The pignora imperii ("pledges of rule") were objects that were supposed to guarantee the continued imperiumofAncient Rome. One late source lists seven. The sacred tokens most commonly regarded as such were:
Inlate antiquity, some narratives of the founding of Constantinople claim that Constantine I, the first emperor to convert to Christianity, transferred the pignora imperii to the new capital. Though the historicity of this transferral may be in doubt, the claim indicates the symbolic value of the tokens.[3]
The 4th-century scholar Servius notes in his commentarytoVergil's Aeneid that "there were seven tokens (pignora) which maintain Roman rule (imperium Romanum)," and gives the following list:[4]
the Ancile, the sacred shield of Mars Gradivus[7] given to Numa Pompilius, kept in the Regia hidden among eleven other identical copies to confuse would-be thieves. All twelve shields were ritually paraded each year through Rome by the Salii during the Agonum Martialis.
Classicist Alan Cameron notes that three of these supposed tokens were fictional (the ashes, scepter, and veil) and are not named in any other sources as sacred guarantors of Rome. The other four objects were widely attested in Latin literature,[8] but have left no archaeological trace. In the 1730 excavations of the Palatine HillbyFrancesco Bianchini, he noted a stone matching the description of Cybele's needle. However its ultimate fate is unknown, with its destruction likely.[9]
^Ovid, Fasti 3.422; Geraldine Herbert-Brown, Ovid and the Fasti: An Historical Study (Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 76–77; R. Joy Littlewood, A Commentary on Ovid's Fasti, Book 6 (Oxford University Press, 2006) pp. 132–135; Robert Turcan, The Gods of Ancient Rome (Routledge, 2001; originally published in French 1998), p. 59; Andreas Hartmann, Zwischen Relikt Und Reliquie: Objektbezogene Erinnerungspraktiken in Antiken Gesellschaften (Verlag Antike, 2010), pp. 545–565.
^Sabine MacCormack, The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine (University of California Press, 1998), p. 167; Symmachus, Third Relatio 8.
^Clifford Ando, "The Palladium and the Pentateuch: Towards a Sacred Topography of the Later Roman Empire," Phoenix 55 (2001) 369–410, especially pp. 398–399.
^Servius, note to Aeneid7.188: septem fuerunt pignora, quae imperium Romanum tenent: acus matris deum, quadriga fictilis Veientanorum, cineres Orestis, sceptrum Priami, velum Ilionae, palladium, ancilia.
^It is disputed what the item was precisely. Meteor showers during the Second Punic War motivated the Romans, after consulting the Sibylline Books, to introduce the cult of the Great Mother of Ida (Magna Mater Idaea, also known as Cybele) to the city. With the aid of their ally Attalus I (241-197 BC), they brought the goddess' most important image, a large black stone that was said to have fallen from the sky, from Pessinus to Rome (Livy 10.4-11.18). This was called a baetylus
