Ara Pacis - North Wall

North Wall

The north wall has about 46 extant or partially extant figures. The first two foreground figures are lictors, carrying fasces (bundles of rods symbolizing Roman authority). The next set of figures consists of priests from the college of the Septemviri epulones, so identified by an incense box they carry with special symbols. One member of this college is missing in a gap.

After them follows the collegium of the quindecimviri sacris faciundis, also identified by the incense box carried by a public slave among them. Although the name suggests this college has exactly fifteen members, the size of the college has grown to 23, including Augustus and Agrippa, who appear on the South Frieze. The other twenty-one members are present here. Two very badly damaged figures in the middle are split by a gap. From photos, the gap appears to affect a single figure, but as Koeppel, Conlin, and Stern have proven, in-site examination reveals that one is a foreground and the other a background figure.

The last portion of the North Frieze consists of members of the imperial family. Many scholars identify the veiled, leading figure as Julia, daughter of Augustus. Since Julia appears on the South Frieze, it is more likely that this figure is Octavia Minor. Other figures in the entourage might include Marcella (a daughter of Octavia), Iullus Antonius (a son of Mark Antony), and two boys and a girl of the imperial family. In 1894, and again in 1902 and 1903, Eugen Petersen suggested that Gaius and Lucius Caesar are the two boys dressed in "Trojan" costume for the equestrian event called the Troy Game, which was held in 13 BC for the dedication of the Theater of Marcellus. But as Charles Brian Rose has noted, "The variable value of the Eastern costume and the uneasy interaction of Trojan and Parthian iconography can make it difficult to determine whether one is viewing the founders of the Romans or their fiercest opponents." The youth wearing Hellenistic Greek clothing suited to a Hellenistic prince is sometimes identified as Gaius in the guise of a camillus, an adolescent attendant of the Flamen Dialis. This figure has also been interpreted as Ptolemy of Mauretania representing Africa, along with a German boy (Europe) and a Parthian prince (Asia).