The Augustan Empire 43 BC

Details of Augustus' social laws of this phase are treated in chapters 3 and 18 below.[200] He did not accept the offer to promulgate statutes as leges Augustae, but proposed them to the people by virtue of his tribunician power, so that they were leges Iuliae. In general, they were concerned with two themes, first the fairer and smoother running of the organs of state and law, and, second, family and birth-rate — of the ordines, the upper class, which was what Augustus thought mattered. Under the first heading the major element was the pair of leges luliae iudiciorumpublicorum etprivatorum, virtually a code for the organization of the courts ofjustice (and including, probably, a regulation de vi that reaffirmed the ancient citizen right ofprovocatio). Others were a lex lulia de ambitu and a lex lulia de collegiis.^nb The package proclaimed that the traditional system of public life was to run as before, at a better level of efficiency. The lectio senatus of 18 в.с. was in the same vein. It was an attempt to reduce the Senate to nearer its old pre-Sullan number of 300, though Augustus did not succeed in getting it below double that figure. More important, a senatorial census was laid down for the first time - a minimum property rating for a man to enter or stay in the august body.¹¹⁶ Augustus wanted an old-fashioned Senate, whose members were to continue to hold virtually all major executive positions in the state, the legionary commands and provincial governorships, as well as receiving new commissions from time to time.

The second heading of the legislation of 18 and 17 b.c., the lex lulia de adulteriis establishing a new criminal court for sexual offences that included extra-marital intercourse of men with freeborn women as well as adultery, and the lex lulia de maritandis ordinibus, which provided bonuses for those with children and penalties for those not, is castigated nowadays as having imported the freedom-denying arm of the law into what had hitherto been matters of private morality and family concern. That, indeed, it did, but the perspective is erroneous unless it be observed that interference by the state in matters of private conduct was no novelty, but part of the age-old tradition of the Republic, which had comitial trials for stuprum, sumptuary laws, the Oppian and Voconian laws, and above all the surveillance of the censors, with their nota for all sorts of conduct disapproved of by society.¹¹⁷ No more than the Greeks did the Romans believe that there was any sphere of private morality separable from the interests of the community at large. Augustus was taking over both the mantle of ancient Greek legislators and the Roman censorial role that he had been offered, but not under the formal title. That is not to say that all of the elite class found the laws to their taste, although Augustus claims in the Res Gestae that the Senate was in favour of his measures.¹¹⁸

Augustus and Agrippa were in Rome. lulia had borne a second son, and the two little boys, Augustus' grandsons, were now formally adopted as his sons, taking the names Gaius and Lucius Caesar — which served plain notice upon the stepsons, Tiberius Claudius Nero and his brother Nero Claudius Drusus, as to what the future could not hold for

Whether we should add, on the basis of the Tabula Irni/ana (Gonzalez 1986 (в 23;) 1 ;o), a lex lulia municipalis standardizing the constitutions of the municipalities of Italy, is a matter of continuing debate.

Discrepancy in the sources: Suet. Aug. 41.1 gives 1,200,000, Dio Liv.17.3 g'^ves 1,000,000 sesterces. ¹¹⁷ Underestimated by Dixon 1988 (f 26л) 71. ¹¹⁸ RG 6.2 (the Greek text).

them, though it would be more than a decade before the boys could come into their political inheritance.