The Augustan Empire 43 BC

Finally, as to social and moral attitudes, in literature and life: Augustus proposed, in certain matters, standards stiffer than those to which part, at least, of the leading class were accustomed. Resistance to the legislation about sexual behaviour, marriage, celibacy and childlessness (and to the direct taxation of cives Romanil) was vociferous. On the other hand, the very practical case of high-status people engaging in theatrical and gladiatorial performances, and of the attempts by the Senate as well as Augustus to prohibit such conduct,[288] brings out the feature that the elite had motives for maintaining its own cohesion by drawing the bounds of accepted standards more tightly. Nevertheless, we can appreciate why, more than anything else, it was Augustus' daughter who broke the spell of Augustus' vision - the candid and caustic Iulia, who did every bit of her duty in her dynastic role but refused to bound her life with demure domesticity.

Some bons mots of Iulia survived, as did some of her father's[289] - and of his opponents. It is not right to imply (though that is sometimes done) that the voice of opposition was somehow suppressed from the historical record, for plenty of it has come down to us, not only in anecdotes but in whole passages in the chief historians where editors point out that the writer is 'following a hostile source'.

And the poets?[290] They have been seen by some as purveyors of propaganda, drafted in detail by someone for them to versify: for how else could their images correspond so well with those of the visual monuments? Patronage certainly demanded its quid pro quo, and it was open and explicit in that age: the frankest statement is the preface of Vitruvius' De Architectural We must beware of hypocrisy: we find no difficulty about accepting that the epigrammatists Crinagoras and Antipater wrote to order for the 'divine family' and others, or that the panegyrist of Messalla or the writer of the Consolatio ad Lit/iam were clientes, so why should we doubt it of the patriotic purple passages in the Aeneid, the 'Roman Odes' of Horace, the Carmen Saeculare, or Propertius' celebrations of Roman legend? Tibullus, precisely because he never belonged to the crucial salon, could stay cool and aloof from the Augustan mystique, and Ovid was able to take on the role of cynic and 'debunker' for the same reason, while Propertius trod a complicated middle ground. It is in Ovid and Propertius that we meet most explicitly the 'alternative life style', the cult of the clandestine love-affair, the theme of militia amoris, or 'love, the true enlistment', and the cry that 'there shall no soldier be born of thee and me'.¹³⁵ Yet even among the 'establish­ment' poets there occurred recusatio, the elegant refusal of commissions: Augustus never got the simply conceived epic of his Res Gestae that he would have liked, nor the revival of good old native drama.¹³⁶ A recent tendency goes further, detecting concealed sniping even in the most panegyrical works. Is fulsomeness of praise, then, a form of deliberate 'overkill'? Is the Aeneid, actually, a condemnation of Augustan trium- phalism (since it is, admittedly, not a naive affirmation)? Some recent claims may come to be thought exaggerated: what it is certainly important not to forget is that, with the exception of Ovid, the minds and hearts of the major poets — and of Livy — were formed before Augustus ever became Augustus, and so were his mind and heart. Their praise of peace and the unity of Italy and Rome's mission, their vision of the 'new age', grew out of the experiences of the late Republic and the triumviral age, and Augustus, their coeval, was the fortunate inheritor of those sentiments: he did not have to drum them up. It may be that all of them, includinghimselj, as time went on, came to perceive only too well the price that had to be paid for the 'Augustan Peace'.

For the Augustan creation perpetuated some of the ruthlessness of its origins. Certainly, in the 'police states' that we nowadays know, the ordinary folk as well as their betters are under fear and compulsion - the informer in the pub and the apartment block, the exclusion of the dissident from employment and of his children from education, the bloody suppression of meetings and arrest of popular leaders. The Augustan regime did not possess the apparatus of ideological tyranny to operate on that global scale, though every provincial governor's duty of 'maintaining the peace' included keeping a sharp eye on public meetings, and both abroad and in Rome the collegia were anxiously controlled. In Rome, too, the Egnatius episode shows that the government would not tolerate a successful demagogue; and the city was heavily policed at the crisis of a.d. 6.