Augustus

Unchallenged control of the legions was crucial to Octavian’s hold on power, and so he felt it important that no other independent personality should be allowed to win a military reputation. It was unthinkable for Crassus to dedicate the armor of his defeated opponent, according to the traditional ritual, in the tiny antique Temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol. So a technicality was cited to prevent him. Crassus was allowed his triumph, but nothing more is heard of him; we must suppose that excessive keenness brought his military career to a premature end.

At last in 27 B.C. Octavian, now thirty-six years old, was ready to unveil his constitutional blueprint. On January 1, he entered his seventh consulship with Agrippa again as his colleague. On the Ides (the thirteenth of the month) he made a most extraordinary speech to the Senate—perhaps the most important speech of his life. Dio gave him words that cannot have been very far from those he actually uttered:

I lay down my office in its entirety and return to you all authority absolutely—authority over the army, the laws and the provinces—not only those territories which you entrusted to me, but those which I later secured for you.

For most of Octavian’s listeners, the statement came as a shock. No one knew exactly how to react, and his cautious audience either believed him or pretended to. While he was speaking, senators broke in with shouts and interjections.

When he sat down, the protests continued. With a great show of reluctance, he allowed himself to be persuaded to accept an unusually large “province” for ten years, consisting of Spain, Gaul, and Syria, presumably with proconsular authority; he would be able to choose deputies, or legates, to rule them on his behalf while he remained consul at Rome. All other provinces would fall under direct senatorial management in the old way: that is, the Senate would appoint former consuls and praetors to govern them.

A grateful Senate voted Octavian new honors. The doorposts of his house on the Palatine were decorated with laurel and the lintel with oak leaves for having saved the lives of Roman citizens (as coins had it, ob cives servatos). A golden shield was set up in the Senate House, as he later proudly recalled, “in recognition of my valour, my clemency, my justice and my piety.”

In a remarkable innovation, Octavian was given a new cognomen, by which he was to be known in future. There had been an idea of calling Rome’s second founder, as the rhetoric had it, by the name of its original founder Romulus. But Romulus had made himself king and, according to one story, had been murdered by angry senators. A much better proposition was Augustus, meaning Revered One; and so it was agreed. Octavian’s official name was now Imperator Caesar Augustus.

A modest title was adopted for everyday use: princeps, “first [or leading] citizen.” It had respectable precedents: the leader of the Senate had always been called princeps senatus, an honor now accorded to Augustus, and men such as Pompey and Crassus had also been known as principes. A new name signified a new start. Octavian, the bloodstained triumvir, was now Augustus, the law-abiding princeps.

In making these arrangements, Augustus aimed primarily at persuading the Senate that he was not heading in the same direction as his adoptive father—toward, that is, an out-and-out autocracy, even toward something like a Hellenistic monarchy. If enough senators believed that he intended to follow in Julius Caesar’s footsteps, Augustus ran a high risk of incurring his own Ides of March.

Also, there was no one on hand, apart from the Senate, to help Augustus in the laborious job of running the empire. He needed the collaboration of the ruling class, and this they would be unlikely to supply unless they were satisfied with the new order of things.

The Senate was not quite the body it had been. New men from the Italian countryside had filled the many gaps left by the old governing families that had been weakened in the civil wars or had lost their money and estates. Many came from regions that had received citizenship as little as fifty years before. Theirs was an Italian rather than a Roman identity. Even more controversially, leading men from southern Gaul and Spain, provinces that had long since adopted the Roman language and culture, were recruited as senators. All these arrivistes saw their fate as inextricably linked to the new regime. So did a good number of impoverished aristocrats, for the astute Augustus took good care to fund them generously and thereby constrain their freedom to oppose him. He bound other noble clans to him by arranging marriages with his relatives.