10. The Augustan Empire 43 BC

XIII. RETROSPECT

Why did Antony and Cleopatra lose? Of course one can point to their political errors, and Octavian's greater shrewdness. There was Antony's insensitivity to the western crisis, which misled him into keeping his legions on the eastern frontier for too long; there was the indelicacy with which he flaunted his liaison with Cleopatra; there were the Donations of Alexandria — pure spectacle, but once again so damaging before an Italian audience. On the other side, there was Octavian's adept manipu­lation of Italian public opinion, exploiting propaganda with greater power and insight than had ever been done before. It is so easy to isolate these facts that we naturally assume they were decisive. They certainly made a difference: how big a difference, one may doubt. It remains true that, with Antony so confined to the East, Italy would have favoured Octavian overwhelmingly in any case; it remains true that, once all the politics had been played out, at the beginning of the } 1 campaign Antony still looked as if he would win. The East was as solid for him as the West for Octavian, and the military factors were on his side. Octavian certainly outwitted Antony in their political exchanges; but it was not this that finally brought the victory.

Perhaps it is easier to isolate the decisive moments. One is obvious, the autumn of 36, when Antony was failing in Parthia and Octavian was crushing Sextus: a suggestive contrast for the Italian public to ponder, and also a startling one — victory could not have been expected to dwell with the weak unmilitary Octavian rather than Antony, the greatest captain of the world. But there are at least two more turning-points. One, rather inconspicuously, was the death of Calenus in 40. It was that which robbed Antony of Gaul, and turned him so firmly eastwards; and, in the longer term, that gave Octavian not merely Gaul but also the whole West. And Calenus' death was just an accident, just Antony's bad luck. The second was the first stage of the Actium campaign itself, with Octavian's swift unimpeded crossing and, more important, Agrippa's series of debilitating thrusts on Antony's scattered forces. It was then that, within a few weeks, Antony started to look the loser rather than the winner; thereafter, the fighting simply ran its course. The true history of those few weeks remains hard to grasp. Why was Antony so dilatory in his resistance? Why was Octavian able to take over the decisive land station at Actium so easily? We shall never know; perhaps once again luck played a great part. But those few weeks decided the future of the Mediterranean world.

Octavian's greater political shrewdness should suggest a different reflection. Antony and Cleopatra might well have won the Actium campaign. If they had, the task of settling the world would in some ways have been easier for them. Their marriage — for marriage, unequivocally, it would then have been — would provide a most attractive register to describe and suggest a new harmony of West and East. That would be particularly true in any culture which thought of its royalty as gods: this would be a divine marriage, a most certain guarantee of the world's prosperity. But such cultures were the cultures of the East: Antony and Cleopatra would be both gods and monarchs, and the fate of Iulius Caesar made clear how sensitive such topics were in Rome. Antony had shown his statesmanship in other ways, especially in his penetrating judgment of the individuals he raised to power in the East, and in the style and range of his settlement. But his failure to appease Italian sentiment would surely have turned out to be a decisive flaw. The union of the Greco-Roman world was always a precarious thing, and it is hard to think that it could have survived the continuing dominion of Cleopatra and Antony. Looking a generation ahead, one could see what might happen: two worlds, not one, with Antyllus (perhaps) succeeding to some sort of control in the West, and Caesarion a more traditional monarch in the East. Or rather, that was the best that could be hoped for;

constitutional questions

a further debilitating series of revolts and civil wars, once again fought out in Italy and Greece, was just as likely. And no one could see what would emerge at the end.

Enthusiasm for Octavian comes less naturally to us now than fifty years ago. 'Because he stood for something more than mere ambition he could draw a nation to him in the coming struggle'³⁴¹ — one would not write that now. We admire the political shrewdness which forwarded ambition so well, but we admire it grudgingly: we have seen too many similar leaders since, and what they have meant for the world. Now the story is once again told, not as Octavian's triumph, but as the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. But, still, they could not have coped with success, and Octavian could: his mastery of Italian propaganda may not have won him the war, but it did much to win the ensuing peace. For Rome, the right man won.

ENDNOTE: CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTIONS

i. the terminal date of the triumvirate

This is notoriously disputed. For thorough discussion of the evidence and bibliography, reaching opposite conclusions, cf. esp. Fadinger 1969 (в 42) 98— 153, Gabba 1970 (в 55) lxviii—lxxix.

The Lex Titia of 27 November 43 established the triumvirate for five years: its terminal date was 31 December 3 8 and the term was more precisely five years and a little over a month-. It was renewed for a further term, but not until the conference of Tarentum in 37 (above, p. 27). The disputed question is the terminal date fixed at the time of this renewal, whether 31 December 3 3 or 31 December 32.

6₇

At RG 7.1 Augustus claims to have held the triumvir per continues annos decern / ovvexeoiv ereaiv 84ка (cf. Suet. Aug. 27.1): i.e. clearly, from 27 November 43 to 31 December 3 3: cf. Brunt - Moore ad loc. I agree with those who regard this as decisive. Thus the Fasti Capitolini, inscribed under Augustus, include the triumvirs before the consuls in their entry for 1 January 37 (rather than 36): the second five-year term had retrospectively been fixed as beginning then. App. III. 28. 80 shows that Appian regarded the triumvirate as due to end at the end of 3 2 rather than 3 3: 8vo yap eXeiirev ётт) rfj Sevrepq. TrevratTla -rfjabe rrjs apxys [of 1 January 33], but that seems to be his own misinterpretation: even though in III. Appian is in general drawing on Augustus' Autobiography, it would not be surprising if Augustus was delicately vague in that work about his status in 32, and it would be in Appian's manner to fill out the gap with his own explanation. BCiv. v.95.398, brei Se о XP°^V°S fXrjye rrjs apxrjs ■ ■ ■ [of Tarentum], perhaps implies that Appian wrongly thought that the triumvirs still held office in 37, when in fact this had already expired (cf. Dio xlviii. 5 4.6): in that case he would naturally assume that the five-year renewal would last from 36 to the end of 32. As Antony and Octavian were due to assume the consulship on 1 January 31, it J" .Charlesworth, САН x' 65.

was tempting to infer that the triumvirate was due to expire on the previous day, and that perhaps misled Appian, But such extensions usually went in five-year terms, and at Tarentum the triumvirs' first priority was to legalize their current position retroactively and therefore to backdate the new term to i January 37.

The oddity is in fact not that they renewed their term only to December 3 3 (that is explained sufficiently by the taste for five-year terms and the need for retrospective recognidon in 37); but that at Misenum, when they completed their consular lists for the following years, they had fixed on 31 rather than 3 2 as the date for their own consulship. They might then already have anticipated that a second quinquennium would expire in 33 rather than 32. But that may well have been Antony's choice: he was in a strong position at both Brundisium and Misenum, and the Antonians Ahenobarbus and Sosius were due to be consuls in 32. Antony may well have been content to rely on them to support him and embarrass Octavian in a crucial year.

2. octavian's'tribunicial sacrosanctity'

Dio xlix. 15.5—6 clearly implies that Octavian was granted this in 36: 'they [the people] voted him... protection from insult in word or deed (то ^ijre еруш р-утс Xoyw Ti v^pt^eadai): anyone who committed such an outrage was to fall liable to the same penalties as in the case of a tribune'. (On the terminology cf. Bauman 1981 (c. 20)). He also received the right to sit on the tribunician bench, ibid.-, the following year sacrosanctity was extended to Octavia and Livia, Dio xlix. 38.1. But App. BCiv. v. 13 2.548 says that in 36 'they' elected Octavian 8-qp.apxos is act, i.e. presumably gave him tribunicia potestas, 'encouraging him, it seems, to replace his previous apxy) [the triumvirate] with this permanent one': Oros. vi. 18.34 also attests a grant of full tribunicia potestas in 36. At li. 19.6 Dio says that Octavian was voted tribunicia potestas in 30; then, oddly enough, at liii. 3 2.5-6 he records a similar vote in 2 3. In fact Augustus certainly counted his trib. pot. from 23 (RG 4.4), and the easiest resolution of the evidential tangle seems to be to assume that Dio xlix. i 5.5—6 is right about sacrosanctity. The misinterpretation of Appian and Orosius is then unsurprising. Dio liii. 32.5 will then correctly record the final vote to confer trib.pot. in 23, and liii.32.6 makes it clear that the honour was then accepted. AtLi.19.6Dio specifies only an offer of trib.pot. in 30; at li. 20.4 he says that Octavian accepted 'all but a few' of the honours voted on that occasion - admittedly surprising phraseology, if the trib. pot. was among those he rejected, but perhaps not impossible (Dio elsewhere tends to present catalogues of honours voted as if they were generally accepted). So Last 1951 (c 15 3)-

Some prefer to assume that Octavian provisionally accepted trib. pot. in 36, but only on condition that both he and Antony laid down the triumvirate; on this view the proposal lapsed when Antony refused, but Octavian managed to preserve sacrosanctity from the original offer: cf. e.g. Schmitthenner 1958 (c 304) 191 n.2, Palmer 1978 (c 184) 322—3. That is possible. Some, e.g. von Premerstein 1937 (a 74) 260-6, suggest that Octavian accepted full trib. pot. in 36, then renounced it at some time (probably early 27) before re-accepting it in 23; but in that case it is odd that this first trib. pot. is never mentioned in

constitutional questions 69

contemporary documents, nor its renunciation in the literary sources. Others, e.g. Kromayer 1888 (c 141) 40, Grant 1946 (в 522)446—5 3, Jones i960 (a 47) 10, 94-5, Reinhold 1988 (в 150) 229-30, prefer to assume that Octavian was allowed the tribunician ius auxilii in 3 o: this rests on Dio li . 19.6, where Dio connects the iusauxilii with the conferring of trib.pot., a notice which that view anyway has to reject or explain in the way outlined above; and it was anyway 'not a Roman habit of thought to decompose the potestas itself' in this manner (Last 1951 (c 153) 101).

CHAPTER 2

POLITICAL HISTORY, 30 B.C. TO A.D. 14

j. a. crook

i. introduction

With the victory of Iulius Caesar's heir there began - though it is apparent only to historical hindsight - both a distinct phase in the history of Europe, the 'Augustan Age', and a distinct epoch in the standard divisions of world history, the 'Roman Empire'. That fact has always constituted a problem for historians, from the earliest writers about Augustus until now, in that Augustus was both an end and a beginning. The temptation is for chronological narrative to be given up - for time, as it were, to stop - at the beginning of the Principate (whether that be put in 27 or 23 or 19 b.c. or in some other year), giving way to thematic accounts of 'institutions' of the Roman Empire as initiated by its 'founder'. Augustus did, indeed, 'found' the Roman Empire; but the danger of succumbing to the thematic temptation is that it makes the institutions he initiated look too much the product of deliberation and the drawing-board, whereas they need to be seen as arising, incomplete and tentative, out of the vicissitudes of a continuing political storv. That story will be told in the present chapter.¹

The sources of evidence for the reign of Augustus, subsequent to the 'triumviral' period narrated in chapter 1 above, are too multifarious to be described generally here,² yet in some ways they are far from satisfactory all the same, and the Augustan beginnings of many institutions of the Roman Empire remain hard to detect. The narratives we have are also of such a kind as to lure people into placing too much emphasis on minor turbulences. One or two features of the evidence need to be brought to the reader's attention. The first is that the only full-scale ancient chronological narrative of Augustus' reign that has come down to us is the relevant part (Books li—lvi) of the Histories, in Greek, by Cassius Dio, a consular senator of the Severan age.³ We are fortunate that, for a

To be read in conjunction with the military story told in ch. 4.

On the main literary sources see САН x¹ 866-76. F.pigraphic documents: F.hrenberg and Jones, 2nd edn 195 5 (в 227) (the paperback reprint of 1976 and 1979, containing important addenda) (EJ²). Translations: AN. Selcct sources in English: Chisholm and Ferguson 1981 (a 16).

Millar 1964 (в 128); Manuwald 1979 (в 121).

7°

71

introduction

good deal of the period, the full narrative written by Dio survives, as opposed to the Byzantine abridgements of him with which historians of the post-Augustan period have mostly to be content; but there are a number of small gaps, due not to any sinister cause but to the mere loss of leaves from a codex, where we are reduced either to the abridgements or to nothing of Dio at all.[169] The loss thus caused to the detailed picture of the last twenty years of the reign is disproportionately great, leaving all too much room for conjecture and making inevitable some imbalance of emphasis upon the first half of the reign.

A second feature of Dio's Histories about which notice must be given is the peculiarity of Book lii. It consists almost entirely of an artificial debate, set in 29 b.c., between Agrippa and Maecenas, as advisers to the future Augustus, on the relative merits of a 'democratic' or a 'monarchic' state; the speech of Maecenas advocating the latter is enormously the longer.[170] The prevailing view, here accepted, is that the Maecenas- speech, at least, is a demarche composed by Dio in the hope of influencing the policy of government in his own age, and cannot be used as direct evidence for what was intended or was the case at the time when it is supposed to have been spoken.

The two major literary sources, apart from the Histories of Dio, are Suetonius' lives of Augustus and Tiberius: the Lives are immensely important, but they are organized thematically rather than chronologi­cally.[171] In any case, Suetonius and Dio being non-contemporary sources, the question arises what their sources may have been, and how reliable. Of contemporary material there survive today Augustus' own Res Gestae (as well as other important inscriptions and papyri), the relevant parts of the Roman History of Velleius Paterculus,[172] and Strabo's Geography. We know that there was much more: Augustus wrote an autobiographical fragment (going down only to 25 b.c.), and there were collections of his letters and sayings; Agrippa, too, wrote memoirs, and we hear of various contemporaries and near-contemporaries who may have narrated the events of the reign - though not a word of them survives.[173] Livy continued his History down to 9 b.c.; but of that work we possess only the so-called Periochae or 'Tables of Contents', and to the important question whether Livy was the main source of the narrative of Dio forthe Augustan period as he had been for the previous period, the answer seems to be that he was probably not.⁹ That leaves the historian of Augustus in the uncomfortable position that his main narrative source is itself dependent upon an unknown and lost source as to whose credentials no judgment can be made.

Of the inscriptions, abundant and of the first importance, though all call for careful interpretation, only one group would really baffle the reader without a word of explanation: the lists known as the Fasti and the Calendars.¹⁰ The Fasti are chronological lists, on stone, of the annual Roman consuls or of those who celebrated triumphs, from early times, the bare lists being sometimes accompanied by brief annotations of other events. The most important surviving set, which includes both consuls and triumphatores, is called the Fasti Capitolini, and was inscribed on an Augustan triumphal arch at the southern end of the Forum Romanum.¹¹ It is crucial to realize that those Fasti are not, as we have them, age-old primary material but a learned compilation, set up enure at a single moment, not for a historical but for a propaganda purpose. Sets of consular Fasti were also erected in the municipalities, who added their local magistrates, and some corporations kept such lists: the vicomagistri furnish a good consular list down to a.d. 3. The Calendars were lists of festivals and other events organized under the days of the year;¹² there was no doubt an official Roman set, but the ones that, in more or less fragmentary states, have come down to us belonged to municipalities or corporations or even private persons. The most useful are the Fasti Praenestini, from the forum of Praeneste: they, too, were a learned construction, the work of the antiquarian Verrius Flaccus, the tutor of Augustus' grandsons, Gaius and Lucius Caesar.

The quantity of new information available today that was not in the possession of those who wrote on Augustus in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History is small, consisting of a few inscriptions and papyri - not but what some of those are of high significance. But an enormous enlargement of the historian's task in handling the evidence for the Augustan age has resulted from three conceptual developments. Scholars have come, first, to see that the physical monuments - buildings, art-objects, coins - are central and not merely corroboratory evidence: they were, to the Romans, speaking monuments, and they spoke politically.¹³ Secondly, that appreciation is part of a wider enlargement of perspective, in that we are required to view symbolism

' Manuwald 1979 (в 121).

Texts in EJ²; edition, Degrassi 1947 and 1963 (в 224) XIII, fascs. 1 and 2.

Latest arguments, Coarelli 1985 (e 19) 11 263-308.

Ovid's Fatti is a versification of the calendar material for half a year.

" Holscher 1984 (p 424); Hannestad 1986 (f 409); Simon 1986 (f 577); Zanker 1987 (f 632).

and myth-making as an integral function of all societies, and a nation's political symbols and images as essential to the understanding of any segment of its history. Finally, there stretches a vast field, on whose battles scarcely any historian has been competent to be more than an onlooker - the works of the famous figures of Augustan literature. A present trend amongst literary specialists is to see those writings as through-and-through political, whether as propaganda for the political regime or as in more or less covert resistance against it, asserting either 'Augustan values' or those of the 'alternative society'. The historian cannot avoid the challenge to regard that material also as central rather than peripheral, though his sense of the impossibility of mastering all the evidence is thereby greatly aggravated.[174]

11. 30-17 B.C.

Actium, though it is convenient to historians as a punctuation mark (Dio says we should date the years of the new ruler's 'monarchy' from 2 September 31 B.C.),[175] and was convenient to the victor as a symbol, was not quite the end of civil war. A campaign had to be mounted for Egypt,[176] and i August 30 B.C., Aegypto capta, is the real ending date, with the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra following hard upon it.

Caesar[177] now had, at just under thirty years of age, all the power there was, but not yet - if ever - was there a 'happy ever after', for there was no necessary acquiescence. The presuppositions of republican political life did not disappear overnight, and though many had gone and many survivors leapt on to the winning bandwagon, opposition did not instantly die away. That fact has received much emphasis in recent scholarship, to the point of finding in 'opposition' the key to most of what happened down to 17 B.C.,[178] but it is best not to exaggerate: such opposition had no sufficient base of power to force Caesar to take or refrain from any action. It is, perhaps, a matter of the right language to use, for there were certainly considerations that he had to face. Victory cast into his lap, along with it, all current problems and all future policies. He held power as long as he satisfied the various elements in the body politic - the armies, mostly wanting demobilization on good terms,¹⁹ his supporters who had made victory a reality, the plebs of Rome, too large, politicized and volatile to ignore,²⁰ and the surviving governing class, without whom an empire could not be maintained. And there were pre-existing structures to which, for the very sake of power, he must relate himself, and which could not be wished away, such as career expectations and clientelae.

A career reward for an important supporter may be the banal explanation of the first momentous decision taken after Cleopatra's death, with which our tale begins. Egypt was a new responsibility. The question was, how that land should be governed; the answer, that it should be a province of the Roman empire, but with an eques, not a senator, as its governor. The choice may, at the time, have been obvious: simply, the member of the victorious junta who had successfully handled the Egyptian campaign and who deserved a major reward. That Gaius Cornelius Gallus²¹ was only an eques was perhaps of secondary or no consideration. Like Dio and Tacitus,²² with hindsight we seek a principle for the consigning of Egypt, ever after, to an eques: the crucial importance of its corn for Rome and the need to deny its resources to opponents. But Gallus was the man on the spot, and Upper Egypt, the old traditional part of the Double Kingdom, recalcitrant to the Ptole­mies and wooed by Cleopatra, had to be integrated militarily with the rest. Meanwhile, the royal treasure-house was seized, which meant the end of shortage of funds and enabled promised payments to be made for the land bought for discharged veterans.

At Rome, tight control was exercised on behalf of his absent chief by another member of the triumphant junta, also an eques, Gaius Maecenas. He scotched an alleged plot by Lepidus, the son of the deposed triumvir, to assassinate Caesar — an unconvincing story indeed, given that Caesar was across the seas. Anyone looking for what was usurpatory and unconstitutional about the new rulers who had vaulted into power need look no further, for there is no sign that Maecenas had any formal authority at all, and there were perfectly valid consuls in office: 'non mos, non ius', yet.²³ And though certain new constitutional powers were voted to the absent Caesar, the 'Vote of Athena' or power of pardon,²⁴ the auxilii latio or power, like a tribune , to come to the aid of citizens in the city of Rome,²⁵ and the power to 'judge when called upon'²⁶ (which scholars seize upon in the search for a constitutional basis for the emperor as judge), they are best seen either as marks of honour, simply — for 30 B.C., with Caesar away from Rome, was hardly a time for constitution-making — or else as giving him some judicial standing in the East, in relation to former partisans of Antony, or of himself.²⁷ (Cf. ch. i. Endnote 2.)

²¹ Boucher 1966 (c 37). ²² Dio li.17.1; Tac. Ann. 11.59.3. ²³ Tac. Ann. 111.28.1.

Jones i960 (a 47) 95.

Dio li. 19.6 says all powers of a tribune, for life. That may have been offered; Caesar accepted (only)'most'of what was offered, li. 20.4. ²⁶ екнХт/тбу Stxa^etv.

²⁷ His partisans in the cities may have been calling for support.

jo—17 в.с.

For Caesar showed no sign of hurry to reach the hub of things. He entered upon his fifth consulship of 29 B.C., as he had done his fourth the year before, in absence from Rome, still in the East, where there was need for diplomatic activity and reflection (no doubt) on policy, and where a major decision was forced on him about cult of himself as the new liberator, peace-bringer and benefactor.²⁸ Caesar was bombarded with offers of official cult, in line with what was customarily offered in the hellenistic world. Dio tells us what he decided: for the Roman citizens in the East, temples of Rome-plus-the-divine-Iulius at Ephesus and Nicaea were to be the prescribed limit of official cult; for the non-Romans, temples of Rome-plus-himself at Pergamum and Nicomedia.²⁹ That, Dio says, was the precedent for the subsequent general pattern; like the prefecture of Egypt, and much else, what came to be settled policy sprang from a quick decision made in a particular context.

The Senate, at its first meeting of 29 B.C., excogitated further honours for the still absent victor: the right to use Imperator as his permanent first name,³⁰ formal approval of his eastern diplomatic arrangements, and, on 11 January, the closing of the gates of Janus in sign that Rome was at total peace. (We can all notice, with Dio,³¹ that campaigns were going on in Spain, Gaul and Africa, but the Romans meant peace as far as they were concerned, and the 'business-as-usual' foreign triumphs by which the aspiring leaders of the Republic brought themselves to prominence, and which had gone on, significantly, all through the triumviral period, were still going on.)

Caesar came leisurely home. In August he was back on Italian soil (Virgil and Maecenas read the Georgics to him at Atella);³² and on 13, 14 and 15 August he celebrated the only three triumphs he was ever to celebrate: for his Dalmatian campaigns of 35-33 B.C., for Actium, and for Egypt. His sister's son Marcus Claudius Marcellus, and his stepson, Tiberius Claudius Nero, coeval, born in 42 B.C., rode with the triumviral carriage.There were gladiatorial and beast shows, a distribution of 400 sesterces per person to everybody 'from the booty', and a present to discharged soldiers of 1,000 sesterces per head. On 18 August came another ceremony: the dedication, on their completion, of two struc­tures in the Forum Romanum proclaiming the glory of the gens lulia,³³ the temple of divus lulius at the southern end and the new senate-house, the Curia lulia, at the northern. The new Curia housed the statue of Victory from Tarentum and the statue of 'Venus rising' by Apelles, purchased by Caesar expressly; and outside the new temple were placed

^a Habicht 1973 (f 134) 55-64. ²⁹ Dio li.20.6-9.

³⁰ So defacto on coins already in the triumviral period. ³¹ Dio li.20.5.

Donatus, Life of Virgil, from Suetonius' hives of tbe Poets (ed. Rostagni 1956 (в 153) 89).

75

Transformation of the Forum Romanum, Simon 1986 (f 577) 84-91.

the rostra captured at Actium, to face the rostra at the other end of the Forum (in their new Caesarian location). Noting these details is not to descend into triviality; they are the first of many examples to come of political statements made through visual monuments.

Caesar and the chief among all his collaborators, Agrippa, were granted censoriapotestas, the authority possessed by censors, with which, in 2 8, being both also the consules ordinarii of the year, they carried out the first solemn lustration of the Roman people since 70 B.C. They also carried out a revision of the senate-list, lectio senatus, which obliged numerous senators to resign. It was the first of several purges of the curial order, but one should be aware of incautious inferences from the story that Caesar and Agrippa wore breastplates under their togas at that lectio. Of course, assassination was always a possibility, but the idea that the purge in 28 B.C. was for the rooting out of irredentist Antonians is simplistic, because such enemies were hardly to be scotched merely by excluding them from the Curia. The Senate had, notoriously, been grossly enlarged by the introduction of people whom the rest of that body regarded as socially unworthy, and in the restoration of the status quo ante which — as will be seen - was afoot, a return to a normalized Senate was in the interest of the senatorial order itself. Furthermore, if Caesar was going to set up a committee chosen by lot from the senators to play some role in the preparation of public business,³⁴ it would need first to shed its unsuitables. Dio mentions here (it is the first of many new regulations governing senatorial affairs) a new rule that senators might only leave Italy-Sicily with Caesar's permission: hitherto the Senate itself had been the licensing authority.³⁵

It was in 28 B.C. that some of the slowly maturing plans began to take shape. There faces us in the end that unavoidable topic, the constitution of the Principate: it will be dealt with in chapter 3, but in the present chronological account what happened can best be described as 'business as usual after alterations', which was what all Rome wanted and expected. 'In my sixth and my seventh consulship, after I had ex­tinguished the fires of civil war, in accordance with the wishes of all [Greek version: 'of my fellow citizens'] having taken control of all things, I transferred the res publico [Greek version: not politeia but kjrieia, 'supreme authority'] from my power into the arbitrament of the Roman Senate and people.'³⁶ It can be noted at once that there was no such thing as 'the constitutional settlement of 27 B.C.': 'In my sixth (28) and my seventh (27) consulship ...', says Augustus.³⁷ The process was con­ceived of as a steady return to normality after years of abnormality. In 28

³⁴ Crook 1955 (d 10) 11. 35 Dio lii.42.6; Mommsen 1888 (a 65) ш 912-13.

³⁶ RG 34.1. ³⁷ And cf. Tac. Ann. 111.28, sexto demum consulate.

Caesar shared the consularfasces, month by month, with his colleague, in the traditional manner (after all, he was now in Rome and so able to do so), and he announced that the rulings of the triumvirs -including his own, and presumably insofar as not already validated — would be abolished as from the end of the year.³⁸ What was occurring was what Antony and Caesar, as triumvirs, had promised would occur. They had envisaged it for their intended joint consulate of 31 в.с.:³⁹ it had been regrettably delayed by civil war, so Caesar implied, but now here it was; and nobody at Rome can have expected that the 'dynasts' would reserve to themselves no special place in the restored order. The difference was that there was now only one 'dynast' left, which was, needless to say, no small difference.

But first, the year 28 had other excitements for the Roman public. To begin with, no less than three 'business-as-usual' proconsular triumphs, in May, July and August; then in September the first celebration of 'Actian Games' in Rome; and in October the completion of the white marble temple of Apollo on the Palatine.⁴⁰ Potent symbolism lay in that: Actian Apollo to be the presiding genius of a new age, a synthesis of Greece and Rome, of arms and arts, his shining temple standing prominent, housing famous original statues and flanked by libraries, and connecting with - so as to be virtually a part of- the house of Caesar. The ever-recurring paradox of all this story comes out in those symbols: the effort of Caesar, on one plane, to restore the 'Scipionic' Rome of past glories, matched, on another plane, by the rapid growth, also by his efforts, of new concepts and structures, of a 'parallel language'.⁴¹ The paradox is yet more apparent if the view of some modern writers be accepted that Caesar's huge Mausoleum beside the Tiber was already finished by 28 в.с. and was a great symbol; but that may not be right,⁴² and there is disagreement about what it is supposed to have symbolized. Certainly, the Mausoleum was not redolent of modest aspirations, but the late-republican Romans were competitive about tombs, and it was perhaps just an ace of trumps in that competition.⁴³

Caesar was absent from his 'Actian Games': he was ill. Scepticism is common amongst historians about the illnesses that punctuated the first forty years of Caesar's life: they were, it is supposed, psychological reactions to tense situations, or even fraudulent and calculated. The scepticism is fuelled by the fact that after 23 B.C. he lived to a great age in

³⁸ Dio Lin.2.5. Grenade equates that announcement with the edict quoted by Suetonius, Aug. 28.2. Unconvincing. ⁵⁹ App. BCiv. v.75.313.

Propertius 11.31; Simon 1986 (f 577) 19-25; Zanker 1987 (f 632) 52-73 and 242-5.

Concept borrowed from C. Nicolet 1976 (a 66) ch. 9, ies langages paralleles'.

Reliance is placed on Suet. Aug. 100.4; but it was recem when Virgil wrote Am. vi.873 and still unfinished when Marcellus was placed in it. ⁴³ For the competition see Zanker 1987 (f 632) 27.

essentially sound health,⁴⁴ by the lack of success of medical historians in diagnosing, from the vague evidence, what, if anything, was seriously the matter with him, and by the fact that he is known to have staged one crisis, when Tiberius threatened retirement — and Tiberius was unde­terred. Nevertheless, doubt is hypersceptical. Illness and early death stalked the corridors of power in antiquity.⁴⁵ Iulius Caesar was epileptic; Pompey was ill every year,⁴⁶ and very gravely ill at Naples in 50 B.C.; as for our Caesar, he nearly died in his teens, and in 42 he was ill at Dyrrhachium and at Philippi, and there were rumours of his death. In 3 3 he was ill in Dalmatia. His illness in 28 went on after the Games all through the winter, for he was still not recovered in May the following year. In 26 illness overtook him at Tarraco after the first Spanish campaign, and may have been continuous through 2 5 and 24; for he was ill at Rome in June 24, and very likely continued so right down to his resignation of the consulship in July 23: then, notoriously, he was thought to be at death's door again. And, surely, he thought himself so: hence the building of the Mausoleum, and the autobiography, after­wards abandoned, and the early versions of the Res Gestae. Caesar's precarious condition, and his own belief in it, must be borne in mind when we think of'constitutional settlements': it really was possible that the whole story would end abruptly, and he must hasten to leave something stable behind.

At the beginning of 27 b.C., all special powers being abolished, Caesar and Agrippa were joint consuls once again. On the Ides of January, in a careful consular speech in the Curia, Caesar handed the whole Roman state back into the hands of the Senate and people, for them to decide the nature of its future government: that was the gesture of fulfilment of the promise. It does not seem likely that the Senate's response was other than carefully prepared and stage-managed:⁴⁷ it was to grant to Caesar what the Senate had traditional authority to grant, a provincia. But that provincia, 'Caesar's province', gave him nevertheless an overwhelming role in the new order, because of its size: Spain, Gaul and Syria (plus, indeed, Egypt, which, having not existed as a province at all until 30 B.C., may not have been thought of as any of the Senate's business to grant), on a ten-year maximum tenure. Caesar made no gesture to resign the consulship, which lay with the people to grant; and if he chose to continue to offer himself annually for election to it, no doubt he would be regularly elected: he would hold his vast provincia either as consul, or, if he ever dropped the consulship, as proconsul. No change at all needed to be made in the traditional arrangements for the rest of the provinces of the Roman world. Strabo, indeed, states — implying that it was at this

⁴⁴ Though he remained hypochondriacal^ fussy about himself all his life, and often had throat infections. ⁴⁵ Syme 1986 (a 95) 20-5. ⁴⁶ Cic. Att. vin.2.3. ⁴⁷ Contra, Dio liii.i i.

time - that Caesar received 'headship of the hegemony' and was made arbiter of peace and war for life, but reasons for limiting the significance of that claim will be given in chapter 3 below.[179]

The formal authority Caesar thus took for himself was vast, indeed, and in its totality un-republican; nevertheless, it was a way of expressing his overwhelming predominance in encouragingly familiar concepts — sovereignty vested in Senate and people, and no political structure incompatible with mos maiorum. And not a colossal confidence trick, for who, amongst those who mattered, could have been taken in? Rather - if Caesar turned out to have made the right political guess — what most people badly wanted to believe; and, furthermore, experimental and with a fixed term. And finally, if he died, the traditional res publico would be standing in place, inviolate.

But at once comes the counterpoint and the paradox. For on 16 January Caesar was heaped with new honours proposed by his adher­ents, above all with the name 'Augustus'; and that was a fantastic novelty, the impact of which is blunted for us by two millennia of calling him by that name. No human person had been called it before, and its symbolic range was very large. The sources preserve a tale that Caesar, or some of his advisers, or both, had first thought of 'Romulus'.[180] Some scholars doubt, others think that 'Augustus' was a second-best imposed by the strength of opposition; but it came to the same thing, for they all knew their Ennius: '... since famous Rome was founded with august augury'. There were other insignia: the 'civic crown' of oak-leaves 'in honour of the salvation of the citizens'; the shield proclaiming Augustus' special qualities, virtus-, dementia, iustitia and pietas erga deos patriamque[181](expressing, of course, what was wanted of the ruler); the laurels placed on either side of his house doorway.[182] As children of a different culture we might be impatient with those insignia, as politically trivial; but in a society in which, to be a great man, you had to be acknowledged and proclaimed as such, the names and crowns and dedications had power, carrying symbolic messages both ways, of what was granted and what was expected.

In Sextilis (or August) Augustus, in poor health again, went off, first to Gaul and then to Spain. In fact, for fifteen years he kept up virtually a regime of three-year trips to the provinces alternating with two-year stays in Rome,[183] and Suetonius remarks that Augustus saw personally every Roman dominion except Africa and Sardinia.⁵³ We need not attribute to him the passion for personal oversight — and for tourism - that motivated Hadrian over a hundred years later. Escape from opposition, at least in the sense of letting experiments simmer, may be more relevant; the desire, also, to foster the impression of 'business-as- usual': the governor goes to his province and Senate and people are sovereign at Rome. Nevertheless, already and at once, the res publico was stamped with that hallmark of a changed world, 'ubi imperator, ibi Roma', 'where the ruler is, there is Rome'. There was only one ruler now, and the world must make its way to where he was.

'Business-as-usual' included a triumph, in September, for Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus (the patron of Tibullus and perhaps of Livy), ex Gallia, but before that, in July, one for Marcus Licinius Crassus, ex Thracia et Getis. Crassus (a grandson of Iulius Caesar's triumviral colleague), who had been a partisan of Sextus Pompeius and then of Mark Antony, but, in spite of that, consul ordinarius in 30 B.C., requested the further honour of dedicating spolia opima for having personally killed an enemy chief. Augustus had it disallowed, on a probably trumped-up ground:⁵⁴ no one was to be allowed military honours greater than the ruler himself could ever conceivably have — indeed, before long not even triumphs would be permitted to any except members of the 'divine family'. But use of this incident to infer a 'challenge to the usurping authority' by an unreconciled Antonian, and a 'crisis of the new order' is altogether out of proportion. Crassus celebrated a full triumph, and the fact that he 'disappears from history' afterwards does not warrant sinister suspicions. What is more, the history of his campaigns, far from being suppressed, must have been written up by somebody, for Dio has a disproportionately long account of them.⁵⁵

Another disappearance at about this time, however, might be regarded as more of a tragedy: the suicide, in 26,⁵⁶ of the poet, soldier, and part-architect of Augustus' victory, Gaius Cornelius Gallus, first prefect of Egypt. Recent new - or newly evaluated — evidence⁵⁷ has led to revisions of the older story, that it was because he got above himself for his undoubtedly successful campaigns to unify Egypt that he forfeited the amicitia of Augustus. But whatever the reason, he did forfeit it, and the protection it afforded, and laid himself open to a senatorial declara­tion that he was liable to prosecution. Suetonius states that Augustus was distressed by Gallus' suicide and had not desired it;⁵⁸ so modern interpreters have urged that Gallus fell, not to the malice of his old chief, but to that of the 'opposition', to whom the consignment of Egypt to an

Livy, iv.20.j (who plainly (32.4) did not believe Augustus' case).

Dio li.23.2-27; and observe Livy Pir. 134-3.

Dio lin.23.4—7. Syme 1986 (a 95), 32, following Jerome, argues for 27.

Hartmann 1965 (в 241); Volkmann 1965 (в 295); Boucher 1966(0 37); Daly and Reiter 1979(0 74); Hermes 1977 (в 82). ⁵⁸ Suet. Aug. 66.2.

81

30-17 в.с.

eques had been an outrage and who seized upon some Achilles' heel of Gallus to destroy him. There is a puzzle of evidence here, whose pieces do not all fit; but it may be that we can legitimately see the Senate emboldening itself to declare - now that the favourite had fallen from grace — that a prefect of Egypt was not exempt from prosecutions to which other governors were liable. And perhaps it is not too fanciful to guess that the fall from grace was because Gallus had had further career pretensions, such as entry into the Senate with high standing. At any rate, insofar as there was a display of opposition in the incident it quite failed to unnerve Augustus, who continued to entrust Egypt to equites (and did not let them rise further).

The story here being challenged, that of attacks upon the usurping junta by an increasingly powerful and bold opposition, leading' to disintegration of the 'Party' and forcing upon the ruler a rethinking of his entire position that bore fruit in 23 B.C., is held to embrace even Augustus' Spanish war — its purpose political propaganda and its goal not achieved.[184] Northern Spain had been a useful triumph-hunting ground for years, down to 26 B.C., but it seems probable that it was now to be definitively annexed for its precious metals. That proved a hard task: Augustus had intended to lead a victorious campaign in person, and he had Marcellus and Tiberius with him as military tribunes, but he was ill at Tarraco and the war had to be carried forward - to no properly conclusive end — by legates. The illness gives a better key to these years: Augustus doubted his own long survival. Timor mortis, rather than fear of the opposition, was what preoccupied him.

His consular colleagues in Rome in 27 and 26 were Marcus Agrippa and Titus Statilius Taurus, reliable men. It can therefore hardly have been out of a sense of insecurity that in 26, from Spain, he promoted another experiment, the appointment of a prefect of the city, the respected triumphator Messalla Corvinus.[185] The post had a remote republican history: in the dim past a prefect had been appointed by the consuls if both had to be absent on campaign, to see to the government of the city, and Iulius Caesar had appointed several prefects simulta­neously in his absence. The prefecture was destined to become a regular post under the Principate, with responsibility for policing Rome, for which the urban cohorts were at the prefect's disposal; it came, in fact, to be the crown of a senatorial career. But in 26 there was a sitting consul, and Messalla, having accepted, gave up the post after six days.[186] The oddity is, if he thought it was a breach of mos maiorum, why he accepted inthe first place. Scholars suggest that pressure from his peers caused him to resign - another 'victory for the opposition' - or that he realized he was being manipulated by the ruler into acquiescing in a sinister novelty. It may be suggested, rather, that Augustus intended the post as an addition to the 'honours list' and Messalla accepted it as such and then learnt (from someone like Livy? We must remember that the Romans did not know much about their ancient history) how historically anomalous it was. There is no sign that he forfeited Augustus' esteem by his resignation, and the post was not, at that time, proceeded with. Statilius Taurus, according to Tacitus, took it, and with success, but hardly immediately, for he was consul; and it is by no means certain that Augustus ever intended that prefecture as a permanent post.

Agrippa, in his chief's absence, was engaged in the creation of a new complex of public structures and leisure-spaces in the Campus Martius. It was part of the stage-by-stage capture of the public spaces of Rome for the symbolism of the new ruler, as well, of course, as the cultivation of the plebs and the continuation of Agrippa's own populist image, inaugurated by his astonishing aedileship in 3 3 B.C.⁶² The new complex comprised, particularly, the Saepta Iulia, the great covered hall for voting (a project of Iulius Caesar), new baths with an attached park, and a new temple, the Pantheon.⁶³ Now the precedents for such a temple as that were hellenistic and monarchical, and scholars detect a whiff of opposition again, for we are told that Agrippa wished to call his structure Augusteum and place in it a statue of Augustus, so implanting direct cult of the ruler in Rome itself. Augustus declined, and if he was not under pressure he was certainly, in the matter of cult, feeling every step of the way; his absence will have helped to save embarrassment.

The creation of public spaces advertising the triumphant glory of Rome was proceeding also in newly conquered lands — in, for example, the major new cities of Colonia Augusta Praetoria (Aosta) and Colonia Augusta Emerita (Merida), both of them settlements of retired soldiers. A second closing of 'the gates of Janus signalized the all-too-incomplete victory in Spain.⁶⁴ Meanwhile, to Tarraco flocked the world's embassies: Parthians, Scyths, Indians, delegations from Greek cities. There could be no doubt where policy was being made; and that was the reverse of the coin, the disadvantage of absence, for not even a pretence could there be made of senatorial involvement. Incidentally, Augustus' wife, Livia Drusilla, was always at his side, whether on tour or at home. But there was no son of that marriage, a fact which remains a mystery.

⁴² Zanker 1987 (f 652) 144-8.

Not like the Hadrianic rotunda to be seen today, and facing in the opposite direction. Coarelli 1983 (f 116).

Oio dates the closing to 2] b.c., liii.27.1; and that is certainly before Augustus got back to Rome.

30-17 в.с.

Hence the major preoccupation of the sick ruler at Tarraco was: what happens if I die tomorrow? The answer arrived at, of immense signifi­cance (and hardly what Livia Drusilla can have advised), was to marry his two nearest blood relations to each other, his daughter lulia, aged fourteen, to his sister's son, Marcellus, aged seventeen. In 24 в.с. Marcellus was admitted to the Senate with the rank of one who had already held the praetorship and with the promise of an early consulship, and in 23, to enhance his popular image, he was made aedile and Augustus contributed to make his aedilician games especially note­worthy.⁶⁵ We ought not to be puzzled at the paradox of a regime carefully founded on the ostensible principle of election to offices, all of whose successive rulers, including the high-minded Marcus Aurelius, thought in exclusively dynastic terms about the succession. Paradox it is, but not novel; on the contrary, rooted in the mentality of the governing class of the Republic, whose young hopefuls had in each generation to compete for the people's votes to obtain office and so 'stay in the club', but felt themselves entitled by descent to be the competitors, and whose major families expected the highest honours for their sons. Augustus' solution, then, was, mutatis mutandis, a traditional one: to see that his natural dynastic successors were placed in the appropriate positions of office. The one idiosyncrasy was his very strictly 'genetic' concept of the succession: it was the blood of his family that was to prevail over all. It is easy to perceive the difficulty, namely that he had to make, and be seen to be responsible for, the choices that, in the Republic, the populus Komanus had made. Tiberius, for example, the son of Livia Drusilla, coeval with Marcellus: what of him? He must play second fiddle. In 24 he was elected quaestor for 23 - a step behind Marcellus - and allowed to stand for further offices five years ahead of normal. Or what of Agrippa, the main architect of victory, guarantor of stability, and focus of plebeian support? He had, at all events, no son. If mortality were to strike Augustus now, he alone could conceivably carry on the regime as they had planned it. Would he do so faithfully in the name of Marcellus and lulia? Well, he presided over the marriage ceremonies, which suggests that he supported the solution — except that Augustus was never sensitive to the feelings of those closest to him.

Augustus struggled home at the end of 25. He entered on his tenth consulship on the road from Spain to Rome; and on that day, 1 January 24 B.C., the Senate took an oath to uphold his acta, and it was announced that he would make a present to the plebs of 400 sesterces per person. Whereupon the Senate, according to Dio, 'released him from all compulsion of the laws',⁶⁶ which meant, goes on Dio, that Augustus was

The vela. Prop. 111.18.13. Crinagoras, Poems x and xi, ed. Gow and Page 1968 (в 6j).

83

Dio liii.z8.2.

to be 'master of himself and the laws and do what he liked and not do what he did not like'. Now Dio remarks elsewhere⁶⁷ that the emperor is 'absolved from the laws' - which was proper constitutional doctrine by his day. If that, plus 'doing what he liked', was proclaimed as the prerogative of Augustus as from i January 24 B.C., it is that date, not 31 nor 29 nor 27 nor 23 nor 19 nor 2 B.C., that would have to count as the start of formal constitutional autocracy at Rome, for both the great doctrines of the High Empire, 'the emperor is dispensed from the laws' and 'what is pleasing to the emperor has the force of statute', are inherent in what Dio says. Scholars do not so count it, and they are right not to; for even those who deduce from the lex de imperio Vespasiant that the second of those doctrines did apply already to Augustus⁶⁸ are usually constrained by parity of reasoning to admit that that same lex shows that Augustus was not, in general, 'dispensed from the laws'.⁶⁹ Such prerogatives could not have been granted by the Senate alone, and it is best to treat the alleged grant just as a proposal, made in Augustus' absence and in contemplation of his illness, that never got beyond the Senate. Constitutional redefinition was on the way, but it was to take a quite different turn.

The year 23 B.C., Augustus' fortieth, was a year of crisis, because Augustus almost died and Marcellus did die. Numerous historians at the present time re-date two events placed by Dio in the year 22 B.C., the 'trial of Marcus Primus' and the 'conspiracy of Caepio and Murena'.⁷⁰ They place them in 23, and claim that those events, coupled with the assumed disgruntlement of Agrippa with the promotion of Marcellus, were the culmination of the long tale of increasingly bold and successful opposition, nearly brought the whole regime down to disaster, and forced upon Augustus a constitutional retreat. The illness of Augustus is seen as a feint, a sharp incentive to the 'Party' to pull itself together. That transposition (with all the inferences that it carries with it) is, on methodological grounds, not adopted in what follows.⁷¹

Early in the year 23, Augustus did not expect to survive. There were, no doubt, people who rejoiced, and to whom the ruler's unexpected and rapid recovery was deeply disappointing. But at the crisis he handed state papers to his fellow-consul and his private signet to Agrippa. That was a scrupulously correct procedure. And he had not given the dynastic signal of adoption to Marcellus, not even in his will - as he was anxious to assure people.⁷² Upon recovery, in fact, he hastened to redefine powers, and, first of all, those of Agrippa. A law was passed conferring

" Dio Liii.18.1. ⁶⁸ Seech. 3 below, pp. 118-20.

⁶⁹ And historians, from Dio onwards, are wrong if they think the two doctrines 'come close to the same thing'. ⁷⁰ DioLiv.5.

⁷¹ Badian 1982 (c 14) argues cogently against it. ⁷² Dio Lin.31.1.

upon Agrippa an imperium proconsulate, probably with a term of five years:[187] not for action, but for eminence next to Augustus (and certainly not maius, for not even Augustus had that yet). Agrippa, with his new imperium, sailed off promptly to the East, to no particular activity, settling his headquarters at Lesbos and governing Syria through his own legates. Already in antiquity historians thought up explanations of this odd conduct: Agrippa had taken himself off, or been sent off by the very grant of proconsular imperium, in rage and humiliation, or in loyal co­operation, in order not to be in the path of the rising star, Marcellus. 'Crisis' historians, nowadays, prefer to see him sent to 'hold the East' because of the strength of opposition to the regime. Better than any of those explanations is to see in Agrippa's departure an experiment with the concept of double-harness at the top, one ruler in the West and one in the East. Augustus was, presumably, convalescent, and no one could know that he was destined never to be seriously ill again. Moreover, there was plague at Rome.

In any case, the new formula for Agrippa was only the first stage in a bigger reformulation, the 'constitutional settlement' of 23 в.с. On 1 July Augustus laid down his eleventh consulship, and must then have made it plain that in subsequent years he would not normally be a candidate for the office; for alternative formulae were adopted for giving him the various powers that he was relinquishing by giving up the consulship. But let us here be clear about the difference between powers and power. Augustus was not engaged in taking or declining or modifying the latter: factual power was not in question; he had that, totally, as long as he satisfied the general interest of governing class, plebs and armies. What was being taken or declined or modified was the expression of that power, which would settle expected boundaries of its use, of the behaviour of the ruler, and the scope to be allowed for a modus vivendi under his power. Not, then, retreats and compromises in a struggle over power, but in order to get the most acceptable modus vivendi. And in 23 the prime need was to restore to full availability the highest social prize of the aristocracy, the consulship,[188] which had been monopolized for years, as to one place, by Augustus, and twice also, as to the other, by Agrippa.⁷⁵ 'Business-as-usual' was what the aristocracy wanted as the price for their co-operation. Suetonius records, undated, a proposal by Augustus for there to be three consuls in any year when he was one, which was turned down:⁷⁶ the proposal tends to be associated with 19 B.C., but it might belong here in 2 3 - tried out, perhaps, on the senatorial steering committee and greeted with too much dismay. The alternative was for the ruler to relinquish the highest office.

Instead (or at least at the same time) Augustus received the grant, annually renewable but for life, of the official powers possessed by tribunes of the plebs, tribunicia potestas. We can argue that he needed the tribunician power so as, constitutionally, to be able to summon the Senate and to introduce legislation, and Augustus certainly so employed it. Some historians, regarding it as the principal cloak for autocracy, designate it as 'vague' and 'all-embracing': that is not right, for, unlike imperium, which was indeed vague, tribunicia potestas was a bundle of specifically defined powers.That is corroborated by the fact that an addition had to be made:[189] the Senate granted Augustus the right to make a formal motion at any session (a right that had not been part of the power of tribunes in the Republic). Tacitus looked in a different direction for the prime significance of the tribunician power: 'Augustus invented it as the title of highest pre-eminence, in order not to assume the name of king or dictator, and yet to have an appellation that would make him stand above all other imperii,[190] Tacitus thus saw it as a distinction rather than a power, and the same inference can be drawn from two other considerations, first that it came to be used as the chronological marker of the reign,[191] and, second, that it came to be the ultimate honour conferred on those chosen to be partners in the ruler's responsibilities - the sign of a 'colleague in rule', collega imperii. Also, of course, in an age attuned to symbols, tribunician power implied a relationship of protec­torate over the common people; though how far that impressed them is doubtful, and what they were hoping for was, as we shall see, something much more full-blooded.

The imperium of Augustus was redefined: it became imperium maius, which gave him prevailing authority over any other provincial governor in any case of conflict. It was, however, only proconsular imperium, giving him no authority in the home sphere such as he had possessed as consul (though, simply for practical convenience, he was allowed to have it 'once for all' in the sense of not having to drop it every time he entered the sacred pomerium of Rome and resume it every time he departed).⁸⁰ Some interpret the redefinition as compensating Augustus for the total maius imperium over the Roman world traditionally pos­sessed by consuls; but not all historians are agreed as to the reality, in practice, of the consular maius imperium, and, once again, not the least importance of the new device was to function as a distinction, keeping Augustus' imperium one stage higher than the new imperium of Agrippa.

'Constitutional settlement' is, then, too schematic a description of the changes of 23 B.C.; but it is only fair to add that the two elements, imperium proconsulate maius and tribunicia potestas, proved a very stable formula for the executive authority of Roman emperors for a long time to come.

So much for paper arrangements; in the world beyond the drafting- board nature and chance play their part: disease and death, fire, flood and famine affect the stability of regimes. The years 23 and 22 в.с. were plague years all over Italy. Marcellus died (we do not know whether of plague), and there was no child of his marriage; that was a blow to Augustus' first attempt to create a succession, though the less urgent in that the ruler himself seemed out of danger. More urgent was the condition of the plebs of Rome, whose goodwill Agrippa had fostered. Along with its huge growth in numbers the plebs, overwhelmingly of freedman status, had acquired some political force.⁸¹ It is exaggerated to suppose that Augustus was either dependent on it or could ever have based power mainly upon it, but it had huge 'nuisance-value' and had to be managed and prevented from developing popular leaders. Along with plague went grave food shortage,⁸² and the commons were angry and disillusioned, calling upon the ruler to undo the careful paperwork and take official powers more plenary than he had ever yet had.

The year 22 B.C. was, in fact, fraught with ills. The statutory court for treason had to be convened for more than one case.⁸³ The trial of Marcus Primus, proconsul of Macedonia, for making war on the Odrysae of Thrace unprovoked and without authority, his claim to have done so at the behest of'Augustus or Marcellus', the appearance of Augustus at the tribunal to deny any such instruction, the question by defence counsel what standing he had to intervene, and his reply that his justification was 'the public interest': all that is a well-known story.⁸⁴ The matter was, no doubt, serious, especially as the resulting conviction of Primus was not unanimous; but it may have been accorded a significance beyond its deserts by being transposed to 23 в.с. It belongs, rather, to the category of 'famous repartees', Augustus' reply being reminiscent of that of Pericles, that moneys had been spent 'for a necessary purpose'.⁸⁵

But there was also a conspiracy by two persons, presumably to attempt what nature had failed to achieve.⁸⁶ One was a wholly unknown Fannius Caepio,⁸⁷ the other a certain Murena (so Dio calls him),⁸⁸ connected with a group close to the ruler: he was the brother, or half- brother, of Maecenas' wife, Terentia⁸⁹ and of Augustus' other equestrian

" See САН ix,² ch. 17. ⁸² Note the frumentatio recorded in RG 1 j. 1.

⁰ Its composition was, presumably, at least half non-senatorial. ^M Dio Liv.3.1-3.

•⁵ Plut. Per. 2J.1. ^M Dio Liv.3.4-8; Veil. Pat. 11.91.2. ⁸⁷ Syme 1986 (л 9;) 40, n.47.

*® Referred to in different sources as Licinius Murena and Varro Murena; doubdess he was also a Terentius, but he was not the mystery man in the consular Fasti for 23. Syme 1986 (л 93) 387-9.

" With whom Augustus was supposed to be having a liaison.

friend, Gaius Proculeius, and he was also the very defence counsel who had sought to embarrass Augustus at the trial of Marcus Primus. There is no reason to think that the charge was merely trumped up by Augus­tus.[192] There was a formal trial for treason,[193] and a conviction, but, again, short of unanimous. The sinister part of the tale is that the convicted men were not permitted to slip away into exile in the traditional way but apprehended and put to death.[194] Perhaps they failed to depart instantly enough. Maecenas is said by Suetonius to have given the nod to his wife to warn her brother to flee,[195] and commonly supposed to have lost his confidential standing with Augustus from that moment (though it is not clear that he did lose it abruptly, and Terentia hardly needed her husband as a go-between for information). Augustus celebrated his delivery from the plot (presumably to knife him) as a victory, and was furious at the lack of unanimity of the condemnation.

Disease and hunger led to demonstrations in Rome. Augustus had set out for eastern parts (we shall see why), but the disorders were too great to ignore, and Agrippa was away, so he hurried back. He was offered the dictatorship,[196] by the Senate under heavy pressure from the city plebs, which was thinking of Iulius Caesar; he was offered the powers of a censor for life; he was offered a consulship that would be 'annual yet perpetual', like his tribunician power. He made, like Iulius Caesar at the Lupercalia, a histrionic scene of public refusal.[197] He cannot have been scheming to get those offices, any one of which amounted to formal constitutional supremacy, though those who believe that the arrange­ments of 23 B.C. were a retreat imposed by opposition also believe that Augustus engineered the public outcry to give him the excuse to recover constitutional ground. If scheming is in question it would be more plausible to suppose that he schemed for a chance to refuse them. Or were opponents trying to manoeuvre him into a false step that would justify tyrannicide? Perhaps all was straightforward on both sides, for the context was that of demands that somebody, somehow, should produce bread, and Augustus did accept cura annonae, charge of the corn supply, and it is altogether too subtle to think that that authority was a disguise for total supremacy and that the shortage itself was engineered for that. Bread appeared quickly enough,⁹⁶ and for the future a not very radical experiment was embarked on to improve the distribution of the free ration: a new annual committee of senior senators, praefectijrumentidandi.

In September 22 B.C. Augustus got away from Rome, and was away three whole years. Agrippa was in the eastern lands, no prefect of the city was appointed, and the urban plebs was not satisfied: the consuls had a rebellious populace on their hands. The people in comitia refused to elect more than one consul for 21 B.C.; equally, Augustus, writing from Samos, refused to take the vacant place. Only at the beginning of 21 did the people obediently elect a second consul.

What had taken the ruler to the East was a major policy issue, and he, not Agrippa, must be the one to achieve a hoped-for diplomatic coup. So Agrippa was available to change places with him, to return to Rome, and, momentously, to marry the widow Iulia. (Tiberius, the stepson, was not offered that hand: he was intended for a career of great public service, indeed, but not to reach the summit of all things.) If Agrippa's presence, briefly, in Rome was also supposed to calm plebeian agitation and prevent the now open consulship from falling into wrong hands, his success was limited, for in 20 в.с. the comitia again declined to elect more than one consul, Gaius Sentius Saturninus, who, in early 19 B.C., found himself facing, alone, the rise of a 'people's champion', a certain Marcus Egnatius Rufus.

The garbled tale of Egnatius Rufus⁹⁷ may be not unfairly boiled down to this: he was a senator who, as aedile, had won the favour of the Roman plebs by organizing a fire service; that had taken him straight to the praetorship, emboldened by which he stood in 19 в.с. for the consul­ship.⁹⁸ That conduct counts, in our sources, as one of the 'canonical' list of conspiracies against Augustus;⁹⁹ it is puzzling why. For Augustus was in the East (and Agrippa was, in a single year's campaign, finally conquering the Cantabrians in Spain), and the problem, whatever it was, was dealt with firmly and successfully by the consul and the Senate. The consul refused Egnatius' candidature, and when a popular uprising occurred it was suppressed, in accordance with a senatus consultum ultimum, and the aspiring popular leader executed. The naive guess is probably right, that the plebs had found a new Clodius, and the fact was dangerous - but to the whole elite, not just to the ruler, so they closed ranks. If Augustus was hoping, as some authors think, that the political agitations of the plebs would lead to an enlargement of his own powers, he would not want his position to seem to be dependent on a demagogue; and if he just feared the plebs would be seduced away from him and Agrippa, he had a yet more obvious motive for wanting Egnatius removed. In any event, neither he nor Agrippa saw any need to rush home.¹⁰⁰

The sources are muddled, not least chronologically: Dio liii. 24.4-6 (under 26 b.c.); Veil. Pat. 11.91.3-4, with the notes of Woodman 1985 (в 203).

The vacant one of 19? It sounds, rather, as if the consul was presiding over ordinary elections, which would have been those for 18. ⁹⁹ Suet. Aug. 19.1.

¹⁰⁰ Agrippa's Aqua Virgo was opened on 9 June, but he can hardly have completed the clinching Spanish campaign quickly enough to be present.

Augustus' eastern sojourn claimed striking achievements. The back­ground of affairs in the kingdoms of Parthia and Armenia is described in chapter 4 below.¹⁰¹ The first result of Augustus' intervention in 20 в.с. was a diplomatic agreement with the government of Parthia, the only substantial territorial power on Rome's horizon. It was no doubt welcome to both sides, and established a treaty relationship as between equal powers and an official frontier. Moreover, legionary standards captured from Marcus Crassus and from Mark Antony were handed back to the Romans. Augustus succeeded brilliantly in exploiting the fact, for home consumption, as a victory of arms, which it was not. An opportunity also offered itself for Tiberius Claudius Nero, the stepson, to gain diplomatic or military credit by installing a Roman supporter on the throne of Armenia - which proved easy, because the monarch of the moment had been assassinated before Tiberius arrived. But it was the 'return of the standards' that became a corner-stone of the ideology of a reinvigorated Rome resuming her historic right to 'spare the conquered and defeat the proud'.¹⁰²

Augustus made many other political dispositions in the eastern provinces, for example depriving cities of their status as 'free' cities and promoting others, quite irrespective (as Dio points out) of the nature of provinces such as Asia and Bithynia, which were technically provinciae populi Romatti governed by proconsuls.¹⁰³ It was done by the authority of his imperium maius. Also, according to Dio,¹⁰⁴ he sent the Senate a letter stating a policy strangely like the instructions that Tacitus says he left behind in a.d. 14: 'to keep the empire within bounds'. That is surprising at this juncture, in view of the huge expansion that was to come: perhaps it was a justification for treaty relations with Parthia and the continued use of 'client kings' in the East.

Augustus voyaged home via Athens, whither Virgil journeyed in his honour (and died in his entourage at Brundisium on the way back: a heavy year for Roman poetry, which saw the death of Tibullus also). The magistrates and Senate proceeded to Campania to meet the returning ruler, a gesture that became a precedent;¹⁰⁵ and he appointed, proprio motu, a second consul for the empty place, thus both resolutely declining to change course but also cutting a Gordian knot by pure auctoritas-. it was not, apparently, challenged.

An altar to Fortuna Redux, 'Fortune the Bringer Home', was erected at the Porta Capena and a ceremony of reditus, return, was enacted, of which much is made in the Res Gestae.¹⁰⁶ A triumph, however, Augustus

к» Pp. i j 8-63.

102 Virg. Aen. VI.853. Cf. Prop, iv.6.83, Horace's Carmen Saeculare, and the breastplate of the statue of Augustus from Prima Porta, Simon 1986 (f 577) 52-7. ¹⁰³ Dio Liv.7.4-5.

¹⁰⁴ Dio Liv.9. i. ¹⁰⁵ First, actually, in 30 b.c., Dio li.4.5.

¹⁰⁶ RG 11; the Fasti Amiternini and Oppiani have it also, under 12 Oct.

refused, accepting instead ornamenta triumphalia, the insignia without the ceremony.¹⁰⁷ Triumphs were to be quite rare, partly because indepen­dent proconsular commands, a prerequisite of a triumph, died out and partly because triumphs competed, as public spectacle, with the ruler's own image-making: Agrippa led the abstinence. In March 19 в.с. Lucius Cornelius Balbus held a full, formal triumph for campaigns in Africa, and that was the last to be recorded in the Fasti Triumphales and the last to be held by anyone outside the 'divine family': for others, ornamenta triumphalia became the usual limit of honours. It may have been at that time that the arch was built next to the temple of Divus Iulius which had on its inner walls the pageant of Roman history represented by the Fasti Capitolini and Fasti Triumphales;¹⁰⁸ the ideology of military success and hegemony was the very breath of Rome: it was to be channelled in the interest of the ruler.

Dio gives a list of further constitutional grants to Augustus in 19 B.C.: an 'overseership of morality' {praejectura morum would have been the Latin), a censorial authority, a grant that most scholars interpret as the consular power for life, and the right to enact any laws he might wish, presumably without submitting them to the comitia, and to call them leges Augustae.*⁰⁹ Was that the successful outcome of a Machiavellian policy of 'reculer pour mieux sauter'? Had the popular agitations given Augustus the all-embracing formal authority he coveted, under an at last accep­table formula? Though widely believed, that is probably not right; the context will suggest an alternative view. In the Res Gestae, Augustus strenuously denies receiving all-embracing formal authority: but what he did proceed to in the years that followed was a programme of legislation, particularly such as he hoped would restore traditional standards of the Roman people. The intention so to legislate must have been known in advance, through the deliberations of the senatorial sub­committee. Praefectura morum, we may guess, was a suggestion mooted for the formal authority on which Augustus should proceed, censorial power another, the right to enact leges Augustae another; all politely rejected, but somehow the offers have got into the record as accepted.¹¹⁰ The 'consular power' is a more complex, and certainly a controversial, question. Most scholars, nowadays,¹¹¹ are only too happy to believe that Augustus accepted it for life in 19 B.C., because it serves to provide formal justification for certain actions he took, for which they can see no other. There is, however, no explicit statement but Dio's and Dio,

¹⁰⁷ Dio says he celebrated an ovation, but see Abaecherli Boyce 1942 (л i).

¹⁰⁶ For the date, and the argument that the Fasti were on a 'Parthian arch', see Coarelli 198) (e 19)11. ¹⁰⁹ Dio Liv.io.j-6.

¹¹⁰ Rejection of magistracy of curator morum, RG 6.1 (Greek only); of censorial power, implicit in RG 8; only Dio mentions leges Augustae, and Augustus' reference to his laws at RG 8.5 gives no hint. Suetonius was misled: Aug. 27.5. ^1,1 Following Jones i960 (a 47) 15-15.

properly read, is saying something different: .. and the power of the consuls he took for life, to the extent of using the twelvefasces always and everywhere and sitting on a magisterial chair between the consuls at any time'.[198] In the Rw Gestae Augustus informs the reader of revisions of the Senate list carried out 'by consular power': he surely means ad hoc grants, and so implies that he did not possess it permanently. What Dio is telling us about is not a power but an honour; for some 'social' rule was bound to be invented, now that Augustus no longer held, every year, one of the two highest offices of the state, about where, on formal occasions, he should be placed in relation to those two officers and what insignia he should have: we remember how the idea of three consuls did not appeal and was dropped.

In fact, those who like to see the first third of Augustus' reign punctuated by 'constitutional settlements' might better look to 18 than to 19 в.с. (though what is to be seen in 18 gives no comfort to any belief that he had acquired some kind of 'total power' in 19.) In 18 B.C. Augustus' provincia ran out: something certainly had to be done about that, and it was, in fact, renewed for the modest term of five years. Simultaneously, Agrippa's proconsular imperium was renewed for the same five years, and in addition he received the tribunician power for five years.[199] In that development there is constitutional novelty in plenty: an original and experimental arrangement based on a collegiate conception of the rulership. Agrippa and Iulia now had a son, and another baby was due, so dynasty was once again assured. The past decade had been uncomfortable for the ruler and his regime; now, with a good measure of optimism and militarism, Rome was to resume her role of conqueror and mistress of the world.

So the years 18 and 17 were marked by a programme of social reform, public and private, including a second revision of the Senate list, and by a great festival of Rome, to proclaim regeneration and traditional values, the ludi saeculares of 17 в.с.

Details of Augustus' social laws of this phase are treated in chapters 3 and 18 below.[200] He did not accept the offer to promulgate statutes as leges Augustae, but proposed them to the people by virtue of his tribunician power, so that they were leges Iuliae. In general, they were concerned with two themes, first the fairer and smoother running of the organs of state and law, and, second, family and birth-rate — of the ordines, the upper class, which was what Augustus thought mattered. Under the first heading the major element was the pair of leges luliae iudiciorumpublicorum etprivatorum, virtually a code for the organization of the courts ofjustice (and including, probably, a regulation de vi that reaffirmed the ancient citizen right ofprovocatio). Others were a lex lulia de ambitu and a lex lulia de collegiis.^nb The package proclaimed that the traditional system of public life was to run as before, at a better level of efficiency. The lectio senatus of 18 в.с. was in the same vein. It was an attempt to reduce the Senate to nearer its old pre-Sullan number of 300, though Augustus did not succeed in getting it below double that figure. More important, a senatorial census was laid down for the first time - a minimum property rating for a man to enter or stay in the august body.¹¹⁶ Augustus wanted an old-fashioned Senate, whose members were to continue to hold virtually all major executive positions in the state, the legionary commands and provincial governorships, as well as receiving new commissions from time to time.

The second heading of the legislation of 18 and 17 b.c., the lex lulia de adulteriis establishing a new criminal court for sexual offences that included extra-marital intercourse of men with freeborn women as well as adultery, and the lex lulia de maritandis ordinibus, which provided bonuses for those with children and penalties for those not, is castigated nowadays as having imported the freedom-denying arm of the law into what had hitherto been matters of private morality and family concern. That, indeed, it did, but the perspective is erroneous unless it be observed that interference by the state in matters of private conduct was no novelty, but part of the age-old tradition of the Republic, which had comitial trials for stuprum, sumptuary laws, the Oppian and Voconian laws, and above all the surveillance of the censors, with their nota for all sorts of conduct disapproved of by society.¹¹⁷ No more than the Greeks did the Romans believe that there was any sphere of private morality separable from the interests of the community at large. Augustus was taking over both the mantle of ancient Greek legislators and the Roman censorial role that he had been offered, but not under the formal title. That is not to say that all of the elite class found the laws to their taste, although Augustus claims in the Res Gestae that the Senate was in favour of his measures.¹¹⁸

Augustus and Agrippa were in Rome. lulia had borne a second son, and the two little boys, Augustus' grandsons, were now formally adopted as his sons, taking the names Gaius and Lucius Caesar — which served plain notice upon the stepsons, Tiberius Claudius Nero and his brother Nero Claudius Drusus, as to what the future could not hold for

Whether we should add, on the basis of the Tabula Irni/ana (Gonzalez 1986 (в 23;) 1 ;o), a lex lulia municipalis standardizing the constitutions of the municipalities of Italy, is a matter of continuing debate.

Discrepancy in the sources: Suet. Aug. 41.1 gives 1,200,000, Dio Liv.17.3 g'^ves 1,000,000 sesterces. ¹¹⁷ Underestimated by Dixon 1988 (f 26л) 71. ¹¹⁸ RG 6.2 (the Greek text).

them, though it would be more than a decade before the boys could come into their political inheritance.

The celebration of a new lustrum — indeed, far more, a new saeculum of Rome — came, in triumphal mood, on 31 May 17 в.с.,¹¹⁹ and Horace's official Ode for the occasion, the Carmen Saeculare, cannot be bettered as a compendium of the ideology set before the Roman people. It is the fashion of our age to undercut official triumphalism, and there is plenty of reason in the present case. Many of the governing class exhibited irreconcilable dissatisfaction with the attempt to regulate their conduct: Augustus had been up against the plebs, but now he was up against its betters. Dio (and it must come from his source) stresses the ««-popularity of Augustus at this time, and even makes 18 в.с. the beginning of plots against him and against Agrippa,¹²⁰ whose status was resented. So if, as we are commonly taught, Augustus' greatest skill was the political tact whereby he experimented to fit his de facto supremacy into a framework of what people wanted it to seem to be, he had not, in the decade down to the ludi saeculares, reaped much fruit of that alleged skill — or so we might think until we notice the consuls of 16 в.с.¹²¹

hi. 16 в.с. - A.D. 14

The consuls of 16 в.с. were young nobles (and similarly in the years that followed, so all was right in that relationship, at least). That particular pair were also related to Augustus. Publius Cornelius Scipio was the son of his former wife Scribonia by an earlier marriage, and so half-brother to Iulia, and Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus was married to Augustus' niece Antonia, one of the two women of that name, the daughters of Octavia and Mark Antony, who carried the great enemy's genes deep into the heart of the 'divine family'.¹²² The 'divine family' was the most distinctly Augustan innovation of all, his way of reconciling the high aristocracy. It was powerful both as fact and as concept. Practically, it secured a cadre of collaborators at the highest level; psychologically, it was the exemplar of Augustus' moral programme; and symbolically it was the 'parallel language' of dynasty and court taking over from elective republicanism. (As a matter of fact, for the second half of the year 16, the plebeian Lucius Tarius Rufus took over from P. Scipio; and that well illustrates the historian's peril in pretending to interpret the politics of the age, for we do not know why. Was it because Rufus could not be denied an honour and had to be fitted in? Or was Scipio ill, or

Pighi 1965 (в 263) 107-30, plus 131-6, shown by Cavallaro 1979 (в 217) to belong to the Augustan ludi. ¹²⁰ Diouv.ij.i. ¹²¹ Syme 1986 (a 95) 53-63.

¹²² For all such persons see, now, Syme 1986 (a 95), via the index.

incompetent, or dissident? Many stories could be told, and a 'crisis of 16 B.C.' invented; but it would all be idle conjecture.)

In any case, the main theme of Augustus' second decade was different. Towards the end of the year 16 Augustus and Agrippa left Rome, for opposite ends of the empire, each for three years - according, as it were, to pattern. Rome was left to the consuls, plus Titus Statilius Taurus as 'prefect of the city and Italy'.[201] Agrippa's role in the East was not military: he exercised imperial policy in half the empire as collega imperii, dealing, for example, with the affairs of the remote client kingdom of the Crimea,[202] and confirming the right of the Jews of the Diaspora to their ancestral laws and customs.[203] More in need of interpretation is Augus­tus' purpose in the West. His departure was hastened by the flurry caused by a legionary standard lost on the Rhine,¹²⁶ for rebuffs to Roman military prestige could not be allowed. According to Dio, some said he left Rome in order to consort with Maecenas' Terentia with less scandal, others that it was to avoid general unpopularity. But maybe a main theme was already emerging: imperial expansion in northern Europe, of which the two efficient stepsons would be the principal agents. Augustus was inexhaustible in experiments with the material at any time to hand: three centuries later, under Diocletian and his successors, the Roman empire would be ruled by two 'Augusti' and two 'Caesares', and the experiment of Augustus' second decade looks as if based on some such idea - save for the awkward and ominous difference that the two 'Caesares' due to be groomed for succession were a different pair of brothers entirely from the ones who were to share the present burdens.

Certain things that were done can be seen as preparatory. The generation of soldiers who had been recruited after Actium must now be pensioned off, so a big phase of veteran settlement occurred in Gaul and Spain; and it is no surprise that, connected with the discharges and new recruitments, the term of service was now[204] officially established at a minimum of sixteen years for legionaries and twelve for the praetorian guard. Thus, out of the needs of the time, emerged the formal establishment of the Roman army as a professional service (for 'other ranks', not officers). And at roughly the same time Lugdunum seems to have begun to function as a major government mint, coining gold and silver; new money was going to be needed to pay legions campaigning in north and west. Gaul was subjected to a census, and detested both the tax and the procurator.

The first big movement¹²⁸ was the subjugation by the brothers, Tiberius Nero and Nero Drusus, of Raetian and Vindelician Switzerland (not without mass deportations) and the bloodless incorporation of the kingdom of Noricum. Augustus took an imperatorial salutation; the stepsons could have neither triumph nor ovation, for they were only legati Augusti, but at least Horace accorded them proud celebration, as he did also for the return of Augustus to Rome in 13 в.с.¹²⁹ And in relation to that reditus a magnificent new way was invented to advertise the 'divine family': on 4 July 13 в.с., by decree of the Senate, there was inaugurated a sacred precinct and altar of the 'Augustan Peace' in the north part of the Campus Martius; it was not dedicated till 10 January 9 в.с. Its famous frieze is an imaginary depiction of a procession of the 'divine family' and the members of the great priesthoods to an inaugural celebration; contemporaries will probably have been able to identify every figure.¹³⁰ Both the frieze and the independent panels of the Ara Pacis are eloquent with all the themes of Augustan ideology, not the least striking emphasis being upon children, the 'young hopefuls', the key to future glory.¹³¹

To the Ara Pacis we now have to add, as an element - perhaps the major element — in a complex architectural ensemble, the enormous public sundial and astronomical clock created, also, in the north part of the Campus.¹³² Its gnomon, 30 m high (with plinth), was one of the two obelisks brought from 'captured Egypt';¹³³ the paved ground under the feet of pedestrians was itself the sundial; and the equinoctial line on the ground passed through the Ara Pacis and subtended a right angle to the Mausoleum by the Tiber. There has been detected a whole wealth of symbolism about the birth and conception of Augustus in relation to renewal and peace, adding significance to one of the best-known inscriptions of the period, the letter of the proconsul of Asia and decrees of the Joint Council of the province inaugurating a new calendar for Asia based on Augustus' birthday, which is celebrated as 'giving a new look to the cosmos'.¹³⁴

Of course, both the rulers returned to Rome in 13 B.C., for their

A prelude consisted of campaigns by Publius Silius in the Alpine foothills.

Hor. Carm. iv.4 and 14; iv.; and 2, lines 41-60.

Contra, however, Zanker 1987 (f 632) 128. There are still many disagreements about the identity of individual figures: see, e.g., the next note.

Zanker 1987 (f 632) 219, contests the view that two of the little boys are barbarian captives, and thinks that they are, after all, Gaius and Lucius Caesar.

Buchner 1982 (f 306); Zanker 1987 (f 632) 149-50. Unmentioned in the Res Gestae-, had it already been discovered that the 'clock was wrong'? (Pliny, HN xxxvi.72-3).

EJ² 14. The other was placed on the spina of the Circus Maximus. Their transport and erection were a tremendous technological feat. ¹³⁴ EJ² 98.

official powers lapsed and required renewal. Needless to say, they were duly renewed, for a cautious five years, including Agrippa's tribunician power.¹³⁵ A tiresome complication is added to the story of official powers by Dio's statement that the cura morum of Augustus was renewed in 12 b.c. for five years;¹³⁶ for, if Augustus possessed it at all, he had had it, on Dio's own account, for five years from 19 b.c., and its renewal should have occurred two years sooner. In the Res Gestae it is asserted that the offer of a cura morum was made again in 11 b.c., but declined. There was, however, a revision of the Senate list in 11 b.c., performed by virtue of censoria potestas; perhaps Dio's garbled tale is an echo of that temporary grant. A much more significant constitutional fact is that in 1 3 b.c. Agrippa's imperium was, at last, defined as maius.¹³⁷ For a brief span he and Augustus had equal formal authority as rulers of the Roman world; it was a joint rule of two colleagues, the one superior to the other only in auctoritas. We notice the immense significance of that experiment all too little because fate decreed that it should be so brief; for in March 12 b.c., only a few days after another great ceremony, stressed in the Res Gestae, the solemn assembly of the Roman people at which, at long last, Augustus became pontifex maximus,^m Agrippa died.¹³⁹ Catastrophe following hard on the heels of triumph is an obstinate motif in the story of the age.

But the engine of Roman imperialism, having been turned on, was not allowed to falter: Tiberius Nero and Nero Drusus embarked at once on their great joint aristeia of 12—9 b.c. in the north, and Augustus set himself at Aquileia and other northern towns, to be in touch with the grand strategy. Tiberius already knew, before he left for Illyricum, what he was going to have to do: divorce Agrippa's daughter, Vipsania, by whom he had a son, and marry lulia, Agrippa's widow. The marriage took place in 11 b.c., and caused all parties untold misery: lives sacrificed to duty. Augustus was relentless in his demand for co-operation, from high as from low, and there are straws in the wind, by the middle of the reign, that not even those well-disposed in general were keen to co­operate on his stern terms. Hence various experiments to get the Senate to work properly, and to encourage the elite not to turn their backs on public service, which belong in this decade.¹⁴⁰

To celebrate the second year of the northern campaigns, in which Drusus, the younger stepson but the favourite of the ruler and the public,¹⁴¹ had the more spectacular part, both he and Tiberius were voted ovations and ornamenta triumphalia, and in their honour there was a

¹³⁵ Diouv.28.1. ¹³⁶ Diouv.50.1. ¹³¹ Dio Liv.28.1; see above, n.i 13.

RG 10. The former triumvir Lepidus had never been deprived of that priestly office, and had remained a senator until his death, though not permitted to live in Rome.

The consular Fasti of 12 b.c. are strange: Syme deduces plague.

See ch. 5 below, pp. 124-5. ^1,1 Tac. Am. 11.41.5, favor vulgi.

distribution of 400 sesterces per head and games were held.¹⁴² But then Octavia died, Augustus' sister and Antony's widow, who had given and inspired devotion. Drusus spoke the laudation, as her son-in-law.

For the third year, 10 B.C., Augustus accompanied the headquarters to Gaul, where the 'Altar at the Confluence of Rhone and Arar' was dedicated as a focus in the West for cult of the ruler, and, on the selfsame day, the future emperor Claudius was born, son of Drusus and the younger Antonia. (The prevailing view, drawing an inference from Dio, is that the dedication was in 12 в.с. It involves a strained interpretation of Suetonius' 'selfsame day'; and Augustus could not have been present at Lugdunum in that year, whereas in 10 we have corroboration from a papyrus that he was.)¹⁴³ In the winter Drusus did not return to Rome, but entered upon his consulship of 9 B.C. in absence; and in that year he carried Roman arms to the river Elbe. Those were noteworthy military achievements: Augustus and both his stepsons took imperatorial salu­tations, Tiberius celebrated the ovation voted to him, and Drusus was due to celebrate his. Whereupon death struck again: Drusus, the darling of all, died, in his consular year, aged 29, on 24 September - there is no record of any suffect consul being created to fill the brief vacancy. Tiberius made all speed, and, according to Dio, just managed to greet his brother before he died.[205] For Tiberius above all it was a catastrophe: as a united force they had had much to achieve.

Augustus did not permit the expansion in Germany to pause; he simply transferred Tiberius to that front. Nevertheless, to him also Drusus' departure was a bad blow, coming so soon upon those of Agrippa and Octavia; it may not be fanciful to detect a growing rigidity in Augustus' attitudes and proceedings, now that he was deprived of the personalities from whom he had derived support and counsel. But there is a remarkable further tale that the reader must be asked to estimate, for it plays quite a part in recent accounts: 'republicanist' opposition on the part of the stepsons. It derives from Suetonius, who says that Drusus at some time wrote to Tiberius 'about forcing Augustus to restore liberty'; there was plainly some historical source that gave Drusus that colour­ing.[206] Conspiracies are mentioned by Dio at the end of his account of the year 9 B.C., and in the very next year a new rule was made that slaves could be compulsorily purchased by the state so as to make them available as witnesses against their former masters in cases of treason. Have we, then, uncovered the 'crisis of 9 в.с.'? There were those who believed that Augustus suspected Drusus and had him poisoned; also, that none other than Tiberius had reported the treasonable correspon-

L. Piso also had ornamenta triumpbalia for a Helium Tbraeicum, probably in 11 B.C.

Dio Liv.32.1; Suet. Claud. 2.1; POxj 3020, col. 1, line 4. Absence of Augustus is, admittedly, not impossible: in 9 B.C., for example, he was at Ticinum and cannot have attended the consecration of the Ara Pacis. ¹⁴⁴ Dio Lv.2.1. ¹⁴⁵ Suet. Tib. 50.1; Claud. 1.4.

dence to his stepfather. Suetonius, however, who records all that, gives one reason for hesitating, namely that there is so much evidence that Drusus was a favourite of Augustus: he had a place in the ruler's will, for instance. Antiquity was given to novelettes about poisoning; we do not have to accept that tale, and the conspiracies alluded to by Dio are unrelated. But it may be a fact that the brothers had discussed the kind of res publico they would like to serve under, and that Tiberius had undertaken to lay their views before Augustus while he was heavily reliant on them. We can imagine how, with Drusus gone, the sole effect would be to make Augustus reluctant to leave things to Tiberius.

The year 8 в.с. was twenty years from that sixth consulship when Augustus had begun handing the res publico back to the Senate and people: vicennalia, it would have been called in a later century, and it was, if mutedly, celebrated (though hand in hand with celebration went, again, loss: Maecenas first, and Horace shortly after). A 'census was completed, by consular imperium (a special, conceivably celebratory, grant), with a revision of the Senate list and — a rare curiosity — an extension of thepomerium of Rome.[207] Now, too, the month Sextilis was renamed 'Augustus'.¹⁴⁷ The anniversary was accompanied, as it had to be, by another formal renewal of Augustus' powers, for - surprisingly but perhaps also in celebration - a further complete decade; what did not accompany it was any acknowledgement of Tiberius as collega imperii: no love existed there, and no trust, and other possibilities were nearly in sight.

Yet the campaign of Tiberius in 7 в.с. was triumphant, leaving Germany 'practically ready to become a province of the Roman empire',¹⁴⁸ and permitting the discharge of large numbers of legionaries over the next few years.¹⁴⁹ Tiberius, who was, that year, consul for the second time, celebrated a full, formal triumph, and afterwards laid the foundation of a temple of Concord in the Forum Romanum, his thoughts perhaps still upon the lost partnership.

There were relatively everyday tasks and problems of government, not necessarily trivial. One such was an accusation, astonishingly, of ambitus, electoral bribery, against all the magistrates, presumably of the year 8. Augustus took care not to peer into that too closely, but he did make new rules to reduce bribery at the consular elections in the future. The very fact that it occurred shows that there was still popular choice, but it is principally a pointer to something else. What was amiss was that for twenty years Augustus had insisted on the being, in the old tradition, only two consuls a year (barring emergencies); but the office was still eagerly sought after and fought over, as the crown of a social career, and soon Augustus experimented again, dividing the year into two halves, with two 'ordinary' consuls followed by two 'suffect' consuls, a system that became regular from 5 в.с.

Natural disasters, too, never ceased to punctuate the history of the biggest conurbation in the ancient world, and governments never did enough. There was a very grave fire in 7 B.C., just before the funeral games in memory of Agrippa. Augustus took occasion to reorganize the local structure of the city into fourteen official 'regions', with a devolution down to the 265 vici or 'blocks', the latter to be responsible for fire precautions. It did not prove adequate.

His coeval generation dying away, Augustus was obliged to place reliance on the younger folk. For Herod the Great and his dynastic problems and brutal treatment of his sons, Augustus had the greatest contempt,¹⁵⁰ but that turned into a terrible irony. In the year 6 в.с. Tiberius Nero received a renewal of imperium, plus tribunician power for five years, which proclaimed him to the world as collega imperii-, and at that very moment he declared his wish to retire from state responsibili­ties and took himself off to Rhodes. Augustus staged a bit of. illness to detain him, but it did not work. The historian Velleius, adulatory of Tiberius, exaggerates the consequences of his retirement into a sort of paralysis of the res publico,¹⁵¹ and the loss of the full text of Dio for those years contributes to a possibly false picture; but it was undeniably major trouble in high politics.

The modern, as well as the ancient, interpretation is that it was dynastic trouble. Gaius and Lucius Caesar were of an age to begin their progress into the limelight (and 'above themselves' already, according to Dio, who writes that in 6 B.C. the people 'chose' Gaius as consul and Augustus had to step in and quash it: a demonstration, perhaps).¹⁵² In 5 b.c. Gaius was made a pontifex and designated consul for a.d. i, and a new title was invented for him, princeps iuventutis or honorary president of the order of equites, and a distribution of money was made in his honour; in 4 в.с. he had a seat on the great consilium called to settle the fate of Judaea upon the death of Herod. In 2 в.с. Lucius was made an augur and designated consul for a.d. 4, and became joint princeps iuventutis. What is more, the coinage was the medium for a course of advertisement for the pair such as neither Drusus nor Tiberius had been accorded.¹⁵³ So, then, Tiberius moved downstage, and the questions that gather about Agrippa's departure seventeen years earlier repeat themselves. Did he go in self-effacing co-operation or in rage and frustration? Scholars have conjured up binary opposites, a Claudian faction led by

¹⁵⁰ Macrob. Sat. 11.4.11. ¹⁵¹ Veil. Pat. 11.100.1.

¹⁵² DioLV.9.1-2. ¹⁵³ Zanker 1987 (f 632) 218-26.

l6 b.c.-a.d. 14

Livia Drusilla on behalf of her sons (now reduced to one) and a Julian, led by Iulia on behalf of hers, whose opposition was destined to tear at the vitals of the regime until Augustus' death, and beyond. That picture may be not so much wrong as a bit too simple. First, there could never have been any doubt, from the moment that Gaius and Lucius were adopted, that if Augustus, and they, survived long enough for them to grow to manhood they would be his chosen successors; Tiberius Nero and Nero Drusus could never have expected a role greater than that of Agrippa. Again, it was in 6 B.C., before the formal elevation of the youths began, that Tiberius retired; that elevation looks more like the ruler's instant response to, than the cause of, Tiberius' desertion. And finally, you hardly make a man collega imperii to kick him out: rather, to try to keep him. The latter end of Tiberius' Rhodian sojourn was certainly an unofficial exile; but there is a wider story to which his initial retirement belongs, the story of people's growing unwillingness to work with and for Augustus, and to play their roles in the drama according to his script. Tiberius Nero, with the independent spirit he had shared with his brother (and shared, to their mutual cost, with his wife, Augustus' daughter), saw himself type-cast as collega imperii, the new Agrippa, and rebelled. To Agrippa, his status as collega imperii had been an insurance for the succession of his sons, and part, anyway, of a lifelong collabor­ation. For Tiberius it was neither: therefore, Augustus must carry on alone.

The impression of a political standstill is doubtless false, but not much can be done to compensate. One important experiment of 4 в.с. serves to help fill the gap: it is known only from an inscription.¹⁵⁴ By a senatus consultum of that year, on a proposal from Augustus, a novel, expedited procedure became available to provincials alleging extortion by Roman magistrates, in all but the gravest (i.e. capital) cases. It probably was genuinely quicker; on the other hand it contained an unadvertised advantage for senatorial governors by enabling them to be tried by a committee of their peers instead of the mainly non-senatorial juries of the quaestio repetundarum.

101

But 2 B.C. was a year of crisis — or so it has been called. Certainly it contained paradox enough to satisfy any novelist. It began with a tremendous burst of ceremony, symbolism and festivity. Augustus was sixty; he was consul ordinarius (he had taken the consulship in 5 B.C. to preside over the debut of Gaius Caesar, and now did the same for Lucius); and on 5 February he was officially designated pater patriae, 'Father of the Nation'. The title crowns the Res Gestae, and Suetonius quotes the very words in which it was bestowed and accepted.¹⁵⁵ It was not (though historians recently have tried to make it) a constitutional ^Ii4 EJ² j11, v. is» Suet. Aug. 58.2.

statement, nor a symbol that the state was ultimately governed by the concept of patria potestas, nor an ingeniously invented jurisprudential basis for equating attacks on the 'divine family' with treason against the state.¹⁵⁶ It was an honour- an extension of the title parens patriae that had been accorded to Marius, to Cicero, and to Iulius Caesar, a supremely high public decoration.

Augustus' quidpro quo was (besides a distribution of money) some very grand consular games - a new set, the ludi Martiales. The name was not fortuitous, for on 12 May¹⁵⁷ the two young Caesars dedicated the most symbolic and triumphalist of all the Augustan public buildings, the temple of Mars Ultor at the far end of the new Augustan Forum, where those long-ago recovered standards would repose permanently. With its porticoes, friezes and caryatids, and the statues of all the Roman triumphatores,¹⁵⁸ the Augustan Forum is the building that must be most attentively listened to. Its emphasis is, actually, not so much on the 'divine family' (and we may be inclined to guess why not) as on victory and the long, successful tale of Roman imperialism: hard, bold, assertive, confident — and for constant public use, especially for law-courts.¹⁵⁹ And, in celebration of the celebration, another marvellous entertainment was provided, the 'naval battle of the Greeks and Persians', in a specially constructed artificial lake beside the Tiber; that, too, is recalled with pride in the Res Gestae.

So it was a many-sided paradox that, later in that year, lulia, the daughter of Augustus, was deported to the island of Pandateria. Her mother Scribonia went with her into exile. Multiple adulteries were the charge against lulia, or the excuse.¹⁶⁰ Tacitus says that Augustus chose to treat those adulteries as treason,¹⁶¹ implying that he did not believe Iulia's offence to have been treason; but modern historians have woven here a tale of a major attempt at a coup d'etat. It ought to be allowed, in any case, that immorality at the heart of that 'divine family' that Augustus wanted as the paradigm for his society was a blow to pride and optimism in the year of the title pater patriae; and, further, that lulia, like Tiberius, was committing the crime of repudiating her role in the scenario as composed by her father. That might be enough and to spare. It is the involvement, as the foremost among Iulia's alleged lovers, of Iulius Antonius that, to some detective minds, has suggested more.¹⁶² He was either executed or forced to commit suicide: the other named men

¹⁵⁶ Contra, respectively, Salmon 19 j 6 (c 204); Lacey'Patria Potestas', in Rawson 1986 (f 54)121- 44; Bauman 1967 (f 640) 255-9. ¹⁵⁷ For this date, rather than in August, Simpson 1977 (f 578).

¹⁵⁸ Zanker n.d. [л 1968] (f 625); Zanker 1987 (p 652) 215. It had been long in building: Macrob. Sat. 11 4.9. Forum dedicated earlier than temple: Degrassi 194; (f 546).

^1W Suet. Aug. 29.1-2; tablets from Puteoli, Camodeca 1986 (f 511). ¹⁶⁰ Dio lv. 12.10-16.

i«i Xac. Ann. in. 24.2. ¹⁶² It did not to Tacitus, Ann. iv.44. j; but cf. Sen. De Brev. Vit. 4.5.

involved incurred mere banishment,[208] an inadequate reaction if they had been part of a treasonable conspiracy. They were members of families of the nobility, indeed,[209] and one of them had been consul in 9 B.C., as Iullus was in 10; but hardly of prominence or stature, apart from him, to justify a picture of a 'faction of the nobility' opposed to the 'radical' Tiberius. Iullus is different: son of Antony and Fulvia, spared after Actium, half-brother of the Antonias, he had become a favoured court figure. As praetor he had given the games for Augustus' birthday in 13 B.C.; he had reached the consulship in 10 в.с. and Dio's epitome states that he was allegedly out for monorchia. Actium reversed and revenged: was that the idea?

The greatest sobriety of judgment is needed here. One matter for pause is what fate we are to suppose Iullus and lulia had in store for Gaius and Lucius Caesar. Were they to perish in the bloodbath? Was lulia to sacrifice her sons? Or was the whole scheme designed to bolster their succession against Tiberius Nero? But they were secure as things were, and it was Tiberius who lived in eclipse and danger. And was Iullus to be content with prominence as a mere caretaker for Iulia's sons, an alternative Tiberius? Not, of course, that the craziness of a proposal is proof that people did not entertain it.

In 2 B.C. prefects of the praetorian guard were appointed for the first time, and some are tempted to relate that novelty to the alleged state of emergency; but caution will suggest hesitation. First, they were a pair, and mere equites at that; secondly, this was certainly not the moment of creation of the praetorian guard, which already existed. It is not known what commanding officer the guard had before 2 в.с. — quite probably Augustus himself, with no intermediary; in which case it is hard to see the establishment of a pair of equestrian prefects as strengthening the ruler's control in face of a crisis.

This is usually held to have been the season of Ovid's Ars Amatoria. That chronology has been challenged,¹⁶⁵ but Dio records some other activities of the 'smart set' that were capable of making Augustus' blood boil.¹⁶⁶ The simple man's alternative, about this story, is therefore still the best: morality uppermost in the ruler's stern plan for triumphant Rome; revelations - perhaps, indeed, made by enemies - of a fast-living set, with lulia and Iullus at its centre; humiliation and rage of the ruler matching the psychological climate of resistance to his relentless imperatives.

The social imperatives were evident in that year in another context. The suffect consuls, Lucius Caninius Gallus and Gaius Fufius Geminus, put through the comitia a law setting limits to the number of slaves an individual master might free by testament; and that may well have a relationship to another change attributed to 2 B.C. whereby the number of recipients of the free corn ration was cut down to 200,000. Too much foreign blood in the citizen body, and too many layabouts!

Phraates IV of Parthia had just, after a long reign, been murdered, and succeeded, by his favourite son, who, with anti-Roman zeal, had assisted in the ejection of the king of Armenia, all that while a Roman nominee. There was an irritable international correspondence, and an air in Rome as of the prelude to a Parthian war; but Augustus repeated almost exactly the successful formula of twenty years before.[210] Tiberius Nero had been his envoy then, and could have been so again, but he was in retirement: indeed, since all his formal powers had run out, and no attempt had been made to renew them, he was — like his wife — an exile. In any case, the occasion could be used to give Gaius Caesar his first impressive role in the official drama; so in 1 B.C., invested with an imperium for the whole East, he set out, amidst a cloud of diplomatic advisers and to the strains of eager poetasters.[211] There was no state of war, so no hurry; in a.d. i,[212]when he entered in absentia upon his long-prearranged consulship, Gaius was engaged in some sort of campaign in Nabatean Arabia.¹⁷⁰ The hopes he carried with him (along with his brother, who died, however, in a.d. 2 at Massilia of some non-sinister cause) are revealed in a letter of Augustus to him written in September, a.d. 2:'... with you two playing your part like true men and taking over the sentry-post from me'.[213] The great diplomatic exchange of courtesies duly took place, on an island in the Euphrates,[214] followed, as it were canonically, by the march to set a Roman protege again on the Armenian throne. This time it was not a formality. At an unknown place, Artagera, Gaius received a stab- wound, though it seemed to heal, and both he and Augustus took imperatorial salutations.¹⁷³ And then occurred the strangest event in the whole tale. Tiberius Nero had just been permitted to return to Rome, a mere private citizen, with a question-mark upon his future;[215] and now Gaius wrote home to say that he was going to retire into private life and contemplation.[216] He was 23. People said at the time, and they were very likely right, that Gaius was a mortally sick man, and, to Augustus' culminating dismay, in a.d. 4 he died; in so short an interval were both the young hopefuls gone. But one can imagine, even before that, the effect of the letter of resignation: 'You too, son'. Like Tiberius and like Iulia: this was the canker that had rotted Augustus' third decade, that the people of his choice did not want to tread his path of duty. When, in a.d. 3, his constitutional powers were again renewed (and for a full decade) there could be no word of Tiberius Nero or of Gaius Caesar, for both were sulking in their tents; there was no collega imperii.

But in a.d. 4 Augustus, alone, implacable¹⁷⁶ and indefatigable, with imperialism and social reform still on his agenda, bowed to political necessity. Tiberius Nero was rehabilitated faute de mieux, received tribunician power for ten years,[217] and was appointed to command in Germany,¹⁷⁸ though apparently even then not with a general imperium maius. The dynastic goal was still the old one. Augustus' nearest relatives, apart from his daughter, were now her surviving three children, her daughters Iulia and Agrippina and her son Agrippa, the so- called 'Postumus'; and the goal determined the action. On 26 June a.d. 4 Augustus adopted Tiberius and Agrippa as his sons — 'for the sake of the res publico', he is supposed to have said in Tiberius' case[218] (though we cannot recapture the tone of that remark, whether of bleak resignation or of confident affirmation). For Tiberius, the choice was power and the chance of new military glory, even if only, still, as a caretaker, over against eclipse and perhaps worse. As for Agrippa, he must not be treated as just peripheral to the story.[219] The ancient writers all describe him as truculent and retarded;¹⁸¹ he may have become so, or this may be no more than the official story by which his later exile and elimination were justified. Bur in a.d. 4 he was a still viable, if eleventh-hour, replacement for his deceased brothers. In any case, that was not the full extent of the ruler's scheme. For, at the same time, Tiberius adopted his own nephew, Nero Claudius Germanicus, son of the adored Drusus, to count as brother to his own son, the second Drusus. Germanicus was married to Agrippina, so it was their children who would carry the Julian inheritance — an exceedingly efficient way of repairing the badly torn 'divine family'.

Legislatively, a.d. 4[220] was the year of the Lex Aelia Sentia, the most far-reaching of the statutes regulating slavery and freedom from sla­very;[221] also of important improvements in the administration of justice, notably the addition of a fourth decuria of persons liable for jury service.[222] Militarily, Tiberius' campaigns in Germany in a.d. 4, 5 and 6 were, as twelve years before, grand successes:[223] in a.d. 5 Roman armies reached the Elbe again, and in a.d. 6 the pincers were set to close on a great prize, the Bohemian kingdom of Maroboduus.

It was the last moment of imperial optimism in Augustus' reign. What was left, looked at narrowly, takes on a colouring of disaster and disillusion, not least — though not only - in the military sphere, where it hurt hardest: the historical irony of that letter to Gaius Caesar becomes very acute. So before plunging into the gloom it is as well to remind ourselves that Augustus had succeeded in establishing a political order that survived, with modifications, for some centuries and a territorial hegemony that expanded for another hundred years and for two centuries lost nothing that it had included at his death.

The forces were poised against Bohemia when the shock came, the news that all Illyricum was in rebellion. Tiberius' efforts of fifteen years before had not proved lasting. Bohemia had to be abandoned, and Tiberius to return to the front he had known, to battle for three heavy years against a national uprising.[224] And it was not the only trouble of those years.[225] We hear of cities in revolt, and proconsuls having to be appointed instead of chosen by the lot and to have their tenures prolonged. The wild Isaurians in Asia Minor were in ferment, and Cossus Cornelius Lentulus won ornamenta triumphalia for operations in Africa against the Gaetulians. Sardinia had to be redesignated as a part of the 'province of Caesar' because of a recrudescence of the corsairs. There was once again a Judaean problem: Archelaus, who had received the lion's share on the death of Herod, had been denounced by his people and exiled to Gaul, and Rome had to take Judaea over as an equestrian province.[226]

Resources were strained. The very nature of the professional army came into question, its recruitment and its cost, especially that of providing for time-expired soldiers. Augustus attempted to cut the cost by lengthening the term of service.¹⁸⁹ He also put to the Senate the problem of funding an overall increase in state income,¹⁹⁰ met a stony silence, and so, in a.d. 6, imposed on Roman citizens a death-duty of 5 per cent on the estates of the moderately rich and upwards, if left to any but their families.¹⁹¹ Its purpose was to fund a new Military Treasury to provide the retirement payments to the soldiers. Augustus primed it with 170 million sesterces of his own money,[227] but the death-duty was the first direct taxation of Roman citizens since 167 b.c., and was regarded by the rich, who paid it, with outrage.

The years a.d. 6 and 7 have the fairest claim of all the years of Augustus' reign to be called 'crisis' years, for upon military and financial anxieties, and widespread disaffection, there supervened natural catas­trophes and dynastic discords. Nature did her best to prove that none of the problems of the great conurbation had been even halfway solved: food shortages led to rationing, and there was another bad fire. A new fire service was established, since the devolution solution had proved inadequate: thus began the vigiles of the imperial period, under an equestrian prefect.[228] But the plebs was disgruntled: there was a spate of revolutionary talk, and flysheets circulated at night.[229] According to Dio, a certain Publius Rufus was thought to have instigated those things, but to have had more powerful hidden backers - a story with repercus­sions that will emerge.

In a.d. 7 Germanicus, quaestor that year, was sent to Illyricum with troop reinforcements for Tiberius. They included not only the products of a rare levy of citizens at Rome,¹⁹⁵ but also slaves purchased by the government and manumitted to enable them to be enrolled.¹⁹⁶ Dio transmits a story that Augustus suspected Tiberius of dragging his feet and sent Germanicus to stir things up: Tiberius had actually said he had soldiers in plenty, and sent some back.¹⁹⁷ We may well suspect political manoeuvrings behind these facts, but they remain obscure. At the elections there were riots, and Augustus, impatient with the proprieties, nominated all the magistrates himself - the only time: he had worked at full stretch for fifty years, and crisis was taking its toll. He began to give up public appearances, and appointed a committee of senior senators to take over the hearing of embassies.

There is a view amongst historians¹⁹⁸ that in Augustus' last decade all was done to the tune of Tiberius, who returned to Rome after each annual campaign. That would be not unlikely, though the arguments tend to be circular and it was normal for commanders-in-chief to return to Rome between campaigning seasons. The question whether it was Tiberius' tune that was being played is certainly very relevant to the next item in the tale of'passion and polities'. No doubt it ought to have been young Agrippa's privilege to be quaestor and take the troops to Germany; instead, probably in a.d. 6,¹⁹⁹ he was removed from Rome to Surrentum, and in a.d. 7 he was repudiated by Augustus and deported to the island of Planasia. In a.d. 8 his sister also, young Iulia, suffered banishment, never to return.²⁰⁰ Scholars deduce treason again, at the heart of the 'divine family': a story going back to 23 b.C., of thirty years of crisis in the 'Party', of the Julian faction's last bid against the, otherwise, now inexorable accession of the hated Claudian. Some speculations on those lines are too close to fiction, but there is a case. Why the exile of Agrippa? He was alleged to have been, or turned into, a cretinous thug; but Germanicus' brother Claudius, spastic and eccentric, though kept out of the limelight, was neither repudiated nor banished: his star was yet to rise. Agrippa, too, had been denied the limelight, being accorded no title of princeps iuventutis and no permission to stand early for office. Was that at Tiberius' behest? Had Agrippa less than mildly suggested that it was not good enough? Suetonius carries a story about a person (of low status) who 'in the name of young Agrippa put out to the public a most bitter letter about him' (Augustus).²⁰¹ But those who rush to make use of the tale fail to notice its ambiguities: it is not clear whether the biographer meant 'on Agrippa's behalf' or 'pretending it was written by Agrippa', nor whether the letter was supposed to have been a private one that was wrongly made public — and if so to whom it was addressed - or a letter actually addressed to the public.

As for Iulia, the official account was, again, adultery, though with only one partner, Decimus Iunius Silanus - who was merely told that he was no longer a friend of the emperor, which he took as dismissal from Rome.²⁰² She, by contrast, was banished, implacably, for life (and it turned out to be twenty years); she was supported financially - this we must take into account — by Livia Drusilla.²⁰³ No less to be taken into account is the identity of Iulia's husband: he was Lucius Aemilius Paullus, who appears in Suetonius' canon of conspirators against Augustus.²⁰⁴ He is there linked with one Plautius Rufus, who reminds historians (though it is a thin point) of the Publius Rufus who is supposed to have spread the revolutionary pamphlets in a.d. 6. Were husband and wife convicted of conspiracy? And of joint, or separate, conspiracies? It has been common to suppose that Paullus was executed, but a strong case has been made against that.²⁰⁵ If he was only banished, that is insufficient punishment for conspiracy; and Iulia's offence is better seen as what it was stated to be. Augustus insisted on the child she bore

"» Veil. Pat. n.112.7.

Ovid, too, had to go, and he, too, was never to be allowed back home.

Suet. Aug. 5 i.i. ²⁰² Unlike Ovid, he was allowed back by Tiberius, Tac. Ann. 111.24.

²⁰³ Tac. Ann. iv.71.4. ²⁰⁴ Suet. Aug. 19.1; Syme 1986 (a 95) ch.9.

²⁰⁵ Syme 1986 (a 95) 125-5.

not being allowed to live, and the sharp-eyed Tacitus found no other cat to let out of the bag. Nor is either lulia named in Suetonius' canon of conspirators.

But yet another mysterious set of facts adds fuel to the hypothesis of conspiracy. There were two — or in an ironical sense perhaps three — attempts to achieve a break-out for Agrippa. In Suetonius' conspiracy- list ' Audasius and Epicadus had intended to spirit lulia the daughter and Agrippa the grandson from the islands where they were held to the armies.'[230] There is something amiss with the tale, because by the time Agrippa was sent to his island 'lulia the daughter' had left hers. Perhaps it is a mere slip for 'lulia the granddaughter'; but the elder lulia was still in exile and still a potential focus for dissidence, so the error may be different. In any case, the story reinforces the view that Agrippa was in banishment because he was dangerous; and the danger was to Tiberius. The second story is how, immediately upon Augustus' death, Agrippa's slave Clemens went hotfoot to Planasia but arrived too late, the primum facinus novi principatus having already occurred — and how, two years later, he obtained a following by passing himself off as Agrippa, was arrested and put to death, and care was taken not to probe deeply into what were suspected to be his powerful backers 'in the house of the princeps' and amongst senators and equites.[231] That story finds credence amongst historians; the third, ironical indeed if true, still divides them. It is that Augustus, shortly before his death, visited Agrippa in his exile and they were reconciled.[232] Whether true or not, that tale, too, points in a consistent direction: Agrippa was politically of high significance. And it may well be that in conjuring up a conspiracy against Augustus (or Tiberius) in the years a.d. 6 to 8 historians have tried to be too clever. The cui bono of the elimination of Iulia's children was Tiberius, and they may have been the victims rather than the authors of a deadly dynastic struggle.

On the return of Tiberius from Illyricum at the beginning of a.d. 9 there was a ceremony of reditus in his honour in the Saepta; and resentment, not on the part of the plebs but of its betters, spilt over: the equites protested against the rules of the lex lulia de maritandis ordinibus, with their penalties upon the childless. Old Augustus read the assembled populace in the Forum a furious lecture about childlessness;[233] and while Tiberius travelled back to the front for what was to prove the conclusive campaign against the rebels in Dalmatia, a Lex Papia Poppaea was put to the assembly by the suffect consuls. It modified the statute of twenty-five years earlier: Dio and Suetonius, however confusing and incompatible their accounts, give an impression that concessions were made, whereas Tacitus speaks expressly to the contrary.[234] For the unmarried, at any rate, one should not underestimate the public ignominy in which the legislation sought to place them: if the ordo equester (being, presumably, the biggest concentration of wealthy caelibes) thought they had influence with the aged ruler, they were sharply rebuffed.

When, late in a.d. 9, with the great rebellion crushed, Tiberius and Germanicus returned to Rome, full triumphs were voted to Augustus and Tiberius, and Germanicus was voted ornamenta triumpbalia, praetor­ian standing, and permission to stand for the consulship ahead of normal.[235] But no triumphs ensued, for, five days later, the mood of congratulation was shattered by the yet more unimaginable blow of the 'disaster of Varus';[236] three legions lost, and everything beyond the Rhine lost with them. The optimism of Roman conquest had, as in Illyricum, proved unjustified, imperium sine fine unattainable. Augustus' nerve very nearly broke, and we are told he had thoughts of suicide. The defeat laid bare the slender military base on which the empire rested; the Illyricum campaign had already stretched manpower to the limits. Conscription was applied, and stepped up, and there are tales of people executed for refusing the levy. All veterans were recalled, freedmen again enrolled. It was a question whether the Roman people would stand it: fear of a tumult us in Rome led to drafting of an extra military force, and the ruler's personal German bodyguard was held no longer safe.[237]

Tiberius had to take on Germany. He toiled for three more hard years,[238] with nothing to show for all of them that could be treated triumphally; when his ceremony of reditus finally took place,[239] and his celebration of a full triumph, it was labelled not as 'over the Germans' but as the postponed triumph 'over Illyricum'. There was to be no provincia Germania.

In the year 12 Germanicus was consul. He was emerging as the new 'limelight personality': Dio has surprisingly much about his part in the Illyrian and German campaigns, which suggests that someone must have been writing them up.[240] However, his consular year was anything but cheerful. Natural disaster played its part again: the Tiber in spate, the Circus flooded and the ludi Martiales displaced. A new, sinister, note is heard, of seditious literature burnt and authors punished. Dates are uncertain, but this year is quite likely that of the banishment of the abrasive, witty barrister Cassius Severus,²¹⁷ for having 'defamed men and women of the highest status with licentious writings' — not, to judge from Tacitus' phrase, the ruler himself; but the offence was treated, for the first time, under the law of treason. One of Cassius' sarcasms related to the burning, by decision of the Senate, of the writings of a fellow- barrister, Titus Labienus, who wrote history, it seems, with a 'republicanist' flavour: he committed suicide.²¹⁸ And Ovid's books had been withdrawn from the libraries. The deterioration is evident: an anxious, touchy government and a subservient Senate.

In a.d. 13 the constitutional powers of Augustus and Tiberius were renewed again for ten years, and the imperium of Tiberius was at last declared equal to that of Augustus:²¹⁹ he was collega imperii. He had saved the sum of things, twice, he was fifty-six, and his duty was now quiedy to take over, with Germanicus, his adopted son, and Drusus, his original son, as the hopefuls for the succession. The senatorial sub-committee that prepared business for the full Senate, which Augustus had always used as his sounding-board, was given a revised membership and new powers, enabling it to pass resolutions equivalent to formal senatus consulta\ Tiberius, Germanicus and Drusus joined it as regular members.²²⁰ The purpose was stated to be to relieve Augustus of regular attendance at the Senate, but one can see how it could be an organ for quiet transition. Not that Augustus was 'going downhill': paradoxically, the very next thing we hear in Dio, when upper-class fretfulness over the iniquities of the death-duty became vocal again, displays the hand of the old manipulator still on the helm of policy. Augustus challenged the senators, individually, to suggest any better way of raising the necessary revenue, and then put in hand apparent preparations to institute an even stiffer scheme (a land-tax on solum Italic urn), whereupon they decided to keep the devil they knew.²²¹

Augustus and Tiberius began a census, with a special grant of consular imperium, and completed the lustrum in the next year on 11 May. Augustus travelled as far as Beneventum with Tiberius, who was on his way to Illyricum. Velleius has it that Tiberius' journey was 'to consoli­date in peace what he had conquered in war',²²² which is an admission that there was not anything needing the attention of Tiberius in Illyricum; but the two collegae imperii could not sit in Rome together. As

^2,7 Tic. Ann. 1.72.5 with the notes of Goodyear 1981 (в 62). ²¹⁸ Sen. Contra/, x Prtuf. 4-8.

^2,9 Veil. Pat. 11.121. i with the note of Woodman 198 3 (в 203); Suet. Tib. 20-21.1. There can be no certainty just when Tiberius received that grant.

²²⁰ Dio lvi.28.2-5; Crook 1955 (d 10) 14-13. Cf. EJ² 579, which may have some genuine documentary basis. ²²¹ Dio lvi.28.4-6. ²²² Veil. Pat. 11.123.1.

in Marcus Agrippa's distant day, they must operate apart; yet, evidently, it was no longer wise for Tiberius to be many days' journey away. Augustus, on his way home, spent a few days at Capri, which he had acquired from the city of Naples, in exchange for Ischia, because he and Tiberius liked it.²²³ He attended local games at Naples, and struggled as far as an old family property at Nola, where, on 19 August, he died.

Transmission, both constitutional and dynastic, had been taken care of. There was a collega imperii in place, and he should not have too many problems, for all that three members of the 'divine family', Augustus' nearest blood-relations, lived in exile - one, poor fellow, too dangerous to be left.²²⁴ Factual power would depend on whether the system had become sufficiently ingrained in Roman political life to survive, without seriously imaginable alternative, the rule of successors less skilful and less ruthless than Augustus; and in that respect his long reign had helped to make success somewhat more likely than not. In the course of the more than forty years since Actium a new age of European history had, in fact, managed to struggle into being, but our narrative has at least shown how far its genesis was from any kind of blueprint.

Suet. Aug. 92.2 Dio Lii.43.2.

Pani 1979 (c 185) has acute, if over-stated, analysis of the dynastic situation.

CHAPTER 3

AUGUSTUS: POWER, AUTHORITY, ACHIEVEMENT

J. A. CROOK

I. POWER

Rome's tradition of government, down to Iulius Caesar, was character­ized by distributed power and multiple sources of decision. That was never to return. From 30 в.с. onwards, the whole Roman world found itself in the grasp of a single ruler, possessing all power and making all decisions, except insofar as he might choose to leave some of them to others. We are insistently bidden to penetrate behind the 'facade' to the 'reality' of Augustus' power, and some advantage is to be gained if, to begin with, we separate the power - its extent and sources and the functions it was used to accomplish — from the authority, which was the dress in which the power was clothed. But we must remember that such a separation is, in the long run, artificial, because, in the actual political life of a nation, power and its formalizations are inextricably linked, and where authority is entrenched recourse to power is unnecessary.

Tacitus, in a paragraph which, if its hostility of tone be discounted, remains the most masterly succinct statement of what Augustus did, writes thus:"... he laid aside the title of triumvir and paraded himself as consul and as content with the tribunician authority for looking after the commons. The soldiery he enticed with gifts, the people with corn, and all alike with the charms of peace and quiet; and thus he edged forward bit by bit (insurgere paulatim), taking into his hands the functions of Senate, magistrates, laws.'¹ Both as to the use of power, and its spheres of application, and as to its translation into constitutional terms, insurgere paulatim describes what occurred with profound insight. What did not change or develop was the ruler's hold on actual coercive power: he possessed that, totally, from the start, and never let a particle of it slip from his hands. Power, he had; functions, he increasingly took over; formulations of that power and those functions he carefully fostered. But one aspect deserves to be stressed from the outset: initiative. All policy was decided by Augustus, as far as we know.² In making decisions he naturally listened to representations from, and took advice from, appropriate quarters, and, for all we know, he may have put into practice

¹ Tac. Am. 1.2.1. ² Millar 1977 (a 59) 616.

"5

policies proposed to him by others, though the state of the evidence makes that difficult to demonstrate. But, apart from what he might choose to leave to others, for example to the Senate, he presided over the withering away of independent sources of initiative.

Those who urge the historian to look behind the 'facade' and confront the 'reality' of Augustus' power mostly imply that he should acknow­ledge that Augustus' ultimate possibility of coercion lay in control of the army. That is a truism, and scarcely penetrates far enough, for we have still to ask, especially in the case of that first sole Roman ruler, how he was able to control the army. The Roman Republic had had no post of Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces; and, until it began to change in the crucible of the late Republic, the army had been a conscript force recruited by the consuls ad hoc, allotted by the the Senate to those whose provinciae required armies, and swearing an oath of obedience to each commander set to lead them. The triumviral age had been the culmina­tion of changes: nevertheless, it was the achievement of Augustus to create a volunteer, professional army, its size determined by himself, 'de- politicize' it,³ and establish for it an ethos of loyalty to himself and the 'divine family'. That result was not accomplished in a day. One of the reasons why Augustus' formal authority cannot be detached from his actual power is that armies can only with difficulty and exceptionally be recruited and held without a legitimate claim. Augustus was, in the first years after jo B.C., consul, and the provincia he was given from 27 B.C. entitled him to overall command of the troops within it (which was most of the troops, and their oath of obedience was necessarily to him). Although for a time there continued to be independent proconsuls with their own auspicia, they did not command enough forces to be a serious counterpoise to those commanded by Augustus. Perhaps the crucial fact in the whole story is that, in Augustus' first decade, Roman citizens were tired of civil war, which had brought no advantage to the ordinary soldier; that generation mostly wanted peace and discharge, and would not have been available for recruitment by a mere new pretender in a struggle against Augustus for power. By the time that war-weariness had worn off, he had succeeded in building a new army loyal to himself, and could offer it enough reward to make service worth while.

But, though legitimacy is important, the most direct influence on soldiers is that of their immediate commanding officers. It was those people's loyalty that Augustus needed to secure. The Republic had had no professional officer class with a distinct ideology or solidarity: commanding troops was something that every member of the governing class must do, but none could or wished to do for more than sporadic periods. Augustus, then, had no army lobby either to oppose him or to

³ Raaflaub 1980 (c 190).

be coaxed into supporting him. His formal powers gave him the right to choose his legati for his provincia, which included most of the areas of military activity, and the formally independent commands soon with­ered away; beyond that, his ability to control who commanded the armies remained simply a part of his general patronage of those who sought high office in the state. So two things were needful to enable Augustus to keep control of the army: he had to satisfy the aspirations of the political class, and to be a reliable paymaster to the troops.

That consideration leads to the second 'brute fact' about the power of Augustus, his overwhelming predominance in resources. The figures he gives in the Res Gestae suffice to show that the resources he directly had and personally controlled, from the start (once the Ptolemaic fortune passed into his hands), made it inconceivable for any alternative paymaster to arise, capable of supporting any notable army against him. The imperium that he caused to be bestowed on himself supplied the formal right to receive out of public revenue the cost of the major part of the armies; but beyond that, though he did not need to mingle the state's revenues officially with his private fortune, he took care to account for, and budget in the light of, the whole resources of the state.

A third aspect of Augustus' de facto power, and that which has received most emphasis recently, is his role as the universal patron, the sole source of benefits.[241] Already in preparation for war upon Antony and Cleopatra he had obtained from Italy and the provinces of the West an oath of personal allegiance, which was to become a standard element in the position of the ruler.[242] For a time, recently, historians urged us to see it as an oath of 'clientship' and describe Augustus as the universal patronus in as formal a sense as a former owner was patronus of his freedmen. That notion has been shown to have been too schematic,[243] and, besides, the practical importance of the oath, beyond its original context, cannot be judged. Nevertheless, patronage played a great role in the ruler's position, and its workings can be seen, already under Augustus, in various spheres. The leading families of the Republic had cultivated clientships all over the Roman world, especially in the East and in Spain and Africa; and numerous documents of the triumviral period show the 'dynasts' of the civil wars using their clients as agents in the control of cities and regions.⁷ 'So-and-so, my friend' [philos, amicus) might be the key figure in a locality. And when there was only one 'dynast' left it was his 'friends' around the world who kept cities and regions in line with his wishes, and could expect rewards such as the grant of Roman citizenship. (One category of such supporters were the 'client kings',⁸ who, even if originally Antony's men, soon submitted to the patronage of the victor of Actium.)

But how far the upper class of Rome as a whole depended for their careers, henceforward, on the patronage of the ruler is, at least for Augustus' time, dificult to determine. It cannot be ascertained how minutely he supervised entry into the militiae that formed the base of every public career. After those first steps, civil promotion depended, as before, on election. We know that Augustus was prepared to promote specific candidates openly by his own canvas and vote; and he could grant the latus clavus or see that a man did not lack the senatorial census. In so far as he created new executive posts, such as the praetorian prefectures, he nominated to them as he chose. But he did not have to control the whole promotion system in painful detail. The Roman state had never had high governmental or executive posts held for life or till retirement: there were no Chancellorships or the like. Nor did Augustus establish any such posts. The structure of public careers remained sporadic and gentlemanly in character: offices were held on short tenures, and none created any kind of fief. That was in one way an advantage to the ruler, but it precluded him, even if he had wished otherwise, from dominating areas of political life through the promotion of his amici to permanencies.

Historians have, since the 1930s, very readily applied to this period the notion of a dominant 'Party'.⁹ Augustus began his career, certainly, as a dux partiunr, when he became sole ruler, we are told, it was through the 'Party' that he continued to dominate the political world, his biggest problems, consequently, being those involved in holding the 'Party' together. That analysis is too closely based on the modern experience; and as soon as one attempts to locate the alleged 'Party' one is confronted with either too many people or too few. The obvious place to look is at the 'Friends of the Ruler', amiciprincipis (and renuntiatio amicitiae, such as happened to Cornelius Gallus, is then described as 'expulsion from the Party'). But the amici principis are too broad a group, for although Augustus' few close collaborators were, of course, amici principis, that category could also include jurists, philosophers, doctors and poets; in fact, it is hard to say where amicitia ended and clientela began. And if we include Augustus' well-wishers in the cities of the empire, we are soon in danger of ascribing to the 'Party' more or less everyone who is not known to have been an opponent of the regime - at which point the concept ceases to be helpful. Neither is any structural organization to be seen such as is nowadays associated with the idea of a 'Party', or would have held Augustus' adherents in the Roman world together politically. Of his handful of close associates, and how he bound them to him, there

' The most cogent account in terms of 'Party' is Be ranger 1959 (c 27).

will be more to say later; it is not at a 'Party' that we shall be looking, but at a dynastic network.

The fact that one finds it impossible not to speak of Augustus 'doing' this or 'deciding' that or 'establishing' the other is a reflection of blunt reality. It was he who decided what campaigns should be waged and when, and by armies of what size. As overall commanders of the main enterprises he appointed whom he chose. He decided policy towards Parthia, and the disposal of Judaea (though in that case we have in Josephus a window through which to watch him taking public advice).¹⁰ It was he who settled, not who should be consuls, but, much more importantly, how many consuls and praetors there should be each year, and from what minimum ages men might hold office. The Campaign to legislate for morality was his campaign. And as he took over functions, such as responsibility for food supply, security and fire-fighting in the capital, so his executive hold grew on more and more aspects of public life. Of power, that is to say of initiative and its important counterpart, the power to prevent things being done, Augustus held the essential reins from the beginning, and the rest he took over.

II. AUTHORITY

So the whole Roman world had a single ruler. The Greek-speaking part of that world , used to rulers and their ideology, saw no complications. By the time of, let us say, Hadrian or Marcus Aurelius, the ruler's total power was equally taken for granted in Rome, Italy and the West, and descriptions and justifications of it in Roman terms were available without embarrassment or hesitation. It was due to Augustus that that came to be so, because he combined a conservative cast of mind, and a vision of himself as restorer of Rome's erstwhile greatness and stability, with the ruthless determination to turn his power into a transmissible system. The descriptions and justifications of the power of the Roman ruler run, for that reason, on two parallel tracks: conformity to mos maiorum and creation of 'charisma'.

It was suggested in chapter 2 above that accounts of the traditional elements in Augustus' position in terms of a 'hoax', a 'cloak', or a 'veneer', masking 'brute power', though common, are seriously inade­quate. The better concept is 'legitimization': 'political power and legitimacy rest not only in taxes and armies, but also in the perceptions and beliefs of men'.¹¹

The narrative in chapter 2 showed how the main constitutional elements of the imperial system, imperium proconsulate maius and tribunicia

Joseph. BJ 11. 25 and 81: A] xvn.229 and 501; Crook 1955 (d 10) 32.

Hopkins 1978 (a 45) 198.

potestas, arose as solutions to particular political situations rather than out of any global vision. What is more, by no means every element of the eventual system was in place by Augustus' death: some of the cogs were added by his successors, and some of what were, during all his time, still experiments, hardened into fixity under his successors. Whether the inventive brain was that of Augustus alone, we cannot be sure. It is possible that the conventions of ancient historiography, aggravated by the self-advertising genius of Augustus, may have caused the suppres­sion from the record of people whose ideas and influences helped to create the imperial system. But little can be done to put that record straight. A final preliminary is to observe that one may judge the product to have been a remarkable achievement without, necessarily, admiring it wholeheartedly.

The Roman Republic - to repeat — had had, by tradition and convention, multiple points of decision-making: votes of the comitia, resolutions of the Senate, edicts of magistrates, interventions of tri­bunes, verdicts of criminal juries, sententiae of lay judges in the civil courts. The most fundamental long-term political trend of the imperial age of Roman history is the dwindling of that multiplicity until decision­making was, by formal rule even, in the hands of the emperor or of those to whom he might delegate authority. When it is asked how far Augustus carried Rome along that path — the path to 'the emperor is dispensed from the laws' and 'what is pleasing to the emperor has the force of statute' — two contrasting answers are given by historians, and debate is not over.

One answer was implied in the narrative of chapter 2, where Augustus was described as keeping, and brilliantly utilizing, the old republican unwritten 'rule-book' and its well-tried terminology, and rejecting offers of powers formally inconsistent with that; but modern scholarship has repeatedly emphasized that there appear to exist a whole set of counterfactuals to that picture, which would lead to the view that, in fully formal terms, Augustus' constitutional position was quite differ­ent, and quite revolutionary. One source, above all, poses the problem: the so called lex de imperio Vespasiani, the surviving second bronze tablet of an inscription on which were set out the constitutional powers conferred on the emperor Vespasian.¹² The sixth surviving clause reads: '... and that, whatever he judges to be in accordance with the interest of the state and the solemnity (maiestas) of divine and human and public and private affairs, he shall have the right and power to do and perform, as the divine Augustus, and Tiberius Iulius Caesar Augustus, and Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, had'. If that sentence be taken at its face value, the consequences for the picture so far given of ¹² EJ² 564; Brunt 1977 (c 535).

Augustus' formal position are devastating, for in that event it must be admitted that he had, all the time, in the most formal sense,[244] total constitutional power. That conclusion is particularly welcome to legal historians, as an explanation of how it was that Augustus seems to have been accepted as the head of the legal order, which no concatenation of executive or initiative powers (which is what imperium and tribunicia potestas were) could have achieved. Numerous further pieces can be fitted into the picture, especially the remark in Gaius' Institutes[245] that'... it has never been doubted that it [a decision by the emperor, constitutio principis] has the force of statute', and the statement in Suetonius' Life of Caligula that Caligula received en bloc, at his accession, the 'right and arbitrament of all matters'.[246] Strabo's claim that Augustus had the arbitrament of peace and war[247] is another item for the dossier. And scholars have found, in phrases from the sources here and there, possible titles for the supremacy Augustus is supposed to have received - 'care of the res publico', 'headship of the common weal', 'Principate', or just imperium.

Augustus told the world how he wished it to think about this in the Res Gestae. Minimizing his formal powers, and insisting on his rejection of powers contrary to mos maiorum, he asserted that what he predomi­nated in was auctoritas,^xl the predicate of'being accepted as a top person' that the 'chief men' (principes virt) of the Republic had been said to possess, by which the things he commanded were done simply because it was he who commanded them. Some historians have tried to show that unofficial auctoritas was turned — by some step that has eluded us - into an official power of legislation, or that it replaced imperium as the formal statement of total power, or that by an edict of 28 B.C. Augustus received a formal 'Principate' that carried all else with it.¹⁸

There is no compatibility between the two pictures, and no com­promise will accommodate both; it is necessary to choose. The choice made in chapter 2 and in the present account, of the more old-fashioned, 'minimalist' - and at present heterodox - picture of the 'Augustan constitution' imposes some immediate caveats and clarifications. First, to repeat: neither picture is an account of de facto power; both are accounts of descriptions, justifications, legitimizations, of power. To choose the first is not, therefore, to imply that Augustus finished up any the less the de facto ruler of Rome; it is to say that he and his contempor­aries clothed his rule in concepts that were not yet of the monolithically monarchical kind familiar to the Severan emperors and their contempor­aries two hundred years later. Secondly it imposes the duty to offer an alternative account of at least three texts, but especially of the sixth clause of the lex de imperio Vespasiani, the so-called 'discretionary clause'.[248]

The difficulty about believing that clause to mean, baldly, what it seems to imply - that is, that Augustus already had total, formal power to act at will — is that it would have made otiose the whole of the rest of the document, including the grants of the major specific powers that presumably occupied the missing first tablet. Proper significance needs, instead, to be given to its position in the list of regulations: it belongs to a closing group, in which the seventh clause grants the new ruler exemption from certain statutes and the eighth validates retrospectively his actions before becoming ruler. That position establishes for the sixth clause its natural and appropriate role as a grant of residual emergency powers.[249] It is, in any case, erroneous to invoke the 'discretionary clause' as a prop for the ruler's legislative authority, for it gives him power to do things, whereas legislation is only in a truistic sense the 'doing' of things: it is the creation of rules, an altogether broader activity.

Gaius, writing an elementary law-book in the second century a.d., sounds uncomfortable in his protestation (if it is his) that 'no one has doubted' that a constitutio principis has the force of statute. Such was certainly correct doctrine in his own day, and perhaps we should simply infer from his embarrassment that he knew that earlier constitutional statements had not taken that form. But Gaius' passage is in a more parlous state still, for it continues by giving a reason for the principle that a constitutio principis has the force of statute which is deficient in logic:'... because the emperor receives his imperium by statute'. The поп sequitur is so blatant as to cast doubt whether Gaius could have penned such an absurdity. It bears, too, the marks of an unintelligent echo of Ulpian's account, quoted in Justinian's Digest, of what is there called the 'royal law', lex regia;[250] it is in all probability an intrusion into the real text of Gaius, which will simply have stated the rule about imperial pronounce­ments that prevailed in his day.

The third text is that of Strabo. He was a contemporary and a serious author; but his assertion that Augustus received 'headship of the hegemony' and 'the power of war and peace for life' comes at the end of his Geography. That is not a work of legal science, and he is not making a constitutional statement. (He is, in fact, detailing the division of the provinces into 'people's provinces' and 'Caesar's provinces'; and that was actually accomplished not by virtue of any great overriding power of Augustus, but, in all probability, in a senatorial debate.)²²

The case, then, for Augustus having been granted a formal 'consti­tutional monarchy' does not prevail over the account, derived from Dio and elsewhere, of his receiving at different stages a concatenation of particular powers; and when Dio himself says that it was from the beginning 'unalloyed monarchy'²³ he is not giving a description but making a comment.

In any case, there is still more to be said about the constitutional forms in which the ruler's power was expressed. They interacted with the 'brute realities' by creating boundaries of normal conduct: the clothing helped to define the role. And the separate powers had a further usefulness: they could be applied piecemeal in the gradual promotion of the ruler's principal collaborator to the position of collega imperii. The pedantic precision of their use in that way can be observed in the papyrus fragment of a Greek translation of Augustus' funeral laudation of Agrippa:'... tribunician power for five years in 18 в.с. on the basis of a senatus consultum, and again in 13 B.C., plus, in a statute, that no man's authority should be greater than yours in any province to which the public weal of Rome might hale you'.²⁴ That careful formulation helps to corroborate the case that has been argued here, that the ruler's own powers were described in terms of a concatenation rather than by some global formula.

Auctoritas is the aspect of the forms (in the sense that it could be given a name and is appealed to in the R« Gestae) that lay closest to the actuality. It was personal to the individual ruler, and if he lacked or lost it his rule was in peril. He possessed it partly by force of personality, partly by the 'brute fact' that he held the reins of power; yet at the same time it was by possessing auctoritas that he held those reins, for, insofar as he possessed it, he had only to command to be obeyed. Inscriptions recording that things were done 'by order of Augustus', iussu Augusti,²⁵ ought not to cause perplexity: they are the reflection of auctoritas, for the people concerned were content to state that they had done things because Augustus told them to. Auctoritas was, furthermore, the link between the conformity to mos maiorum (for it had been predicated of republican principes viri) and the creation of 'charisma' (because it was predicated of the ruler as an individual): it could pave the way for the insertion of the ruler's personality in the permanent, extra-constitutional consciousness of the people.

But legal historians are quite right, that it is above all for the ruler's role as an issuer of norms, regulations to be obeyed generally and for the future, that we need to seek the constitutional basis, because that role is

²² Lacey 1974 (c 146). a Dio ui.i.i. 24 _ej₂ ,66. « _ep _tgj. _j6g

not explicable in terms of the 'blunt realities' of power. Augustus' word, though it was as well to obey it in the instant case, did not 'have the force of statute'. He was offered, as a special grant, the right to make leges Augustae, but turned it down; instead he put bills before the comitia by virtue of his tribunician power, and they became leges luliae.[251] He could summon and put motions to the Senate, but the resulting decisions were senatus consulta.²¹ His edicts would lapse unless validated, at least tacitly, by his successors (though is was probably not doubted that they would be).[252] The responsaprudentium, 'opinions of the jurists' (the jurists of the late Republic had sought normative status for their responsa,^z<) which came, in the imperial period, to count as an official source of law) continued to depend on the auctoritas of the individual jurist. Augustus, besides himself giving some responsa,[253] is said to have 'decided that they [the jurists] should give their opinions ex auctoritate eius'.[254] There are reasons for being extremely unsure what exactly that meant or what resulted from it. Some scholars see it as a takeover by the ruler of the interpretation of the law, which is very implausible; others think it just gave certain favoured jurists a status somewhat like that of English Queen's Counsel. In any case, what supported the privilege was not imperium orpotestas, but, properly, auctoritas, Augustus' auctoritas supple­menting, as it were, that of the particular jurist.

The ruler in the imperial period had the role, also, of supreme and ultimate judge. In the Republic there had been no supreme judge or court of the Roman state, and decisions both of the criminal and of the civil courts were inappellable. So it has again to be asked what part Augustus played in that important development, and by what consti­tutional authority. Under him the civil courts continued to function in the standard way, and so did the criminal quaestiones, with, even, an addition, the adultery court; and for the organization of them all the important pair of statutes de iudiciis was passed.[255] But besides that, there existed already judicial appeal to the ruler as a supreme court and jurisdiction by the ruler at first instance, in the form of pure cognitio: there is not much evidence, and it is anecdotal at that, but historians mostly, and rightly, accept that at least tentative beginnings can be perceived under Augustus.[256] Attempts to derive that extra ordinem jurisdiction of

Augustus from republican precedents and his traditional constitutional powers[257] all fail, at least in part, however hard scholars press into service the early grants of'judging when called upon' and the 'vote of Athena',[258]or seek to extract a judicial power from his proconsular imperium or — for those who believe in its existence — his consular potestas. It seems necessary to posit some formal legislative basis for Augustus' jurisdic­tion; and as that is unlikely to have been a statute of which no hint survives in the sources, a reasonable guess, in a situation of admitted uncertainty, is that something may have been contained in the leges de iudiciis. Be that as it may, the emergence of the ruler as supreme judge and head of the legal order is the principal formal difference between the Republic and the Empire.

III. ACHIEVEMENT /. Governing class

However one may qualify or re-phrase, the late Republic was running into an imbalance between the growing scale of its responsibilities as a world power and the organization needed to meet them,[259] and, with further growth of empire, some initiatives would have had to be taken, though they did not need to be massive or revolutionary. The organs of government of the Roman empire are treated in various chapters below, but we must here consider what part Augustus played in their development.

To call the Senate an 'organ of government' brings out vividly the change it had to undergo, for it had been, not an 'organ', but the government itself. To an extent, that continued to be so.³⁷ There was no 'dyarchy': just as Augustus' imperium maius entitled him to determine things all over the empire, so senatus consulta could be of universal application. And the Senate gained (like Augustus) one completely new role, as a court of law.³⁸ Nor need it be doubted that Augustus' repeated efforts to reduce the size and purify the social composition of the Senate were motivated by his desire for that body to retain a responsible role in public affairs. The sub-committee he set up to prepare senatorial business with him will have improved, not diminished, the chance of the Senate to maintain a hold on serious matters of state, as well as for the ruler to propose initiatives and gauge reactions.³⁹ As individuals, the senators remained the holders of virtually all the top offices of state - in principle, all home magistracies, all legionary legateships and all governorships of provinces, save for the one major exception, Egypt, and a few minor ones. (Nor was Egypt any harbinger of change: no further major province, nor any other legionary command, became equestrian till Severan times.) Senators also retained charge of the state treasury, and supplied, exclusively, the personnel of a number of new administrative committees:praefectifrumenti dandi from 22 B.C.; curatores viarum from 20 b.C., curatores aquarum from 11 b.C.; praefecti aerarii militaris from a.d. 6; curatores operum publicorum (not datable); curatores frumenti⁴⁰ for acquiring grain in a.d. 6 and 7; the consular commission on expenditure, a.d. 6; the consular committee to take over embassies, from a.d. 8. The consuls were also charged with a new jurisdiction over fideicommissa, testamen­tary trusts. Finally, experimental but with a future of high prestige, there was the prefecture of the city.

An important advance on tradition, however, was that Augustus created in the senatorial order something closer to a hereditary peerage.⁴¹ Suetonius informs us that Augustus permitted the sons of senators to wear the 'broad stripe', latus clavus,^vl and Dio that in 18 в.с. he imposed a minimum property qualification upon candidates for office, which settled at 250,000 drachmas - a million sesterces. Dio states, indeed, that Augustus' original minimum was 100,000 drachmas (400,000 sesterces), but that was just the 'equestrian' rating that everybody had to have to serve as an officer, the necessary preliminary to all political office. So 18 в.с. should date the inception of a specifically senatorial census.⁴³ Sons of senators could, henceforward, automatically stand for the offices that — still, alone - gave entrance to the order. Suetonius does not say that others could only do so as a beneficium of the ruler, thus giving'him sole control over access to the order, but the power may have been employed to keep out 'gatecrashers'.⁴⁴ As for the property qualification, the figure was presumably chosen with an eye to getting a senatorial order of the desired size, for there were plenty of people - and not only senators — much richer than the minimum.

But Augustus' struggle was uphill, because he could not bring himself to accept the inevitability of apathy. To put it in a homely form, if you say to people 'I am the ruler, but please, everybody, carry on exactly as usual', they won't. The honorific and social position was still a goal, and legionary and provincial commands were still sought after, but the requirement of residence to attend formal meetings was thought a

Dio Lv.26.2; 31.4.

Nicolet 1976(0 j 3); Chastagnol 1973 (d 31) and 1975 (d 33). Both Mommsen and Willemshad, in their day, pointed this out.

Suet. Aug. 38.2; Suetonius docs not necessarily imply that (for example, owing to a 'crisis of recruitment') they were forced to enter the Senate.

Dio liv.i7.3; Suet. Aug. 41.1, with Carter's note. ⁴⁴ As in 36 b.c., Dio xlix. 16.1.

nuisance. Hence the changes that had to be made in the rules of senatorial procedure.⁴⁵ The 'acts of the Senate' ceased to be published,⁴⁶ and it is possible that that was intended actually to encourage freedom of oral debate; but principally the changes were by way of securing proper levels of attendance:⁴⁷ increased fines for absence, fixing of regular sessions of the Senate fortnighdy on specified days, and - in capitulation, really - lowering of the quorum needed to pass valid senatus consulta.

Recently, in line with the general theme of 'opting out' whose repercussions on the 'divine family' were seen in chapter 2 above, historians have discerned a 'crisis of recruitment' in the governing class, especially in the Senate. In 13 b.c. the Senate itself, in Augustus' absence, alarmed at the situation, appointed men from the equestrian order to the lowest set of senatorial posts, the 'vigintivirate' (allowing them to remain equites), and obliged ex-quaestors over forty to draw lots for the tribunate; and on his return Augustus compelled some people with the requisite census to enter the Senate. In the following year there was again a shortage for the tribunate, and equites were forced into it, with a choice, at the end, which order to stay in. In a.d. 5 (and often, says Dio) people were unwilling to be aediles, and compulsion was used. Suetonius alleges that the additional decuria was necessitated by avoidance of jury- service, and Dio records the difficulty of getting people to offer their daughters as Vestal Virgins.⁴⁸ We can, then, agree as to the phenome­non, provided that a careful distinction be made. For the people at the lower end of the elite group, the sort who in the Republic would not have got beyond quaestorian rank and would have remained senatores pedarii, in the new dispensation the rank was not worth the trouble and expenditure. But the top was unaffected; praetorships and consulships were sdll sought after and fought over, hence Augustus' need to pass a lex de ambitu and make a rule, in 8 B.C., requiring deposits from candidates for office.⁴⁹ In 23 B.C. he had declared that only ten praetors were needed annually, and the figure was kept at that for a few years; but there was pressure, and they were restored to twelve. And in a.d. ii, there being sixteen candidates, all were let in.⁵⁰ As for the consulship, both its relinquishment by Augustus from 23 B.C. and the introduction of a second pair each year, which was regular from 5 B.C., must be seen as a response to the number of men eagerly surging up through the system and wanting the social reward: the age at which nobiles might reach the consulship was actually lowered.⁵¹ So it is no wonder that in the Augustan marriage-laws one of the privileges achieved by the possession of children was priority in the candidature for office.

⁴⁵ Talbert 1984 (d 77) 122-4, following Rotondi, posits a lex lulia de senatu babendo of 9 b.c.

⁴⁴ Suet. Aug. 36.1. ⁴⁷ Dio Liv.18.5 and 35.1; lv.3. ⁴⁸ Suet. Aug. 32; Dio lv.22.j.

⁴' DioLV.5.3. ^M Dio lvi.23.4. ⁵¹ Syme 1986 (a 95) j 1-3

The election to magistracies was plainly not intended by Augustus to go simply by his fiat. There was insistence on giving people the vote, as in the arrangements for the decurions of the twenty-eight Italian coloniae to have a kind of 'postal vote';[260] and Agrippa's new Saepta and Diribitorium must have been intended and used for actual voting and vote-counting, even if also for exhibitions. That might not be very significant: by Pliny's time, elections by the people in the Campus, though they still happened, were just a piece of pageantry. But to the extent to which, in Augustus' day, the ruler still needed to influence them, that state had not yet arrived. We are told how he gave presents to his own tribes and canvassed personally for his preferred candidates.[261]One of his privileges was that of 'commendation' of candidates for the higher offices, who were then 'candidates of Caesar' and automatically elected: Augustus seems to have used it sparingly, and not at all (as far as we know) for the consulship. He did not 'give' consulships to people, though we have seen in chapter 2 how he caused special arrangements to be made for the young hopefuls of the 'divine family'. Dio asserts that Augustus often chose the urban praetor himself[262] (not, it appears, the peregrine praetor, who shared the civil jurisdiction, which shows that this is nothing to do with a 'grip on the law'); doubtless what that means is that he decided which of the annually elected praetors should have the hierarchically senior position.⁵⁵ As for governors of provinces, those of Augustus' own provincia were, properly, his to choose: it was an immense hold on promotion to the really significant jobs. The proconsulships of the 'provinces of the Roman people', were, in principle, still determined by the lot. Some scholars are minded to show that they were somehow picked with an eye to particular talent or suitability or experience.⁵⁶ The attempt results in very little, but some manipulation of the lot is plausible, for ensuring, for example, that Africa got a soldier when needed, and we know that the lot was abandoned in at least one period of emergency.

In any case, it is a merit of recent scholarship to have pointed out that, in the Empire just as in the Republic, public responsibilities were not specialized (not even, by and large, the military ones, for every gentleman had to do some soldiering). Provided candidates seemed loyal and ordinarily competent, it did not greatly matter who received which office, and there was little need to gerrymander the system in detail, except, perhaps, negatively, to exclude men not competent enough — or too competent. The great, overriding campaign commands were just put, unashamedly, in the hands of members of the 'divine family';

otherwise, the important criteria were, really, social, and it is best to view the whole as an honours system, positions of distinction graded in a traditional ladder up which the socially ambitious could move. Its other importance was as a 'brokerage' system in the distribution of the ruler's beneficia, because it was those who rose in the order whose recommenda­tions carried weight, and who could obtain favours for the people or cities who were their clientes.⁵¹

The only other 'order' that mattered was that of the equites, and to them Augustus looked for some administrative personnel, without whom he would have had to expand the traditional magistracies and so dilute the senatorial crime de la creme. The wealthy class of newly united Italy was ready to be brought into the scheme of things. We have learnt better, however, than to see Augustus as 'inventing the Roman civil service' or harnessing to his regime the skills of a 'business class'. He used individuals of different kinds and skills and backgrounds, and did not create for them a cursus honorum in imitation of that of the senators: that was a later development. He did take steps to give the order a stronger collective image, with a formal 'entrance examination' and an annual equestrian parade, and, when Gaius and Lucius Caesar were old enough, making them its honorary presidents. From the funeral honours for Germanicus⁵⁸ we learn of a Lex Valeria Cornelia of a.d. 5, by which a new electoral committee of senators and select equites was interposed between candidature for office and the comitia, choosing a list of persons destinati, to be added, probably, to any commendati, to be put before the assembly of the people. It was allowed for that there might still be more candidates presenting themselves independently, but maybe from then on the assembly was virtually a rubber stamp. The significance of the new committee has been variously assessed; one view is that it had a political purpose, to encourage, by allowing some equites a say in the process, the rise to office of 'new men' favourable to Tiberius. But the more sober, and now prevailing, view is that it was an 'honour', a further special mark of distinction for the equestrian order.⁵⁹

When it came to the offices opened to the equites, there was, in Augustus' conception, no 'ladder'.⁶⁰ The order maintained, in any case, its traditional role as a principal source for the manning of the standard jury-courts and the filling of junior army officerships. The most significant of the new functions were for experienced military equites: the prefectures of small provinces and of the naval squadrons, and the census

^s7 Sailer 1981 (p 59) 94-111 and 7)-8.

^и The rogatio Valeria Auretia of a.d. 19. Sources: Tabula Hebana, EJ² 94a; Tabula Siarensis, J. Gonzalez 1984 (в 234); Rome fragment, C1L vi 31199; perhaps also the Tabula I/ieitaiu, EJ² 94b (or the latter may come from similar honours for Drusus in a.d. 23). ^w Brunt 1961 (c 47).

⁶⁰ Dismantling of the 'ladder' began with Sherwin-White 1939 (d 65).

officerships in the provinces. Above all, of course, stood the prefecture of Egypt and Alexandria itself. The first three prefects performed important military tasks; quite a number of other prefects are known by name from Augustus' reign, but we hear little of their activities, they had short terms of office, and they were socially not of high consequence.⁶¹ Equites were also employed in new procuratorial, that is financial, offices (though such offices might go to freedmen, such as the notorious Julius Licinus).⁶² The equestrian offices in the capital arose only relatively late, in the process of experimentation: the two praetorian prefects first in 2 b.c., thepraefectus vigilum in a.d. 6, thepraefectus annonae not before a.d. 7.⁶³ The stimulus may not have been so much growing confidence in the equestrians as dissatisfaction with experiments using senatorial committees.⁶⁴

In the imperial period there is a civil service, purely executive, staffed by 'slaves of Caesar' and 'freedmen of Augustus' (until its headships begin to go to equites, and then we really are in a different world). There are, especially, a number of central posts occupied by freedmen, the secretaryships of correspondence, accounts, and petitions being the principal: and for a period in the first century a.d. holders of some of those posts had powerful personal influence on the rulers. Augustus' part in initiating the system is hard to estimate because of shortage of evidence, but historians, probably rightly, tend to conclude from that shortage that the beginnings, under him, were slight and unsystematic. To his last instructions, leaving behind a military and financial handbook to the empire, he 'appended also the names of the freedmen and slaves who could be called to account',⁶⁵ which suggests a precursor of the Department of Accounts; but the floodtide of correspondence was yet to come,⁶⁶ and the regular answering of, at any rate, legal petitions a later development. Certainly, there is no sign of any such persons having political influence on Augustus. Naturally, there was also a large personnel, greater than, though not different in kind from, that of the republican prirtcipes viri, of household servants, and with the rise of a 'court' (to which we shall come) it was destined to become very large indeed. But Augustus treated his servants sternly,⁶⁷ and no sign is yet to be detected of the influence of chamberlains or the like, let alone of the ruler's inaccessibility behind layers of personnel.

Our focus has shifted from the way Augustus secured the personnel he needed to the extent of their influence upon him. The 'Party' has been

⁶¹ Brunt 1975 (e 906). ⁶² Dio liv. 21.3-8.

It is likely that the praefectus vebtculorum also goes back to Augustus, though not yet epigraphically attested so early: Suet. Aug. 49-3.

" Eck 1985 (c 82). « Suet. Aug. 101.4.

Though for a trace of a precursor of ab epistulis see Suet. Aug. 67.2, with Kienast 1982 (c 136) 262. ⁶¹ Suet. Aug. 67; 74.

adduced, and the amici principis were his obvious channel of advice; but it is practically impossible to attribute any particular action to the influence of a specific individual, except in a few cases of personal patronage. Crucially lacking, of course, are the files, letters, memoirs and diaries from which historians of the modern age extract such information. In accordance with mos maiorum, Augustus brought in persons of standing, of his choice, when public decisions had to be seen to be made; they can be observed, listed hierarchically, in the minutes of formal meetings.⁶⁸ It is also quite certain that Augustus used amici of his choice, according to their talents and the matter in hand, as his informal consilium, summoned according to need.⁶⁹ Doubtless they did exercise influence; someone must have been involved, for example, in the orchestration of the imperial symbolism (a subject to which we shall come). Doubtless, too, the senatorial probouleutic sub-committee was not always on the mere receiving end. But that is all that can be said.⁷⁰ There were eminencesgrises: Maecenas and Sallustius Crispus were sources of confidential infor­mation and privy to secret plans, and people, no doubt rightly, believed that they could get what they wanted;⁷¹ but we do not actually know what items of policy sprang from their brains.⁷² Livia Drusilla, always at her husband's side, may have had the greatest influence of all; in her case, the less people knew, the more — and worse - they guessed. Prosopogra- phy has, to be sure, given vivid life to a number of powerful personalities of the age whom we may well guess to have been immensely influential: M. Lepidus, M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus, L. Calpurnius Piso, consul of 15 B.C., Cn. Cornelius Lentulus, consul of 14 B.C., Paullus Fabius Maximus, consul of n B.C., and plenty of others. But the most characteristic means whereby Augustus obtained the co-operation of, and promoted to high responsibilities, the people of his choice, was their incorporation in the ramifications of the 'divine family'.⁷³ Complex family alliances were not in the least contrary to tradition, but when such an alliance revolved round just one princeps vir instead of many, the quantitative change became qualitative, and an imperial court was in the making. To the ideological aspects of the 'divine family' we shall return; its practical aspect was that the greatest commands and the most spectacular diplomatic missions went — and were held for as long as the ruler thought necessary - to the closest members of his family and then, as it were, spread outwards. It is likely that, insofar as they were experienced enough, those men were also Augustus' principal counsel-

^M Ep 579, lines 34-40. ⁶⁴ Crook 1933 (d to) ch. 3.

Policy about codicils was suggested by the jurist Trebatius Testa, Inst. just. 11. 25.

Hor. Sat. 1.9.43-56; 11.6.58-58.

Crispus may have been solely responsible for the elimination of Agrippa Postumus.

For the process, and the people, see Syme 1986 (a 95).

lors and collaborators; hence the political tragedy of Augustus' unwil­lingness to trust Tiberius and Tiberius' withdrawal from collaboration with Augustus.

2. Policy

What, with hindsight, historians analyse as Roman 'policy' was often, simply, the Roman government's pragmatic reaction to situations. (The 'spread of citizenship', with the founding of new coloniae, is, as far as Augustus is concerned, a case in point, because veterans had to be settled somewhere.) There are, nonetheless, one or two areas in which it is proper to speak of, and needful briefly to review, Augustus' 'policy'. He had a military and imperial policy: that is assessed in chapter 4 below. He had a financial and budgetary policy and a social and demographic policy. He also had an ideology, the most important part of the whole story.

A degree of financial policy and initiative greater than that of the Republic was forced upon Augustus by the need for a permanent military budget. What was needed was relatively exact housekeeping - and the Res Gestae was evidently composed by someone who relished exact figures. A 'statement of accounts' of the empire, such as was left by Augustus to his successor, had already been available to be handed to his fellow-consul in 23 b.C., when he thought he was dying.⁷⁴ The general basis of taxation from the republican time was not seriously changed, except for the introduction, quite late on, of the estate duty, vicesima hereditatium, to feed the new account for meeting army discharge gratuities. However, a full property and poll census of the provinces was put in hand, gradually and over many years; it was imposed particularly on newly acquired regions, where it was regarded as the principal sign of subjection and was a major cause of unrest. Besides army pay, another costly item was the supply of free corn at Rome (though much of the taxation for that came in in kind). Augustus did not invent the policy of 'bread and circuses'; in fact, probably after the great food panic of a.d. 6, he was minded to abolish the Jrumentatio (his motive being not economic but social, namely the very conservative belief that free corn at Rome lured citizens away from the admirable activity of peasant farming). But he concluded that abolition was politically inexpedient.⁷⁵ The main economic fact, however, that determined policy was the enormous, and ever-growing, wealth of the ruler himself; the patrimonium could serve as an alternative treasury, and enabled Augustus to practise a kind of deficit financing on the main accounts, with himself making up the shortfall from his private fortune. Chapters 15 to 18 of the Res Gestae tell the story:

⁷⁴ Dio liii.50.2. 75 Suet. Aug. 42.3.

'... four times I helped the state treasury with my money';'... from the year of the Lentuli [18 B.C.], when the public revenues were insufficient, I gave subventions of corn and cash from my own granary and bank to sometimes 100,000 people and sometimes many more'. The ruler thus imposed on himself, as the richest citizen, a kind of super-liturgy, which enabled him - as the ancient liturgical principle always enabled the payer - to take on the role of super-benefactor.[263]

Except for that part of the taxation of the provinces that was paid in kind, the Roman empire had a money economy. In particular, the armies were paid in cash, and so were the principal officials. Governors of provinces received large salaries (which was an important innovation of Augustus),⁷⁷ and equestrian officialdom was from the start a salaried service. As in every respect, so in that of coinage the Roman imperial system relied on the continuance of local government and practice, and so the cities of the Roman world went on issuing, for everyday use, their own, mostly bronze, coinages. The gold and, above all, the silver coinages, for major payments, passed into the control of Rome, the ruler. Numismatists tell us that under Augustus there came into being a 'world coinage'. There was less of policy about that than just the way things worked out (and the only actual Augustan change in the currency system was, surprisingly, in the non-precious metal currency of Rome, which became bimetallic):[264] huge coinages had been issued in the triumviral period, to pay the rival armies, so there was much in circulation; the government opened and closed mints at different times and places, as and when the need was perceived for specific quantities of new coin. The total production was, undeniably, enormous.⁷⁹

The aspect of Augustus' activity, however, that most plainly deserves the name of 'policy' is that which is commonly called his 'social policy', since it evidently sprang from passionate personal concern: he doggedly fought his own elite over it. The impression given by much recent writing is that Augustus was both revolutionary, in trying to mould the morality and demography of a society by legislation, and at the same time grossly illiberal and reactionary in the rules he sought to impose. As was pointed out in chapter 2 above, there stood behind Augustus a strong republican tradition of the state's interference in the behaviour of the citizens, through legislation, the courts, and, above all, the censorship.⁸⁰ As to the illiberality, it has often been characteristic of dictators and the like to treat what part, at least, of the citizenry regard as freedoms of personal choice as signs of decadence, and try to curb them, and Augustus is easily tarred with that brush; but the debate about the state's role in relation to morality and family is perennial, and we should beware of imposing a current standard too crudely. Augustus shared with Cicero⁸¹ the belief in a superior early and middle Republic, whose victories had been based on better morals and solider family virtues, and he strove to re-create that idealized past.

The legislation relating to slaves and former slaves (freedmen and freedwomen) occurs relatively late in Augustus' reign, and was not part of the 'package' of the leges Iuliae.^iZ Proposed by consuls, it may well have been with the approval or even at the initiative of the Senate; for the governing class had a tradition (as can be seen in 'sumptuary laws') of restraining their richer members from stepping too far out of line.⁸³ The astute may even detect, in the Lex Aelia Sentia, some competing pressures, for example, between the drastic regulation of the number and kind of persons who could be elevated to Roman citizenship by the mere process of being liberated by a Roman owner, and, on the other hand, the even-handed provisions governing conduct between freed people and their former owners.⁸⁴ The leges luliae de adulteriis and de maritandis ordinibus and the Lex Papia Poppaea are the group that represent a moral commitment evinced by Augustus from the beginning,⁸⁵ and never given up. The curious title of the lex lulia de maritandis ordinibus seems to relate only to those parts of the big statute that restricted the right to full Roman marriage between certain status classes, for example between the senatorial order and freed persons and between all freeborn persons and the usual classes of 'people of low repute' (,infames); but its best-known feature is the pressure that it placed on citizens to marry and re-marry, backed by rewards for those with at least three children and penalties for the childless. The rewards included priority in the competition for public office, and the penalties included severe public marks of disesteem for the unmarried; but the system was made to turn a good deal on how far people were allowed to take inheritances, and those rules did not apply as between close kin, nor below a modestly high property rating. It is fair to infer that it was the birth-rate in the upper ranks of society that Augustus cared about (less so to infer that the true purpose of the legislation was different from what lies on its face, such as the preservation of estates).⁸⁶ It is, of course, true that Augustus did not dispose of proper demo-

Cic. Marccll. 2 3.

The Lex Iunia, which created the status of'Junian Latins', bears the title lunia Norbana in Inst. Jut. i. 5. j, and should be dated to a.d. 19 accordingly. If it had been part of the early batch of Augustus' laws it would have been a Lex lulia like the rest.

For leges sumptmriae of Julius Caesar and of Augustus in the old republican tradition, see Rotondi 1912 (f 68j) 421 and 447 andGell. NA 11.24.14-15.

Accusation of ingratitude against freedmen, Dig. 40.9. 30 pr.; but if patron fails to support freed man he loses rights, Dig. 38.2.33; and if he obliges freedman or freed woman to agree not to marry he loses rights, Dig. 37.14.13.

The standard view; challenged by Badian 1985 (f 4). ⁸⁶ So Wallace-Hadrill 1981 (f 73).

graphic knowledge about the trend of the birth-rate and what needed to be achieved to change it; but he probably thought he knew quite enough, and the upper class he could, if unsystematically, observe. His legislation was not going to produce waves of stout yeomen (unless by imitation of their betters), but what he might achieve was a stable officer class. That such was his aim is corroborated by two other new legal rules that will have had importance mainly for the better-off: first, the introduction of peculium castrense, the fund comprising what a filius familias earned from, or acquired in connexion with, his military service, which he could control independently of his paterfamilias-, and, secondly, the rule that a paterfamilias was not allowed to disinherit a filius familias during his military service.[265]

Augustus was, then, probably telling in the Res Gestae the simple truth about what he conceived his legislation to have been for: 'By new statutes passed on my initiative I restored many good examples of our forbears that were disappearing from the current age, and I personally[266]handed on to posterity examples of many things for them to imitate'. That does not mean that it was particularly successful or that it was without pernicious consequences, of which perhaps the worst was that the marriage laws conjured up a fiscal interest in escheated estates that had not existed before.