Augustus, page 29
AGE, ILLNESS AND DEATH
When Augustus finally returned to Rome it was late in the year, but he was able to travel along roads newly restored. He had himself paid for the repair of the Via Flaminia and encouraged other senators, and especially men who had triumphed, to undertake work on other major roads. A few followed his lead, but in the end the bulk of the task was performed by Caesar Augustus and Agrippa. Once again these projects combined the practical with a strong visual message. Milestones recorded the name of the restorer, while at prominent points, such as major bridges, there were statues of the princeps.8
The statues were elegant and showed a strong man whose face betrayed no sign of age or strain, in contrast to the heavily creased and jowly portraiture so common in Rome for the last few generations. Yet in truth Caesar Augustus was in his thirty-ninth year and beset by serious illness, so he was unable to attend the wedding of Marcellus to Julia. Agrippa stood in his place – a statement true of so many situations. No one, least of all Augustus himself, could be sure how much longer he was going to live. We do not know the cause of his repeated ill health, although Suetonius tells us that the problem was in the liver, so it seems safe to assume that it was at least something in that general area. Some scholars have wanted to depict the illnesses as feigned, intended to frighten the wider population with the prospect that the princeps might die and civil war return and so make them grateful for his continued life and accepting of his dominance as better than any alternative. Others have suggested that the condition was psychosomatic, although as one eminent scholar noted, this is always ‘a suggestion popular among doctors for diseases they cannot diagnose’.9
Grooming the next generation for a public career was natural for Roman aristocrats. Both Marcellus and Tiberius publicly came of age before they left Rome to accompany Augustus to Spain. This was normal, as was the gaining of their first military and provincial experience on the staff of a relative, albeit they were a little young to be given the rank of military tribune. Yet the attention they continued to receive was far greater than normal. The two youths returned to Rome before Caesar, but in their last weeks with the army in Spain they presided over a series of games and entertainments staged for the legionaries at the end of the campaign. Then in 24 BC the Senate, under Augustus’ encouragement, granted them accelerated careers. They were added to the senatorial roll, and Marcellus graded as an ex-praetor and given the right to hold each office, including the consulship, ten years before the normal age. Tiberius was permitted to hold office five years early.
In the autumn the two eighteen-year-olds first stood for office, certainly with Augustus’ open support and quite possibly his physical presence during canvassing and at the election. The result was never in any doubt, as with any of his recommendations – Marcellus was elected aedile and Tiberius became quaestor. Although they were exceptionally young, we should never forget that each was also a member of an old and extremely prestigious noble family. In this sense they were highly acceptable to other senators, more so than someone like Agrippa.
Marcellus was especially favoured, receiving higher offices as well as the greatest honour of marriage to the princeps’ only child. Yet the honours granted to Tiberius were still generous and highly exceptional, and his bride-to-be, Vipsania, was the daughter of a man who could boast three consulships, and the granddaughter of Atticus. In 23 BC Augustus chose Livia’s son as his own quaestor and gave him special responsibility for organising the grain shipments on the last stages of their journey to Rome. He also had a roving brief to investigate the slave barracks maintained on many of the great rural estates, some of which were rightly suspected of wrongfully imprisoning innocent travellers and forcing them to work. Both were useful tasks and, as importantly, ones that gave Tiberius a good opportunity to do prominent and popular public service. This was even more true of Marcellus, who as aedile was responsible for staging games, which he did in especially memorable style, aided by his uncle and father-in-law, the princeps. Canopies were erected over the temporary stands in the Forum to shade the audience, and among the performers was a dancer who held equestrian status and a young lady from one of the aristocratic families.10
Marcellus and Tiberius were both nineteen in 23 BC. Caesar Augustus was in his fortieth year and was consul for the eleventh time. His elected colleague was to be a certain Varro Murena, but he died either late in 24 BC or very early the next year. His replacement was Cnaeus Calpurnius Piso, who had served against him at Philippi. Piso’s family was distinguished, but since the Civil War he had taken little active part in public life and was said to have refused encouragement to seek office in the past. This time he was persuaded; we cannot know what changed his mind, but it broke the succession of consular colleagues who were known as close associates of Augustus. It may have been meant as a sign of reconciliation, or at least as assurance that aristocrats from established families were able to enjoy the high honours they felt to be their due.11
The year did not go well, but that had nothing to do with either consul or their ability to work together and was instead due to natural disasters. A serious epidemic broke out, which caused heavy loss of life throughout Italy and flared up on several occasions in Rome during this and the following year. The River Tiber flooded, affecting lower-lying parts of the City, causing more disease, and bad harvests produced shortages of grain. Although Tiberius’ efforts may have helped, the market was badly disrupted and prices soared. Augustus used his own funds to give twelve – presumably monthly – gifts of grain or flour to 250,000 citizens in Rome to relieve the hardship of the less well-off.12
Everyone expected Caesar Augustus to die. At some point in the first half of the year he was once more critically ill with the same liver problems that had dogged him for some time. The normal treatment involved warm compresses, but these failed to provide relief. Augustus summoned to his bedside the senior magistrates, prominent senators and representatives of the equestrian order and spoke to them about affairs of state. At the end of this session, he passed his signet ring to Agrippa, but gave a report of the current state of the army and the public accounts to his fellow consul Piso. No mention was made of Marcellus, and Caesar Augustus very deliberately did not name a successor. This would have been difficult, since his powers and auctoritas were personal and there was not a formal position of princeps to pass on to someone else. Apart from that, Marcellus was only nineteen and at the very start of his career, and even Augustus himself had assumed the position of his father over the course of time. If Caesar Augustus had died, then Agrippa was best placed to take control of the bulk of his legions, but his lack of political connections and past willingness to give the lion’s share of credit to his friend were weaknesses. He was not a Caesar, nor indeed from a noble family at all, and the odds were that he would have had to fight to hold onto any power he was able to seize.
Caesar Augustus clung to life, although for a while he was incapable of coping with any further meetings, or even making important decisions. A new doctor was brought to attend him, the freedman Antonius Musa, who like many physicians probably hailed from the Hellenistic world. Reversing the normal treatment, he made use of cold, instead of warm, compresses and cold baths. The princeps responded and gradually regained his strength. Whether Musa’s treatment was responsible or his body had simply recovered itself, he was never again to be so seriously ill or troubled with this liver problem. Other illnesses, including colds and a tendency to sickness at the start of spring and around the time of his birthday in September, struck most years, but the seemingly frail Augustus would in fact live on for three and a half more decades.
For his apparently miraculous cure Musa was richly rewarded by the recovering princeps. The Senate followed with its own public display of gratitude and promptly voted the physician an additional generous sum of money as well as the right to wear a golden ring. They also commissioned a statue of him and had it set up next to Aesculapius, the god of healing, while both he and his fellow doctors were made permanently exempt from taxation. As the news spread, individuals and communities offered public thanks for Caesar Augustus’ recovery.13
Stability was – at least for the moment – assured, and even those not especially well disposed towards the princeps were glad of it. Yet concerns remained about the future, and there was gossip suggesting why Marcellus had been ignored, making it clear that at least some felt the favour shown to him was a sign of preparing an heir. Augustus was displeased by the talk, which marred his otherwise very proper and very public handover of responsibilities to his consular colleague and old friend. When well enough to begin attending meetings of the Senate, he publicly denied that there was any truth in the belief that Marcellus was being groomed to succeed him. As evidence, Caesar Augustus brought with him a document he claimed was his will and offered to read it to the senators to show that his nephew could expect nothing beyond normal legacies – an interesting echo of his release of Antony’s will almost a decade earlier. Since accepting the offer would imply the need for the princeps’ word to be backed up by proof, the senators quickly shouted out their refusal to let him to do any such thing.14
On 1 July Augustus left Rome itself for the nearby Alban Mount, where he resigned from the consulship. Outside the formal boundaries of the City and quite possibly with little prior warning to prevent demonstrations of ‘loyalty’ by senators or the wider population forcing him to reconsider, he probably also announced his intention not to hold the office again in the immediate future. The remaining consul, Piso, presided over the rapid election of a suffect consul to replace him. How many candidates appeared at such short notice is unclear, and Augustus may already have encouraged Lucius Sestius to stand. Sestius had been Brutus’ quaestor and had fought for him against the young Caesar. Although he had surrendered after Philippi and been pardoned, he was still open and enthusiastic in his praise of the dead Liberator, keeping images of Brutus in his house and delivering regular eulogies. The choice of such a man who was most clearly not a crony of the princeps was widely admired, especially by the aristocracy. Like Piso, he was seen by the established families as a very suitable man to hold the supreme magistracy, and in fact over the course of the next decade many consuls would come from the aristocracy. It was a further gesture towards the restoration of at least a veneer of normality.15
Yet even though Augustus was no longer consul, he was less than halfway through his ten-year command of all the key military provinces of the empire. He continued to enjoy immense auctoritas and, even more importantly, a virtual monopoly of military force, so that his resignation of the consulship in no way weakened his supremacy. How this dominance was to be expressed legally required attention. The Senate quickly voted him permanent proconsular imperium, granting him the formal right to control his provinces and the legions within them now that he no longer possessed the imperium of a consul. This power to command and dispense justice normally lapsed when an individual returned from his province and crossed the pomerium to enter Rome – apart from the special dispensation given to a man on the day of his triumph. Augustus planned to leave and return to Rome frequently, and to avoid the need to renew the grant on every occasion he did this, the Senate and the Popular Assembly ratified an exemption.
Imperator Caesar Augustus was granted permanent proconsular imperium even when he came into Rome. It was also to be defined as superior (in later years expressed by the word maius or ‘greater’) to the imperium of any other proconsul. If Augustus ever found himself in any of the senatorial provinces, this prevented its governor from blocking or overruling his actions and decisions. The grant did not place him in command of these provinces as well as his own, or require him to issue regular instructions to the proconsuls. As before, he continued to receive and answer petitions from communities within these areas and his decisions were respected because of his overwhelming auctoritas as much as any formal power.
On several occasions in the past Caesar had received grants of some of the rights and powers of the tribunes of the plebs. In 23 BC these were either revived or granted more fully. As a patrician he could not legally hold the office itself, in spite of his attempt in the confusion of 44 BC to seek the post. Since 36 BC he – and subsequently Octavia and Livia as well – was held to possess the same sacrosanctitas as a tribune, making it an offence against the gods to harm him in any way. Now that he was no longer consul, he lacked the formal right to conduct business within the City, and the powers of the tribunate were introduced to permit this. As a magistrate, a tribune could summon a meeting of the Senate or the Concilium plebis. Augustus was given an additional right never possessed by the tribunes, which permitted him to propose one motion in every senatorial meeting.16
The precise details of these new powers and the reasons why they were introduced remain highly controversial, subject to on going scholarly debate. There are no simple answers and, as is almost always the case, we have no real idea what motivated Augustus and his advisers. The plan was surely the result of careful consideration, although it is harder to say whether this began before or after his illness. The consulship was convenient and an obvious expression of power that was traditional and distinguished. Yet 23 BC saw Augustus’ ninth consecutive magistracy, and apart from the first two years he had always served a full term. Until that year, his colleagues had mainly been close associates. While useful as a means of holding power and acting in a legal and open way, this meant a decade when the pinnacle of the senatorial career was denied to all but the princeps’ inner circle. Routine resignation and appointment of suffects diminished the dignity of the office, expressed the blatant dominance of Augustus since he controlled the system, and required frequent elections.17
Dio was probably right to say that Caesar Augustus wanted to give more senators the opportunity to win the supreme magistracy. After 23 BC there were no suffect consuls for a decade and even then this was an isolated break in the pattern. Most of the men who held the office came from aristocratic, often noble, families, but were too young to have served in anything other than a junior capacity in the civil wars, especially the increasingly distant Philippi campaign. Men like Piso and Sestius represented the old senatorial elite and might openly associate themselves with the cause of the Liberators and wish for an ideal res publica guided by the Senate and dominated by no one man or faction.18
Yet they were also all men who had now lived under the dominance of the triumvirate or of Caesar Augustus himself for more than twenty years. Whether willingly or not, they had no choice but to accept the reality of the new regime, at least for the moment. Their presence in the fasti, the official lists of consuls, and their public performance of the duties of their office were ornaments to a properly functioning commonwealth. Ironically, the reversion to a pattern of two consuls each year was not only traditional, but also prevented any individual from attaining too much or too permanent influence and power, just as it was supposed to do. However distinguished his name, none of the consuls could in any way compete with Caesar Augustus, eleven times consul, celebrant of three triumphs and formally credited with even more victories, still entrusted with control of all the most important provinces and with an active role in public life in Rome itself.
In spite of attempts to understand these years in terms of concerted opposition, there is not the slightest hint that Augustus was forced into this change of his formal position. Many senators were surely pleased to see the consulship once again opened to wider competition between suitable candidates. Not everyone shared that view. In the next few years the majority of voters in the Comitia centuriata routinely wrote Caesar Augustus’ name on their ballots even though he was not standing as candidate. This was in spite of the fact that such elections were presided over by one or other of the aristocratic consuls of that year, and were fiercely contested – we hear of wide-spread bribery and some violent disturbances in the fullest tradition of earlier decades. Augustus always refused to accept re-election, but it is clear that many people only felt secure if he had open power to maintain stability and avoid the return of civil war. Voting in the Comitia centuriata was led, and often decided, by the centuries composed of the well-off, so this was not a question of the unruly and ill-educated poor simply wanting to keep in power the man who gave them entertainments and free grain.19
It was sensible to keep senators reasonably content, since they were the men through whom Augustus would work both in Italy and the provinces. Apart from in Egypt, senators provided all his provincial legates and the junior legates who commanded the legions. The system required a continuous supply of such men to serve willingly, taking the reward of honours, titles and opportunities to win reputations for themselves and their families. There was a lot that needed doing. In 23 BC Augustus also increased the number of praetors from the traditional eight to ten, using the extra two to help administer state finances. Having two new consuls every year, combined with his own new powers, provided additional senior executive officers and enabled more to be done. Holding the consulship continuously may also have been inconvenient for Augustus, and certainly placed a heavy burden on his colleague in the years when he was away from Rome. There were thus sound practical reasons for the change.20
