Augustus

Augustus introduced greater order into the day-to-day management of the empire than had existed in the past. In the absence of a professional civil service, officeholders with imperium in the Republic, such as consuls and praetors, used to govern from their town houses in Rome and used slaves and servants, family and friends to expedite business. Augustus governed in the same way, but on a much larger scale. He employed a growing army of slaves and freedmen to undertake the routine tasks of administration.

However, it was not politically acceptable for such people to be the official face of the regime. The princeps thus established a governmental career structure for the upper classes. Young men of the senatorial order who showed promise could spend a lifetime as well-paid public administrators.

When they were in their late teens, after military service, they could seek minor posts as vigintiviri (literally, “twenty men”). They worked for a year in the mint, were in charge of the streets of Rome, managed prisons and executions, and judged legal cases involving questions of slavery or freedom. They then served either as tribunes of the people (except for patricians) or as aediles. They could stand for one of the twelve praetorships, after which they might command a legion or govern a minor province. The most successful could aspire to the consulship, followed by the governorship of a major province or one of the curatorships at Rome.

The Senate only produced senior administrators, and the princeps also looked for assistance in less important jobs from the equites. Whether they were senators or equites, able men became professional servants of the state, receiving a salary and living out long and interesting careers. The fact that Augustus twice enacted antibribery laws, in 18 B.C. and 8 B.C., not only illustrates his commitment to clean government, but also suggests that his efforts may have met some resistance. Inch by inch, though, prototypes of the institutions that we take for granted in a modern state were beginning to emerge. The amateurish and corrupt mechanisms of the Republic were gradually replaced by something resembling an honest state bureaucracy.

Rome’s public treasury, the Aerarium, was based at the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum and was managed by two praetors. We have no exact information of the exchequer receipts from taxes, customs duties, and tribute payments from client rulers, but it is unlikely that large sums of money moved to and from Rome. Each province had its own treasury, from which the princeps would draw for local military and administrative purposes, and in many cases there would not have been a large surplus to send to Rome.

The main claim on the empire’s resources was the army—namely, twenty-eight legions and an equivalent resource of auxiliary units. This was not a large force for so extensive an empire, but the financial burden was considerable. A soldier’s basic pay was nine hundred sesterces a year, entailing an aggregate expenditure of 140 million sesterces. However, the real cost of maintaining the army was considerably higher, for the cavalry was better paid than ordinary infantrymen; and officers, from centurions to the legionary commanders, or legates, earned very large salaries. On top of this came expenditure on military equipment, the empire’s fleets, and the elite Praetorians in Italy.

Augustus was enormously rich. His wealth came from his inheritance from Julius Caesar, from legacies (it was the done thing to remember the princeps with a generous bequest), the profits of the proscriptions and the civil war, and large estates in various parts of the empire. In his official memoir, he notes with satisfaction that he spent 600 million sesterces on land bought in Italy for his veterans and 260 million sesterces elsewhere. In lieu of farms, some demobilized soldiers received money grants, totaling 400 million sesterces.

In addition to these phenomenally large sums of money, the princeps often topped up the Aerarium from his own pocket when it ran low of funds. In practice, it was difficult to distinguish between the treasury and the privy purse.

In summary, Augustus’ reforms of the way governmental power was exercised were not particularly controversial, nor were they widely understood to be revolutionary, when seen individually, but taken together they expressed four slow and irresistible trends. First, the princeps was accumulating more and more power to himself, whether by streamlining the legislative and decision-making process, speeding up governmental communications across the empire, or enhancing his judicial role.