by Baker, Simon
Although those legions were replaced, the sums did not add up sufficiently to risk pursuing the conquest of Germany. Augustus told his successor as much. He left the emperor Tiberius a handwritten letter strongly advising him to keep Rome within the boundaries of its current frontiers: the Atlantic Ocean in the west, Egypt and North Africa in the south, the English Channel and the rivers Rhine and Danube to the north, and the border of Roman Syria with neighbouring Parthia in the east. Although Tiberius heeded his adoptive father’s words, later emperors would not. For the time being, however, Augustus ensured that along these borders his professionalized army maintained the security of the Roman empire. It was a solid platform upon which to cultivate his age of peace.
THE CULT OF PEACE
An essential part of that peace was the creation of the ideology of the emperor. The Greek-speaking eastern provinces of the empire had long been accustomed to worshipping and glorifying the personalities of their individual Roman governors; this was a cultural hangover from the relationship between eastern subjects and their Hellenistic kings. Under Augustus, those provincials continued the practice, but transferred their worship to the figure of Augustus. He was treated like a god. Temples were built to him, and prayers, festivals and sacrifices glorified the names of Augustus and his family. Now that he had successfully weathered the early opposition to his rule, he devised ways of making his glorification an empire-wide trend. It was a task he could set to with flair.
Today, Augustus’s genius for presentation would impress even a modern spin-doctor. His favourite tactic was to make skilful use of traditional Roman history. In order to advertise to citizens his successes in foreign policy, for example, Augustus rekindled an ancient custom. He was reminded that in a more ancient era the doors to the Temple of Janus were closed at times of peace, and opened only when a war was being waged. So, when Augustus went to war with Spain in 26 BC, the doors were solemnly opened. In that campaign, Augustus, like modern imperialists, was determined to set reluctant ‘friends’ straight, and when his generals had completed the job seven years later, he referred to the victory as ‘pacification’.10 At the same time the doors of the small temple in the Forum were ceremoniously closed. It was not, however, his peace with Spain, but with Parthia that was Augustus’s greatest public relations coup.
The neighbouring empire to Rome’s east had brought about one of the republic’s most ignoble and embarrassing defeats. In 55 BC an army, commanded by a leading general of the late republic, Marcus Licinius Crassus, and his son, was utterly annihilated by superior Parthian tactics in the deserts of Arabia. Symbolic of the wound gouged into the Roman empire was the loss of Crassus’s military standards. These had become a trophy, an emblem of Parthian defiance and a totemic museum piece in that empire’s capital city. In 19 BC Augustus set about remedying this. His approach, however, did not march to the loud drumbeat of war. It moved to the quieter sounds of a diplomatic agreement, backed up with the baring of military teeth and a show of Roman force. It was enough of a threat for a new treaty with Parthia to be signed and, critically, the standards to be returned.
Back in Rome, Augustus was quick to spot and exploit the potential of the event. He magically upgraded the Parthian settlement from a peace treaty into a Roman victory to rival Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. With exuberant fanfare and pageantry, the standards were brought back into Rome, a triumphal arch was dedicated and the standards themselves were laid to rest. Their location? The new Temple of Mars the Avenger. The theme of this ‘victory’ was reiterated in the famous ‘Prima Porta’ statue of Augustus. Right in the centre of the emperor’s richly decorated breastplate was chiselled the scene of a Parthian humbly handing back the standards to a Roman. Without so much as a drop of blood being shed, the Roman ‘revenge’ was exacted.
Old Roman history put to modern political spin was also the theme of much of Augustus’s great marble building programme. In the Rome of the late republic, marble had been used sparingly and only by the very rich in the building of monuments. It was expensive because it had to be transported all the way from Greece. Under Augustus, however, a rich and far cheaper supply had been found and quarried at Carrara, in modern-day Tuscany. For this reason above all, Augustus was able to boast that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.11 He would oversee Rome’s extraordinary transformation from the dirty, chaotic rabbit warrens of the late republic into a capital city worthy of a Mediterranean-wide empire. The Altar of Peace, the Pantheon, the city’s first stone amphitheatre, and a new Temple to Apollo were just some of the fruits of his building programme. It was, however, the new Forum of Augustus that was perhaps his greatest achievement. In it, the same genius for rhetorical effect can be detected.
Two long porticoes, housing a reverent parade of historical statues, flanked either side of the Forum. On one side were the statues of Romulus, the first kings of Rome, and a series of grand Romans of the republic. On the opposite side were the marble images of Augustus’s ancestors – and a formidable, blue-blooded line-up they made too. Beginning with Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, it continued with his descendants, the kings of the city of Alba Longa, which Aeneas’s son Iulus had founded, then on to his descendants, the family of the Julii, and right down to Julius Caesar, Augustus’s adoptive father. No chance was missed to exploit his divine ancestry too. At one end of the parallel porticoes stood the great Temple of Mars the Avenger. As Aeneas was said to be the son of the goddess Venus, this deity took pride of place both inside the temple and also in its pediment. Within she stood alongside Julius Caesar and Mars; outside she was next to Romulus. Crucially, however, the Forum’s rich, sophisticated panorama of Roman history encircled one figure. Right in the middle of it, almost certainly, stood a statue of Augustus himself.
One clear political statement rang out. Augustus was the pinnacle, the summation of Roman history; he was the favoured one of the gods; he was the guardian of ancient Roman values, and the embodiment of those values in the future. The new Forum of Augustus was thus the forerunner of more recent monuments of imperialism. For example, the Victorians erected monuments that reflected the belief that their own age was the peak of civilization, and in the 1920s and 1930s, when Mussolini was seeking to assemble his new Italian empire, he too took inspiration from Augustus’s building programme.
The life of the city that flowed around this sophisticated and elegant space served only to underline Augustus’s carefully crafted script. Everywhere a Roman walked as he went about his civic administrative duties in the Forum he would see images, names and incarnations of Augustus and his glorious ancestry. The Temple of Mars also had a specific state function. Augustus suggested that whenever the Senate met to decide on declarations of war and peace, they should do so in the appropriate surroundings of that temple. Although the meetings were ostensibly collegiate affairs, the senators would not be allowed to forget one simple thing: this was Augustus’s temple, and the glory of the wars declared and the peaces agreed in it was Augustus’s too. His name was emblazoned across the front above the columns and even the building’s incarnation was rooted in his early career. The first citizen had piously vowed to build this religious precinct, so he claimed, after the battle of Philippi in 42 BC, the event that concluded the son’s war of revenge against the assassins of his father, Julius Caesar.12 From the seed of this vow had grown an oak tree of political ideology. Yes, it evoked the traditional past, the ancient virtues of the Roman republic. But it also glorified Rome’s kings, a dutiful line of succession that wove together centuries of history and reached its highest point with Augustus.
Augustus’s manipulation of history was perhaps matched only by his self-proclaimed restoration of Roman religion. His adoptive father Julius Caesar had reformed the Roman calendar in the last decades of the republic because it had grown completely out of step with the seasonal year. He corrected it by putting in place a calendar based on the solar year. It’s almost exactly the same as the one we use to
day. Now Caesar’s adopted son turned his attention to revitalizing the annual list of Roman religious festivals and events. Old rituals from the republic’s early history were dusted down, celebrated in the city and injected with new life. Into this resuscitation of a comforting past, however, Augustus had once again stealthily inserted himself and his family. In among the ancient festivals were less ‘antique’ moments for Roman citizens to commemorate. Augustus’s ‘restoration’ of the republic in 27 BC, for example, made an appearance. His first closing of the doors of the Temple of Janus was there too. Also deemed worthy of celebration were, of course, the first citizen’s birthday and the significant propitious days in the lives of his family. The final touch was the renaming of the month formerly known as Sextilis: now it became August. Furtively, the new age was being mapped on to the old.
Time too became a victim of Augustus’s stealth offensive. The defining symbol of this assault was not the Roman calendar but Augustus’s Horologium. This massive sundial was erected in the Campus Martius to the north of the city around 10 BC. Its marker still stands today in the Piazza Montecitorio in front of the modern Italian parliament building, but in the age of Augustus and the emperors who succeeded him it provided Roman citizens with the centrepiece of a magnificent astronomical display. A bronze line scored into the stone-paved ground marked the meridian where the sundial’s marker fell at noon, and the lines pointing out from the centre were gradated with cross-lines indicating how the shadow of the sun lengthened and shortened throughout the year. The sun that rose in the empire’s east and set in its west thus told the time in that empire’s capital city.
Augustus, however, made this very much his sundial. The marker was a red granite obelisk brought from the province that was most gloriously associated with him. Egypt was famed for its wealth and was now the bread basket of the Roman empire. It was the jewel in the empire’s crown, and the man who had first set it there was Augustus. But that connection was not his only fingerprint on the astronomical display. Augustus’s birthday fell on the same date as the autumnal equinox (23 September), and on that day the shadow was said to fall in line with Augustus’s Altar of Peace near by – another cornerstone in the ideology of the emperor. It was as if Augustus not only controlled time, but also the very movement of planets and heavenly bodies.
The height of Augustus’s association with the gods and the heavens was his Games of the Ages in 17 BC. Their impact followed hot on the heels of earlier measures undertaken by him to establish his piety towards the gods and the work of healing the Roman state. In the minds of many the civil war was thought to have taken place because Romans had neglected the gods. At its conclusion, therefore, Augustus, reconnected the state with divine favour by restoring the city’s temples and shrines. At the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol Hill he went one better. In the inner chamber he deposited ‘sixteen thousand pounds of gold, as well as pearls and precious stones to the value of fifty million sesterces’.13 The year before the Games of the Ages, Augustus’s medicine for the state took the form not of gifts to the gods, but of law reform.
INVENTING TRADITION
In 18 BC Augustus passed a series of moral and social legislation that was both harsh and conservative. This focused on putting into law penalties and incentives to promote marriage, childbirth, sexual fidelity and moral improvement in young men. The new public laws on adultery, previously a private matter, were the most notorious. A criminal court was established to deal with sexual offences, and in certain circumstances punishment could be as severe as loss of property and exile. Women rather than men were the worst off under the law. While it was still permitted for men to have adulterous sex so long as it was with a slave or a citizen with a bad reputation, such as a prostitute, respectable citizen women could not have sex with anyone outside marriage. The law even sanctioned the right of a father to kill his daughter and her lover if they were caught in his house having non-marital sex, and also empowered a husband to kill his wife’s lover if that man was a known philanderer. If the law was the bitter medicine to enforce social cohesion, the year 17 BC laced it with sugar.
The Games of the Ages picked up on the theme of traditional Roman values such as chastity and piety. But once again tradition was a useful political instrument. The games supposedly harked back seven centuries to the very earliest history of Rome, and were said to be held every 110 years. It was not possible, therefore, for anyone to see them twice in their lifetime. For once, the billing for a show that no one had ever seen before and would never see again was, quite literally, true.14 As a result of the festival’s cyclical nature, its celebration promised an emotional moment of time travel back to the past. Crucially, however, when citizens witnessed the games in 17 BC there was no one alive who could say they were really authentic. The palette of Augustus was antique, but the paints which he was able to use were all new, bold and bright.
In the three days of sacrifices, gone were the offerings to the gods of the underworld that had been the focus in previous Games of the Ages. New gods were now in fashion. The goddess Diana (associated with fertility and childbirth), and Mother Earth (vegetation, regrowth and bountiful produce), as well the gods of Apollo (associated with peace and art) and Jupiter (Rome’s patron god) all took centre stage. The star performer, however, was not a priest or purely religious figure as a Roman might have expected. It was the head of the Roman state himself.
On the first night Augustus sacrificed nine sheep and nine goats to the Fates. It was an atmospheric, holy and magical affair. He recited a long prayer that these goddesses might bestow their favour on the power and majesty of the Roman people, on their future good health and prosperity, on the increase of the empire and, last but not least, on himself and the house of his family. The next night saw an even more spectacular ceremony. The first citizen sacrificed a pregnant sow to Mother Earth. It was as though he was searing into the hearts and minds of the massed Roman witnesses a highly charged moment of legend. This moment was imbued with the distant past, but it was a moment from which would spring the new age of the Caesars. The creation of an orderly, cohesive society of new moral Romans did, however, come apart at the seams.
One might imagine that some among the plebs, adjusting to peace and stability, were persuaded by the festival’s emotional power. So too perhaps were Augustus’s favoured senators and knights, those loyal to the new regime. The association with Rome’s past made their position in the administration seem more rooted than perhaps it actually was. As with any ‘back to basics’ political campaign, though, the very people expected to endorse it were the ones who flouted it. Most of the survivors from the old Roman aristocracy hated it. The last decades of the republic, that time of extraordinary licence and luxury, were a recent memory. The life of the witty, erudite poet Ovid is a revealing foil to that of Augustus. Ovid was a rich man of equestrian rank from Italy. For someone of his standing and intelligence, a glittering career in Augustus’s inner circle beckoned. He opted instead for a very un-Augustan life, one dedicated to sex, fun and art. In due course, Ovid became a celebrity, Rome’s foremost poet. One poem, however, proved his undoing. In it he advised young people on how to find a partner – at the theatre and at the games, for example. He even disclosed his tips on picking up respectable women. The poem, called The Art of Love, flew in the face of Augustus’s moral programme, provoking the emperor to take severe action. In AD 8 Ovid was banished to a miserable backwater of the empire, the frontier post of Tomis (now Constanta) on the Black Sea. But the poet was not the only notorious person to fall foul of Augustus’s stern laws.
In 2 BC, the same year that Ovid’s The Art of Love was perhaps published, scandal surrounding Augustus’s daughter Julia could no longer be suppressed. The rumours had long built up and now the dam burst. Julia had sold her body for money, went the riveting chatter; she had had sex on the very public spot in the Forum from which her father had proposed his ‘moral’ legislation; and one of her many lovers from the glamorous, fast set o
f the aristocracy was none other than the son of Augustus’s old enemy, Mark Antony. The stories may have been no more than rumours seeded in a daughter’s rebellion against a father who had long used her as a political pawn. Nonetheless, they put Augustus in a deeply embarrassing situation. They threatened to undo all his hard work. Cracks were appearing in his pious imperial edifice.
The reaction of the first citizen was merciless. He went to the Senate, denounced his own daughter, damned her memory by having all sculptures of her destroyed, then sent her into exile on Pandeteria, an island off the western coast of Italy near Campania. Although she was granted permission to move to a nicer part of Italy, she spent the rest of her life in exile. Eventually, her income withheld, she died of malnutrition. For committing exactly the same kinds of ‘crime’, Julia’s daughter was also permanently banished in AD 8. Augustus’s unsentimental show of consistency between his ‘children’ in the Roman state and his own biological children was perhaps just another performance – one designed to put his family above suspicion. This is suggested by another rumour that was doing the rounds: Augustus, the newly entitled ‘Father of the Fatherland’, was said to have been regularly provided with young girls and respectable married women for his pleasure. He would strip them naked and ‘inspect them as if they were the wares of Torianus the slave dealer.’ And the supplier of these goods? His own wife, Livia Drusilla. The stories remained, however, just gossip. The public show of rectitude had to go on.
By the time Augustus died in AD 14 his sleight of hand was completed. The Roman people and the Roman Senate had witnessed the discreet replacement of the republic with a new system of rule by one man. At every step they were persuaded, mesmerized and, if necessary, bullied into accepting that a reassuring, comforting continuity between the two eras existed. Whatever Augustus’s intention may have been, be it the sinister deception of a tyrant or a genuine attempt by a statesman to return the state to a traditionally styled constitutional government, depends on one’s point of view. It was probably a bit of both. What is certain is that there was no grand master plan. In establishing the new regime Augustus improvised as he went along albeit with inventiveness, genius and cold, sometimes cruel calculation. If some in the political élite were violently dragged into the new age kicking and screaming, the Roman people knew full well who looked after their interests most powerfully. When, in 19 BC, Rome was hit first by a plague and then a grain shortage, it was not only the people who took to the streets begging the saviour Augustus to come to their aid and sort out the crisis; so too did the Senate, and even those in the political élite who hated Augustus. He had, quite simply, made himself indispensable.
