The Classical World (64 page)

When he returned to Rome in 29, the obvious first move was celebration. In mid-August Octavian held a magnificent triple triumph for three victories, those in 35–33, the win at Actium and the follow-up in Egypt. Gladiatorial shows accompanied it, always a great attraction for the people, together with magnificent gifts of money to each member of the Roman plebs and two and a half times as much to each discharged soldier. All around them grand new monuments were being built in the city, arising from Octavian–Caesar’s personal exploits. His own Mausoleum was alreadyunder construction, a type of building which Hadrian would later imitate. A great temple to the Deified Julius Caesar was being finished in 29, and a huge new temple was being finished on the Palatine hill beside his house. In October 28 it would be dedicated to Apollo, his patron-god at Actium. A big arch to commemorate Actium was begun in the Forum, where columns were to be made of bronze from the prows of Cleopatra’s ships. The face of Rome was being changed by its despot’s career, but he could not continue in this personal style on the path of his adopted father. Prolonged dictatorship, ‘kingship’ or cult as a god inside Rome would be fatal. Although many of the great families of the Republic had been diminished in the Civil Wars, they had not died out. Members of them were among the senators of the moment and would be the provincial army-commanders of the future, yet some of them had hoped with Cicero for a restored Republic as recently as spring 43
BC
. They had to be reconciled to a new ‘order’. It was a mixed blessing that house prices were rising sharply in Rome, propelled by the spending of the captive spoils from Egypt.

Peace, at least, was a blessing, and it came at an apt moment. Since the 50s
BC
a new confidence had been spreading in many areas of intellectual life at Rome, as if Romans could at last measure up to the feats of the Greeks. After so much civil war, there were hopes for a return from armyservice to ‘life on the land’. After all the devastation,
there was a pride in the special qualities of Italy, potentially such a blessed country. Augustus’ scholarly freedman, Hyginus, would even write a book on the origins and sites of Italian cities. In 30/29
BC
these themes came together in Virgil’s marvellous poem, the
Georgics
. The ‘best poem by the best poet’ combined praises of Italy and country living with tributes (often playful) to the new Caesar. A virtuoso ending blended Greek myths into a new, entrancing whole. As such a poem proves, there was hope and also confidence after so much terror. It was up to the new ‘Caesar’ to harness them, for they underlie what he was to make into a classicizing age.

In 28
BC
Octavian and his loyal ‘new man’ Agrippa began the process by holding the consulship together. A newly found gold coin, struck in this very year, shows Octavian seated on his chair of office, holding a scroll: the caption refers to the Restoration of Laws and Rights to the Roman People.
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The triumvirate, therefore, was regarded as illegal and the law courts and elections, by implication, could now function normally. The swollen number of senators was reduced; the public Treasury was put back on its feet, an ‘urban praetor’ was appointed (to see to regular justice again in Rome) and by the end of the year, the illegal acts of the triumvirs were to be cancelled. Looted treasures were also to be returned to their temples. Meanwhile, military prowess caught the headlines. Three separate commanders celebrated personal triumphs in Rome during the summer, and it was as well that games to commemorate Actium could follow from the unmilitary ‘Caesar’s’ own corner in September. Much more awkwardly, one of the most distinguished surviving noblemen, Licinius Crassus, claimed the highest and rarest of military honours for the feat of slaying an enemy in single combat. It was not exactly a feat which timid ‘Caesar’ could match, and so Crassus’ request was refused. He had a fair case, but Octavian denied him with a feeble lie about past history.
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Nonetheless, the ‘restoration’ continued into the following year. Again, Octavian was consul and on 13 January 27
BC
he raised in the Senate the traditional question of the allotment of provinces to the consuls. One answer, no doubt prearranged, was to offer him them all. A few days later he kindly accepted not all but many, including the important trio of Gaul, Spain and Syria, together with others
which had most of the main armies. He would govern them for ‘up to ten years’. He was also offered a new, solemn name: Augustus (Romulus was said to have been suggested, but Romulus had had his darker sides, including the murder of his brother and his death, on one view, at the hands of his own senators). An honorary wreath of oak-leaves was voted to adorn the entry to the new Augustus’ house and an honorific shield proclaimed, and therefore defined, his special ‘virtues’. Nearly twenty years before, Cicero had picked out similar virtues when pleading before Julius Caesar: valour, clemency, justice and piety.
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It was not that Octavian had necessarily read Cicero’s speech, although Atticus could have lent it to him, but these virtues had entered the ‘climate of opinion’. There were precedents of a sort for his new command in the enlarged commands for the likes of Pompey under the Republic. At first, many senators may genuinely have thought of it all as restoration, especially as the other provinces were being restored to the ‘people’ as ‘public’. Augustus then left Rome for Gaul with talk of a trip to Britain. In fact, he contented himself with a nearer edge of the world, the coast of north-west Spain (Finisterre, ‘Land’s End’). Perhaps not everybody expected that he would continue to be consul in the following years, but if so, he could point out that he was continuing to fight wars. In the summer of 27, in his absence, Licinius Crassus could enjoya triumph, at least, in the city: Augustus could not deny him that honour, too, but he personally did not have to witness it on 4 July.

Despite the changed presentation, Augustus’s power-base remained unchanged: like Julius Caesar the Dictator’s, it was still the army, the favour of Rome’s common people and a vast personal fortune. When millions of Rome’s subjects abroad were looking to him as a sort of king, and many could not even have spelled a complicated word like
imperium
, why did the careful re-presentation of his power at Rome matter? It did not matter much to most of the leading families in Italy’s towns. The ‘Roman constitution’ had never been high on their list of concerns and many of their leaders were now ‘new men’ who had profited mightily from the killings and proscriptions of the late 40s, the very opposite of true republican liberty. What they wanted now was peace and the absence of armies and militarysettlers tramping over their property. As for the people of Rome, their main concern
was that somebody would feed them and attend to their security, which the Senate historically would not do. Security, however, is not the same as liberty. Rather, the important constituency for the ‘restoration’ was senatorial opinion, on which the supply of army-commanders, Augustus’ personal safety and his legitimacydepended. Augustus’ tricks here included the modern art of airing a very extreme proposal, only (mercifully) to accept something slightly less extreme. He also kept a simple profile, accessible, low-key and civil. In so many ways, he epitomized ordinariness.

Not that his position was secure. In 26 an attempt to attend to the potential problems of the ‘urban mob’ by appointing a Prefect of the City collapsed within seven days, no doubt through traditionalist senators’ protests: there were precedents for such a job, but only if both consuls, not one, were away from Rome. In Spain, Augustus’ health then went badly wrong and in the Balkans, a delicate manoeuvre went wrong too. In 24 (probably) the governor of Macedonia, a ‘public province’, was moved to wage war outside its boundaries. Revealingly, this illegal war had as its target a people whom the great Licinius Crassus had gained as ‘clients’ by his recent military prowess.
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The action was illegal (only the Roman people had the right to make war or peace) and Augustus’ tacit encouragement was suspected: it was too tempting an opportunity, a snub to Crassus yet again. Worse, there were suspicions that Augustus’ young nephew, Marcellus, had urged on the offending governor. Marcellus had begun to enjoy an accelerated public career with Augustus’ backing, but his advancement was not uncontroversial and, on any view, he had absolutely no business to be involved in such an order. Augustus was seriouslyill, but he could see scandal coming. The year 23 began with a non-partisan noble as consul; in the spring there were real fears that Augustus would die.

The surrounding chronologyis still disputed, but certainlyon 1 July 23 Augustus ceremonially resigned his consulship. Instead, he took a new card, the powers of a tribune but detached from the popular office of tribune itself. The consulship could then be opened up to senatorial competitors to their satisfaction. The first holder of the honour was another non-Augustan, a man, however, whom Horace teased for his taste in slave-boys. Augustus also received the power of
an ex-consul, made greater than the power of all provincial governors (he had lost this power by surrendering the consulship). Other specific powers were voted to him to ‘legalize’ his dealings with the Senate and people, but he could not stop the Balkan scandal playing itself out. It was arguably in early 22 that the offending governor in Macedonia was finallyput on trial in Rome. In defence, he cited the advice ‘now of Augustus, now of Marcellus’. It was a dreadful moment, making a nonsense of Augustus’ professed ‘Republic’. Augustus appeared unexpectedly in court, but let down the defendant and his defending lawyer by his answers. He was then confronted with a serious plot against his life, which was shared in by the defence lawyer whom he had betrayed. The conspirators were killed off: an informer was thoroughly rewarded. It was a real crisis.
⁸

During these months Augustus might have been killed and the Republic could have been restored in earnest. Things were still very fragile. However, Augustus’ new bundle of powers was certainly not a retreat from his previous legal position. Instead, they made different strengths in his power-base more prominent. The tribune’s power evoked his special relations with Rome’s plebs (including his power to propose laws), while his proconsular power kept him connected with the standing armies in his many provinces. It was ‘greater’ than that of other proconsuls, like the power voted to Pompey to cope with the grain crises of 57
BC
: ironically, the Liberators (in 43 bc) had been voted the same. These powers would represent the two pillars of a Roman emperor’s position for centuries. Perhaps Augustus had also been thinking during his sickness of ensuring a successor. It would be easier to give someone these powers, which were detached from any need to be elected to office. But he had also surely been planning the change for his own immediate ends in the face of a crisis which was already brewing. In the storm he would enact a shrewd withdrawal, not from his power-base, but from centre stage. The senators could have back the consulships (it would be hard for him to go on monopolizing them any way in an age of ‘peace’), but they would then learn the hard way that he was indispensable at Rome.

The sequel was severe disorder in the city. A plague, no doubt, was unforeseeable, but a severe grain shortage usefully caused Augustus to be begged to intervene: he settled it (having provoked it?) in ten
days. He then left the city and went off to deal slowly with the question of Parthia in the East. In his absence, the people refused to elect two consuls for 21
BC
. A constitutional impasse threatened. By 19, still in his absence, a new champion of the people’s interests, Egnatius Rufus, had emerged in Rome and had to be stopped from running directly for the consulship by the ‘ultimate decree’, passed by the Senate and enforced by the sole consul in office. By 19 there was a continuing crisis in the city which only Augustus could solve: like Pompey in 52, he had become indispensable.

In 19
BC
envoys from Rome went out to him, finding him in Greece and persuading him to nominate a new consul (he chose a noble). Augustus then returned to Italy, to his villa near Naples, where he arrived, apparently quietly, in midsummer. At Rome, an embassy of the consuls, magistrates and leading citizens was duly dispatched to meet with him. It was a cardinal moment, a further capitulation by Rome’s upper orders. Augustus did not want a triumph or a big daytime welcome, but before he entered Rome again details in his formal powers did need to be sorted out. His formal power was probably able to run inside Rome already, but henceforward it was to be made visible to onlookers bybeing accompanied with the formal insignia of office. Manifestly, he would be seen to combine the popular powers of a tribune with his power of command greater than all consuls and ex-consuls. The ambiguity between ‘Senate’ and ‘people’ in so much of the history of the Republic was now to be seen to be resolved in one man’s hands, at the request of both parties.

Instead of a triumph, Augustus opted for an altar to ‘Fortune, the bringer-back’. It was false modesty, because there was no luck about his return. A separate festival, in October, was to be held just outside the city; more realistically, it was called the ‘Augustalia’ and became an annual event. One spectator, however, was absent: the poet Virgil whom Augustus had brought back, a sick man, from Greece. He had died in Naples, but his great epic poem, the
Aeneid
, was almost complete. It already contained lines on the official view of the past, on the decadence of Antony, the Egyptian queen (never named personally), her dreadful gods and the saving of Roman values by the victor. Yet its view of its hero, Rome’s founding father Aeneas, was more delicately shaded. If it had all been written thirty years later, there
would have been even more pressure on Virgil to make Augustus’ own deeds explicit. As the poem stood, it told future Romans to ‘remember’ that it was their role to ‘spare those they subjected and to conquer utterly the proud in war’.
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This advice was all very well, but it did not characterize the Roman of the moment, Augustus himself. He had ruthlessly killed off his opponents, he had won no glory in battle and he had cheated and outmanoeuvred the proudest men left in Rome.