11c: Roman Propaganda

Augustus was a master of political propaganda. He maintained and advertised and enhanced his power in every way possible. At the same time, he was careful as always to observe the sense of the mos maiorum. Careful to avoid anything that could possibly suggest he was making the Principate a hereditary, he merely awarded special honors to the men and women in his family. He started with his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, who was  declared a god almost immediately his death. As Princeps, Augustus later honored his father with the massive and beautiful Temple of the Divine Julius. Romans could be trusted to connect the dots, and treat Augustus as the son of a god.  His grandsons, whom he adopted at early ages, also received high governmental offices despite their youth.

Augustus also added to his prestige through building up the city of Rome. He famously boasted: "I found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble." Augustus, the members of his household, and his closest associates undertook dozens of building projects all at personal expense. Among his major monuments in the city, we have already mentioned the Temple of Divine Julius. Another important Augustan building was the Temple of Mars Ultor - Mars the Avenger - built to celebrate his victory over the men who had assassinated Julius Caesar. The Ara Pacis Augustae - Altar of Augustan Peace - emphasized his role as bringer of peace to the Mediterranean world. The Forum of Augustus and the Baths of Agrippa provided the people of Rome with highly functional public spaces. Even in his extravagance Augustus was intensely practical.

Augustus also got his message out through literature. For the masses, he kept it simple. An engraved tablet of his official List of Accomplishments (Res Gestae) was placed prominently in all of the Roman Empire's important cities. In this passage, Augustus repeats his claim that he is just a regular Roman guy with a whole lot of influence.

In my sixth and seventh consulates (28-27 B.C.E.), after exstinguishing the civil war, having obtained all things by universal consent, I handed over the state from my power to the control of the senate and Roman people. And for my merits, by a senate decree, I was called Augustus. The doors of my temple were publicly clothed with laurel and a civic crown was fixed over my door and a gold shield placed in the Julian senate-house. The inscription of that shield testified to the virtue, mercy, justice, and piety, for which the senate and Roman people gave it to me. After that time, I exceeded all in influence, but I had no greater power than the others who were colleagues with me in each magistracy. 

Augustus also supported poets and prose writers who would help him glorify the Principate and help him raise Rome's moral tone. He didn't pay the writers directly, of course, because that would be too obvious. Those who toed the party line, though, tended to split their time between huge country estates and beautiful Roman townhouses. One of these was Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace of carpe diem fame); in his famous Ode 1.37, he writes:

Now it's time to drink! Time to smite the earth with happy, dancing feet and pile the gods' tables high with Salian feasts, my friends! Until now, we weren't allowed to bring out the good wine our ancestors had stored up - as long as that demented queen was plotting ruin and death for the Capitol and for the Empire, along with her sick flock of eunuchs, helplessly drunk but hoping for something positive. But she sobered up when she saw exactly one ship make it back from the fires; and Caesar gave her wine-logged brain a textbook lesson in terror...

Horace is talking, of course, about Augustus's victory over Antony at Actium. But notice how he faithfully follows the Augustan party line by refusing to talk about a civil war. Instead, Horace emphasizes the victory over the ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra. Thus Augustus's victory is not so much a Roman over another Roman, as it is the victory of Rome over chaos.

The most famous of Augustus's poetic supporters was Publius Vergilius Maro, also known as the Vergil of Divine Comedy fame. Vergil's greatest work was the Aeneid, which was in part a Roman challenge to Greece's most glorious literary achievement: the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer. The Aeneid was also meant to glorify Augustus and the Principate through comparison with Aeneas's foundation of Rome. Aeneas's greatest quality is his pietas, or devotion, which he displays to the gods, to his father, and to his destiny as the founder of Rome. Aeneas emerges from the smoking wreck of Troy, which stands for the smoking wreck of the Republic which Augustus had inherited. Aeneas is carrying on his shoulders his aged father Anchises, who stands for the late great Julius Caesar, and leading by his hand his son Iulus. Any resemblance to the name "Julius" is not at all accidental.

Augustus also identified himself with Rome's mission to impose Pax Romana upon the world. In book 6 of the Aeneid, Aeneas consults his now deceased father Anchises in the underworld, before beginning his divine mission to found Rome. Anchises points out to him a long and distinguished line of future Roman leaders - culminating in Augustus, of course - and then explains Rome's unique form of "manifest destiny." Note the backhanded slap at Greek cultural achievements, making Roman political practicality stand out even more.

Others, with more delicate fingers, may better fashion the breathing bronze
No doubt they will also create more lifelike features out of marble:
They will plead more cleverly in the courts, and plot accurately
The carpet of the stars, and the courses of the swift constellations.

This is your care, O Rome: o subdue the whole world for your empire!
These are your arts: to establish the order of peace,
To spare the vanquished, and to humble the haughty!

In order to keep the whole world subdued and the Pax Romana in effect, Augustus encouraged the whole world to honor him personally in one form or another. His corporate image as Princeps - the influential but modest old-school Roman living with his modest wife in their modest home on the Palatine Hill - was far closer to his actual personality than that of the Oriental god-king. It satisfied the Romans enormously. Yet the peoples of the Greek-speaking East, most of which had once belonged to the god-king Alexander the Great three centuries earlier, would not respect a ruler who was not at least somewhat divine. Strange as that may sound, the people of the East were actually more comfortable being ruled by a god. In the semi-pacified areas of Spain and Gaul, the concept of a divine Princeps was actually helpful in winning over the less civilized tribes and starting them on the path of becoming Romanized. Even in Rome, the worship of Augustus's "Genius," or guardian spirit, stressed his connection to the deified Julius Caesar and suggested that perhaps Augustus actually was not just a regular Roman after all, but the bringer of a glorious Golden Age.