The Ara Pacis: Peace as a Goddess

He arrives in Rome to a Senate vote.

Augustus — Princeps, First Citizen, the man who ended the civil wars and whose settlements in Gaul and Spain have pacified the western provinces — returns to the city in 13 BCE. The Senate has been watching his return for months. They vote: an altar. Not to Jupiter, not to Mars, not to the traditional gods who receive thanks for military victories. An altar to Pax Augusta — the Augustan Peace. Peace itself as a divine entity, the achievement of the age made into a goddess and given a monument.

The altar is dedicated on the Via Flaminia, the road that leads north from Rome, on the flat ground of the Campus Martius — the Field of Mars, the place where armies muster. Peace stands on the field of war. This is deliberate.

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The marble is everything.

The Ara Pacis — the Altar of Augustan Peace — is a marble precinct enclosing a central altar. The outer walls are decorated with four panels of mythological scenes and processional friezes. The mythological panels show: Aeneas sacrificing at the arrival in Latium, Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf, the goddess Roma seated on a pile of weapons, and — most celebrated — a central panel of a goddess with two children on her lap, surrounded by fertility.

The fertility panel shows a woman seated on a throne of vegetation: she holds two fat, naked babies, one on each knee. Around her, sheep and cattle graze. Her veil blows back. On either side, two female figures on wind and water carry her drapery. The earth blooms in every direction. The crops are at full growth. The animals are at peace.

This goddess has been called Tellus (Earth), Italia, Pax, Venus, Ceres — scholars still debate her identity. The debate may be wrong: she may not be one goddess but a divine synthesis, the living expression of what Augustan peace means for the natural world. Under Augustus, the fields grow. The animals are safe. The children are healthy. The goddess is all of the above.

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The processional friezes show the real world.

On the north and south outer walls, the marble shows a procession: Augustus, priests, magistrates, the imperial family, their children. The children are remarkable — the grandchildren, the heirs, the children of the allied kings of the East brought up at Augustus’s court. They are shown with their foreign ethnic dress, their small faces, their childish clutching at adult togas. The empire in miniature, conducted in a religious procession behind the figure of the Princeps.

Augustus himself is shown with his head veiled — the posture of the Roman sacrificing priest, the posture of the man mediating between the human community and the divine. He is not shown as a god. He is shown as the chief priest of a community that the gods favor. The theological statement is precise: Augustus does not claim to be divine. He claims to be the point of contact between the divine order and the human city.

The altar inside the precinct received annual sacrifices on January 30th, the anniversary of the Senate’s vote, performed by magistrates, priests, and the Vestal Virgins.

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The monument survived because it was buried.

Over centuries, the Tiber flooded repeatedly and the altar was covered in sediment. The high water table of the Campus Martius preserved the marble in near-perfect condition underground. When Renaissance builders began excavating for a new foundation, they found carved marble panels. The pieces were scattered across European collections for three centuries.

Mussolini reassembled them in 1938 for the bimillennial of Augustus’s birth, a political choice whose irony was lost on no one: the monument to peace, the man who claimed to have ended civil war, was reconstructed by the man who was about to start one.

The altar now stands in Richard Meier’s building on the Lungotevere, near where it was built. The procession still moves in marble: the children in their foreign dress, the priests with their veiled heads, the Vestals in their white, the whole civic-religious community of the Augustan settlement walking in permanent processional.

Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is this: the fertility goddess with her children, the filed grain, the grazing animals, the civic community processing behind its leader toward the altar. Peace is what Rome claimed to have made. The marble says it was worth claiming.