The Augustan Empire 43 BC

But at once comes the counterpoint and the paradox. For on 16 January Caesar was heaped with new honours proposed by his adher­ents, above all with the name 'Augustus'; and that was a fantastic novelty, the impact of which is blunted for us by two millennia of calling him by that name. No human person had been called it before, and its symbolic range was very large. The sources preserve a tale that Caesar, or some of his advisers, or both, had first thought of 'Romulus'.[180] Some scholars doubt, others think that 'Augustus' was a second-best imposed by the strength of opposition; but it came to the same thing, for they all knew their Ennius: '... since famous Rome was founded with august augury'. There were other insignia: the 'civic crown' of oak-leaves 'in honour of the salvation of the citizens'; the shield proclaiming Augustus' special qualities, virtus-, dementia, iustitia and pietas erga deos patriamque[181](expressing, of course, what was wanted of the ruler); the laurels placed on either side of his house doorway.[182] As children of a different culture we might be impatient with those insignia, as politically trivial; but in a society in which, to be a great man, you had to be acknowledged and proclaimed as such, the names and crowns and dedications had power, carrying symbolic messages both ways, of what was granted and what was expected.

In Sextilis (or August) Augustus, in poor health again, went off, first to Gaul and then to Spain. In fact, for fifteen years he kept up virtually a regime of three-year trips to the provinces alternating with two-year stays in Rome,[183] and Suetonius remarks that Augustus saw personally every Roman dominion except Africa and Sardinia.⁵³ We need not attribute to him the passion for personal oversight — and for tourism - that motivated Hadrian over a hundred years later. Escape from opposition, at least in the sense of letting experiments simmer, may be more relevant; the desire, also, to foster the impression of 'business-as- usual': the governor goes to his province and Senate and people are sovereign at Rome. Nevertheless, already and at once, the res publico was stamped with that hallmark of a changed world, 'ubi imperator, ibi Roma', 'where the ruler is, there is Rome'. There was only one ruler now, and the world must make its way to where he was.

'Business-as-usual' included a triumph, in September, for Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus (the patron of Tibullus and perhaps of Livy), ex Gallia, but before that, in July, one for Marcus Licinius Crassus, ex Thracia et Getis. Crassus (a grandson of Iulius Caesar's triumviral colleague), who had been a partisan of Sextus Pompeius and then of Mark Antony, but, in spite of that, consul ordinarius in 30 B.C., requested the further honour of dedicating spolia opima for having personally killed an enemy chief. Augustus had it disallowed, on a probably trumped-up ground:⁵⁴ no one was to be allowed military honours greater than the ruler himself could ever conceivably have — indeed, before long not even triumphs would be permitted to any except members of the 'divine family'. But use of this incident to infer a 'challenge to the usurping authority' by an unreconciled Antonian, and a 'crisis of the new order' is altogether out of proportion. Crassus celebrated a full triumph, and the fact that he 'disappears from history' afterwards does not warrant sinister suspicions. What is more, the history of his campaigns, far from being suppressed, must have been written up by somebody, for Dio has a disproportionately long account of them.⁵⁵

Another disappearance at about this time, however, might be regarded as more of a tragedy: the suicide, in 26,⁵⁶ of the poet, soldier, and part-architect of Augustus' victory, Gaius Cornelius Gallus, first prefect of Egypt. Recent new - or newly evaluated — evidence⁵⁷ has led to revisions of the older story, that it was because he got above himself for his undoubtedly successful campaigns to unify Egypt that he forfeited the amicitia of Augustus. But whatever the reason, he did forfeit it, and the protection it afforded, and laid himself open to a senatorial declara­tion that he was liable to prosecution. Suetonius states that Augustus was distressed by Gallus' suicide and had not desired it;⁵⁸ so modern interpreters have urged that Gallus fell, not to the malice of his old chief, but to that of the 'opposition', to whom the consignment of Egypt to an

Livy, iv.20.j (who plainly (32.4) did not believe Augustus' case).

Dio li.23.2-27; and observe Livy Pir. 134-3.

Dio lin.23.4—7. Syme 1986 (a 95), 32, following Jerome, argues for 27.

Hartmann 1965 (в 241); Volkmann 1965 (в 295); Boucher 1966(0 37); Daly and Reiter 1979(0 74); Hermes 1977 (в 82). ⁵⁸ Suet. Aug. 66.2.

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