Regular relay stations were established, where state couriers and government officials could change horses and chariots and spend the night at the station’s hostel. Local authorities provided the chariots and horses, and officials using the service paid a fixed charge. As the system developed, an experienced military man was placed in charge of it as the praefectus vehiculorum. Eventually an infrastructure emerged that significantly improved communications with all parts of Italy and the provinces to the north.
In the days of the Republic, it had been expected of prominent men that they spend large sums on public works; outstanding examples were the imposing stone theater built by Pompey the Great and the new forum commissioned by Julius Caesar. As we have seen, Augustus and Agrippa followed in their footsteps and invested heavily in new public buildings and refurbishments in the city.
With the passage of time, various senatorial commissions were created—for example, the curatores viarum, who made sure that roads were kept in a good state of repair, and the curatores locorum publicorum, who were responsible for maintaining public buildings and temples. These groups were not themselves public construction agencies, but worked through local officials and contractors to effect repairs.
Augustus introduced greater order into the day-to-day management of the empire than had existed in the past. In the absence of a professional civil service, officeholders with imperium in the Republic, such as consuls and praetors, used to govern from their town houses in Rome and used slaves and servants, family and friends to expedite business. Augustus governed in the same way, but on a much larger scale. He employed a growing army of slaves and freedmen to undertake the routine tasks of administration.
However, it was not politically acceptable for such people to be the official face of the regime. The princeps thus established a governmental career structure for the upper classes. Young men of the senatorial order who showed promise could spend a lifetime as well-paid public administrators.
When they were in their late teens, after military service, they could seek minor posts as vigintiviri (literally, “twenty men”). They worked for a year in the mint, were in charge of the streets of Rome, managed prisons and executions, and judged legal cases involving questions of slavery or freedom. They then served either as tribunes of the people (except for patricians) or as aediles. They could stand for one of the twelve praetorships, after which they might command a legion or govern a minor province. The most successful could aspire to the consulship, followed by the governorship of a major province or one of the curatorships at Rome.
The Senate only produced senior administrators, and the princeps also looked for assistance in less important jobs from the equites. Whether they were senators or equites, able men became professional servants of the state, receiving a salary and living out long and interesting careers. The fact that Augustus twice enacted antibribery laws, in 18 B.C. and 8 B.C., not only illustrates his commitment to clean government, but also suggests that his efforts may have met some resistance. Inch by inch, though, prototypes of the institutions that we take for granted in a modern state were beginning to emerge. The amateurish and corrupt mechanisms of the Republic were gradually replaced by something resembling an honest state bureaucracy.
Rome’s public treasury, the Aerarium, was based at the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum and was managed by two praetors. We have no exact information of the exchequer receipts from taxes, customs duties, and tribute payments from client rulers, but it is unlikely that large sums of money moved to and from Rome. Each province had its own treasury, from which the princeps would draw for local military and administrative purposes, and in many cases there would not have been a large surplus to send to Rome.
The main claim on the empire’s resources was the army—namely, twenty-eight legions and an equivalent resource of auxiliary units. This was not a large force for so extensive an empire, but the financial burden was considerable. A soldier’s basic pay was nine hundred sesterces a year, entailing an aggregate expenditure of 140 million sesterces. However, the real cost of maintaining the army was considerably higher, for the cavalry was better paid than ordinary infantrymen; and officers, from centurions to the legionary commanders, or legates, earned very large salaries. On top of this came expenditure on military equipment, the empire’s fleets, and the elite Praetorians in Italy.
Augustus was enormously rich. His wealth came from his inheritance from Julius Caesar, from legacies (it was the done thing to remember the princeps with a generous bequest), the profits of the proscriptions and the civil war, and large estates in various parts of the empire. In his official memoir, he notes with satisfaction that he spent 600 million sesterces on land bought in Italy for his veterans and 260 million sesterces elsewhere. In lieu of farms, some demobilized soldiers received money grants, totaling 400 million sesterces.
In addition to these phenomenally large sums of money, the princeps often topped up the Aerarium from his own pocket when it ran low of funds. In practice, it was difficult to distinguish between the treasury and the privy purse.
In summary, Augustus’ reforms of the way governmental power was exercised were not particularly controversial, nor were they widely understood to be revolutionary, when seen individually, but taken together they expressed four slow and irresistible trends. First, the princeps was accumulating more and more power to himself, whether by streamlining the legislative and decision-making process, speeding up governmental communications across the empire, or enhancing his judicial role.
Although it was increasingly clear who was in charge, the senatorial ruling class acquiesced in the autocracy because of the second trend of Augustus’ reign: the enhancement of the Senate’s workload and prestige. When Augustus developed a career structure for the imperial administration, he was not simply improving the quality of governance, but creating high-status, well-paid jobs.
Senators will also have been pleased to witness the declining importance of the people—the third trend, and one the citizens of Rome were themselves willing to countenance as they experienced the benefits of life under the principate. They had no wish at all to return to the inefficiencies of the Republic.
Fourth, Augustus introduced the beginnings of a public bureaucracy, with the increasing use of nonpolitician freedmen and slaves who handled day-to-day business.
Romans distinguished between imperium, power, and auctoritas, authority. It was evidence of the remarkable success of the Augustan system that the princeps was able to command obedience simply through his authority, and was very seldom obliged to draw on the brute power at his disposal.
XIX
THE CULT OF VIRTUE
20S B.C.–A.D. 9
The princeps understood that independence of spirit was central to a Roman’s idea of himself. His claim to have restored the Republic would not have been acquiesced to, nor his rule accepted, if he had attempted to muzzle opinion. In fact, he would have found it hard to do so, for he did not have a secret police at his disposal.