Office holders, be they tribunes or consuls, continued to be chosen, but even if they were formally elected, they were at least nominated by Augustus. By AD 5 the lists of candidates for office brought before the people at election time contained only the names of yes-men senators whom Augustus could trust not to rock the boat. When an independent candidate stood of his own free will, Augustus’s response was methodical, befitting the unspoken logic of the new regime. A young senator called Egnatius Rufus, for example, won considerable popularity for successfully establishing a private fire-fighting service manned by his slaves. When he refused to withdraw his name from the list of candidates for the consulship, the consequence was fatal. Rufus was tried for ‘conspiracy’ and executed. The cherished, seminal power of the Roman citizen’s electoral vote was reduced to a hollow gesture.
In the administration of the empire the signs of the silent revolution were evident too; power sharing was another carefully coded performance. Men of ambition and standing could, ostensibly, have a legitimate career. Augustus scrupulously maintained the licence of individuals to pursue office in the controlled elections: giving the senatorial élite a role in government was one way to keep potential rivals at bay and, more importantly, he could not manage the empire alone. He needed the experience and the sheer manpower of senators and knights to hear and adjudicate legal cases in the city, to govern the provinces abroad, and to oversee the exaction of taxes. He also needed commanders to fight wars; under his rule the size of the Roman empire’s provinces nearly doubled. There was, however, a very fine line circumscribing office holders’ power. Those who crossed it, and thus dared to rival Augustus’s authority, paid the price for forgetting their lines. In reality, the skills now required of office holders were closer to those of a bureaucrat or a loyal deputy of Augustus. Though their ambitions were perhaps satisfied by the appearance of authority, the élite knew that the real power lay elsewhere.
It was a fact to which the senators and knights slowly grew accustomed. Naturally, the stars of those loyal to the new regime rose; office in the administration, albeit of limited responsibility, made them acquiescent. Those of a more independent leaning simply withdrew and bided their time. Perhaps they consoled themselves that this unhappy state of affairs was temporary, a symptom only of Augustus’s personal dominance within the state. At some point in the future he would be gone, they perhaps thought, and at that time there would return both the glorious republic and political freedom. For the time being, they were prepared to play along to keep the ideal alive. Augustus, however, had other ideas.
The old, idealized republic, if it had ever existed, was dead and gone for ever. Dead too was the rivalry among the senatorial élite, and the search for glory in the eyes of the Roman people, which many believed defined it. Just to make sure, in AD 6 Augustus set about implementing the most influential reform of his entire rule.
REFORMING THE ARMY
The reform of the Roman army was the key to stabilizing Augustus’s position and the age of emperors to come. The army had always been the source of the empire’s security. In the last decades of the republic, however, it had also been the chief source of conflict. This was because it had been in legionaries’ interests to go to war even if it meant fighting another Roman army. Recruited and groomed by ambitious generals with the offer of wealth, booty and land, their loyalty had been detached from the Roman state, but had become fatally up for grabs to the highest bidder (as under Julius Caesar). Augustus knew this better than anyone. In the civil war he had repaid his followers in the Roman army by forcibly booting humbler citizens off their Italian countryside properties in order to settle soldiers on them.
Now, however, that relationship changed, and the umbilical cord between commanders and troops was cut. The Roman army was at last taken out of politics and nationalized. Citizens were offered a professional career in army service, a salary and a chance for promotion. The legions, for example, were fixed by law at a core twenty-eight regular units. These were spread along the frontiers of the empire, while a new, 9000-strong élite ‘Praetorian’ army was stationed in Italy and Rome. Its men were paid three times as much as ordinary soldiers and would with time become the personal bodyguard of the emperor. For the many who chose a career in the regular army, military service was eventually set at twenty years, and, from AD 6, a fixed annual salary of 900 sesterces was decreed, but with the promise of 12,000 sesterces pension upon retirement from the army. (The minimum subsistence for a peasant family is reckoned at 500 sesterces per annum.) At first Augustus paid for the army out of his own personal wealth; his proconsular power did, after all, make him commander of most of the Roman army, and this patronage again underlined his supreme position. In AD 6, however, he took the professionalization of the army to its logical conclusion and created a military treasury, endowed it with a massive initial grant, and then funded it through taxation.
Although Augustus had improved the stability of his own position, the reform of the army was also highly risky. At the end of Augustus’s rule the legions in Gaul and Pannonia (modern-day Hungary and the Balkans to the south) seized the opportunity of the emperor’s death to renegotiate their terms of duty. Of course there were the usual gripes. They were fed up with their low pay, corrupt superior officers and the paltry prospect at the end of their service, should they live to see it, of some thin-soiled plot of land tucked far away from home; the rewards just weren’t as appetizing as they had been under the likes of Julius Caesar. What sparked the mutinies, however, was one grievance above all. Soldiers were being kept on beyond their agreed length of service; the reforms were so expensive that the Roman authorities were desperately trying to save money by delaying payment of the legionaries’ retirement bonus.
It is very hard to make financial comparisons across time, but one modern historian has valued the minimum annual state budget at 800 million sesterces. We can calculate that expenditure on the army was in the order of 445 million sesterces each year. This means that the army wiped out roughly half the empire’s annual budget.8 Augustus’s initial grant to the treasury was bountiful, but later emperors would not always find it possible to be as generous. An emperor’s ability to sustain the professional army would be the critical factor in the future security of the frontiers. Augustus had drawn the sting from the army by destroying its dependency on ambitious, big-hitting generals pursuing their own political objectives. In doing so, however, he had also created the empire’s Achilles heel, then and throughout the next five centuries.
If the first lesson of the civil war had been that the Roman army needed to be taken out of the control of ambitious generals, a second lesson followed from the first. In order for the emperor to maintain his ability to pay for the new professional army of the state, he needed to maintain the security of the tax revenues. No longer could the empire afford to allow the wealth of the provinces to fall into the hands of the generals who governed them and lined their own pockets. It was essential that taxes flowed smoothly from the provinces to the centre – to Augustus’s imperial coffers. Understanding this was key to the success of an emperor’s rule, both for Augustus and for emperors to come.
Even with such a system in place, however, twenty-eight army units were all that Rome could afford. Augustus learnt this lesson too, and it was one he learnt the hard way. For the best part of his rule, his generals had been arduously campaigning to bring Germany between the Rhine and the Elbe under Roman control. That policy appeared to be paying off. Then, in AD 9, disaster struck. As the general Quintilius Varus was concluding a successful campaigning season and returning his army to winter quarters on the Rhine, he took a route through the Teutoberg forest. Within that eerie wood, however, lay a venomous snake: an army of German warriors appeared like ghosts from behind the trees, descended on the Romans and massacred no fewer than three Roman legions. Augustus is said to have been so completely shaken by the news that ‘for months at a time he let his beard and hair grow and would hit his head against the door, shouting, “Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!”’9