At the same time, a military expedition was organized against the strategically placed kingdom of Armenia. The aim was to depose its anti-Roman king, Ardashes, and replace him with a quisling. If Armenia was to fall within Rome’s sphere of influence, the Parthians would be out-flanked with a hostile northern frontier.
The general whom Augustus chose to lead his legions against the Armenians in 20 B.C. was his stepson Tiberius, who was now twenty-two years old and eligible for the jobs that would surely have gone to a living Marcellus.
He was strongly and heavily built and above average height; his shoulders and chest were broad and his body was well proportioned. He had a handsome, fresh-complexioned face, although his skin tended to break out in pimples. He had a large crown, tight lips like his mother’s, and piercing eyes. He let his hair grow long at the back, a habit of the Claudian clan.
Tiberius was not at all religious, but he did believe in astrology and therefore saw the world as governed by fate. Like Augustus, he was terrified of thunder, and when the skies loured he would put a laurel wreath on his head, to lightning-proof himself. He was devoted to Greek and Latin literature. He especially loved ancient myths and legends. He enjoyed the company of professors of Greek literature, whom he delighted in asking abstruse and unanswerable questions: such as “Who was Hecuba Queen of Troy’s mother?,” “What song did the Sirens sing?” “By what name was Achilles called when he was disguised as a girl?” His speaking style was encumbered by so many affectations and pedantries that his extempore speeches were considered far better than those he prepared.
Augustus arranged for Tiberius to enter public life in his late teens; the young man undertook high-profile prosecutions and special commissions, among the latter, the crucial task of reorganizing Rome’s grain supply. He acquitted himself well. The princeps was pleased, for he was keen for Tiberius and his brother, the eighteen-year-old Drusus, to share the burden of government. They were to be the packhorses of the regime, for the princeps had not given up his dynastic ambitions. In 20 B.C., Agrippa’s union with Julia produced a boy, Gaius. If he survived the multiple potentially lethal ailments of infancy, he could become the heir to empire, and on this occasion Augustus’ old school friend would be hardly likely to object.
But that was for the future. In the meantime, Tiberius led an army into Armenia. As it turned out, there was no fighting to be done, for the Armenians rose against their king and killed him before the Romans arrived. Tiberius crowned his successor, a pro-Roman exile, with his own hands.
Confronted with the Armenian takeover, Frahâta made the judgment call for which the Romans had been hoping. Although Augustus had no intention whatever of attacking Parthia, he was now in a strong tactical position if he wished to do so. The king handed over the standards and the prisoners.
Although the Roman public would have preferred a thoroughgoing military victory, this was a great diplomatic achievement, of which Augustus was extremely proud. Relations between the two empires moved from glacial to cautiously warm, where they remained for some time. In the official account of his life, the princeps allowed himself some exaggeration: “I compelled the Parthians to restore the spoils and the standards of three Roman legions to me and to ask as suppliants the friendship of the Roman People.”
Disturbing news arrived from Rome. In the absence of both the princeps and Agrippa, the public mood had grown feverish. The people left one of the consulships for 19 B.C. unfilled and agitated for Augustus, once again, to assume the vacant post.
A certain Egnatius Rufus, who, according to an unfriendly critic, was “better qualified to be a gladiator than a Senator,” volunteered to fill the gap himself. In 21, when he was serving as aedile, he had made himself very popular by creating Rome’s first fire service (paying out of his own pocket for a troop of some six hundred slaves) and had been elected praetor in the following year. Strictly speaking this was illegal, for the rules called for an interval of some years between successive elective posts in the honors race.
Egnatius’ candidature for the consulship was blocked, but this was not the end of the story, for he was soon arrested, tried, condemned, and executed for plotting to assassinate Augustus. Whether there was any truth in this is unknown, but it would not be surprising if the authorities decided to eliminate a great nuisance by inventing a capital charge. Augustus put an end to further agitation and speculation by nominating a second consul for the year.
The princeps had devoted much of the previous decade to the provinces. On his return to Rome in 19 B.C., he turned his mind to domestic affairs. In the first place, the constitutional settlement needed some further adjustment. He had to find some means of calming public opinion, which remained hostile to the Senate. Also, there were a couple of aspects of a consul’s imperium that neither Augustus’ tribunicia potestas nor his imperium proconsulare covered.
First, he held no imperium specific to Italy, and consequently had no authority to command troops on Italian soil. This was awkward, because after Julius Caesar’s death both Antony and the then Octavian formed large bodyguards, the cohortes praetoriae that we know as Praetorian Guards. After Actium, Octavian retained his cohorts to act as a peacetime security force and stationed them in and around Rome. There were nine cohorts in all, amounting to a maximum of 5,400 men. It was time that the control of these soldiers was placed on a proper footing.
Second, Augustus did not have first place—at least, not officially—in the conduct of senatorial business. A consul had the right to be the first to propose legislation or to speak on a given topic, so the princeps was obliged to wait his turn. This was inconvenient, and might also be embarrassing, if senators did not receive a cue about Augustus’ wishes at the beginning of a debate.
So in 19 B.C. some form of consular imperium was conferred on the princeps although he did not actually have to hold consular office (following the same principle as with tribunicia potestas). The ancient sources disagree on, and are unclear about, the precise nature of this authority or the term for which it was awarded. It may be that Augustus’ proconsular imperium, granted for ten-year periods and renewed, was simply extended to include Rome and Italy. A certain vagueness at the time may have suited all sides. Whatever form it was couched in, though, this new power completed Augustus’ political mastery of the state.
It is possible to guess at the shape of an unstated concordat from what actually happened in the coming years. A generation of nobiles had been drastically thinned out during the civil wars by death in battle or by proscription, but now their children had grown up; if, as they were told, the Republic had been restored, they expected to have the same access to the consulship (and other senior posts) that their fathers had had. It was, they knew, their birthright. For the next five years or so, the consular lists are crowded with old republican names—Cornelius Lentulus, Licinius Crassus, Calpurnius Piso, Livius Drusus.
During the triumvirate, a new custom had come into being whereby consuls served only for part of the year and were regularly replaced by one or more “suffect” consuls. Although this was a useful and cheap means of rewarding loyalty and producing proconsuls to help govern the empire, it also devalued both the splendor of the office and its executive effectiveness. Augustus more or less eliminated suffects; most consuls now served for an entire term, so regaining much of their prestige.