Including Rome herself. A famous phrase, lodged in the mind of every citizen, asserted that the city had been ‘founded with august augury’26 – and now, by becoming Augustus, Octavian had made this phrase his own. To found Rome anew – here was his lifetime’s mission, and every time his fellow citizens spoke his name, they would be reminded of it. The artful, almost subliminal, nature of such an association was entirely calculated, for tempted as Octavian had been by the more obvious name of ‘Romulus’, he had rejected it: the first founder of Rome had been a king and had killed his brother, unfortunate details both. Now that Octavian held supreme power, anything that might jog memories of how he had won it was to be suppressed. Already, eighty silver statues, voted him the previous decade by an obsequious Senate, had been melted down. In official commemorations of his career, the years between Philippi and Actium were left a blank. And most crucially of all, of course, the name ‘Octavian’ itself was to be buried in oblivion. Augustus Caesar perfectly understood the importance of rebranding.
And he understood it because he understood the Roman people themselves. Augustus had shared in their deepest dreams and desires. That, after all, was what had won him the world. Last and greatest of the Republic’s strongmen, he had recognised, with the pitiless eye of a pathologist, the malignancy corrupting his city’s noblest ideals – nor had he ever ceased to exploit it. ‘Always fight bravely, and be superior to others,’ Posidonius had admonished Pompey, citing the impeccable authority of Homer. But the age of heroes was past, and the desire to fight bravely and to be superior to others might now encompass the ruin of Rome. The stakes had grown so high, the resources available to the ambitious so immense, the methods open to them so devastating and lethal, that they had brought the Republic and all its empire to the point of annihilation. No longer a polity of citizens bound by shared assumptions and restraints, Rome had become an anarchy of head-hunters in which only the cruel and fratricidal could hope to advance. This was the hunting-ground into which Octavian, just nineteen, had thrown himself – and there could be no doubt that his aim, from the outset, had been to seize mastery of the state. Having achieved that, however, with his rivals dead or tamed and his people exhausted, he had next faced a momentous decision. Either to continue trampling on the traditions of his city’s past, to wield power nakedly with a sword, as a warlord, perhaps, like his father, like Antony, as a god – or to cast himself as the heir of tradition. By becoming ‘Augustus’ he signalled his choice. He would rule not against the grain of the Republic but with it. He would instruct his countrymen in an ancient lesson: that ambition, if not pursued for the general good, might be a crime. And he himself, the ‘best guardian of Romulus’ people’,27 would revitalise the ideals of citizenship so that never again would they over-reach themselves and degenerate into savagery and civil war.
Hypocrisy of an Olympian order, of course, but Romulus’ people were no longer in a condition much to care. Citizens now imagined their doom inexorable.
What does the bloodthirsty passage of time not leech away?
Our parents’ generation, worse than their parents
’,
Has given birth to us, worse yet – and soon
We will have children still more depraved
.
28
This was a pessimism bred of more than war-weariness. The old certainties of what it meant to be a Roman had been poisoned, and a confused and frightened people despaired of what had once bound them together: their honour, their love of glory, their military ardour. Freedom had betrayed them. The Republic had lost its liberty, but worse, it had lost its soul. Or so the Romans feared.
The challenge – and the great opportunity – for Augustus was to persuade them of the opposite. Do that and the foundations of his regime would be secure. A citizen who could restore to his fellows not only peace, but also their customs, their past and their pride would rank as august indeed. But he could not do it simply by legislating, ‘for what use are empty laws without traditions to animate them?’29 Decrees on their own would not resurrect the Republic. Only the Roman people, by proving themselves worthy of Augustus’ labours, could do that – and therein lay the genius and the greatness of the policy. The new era could be cast as a moral challenge of the kind that the Romans had so often faced – and risen to triumphantly – in the past. Augustus, claiming no more authority than was due to him by virtue of his achievements and prestige, summoned his countrymen to share with him the heroic task of revitalising the Republic. He encouraged them, in short, to feel like citizens again.
And the programme was funded, as was traditional, with the gold of the defeated. The realisation of Augustus’ dreams was to be paid for, fittingly, out of the ruin of Cleopatra’s. In 29 BC Octavian had returned to Rome from the East with the fabled treasure of the Ptolemies in his cargo-holds – and had immediately begun spending it. Huge tranches of land were bought up, in Italy and throughout the provinces, so that Augustus would never again have to commit the terrible crime of his youth: settling his veterans on confiscated property. Nothing had caused more misery and dislocation, and nothing had struck more brutally at the Romans’ sense of themselves. Now, at enormous expense, Augustus worked to expiate his offence. ‘The assurance of every citizen’s property rights’ was to be an enduring slogan of the new regime, and one that did much to underpin its widespread popularity. To the Romans, security of tenure was a moral as much as a social or economic good. Those who benefited from its return saw it as hailing nothing less than a new golden age: ‘cultivation restored to the fields, respect to what is sacred, freedom from anxiety to mankind’.30
Yet this golden age would impose duties on those who enjoyed it. Unlike the Utopia described by Virgil, it would not be a paradise purged of toil and danger. That would hardly serve to breed hardy citizens. Augustus had not invested the treasure of the Ptolemies merely to encourage his countrymen to lounge around like effeminate Orientals. Instead, his fantasy was the old one of all Roman reformers: to renew the rugged virtues of the ancient peasantry, to bring the Republic back to basics. It struck a deep chord, for this was the raw stuff of Roman myth: nostalgia for a venerated past, yes, but simultaneously a spirit harsh and unsentimental, the same that had forged generations of steel-hard citizens and carried the Republic’s standards to the limits of the world. ‘Back-breaking labour, and the urgings of tough poverty – these can conquer anything!’31 So Virgil had written, while Octavian, in the East, was defeating Cleopatra and bringing an end to the civil wars. No vision of an indolent paradise now, but something more ambiguous, challenging – and, by Roman lights, worthwhile. Honour, in the Republic, had never been a goal in itself, only a means to an infinite end. And what was true of her citizens, naturally, was also true of Rome herself. Struggle had been her existence, and the defiance of disaster. For the generation that had lived through the civil wars, this was the consolation that history gave them. Out of calamity could come greatness. Out of dispossession could come the renewal of a civilised order.