The Augustan Empire 43 BC

potestas, arose as solutions to particular political situations rather than out of any global vision. What is more, by no means every element of the eventual system was in place by Augustus' death: some of the cogs were added by his successors, and some of what were, during all his time, still experiments, hardened into fixity under his successors. Whether the inventive brain was that of Augustus alone, we cannot be sure. It is possible that the conventions of ancient historiography, aggravated by the self-advertising genius of Augustus, may have caused the suppres­sion from the record of people whose ideas and influences helped to create the imperial system. But little can be done to put that record straight. A final preliminary is to observe that one may judge the product to have been a remarkable achievement without, necessarily, admiring it wholeheartedly.

The Roman Republic - to repeat — had had, by tradition and convention, multiple points of decision-making: votes of the comitia, resolutions of the Senate, edicts of magistrates, interventions of tri­bunes, verdicts of criminal juries, sententiae of lay judges in the civil courts. The most fundamental long-term political trend of the imperial age of Roman history is the dwindling of that multiplicity until decision­making was, by formal rule even, in the hands of the emperor or of those to whom he might delegate authority. When it is asked how far Augustus carried Rome along that path — the path to 'the emperor is dispensed from the laws' and 'what is pleasing to the emperor has the force of statute' — two contrasting answers are given by historians, and debate is not over.

One answer was implied in the narrative of chapter 2, where Augustus was described as keeping, and brilliantly utilizing, the old republican unwritten 'rule-book' and its well-tried terminology, and rejecting offers of powers formally inconsistent with that; but modern scholarship has repeatedly emphasized that there appear to exist a whole set of counterfactuals to that picture, which would lead to the view that, in fully formal terms, Augustus' constitutional position was quite differ­ent, and quite revolutionary. One source, above all, poses the problem: the so called lex de imperio Vespasiani, the surviving second bronze tablet of an inscription on which were set out the constitutional powers conferred on the emperor Vespasian.¹² The sixth surviving clause reads: '... and that, whatever he judges to be in accordance with the interest of the state and the solemnity (maiestas) of divine and human and public and private affairs, he shall have the right and power to do and perform, as the divine Augustus, and Tiberius Iulius Caesar Augustus, and Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, had'. If that sentence be taken at its face value, the consequences for the picture so far given of ¹² EJ² 564; Brunt 1977 (c 535).

Augustus' formal position are devastating, for in that event it must be admitted that he had, all the time, in the most formal sense,[244] total constitutional power. That conclusion is particularly welcome to legal historians, as an explanation of how it was that Augustus seems to have been accepted as the head of the legal order, which no concatenation of executive or initiative powers (which is what imperium and tribunicia potestas were) could have achieved. Numerous further pieces can be fitted into the picture, especially the remark in Gaius' Institutes[245] that'... it has never been doubted that it [a decision by the emperor, constitutio principis] has the force of statute', and the statement in Suetonius' Life of Caligula that Caligula received en bloc, at his accession, the 'right and arbitrament of all matters'.[246] Strabo's claim that Augustus had the arbitrament of peace and war[247] is another item for the dossier. And scholars have found, in phrases from the sources here and there, possible titles for the supremacy Augustus is supposed to have received - 'care of the res publico', 'headship of the common weal', 'Principate', or just imperium.