The Augustan Empire 43 BC

A distinction can properly be made between political and ideological dissent within the Roman people (which is really our theme) and the resistance of conquered peoples to Roman imperialism. Of the latter there was enough and to spare, but the only question about it needing to be raised here is how Augustan rule was viewed in the Greek half of Rome's dominions. For the Greek world too, was a conquered world. Most of it, indeed, had been conquered already under the Republic, and the 'intellectual opposition' (a well-worn topic)¹²⁵ was rather to Rome in general than to the Augustan rearrangements — though it was them that Alexandria long bitterly resented.¹²⁶ By and large, the ruling classes, to whom the Augustan effort was mainly addressed, were glad of the 'Augustan Peace', which perpetuated their own local predominance; and there was no shortage of leading families eager for Roman citizenship. If

Virg. Aen. vi.8ji; Lucr. v.1129-30.

D'Elia 193 5 (в 41); La Penna 1963 (в 102).

'M See the collections of papers in Pippidi 1976 (а 72л) and Yuge and Doi 1988 (a i i i).

Bowersock 1965 (c 39) ch. 8.

Hence the 'Acts of the Pagan Martyrs': for the Augustan items that may belong to them, see Musurillo 1954 (в 381) no. 1; POxy 3020; POxy 2435, verso ( = EJ² 379).

they did not 'rally to the support of the Principate',¹²⁷ they did not rally against it. The two expatriate Greek intellectuals in Rome of the Augustan time of whose writings the most survives today, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Strabo of Amaseia, were enthusiastic supporters; if the rest of the Greek world was cooler, it was not estranged.

Coming, however, to Roman opposition to Augustus, we should first remember that there were conspiracies, numerous, it appears,¹²⁸ and spanning his whole reign. Heads of state are, notoriously, at the mercy of plain and simple assassination attempts by individuals, but it was - presumably - Augustus' triumph not to bring upon himself a conspiracy of an entire section of the governing class, as Iulius Caesar had done. As to conspiracy by factions within the 'divine family', reasons have been given for wariness in the face of some sensational hypotheses; in so far as such conspiracies existed, they seem to have been directed against the succession of Tiberius, and, in the end, by him against residual rivals.

More generally, however, we have to do with what was described earlier as resistance to playing the game by Augustus' rules and subscribing to the Augustan ethic. Modern studies place emphasis on the 'crisis of recruitment' of the senatorial class and Augustus' continual battle against the apathy of senators towards attendance in the Curia; they invite attention, too, to the 'crisis of recruitment' of the armed forces in the last decade of the reign. And, lastly, recent studies of Augustan Latin literature have dwelt upon the themes of resistance to tyranny, revolt against crude demands for panegyric and conformity, and covert undermining of the official ethic and promotion of an alternative ideology of 'love, not war' - with the fates of Cornelius Gallus, at one end, and Ovid, at the other, as the real, and damning, historical symbols of the 'Augustan Peace'.

As to the 'crisis of recruitment' in the governing elite, something has been already said, and a distinction has been insisted on: from the top parts of the cursus honorum and the valuable and prestige-enhancing offices of state there was no such flight, and leading dignitaries from the provinces would soon be eager for a place in the system. In the case of the armies, conscription was certainly needed at the military crisis, which shows that the envisaged system was over-stretched; the reduction of the legions to twenty-five after the Varian disaster may have brought the size of the citizen army into balance with what the recruiting possibilities were as well as what the treasury could afford. Already in a.d. 5 the length of service of legionary rank-and-file was raised from sixteen to twenty years, because time-expired soldiers were not staying on;¹²⁹ that implies that there were not plenty of citizens queuing to take over from

¹²⁷ Bowersock 196) (c 39) 104; he is talking specifically about a.d. 6.

¹²¹ Suet. Aug. 19.1; Dio liv.ij.i. ¹²⁹ DioLV.23.1.

them. But the undoubted eventual decline of recruitment in Italy was a very long-term process, hardly to be attributed to discontent with Augustus. He did not, after all, find himself constrained to raise the pay of the troops, he gave only two army donatives, and he was able to impose a prohibition of iustum matrimonium upon serving soldiers.[287] At his death the northern armies were just about to mutiny; but they had not, nor had the rest, simply melted away.