My research on this subject has developed over the last forty years in a wide variety of directions: from investigating the reasons that led to the restoration of this college of priests, to exploring the place of worship and exploiting the information gleaned from reading the annual reports left to us by this brotherhood. I also took advantage of the lecture to close, once and for all I hope, a number of files I had put aside in the 1980s, when I was writing the synthesis I devoted to the arvales.
Who were the arvales brothers? They were a brotherhood of twelve priests, whose mission was to celebrate an annual sacrifice in a sacred grove 8 km west of Rome, to Dea Dia, a goddess who dispensed good celestial light at the crucial moment when cereals were ripening. They were responsible for the goddess's sacred wood, and were also charged with celebrating religious services in Rome, along with the other public priests, for the salvation of the prince. So who were these arvals, and in particular the first arvals? We know their names from the list of attendees that appears under each protocol of the brotherhood's meetings. But we had never studied them as a group, and we didn't know why the emperor Augustus had restored this brotherhood. Based on the biographies of the first arvals, I set out to reconstruct why the brotherhood was re-founded. At the time, it was thought that the brotherhood had been revived by Octavian/Augustus in the very place where it had been celebrating, if not forever, at least for a long time, the cult of Dea Dia. Four years ago, I spoke at length to my audience about this problem, and I believe I demonstrated that Octavian actually created the arvales brothers far more than he restored their activities. In the 1st century B.C., scholars still remembered the name "arvale brother", without really knowing what these confreres did. It was an old public or aristocratic institution, long since moribund, before the new masters of Rome saw what they could do with it.
For my part, I embarked at the time on what is known as a prosopographical study of the arvals sitting in the brotherhood during the first century of their second life. My conclusions were as follows. The first arvals and even the arvals of the Julio-Claudian century were aristocrats of the highest rank. Most belonged to old patrician families, the Claudii, the Cornelii, the Valerii, the Domitii, the Pompeii and of course the Iulii.
