The Winter Solstice as a Roman Cultural Fingerprint from the Mythical Origins of Rome to Augustus

Abstract

The winter solstice shaped Rome and its landscape from the ancestral cult of Saturnus as primordial god of the Roman territory before the city’s founding to its use by Augustus as one of the signs of his multiple celestial and solar connections. The important feasts around this date are well known and, in this paper, we propose to demonstrate how some significant public monuments, possibly from the origins of Rome and certainly from during Augustus’s reign, are oriented towards the winter solstice sunrise or sunset. To demonstrate the importance and truly cultural sense of these observations we show how the solstitial orientation is dominant in the cities founded or significantly rebuilt under Augustus. The winter solstice appears then as a powerful and stable cultural marker that traverses the history of the city of Rome, links Augustus with the origins of the city as a kind of new founder–as was already known through other evidence–and connects any provincial cities with Rome to show the depth of their commitment to her as a part of a common world view.