Augustus

by Anthony Everitt

  The Senate was not quite the body it had been. New men from the Italian countryside had filled the many gaps left by the old governing families that had been weakened in the civil wars or had lost their money and estates. Many came from regions that had received citizenship as little as fifty years before. Theirs was an Italian rather than a Roman identity. Even more controversially, leading men from southern Gaul and Spain, provinces that had long since adopted the Roman language and culture, were recruited as senators. All these arrivistes saw their fate as inextricably linked to the new regime. So did a good number of impoverished aristocrats, for the astute Augustus took good care to fund them generously and thereby constrain their freedom to oppose him. He bound other noble clans to him by arranging marriages with his relatives.

  Nevertheless, members of the Senate still held a residual, deeply felt belief in Rome’s constitution. They would not accept one-man rule; and they expected the state to remain a collective enterprise even if led by one man.

  The presentation on January 13 of 27 B.C. was a piece of theater, of course. The Senate and the people remained, as they always had been, the sole sources of legal authority, but Augustus did not hand back any real power. In the last analysis he owed his dominant position to the army (and to a lesser extent to the people, who could be relied on to reelect him as consul for as many terms as he liked). It was no accident that his governorship of Spain, Gaul, and Syria gave him the command of twenty legions. The legions had legitimate reason to be there: the northern of the two Spanish provinces was still not entirely subdued; Gaul remained unruly; and Syria abutted the untrustworthy Parthians. But, by comparison, the “senatorial” provinces, to be governed by proconsuls in the ordinary way, were calm; only three of them required armies, and in total, they commanded five or six legions. Thus, most of Rome’s armies were under the command of the princeps; as long as they and their commanders stayed loyal, he was safe.

  Another important source of Augustus’ power was patronage. He had inherited Julius Caesar’s empire-wide clientela, and no doubt he had greatly expanded it even before Actium won him Antony’s clientela too. His authority across the empire was expressed through a web of personal connections and loyalties, to which no other Roman could remotely aspire. In every community large or small, leading men were under an obligation to him, and were usually rewarded with the gift of Roman citizenship.

  Augustus was pleased to boast: “When I had put an end to the civil wars, having acquired supreme power over the empire with universal consent, I transferred the Republic from my control into that of the Senate and People of Rome.” That was literally correct—the machinery of constitutional government came creakily back into operation—but for anyone with eyes to see, the truth of the matter was obvious. The princeps admitted it himself, stating baldly: “After this time, I exceeded everybody in authority.”

  This was acceptable because Augustus held no unconstitutional or novel office. Broadly speaking, he was acting within precedent. Also, he gave back to the political class its glittering prizes. Once more it became worthwhile to compete for political office (even though the princeps tended to select the candidates). The ambitious and the able could win glory on the floor of the Senate or in the outposts of empire.

  It would be wrong to suppose that Romans failed to understand what was going on. They were not deceived. They could see that Augustus’ power ultimately rested on force. However, his constitutional settlement gave him legitimacy and signaled a return to the rule of law. For this, most people were sincerely grateful.

  Augustus’ “restored Republic” was a towering achievement, for it transformed a bankrupt and incompetent polity into a system of government that delivered the rule of law, wide participation by the ruling class, and, at the same time, strong central control. It installed an autocracy with the consent of Rome’s—and indeed of Italy’s—independent-minded elites. Some Roman historians, among them Tacitus a century or so later, mourned the death of liberty, but at the time politicians, citizens, and subjects of the empire recognized that the new constitutional arrangements would bring stability and the promise of fair and effective public administration.

  If Julius Caesar had lived he would probably have devised a far more radical scheme, imposing a brutally abrupt transition from a republican past to an imperial future. Augustus may have been less brilliant than his adoptive father, but he was wiser. He understood that if his new system was to last, it should be seen to grow out of what came before. Rather than insist on a chasm, he built a bridge.

  XVII

  WHOM THE GODS LOVE

  27–23 B.C.

  * * *

  In the meantime, the huge provincia called for his attention. Augustus’ first stop was Gaul, where rumor had it that he intended to complete the task Julius Caesar had left unfinished in 54 B.C.—an invasion of the remote island of Britannia, perched on the edge of the known world. But Augustus was too busy to waste his time on such a diversion.

  During the civil wars, Gaul had fallen into turmoil; Augustus’ presence reasserted Roman authority. After establishing order and conducting a census, he moved on to Spain, where a thornier problem awaited. The native tribes in the northern of the two Spanish provinces, especially the Astures (whence the modern Asturias) and the Cantabri (in the area of today’s Santander and Bilbao), had never been fully subdued. Augustus led a campaign against them, but this time he was without Agrippa to help him. The tribes used guerrilla tactics, hiding in their mountain fastnesses and cleverly avoiding the full-scale battle for which the legion was designed and for which they themselves were poorly adapted. Whenever the Romans marched in a given direction, they found themselves facing enemy fighters on high ground in front of them. In valleys and woods they stumbled into ambushes.

  The princeps was superstitious, and devoutly believed in premonitory signs. He always carried a piece of sealskin as an amulet against thunder and lightning, which he feared. During the Spanish campaign, the amulet worked its magic for him. On a night march during a thunderstorm, a flash of lightning scorched his litter and killed a slave who was walking ahead with a torch. In thanks for this narrow escape, he built the Temple of Jupiter Tonans (the Thunderer) on the edge of the Capitol overlooking the Forum. It was known for its magnificence and contained famous works of art. Augustus often visited it.

  As so often when he faced a crisis (particularly a military one), Augustus fell ill—according to Dio, “from the fatigue and anxiety caused by these conditions.” He took the waters in the Pyrenees and convalesced in Tarraco (today’s Tarragona). His deputy swiftly brought the fighting to a successful conclusion, which was attributed (of course) to the genius of the princeps. The illness seems to have lasted at least for a year, although our sources tell us nothing of its nature. To pass the time Augustus wrote an autobiography, which he dedicated to Agrippa and Maecenas. Sadly, the book has not survived.

  During the late Republic, the wives of senior Roman officials did not often travel abroad with their husbands. Augustus himself ruled that the legates he appointed to the provinces at his disposal should not spend time with their wives or, if they insisted on doing so, then only outside the campaigning season (generally March to October).

  However, we have it on good authority that Livia accompanied her husband on his travels to west and east. She was probably with him in Gaul and Spain, although she will have stayed safely in the rear when Augustus was with the army, and tended him when he was ill.

  Livia was an able businesswoman and over the years accumulated numerous properties and estates across the empire. Her tours around the Mediterranean as Rome’s first lady allowed her to inspect her acquisitions and check that they were being well managed. In Gaul she owned land with a copper mine. Her property portfolio also included palm groves in Judea and estates in Egypt, including papyrus marshes, arable farms, vineyards, commercial vegetable gardens, granaries, and olive and wine presses.

  It may have been Augustus’ poor health that prom
pted him in 25 B.C. to take the first concrete step to arranging a dynastic succession: he married off his daughter and only child, Julia (by his second wife, Scribonia), who was now fourteen, to his nephew, the twenty-year-old Marcellus. Augustus being absent in Spain, Agrippa presided over the wedding; what he thought of the young man’s promotion is unknown, for he kept his own counsel.

  The Senate voted Marcellus special honors; he was given the senior ranking of a praetor for official occasions. So far as the honors race was concerned, he received permission to stand for the consulship ten years before the legal minimum age of thirty-seven, and was counted as a former quaestor, the most junior elective post. This meant that he would be able to serve as an aedile in 23 B.C. The post would give him a chance to make his mark with the average citizen in Rome, for he would be in charge of the city’s public entertainments for the year. Spectacle at its most extravagant was what the public demanded, and they would show their appreciation at the ballot box. His uncle made sure that Marcellus had an unprecedented budget.

  Rome had not seen its princeps for three years. At last, in the middle of 24 B.C., he struggled home, still weak and uncertain of his survival. If he hoped that his political settlement had been fully accepted and was working smoothly, he was to be disabused. In late 24 or early 23 B.C., Marcus Primus, the governor of Macedonia, one of the Senate’s provinces, was taken to court for having gone to war without permission with a friendly Thracian tribe. It was a serious offense for a proconsul to take an army outside his province.

  Among Primus’ defenders was one of the consuls for 23 B.C., Aulus Terentius Varro Murena, a trusted and senior follower of the princeps. He was Maecenas’ brother-in-law, and the poets Virgil and Horace were his friends (he had lent the party of poets his house at the resort of Formiae on their journey from Rome to Brundisium in 39 B.C.). He seems to have been a dashing, impatient sort of fellow, and Horace took it upon himself to offer an ode of advice.

  The loftiest pines, when the wind blows,

  Are shaken hardest; tall towers drop

  With the worst crash….

  Primus’ defense was that he had been ordered to launch a campaign by both the princeps and Marcellus. This was most embarrassing, for in theory Augustus only held authority in his own provincia. Of his own accord he attended the court where the trial was being held. The praetor, or presiding judge, asked him if he had given the man orders to make war and he replied that he had not.

  Murena made some disrespectful remarks about the princeps, and asked him to his face: “What are you doing here, and who asked you to come?”

  “The public interest,” Augustus drily replied.

  It is no surprise that Primus was found guilty; he was very probably sent into exile. However, many observers at the time must have thought it unlikely that Primus would have claimed to have acted under orders unless he had actually done so. The affair revealed the res publica restituta, the “restored Republic,” as something of a sham.

  The Primus affair led to the formation of a little-understood conspiracy against Augustus. The leader was a young republican called Fannius Caepio. Apparently, the consul Murena was implicated, although Dio thought the charge might be false, “since he was notoriously rough-tongued and headstrong in his manner of address towards all alike.” The plot was uncovered and the accused men condemned to death in absentia. In constitutional theory, the execution of a serving consul was a contradiction in terms, for the Republic’s chief executive had supreme authority; if he broke the law, charges could only be brought against him after his term of office had expired. Once again, the libertarian pretensions of the regime were exposed.

  What the aims of the plotters were and how they were revealed cannot now be recovered. Perhaps there was no conspiracy at all—or, rather, the princeps organized a setup. But why? We cannot tell. If it was a serious attempt to overthrow the new order, it was evidence the settlement of 27 B.C. was not working.

  The story has a sad footnote. Maecenas confided the discovery of the Caepio conspiracy, a state secret, to his wife, Terentia. Murena was her brother, and she seems to have warned him that he was in trouble. Augustus found out what had happened, and from that moment his friendship with Maecenas cooled. They remained on reasonably good terms, but the Etruscan aesthete was no longer a full member of the inner circle.

  The year 23 B.C. had not gotten off to a good start, but Marcellus in his role as aedile made a brilliant success of the games. Throughout the summer, a canopy sheltered the Forum, where a temporary wooden arena was erected for the gladiatorial displays. Novel, slightly scandalous acts included a woman of noble birth taking part in a stage performance and an eques dancing in a ballet.

  However, the mood in Rome was darkened by the onset of a plague. Epidemics were terrifying and not infrequent occurrences in a large crowded city such as Rome. What disease struck on this occasion is unknown; it may have been smallpox, bubonic plague, or typhoid fever. Scarlet fever and influenza have also been recorded by Greek and Roman medical writers.

  Augustus fell ill again. Suetonius has it that he was suffering abscesses on the liver. According to Celsus, whose On Medicine was published in the first century A.D., the symptoms of liver disease were

  severe pain in the right part under the praecordia [the region of the body about the heart], which spreads to the right side, to the clavicle and arm of that side; at times there is also pain in the right hand, there is hot shivering…[in bad cases] after a meal there is greater difficulty in breathing; then supervenes a sort of paralysis of the lower jaws.

  Recommended treatment included the application of hot water in winter and tepid water in the summer, but “all cold things must be especially avoided, for nothing is more harmful to the liver.”

  Augustus was in despair, for there seemed to be no hope of recovery; it appeared that the new regime was about to end. This would be a tragedy not just for him but for many others in public life. He had to take what steps he could to ensure a permanent legacy.

  He gathered around his bedside the officers of state and leading senators and equites. He spoke to them on matters of public policy and handed his fellow consul, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, the breviarium imperii, a book that recorded the empire’s financial and military resources.

  Many were expecting the princeps to bequeath his authority to Marcellus, whom he had only too evidently been grooming. But this had been a long-term plan, and the boy was too young and inexperienced to hold supreme power now. Agrippa would have had little trouble deposing him once Augustus was dead. Bowing to this reality, the dying man handed Agrippa the symbol of his authority: his signet ring bearing the head of Alexander the Great.

  Much to everyone’s surprise, including his own, the princeps recovered. His doctor, Antonius Musa, turning medical orthodoxy on its head, decided to abandon the hot fomentations he had been using to no avail in favor of cold baths and cold potions. The shock treatment worked. (It has been suggested that Augustus was, in fact, suffering from typhoid fever, which could well have been the cause of the epidemic devastating Rome at the time; cold packs were a well-known treatment for the disease in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.)

  The convalescent princeps showed that he was aware of the general unpopularity of his dynastic plans by bringing his will to a meeting of the Senate. He intended to read it out, as proof that he had no successor in mind, but in the event, to show their confidence in him, the senators would not permit it.

  The settlement of 27 B.C. needed revision and it was time to make a fresh start. Augustus resigned as consul on July 1 and let it be known that he would no longer be a regular candidate. For him to continue holding the consulship year after year was stretching constitutional propriety very thin, for it made the post look like a permanent one, not so far from Julius Caesar’s unpopular dictatorship for life. Too, the office entailed a good deal of routine business and time-consuming ceremonial, and as long as Augustus held it he was blocking off access to one of
Rome’s two top jobs every year, so irritating political aspirants.

  But if he was to give up the consulship, the princeps would need some other source of imperium. With typical ingenuity, he came up with two devices. For some years he had been awarded tribunicia sacrosanctitas, or the immunity from physical attack given to a tribune of the people. Now he decided to assume tribunicia potestas in perpetuity: he would enjoy the power of a tribune without actually having to hold the post. That power was considerable. Tribunes attended Senate meetings and were entitled to present laws for approval by the people. They could also veto any officeholder’s decisions, including those of other tribunes.

  Augustus recognized that tribunicia potestas, together with his enormous provincia, gave him almost all the authority he needed to govern without hindrance. He dated his “reign” from when it was awarded, on July 1, 23 B.C., and added the potestas to his long list of titles. However, a couple of gaps needed to be filled. Proconsuls, or provincial governors, lost their imperium when they crossed the pomerium—the sacred boundary of Rome—and entered the city. That would mean that when he was in the city the princeps would only have the status of a private citizen. Thanks to his prestige, or auctoritas, his wishes would usually be obeyed, but on occasion there might be some awkwardness. So the Senate voted that Augustus’ proconsular imperium should not lapse when he was inside the city walls.

  The Marcus Primus affair had thrown an embarrassing light on Augustus’ relations with the governors of senatorial provinces, in whose business he had no right to meddle—in theory. To correct this problem, he was granted a general and overriding proconsular authority (imperium maius, “greater power”), the right to intervene anywhere in the empire as and when he chose. It was a right he exercised very discreetly and with the utmost caution, for by tradition a Roman governor had a free hand during his term of office.