Augustus is dead. Long live Augustus!

Augustus died on 19 August 14 CE, shortly before his seventy-sixth birthday, at one of his houses in southern Italy. According to Suetonius, he had been holidaying on the island of Capri, playing learned games with his guests – insisting, for example, that all the Roman guests should dress as Greeks and speak Greek, while all the Greek guests should act as Romans. The end was all very low-key. By the time he returned to the mainland, his stomach was giving him trouble, and eventually it forced him to his bed, where, somewhat surprisingly, given the fate of so many of his contemporaries, he died. There were rumours later that Livia had had a hand in his end, with some poisoned figs, to ease Tiberius’ accession to power, just as some had said she had hastened the end of other family members for fear that they would spoil Tiberius’ chances of the throne. But it was another case of unexplained deaths in the Roman world – as the majority were outside battle, childbirth and accident – attracting that sort of gossip whether there was any foundation for it or not. And poisoning was always supposed to be the woman’s weapon of choice. It required no physical strength, only cunning, and was a frightful inversion of her traditional role of nurturer.

Others believed, more plausibly, that Livia played a major part in smoothing the transition from Augustus to Tiberius. As soon as her husband’s death looked imminent, she sent for her son, who was about five days’ journey away across the Adriatic. Meanwhile she kept issuing optimistic bulletins about Augustus’ health until Tiberius arrived and the death could be announced; when the old man really died was always a matter of dispute. But whether it was before or after his heir’s arrival, the accession proved fairly seamless. The body was carried more than 100 miles to Rome from where he died at Nola, on the shoulders of the leading men of the towns along the route. There was no coronation ceremony; whatever use Augustus had made of his triumph in 29 BCE, there was no specific Roman ritual to mark imperial accession. But Tiberius was already effectively in control as the new emperor when he arranged a meeting of the senate to make public Augustus’ will, bequests and other instructions for the future and to discuss the funeral arrangements.

There are a few hints that the organisers were anxious about possible trouble. Why else did they have the ceremony and the funeral route guarded by troops? But all passed off peacefully, and in a way that would have been more or less familiar to Polybius more than 150 years earlier, even if on a more lavish scale. A wax model of Augustus, not the body itself, was propped up on the rostra while Tiberius delivered the funeral address. The procession featured images not only of Augustus’ ancestors but also of great Romans of the past, including Pompey and Romulus, as if Augustus had been the descendant of them all. After the cremation, Livia – now called Augusta, because Augustus had formally adopted her in his will – rewarded with the sum of a million sesterces the man who swore that he had seen Augustus soaring to heaven. Augustus was now a god.

66. This is a simplified version of the family and descendants of Augustus and Livia; emperors are marked in bold type. The complexities of adoption and multiple marriages, combined with any number of characters with the same name, make it close to baffling; but baffling complexity was part of the point of dynasty.

The emperor in his human form remained enigmatic to the last. Among his final words to his assembled friends, before a lingering kiss with Livia, was a characteristically shifty quotation from a Greek comedy: ‘If I have played my part well, then give me applause.’ What kind of act had he been playing all those years? they were supposed to wonder. And where was the real Augustus? And who wrote his lines? Those questions remain. How Augustus managed to recast so much of the political landscape of Rome, how he managed to get his own way for more than forty years, and with what support, is still puzzling. Who, for example, made the decision about his (or Livia’s) official image? What kind of discussions, and with whom, lay behind the new scheme for army service and pensions? How far was he simply lucky to have survived so long?

Nonetheless, the broad framework he set out for being an emperor lasted for more than 200 years – or, to put it another way, for the rest of the period covered by this book. Every later emperor we shall meet was or at least impersonated Augustus. They used the name Augustus among their imperial titles, and they inherited his personal signet ring, which is supposed to have passed down the line from one to the next. This was no longer his original favourite, the sphinx. Over the decades he had changed the design, first to a portrait of Alexander the Great and finally to a portrait of himself. Augustus’ head, in other words, and his distinctive features became the signature of each of his successors. Whatever their idiosyncrasies, virtues, vices or backgrounds, whatever the different names we know them by, they were all better or worse reincarnations of Augustus, operating within the model of autocracy he established and dealing with the problems that he left unresolved.

It is to some of the problems facing this series of new Augusti that we now turn – starting with another death.