Augustus

I

SCENES FROM A PROVINCIAL CHILDHOOD

63–48 B.C.

Little remains of ancient Velitrae, but signs of the Renaissance are to be found everywhere. In the main square stands an old fountain with battered lions spouting water. The streets leading off the piazza are roughly parallel and are gridded, echoing the original pattern of the old Roman vici. At the town’s highest point, where the citadel must have been, a sixteenth-century palazzo communale, which combines the functions of town hall and museum, was built on the foundations of a Roman building.

Here, on a stone platform, the modern life-size statue in bronze of a man in his late teens gazes blankly from empty eye sockets into the far distance, contemplating the life that has yet to unfold. This is Gaius Octavius, Rome’s future ruler Augustus: for Velitrae was his hometown and Velletri is proud to celebrate his memory.

Gaius would recognize the lay of the land, the rise and fall of streets and alleys, perhaps the layout, certainly the views. Now as then, this is a provincial place, which seems farther from the capital city than it really is. Change has always come slowly. The community leaves a powerful impression of being self-contained and a little isolated. Even today, elderly locals squint blackly at strangers.

A certain dour feeling for tradition, a suspicion of newfangled ways, a belief in propriety, have always been typical of provincial life in towns such as Velitrae, and it would be hard to imagine a more conventional family than that into which Gaius Octavius was born in 63 B.C.

Every Roman boy received a praenomen, or forename, such as Marcus, Lucius, Sextus—or Gaius. Then came his clan name, or nomen, such as Octavius. Some but not all Romans also had a cognomen, which signified a family subset of a clan. Successful generals were sometimes awarded a hereditary agnomen; for example, Publius Cornelius Scipio added Africanus to his existing names, in honor of his victory over Hannibal in north Africa. By contrast, girls were only known, inconveniently, by the feminine version of their nomen; so Gaius’ two sisters were both known as Octavia.

An important feature of the infant Gaius’ inheritance was that, although like most Italians the Octavii held Roman citizenship, they were not of “Roman” stock. Velitrae was an outpost on the borders of Latium, home of the Latin tribes that, centuries before, had been among the first conquests of the aggressive little settlement beside a ford on the river Tiber.

Two hundred years before Gaius’ birth, Rome finally united the tribes and communities of central and southern Italy through a network of imposed treaties. The men of these lands provided the backbone of the legions and were eventually, as late as the eighties B.C., incorporated into the Republic as full citizens. The little boy grew up with a clear impression of the contribution that Rome’s onetime opponents were making to its imperial greatness, a contribution not always fully recognized by the chauvinists in the capital. In a real sense, the Roman empire would be better called the Italian empire.

The Octavii were a well-respected local family of considerable means. A Vicus Octavius, or Octavius Street, ran through Velitrae’s center (just as a Via Ottavia does today), past an altar consecrated by a long-ago ancestor.

The family seems to have been in trade, a sure sign that it was not of aristocratic status. Gaius’ paternal great-grandfather fought in Sicily as a military tribune (a senior officer in a legion, or regiment) during the second war against the great merchant state of Carthage in northern Africa (218 to 201 B.C.). Carthage’s comprehensive defeat was the first indication to the Mediterranean world that a new military power had arrived on the scene. Gaius’ grandfather, who lived to an advanced age, was well-off, but had no ambitions for a career in national politics, being apparently content to hold local political office.

Later hostile gossip claimed that the great-grandfather was an ex-slave who, having won his freedom, made a living as a rope maker in the neighborhood of Thurii, a town in Italy’s deep south. It was also rumored that the grandfather was a money changer, with “coin-stained hands.” Friendly propagandists took a different tack and invented a fictitious link with a blue-blooded Roman clan of the same name.

When he came to write his memoirs many years afterward, Gaius merely noted that he “came from a rich old equestrian family.” The equites, or knights, were the affluent middle class, occupying a political level below that of the nobility and members of the ruling Senate, but often overlapping with them socially. To qualify for equestrian status, they needed to own property worth more than 400,000 sesterces, and were not actively engaged in government. They were usually wealthy businessmen or landed gentry who preferred to avoid the expense and dangers of a political career. Many were contracted by the state to collect taxes on its behalf from the provinces. By the time of the boy’s father, also named Gaius Octavius, the family had become seriously rich, and probably far exceeded the equestrian minimum.

The father Octavius, an ambitious man, decided to pursue a career in politics at Rome with a view to making his way, if he could, to the top. This was an extremely difficult project. The Roman constitution was a complicated contraption of checks and balances, and the odds were stacked against an outsider—a novus homo, or “new man”—from winning a position of authority.

Rome became a republic in 509 B.C., after driving out its king and abolishing the monarchy. The next two centuries saw a long struggle for power between a group of noble families, patricians, and ordinary citizens, plebeians, who were excluded from public office.

The outcome was an apparent victory for the people, but the old aristocracy, supplemented by rich plebeian nobles, still controlled the state. What looked in many ways like a democracy was, in fact, an oligarchy modified by elections.

The Roman constitution was the fruit of many compromises and developed into a complicated mix of laws and unwritten understandings. Power was widely distributed and there were multiple sources of decision-making.

Roman citizens (only men, for women did not have the vote) attended public meetings called assemblies, where they passed laws and elected politicians to govern the Republic. These leaders doubled as generals in time of war. Although in theory any citizen could stand for public office, candidates usually came from a small group of very rich, noble families.

If successful, politicians passed through a set sequence of different jobs, a process called the cursus honorum or honors race. The first step on the ladder, taken at the age of thirty or above (in practice, younger men were often elected), was to become one of a number of quaestors; this post entailed supervising the collection of taxes and making payments, either for the consuls in Rome or for provincial governors. Then, if he wished, a man could be elected one of four aediles, who were responsible for the administration of the city of Rome. During festivals they staged public entertainments at their own expense, so deep pockets were needed. The next position, that of praetor, was compulsory. Praetors were senior officers of state, responsible for presiding as judges in the law courts and, when required, to lead an army in the field.

At the top of the pyramid were two consuls, who were heads of government with supreme authority; they were primarily army commanders and conveners of the Senate and assemblies.

Consuls and praetors held imperium, officially sanctioned absolute power, although they were constrained in three important ways. First, they held office only for one year. Second, there were always two or more officeholders at the same level. Those of equal rank were allowed to veto anything that their colleagues or junior officeholders decided. Finally, if they broke the law, officeholders could face criminal charges once they were out of office.

On top of that, ten tribunes of the people were elected, whose task was to make sure that officeholders did nothing to harm ordinary Romans (patricians were not allowed to be tribunes). They could propose laws to the Senate and the people and were empowered to convene citizens’ assemblies. The tribunes held power only within the city limits, where they could veto any officeholder’s decisions, including another tribune’s.

The power of the assemblies was limited. They approved laws—but only those that were laid before them. Speakers supported or opposed a proposed measure, but open debate was forbidden; all that citizens were allowed to do was vote. There were different kinds of assembly, each with its own rules: in the assembly that elected praetors and consuls, for example, the voting system was weighted in favor of property owners in the belief that they would act with care because they had the most to lose if any mistakes were made.

The Roman constitution made it so easy to stop decisions from being made that it is rather surprising that anything at all got done. The Romans realized that sometimes it might be necessary to override the constitution. In a grave emergency, for a maximum of six months, a dictator was appointed who held sole power and could act as he saw fit.

The Roman Senate was mainly recruited from officeholders. By Octavius’ day, a quaestor automatically became a lifelong member, and he and his family joined Rome’s nobility (if he was not already a member of it). Senators were prohibited by law from engaging in business, although many used agents or front men to circumvent the ban.

In theory, the Senate held little official power and its role was merely to advise the consuls. However, because the Senate was a permanent feature of the government, whereas consuls and other officeholders had fixed terms, its authority and influence were very great. It was responsible for managing foreign affairs, and it discussed laws before they were presented to the assemblies. Its decrees, although not legally binding, were usually obeyed.

The Senate appointed former consuls and praetors, called proconsuls and propraetors (Octavius was one), to rule Rome’s provinces, usually for between one and three years.

The equites, who as has been mentioned were not members of the Senate, formed a second social class, mainly comprising businessmen and country gentry. Beneath them came ordinary citizens, listed in different categories according to their wealth. The poorest citizens were capite censi, the “head count.”

Modern governments employ many thousands of administrators who carry out their decisions. This was not the case during the Roman Republic. There were no bureaucrats, apart from a few clerks who looked after the public treasury. There was no police force, no public postal system, and no fire service, and there were no banks. There was no public criminal prosecution or judicial service, and cases were brought by private citizens. Elected politicians acted as judges in the law courts. The consuls brought in servants and slaves from their households, as well as personal friends, to help run the government.

Gaius Octavius won a quaestorship, probably in 70 B.C., and joined the Senate. This was no mean achievement for a country gentleman outside the magic circle of Roman politics. The promise of political success brought with it an important benefit: a wife from one of Rome’s great patrician clans.

Octavius was already married to a woman of whom history has recorded nothing except for her name, Ancharia. The couple had a daughter, and perhaps Ancharia died in childbirth, for families with only one child were rare, especially if the child was a girl. Her family was of obscure origin; she may have come from Velitrae or thereabouts. She would have been no help to an ambitious young man’s career and, if alive, must have been divorced. Her removal from the scene enabled Octavius to achieve a splendid alliance, when he married Atia, a member of the Julian family.

The Julii traced their ancestry to before the city’s foundation, traditionally set at 753 B.C. The legend went that when, after a ten-year siege, the Greeks sacked the city of Troy on what is now the Turkish coast near the Dardanelles, they killed or enslaved most of the leading Trojans. One exception was Aeneas, the son of the love goddess Venus and a handsome young warrior. He escaped the city’s destruction with some followers and after many adventures made landfall in Latium. His son Iulus (sometimes also called Ascanius) founded the Julian dynasty.

By the first century B.C., high birth was not sufficient to guarantee political success. Money was also required, and in large quantities. The Julii were impoverished; for long generations few of them had won important posts in the honors race. Like aristocratic families before and since that fall on hard times, they used marriage as a means of income generation.

The current head of the family, Gaius Julius Caesar, was a rising politician in his late thirties, about the same age as Octavius. Talented, amusing, and fashionable, he had a voracious appetite for cash and had built up enormous debts to feed both his lifestyle and his career. One of his sisters married Marcus Atius Balbus, a local worthy from Aricia, a town not far from Velitrae. Balbus was not prominent in public life and his greatest attraction must have lain in the fact that he was a man of substance.

As a new man, Octavius knew that his dubious ancestry would damage his career. A commodious dowry would be of value in a wife, but what he really needed was entrée into the Roman nobility. As a niece of Julius Caesar, Balbus’ daughter Atia was well placed to make that possible. Because the Balbi lived not far from Octavius’ home base of Velitrae, they may well have traveled in the same social circles. In that case, Atia formed an ambitious man’s bridge from provincial life to Rome.

Sometime before 70 B.C., the couple married and, in due course, Atia became pregnant. Disappointingly, the outcome was a second daughter. Five or six years passed before another child arrived: a son, this time, Gaius. He was born just before sunrise on September 23, 63 B.C., at Ox Heads, a small property on the slopes of the fashionable Palatine Hill, a few minutes’ walk from Rome’s main square, the Forum, and the Senate House.

By tradition, the paterfamilias held the power of life and death over his household, both his relatives and his slaves. When a child was born, the midwife took the infant and placed it on the floor in front of the father. Should the father wish to acknowledge his paternity, he would lift the baby into his arms if it was a boy; if a girl, he would simply instruct that she be fed. Only after this ritual had taken place did the child receive his or her first nourishment.

Apparently, Gaius was lucky to survive this procedure, for an astrologer had given him a bad prognosis and he narrowly escaped infanticide. If Gaius had been rejected, he would have been abandoned in the open air and left to die; this was a fate to which illegitimate children and girls were especially liable, as were (one may surmise) sickly or disabled babies. Rejected infants were left on dunghills, or near cisterns. They were often picked up there by slave traders (although the family might reclaim the child later, if it so wished) or, more rarely, rescued by a kindly passerby. Otherwise, they would starve, unless eaten by stray dogs.

Rome, with about a million inhabitants, was an unhygienic, noisy, crowded megalopolis, no place for rearing a child, and there is evidence that Gaius spent much of his infancy at his grandfather’s country house near Velitrae. More than a century later, Suetonius reported that the house still existed and was open to the public: “a small room, not unlike a butler’s pantry, is still shown and described as [his] nursery.”

Helped by the link, through Atia, to Julius Caesar, Octavius’ political career was advancing rapidly. After serving as quaestor, he could move up to the next rung, as one of the four aediles. The aedileship being optional, it is not known whether Octavius held this office, but he could probably have afforded it.

At the age of thirty-nine, Octavius was eligible to run for praetor. According to Velleius Paterculus, he was regarded as “a dignified person, of upright and blameless life, and [was] extremely rich.” In the praetorian election for 61 B.C., he came in first even though he was running against a number of aristocratic competitors.

The two-year-old Gaius would have seen little of his father, who spent a year in Rome discharging his judicial duties as praetor. Then, as was usual for senior government officials after their period of office, at the end of 61 B.C. Octavius went overseas for a twelve-month stint as governor, or propraetor, of the province of Macedonia.

Octavius was due to sail from Brundisium, a major port on the heel of Italy, but before he did so, the Senate asked him to make a detour to the town of Thurii on the toe and disperse a group of outlawed slaves.

More than ten years previously, these men had joined the great slave revolt of Spartacus, following him during the years when he won one victory after another over incompetently led Roman legions. They managed to avoid the terrible penalty exacted on the survivors of Spartacus’ final defeat: thousands were crucified along the length of the road from Rome to Capua, where the rebellion had started at a school for slave gladiators.

Somehow the escapees managed to keep going as a group, reemerging briefly to join the forces of Lucius Sergius Catilina. In the year of Gaius’ birth, this dissident aristocrat had plotted the violent overthrow of the Republic and its replacement by a regime of radicals which he would lead. The alert consul, Marcus Tullius Cicero, was a new man like Octavius; a fine public speaker and an able and honest administrator, he outwitted the conspirator and finessed him into a botched military insurrection.

The Romans depended on, but also feared, the hundreds of thousands of slaves who in large part ran their economy, providing labor for agricultural estates and manufacturing businesses. Slaves could also be found in every reasonably well-off home, cooking, cleaning, acting as secretaries and managers. If they were young and good-looking, slaves of either sex could well find themselves providing sexual services.

A slave was something one could own, like a horse or a table. In the Roman view, he or she was “a talking instrument.” Slaves could not marry, although they could make and save money and could receive legacies. If a master was murdered by a slave, all the slaves in his ownership were killed. It was believed that a slave could give true evidence only under torture. Perhaps a third of the population of Italy were slaves in the late Republic—as many as three million people.

For Octavius, dealing with the surviving Spartacans was an important task. They did not pose a great threat in themselves; it was the principle that counted. No rebellious runaway should be allowed to enjoy the fruits of his illicit freedom.

As a victorious general, Octavius could acquire an honorific and hereditary title and it seems that he added Thurinus to his name to mark his defeat of the slaves, passing it on to his infant son. Suetonius, writing in the first century B.C., asserted:

I can prove pretty conclusively that as a child [Gaius] was called Thurinus, perhaps…because his father had defeated the slaves in that neighborhood soon after he was born; my evidence is a bronze statuette which I once owned. It shows him as a boy, and a rusty, almost illegible inscription in iron letters gives him this name.

The truth is that Octavius was making himself slightly ridiculous, for the defeat of slaves conferred no great honor on the victor. In adult life his son was often insultingly referred to as the Thurian.

The new governor of Macedonia administered his province “justly and courageously” and won a high reputation in leading circles in Rome. It was clear to all that, despite his provincial origins, Octavius was well qualified for the top job in Roman politics, the consulship. But in 58 B.C., when he must have been only in his mid-forties, he died unexpectedly en route from Brundisium to Rome, before he had a chance to launch his candidacy.

It is not known what killed Octavius. An accident of some kind is a possibility, although one would suppose that the ancient sources would have mentioned that. He died in his bedroom at a country villa belonging to the family that stood on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius—a fact that suggests illness.

Most probably, he fell victim to one of the many health hazards in the Roman world. One of these was food poisoning; stomach upset was among the most common recorded complaints, and analysis of Roman sewage deposits suggests that certain intestinal parasites were often endemic, borne by bad fish and meat, among other sources. Despite the growing availability of fresh water brought in through aqueducts, standards of sanitation for most people were low, although the rich were able to afford separate kitchens, underfloor heating, domestic bathhouses, and private latrines. Few understood that human waste matter could spread disease. Oil lamps and open hearths or braziers generated irritant smoke, which caused and spread respiratory infections. Epidemics of all kinds regularly swept through Rome as a result of overcrowding and the fact that the capital of a great empire witnessed a continual influx of visitors, traders, and returning government officials and soldiers.

Gaius was only four years old when his father died. In addition to the sadness of his loss, his premature death will have caused a family crisis. Domestic life was rigorously patriarchal. A widow, especially one of independent means, was often expected to marry again at the earliest opportunity, although if she remained true to the memory of her dead husband she would deserve praise for being a univira, a one-man woman.

This may not always have been easy for a woman of a certain age with a growing family; but Atia was still young, and her connections made her highly eligible. A year or two after Octavius’ death, she landed another apparently rising politician, Lucius Marcius Philippus, an aristocrat who proudly claimed descent from the royal line of Macedon. He had just returned from Syria, where he had been provincial governor, and he stood successfully for one of the two consulships of 56 B.C.

He backed his brother-in-law Julius Caesar as Caesar climbed the political ladder—but only cautiously so. Unlike his dashing ancestors, the Macedonian king Philip and Philip’s son Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian empire in the fourth century B.C., Philippus was temperamentally risk-averse—a neutral who preferred diplomacy to commitment.

After his father’s death, little Gaius seems to have been brought up by his maternal grandmother, Julius Caesar’s sister, in whose house Atia may well have passed her brief widowhood. That he stayed with her after his mother’s remarriage is a little odd; it could be explained by mutual affection or by Philippus’ lack of interest in a small stepson. It may have been in this house that he first met his famous great-uncle, Julius Caesar.

Romans of high social status took very seriously the education of children, and especially of boys. During his early years, a boy was looked after by the women of a household, but once he reached the age of seven he usually passed into the control of his father, whose duty was to instill in his offspring the qualities of a good man, a vir bonus. High among these were pietas, loyalty and a due respect for authority and traditional values; gravitas, a serious (sometimes oversolemn) approach to the challenges of life; and fortitudo, manliness and courage. A son was expected to learn by observation; he helped his father on the land and, wearing his smart little toga praetexta, an all-enveloping cloaklike garment with a red stripe indicating the wearer’s childhood status, trotted around after him as he went about on public business or conducted religious ceremonies. In this way the boy would learn how the political system worked and how grownups were expected to behave.

It is not clear who, if anyone, played this paternal role for the orphaned Gaius. For a time a friend of Octavius, one Gaius Toranius, was the boy’s guardian, but he left little mark (we know that the adult Gaius did not value him highly). However, Atia won a reputation as a strict and caring mother, even if she was not always directly involved in her son’s day-to-day supervision. One positive masculine influence is recorded: a slave called Sphaerus was Gaius’ “attendant” during his childhood. He seems to have been much loved; he was given his freedom and, when he died many years later, his charge, now adult and famous, gave him a public funeral.

Boys from affluent families were sometimes taught at home, but many went to private elementary schools, ludi litterarii, which inculcated reading, writing, and arithmetic. Girls might also attend, but their schooling ended with puberty, although they were trained in the domestic arts by their mothers and some received private tuition in their teens. It is probable that Gaius attended classes in Velitrae or Rome, accompanied by Sphaerus.

Teaching methods were painstaking, but hardly inspired, a matter of imitation and repetition. The school day opened with a breakfastless dawn and ran on into the afternoon. No attention was paid to games or gymnastics (fathers looked after boys’ physical exercise), but the long hours of instruction ended with a bath. Pupils had to learn the names of the letters of the alphabet before being shown what they looked like; they chanted the letters all in order forward and backward. They then graduated to groups of two or three letters, and finally to syllables and words.

In about 51 B.C., when Gaius was twelve, his grandmother Julia died. It must have been a sign of their closeness that the boy was given the signal honor of delivering a eulogy at her funeral. The invitation is also evidence that he was growing into a self-possessed and clever teenager, who was likely to acquit himself well. He addressed a large crowd and was warmly applauded.

Gaius at last moved into his stepfather’s household, where both Atia and Philippus took his secondary education into hand. He attended a school run by a grammaticus, a teacher of literature and language, the staples of the curriculum. Both Greek and Latin were taught, but literary studies centered on the Hellenic inheritance: the epic poems of Homer, the Athenian dramatists, and the great orators. (There was a Latin literature, but it was rough-hewn and heavily dependent on Greek paradigms.) As Cicero drily put it: “We must apply to our fellow-countrymen for virtue, but for our culture to the Greeks.”

The teacher specialized in textual analysis, examining syntax and the rules of poetic scansion and explaining obscure or idiomatic phrases. The student learned to read texts aloud with conviction and persuasiveness, to master the art of parsing (that is, breaking a sentence down into its constituent grammatical parts), and to scan verse. This form of schooling had a long life: it survived into the Dark Ages and was reinvigorated in the Renaissance. As one modern commentator has observed, “There was not a great difference in the teaching of Latin and Greek between early nineteenth-century Eton and the schools of imperial Rome.”

The grammaticus also introduced the student to rhetoric, the art of public speaking. Most upper-class Roman men were destined for a career in politics, so the ability to persuade people to adopt a course of action or entertain an opinion was an essential skill. But oratory was held to be more than a talent; it conduced to the leading of a good life. The statesman and moralist Cato the Censor defined an orator as “a good man skilled in speech.”

Apparently Gaius showed great promise: if this is not a later invention, boys ambitious for a political career used to go around with him when he went out riding or visited the houses of relatives and friends. Like the adult senators, who used to walk through the city accompanied by crowds of dependents, Gaius was attracting young adherents whose support would be returned, they hoped, by help whether now or in the future. This will have had less to do with his charm or intelligence than with the fact that he was related to Rome’s most powerful politician, Julius Caesar.

Gaius made two special school friends, very different from each other in personality. The first was Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a year younger than Gaius. The origins of his family are unknown, but Suetonius says that he was of “humble origin”; the name “Vipsanius” is highly unusual and Agrippa himself preferred not to use it. He may have come from Venetia or Istria in northern Italy. Like the Octavii, the family was probably of affluent provincial stock.

According to Aulus Gellius, a collector of curious anecdotes and other unconsidered trifles, the word “Agrippa” denoted an infant “at whose birth the feet appeared first, instead of the head.” Breech births were difficult to manage and could endanger the mother’s life. It is said that Marcus was born in this perilous manner, and was so named in memory of the event.

Gaius’ second friend, Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, boasted a distinguished ancestry. He traced his lineage to the splendid, mysterious Etruscan civilization, based in today’s Tuscany, which dominated central Italy before the rise of Rome. The Etruscans were believed by some to be immigrants from Lydia in Asia Minor. Maecenas was of regal stock, descending on his mother’s side from the Cilnii, who many centuries before ruled the Etruscan town of Arretium (today’s Arezzo). By the first century B.C., though, the family had come down somewhat in the world: they were now equites.

If one may judge by their later careers, Agrippa was likely a tough, down-to-earth boy who enjoyed physical exercise and warlike pursuits, while Maecenas had a more pacific, even feminine temperament and was especially interested in literature and the arts. They grew into adulthood alongside Gaius, learning to accord him total trust and forming a lasting, loving bond with him.

As his teens proceeded, an able upper-class adolescent moved from his secondary school to the ancient equivalent of a higher education. Leading politicians would often house writers and thinkers in their capacious homes. Young men were able to spend time there, learning from the conversation and watching the political career of their host. As a form of military service, they would also join the staff of a leading general.

For most of his life, Gaius had seen little or nothing of his astonishing great-uncle, Julius Caesar, who had spent ten years conquering Gaul. Soon the triumphant general would be back in Rome and able to provide the eager teenager with the most remarkable introduction to the twin arts of politics and war in the history of western civilization. That finishing school finished off the Roman Republic for good.