DE IMPERATORIBUS ROMANIS

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Nero (54 – 68 A.D.)

Herbert W. Benario

Emory University

Abb.: http://www.roman-emperors.org/Nero.jpg
 

Introduction and Sources

The five Julio-Claudian emperors are very different one from the other. Augustus dominates in prestige and achievement from the enormous impact he had upon the Roman state and his long service to Rome, during which he attained unrivaled auctoritas. Tiberius was clearly the only possible successor when Augustus died in AD 14, but, upon his death twenty-three years later, the next three were a peculiar mix of viciousness, arrogance, and inexperience. Gaius, better known as Caligula, is generally styled a monster, whose brief tenure did Rome no service. His successor Claudius, his uncle, was a capable man who served Rome well, but was condemned for being subject to his wives and freedmen. The last of the dynasty, Nero, reigned more than three times as long as Gaius, and the damage for which he was responsible to the state was correspondingly greater. An emperor who is well described by statements such as these, „But above all he was carried away by a craze for popularity and he was jealous of all who in any way stirred the feeling of the mob.“ and „What an artist the world is losing!“ [[1]] and who is above all remembered for crimes against his mother and the Christians was indeed a sad falling-off from the levels of Augustus and Tiberius. Few will argue that Nero does not rank as one of the worst emperors of all.

The prime sources for Nero’s life and reign are Tacitus‘ Annales 12-16, Suetonius‘ Life of Nero, and Dio Cassius‘ Roman History 61-63, written in the early third century. Additional valuable material comes from inscriptions, coinage, papyri, and archaeology.
 

Early Life

He was born on December 15, 37, at Antium, the son of Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus [[PIR² D127]] and Agrippina [[PIR² I641]]. Domitius was a member of an ancient noble family, consul in 32; Agrippina was the daughter of the popular Germanicus [[PIR² I221]], who had died in 19, and Agrippina, daughter of Agrippa, Augustus‘ closest associate, and Julia, the emperor’s daughter, and thus in direct descent from the first princeps. When the child was born, his uncle Gaius had only recently become emperor. The relationship between mother and uncle was difficult, and Agrippina suffered occasional humiliation. But the family survived the short reign of the „crazy“ emperor, and when he was assassinated, it chanced that Agrippina’s uncle, Claudius, was the chosen of the praetorian guard, although there may have been a conspiracy to accomplish this.

Ahenobarbus had died in 40, so the son was now the responsibility of Agrippina alone. She lived as a private citizen for much of the decade, until the death of Messalina, the emperor’s wife, in 48 made competition among several likely candidates to become the new empress inevitable. Although Roman law forbade marriage between uncle and niece, an eloquent speech in the senate by Lucius Vitellius [[PIR V500]], Claudius‘ closest advisor in the senatorial order, persuaded his audience that the public good required their union. [[2]] The marriage took place in 49, and soon thereafter the philosopher Seneca [[PIR² A617]] was recalled from exile to become the young Domitius‘ tutor, a relationship which endured for some dozen years.

His advance was thereafter rapid. He was adopted by Claudius the following year and took the name Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar or Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus, was preferred to Claudius‘ natural son, Britannicus [[PIR² C820]], who was about three years younger, was betrothed to the emperor’s daughter Octavia, and was, in the eyes of the people, the clear successor to the emperor. In 54, Claudius died, having eaten some poisoned mushrooms, responsibility for which was believed to be Agrippina’s, [[3]] and the young Nero, not yet seventeen years old, was hailed on October 13 as emperor by the praetorian guard.
 

The first years of rule

The first five years of Nero’s rule are customarily called the quinquennium, a period of good government under the influence, not always coinciding, of three people, his mother, Seneca, and Sextus Afranius Burrus [[PIR² A441]], the praetorian prefect. The latter two were allies in their „education“ of the emperor. Seneca continued his philosophical and rhetorical training, Burrus was more involved in advising on the actualities of government. They often combined their influence against Agrippina, who, having made her son emperor, never let him forget the debt he owed his mother, until finally, and fatally, he moved against her.

Nero’s betrothal to Octavia [[PIR² C1110]] was a significant step in his ultimate accession to the throne, as it were, but she was too quiet, too shy, too modest for his taste. He was early attracted to Poppaea Sabina [[PIR² P850), the wife of Otho, and she continually goaded him to break from Octavia and to show himself an adult by opposing his mother. In his private life, Nero honed the musical and artistic tastes which were his chief interest, but, at this stage, they were kept private, at the instigation of Seneca and Burrus.

As the year 59 began, Nero had just celebrated his twenty-first birthday and now felt the need to employ the powers which he possessed as emperor as he wished, without the limits imposed by others. Poppaea’s urgings had their effect, first of all, at the very onset of the year, with Nero’s murder of his mother in the Bay of Naples.

Agrippina had tried desperately to retain her influence with her son, going so far as to have intercourse with him. But the break between them proved irrevocable, and Nero undertook various devices to eliminate his mother without the appearance of guilt on his part. The choice was a splendid vessel which would collapse while she was on board. As this happened, she swam ashore and, when her attendant, having cried out that she was Agrippina, was clubbed to death, Agrippina knew what was going on. She sent Nero a message that she was well; his response was to send a detachment of sailors to finish the job. When she was struck across the head, she bared her womb and said, „Strike here, Anicetus, strike here, for this bore Nero,“ and she was brutally murdered. [[4]]

Nero was petrified with fear when he learned that the deed had been done, yet his popularity with the plebs of Rome was not impaired. This matricide, however, proved a turning point in his life and principate. It appeared that all shackles were now removed. The influence of Seneca and Burrus began to wane, and when Burrus died in 62, Seneca realized that his powers of persuasion were at an end and soon went into retirement. Britannicus had died as early as 55; now Octavia was to follow, and Nero became free to marry Poppaea. It may be that it had been Burrus rather than Agrippina who had continually urged that Nero’s position depended in large part upon his marriage to Octavia. Burrus‘ successor as commander of the praetorian guard, although now with a colleague, was Ofonius Tigellinus [[PIR² O91]], quite the opposite of Burrus in character and outlook. Tigellinus became Nero’s „evil twin,“ urging and assisting in the performance of crimes and the satisfaction of lusts.
 

Administrative and foreign policy

With Seneca and Burrus in charge of administration at home, the first half-dozen years of Nero’s principate ran smoothly. He himself devoted his attention to his artistic, literary, and physical bents, with music, poetry, and chariot racing to the fore. But his advisors were able to keep these performances and displays private, with small, select audiences on hand. Yet there was a gradual trend toward public performance, with the establishment of games. Further, he spent many nights roaming the city in disguise, with numerous companions, who terrorized the streets and attacked individuals. Those who dared to defend themselves often faced death afterward, because they had shown disrespect for the emperor. The die was being cast for the last phases of Nero’s reign.

Abroad there were continuous military and diplomatic difficulties, first in Britain, then in the East involving Parthia and Armenia, and lastly in Judaea. The invasion of Britain had begun in 43 and that campaign continued for four years. But the successive governors had the task of consolidating what had been conquered and adding to the extent of the province. This involved some very vicious fighting, particularly in the west against the Silures and the Ordovices. In the year 60 the great explosion occurred. When the governor, Suetonius Paullinus [[PIR S694]], was attacking the island of Mona, modern Anglesey, to extirpate the Druids, Boudica, the queen of the Iceni, located chiefly in modern Norfolk, rose in revolt, to avenge personal injuries suffered by herself and her daughters and to expel Rome from the island. Her army destroyed three Roman cities with the utmost savagery, Colchester, London, and St. Albans falling to sword and fire. But Paullinus met the enemy horde at a site still unknown and destroyed the vastly larger British forces. [[5]] Nero is said to have considered giving up the province of Britannia because the revenue it produced was far lower than had been anticipated about a score of years before, and it cost Rome more to maintain and expand the province than the latter was able to produce. Yet, at the last, Nero decided that such an action would damage Rome’s prestige enormously, and could be interpreted as the first of a series of such actions. The status quo therefore remained. [[6]]

The problem in the East was different. Parthia and Rome had long been rivals and enemies for preeminence in the vast territory east of Syria and Cappadocia. The key was Armenia, the land which separated the two great powers. It served as a buffer state; the important issue in the minds of both concerned the ruler of Armenia. Was he to be chosen by Rome or by Parthia, and thereby be considered the vassal of one or the other? In the latter fifties there were frequent disagreements which led to war, fought viciously and variously. Rome suffered some significant losses, until Cn. Domitius Corbulo [[PIR² D142]]was appointed governor of Syria and made commander of all military forces. He won the day by diplomacy as much as by force of arms. The upshot was that the man chosen for the Armenian throne came to Rome to be crowned by Nero with enormous panoply and display.

The year 66 saw the beginning of an uprising in Judaea which was brutal in the extreme. The future emperor Vespasian was appointed to crush the rebels, which he and his son Titus were able to accomplish. Four legions were assigned to Judaea; the neighboring province of Syria, under its governor Mucianus, also possessed four. This was a mighty military muster in a relatively small part of the empire.
 

The great fire at Rome and the punishment

of the ChristiansThe year 64 was the most significant of Nero’s principate up to this point. His mother and wife were dead, as was Burrus, and Seneca, unable to maintain his influence over Nero without his colleague’s support, had withdrawn into private life. The abysmal Tigellinus was now the foremost advisor of the still young emperor, a man whose origin was from the lowest levels of society and who can accurately be described as criminal in outlook and action. Yet Nero must have considered that he was happier than he had ever been in his life. Those who had constrained his enjoyment of his (seemingly) limitless power were gone, he was married to Poppaea, a woman with all advantages save for a bad character [[7]], the empire was essentially at peace, and the people of Rome enjoyed a full measure of panem et circenses. But then occurred one of the greatest disasters that the city of Rome, in its long history, had ever endured.

The fire began in the southeastern angle of the Circus Maximus, spreading through the shops which clustered there, and raged for the better part of a week. There was brief success in controlling the blaze, but then it burst forth once more, so that many people claimed that the fires were deliberately set. After about a fortnight, the fire burned itself out, having consumed ten of the fourteen Augustan regions into which the city had been divided.

Nero was in Antium through much of the disaster, but his efforts at relief were substantial. Yet many believed that he had been responsible, so that he could perform his own work comparing the current fate of Rome to the downfall of Troy. All his efforts to assist the stricken city could not remove the suspicion that „the emperor had fiddled while Rome burned.“ He lost favor even among the plebs who had been enthusiastic supporters, particularly when his plans for the rebuilding of the city revealed that a very large part of the center was to become his new home.

As his popularity waned, Nero and Tigellinus realized that individuals were needed who could be charged with the disaster. It so happened that there was such a group ready at hand, Christians, who had made themselves unpopular because of their refusal to worship the emperor, their way of life, and their secret meetings. Further, at this time two of their most significant „teachers“ were in Rome, Peter and Paul. They were ideal scapegoats, individuals whom most Romans loathed, and who had continually sung of the forthcoming end of the world.

Their destruction was planned with the utmost precision and cruelty, for the entertainment of the populace. The venue was Nero’s circus near the Mons Vaticanus. Christians were exposed to wild animals and were set ablaze, smeared with pitch, to illuminate the night. The executions were so grisly that even the populace displayed sympathy for the victims. Separately, Peter was crucified upside down on the Vatican hill and Paul was beheaded along the Via Ostiensis. But Nero’s attempt, and hope, to shift all suspicion of arson to others failed. His popularity even among the lower classes was irrevocably impaired. [[8]]
 

City planning, architecture, and literature

The devastation in the center of the city presented an opportunity for Nero to build a mansion worthy of himself, the vast estate known as the „Golden House,“ the domus aurea. It consisted of a very extensive residential quarter, with numerous architectural innovations, a lake, and a colossal statue of himself. In subsequent years, all were destroyed or transformed. The Golden House was filled in and served as the foundation of Trajan’s baths, the lake disappeared under the Colosseum, the amphitheatrum Flavium, and the statue’s head was changed to that of a divinity. The entire project was a huge example of Roman building techniques and imagination. Indeed, the architects responsible, Severus and Celer, [[9]] are the first in Roman history whose names are known. [[10]]

There is little else of importance in the field of architecture. Nero did have other grand plans, such as cutting a canal through the Isthmus of Corinth in Greece, but they did not come to fruition.

The situation was different in the arts and literature. Nero considered himself a virtuoso in music, acting, chariot racing, and literary activity, to the point that he could not tolerate any rivals. In competitions, it was routine that he always won, and those compelled to attend his performances were faced with execution if they did not evince appropriate attention and enthusiasm. The future emperor Vespasian fell asleep on more than one such occasion but was spared.

We know essentially nothing about Nero’s competitors in other fields, but in literature there were substantial rivals. Chief among them was Lucan, whose epic on the Caesarian civil war evoked the majesty, in subject and manner, of Vergil. Lucan offended Nero by criticism of the latter’s poetry and was forbidden to recite his own work. Seneca was the other great figure of the literary age, but his specialities of philosophy and rhetoric did not appeal to the emperor. Pliny the Elder similarly devoted himself to works of massive scope, such as his History of the German Wars and the Natural History, which defied competition from the emperor.
 

A failed conspiracy

The year 65 was marked by a conspiracy of a large scale, the purpose of which, it goes without saying, was to eliminate Nero and replace him with a member of the senatorial order. [[11]] The chosen designee was C. Calpurnius Piso [[PIR² C284]], although there was talk that Seneca was the favorite of many. The conspiracy failed, in part because there were too many people involved in it and some, by action or word, caused suspicion which Tigellinus ruthlessly pursued. Once it was broken, leading members of society behaved miserably and dishonorably, squealing on others and facing their own ends with fear and shame. Only two persons who were tortured or put to death behaved in the fashion of an „old Roman,“ and these were members of the lower classes. A freedwoman Epicharis, after torture had not succeeded in breaking her resistance, committed suicide by hanging herself before a second day of interrogation. [[12]] Subrius Flavus, a tribune of the praetorian guard, was the only person, as reported by Tacitus, who bluntly spoke when Nero asked him why he had ignored his oath as a soldier and acted against him.

„I hated you, yet not a soldier was more loyal to you while you deserved to be loved. I began to hate you when you became the murderer of your mother and your wife, a charioteer, an actor, and an incendiary.“ [[13]]

Flavus‘ judgment of Nero essentially expressed the views of subsequent history. Among the other deaths were those of Piso and Seneca by suicide.

Nero was now twenty-seven years old. He had been emperor for more than a decade and had overseen or been responsible for three major disasters in the space of little more than one year. The only positive result from any of these was the imposition of strict building laws for the reconstruction of the city, calling for wider streets, a limitation on the height of buildings, and the use of safer building materials. Though Rome became a healthier and more attractive city, resentment remained because Nero had taken for his own use such a large part of the central city and had brought the countryside into the city. Yet Nero’s response to these challenges was to devote ever more attention to his artistic leanings, in ever more public contexts. First there came an extended visit to Naples, the most Greek city of Italy, then a trip to Greece, where he participated in each of the great festivals and won hundreds of contests. Who, after all, would dare vote against the man who held the power of life and death over all? [[14]]
 

The end – Nero’s death and its aftermath

Nero’s and Tigellinus‘ response to the conspiracy was immediate and long-lasting. The senatorial order was decimated, as one leading member after another was put to death or compelled to commit suicide. The year 66 saw the suicides of perhaps the most distinguished victims of the „reign of terror,“ Caius Petronius [[PIR² P294]]and Thrasea Paetus [[PIR² C1187]].[[15]] Petronius, long a favorite of Nero because of his aesthetic taste, had been an able public servant before he turned to a life of ease and indolence. He was recognized as the arbiter elegantiae of Nero’s circle, and may be the author of the Satyricon. At his death, he left for Nero a document which itemized many of the latter’s crimes. Thrasea, a staunch Stoic who had been for some years an outspoken opponent of Nero’s policies, committed suicide in the Socratic manner. This scene is the last episode in the surviving books of Tacitus‘ Annals.

In the year 68, revolt began in the provinces, with the uprising of Julius Vindex, a Gallic noble, governor of Gallia Lugdunensis. His purpose, it seems clear, was not a nationalistic undertaking but an attempt to depose Nero and offer Rome the opportunity to choose a new ruler. But he received little support from other governors; indeed, only the elderly Galba in Spain indicated approval. Vindex may have been in communication with Lucius Verginius Rufus [[PIR² V284]], governor of Germania Superior, but when he moved his army in Gaul, a battle ensued between the two forces, perhaps instigated by the army of Germany. Upon Vindex’s defeat and death, Verginius was offered the purple by his troops, which he rejected, stating that such a decision was a prerogative of the Senate. By this action he gained enduring fame, which was recorded on his epitaph almost thirty years later:

Hic situs est Rufus, pulso qui Vindice quondam
imperium adseruit non sibi, sed patriae.

(Pliny the Younger 9.19.1)

Here lies Rufus, who once, after Vindex’s defeat,
claimed the empire not for himself, but for his country.

Nonetheless the end of Nero’s reign became inevitable. Galba claimed the throne and began his march from Spain. Nero panicked and was rapidly abandoned by his supporters. He finally committed suicide with assistance, on June 9, 68, and his body was tended and buried by three women who had been close to him in his younger days, chief of whom was Acte.[[16]] His death scene is marked above all by the statement, „Qualis artifex pereo,“ (What an artist dies in me.) Even at the end he was more concerned with his private life than with the affairs of state.

The aftermath of Nero’s death was cataclysmic. Galba was the first of four emperors who revealed the new secret of empire, that an emperor could be made elsewhere than in Rome. [[17]] Civil war ensued, which was only ended by the victory of the fourth claimant, Vespasian, who established the brief dynasty of the Flavians. The dynasty of the Julio-Claudians was at an end.

Nero’s popularity among the lower classes remained even after his death. His close friend, and successor to Galba, Otho paid him all public honors. But with Vespasian’s triumph Nero began to fade from public memory. Vespasian built the enormous amphitheater known from the beginning of the Middle Ages as the Colosseum on the site of Nero’s lake, the stupendous statue of himself was transformed into a representation of a god, and in the decades of Trajan and Hadrian most of the remainder of the Golden House disappeared under the Baths of Trajan on the Esquiline Hill and the Temple of Venus and Rome built by Hadrian at the extreme east end of the Roman Forum. The land claimed by Nero for his private pleasure was restored to the Roman people, for enjoyment and worship.

Nonetheless, over the two decades or so after his death, several pseudo-Neros appeared on the scene, claiming to be the emperor. But these claimants had no success, and Nero then passed entirely into history.

It is not excessive to say that he was one of the worst of Rome’s emperors in the first two centuries and more of the empire. Whatever talents he had, whatever good he may have done, all is overwhelmed by three events, the murder of his mother, the fire at Rome, and his savage treatment of the Christians.

Precisely these qualities are the reasons that he has remained so well known and has been the subject of many writers and opera composers in modern times. These works of fiction particularly merit mention: Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis, one of the finest works of the 1907 Nobel Laureate in Literature, and John Hersey’s The Conspiracy. Nero unquestionably will always be with us.
 

Bibliography

Ball, L.F., The Domus Aurea and the Roman Architectural Revolution (Cambridge 2003)

Barrett, A.A., Agrippina. Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire (New Haven and London 1996)

Beaujeu, J., L’Incendie de Rome en 64 et les chrétiens (Brussels 1960, Collection Latomus 49)

Benario, H.W., „Three Tacitean Women,“ in S.K. Dickison & J.P. Hallett, eds., Rome and Her Monuments (Wauconda, IL, 2000) 587-601

Boëthius, A., and J.B. Ward-Perkins, Etruscan and Roman Architecture (Harmondsworth 1970)

Champlin, E., Nero (Cambridge, MA, 2003)

Eck, W., Der Neue Pauly 8 (2000) cols. 851-55

Elsner, J., Reflections of Nero: culture, history, and representation (London 1994)

Freudenberger, R., Das Verhalten der römischen Behörden gegen die Christen im 2. Jahrhundert (Munich 1967) 180-89

Garzetti, A., From Tiberius to the Antonines. A History of the Roman Empire AD 14-192 (London 1974)

Grant, M., Nero (New York 1970)

Griffin, M.T., Nero. The End of a Dynasty (London 1984)

Kleiner, F., The Arch of Nero in Rome: a study of the Roman honorary arch before and under Nero (Rome 1985)

MacDonald, W.L., The Architecture of the Roman Empire I (New Haven 1965)

Malitz, J., Nero (Oxford 2005)

Rudich, V., Political Dissidence under Nero: the price of dissimulation (London and New York 1993)

Shotter, D., Nero (London and New York 2005²)

Smallwood, E.M., Documents Illustrating the Principates of Gaius, Claudius and Nero (Cambridge 1967)

Temporini-Gräfin Vitzthum, H., Die Kaiserinnen Roms. Von Livia bis Theodora (Munich 2002)

Waldherr, G.H., Nero (Regensburg 2005)

Warmington, B.H., Nero. Reality and Legend (London 1969)

Wlosok, A., Rom und die Christen. Zur Auseinandersetzung zwischen Christentum und römischem Staat (Stuttgart 1970)
 

Footnotes

[[1]] Suetonius 53 and 49. All translations from Suetonius are taken from J.C. Rolfe’s Loeb Classical Library edition II, 1950.

[[2]] Tacitus 12.5-6.

[[3]] Tacitus 12.66-67.

[[4]] Tacitus 14.1-11; Dio 62.11-14.

[[5]] Tacitus Agricola 15-16, Annals 14.29-39; Dio 62.1- 12.

[[6]] Suetonius 18.

[[7]] Tacitus 13.45; huic mulieri cuncta alia fuere praeter honestum animum.

[[8]] Tacitus 15.38-44, Suetonius 38. See Beaujeu, Freudenberger, Wlosok.

[[9]] Tacitus 15.42-43.

[[10]] See Ball, Boëthius and Ward-Perkins, MacDonald.

[[11]] Tacitus 15.48-74, Dio 62.24-25.

[[12]] See Benario 589-91.

[[13]] Tacitus 15.67. The translation is from A.J. Church and W.J. Brodribb, The Complete Works of Tacitus, The Modern Library, 1942.

[[14]] Dio 62.8-11.

[[15]] Tacitus 16.18-19, 34-35.

[[16]] See Benario 591-92.

[[17]] Tacitus, Histories 1.4.2, evolgato imperii arcano, posse principem alibi quam Romae fieri.

Copyright 1998, Garrett G. Fagan. This file may be copied on the condition that the entire contents, including the header and this copyright notice, remain intact.

Comments to: Comments to: Herbert W. Benario

Updated: 10 November 2006

Unveränd. Zweitpubl. v. Herbert W. Benario: Nero (54-68 A.D.), in: De Imperatoribus Romanis. An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Rulers [10.11.2006], http://www.roman-emperors.org/nero.htm

DE IMPERATORIBUS ROMANIS

An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Rulers

DIR Atlas

Claudius (41 – 54 A.D.)

Garrett G. Fagan

Pennsylvania State University

Abb.: http://www.roman-emperors.org/claudius.jpg

Introduction

Ti. Claudius Nero Germanicus (b. 10 BC, d. 54 A.D.; emperor, 41-54 A.D.) was the third emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. His reign represents a turning point in the history of the Principate for a number of reasons, not the least for the manner of his accession and the implications it carried for the nature of the office. During his reign he promoted administrators who did not belong to the senatorial or equestrian classes, and was later vilified by authors who did. He followed Caesar in carrying Roman arms across the English Channel into Britain but, unlike his predecessor, he initiated the full-scale annexation of Britain as a province, which remains today the most closely studied corner of the Roman Empire. His relationships with his wives and children provide detailed insights into the perennial difficulties of the succession problem faced by all Roman Emperors. His final settlement in this regard was not lucky: he adopted his fourth wife’s son, L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, who was to reign catastrophically as Nero and bring the dynasty to an end. Claudius’s reign, therefore, was a mixture of successes and failures that leads into the last phase of the Julio-Claudian line.

Early Life (10 BC – 41 A.D. )

Claudius was born on 1 August 10 BC at Lugdunum in Gaul, into the heart of the Julio-Claudian dynasty: he was the son of Drusus Claudius Nero, the son of Augustus’s wife Livia, and Antonia, the daughter of Mark Antony. [[1]] His uncle, Tiberius, went on to become emperor in AD 14 and his brother Germanicus was marked out for succession to the purple when, in AD 4, he was adopted by Tiberius. It might be expected that Claudius, as a well-connected imperial prince, would have enjoyed the active public life customary for young men of his standing but this was not the case. In an age that despised weakness, Claudius was unfortunate enough to have been born with defects. He limped, he drooled, he stuttered and was constantly ill. [[2]] His family members mistook these physical debilities as reflective of mental infirmity and generally kept him out of the public eye as an embarrassment. A sign of this familial disdain is that he remained under guardianship, like a woman, even after he had reached the age of majority. Suetonius, in particular, preserves comments of Antonia, his mother, and Livia, his grandmother, which are particularly cruel in their assessment of the boy. From the same source, however, it emerges that Augustus suspected that there was more to this „idiot“ than met the eye.[[3]] Nevertheless, Claudius spent his entire childhood and youth in almost complete seclusion. The normal rites de passage of an imperial prince came and went without official notice, and Claudius received no summons to public office or orders to command troops on the frontiers.[[4]] When he assumed the toga virilis, for instance, he was carried to the Capitol in a litter at night; the normal procedure was to be led into the Forum by one’s father or guardian in full public view. How he spent the voluminous free time of his youth is revealed by his later character: he read voraciously. He became a scholar of considerable ability and composed works on all subjects in the liberal arts, especially history; he was the last person we know of who could read Etruscan. [[5]] These skills, and the knowledge of governmental institutions he acquired from studying history, were to stand him in good stead when he came to power.

It should not be forgotten that Claudius’s wing of the family suffered terribly in the internal struggles for succession that racked the imperial house. His father died on campaign when Claudius was only one year old, and his beloved brother, Germanicus, succumbed under suspicious circumstances in AD 19. His only other sibling to reach adulthood, Livilla, became involved with Sejanus and paid the ultimate price in the wake of the latter’s fall from grace in AD 31. Through all this turmoil Claudius survived, primarily through being ignored as an embarrassment and an idiot.[[6]]

Claudius’s fortunes changed somewhat when his unstable nephew, Gaius (Caligula), came to power in the spring of 37 A.D. Gaius, it seems, liked to use his bookish, frail uncle as the butt of cruel jokes and, in keeping with this pattern of behavior, promoted him to a suffect consulship on 1 July 37 A.D. At 46 years of age, it was Claudius’s first public office. Despite this sortie into public life, he seemed destined for a relatively quiet and secluded dotage when, in January 41, events overtook him.[[7]]

Accession (24-25 January, 41 A.D.)

Arguably the most important period of Claudius’s reign was its first few hours. The events surrounding his accession are worthy of detailed description, since they revealed much about the true nature of the Augustan Principate.

In the early afternoon of 24 January 41 A.D., the emperor Gaius was attending a display of dancers in a theater near the palace. Claudius was present. Shortly before lunch time, Claudius took his leave and the emperor decided that he, too, would adjourn for a bath. As Gaius was making his way down an isolated palace corridor he was surrounded and cut down by discontented members of his own bodyguard. In the aftermath of the assassination — the first open murder of a Roman emperor — there was widespread panic and confusion. The German elements of the emperor’s bodyguard, who were fiercely loyal to their chief, went on the rampage and killed indiscriminately. Soldiers of the larger Praetorian Guard began looting the imperial palace. According to the best-known tradition, some Guardsmen found Claudius cowering behind a curtain and, on the spot, they declared him their emperor and carried him off to their camp. In this story, a hapless Claudius falls into power entirely as a result of accident, and very much against his will. It is not hard to see why, with its implicit theme of recusatio imperii, it is the story of his accession that Claudius himself favored.[[8]] Vestiges, however, can be traced of another tradition that paints a somewhat different picture. In this version, the Guardsmen meet in their camp and discuss the situation facing them in light of Gaius’s murder. Their pleasant, city-based terms of military service were in jeopardy. They needed an emperor. Fixing their intentions on Claudius as the only surviving mature member of the Julio-Claudian house, they sent out a party of troops to find him and bring him back to their camp so he could be acclaimed emperor, which is what happened. In this story, the elevation of Claudius to the purple was a purposeful plan on the part of the soldiers, even if Claudius remains a passive and reluctant partner in the whole process.[[9]]

The possibility has to be entertained that Claudius was a far more active participant in his own elevation than either of these traditions let on. There is just reason to suspect that he may even have been involved in planning the murder of Gaius — his departure from the theater minutes before the assassination appears altogether too fortuitous. These possibilities, however, must remain pure speculation, since the ancient evidence offers nothing explicit in the way of support for them. On the other hand, we can hardly expect them to, given the later pattern of events. The whole issue of Claudius’s possible involvement in the death of Gaius and his own subsequent acclamation by the Praetorian Guard must, therefore, remain moot.[[10]]

Despite the circumstances that brought him there, the hours following Claudius’s arrival at the Praetorian Camp and his acceptance as emperor by the Senate are vital ones for the history of the Principate. Events could have taken a very different course, but that they worked out as they did speaks volumes as to how far seven decades of the Augustan Principate had removed Rome from the possibility of a return to the so-called free Republic.

News of Gaius’s death prompted a meeting of the Senate. Initially, there was talk of declaring the Republic restored and dispensing with emperors altogether. Then, however, various senators began proposing that they be chosen as the next princeps. Debate was in progress when news reached the senators that the Guard had made the decision for them: Claudius, the soldiers‘ choice, was sitting in the Praetorian Camp.[[11]] The main historical difficulty in what happened next is due to confusion in Josephus’s account (which is the fullest). In one version, the Senate sent two tribunes to the Camp to demand that Claudius step down. Once in the Camp, however, the tribunes were cowed by the ardent support for Claudius among the soldiers and instead requested that he come to the Senate to be ratified as emperor. In Josephus’s alternate version, however, Herod Agrippa is summoned by the senators and employed as an envoy between the Camp and the Senate.[[12]] Clearly, Josephus is conveying two traditions about these events, one Roman (featuring the tribunes), the other Jewish (highlighting the role of Herod Agrippa). Suetonius, naturally enough, follows the Roman tradition, as does Dio in his main account; interestingly, the latter shows awareness of some participation on the part of Herod Agrippa in a later passage.[[13]]

Regardless of how the negotiations were conducted, the Senate quickly realized it was powerless in the presence of several thousand armed men supporting Claudius’s candidacy. The impotence that the esteemed council had experienced time and again when dealing with the military dynasts of the Late Republic was once more revealed to all, and the meeting dissolved with the fate of the Empire left undecided. When the Senate met again later that night in the Temple of Jupiter Victor, it found its numbers much depleted, since many had fled the city to their country estates. The senators assessed their military strength: they had three or four urban cohorts under the command of the City Prefect, numbering perhaps 3,000 men. With these, they occupied the Forum and Palatine. Plans were laid to arm some ex-slaves to provide reinforcements. By these actions the senators were accepting that supreme power in post-Augustan Rome could be achieved only by military force; all questions of legal niceties were irrelevant. But the Senate could not control their troops — they all deserted to the Praetorian Guard, with whom they shared the Camp.[[14]]

Now completely powerless, the senators hurried off to the Praetorian Camp to pay their respects to Claudius. On 25 January 41 A.D. Claudius was formally invested with all the powers of the princeps, becoming Ti. Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. (Since Claudius had no legal claim to it whatsoever, the appearance of „Caesar“ in his imperial name marks the first step in this word’s transmutation from a family name to a title denoting ruler, and so begins a tradition that stretches into the modern era with „Kaiser,“ „Czar,“ and possibly „Shah.“)

These events have been treated in some detail because of their immense historical importance. Gaius was the first emperor of Rome to be openly murdered, and Claudius’s accession marks the first overt and large-scale intrusion of the military into post-Augustan politics. The basic fact of the Principate, which had always been implicit in the Augustan settlement but heretofore carefully disguised, was now made plain: the emperor’s position ultimately rested not on consensus but on the swords of the soldiers who paid him homage. From one perspective, the Principate had been revealed for what it truly was — an exercise in managing the military’s loyalties, and not a form of government rooted in law and consensus. The Senate, in attempting to block Claudius with troops of their own, had acquiesced in this structure of power. For ever afterward, emperors sat on the throne on the sufferance of the troops they commanded, and a loss of army loyalty necessarily entailed a loss of power, usually accompanied by the loss of the incumbent’s life. But the harder lessons in these realities lay in the future; for the moment order had been restored, and Claudius embarked on his reign in relative security.

The Early Years: Britain, Freedmen, and Messalina (AD 41 – 48)

Among Claudius’s first acts was the apprehension and execution of Gaius’s assassins. Whatever his opinion of their actions, politics and pietas required that Claudius not be seen to condone men who murdered an emperor and a member of his own family.[[15]] He also displayed immediate understanding of the centrality of the military to his position and sought to create a military image for himself that his prior sheltered existence had denied him. Preparations got under way soon after his accession for a major military expedition into Britain, perhaps sparked by an attempted revolt of the governor of Dalmatia, L. Arruntius Camillus Scribonianus, in 42 A.D.. The invasion itself, spearheaded by four legions, commenced in the summer of 43 and was to last for decades, ultimately falling short of the annexation of the whole island (if indeed that was Claudius’s final objective at the outset). This move marked the first major addition to the territory of the Roman empire since the reign of Augustus.[[16]] Claudius himself took part in the campaign, arriving in the war zone with an entourage of ex-consuls in the late summer of 43 A.D. After a parade at Camulodunum (Colchester) to impress the natives, he returned to Rome to celebrate a triumph in 44 A.D. His military credentials had been firmly established.[[17]]

The sources are united in portraying Claudius as a dupe to his imperial freedmen advisors as well as to his wives. It is possible that the hostile stance of the elite toward Claudius extended back into his reign — he was, after all, a usurper who had been foisted on the aristocrats by the soldiers. If so, Claudius’s reliance on his freedmen may have stemmed from this circumstance, in that the ex-slaves were (as far as he was concerned) more trustworthy than the sullen aristocracy. For whatever reasons, there is no doubt that Claudius’s reign is the first era of the great imperial freedman. To be sure, the secretariat had existed before Claudius and members of it had achieved some prominence (notably Helicon and Callistus under Gaius), but the rise of powerful individuals like Narcissus, Polybius, and Pallas was a distinctive mark of Claudius’s reign. The power of these men was demonstrated early on when the emperor chose Narcissus as his envoy to the legions as they hesitated to embark on their invasion of Britain.[[18]] According to our sources, the freedmen were frequently to exert less beneficent influences throughout Claudius’s reign.

In 38 A.D. Claudius had married Valeria Messalina, a scion of a noble house with impressive familial connections. Messalina bore him a daughter (Octavia, born in 39) and a son (Britannicus, born in 41): she was therefore the mother of the heir-apparent and enjoyed influence for that reason. In the sources, Messalina is portrayed as little more than a pouting adolescent nymphomaniac who holds wild parties and arranges the deaths of former lovers or those who scorn her advances; and all this while her cuckolded husband blunders on in blissful ignorance. Recently, attempts have been made to rehabilitate Messalina as an astute player of court politics who used sex as a weapon, but in the end we have little way of knowing the truth.[[19]] What we can say is that either her love of parties (on the adolescent model) or her byzantine scheming (on the able courtier model) brought her down. While Claudius was away in Ostia in AD 48, Messalina had a party in the palace in the course of which a marriage ceremony was performed (or playacted) between herself and a consul-designate, C. Silius. Whatever the intentions behind it, the political ramifications of this folly were sufficiently grave to cause the summary execution of Messalina, Silius, and assorted hangers-on (orchestrated, tellingly, by the freedman Narcissus).[[20]] Claudius was now without a wife.

The Rise of Agrippina and Claudius’s Death (48-54 A.D.)

In our sources, the death of Messalina is presented as initiating a scramble among the freedmen, each wishing to place his preferred candidate at Claudius’s side as the new empress. In the end, it was Pallas who prevailed when he convinced Claudius to marry Agrippina the Younger. The marriage took place within months of Messalina’s execution. Agrippina was a colorful figure with extensive and far-reaching imperial connections: she was the daughter of Claudius’s brother, Germanicus, and a sister of Gaius Caligula, by whom she had been exiled for involvement in the conspiracy of Gaetulicus; moreover, she had been married before. She therefore brought to the marriage with Claudius — which necessitated a change in the law to allow uncles to marry their brothers‘ daughters — a son, L. Domitius Ahenobarbus. Agrippina’s ambitions for this son proved the undoing of Claudius.[[21]]

The years between his marriage to Agrippina in 48 and his death in 54 were difficult ones for Claudius. Whether or not sources are right to portray him as a dupe of his wives and freedmen throughout his reign, there can be little doubt that Agrippina’s powerful personality dominated Claudius’s last years. Her position, openly influential in a manner unlike any previous empress, was recognized by those attuned to imperial politics, and she appears more and more prominently in official inscriptions and coins. In 50 the Senate voted her the title „Augusta,“ the first prominent imperial woman to hold this title since Livia — and the latter had only held it after Augustus’s death. She greeted foreign embassies to the emperor at Rome from her own tribunal, and those greetings were recorded in official documents; she also wore a gold-embroidered military cloak at official functions. It is a sign of her overt influence that a new colony on the Rhine bore her name.[[22]]Agrippina’s powerful position facilitated the advancement of her son Domitius and was, in turn, strengthened by it. Claudius already had a natural son, Britannicus, who was still a minor. Domitius, at 13, was three years older. Now Claudius began to advance Domitius through various signs of favor, the most important being his adoption as Claudius’s son on 25 February AD 50. Henceforth Domitius was known as Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus Caesar and known to posterity simply as „Nero“. But Claudius openly advanced Nero in other ways, too: the emperor held the consulship in 51, which was the year Nero took the „toga of manhood,“ and that event was itself staged several months before the customary age for Roman teenagers; Nero was granted imperium proconsulare outside the city, addressed the Senate, appeared with Claudius at circus games (while Britannicus appeared still in the toga of a minor), and was hailed as „Leader of the Youth“ (princeps iuventutis) on the coinage; in AD 53 Nero married Claudius’s daughter, Octavia.[[23]] All of these are sure signs of preference in the ever-unstable imperial succession schemes. The main difficulty for modern scholars lies in how to explain Claudius’s favoring of Nero over his natural son, Britannicus; the reasons remain a matter of intense debate.[[24]]

No matter what the reasons were, there can be little doubt that Nero, despite his tender age, had been clearly marked out as Claudius’s successor. Agrippina, according to Tacitus, now decided it was time to dispose of Claudius to allow Nero to take over. The ancient accounts are confused — as is habitual in the cases of hidden and dubious deaths of emperors — but their general drift is that Claudius was poisoned with a treated mushroom, that he lingered a while and had to be poisoned a second time before dying on 13 October 54 A.D. At noon that same day, the sixteen-year-old Nero was acclaimed emperor in a carefully orchestrated piece of political theater. Already familiar to the army and the public, he faced no serious challenges to his authority.[[25]]

Claudius and the Empire

The invasion and annexation of Britain was by far the most important and significant event in Claudius’s reign. But several other issues deserve attention: his relationship with and treatment of the aristocracy, his management of the provinces and their inhabitants, and his judicial practices, and his building activities. Before looking at these subjects, however, we should note that the long-lived notion that Claudius initiated a coherent policy of centralization in the Roman Empire — evidenced in the centralization of provincial administration and judicial actions, in the creation of a departmental bureaucracy, his interference in financial affairs, and so on — has been decisively disproven by a recent biography of Claudius.[[26]] Whatever actions Claudius took in regard to the various wings of government, he did so without any unifying policy of centralization in mind.

Claudius’s relationship with the Senate did not get off to a good start — given the nature of his succession and the early revolt of Scribonianus with its ensuing show trials — and it seems likely that distrust of the aristocracy is what impelled Claudius to elevate the role of his freedmen. During his reign, however, Claudius made efforts to conciliate Rome’s leading council, but he also embarked on practices that redounded to his detriment, especially those of sponsoring the entrance men considered unworthy into the Order and hearing delicate cases behind closed doors (in camera). In the last analysis, the figures speak for themselves: 35 senators and several hundred Knights were driven to suicide or executed during the reign. The posthumous vilification of Claudius in the aristocratic tradition also bespeaks a deep bitterness and indicates that, ultimately, Claudius’s relationship with the Senate showed little improvement over time. His reviving and holding the censorship in 47-48 is typical of the way the relationship between Senate and emperor misfired: Claudius, no doubt, thought he was adhering to ancient tradition, but the emperor-censor only succeeded in eliciting odium from those he was assessing.[[27]]

Claudius was remembered (negatively) by tradition as being noticeably profligate in dispensing grants of Roman citizenship to provincials; he also admitted „long-haired“ Gauls into the senatorial order, to the displeasure of the snobbish incumbents. Both of these practices demonstrate his concern for fair play and good government for the provinces, despite his largely sedentary reign: under Claudius are attributed the first issues of standing orders (mandata) from emperor to governor.[[28]] In the organization of the provinces, Claudius appears to have preferred direct administration over client kingship. Under him the kingdoms of Mauretania, Lycia, Noricum, and Thrace were converted into provinces. Stable kingdoms, such as Bosporus and Cilicia, were left untouched. A good example of the pattern is Herod Agrippa I. This client prince had grown up at Rome and had been awarded tetrarchic lands in Galilee by Gaius (Caligula). As we saw above, he had been involved in the accession of Claudius and, as a reward for services rendered, he was granted Judaea and Samaria in addition to his former holdings. He fell from grace, however, when he suspiciously extended Jerusalem’s walls and invited other eastern kings to a conference at Tiberias. He died suddenly in 44 A.D., after which his former kingdom again came under direct Roman rule.[[29]]

One feature of Claudius’s reign that the sources particularly criticize is his handling of judicial matters. While he was certainly diligent in attending to hearings and court proceedings — he was constantly present in court and heard cases even during family celebrations and festal days — the sources accuse him of interfering unduly with cases, of not listening to both sides of a case, of making ridiculous and/or savage rulings, and of hearing delicate cases in closed-door private sessions with only his advisors present. The most celebrated and infamous of the latter cases is that of Valerius Asiaticus, the Gallic ex-consul and one-time friend of Claudius, who fell from grace in 47, reputedly at Messalina’s instigation. His case was heard in the emperor’s bedroom and Asiaticus was forced to suicide. Even if a survey of surviving rulings by Claudius do not show him making silly decisions, his judicial practices caught such attention that Seneca’s Apocolocyntosis ends with a courtroom scene with Claudius as the accused: he is not allowed to make his defence, is convicted, and condemned to be a powerless courtroom clerk. Such an image must have been most pleasing to the senatorial imagination.[[30]]

Finally, there is Claudius’s building activities. Public building was de rigueur for Roman emperors, and ancient accounts of individual reigns routinely include mention of imperial munificence. Matters hydraulic account for Claudius’s greatest constructional achievements, in the form of a new aqueduct for the city of Rome, a new port at Portus near Ostia, and the draining of the Fucine Lake. The sources are at pains to highlight the almost catastrophic outcome of the latter project, but its scale cannot be denied. Suetonius’s assessment that „his public works were grandiose and necessary rather than numerous“ is entirely correct[[31]].

Conclusion

Robert Graves‘ fictional characterization of Claudius as an essentially benign man with a keen intelligence has tended to dominate the wider public’s view of this emperor. Close study of the sources, however, reveals a somewhat different kind of man. In addition to his scholarly and cautious nature, he had a cruel streak, as suggested by his addiction to gladiatorial games and his fondness for watching his defeated opponents executed.[[32]] He conducted closed-door (in camera ) trials of leading citizens that frequently resulted in their ruin or deaths — an unprecedented and tyrannical pattern of behavior. He had his wife Messalina executed, and he personally presided over a kangaroo court in the Praetorian Camp in which many of her hangers-on lost their lives. He abandoned his own son Britannicus to his fate and favored the advancement of Nero as his successor. While he cannot be blamed for the disastrous way Nero’s rule turned out, he must take some responsibility for putting that most unsuitable youth on the throne. At the same time, his reign was marked by some notable successes: the invasion of Britain, stability and good government in the provinces, and successful management of client kingdoms. Claudius, then, is a more enigmatic figure than the other Julio-Claudian emperors: at once careful, intelligent, aware and respectful of tradition, but given to bouts of rage and cruelty, willing to sacrifice precedent to expediency, and utterly ruthless in his treatment of those who crossed him. Augustus’s suspicion that there was more to the timid Claudius than met the eye was more than fully borne out by the events of his unexpected reign.

Bibliography (see also the bibliographies for Gaius and Nero)

Barrett, A. A. Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire. New Haven, 1996.

Braund, D. Augustus to Nero: A Sourcebook on Roman History, 31 BC – A.D. 68. London, 1985.

Eck, W., A. Caballos, and F. Fernández. Das Senatusconsultum de Cn. Pisone Patre. Munich, 1996.

Ehrhardt, C. „Messalina and the Succession to Claudius.“ Antichthon 12 (1978): 51-77.

Sherk, R. K. The Roman Empire: Augustus to Hadrian. Cambridge, 1988.

Levick, B. Claudius. New Haven, 1990.

Momigliano, A. Claudius: The Emperor and his Achievement.² Oxford, 1961.

Schwartz, D. R. Agrippa I: The Last King of Judaea. Tübingen, 1990.

Scramuzza, V. M. The Emperor Claudius. London, 1940.

Sherwin-White, A. N. The Roman Citizenship². Oxford, 1973.

Smallwood, E. M. Documents Illustrating the Principates of Gaius, Claudius, and Nero. Cambridge, 1967.

Strocka, V.M. (ed.) Die Regierungszeit des Claudius. Mainz 1993.

Sutherland, C. H. V. Coinage in Roman Imperial Policy. London, 1951.

________. The Roman Imperial Coinage. Vol. 1,² London, 1982. (= RIC)

Talbert, R. J. A. The Senate of Imperial Rome. Princeton, 1984.

Vivo, A. de. Claudio e Tacito: Storia e codificazione letteraria. Naples, 1980.

Wellesley, K. „Can You Trust Tacitus?“ GaR 1 (1954): 13-33.

Wiseman, T.P. Flavius Josephus: Death of an Emperor. Exeter 1991.

Notes

[[1]] The main ancient literary sources for Claudius’s reign are: Tac. Ann. 11-12; Dio 59.1-60(61).4; Seneca, Apocolocyntosis; Suet. Claudius. Supplementary information is found in Josephus, and inscriptions and coins are collected in Smallwood, Documents (many of the latter’s entries are translated in Braund or Sherk). Birth: Suet. Claud. 2.1.

[[2]] Defects: Suet. Claud. 2.1-2. Claudius may have suffered from cerebral palsy, but medical diagnoses in the absence of physical remains and at a distance of 2,000 years are not the soundest.

[[3]] Antonia, reports Suetonius [Claud. 3.2], used to call him „a half-formed monster“ and berated fools as „more stupid than my son Claudius.“ These assessments may well derive from the imperial archives, to which Suetonius had access. For citations from Augustus’s correspondence that reveal a more balanced view of the young Claudius, see Suet. Claud. 4. Recent confirmation of Claudius’s low status in the dynasty comes from the SC de Cn. Pisone Patre (AD 20): in the lengthy praises of members of Germanicus’s family, Claudius, Germanicus’s brother, is barely mentioned (line 148) ; see W. Eck et al., Das Senatusconsultum de Cn. Pisone Patre (Munich, 1996), ll. 136-50.

[[4]] He did hold an augural priesthood, but nothing else. The flimsiness of Augustus’s bequest to him, in naming him an heir in the third degree among complete strangers, is a further indication of his almost total marginalization from the center of the dynasty, see Suet. Claud. 4.7.

[[5]] Suet. Claud. 3.1, 41-42. Among his works, which were composed in Greek and Latin and none of which survive, were: 43 books of Roman history, 21 books of Etruscan history, and 8 on Carthaginian; a book on philology; a rhetorical defence of Cicero; and an autobiography in 8 books. The latter have been fictionalized by Robert Graves in his masterly novels „I, Claudius“ and „Claudius the God.“

[[6]] Suetonius (Claud.5-6) records various incidental honors and respects paid to him from various quarters, such as his representation on two occasions of the equestrian order as their patron. However, as he was an under-utilized and therefore accessible member of the imperial house, it would have been more surprising had some party not attempted to use him as an avenue of approach into more powerful inner circles.

[[7]] Consulship and rough treatment under Gaius: Suet. Claud. 7-9.

[[8]] Suet. Claud. 10; Dio 60.1.2-3a. Josephus (AJ 19.212-20) is largely in agreement, but unwittingly contradicts an earlier passage in his work (see next note). Another possibility (see Scramuzza, 56-57) is that Josephus in AJ 19.212-20 is portraying the sequel of the events he describes in AJ 10.162-65.

[[9]] The tradition of the „active Guard“ is preserved in Jos. AJ 19.162-65.

[[10]] The danger here is that we enter a pattern of circular reasoning: because Claudius was involved in the assassination and his own accession, he suppressed the evidence and put out the „hapless accession“ story; therefore, the absence of evidence for his active involvement is to be read as proof of it! Levick (29-39) skirts this sort of logic, but falls short of endorsing it.

[[11]] Suet. Claud. 10.1-3; Dio 60.1.3a; Jos. AJ 19.229, BJ 2.206-7.

[[12]] Tribunes: Jos. AJ 19.229-35; Herod Agrippa: Jos. AJ 19.239-45.

[[13]] Suet. Claud. 10.3; Dio 60.1.4 (tribunes), 60.8.2 (allusion to Herod Agrippa’s role). Josephus’s account of these Roman events, in fact, is part of an extended, self-contained subdivision of his AJ that could easily be entitled „The Adventures of Herod Agrippa Among the Romans.“ There is just cause to doubt the degree of prominence he affords Herod in these events, but that the Jewish prince played some role is hardly to be doubted.

[[14]] Depleted Senate: Jos. AJ 19.248-49. Senatorial military strength and actions: Suet. Claud. 10.4; Jos. AJ 19.188, 242, BJ 2.205. Desertions: Dio 60.1.4; Jos. AJ 19.259-60, BJ 2.211-12. The most likely reason for the sudden desertion of the Senate’s troops late on 24 January was not fear of a restored Republic or an unwillingness to fight their comrades (as Josephus claims in the AJ and BJ, locc. citt., respectively), but the announcement on the evening of that day of Claudius’s huge donative to the urban and provincial troops (Jos. AJ 19.247, Suet. Claud. loc. cit.).

[[15]] Suet. Claud. 11.1; Dio 60.3.4; Jos. AJ 19.268-71. Chaerea had virtually ensured his own death by insisting that Claudius be killed along with Gaius.

[[16]] Scribonianus’s rebellion: Suet. Claud. 13.2; Dio 60.15-16; Tac. Hist. 1.89, 2.75, Ann. 12.52.2. The invasion of Britain has been analyzed in minute detail by many British scholars: e.g., S. Frere, Britannia,³ (London, 1987), 16-80; J. Peddie, Invasion: The Roman Conquest of Britain (New York, 1987); P. Salway, Roman Britain (Oxford, 1981), 65-99; G. Webster and D. Dudley, The Roman Conquest of Britain,² (London, 1973). Claudius’s initial objective may have been the annexation of the southern shoreline only; see Levick, 137-48.

[[17]] The bombastic inscription from his (lost) triumphal arch, now in a courtyard of the Musei Capitolini in Rome, declares that „he received the surrender of eleven British kings who had been defeated without loss in battle, and was the first to bring barbarian peoples from across the Ocean under the sway of the Roman people“ (CIL 6.920 = ILS 216). There were other military actions. Claudius inherited a war in Mauretania from Gaius’s reign and, once fighting subsided, organized the former kingdom into two provinces (Mauretania Tingitana and Caesariensis) perhaps as early as AD 43; he subdued trouble in Lycia and annexed the region as a province, probably around AD 47 or 48; and he saw fighting along the Rhine and Danube frontiers; for all this, see Levick, 149-61. By the end of his reign, he had been hailed as imperator twenty-seven times (see, e.g., CIL 6.1256 = ILS 218), more than any emperor until Constantine the Great.

[[18]] On the imperial freedmen, see Levick, 53-79; Scramuzza, 5-34. Claudius’s relations with the aristocracy: Levick, 93-103. Narcissus and the legions: Dio 60.19.2-3. A classic example of the growing power of the freedmen is Claudius’s abolition of the senatorial post of quaestor Ostiensis and its replacement with a freedman procurator portus Ostiensis in 44; see Suet. Claud. 24.2.

[[19]] Messalina was Claudius’s third wife: previous unions with Plautia Urgulanilla and Aelia Paetina had failed for various reasons; see Suet. Claud. 26.1-2. Messalina’s influence is indicated by her appearance on the obverse of coins of Claudius’s reign (where one would expect the head of the emperor), or in the cameo now in Paris depicting Messalina, Octavia, and Britannicus. Messalina’s excesses are reflected in such sources as Sen. Apoc., passim and Juv. Sat. 6 and 10.

[[20]] Messalina’s fall: Tac. Ann. 11.26-37; Suet. Claud. 26; Dio 60(61).31.1-5; Sen. Oct. 257-61.

[[21]] Timing of marriage: Tac. Ann. 12.6-8. Agrippina’s life and connections: Barrett, Agrippina, 1-94 (before marriage to Claudius).

[[22]] Augusta: Dio 60(61).33.2a. Greeting ambassadors: Tac. Ann. 12.37.5; Dio 60(61).33.7. Cloak: Pliny HN 33.63, Dio 60(61).33.3. Colony: Tac. Ann. 12.27.1-2. Tacitus, typically, contrives the most biting aphorism to describe Agrippina’s ascendancy: „she presided over an almost masculine servitude“ (adductum et quasi virile servitium — Ann. 12.7.5).

[[23]] Adoption: Tac. Ann. 12.25; Suet. Claud. 27, Nero 7; Dio 60(61).32.22. Toga virilis and public appearances: Tac. Ann. 12.41-42; Suet. Nero 7; Dio 60(61).32.5, 33.2c, 33.9. Imperium proconsulare: Tac. Ann. 12.41.2. Princeps Iuventutis: C.H.V. Sutherland, Coinage in Roman Imperial Policy (London, 1951), pp.143-44 and id., RIC 126 (nos. 75. 80, 82) (many of these coins also celebrate Agrippina independently of Claudius — e.g., Sutherland, Coinage, 146 and id., RIC, 125 [no. 75] — a sure sign of her overt influence). Marriage to Octavia: Tac. Ann. 12.58.1; Dio 60(61).33.11.

[[24]] Tacitus is unequivocal in attributing Nero’s advancement to Agrippina’s efforts (studiis matris at Ann. 12.9.2). Modern attempts to counter this judgment (e.g., Scramuzza, 91-92) are unconvincing, though Barrett’s (Agrippina, 95-142) portrayal of Agrippina and Claudius acting in concert has its attractions. Tacitus portrays Pallas, Agrippina’s ally, as persuading Claudius to advance Nero for reasons of state, slyly appealing to the sort of historical precedents he knew would appeal to Claudius’s antiquarian sensibilities (Tac. Ann. 12.25). It is noteworthy that in his epigraphically preserved speech to Lugdunum (dated to AD 48, and thus before Nero was a factor), Claudius had referred to just such precedents regarding monarchic succession (Smallwood, Documents, no. 369.8-27). Levick (69-79) argues for the „pairing“ of Britannicus and Nero in a joint-succession scheme she sees extending back to Augustus. However, her „dynastic collegiality“ format for the imperial succession is rather thin for evidence and, tellingly, was not realized even once when power changed hands in the first century AD. Barrett (Agrippina, loc. cit.) argues that Claudius intended to promote Nero from the outset, since the prince could claim direct descent from Augustus and that this claim buttressed his own regime. This position seems a little stretched, since Claudius must have known that to do so would result in Britannicus’s death (as indeed it did, within weeks of Nero’s accession; see Tac. Ann. 13.15-17). Another possibility, little more than mentioned in the modern authorities but entirely possible, is that Claudius saw some flaws in Britannicus that turned him toward Nero (Tac. Ann. 13.16.5).

[[25]] Death of Claudius: Tac. Ann. 12.64-67; Suet. Claud. 43-44; Dio 60(61).34.1-3. Scramuzza (92-93) believes that Claudius died naturally, and Barrett (Agrippina, 139-42) leans in the same direction, on the basis that the confused and conflicting accounts of our sources make murder unlikely. Levick (76-77), while stating that murder cannot be proven, nonetheless finds Claudius’s death altogether too timely to have been natural. The aging emperor had fallen ill frequently in the years leading up to his death, but the fortuitous timing of his death is indeed highly suspicious.

[[26]] Proponents of centralization: e.g., Momigliano, passim; H.H. Scullard, From the Gracchi to Nero⁵ (London, 1985), 292-95. Disproven: Levick, 81-91.

[[27]] Consulting the House: Claudius’s record of attendance at meetings of the Senate is among best for the emperors; see R.J.A. Talbert, The Senate of Imperial Rome (Princeton, 1984), 174-84, esp. 176-77. Conciliatory gestures: he declared amnesty for senators implicated in Gaius’s death (Dio 60.3.5-4.2); he adopted a general demeanor of deference to the House (Suet. Claud. 12.1-2, 35.1); he rose to greet consuls and dressed unassumingly for meetings (Dio 60.6.1, 9); and so on. Unworthy senators: e.g., Tac. Ann. 11.20.4-21.4. Numbers of dead: Sen., Apoc. 14.1 (who numbers 35 senators and 221 equites); Suet. Claud. 29.2 (35 senators and over 300 equites). Censorship: Tac. Ann. 11.13, Suet. Claud. 16.

[[28]] Excessive grants of citizenship: Sen. Apoc. 3.3; his grant of citizenship en masse to the Alpine tribe of the Anauni (CIL 14.85 = ILS 206) is a particularly famous example. Levick (165) has pointed out, however, that in the indices of provincial citizens „Claudii“ are far outweighed by „Iulii“ or „Flavii,“ suggesting that the tradition has exaggerated this tendency of Claudius’s; see also see A.N. Sherwin-White The Roman Citizenship² (Oxford, 1973), 237-50. Admission of Gauls to the senate: Tac. Ann. 11.23-25; Smallwood, Documents, no. 369 (see also K. Wellesley, „Can You Trust Tacitus?“, GaR 1[1954]: 13-33). Mandata: Levick, 164.

[[29]] Career of Herod Agrippa I: D.R. Schwartz, Agrippa I: The Last King of Judaea (Tübingen, 1990); above, nn. 12-13.

[[30]] Hearing cases: Suet. Claud. 14, Dio 60.4.3, 17.1. Suetonius (Claud. 14-15) sums up his judicial failings with many examples; see also Dio 60.5.6-7. Closed hearings: Tac. Ann. 11.2.1, 13.4.2. Valerius Asiaticus and survey of rulings: Levick, 61-63 (with sources in notes) and 123-26, respectively. Seneca: Apoc. 12-14 (where there are many echoes of Suetonius’s charges).

[[31]] Suet. Claud. 20 (quote at 20.1: opera magna potius et necessaria quam multa perfecit). See also F.C. Bourne, The Public Works of the Julio-Claudians and Flavians (Princeton, 1946), 42-48; Levick, 108-11.

[[32]] Cruelty: Suet. Claud. 34.

Copyright 1998, Garrett G. Fagan. This file may be copied on the condition that the entire contents, including the header and this copyright notice, remain intact.

Comments to: Garrett G. Fagan

Updated:30 April 2004

Unveränd. Zweitpubl. v. Garrett G. Fagan: Claudius (41-54 A.D.), in: De Imperatoribus Romanis. An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Rulers [30.04.2004], http://www.roman-emperors.org/claudius.htm

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Gaius (Caligula) (A.D. 37 – 41)

Garrett G. Fagan

Pennsylvania State University

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Introduction

Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (b. A.D. 12, d. A.D. 41, emperor A.D. 37-41) represents a turning point in the early history of the Principate. Unfortunately, his is the most poorly documented reign of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. The literary sources for these four years are meager, frequently anecdotal, and universally hostile.[[1]] As a result, not only are many of the events of the reign unclear, but Gaius himself appears more as a caricature than a real person, a crazed megalomaniac given to capricious cruelty and harebrained schemes. Although some headway can be made in disentangling truth from embellishment, the true character of the youthful emperor will forever elude us.

Gaius’s Early Life and Reign

Gaius was born on 31 August, A.D. 12, probably at the Julio-Claudian resort of Antium (modern Anzio), the third of six children born to Augustus’s adopted grandson, Germanicus, and Augustus’s granddaughter, Agrippina. As a baby he accompanied his parents on military campaigns in the north and was shown to the troops wearing a miniature soldier’s outfit, including the hob-nailed sandal called caliga, whence the nickname by which posterity remembers him.[[2]] His childhood was not a happy one, spent amid an atmosphere of paranoia, suspicion, and murder. Instability within the Julio-Claudian house, generated by uncertainty over the succession, led to a series of personal tragedies. When his father died under suspicious circumstances on 10 October A.D. 19, relations between his mother and his grand-uncle, the emperor Tiberius, deteriorated irretrievably, and the adolescent Gaius was sent to live first with his great-grandmother Livia in A.D. 27 and then, following Livia’s death two years later, with his grandmother Antonia. Shortly before the fall of Tiberius’s Praetorian Prefect, Sejanus, in A.D. 31 he was summoned to join Tiberius at his villa on Capri, where he remained until his accession in A.D. 37. In the interim, his two brothers and his mother suffered demotion and, eventually, violent death. Throughout these years, the only position of administrative responsibility Gaius held was an honorary quaestorship in A.D. 33. [[3]]

When Tiberius died on 16 March A.D. 37, Gaius was in a perfect position to assume power, despite the obstacle of Tiberius’s will, which named him and his cousin Tiberius Gemellus joint heirs. (Gemellus’s life was shortened considerably by this bequest, since Gaius ordered him killed within a matter of months.) Backed by the Praetorian Prefect Q. Sutorius Macro, Gaius asserted his dominance. He had Tiberius’s will declared null and void on grounds of insanity, accepted the powers of the Principate as conferred by the Senate, and entered Rome on 28 March amid scenes of wild rejoicing. His first acts were generous in spirit: he paid Tiberius’s bequests and gave a cash bonus to the Praetorian Guard, the first recorded donativum to troops in imperial history. He honored his father and other dead relatives and publicly destroyed Tiberius’s personal papers, which no doubt implicated many of the Roman elite in the destruction of Gaius’s immediate family. Finally, he recalled exiles and reimbursed those wronged by the imperial tax system [[4]]. His popularity was immense. Yet within four years he lay in a bloody heap in a palace corridor, murdered by officers of the very guard entrusted to protect him. What went wrong?

Gaius’s „Madness“

The ancient sources are practically unanimous as to the cause of Gaius’s downfall: he was insane. The writers differ as to how this condition came about, but all agree that after his good start Gaius began to behave in an openly autocratic manner, even a crazed one. [[5]] Outlandish stories cluster about the raving emperor, illustrating his excessive cruelty, immoral sexual escapades, or disrespect toward tradition and the Senate. The sources describe his incestuous relations with his sisters, laughable military campaigns in the north, the building of a pontoon bridge across the Bay at Baiae, and the plan to make his horse a consul. [[6]] Modern scholars have pored over these incidents and come up with a variety of explanations: Gaius suffered from an illness; he was misunderstood; he was corrupted by power; or, accepting the ancient evidence, they conclude that he was mad.[[7]] However, appreciating the nature of the ancient sources is crucial when approaching this issue. Their unanimous hostility renders their testimony suspect, especially since Gaius’s reported behavior fits remarkably well with that of the ancient tyrant, a literary type enshrined in Greco-Roman tradition centuries before his reign. Further, the only eye-witness account of Gaius’s behavior, Philo’s Embassy to Gaius, offers little evidence of outright insanity, despite the antagonism of the author, whom Gaius treated with the utmost disrespect. Rather, he comes across as aloof, arrogant, egotistical, and cuttingly witty — but not insane. The best explanation both for Gaius’s behavior and the subsequent hostility of the sources is that he was an inexperienced young man thrust into a position of unlimited power, the true nature of which had been carefully disguised by its founder, Augustus. Gaius, however, saw through the disguise and began to act accordingly. This, coupled with his troubled upbringing and almost complete lack of tact led to behavior that struck his contemporaries as extreme, even insane.

Gaius and the Empire

Gaius’s reign is too short, and the surviving ancient accounts too sensationalized, for any serious policies of his to be discerned. During his reign, Mauretania was annexed and reorganized into two provinces, Herod Agrippa was appointed to a kingdom in Palestine, and severe riots took place in Alexandria between Jews and Greeks. These events are largely overlooked in the sources, since they offer slim pickings for sensational stories of madness. [[8]] Two other episodes, however, garner greater attention: Gaius’s military activities on the northern frontier, and his vehement demand for divine honors. His military activities are portrayed as ludicrous, with Gauls dressed up as Germans at his triumph and Roman troops ordered to collect sea-shells as „spoils of the sea.“ Modern scholars have attempted to make sense of these events in various ways. The most reasonable suggestion is that Gaius went north to earn military glory and discovered there a nascent conspiracy under the commander of the Upper German legions, Cn. Lentulus Gaetulicus. The subsequent events are shrouded in uncertainty, but it is known that Gaetulicus and Gaius’s brother-in-law, M. Aemilius Lepidus, were executed and Gaius’s two surviving sisters, implicated in the plot, suffered exile. [[9]] Gaius’s enthusiasm for divine honors for himself and his favorite sister, Drusilla (who died suddenly in A.D. 38 and was deified), is presented in the sources as another clear sign of his madness, but it may be no more than the young autocrat tactlessly pushing the limits of the imperial cult, already established under Augustus. Gaius’s excess in this regard is best illustrated by his order that a statue of him be erected in the Temple at Jerusalem. Only the delaying tactics of the Syrian governor, P. Petronius, and the intervention of Herod Agrippa prevented riots and a potential uprising in Palestine. [[10]]

Conspiracy and Assassination

The conspiracy that ended Gaius’s life was hatched among the officers of the Praetorian Guard, apparently for purely personal reasons. It appears also to have had the support of some senators and an imperial freedman. [[11]] As with conspiracies in general, there are suspicions that the plot was more broad-based than the sources intimate, and it may even have enjoyed the support of the next emperor Claudius, but these propositions are not provable on available evidence. On 24 January A.D. 41 the praetorian tribune Cassius Chaerea and other guardsmen caught Gaius alone in a secluded palace corridor and cut him down. He was 28 years old and had ruled three years and ten months. [[12]]

Conclusion

Whatever damage Tiberius’s later years had done to the carefully crafted political edifice created by Augustus, Gaius multiplied it a hundredfold. When he came to power in A.D. 37 Gaius had no administrative experience beyond his honorary quaestorship, and had spent an unhappy early life far from the public eye. He appears, once in power, to have realized the boundless scope of his authority and acted accordingly. For the elite, this situation proved intolerable and ensured the blackening of Caligula’s name in the historical record they would dictate. The sensational and hostile nature of that record, however, should in no way trivialize Gaius’s importance. His reign highlighted an inherent weakness in the Augustan Principate, now openly revealed for what it was — a raw monarchy in which only the self-discipline of the incumbent acted as a restraint on his behavior. That the only means of retiring the wayward princeps was murder marked another important revelation: Roman emperors could not relinquish their powers without simultaneously relinquishing their lives.

Bibliography

The bibliography on Gaius is far too vast for comprehensive citation here. Most of the ancient material can be found in Gelzer and Smallwood. Ample reference to relevant secondary works is made in Barrett, Caligula (319-28) and Hurley (219-30). The works listed below are therefore either the main treatments of Gaius or are directly pertinent to the issues discussed in the entry above.

Balsdon, J.P.V.D. The Emperor Gaius. Oxford, 1934.

________. „The Principates of Tiberius and Gaius.“ ANRW 2.2 (1975): 86-94.

Barrett, A.A. Caligula: The Corruption of Power. New Haven, 1989.

________. Agrippina. Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire. New Haven, 1996.

Benediktson, D.T. „Caligula’s Madness: Madness or Interictal Temporal Lobe Epilepsy?“ Classical World 82 (1988-89), 370-5.

Bicknell, P. „The Emperor Gaius‘ Military Activities in AD 40.“ Historia 17 (1968): 496-505.

Bilde, P. „The Roman Emperor Gaius (Caligula)’s Attempt to Erect his Statue in the Temple of Jerusalem.“ STh 32 (1978): 67-93.

Boschung, D. Die Bildnisse des Caligula. Berlin, 1989.

Charlesworth, M.P. „The Tradition About Caligula“ Cambridge Historical Journal 4 (1933): 105-119.

Davies, R.W. „The Abortive Invasion of Britain by Gaius.“ Historia 15 (1966): 124-28.

D’Ecré, F. „La mort de Germanicus et les poisons de Caligula.“ Janus 56 (1969): 123-48.

Ferrill, A. Caligula, Emperor of Rome. London, 1991.

Gelzer, M. „Iulius Caligula.“ Real-Enzyclopädie 10.381-423 (1919).

Grant, M. The Roman Emperors. A Biographical Guide to the Rulers of Imperial Rome 31 BC – AD 476 (New York, 1985), 25-28.

Hurley, D.W. „Gaius Caligula in the Germanicus Tradition.“ American Journal of Philology 110 (1989): 316-38.

________. An Historical and Historiographical Commentary on Suetonius‘ Life of C. Caligula. Atlanta, 1993.

Jerome, T.S. „The Historical Tradition About Gaius,“ in id., Aspects of the Study of Roman History. New York, 1923.

Katz, R.S. „The Illness of Caligula.“ Classical World 65 (1971-72): 223-5

McGinn, T.A.J. „Caligula’s Brothel on the Palatine,“ EMC 42 (1998): 95-107.

Massaro, V. and I. Montgomery. „Gaius: Mad Bad, Ill or All Three?“ Latomus 37 (1978): 894-909

________. „Gaius (Caligula) Doth Murder Sleep.“ Latomus 38 (1979): 699-700.

Maurer, J. A. A Commentary on C. Suetoni Tranquilli, Vita C. Caligulae Caesaris, Chapters I-XXI. Philadelphia, 1949.

Morgan, M.G. „Caligula’s Illness Again.“ Classical World 66 (1972-73): 327-9

Philips, E.J. „The Emperor Gaius‘ Abortive Invasion of Britain.“ Historia 19 (1970): 369-74.

Simpson, C. J. „The ‚Conspiracy‘ of AD 39.“ In Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History II, edited by C. Deroux, 347-66. Brussels, 1980.

Smallwood, E.M. (ed.). Documents Illustrating the Principates of Gaius, Claudius and Nero. Cambridge. 1967.

Wardle, D. Suetonius‘ Life of Caligula: A Commentary. Brussels, 1994.

Woods, D. „Caligula’s Seashells.“ Greece and Rome 47 (2000): 80-87.

Wood, S. „Diva Drusilla Panthea and the Sisters of Caligula.“ AJA 99 (1995): 457-82.

NOTES

[[1]] The main ancient sources for Gaius’s reign are: Suet. Gaius; Dio 59; Philo In Flaccum and Legatio ad Gaium; Jos. AJ 19.1-211. Tacitus’s account of the reign is lost. However, he makes occasional references to Gaius in the extant portions of his works, as does Seneca. All of these sources have reason to be hostile to Gaius’s memory: Seneca’s style was roundly abused by the emperor (Suet. Gaius 53.2; Dio 59.19.7-8); Philo and Josephus, as Jews, resented Gaius’s blasphemous demands for divinity that almost roused Palestine to rebellion (see above, Gaius and the Empire); and the later sources inherited a tradition about Gaius that can be shown to be biased and exaggerated, cf. Charlesworth, „The Tradition about Gaius.“ Besides these literary sources, inscriptions and coins also offer some information, see Smallwood, Documents Illustrating.

[[2]] Tac. Ann. 1.41.3; Suet. Gaius 9.1.

[[3]] Death of Germanicus and aftermath: Tac. Ann. 2.69-3.19; Gaius with Livia, Antonia, and Tiberius: Tac. Ann. 6.20.1; Suet. Gaius 10.1, 23.2; fate of Agrippina: Tac. Ann. 5.3.2 – 5.5.2, 6.25.1; and of Nero and Drusus Caesar: Tac. Ann. 5.3.2, 6.23.4-5, Suet. Tib. 54, Gaius 7; Gaius’s quaestorship: Dio 58.23.1. For the alleged involvement of Gaius in his father’s death, see D’Ecré, „La mort de Germanicus.“

[[4]] Early reign and first acts: Suet. Gaius 13-16; Philo Leg. 8-13; Dio 59.2-3. Macro’s full name: Smallwood, Documents Illustrating, no. 254. Date of Gaius’s arrival in Rome: Acta Fratrum Arvalium (Smallwood, Documents Illustrating, no. 3.15-17). Gemellus: Suet. Gaius 14.1, 15.2, 23.3; Dio 59.1.2-3, 59.8.1-2; Philo Leg. 23-31.

[[5]] Seneca, without explanation, believes he went mad (Brev. 18.5-6; Helv. 10.4; Tranqu. 14.5; Ben. 7.11.2). Josephus also thinks that Gaius went mad but alludes to a love-potion administered by his wife Caesonia as the cause (AJ 19.193), apparently after two years of good rule (AJ 18.256). Philo blames an illness in the fall of A.D. 37 (Leg. 14-22). Suetonius mentions simply a „brain sickness“ (valitudo mentis; Gaius 51.1). Dio thinks that faults of character led to a deterioration in his behavior (59.3-4). Surviving references suggest that Tacitus thought Gaius at least of troubled and impulsive mind, which is not the same thing as crazed (Agr. 13.2; Ann. 6.20.1, 6.45.5, 13.3.6; Hist. 4.48.2).

[[6]] Incest: Suet. Gaius 24.1; Dio 59.3.6; Jos. AJ 19.204. Military campaigns: Tac. Hist. 4.15.3, Germania 37.5, Suet. Gaius 43-46, Dio 59.21.1-3. Bridge at Baiae: Suet. Gaius 19; Dio 59.17; Jos. AJ 19.5-6. Horse as consul: Suet. Gaius 55.3; Dio 59.14.7; His alleged setting up of a brothel in the palace may contain a kernel of truth, even if the story is much embellished, see T.A.J. McGinn, „Caligula’s Brothel on the Palatine,“ EMC 42 (1998): 95-107.

[[7]] Alcoholism: Jerome, „Historical Tradition“; hyperthyroidism/thyrotoxicos: Katz, „Illness of Caligula“; mania: Massaro and Montgomery, „Gaius: Mad, Bad, Ill or All Three“ and „Gaius (Caligula) Doth Murder Sleep“; epilepsy: Benediktson, „Caligula’s Madness.“ Morgan („Caligula’s Illness Again“) makes some astute observations on the weakness of the medical approach as a whole. He points out that the ancient concept of physiognomy — that people’s characters are manifest in their appearance — makes any diagnosis highly suspect. In fact, all such medical explanations are doomed to failure. The sources simply cannot be trusted, and diagnosing a patient 2,000 years dead is, at best, a stretch. Balsdon (The Emperor Gaius) argued that Gaius was misunderstood and attempted to offer rational explanations for all of his apparently deranged antics. A useful summary and critique of „madness“ theories is to be found in Barrett, Caligula, 213-41. For a recent acceptance of the madness thesis, cf. Ferrill, Caligula, Emperor of Rome.

[[8]] Mauretania: Dio 59.25.1; see also Barrett, Caligula, 115-20. Agrippa: Jos. AJ 18.228-37; Phil Leg. 324-26; see also E. M. Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule (Leiden, 1976), 187-200. Alexandrian riots: Philo Flacc and Leg.

[[9]] Fake Germans in triumph: Suet. Gaius 47. Military campaigns: see above, note [6]. For modern rationalizations of these campaigns, cf., e.g., Bicknell, „Military Activities“; Davies, „Abortive Invasion“; Philips, „Abortive Invasion“; Barrett, Caligula, 125-39, and Woods, „Caligula’s Seashells.“. Execution of Gaetulicus and exile of sisters: the Gaetulicus affair is ably assessed in Barrett, Caligula, 91-113, and id. Agrippina, 60-70; for a contrasting view, see Simpson, „The ‚Conspiracy‘ of AD 39.“

[[10]] The Jerusalem affair is described most fully by Josephus (AJ 18.261-309; BJ 2.184-203) and Philo (Leg. 188, 198-348). Thorough modern assessments can be found in Barrett, Caligula, 188-91, cf. 140-53 (on Gaius’s demand for divine honours, which Barrett argues are exaggerated by the sources); Bilde „Statue in the Temple“; and Smallwood, Jews (above, note [8]), 174-80. Drusilla: Suet. Gaius 24.2-3; Dio 59.11; Smallwood, Documents Illustrating, nos 5.12-15, 11, 128, 401.12; Wood, „Diva Drusilla.“

[[11]] The named Praetorian conspirators include three tribunes — Cassius Chaerea (Suet. Gaius 56.2; Dio 59.29.1; Sen. Const. 18.3; Jos. AJ 19.18, 21, 28-37); Cornelius Sabinus (Suet. Gaius 58.2; Dio 59.29.1; Jos. AJ 19.46, 48, 261); Papinius (Jos. AJ 19.37) — and the Prefect M. Arrecinus Clemens (Jos. AJ 19.37-46). Senators associated with the plot are M. Annius Vinicianus (Jos. AJ 19.18, 20, 49-51), M. Valerius Asiaticus (Tac. Ann. 11.1.2), Cluvius Rufus and L. Nonius Asprenas (Jos. AJ 19.91-92, 98). Gaius’s freedman Callistus is also a named participant (Tac. Ann. 11.29.1; Dio 29.29.1; Jos. AJ 19.63-69).

[[12]] The possible involvement of Claudius in the plot is assessed by B. Levick, Claudius (New Haven, 1990), 33-39. The fullest account of the assassination is that of Josephus (AJ 19.70-113), with more summary accounts found in Suetonius (Gaius 58) and the epitome of Dio (59.29.5-7).

Copyright © 1997, Garrett G. Fagan. This file may be copied on the condition that the entire contents, including the header and this copyright notice, remain intact.

Comments to: Garrett G. Fagan

Updated: 28 October 2004

Unveränd. Zweitpubl. v. Garrett G. Fagan: Tiberius (A.D. 14-37), in: De Imperatoribus Romanis. An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Rulers [28.10.2004], http://www.roman-emperors.org/gaius.htm

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Tiberius (A.D. 14 – 37)

Garrett G. Fagan

Pennsylvania State University

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Introduction

The reign of Tiberius (b. 42 B.C., d. A.D. 37, emperor A.D. 14-37) is a particularly important one for the Principate, since it was the first occasion when the powers designed for Augustus alone were exercised by somebody else. [[1]] In contrast to the approachable and tactful Augustus, Tiberius emerges from the sources as an enigmatic and darkly complex figure, intelligent and cunning, but given to bouts of severe depression and dark moods that had a great impact on his political career as well as his personal relationships. His reign abounds in contradictions. Despite his keen intelligence, he allowed himself to come under the influence of unscrupulous men who, as much as any actions of his own, ensured that Tiberius’s posthumous reputation would be unfavorable; despite his vast military experience, he oversaw the conquest of no new region for the empire; and despite his administrative abilities he showed such reluctance in running the state as to retire entirely from Rome and live out his last years in isolation on the island of Capri. His reign represents, as it were, the adolescence of the Principate as an institution. Like any adolescence, it proved a difficult time.

Early life (42-12 B.C.)

Tiberius Claudius Nero was born on 16 November 42 B.C. to Ti. Claudius Nero and Livia Drusilla. Both parents were scions of the gens Claudia which had supplied leaders to the Roman Republic for many generations. Through his mother Tiberius also enjoyed genealogical connections to prominent Republican houses such as the Servilii Caepiones, the Aemilii Lepidi, and the Livii Drusi. From his birth, then, Tiberius was destined for public life. But during his boyhood the old Republican system of rule by Senate and magistrates, which had been tottering for decades, was finally toppled and replaced by an autocracy under the able and ambitious Octavian (later named Augustus). It proved fateful for Tiberius when, in 39 B.C., his mother Livia divorced Ti. Claudius Nero and married Octavian, thereby making the infant Tiberius the stepson of the future ruler of the Roman world. Forever afterward, Tiberius was to have his name coupled with this man, and always to his detriment. [[2]]

Tiberius’s early life was relatively uneventful, even if the times were not. In 32 B.C, as civil war loomed between Antony and Octavian, Tiberius made his first public appearance at the age of nine and delivered the eulogy at his natural father’s funeral. In the years following the battle of Actium in 31 B.C., as Augustus secured his position at the head of the state, Tiberius grew to maturity and took his first real steps in public life. In 29 B.C. he took part in Augustus’s triumph for the Actium campaign, riding on the left of Augustus in the triumphal chariot. Two years later he assumed the gown of manhood (toga virilis) and Augustus led him into the forum. Three years after that, at the age of 17, he became a quaestor and was given the privilege of standing for the praetorship and consulship five years in advance of the age prescribed by law. He then began appearing in court as an advocate and was sent by Augustus to the East where, in 20 B.C., he oversaw one of his stepfather’s proudest successes. The Parthians, who had captured the eagles of the legions lost in the failed eastern campaigns of M. Crassus (53 B.C.), Decidius Saxa (40 B.C.), and Mark Antony (36 B.C.), formally returned them to the Romans. Tiberius may have received a grant of proconsular power (imperium proconsulare) to carry out this mission, but, if so, the sources do not mention it. After returning from the East, Tiberius was granted praetorian rank and, in 13 B.C., he became consul. Between his praetorship and consulship he was on active duty with his brother, Drusus Claudius Nero, combatting Alpine tribes; he also was governor of Gallia Comata for one year, probably in 19 B.C. His personal life was also blessed at this time by a happy marriage to Vipsania Agrippina, the daughter of Augustus’s longstanding friend and right-hand man, M. Vipsanius Agrippa. The marriage probably took place in 20 or 19 B.C. When he was consul, his wife produced a son, Drusus. [[3]]

Determining the significance of all these offices, delegations, and the marriage to Vipsania largely depends on what view is taken of Augustus’s efforts for the succession. In one sense, Tiberius’s early career was an entirely natural one for a young man so close to the center of power; it would have been more remarkable had he stayed at home. Tiberius’s career, however, cannot be so easily divorced from the larger context of the Augustan succession. The issue is a major one and hotly contentious. [[4]]For the present, it is worth noting that Augustus, in his arrangements for the succession, appears to have indulged a Republican instinct for favoring his immediate family and accordingly focused his attentions on the Julii. First, his nephew Marcellus was favored. Following this young man’s premature death in 23 B.C., Augustus used his daughter Julia to tie his friend M. Vipsanius Agrippa into his family by marriage. The union, solemnized in 21 B.C., was a fertile one and produced two sons within four years, both of whom Augustus adopted in a single ceremony in 17 B.C. Modern scholarship has puzzled over these labyrinthine arrangements, in which there seems no place for the stepsons, Tiberius and Drusus. The best explanation is that Augustus’s succession scheme was a flexible one, comprising a pool of princes from which the emperor could draw in the event of emergencies — a wise counsel, as matters turned out. On this view, Tiberius’s early career was not insignificant, but his position was not as elevated and evidently favored as that of Agrippa, now the heir-apparent, and the boys, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, who seemed marked out to succeed in the third generation. Whatever personal ambitions Tiberius had, or his mother Livia had for him, were to be utterly subordinated to Augustus’s wish to see a Julian at the helm of the Principate. As it was, fate was on Tiberius’s side.

The Heir to Augustus: The First Attempt and the „Retirement“ to Rhodes (12 B.C-A.D. 2)

Agrippa died in 12 B.C. Tiberius, on Augustus’s insistence, divorced Vipsania and married Agrippa’s widow, Julia. The union was not a happy one and produced no children. Tiberius had been happily married to Vipsania and, following an embarrassing display in public, he was ultimately forbidden by Augustus even to see her. Nevertheless, Tiberius’s elevation in his stepfather’s succession scheme continued. He received important military commissions in Pannonia and Germany between 12 and 6 B.C. and proved very successful in the field. He was consul for the second time in 7 B.C., and, in 6 B.C., he was granted tribunician power (tribunicia potestas) and an extensive commission in the East [[5]]. In essence, Tiberius had replaced Agrippa as Augustus’s successor. He was Julia’s husband, the leading general in the state, and he enjoyed a share of the emperor’s power. Everything seemed settled, until the darker side of Tiberius’s personality intervened.

Without warning, in 6 B.C. Tiberius — the visible heir to Augustus — announced his withdrawal from public life and went to live on Rhodes with some personal friends and an astrologer, Thrasyllus. His reasons for doing so have fueled intense speculation in ancient and modern sources. [[6]] Whatever his motivation, the move was not only a snub to Augustus, but it was also highly inconvenient to the latter’s succession plans. Gaius and Lucius Caesar were still too young to assume the heavy responsibilities of the Principate, and Augustus now had no immediate successor to assume power and see the boys to maturity, since Tiberius’s brother Drusus had died of an illness in 9 B.C. If anything should befall Augustus now, the Principate might be washed away or, if it should continue, his family’s position at the head of it was placed in jeopardy. Finally, and not the least concern, there was the danger that an imperial prince removed from Augustus’s ambit could afford a focus for conspiracy. [[7]] Whatever had been Augustus’s opinion of Tiberius to this point, henceforward he seems to have had little patience with, or affection for him. Something of Augustus’s irritation is revealed by his repeated refusal to allow Tiberius to return to Rome after the latter realized the delicacy of his position on Rhodes; and this in spite of pressure brought to bear on Augustus by his influential and persuasive wife, Livia. When Tiberius’s powers ran out in 1 B.C. they were not renewed, and his situation became even more precarious. According to the sources, he was expecting a ship bearing the order for his death. When the ship arrived in A.D. 2, however, it brought quite different tidings. [[8]]

The Heir to Augustus: The Second Attempt (A.D. 2-14)

Tragedy worked for the benefit of Tiberius. In A.D. 2 Lucius Caesar died of an illness at Massilia. Augustus, resistant to the idea of allowing Tiberius to return, finally yielded to the requests of Livia and Gaius Caesar on his behalf. Tiberius returned to Rome and lived in the political wilderness until, unexpectedly, Gaius Caesar died of a wound received during a siege in Armenia. [[9]]Augustus, devastated, was left without his adoptive sons and, more importantly, without an heir and successor. His careful planning for the succession had come to nothing. In the crisis, he turned once more to Tiberius. The wayward prince was summoned from private life and adopted as Augustus’s son. Also adopted by Augustus was Agrippa Postumus, the third son of Julia and Agrippa. Tiberius, despite having a natural son, was required to adopt his nephew, Germanicus, the son of his brother Drusus and married to M. Antony’s daughter, Antonia. Once more, these complicated manoeuvres surrounding the succession have generated scholarly debate, but the best interpretation seems to be that Augustus was re-establishing a slate of candidate princes, with Tiberius at its head and the others as potential substitutes in the event of disaster. Tiberius’s forced adoption of Germanicus appears to have been Augustus’s attempt to mark out the succession in the third generation of the Principate. For through Germanicus lay the only route for a Julian to the purple: Germanicus’s children would have Augustus’s blood in their veins. Augustus’s continued coldness toward Tiberius is suggested in the melancholic comment in his will about these arrangements, echoed in the Res Gestae: „Since cruel fate has robbed me of my sons, Gaius and Lucius …“ [[10]]

From A.D. 4 to 14 Tiberius was clearly Augustus’s successor. When he was adopted, he also received grants of proconsular power and tribunician power; and in A.D. 13 his proconsular power was made co-extensive with that of Augustus. [[11]] In effect, Tiberius was now co-princeps with Augustus so that when the latter finally died on 19 August A.D. 14, Tiberius’s position was unassailable and the continuation of the Principate a foregone conclusion. After 55 years living at the behest of his stepfather, Tiberius finally assumed the mantle of sole power.

Accession and Early Reign (A.D. 14 – 23)

The accession of Tiberius proved intensely awkward. After Augustus had been buried and deified, and his will read and honored, the Senate convened on 18 September to inaugurate the new reign and officially „confirm“ Tiberius as emperor. Such a transfer of power had never happened before, and nobody, including Tiberius, appears to have known what to do. Tacitus’s account is the fullest. Tiberius came to the Senate to have various powers and titles voted to him. Perhaps in an attempt to imitate the tact of Augustus, Tiberius donned the mask of the reluctant public servant — and botched the performance. Rather than tactful, he came across to the senators as obdurate and obstructive. He declared that he was too old for the responsibilities of the Principate, said he did not want the job, and asked if he could just take one part of the government for himself. The Senate was confused, not knowing how to read his behavior. Finally, one senator asked pointedly, „Sire, for how long will you allow the State to be without a head?“ Tiberius relented and accepted the powers voted to him, although he refused the title „Augustus.“ [[12]]

In fact, that first meeting between the Senate and the new emperor established a blueprint for their later interaction. Throughout his reign, Tiberius was to baffle, befuddle, and frighten the Senators. He seems to have hoped that they would act on his implicit desires rather than on his explicit requests. Again, this behavior may have been an attempt to imitate Augustus’s careful and tactful use of auctoritas, but, if so, it backfired and became a pathetic charade. Tiberius’s opinion of the revered body as it struggled with his oblique approach to rule was not high: „Men fit to be slaves.“ [[13]]

There was trouble not only at Rome, however. The legions posted in Pannonia and in Germany, the most powerful concentration of troops in the empire, took the opportunity afforded by Augustus’s death to voice their complaints about the terms and conditions of their service. Matters escalated into an all-out mutiny that was only repressed by the direct intervention of Tiberius’s sons, Germanicus and Drusus. There was bloodshed at both locations, but in Germanicus’s sector, Germany, there was particularly chaotic disorder and frightful scenes of mayhem. [[14]]

Despite his difficult relationship with the Senate and the Rhine mutinies, Tiberius’s first years were generally good. He stayed true to Augustus’s plans for the succession and clearly favored his adopted son Germanicus over his natural son, Drusus. (Agrippa Postumus, also adopted by Augustus in A.D. 4, had suffered demotion and exile in A.D. 6-7, and upon Augustus’s death he was murdered; responsibility for the crime remains obscure.) On Tiberius’s request, Germanicus was granted proconsular power and assumed command in the prime military zone of Germany, where he suppressed the mutiny there and led the formerly restless legions on campaigns against Germanic tribes in A.D. 14-16. After being recalled from Germany, Germanicus celebrated a triumph in Rome in A.D. 17. In the same year, he was granted imperium maius over the East and, in A.D. 18, after being consul with Tiberius as his colleague , he was sent East, just as Tiberius himself had been almost four decades earlier. Unfortunately for Tiberius, Germanicus died there in A.D. 19 and, on his deathbed, accused the governor of Syria, Cn. Calpurnius Piso, of murdering him. Piso was a long-time friend of Tiberius and his appointee to the Syrian governorship, so suspicion for Germanicus’s death ultimately came to rest at the palace door. When Germanicus’s widow, Agrippina (the Elder), returned to Italy carrying her popular husband’s ashes, she publicly declared Piso guilty of murder and hinted at the involvement of more hidden agents. Piso was put on trial in the Senate, where he expected some help from his friend, Tiberius. Instead, Tiberius sat statue-like and let the proceedings take their course. In Tacitus’s account, Piso realized his peril and threatened to make public certain documents that would embarrass the emperor. The ploy failed and Piso committed suicide; the documents were never made public. Recently, a remarkable inscription has been found in Spain, containing the text of the „Senatorial Decree concerning Cn. Piso, Senior.“ It largely corroborates Tacitus’s account, including Germanicus’s death-bed accusation of Piso. But naturally, in this „official“ account, there is no mention of Tiberius’s alleged involvement in Germanicus‘ death. [[15]]

With Germanicus dead, Tiberius began elevating his own son Drusus to replace him as the imperial successor. Relations with Germanicus’s family were strained, but they were to reach a breaking point when Tiberius allowed a trusted advisor to get too close and gain a tremendous influence over him. That advisor was the Praetorian Prefect, L. Aelius Sejanus, who would derail Tiberius’s plans for the succession and drive the emperor farther into isolation, depression, and paranoia.

Sejanus (A.D. 23-31)

Sejanus hailed from Volsinii in Etruria. He and his father shared the Praetorian Prefecture until A.D. 15 when the father, L. Seius Strabo, was promoted to be Prefect of Egypt, the pinnacle of an equestrian career under the Principate. Sejanus, now sole Prefect of the Guard, enjoyed powerful connections to senatorial houses and had been a companion to Gaius Caesar on his mission to the East, 1 B.C. – A.D. 4. Through a combination of energetic efficiency, fawning sycophancy, and outward displays of loyalty, he gained the position of Tiberius’s closest friend and advisor. One development that favored Sejanus was the concentration of all nine cohorts of Praetorian Guardsmen into a single camp at Rome. Augustus had billeted these troops discretely in small towns around Rome, but now Tiberius — undoubtedly with Sejanus’s encouragement, perhaps even at his suggestion — brought them into the city, probably in A.D. 17 or 18. Sejanus, therefore, commanded some 9,000 troops within the city limits. As Sejanus’s public profile became more and more pronounced, his statues were erected in public places, and Tiberius openly praised him as „the partner of my labors.“ But Sejanus had his own ideas. [[16]]

According to Tacitus, Sejanus’s first subversive act was the seduction of Tiberius’s daughter-in-law, Livilla, at the time married to Drusus, Tiberius’s son. Drusus, it seems, resented Sejanus’s influence over his father so the Prefect, in conjunction with Livilla, poisoned him in A.D. 23. [[17]] There followed a series of attacks on Agrippina’s friends, mostly played out in the courts in the guise of charges of treason (maiestas) but, in Tacitus’s account, actually the work of Sejanus. [[18]]

Then, in A.D. 25, Sejanus asked Tiberius for permission to marry Livilla, Drusus’s widow. Tiberius refused. This setback for Sejanus was offset the following year, when the ageing emperor withdrew from Rome to live on Capri; he was never to return to the city. Tiberius was most probably encouraged in his decision to retire by Sejanus, who now became the chief vehicle of access to the emperor. With Tiberius absent, Sejanus vented his full fury against Agrippina’s family, whose demise he had been plotting for some time. In rapid succession Agrippina and her eldest son, Nero Caesar, and eventually also Drusus Caesar, who had been involved in his brother’s downfall, were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. By A.D. 31 Sejanus had reached the pinnacle of his power and was effectively emperor himself. The sources paint a grimly comic picture of senators lining up to pay respects to a man they considered their social inferior. [[19]]

What exactly Sejanus was aiming at remains a matter of intense debate. [[20]]The Prefect’s attacks against Agrippina and his proposal to marry Drusus’s widow, Livilla, suggest that he was attempting to follow the precedent of Agrippa, that is, an outsider who became the emperor’s successor through a combination of overt loyalty, necessity, and a family alliance forged by marriage. Tiberius, perhaps sensitive to this ambition, rejected Sejanus’s initial proposal to marry Livilla in A.D. 25, but later put it about that he had withdrawn his objections so that, in A.D. 30., Sejanus was betrothed to Livilla’s daughter (Tiberius‘ granddaughter). The Prefect’s family connection to the Imperial house was now imminent. In A.D. 31 Sejanus held the consulship with the emperor as his colleague, an honor Tiberius reserved only for heirs to the throne. Further, when Sejanus surrendered the consulship early in the year, he was granted a share of the emperor’s proconsular power. When he was summoned to a meeting of the Senate on 18 October in that year he probably expected to receive a share of the tribunician power; with that he would, after all, have become Tiberius’s Agrippa. [[21]]

But in a shocking and unexpected turn of events, the letter sent by Tiberius from Capri initially praised Sejanus extensively, and then suddenly denounced him as a traitor and demanded his arrest. Chaos ensued. Senators long allied with Sejanus headed for the exits, the others were confused — was this a test of their loyalty? what did the emperor want them to do? — but the Praetorian Guard, the very troops formerly under Sejanus’s command but recently and secretly transferred to the command of Q. Sutorius Macro, arrested Sejanus, conveyed him to prison, and shortly afterwards executed him summarily. A witch-hunt followed. Sejanus’s family was arrested and executed; Livilla perished; followers and friends of Sejanus were denounced and imprisoned, or tried and executed; some committed suicide. All around the city, grim scenes were played out, and as late as A.D. 33 a general massacre of all those still in custody took place. [[22]]

Tiberius himself later claimed that he turned on Sejanus because he had been alerted to Sejanus’s plot against Germanicus’s family. This explanation has been rejected by most ancient and modern authorities, since Sejanus’s demise did nothing to alleviate that family’s troubles: Agrippina remained under house arrest, Drusus was still housed in the Palatine’s basement, and both died violently within three years of the Prefect’s fall. Tiberius is also said to have discovered Sejanus’s part in his own son’s death in A.D. 23; the source of this information, however, is suspect (see n. [[23]]). Possibly, in the highly charged atmosphere surrounding Sejanus’s fall, the news acted as a catalyst, but its truth cannot be verified. Whatever the precise reasons, Sejanus’s career and demise, and that of those around him, was an object lesson in the dangers of imperial politics. To achieve power under the emperors, the ambitious needed to get close to the source, but getting too close could lead to catastrophe, for both the aspirant and any who rode his coattails. [[23]]

The Last Years (A.D. 31-37)

The Sejanus affair appears to have greatly depressed Tiberius. A close friend and confidant had betrayed him; whom could he trust anymore? His withdrawal from public life seemed more complete in the last years. Letters kept him in touch with Rome, but it was the machinery of the Augustan administration that kept the empire running smoothly. Tiberius, if we believe our sources, spent much of his time indulging his perversities on Capri. He also became all but paranoid in his dealings with others and spent long hours brooding over the death of his son, Drusus, which had now been revealed to him as the work of his „friend“ Sejanus; all who were implicated, he had executed in barbaric fashion. As a result, no measures were taken for the succession, beyond vague indications of favor to his nephew Gaius (Caligula) and his grandson Tiberius Gemellus.[[24]]

Tiberius died quietly in a villa at Misenum on 16 March A.D. 37. He was 78 years old. There are some hints in the sources of the hand of Caligula in the deed, but such innuendo can be expected at the death of an emperor, especially when his successor proved so depraved. The level of unpopularity Tiberius had achieved by the time of his death with both the upper and lower classes is revealed by these facts: the Senate refused to vote him divine honors, and mobs filled the streets yelling „To the Tiber with Tiberius!“ (in reference to a method of disposal reserved for the corpses of criminals). [[25]]

Tiberius and the Empire

Three main aspects of Tiberius’s impact on the empire deserve special attention: his relative military inertia; his modesty in dealing with offers of divine honors and his fair treatment of provincials; and his use of the Law of Treason (maiestas).

At the meeting of the Senate in September A.D. 14 when Augustus’s will was read, another document was produced. It was a sort of posthumous „State of the Empire“ address that listed all the resources, army postings, etc. of the state. Part of the document urged future rulers to leave things as they were, and not to expand the empire further. This so-called „Testament of Augustus“ appears to be the basic reason why Tiberius did not expand the empire, though the authenticity of the „Testament“ itself has divided scholars. Nevertheless, throughout his reign, Tiberius embarked on no major wars of conquest, although he did order punitive campaigns against the Germans across the Rhine in A.D. 14-16; the suppression of a Gallic national revolt under Julius Sacrovir in A.D. 21-22; and the suppression of a persistent guerilla war in North Africa under Tacfarinas in A.D. 17-24. Tiberius seemed adept at choosing provincial governors, with some notable exceptions, and his diplomatic management of potentially disruptive instabilities in Armenia was exemplary — no Roman intervention in force was required. [[26]]

In general, Tiberius dealt fairly and well with the provincials. The emperor’s absence from Rome hardly affected the majority of the empire’s population, for whom the emperor was already a shadowy and distant figure. His generally sound choices of provincial governors have already been noted. When the provincials overstepped themselves and offered Tiberius divine honors, or other tributes that struck him as excessive, he declined to accept. Tacitus and Suetonius infer hypocrisy, but there is no reason to suspect that the lugubrious emperor was not acting in good faith in abiding by Augustus’s precedent, which was always a paramount concern for him. [[27]]

One area of administration where Tiberius did diverge from Augustan practice was his increasingly frequent invocation of the treason law (maiestas) to attack his enemies. Since his working relationship with the Senators was not a good one, repression was a convenient method in dealing with them. This legislation was one of Sejanus’s chief tools, but Tiberius himself used it liberally. Dozens of Senators and equites are on record as having fallen to it. It was a precedent followed in later years by emperors more tyrannical still than Tiberius had ever been. [[28]]

Conclusion

It is all but inevitable that any historical assessment of Tiberius will quickly devolve into a historiographical assessment of Tacitus. So masterful is Tacitus’s portrayal of his subject, and so influential has it been ever since, that in all modern treatments of Tiberius, in attempting to get at the man, must address the issue of Tacitus’s historiographical methods, his sources, and his rhetoric. The subject is too vast to address here, but some points are salient. Tacitus’s methods, especially his use of innuendo and inference to convey notions that are essentially editorial glosses, makes taking his portrayal of Tiberius at face value inadvisable. Further, his belief in the immutable character of people — that one’s character is innate at birth and cannot be changed, although it can be disguised — prevents him from investigating the possibility that Tiberius evolved and developed over his lifetime and during his reign. Instead, Tacitus’s portrayal is one of peeling back layers of dissimulation to reach the „real“ Tiberius lurking underneath. [[29]]

Overall, Tiberius’s reign can be said to show the boons and banes of rule by one man, especially a man as dark, awkward, and isolated as Tiberius. For the people of the provinces, it was a peaceful and well-ordered time. Governors behaved themselves, and there were no destructive or expensive wars. In the domestic sphere, however, the concentration of power in one person made all the greater the threat of misbehavior by ambitious satellites like Sejanus or foolish friends like Piso. Furthermore, if the emperor wished to remain aloof from the mechanics of power, he could do so. Administrators, who depended on him for their directions, could operate without his immediate supervision, but their dealings with a man like Sejanus could lead to disaster if that man fell from grace. As a result, although he was not a tyrant himself, Tiberius’s reign sporadically descended into tyranny of the worst sort. In the right climate of paranoia and suspicion, widespread denunciation led to the deaths of dozens of Senators and equestrians, as well as numerous members of the imperial house. In this sense, the reign of Tiberius decisively ended the Augustan illusion of „the Republic Restored“ and shone some light into the future of the Principate, revealing that which was both promising and terrifying.

Bibliography

Listed below are the main works on Tiberius’s life and reign, mostly in English; the bibliographies of each entry can be checked for more detailed studies of various aspects of his reign and career. Also included below are works, not directly related to Tiberius, but which address broader issues raised in the biography above.

Balsdon, J. P. V. D. „The Principates of Tiberius and Gaius.“ Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 2.2 (1975): 86-94.

Birch, R. A. „The Settlement of 26 June, A.D. 4 and its Aftermath.“ Classical Quarterly 31 (1981): 443-56.

Bird, H. W. „L. Aelius Sejanus and His Political Influence.“ Latomus 28 (1969): 61-98.

Boddington, A. „Sejanus: Whose Conspiracy?“ American Journal of Philology 84 (1963): 1-16.

Bonamente, G. Germanico: La persona, la personalità, il personaggio. Rome, 1987.

Bowersock, G. „Augustus and the East: The Problem of the Succession,“ in F. Millar and E. Segal, eds, Caesar Augustus: Seven Aspects (Oxford, 1984), 169-88.

Braund, D. Augustus to Nero: A Sourcebook on Roman History, 31 BC – A.D. 68. London, 1985.

Charlesworth, M. P. „Tiberius and the Death of Augustus.“ American Journal of Philology 44 (1923): 145-157.

Durry, M. Les cohortes prétoriennes. Paris, 1938.

Eck, W. „Das s.c. de Cn. Pisone patre und seine Publikation in der Baetica.“ Cahiers du Centre Glotz 4 (1993): 189-208.

________, A. Caballos, and F. Fernandez. Das Senatus Consultum des Cn. Pisone Patre. Munich, 1996.

Ehrenberg, V. and A. H. M. Jones, eds. Documents Illustrating the Reigns of Augustus and Tiberius. Oxford, 1970.

Grant, M. Aspects of the Principate of Tiberius. New York, 1950.

________. The Roman Emperors. A Biographical Guide to the Rulers of Rome, 31 BC-A.D. 476 (New York, 1985), 16-24.

Gruen, E. S. „The Imperial Policy of Augustus.“ In Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and his Principate, edited by K. Raaflaub and M. Toher, 395-416. Berkeley, 1990.

Heinrichs, A. D. Sejan und das Schicksal Roms in den Annalen des Tacitus. Marburg, 1976.

Hennig, D. L. Aelius Seianus. Untersuchungen zur Regierung des Tiberius. Munich, 1975.

Levick, B. „Tiberius‘ Retirement to Rhodes in 6 BC.“ Latomus 25 (1972): 779-813.

________. „Julians and Claudians.“ Greece and Rome 22 (1975): 29-38.

________. Tiberius the Politician. London, 1976.

Marsh, F. B. The Reign of Tiberius. Oxford, 1931.

Martin, R. H. „Tacitus and the Death of Augustus.“ Classical Quarterly 5 (1955): 123-28.

Nicols, J. „Antonia and Sejanus.“ Historia 24 (1975): 48-58.

Ober, J. „Tiberius and the Political Testament of Augustus.“ Historia 31 (1982): 306-28.

Pelling, C. „Tacitus and Germanicus.“ In Tacitus and the Tacitean Tradition, edited by T. J. Luce and A. J. Woodman, 59-85. New Jersey, 1993.

Rapke, I. T. „Tiberius, Piso and Germanicus.“ Acta Classica 25 (1982): 61-69.

Rogers, R. S. „The Conspiracy of Agrippina.“ Transactions of the American Philological Association 62 (1931): 141-68.

________. Criminal Trials and Criminal Legislation under Tiberius. Middletown, 1935.

________ Studies in the Reign of Tiberius. Baltimore, 1943.

Ross, D. C. „The Tacitean Germanicus.“ Yale Classical Studies 23 (1973): 209-27.

Sattler, P. „Julia und Tiberius: Beiträge zur römischen Innenpolitik zwischen den Jahren 12 vor und 2 nach Chr.“ In Augustus, edited by W. Schmitthenner, 486-530. Darmstadt, 1969.

Seager, R. Tiberius. London, 1972.

Sealey, R. „The Political Attachments of L. Aelius Sejanus.“ Phoenix 15 (1961): 97-114.

Sherk, R. K. The Roman Empire: Augustus to Hadrian.Cambridge, 1988.

Shotter. D. C. A. „Tacitus, Tiberius and Germanicus.“ Historia 17 (1968): 194-214.

________. „Julians, Claudians and the Accession of Tiberius.“ Latomus 30 (1971): 1117-23.

________. „The Fall of Sejanus — Two Problems.“ Classical Philology 69 (1974): 42-46.

________. „Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso, Legate of Syria.“ Historia 23 (1974): 229-45.

________. Tiberius Caesar. London, 1992.

Sinclair, P. „Tacitus‘ Presentation of Livia Julia, wife of Tiberius‘ son Drusus.“ American Journal of Philology 111 (1990): 238-56.

Smith, C. E. Tiberius and the Roman Empire. Oxford, 1942.

Stewart, Z. „Sejanus, Gaetulicus and Seneca.“ American Journal of Philology 74 (1953): 70-85.

Sumner, G. V. „Germanicus and Drusus Caesar.“ Latomus 26 (1967): 413-35.

________. „The Family Connections of L. Aelius Sejanus.“ Phoenix 19 (1965): 134-45.

Syme, R. „Sejanus on the Aventine.“ Hermes 84 (1956): 257-66.

Tuplin, C. J. „The False Drusus of A.D. 31 and the Fall of Sejanus.“ Latomus 46 (1987): 781-805.

Wellesley, K. „The Dies Imperii of Tiberius.“ Journal of Roman Studies 57 (1967): 23-30.

NOTES

[[1]] The main ancient literary sources for the reign of Tiberius are: Tac. Ann. 1-6; Dio 57-59; Suetonius, Tiberius and Gaius; Josephus BJ 2.204-17 and AJ 18.181-87, 205-25; Velleius Paterculus, esp. 2.94-131. References to Tiberius are also found in Pliny the Elder, Philo, Seneca and others. Coins and inscriptions are, as always, helpful and are readily accessible in Ehrenberg and Jones, Documents Illustrating (in original languages) and in collections such as those of Braund and Sherk (in English translation).

[[2]] Family background and connections, birth, and adoption: Suet. Tib. 1-5.

[[3]] First public appearances: Suet. Tib. 6.4. Toga virilis: Suet. Tib. 7.1. Quaestor and age privileges: Dio 53.28.3-4; Vell. 2.94.1. Commands, esp. in the east: Dio 54.8.1-2, 9.4-5; RG 27.2. First consulship: Dio 54.10.4, 54.25.1; governorship in Gaul: Dio 54.22.1; Suet. Tib. 9.1. Marriage to Vipsania: Suet. Tib. 7.2.

[[4]] See, for instance, the theories of Seager, Tiberius, 18-38 (regency); Levick, „Tiberius’s Retirement to Rhodes“ and ead., Tiberius the Politician, 19-67 (joint succession); see also, Corbett, „Succession Policy“ (Tiberius was always to succeed from 12 B.C. onward).

[[5]] Tiberius/Vipsania: Suet. Tib. 7.2-3. Military commissions and honors: Dio 54.29.1, Suet. Tib. 9.2. Second consulship: Dio 55.8.1. Tribunician power: Dio 55.9.4, Suet. Tib. 9.3.

[[6]] The following reasons are posited in the literary sources, which often present several rumored possibilities in conjunction: he wanted a rest from work (Suet. Tib. 10.2; Vell. 2.99.1-2); he hated his wife Julia and wanted to be away from her (Dio. 55.9.7; Suet. Tib. 10.1, 11.4; Tac. Ann. 1.43); he wished to avoid a possible confrontation with Gaius and Lucius Caesar, with whom he did not get along (Dio 55.9.1-6; Suet. Tib. 10.1, 11.5); he wished to enhance his prestige by being absent from Rome (Suet. Tib. 10.1). According to Suetonius, Tiberius himself initially claimed that he was weary and wanted a rest, but later changed his story and said he did not want a confrontation with Gaius and Lucius (Suet. Tib. 10.2, 11.5). For a more Machiavellian interpretation of the reasons behind the retirement, see Levick, „Tiberius’s Retirement to Rhodes“ and Tib. the Pol., 31-46; Levick postulates the rise of a „Julian“ party within the imperial house that drove Tiberius underground. For a further analysis of this party’s activities, see her „Julians and Claudians.“ The reconstruction is a clever one, although largely without ancient attestation. For a similarly „political“ interpretation of the relationship between Tiberius and Julia, see also, Sattler, „Tiberius und Julia.“ A recent theory, that Tiberius was on an undercover mission to the East at Augustus’s behest, is imaginative but unconvincing; see P. Southern, Augustus (London, 1998), 173-76

[[7]] Death of Drusus: Dio 55.1-2. The existence of some worry concerning a possible conspiracy is borne out by the rumors of Tiberius’s dealings with military commanders while on Rhodes, thereby exciting his stepfather’s suspicions, see Suet. Tib. 12.3; Bowersock, „Augustus and the East.“ Another prince held on an island, Agrippa Postumus, later proved the point: a slave claiming to be the prince garnered some support until he was captured and executed, see Tac. Ann. 2.39-40; Suet. Tib. 25.

[[8]] Tiberius stuck on Rhodes: Suet. Tib. 11.4 – 13.2. The precariousness of Tiberius’s position is reflected in the open destruction of his statues at Nemausus (Suet. Tib. 13.1). If this anecdote is true, it reflects the low level of Tiberius’s public image at this time.

[[9]] Deaths of Gaius and Lucius Caesar: Dio 55.10a.6-9; RG 14.1; Suet. Aug. 65.1, Tib. 15.2; Tac. Ann. 1.3. Recall of Tiberius and quiet existence at Rome: Suet. Tib. 13.2, 15.1

[[10]] Citation from the will: Suet. Tib.23; RG 14.1. Adoptions of A.D. 4: Dio 55.13.1a-2; Suet. Tib. 15.2-16.1; Tac. Ann. 1.3; Vell. 2.103.2-3; see also Birch, „The Settlement of 26 June, A.D. 4.“ Augustus’s cold attitude to Tiberius is perhaps also echoed in the rather distant way he refers to him in the RG, „Tiberius Nero, who was at that time my stepson“ (RG 27.2, 30.1: … per Ti. Neronem, qui tum mihi privignus erat … ). Tiberius, in fact, is never referred to as Augustus’s son in the RG, despite its composition some nine years after Tiberius’s adoption. In contrast, Gaius and Lucius Caesar are always termed „my sons“ by Augustus (RG 14, 20.3, 22, 27.2). In addition, Augustus added the phrase „This I do for reasons of State“ to the official formula when adopting Tiberius. The statement is ambiguous, however, and can be read either as a clear statement of Tiberius’s qualities and suitability for the Principate or as an indication of Augustus’s lack of affection for him (Suet. Tib. 23). It is noteworthy that Suetonius (Tib. 21) provides ample testimony from Augustus’s own correspondence of the latter’s affection for Tiberius.

[[11]] Suet. Tib. 21.1; Vell. 2.121.1.

[[12]] Tiberius’s accession: Tac. Ann. 1.11-14; Suet. Tib. 22-26; Dio 57.2. See also the modern commentaries in Seager, Tiberius, 48-57; Levick, Tib. the Pol., 68-81; Marsh, Reign, 45-69.

[[13]] Quote at Tac. Ann. 3.65 (O homines ad servitutem paratos). A good example of his perturbing correspondence is the opening of the letter of A.D. 32, cited by Suetonius (Tib. 67.1) and Tacitus (Ann. 6.6): „If I know what to write to you, gentlemen, or how I should write it, or, indeed, what I should not write at this time, may the gods ruin me more horribly than I feel myself dying everyday.“ The quote is also indicative of Tiberius’s dark mental state.

[[14]] Pannonia: Tac. Ann. 1.16-30; Dio 57.4. Germany: Tac. Ann. 1.31-48; Dio 57.5-6.1.

[[15]] Demotion, exile, and murder of Agrippa Postumus: Dio 55.32.1-2; Suet. Aug. 65.1 (demotion and exile), Tac. Ann.1.6; Suet. Tib. 22; Dio 57.3.5-6 (murder). Elevation of Germanicus: proconsular power: Tac. Ann. 1.14; campaigns in Germany: Tac. Ann. 1.31-51, 55-71, 2.5-26; consulship and imperium maius: Tac. Ann. 2.43, 53, Ehrenberg and Jones, Documents, p. 41. Tiberius’s consulship with Germanicus in A.D. 18 is particularly instructive, since he only held the office three times after his accession, all with the favored heirs at the time (Drusus in A.D. 21 and Sejanus in A.D. 31). Death of Germanicus and aftermath: Tac. Ann. 2.43, 53-3.18 (Dio and Suetonius provide only summary accounts; the former survives only in fragments at this point). Senatorial decree on Piso: W. Eck et al., Senatus Consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre. (The death of Germanicus and Tiberius’s real or imagined place in it has generated intense debate in modern scholarship, see the DIR’s Germanicus.)

[[16]] On Sejanus’s background, see Bird „Sejanus and His Political Influence“; Levick, Tib. the Pol., 158-60; Sumner, „Family Connections.“ Sejanus as sole Prefect/moving the guards into Rome: Tac. Ann. 4.2; Dio 57.19.6, see also Durry, Cohortes prétoriennes, 43-63. Partner of my labors: Tac. Ann. 4.2. A good example of Sejanus’s overt loyalty to Tiberius is the incident in Spelunca (Sperlonga) in A.D. 26. When a rockfall buried the imperial party as it dined in a natural cave, Sejanus covered Tiberius’s body with his own and remained in that position until the rescuers reached them, see Tac. Ann. 4.59 (Suet. Tib. 39 makes no mention of Sejanus’s role in the incident). Was this a genuine act of loyalty, or an ostentatious display designed to impress the Emperor?

[[17]] Tac. Ann. 4.3-8; Suet. Tib. 39; Dio 57.22.1. It remains suspicious that no inkling of foul play in Drusus’s death was entertained until eight years later, when Sejanus’s ex-wife, Apicata, „revealed“ the matter in her suicide note, see below note [23]. Quite possibly, Drusus died of natural causes and Sejanus’s involvement is a myth.

[[18]] Sejanus’s attacks on Agrippina’s family friends: see C. Silius and Sosia Galla in A.D. 24 (Tac. Ann. 4.18-20 ), Claudia Pulchra in A.D. 26 (Tac. Ann. 4.52), and T. Sabinus in A.D. 28 (Tac. Ann. 4.68-70; Dio 58.1.1b-3). There is some doubt, however, as to how many of the cases Tacitus ascribes to him were actually the work of Sejanus, see Levick, Tib. the Pol., 163-64. The cases just listed, however, seem securely Sejanian.

[[19]] Marriage proposal: Tac. Ann. 4.39-40, see also Seager, Tiberius, 195-96; Levick, Tib. the Pol. 164-65. Tiberius’s withdrawal to Capri: Tac. Ann. 4.41, 57; Suet. Tib. 39-41; Dio 58.1.1. Downfall of Nero Caesar and Agrippina in A.D. 29: Tac. Ann. 4.59-5.4 Suet. Tib. 53-54; ; of Drusus Caesar in A.D. 30: Tac. Ann. 6.23; Suet. Tib. 53.2, Gaius 7; Dio 58.3.8. Sejanus as de facto emperor: Dio 58.5.1. Senators courting Sejanus: Dio 58.2.7-8.

[[20]] The ancient sources are vague on Sejanus’s goals: Tacitus (Ann. 4.1, 3) merely states that he wanted regnum; Dio (57.22.4b) says he aimed at power; Suetonius (Tib. 65.1) claims the prefect was a revolutionary; and Josephus (AJ 18.181) comments that Sejanus led a conspiracy, but omits mention of its purpose. Modern opinion is divided. Marsh (Reign, 166) and Seager (Tiberius, 180-81) see Sejanus as aiming at regency over Caligula and Gemellus; Smith (Tiberius and Empire, 152-53) sees Sejanus as a naive innocent who rose too high for his own boots; Rogers („Conspiracy‘) argues that Agrippina was plotting against Tiberius and Sejanus was merely defending him. The notion that Sejanus was attempting to topple Tiberius (Suet. Tib. 48.2, 65.1) has been rightly questioned by modern scholars (e.g., Marsh, Reign, 204-10). Sejanus was an underling whose career was tied to Tiberius. He never reached a point where he was equal, never mind superior to the emperor, and so he could not have replaced him successfully. The best explanation for Sejanus’s goals is that put forward by Levick (Tib. the Pol., 170-71), since taken up by Shotter (Tiberius Caesar, 42-44), that Sejanus aimed at being to Tiberius what Agrippa had been to Augustus: the trusted servant who would succeed to the throne. This explains Sejanus’s attacks on Tiberius’s successors (Drurus and the family of Germanicus) and is echoed in two comments in the sources: in Tacitus (Ann. 4.3) when he comments that a house full of Caesars was an obstacle to Sejanus’s plans, and in Dio (57.22.4b) when he expressly says that Sejanus wanted to succeed Tiberius.

[[21]] Betrothal to Livilla: Dio 58.3.9; Suet. Tib. 65.1; Tac. Ann. 5.6, 6.8. Consulship: Suet. Tib. 65.1, Ehrenberg and Jones, Documents, p. 32 and nos. 50a, 358a. Imperium pronconsulare: Dio 58.7.4. The comments about Sejanus in Velleius Paterculus, whose work was published in A.D. 30 or early in 31, show the extent of Sejanus’s power: Velleius praises Sejanus at length, calling him the „helper“ of Tiberius (Vell. 2.127-28; see also Tac. Ann. 4.7). Dio (58.4.3-4) reports also that Sejanus was consul designate for A.D. 31 and that sacrifices were offered to his image along with Tiberius’s.

[[22]] Fall of Sejanus: Dio (58.5.5 – 11.5) provides the only narrative account, but see also Suet. Tib. 65. Witch-hunt: Tac. Ann. 5.8, 11. 6.14, 19, 47; Suet. Tib. 61; Stewart, „Sejanus, Gaetulicus, and Seneca.“

[[23]] Tiberius’s claim for ruining Sejanus: Suet. Tib. 61. Letter from Apicata, Sejanus’s ex-wife: Tac. Ann. 4.10-11; Dio 58.11.6. For modern discussions of the problem of the Prefect’s fall, see Levick, Tib. the Pol., 173-74; Marsh, Reign 192-99; Nicols, „Antonia and Sejanus“; Shotter, „Fall of Sejanus“; Smith, Tiberius, 145-52; Seager, Tiberius, 214-23.

[[24]] Perversities and paranoia: Suet. Tib. 43-44 (perversities) 63-64, 66-67 (paranoia). Brooding over Drusus: Suet. Tib. 62.1-2, Tac. Ann. 6.1, Dio 58.11.6-7. Ignoring the succession: see the DIR’s Gaius (Caligula).

[[25]] Death of Tiberius: Tac. Ann. 6.50; Dio 58.28.1-4; Suet. Tib. 73, Gaius 12.2-3; Jos. AJ 18.225. Posthumous insults: Suet. Tib. 75.

[[26]] „Testament of Augustus“: Tac. Ann. 1.11, see also Gruen, „Imperial Policy of Augustus“; Ober, „Tiberius and the Political Testament.“ Lack of conquest: Suet. Tib. 37.4. German campaigns of A.D. 16-17: Tac. Ann. 1.49-52, 55-71, 2.5-26; Sacrovir: Tac. Ann. 3.40-47; Tacfarinas: Tac. Ann. 2.52, 3.20-21, 72-74, 4.23-26. Most of Tiberius’s choices for governorships were successes; a notable exception is Piso in Syria when Germanicus was there.

[[27]] Respect for Augustus’s precedents: Tac. Ann. 1.77, 4.37; Dio 57.7-10. Modesty: Suet. Tib. 26-27, see also Tac. Ann. 6.51. Note especially the incident in A.D. 26 when Tiberius rejected petitions from several Asian communities to erect temples to him, Tac. Ann. 4.55-56. For a summary of Tiberius’s dealings with excessive honors and the provincials, see the relevant chapters in Levick, Tib. the Pol., Marsh, Reign, and Seager, Tiberius. Note also, Shotter, Tiberius Caesar, 51-58.

[[28]] Among the most shocking invocations of the law was the case in A.D. 24 of the Vibii Sereni, father and son, who found themselves in the roles of defendant and prosecutor respectively (Tac. Ann. 4,28-30). Tacitus (Ann. 4.32-33), in fact, apologizes for the monotony of his narrative in documenting these „show trials“ in such detail. See Levick, Tib. the Pol., 180-200; Marsh, Reign, 289-95; Chilton, „Roman Law of Treason“; Rogers, Criminal Trials.

[[29]] This is particularly evident in Tacitus’s scathing „obituary“ of Tiberius at Ann. 6.51.

Copyright © 1997, Garrett G. Fagan. This file may be copied on the condition that the entire contents, including the header and this copyright notice, remain intact.

Comments to: Garrett G. Fagan

Updated: 22 December 2001

Unveränd. Zweitpubl. v. Garrett G. Fagan: Tiberius (A.D. 14-37), in: De Imperatoribus Romanis. An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Rulers [22.12.2001], http://www.roman-emperors.org/tiberius.htm

DE IMPERATORIBUS ROMANIS

An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Rulers

DIR Atlas

Augustus (31 B.C. – 14 A.D.)

[Additional entry on this emperor’s life is available in DIR Archives]

Garrett G. Fagan

Pennsylvania State University

Abb.: http://www.roman-emperors.org/Augustu1.jpg

Introduction

Augustus is arguably the single most important figure in Roman history. In the course of his long and spectacular career, he put an end to the advancing decay of the Republic and established a new basis for Roman government that was to stand for three centuries. This system, termed the „Principate,“ was far from flawless, but it provided the Roman Empire with a series of rulers who presided over the longest period of unity, peace, and prosperity that Western Europe, the Middle East and the North African seaboard have known in their entire recorded history. Even if the rulers themselves on occasion left much to be desired, the scale of Augustus’s achievement in establishing the system cannot be overstated. Aside from the immense importance of Augustus’s reign from the broad historical perspective, he himself is an intriguing figure: at once tolerant and implacable, ruthless and forgiving, brazen and tactful. Clearly a man of many facets, he underwent three major political reinventions in his lifetime and negotiated the stormy and dangerous seas of the last phase of the Roman Revolution with skill and foresight. With Augustus established in power and with the Principate firmly rooted, the internal machinations of the imperial household provide a fascinating glimpse into the one issue that painted this otherwise gifted organizer and politician into a corner from which he could find no easy exit: the problem of the succession. [[1]]

The Background

To understand Augustus, it is necessary to appreciate briefly the nature of the Roman Revolution and, in particular, the place of Julius Caesar within it. The Roman Republic had no written constitution but was, rather, a system of agreed-upon procedures crystallized by tradition (the mos maiorum, „the way of our ancestors“). Administration was carried out by (mostly) annually elected officials, answerable to the senate (a senior council, but with no legislative powers) and the people (who, when constituted into voting assemblies, were the sovereign body of the state). Precedent prescribed procedure and consensus set the parameters for acceptable behavior. Near the end of the second century BC, however, the system started to break down. Politicians began to push at the boundaries of acceptable behavior, and in so doing set new and perilous precedents. Violence also entered the arena of domestic politics. (This long process of disintegration, completed a century later by Augustus, has been termed by modern scholars the „Roman Revolution.“) By the time of Caesar’s dominance in 49-44 BC the Republic had not been functioning effectively for at least a dozen years, some would argue for longer. Politics had come to be dominated by violence and intimidation; scores were settled with clubs and daggers rather than with speeches and persuasion. Powerful generals at the head of politicized armies extorted from the state more and greater power for themselves and their supporters. When „constitutional“ methods proved inadequate, the generals occasionally resorted to open rebellion. Intimidation of the senate through the use of armies camped near Rome or veterans brought to the city to influence the voting assemblies also proved effective and was regularly employed as a political tactic from ca. 100 BC onwards. These generals also used their provincial commands to extract money from the locals as a way of funding their domestic political ambitions. As the conflict in the state wore on, popular assemblies, the only avenue for the passage of binding legislation in the Roman Republic, routinely ended in disorder and rioting. The senatorial aristocracy, riven by internal disputes, proved incapable of dealing effectively with the mounting disorder, yet the alternative, monarchy, was not openly proposed by anyone. When civil war erupted between Pompey and Caesar in 49 BC, few could have been surprised. These two men were the strongest personalities in the state, each in command of significant military forces, and they were mutually antagonistic. [[2]]

Despite vanquishing his opponents in the long series of civil wars 49-45 BC, Caesar did little to address the underlying ills of the Republic. His concerns were first and foremost the defeat in the field of his political opponents. During these years, and following his final victory, he was content to maintain control by a combination of the consulship and the revived, albeit reviled, dictatorship. Extensive and excessive honors of all sorts were also voted to Caesar by a sycophantic senate: he refused none, save attempts to crown him king. Nevertheless, his broad disregard for tradition and precedent, and the general air of arrogance and high-handedness that marked Caesar’s dealings with his peers, made him appear Rome’s king in all but name. To be sure, he passed various items of legislation dealing with immediate problems (for instance, debt relief or the calendar), but he made no serious effort to systematize his position or tackle the issues that had generated the Roman Revolution in the first place. In fact, in the last months of his life he was planning to leave Rome for several years to campaign against the Parthians in the East. That the cabal of nobles who conspired to kill Caesar included disaffected members of his own party constitutes stark testimony as to the effects of Caesar’s tactlessness. On 15 March, 44 BC C. Julius Caesar, dictator for life, was surrounded by the conspirators at a meeting of the senate and cut down with twenty-three stab wounds. He died at the foot of a statue of his great rival, Pompey. The senatorial „Liberators,“ covered in blood and brandishing their daggers, rushed out to accept the gratitude of the liberated. They met with a somewhat different reception.

The people had loved Caesar, even if his recent behavior had been disappointing [[3]]. The Liberators, who were led by L. Cassius Longinus and M. Junius Brutus, held public meetings in the Forum, but the reaction of the people was equivocal at best. The senate, meeting on March 17, vacillated and declared an amnesty for the Liberators (inferring legitimacy for their act of tyrannicide) while ratifying all of Caesar’s acts and decreeing him a public funeral in the Forum (inferring legitimacy for Caesar’s power). It may have seemed a workable compromise, but when Caesar’s mutilated body was displayed to the crowd and the contents of his will were made public–in which some gardens were bequeathed to the public and an individual stipend given to each member of the Roman people–the dam of emotion burst and rioting ensued. The Liberators fled the city. Power seemed firmly in the hands of the pro-Caesar camp and, in particular, in those of M. Antonius (Mark Antony), Caesar’s right-hand man. The dictator’s will, however, had contained something of a political bombshell that was to shake this situation to its foundations. For Caesar named as his chief heir and adopted son one of his three great-nephews, C. Octavius.

Early Life and Adoption

C. Octavius (later Augustus) was born on 23 September, 63 BC, the son of a man from Velitrae who had reached the praetorship before dying unexpectedly when Octavius was four. His father Octavius had earned the hand of Atia, daughter of Caesar’s sister, Julia, and this seemingly remote family link between the young Octavius and Caesar was to play a determinative role in shaping the rest of Octavius’s life. When his grandmother Julia died in 51 BC, Octavius delivered the eulogy at her funeral, which was his first public appearance. [[4]]

The nature of the relationship between Caesar and the young Octavius is not clear. Dio claims (45.1.2) that after Octavius reached maturity (in 48 BC), Caesar took him in and began training him to be his successor. This assertion is clearly more informed by later imperial behavior than by Late Republican practice, and is unlikely in any case, since Caesar was much occupied with the civil wars at this time (49-45 BC). There is no evidence that the two actually met before Octavius was in his mid-teens, but that the dictator noticed Octavius is hardly to be doubted. Suetonius (Aug. 8.1) presents a more likely series of events. In 48 BC the young Octavius was elected to the pontifical college. When Caesar celebrated his multiple triumphs in September 46 BC, Octavius took part in the procession and was accorded military honors. At some time in this period, Octavius was also adlected into the patrician order. He then followed Caesar to Spain when the latter went to fight the Pompeians at Munda (45 BC). He earned the admiration of the dictator for the daring of his journey, which included a shipwreck; he was to show this same daring repeatedly in future months and years. In 44 BC Caesar nominated the magistrates several years in advance (another shunning of tradition on Caesar’s part), and the young man was included as his Master of Horse for 43 or 42 BC. Despite these indications of favor, it is fair to say that in the broad scheme of things Octavius was a non-player and a political nobody in March 44 BC, when his great-uncle was killed.

When he heard of Caesar’s murder, Octavius was in Apollonia in Illyricum, preparing to join Caesar on his Parthian campaign. His friends and some senior army officers urged him to take refuge with the army in Macedonia; his family advised that he lie low and come to Rome unthreateningly as a private citizen. He opted for the latter course of action and arrived in southern Italy, south of Brundisium. Here, he heard more details about Caesar’s death and of his own adoption. His family, now fearful for his life, urged him to renounce the adoption and inheritance in order to secure his personal safety. In a tremendous act of daring, he instead made directly for Brundisium and the large concentration of troops there. [[5]]

Entrance into Politics: April 44-November 43 BC [[6]]

By virtue of his adoption, following Roman custom, Octavius now assumed the name C. Julius Caesar Octavianus (hereafter „Octavian“). To identify himself fully with his adoptive father and to lend his subsequent actions a veneer of legitimacy, he simply called himself „Caesar,“ and is usually so named in ancient sources. [[7]] The name had a tremendous pull and Octavian’s use of it represents his first major political reinvention: from unknown Octavius to Caesar, son of Caesar. Many of the troops at Brundisium joined his cause, and as he moved toward Rome his retinue grew in size, especially from among the ranks of veterans settled by Caesar in Italian colonies. By mid-April, he was nearing Rome. [[8]]

Antony paid no attention, at least officially. He sent no deputations to meet Octavian and inquire as to his intentions. Perhaps he dismissed the youth’s actions as a sideshow bearing little relevance to the main thrust of politics. [[9]] At that time Antony was deeply occupied with several important matters, not the least being to secure powerful provinces for himself while downgrading those of Cassius and Brutus, the leaders of the Liberators. Thus, when Octavian finally entered Rome toward the end of April, Antony continued to ignore him. Octavian kept his cool and arranged a meeting. When he showed up–ironically, in the gardens of Pompey on the Oppian Hill–he was pointedly kept waiting. The ensuing exchange did not go well. [[10]] In subsequent weeks, Antony blocked Octavian’s moves to have his adoption officially recognized and also prevented him from standing for public office. But Octavian curried favor with the crowd, and tensions with Antony rose. [[11]]

Events around Mutina in northern Italy brought matters to a head, both between the Caesarian camp and the Liberators and between Antony and Octavian. Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus had been a supporter of Caesar’s — and one of his assassins. The dictator had appointed him to the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul (roughly the Po Valley region of modern Italy), an appointment confirmed by the senate. The senate had also assigned Antony, consul in 44 BC, the province of Macedonia. Through tribunician legislation in June 44 BC, Antony had his command in Macedonia exchanged for that in proximate and powerful Cisalpine Gaul. Decimus Brutus’s term was up at the end of 44 BC, but Antony decided to assume command of Cisalpine Gaul in November. Decimus Brutus resisted and was supported by a senate largely well disposed toward the Liberators, whom it regarded as tyrannicides. [[12]]

Against this backdrop of looming crisis between the Caesarians and the Liberators, the relationship between Antony and Octavian continued to deteriorate, despite occasional public reconciliations. Antony accused Octavian of plotting against him, while Octavian attempted, through agents, to undermine the loyalty of the army that Antony was bringing to Italy from Macedonia. Antony went to Brundisium to secure his army (things did not go well there for him), at which juncture Octavian showed his daring once more. Despite the risk of being branded a public enemy, he toured the Caesarian colonies of Campania and, relying on old loyalties, raised a private army from among Caesar’s veterans, perhaps 10,000 strong. It was a vivid demonstration of the power of the name „Caesar.“ Antony, meanwhile, returned to Rome and intended to denounce Octavian to the senate when he heard that two of his five legions from Macedonia had defected to Octavian. Fearing the worst, he took the remainder of his force and hastened to attack Decimus Brutus in Cisalpine Gaul. [[13]]

The situation was now highly volatile. Decimus Brutus, backed by the senate, was resisting Antony under arms, and retired to the fortified town of Mutina in Cisalpine Gaul. Antony had four legions, Octavian had five. All the armed parties were mutually antagonistic. The senate, led by Cicero in his last great political action, identified Antony as the greater threat. [[14]] Cicero and Antony were now on opposing sides, following an acrimonious oratorical exchange in the senate that started in September 44 BC. At this crucial juncture, then, Cicero deployed his considerable rhetorical skill to Octavian’s benefit and began to champion his cause as a foil to Antony’s power. As a result, on 1 January, 43 BC Octavian’s essentially illegal command of men under arms was legitimized with a grant of propraetorian power. As such, Octavian continued his preparations to attack Antony, now declared a public enemy, who had begun besieging Decimus Brutus at Mutina. Octavian, now an official representative of the republic, led his force into the region and moved against Antony. [[15]]

In two engagements in April, Antony was bested and fled over the Alps to his political allies in Transalpine Gaul. Both consuls for 43 BC, however, perished in the fighting around Mutina, and Octavian, as the senior commander on the spot, refused to cooperate any further with Decimus Brutus, a murderer of his father. The senators, it appears, hoped that Octavian would now go away. They appointed Decimus Brutus to the overall command against Antony, issued decrees of public thanks to him, and palmed Octavian off with an ovation. When a commission to distribute land to veterans was set up, Octavian was pointedly omitted. Smarting at such insulting treatment, Octavian bided his time and put in requests for a consulship (with Cicero as his colleague) and a triumph. Meanwhile, Antony was preparing to return to Cisalpine Gaul with enormous forces gained from Caesarian commanders in Transalpine Gaul. The situation remained unstable.[[16]]

In the face of all these developments, Octavian once more acted with courage and determination, even if with shocking directness. Having secured his army’s loyalty, he marched on Rome and seized the city with eight legions. Three legions brought from outside Italy to counter him defected. Unsurprisingly, Octavian was elected consul to replace the deceased consuls of 43 BC. He now carried the long-delayed ratification of his adoption, paid out the remainder of Caesar’s legacy, revoked the amnesty for the Liberators, and tried and convicted them en masse and in absentia on a single day. Despite his control of Rome, Octavian’s position was perilous. Antony was massing huge forces in Cisalpine Gaul and, across the Adriatic, Cassius and Brutus had taken the opportunity offered by the enmity between the Caesarian leaders to gain control of most of the eastern empire, it might be noted, with no great regard for either legality or scruple. [[17]]

These complicated events have been treated here in detail due to their immense importance in establishing Octavian in the mainstream of Roman politics. Dismissed by Antony and then by the senate as a bit player, he proved repeatedly capable of deft and resolute action in defence of his interests. On account of his tender years, he lacked the nexus of influential support that most leading Roman politicians, including Antony, found essential to their success and therefore he had to rely more on direct appeals to the mob, his troops, and supporters of Caesar. His actions might not have been always scrupulous or admirable, but Late-Republican politics was a vicious and cutthroat business and few involved adhered solely to principle (the Liberators, for instance, went about the eastern empire seizing provinces and only had their acts ratified post factum by a compliant senate). Octavian had only two reliable tools available to him at this early stage in his career: his name, Caesar, and promises of bounty to the soldiers, and he deployed both with daring and decisiveness when he had to. In the autumn of 43 BC, he was to make his most ambitious move yet.

The Triumvirate I: Early Challenges, 43-36 BC

Shortly after Mutina, Octavian had begun showing signs of seeking a reconciliation with Antony; now, he acted resolutely. On the pretence of preparing his army for campaign, he moved north in November and met with his rival; while Octavian was en route, his consular colleague had secured the repeal of the decrees declaring Antony a public enemy. The two met, with Antony’s supporter, M. Aemilius Lepidus, on an island in a river near Bononia. Two days of difficult negotiation produced an agreement: the three Caesarians were to form a „Board of Three for Organizing the State“ (triumviri rei publicae constituendae) that would run for five years, until 31 December, 38 BC. Unlike the so-called „First Triumvirate“ (comprised of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus), this „Second Triumvirate“ was legally constituted by a tribunician law, the lex Titia, passed on 27 November, 43 BC. The triumvirs also agreed to divide the western provinces of the empire among themselves, with Octavian drawing seemingly minor allocations in Sardinia, Sicily, and Africa while Antony retained Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, and Lepidus got Spain and Gallia Narbonensis. In effect, the Second Triumvirate was a military junta whose decisions were made without reference to the senate or any other traditional organ of the Roman state. [[18]]

The rule of the three got off to an inauspicious start. Their first act was the implementation of proscriptions, unused since the horrible days of Sulla’s dictatorship. Since the property of the proscribed was forfeited, the main motive of the triumvirs in instigating the terror appears to have been financial, as many of their most implacable enemies were not in Rome or Italy at all but with Brutus and Cassius in the East. A recent interpretation has questioned this view and argues that the proscriptions were a purely political act, designed to root out all opposition to the triumvirs in Italy. Our sources preserve, in excruciating detail, dozens of tragic anecdotes about the proscribed as well as the text of the chilling proclamation announcing the proscriptions. Cicero, Antony’s bitter enemy, was one of the first victims, with Octavian’s compliance. The apparent financial reason for the triumvirs‘ need for money was soon to be made clear, when mass veteran settlements took place. Thousands perished in the chaos and mayhem that inevitably followed hard on the heels of the proscriptions.[[19]]

Next, the Liberators had to be dealt with. After a prelude in Africa early in 42 BC, in which a pro-senate governor was ousted by Octavian’s appointee, Antony and Octavian moved on Cassius and Brutus in the summer and autumn of that same year. The campaign took place in the Balkans and culminated in a double battle some weeks apart in October at Philippi in Macedonia. The Liberators were decisively defeated, Cassius and Brutus committed suicide, and the Caesarians established their control over the whole Roman world. Octavian, who had not played a glorious part in the battles, showed complete implacability in executing any and all of those implicated in the murder of Caesar who fell into his hands. A reshuffling of the provinces was required in light of the new situation: Antony got the East but retained Transalpine and Narbonese Gaul; Octavian got most of the West; Lepidus, fast being overshadowed by his more ambitious and ruthless partners, was effectively sidelined in Africa. Following Philippi, Antony moved east, Octavian returned to Italy, and a new polarization of the Roman world began to manifest itself. [[20]]

In the West, Octavian faced an immediate problem: the settlement of some 40,000 veterans in Italian communities. Veteran settlement was of paramount concern, since it spoke to Octavian’s trustworthiness as a patron and so could influence the future loyalty of his armies. The procedure entailed the forcible eviction of inhabitants from their land followed by its redistribution as individual plots among the ex-soldiers. Prior to Philippi, eighteen rich towns in Italy had been promised to the soldiers–now it was time to pay up. Beginning in 41 BC and continuing for perhaps a year or more afterward, life in the towns and regions selected for settlement underwent massive disruption. It seems that the dispossessed were not compensated for their loss, so that the whole process made Octavian enormously unpopular in Italy. [[21]]

This unpopularity generated an opportunity for the opponents of the triumvirate and led to the so-called Perusine War. One of the consuls of 41 BC was L. Antonius, brother of Mark Antony. Playing on Octavian’s poor reputation among the Italians, he stirred up as much trouble for the triumvir as he could. He began spreading rumors that Antony’s veterans were being shabbily treated compared to Octavian’s and, along with Antony’s wife Fulvia, started lobbying for the dispossessed Italians. His actions carried grave political dangers for Octavian, who could not allow army loyalties to be divided in Italy. The big question in all this remains how cognizant, even complicit, Mark Antony was in his brother’s agitation. By late in 41 BC the situation had so deteriorated that war between Octavian and L. Antonius in Italy was inevitable. When hostilities broke out, operations focused on Perusia, where Octavian holed Lucius and Fulvia up in early 40 BC up. After several months of siege, Lucius surrendered and was magnanimously spared by Octavian, though the councilors and people of Perusia were not so fortunate: Octavian executed the local council and gave the town over to his soldiers to plunder. He then adjourned to Gaul, there to supervise the transfer of the region to his own command, since the Antonian governor had died. [[22]]

Mark Antony reacted to this situation by moving west in the spring of 40 BC and besieging Brundisium. Octavian gathered his forces and marched south to confront him. The triumvirate appeared to be over, its two chief members at war. However, neither army was keen for war and negotiations produced an agreement instead, termed the „Pact of Brundisium.“ By means of this agreement, Antony ceded Gaul to Octavian, relinquishing his last foothold in the West, but was confirmed in the East. Lepidus continued to languish in Africa. Further, Antony was married to Octavian’s sister, Octavia. (Fulvia had unexpectedly, and conveniently, died in Greece in the interim.) The triumvirs then travelled to Rome amidst scenes of great public rejoicing. [[23]]

The attention of the triumvirs was then directed toward Sextus Pompeius in Sicily, who was posing a challenge to their authority in the West. Sextus, the youngest son of Pompey, is one of the more colorful characters of the Roman Revolution. Surviving the Pompeian defeat at Munda in 45 BC, he fought guerilla warfare in Spain and then took to the sea as a pirate leader. When he was recalled to Rome following Caesar’s murder, he cautiously sailed to Massilia and awaited developments. During the war at Mutina, when the fortunes of the senate and the Liberators appeared to be in the ascendant, he found himself appointed prefect of Rome’s fleets and Italy’s coastal zones (on 20 March, 43 BC). With the establishment of the triumvirate six months later, he seized Sicily and, as a beacon of resistance against the triumvirs, was greatly reinforced by refugees from the proscriptions, survivors of Philippi, those dispossessed by the veteran settlements in Italy, and any remaining forces of republican sentiment. He beat off attempts by Octavian to oust him from Sicily. Antony formed a pact with him, in order to make his move against Octavian in 40 BC but, if Sextus had hoped for some concrete reward for this service, he got none: he benefited in no way from the Pact of Brundisium and was not officially recognized by the triumvirs. Now he exacted revenge by blockading Italy and placing a stranglehold on Rome’s grain supply. Antony and Octavian were forced to act. Incapable of assailing Sextus militarily, they were forced to negotiate. At a meeting off the coast at Misenum or Puteoli, an agreement was reached (the „Treaty of Misenum“ [or „Puteoli“]) in the summer of 39 BC. This agreement saw Sextus’s control over Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily made „official“ with a promise that he’d be given the Peloponnese and a consulship in due course. Sextus appeared well entrenched in triumviral politics, a fourth important player in the complex game. [[24]]

The Treaty of Misenum was to have a short shelf life. Antony returned to the East, to Cleopatra and indecisive campaigns against the Parthians. Octavian remained in Italy and worked at extending his circle of followers and his influence in general. Toward that end, the presence of Sextus Pompeius was an obstacle. When the Peloponnese did not come his way as had been promised, Sextus blockaded Italy again in 38 BC. Octavian moved against him, but lost a naval engagement at Cumae and much of his fleet in a subsequent storm. He now appealed to Antony for help. The two met at Tarentum in the summer of 37 BC. Aside from Octavian’s acquisition of some 120 ships from Antony for the effort against Sextus (in return for a promise of 20,000 Italian troops for Antony’s planned Parthian campaign), the meeting saw the triumvirate renewed for a further five years. The office had expired on 31 December, 38 BC, but none of the incumbents had paid any attention to that inconvenient detail and continued to exercise its prerogatives (illegally) for the first months of 37 BC. Now their power was renewed. [[25]]

Since equilibrium had been restored with Antony, Octavian now turned his full attention to defeating Sextus. Elaborate preparations, mostly under the direction M. Vipsanius Agrippa, finally readied Octavian’s fleet for action in 36 BC. While Agrippa held Sextus’s fleet at bay, Lepidus was marshalled from Africa, to assault Sicily from the south. Another of Octavian’s generals was to converge on Italy from the northeast, while Octavian himself would move from Campania. But ship-destroying storms and another naval defeat for Octavian at the hands of Sextus seemed to signal the failure of the entire operation. Agrippa, however, saved the day and took several of Sextus’s ports before engaging and destroying the rebel’s fleet at the battle of Naulochus on 3 September, 36 BC. Sextus fled east but was murdered not long afterward. Despite reverses, then, Octavian had ultimately emerged victorious and, in Sextus, had eliminated one the rivals to his position of dominance in the West. Fate allowed him to neutralize the other. Lepidus, so long in the shadows, now decided to make a play for power. Finding himself in control of twenty-two legions in Sicily, he defied Octavian and made demands that he quit the island for good. Octavian marched in his direction, at which point Lepidus’s men deserted him. At an embarrassing scene in Lepidus’s camp, Octavian spared his former triumviral colleague but stripped him of his powers and confined him to house arrest at the pleasant seaside town of Circeii. There he lived out his life unmolested until he died, of natural causes, in 12 BC.[[26]]

Octavian was now the unchallenged master of the Roman West. In one campaigning season he had rid himself of the open challenge of Sextus Pompeius and the sleeping challenge of Lepidus. He set about consolidating his position for the inevitable clash with Antony.

The Triumvirate II: Showdown with Antony, 36-30 BC

When Octavian returned to Rome in triumph following the defeat of Sextus, the senate naturally moved to honor him extravagantly. Among the proposed honors was the suggestion that Octavian be named pontifex maximus, pagan Rome’s chief priest. Octavian refused. Lepidus, though disgraced, was pontifex maximus; and it would be against established practice for an incumbent to be stripped of this august priesthood while still alive. Here emerges the first sign of a second major political reinvention on Octavian’s part, from avenger of Caesar and militarist revolutionary to upholder and guardian of Roman tradition. The war against Sextus had been tremendously difficult. Despite his popularity in some circles, Sextus had been successfully cast as an enemy of the Roman people, the one who threatened them with famine and starvation by cutting off grain shipments. Conversely, Octavian had presented himself as the defender of the people’s interests. For this reason, his victory was immensely popular. It also seems that the war caused Octavian to consider what alternative bases for his power were available to him, and to seek new and broader platforms of support beyond the army. His political reinvention was symbolized by Octavian’s decree that all records of his acts up to that point be burned. He was starting over. From this perspective, the Principate may be argued to have had its roots not with Caesar’s murder in March 44 BC but with Sextus Pompeius’s defeat in September 36 BC.[[27]]

In the East, Antony was not faring terribly well. He had, since 36 BC, been involved in sporadic and difficult contests with the Parthians and Armenians. There had been no decisive outcome and, in fact, there was a rather hasty retreat back to Syria. This was all the more regrettable (in Antony’s eyes), since Octavian had been successful against Sextus and then, in 35-33 BC, against the tribes of Illyricum. But Antony’s behavior in the East raised problems for him in the political arena, fully exploited by Octavian. His continuing link with Cleopatra, despite his marriage to Octavia, was among the most troublesome, and it had produced two children. Antony also appeared to have „gone native,“ wearing eastern dress, with an eastern despot as a consort, and practising eastern customs. Even more appalling, having seized Armenia in 34 BC, Antony staged a spectacle in Alexandria’s gymnasium known since as the „Donations of Alexandria.“ In this spectacle, Antony declared Cleopatra „Queen of Kings“ and her son by Caesar, Caesarion, „King of Kings“; he then divided up the eastern Roman Empire among Cleopatra, Caesarion, and his own children. It seemed, from an Italian perspective, that Antony was under the spell of Cleopatra, whose ultimate goal, it was rumored, was to become Queen of Rome. Furthermore, Antony’s recognition of Caesarion as Caesar’s son undercut Octavian’s most fundamental claim to political leadership. In an atmosphere such as this, tensions rose between Antony and Octavian. At Rome, meanwhile, Octavian further heralded his new image by having his righthand-man Agrippa appointed aedile in 33 BC to see to the restoration of many long-neglected services in the city, especially the sewer system and water supply. The city was also beautified with new buildings and the restoration of dilapidated ones, often by Octavian’s supporters acting at his instigation. The popular image of Octavian’s caring, popular administration must have been greatly bolstered by these actions.[[28]]

The year 32 BC was a difficult one and saw Octavian and Antony finally embark openly on the road to war. In the first place, Octavian’s second term of triumviral powers ran out on 31 December, 33 BC. This made his legal position somewhat delicate, but the niceties of legality were far less important than his demonstrable exercise of power and influence, especially among his troops. Who was going to challenge him? It is interesting to observe that Octavian immediately ceased using the title „triumvir“; Antony did not. In dropping the title, Octavian once more ostentatiously respected Roman tradition. As matters turned out, events at Rome were to offer Octavian a new basis for claiming legitimate leadership of the Roman people, albeit a non-legal one. On 1 January, 32 BC, the Antonian consul, C. Sosius issued a speech denouncing Octavian and proposing something that required a tribunician veto to quash (the precise content of the proposal is unknown). Octavian, not in the city at the time, soon entered with an armed escort, convened the senate, and denounced Antony. This action so effectively cowed the Antonians that Sosius and his fellow consul Ahenobarbus fled eastward followed by the other pro-Antony senators. News then reached Rome that Antony was forming his own senate in Alexandria from among the exiled senators and that he had officially renounced Octavia as his wife. Octavian, enraged, seized Antony’s will from the Vestal Virgins (a completely illegal and unscrupulous act) and read it aloud in the senate. Its contents shocked Roman sentiment: Antony wished to be buried in Alexandria, next to Cleopatra. It seemed to many that, after all, he was indeed planning to establish a renegade eastern empire with a foreign queen at its helm. War was declared on Cleopatra, and traditional rituals revived to emphasize that the official enemy was a foreigner, not a fellow Roman. As preparations for war geared up in the summer of 32 BC, a remarkable thing happened. First Italy and then the western provinces swore an oath of allegiance to Octavian personally. Whether the oath was voluntary, as Augustus later claimed in his Res Gestae, or a more carefully orchestrated piece of political theater, Octavian could now claim to be the people’s choice for the war against Cleopatra. It was not a legal position, but it was an unassailable one. [[29]]

In prospect, the war between Antony and Octavian promised to be the largest civil conflict ever conducted by the Romans. Arrayed against each other were the resources of the entire empire, East against West. The not inconsiderable resources of Ptolemaic Egypt, the last surviving major Hellenistic kingdom, were also in the mix. In the end, however, the war ended not with a bang but with a fizzle. The massive forces moved against each other and converged in Greece, as had Caesar and Pompey at the outset of an earlier great conflict. The two sides encamped on the north side of the Ambracian gulf, near the promontory of Actium. Cleopatra’s presence proved problematic for Antony, and there were defections to Octavian. Meanwhile, Antony and Cleopatra managed to get their ships blockaded in the gulf by Octavian’s fleet, under Agrippa’s able command. In an attempt to break out on 2 September, 31 BC (almost five years to the day since Sextus‘ defeat at Naulochus) Antony was decisively defeated. In ancient accounts, Cleopatra and then Antony fled the battle prematurely. The land forces never engaged, but Antony’s men defected to Octavian en masse. Everything had been decided in a few hours of naval warfare. [[30]]

The victory of Octavian was complete. Antony and Cleopatra fled to Egypt. Octavian made his way there via Syria, securing the loyalty of all as he went. Antony’s forces and former supporters defected in droves. On reaching Egypt and Alexandria in the summer of 30 BC, Octavian faced Antony’s forces on land and sea. A great battle seemed imminent — until Antony’s navy and cavalry defected en masse before the very eyes of their general and his infantry were defeated (1 August, 30 BC). Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide, and passed from historical reality into the realm of romantic legend. Octavian had Caesarion and Antony’s eldest son (Antyllus) executed, and he annexed Egypt as a province of Rome, ending the Ptolemaic period of that country’s history. He was now sole master of the entire Roman world. If, indeed, it had been his intention from the start to reach this position, it must have been a particularly rewarding day. For fourteen years he had played a careful, dangerous, and patient game. Now it was time to secure the future, for himself and for Rome.[[31]]

From Octavian to Augustus: A New Order Established

The third and final political reinvention of Augustus was about to take place. That the Republic needed a guiding hand was beyond doubt. The old system had failed utterly and, if reinstated, would do so again. Even someone as republican in sentiment as Cicero had finally admitted the need for a „governing leader“ of the state (rector). Octavian was to remain in control, that much was clear. But how? Over the next three decades, his position in the state was established in a complex amalgam of legal and non-legal powers and privileges. The process was not instantaneous nor did it adhere to a single agenda relentlessly pursued; rather, it evolved piecemeal over time, occasionally reactionary, occasionally with foresight. Many details remain debated or uncertain, but the overall process is clearly discernible: it extends through two main „Constitutional Settlements“ in 27 and 23 BC respectively, some refinements in 19 BC, and sporadic assignations of numerous rights and privileges down to the granting of the ultimate title, „Father of his Country“ (Pater Patriae), in 2 BC.

In the wake of Actium, however, there was work to be done. After taking Egypt and settling affairs there, Octavian stayed away from Rome as he saw to the organization of the East. For the most part, Antony’s arrangements were left in place, as long as old loyalties were suitably redirected. Octavian returned to Rome and Italy, amid tumultuous celebrations, in August of 29 BC. Large numbers of veterans were settled (perhaps 25 legions totalling 40,000 men or more) both in Italy and the provinces, this time without complaint, since the vast wealth of Egypt allowed for ample compensation. When he entered Rome, he celebrated three triumphs over three days (over Dalmatia, Actium, and Egypt). Legally, his difficult position of 32 BC had been bypassed and Octavian held the consulship every year from 31 BC onwards (until 23 BC). Just as important, however, was the non-legal basis for his dominance, later expressed by Augustus as „universal consent.“ The roots of this consent must lie in the oath of 32 BC, now extended in principle, if not in practice, to embrace the entire empire and all its armies. Octavian was, as he later put it, „in complete control of affairs“ precisely because everyone wanted him to be and, just as significantly, because he was the last man standing. There is political posturing in his claim to „universal consent,“ to be sure, but possibly also some kernel of truth. He had ended the civil wars, and all hopes for a peaceful future now rested with him and him alone. In light of this, the senate and people voted him numerous honors in 29 BC, some of which Octavian judiciously refused, consonant with his image as respecter of tradition. [[32]]

Octavian’s holding continuous consulships would be insufficient as a mode of administration in the long term, especially if, as he intended, the old order was to be seen to be restored. He needed, somehow, to find a firm place simultaneously within and above established norms. His position at the head of affairs therefore needed careful consideration, and this no doubt explains the eighteen-month gap between his return to Rome in August 29 BC and the so-called First Constitutional Settlement of 13 January, 27 BC which, with the broadest of brush strokes, began painting the portrait of the new order. Memories of Caesar’s fate must have loomed large. Despite that dictator’s huge popularity among the masses, his complete victory over his enemies in civil war, and the devotion of his troops, he had been laid low by a few dozen disillusioned aristrocrats. Among the uppermost considerations pressing on Octavian, therefore, must have been the need to appease the sensibilities of the elite. In addition, the divided loyalties of highly politicized armies had been a plague on the Late Republic. This situation too would require remedying. These two issues, in fact, were at the heart of the „First Settlement,“ staged in the senate on 13 January, 27 BC.[[33]]

On that day, Octavian entered the senate and, to the shock of those not in the know, surrendered his position and retired to private life. The senators, possibly confused, reacted with indignance and insisted that Octavian remain at the helm of the state. After a show of reluctance, Octavian graciously accepted a share in the running of the state, gaining command of Spain (except Baetica), Gaul, Syria, Cyprus, and Egypt while the senate and people kept the rest. Within his extended provincia, granted for ten years, Octavian could appoint legates to administer regions on his behalf. Modern scholars have failed to reach agreement on the exact legal status of Octavian’s command over his provinces (was it by virtue of imperium consulare or proconsulare, imperium maius or aequum?), but the case for imperium proconsulare is the stronger; it also had precedents, in the form of the „extraordinary commands“ of Pompey or Caesar in the Late Republic. This situation would have appealed to Octavian’s desire to appear to be maintaining traditions while also doing nothing alarmingly new or innovative. Other honors and privileges were also forthcoming, at a second meeting on 16 January. Here Octavian was named Augustus, a word ringing with religious (augur) and social (auctoritas) meaning but not suggestive of overt political dominance. C. Julius Caesar Octavianus now became Imperator Caesar Augustus. Other honors carried more symbolic meaning (laurels placed on the door of his house; award of the corona civica for saving the lives of citizens; the „Shield of Virtues“ erected in his honor) but they were no less significant for that: they helped establish Augustus’s pre-eminent place in the state and craft the beginnings of an Augustan ideology. By means of this settlement, Augustus was simultaneously commander, leader, savior. [[34]]

In the summer following the settlement, Augustus left Rome to tour Gaul and Spain. The journey kept him away from Rome until 24 BC–probably a wise choice on his part, to be out of the public eye while the new arrangements took root. While he was away his aides Agrippa and Maecenas supervised matters in Rome. The summer after his return, probably in June or July, the „Second Constitutional Settlement“ was staged. At around this time a conspiracy was unearthed and two principals, Fannius Caepio and Varro Murena, were executed. In the absence of evidence, scholarly debate has raged about the timing, aims, methods, and members of the conspiracy: was the „Second Settlement“ a reaction to the conspiracy, or vice versa? Or were the events unrelated? In the end, the conclusion has to be left open, but the case for the conspiracy’s occurring after the settlement seems the stronger, though any causative links between events remains little more than putative. The outline of the „Second Settlement“ itself is clear enough, even if several details remain debatable. Augustus relinquished the consulship (which he had been monopolizing since 31 BC) and was only to take it up on two further occasions in the rest of his life, for dynastic reasons. In return, he received an empire-wide grant of proconsular power (imperium proconsulare) for five years. It is debated whether this imperium was „greater“ (maius) than that of any other governor or „equal“ (aequum) to it. Five decrees found in Cyrenaica, dated to the period 6-4 BC, show Augustus intervening in the internal affairs of this province. The implication is that his imperium overrode that of the governor on the spot (and so was maius), though the possibility that it was co-extensive with it must also be allowed (making the imperium aequum). Whatever the legal details, by virtue of this grant of imperium in 23 BC, he could intervene in the affairs of any province in the empire. Unlike other governors, he was also given dispensation to retain his power within the city limits of Rome (the pomerium), probably for purely practical reasons: otherwise, every time he left the city, his proconsular power would need to be renewed. In relinquishing the consulship, Augustus lost certain powers and privileges within the city of Rome and its polity (his proconsular power notwithstanding). These were now compensated for by a grant of tribunician power (tribunicia potestas), also for five years, that allowed him all the rights and privileges of a tribune of the people, without actually holding that office: he could summon the people, propose legislation, veto meetings and proposals, and so on. With both his tribunician power and proconsular power, Augustus now had the ability to direct affairs in every wing of domestic and foreign administration. These two powers were long to remain the twin pillars of the Roman emperors‘ legal position. [[35]]

While the major settlements of 27 and 23 BC established the bases of Augustus’s position, further refinements were necessary. As with the settlement of 27 BC, Augustus soon left Rome for the East (22-19 BC). Before he left, he was forced to refuse offers of the dictatorship or perpetual consulship pressed on him by the people, who appear to have completely missed the subtleties of the Second Settlement the year before. Over the coming years, he received, piecemeal, some significant privileges and honors. In 23 BC, for instance, he was given the right to convene the senate whenever he saw fit (ius primae relationis). In 22 BC, he was appointed to oversee Rome’s grain supply (for how long is unclear). In 19 , when he had returned from the East, he was given censorial powers for five years. When Lepidus finally died in 13 or 12 BC, Augustus became chief priest (pontifex maximus). Finally, in 2 BC, he was granted the title „Father of his Country“ (pater patriae), a title of which he was immensely proud. It is not hard to see why, since the title placed Augustus in a relationship with the Roman state analogous to that of a paterfamilias over his charges: he was to be in complete control of everything. In addition, there was his membership of all the colleges of priests, numerous symbolic privileges (e.g., immunity from taxes), and the matter of auctoritas. This personal quality, impossible to translate into English with a single word, was a combination of authority and influence derived from one’s social and political position, family, abilities, and achievements. It was, most importantly, an informal virtue: it could not be voted to anyone by the senate or the people. In this way, the extent of Augustus’s auctoritas reflected the extent and success of his life’s work, and it helped him get a lot of business done without constantly invoking his legally-conferred powers. Augustus simply had to make known his preferences for matters to transpire accordingly, so that, for instance, candidates for office whom he favored invariably got elected. No wonder he was proud to boast that he „surpassed all in auctoritas.“ [[36]]

The complex edifice of the Augustan Principate was, at heart, a sham. But, like any successful sham, it was one that people could believe in. Above all, there was political genius in Augustus’s slow and careful acquisition of overarching authority in every area of public life. At every step of the way–from the oath of 32 BC through the „constitutional settlements“ and the honors and privileges conferred upon him piecemeal–he could present himself as the passive partner. On all occasions, the senate and people of Rome voluntarily conferred powers, privileges, and honors on him. He sought nothing for himself; he was no Caesar. Indeed, he often expressed reluctance to accept offices and honors that struck him as excessive, and occasionally he refused them outright. In sharp contrast to Caesar, Augustus constantly had one eye on aristocratic sensitivities. Furthermore, none of his cardinal powers were conferred for life but, rather, for fixed periods of five or (later) ten years. That these powers were never rescinded when they came up for renewal is entirely beside the point: there was the illusion of choice. That is what mattered. The vocabulary Augustus chose to express his power, too, was a model of tact: „leading citizen“ (princeps) not dictator, „authoritative influence“ (auctoritas) not „command“ (imperium). Throw into the equation his modest lifestyle, affable approachability, routine consultation of the senate, and genuinely impressive work ethic, and we have in Augustus one of the greatest and most skillfully manipulative politicians of any nation in any age.

The Nature of the Principate and The Problem of the Succession

While his tact and the careful construction of his position shielded Augustus from contemporary accusations of grasping ambition and lust for power, it did bring with it an unpleasant corollary: tremendous uncertainty as to happened when the „leading citizen“ died. Technically, Augustus’s position was a particular package of powers granted to him by the senate and people, for fixed periods. When he died, therefore, technically, it was up to the senate and people to decide what happened next. They could appoint another princeps to replace Augustus, or return to the republican system of popular votes and annual magistrates. Both of these options, however, would undoubtedly lead to civil war. What would stop army commanders, particularly those related to Augustus, from challenging a princeps chosen by the senators? If there were a return to the „free republic,“ what would prevent a resurgence of the chaos that had preceded Augustus? Indeed, paradoxically, Augustus’s very position had set a new precedent for what one could achieve: others would almost certainly aspire to it, even it were officially abandoned. In short, there was no possibility of Augustus leaving the choice of what happened after his death to the senate and people, despite their legal position as the source of his powers. He himself realized this. Suetonius reports his published ambition that the new order continue after his death. But there was a problem here, too. If, as Augustus himself claimed in his Res Gestae, he really „possessed no more official power than the others who were my colleagues in the several magistracies,“ then he had as little right to appoint a successor as did a governor, or a consul, or a praetor. Such an action would traduce tradition and smack too openly of the despised kingship. So Augustus was in a real bind in the matter of the succession. His solution will be familiar to Kremlinologists: the granting of signs of preference to favored individuals, in this case drawn largely from within the princeps‘ own house. In selecting members of his extended family, Augustus was behaving entirely within the ethos of the Roman aristocracy, for whom family was paramount. It would also ensure that the name „Caesar,“ which had been so vital in establishing Augustus’s own control over the armed forces, would remain at the head of the state. But the informal nature of Augustus’s succession arrangements, even if forced on him by the nature of his position, opened the door to domestic turmoil and proved the single most consistently destabilizing political factor in his reign and those of future emperors. [[37]]

After Actium, Augustus moved on the succession problem quickly. He began to show signs of favor to his nephew, Marcellus. He himself only had one natural child, Julia, his daughter by his second wife, Scribonia. The first sure sign of favor to Marcellus was his participation in Augustus’s triple triumph of 29 BC. In 25 BC, Marcellus was married to Julia, forming a closer family link with Augustus. The following year, Marcellus became aedile and, on Augustus’s request, was granted the privilege of sitting as an ex-praetor in the senate and of standing for the consulship ten years in advance of the legal age. By 23 BC he was widely considered, in Velleius’s words, Augustus’s „successor in power“ (successor potentiae). Then, a surprise. Augustus fell seriously ill in 23 BC. As he lay on what he thought was his deathbed, he handed an account of the state’s resources to the consul Cn. Calpurnius Piso, and his signet ring to Agrippa. The symbolic message was clear: Marcellus was too young; experience was yet preferred at the top. Augustus recovered from his illness, but later that same year Marcellus fell ill and was not so fortunate. He was nineteen when he died and was entombed with all due pomp and ceremony in Augustus’s family mausoleum. [[38]]

The career of Marcellus, short though it was, already revealed the elements of Augustus’s methods: he was to use family links (marriage or adoption) in conjunction with constitutional privileges (office-holding and the privilege of standing for office early) to indicate his successor. His inspiration appears to have been his personal experience: as Caesar had presented Octavius to the public at his triumphs of September 46 BC, so now did Augustus display Marcellus at his own triumphs in August 29 BC; as the senate had Octavius granted the right to stand for the consulship ten years in advance of the legal age in 43 BC, so Augustus had the same right granted to Marcellus in 24 BC; and just as Caesar had bound Octavius to him by a familial link, so now did Augustus with Marcellus’s marriage to Julia (although such political alliances through family ties had long been a staple of the Roman nobility). Each event had its precedent; it was their combination that was significant. [[39]]

Marcellus was soon replaced by Agrippa. Shortly before Marcellus’s death, Agrippa had left for the East. In the face of Marcellus’s earlier preferment, the sources abound with rumors of Agrippa’s voluntary departure in high dudgeon or of his forcible exile, but such speculations are demonstrably without merit. Agrippa had been favored when Augustus was ill in 23 BC and subsequently went East with a grant of imperium proconsulare, a share in Augustus’s own powers. This is not what Augustus would have done with a man of whom he was suspicious or who had fallen in any way from favor. Augustus had business in the East, to which he was shortly to attend personally, and Agrippa was doubtless sent ahead to pave the way. Maecenas, Augustus’s other chief advisor and no friend of Agrippa, is reported to have commented in 21 BC that Agrippa had now been raised so high that either Augustus must marry him to Julia or kill him. Augustus chose the former route. Julia was married to Agrippa in that year. Until his death in 12 BC, Agrippa was clearly intended to be Augustus’s successor. Aside from his marriage to Julia, in 18 BC Agrippa’s proconsular power was renewed and, more significantly, he received a share of tribunician power (renewed in 13 BC). [[40]]

By virtue of these powers and privileges, had anything happened to Augustus in the years 21-13 BC, Agrippa would have been ideally placed to take over the reins of government. Coins of the period 13-12 BC depict Agrippa as virtual co-emperor with Augustus, although the latter was always the senior partner. This straightforward interpretation of the situation in these years has been complicated by Augustus’s treatment of Agrippa and Julia’s sons, Gaius (born in 20 BC) and Lucius (born in 17 BC). When Lucius was born, Augustus adopted them both as his own sons and they became Gaius and Lucius Caesar. A further complication is added when the ongoing careers of Augustus’s stepsons, Tiberius and Drusus, who were also advanced over these years, are taken into consideration. The intent behind these labyrinthine machinations appears to have been to create a pool of eligible candidates, headed by a frontrunner. Any other princes as were advanced in the background are best considered as insurance against fate or as indicators of Augustus’s preferences for the third generation of the Principate. In this way, Agrippa was to succeed Augustus, but the adoption of Gaius and Lucius signalled Augustus’s desire that one of them succeed Agrippa (which one was to be preferred remains unclear, given subsequent events). Tiberius and Drusus, as imperial princes, can be expected to have enjoyed high public profiles and earned various privileges, but they were very much on the backburner in these years. Notions of Regency (Agrippa over Gaius and Lucius) or paired succession (Gaius and Lucius, Tiberius and Drusus) proposed by modern scholars seem remoter possibilities. [[41]]

Augustus’s vision for the succession can be seen in action again in 12 BC, when Agrippa died. Julia, now widowed a second time, was married to Tiberius the following year. Tiberius was Augustus’s stepson and the most senior and experienced of the „secondary“ princes in the imperial house. As such, he was a natural choice. Not long afterward, Tiberius left for campaigns in Germany and Pannonia, possibly with a grant of proconsular imperium. In 7 BC he entered his second consulship and the following year his position was made plain when he received a large commission in the East and a grant of tribunician power. In short, between 12 and 6 BC Tiberius was upgraded to take Agrippa’s place in Augustus’s scheme and was installed to be Augustus’s successor. But it was to be a rocky road indeed that led to his eventual succession in AD 14. In 6 BC Tiberius unexpectedly „retired“ to Rhodes, despite his prominent public position. Augustus, apparently angered by Tiberius’s action, had little choice (Drusus, Tiberius’s brother had died in Germany in 9 BC). He appears to have relied on his increasingly robust health to see his adopted sons Gaius and Lucius Caesar to their maturity. But fate intervened once more and both young men died, Lucius in AD 2 and Gaius two years after that. In a burst of dynastic activity in June of AD 4, Tiberius was rehabilitated and adopted by Augustus, as was Agrippa Postumus (the youngest child of Julia and Agrippa); Tiberius was constrained to adopt his nephew Germanicus. Again, debate has swirled around these arrangements but, following the suggestions made above, it is probably best to avoid notions of regency or paired succcession and see here an attempt by Augustus to re-establish a „pool“ of princes from which to draw candidates, with Tiberius as the favored successor and Germanicus to come behind him. The adoption of Agrippa Postumus remains puzzling, but he was still only a teenager at the time and the move may have been intended only to secure his prominence in future succession plans. Germanicus, twenty years old at the time of his adoption by Tiberius, was clearly the frontrunner for the third generation of the Principate. Through him, also, Augustus could hope for a Julian heir to the throne, but it is far from clear whether this remote consideration played any decisive role in Augustus’s thinking. [[42]]

The succession issue was not a happy one for the imperial house and carried in its train some domestic tragedies. Aside from the deaths of the various princes, Augustus banished his own daughter Julia in 2 BC and her daughter, also named Julia, in AD 8. In AD 6-7 Agrippa Postumus was disinherited and banished to the small island of Planasia, only to be murdered shortly after Augustus’s death. The banishment of Julia the Elder is emblematic of this group of events. Julia’s marriage to Tiberius had not been successful and she appears to have sought solace in the arms of various noblemen and equestrians. In 2 BC her indiscretions were brought to Augustus’s attention and, enraged, he banished her to the island of Pandateria. She never returned to Rome. The sources unanimously ascribe Julia’s fate to her licentiousness and immorality, but modern scholars have rightly questioned this presentation and seen instead dynastic scheming behind Julia’s actions and subsequent banishment. Whatever the actual degree of Julia’s political acumen, the informal and allusive nature of the succession system itself was the root cause of her demise. For, in the Augustan system, an imperial princess who had been married to no less than three indicated favorites (Marcellus, Agrippa, and Tiberius) and who then brought outsiders into her bed was also bringing them into the heart of the dynasty. That could not be tolerated. That Augustus interpreted his daughter’s misdeeds in political terms, at least in part, is suggested by the trial for treason of one of Julia’s lovers, Iullus Antonius, and his subsequent execution or suicide; others of her lovers were banished. The same can be said for the fall of Agrippa Postumus and then of Julia the Younger. However murky the details in each case, they can all be seen as victims of the Augustan succession system. [[43]]

In all, then, the succession problem was a difficult one for Augustus, and his solutions only perpetuated it for all future emperors. Despite the internal difficulties engendered by the issue, Augustus was keen to present a united image of the imperial house to the populace. This is best illustrated by the „Altar of the Augustan Peace“ (Ara Pacis Augustae), dedicated in January, 9 BC, and laden with symbolic significance largely outside the purview of this biography. For our current purposes, most important is the presentation to the people, on the south frieze, of the imperial family–women and children included–as a corporate entity. The message of dynastic harmony and the promise of future stability emanating from the imperial house is palpable. The reality, as we have just seen, was rather different.

Augustus and the Empire I: the Army

At the heart of Augustus’s position in the state lay the army. It had been a major player in the chaotic events of the Late Republic and it had carried Augustus to power. Concern for its proper maintenance and for the effective channelling of its loyalties was therefore one of the chief goals of the Augustan settlement. In achieving these goals, Augustus’s actions were a rousing success, since the army was tamed as a force in imperial politics for the better part of a century.

Augustus completed the ongoing professionalization of the Roman military by establishing a force of 28 standing legions (three were to be lost in Germany in AD 9), made up of volunteer recruits. For the citizen soldiers of the legions, service was for a prescribed period (first 16, then 20 years), on a regular wage, and with fixed rewards upon discharge. After 14 BC, land grants were discontinued in favor of cash pension payments; such payments were funded, after AD 6, by a new public treasury (the aerarium militare). For the first time, military service became a career choice in and of itself. Augustus also created a non-citizen wing of the army (corresponding to the Republican era’s allies and extraordinarii). These auxiliary troops were formed into cohorts of infantry and wings (alae) of cavalry, usually 500 or 1000 strong, sometimes under their own commanders, sometimes under a Roman officer (an ex-centurion or tribune). Under Augustus, auxiliary units were mostly raised as needed and disbanded when the campaign(s) ended; some units were incorporated into the new permanent force, on terms of service similar to those for the legionaries. Augustus also regularized the organization and terms of service in the Roman navy and created the praetorian guard, a personal force which he discreetly and tactfully billeted in townships around Rome. [[44]]

Augustus was careful to channel the loyalties of this new professional army solely in his direction. The troops‘ loyalty to Augustus was assured by their taking a personal oath of loyalty to him and by his role as their sole paymaster and guarantor of their rewards on discharge. In short, he was their patron. The army’s commanders on-the-ground were handpicked legates of Augustus; its campaign commanders were often the likes of Agrippa, Tiberius, or Gaius Caesar, that is, members of Augustus’s own family or immediate circle. He also kept the army busy in major campaigns in Spain, the Alpine regions, along the Danube and Rhine rivers, across the Rhine in Germany, and in numerous small-scale actions all along the empire’s frontiers. Where active campaigns were not prosecuted, as in Gaul or in the East, the army was used as a means of aiding political settlements (as in the return of the Parthian eagles in 20 BC or the meeting of C. Caesar and the Parthians on an island in the Euphrates in AD 2) or as a garrison over local populations (as in Gaul). While Augustus did not go so far as to station the legions along the frontier as a defensive garrison force (as was to happen in later ages), he at least removed them from the center of power and began the process of keeping them in the vicinity of the frontiers. Although Augustus appears to some scholars to have been aiming at establishing „scientific frontiers“ along the Rhine/Elbe and Danube lines, the whole issue of his foreign policy–indeed, whether even such a policy existed–remains most unclear. For the „scientific frontiers“ view to be true, certain problematic assumptions are requisite, not the least concerning the Romans‘ cartographic capabilities and their appreciation of geographic realities well beyond their immediate purview; it is also questionable to what degree the administration of the empire in general adhered to clearly conceived „policy“ on anything, rather than reacting ad hoc as circumstances and local conditions dictated. On the whole, then, we should probably avoid notions of Roman „imperial policy“ on the model of modern national policies. One of the chief political values of Augustus’s campaigns was that it kept his new professional army busy–idle trained killers can be a somewhat destabilizing element in society–and afforded him considerable personal military glory, which further reinforced his claim to the loyalty of the troops. [[45]]

The importance to Augustus, as well as to the state, of his monopolization of army loyalties is revealed in two suggestive incidents in 27 BC, when the Augustan order was still in its infancy. At this delicate time, M. Licinius Crassus, grandson of the great Late Republican magnate, raised a serious problem for Augustus. As governor of Macedonia he had undertaken successful campaigns south of the Danube in 29-28 BC and had personally killed the enemy leader in battle. In 27 BC, then, he was awarded a triumph but he went further: he claimed the ancient honor of spolia opima („the most honorable spoils“), awarded to a Roman commander who had slain his counterpart with his own hand. These honors, involving the dedication of the enemy commander’s captured panoply to Jupiter Feretrius, had only been earned on three prior occasions in all of Roman history. Since Crassus’s claim to the spolia opima would have raised Crassus into the uppermost echelons of military glory, it had the potential to confuse the soldiers‘ loyalty toward Augustus. So Augustus blocked the claim on a technicality. Crassus held his triumph and promptly disappears from our records. (It is unlikely that he was killed but, rather, that his public profile died a death in the face of Augustus’s displeasure, a good example, if true, of the workings of auctoritas.) Not long afterward, another governor proved problematic. C. Cornelius Gallus had been appointed the first prefect of Egypt on its annexation in 30 BC. Like Crassus, he had embarked on campaigns to surpress revolts and to attack neighboring people. He then celebrated his successes with statues of himself and bragging inscriptions, one of which has survived. Enraged, Augustus let it be known that he no longer considered Gallus his friend. Charges were immediately brought and proposals laid that Gallus be convicted in absentia, exiled, and his property given to Augustus. His social status and political career in ruins, his very life perhaps in danger, Gallus committed suicide (possibly in 26 BC). Both of these men had behaved fully within the boundaries of republican precedent but had failed utterly to appreciate a fundamental rule of the new order: there was to be no military glory but Augustus’s. In contrast, Agrippa, for so long Augustus’s right-hand man, repeatedly refused honors and triumphs granted to him; all his victories were celebrated by Augustus. [[46]]

Augustus and the Empire II: Administration

Augustus also reformed and refined the administration of the Roman empire in many respects. In the domestic sphere, the senate had moved from being the chief organ of the state to being a subordinate entity, an assemblage of administrators at the disposal of Augustus. What was essential from Augustus’s viewpoint was that the senators not have this fact dangled before their faces, hence his tact in dealing with them. Consuls, for instance, continued to hold office annually but the need to pass the honor around more liberally required Augustus to create „suffect“ consulships, a sort of supplementary consulship that doubled the number of men holding the consulship per year (the suffects replaced the „ordinary“ consuls, who stepped down from office in mid-term, so there was always the traditional pair of consuls in office at any given time). This is a good illustration of the mixture of tradition and innovation that marks so much of Augustus’s activity. Augustus also appointed senators to newly-created positions such as the curatorships of the aqueducts or of the public works, the prefecture of the city, and so on. Throughout, he consulted the senate frequently and fully and treated it with respect. More significantly, he formed an inner „cabinet“ (consilium) from the two presiding consuls, a representation of minor magistrates, and fifteen senators chosen by lot. Nevertheless, in Dio’s revealing words, „nothing was done that did not please Caesar.“ As the administration of the state became more regularized, Augustus also drew administrators from the non-senatorial section of the elite, the equites. A variety of new posts was created exclusively for equestrians, including command of the praetorian cohorts and of the vigiles (firefighters), and the important prefectures of the corn supply and of Egypt; their role as army officers also appears to have expanded in these years. As a result, the equites benefited enormously from Augustus’s rule, and that of future emperors. Altogether, the thrust of Augustus’s administrative reforms was to create permanent, standing offices headed by longer-term appointments where the Republican system had preferred occasional or rotating appointments, or none at all. [[47]]

In the sphere of external affairs, many of the army’s conquests were formed into new provinces, especially along the south shore of the Danube (Moesia, Pannonia, Noricum, and Raetia) and the Alps (Alpes Cottiae and Maritimae). In the East and in Mauretania in North Africa, client kingdoms and principalities were allowed to exist, sometimes in very complex arrangements, as with the Tetrarchs in Palestine or the numerous lesser kingdoms that dotted the interior and eastern reaches of Asia Minor. From 27 BC onward these provinces were divided into those that fell into the vast provincia of Augustus (the „imperial“ provinces) and those that were retained by the senate and people (the „senatorial“ or „public“ provinces; see above, „From Octavian to Augutus: A New Order Established“). When the disposition of the provinces is examined (as it stood on Augustus’s death in AD 14), it shows that the imperial territories outnumber the public ones by a factor of almost two, and that all but one of the empire’s twenty-five legions then in service fell under the emperor’s command. Further, the Cyrenaica decrees reveal the emperor making decisions about the internal operation of this, a public province. Such interference on Augustus’s part was legitimated by the improved imperium proconsulare granted him in the settlement of 23 BC and brings into question any notions of joint rule by senate and princeps (so-called dyarchy). Ultimately, all the provinces were Augustus’s concern. [[48]]

Overall, it is fair to say that the provinces, whether public or imperial, benefited enormously from Augustus’s reign. Not only had he brought them peace, he also brought them good government. Legates in imperial provinces were appointed by Augustus for periods of three years or more depending on local conditions, whereas proconsuls in the public provinces continued to rotate annually. The men varied in rank from senators (proconsuls, usually of praetorian rank, in public provinces; legates of praetorian or consular rank in imperial ones) to equites (governing as prefects, as in Egypt and some of the smaller, unarmed provinces). Whatever their status, under the new order governors had no reason to extort from their provinces the huge sums of money that Republican-era proconsuls and propraetors had used to bankroll their domestic political careers, since the success of those careers now depended less on victory at the polls and more on the emperor’s favor. Indeed, extortion in the provinces could be positively dangerous, as it raised suspicions about the nature of one’s ultimate ambitions. These strictures applied no less in the public than in the imperial provinces, since all governors were now answerable to a single source of authority in a way they had not been under the Republic. This does not mean that rapacious governors entirely disappeared as a breed but that, for the most part–the disappointments of Gallus and Crassus aside–Augustus’s gubernatorial appointments were sound. We hear of no major failings in the management of the provinces during his reign and certainly nothing on a par with the rapacious activities of the likes of Caesar or Sulla under the Republic. Augustus, by virtue of proconsular power, could also intervene directly in any provincial dispute, as he did famously in Cyrenaica. Hardly surprising, then, is the fact that of all the emperors, Augustus’s image is the most commonly found in the provinces, even long after his death. The remarkable period of peace and prosperity ushered in by Augustus’s reign is known not only as the Pax Romana but also as the Pax Augusta. [[49]]

Augustus, as the protector and guardian of Roman tradition, also sought to inculcate a return to that tradition by means of legislation: „by new laws passed at my instigation, I brought back those practices of our ancestors that were passing away in our age“ (RG 8.5). Thus, for instance, he passed laws limiting public displays of extravagance (so-called sumptuary legislation) in the manner of the old Republican senate, and he attempted through marriage regulations to put a cap on divorces and punish childlessness and adultery among the elite. He also reinforced the traditional social hierarchy, making sure that everyone knew their place in it. Minimum property qualifications for membership of the upper orders were reinforced, and status symbols for all the classes, especially the amorphous equestrians, clearly established. The convergence of this sort of legislation is illustrated by the series of laws pertaining to freed slaves, passed between 17 BC and AD 4. In the first place, the numbers of slaves that could be informally manumitted or freed in wills was restricted in proportion to the total number of slaves owned. This is a piece of sumptuary regulation, limiting overly extravagant displays of wealth and generosity in public. Second, informally freed slaves were placed into a special class of quasi-citizenship termed Junian Latinity that was capable of being upgraded to full citizenship only after the Junians had proved themselves worthy; one way of achieving worthiness was to have children. Such regulations, then, encapsulated the Augustan attitudes toward public extravagance, maintenance of the social hierarchy, and marriage and reproduction. In his private life, Augustus fell short of his own ideals (witness the turmoil engendered in his family by adultery and infidelities of all sorts), but the thrust of his social legislation was less to regulate individuals‘ private behavior than to maintain the proper outward appearance of dignitas and decency that Augustus felt had been lost during the Late Republic. As such, it pertained to the ruling classes of the state and hardly at all affected the commoner on the street. [[50]]

Finally, there is the issue of the worship of Augustus. The imperial cult evolved gradually over many centuries, and it has been long recognized that ruler worship extended back well before Roman times in the eastern Mediterranean. In the East, then, the worship of Augustus as a god commenced not long after Actium. Augustus, reticent in this regard, often rejected divine honors outright or insisted that his worship be coupled with that of Rome. He probably had an eye on Caesar’s fate in so acting. The situation in the West, however, was more difficult. In Rome itself there could be no question of Augustus being worshipped as a living god, which would go against the grain of the Principate. In any case, he was already the son of a god and the „revered one“ (Augustus). A compromise solution appears to have been to have his will (numen) or essence (genius) recognized as divine. In Italy and out in the western provinces Augustus did not actively block direct worship, and two major cult centers were established at Lugdunum in Gaul and Cologne on the Rhine with altars at each place to Rome and Augustus, maintained by officials drawn from the local elite. In communities all across the West, in fact, altars and temples to Rome and Augustus and to Augustus himself are attested, all staffed by locals. Such cult centers therefore acted not only to promote unity in the previously barbarous western provinces and to direct loyalties accordingly, but they also facilitated the assimilation of local populations into a Roman way of life. [[51]]

„The Augustan Age“

As Rome’s pre-eminent citizen, Augustus quickly became the empire’s pre-eminent patron of the arts, and many of the people within his ambit enjoyed similar roles. In the sphere of art and architecture, the Augustan building programme was extensive, prompting his famous quote: „I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.“ Augustus himself proudly boasted of the dozens of building projects (constructions, restorations, and adornments) he undertook at his own expense. These projects exclude the innumerable acts of munificence carried out by members of his household, his inner circle, or the elite at his instigation. Among his major monuments in the city were his Forum (still an impressive ruin), the Ara Pacis Augustae, and Agrippa’s extensive activity in the Campus Martius, which generated the Baths of Agrippa, the Stagnum and Euripus, the Pantheon, and the Saepta Julia. Throughout, the Augustan style is a mixture of conservatism and innovation and often strives for a Greek look so that it has been termed „classicizing“ in tone, which is aptly demonstrated by the way Augustus’s ageless portraits stand in sharp constrast with the sometimes brutally frank „veristic“ representations of the Late-Republican elite. [[52]]

The Augustan literary scene was also exceptionally vibrant. This is the era of some of Rome’s most famous and influential writers, including Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus in poetry, and Livy in prose. Vergil, in particular, crafted a new national epic for the Romans in the Aeneid, which quickly came to replace Ennius’s Annales as the poem every schoolchild learned by heart. This great flowering of literary activity was generated by the development of literary circles of patronage, which had been mostly in abeyance since the second century BC. The most famous literary, indeed artistic, patron of his day was C. Maecenas, a close associate of Augustus from the very beginning but one who never played an active role in politics (in contrast to Agrippa). Something of a bon vivant, he actively supported the careers of Vergil and Horace, for instance, until his death in 8 BC. Another circle formed around M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus, who promoted the careers of Tibullus and Ovid. For the historian the most intriguing question such literary circles prompt is the degree to which the political and cultural sentiments expressed by these writers were officially directed, and so in effect provided propaganda for the Augustan regime. When all the evidence is weighed, there can be no question of a state-controlled literature (on the model of media in modern totalitarian states) but there may have been encouragement from the top to express the correct view coupled, no doubt, with genuine gratitude and relief on the part of the patrons and writers alike that Augustus had restored peace and stability to public affairs. In this way, Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics can reflect the hope Augustus brought for a restoration of peace to the Italian countryside, while the Republican sentiments of Livy’s history could be so pronounced that Augustus jokingly termed him „my Pompeian.“ The point is that both authors flourished under the regime. [[53]]

Death and Retrospective

In his later years, Augustus withdrew more and more from the public eye, although he continued to transact public business. He was getting older, and old age in ancient times must have been considerably more debilitating than it is today. In any case, Tiberius had been installed as his successor and, by AD 13, was virtually emperor already. In AD 4 he had received grants of both proconsular and tribunician power, which had been renewed as a matter of course whenever they needed to be; in AD 13, Tiberius’s imperium had been made co-extensive with that of Augustus. While traveling in Campania, Augustus died peacefully at Nola on 19 August, AD 14. Tiberius, who was en route to Illyricum, hurried to the scene and, depending on the source, arrived too late or spent a day in consultation with the dying princeps. The tradition that Livia poisoned her husband is scurrilous in the extreme and most unlikely to be true. Whatever the case about these details, Imperator Caesar Augustus, Son of a God, Father of his Country, the man who had ruled the Roman world alone for almost 45 years, or over half a century if the triumviral period is included, was dead. He was accorded a magnificent funeral, buried in the mausoleum he had built in Rome, and entered the Roman pantheon as Divus Augustus. In his will, he left 1,000 sesterces apiece to the men of the Praetorian guard, 500 to the urban cohorts, and 300 to each of the legionaries. In death, as in life, Augustus acknowledged the true source of his power. [[54]]

The inscription entitled „The Achievements of the Divine Augustus“ (Res Gestae Divi Augustae; usually abbreviated RG) remains a remarkable piece of evidence deriving from Augustus’s reign. The fullest copy of it is the bilingual Greek and Latin version carved into the walls of the Temple of Rome and Augustus at Ancyra in Galatia (for this reason the RG used to be commonly referred to as the Monumentum Ancyranum). Other evidence, however, demonstrates that the original was inscribed on two bronze pillars that flanked the entrance to the Mausoleum of Augustus in Rome. The inscription remains the only first-person summary of any Roman emperor’s political career and, as such, offers invaluable insights into the Augustan regime’s public presentation of itself. [[55]]

In looking back on the reign of Augustus and its legacy to the Roman world, its longevity ought not to be overlooked as a key factor in its success. People had been born and reached middle age without knowing any form of government other than the Principate. Had Augustus died earlier (in 23 BC, for instance), matters may have turned out very differently. The attrition of the civil wars on the old Republican aristocracy and the longevity of Augustus, therefore, must be seen as major contributing factors in the transformation of the Roman state into a monarchy in these years. Augustus’s own experience, his patience, his tact, and his great political acumen also played their part. All of these factors allowed him to put an end to the chaos of the Late Republic and re-establish the Roman state on a firm footing. He directed the future of the empire down many lasting paths, from the existence of a standing professional army stationed at or near the frontiers, to the dynastic principle so often employed in the imperial succession, to the embellishment of the capital at the emperor’s expense. Augustus’s ultimate legacy, however, was the peace and prosperity the empire was to enjoy for the next two centuries under the system he initiated. His memory was enshrined in the political ethos of the Imperial age as a paradigm of the good emperor; although every emperor adopted his name, Caesar Augustus, only a handful earned genuine comparison with him.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

As always, but perhaps more so in this case, the potential bibliography for this subject is daunting. Listed below are only the most influential and/or recent works, the bibliographies of which can be plundered profitably for more focused studies. The author welcomes notification of errors, omissions, or updates. The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 10 (2nd ed., 1996) offers an excellent starting point for the interested reader.

Benario, H.W., „Octavian’s Status in 32 BC,“ Chiron 5 (1975): 301-9.

Birch, R.A., „The Settlement of 26 June, AD 4 and its Aftermath,“ CQ 31 (1981): 443-56.

Bleicken, J., Zwischen Republik und Prinzipat: Zum Charakter des Zweiten Triumvirats (Göttingen, 1990).

________. Augustus (Berlin, 1998).

Bradley, K.R., Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1987).

Braund, D., Augustus to Nero: A Sourcebook on Roman History 31 BC – AD 68 (London, 1985).

Carter, J. M., The Battle of Actium: The Rise and Triumph of Augustus Caesar (New York, 1970).

Conlin, D.A., The Artists of the Ara Pacis (Chapel Hill, 1997).

Corbett, J.H., „The Succession Policy of Augustus,“ Latomus 33 (1974): 87-97.

Crook, J., Consilium Principis: Imperial Councils and Counsellors from Augustus to Diocletian (Cambridge, 1955).

Demougin, S., L’Ordre equestre sous les Julio-Claudiens (Rome, 1988).

Durry, M., Les Cohortes Prétoriennes (Paris, 1938).

Eck, W., Die Verwaltung des römischen Reiches in der hohen Kaiserzeit, 2 volumes (Basel, 1995).

W. Eck, The Age of Augustus (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 2003)

Eder, W., „Augustus and the Power of Tradition: The Augustan Principate as Binding Link between Republic and Empire,“ in Raaflaub and Toher, 71-122.

Fishwick, D., The Imperial Cult in the Latin West (Leiden, 1987).

Galinsky, K., Augustan Culture: An Interpretive Introduction (Princeton, 1996).

Gowing, A.M. The Triumviral Narratives of Appian and Cassius Dio (Ann Arbor, 1992).

Gray, E.W., „The Imperium of M. Agrippa,“ ZPE 6 (1970): 227-38.

Gruen, E. S., „The Imperial Policy of Augustus,“ in Raaflaub and Toher, 395-416 (expanded on in his entry in CAH vol. 10)

Gurval, R.A., Actium and Augustus: The Politics and Emotions of Civil War (Ann Arbor, 1995).

Hadas, M., Sextus Pompey (New York, 1930; reprint, 1966).

Issac, B., The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East, revised edition (Oxford, 1992).

Jameson, S., „Augustus and Agrippa Postumus,“ Historia 24 (1975): 287-314.

Kaiser Augustus und die verlorene Republik, eine Ausstellung im Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 7. Juni-14. August 1988. (Mainz, 1988).

Keppie, L., Colonisation and Veteran Settlement in Italy, 47-14 BC (London, 1983).

________. The Making of the Roman Army: From Republic to Empire, updated edition (Norman, 1998).

Kienast, D., Augustus: Prinzeps und Monarch (Darmstadt, 1982).

________. Römische Kaisertabelle, 2nd edition (Darmstadt, 1996).

Kolb, F., „Zur Statussymbolik im antiken Rom,“ Chiron 7 (1977): 239-59.

Lacey, W.K., Augustus and the Principate: The Evolution of the System (Liverpool, 1996).

Lanza, C., Auctoritas Principis (Milan, 1996).

Levick, B., „Drusus Caesar and the Adoptions of AD 4,“ Latomus 25 (1966): 227-44.

________. „Abdication and Agrippa Postumus,“ Historia 21 (1972): 674-97.

________. „Julians and Claudians,“ Greece and Rome 22 (1975): 29-38.

Lintott, A., Imperium Romanum: Politics and Administration (London, 1993).

Jones, A.H.M. Augustus (London, 1970)

Magdelain, A., Auctoritas Principis (Paris, 1947).

Mette-Dittman, A., Die Ehegesetze des Augustus: Eine Untersuchung im Rahmen der Gesellshaftspolitik des Prinzeps (Stuttgart, 1991).

Millar, F., „The Emperor, the Senate and the Roman Provinces,“ JRS 56 (1966): 156-66.

________. „Triumvirate and Principate,“ JRS 63 (1973): 50-67.

________. The Emperor in the Roman World (London, 1977).

________. The Roman Empire and its Neighbours, 2nd edition (London, 1981).

Millar, F. and E. Segal, Caesar Augustus: Seven Aspects (Oxford, 1984).

Ostrow, S.E., „The Augustales in the Augustan Scheme,“ in Raaflaub and Toher, 364-78.

Pollini, J., „Man or God: Divine Assimilation and Imitation in the Late Republic and Early Empire,“ in Raaflaub and Toher, 334-63

Prince, S.R.F., Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor (Cambridge, 1984)

Raaflaub, K., and L. J. Samons II, „Opposition to Augustus,“ in Raaflaub and Toher, 417-54.

________. and M. Toher (eds.), Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and his Principate (Berkeley, 1990).

Ramage, E.S., The Nature and Purpose of Augustus’s Res Gestae (Stuttgart, 1987).

Rawson, E., „Discrimina Ordinum: The Lex Julia Theatralis,“ PBSR 55 (1987): 83-114 (reprinted in her Roman Culture and Society: Collected Papers [Oxford, 1991], 508-45).

Rich, J.W., Cassius Dio and the Augustan Settlement (Warminster, 1990).

Reinhold, M., Marcus Agrippa: A Biography (Rome, 1965).

Roddaz, J.-M., Marcus Agrippa (Rome, 1984).

Salmon, E.T., „The Evolution of Augustus’s Principate,“ Historia 5 (1956): 456-78.

Schlüter, W. „The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest: Archaeological Research at Kalkreise near Osnabrück,“ in J.D. Creighton and R.J.A. Wilson (eds), Roman Germany: Studies in Cultural Interaction (Portsmouth, RI, 1999), 125-59.

Shotter, D.C., Augustus Caesar (London, 1991)

Simon, E., Augustus: Kunst und Leben in Rom um die Zeitenwende (Munich 1986).

Southern, P., Augustus (London, 1998).

Syme, R., The Roman Revolution, rev. ed. (Oxford, 1952).

________. History in Ovid (Oxford, 1978).

________. The Augustan Aristocracy (Oxford, 1986).

Talbert, R.J.A., The Senate of Imperial Rome (Princeton, 1984).

Taylor, L. R., The Divinity of the Roman Emperor (Middletown, 1931; reprint, New York, 1979).

Von Premerstein, A. Vom Werden und Wesen des Prinzipate. (Munich, 1937).

Ward-Perkins, J.B., Roman Imperial Architecture, 2nd edition (Hammondsworth, 1981).

Weigel, R.D., Lepidus: The Tarnished Triumvir (London, 1992).

Whittaker, C.R., Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore, 1994).

Williams, G., „Did Maecenas ‚Fall from Favor‘? Augustan Literary Patronage,“ in Raaflaub and Toher, 258-75

Zanker, P., The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, 1988).

NOTES (throughout the notes, items in the bibliography are referred to in abbreviated form)

[[1]] The chief ancient sources for the life of Augustus (mostly available as Penguin Classics or in the Loeb Classical Library) are: Appian B. Civ. books 3-5; Dio, books 45-56; Cicero, Philippics and some letters; Nicolaus of Damascus, Augustus; Plutarch, Mark Antony; Suetonius, Augustus; the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (see the edition by P.A. Brunt and J.M. Moore [Oxford, 1967]). Fragments of the biography of Augustus by Nicolaus of Damascus (fl. ca. 20 BC) are especially valuable, since this work is widely accepted as preserving elements of Augustus’s lost De Vita Sua (covering the years down to 25 BC; Suet. Aug. 1-18 appears also to be based on this autobiography). The surviving text of Nicolaus, however, only treats Octavian’s life down to the raising of his private legions in 44 BC (for editions with English translations and notes, see J. Bellemore, Nicolaus of Damascus: Life of Augustus [Bristol, 1984]; C.M. Hall, Nicolaus of Damascus: Life of Augustus [Baltimore, 1923]). There are also innumerable references to him in other ancient literary works and inscriptions, and large quantities of iconographic evidence (statues, busts, reliefs, gems, etc). The number of modern accounts is also formidable, with useful and concise introductions to be found in Shotter, Augustus Caesar and Jones, Augustus. More thorough and specific treatments include Bleicken, Augustus; Kienast, Augustus; Millar and Segal, Caesar Augustus: Seven Aspects; Raaflaub and Toher, Between Republic and Empire; Southern, Augustus; Syme, Roman Revolution; id. History in Ovid. In the interests of conciseness, the notes emphasize the ancient evidence; most of the secondary studies just cited tackle the issues addressed in this article.

[[2]] The fall of the Roman Republic has also generated vast quantities of bibliography; see, esp., P.A. Brunt, The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays (Oxford, 1988); M. Crawford and M. Beard, Rome in the Late Republic (Ithaca, 1985); F. Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Ann Arbor, 1998); E. Gruen, The Last Generation of the Roman Republic (Berkeley, 1974); Syme, Rom. Rev.

[[3]] The lack of popular enthusiasm for Caesar’s naked autocracy is reflected in a famous incident during the Lupercalia (15 February) in 44 BC. Caesar had twice been offered a royal diadem in front of the crowd. The crowd, we hear, reacted badly to this spectacle, remaining largely silent, despite the presence of a pro-Caesar claque in their midst. Only when Caesar refused the crown did the crowd cheer wildly. See Dio 44.11-12; App. B. Civ. 2.109; Plut. Caes. 61-62. Suet. Caes. 79.2 only alludes to the incident.

[[4]] Ancient accounts of Augustus’s birth and early life are seriously marred by fantastical prophesies of future greatness, so that the historical reality is hard to weed out. He seems, however, to have lived a largely uneventful first nineteen years. See Dio 45.1-2; Suet. Aug. 1-8; Nic. Aug. 2-5; Tac. Dial. 28.5 Cicero’s letters provide the only contemporary evidence for Augustus’s early career, and are indispensable for that, but provide little information on his early life. A note on names: Augustus was born C. Octavius, became C. Julius Caesar Octavianus (usually abbreviated „Octavian“ in modern sources) in 44 BC, and was renamed yet again as Imperator Augustus Caesar in 27 BC. Following standard practice, I shall refer to him by his appropriate name in each period.

[[5]] Association with Caesar: Nic. Aug. 7-12. Aftermath of murder: App. B. Civ. 3.9-11. Octavian seems to have arrived in Italy in early April or late March: Cicero, in a letter from Astura dated 11 April, inquired of Atticus how it went (Att. 14.5.3 = SB 359). Note that the influential Caesarian L. Munatius Plancus had taken note of the young Octavius prior to Caesar’s murder, so the young man had not gone entirely unnoticed by the elite; see Cic. Fam. 10.24.5

[[6]] For ancient narratives of the events here described, see App. B. Civ. 3.11-98; Dio 45.5.1-46.52.4; Nic. Aug. 16-31; Suetonius (Aug. 8.3-12) presents a conflated and rather confused account. Augustus’s own summary of this phase of his career (RG 1.1) is restricted to the simple and tendentious assertion he „successfully championed the liberty of the republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.“

[[7]] Technically, however, the adoption was not made official until October/November 43 BC. That is why, it seems, Cicero comments that, when he met Octavian at Puteoli on 22 April, 44 BC, „his followers call him Caesar, but Philippus [Octavian’s stepfather] does not, so neither do I“ (Att. 14.12.2 = SB 366); the Liberator M. Junius Brutus also refers to Octavian as „Octavius“ (Cic. Ad Brut. 17.5-6, 25.1, 2, 7, 8, 11; dated June and July 43 BC). In contrast, L. Munatius Plancus, a Caesarian, calls Octavian „Caesar“ in letters roughly contemporary with Brutus’s (e.g., Cic. Fam. 10.23.6, 10.24.4-8). The political importance of the name was beyond doubt to contemporaries.

[[8]] Cicero first met Octavian in Naples on 19 April, 44 BC, one day after Octavian had arrived in the city (Att. 14.10.3 = SB 364). A few days later, on 22 April, he had decided that Octavian’s influence on events could not be good, since his supporters were threatening death to the Liberators (Att. 14.12.2 = SB 366).

[[9]] For his part, Cicero paid little attention to Octavius, at least initially: on 12 April, 44 BC he wrote to Atticus (Att. 14.6.1 = SB 360), „As for Octavius — it’s neither here not there.“

[[10]] Appian (B. Civ. 3.14-21) puts windy speeches into both their mouths: Octavian asks for his inheritance, Antony refuses by claiming the money is tied up in litigation, largely spent already, or not yet counted. In contrast, Dio (45.5.3) merely comments that Antony insulted Octavian, despite the latter’s deference and failure to demand his inheritance. Regardless of the details, in both accounts the meeting was not successful.

[[11]] Cicero, in letters to Atticus dated 11 and 18 May, 44 BC (Att. 14.20.5 = SB 374, 14.21.4 = SB 375, and 15.2.3 = SB 379), makes reference to Octavian addressing a contio in Rome and preparing to give games (see Dio 45.6.4). C. Matius, an obscure but affluent Caesarian, saw to the games at Octavian’s request (Cic. Fam. 11.28.6).

[[12]] See App. B. Civ. 3.27, 30; Dio 45.9.3.

[[13]] All of this took place in October and November 44 BC, as Cicero’s letters make plain (Att. 16.8.1-2 = SB 418; Fam. 12.23.2). See also App. B. Civ. 3.40-48; Dio 45.12.

[[14]] Cicero, however, had been from the outset doubtful about Octavian’s nature and intentions; see Att. 14.12.2 = SB 366 (April 44 BC) and 16.9 = SB 419 (November 44 BC). Needless to say, it was also to the political benefit of the Liberators and their supporters (Cicero among them) to keep the Caesarian leadership quarrelling.

[[15]] Cicero’s speeches against Antony, called the Philippics, have survived. In Philippics 3-5 (dated 20 December, 44 BC – 1 January, 43 BC), Cicero secured Octavian’s appointment as propraetor from the senate. See also Cic. Fam. 10.28.3 (dated 2 February, 43 BC)

[[16]] App. B. Civ. 3.49-73; Cic. Fam. 11.8.2 (Cicero to Decimus Brutus, dated late January, 43 BC), 10.30.4 (letter from Ser. Sulpicius Galba serving with consuls at Mutina, dated 15 April, 43 BC), 10.33.3-4 (letter from C. Asinius Pollio, dated late May, 43 BC); Cic. Phil. 14; Dio 45.12-46.38. Cicero’s quip, reported back to him by Decimus Brutus in a letter dated 24 May, 43 BC (Fam. 11.20.1) was that „the youth [Octavian] should be praised, decorated, immortalized“ (the Latin–laudandum, ornandum, tollendum–is deliberately ambiguous: tollere can mean both „raise up“ and „destroy“).

[[17]] App. B. Civ. 3.74-95; Cic. Fam. 11.10.2, 11.13.1, 11.14.2 (correspondence to and from Decimus Brutus, dated May, 43 BC), 10.23.6 (letter from Plancus, dated 6 June, 43 BC). Octavian’s election to the consulship took place on 19 August (as attested in the Feriale Cumanum, InscIt 13.2.278ff.), though his demand for the consulship appears to have begun in June (Cic. Ad Brut. 18.3); Dio 46.39-49. On Cassius and Brutus in the East, see App. B. Civ. 3.26, 63, 77-79, 96; Dio 47.20-36.

[[18]] Overtures to Antony: App. B. Civ. 3.80-81. Meeting and formation of the triumvirate: App. B. Civ. 3.96-4.3 (Appian places the meeting at Mutina); Dio 46.54.3-55.5. Passage of the lex Titia: App. B. Civ. 4.7; Dio 47.2.2. The terminal date of the triumvirate is unequivocally established by the Fasti Colotiani. On the legalities of the Second Triumvirate, see Bleicken, Zwischen Republik und Prinzipat; see also Millar, „Triumvirate.“

[[19]] See App. B. Civ. 4.8-9 (text of proclamation) and 4.10-51 (anecdotes of the proscribed); see also Dio 47.9-13. Death of Cicero: App. B. Civ. 4.19; Dio 47.8.3-4; Plut. Cic. 46-49. Plutarch (Cic. 49.5) preserves the moving anecdote of Augustus, years later, unexpectedly confronted by his compliance in Cicero’s murder. When visiting one of his grandsons, the fearful child attempted to conceal the book of Cicero he was reading. Augustus took the book, read it for some time, and gave it back to the boy saying, „A learned man, my boy, learned and a true patriot.“ Dio (47.8.1), Pliny (HN 7.147), Plutarch (Ant. 21), Suetonius (Aug. 27.1), and Velleius (2.66.1-3) unite in blaming the proscriptions mainly on Antony (and Lepidus), the former „public enemies“ out for revenge; there has to be a suspicion of pro-Augustan retroactive finger-pointing here. (Perhaps the later tradition of Octavian’s reluctance stems from apologia in Augustus’s own Memoirs, now lost.) The final count of the dead is given by Appian (B. Civ. 4.5) as 300 senators and 2,000 Knights. Southern (57-59) joins Kienast (35) in arguing forcefully that the proscriptions were motivated by the mentality of the political purge, not financial need.

[[20]] Africa: App. B. Civ. 4.53-56. Campaign of Philippi: App. B. Civ. 4.86-139; Dio 47.37-49. Octavian’s limited role in the fighting: Dio 47.41.1-4; Pliny HN 7.148. Re-alignment of the triumviral provinces: App. B. Civ. 5.3, 12; Dio 48.1.2-3. (Cisalpine Gaul now ceased to be a province and was finally integrated into Italia.)

[[21]] On the depradations of the soldiers in Italy, see Dio 47.14.4-5. On this settlement, see Keppie, Colonisation, 58-69. On the methods and impact of veteran settlement, see ibid., 87-133. The eighteen towns: App. B. Civ. 4.3 (Appian says the towns were „remarkable for their wealth and fine lands and houses“). It should be noted that where the territory of a designated veteran colony proved insufficient for the requirements of settlement, the territory of neighboring towns would be encroached upon, occasionally to the point of total subsumption (e.g., Caudium, entirely absorbed by the settlement at Beneventum). Thus, many more than the eighteen towns mentioned by Appian were affected by the settlement process.

[[22]] On the Perusine War, see App. B. Civ. 5.14, 30-51; Dio 48.13-14 . Antony’s complicity: App. B. Civ. 5.21-22; Dio 48.28. Execution of councilors: App. B. Civ. 5.48; Dio 48.14.3. Acquisition of Gaul: App. B. Civ. 5.51, 53; Dio 48.20.1, 3.

[[23]] Threatened war and „Pact of Brundisium“: App. B. Civ. 5.52-65; Dio 48.28-30.

[[24]] Career of Sextus: App. B. Civ. 2.105, 122, 3.4, 4.25, 36-54 (passim), 83-85, bk. 5 (passim); Dio 47.36.4, 47.49.4, 48.16-20. Date of appointment of Sextus to the prefecture of the fleet: Cic. Phil. 13.13. Sextus’s pact with Antony: App. B. Civ. 5.56. „Treaty of Misenum/Puteoli“: App. B. Civ. 5.67-74 (Appian places the meeting at Puteoli); Dio 48.36-38. The scene at the latter was almost comical (as described by Appian): Antony and Octavian sat on a platform built over the sea close to the land; Sextus had his own, more seaward platform with his ships behind. A narrow strip of water separated the two platforms. Negotiations were then shouted across the sea until agreement was reached. On Sextus Pompeius, see also Hadas, Sextus Pompey. In Syme’s view (Rom. Rev., 221), the „Peace of Puteoli enlarged the Triumvirate to include a fourth partner,“ which is something of an overstatement, given its evidently expedient nature.

[[25]] Collapse of Misenum/Puteoli agreement and war: App. B. Civ. 5.77-92; Dio 48.45.4-49 . „Treaty of Tarentum“ and renewal of triumvirate: App. B. Civ. 5.93-95; Dio 48.54.1-6. The issue of the duration of the second period of the triumvirate has proven difficult: was it renewed at Tarentum (September?, 37 BC) retroactively from 1 January, 37 BC (to end on 31 December, 33 BC) or did it run directly from September(?), 37 BC (to end sometime toward the end of 32 BC)? The more convincing case is on the side of the „retroactive“ view: see the excellent summary in Benario, „Octavian’s Status.“ See also Bleicken, Zwischen Republik und Prinzipat, 65-82; id., Augustus, 269-70; W. Eder, „Augustus and the Power of Tradition: The Augustan Principate as Binding Link Between Republic and Empire,“ in Raaflaub and Toher, 97-98; Jones, 31; Kienast, 55; Southern, 94. In all likelihood, Republican legalities played a lesser part in the considerations of the time than the observable reality of the triumvirate’s dominance and, therefore, in the actual operation of its power; see below, n. 29. On the growth of Octavian’s „party“ at this time, see Syme, Rom. Rev., 227-42.

[[26]] Final campaign against Sextus: App. B. Civ. 5.96-144; Dio 49.1-18. Lepidus: App. B. Civ. 5.123; Dio 49.11.2-12.4; see also Weigel, Lepidus. Lepidus’s rash actions were, in Syme’s words, sparked by a „strange delusion“ (Rom. Rev., 232). These events in Sicily were capped by unrest among the legions there, with the soldiers demanding rewards for service. Octavian discharged 20,000 of them on the spot and promised the rest bounties after campaigns in Illyricum; see Appian and Dio locc. citt.; Keppie, Colonisation, 69-73.

[[27]] One of the honors allegedly given to Octavian after Naulochus, late in 36 BC, was the tribunician power (App. B. Civ. 5.132). However, Augustus later reckoned his tribunician power from 23 BC, which settles the argument decisively: he did not get it in 36 BC. Dio is probably correct (49.15.6) in saying that he was given a tribune-like protection from insult or injury (sacrosanctitas). Refusal of the pontificate: App. B. Civ. 5.131; Dio 49.15.3; Suet. Aug. 31.1. Burning of the records: App. B. Civ. 3.132.

[[28]] Antony’s wars in the East: Dio 49.19-30; Plut. Ant. 37-52. Octavian in Illyricum: App. Ill. 12-28. Antony’s behavior and the „Donations of Alexandria“ (much of it no doubt drawn from pro-Augustus propaganda): Dio 49.41, Plut. Ant. 54.3-6 (Donations); Dio 50.4-5 (behavior). Cleopatra’s ambitions: Dio 50.4.1, 5.4. Rising tensions: Plut. Ant. 54-55. Agrippa’s aedileship and munificence instigated by Octavian: Dio 49.43.1-4; Pliny HN 36.121; Roddaz, 145-57 (aedileship); Suet. Aug. 29.4-5; Vell. Pat. 2.89.4 (munificence).

[[29]] On the date of the expiration of the triumviral powers, see above n. 25. It is my opinion that many modern scholars, wedded to contemporary paradigms of legally-sanctioned government, have overstated the importance of legalities in establishing the powers of Roman Republican officials; precedent, ritual, and appearance were just as important, if not more so. Certainly traditional procedures and practices were used during the Republic to legitimate magisterial authority, but many of these niceties had fallen by the wayside in the years since Pompey and Caesar. Time and again in the period after Sulla extraordinary powers and privileges had been voted to generals in recognition of their de facto supremacy. So too now, with Octavian. Technically, his triumviral powers had lapsed. No one, however, not even the Antonian consuls for 32 BC, C. Sosius and Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus, were going to point that out publicly; although the content of Sosius’s anti-Octavian speech of 1 January, 32 BC has not survived, that he focused on the expiration of the triumviral powers is unlikely, since the lapse applied to Antony as well. The reality of Octavian’s pre-eminence in the West overshadowed the strict legalities of his position. On ritual, ceremony, and appearance in Republican magistracy, see D.J. Gargola, Lands, Laws and Gods: Magistrates and Ceremony in the Regulation of Public Lands in Republican Rome (Chapel Hill, 1995), esp. 16-24; R. Stewart, Public Office in Early Rome: Ritual Procedure and Political Practice (Ann Arbor, 1998). The 1 January meeting of the senate and aftermath: Dio 50.2.3-7. Reading Antony’s will: Dio 50.3.1-4.1, Plut. Ant. 58.3-4. Oath: RG 25.2; Dio 50.6.3-4 (where the oath is unmentioned but implicit); Suet. Aug. 17.2. Augustus himself (RG, loc. cit.) states that the oath was voluntary (sponte sua), but it may not have been (see Dio and Suetonius, locc. citt.). Syme (Rom. Rev., 284) was convinced the oath came before the denunciation of Antony in the senate and the declaration of war and, in a rousing phrase, believed the oath „riveted the shackles of [Italy’s] servitude.“

[[30]] Campaign at Actium: Dio 50.10-35; Plut. Ant. 61-68.3; Vell. Pat. 2.84-85; Carter, Battle of Actium. The forces on each side were monumental: about 30 legions apiece, and Antony had 500 warships to Octavian’s 250 (Plut. Ant. 61). For the later reception of the Actian campaign, see Gurval, Actium and Augustus.

[[31]] Aftermath of Actium: Dio 51.1-17; Plut. Ant. 68.4-86. Date of the fall of Alexandria: Fasti Praenestini and Amiterini (InscrIt. 13.2.107 and 13.2.185). Cleopatra, according to Plutarch (Ant. 78-86.3), was taken alive by Octavian, who planned to display her at his triumph. But she had an asp smuggled into a banquet she was holding, hidden among a plate of figs. (The asp bit her on the arm, not the breast, according to Plutarch [Ant. 86.1-3] and Dio [51.14.1-2].) The revolt or plot of Lepidus is a shadowy affair: Vell. Pat. 2.88; Dio 54.15.4; Suet. Aug. 19.1.

[[32]] Settling affairs in the East: Dio 51.18. Veteran settlements: Keppie, Colonisation, 73-82. Wealth of Egypt used for settlements: Dio 51.17.6-8. Three triumphs: Dio 51.21.6-9. „By universal consent I was in complete control of affairs“: RG 34.1. On 11 January, 29 BC the doors of the Temple of Janus in Rome were closed, symbolizing that the entire Roman world was at peace (though Dio is quick to point out the various wars still in progress in diverse locales): it had only happened twice before in all of Roman history (Dio 51.20.4-5). Such a symbolic gesture must have had a powerful effect on those who witnessed or heard about it and reinforced the notion of Octavian as the bringer of peace. Honors: Dio 51.19-21.

[[33]] None of this is meant to suggest that the system later called the Principate was, in its entirety, planned out and effected according to a pre-ordained blueprint, but rather that Octavian, in the run up to the First Settlement, must have given careful thought to his position and acted accordingly. That attitude, in fact, had marked his behavior from the very outset of his career and was encapsulated in his favorite aphorisms, „Rush slowly“ (festina lente) and „Whatever is done well enough is done quickly enough“ (sat celeriter fieri quidquid fiat satis bene; see, for both, Suet. Aug. 25.4). These are the mottoes of a patient and careful planner. Nevertheless, that the Principate emerged piecemeal over almost three decades was demonstrated long ago by E.T. Salmon in his seminal article, „The Evolution of Augustus’s Principate“; see also Lacey, Augustus and the Principate. Need for a rector: Cic. Rep. 2.51; 5.5, 6; 6.13. As consul in 28 BC, Octavian had annulled all the „illegal“ acts of the triumvirate, effectively wiping the slate clean in that department (Dio 53.2.6); his behavior in this year, with Agrippa as his colleague, was generally traditional, generous, and exemplary (Dio 53.1-2). A new beginning was being heralded, support for it organized, and its nature indicated: later, Augustus himself considered the events of 28 and 27 BC as part of a single process of transferring „the republic from my power to the dominion of the senate and people of Rome“ (RG 34.1).

[[34]] First Settlement: Dio 53.3-17.1; RG 34.1-2; Suet. Aug. 28.1; Vell. 2.89. „Settlement“ staged: Dio 53.2.7. Division of provinces: Dio 53.12; see also Millar, „The Emperor, the Senate and the Roman Provinces.“ Debate over legal status of Octavian: Southern, 111-13. Imperium proconsulare is more likely to have been granted for ten years than imperium consulare, which Octavian already held by virtue of his consulship: or was it expected he would be consul every year for the following ten years? On the settlement, see, e.g., Bleicken, 315-42; Rich, Cassius Dio; Southern, 111-17; Syme, Rom. Rev. 313-30.

[[35]] Travels of Augustus: Dio 53.22.5. Illness and recovery: Dio 53.30.3; Hor. Epist. 1.15; Pliny HN 25.77; Suet. Aug. 81.1. Conspiracy: Dio 54.3.2-3 (who dates the event to 22 BC, so breaking the direct link between it and the Settlement of 23); Vell. Pat. 2.91.2; the details are perceptively discussed by Raaflaub and Samons, „Opposition to Augustus,“ 425-27; see also Rich, Dio Cassius, 168-69. „Second Settlement“: Dio 53.32; RG 10.1; Suet. Aug. 28.1. For the Cyrenaica decrees, see below n. 48.

[[36]] Refusal of dictatorship et al.: Dio 54.1.3-4; RG 5.1-2; Vell. Pat. 2.89.5; Suet. Aug. 52. Cura annonae: Dio 54.1.3. Ius primae relationis: Dio 54.3.3. Privileges of 19 BC: Dio 54.10.3-7; RG 6.1; Suet. Aug. 27.5. „Father of the Country“: Dio 55.10.10; RG 35.1; Suet. Aug. 58. Priesthoods: RG 7.3. Auctoritas: RG 34.3; see also Cic. Off. 2.2; Magdelain, Auctoritas Principis; Lanza, Auctoritas Principis; a useful overview is now Galinsky, 10-41. Dio (55.34.2) reports that in AD 8, when he had become too infirm to attend elections in person, Augustus would post the names of the candidates for office he favored; it’s hard to imagine such candidates failing. Galinsky (42-79) surveys the establishment of the Principate with emphasis on the terminology of power Augustus uses to describe it.

[[37]] Continuity of Principate: Suet. Aug. 28.1-2.

[[38]] Before marrying Livia Drusilla in 39 BC, he had been married to Clodia, stepdaughter of Antonius (PIR² C 1057), from 43-41 BC; and then to Scribonia (PIR S 220), from 40-39 BC. Appearance at triumph: Suet. Tib. 6.4. Marriage: Dio 53.27.5. Aedile/legal age: Dio 53.28.3. „Successor in power“: Vell. Pat. 2.93.1. „Deathbed“ scene: Dio 53.30.1-2; Suet. Aug. 28.1. Death and burial of Marcellus: Dio 53.30.4. Livia’s rumored hand in his demise (Dio 53.33.4.) is entirely unproven; that summer in Rome was considered particularly unhealthy and death by illness was widespread (Dio loc. cit.). Marcellus was not adopted by Augustus: the RG (21.1) refers to him as „my son-in-law“ as does Marcellus’s epitaph (Braund, 27).

[[39]] Octavius in Caesar’s triumph: see n. 5. Octavius granted right of standing early: App. B. Civ. 3.51.

[[40]] Agrippa goes East: Dio 53.31.2-4; Pliny HN 7.149; Tac. Ann. 14.53.3; Suet. Aug. 66.3, Tib. 10.3. Agrippa’s power in the east: Gray, „Imperium of M. Agrippa.“ Maecenas’s quip: Dio, 54.6.5. Marriage: Dio 54.6.5; Suet. Aug. 63.1. Agrippa’s powers: Dio 54.12.4-5 (18 BC), 54.28.1 (13 BC).

[[41]] Coins: RIC nos. 407, 408, 414. Gaius and Lucius Caesar: Dio 54.18.1, Tac. Ann. 1.3. Tiberius and Drusus‘ advancement: see DIR’s Tiberius. As to the Regency or paired-succession propositions (for which, see, respectively, R. Seager, Tiberius [London, 1972], 18-22, 24-26, 29-38, recently restated in Southern, 162, 168; and B. Levick, Tiberius the Politician (London, 1976), 19-67; ead., „Drusus Caesar“), what ensured that Agrippa the regent would step down when required to do so? What mechanisms realistically existed for depriving an incumbent regent or princeps of his powers? Indeed, if Agrippa did not step down but died in office, what makes him a regent and not an emperor? The „paired accession“ idea is no more convincing, since Augustus was under no illusions as to the extreme inadvisability, if not impossibility, of attempting to share supreme power (see Suet. Aug. 28.1): his own career as triumvir was illustration enough of that. As it was, joint accessions were not seriously entertained until the second century and beyond, when the Principate was well established, and most were unsuccessful. That Augustus was blind to the danger of presenting two equally qualified and favored candidates to the armed forces is all but inconceivable.

[[42]] Death of Agrippa: Dio 54.28.2-3, 29. Marriage of Tiberius and Julia: Dio 54.31.2. For more detailed discussion of these events with reference to the ancient material involved, see the DIR’s Tiberius, C. and L. Caesar, Germanicus, Agrippa Postumus. See also, Birch, „Settlement“; Levick, „Drusus Caesar“; Seager, Tiberius, 35-38. Germanicus, the son of Tiberius‘ brother Drusus, was himself a Claudian but his marriage to Agrippina (Augustus’s granddaughter) offered hope of a Julian heir in the fourth generation.

[[43]] Fall of Julia the Elder: Dio 55.10.12-16; Suet. Aug. 65.1, Tib. 11.4; Tac. Ann. 1.53.1; Vell. Pat. 2.100.2-5. For the „political scheming“ view, see Levick, „Julians and Claudians.“ Fall of Agrippa Postumus: Dio 55.32.1-2; Suet. Aug. 65.1, 65.4; Levick, „Abdication“; Jameson, „Augustus and Agrippa Postumus.“ Fall of Julia the Younger: Suet. Aug. 19.1, 65.1.

[[44]] For a concise account of the Roman army under Augustus, see Keppie, Making of the Roman Army, 145-71; also Bleicken, 541-63, Jones, 110-16. On the praetorians, see Durry, Cohortes Prétoriennes, esp. 65-89.

[[45]] On Augustus’s campaigns, see RG 26-27; Keppie, loc. cit. in n. 44. On the Varan disaster, see Schlüter, „The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.“ For an overview of Augustus’s „foreign policy,“ see Gruen, „Imperial Policy.“ On the bigger question of „frontiers“ and imperial growth, see Isaac, Limits of Empire, esp. 372-418; Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire, esp. 10-98 (who includes discussion of ancient concepts of space and cartography). On the reactive nature of ancient government, see Millar, Roman Empire and its Neighbours, esp. 52-80. For the stations of the legions on Augustus’s death, see n. 48.

[[46]] On the Crassus affair, see Dio 52.23.2-27.3; Livy 4.19-20 (the previous awards of spolia opima were to A. Cornelius Cossus in the late fifth century BC and M. Claudius Marcellus in 222 BC). On Gallus, see Dio 53.23.5-24.1. The inscription (ILS 8995) is worth quoting: „C. Cornelius Gallus, son of Cnaeus, Roman knight, appointed the first Prefect of Alexandria and of Egypt after its kings had been defeated by Caesar, son of a god; he [Gallus] was twice victor in pitched battles during the Theban revolt, within 15 days, in which he defeated the enemy; he took by assault five cities (Boresos, Coptus, Ceramice, Diospolis Magna, and Opheium) and captured the leaders of their revolts; he led an army beyond the cataphract of the Nile, into which region arms had not previously been borne either by the Roman people or by the kings of Egypt; he took Thebes, the shared fear of all the kings (of Egypt); he received ambassadors of the Ethiopian king at Philae and received that king into his protection; he appointed a ruler over the Ethiopian region of Triacontaschoenus. He [Gallus] gave and dedicated this monument to the ancestral gods and the Nile, his helper.“ A useful overview of both incidents is provided by Southern (115-17). Augustus arrogated for himself victories won by his generals: the successes of Tiberius and Drusus on the Rhine and Danube in 12 and 11 BC caused him to add two imperatorial acclamations to his titles; Tiberius and Drusus got none (Dio 54.33.5). Agrippa refusing triumphs: Dio 53.23.4 (general modesty of Agrippa), 54.11.6 (over the Cantabri), 54.24.7 (over the Bosporus).

[[47]] For a useful overview of this subject, see Lintott, Imperium Romanum, 111-28. On the consilium, instituted between 27 and 18 BC, see Dio 53.21.3-5 (quote at 53.21.6); Suet. Aug. 35.4; Crook, Consilium Principis. On the role of the imperial senate, see Talbert, Senate of Imperial Rome, esp. Part Three: Functions. On suffect consuls, see ibid., 202-7. Newly-created positions: Suet. Aug. 37. On the equestrians, see Demougin, Ordre Equestre. The rosy picture of imperial rule painted by Velleius Paterculus (of equestrian status) reflects, perhaps, not only Velleius’s sycophantic personality but also a genuine sense of gratitude toward the imperial regime on the part of his class as a whole. Note also Syme, Augustan Aristocracy.

[[48]] Cyrenaica decrees: SEG 9 (1944) 8 = FIRA 1.68. The disposition of the empire’s territories on Augustus’s death was as follows:

Territory Status Type of Governor Legions

Spain

Baetica Public proconsul (ex-praetor) –

Lusitania Imperial legat. Aug. (ex-praetor) –

Tarrocensis Imperial legat. Aug. (ex-consul) 3

Gaul

Narbonensis Public (23 BC) proconsul (ex-praetor) –

Aquitania Imperial legat. Aug. (ex-praetor) –

Belgica Imperial legat. Aug. (ex-praetor) –

Lugdunensis Imperial legat. Aug. (ex-praetor) –

Germany (after AD 9, the area west of the Rhine)

Military zone n/a 2 legat. Aug. (ex-consuls) 8 (4 and 4)

(Upper and Lower)

Alps

Cottian Imperial equest. pref. –

Maritime Imperial equest. pref. –

Upper Danube region

Raetia Imperial equest. pref. –

Noricum Imperial equest. pref. –

Lower Danube region/northern Balkans

Illyricum Imperial (11 BC) legat. Aug. (ex-consul) 2

Pannonia Imperial legat. Aug. (ex-consul) 3

Moesia Imperial legat. Aug. (ex-consul) 2

Southern Balkans/Greece

Macedonia Public proconsul (ex-praetor) –

Achaea Public proconsul (ex-praetor) –

Thrace Client kingdom – –

Asia Minor

Asia Public proconsul (ex-consul) –

Bythinia-Pontus Public proconsul (ex-praetor) –

Galatia Imperial legat. Aug. (ex-praetor) –

Lycia Free federation – –

Pontus Client kingdom – –

Cappadocia Client kingdom – –

Several client principalities – –

Near East

Syria Imperial legat. Aug. (ex-consul) 4

Judaea Imperial equest. pref. –

Several client principalities – –

Africa

Egypt Imperial equest. pref. 2

Cyrenaeca Public proconsul (ex-praetor) –

Africa Public proconsul (ex-consul) 1

Mauretania Client Kingdom – –

Islands

Sicily Public proconsul (ex-praetor) –

Sardinia Imperial (AD 6) equest. pref pro legato –

Corsica Imperial (AD 6) equest. pref pro legato –

Cyprus Public (23 BC) proconsul (ex-praetor) –

Crete was part of Cyrenaeca

[[49]] For a concise overview of Augustus’s arrangement and administration of the provinces, see Jones, 94-109. See also Bleicken, 391-438; Eck, Verwaltung, 1.83-158. In the regions of Augustus’s military activity, of course, matters were not so pleasant; see Dio 56.16.3 on the comment of Bato, leader of the Pannonian revolt of AD 6-9, that the Romans were responsible for the war, since „you send as guardians of your flocks not dogs or shepherds, but wolves.“ Sulla in the East: Plut. Sulla 12.3-9 (pilfering of Greece), 22.5 (indemnity from Mithridates), 25.2 (vast fine extorted from Asian communities). Caesar in Spain and Gaul: Plut. Caes. 12.4 (Spain), 29.3-4. On Augustus’s image, see Zanker’s seminal work, The Power of Images.

[[50]] There remains to be written a comprehensive account of Augustus’s legislation and social programmes; most of the standard biographies contain pertinent chapters or sections of chapters (e.g., Jones, 131-43; Southern, 146-52). On the marriage laws, see Mette-Dittman, Ehegesetze. On the status symbols of the equestrians, see Kolb, „Status-symbolik.“ A good example of his stiffening of the social hierarchy was the regulation of seating arrangements at spectacles by social class, enforced empire-wide: see Suet. Aug. 44.1; Rawson, „Discrimina Ordinum.“ Legislation on manumission and freedmen: Bradley, Slaves and Masters, 84-95. Augustus’s private foibles: Suet. Aug. 68-71.

[[51]] On the imperial cult, see the still classic study of Taylor, Divinity. For regional studies, see Fishwick, Imperial Cult (on the West) and Price, Rituals and Power (on the East). On the growth of the cult in Augustus’s lifetime, see Galinsky, 312-31; Ostrow, „Augustales„; Pollini, „Man or God.“ On the contemporary worship of Augustus’s numen, see, e.g., Hor. Epist. 2.1.15; Ovid Trist. 3.8.13.

[[52]] Quote: Dio 56.30.3; Suet. Aug. 28.3. Building projects: RG 19-21, 24. Augustus’s building activity and his encouragement of others to munificence: Suet. Aug. 28.2-29.5; Vell. Pat. 2.89.4. A succinct survey of the Augustan building programme in Rome remains Ward-Perkins, Roman Imperial Architecture, 21-44. On the much-studied Ara Pacis, see RG 12.2; Dio 54.25.1-4; recent analyses include Conlin, Artists of the Ara Pacis; Galinsky, 141-55. For a survey of the varied artistic achievements of the period, see Galinsky, 141-224; Kaiser Augustus und die verlorene Republik.

[[53]] On the literature of the period, consult any standard history of Latin literature (e.g., the Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. 2, ed. E.J. Kenney, [1982]); for a concise overview, see Galinsky, 225-87. On Maecenas, see Williams, „Did Maecenas ‚Fall from Favor‘?“ (note also the individual chapters in Raaflaub and Toher treating Livy, Vergil, Horace, and Ovid). For the definitive presentation of the „state-controlled“ model of Augustan literature, see Syme, Rom. Rev., 459-75. For more moderated views, see., e.g., Galinsky, passim (esp. 229-34). „My Pompeian“: Tac. Ann. 4.34.4 (the anecdote, ironically, appears in the context of the trial of a later historian, A. Cremutius Cordus, charged with maiestas under Tiberius in AD 25 for praising Brutus and Cassius in his history).

[[54]] Withdrawal: Dio 55.33.5, 55.34.2, 56.26.2-3, 56.28.1-2; see also Southern, 181-90. Tiberius’s position: Suet. Tib. 21.1; Vell. Pat. 2.121.1. Livia’s alleged involvement: Dio 56.30. Death and burial: Dio 56.29-42; Suet. Aug. 98-101. Will: Dio 56.32; Suet. Aug. 101.4.

[[55]] Original position of the RG: RG pr.; Suet. Aug. 101.4. ). For a recent analysis, see Ramage, Nature and Purpose.

Copyright © 1999, Garrett G. Fagan. This file may be copied on the condition that the entire contents, including the header and this copyright notice, remain intact.

Comments to: Garrett G. Fagan

Updated: 5 July 2004

Unveränd. Zweitpubl. v. Garrett G. Fagan: Augustus (31 B.C. – 14 A.D.), in: De Imperatoribus Romanis. An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Rulers [05.07.2004], http://www.roman-emperors.org/auggie.htm