The Astronomical Significance of the Tellus Relief

The Tellus Relief, Ara Pacis. Photo by kind permission of Dr. Janice Siegel.

I hadn’t realised that Prof. Shawn O’Bryhim would be giving his talk at the CA, The Astronomical Significance of the Tellus Relief, until the morning of the event. Naturally it clashed with the other talk I wanted to hear about – on the Greek Pantheon and Battlestar Galactica* – but I thought I ought to go to this as I was in Newcastle for business rather than pleasure. Fortunately Prof. O’Bryhim’s talk was both.

It’s going to tax my memory to accurately recall exactly what was said because the talk was a good example of the problems of working across disciplines. There were a lot of different issues to grasp at once. Thankfully the talk orbited the most important question “So what?” so it didn’t get lost down paths of irrelevant detail. Briefly the Tellus Relief, above, found on the Ara Pacis is a bit of a puzzle and there have been many attempts to interpret it. This is made no easier by that probability that there is no one meaning and the relief can have multiple significances. Prof. O’Bryhim contends that this was a relief of the wife of Augustus, Livia’s, horoscope.

One obvious step would be to show that this was a depiction of her horoscope. O’Bryhim argued that the symbols at the base of the relief show various symbols important to the horoscope. For instance there are the Solar, Lunar and Ascendant signs. Other symbols are planets placed in their locations. This part of the talk was very thorough. Indeed possibly from my view it was over-thorough. He showed how a device like the Antikythera Mechanism could be used to calculate the positions of celestial bodies. This is accurate, but perhaps not essential. Many of the planets on the calculated date would have been visible in the evening sky if I recall the date correctly. From talking to him before the paper it seems there is scepticism that the ancient Romans could have plotted the daytime sky, which seems odd because the Greeks were familiar with stars being the daytime sky in the earliest texts like Hesiod.

I’m wary of astronomically led arguments because they can give the illusion of accuracy. The horoscope might be accurate compared to the night sky, but when you consider the size of the Imperial family and the presumably polysemic nature of the relief it becomes a lot easier to find a match, particularly if you ignore all the reliefs that don’t match horoscopes. If you only count hits and ignore misses your theory will always be 100% accurate. The reason the talk was more than an astronomical oddity is that it was also firmly grounded in the history of the time.

Augustus was known to have a keen interest in astrology and was a master of propaganda. He was also keen to promote his household as leading Rome and presenting Livia as the mother of Rome would in turn cement the impression of him as its father. The dedication of the Ara Pacis was part of this propaganda campaign and this very altar was dedicated on Livia’s birthday at the start of her fiftieth year. It’s this political connection which makes the use of astrological symbolism interesting because it gives a clear reason for connecting Livia’s horoscope with the altar. I’m looking forward to reading the final paper. It promises to shed light on the sophistication of Augustan imagery.

* Amanda Potter (Open University) Pandora and the Pythia: Classics meets 9/11 in the Current TV Series ‘Battlestar Galactica’. By all accounts a very good talk.