Augustus (44 page)

Can you rule earth.

From a couple of years or so before Actium, Augustus recognized the importance of encouraging the state religion. In addition to the Temple of Apollo interconnecting with his house on the Palatine, and that of Jupiter Tonans on the Capitol, Augustus built or refurnished many temples, all of them associated with him, his family, and the regime.

One of the most splendid was the Temple of Mars Ultor (Avenging Mars) on the Capitol. Vowed at the battle of Philippi, it was the centerpiece of a huge new Forum of Augustus which was dedicated in 2
B.C.
Like the Parthenon in Athens, the temple was large enough to have eight columns across the front. In its
cella,
or hall, stood images of Augustus’ ancestors, and Rome’s long ago recovered legionary standards were displayed. Here the
princeps
received foreign embassies; here the Senate debated questions of war, and young Roman boys celebrated their coming of age.

However, something more than marble buildings was required to bring about a religious renaissance. Some great event was called for, a sacred ceremony that would bring citizens together to celebrate the dawning of a new age. It was found in an unusual quarter.

A little to the north of the city in the Campus Martius was a volcanic cleft, at the bottom of which stood a subterranean altar known as the Tarentum or Terentum. Here a nocturnal festival was held in honor of Dis and Proserpina, the gloomy deities of the underworld. Called the Ludi Tarentini, the festival took place over three nights once every century (the interval was set so that no one would be able to attend more than once).

Augustus and his religious advisers decided to rebrand the festival, naming it the Ludi Saeculares, Centennial (or Secular) Games, in the summer of 17
B.C.
(and decreasing the periodicity to 110 years).

The ceremonies themselves needed some cheering up. Torches, sulfur, and asphalt were distributed to the entire citizenry, to encourage mass participation in a fiery purification rite. Dis and Proserpina were dismissed, being replaced by the Fates, divine beings who watched over the fertility of nature and of humankind, by the goddess of childbirth, and by Mother Earth. Some daytime celebrations were added in honor of Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, and Apollo’s sister Diana. In other words, the old melancholy emphasis on death and the passing of an era was transformed into a forward-looking invocation of the future.

The Ludi culminated in a splendid ritual in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine. An inscription recorded the program for the day: “After a sacrifice was completed by those thereunto appointed, twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls who had lost neither father nor mother, sang a hymn, and so likewise on the Capitol. The hymn was written by Q. Horatius Flaccus.”

The chubby little poet of the pleasures of private life kept a straight face for once and produced something as solemn and grand as the occasion warranted. He struck all the notes that his master and friend expected.

Goddess [Diana], make strong our youth and bless the Senate’s

Decrees rewarding parenthood and marriage,

That from the new laws Rome may reap a lavish

Harvest of boys and girls.

The main message was that the
princeps
had brought back old Rome and breathed new life into the
mos maiorum
. A procession of abstract personifications was conjured up in calm, high-flying verse:

Now Faith and Peace and Honour and old-fashioned

Conscience and unremembered Virtue venture

To walk again, and with them blessed Plenty

Pouring her brimming horn.

Ten years had passed since the “restoration” of the Republic. Augustus, now aged forty-six, had established his power without getting himself assassinated. Once a faction leader who had expropriated the Republic, he had successfully recast himself as a new Romulus. The regime had laid claim to embodying the Roman state, and few of those who attended the Ludi Saeculares will have gainsaid it.

However, almost invisible cracks, beyond evidence but not beyond the scrutiny of suspicion, hint at strains in the heart of government. The execution of Murena, the estrangement from Maecenas, the impression of an alliance between Agrippa and Livia to put a brake on the
princeps’
dynastic plans, the brushes with death—these all stood in uneasy contrast with the public symbolism of order, stability, and permanence.

XX

LIFE AT COURT

His daily routine when he was
princeps
seems to have changed little over the years and was studiedly austere. His house on the Palatine, next to Livia’s house, was modestly appointed. Its substantial remains confirm Suetonius’ description of it as “remarkable neither for size nor for elegance; the courts being supported by squat columns of peperino stone, and the living-rooms innocent of marble or elaborately tessellated floors.” The building had a private side with small living spaces and some larger public staterooms.

Suetonius also remarked on the
princeps’
study. “Whenever he wanted to be alone and free of interruptions, he could retreat to a study at the top of the house, which he nicknamed ‘Syracuse’ [perhaps alluding to the workroom of Archimedes, the great Syracusan mathematician and experimental scientist] or ‘my little workshop.’”

This room has been discovered and reconstructed. The walls and ceiling are painted in red, yellow, and black on a white ground. Motifs include swans, calyxes, winged griffins, candelabra, and lotus flowers. All these images were derived from the art of Alexandria, which was popular in Rome in the first century
B.C.
, and may have reflected the impression the city made on Octavian during his visit in 30
B.C.

The
princeps
used the same bedroom all the year round for more than forty years. He is said to have slept on a low bed with a very ordinary coverlet. A small windowless chamber, finely decorated with frescoes featuring the comic and tragic masks of theater, survives, which may have been Augustus’ bedroom.

The couches and tables that furnished the house were preserved at least until Suetonius’ day; many of them, he wrote after examining them, “would hardly be considered fit for a private citizen.”

Like their aristocratic contemporaries, Augustus and Livia are likely to have slept apart. The
princeps
awoke with dawn to the sounds of a stirring household. A poor sleeper, he would often drop off during the day while he was being carried through the streets and when his litter was set down because of some delay.

Slaves bustled about cleaning the house, with buckets, ladders to reach the ceilings, poles with sponges on the ends, feather dusters, and brooms. In the days before electrification, every minute of natural daylight was precious, so Augustus did not lie in but got up at once. He wore a loincloth and undertunic in bed, so when he rose all he had to do was slip his feet into his shoes. He took care not to thrust his right foot into his left shoe, for he believed that would bring him bad luck. He probably cleaned his teeth with dentrifice, a powder made from bone, horn, or egg or shell-fish shells.

The
princeps
paid little attention to his hair, and when it was cut had several barbers working in a hurry at the same time. Sometimes he had his beard clipped and at other times was shaved. When at the hairdresser’s, he used to read or write.

Unless he was due to preside over a public ceremony or attend a meeting of the Senate, Augustus wore house clothes woven and sewn for him (or so it was sedulously said) by Livia and his female relatives. He felt the cold badly, and in winter protected himself with four tunics and a heavy toga above an undershirt; below that he wore a chest protector, underpants, and woolen gaiters. His shoes had thick soles to make him look taller. A change of better clothes and shoes was always at hand in case he was unexpectedly called on to appear in an official capacity.

A Roman breakfast (
ientaculum
) was a quick and simple affair—some cheese and olives (possibly prepared as a paste to spread on the cheese), some bread dipped in water, honey, or diluted wine. The business of the day started with a
salutatio;
when the doors of the house were opened a crowd of clients or dependents arrived to pay their respects. Senators often attended and were greeted with a kiss. However, anyone was admitted and was allowed to present a request. Augustus behaved in a relaxed and friendly manner; once a petitioner was in such a state of anxiety that he laughed and said: “Anyone would think you were offering a penny to an elephant!”

Once the morning reception was over, Augustus was free to work by himself in his “Syracuse,” and to hold meetings with his staff as well as with politicians.

Augustus’ and Livia’s houses witnessed a mix of personal and business life (the
domus
or home, and the
familia Caesaris
or Caesar’s household). They were far too small for administrative needs, so other neighboring buildings on the Palatine were bought up, creating a government quarter. Because the new Temple of Apollo adjoined Augustus’ house, its spaces—the
cella
and the Greek and Latin libraries—could be used to house official events or large meetings.

As is always the case with autocracies, a court developed—that is, not so much a place as a social group, which acted as an intermediary between the ruler and society at large. It accompanied Augustus on his travels away from Rome. Distinctions of power and influence were carefully graded and essentially expressed the degree of access a given person had to the ruler. Augustus went to a great deal of trouble to conceal the thoroughly unrepublican reality of his absolute authority, and took care to act much as any ordinary consul or other officeholder would. He was scrupulously polite to other members of the nobility, exchanging social visits with them and always attending their birthday celebrations.

A group of trusted intimates emerged, the
amici Caesaris,
or friends and political allies of Caesar. It was not a formal grouping, but if an
amicus
lost his status for any reason, this was a terrible thing. Once a consul-elect, Tedius Afer, learning that a spiteful comment of his had enraged Augustus, committed suicide by jumping from a height.

It was far more unusual for a family member to forfeit his or her place in the
princeps’
circle. Their relationship to Augustus gave them a more or less permanent position; a daughter or a nephew might misbehave but remain a daughter or a nephew. As in courts throughout history, important relatives probably came to represent different political points of view, and courtiers gathered behind them in cabals as they perceived their interests to dictate. Thus we detect in 23
B.C.
what may have been shadowy groupings around Octavia and Marcellus on the one hand, and Agrippa and Livia on the other. Policy, love, and friendship were often hard to disentangle.

Running the empire entailed a huge amount of complicated administrative work, much of which was performed by freedmen. These had a number of important advantages over family members and social equals: there was an inexhaustible supply of them, and, unlike aristocratic members of the ruling class, they obeyed direct orders. They had no political constituency and their fate was bound up with that of their employer. Crucially, they reported to nobody but the
princeps,
and so what they did was easily kept secret.

For this reason, little is known about how Augustus organized his staff. To judge by the officially designated separate departments established by later emperors, they may have been loosely arranged in groups that dealt with correspondence, with petitions, with foreign embassies and delegations, and with legal matters. There must have been an archiving function and an accounts department to manage Augustus’ vast wealth.

A few freedmen—among them Licinus and Celadus—became close friends of the
princeps
. When he wanted to be completely incommunicado he hid himself away in a suburban villa owned by a freedman who had been a member of his bodyguard. However, bad behavior was strictly punished; when an imperial secretary was found to have leaked the contents of a confidential letter, Augustus had his legs broken.

Augustus cultivated a simple, easy style of speaking and writing and disliked what he called the “stink of far-fetched phrases.” He conveyed his meaning as plainly and directly as possible; so, for example, he would repeat the same conjunction several times for clarity, even though the effect was awkward. Letters of his seen by Suetonius employed some rather odd expressions, perhaps deriving from his provincial childhood. For example, he liked to say “wooden-headed” (
pulleiacus
) for “crazy” (
cerritus
), “feel flat” (
vapide se habere
) for “feel bad” (
male se habere
), and “be a beetroot” (
betizare
) for “be sluggish” (
languere
). Of a sudden or swift action, he would say it was “quicker than boiled asparagus.” He often wrote “they will pay on the Greek Kalends,” a proverbial expression meaning “never,” for the Kalends, signifying the first day of a month, were a purely Roman term. Favorite Greek maxims included “More haste, less speed” and “Give me a safe commander, not a bold one”; he liked the Latin tag “Well done is quickly done.”

Augustus wrote a number of prose works of various kinds, some of which he read aloud to close friends in the same way that professional authors used to do in lecture halls. They included an “Encouragement of Philosophy” and some volumes of autobiography (written during his illness in Spain in 24
B.C.
). Augustus’ attempts at verse were few and far between. He wrote a poem in hexameters, “Sicily,” and a few epigrams, which he composed at bathtime.