by Woolf, Greg
(Tacitus, Annales 1.1)
The Return of Monarchy
Rome had an empire before it had emperors. The first half of this book has told the story of how that came about. One city in competition with others, fighting to control first Italy, then the west, and finally the entire Mediterranean basin and more besides. Or as the Romans themselves most often saw it, one people winning leadership (imperium, arche, hegemonia) over the other peoples of the inhabited world. Romans imagined this as a collective effort: Senate and people, Rome and her allies, the men and the gods of the city working together. Only in the final stages did individual leaders emerge from the pack of Scipiones, Fabii, Metelli, Aemilii Paulli, and the other great families. Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar seem—with hindsight—like intimations of monarchy.1 Great generals provided a coordination of resources and policy that empire badly needed. The emperors did all this even better, and they also imposed peace. The senatorial historian Tacitus, writing in the early second century AD (around a century and a half after the battle of Actium), satirically represented Republican government as a brief deviation within a grand narrative of a Roman monarchy. But there is no sign that he or any other senator of his age actually opposed the rule of the Caesars. Emperors had turned out to be a vital component of the Roman Empire.
This chapter tells the story of how the Romans stopped worrying and came to love their new kings, even if they could never bring themselves to call them by that name. That tact mattered most for the Romans of Rome. Greeks were happy to use the word basileus (king), Egyptians treated them as pharaohs, provincials everywhere made the family name Caesar and the special title of Augustus, awarded Octavian by the Senate in 27 BC, into synonyms for monarch. The first emperor knew better than to stage an overt revolution, yet over the first three centuries of the empire monarchy comes out of the shadows. We still call the early empire the Principate, since the emperors also used the term princeps, first citizen. All the same, there is now a consensus that all the essentials of monarchy had been there right from the start: these included an inner circle of favourites, advisers, secretaries, and viziers; palace intrigues, because the palace was where decisions were made; central pooling of information and control of resources; a nexus of patronage centred on the court; and a hereditary principle of succession, even if it was a while before it could be acknowledged.
Like all monarchies, its history is one of struggles for influence at court, of intergenerational conflict, of tangled sexual and political rivalries, of actual and suspected plots. But it is also a history of remarkable stability. If it was largely true that (as one historian has put it) ‘Emperors don’t die in bed’, it was also true that the murders of many individual emperors seem to have done little to shake the system itself. That is why much of this chapter is concerned with the emerging institution rather than the admittedly colourful characters who occupied the throne. The narrative overlaps with that in Chapter 13 which will consider the outward face of empire, especially war and diplomacy. That story will be one of two centuries of cautious consolidation and modest advance followed in the third century with a crisis that caught the emperors completely by surprise and from which it took the empire more than a generation to recover. The empire almost collapsed under the combined pressure of invasions from northern Europe and war with a rejuvenated and very aggressive Persian Empire. What survived was, in fact, a new empire. Its story will be told in Chapters 15 and 17. But through all these transformations, the person of the emperor remains at the focus of our gaze, and it is appropriate to begin with the first and greatest.
Augustus
In August 30 BC, Octavian stood almost exactly where his adoptive father Julius Caesar had stood nearly eighteen years before: in Alexandria, contemplating victory amidst the corpses of his enemies. But the Roman world had changed in the decades since Pharsalus. Back in 48, Caesar had lamented the murder of Pompey, swearing he would have spared him. Perhaps he would have done, just as he spared Brutus and Cassius after his victory over Pompey. Nearly two decades later the new victor was a very different animal. Antony and Cleopatra were both dead, each at their own hands. But it was on Octavian’s orders that Caesarion, the boy Cleopatra claimed she had borne to Caesar, was executed. After wrestling with Antony for leadership of the Caesarian party, Octavian would tolerate no other heirs for Caesar. Egypt he took control of too, absorbing the last of the great Greek kingdoms into his empire. He would need the treasury of the Ptolemies to settle his and Antony’s soldiers. Octavian learned from others’ mistakes. He would not rely on terror and legislation to fix the state as Sulla had done. He would not imitate Pompey’s actions in 62 BC by dismissing his legions. He would not forgive as Caesar had. He would not take the title dictator and sit around in Rome waiting for the assassins’ daggers. He meant to rule.
Oceans of ink have been spilled debating the question of how Octavian escaped Caesar’s fate. Was he cunning or lucky? He had enemies after Actium, to be sure, and perhaps there were plots too. Did he really face the same challenges? How different was the Rome he returned to rule and the ruling class he converted into his allies? Was Rome now so weary of civil war it would accept any alternative? Had the Senate been cowed by the proscriptions and the civil wars? Had the people really come to accept him as a god who had saved the state? These questions are not difficult to answer for lack of evidence: the long reign of Octavian/Augustus (forty-five years from Actium to his death) is one of the best documented in Roman history. The problem is the success of Octavian and his allies in presenting their version of history as the dominant narrative. The themes of renewal, moral rearmament, and recovery sponsored by the gods resonate in the poetry created by Propertius, Virgil, and Horace, in the monumental rebuilding of Rome and some major provincial cities, in the elaborate iconographic programmes of the Altar of Peace, of the Fora of Augustus and of Julius Caesar, and of the temples to Mars, Apollo, and other gods the first emperor set about constructing. It was also performed. It is difficult for us to imagine the experience of watching the great triple triumph of 29 BC, celebrating his victories in the Balkans, in the campaign of Actium, and in Egypt. But the spectators knew this meant the end of civil war. The same applies to the magnificent Saecular Games of 17 BC, ostensibly an ancient festival revived, but used by Augustus as another means to signal the end of one era and the start of the next. Some performances were more subtle. During the 20s BC Octavian gradually rebuilt his image in a series of carefully stage-managed renunciations of his power, each followed by new grants from the Senate. The focal point occurred at two meetings in January 27 BC from which he emerged with the title Augustus, a vast province (essentially that half of the empire that contained armies) granted for ten years, and the right to govern through legates. During 23 BC he finally resigned the last of a series of consulships and received a grant of imperium maius, the same kind of command that had allowed Pompey and others to outrank governors in their provinces. In fact in almost all his titles and powers he was much more the heir of Pompey than of Caesar. The only popularis elements were the powers and inviolable status of a tribune. The people had festivals—bread and circuses in the famous phrase—but the power of the assemblies to actually choose magistracies or pass legislation withered away. Augustus passed his legislation via the Senate, appointed senators to all the major military and political commands, with equestrians taking on the lesser ones, chose some magistrates and reserved the right to veto appointments to others, determine the election of the most important priests. Without ever creating a formal constitutional position of emperor, he accumulated, through influence, persuasion, vast wealth, and the threat of overwhelming military force, a determining position in the state. On his death, the whole bundle of powers and almost all the titles were passed on to his successor. Back in the 20s his death was, of course, a long way off, although his frequent illnesses meant no one could count on it. But this gave him a long time to develop the role of emperor. The 20s were about survival, demobilizing armies, tou
ring and securing the provinces, and establishing a delicate cohabitation with the Senate. Keeping physically away from Rome for much of the decade probably helped. A plot in 22 BC caused a momentary crisis, but by 17 BC and the Saecular Games he was as secure as he ever would be. During the middle part of his reign he initiated great campaigns of conquest. Peace was made with the Parthians in 20 BC, the standards of Crassus were returned, and with the east secure he was able to devote resources to the conquest of Europe. His stepsons Tiberius and Drusus led great armies across the Rhine and up and down the Danube. World conquest was almost certainly devised as a solution to the domestic problem of What did an emperor do? Up until a disastrous defeat in Germany in AD 9 the answer could be, the emperor leads Rome in the fulfilment of her historical destiny. Augustan art and poetry is full of images of world conquest, and the submission of India, Britain, and northern Scythia was confidently predicted. Victory abroad distracted from scandal at home, driven partly by struggles over who would be Augustus’ successor. In the end it was to be Tiberius. No one else was left, alive or untarnished.
Tiberius already shared most of Augustus’ formal powers by the time of the latter’s death, but he still had to endure his predecessor’s final arrangements. A great dynastic mausoleum had been built in the Field of Mars not far from the Tiber. Over the years since its completion (in 28 BC) it had accumulated the remains of a number of those who Augustus had once hoped would succeed him, notably his sons-in-law Marcellus and Agrippa, and his grandsons Gaius and Lucius. Only the favoured were admitted: his daughter Julia was forbidden to lie alongside her husbands and sons, his granddaughter was also banned from burial within it, and a final grandson was murdered, allegedly on his orders, as soon as Augustus’ death was announced to make sure Tiberius faced no possible rival from within the family. The ruthless Octavian had clearly survived beneath the benevolent figure of Augustus. In this Mausoleum the ashes of Augustus would lie. But first came the send-off.
On the news of Augustus’ death the priestesses of Vesta produced his will, which had been left with them for safekeeping.2 Tiberius and his mother, Augustus’ wife Livia, were named as principal heirs of his vast personal property in a ratio of two parts to one. The will also detailed the customary legacies that Roman nobles made to their relatives, friends, and clients. But the scale was now rather different. Augustus included legacies to every single Roman citizen, and to every soldier in the Roman army. The will was supplemented by three other documents, codicils. One offered a balance sheet of the entire empire. It detailed where the soldiers were stationed and how many they were in each unit, how much money was in the treasuries, how much tax was owing, and to these lists were added the names of those of Augustus’ slaves and ex-slaves who could furnish further details. This is a tacit statement of how far the coordination of the empire had progressed in the ninety years since Gabinius had first proposed that first exceptional command for Pompey against the pirates. It also reveals how Augustus managed the empire, through his private household, that is, relying on his own dependants rather than public slaves, senators, or equestrians. No other accounts had ever been offered. But the document was a display of openness, not an invitation to the Senate to take the reins. Augustus’ slaves and clients were part of Tiberius’ inheritance; he already had imperium maius and all the other powers that mattered.
A second codicil included instructions for Augustus’ funeral. There would be a grand pageant through the city of Rome, one in which all the orders would participate alongside the members of his family. The funeral procession would make its way to a specially constructed pyre on the Field of Mars. On it was a tower from the top of which an eagle would be released at the moment it was ignited. The eagle would soar to heaven, carrying Augustus’ soul with it. He himself would become a god, like Julius Caesar before him.
The third codicil was Augustus’ account of his life, not his memoirs or autobiography, but the text for an epigraphic monument. It was to be inscribed on two pillars of bronze outside the Mausoleum. They are long gone, but many copies were made and set up all over the empire. The best surviving example is from a temple of the imperial cult at Ankara in central Turkey. The Greek heading reads as follows:
Translated and inscribed below are the deeds and gifts of the god Augustus, the account of which he left in the City of Rome engraved on two bronze tablets.
This precisely describes its contents in thirty-five succinct chapters, which list in exhausting detail the peoples conquered, the monuments built in the city of Rome, and the gifts given to all and sundry. It also offers a highly tendentious account of his role in the civil wars. The Latin original of the title had more nuance. Augustus is described by the term divus —deified— rather than the blunt term for god, his achievements are glossed as those by which he made the entire world subject to the will of the Roman people, and his gifts are explained as the sums he expended on behalf of the state and of the people. Saviour, conqueror, benefactor, patron, and a Roman who had outdone all his peers and all his predecessors. It is a longer epitaph than the one Sulla chose for himself, but maybe not so different.
Dynasties
Tiberius’ accession in AD 14—long planned for and formidably resourced— went smoothly. This was the first in a number of crucial stages through which the charisma and standing enjoyed by Augustus personally become institutionalized into the role of emperor. Tiberius ruled until AD 37, efficient and cautious, but remote and unpopular. Much of the latter part of his reign he spent away from Rome, ruling the city via his praetorian prefect. There were crises but he survived them. AD 41 showed the dynasty could survive an assassination, that of Tiberius’ successor Caligula. After Caligula’s death the Senate had reportedly discussed a return to Republican government: the debate was still running when the imperial guard installed Claudius on the throne. As far as we know the issue was never seriously raised again. Nero’s suicide in AD 68 left no obvious heirs, and a short civil war followed. It was the first in a century and it lasted less than two years. Governors in Gaul and Spain had been the first to rebel against Nero, and on his death installed Galba as his successor. But he failed to win over either Rome or the other armies and was murdered on 15 January AD 69, the year remembered as that of four emperors. Otho was backed by the Praetorian Guard, Vitellius by the German legions, and Vespasian by the armies of the Danube and Syria and the prefect of Egypt. But after victory for Vespasian’s party, the institutions of empire snapped quickly back into place and all seemed to continue much as before. It was as if Senate, equites, people, army, and provinces all felt a need for one man to hold the centre. A bronze tablet records a senatorial decree passed in December AD 69, and probably formally approved by the assembly shortly thereafter, which grants Vespasian a series of privileges, citing powers and rights granted to Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius as precedents. By the time it was issued Vespasian had no real rivals and the Senate and people no real choice, but it expresses the will of all sides for a restoration of the status quo before the civil war.
The events of AD 69 show the importance of the person of the emperor as a symbolic centre, as a focus of ritual and cosmological power. For Vespasian’s candidacy was supported by heaven. Josephus, a rebel Jewish leader in captivity, predicted it; Vespasian waiting at Alexandria performed healing miracles; the goddess Isis supported his cause. Without an emperor the Capitol burned and there were rumours of Druidic curses. The world did seem to be coming apart. German auxiliaries and Gallic rebels dreamt of founding a new empire on the Rhine. The installation of the new Flavian dynasty (Vespasian’s full name was Titus Flavius Vespasianus) immediately restored order to the world.
Descent mattered above all else. The title king continued to be avoided in Rome. But there can have been no doubt from the start that the Roman Empire was now a family affair. Not only did Augustus advertise himself son of the god (of the deified Julius Caesar, that is) but he covered the city in monuments named after family members and their spouses. The po
rticoes of Livia, Octavia, and Julia, the theatre of Marcellus, the baths of Agrippa joined the Julian and Augustan fora. That monumental idiom was maintained by his successors. Heirs were designated from his family, and the coming of age of his grandchildren was celebrated on the grandest scale. Poets and provincial cities soon got the idea: extravagant honours were paid to one imperial prince after another. The calendar of a military unit stationed on the Persian frontier shows many of these festivals were still being celebrated 200 years later. Consent to the hereditary principle is evident in the support given to otherwise very lacklustre emperors. Claudius, when raised to the throne by the Praetorians, had only his name and ancestry to recommend him. Many refused to believe Nero dead, and there were at least three pretenders claiming to be him. When Vespasian won the support of the eastern and Danubian armies for his bid for the throne it is very clear that one major recommendation was that he had two adult sons, Titus and Domitian, as potential successors. Despite the lack of any family connection, Vespasian’s formal imperial name was Imperator Caesar Vespasianus Augustus. And in an innovation the title Caesar was employed to designate Domitian as his heir.
Imperial women had their part to play too in the presentation of a dynasty. The wives of emperors were public figures, appearing in ceremonial, honoured by the Senate, people, and army, and often given religious roles.3 Augustus married his daughter to a series of potential heirs. Empresses were also the mothers of potential future emperors. Before her fall from grace, images of Claudius’ beautiful young wife Messalina, carrying the child Britannicus, advertised the posterity of the dynasty. Caligula’s sisters feature on his coinage and in portrait sculpture, associated with cardinal virtues.4 Agrippina the Younger was celebrated as Mother of the Camps. Livia was given honours by the Senate, before and after her death. Imperial women might be given extravagant funerals and consecrated after their deaths as divae, the female counterparts of the deified emperors. Provincial cities often had priestesses of the living empress.