Augustus

XVII

WHOM THE GODS LOVE

27–23 B.C.

In the meantime, the huge provincia called for his attention. Augustus’ first stop was Gaul, where rumor had it that he intended to complete the task Julius Caesar had left unfinished in 54 B.C.—an invasion of the remote island of Britannia, perched on the edge of the known world. But Augustus was too busy to waste his time on such a diversion.

During the civil wars, Gaul had fallen into turmoil; Augustus’ presence reasserted Roman authority. After establishing order and conducting a census, he moved on to Spain, where a thornier problem awaited. The native tribes in the northern of the two Spanish provinces, especially the Astures (whence the modern Asturias) and the Cantabri (in the area of today’s Santander and Bilbao), had never been fully subdued. Augustus led a campaign against them, but this time he was without Agrippa to help him. The tribes used guerrilla tactics, hiding in their mountain fastnesses and cleverly avoiding the full-scale battle for which the legion was designed and for which they themselves were poorly adapted. Whenever the Romans marched in a given direction, they found themselves facing enemy fighters on high ground in front of them. In valleys and woods they stumbled into ambushes.

The princeps was superstitious, and devoutly believed in premonitory signs. He always carried a piece of sealskin as an amulet against thunder and lightning, which he feared. During the Spanish campaign, the amulet worked its magic for him. On a night march during a thunderstorm, a flash of lightning scorched his litter and killed a slave who was walking ahead with a torch. In thanks for this narrow escape, he built the Temple of Jupiter Tonans (the Thunderer) on the edge of the Capitol overlooking the Forum. It was known for its magnificence and contained famous works of art. Augustus often visited it.

As so often when he faced a crisis (particularly a military one), Augustus fell ill—according to Dio, “from the fatigue and anxiety caused by these conditions.” He took the waters in the Pyrenees and convalesced in Tarraco (today’s Tarragona). His deputy swiftly brought the fighting to a successful conclusion, which was attributed (of course) to the genius of the princeps. The illness seems to have lasted at least for a year, although our sources tell us nothing of its nature. To pass the time Augustus wrote an autobiography, which he dedicated to Agrippa and Maecenas. Sadly, the book has not survived.

During the late Republic, the wives of senior Roman officials did not often travel abroad with their husbands. Augustus himself ruled that the legates he appointed to the provinces at his disposal should not spend time with their wives or, if they insisted on doing so, then only outside the campaigning season (generally March to October).

However, we have it on good authority that Livia accompanied her husband on his travels to west and east. She was probably with him in Gaul and Spain, although she will have stayed safely in the rear when Augustus was with the army, and tended him when he was ill.

Livia was an able businesswoman and over the years accumulated numerous properties and estates across the empire. Her tours around the Mediterranean as Rome’s first lady allowed her to inspect her acquisitions and check that they were being well managed. In Gaul she owned land with a copper mine. Her property portfolio also included palm groves in Judea and estates in Egypt, including papyrus marshes, arable farms, vineyards, commercial vegetable gardens, granaries, and olive and wine presses.

It may have been Augustus’ poor health that prompted him in 25 B.C. to take the first concrete step to arranging a dynastic succession: he married off his daughter and only child, Julia (by his second wife, Scribonia), who was now fourteen, to his nephew, the twenty-year-old Marcellus. Augustus being absent in Spain, Agrippa presided over the wedding; what he thought of the young man’s promotion is unknown, for he kept his own counsel.

The Senate voted Marcellus special honors; he was given the senior ranking of a praetor for official occasions. So far as the honors race was concerned, he received permission to stand for the consulship ten years before the legal minimum age of thirty-seven, and was counted as a former quaestor, the most junior elective post. This meant that he would be able to serve as an aedile in 23 B.C. The post would give him a chance to make his mark with the average citizen in Rome, for he would be in charge of the city’s public entertainments for the year. Spectacle at its most extravagant was what the public demanded, and they would show their appreciation at the ballot box. His uncle made sure that Marcellus had an unprecedented budget.

Rome had not seen its princeps for three years. At last, in the middle of 24 B.C., he struggled home, still weak and uncertain of his survival. If he hoped that his political settlement had been fully accepted and was working smoothly, he was to be disabused. In late 24 or early 23 B.C., Marcus Primus, the governor of Macedonia, one of the Senate’s provinces, was taken to court for having gone to war without permission with a friendly Thracian tribe. It was a serious offense for a proconsul to take an army outside his province.

Among Primus’ defenders was one of the consuls for 23 B.C., Aulus Terentius Varro Murena, a trusted and senior follower of the princeps. He was Maecenas’ brother-in-law, and the poets Virgil and Horace were his friends (he had lent the party of poets his house at the resort of Formiae on their journey from Rome to Brundisium in 39 B.C.). He seems to have been a dashing, impatient sort of fellow, and Horace took it upon himself to offer an ode of advice.

The loftiest pines, when the wind blows,

Are shaken hardest; tall towers drop

With the worst crash….

Primus’ defense was that he had been ordered to launch a campaign by both the princeps and Marcellus. This was most embarrassing, for in theory Augustus only held authority in his own provincia. Of his own accord he attended the court where the trial was being held. The praetor, or presiding judge, asked him if he had given the man orders to make war and he replied that he had not.

Murena made some disrespectful remarks about the princeps, and asked him to his face: “What are you doing here, and who asked you to come?”

“The public interest,” Augustus drily replied.

It is no surprise that Primus was found guilty; he was very probably sent into exile. However, many observers at the time must have thought it unlikely that Primus would have claimed to have acted under orders unless he had actually done so. The affair revealed the res publica restituta, the “restored Republic,” as something of a sham.

The Primus affair led to the formation of a little-understood conspiracy against Augustus. The leader was a young republican called Fannius Caepio. Apparently, the consul Murena was implicated, although Dio thought the charge might be false, “since he was notoriously rough-tongued and headstrong in his manner of address towards all alike.” The plot was uncovered and the accused men condemned to death in absentia. In constitutional theory, the execution of a serving consul was a contradiction in terms, for the Republic’s chief executive had supreme authority; if he broke the law, charges could only be brought against him after his term of office had expired. Once again, the libertarian pretensions of the regime were exposed.

What the aims of the plotters were and how they were revealed cannot now be recovered. Perhaps there was no conspiracy at all—or, rather, the princeps organized a setup. But why? We cannot tell. If it was a serious attempt to overthrow the new order, it was evidence the settlement of 27 B.C. was not working.

The story has a sad footnote. Maecenas confided the discovery of the Caepio conspiracy, a state secret, to his wife, Terentia. Murena was her brother, and she seems to have warned him that he was in trouble. Augustus found out what had happened, and from that moment his friendship with Maecenas cooled. They remained on reasonably good terms, but the Etruscan aesthete was no longer a full member of the inner circle.

The year 23 B.C. had not gotten off to a good start, but Marcellus in his role as aedile made a brilliant success of the games. Throughout the summer, a canopy sheltered the Forum, where a temporary wooden arena was erected for the gladiatorial displays. Novel, slightly scandalous acts included a woman of noble birth taking part in a stage performance and an eques dancing in a ballet.

However, the mood in Rome was darkened by the onset of a plague. Epidemics were terrifying and not infrequent occurrences in a large crowded city such as Rome. What disease struck on this occasion is unknown; it may have been smallpox, bubonic plague, or typhoid fever. Scarlet fever and influenza have also been recorded by Greek and Roman medical writers.

Augustus fell ill again. Suetonius has it that he was suffering abscesses on the liver. According to Celsus, whose On Medicine was published in the first century A.D., the symptoms of liver disease were

severe pain in the right part under the praecordia [the region of the body about the heart], which spreads to the right side, to the clavicle and arm of that side; at times there is also pain in the right hand, there is hot shivering…[in bad cases] after a meal there is greater difficulty in breathing; then supervenes a sort of paralysis of the lower jaws.

Recommended treatment included the application of hot water in winter and tepid water in the summer, but “all cold things must be especially avoided, for nothing is more harmful to the liver.”

Augustus was in despair, for there seemed to be no hope of recovery; it appeared that the new regime was about to end. This would be a tragedy not just for him but for many others in public life. He had to take what steps he could to ensure a permanent legacy.

He gathered around his bedside the officers of state and leading senators and equites. He spoke to them on matters of public policy and handed his fellow consul, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, the breviarium imperii, a book that recorded the empire’s financial and military resources.

Many were expecting the princeps to bequeath his authority to Marcellus, whom he had only too evidently been grooming. But this had been a long-term plan, and the boy was too young and inexperienced to hold supreme power now. Agrippa would have had little trouble deposing him once Augustus was dead. Bowing to this reality, the dying man handed Agrippa the symbol of his authority: his signet ring bearing the head of Alexander the Great.

Much to everyone’s surprise, including his own, the princeps recovered. His doctor, Antonius Musa, turning medical orthodoxy on its head, decided to abandon the hot fomentations he had been using to no avail in favor of cold baths and cold potions. The shock treatment worked. (It has been suggested that Augustus was, in fact, suffering from typhoid fever, which could well have been the cause of the epidemic devastating Rome at the time; cold packs were a well-known treatment for the disease in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.)

The convalescent princeps showed that he was aware of the general unpopularity of his dynastic plans by bringing his will to a meeting of the Senate. He intended to read it out, as proof that he had no successor in mind, but in the event, to show their confidence in him, the senators would not permit it.

The settlement of 27 B.C. needed revision and it was time to make a fresh start. Augustus resigned as consul on July 1 and let it be known that he would no longer be a regular candidate. For him to continue holding the consulship year after year was stretching constitutional propriety very thin, for it made the post look like a permanent one, not so far from Julius Caesar’s unpopular dictatorship for life. Too, the office entailed a good deal of routine business and time-consuming ceremonial, and as long as Augustus held it he was blocking off access to one of Rome’s two top jobs every year, so irritating political aspirants.

But if he was to give up the consulship, the princeps would need some other source of imperium. With typical ingenuity, he came up with two devices. For some years he had been awarded tribunicia sacrosanctitas, or the immunity from physical attack given to a tribune of the people. Now he decided to assume tribunicia potestas in perpetuity: he would enjoy the power of a tribune without actually having to hold the post. That power was considerable. Tribunes attended Senate meetings and were entitled to present laws for approval by the people. They could also veto any officeholder’s decisions, including those of other tribunes.

Augustus recognized that tribunicia potestas, together with his enormous provincia, gave him almost all the authority he needed to govern without hindrance. He dated his “reign” from when it was awarded, on July 1, 23 B.C., and added the potestas to his long list of titles. However, a couple of gaps needed to be filled. Proconsuls, or provincial governors, lost their imperium when they crossed the pomerium—the sacred boundary of Rome—and entered the city. That would mean that when he was in the city the princeps would only have the status of a private citizen. Thanks to his prestige, or auctoritas, his wishes would usually be obeyed, but on occasion there might be some awkwardness. So the Senate voted that Augustus’ proconsular imperium should not lapse when he was inside the city walls.

The Marcus Primus affair had thrown an embarrassing light on Augustus’ relations with the governors of senatorial provinces, in whose business he had no right to meddle—in theory. To correct this problem, he was granted a general and overriding proconsular authority (imperium maius, “greater power”), the right to intervene anywhere in the empire as and when he chose. It was a right he exercised very discreetly and with the utmost caution, for by tradition a Roman governor had a free hand during his term of office.

The reforms considerably strengthened Augustus’ position, but the real winner from the crisis of 23 B.C. was Agrippa. He had been shown to be indispensable; now he, too, received imperium proconsulare (but not imperium maius). This probably gave him some kind of general authority in the eastern provinces, where Augustus dispatched him in the autumn. In effect, Agrippa was now the empire’s co-regent.

Too much information has been lost for us to be sure, but it looks very much as if the princeps had had his wings clipped. Perhaps the governing faction—that is, all those men whose fortunes, livelihoods, even lives depended on the regime’s continuance—made its leader acknowledge that the state was not his personal property and that an insurance policy (to wit, Agrippa) needed to be taken out against some future mortal illness.

It has even been speculated in modern times that what had taken place was a “secret coup d’état” in which Agrippa and Livia joined forces. There is hardly anything to back this up—except that Tiberius, Livia’s eldest son, was betrothed, perhaps already married, to Agrippa’s daughter, Vipsania. This could be interpreted as a sign that the two most important people in Augustus’ life felt the need to jointly protect themselves against the dynastically domineering princeps. It also appears that Octavia and Livia did not get on, and that the latter was irritated by the former’s promotion of Marcellus. Equally, though, Augustus and his canny wife could have seen the value of neutralizing the prickly Agrippa by making him a member of the family.

At the time, many observers interpreted Agrippa’s departure as exile. According to Suetonius, he “had felt that Augustus was not behaving as warmly towards him as usual, and that Marcellus was being preferred to him; he resigned all his offices and went off to Mytilene.” Some held that Agrippa did not want to oppose or seem to belittle the young man. In another view, on his recovery Augustus found out that Marcellus was not well disposed toward Agrippa because of the delivery to Agrippa of the seal, and so ordered Agrippa to the east. A writer in the following century wrote of the “scandalous sending away of Agrippa.”

It is not necessary to see these two accounts—co-regency and “exile”—as mutually exclusive. Augustus and Agrippa were grown-up politicians. Both of them (and perhaps especially the latter) held a somber commitment to the public interest, not to mention the advantage of their governing party (which they saw as much the same thing). It is possible that they agreed not only about Agrippa’s promotion, but also on the desirability of a tactful withdrawal to allow Marcellus to emerge onto the public stage without Agrippa’s overshadowing presence.

When looking to the future, Agrippa and the sickly Augustus had to accommodate a number of possible outcomes. If the princeps were to die soon, Agrippa would presumably take over. His humble birth and rough tongue made him unpopular with the old nobility, and he did not have the huge advantage of being a member of the Caesarian, almost-royal family; but he was omnicompetent, and would do.

If both men lived for another fifteen or twenty years, a perfectly reasonable supposition, Marcellus would be an appropriate dynastic successor, assuming that meanwhile he showed sufficient ability at the business of government. To make assurance doubly sure, Livia’s promising sons, Tiberius and the fifteen-year-old Drusus, would also be trained in public administration.

Whatever was or was not going on behind the scenes, the professional partnership between Augustus and Agrippa went on from strength to strength. When the two men’s powers were renewed in 18 B.C., Agrippa was granted the same tribunicia potestas that the princeps held. His energy and effectiveness were undimmed.

Then the worst possible thing that Augustus could imagine took place. In the autumn of 23 B.C., before his games were over, Marcellus fell ill and died. He was only twenty-one years old. He was given the same medical treatment by Musa as his uncle, but this time it did not work. The princeps delivered a eulogy at his funeral and placed his body in the great circular family mausoleum he was in the process of building (Marcellus’ gravestone and the later one of his mother survive). A new theater on the far side of the Capitoline Hill from the Forum, the foundations of which had been laid by Julius Caesar, was named the Theater of Marcellus in his honor. (Part of its exterior wall can still be seen.)

Octavia never recovered. She refused to have a portrait of her son or to permit anyone to mention his name in her presence. She came to hate all mothers and, more especially, Livia, whose Tiberius would now inherit the happiness she had been promised. She spent more and more of her time in darkness and paid little attention to her brother. Becoming something of a recluse, she stayed in mourning for the rest of her life.

She did attend a special reading by the poet Virgil of extracts from his new epic about the foundation of Rome, the Aeneid. Its hero is the Trojan prince, Aeneas; the poem tells the story of his escape from the sack of Troy and his arrival at Latium, where he rules over a kingdom that is the precursor of Rome. At one point in the narrative, Aeneas visits the underworld, where he meets not only the great dead but also the shades of the unborn. He notices a good-looking but downcast youth, and asks who he is.

The phantom of Aeneas’ dead father tells him that it is the future Marcellus:

Fate shall allow the earth one glimpse of this young man—

One glimpse, no more….

Alas, poor youth! If only you could escape your harsh fate!

Marcellus you shall be. Give me armfuls of lilies

That I may scatter their shining blooms and shower these gifts

At least upon the dear soul, all to no purpose though

Such kindness be.

Virgil’s style of recitation was “sweet and strangely seductive.” When he reached the line “Tu Marcellus eris,” “Marcellus you shall be,” Octavia is said to have fainted, and was revived only with some difficulty.

Almost certainly the young man was one of the many Romans who succumbed to the epidemic sweeping through the city, but soon rumors were put about of foul play. It was whispered that Livia had poisoned him because he had been preferred to her sons for the succession. If true this would have been an ill-judged move, for in the following year Augustus arranged for his daughter, Julia, Marcellus’ widow, to marry Agrippa, a formidable alliance likely to produce dynastic progeny.

The main victim of this arrangement was Octavia’s daughter, Marcella, who was divorced from her husband, Agrippa, to make room for her first cousin. In the regime’s innermost circles, no room was left for sentiment, and the Julian family’s women were disposed of according to the political imperative of the hour. Apparently the princeps took the decision on the advice of Maecenas, who told him, “You have made him [Agrippa] so powerful that he must either become your son-in-law, or be killed.”

Livia’s reputation for murderous scheming, once acquired, proved impossible to expunge. This was partly because in the ancient world (as in the magical world of the fairy tale) stepmothers were expected to behave badly. The great Greek tragedian Aeschylus described a reef in the sea as a “stepmother to ships.” Women, living as they did in a male-dominated society, must have felt that they could only protect their futures by advancing their sons’ interests. Enough of them lived up to the stereotype, persecuting the children of their husband’s first marriage, that fathers sometimes had their children adopted and brought up in another family.

Although Augustus never formally adopted Marcellus, he had treated him as an honorary son, so Livia found herself cast as a stepmother, with all the ugly connotations that that status entailed. There is no evidence that she acted in any way improperly, although it is legitimate to assume that she would do her best for her own boys. Augustus and Octavia were kind to children to whom they were not related by blood—notably, Antony’s offspring by Fulvia and Cleopatra; it is hard to imagine them failing to notice and correct any cruelty on Livia’s part.

The accusations against Livia need to be set in the context of the Romans’ exaggerated fear of death by poisoning. It was, for example, widely and probably inaccurately rumored that poison had been sprinkled on Pansa’s wound after the fighting at Mutina in 43 B.C., and that this had either been arranged by the then Octavian, or at least been done in his interest. Cicero’s speeches as a criminal lawyer reveal a high incidence of reported poisoning cases.

Surprising deaths were likely to have been from undiagnosed natural causes. Poison scares often coincided with plagues, and there are well-attested cases of food poisoning, especially from contaminated fish. The practice of boiling down wine in lead pans to create a cooking sauce will have led to many illnesses and premature deaths. Some years later a close friend of Augustus, Nonius Asprenas, gave a party after which 130 guests fell ill and died, presumably from food poisoning. Asprenas was taken to court for murder, but (after a show of support by the princeps) was acquitted.

There was little that Livia could do in the face of this anonymous gossip. A woman had no locus as a public figure and was obliged to suffer slander in silence.