The loftiest pines, when the wind blows,
Are shaken hardest; tall towers drop
With the worst crash….
Primus’ defense was that he had been ordered to launch a campaign by both the princeps and Marcellus. This was most embarrassing, for in theory Augustus only held authority in his own provincia. Of his own accord he attended the court where the trial was being held. The praetor, or presiding judge, asked him if he had given the man orders to make war and he replied that he had not.
Murena made some disrespectful remarks about the princeps, and asked him to his face: “What are you doing here, and who asked you to come?”
“The public interest,” Augustus drily replied.
It is no surprise that Primus was found guilty; he was very probably sent into exile. However, many observers at the time must have thought it unlikely that Primus would have claimed to have acted under orders unless he had actually done so. The affair revealed the res publica restituta, the “restored Republic,” as something of a sham.
The Primus affair led to the formation of a little-understood conspiracy against Augustus. The leader was a young republican called Fannius Caepio. Apparently, the consul Murena was implicated, although Dio thought the charge might be false, “since he was notoriously rough-tongued and headstrong in his manner of address towards all alike.” The plot was uncovered and the accused men condemned to death in absentia. In constitutional theory, the execution of a serving consul was a contradiction in terms, for the Republic’s chief executive had supreme authority; if he broke the law, charges could only be brought against him after his term of office had expired. Once again, the libertarian pretensions of the regime were exposed.
What the aims of the plotters were and how they were revealed cannot now be recovered. Perhaps there was no conspiracy at all—or, rather, the princeps organized a setup. But why? We cannot tell. If it was a serious attempt to overthrow the new order, it was evidence the settlement of 27 B.C. was not working.
The story has a sad footnote. Maecenas confided the discovery of the Caepio conspiracy, a state secret, to his wife, Terentia. Murena was her brother, and she seems to have warned him that he was in trouble. Augustus found out what had happened, and from that moment his friendship with Maecenas cooled. They remained on reasonably good terms, but the Etruscan aesthete was no longer a full member of the inner circle.
The year 23 B.C. had not gotten off to a good start, but Marcellus in his role as aedile made a brilliant success of the games. Throughout the summer, a canopy sheltered the Forum, where a temporary wooden arena was erected for the gladiatorial displays. Novel, slightly scandalous acts included a woman of noble birth taking part in a stage performance and an eques dancing in a ballet.
However, the mood in Rome was darkened by the onset of a plague. Epidemics were terrifying and not infrequent occurrences in a large crowded city such as Rome. What disease struck on this occasion is unknown; it may have been smallpox, bubonic plague, or typhoid fever. Scarlet fever and influenza have also been recorded by Greek and Roman medical writers.
Augustus fell ill again. Suetonius has it that he was suffering abscesses on the liver. According to Celsus, whose On Medicine was published in the first century A.D., the symptoms of liver disease were
severe pain in the right part under the praecordia [the region of the body about the heart], which spreads to the right side, to the clavicle and arm of that side; at times there is also pain in the right hand, there is hot shivering…[in bad cases] after a meal there is greater difficulty in breathing; then supervenes a sort of paralysis of the lower jaws.
Recommended treatment included the application of hot water in winter and tepid water in the summer, but “all cold things must be especially avoided, for nothing is more harmful to the liver.”
Augustus was in despair, for there seemed to be no hope of recovery; it appeared that the new regime was about to end. This would be a tragedy not just for him but for many others in public life. He had to take what steps he could to ensure a permanent legacy.
He gathered around his bedside the officers of state and leading senators and equites. He spoke to them on matters of public policy and handed his fellow consul, Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, the breviarium imperii, a book that recorded the empire’s financial and military resources.
Many were expecting the princeps to bequeath his authority to Marcellus, whom he had only too evidently been grooming. But this had been a long-term plan, and the boy was too young and inexperienced to hold supreme power now. Agrippa would have had little trouble deposing him once Augustus was dead. Bowing to this reality, the dying man handed Agrippa the symbol of his authority: his signet ring bearing the head of Alexander the Great.
Much to everyone’s surprise, including his own, the princeps recovered. His doctor, Antonius Musa, turning medical orthodoxy on its head, decided to abandon the hot fomentations he had been using to no avail in favor of cold baths and cold potions. The shock treatment worked. (It has been suggested that Augustus was, in fact, suffering from typhoid fever, which could well have been the cause of the epidemic devastating Rome at the time; cold packs were a well-known treatment for the disease in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.)
The convalescent princeps showed that he was aware of the general unpopularity of his dynastic plans by bringing his will to a meeting of the Senate. He intended to read it out, as proof that he had no successor in mind, but in the event, to show their confidence in him, the senators would not permit it.
The settlement of 27 B.C. needed revision and it was time to make a fresh start. Augustus resigned as consul on July 1 and let it be known that he would no longer be a regular candidate. For him to continue holding the consulship year after year was stretching constitutional propriety very thin, for it made the post look like a permanent one, not so far from Julius Caesar’s unpopular dictatorship for life. Too, the office entailed a good deal of routine business and time-consuming ceremonial, and as long as Augustus held it he was blocking off access to one of Rome’s two top jobs every year, so irritating political aspirants.
But if he was to give up the consulship, the princeps would need some other source of imperium. With typical ingenuity, he came up with two devices. For some years he had been awarded tribunicia sacrosanctitas, or the immunity from physical attack given to a tribune of the people. Now he decided to assume tribunicia potestas in perpetuity: he would enjoy the power of a tribune without actually having to hold the post. That power was considerable. Tribunes attended Senate meetings and were entitled to present laws for approval by the people. They could also veto any officeholder’s decisions, including those of other tribunes.
Augustus recognized that tribunicia potestas, together with his enormous provincia, gave him almost all the authority he needed to govern without hindrance. He dated his “reign” from when it was awarded, on July 1, 23 B.C., and added the potestas to his long list of titles. However, a couple of gaps needed to be filled. Proconsuls, or provincial governors, lost their imperium when they crossed the pomerium—the sacred boundary of Rome—and entered the city. That would mean that when he was in the city the princeps would only have the status of a private citizen. Thanks to his prestige, or auctoritas, his wishes would usually be obeyed, but on occasion there might be some awkwardness. So the Senate voted that Augustus’ proconsular imperium should not lapse when he was inside the city walls.