Pax, A Compendium of the Ancient Gods

Pax was the Roman personification of peace, particularly the peace that the Roman state imposed by victory. She is older than Augustus — the cult is attested in the second century BCE — but she became, under his settlement, the great Augustan deity. The Pax Augusta or Pax Romana, the peace established by Augustus through the conclusion of the civil wars and the orderly administration of the empire, was the central ideological achievement of the principate, and Pax was its divine embodiment.

Augustus dedicated the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace, in 9 BCE upon the Campus Martius. This altar — rediscovered piece by piece between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, finally reassembled and re-erected in a museum on the Tiber bank in 1938 — is one of the most important monuments of Roman imperial art. Its sculptural reliefs depict the imperial family in procession with priests and attendants, and on the side panels, allegorical scenes (one of which is identified with Tellus, treated above; the other with Roma) representing the fruitful peace that the empire had brought.

The temple of Pax was built later, by Vespasian, between 71 and 75 CE, on the eastern side of the Roman Forum, to mark the conclusion of the Jewish War and the establishment of the Flavian dynasty. The temple housed the spoils from Jerusalem, including the great seven-branched menorah depicted on the Arch of Titus, which was kept in the temple of Pax until the sack of Rome by the Vandals in 455. The temple itself was destroyed by fire in 192 and rebuilt by Septimius Severus, and was a landmark of imperial Rome until late antiquity.

Curator’s note

What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay

Pax appears on coins from at least 70 BCE (the Pax of Aulus Hirtius). The Augustan cult is documented in the Res Gestae 12.2 (Augustus's own account), in Ovid (Fasti 1.709-722, the prayer for Pax), in the Ara Pacis itself. The Vespasianic temple is described in Suetonius (Vespasian 9), Pliny (Naturalis Historia 36.27 — listing the artworks Vespasian had assembled there), Cassius Dio (66.15), and Josephus (Bellum Judaicum 7.158-162, the Jewish spoils). The Ara Pacis has an enormous bibliography; Karl Galinsky's Augustan Culture is a standard treatment.

Kin in the sources

Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.

Companion ofTellusone of which is identified with Tellus, treated above; the other with Roma
Companion ofRomaone of which is identified with Tellus, treated above; the other with Roma

When the sources speak

Dated witnesses for The Deified Virtues and the Imperial Mystery Cults. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline

c. 1000–750 BCE: Iron Age communities of Latium and neighboring peoples develop the cult landscapes later absorbed into Roman tradition.
traditional 753 BCE: Roman foundation chronology places Romulus and the first civic institutions at the beginning of the city’s sacred history.
traditional 7th–6th centuries BCE: The regal period is credited with priesthoods, calendars, temples, and the organization of public rites.
509–264 BCE: Republican expansion incorporates Latin, Sabine, Etruscan, and Italian cults through treaty, migration, and evocatio.
264–146 BCE: Mediterranean conquest accelerates Greek interpretation and the importation or redefinition of foreign gods.
204 BCE: The Magna Mater is formally brought from Pessinus during the Second Punic War.
1st century BCE: Varro, Cicero, and other antiquarians document rites and divine names amid civil war and institutional change.
27 BCE–14 CE: Augustan restoration monumentalizes selected ancestral cults and rewrites Roman sacred history.