The Augustan Empire 43 BC

to be 'master of himself and the laws and do what he liked and not do what he did not like'. Now Dio remarks elsewhere⁶⁷ that the emperor is 'absolved from the laws' - which was proper constitutional doctrine by his day. If that, plus 'doing what he liked', was proclaimed as the prerogative of Augustus as from i January 24 B.C., it is that date, not 31 nor 29 nor 27 nor 23 nor 19 nor 2 B.C., that would have to count as the start of formal constitutional autocracy at Rome, for both the great doctrines of the High Empire, 'the emperor is dispensed from the laws' and 'what is pleasing to the emperor has the force of statute', are inherent in what Dio says. Scholars do not so count it, and they are right not to; for even those who deduce from the lex de imperio Vespasiant that the second of those doctrines did apply already to Augustus⁶⁸ are usually constrained by parity of reasoning to admit that that same lex shows that Augustus was not, in general, 'dispensed from the laws'.⁶⁹ Such prerogatives could not have been granted by the Senate alone, and it is best to treat the alleged grant just as a proposal, made in Augustus' absence and in contemplation of his illness, that never got beyond the Senate. Constitutional redefinition was on the way, but it was to take a quite different turn.

The year 23 B.C., Augustus' fortieth, was a year of crisis, because Augustus almost died and Marcellus did die. Numerous historians at the present time re-date two events placed by Dio in the year 22 B.C., the 'trial of Marcus Primus' and the 'conspiracy of Caepio and Murena'.⁷⁰ They place them in 23, and claim that those events, coupled with the assumed disgruntlement of Agrippa with the promotion of Marcellus, were the culmination of the long tale of increasingly bold and successful opposition, nearly brought the whole regime down to disaster, and forced upon Augustus a constitutional retreat. The illness of Augustus is seen as a feint, a sharp incentive to the 'Party' to pull itself together. That transposition (with all the inferences that it carries with it) is, on methodological grounds, not adopted in what follows.⁷¹

Early in the year 23, Augustus did not expect to survive. There were, no doubt, people who rejoiced, and to whom the ruler's unexpected and rapid recovery was deeply disappointing. But at the crisis he handed state papers to his fellow-consul and his private signet to Agrippa. That was a scrupulously correct procedure. And he had not given the dynastic signal of adoption to Marcellus, not even in his will - as he was anxious to assure people.⁷² Upon recovery, in fact, he hastened to redefine powers, and, first of all, those of Agrippa. A law was passed conferring

" Dio Liii.18.1. ⁶⁸ Seech. 3 below, pp. 118-20.

⁶⁹ And historians, from Dio onwards, are wrong if they think the two doctrines 'come close to the same thing'. ⁷⁰ DioLiv.5.

⁷¹ Badian 1982 (c 14) argues cogently against it. ⁷² Dio Lin.31.1.

upon Agrippa an imperium proconsulate, probably with a term of five years:[187] not for action, but for eminence next to Augustus (and certainly not maius, for not even Augustus had that yet). Agrippa, with his new imperium, sailed off promptly to the East, to no particular activity, settling his headquarters at Lesbos and governing Syria through his own legates. Already in antiquity historians thought up explanations of this odd conduct: Agrippa had taken himself off, or been sent off by the very grant of proconsular imperium, in rage and humiliation, or in loyal co­operation, in order not to be in the path of the rising star, Marcellus. 'Crisis' historians, nowadays, prefer to see him sent to 'hold the East' because of the strength of opposition to the regime. Better than any of those explanations is to see in Agrippa's departure an experiment with the concept of double-harness at the top, one ruler in the West and one in the East. Augustus was, presumably, convalescent, and no one could know that he was destined never to be seriously ill again. Moreover, there was plague at Rome.