The riddle of Augustus
It is impossible even to guess how Antony would have ruled the Roman world if he had ever had the chance. But there is little doubt that whoever emerged as the victor after the long civil wars, the outcome was going to be not a return to Rome’s traditional pattern of power sharing but some form of autocracy. By 43 BCE even Brutus the Liberator was striking coins featuring his own head, which was a fair indication of the direction in which he was moving (Fig. 48). It was not so clear what form that one-man rule would take or how it could be made to succeed. Octavian almost certainly did not return to Italy from Egypt with an autocratic master plan ready to apply. But through a long series of practical experiments, improvisations, false starts, a few failures and, very soon, a new name intended to consign the bloody associations of ‘Octavian’ to the past, he eventually devised a template for how to be a Roman emperor which lasted in most of its significant details for the next 200 years or so, and in broad terms much longer. Some of his innovations are still taken for granted as part and parcel of our mechanisms of political power.
For the founding father of all Roman emperors, however, it has always proved difficult to pin him down. In fact, the new name ‘Augustus’, which he adopted soon after his return from Egypt (and which I shall use from now on), captures the slipperiness very nicely. It is a word that evoked ideas of authority (auctoritas) and proper religious observance, echoing the title of one of the main groups of Roman priests, called the augures. It sounded impressive and had none of the unfortunate, fratricidal or regal associations of ‘Romulus’, another potential name which he is said to have rejected. No one had ever been called it before, although it had occasionally been used as a rather high-flown adjective meaning something more or less like ‘holy’. All later emperors took over ‘Augustus’ as part of their title. But the truth is, it did not really mean anything. ‘Revered One’ gets it about right.
Even at the time of his funeral, people were debating exactly what Augustus’ regime had been based on. Was it a moderate version of autocracy, founded on respect for the citizen, the rule of law and patronage of the arts? Or was it not far short of a blood-stained tyranny, under a ruthless leader who had not changed much since the years of civil war and with a series of high-profile victims executed either for plotting against him or for getting into bed with Julia, his daughter?
Whether people liked or loathed him, he was in many ways a puzzling and contradictory revolutionary. He was one of the most radical innovators Rome ever saw. He exercised such influence over elections that the popular democratic process withered: the large new building completed in 26 BCE to house the assemblies was soon more often used for gladiatorial shows than voting, and one of the first acts of his successor was to transfer what remained of the elections to the senate, leaving the people out entirely. He controlled the Roman army by directly hiring and firing the legionary commanders and by making himself the overall governor of all the provinces in which there was a military presence. He attempted to micromanage the behaviour of citizens in an entirely new and intrusive way, from regulating the sex life of the upper classes, who were to suffer political penalties if they did not produce enough children, to stipulating what people should wear in the Forum – togas only, no tunics, trousers or nice warm cloaks. And, unlike anyone before, he directed the traditional mechanisms of Roman literary patronage towards a concerted, centrally sponsored campaign. Cicero had been eager to find poets to celebrate his various successes. Augustus to all intents and purposes had writers such as Virgil and Horace on his payroll, and the work they produced offers a memorable and eloquent image of a new golden age for Rome and its empire, with Augustus centre stage. ‘I have given them empire without limit’ (imperium sine fine), Jupiter prophesies for the Romans in Virgil’s Aeneid, national epic, instant classic and a book which landed straight on the school curriculum in Augustan Rome. It still remains (just) on the modern Western curriculum 2,000 years later.
Yet Augustus appears to have abolished nothing. The governing class remained the same (this was no revolution in the strict sense of the word), the privileges of the senate were in many ways enhanced, not removed, and the old offices of state, consulships and praetorships and so on, continued to be coveted and filled. Much of the legislation that is usually ascribed to Augustus was formally introduced, or at least fronted, by those regular officials. It was a standing joke that the pair of consuls who proposed one of ‘his’ laws promoting marriage were both bachelors. Most of his formal powers were officially voted to him by the senate and cast almost entirely in a traditional Republican format, his continued use of the title ‘son of a god’ being the only important exception. And he lived in no grand palace but in the sort of house on the Palatine Hill where you would expect to find a senator, and where his wife Livia could occasionally be spotted working her wool. The word that Romans most often used to describe his position was princeps, meaning ‘first citizen’ rather than ‘emperor’, as we choose to call him, and one of his most famous watchwords was civilitas – ‘we’re all citizens together’.
Even where he seems most visible, Augustus turns out to be elusive; and that was presumably part of his secret. One of his most significant and lasting innovations was to flood the Roman world with his portrait: heads stamped on the small change in people’s pockets, life-size or larger statues in marble and bronze standing in public squares and temples, miniatures embossed or engraved on rings, gems and dining room silverware. This was on a vastly bigger scale than anything of the sort before. There is no earlier Roman for whom more than a handful of possible portraits are known, and most of those are uncertainly identified anyway (the temptation to give a name to otherwise anonymous heads, or to find a face for Cicero and Brutus and so on, often proving irresistible, despite the lack of evidence). Even for Julius Caesar, apart from coins, there are only a couple of very doubtful candidates for a portrait that was made during his lifetime. By contrast, about 250 statues, not to mention images on jewels and gems, found right across Roman territories and beyond, from Spain to Turkey and Sudan, show Augustus in many different guises, from heroic conqueror to pious priest.
61. Two different images of Augustus. On the left, he appears in his role as priest, his toga pulled over his head, as was customary when offering a sacrifice. On the right, he is shown as a heroic, semi-divine warrior. At his feet is a small image of Cupid, reminding those who saw it of the emperor’s descent through Aeneas from the goddess Venus herself.
These all have such similar facial features that standard models must have been sent out from Rome, in a coordinated attempt to spread the emperor’s image to his subjects. They all adopt an idealising, youthful style that echoes the classical art of fifth-century BCE Athens and makes a glaring and loaded contrast with the craggy, elderly, wrinkled, exaggerated ‘realism’ that is characteristic of the portraits of the Roman elite in the earlier part of the first century BCE (Fig. 33). They were all intended to bring a far-flung population, most of whom would never see the man himself, face to face with their ruler. And yet they almost certainly look nothing like the real Augustus at all. Not only do they fail to match up with the one surviving written description of his features, which – trustworthy or not – prefers to stress his unkempt hair, his bad teeth and the platform shoes which, like many autocrats since, he used to disguise his short stature; they also look almost exactly the same throughout his life, so that at the age of seventy-plus he was still being portrayed as a perfect young man. This was at best an official image – to put it less flatteringly, a mask of power – and the gap between this and the flesh-and-blood emperor, the man behind the mask, has always been, for most people, impossible to bridge.
Unsurprisingly, several well-informed ancient observers decided that the enigma of Augustus was the whole point. Nearly 400 years later, in the mid fourth century CE, the emperor Julian wrote a clever skit on his predecessors, imagining them all turning up together for a grand party with the gods. They troop in, matching what had by then become their caricatures. Julius Caesar is so power crazy that he seems likely to unseat the king of the gods and party host; Tiberius looks terribly moody; Nero cannot bear to be parted from his lyre. Augustus enters like a chameleon who is impossible to sum up, a tricky old reptile continually changing colour, from yellow to red to black, one minute gloomy and sombre, the next parading all the charms of the goddess of love. The divine hosts have no option but to hand him over to a philosopher to make him wise and moderate.
Earlier writers hinted that Augustus relished this kind of tease. Why else did he choose for the design of his signet ring, with which he authenticated his correspondence – the ancient equivalent of a signature – the image of the most famous riddling creature in the whole of Greco-Roman mythology: the sphinx? Roman dissidents, who have been followed by a number of modern historians, pushed the point further, accusing the Augustan regime of being based on hypocrisy and pretence and of abusing traditional Republican forms and language to provide a cloak and disguise for a fairly hard-line tyranny.
There is certainly something in this. Hypocrisy is a common weapon of power. And on many occasions it may have suited Augustus to be just as Julian painted him, enigmatic, slippery and evasive, and to say one thing while meaning another. But that can hardly have been everything. There must have been firmer footings under the new regime than a series of riddles, doublespeak and pretence. So what were those footings? How did Augustus get away with it? That is the problem.
It is almost impossible to see behind the scenes of the Augustan regime, despite all the evidence we appear to have. This is one of the best-documented periods of Roman history. There are volumes of contemporary poetry, mostly singing the emperor’s praises, though not always. Ovid’s hilarious spoof on how to pick up a partner, which still survives under the title Ars Amatoria (Love Lessons), was sufficiently at odds with Augustus’ moral programme that it was one reason for the poet ending up in exile on the Black Sea; his relationship with Julia may have been another. And any number of later historians and antiquarians found Augustus an interesting subject, whether they were reflecting on his imperial style or collecting his jokes and bons mots. The repartee with the raven trainers is only one example from a mini-anthology of his banter, which also includes some nice fatherly ribaldry on his daughter’s habit of pulling out her grey hairs (‘Tell me, would you rather be grey or bald …?’). Another memorable survival is the chatty, episodic biography written by Suetonius about 100 years after the emperor’s death: it is the source of remarks about his teeth and hair, as well as many more reliable and unreliable snapshots and snippets, right down to his occasional poor spelling, his terror of thunderstorms and his habit of wearing four tunics and a vest under his toga in the winter.
Among all this, however, there is almost no good evidence, and certainly none of it contemporary, about the nuts and bolts, disputes and decision-making that underpinned the new politics of Rome. The few private letters of Augustus that Suetonius excerpts were chosen for what they say about his luck on the gambling table or his lunch menu (‘a bit of bread and some dates in my carriage’) rather than about any political strategy. Roman historians complained about almost exactly the same issue as the modern historian faces: when they tried to write the history of this period, they found that so much of importance had happened in private, rather than publicly in the senate house or Forum as before, that it was hard to know exactly what had taken place, let alone how to explain it.
What does survive, however, is the text of Augustus’ curriculum vitae, a document that he wrote at the end of his life, summing up his achievements (Res Gestae, as the surviving version is usually titled in Latin – or ‘What I Did’). It is a self-serving, partisan and often rose-tinted piece of work, which carefully glosses or entirely ignores the murderous illegalities of his early career. It is also a unique account, in roughly ten pages of modern text, of what the old reptile wanted posterity to know about his many years as princeps, how he defined the role and how he claimed to have changed Rome. It is worth attending to his sometimes surprising words before trying to look behind them.