ABSTRACT
The twelve Arval Brothers constituted an archaic priesthood revived by Augustus in the last decades of the first century B.C. as part of his program of religious renewal. At least once every year, the Brothers climbed the Capitoline Hill, the religious and political focal point of Rome, and prayed to the chief gods of the state, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, as well as Salus Publica and other divinities, for the salvation of the emperor.1 Once inside the portico of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the leader (magister) of the Brothers would say: “Since the immortal gods, their power propitiated, have heard the prayers [vota] of the world, which were eagerly undertaken for the salvation of the emperor [pro salute imperatoris], his wife, and all their house, it is right for the college to fulfill their previous vows and to proclaim new ones.”2 The Brothers scrupulously recorded the names of the priests, date of the dedications, the type and number of animals slaughtered, and the names of the gods, who if appeased by the blood offerings and prayers would grant salvation to the emperor and the inhabitants of the empire. This information was later inscribed for posterity and kept at the sacred grove of the Brothers just outside Rome, in an archive that would span three centuries.3 The very act of record keeping was obviously crucial to the participants in the rituals, especially the registering of their names, which publicized the social status of the individual priests and bolstered the sense that each was a member of a religious community that traced its origins to the distant past.4 Seen from this perspective, these inscriptions provided a means by which each individual priest could, at least to a certain extent, fashion his identity through the public affirmation of loyalty to the emperor.
