Augustus

Dio preserves an unconvincing tale that echoes one told of Alexander the Great’s mother and was no doubt designed to encourage a direct comparison. When Julius Caesar decided to make Octavian his heir, he was influenced by “Atia’s [his mother’s] emphatic declaration that the youth had been engendered by Apollo; for while sleeping in his temple, she said, she thought she had intercourse with a serpent, and it was this that caused her at the end of her pregnancy to bear a son.”

On the day of Octavian’s birth, Atia dreamed that her intestines were raised up into the sky and spread out all over the earth, and during the same night her husband, Octavius, thought that the sun rose from her womb. The following day the elder Octavius came across a learned expert on divination, Publius Nigidius Figulus, and explained what had happened. Figulus replied: “You have begotten a master over us!”

An even grander (and even less likely) endorsement was devised: one night the elder statesman Cicero dreamed that Jupiter was going to appoint a senator’s son as ruler of Rome. The boys all presented themselves at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Best and Greatest) on the Capitol. The statue of Jupiter stretched out its hand and said: “Romans, you shall have an end to civil wars, when this boy becomes your leader.”

Another senior senator and leading traditionalist, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, had a similar experience: when the boy was walking in a procession to the same temple of Jupiter, Catulus saw the god throw what looked like a figurine of Rome in the form of a goddess into the lap of his toga.

There is ingenious method behind these stories. The three men cited were safely dead, so they could not be invited to confirm or deny their accuracy. In fact, Catulus died before Octavian’s fourth birthday, rather early for the young hopeful to be taking part in a public ceremony.

More significantly, Nigidius, Cicero, and Catulus had all been distinguished republicans. They had opposed Julius Caesar, and the first two had sided with Pompey in the civil war. The point of the anecdotes is that they gave the young revolutionary, whose career had been founded on illegality and violence, a respectable, conservative pedigree.

In August of 29 B.C., Octavian celebrated three triumphs—over Dalmatia, where he had campaigned successfully in 35 and 34; over Cleopatra (meaning Actium); and over Egypt (meaning the capture of Alexandria). They were magnificent affairs, during which the spoils of Egypt were displayed on large carts. An effigy of the dead Cleopatra lying on a couch was a prize exhibit and her surviving children, Alexander Helios, Cleopatra Selene, and Ptolemy Philadelphus walked in the pageant.

After them rode Octavian, in the traditional chariot drawn by four horses, wearing a gold-embroidered toga and a flowered tunic. On his head was a laurel wreath signifying victory. Usually the general being honored by a triumph followed the holders of the offices of state and the Senate; but, on this occasion, Octavian went first, in a clear visual demonstration of his political predominance.

A few days later the Senate House, or Curia Hostilia, rebuilt after the mob burned it down on the day of Julius Caesar’s funeral, opened for business with the new name of the Curia Julia; a new speakers’ platform was constructed, decorated with rostra, ships’ prows, from Actium, and the temple to the now deified dictator, erected on the spot in the Forum where he had been cremated on an impromptu pyre, was dedicated.

Octavian had once been proud to call himself divi filius, for it authorized his power in the eyes of his adoptive father’s adoring soldiers and ordinary Roman citizens. But since the Sicilian War he had not used the title so frequently and now, from this high point of celebration, Octavian’s propaganda begins to make even less of Julius Caesar than in the past: the dictator had been an extremist, who destroyed old Rome, and the new Rome wanted to associate itself with tradition rather than innovation.

Sharp-eyed observers were struck by the fact that Octavian was accompanied during his triumph by two teenagers, riding on the chariot’s right and left trace horses. One was Gaius Claudius Marcellus, his sister Octavia’s fourteen-year-old son, and the other was Tiberius Claudius Nero, his wife Livia’s eldest son, thirteen.

Their arrival on the verge of adulthood promised to transform the dynamics of Octavian’s inner circle. Octavia was about six years older than her devoted brother. She adored her son, an attractive and intelligent boy, “cheerful in mind and disposition,” and, just as Julius Caesar had done in his own case, Octavian took a special interest in his development.