Augustus (63 B.C. - A.D. 14)

Also called Augustus Caesar or (until 27 BC) Octavian, original name Gaius Octavius, adopted name Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus first Roman emperor, following the republic, which had been finally destroyed by the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, his great-uncle and adoptive father. His autocratic regime is known as the principate because he was the princeps, the first citizen, at the head of that array of outwardly revived republican institutions that alone made his autocracy palatable. With unlimited patience, skill, and efficiency, he overhauled every aspect of Roman life and brought durable peace and prosperity to the Greco-Roman world.

Gaius Octavius was born on September 23, 63 BC, of a prosperous family that had long been settled at Velitrae (Velletri), southeast of Rome. His father, who died in 59 BC, had been the first of the family to become a Roman senator and was elected to the high annual office of the praetorship, which ranked second in the political hierarchy to the consulship. Gaius Octavius's mother, Atia, was the daughter of Julia, the sister of Julius Caesar; and it was Caesar who launched the young Octavius in Roman public life. At age 12 he made his debut by delivering the funeral speech for his grandmother Julia. Three or four years later he received the coveted membership of the board of priests (pontifices). In 46 BC he accompanied Caesar, now dictator, in his triumphal procession after his victory in Africa over his opponents in the Civil War; and in the following year, in spite of ill health, he joined the dictator in Spain. He was at Apollonia (now in Albania), completing his academic and military studies when, in 44 BC, he learned that Julius Caesar had been murdered.

Rise to power

Returning to Italy, he was told that Caesar in his will had adopted him as his son and had made him his chief personal heir. He was only 18 when, against the advice of his stepfather and others, he decided to take up this perilous inheritance and proceeded to Rome. Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius), Caesar's chief lieutenant, who had taken possession of his papers and assets and had expected that he himself would be the principal heir, refused to hand over any of Caesar's funds, forcing Octavius to pay the late dictator's bequests to the Roman populace from such resources as he could raise. Caesar's assassins, Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, ignored him and withdrew to the east. Cicero, the famous orator who was one of Rome's principal elder statesmen, hoped to make use of him but underestimated his abilities.

Celebrating public games, instituted by Caesar, to ingratiate himself with the city populace, Octavius succeeded in winning considerable numbers of the dictator's troops to his own allegiance. The Senate, encouraged by Cicero, broke with Antony, called upon Octavius for aid (granting him the rank of senator in spite of his youth), and joined the campaign of Mutina (Modena) against Antony, who was compelled to withdraw to Gaul. When the consuls who commanded the Senate's forces lost their lives, Octavius's soldiers compelled the Senate to confer a vacant consulship on him. Under the name of Gaius Julius Caesar he next secured official recognition as Caesar's adoptive son. Although it would have been normal to add "Octavianus" (with reference to his original family name), he preferred not to do so. Today, however, he is habitually described as Octavian (until the date when he assumed the designation Augustus).

Octavian soon reached an agreement with Antony and with another of Caesar's principal supporters, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who had succeeded him as chief priest. On November 27, 43 BC, the three men were formally given a five-year dictatorial appointment as triumvirs for the reconstitution of the state (the Second Triumvirate—the first having been the informal compact between Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar). The east was occupied by Brutus and Cassius, but the triumvirs divided the west among themselves. They drew up a list of "proscribed" political enemies, and the consequent executions included 300 senators (one of whom was Antony's enemy Cicero) and 2,000 members of the class below the senators, the equites or knights. Julius Caesar's recognition as a god of the Roman state in January 42 BC enhanced Octavian's prestige as son of a god.

He and Antony crossed the Adriatic and, under Antony's leadership (Octavian being ill), won the two battles of Philippi against Brutus and Cassius, both of whom committed suicide. Antony, the senior partner, was allotted the east (and Gaul); and Octavian returned to Italy, where difficulties caused by the settlement of his veterans involved him in the Perusine War (decided in his favour at Perusia, the modern Perugia) against Antony's brother and wife. In order to appease another potential enemy, Sextus Pompeius (Pompey the Great's son), who had seized Sicily and the sea routes, Octavian married Sextus's relative Scribonia (though before long he divorced her for personal incompatibility). These ties of kinship did not deter Sextus, after the Perusine War, from making overtures to Antony; but Antony rejected them and reached a fresh understanding with Octavian at the treaty of Brundisium, under the terms of which Octavian was to have the whole west (except for Africa, which Lepidus was allowed to keep) and Italy, which, though supposedly neutral ground, was in fact controlled by Octavian. The east was again to go to Antony, and it was arranged that Antony, who had spent the previous winter with Queen Cleopatra in Egypt, should marry Octavian's sister Octavia. The peoples of the empire were overjoyed by the treaty, which seemed to promise an end to so many years of civil war. In 38 BC Octavian formed a significant new link with the aristocracy by his marriage to Livia Drusilla.

But a reconciliation with Sextus Pompeius proved abortive, and Octavian was soon plunged into serious warfare against him. When his first operations against Sextus's Sicilian bases proved disastrous, he felt obliged to make a new compact with Antony at Tarentum (Taranto) in 37 BC. Antony was to provide Octavian with ships, in return for troops Antony needed for his forthcoming war against the empire's eastern neighbour Parthia and its Median allies. Antony handed over the ships, but Octavian never sent the troops. The treaty also provided for renewal of the Second Triumvirate for five years, until the end of 33 BC.

Military successes

In the following year the balance of power began to change: whereas Antony's eastern expedition failed, Octavian's fleet—commanded by his former schoolmate Marcus Agrippa, who, although unpopular with the influential nobles, was an admiral of genius—totally defeated Sextus Pompeius off Cape Naulochus (Venetico) in Sicily. At this point the third triumvir, Lepidus, seeking to contest Octavian's supremacy in the west by force, was disarmed by Octavian, deprived of his triumviral office, and forced into retirement. Ignoring Antony's right to settle his own veterans in Italy and recruit fresh troops, Octavian discharged many legionaries and founded settlements for them. His deliberate rivalry with Antony for the eventual mastership of the Roman world became increasingly apparent. Octavian's marriage two years earlier had begun to win over some of the nobles who had previously been Antony's supporters. Octavian also launched elaborate religious and patriotic publicity, centring on the classical god of order, Apollo, in contrast to Antony's less Roman patron, Dionysus (Bacchus). In addition, Octavian had started to prefix his name with the designation "Imperator," to suggest that he was the commander par excellence; and now, although he continued to use his triumviral powers, he omitted all reference to them from his coins, gradually concentrating on the plain, emotive name "Caesar Son of a God."

But, if Octavian was to compete with Antony's military seniority, successes in a foreign war were necessary; and so Octavian between 35 and 33 BC fought three successive campaigns in Illyricum and Dalmatia (parts of modern Slovenia and Croatia) in order to protect the northeastern approaches of Italy. With the help of Agrippa, he also lavished large sums on the adornment of Rome. When Octavian fomented public clamour against Antony's territorial gifts to Cleopatra, it was clear that a clash between the two men was imminent.

In 32 BC the triumvirate had officially ended, and Octavian, unlike Antony, professed no longer to be employing its powers. Amid a virulent exchange of propaganda, Antony divorced Octavia, whereupon her brother Octavian seized Antony's will and claimed to find in it damaging proofs of Cleopatra's power over him. Each leader induced the populations under his control to swear formal oaths of allegiance to his own cause. Then, in spite of grave discontent aroused by his exactions in Italy, Octavian declared war—not against Antony but against Cleopatra.

Accompanied by her, Antony had brought up his fleet and army to guard strongpoints along the coast of western Greece; but in 31 BC Octavian dispatched Agrippa very early in the year to capture Methone, at the country's southwestern tip. His enemies were taken by surprise; and after Octavian himself arrived—leaving his Etruscan friend and adviser Gaius Maecenas in charge of Italy—he and Agrippa soon shut Antony's fleet inside the Gulf of Ambracia (Arta). At the Battle of Actium, Antony tried to extricate his ships in the hope of continuing the fight elsewhere. Though Cleopatra and then Antony succeeded in getting away, only a quarter of their fleet was able to follow them. Cleopatra and Antony fled to Egypt and committed suicide when Octavian captured the country in the following year. Executing Cleopatra's son Ptolemy XV Caesar (Caesarion)—whose father she had claimed was Caesar—Octavian annexed Egypt and retained it under his direct control.

The seizure of Cleopatra's treasure enabled him to pay off his veterans and made him finally master of the entire Greco-Roman world. From this point on, by a long and gradual series of tentative, patient measures, he established the Roman principate, a system of government that enabled him to maintain, in all essentials, absolute control. Gradually reducing his 60 legions to 28, he retained approximately 150,000 legionaries, mostly Italian, and supplemented them by about the same number of auxiliaries drawn from the provinces. A permanent bodyguard (the Praetorians), based on the bodyguards maintained by earlier generals, was stationed partly in Rome and partly in other Italian towns. A superb network of roads was created to maintain internal order and facilitate trade, and an efficient fleet was organized to police the Mediterranean. In 28 BC Octavian and Agrippa held a census of the civil population, the first of three during the reign. They also reduced the Senate from about 1,000 to 800 (later 600) compliant members, and Octavian was appointed its president.

Government and administration

Remembering, however, that Caesar had been assassinated because of his resort to naked power, Octavian realized that the governing class would welcome him as the terminator of civil war only if he concealed his autocracy beneath provisions avowedly harking back to republican traditions. From 31 until 23 BC the constitutional basis of his power remained a continuous succession of consulships, but in January 27 BC he ostensibly "transferred the State to the free disposal of the Senate and people," earning the misleading, though outwardly plausible, tribute that he had restored the republic. At the same time, he was granted a 10-year tenure of an area of government (provincia) comprising Spain, Gaul, and Syria, the three regions containing the bulk of the army. The remaining provinces were to be governed by proconsuls appointed by the Senate in the old republican fashion. Octavian, however, believed that his supreme prestige—crystallized in the meaningful term auctoritas—safeguarded him against any defiance by these personages; and he was indeed able, more or less indirectly, to influence their appointments, just as he was able (on the rare occasions when he regarded it as desirable) to influence the appointments to the consulships and other metropolitan offices that continued to exist in "republican" fashion.

Four days after these measures, his name Caesar, acquired through adoption in Julius's will, was supplemented by "Augustus," an appellation with an antique religious ring, believed to be linked etymologically with auctoritas and with the ancient practice of augury. The word augustus was often contrasted with humanus; its adoption as the title representing the new order cleverly indicated, in an extraconstitutional fashion, his superiority over the rest of mankind. With the aid of writers such as Virgil, Livy, and Horace, all of whom in their different ways shared the same ideas, he showed his patriotic veneration of the old Italian faith by reviving many of its ceremonials and repairing numerous temples.

Military operations continued in many frontier areas. In 25 BC recalcitrant Alpine tribes were reduced, and Galatia (central Asia Minor) was annexed. Mauretania, on the other hand, was transferred from Roman provincial status to that of a client kingdom, for such dependent monarchies, as in the later republic, bore a considerable part of the burden of imperial defense. Augustus himself visited Gaul and directed part of a campaign in Spain until his health gave out; in 23 he fell ill again and seemed on the point of death. Feeling, amid reports of conspiracies, that new constitutional steps were necessary, he proceeded to terminate his series of consulships in favour of a power (imperium majus) that was separated altogether from office and its practical inconveniences. This power raised him above the proconsuls; it was never referred to on the official coinage or in Augustus's political testament but was intended to be exercised mainly in emergencies and on personal visits. He was also awarded the power of a tribune (tribunicia potestas) for life. Earlier he had accepted certain privileges of a tribune. The full power he now assumed carried with it practical advantages, notably the right to convene the Senate. But, more particularly, the office of a tribune surrounded him with a "democratic" aura because of the ancient character of the annually elected tribunes of the people as defenders of the plebs. This was, perhaps, needed all the more because Augustus himself—while admittedly supporting the interests of poorer people by a great extension of the right of judicial appeal—tended to back the established classes as the keystone of his system.

Agrippa, too, was granted superiority over proconsuls, presumably in order to ensure that the armies would be in safe hands in case one of Augustus's recurrent illnesses proved fatal. The next to die, however, was the emperor's young nephew Marcus Claudius Marcellus, who had been married to his daughter Julia and might eventually have been envisaged as his successor. In the same year, 23 BC, Agrippa was sent out to the east as deputy princeps; two years later he became Julia's second husband. Meanwhile Augustus himself traveled in Sicily, Greece, and Asia (22-19). Important reorganizations were put into effect wherever he went; and immense satisfaction was caused by an agreement in 20 BC with Parthia, under which the Parthians recognized Rome's protectorate over Armenia and returned the legionary standards captured from Crassus 33 years earlier. In 19 BC Agrippa completed the subjugation of Spain. In this year there was some adjustment of Octavian's powers to allow him to exercise them more freely in Italy, and the two following years witnessed social legislation attempting to encourage marriage, regulate penalties for adultery, and reduce extravagance. In 17 there were resplendent celebrations of ancient ritual, known as the Secular Games, to purify the Roman people of their past sins and provide full religious inauguration of the new age.

Although the principate was not an office which could be automatically handed on, Augustus seemed to be indicating his views regarding his ultimate successor when he adopted the two sons of his daughter Julia, boys aged three and one, who were henceforward known as Gaius Caesar and Lucius Caesar. Their father, Agrippa, whose powers had been renewed along with his master's, returned to the east. But now Augustus also gave important employment to his stepsons—his wife Livia's sons by her former marriage—Tiberius and Drusus the Elder. Proceeding across the Alps, they annexed Noricum and Raetia, comprising large parts of what are now Switzerland, Austria, and Bavaria, and extended the imperial frontier from Italy to the upper Danube (16-15 BC).

It was probably during these years that an executive, or drafting, committee (consilium) of the Senate was established in order to help Augustus to prepare senatorial business. His administrative burden was also lightened by the expansion of his own staff (knights, who could also now rise to a number of key posts, and freedmen) to form the beginnings of a civil service, which had never existed before but was destined to become an essential feature of the imperial system. Gradually, too, a completely reformed administrative structure of Rome, Italy, and the whole empire was evolved. The financial system that made this possible was evidently far more effective than anything the empire had ever seen until then. The system was based on the central treasury (aerarium), but the details of its relationship with the treasuries of the provinces, and particularly the provincia of Augustus, are still imperfectly understood, partly because, although the emperor proudly recorded his gifts to the central treasury, he did not report what funds passed in the opposite direction.

The taxation providing these resources apparently included two main direct taxes: a poll tax (tributum capitis), paid in some provinces by all adults and in others by adult males only, and a land tax (tributum soli). There were also indirect taxes, which (as in the past) were farmed out to contractors because their yield was unpredictable and the embryonic civil service lacked the resources to handle them. The republican customs dues continued; but the rates were low enough not to hamper trade, which, in the peaceful conditions created by Augustus, flourished in wholly unprecedented fashion. Industries did not exist on a very large scale, but commerce was greatly stimulated by a sweeping reform and expansion of the Roman coinage. Gold and silver pieces, their designs reflecting many facets of imperial publicity, were issued in great quantities at a number of widely distributed mints. The Rome mint was reopened for this purpose about 20 BC. The absence of bronze token coinage, which had been sparse for many decades, was remedied by the creation of abundant mintages in yellow orichalcum and red copper. In the west the principal mint for these pieces, besides Rome, was Lugdunum (Lyon), whose coins displayed a view of the Altar of Rome and Augustus that formed a model for other provincial capitals. The Roman citizen colonies of the west, many of them established by Augustus to settle his veterans, supplemented this output by their own local coinages, and in the east, particularly Asia Minor and Syria, numerous Greek cities were also allowed to issue small change.

Expansion of the empire

The death in 12 BC of Lepidus enabled Augustus finally to succeed him as the official head of the Roman religion, the chief priest (pontifex maximus). In the same year, Agrippa, too, died. Augustus compelled his widow, Julia, to marry Tiberius against both their wishes. During the next three years, however, Tiberius was away in the field, reducing Pannonia up to the middle Danube, while his brother Drusus crossed the Rhine frontier and invaded Germany as far as the Elbe, where he died in 9 BC. In the following year, Augustus lost another of his intimates, Maecenas, who had been the adviser of his early days and was an outstanding patron of letters.

Tiberius, who replaced Drusus in Germany, was elevated in 6 BC to a share in his stepfather's tribunician power. But shortly afterward he went into retirement on the island of Rhodes. This was attributed to jealousy of his stepnephew Gaius Caesar, who was introduced to public life with a great fanfare in the following year; and the same compliments were paid to his brother Lucius in 2 BC, the year in which Augustus received his climactic title, "father of the country" (pater patriae). Gaius was sent to the east and Lucius to the west. Both, however, soon died. Tiberius returned home in 2, and in 4 Augustus adopted him as his son, who in turn was required to adopt Germanicus, the son of his brother Drusus. The powers conferred upon Tiberius made him almost Augustus's own equal in everything except prestige.

Tiberius's next task was to consolidate the invasion and provincial organization of Germany (AD 4-5). An invasion of Bohemia was planned and had already been launched from two directions when news came in 6 that Pannonia and Illyricum had revolted. It took three years for the rebellion to be put down; and this had only just been completed when Arminius raised the Germans against their Roman governor Varus and destroyed him and his three legions. As Augustus could not readily replace the troops, the annexation of western Germany and Bohemia was postponed indefinitely; Tiberius and Germanicus were sent to consolidate the Rhine frontier.

Although Augustus was now feeling his age, these years in association with Tiberius were marked by administrative innovations: the annexation of Judaea in AD 6 (its client king Herod the Great had died 10 years previously); the establishment at Rome (in the same year) of a fire brigade with police duties, supplemented seven years later by a regular police force (cohortes urbanae); the creation of a military treasury (aerarium militare) to defray soldiers' retirement bounties from taxes; and the conversion of the hitherto occasional appointment of prefect of the city (praefectus urbi) into a permanent office (AD 13). When, in the same year, the powers of Augustus were renewed for 10 years—such renewals had been granted at intervals throughout the reign—Tiberius was made his equal in every constitutional respect. In April, Augustus deposited his will at the House of the Vestals in Rome. It included a summary of the military and financial resources of the empire (breviarium totius imperii) and his political testament, known as the "Res Gestae Divi Augusti" ("Achievements of the Divine Augustus"). The best-preserved copy of the latter document is on the walls of the Temple of Rome and Augustus at Ankara, Turkey (the Monumentum Ancyranum). In AD 14 Tiberius was due to leave for Illyricum but was recalled by the news that Augustus was gravely ill. He died on August 19, and on September 17 the Senate enrolled him among the gods of the Roman state. By that time Tiberius had succeeded him as the second Roman emperor, though the formalities involved in the succession proved embarrassing both to himself and to the Senate because the "principate" of Augustus had not, constitutionally speaking, been heritable or continuous. Like other emperors, Tiberius assumed the designation "Augustus" as an additional title of his own. Agrippa Postumus, who had been named his co-heir but was later banished, was put to death. The order to kill him may already have been given by Augustus, but this is not certain.

Personality and achievement

Augustus was one of the great administrative geniuses of history. The gigantic work of reorganization that he carried out in every field of Roman life and throughout the entire empire not only transformed the decaying republic into a new, monarchic regime with many centuries of life ahead of it but also created a durable Roman peace, based on easy communications and flourishing trade. It was this Pax Romana that ensured the survival and eventual transmission of the classical heritage, Greek and Roman alike, and provided the means for the diffusion of Judaism and Christianity. Although his regime was an autocracy, Augustus, being a tactful and imaginative master of propaganda of many kinds, knew how to cloak that autocracy in traditionalist forms that would satisfy a war-worn generation—perhaps, most of all, the upper bourgeoisie immediately below the leading nobility, since it was they who benefited from the new order more than anyone. He was also able to win the approbation, through the patronage of Maecenas, of some of the greatest writers the world has ever known, including Virgil, Horace, and Livy.

Their enthusiasm was partly due to Augustus's conviction that the Roman peace must be under Occidental, Italian control. This was in contrast to the views of Antony and Cleopatra, who had envisaged some sort of Greco-Roman partnership such as began to prevail only three or four centuries later. Augustus's narrower view, although modified by an informed admiration of Greek civilization, was based on his small-town Italian origins. These were also partly responsible for his patriotic, antiquarian attachment to the ancient religion and for his puritanical social policy.

Augustus was a cultured man, the author of a number of works (all lost): a pamphlet against Brutus, an exhortation to philosophy, an account of his own early life, a biography of Drusus, poems, and epigrams. The conventional view of his character distinguishes between his cruelty in early years and his mildness in later life. But there was not so much need for cruelty later on, and, when it was needed (notably in the suppression of alleged plots), he was still ready to apply it. It is probable that nothing short of this degree of political ruthlessness could have achieved such enormous results. His domestic life, however, was simple and homespun. Within his family, the successive deaths of those he had earmarked as his successors or helpers caused him much sadness and disappointment. His devotion to his wife Livia Drusilla remained constant, though, like other Romans, he was unfaithful. His surviving letters show kindliness to his relations. Yet he exiled his daughter Julia for offending against his public moral attitudes, and he exiled her daughter by Agrippa for the same reason; he also exiled the son of Agrippa and Julia, Agrippa Postumus, though the suspicion that he later had him killed is unproved. As for Augustus's male relatives who were his helpers, he was loyal to them but drove them as hard as he drove himself. He needed them because the burden was so heavy, and he especially needed them in the military sphere because he was not a great commander. In Agrippa and Tiberius and a number of others, he had men who supplied this deficiency, and although, on his deathbed, he is said to have advised against the further expansion of the empire, he himself, with their assistance, had expanded its frontiers in many directions.

His physical condition was subject to a host of ills and weaknesses, many of them recurrent. Indeed, in his early life, particularly, it was only his indomitable will that enabled him to survive—a strange preliminary to an unprecedented and unequaled life's work. His appearance is described by the biographer Suetonius:

He was unusually handsome and exceedingly graceful at all periods of his life, though he cared nothing for personal adornment. His expression, whether in conversation or when he was silent, was calm and mild. He had clear, bright eyes, in which he liked to have it thought that there was a kind of divine power, and it greatly pleased him, whenever he looked keenly at anyone, if he let his face fall as if before the radiance of the sun. His teeth were wide apart, small and ill-kept; his hair was slightly curly and inclining to golden; his eyebrows met. His complexion was between dark and fair. He was short of stature, but this was concealed by the fine proportion and symmetry of his figure, and was noticeable only by comparison with some taller person standing beside him.

Augustus's countenance proved a godsend to the Greeks and Hellenized easterners, who were the best sculptors of the time, for they elevated his features into a moving, never-to-be-forgotten imperial type, which Napoleon's artists, among others, keenly emulated. The contemporary portrait busts of Augustus, echoed on his coins, formed part of a significant renaissance of the arts in which Italic and Hellenic styles were discreetly and brilliantly blended. Still extant at Rome are the severe yet delicate reliefs of the Ara Pacis ("Altar of Peace"), depicting a religious procession in which the national leaders are taking part; there are also scenes from the Roman mythology. The altar was dedicated by the Senate and people of Rome in 13 BC to commemorate the pacification of Gaul and Spain.

The architectural masterpieces of the time were also numerous; and something of their monumental grandeur and classical purity can be seen today at Rome in the remains of the Theatre of Marcellus and of the massive Forum of Augustus, flanked by colonnades and culminating in the Temple of Mars the Avenger—the Avenger of Julius Caesar. Outside Rome, too, there are abundant memorials of the Augustan Age; on either side of the Alps, for example, there are monuments to celebrate the submission and loyalty of the local tribes, an elegant arch at Segusio (Susa), and a square stone trophy, topped by a cylindrical drum, at La Turbie. From Livia's mansion on the outskirts of Rome, at Prima Porta, comes a reminder that not all the art of the day was formal and grand. One of the rooms is adorned with wall paintings representing an enchanted garden; beyond a trellis are orchards and flower beds, in which birds and insects perch among the foliage. Augustus himself had no interest in personal luxury. Yet if ever he or his associates had any spare time, such were the rooms in which they spent it. (Encyclopaedia Britannica Article)

Michael Grant