Augustus

It was far more unusual for a family member to forfeit his or her place in the princeps’ circle. Their relationship to Augustus gave them a more or less permanent position; a daughter or a nephew might misbehave but remain a daughter or a nephew. As in courts throughout history, important relatives probably came to represent different political points of view, and courtiers gathered behind them in cabals as they perceived their interests to dictate. Thus we detect in 23 B.C. what may have been shadowy groupings around Octavia and Marcellus on the one hand, and Agrippa and Livia on the other. Policy, love, and friendship were often hard to disentangle.

Running the empire entailed a huge amount of complicated administrative work, much of which was performed by freedmen. These had a number of important advantages over family members and social equals: there was an inexhaustible supply of them, and, unlike aristocratic members of the ruling class, they obeyed direct orders. They had no political constituency and their fate was bound up with that of their employer. Crucially, they reported to nobody but the princeps, and so what they did was easily kept secret.

For this reason, little is known about how Augustus organized his staff. To judge by the officially designated separate departments established by later emperors, they may have been loosely arranged in groups that dealt with correspondence, with petitions, with foreign embassies and delegations, and with legal matters. There must have been an archiving function and an accounts department to manage Augustus’ vast wealth.

A few freedmen—among them Licinus and Celadus—became close friends of the princeps. When he wanted to be completely incommunicado he hid himself away in a suburban villa owned by a freedman who had been a member of his bodyguard. However, bad behavior was strictly punished; when an imperial secretary was found to have leaked the contents of a confidential letter, Augustus had his legs broken.

Augustus cultivated a simple, easy style of speaking and writing and disliked what he called the “stink of far-fetched phrases.” He conveyed his meaning as plainly and directly as possible; so, for example, he would repeat the same conjunction several times for clarity, even though the effect was awkward. Letters of his seen by Suetonius employed some rather odd expressions, perhaps deriving from his provincial childhood. For example, he liked to say “wooden-headed” ( pulleiacus) for “crazy” (cerritus), “feel flat” (vapide se habere) for “feel bad” (male se habere), and “be a beetroot” (betizare) for “be sluggish” (languere). Of a sudden or swift action, he would say it was “quicker than boiled asparagus.” He often wrote “they will pay on the Greek Kalends,” a proverbial expression meaning “never,” for the Kalends, signifying the first day of a month, were a purely Roman term. Favorite Greek maxims included “More haste, less speed” and “Give me a safe commander, not a bold one”; he liked the Latin tag “Well done is quickly done.”

Augustus wrote a number of prose works of various kinds, some of which he read aloud to close friends in the same way that professional authors used to do in lecture halls. They included an “Encouragement of Philosophy” and some volumes of autobiography (written during his illness in Spain in 24 B.C.). Augustus’ attempts at verse were few and far between. He wrote a poem in hexameters, “Sicily,” and a few epigrams, which he composed at bathtime.

People often wrote with a reed quill on sheets of papyrus, using sponges to erase text and clean the quill. When Augustus tried his hand at a tragedy about the Greek hero Ajax, who went mad and killed himself with his sword, he was dissatisfied with the result and destroyed it. When some friends asked: “What in the world has become of Ajax?” he replied: “Ajax has fallen on his sponge!”

Augustus seems to have been slightly dyslexic. Uninterested in correct spelling, as determined by grammarians, he preferred to write words as they were pronounced, and often transposed syllables and letters or omitted them. When he wrote in cipher he used the same very basic code that Julius Caesar did; he simply wrote “B” for “A,” “C” for “B,” and so on (using “AA” for the last letter of the alphabet).

The mornings of fasti (lucky) days were devoted to public business: meetings of the Senate (which, in theory at least, could last until sunset but no later), court cases, and religious ceremonies. So the princeps would often find himself out and about in central Rome.