The Augustan Empire 43 BC

AUGUSTUS: POWER, AUTHORITY, ACHIEVEMENT

J. A. CROOK

I. POWER

Rome's tradition of government, down to Iulius Caesar, was character­ized by distributed power and multiple sources of decision. That was never to return. From 30 в.с. onwards, the whole Roman world found itself in the grasp of a single ruler, possessing all power and making all decisions, except insofar as he might choose to leave some of them to others. We are insistently bidden to penetrate behind the 'facade' to the 'reality' of Augustus' power, and some advantage is to be gained if, to begin with, we separate the power - its extent and sources and the functions it was used to accomplish — from the authority, which was the dress in which the power was clothed. But we must remember that such a separation is, in the long run, artificial, because, in the actual political life of a nation, power and its formalizations are inextricably linked, and where authority is entrenched recourse to power is unnecessary.

Tacitus, in a paragraph which, if its hostility of tone be discounted, remains the most masterly succinct statement of what Augustus did, writes thus:"... he laid aside the title of triumvir and paraded himself as consul and as content with the tribunician authority for looking after the commons. The soldiery he enticed with gifts, the people with corn, and all alike with the charms of peace and quiet; and thus he edged forward bit by bit (insurgere paulatim), taking into his hands the functions of Senate, magistrates, laws.'¹ Both as to the use of power, and its spheres of application, and as to its translation into constitutional terms, insurgere paulatim describes what occurred with profound insight. What did not change or develop was the ruler's hold on actual coercive power: he possessed that, totally, from the start, and never let a particle of it slip from his hands. Power, he had; functions, he increasingly took over; formulations of that power and those functions he carefully fostered. But one aspect deserves to be stressed from the outset: initiative. All policy was decided by Augustus, as far as we know.² In making decisions he naturally listened to representations from, and took advice from, appropriate quarters, and, for all we know, he may have put into practice

¹ Tac. Am. 1.2.1. ² Millar 1977 (a 59) 616.

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policies proposed to him by others, though the state of the evidence makes that difficult to demonstrate. But, apart from what he might choose to leave to others, for example to the Senate, he presided over the withering away of independent sources of initiative.

Those who urge the historian to look behind the 'facade' and confront the 'reality' of Augustus' power mostly imply that he should acknow­ledge that Augustus' ultimate possibility of coercion lay in control of the army. That is a truism, and scarcely penetrates far enough, for we have still to ask, especially in the case of that first sole Roman ruler, how he was able to control the army. The Roman Republic had had no post of Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces; and, until it began to change in the crucible of the late Republic, the army had been a conscript force recruited by the consuls ad hoc, allotted by the the Senate to those whose provinciae required armies, and swearing an oath of obedience to each commander set to lead them. The triumviral age had been the culmina­tion of changes: nevertheless, it was the achievement of Augustus to create a volunteer, professional army, its size determined by himself, 'de- politicize' it,³ and establish for it an ethos of loyalty to himself and the 'divine family'. That result was not accomplished in a day. One of the reasons why Augustus' formal authority cannot be detached from his actual power is that armies can only with difficulty and exceptionally be recruited and held without a legitimate claim. Augustus was, in the first years after jo B.C., consul, and the provincia he was given from 27 B.C. entitled him to overall command of the troops within it (which was most of the troops, and their oath of obedience was necessarily to him). Although for a time there continued to be independent proconsuls with their own auspicia, they did not command enough forces to be a serious counterpoise to those commanded by Augustus. Perhaps the crucial fact in the whole story is that, in Augustus' first decade, Roman citizens were tired of civil war, which had brought no advantage to the ordinary soldier; that generation mostly wanted peace and discharge, and would not have been available for recruitment by a mere new pretender in a struggle against Augustus for power. By the time that war-weariness had worn off, he had succeeded in building a new army loyal to himself, and could offer it enough reward to make service worth while.