Augustus

by Anthony Everitt

  The reforms considerably strengthened Augustus’ position, but the real winner from the crisis of 23 B.C. was Agrippa. He had been shown to be indispensable; now he, too, received imperium proconsulare (but not imperium maius). This probably gave him some kind of general authority in the eastern provinces, where Augustus dispatched him in the autumn. In effect, Agrippa was now the empire’s co-regent.

  Too much information has been lost for us to be sure, but it looks very much as if the princeps had had his wings clipped. Perhaps the governing faction—that is, all those men whose fortunes, livelihoods, even lives depended on the regime’s continuance—made its leader acknowledge that the state was not his personal property and that an insurance policy (to wit, Agrippa) needed to be taken out against some future mortal illness.

  It has even been speculated in modern times that what had taken place was a “secret coup d’état” in which Agrippa and Livia joined forces. There is hardly anything to back this up—except that Tiberius, Livia’s eldest son, was betrothed, perhaps already married, to Agrippa’s daughter, Vipsania. This could be interpreted as a sign that the two most important people in Augustus’ life felt the need to jointly protect themselves against the dynastically domineering princeps. It also appears that Octavia and Livia did not get on, and that the latter was irritated by the former’s promotion of Marcellus. Equally, though, Augustus and his canny wife could have seen the value of neutralizing the prickly Agrippa by making him a member of the family.

  At the time, many observers interpreted Agrippa’s departure as exile. According to Suetonius, he “had felt that Augustus was not behaving as warmly towards him as usual, and that Marcellus was being preferred to him; he resigned all his offices and went off to Mytilene.” Some held that Agrippa did not want to oppose or seem to belittle the young man. In another view, on his recovery Augustus found out that Marcellus was not well disposed toward Agrippa because of the delivery to Agrippa of the seal, and so ordered Agrippa to the east. A writer in the following century wrote of the “scandalous sending away of Agrippa.”

  It is not necessary to see these two accounts—co-regency and “exile”—as mutually exclusive. Augustus and Agrippa were grown-up politicians. Both of them (and perhaps especially the latter) held a somber commitment to the public interest, not to mention the advantage of their governing party (which they saw as much the same thing). It is possible that they agreed not only about Agrippa’s promotion, but also on the desirability of a tactful withdrawal to allow Marcellus to emerge onto the public stage without Agrippa’s overshadowing presence.

  When looking to the future, Agrippa and the sickly Augustus had to accommodate a number of possible outcomes. If the princeps were to die soon, Agrippa would presumably take over. His humble birth and rough tongue made him unpopular with the old nobility, and he did not have the huge advantage of being a member of the Caesarian, almost-royal family; but he was omnicompetent, and would do.

  If both men lived for another fifteen or twenty years, a perfectly reasonable supposition, Marcellus would be an appropriate dynastic successor, assuming that meanwhile he showed sufficient ability at the business of government. To make assurance doubly sure, Livia’s promising sons, Tiberius and the fifteen-year-old Drusus, would also be trained in public administration.

  Whatever was or was not going on behind the scenes, the professional partnership between Augustus and Agrippa went on from strength to strength. When the two men’s powers were renewed in 18 B.C., Agrippa was granted the same tribunicia potestas that the princeps held. His energy and effectiveness were undimmed.

  Then the worst possible thing that Augustus could imagine took place. In the autumn of 23 B.C., before his games were over, Marcellus fell ill and died. He was only twenty-one years old. He was given the same medical treatment by Musa as his uncle, but this time it did not work. The princeps delivered a eulogy at his funeral and placed his body in the great circular family mausoleum he was in the process of building (Marcellus’ gravestone and the later one of his mother survive). A new theater on the far side of the Capitoline Hill from the Forum, the foundations of which had been laid by Julius Caesar, was named the Theater of Marcellus in his honor. (Part of its exterior wall can still be seen.)

  Octavia never recovered. She refused to have a portrait of her son or to permit anyone to mention his name in her presence. She came to hate all mothers and, more especially, Livia, whose Tiberius would now inherit the happiness she had been promised. She spent more and more of her time in darkness and paid little attention to her brother. Becoming something of a recluse, she stayed in mourning for the rest of her life.

  She did attend a special reading by the poet Virgil of extracts from his new epic about the foundation of Rome, the Aeneid. Its hero is the Trojan prince, Aeneas; the poem tells the story of his escape from the sack of Troy and his arrival at Latium, where he rules over a kingdom that is the precursor of Rome. At one point in the narrative, Aeneas visits the underworld, where he meets not only the great dead but also the shades of the unborn. He notices a good-looking but downcast youth, and asks who he is.

  The phantom of Aeneas’ dead father tells him that it is the future Marcellus:

  Fate shall allow the earth one glimpse of this young man—

  One glimpse, no more….

  Alas, poor youth! If only you could escape your harsh fate!

  Marcellus you shall be. Give me armfuls of lilies

  That I may scatter their shining blooms and shower these gifts

  At least upon the dear soul, all to no purpose though

  Such kindness be.

  Virgil’s style of recitation was “sweet and strangely seductive.” When he reached the line “Tu Marcellus eris,” “Marcellus you shall be,” Octavia is said to have fainted, and was revived only with some difficulty.

  Almost certainly the young man was one of the many Romans who succumbed to the epidemic sweeping through the city, but soon rumors were put about of foul play. It was whispered that Livia had poisoned him because he had been preferred to her sons for the succession. If true this would have been an ill-judged move, for in the following year Augustus arranged for his daughter, Julia, Marcellus’ widow, to marry Agrippa, a formidable alliance likely to produce dynastic progeny.

  The main victim of this arrangement was Octavia’s daughter, Marcella, who was divorced from her husband, Agrippa, to make room for her first cousin. In the regime’s innermost circles, no room was left for sentiment, and the Julian family’s women were disposed of according to the political imperative of the hour. Apparently the princeps took the decision on the advice of Maecenas, who told him, “You have made him [Agrippa] so powerful that he must either become your son-in-law, or be killed.”

  Livia’s reputation for murderous scheming, once acquired, proved impossible to expunge. This was partly because in the ancient world (as in the magical world of the fairy tale) stepmothers were expected to behave badly. The great Greek tragedian Aeschylus described a reef in the sea as a “stepmother to ships.” Women, living as they did in a male-dominated society, must have felt that they could only protect their futures by advancing their sons’ interests. Enough of them lived up to the stereotype, persecuting the children of their husband’s first marriage, that fathers sometimes had their children adopted and brought up in another family.

  Although Augustus never formally adopted Marcellus, he had treated him as an honorary son, so Livia found herself cast as a stepmother, with all the ugly connotations that that status entailed. There is no evidence that she acted in any way improperly, although it is legitimate to assume that she would do her best for her own boys. Augustus and Octavia were kind to children to whom they were not related by blood—notably, Antony’s offspring by Fulvia and Cleopatra; it is hard to imagine them failing to notice and correct any cruelty on Livia’s part.

  The accusations against Livia need to be set in the context of the Romans’ exaggerated fear of death by poisoning. It was, for example, widely
and probably inaccurately rumored that poison had been sprinkled on Pansa’s wound after the fighting at Mutina in 43 B.C., and that this had either been arranged by the then Octavian, or at least been done in his interest. Cicero’s speeches as a criminal lawyer reveal a high incidence of reported poisoning cases.

  Surprising deaths were likely to have been from undiagnosed natural causes. Poison scares often coincided with plagues, and there are well-attested cases of food poisoning, especially from contaminated fish. The practice of boiling down wine in lead pans to create a cooking sauce will have led to many illnesses and premature deaths. Some years later a close friend of Augustus, Nonius Asprenas, gave a party after which 130 guests fell ill and died, presumably from food poisoning. Asprenas was taken to court for murder, but (after a show of support by the princeps) was acquitted.

  There was little that Livia could do in the face of this anonymous gossip. A woman had no locus as a public figure and was obliged to suffer slander in silence.

  XVIII

  EXERCISING POWER

  23–17 B.C.

  * * *

  Travel was slow and often dangerous; weeks might pass before the princeps learned of a serious development on the Parthian frontier, months before any substantial reaction could be implemented. The pace of communications also slowed the analysis of complex problems. Important branches of knowledge—geography, for example, and economics—were in their infancy, so there were insufficient reliable and accessible data on which to base policy decisions. From a modern perspective, events took place in slow motion and in a fog.

  Augustus and Agrippa took the business of empire seriously, realizing that it would be difficult to achieve anything without being on the spot themselves. Both men spent years away from Rome, traveling from province to province. Sometimes they exchanged places, one of them picking up where the other left off.

  For some years after the settlement after Actium, the eastern provinces were largely left to their own devices. In 26 B.C., there was an unsuccessful Roman expedition to Arabia Felix (the southwest corner of the Arabian peninsula, today’s Yemen), probably aimed at opening up a trade route; in the following year, Galatia (in central Anatolia) was annexed as a province.

  When the princeps sent Agrippa to the east in 23 B.C., we do not know exactly what his mission was. He made the island of Samos his headquarters and it can be assumed that his presence was intended to be a reminder of Roman power. It is possible that he also had an important unpublicized task—to gain intelligence on the Parthians. It would be useful to settle the unfinished business of the Roman defeat at Carrhae in 53 B.C., and, in particular, to negotiate the return of the army standards that the Parthians had captured (as well as those lost in 36 B.C. by Antony). The princeps was not interested in resuming hostilities and hoped for a long-term entente.

  He intended either to join Agrippa or to take over from him, but was detained by trouble in Rome. The river Tiber overflowed its banks and flooded the city. The plague of the previous year continued throughout Italy and farmers stopped tilling the fields. Food shortages followed. The panic-stricken and angry mob did not trust old-style republican politicians to govern effectively and called for Augustus to be appointed dictator. It besieged the Senate House and threatened to burn it down with the senators inside it if they did not vote for the appointment.

  The episode showed how fragile the princeps’ underlying position was. The careful balance between autocracy and a restoration of the Senate’s authority had been designed to reconcile the ruling class to the Augustan order. However, it irritated the people—that is, the hundreds of thousands of citizens who lived in or near Rome. They wanted to see Augustus seize absolute power openly and unambiguously.

  Not only would it have been unwise to listen to such calls, it would have been illegal, for Mark Antony had abolished the dictatorship in 44, shortly after the Ides of March. Any attempt to restore the post would infuriate mainstream senatorial opinion. Augustus made it clear that he would do no such thing.

  When facing disgrace a Roman would tear his clothes in public, and this was what the princeps did to dramatize his refusal to be moved. He went up to the crowd, bared his throat, and swore that he would rather be stabbed to death by its daggers than accept the appointment. Instead, he had himself made commissioner for the grain supply, rapidly put an end to the food shortages, and arranged for the annual appointment of two former praetors to supervise the distribution of grain in the future. Although, so far as we know, Augustus did not reform the system of production and distribution, he did his best to ensure that shortfalls were quickly made good and he used his own financial resources to alleviate famine.

  At long last in the autumn of 22, Augustus, probably taking Livia with him, set out on a leisurely journey eastward. His first stop was Sicily. News came from Rome of more unrest among the people, who had elected only a single consul in the hope that Augustus would occupy the vacancy. This he refused to do, but recalled Agrippa to return from the east and restore order at Rome. It was now, in 21 B.C., that, in a further sign of his growing authority, Agrippa married the eighteen-year-old Julia despite her father’s absence.

  Agrippa then moved on to his next assignment in Gaul and Spain. He campaigned in Aquitania and elsewhere; he also encouraged the building of Roman-style cities and networks of roads. He then went to northern Spain, where he resumed Augustus’ not entirely successful war of pacification. In 19 B.C., he finally subdued the unruly tribes whom the unmilitary princeps had found it so hard to defeat a few years before.

  In the meantime, Augustus devoted time and attention to adjusting the boundaries and rulers of the smaller client kingdoms along the empire’s eastern frontier; but his real aim was to do a deal with King Frahâta of Parthia. His tactic was to run a diplomatic campaign alongside the threat of a military one. A pretender to the Parthian throne had kidnapped one of Frahâta’s sons and escaped with him to Rome. Augustus had sent the boy back to his father on condition that all the Roman standards and any surviving prisoners-of-war were returned. He now invited Frahâta to live up to his side of the bargain.

  At the same time, a military expedition was organized against the strategically placed kingdom of Armenia. The aim was to depose its anti-Roman king, Ardashes, and replace him with a quisling. If Armenia was to fall within Rome’s sphere of influence, the Parthians would be out-flanked with a hostile northern frontier.

  The general whom Augustus chose to lead his legions against the Armenians in 20 B.C. was his stepson Tiberius, who was now twenty-two years old and eligible for the jobs that would surely have gone to a living Marcellus.

  He was strongly and heavily built and above average height; his shoulders and chest were broad and his body was well proportioned. He had a handsome, fresh-complexioned face, although his skin tended to break out in pimples. He had a large crown, tight lips like his mother’s, and piercing eyes. He let his hair grow long at the back, a habit of the Claudian clan.

  Tiberius was not at all religious, but he did believe in astrology and therefore saw the world as governed by fate. Like Augustus, he was terrified of thunder, and when the skies loured he would put a laurel wreath on his head, to lightning-proof himself. He was devoted to Greek and Latin literature. He especially loved ancient myths and legends. He enjoyed the company of professors of Greek literature, whom he delighted in asking abstruse and unanswerable questions: such as “Who was Hecuba Queen of Troy’s mother?,” “What song did the Sirens sing?” “By what name was Achilles called when he was disguised as a girl?” His speaking style was encumbered by so many affectations and pedantries that his extempore speeches were considered far better than those he prepared.

  Augustus arranged for Tiberius to enter public life in his late teens; the young man undertook high-profile prosecutions and special commissions, among the latter, the crucial task of reorganizing Rome’s grain supply. He acquitted himself well. The princeps was pleased, for he was keen for Tiberius and his brother, the eightee
n-year-old Drusus, to share the burden of government. They were to be the packhorses of the regime, for the princeps had not given up his dynastic ambitions. In 20 B.C., Agrippa’s union with Julia produced a boy, Gaius. If he survived the multiple potentially lethal ailments of infancy, he could become the heir to empire, and on this occasion Augustus’ old school friend would be hardly likely to object.

  But that was for the future. In the meantime, Tiberius led an army into Armenia. As it turned out, there was no fighting to be done, for the Armenians rose against their king and killed him before the Romans arrived. Tiberius crowned his successor, a pro-Roman exile, with his own hands.

  Confronted with the Armenian takeover, Frahâta made the judgment call for which the Romans had been hoping. Although Augustus had no intention whatever of attacking Parthia, he was now in a strong tactical position if he wished to do so. The king handed over the standards and the prisoners.

  Although the Roman public would have preferred a thoroughgoing military victory, this was a great diplomatic achievement, of which Augustus was extremely proud. Relations between the two empires moved from glacial to cautiously warm, where they remained for some time. In the official account of his life, the princeps allowed himself some exaggeration: “I compelled the Parthians to restore the spoils and the standards of three Roman legions to me and to ask as suppliants the friendship of the Roman People.”

  Disturbing news arrived from Rome. In the absence of both the princeps and Agrippa, the public mood had grown feverish. The people left one of the consulships for 19 B.C. unfilled and agitated for Augustus, once again, to assume the vacant post.

  A certain Egnatius Rufus, who, according to an unfriendly critic, was “better qualified to be a gladiator than a Senator,” volunteered to fill the gap himself. In 21, when he was serving as aedile, he had made himself very popular by creating Rome’s first fire service (paying out of his own pocket for a troop of some six hundred slaves) and had been elected praetor in the following year. Strictly speaking this was illegal, for the rules called for an interval of some years between successive elective posts in the honors race.