As the soldiers of Rome's Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Legions lay dead or dying in the mud and marshland pools of the north, and as dusk fell on the gloomy wilderness of this deadly trap for overconfident Romans, a completely different scene was playing out in the imperial capital seven hundred miles to the south.
Life in Rome in A. D. 9
In the warm September evening, the workday was drawing to a close for hundreds of thousands of Romans. All along the side streets, merchants were closing up their storefronts for the night, and the crowds of customers were dwindling. Women were hurrying home with their baskets of fruits and vegetables to prepare the evening meal for their families, since their husbands would arrive shortly. In the markets, farmers were packing up the remains of the produce they had brought into the city before dawn and beginning to drive their creaky wagons through the streets, out the city gates, and back to their farms. It would be several days before the emperor Augustus learned of the catastrophe in the north, and even longer before the Roman citizens grasped its meaning for the future of their city and the lands it ruled.
Rome was the largest city in the world in A. D. 9, with a population of around a million people. In the center were broad boulevards paved with stone, lined with stone and brick buildings, and with gleaming marble temples, palaces, forums, and other public monuments sponsored by rich men, especially by the emperor Augustus himself. Huge columned temples honored the Roman gods, such as Jupiter and Mars, and over-life-size statues glorified the city's human heroes. Much of Rome's center was new, and in A. D. 9 many construction projects were under way. Augustus had carried out a massive program of renewal, tearing down old buildings and erecting new ones in their place, and he was especially active in building public monuments to the glory of Rome and its rulers. He is said to have boasted, "I arrived in a city of brick, and I created a city of marble." Among the major public buildings he had erected were the Forum of Augustus (considerably larger than the forum Julius Caesar had built in 46 B. C.), the Theater of Marcellus (named for his nephew), the Baths ofAgrippa (named for a loyal follower who had served as governor of Gaul), the Pantheon, the Altar of Peace (Ara Pacis), the enormous sundial (horologium) that included an Egyptian carved stone obelisk as pointer, and his own imposing burial monument, the Mausoleum of Augustus.
As in every major city—such as New York, Washington, Paris, and London today—outside of the grandiose center, the streets and neighborhoods were much more modest. In a few parts of Rome, there were magnificent brick and stone residences of the wealthy, while much of the city was occupied by multistory apartment buildings made of concrete faced with brick, where the majority of the inhabitants lived. A law passed under Augustus's reign restricted the height of such structures to sixty feet, allowing five stories, but it was not always obeyed.
In the business and market areas, the Roman streets were bustling all day and well into the warm Mediterranean evenings. In the markets, farmers arrived from the fields outside the city to offer their fruits, vegetables, and meats to hungry city dwellers. Small shops along the streets housed jewelers, weavers, wood-carvers, and all manner of other crafts workers. Laborers and slaves bustled along the edges of the streets on their errands.
Roman society was highly stratified. At the top of the social pyramid stood the emperor Augustus and his family—his wife, Livia, his surviving adopted son, Tiberius, and a variety of nieces, nephews, and younger offspring. His only child, Julia, had by this time been banished fTom Rome for her outrageous behavior, as we will see below. Next in rank were the senators, some six hundred men from Rome's richest and most distinguished families, their wealth and status deriving mainly from extensive land holdings. Filling out the bottom part of the elite were members of the equestrian class, or knights. They too were rich men. Many of the officials who administered the city and went abroad as provincial governors, and many officers in the army, came from the equestrian class. Below this upper part of the social pyramid were the fTee citizens of Rome—crafts workers, merchants, sailors, and other laborers and, in the countryside beyond the city limits, farmers.
At the bottom of the hierarchy were slaves, persons either captured in battle or seized from a defeated populace, or children of persons already enslaved. Most slaves stemmed not from either Italy or Greece but from other lands conquered by the Roman army Life for slaves varied greatly, depending upon the treatment they received from their owners and the jobs they were required to do. Some slaves worked on farms, others in factories making pottery, others as domestic servants in the homes of the wealthy. In A. D. 9, Rome may have had as many as 200,000 slaves among its million people. Slaves were often permitted to acquire wealth, and many bought their freedom, became citizens, and, sometimes, even became extremely wealthy. Finally, by this time Rome had considerable numbers of foreigners in residence, mostly from different parts of the Empire but also from beyond it. Gauls, Greeks, Syrians, and North Africans contributed to the rich diversity of languages, religious beliefs, and traditions of this huge and cosmopolitan city.
All of the important offices in the Roman government were held by wealthy men. Women were in charge of their households, and wealthy women could often wield considerable power, particularly if their husbands were senators or the emperor. Some important ritual roles were held by women, such as those of the vestal virgins, who were responsible for tending the sacred fire of Rome. In this special position, they often exercised appreciable political power.
Wealthy Romans lived in big houses. Each had a sizable front door opening onto the street, a spacious entrance hall, and rows of rooms that surrounded a courtyard that was open to the air, usually with a fountain and beds of flowers. Floors of some rooms had mosaics that formed patterns or pictures, and the walls of many rooms were colorfully painted with outdoor scenery. The great majority of the Roman populace inhabited apartment houses that were typically four or five stories high and situated on narrow, crowded streets. Families lived in small, cramped, and poorly lit and ventilated rooms without running water and often without cooking facilities.
Wealthy Romans spent part of each day at the baths, which played a role in some ways similar to that of social clubs in modern America. After their business of the day was complete, affluent men went off to the baths to meet other elites, to relax in the steam baths or swim in the pools, to conduct casual business, chat, and perhaps play friendly games of dice. Other Romans could also go to the public baths, but many had no spare time for such activities. Water for the baths, like that for general use, was supplied by a system of aqueducts that brought abundant fresh water from hilly regions outside of Rome into the urban center. Many wealthy Romans had conduits that brought water directly into their homes, while poorer persons had to use public fountains to collect the water they needed.
Day-to-day life in Rome was enlivened by regular festivals, such as Lupercalia and Saturnalia, that were celebrated by a large proportion of the population. Festivals had a religious basis and served to maintain the favor of the gods. For many festivals, state officials carried out rituals at temples dedicated to the major Roman deities. But it was the public games that generated the most enthusiasm. Besides the events put on by the city, wealthy individuals often sponsored public spectacles to win favor from the Roman populace. Elites and commoners alike enjoyed the games sponsored by the emperor or other wealthy Romans, often to celebrate and draw attention to particular events, especially victorious military campaigns. Chariot races, staged fights between wild animals, brought from as far away as Africa, and gladiatorial contests delighted the mass of Rome's population, including the emperor Augustus. Augustus's biographer Suetonius notes that unlike Julius Caesar, who was sometimes observed reading letters during games he attended, Augustus gave the spectacles his full attention.
Gladiators tended to be criminals or slaves. They were specially trained for their public performances, and their battles were organized with great care with regard to the weapons and tactics they could use. The first stone amphitheater in Rome, called the Amphitheater of Satillus Taurus, was constructed during Augustus's reign, and this is where the gladiatorial fights were held. (The famous Colosseum was not built until about seventy years after his death.)
Romans honored a number of different gods and spirits. The head of the Roman pantheon was Jupiter, and Rome maintained an official state cult in his honor. But people worshiped many other deities as well, including prominent official gods such as Venus and Mars, and spirits of individual houses and of natural forces. Worshiping gods involved making sacrifices, which could take the form of killing an animal and burning parts of it on an altar dedicated to a specific god, or tossing offerings of coins, jewelry, or pottery into sacred places as dedications to the deity. Huge ornate temples in the city honored the principal official gods, and small altars were common in people's houses for honoring spirits that were special to individual households.
The diet of Romans in A. D. 9 was unlike what we think of as Italian food today. Pasta did not exist in Italy at the time, and the tomato was unknown until it was brought to Europe from South America in the sixteenth century. The Roman diet consisted mainly of grains, legumes, olive oil, and wine. Wheat, the principal staple, was often cooked with water to make a porridge or baked into bread. Lentils, beans, peas, cabbage, onions, radishes, and lettuce supplied important nutrients and lent some variety to the diet. Only the wealthy were able to eat meat often. The poor had to be content with a small piece once every few days.
Well-to-do Romans had access to all kinds of delicacies, both locally produced and imported. From the sea came shellfish, especially oysters, and fish. Dormice and snails were considered special fare, and domestic as well as wild birds were much favored. Different kinds of cakes sweetened with honey were popular after meals. The wealthy enjoyed olives and nuts of different kinds. Spices and herbs were imported from all parts of the provinces and beyond to grace the tables and delight the palates of the rich. Romans everywhere were particularly fond of a sauce called garum, made from fermented fish, probably something like modern Worcestershire sauce. Many liked to sprinkle this pungent flavoring over a wide variety of foods, and garum was a major trade commodity, shipped throughout the Roman world in large ceramic amphoras, just as wine and olive oil were transported. Romans did not have forks. They ate with their hands and sometimes with spoons.
Rome's poor received monthly allotments of wheat. During his reign, Augustus oversaw the doling out of grain to some 200,000 of the city's poorest citizens, and he supervised the supply of adequate fTesh water delivered by the system of aqueducts.
Rome's Ruler in A. D. 9
Augustus, the man who ruled over this enormous and complex city, at the center of the greatest empire of the ancient world, was seventy-two years old in A. D. 9. He was unique in Roman, and indeed world, history. His given name at birth was Octavius, and the Roman Senate bestowed upon him the honorific name Augustus in 27 B. C. As Rome's first emperor, he established many precedents for his successors to follow during the four centuries after his rule. After two decades of calamitous civil wars, Augustus restored peace and harmony to Roman Italy, and he presided over forty-five years of prosperity and civil order. He organized the Roman army as the professional fighting force that guaranteed the might of the Empire. He was an almost unimaginably powerful and wealthy man, for more than four decades supreme ruler of an empire that encircled the Mediterranean Sea and included half of Europe, Africa north of the Sahara Desert, and most of the Near East.
Augustus the Man
The man who was to become Rome's first emperor was born on September 23, 63 B. C. Like his father, he was named Gaius Octavius. He was born in Rome, but his father hailed from Velitrae, in the Alban Hills, twenty-five miles southeast of the city. The family of the elder Gaius Octavius belonged to the equestrian class of Roman Italy. His grandfather had served as a town official and may have worked as a money changer. The family thus had status as equestrians and possessed at least some wealth, but was not one of the old elite families of Roman tradition. Augustus's father was the first member of the family to attain the rank of senator. Through his energy and determination, he had become a member of the Roman Senate and was elected to the office of praetor—a magistrate of the city of Rome—in 6i B. C. In the years 61—59, he served successfully as governor of Macedonia. Shortly after returning to Rome, he died suddenly, leaving his son and two daughters fatherless.
Young Octavius's mother, Atia, on the other hand, provided the boy with a highly influential pedigree. Atia was the daughter of Atius Balbus, who came from northern Africa, and of Julia. Julia was the sister of Julius Caesar, an increasingly powerful politician. This family connection played a vital role in young Octavius's rise to prominence and power in late Republican Rome.
We are not well informed about Octavius's childhood. Since, unlike his great uncle, he was not a member of one of Rome's most elite families, chroniclers of the time did not follow the course of his early education. And in his later years, Augustus was reticent about his personal life and said little concerning his upbringing. The Julii family, to which Julius Caesar belonged, was one of the most distinguished and powerful in Republican Rome, and young Octavius's own immediate family must have made him very much aware of this connection and of the ongoing achievements of his great-uncle.
An important event is recorded from the year 51 B. C., when Octavius was twelve. At the funeral ceremony for Julia, his grandmother, Octavius gave an oration in her honor. We do not know the content of that speech, but it is likely that he drew attention to the Julii family's contributions to Rome and in particular to the recent success of Julia's brother, Julius Caesar, in conquering Gaul, adding that huge and rich territory to Rome's domain. Funerals were occasions on which families displayed their status and importance, and this event was probably Octavius's initiation into active politics. When Octavius was fifteen, he was honored by being granted the privilege of wearing the toga virilis—the garment of the elite adult male—a privilege usually first conferred upon young men at the age of seventeen.
Octavius's relationship with his great-uncle was a formative factor in his development as a self-confident and ambitious young man and later in his rise to the supreme power in Rome.
Julius Caesar and His Great-Nephew Octavius
The years between 120 and 60 B. C. had been a time of immense change in Rome. From the middle of the first millennium B. C. on, Rome grew rapidly from a modest town in central Italy to the great and expansive power that dominated the whole central Mediterranean region (map 4). As a result of Rome's early conquests of Sicily, part of Iberia, Illyria, Asia Minor, Macedonia, Greece, and parts of North Africa, great riches accrued to the city's powerful families and stress between the wealthy and the mass of Rome's population increased. In the social, political, and economic struggles, unusual power came into the hands of a few individuals. In the first half of the first century B. C., four main competitors vied for supreme power in Rome—Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar.
In 58 B. C., Julius Caesar led his legions into Gaul (see chapter 7). According to his own detailed written account, the purpose was to aid tribes there allied with Rome that requested assistance in repelling incursions by the Helvetii and the Suebi, local tribal groups. The circumstances of Caesar's decision to intervene in Gaul are murky, and recently scholars have argued that he may actually have provoked the conflicts and used them as justifications for his military campaigns there. In the course of eight years of fighting, Caesar led his legions to successful conquest of the whole of Gaul, from the Pyrenees to the Rhine. Throughout these years, he was increasingly engaged in struggles with his powerful rivals in Rome. When Caesar took his legions southward across the Rubicon River into central Italy in 49 B. C., he precipitated civil war between the rival factions. After fighting in
49—47 against his enemies in Italy and Greece, he led his troops through Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor, lending military and political support to regimes friendly to Rome. He finally defeated the armies of his rivals in North Africa. When he returned to Rome, he was honored with grand triumphal celebrations.
In the course of his military adventures, Caesar became involved in a relationship with one of the most influential rulers in the ancient world, Cleopatra (see illustration 12). After arriving with his army at Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt in 48 B. C., he met Cleopatra, and he remained there with her for several months. On June 23 of 47, Cleopatra gave birth to their son, whom she named Ptolemy Caesarion. Although Caesar departed from Egypt on business that took him to Rome, Asia Minor, Syria, and Africa, his affair with Cleopatra served to bolster her hold on power in Egypt, which in turn helped assure that taxes would flow from this rich land to the treasury at Rome. In 46, Cleopatra traveled to Rome, where Caesar, although married to Calpurnia, treated her and her husband as his personal guests. The visit had the effect of strengthening friendly political ties between Egypt and Rome, which were to remain important for both.
Meanwhile, Caesar favored his great-nephew Octavius and arranged for him to be appointed to a series of public offices. These were largely honorific in nature, but they brought the young man into public view and helped prepare him for future political office. In 47 B. C., Caesar strongly supported Octavius's election to the office of pontifex—a leader in the Roman priesthood—and had him appointed city prefect. Later Caesar arranged for Octavius to be appointed, at only eighteen years of age, to the highly regarded office of magister equitum—master of the horse, a mainly honorific office that included both command of cavalry forces and direct assistance to Caesar. Young Octavius frequently accompanied Caesar around Rome, as part of his entourage, to political events and social functions, an association from which the rising young Roman was to benefit in future years.
In 45 B. C., Octavius traveled to Spain to join Caesar on campaign there, gaining some early direct military experience. Later that year, Caesar arranged to have Octavius go to Apollonia, on the east coast of the Adriatic Sea, for further education. One reason for Caesar's selection of Apollonia may have been that five Roman legions were stationed in Macedonia, affording Octavius the opportunity to continue to learn military ways along with the rest of his schooling.
In February of the year 44, in gratitude for the victories he won for Rome and for a certain stability he brought to the city after the chaos of the civil wars, officials and the people of Rome appointed Caesar dictator in perpetuity. He further succeeded, after some effort, in having the Roman Senate honor him as a god. The power he was amassing frightened many among Rome's elites, and a group of senators conspired to murder Julius Caesar on the Ides of March—March 15, 44 B. C.
Octavius's Rise to Power
Upon hearing of Caesar's death, Octavius sailed from Apollonia to Brundisium, in southern Italy. There he learned from allies that in his will written the year before, Caesar, having no legitimate children of his own, had legally adopted Octavius and made him his heir. Since Caesar had many enemies in Roman Italy, and since Octavius could count on their striving to limit his ability to assume his great-uncle's mantle, he proceeded cautiously in claiming his inheritance. Through the adoption by Caesar, Octavius had now become a member of the highly distinguished Julii family, and he could assume the name Julius Caesar Octavianus. Furthermore, since his adoptive father had been officially deified before his death,
Octavius—from this point known as Octavian—could also use the title DiviJulii filius—son of the god Julius (Caesar).
Octavian waited a couple of months in southern Italy and in Campania, talking with supporters to learn how volatile the political situation was, before returning to Rome. When he finally arrived in Rome in May as the returning adopted son of Caesar, according to reports a halo seen around the sun was interpreted as a positive omen. From this point on, Octavian became engaged in a long struggle between leaders who claimed to represent the murdered Caesar. Octavian's principal stated aim was the avenging of Caesar's death. When the people of Rome elected him to the office of consul—one of two civil and military magistrates of the city, in effect the two supreme rulers of the Roman world, elected annually—the appearance of twelve vultures flying overhead was understood as another omen, this one linking Octavian with the legendary founder of Rome, Romulus. Octavian was still only nineteen years old.
For a decade, beginning in 43 B. C., three powerful men— Octavian, Mark Antony, and M. Aemilius Lepidus—agreed to band together as a triumvirate to confront their common enemies, in the process executing or banishing hundreds of political opponents. In 42 B. C. at Philippi, in Macedonia, they defeated the armies of Brutus and Cassius, the leaders of the conspiracy against Caesar that had resulted in his assassination. Back in Italy, they confiscated lands to reward the soldiers who had fought for them; this created further chaos, disruption, and fear throughout Roman Italy.
After Lepidus lost the confidence of his army and thus his ability to rival Octavian and Antony, the competition for supreme power over Rome was reduced to two men. From early on in his quest for power, Octavian understood the importance of the support of his army, and as the heir of Caesar he was given strong backing by both the veterans and the populace of Rome. In preparation for an engagement with Mark Antony's forces in their rivalry for the role of Caesar's successor, Octavian paid his soldiers 2,500 denarii each from the Roman treasury, about ten times their annual salary.
Antony and Cleopatra
In order to strengthen his position as a contender for sole rule of Rome, Antony planned a major military campaign against the Parthian Empire, Rome's principal competition on the eastern frontier. The Parthians, who occupied the region of modern Iraq and Iran, were a formidable political power and military force at this time, known particularly for their fierce cavalry and skilled archers. In earlier fighting, Parthian forces had captured Roman legionary eagles. To establish a base for supplies to support this initiative, Antony decided to approach Cleopatra of Egypt. The resulting arrangement was highly advantageous to Cleopatra. It reaffirmed her position as queen of Egypt and provided her with a direct connection to one of Rome's two current rulers. Antony and Cleopatra began a romantic relationship, and in the fall of 40 B. C. Cleopatra gave birth to twins, a girl and a boy. At the time, Antony was in Rome marrying Octavian's sister Octavia, in an attempt to build an alliance with his rival. But that political alliance did not last long.
In 37 B. C. Antony left Octavia and Italy to rejoin Cleopatra. A year later, his first major campaign against the Parthians ended in a Roman defeat. In January of 35, Cleopatra bore another child by Antony. The following year, Antony conducted more successful military operations against the Parthians, achieving a victory that he celebrated grandly in Alexandria. Meanwhile in Rome, Octavian mounted a public campaign against Antony, enlisting the Senate to turn against him. On September 2, 31, Octavian led his navy against the combined naval forces of Antony and Cleopatra offActium, in western Greece, winning a major vie-tory. Finally in the summer of 30, Octavian's army attacked and defeated the remaining forces ofAntony and Cleopatra in Egypt. In the end, Antony and Cleopatra both committed suicide, and Octavian had Cleopatra's son by Caesar, Caesarion, killed to remove him as a possible contender for power. Octavian did not order the deaths of her three children fathered by Antony.
Octavian/Augustus Becomes Sole Ruler of Rome
In order to gain an important political connection with one of Rome's leading families, Octavian had in 40 B. C. married a woman named Scribonia. She was related by marriage to Sextus Pompeius, a powerful political and military leader whose support Octavian wanted in his rivalry with Antony. Octavian divorced Scribonia in the following year, apparently on the very day that Scribonia gave birth to their daughter Julia, who was Octavian's only legitimate child. On January 17, 38, Octavian married Livia Drusilla, a clever and crafty nineteen-year-old woman with powerful political connections, who divorced her husband in order to marry Octavian. Her son Tiberius was three years old at the time, and her other son, Drusus, had been born just three days before her marriage with Octavian. These two boys were to become Augustus's principal generals in his wars against the Germans.
The new union provided Octavian with a link to the Claudii, another old and powerful family in Republican Rome. At about this same time, Octavian assumed the title Imperator Caesar to convey his leadership of the political group in Rome that claimed to be the political heirs of Caesar. He also commissioned the construction of his mausoleum—an enormous circular burial monument built of stone, 130 feet high and 285 feet in diameter—near the center of the city of Rome. The main reason why the twenty-five-year-old Octavian wanted such a monument was probably to create a powerful visual sign of his status and authority to serve him in his struggle for power with Antony Throughout his often ruthless dealings with friends and enemies alike, Octavian consistently portrayed himself as the defender of Roman tradition and in particular as the restorer of the Republic—a period remembered for its relative peace in Italy and higher morals among Romans.
Octavian's defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium ended the rivalry for power in Rome in Octavian's favor and opened the way for the incorporation of Egypt into the Roman Empire as a province in 30 B. C. In the next year, Octavian returned to Rome as a great hero, to celebrate a grand triumph for his victories. He now began his extensive program of public building throughout the city. Much of the construction was truly monumental, intended to display to the citizens of the city the power, history, and traditions of Rome. It included statuary, religious buildings, and practical structures such as aqueducts to provide the city with clean water for its baths, as well as for drinking and cooking.
In the year 27 B. C., Octavian was accorded near-absolute power by Roman officials and the people. On January 16, the Roman Senate granted him the title Augustus, a name that conveyed the meanings "dignified" and "sacred." The Senate named the sixth month of the Roman calendar "Augustus" in his honor, a name preserved today in many languages for what is our eighth month. Between 27 and 13 B. C., Augustus, as he was now called, spent the majority of his time outside of Rome in the imperial territories, overseeing the administration of the provinces and organizing for future conquests along the frontiers. He was now the commander in chief of all of Rome's armies, a position for which he was well qualified, having distinguished himself in battles during the 40s and 30s. He had commanded successful naval operations off Sicily and at Actium, and was close to the action in land campaigns in Dalmatia and Cantabria. In Dalmatia, he was wounded, struck on the leg by a slingstone. In numerous other engagements, he let his generals oversee the combat, but he assumed responsibility for overall strategy.
In order to maintain a standing army of sufficient size and to keep morale of the soldiers high, Augustus frequently paid them from his own resources. He was by far the wealthiest person in the Roman world, and he used his personal wealth not only to pay active troops but also to provide settlements for veterans after their service, to erect public buildings in Rome, to sponsor games, and to aid financially troubled individuals. Even after expending hundreds of millions of sestertii on the army and various public works, when he died in A. D. 14, Augustus left some 250 million sestertii to his heirs, the army, and the Roman people. The sources of his vast wealth were many—inheritance from his father and from his great-uncle Julius Caesar, gifts from wealthy Romans, war booty from his conquests, and tribute payments of various sorts from the provinces.
Augustus began to organize a widespread system of taxation for the entire Empire. Specific forms of taxes and collection varied in different regions, but in general two main types of taxes were collected in the provinces—a poll tax that every adult had to pay, and a tax on assets such as land and houses. Careful censuses of the population and assessments of land holdings were carried out to assure a reasonably equitable collection of taxes. Under Augustus, taxes were not so high that any part of the population suffered much, though under later emperors the peasant farmers did not fare so well. At the borders of the Empire, customs duties were collected, and smaller duties had to be paid on goods transported between provinces. Finally, Augustus levied an inheritance tax on the citizens of Rome. Proceeds of the various taxes and duties were destined for Augustus at the center of the Roman system. In some parts of the Empire, there was vigorous public resistance to the imposition of taxes. Tax collection and the bureaucratic process of which it was part played major roles in creating dissatisfaction among peoples in many of Rome's provinces.
Under Augustus, the Roman legions were active in conquering new territories, especially in Europe, and in regularly winning glory for Rome (see illustration 13).This military activity served a number of purposes. It increased Augustus's power and influence greatly, assuring him the continued support of the army and of the Roman people. The more or less continual warfare provided the rationale for Augustus to maintain a large standing army that he could rely on in case any new leaders were to contest his supremacy. Newly conquered territories were lands upon which Augustus could settle veterans. And, of course, the conquests provided new tax revenues for him and his administration. He and his supporters took full advantage of the idea that Roman armies could conquer the whole world, though it is likely that at least on some level Augustus knew that the propaganda to that effect was misleading. In fact, his policy along the frontiers was to establish friendly and mutually beneficial relations with leaders of groups on the other side of Rome's provincial borders. This policy served to maintain some degree of peace along most of the frontiers and to create a buffer between the Roman lands and more distant peoples who might launch invasions into the rich provinces.
Augustus saw to it that the people of Rome were well cared for. Besides assuring consistent water and food supplies, he commissioned the numerous temples, statues, and other public works that demonstrated the power and wealth of the city and provided the people with visual reminders of Rome's glory and of the values he was trying to convey. He took special pains to emphasize the continuity of tradition from the Republic, with the celebration of religious rituals and public festivals that recreated the old Roman traditions. On January 11, 29 B. C., the doors to the temple ofJanus in the Roman Forum were closed, symbolizing that Rome was at peace for the first time in many decades. This image of tradition and peace was one that Augustus worked hard to maintain, though the idea that the whole Roman world was at peace at the time was an exaggeration. In 9 B. C., the Altar of Peace (Ara Pacis) was dedicated in Rome as an embodiment of the peace that he strived for throughout the empire. Its ornament included portraits of Augustus and his family, represented in ways that conveyed quasi-religious power and authority. Statues of the time, many of which were erected in Rome, represent Augustus as serious and focused, absorbed with his duties toward Rome. By now his enormous burial monument in the center of the city had been completed. It made an obvious statement about how important to Rome and its people he regarded himself.
The Emperor's Family Problems
In his later years, especially after 10 B. C., Augustus was much concerned with the question of what would happen to Rome after he died. Since his position and his entire career were anomalous for Rome, there existed no precedent. He had no legitimate sons. Augustus had hoped that either Gaius or Lucius, the sons of his daughter, Julia, might provide a successor. Augustus adopted them both. But the outlandish behavior of which Augustus accused his daughter in the year 2 B. C. almost destroyed his hopes that his grandsons would be considered suitable successors, as well as causing him acute embarrassment.
Although mentioned by many Roman writers, the episode is somewhat mysterious, because few details are provided. The facts appear to be as follows. In the latter part of the year 2, Augustus disowned and banished his only child, Julia, then thirty-seven years old, and publicly accused her of outrageous immoral behavior. She seems to have been charged with two main offenses—flagrantly enjoying the company of a series of lovers (while married to Tiberius, who was in self-imposed exile on the island of Rhodes at the time) and carousing repeatedly and openly in the Forum and other public places in the city, flaunting her contempt for her father's sense of decorum. Among the lovers who are named in the Roman texts are several men from prominent Roman families, and others are mentioned who were of no special note. Augustus sentenced one of these men, Iullus Antonius, to death; others he banished.
Julia's behavior particularly enraged Augustus, because he had worked hard to foster a return to what were perceived to be earlier traditions of moral uprightness in Roman society. He was a vehement advocate of what we would call family values. And his own daughter publicly and willfully violated the mores he was trying to reestablish.
Roman writers of the time and modern historians are divided in their interpretations of this episode. While it seems clear that Julia flagrantly challenged Augustus's program for moral regeneration for the city and behaved in the worst way possible for a daughter of the emperor, many observers believe that the harshness of the punishments Augustus meted out indicate that there was an important political aspect to the affair. Officially, Julia was banished, Iullus Antonius sentenced to death, and other of her lovers variously punished, because of their openly improper public behavior. But many commentators think that Julia and her associates were involved in a political conspiracy against Augustus and that his public outrage over the sexual indiscretions was a cover for his determination to eliminate the political threat. Several historians have suggested that Julius Antonius, a member of a socially and politically significant family, may have had ambitions to achieve power in Rome.
Another important aspect to the story is that Augustus always treated Julia mainly as a pawn in his political machinations. When she was born, Augustus immediately divorced her mother, Scribonia, because Julia was not a male who could succeed him as emperor. Augustus forced her into a series of engagements—first at the age of two to Mark Antony's five-year-old son, who died as a child—and marriages to men with whom Augustus wanted to ally himself. One was his close associate Agrippa, with whom she traveled to and lived in the Roman east. When he died, Augustus compelled her to marry Tiberius, who was already married but whom Augustus forced to divorce his wife. Later Augustus's main interest in Julia seems to have been that she was the mother of his only blood relatives who could be heirs—Gaius and Lucius, sons of his friend Agrippa. As the historian A. H. M. Jones has put it, given the way Augustus treated his daughter throughout her young life, "it is not surprising that Julia went off the rails."
The punishment was harsh. Augustus banished Julia to Pandateria, a small island about thirty-five miles off the coast west of Naples. After five years there, she was moved to Rhegium, at the southern end of the Italian peninsula, where she died ten years later of starvation. Augustus further ordered that she not be buried in the mausoleum intended for his family at Rome.
Appointed as legates—advisers to military commanders—by Augustus in order that they might gain practical experience as young men, Gaius and Lucius began at an early age to serve the Roman cause. But Lucius died at Massilia, in southern Gaul, in A. D. 2, while traveling from Italy to Spain, and Gaius was wounded in Armenia in the east and died in A. D. 4. Thus Augustus's greatest hopes for an heir related by blood were gone. In desperation to have a successor whom he designated, Augustus adopted Tiberius, forty-five or forty-six years old at the time, immediately following Gaius's death. He was an experienced soldier who had proven his leadership abilities.
The Rhine Frontier and Augustus's German Policy
Augustus's greatest military challenge in the latter part of his life and the greatest military disaster of his career were to happen in the frontier regions on the Rhine. After Caesar's conquest of Gaul, completed in 51 B. C., written accounts about Gaul are relatively few (see chapter 7). Roman writers were occupied with the events of the civil wars that raged in Italy As Augustus assumed near-absolute power in 27 B. C., he decided that the security and prosperity of Rome depended upon expanding the Empire's borders. Around 20 B. C., Gaul enters the Roman historical record again. In 20-19, Agrippa, Augustus's principal assistant for military affairs, was busy organizing the Roman road network and making other improvements in Gaul. According to written accounts, in the year 16, after capturing and executing a contingent of Roman soldiers east of the Rhine, a raiding party made up of members of the Sugambri, Usipetes, and Tencteri tribes crossed the river and attacked a Roman cavalry unit. Pursuing the fleeing troops, these invaders unexpectedly encountered the Fifth Legion, under the command of Marcus Lollius. The invaders defeated the legion and captured its eagle standard. This ignominious loss was among the events that made Augustus decide to go to Gaul to reorganize the Roman military there and to prepare Rhineland-based troops for campaigns into Germanic territory A subsequent advance by Lollius and his forces, together with the impending arrival of Augustus, caused the invaders to recross the Rhine back to their homelands and to sue for peace with Rome.
Augustus remained in Gaul, the Rhineland, and Spain from 16 to 13 B. C., overseeing the reorganization of these territories and preparing for the upcoming campaigns. His adopted son, and later emperor, Tiberius accompanied him in Gaul to assist in these projects. At this time, Augustus established a mint at Lyon (Lugdunum), in Gaul, to provide a means of coining money to pay the troops, organized a census for collection of taxes in Gaul, and directed the establishment of military bases on the west bank of the Rhine (see chapter 5).
During these same years, the generals Tiberius and Drusus, sons of his wife Livia, undertook the conquest of the Alpine tribes and the region between the Alps and the Danube, and they completed these conquests in 15 B. C. (see chapter 7).Three years later, the offensive against the Germanic peoples east of the middle and lower Rhine began in earnest, first led by Drusus, who pushed all the way eastward to the Elbe River and erected an altar there dedicated to his stepfather, the emperor. But this campaign, like others after it, while achieving successful passage of Roman troops through Germanic territory, did not conquer the peoples that inhabited it. Unlike the Gauls, whom Caesar conquered in 58-51 B. C., these Germanic tribal peoples had no major centers that they defended and that the Romans could make the focus of their attacks. This enemy was more mobile and flexible, and more difficult to defeat with Rome's military tactics. After Drusus's death, in 9 B. C., from injuries suffered when he fell from his horse while on campaign in Germany, his older brother, Tiberius, took over command of the Rhine forces.
Augustus's aims in these eastward campaigns are much debated today. The idea that Rome aspired to total conquest of the known world is discarded by many investigators. They argue that Augustus would have understood the impossibility of conquering and maintaining control over the vast lands, known to the Romans, east of the Rhine, to the north in Scandinavia, and to the northwest in Britain. More likely, Augustus maintained the political fiction of aiming at world domination, while realizing that such a goal was neither possible nor desirable.
After his return in 13 B. C., Augustus never again left Italy on a military mission. Between 6 B. C. and A. D. 4, Roman armies conducted a series of campaigns across the Rhine, many of them successful, but others marred by defeats and rebellions (see chapter 7). In A. D. 6, a time of many uprisings among the peoples Rome was trying to subdue east of the Rhine, the Roman armies, in concert with some Germanic military forces who were allied with them, had succeeded in isolating the eastern
Germanic leader Maroboduus in what was later Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic. These allied armies were ready to attack simultaneously from the Rhineland in the west and from the Danube region in the south. But then in A. D. 6 a rebellion broke out in Pannonia (roughly contiguous with modern Hungary and parts of Austria and Slovenia) and Dalmatia (roughly modern Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina). Tiberius had to quickly change plans to put down the uprising, and he was occupied there until A. D. 9 (see chapter 6). That year Tiberius, together with Drusus's son Germanicus, returned to Rome to great jubilation and honor after their successes in Pannonia. But before all of the celebrations were complete, news arrived that the Roman general Publius Quinctilius Varus, recently appointed Augustus's governor to manage affairs east of the Rhine, had led his troops into a catastrophic trap.
Augustus, already seventy-two years old, never recovered from the shock of this disaster. His daughter's acutely embarrassing misbehavior, the deaths of his grandsons, and the large and bloody uprising in Pannonia and Dalmatia had all caused him tremendous upset and disappointment, and the Teutoburg Forest defeat was the final blow to his spirit. In A. D. 13,Augustus named Tiberius his co-emperor, and effectively dropped out of active public life. In a statement that he had written to be read after his death, Augustus told Tiberius not to attempt any more conquests in the regions east of the Rhine. Augustus died August 19 in A. D. 14 in Nola, in Campania, 120 miles southeast of Rome.
World History
