The ‘Ara Pacis Augustae’

Extract

Dr. Stefan Weinstock's article ‘Pax and the “Ara Pacis”’, contributed to Volume L, 1960, of this Journal (pp. 44–58), has performed two signal services to archaeology. In Part I of his paper the writer has given us a full and very valuable account of the cult of Peace in the Greek and Roman worlds from the fourth century B.C. to the Flavian age; and throughout the study as a whole he most properly insists that we possess no explicit evidence, such as that of an inscription, to prove that the well-known monument excavated in the Campus Martius is to be identified with the Ara Pacis of the texts. This is a point on which all previous students of the monument, myself included, have certainly laid far too little emphasis. It is, however, not perhaps quite fair to imply that the advocates of the equation have been victims of credulity (p. 44), even if they have in their writings taken that equation too much for granted, or to state that ‘the question has never been asked why it [the monument] should be the Ara Pacis’.