constitutional questions 69
contemporary documents, nor its renunciation in the literary sources. Others, e.g. Kromayer 1888 (c 141) 40, Grant 1946 (в 522)446—5 3, Jones i960 (a 47) 10, 94-5, Reinhold 1988 (в 150) 229-30, prefer to assume that Octavian was allowed the tribunician ius auxilii in 3 o: this rests on Dio li . 19.6, where Dio connects the iusauxilii with the conferring of trib.pot., a notice which that view anyway has to reject or explain in the way outlined above; and it was anyway 'not a Roman habit of thought to decompose the potestas itself' in this manner (Last 1951 (c 153) 101).
CHAPTER 2
POLITICAL HISTORY, 30 B.C. TO A.D. 14
j. a. crook
i. introduction
With the victory of Iulius Caesar's heir there began - though it is apparent only to historical hindsight - both a distinct phase in the history of Europe, the 'Augustan Age', and a distinct epoch in the standard divisions of world history, the 'Roman Empire'. That fact has always constituted a problem for historians, from the earliest writers about Augustus until now, in that Augustus was both an end and a beginning. The temptation is for chronological narrative to be given up - for time, as it were, to stop - at the beginning of the Principate (whether that be put in 27 or 23 or 19 b.c. or in some other year), giving way to thematic accounts of 'institutions' of the Roman Empire as initiated by its 'founder'. Augustus did, indeed, 'found' the Roman Empire; but the danger of succumbing to the thematic temptation is that it makes the institutions he initiated look too much the product of deliberation and the drawing-board, whereas they need to be seen as arising, incomplete and tentative, out of the vicissitudes of a continuing political storv. That story will be told in the present chapter.1
The sources of evidence for the reign of Augustus, subsequent to the 'triumviral' period narrated in chapter 1 above, are too multifarious to be described generally here,2 yet in some ways they are far from satisfactory all the same, and the Augustan beginnings of many institutions of the Roman Empire remain hard to detect. The narratives we have are also of such a kind as to lure people into placing too much emphasis on minor turbulences. One or two features of the evidence need to be brought to the reader's attention. The first is that the only full-scale ancient chronological narrative of Augustus' reign that has come down to us is the relevant part (Books li—lvi) of the Histories, in Greek, by Cassius Dio, a consular senator of the Severan age.3 We are fortunate that, for a
To be read in conjunction with the military story told in ch. 4.
On the main literary sources see САН x1 866-76. F.pigraphic documents: F.hrenberg and Jones, 2nd edn 195 5 (в 227) (the paperback reprint of 1976 and 1979, containing important addenda) (EJ2). Translations: AN. Selcct sources in English: Chisholm and Ferguson 1981 (a 16).
Millar 1964 (в 128); Manuwald 1979 (в 121).
7°
71
introduction
good deal of the period, the full narrative written by Dio survives, as opposed to the Byzantine abridgements of him with which historians of the post-Augustan period have mostly to be content; but there are a number of small gaps, due not to any sinister cause but to the mere loss of leaves from a codex, where we are reduced either to the abridgements or to nothing of Dio at all.[169] The loss thus caused to the detailed picture of the last twenty years of the reign is disproportionately great, leaving all too much room for conjecture and making inevitable some imbalance of emphasis upon the first half of the reign.
A second feature of Dio's Histories about which notice must be given is the peculiarity of Book lii. It consists almost entirely of an artificial debate, set in 29 b.c., between Agrippa and Maecenas, as advisers to the future Augustus, on the relative merits of a 'democratic' or a 'monarchic' state; the speech of Maecenas advocating the latter is enormously the longer.[170] The prevailing view, here accepted, is that the Maecenas- speech, at least, is a demarche composed by Dio in the hope of influencing the policy of government in his own age, and cannot be used as direct evidence for what was intended or was the case at the time when it is supposed to have been spoken.
The two major literary sources, apart from the Histories of Dio, are Suetonius' lives of Augustus and Tiberius: the Lives are immensely important, but they are organized thematically rather than chronologically.[171] In any case, Suetonius and Dio being non-contemporary sources, the question arises what their sources may have been, and how reliable. Of contemporary material there survive today Augustus' own Res Gestae (as well as other important inscriptions and papyri), the relevant parts of the Roman History of Velleius Paterculus,[172] and Strabo's Geography. We know that there was much more: Augustus wrote an autobiographical fragment (going down only to 25 b.c.), and there were collections of his letters and sayings; Agrippa, too, wrote memoirs, and we hear of various contemporaries and near-contemporaries who may have narrated the events of the reign - though not a word of them survives.[173] Livy continued his History down to 9 b.c.; but of that work we possess only the so-called Periochae or 'Tables of Contents', and to the important question whether Livy was the main source of the narrative of Dio forthe Augustan period as he had been for the previous period, the answer seems to be that he was probably not.9 That leaves the historian of Augustus in the uncomfortable position that his main narrative source is itself dependent upon an unknown and lost source as to whose credentials no judgment can be made.
Of the inscriptions, abundant and of the first importance, though all call for careful interpretation, only one group would really baffle the reader without a word of explanation: the lists known as the Fasti and the Calendars.10 The Fasti are chronological lists, on stone, of the annual Roman consuls or of those who celebrated triumphs, from early times, the bare lists being sometimes accompanied by brief annotations of other events. The most important surviving set, which includes both consuls and triumphatores, is called the Fasti Capitolini, and was inscribed on an Augustan triumphal arch at the southern end of the Forum Romanum.11 It is crucial to realize that those Fasti are not, as we have them, age-old primary material but a learned compilation, set up enure at a single moment, not for a historical but for a propaganda purpose. Sets of consular Fasti were also erected in the municipalities, who added their local magistrates, and some corporations kept such lists: the vicomagistri furnish a good consular list down to a.d. 3. The Calendars were lists of festivals and other events organized under the days of the year;12 there was no doubt an official Roman set, but the ones that, in more or less fragmentary states, have come down to us belonged to municipalities or corporations or even private persons. The most useful are the Fasti Praenestini, from the forum of Praeneste: they, too, were a learned construction, the work of the antiquarian Verrius Flaccus, the tutor of Augustus' grandsons, Gaius and Lucius Caesar.
The quantity of new information available today that was not in the possession of those who wrote on Augustus in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History is small, consisting of a few inscriptions and papyri - not but what some of those are of high significance. But an enormous enlargement of the historian's task in handling the evidence for the Augustan age has resulted from three conceptual developments. Scholars have come, first, to see that the physical monuments - buildings, art-objects, coins - are central and not merely corroboratory evidence: they were, to the Romans, speaking monuments, and they spoke politically.13 Secondly, that appreciation is part of a wider enlargement of perspective, in that we are required to view symbolism