huts for the shade, the supporting tree trunks worthy substitutes for the marble columns
of Augustan temple architecture. The Greek drinking vessels (cyathi, crater) mirror
the refinement of a Hellenistic symposium. The cultivated festival community take
their inspiration from the lifespans of Nestor and the Cumaean Sibyl, whose num-
ber of years they are vowing to match in cups of wine. And in their intoxicated state,
the revelers do not burst into merry rustic chants. Instead, they imitate fashionable
songs and dances from the Augustan stage of the day. On their way home late at
night, the drunken crowd becomes itself an entertaining spectacle in the city streets.
How can the topographical relationship between city center and periphery, so strongly
accentuated by Ovid, be gauged in religio-historical terms? One possible model would
be to assume that in the Augustan period, the old Italic cults, which had long
been forgotten in the city and only preserved in the independent sanctuaries of the
periphery, were caught in the maelstrom of the metropolis. The urbanization of an
archaic spring cult then had to be explained as “alienation” or “cult transformation.”
The existence of an archaic religion in the countryside, whose cult centers were
autonomous and without urban connections, however, is a scholarly opinion for which
as yet no evidence has been found in the sources (North 1995). Alternatively, it could
be argued that the groves and spring sanctuaries of the periphery were from their
inception oriented toward the center, Rome. In that case, the urban habitusof
the festival community would merely be the expression of a strong center–periphery
dependency, which ought to be present in other areas as well – in the cult organ-
ization, for instance, or in the construction of the local myth. This theory is con-
firmed in a comparison with the cult of the Arval Brethren, which was revived under
Augustus. As evidenced by the inscribed records, the rites performed at the extra-
urban precinct were complemented by sacrificial acts at the magister’s city residence.
The traditional bond between the Augustan priesthood and Rome was strengthened
by mythical references to the city’s founder Romulus as the progenitor of the Arval
Brethren (Plin. Nat.18.6).
In this mythical construct, which ties a border sanctuary to users from the city of
Rome, we find a constellation similar to Ovid’s description of the festival of Anna
Perenna. Ovid’s literary revelers concur with the intended reading audience of the
etiological cult myths: in the urban, cultivated festival community which frequents
the nearby grove of Anna Perenna every March 15, the poet has created his ideal
readership. To them he addresses the learned cult aitionof the first outdoor ban-
quet commemorating Anna’s apotheosis in the Numicus, near Aeneas’ hometown
of Lavinium, thus incorporating the Augustan rituals into Rome’s mythical prehis-
tory. Typically, this tale of origins is not presented in situ, for instance as a ritual
song, but outside the festival context in the artificial style of a Hellenistic epyllion.
The Sanctuary of Apollo Palatinus as a
Cult(ural) Center
Unlike the newly discovered nymph’s spring of Anna Perenna, the sanctuary of Apollo
Palatinus is one of the best-known cult sites of the early Augustan period (Zanker
214 Ulrike Egelhaaf-Gaiser