would have been most obvious to Augustus contemporaries, the rebuilding of
Rome. It is a paradigm of Augustan-style restoration, as defined earlier: the city was
not simply rebuilt in its prior form, but the urban plan was clarified and reorganized,
with new buildings being deliberately so arranged as to form coherent ensembles
with the older structures and with one another, thereby serving as focal points (Favro
1996, 2005).
Temples and other sacred building figured prominently in this endeavor. As men-
tioned before, Augustus himself lists many of the restored and new buildings in the
extensive summary of his achievements, the Res Gestae. The quantity alone was impres-
sive: “In my sixth consulship” [28 bc], he states, “I restored 82 temples of the gods
in the city on the authority of the senate, neglecting none that required restoration
at the time” (20.4). We can assume that the rebuilding took longer, even if these
temples were not massive stone buildings but mostly smaller shrines made of less
durable materials, such as wood and terracotta. And we should note that Augustus,
quite typically, shows himself as deferential to the senate, which had the traditional
say over the building of temples (see chapter 5). More importantly, what did it all
mean? It is not that the populace forthwith became more “religious” or “pious” –
we always have to be careful not to transpose later notions of religion back into Roman
times. The rebuilding, first and foremost, was a matter of signifying the return to
stability. Roman religion was not a religion of salvation, but it was intimately con-
nected with the civil order of the state. No question, as always in times of distress
- and the preceding decades of internecine war were horrendous – people would
wonder whether the gods had turned away from Rome or were punishing the city
for its misdeeds; such sentiments are readily found in Roman authors, including the
poet Horace. The basic phenomenon, however, is very simple: religion, in the end,
is an alternative and response to chaos, and chaos had ruled, reaching new extremes
in the civil war between Antony and Octavian. The gods were there to protect the
community, to safeguard its values, and to help instill proper civic behavior. When
their shrines fell apart it was a sign of the fraying of this fabric. Their restoration
signified the return of divinely ordered civic stability.
Part of that stability was that, like so many of its other functions, the aristo-
cracy’s competition in temple building came to an end. Munatius Plancus, who
was a former partisan of Antony’s but introduced the motion to name Octavian
“Augustus,” still had the privilege of being in charge of the restoration of one of
Rome’s oldest temples, that of Saturn in the Forum. That temple is a fine example
of the nexus between religion and the state, as it also housed the state treasury. New
temples, however, were built exclusively by the emperor or members of his family.
They were true, eye-catching cynosures as they were sheathed in gleaming, white
Luni marble (the same Carrara marble Michelangelo used later). First among them
was the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, dedicated in 28 bc. It was closely inte-
grated with Augustus’ house and thus prepared the way for that house to become
in part a shrine to Vesta after Augustus assumed the office of pontifex maximusin
12 bcand did not, of course, move to the pontiff ’s residence in the Forum. Another
standout was the temple of Mars in the new Forum of Augustus, which was dedi-
cated in 2 bcand commemorated the revenge taken both on Caesar’s murderers
74 Karl Galinsky