The Twelve Caesars

by Matthew Dennison

  His legacy is fecund, the cultural and economic efflorescence of his reign symptomatic of fertility at a moment when Roman strength burgeoned at home and abroad. But Augustus himself, although a dedicated philanderer whose interest in sex never faltered, had only a single child. Julia was his daughter by his first wife, Scribonia, a stern-faced matron of the old school whom he divorced on the day of Julia’s birth on the flimsy pretext that he was ‘unable to put up with her shrewish disposition’. (In fact he was consumed with lust for Livia and, conspicuously parvenu in a political environment of entrenched snobbery, equally desperate for the unique political legitimacy of Livia’s aristocratic Claudian heritage.) The story of Augustus’ reign is one of consistent political realignment, of the transference of powers associated with formerly elected offices to an unelected head of state. The human drama, first played out behind closed doors on the Palatine and afterwards in the more public arena of coinage and consulships, focuses on Augustus’ quest, in the absence of a son of his own, for an heir for these greedily hoarded powers. In itself it indicates the success of the princeps’ process of encroachment and monopoly. It was a search which would consume significant energies on Augustus’ part. His eventual choice of successor shaped the course of the principate as surely as any of his actions.

  In 44 BC, Gaius Octavianus, a sickly and catarrhal young man of equestrian stock, described by Suetonius as well endowed with birthmarks but inclining to shortness and even limping on occasion, recognized a challenge: ‘he considered nothing more incumbent on him than to avenge his uncle’s death.’ The uncle in question was a great-uncle, the brother of his maternal grandfather’s wife Julia. Julius Caesar’s death on the Ides of March elevated him to the position of most famous man in the Roman world. He would afterwards become a god; in the meantime he was the first of many casualties of the death-throes of the Roman Republic. Without a son of his own, he had divided his immense fortune between the people of Rome, bequeathing to every man 300 sesterces and gardens beyond the Tiber, and the studious youth in whom we assume he glimpsed something of himself. He also offered to Gaius Octavianus that lustrous name whose incalculable value his fellow consul Mark Antony correctly estimated, and the combined loyalty of troops and clients across the Roman world. Under the Republic, no man could leave more. The unprecedented position occupied by Caesar was his by gift of the senate and the people of Rome, an amalgam of constitutional empowerments invested in him personally, not his to bestow. For a puny stripling studying rhetoric in Illyricum, its august resonance represented nevertheless a sonorous wake-up call.

  To the friends who greeted Octavian on his return to Rome in early May 44 BC, the exact nature of his inheritance from Caesar was clear: ‘at the moment of his entering the city, men saw above his head the orb of the sun with a circle above it, coloured like a rainbow, seeming thereby to place a crown upon the head of one destined soon to greatness.’3 This useful fiction reassured those of Caesar’s veterans who had pledged their loyalty to their lost leader’s heir, endowing the young man who arrived in Rome not only with meteorological endorsements but effectively a private army. In that springtime confusion, as Roman politicians struggled in pursuit of elusive consensus, dissent was powerful and far-reaching. Chief among the ranks of the unbelievers was Mark Antony himself, Caesar’s Master of the Horse (his second-in-command), extravagant, genial, feckless and sensuous, a patrician rapscallion. Antony regarded himself as Caesar’s true heir. Unwilling to humour a young man whose equestrian origins and rumoured effeminacy he dismissed with determined contempt, he made clear to Octavian his plan of withholding from him for as long as possible payment of Caesar’s will. He also asserted his intention of maintaining that mastery of Rome which he had won in the disarray consequent on the tyrannicides’ failure to decide on any plan of action bar Caesar’s murder. Octavian adopted the line that intermittently would characterize his political behaviour for the next half-century. Borrowing enormous sums of money, he himself paid Caesar’s bequest to the people of Rome. He took pains that the nature of his action was widely disseminated and understood. He also staged lavish games in Caesar’s honour. In private he discussed with Cicero the restoration of the Republic. Perhaps no one but Octavian apprehended the full irreconcilability of these impulses. His career as juggler began early.

  In allying himself with Crassus and Pompey, Caesar had enlisted money (Crassus) and military support (Pompey) to promote his political aspirations. Thanks to Caesar, Octavian possessed both already. It was not enough to invest his cause with either legality or legitimacy. This man too young for senatorial office required both. They came in 43, when the senate awarded him the rank of propraetor with imperium and dispatched him to Gaul. He accompanied the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, their joint purpose to oppose Mark Antony in his attempt to seize control of the province for himself. At the battle of Mutina, Caesarean forces defeated Antony, who fled. Hirtius and Pansa both died. Only Octavian could return to Rome. But in Rome the senate was laggardly in rewarding his victory. It denied him one of the consulships made vacant by Hirtius and Pansa’s deaths. Incensed, Octavian marched on the city at the head of eight legions of cavalry and auxiliaries. It was force majeure, but consulship was the prize. As in his ‘father’s’ career, military menace had won those concessions dialogue denied. It was to become a feature of the principate that Augustus bequeathed to his heirs – the iron fist within the velvet glove, the omnipresence of militarism in a regime ostensibly based on charisma and civic-mindedness.

  They chose an island to meet on, the consul Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus. It was November 43 and the three men – Caesar’s heir, his former second-in-command, and the pontifex maximus who the previous year had become Mark Antony’s Master of the Horse – had decided on an alliance. Like a previous triumvirate, collaboration masked deep fissures: mutual mistrust, personal enmities. In this case its duration spanned a decade. Opposed to the gathering strength of the tyrannicides, these second triumvirs united in the name of Caesar. It was a contentious legacy, which provided nevertheless the ideological basis for their overthrow of constitutional government in Rome. Their intention was mastery of the Roman world, an unwieldy aim which demanded defeat of the armies of the East, rallied now under Brutus and Cassius, and the removal of Pompey’s son Sextus Pompey, currently encamped on Sicily in charge of the Roman navy. Dominance could be achieved by the sole means of war.

  Death and suffering are not the only costs of war: there is a fiscal price too. Although the trio awarded themselves consular power for five years each, their overwhelming need was money. Velleius Paterculus attributes their solution to Antony and Lepidus: Octavian ‘protested, but without avail, being but one against two’.4 For a second time, a triumvirate of self-seeking opportunists imposed proscriptions on Rome. First reservations banished, Octavian responded with ruthlessness. In Suetonius’ account, there is nothing half-hearted in his dedication to this policy of killing and plunder, in which up to 300 senators and 2,000 equestrians lost their lives; without compunction he added to the list his own guardian, Gaius Torianus, a former colleague of his father. Octavian paid in the blackening of his reputation – among other claims, he was accused of covetousness in the matter of Corinthian bronzes belonging to those proscribed; perhaps his later wariness of luxurious decoration can be traced to this early poor judgement. His reputation also suffered at the battle of Philippi, at which, fighting alongside Mark Antony, he helped inflict decisive defeat on the forces of Brutus and Cassius. The lion’s share of victory belonging to Antony on that occasion, it was Octavian who behaved with greatest brutality. His behaviour contrasted with Caesar’s much-vaunted clemency towards the vanquished. Under such circumstances, Octavian’s boast, valid from 1 January 42, to be the son of a god, following divine honours voted to Caesar by both senate and triumvirate, surely rang hollow.

  The division of spoils following Philippi that October was concerned with nothing less than the entirety of the Roman world. The bulk fell
to Octavian (the west of the empire including Italy) and Mark Antony (the east of the empire and that area of Gaul to the north of the Alps). Suspected of disloyalty with Sextus Pompey, Lepidus received shorter shrift: the province of Africa, a clear demotion. At Philippi had died an idea of Rome’s Republic as hitherto understood; with it fell many of its leading families. The way lay clear for innovation in Rome. The ultimate victor was that man who, dedicated to personal ambition with bloody single-mindedness, disguised self-fulfilment as the restoration of age-old ideals of mutuality and power-sharing. Little wonder they called him Augustus. His ‘increase’ consisted of those powers which, destroyed on the battlefields of Philippi, he appropriated from the wreckage in the service of his own ends. It was a splendid hypocrisy, which nevertheless imposed on Rome stable government and consistency of policy-making. To obtain power, Octavian needed to defeat the Republic; to sustain his power, he feigned its resuscitation.

  His inheritance lacked ballast. Caesar gave Octavian his reputation; its ideological foundations were flimsy. It was a cult of personality, as Augustus’ rule would be. By exploiting personality, Octavian in time defeated Mark Antony. His target, when after almost a decade of more or less inimical jockeying for position, open hostility was at last acknowledged between Octavian and Antony, was not his fellow triumvir. He chose instead a woman, Cleopatra VII, last queen of Egypt.

  Following a long and highly public affair, Cleopatra had replaced Octavian’s sister Octavia as Antony’s wife. That in itself was offence enough, since Octavian had bestowed on Octavia a grant of sacrosanctity which meant that any slight against his sister challenged Rome itself: at a stroke Antony’s infidelity became essentially treasonable. It was just the beginning. Octavian reimagined their contest as a battle between East and West. He enlisted in support of this specious ideological debate the fixed xenophobia of the Republican mindset, alongside that mistrust of luxury which traditionally had formed a feature of Rome’s lexicon at moments of national unease. Octavian’s Cleopatra is a quintessence of otherness, an amalgam of those characteristics Rome regarded as backslidings: extravagant, indolent, sexually predatory, politically tyrannous. Her female failings, it was asserted, had corrupted Antony’s martial vigour. Octavian demonized Cleopatra and invested his own cause – the only purpose of which was to strip Antony of power – with the nimbus of a moral crusade. As the triumvirate drew to its close late in 33, he pitted the old-fashioned virtues of his own wife Livia against the painted harlotry of his enemy’s squeeze, and then, ‘when Caesar had made sufficient preparations, a vote was passed to wage war against Cleopatra, and to take away from Antony the authority which he had surrendered to a woman’.5 For good measure beforehand, Octavian insisted on an oath of allegiance from all those in the western empire: ‘all Italy swore my name of its own free will and chose me as leader in the war in which I conquered at Actium.’6

  We know the outcome. Defeat at Actium. The siege of Alexandria. Antony’s suicide in age-old fashion falling on his sword. Cleopatra’s eroticized demise thanks to a serpent clasped to her breast, symbolically a victory for maleness (Octavian and Rome, represented by the snake) over the weaker flesh of female Egypt. An outpouring of Augustan poetry, in which the victory of Octavian’s commander Marcus Agrippa appears inevitable, preordained. Octavian a sole survivor, Egypt annexed as a province administered not in the name of Rome but in that of Octavian. All the riches of the East available to the victor: the windfall which funded Octavian’s settlement of army veterans threatening mutiny. A telling detail recorded by Suetonius: ‘He greatly desired to save Cleopatra alive for his triumph, and even had Psylli brought to her, to suck the poison from her wound, since it was thought that she died from the bite of an asp.’ This looks like gloating, vindictiveness – in love and war the victor’s part. ‘I spared all citizens who sued for pardon,’ Octavian recorded. Cleopatra had not implored his forgiveness and chose to remain unto death mistress of her own destiny. The short-term outcome for Octavian was that, in the triumph of Actium, celebrated in Rome in the late summer of 29, Cleopatra appeared not in person but in effigy. She vied for the attention of the crowds with Octavian’s nephew Marcellus, the son of his sister Octavia, and his stepson Tiberius, elder son of his second wife Livia, who accompanied Octavian’s progress. Among the ‘prizes’ of victory in the East were the first stirrings of dynasticism.

  For Octavian the challenge of peace was one of clarification. Latterly his power had derived from a series of consulships held continuously since Actium. To that office he added significant military support, even after his rationalization of the army following his retirement of veterans. It was a hazardous position, this approximation to military dictatorship, too close for comfort to that once occupied by Caesar. Fifteen years after the latter’s murder, Octavian had no intention of featuring in his own Ides of March.

  His response was to do nothing while appearing to change everything. In a speech to the senate on 13 January 27, Octavian gave back those powers he had been granted for the defeat of Antony. Dio’s version of that speech combines Caesarean high-handedness and that bald swank typical of the Res gestae with a degree of humility which was the leaven of charm by which Octavian consistently achieved consensus:

  The fact that it is in my power to rule over you for life is evident to you all. Every one of the rival factions has been justly tried and extinguished... the disposition both of yourselves and of the people leaves no doubt that you wish to have me at your head. Yet for all that I shall lead you no longer, and nobody will be able to say that all the actions of my career to date have been undertaken for the sake of winning supreme power. On the contrary, I lay down my office in its entirety and return to you all authority absolutely.7

  This crafty coup de théâtre achieved the desired result. Octavian was created ‘Augustus’, his consulship (shared with Agrippa) confirmed for the year. Far from surrendering power, the new Augustus received for ten years a large overseas province, which consisted of Gaul, Spain, Syria, Egypt, Cilicia and Cyprus (and hence a significant number of Roman legions); he combined consular and proconsular powers. ‘Imperator Caesar divi filius Augustus’ chose to be addressed as princeps, a title eminent Romans had held before him: it suggested leadership without associations of monarchy. To highlight the magnitude of his achievement in Rome’s service, he closed the gates of the Temple of Janus. It was a symbolic act, which indicated peace across the Empire. For more than two centuries, since the end of the First Punic War, the gates had stood open. For those in Rome assailed by doubts, their closure represented the real justification for Augustus’ special treatment. No sleight of hand is wholly invisible, but the gift of peace after long years of war excused empty words and casuistry. In the same year, Augustus departed Rome for Spain.

  His return, after an interval of three years, was postponed by illness, a protracted interlude in which, perhaps prey to intimations of mortality, he embarked on a heavyweight autobiography extending to thirteen volumes. Back in Rome, he fell ill again. He entrusted his signet ring to Agrippa. For reasons of lessening his workload or in response to senatorial disaffection, he marked this second recovery by resigning the consulship for the first time in a decade. Since this left him no constitutional basis for power in Rome, a refinement of the settlement of 27 became necessary. To this end, Augustus received from the senate a grant of maius imperium, power superior to that held by any other magistrate or proconsul, and tribunician power. Together they invested him with supremacy at home and abroad, both within and outside Rome. These were the wide-ranging powers which would afterwards comprise Rome’s ‘throne’. Enhanced by Augustus’ personal authority and the degree of influence he exercised over the senate (an influence he had increased after revising senatorial membership in 28 BC), they granted Augustus a high degree of independence. Truthfully he could claim, ‘After this I excelled all in authority’:8 now the claim was safe. Only the most beady-eyed were mindful that in exercising the powers of office without hold
ing those offices or even standing for election, Augustus’ claim of a republic restored was that of a republic exposed to fundamental change.

  In 23 BC the elegist Propertius was in commemorative mode. ‘What profit did he get from birth, courage or the best of mothers, from being embraced at Caesar’s hearth?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘He is dead, and his twentieth year left ruined: so bright a day confined in so small a circle.’9 The poet’s subject was Augustus’ nephew Marcellus, one of those two youths who had accompanied the princeps in his triumph of Actium. His death was more than a cause of sadness for Augustus. Seneca claimed that Marcellus had possessed ‘the certain hope of becoming emperor’:10 he was the first of a number of choices Augustus would make in his efforts to perpetuate beyond his own lifetime the settlement of 23. In time those efforts inflicted unhappiness on both Augustus and his large extended family; they established a leitmotiv of this history of the twelve Caesars. Only Claudius, Vitellius and Vespasian had sons of their own: Claudius frittered away his son’s patrimony through uxoriousness, while Vitellius’ reign was too brief for inheritance. Vespasian by contrast was succeeded by not one but two adult sons. In his unique case, the possession of viable male heirs precluded that destabilization from inside and outside the emperor’s family that was brought about by speculation and place-seeking. In the case of the emperor Galba, as we will see, the choice of the ‘wrong’ heir became a major contributory factor in the regime’s collapse.