The temple was considered among Augustus's most impressive archaeological projects, and played an important role in the Secular Games, a religious and artistic festival that he revived in 17 BCE.

[3]During the Secular Games, a religious and artistic festival revived by Augustus in 17 BCE and celebrated periodically thereafter,[4] the temple was used as one of four centres from which the fifteen priests known as the quindecimviri sacris faciundis would issue purifying agents (purgamenta) – torches, sulphur and bitumen – to the Roman people.

[3] According to a depiction of the temple on a coin of Augustus, minted around 19 BCE, its portico was hexastyle (that is, constructed with six columns across its front) and built in the Corinthian order.

[13] Gros has suggested that this story may have been concocted to explain an older, forgotten belief, by which the bells were intended to serve an apotropaic (protective) function against lightning.

[14] It is generally held that this relief shows public monuments worked on by the tomb's founder, Quintus Haterius, a redemptor (building contractor).

[19] Excavations begun in 1811–1812 by the papal architect Giuseppe Camporese [it] eventually confirmed the correct identification of the ruins, though it was not until 1844 that the archaeologist Luigi Canina labelled them as such.

[2] A tentative identification has been made between the temple and a building shown at the eastern edge of the Area Capitolina on the third-century CE map of Rome known as the Forma Urbis Romae.