Augustus (39 page)

The
princeps
was superstitious, and devoutly believed in premonitory signs. He always carried a piece of sealskin as an amulet against thunder and lightning, which he feared. During the Spanish campaign, the amulet worked its magic for him. On a night march during a thunderstorm, a flash of lightning scorched his litter and killed a slave who was walking ahead with a torch. In thanks for this narrow escape, he built the Temple of Jupiter Tonans (the Thunderer) on the edge of the Capitol overlooking the Forum. It was known for its magnificence and contained famous works of art. Augustus often visited it.

As so often when he faced a crisis (particularly a military one), Augustus fell ill—according to Dio, “from the fatigue and anxiety caused by these conditions.” He took the waters in the Pyrenees and convalesced in Tarraco (today’s Tarragona). His deputy swiftly brought the fighting to a successful conclusion, which was attributed (of course) to the genius of the
princeps
. The illness seems to have lasted at least for a year, although our sources tell us nothing of its nature. To pass the time Augustus wrote an autobiography, which he dedicated to Agrippa and Maecenas. Sadly, the book has not survived.

During the late Republic, the wives of senior Roman officials did not often travel abroad with their husbands. Augustus himself ruled that the legates he appointed to the provinces at his disposal should not spend time with their wives or, if they insisted on doing so, then only outside the campaigning season (generally March to October).

However, we have it on good authority that Livia accompanied her husband on his travels to west and east. She was probably with him in Gaul and Spain, although she will have stayed safely in the rear when Augustus was with the army, and tended him when he was ill.

Livia was an able businesswoman and over the years accumulated numerous properties and estates across the empire. Her tours around the Mediterranean as Rome’s first lady allowed her to inspect her acquisitions and check that they were being well managed. In Gaul she owned land with a copper mine. Her property portfolio also included palm groves in Judea and estates in Egypt, including papyrus marshes, arable farms, vineyards, commercial vegetable gardens, granaries, and olive and wine presses.

It may have been Augustus’ poor health that prompted him in 25
B.C.
to take the first concrete step to arranging a dynastic succession: he married off his daughter and only child, Julia (by his second wife, Scribonia), who was now fourteen, to his nephew, the twenty-year-old Marcellus. Augustus being absent in Spain, Agrippa presided over the wedding; what he thought of the young man’s promotion is unknown, for he kept his own counsel.

The Senate voted Marcellus special honors; he was given the senior ranking of a praetor for official occasions. So far as the honors race was concerned, he received permission to stand for the consulship ten years before the legal minimum age of thirty-seven, and was counted as a former quaestor, the most junior elective post. This meant that he would be able to serve as an aedile in 23
B.C.
The post would give him a chance to make his mark with the average citizen in Rome, for he would be in charge of the city’s public entertainments for the year. Spectacle at its most extravagant was what the public demanded, and they would show their appreciation at the ballot box. His uncle made sure that Marcellus had an unprecedented budget.

Rome had not seen its
princeps
for three years. At last, in the middle of 24
B.C.
, he struggled home, still weak and uncertain of his survival. If he hoped that his political settlement had been fully accepted and was working smoothly, he was to be disabused. In late 24 or early 23
B.C.,
Marcus Primus, the governor of Macedonia, one of the Senate’s provinces, was taken to court for having gone to war without permission with a friendly Thracian tribe. It was a serious offense for a proconsul to take an army outside his province.

Among Primus’ defenders was one of the consuls for 23
B.C.
, Aulus Terentius Varro Murena, a trusted and senior follower of the
princeps
. He was Maecenas’ brother-in-law, and the poets Virgil and Horace were his friends (he had lent the party of poets his house at the resort of Formiae on their journey from Rome to Brundisium in 39
B.C.
). He seems to have been a dashing, impatient sort of fellow, and Horace took it upon himself to offer an ode of advice.

The loftiest pines, when the wind blows,

Are shaken hardest; tall towers drop

With the worst crash….

Primus’ defense was that he had been ordered to launch a campaign by both the
princeps
and Marcellus. This was most embarrassing, for in theory Augustus only held authority in his own
provincia
. Of his own accord he attended the court where the trial was being held. The praetor, or presiding judge, asked him if he had given the man orders to make war and he replied that he had not.

Murena made some disrespectful remarks about the
princeps,
and asked him to his face: “What are you doing here, and who asked you to come?”

“The public interest,” Augustus drily replied.

It is no surprise that Primus was found guilty; he was very probably sent into exile. However, many observers at the time must have thought it unlikely that Primus would have claimed to have acted under orders unless he had actually done so. The affair revealed the
res publica restituta,
the “restored Republic,” as something of a sham.

The Primus affair led to the formation of a little-understood conspiracy against Augustus. The leader was a young republican called Fannius Caepio. Apparently, the consul Murena was implicated, although Dio thought the charge might be false, “since he was notoriously rough-tongued and headstrong in his manner of address towards all alike.” The plot was uncovered and the accused men condemned to death in absentia. In constitutional theory, the execution of a serving consul was a contradiction in terms, for the Republic’s chief executive had supreme authority; if he broke the law, charges could only be brought against him after his term of office had expired. Once again, the libertarian pretensions of the regime were exposed.

What the aims of the plotters were and how they were revealed cannot now be recovered. Perhaps there was no conspiracy at all—or, rather, the
princeps
organized a setup. But why? We cannot tell. If it was a serious attempt to overthrow the new order, it was evidence the settlement of 27
B.C.
was not working.

The story has a sad footnote. Maecenas confided the discovery of the Caepio conspiracy, a state secret, to his wife, Terentia. Murena was her brother, and she seems to have warned him that he was in trouble. Augustus found out what had happened, and from that moment his friendship with Maecenas cooled. They remained on reasonably good terms, but the Etruscan aesthete was no longer a full member of the inner circle.

The year 23
B.C.
had not gotten off to a good start, but Marcellus in his role as aedile made a brilliant success of the games. Throughout the summer, a canopy sheltered the Forum, where a temporary wooden arena was erected for the gladiatorial displays. Novel, slightly scandalous acts included a woman of noble birth taking part in a stage performance and an
eques
dancing in a ballet.

However, the mood in Rome was darkened by the onset of a plague. Epidemics were terrifying and not infrequent occurrences in a large crowded city such as Rome. What disease struck on this occasion is unknown; it may have been smallpox, bubonic plague, or typhoid fever. Scarlet fever and influenza have also been recorded by Greek and Roman medical writers.

Augustus fell ill again. Suetonius has it that he was suffering abscesses on the liver. According to Celsus, whose
On Medicine
was published in the first century
A.D
., the symptoms of liver disease were

severe pain in the right part under the praecordia [the region of the body about the heart], which spreads to the right side, to the clavicle and arm of that side; at times there is also pain in the right hand, there is hot shivering…[in bad cases] after a meal there is greater difficulty in breathing; then supervenes a sort of paralysis of the lower jaws.

Recommended treatment included the application of hot water in winter and tepid water in the summer, but “all cold things must be especially avoided, for nothing is more harmful to the liver.”

Augustus was in despair, for there seemed to be no hope of recovery; it appeared that the new regime was about to end. This would be a tragedy not just for him but for many others in public life. He had to take what steps he could to ensure a permanent legacy.

He gathered around his bedside the officers of state and leading senators and
equites
. He spoke to them on matters of public policy and handed his fellow consul, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, the
breviarium imperii,
a book that recorded the empire’s financial and military resources.

Many were expecting the
princeps
to bequeath his authority to Marcellus, whom he had only too evidently been grooming. But this had been a long-term plan, and the boy was too young and inexperienced to hold supreme power now. Agrippa would have had little trouble deposing him once Augustus was dead. Bowing to this reality, the dying man handed Agrippa the symbol of his authority: his signet ring bearing the head of Alexander the Great.

Much to everyone’s surprise, including his own, the
princeps
recovered. His doctor, Antonius Musa, turning medical orthodoxy on its head, decided to abandon the hot fomentations he had been using to no avail in favor of cold baths and cold potions. The shock treatment worked. (It has been suggested that Augustus was, in fact, suffering from typhoid fever, which could well have been the cause of the epidemic devastating Rome at the time; cold packs were a well-known treatment for the disease in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.)

The convalescent
princeps
showed that he was aware of the general unpopularity of his dynastic plans by bringing his will to a meeting of the Senate. He intended to read it out, as proof that he had no successor in mind, but in the event, to show their confidence in him, the senators would not permit it.

The settlement of 27
B.C.
needed revision and it was time to make a fresh start. Augustus resigned as consul on July 1 and let it be known that he would no longer be a regular candidate. For him to continue holding the consulship year after year was stretching constitutional propriety very thin, for it made the post look like a permanent one, not so far from Julius Caesar’s unpopular dictatorship for life. Too, the office entailed a good deal of routine business and time-consuming ceremonial, and as long as Augustus held it he was blocking off access to one of Rome’s two top jobs every year, so irritating political aspirants.

But if he was to give up the consulship, the
princeps
would need some other source of
imperium
. With typical ingenuity, he came up with two devices. For some years he had been awarded
tribunicia sacrosanctitas,
or the immunity from physical attack given to a tribune of the people. Now he decided to assume
tribunicia potestas
in perpetuity: he would enjoy the power of a tribune without actually having to hold the post. That power was considerable. Tribunes attended Senate meetings and were entitled to present laws for approval by the people. They could also veto
any
officeholder’s decisions, including those of other tribunes.

Augustus recognized that
tribunicia potestas,
together with his enormous
provincia,
gave him almost all the authority he needed to govern without hindrance. He dated his “reign” from when it was awarded, on July 1, 23
B.C
., and added the
potestas
to his long list of titles. However, a couple of gaps needed to be filled. Proconsuls, or provincial governors, lost their
imperium
when they crossed the
pomerium
—the sacred boundary of Rome—and entered the city. That would mean that when he was in the city the
princeps
would only have the status of a private citizen. Thanks to his prestige, or
auctoritas,
his wishes would usually be obeyed, but on occasion there might be some awkwardness. So the Senate voted that Augustus’ proconsular
imperium
should not lapse when he was inside the city walls.

The Marcus Primus affair had thrown an embarrassing light on Augustus’ relations with the governors of senatorial provinces, in whose business he had no right to meddle—in theory. To correct this problem, he was granted a general and overriding proconsular authority (
imperium maius,
“greater power”), the right to intervene anywhere in the empire as and when he chose. It was a right he exercised very discreetly and with the utmost caution, for by tradition a Roman governor had a free hand during his term of office.

The reforms considerably strengthened Augustus’ position, but the real winner from the crisis of 23
B.C.
was Agrippa. He had been shown to be indispensable; now he, too, received
imperium proconsulare
(but not
imperium maius
). This probably gave him some kind of general authority in the eastern provinces, where Augustus dispatched him in the autumn. In effect, Agrippa was now the empire’s co-regent.

Too much information has been lost for us to be sure, but it looks very much as if the
princeps
had had his wings clipped. Perhaps the governing faction—that is, all those men whose fortunes, livelihoods, even lives depended on the regime’s continuance—made its leader acknowledge that the state was not his personal property and that an insurance policy (to wit, Agrippa) needed to be taken out against some future mortal illness.