Pax

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Pax is the Roman personification of peace, worshipped as a goddess and made, under Augustus, an instrument of imperial ideology. Her name is simply the Latin word for peace, and she belongs to a class of Roman deities in which an abstraction central to public life was given an altar and a face: Victoria (victory), Concordia (civic agreement), Salus (safety and welfare), Fortuna (fortune). These were not allegories in the modern sense but genuine objects of cult — divine qualities, each with its own priests, festival, and place in the calendar, the deified powers by which the community understood itself to stand or fall. Such personified powers stood beside the older numina of place and act, the spring-goddess Juturna or the wine-god Liber, as a younger and more abstract kind of divinity — gods made not of a river or a field but of a word. What distinguishes Pax within this company is timing: she rose to prominence at the exact moment the Roman state had something to say about peace, and meant a particular thing by it. A peace that has nothing to defend itself against needs no goddess; Pax acquired her face when peace had become the regime’s central claim.

The Ara Pacis Augustae in Rome, the marble enclosure of the Altar of Augustan Peace, viewed from the front. — Luciano Tronati, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

That meaning was not the absence of conflict so much as the order secured by victory. The peace Augustus advertised was the pax Romana — more precisely the pax Augusta, peace bearing the emperor’s own name — the settled condition that followed a century of civil war and was held in place by Roman arms. It was a peace with a sword behind it: not the cessation of fighting but the imposition of a single will under which fighting need no longer occur, the war ended because one side had won and the winner was now the state. To call this condition Pax was to make a political argument in the form of a goddess. The same coins that show her holding the olive branch sometimes show her setting fire to a heap of weapons, and the contradiction is the whole point: the arms are burned because they have already done their work.

The defining monument is the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace, vowed by the Senate on 4 July 13 BCE to mark the emperor’s return from three years in the western provinces — Hispania and Gaul — and dedicated on 30 January 9 BCE on the Campus Martius. Augustus records the vow in his own first-person account of his deeds, naming the altar among the honors the Senate decreed for his homecoming. What survives is not a temple but a marble enclosure of Luna stone, walls carved in two registers, sheltering a central altar. The upper register of the long sides carries a procession — the imperial family, magistrates, senators, and priests, including members of the Arval Brethren, the archaic priesthood of the fields — frozen mid-step, the first time a living Roman dynasty had been set in stone in the act of moving through the city in pious order. Below runs a vast scroll of acanthus, swans, and small creatures: vegetable abundance as the visible yield of peace. The short ends carry mythic and allegorical panels — Aeneas sacrificing, the wolf and twins of the founding, the seated armed figure read as Roma.

The most discussed of these is the seated maternal panel: a goddess amid fruit, beasts, and two infants on her lap, flanked by airy female figures usually taken for breezes or waters. Her identity has never been settled. She has been read as Venus Genetrix, ancestress of the Julian house; as Tellus or Terra Mater, the nursing Earth; as Italia, the land personified; and as Pax herself, peace shown as the fertility she makes possible. The ambiguity is not a failure of the relief but its method. The Augustan program did not want the viewer to choose; it wanted peace, earth, motherland, and the divine ancestress of the ruling family to bleed into one image, so that the prosperity of the soil seemed continuous with the dynasty that guaranteed it. The altar’s whole grammar is this fusion — peace rendered not as a treaty but as a teeming, maternal, inexhaustible plenty, with the human family of Augustus walking past it as the condition of its continuance.

The seated maternal panel from the Ara Pacis, variously identified as Tellus, Italia, Venus, or Pax herself, with infants, fruit, and beasts amid flanking breeze-figures. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Three generations later the goddess received the only temple Rome ever raised to her. After the suppression of the Jewish revolt and the sack of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Vespasian built the Templum Pacis — the Temple, or Forum, of Peace — begun in 71 and dedicated in 75, financed from the spoils of the war and standing at the edge of the old Forum. Into it the emperor placed the treasures carried out of the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem: the golden seven-branched lampstand, the table of the shewbread, the sacred vessels, displayed among Greek paintings and statues so that the complex served at once as sanctuary, gallery, and library. The Jewish historian Josephus, an eyewitness to the war, describes the deposit of the spoils there in his Jewish War. The dedication makes explicit what the Ara Pacis only implied: this was peace as the spoil of war, the goddess presiding over a shrine furnished from a conquered sanctuary, the loot of one nation’s holy of holies become the décor of the victor’s house of Peace. The spoils remained on view for centuries, until the Vandals under Geiseric carried them off in 455 CE.

Between altar and temple, Pax traveled chiefly on coinage, where she is among the most frequently struck of all Roman deities. A standing woman holds an olive branch and, in her other hand, a cornucopia, a scepter, or the herald’s caduceus; sometimes she leans on a column, sometimes she fires the pile of arms. Legends read PAX, PAX AVGVSTA, PAX AVGVSTI, PAX ORBIS TERRARVM — the peace of the world. She is dense on the coinage of Augustus, abundant again under Vespasian, who used her to announce the close of the civil wars of 69 and the end of the Judaean campaign, and she recurs through the reigns that follow whenever an emperor needed to claim that the empire was at rest. The image made the claim portable: every transaction passed the regime’s promise from hand to hand, and a soldier paid in denarii carried the assertion of peace in the same purse as the wage of war. The personification cults are best read less as objects of private devotion than as the visual grammar of Roman public self-presentation — and Pax above all is a creation of the imperial settlement, older as a word than as a goddess, with little independent mythology of her own.

Silver denarius of Vespasian (69-79 CE); the reverse shows Pax seated, holding an olive branch and caduceus. — The Portable Antiquities Scheme / The Trustees of the British Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

That want of myth was filled, late and lightly, by borrowing. The Greeks had long honored Eirene, the personification of peace and one of the Horai — the Seasons — daughter of Zeus and Themis and sister to Eunomia (good order) and Dike (justice), a genealogy that already made peace the offspring of law. Athens gave Eirene a state cult in the fourth century BCE: after a naval victory over Sparta the city raised altars to Peace, and following the Common Peace of 371 BCE instituted an annual public sacrifice to her. The sculptor Cephisodotus the Elder cast for the Agora a bronze of Eirene cradling the infant Ploutos — Wealth — gazing down at the child of plenty she nurses, an image that survives in Roman marble copies and made the argument in a single gesture: peace is the mother on whose milk prosperity grows. From this figure Pax took her olive branch and her cornucopia, and the late mythographers gave her in turn a Greek-style parentage, daughter of Jupiter and Iustitia, peace born of justice as Eirene was. The forms crossed the sea intact; the meaning did not. Athenian Eirene was one civic good among the city’s many, a respite the demos voted itself between wars. Roman Pax was the keystone of an order that did not intend to end — the same olive branch, but held now by the hand that had won.

Eirene (Peace) holding the infant Ploutos (Wealth), a Roman marble copy after the bronze by Cephisodotus the Elder; the prototype Pax drew on for her olive branch and cornucopia. Glyptothek, Munich. — Bibi Saint-Pol, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Here is the knot at the center of her cult, the thing no olive branch quite covers. Pax was the latest-faced of the great Roman powers and the one whose face told the largest lie of omission: the goddess of peace was the goddess of a peace made of victory, and her serenity was the serenity of a settled field over a buried fight. The word pax is old, kin to pacisci, to make a pact, to bind by agreement — peace as the thing two parties strike, a compact. The goddess is young, and the compact she embodies has only one party left standing. An altar vowed for a homecoming, a temple paid for by a sacked city, a coin that burns the very arms it needed — each is the same gesture, peace displayed as the calm after the conqueror has had his way. She is worshipped not because the fighting has stopped of its own accord but because someone has won decisively enough to call the result peace and mean it. The olive branch in her hand is genuine. So is the smoke from the weapons at her feet.

Sources and scholarship

The primary witness for the Ara Pacis is Augustus himself, who names the altar among his honors in the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, the first-person inscription of his deeds set up after his death; the surviving enclosure on the Campus Martius, excavated in stages and reassembled in the twentieth century, is the material record against which his account is read. For the Temple of Peace the indispensable contemporary source is the Jewish historian Josephus, whose Jewish War describes Vespasian depositing the spoils of the Jerusalem Temple there; Pliny the Elder counted the complex among the most beautiful buildings of the city. The numismatic record — surveyed in the standard imperial-coinage catalogs and by collections such as the American Numismatic Society — is where Pax appears most densely, the olive branch, cornucopia, and burning arms recurring across reigns from Augustus to the later empire.

Modern study treats Pax less as a goddess with a biography than as a node in the Roman cult of divine qualities. The framing work is the analysis of how Rome deified abstractions — Victoria, Concordia, Salus, Fortuna, Pax — as genuine objects of public cult, set out in studies of Roman personification worship and, at scholarly length, in Anna Clark’s Divine Qualities: Cult and Community in Republican Rome (Oxford, 2007). On the altar, Paul Zanker’s The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (1988) reads the monument as the visual program of the new regime; the seated maternal panel — Pax, Tellus, Italia, or Venus — has generated a long and unresolved literature, scholars dividing over which goddess, if only one, the carver intended. The Greek background, Eirene and the Athenian cult, is documented through the votive statue of Cephisodotus the Elder and the calendar of the fourth-century city.

→ Related: Juturna · Faunus · Liber · Salus · Fortuna · Venus