The Augustan Empire 43 BC

The impression of a political standstill is doubtless false, but not much can be done to compensate. One important experiment of 4 в.с. serves to help fill the gap: it is known only from an inscription.¹⁵⁴ By a senatus consultum of that year, on a proposal from Augustus, a novel, expedited procedure became available to provincials alleging extortion by Roman magistrates, in all but the gravest (i.e. capital) cases. It probably was genuinely quicker; on the other hand it contained an unadvertised advantage for senatorial governors by enabling them to be tried by a committee of their peers instead of the mainly non-senatorial juries of the quaestio repetundarum.

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But 2 B.C. was a year of crisis — or so it has been called. Certainly it contained paradox enough to satisfy any novelist. It began with a tremendous burst of ceremony, symbolism and festivity. Augustus was sixty; he was consul ordinarius (he had taken the consulship in 5 B.C. to preside over the debut of Gaius Caesar, and now did the same for Lucius); and on 5 February he was officially designated pater patriae, 'Father of the Nation'. The title crowns the Res Gestae, and Suetonius quotes the very words in which it was bestowed and accepted.¹⁵⁵ It was not (though historians recently have tried to make it) a constitutional ^Ii4 EJ² j11, v. is» Suet. Aug. 58.2.

statement, nor a symbol that the state was ultimately governed by the concept of patria potestas, nor an ingeniously invented jurisprudential basis for equating attacks on the 'divine family' with treason against the state.¹⁵⁶ It was an honour- an extension of the title parens patriae that had been accorded to Marius, to Cicero, and to Iulius Caesar, a supremely high public decoration.

Augustus' quidpro quo was (besides a distribution of money) some very grand consular games - a new set, the ludi Martiales. The name was not fortuitous, for on 12 May¹⁵⁷ the two young Caesars dedicated the most symbolic and triumphalist of all the Augustan public buildings, the temple of Mars Ultor at the far end of the new Augustan Forum, where those long-ago recovered standards would repose permanently. With its porticoes, friezes and caryatids, and the statues of all the Roman triumphatores,¹⁵⁸ the Augustan Forum is the building that must be most attentively listened to. Its emphasis is, actually, not so much on the 'divine family' (and we may be inclined to guess why not) as on victory and the long, successful tale of Roman imperialism: hard, bold, assertive, confident — and for constant public use, especially for law-courts.¹⁵⁹ And, in celebration of the celebration, another marvellous entertainment was provided, the 'naval battle of the Greeks and Persians', in a specially constructed artificial lake beside the Tiber; that, too, is recalled with pride in the Res Gestae.

So it was a many-sided paradox that, later in that year, lulia, the daughter of Augustus, was deported to the island of Pandateria. Her mother Scribonia went with her into exile. Multiple adulteries were the charge against lulia, or the excuse.¹⁶⁰ Tacitus says that Augustus chose to treat those adulteries as treason,¹⁶¹ implying that he did not believe Iulia's offence to have been treason; but modern historians have woven here a tale of a major attempt at a coup d'etat. It ought to be allowed, in any case, that immorality at the heart of that 'divine family' that Augustus wanted as the paradigm for his society was a blow to pride and optimism in the year of the title pater patriae; and, further, that lulia, like Tiberius, was committing the crime of repudiating her role in the scenario as composed by her father. That might be enough and to spare. It is the involvement, as the foremost among Iulia's alleged lovers, of Iulius Antonius that, to some detective minds, has suggested more.¹⁶² He was either executed or forced to commit suicide: the other named men

¹⁵⁶ Contra, respectively, Salmon 19 j 6 (c 204); Lacey'Patria Potestas', in Rawson 1986 (f 54)121- 44; Bauman 1967 (f 640) 255-9. ¹⁵⁷ For this date, rather than in August, Simpson 1977 (f 578).

¹⁵⁸ Zanker n.d. [л 1968] (f 625); Zanker 1987 (p 652) 215. It had been long in building: Macrob. Sat. 11 4.9. Forum dedicated earlier than temple: Degrassi 194; (f 546).

^1W Suet. Aug. 29.1-2; tablets from Puteoli, Camodeca 1986 (f 511). ¹⁶⁰ Dio lv. 12.10-16.

i«i Xac. Ann. in. 24.2. ¹⁶² It did not to Tacitus, Ann. iv.44. j; but cf. Sen. De Brev. Vit. 4.5.