The Augustan Empire 43 BC

The sources of evidence for the reign of Augustus, subsequent to the 'triumviral' period narrated in chapter 1 above, are too multifarious to be described generally here,² yet in some ways they are far from satisfactory all the same, and the Augustan beginnings of many institutions of the Roman Empire remain hard to detect. The narratives we have are also of such a kind as to lure people into placing too much emphasis on minor turbulences. One or two features of the evidence need to be brought to the reader's attention. The first is that the only full-scale ancient chronological narrative of Augustus' reign that has come down to us is the relevant part (Books li—lvi) of the Histories, in Greek, by Cassius Dio, a consular senator of the Severan age.³ We are fortunate that, for a

To be read in conjunction with the military story told in ch. 4.

On the main literary sources see САН x¹ 866-76. F.pigraphic documents: F.hrenberg and Jones, 2nd edn 195 5 (в 227) (the paperback reprint of 1976 and 1979, containing important addenda) (EJ²). Translations: AN. Selcct sources in English: Chisholm and Ferguson 1981 (a 16).

Millar 1964 (в 128); Manuwald 1979 (в 121).

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introduction

good deal of the period, the full narrative written by Dio survives, as opposed to the Byzantine abridgements of him with which historians of the post-Augustan period have mostly to be content; but there are a number of small gaps, due not to any sinister cause but to the mere loss of leaves from a codex, where we are reduced either to the abridgements or to nothing of Dio at all.[169] The loss thus caused to the detailed picture of the last twenty years of the reign is disproportionately great, leaving all too much room for conjecture and making inevitable some imbalance of emphasis upon the first half of the reign.

A second feature of Dio's Histories about which notice must be given is the peculiarity of Book lii. It consists almost entirely of an artificial debate, set in 29 b.c., between Agrippa and Maecenas, as advisers to the future Augustus, on the relative merits of a 'democratic' or a 'monarchic' state; the speech of Maecenas advocating the latter is enormously the longer.[170] The prevailing view, here accepted, is that the Maecenas- speech, at least, is a demarche composed by Dio in the hope of influencing the policy of government in his own age, and cannot be used as direct evidence for what was intended or was the case at the time when it is supposed to have been spoken.

The two major literary sources, apart from the Histories of Dio, are Suetonius' lives of Augustus and Tiberius: the Lives are immensely important, but they are organized thematically rather than chronologi­cally.[171] In any case, Suetonius and Dio being non-contemporary sources, the question arises what their sources may have been, and how reliable. Of contemporary material there survive today Augustus' own Res Gestae (as well as other important inscriptions and papyri), the relevant parts of the Roman History of Velleius Paterculus,[172] and Strabo's Geography. We know that there was much more: Augustus wrote an autobiographical fragment (going down only to 25 b.c.), and there were collections of his letters and sayings; Agrippa, too, wrote memoirs, and we hear of various contemporaries and near-contemporaries who may have narrated the events of the reign - though not a word of them survives.[173] Livy continued his History down to 9 b.c.; but of that work we possess only the so-called Periochae or 'Tables of Contents', and to the important question whether Livy was the main source of the narrative of Dio forthe Augustan period as he had been for the previous period, the answer seems to be that he was probably not.⁹ That leaves the historian of Augustus in the uncomfortable position that his main narrative source is itself dependent upon an unknown and lost source as to whose credentials no judgment can be made.