The Augustan Empire 43 BC

The 'divine family' must return into consideration here, from a more conceptual viewpoint. Should we, for example, see Livia Drusilla as an 'empress', or Gaius and Lucius Caesar as 'princes'? Did Augustus inhabit a 'palace', and was he surrounded by a 'court'? The best answer to all those questions would be 'hardly, yet', and, as in the constitutional sphere, comparison with the Severan or Diocletianic age shows how far there was to go. Yet transition was certainly occurring, as can be neatly seen in the matter of Augustus' house.[274] Its nucleus was the house of the republican orator, Hortensius, on the south-western slope of the Palatine, and it remained modest in type and scale, though neighbouring properties were added to it[275] to an extent that is yet uncertain (and the well-known 'House of Livia' presumably came to count as part of it). But the symbolic significance of the dwelling was played upon with insist­ence.¹⁰¹ Augustus' temple of Apollo was built not merely adjacent to it but connecting directly with it. Then, in 27 B.C., the civic crown of oak was placed permanently above its doorway, and laurels were planted to flank the entrance.¹⁰² When Augustus became pontifex maximus in 12

B.C., a shrine of Vesta was consecrated in the house.[276] After a fire on the Palatine in a.d. 2 or 3, in which the house of Augustus and the temple of the Magna Mater suffered badly, a public subscription was got up, of which Augustus graciously accepted part; but he then declared the house public property, as being the residence of thepontifex maximus.^m A few years later, Ovid, describing how his books from exile might approach the ruler, shows - if we discount a degree of understandable sycophancy - how much more than a mere house the 'Caesaris domus', though still so called, had become.[277]

The association of the ruler's family with him took no long time to develop.[278] We have seen the 'divine family' on exhibition in the frieze of the Ara Pacis of 13 B.C., and can see it at a later stage in the inscriptions recorded in the Codex Einsiedlensis as coming from statues that adorned a gateway at Ticinum, dated to Augustus' thirtieth tribunician power, a.d. 7-8.[279] Honours, even cult, were paid in the cities to members of the family besides Augustus. To what extent the group associated, or even lived, together is uncertain;[280] but there sound like the makings of a 'court' when we hear of Augustus' views about the younger members appearing for dinner with their elders and whether young Claudius could be allowed to make public appearances,[281] and there is rather more evidence about the education of the 'princes' and other youngsters who belonged to the charmed circle.[282] The house of a princeps vir of the republican time had never been solely a haven of privacy, so it was not new for the ruler to live his life in the public gaze, but Augustus wanted his domus to serve as a universal exemplar of the values he aimed to promote.

Most of the evidence about imperial insignia and ceremonial[283]concerns developments later than Augustus: till well after his day, accessibility of the ruler and primacy inter pares remained the ideal. The orb and sceptre carried by the 'emperor', the sacred fire carried before the 'empress', belong to an ideology that was to lead to the remote and hieratic emperorship of late antiquity, and hardly began before the middle of the second century a.d. Yet some seminal elements can already be traced, for example, in the oak-leaf crowns and laurel wreaths, and the symbolism of victory-on-the-orb on the coinage and elsewhere; and

Augustus was accorded the right to wear at any time the triumphal costume, which was the dress of Jupiter himself, and included a sceptre.

In any case, ceremonial in a wider sense was of the first importance. Augustus was a supreme showman (or someone was on his behalf), and made a perpetually inventive use of the 'parallel language' to maintain himself and his achievements in the public consciousness. The games and shows are one part of the story, valuable to him to establish a relationship to his plebs, to preside over its pleasures and expose himself to its demonstrations. Augustus provided generously, adding ludi Actiaci and ludi Martiales to the traditional regular series; and there were regular games on his birthday from 11 B.C. onwards. Triumphs, the irregular spectacle par excellence, reserved after 19 в.с. for members of the 'divine family', were pretty rare, but they were complemented by the great funerals, often also with games: Marcellus, Octavia, Agrippa, Drusus. As for the posthumous honours for Gaius and Lucius Caesar, their complexity and comprehensiveness are revealed in detail by inscriptions[284] (which show, incidentally, that such ceremonies were not laid on only at Rome, but took place in the municipalities and provinces).