Augustus built the Temple of Mars Ultor to Mars the Avenger after his victory at the Battle of Philippi over Cassius and Brutus, the assassins of his divine adoptive father Julius Caesar. While the campaign was won in 42 B.C., the temple, enclosed in the new Forum of Augustus, was not dedicated until 2 B.C. The second story of the colonnade of the forum had statues of caryatids, draped female figures that replaced the columns and carried capitals on their heads. These maidens were exact replicas, in reduced scale, of the caryatids from the south porch of the Erechtheum on the Acropolis in Athens, erected in the fifth century B.C. By duplicating the Greek caryatids in his forum, Augustus chose to suggest to the public that his new Golden Age rivaled the Golden Age of Periclean Athens.

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