The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  Despite the new treasury, Augustus's reign ended with low military morale, a repeated need for levies and major mutinies on the northern frontier. The basic culprit was the old man's personal drive for wars in the north from ad 5 onwards. Hard fighting here advanced Rome to the rivers Elbe and Weser; the principal remaining enemy, Maroboduus, was classed as the 'worst since Hannibal',10 but the attack on him required forced levies elsewhere, and these levies provoked revolts in the Balkans, especially in Illyricum. In the end, negotiations had to begin with Maroboduus. In ad 9 a German counter-attack caught the legions dispersed and off guard and inflicted a truly frightful disaster on their commander, Varus: the German hero was Arminius (whence 'Herman the German'). The reprisals were led by the future Emperor Tiberius, who revived outdated modes of discipline and imposed the harshest orders. They did not bode well for his years as emperor.

  To man these campaigns, soldiers had been retained for far too long, sometimes for thirty years: the practice of 'extra time' was still widespread and resented. There had also been conscription at Rome which had brought riff-raff into the front line. The affair was all a blot on Augustus' military management, which was anyway tarnished. The old-fashioned discipline of Tiberius and his contemporaries did not help morale, either, when they came out to pull things round after some very much softer commanders.

  With such specific causes, the mutinies of ad 14 were curable. Conspicuously, they did not recur, not even in the year 69 when four emperors marched against one another in succession. In 69 army pay did not even have to be increased to urge on the troops (it stayed constant until the reign of Domitian). In many provinces, meanwhile, army life settled down to peacetime routine. From military manuals and daily registers which are preserved on papyrus, we can see that it was certainly not boring." There were regular exercises and an impor­tant array of civilian duties, including road-building, quarrying, mining and bridge-building. Soldiers became involved in surrounding life, even in seeing off plagues of locusts. Their commanders, inevi­tably, were called on to arbitrate and settle disputes, and not only disputes between soldiers. So much of what we see as 'Romanization' was the work of troops on long alert (including the aqueducts built in north Africa). Legionary camps became pools of experienced archi­tects and engineers who could also advise on civilian projects. There was a huge volume of paperwork, to keep daily lists and details of pay: manuals urged that soldiers should, if possible, be literate, and army service was certainly an agent for promoting literacy.

  Commanders of legions were senators (outside Egypt) and in a province with several legions, they were men in their mid-thirties who had already been a praetor in Rome. The linchpins of support for these amateurs were the long-serving centurions who were usually as tough as nails. The experienced 'prefects of the camp' were also particularly important here. Each legion had five experienced tribunes of equestrian rank too: the sixth tribune was a young man of senatorial birth, eighteen or nineteen years old. By comparison, he was very raw, though the commanding legate might enjoy his company. It was exceptional, the historian Tacitus noted, for these favoured young men not to lounge around and waste their posting.12

  Even the ordinary men's diet was surprisingly varied, including quite a range of meat (much of it caught by hunting). The army, therefore, spread hunting ever further down the social ladder. The camps, meanwhile, manufactured the troops' armour and weapons, while their basic supplies were taken from the provincials, sometimes transported across long distances. It is not clear how often they were properly paid for. A legion has been estimated to eat '2,000 tonnes' of grain a year, while the horses of a single cavalry unit needed another '635': it would have taken a very high demand by soldiers for paid local services to compensate provincials for this burden. For soldiers, however, a particular advantage of military life over civilian life was care for the sick. Hospitals are an invention of the Roman army.

  In long intervals of peace, troops in these camps would inevitably 'soften', and here the Romans' long-running fear of 'luxury' came into play. A new commander or a visiting emperor would sometimes decide to tighten things up: in 121/2, Hadrian set about the troops in Germany. Beds were banned (Hadrian slept in camp on straw) and fancy dining rooms and colonnades were demolished. No doubt they had been the creations of soft officers: there was even a most interest­ing need to uproot their ornamental gardens. Hadrian himself under­took the hard marches, up to twenty miles in armour, which he re-imposed on the legions. His 'discipline' was remembered for cen­turies by the authors of military manuals.11 As a general practice, units were anyway moved around quite widely beyond their bases: by Hadrian's time, watchtowers had become common and outlying forts could be more than a hundred miles distant from the main camp. Military minds, meanwhile, did not forget that Hannibal's men were said to have been sapped by that winter spent among the 'luxury' of Capua, and Sulla's by the 'luxury' of Asia. So in due course, a legionary camp would be moved on and, behind it, a township would develop on its former site. Fear of luxury thus helped indirectly to urbanize Rome's subjects. The towns which grew up on former camp-sites helped to 'soften' the provincials whom the hardy soldiers had been supposed to be guarding. In Britain, towns like Gloucester and Lincoln began in this way.

  If soldiers had to be separated from towns, they also had to be kept away from wives. From Augustus until the third century legionaries were not allowed to marry. Existing marriages, even, were ended at the moment of recruitment. Of course men could not be kept away from women. Liaisons flourished (soldiers even wrote of their 'girl­friends' and 'darlings'), and brothels were also kept busy, though one army-unit on the northern coast of the Black Sea can be found to have been collecting the local tax from the prostitutes. Legionaries' offspring, however, were illegitimate. In inscriptions, we find 'sons of Spurius' (soldier-bastards) and in the papyri of Roman Egypt, a conspicuous class of 'the fatherless' appear.14 They are not orphans: they are children of legally prohibited unions, whether between Romans and Egyptians, or Roman legionaries and locals. Long before the celibate prize-fighters of the Christian monasteries, the military minds of Rome were already opposed to marriage. One advantage was that, in the case of a military disaster, nothing would need to be paid to dead soldiers' wives or families.

  44

  The New Age

  This is the oath taken by the inhabitants of Paphlagonia and the Romans who do business among them. T swear by Zeus, Earth, Sun, all the gods and goddesses and Augustus himself that I will be favourably disposed to [Caesar Augustus and his children and descendants all the time of my [life] in word and deed and thought. . . Whatever I may see or hear being said or plotted or done against them, I will report it and I will be the enemy of the person who says or plots or does these things ... If I do anything contrary to this [oath] . . . I pray that there may come on me, my body and soul and life, my children and all my family and whatever is of use to us, destruc­tion, total destruction until the end of all my line and of all my descendants . . .' In these same words this oath was sworn by all the [inhabitants of the land] in the temples of Augustus throughout the local districts [of Paphlagonia] by the altars [of Augustus]. Oath sworn in Paphlagonia, 6 March 3 bc

  Augustus' first moral legislation was the prelude to his celebration of a 'new age' in Rome. An 'ancient' oracle was conveniently cited to support it and, on highly questionable grounds, it was calculated to fall due in 17 bc. For three days and nights, beginning on 31 May, animal sacrifices were offered to Greek and Roman divinities under the general direction of the traditional priesthood for this occasion. The traditional items for purification were given to the people, but it was Augustus and his heir, the obscurely born Agrippa, who now led the proceedings. The daytime rites were an innovation: the grim gods of the underworld were replaced by the goddess of childbirth, mother Earth and such gods as Apollo, Diana and Jupiter. Like so much of Augustus' professed conservatism, the apparently traditional occasion was reshaped in a new way.

  On th
e final day, a specially commissioned hymn was sung by two fine choruses, one of twenty-seven boys, one of twenty-seven girls, all of whose parents were still living. The hymn was performed twice by these trusting young patriots, once to Apollo at the recently built temple on the Palatine hill, once to Jupiter on the Capitol, the 'father' god of the Romans. The hymn was written by the poet Horace and we can see how it goes beyond the rituals which had preceded it. It prays for the success of the recent marriage legislation (the 'decrees of the fathers on the yoking of women'); it evokes Rome's Trojan past which Virgil's great Aeneid had made so famous only two years before; it praises Augustus and asks for his every prayer to be heard; he is the descendant of Venus, the one (echoing Virgil) who is 'superior to the one who wages war, gentle to the fallen enemy'.1 He rules far to the east, even being petitioned by 'proud Indians' (an Indian embassy had come to Augustus in 25 bc and agreed 'friendship' in 20).

  Horace's hymn evokes the birthrate, conquest and moral values (Honour and ancient Modesty). It refers to Augustus' legendary family, the fertility of the land and Rome's future. Such a poem was quite new for this sort of occasion. It was followed by theatrical shows, chariot racing and 'hunts' of wild animals which would delight the people for another week. Among the fun, nobody, least of all Horace, could have guessed that Augustus, 'the glorious blood of Anchises and Venus', would rule for so many more years. Horace would continue to link these themes together in his Odes, but his praises were no truer at the end of Augustus' life than at the beginning. Prominent themes of Augustus' dominance were to be foreign cam­paigns (but not always conquest), organized attention to Rome and its people (but riots and natural crises still occurred) and attempts to promote his own family and assure a successor (the one coup which repeatedly eluded him). These concerns were to be the concerns of every subsequent Roman emperor.

  Before celebrating the 'new age', Augustus had adopted his two

  the classical world

  grandsons, the children of his one daughter Julia and the loyal Agrippa. For once, he was surrounded by a cluster of family members, a sister, a wife and heirs. Importantly, the boys added the magic name of Caesar to their own. At the festival in 17 Augustus prayed for 'me, my house and household'2 and over the next fifteen years, he set about marking out his two obvious successors. At a very early age, the grandsons were given magistracies; they were designated as consul years in advance (Gaius Caesar would be only twenty-one when hold­ing this top job, usually held when about forty-two); they were tact­fully presented to the armies; they were advertised on the coinage in provincial cities. In 5 bc Gaius was made 'head of the youth', a special title which allowed him to preside over the order of Roman knights. Outside Rome, they and other family members received divine honours in provincial cities. Far inland, in western Asia, we find people in c. 3 bc swearing an oath of loyalty to Augustus, 'his children and his descendants'.'

  There was a large unanswered question here. The troops would like to have a family successor, another 'Caesar' from the line of Julius Caesar. If the heir was adopted, as in Augustus' case, adoption did not matter to them. Such, too, was the wish of the common people of Rome, who also responded to youth and beauty. They would have loved our modern magazines and pictures of princes and princesses. But in the eyes of any thoughtful senator, the Republic was not a family affair, to be passed on by inheritance. In due course, senators would prefer to be able to elect a successor from their own number.

  Between 18 and 12 bc Augustus had a junior partner whom he himself had chosen: the loyal Agrippa. It was only a sop to traditional­ist opinion that his powers were formally renewable, like Augustus' own. When Agrippa inconveniently died in 12 bc Augustus pro­nounced a funerary eulogy over him and the speech was circulated to provincial governors: no doubt they circulated it locally in transla­tions. There were two blanches to the emerging 'dynasty': Augustus' descendants through his first wife Scribonia and their daughter Julia (the Julians), and his stepsons and descendants through his able second wife Livia (the Claudians). From these two branches, the dynasty of the next eight decades is known as the Julio-Claudians (to ad 68).

  The Claudian branch began by being older and proved itself much abler. Up in the Alps, Augustus' two Claudian stepsons turned out to be far better soldiers than he could ever be. In 9 bc the younger of the two, Drusus, died; we have recently learned that his funeral was splendid and his eulogy by Augustus was circulated through the prov­inces too. Probably it was accompanied by moral 'encouragement' to the public: when Drusus' equally popular son died in October 19, the emperor's testimony to him was also circulated for the benefit of 'the youth of our children and descendants'.4 'Improvement' of the young was a part of Augustus' gratuitous programme. It impinged on the sons of senators who dressed formally and attended their fathers' meetings, or the young knights who processed on horseback. They were parts of a vision which we still recognize: set the young examples, give them public functions and try to smother independent thought.

  There was also, we realize increasingly, Augustus' second wife, the redoubtable Livia: if only we had a memoir by her (she lived right on to ad 29). Wicked gossip claimed that she poisoned rivals and procured young girls for the moral Augustus and had them smuggled secretly into the house on the Palatine. Her public image was quite different, but these rumours show that it was not the Romans' only perception of her. Back in 36 bc Livia had shared the 'sacrosanctity' of a tribune with her husband: it was a most unrepublican honour for a female, but it marked her off from Antony's Eastern women. She then received other small honours and she helped to restore temples in Rome for cults which were associated with respectable women. In 7 bc she gave her name to a splendid public Portico in Rome which in­cluded colonnades with trompe l'oeil landscape paintings and a public display of works of art (Agrippa was already said to have wanted to confiscate all private works of art and display them publicly, one reason why the Roman nobles boycotted the vulgar man's funeral). The site of Livia's Portico was significant. Previously, it had housed the enormous private mansion of the disreputable Vedius Pollio who had served Augustus in the East. He was denounced for his excessive luxury, including the bad example (men said) of throwing slaves into his pond of man-eating fish. His palace was demolished on its site and Livia publicized sober Concord (a matrimonial virtue) and a 'people's walk' where looted Greek statues were displayed. How differently she was presenting herself from the bad women of Cicero's rhetoric, from people like Antony's Fulvia whose personal greed and cruelty had been alleged so as to emphasize her husband's 'tyrannical' character.

  Rhetoric then outran the restraint and consideration which these actions projected. After the death of Livia's son Drusus in 9 bc, a Roman knight even wrote a poem to console her, obsequiously, as 'the First Lady'. A spectacular recent find of inscriptions in Spain has shown us how the Senate dwelt on her virtues in an effusive response to an imperial family crisis. In ad 20 they publicly praised Livia not only for having given birth to the austere Emperor Tiberius but also for 'her many great favours to men of every rank; she could rightly and deservedly have supreme influence in what she asked from the Senate, though she used that influence sparingly'.5 Republican tra­ditionalists would have been horrified. Once again, this long decree was to be publicly set up for the instruction of posterity. It was to be displayed in conspicuous places in the provinces and even in the army-camps.

  The moral purpose of the new age extended to buildings too. Augus­tus' boast in Rome was that he found the city made of brick and left it marble. Certainly, the Rome of 30 bc had had none of the planned grandeur of the great cities of the Greek East. Even its civic centre was a rambling jumble, not fit to be the showpiece of the world. There was to be much Augustan work in the city centre, and in keeping with the new moral order, sculptors and architects tended to favour a restrained classicism. The tall marble columns of the public temples were more showy, favouring the Corinthian style of capital, but admir­able though the craftsmanship is, the m
ain sculpted monuments with Augustan themes have a controlled range of allusion and form which veer to ghastly good taste. Frequently, they express ideals of his own moral and family rhetoric. The 30s bc had been a great era of political publicity in buildings, coins and literature. Augustan Rome continued its use of sculpture and architecture for a message.

  As a result, the new Augustan era has one of its claims to be a 'classical' age. It is, in fact, 'classicizing', dependent on fifth- and fourth-century Greece: without it, Augustan public art would never have taken this direction. In its Roman context, this style implied dignity, authority and restraint in a way which had never been so in its original setting: 'we see in the political choice of classicism an expression of the Roman order of state.' Order, dignity and structure were also the qualities of much early Augustan literature, especially the poems of Horace and Virgil. Here, the 'new age' can claim to be 'classic', in the simple sense of first class. But its great poets, like the great oratorical prose of Cicero, had matured in the pre-Augustan age of liberty.