Reign of Agustus, Roman Empire

In 27 BCE Augustus is awarded the title ‘princeps’ by the Senate. The word, meaning ‘first citizen’, was deliberately modest, purportedly placing Augustus at the head of a community of equals and forgoing any allusion to Augustus being a king.

Augustus was more conscientious than Caesar in avoiding the trappings of monarchy; he wore no crown, he lived in a modest house on the Palatine Hill like any other senator and, when the civil wars ended, he announced the restoration of the Republic, transferring the armies, the provinces and the organs of state back to the Senate and the people. Under Augustus, the Senate still holds all its formal powers, and members of the senatorial class are allowed to govern the more peaceful, less important parts of the empire. The position of 'emperor' is never formally codified in Roman law. Instead, it is a de facto office where a single man is given a bundle of powers.

The ordinary people are placated with bread and circuses; huge public games and festivals are organised, including a mock naval battle featuring 3000 gladiators on an artificial lake. The grain dole is formalised and expanded, and Augustus takes on the title and roles of the Tribune, assuring the Roman people that he is their advocate.

 

But the restoration of the republic is a facade. Augustus is granted a series of powers that make him a de facto monarch, while the restored powers of the Senate become merely symbolic. He is given personal control of all the armies in important provinces such as Gaul, Hispania and Asia Minor, as well as personal control over Egypt, now the most important province in the empire after Italy. He is also granted the right to speak first in Senate meetings, setting the agenda and tone of the discussions (after all, who among the senators would dare publicly contradict the saviour of the Republic?). He is immune from harm or prosecution, given the power of the Tribunes to veto and introduce legislation. He may also induct and remove senators, fire and hire governors of imperial provinces and exercise the powers of the censor. Finally, he becomes Pontifex Maximus, the highest religious and moral authority in the land.

Even the urban landscape of Rome is changed. Before Augustus and his successors, Rome was not the white marble city we imagine it to be today. Below the Palatine Hill, it was a warren of twisting streets, wooden tenements, and slums. Augustus initiated a huge building programme. Using the spoils of wars abroad, he built a series of temples, including the Temple of Mars Ultor, and the Temple of the Divine Julius Caesar, dedicated to his deified great-uncle, as well as a new forum, theatre, triumphal arcs, the beautiful Ara Pacis, parks and gardens, roads, aqueducts and a huge family mausoleum. The Augustan building project, as it is now known, was by far the largest single building project in Rome’s history. It was an attempt to show the Roman people that they had entered a new golden age of peace and prosperity, that they now sat on top of a vast, unified empire, with the gleaming city of Rome as its capital. 

Though Augustus changes Roman politics and culture more than any other Roman before or (arguably) after, he frames himself as a traditionalist. He declares a series of moral reforms aimed at constraining the purportedly decadent, un-Roman behaviour of the elites during the Republic and promoting virtues of patriotism, restraint, and piety. These include the criminalisation of adultery (and the legalisation of fathers murdering adulterous daughters), cash incentives for large families, curbs on excessive banquets, and even a strict dress code for entering the Forum. Augustus takes pains to follow these laws himself, portraying himself and his family as paragons of virtue and piety, so much so that when his daughter Julia is accused of adultery, he has her exiled to the island of Pandateria.

Augustus is inscrutable; he is always two things, always a paradox. He restored the Republic, yet he destroyed it. He authored the biggest revolution since the early Republic in Roman thought and politics, yet he was a staunch traditionalist and conservative. He entrenched the privileges of Rome’s senatorial class, whilst declawing their political power. He was a man of the people who excluded the people from politics.

Augustus and his regime is cynical, hypocritical, confusing and absolutely fascinating. It laid the bedrock for an imperial system that would last until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and every succeeding emperor would have to navigate the surreal, contradictory world that Augustus created to obscure and further his power.