Pax- Roman GodDeity"Pax Augusta"

The Ara Pacis

In 13 BCE the Senate commissioned an altar to Pax on the Campus Martius, the field where Roman armies had traditionally gathered before marching to war. Augustus had just returned from pacifying Gaul and Spain. The civil wars were over. The altar, dedicated on 30 January 9 BCE, was carved from marble and ringed with sculptural reliefs: a procession of senators and priests, Augustus himself with his family, Aeneas sacrificing a sow at Lavinium, and a seated goddess with two children on her lap, fruit in her arms, cattle at her feet.

The Ara Pacis stood in the open air. Citizens could walk around it and read the procession carved into the stone. Ovid recorded the annual sacrifice there on the anniversary of its dedication.

On the Coins

Pax appeared on imperial coinage more than almost any other deity. Mints struck her image under Augustus, then under nearly every emperor who followed. She was a standing woman, draped, holding an olive branch or a caduceus. Sometimes she carried a cornucopia. Sometimes she held a torch to a pile of captured weapons and armor, burning them.

The image traveled wherever Roman money traveled. A merchant in Britain or a soldier in Syria handled coins stamped with Pax and the emperor's name on the reverse. The pairing was deliberate: peace was what the emperor provided.

Vespasian's Temple

After the Jewish War and the chaos of 69 CE, when four emperors ruled and fell in a single year, Vespasian built a Temple of Peace in Rome and dedicated it in 75 CE. Josephus described it as surpassing all human imagination. Inside, Vespasian placed the golden menorah, the table of showbread, and other treasures taken from the Temple in Jerusalem, alongside Greek paintings and sculptures collected from across the empire.

The building was more than a shrine. It housed a library and served as a public gallery. Pliny listed the masterworks displayed there. The Temple of Peace stood in the Imperial Forums near the forums of Caesar and Augustus, the newest in a row of monuments that each dynasty raised to prove it had earned its place.