The Frontiers — Augustus: He Found Rome Brick and Left It Marble

One victory on this map does not look like a victory. For years the Parthians have held standards and prisoners from the defeats of Roman armies. Augustus recovers them without a battle. Dio writes that he received them as if he had defeated the Parthians in war, and boasted that he had recovered without a fight what had once been lost in battle (54.8). In the Res Gestae he puts it more strongly: he forced the Parthians to give up the spoils and standards of three Roman armies (29). The standards go to the temple of Mars the Avenger.

Peace gets its own altar. When Augustus returns from Spain and Gaul, the Senate decrees the altar of Pax Augusta on the Campus Martius and annual sacrifices by magistrates, priests and Vestal Virgins (Res Gestae 12).

And peace has its own counter. The gate of the temple of Janus stands open while the state is at war, and is closed only when victory has secured peace on land and sea. Guess how many times it was closed during Augustus’s life.

Augustus’s own summary sounds proud. Gaul, Spain and Germania “from Gades to the mouth of the Elbe” he brought to peace. The Alps, from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian Sea, he pacified, he claims, without an unjust war against any tribe. His fleet sailed east of the mouth of the Rhine as far as the lands of the Cimbri, where no Roman had gone before. He sent two armies to Ethiopia and Arabia: one reached the town of Nabata, the other Mariba (Res Gestae 26).

This is self-advertisement, and it should be read as such. Dio writes, for example, that in Spain the Cantabrians and Asturians rose in revolt once more, were defeated and enslaved (54.5). We do not have their account.

Calm on the frontiers, marble in the forum, the Parthians hand over the standards. Only in Augustus’s own house is no one sure of their place.