Augustus

XVI

ABDICATION

30–27 B.C.

The claim of clemency should not be taken at face value. Many were forgiven, but some were not. Sosius was given employment, while Antony’s loyal army commander, Canidius, who was unfairly criticized for abandoning his legions after Actium, was executed: despite having boasted that he did not fear dying, he is reported to have lost his nerve at the end.

Vengeance was also taken on the dead. Antony’s memory was formally expunged. His name was obliterated from the Fasti, the state registers of official events. His statues were removed. It was to be as if he had never existed. The Senate, not unprompted surely, voted that no member of the Antonius clan should be named Marcus (a measure that was later repealed). His birthday was made a dies nefastus, an unlucky day, on which public business could not be conducted.

What had taken place, the meaning of the campaign that had been won and lost, needed to be attractively dramatized as an irreversible turning point in history. Actium, which had really been no more than a scrappy breakout from a blockade, was transformed into a great battle—a duel between Rome and anti-Rome, between good and evil.

The poets associated with Maecenas worked on an imaginative rewriting of history. Horace produced an ode that celebrated Octavian’s achievement at Actium (in fact, as we have seen, the credit for the campaign goes to Agrippa) and blackened Cleopatra’s name. He described her as

Plotting destruction to our Capitol

And ruin to the Empire with her squalid

Pack of diseased half-men—mad, wishful grandeur,

Tipsy with sweet good luck!

But all her fleet burnt, scarcely one ship saved—

That tamed her rage; and Caesar, when his galleys

Chased her from Italy, soon brought her, dreaming

And drugged with native wine,

Back to the hard realities of fear.

In this vivid caricature, there is not a single accurate assertion. As we have seen, Cleopatra was not plotting the end of the Roman empire, all her fleet was not burned, Octavian did not chase her anywhere, certainly not from Italy, and there is no evidence that the queen was a drunk. However, it is fine poetry.

It was the leading poet of the age, Virgil, who drew the fullest picture of the battle in his great national epic about Rome’s beginnings, the Aeneid. Prophetically engraved on the shield of Julius Caesar’s ancestor Aeneas, Octavian is envisioned at the head of tota Italia, all Italy. The star or comet that blazed in the night sky for a week after Caesar’s assassination shines above Octavian as he sets sail against the corrupt and cowardly east.

High up on the poop [he] is leading

The Italians into battle, the Senate and People with him,

His home gods and the great gods: two flames shoot up from his helmet

In jubilant light, and his father’s star dawns over its crest.

Defining the past in glowing terms was only half of what needed to be done if the victorious regime was to establish itself firmly in the hearts and minds of the ruling class and of the people at large. It was also important to present Octavian as the natural ruler of Rome—to develop a personality cult and an iconography of power. This was to be achieved by two means.

First, Octavian made the little complex of houses on Rome’s Palatine Hill, where he and Livia lived, a symbol of his authority. Some of these buildings substantially survive (although at the time of writing they are closed to the public). A ramp connected them to an adjacent temple of Apollo, which was an integral part of the complex. Octavian had vowed to build it during the wars against Sextus Pompeius, but its construction only became a major project after Actium; the temple was dedicated in 28 B.C.

Almost nothing of it remains now, but it was as splendid an edifice as could be designed. Its walls were of solid bright-white marble (the walls of Roman temples were usually of brick and concrete with marble cladding). The doors were gilded and inlaid with ivory. On the roof stood a chariot of the sun. The temple was surrounded by, or connected to, a portico of giallo antico, a speckled yellow marble from quarries in Numidia.

The Sibylline Books were removed from their traditional home in the cellars of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol and stored under a colossal statue of Apollo that stood in front of the new temple. The books were a much-valued collection of oracular utterances in Greek hexameters, which were consulted in times of trouble, not to discover the future but to learn how to avert the anger of the gods. Their presence in the precincts of Octavian’s house was a telling emblem of his unique role in the state.

The temple was not used simply for religious purposes. It became, in effect, a cultural center. Remembering Alexandria and taking up a plan of Julius Caesar’s before his murder, Octavian located two public libraries there, one for books in Greek and the other for those in Latin. Medallion portraits of famous writers were affixed to the walls. Here authors delivered public readings and the chief librarian, a polymath called Gaius Julius Hyginus, taught classes.

Octavian also received a personality makeover. The object was to give him something of the sparkle of divinity, or at least of semidivine, heroic status. Stories began to circulate of his miraculous childhood and of prophecies that foreshadowed his current greatness. It is uncertain when these first emerged and whether they were invented by the regime or unofficially encouraged as spontaneous urban myths. But it is plausible that from this time new accounts of Octavian’s childhood appeared that lent legitimacy to his political dominance.

Dio preserves an unconvincing tale that echoes one told of Alexander the Great’s mother and was no doubt designed to encourage a direct comparison. When Julius Caesar decided to make Octavian his heir, he was influenced by “Atia’s [his mother’s] emphatic declaration that the youth had been engendered by Apollo; for while sleeping in his temple, she said, she thought she had intercourse with a serpent, and it was this that caused her at the end of her pregnancy to bear a son.”

On the day of Octavian’s birth, Atia dreamed that her intestines were raised up into the sky and spread out all over the earth, and during the same night her husband, Octavius, thought that the sun rose from her womb. The following day the elder Octavius came across a learned expert on divination, Publius Nigidius Figulus, and explained what had happened. Figulus replied: “You have begotten a master over us!”

An even grander (and even less likely) endorsement was devised: one night the elder statesman Cicero dreamed that Jupiter was going to appoint a senator’s son as ruler of Rome. The boys all presented themselves at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Best and Greatest) on the Capitol. The statue of Jupiter stretched out its hand and said: “Romans, you shall have an end to civil wars, when this boy becomes your leader.”

Another senior senator and leading traditionalist, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, had a similar experience: when the boy was walking in a procession to the same temple of Jupiter, Catulus saw the god throw what looked like a figurine of Rome in the form of a goddess into the lap of his toga.

There is ingenious method behind these stories. The three men cited were safely dead, so they could not be invited to confirm or deny their accuracy. In fact, Catulus died before Octavian’s fourth birthday, rather early for the young hopeful to be taking part in a public ceremony.

More significantly, Nigidius, Cicero, and Catulus had all been distinguished republicans. They had opposed Julius Caesar, and the first two had sided with Pompey in the civil war. The point of the anecdotes is that they gave the young revolutionary, whose career had been founded on illegality and violence, a respectable, conservative pedigree.

In August of 29 B.C., Octavian celebrated three triumphs—over Dalmatia, where he had campaigned successfully in 35 and 34; over Cleopatra (meaning Actium); and over Egypt (meaning the capture of Alexandria). They were magnificent affairs, during which the spoils of Egypt were displayed on large carts. An effigy of the dead Cleopatra lying on a couch was a prize exhibit and her surviving children, Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene, and Ptolemy Philadelphus walked in the pageant.

After them rode Octavian, in the traditional chariot drawn by four horses, wearing a gold-embroidered toga and a flowered tunic. On his head was a laurel wreath signifying victory. Usually the general being honored by a triumph followed the holders of the offices of state and the Senate; but, on this occasion, Octavian went first, in a clear visual demonstration of his political predominance.

A few days later the Senate House, or Curia Hostilia, rebuilt after the mob burned it down on the day of Julius Caesar’s funeral, opened for business with the new name of the Curia Julia; a new speakers’ platform was constructed, decorated with rostra, ships’ prows, from Actium, and the temple to the now deified dictator, erected on the spot in the Forum where he had been cremated on an impromptu pyre, was dedicated.

Octavian had once been proud to call himself divi filius, for it authorized his power in the eyes of his adoptive father’s adoring soldiers and ordinary Roman citizens. But since the Sicilian War he had not used the title so frequently and now, from this high point of celebration, Octavian’s propaganda begins to make even less of Julius Caesar than in the past: the dictator had been an extremist, who destroyed old Rome, and the new Rome wanted to associate itself with tradition rather than innovation.

Sharp-eyed observers were struck by the fact that Octavian was accompanied during his triumph by two teenagers, riding on the chariot’s right and left trace horses. One was Gaius Claudius Marcellus, his sister Octavia’s fourteen-year-old son, and the other was Tiberius Claudius Nero, his wife Livia’s eldest son, thirteen.

Their arrival on the verge of adulthood promised to transform the dynamics of Octavian’s inner circle. Octavia was about six years older than her devoted brother. She adored her son, an attractive and intelligent boy, “cheerful in mind and disposition,” and, just as Julius Caesar had done in his own case, Octavian took a special interest in his development.

Tiberius was also a promising lad, but he was not of Octavian’s blood and so took second place in his plans. The man who was now in sole command of the Roman empire was beginning to consider how to ensure his regime’s long-term future. With his always uncertain health, it was not too soon to establish a dynastic succession; if his nephew fulfilled his promise, he would be an ideal heir.

There was another thing: Octavian liked and trusted youth. He and his “band of brothers,” his two trusted former school friends, Agrippa and Maecenas, had set out together on their great enterprise to avenge Caesar’s murder and win power when in their late teens. The challenges they faced called forth their talent; now Octavian was looking forward to promoting the new younger generation that was about to emerge. Perhaps as early as 29 B.C., he arranged for the minimum ages of officeholders to be reduced: in the case of a quaestor, from thirty years to twenty-five; of a consul, from forty-two to thirty-seven. Senators’ sons were expected to familiarize themselves with administration; they were allowed to wear the purple-striped toga, which was the uniform of a senator, encouraged to attend Senate meetings, and given officer posts during their military service.

Sadly, Octavian and his beloved Livia were childless, although she suffered one miscarriage. It is curious that both had had children by their former spouses. Perhaps, as one classical source has it, this was a case of physical incompatibility, but more probably some illness led one or the other to become infertile.

As yet the boys were too young to help shoulder the burdens of government. That remained the task of Agrippa and Maecenas, although little love was lost between them. The former was “more a rustic at heart than a man of refined tastes,” although he admired great art and argued that all paintings and sculptures should be nationalized rather than spirited away into private collections where they were never seen. He was a collector on a grand scale, spending an astonishing 1.2 million sesterces on two paintings—one of them depicting the Greek hero Ajax and the other Aphrodite—which he installed in the public baths he built.

By contrast, Maecenas could almost “outdo a woman in giving himself up to indolence and soft luxury.” He delighted in silks and jewels; he was an epicure, who introduced to fashionable dining tables a new delicacy, the flesh of young donkeys; and he was reputed to have been the first person to build a heated swimming pool in the capital. He was married to the beautiful but arrogant Terentia. They were always quarreling, but her husband remained fond of her and invariably sought reconciliation. It was said of him that he married a thousand times, although he only had one wife.

Terentia attracted, and apparently won, Octavian’s favors, but this seems not to have affected the two men’s relationship. Although he was uxorious, Maecenas was not monogamous. He had many affairs, including one with a famous actor, Bathyllus, a freedman and friend of Octavian. Although sleeping with men was apparently not to his taste, Octavian had no objection to multifarious lifestyles among members of his circle.

Octavian used to poke fun at his friend’s precious, overelaborate style of writing, by parodying it in personal letters to him. Macrobius, a writer of the fifth century A.D., quotes an example: “Goodbye, my ebony of Medullia, ivory from Etruria, silphium from Arretium, diamond of the Adriatic, pearl from the Tiber, Cilnian emerald, jasper of the Iguvians, Persenna’s beryl, Italy’s carbuncle—in short, you charmer of unfaithful wives.”

Though his private life was colorful, Maecenas showed sleepless energy in times of crisis, and he gave excellent political advice. He did not seek public political office, preferring to operate informally, behind the scenes. As we have seen, he cultivated the finest poets of the age, ensuring that, so far as possible and without the application of censorship, geniuses such as Virgil and Horace stayed on message.

Agrippa could not stand Maecenas’ exotic and effeminate manners. Straightforward, direct, and loyal, he was the finest general and admiral of the age. He made up for Octavian’s lack of military skills, as had been tacitly acknowledged by the award of the corona rostrata for his services in the Naulochus campaign. The war against Sextus Pompeius would not have been won without him, and he had been discreetly invaluable in Illyricum. Now, as the mastermind of victory at Actium, he received the right to display an azure banner and (of more practical value) the freehold of country estates in Egypt.

Agrippa was completely loyal to Octavian and to the public service. In fact, he regarded them as one and the same, and it would be a bad day for the regime were he ever to see them as different. Completely trusted, he became (in effect) Octavian’s deputy—nearly his equal, but always a step behind when on parade.

According to a near contemporary historian, Agrippa “was…well-disciplined to obedience, but to one man only, yet eager to command others; in whatever he did he never admitted the possibility of delay. With him, an idea was implemented as soon as it was thought of.” Portrait busts show a man with hard and determined features, someone whose disapproval was to be feared—perhaps even by his friend and master? He held official posts, but was as uninterested in the trappings of authority as Maecenas, albeit for a completely different reason. While Maecenas could not really be bothered with power (being satisfied with influence), Agrippa cared for it passionately—but only for its reality.

Although no records survive of Agrippa’s private opinions, we may surmise that he watched Octavian’s growing affection for Marcellus with unease. As the young man grew up, Agrippa could well find an inexperienced heir interfering in his freedom of action, interposing himself between him and Octavian. That would not do.

The end of the civil wars brought a substantial peace dividend. A grand total of sixty legions under arms in 31 B.C. was reduced to the minimum necessary to guard the empire from external invasion. Octavian set the number at twenty-eight legions, or about 150,000 men, all of whom were Roman citizens. These were brigaded with about the same number of auxiliary troops, noncitizens recruited from the less Romanized and less militarily secure provinces (for example, Gaul and northern Africa). These auxiliaries often served near or in their homelands—a sensible policy, for it gave the provinces an active role in their own defense.

The army was permanently stationed where it was most needed: along the imperial frontiers in the east and northern Africa, Spain, northeast Gaul, and what we now call the Balkans. These dispositions were adequate, but there was no reserve to send to trouble spots in times of emergency. Intent on reducing public expenditure and seeing no great and imminent threat, Octavian was willing to take the risk of a lean military establishment.

He then turned his attention to civilian matters. According to Suetonius, he gave serious consideration after Actium to bringing back the Republic, but everything we know about Octavian—above all, his slow, undeviating pursuit of mastery—suggests that this must be a misunderstanding. What he did do was give very careful thought to the kind of polity that should now be installed. Dio imagined that a debate took place at this time in Octavian’s presence, in which Agrippa put the case for a democratic or, in effect, republican constitution, and Maecenas argued the benefits of monarchy. Though such a discussion probably never took place, it is true that Octavian found a way forward that married these two opposing positions. As usual, he took his time, and a good three years passed before he came to a conclusion.

In 28 B.C., Octavian held his sixth consulship, this time alongside Agrippa. All the acts of the triumvirs were annulled, and assurances given that there would never be a return to the terrible past. The consuls assumed censoria potestas, the powers of censors. The censors were two senior officials elected every five years. They had three main tasks: first, to hold a lustrum or general ritual purification of the people; second, to conduct a census of Roman citizens; and third, to supervise the conduct of citizens, and more especially of members of the Senate.

The census held by Octavian and Agrippa revealed that there were 4,063,000 citizens (we do not know whether the number included women and children). A more ticklish job was to identify and weed out senatorial undesirables. The number of senators was reduced from one thousand to a somewhat more manageable eight hundred. As Suetonius records, this was a highly unpopular procedure. At the meeting when the outcome of the review of the Senate was announced, Octavian is said to have worn a sword and steel corselet beneath his tunic. Senators were allowed to approach only after their togas were searched.

The regime was not yet quite ready to chart a course for the long term, but an awkward incident took place which strongly suggested that a new political framework must be put in place sooner rather than later. People needed to know what the rules of the political game now were.

Marcus Licinius Crassus, the able grandson of Julius Caesar’s onetime colleague, returned to Rome from a highly successful campaign on the Macedonian frontier. He claimed not only a triumph but also spolia opima. This high and rare honor was granted to a general who had killed the enemy commander with his own hands and stripped him of his armor—namely, the spolia opima, or splendid spoils. This was what Crassus had done. In the history of the state, only two men had achieved this feat previously.

Unchallenged control of the legions was crucial to Octavian’s hold on power, and so he felt it important that no other independent personality should be allowed to win a military reputation. It was unthinkable for Crassus to dedicate the armor of his defeated opponent, according to the traditional ritual, in the tiny antique Temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol. So a technicality was cited to prevent him. Crassus was allowed his triumph, but nothing more is heard of him; we must suppose that excessive keenness brought his military career to a premature end.

At last in 27 B.C. Octavian, now thirty-six years old, was ready to unveil his constitutional blueprint. On January 1, he entered his seventh consulship with Agrippa again as his colleague. On the Ides (the thirteenth of the month) he made a most extraordinary speech to the Senate—perhaps the most important speech of his life. Dio gave him words that cannot have been very far from those he actually uttered:

I lay down my office in its entirety and return to you all authority absolutely—authority over the army, the laws and the provinces—not only those territories which you entrusted to me, but those which I later secured for you.

For most of Octavian’s listeners, the statement came as a shock. No one knew exactly how to react, and his cautious audience either believed him or pretended to. While he was speaking, senators broke in with shouts and interjections.

When he sat down, the protests continued. With a great show of reluctance, he allowed himself to be persuaded to accept an unusually large “province” for ten years, consisting of Spain, Gaul, and Syria, presumably with proconsular authority; he would be able to choose deputies, or legates, to rule them on his behalf while he remained consul at Rome. All other provinces would fall under direct senatorial management in the old way: that is, the Senate would appoint former consuls and praetors to govern them.

A grateful Senate voted Octavian new honors. The doorposts of his house on the Palatine were decorated with laurel and the lintel with oak leaves for having saved the lives of Roman citizens (as coins had it, ob cives servatos). A golden shield was set up in the Senate House, as he later proudly recalled, “in recognition of my valour, my clemency, my justice and my piety.”

In a remarkable innovation, Octavian was given a new cognomen, by which he was to be known in future. There had been an idea of calling Rome’s second founder, as the rhetoric had it, by the name of its original founder Romulus. But Romulus had made himself king and, according to one story, had been murdered by angry senators. A much better proposition was Augustus, meaning Revered One; and so it was agreed. Octavian’s official name was now Imperator Caesar Augustus.

A modest title was adopted for everyday use: princeps, “first [or leading] citizen.” It had respectable precedents: the leader of the Senate had always been called princeps senatus, an honor now accorded to Augustus, and men such as Pompey and Crassus had also been known as principes. A new name signified a new start. Octavian, the bloodstained triumvir, was now Augustus, the law-abiding princeps.

In making these arrangements, Augustus aimed primarily at persuading the Senate that he was not heading in the same direction as his adoptive father—toward, that is, an out-and-out autocracy, even toward something like a Hellenistic monarchy. If enough senators believed that he intended to follow in Julius Caesar’s footsteps, Augustus ran a high risk of incurring his own Ides of March.

Also, there was no one on hand, apart from the Senate, to help Augustus in the laborious job of running the empire. He needed the collaboration of the ruling class, and this they would be unlikely to supply unless they were satisfied with the new order of things.

The Senate was not quite the body it had been. New men from the Italian countryside had filled the many gaps left by the old governing families that had been weakened in the civil wars or had lost their money and estates. Many came from regions that had received citizenship as little as fifty years before. Theirs was an Italian rather than a Roman identity. Even more controversially, leading men from southern Gaul and Spain, provinces that had long since adopted the Roman language and culture, were recruited as senators. All these arrivistes saw their fate as inextricably linked to the new regime. So did a good number of impoverished aristocrats, for the astute Augustus took good care to fund them generously and thereby constrain their freedom to oppose him. He bound other noble clans to him by arranging marriages with his relatives.

Nevertheless, members of the Senate still held a residual, deeply felt belief in Rome’s constitution. They would not accept one-man rule; and they expected the state to remain a collective enterprise even if led by one man.

The presentation on January 13 of 27 B.C. was a piece of theater, of course. The Senate and the people remained, as they always had been, the sole sources of legal authority, but Augustus did not hand back any real power. In the last analysis he owed his dominant position to the army (and to a lesser extent to the people, who could be relied on to reelect him as consul for as many terms as he liked). It was no accident that his governorship of Spain, Gaul, and Syria gave him the command of twenty legions. The legions had legitimate reason to be there: the northern of the two Spanish provinces was still not entirely subdued; Gaul remained unruly; and Syria abutted the untrustworthy Parthians. But, by comparison, the “senatorial” provinces, to be governed by proconsuls in the ordinary way, were calm; only three of them required armies, and in total, they commanded five or six legions. Thus, most of Rome’s armies were under the command of the princeps; as long as they and their commanders stayed loyal, he was safe.

Another important source of Augustus’ power was patronage. He had inherited Julius Caesar’s empire-wide clientela, and no doubt he had greatly expanded it even before Actium won him Antony’s clientela too. His authority across the empire was expressed through a web of personal connections and loyalties, to which no other Roman could remotely aspire. In every community large or small, leading men were under an obligation to him, and were usually rewarded with the gift of Roman citizenship.

Augustus was pleased to boast: “When I had put an end to the civil wars, having acquired supreme power over the empire with universal consent, I transferred the Republic from my control into that of the Senate and People of Rome.” That was literally correct—the machinery of constitutional government came creakily back into operation—but for anyone with eyes to see, the truth of the matter was obvious. The princeps admitted it himself, stating baldly: “After this time, I exceeded everybody in authority.”

This was acceptable because Augustus held no unconstitutional or novel office. Broadly speaking, he was acting within precedent. Also, he gave back to the political class its glittering prizes. Once more it became worthwhile to compete for political office (even though the princeps tended to select the candidates). The ambitious and the able could win glory on the floor of the Senate or in the outposts of empire.

It would be wrong to suppose that Romans failed to understand what was going on. They were not deceived. They could see that Augustus’ power ultimately rested on force. However, his constitutional settlement gave him legitimacy and signaled a return to the rule of law. For this, most people were sincerely grateful.

Augustus’ “restored Republic” was a towering achievement, for it transformed a bankrupt and incompetent polity into a system of government that delivered the rule of law, wide participation by the ruling class, and, at the same time, strong central control. It installed an autocracy with the consent of Rome’s—and indeed of Italy’s—independent-minded elites. Some Roman historians, among them Tacitus a century or so later, mourned the death of liberty, but at the time politicians, citizens, and subjects of the empire recognized that the new constitutional arrangements would bring stability and the promise of fair and effective public administration.

If Julius Caesar had lived he would probably have devised a far more radical scheme, imposing a brutally abrupt transition from a republican past to an imperial future. Augustus may have been less brilliant than his adoptive father, but he was wiser. He understood that if his new system was to last, it should be seen to grow out of what came before. Rather than insist on a chasm, he built a bridge.