The Augustan Empire 43 BC

graphic knowledge about the trend of the birth-rate and what needed to be achieved to change it; but he probably thought he knew quite enough, and the upper class he could, if unsystematically, observe. His legislation was not going to produce waves of stout yeomen (unless by imitation of their betters), but what he might achieve was a stable officer class. That such was his aim is corroborated by two other new legal rules that will have had importance mainly for the better-off: first, the introduction of peculium castrense, the fund comprising what a filius familias earned from, or acquired in connexion with, his military service, which he could control independently of his paterfamilias-, and, secondly, the rule that a paterfamilias was not allowed to disinherit a filius familias during his military service.[265]

Augustus was, then, probably telling in the Res Gestae the simple truth about what he conceived his legislation to have been for: 'By new statutes passed on my initiative I restored many good examples of our forbears that were disappearing from the current age, and I personally[266]handed on to posterity examples of many things for them to imitate'. That does not mean that it was particularly successful or that it was without pernicious consequences, of which perhaps the worst was that the marriage laws conjured up a fiscal interest in escheated estates that had not existed before.

j. Ideology

The act of creative policy, however, that was Augustus' abiding legacy to Rome was the bringing into being of an ideology of rule, parallel to the careful traditionalism of most of what has been spoken of so far — surprising, in that it manifests itself quite early in Augustus' reign, and multifaceted, so that to describe it even summarily involves consider­ation of many phenomena, of which the 'imperial cult' is only one. Glorification of the personality of the ruler, advertisement of his role, proclamation of his virtues, pageantry over his achievements, visual reminders of his existence, and the creation of a court and a dynasty: those are,par excellence, the things that make a.d. i 4 different from 30 b.c.

It is a difficult question how far the pattern of ideas and symbols that pervades the culture of Augustus' age was 'orchestrated'. Scholars do make such a claim,[267] and, however great the need to resist exaggeration, at least some of the broad lines of the pattern must have been someone's deliberate contrivance. Augustus was probably entirely sincere when he said he wanted to be remembered as the creator of the 'best possible condition' (optimus status), and in his delight when the crew and passengers of a ship from Alexandria put on festal dress and poured libations and cried that 'because of him they had their livelihood, because of him they sailed the seas, they enjoyed freedom and prosperity through him';[268] but into that broad river flowed many channels, some the result of more deliberate channelling than others.