Augustus (50 page)

Despite the reforms of the past fifteen years, the Senate was still not working as well as it should. The adoption in 18
B.C.
of a million sesterces as the new wealth minimum for membership had had the unintended consequence that qualified men who wished to avoid service were able to plead poverty (not always honestly) and so win exemption from senatorial status. Not enough suitable men were making themselves available for the
vigintiviri,
the junior administrative jobs that opened a political career.

During his absence from Rome, Augustus had arranged for a decree allowing him to open the
vigintiviri
to selected
equites
. Now that he was back in the city, he reviewed the entire membership of the Senate and compelled senatorial malingerers—that is, young men of the senatorial class who possessed the necessary property qualification but tried to conceal it—to take their proper places.

Fighting apathy in the ruling elite was an uphill struggle, and Augustus’ adjustments made little real difference. The great offices of state and senior army appointments gave status to those who held them. But the fact that power was gathered into one man’s hands, not widely distributed as it had been under the Republic, was the real reason that many young men were less interested in a public career than their forebears had been. There was nothing Augustus would or could do about that.

A long-overdue departure at last took place. Self-seeking, self-indulgent old Lepidus had spent a quiet quarter of a century in retirement. Augustus had dropped him as triumvir but left him with his private fortune and his position as
pontifex maximus
. In 13
B.C.
he died, full of years if not of honor.

Now that Lepidus had gone, Augustus succeeded him as
pontifex maximus
. Finally, he had reached the commanding heights of the Roman religious establishment. He was in a stronger position than ever to accelerate his efforts to restore traditional religious values. Most educated Romans were skeptics and rationalists yet still harbored a belief that Rome’s greatness was in some way due to its piety. If the
pax deorum,
the goodwill of the gods, were not maintained, then disaster could be just around the corner.

As we have seen, Augustus’ temple building and restoration program was only one aspect of his policy; he also continued to revive lost religious practices, increasing the number of priests and enhancing their privileges. He revived old fellowships, such as the
fratres arvales,
or “land brothers,” who handled spring ceremonials to promote the crops. Ordinary citizens were catered for with the revival of local cults in the city’s neighborhoods: at ceremonies to propitiate the
lares compitales,
the spirits of the main crossroads in every ward in the city, their images were garlanded with wreaths of flowers twice a year. The
princeps
sealed his long-standing popularity with the people by associating these cults with that of his “genius,” the spirit that protected him and his family.

This was as far as Italian opinion would let him go. Julius Caesar had been deified when safely dead, and Augustus knew better than to have himself declared a god in his lifetime. However, elsewhere throughout the empire he encouraged the dual cult of Rome as a goddess and of himself as a godlike being. This gave provincials the opportunity to stage loyalty ceremonies and encouraged an imperial esprit de corps.

It was time to complete stage two of the military strategy. The Alps had been won and two Danube provinces created. But the Pannonian tribes were becoming restive again, and a Roman general led an expedition against them in 14
B.C.
Toward the end of the following year, Augustus decided it was time to impose a permanent solution and gave Agrippa overall direction of the war. Although winter had begun, Agrippa embarked on his campaign at once. We have no details, but the Pannonians seem to have quieted down, and Agrippa returned from the Balkans, crossing by sea to Brundisium.

The real reason for his return may have been his health, for in March of 12
B.C.,
when he arrived in Campania on his way north to the capital, he fell gravely ill. Although at fifty he was still comparatively young, no surviving source has revealed what he was suffering from. Perhaps nobody knew. A fierce Balkan winter may have had something to do with it, and it is reported that in his final years Agrippa suffered unendurable pain from gout. On medical advice, and without informing Augustus, Agrippa took an agonizing course of treatment, plunging his legs into hot vinegar when a paroxysm of the disease was at its worst.

Augustus learned of his colleague’s illness while he was presenting some gladiatorial games in honor of Gaius and Lucius. He immediately set out from Rome, but Agrippa was dead when he arrived. The blow was devastating. The two men had been friends from boyhood, and had shared the astonishing adventure of their lives. Even when their relationship was severely tested, they had remained true to each other. Augustus knew that without Agrippa’s military talent he would have been lucky to have reached his present eminence.

Many prodigies and portents were recorded, which served to underline the seriousness of Rome’s loss. The one that will have made the greatest impression as far as Augustus was concerned was the burning down of the hut of Romulus, next to his house on the Palatine. This had happened before, thanks to careless priests, but the culprits this time were said to be crows. The birds dropped onto the hut flaming fragments of meat, which they had snatched from some sacrificial altar.

It was the custom for widows to remarry, and the
princeps
gave careful consideration to Julia’s future. He flirted with the idea of giving her to some political nonentity, even an
eques
. The trouble was that Julia would remain a great lady and, being an independent-minded person, might be willing and able to exert political influence on her own account from the security of a separate household. Better by far to keep her inside the family circle. In that case the only two available candidates were Drusus and Tiberius; but Drusus’ wife, Antonia, was Octavia’s daughter and thus able to produce children of Augustus’ bloodline. She had already given birth to a son, called Germanicus after his father’s victories, and more offspring might be anticipated.

Tiberius, now thirty-one years old, was the better choice, Augustus felt. His wife, Vipsania, was Agrippa’s daughter by his first marriage and dynastically unimportant. Unfortunately, Tiberius loved Vipsania and was most unwilling to divorce her. What was more, he strongly disapproved of Julia, who (according to Suetonius) had made a pass at him during Agrippa’s lifetime.

Such considerations did not trouble the
princeps,
for whom duty trumped personal preference. In 11
B.C.,
he required Tiberius to put Vipsania away and marry his daughter. This he did, but continued to miss his first wife. Once accidentally catching sight of her, he stared at her with tears in his eyes and an expression of intense unhappiness. This was noticed and precautions were taken against his ever seeing her again.

At first, Tiberius pulled himself together and made an effort; he and Julia lived affectionately enough as man and wife until a child that was born to them died in infancy. By then he had come to loathe her and renounced marital relations.

Livia is sometimes credited with promoting the match. Perhaps: she would hardly be human if she did not look out for her sons, and she won a reputation among her acquaintances for discreet scheming. A sharp-eyed great-grandson, who knew her in her extreme old age, nicknamed her after the Greek hero most famous for deviousness and sagacity. He called her
Ulixes stolatus,
Ulysses in a frock. However, no evidence survives of her intervention, and Augustus’ choice of Tiberius was a logical one, which needed no special pleading.

For his father-in-law and (assuming her approval) his mother, Tiberius’ feelings were irrelevant. But he was a private, silent, and introverted man, whose obedience masked obstinate emotion. He had given way on this occasion, but would the time come when he broke free from the heartless and demanding
princeps
?

Personal loss was not allowed to halt the progress of imperial expansion. Tiberius took over from Agrippa in Illyricum and Pannonia, and Drusus commanded the legions on the Rhine. In the spring or early summer of 12
B.C.
, the brothers launched simultaneous campaigns. To be in close touch with events as they unfolded, the
princeps
spent time in Aquileia and other towns in northern Italy.

The older brother fought the Pannonian tribes for four years, but faced few major difficulties because the enemy seemed unable to unite against a common threat. He deployed his usual ruthlessness, deporting most of the men and selling them into slavery. It appeared that the Pannonian problem had been solved once and for all, and that the last gap along the Danube frontier had been plugged.

Drusus had a more difficult time, although he won victory after victory. He also worked hard to encourage Gallic unity under the aegis of Rome. A great altar to Augustus was erected in a temple at Lugdunum at the confluence of the rivers Rhône and Saône. The altar carried an inscription with the names of all Gaul’s sixty tribes, and each tribe contributed a symbolic image of itself.

Propaganda in Gaul was matched by warfare on the far side of the Rhine. Drusus launched a succession of annual incursions. In 12
B.C.,
he sent a fleet up to the river Weser, and then having won the seacoast marched deep into German lands as far as the mid-Weser. However, he was not such a safe pair of hands as Tiberius and could be foolhardy. He was obsessively ambitious to win the
spolia opima
—as mentioned earlier, this was Rome’s greatest and rarest military prize, awarded to a commander in chief who personally killed an opposing general—and he used to chase German chieftains across the battlefield at great risk to himself.

The young general twice got into severe difficulties. Evidently failing to understand the vigor of non-Mediterranean tides, he once allowed his fleet to become stranded when the sea ebbed, and just managed to extricate himself from the resulting danger with help from a friendly local tribe. On another occasion Drusus was ambushed in a narrow pass and faced annihilation. Fortunately, his attackers were overconfident and lost formation when they came to close quarters. Only the cool professionalism of the Roman legionary saw off the enemy.

By the fourth year, Drusus reached what was probably his ultimate destination, the river Elbe. After stiff fighting, he defeated the Marcomanni, a tribe strategically placed between the heads of the Elbe and the Danube. These were fine achievements, which earned the popular general triumphal regalia.

The brothers’ successes were impressive, but impermanent. Drusus raided rather than conquered; at the end of each year’s campaigning, he left fortresses, but withdrew his army into Gaul. The relative incompetence of the Pannonians concealed bitter anti-Roman feeling. They did not accept the verdict of the war.

The year 9
B.C.
began well for Augustus. On January 30 (Livia’s birthday, and perhaps her fiftieth) a great Ara Pacis, Altar of Peace, commissioned four years previously, was completed in Rome. Entirely made of marble, it was a sizable square enclosure, with two doorways. Inside, some steps led up to a large three-sided altar; drains were built in to allow the blood from slaughtered sacrificial animals to be washed away. Reliefs around the outside of the walls, inspired by the Parthenon marbles, depicted a grave procession of Roman notables headed by Augustus and Agrippa, with Livia and various relatives, including Gaius and Lucius.

The altar completed a grouping of magnificent structures that asserted the greater glory of the
princeps
and the stability of the regime. The Mausoleum of Augustus was the largest example of its kind; erected in a prominent location between the Via Flaminia leading north from the city, and the Tiber, it was a circular building about 262 feet in diameter, on top of which was piled a mound of earth planted with cypress trees and surmounted by a statue of Augustus. Next door stood a square four-walled enclosure covered by a metal grating. This was the
ustrinum,
where the dead were cremated before their ashes were placed in the mausoleum. Oriented toward the Ara Pacis was the Horologium Augusti, a vast sundial whose pointer was an obelisk that the
princeps
had brought back from Egypt. Lines marking months, days, and hours were inlaid in bronze on the dial’s face. At equinoxes, one of which was September 23, Augustus’ birthday, the shadow on the dial fell on the entrance to the altar. (Unfortunately, after a while the sundial started telling the wrong time, probably because an earthquake disturbed the alignments.)

The ruins of the mausoleum survive, as does the Ara Pacis, which reopened to the public in 2005 after a long period of restoration. The
ustrinum
is gone; of the Horologium, only the obelisk remains (it now stands in front of the Italian parliament).

Fate intervened once again to lop off another member of the “divine family.” In the late summer or autumn of 9
B.C.,
while he was at his summer headquarters, the twenty-nine-year-old Drusus had a riding accident and broke his leg. It was quickly apparent that he was not going to recover, although it is uncertain why. The Roman army employed experienced medical teams, and on campaign deployed well-equipped field hospitals. In the nature of military life, fractures were common; military surgeons had a good knowledge of how to deal with them, and the techniques of splinting and setting bones described in ancient medical texts are not greatly dissimilar to modern practice.

Some of the literary sources write of an illness rather than an accident, which may mean that it was not the broken leg that killed Drusus, but later complications. An inflammation and fever may have supervened. If there was an open wound, perhaps an infection took hold; without effective antibiotics, that could have led to gangrene and amputation.