11b: Augustus and the Principate

Young Gaius Octavius beat long odds to become Rome's second founder, Augustus Caesar. Octavian, as we will call him for the time being, was adopted at age eighteen in Julius Caesar's will. As Caesar's adoptive son, he now bore the name Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus. Both Cicero and Marc Antony looked at Octavian as just a kid with a fancy name - someone to be used, abused, and thrown away.  They paid for their mistake with their lives. Unlike his adoptive father, Octavian was not a military genius or even a soldier. He relied instead on his name, his political skill and his right-hand man, the general Marcus Agrippa. Most of all, Octavian was guided by an extremely clear sense of Roman culture. Unlike his adoptive father Julius Caesar, Octavian realized that Romans would never stand for rule by a king, or by anyone suspected of wanting to be king. So instead he convinced the Roman world that he was merely a regular guy who just happened to be in temporary charge of the government and the military. Octavian's brilliant arrangement, which is known as the Principate (rule by the princeps or "First Man") could just as well be termed a dictatorship. But comparing the two centuries of Pax Romana which resulted from the Principate, with the century of civil war which preceded it, the Principate literally saved the Roman Empire.

Octavian was no saint. He could not fight Antony and the Senatorial faction at the same time, so he set up the Second Triumvirate with Antony and an aristocratic counterweight named Lepidus, or "Pretty Boy." Unlike the so-called First Triumvirate of Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey, the Second Triumvirate of Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus was a legal arrangement backed up by Julius Caesar's adoring veterans. Unofficially it required each member to draw up a list of proscriptions. Atop Antony's hit list was the name Marcus Tullius Cicero, leader of the Senatorial faction; Rome's greatest orator was executed with Octavian's approval. Yet at least the average Roman was spared the reign of terror which had followed the earlier civil wars. In 42 BC, the Second Triumvirate's forces stamped out Julius Caesar's assassins. When Lepidus temporarily mistook himself for an equal partner, Octavian and Antony kicked him upstairs to the job of pontifex maximus. The next decade was spent in an uneasy peace between Octavian, who ruled the west half of the Roman world, and Antony, who ruled the Eastern, Greek-speaking half. Although Antony had married Octavian's sister, who had remained loyal to him, Antony took up with a mistress - the now wealthy Queen Cleopatra of Ancient Egypt. Typically of Octavian, he used this as propaganda against Antony - dropping his dutiful wife Octavia for an Ancient Egyptian floozie. Rumor even had it that Antony wanted to leave the Eastern Roman Empire to his children by Cleopatra - as king and queen. A showdown eventually came, ended by Agrippa's victory at the battle of Actium in 31 BC. After a year of mop-up activities which followed, thirty-three year old Octavian was sole ruler of the Roman world.

The idea of the Principate did not just leap out of Octavian's head. In fact, it took years for him to work out and negotiate with the Roman people. In 27 BC, Octavian made a great show of restoring the Roman state to the Senate. In return the Senate voted him supreme proconsular imperium over any province containing a Roman legion. This gave him permanent legal control over what was already his personal client army. He also received the name Imperator Augustus Caesar, which he used for the rest of his life. In 23 BC Augustus - as history knows him best - also received lifetime tribunician power, which gave him formal veto power over everything and scored him points with the urban masses. In 12 BC, with the death of Pretty Boy Lepidus, Augustus was elected Pontifex Maximus. Now that he held supreme military, secular, and religious power - Augustus was virtually the paterfamilias of all Rome. Still, he strictly observed the demands of the mos maiorum in his role as princeps, or Rome's "First Man." The annual elections continued as before, the legislative assemblies met as before, the senatorial class accepted proconsulships, and the equestrian class continued to get rich thanks to its special relationship with the Princeps. The masses were impressed with Augustus's generosity and with Rome's reputation as the one great world power. It was all a facade, of course, publicized by Augustus's building program, and his government supported poets, and backed up by 150,000 veteran legionaries stationed all around the Roman world. Yet almost all Romans preferred this facade to the century of chaos Rome had endured before Augustus took charge.

Augustus was careful to allow the Senate only nominal power. The magistracies became more and more empty honors, while actual government business was handled by handpicked members of the Equestrian class. The Senatorial class ran only those provinces which had no troops; the other, "Imperial" provinces were administered (again) by equestrian "legates," while the armies were commanded by Augustus's own handpicked generals, usually members of his family. This arrangement bolstered security by virtually removing any threat of client armies: every soldier now swore an oath to Augustus and to Rome. This arrangement also benefitted the people of the provinces, since Augustus recognized the connection between contented provincials and a smaller Roman military establishment. He therefore made sure that provincial governors actually governed instead of exploiting. Augustus also made a great show of trying to restore that good old time Roman religion, too: religious rites were re-established and the cult of his own "Genius," or guardian spirit established. This was partially inspired by Eastern concepts of the god-king; indeed, Augustus was worshiped in parts of the East as a god himself. He also concerned himself with public morality, and exiled his own daughter for being promiscuous. Literature and the arts in general flourished in Augustus's time, often with his personal support. As in all other matters, Augustus's posture was carefully contrived.

However, even Augustus himself could not foresee or manage everything. Specifically, he had no male offspring to serve as his official heir, as he had been Julius Caesar's heir. He adopted his adult stepson, Tiberius; he gave his personal blessing and the magic name of Caesar. But giving Tiberius anything more would be a violation of the mos maiorum: the status of Rome's paterfamilias could not be handed down like that. It would smack of kingship and blow the facade right off the Principate. Poor Tiberius had a tough act to follow. He had to earn the patria potestas needed to rule the Roman world, all the while standing in the shadow of the big man.