Augustus – Making a Legacy of the Pax Deorum Aspects of a Pagan Attempt at Religious Revival Shortly Before the Birth of Christ

• Main Author: David P. Wick
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Athens Institute for Education and Research 2019-04-01
• Series: Athens Journal of History
• Online Access: https://www.athensjournals.gr/history/2019-5-2-2-Wick.pdf

My intent in this study – the finishing part of three – has been to examine the attempt by Augustus build a legacy (after the Mediterranean-wide efforts of the year 17 of the old era) that would graft in place the transformative events he had tried to define and publicize in the Ludi Saeculares, to re-create the family religious solidarity and wholeness of community he and his wife believed the Roman world needed to survive. The first part investigated the widespread feeling in the Mediterranean at the time of Actium that human culture had become so destructive and infected by guilt and ambition it might itself end in war or social disaster, the second, the "engineering" of the event itself. In this final portion of the study I look at choices Augustus and those around him made to craft a legacy of the themes of the Saeculares event itself – choices in temple construction, religious dedication (and choices of which themes to highlight around the Mediterranean), choices of iconography and religiously redefined politics. I intend to sketch the aftermath of the belief-experience built at the Saeculares (looking at how Augustus and his wife may have assessed the impact they made, rather than the way it is assessed as successful propaganda or narrative construction today) and in particular at its application to the army and the Roman idea of military power vs. peace. What Augustus had vowed he would do with his new power after the victory at Actium ended up looking very different by the year of the Saeculares, and was undermined (in our eyes) heavily by revolts in his family, fashionable artistic culture in Rome, even by his heir Tiberius, but largely, I would argue, because new choices Augustus (and his wife, his closest friends) made were genuine, but could not be engineered in the way he hoped. This (partial) failure was not the result only of a changing power-environment, or one well-crafted power narrative simply moving on from another.