The Augustan Empire 43 BC

involved incurred mere banishment,[208] an inadequate reaction if they had been part of a treasonable conspiracy. They were members of families of the nobility, indeed,[209] and one of them had been consul in 9 B.C., as Iullus was in 10; but hardly of prominence or stature, apart from him, to justify a picture of a 'faction of the nobility' opposed to the 'radical' Tiberius. Iullus is different: son of Antony and Fulvia, spared after Actium, half-brother of the Antonias, he had become a favoured court figure. As praetor he had given the games for Augustus' birthday in 13 B.C.; he had reached the consulship in 10 в.с. and Dio's epitome states that he was allegedly out for monorchia. Actium reversed and revenged: was that the idea?

The greatest sobriety of judgment is needed here. One matter for pause is what fate we are to suppose Iullus and lulia had in store for Gaius and Lucius Caesar. Were they to perish in the bloodbath? Was lulia to sacrifice her sons? Or was the whole scheme designed to bolster their succession against Tiberius Nero? But they were secure as things were, and it was Tiberius who lived in eclipse and danger. And was Iullus to be content with prominence as a mere caretaker for Iulia's sons, an alternative Tiberius? Not, of course, that the craziness of a proposal is proof that people did not entertain it.

In 2 B.C. prefects of the praetorian guard were appointed for the first time, and some are tempted to relate that novelty to the alleged state of emergency; but caution will suggest hesitation. First, they were a pair, and mere equites at that; secondly, this was certainly not the moment of creation of the praetorian guard, which already existed. It is not known what commanding officer the guard had before 2 в.с. — quite probably Augustus himself, with no intermediary; in which case it is hard to see the establishment of a pair of equestrian prefects as strengthening the ruler's control in face of a crisis.

This is usually held to have been the season of Ovid's Ars Amatoria. That chronology has been challenged,¹⁶⁵ but Dio records some other activities of the 'smart set' that were capable of making Augustus' blood boil.¹⁶⁶ The simple man's alternative, about this story, is therefore still the best: morality uppermost in the ruler's stern plan for triumphant Rome; revelations - perhaps, indeed, made by enemies - of a fast-living set, with lulia and Iullus at its centre; humiliation and rage of the ruler matching the psychological climate of resistance to his relentless imperatives.

The social imperatives were evident in that year in another context. The suffect consuls, Lucius Caninius Gallus and Gaius Fufius Geminus, put through the comitia a law setting limits to the number of slaves an individual master might free by testament; and that may well have a relationship to another change attributed to 2 B.C. whereby the number of recipients of the free corn ration was cut down to 200,000. Too much foreign blood in the citizen body, and too many layabouts!