First Among Equals — Augustus: He Found Rome Brick and Left It Marble

What exactly came into being that January? The Romans have no name for it. In the Res Gestae Augustus calls himself simply princeps, that is, the first. Tacitus sums up this system in a few merciless sentences.

According to Tacitus, Augustus put aside the title of triumvir, proclaimed himself consul, and declared that the power of a tribune was enough for him to protect the people. He won over the soldiers with gifts, the people with cheap grain, and everyone with the sweetness of peace. Little by little he rose higher, until the functions of the Senate, the magistrates and the laws were gathered in one hand (Annals 1.2).

No one stood in his way. The boldest had fallen in battle or perished on the lists of the condemned. The remaining powerful men rose in wealth and honors the more eagerly they served. The provinces did not long for the old order either: they distrusted the rule of the Senate and the people, because the great men fought among themselves and the magistrates plundered. Tacitus’s conclusion is simple: they preferred the safety of the present to the dangerous past.

Formally, not forever. Dio writes that he received power for ten years, and as that time ran out, the Senate voted him further periods: five years, another five, and then three more times ten. So, according to Dio, he ruled alone to the end of his life (53.16). Later emperors took power for life from the outset, but every ten years they still celebrated a festival as if renewing it.

Did he believe in it himself? Suetonius describes how twice he thought of restoring the Republic: once right after Antony’s fall, and again during a long illness, when he summoned the magistrates and the Senate to his house and gave an account of the state of the empire. He concluded, however, that he himself would not be safe after stepping down, and that handing the state over to the many would be dangerous. He stayed (Augustus 28).

In 23 BC Augustus finds out what will happen when he is gone. He is consul for the eleventh time and gravely ill. Dio writes that he puts everything in order like a dying man: he summons the magistrates, the foremost senators and equestrians, gives his fellow consul Piso a book with a register of the army and the state’s revenues, and his signet ring to Agrippa. He names no successor (53.30).

The ring goes to a friend and general, not a relative, though everyone had expected Marcellus, Augustus’s sister’s son. The physician Antonius Musa saves him with cold baths and cold drinks. For this he receives from Augustus and the Senate a great deal of money, the right to wear a gold ring (he was a freedman), and exemption from taxes for himself and his whole profession (53.30).

All this Augustus will later describe in his own words. He has his record of achievements engraved in front of the mausoleum; copies survive, including one in Ankara. This is the Res Gestae. This is how he speaks of his power there.

That is his version. In practice the army, the money and the provinces have one master. Suetonius shows how it looks from the inside: he stations the legions and auxiliary units in the provinces and keeps the fleet at Misenum and Ravenna. To defend the city and his own person he keeps the rest, but never more than three cohorts in Rome, and without a permanent camp; the others winter in nearby towns (Augustus 49). These are the first cohorts of the Guard, a Guard we will hear much more about.

He also sets fixed rates of pay and terms of service, so that discharged soldiers will not seek revolution out of poverty. Dio records that in 13 BC he introduces twelve years of service for guardsmen and sixteen for the rest, and in place of the land that veterans keep demanding, he gives money (54.25). Only in AD 6 does he found the military treasury, fed by new taxes (Dio 55.25, Augustus 49). He posts messengers along the roads, and later post stations.

The army is placated, the treasury full. Only the city looks as if no one loved it: brick, timber, floods and fires.