andria (27 March), Thapsus (6 April), Ilerda and Zela (2 August), Pharsalus (9
August) — not to mention Caesar’s birthday (12 July, first performed as a festival
in 42 b.c.e.).^92 For the first time the name of a human being is on the fasti,even if
the actual creation of a named festival in honor of a living human had to wait, as
we have seen, for the Augustalia of 19 b.c.e.^93 Other ideas were mooted in Caesar’s
lifetime that did not get carried through, but that anticipated the kind of honorific
acts that later fastiwould commemorate. Cicero tells us, for example, that Anto-
nius proposed that an entry should be made in the fastifor the Lupercalia, saying
that on this day the kingship was offered to Julius Caesar by M. Antonius the con-
sul, but that he had refused it.^94 Cicero himself, a great adept in the invention of
honors, proposed in April 43 b.c.e.that the name of D. Brutus should be written
in the fastibeside his birthday, since by chance this was the day that his victory at
Mutina on 21 April was announced at Rome: although Cicero does not mention
Caesar’s name in this passage, Caesar was clearly the prototype for the idea that D.
Brutus too should have “a perpetual mark in the fastiof his most welcome victory”
(notam... in fastis gratissimae uictoriae sempiternam).^95 The wish to avoid Caesar’s
example means that Cicero has to resort to the desperate expedient of pointing to
the legendary Acca Larentia as a precedent for honoring a living human being in
the fastiin this way: in making his proposal, he tells M. Brutus, “I followed the
precedent of our ancestors, who gave this honor to the woman Larentia, to whom
you pontificesmake your regular sacrifice at the altar in the Velabrum” (sum maio-
rum exemplum secutus, qui hunc honorem mulieri Larentiae tribuerunt, cui uos ponti-
fices ad aram in Velabro sacrificium facere soletis).^96 Cicero is perfectly well aware
that Caesar and D. Brutus have in fact no precedents for their presence on the fasti.
The revolutionary Julian calendar, with its new use in constructing the Prin-
cipate ’s part in Roman practice, played a profoundly important role in the inte-
gration of the regime into the changing religious and ideological patterns of post-
Republican life. In adding all these meanings to the dense semiotic displays of the
Roman year, the new fastiprogressively redefined the meaning of what living as a
Roman now meant.^97 The period of Augustus’s rule was when the greatest part of
this work on the fastiwas done; Rüpke well points out that much of the impetus
for addition and elaboration died away as the regime consolidated itself and the
reign of Augustus became itself a foundational period in its own right.^98 By the
time of Claudius the revolutionary momentum was more or less played out, even
though the calendars clearly continued in use. All of our surviving monumental
inscribed imperial fasticome from the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, although
additions are occasionally registered on them up to Claudius’s reign.^99
Augustus’s Calendrical Year. 189