singular and as finely executed as that of the Primaporta statue; the fact that the head is missing may have something to do with its past omission from the handbook canon. As on the Primaporta cuirass, the figure decoration is in three zones (fig. 5): (above) Mars Ultor in the heavens gazes upward; (middle) from our left, Amor as a youth holds his bow, Venus carrying the weapons of Mars gazes at the half-nude Caesar, who faces her with a Victory in his hand, as a full-size Victory moves to set a corona civica on his head; (below) two Tritons, one fish-

bodied with an akrostolion (part of a ship's prow), the other with fish tail turned to acanthus scrolls and holding a cornucopia.^[75] The program in sum praises the vengeance vowed by Augustus to Mars Ultor on behalf of his murdered father, Julius, depicted here as divus, by means of the sea victory at Actium, which has had the effect of establishing civil peace by land and sea (fish Triton:vegetal Triton) under the aegis of Venus, presiding over the laying aside of arms.

This Augustan work can only have portrayed Augustus himself.^[76] Particular points of comparison with the BR scene are, of course, the stressed line of descent from Venus by way of Caesar (himself shown as savior of Roman lives through military triumph; note, for example, the Victory with corona civica ); the fusion of peace and triumph imagery, focused about the person of Venus Genetrix/Victrix; and the depiction of the Julio-Claudian protagonist with Victory in his hand. (A fine glass signet in Florence of ca. 20 B.C. on which Augustus in a cuirass, laurel-crowned, holds in his left hand a trophy-bearing Victory, a portrait probably derived from a statue, should be mentioned in this context.)^[77] The central composition on the Cherchel cuirass (Victory, standing imperial honorand, Venus) was current in Augustus' reign; witness its adaptation for an imperial cult altar at Tarentum where the honorand is the togate Augustus (fig. 31).^[78] A Republican relief from Selinus made for a Roman imperator offers now a prototype (fig. 10) where the general is crowned by Victory, though here Venus has yet to turn to her protégé.^[79]

One should address S. Weinstock's interpretation of the BR group of Venus-Victory-Augustus. Discussing the ways in which Caesar linked Venus and Victory, he postulated three sculptural prototypes created for Caesar, which were fused to constitute the BR group. "It is certain that there was a statue of Venus holding Victoria," "almost certain" that there was "one of Caesar" holding Victoria, "and in addition a group of Venus handing Victoria to Caesar."^[80] This last hypothesis is based on the BR cup itself: "It makes better sense if it depends on a Caesarian composition; Venus handing over victory to Caesar is natural, to Augustus only if it follows Caesarian precedent." Weinstock's first hypothesis makes sense, particularly in conjunction with some of Caesar's coinage; there is, however, no Caesarian parallel whatsoever for his second hypothesis; and as for his third, it should be dismissed as illogical. The BR scene certainly evokes Caesarian ideology, specifically descent from the goddess, but we do not need to invent a pre-Augustan statue group to explain this—on these lines of reasoning the Aeneid 's picture of the relationship of Venus,

Caesar, Augustus, and their triumphs would have to be based on a Caesarian poem.

Weinstock did not know the Cherchel statue. Here indeed is Caesar with Victory in his hand (fig. 5), but this is the figure type for divus Julius and was created under the sponsorship of Augustus.^[81] The BR composition is a purely Augustan creation; moreover, a cameo fragment shows that it was not created solely for this cup (which could hardly have gone on to inspire other works of art) but existed either as a template in the imperial ateliers or as a monumental prototype somewhere on public view. This early Julio-Claudian cameo (fig. 18) preserves the central part. of a scene where a mural-crowned goddess draped like Venus moves to hand Victory to an enthroned emperor (mostly broken away).^[82] The goddess wears the crown of Oikoumene but is depicted after the exact figure type of the BR Venus, performing the same action toward the same protagonist, a seated emperor.

The BR composition belongs to monumental relief, not freestanding statuary, though it is Augustan statuary types that are slotted into the composition. The key is the Victory, who herself actively reaches to the emperor. Augustus' artists borrowed a stock composition from public, honorific relief, not from the minor arts; they adapted a classic theme of Athenian stelai of the fourth century B.C. (figs. 24–25), where Athena holds out a little Victory, who in turn reaches to crown or garland a mortal honorand (in fourth-century Athens shown much smaller than the state goddess), who himself raises a hand (in prayer).^[83]

Héron de Villefosse, the last scholar who examined the cups closely at firsthand, thought that he recognized a portrait of Livia in the BR Venus.^[84] This cannot be accepted without a chance to reexamine the cup, a chance now lost (this figure has been destroyed since 1899). The small mouth and delicate rounded chin could as easily result from an abstract classicizing standard of beauty, while the hint of Livia's distinctive aquiline profile visible in the existing plates could be a trick of light, a dent in the cup, or whatever. If this is taken as a portrait of Livia in the guise of Venus, it would not be very surprising, for there are several parallels for such representations in Augustus' own lifetime. A bronze plaque in Bonn from the Rhine (fig. 114), a piece of mass-produced (matrix-stamped) accoutrement for the Rhine armies, shows Livia/Venus with Drusus and Tiberius; the two princes are depicted as boys reaching to Venus' shoulder and are dressed as young imperatores . On a turquoise emblema in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (fig. 113) Livia/Venus Genetrix exchanges a doting

glance with the young general Tiberius, his head against her shoulder. The fine court gem and the crude bronze plaque from the government managed military workshops draw on the same composition, to the same ends of dynastic propaganda (see chapter 8, p. 173); hence the Livia/Venus on the later Ravenna relief (fig. 8), which honored Claudius' father, Drusus, her son. (Compare the Belvedere altar,^[85] one of the altars set up by each vicus in Rome for imperially sponsored cult under Augustus, where Julia may appear as Venus with her sons Gaius and Lucius.) Livia on the BR cup would function within this one scene as consort, but since the other side of the cup celebrates her son Drusus, and the companion cup, BR II, celebrates Tiberius, her conflation with Venus Genetrix as mother to the imperial line would parallel the three examples cited above.

Such compositions inject specific imperial personalities into a more general political theology where Venus Genetrix/Victrix attends the generation of future Julio-Claudian conquerors and rulers, as on an Augustan cameo vase in Berlin that must have been commissioned for the birth of some member of the dynasty:^[86] here, Venus sits with a Gorgoneion shield by a trophy with a captive at her feet, watching the lustration of a new-born princeling by a trio of birth goddesses (fig. 7). This vase with its "messianic" imagery should be compared to the fresco cycle of Room H in the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, where Venus Genetrix/Victrix (fig. 4) is the centerpiece of a room whose long sides adapt a Hellenistic palace painting cycle acclaiming the birth of a royal child in connection with the conquest of Asia. The ensemble, from the early 40s, is tied to Caesarian political ideology by its celebration of Venus Genetrix and its allusions to Eastern campaigns (cf. Caesar's planned Parthian campaign). The hopeful celebration of the Julio-Claudian boy-prince who will grow up to conquer resurfaces as one of the subthemes of the Grande Camée de France (boy imperator with his parents before Tiberius and Livia, with a Persian captive huddled by Livia's throne).^[87]

Mars

Although the BR Mars (pl. 18) cannot be matched to Augustan monuments and works of art in the same specific way as the depiction of Venus, it does conform to a Julio-Claudian figure type extant both in freestanding sculpture and in relief. An early imperial torso in Copenhagen (fig. 14)^[88] and the sacrificing officer/Romulus on a base from Falerii (Cività Castellana) of the late first century B.C. (figs. 29–30)^[89] have the same cuirass

and display the same stance, the swinging stride with its marked displacement of the hips. The Copenhagen torso reproduces somewhat the disposition of the drapery folds about Mars' thighs; thus the sculptural quality and sophistication of the BR figure are no accident but reflect direct familiarity with a known monumental type, some Neo-Attic statue produced in the same artistic climate as the BR Venus type. The more complete (if esthetically inferior) Cività Castellana figure gives the BR pose in full, down to the positioning of the lance; it is at the same level of artistic dependence as the BR figure, deriving equally but separately from the freestanding Roman prototype and adapted to relief.

This prototype figure evidently combined a strong evocation of Late Classical style—Greek—with specific Italic overtones in the god's attributes: the BR and Cività Castellana figures together show that the winged helmet was part of the prototype (the Copenhagen torso is headless), and this winged helmet is an Italian type. A fourth-century Oscan helmet demonstrates that it was worn in Italy in the period of the early Republic; it crops up thereafter in southern Italian vases, on a Sullan metope fragment from Orvinio, on the Mars of the Altar of the Twelve Gods at Pompeii, and is used, significantly, for some images of Roma on Republican coinage.^[90] If we grant that the prototype figure was a Mars commissioned in the late Republic, we then have an interesting example of the deliberate superimposition of Roman religious iconography on Greek forms.^[91]

There were two Mars types in Augustan cult, the youthful god, unbearded as here, and the mature bearded type that was to be used in 2 B.C. for the cult statue of Mars Ultor in Augustus' Forum, as also for Mars on the Ara Pacis and on the Sorrento base (holding a Parthian [?] standard) (fig. 15b).^[92] If the BR Mars depended on a Mars Ultor type established for ad hoc use before the definitive cult statue, it might still have overtones of Mars Ultor—but if this is so, then the artist has taken no pains to make it very clear. Augustus' Mars Ultor was associated with one particular foreign conquest above all; besides being linked to vengeance against Caesar's assassins, he was associated with the "submission" of Parthia, as the return of Crassus' standards in 19 B.C. was styled by Augustan propaganda, and thus with the redress of wrongs done to Rome by outsiders. The BR Mars certainly is connected with the domination of foreign peoples, but there is no personification answering to Parthia in the BR group. The BR Mars certainly embodies the military might that holds the Empire together and assures Roman superiority, but he is a guardian and not a conqueror in action, in keeping with the mood of the central group;

for the group of personifications represents peoples already firmly incorporated in the Empire, rather than captive peoples who have just been beaten.

As with Venus, strong personal and dynastic associations are implicit in Mars' presence. As armed guardian and special patron of the people and their urbs, he balances Roma and the Genius on the other side of the scene; the traditional gods and symbols of the state thus attend on Augustus' personal supremacy. (Note that the same four divinities figure in the Ara Pacis panels; see fig. 71.) The armed Mars and Roma form a protective bulwark within which the riches of the Roman people can overflow as the unarmed goddess of love consecrates the rule of the togate emperor. In the structure of the composition, it is Venus to whom Mars answers, not just as her mythical consort and fellow parent to Rome, but literally as her mirror image: his placement, motion, and pose mirror hers, as the inward-leaning diagonal of his lance meets the rising diagonal set up by the lines of Venus' figure, to frame and exalt the pyramidal figure elevated between them. A similar framing composition occurs on the Augustan (or early Tiberian) Sorrento base (fig. 15b): Romulus sits before Augustus' Palatine house facade under Augustus' corona civica, facing (three-quarters right) his parent Mars, framed in the diagonal of the standard elevated by Mars to touch the crown; the Venus to be restored opposite will have lifted something also to make a symmetrical group.^[93] The most striking compositional aspect of the central BR triad is that Mars and Venus are both clearly subordinate in height to Augustus on his throne. Augustus would be no taller standing on their level, yet as he is enthroned, his head is over both of theirs, irresistibly evoking the image of Jupiter, who sits enthroned above the other gods. The next chapter must account for this image.