The Twelve Caesars (7 page)

In the Rome of the sources, portents are never superfluous (Tacitus described it as ‘a city which found a meaning in everything’).
²⁷
They punctuate the rise and fall of human existence
as surely as life and death. To overlook – or worse, disdain – the asomatous was just another instance of Caesar’s failing judgement. Overworked and tired, increasingly plagued by
epilepsy, he made plans nevertheless for a three-year absence from Italy, beginning on 18 March, to avenge Crassus’ defeat in Parthia. His plan finally ended the procrastination of that
conspiracy of sixty senators under Marcus Junius Brutus, which, on the Ides of March, forcibly prevented his departure, almost on its very eve. Anticipating tragedy, horses left by Caesar to graze
the banks of the Rubicon wept copiously; a bird called a king-bird, flying into the Hall of Pompey with a sprig of laurel in its beak, was pursued and killed by larger birds; a burning slave,
cloaked in flames, survived uninjured; and Caesar’s wife Calpurnia dreamed that the pediment of their house collapsed and that Caesar was stabbed in the arm. On more than one occasion, a
soothsayer called Spurinna warned Caesar to beware of danger that would come to him no later than the Ides of March. In response he disbanded his Spanish bodyguard.

And so it came to pass that Gaius Julius Caesar, described by Suetonius as invariably kind and considerate to his friends, died at the hands of a conspiracy whose members were all known to him.
Many centuries later, the scene was painted by the Italian Neoclassicist Vincenzo Camuccini. Camuccini’s re-creation depicts a frieze-like orchestration of balletic fury, its focus a
crimson-clad Caesar languid in fearless profile. The truth
cannot have been so orderly. Under the rain of dagger blows, a single groan escaped Caesar’s lips; also, in
some accounts, the words ‘You, too, my child?’, uttered in Greek to Brutus. Thanks to Shakespeare, who rendered that dying cadence ‘Et tu, Brute?’, the murdered tyrant
became a tragic hero. Our story is rich in such apparent contradictions and ambiguities.

Augustus
: Bronze statue of emperor Caesar Augustus © Only Fabrizio

A
ugustus described himself as a player in the comedy of life. Undoubtedly the man who appended to his dispatches the seal of
Alexander the Great and who responded with pique to the inclusion of his name in the writings of any but the most eminent authors treated that comedy and his own role in it with seriousness.
‘He had clear, bright eyes in which he liked to have it thought that there was a kind of divine power, and it greatly pleased him, whenever he looked keenly at anyone, if he let his face fall
as if before the radiance of the sun.’ Quasi-divinity became Augustus’ lot in life long before Numerius Atticus, kneeling at his funeral pyre, earned a million sesterces by witnessing
the ascent of his spirit to heaven ‘in the same way, as tradition has it, as occurred in the case of Proculus and Romulus’.
¹
Adoption by Julius Caesar had made him the son of a god at
eighteen; the very name ‘Augustus’ (‘the increased one’) embraces in its etymology associations of the sublime and ordinary human abilities extraordinarily magnified.

He boasted of transforming brick-built Rome into a city of marble, ‘adorned as the dignity of the empire demanded’: his boastfulness, though on occasion disingenuous, seldom
encompassed levity. (The habit of propaganda, once entrusted to Virgil and Horace, was too strong. The
Res gestae divi Augusti
(‘Acts of the Divine Augustus’), his valedictory
inventory of
his achievements inscribed in bronze outside his mausoleum, asserted unblushingly and without elaboration achievements history has yet to surpass.) As his
contemporaries acknowledged – as we continue to acknowledge – the talents of this divine comedian extended beyond rebuilding Rome. He was the architect of a revolutionary settlement
which hoodwinked the majority and held in check for his lifetime the disaffected few. In the turbulent aftermath of Caesar’s murder, it carved peace from chaos and conjured prosperity from
civil strife and bloody factionalism; relief at the advent of that peace facilitated Augustus’ ‘revolution’. In time it directed the lives of all ten successive Caesars and shaped
the experience of countless millions across Rome’s empire. In its way it was every bit as influential as ‘the radiance of the sun’ glimpsed in those eyes which Pliny the Elder
described as being as widely spaced as a horse’s. Impossible that its creator should avoid assertions of divinity: on the face of it his actions amounted to more than one man’s
portion.

Asking whether he had played the comedy of life fitly, the dying Augustus answered his own question and begged our recognition:

Augustus understood the theatre of politics. He was not, like Julius Caesar, impatient of those pragmatic deceits by which personal ambition was reconciled to convention. He
understood that, in espousing Caesar’s legacy, all his world became a stage: when the time was ripe, his own role was that of Rome’s principal strutting player. Perpetual dictatorship
had cost Caesar his life. When the people did their best to force the dictatorship
upon Augustus, like an actor in the theatre ‘he knelt down, threw off his toga from
his shoulders and with bare breasts begged them not to insist’. His career was one of manipulation, his sleight of hand worthy of a conjurer: his ‘restoration of the Republic’
became a suit of new clothes for an emperor. His ascent to a position approaching majesty, described by his contemporaries as
princeps
(‘leader’), took him a dozen years; his
‘reign’ lasted four decades. ‘He thought nothing less becoming in a well-trained leader than haste and rashness,’ Suetonius records. His favourite sayings included
‘More haste, less speed’ and ‘That is done quickly enough which is done well enough’. After the all-consuming whirlwind of Caesar’s fiery glory, the victory of his
great-nephew offered Romans drama of a different kind. The ruler who displayed to curious crowds a rhinoceros, a tiger and a snake measuring fifty cubits, and ‘who surpassed all his
predecessors in the frequency, variety and magnificence of his public shows’, insisted on his own place centre-stage. For the first time in Roman history, this canny impresario enrolled his
family as supporting actors and politicized every intimate domestic impulse from weaning to weaving, carefully displayed for public consumption. His greatest monument, the Ara Pacis Augustae,
dedicated in 13
BC
and celebrating that settlement he imposed empire-wide, is decorated with friezes carved with images of his extended family. They preserve in marble the
dramatis personae
of the Augustan spectacular.

In the drama of his life, the comic impulse was balanced by something darker (intimations of tragedy); offenders included his daughter and his granddaughter, both Julias. For his part Augustus
donned the mantle of epic heroism crafted in his service by unrivalled poets, patrons and scribblers united in their vision of a new Golden Age. His own happy ending, which bestowed on Rome and her
empire the singular glory
of the
pax Augusta
, was seldom rivalled in the reigns of his successors, though the strength of that peace was such that it survived through
generations. In Augustus’ life, statecraft and stagecraft combined. Even the decoration of his houses included an element of theatrical fantasy. In preference to costly paintings or statues,
rooms were full of ‘the monstrous bones of huge sea monsters and wild beasts, called “the bones of the giants” and the “weapons of the heroes”’, a topsy-turvy
visual idiom which challenged distinctions between appearance and reality and created an environment of super-scaled make-believe in which Augustus reigned supreme as a mythic conqueror at home
with heroes and giants. The creation of the principate was a magnificent piece of improvisation. As with any theatre, it depended for its success on a suspension of disbelief among its audience,
the challenge not only for Augustus but for each of his successors.

Augustus’ story reverses the pattern that will emerge in the course of our survey. For the record of those Caesars who follow him is one of decline over the passage of time; reigns which,
joyful at the outset, end in personal disillusionment, the evaporation of early hopefulness succeeded by bloodshed, brutality and the unthinking pursuit of self (Vespasian and Titus are
exceptions). Augustus, by contrast, who first contemplated world domination in his teens, embarked on that unthinkable course with a ruthless single-mindedness which made few concessions to finer
scruples; benevolence came later. This giant of world history is described by Suetonius prior to his emergence as
princeps
as having ‘incurred general detestation by many of his
acts’. If we believe Suetonius’ account, that loathing is well founded. One day the praetor Quintus Gallius approached Augustus with folded tablets concealed among his clothes.
Augustus’ suspicions immediately descried a hidden sword.
Gallius was removed from the gathering and tortured: of course no confession of intended wrongdoing emerged.
Still Augustus ordered his execution. For good measure, first he ‘[tore] out the man’s eyes with his own hand’. It is a vigorous contradiction of the author’s subsequent
assertion that ‘the evidences of his clemency and moderation are numerous and strong’. We will discover that clemency is the luxury of the autocrat, a benignity available to those whose
position of superiority is unassailable. At the end of his life, Augustus was able to bequeath just such a position to his heirs. Behind that legacy lay a scramble for supremacy which concealed
ugly and discreditable truths. There were good reasons why the future emperor Claudius was persuaded to exclude from his history of Rome an account of Augustus’ rise to power. Unlike those of
Julius Caesar, Augustus’ illegalities never seriously threatened to find him out. Among his manifold achievements that were denied Julius was longevity: he survived long enough to outlive the
memory span of many of his contemporaries.

Suetonius endows Augustus with a supernatural endorsement of unparalleled richness, beginning with the ‘warning that nature was pregnant with a king for the Roman people’ which
presaged his birth in a small house on the Palatine on 23 September 63
BC
. At the turning points in his life omens and portents abound. For the early biographer, this
sanction of the numinous serves the essential purpose of exempting Augustus from culpability: the fates have decreed the course of his life – the completion of the transition from Republic to
Empire. It is a dialectic which seeks to erase ambition and which Augustus himself contradicted in those actions and edicts which asserted his dynastic intent and his craving for long continuance
of his settlement: ‘bear with me the hope when I die that the foundations which I have laid for the State will remain unshaken.’ Unrivalled in life in authority
and renown, after his death he received from a grateful state the sanction of divinity. Suetonius subscribes to the irresistibility of that impulse, discounting the political
expediency to Augustus’ successors of his own status as a god.