The Caesareum or aedes Divum (Temple of the Divine Caesars) was part of the complex of the Arval sanctuary today located at Magliana Vecchia, at the foot of the sacred grove of the goddess Dia. It was a minor temple where deceased and deified emperors (Divi) were worshipped: the Arvals immolated animal victims in their honor on the second day of the festivals.
Specifically, the records, the acta fratrum Arvalium, attest that in front of the Caesareum on the second day of the festivals, the Arvals consumed the morning banquet (epulati sunt) in aedem Caesarei, and the afternoon banquet in Caesareo. Since the banquets also took place in the tetrastylum, it would seem that the words tetrastylum and Caesareum or aedes Caesarei refer to a single area. Based on an examination of the confraternity’s commentarii, Scheid, one of the foremost scholars of the Arval ceremonies, argues that everything leads to the belief that the Caesareum was an independent area that incorporated a subordinate element: an enclosure, with a number of decorative or functional elements, and specifically the tetrastylum. The Caesareum would thus have been the name given to an entire sector of the sacred area, whose function was worshipping the Divi: this space contained a building called the aedes of the Caesareum or tetrastylum, in which statues of the emperors were erected and, when necessary, seats and banquet couches of the Arvales were placed.
The Caesareum could possibly be identified as a small shrine (sacellum) or, more likely, as the open porticoed space (photo), where the statues of the emperors must have been displayed, some pedestals with related inscriptions of which were found in the 16th century. The remains, which are no longer visible today, were first identified by Sallustio Peruzzi, a humanist and architect and son of the more famous architect Baldassarre Peruzzi, in the 16th century. Peruzzi described and measured the temple: the sacellum was 4.40 meters wide and 6.20 meters long, with four columns at the corners, travertine-clad walls, and an apse on the back wall (photo).
It was rebuilt in the 2nd or early 3rd century AD and was used until the time of Gordian III in the mid-3rd century. The scholar described the nine busts found in the area: “Statues number nine, of emperors with wreaths of corn […]. Each one had an epitaphio and at the end of the epitaphio there was ‘Frati Arvali’ and there were nine epitaphi corresponding to the nine statues up to Gordian.”
It has been studied how the statues were found and later got lost: three are still in two European museums, two in the Louvre Museum in Paris (Antoninus Pius and Lucius Verus) and one at the British Museum in London (Marcus Aurelius). The scholar Evers hypothesizes that this cycle of excellent sculptures, later housed in the apse of the tetrastylum, originated from the gallery of Divi from the 2nd and 3rd centuries, chosen from the statues that decorated the Caesareum during a period of general renovation in the Severan age.
Reference Bibliography:
H. Broise, J. Scheid, Tra terra e cielo: la topografia ed il culto del lucus Deae Diae, in Recherches archéologiques à La Magliana, 3. Un bois sacré du Suburbium romain : topographie générale du site ad Deam Diam. Roma Antica 8. Roma: École française de Rome; Soprintendenza Speciale Archeologia Belle Arti Paesaggio di Roma 2020
J. Scheid, Romulus et ses frères. Le college des Frères Arvales, modèle de culte public dans la des empereurş, EFR 275, Roma 1990
J. Scheid, s.v. Deae Diae lucus, in Lexicon Topographicum Urbis Romae. Suburbium, vol. II, Roma 2004, pp. 189-191