This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
For most of the last century, one panel of the Ara Pacis Augustae has had a settled identity. A bearded man in priestly dress stands with two young attendants, preparing to sacrifice a sow, and the standard reading has named him Aeneas, the Trojan hero whose arrival in Italy the poet Virgil made into Rome's own founding epic. The identification fit Augustus perfectly: the Julian family claimed descent from Aeneas, son of the goddess Venus, and putting him on an altar celebrating the emperor's own peace read as a natural piece of dynastic messaging.
In 2001, the classical art historian Paul Rehak published a peer reviewed challenge to that reading in The Art Bulletin. Rehak went back to the panel and to the Roman texts around it and argued the figure is more likely Numa Pompilius, Rome's legendary second king, credited in Roman tradition with founding the city's state religion and with establishing the very fetial sacrifice ritual the panel appears to show. Rehak's case rests partly on symmetry: the altar's other western panel shows Romulus and Remus, the warlike founder and his brother, nursed by the she wolf. A panel showing Numa, the peaceful, religion founding king, would balance that panel exactly, pairing Rome's warlike origin against its peaceful one, a symmetry the Aeneas reading does not supply.
Neither reading has driven the other from the field. Museum labels and general references still lean toward Aeneas, the older and more widely repeated identification, while Rehak's argument continues to be cited in specialist literature on the monument. The atlas holds both figures, and states the disagreement as what it is: a real, unresolved scholarly question about one panel of Roman religious art, not a settled fact either way.