The Twelve Caesars (9 page)

The division of spoils following Philippi that October was concerned with nothing less than the entirety of the Roman world. The bulk fell to Octavian (the west of the empire including Italy)
and Mark Antony (the east of the empire and that area of Gaul to the north of the Alps). Suspected of disloyalty with Sextus Pompey, Lepidus received shorter shrift: the province of Africa, a clear
demotion. At Philippi had died an idea of Rome’s Republic as hitherto understood; with it fell many of its leading families. The way lay clear for innovation in Rome. The ultimate
victor was that man who, dedicated to personal ambition with bloody single-mindedness, disguised self-fulfilment as the restoration of age-old ideals of mutuality and power-sharing.
Little wonder they called him Augustus. His ‘increase’ consisted of those powers which, destroyed on the battlefields of Philippi, he appropriated from the wreckage in the service of
his own ends. It was a splendid hypocrisy, which nevertheless imposed on Rome stable government and consistency of policy-making. To obtain power, Octavian needed to defeat the Republic; to sustain
his power, he feigned its resuscitation.

His inheritance lacked ballast. Caesar gave Octavian his reputation; its ideological foundations were flimsy. It was a cult of personality, as Augustus’ rule would be. By
exploiting personality, Octavian in time defeated Mark Antony. His target, when after almost a decade of more or less inimical jockeying for position, open hostility was at last acknowledged
between Octavian and Antony, was not his fellow triumvir. He chose instead a woman, Cleopatra VII, last queen of Egypt.

Following a long and highly public affair, Cleopatra had replaced Octavian’s sister Octavia as Antony’s wife. That in itself was offence enough, since Octavian had bestowed on
Octavia a grant of sacrosanctity which meant that any slight against his sister challenged Rome itself: at a stroke Antony’s infidelity became essentially treasonable. It was just the
beginning. Octavian reimagined their contest as a battle between East and West. He enlisted in support of this specious ideological debate the fixed xenophobia of the Republican mindset, alongside
that mistrust of luxury which traditionally had formed a feature of Rome’s lexicon at moments of national unease. Octavian’s
Cleopatra is a quintessence of
otherness, an amalgam of those characteristics Rome regarded as backslidings: extravagant, indolent, sexually predatory, politically tyrannous. Her female failings, it was asserted, had corrupted
Antony’s martial vigour. Octavian demonized Cleopatra and invested his own cause – the only purpose of which was to strip Antony of power – with the nimbus of a moral crusade. As
the triumvirate drew to its close late in 33, he pitted the old-fashioned virtues of his own wife Livia against the painted harlotry of his enemy’s squeeze, and then, ‘when Caesar had
made sufficient preparations, a vote was passed to wage war against Cleopatra, and to take away from Antony the authority which he had surrendered to a woman’.
⁵
For good measure beforehand,
Octavian insisted on an oath of allegiance from all those in the western empire: ‘all Italy swore my name of its own free will and chose me as leader in the war in which I conquered at
Actium.’
⁶

We know the outcome. Defeat at Actium. The siege of Alexandria. Antony’s suicide in age-old fashion falling on his sword. Cleopatra’s eroticized demise thanks to a serpent clasped to
her breast, symbolically a victory for maleness (Octavian and Rome, represented by the snake) over the weaker flesh of female Egypt. An outpouring of Augustan poetry, in which the victory of
Octavian’s commander Marcus Agrippa appears inevitable, preordained. Octavian a sole survivor, Egypt annexed as a province administered not in the name of Rome but in that of Octavian. All
the riches of the East available to the victor: the windfall which funded Octavian’s settlement of army veterans threatening mutiny. A telling detail recorded by Suetonius: ‘He greatly
desired to save Cleopatra alive for his triumph, and even had Psylli brought to her, to suck the poison from her wound, since it was thought that she died from the bite of an asp.’ This looks
like gloating, vindictiveness – in love and war the victor’s
part. ‘I spared all citizens who sued for pardon,’ Octavian recorded. Cleopatra had not
implored his forgiveness and chose to remain unto death mistress of her own destiny. The short-term outcome for Octavian was that, in the triumph of Actium, celebrated in Rome in the late summer of
29, Cleopatra appeared not in person but in effigy. She vied for the attention of the crowds with Octavian’s nephew Marcellus, the son of his sister Octavia, and his stepson Tiberius, elder
son of his second wife Livia, who accompanied Octavian’s progress. Among the ‘prizes’ of victory in the East were the first stirrings of dynasticism.

For Octavian the challenge of peace was one of clarification. Latterly his power had derived from a series of consulships held continuously since Actium. To that office he added
significant military support, even after his rationalization of the army following his retirement of veterans. It was a hazardous position, this approximation to military dictatorship, too close
for comfort to that once occupied by Caesar. Fifteen years after the latter’s murder, Octavian had no intention of featuring in his own Ides of March.

His response was to do nothing while appearing to change everything. In a speech to the senate on 13 January 27, Octavian gave back those powers he had been granted for the defeat of Antony.
Dio’s version of that speech combines Caesarean high-handedness and that bald swank typical of the
Res gestae
with a degree of humility which was the leaven of charm by which Octavian
consistently achieved consensus:

This crafty
coup de théâtre
achieved the desired result. Octavian was created ‘Augustus’, his consulship (shared with Agrippa) confirmed for the
year. Far from surrendering power, the new Augustus received for ten years a large overseas province, which consisted of Gaul, Spain, Syria, Egypt, Cilicia and Cyprus (and hence a significant
number of Roman legions); he combined consular and proconsular powers. ‘Imperator Caesar divi filius Augustus’ chose to be addressed as
princeps
, a title eminent Romans had held
before him: it suggested leadership without associations of monarchy. To highlight the magnitude of his achievement in Rome’s service, he closed the gates of the Temple of Janus. It was a
symbolic act, which indicated peace across the Empire. For more than two centuries, since the end of the First Punic War, the gates had stood open. For those in Rome assailed by doubts, their
closure represented the real justification for Augustus’ special treatment. No sleight of hand is wholly invisible, but the gift of peace after long years of war excused empty words and
casuistry. In the same year, Augustus departed Rome for Spain.

His return, after an interval of three years, was postponed by illness, a protracted interlude in which, perhaps prey to intimations of mortality, he embarked on a heavyweight autobiography
extending to thirteen volumes. Back in Rome,
he fell ill again. He entrusted his signet ring to Agrippa. For reasons of lessening his workload or in response to senatorial
disaffection, he marked this second recovery by resigning the consulship for the first time in a decade. Since this left him no constitutional basis for power in Rome, a refinement of the
settlement of 27 became necessary. To this end, Augustus received from the senate a grant of
maius imperium
, power superior to that held by any other magistrate or proconsul, and tribunician
power. Together they invested him with supremacy at home and abroad, both within and outside Rome. These were the wide-ranging powers which would afterwards comprise Rome’s
‘throne’. Enhanced by Augustus’ personal authority and the degree of influence he exercised over the senate (an influence he had increased after revising senatorial membership in
28
BC
), they granted Augustus a high degree of independence. Truthfully he could claim, ‘After this I excelled all in authority’:
⁸
now the claim was safe. Only
the most beady-eyed were mindful that in exercising the powers of office without holding those offices or even standing for election, Augustus’ claim of a republic restored was that of a
republic exposed to fundamental change.

In 23
BC
the elegist Propertius was in commemorative mode. ‘What profit did he get from birth, courage or the best of mothers, from being embraced
at Caesar’s hearth?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘He is dead, and his twentieth year left ruined: so bright a day confined in so small a circle.’
⁹
The poet’s subject was
Augustus’ nephew Marcellus, one of those two youths who had accompanied the
princeps
in his triumph of Actium. His death was more than a cause of sadness for Augustus. Seneca claimed
that Marcellus had possessed ‘the certain hope of becoming emperor’:
¹⁰
he was the first of a number of choices Augustus would make in his efforts to perpetuate
beyond his own lifetime the settlement of 23. In time those efforts inflicted unhappiness on both Augustus and his large extended family; they established a leitmotiv of this history of the twelve
Caesars. Only Claudius, Vitellius and Vespasian had sons of their own: Claudius frittered away his son’s patrimony through uxoriousness, while Vitellius’ reign was too brief for
inheritance. Vespasian by contrast was succeeded by not one but two adult sons. In his unique case, the possession of viable male heirs precluded that destabilization from inside and outside the
emperor’s family that was brought about by speculation and place-seeking. In the case of the emperor Galba, as we will see, the choice of the ‘wrong’ heir became a major
contributory factor in the regime’s collapse.

Two years before his death, Marcellus had been married to his cousin, Augustus’ daughter Julia. A youthful widow, Julia was shortly remarried by her father to his leading militarist,
Marcus Agrippa. The first of the couple’s five children, a son Gaius Caesar, was born in 20
BC
, followed three years later by Lucius Caesar. At Lucius’ birth,
Dio reports, ‘Augustus immediately adopted him together with his brother Gaius... He did not wait for them to attain manhood, but straightaway appointed them as his successors in authority to
discourage plotters from conspiring against them.’
¹¹
It is an undertaking clearly at odds with claims of Republicanism; so too the title
princeps iuventutis
, ‘Prince of
Youth’ or ‘Leader of Youth’, with which Augustus endowed Gaius. In the event it scarcely mattered: Lucius died in
AD
2, Gaius two years later. In both
cases rumour suggested malevolence on the part of Augustus’ wife Livia. No explanations are provided of how Livia poisoned victims scattered across the breadth of the Empire. On 26 June
AD
4, Augustus made his
final adoption, on this occasion of Livia’s elder son, his stepson Tiberius Claudius Nero. It was not a choice born of
affection. Unlike his predecessors in Augustus’ scheme, Tiberius offered a record of achievement which appeared to fit him for the role of
princeps
. Augustus masterminded awards to
Tiberius of
maius imperium
and tribunician power equal to his own. At a moment of uncertainty, it was the most he could do to ensure the continuance of his own system of government in the
hands of a member of his own family.