053 - Reigning Supreme

Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, Episode 53, Reigning Supreme. Octavian had transformed himself into Caesar Augustus by skillfully using the mechanisms and rhetoric of the Republic to carve out an infallible little niche for himself. Where Julius Caesar had made bold and inflammatory declarations about how obsolete Republican institutions were, Augustus was careful to never admit publicly what he was really up to. This was all about restoring the Republic, he would say. This is not about some personal power grab. It was all charade, of course, but there was much to be gained by keeping the charade going. For example, not being stabbed to death on the floor of the Senate.

But before we get going on the next few years of Augustan rule, I have to start this week by correcting what I said about the Pantheon last week. I'm not sure how exactly I managed to swing and miss so badly on my facts, but I did, so let's set things right. The Pantheon was indeed first built by Agrippa in 28 BC, and subsequently gutted by a fire in 80 AD. But when it was rebuilt in 126 AD, the construction was overseen by the Emperor Hadrian, not the Emperor Trajan, who had of course died in 117. And the blueprints were not set to Agrippa's original specifications, but rather new plans were drawn up that some have attributed to Hadrian himself, who was a big fan of architecture, but most likely simply came from his staff architects who were engaged in multiple urban renewal projects initiated by the Emperor. The dome, which is the Pantheon's most famous attribute, was a product of Hadrian's later Pantheon. Agrippa's original version did not feature this most famous architectural achievement. I completely misread and misinterpreted the source material when I was taking notes for last week's episode, and as a result, completely face-planted for about 40 seconds there. Ugly business that I hope we can all put behind us.

Okay, so by 23 BC, Augustus had worked out about 90% of the legalities for his long reign over the Roman Empire. There were still a few loose ends that needed to be cleared up over the next decade, though. Lepidus, for example, was still alive and serving as Pontifex Maximus, so Augustus was as of yet unable to assimilate that all-important religious position into his pile of honors. Plus, as much as his new proconsular imperium granted him preeminence in the provinces, Italy itself had always been treated differently under Roman law, so technically Augustus had no right to command the 5,400 or so Praetorian guardsmen he had stationed in and around Rome. But other than those few outliers, Augustus was past the stage in his career where he was consolidating his power. Now it was simply time to reign supreme.

Ironically, one of the first early crises of his de facto dictatorship did not lead to pressure for him to abdicate the throne and revive the Republic, but rather it led to pressure from the masses for him to set aside this de facto business and formally become dictator for life. The people had never been happy with the sloppy and corrupt oligarchy that had ruled them for centuries and saw no reason to mince words with the Senate now that Augustus was in charge. So when a grain shortage rocked the city after Italian farms were crippled by plague, the common citizens rioted and called for Augustus to be named dictator. They had no faith that the Senate would be able to solve their problems, only the princeps could see them through the trouble. But Augustus, knowing that publicly embracing absolute power would alienate the Senate, refused the honor. After telling the people that the abolition of the office of dictator, decreed by Mark Antony in the wake of Julius Caesar's assassination, was still in effect, and that he would rather be stabbed in the throat than assume that office, they were forced to relent. The incident highlights the counterintuitive notion that when it came to Augustus's relationship with common Romans, their problem with him was not that he had seized too much power, but that he had not seized enough.

In the years after the constitutional settlement of 23 BC, Augustus focused his attention first on foreign affairs. He switched places with his co-regent Marcus Agrippa, sending his old friend into Spain to keep an eye on things in the west, while the princeps himself traveled to the east. His foremost concern was Roman relations with the Parthian Empire. Reviewing the disastrous campaigns of Crassus and Antony, Augustus determined that there was no productive angle in continuing to view Parthia as a territory ripe for imperial expansion. It was time to come to terms with the Parthians and embrace a new policy of mutual coexistence. But by no means had Augustus forgotten the legionary standards still displayed as trophies in the Parthian court. Any deal would have to begin with the return of Rome's lost honor.

But it was not enough to simply say, give us back the standards and we'll leave you alone. After easily repelling two massive Roman invasions, the Parthians felt pretty good about their position. Plus, there was now a pro-Parthian monarch on the throne in Armenia. Unless the Romans somehow managed to regain control of Armenia, the Parthians really had nothing to worry about. So Augustus set about reestablishing control of Armenia. To lead the campaign into that all-important buffer state set for 20 BC, Augustus chose his 22-year-old stepson Tiberius. It was time for the young man to get his feet wet and introduce the world to an important new cog in Augustus's dynastic machine. But while Tiberius would ultimately prove to be a highly effective military commander, he didn't have much of a chance to prove it in Armenia this time around. While the legions marched to the border, a native revolt erupted that deposed the sitting monarch. All that was left for Tiberius to do was crown the handpicked Roman successor.

With Armenia back under Roman influence, and Augustus ordering the legions stationed in Syria out on all sorts of showy maneuvers, the Roman signals coming into Parthia were clear. You better watch out, because you don't know what we're going to do next. Augustus parlayed these shows of force into a sit-down with the king of Parthia. The princeps had no interest in actually entangling Rome in a war with Parthia. But as long as they didn't know that, he bargained from a position of strength. Not willing to risk that Rome was bluffing, the king of Parthia relented to Augustus's diplomatic overtures, and agreed to return the legionary standards, along with Roman prisoners taken over the years, in exchange for a lasting peace. The loss of the standards had eaten at Rome's heart for more than 30 years, and when they were finally brought back to Rome, the people celebrated as if a great military victory had just been won. For the rest of his life, Augustus considered the diplomatic return of the legionary eagles one of the great highlights of his career.

With the eastern frontier now secure, Augustus returned to Rome and set his sights on domestic concerns. As I've mentioned a few times, Augustus was not interested in power simply for the comfort and prestige that it would afford him. Rather, he had big plans for reforming the empire. And he didn't confine his vision to public concerns, like how the senate operated, or how the provinces were administered. He was also interested in promoting what he considered to be healthful private relations as well. So heads up, Caesar Augustus is coming to a bedroom near you.

But before he started ruffling everyone's feathers by, say, outlawing adultery, Augustus needed to make sure that he was well protected from physical abuse. So in 19 BC, he had the senate officially acknowledge that when they had granted him at-large pro-consular authority, they had by no means meant to exclude Italy from the list of territories over which Augustus held imperium. This gave him the legal cover he needed to command the praetorian guardsmen he had stationed around the city. I will have much more to say about the praetorians as we move forward, as they will soon establish themselves as the gravitational center of imperial politics. But for now, let me just note that where once it had been illegal to command troops on the home peninsula, it was now the prerogative of the emperor to do so.

With his physical person protected, Augustus set about his great project of meddling in everyone's affairs. His first target was the senate. Having been thwarted in his last attempt at reforming the ancient body, the princeps tried a different tact. His main problem was not that the senate existed or that it wielded too much power. No, his problem was that it was way too big. Augustus had every intention of delegating assignments to the senate, but with over a thousand members, it was simply too large to work as an effective administrative body. If he was ever going to achieve his larger goal of improving governance of the empire, he needed to get the senate down to a more manageable size. Membership of the senate was, among other things, predicated on wealth requirements, so rather than going through the rolls and purging specific members, which had failed miserably the last time he tried it, Augustus simply jacked up the minimum income required for admittance. He was trying to get the total number down to a manageable 300, but his attempts again proved futile. After much complaining, fraud, and special exemptions, the senate wound up changing very little in composition. So Augustus tried a third strategy, which proved to be a fairly workable one in practice. He formed a working group of 30 members, representing the quaestors, praetors, and consuls for the year, along with a rotating group of notable senators. Proposals would be hashed out in the working group, and then their recommendations would guide the rest of the senate. That Augustus himself was the only permanent member of the committee meant that his hand guided the senate's guiding hand. It was not a perfect solution, but it kept his reforms from getting bogged down in the morass of open debate.

Augustus then turned his attention to matters of imperial administration. One of the glaring weaknesses of the previous republican administration was that there was no static bureaucracy in place. Former consuls and praetors were assigned to run a province for a year, and then they were replaced by some other incoming official. As I noted in the episode on Julius Caesar's first consulship, it was a system that led to rank corruption and abuse. The Lex Julia had gone a long way towards reigning in the worst of the offenders, but it was still a grossly inefficient system. So in addition to passing supplementary anti-bribery laws, Augustus began building a permanent civil service, the ranks of which would be filled by slaves and freedmen. At all levels of government, out in the provinces, in the heart of Rome itself, up and down the line, competent slaves and ex-slaves began forming permanent support staffs for their ever-changing political appointee bosses. This new system was a great success. It not only kept the political appointees happy, they were given cushy jobs with nice salaries and little real responsibility, but it also introduced a degree of professionalism to state administration that had never before existed. Had Augustus not instituted these reforms, it is unlikely that the empire would have lasted for as long as it did.

Augustus was also aware that one of the great challenges facing any large-scale empire was timely communication. The decision-makers in Rome couldn't be expected to respond effectively to developing situations abroad when it took months for word of said developing situation to reach them. Augustus pushed for other wealthy Romans to join him in improving the communications infrastructure of the empire. In the days before fiber optics and cable lines, this basically meant better roads and more horse relay stations. Augustus encouraged other wealthy Romans to join him in improving the system, but either because he was loath to wield his power like a bludgeon or because he wasn't quite as powerful as he liked to make out, when other potential patrons dragged their feet, he let them off the hook and footed the bill himself. It is hard to overstate how wealthy Augustus was at this point, or how important that wealth was. Right alongside his command of the legions, the personal fortune he controlled was the foundation of his rule. Having built on the massive inheritance he received from Julius Caesar by first annexing Egypt and then taking control of the imperial provinces, Augustus was now by far the richest man in the empire. His wealth allowed him to do things like personally underwrite infrastructure projects that otherwise would not have gotten off the ground, say an improved communications network, which greatly enhanced his prestige with the people. This new road is not brought to you by the slow-moving self-absorbed Senate, but rather by Augustus, the man who gets things done. Who would you rather support, the guy who's funding aqueduct expansion, or the do-nothings in the Senate who were, well, doing nothing? Augustus invested lavishly and wisely in his empire, and the people loved him for it. Money may not buy you happiness, but it will buy you control of a multinational Mediterranean empire.

In 18 BC, Augustus embarked on perhaps his most controversial reform programs. A conservative at heart, the prince was appalled by what he saw as the decline of Roman morality. He joined with other social critics who abhorred the indulgent excesses of modern Rome. Gone were the days of rigorous discipline and austerity, replaced by an atmosphere of sensuous permissiveness and conspicuous luxury. The strict Roman ethic that had conquered the world was pushed aside. Now men and women simply wanted to enjoy the fruits of the empire that their forefathers had won for them. In the eyes of Augustus, Rome was in danger of losing what it had won if something was not done to bring back traditional virtue.

Augustus believed that the heart of the problem was the breakdown in the family structure. He believed, not without reason, that Rome had been built on the back of strong families. The pater familiis, who rears a brood of swarthy Roman children, who, if they were boys, grew to fill the ranks of the legions, and if they were girls, grew up to make more Roman boys. That was how they had come back from the disaster after Cannae. 50,000 dead in a single day? Tragic, yes, but there's more where that came from. So when Augustus took the census and realized that birth rates were on the decline, he began to worry about the next Cannae. Would Rome ever be able to recover if there were not any true Romans left? He began investigating the problem and soon came to realize that the issue was not that there was some epidemic of infertility or infant mortality, rather men and women were simply choosing not to have children. Children were a pain, so why waste time with them? It seems that everyone was pursuing their own immediate pleasures at the expense of the next generation, and possibly at the expense of the whole empire.

So Augustus created incentives to encourage large families. Having one child meant that a man could stand for office a year before he was technically eligible. A man who sired three sons could expect multiple legal privileges for his contributions to the state. It goes without saying that Fred McMurray would have been a very well-respected man in Augustan Rome. But beyond concerns about children, Augustus was also distressed by what he saw as the degradation of marriage. In the past, a man and a woman married and were faithful to one another. Now though, adultery ran so rampant that no one even batted an eye about it anymore. In fact, many men, failing to see the point of even maintaining pretenses, simply avoided getting married altogether. To Augustus, this persistent embrace of immorality was dangerously eroding Roman virtue. All that self-indulgence was simply not compatible with the self-sacrifice that the state required. A man and a woman get married and they remain faithful. That was how it was supposed to go.

So Augustus implemented penalties that hit unmarried men and women hard. The goal was to make single life so unbearable that married life seemed like a reprieve. Once he had everyone locked up in a formal marriage, he went ahead and outlawed adultery. No longer simply a matter of personal honor, cheating on a spouse became an offense against the state. In certain cases, the penalty for a woman caught cheating was actually death. Harsh? Yes. Did it work? Well, no. Not really. It was hard for anyone to take the law too seriously when it was Augustus who was wagging his finger. The princeps had a well-earned reputation for straying from his wife, with slaves, with young women, with married women, with anyone who caught his eye, really. The massive hypocrisy of the draconian adultery law was not lost on anyone and so it was taken with a grain of salt. Not that the laws didn't sometimes lead to banishment and death, but just that no one really went out of their way to inform on anyone, so most people wound up not getting caught. In the end, the Augustan morality laws did little to change anyone's behavior, but he refused to give up on them. Indeed, Augustus' peculiar obsession with adultery would eventually cost him both his daughter and his granddaughter.

Believing he had set his people back on a more virtuous path, Augustus returned to his greater imperial ambitions. Unlike his uncle, who invaded Gaul because basically it was there, and died with plans to invade Parthia sitting on his desk, Augustus did not have foreign conquest in his heart. He was not really interested in winning huge new swaths of territory for the empire. In fact, from his vantage point at the very pinnacle of the state, Augustus was perhaps the only one who could see the truth. The empire was big enough. He, of course, did not let on to the fact that he was coming to believe that the empire had reached its greatest manageable extent, because for all its long history, Rome had been forever expanding, and most believed that like a shark, if they ever stopped moving, they would die. For all his radical reforms, the idea that Rome should stop expanding was perhaps the most radical, and so he played his cards on that account very close to his chest. But I'm actually getting a little ahead of myself.

While Augustus certainly believed that the empire would soon be as big as it would ever need to be, he also believed that it wasn't quite there yet. When Augustus surveyed the empire, he could see that on the west it was bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, to the south it was bordered by the Sahara Desert, in the east it was bordered by the Parthian Empire. On all three sides, Rome was protected by natural boundaries or formal treaties with civilized neighbors. But in the north, the north was an altogether different animal. In the east, the northern border was simply an ill-defined frontier above Greece that offered no natural protection to anybody. In the west, Rome controlled Gaul up until the banks of the Rhine, but beyond that lay the anarchy of Germania. This was all totally unacceptable to Augustus. He believed that if something could be done to secure the northern frontier, a Mediterranean empire centered in Rome could continue indefinitely.

In the east, Augustus had his eye on the Danube River as the natural northern border for the empire. The long, broad river would be easy to defend, and most importantly, if Rome controlled all the country up to its southern banks, there would be a territorial buffer between Italy and the lawless lands beyond. In the west, Augustus identified the Elbe River as his preferred border. If he could properly garrison the Elbe and the Danube, Rome would have a secure natural border from the North Sea to the Black Sea, and he could go to his grave knowing that he was leaving behind a stable empire that could last forever.

The process of establishing new eternal borders in the north, though, did not begin in Germania or Lyricum. It actually began much closer to home. Augustus decided that before he could think about pushing the borders of the empire northward, that he would need to plug the one clearing hole of Roman domination over Western Europe, the Alps. For all they had conquered in all their years of expansion, Rome had never actually nailed down the troublesome mountain tribes in their own backyard. Augustus aimed to put a stop to this embarrassment once and for all. To oversee the operation, he chose once again to elevate Tiberius, who might get a chance to actually fight a battle this time around. Joining Tiberius as a co-general would be his younger brother, Drusus. Augustus wanted to make sure that whatever glory was won in the Alps and in his planned future campaigns along the Danube and in Germania, that it was all kept in the family. Augustus knew that the greatest and most likely threat to his rule would come from an independent general winning great battles for Rome all on his own, so Augustus was careful to always give overall command of a campaign he initiated to someone he could trust not to turn against him. In practice, this meant members of his own family. So even though his step-sons were in their early twenties, much younger than your average Roman general, they were still put in command. It was just a happy coincidence, really, that they turned out to be highly effective leaders.

I'm going to leave it there for this week. Next time, we'll dig into the campaigns of Tiberius and Drusus as they attempt to implement the vision laid out by their stepfather of pushing the borders of the empire to the Danube and Elbe respectively. Next week will also mark a transition period for Augustus personally, as the old friends who had advised him and guided him for his entire career begin to die off, leaving the princeps alone at the top, fervently trying to protect his legacy in the face of one cruel twist of fate after another.

But before we go, I want to throw one other thing out there. I've been approached about having the show sponsored by Audible.com. The deal would involve me reading some ad copy and directing you, my faithful listeners, to visit their fine website in exchange for giving me some money. The history of Rome has always been ad-free, and I like it that way, but I'll admit I am intrigued by the idea. Podcasting is something I enjoy immensely, and any hypothetical plan to take this from something I do in my spare time to something I actually do to draw in income involves advertising of some kind or another. So basically, I want to know what you all think. Should I take the plunge, or will it turn you off? My first priority is maintaining the integrity of the show, so if it turns out to be too intrusive, I will cut it off immediately, but I don't know. Let me know what you think in the comments at thehistoryofrome.typepad.com, or drop me an email. We're all in this together, so I figure we'll make it a group decision.