Augustus

Tipsy with sweet good luck!

But all her fleet burnt, scarcely one ship saved—

That tamed her rage; and Caesar, when his galleys

Chased her from Italy, soon brought her, dreaming

And drugged with native wine,

Back to the hard realities of fear.

In this vivid caricature, there is not a single accurate assertion. As we have seen, Cleopatra was not plotting the end of the Roman empire, all her fleet was not burned, Octavian did not chase her anywhere, certainly not from Italy, and there is no evidence that the queen was a drunk. However, it is fine poetry.

It was the leading poet of the age, Virgil, who drew the fullest picture of the battle in his great national epic about Rome’s beginnings, the Aeneid. Prophetically engraved on the shield of Julius Caesar’s ancestor Aeneas, Octavian is envisioned at the head of tota Italia, all Italy. The star or comet that blazed in the night sky for a week after Caesar’s assassination shines above Octavian as he sets sail against the corrupt and cowardly east.

High up on the poop [he] is leading

The Italians into battle, the Senate and People with him,

His home gods and the great gods: two flames shoot up from his helmet

In jubilant light, and his father’s star dawns over its crest.

Defining the past in glowing terms was only half of what needed to be done if the victorious regime was to establish itself firmly in the hearts and minds of the ruling class and of the people at large. It was also important to present Octavian as the natural ruler of Rome—to develop a personality cult and an iconography of power. This was to be achieved by two means.

First, Octavian made the little complex of houses on Rome’s Palatine Hill, where he and Livia lived, a symbol of his authority. Some of these buildings substantially survive (although at the time of writing they are closed to the public). A ramp connected them to an adjacent temple of Apollo, which was an integral part of the complex. Octavian had vowed to build it during the wars against Sextus Pompeius, but its construction only became a major project after Actium; the temple was dedicated in 28 B.C.

Almost nothing of it remains now, but it was as splendid an edifice as could be designed. Its walls were of solid bright-white marble (the walls of Roman temples were usually of brick and concrete with marble cladding). The doors were gilded and inlaid with ivory. On the roof stood a chariot of the sun. The temple was surrounded by, or connected to, a portico of giallo antico, a speckled yellow marble from quarries in Numidia.

The Sibylline Books were removed from their traditional home in the cellars of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol and stored under a colossal statue of Apollo that stood in front of the new temple. The books were a much-valued collection of oracular utterances in Greek hexameters, which were consulted in times of trouble, not to discover the future but to learn how to avert the anger of the gods. Their presence in the precincts of Octavian’s house was a telling emblem of his unique role in the state.

The temple was not used simply for religious purposes. It became, in effect, a cultural center. Remembering Alexandria and taking up a plan of Julius Caesar’s before his murder, Octavian located two public libraries there, one for books in Greek and the other for those in Latin. Medallion portraits of famous writers were affixed to the walls. Here authors delivered public readings and the chief librarian, a polymath called Gaius Julius Hyginus, taught classes.

Octavian also received a personality makeover. The object was to give him something of the sparkle of divinity, or at least of semidivine, heroic status. Stories began to circulate of his miraculous childhood and of prophecies that foreshadowed his current greatness. It is uncertain when these first emerged and whether they were invented by the regime or unofficially encouraged as spontaneous urban myths. But it is plausible that from this time new accounts of Octavian’s childhood appeared that lent legitimacy to his political dominance.