Power politics

The Res Gestae was always intended as a record of success, a retrospective parade of achievement that would also set a pattern for the future. It steers clear of any sign of difficulty, conflict or contest, except in briefly dismissing the long-dead adversaries of the civil war. And with its insistent series of first-person verbs (‘I paid’, ‘I built’, ‘I gave’) and matching pronouns (there are almost 100 ‘me’s and ‘mine’s), it is more egocentric than any Roman public document before, composed in the style of an autocrat who appears to take his personal power for granted. That is, however, only one side of the Augustan story, seen from its successful end after more than forty years in power. It looked very different when he returned to Italy in 29 BCE, still as Octavian, with the example of Julius Caesar looming large. Caesar was his main access to power and legitimacy, as well as to that title ‘son of a god’, but he was also a warning of the fate that might lie in store. To be the son of an assassinated dictator was a mixed blessing. The big question in those early days was simple: how was he going to devise a form of rule that would win hearts and minds, defuse the opposition not wholly extinguished by the end of the war and allow him to stay alive?

Part of the answer came down to the language of power. For obvious Roman reasons, he did not call himself king. He made an elaborate show of rejecting the title ‘dictator’ too, distancing himself from Caesar’s example. The story that a crowd of protesters once barricaded the senators in the senate house and threatened to burn it down over their heads if they did not make Augustus a dictator only added extra lustre to this refusal. Instead he chose to frame all his powers in terms of regular Republican office holding. To begin with, that meant being repeatedly elected consul, eleven times in all between 43 and 23 BCE, and on two isolated occasions later. Then, from the mid 20s BCE, he arranged to be granted a series of formal powers that were modelled on those of traditional Roman political offices but not the offices themselves: he took ‘the power of a tribune’ but did not hold the tribunate, and ‘the rights of a consul’ without holding the consulship.

This was a long way from the realities of traditional Republican practice, especially when he piled up multiple titles and offices together: the power of a tribune on top of the rights of a consul at the same time was unheard of; so too was his holding of not just one but all the major Roman priesthoods together. Whatever the later allegations of hypocrisy, he can hardly have been using these comfortable, old-fashioned titles to pretend that this was a return to the politics of the past. Romans were not, by and large, so unobservant that they would have failed to spot the autocracy lurking behind the fig leaf of ‘the rights of a consul’. The point was that Augustus was cleverly adapting the traditional idioms to serve a new politics, justifying and making comprehensible a new axis of power by systematically reconfiguring an old language.

His rule was also presented as inevitable, as part of the natural and historical order: in short, as part of how things were. In 8 BCE the senate decided (who knows with what nudging?) that the month Sextilis, next to Julius Caesar’s July, should be renamed August – and so Augustus became part of the regular passage of time, as he remains. Only the year before, the governor of the province of Asia had been thinking on similar lines when he persuaded the locals to align their calendar with the life cycle of the emperor and to begin their civic year on Augustus’ birthday. The 23rd of September, the governor urged (in words still preserved in an inscription), might ‘justly be considered equal to the beginning of all things … for [Augustus] has given a different appearance to the whole world, a world which would have met its ruin if … he had not been born’. In Rome, the language used might have been less overblown, but even there, myth and religion could usefully underpin Augustus’ position. His claim to descend directly from Aeneas helped to portray the emperor as a fulfilment of Roman destiny, as the ordained refounder of Rome.

That is certainly one element in Virgil’s epic story of Aeneas, with its clear echoes between the emperor and the legendary founding hero. But it is also seen vividly in the sculptural programme of Augustus’ new Forum. This featured prominent statues of both Aeneas and Romulus and one of Augustus standing in a triumphal chariot in the centre of the piazza. The surrounding porticoes and arcades were lined with dozens of other statues, depicting ‘the famous men of the Republic’, each with a short text summing up his claim to fame: from Camillus and several Scipios to Marius and Sulla. The clear message was that the whole course of Roman history led up to Augustus, who now took centre stage. The story of the Republic had not been obliterated; it had been turned into a harmless backdrop to Augustan power, whose roots were found in the very origin of Rome. Or to put it another way, Augustus took over where the previous politics of Rome had collapsed. It was widely known that he was born in 63 BCE, the year of Catiline’s conspiracy. Suetonius even claims that his father was held up by the birth and so was late for one of Cicero’s big performances in the senate on the subject. No senatorial meeting was held on 23 September, so far as is known. But whether the story was an invention or not, the point was to present the same day as both the end of Republican politics, demonstrated in the corruption of Catiline, and the beginning of the life of the emperor.

There was, however, some much more ruthless realpolitik involved than this. Art, religion, myth, symbol and language, from the poetry of Virgil to the sculptural extravaganza of the new Forum, played an important part in grounding the new regime. But Augustus also took some down-to-earth steps to secure his position, by ensuring that the army was loyal to him and to no one else, by cutting off potential opponents from their support networks among the soldiers and the ordinary people and by transforming the senate from an aristocracy of competing dynasts, and possible rivals, into an aristocracy of service and honour. A classic ‘poacher turned gamekeeper’, Augustus set out to make sure that no one could easily follow the example of his own youth: that is, raise a private army and take over the state.

He took a monopoly on military force, but his regime was nothing like a modern military dictatorship. In our terms, Rome and Italy at this period were remarkably soldier free. Almost all the 300,000 Roman troops were stationed a safe distance away, near the boundaries of the Roman world and in areas of active campaigning, with only a very few troops, including the famous security forces known as the Praetorian Guard, based in Rome, which was otherwise a demilitarised zone. But Augustus became something no Roman had been before: the commander-in-chief of all the armed forces, who appointed their major officers, decided where and against whom the soldiers should fight, and claimed all victories as by definition his own, whoever had commanded on the ground.

He also secured his position by severing the links of dependence and personal loyalty between armies and their individual commanders, largely thanks to a simple, practical process of pension reform. This must count among the most significant innovations of his whole rule. He established uniform terms and conditions of army employment, fixing a standard term of service of sixteen years (soon raised to twenty) for legionaries and guaranteeing them on retirement a cash settlement at public expense amounting to about twelve times their annual pay or an equivalent in land. That ended once and for all the soldiers’ reliance on their generals to provide for their retirement, which over the last century of the Republic had repeatedly led to the soldiers’ private loyalty to their commander trumping their loyalty to Rome. In other words, after hundreds of years of a semi-public, semi-private militia, Augustus fully nationalised the Roman legions and removed them from politics. Although the Praetorian Guard continued to be a problematic political force, simply because of its proximity to the centre of power in Rome, only during two brief periods of civil war over the next two centuries, in the years 68 to 69 CE and again in 193 CE, were legions stationed outside the city instrumental in putting their candidates on the Roman throne.

This reform was one of the most expensive things Augustus ever did, and it was close to unaffordable. Unless he made a gross error in his arithmetic, the cost alone is an indication of the high priority he gave it. On a rough reckoning using the known military salary figures, the annual bill for regular pay combined with retirement packages for the whole army would now have come to about 450 million sesterces. That was, on an even rougher reckoning, the equivalent of more than half the total annual tax revenue of the empire. There are clear signs that, even with the huge reserves of state and emperor combined, it was hard to find the money. That is certainly the implication of the complaints of mutinous soldiers on the German frontier just after Augustus’ death, who objected to being kept in service for much longer than the regulation twenty years or to being given a piece of worthless bog as a land settlement in lieu of a decent farm. Then as now, the easiest tactic for a government trying to reduce the pension bill was to raise the pension age.

At home there was a similar logic behind the gradual decline and eventual end of popular elections. This was not mainly an assault on what was left of Roman democracy, even if that was one inevitable consequence. More important, it was a clever way of inserting a wedge between the emperor’s potential rivals and any large-scale popular or factional support in the city. Free elections had provided the glue of mutual dependence between prominent politicians and the people as a whole. As soon as ambitious individuals came to rely on the nod of the emperor rather than on the popular vote for public office and other sorts of preferment, they no longer had to attract the support of the people en masse, they were no longer compelled to build up a popular following and they had no institutional framework within which to do so. The intention was, as the Res Gestaemore or less declares, that Augustus should monopolise the support of the people, edging the senators safely out of the picture.

Yet for all his autocratic power, Augustus still needed the senate. No sole ruler ever really rules alone. The Roman Empire had a light administrative footprint compared with the bureaucracy of all modern states and some ancient ones too. Even so, someone had to command the legions, govern the provinces, run the corn and water supplies and generally act as the deputy for an emperor who could not do everything. As is often the case in regime change, the new guard is more or less forced to rely on a carefully reformed version of the old guard, or – as we have seen in recent history – anarchy can result.

In broad terms, Augustus bought senatorial acquiescence and senatorial service at the price of granting them honours, respect and in some cases new powers. Many of the old uncertainties were resolved, usually in the senate’s favour. Senatorial decrees had previously been advisory only and in the last resort could be ignored or flouted, which was exactly what Caesar and Pompey did in 50 BCE when the senate instructed them both to disarm. These decrees were now given the force of law and gradually, along with the pronouncements of the emperor, became the main form of Roman legislation. The split that Gaius Gracchus had opened up in the 120s BCE between senators and knights was made complete. The two groups were formally separated, and a new wealth qualification of a million sesterces, as against 400,000 for the knights, was now applied to a ‘senatorial class’. Senatorial status was also made hereditary over three generations. That meant a senator’s son and grandson could keep all the perks of being a senator without ever taking public office. Those perks increased too, as did the prohibitions that were intended to mark senatorial superiority: guaranteed front-row seats at all public shows on the one hand, an absolute ban on performing as an actor on the other.

In return, the senate became something much closer to an arm of administration in the service of the emperor. Augustus’ introduction of a senatorial retirement age is just one hint of that. Senators also lost some of their most important and traditional marks of glory and status. For centuries, the acme of Roman ambition, the dream of every commander, even of the awkwardly unmilitary Cicero, had been to celebrate a triumph, parading through the streets with his spoils, prisoners and jubilant troops, dressed up as the god Jupiter. When on 27 March 19 BCE Lucius Cornelius Balbus, a one-time henchman of Julius Caesar, celebrated some victories he had scored on behalf of the new Augustan regime against some powerful Berber people on the edge of the Sahara, it was the last triumphal procession that an ordinary senatorial general was ever to have. Henceforth the ceremony was restricted entirely to emperors and their close family. It was not in the interests of the autocracy to share the fame and prominence that a triumph brought, and this was another glaring sign that the old Republic was finished.

It was also another case where a radical change of practice was made to seem somehow inevitable. As part of his celebration of the past – as the past – Augustus commissioned the register of all the triumphing generals, from Romulus to Balbus, displayed in the Roman Forum (p. 128). Much of it still survives, dug up in small fragments of a marble jigsaw puzzle that was first put together, it is said, by Michelangelo in the sixteenth century to decorate the new Palazzo dei Conservatori that he redesigned for the Capitoline Hill. It was laid out on four panels, and thanks to careful calculation on the part of the inscribers, the triumph of Balbus is recorded at the very bottom of the final panel, with no blank space underneath, leaving no room for more names. More than design symmetry was at stake here. The message was that the institution had not been interrupted in midstream. It had come to its natural end. There was no room for more.