Augustus

The princeps decided to treat the setback as a grave emergency and traveled to Gaul to take matters in hand himself, bringing with him Tiberius (whom he seems to have appointed governor of Long-haired Gaul). Once arrived, he found there was nothing for him to do, for, learning that Lollius was preparing a punitive expedition and that Augustus himself was on his way, the tribal horde had vanished back into its own lands. Nevertheless, the princeps remained in Gaul for three years.

Why so long? The information that survives prevents a confident answer. Some unkind tongues at Rome supposed that he wanted to leave Rome so that he could pursue his affair with Maecenas’ wife, Terentia. This is possible—if a little odd, for Livia likely accompanied her husband on this as on his other expeditions. It may have been on this occasion that Augustus turned down her request to grant citizenship to a Gaul, and one source dates a curious (if possibly fictional) incident to this time.

Apparently a plot against the princeps was discovered while he was in Gaul, implicating among others a grandson of Pompey the Great, a foolish young man called Gnaeus (or possibly Lucius) Cornelius Cinna. Augustus spent sleepless nights and anxious days wondering whether to execute him; according to Dio, Livia persuaded him that clemency would calm his critics and so was more likely than severity to deter future plots.

Augustus was probably laying the ground for a series of major military offensives. He reorganized the army, demobilizing a large number of time-expired soldiers who had joined up after Actium and settling them in Gaul and Spain. This was presumably accompanied by a recruiting drive. The length of a legionary’s service was extended to sixteen years (and twelve for members of the Praetorian Guard). At about this time Lugdunum (today’s Lyon) seems to have begun to operate as a major mint, coining gold and silver with which to pay legions on campaign in Gaul and Germany.

In 17 or 16 B.C., hostilities opened when the governor of Illyricum launched an attack on a couple of Alpine tribes, probably inhabitants of the region between Como and Lake Garda. Then in 15 B.C., to avenge some alleged atrocities on Roman citizens, Tiberius and Drusus headed a two-pronged attack into Raetia, an area covering today’s Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and western Austria, and into the lands of the Vindelici, in southern Bavaria. It seems to have been an easy victory, for the young commanders achieved all their aims in a single summer campaign. In the following year, Roman forces conquered and annexed the Maritime Alps.

As a rule, Roman armies won their wars against “barbarian” tribes in Spain, Gaul, or Germany by a preponderance of force, but they found it very difficult to stamp out the last embers of resistance. Time and again the enemy recovered, regrouped, and returned to the offensive, often using guerrilla tactics. Tiberius and Drusus decided to prevent a future Alpine revolt by a simple but brutal means: mass deportations of men of military age. Enough people were left behind to keep the area inhabited, but too few to launch an uprising. The new province of Raetia came into being. The geographer Strabo visited the region a generation later and reported a continuing “state of tranquillity.” If so, it was the tranquillity of desolation.

Not only had stage one of the military strategy been swiftly and brilliantly completed, but in the process stage two had been launched. This was because Raetia’s northern border was the river Danube, and a little additional fighting led to the acquisition of the neighboring territory of Noricum to the east (roughly the rest of Austria). Noricum abutted Pannonia, whose tribesmen had been defeated in Octavian’s Illyrian wars; although the Pannonians had been neither conquered nor occupied, for the time being they were quiet.

On Pannonia’s eastern borders, Moesia had already been subdued, although it was not felt necessary to turn it into a formal province for a generation or so. Pannonia was a lurking problem that would sooner or later have to be solved, but for the first time in its history Rome faced no direct threat south of the Danube.

This was a real and permanent achievement, and Augustus was well pleased. He commissioned a huge celebratory monument, the Tropaeum Alpium (Trophy of the Alps). Fifty feet high, it was a great square stone edifice, which supported a wide circular tower surrounded by columns and topped with a great stepped roof, like a squat spire. On the apex there probably stood a statue of the princeps. The monument’s still impressive remains can be seen at La Turbie, near Monaco.