LAUSR

AFTERTHE BATTLE OF Naulochus in 36 BCE, a naval columnwas erected in the Roman forum in Octavian’s honor, decorated with the prows of captured ships and topped with a gilded honorific statue. Visually, this column openly echoed another naval column situated nearby: that of Gaius Duilius, the hero of the First PunicWar, commemorating his victory at the Battle of Mylae, fought some two centuries earlier in roughly the same stretch of sea asOctavian’s victory. A statue of Duilius was later incorporated into the gallery of summi viri in the Forum Augusti, accompanied by an elogium mentioning Duilius’ column, and it is likely that it was under Augustus, too, that the Duilius monument was “restored,” complete with a revamped inscription (re)carved on lunar marble, and featuring archaic orthography. The two naval victories were thus commemorated in parallel in the memorial landscape of Rome: one gilded, polished, new; the other constructedly archaic. Harnessing the spatial politics of memory by situating the statues in deliberately close proximity to one another, Augustus located his victory in a line of succession from the heroes of the Punic Wars, seemingly not merely echoing their success, but improving it in gilded splendor. The same strategy could be seen in the Forum Augusti, where the known figures in the gallery included not just Duilius, but M. Claudius Marcellus, Q. Fabius Maximus “Cunctator,” and Scipio Aemilianus. Even as he was giving space to the heroes of the Punic Wars in the memorial landscape of Rome, Octavian/Augustus was also engaged in another “reconstruction”: that of the city of Carthage. Around 29 BCE, the year Virgil is said to have