The Augustan Empire 43 BC

Of the inscriptions, abundant and of the first importance, though all call for careful interpretation, only one group would really baffle the reader without a word of explanation: the lists known as the Fasti and the Calendars.¹⁰ The Fasti are chronological lists, on stone, of the annual Roman consuls or of those who celebrated triumphs, from early times, the bare lists being sometimes accompanied by brief annotations of other events. The most important surviving set, which includes both consuls and triumphatores, is called the Fasti Capitolini, and was inscribed on an Augustan triumphal arch at the southern end of the Forum Romanum.¹¹ It is crucial to realize that those Fasti are not, as we have them, age-old primary material but a learned compilation, set up enure at a single moment, not for a historical but for a propaganda purpose. Sets of consular Fasti were also erected in the municipalities, who added their local magistrates, and some corporations kept such lists: the vicomagistri furnish a good consular list down to a.d. 3. The Calendars were lists of festivals and other events organized under the days of the year;¹² there was no doubt an official Roman set, but the ones that, in more or less fragmentary states, have come down to us belonged to municipalities or corporations or even private persons. The most useful are the Fasti Praenestini, from the forum of Praeneste: they, too, were a learned construction, the work of the antiquarian Verrius Flaccus, the tutor of Augustus' grandsons, Gaius and Lucius Caesar.

The quantity of new information available today that was not in the possession of those who wrote on Augustus in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History is small, consisting of a few inscriptions and papyri - not but what some of those are of high significance. But an enormous enlargement of the historian's task in handling the evidence for the Augustan age has resulted from three conceptual developments. Scholars have come, first, to see that the physical monuments - buildings, art-objects, coins - are central and not merely corroboratory evidence: they were, to the Romans, speaking monuments, and they spoke politically.¹³ Secondly, that appreciation is part of a wider enlargement of perspective, in that we are required to view symbolism

' Manuwald 1979 (в 121).

Texts in EJ²; edition, Degrassi 1947 and 1963 (в 224) XIII, fascs. 1 and 2.

Latest arguments, Coarelli 1985 (e 19) 11 263-308.

Ovid's Fatti is a versification of the calendar material for half a year.

" Holscher 1984 (p 424); Hannestad 1986 (f 409); Simon 1986 (f 577); Zanker 1987 (f 632).

and myth-making as an integral function of all societies, and a nation's political symbols and images as essential to the understanding of any segment of its history. Finally, there stretches a vast field, on whose battles scarcely any historian has been competent to be more than an onlooker - the works of the famous figures of Augustan literature. A present trend amongst literary specialists is to see those writings as through-and-through political, whether as propaganda for the political regime or as in more or less covert resistance against it, asserting either 'Augustan values' or those of the 'alternative society'. The historian cannot avoid the challenge to regard that material also as central rather than peripheral, though his sense of the impossibility of mastering all the evidence is thereby greatly aggravated.[174]

11. 30-17 B.C.

Actium, though it is convenient to historians as a punctuation mark (Dio says we should date the years of the new ruler's 'monarchy' from 2 September 31 B.C.),[175] and was convenient to the victor as a symbol, was not quite the end of civil war. A campaign had to be mounted for Egypt,[176] and i August 30 B.C., Aegypto capta, is the real ending date, with the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra following hard upon it.