gencies offighting guerrilla warfare in Spain: if you are fighting a war in southern
Italy you can have the consuls come into office in March in time for the campaign-
ing season, but if one of the consuls is going to fight in Spain virtually every year
then he and any men he is taking with him will need to start walking in January.^36
The parade of paired consular names on the Republican fastiis most imposing,
then, but the very fact that each pair of names does not necessarily correspond to
a calendar year shows that the names originally represent “dates” as we under-
stand them only in a limited sense. In time, however, the consular names did come
to stand for “dates” in a more rigorous sense; in part this is a development from the
synchronization of the consular and calendrical year from 153 b.c.e.on, but it is no
accident that this process is most distinctly visible when the power of the office as
an officeis compromised, under the pressure of Augustus’s Principate. We now
turn to the fate of the fastiunder Augustus, to see how his and his father’s revolu-
tion produced this transformation, along with many others of equal, or greater,
significance.^37
AUGUSTUS’S CONSULAR YEARS
The fullest and most imposing surviving consular fastiare the so-called Fasti
Capitolini, erected by Augustus in some kind of proximity to his father’s temple at
the east end of the Forum Romanum.^38 Together with Augustus’s so-called Fasti
Triumphales, they take up an entire wall of a room in the Palazzo dei Conservatori
on the Capitoline, and they are beautifully on display in Degrassi (1947) in photo-
graphic and transcribed form.^39 Figure 6 shows a photograph of the section cover-
ing the years 260 – 154 b.c.e.;^40 figure 7 is Degrassi’s drawing of one portion of this
section, covering the years 173 – 154 b.c.e., and figure 8 is Degrassi’s transcription
in modern conventions of that same portion of text. Each line gives the names of
the two consuls of the year, or of the tribuni militumduring the years in the fifth
and fourth centuries b.c.e.when they were the eponymous magistrates. If one of
the consuls died or vacated office, then underneath his name is written the name of
his successor, the so-called suffect consul, indented by about three letter spaces:
this may be seen in the penultimate lines offigures 7 and 8, where the name of
M.’ Acilius Glabrio, suffect consul for 154 b.c.e., is indented beneath the name of
his predecessor, L. Postumius Albinus, who died in office.^41 At increasingly regu-
lar intervals, ideally every five years, come the names of the two censors, indented
by about one letter space, as in the last lines offigures 7 and 8, where one may see
the names of the censors for 154 b.c.e.The fastimark turning points of note in the
- Years, Months, Days II: Grids of the Fasti