We then examined the current state of this generally accepted hypothesis, which doesn't necessarily prove that I was right.
There are no known arvals from before Octavian/Augustus, apart from Romulus. The earliest are known from the dedication of the arvale calendar and, above all, from the attendance lists in the first two known minutes of the brotherhood. We have discussed the precise identity of the first arvales, examining the criticisms made, or else criticizing certain choices, even though they were approved by masters such as R. Syme. The result is that the hypothesis that the first arvales were former friends or political enemies of Octavian, whom the triumvir brought together in this brotherhood to signify the reconciliation of the elites, still holds. The subsequent prosopography of the arvales between the Flavian and Severan emperors seems to verify this hypothesis: in AD 70, as between AD 193 and 196, it would appear that the emperors had the gaps in the brotherhood filled by aristocrats belonging to the Flavian and Severan parties, to signify that the elite had been reconciled.
In 1975 and especially in 1990, I shed light on Octavian's choice of this brotherhood, using the parallelism that exists between the creation of the Arvale brotherhood and Virgil's writing of the Georgics : both initiatives concern agriculture, and were completed between 34 and 28 BC in the entourage of the triumvir Octavian. A check of the work done since on the Georgics confirms that my impression was correct: following the example of the Georgics, the "restoration" of the arvals was intended to underline the excellence of Octavian's party against that of Mark Antony (see the foreword to the reprint of Romulus and his Brothers (BEFAR, vol. 275, Rome, 2016, pp. VIII-X).
We took advantage of this lecture to explain why we had not retained in our 1975 and 1990 works three documents that could be related to the Arval brothers: two triangular bases of tripod or thymiatèria supports, which are preserved in the Louvre and the Capitoline Museum, one side of which depicts a crown of ears of corn similar to that worn by the arvales, two passages in Suetonius(Divine Augustus, 94, 11) and Cassius Dion(Roman History, 45, 2, 1) which relate an omen delivered to the young Octavian on the via Campana, and finally the attribution of the inscription CIL VI, 970 to the arvales brothers.
