Problems and successions
Things did not all go Augustus’ way. Even through the generally celebratory ancient gloss on his rule, it is possible to glimpse what a much more troubled account might look like. In 9 CE, five years before his death, there was a terrible military disaster in Germany at the hands of local rebels and freedom fighters, which destroyed most of three legions. It did not stop the pacification of Germany from being a proud boast in the Res Gestae, but the severity of this defeat is supposed to have prompted Augustus to call a halt to projects for world conquest. At home there was more overt opposition to his rule than appears at first sight: there was offensive literature which ended up being burnt and conspiracies which he probably survived as much by luck as by anything else. Suetonius lists a number of dissidents and plotters, but as always with failed coups it is hard to tell what was driving them, between politics and personal grudges. It is never in the interests of the intended victim to give them a fair press.
In one case it seems likely that the changed political role of the elite and Augustus’ control of elections was a major factor behind the discontent. The story of Marcus Egnatius Rufus, as it has come down to us, is predictably muddled in detail, but the bare bones are clear enough. Egnatius, first of all, challenged Augustus by making independent benefactions to the people. In particular, when he held the office of aedile in 22 BCE he used his own cash to set up a rudimentary city fire brigade. Augustus disapproved but decided to trump Egnatius by making 600 of his own slaves available for firefighting. A few years later, while Augustus was abroad, Egnatius attempted to stand for the consulship without the emperor’s approval and at an illegally early age. This cannot have been an organised plot against the emperor: he was not in Rome to be disposed of anyway, which might have been why Egnatius thought he could get away with his stand. But when his candidacy was refused, there were popular riots. He was executed, on the decision of the senate, presumably with the absent emperor’s agreement.
How many of his fellow senators sympathised with Egnatius Rufus is a matter of guesswork. We know nothing of his background and can only infer what his aims and motives were. Some modern historians have wanted to make him a kind of people’s champion on the model of Clodius and other tribunes in the late Republic. But it looks much more likely that he was protesting against the erosion of senatorial independence and asserting the rights of the senators to their traditional links with the Roman people.
Beyond front-line politics, there were certainly subversive views of the symbolic world that Augustus was busy sponsoring, and his new image of Rome. The poet Ovid, a victim of the ruthless side of the Augustan regime, gives clear hints of how the mutterings on the street might have gone. Writing from his unhappy exile on the shores of the Black Sea, in a series of poems titled Miseries (Tristia) – often more barbed than sad – he took a witty potshot at the decoration of the temple dominating Augustus’ new Forum, which featured statues of the gods Mars and Venus. As the father of Romulus and mother of Aeneas, these were the two founding deities of Rome. They were also the two most famous divine adulterers of classical mythology. As far back as Homer the story had been told of how Venus’ cuckolded husband, Vulcan, the god of manufacture, had caught the pair embarrassingly in flagrante, cleverly trapping them in a metal net he specially constructed for the purpose. Hardly the appropriate symbol for the emperor’s new, moral Rome, where adultery was a crime, the exiled poet insinuated. Some of the elaborate displays of civilitasmay have backfired too. If it is really true that each time Augustus entered or left the senate he acknowledged every senator in turn by name, the whole palaver – allowing ten seconds per man and a fairly full house – would have taken about an hour and a half on entry and exit. For some it must have seemed a display of power rather than citizenly equality.
Even Virgil’s Aeneid, the epic poem sponsored by the emperor himself, prompts troubling questions. The figure of Aeneas, Augustus’ mythical ancestor and clearly intended to be some reflection of him, is a decidedly unstraightforward hero. Modern readers are probably much more disturbed than their ancient counterparts were by the way Aeneas abandons the unfortunate Dido and causes her terrible suicide on the pyre: the message is that mere passion should not deflect the pursuit of patriotic duty, and the dangerous image of Cleopatra behind the queen of Carthage underlines the point. But the final scene of the poem, in which Aeneas, now established in Italy, allows his rage to triumph as he brutally kills an enemy who has surrendered, has always been an unsettling conclusion. Such ambivalences have, of course, made the Aeneid a more powerful work of literature than thousands of lines of jingoistic praise would have been. But they continue to raise questions about Virgil’s relationship with his patron and the Augustan regime. What went through Augustus’ head when he first read, or listened to, those last lines? That was not for Virgil to tell. He died in 19 BCE, before, it was said, he had completed the final revision of his poem.
Augustus’ bigger problem, however, was how to find a successor. It is clear that he intended to pass his power on. His enormous tomb in Rome, already completed in 28 BCE, was a powerful sign that he, unlike Antony, would be buried in Italian soil and that there would be a dynasty to follow him. He also built up the idea of an imperial family, including his wife Livia. One-man rule often brings women into greater prominence, not because they necessarily have any formal power but because, when one person takes key decisions of state in private, anyone with close access to that person is perceived as influential too. The woman who can whisper in her husband’s ear wields more power de facto, or rather is often alleged to, than the colleague who can only send official requests and memos. On one occasion, Augustus acknowledged in a letter to the Greek city of Samos that Livia had been putting in a good word for it behind the scenes. But he seems more actively to have promoted her role beyond this, as a linchpin of his dynastic ambitions.
Livia had an official image in Roman sculpture, just as Augustus did (see plate 12). And she was granted a series of special legal privileges, including front-row seats at the theatre, financial independence and, from the civil war years, the right of sacrosanctitas (‘inviolability’), modelled on the privilege of a tribune. Sacrosanctitas had originated in the Republic and had been intended to protect the people’s representatives from attack. What in practice it protected Livia from is not so clear, but the important novelty is that it was explicitly based on the rights of a male public official. This was edging her into the official limelight more than any woman had been edged before. One poem, addressed to her on the death of her son Drusus in 9 BCE, even calls her Romana princeps. It was the female equivalent of a term regularly applied to Augustus, Romanus princeps, or ‘first citizen of Rome’, and meant something close to ‘first lady’. An extravagant piece of hyperbole composed by a flatterer maybe, and certainly not a sign of growing emancipation of women in general, but it points to the public importance of the emperor’s wife within a would-be imperial dynasty.
The trouble was that the couple had no children. Augustus had a single daughter, Julia, from an earlier marriage, and Livia already had Drusus and was pregnant with another son, Tiberius, when they married in 37 BCE. Whatever their later respectability, the start to their relationship had a scandalous tinge, branded by Antony as a disgraceful bit of philandering. In retaliation, presumably, for all the vicious rumours spread about his immoralities, he used to claim that the pair would meet at her husband’s parties, go off to a convenient bedroom halfway through dinner and return looking tousled. But scandalous or respectable, the marriage produced no offspring: with Augustus, according to Suetonius, Livia had had just one premature stillbirth.
So the emperor went to great lengths to secure heirs who could be presented, in the circumstances, as legitimate successors. Julia, as his natural daughter, was the favourite instrument in his plans. She was married off first to her cousin Marcellus, who died when she was only sixteen; then to her father’s friend and colleague Marcus Agrippa, more than twenty years her senior; then, in what must have looked the perfect arrangement, to Livia’s son Tiberius. If an existing partner stood in the way of any of these matches, Augustus insisted on divorce. Only rarely does any hint survive of the personal cost of it all. Tiberius was reportedly devastated to be forced to part from his wife Vipsania Agrippina, the daughter of Agrippa by an earlier marriage, in order to marry Julia, who was now Agrippa’s widow – a characteristic bit of dynastic confusion. On one occasion after their divorce Tiberius is said to have caught sight of Vipsania by chance, and it brought tears to his eyes; his minders made sure that he never saw her again. As for Julia, it may be that this series of arranged marriages had something to do with her notoriously rebellious sex life. One lurid story has it that she hosted wild parties on the rostra in the Forum; by a satisfying, or horrible, symmetry it was the very place from which her father had advocated his curbs on adultery. True or not, her affairs were one of the factors (alleged treason was another) that led to her being packed off in 2 BCE to exile on an island about half a mile square and never returning to Rome.
65. Detail of a processional frieze from the Altar of Peace (Ara Pacis) in Rome commissioned in 13 BCE. This frieze featured the extended imperial family, including here on the left Agrippa. The woman behind him may be his then wife Julia, but she is more often identified as Livia.
The end result of all this dynastic planning is that the family tree of what is now called the Julio-Claudian dynasty (Julius being Augustus’ family name, Claudius that of Livia’s first husband) became so bafflingly complicated that is impossible to diagram clearly on paper, let alone recall in any detail. But even so, the desired heirs either did not appear or, if they did, died too soon. The marriage of Tiberius and Julia produced only one child, who did not survive childhood. Augustus adopted two sons of her marriage to Agrippa as a way of marking them out as heirs (while further confusing the family tree). They were carefully portrayed around the Roman world looking the spitting image of their adoptive father; but one died of an illness in 2 CE aged just nineteen, the other in 4 CE after being wounded on campaign in the East and before his marriage (to another relative) had produced a child. In the end, despite all his efforts, Augustus was back where he could have started all along, with Livia’s son Tiberius, who became the next emperor in 14 CE. Pliny the Elder could not resist pointing out one other irony of this. Tiberius Claudius Nero, the new emperor’s father, had been on Antony’s side in the civil war, and his family had been among those besieged at Perusia. Augustus died, Pliny quipped, ‘with the son of his enemy as his heir’.