Augustus

Image and Substance

Barbara Levick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317867432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Throughout a long and spectacularly successful political life, the Emperor Augustus (63BC-AD14) was a master of spin. Barbara Levick exposes the techniques which he used to disguise the ruthlessness of his rise to power and to enhance his successes once power was achieved.

There was, she argues, less difference than might appear between the ambitious youth who overthrew Anthony and Cleopatra and the admired Emperor of later years. However seemingly benevolent his autocracy and substantial his achievements, Augustus' overriding purpose was always to keep himself and his dynasty in power. Similar techniques were practised against surviving and fresh opponents, but with increasing skill and duplicity, and in the end the exhausted members of the political classes were content to accept their new ruler. This book charts the stages of Augustus' rise, the evolution of his power and his methods of sustaining it, and finally the ways in which he used artists and literary men to glorify his image for his own time and times to come.

This fascinating story of the realities of power in ancient Rome has inescapable contemporary resonance and will appeal equally to students of the Ancient World and to the general reader.

Chapter 1 Octavian: Heir of an Autocrat

DOI: 10.4324/9781315835297-2

Entry into politics

Sallust writes in his Catiline, a work that belongs to the terrible opening years of the Second Triumvirate, 42–41 BC, that after 70 BC all who harried the Commonwealth used fine pretexts, some that they were defending the rights of the People, others that they were maintaining the authority of the Senate. They made a pretence of the public good, but each was fighting for his own power. ¹ Octavian/Augustus made these protestations, but he was an original in that he was the first Roman politician actually to embark on his career with the intention of winning permanent supremacy. If this is accepted, his entire conduct must be seen in that light, as the rational and consistent pursuit of sole power and its perpetuation. That certainly is the aim that Cassius Dio attributes to Octavian: he set out in pursuit of aims of the kind that had led to Caesar’s murder. Admittedly, Dio’s view of Augustus is very much his own. More decisive would be a pronouncement made on oath by Octavian himself within his first year in politics, in which he over-boldly made no secret in a popular assembly of wanting to attain his father’s offices, even as he pointed to a statue of Julius Caesar. But Octavian was too clever for that. A better interpretation of this part of Cicero’s letter, in which the claim is made, is that he was demanding the implementation of his father’s divine status – which he soon achieved. It was only later that Nicolaus of Damascus put forward the claim in its fullest form_ it was legally proper and necessary for the son to resume Caesar’s responsibilities. ²

Figure 2 Octavian and Caesar coin (© the Trustees of the British Museum)

The thirteen years that followed Caesar’s murder were full of dispute, espionage, warfare, corruption, treachery and atrocities; Tacitus calls the Dictatorship and Triumvirate, the civil war period that preceded the foundation of the Principate, ‘twenty years of unmitigated strife; no morality, no law; all the worst villainy went unpunished, while decency often brought destruction’. For Dio the Triumvirate was a time that made Caesar’s Dictatorship seem like a golden age. ³ The youth of many of the key players, notably of Octavian himself, harped on by opponents, ⁴ and of his closest allies Agrippa and Maecenas, his opponents Sextus Pompeius and Cleopatra, is pointed out by J. Osgood as a factor that contributed to their precipitate behaviour – not mere youth, but the fact that they had not seen the brutal consequences of the civil wars between Sulla and the Marians in the 80s – when advancing years mitigated the brutality not a scrap. ⁵ Rather the premature deaths of parents brought precocious and ambitious boys to the front, as it had with Pompey the Great. Octavian’s ambition and unscrupulousness were to outdo anything that his forerunners displayed.

The diverse sources present impossible choices for the historian at every turn. ⁶ Whatever the mitigation to be allowed him, or the blame to be attached to his antagonists, Octavian, participant in the Perusine war as well as the campaign of Philippi and the proscriptions, must bear the greatest responsibility – and be credited with systematic and rational efforts to realise his ambitions. Their intensity can be measured by considering the dangers of the course he embarked on. The fourth-century compiler known as the Epitomator of Aurelius Victor, writing imperial biographies, set the failings of his first subject against his merits: Augustus’ failings are that he was ambitious beyond belief for supremacy; and that he was a keen dice player. ⁷ The author was telling us more than he intended.

In the event Octavian was to have a lifetime of seventy-six years, and he came on the stage at a crucial point in a revolution that transformed an aggressive, oligarchical republic with a firm claim on three continents into a monarchic empire. C. Octavius, who from the opening of Caesar’s will in 44 and the acceptance of his inheritance down to 27 BC is conventionally known to modern historians as Octavian, had been with Caesar in Spain for some part of his stay there in 46–45, but does not seem to have taken part in the main campaign, of Munda (Montilla). ⁸ It was during further training at Apollonia (Pojani) in Epirus in preparation for Caesar’s Parthian campaign that he heard of his great-uncle’s assassination on 15 March, 44 BC; the letter from his mother Atia reached him near the end of the month and urged him to return to Italy. Nicolaus of Damascus gives a graphic account of the views of Octavius’ entourage. ⁹ He crossed to Brunisium (Brindisi) and at Lupiae (Lecce), still in southern Italy, he learned the details of Caesar’s will. ¹⁰ Despite the pleas of his mother and stepfather L. Marcius Philippus, consul 56 BC and a neutral in the civil wars of 49–45, he decided at once to accept the bequest and the obligation to avenge Caesar that that carried with it, and did so publicly on the day after he arrived in Rome on 6 May, ¹¹ promising the people the games in honour of Venus Genetrix vowed by Caesar at the battle of Pharsalus and the payment of Caesar’s bequest to them.

Octavian had had more than a month to think, and advice from relatives and friends, from the cautious Philippus to hold off altogether, from young and ambitious comrades to stage a coup immediately, and from more prudent older followers of Caesar to enter the political arena – which he followed. So it was a considered decision. Caesar had had an agnate relative, Sextus Caesar, but he had been killed two years previously governing Syria as quaestor pro praetore. That had removed a possible rival heir, however insignificant he might be. ¹² The inheritance left Octavius by Caesar’s last dispositions of September 45 was the greater part of Caesar’s estate and, more important, the name that he was required to take with it: he was now ‘Caesar’ and was addressed as such before his arrival in Rome. ¹³ As to the property, he had to meet charges on it such as the HS 300 left: to each member of the Roman plebs and was forced to raise money by selling properties, as well as showing himself willing to spend all he had from any source in pursuit of political ends. ¹⁴

It was a familiar provision of Roman wills that a main heir should take on the name of a testator whose line and name would otherwise have been extinguished, but it did not have the status of a formal adoption. ¹⁵ The original name of a properly adopted son was often attached to his new one, in an adjectival form_ the great second-century general R Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus was an Aemilius adopted by a Cornelius Scipio. Caesar’s heir dropped his comparatively undistinguished former name completely and enveloped himself in the grandeur of his great-uncle’s name. Some refused that and still called him Octavius; so the senior statesman and great orator M. Tullius Cicero, who was devoted to the cause of the Republic, followed the example of Philippus against the practice of the youth’s entourage. ¹⁶ It was unfriendly too to recall the original name by using ‘Octavianus’. ¹⁷ Such pinpricks were nothing compared with the fact that the will did not make him Caesar’s son, a status worth far more than a name, for it would give him a firm claim to the loyalty of Caesar’s clients, his freedmen and other dependants. ¹⁸ Octavian was to remedy this as soon as he could, and by unprecedented means.

But if Octavian was to make his way to the eminence that his ‘father’s’ will indicated for him, he first had to play off two sides, both hostile to any such ambitions – but also to each other: Caesar’s political ally and consul of 44, Mark Antony, ¹⁹ and the assassins (‘Liberators’) and their natural allies, senators such as Cicero, who were aiming at a restoration of traditional Republican government: a nominal democracy under the guidance of a Senate united in defending its own collective power and interests. These were men known in their own time and to themselves as optimates, those who advocated the rule of ‘the best’. ²⁰ Cicero’s greatest fear and dislike was for Caesar’s long-standing ally Mark Antony, the consul of 44 BC, who would remain in power and the possession of legions as a proconsul in 43. That made Cicero vulnerable to the wiles of Caesar’s untried heir. Octavian was taken up by Cicero, whatever his misgivings, as the only effective means of saving the state from rule by Caesar’s lieutenant. Octavian was aware that he was being used, eventually let Cicero know that he was not going to be disposed of, and made ideas of that kind a pretext for going over to Antony and Caesar’s other leading ally M. Aemilius Lepidus, consul in 46 and Caesar’s deputy as Master of the Horse. ²¹ All the same, Octavian had shown Cicero the respect due to an elder statesman and was given strong support, being compared by Cicero with Republican early achievers such as P. Scipio Africanus and Pompey the Great. ²² For long after his early days as a ‘butcher boy’, Pompey had come to defend the Republic against the usurping Julius Caesar, and could be presented as a model statesman. ²³ Octavian’s necessarily equivocal and at its worst treacherous role during his rise to power made this part of his life history difficult to put in a favourable light. We do not possess his Autobiography, only the material in Nicolaus of Damascus’ biography and in other writers deriving from it and the much later formal recital of his Achievements; in that the references to his activities in this period are ‘lacunose and scattered’. ²⁴

Since he arrived in Italy Octavian had been raising a private army for his own use, recruiting from Caesar’s veterans in Campania (each man received a bonus of 500 denarii) and bribing legions away from Antony, the Martia and the Fourth, who had grievances about pay, with his five-fold offers. ²⁵ Emissaries were also working on Antony’s legions still on the other side of the Adriatic. When a story went round at the beginning of October that Octavian intended to assassinate Antony, ordinary people put it down as an invention of Antony’s; Cicero liked to think that it was true – and approved. ²⁶ On 10 November 44 Octavian appeared in Rome in the absence ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Maps and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher's Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Enigma
• Chapter 1 Octavian: Heir of an Autocrat
• Chapter 2 Augustus: Political Evolution
• Chapter 3 Techniques of Management and the Feel-Good Factor
• Chapter 4 Opposition and Discontent
• Chapter 5 The Self-Presentation of a Monarch
• Chapter 6 Augustus in Art and Literature
• Chapter 7 Unmasking a God
• Glossary of Ancient Terms
• Bibliography
• Indexes 1. Peoples and Places
• 2. Persons
• 3. General