Augustus (42 page)

The Senate’s powers remained advisory in principle, and bills were still laid before popular assemblies for approval. However, its decrees or
senatusconsulta
were increasingly regarded as binding, especially when specifically supported or initiated by the
princeps
.

Both the Senate and the
princeps
acquired new legal powers. The old republican courts of law, the
iudicia publica,
remained in being, presided over by praetors. But cases of treason or otherwise high political importance could be brought to one of two new courts, the
princeps
in council or the consuls in the Senate, against which there was no appeal. The ever growing number of citizens made it impractical to remit all criminal prosecutions to Rome, so proconsuls were given the authority to carry out judicial functions.

Under the Republic, any citizen found guilty of an offense had the right to appeal to the people. However, Augustus was given the authority to overturn a sentence of death by the use of his
imperium
. So
provocatio ad populum
gave way to
appellatio ad Caesarem,
an appeal to Caesar.

Augustus sought to improve the honesty and efficiency of imperial administration. Without interfering excessively in local ways of doing things, he and Agrippa introduced orderly governance throughout the empire and, in the Gallic and Spanish provinces and Africa where they were missing, the benefits of urban living. Regular censuses were held to enable a fair assessment of the provincial tax burden, and tax collection was made fairer.

In Rome itself, the
princeps
borrowed Egnatius Rufus’ idea of maintaining a troop of six hundred slave firefighters (in
A.D.
6, this was expanded into seven cohorts of firemen, each cohort being responsible for two of the fourteen districts into which Augustus divided the city). Three
cohortes urbanae,
or urban cohorts, were established to police the city.

Augustus did not interfere in the local government of Italy. He left its four hundred or so towns and cities to manage their own affairs as they had always done, except in two respects. He divided the peninsula into eleven departments for the purpose of the census of citizens and of the registration of public land. And, more important, he recognized the need for speedy communications. He tried to persuade senators to invest some of the spoils of successful military campaigns in improving and extending the Italian road network. When that failed, he himself took over the
cura viarum,
the responsibility for roads, and made large donations from his own pocket for road construction.

Regular relay stations were established, where state couriers and government officials could change horses and chariots and spend the night at the station’s hostel. Local authorities provided the chariots and horses, and officials using the service paid a fixed charge. As the system developed, an experienced military man was placed in charge of it as the
praefectus vehiculorum
. Eventually an infrastructure emerged that significantly improved communications with all parts of Italy and the provinces to the north.

In the days of the Republic, it had been expected of prominent men that they spend large sums on public works; outstanding examples were the imposing stone theater built by Pompey the Great and the new forum commissioned by Julius Caesar. As we have seen, Augustus and Agrippa followed in their footsteps and invested heavily in new public buildings and refurbishments in the city.

With the passage of time, various senatorial commissions were created—for example, the
curatores viarum,
who made sure that roads were kept in a good state of repair, and the
curatores locorum publicorum,
who were responsible for maintaining public buildings and temples. These groups were not themselves public construction agencies, but worked through local officials and contractors to effect repairs.

Augustus introduced greater order into the day-to-day management of the empire than had existed in the past. In the absence of a professional civil service, officeholders with
imperium
in the Republic, such as consuls and praetors, used to govern from their town houses in Rome and used slaves and servants, family and friends to expedite business. Augustus governed in the same way, but on a much larger scale. He employed a growing army of slaves and freedmen to undertake the routine tasks of administration.

However, it was not politically acceptable for such people to be the official face of the regime. The
princeps
thus established a governmental career structure for the upper classes. Young men of the senatorial order who showed promise could spend a lifetime as well-paid public administrators.

When they were in their late teens, after military service, they could seek minor posts as
vigintiviri
(literally, “twenty men”). They worked for a year in the mint, were in charge of the streets of Rome, managed prisons and executions, and judged legal cases involving questions of slavery or freedom. They then served either as tribunes of the people (except for patricians) or as aediles. They could stand for one of the twelve praetorships, after which they might command a legion or govern a minor province. The most successful could aspire to the consulship, followed by the governorship of a major province or one of the curatorships at Rome.

The Senate only produced senior administrators, and the
princeps
also looked for assistance in less important jobs from the
equites
. Whether they were senators or
equites,
able men became professional servants of the state, receiving a salary and living out long and interesting careers. The fact that Augustus twice enacted antibribery laws, in 18
B.C.
and 8
B.C.
, not only illustrates his commitment to clean government, but also suggests that his efforts may have met some resistance. Inch by inch, though, prototypes of the institutions that we take for granted in a modern state were beginning to emerge. The amateurish and corrupt mechanisms of the Republic were gradually replaced by something resembling an honest state bureaucracy.

Rome’s public treasury, the Aerarium, was based at the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum and was managed by two praetors. We have no exact information of the exchequer receipts from taxes, customs duties, and tribute payments from client rulers, but it is unlikely that large sums of money moved to and from Rome. Each province had its own treasury, from which the
princeps
would draw for local military and administrative purposes, and in many cases there would not have been a large surplus to send to Rome.

The main claim on the empire’s resources was the army—namely, twenty-eight legions and an equivalent resource of auxiliary units. This was not a large force for so extensive an empire, but the financial burden was considerable. A soldier’s basic pay was nine hundred sesterces a year, entailing an aggregate expenditure of 140 million sesterces. However, the real cost of maintaining the army was considerably higher, for the cavalry was better paid than ordinary infantrymen; and officers, from centurions to the legionary commanders, or legates, earned very large salaries. On top of this came expenditure on military equipment, the empire’s fleets, and the elite Praetorians in Italy.

Augustus was enormously rich. His wealth came from his inheritance from Julius Caesar, from legacies (it was the done thing to remember the
princeps
with a generous bequest), the profits of the proscriptions and the civil war, and large estates in various parts of the empire. In his official memoir, he notes with satisfaction that he spent 600 million sesterces on land bought in Italy for his veterans and 260 million sesterces elsewhere. In lieu of farms, some demobilized soldiers received money grants, totaling 400 million sesterces.

In addition to these phenomenally large sums of money, the
princeps
often topped up the Aerarium from his own pocket when it ran low of funds. In practice, it was difficult to distinguish between the treasury and the privy purse.

In summary, Augustus’ reforms of the way governmental power was exercised were not particularly controversial, nor were they widely understood to be revolutionary, when seen individually, but taken together they expressed four slow and irresistible trends. First, the
princeps
was accumulating more and more power to himself, whether by streamlining the legislative and decision-making process, speeding up governmental communications across the empire, or enhancing his judicial role.

Although it was increasingly clear who was in charge, the senatorial ruling class acquiesced in the autocracy because of the second trend of Augustus’ reign: the enhancement of the Senate’s workload and prestige. When Augustus developed a career structure for the imperial administration, he was not simply improving the quality of governance, but creating high-status, well-paid jobs.

Senators will also have been pleased to witness the declining importance of the people—the third trend, and one the citizens of Rome were themselves willing to countenance as they experienced the benefits of life under the principate. They had no wish at all to return to the inefficiencies of the Republic.

Fourth, Augustus introduced the beginnings of a public bureaucracy, with the increasing use of nonpolitician freedmen and slaves who handled day-to-day business.

Romans distinguished between
imperium,
power, and
auctoritas,
authority. It was evidence of the remarkable success of the Augustan system that the
princeps
was able to command obedience simply through his authority, and was very seldom obliged to draw on the brute power at his disposal.

XIX

THE CULT OF VIRTUE

20
S B.C.–A.D.
9

The
princeps
understood that independence of spirit was central to a Roman’s idea of himself. His claim to have restored the Republic would not have been acquiesced to, nor his rule accepted, if he had attempted to muzzle opinion. In fact, he would have found it hard to do so, for he did not have a secret police at his disposal.

What was more, there was no need to restrict citizens’ rights to self-expression, for there was little outright opposition. The whole point of his constitutional settlement was that it attracted a broad consent among the ruling class. What critics there were could be allowed their say without risking revolution.

This is not to say that rising men did not practice self-censorship, or that poets and historians failed to flatter. As we have seen, the
princeps
and his unofficial “minister of culture,” Maecenas, well understood the power of literature to promote official values.

But there was another, more subtle and more compelling reason for the license Augustus allowed commentators—historians and poets. This concerned his core beliefs. Like many of his fellow Romans, he deeply disapproved of the decadent society around him, which had abandoned the severe Roman virtues of the past. He wanted writers like Titus Livius (in English, Livy) to speak their minds on this subject without fear or favor.

About the same age as the
princeps,
Livy was born in Patavium (today’s Padua) in Cisalpine Gaul. He made no effort to follow a public career, instead devoting his long life to the writing of a monumental history of Rome, from the foundation to 9
B.C.
He was one of Rome’s first professional historians, for until then history had usually been a pastime for retired politicians.

Livy’s worldview was moral and romantic, and most thinking people of his age shared it. In the preface to his magnum opus, he stated that writing history was a way of escaping the troubles of the modern world: “Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every kind of sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death both individual and collective.”

The trouble was seen to have begun in the second century
B.C.,
when, somewhat absentmindedly, the Senate acquired its empire in the east—first Greece and Macedonia, then Asia Minor and Syria. Leading Romans began to copy the extravagant lifestyle of Asiatic Greeks. The culminating metaphor for Roman decadence was the career of Mark Antony and his sexual subversion by Cleopatra.

This perceived moral decline was accompanied by political collapse at the hands of a succession of selfish dynasts. The greatest of them, Julius Caesar, broke the Republic, which for centuries had embodied in constitutional form the traditional Roman virtues, now lost. Although himself a dynast, Pompey the Great, who opposed Caesar in the civil war, gave his life for the republican cause, and came to be a symbol of it.

According to Tacitus, Livy “praised Pompey so warmly that Augustus [whom he knew personally] called him ‘the Pompeian.’” The historian never called Brutus and Cassius bandits and parricides, their “fashionable designations today.”

Livy was not alone in his overt republican sympathies. In the
Aeneid,
Augustus’ poet laureate dared to rehabilitate that most die-hard of republicans, the pigheaded purist Marcus Porcius Cato, who led the optimates against Julius Caesar and died by his own hand after his defeat in Africa.

The victor of Actium was not the only great Roman to be depicted on the shield of Aeneas. In a vision of the underworld various historical figures are shown waiting for their lives to begin. Virgil points to where “the righteous are set apart, with Cato as their lawgiver.” Elsewhere, the poet delivers Julius Caesar a veiled rebuke: “Turn not your country’s hand against your country’s heart!”

The
princeps
did not demur from this kind of talk. He transferred the statue of Pompey the Great from the hall where Caesar had been assassinated to a much more prominent position on an arch facing the grand door of Pompey’s Theater. He remarked of Cato that “to seek to keep the constitution unchanged argues a good citizen and a good man.”