August
"Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them." Isaiah 1:14
Supposedly, August was given an extra day from February so that it would have the same number as July (and be an odd number). That now made for three successive months (July, August, September) with thirty-one days. Caesar's system of alternating months of thirty and thirty-one days was said to have been abandoned, and a day taken from September and added to October, and a day from November added to December to give the months their familiar lengths. And obliging one to remember them all by chanting "Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November...," a rhyme that extends back to the Middle Ages.
It could have been worse: Suetonius relates that Caligula renamed September after his father Germanicus and that Nero renamed April after himself, as did Domitian for the months of September and October. (All three emperors suffered damnatio memoriae by the Senate, however, and their memories condemned.) There also were attempts to substitute Claudius for May and Germanicus for June. Indeed, Commodus wanted to rename every month of the year after himself. Tiberius, who succeeded Augustus and was offered a similar honor, at least asked what eventually would happen if there were thirteen caesars.
"The course of my song hath led me to the altar of Peace. The day will be the second from the end of the month. Come, Peace, thy dainty tresses wreathed with Actian laurels [in honor of the end of civil war], and let thy gentle presence abide in the whole world. So but there be nor foes nor food for triumphs, thou shalt be unto our chiefs a glory greater than war. May the soldier bear arms only to check the armed aggressor, and may the fierce trumpet blare for naught but solemn pomp!"
Ovid, Fasti (January)
On the return of Augustus from his victorious campaigns in Gaul and Spain, the Senate commissioned the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace), which was dedicated four years later in 9 BC to memorialize the peace which conquests there brought to the empire. A square enclosure on a low platform with an altar in the center, the four marble walls are carved in relief and decorated with an arcanthus frieze. On the south wall, the imperial family is depicted in the procession that took place when the altar was commissioned.
In 10 BC, Augustus brought to Rome its first obelisks, to be set up as monuments to the conquest of Egypt and as dedications to the sun. One, which now is in the Piazza del Popolo, was placed on the spina of the Circus Maximus; the other, which was slightly smaller and now is in the Piazza di Montecitorio, served as the gnomon of a colossal sundial, the Horologium Augusti, measuring some 525 by 245 feet and laid out in the Campus Martius, its shadow indicating the hour and date. On a grid marked out in stone, the shadow that was cast moved from west to east as the day advanced and from north to south as the seasons passed, beginning with the winter solstice and ending with the summer solstice, the shadow returning northward for the remaining six months of the year. On the autumnal equinox (September 23), the date claimed by Augustus as his birthday, the shadow of the gnomon fell east and, as the sun set, entered the Ara Pacis, symbolizing the determination of Augustus to be remembered as one born for peace.
Pliny, in his Natural History, describes how the obelisk was placed.
"A pavement was laid down for a distance appropriate to the height of the obelisk so that the shadow cast at noon on the shortest day of the year might exactly coincide with it. Bronze rods let into the pavement were meant to measure the shadow day by day as it gradually became shorter and then lengthened again....The readings thus given have for about thirty years past failed to correspond to the calendar, either because the course of the sun itself is anomalous and has been altered by some change in the behavior of the heavens or because the whole earth has shifted slightly from its central positionm, a phenomenon which, I hear, has been detected also in other places. Or else earth-tremors in the city may have brought about a purely local displacement of the shaft or floods from the Tiber may have caused the mass to settle, even thought the foundations are said to have been sunk to a depth equal to the height of the load they have to carry."
Although it was in his capacity as pontifex maximus that Julius Caesar reformed the Republican calender, this statue portrays Augustus in that role, an office he assumed in 12 BC. His pietas toward the gods, one of the virtues stressed by Augustus, is demonstrated by his portrayal as a priest offering sacrifice, with the toga pulled partly over his head (capite velato). Although the hands and right forearm are missing, they are presumed to have held the lituus, a crooked staff with which the augur divided the sky into regions for the purpose of divination, and the patera, a shallow bowl used in sacrifices.
The statue, the head of which is of Greek marble and the toga of Italian marble, is is in the Palazzo Massimo Alle Terme (Rome) and thought to date from the last decade of the first century BC, shortly after the dedication of the Ara Pacis.
