Aquinum, an altar brings to light the imperial cult of the Roman colony

In ancient Aquinum, a Roman city in southern Latium, the eighteenth excavation campaign conducted by the University of Salento has brought to light two finds that enrich knowledge of local religious practices: a decorated cippus and a marble votive altar. The discovery is part of a multi-year research effort that the Salento university is carrying out at the site, progressively yielding elements of the civic and cultic life of the colony.

The most significant element concerns a new fragment of the altar, which allowed archaeologists to reconstruct an inscription dedicated to the Genius of Augustus, the Lares of Augustus and the Genius of the Colony. This is a set of dedications belonging to the imperial cult, the form of public religiosity that, starting with the principate of Augustus, associated the figure of the emperor with tutelary divine entities, extending the cult to local realities as well through reference to the Genius of the Colony, that is, the protective spirit of the city community. The inscription, once reconstructed in its entirety thanks to the new fragment, thus offers direct evidence of how a provincial city like Aquinum received and reworked the cult promoted by Rome, placing the colony’s traditional deities alongside the new figures linked to the imperial family.

The second find concerns a different area of the site, the Roman theatre, where a marble slab linked to a specific ritual of Roman religion was recovered: the consecration of places struck by lightning. This practice, known as fulguration, required that the exact point where a lightning bolt had struck the ground be delimited and made sacred through a purification rite, transforming an event perceived as a divine manifestation into a place to be treated with religious precautions. The discovery of a slab linked to this ritual inside the theatre suggests that the building, or an area close to it, was affected by a phenomenon of this kind, and that the community responded with the procedures prescribed by Roman tradition.

Taken together, the two finds form a picture that goes beyond the single excavation: they tell of a city that actively participated in the symbolic construction of Augustan power, while maintaining a religious framework capable of including older and more widespread practices, such as that of fulguration. The votive altar, in particular, stands as a first-hand document on the local reception of the imperial cult, a subject that historians of antiquity generally study through literary sources or fragmentary epigraphic evidence from different contexts.

It should be noted that, at present, the news comes from a single source — the announcement of the excavation campaign by the University of Salento, picked up by the press — and no independent confirmation is available of the details concerning the reconstruction of the inscription or the precise dating of the theatre slab. This is a physiological limitation in the phase immediately following an archaeological discovery, when detailed scientific publication requires longer timeframes than the announcement of the find.

The site of Aquinum, the subject of a multi-year excavation campaign now in its eighteenth edition, thus continues to yield elements useful for reconstructing the life of a medium-sized Roman colony, far from the major centres of power but fully embedded in the religious and symbolic circuits of the Augustan empire.