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.