The figured upper panels on the enclosure’s outer face are the most interesting part of the monument. On the north and south faces a procession moves westward. It is imagined as turning the corner of the enclosure and entering the west doorway to sacrifice at the altar. The heads on the north side were heavily restored in the Renaissance, but the fasces, the laurel crowns, the senatorial shoes and rings, the cult objects carried make it clear that the procession is of magistrates and priests. The south side, which faced the city, must have been considered the most important half, and here, indeed, many historical figures of Augustus’ family and court have been identified. It is noteworthy how the division of the friezes into dynastic and non-dynastic halves parallels the arrangement of the Hall of Fame in Augustus’ Forum.
The face in the upper right corner of the fragmentary left panel in [Fig. 6.10], though cracked badly across the eye (for the whole weight of the Palazzo Fiano rested upon it for centuries), is recognizable from other portraits, from what remains of the profile, and from the treatment of the hair, as Augustus himself. The figures in the spiked caps to the far right are flamines, priests of Jupiter and Mars. The figure second to the left of the first flamen, all by himself in the background, is a spectator, the very type of the old Republican Roman. Lictors with the fasces precede the figure to the spectator’s left of Augustus. This figure, then, must be the consul of the year, with the other consul on the other side of the Emperor.
But of which year? The consuls of the year 13 B.C., when the building of the altar was officially decreed, were Varus (who fell in the Teutoberg forest twenty-two years later) and Tiberius. Those of the year 9 B.C., when the altar was consecrated, were Drusus and Quinctius Crispinus. Now the slab pictured in [Fig. 6.11] contains on its left edge, on either side of the veiled background figure with her finger on her lips (who is Augustus’ sister Octavia) a family group. This has been almost certainly identified as Drusus (in uniform, with short tunic), and his wife, Antonia Minor, holding their son Germanicus by the hand. Drusus can hardly be in two places at once. Therefore the consuls on the earlier slab are those of 13 B.C., and the whole procession is imagined as that of the altar’s constitutio, when the marble version was not yet finished, not yet, perhaps, even begun. This hypothesis explains the treatment of the enclosure’s inner face, where the recessed panels represent a temporary wooden fence. The swags in marble relief, of barley, grapes, olives, figs, apples, pears, plums, cherries, pine cones, nuts, oak leaves, ivy, laurel, and poppy—all the riches of a fertile Italy at peace—were originally painted, like Della Robbia terracottas, against a blue background. They must have been intended to render the natural festoons swinging in the open air against the blue sky. The paterae, or sacrificial bowls, in two alternating patterns of gilded marble, which hang above the swags, must be imagined as suspended from an upper crossbar.
The persons in [Fig. 6.12] are of the greatest historical interest. The tall man with a fold of his toga over his head, whose careworn face and pronounced Roman nose make a recognizable portrait, can be identified from other likenesses as Augustus’ lieutenant Agrippa, acting as Pontifex Maximus. The child clinging to his toga is then one of his sons, Gaius or Lucius. Gaius, the elder, born in 20 B.C., would have been, in 13, of the age represented here; a modern symbol of Aeneas’ son Ascanius, or Romulus, the son of Mars. The woman in the background with her hand on his head would then be Gaius’ mother Julia, Augustus’ daughter, whom he was later to banish for her immoral conduct. The older woman in the foreground, the most carefully wrought female figure in either frieze, would then be Julia’s stepmother, the redoubtable Empress Livia.
Fig. 6.11 Rome, Altar of Peace, frieze with family group of Julio-Claudians. (MPI)
Fig. 6.12 Rome, Altar of Peace, frieze probably portraying Agrippa, Julia, and Livia. (MPI)
The family group to the right of Drusus in [Fig. 6.11] is also pregnant with history. The shapely woman with her hand on the small boy’s shoulder is identified as Antonia Major, Mark Antony’s daughter by Octavia. The small boy grasping a fold of his uncle Drusus’ cloak grew up to father the Emperor Nero. The girl to the spectator’s right of the small boy is his sister Domitia; her father, Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, later commander of the Roman army in Germany, has his hand raised over her head. The elderly background figure with the kindly, lined face is perhaps Maecenas, Augustus’ secretary of state for propaganda, the patron of Vergil and Horace.
The whole atmosphere of the procession is very Italian, quite intimate and informal, without central focus. Its members face in all directions, and are so incorrigibly chatty that Octavia must command silence, finger to lips. Here, in these realistic groups, are the living likenesses of some of the men and women whose ashes later lay in Augustus’ mausoleum, of some of the men and women who made a Golden Age. Here are the pages of history made flesh, and here are all the basic ideas of the Augustan program: the pretense of the revived Republic, in the consuls and lictors; the emphasis on religion, in the flamines and the veiled Pontifex; the dynastic hopes, in little Gaius; the subvention of literature, in Maecenas.