An altar to the "Peace of Augustus," freezing the empire’s dawn into a solemn marble procession.
Dedicated in 9 BC to the "age of peace" Augustus brought to Rome.
After the civil wars ended and Octavian became Augustus, the Senate raised this "Altar of Peace" to commemorate his ending of a century of turmoil and his founding of the "Roman Peace" (Pax Romana). The marble reliefs on its walls show Augustus’s family and the senators in a solemn slow procession — a carefully designed piece of political messaging: to cast a man who had just seized power by force as the father of the nation, bringer of peace and plenty. The modern imagination of a "golden age" begins, in large part, with this Augustan peace.
Sources：Augustus, Res Gestae Divi Augusti · The reliefs of the Ara Pacis
↑ Because of the last layer：Precisely because it was the most important propaganda monument of the empire’s birth, modern Italy spared no cost to restore and re-enshrine it.
Shattered and scattered for two millennia, it was pieced back together and now sits in a modern glass pavilion by the Tiber.
After the empire’s decline the Ara Pacis was gradually buried in silt, dismantled, and scattered, its fragments dispersed to museums around the world. In the early twentieth century archaeologists recovered and reassembled it piece by piece, like a giant puzzle, and in 2006 built it a Modernist glass pavilion. The altar you see through glass today is another Roman story of "piecing a broken antiquity back together" — only this time with twenty-first-century architecture.
Sources：Museo dell’Ara Pacis (2006)
In Rome：The Ara Pacis is dedicated.
At the same time, elsewhere：At the same time, Rome was nearing the height of its imperial dawn, and Jesus was soon to be born at the empire’s eastern edge.
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