On the day of her husband’s funeral, Julia Augusta – as she was now formally known – accompanied his corpse from the Palatine down to the Forum, where Tiberius and her grandson Drusus both delivered eulogies; then, travelling a short distance to where the pyre had been built, she watched in dignified silence as senators lifted the body up onto the brushwood. The fire caught; the flames began to lick; an eagle was released and soared up into the sky. Later, to a senator who claimed to have witnessed the spirit of Augustus similarly rising from the pyre and ascending into the heavens, Livia granted a massive donative. It was money well spent. When the Senate met for the first time a week after the funeral, on 17 September, it was to confirm that the dead Princeps was indeed to be worshipped as a god. His wife was appointed his priest. This, in a city where all the priesthoods except for those of Vesta were monopolised by men, was unprecedented. Astonishingly, Livia was even given a lictor.
After the burning of Augustus’s body, the pall of ashes had soon cleared, and even though the remains of the pyre had continued to glow for four days, the pious and dutiful Augusta had been able on the fifth day of her vigil to gather up his bones and place them in a nearby mausoleum, readied for the purpose more than forty years before. A second pall, though, was not so easily dispelled. That Rome, with the execution of Agrippa Postumus, was now once again a city in which murder might be deployed as a manoeuvre in the great game of dynastic advancement was a fact no less true for being too dangerous to acknowledge. Already, as Tiberius prepared to shoulder the burden of rule bequeathed him by his deified predecessor, his reign had fallen into shadow. ‘The execution of Agrippa Postumus was the first crime committed under the new Princeps.’129 Which naturally begged a menacing question: how many more would there be?
*
*1 Or possibly he suffered internal injuries. ‘He died on his way to the Rhine of some illness,’ is Dio’s helpful version of what happened (55.1.4).
*2 In due course, after a century or so of gentrification, it would end up as the centre of the city’s book trade.
*3 Take, for instance, an arch built at Ticinum in northern Italy (modern Pavia) in AD 7 or 8, which celebrated the August Family with ten statues – including the dead Gaius and Lucius. Their younger brother was notable only by his absence.
*4 The city of Constanta, as Tomis is now known, is today one of Romania’s most popular beach resorts.
*5 There is no evidence that the ‘Germans’ had any notion of themselves as a distinct group of tribes, or thought of the lands east of the Rhine as a place called ‘Germania’.
*6 The key find which has served to demonstrate the scale and ambition of Roman urbanism east of the Rhine was made in the late 1990s, at Waldgirmes, some sixty miles beyond the river, in the state of Hesse.
*7 Saltus in Latin can mean both ‘pass’ and ‘forest’. Tacitus’s use of the word to describe the site of the battle has traditionally been translated as ‘forest’; but the definitive identification of the battle-site with the foot of the Kalkriese Berg in southern Saxony, first made in the 1990s, now enables the correct translation to be made.
II
COSA NOSTRA
4
THE LAST ROMAN
Taking the Wolf by its Ears
Until Augustus built him one, Mars had never had a temple within the sacred limits of Rome. The pomerium, ploughed by Romulus and consecrated by the blood of Remus, had always served to mark the border between the twin worlds of war and peace. Only when celebrating a triumph were a general and his army permitted to enter Rome; otherwise, it was sternly forbidden soldiers to trespass on land consecrated to Jupiter. The realm of Mars lay instead in an expanse of flat land that stretched between the western course of the pomerium and the curving of the Tiber. It was here, in ancient times, that the Roman people had convened in times of war; here too that they had gathered every year, in an assembly known as the comitia centuriata, modelled on the primordial army of the kings, to vote for their senior magistrates. A fitting place, then, to consign to the heavens a man who had secured more conquests for the Roman people than any citizen in history, and served them a record thirteen times as consul. Ascending from the flames of his pyre, the divine Augustus would have gazed down upon a plain long sanctified by the primordial rhythms of the campaigning season and the electioneering of statesmen: the Campus Martius.
Much had changed, though, over the course of his long supremacy, on the field of Mars. Even before his first appearance on the political scene, the ambitions of rival warlords had seen the ancient parade ground of the Roman people starting to vanish beneath marble and parkland. It was on the Campus that Pompey had planted his vast stone theatre; it was on the Campus that Antony had boasted a notoriously luxurious garden.1 Both, inevitably, had ended up under the wing of Augustus – who had then, as was his habit, trumped them with spectacular developments of his own. Presented with a greenfield site right on the doorstep of Rome, he had naturally seized the opportunity to set his stamp on it once and for all. Mourners, as they gathered on the Campus to witness the final journey of the Princeps to his funeral pyre, had been able to admire an assemblage of his grands projets. Altars, temples, obelisks: all redounded to his glory. Particularly imposing was the mausoleum in which Livia had reverently deposited his ashes. Though it was common for tombs to line the approaches of Rome, none could possibly compare for sheer scale with that of Augustus. Built in the early years of his supremacy, it provided him in death with the kind of ostentatious residence that he had always been chary of in life. Certainly, no other citizen had thought to commission for himself a vast tumulus, complete with a marble base, a ring of poplars, and a gilded self-portrait on the top. A worthy resting place for the mortal remains of a god.
All of which, from the perspective of his adopted son, only made it the more intimidating to follow in his footsteps. Already, reading out Augustus’s will to the Senate, Tiberius had choked, begun to sob, then handed over the document to Drusus to complete on his behalf. A revealing moment. Flinty as Tiberius was, and contemptuous of histrionics, he was hardly the man to fake a breakdown. A veil had briefly been lifted on the ferocious stresses that came with being the heir of Augustus. A fortnight later, on 17 September, the pressure had been ratcheted up even more. The Senate’s decision to confirm the divinity of the dead Princeps meant that Tiberius, just like Augustus, had become divi filius, ‘the son of a god’. A glamorous-seeming promotion, to be sure – but not one that necessarily worked to his advantage. Even though Ovid, desperate enough by now to try anything, would soon be lauding Tiberius from the distant shores of the Black Sea as ‘equal in virtus to his father’,2 such praise was off-key, sycophantic, embarrassing. No one could equal Augustus. He had saved the Republic, redeemed the Roman people. Tiberius, no less than anyone else, had grown up in his shadow – and everybody knew it. The mould of what it meant to be an imperator, an ‘emperor’, had been irreducibly set. Even dead, Augustus continued to set the standard. Lying on his deathbed, he had demanded applause for his performance in ‘the comedy of life’;3 but his heir, never a good actor, was now being obliged to take on the role of Augustus himself. Trapped on a stage-set not of his own making, the new Princeps had no choice but to act out a part already scripted for him by a god. The more that Tiberius Julius Caesar laid claim to the inheritance of his adoptive father, the less he could be himself.