The Augustan Empire 43 BC

Disease and hunger led to demonstrations in Rome. Augustus had set out for eastern parts (we shall see why), but the disorders were too great to ignore, and Agrippa was away, so he hurried back. He was offered the dictatorship,[196] by the Senate under heavy pressure from the city plebs, which was thinking of Iulius Caesar; he was offered the powers of a censor for life; he was offered a consulship that would be 'annual yet perpetual', like his tribunician power. He made, like Iulius Caesar at the Lupercalia, a histrionic scene of public refusal.[197] He cannot have been scheming to get those offices, any one of which amounted to formal constitutional supremacy, though those who believe that the arrange­ments of 23 B.C. were a retreat imposed by opposition also believe that Augustus engineered the public outcry to give him the excuse to recover constitutional ground. If scheming is in question it would be more plausible to suppose that he schemed for a chance to refuse them. Or were opponents trying to manoeuvre him into a false step that would justify tyrannicide? Perhaps all was straightforward on both sides, for the context was that of demands that somebody, somehow, should produce bread, and Augustus did accept cura annonae, charge of the corn supply, and it is altogether too subtle to think that that authority was a disguise for total supremacy and that the shortage itself was engineered for that. Bread appeared quickly enough,⁹⁶ and for the future a not very radical experiment was embarked on to improve the distribution of the free ration: a new annual committee of senior senators, praefectijrumentidandi.

In September 22 B.C. Augustus got away from Rome, and was away three whole years. Agrippa was in the eastern lands, no prefect of the city was appointed, and the urban plebs was not satisfied: the consuls had a rebellious populace on their hands. The people in comitia refused to elect more than one consul for 21 B.C.; equally, Augustus, writing from Samos, refused to take the vacant place. Only at the beginning of 21 did the people obediently elect a second consul.

What had taken the ruler to the East was a major policy issue, and he, not Agrippa, must be the one to achieve a hoped-for diplomatic coup. So Agrippa was available to change places with him, to return to Rome, and, momentously, to marry the widow Iulia. (Tiberius, the stepson, was not offered that hand: he was intended for a career of great public service, indeed, but not to reach the summit of all things.) If Agrippa's presence, briefly, in Rome was also supposed to calm plebeian agitation and prevent the now open consulship from falling into wrong hands, his success was limited, for in 20 в.с. the comitia again declined to elect more than one consul, Gaius Sentius Saturninus, who, in early 19 B.C., found himself facing, alone, the rise of a 'people's champion', a certain Marcus Egnatius Rufus.

The garbled tale of Egnatius Rufus⁹⁷ may be not unfairly boiled down to this: he was a senator who, as aedile, had won the favour of the Roman plebs by organizing a fire service; that had taken him straight to the praetorship, emboldened by which he stood in 19 в.с. for the consul­ship.⁹⁸ That conduct counts, in our sources, as one of the 'canonical' list of conspiracies against Augustus;⁹⁹ it is puzzling why. For Augustus was in the East (and Agrippa was, in a single year's campaign, finally conquering the Cantabrians in Spain), and the problem, whatever it was, was dealt with firmly and successfully by the consul and the Senate. The consul refused Egnatius' candidature, and when a popular uprising occurred it was suppressed, in accordance with a senatus consultum ultimum, and the aspiring popular leader executed. The naive guess is probably right, that the plebs had found a new Clodius, and the fact was dangerous - but to the whole elite, not just to the ruler, so they closed ranks. If Augustus was hoping, as some authors think, that the political agitations of the plebs would lead to an enlargement of his own powers, he would not want his position to seem to be dependent on a demagogue; and if he just feared the plebs would be seduced away from him and Agrippa, he had a yet more obvious motive for wanting Egnatius removed. In any event, neither he nor Agrippa saw any need to rush home.¹⁰⁰

The sources are muddled, not least chronologically: Dio liii. 24.4-6 (under 26 b.c.); Veil. Pat. 11.91.3-4, with the notes of Woodman 1985 (в 203).

The vacant one of 19? It sounds, rather, as if the consul was presiding over ordinary elections, which would have been those for 18. ⁹⁹ Suet. Aug. 19.1.

¹⁰⁰ Agrippa's Aqua Virgo was opened on 9 June, but he can hardly have completed the clinching Spanish campaign quickly enough to be present.