Augustus

The Julii traced their ancestry to before the city’s foundation, traditionally set at 753 B.C. The legend went that when, after a ten-year siege, the Greeks sacked the city of Troy on what is now the Turkish coast near the Dardanelles, they killed or enslaved most of the leading Trojans. One exception was Aeneas, the son of the love goddess Venus and a handsome young warrior. He escaped the city’s destruction with some followers and after many adventures made landfall in Latium. His son Iulus (sometimes also called Ascanius) founded the Julian dynasty.

By the first century B.C., high birth was not sufficient to guarantee political success. Money was also required, and in large quantities. The Julii were impoverished; for long generations few of them had won important posts in the honors race. Like aristocratic families before and since that fall on hard times, they used marriage as a means of income generation.

The current head of the family, Gaius Julius Caesar, was a rising politician in his late thirties, about the same age as Octavius. Talented, amusing, and fashionable, he had a voracious appetite for cash and had built up enormous debts to feed both his lifestyle and his career. One of his sisters married Marcus Atius Balbus, a local worthy from Aricia, a town not far from Velitrae. Balbus was not prominent in public life and his greatest attraction must have lain in the fact that he was a man of substance.

As a new man, Octavius knew that his dubious ancestry would damage his career. A commodious dowry would be of value in a wife, but what he really needed was entrée into the Roman nobility. As a niece of Julius Caesar, Balbus’ daughter Atia was well placed to make that possible. Because the Balbi lived not far from Octavius’ home base of Velitrae, they may well have traveled in the same social circles. In that case, Atia formed an ambitious man’s bridge from provincial life to Rome.

Sometime before 70 B.C., the couple married and, in due course, Atia became pregnant. Disappointingly, the outcome was a second daughter. Five or six years passed before another child arrived: a son, this time, Gaius. He was born just before sunrise on September 23, 63 B.C., at Ox Heads, a small property on the slopes of the fashionable Palatine Hill, a few minutes’ walk from Rome’s main square, the Forum, and the Senate House.

By tradition, the paterfamilias held the power of life and death over his household, both his relatives and his slaves. When a child was born, the midwife took the infant and placed it on the floor in front of the father. Should the father wish to acknowledge his paternity, he would lift the baby into his arms if it was a boy; if a girl, he would simply instruct that she be fed. Only after this ritual had taken place did the child receive his or her first nourishment.

Apparently, Gaius was lucky to survive this procedure, for an astrologer had given him a bad prognosis and he narrowly escaped infanticide. If Gaius had been rejected, he would have been abandoned in the open air and left to die; this was a fate to which illegitimate children and girls were especially liable, as were (one may surmise) sickly or disabled babies. Rejected infants were left on dunghills, or near cisterns. They were often picked up there by slave traders (although the family might reclaim the child later, if it so wished) or, more rarely, rescued by a kindly passerby. Otherwise, they would starve, unless eaten by stray dogs.

Rome, with about a million inhabitants, was an unhygienic, noisy, crowded megalopolis, no place for rearing a child, and there is evidence that Gaius spent much of his infancy at his grandfather’s country house near Velitrae. More than a century later, Suetonius reported that the house still existed and was open to the public: “a small room, not unlike a butler’s pantry, is still shown and described as [his] nursery.”

Helped by the link, through Atia, to Julius Caesar, Octavius’ political career was advancing rapidly. After serving as quaestor, he could move up to the next rung, as one of the four aediles. The aedileship being optional, it is not known whether Octavius held this office, but he could probably have afforded it.

At the age of thirty-nine, Octavius was eligible to run for praetor. According to Velleius Paterculus, he was regarded as “a dignified person, of upright and blameless life, and [was] extremely rich.” In the praetorian election for 61 B.C., he came in first even though he was running against a number of aristocratic competitors.

The two-year-old Gaius would have seen little of his father, who spent a year in Rome discharging his judicial duties as praetor. Then, as was usual for senior government officials after their period of office, at the end of 61 B.C. Octavius went overseas for a twelve-month stint as governor, or propraetor, of the province of Macedonia.