The Augustan Empire 43 BC

For Caesar showed no sign of hurry to reach the hub of things. He entered upon his fifth consulship of 29 B.C., as he had done his fourth the year before, in absence from Rome, still in the East, where there was need for diplomatic activity and reflection (no doubt) on policy, and where a major decision was forced on him about cult of himself as the new liberator, peace-bringer and benefactor.²⁸ Caesar was bombarded with offers of official cult, in line with what was customarily offered in the hellenistic world. Dio tells us what he decided: for the Roman citizens in the East, temples of Rome-plus-the-divine-Iulius at Ephesus and Nicaea were to be the prescribed limit of official cult; for the non-Romans, temples of Rome-plus-himself at Pergamum and Nicomedia.²⁹ That, Dio says, was the precedent for the subsequent general pattern; like the prefecture of Egypt, and much else, what came to be settled policy sprang from a quick decision made in a particular context.

The Senate, at its first meeting of 29 B.C., excogitated further honours for the still absent victor: the right to use Imperator as his permanent first name,³⁰ formal approval of his eastern diplomatic arrangements, and, on 11 January, the closing of the gates of Janus in sign that Rome was at total peace. (We can all notice, with Dio,³¹ that campaigns were going on in Spain, Gaul and Africa, but the Romans meant peace as far as they were concerned, and the 'business-as-usual' foreign triumphs by which the aspiring leaders of the Republic brought themselves to prominence, and which had gone on, significantly, all through the triumviral period, were still going on.)

Caesar came leisurely home. In August he was back on Italian soil (Virgil and Maecenas read the Georgics to him at Atella);³² and on 13, 14 and 15 August he celebrated the only three triumphs he was ever to celebrate: for his Dalmatian campaigns of 35-33 B.C., for Actium, and for Egypt. His sister's son Marcus Claudius Marcellus, and his stepson, Tiberius Claudius Nero, coeval, born in 42 B.C., rode with the triumviral carriage.There were gladiatorial and beast shows, a distribution of 400 sesterces per person to everybody 'from the booty', and a present to discharged soldiers of 1,000 sesterces per head. On 18 August came another ceremony: the dedication, on their completion, of two struc­tures in the Forum Romanum proclaiming the glory of the gens lulia,³³ the temple of divus lulius at the southern end and the new senate-house, the Curia lulia, at the northern. The new Curia housed the statue of Victory from Tarentum and the statue of 'Venus rising' by Apelles, purchased by Caesar expressly; and outside the new temple were placed

^a Habicht 1973 (f 134) 55-64. ²⁹ Dio li.20.6-9.

³⁰ So defacto on coins already in the triumviral period. ³¹ Dio li.20.5.

Donatus, Life of Virgil, from Suetonius' hives of tbe Poets (ed. Rostagni 1956 (в 153) 89).

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Transformation of the Forum Romanum, Simon 1986 (f 577) 84-91.

the rostra captured at Actium, to face the rostra at the other end of the Forum (in their new Caesarian location). Noting these details is not to descend into triviality; they are the first of many examples to come of political statements made through visual monuments.

Caesar and the chief among all his collaborators, Agrippa, were granted censoriapotestas, the authority possessed by censors, with which, in 2 8, being both also the consules ordinarii of the year, they carried out the first solemn lustration of the Roman people since 70 B.C. They also carried out a revision of the senate-list, lectio senatus, which obliged numerous senators to resign. It was the first of several purges of the curial order, but one should be aware of incautious inferences from the story that Caesar and Agrippa wore breastplates under their togas at that lectio. Of course, assassination was always a possibility, but the idea that the purge in 28 B.C. was for the rooting out of irredentist Antonians is simplistic, because such enemies were hardly to be scotched merely by excluding them from the Curia. The Senate had, notoriously, been grossly enlarged by the introduction of people whom the rest of that body regarded as socially unworthy, and in the restoration of the status quo ante which — as will be seen - was afoot, a return to a normalized Senate was in the interest of the senatorial order itself. Furthermore, if Caesar was going to set up a committee chosen by lot from the senators to play some role in the preparation of public business,³⁴ it would need first to shed its unsuitables. Dio mentions here (it is the first of many new regulations governing senatorial affairs) a new rule that senators might only leave Italy-Sicily with Caesar's permission: hitherto the Senate itself had been the licensing authority.³⁵