The Augustan Empire 43 BC

The creation of public spaces advertising the triumphant glory of Rome was proceeding also in newly conquered lands — in, for example, the major new cities of Colonia Augusta Praetoria (Aosta) and Colonia Augusta Emerita (Merida), both of them settlements of retired soldiers. A second closing of 'the gates of Janus signalized the all-too-incomplete victory in Spain.⁶⁴ Meanwhile, to Tarraco flocked the world's embassies: Parthians, Scyths, Indians, delegations from Greek cities. There could be no doubt where policy was being made; and that was the reverse of the coin, the disadvantage of absence, for not even a pretence could there be made of senatorial involvement. Incidentally, Augustus' wife, Livia Drusilla, was always at his side, whether on tour or at home. But there was no son of that marriage, a fact which remains a mystery.

⁴² Zanker 1987 (f 652) 144-8.

Not like the Hadrianic rotunda to be seen today, and facing in the opposite direction. Coarelli 1983 (f 116).

Oio dates the closing to 2] b.c., liii.27.1; and that is certainly before Augustus got back to Rome.

30-17 в.с.

Hence the major preoccupation of the sick ruler at Tarraco was: what happens if I die tomorrow? The answer arrived at, of immense signifi­cance (and hardly what Livia Drusilla can have advised), was to marry his two nearest blood relations to each other, his daughter lulia, aged fourteen, to his sister's son, Marcellus, aged seventeen. In 24 в.с. Marcellus was admitted to the Senate with the rank of one who had already held the praetorship and with the promise of an early consulship, and in 23, to enhance his popular image, he was made aedile and Augustus contributed to make his aedilician games especially note­worthy.⁶⁵ We ought not to be puzzled at the paradox of a regime carefully founded on the ostensible principle of election to offices, all of whose successive rulers, including the high-minded Marcus Aurelius, thought in exclusively dynastic terms about the succession. Paradox it is, but not novel; on the contrary, rooted in the mentality of the governing class of the Republic, whose young hopefuls had in each generation to compete for the people's votes to obtain office and so 'stay in the club', but felt themselves entitled by descent to be the competitors, and whose major families expected the highest honours for their sons. Augustus' solution, then, was, mutatis mutandis, a traditional one: to see that his natural dynastic successors were placed in the appropriate positions of office. The one idiosyncrasy was his very strictly 'genetic' concept of the succession: it was the blood of his family that was to prevail over all. It is easy to perceive the difficulty, namely that he had to make, and be seen to be responsible for, the choices that, in the Republic, the populus Komanus had made. Tiberius, for example, the son of Livia Drusilla, coeval with Marcellus: what of him? He must play second fiddle. In 24 he was elected quaestor for 23 - a step behind Marcellus - and allowed to stand for further offices five years ahead of normal. Or what of Agrippa, the main architect of victory, guarantor of stability, and focus of plebeian support? He had, at all events, no son. If mortality were to strike Augustus now, he alone could conceivably carry on the regime as they had planned it. Would he do so faithfully in the name of Marcellus and lulia? Well, he presided over the marriage ceremonies, which suggests that he supported the solution — except that Augustus was never sensitive to the feelings of those closest to him.

Augustus struggled home at the end of 25. He entered on his tenth consulship on the road from Spain to Rome; and on that day, 1 January 24 B.C., the Senate took an oath to uphold his acta, and it was announced that he would make a present to the plebs of 400 sesterces per person. Whereupon the Senate, according to Dio, 'released him from all compulsion of the laws',⁶⁶ which meant, goes on Dio, that Augustus was

The vela. Prop. 111.18.13. Crinagoras, Poems x and xi, ed. Gow and Page 1968 (в 6j).

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Dio liii.z8.2.