Epochs and periods are our tools to describe and cope with developments and trends in history. However, there is a need to critically approach these terms in order to revise the ways in which they are applied in scholarship and often hamper how we look and write about certain times, individuals, and phenomena in history. Distinguishing epochs and periods makes historical phenomena comparable and comprehensive, but it is a retrospective act creating boundaries, which inhibit to see the processual, transgressing elements.

In this workshop, the Augustan period as one of the best studied periods of Roman and more general Mediterranean and European history served as example to ask about a revision of the concepts of epochalisation and periodization through the lens of strategies within the religious sphere. Contributors were asked to consider a) a critique of periodization, 2) innovation and tradition of religion, c) politicization of religion. With a focus on the time between 45 BC and AD 15, the participants dealt with problems of the (trans-)formation of religion in the time of Octavian and later Augustus. The small circle allowed for an intensive discussion of individual papers.

Karl Galsinky (“hic nec tempora pono: Tua, Caesar, aetas”) discussed concepts of periodization in the times of Augustus by looking mainly at poetry, or the involvement of people in religious affairs (ludi saeculares). The more cosmopolitical frame in the Empire lead to a memory creation linked to the emperor and oriented towards the future and not the past. Hence, the notion of saeculum becomes qualitative rather than chronological in the times of Augustus.

New insights into the recent findings of one of the earliest temples for the veneration of Augustus (Tiberian) in Ostia came with the paper of Roberta Geremia (“The temple of Rome and Augustus in Ostia: new elements for its dating”). A close revision of iconographical elements (clipeus, capricorn), entries in the fasti and historical setting under the successor of August lead her to this early dating.

With Jesper Majbom Madsen (“When their leaders became gods: Ruler cult in a Roman political context”) the roots of the emperor’s worship were questioned. Against the general opinion that the emperor’s worship emerged from the Hellenistic ruler cult in the Greek East – and not earlier than 29 BCE – he claimed that it started earlier referring to Roman traditions in the last years of Caesar’s dictatorship.

The margins were the topic of Rubina Raja’s paper on the “Creation of an epoch: Octavian, Herod and the epochalisation seen from the East”. She focused on the active role Herod played in Augustus’ politics in a time when his sovereignty was not yet assured. Herod did not only copy Roman models but was in some aspects a forerunner to developments in Rome.

Christopher Hallet revised in an overview of “Octavian’s renewal of Rome’s earliest temples and shrines in the late 30’s and early 20s BC: An Archaic Revival” the prevailing view on the “Augustan Classicism”. He could show convincingly how slow architecture and sculpture was modelled along the lines of Classical Greek imagery, ornaments, and buildings, and how big and important the interest in Etruscan and Italic exempla was.

A phenomenon in Rome itself was tackled by Katharina Rieger (“Religion at grassroots, religion in Apollinic spheres: A look at some altars and bases in Augustan Rome”). Analysing the chronological range of altars and bases (of the quindecemviri and the vicomagistri), she showed how short-lived or tentative some phenomena in objects and iconography were. Only scholars’ retrospective views make these objects being cores of the changes in art and religion, but might have had an ephemeral role in their time.

Jörg Rüpke focused on the “Augustan History of the Roman calendar” and argued that the changes in the times of Augustus opened the calendar for further meanings as well as determined it for the purposes related to Augustan politics and Roman imperialism. Hence, the Augustan phase between the Julian reform and Julio-Claudian routinization was more influential than the fixed distinction of reforms make us think.

All papers, based on variegated evidence, showed that manifold strands of religious representations, the power of marginality as well as memory and the past were present as driving forces in the pre-Augustan and Augustan time. Thus, the participants added aspects to the conditions prevailing in this time that gave politics the chance to change and use religion to a much higher degree allowing for a soft religious innovation and change of how “history” was employed by exceptional politicians like Octavian and later Augustus.

Conference overview:

Rubina Raja (Aarhus University) / Jörg Rüpke (University of Erfurt): Introduction

Karl Galinsky (University of Texas at Austin): His nec tempora pono: Tua, Caesar, aetas

Roberta Geremia (Istituto Nazionale di Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte): The temple of Rome and Augustus in Ostia: New elements for its dating

Jesper Majbom Madsen (University of Southern Denmark): When their leaders became gods: Ruler cult in a Roman political context

Rubina Raja (Aarhus University): The creation of an epoch: Octavian, Herod and epochalisation seen from the East

Christopher Hallett (UC Berkeley): Octavian’s renewal of Rome’s earliest temples and shrines in the late 30s and early 20s BC: An “Archaic Revival”?

Katharina Rieger (University of Erfurt): Religion at grassroots, religion in Apollinic spheres: A look at some altars and bases in Augustan Rome

Françoise van Haeperen (Université Catholique de Louvain): Considerations on the periodization of the 'pre-Augustan' years (43-30) in the light of the religious commemoration of the Octavian’s deeds

Jörg Rüpke (University of Erfurt): The Augustan history of the Roman calendar