Augustus

Alexandria as it appeared in ancient times. The view is of Canopic Way, one of the city’s main avenues. In the foreground is the crossroads near which stood the tomb of Alexander the Great. In the distance the Heptastadion can be seen, the great causeway that led to the island of Pharos and created the city’s two harbors.

Cleopatra, a portrait in marble probably made in Italy when she was a young woman. It conveys something of the charm of her personality, which captivated Julius Caesar.

Augustus’ much-loved sister Octavia. A kindly woman, she brought up Mark Antony’s children, including those he had by Cleopatra. She never recovered from the death of her twenty-year-old son, Marcellus, in 23 B.C. The marble bust dates from about 40 B.C.

Augustus’ wife, Livia, in middle age. This study, made in her lifetime, evokes an efficient woman of affairs, discreet but decisive.

Augustus and Agrippa at the height of their powers. These marble busts were carved in the 20s B.C. They are realistic character studies that illustrate the two men’s different personalities—the one astute and calculating and the other energetic and determined.

The tall man in the center of this relief has been identified as Agrippa. His head is veiled in his capacity as a priest attending a ritual sacrifice. In front of him walk two religious officials, the flamines diales, with their pointed hats, and a lictor, or ceremonial guard, carrying the fasces, an ax inside a bundle of rods. The little boy holding onto his toga may be either his son Gaius or Lucius. The boy is looking back toward his mother, Julia. The man walking behind her is probably Mark Antony’s son Iullus Antonius, later to become Julia’s lover. The stone carving comes from the Ara Pacis Augustae, or Altar of Augustan Peace. Inspired by the friezes on the Parthenon, it was dedicated in 9 B.C.

A contemporary portrait of Tiberius as a young man setting out on a distinguished career as soldier and public servant.

Young Gaius Caesar, Agrippa’s son by Augustus’ daughter Julia, whom the princeps adopted and groomed as his successor. The marble bust dates from about the time of his consulship in 1 B.C. or during his eastern mission.

Agrippa’s last son, Agrippa Postumus, born after his father’s premature death in 12 B.C. The contemporary sculptor has captured a sense of danger and intensity in his youthful subject.

This onyx cameo, the Gemma Augustea, is an example of mendacious art at its finest. Made in A.D. 10 the seventy-three-year-old princeps is presented as a half-naked youth. He is seated next to a personification of Rome, beside whom stands Augustus’ grandson Germanicus. On the left Tiberius alights from a chariot. Beneath is a scene of defeated and humbled barbarians. The overall impression is of serenity and success. In fact, the mood at Rome was nervous and gloomy, for Augustus was just recovering from the greatest threat to his authority during his long reign, the loss of three legions destroyed in an ambush in Germany the previous year.

A fresco of an actor’s mask from a room in Augustus’ house on the Palatine Hill, which may have been his bedroom. The princeps enjoyed theater and, to judge by his last words, saw himself as a performer. He asked the people around his bedside: “Have I played my part in the farce of life well enough?”

This image of Augustus is a majestic statement in stone of his imperium and auctoritas, his power and authority. Probably made in A.D. 15, the year after his death, it shows him as a beautiful young man, whose ageless features combine aspects of his actual appearance and the classic lineaments of the god Apollo, Augustus’ favorite in the Olympian pantheon. Found at his wife Livia’s villa at Prima Porta outside Rome.

XXI

GROWING THE EMPIRE

17–8 B.C.

As so often, it is as well to look below the surface of what the princeps said to what he exactly did. At bottom, he was an aggressive imperialist. Under his rule, Rome gained more new territory than in any comparable period in its previous history. His real position is set out in his official autobiography, Res Gestae, where he boasts: “I enlarged the territory of all provinces of the Roman People on whose borders were people who were not yet subject to our imperium.”

Public opinion expected nothing less of Rome’s ruler. Republican law had forbidden the Senate to declare war without provocation, without a casus belli, and indeed Rome (like Great Britain two millennia later) had acquired much of its eastern empire without altogether intending to do so. But now the idea that Rome had an imperial destiny was one of the ways by which the regime justified itself in the public mind.