John M.

Lawless, editor

ARTICLES & NOTES

New England Classical Journal 32.3 (2005) 213-220

Augustus and Christianity in Myth and

Legend
Paul F. Burke
Clark University

T
he story of the emperor Augustus and the miracle of Aracoeli is
among the best known of the tales making up the large corpus of
Latin and Byzantine traditions concerning the Miracles of Mary. It is
of interest to us because it links themes of Roman, Sibylline divination and
an ancient biography of Augustus with the foundation of one of Rome’s
most important medieval churches, that of S. Maria in Aracoeli.
The Aracoeli myth, like the larger body of the tales of the Miracles
of Mary as a whole, had a very wide diffusion by the twelfth century,
in Europe, from Iceland to Hungary and into the Greek Christian East.
Translated into Arabic, the Book of the Miracles of Mary passed into Syria,
Palestine, and Egypt, whence the Coptic Church transmitted it to Ethiopia.1
In this way, in a period of about two centuries, the miracles of Mary,
including the Aracoeli tale of interest to us here, traveled from Western
Europe to Ethiopia, becoming part of a body of knowledge common to
Christians from the Arctic Circle to the Red Sea. My purpose here will be
to make some observations on the possible origins and antiquity of the
story of the conversion of Augustus by a vision of the Virgin Mary and the
infant Jesus; I will also show how some elements of the story seem to have
originated in aspects of Suetonius’s decidedly unchristian early second-
century biography of Augustus.
The Aracoeli account consists of the following elements:
(1) Augustus refused divine honors which the Roman people
wished to grant him; this element derives from chapters 52 and 53
of Suetonius’s Life of Augustus:
1
Enrico Cerulli, Il Libro Etiopico dei Miracoli di Maria e le sue Fonte nelle Letterature
del Medio Evo Latino (Rome, 1943), pp. 3-4.
I am grateful to Clark University and to Clark’s Higgins School of Humanities
for sabbatical leave and grant support which allowed me to conduct research for
this paper in Rome during the Spring of 2004. The American Academy in Rome,
and its efficient staff, provided me with housing and access to the Academy’s
superb library. I am also grateful to Fr. William Sheehan of the Biblioteca Apostolica
Vaticana for his assistance.
A somewhat abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the 2005
Annual Meeting of CANE at St. Joseph’s College, Standish, Maine.

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 [52] Although the voting of temples to popular proconsuls was a
commonplace, [Augustus] would not accept any such honor, even
in the provinces, unless his name were coupled with that of Rome.
He even more vigorously opposed the dedication of a temple
to himself at home, and went so far as to melt down the silver
statues previously erected, and to spend the silver coined from
them on golden tripods for Palatine Apollo . . . [53] He always felt
horrified and insulted when called “My Lord,” a form of address
used by slaves to their owners . . .

(2) Augustus consulted the Tiburtine Sibyl (or the Pythia at Delphi,
or some other prophetess of Apollo) who gave him an oracle,
rendered in some versions in three verses, which tells him that there
is, in fact, to be a divine ruler of the world, but that it is not to be
Augustus. The following lines are the first three verses of a much
longer prophecy delivered by the Erythraean Sibyl, as quoted by
Augustine (De civitate Dei, 18.23):
Iudici signum, tellus sudore madescet.
E coelo rex adveniet per secla futurus.
Scilicet in carne praesens ut iudicet orbem.
which I translate as: “In token of judgment, the earth shall drip
with sweat. A king destined to rule forever will arrive from
heaven, present in mortal flesh, in order to judge the world.”
The full prophecy quoted by Augustine was originally, he tells
us, a Greek acrostic, the initial letters of whose lines read: ᾿Ιησοῦς
Χριστὸς Θεοῦ ῾Υιὸς Σωτήρ. The first letters of this phrase, in turn,
read ΙΧΘΥΣ, or “fish,” the familiar symbol of the early Christian
church.2 Augustine’s discussion of Sibylline prophecies of the birth
of Jesus do not mention either Augustus or the miracle of Aracoeli.
Most scholars agree, of course, that “Sibylline” prophecies such
as this are pious early Christian forgeries, that is, interpolations of
Christian doctrine into the confused and miscellaneous body of
pagan prophetic texts which were known as the Sibylline Books.

(3) Following the delivery of the oracle (and sometimes in place of

the oracle), a miracle takes place: a ring of light surrounds the sun.
This, too, may derive from an event recorded in Suetonius’s Life of

2
Cf. Walter Lowrie, Art in the Early Church, second edition, revised (New York,
1965), pp. 55-57: “. . . [T]he choice of the fish as a symbol of Christ seems in the
first instance to have been due to the mere fact that two fishes were included in
the repast near Bethsaida [Mk 6:32-45]. The most summary abbreviation of that
story is the picture of two fishes . . . But it is certain that this symbol owed its great
popularity to the invention of the famous acrostic . . . This in a way deepened the
meaning of the fish symbol in its relation to the Eucharist, emphasizing the fact that
the food there offered is Christ himself . . . The fish appears from the second to the
fourth century and well beyond that in a great variety of connections and upon all
sorts of monuments, upon amulets, carved stones, and rings.“

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 Augustus, referring to the future emperor’s return to Rome from
Greece subsequent to the events of the Ides of March, 44 BC [Aug.
95]:
When [Augustus] returned to Rome from Apollonia at news of
Julius Caesar’s assassination, the sky was clear of clouds, but a
rainbow-like halo formed around the sun; and suddenly lightning
struck the tomb of Caesar’s daughter, Julia . . .
In most versions of the Christian story, including the Arabic and
Ethiopic, the emperor sees, inside the golden ring, a vision of a
young woman holding a small child, clearly Jesus and Mary. He
asks the Sibyl who they are and is told that the boy is the king of
heaven and earth. Augustus tells the Senate about his remarkable
vision. The senators believe in the oracle and its meaning; they
enthusiastically support Augustus’s orders that an altar be
dedicated in his palace (which is assumed in the story to be on the
Capitoline). The altar is to commemorate the divine vision and is
called the Ara Coelestis.

(4) The altar, later3 known in legend as the Ara Coeli, is claimed to
have stood on the site of the medieval Roman church of S. Maria in
Aracoeli, which in turn stands on the site of the much older church
of S. Maria in Capitolio.

(5) The altar in the Chapel of St. Helena in the current thirteenth-
century Church of S. Maria in Aracoeli bears an inscription
recording the emperor’s prophetic vision and an effigy of Augustus
and the Mother and Child,4 linking Augustan Rome with the
Christian Middle Ages:
Luminis hanc almam Matris qui scandis ad aulam
Cunctarum prima que fuit in orbe sita
Noscas quod Cesar tunc struxit Octavianus
Hanc Aram celi sacra proles cum pateret ei.
I translate this roughly as: “You who climb to this propitious palace
of the Mother of Light, first of all to be built in the world, know that
Caesar Octavianus built this Altar of Heaven at the time when the
Divine Child was revealed to him.”

3
Cerulli (above, note 1), p. 416, points out that the name Aracoeli does not
appear in European documents before 1323; previously, the altar said to have
been erected by Augustus was called the “Ara Filii Dei.” The term “celestial altar”
appears first in Arabic and Ethiopic accounts of the legend.
4
For a discussion of these and other artistic representations of the legend,
twelfth to sixteenth centuries, see Ferdinand Piper, Mythologie und Symbolik der
christliche Kunst (Osnabrück, 1972; reprint of the edition of 1847), pp. 485-490.

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FIGURE 1: Thirteenth c. altar, S. Maria in Aracoeli, Rome (cast)

FIGURE 2: detail of altar: the emperor Augustus

216
 FIGURE 3: Mary and Jesus within the ring of light

It is possible to trace the origins of both the myth of Augustus, Mary

and Jesus, and of the present church of S. Maria in Aracoeli back in
time, but only to a certain extent; in neither case can we arrive at a point
of origin. The church is the easier case, and we may look quickly at its
role in the development of the Capitoline Hill through the centuries. As
Richard Krautheimer points out,5 the structures of the current layout of
the Capitoline face mainly west, towards what had become the abitato or
populated area of the city: Michelangelo’s piazza with the statue of Marcus
Aurelius and its three framing palazzi, with S. Maria in Aracoeli higher
up to the left, also facing west. The structures on the ancient Capitoline all
faced east over the Forum, part of the medieval disabitato:6 the Temple of
Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the Temple of Juno Moneta, on the northern
peak, where the church of S. Maria in Aracoeli now stands, and the

5
Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308 (Princeton, 1980), pp.
285-288.
6
Ibid., p. 68: “The contrast between the abitato and the disabitato, as the 16th
century called them . . . persisted until the late nineteenth century: a large expanse
of vineyards, fields, and ruins, interspersed with small settlements and a few farms
surrounding a small densely populated nucleus.” During the medieval period, the
Forum Romanum was called the Campo Vaccino or Cow Pasture.

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Tabularium. By the eighth century or earlier, the Church of S. Maria in
Capitolio had been built on the ruins of the old Temple of Juno.
The map of the medieval Capitol took its final, west-facing shape in
the thirteenth century, and this determined Michelangelo’s design three
hundred years later. In the thirteenth century, a new church and convent
of S. Maria in Aracoeli, as it was then named, took the place of the church
and convent of S. Maria in Capitolio. Its towering position was further
underscored when in 1348 the steep stairs were built ascending from Piazza
Aracoeli. The Church of S. Maria in Aracoeli was much more prominent
and widely visible before the construction of the Victor Emanuel Monument
in 1911.
The history of the structures on the site which concerns our legend
is therefore fairly straightforward: Roman Temple of Juno Moneta, to
eighth-century Church of S. Maria in Capitolio, to the present thirteenth-
century Church of S. Maria in Aracoeli. Not so when we turn to the legend
itself. The Mirabilia Urbis Romae, or Marvels of Rome, the medieval Latin
description of the city of Rome, dating from about 1150, supplies the most
readily accessible version of the miraculous conversion of Augustus:

In the time of the emperor Octavian the senators, seeing him to be of

such great beauty that none could look into his eyes and of such great
prosperity and peace that he made all the world render tribute to him, said
to him, ‘We desire to worship you because the godhead is in you; for if it
were not so all things would not prosper with you as they do.’ But he was
reluctant and demanded a delay and called the Sibyl of Tibur to him, and
he repeated all that the senators had said. She begged for three days time,
during which she kept a strict fast, and then answered him after the third
day. ‘These things, lord emperor, shall surely come to pass:
Token of doom: the earth shall drip with sweat;
From heaven shall come the king for evermore,
And present in the flesh shall judge the world.’
And the other verses that follow. And while Octavian diligently listened
to the Sibyl, heaven opened, and a great brightness shone on him, and
he saw in heaven a virgin exceedingly fair standing on an altar holding a
man-child in her arms. Octavian marveled greatly at this, and he heard a
voice from heaven saying: ‘This is the Virgin who shall conceive the Savior
of the World.’ And again he heard another voice from heaven saying, ‘This
is the altar of the Son of God.’ The emperor straightway fell to the ground
and worshipped the Christ that should come. He showed this vision to the
senators and they likewise marveled exceedingly. The vision took place
in the chamber of Emperor Octavian where the Church of Santa Maria
in Capitolio is now and where the Friars Minor are. Therefore it is called
Santa Maria in Aracoeli.7

There is no indication of awareness here that the church stands on the ruins
of an ancient temple of Juno; indeed, this text, and other versions as well,

7
Francis Morgan Nichols, ed. and trans., The Marvels of Roma: Mirabilia Urbis
Romae, second edition (New York, 1986), Part 2, section 1: “The Vision of Octavian
and the Sibyl’s Answer.”

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seems to claim that Augustus’s residence was on the Capitoline, and not, as
we know to have been the case, on the Palatine.
Other versions of the same legend are to be found in twelfth- to
fourteenth-century chronicles. For example, a version of this legend
occurs in the poem by Guillaume le Clerc de Normandie, a French poet
of the thirteenth century, entitled De Notre Dame. The Flores Temporum of
Hermannus Gigas, a fourteenth-century chronicle of the world’s history
compiled by a Swabian Franciscan, records the same miracle in passing in
the context of a list of portents foretelling the coming of Christ, such as the
appearance of a spring of olive oil in Rome, the death of all sodomites, and
the rising of three suns in the East which merge into one.8
These Latin sources take us back only as far as the twelfth century;
however, the story is much older. Comparetti points out that the legend is
found in eighth-century Byzantine chronicles and makes the claim that the
Latin, Western, versions derive from the Greek East. On the other hand,
a manuscript in the Vatican, Vaticanus Palatinus 227, contains the same
story; this MS has been dated plausibly to the seventh century. Internal
evidence indicates that the author of the text was British and that he used
Byzantine sources of the sixth century.9 This, then, is the most ancient source
I have been able to locate for this legend; the anonymous chronicle reads as
follows, in my translation:
Caesar Augustus, in the 56th year of his reign, in the month of October
(which is called Hyperberetaeus by the Athenians) went to the Capitolium,
which is in the middle of the city in order to learn through divination who
would rule the Roman Republic after him. The Pythia [pythonia] said to
him that a Jewish child [infans hebraeus], descending from heaven by the
will of God, will immediately come to this residence [domicilium]. He will
be born without blemish [macula] and will be an enemy of our altars. And
so, Augustus Caesar, departing from the place of prophecy, built on the
Capitoline a great altar on an elevated site, and upon it he wrote in Latin:
HAEC ARA FILII DEI EST.
The not uncommon confusions are to be seen here: Augustus is assumed to
have his domicilium on the Capitoline Hill; the prophetess is identified as the
Pythia, who rightly belongs in Delphi, in Greece, and not in Italy at all.
Finally, the Suida, a tenth-century Byzantine lexicon10 known to have
been based on much older sources now lost to us, records the legend in

8
A survey of these and other accounts of the Aracoeli legend may be found in
Domenico Comparetti, Vergil in the Middle Ages, E.F.M. Benecke trans. (New York,
1929), pp. 313-314.
9
Ibid., pp. 313-314, and Henri Leclercq, “Marie in Ara Coeli,” Dictionnaire
d’Archéologie Chrétienne et de Liturgie, pp. 2076-2077, vol. 10, part 2 (Paris, 1932).
Leclercq makes an intriguing, if ultimately unprovable, suggestion about the origin
of the Aracoeli legend: “The legend of the erection by Augustus of a Christian Ara
Coeli seems to be connected with a poorly understood ancient inscription. In 1896,
an epitaph of a priestess of Juno was found, describing the goddess as ‘dea virgo
coelestis’; Ara Coeli may be an echo of this.”
10
Suidae Lexicon, I. Bekker ed. (Berlin, 1854); s.v. “Αὔγουστος Καῖσαρ.”

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Greek and supplies, under the heading Αὔγουστος Καῖσαρ, what may be as
close as we can come to the Greek original of the earliest version of our
legend:

“Augustus Caesar, after sacrificing, asked the Pythia who would rule after him.
And she said:
Παῖς Ἑβραῖος κέλεταί με θεοῖς μακάρεσσιν ἀνάσσων
τόνδε δόμον προλιπεῖν καὶ Ἀίδην αὖθις ἱκέσθαι.
λοιπὸν ἄπιθι σιγῶν ἐκ βωμῶν ἡμετέρων.
[“The Hebrew child, ruling over the blessed gods, orders me to leave
this temple and to go straight to Hades. Go in silence hereafter from our
altars.”]
“After leaving the oracle, Augustus set up an altar on the Capitolium, on which
he wrote in Roman letters [Ῥωμαϊκοῖς γράμμασιν]:
ὁ βωμὸς οὗτός ἐστι τοῦ πρωτογόνου Θεοῦ.
[This is the altar of the first-born of God.]”

This is not the end of the story, of course; rather, it is merely the end of what
we have space for here. Some versions of the legend of Augustus and Jesus
include Vergil, either on his own or in company with the prophetess figure.
The appearance of Vergil in this tradition establishes a connection to a vast
body of early Christian and medieval legend which identifies the poet of
the Aeneid as an inspired proto-Christian, a “prophet of the Gentiles,” who
foretold the coming of Jesus in the Fourth Eclogue, and in the allegedly
Christian spiritual content of his epic. The prominent role played by the
Cumaean Sibyl in Aeneid 6 served to establish even more securely in the
post-Classical mind the existence of a constellation of ideas involving
Vergil, the Sibyl, prophecy, Aeneas, Augustus, Jesus, supernatural access
to ultimate religious truths of Fate, Destiny and “sadness at the doubtful
doom of humankind.” Issues such as theses, however, will have to wait for
another time and place.

❖❖❖

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