Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [118]
Vengeance was also taken on the dead. Antony’s memory was formally expunged. His name was obliterated from the Fasti, the state registers of official events. His statues were removed. It was to be as if he had never existed. The Senate, not unprompted surely, voted that no member of the Antonius clan should be named Marcus (a measure that was later repealed). His birthday was made a dies nefastus, an unlucky day, on which public business could not be conducted.
What had taken place, the meaning of the campaign that had been won and lost, needed to be attractively dramatized as an irreversible turning point in history. Actium, which had really been no more than a scrappy breakout from a blockade, was transformed into a great battle—a duel between Rome and anti-Rome, between good and evil.
The poets associated with Maecenas worked on an imaginative rewriting of history. Horace produced an ode that celebrated Octavian’s achievement at Actium (in fact, as we have seen, the credit for the campaign goes to Agrippa) and blackened Cleopatra’s name. He described her as
Plotting destruction to our Capitol
And ruin to the Empire with her squalid
Pack of diseased half-men—mad, wishful grandeur,
Tipsy with sweet good luck!
But all her fleet burnt, scarcely one ship saved—
That tamed her rage; and Caesar, when his galleys
Chased her from Italy, soon brought her, dreaming
And drugged with native wine,
Back to the hard realities of fear.
In this vivid caricature, there is not a single accurate assertion. As we have seen, Cleopatra was not plotting the end of the Roman empire, all her fleet was not burned, Octavian did not chase her anywhere, certainly not from Italy, and there is no evidence that the queen was a drunk. However, it is fine poetry.
It was the leading poet of the age, Virgil, who drew the fullest picture of the battle in his great national epic about Rome’s beginnings, the Aeneid. Prophetically engraved on the shield of Julius Caesar’s ancestor Aeneas, Octavian is envisioned at the head of tota Italia, all Italy. The star or comet that blazed in the night sky for a week after Caesar’s assassination shines above Octavian as he sets sail against the corrupt and cowardly east.
High up on the poop [he] is leading
The Italians into battle, the Senate and People with him,
His home gods and the great gods: two flames shoot up from his helmet
In jubilant light, and his father’s star dawns over its crest.
Defining the past in glowing terms was only half of what needed to be done if the victorious regime was to establish itself firmly in the hearts and minds of the ruling class and of the people at large. It was also important to present Octavian as the natural ruler of Rome—to develop a personality cult and an iconography of power. This was to be achieved by two means.
First, Octavian made the little complex of houses on Rome’s Palatine Hill, where he and Livia lived, a symbol of his authority. Some of these buildings substantially survive (although at the time of writing they are closed to the public). A ramp connected them to an adjacent temple of Apollo, which was an integral part of the complex. Octavian had vowed to build it during the wars against Sextus Pompeius, but its construction only became a major project after Actium; the temple was dedicated in 28 B.C.
Almost nothing of it remains now, but it was as splendid an edifice as could be designed. Its walls were of solid bright-white marble (the walls of Roman temples were usually of brick and concrete with marble cladding). The doors were gilded and inlaid with ivory. On the roof stood a chariot of the sun. The temple was surrounded by, or connected to, a portico of giallo antico, a speckled yellow marble from quarries in Numidia.
The Sibylline Books were removed from their