SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

  In broad terms, Augustus bought senatorial acquiescence and senatorial service at the price of granting them honours, respect and in some cases new powers. Many of the old uncertainties were resolved, usually in the senate’s favour. Senatorial decrees had previously been advisory only and in the last resort could be ignored or flouted, which was exactly what Caesar and Pompey did in 50 BCE when the senate instructed them both to disarm. These decrees were now given the force of law and gradually, along with the pronouncements of the emperor, became the main form of Roman legislation. The split that Gaius Gracchus had opened up in the 120s BCE between senators and knights was made complete. The two groups were formally separated, and a new wealth qualification of a million sesterces, as against 400,000 for the knights, was now applied to a ‘senatorial class’. Senatorial status was also made hereditary over three generations. That meant a senator’s son and grandson could keep all the perks of being a senator without ever taking public office. Those perks increased too, as did the prohibitions that were intended to mark senatorial superiority: guaranteed front-row seats at all public shows on the one hand, an absolute ban on performing as an actor on the other.

  In return, the senate became something much closer to an arm of administration in the service of the emperor. Augustus’ introduction of a senatorial retirement age is just one hint of that. Senators also lost some of their most important and traditional marks of glory and status. For centuries, the acme of Roman ambition, the dream of every commander, even of the awkwardly unmilitary Cicero, had been to celebrate a triumph, parading through the streets with his spoils, prisoners and jubilant troops, dressed up as the god Jupiter. When on 27 March 19 BCE Lucius Cornelius Balbus, a one-time henchman of Julius Caesar, celebrated some victories he had scored on behalf of the new Augustan regime against some powerful Berber people on the edge of the Sahara, it was the last triumphal procession that an ordinary senatorial general was ever to have. Henceforth the ceremony was restricted entirely to emperors and their close family. It was not in the interests of the autocracy to share the fame and prominence that a triumph brought, and this was another glaring sign that the old Republic was finished.

  It was also another case where a radical change of practice was made to seem somehow inevitable. As part of his celebration of the past – as the past – Augustus commissioned the register of all the triumphing generals, from Romulus to Balbus, displayed in the Roman Forum (p. 128). Much of it still survives, dug up in small fragments of a marble jigsaw puzzle that was first put together, it is said, by Michelangelo in the sixteenth century to decorate the new Palazzo dei Conservatori that he redesigned for the Capitoline Hill. It was laid out on four panels, and thanks to careful calculation on the part of the inscribers, the triumph of Balbus is recorded at the very bottom of the final panel, with no blank space underneath, leaving no room for more names. More than design symmetry was at stake here. The message was that the institution had not been interrupted in midstream. It had come to its natural end. There was no room for more.

  Problems and successions

  Things did not all go Augustus’ way. Even through the generally celebratory ancient gloss on his rule, it is possible to glimpse what a much more troubled account might look like. In 9 CE, five years before his death, there was a terrible military disaster in Germany at the hands of local rebels and freedom fighters, which destroyed most of three legions. It did not stop the pacification of Germany from being a proud boast in the Res Gestae, but the severity of this defeat is supposed to have prompted Augustus to call a halt to projects for world conquest. At home there was more overt opposition to his rule than appears at first sight: there was offensive literature which ended up being burnt and conspiracies which he probably survived as much by luck as by anything else. Suetonius lists a number of dissidents and plotters, but as always with failed coups it is hard to tell what was driving them, between politics and personal grudges. It is never in the interests of the intended victim to give them a fair press.

  In one case it seems likely that the changed political role of the elite and Augustus’ control of elections was a major factor behind the discontent. The story of Marcus Egnatius Rufus, as it has come down to us, is predictably muddled in detail, but the bare bones are clear enough. Egnatius, first of all, challenged Augustus by making independent benefactions to the people. In particular, when he held the office of aedile in 22 BCE he used his own cash to set up a rudimentary city fire brigade. Augustus disapproved but decided to trump Egnatius by making 600 of his own slaves available for firefighting. A few years later, while Augustus was abroad, Egnatius attempted to stand for the consulship without the emperor’s approval and at an illegally early age. This cannot have been an organised plot against the emperor: he was not in Rome to be disposed of anyway, which might have been why Egnatius thought he could get away with his stand. But when his candidacy was refused, there were popular riots. He was executed, on the decision of the senate, presumably with the absent emperor’s agreement.

  How many of his fellow senators sympathised with Egnatius Rufus is a matter of guesswork. We know nothing of his background and can only infer what his aims and motives were. Some modern historians have wanted to make him a kind of people’s champion on the model of Clodius and other tribunes in the late Republic. But it looks much more likely that he was protesting against the erosion of senatorial independence and asserting the rights of the senators to their traditional links with the Roman people.

  Beyond front-line politics, there were certainly subversive views of the symbolic world that Augustus was busy sponsoring, and his new image of Rome. The poet Ovid, a victim of the ruthless side of the Augustan regime, gives clear hints of how the mutterings on the street might have gone. Writing from his unhappy exile on the shores of the Black Sea, in a series of poems titled Miseries (Tristia) – often more barbed than sad – he took a witty potshot at the decoration of the temple dominating Augustus’ new Forum, which featured statues of the gods Mars and Venus. As the father of Romulus and mother of Aeneas, these were the two founding deities of Rome. They were also the two most famous divine adulterers of classical mythology. As far back as Homer the story had been told of how Venus’ cuckolded husband, Vulcan, the god of manufacture, had caught the pair embarrassingly in flagrante, cleverly trapping them in a metal net he specially constructed for the purpose. Hardly the appropriate symbol for the emperor’s new, moral Rome, where adultery was a crime, the exiled poet insinuated. Some of the elaborate displays of civilitas may have backfired too. If it is really true that each time Augustus entered or left the senate he acknowledged every senator in turn by name, the whole palaver – allowing ten seconds per man and a fairly full house – would have taken about an hour and a half on entry and exit. For some it must have seemed a display of power rather than citizenly equality.

  Even Virgil’s Aeneid, the epic poem sponsored by the emperor himself, prompts troubling questions. The figure of Aeneas, Augustus’ mythical ancestor and clearly intended to be some reflection of him, is a decidedly unstraightforward hero. Modern readers are probably much more disturbed than their ancient counterparts were by the way Aeneas abandons the unfortunate Dido and causes her terrible suicide on the pyre: the message is that mere passion should not deflect the pursuit of patriotic duty, and the dangerous image of Cleopatra behind the queen of Carthage underlines the point. But the final scene of the poem, in which Aeneas, now established in Italy, allows his rage to triumph as he brutally kills an enemy who has surrendered, has always been an unsettling conclusion. Such ambivalences have, of course, made the Aeneid a more powerful work of literature than thousands of lines of jingoistic praise would have been. But they continue to raise questions about Virgil’s relationship with his patron and the Augustan regime. What went through Augustus’ head when he first read, or listened to, those last lines? That was not for Virgil to tell. He died in 19 BCE, before, it was said, he had completed the final revision of his poem.

  Augustus’
bigger problem, however, was how to find a successor. It is clear that he intended to pass his power on. His enormous tomb in Rome, already completed in 28 BCE, was a powerful sign that he, unlike Antony, would be buried in Italian soil and that there would be a dynasty to follow him. He also built up the idea of an imperial family, including his wife Livia. One-man rule often brings women into greater prominence, not because they necessarily have any formal power but because, when one person takes key decisions of state in private, anyone with close access to that person is perceived as influential too. The woman who can whisper in her husband’s ear wields more power de facto, or rather is often alleged to, than the colleague who can only send official requests and memos. On one occasion, Augustus acknowledged in a letter to the Greek city of Samos that Livia had been putting in a good word for it behind the scenes. But he seems more actively to have promoted her role beyond this, as a linchpin of his dynastic ambitions.

  Livia had an official image in Roman sculpture, just as Augustus did (see plate 12). And she was granted a series of special legal privileges, including front-row seats at the theatre, financial independence and, from the civil war years, the right of sacrosanctitas (‘inviolability’), modelled on the privilege of a tribune. Sacrosanctitas had originated in the Republic and had been intended to protect the people’s representatives from attack. What in practice it protected Livia from is not so clear, but the important novelty is that it was explicitly based on the rights of a male public official. This was edging her into the official limelight more than any woman had been edged before. One poem, addressed to her on the death of her son Drusus in 9 BCE, even calls her Romana princeps. It was the female equivalent of a term regularly applied to Augustus, Romanus princeps, or ‘first citizen of Rome’, and meant something close to ‘first lady’. An extravagant piece of hyperbole composed by a flatterer maybe, and certainly not a sign of growing emancipation of women in general, but it points to the public importance of the emperor’s wife within a would-be imperial dynasty.

  The trouble was that the couple had no children. Augustus had a single daughter, Julia, from an earlier marriage, and Livia already had Drusus and was pregnant with another son, Tiberius, when they married in 37 BCE. Whatever their later respectability, the start to their relationship had a scandalous tinge, branded by Antony as a disgraceful bit of philandering. In retaliation, presumably, for all the vicious rumours spread about his immoralities, he used to claim that the pair would meet at her husband’s parties, go off to a convenient bedroom halfway through dinner and return looking tousled. But scandalous or respectable, the marriage produced no offspring: with Augustus, according to Suetonius, Livia had had just one premature stillbirth.

  So the emperor went to great lengths to secure heirs who could be presented, in the circumstances, as legitimate successors. Julia, as his natural daughter, was the favourite instrument in his plans. She was married off first to her cousin Marcellus, who died when she was only sixteen; then to her father’s friend and colleague Marcus Agrippa, more than twenty years her senior; then, in what must have looked the perfect arrangement, to Livia’s son Tiberius. If an existing partner stood in the way of any of these matches, Augustus insisted on divorce. Only rarely does any hint survive of the personal cost of it all. Tiberius was reportedly devastated to be forced to part from his wife Vipsania Agrippina, the daughter of Agrippa by an earlier marriage, in order to marry Julia, who was now Agrippa’s widow – a characteristic bit of dynastic confusion. On one occasion after their divorce Tiberius is said to have caught sight of Vipsania by chance, and it brought tears to his eyes; his minders made sure that he never saw her again. As for Julia, it may be that this series of arranged marriages had something to do with her notoriously rebellious sex life. One lurid story has it that she hosted wild parties on the rostra in the Forum; by a satisfying, or horrible, symmetry it was the very place from which her father had advocated his curbs on adultery. True or not, her affairs were one of the factors (alleged treason was another) that led to her being packed off in 2 BCE to exile on an island about half a mile square and never returning to Rome.

  65. Detail of a processional frieze from the Altar of Peace (Ara Pacis) in Rome commissioned in 13 BCE. This frieze featured the extended imperial family, including here on the left Agrippa. The woman behind him may be his then wife Julia, but she is more often identified as Livia.

  The end result of all this dynastic planning is that the family tree of what is now called the Julio-Claudian dynasty (Julius being Augustus’ family name, Claudius that of Livia’s first husband) became so bafflingly complicated that is impossible to diagram clearly on paper, let alone recall in any detail. But even so, the desired heirs either did not appear or, if they did, died too soon. The marriage of Tiberius and Julia produced only one child, who did not survive childhood. Augustus adopted two sons of her marriage to Agrippa as a way of marking them out as heirs (while further confusing the family tree). They were carefully portrayed around the Roman world looking the spitting image of their adoptive father; but one died of an illness in 2 CE aged just nineteen, the other in 4 CE after being wounded on campaign in the East and before his marriage (to another relative) had produced a child. In the end, despite all his efforts, Augustus was back where he could have started all along, with Livia’s son Tiberius, who became the next emperor in 14 CE. Pliny the Elder could not resist pointing out one other irony of this. Tiberius Claudius Nero, the new emperor’s father, had been on Antony’s side in the civil war, and his family had been among those besieged at Perusia. Augustus died, Pliny quipped, ‘with the son of his enemy as his heir’.

  Augustus is dead. Long live Augustus!

  Augustus died on 19 August 14 CE, shortly before his seventy-sixth birthday, at one of his houses in southern Italy. According to Suetonius, he had been holidaying on the island of Capri, playing learned games with his guests – insisting, for example, that all the Roman guests should dress as Greeks and speak Greek, while all the Greek guests should act as Romans. The end was all very low-key. By the time he returned to the mainland, his stomach was giving him trouble, and eventually it forced him to his bed, where, somewhat surprisingly, given the fate of so many of his contemporaries, he died. There were rumours later that Livia had had a hand in his end, with some poisoned figs, to ease Tiberius’ accession to power, just as some had said she had hastened the end of other family members for fear that they would spoil Tiberius’ chances of the throne. But it was another case of unexplained deaths in the Roman world – as the majority were outside battle, childbirth and accident – attracting that sort of gossip whether there was any foundation for it or not. And poisoning was always supposed to be the woman’s weapon of choice. It required no physical strength, only cunning, and was a frightful inversion of her traditional role of nurturer.

  Others believed, more plausibly, that Livia played a major part in smoothing the transition from Augustus to Tiberius. As soon as her husband’s death looked imminent, she sent for her son, who was about five days’ journey away across the Adriatic. Meanwhile she kept issuing optimistic bulletins about Augustus’ health until Tiberius arrived and the death could be announced; when the old man really died was always a matter of dispute. But whether it was before or after his heir’s arrival, the accession proved fairly seamless. The body was carried more than 100 miles to Rome from where he died at Nola, on the shoulders of the leading men of the towns along the route. There was no coronation ceremony; whatever use Augustus had made of his triumph in 29 BCE, there was no specific Roman ritual to mark imperial accession. But Tiberius was already effectively in control as the new emperor when he arranged a meeting of the senate to make public Augustus’ will, bequests and other instructions for the future and to discuss the funeral arrangements.

  There are a few hints that the organisers were anxious about possible trouble. Why else did they have the ceremony and the funeral route guarded by troops? But all passed off peacefully, and in a way that would have been more or
less familiar to Polybius more than 150 years earlier, even if on a more lavish scale. A wax model of Augustus, not the body itself, was propped up on the rostra while Tiberius delivered the funeral address. The procession featured images not only of Augustus’ ancestors but also of great Romans of the past, including Pompey and Romulus, as if Augustus had been the descendant of them all. After the cremation, Livia – now called Augusta, because Augustus had formally adopted her in his will – rewarded with the sum of a million sesterces the man who swore that he had seen Augustus soaring to heaven. Augustus was now a god.

  66. This is a simplified version of the family and descendants of Augustus and Livia; emperors are marked in bold type. The complexities of adoption and multiple marriages, combined with any number of characters with the same name, make it close to baffling; but baffling complexity was part of the point of dynasty.

  The emperor in his human form remained enigmatic to the last. Among his final words to his assembled friends, before a lingering kiss with Livia, was a characteristically shifty quotation from a Greek comedy: ‘If I have played my part well, then give me applause.’ What kind of act had he been playing all those years? they were supposed to wonder. And where was the real Augustus? And who wrote his lines? Those questions remain. How Augustus managed to recast so much of the political landscape of Rome, how he managed to get his own way for more than forty years, and with what support, is still puzzling. Who, for example, made the decision about his (or Livia’s) official image? What kind of discussions, and with whom, lay behind the new scheme for army service and pensions? How far was he simply lucky to have survived so long?