Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [177]
Brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed, the plan saw the two armies within a few days of converging on the Marcomanni, when news came of a great revolt in Dalmatia and Pannonia. Tiberius immediately came to terms with the king of the Marcomanni and rushed off to Pannonia, where he was to spend the next three years fighting the rebels.
He was replaced in Germania by his fellow consul of 13 B.C., a competent but lackluster administrator named Publius Quinctilius Varus. The new proconsul believed that Tiberius’ victories had silenced all opposition; he saw his task as the transformation of a defeated territory into a Roman province.
Back at Rome, the elderly princeps went on governing. In A.D. 4, he conducted a census, to register citizens and their property. The purpose was to revise taxation indebtedness, doubtless upward. However, in light of the uneasy public mood he applied the findings of the census only to those who owned property in Italy worth more than 200,000 sesterces.
The terms of military service were reformed: new recruits were now required to serve twenty years rather than the former sixteen; the cash gratuity at the end of a soldier’s service was set at twelve thousand sesterces, the equivalent of fourteen years’ pay. Centurions were rewarded at a much higher rate and could become wealthy men. The cost of these gratuities was becoming hard to bear and in A.D. 6 Augustus established an aerarium militare, or military exchequer, which arranged for the payment of gratuities (the state treasury continued to maintain the standing legions). It was financed, unpopularly, by a death duty and a tax on the proceeds of public auctions. Providing in this way for retired soldiers was a wise move, for it cut the personal link between a general and his men, who in the days of the Republic expected him to guarantee their future.
In A.D. 9 the princeps responded to agitation to repeal the law concerning unmarried and childless individuals by consolidating his moral legislation with the lex Papia Poppaea.* The previous laws were confirmed, but some concessions were made. Married people without children were no longer treated as unmarried in the matter of inheritance. Childless widows and divorced women were given a longer period of grace—two years and eighteen months, respectively—before they were required to remarry. Men debarred from receiving legacies because they were unmarried were granted some time after being named in a will to marry.
The news of the Pannonian revolt, which had brought Tiberius’ German campaign to an untimely halt, deeply shocked Augustus and the Roman establishment. It was reported (perhaps with a touch of exaggeration) that the Pannonians had more than two hundred thousand infantry and nine thousand cavalry in arms. Velleius points out that the Pannonians were well-trained soldiers: “The Pannonians possessed not only a knowledge of Roman discipline but also of the Roman tongue, many also had some measure of literary culture, and the exercise of the intellect was not uncommon among them.”
The rebel forces overwhelmed Macedonia with fire and the sword. Roman traders were massacred. The princeps reported to the Senate that Italy was at risk of invasion. He moved for a time to Ariminum (today’s Rimini), to be closer to the theater of war and able to advise on developments.
Fresh from Germania, Tiberius did not have enough troops to quell the Pannonians decisively, but was able to make a stand with five legions. More legions were urgently summoned from the eastern provinces, but it would take them some time to reach the scene. The citizenry of Italy, in these uneasy times, refused to flock to the legionary standards, and Augustus raised levies from among the slaves of the wealthy, who were given their freedom when they enlisted. This was a bitter