The most venerable monument to such resistance, built on the lower slope of the Aventine centuries before Antony had thought to co-opt it, was none other than the shrine of Liber. It commemorated an occasion way back in 494 BC when the plebs, oppressed by debt and the exactions of the rich, had staged a mass walk-out. Heading upriver from Rome, the strikers had camped on a hill overlooking the Tiber. Here, in a pointed retort to the institution of the consulship, they had elected two officials of their own – ‘tribunes’101 – to serve as guardians of their interests. The tribunes, the plebs had agreed, were to be regarded as sacrosanct. The life of anyone who laid so much as a finger on them was to be forfeit. Blood-curdling compacts to that effect had been sworn. The Roman upper classes, with great reluctance, had been brought to swallow these terms. Centuries on, and the tribunate had emerged to become one of the most potent offices in the entire Republic. It remained sacrilege to assault any citizen who held it. A tribune could impose the death penalty on those who challenged his authority; veto legislation of which he did not approve; summon the Senate and introduce measures of his own. Privileges of this order, freighted as they were by tradition and potentially awesome in their scope, could hardly help but pique the interest of the Princeps.
And sure enough, in due course, he had made his move. Laying down his consulship, he had reaped momentous compensation. Many of the most formidable powers ceded to him by the Senate in 23 BC, and which had served to buttress his primacy to such decisive effect, were those of a tribune: the tribunicia potestas. The plebs themselves, far from resenting this appropriation of their hard-won prerogatives by Rome’s richest man, were instead confirmed in their view of him as their champion. It certainly came as no novelty to them that a man of high-class pedigree might wish to exercise the tribunicia potestas. A hundred years before, two grandsons of Scipio Africanus, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, had served as tribunes; more recently, the rumbustious career of Clodius Pulcher had been launched on the back of a tribunate. A palpable flavour of class warfare clung to the memories of all three men. Hostile elements in the Senate had been provoked to open violence by their agitating. Blood had flowed in the streets of Rome. Both the Gracchi brothers had been assassinated: Tiberius clubbed to death with a stool-leg and Gaius decapitated. As for Clodius, it was the riots following his murder by a political adversary that had led to the immolation of the original Senate House. Perhaps, then, among the ranks of the senators, there was a flutter of nervousness that Augustus, in laying down the powers of a consul, should have taken up those of a tribune.
If so, then they mistook their man. An operator as consummately sphinx-like as the Princeps had no interest in playing the demagogue. No matter that he had been endowed with the tribunicia potestas, he was not a tribune. The people’s favourite, he offered himself as well to the Senate as their protector. Just how combustible the plebs might still be, and just how dependent the rich were upon Augustus to keep secure for them their swimming pools, their works of art and their exquisite topiary, had been made unsettlingly apparent to them in the wake of his departure from Rome. Between 23 and 19 BC, with the Princeps absent in the eastern Mediterranean, the city had seethed with factionalism and street fighting. Riots had flared. Murders had spiked. A consul had nervously requested extra bodyguards. Order had been restored only when the Princeps finally returned from the East, bringing with him in triumph the standards won back from the Parthians. The lesson had been well and truly rubbed home. ‘When Augustus was absent from Rome, the people were fractious – and when he was present, they behaved themselves.’102
Guardian of the Senate and champion of the plebs: the Princeps was both of these, and more. For too long, the Republic had been its own worst enemy. Together, the greed of the mighty and the brutishness of the masses had brought it to the verge of ruin. Had the gods not sent Augustus to redeem Rome from the misery of the civil wars, then city and empire alike would surely have perished. The duty of the Princeps was clear: to stand guard over the Republic and protect it from itself. Revolution could not have been further from his mind. His heavensent responsibility it was to remind Senate and people alike of what they had originally been. Restore to them their ancient birthright of virtus and discipline, and his mission would be complete. ‘The good man,’ he once ringingly declared, ‘is the one who has no intention of altering the traditional way of doing things.’103 All that Augustus had ever done, all the changes that he had ever made, all the manifold breaks with recent custom for which he had pushed, had aimed, not at novelty, but rather at the opposite: the return to the Roman people of their ancestral inheritance of greatness.
Once, the gods had graced Rome with their favours and their protection. Incense had perfumed the flames of sacrifice and veiled the sun with smoke; the blood of white oxen had spilled from axe-blows onto the earth; festivals of primordial antiquity had given order to the city’s year. But then, over time, as the processions had come to be abandoned, so the rituals had been forgotten and the stones of the shrines grown mute. Horace had been only one of many to shudder at the sight of temples sharing in the general dilapidation of the city. ‘The sanctuaries with their dark images stand ruined, befouled with smoke.’104 Struggling to keep afloat during the difficult years that had followed his return from Philippi, haunted by his memories of citizen slaughtering citizen and impoverished by the loss of his lands, the poet had drawn the obvious conclusion. ‘The gods, because neglected, have brought a whole multitude of evils on sorrowing Italy.’105 Augustus, charged as he was by the heavens with purging the Republic of its sickness, fully concurred with this diagnosis. His repairs to the ancient shrine on the Palatine in which the ‘spoils of honour’ were kept had been only a start. Crumbling and roofless temples were an affront both to the gods and to the dignity of the Roman people: pustules upon the face of the city. Augustus, with the wealth of the world his to command, could well afford the necessary medicine. What had been decayed was to become pristine; what had been black was to become white; what had been mud-brick was to become marble. As the scaffolding came down from the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, so it went up across the rest of Rome. Even Livia, who sponsored the sprucing-up of a sanctuary on the Aventine much favoured by respectable matrons, got in on the act. As for the Princeps himself, he would end up funding the restoration of no fewer than eighty-two temples. If some were only given a lick of paint or a layering of stucco, then most were endowed with as handsome a makeover as the world’s finest architects could provide. Entire mountains were levelled to provide them with the necessary supplies of stone. So, at any rate, ran the joke. It was beauty, not antiquity, that counted now. ‘The temples of our ancestors were all well and good – but golden ones are more delightful. Majesty, after all, is what becomes a god.’106