Augustus’s manipulation of history was perhaps matched only by his self-proclaimed restoration of Roman religion. His adoptive father Julius Caesar had reformed the Roman calendar in the last decades of the republic because it had grown completely out of step with the seasonal year. He corrected it by putting in place a calendar based on the solar year. It’s almost exactly the same as the one we use today. Now Caesar’s adopted son turned his attention to revitalizing the annual list of Roman religious festivals and events. Old rituals from the republic’s early history were dusted down, celebrated in the city and injected with new life. Into this resuscitation of a comforting past, however, Augustus had once again stealthily inserted himself and his family. In among the ancient festivals were less ‘antique’ moments for Roman citizens to commemorate. Augustus’s ‘restoration’ of the republic in 27 BC, for example, made an appearance. His first closing of the doors of the Temple of Janus was there too. Also deemed worthy of celebration were, of course, the first citizen’s birthday and the significant propitious days in the lives of his family. The final touch was the renaming of the month formerly known as Sextilis: now it became August. Furtively, the new age was being mapped on to the old.
Time too became a victim of Augustus’s stealth offensive. The defining symbol of this assault was not the Roman calendar but Augustus’s Horologium. This massive sundial was erected in the Campus Martius to the north of the city around 10 BC. Its marker still stands today in the Piazza Montecitorio in front of the modern Italian parliament building, but in the age of Augustus and the emperors who succeeded him it provided Roman citizens with the centrepiece of a magnificent astronomical display. A bronze line scored into the stone-paved ground marked the meridian where the sundial’s marker fell at noon, and the lines pointing out from the centre were gradated with cross-lines indicating how the shadow of the sun lengthened and shortened throughout the year. The sun that rose in the empire’s east and set in its west thus told the time in that empire’s capital city.
Augustus, however, made this very much his sundial. The marker was a red granite obelisk brought from the province that was most gloriously associated with him. Egypt was famed for its wealth and was now the bread basket of the Roman empire. It was the jewel in the empire’s crown, and the man who had first set it there was Augustus. But that connection was not his only fingerprint on the astronomical display. Augustus’s birthday fell on the same date as the autumnal equinox (23 September), and on that day the shadow was said to fall in line with Augustus’s Altar of Peace near by – another cornerstone in the ideology of the emperor. It was as if Augustus not only controlled time, but also the very movement of planets and heavenly bodies.
The height of Augustus’s association with the gods and the heavens was his Games of the Ages in 17 BC. Their impact followed hot on the heels of earlier measures undertaken by him to establish his piety towards the gods and the work of healing the Roman state. In the minds of many the civil war was thought to have taken place because Romans had neglected the gods. At its conclusion, therefore, Augustus, reconnected the state with divine favour by restoring the city’s temples and shrines. At the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol Hill he went one better. In the inner chamber he deposited ‘sixteen thousand pounds of gold, as well as pearls and precious stones to the value of fifty million sesterces’.13 The year before the Games of the Ages, Augustus’s medicine for the state took the form not of gifts to the gods, but of law reform.
INVENTING TRADITION
In 18 BC Augustus passed a series of moral and social legislation that was both harsh and conservative. This focused on putting into law penalties and incentives to promote marriage, childbirth, sexual fidelity and moral improvement in young men. The new public laws on adultery, previously a private matter, were the most notorious. A criminal court was established to deal with sexual offences, and in certain circumstances punishment could be as severe as loss of property and exile. Women rather than men were the worst off under the law. While it was still permitted for men to have adulterous sex so long as it was with a slave or a citizen with a bad reputation, such as a prostitute, respectable citizen women could not have sex with anyone outside marriage. The law even sanctioned the right of a father to kill his daughter and her lover if they were caught in his house having non-marital sex, and also empowered a husband to kill his wife’s lover if that man was a known philanderer. If the law was the bitter medicine to enforce social cohesion, the year 17 BC laced it with sugar.
The Games of the Ages picked up on the theme of traditional Roman values such as chastity and piety. But once again tradition was a useful political instrument. The games supposedly harked back seven centuries to the very earliest history of Rome, and were said to be held every 110 years. It was not possible, therefore, for anyone to see them twice in their lifetime. For once, the billing for a show that no one had ever seen before and would never see again was, quite literally, true.14 As a result of the festival’s cyclical nature, its celebration promised an emotional moment of time travel back to the past. Crucially, however, when citizens witnessed the games in 17 BC there was no one alive who could say they were really authentic. The palette of Augustus was antique, but the paints which he was able to use were all new, bold and bright.
In the three days of sacrifices, gone were the offerings to the gods of the underworld that had been the focus in previous Games of the Ages. New gods were now in fashion. The goddess Diana (associated with fertility and childbirth), and Mother Earth (vegetation, regrowth and bountiful produce), as well the gods of Apollo (associated with peace and art) and Jupiter (Rome’s patron god) all took centre stage. The star performer, however, was not a priest or purely religious figure as a Roman might have expected. It was the head of the Roman state himself.
On the first night Augustus sacrificed nine sheep and nine goats to the Fates. It was an atmospheric, holy and magical affair. He recited a long prayer that these goddesses might bestow their favour on the power and majesty of the Roman people, on their future good health and prosperity, on the increase of the empire and, last but not least, on himself and the house of his family. The next night saw an even more spectacular ceremony. The first citizen sacrificed a pregnant sow to Mother Earth. It was as though he was searing into the hearts and minds of the massed Roman witnesses a highly charged moment of legend. This moment was imbued with the distant past, but it was a moment from which would spring the new age of the Caesars. The creation of an orderly, cohesive society of new moral Romans did, however, come apart at the seams.
One might imagine that some among the plebs, adjusting to peace and stability, were persuaded by the festival’s emotional power. So too perhaps were Augustus’s favoured senators and knights, those loyal to the new regime. The association with Rome’s past made their position in the administration seem more rooted than perhaps it actually was. As with any ‘back to basics’ political campaign, though, the very people expected to endorse it were the ones who flouted it. Most of the survivors from the old Roman aristocracy hated it. The last decades of the republic, that time of extraordinary licence and luxury, were a recent memory. The life of the witty, erudite poet Ovid is a revealing foil to that of Augustus. Ovid was a rich man of equestrian rank from Italy. For someone of his standing and intelligence, a glittering career in Augustus’s inner circle beckoned. He opted instead for a very un-Augustan life, one dedicated to sex, fun and art. In due course, Ovid became a celebrity, Rome’s foremost poet. One poem, however, proved his undoing. In it he advised young people on how to find a partner – at the theatre and at the games, for example. He even disclosed his tips on picking up respectable women. The poem, called The Art of Love, flew in the face of Augustus’s moral programme, provoking the emperor to take severe action. In AD 8 Ovid was banished to a miserable backwater of the empire, the frontier post of Tomis (now Constanta) on the Black Sea. But the poet was not the only notorious person to fall foul of Augustus’s stern laws.