Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [153]
XXI
GROWING THE EMPIRE
17–8 B.C.
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As so often, it is as well to look below the surface of what the princeps said to what he exactly did. At bottom, he was an aggressive imperialist. Under his rule, Rome gained more new territory than in any comparable period in its previous history. His real position is set out in his official autobiography, Res Gestae, where he boasts: “I enlarged the territory of all provinces of the Roman People on whose borders were people who were not yet subject to our imperium.”
Public opinion expected nothing less of Rome’s ruler. Republican law had forbidden the Senate to declare war without provocation, without a casus belli, and indeed Rome (like Great Britain two millennia later) had acquired much of its eastern empire without altogether intending to do so. But now the idea that Rome had an imperial destiny was one of the ways by which the regime justified itself in the public mind.
Virgil writes of a Caesar “whose empire / shall reach to the Ocean’s limits, whose fame shall end in the stars”; Horace begs the goddess of luck to “guard our young swarm of warriors on the wing now / to spread the fear of Rome / into Arabia and the Red Sea coasts.”
The phrase “Ocean’s limits” reminds us how small and fuzzy at the edges was the Roman world. Accurate navigational equipment not having been invented, most explorers—usually they were traders—did not travel very far from the Mediterranean.
The Romans believed that the world’s landmass was a roughly circular disk consisting only of Europe and Asia, and that it was surrounded by a vast expanse of sea, Oceanus. They had no idea that the American and Australasian continents existed, nor that there was land beyond India. The landmass itself surrounded the Mediterranean Sea and Greece and Italy. The island of Britannia perched on its northwestern edge. The Roman empire took up a large part of the world as its inhabitants believed that world to be, and it was very tempting for its ambitious rulers to dream that they might one day conquer it all.
Maps were rare in the classical time; the first known world maps appeared in fifth-century Athens. Borrowing from Alexandrian models, the Romans, with their imperial responsibilities, recognized the practical importance of cartography. A world map was commissioned by Julius Caesar, probably as part of a triumphal monument he built on the Capitoline Hill, which showed him in a chariot with the world, in the form of a globe, at his feet.
Augustus commissioned his deputy, Agrippa, to work on a more detailed map, the orbis terrarum or “globe of the earth.” This showed hundreds of cities linked by Rome’s network of roads; it was based on reports sent in by Roman generals and governors, and by travelers. The result was a broadly recognizable picture, although distances and shapes became less and less accurate the farther places were from Rome.
The main purpose of the map was as an aid for imperial administrators, provincial governors, and military commanders; as a visual representation of the empire, it was also a powerful metaphor of Roman power. The map was painted or engraved on the wall of the Porticus Vipsania, a colonnade built by Agrippa’s sister, and was on permanent public display. Copies on papyrus or parchment were made for travelers, or information copied down.
As we have seen, Augustus and Agrippa spent many years abroad in different corners of the empire. Between 27 and 24 B.C., the princeps was in Gaul and Spain; between 22 and 19 B.C. in Greece and Asia; and between 16 and 13 B.C. in Gaul. Meanwhile, Agrippa spent 23 to 21 B.C. in the east, 20 and 19 in Gaul and Spain, and 16 to