The Augustan Empire 43 BC

Natural disasters, too, never ceased to punctuate the history of the biggest conurbation in the ancient world, and governments never did enough. There was a very grave fire in 7 B.C., just before the funeral games in memory of Agrippa. Augustus took occasion to reorganize the local structure of the city into fourteen official 'regions', with a devolution down to the 265 vici or 'blocks', the latter to be responsible for fire precautions. It did not prove adequate.

His coeval generation dying away, Augustus was obliged to place reliance on the younger folk. For Herod the Great and his dynastic problems and brutal treatment of his sons, Augustus had the greatest contempt,¹⁵⁰ but that turned into a terrible irony. In the year 6 в.с. Tiberius Nero received a renewal of imperium, plus tribunician power for five years, which proclaimed him to the world as collega imperii-, and at that very moment he declared his wish to retire from state responsibili­ties and took himself off to Rhodes. Augustus staged a bit of. illness to detain him, but it did not work. The historian Velleius, adulatory of Tiberius, exaggerates the consequences of his retirement into a sort of paralysis of the res publico,¹⁵¹ and the loss of the full text of Dio for those years contributes to a possibly false picture; but it was undeniably major trouble in high politics.

The modern, as well as the ancient, interpretation is that it was dynastic trouble. Gaius and Lucius Caesar were of an age to begin their progress into the limelight (and 'above themselves' already, according to Dio, who writes that in 6 B.C. the people 'chose' Gaius as consul and Augustus had to step in and quash it: a demonstration, perhaps).¹⁵² In 5 b.c. Gaius was made a pontifex and designated consul for a.d. i, and a new title was invented for him, princeps iuventutis or honorary president of the order of equites, and a distribution of money was made in his honour; in 4 в.с. he had a seat on the great consilium called to settle the fate of Judaea upon the death of Herod. In 2 в.с. Lucius was made an augur and designated consul for a.d. 4, and became joint princeps iuventutis. What is more, the coinage was the medium for a course of advertisement for the pair such as neither Drusus nor Tiberius had been accorded.¹⁵³ So, then, Tiberius moved downstage, and the questions that gather about Agrippa's departure seventeen years earlier repeat themselves. Did he go in self-effacing co-operation or in rage and frustration? Scholars have conjured up binary opposites, a Claudian faction led by

¹⁵⁰ Macrob. Sat. 11.4.11. ¹⁵¹ Veil. Pat. 11.100.1.

¹⁵² DioLV.9.1-2. ¹⁵³ Zanker 1987 (f 632) 218-26.

l6 b.c.-a.d. 14

Livia Drusilla on behalf of her sons (now reduced to one) and a Julian, led by Iulia on behalf of hers, whose opposition was destined to tear at the vitals of the regime until Augustus' death, and beyond. That picture may be not so much wrong as a bit too simple. First, there could never have been any doubt, from the moment that Gaius and Lucius were adopted, that if Augustus, and they, survived long enough for them to grow to manhood they would be his chosen successors; Tiberius Nero and Nero Drusus could never have expected a role greater than that of Agrippa. Again, it was in 6 B.C., before the formal elevation of the youths began, that Tiberius retired; that elevation looks more like the ruler's instant response to, than the cause of, Tiberius' desertion. And finally, you hardly make a man collega imperii to kick him out: rather, to try to keep him. The latter end of Tiberius' Rhodian sojourn was certainly an unofficial exile; but there is a wider story to which his initial retirement belongs, the story of people's growing unwillingness to work with and for Augustus, and to play their roles in the drama according to his script. Tiberius Nero, with the independent spirit he had shared with his brother (and shared, to their mutual cost, with his wife, Augustus' daughter), saw himself type-cast as collega imperii, the new Agrippa, and rebelled. To Agrippa, his status as collega imperii had been an insurance for the succession of his sons, and part, anyway, of a lifelong collabor­ation. For Tiberius it was neither: therefore, Augustus must carry on alone.