This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 13 BCE the Roman Senate voted to build an altar for a peace that had not, strictly speaking, arrived through fighting anyone in the room. Augustus was coming home from three years in Hispania and Gaul, and the Senate wanted the moment marked permanently. What they built was not a battle memorial. It was the Ara Pacis Augustae, the Altar of Augustan Peace, a low marble precinct wall wrapped entirely in relief carving, enclosing an altar for sacrifice at its center.
Walk around the wall and the message repeats in different registers. The long north and south sides carry a processional frieze: the imperial family itself, priests, senators, all shown walking together toward the sacrifice, ordinary Romans made into a religious procession in stone. Acanthus scrollwork, dense and continuous, wraps the lower half of every wall, nature itself rendered as ordered and abundant as the peace the altar claims. And on the short east and west walls, four separate panels place the whole scene inside myth: Roma the goddess of the city, a fertility goddess usually called Tellus or Pax, Romulus and Remus nursed by the she wolf, and a bearded man in priestly robes, sacrificing.
That last panel has usually been read as Aeneas, the Trojan ancestor the Julian family claimed as their own, arriving in Italy and giving thanks. Whether that reading is the whole story is worth its own separate telling.