Augustus (41 page)

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 eighteen-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.

Egnatius’ candidature for the consulship was blocked, but this was not the end of the story, for he was soon arrested, tried, condemned, and executed for plotting to assassinate Augustus. Whether there was any truth in this is unknown, but it would not be surprising if the authorities decided to eliminate a great nuisance by inventing a capital charge. Augustus put an end to further agitation and speculation by nominating a second consul for the year.

The
princeps
had devoted much of the previous decade to the provinces. On his return to Rome in 19
B.C.
, he turned his mind to domestic affairs. In the first place, the constitutional settlement needed some further adjustment. He had to find some means of calming public opinion, which remained hostile to the Senate. Also, there were a couple of aspects of a consul’s
imperium
that neither Augustus’
tribunicia potestas
nor his
imperium proconsulare
covered.

First, he held no
imperium
specific to Italy, and consequently had no authority to command troops on Italian soil. This was awkward, because after Julius Caesar’s death both Antony and the then Octavian formed large bodyguards, the
cohortes praetoriae
that we know as Praetorian Guards. After Actium, Octavian retained his cohorts to act as a peacetime security force and stationed them in and around Rome. There were nine cohorts in all, amounting to a maximum of 5,400 men. It was time that the control of these soldiers was placed on a proper footing.

Second, Augustus did not have first place—at least, not officially—in the conduct of senatorial business. A consul had the right to be the first to propose legislation or to speak on a given topic, so the
princeps
was obliged to wait his turn. This was inconvenient, and might also be embarrassing, if senators did not receive a cue about Augustus’ wishes at the beginning of a debate.

So in 19
B.C.
some form of consular
imperium
was conferred on the
princeps
although he did not actually have to hold consular office (following the same principle as with
tribunicia potestas
). The ancient sources disagree on, and are unclear about, the precise nature of this authority or the term for which it was awarded. It may be that Augustus’ proconsular
imperium,
granted for ten-year periods and renewed, was simply extended to include Rome and Italy. A certain vagueness at the time may have suited all sides. Whatever form it was couched in, though, this new power completed Augustus’ political mastery of the state.

It is possible to guess at the shape of an unstated concordat from what actually happened in the coming years. A generation of
nobiles
had been drastically thinned out during the civil wars by death in battle or by proscription, but now their children had grown up; if, as they were told, the Republic had been restored, they expected to have the same access to the consulship (and other senior posts) that their fathers had had. It was, they knew, their birthright. For the next five years or so, the consular lists are crowded with old republican names—Cornelius Lentulus, Licinius Crassus, Calpurnius Piso, Livius Drusus.

During the triumvirate, a new custom had come into being whereby consuls served only for part of the year and were regularly replaced by one or more “suffect” consuls. Although this was a useful and cheap means of rewarding loyalty and producing proconsuls to help govern the empire, it also devalued both the splendor of the office and its executive effectiveness. Augustus more or less eliminated suffects; most consuls now served for an entire term, so regaining much of their prestige.

For a time, we do not hear of popular agitation and riots in the streets. This may be explained by the gaps in our inadequate surviving sources, but it does appear that the role of the people in political life declined from this point on. They still elected officeholders, but candidates were nominated or preapproved by the
princeps,
presumably after informal consultations with the interested parties.

All of this suggests an arrangement out of which everyone got something. His added consular authority completed Augustus’ hold on power and convinced a suspicious Roman public that he was genuinely in charge of the state. By contrast the
nobiles
welcomed their return to the consulship, and were grateful to Augustus for his efforts to restore their ancient
dignitas
.

Augustus was a reformer who liked to move forward at a snail’s pace. In many aspects of his administration, change and innovation proceeded step by step over many years.

Time and again, he did his best to improve the functioning of the Senate, which, together with the people, remained the legal source of authority in the state. Rather than appoint more censors, the
princeps
decided in 18
B.C.
to use his new consular authority to act as a censor himself (as he and Agrippa had done in 28
B.C.
) and review the membership of the Senate. He raised the minimum wealth of a senator from 400,000 to 1 million sesterces, a substantial sum of money. This set a significant distance between the senatorial and the equestrian orders, and helped to create a distinct senatorial class. Birth as well as property became a qualification. In the days of the Republic only senators could lay claim to senatorial status, but from now on sons of senators acquired the status as of right, while others were obliged to apply for it.

As the
princeps
had discovered ten years previously, cleansing the Senate of its reprobates was a tricky and unpopular exercise. His dream was to reduce it to three hundred members, which would make it a much more effective legislative body. He devised an ingenious scheme, which was intended to achieve his objective with the least possible blame attaching to him.

He selected thirty senators, each of whom was then to choose a further five. Each group of five would choose one of its number by lot, who would become a senator. This man would repeat the process, which was to continue until three hundred senators had been found. The scheme being too clever by half, various malpractices developed, the proceedings ground to a confused halt, and Augustus was obliged to take over the selection himself. He ended up by creating a Senate of six hundred members and seriously annoying a large number of people. In compensation, he gave various privileges to those who had been expelled. They were allowed to stand for election to the various offices of state; in due course most of them returned to the Senate.

The exercise had been an almost complete waste of time and energy. For all his
auctoritas,
his
dignitas,
and his
imperium,
the
princeps
knew that he touched the Senate, the heartland of the republican idea, at his peril. He also knew when to admit defeat. There was always time, and he could return to the subject in the future.

So the Senate remained a somewhat unsatisfactory institution. Augustus always treated it with great respect and took trouble to consult it. He encouraged freedom of expression and his speeches were often interrupted by remarks such as “I don’t understand that!” or “I’d dispute that if I had the chance!” However, its members did not take their responsibilities as seriously as he would have wished. In 17
B.C.,
fines for nonattendance were increased and quorums were set for certain classes of business.

Sometime between 27 and 18
B.C.
, the
princeps
took a step aimed at expediting decision-making, which recognized the difficulty that any deliberative body has in agreeing on clear-cut actions. He set up a senatorial standing committee, which consisted of himself, one or both consuls, one each from the quaestors, aediles, and praetors, and fifteen other senators chosen by lot. Some members changed every six months and the whole committee once a year, except for the
princeps
. Its task was to prepare business for full sessions of the Senate.

A group of twenty-one is still rather too large to be efficiently executive, and the rapid turnover must have prevented it from building a collective esprit de corps or devising long-term policies. This was probably as the
princeps
intended, for he reserved strategic planning to himself and a small, informal group of advisers, the
amici Caesaris,
“Caesar’s friends.” The standing committee’s job must mainly have been to receive and discuss already prepared positions, and to act as a sounding board of senatorial opinion. It probably worked by consensus and guided discussion in the full Senate.