The Donations were in line with the thinking that underlay Antony’s previous reorganization of the east. That is, it was far easier to allow locals to manage most of the eastern provinces on behalf of Rome, administering justice and raising taxes, than for the imperial authorities to do it. The Romans being unsupported by a permanent civil service, this would save them a world of trouble, as well as helping to solve the problem of rapacious public officials. The empire would be far more stable if its inhabitants did not feel that they were under foreign occupation.
However, unkind commentators, both at the time and later, saw something more alarming. A large part of the east, Antony’s allocated territory as triumvir, was being gathered together into a single monarchy, with Antony as emperor and Cleopatra as empress. Their long-term aim, it was suggested, was to overthrow Rome. Rumor assiduously put it about that the queen’s favorite oath was “so surely as I shall one day give judgement on the Capitol.”
This is implausible. Antony had a conventional mind that could not imagine an end to Roman dominion, and Cleopatra was too much of a realist to wish for more than the reassertion of Egypt as the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean, under Roman protection. Most probably, the Donations were a symbolic gesture, a way of settling public opinion in the east and marshaling it behind Antony as Dionysus/Osiris and Cleopatra as Isis/Aphrodite. In fact, few if any practical changes were noticeable on the ground in Syria, or Cappadocia, Pontus, or Galatia. Hordes of Egyptian administrators did not spread through the Middle East, replacing local authorities and Roman officials and tax farmers.
It is hard to disagree with the sentiments that the great twentieth-century Alexandrian poet Constantine Cavafy attributed to the audience at that glittering ceremony in the Gymnasium.
And the Alexandrians thronged to the festival
Full of enthusiasm, and shouted acclamations,
In Greek, and Egyptian, and some in Hebrew,
Charmed by the lovely spectacle—
Though they knew of course what all this was worth,
What empty words they really were, these kingships.
XIII
THE PHONY WAR
33–31 B.C.
Trials were conducted here in the open air, senators met and debated in the Senate House, citizens’ assemblies were convened in an open space called the Comitia. Money could be borrowed in the Forum, and prostitutes bought. Statues of famous statesmen stood on columns, and large paintings illustrated Roman victories. Down the Forum’s long sides stood two basilicas, which combined the functions of shopping mall and conference center.
With the Second Triumvirate and Octavian’s growing domination of the political scene, a gradual change could be detected. Politics moved from the noisy open square up to a complex of houses on the fashionable Palatine Hill, where Octavian and Livia lived and worked. From “Palatine” derives the word “palace,” meaning that enclosed space where autocrats make decisions in private.
Today the Palatine is a quiet, almost pastoral spot, overshadowed by tall maritime pines. A short but brisk climb from the Forum leads to the summit of the hill, a flat area pockmarked with ruins, some of them protected from the weather by modern roofs. The top of the Palatine is a maze of shaded lanes and hidden corners.
To the northwest stand the buildings where Octavian and Livia spent most of their lives. In 36 B.C., a grateful popular assembly voted that a house should be presented to him at public expense. Octavian had already bought an expensive property at the southwest end of the Palatine Hill, but it had been struck by lightning—an omen that persuaded him to demolish the unlucky building and replace it with a temple to Apollo. With his grant from the Senate, he arranged the purchase of a house, or more accurately a group of houses, next door.
The location was chosen with great care, for Octavian wanted his residence to signal and embody his role in the commonwealth. Near it stood a hut, built on the hill’s natural tufa and with a sloping thatched roof, its reed walls daubed in clay. This was said to be the home of Romulus, Rome’s founder, and was carefully preserved in his honor. By closely associating himself with Rome’s beginnings, Octavian was telling the Roman world that he stood for traditional values, for mos maiorum, the customs of ancestors.
There was no question about it in anyone’s mind: Rome did not look like the capital of a great empire. Over the centuries, the city had grown untidily and organically. There were no broad avenues and few open spaces, apart from the Forum and the forum boarium. Few streets were wide enough to allow vehicles to pass one another and most of them were unpaved. (In the daytime there was no wheeled transport, for, in an attempt to eliminate daytime traffic jams, Julius Caesar had restricted it to the hours after dark; the night clattered with the cacophony of wooden carts.) Projecting balconies and upper rooms sometimes nearly touched one another.
The rich lived in houses with no outside windows, so that it was possible (as in traditional Arab town houses) to escape the urban hubbub; rooms were grouped around one or more open-air courtyards. The poor rented single rooms or crowded into multistory apartment blocks, or insulae. These were often jerry-built and liable to fire or collapse.
Shops lined many of the main streets, but they were usually no more than a ground-floor room with a masonry or wooden counter for selling goods and a space at the back for stock. All kinds of goods were on display—jewelry, clothing and fabrics, pots and pans, and books. There were numerous bars and restaurants, catering mainly to people from the lower classes, whose houses did not have properly equipped kitchens.
Rome was a city of horrible smells. Rubbish and sewage, even, occasionally, human corpses, were tipped into the street. Passersby were so often hit by the contents of chamber pots emptied from the second floor or the roof that laws were passed regulating the damages that could be claimed.
City life was made bearable only by the ready availability of water. Four aqueducts (the first of them built in the fourth century B.C.), high arcades, strode across the land, bringing fresh, clean water from springs and lakes miles away. The water was piped to fountains, some of them no more than stone troughs, in the small public squares that dotted Rome. The rich and famous could obtain the Senate’s permission to tap the pipes. Ordinary citizens collected water from the nearest fountain or had it delivered by a water seller.
This abundance of water made possible one of Rome’s most popular pastimes, going to the public baths. These received their own supply and were much like modern Turkish baths or hammams. The price of entry was so small that everyone except the poorest could afford it. Many Romans would go to the baths every day, often in the early afternoon, after work and before the evening meal. Here they could meet friends and exchange gossip.
In 33, Octavian and Agrippa were back in Rome from Illyricum. How could they give the regime legitimacy, they asked themselves, how persuade public opinion that, after the long years of division, bloodshed, and power politics, Octavian meant to govern in the people’s interest, not just his own?
They found an answer in their run-down megalopolis. Investment in public buildings and services would achieve three useful purposes. First, it would improve the city’s grandeur, making its appearance worthy of its role as the capital of the known world. Second, the quality of life of Rome’s volatile citizenry would be enhanced. Third, the refurbishment of the city’s architectural heritage would be the first concrete illustration of Octavian’s commitment to restoring Rome’s antique values. An appeal to the old ways was a powerful means of sweetening the revolutionary nature of the Triumvirate.