For what was Caesar Augustus himself, after all, if not the heir of a refugee? Long before there had been such a city as Rome, Prince Aeneas, the son of Venus, the ancestor of the Julian clan, had fled burning Troy and voyaged with his small fleet to Italy, his quest, given him by Jupiter, to make a new beginning. It was from Aeneas and his Trojans that the Roman people had eventually sprung, and in their souls it could be imagined they still retained something of the wanderer. Not to be content with what they had, but always to strive and fight for more, this had been the destiny of the Republic’s citizens – and it gave to Augustus and his mission a time-hallowed glow.
In the Romans’ beginning was their end. In 29 BC, the same year that Octavian returned from the East to push forward his programme of regeneration, Virgil started a poem on the theme of Aeneas. This was to become the great epic of the Roman people, an exploration both of their primordial roots and of their recent history. Like spectres, famous names out of the future haunt the vision of the Trojan hero: Caesar Augustus, naturally, ‘son of a god, who brings back the age of gold’,32 but others too – Catiline, ‘trembling at the faces of the Furies’, and Cato, ‘giving laws to the just’.33When Aeneas, shipwrecked off the African coast, neglects his god-given duties to the future of Rome and dallies instead with Dido, the Queen of Carthage, the reader is troubled by knowing what will happen to the Trojan’s descendants, Julius Caesar and Antony; Carthage shimmers and elides with Alexandria; Dido with Cleopatra, a second fatal queen. What is gone and what is to come, both cast their shadows, one on the other, meeting, merging, separating again. When Aeneas sails up the Tiber, cattle low in the field that, a thousand years hence, will be the site of the Forum of Augustus’ Rome.
To the Romans themselves, who remained a conservative people despite all the upheavals of repeated civil wars, there was nothing startling about the perception that the past might shadow the present. The unique achievement of Augustus, however, was the brilliance with which he colonised both. His claim to be restoring their lost moral greatness to them stirred in the Romans deep sensibilities and imaginings that at their profoundest could inspire a Virgil, and make their landscape once again a sacred and myth-haunted place. But these yearnings also served other, more programmatic purposes. They encouraged veterans, for instance, to remain on their farms and not come endlessly flocking to Rome; to be content with their lot, leaving their swords to rust in the lofts of their barns. And over the vast tracts of the countryside that remained the property of agri-business, worked by chain-gangs of slaves, they cast a veil woven of fantasy.
What is happiness? – opting out of the rat race
,
Just like the ancient race of men
,
Tilling ancestral fields with your own team of oxen
,
Spared the horror of overdrafts
,
Not a soldier, blood pumping at the fierce trumpet
,
Not trembling at the angry sea.34
So wrote Virgil’s friend Horace, with delicate irony, for he perfectly appreciated that his vision of the good life bore little relation to the realities of existence in the countryside. Yet it was no less precious to him for that. Horace had fought on the losing side in the civil wars, running away ingloriously from Philippi, and returning to Italy to find his father’s farm confiscated. Like his political loyalties, his dreams of a modest villa, of a life lived close to the land, were bred of nostalgia, no matter how self-mockingly expressed. Augustus, who never held Horace’s youthful indiscretions against him, offered the poet friendship and made an investment in his dreams. Even as the new regime was parcelling out the huge estates of fallen Antonians to its supporters, it was also subsidising Horace in an idyllic existence outside Rome, complete with garden, spring and little wood. Horace himself was too subtle, too independent, to be bought as a propagandist, but crude propaganda was not what Augustus wanted from him, nor from Virgil. For generations Rome’s leading citizens had been tortured by the need to choose between self-interest and traditional ideals. Augustus, with his genius for squaring circles, simply made himself the patron of both.
And he could do this because, like any star performer, he had the pick of roles he wanted. Only the reality could not be acknowledged: Augustus had no wish to end up murdered on the Senate House floor. Instead, with the willing collaboration of his fellow citizens, who flinched from staring the truth in the face, he veiled himself in robes garnered from the antique lumber-box of the Republic, refusing any magistracy not sanctioned by the past, and often not holding any magistracy at all. Authority, not office, was what counted: that mysterious quality that had given to Catulus or to Cato his prestige. ‘In all the qualities that make up a man,’ Cicero had once acknowledged, ‘M. Cato was first citizen.’35 ‘First citizen’ – ‘princeps’: Augustus let it be known that he could wish for no prouder title. The son of Julius Caesar was to be regarded as the heir of Cato too.
And he pulled it off. No wonder that Augustus boasted of his skills as an actor. Only a man with a supreme talent for dissimulation could have played such various parts so subtly – and with such success. On his signet-ring, the princeps carried the image of a sphinx – and throughout his career he posed his countrymen a riddle. The Romans were used to citizens who vaunted their power, who exulted in the brilliance and glamour of their greatness – but Augustus was different. The more his grip tightened on the state, the less he flaunted it. Paradox, of course, had always suffused the Republic, and Augustus, insinuating himself into its heart, took on, chameleon-like, the same characteristic. The ambiguities and subtleties of civic life, its ambivalences and tensions, all were absorbed into the enigma of his own character and role. It was as though, in a crowning paradox, he had ended up as the Republic itself.
During his final illness, Augustus, by now a venerable seventy-five years old, asked his friends whether he had performed adequately ‘in the mime-show of life’.36 That he had retained his hold on supreme power for more than forty years; that in all that time he had kept Rome, and the world with her, secure from civil war, claimed no special rank for himself that had not been sanctioned by the law, and had his legions stationed not around him but far away, among forests or deserts, on barbarous frontiers; that in the end he was dying not of dagger wounds, not at the base of an enemy’s statue, but peacefully in his bed: these were dazzling notices for any citizen to have. Yes, it could be reckoned that Augustus had put on a good show. After all, he had made himself the only star in town.
He died finally in the summer of AD 14 in Nola – the same city from which Sulla, a century earlier, had begun his fateful march on Rome. Escorted back to the capital by senators, borne at night to prevent it turning putrid, the corpse of Augustus was finally burned, as Sulla’s had been, on a great pyre in the Campus Martius. The old dictator, if his ghost still haunted the plain, would have found the setting dramatically altered from the one he had known while alive. Carried reverently from the smouldering pyre, the ashes of Caesar Augustus were laid to rest in his mausoleum, a tomb so enormous that it had been built complete with its own public park: both its scale and its circular form, it was said, had been inspired by the tomb of Alexander the Great. The Campus Martius, once the training-ground of Roman youth, was now one vast demonstration of the virtues of the Princeps. Of his magnanimity – for there, to the south, could still be seen Pompey’s theatre, the name and the trophies of Caesar’s enemy preserved by the grace of Caesar’s son. Of his benignity – for where once the Republic’s citizens had gathered to practise their weapons and be marshalled for war there now stood an Altar of Peace. And of his beneficence – for stretching even longer than Pompey’s theatre, a whole mile of gleaming porticoes, rose what had rapidly become, since its completion in 26 BC, Rome’s premier entertainment venue, where Augustus had staged some of the most lavish spectacles ever seen in the city. Officially, this was the voting hall, the Ovile, an extravagant upgrading of the old wooden pens into marble. But it was rarely used for voting. Instead, where the Roman people had once gathered to elect their magistrates, gladiators now fought and bizarre monsters – giant serpents, for instance, almost ninety feet long – were displayed. And if there were no shows, then citizens could always flock there for the luxury shopping.