The Twelve Caesars (8 page)

His first and best-known opponent, Mark Antony, insisted that Augustus owed everything to a name, the name of Julius Caesar bestowed on him by testamentary adoption following Caesar’s
bloody death. Caesar was Augustus’ great-uncle, though in Rome, inevitably, rumour construed the young Augustus, then called Octavian and described as ‘unusually handsome and
exceedingly graceful’, as the older man’s catamite. (A habit of softening the hairs of his thighs by singeing them with hot walnut shells cannot have helped in the emergence of such a
tradition; Lucius Antonius also claimed that Octavian had offered himself to Aulus Hirtius for 3,000 gold pieces.) But the connection of great-uncle and nephew transcended heredity (or lust): their
affinity was one of character and spirit. Augustus’ mother and stepfather vigorously opposed Octavian’s assumption of Caesar’s name. Atia’s admonishments fell on stony
ground. ‘His divine soul... spurned the counsels of human wisdom,’ Velleius Paterculus records, ‘and he determined to pursue the highest goal with danger rather than a lowly
estate and safety.’
²
It was indeed the avowal of a ‘Caesar’.

Cato, we have seen, claimed that Caesar was the only man who undertook to overthrow the Roman state when sober. It was an accusation better levelled at Augustus. For while Caesar, punch-drunk
with ambition, lost sight of political realities, Augustus’ focus never wavered: his sobriety was central to that cult of personality which underpinned his rule. Amassing unprecedented power
and riches – in his final two decades he received 1,400 million sesterces in bequests from friends – he offered Romans a display of considered modesty as accomplished
in its dramatic mendacity as anything presented on the classical stage by those pantomime actors whom he so admired. ‘You must take great care not to write and talk
affectedly,’ he cautioned his granddaughter Agrippina: his instincts recoiled from ostentation even in speech, ‘the noisomeness of far-fetched words’, or the florid style of his
friend Maecenas, sponsor of Virgil, Horace and Propertius, which he dismissed as ‘unguent-dripping curls’. Only Augustus’ ease and affability mitigated a deliberate austerity
inspired by the customs of the Republic, with its emphasis on communal wellbeing. Suetonius pulls no punches: ‘In the... details of his life it is generally agreed that he was most temperate
and without even the suspicion of any fault.’

He lived in the same small house on the Palatine for forty years. His furniture was such as would stifle pride in a middling citizen of Hadrian’s reign, the time of Suetonius’
writing. There was a cultivated ordinariness to his clothes, which he claimed his sister Octavia, his wife Livia or his daughter Julia made for him (incredible claims in relation to Livia and
Julia). He ate simple food sparingly: green figs, coarse bread, small fishes, handmade moist cheese, a handful of dates or firm grapes, sharp apples, cucumber and young lettuce, that diet Tityrus
offers Meliboeus in Virgil’s first
Eclogue
; occasionally he soaked his bread in cold water. He drank with similar restraint. Assiduous in the service of the state, he worked late into
the night free from the befuddlement of gluttony or hard drinking. His study was small, squirrelled out of sight at the top of the house and called ‘Syracuse’ in reference to the
mathematician and philosopher Archimedes. Physical discomfort was a badge of honour, proof of the wholeheartedness of his dedication to Rome’s custodianship. When his granddaughter Julia
built a particularly sumptuous country retreat, Augustus pulled it down. So easily was luxury sacrificed to a political manifesto.
Cynical sources may doubt the sincerity of
this affectation of the mundane: none can deny the rigour of Augustus’ stance.

His legacy is fecund, the cultural and economic efflorescence of his reign symptomatic of fertility at a moment when Roman strength burgeoned at home and abroad. But Augustus himself, although a
dedicated philanderer whose interest in sex never faltered, had only a single child. Julia was his daughter by his first wife, Scribonia, a stern-faced matron of the old school whom he divorced on
the day of Julia’s birth on the flimsy pretext that he was ‘unable to put up with her shrewish disposition’. (In fact he was consumed with lust for Livia and, conspicuously
parvenu in a political environment of entrenched snobbery, equally desperate for the unique political legitimacy of Livia’s aristocratic Claudian heritage.) The story of Augustus’ reign
is one of consistent political realignment, of the transference of powers associated with formerly elected offices to an unelected head of state. The human drama, first played out behind closed
doors on the Palatine and afterwards in the more public arena of coinage and consulships, focuses on Augustus’ quest, in the absence of a son of his own, for an heir for these greedily
hoarded powers. In itself it indicates the success of the
princeps
’ process of encroachment and monopoly. It was a search which would consume significant energies on Augustus’
part. His eventual choice of successor shaped the course of the principate as surely as any of his actions.

In 44
BC
, Gaius Octavianus, a sickly and catarrhal young man of equestrian stock, described by Suetonius as well endowed with birthmarks but inclining to
shortness and even limping on occasion, recognized a challenge: ‘he considered nothing
more incumbent on him than to avenge his uncle’s death.’ The uncle in
question was a great-uncle, the brother of his maternal grandfather’s wife Julia. Julius Caesar’s death on the Ides of March elevated him to the position of most famous man in the Roman
world. He would afterwards become a god; in the meantime he was the first of many casualties of the death-throes of the Roman Republic. Without a son of his own, he had divided his immense fortune
between the people of Rome, bequeathing to every man 300 sesterces and gardens beyond the Tiber, and the studious youth in whom we assume he glimpsed something of himself. He also offered to Gaius
Octavianus that lustrous name whose incalculable value his fellow consul Mark Antony correctly estimated, and the combined loyalty of troops and clients across the Roman world. Under the Republic,
no man could leave more. The unprecedented position occupied by Caesar was his by gift of the senate and the people of Rome, an amalgam of constitutional empowerments invested in him personally,
not his to bestow. For a puny stripling studying rhetoric in Illyricum, its august resonance represented nevertheless a sonorous wake-up call.

To the friends who greeted Octavian on his return to Rome in early May 44
BC
, the exact nature of his inheritance from Caesar was clear: ‘at the moment of his
entering the city, men saw above his head the orb of the sun with a circle above it, coloured like a rainbow, seeming thereby to place a crown upon the head of one destined soon to
greatness.’
³
This useful fiction reassured those of Caesar’s veterans who had pledged their loyalty to their lost leader’s heir, endowing the young man who arrived in Rome not only
with meteorological endorsements but effectively a private army. In that springtime confusion, as Roman politicians struggled in pursuit of elusive consensus, dissent was powerful and far-reaching.
Chief among the ranks
of the unbelievers was Mark Antony himself, Caesar’s Master of the Horse (his second-in-command), extravagant, genial, feckless and sensuous, a
patrician rapscallion. Antony regarded himself as Caesar’s true heir. Unwilling to humour a young man whose equestrian origins and rumoured effeminacy he dismissed with determined contempt,
he made clear to Octavian his plan of withholding from him for as long as possible payment of Caesar’s will. He also asserted his intention of maintaining that mastery of Rome which he had
won in the disarray consequent on the tyrannicides’ failure to decide on any plan of action bar Caesar’s murder. Octavian adopted the line that intermittently would characterize his
political behaviour for the next half-century. Borrowing enormous sums of money, he himself paid Caesar’s bequest to the people of Rome. He took pains that the nature of his action was widely
disseminated and understood. He also staged lavish games in Caesar’s honour. In private he discussed with Cicero the restoration of the Republic. Perhaps no one but Octavian apprehended the
full irreconcilability of these impulses. His career as juggler began early.

In allying himself with Crassus and Pompey, Caesar had enlisted money (Crassus) and military support (Pompey) to promote his political aspirations. Thanks to Caesar, Octavian possessed both
already. It was not enough to invest his cause with either legality or legitimacy. This man too young for senatorial office required both. They came in 43, when the senate awarded him the rank of
propraetor with
imperium
and dispatched him to Gaul. He accompanied the consuls Hirtius and Pansa, their joint purpose to oppose Mark Antony in his attempt to seize control of the province
for himself. At the battle of Mutina, Caesarean forces defeated Antony, who fled. Hirtius and Pansa both died. Only Octavian could return to Rome. But in Rome the senate was laggardly in rewarding
his victory.
It denied him one of the consulships made vacant by Hirtius and Pansa’s deaths. Incensed, Octavian marched on the city at the head of eight legions of
cavalry and auxiliaries. It was
force majeure
, but consulship was the prize. As in his ‘father’s’ career, military menace had won those concessions dialogue denied. It was
to become a feature of the principate that Augustus bequeathed to his heirs – the iron fist within the velvet glove, the omnipresence of militarism in a regime ostensibly based on charisma
and civic-mindedness.

They chose an island to meet on, the consul Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus. It was November 43 and the three men – Caesar’s heir, his former second-in-command,
and the
pontifex maximus
who the previous year had become Mark Antony’s Master of the Horse – had decided on an alliance. Like a previous triumvirate, collaboration masked deep
fissures: mutual mistrust, personal enmities. In this case its duration spanned a decade. Opposed to the gathering strength of the tyrannicides, these second triumvirs united in the name of Caesar.
It was a contentious legacy, which provided nevertheless the ideological basis for their overthrow of constitutional government in Rome. Their intention was mastery of the Roman world, an unwieldy
aim which demanded defeat of the armies of the East, rallied now under Brutus and Cassius, and the removal of Pompey’s son Sextus Pompey, currently encamped on Sicily in charge of the Roman
navy. Dominance could be achieved by the sole means of war.

Death and suffering are not the only costs of war: there is a fiscal price too. Although the trio awarded themselves consular power for five years each, their overwhelming need was money.
Velleius Paterculus attributes their solution to Antony and Lepidus: Octavian ‘protested, but without avail, being but one against two’.
⁴
For a second time, a
triumvirate of self-seeking opportunists imposed proscriptions on Rome. First reservations banished, Octavian responded with ruthlessness. In Suetonius’ account, there is nothing half-hearted
in his dedication to this policy of killing and plunder, in which up to 300 senators and 2,000 equestrians lost their lives; without compunction he added to the list his own guardian, Gaius
Torianus, a former colleague of his father. Octavian paid in the blackening of his reputation – among other claims, he was accused of covetousness in the matter of Corinthian bronzes
belonging to those proscribed; perhaps his later wariness of luxurious decoration can be traced to this early poor judgement. His reputation also suffered at the battle of Philippi, at which,
fighting alongside Mark Antony, he helped inflict decisive defeat on the forces of Brutus and Cassius. The lion’s share of victory belonging to Antony on that occasion, it was Octavian who
behaved with greatest brutality. His behaviour contrasted with Caesar’s much-vaunted clemency towards the vanquished. Under such circumstances, Octavian’s boast, valid from 1 January
42, to be the son of a god, following divine honours voted to Caesar by both senate and triumvirate, surely rang hollow.