Augustus and the Problem of the Pax Deorum – A Case Study in Social & Religious Motives at the Birth of the Roman Empire

Abstract

The Emperor Augustus would believe at the end of his life that he had rekindled at least a functioning image of the archaic Roman religious spirit in the major arteries of his empire and at least in his city. His contemporaries seem to have agreed that they could see this happening, even when they acknowledged it as an act of propaganda in some sort. Modern scholars have been more inclined to see through it. This study approaches the question of the ‘new era’ after Actium from both the viewpoints of religious anxiety in original sources and also what roles or avenues of approach the newly-named Augustus might have had to work with, politically and in popular religion or moral reform. His earliest role, as ‘avenger of Caesar’, would have been entirely destructive and preserved the violence of feeling that rose in the Civil Wars. Role-playing Alexander, the ‘Hercules’ of popular myth, even ultimately a devotion to Apollo, all seemed inadequate. Instead, his road led him to create the groundwork for an attempt at a culture-wide ‘religious revival’, a construct we do not normally think native to the classical world, and which the sequel to this study hopes to pursue as it unfolded in actual practice.