The Twelve Caesars

by Robert Graves

  27. For ten years Augustus remained a member of the Triumvirate commissioned to reorganize the Government, and though at first opposing his colleagues’ plan for a proscription, yet, once this had been decided upon, carried it out more ruthlessly than either of them. They often relented under the pressure of political influence, or when the intended victims appealed for pity; Augustus alone demanded that no one was to be spared, and even added to the list of proscribed persons the name of his guardian Gaius Torranus, who had been an aedile at the same time as his father Octavius. Julius Saturninus has more to say on this subject: when the proscription was over and Marcus Lepidus, in an address to the House, justified the severe measures that had been taken but encouraged the hope that greater leniency would now be shown, since enough blood had been shed, Augustus spoke in a quite opposite sense. ‘I consented to close the list,’ he said, ‘on condition that I should be allowed a free hand in future.’ Later, however, he emphasized his regret for this rigorous attitude by creating Titus Vinius Philopoemen a knight—Philopoemen had, it appears, secretly harboured his patron who was on the list of the proscribed.

  Under the Triumvirate, many of Augustus’s acts won him the hatred of the people. Once, for instance, while addressing a soldiers’ assembly at which a crowd of civilians were also present, he saw a Roman knight named Pinarius transcribing his speech; and had him stabbed there and then as taking too close an interest in the proceedings. Again, a spiteful comment by Tedius Afer, Consul-Elect, on some act of Augustus’s, provoked him to such frightful threats that Afer committed suicide by jumping from a height. There was also the case of Quintus Gallius the praetor who, while paying Augustus his respects, clutched a set of writing-tablets underneath his robe. Augustus suspected that he had a sword, but dared not have him searched on the spot, for fear of being mistaken; so presently ordered an officer’s party to drag him away from the tribunal. Gallius was tortured as if he were a slave; and though he confessed to nothing, Augustus himself tore out his eyes and sentenced him to death. In his own account of the incident, however, Augustus records that Gallius asked for an audience, attacked him unexpectedly, and was removed to prison; that, being then banished from Italy, he disappeared on the way to his place of exile, but whether he was shipwrecked or ambushed by bandits, nobody knew.

  The commons awarded Augustus life-long tribunician power, and once or twice he chose a colleague to share it with him for a five-year period. The Senate also voted him the task of supervising public morals and scrutinizing the laws—another lifelong appointment. Thus, although he did not adopt the title of Censor, he was privileged to hold a public census, and did so three times, assisted by a colleague on the first and third occasions, though not the second.

  28. Twice Augustus seriously thought of restoring the Republican Constitution: immediately after the fall of Antony, when he remembered that Antony had often accused him of being the one obstacle to such a change; and again when he could not shake off an exhausting illness. He then actually summoned the chief Officers of State, with the rest of the Senate, to the Palace and gave them a faithful account of the military and financial state of the Empire. On reconsideration, however, he decided that to divide the responsibilities of government among several hands would be to jeopardize not only his own life, but national security; so he did nothing. The results were almost as good as his intentions, which he expressed from time to time and even published in an edict: ‘May I be privileged to build firm and lasting foundations for the Government of Rome. May I also achieve the reward to which I aspire: that of being known as the author of the best possible Constitution, and of carrying with me, when I die, the hope that these foundations will abide secure.’ And, indeed, he achieved this success, having taken great trouble to prevent his political system from causing any individual distress.

  Aware that the City was architecturally unworthy of her position as capital of the Roman Empire, besides being vulnerable to fire and river floods, Augustus so improved her appearance that he could justifiably boast: ‘I found Rome built of sun-dried bricks; I leave her clothed in marble.’ He also used as much foresight as could have been expected in guarding against future disasters.

  29. Among his larger public works three must be singled out for mention: the Forum dominated by the Temple of Avenging Mars; the Palatine Temple of Apollo; and the Temple of Juppiter the Thunderer on the Capitoline Hill. He built his Forum because the two already in existence could not deal with the recent great increase in the number of law-suits caused by a corresponding increase in population; which was why he hurriedly opened it even before the Temple of Mars had been completed. Public prosecutions and the casting of lots for jury service took place only in this Forum. Augustus had vowed to build the Temple of Mars during the Philippi campaign of vengeance against Julius Caesar’s assassins. He therefore decreed that the Senate should meet here whenever declarations of war or claims for triumphs were considered; and that this should be both the starting point for military governors, when escorted to their provinces, and the repository of all triumphal tokens when they returned victorious. The Temple of Apollo was erected in the part of his Palace to which, the soothsayers said, the God had drawn attention by having it struck with lightning. The colonnades running out from it housed Latin and Greek libraries; and in his declining years Augustus frequently held meetings of the Senate in the nave, or revised jury lists there. A lucky escape on a night march in Cantabria prompted him to build the Temple of Juppiter the Thunderer: a flash of lightning had scorched his litter and killed the slave who was going ahead with a torch.

  Some of Augustus’s public works were undertaken in the names of relatives: such as the colonnade and basilica of his grandsons Gaius and Lucius; the colonnades of his wife Livia and his sister Octavia; the theatre of his nephew Marcellus. He also often urged leading citizens to embellish the City with new public monuments or to restore and improve ancient ones, according to their means. Many responded: thus the Temple of Hercules and the Muses was raised by Marcius Philippus; that of Diana by Lucius Cornificius; the Hall of Liberty by Asinius Pollio; the Temple of Saturn by Munatius Plancus; a theatre by Cornelius Balbus; an amphitheatre by Statilius Taurus; and a variety of magnificent buildings by Marcus Agrippa.

  30. Augustus divided the City into districts and wards; placing the districts under the control of magistrates annually chosen by lot, and the wards under supervisors locally elected. He organized stations of night-watchmen to alarm the fire brigades; and, as a precaution against floods, cleared the Tiber channel which had been choked with an accumulation of rubbish and narrowed by projecting houses. Also, he improved the approaches to the City: repaving the Flaminian Way as far as Ariminium, at his own expense, and calling upon men who had won triumphs to spend their prize money on putting the other main roads into good condition.

  Furthermore, he restored ruined or burned temples, beautifying these and others with the most lavish gifts: for instance, a single donation to Capitoline Juppiter of 16,000 lb of gold, besides pearls and precious stones to the value of 500,000 gold pieces.

  31. Finally, on assuming the office of Chief Pontiff vacated by the death of Marcus Lepidus—he could not bring himself to divest his former colleague of it, even though he were an exile—Augustus collected all the copies of Greek and Latin prophetic verse then current, the work of either anonymous or little-known authors, and burned more than two thousand. He kept only the Sibylline Books, and edited even these before depositing them in two gilded cases under the pedestal of Palatine Apollo’s image. Since official negligence had allowed the Calendar, reformed by Julius Caesar, to fall into confusion, he put it straight again; and while doing so renamed the month of Sextilis ‘August’ (although he had been born in September), because it was during Sextilis that he had won his first Consulship and his most decisive victories. He increased the priesthood in numbers and dignity, and in privileges, too, being particularly generous to the College of Vestal Virgins. However, when the death of a Virgin
caused a vacancy in this College, and many citizens busily tried to keep their daughters’ names off the list of candidates—one of whom would be chosen by lot—Augustus took a solemn oath that if any of his grand-daughters had been of eligible age he would have proposed her.

  He also revived certain obsolescent rites and appointments: the augury of the Goddess Safety, the office of Flamen Dialis (a priesthood of Juppiter), the Lupercalian Festival, the Saecular Games, and the Cross-Roads Festival. But at the Lupercalia he forbade any boys to run who had not yet shaved off their first beards; and at the Saecular Games no young people might attend a night performance unless accompanied by an adult relative. The images of the Cross-Road gods were to be crowned twice a year, with wreaths of spring and summer flowers.

  Next to the Immortals, Augustus most honoured the memory of those citizens who had raised the Roman people from small beginnings to their present glory; which was why he restored many public buildings erected by men of this calibre, complete with their original dedicatory inscriptions, and raised statues to them, wearing triumphal dress, in the twin colonnades of his Forum. Then he proclaimed: ‘This has been done to make my fellow-citizens insist that both I (while I live), and my successors, shall not fall below the standard set by those great men of old.’ He also transferred Pompey’s statue from the hall in which Julius Caesar had been assassinated24 to a marble arch facing the main entrance of the Theatre.

  32. Many of the anti-social practices that endangered public peace were a legacy of lawlessness from the Civil Wars; but some were of more recent origin. For example, bandit parties infested the roads armed with swords, supposedly worn in self-defence, which they used to overawe travellers—whether free-born or not—and force them into slave-barracks built by the landowners.25 Numerous so-called ‘workmen’s guilds’, in reality organizations for committing every sort of crime, had also been formed. Augustus now stationed armed police in bandit-ridden districts, had the slave-barracks inspected, and dissolved all workmen’s guilds except those that had been established for some time and were carrying on legitimate business. Since the records of old debts to the Public Treasury had become by far the most profitable means of blackmail, Augustus burned them; also granting title-deeds to the occupants of City sites wherever the State’s claim to ownership was disputable. When persons had long been awaiting trial on charges that were not pressed, and therefore continued to wear mourning in public—with advantage to nobody, except their gleeful enemies—Augustus struck the cases off the lists and forbade any such charge to be renewed unless the plaintiff agreed to suffer the same penalty, if he lost the case, as the defendant would have done. To prevent actions for damages, or business claims, from either not being heard or being prorogued, he increased the legal term by another thirty days—a period hitherto devoted to public games in honour of distinguished citizens. He added a fourth inferior division of jurors to the three already existing; these so-called ‘Ducenarii’—meaning men whose estates were valued at 2,000 gold pieces—judged cases which involved only small monetary claims. The minimum age for enrolment in a jury was reduced from thirty-five to thirty years; but, observing a general movement to evade jury service, he grudgingly granted each of the four divisions in turn one year’s exemption, and closed all courts throughout the months of November and December.

  33. Augustus proved assiduous in his administration of justice, often remaining in Court until nightfall; and, if he happened to be unwell, would have his litter carried up to the tribunal. Sometimes he even judged cases from his sick-bed in the Palace. As a judge he was both conscientious and lenient: once, to save a man who had obviously committed parricide from being sewn up in a sack—with a dog, a cock, a snake, and a monkey to typify the four different vices that had led him to this crime—he is said to have asked the accused: ‘I may assume, of course, that you did not kill your father?’

  On another occasion the witnesses to a forged will were punishable under the Cornelian Law but, besides the usual two tablets for recording their verdict of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’, Augustus handed the jurors a third, for acquitting any of the accused whose signature had, in their opinion, either been obtained by false pretences or attached in error. Every year he referred to the City Praetor cases in which Roman citizens had exercised their right of appeal; foreigners’ appeals would be handled by particular ex-Consuls whom he had appointed to protect nationals of the province concerned.

  34. The existing laws that Augustus revised, and the new ones that he enacted, dealt, among other matters, with extravagance, adultery, unchastity, bribery, and the encouragement of marriage in the Senatorial and Equestrian Orders. His marriage law being more rigorously framed than the others, he found himself unable to make it effective because of an open revolt against several of its clauses. He was therefore obliged to withdraw or amend certain penalties exacted for a failure to marry; to increase the rewards he offered for large families; and to allow a widow, or widower, three years’ grace before having to marry again. Even this did not satisfy the knights, who demonstrated against the law at a public entertainment, demanding its repeal; whereupon Augustus sent for the children whom his grand-daughter Agrippina had borne to Germanicus, and publicly displayed them, some sitting on his own knee, the rest on their father’s—and made it quite clear by his affectionate looks and gestures that it would not be at all a bad thing if the knights imitated that young man’s example. When he then discovered that bachelors were getting betrothed to little girls, which meant postponing the responsibilities of fatherhood, and that married men were frequently changing their wives, he dealt with these evasions of the law by shortening the permissible period between betrothal and marriage, and by limiting the number of lawful divorces.

  35. The Senatorial Order now numbered more than 1,000 persons, some of whom were popularly known as the ‘Orcus Men’. This was really a name for ex-slaves freed in the masters’ wills, but had come to describe senators who had bribed or otherwise influenced Mark Antony to enrol them in the Order on a pretence that Julius Caesar, before he died, had chosen them for this honour. The sight of this sad rabble, wholly unworthy of office, decided Augustus to restore the Order to its former size and repute by two new acts of enrolment. First, each member was allowed to nominate one other; then Augustus and Agrippa together reviewed the list and announced their own choice. When Augustus presided on this second occasion he is said to have worn a sword and a steel corselet beneath his tunic, with ten burly senatorial friends crowding around him. According to Cremutius Cordus, the senators were not even then permitted to approach Augustus’s chair, except singly and after the folds of their robes had been carefully searched. Though shaming some of them into resignation, he did not deny them the right to wear senatorial dress, or to watch the Games from the Orchestra seats, or to attend the Order’s public banquets. He then encouraged those selected for service to a more conscientious (and less inconvenient) discharge of their duties, by ruling that each member should offer incense and wine at the altar of whatever temple had been selected for a meeting; that such meetings should not be held more than twice a month—at the beginning and in the middle—and that, during September and October, no member need attend apart from the few whose names were drawn by lot to provide a quorum for the passing of decrees. He also arranged that privy councillors should be chosen by lot every six months, their duty being to study the drafts of bills which would later be laid before the House as a whole. During debates of critical importance Augustus shelved the custom of calling on members in order of seniority, and instead singled out speakers arbitrarily; this was intended to make all present take an alert interest in proceedings and feel responsible for constructive thought, instead of merely rising to remark: ‘I agree with the last speakers.’

  36. Among Augustus’s other innovations were: a ban on the publication of Proceedings of the Senate;26 a statutory interval between the conclusion of City magistracies and their holders’ departure to appointments abroad; a fixed mule
-and-tent allowance to provincial governors, replacing the system by which they contracted for these necessities and charged them to the Public Treasury; the transference of the Treasury from the control of City quaestors to that of ex-praetors or praetors; and the ruling that a Board of Ten, instead of the ex-quaestors, should convoke the so-called Centumviral Court—an ancient tribunal, now consisting of 180 members, that met in the Julian Basilica.

  37. To give more men some experience of governmental duties he created new offices dealing with the upkeep of public buildings, roads and aqueducts; the clearing of the Tiber channel; and the distribution of grain to the people—also a Board of Three for choosing new senators, and another for inspecting the troops of knights, whenever this was needed. He also revived the long obsolete custom of appointing Censors; increased the number of praetors; and requested not one colleague but two whenever he held a consulship. The Senate, however, refused this last plea: everyone shouting that it was sufficient detraction from his supreme dignity to acknowledge even a single colleague.

  38. Augustus showed equal generosity in recognizing strategic skill, by letting full triumphs be voted to more than thirty of his generals, and triumphal regalia to an even larger number.

  Senators’ sons were now encouraged to familiarize themselves with the administration; they might wear purple-striped gowns immediately upon coming of age and attend meetings of the House. When their military careers began, they were not merely given colonelcies in regular legions, but the command of cavalry squadrons; and Augustus usually appointed two to the command of each squadron, thus ensuring that no senior officer lacked experience in this arm of the service.

  He frequently inspected the troops of knights, and revived the long-forgotten custom of making them ride in procession; yet he withdrew the spectators’ right of challenging knights to dismount while the parade was in progress; and those who were so old or infirm that they would look ridiculous, if they took part, might now send their riderless mounts to the starting point and report to Augustus on foot. Later, all knights over thirty-five years of age who did not wish to retain their chargers, were excused the embarrassment of publicly surrendering them.