Augusto a Tibur

Abstract

literary sources and the monuments. Individuals very close to the emperor (soldiers and poets) frequented the city or owned villas there, which local scholars have attempted to identify with the existing ruins.
We know from Appian (Civ., 5, 24, 97) that in 41 BC, during the war against Mark Antony, Octavian Augustus borrowed money from some temples in Lazio, including that of Hercules at Tibur, promising to return it with gratitude. According to Suetonius, Augustus (Aug., 72), owned a “retreat” (secessus) at Tibur, where he often delivered justice beneath the porticoes of the “temple” of Hercules, in other words the large late Republican sanctuary (1st cent. BC) of Hercules Victor. A rectangular building in opus reticulatum, located in the south-east corner of the porticoes of the sacred area and formerly believed to be a basilica, should in fact be identified for structural reasons as the library, “well-supplied with books”, that existed inside the sanctuary, as Aulus Gellius writes (Noct. Act., 19, 5, 1-4). This library was probably donated by Augustus as recompense for the help received, together with a renovation of the architectural and sculptural decorations and the enlargement of the theatre in front of the temple.
In the forum area, the freedman M. Varenus Diphilus, magister of the Herculanei (the college of priests in charge of the cult of Hercules), gave to the city, as attested by the inscriptions, the complex of the ponderarium-Augusteum, excavated in the late 19th and early 20th century. The ponderarium, where official samples of weights and measures were kept on elegant marble mensae, postdates the project to unify units of measurement throughout the empire conceived by Augustus in the early years of his reign and is almost certainly contemporary with the shrine of the imperial cult (Augusteum), built on the eve of Augustus’s return to Rome in 19 BC. It is an apsidal hall with a marble floor and paintings adorned with festoons on the walls, in which the headless statue of the emperor portrayed as Jupiter Capitolinus is preserved. The connection with Hercules, protector of the city, is underlined by the clubs sculpted on the supports of the mensae and by a low relief with a depiction of Hercules Musagetes. The whole complex exemplifies adherence to the propaganda and political policies of the princeps, whose Genius was also venerated in association with the cult of the most important local deity.

Keywords: Tibur, Hercules Victor, library, Augusteum, Augustus as Jupiter