Unless he was due to preside over a public ceremony or attend a meeting of the Senate, Augustus wore house clothes woven and sewn for him (or so it was sedulously said) by Livia and his female relatives. He felt the cold badly, and in winter protected himself with four tunics and a heavy toga above an undershirt; below that he wore a chest protector, underpants, and woolen gaiters. His shoes had thick soles to make him look taller. A change of better clothes and shoes was always at hand in case he was unexpectedly called on to appear in an official capacity.
A Roman breakfast (ientaculum) was a quick and simple affair—some cheese and olives (possibly prepared as a paste to spread on the cheese), some bread dipped in water, honey, or diluted wine. The business of the day started with a salutatio; when the doors of the house were opened a crowd of clients or dependents arrived to pay their respects. Senators often attended and were greeted with a kiss. However, anyone was admitted and was allowed to present a request. Augustus behaved in a relaxed and friendly manner; once a petitioner was in such a state of anxiety that he laughed and said: “Anyone would think you were offering a penny to an elephant!”
Once the morning reception was over, Augustus was free to work by himself in his “Syracuse,” and to hold meetings with his staff as well as with politicians.
Augustus’ and Livia’s houses witnessed a mix of personal and business life (the domus or home, and the familia Caesaris or Caesar’s household). They were far too small for administrative needs, so other neighboring buildings on the Palatine were bought up, creating a government quarter. Because the new Temple of Apollo adjoined Augustus’ house, its spaces—the cella and the Greek and Latin libraries—could be used to house official events or large meetings.
As is always the case with autocracies, a court developed—that is, not so much a place as a social group, which acted as an intermediary between the ruler and society at large. It accompanied Augustus on his travels away from Rome. Distinctions of power and influence were carefully graded and essentially expressed the degree of access a given person had to the ruler. Augustus went to a great deal of trouble to conceal the thoroughly unrepublican reality of his absolute authority, and took care to act much as any ordinary consul or other officeholder would. He was scrupulously polite to other members of the nobility, exchanging social visits with them and always attending their birthday celebrations.
A group of trusted intimates emerged, the amici Caesaris, or friends and political allies of Caesar. It was not a formal grouping, but if an amicus lost his status for any reason, this was a terrible thing. Once a consul-elect, Tedius Afer, learning that a spiteful comment of his had enraged Augustus, committed suicide by jumping from a height.
It was far more unusual for a family member to forfeit his or her place in the princeps’ circle. Their relationship to Augustus gave them a more or less permanent position; a daughter or a nephew might misbehave but remain a daughter or a nephew. As in courts throughout history, important relatives probably came to represent different political points of view, and courtiers gathered behind them in cabals as they perceived their interests to dictate. Thus we detect in 23 B.C. what may have been shadowy groupings around Octavia and Marcellus on the one hand, and Agrippa and Livia on the other. Policy, love, and friendship were often hard to disentangle.
Running the empire entailed a huge amount of complicated administrative work, much of which was performed by freedmen. These had a number of important advantages over family members and social equals: there was an inexhaustible supply of them, and, unlike aristocratic members of the ruling class, they obeyed direct orders. They had no political constituency and their fate was bound up with that of their employer. Crucially, they reported to nobody but the princeps, and so what they did was easily kept secret.
For this reason, little is known about how Augustus organized his staff. To judge by the officially designated separate departments established by later emperors, they may have been loosely arranged in groups that dealt with correspondence, with petitions, with foreign embassies and delegations, and with legal matters. There must have been an archiving function and an accounts department to manage Augustus’ vast wealth.
A few freedmen—among them Licinus and Celadus—became close friends of the princeps. When he wanted to be completely incommunicado he hid himself away in a suburban villa owned by a freedman who had been a member of his bodyguard. However, bad behavior was strictly punished; when an imperial secretary was found to have leaked the contents of a confidential letter, Augustus had his legs broken.
Augustus cultivated a simple, easy style of speaking and writing and disliked what he called the “stink of far-fetched phrases.” He conveyed his meaning as plainly and directly as possible; so, for example, he would repeat the same conjunction several times for clarity, even though the effect was awkward. Letters of his seen by Suetonius employed some rather odd expressions, perhaps deriving from his provincial childhood. For example, he liked to say “wooden-headed” ( pulleiacus) for “crazy” (cerritus), “feel flat” (vapide se habere) for “feel bad” (male se habere), and “be a beetroot” (betizare) for “be sluggish” (languere). Of a sudden or swift action, he would say it was “quicker than boiled asparagus.” He often wrote “they will pay on the Greek Kalends,” a proverbial expression meaning “never,” for the Kalends, signifying the first day of a month, were a purely Roman term. Favorite Greek maxims included “More haste, less speed” and “Give me a safe commander, not a bold one”; he liked the Latin tag “Well done is quickly done.”
Augustus wrote a number of prose works of various kinds, some of which he read aloud to close friends in the same way that professional authors used to do in lecture halls. They included an “Encouragement of Philosophy” and some volumes of autobiography (written during his illness in Spain in 24 B.C.). Augustus’ attempts at verse were few and far between. He wrote a poem in hexameters, “Sicily,” and a few epigrams, which he composed at bathtime.
People often wrote with a reed quill on sheets of papyrus, using sponges to erase text and clean the quill. When Augustus tried his hand at a tragedy about the Greek hero Ajax, who went mad and killed himself with his sword, he was dissatisfied with the result and destroyed it. When some friends asked: “What in the world has become of Ajax?” he replied: “Ajax has fallen on his sponge!”
Augustus seems to have been slightly dyslexic. Uninterested in correct spelling, as determined by grammarians, he preferred to write words as they were pronounced, and often transposed syllables and letters or omitted them. When he wrote in cipher he used the same very basic code that Julius Caesar did; he simply wrote “B” for “A,” “C” for “B,” and so on (using “AA” for the last letter of the alphabet).
The mornings of fasti (lucky) days were devoted to public business: meetings of the Senate (which, in theory at least, could last until sunset but no later), court cases, and religious ceremonies. So the princeps would often find himself out and about in central Rome.
Senior Roman officials not only commanded political authority, they also dispensed justice in the courts. Augustus attended assiduously to his legal work, often staying in court until nightfall. If he happened to be unwell, he had his litter carried to the open-air judicial tribunal in the Forum. As a judge, he was conscientious and lenient. He speeded up the legal process, striking off the lists lawsuits that were not promptly pursued. Once he tried a case of parricide, the punishment for which was being sewn up in a sack with a dog, a cockerel, a snake, and a monkey and thrown into a river or the sea. Anxious to save the guilty man from this terrible fate, he asked him: “I take it, of course, that you did not kill your father?”