The year 8 в.с. was twenty years from that sixth consulship when Augustus had begun handing the res publico back to the Senate and people: vicennalia, it would have been called in a later century, and it was, if mutedly, celebrated (though hand in hand with celebration went, again, loss: Maecenas first, and Horace shortly after). A 'census was completed, by consular imperium (a special, conceivably celebratory, grant), with a revision of the Senate list and — a rare curiosity — an extension of thepomerium of Rome.[207] Now, too, the month Sextilis was renamed 'Augustus'.147 The anniversary was accompanied, as it had to be, by another formal renewal of Augustus' powers, for - surprisingly but perhaps also in celebration - a further complete decade; what did not accompany it was any acknowledgement of Tiberius as collega imperii: no love existed there, and no trust, and other possibilities were nearly in sight.
Yet the campaign of Tiberius in 7 в.с. was triumphant, leaving Germany 'practically ready to become a province of the Roman empire',148 and permitting the discharge of large numbers of legionaries over the next few years.149 Tiberius, who was, that year, consul for the second time, celebrated a full, formal triumph, and afterwards laid the foundation of a temple of Concord in the Forum Romanum, his thoughts perhaps still upon the lost partnership.
There were relatively everyday tasks and problems of government, not necessarily trivial. One such was an accusation, astonishingly, of ambitus, electoral bribery, against all the magistrates, presumably of the year 8. Augustus took care not to peer into that too closely, but he did make new rules to reduce bribery at the consular elections in the future. The very fact that it occurred shows that there was still popular choice, but it is principally a pointer to something else. What was amiss was that for twenty years Augustus had insisted on the being, in the old tradition, only two consuls a year (barring emergencies); but the office was still eagerly sought after and fought over, as the crown of a social career, and soon Augustus experimented again, dividing the year into two halves, with two 'ordinary' consuls followed by two 'suffect' consuls, a system that became regular from 5 в.с.
Natural disasters, too, never ceased to punctuate the history of the biggest conurbation in the ancient world, and governments never did enough. There was a very grave fire in 7 B.C., just before the funeral games in memory of Agrippa. Augustus took occasion to reorganize the local structure of the city into fourteen official 'regions', with a devolution down to the 265 vici or 'blocks', the latter to be responsible for fire precautions. It did not prove adequate.
His coeval generation dying away, Augustus was obliged to place reliance on the younger folk. For Herod the Great and his dynastic problems and brutal treatment of his sons, Augustus had the greatest contempt,150 but that turned into a terrible irony. In the year 6 в.с. Tiberius Nero received a renewal of imperium, plus tribunician power for five years, which proclaimed him to the world as collega imperii-, and at that very moment he declared his wish to retire from state responsibilities and took himself off to Rhodes. Augustus staged a bit of. illness to detain him, but it did not work. The historian Velleius, adulatory of Tiberius, exaggerates the consequences of his retirement into a sort of paralysis of the res publico,151 and the loss of the full text of Dio for those years contributes to a possibly false picture; but it was undeniably major trouble in high politics.
The modern, as well as the ancient, interpretation is that it was dynastic trouble. Gaius and Lucius Caesar were of an age to begin their progress into the limelight (and 'above themselves' already, according to Dio, who writes that in 6 B.C. the people 'chose' Gaius as consul and Augustus had to step in and quash it: a demonstration, perhaps).152 In 5 b.c. Gaius was made a pontifex and designated consul for a.d. i, and a new title was invented for him, princeps iuventutis or honorary president of the order of equites, and a distribution of money was made in his honour; in 4 в.с. he had a seat on the great consilium called to settle the fate of Judaea upon the death of Herod. In 2 в.с. Lucius was made an augur and designated consul for a.d. 4, and became joint princeps iuventutis. What is more, the coinage was the medium for a course of advertisement for the pair such as neither Drusus nor Tiberius had been accorded.153 So, then, Tiberius moved downstage, and the questions that gather about Agrippa's departure seventeen years earlier repeat themselves. Did he go in self-effacing co-operation or in rage and frustration? Scholars have conjured up binary opposites, a Claudian faction led by
150 Macrob. Sat. 11.4.11. 151 Veil. Pat. 11.100.1.
152 DioLV.9.1-2. 153 Zanker 1987 (f 632) 218-26.
l6 b.c.-a.d. 14
Livia Drusilla on behalf of her sons (now reduced to one) and a Julian, led by Iulia on behalf of hers, whose opposition was destined to tear at the vitals of the regime until Augustus' death, and beyond. That picture may be not so much wrong as a bit too simple. First, there could never have been any doubt, from the moment that Gaius and Lucius were adopted, that if Augustus, and they, survived long enough for them to grow to manhood they would be his chosen successors; Tiberius Nero and Nero Drusus could never have expected a role greater than that of Agrippa. Again, it was in 6 B.C., before the formal elevation of the youths began, that Tiberius retired; that elevation looks more like the ruler's instant response to, than the cause of, Tiberius' desertion. And finally, you hardly make a man collega imperii to kick him out: rather, to try to keep him. The latter end of Tiberius' Rhodian sojourn was certainly an unofficial exile; but there is a wider story to which his initial retirement belongs, the story of people's growing unwillingness to work with and for Augustus, and to play their roles in the drama according to his script. Tiberius Nero, with the independent spirit he had shared with his brother (and shared, to their mutual cost, with his wife, Augustus' daughter), saw himself type-cast as collega imperii, the new Agrippa, and rebelled. To Agrippa, his status as collega imperii had been an insurance for the succession of his sons, and part, anyway, of a lifelong collaboration. For Tiberius it was neither: therefore, Augustus must carry on alone.
The impression of a political standstill is doubtless false, but not much can be done to compensate. One important experiment of 4 в.с. serves to help fill the gap: it is known only from an inscription.154 By a senatus consultum of that year, on a proposal from Augustus, a novel, expedited procedure became available to provincials alleging extortion by Roman magistrates, in all but the gravest (i.e. capital) cases. It probably was genuinely quicker; on the other hand it contained an unadvertised advantage for senatorial governors by enabling them to be tried by a committee of their peers instead of the mainly non-senatorial juries of the quaestio repetundarum.
101
But 2 B.C. was a year of crisis — or so it has been called. Certainly it contained paradox enough to satisfy any novelist. It began with a tremendous burst of ceremony, symbolism and festivity. Augustus was sixty; he was consul ordinarius (he had taken the consulship in 5 B.C. to preside over the debut of Gaius Caesar, and now did the same for Lucius); and on 5 February he was officially designated pater patriae, 'Father of the Nation'. The title crowns the Res Gestae, and Suetonius quotes the very words in which it was bestowed and accepted.155 It was not (though historians recently have tried to make it) a constitutional Ii4 EJ2 j11, v. is» Suet. Aug. 58.2.