The Augustan Empire 43 BC

In any case, there is still more to be said about the constitutional forms in which the ruler's power was expressed. They interacted with the 'brute realities' by creating boundaries of normal conduct: the clothing helped to define the role. And the separate powers had a further usefulness: they could be applied piecemeal in the gradual promotion of the ruler's principal collaborator to the position of collega imperii. The pedantic precision of their use in that way can be observed in the papyrus fragment of a Greek translation of Augustus' funeral laudation of Agrippa:'... tribunician power for five years in 18 в.с. on the basis of a senatus consultum, and again in 13 B.C., plus, in a statute, that no man's authority should be greater than yours in any province to which the public weal of Rome might hale you'.²⁴ That careful formulation helps to corroborate the case that has been argued here, that the ruler's own powers were described in terms of a concatenation rather than by some global formula.

Auctoritas is the aspect of the forms (in the sense that it could be given a name and is appealed to in the R« Gestae) that lay closest to the actuality. It was personal to the individual ruler, and if he lacked or lost it his rule was in peril. He possessed it partly by force of personality, partly by the 'brute fact' that he held the reins of power; yet at the same time it was by possessing auctoritas that he held those reins, for, insofar as he possessed it, he had only to command to be obeyed. Inscriptions recording that things were done 'by order of Augustus', iussu Augusti,²⁵ ought not to cause perplexity: they are the reflection of auctoritas, for the people concerned were content to state that they had done things because Augustus told them to. Auctoritas was, furthermore, the link between the conformity to mos maiorum (for it had been predicated of republican principes viri) and the creation of 'charisma' (because it was predicated of the ruler as an individual): it could pave the way for the insertion of the ruler's personality in the permanent, extra-constitutional consciousness of the people.

But legal historians are quite right, that it is above all for the ruler's role as an issuer of norms, regulations to be obeyed generally and for the future, that we need to seek the constitutional basis, because that role is

²² Lacey 1974 (c 146). a Dio ui.i.i. 24 _ej₂ ,66. « _ep _tgj. _j6g

not explicable in terms of the 'blunt realities' of power. Augustus' word, though it was as well to obey it in the instant case, did not 'have the force of statute'. He was offered, as a special grant, the right to make leges Augustae, but turned it down; instead he put bills before the comitia by virtue of his tribunician power, and they became leges luliae.[251] He could summon and put motions to the Senate, but the resulting decisions were senatus consulta.²¹ His edicts would lapse unless validated, at least tacitly, by his successors (though is was probably not doubted that they would be).[252] The responsaprudentium, 'opinions of the jurists' (the jurists of the late Republic had sought normative status for their responsa,^z<) which came, in the imperial period, to count as an official source of law) continued to depend on the auctoritas of the individual jurist. Augustus, besides himself giving some responsa,[253] is said to have 'decided that they [the jurists] should give their opinions ex auctoritate eius'.[254] There are reasons for being extremely unsure what exactly that meant or what resulted from it. Some scholars see it as a takeover by the ruler of the interpretation of the law, which is very implausible; others think it just gave certain favoured jurists a status somewhat like that of English Queen's Counsel. In any case, what supported the privilege was not imperium orpotestas, but, properly, auctoritas, Augustus' auctoritas supple­menting, as it were, that of the particular jurist.