Augustus

The incidents and actions that make up a life cannot be fully realized without also conveying a sense of place. So I have sought to evoke the main locations of Augustus’ career, as they were at the time and as they appear today—among them, his house on the Palatine, the secret palace on the island of Pandateria, the low, sandy headland of Actium, and the spectacular city of Alexandria.

The Roman world is still recognizable to us who live two millennia later. The day-to-day practice of politics, the realities of urban living, the seaside resorts, the cultivation of the arts, the rising divorce rate, the misdemeanors of the younger generation: past and present have many things in common. However, certain forms of degradation—slavery, the low status of women, and the gladiatorial carnage of the arena—shock and astonish us. So, too, does the moral approval accorded to military violence and imperial expansion. Julius Caesar’s largely unprovoked conquest of Gaul was hailed at Rome as a wonderful achievement, but it is estimated that one million Gauls lost their lives in the fighting.

Augustus was a very great man, but he grew gradually into greatness. He did not possess Julius Caesar’s bravura and political genius (it was that genius, of course, which killed Caesar, for it made him incapable of compromise). He was a physical coward who taught himself to be brave. He was intelligent, painstaking, and patient, but could also be cruel and ruthless. He worked extraordinarily hard. He thought in the long term, achieving his aims slowly and by trial and error.

Augustus is one of the few historical figures who improved with the passage of time. He began as a bloodthirsty adventurer, but once he had achieved power, he made a respectable man of himself. He repealed his illegal acts and took trouble to govern fairly and efficiently.

One curious aspect of Augustus’ life is that many of the leading players were very young men. The adults who started Rome’s civil wars fell victim to long years of fighting, leaving the baton to be picked up by the next generation. Augustus and his schoolmates Maecenas and Agrippa were in their late teens when they took charge of the state. Pompey the Great’s son Sextus was probably much the same age when he set himself up as a guerrilla leader in Spain.

Augustus died old, but throughout his long reign he never hesitated to entrust great responsibility to the young men of his family: his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus, and his grandsons Gaius and Lucius. The excitement of making one’s way in an adult world must have been intoxicating.

We are right to call Augustus Rome’s first emperor, yet the title is anachronistic. At the time he was simply regarded as the chief man in the state. The Roman Republic had, apparently, been restored, not abolished. Augustus developed a personality cult, but he did not hold permanent authority and had to have his powers regularly renewed. Only with the accession of Tiberius did people finally realize that they were no longer citizens of a free commonwealth, but subjects living under a permanent monarchy. So nowhere in this book do I call Augustus emperor.

The task of writing a life of Augustus is complicated by the fact that many contemporary sources are lost, casualties of the Dark Ages: the autobiography down to 25 B.C. that Augustus wrote in Spain; his correspondence with Cicero; Agrippa’s memoirs; the history of his times by Pollio and Messala’s commentaries on the civil wars after Julius Caesar’s assassination; thirty books of Livy’s great history of Rome, covering the period from 44 to 9 B.C. Only fragments of the life of Augustus written by a friend of Herod the Great, Nicolaus of Damascus, have survived, and Appian’s detailed study of Rome’s civil wars in the first century B.C. closes with the death of Sextus Pompeius in 35 B.C.

Dio Cassius gives a reasonably complete account in his Roman History, but his style is pedestrian and he wrote three hundred years after the event. The findings of the modern archaeologist (especially inscriptions and coins) add valuable information. Neither Suetonius nor Plutarch is a historian, properly speaking, but both inject some welcome anecdotes and personality assessments.

Much more is recorded about Augustus’ first thirty years than about his later life and a thorough and coherent narrative of his youth can be constructed. However, important events of his maturity and old age call for the skills of the detective rather than the historian. Mysterious and incomplete narratives conceal as much they reveal, and sometimes only speculative explanations can be offered. For certain years nothing definite is known at all; between 16 and 13 B.C., we are told, Augustus was in Gaul and Germany, but we have no idea where he went or where he was at any particular time. For the second half of this book I have been obliged to switch from straightforward narrative to a more thematic approach to my subject.