Augustus, p.1
Augustus, page 1
AUGUSTUS
By the same author
NON-FICTION
The Roman Army at War, 100 BC–AD 200
Roman Warfare
The Fall of Carthage: The Punic Wars 265–146 BC
Cannae: Hannibal’s Greatest Victory
The Complete Roman Army
In the Name of Rome: The Men Who Won the Roman Empire
Caesar: The Life of a Colossus
The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower
Antony and Cleopatra
FICTION
True Soldier Gentlemen
Beat the Drums Slowly
Send Me Safely Back Again
All in Scarlet Uniform
Run Them Ashore
AUGUSTUS
First Emperor of Rome
ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY
First published 2014 in the United States by Yale University
Press and in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Copyright © 2014 by Adrian Goldsworthy.
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014940657
ISBN 978-0-300-17872-2 (cloth: alk. paper)
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
List of Maps
Introduction
PART ONE: Caius Octavius (Thurinus) 63–44 BC
1 ‘Father of His Country’
2 ‘A Man of Wealth and Good Reputation’
3 The Consulship of Julius and Caesar
4 A Way Out
PART TWO: Caius Julius Caesar (Octavianus) 44–38 BC
5 Heir
6 Praise
7 Reward and Discard
8 Vengeance and Discord
PART THREE – Imperator Caesar, Divi Filius 38–27 BC
9 Sons of Gods
10 Rivals
11 Triumph
PART FOUR: Imperator Caesar Augustus, Divi Filius 27–2 BC
12 Renewal and Restoration
13 To Overcome the Proud in War
14 The ‘Title of Greatest Power’
15 The Eagles
16 An End and a Beginning
17 Family and Colleagues
18 Augustan Peace
PART FIVE: Imperator Caesar Augustus, Divi Filius, Pater Patriae 2 BC–AD 14
19 Father
20 The ‘Sentry Post’
21 For the Sake of the Res Publica
22 Pax Augusta
Conclusion: Hurry Slowly
Appendix One: The Senatorial Career or Cursus Honorum
Appendix Two: Date of the Birth of Jesus
Glossary
Key Personalities
Family Trees
Bibliography
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many of the ideas in this book have developed over many years. At the end of my first year at Oxford back in 1988, I took a course on Augustan Rome, which was wonderfully taught by my tutor Nicholas Purcell, who first brought me into contact with Platner and Ashby’s hefty A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929). In the years that followed there were lectures, seminars and tutorials given by the likes of Alan Bowman, Miriam Griffin, Fergus Millar, Barbara Levick, Andrew Lintott and David Stockton, all helping to shape my understanding of the ancient world and Augustus and his era in particular. You will find works by all of these in the notes at the end of this book, and I should also acknowledge the great debt to the many other scholars whose books and articles I have consulted.
More specifically, I must thank those who have helped during the writing of this biography. Philip Matyszak is a friend made during those years at Oxford, whose ideas about the inner workings of the Roman Senate have always been inspirational. Once again he has taken time off from his own writing to read this manuscript and provide many useful comments. Similarly Ian Hughes took a look at a large chunk of the book and provided comments blending an understanding of the history with something of a copy-editor’s eye. Kevin Powell read the entire book with his accustomed eye for detail and ability to retain sight of the broader picture. Another great friend, Dorothy King, listened to many of the ideas as they developed, invariably commenting with both insight and wit, and also helped by providing some of the pictures. Thanks should also go to my mother for her proof-reading skills, and my wife for taking a look at some sections. They and all the other family and friends have had to live with Augustus in their lives for the last few years, and I am very grateful for their support.
As always, I must thank my agent, Georgina Capel, for creating the situation allowing me to take the time to write this book properly, and for her unfailing enthusiasm for the project. Thanks must also go to my editors, Alan Samson in the UK and Christopher Rogers in the USA, and their teams for producing so handsome a volume.
Finally, I owe a great debt to David Breeze for producing the family trees in this book. Inspired by the tables in M. Cooley (ed.), The Age of Augustus. Lactor 17 (2003), he not only suggested the idea of having more specific tables looking at the family at different stages, but then went to considerable trouble to produce them for me. The family connections of Augustus’ relatives and their contemporaries are complicated in the extreme, but these diagrams go a long way to making them seem simple.
MAPS
The Roman Empire in the first century BC
The centre of Rome around 63 BC
Italy
Greece and Macedonia, and the Battles of Philippi
Augustus’ campaigns in Illyricum, 35–33 BC
The Battle of Actium
The western provinces, including Spain and Gaul
Plan of the Palatine quarter developed by Augustus
The Forum of Augustus
The Campus Martius
The fourteen administrative regions of Rome
The centre of Rome by AD 14
The Rhine and Danube frontiers
INTRODUCTION
‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.’ The Gospel according to Luke, later first century AD.1
This brief mention in the Christmas story must have been the first time I heard of Augustus, and although it is hard to be precise with such early memories I must have been very young. Like most people who hear or read these words, I doubt that I thought much of them, and it was only later that my love of history grew and I developed a particular fascination for everything about ancient Rome. You cannot study Roman history without coming across Augustus and his legacy. He was the first emperor, the man who finally replaced a Republic which had lasted for almost half a millennium with a veiled monarchy. The system he created gave the empire some 250 years of stability, when it was both larger and more prosperous than at any other time. In the third century AD it faced decades of crisis and survived only after extensive reform, but even so the ‘Roman’ emperors who ruled from Constantinople until the fifteenth century felt themselves to be rightful successors to the power and authority of Augustus.
Unquestionably important, his story is at the same time intensely dramatic. When teaching students about Augustus, I have always stopped to remind them that he was not quite nineteen when he thrust himself into Rome’s extremely violent politics – hence almost always younger than anyone in the class. It is often hard to remember this when recounting what he did, skilfully and unscrupulously manoeuvring his way through the twisting allegiances of these years of civil war. The great-nephew of the murdered Julius Caesar, he was made the principal heir in his will and given his name, which he took to mean full adoption. Power was not supposed to be inherited at Rome, but armed with this name he rallied the dead dictator’s supporters and proclaimed his intention to assume all of his father’s offices and status. He then proceeded to achieve precisely that, against all the odds and opposed by far more experienced rivals. Mark Antony was the last of these, and he was defeated and dead by 30 BC. The young, murderous warlord of the civil wars then managed to reinvent himself as the beloved guardian of the state, took the name Augustus with its religious overtones, and was eventually dubbed ‘the father of his country’, an inclusive rather than divisive figure. He held supreme power for forty-four years – a very long time for any monarch – and when he died of old age, there was no question that his nominated successor would follow him.
Yet in spite of his remarkable story and profound influence on the history of an empire which has shaped the culture of the western world, Caesar Augustus has slipped from the wider consciousness. For most people he is a name mentioned in Christmas services or school Nativity plays and nothing more than that. Hardly anybody stops to think that the month of July is named after Julius Caesar, but I suspect even fewer are aware that August is named after Augustus. Julius Caesar is famous, and so are Antony and Cleopatra, Nero, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, perhaps Hadrian, and a few of the philosophers – but Augustus is not. One of the reasons is that Shakespeare never wrote a play about him, perhaps because there is little natural tragedy in a man who lives to a ripe old age and dies in his bed. He appears as Octavius in Julius Caesar and as Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra, but in neither play is his character particularly engaging, unlike Brutus, Antony – or even lesser players like Enobarbus. His fate is principally to serve as a foil to Antony, weak, even cowardly, but cold and manipulative where the latter is brave, intensely physical, simple and passionate. The contrast was already there in the ancient sources, and had its roots in the propaganda war waged at the time; it has only tended to become even more pronounced in modern treatments of the story – think for instance of the glacially cold performance with just hints of sadism given by Roddy McDowall in the famous 1963 epic movie Cleopatra.2
Calculating, devious and utterly ruthless, such an Augustus encourages the audience to sympathise with Antony and Cleopatra, and thus makes their deaths all the more tragic, for in the end these stories are about them. No play, film or novel with Augustus at its heart has ever captured the popular imagination. In Robert Graves’ novel, I Claudius – and the wonderful BBC dramatisation which is now at least as well known – he is once again no more than prominent among the supporting cast. This treatment is much more sympathetic, and he plays a different role as the simple, emotional – and only occasionally menacing – old man being outmanoeuvred by Livia, his manipulative and murderous wife. Such stories are involving and entertaining, but on their own give no real understanding of why Augustus was so important, making it hard to connect the young schemer to the ageing and often outwitted emperor.
There is far more to Augustus’ life than this, and this bigger story is far from dull. One of the great dangers is to assume an inevitability about his success, whether based on his genius for politics or – and this is an older view – wider trends which made the creation of a monarchy at Rome little more than a matter of time. Augustus’ longevity surprised everyone, as did his success, especially in the early years. Much of the time the gambler is more obvious than the careful planner. Augustus took risks, especially during the civil wars, and not all of these risks paid off. There was more of Julius Caesar about him than is sometimes appreciated, not least in his ability to extricate himself from scrapes of his own making. Nor is there any real evidence of a long-nurtured plan for creating his new regime; instead the picture is one of improvisation and experimentation, creating the system by trial and error, with chance events playing almost as big a role as design. The image of the icy manipulator also quickly vanishes as we look at a man who struggled, and often failed, to restrain his passions and hot temper. This is the Augustus who had an affair with the married and pregnant Livia, made her husband divorce her and then had the man preside over their wedding mere days after she had given birth. It is an episode you might expect more of Antony – or perhaps even more of Nero, great-grandson of Mark Antony and Augustus’ sister.
Alongside the passion came a good deal of savagery. Augustus, Antony and their fellow triumvir Lepidus were all guilty of mass murder, famously during the proscriptions – ‘these many, then, shall die, their names are pricked’ in Shakespeare’s version – and on plenty of other occasions. That the other warlords of this era rarely behaved any better does not absolve them of such cruelty. It is often difficult to like the young Augustus, in spite of his moderation in later life, and the struggle to reconcile two apparently different men has troubled most of his modern biographers. Often the solution is effectively to divide his life into two. His initial rise up until the victory at Actium readily lends itself to narrative, packed as it is with battles and intrigue, and such well-known characters as Cicero, Brutus, Sextus Pompeius and Cleopatra. Then many biographers will jump to his later years and turn to the alleged intrigue surrounding his choice of successors – and it is no coincidence that these two distinct stories mirror the themes chosen respectively by Shakespeare and Graves. Other authors, especially those from the academic world, also usually end their narrative in 30 BC, and for the rest of his life discuss broader topics – for instance ‘Augustus and the Senate’, ‘Augustus and the provinces’, ‘Augustus and religion’.3
Biography has few champions in the academic world, in spite of – perhaps in part because of – its immense appeal for more general readers. I wrote my biography of Julius Caesar because none of the more recent books about him were entirely satisfying – either they lacked detail or they only covered one aspect of his life. Each looked at either his political or his military career, but never at both – a distinction which would have baffled the Romans. It was while working on that book that I knew I had one day to write one on a similar scale about Augustus because no one has yet written the one he deserves. There are good treatments of aspects of his life, some excellent brief overviews, but nothing that deals with all of his life in any real detail. The great weakness of the thematic approach is that the man tends to be lost in discussion of policy, ideas, or the imagery employed by the regime. It far too readily becomes as disjointed as the leap from the young to the elderly Augustus, which loses any real sense of how the one turned into the other. As with Caesar: The Life of a Colossus, the aim is to write as if this were the biography of a modern statesman, asking the same questions even if our sources make it difficult to answer them, and trying as far as is possible to understand the real man.4
THE CHANGING FACE OF AN EMPEROR
Yet the real Augustus is very hard to pin down, not least because he took great care to reinvent himself during his lifetime. In the middle of the fourth century AD the Emperor Julian – himself lately having seized by force the supreme title of Augustus after several years as a junior Caesar in the imperial system of those years – wrote a satire imagining a banquet where the gods welcomed Rome’s deified emperors. Augustus is there, but is depicted as a strange, unnatural figure, constantly changing colour to blend with his surroundings like a chameleon. Only when instructed by philosophy is he turned into a good and wise ruler.5
Augustus was aware of his public image, but then all Roman politicians advertised their own and their families’ merits and achievements at every opportunity. Mark Antony still has a reputation as an experienced and capable general that has far more to do with his own propaganda than his actual military experience and abilities. The big difference with Augustus was that he had so much longer to develop and spread his message, as well as vastly greater resources than anyone else. More images survive of Augustus than any other human being from the ancient world. Especially after Actium, it is even harder to see past this façade and understand the real man. Even so we have plenty of stories about his domestic life and habits, a lot of anecdotes about everyday incidents and even a collection of jokes told by him or at his expense. There is far more material of this sort about Augustus than Julius Caesar or almost any other major figure in Roman history. Yet we need to be careful, for such apparently ‘natural’ moments were also opportunities to perform, and public life at Rome was highly theatrical. Roman politicians lived their lives in public, and Augustus in particular wanted to appear a model of proper behaviour in private life as well as when performing his official duties. Little about him was ever entirely straightforward.
Perhaps we should begin with the basic problem of what to call him, having noted that even Shakespeare uses a different name in each play. Born Caius Octavius, when he became Julius Caesar’s heir he took his name and became Caius Julius Caesar. He could have added Octavianus to this as a reminder of his real – rather obscure – family, but deliberately did not, and only his enemies ever called him Octavianus. As the years passed he modified his name, dropping the first name Caius and replacing it with the highly unorthodox Imperator – victorious general or generalissimo. After Julius Caesar was deified he became the son of the divine Julius, and finally in 27 BC the name Augustus was awarded to him by the vote of the Senate and People of Rome, no doubt carefully prepared to know that this would please him.
