Augustus

Like previous years of crisis, 2 B.C. opened well. The princeps held his thirteenth consulship, this time to mark the entry into the adult world of the fifteen-year-old Lucius, whom he designated consul for A.D. 4.

A popular campaign was launched to confer on him the title pater patriae, “father of his country.” This would be a very great honor, seldom bestowed. It had been last awarded to Julius Caesar after the battle of Munda and before that in 63 B.C. to the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, when he unmasked Catilina’s conspiracy against the state.

Messalla was an honorable turncoat (by contrast, say, with the egregious Plancus) and continued to refer to Cassius, under whom he had fought, as “my general” even after he became one of the princeps’ closest friends. He joined Mark Antony after the defeat at Philippi, and switched sides one final time, foreseeing the ruin that Antony’s partnership with Cleopatra would bring about. He distinguished himself at Actium.

After that battle, the then Octavian joked: “You have fought for me as well as you did against me at Philippi.”

Messalla cleverly replied: “I have always chosen the best and justest side!”

On February 5, at a meeting of the Senate, this distinguished man addressed his leader: “Caesar Augustus, the Senate agrees with the People of Rome in saluting you as Father of your Country.” It was one of the proudest moments in Augustus’ life, for the honor was clearly more than flattery: it reflected genuine respect.

With tears in his eyes, he replied: “Fathers of the Senate, I have at last achieved my highest ambition. What more can I ask of the immortal gods than that they may permit me to enjoy your approval until my dying day?”

After long years of construction, the Temple of Mars Ultor, or Avenging Mars, and the huge new Forum of Augustus of which the temple was the grand centerpiece, were opened to the public. To mark the occasion, Gaius and Lucius presided over horse races and their younger brother, Agrippa Postumus, aged ten (as his name suggests, he had been born after his father’s death), took part in a staging of the Troy Game, with other teenaged riders from good families.

Entertainments included a gladiatorial contest and the slaughter of thirty-six crocodiles. The most ambitious event was a naval battle between “Persians” and “Athenians,” for which a large artificial lake, eighteen hundred feet long and twelve hundred feet wide, was excavated beside the Tiber. This was spectacle on a scale that only Hollywood, two millennia later, would be able to imitate—with the difference that in Rome, real blood was spilled and real ships torched or sunk. Thirty triremes and biremes, equipped with rams, were set against one another, alongside many small vessels. Augustus proudly asserts that three thousand men, in addition to the rowers, fought in the engagement, although he does not record how many of them lost their lives. As at the original battle of Salamis in the fifth century B.C., the Athenians won the day.

Much to Augustus’ dismay, his social legislation of 18 and 17 B.C. seemed not to have had the desired effect on Rome’s ruling class. Young men-about-town behaved as badly as ever, spending most of their time chasing women instead of settling down and pursuing politics with due gravitas.

One of their trend-setters was the poet Publius Ovidius Naso (or, in English, Ovid). He was born into a well-to-do and ancient equestrian family in 43 B.C., and his dominating father did not want him to waste time writing poetry. But this was exactly what delighted young Ovid. Once when his father reprimanded him for scribbling verses instead of doing his homework, the boy cheekily replied by improvising a perfect pentameter, a line of verse with five feet: “Parce mihi! Numquam versicabo, pater!”—“Forgive me, Dad! I’ll never write a verse.”

Unlike Virgil and Horace, Ovid never entered Augustus’ circle. This was hardly surprising, considering the subject matter of much of his poetry—namely, the obsessive pursuit of pretty girls. His Amores, “Love Affairs,” first appeared in 16 B.C. and the Ars Amatoria, or “Art of Love,” about 2 B.C.

Ovid did not believe in paying for sex and, although many of his poems may be about his wife, he enjoyed hunting down married women. He wrote a poem about trying to pick one up at a popular cruising ground, Augustus’ Temple of Apollo on the Palatine. The only trouble is that she is guarded by a eunuch attendant. The poet begs him:

All we need is your consent to some quiet love-making—

It’s hard to imagine a more harmless request.