Ara Pacis - The East and West Walls

The East and West Walls

The East and West walls each contain two panels, one well preserved and one represented only in fragments.

The East Wall contains a badly preserved scene of a female warrior (bellatrix), possibly Roma, apparently sitting on a pile of weapons confiscated from the enemy, thus forcing peace upon them by rendering them unable to make war. This scene has been reconstructed based on coins that depict such a seated Roma. When the monument was being reconstructed at its present site, Edmund Buchner and other scholars sketched what the panel may have looked like. This interpretation, though widely accepted, can not be proved correct, as so little of the original panel survives.

The other panel is more controversial in its subject, but far better preserved. A goddess sits amid a scene of fertility and prosperity with twins on her lap. Scholars have suggested that the goddess is Italia, Tellus (Earth), Venus, or Peace (other views also circulate). Peace (Pax Augusta) makes the most sense since the entire scene depicts the benefits of peace, and the monument is the "Altar of Augustan Peace," not the "Altar of Italy" or "the Altar of Earth." The exact identity of the goddess remains debated, however.

The West Wall also contains two panels. The fragmentary panel called "The Lupercal Panel" apparently preserves the moment when Romulus and Remus were discovered by Faustulus the shepherd, while Mars looks on.

The better preserved scene depicts the sacrifice of a pig (the standard sacrifice when Romans made a peace treaty) by an old priest and two attendants. In 1907 this scene was identified by Johannes Sieveking as the moment when Aeneas, newly arrived in Italy, sacrificed a sow and her piglets to Juno, as told by Virgil and others. In the 1960s, Stephan Weinstock challenged this identification (and the very identity of the entire monument), citing numerous discrepancies that Sieveking and his followers had failed to notice between Virgil's version and the panel. Subsequently, Paul Richardson proposed, and Paul Rehak later published an alternative identification of the scene as Numa Pompilius, the Roman king associated with Peace and the Gates of Janus.