Augustus

XVIII

EXERCISING POWER

23–17 B.C.

Travel was slow and often dangerous; weeks might pass before the princeps learned of a serious development on the Parthian frontier, months before any substantial reaction could be implemented. The pace of communications also slowed the analysis of complex problems. Important branches of knowledge—geography, for example, and economics—were in their infancy, so there were insufficient reliable and accessible data on which to base policy decisions. From a modern perspective, events took place in slow motion and in a fog.

Augustus and Agrippa took the business of empire seriously, realizing that it would be difficult to achieve anything without being on the spot themselves. Both men spent years away from Rome, traveling from province to province. Sometimes they exchanged places, one of them picking up where the other left off.

For some years after the settlement after Actium, the eastern provinces were largely left to their own devices. In 26 B.C., there was an unsuccessful Roman expedition to Arabia Felix (the southwest corner of the Arabian peninsula, today’s Yemen), probably aimed at opening up a trade route; in the following year, Galatia (in central Anatolia) was annexed as a province.

When the princeps sent Agrippa to the east in 23 B.C., we do not know exactly what his mission was. He made the island of Samos his headquarters and it can be assumed that his presence was intended to be a reminder of Roman power. It is possible that he also had an important unpublicized task—to gain intelligence on the Parthians. It would be useful to settle the unfinished business of the Roman defeat at Carrhae in 53 B.C., and, in particular, to negotiate the return of the army standards that the Parthians had captured (as well as those lost in 36 B.C. by Antony). The princeps was not interested in resuming hostilities and hoped for a long-term entente.

He intended either to join Agrippa or to take over from him, but was detained by trouble in Rome. The river Tiber overflowed its banks and flooded the city. The plague of the previous year continued throughout Italy and farmers stopped tilling the fields. Food shortages followed. The panic-stricken and angry mob did not trust old-style republican politicians to govern effectively and called for Augustus to be appointed dictator. It besieged the Senate House and threatened to burn it down with the senators inside it if they did not vote for the appointment.

The episode showed how fragile the princeps’ underlying position was. The careful balance between autocracy and a restoration of the Senate’s authority had been designed to reconcile the ruling class to the Augustan order. However, it irritated the people—that is, the hundreds of thousands of citizens who lived in or near Rome. They wanted to see Augustus seize absolute power openly and unambiguously.

Not only would it have been unwise to listen to such calls, it would have been illegal, for Mark Antony had abolished the dictatorship in 44, shortly after the Ides of March. Any attempt to restore the post would infuriate mainstream senatorial opinion. Augustus made it clear that he would do no such thing.

When facing disgrace a Roman would tear his clothes in public, and this was what the princeps did to dramatize his refusal to be moved. He went up to the crowd, bared his throat, and swore that he would rather be stabbed to death by its daggers than accept the appointment. Instead, he had himself made commissioner for the grain supply, rapidly put an end to the food shortages, and arranged for the annual appointment of two former praetors to supervise the distribution of grain in the future. Although, so far as we know, Augustus did not reform the system of production and distribution, he did his best to ensure that shortfalls were quickly made good and he used his own financial resources to alleviate famine.

At long last in the autumn of 22, Augustus, probably taking Livia with him, set out on a leisurely journey eastward. His first stop was Sicily. News came from Rome of more unrest among the people, who had elected only a single consul in the hope that Augustus would occupy the vacancy. This he refused to do, but recalled Agrippa to return from the east and restore order at Rome. It was now, in 21 B.C., that, in a further sign of his growing authority, Agrippa married the eighteen-year-old Julia despite her father’s absence.

Agrippa then moved on to his next assignment in Gaul and Spain. He campaigned in Aquitania and elsewhere; he also encouraged the building of Roman-style cities and networks of roads. He then went to northern Spain, where he resumed Augustus’ not entirely successful war of pacification. In 19 B.C., he finally subdued the unruly tribes whom the unmilitary princeps had found it so hard to defeat a few years before.

In the meantime, Augustus devoted time and attention to adjusting the boundaries and rulers of the smaller client kingdoms along the empire’s eastern frontier; but his real aim was to do a deal with King Frahâta of Parthia. His tactic was to run a diplomatic campaign alongside the threat of a military one. A pretender to the Parthian throne had kidnapped one of Frahâta’s sons and escaped with him to Rome. Augustus had sent the boy back to his father on condition that all the Roman standards and any surviving prisoners-of-war were returned. He now invited Frahâta to live up to his side of the bargain.

At the same time, a military expedition was organized against the strategically placed kingdom of Armenia. The aim was to depose its anti-Roman king, Ardashes, and replace him with a quisling. If Armenia was to fall within Rome’s sphere of influence, the Parthians would be out-flanked with a hostile northern frontier.

The general whom Augustus chose to lead his legions against the Armenians in 20 B.C. was his stepson Tiberius, who was now twenty-two years old and eligible for the jobs that would surely have gone to a living Marcellus.

He was strongly and heavily built and above average height; his shoulders and chest were broad and his body was well proportioned. He had a handsome, fresh-complexioned face, although his skin tended to break out in pimples. He had a large crown, tight lips like his mother’s, and piercing eyes. He let his hair grow long at the back, a habit of the Claudian clan.

Tiberius was not at all religious, but he did believe in astrology and therefore saw the world as governed by fate. Like Augustus, he was terrified of thunder, and when the skies loured he would put a laurel wreath on his head, to lightning-proof himself. He was devoted to Greek and Latin literature. He especially loved ancient myths and legends. He enjoyed the company of professors of Greek literature, whom he delighted in asking abstruse and unanswerable questions: such as “Who was Hecuba Queen of Troy’s mother?,” “What song did the Sirens sing?” “By what name was Achilles called when he was disguised as a girl?” His speaking style was encumbered by so many affectations and pedantries that his extempore speeches were considered far better than those he prepared.

Augustus arranged for Tiberius to enter public life in his late teens; the young man undertook high-profile prosecutions and special commissions, among the latter, the crucial task of reorganizing Rome’s grain supply. He acquitted himself well. The princeps was pleased, for he was keen for Tiberius and his brother, the eighteen-year-old Drusus, to share the burden of government. They were to be the packhorses of the regime, for the princeps had not given up his dynastic ambitions. In 20 B.C., Agrippa’s union with Julia produced a boy, Gaius. If he survived the multiple potentially lethal ailments of infancy, he could become the heir to empire, and on this occasion Augustus’ old school friend would be hardly likely to object.

But that was for the future. In the meantime, Tiberius led an army into Armenia. As it turned out, there was no fighting to be done, for the Armenians rose against their king and killed him before the Romans arrived. Tiberius crowned his successor, a pro-Roman exile, with his own hands.

Confronted with the Armenian takeover, Frahâta made the judgment call for which the Romans had been hoping. Although Augustus had no intention whatever of attacking Parthia, he was now in a strong tactical position if he wished to do so. The king handed over the standards and the prisoners.

Although the Roman public would have preferred a thoroughgoing military victory, this was a great diplomatic achievement, of which Augustus was extremely proud. Relations between the two empires moved from glacial to cautiously warm, where they remained for some time. In the official account of his life, the princeps allowed himself some exaggeration: “I compelled the Parthians to restore the spoils and the standards of three Roman legions to me and to ask as suppliants the friendship of the Roman People.”

Disturbing news arrived from Rome. In the absence of both the princeps and Agrippa, the public mood had grown feverish. The people left one of the consulships for 19 B.C. unfilled and agitated for Augustus, once again, to assume the vacant post.

A certain Egnatius Rufus, who, according to an unfriendly critic, was “better qualified to be a gladiator than a Senator,” volunteered to fill the gap himself. In 21, when he was serving as aedile, he had made himself very popular by creating Rome’s first fire service (paying out of his own pocket for a troop of some six hundred slaves) and had been elected praetor in the following year. Strictly speaking this was illegal, for the rules called for an interval of some years between successive elective posts in the honors race.

Egnatius’ candidature for the consulship was blocked, but this was not the end of the story, for he was soon arrested, tried, condemned, and executed for plotting to assassinate Augustus. Whether there was any truth in this is unknown, but it would not be surprising if the authorities decided to eliminate a great nuisance by inventing a capital charge. Augustus put an end to further agitation and speculation by nominating a second consul for the year.

The princeps had devoted much of the previous decade to the provinces. On his return to Rome in 19 B.C., he turned his mind to domestic affairs. In the first place, the constitutional settlement needed some further adjustment. He had to find some means of calming public opinion, which remained hostile to the Senate. Also, there were a couple of aspects of a consul’s imperium that neither Augustus’ tribunicia potestas nor his imperium proconsulare covered.

First, he held no imperium specific to Italy, and consequently had no authority to command troops on Italian soil. This was awkward, because after Julius Caesar’s death both Antony and the then Octavian formed large bodyguards, the cohortes praetoriae that we know as Praetorian Guards. After Actium, Octavian retained his cohorts to act as a peacetime security force and stationed them in and around Rome. There were nine cohorts in all, amounting to a maximum of 5,400 men. It was time that the control of these soldiers was placed on a proper footing.

Second, Augustus did not have first place—at least, not officially—in the conduct of senatorial business. A consul had the right to be the first to propose legislation or to speak on a given topic, so the princeps was obliged to wait his turn. This was inconvenient, and might also be embarrassing, if senators did not receive a cue about Augustus’ wishes at the beginning of a debate.

So in 19 B.C. some form of consular imperium was conferred on the princeps although he did not actually have to hold consular office (following the same principle as with tribunicia potestas). The ancient sources disagree on, and are unclear about, the precise nature of this authority or the term for which it was awarded. It may be that Augustus’ proconsular imperium, granted for ten-year periods and renewed, was simply extended to include Rome and Italy. A certain vagueness at the time may have suited all sides. Whatever form it was couched in, though, this new power completed Augustus’ political mastery of the state.

It is possible to guess at the shape of an unstated concordat from what actually happened in the coming years. A generation of nobiles had been drastically thinned out during the civil wars by death in battle or by proscription, but now their children had grown up; if, as they were told, the Republic had been restored, they expected to have the same access to the consulship (and other senior posts) that their fathers had had. It was, they knew, their birthright. For the next five years or so, the consular lists are crowded with old republican names—Cornelius Lentulus, Licinius Crassus, Calpurnius Piso, Livius Drusus.

During the triumvirate, a new custom had come into being whereby consuls served only for part of the year and were regularly replaced by one or more “suffect” consuls. Although this was a useful and cheap means of rewarding loyalty and producing proconsuls to help govern the empire, it also devalued both the splendor of the office and its executive effectiveness. Augustus more or less eliminated suffects; most consuls now served for an entire term, so regaining much of their prestige.

For a time, we do not hear of popular agitation and riots in the streets. This may be explained by the gaps in our inadequate surviving sources, but it does appear that the role of the people in political life declined from this point on. They still elected officeholders, but candidates were nominated or preapproved by the princeps, presumably after informal consultations with the interested parties.

All of this suggests an arrangement out of which everyone got something. His added consular authority completed Augustus’ hold on power and convinced a suspicious Roman public that he was genuinely in charge of the state. By contrast the nobiles welcomed their return to the consulship, and were grateful to Augustus for his efforts to restore their ancient dignitas.

Augustus was a reformer who liked to move forward at a snail’s pace. In many aspects of his administration, change and innovation proceeded step by step over many years.

Time and again, he did his best to improve the functioning of the Senate, which, together with the people, remained the legal source of authority in the state. Rather than appoint more censors, the princeps decided in 18 B.C. to use his new consular authority to act as a censor himself (as he and Agrippa had done in 28 B.C.) and review the membership of the Senate. He raised the minimum wealth of a senator from 400,000 to 1 million sesterces, a substantial sum of money. This set a significant distance between the senatorial and the equestrian orders, and helped to create a distinct senatorial class. Birth as well as property became a qualification. In the days of the Republic only senators could lay claim to senatorial status, but from now on sons of senators acquired the status as of right, while others were obliged to apply for it.

As the princeps had discovered ten years previously, cleansing the Senate of its reprobates was a tricky and unpopular exercise. His dream was to reduce it to three hundred members, which would make it a much more effective legislative body. He devised an ingenious scheme, which was intended to achieve his objective with the least possible blame attaching to him.

He selected thirty senators, each of whom was then to choose a further five. Each group of five would choose one of its number by lot, who would become a senator. This man would repeat the process, which was to continue until three hundred senators had been found. The scheme being too clever by half, various malpractices developed, the proceedings ground to a confused halt, and Augustus was obliged to take over the selection himself. He ended up by creating a Senate of six hundred members and seriously annoying a large number of people. In compensation, he gave various privileges to those who had been expelled. They were allowed to stand for election to the various offices of state; in due course most of them returned to the Senate.

The exercise had been an almost complete waste of time and energy. For all his auctoritas, his dignitas, and his imperium, the princeps knew that he touched the Senate, the heartland of the republican idea, at his peril. He also knew when to admit defeat. There was always time, and he could return to the subject in the future.

So the Senate remained a somewhat unsatisfactory institution. Augustus always treated it with great respect and took trouble to consult it. He encouraged freedom of expression and his speeches were often interrupted by remarks such as “I don’t understand that!” or “I’d dispute that if I had the chance!” However, its members did not take their responsibilities as seriously as he would have wished. In 17 B.C., fines for nonattendance were increased and quorums were set for certain classes of business.

Sometime between 27 and 18 B.C., the princeps took a step aimed at expediting decision-making, which recognized the difficulty that any deliberative body has in agreeing on clear-cut actions. He set up a senatorial standing committee, which consisted of himself, one or both consuls, one each from the quaestors, aediles, and praetors, and fifteen other senators chosen by lot. Some members changed every six months and the whole committee once a year, except for the princeps. Its task was to prepare business for full sessions of the Senate.

A group of twenty-one is still rather too large to be efficiently executive, and the rapid turnover must have prevented it from building a collective esprit de corps or devising long-term policies. This was probably as the princeps intended, for he reserved strategic planning to himself and a small, informal group of advisers, the amici Caesaris, “Caesar’s friends.” The standing committee’s job must mainly have been to receive and discuss already prepared positions, and to act as a sounding board of senatorial opinion. It probably worked by consensus and guided discussion in the full Senate.

The Senate’s powers remained advisory in principle, and bills were still laid before popular assemblies for approval. However, its decrees or senatusconsulta were increasingly regarded as binding, especially when specifically supported or initiated by the princeps.

Both the Senate and the princeps acquired new legal powers. The old republican courts of law, the iudicia publica, remained in being, presided over by praetors. But cases of treason or otherwise high political importance could be brought to one of two new courts, the princeps in council or the consuls in the Senate, against which there was no appeal. The ever growing number of citizens made it impractical to remit all criminal prosecutions to Rome, so proconsuls were given the authority to carry out judicial functions.

Under the Republic, any citizen found guilty of an offense had the right to appeal to the people. However, Augustus was given the authority to overturn a sentence of death by the use of his imperium. So provocatio ad populum gave way to appellatio ad Caesarem, an appeal to Caesar.

Augustus sought to improve the honesty and efficiency of imperial administration. Without interfering excessively in local ways of doing things, he and Agrippa introduced orderly governance throughout the empire and, in the Gallic and Spanish provinces and Africa where they were missing, the benefits of urban living. Regular censuses were held to enable a fair assessment of the provincial tax burden, and tax collection was made fairer.

In Rome itself, the princeps borrowed Egnatius Rufus’ idea of maintaining a troop of six hundred slave firefighters (in A.D. 6, this was expanded into seven cohorts of firemen, each cohort being responsible for two of the fourteen districts into which Augustus divided the city). Three cohortes urbanae, or urban cohorts, were established to police the city.

Augustus did not interfere in the local government of Italy. He left its four hundred or so towns and cities to manage their own affairs as they had always done, except in two respects. He divided the peninsula into eleven departments for the purpose of the census of citizens and of the registration of public land. And, more important, he recognized the need for speedy communications. He tried to persuade senators to invest some of the spoils of successful military campaigns in improving and extending the Italian road network. When that failed, he himself took over the cura viarum, the responsibility for roads, and made large donations from his own pocket for road construction.

Regular relay stations were established, where state couriers and government officials could change horses and chariots and spend the night at the station’s hostel. Local authorities provided the chariots and horses, and officials using the service paid a fixed charge. As the system developed, an experienced military man was placed in charge of it as the praefectus vehiculorum. Eventually an infrastructure emerged that significantly improved communications with all parts of Italy and the provinces to the north.

In the days of the Republic, it had been expected of prominent men that they spend large sums on public works; outstanding examples were the imposing stone theater built by Pompey the Great and the new forum commissioned by Julius Caesar. As we have seen, Augustus and Agrippa followed in their footsteps and invested heavily in new public buildings and refurbishments in the city.

With the passage of time, various senatorial commissions were created—for example, the curatores viarum, who made sure that roads were kept in a good state of repair, and the curatores locorum publicorum, who were responsible for maintaining public buildings and temples. These groups were not themselves public construction agencies, but worked through local officials and contractors to effect repairs.

Augustus introduced greater order into the day-to-day management of the empire than had existed in the past. In the absence of a professional civil service, officeholders with imperium in the Republic, such as consuls and praetors, used to govern from their town houses in Rome and used slaves and servants, family and friends to expedite business. Augustus governed in the same way, but on a much larger scale. He employed a growing army of slaves and freedmen to undertake the routine tasks of administration.

However, it was not politically acceptable for such people to be the official face of the regime. The princeps thus established a governmental career structure for the upper classes. Young men of the senatorial order who showed promise could spend a lifetime as well-paid public administrators.

When they were in their late teens, after military service, they could seek minor posts as vigintiviri (literally, “twenty men”). They worked for a year in the mint, were in charge of the streets of Rome, managed prisons and executions, and judged legal cases involving questions of slavery or freedom. They then served either as tribunes of the people (except for patricians) or as aediles. They could stand for one of the twelve praetorships, after which they might command a legion or govern a minor province. The most successful could aspire to the consulship, followed by the governorship of a major province or one of the curatorships at Rome.

The Senate only produced senior administrators, and the princeps also looked for assistance in less important jobs from the equites. Whether they were senators or equites, able men became professional servants of the state, receiving a salary and living out long and interesting careers. The fact that Augustus twice enacted antibribery laws, in 18 B.C. and 8 B.C., not only illustrates his commitment to clean government, but also suggests that his efforts may have met some resistance. Inch by inch, though, prototypes of the institutions that we take for granted in a modern state were beginning to emerge. The amateurish and corrupt mechanisms of the Republic were gradually replaced by something resembling an honest state bureaucracy.

Rome’s public treasury, the Aerarium, was based at the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum and was managed by two praetors. We have no exact information of the exchequer receipts from taxes, customs duties, and tribute payments from client rulers, but it is unlikely that large sums of money moved to and from Rome. Each province had its own treasury, from which the princeps would draw for local military and administrative purposes, and in many cases there would not have been a large surplus to send to Rome.

The main claim on the empire’s resources was the army—namely, twenty-eight legions and an equivalent resource of auxiliary units. This was not a large force for so extensive an empire, but the financial burden was considerable. A soldier’s basic pay was nine hundred sesterces a year, entailing an aggregate expenditure of 140 million sesterces. However, the real cost of maintaining the army was considerably higher, for the cavalry was better paid than ordinary infantrymen; and officers, from centurions to the legionary commanders, or legates, earned very large salaries. On top of this came expenditure on military equipment, the empire’s fleets, and the elite Praetorians in Italy.

Augustus was enormously rich. His wealth came from his inheritance from Julius Caesar, from legacies (it was the done thing to remember the princeps with a generous bequest), the profits of the proscriptions and the civil war, and large estates in various parts of the empire. In his official memoir, he notes with satisfaction that he spent 600 million sesterces on land bought in Italy for his veterans and 260 million sesterces elsewhere. In lieu of farms, some demobilized soldiers received money grants, totaling 400 million sesterces.

In addition to these phenomenally large sums of money, the princeps often topped up the Aerarium from his own pocket when it ran low of funds. In practice, it was difficult to distinguish between the treasury and the privy purse.

In summary, Augustus’ reforms of the way governmental power was exercised were not particularly controversial, nor were they widely understood to be revolutionary, when seen individually, but taken together they expressed four slow and irresistible trends. First, the princeps was accumulating more and more power to himself, whether by streamlining the legislative and decision-making process, speeding up governmental communications across the empire, or enhancing his judicial role.

Although it was increasingly clear who was in charge, the senatorial ruling class acquiesced in the autocracy because of the second trend of Augustus’ reign: the enhancement of the Senate’s workload and prestige. When Augustus developed a career structure for the imperial administration, he was not simply improving the quality of governance, but creating high-status, well-paid jobs.

Senators will also have been pleased to witness the declining importance of the people—the third trend, and one the citizens of Rome were themselves willing to countenance as they experienced the benefits of life under the principate. They had no wish at all to return to the inefficiencies of the Republic.

Fourth, Augustus introduced the beginnings of a public bureaucracy, with the increasing use of nonpolitician freedmen and slaves who handled day-to-day business.

Romans distinguished between imperium, power, and auctoritas, authority. It was evidence of the remarkable success of the Augustan system that the princeps was able to command obedience simply through his authority, and was very seldom obliged to draw on the brute power at his disposal.