Ara Pacis - The Altar

The Altar

The Ara Pacis stood within an enclosure elaborately and finely sculpted entirely in gleaming white marble, depicting scenes of traditional Roman piety, in which the Emperor and his family were portrayed in the act of offering sacrifices to the gods. Various figures bring forth cattle to be sacrificed. Some have their togas drawn over their heads, like a hood; this signifies that they are acting in their official capacity as priests. Others wear laurel crowns, traditional symbols of victory. Men, women, and children all approach the gods. Themes of civil peace are linked to themes of the dynastic Julio-Claudian claims, and the importance of religion as a civilizing force, in rites of which some were consciously being revived for the occasion, according to Augustus himself.

The Altar is universally recognized as a masterpiece, the most famous surviving example of Augustan sculpture; the life-sized figures in the procession are not idealized types, as are typically found in Greek sculpture, but rather portraits of individuals, some of them recognizable today.

G. Karl Galinsky pointed out that the sculpture of the Ara Pacis is primarily symbolic rather than decorative, and that its iconography has several levels of significance. Studies of the Ara Pacis and similar public Roman monuments traditionally address the potent political symbolism of their decorative programs, that emphasizes dynastic and other imperial policies. The Ara Pacis is seen to embody without conscious effort the deep-rooted ideological connections among cosmic sovereignty, military force and fertility that were first outlined by Georges Dumézil, connections which are attested in early Roman culture and more broadly in the substructure of Indo-European culture at large. It has been suggested by Peter Holliday that the Altar's imagery of the Golden Age, usually discussed as mere poetic allusion, actually appealed to a significant component of the Roman populace. The program of the Ara Pacis addressed this group's very real fears of cyclical history, and promised that the rule of Augustus would avert the cataclysmic destruction of the world predicted by contemporary models of historical thought.