Pergamon and the Ara Pacis Augustae

Abstract What can monuments of Attalid and post-Attalid Pergamon and its world illuminate about the Ara Pacis Augustae and the artistic world of Rome, the metropolis, at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire? This chapter critiques prior answers to that question about a ‘Pergamene’ Ara Pacis, with its distinctive melange of ‘Roman’ and ‘Greek’ elements. It probes what appropriation and exchange can have been like regarding imagination, authorship, patronage, facture, and reception in a proto-global world that saw objects and ideas fruitfully in motion around the Hellenistic/Roman Mediterranean. Visual echoes and resonances made key political and cultural points. What archaeological, visual, and historical evidence and what models can ground an account of the Roman encounter with Pergamon and Cyzicus? The chapter uses the Ara Pacis itself as a spur towards the reconstruction of kinds of Roman viewership of the Attalids’ artistic legacy.