essentially sound health,44 by the lack of success of medical historians in diagnosing, from the vague evidence, what, if anything, was seriously the matter with him, and by the fact that he is known to have staged one crisis, when Tiberius threatened retirement — and Tiberius was undeterred. Nevertheless, doubt is hypersceptical. Illness and early death stalked the corridors of power in antiquity.45 Iulius Caesar was epileptic; Pompey was ill every year,46 and very gravely ill at Naples in 50 B.C.; as for our Caesar, he nearly died in his teens, and in 42 he was ill at Dyrrhachium and at Philippi, and there were rumours of his death. In 3 3 he was ill in Dalmatia. His illness in 28 went on after the Games all through the winter, for he was still not recovered in May the following year. In 26 illness overtook him at Tarraco after the first Spanish campaign, and may have been continuous through 2 5 and 24; for he was ill at Rome in June 24, and very likely continued so right down to his resignation of the consulship in July 23: then, notoriously, he was thought to be at death's door again. And, surely, he thought himself so: hence the building of the Mausoleum, and the autobiography, afterwards abandoned, and the early versions of the Res Gestae. Caesar's precarious condition, and his own belief in it, must be borne in mind when we think of'constitutional settlements': it really was possible that the whole story would end abruptly, and he must hasten to leave something stable behind.
At the beginning of 27 b.C., all special powers being abolished, Caesar and Agrippa were joint consuls once again. On the Ides of January, in a careful consular speech in the Curia, Caesar handed the whole Roman state back into the hands of the Senate and people, for them to decide the nature of its future government: that was the gesture of fulfilment of the promise. It does not seem likely that the Senate's response was other than carefully prepared and stage-managed:47 it was to grant to Caesar what the Senate had traditional authority to grant, a provincia. But that provincia, 'Caesar's province', gave him nevertheless an overwhelming role in the new order, because of its size: Spain, Gaul and Syria (plus, indeed, Egypt, which, having not existed as a province at all until 30 B.C., may not have been thought of as any of the Senate's business to grant), on a ten-year maximum tenure. Caesar made no gesture to resign the consulship, which lay with the people to grant; and if he chose to continue to offer himself annually for election to it, no doubt he would be regularly elected: he would hold his vast provincia either as consul, or, if he ever dropped the consulship, as proconsul. No change at all needed to be made in the traditional arrangements for the rest of the provinces of the Roman world. Strabo, indeed, states — implying that it was at this
44 Though he remained hypochondriacal^ fussy about himself all his life, and often had throat infections. 45 Syme 1986 (a 95) 20-5. 46 Cic. Att. vin.2.3. 47 Contra, Dio liii.i i.
time - that Caesar received 'headship of the hegemony' and was made arbiter of peace and war for life, but reasons for limiting the significance of that claim will be given in chapter 3 below.[179]
The formal authority Caesar thus took for himself was vast, indeed, and in its totality un-republican; nevertheless, it was a way of expressing his overwhelming predominance in encouragingly familiar concepts — sovereignty vested in Senate and people, and no political structure incompatible with mos maiorum. And not a colossal confidence trick, for who, amongst those who mattered, could have been taken in? Rather - if Caesar turned out to have made the right political guess — what most people badly wanted to believe; and, furthermore, experimental and with a fixed term. And finally, if he died, the traditional res publico would be standing in place, inviolate.
But at once comes the counterpoint and the paradox. For on 16 January Caesar was heaped with new honours proposed by his adherents, above all with the name 'Augustus'; and that was a fantastic novelty, the impact of which is blunted for us by two millennia of calling him by that name. No human person had been called it before, and its symbolic range was very large. The sources preserve a tale that Caesar, or some of his advisers, or both, had first thought of 'Romulus'.[180] Some scholars doubt, others think that 'Augustus' was a second-best imposed by the strength of opposition; but it came to the same thing, for they all knew their Ennius: '... since famous Rome was founded with august augury'. There were other insignia: the 'civic crown' of oak-leaves 'in honour of the salvation of the citizens'; the shield proclaiming Augustus' special qualities, virtus-, dementia, iustitia and pietas erga deos patriamque[181](expressing, of course, what was wanted of the ruler); the laurels placed on either side of his house doorway.[182] As children of a different culture we might be impatient with those insignia, as politically trivial; but in a society in which, to be a great man, you had to be acknowledged and proclaimed as such, the names and crowns and dedications had power, carrying symbolic messages both ways, of what was granted and what was expected.
In Sextilis (or August) Augustus, in poor health again, went off, first to Gaul and then to Spain. In fact, for fifteen years he kept up virtually a regime of three-year trips to the provinces alternating with two-year stays in Rome,[183] and Suetonius remarks that Augustus saw personally every Roman dominion except Africa and Sardinia.53 We need not attribute to him the passion for personal oversight — and for tourism - that motivated Hadrian over a hundred years later. Escape from opposition, at least in the sense of letting experiments simmer, may be more relevant; the desire, also, to foster the impression of 'business-as- usual': the governor goes to his province and Senate and people are sovereign at Rome. Nevertheless, already and at once, the res publico was stamped with that hallmark of a changed world, 'ubi imperator, ibi Roma', 'where the ruler is, there is Rome'. There was only one ruler now, and the world must make its way to where he was.
'Business-as-usual' included a triumph, in September, for Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus (the patron of Tibullus and perhaps of Livy), ex Gallia, but before that, in July, one for Marcus Licinius Crassus, ex Thracia et Getis. Crassus (a grandson of Iulius Caesar's triumviral colleague), who had been a partisan of Sextus Pompeius and then of Mark Antony, but, in spite of that, consul ordinarius in 30 B.C., requested the further honour of dedicating spolia opima for having personally killed an enemy chief. Augustus had it disallowed, on a probably trumped-up ground:54 no one was to be allowed military honours greater than the ruler himself could ever conceivably have — indeed, before long not even triumphs would be permitted to any except members of the 'divine family'. But use of this incident to infer a 'challenge to the usurping authority' by an unreconciled Antonian, and a 'crisis of the new order' is altogether out of proportion. Crassus celebrated a full triumph, and the fact that he 'disappears from history' afterwards does not warrant sinister suspicions. What is more, the history of his campaigns, far from being suppressed, must have been written up by somebody, for Dio has a disproportionately long account of them.55
Another disappearance at about this time, however, might be regarded as more of a tragedy: the suicide, in 26,56 of the poet, soldier, and part-architect of Augustus' victory, Gaius Cornelius Gallus, first prefect of Egypt. Recent new - or newly evaluated — evidence57 has led to revisions of the older story, that it was because he got above himself for his undoubtedly successful campaigns to unify Egypt that he forfeited the amicitia of Augustus. But whatever the reason, he did forfeit it, and the protection it afforded, and laid himself open to a senatorial declaration that he was liable to prosecution. Suetonius states that Augustus was distressed by Gallus' suicide and had not desired it;58 so modern interpreters have urged that Gallus fell, not to the malice of his old chief, but to that of the 'opposition', to whom the consignment of Egypt to an