Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor
Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor
Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor
Ebook566 pages8 hours

Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

He found Rome made of clay and left it made of marble. As Rome’s first emperor, Augustus transformed the unruly Republic into the greatest empire the world had ever seen. His consolidation and expansion of Roman power two thousand years ago laid the foundations, for all of Western history to follow. Yet, despite Augustus’s accomplishments, very few biographers have concentrated on the man himself, instead choosing to chronicle the age in which he lived. Here, Anthony Everitt, the bestselling author of Cicero, gives a spellbinding and intimate account of his illustrious subject.

Augustus began his career as an inexperienced teenager plucked from his studies to take center stage in the drama of Roman politics, assisted by two school friends, Agrippa and Maecenas. Augustus’s rise to power began with the assassination of his great-uncle and adoptive father, Julius Caesar, and culminated in the titanic duel with Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
The world that made Augustus–and that he himself later remade–was driven by intrigue, sex, ceremony, violence, scandal, and naked ambition. Everitt has taken some of the household names of history–Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Antony, Cleopatra–whom few know the full truth about, and turned them into flesh-and-blood human beings.

At a time when many consider America an empire, this stunning portrait of the greatest emperor who ever lived makes for enlightening and engrossing reading. Everitt brings to life the world of a giant, rendered faithfully and sympathetically in human scale. A study of power and political genius, Augustus is a vivid, compelling biography of one of the most important rulers in history.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 17, 2006
ISBN9781588365552
Author

Anthony Everitt

Anthony Everitt is a former visiting professor in the visual and performing arts at Nottingham Trent University and previously served as secretary general of the Arts Council of Great Britain. He has written extensively on European culture and history, and is the author of Cicero, Augustus, Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome, The Rise of Rome, and The Rise of Athens. Everitt lives near Colchester, England's first recorded town, founded by the Romans.

Read more from Anthony Everitt

Related to Augustus

Related ebooks

Ancient History For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for Augustus

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Augustus - Anthony Everitt

    PREFACE


    IMPERATOR CAESAR AUGUSTUS, TO GIVE him his proper title, was one of the most influential men in history. As Rome’s first emperor, he transformed the chaotic Roman Republic into an orderly imperial autocracy. His consolidation of the Roman empire two thousand years ago laid the foundations on which Europe both as a region and as a culture was subsequently built. If anyone qualifies as the founding father of western civilization, it is Augustus.

    His career was a masterly study in the wielding of power. He learned how to obtain it and, more important, how to keep it. As the history of the last hundred years has shown, empires are hard won and easily lost. In the first century B.C., Rome governed one of the largest empires the world had seen, but through foolish policies and bad governance risked its collapse. Augustus devised a political system that enabled the empire’s survival for half a millennium. History never repeats itself exactly, but today’s leaders and students of politics will find his policies and methods to be of interest.

    Yet Augustus himself is a shadowy figure. Many books have been written about his achievements, but they have tended to focus on the Augustan age, rather than on the man as he was. My hope is to make Augustus come alive.

    As well as narrating his own doings, I place his story in his times and describe the events and personalities that affected him. Shipwrecks, human sacrifice, hairbreadth escapes, unbridled sex, battles on land and at sea, ambushes, family scandals, and above all the unforgiving pursuit of absolute power—Augustus lived out an extraordinary and often terrifying drama.

    The stage is crowded with larger-than-life personalities: the brilliant and charming Julius Caesar; the ruthless Cleopatra, who is often said to have used sex as an instrument of policy; the idealistic assassin Brutus; the intelligent drunkard Mark Antony; the dour Tiberius; the great but promiscuous lady Julia, and many more.

    The incidents and actions that make up a life cannot be fully realized without also conveying a sense of place. So I have sought to evoke the main locations of Augustus’ career, as they were at the time and as they appear today—among them, his house on the Palatine, the secret palace on the island of Pandateria, the low, sandy headland of Actium, and the spectacular city of Alexandria.

    The Roman world is still recognizable to us who live two millennia later. The day-to-day practice of politics, the realities of urban living, the seaside resorts, the cultivation of the arts, the rising divorce rate, the misdemeanors of the younger generation: past and present have many things in common. However, certain forms of degradation—slavery, the low status of women, and the gladiatorial carnage of the arena—shock and astonish us. So, too, does the moral approval accorded to military violence and imperial expansion. Julius Caesar’s largely unprovoked conquest of Gaul was hailed at Rome as a wonderful achievement, but it is estimated that one million Gauls lost their lives in the fighting.

    Augustus was a very great man, but he grew gradually into greatness. He did not possess Julius Caesar’s bravura and political genius (it was that genius, of course, which killed Caesar, for it made him incapable of compromise). He was a physical coward who taught himself to be brave. He was intelligent, painstaking, and patient, but could also be cruel and ruthless. He worked extraordinarily hard. He thought in the long term, achieving his aims slowly and by trial and error.

    Augustus is one of the few historical figures who improved with the passage of time. He began as a bloodthirsty adventurer, but once he had achieved power, he made a respectable man of himself. He repealed his illegal acts and took trouble to govern fairly and efficiently.

    One curious aspect of Augustus’ life is that many of the leading players were very young men. The adults who started Rome’s civil wars fell victim to long years of fighting, leaving the baton to be picked up by the next generation. Augustus and his schoolmates Maecenas and Agrippa were in their late teens when they took charge of the state. Pompey the Great’s son Sextus was probably much the same age when he set himself up as a guerrilla leader in Spain.

    Augustus died old, but throughout his long reign he never hesitated to entrust great responsibility to the young men of his family: his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus, and his grandsons Gaius and Lucius. The excitement of making one’s way in an adult world must have been intoxicating.

    We are right to call Augustus Rome’s first emperor, yet the title is anachronistic. At the time he was simply regarded as the chief man in the state. The Roman Republic had, apparently, been restored, not abolished. Augustus developed a personality cult, but he did not hold permanent authority and had to have his powers regularly renewed. Only with the accession of Tiberius did people finally realize that they were no longer citizens of a free commonwealth, but subjects living under a permanent monarchy. So nowhere in this book do I call Augustus emperor.

    The task of writing a life of Augustus is complicated by the fact that many contemporary sources are lost, casualties of the Dark Ages: the autobiography down to 25 B.C. that Augustus wrote in Spain; his correspondence with Cicero; Agrippa’s memoirs; the history of his times by Pollio and Messala’s commentaries on the civil wars after Julius Caesar’s assassination; thirty books of Livy’s great history of Rome, covering the period from 44 to 9 B.C. Only fragments of the life of Augustus written by a friend of Herod the Great, Nicolaus of Damascus, have survived, and Appian’s detailed study of Rome’s civil wars in the first century B.C. closes with the death of Sextus Pompeius in 35 B.C.

    Dio Cassius gives a reasonably complete account in his Roman History, but his style is pedestrian and he wrote three hundred years after the event. The findings of the modern archaeologist (especially inscriptions and coins) add valuable information. Neither Suetonius nor Plutarch is a historian, properly speaking, but both inject some welcome anecdotes and personality assessments.

    Much more is recorded about Augustus’ first thirty years than about his later life and a thorough and coherent narrative of his youth can be constructed. However, important events of his maturity and old age call for the skills of the detective rather than the historian. Mysterious and incomplete narratives conceal as much they reveal, and sometimes only speculative explanations can be offered. For certain years nothing definite is known at all; between 16 and 13 B.C., we are told, Augustus was in Gaul and Germany, but we have no idea where he went or where he was at any particular time. For the second half of this book I have been obliged to switch from straightforward narrative to a more thematic approach to my subject.

    This disjunction is not only due to the loss of texts, but also to a lack of governmental transparency. Once the imperial system had been established, Dio claims,most events began to be kept secret and were denied to common knowledge…. Much that never materializes becomes common talk, while much that undoubtedly came to pass remains unknown, and in pretty well every instance the report which is spread abroad does not correspond to what actually happened.

    That is going a little too far: intentions are often revealed through actions, and the broad thrust of history cannot easily be concealed. However, Dio has a point.

    Hindsight is not open to biographers, who have a duty to tell a life as closely as possible to how it was lived. I have tried not to forget that the past was once present and the future unknown, and have done my best to hide my guilty knowledge of what fate had in store for the actors in the drama.

    The plural of a family name that ends in -us or -ius I give as -i. Thus one Balbus becomes some Balbi, rather than the clumsy Balbuses. However, I am contentedly inconsistent; I allow Caesar to mutate into Caesars on the grounds that it is not inelegant and that the correct Latin would be the pedantic-sounding Caesares. I say Pompey and Livy rather than Pompeius and Livius, because that is how the English-speaking world has termed them for many centuries. Place-names are usually given in their Latin form, except for well-known Anglicisms such as Rome and Athens. To convey the otherness of not-Rome, I have used Parthian and Armenian personal names in place of their Romanized or Hellenized versions. So Artavasdes becomes Artavâzd, Artaxes Ardashes, Orodes Urûd, Pacorus Pakûr, Phraates Frahâta, Phrataces Frahâtak, and Tigranes Dikran.

    The modern-day interpretation of the ancient literary sources has reached a high level of sophistication and a skeptical eye is turned, usually wisely, on any claim made by a Latin or Greek historian. I incline to a minimalist view, often accepting what I am told unless there is an obvious or rational objection (for example, when two sources disagree). It is important to hesitate before ironing out inconsistent or surprising behavior; human beings are capable of harboring contradictory emotions, of acting against their interests, or stupidly.

    So, for example, Augustus’ reported visit to see his grandson Agrippa Postumus on his island of exile may have been an odd and foolish thing for a sick old man to do, but it does not follow that the visit never took place. Even implausibility is a criterion of judgment to be applied with caution. Most of the contradictions in this story fall comfortably inside the usual bounds of human irrationality.

    It is difficult to be categorical about the value of money, because the costs of providing different products and services are not the same as those of today. The basic Roman unit of account was the sesterce, very roughly worth between one and two pounds sterling.

    The Romans dated their years from the supposed foundation of the city in 753 B.C., but it would confuse the reader if I placed Caesar’s assassination in 709 A.U.C. (ab urbe condita, or from the city’s foundation), rather than the familiar 44 B.C. I use modern dating, and in so doing allude on almost every page to the one great event of Augustus’ life about which he and practically everyone else in the Roman empire knew nothing: the birth of Christ.

    INTRODUCTION

    A.D. 14


    THE OLD MAN LOVED CAPRI. It was a pleasure to be back, if only for a few days. The visit would be not much longer than that, for he was about to manage his own death. Every detail had been decided.

    The island was mountainous and almost completely inaccessible, with precipitous cliffs, sea grottoes, and strangely shaped rocks. Endless sunshine, abundant, almost tropical flora, and clear air made it a lovely place, as did its delightful inhabitants, who were originally colonists from mainland Greece. Here he could forget business of state and relax in complete privacy and safety.

    Security was an important issue, for the old man was ruler of the known world and had many enemies. He had overthrown the partly and messily democratic Republic, and for more than forty years had governed the Roman empire alone. He was known as Augustus, or Revered One, a name that separated him from ordinary mortals. However, he never paraded his authority; he did not like to be called dominus, My Lord, but princeps, top person or first citizen.

    Capri was not just beautiful, it was easy to defend. Years ago Augustus had built a palatial villa here. Perched on a high promontory, it was like a ship’s prow made from stone. The building contained every luxury—extensive gardens, a bath complex with hot rooms and splash pools, and spectacular views of the sea. There were no springs in this arid, rocky spot, so cisterns gathered a supply of rainwater. Four-story apartment blocks housed the many servants, slaves, and guards needed to look after the princeps and his guests.

    Augustus was not the only lotus-eater. He wanted his staff to have a good time, too. Some of them lived on an islet off Capri, which he nicknamed the Land of Do-Nothings because they were so lazy.

    Augustus was seventy-seven and in poor health. He had noticed the first signs of terminal decline the previous spring; the end was fast approaching. So, too, was his greatest challenge. For the good of Rome (he told himself) one-man rule had to continue, so he gave careful thought to the preparations that would ensure a smooth handover of power to his chosen successor. He knew that trouble lay ahead. As soon as he died, many Romans would want to go back to the days of the free Republic. People were already talking idly of the blessings of liberty. There was irresponsible chatter of civil war.

    The princeps set up a small succession committee, comprising a handful of trusted advisers, and gave it the task of planning the transition. The trick would be to set everything in place before anyone noticed or had time to object. He chaired the meetings himself, and he took Livia, his seventy-one-year-old wife, into his confidence, as he always had done throughout his career; she attended some of the group’s meetings.

    Augustus intended his successor to be Livia’s fifty-five-year-old son, an able military commander, Tiberius Claudius Nero. Ten years ago he had formally adopted Tiberius and shared his power with him.

    If only, the old man thought to himself, he did not have to leave Rome to a man he did not really care for. Competent, hardworking, experienced—yes, Tiberius was all these things, but he was also gloomy and resentful. Poor Rome, he muttered to himself, doomed to be masticated by those slow-moving jaws!

    There was another possible pretender. Augustus had a grandson, Agrippa Postumus, now in his mid-twenties. He had always had a soft spot for Agrippa, but the child grew up into an angry and violent young man, unsuitable for public office. Nevertheless, Augustus adopted him as his son simultaneously with Tiberius, hoping that the lad would become more mature and responsible.

    He did not, and his saddened grandfather had had to disown him. A few years ago, he had sent Agrippa to cool his heels at the seaside resort of Surrentum. But the boy still managed to get into trouble, and was now languishing under military guard on Planasia, a tiny island south of Elba: out of sight but, unhappily, not out of mind.

    This was because Agrippa had influential friends at Rome, people who were tired of his grandfather’s cautious, patient style of governing. Augustus had received reliable reports that a plot was afoot to spring the boy from his place of exile, take him to one of the frontier armies, and march on Rome.

    Any resistance during the handover of power after Augustus’ death would center on Agrippa. So the succession committee’s first job was to deal with the threat he posed. In May of A.D. 14 Augustus let it be known that he was in need of some peace and quiet and intended to spend a couple of weeks at a villa in the countryside south of Rome. From there, he departed, under conditions of strictest secrecy, on the long sea journey north to Planasia.

    Agrippa was astonished by the sudden arrival of his grandfather, and there were tears and hugs all round. But a little conversation showed that the boy was as moody and dangerous as ever. Augustus was moved, but pitiless. Right from his entry into public life at the age of eighteen, no one who threatened his power received any quarter. The greater the threat, even if it came from his nearest and dearest, the icier the punishment.

    The princeps put his arm around Agrippa’s shoulders and reassured him that he loved him and would soon bring him home to Rome. He calculated that this would dampen any enthusiasm for plotting escape and revenge. Then Augustus boarded his ship, upset but glumly reconciled to arranging his grandson’s execution.

    Everything would be much more manageable if all the main players in the succession game were out of Rome. The agreed plan was that when the time came, the princeps would dispatch Tiberius, his established deputy and heir, to settle affairs in the troublesome province of Illyricum (today’s Croatia). He would be giving a clear sign to political observers that all was well, and (more to the point) that he was well. His own final destination would be his father’s old villa at Nola, near the volcanic mountain of Vesuvius. If matters could be so arranged, he would die in the same room as Gaius Octavius had more than seventy years previously. This would be a dignified reminder of what the regime stood for: honoring the past and the old plain-living values of rural Italy.

    At last, in the summer of A.D. 14, the moment of truth arrived. The princeps looked and felt more ill than ever. Neither he nor his doctors knew what was the matter with him; he seemed to be suffering from no particular illness, but felt feverish and very weak. It was clear to him as well as to Livia and Tiberius that he had, at best, only weeks to live. It was time to put the succession plan into operation.

    To make sure rumor and malice did not reach the legions on the frontiers before official news came of a change of leadership in the capital, top-secret dispatches were sent by rapid courier to the commanders of the German and Danube armies and to the governors of the eastern provinces. These warned of Augustus’ failing condition, and Tiberius’ succession. They advised strict discipline to reduce the risk of mutinies.

    Augustus gave Tiberius his commission for Illyricum. As a very public sign of his confidence in him, he decided to accompany Tiberius for part of his journey south down the Via Appia, the great road that led to the port of Brundisium on Italy’s heel. He was held up at Rome for some days by a long list of court cases that he was judging. Losing patience, he cried: I will stay here no longer, whoever tries to detain me! It occurred to him that when he was gone, people would remember that remark as prophetic.

    Eventually the two men were able to leave Rome, accompanied by a large bodyguard of soldiers and an entourage of slaves, servants, and officials. Augustus noticed that a brisk sea breeze was rising and decided on the spur of the moment that the party would take ship that evening, although he disliked night voyages. This had the advantage of avoiding the malarial Pomptine Marshes, through which they would have had to pass if traveling by road.

    It was a bad idea, for the old man caught a chill, the first symptom of which was diarrhea. So, after coasting past Campania, he decided to spend a few last sunlit days at Capri. He was determined to enjoy himself. The princeps sat for a long time watching local youths at the open-air gymnasium, and invited them back to a banquet. He encouraged them to play practical jokes, and they scrambled about for tokens that he threw at them, entitling the holders to small prizes such as fruit and sweetmeats.

    The princeps and his party crossed over from Capri to Neapolis (today’s Naples), where, although his stomach was still weak and his diarrhea returning intermittently, he attended the athletic competition that the city staged every five years in his honor. He then set off with Tiberius and said goodbye to him at Beneventum, retracing his steps as arranged to the villa at Nola. Privately, Tiberius was warned not to hurry, and to expect an early recall.

    Augustus looked at Livia. The last thing either of them expected had happened: he was feeling and looking in excellent form. She stared back at him. There seemed to be a third person in the bedroom—an almost touchable awareness of the huge, difficult thing that needed to be done.

    The problem was obvious. All the arrangements were in place for the princeps’ death, but the princeps was recovering from his final illness. The timetable was at risk. The recently sent dispatches would soon be received. The longer Augustus lived, the more opportunity there would be for rumors to fly around Rome and the empire, fomenting disunity and trouble, imperiling the smooth transfer of power.

    That afternoon, while Augustus was taking a siesta and the house was quiet in the summer heat, Livia went to the peristyle, a large cloister around an open-air garden. In the middle stood a fig tree, heavy with ripe fruit, which Livia had planted years ago. Augustus liked to pick a fig or two in the evening. Livia coated some of them with a poisonous ointment, leaving a few untouched.

    Later, the aged couple walked out into the garden and Augustus picked two of the poisoned fruit and ate them. He noticed nothing. Livia ate a fig she had left alone. There was no reason for her husband to know exactly how he was going to die, she thought; indeed, if she was lucky, he might not guess that she had had to carry out what they had unspokenly agreed. Much more pleasant for him.

    Augustus slept badly. He suffered from stomach cramps and renewed diarrhea, and developed a high fever. Guessing what had happened, he silently thanked his wife. In the morning, he called for a mirror. He looked terrible. He had his hair combed and his lower jaw, which had fallen from weakness, was propped up. He gave some orders to a military officer, who immediately set sail for the island of Planasia with a troop of soldiers. Hail and farewell, Agrippa!

    A small group of notables, including Livia and Tiberius, recalled as prearranged, gathered round the bedside. The princeps uttered some suitable, obviously unspontaneous last words.

    I found Rome built of clay: I leave it to you in marble.

    He was referring not simply to his redevelopment of the city, but also to the strength of the empire.

    Augustus could not resist adding a bleak joke. He had always seen life as a pretense, something not to be taken too seriously, and at his house on the Palatine Hill at Rome, he had had his bedroom walls painted with frescoes of the tragic and comic masks that actors wore. Their image came into his mind, and he asked:

    Have I played my part in the farce of life well enough?

    After a short pause, he quoted a well-known theatrical tag.

    "If I have pleased you, kindly signify

    Appreciation with a warm goodbye."

    I

    SCENES FROM A PROVINCIAL CHILDHOOD

    63–48 B.C.


    VELLETRI IS A COMPACT HILL town about twenty-five miles southeast of Rome. It lies at the southern edge of the Alban Hills, overlooking a wide plain and distant mountains. The walk from the railway station to the center is a steep, hot climb.

    Little remains of ancient Velitrae, but signs of the Renaissance are to be found everywhere. In the main square stands an old fountain with battered lions spouting water. The streets leading off the piazza are roughly parallel and are gridded, echoing the original pattern of the old Roman vici. At the town’s highest point, where the citadel must have been, a sixteenth-century palazzo communale, which combines the functions of town hall and museum, was built on the foundations of a Roman building.

    Here, on a stone platform, the modern life-size statue in bronze of a man in his late teens gazes blankly from empty eye sockets into the far distance, contemplating the life that has yet to unfold. This is Gaius Octavius, Rome’s future ruler Augustus: for Velitrae was his hometown and Velletri is proud to celebrate his memory.

    Gaius would recognize the lay of the land, the rise and fall of streets and alleys, perhaps the layout, certainly the views. Now as then, this is a provincial place, which seems farther from the capital city than it really is. Change has always come slowly. The community leaves a powerful impression of being self-contained and a little isolated. Even today, elderly locals squint blackly at strangers.

    A certain dour feeling for tradition, a suspicion of newfangled ways, a belief in propriety, have always been typical of provincial life in towns such as Velitrae, and it would be hard to imagine a more conventional family than that into which Gaius Octavius was born in 63 B.C.

    Every Roman boy received a praenomen, or forename, such as Marcus, Lucius, Sextus—or Gaius. Then came his clan name, or nomen, such as Octavius. Some but not all Romans also had a cognomen, which signified a family subset of a clan. Successful generals were sometimes awarded a hereditary agnomen; for example, Publius Cornelius Scipio added Africanus to his existing names, in honor of his victory over Hannibal in north Africa. By contrast, girls were only known, inconveniently, by the feminine version of their nomen; so Gaius’ two sisters were both known as Octavia.

    An important feature of the infant Gaius’ inheritance was that, although like most Italians the Octavii held Roman citizenship, they were not of Roman stock. Velitrae was an outpost on the borders of Latium, home of the Latin tribes that, centuries before, had been among the first conquests of the aggressive little settlement beside a ford on the river Tiber.

    Two hundred years before Gaius’ birth, Rome finally united the tribes and communities of central and southern Italy through a network of imposed treaties. The men of these lands provided the backbone of the legions and were eventually, as late as the eighties B.C., incorporated into the Republic as full citizens. The little boy grew up with a clear impression of the contribution that Rome’s onetime opponents were making to its imperial greatness, a contribution not always fully recognized by the chauvinists in the capital. In a real sense, the Roman empire would be better called the Italian empire.

    The Octavii were a well-respected local family of considerable means. A Vicus Octavius, or Octavius Street, ran through Velitrae’s center (just as a Via Ottavia does today), past an altar consecrated by a long-ago ancestor.

    The family seems to have been in trade, a sure sign that it was not of aristocratic status. Gaius’ paternal great-grandfather fought in Sicily as a military tribune (a senior officer in a legion, or regiment) during the second war against the great merchant state of Carthage in northern Africa (218 to 201 B.C.). Carthage’s comprehensive defeat was the first indication to the Mediterranean world that a new military power had arrived on the scene. Gaius’ grandfather, who lived to an advanced age, was well-off, but had no ambitions for a career in national politics, being apparently content to hold local political office.

    Later hostile gossip claimed that the great-grandfather was an ex-slave who, having won his freedom, made a living as a rope maker in the neighborhood of Thurii, a town in Italy’s deep south. It was also rumored that the grandfather was a money changer, with coin-stained hands. Friendly propagandists took a different tack and invented a fictitious link with a blue-blooded Roman clan of the same name.

    When he came to write his memoirs many years afterward, Gaius merely noted that he came from a rich old equestrian family. The equites, or knights, were the affluent middle class, occupying a political level below that of the nobility and members of the ruling Senate, but often overlapping with them socially. To qualify for equestrian status, they needed to own property worth more than 400,000 sesterces, and were not actively engaged in government. They were usually wealthy businessmen or landed gentry who preferred to avoid the expense and dangers of a political career. Many were contracted by the state to collect taxes on its behalf from the provinces. By the time of the boy’s father, also named Gaius Octavius, the family had become seriously rich, and probably far exceeded the equestrian minimum.

    The father Octavius, an ambitious man, decided to pursue a career in politics at Rome with a view to making his way, if he could, to the top. This was an extremely difficult project. The Roman constitution was a complicated contraption of checks and balances, and the odds were stacked against an outsider—a novus homo, or new man—from winning a position of authority.

    Rome became a republic in 509 B.C., after driving out its king and abolishing the monarchy. The next two centuries saw a long struggle for power between a group of noble families, patricians, and ordinary citizens, plebeians, who were excluded from public office.

    The outcome was an apparent victory for the people, but the old aristocracy, supplemented by rich plebeian nobles, still controlled the state. What looked in many ways like a democracy was, in fact, an oligarchy modified by elections.

    The Roman constitution was the fruit of many compromises and developed into a complicated mix of laws and unwritten understandings. Power was widely distributed and there were multiple sources of decision-making.

    Roman citizens (only men, for women did not have the vote) attended public meetings called assemblies, where they passed laws and elected politicians to govern the Republic. These leaders doubled as generals in time of war. Although in theory any citizen could stand for public office, candidates usually came from a small group of very rich, noble families.

    If successful, politicians passed through a set sequence of different jobs, a process called the cursus honorum or honors race. The first step on the ladder, taken at the age of thirty or above (in practice, younger men were often elected), was to become one of a number of quaestors; this post entailed supervising the collection of taxes and making payments, either for the consuls in Rome or for provincial governors. Then, if he wished, a man could be elected one of four aediles, who were responsible for the administration of the city of Rome. During festivals they staged public entertainments at their own expense, so deep pockets were needed. The next position, that of praetor, was compulsory. Praetors were senior officers of state, responsible for presiding as judges in the law courts and, when required, to lead an army in the field.

    At the top of the pyramid were two consuls, who were heads of government with supreme authority; they were primarily army commanders and conveners of the Senate and assemblies.

    Consuls and praetors held imperium, officially sanctioned absolute power, although they were constrained in three important ways. First, they held office only for one year. Second, there were always two or more officeholders at the same level. Those of equal rank were allowed to veto anything that their colleagues or junior officeholders decided. Finally, if they broke the law, officeholders could face criminal charges once they were out of office.

    On top of that, ten tribunes of the people were elected, whose task was to make sure that officeholders did nothing to harm ordinary Romans (patricians were not allowed to be tribunes). They could propose laws to the Senate and the people and were empowered to convene citizens’ assemblies. The tribunes held power only within the city limits, where they could veto any officeholder’s decisions, including another tribune’s.

    The power of the assemblies was limited. They approved laws—but only those that were laid before them. Speakers supported or opposed a proposed measure, but open debate was forbidden; all that citizens were allowed to do was vote. There were different kinds of assembly, each with its own rules: in the assembly that elected praetors and consuls, for example, the voting system was weighted in favor of property owners in the belief that they would act with care because they had the most to lose if any mistakes were made.

    The Roman constitution made it so easy to stop decisions from being made that it is rather surprising that anything at all got done. The Romans realized that sometimes it might be necessary to override the constitution. In a grave emergency, for a maximum of six months, a dictator was appointed who held sole power and could act as he saw fit.

    The Roman Senate was mainly recruited from officeholders. By Octavius’ day, a quaestor automatically became a lifelong member, and he and his family joined Rome’s nobility (if he was not already a member of it). Senators were prohibited by law from engaging in business, although many used agents or front men to circumvent the ban.

    In theory, the Senate held little official power and its role was merely to advise the consuls. However, because the Senate was a permanent feature of the government, whereas consuls and other officeholders had fixed terms, its authority and influence were very great. It was responsible for managing foreign affairs, and it discussed laws before they were presented to the assemblies. Its decrees, although not legally binding, were usually obeyed.

    The Senate appointed former consuls and praetors, called proconsuls and propraetors (Octavius was one), to rule Rome’s provinces, usually for between one and three years.

    The equites, who as has been mentioned were not members of the Senate, formed a second social class, mainly comprising businessmen and country gentry. Beneath them came ordinary citizens, listed in different categories according to their wealth. The poorest citizens were capite censi, the head count.

    Modern governments employ many thousands of administrators who carry out their decisions. This was not the case during the Roman Republic. There were no bureaucrats, apart from a few clerks who looked after the public treasury. There was no police force, no public postal system, and no fire service, and there were no banks. There was no public criminal prosecution or judicial service, and cases were brought by private citizens. Elected politicians acted as judges in the law courts. The consuls brought in servants and slaves from their households, as well as personal friends, to help run the government.

    Gaius Octavius won a quaestorship, probably in 70 B.C., and joined the Senate. This was no mean achievement for a country gentleman outside the magic circle of Roman politics. The promise of political success brought with it an important benefit: a wife from one of Rome’s great patrician clans.

    Octavius was already married to a woman of whom history has recorded nothing except for her name, Ancharia. The couple had a daughter, and perhaps Ancharia died in childbirth, for families with only one child were rare, especially if the child was a girl. Her family was of obscure origin; she may have come from Velitrae or thereabouts. She would have been no help to an ambitious young man’s career and, if alive, must have been divorced. Her removal from the scene enabled Octavius to achieve a splendid alliance, when he married Atia, a member of the Julian family.

    The Julii traced their ancestry to before the city’s foundation, traditionally set at 753 B.C. The legend went that when, after a ten-year siege, the Greeks sacked the city of Troy on what is now the Turkish coast near the Dardanelles, they killed or enslaved most of the leading Trojans. One exception was Aeneas, the son of the love goddess Venus and a handsome young warrior. He escaped the city’s destruction with some followers and after many adventures made landfall in Latium. His son Iulus (sometimes also called Ascanius) founded the Julian dynasty.

    By the first century B.C., high birth was not sufficient to guarantee political success. Money was also required, and in large quantities. The Julii were impoverished; for long generations few of them had won important posts in the honors race. Like aristocratic families before and since that fall on hard times, they used marriage as a means of income generation.

    The current head of the family, Gaius Julius Caesar, was a rising politician in his late thirties, about the same age as Octavius. Talented, amusing, and fashionable, he had a voracious appetite for cash and had built up enormous debts to feed both his lifestyle and his career. One of his sisters married Marcus Atius Balbus, a local worthy from Aricia, a town not far from Velitrae. Balbus was not prominent in public life and his greatest attraction must have lain in the fact that he was a man of substance.

    As a new man, Octavius knew that his dubious ancestry would damage his career. A commodious dowry would be of value in a wife, but what he really needed was entrée into the Roman nobility. As a niece of Julius Caesar, Balbus’ daughter Atia was well placed to make that possible. Because the Balbi lived not far from Octavius’ home base of Velitrae, they may well have traveled in the same social circles. In that case, Atia formed an ambitious man’s bridge from provincial life to Rome.

    Sometime before 70 B.C., the couple married and, in due course, Atia became pregnant. Disappointingly, the outcome was a second daughter. Five or six years passed before another child arrived: a son, this time, Gaius. He was born just before sunrise on September 23, 63 B.C., at Ox Heads, a small property on the slopes of the fashionable Palatine Hill, a few minutes’ walk from Rome’s main square, the Forum, and the Senate House.

    By tradition, the paterfamilias held the power of life and death over his household, both his relatives and his slaves. When a child was born, the midwife took the infant and placed it on the floor in front of the father. Should the father wish to acknowledge his paternity, he would lift the baby into his arms if it was a boy; if a girl, he would simply instruct that she be fed. Only after this ritual had taken place did the child receive his or her first nourishment.

    Apparently, Gaius was lucky to survive this procedure, for an astrologer had given him a bad prognosis and he narrowly escaped infanticide. If Gaius had been rejected, he would have been abandoned in the open air and left to die; this was a fate to which illegitimate children and girls were especially liable, as were (one may surmise) sickly or disabled babies. Rejected infants were left on dunghills, or near cisterns. They were often picked up there by slave traders (although the family might reclaim the child later, if it so wished) or, more rarely, rescued by a kindly passerby. Otherwise, they would starve, unless eaten by stray dogs.

    Rome, with about a million inhabitants, was an unhygienic, noisy, crowded megalopolis, no place for rearing a child, and there is evidence that Gaius spent much of his infancy at his grandfather’s country house near Velitrae. More than a century later, Suetonius reported that the house still existed and was open to the public: a small room, not unlike a butler’s pantry, is still shown and described as [his] nursery.

    Helped by the link, through Atia, to Julius Caesar, Octavius’ political career was advancing rapidly. After serving as quaestor, he could move up to the next rung, as one of the four aediles. The aedileship being optional, it is not known whether Octavius held this office, but he could probably have afforded it.

    At the age of thirty-nine, Octavius was eligible to run for praetor. According to Velleius Paterculus, he was regarded as a dignified person, of upright and blameless life, and [was] extremely rich. In the praetorian election for 61 B.C., he came in first even though he was running against a number of aristocratic competitors.

    The two-year-old Gaius would have seen little of his father, who spent a year in Rome discharging his judicial duties as praetor. Then, as was usual for senior government officials after their period of office, at the end of 61 B.C. Octavius went overseas for a twelve-month stint as governor, or propraetor, of the province of Macedonia.

    Octavius was due to sail from Brundisium, a major port on the heel of Italy, but before he did so, the Senate asked him to make a detour to the town of Thurii on the toe and disperse a group of outlawed slaves.

    More than ten years previously, these men had joined the great slave revolt of Spartacus, following him during the years when he won one victory after another over incompetently led Roman legions. They managed to avoid the terrible penalty exacted on the survivors of Spartacus’ final defeat: thousands were crucified along the length of the road from Rome to Capua, where the rebellion had started at a school for slave gladiators.

    Somehow the escapees managed to keep going as a group, reemerging briefly to join the forces of Lucius Sergius Catilina. In the year of Gaius’ birth, this dissident aristocrat had plotted the violent overthrow of the Republic and its replacement by a regime of radicals which he would lead. The alert consul, Marcus Tullius Cicero, was a new man like Octavius; a fine public speaker and an able and honest administrator, he outwitted the conspirator and finessed him into a botched military insurrection.

    The Romans depended on, but also feared, the hundreds of thousands of slaves who in large part ran their economy, providing labor for agricultural estates and manufacturing businesses. Slaves could also be found in every reasonably well-off home, cooking, cleaning, acting as secretaries and managers. If they were young and good-looking, slaves of either sex could well find themselves providing sexual services.

    A slave was something one could own, like a horse or a table. In the Roman view, he or she was a talking instrument. Slaves could not marry, although they could make and save money and could receive legacies. If a master was murdered by a slave, all the slaves in his ownership were killed. It was believed that a slave could give true evidence only under torture. Perhaps a third of the population of Italy were slaves in the late Republic—as many as three million people.

    For Octavius, dealing with the surviving Spartacans was an important task. They did not pose a great threat in themselves; it was the principle that counted. No rebellious runaway should be allowed to enjoy the fruits of his illicit freedom.

    As a victorious general, Octavius could acquire an honorific and hereditary title and it seems that he added Thurinus to his name to mark his defeat of the slaves, passing it on to his infant son. Suetonius, writing in the first century B.C., asserted:

    I can prove pretty conclusively that as a child [Gaius] was called Thurinus, perhaps…because his

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1