The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  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.4 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.5

  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.6 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 enjoy a 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 military settlers 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 legitimacy depended. 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.' 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 seriously ill, 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 chronology is still disputed, but certainly on 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 z2 that the offending governor in Mace­donia was finally put 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.

  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 anyway in an age of 'peace'), bu
t 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 by being 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'.9 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.

  41

  Morals and Society

  The divine Augustus banished his daughter who was shameless beyond the very limits of the word. He made public the scan­dals of the Emperor's household, that adulterers had been admitted in droves, that the city had been roamed through on nocturnal revels and that the very Forum and Rostrum from which her father had passed the law on adultery had been her preferred places for her debaucheries . . . from being an adulteress, she had turned to selling her person for money and had sought the right to every sort of indulgence with partners whose names she did not know. Seneca, On Benefits 6.32

  I myself saw in Africa someone who changed sex and became a man on the day of his marriage: Lucius Constitius, a citizen of the town of Thysdrus. Elder Pliny, Natural History 7.36

  Augustus' conservative revolution did not stop with the constitution: it also extended to religion and social and sexual behaviour. These dimensions are directly relevant to personal freedom and to what it would mean to be a prominent Roman man or woman henceforward under the Empire. They are also the context for some of the most admired poetry of the Augustan age, especially poems by Horace, Ovid and Propertius. They continued to concern each subsequent emperor, with varying responses. Under Hadrian, the senators still had to rule on vexed points of the Augustan laws on marriage and sexual relations. They also had to cope with Hadrian himself. Excel­ling even Augustus' concern, he was later alleged to have used army-supply officers to spy on his friends' private lives. When he intercepted letters in which a wife complained about her husband's preference for 'pleasures' and the baths, the husband, when confronted, is said to have asked Hadrian, 'Has my wife complained to you as well as to me?"

  Why ever had such matters become public business? The dreadful troubles of the Civil War could be traced to neglect of the gods, the collapse of ancient morality and guilt inherited from Rome's Trojan past. These facile explanations were taken up by Virgil and also by Horace and even those who did not really believe them were aware of the climate of opinion. In the 40s and 30s most of Rome's religious rites and yearly observances were not seriously in abeyance or even in sceptical decay. What had decayed, as so often in ancient cities, was the temples. Restoration of the temples was not a new idea of Augustus', either. In the 30s temple-building had been part of the competitive rivalry in Rome: even Cicero's friend, the non-political and cultured Atticus, had been urging such action.2 But Augustus restored at least eighty-two temples. He added new ones as well, for gods connected with his own career. Like Augustus, Hadrian would also restore old temples in the city, including the magnificent Pan­theon, the ancient distinction of modern Rome. He repeated the temple's great dedicatory inscription by the self-made man Agrippa, but, like so many of Augustus' restorations, his was not an exact repeat.

  Augustus' religious restoration was radically new, and what made it so was his own increasing dominance. He was made a new member, like nobody else, of all Rome's priestly colleges. Cults and festivals increasingly included prayers and references to himself and his family; above all, the calendar grew to include new festival days commemorat­ing crucial dates for 'Caesar' in the 30s and for his father Julius Caesar during his dictatorship. Time, in the restored Republic, acquired pro­foundly unrepublican markers. So did the religious map. The ancient Sibylline Books were moved to Augustus' new temple of Apollo, next to his house on Rome's Palatine hill. The ancient goddess of the Hearth (Vesta) received a new cult-site here, also next to his home.

  'Whoever wishes to take away impious slaughter,' wrote Horace in an ode in the early 20s bc, 'if he aims to have the words "Father of cities" inscribed beneath his statues, let him dare to curb unbroken licence.'1 The verses were suitably prophetic. From 18 bc onwards, the 'Father of the Fatherland' (as Augustus became in 2 bc) encour­aged laws against 'licence' in sex and marriage. While aspiring to go back to basics, they were tendentious, intrusive and quite often hated. One answer was to evade them, but they continued to be revised and feared for centuries. In our age, the 'problems of the family' are problems of divorce and single parents, with public discussions of homosexual relations and racial integration. None of these problems was addressed in Augustan Rome.

  Like the restoration of the temples, legislation on sex and the family touched a pre-existing chord. It was not only that the likes of Cicero had written of the need for Julius Caesar, as dictator, to encourage the birth of more children and to curb the 'licence' of women or that Julius had stood forward as 'prefect of morals'. On a longer view, Roman education had always been strongly based in the family and in the lessons which parents transmitted to children. For centuries, too, the censors and their reviews of Rome's upper orders had put moral standards at the centre of Roman public life. Laws, then, would rest on a strong undercurrent of custom and long-repeated examples. By now there were stories of Roman matrons who had been pros­ecuted in the distant past for adultery before the Roman people. Way back in 405 bc, it was alleged, a tax had been introduced on Roman bachelors. Laws against the unmarried may even have been revived in the 30
s bc.4 At that time Augustus had widely publicized the 'immorality' of 'Egyptian' Antony, a spin which Virgil enlarged on in parts of his Aeneid. After victory, a return to old Roman values was a natural next step for a self-styled 'restorer'. The antiquarian scholar, Varro, had recently written a book, On the Life of the Roman People, which gave a highly moralizing account of its ancient ideals. A 'return' to them would enhance Augustus' artful claim to be restoring ancient rights to the people. But it was only worth trying because it had a constituency. The 30s, like the 40s, had echoed to moralizing rhetoric, and they had also been a disorderly time for class-distinctions: an ex-slave was even found to have tried to stand as a praetor. Horace, himself a social nobody, had capitalized on such outrages by protest­ing in his poems during the 30s at jumped-up holders of prized pos­itions.1 The Senate, too, had grown too large, with many members of dubious merit. In 28 it had already had to be slimmed by the young 'Caesar'. Survivors were aware that there had recently been too much social confusion.