Augustus

A little to the north of the city in the Campus Martius was a volcanic cleft, at the bottom of which stood a subterranean altar known as the Tarentum or Terentum. Here a nocturnal festival was held in honor of Dis and Proserpina, the gloomy deities of the underworld. Called the Ludi Tarentini, the festival took place over three nights once every century (the interval was set so that no one would be able to attend more than once).

Augustus and his religious advisers decided to rebrand the festival, naming it the Ludi Saeculares, Centennial (or Secular) Games, in the summer of 17 B.C. (and decreasing the periodicity to 110 years).

The ceremonies themselves needed some cheering up. Torches, sulfur, and asphalt were distributed to the entire citizenry, to encourage mass participation in a fiery purification rite. Dis and Proserpina were dismissed, being replaced by the Fates, divine beings who watched over the fertility of nature and of humankind, by the goddess of childbirth, and by Mother Earth. Some daytime celebrations were added in honor of Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, and Apollo’s sister Diana. In other words, the old melancholy emphasis on death and the passing of an era was transformed into a forward-looking invocation of the future.

The Ludi culminated in a splendid ritual in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine. An inscription recorded the program for the day: “After a sacrifice was completed by those thereunto appointed, twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls who had lost neither father nor mother, sang a hymn, and so likewise on the Capitol. The hymn was written by Q. Horatius Flaccus.”

The chubby little poet of the pleasures of private life kept a straight face for once and produced something as solemn and grand as the occasion warranted. He struck all the notes that his master and friend expected.

Goddess [Diana], make strong our youth and bless the Senate’s

Decrees rewarding parenthood and marriage,

That from the new laws Rome may reap a lavish

Harvest of boys and girls.

The main message was that the princeps had brought back old Rome and breathed new life into the mos maiorum. A procession of abstract personifications was conjured up in calm, high-flying verse:

Now Faith and Peace and Honour and old-fashioned

Conscience and unremembered Virtue venture

To walk again, and with them blessed Plenty

Pouring her brimming horn.

Ten years had passed since the “restoration” of the Republic. Augustus, now aged forty-six, had established his power without getting himself assassinated. Once a faction leader who had expropriated the Republic, he had successfully recast himself as a new Romulus. The regime had laid claim to embodying the Roman state, and few of those who attended the Ludi Saeculares will have gainsaid it.

However, almost invisible cracks, beyond evidence but not beyond the scrutiny of suspicion, hint at strains in the heart of government. The execution of Murena, the estrangement from Maecenas, the impression of an alliance between Agrippa and Livia to put a brake on the princeps’ dynastic plans, the brushes with death—these all stood in uneasy contrast with the public symbolism of order, stability, and permanence.

XX

LIFE AT COURT

His daily routine when he was princeps seems to have changed little over the years and was studiedly austere. His house on the Palatine, next to Livia’s house, was modestly appointed. Its substantial remains confirm Suetonius’ description of it as “remarkable neither for size nor for elegance; the courts being supported by squat columns of peperino stone, and the living-rooms innocent of marble or elaborately tessellated floors.” The building had a private side with small living spaces and some larger public staterooms.

Suetonius also remarked on the princeps’ study. “Whenever he wanted to be alone and free of interruptions, he could retreat to a study at the top of the house, which he nicknamed ‘Syracuse’ [perhaps alluding to the workroom of Archimedes, the great Syracusan mathematician and experimental scientist] or ‘my little workshop.’”

This room has been discovered and reconstructed. The walls and ceiling are painted in red, yellow, and black on a white ground. Motifs include swans, calyxes, winged griffins, candelabra, and lotus flowers. All these images were derived from the art of Alexandria, which was popular in Rome in the first century B.C., and may have reflected the impression the city made on Octavian during his visit in 30 B.C.