He satisfied his troops by giving several hundred thousand veterans land, money, or both, settling them in colonies both in Italy and overseas. This was very expensive, and at first Augustus paid for it from war booty. Then, after the year 6, he taxed the rich. He kept a careful eye out for renegade commanders—potential new Caesars, as it were. He reduced the size of the army from more than sixty legions to twenty-eight, yielding a total military (including light infantry and cavalry) of about three hundred thousand men. This reduced taxes but also limited the empire’s ability to expand its boundaries. No wonder Augustus negotiated peace with Parthia instead of renewing war.
But he did not stop expansion—far from it. Romans expected their leaders to conquer new territory and thereby demonstrate the favor of the gods. Augustus carried out this responsibility with enthusiasm. As his favored poet Virgil wrote, Rome had a duty to achieve “empire without end.” So Augustus won new lands in Hispania, the northern Balkans, and Germany, as well as annexing Egypt. The wealth gained from conquest helped to pay for new projects in Rome.
Although never a natural commander, Augustus fought in campaigns when he could. In later years, he left generalship to others—preferably, trusted members of his family. Perhaps it was then that he got into the habit of writing words of caution to his generals: “Make haste slowly.”
He wanted to push eastward and conquer Germany as far as the Elbe River. But Augustus suffered badly when, in the year 9, Publius Quinctilius Varus lost three legions, or about fifteen thousand men, in Germany’s Teutoburg Forest. The disaster reduced the number of the legions from twenty-eight to twenty-five for a generation. More important in the long term, it cost Rome control of most of Germany. “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!” Augustus is supposed to have cried out at the news, not just once but occasionally for months afterward. Once again he grew a beard of mourning, though this time for only a few months.
RESTORING THE REPUBLIC? OR RENOVATING IT?
Augustus learned from Julius Caesar that power grew from the blade of a sword. Yet, unless it had the support of an outstretched arm and a willing heart, power would vanish in the flash of a dagger. Augustus learned that from Caesar, too.
Through a process of trial and error, Augustus found a way to adapt traditional Roman constitutional procedures to new circumstances. Never mind that in doing so, he changed their meaning entirely. It was a pragmatic solution to the problem of one-man rule, and it was very Roman. The Romans, like all people, sometimes floundered in the face of crisis, but in the end they displayed the ability to change. Augustus embodied his nation’s adaptability.
Augustus asked the Senate to grant him the powers of a people’s tribune—that is, the powers to propose legislation and exercise a veto. The ten people’s tribunes represented the interests of ordinary people. Although they continued to exist, people’s tribunes effectively ceded their clout to Augustus and his successors. Augustus also asked for supreme military power in both Rome and the provinces. The Senate agreed, as no doubt it had to, but it put Augustus’s rule on a legal footing.
Augustus’s standing in Rome never rested solely on his legal powers, though. It was also a function of his authority—what the Romans called auctoritas, which meant not just authority but also prestige, respect, and the ability to inspire awe.
Augustus had the fingertip feel for power that was typically Roman. He understood that successful regimes don’t merely crush the opposition but co-opt it. So he granted senators a degree of influence and honor.
By no means, though, did Augustus intend for the Senate to be its old self. It was, as the Roman historian Tacitus put it, a much diminished body; a mere “semblance of the republic.” For instance, the new Senate no longer controlled foreign policy, finance, or war. Under the republic, senators had governed provinces, and they still did, but generally only the less important provinces. Augustus kept for himself the key provinces on the frontiers with the main concentration of armies, as well as Egypt. The local authorities there were not senators but Roman knights. Knights were a group of extremely rich men around the empire, almost equal to senators in wealth and far greater in number. Augustus and his successors increasingly made use of knights as military officers and as administrators, much to senators’ dismay. Cowed by the memory of those who fell in the civil wars or were evicted in purges, senators all claimed to support the emperor, but many privately mourned the old days.
Augustus never made the mistake of confusing the Roman Empire with the city of Rome. He had only one foot in the old Roman aristocracy himself—as his opponents never let him forget—and in some sense, he saw his primary constituency as the elite of Italy rather than the first families of Rome. And he also looked much further afield. Indeed, after returning from the civil war in 28 BC, Augustus spent another decade outside Italy on a series of military and political trips around the empire, more time abroad than any other emperor until Hadrian ruled, from 117 to 138.
Like Julius Caesar before him, Augustus shifted power away from the city of Rome toward the provinces. He laid the groundwork for what became under his successors an international ruling class. It was something new to the Romans but familiar to us today. We call it globalization.
From one end of the empire to another, from Britain to Iraq, people shared a common culture. Here, people means a tiny privileged, wealthy, and educated elite. They all shared a similar education, held common values, and maintained like ambitions. They wore the same clothes, quoted the same literary classics, showed off the same rhetorical skill, boasted the same table manners, and aimed at similar careers. Like today’s “Davos elite” they belonged to a rarefied globalized club. Nowadays, a CEO in California’s Silicon Valley often has more in common with a CEO in Mumbai than with a garlic farmer down the road in Gilroy. So in ancient times, a Roman estate owner in Gaul had more in common with his counterpart in Syria than with the peasant who lived down the road.
The big losers were the people of the city of Rome: both the old nobility, which had to give up its monopoly of political power, and the ordinary plebeians—the common people—who lost the right to take part in elections. Politics as it had existed in the republic—messy, lively, parochial, cranky, sometimes violent but always free—was gone. It was replaced by order, internationalization, and control; replaced, in short, by the emperor and his helpers. Meanwhile, imperial society was split between a tiny ruling group and a mass of ordinary people.
In theory, Rome was still a republic. Augustus was just a public official exercising enhanced powers at the request of SPQR: senatus populusque Romanus, or the Senate and the Roman people. In practice, Augustus was a monarch, but the founder of the Roman Empire never called himself king, much less emperor, at least not in Rome. He was too cagey for that. Instead, he called himself by a variety of other titles, of which the most important were Caesar, Augustus, Imperator, and Princeps, or First Citizen.
Our word emperor comes from the Latin imperator, which meant “victorious general.” Augustus knew that the spirit of republican liberty—the impulse that had murdered Julius Caesar—still survived. So, having won supreme power, he masked it. In the Greek-speaking East, Augustus was often called king, but not in Rome.
Augustus lived in a house on Rome’s Palatine Hill. His successors would build splendid palaces there. In contrast, he lived in relatively modest circumstances, but only relatively so, as his estate did include such features as a temple of Apollo. Previously a neighborhood for wealthy families, the Palatine was on its way to an imperial takeover. It became an exclusive site for the emperor and his courtiers. Still, when Augustus went down from the Palatine to the Forum to attend Senate meetings, he made sure to greet every member by name, without a prompter, and he didn’t make them get up from their seats in his presence. Nor did he allow people to call him Lord; it took three hundred years until one of his successors took that title.
Augustus managed change not by the language of revolution but by the language of refo
rm and renewal. In 27 BC he proclaimed “the transfer of the state to the free disposal of the Senate and the people.” He used language that suggested that he had restored the republic, but it could also mean simply that he had restored constitutional government or that he had renovated the republic—and not that he had restored the system as it was before Julius Caesar.
CITY OF MARBLE
Augustus turned the common people of Rome from feisty political actors into pampered spectators. And he completed the transformation of their city from a lean, mean, fighting machine into a spectacular stage set of an imperial capital.
Julius Caesar had already given Rome a new forum. Augustus went further and practically rebranded Rome’s cityscape with his and his family’s name. In the late 30s BC, before he was thirty-five, he began building his mausoleum. A grandiose dynastic tomb for Augustus and his extended family, it was the tallest building in the city. It consisted of an artificial hill sitting on a white marble foundation, and was covered with evergreens and crowned by a bronze statue of Augustus. The exterior was decorated with the loot of battle, rendering it a war memorial and trophy as well as a tomb. The massive ruins are still visible today in the Campo Marzio neighborhood of central Rome.
In 29 BC Augustus dedicated a temple to the deified Julius Caesar. Located on the edge of the Roman Forum, on the site of Caesar’s cremation, it was his shrine. In addition, Augustus gave Rome a new forum, the Forum of Augustus, complete with a Temple of Mars the Avenger—the avenger of Julius Caesar, that is—and a statue gallery of famous Romans. Augustus paid for the new forum with the spoils of war, which gave the project added prestige in Roman eyes. He also built a victory arch, a sundial, and a stunning new altar of peace. His family members built or renovated temples, aqueducts, baths, theaters, parks, and covered porches. On his deathbed, Augustus would say, “I found a Rome of bricks; I leave to you one of marble.” It was meant to be a metaphor for the empire’s strength, but it was literally true of much of the city.
Poets and historians under Augustus coined the idea of Rome as the Eternal City. It was a vivid metaphor of the lasting power that Augustus hoped his new regime would have. Although the empire is long gone, that name for the city has survived.
Augustus paid careful attention to the poor people of Rome, who, in the past, had been the source of riot and revolution. He made grain distribution to the poor more efficient and instituted public works programs. To keep order in the streets, Augustus created Rome’s first police force and also stationed his own personal guard on the edge of town. Called the Praetorians or Praetorian Guard, the name used for a Roman general’s bodyguard, the Guard would play a crucial role in future imperial politics.
Nor was Augustus all stick and no carrot. He made celebration a theme of his regime, undoubtedly on the principle that if people behaved as if they were happy, then they really would be happy. In 29 BC, after returning from Egypt, he staged a magnificent triumph to dramatize the end of the civil wars. As an impresario, Augustus outdid all earlier Roman leaders by staging bigger, better, and more frequent games and shows. His “Secular” or New Era Games in 17 BC were a two-week spectacular of sports, theater, music, animal sacrifices, eating, and drinking. Whenever Augustus attended a game or show, he made sure the crowd saw him watching carefully, and he let people know that he loved a good show. When he appeared in public, he tried to look the part of leader. For example, because he was of only average height for a Roman male, at five foot seven, he wore lifts in his shoes to look taller.
BETWEEN A ROCK STAR AND A SAINT
Augustus put religion at his service to sell his regime. Conquering bodies was not enough for him; he wanted people’s souls as well. He brought sacred monarchy to Rome, borrowing the basic ideas from the great Greek kingdoms of the East where Cleopatra and her fellow rulers had long been worshiped in one form or another. But he shrewdly gave Greek kingship a Roman accent.
Augustus founded the emperor cult that recognized him as the son of a god (Julius Caesar) in Rome and a divine being elsewhere. In the ancient world, having the status of a god was something like a cross between being a rock star and a saint today. Neither Greeks nor Gauls minded giving Augustus that status, but it offended republican ideas of equality, so he came close to accepting divine honors in Rome without actually doing so. He put up a colossal statue of the Guardian Spirit of Augustus (Genius Augusti) in his new forum, and it resembled him without actually being him. Meanwhile, the East had a popular cult of Rome and Augustus, while Gaul and Germany were centers of emperor worship.
Grassroots organizations sprang up in many cities of the Western Empire to spread the word about Augustus and honor him. Most of the members of these groups were freedmen (ex-slaves), showing how Augustus’s message expanded beyond the citizen class. Meanwhile, men whose careers he had promoted, regardless of their rank, employed themes of Augustan art and architecture in their tombs and gravestones.
Even Rome conceded that there was something divine about Augustus. After reorganizing the city of Rome into 265 districts, he paid for a new crossroads shrine in each of them, and as a result he was worshipped at those shrines alongside the gods. In a sign of local initiative, people in Rome, as elsewhere, started pouring wine as an offering to the emperor at every banquet, public and private.
The Roman father was a priest as well as the head of his household. He was responsible for the family maintaining a proper relationship with the gods. As chief priest, or pontifex maximus, the emperor did the same for all of Rome. Augustus set the pattern: religion was the emperor’s responsibility, and many a later emperor launched a major religious reform.
The reign of Augustus was a classic moment in the history of the world. It was one of the most creative and enduring eras of Western political history, yielding basic political concepts such as emperor, prince, and palace. The very term Augustan Age means a period of peace, prosperity, and cultural flowering under an enlightened and orderly political patron. Writers such as the poets Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, as well as the historian Livy, flourished. Augustus was an educated man who appreciated literature.
THE FAMILY BUSINESS
Augustus ran his regime like a family business. He kept the circle closed and turned to a trusted group of reliable men and women related to him by blood or marriage. Family branding also humanized the process of communicating to the world outside. Everybody loves family dramas, but few people like the details of road building or grain procurement.
The role of family in Roman politics was not new. A few proud aristocratic houses had always dominated Roman politics in every period of the republic. What was new was that from now on, only one house, the Julian clan, would rule. That was a tall order for one family, so it was only logical that Augustus increased its resources, both male and female. He brought Agrippa, his most trusted lieutenant, into the family by marrying Agrippa to his daughter, Julia. Augustus eventually adopted their sons. He also increased Agrippa’s powers to the point that he was in effect Augustus’s deputy and a potential heir.
Women loomed large in Augustus’s family business. Across the stage of the late republic stepped some of the most powerful women of ancient history. And then came Livia, the mightiest of them all. Yet she was neither flamboyant nor lascivious, at least not after, as a pregnant nineteen-year-old, she left her husband for Octavian. For the rest of her life she put on a mask of modesty and simplicity, like the man she married, and worked her will behind the scenes.
The new Livia made an effort to present herself as the ideal Roman wife and mother; the picture of domesticity. She never overtly interfered in politics or her husband’s public business. She played her part in the regime’s ongoing effort to differentiate itself from the excesses of the late republic.
But Livia had extraordinary influence, with only Augustus’s sister, Octavia, as a near rival. Augustus had both women made inviolable (sacrosanct) like the people’s tribunes, freed from male guardianship and honored in statues. Each woman control
led enormous wealth, ran a huge household, and even sponsored public buildings. But Livia was closer to Augustus and lived much longer than Octavia, who died in 11 BC.
Centuries later, in the Middle Ages, a notorious love affair would attest to Livia’s lasting prestige. The French theologian Peter Abelard seduced his brilliant student Heloise d’Argenteuil. Although the relationship cost them both, she had no regrets. Heloise once defiantly wrote to Abelard that she would rather be his whore than Augustus’s empress. Heloise chose her figure of wifely privilege well.
Livia’s great-grandson, the emperor Caligula, called her “Ulysses in a stola,” that is, a model of cunning in the long, free-flowing linen robe that was the traditional dress of a Roman woman, and thus the image of modesty. She and Augustus, the master strategist, Carl von Clausewitz in a toga, made an incomparable couple.
One of the secrets of Augustus’s success was a certain androgyny, or so it appears to a modern eye looking at the many portrait statues that show him young and ageless, with a sweet face, even when wearing a soldier’s armor. Augustus was both a man’s man and the greatest friend that elite Roman women had ever had. At times, it seems almost as if he were playing to them as to a constituency in modern politics. No Roman woman had the vote, of course, but elite women enjoyed enormous wealth and even political power.
Livia was one of Augustus’s most trusted advisors. She was his traveling partner around the empire in spite of the previous Roman male practice to leave the wife at home while on business abroad. Other elite women also began traveling with their husbands on business abroad and sometimes took part in their decisions. When discussing important matters with Livia, Augustus wrote memoranda in advance and read them from a notebook in order to get things just right. For her part, Livia saved her husband’s letters, kept them in a shrine, and pulled them out when needed after his death.
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