Augustus — A Personal View

It is 31 BC, and Octavian — the most powerful man in Rome — looks out over the sun-bleached brick and marble and terracotta city from his sumptuous, palatial villa perched atop the Palatine Hill. His brow is furrowed, as he knows his armies and navies have been engaged in a titanic battle in the east against the combined forces of Egypt and his most bitter, most worthy adversary; Mark Anthony. Octavian might do well to worry, as battles are volatile affairs, and gambling everything on one afternoon of play is always uncomfortably risky. A breathless imperial messenger, dusty from the road, busts in to hand him a written message. Octavian snatches it. Reads it. Pauses. Allows the parchment to fall from his hand. He steadies himself against a gilded desk. He looks out over the cityscape again, eyes anew, for he is now no longer the most powerful man in Rome; he is the most powerful man in the world.

The life and career of Octavian, the grand nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar — and later to be styled Augustus — is among my very favourites from all of history. It is a rip roaring roller coaster of a tale, filled with battles and intrigue, power and politics, love and death, all played for the very highest of stakes. Augustus is without doubt among the most pivotal single personages in Roman history, and indeed perhaps in all of history, full stop.

Some figures in history loom so large, are so steeped in glory or ignominy, that the real person is almost entirely subsumed by their historical memory. The real human being underneath it all is difficult to glimpse, let alone understand. Figures like Alexander, or Jesus, or Constantine, or Buddha; the real person is almost lost. Unfortunately, Augustus firmly belongs in this illustrious company. Muddying the waters further, is the fact that he seemed to have behaved very differently at various points during his career; by turns ruthless then lenient, bloodthirsty then clement. Historians, both ancient and modern, can paint a convincing picture of very different men, and all are legitimate. He is a tricky man to get the measure of.

Octavian’s career began the moment uncle Julius was stabbed to ribbons in the senate house on that bright windless morning in mid-March 44 BC. He tells what happened next in his own words in the text known as the Res Guesti, or, My Achievements, inscribed on the side of his tomb:

At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty to the republic, which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.

Of course we know this is propaganda. A rose-tinted victors account. To characterise the civil wars Octavian took part in, and occasionally instigated, as ‘setting the Republic free from the tyranny of a faction’ is being generous in the extreme. Many would, and have, characterised it instead as the behaviour of a ruthless and determined warlord, prepared to stop at nothing, prepared to justify anything, in order to achieve his goal; sole executive power over the Roman world.

When trying to understand someone's character, whether it be in real life, in literature, or an historical figure, first impressions are always very important. The first things you learn about a person or a character are often difficult to subsequently shake. Depictions of historical figures on the small or silver screen, if inaccurate, often serve to severely warp one’s perception. For example, my first exposure to the Duke of Wellington — Napoleon’s nemesis — was the portrayal by Stephen Fry in Blackadder The Third. Fry plays the Iron Duke as a hyper-aggressive, red-faced, violent bully who is always a moment away from bellowing in peoples faces and physically assaulting them. A comedy caricature, of course; yet utterly, completely misleading. Wellington was known to occasionally chew out an officer in no uncertain terms, but only when it was necessary, and if anything, was known for being reserved and gentlemanly. He was a cold fish, more likely to silently raise an eyebrow in derision than to start shouting or kicking people. It took many years and much reading before I felt entirely comfortable abandoning Richard Curtis and Ben Elton’s portrayal.

So too with Augustus. My first impressions of him were Brian Blessed’s depiction in the TV adaptation of I, Claudius. Robert Graves, the writer of the original novels, painted Augustus as a type of kindly and generous grandfather figure. A friendly magic grandad with a slight hint of steely reserve far below the surface. Blessed plays this to a T; a superb performance in my opinion. Yet Graves, the screenwriters, the director, and Blessed himself all chose to portray Augustus in a very particular light. The most positive and sympathetic light possible. Again, it took me many years and lots of reading before I was largely able to dismiss Graves’s version of Augustus.

So, let's run down with extreme brevity the main events of Augustus’s career, then take a look at what historians have said about it ever since. After Julius Caesar was murdered by senatorial, aristocratic oligarchs who naively thought his death would herald a return to republican norms, Octavian, as he was known at that point, was surprised to discover that uncle Julius had posthumously adopted him as his son, and bequeathed him vast sums of money. Over the next few years, through all sorts of tenuous and questionable machinations — including changing sides and back-stabbing allies — the young Octavian was able to hunt down and eliminate all of Caesar's killers. Then, in a power-sharing arrangement with two others, Lepidus and Antony, he ruled Italy and Rome as a ‘Triumvir.’ A programme of ‘proscriptions’ was enforced, which is a sanitised way of describing the wholesale slaughter of the Roman aristocracy and all remaining political opponents. Something which Machiavelli might argue was pure expediency, but to most observers is difficult to characterise as nothing other than a monstrous crime. Eventually, Lepidus was sidelined, and the final grand showdown could at last occur between the only men left standing; Octavian and Anthony. The issue was settled at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, the battle alluded to at the top of this article. After this epoch-defining clash of arms, Octavian had many decades of autocratic rule before him. He altered his methods though, and his later, undisputed reign, was remarkably bloodless. Most of his policies were designed to promote peace and reconciliation. Quite the transformation.

In his excellent book Dynasty, writer and historian Tom Holland gives us a superb overview: 

Submission to the rule of a single man had redeemed their city and it’s empire from self-destruction; but the cure itself had been a kind of sickness. Augustus, their new master had called himself, the divinely favoured one. The great-nephew of Julius Caesar, he had waded through blood to secure the command of Rome and her empire, and then, his rivals once dispatched, had cooly posed as a prince of peace. As cunning as he was ruthless, as patient as he was decisive, Augustus had managed to maintain his supremacy for decades, and then to die in his bed. Key to this achievement, had been his ability to rule with, rather than against, the grain of Roman tradition. For by pretending that he was not an autocrat, he had licensed his fellow citizens to pretend that they were still free. A veil of shimmering and seductive subtlety had been draped over the brute contours of his dominance. Time, though, had seen this veil become increasingly threadbare. On Augustus’s death in AD 14, the powers which he had accumulated over the course of his long and mendacious career, stood revealed not as temporary expediencies, but rather as a package to be handed down to an heir.

Tom Holland is seemingly not bamboozled by pro-Augustan propaganda, nor the depiction of the man we are offered in I, Claudius. Even many Romans at the time were unconvinced that Augustus was a force for benevolence. The greatest ancient Roman historian, arguably, is Cornelius Tacitus. In his seminal history, the Annals, he tells us of Augustus’s exploits, then, in signature style, gives us both sides of the argument surrounding his personality and motivations. Here is an excerpt of that overview: 

When the world was wearied by civil strife, (he) subjected it to empire, under the title of prince. But the successes and reverses of the old Roman people have been recorded by famous historians, and, fine intellects were not wanting to describe the times of Augustus, till growing sycophancy scared them away. The histories of Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius and Nero while they were in power were falsified through terror, and after their death were written under the irritation of a recent hatred. Hence, my purpose is to relate a few facts about Augustus, more particularly his last acts, then the reign of Tiberius and all that follows, without either bitterness or partiality from any motives to which I am far removed. When, after the destruction of Brutus and Cassius, there was no longer any army of the commonwealth, when Pompius was crushed in Sicily, and when, with Lepidus pushed aside, and Anthony slain, even the Julian faction had only Caesar left to lead it, then dropping the title of Triumvir and giving out that he was a Consul, and was satisfied with a Tribunes authority for the protection of the people, Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, the populus with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of repose; and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself the functions of the senate, the magistrates and the laws. He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or in the proscription, while the remaining nobles — the readier they were to be slaves - were raised the higher by wealth and promotion, so that, aggrandised by revolution, they preferred the safety of the present, to the dangerous past.

Tacitus then tells us all about the final days and hours of Augustus’s life, followed by an account of the lavish funerary arrangements. Then he tells us about how men at the time — for Tacitus was writing about an hundred years after the fact — thought about the legacy of their newly late first citizen. First, the generous interpretation: 

Sensible men, however, spoke variously of his life with praise and censure. Some said that dutiful feeling towards a father, and the necessities of the state in which laws had then no place, drove him into civil war, which can neither be planned, nor conducted on any right principles. He had often yielded to Antony while he was taking vengeance on his fathers murderers; often also to Lepidus. When the latter sank into feeble dotage, and the former had been ruined by his profligacy, the only remedy for his distracted country was the rule of a single man. Yet the state had been organised under the name neither of a kingdom, nor a dictatorship, but under that of a prince. The ocean and remote rivers were the boundaries of the empire. The legions, provinces, fleets, all things were linked together. There was law for the citizens, there was respect shown to the allies. The capital had been embellished on a grand scale. Only in a few instances had he resorted to force, simply to secure general tranquillity.

None of the above is entirely unreasonable. But there is a far harsher interpretation to be had. Tacitus lays it out for us:

It was said, on the other hand, that filial duty and state necessity were merely assumed as a mask. It was really from a love of sovereignty that he had excited the veterans by bribery; had, when a young man and a subject, raised an army, tampered with the consuls legions and feigned an attachment to the faction of Pompius. Then when by a decree of the senate he had usurped the high functions and authority of praetor, when Hirtius and Pansa (legitimate consuls) were slain, whether they were destroyed by the enemy or Pansa by poison infused into a wound, Hirtius by his own soldiers and Caesars treacherous machinations, he at once possessed himself of both their armies, rested the consulate from a reluctant senate, and turned against the state the arms with which he had been entrusted against Anthony. Citizens were proscribed, lands divided, without so much as the approval of those who executed these deeds. Even granting that deaths of Cassius and of the Brutii were sacrifices to a hereditary enmity, though duty requires us to wave private feuds for the sake of the public welfare, still, Pompey had been deluded by the phantom of peace, and Lepidus by the mask of friendship. Subsequently, Anthony had been lured on by the treaties of Tarentum and Brundisium, and by his marriage with the sister, and paid by his death the penalty of a treacherous alliance. No doubt there was peace after all this, but it was a peace stained with blood.

We are left, then, with a picture which is still far from definitive. Augustus has divided opinion ever since he walked the earth. For me, I am no longer able to accept the portrayal Graves and Blessed present. Though the older Augustus was nothing like Nero or Stalin, he could not possibly have been like Bob Ross or Jimmy Stewart either. I suspect that, at least in later life, he would have been approachable, but with an implacable and ruthless streak a mile wide, and not very far beneath the surface. At a distance of over two thousand years, we will never know for sure. We can only read and re-read the accounts, and allow our imaginations to fill in the gaps; something I have never grown weary of.