Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [3]
Augustus died old, but throughout his long reign he never hesitated to entrust great responsibility to the young men of his family: his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus, and his grandsons Gaius and Lucius. The excitement of making one’s way in an adult world must have been intoxicating.
We are right to call Augustus Rome’s first emperor, yet the title is anachronistic. At the time he was simply regarded as the chief man in the state. The Roman Republic had, apparently, been restored, not abolished. Augustus developed a personality cult, but he did not hold permanent authority and had to have his powers regularly renewed. Only with the accession of Tiberius did people finally realize that they were no longer citizens of a free commonwealth, but subjects living under a permanent monarchy. So nowhere in this book do I call Augustus emperor.
The task of writing a life of Augustus is complicated by the fact that many contemporary sources are lost, casualties of the Dark Ages: the autobiography down to 25 B.C. that Augustus wrote in Spain; his correspondence with Cicero; Agrippa’s memoirs; the history of his times by Pollio and Messala’s commentaries on the civil wars after Julius Caesar’s assassination; thirty books of Livy’s great history of Rome, covering the period from 44 to 9 B.C. Only fragments of the life of Augustus written by a friend of Herod the Great, Nicolaus of Damascus, have survived, and Appian’s detailed study of Rome’s civil wars in the first century B.C. closes with the death of Sextus Pompeius in 35 B.C.
Dio Cassius gives a reasonably complete account in his Roman History, but his style is pedestrian and he wrote three hundred years after the event. The findings of the modern archaeologist (especially inscriptions and coins) add valuable information. Neither Suetonius nor Plutarch is a historian, properly speaking, but both inject some welcome anecdotes and personality assessments.
Much more is recorded about Augustus’ first thirty years than about his later life and a thorough and coherent narrative of his youth can be constructed. However, important events of his maturity and old age call for the skills of the detective rather than the historian. Mysterious and incomplete narratives conceal as much they reveal, and sometimes only speculative explanations can be offered. For certain years nothing definite is known at all; between 16 and 13 B.C., we are told, Augustus was in Gaul and Germany, but we have no idea where he went or where he was at any particular time. For the second half of this book I have been obliged to switch from straightforward narrative to a more thematic approach to my subject.
This disjunction is not only due to the loss of texts, but also to a lack of governmental transparency. Once the imperial system had been established, Dio claims, most events began to be kept secret and were denied to common knowledge…. Much that never materializes becomes common talk, while much that undoubtedly came to pass remains unknown, and in pretty well every instance the report which is spread abroad does not correspond to what actually happened.
That is going a little too far: intentions are often revealed through actions, and the broad thrust of history cannot easily be concealed. However, Dio has a point.
Hindsight is not open to biographers, who have a duty to tell a life as closely as possible to how it was lived. I have tried not to forget that the past was once present and the future unknown, and have done my best to hide my guilty knowledge of what fate had in store for the actors in the drama.
The plural of a family name that ends in “-us” or “-ius” I give as “-i.” Thus one Balbus becomes some Balbi, rather than the clumsy Balbuses. However, I am contentedly inconsistent; I allow “Caesar” to mutate into “Caesars” on the grounds that it is not inelegant and that the correct Latin would be the pedantic-sounding Caesares. I say “Pompey” and “Livy” rather than “Pompeius” and “Livius,