SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  More than two pages of the modern text of the Res Gestae catalogue the territories he added to the empire, the foreign rulers he made subject to Rome and the embassies and suppliants who flocked to recognise the emperor’s power. ‘I extended the territory of all the provinces of the Roman people, which had neighbours not obedient to our rule,’ he announces, with slight exaggeration, before moving on to itemise at what can now seem tedious length his imperial successes and military victories all over the world: Egypt made a Roman possession; the Parthians forced to return the Roman military standards lost in 53 BCE; a Roman army reaching the city of Meroe south of the Sahara and a fleet entering the North Sea; delegations arriving from as far afield as India, not to mention a mixed bag of renegade kings begging for mercy, with names gratifyingly exotic to a Latin ear – ‘Artavasdes king of the Medes, Artaxares of the Adiabenians, Dumnobellaunus and Tincomarus of the Britons’. And that is only a small slice of it.

  There is something entirely traditional about this. Military success had been one foundation of political power as far back in Roman history as it is possible to go. Augustus outstripped all possible rivals on this score, bringing more territory under Roman rule than anyone else before or after. Yet this was a new kind of imperialism too. The heading of the inscribed text, the closest thing it has to an original title, reads: ‘This is how he made the world subject to the power of the people of Rome’. Pompey, more than half a century earlier, had just hinted at that kind of ambition. Augustus explicitly turned global conquest – and a ‘joined-up’ territorial view of an empire centred on Rome, rather than the old mosaic of obedient states – into a rationale for his rule. How all this would have come across to the provincial audience in Ankyra is impossible to know. But it is an idea reflected in other monuments that Augustus sponsored in the city of Rome, most famously in the world ‘map’ that he and his colleague Marcus Agrippa commissioned and put on public display. No trace of this survives, and the best guess is that it was something closer to an annotated plan of Roman roads than a realistic geography in our terms (see plate 21). But whatever its exact appearance, it fitted Augustus’ vision of empire. As Pliny later put it, in his encyclopaedia, the map’s purpose was to make ‘the world [orbis] something for the city [urbs] to see’, or to display the world as Roman territory under the emperor’s rule.

  Augustus’ generosity to the ordinary people at home claims as much space in the Res Gestae as his conquests abroad. He was wealthy on a new scale. The combination of his inheritance from Caesar, the riches of Egypt that he seized after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra and the occasional blurring of the boundary between state funds and his own meant that he could outbid anyone as a popular benefactor. Here he carefully lists his regular distributions of cash: the dates, the precise amounts he gave per head (often the equivalent of several months’ pay for an ordinary worker) and the number of beneficiaries; ‘these handouts of mine never reached fewer than 250,000 men,’ he insists. He also catalogues other kinds of gifts and sponsorship. These were above all gladiatorial shows, ‘athletic spectacles’, wild beast hunts with animals specially imported from Africa (a later writer refers to 420 leopards on a single occasion) and one mock naval battle that became legendary. This was a huge triumph of engineering and ingenuity, for it was staged, as Augustus proudly explains, on an artificial lake, more than 500 metres by 350, specially constructed ‘on the other side of the Tiber’ (in modern Trastevere), and it featured 30 large warships plus even more smaller boats and 3,000 fighting men in addition to the rowers. On his own reckoning the Roman people could have counted on roughly one major entertainment at the emperor’s expense each year. It was hardly the daily bloodbath of popular pleasure that the modern movie image of ancient Rome suggests, but it still involved a vast outlay of time, logistics and cash, as well as human and animal lives.

  The message is clear. It was an axiom of the Augustan regime that the emperor paraded his generosity to the ordinary people of the city of Rome and that they in turn were to look to him as their patron, protector and benefactor. He made the same point when he took (or, technically, was given) ‘the power of a tribune’ for life. He was linking himself to the tradition of popular politicians, going back at least to the Gracchi, who stood up for the rights and welfare of the Roman in the street.

  The final theme is his building. One part of this was a massive programme of restorations, of everything from roads and aqueducts to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, the founding monument of the Republic. With tremendous bravura, Augustus claims to have restored eighty-two temples of the gods in a single year – a number, not far short of all the temples in the city, that is clearly intended to underline his zealous piety, although it also suggests that the practical work done on each was not substantial. But like many tyrants, monarchs and dictators before and since, he also set about constructing what was in effect a new Rome and literally building himself into power. The Res Gestae itemises a wholesale redevelopment of the city centre, which exploited for the first time the marble quarries of northern Italy and the most lustrous, colourful and expensive stones that the empire had to offer. It turned the ramshackle old town into something that looked like an imperial capital. There was a huge new Forum to rival, if not overshadow, the old one, a new senate house, a theatre (still standing as the Theatre of Marcellus), porticoes, public halls (or basilicas) and walkways, as well as more than a dozen new temples, including one in honour of his father Julius Caesar. When Augustus said, as Suetonius quotes him, ‘I found the city built of brick and left it built of marble,’ this is what he meant. The Res Gestae provides a gazetteer of his transformation of Rome’s urban landscape.

  64. An imaginative reconstruction of Augustus’ new Forum, which survives only in small sections (best now viewed from Mussolini’s road, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, which overlies most of the Forum’s piazza). Though certainly unreliable in detail, the drawing gives a good sense of the elaborate and highly planned character of this new development, in contrast to the rather ramshackle image of the old Republican Forum.

  It also amounts to a clear blueprint for one-man rule. Augustus’ power, as he formulates it, is signalled by military conquest, by his role of protector and benefactor of the people in Rome and by construction and reconstruction on a vast scale; and it was underpinned by massive reserves of cash, combined with the display of respect for the ancient traditions of Rome. It was against this blueprint that every emperor for the next 200 years was judged. Even the most unmilitary types could use conquest to assert their right to rule, as the elderly Claudius did in 43 CE when he made as much as he possibly could out of ‘his’ victory, won entirely by his subordinates, over the island of Britain. And there was an ongoing competition among succeeding rulers about who could parade himself as the most generous to the Roman population or who could write his own story most noticeably into the fabric of the city. The emperor Trajan’s soaring column, documenting his conquests across the river Danube in the early second century CE – and ingeniously securing maximum impact for minimum floor area – was one obvious winner. Hadrian’s Pantheon was another. Finished in the 120s CE, the concrete span of its dome remained the widest in the world until 1958 (when it was beaten by the Centre of New Industries and Technologies building in Paris), and twelve of the original columns in its portico were each 12 metres high, carved from a single block of grey granite and specially transported 2,500 miles from the Egyptian desert. Ultimately this all went back to Augustus.

  Power politics

  The Res Gestae was always intended as a record of success, a retrospective parade of achievement that would also set a pattern for the future. It steers clear of any sign of difficulty, conflict or contest, except in briefly dismissing the long-dead adversaries of the civil war. And with its insistent series of first-person verbs (‘I paid’, ‘I built’, ‘I gave’) and matching pronouns (there are almost 100 ‘me’s and ‘mine’s), it is more egocentric than any Roman public document before, com
posed in the style of an autocrat who appears to take his personal power for granted. That is, however, only one side of the Augustan story, seen from its successful end after more than forty years in power. It looked very different when he returned to Italy in 29 BCE, still as Octavian, with the example of Julius Caesar looming large. Caesar was his main access to power and legitimacy, as well as to that title ‘son of a god’, but he was also a warning of the fate that might lie in store. To be the son of an assassinated dictator was a mixed blessing. The big question in those early days was simple: how was he going to devise a form of rule that would win hearts and minds, defuse the opposition not wholly extinguished by the end of the war and allow him to stay alive?

  Part of the answer came down to the language of power. For obvious Roman reasons, he did not call himself king. He made an elaborate show of rejecting the title ‘dictator’ too, distancing himself from Caesar’s example. The story that a crowd of protesters once barricaded the senators in the senate house and threatened to burn it down over their heads if they did not make Augustus a dictator only added extra lustre to this refusal. Instead he chose to frame all his powers in terms of regular Republican office holding. To begin with, that meant being repeatedly elected consul, eleven times in all between 43 and 23 BCE, and on two isolated occasions later. Then, from the mid 20s BCE, he arranged to be granted a series of formal powers that were modelled on those of traditional Roman political offices but not the offices themselves: he took ‘the power of a tribune’ but did not hold the tribunate, and ‘the rights of a consul’ without holding the consulship.

  This was a long way from the realities of traditional Republican practice, especially when he piled up multiple titles and offices together: the power of a tribune on top of the rights of a consul at the same time was unheard of; so too was his holding of not just one but all the major Roman priesthoods together. Whatever the later allegations of hypocrisy, he can hardly have been using these comfortable, old-fashioned titles to pretend that this was a return to the politics of the past. Romans were not, by and large, so unobservant that they would have failed to spot the autocracy lurking behind the fig leaf of ‘the rights of a consul’. The point was that Augustus was cleverly adapting the traditional idioms to serve a new politics, justifying and making comprehensible a new axis of power by systematically reconfiguring an old language.

  His rule was also presented as inevitable, as part of the natural and historical order: in short, as part of how things were. In 8 BCE the senate decided (who knows with what nudging?) that the month Sextilis, next to Julius Caesar’s July, should be renamed August – and so Augustus became part of the regular passage of time, as he remains. Only the year before, the governor of the province of Asia had been thinking on similar lines when he persuaded the locals to align their calendar with the life cycle of the emperor and to begin their civic year on Augustus’ birthday. The 23rd of September, the governor urged (in words still preserved in an inscription), might ‘justly be considered equal to the beginning of all things … for [Augustus] has given a different appearance to the whole world, a world which would have met its ruin if … he had not been born’. In Rome, the language used might have been less overblown, but even there, myth and religion could usefully underpin Augustus’ position. His claim to descend directly from Aeneas helped to portray the emperor as a fulfilment of Roman destiny, as the ordained refounder of Rome.

  That is certainly one element in Virgil’s epic story of Aeneas, with its clear echoes between the emperor and the legendary founding hero. But it is also seen vividly in the sculptural programme of Augustus’ new Forum. This featured prominent statues of both Aeneas and Romulus and one of Augustus standing in a triumphal chariot in the centre of the piazza. The surrounding porticoes and arcades were lined with dozens of other statues, depicting ‘the famous men of the Republic’, each with a short text summing up his claim to fame: from Camillus and several Scipios to Marius and Sulla. The clear message was that the whole course of Roman history led up to Augustus, who now took centre stage. The story of the Republic had not been obliterated; it had been turned into a harmless backdrop to Augustan power, whose roots were found in the very origin of Rome. Or to put it another way, Augustus took over where the previous politics of Rome had collapsed. It was widely known that he was born in 63 BCE, the year of Catiline’s conspiracy. Suetonius even claims that his father was held up by the birth and so was late for one of Cicero’s big performances in the senate on the subject. No senatorial meeting was held on 23 September, so far as is known. But whether the story was an invention or not, the point was to present the same day as both the end of Republican politics, demonstrated in the corruption of Catiline, and the beginning of the life of the emperor.

  There was, however, some much more ruthless realpolitik involved than this. Art, religion, myth, symbol and language, from the poetry of Virgil to the sculptural extravaganza of the new Forum, played an important part in grounding the new regime. But Augustus also took some down-to-earth steps to secure his position, by ensuring that the army was loyal to him and to no one else, by cutting off potential opponents from their support networks among the soldiers and the ordinary people and by transforming the senate from an aristocracy of competing dynasts, and possible rivals, into an aristocracy of service and honour. A classic ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’, Augustus set out to make sure that no one could easily follow the example of his own youth: that is, raise a private army and take over the state.

  He took a monopoly on military force, but his regime was nothing like a modern military dictatorship. In our terms, Rome and Italy at this period were remarkably soldier free. Almost all the 300,000 Roman troops were stationed a safe distance away, near the boundaries of the Roman world and in areas of active campaigning, with only a very few troops, including the famous security forces known as the Praetorian Guard, based in Rome, which was otherwise a demilitarised zone. But Augustus became something no Roman had been before: the commander-in-chief of all the armed forces, who appointed their major officers, decided where and against whom the soldiers should fight, and claimed all victories as by definition his own, whoever had commanded on the ground.

  He also secured his position by severing the links of dependence and personal loyalty between armies and their individual commanders, largely thanks to a simple, practical process of pension reform. This must count among the most significant innovations of his whole rule. He established uniform terms and conditions of army employment, fixing a standard term of service of sixteen years (soon raised to twenty) for legionaries and guaranteeing them on retirement a cash settlement at public expense amounting to about twelve times their annual pay or an equivalent in land. That ended once and for all the soldiers’ reliance on their generals to provide for their retirement, which over the last century of the Republic had repeatedly led to the soldiers’ private loyalty to their commander trumping their loyalty to Rome. In other words, after hundreds of years of a semi-public, semi-private militia, Augustus fully nationalised the Roman legions and removed them from politics. Although the Praetorian Guard continued to be a problematic political force, simply because of its proximity to the centre of power in Rome, only during two brief periods of civil war over the next two centuries, in the years 68 to 69 CE and again in 193 CE, were legions stationed outside the city instrumental in putting their candidates on the Roman throne.

  This reform was one of the most expensive things Augustus ever did, and it was close to unaffordable. Unless he made a gross error in his arithmetic, the cost alone is an indication of the high priority he gave it. On a rough reckoning using the known military salary figures, the annual bill for regular pay combined with retirement packages for the whole army would now have come to about 450 million sesterces. That was, on an even rougher reckoning, the equivalent of more than half the total annual tax revenue of the empire. There are clear signs that, even with the huge reserves of state and emperor combined, it was hard to find the money. That is ce
rtainly the implication of the complaints of mutinous soldiers on the German frontier just after Augustus’ death, who objected to being kept in service for much longer than the regulation twenty years or to being given a piece of worthless bog as a land settlement in lieu of a decent farm. Then as now, the easiest tactic for a government trying to reduce the pension bill was to raise the pension age.

  At home there was a similar logic behind the gradual decline and eventual end of popular elections. This was not mainly an assault on what was left of Roman democracy, even if that was one inevitable consequence. More important, it was a clever way of inserting a wedge between the emperor’s potential rivals and any large-scale popular or factional support in the city. Free elections had provided the glue of mutual dependence between prominent politicians and the people as a whole. As soon as ambitious individuals came to rely on the nod of the emperor rather than on the popular vote for public office and other sorts of preferment, they no longer had to attract the support of the people en masse, they were no longer compelled to build up a popular following and they had no institutional framework within which to do so. The intention was, as the Res Gestae more or less declares, that Augustus should monopolise the support of the people, edging the senators safely out of the picture.

  Yet for all his autocratic power, Augustus still needed the senate. No sole ruler ever really rules alone. The Roman Empire had a light administrative footprint compared with the bureaucracy of all modern states and some ancient ones too. Even so, someone had to command the legions, govern the provinces, run the corn and water supplies and generally act as the deputy for an emperor who could not do everything. As is often the case in regime change, the new guard is more or less forced to rely on a carefully reformed version of the old guard, or – as we have seen in recent history – anarchy can result.