Augustus Rebuilds the Gods of Rome

Rome’s temples are ruins when Augustus inherits the city.

Not all of them, but many. The century of civil war — the Social War, the conflicts of Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, the triumvirate’s destruction of the Senate’s authority — has been hard on the infrastructure of Roman religion. Temples fall into disrepair when no one is responsible for them; the priestly colleges that should maintain them have spent the last decades managing political crises; the Vestal fire nearly went out during the worst years. The city that is supposed to be the gods’ chosen seat looks, by 30 BCE, like a city the gods have chosen to leave.

Augustus decides this is the organizing narrative of his political program.

Rome fell into chaos because it forgot the gods. The civil wars were divine punishment for impiety. The new age — his age — will be a religious renewal: the return to the ancestors’ practices, the rebuilding of the broken shrines, the revival of obsolete priesthoods, the restoration of the relationship between Rome and the divine order that makes Roman power legitimate.

He does not merely say this. He builds it.

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Eighty-two temples, rebuilt or restored in a single year.

The Res Gestae — the account of his own achievements that Augustus had inscribed on bronze tablets outside his mausoleum — records this number with the matter-of-fact tone of a man reporting construction figures. Eighty-two temples. He names the most important ones: the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, which Romulus originally built to house the spolia opima (the armor stripped from an enemy king killed in personal combat). The temple of Saturn. The temple of Castor and Pollux. The round temple of Vesta.

He also builds new temples: the temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill, adjacent to his own house, connected to it by a portico — the most explicit possible statement about the divine patron of the new age. He has been associating himself with Apollo since the battle of Actium, where the sun god’s shrine at Leucas overlooked the battle. Apollo is reason, light, arts, order: the Augustan values in divine form.

He rebuilds the temple of Divus Julius — the deified Julius Caesar, his adoptive father — in the Forum. He is the son of a god.

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The Arval Brothers are revived after centuries of neglect.

The Arval Brothers (Fratres Arvales) were a priestly college of twelve men who performed ancient agricultural rites in May, singing the Carmen Arvale — one of the oldest surviving Latin texts, in an archaic Latin so archaic that even 1st-century Romans couldn’t understand all of it. Augustus revives the college, joins it himself, and uses it as a model for the Augustan religious program: ancient, indigenous, pre-Greek, expressing the old Italian religion that predates the Olympian layer.

He revives the Sodales Titii — another archaic college. He brings back the Lupercal observances. He regularizes the Vestal selection procedures. He becomes Pontifex Maximus in 12 BCE, combining religious and political authority permanently.

Horace, writing in the Odes, gives the theological framework explicitly: Your fault, O Roman, is that your shrines have fallen, and that you rebuild them, long neglected by the ancestors. The civil wars are the punishment for neglect. The rebuilding is the cure.

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The question of belief is inescapable.

Did Augustus believe that Apollo cared which army won at Actium? Did he believe that the Vestal fire’s maintenance prevented Rome’s destruction? Did he believe the haruspices reading sheep livers were receiving genuine divine messages?

Suetonius notes that Augustus was afraid of thunder — he carried a sealskin to ward off lightning — and that he took dreams and omens seriously in ways that his educated peers often found excessive. He was also the man who used religious procedures as political instruments with a sophistication that only works if you understand them as human constructions.

The answer is probably not a simple yes or no. Augustus was a Roman of his time, which means he had a practical relationship with the divine: you perform the rites correctly, you maintain the relationships, you keep the transactions current. Whether the gods exist in some metaphysical sense independent of the rites is a question for philosophers. What he knew was that Roman power had been built by men who performed the rites, and that the century of civil war coincided with the neglect of the rites, and that the restoration of the rites coincided with stability.

This is Roman theology at its most characteristically Roman: empirical, transactional, and not particularly interested in the metaphysical question. The temples are rebuilt. The fires are lit. The gods are returned to their proper houses.

The golden age, the poets say, has come back.