In September 22 B.C. Augustus got away from Rome, and was away three whole years. Agrippa was in the eastern lands, no prefect of the city was appointed, and the urban plebs was not satisfied: the consuls had a rebellious populace on their hands. The people in comitia refused to elect more than one consul for 21 B.C.; equally, Augustus, writing from Samos, refused to take the vacant place. Only at the beginning of 21 did the people obediently elect a second consul.
What had taken the ruler to the East was a major policy issue, and he, not Agrippa, must be the one to achieve a hoped-for diplomatic coup. So Agrippa was available to change places with him, to return to Rome, and, momentously, to marry the widow Iulia. (Tiberius, the stepson, was not offered that hand: he was intended for a career of great public service, indeed, but not to reach the summit of all things.) If Agrippa's presence, briefly, in Rome was also supposed to calm plebeian agitation and prevent the now open consulship from falling into wrong hands, his success was limited, for in 20 в.с. the comitia again declined to elect more than one consul, Gaius Sentius Saturninus, who, in early 19 B.C., found himself facing, alone, the rise of a 'people's champion', a certain Marcus Egnatius Rufus.
The garbled tale of Egnatius Rufus97 may be not unfairly boiled down to this: he was a senator who, as aedile, had won the favour of the Roman plebs by organizing a fire service; that had taken him straight to the praetorship, emboldened by which he stood in 19 в.с. for the consulship.98 That conduct counts, in our sources, as one of the 'canonical' list of conspiracies against Augustus;99 it is puzzling why. For Augustus was in the East (and Agrippa was, in a single year's campaign, finally conquering the Cantabrians in Spain), and the problem, whatever it was, was dealt with firmly and successfully by the consul and the Senate. The consul refused Egnatius' candidature, and when a popular uprising occurred it was suppressed, in accordance with a senatus consultum ultimum, and the aspiring popular leader executed. The naive guess is probably right, that the plebs had found a new Clodius, and the fact was dangerous - but to the whole elite, not just to the ruler, so they closed ranks. If Augustus was hoping, as some authors think, that the political agitations of the plebs would lead to an enlargement of his own powers, he would not want his position to seem to be dependent on a demagogue; and if he just feared the plebs would be seduced away from him and Agrippa, he had a yet more obvious motive for wanting Egnatius removed. In any event, neither he nor Agrippa saw any need to rush home.100
The sources are muddled, not least chronologically: Dio liii. 24.4-6 (under 26 b.c.); Veil. Pat. 11.91.3-4, with the notes of Woodman 1985 (в 203).
The vacant one of 19? It sounds, rather, as if the consul was presiding over ordinary elections, which would have been those for 18. 99 Suet. Aug. 19.1.
100 Agrippa's Aqua Virgo was opened on 9 June, but he can hardly have completed the clinching Spanish campaign quickly enough to be present.
Augustus' eastern sojourn claimed striking achievements. The background of affairs in the kingdoms of Parthia and Armenia is described in chapter 4 below.101 The first result of Augustus' intervention in 20 в.с. was a diplomatic agreement with the government of Parthia, the only substantial territorial power on Rome's horizon. It was no doubt welcome to both sides, and established a treaty relationship as between equal powers and an official frontier. Moreover, legionary standards captured from Marcus Crassus and from Mark Antony were handed back to the Romans. Augustus succeeded brilliantly in exploiting the fact, for home consumption, as a victory of arms, which it was not. An opportunity also offered itself for Tiberius Claudius Nero, the stepson, to gain diplomatic or military credit by installing a Roman supporter on the throne of Armenia - which proved easy, because the monarch of the moment had been assassinated before Tiberius arrived. But it was the 'return of the standards' that became a corner-stone of the ideology of a reinvigorated Rome resuming her historic right to 'spare the conquered and defeat the proud'.102
Augustus made many other political dispositions in the eastern provinces, for example depriving cities of their status as 'free' cities and promoting others, quite irrespective (as Dio points out) of the nature of provinces such as Asia and Bithynia, which were technically provinciae populi Romatti governed by proconsuls.103 It was done by the authority of his imperium maius. Also, according to Dio,104 he sent the Senate a letter stating a policy strangely like the instructions that Tacitus says he left behind in a.d. 14: 'to keep the empire within bounds'. That is surprising at this juncture, in view of the huge expansion that was to come: perhaps it was a justification for treaty relations with Parthia and the continued use of 'client kings' in the East.
Augustus voyaged home via Athens, whither Virgil journeyed in his honour (and died in his entourage at Brundisium on the way back: a heavy year for Roman poetry, which saw the death of Tibullus also). The magistrates and Senate proceeded to Campania to meet the returning ruler, a gesture that became a precedent;105 and he appointed, proprio motu, a second consul for the empty place, thus both resolutely declining to change course but also cutting a Gordian knot by pure auctoritas-. it was not, apparently, challenged.
An altar to Fortuna Redux, 'Fortune the Bringer Home', was erected at the Porta Capena and a ceremony of reditus, return, was enacted, of which much is made in the Res Gestae.106 A triumph, however, Augustus
к» Pp. i j 8-63.
102 Virg. Aen. VI.853. Cf. Prop, iv.6.83, Horace's Carmen Saeculare, and the breastplate of the statue of Augustus from Prima Porta, Simon 1986 (f 577) 52-7. 103 Dio Liv.7.4-5.
104 Dio Liv.9. i. 105 First, actually, in 30 b.c., Dio li.4.5.
106 RG 11; the Fasti Amiternini and Oppiani have it also, under 12 Oct.
refused, accepting instead ornamenta triumphalia, the insignia without the ceremony.107 Triumphs were to be quite rare, partly because independent proconsular commands, a prerequisite of a triumph, died out and partly because triumphs competed, as public spectacle, with the ruler's own image-making: Agrippa led the abstinence. In March 19 в.с. Lucius Cornelius Balbus held a full, formal triumph for campaigns in Africa, and that was the last to be recorded in the Fasti Triumphales and the last to be held by anyone outside the 'divine family': for others, ornamenta triumphalia became the usual limit of honours. It may have been at that time that the arch was built next to the temple of Divus Iulius which had on its inner walls the pageant of Roman history represented by the Fasti Capitolini and Fasti Triumphales;108 the ideology of military success and hegemony was the very breath of Rome: it was to be channelled in the interest of the ruler.
Dio gives a list of further constitutional grants to Augustus in 19 B.C.: an 'overseership of morality' {praejectura morum would have been the Latin), a censorial authority, a grant that most scholars interpret as the consular power for life, and the right to enact any laws he might wish, presumably without submitting them to the comitia, and to call them leges Augustae.*09 Was that the successful outcome of a Machiavellian policy of 'reculer pour mieux sauter'? Had the popular agitations given Augustus the all-embracing formal authority he coveted, under an at last acceptable formula? Though widely believed, that is probably not right; the context will suggest an alternative view. In the Res Gestae, Augustus strenuously denies receiving all-embracing formal authority: but what he did proceed to in the years that followed was a programme of legislation, particularly such as he hoped would restore traditional standards of the Roman people. The intention so to legislate must have been known in advance, through the deliberations of the senatorial subcommittee. Praefectura morum, we may guess, was a suggestion mooted for the formal authority on which Augustus should proceed, censorial power another, the right to enact leges Augustae another; all politely rejected, but somehow the offers have got into the record as accepted.110 The 'consular power' is a more complex, and certainly a controversial, question. Most scholars, nowadays,111 are only too happy to believe that Augustus accepted it for life in 19 B.C., because it serves to provide formal justification for certain actions he took, for which they can see no other. There is, however, no explicit statement but Dio's and Dio,