Augustus Down the Centuries

When the Emperor Augustus died in AD 14 in his seventy-sixth year, he had been master, jointly or singly, of the Roman world for fifty-six years. He had created the political and social conditions which ensured the perpetuation for another two centuries of a system of rule which brought almost unbroken peace, a large measure of prosperity, and very wide diffusion of Graeco-Roman material and intellectual culture to all those who lived within the confines of the Empire. It was he who gave that Empire definite shape and almost its final limits. His names Caesar Augustus became the titles of imperial legitimacy; the achievements of his reign in literature, architecture and the fine arts ranged from the sensational to the merely notable; and his posthumous deification reflected a strong tendency among the ordinary inhabitants of the Empire to see him as indeed a superman or species of divine being.

Yet there was another side to the picture. Before his metamorphosis into Augustus in 27 BC, the youthful Octavian had been a ruthless revolutionary. His early career was stained with blood, treachery, intrigue, and lust for power. The future Emperor Claudius, writing history seriously and with the encouragement of Livy, on being warned by his mother Antonia (Antony's daughter) and his grandmother Livia (Augustus' wife) that Augustus would never allow him to publish the truth, preferred to omit all account of events between the murder of Julius Caesar in 44 BC and the end of the civil wars fourteen years later. There was much to hide, and the regime was not entirely successful in its attempts to obscure the record.

So long as Augustus and his descendants, the Emperors Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero, held power, the attitudes men took towards the first princeps (emperor) had inescapable political context and content. But with Nero's suicide in AD 68 in the face of armed revolt, Augustus' line ceased. Vespasian (AD 69-79), superseding three ephemeral rivals who all, like himself, were unconnected with the first emperor and used their armies to win power, showed that the true basis of the principate was the loyalty of the soldiers. Of course the emperors themselves joined in conspiracy with those hallowed but now powerless bestowers of constitutional authority, the Senate and People of Rome, to divert attention from this uncomfortable fact and to pretend that there were other reasons why a man should become emperor. But a lineal connection with Augustus was not amongst such reasons. Augustus had inherited, exploited and reinforced the special ties his 'father' Julius Caesar created between himself and the people of Rome. In the language of Roman social institutions he had been their patron and the people his clients. Such relationships were an ancient, essential, and deeply embedded feature of Roman life. The bond between patron and client was felt to be hereditary on both sides and without it none of Tiberius' three successors would have become emperor. But with Vespasian's accession all that was at an end. Augustus had ceased to matter as a determining factor in the brute question of who was to hold power.

That did not mean that Augustus became irrelevant. What happened was that he turned (largely by contrast with his unpopular successors) into a symbol of the good ruler and was no longer a means of legitimising, by descent, the holding of power. Vespasian, the successful usurper, made considerable use on his coinage of types which had been issued by Augustus. Thus he implicitly invited Romans to see him as another Augustus, a bringer of peace after civil war; and his sons and successors Titus ( AD 79-81) and Domitian (AD 81-96) used the same medium to establish a sequence of imperial paragons to which, naturally, they themselves belonged. The elder Pliny, writing his Natural History at this time, comments that Augustus deserved, as well as attained, entry to heaven as a god. Pliny also composed a history of the German wars, and if this had survived we would know more of his attitude towards Augustus' policies; but though it was now politically possible to attempt an objective account of Augustus' reign, there were still many men alive whose careers, or whose father's or grandfather's careers, owed everything to the patronage of Augustus and his heirs. A proper historical perspective could not really be attained until Domitian's murder and the next change of dynasty.

With the reign of Trajan (AD 98-117), the first non-Italian born emperor, comes the famous picture presented by Tacitus at the opening of his Annals of the devious tyrant who destroyed the liberties of Rome, and the much more sympathetic portrait drawn by Suetonius of the father of his country, who succeeded magnificently in putting behind him the violence and cruelty of his early career. (Plutarch, their contemporary, also wrote a life of Augustus, but it does not survive.) This fullness of historical treatment marks very precisely the moment of Augustus' passage from being a fact of current politics to being one of the timeless great men of history, to be paraded for instruction or amusement. It can be no coincidence that Trajan was the last emperor to make substantial reference on his coinage to Augustus, as one of a series of deified emperors (starting with Julius and, interestingly, including the yet unblackened Tiberius) to whose number Trajan thereby declared that he belonged. But he also reissued, as no previous ruler had done, a number of the coins of the Republic; and it is probably right to see Trajan's 'emperor' series in this wider context, emphasising for Romans the continuity of past and present, Repuhlic and Empire.

Subsequent emperors make practically no reference to Augustus. The capricorn, Augustus' birth-sign, which featured prominently on some of his own coins, is found on issues of Hadrian (AD 117-138) and Antoninus Pius (AI) 138-161) and may possibly be intended to recall Augustan felicity. Antoninus' successor Marcus Aurelius (AD 161-180) mentions Augustus in his Meditations only to use his court as an example of greatness of which men are now oblivious. The other surviving non-historical literature of the second century AD shows equally little interest in Augustus. The young Pliny has nothing of importance to say about him. Juvenal ignores him, Lucian has a single anecdote, Apuleius names him once – but as orator, not as emperor.

From the mid-second century, serious interest in Augustus was confined to historians such as Appian and Cassius Dio, who wrote our only surviving accounts of any large part of his reign. Lacking the penetration and passion of Tacitus, they depended on the quality and temper of whatever sources they happened to have been drawing on, and can hardly be said to have had a viewpoint themselves. More revealing for the ordinary Roman's perception of the first emperor are the odd items of popular mythology or perverted history which surface in the imperial panegyrics of the fourth century. A memory of his unpopular but long-lived moral legislation lingers in a passage which associates him withmores just as it links Antoninus with pietas (duty) and Hadrian with leges (laws). He is also presented as a man who stuck to his job through long years of service. The Battle of Actium receives mention, too, his side being propagandistically simplified into hardy defenders of freedom against the decadent Oriental hordes of Antony and Cleopatra. Augustus watches the battle from a tower made of ladders lashed together, while Agrippa (already his son-in-law!) does the fighting. In the mid-third century the Roman people saluted the emperor Traianus Decius (AD 249-251) as 'more fortunate (felicior ) than Augustus, better than Trajan'. Since Trajan was known as Optimus Princeps (Best Emperor), it is clear that Augustus represented, above all, the 'fortunate' emperor.

As pagan culture merged into Christian, we find a new slant. Orosius, writing his version of Roman history early in the fifth century AD, makes Augustus' closing of the Temple of Janus (only done at a time of general peace) on January 6th (Epiphany) show that Augustus was 'God's preparation for His son, and a man predestined to great works. He has Augustus refuse the title Dominus (lord) because he knew the true Lord was coming. John Malalas, a Greek writer of the late sixth century, tells of Augustus consulting the Delphic oracle: when he asks the Pythia who will succeed him at Rome, she orders him to leave the temple, because a 'Hebrew child' is commanding her to depart to Hades, and he then erects in Rome an altar to the 'First-born of God'. The medieval Mirabilia Urbis Romae (Wonders of Rome) avers that Augustus had a palace on the Campidoglio from which he saw a virgin in the sky standing on an altar and holding a baby boy: hence the church of S. Maria d'Aracoeli. There were of course learned and sober men like John of Salisbury, whose Policraticus (AD 1159) shows a fair acquaintance with the ancient writers and makes a number of references to Augustus, in the familiar tradition, as a great and fortunate ruler who was nonetheless frugal, merciful and continent. But even Petrarch, on visiting the Holy City, could be so carried away as to write to Giovanni Colonna that it was 'here that they say Augustus, in his old age, with the guidance of the Sibyl, set eyes on the infant Christ'.

Petrarch, in the fourteenth century, had a foot in both worlds – that of the medieval wonderer at the incomprehensible marvels of a vanished and non-Christian age, and that of the Renaissance scholar who wanted to know more about that age and recreate some sort of historical perspective. Soon, with the relearning of Greek in the West, and the rediscovery and publication. through the new medium of printing, of many ancient authors, it became possible for an educated man to acquire a considerable knowledge of Roman history. Tacitus' astringent comments on Augustus became known again with Beroaldus' 1515 edition of the first six books of the Annals , hitherto supposed lost but brought to Rome a few years previously from a German monastery. Appian and Cassius Dio were both printed in Paris about 1550, and had been available in Latin or Italian translation earlier. With the sixteenth century we enter a world whose inhabitants now rlearly perceive the classical civilisation of Greece and Rome as something separate from themselves, like a mountain range seen across a misty valley from some point on another range. Its distance, its 'otherness', and its splendour are all apparent. Augustus is obviously a peak in the political section of the range. Erasmus, for example, recommends the Christian prince to imitate 'Aristides, Epaminondas, Octavius (i.e. Augustus), Trajan, Antoninus Pius, Alexander Mammeas'. We have reached a new, and more objective, distance.

As it happens, Erasmus wrote that sentence only a few months after Tacitus' Annals were published, and almost certainly without knowledge of them. No later author could ignore Tacitus: the adverse judgement of the greatest of the Roman historians disposed for ever of the simple medieval view, based on Suetonius and on uncritical epitomes of history like Orosius', which Erasmus had been able to assume. Further, the availability of the Greek writers Appian, Dio and Plutarch, none of whom adopts a particularly pro Augustan tone, provided clear and sometimes unflattering detail. From the sixteenth century to the present day the ambiguities of Augustus' record and the sharp division of ancient opinions about it have allowed writers to deliver very different assessments. Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra owes its existence to North's famous translation of Plutarch, whose life of Antony draws upon a mixture of sources and tends naturally to relegate Octavian/Augustus to a subordinate role. Thus in the play Octavian appears as a cool, efficient, but somewhat colourless young man. Voltaire, averting his eyes from politics, named the Rome of Caesar and Augustus along with the Athens of Pericles, the Italy of the Medici, and the France of Louis XIV, as one of the four great ages which deserved to be written about on cultural grounds. Gibbon, living in an England whose political and social system bore many resemblances to that of imperial Rome, had no hesitation in adopting Tacitus' viewpoint:

His virtues, and even his vices, were artificial; and according to the various dictates of his interest, he was at first the enemy, and at last the father, of the Roman world. When he framed the artful system of imperial authority, his moderation was inspired by his fears. He wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government.

The intellectual optimism and scientific rationalism of the nineteenth century caused that great historian of the Roman world, Theodor Mommsen, himself a lawyer and constitutionalist, to take Augustus' window-dressing for the real thing and to propagate the unrealistic theory that the Augustan monarchy was a 'dyarchy', power being equally shared between emperor and senate. Mommsen also overvalued the achievements of Caesar as compared with those of Augustus; and though the work in which he gave expression to his notorious admiration of Caesar preceded by some years the exploits of Bismarck, the same culture and the same militarism and hegemonial notions gave birth to both. It is interesting, too, to note that the constitution of the German Empire after 1871, framed by Bismarck, did indeed embody a sort of 'dyarchy' between Kaiser and Reichstag. The Oxford don H.F. Pelham, writing about 1890, presents a balanced account but can no more escape his age than any other historian. His interpretation of Augustus' moral legislation is suffused with a warm glow of Victorian idealism and belief in an imperial mission:

Great statesman as he was, he realised from the first the necessity... of creating in a people demoralised by faction and civil war a healthy and vigorous public feeling. ... Leaving on one side the degenerate political life of the Roman forum and campus, they were to find their vocation as citizens in an active municipal life, in homely industry, or in useful service abroad.

In 1861 an event occurred which gave the Roman Empire, and its founder, a new political significance. This was the creation by Garibaldi and Cavour of the modern state of Italy. For the first time since the fall of the Western Empire in the fifth century AD, Italy was a political entity – the only missing piece being Rome itself, which was added in 1870. Italians began to draw with relish on the Roman past. G. Ferrero, for example, gave high praise to Augustus in his Greatness and Decline of Rome (1907) and called him 'the pacifier Augustus, who is able gradually by cleverness and infinite patience to re-establish peace and order in the troubled empire'.

National greatness was one of the themes strongly emphasised by Mussolini when he led the Fascists into office in 1922. The new Italy was to draw its inspiration from the achievements of the past and model itself on the hardiness, frugality, nobility and courage of the ancient Romans. To this end the government poured money into various enterprises designed to bring alive the glories of classical Rome and to reawaken ideas of imperial destiny. The learned journal Historia (no relation of the present one) was launched from the offices of Mussolini's influential newspaperIl Popolo d'Italia . In the preface to the first number (1927) Mussolini's brother Arnaldo, by now editor-in-chief, wrote:

Rome and Italy have a history and a destiny to confound and surpass any other Nation... Historia ... will be... the review which will illuminate the ancient virtues, and the greatness of our ancestors, and will, by means of comparative material and the interpretation of the facts of history, help towards the greater and better political understanding of our times.

The issue carries an appreciation of a lecture delivered by Benito himself on 'Ancient Rome and the sea', in which the reviewer writes:

From this memory (of its origins) are born and will be born the works which in peace and in war affirm the greatness of a people. It is thus that, as speaker and writer, theDuce of Italy claims for Italy the highways of the sea, for the fulfilment of her destinies.

In 1928 there took place the first National Congress of Roman Studies (the announcement of which in Historia spoke of 'the renewed love of Rome and Roman-ness'), and the first international congress devoted to Etruscan Studies. The Capitoline Museum was refurbished and rechristened the Museo Capitolino Mussolini.

But it was the archaeological enterprises which were the most spectacular. Massive projects like the restarting of excavation at Herculaneum, the draining of Lake Nemi and the recovery of the galleys, the enormous new efforts at Ostia, and the clearing of the Republican temples of the Largo Argentina in Rome were all dwarfed by the huge programme to open up the heart of imperial Rome. Mussolini declared in a speech to Rome City Council:

In five years this city must appear wonderful to the whole world, immense, orderly, and powerful as she was in the days of the first empire of Augustus. The approaches to the Theatre of Marcellus, the Campidoglio, and the Pantheon must be cleared of everything that has grown up round them during the centuries of decadence.

They were cleared (except the Pantheon); and the new avenue that drove straight from the Campidoglio to the Colosseum between the newly revealed imperial Fora of Caesar and Augustus was named Via dell'Impero Romano (now Via dei Fori Imperiali).

The two thousandth anniversary of Augustus' birth fell on September 23rd, 1938, and Mussolini decided that the preceding twelve months should be a bimillenniary year of celebration. A huge exhibition of Roman civilisation was mounted ('Mostra Augustea della Romanita') which can still be seen at the Museo della Civita Romana. Great efforts were made with especially Augustan monuments. The Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome was cleared of accretions, as was his Arch at Rimini, and the most remarkable excavation of the whole series was triumphantly accomplished by Moretti, who in the face of great technical difficulties and by the brilliant use of refrigeration managed to recover from below the water table and from under the foundations of a Renaissance pa1azzo large portions of the marble bas-reliefs from Augustus' Altar of Peace (Ara Pacis ). The altar was then reconstructed on a new site next to the Mausoleum, incorporating other sculptured slabs that had been retrieved at intervals since the sixteenth century. On the supporting terrace wall was carved the whole text of Augustus' own statement of his achievements (his Res Gestae ), which had once been cut, by Augustus' own command, on the two bronze pillars which originally flanked the entrance to the Mausoleum.

It is not clear to what extent, if at all, Mussolini consciously identified himself with Augustus. His dreams of conquest and empire and his aggressive foreign policy must have been inspired not so much by a person as by the idea of the ancient dominance of Rome. On the other hand there exist some striking parallels with the first emperor. Like Augustus, Mussolini could claim to have brought peace and prosperity to Italy after a period of chaos and civil war (or in his case, the threat of civil war). Like Augustus, he was reluctant to accept honours; on being made an honorary citizen of Florence he said 'I do not feel myself worthy of this honour'. Like Augustus, he lived simply, was not a gourmet, sent his children to state schools (the equivalent of Augustus' old-fashioned upbringing of his daughter and grandchildren), and was indifferent to sartorial fashion. Like Augustus, he was a great womaniser. Like Augustus, he ruled autocratically but generally within the law, and even though he may never have acquired Augustus' proudest title 'Father of his Country', he did, like Augustus, have concern for the welfare of the ordinary people of Italy. In a speech of 1924 he said:

The people... have never asked me to free them from a tyranny which they do not feel, because it does not exist. They have asked me for railways, houses, drains, water, light, and roads.

These things the Fascists provided, just as Augustus provided roads, water, flood control, public amenities, and a basic food supply.

In the world of letters, Augustus continued in these years to receive a generally favourable press – especially of course in Italy. Classical scholars incline to the conservative, and in England a generation brought up on Victorian and Edwardian ideals of Empire tended to approve both of Augustus and of Mussolini's disciplining of Italian waywardness. John Buchan's eulogistic biography of Augustus, which appeared for the bimillenniary, embodies attitudes perhaps only to be expected from the Governor-General of Canada, a latter-day proconsul:

Augustus was impatient (in 23 BC) to get to the task which he conceived to be his prime duty, that of making life secure and tolerable for every class in the empire.

Another book published in 1937 (Augustus Caesar by B.M. Allen), briefly reviewing previous accounts, offers this:

Gardthausen (remedying Mommsen)... in his exhaustive and scholarly work restores Augustus to his rightful position as Builder of the Roman Empire... In England the few sentences which Gibbon devotes to Augustus in the opening chapters of his Decline and Fall show the same animus against the creator of the Roman Empire which is seen in many other eighteenth-century writers. Amends for this hasty and superficial estimate made by a great English historian of a great Roman ruler have been made in recent years by... (and there follow the names of a number of well-known English classical scholars).

But by 1939 the claptrap about 'national destiny' and the cosy view of Augustus as sharing the ideals of Thomas Arnold's Rugby were ripe for demolition. The unacceptable face of Fascism was all too plain and scholars who had never known the world as it was before 1914 had come to maturity, their views conditioned by the Russian revolution, Fascism, the rise of Hitler, and the Spanish civil war. Perhaps fittingly, it was not a European but a New Zealander who carried out the demolition. Sir (as he now is) Ronald Syme, building on work and techniques developed by German scholars, wrote his classic The Roman Revolution (1939) to sweep away the facade of Augustus' propaganda and reveal him as an extraordinarily ruthless and ambitious party leader who succeeded in winning a civil war and manipulating the institutions of state and society to ensure the continuance of his power. We are back with Gibbon and with Tacitus, supported with a depth of evidence which it was not their purpose to deploy. The values of the liberal, sceptical, intellectual tradition so threatened in the late 1930s shine through the work. We are invited, not to condemn Augustus (that is not the historian's function), but to see him for what he was:

About the chief persons in the government of the New State, namely the Princeps himself and his allies, Agrippa, Maecenas, and Livia, history and scandal have preserved a sufficient testimony to unmask the realities of their rule. The halo of resplendent fortune may dazzle, but it cannot blind, the critical eye. Otherwise there can be no history of these times deserving the name, but only adulation and a pragmatic justification of success.

If we understand Augustus, we may look with a clearer eye at all those who stamp our freedom in the name of the national interest. Such men need not be all evil; but we must strip away the cant and the rhetoric, the spurious justification and the perversion of the record, and see them too for what they are. If ever there was a book for its time, The Roman Revolution is that book. Past and present illuminate each other, as they must and will do so as long as history is something more than mere dead knowledge.

John Carter is Senior Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway College, University of London and author of Suetonius Divus Augustus (Bristol Classical Press, 1982).