The Augustan Empire 43 BC

official powers lapsed and required renewal. Needless to say, they were duly renewed, for a cautious five years, including Agrippa's tribunician power.¹³⁵ A tiresome complication is added to the story of official powers by Dio's statement that the cura morum of Augustus was renewed in 12 b.c. for five years;¹³⁶ for, if Augustus possessed it at all, he had had it, on Dio's own account, for five years from 19 b.c., and its renewal should have occurred two years sooner. In the Res Gestae it is asserted that the offer of a cura morum was made again in 11 b.c., but declined. There was, however, a revision of the Senate list in 11 b.c., performed by virtue of censoria potestas; perhaps Dio's garbled tale is an echo of that temporary grant. A much more significant constitutional fact is that in 1 3 b.c. Agrippa's imperium was, at last, defined as maius.¹³⁷ For a brief span he and Augustus had equal formal authority as rulers of the Roman world; it was a joint rule of two colleagues, the one superior to the other only in auctoritas. We notice the immense significance of that experiment all too little because fate decreed that it should be so brief; for in March 12 b.c., only a few days after another great ceremony, stressed in the Res Gestae, the solemn assembly of the Roman people at which, at long last, Augustus became pontifex maximus,^m Agrippa died.¹³⁹ Catastrophe following hard on the heels of triumph is an obstinate motif in the story of the age.

But the engine of Roman imperialism, having been turned on, was not allowed to falter: Tiberius Nero and Nero Drusus embarked at once on their great joint aristeia of 12—9 b.c. in the north, and Augustus set himself at Aquileia and other northern towns, to be in touch with the grand strategy. Tiberius already knew, before he left for Illyricum, what he was going to have to do: divorce Agrippa's daughter, Vipsania, by whom he had a son, and marry lulia, Agrippa's widow. The marriage took place in 11 b.c., and caused all parties untold misery: lives sacrificed to duty. Augustus was relentless in his demand for co-operation, from high as from low, and there are straws in the wind, by the middle of the reign, that not even those well-disposed in general were keen to co­operate on his stern terms. Hence various experiments to get the Senate to work properly, and to encourage the elite not to turn their backs on public service, which belong in this decade.¹⁴⁰

To celebrate the second year of the northern campaigns, in which Drusus, the younger stepson but the favourite of the ruler and the public,¹⁴¹ had the more spectacular part, both he and Tiberius were voted ovations and ornamenta triumphalia, and in their honour there was a

¹³⁵ Diouv.28.1. ¹³⁶ Diouv.50.1. ¹³¹ Dio Liv.28.1; see above, n.i 13.

RG 10. The former triumvir Lepidus had never been deprived of that priestly office, and had remained a senator until his death, though not permitted to live in Rome.

The consular Fasti of 12 b.c. are strange: Syme deduces plague.

See ch. 5 below, pp. 124-5. ^1,1 Tac. Am. 11.41.5, favor vulgi.

distribution of 400 sesterces per head and games were held.¹⁴² But then Octavia died, Augustus' sister and Antony's widow, who had given and inspired devotion. Drusus spoke the laudation, as her son-in-law.

For the third year, 10 B.C., Augustus accompanied the headquarters to Gaul, where the 'Altar at the Confluence of Rhone and Arar' was dedicated as a focus in the West for cult of the ruler, and, on the selfsame day, the future emperor Claudius was born, son of Drusus and the younger Antonia. (The prevailing view, drawing an inference from Dio, is that the dedication was in 12 в.с. It involves a strained interpretation of Suetonius' 'selfsame day'; and Augustus could not have been present at Lugdunum in that year, whereas in 10 we have corroboration from a papyrus that he was.)¹⁴³ In the winter Drusus did not return to Rome, but entered upon his consulship of 9 B.C. in absence; and in that year he carried Roman arms to the river Elbe. Those were noteworthy military achievements: Augustus and both his stepsons took imperatorial salu­tations, Tiberius celebrated the ovation voted to him, and Drusus was due to celebrate his. Whereupon death struck again: Drusus, the darling of all, died, in his consular year, aged 29, on 24 September - there is no record of any suffect consul being created to fill the brief vacancy. Tiberius made all speed, and, according to Dio, just managed to greet his brother before he died.[205] For Tiberius above all it was a catastrophe: as a united force they had had much to achieve.