statement, nor a symbol that the state was ultimately governed by the concept of patria potestas, nor an ingeniously invented jurisprudential basis for equating attacks on the 'divine family' with treason against the state.156 It was an honour- an extension of the title parens patriae that had been accorded to Marius, to Cicero, and to Iulius Caesar, a supremely high public decoration.
Augustus' quidpro quo was (besides a distribution of money) some very grand consular games - a new set, the ludi Martiales. The name was not fortuitous, for on 12 May157 the two young Caesars dedicated the most symbolic and triumphalist of all the Augustan public buildings, the temple of Mars Ultor at the far end of the new Augustan Forum, where those long-ago recovered standards would repose permanently. With its porticoes, friezes and caryatids, and the statues of all the Roman triumphatores,158 the Augustan Forum is the building that must be most attentively listened to. Its emphasis is, actually, not so much on the 'divine family' (and we may be inclined to guess why not) as on victory and the long, successful tale of Roman imperialism: hard, bold, assertive, confident — and for constant public use, especially for law-courts.159 And, in celebration of the celebration, another marvellous entertainment was provided, the 'naval battle of the Greeks and Persians', in a specially constructed artificial lake beside the Tiber; that, too, is recalled with pride in the Res Gestae.
So it was a many-sided paradox that, later in that year, lulia, the daughter of Augustus, was deported to the island of Pandateria. Her mother Scribonia went with her into exile. Multiple adulteries were the charge against lulia, or the excuse.160 Tacitus says that Augustus chose to treat those adulteries as treason,161 implying that he did not believe Iulia's offence to have been treason; but modern historians have woven here a tale of a major attempt at a coup d'etat. It ought to be allowed, in any case, that immorality at the heart of that 'divine family' that Augustus wanted as the paradigm for his society was a blow to pride and optimism in the year of the title pater patriae; and, further, that lulia, like Tiberius, was committing the crime of repudiating her role in the scenario as composed by her father. That might be enough and to spare. It is the involvement, as the foremost among Iulia's alleged lovers, of Iulius Antonius that, to some detective minds, has suggested more.162 He was either executed or forced to commit suicide: the other named men
156 Contra, respectively, Salmon 19 j 6 (c 204); Lacey'Patria Potestas', in Rawson 1986 (f 54)121- 44; Bauman 1967 (f 640) 255-9. 157 For this date, rather than in August, Simpson 1977 (f 578).
158 Zanker n.d. [л 1968] (f 625); Zanker 1987 (p 652) 215. It had been long in building: Macrob. Sat. 11 4.9. Forum dedicated earlier than temple: Degrassi 194; (f 546).
1W Suet. Aug. 29.1-2; tablets from Puteoli, Camodeca 1986 (f 511). 160 Dio lv. 12.10-16.
i«i Xac. Ann. in. 24.2. 162 It did not to Tacitus, Ann. iv.44. j; but cf. Sen. De Brev. Vit. 4.5.
involved incurred mere banishment,[208] an inadequate reaction if they had been part of a treasonable conspiracy. They were members of families of the nobility, indeed,[209] and one of them had been consul in 9 B.C., as Iullus was in 10; but hardly of prominence or stature, apart from him, to justify a picture of a 'faction of the nobility' opposed to the 'radical' Tiberius. Iullus is different: son of Antony and Fulvia, spared after Actium, half-brother of the Antonias, he had become a favoured court figure. As praetor he had given the games for Augustus' birthday in 13 B.C.; he had reached the consulship in 10 в.с. and Dio's epitome states that he was allegedly out for monorchia. Actium reversed and revenged: was that the idea?
The greatest sobriety of judgment is needed here. One matter for pause is what fate we are to suppose Iullus and lulia had in store for Gaius and Lucius Caesar. Were they to perish in the bloodbath? Was lulia to sacrifice her sons? Or was the whole scheme designed to bolster their succession against Tiberius Nero? But they were secure as things were, and it was Tiberius who lived in eclipse and danger. And was Iullus to be content with prominence as a mere caretaker for Iulia's sons, an alternative Tiberius? Not, of course, that the craziness of a proposal is proof that people did not entertain it.
In 2 B.C. prefects of the praetorian guard were appointed for the first time, and some are tempted to relate that novelty to the alleged state of emergency; but caution will suggest hesitation. First, they were a pair, and mere equites at that; secondly, this was certainly not the moment of creation of the praetorian guard, which already existed. It is not known what commanding officer the guard had before 2 в.с. — quite probably Augustus himself, with no intermediary; in which case it is hard to see the establishment of a pair of equestrian prefects as strengthening the ruler's control in face of a crisis.
This is usually held to have been the season of Ovid's Ars Amatoria. That chronology has been challenged,165 but Dio records some other activities of the 'smart set' that were capable of making Augustus' blood boil.166 The simple man's alternative, about this story, is therefore still the best: morality uppermost in the ruler's stern plan for triumphant Rome; revelations - perhaps, indeed, made by enemies - of a fast-living set, with lulia and Iullus at its centre; humiliation and rage of the ruler matching the psychological climate of resistance to his relentless imperatives.
The social imperatives were evident in that year in another context. The suffect consuls, Lucius Caninius Gallus and Gaius Fufius Geminus, put through the comitia a law setting limits to the number of slaves an individual master might free by testament; and that may well have a relationship to another change attributed to 2 B.C. whereby the number of recipients of the free corn ration was cut down to 200,000. Too much foreign blood in the citizen body, and too many layabouts!
Phraates IV of Parthia had just, after a long reign, been murdered, and succeeded, by his favourite son, who, with anti-Roman zeal, had assisted in the ejection of the king of Armenia, all that while a Roman nominee. There was an irritable international correspondence, and an air in Rome as of the prelude to a Parthian war; but Augustus repeated almost exactly the successful formula of twenty years before.[210] Tiberius Nero had been his envoy then, and could have been so again, but he was in retirement: indeed, since all his formal powers had run out, and no attempt had been made to renew them, he was — like his wife — an exile. In any case, the occasion could be used to give Gaius Caesar his first impressive role in the official drama; so in 1 B.C., invested with an imperium for the whole East, he set out, amidst a cloud of diplomatic advisers and to the strains of eager poetasters.[211] There was no state of war, so no hurry; in a.d. i,[212]when he entered in absentia upon his long-prearranged consulship, Gaius was engaged in some sort of campaign in Nabatean Arabia.170 The hopes he carried with him (along with his brother, who died, however, in a.d. 2 at Massilia of some non-sinister cause) are revealed in a letter of Augustus to him written in September, a.d. 2:'... with you two playing your part like true men and taking over the sentry-post from me'.[213] The great diplomatic exchange of courtesies duly took place, on an island in the Euphrates,[214] followed, as it were canonically, by the march to set a Roman protege again on the Armenian throne. This time it was not a formality. At an unknown place, Artagera, Gaius received a stab- wound, though it seemed to heal, and both he and Augustus took imperatorial salutations.173 And then occurred the strangest event in the whole tale. Tiberius Nero had just been permitted to return to Rome, a mere private citizen, with a question-mark upon his future;[215] and now Gaius wrote home to say that he was going to retire into private life and contemplation.[216] He was 23. People said at the time, and they were very likely right, that Gaius was a mortally sick man, and, to Augustus' culminating dismay, in a.d. 4 he died; in so short an interval were both the young hopefuls gone. But one can imagine, even before that, the effect of the letter of resignation: 'You too, son'. Like Tiberius and like Iulia: this was the canker that had rotted Augustus' third decade, that the people of his choice did not want to tread his path of duty. When, in a.d. 3, his constitutional powers were again renewed (and for a full decade) there could be no word of Tiberius Nero or of Gaius Caesar, for both were sulking in their tents; there was no collega imperii.