The Augustan Empire 43 BC

In the year 12 Germanicus was consul. He was emerging as the new 'limelight personality': Dio has surprisingly much about his part in the Illyrian and German campaigns, which suggests that someone must have been writing them up.[240] However, his consular year was anything but cheerful. Natural disaster played its part again: the Tiber in spate, the Circus flooded and the ludi Martiales displaced. A new, sinister, note is heard, of seditious literature burnt and authors punished. Dates are uncertain, but this year is quite likely that of the banishment of the abrasive, witty barrister Cassius Severus,²¹⁷ for having 'defamed men and women of the highest status with licentious writings' — not, to judge from Tacitus' phrase, the ruler himself; but the offence was treated, for the first time, under the law of treason. One of Cassius' sarcasms related to the burning, by decision of the Senate, of the writings of a fellow- barrister, Titus Labienus, who wrote history, it seems, with a 'republicanist' flavour: he committed suicide.²¹⁸ And Ovid's books had been withdrawn from the libraries. The deterioration is evident: an anxious, touchy government and a subservient Senate.

In a.d. 13 the constitutional powers of Augustus and Tiberius were renewed again for ten years, and the imperium of Tiberius was at last declared equal to that of Augustus:²¹⁹ he was collega imperii. He had saved the sum of things, twice, he was fifty-six, and his duty was now quiedy to take over, with Germanicus, his adopted son, and Drusus, his original son, as the hopefuls for the succession. The senatorial sub-committee that prepared business for the full Senate, which Augustus had always used as his sounding-board, was given a revised membership and new powers, enabling it to pass resolutions equivalent to formal senatus consulta\ Tiberius, Germanicus and Drusus joined it as regular members.²²⁰ The purpose was stated to be to relieve Augustus of regular attendance at the Senate, but one can see how it could be an organ for quiet transition. Not that Augustus was 'going downhill': paradoxically, the very next thing we hear in Dio, when upper-class fretfulness over the iniquities of the death-duty became vocal again, displays the hand of the old manipulator still on the helm of policy. Augustus challenged the senators, individually, to suggest any better way of raising the necessary revenue, and then put in hand apparent preparations to institute an even stiffer scheme (a land-tax on solum Italic urn), whereupon they decided to keep the devil they knew.²²¹

Augustus and Tiberius began a census, with a special grant of consular imperium, and completed the lustrum in the next year on 11 May. Augustus travelled as far as Beneventum with Tiberius, who was on his way to Illyricum. Velleius has it that Tiberius' journey was 'to consoli­date in peace what he had conquered in war',²²² which is an admission that there was not anything needing the attention of Tiberius in Illyricum; but the two collegae imperii could not sit in Rome together. As

^2,7 Tic. Ann. 1.72.5 with the notes of Goodyear 1981 (в 62). ²¹⁸ Sen. Contra/, x Prtuf. 4-8.

^2,9 Veil. Pat. 11.121. i with the note of Woodman 198 3 (в 203); Suet. Tib. 20-21.1. There can be no certainty just when Tiberius received that grant.

²²⁰ Dio lvi.28.2-5; Crook 1955 (d 10) 14-13. Cf. EJ² 579, which may have some genuine documentary basis. ²²¹ Dio lvi.28.4-6. ²²² Veil. Pat. 11.123.1.

in Marcus Agrippa's distant day, they must operate apart; yet, evidently, it was no longer wise for Tiberius to be many days' journey away. Augustus, on his way home, spent a few days at Capri, which he had acquired from the city of Naples, in exchange for Ischia, because he and Tiberius liked it.²²³ He attended local games at Naples, and struggled as far as an old family property at Nola, where, on 19 August, he died.

Transmission, both constitutional and dynastic, had been taken care of. There was a collega imperii in place, and he should not have too many problems, for all that three members of the 'divine family', Augustus' nearest blood-relations, lived in exile - one, poor fellow, too dangerous to be left.²²⁴ Factual power would depend on whether the system had become sufficiently ingrained in Roman political life to survive, without seriously imaginable alternative, the rule of successors less skilful and less ruthless than Augustus; and in that respect his long reign had helped to make success somewhat more likely than not. In the course of the more than forty years since Actium a new age of European history had, in fact, managed to struggle into being, but our narrative has at least shown how far its genesis was from any kind of blueprint.

Suet. Aug. 92.2 Dio Lii.43.2.

Pani 1979 (c 185) has acute, if over-stated, analysis of the dynastic situation.

CHAPTER 3