Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [127]
The year 23 B.C. had not gotten off to a good start, but Marcellus in his role as aedile made a brilliant success of the games. Throughout the summer, a canopy sheltered the Forum, where a temporary wooden arena was erected for the gladiatorial displays. Novel, slightly scandalous acts included a woman of noble birth taking part in a stage performance and an eques dancing in a ballet.
However, the mood in Rome was darkened by the onset of a plague. Epidemics were terrifying and not infrequent occurrences in a large crowded city such as Rome. What disease struck on this occasion is unknown; it may have been smallpox, bubonic plague, or typhoid fever. Scarlet fever and influenza have also been recorded by Greek and Roman medical writers.
Augustus fell ill again. Suetonius has it that he was suffering abscesses on the liver. According to Celsus, whose On Medicine was published in the first century A.D., the symptoms of liver disease were
severe pain in the right part under the praecordia [the region of the body about the heart], which spreads to the right side, to the clavicle and arm of that side; at times there is also pain in the right hand, there is hot shivering…[in bad cases] after a meal there is greater difficulty in breathing; then supervenes a sort of paralysis of the lower jaws.
Recommended treatment included the application of hot water in winter and tepid water in the summer, but “all cold things must be especially avoided, for nothing is more harmful to the liver.”
Augustus was in despair, for there seemed to be no hope of recovery; it appeared that the new regime was about to end. This would be a tragedy not just for him but for many others in public life. He had to take what steps he could to ensure a permanent legacy.
He gathered around his bedside the officers of state and leading senators and equites. He spoke to them on matters of public policy and handed his fellow consul, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, the breviarium imperii, a book that recorded the empire’s financial and military resources.
Many were expecting the princeps to bequeath his authority to Marcellus, whom he had only too evidently been grooming. But this had been a long-term plan, and the boy was too young and inexperienced to hold supreme power now. Agrippa would have had little trouble deposing him once Augustus was dead. Bowing to this reality, the dying man handed Agrippa the symbol of his authority: his signet ring bearing the head of Alexander the Great.
Much to everyone’s surprise, including his own, the princeps recovered. His doctor, Antonius Musa, turning medical orthodoxy on its head, decided to abandon the hot fomentations he had been using to no avail in favor of cold baths and cold potions. The shock treatment worked. (It has been suggested that Augustus was, in fact, suffering from typhoid fever, which could well have been the cause of the epidemic devastating Rome at the time; cold packs were a well-known treatment for the disease in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.)
The convalescent princeps showed that he was aware of the general unpopularity of his dynastic plans by bringing his will to a meeting of the Senate. He intended to read it out, as proof that he had no successor in mind, but in the event, to show their confidence in him, the senators would not permit it.
The settlement of 27 B.C. needed revision and it was time to make a fresh start. Augustus resigned as consul on July 1 and let it be known that he would no longer be a regular candidate. For him to continue holding the consulship year after year was stretching constitutional propriety very thin, for it made the post look like a permanent one, not so far from Julius Caesar