107 Dio says he celebrated an ovation, but see Abaecherli Boyce 1942 (л i).
106 For the date, and the argument that the Fasti were on a 'Parthian arch', see Coarelli 198) (e 19)11. 109 Dio Liv.io.j-6.
110 Rejection of magistracy of curator morum, RG 6.1 (Greek only); of censorial power, implicit in RG 8; only Dio mentions leges Augustae, and Augustus' reference to his laws at RG 8.5 gives no hint. Suetonius was misled: Aug. 27.5. 1,1 Following Jones i960 (a 47) 15-15.
properly read, is saying something different: .. and the power of the consuls he took for life, to the extent of using the twelvefasces always and everywhere and sitting on a magisterial chair between the consuls at any time'.[198] In the Rw Gestae Augustus informs the reader of revisions of the Senate list carried out 'by consular power': he surely means ad hoc grants, and so implies that he did not possess it permanently. What Dio is telling us about is not a power but an honour; for some 'social' rule was bound to be invented, now that Augustus no longer held, every year, one of the two highest offices of the state, about where, on formal occasions, he should be placed in relation to those two officers and what insignia he should have: we remember how the idea of three consuls did not appeal and was dropped.
In fact, those who like to see the first third of Augustus' reign punctuated by 'constitutional settlements' might better look to 18 than to 19 в.с. (though what is to be seen in 18 gives no comfort to any belief that he had acquired some kind of 'total power' in 19.) In 18 B.C. Augustus' provincia ran out: something certainly had to be done about that, and it was, in fact, renewed for the modest term of five years. Simultaneously, Agrippa's proconsular imperium was renewed for the same five years, and in addition he received the tribunician power for five years.[199] In that development there is constitutional novelty in plenty: an original and experimental arrangement based on a collegiate conception of the rulership. Agrippa and Iulia now had a son, and another baby was due, so dynasty was once again assured. The past decade had been uncomfortable for the ruler and his regime; now, with a good measure of optimism and militarism, Rome was to resume her role of conqueror and mistress of the world.
So the years 18 and 17 were marked by a programme of social reform, public and private, including a second revision of the Senate list, and by a great festival of Rome, to proclaim regeneration and traditional values, the ludi saeculares of 17 в.с.
Details of Augustus' social laws of this phase are treated in chapters 3 and 18 below.[200] He did not accept the offer to promulgate statutes as leges Augustae, but proposed them to the people by virtue of his tribunician power, so that they were leges Iuliae. In general, they were concerned with two themes, first the fairer and smoother running of the organs of state and law, and, second, family and birth-rate — of the ordines, the upper class, which was what Augustus thought mattered. Under the first heading the major element was the pair of leges luliae iudiciorumpublicorum etprivatorum, virtually a code for the organization of the courts ofjustice (and including, probably, a regulation de vi that reaffirmed the ancient citizen right ofprovocatio). Others were a lex lulia de ambitu and a lex lulia de collegiis.nb The package proclaimed that the traditional system of public life was to run as before, at a better level of efficiency. The lectio senatus of 18 в.с. was in the same vein. It was an attempt to reduce the Senate to nearer its old pre-Sullan number of 300, though Augustus did not succeed in getting it below double that figure. More important, a senatorial census was laid down for the first time - a minimum property rating for a man to enter or stay in the august body.116 Augustus wanted an old-fashioned Senate, whose members were to continue to hold virtually all major executive positions in the state, the legionary commands and provincial governorships, as well as receiving new commissions from time to time.
The second heading of the legislation of 18 and 17 b.c., the lex lulia de adulteriis establishing a new criminal court for sexual offences that included extra-marital intercourse of men with freeborn women as well as adultery, and the lex lulia de maritandis ordinibus, which provided bonuses for those with children and penalties for those not, is castigated nowadays as having imported the freedom-denying arm of the law into what had hitherto been matters of private morality and family concern. That, indeed, it did, but the perspective is erroneous unless it be observed that interference by the state in matters of private conduct was no novelty, but part of the age-old tradition of the Republic, which had comitial trials for stuprum, sumptuary laws, the Oppian and Voconian laws, and above all the surveillance of the censors, with their nota for all sorts of conduct disapproved of by society.117 No more than the Greeks did the Romans believe that there was any sphere of private morality separable from the interests of the community at large. Augustus was taking over both the mantle of ancient Greek legislators and the Roman censorial role that he had been offered, but not under the formal title. That is not to say that all of the elite class found the laws to their taste, although Augustus claims in the Res Gestae that the Senate was in favour of his measures.118
Augustus and Agrippa were in Rome. lulia had borne a second son, and the two little boys, Augustus' grandsons, were now formally adopted as his sons, taking the names Gaius and Lucius Caesar — which served plain notice upon the stepsons, Tiberius Claudius Nero and his brother Nero Claudius Drusus, as to what the future could not hold for
Whether we should add, on the basis of the Tabula Irni/ana (Gonzalez 1986 (в 23;) 1 ;o), a lex lulia municipalis standardizing the constitutions of the municipalities of Italy, is a matter of continuing debate.