TheAra Pacis Augustae: Visual Rhetoric in Augustus' Principate

New Finds Regarding the Architecture and Sculptures of Ancient Tenea

“…It has the same type of meander bands, the same deep carving at the inner surface of the block, in order to create a vivid almost three-dimensional relief, always between The monument is one of the most important altars of the Roman period. The central civic monument was placed at the most crucial urban crossroad of the city of Rome [16].…”

Empires reconsidered: current archaeological approaches

“…On that monument, the First Citizen laid claim to a particular set of narrative relationships among his family, the Roman aristocracy, the story of Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome, and the deities who blessed and underwrote the entire structured history. The core purpose of the monument was to act as a visual rhetorical device to legitimize Augustan succession (Lamp 2009). Similar appropriations of the imagined or real past-reconfigured to the interests of the moment-pervaded the material imaging of virtually all empires that we choose to examine (e.g., Sinopoli 2003;D'Altroy 2015b).…”