tween the Capitoline cult [instituted at the foundation of the Republic] and the
institution of eponymity.”^49 This “structural association” is now severely weak-
ened, in a way that makes the modern name of Augustus’s list — the Capitoline
fasti— look profoundly ironic.
A related derogation from the prerogatives of the Capitoline cult comes with
the dedication of Mars Ultor in 2 b.c.e., and the invention of a new rite linked to
the new temple, calqued upon the tradition of the annual nail driven into the door
of Jupiter’s temple on the Capitoline by the consul.^50 Augustus laid down that the
censors should hammer a nail into the temple of Mars Ultor at the conclusion of
each five-year lustrum;since one of these censors would always be the emperor, the
new rite is in direct competition with the traditional Republican and Capitoline
association “of the driving of the nail, the dedication of a temple to the chief state
deity, and the beginning of a new form of government characterized by annual
magistrates.”^51 Instead of the temple of Jupiter, there is now the temple of
Augustus’s Mars; instead of a tradition of annually successive eponymity, there is
a new tradition offive-yearly cyclical repetitions of the same name, “Augustus.”^52
The censors have a role to play also in the Augustan consular fasti,and once
again an apparently minor annotation has far-reaching consequences for the time
frames being evoked, with the symbolically laden watershed of the expulsion of
the kings once again being transgressed.^53 The Republican Fasti Antiates already
record the censors, whose names occur at five-year intervals, although the pat-
terning is not perfect, for in the years covered by the Fasti Antiates there were
occasionally six or seven years between censors.^54 As may be seen in figure 9,
which reproduces the Fasti Antiates for the years 164 – 137 b.c.e., the censors punc-
tuate the regular run of consuls’ paired names, which are painted in black and lined
up in paired columns separated by a slight gap. The names of the two censors,
painted in bright red, start one or two letter spaces to the left of the normal con-
sular margin; their names run across the gap that separates the two consuls’ names,
and underneath the censors’ names, indented and likewise running across the gap,
is the phrase lustrum fecerunt(“performed the lustration”). The norm is the paired
black consular names, with the censors’ lustration in red providing a cyclical punc-
tuation, ideally on a five-year rhythm. Augustus’s inscribed fastido not have the
color distinction of the painted Fasti Antiates, but they have a related way of off-
setting the censors’ names from the consuls’, slightly indenting their names from
the normal left margin. The difference from the earlier fastiis that after the for-
mulaic abbreviated phrase l(ustrum) f(ecerunt)now comes a number, marking that
the censors “performed the lustration for the nth time”: the last lines offigures 7
- Years, Months, Days II: Grids of the Fasti