Augustus

Although it was increasingly clear who was in charge, the senatorial ruling class acquiesced in the autocracy because of the second trend of Augustus’ reign: the enhancement of the Senate’s workload and prestige. When Augustus developed a career structure for the imperial administration, he was not simply improving the quality of governance, but creating high-status, well-paid jobs.

Senators will also have been pleased to witness the declining importance of the people—the third trend, and one the citizens of Rome were themselves willing to countenance as they experienced the benefits of life under the principate. They had no wish at all to return to the inefficiencies of the Republic.

Fourth, Augustus introduced the beginnings of a public bureaucracy, with the increasing use of nonpolitician freedmen and slaves who handled day-to-day business.

Romans distinguished between imperium, power, and auctoritas, authority. It was evidence of the remarkable success of the Augustan system that the princeps was able to command obedience simply through his authority, and was very seldom obliged to draw on the brute power at his disposal.

XIX

THE CULT OF VIRTUE

20S B.C.–A.D. 9

The princeps understood that independence of spirit was central to a Roman’s idea of himself. His claim to have restored the Republic would not have been acquiesced to, nor his rule accepted, if he had attempted to muzzle opinion. In fact, he would have found it hard to do so, for he did not have a secret police at his disposal.

What was more, there was no need to restrict citizens’ rights to self-expression, for there was little outright opposition. The whole point of his constitutional settlement was that it attracted a broad consent among the ruling class. What critics there were could be allowed their say without risking revolution.

This is not to say that rising men did not practice self-censorship, or that poets and historians failed to flatter. As we have seen, the princeps and his unofficial “minister of culture,” Maecenas, well understood the power of literature to promote official values.

But there was another, more subtle and more compelling reason for the license Augustus allowed commentators—historians and poets. This concerned his core beliefs. Like many of his fellow Romans, he deeply disapproved of the decadent society around him, which had abandoned the severe Roman virtues of the past. He wanted writers like Titus Livius (in English, Livy) to speak their minds on this subject without fear or favor.

About the same age as the princeps, Livy was born in Patavium (today’s Padua) in Cisalpine Gaul. He made no effort to follow a public career, instead devoting his long life to the writing of a monumental history of Rome, from the foundation to 9 B.C. He was one of Rome’s first professional historians, for until then history had usually been a pastime for retired politicians.

Livy’s worldview was moral and romantic, and most thinking people of his age shared it. In the preface to his magnum opus, he stated that writing history was a way of escaping the troubles of the modern world: “Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every kind of sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death both individual and collective.”

The trouble was seen to have begun in the second century B.C., when, somewhat absentmindedly, the Senate acquired its empire in the east—first Greece and Macedonia, then Asia Minor and Syria. Leading Romans began to copy the extravagant lifestyle of Asiatic Greeks. The culminating metaphor for Roman decadence was the career of Mark Antony and his sexual subversion by Cleopatra.

This perceived moral decline was accompanied by political collapse at the hands of a succession of selfish dynasts. The greatest of them, Julius Caesar, broke the Republic, which for centuries had embodied in constitutional form the traditional Roman virtues, now lost. Although himself a dynast, Pompey the Great, who opposed Caesar in the civil war, gave his life for the republican cause, and came to be a symbol of it.

According to Tacitus, Livy “praised Pompey so warmly that Augustus [whom he knew personally] called him ‘the Pompeian.’” The historian never called Brutus and Cassius bandits and parricides, their “fashionable designations today.”

Livy was not alone in his overt republican sympathies. In the Aeneid, Augustus’ poet laureate dared to rehabilitate that most die-hard of republicans, the pigheaded purist Marcus Porcius Cato, who led the optimates against Julius Caesar and died by his own hand after his defeat in Africa.