Octavian’s immediate aim in 29 Bc, when he arrived back in Rome, was to play down any fears among senators that he might be a military dictator. He had soon disbanded over 100,000 men and discharged them with land bought out of his own wealth, notably from the treasury of Egypt that he had appropriated for himself. It was a shrewd move as it bound the veterans directly to him and at the same time avoided the need for new taxes or confiscations of land. It was not until ad 6 that Octavian transferred responsibility for paying for the discharge of soldiers to the state. The smooth execution of the policy stands out as an accomplished act of administration in itself. A more manageable peacetime army of twenty-eight legions, probably 150,000 men, remained and with some fluctuations this was to remain the standard size of the army for most of the next century. Then, in 28 bc, as if closing the door on the many brutal events which had brought him to power, Octavian issued an edict declaring an amnesty and an annulment of any unjust orders he had given during the wars. A coin struck in 28 bc confirms his approach. One side shows Octavian, as he still was, crowned with a laurel wreath and the words ‘Imper-ator Caesar, son of the divine, consul for the sixth time’ The other shows him as a magistrate in civilian toga with the legend: ‘He revived the rights and laws of the Roman people’ The ambitious upstart, still only 34 years old, was already creating a new role for himself as senior statesman.
Octavian’s opening initiative in January 27 was a surprising one, made with the support of his close advisers. He proclaimed that it was now safe to restore the republic and that he would surrender all the powers he held back to the senate. He was, in effect, asking the body to resume its traditional role. It was an astute move. The senators knew, as did Octavian, that they could not keep order without him and that they would have to offer him something back. An elaborate game followed in which both sides pretended to be acting according to republican precedents while at the same time powers were transferred, temporarily it seemed at first but, as it turned out, permanently, into Octavian’s hands. Following the precedent by which Pompey had been given a command in Spain without actually having to go there, Octavian was offered the administration of the provinces of Syria, Cilicia, Cyprus, Gaul, and Spain for ten years. It was in these provinces that the bulk of the remaining legions were now stationed. Octavian was thus being tacitly confirmed as the supreme military commander. The remaining provinces were to be administered, as they had been under the republic, by senators selected by lot. A few days later came the grant of a new name, Augustus, the name by which Octavian became known through history. It was a highly emotive word evoking both dignity and piety and its adoption by Octavian added powerfully to his aura. More significantly, however, Octavian remained consul, his position renewed from year to year until 23 bc. In this case he was certainly breaking with republican tradition and risked alienating those senators who would normally have sought the post for themselves.
Now confident of his position, Augustus spent the next three years away from Rome, campaigning in Spain and Gaul, but by 23 he was back in Rome where at the beginning of the year he fell seriously ill. One result was that in July he surrendered the post of consul. This proved a wise move. It released Augustus from a heavy administrative burden and opened the post again to ambitious senators. (It became the custom after this to elect several consuls a year, thus allowing the honour of the post to be shared more widely.) In return Augustus was given imperium maius, ‘greater proconsular power, which gave him greater authority than other proconsuls. Unlike traditional proconsular power it did not lapse when he entered the city of Rome.
As important was the grant of the powers of a tribune. Augustus may have been given individual tribunician powers earlier (there is some scholarly dispute on what specific powers and when) but now all these were consolidated. Like any tribune he could summon the senate and the concilium, propose measures to them, and veto any business he disapproved of. He could be appealed to by any citizen and like any magistrate had the right to insist on his orders being obeyed. The grant of full trib-unician powers proclaimed Augustus as guardian of the people’s rights. The years that followed showed that he retained enormous popularity with the people of Rome. When he gave up the consulship, the crowds mistook the move as an abdication of power to the senate and rioted. Between 22 and 18 Bc Augustus had to take on a variety of roles, including some of the powers of censor, to placate them. The most useful was that of supervising grain supplies, a position held by Pompey in the 50s. Public order in Rome, and thus the survival of the emperor, was so dependent on efficient distribution of food that this became a responsibility taken on by all subsequent emperors.
By 17 BC there was a feeling that stability had returned and the Ludi Saeculares, games traditionally celebrated, according to a Sybilline prophecy, every 110 years to commemorate relief from national danger, were held with great ceremony in Rome. A series of sacrifices were carried out over three days and nights, accompanied by games and theatrical presentations. They were followed by more honours for Augustus. He had shown immense respect for the traditional religious life of Rome, commissioning images of himself at prayer or veiled for sacrifice, and in 12 BC he became pontifex maximus, the official head of the priesthood. (It was characteristic of Augustus’ continuing sensitivity that he allowed the former pontifex, Lepidus, to die before taking the post.) His new status was celebrated by one of the most fascinating complexes of Augustan Rome, a giant sundial, parts of which have now been rediscovered.
The model for the dial appears to have taken from Egyptian examples and at the centre there was indeed an obelisk from Egypt that served as the needle. (The obelisk, from the reign of Psammetichus II, see earlier p. 103, has been found and now stands in the Piazza Montecitorio.) The whole complex was designed so that on the date of Augustus’ birth the tip of the shadow from the obelisk pointed towards another celebrated building of Augustan Rome, the Ara Pacis, the Altar of Peace. This great altar, fragments of which were only rediscovered in the nineteenth century (with most of it excavated in the 1930s under the patronage of Mussolini), had been commissioned earlier by the senate (in 13 Bc) to welcome Augustus back from campaigns in Gaul and Spain. The imperial family, including Augustus and his grandchildren, are seen in procession on their way to sacrifice. The altar is important in showing how the senate was by now prepared to accept Augustus and his family as a ‘first family’ that had been fully integrated into the religious and political life of Rome. As with all the finest Roman sculpture, it was the work of imported Greek craftsmen and echoes the serenity of Classical art, which Augustus preferred to the more ornate Hellenistic styles.
The responsibility of providing a model of family life was one that Augustus took seriously (although the means by which he had acquired Livia were scarcely praiseworthy). He seems to have been reacting against the breakdown of family life among the elite in the late republic. Adultery was made a criminal offence in 18 bc, though in effect only for women. A husband was supposed to reveal his wife’s infidelities and then prosecute her. If he failed to do so he could himself be prosecuted for living off immoral earnings. Any outsider could also report adulteries and the law thus gave informers a field day. Augustus also encouraged marriage, rewarding those who had children and restricting the rights of inheritance of those who had not. His motive here must have been to restore the breeding-stock of upper-class families that had been so depleted by the civil wars.
The final honour given to Augustus was the one that he himself said meant most to him, the title Pater Patriae, ‘Father of the Fatherland’. It came on the initiative of the crowds who forced the request on the senate in 2 bc. It was said that the normally restrained Augustus was in tears as he received the title.
Augustus’ formal powers were rooted in republican precedent and there was the knowledge that they had been granted freely to him by the senate and the people of Rome. In combination and duration they extended beyond anything known in the republic. Added to them was his own auctoritas, that indefinable charisma and authority that enabled Augustus to achieve so much without having to rely on his formal powers. In effect he controlled the business of government. He could influence elections to the magistracies and supervise the governors of even the senate’s provinces. He was commander of all the empire’s armies. There was no longer any independent centre of decision-making and, almost without realizing it, the senators had surrendered their traditional role as the dominant force in Roman political life. Henceforth, the princeps, first citizen, the title Augustus preferred for himself, was the focus for all political activity. (Princeps was a form of honorary title without specific powers, a forerunner of the later Duce or Fuhrer.)
Whatever the realities of his power, Augustus remained scrupulous in his dealings with senators. He knew the importance they attached to being addressed correctly and how much they appreciated his attending their family celebrations. He boosted the dignity of the body by expelling its more dissolute members and insisting on good birth, respectable wealth (a minimum sum of a million sestertii, a purely nominal amount for many grandees), and integrity. Numbers were reduced to 600 but, in accordance with republican traditions, senators continued to fill almost all the senior posts in the empire, including the governorships of the provinces and the commands of the legions. In any public proclamation in which the senate had been involved, Augustus was always careful to stress their role. Egypt was excluded from all this. The province was treated as the personal conquest of Augustus, and was the source of much of his personal wealth. No senator was allowed to visit the province without the express permission of the emperor and it was governed on his behalf by an equestrian.
Augustus was also sensitive in the use of his formal powers. One decree sent to Cyrene in 7 bc is typical. It gave orders that were effective only ‘until the senate deliberates about this or I myself find a better solution. It gradually became common practice, however, for Augustus to write directly to governors, and soon the cities and provinces themselves began bypassing the senate and appealing directly to him. This was quite natural for petitioners in the eastern provinces who had become used over centuries to appealing to monarchs when things needed to be done. Augustus was also integrated into local ruler cults and became the focus of their prayers. In Egypt his statues were placed in the temples as those of the pharaohs and Ptolemies had been in the centuries before.
In the west of the empire, where there was no tradition of monarchical rule, the imperial cult was a more artificial creation, often established through an imposing temple. A temple to Rome and Augustus was consecrated in Lugdunum (Lyon), the administrative capital of Gaul, in 12 bc for instance, and others were to be found elsewhere. The well-preserved Maison Carree at Nimes in France was dedicated by the emperor to the memory of two of his adopted grandsons who he had hoped would succeed him.
As seen in Chapter 20, the Hellenistic monarchs had traditionally made their capitals, Alexandria and Pergamum, for instance, showpieces of their rule. In Rome Augustus followed their example. During the years of political breakdown in the first century bc the city had fallen into decay. (The poet Horace claimed that the gods had unleashed the civil wars on Rome as revenge for the neglect of their temples.) Caesar had attempted to build a new forum for the capital and characteristically it was this that Augustus finished first when he returned to Rome. (Augustus never forgot that it was his divine heritage that had given him entry into Roman politics.) Next, according to his boast in the Res Gestae, the record of his achievements that he had inscribed on the great Mausoleum he had built for himself and his family (see further below), he set to work to restore eighty-two temples. It was only then that he began on his own work, the Forum Augustum, dominated by the great temple of Mars Ultor, the god of war portrayed as the avenger of his adoptive father’s death. It was dedicated in 2 bc and became a focus for the military achievements of the empire. The standards brought back from Parthia were displayed here and the senate met in the Forum when it was about to declare war. (A large part of this Forum, including its entrance, still lies under the Via dei Fori Imperiali unexcavated.)
Augustus’ efforts were augmented by his lifelong friend Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, who carried out the building of the original Pantheon (see below, pp. 537-8) and the construction of the first great city baths. By Augustus’ death much of central Rome had been filled with new building and what was a city of brick had become, in another of his boasts, ‘a city of marble’. The buildings, statues, and decorations of the city were carefully designed to project the image of a new revived Rome, proud of its past and its reputation as a world conqueror. In the Forum
Augustum the history of Rome was flaunted in the form of two rows of statues, one proclaiming the ancestors of Augustus back to Aeneas, the other great figures from the Republic including Romulus. The porticos that sheltered these statues enclosed Augustus himself whose victories were inscribed under a great quadriga, a triumphal four-horse chariot erected in the Forum’s centre. (Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, Ann Arbor, 1988, is the classic introduction to the use of art as propaganda by Augustus.)
These were not the only images through which Augustus projected himself. In 1863, a superb statue of Augustus was found in the villa at Prima Porta outside Rome where Augustus’ wife Livia had retired after his death. The Prima Porta statue is not the original, which would have been cast in bronze, probably soon after 20 Bc, but a marble copy of a few years later which Livia may have had made for herself, or certainly wished to keep after her husband’s death. Augustus is shown as imperator, in military dress with his right hand raised as if addressing troops and celebrating victory—in this case over the Parthians (see further below). He is youthful, in an image he had adopted for his statues soon after 27. It was a break with the Roman tradition of showing statesmen as middle-aged or older and Augustus’ face is idealized in a way that was common in the Greek Classical period. (The earlier tradition of Roman republican sculpture had been one of ‘warts and all’.) The carefully composed body also echoes fifth-century BC ideals of symmetry as advocated by Polycleitos (see earlier, p. 246). Then there are hints of a divine ancestry, Eros, the son of Venus, is shown on a dolphin at his feet and these are, remarkably in view of the cuirass and military attire that Augustus wears, bare, always a symbol of heroic or divine status.
The title Pater Patriae reflected Augustus’ supremacy not only in Rome but in Italy. A period of stability was desperately needed to unify the peninsula. Control of the peninsula from Rome still remained comparatively weak in a country where local loyalties had always been strong. Italy had suffered heavily in the first century, in the civil wars and endless confiscations of land as rival commanders attempted to settle their veterans. In the latest civil wars no less than sixteen major towns had been razed to the ground. Cisalpine Gaul had been formally integrated into Italy only in 42 BC and in the south the Greek cities still retained their own cultures. In his great building programme Augustus looked beyond Rome to the rest of Italy. He repaired roads and bridges, notably the important Via Flaminia that ran from Rome to Ariminum (modern Rimini), improved the security of travel by setting up guard posts along the main routes, and encouraged the building or reconstruction of towns. Many of the new towns, among them Aosta and Turin, were built to consolidate Roman control over the rich plain of the Po and they retained the atmosphere of frontier towns in an area still perceived to be vulnerable to attack from the north.
Augustus himself never forgot his own provincial roots and he was determined to integrate the wealthier Italian families into the government of Rome, not only to use talent more effectively but also to dilute the power of the Roman aristocracy. Italians were now welcome in the capital either as aspiring senators or as equestrians who could be given administrative jobs. The army proved another unifying force in the peninsula. The legions could only recruit from among citizens and in this period this meant mostly from Italy and overseas citizen colonies. The Celtic tribes of the north proved one of the best recruiting grounds and army service was an excellent way of integrating them into the Roman way of life. Meanwhile in the countryside the end of conflict brought new prosperity. Probably no part of the empire benefited from Augustus’ reign as much as Italy. One of the most common themes in the works of Horace and Virgil is the peace and fruitfulness of the land now order had been restored. Stability also allowed the continued spread of Latin, which acted as a lingua franca among the local languages of the peninsula and gradually displaced many of them.
Augustus realized the importance of establishing a professional army loyal to the state with formal conditions of service and arrangements for discharge. In 13 Bc the normal period of legionary service was set at sixteen years, with annual pay of 900 sestertii. In ad 5 it was raised to twenty years with a discharge payment of some 12,000 sestertii. Increasingly it was a sum such as this rather than land that became the standard payout. From ad 6 the cost of this was borne by a military treasury. Augustus paid in 170 million sestertii of his own money to get it established and it was then maintained by a 5 per cent inheritance tax on all citizens and a 1 per cent sales tax. As support to the legions Augustus formalized the setting up of auxiliary units raised in the provinces from non-citizens. In most cases they drew on local military traditions and skills such as archery or horsemanship. To provide an incentive to serve, citizenship was granted to auxiliaries and their families when they retired.
An elite group among the legionaries was the Praetorian Guard. Under the republic, generals such as Marius, Caesar, and Antony had raised their own bodyguards but Augustus established a more formal and permanent unit of nine cohorts each of six centuries, about 5,400 men in all. Three of the cohorts were stationed in Rome, the other six in surrounding towns. They were commanded by equestrian Praetorian Prefects. The Guard had higher wages than legionaries, 3,000 sestertii a year, and had only to serve sixteen years. As the only first-class fighting force in the vicinity of Rome their role was to become crucial at times of instability, such as when an emperor died and there was no obvious successor. Their normal duties included accompanying the emperor both in Rome and when he was on campaign and on occasions keeping order in the city itself.
World History
