What I did
A rare piece of archaeological good fortune has preserved this version of Augustus’ life story. In his will he asked that it be inscribed on two bronze pillars at the entrance to his vast family tomb, as a permanent record of what he had done and something not far short of a job description for his successors. The original pillars have long since been melted down, probably into some form of medieval ballistics, but the text was copied on stone in other parts of the empire, to memorialise his rule outside Rome too. Fragments of four of these copies have been discovered, including an almost complete version from Ankyra (modern Ankara).
This version had been inscribed on the walls of a temple in honour of ‘Rome and Augustus’, both in the original Latin and in a Greek translation, for the benefit of the largely Greek-speaking inhabitants of the area – and was preserved because the temple was turned into a Christian church in the sixth century CE and then later into part of a mosque. There are all kinds of stories of heroic efforts expended from the mid sixteenth century onwards in deciphering and copying the emperor’s words at often perilous heights, until Kemal Atatürk, as the president of Turkey, proudly had the whole inscription uncovered and preserved in the 1930s to mark the 2,000th anniversary of Augustus’ birth. But the simple fact that the best text of the emperor’s words survives thousands of miles, and in the ancient world more than a month’s journey, away from Rome sums up a lot about the imperial regime and its public face.
The Res Gestae is a rich source of detail about Augustus’ career and the Roman world of his day. It starts with a delicately euphemistic description of his rise to power, which entirely omits any mention of the pogrom (‘I liberated the state oppressed by the power of a faction’ is how he refers to his clash with either Antony or Brutus and Cassius). It goes on to refer briefly to such things as his splendid triumphal processions (‘nine kings or children of kings’ walked as captives before his chariot, he boasts, with typically Roman delight in captured royalty) and his emergency management of the Roman corn supply when famine loomed. For some modern historians the most important sentences are the couple that report the results of his censuses of Roman citizens, recording a total head count of 4,063,000 in 28 BCE, rising to 4,937,000 in 14 CE. These are the most reliable data we have for the size of the ancient Roman citizen body at any time, largely because, inscribed on stone, they are prone to none of the errors that careless manuscript copiers can easily introduce. Even so, there is still a fierce dispute about whether the figures include men only or women and children too – whether, in other words, the Roman citizen population all told was around 5 million, allowing for some under-registration, or something over 12 million.
62. The Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome, outside which the bronze pillars bearing his account of his achievements once stood. It was on a scale quite out of proportion to even the richest tombs of the Republican aristocracy and stood in Rome throughout most of Augustus’ long reign. Its early completion was partly a precautionary measure (there were numerous scares over Augustus’ health) and partly an aggressive assertion of the emperor’s power, of his dynastic aspirations and of his commitment to be buried in Rome.
63. The Temple of Rome and Augustus in Ankara, from where the most complete text of the Res Gestae comes (the minaret of the later mosque, partly built into it, is visible just behind). The Latin text was inscribed on both sides of the main entrance, the Greek over one of the outside walls. Neither version survives complete, the missing portions of Latin can be completed from the Greek and vice versa.
None of this, however, was Augustus’ main theme. And many other likely topics find no place at all. There is nothing about his family, apart from one reference to honours paid to two of his adopted children who died young. There is nothing about his programme of moral legislation or his attempts to increase the birth rate, though the census figures may have been intended to demonstrate success on that score – probably erroneously, as it is much more likely that the creation of new citizens and more efficient counting lay behind most of the rise in numbers, rather than imperial finger wagging at the upper class for not producing enough babies. There is little more than allusive references to any individual piece of legislation or political reform. Instead, roughly two-thirds of the text is devoted to just three main subjects: Augustus’ victories and conquests, his benefactions to the Roman people, and his buildings.
More than two pages of the modern text of the Res Gestae catalogue the territories he added to the empire, the foreign rulers he made subject to Rome and the embassies and suppliants who flocked to recognise the emperor’s power. ‘I extended the territory of all the provinces of the Roman people, which had neighbours not obedient to our rule,’ he announces, with slight exaggeration, before moving on to itemise at what can now seem tedious length his imperial successes and military victories all over the world: Egypt made a Roman possession; the Parthians forced to return the Roman military standards lost in 53 BCE; a Roman army reaching the city of Meroe south of the Sahara and a fleet entering the North Sea; delegations arriving from as far afield as India, not to mention a mixed bag of renegade kings begging for mercy, with names gratifyingly exotic to a Latin ear – ‘Artavasdes king of the Medes, Artaxares of the Adiabenians, Dumnobellaunus and Tincomarus of the Britons’. And that is only a small slice of it.
There is something entirely traditional about this. Military success had been one foundation of political power as far back in Roman history as it is possible to go. Augustus outstripped all possible rivals on this score, bringing more territory under Roman rule than anyone else before or after. Yet this was a new kind of imperialism too. The heading of the inscribed text, the closest thing it has to an original title, reads: ‘This is how he made the world subject to the power of the people of Rome’. Pompey, more than half a century earlier, had just hinted at that kind of ambition. Augustus explicitly turned global conquest – and a ‘joined-up’ territorial view of an empire centred on Rome, rather than the old mosaic of obedient states – into a rationale for his rule. How all this would have come across to the provincial audience in Ankyra is impossible to know. But it is an idea reflected in other monuments that Augustus sponsored in the city of Rome, most famously in the world ‘map’ that he and his colleague Marcus Agrippa commissioned and put on public display. No trace of this survives, and the best guess is that it was something closer to an annotated plan of Roman roads than a realistic geography in our terms (see plate 21). But whatever its exact appearance, it fitted Augustus’ vision of empire. As Pliny later put it, in his encyclopaedia, the map’s purpose was to make ‘the world [orbis] something for the city [urbs] to see’, or to display the world as Roman territory under the emperor’s rule.
Augustus’ generosity to the ordinary people at home claims as much space in the Res Gestae as his conquests abroad. He was wealthy on a new scale. The combination of his inheritance from Caesar, the riches of Egypt that he seized after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra and the occasional blurring of the boundary between state funds and his own meant that he could outbid anyone as a popular benefactor. Here he carefully lists his regular distributions of cash: the dates, the precise amounts he gave per head (often the equivalent of several months’ pay for an ordinary worker) and the number of beneficiaries; ‘these handouts of mine never reached fewer than 250,000 men,’ he insists. He also catalogues other kinds of gifts and sponsorship. These were above all gladiatorial shows, ‘athletic spectacles’, wild beast hunts with animals specially imported from Africa (a later writer refers to 420 leopards on a single occasion) and one mock naval battle that became legendary. This was a huge triumph of engineering and ingenuity, for it was staged, as Augustus proudly explains, on an artificial lake, more than 500 metres by 350, specially constructed ‘on the other side of the Tiber’ (in modern Trastevere), and it featured 30 large warships plus even more smaller boats and 3,000 fighting men in addition to the rowers. On his own reckoning the Roman people could have counted on roughly one major entertainment at the emperor’s expense each year. It was hardly the daily bloodbath of popular pleasure that the modern movie image of ancient Rome suggests, but it still involved a vast outlay of time, logistics and cash, as well as human and animal lives.
The message is clear. It was an axiom of the Augustan regime that the emperor paraded his generosity to the ordinary people of the city of Rome and that they in turn were to look to him as their patron, protector and benefactor. He made the same point when he took (or, technically, was given) ‘the power of a tribune’ for life. He was linking himself to the tradition of popular politicians, going back at least to the Gracchi, who stood up for the rights and welfare of the Roman in the street.
The final theme is his building. One part of this was a massive programme of restorations, of everything from roads and aqueducts to the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline, the founding monument of the Republic. With tremendous bravura, Augustus claims to have restored eighty-two temples of the gods in a single year – a number, not far short of all the temples in the city, that is clearly intended to underline his zealous piety, although it also suggests that the practical work done on each was not substantial. But like many tyrants, monarchs and dictators before and since, he also set about constructing what was in effect a new Rome and literally building himself into power. The Res Gestae itemises a wholesale redevelopment of the city centre, which exploited for the first time the marble quarries of northern Italy and the most lustrous, colourful and expensive stones that the empire had to offer. It turned the ramshackle old town into something that looked like an imperial capital. There was a huge new Forum to rival, if not overshadow, the old one, a new senate house, a theatre (still standing as the Theatre of Marcellus), porticoes, public halls (or basilicas) and walkways, as well as more than a dozen new temples, including one in honour of his father Julius Caesar. When Augustus said, as Suetonius quotes him, ‘I found the city built of brick and left it built of marble,’ this is what he meant. The Res Gestae provides a gazetteer of his transformation of Rome’s urban landscape.
64. An imaginative reconstruction of Augustus’ new Forum, which survives only in small sections (best now viewed from Mussolini’s road, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, which overlies most of the Forum’s piazza). Though certainly unreliable in detail, the drawing gives a good sense of the elaborate and highly planned character of this new development, in contrast to the rather ramshackle image of the old Republican Forum.
It also amounts to a clear blueprint for one-man rule. Augustus’ power, as he formulates it, is signalled by military conquest, by his role of protector and benefactor of the people in Rome and by construction and reconstruction on a vast scale; and it was underpinned by massive reserves of cash, combined with the display of respect for the ancient traditions of Rome. It was against this blueprint that every emperor for the next 200 years was judged. Even the most unmilitary types could use conquest to assert their right to rule, as the elderly Claudius did in 43 CE when he made as much as he possibly could out of ‘his’ victory, won entirely by his subordinates, over the island of Britain. And there was an ongoing competition among succeeding rulers about who could parade himself as the most generous to the Roman population or who could write his own story most noticeably into the fabric of the city. The emperor Trajan’s soaring column, documenting his conquests across the river Danube in the early second century CE – and ingeniously securing maximum impact for minimum floor area – was one obvious winner. Hadrian’s Pantheon was another. Finished in the 120s CE, the concrete span of its dome remained the widest in the world until 1958 (when it was beaten by the Centre of New Industries and Technologies building in Paris), and twelve of the original columns in its portico were each 12 metres high, carved from a single block of grey granite and specially transported 2,500 miles from the Egyptian desert. Ultimately this all went back to Augustus.