A prelude consisted of campaigns by Publius Silius in the Alpine foothills.
Hor. Carm. iv.4 and 14; iv.; and 2, lines 41-60.
Contra, however, Zanker 1987 (f 632) 128. There are still many disagreements about the identity of individual figures: see, e.g., the next note.
Zanker 1987 (f 632) 219, contests the view that two of the little boys are barbarian captives, and thinks that they are, after all, Gaius and Lucius Caesar.
Buchner 1982 (f 306); Zanker 1987 (f 632) 149-50. Unmentioned in the Res Gestae-, had it already been discovered that the 'clock was wrong'? (Pliny, HN xxxvi.72-3).
EJ2 14. The other was placed on the spina of the Circus Maximus. Their transport and erection were a tremendous technological feat. 134 EJ2 98.
official powers lapsed and required renewal. Needless to say, they were duly renewed, for a cautious five years, including Agrippa's tribunician power.135 A tiresome complication is added to the story of official powers by Dio's statement that the cura morum of Augustus was renewed in 12 b.c. for five years;136 for, if Augustus possessed it at all, he had had it, on Dio's own account, for five years from 19 b.c., and its renewal should have occurred two years sooner. In the Res Gestae it is asserted that the offer of a cura morum was made again in 11 b.c., but declined. There was, however, a revision of the Senate list in 11 b.c., performed by virtue of censoria potestas; perhaps Dio's garbled tale is an echo of that temporary grant. A much more significant constitutional fact is that in 1 3 b.c. Agrippa's imperium was, at last, defined as maius.137 For a brief span he and Augustus had equal formal authority as rulers of the Roman world; it was a joint rule of two colleagues, the one superior to the other only in auctoritas. We notice the immense significance of that experiment all too little because fate decreed that it should be so brief; for in March 12 b.c., only a few days after another great ceremony, stressed in the Res Gestae, the solemn assembly of the Roman people at which, at long last, Augustus became pontifex maximus,m Agrippa died.139 Catastrophe following hard on the heels of triumph is an obstinate motif in the story of the age.
But the engine of Roman imperialism, having been turned on, was not allowed to falter: Tiberius Nero and Nero Drusus embarked at once on their great joint aristeia of 12—9 b.c. in the north, and Augustus set himself at Aquileia and other northern towns, to be in touch with the grand strategy. Tiberius already knew, before he left for Illyricum, what he was going to have to do: divorce Agrippa's daughter, Vipsania, by whom he had a son, and marry lulia, Agrippa's widow. The marriage took place in 11 b.c., and caused all parties untold misery: lives sacrificed to duty. Augustus was relentless in his demand for co-operation, from high as from low, and there are straws in the wind, by the middle of the reign, that not even those well-disposed in general were keen to cooperate on his stern terms. Hence various experiments to get the Senate to work properly, and to encourage the elite not to turn their backs on public service, which belong in this decade.140
To celebrate the second year of the northern campaigns, in which Drusus, the younger stepson but the favourite of the ruler and the public,141 had the more spectacular part, both he and Tiberius were voted ovations and ornamenta triumphalia, and in their honour there was a
135 Diouv.28.1. 136 Diouv.50.1. 131 Dio Liv.28.1; see above, n.i 13.
RG 10. The former triumvir Lepidus had never been deprived of that priestly office, and had remained a senator until his death, though not permitted to live in Rome.
The consular Fasti of 12 b.c. are strange: Syme deduces plague.
See ch. 5 below, pp. 124-5. 1,1 Tac. Am. 11.41.5, favor vulgi.
distribution of 400 sesterces per head and games were held.142 But then Octavia died, Augustus' sister and Antony's widow, who had given and inspired devotion. Drusus spoke the laudation, as her son-in-law.
For the third year, 10 B.C., Augustus accompanied the headquarters to Gaul, where the 'Altar at the Confluence of Rhone and Arar' was dedicated as a focus in the West for cult of the ruler, and, on the selfsame day, the future emperor Claudius was born, son of Drusus and the younger Antonia. (The prevailing view, drawing an inference from Dio, is that the dedication was in 12 в.с. It involves a strained interpretation of Suetonius' 'selfsame day'; and Augustus could not have been present at Lugdunum in that year, whereas in 10 we have corroboration from a papyrus that he was.)143 In the winter Drusus did not return to Rome, but entered upon his consulship of 9 B.C. in absence; and in that year he carried Roman arms to the river Elbe. Those were noteworthy military achievements: Augustus and both his stepsons took imperatorial salutations, Tiberius celebrated the ovation voted to him, and Drusus was due to celebrate his. Whereupon death struck again: Drusus, the darling of all, died, in his consular year, aged 29, on 24 September - there is no record of any suffect consul being created to fill the brief vacancy. Tiberius made all speed, and, according to Dio, just managed to greet his brother before he died.[205] For Tiberius above all it was a catastrophe: as a united force they had had much to achieve.
Augustus did not permit the expansion in Germany to pause; he simply transferred Tiberius to that front. Nevertheless, to him also Drusus' departure was a bad blow, coming so soon upon those of Agrippa and Octavia; it may not be fanciful to detect a growing rigidity in Augustus' attitudes and proceedings, now that he was deprived of the personalities from whom he had derived support and counsel. But there is a remarkable further tale that the reader must be asked to estimate, for it plays quite a part in recent accounts: 'republicanist' opposition on the part of the stepsons. It derives from Suetonius, who says that Drusus at some time wrote to Tiberius 'about forcing Augustus to restore liberty'; there was plainly some historical source that gave Drusus that colouring.[206] Conspiracies are mentioned by Dio at the end of his account of the year 9 B.C., and in the very next year a new rule was made that slaves could be compulsorily purchased by the state so as to make them available as witnesses against their former masters in cases of treason. Have we, then, uncovered the 'crisis of 9 в.с.'? There were those who believed that Augustus suspected Drusus and had him poisoned; also, that none other than Tiberius had reported the treasonable correspon-
L. Piso also had ornamenta triumpbalia for a Helium Tbraeicum, probably in 11 B.C.
Dio Liv.32.1; Suet. Claud. 2.1; POxj 3020, col. 1, line 4. Absence of Augustus is, admittedly, not impossible: in 9 B.C., for example, he was at Ticinum and cannot have attended the consecration of the Ara Pacis. 144 Dio Lv.2.1. 145 Suet. Tib. 50.1; Claud. 1.4.
dence to his stepfather. Suetonius, however, who records all that, gives one reason for hesitating, namely that there is so much evidence that Drusus was a favourite of Augustus: he had a place in the ruler's will, for instance. Antiquity was given to novelettes about poisoning; we do not have to accept that tale, and the conspiracies alluded to by Dio are unrelated. But it may be a fact that the brothers had discussed the kind of res publico they would like to serve under, and that Tiberius had undertaken to lay their views before Augustus while he was heavily reliant on them. We can imagine how, with Drusus gone, the sole effect would be to make Augustus reluctant to leave things to Tiberius.