Augustus

by Anthony Everitt

  Decrees rewarding parenthood and marriage,

  That from the new laws Rome may reap a lavish

  Harvest of boys and girls.

  The main message was that the princeps had brought back old Rome and breathed new life into the mos maiorum. A procession of abstract personifications was conjured up in calm, high-flying verse:

  Now Faith and Peace and Honour and old-fashioned

  Conscience and unremembered Virtue venture

  To walk again, and with them blessed Plenty

  Pouring her brimming horn.

  Ten years had passed since the “restoration” of the Republic. Augustus, now aged forty-six, had established his power without getting himself assassinated. Once a faction leader who had expropriated the Republic, he had successfully recast himself as a new Romulus. The regime had laid claim to embodying the Roman state, and few of those who attended the Ludi Saeculares will have gainsaid it.

  However, almost invisible cracks, beyond evidence but not beyond the scrutiny of suspicion, hint at strains in the heart of government. The execution of Murena, the estrangement from Maecenas, the impression of an alliance between Agrippa and Livia to put a brake on the princeps’ dynastic plans, the brushes with death—these all stood in uneasy contrast with the public symbolism of order, stability, and permanence.

  XX

  LIFE AT COURT

  * * *

  His daily routine when he was princeps seems to have changed little over the years and was studiedly austere. His house on the Palatine, next to Livia’s house, was modestly appointed. Its substantial remains confirm Suetonius’ description of it as “remarkable neither for size nor for elegance; the courts being supported by squat columns of peperino stone, and the living-rooms innocent of marble or elaborately tessellated floors.” The building had a private side with small living spaces and some larger public staterooms.

  Suetonius also remarked on the princeps’ study. “Whenever he wanted to be alone and free of interruptions, he could retreat to a study at the top of the house, which he nicknamed ‘Syracuse’ [perhaps alluding to the workroom of Archimedes, the great Syracusan mathematician and experimental scientist] or ‘my little workshop.’”

  This room has been discovered and reconstructed. The walls and ceiling are painted in red, yellow, and black on a white ground. Motifs include swans, calyxes, winged griffins, candelabra, and lotus flowers. All these images were derived from the art of Alexandria, which was popular in Rome in the first century B.C., and may have reflected the impression the city made on Octavian during his visit in 30 B.C.

  The princeps used the same bedroom all the year round for more than forty years. He is said to have slept on a low bed with a very ordinary coverlet. A small windowless chamber, finely decorated with frescoes featuring the comic and tragic masks of theater, survives, which may have been Augustus’ bedroom.

  The couches and tables that furnished the house were preserved at least until Suetonius’ day; many of them, he wrote after examining them, “would hardly be considered fit for a private citizen.”

  Like their aristocratic contemporaries, Augustus and Livia are likely to have slept apart. The princeps awoke with dawn to the sounds of a stirring household. A poor sleeper, he would often drop off during the day while he was being carried through the streets and when his litter was set down because of some delay.

  Slaves bustled about cleaning the house, with buckets, ladders to reach the ceilings, poles with sponges on the ends, feather dusters, and brooms. In the days before electrification, every minute of natural daylight was precious, so Augustus did not lie in but got up at once. He wore a loincloth and undertunic in bed, so when he rose all he had to do was slip his feet into his shoes. He took care not to thrust his right foot into his left shoe, for he believed that would bring him bad luck. He probably cleaned his teeth with dentrifice, a powder made from bone, horn, or egg or shell-fish shells.

  The princeps paid little attention to his hair, and when it was cut had several barbers working in a hurry at the same time. Sometimes he had his beard clipped and at other times was shaved. When at the hairdresser’s, he used to read or write.

  Unless he was due to preside over a public ceremony or attend a meeting of the Senate, Augustus wore house clothes woven and sewn for him (or so it was sedulously said) by Livia and his female relatives. He felt the cold badly, and in winter protected himself with four tunics and a heavy toga above an undershirt; below that he wore a chest protector, underpants, and woolen gaiters. His shoes had thick soles to make him look taller. A change of better clothes and shoes was always at hand in case he was unexpectedly called on to appear in an official capacity.

  A Roman breakfast (ientaculum) was a quick and simple affair—some cheese and olives (possibly prepared as a paste to spread on the cheese), some bread dipped in water, honey, or diluted wine. The business of the day started with a salutatio; when the doors of the house were opened a crowd of clients or dependents arrived to pay their respects. Senators often attended and were greeted with a kiss. However, anyone was admitted and was allowed to present a request. Augustus behaved in a relaxed and friendly manner; once a petitioner was in such a state of anxiety that he laughed and said: “Anyone would think you were offering a penny to an elephant!”

  Once the morning reception was over, Augustus was free to work by himself in his “Syracuse,” and to hold meetings with his staff as well as with politicians.

  Augustus’ and Livia’s houses witnessed a mix of personal and business life (the domus or home, and the familia Caesaris or Caesar’s household). They were far too small for administrative needs, so other neighboring buildings on the Palatine were bought up, creating a government quarter. Because the new Temple of Apollo adjoined Augustus’ house, its spaces—the cella and the Greek and Latin libraries—could be used to house official events or large meetings.

  As is always the case with autocracies, a court developed—that is, not so much a place as a social group, which acted as an intermediary between the ruler and society at large. It accompanied Augustus on his travels away from Rome. Distinctions of power and influence were carefully graded and essentially expressed the degree of access a given person had to the ruler. Augustus went to a great deal of trouble to conceal the thoroughly unrepublican reality of his absolute authority, and took care to act much as any ordinary consul or other officeholder would. He was scrupulously polite to other members of the nobility, exchanging social visits with them and always attending their birthday celebrations.

  A group of trusted intimates emerged, the amici Caesaris, or friends and political allies of Caesar. It was not a formal grouping, but if an amicus lost his status for any reason, this was a terrible thing. Once a consul-elect, Tedius Afer, learning that a spiteful comment of his had enraged Augustus, committed suicide by jumping from a height.

  It was far more unusual for a family member to forfeit his or her place in the princeps’ circle. Their relationship to Augustus gave them a more or less permanent position; a daughter or a nephew might misbehave but remain a daughter or a nephew. As in courts throughout history, important relatives probably came to represent different political points of view, and courtiers gathered behind them in cabals as they perceived their interests to dictate. Thus we detect in 23 B.C. what may have been shadowy groupings around Octavia and Marcellus on the one hand, and Agrippa and Livia on the other. Policy, love, and friendship were often hard to disentangle.

  Running the empire entailed a huge amount of complicated administrative work, much of which was performed by freedmen. These had a number of important advantages over family members and social equals: there was an inexhaustible supply of them, and, unlike aristocratic members of the ruling class, they obeyed direct orders. They had no political constituency and their fate was bound up with that of their employer. Crucially, they reported to nobody but the princeps, and so what they did was easily kept secret.

  For this reason, little is known about how Augustus or
ganized his staff. To judge by the officially designated separate departments established by later emperors, they may have been loosely arranged in groups that dealt with correspondence, with petitions, with foreign embassies and delegations, and with legal matters. There must have been an archiving function and an accounts department to manage Augustus’ vast wealth.

  A few freedmen—among them Licinus and Celadus—became close friends of the princeps. When he wanted to be completely incommunicado he hid himself away in a suburban villa owned by a freedman who had been a member of his bodyguard. However, bad behavior was strictly punished; when an imperial secretary was found to have leaked the contents of a confidential letter, Augustus had his legs broken.

  Augustus cultivated a simple, easy style of speaking and writing and disliked what he called the “stink of far-fetched phrases.” He conveyed his meaning as plainly and directly as possible; so, for example, he would repeat the same conjunction several times for clarity, even though the effect was awkward. Letters of his seen by Suetonius employed some rather odd expressions, perhaps deriving from his provincial childhood. For example, he liked to say “wooden-headed” ( pulleiacus) for “crazy” (cerritus), “feel flat” (vapide se habere) for “feel bad” (male se habere), and “be a beetroot” (betizare) for “be sluggish” (languere). Of a sudden or swift action, he would say it was “quicker than boiled asparagus.” He often wrote “they will pay on the Greek Kalends,” a proverbial expression meaning “never,” for the Kalends, signifying the first day of a month, were a purely Roman term. Favorite Greek maxims included “More haste, less speed” and “Give me a safe commander, not a bold one”; he liked the Latin tag “Well done is quickly done.”

  Augustus wrote a number of prose works of various kinds, some of which he read aloud to close friends in the same way that professional authors used to do in lecture halls. They included an “Encouragement of Philosophy” and some volumes of autobiography (written during his illness in Spain in 24 B.C.). Augustus’ attempts at verse were few and far between. He wrote a poem in hexameters, “Sicily,” and a few epigrams, which he composed at bathtime.

  People often wrote with a reed quill on sheets of papyrus, using sponges to erase text and clean the quill. When Augustus tried his hand at a tragedy about the Greek hero Ajax, who went mad and killed himself with his sword, he was dissatisfied with the result and destroyed it. When some friends asked: “What in the world has become of Ajax?” he replied: “Ajax has fallen on his sponge!”

  Augustus seems to have been slightly dyslexic. Uninterested in correct spelling, as determined by grammarians, he preferred to write words as they were pronounced, and often transposed syllables and letters or omitted them. When he wrote in cipher he used the same very basic code that Julius Caesar did; he simply wrote “B” for “A,” “C” for “B,” and so on (using “AA” for the last letter of the alphabet).

  The mornings of fasti (lucky) days were devoted to public business: meetings of the Senate (which, in theory at least, could last until sunset but no later), court cases, and religious ceremonies. So the princeps would often find himself out and about in central Rome.

  Senior Roman officials not only commanded political authority, they also dispensed justice in the courts. Augustus attended assiduously to his legal work, often staying in court until nightfall. If he happened to be unwell, he had his litter carried to the open-air judicial tribunal in the Forum. As a judge, he was conscientious and lenient. He speeded up the legal process, striking off the lists lawsuits that were not promptly pursued. Once he tried a case of parricide, the punishment for which was being sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cockerel, a snake, and a monkey and thrown into a river or the sea. Anxious to save the guilty man from this terrible fate, he asked him: “I take it, of course, that you did not kill your father?”

  When appearing in public Augustus liked to present himself as being no more important than any other leading senator. He did his best to avoid leaving or entering Rome in daylight hours because that would have compelled the authorities to give him a formal welcome or send-off. When he was serving as consul, it was inevitable that he was seen in public as he moved from Senate meeting to law court to temple ceremony and sacrifice. He usually walked from one engagement to another through the streets of Rome, although sometimes he was carried about in a closed litter.

  Although Augustus was perfectly capable of speaking extempore in public, he was always afraid of saying too much, or too little. So he not only carefully drafted his speeches to the Senate and read them out from a manuscript, but he also wrote down in advance any important statement he planned to make to an individual, and even to Livia (it says something of her own clerical tidy-mindedness that she kept and filed all Augustus’ written communications with her).

  Most Romans had lunch, a snack much like breakfast, about midday, but Augustus seldom observed regular mealtimes, eating as and when he felt hungry. “I had some bread and dates while out for my drive today,” he noted in a letter, and informed another correspondent: “On the way back in my litter from the Regia [the “Palace,” a tiny and ancient building in the Forum, the official headquarters of the pontifex maximus], I munched an ounce of bread and a few hard-skinned grapes.”

  He was a light eater and preferred plain food to gourmet dishes. He especially liked coarse bread. This was made of crushed or ground wheat (if the latter, it often contained bits of grit from the stone mill, which could grind down the eater’s teeth), and could be cooked without leaven or kneading. The resulting loaf was as hard as rock. Other favorite foods were small fishes, hand-pressed moist cheese (probably like today’s Italian ricotta), and green figs.

  Augustus drank little alcohol. His limit was a pint of wine-and-water (ancient wine was strong and rich and was almost always diluted); and if he went beyond that he made himself vomit it up. He seldom touched wine before the main meal of the day. Instead he would quench his thirst with a piece of bread dunked in water; or a slice of cucumber or a lettuce heart; or a sour apple, either fresh or dried.

  In the afternoon the princeps could enjoy some leisure. He used to lie down for a while without taking his clothes or shoes off. He had a blanket spread over him, but left his feet uncovered.

  Augustus had learned to pamper his health. He suffered from various minor conditions. Sometimes the forefinger of his right hand became so weak when it was numb and shrunken with the cold that he could hardly write, even when wearing a horn finger-brace. For some years he suffered from bladder pains, but these disappeared after he passed gravel in his urine. He could not tolerate sunlight even in winter; so he always wore a broad-brimmed hat when he was outdoors.

  Some seasonal ailments recurred—an expanded diaphragm in early spring and when the sirocco blew, catarrh. He found it hard to endure extremes of heat and cold. He became rheumatic and took the waters at some sulfur springs between Rome and Tibur (today’s Tivoli).

  Medical practitioners could do little to cure most disorders, so sensible doctors concentrated their energy on preventive medicine. Celsus advised moderate exercise and cautioned against excess in eating, drinking, and sexual intercourse. Although the last activity may be counted as an exception, it would appear that Augustus adopted this kind of regimen.

  “He who has been engaged during the day, whether in domestic or public affairs,” wrote Celsus, “ought to keep some portion of the day for the care of the body.” During the civil wars Augustus took exercise by riding and fencing on the Campus Martius. With the arrival of peace, he used to play catch with two companions, or handball with groups. He soon gave this up and confined himself to riding, or taking a walk at the end of which he would work up a sweat by wrapping himself in a cloak or blanket and sprinting or jumping. Sometimes he went fishing.

  On other occasions, especially when the weather was bad, he played dice or marbles with deliciae. Augustus was always on the lookout for little boys with pretty faces and cheerful chatter, and he loathed people who were dwarfish or disabl
ed, seeing them as freaks of nature and harbingers of misfortune.

  Romans usually took a bath in the afternoon, after exercise and before the main meal of the day, either in their own bathhouse at home if they were rich enough to afford one, or at the public baths, such as Agrippa’s splendid new Thermae. Once again, Augustus’ watchword was moderation in everything. He did not have a full bath too often, and instead was given a rubdown with oil or took a sweat by the fire after which he was doused with water that had been either warmed or allowed to stand in the sun to remove its chill.

  Livia awoke at about the same time as her husband and their respective days ran along broadly parallel lines, only intersecting from time to time. In bed she will have been wearing a loincloth, a brassiere or a corset, and a tunic reaching to a little below the knee. When she got up she stepped into some shoes and put on a finely made stola or long tunic. Above this she could drape a wrap or mantle (amictus).

  Fashionable women preferred cotton from India (available since the Parthian entente with Rome) to linen or wool, or silk imported mysteriously from the distant undiscovered Orient. White and black were popular, as well as bright colors such as purple, yellow, and blue. Scarves could be worn, tied at the neck; a mappa, or kerchief, dangling from an arm could be used to wipe dust or perspiration from the face.

  According to the poet Ovid, Livia was too busy to devote much attention to her appearance.

  Don’t suppose you’ll ever catch her

  Completely at leisure; she’s scarcely time for her own

  Toilet.

  However, as a great lady, she was expected to meet a certain standard. She employed numerous dressers (ornatrices) as well as staff to look after her wardrobe. One person was responsible for tending her ceremonial garments and accessories. A calciator made her shoes. A masseuse (unctrix) helped keep her physically in good shape.