And knowledge, as so often, was power. It was a father’s right, of course, to track what those under his authority were up to – not just to punish them when they did wrong, but to keep them secure from peril. In Rome, potential calamity was only ever a spark away. In 7 BC, arsonists had started a fire that at one point had threatened the Forum itself with immolation. Augustus, responding to this near-calamity in predictable fashion, had sponsored yet more lists. Officials were instructed to ensure that even the meanest attic in a high-rise be armed with a bucket. Health and safety regulations like these, by ensuring that neighbourhoods were less likely to go up in flames, reaped the Princeps massive reward. In a tinder-box such as Rome, there existed no surer path to popularity than the provision to nervous citizens of a reliable fire service. Augustus was not the first to have realised this. Back in 19 BC, with the Princeps absent in the East, a bold and ambitious nobleman named Egnatius Rufus had funded his own supply of firefighters, ending up so popular in consequence that it had completely turned his head. Seduced into aiming at the consulship against the explicit wishes of Augustus, he had sent the proxies appointed by the Princeps to administer Rome scrabbling to contain the damage. In the event, the coup had fizzled out ingloriously. Egnatius’s attempt on the consulship had been suppressed, and Egnatius himself, flung into prison, had ‘there met with the end that his life so richly merited’.54 Augustus, though, had learnt his lesson. Only one man could be permitted to serve the city and its teeming masses as their guardian – and it was not Egnatius. Nothing to the benefit of the people but it was to proceed from the Princeps himself.
Which was why, despite their indignation at Julia’s fate, Augustus could feel confident that their demands for her return were unlikely to degenerate into rioting, or worse. Seen from the summit of the Palatine, the city’s smog-wreathed workshops and tower blocks might have appeared perfervid with menace: Rome’s heart of darkness, from which Clodius, in the dying days of the Republic, had recruited his paramilitaries, and from which mobs, reduced to skin and bone by the various wars of the Triumvirate, had periodically erupted. Those days, though, seemed over. Augustus himself, armed with maps and detailed breakdowns of the city’s population, had successfully brought order where before there had been only chaos. In 7 BC, prompted by his reform of the fire service, he had made a tour of Rome’s various neighbourhoods. Rather than venture into the shapeless tangle of side-alleys, he had focused his attention on the crossroads, the compita, which stood at the heart of every district. These, like the knots of a giant net, spanned the city. Control the city and control the urban fabric. Augustus, like a master huntsman, knew what it took to make a catch.
The origins of the compita, so the Roman people believed, reached way back to the time when kings had ruled the city, and were the focus of intense local devotion and pride. Mysterious twin spirits, known as Lares, stood guard over them, and were celebrated every year in a wild festival named the Compitalia. Sacrifices were made before each crossroads shrine. Everyone, no matter how lowly, no matter how wretched, would be invited to join in the fun; even slaves would dress up for the occasion. All of which, not surprisingly, had long been regarded with deep suspicion by conservatives in the Senate. Their concern, though, was rooted in something more than simple snobbery. The Compitalia had often literally been a riot. This was why, in 64 BC, the Senate had voted to suppress it. Yet the ban had not lasted for long. Clodius, whose genius for street fighting had seen him refine it into a veritable political art, had made sure of that. Patronage of the festival had been a key factor in his ground-breaking brand of gangsterism. It had enabled him not only to recruit supporters, but to fashion them into a city-wide organisation. Compita, after all, were everywhere in Rome. ‘The city has a thousand Lares.’55
What Clodius had achieved, by transforming their shrines into hubs for his own personal ambitions, was not forgotten. The poor, it seemed, could provide even the most blue-blooded nobleman with a political base. This, as Egnatius’s abortive coup had demonstrated, was bound to serve power-hungry senators as a standing temptation. Clearly, then, the Princeps had been left with no choice but to put a stop to it for good. Rather than ban the Compitalia, though, as the Senate had always sought to do, he had made himself its patron. Augustus was never the man to suppress a venerable custom – not when he could twist it to his own ends. By touring the city’s crossroads, by centring the provision of firefighting and other services on them, and by gracing them with marks of his favour, he had won hearts and minds across the entire immensity of Rome. Potential trouble spots had been transformed by his initiative into nerve centres of the regime.
Even in the darkest slums, then, even in the very roughest quarters, the authority of the Princeps blazed radiantly. Early in 1 BC, when Gaius set out, via the frontier on the Danube, on his mission to the East, he did so from the great temple of Mars, surrounded by the marmoreal splendour of its colonnades, in the presence of the standards won back from Parthia, before the awful gaze of the war-god. No dirtying of sandals in the filth of the side-alleys for Caesar’s son. Yet there too, in the neighbourhoods beyond the new forum, his departure was much on people’s minds. Head from the temple of Mars into the steaming agglomeration of workshops, fast-food stalls and brothels known as the Suburra, then skirt southwards, and a citizen would come to an ancient street, named after the cobblers who had once lined it the Vicus Sandalarius.*2 At the end of the street was a compitum; and here, newly chiselled, stood an altar. It had been placed beside the crossroads just a few months earlier by the officers responsible for the adjoining quarters: men of thoroughly humble origin, but no less conscious of their dignity for that. There had certainly been no protests at Julia’s fate from these officials. Entrusted by Augustus with the key responsibilities of local government, permitted an escort of lictors on public holidays, men literally at the centre of all that went on in their neighbourhood, they could hardly have been more in the Princeps’s debt. The new altar set up beside the crossroads was an expression of their gratitude. One side was carved with laurel, another with trophies of victory. Its front featured Augustus and Livia, who were portrayed standing on either side of Gaius, gazing at him approvingly. Julia was notable by her absence. The officials who had commissioned the relief, raising their gaze from the swirl and clamour of their own little patch of Rome, could feel themselves, however tangentially, embroiled in global affairs. Mars was not the only god summoned to keep watch over Gaius on his travels. So too were the Lares; and so too a novel and awesome power now increasingly honoured alongside them. Instituted by the Princeps on his tour of the compita in 7 BC, its cult had already taken root across the whole of Rome, wherever there was a crossroads to be found and a new altar raised: the animating spirit, the Genius, of Caesar Augustus himself.
With divine backing of this order, it seemed out of the question that anything could go wrong for Gaius. ‘Grant him the popularity of Pompey, the boldness of Alexander, and my own good fortune.’56 So Augustus prayed. Nor were gods the only guardians he made sure to provide his adoptive son. Marcus Lollius, a veteran of numerous provincial commands who also, perhaps tellingly, had long enjoyed a bitter feud with Tiberius, was assigned to the young prince as his mentor, and to serve Augustus as his eyes and ears. Watched over by the heavens and guided by a seasoned counsellor, Gaius was soon winning golden opinions. Cutting a dash wherever he went, he processed through the cities of the East to the furthermost limits of Roman power. Here, on an island in the Euphrates, he enjoyed a flamboyant and successful summit with the king of Parthia; shortly afterwards, and he was busying himself with the slaughter of various barbarians, ‘for the better security of all mankind’.57 Unsurprisingly, news of Gaius’s progress was greeted with rapturous excitement back in Italy. The hopes invested by the Roman people in their favourite could hardly have been more promisingly fulfilled. ‘Not only had he governed well, but he had defeated or received into alliance the fiercest and most powerful of peoples.’58 The gods, it seemed, had been listening to his grandfather’s prayers.