and 8 show the numeral LV at the very end, noting that the censors for the year
had performed the census for the fifty-fifth time. Since the census and lustration
were inaugurated according to tradition by the sixth king, Servius Tullius, this
significant rhythmical pattern of the city’s life is now being marked as one that
goes back before the time of the Republic, its Capitoline cult, and its consuls.^55
These changes, however slight in appearance, have the cumulative effect of
reconfiguring the status of the eponymous consular list as the distinctive way of
charting the city’s time under the Republic. Of course, the nature of the office of
the consulship itself is being reconceived under the Principate, as the power of the
supreme magistracy is drained away into the hands of the emperor. The iconogra-
phy of Augustus’s consular fastirepresents this particular transformation in two
principal ways, reflecting a revolution in what the magistracy and its fastiwere for
and about.^56
The first innovation here concerns the conventions for recording the names of
the suffect consuls, those who came into office for any reason after the first two
consuls of the year, the ordinarii.^57 Under the Republic, suffect consuls were rare,
coming into office on the unusual occasions when one of the ordinariidied or was
deposed. In the Republican Fasti Antiates, the suffects’ names, like those of the
censors, represent a supplement to the fundamentally eponymous parade of con-
sular names, and the suffects’ names are accordingly marked in red in the same way
as the censors’.^58 In the year 154 b.c.e., for example, as may be seen in figure 9, the
name of the first consul is preceded by the red Greek letter theta, standing for the
first letter ofqavnato", thanatos,the Greek word for “death”; under his name,
indented by three letter spaces to the right, and painted in red, are the words
suffectus M.’ [Acili(us) G]labrio.^59 With the exception of the color distinction and
the use of theta, this is very much what one sees in the first four tablets of
Augustus’s Fasti Capitolini, which extend to the year 12 b.c.e.in the current state
of tablet IV. A suffect ’s name is underneath that of his predecessor in office,
indented by about three letter spaces, introduced by the phrase in eius locum factus
est(“in his place was elected”). If the suffect replaces the leading ordinariusof the
year, his indented name is underneath his predecessor’s on the left-hand side of the
column; if he replaces the other consul, then his indented name is underneath his
predecessor’s on the right-hand side. The overall effect, as in the Republican Fasti
Antiates, is “to mark the eponymous magistrates of each year and to indicate by a
hierarchical sequence of indentation the subordinate status of any substitute offi-
cials serving during the same year.”^60 [PacleFg iure 9 n ear here.]
Tablet V, however, beginning as we now have it in the year 1 c.e., and added at
Augustus’s Consular Years. 177