Although those legions were replaced, the sums did not add up sufficiently to risk pursuing the conquest of Germany. Augustus told his successor as much. He left the emperor Tiberius a handwritten letter strongly advising him to keep Rome within the boundaries of its current frontiers: the Atlantic Ocean in the west, Egypt and North Africa in the south, the English Channel and the rivers Rhine and Danube to the north, and the border of Roman Syria with neighbouring Parthia in the east. Although Tiberius heeded his adoptive father’s words, later emperors would not. For the time being, however, Augustus ensured that along these borders his professionalized army maintained the security of the Roman empire. It was a solid platform upon which to cultivate his age of peace.
THE CULT OF PEACE
An essential part of that peace was the creation of the ideology of the emperor. The Greek-speaking eastern provinces of the empire had long been accustomed to worshipping and glorifying the personalities of their individual Roman governors; this was a cultural hangover from the relationship between eastern subjects and their Hellenistic kings. Under Augustus, those provincials continued the practice, but transferred their worship to the figure of Augustus. He was treated like a god. Temples were built to him, and prayers, festivals and sacrifices glorified the names of Augustus and his family. Now that he had successfully weathered the early opposition to his rule, he devised ways of making his glorification an empire-wide trend. It was a task he could set to with flair.
Today, Augustus’s genius for presentation would impress even a modern spin-doctor. His favourite tactic was to make skilful use of traditional Roman history. In order to advertise to citizens his successes in foreign policy, for example, Augustus rekindled an ancient custom. He was reminded that in a more ancient era the doors to the Temple of Janus were closed at times of peace, and opened only when a war was being waged. So, when Augustus went to war with Spain in 26 BC, the doors were solemnly opened. In that campaign, Augustus, like modern imperialists, was determined to set reluctant ‘friends’ straight, and when his generals had completed the job seven years later, he referred to the victory as ‘pacification’.10 At the same time the doors of the small temple in the Forum were ceremoniously closed. It was not, however, his peace with Spain, but with Parthia that was Augustus’s greatest public relations coup.
The neighbouring empire to Rome’s east had brought about one of the republic’s most ignoble and embarrassing defeats. In 55 BC an army, commanded by a leading general of the late republic, Marcus Licinius Crassus, and his son, was utterly annihilated by superior Parthian tactics in the deserts of Arabia. Symbolic of the wound gouged into the Roman empire was the loss of Crassus’s military standards. These had become a trophy, an emblem of Parthian defiance and a totemic museum piece in that empire’s capital city. In 19 BC Augustus set about remedying this. His approach, however, did not march to the loud drumbeat of war. It moved to the quieter sounds of a diplomatic agreement, backed up with the baring of military teeth and a show of Roman force. It was enough of a threat for a new treaty with Parthia to be signed and, critically, the standards to be returned.
Back in Rome, Augustus was quick to spot and exploit the potential of the event. He magically upgraded the Parthian settlement from a peace treaty into a Roman victory to rival Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. With exuberant fanfare and pageantry, the standards were brought back into Rome, a triumphal arch was dedicated and the standards themselves were laid to rest. Their location? The new Temple of Mars the Avenger. The theme of this ‘victory’ was reiterated in the famous ‘Prima Porta’ statue of Augustus. Right in the centre of the emperor’s richly decorated breastplate was chiselled the scene of a Parthian humbly handing back the standards to a Roman. Without so much as a drop of blood being shed, the Roman ‘revenge’ was exacted.
Old Roman history put to modern political spin was also the theme of much of Augustus’s great marble building programme. In the Rome of the late republic, marble had been used sparingly and only by the very rich in the building of monuments. It was expensive because it had to be transported all the way from Greece. Under Augustus, however, a rich and far cheaper supply had been found and quarried at Carrara, in modern-day Tuscany. For this reason above all, Augustus was able to boast that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.11 He would oversee Rome’s extraordinary transformation from the dirty, chaotic rabbit warrens of the late republic into a capital city worthy of a Mediterranean-wide empire. The Altar of Peace, the Pantheon, the city’s first stone amphitheatre, and a new Temple to Apollo were just some of the fruits of his building programme. It was, however, the new Forum of Augustus that was perhaps his greatest achievement. In it, the same genius for rhetorical effect can be detected.
Two long porticoes, housing a reverent parade of historical statues, flanked either side of the Forum. On one side were the statues of Romulus, the first kings of Rome, and a series of grand Romans of the republic. On the opposite side were the marble images of Augustus’s ancestors – and a formidable, blue-blooded line-up they made too. Beginning with Aeneas, the legendary founder of Rome, it continued with his descendants, the kings of the city of Alba Longa, which Aeneas’s son Iulus had founded, then on to his descendants, the family of the Julii, and right down to Julius Caesar, Augustus’s adoptive father. No chance was missed to exploit his divine ancestry too. At one end of the parallel porticoes stood the great Temple of Mars the Avenger. As Aeneas was said to be the son of the goddess Venus, this deity took pride of place both inside the temple and also in its pediment. Within she stood alongside Julius Caesar and Mars; outside she was next to Romulus. Crucially, however, the Forum’s rich, sophisticated panorama of Roman history encircled one figure. Right in the middle of it, almost certainly, stood a statue of Augustus himself.
One clear political statement rang out. Augustus was the pinnacle, the summation of Roman history; he was the favoured one of the gods; he was the guardian of ancient Roman values, and the embodiment of those values in the future. The new Forum of Augustus was thus the forerunner of more recent monuments of imperialism. For example, the Victorians erected monuments that reflected the belief that their own age was the peak of civilization, and in the 1920s and 1930s, when Mussolini was seeking to assemble his new Italian empire, he too took inspiration from Augustus’s building programme.
The life of the city that flowed around this sophisticated and elegant space served only to underline Augustus’s carefully crafted script. Everywhere a Roman walked as he went about his civic administrative duties in the Forum he would see images, names and incarnations of Augustus and his glorious ancestry. The Temple of Mars also had a specific state function. Augustus suggested that whenever the Senate met to decide on declarations of war and peace, they should do so in the appropriate surroundings of that temple. Although the meetings were ostensibly collegiate affairs, the senators would not be allowed to forget one simple thing: this was Augustus’s temple, and the glory of the wars declared and the peaces agreed in it was Augustus’s too. His name was emblazoned across the front above the columns and even the building’s incarnation was rooted in his early career. The first citizen had piously vowed to build this religious precinct, so he claimed, after the battle of Philippi in 42 BC, the event that concluded the son’s war of revenge against the assassins of his father, Julius Caesar.12 From the seed of this vow had grown an oak tree of political ideology. Yes, it evoked the traditional past, the ancient virtues of the Roman republic. But it also glorified Rome’s kings, a dutiful line of succession that wove together centuries of history and reached its highest point with Augustus.