Augustus

Unfortunately, there was insufficient state-owned land to accommodate the veterans. The exchequer was empty, so compulsory purchase was out of the question. Eighteen cities in Italy were marked down for land confiscation and freeholders were summarily dispossessed. Public opinion was outraged. Those threatened flooded into Rome. Appian writes: “People came in groups…young men, old men, women with their children, and gathered in the Forum and the temples, lamenting and declaring that they had done no wrong.”

Octavian explained to the towns that he had no choice. “From what other source, then, are we to pay the veterans their prize money?” he asked complainants. This was nothing less than the truth. There was no countervailing force with which to gainsay the soldiers. Worse, the allocated land was still not enough and some men used violence to expropriate farms they had not been granted, often with more fertile fields. In many parts of Italy, law and order were breaking down. Relations between the soldiers and their commander also deteriorated, as an unnerving incident demonstrated only too clearly.

Veterans were summoned to the Campus Martius to hear announcements on the allocations. They were so eager for news that they arrived early, before first light. Octavian was late; they became angry, and when a centurion gave them a severe dressing-down they first jeered at him and then killed him.

Octavian made a calculated and very brave decision. What had suddenly become a crisis would, he judged, end in catastrophe if he stayed away from the assembly. So he walked there as planned, turning aside when he saw the centurion’s body and politely asking the legionaries to behave with greater restraint in future.

He then announced the expected land grants, handed out some bounties, and invited further applications for reward. This disarmed the angry soldiers, who became ashamed of what had been done and asked Octavian to punish the centurion’s murderers. He agreed to do so, but carefully (and wisely) imposed two conditions: that the culprits admit their guilt and that the army as a whole condemn them. The men’s mood cleared.

For much of 41 B.C. Octavian was caught between two fires. At the same time that he sought to pacify the veterans, he made conciliatory gestures toward the civilian population. As Dio put it, “He learned from actual experience that weapons had no power to make the injured feel friendly towards him.” So he no longer confiscated senatorial estates and kept his hands off other kinds of private property.

However, the veterans were annoyed by this; Dio reports that they killed a number of centurions and others whom they saw as taking his side: “They came very near to killing [Octavian] himself, making any excuse justify their anger.” Relations between them and the dispossessed citizens went from bad to worse. Riots took place, in which the two sides fought against each other in the streets. The capital and even Italy were slipping out of official control. At one point there seems to have been something approaching a general strike at Rome. Appian writes: “The civilian population shut the workshops and made the elected office-holders leave, saying that they had no need of either office-holders or crafts in a starving and plundered city.”

For years the landless poor had gravitated to Rome, and many thousands depended on the supply of subsidized grain to keep body and soul together.

Every year the city consumed between 140,000 and 190,000 tons of wheat. More than 300,000 citizens were on the dole and received free supplies of grain. Some of this was homegrown, but much came from overseas, from Sicily, Africa, and Sardinia. The fact that Italy was not agriculturally self-sufficient made Rome heavily dependent on the vagaries of international politics, just as today’s industrial societies rely on imports of gas and oil.

Pompey the Great had understood this well; in 67 B.C. (as already noted) he had cleared the seas of pirates, who had become so widespread and powerful as to blight the free passage of goods, including wheat. He began by “entirely clearing pirates from the seas adjoining Etruria, Libya, Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily.” A quarter of a century later, his son Sextus controlled these waters himself; one wonders if, as a boy, he had heard his father reminisce about his past exploits and learned of the pirates’ strategic stranglehold.

Sextus set out systematically to starve the city. The republican admirals Ahenobarbus and Murcus strengthened the blockade by standing off Brundisium in the Ionian Gulf. Exploiting the confusion pirates raided southern Italy.