Fortuna Redux, the ludi saeculares, Actian Apollo, the Altar of the Three Gauls and the temple of Rome and Augustus at Pergamum. The collegiality of Augustus and Agrippa was also given some emphasis. But the only specific promotional campaign run by the official coinage was bestowed on Gaius and Lucius Caesar (though the successes of Tiberius late in the reign did not go quite without mark). At least, however, the Augustan coinage was, even in terms of types, as well as scale, a world- coinage, with Lugdunum and Nemausus, Ephesus and Pergamum, all striking to recognizably similar effect, and as a dissemination of the image of the ruler that was tremendous.
Buildings also (to return to that important theme) were part of the image-making.114 The public heart of the city of Rome was transformed: everyone knows how Augustus boasted that he had 'taken over a Rome of brick and left a Rome of marble',[286] and Ovid, justifying the soignee look for ladies, exclaims 'Before, all was country plainness: now Rome is of gold'.116 The transformation was not just in grandeur, but in symbolic orientation towards the ruler. It is, indeed, unfair to see the programme solely in that context: improvement and amenity went hand in hand with symbolism. Sewers and water supply, markets and porticoes, theatres and an amphitheatre, improvements to the race-course, parks, baths and libraries now adorned Rome, and Agrippa's part was the more brilliant in that it combined the prosaic and the charismatic. But improvement stopped short when it paid no dividends in prestige (and when Agrippa was no longer there), so that some of the recurrent scourges of the plebs
floods, fires and collapses - were tackled with less than total commitment. About the transformation of Augustus' house enough has been said, and about his new Forum; but even the Forum Romanum took on the symbolism of the ruler and his divine ancestry, and Jupiter Tonans on the Capitol stole some of the limelight of the Capitoline god himself.117 Agrippa adorned the middle Campus, Augustus the northern part, with the Mausoleum, the Ara Pacis and the Horologium. Buildings were erected by, or in the name of, many members of the 'divine family'; as for the republican tradition by which triumphing generals embellished the capital and built roads 'out of spoils' (ex manubiis), Augustus was keen for it to continue, and for a while it did, endowing Rome with such important structures as Asinius Pollio's Atrium Libertatis, with the first Roman public library, Cn. Domitius Calvinus' marble rebuilding of the Regia, T. Statilius Taurus' amphitheatre in the Campus and the major temples of C. Sosius (Apollo Sosianus in the Campus) and C. Cornificius (Diana on the Aventine). That tradition only died out because the triumphs and the independent commands on which they rested died out: the last major such building was the theatre of Balbus, and he was, precisely, the last person outside the 'divine family' to celebrate a full triumph.
It hardly needs saying that building programmes advertising the ruler were not confined to the capital. Nor, in the Roman world in general, were they confined to structures erected at government expense, for there was a great mass of building on local and private initiative, as the municipal wealthy responded to the stability of the 'Augustan Peace'. Much was, however, inspired from the centre, such as the Augustan arches that still stand in testimony to the construction of roads, city-walls and harbours, and other imposing structures still to be seen - the Pont du Gard, the Maison Carree, the public buildings of Merida: enough for the imagination to grasp how new a visual world had been created by a.d. 14. In the Roman Forum stood the Golden Milestone,118 and the Chorographic Map of Agrippa stood in his sister Vipsania's portico.119
Of such elements was composed the great assault on the psychology of a generation. A consistent ideology is conveyed, an 'Augustan synthesis', the visual monuments being echoed by the literary monuments: it may be summarily spelt out, under three or four heads. First, this is a 'new age', novum saeculum - the keystone of Virgil's Aeneid,120 the theme of the ludi saeculares and of the architectural transformation of Rome. It is an age in which the Hellenic and Roman cultural heritages are to be no longer enemies but partners,121 a partnership symbolized by Actian Apollo, the god combining arms and arts, with his temple and libraries on the Palatine. The gift of the new age is the 'Augustan Peace'; and the
111 On the Forum Romanum, Simon 1986 (f 5 77) 84-91; on Jupiter Tonans, Zanker 1987 (f6j2) 44. »» Dio liv. 8.4. 119 Strab. 11.5.17 (120C); Pliny, HN 111.17.
120 Virg. Aen. vi-791-853. 121 Bowersock 1965 (c 59) ch. 10.
prerequisite of that peace is the ruler's untiring devotion to his cura, by reason of his virtus, dementia, iustitia and pietas. But it demands an answering devotion from others, a willingness to constitute a nation of stern morality and stable family life: that comes out best in the most overtly moralizing of all the literary monuments, the Carmen Saeculare of Horace. And amongst the duties demanded is untiring militarism. For Roman victory and supremacy to be maintained the Romans must keep faith with their long history. That is the message of the Fasti Trium- phales and the busts of Rome's heroes in the porticoes of the Augustan Forum, of the triumphal arches placed about the Roman world, and of the importance attached to the 'return of the standards' in the symbolic nexus. Virgil's 'Be it thy care, О Roman, to rule the peoples with thy sway' is the formal repudiation of the Epicureanism of Lucretius: 'Better to obey in quiet than wish to rule things with your sway and control kingdoms.122
4. Resistance
The 'Augustan synthesis', thus summarized, is a rich diet and a heady brew; historical therapy demands that it be countered, in conclusion, by more astringent and sobering reflections. The historian must ask how successful the mystique was. To what extent can we perceive scepticism, rejection, an alternative ideology,123 a revoludonary temper, even? 'Resistance' is an insistent modern theme;124 how much of it is to be found beneath the confident surface of the 'Augustan synthesis'?
A distinction can properly be made between political and ideological dissent within the Roman people (which is really our theme) and the resistance of conquered peoples to Roman imperialism. Of the latter there was enough and to spare, but the only question about it needing to be raised here is how Augustan rule was viewed in the Greek half of Rome's dominions. For the Greek world too, was a conquered world. Most of it, indeed, had been conquered already under the Republic, and the 'intellectual opposition' (a well-worn topic)125 was rather to Rome in general than to the Augustan rearrangements — though it was them that Alexandria long bitterly resented.126 By and large, the ruling classes, to whom the Augustan effort was mainly addressed, were glad of the 'Augustan Peace', which perpetuated their own local predominance; and there was no shortage of leading families eager for Roman citizenship. If
Virg. Aen. vi.8ji; Lucr. v.1129-30.
D'Elia 193 5 (в 41); La Penna 1963 (в 102).
'M See the collections of papers in Pippidi 1976 (а 72л) and Yuge and Doi 1988 (a i i i).
Bowersock 1965 (c 39) ch. 8.
Hence the 'Acts of the Pagan Martyrs': for the Augustan items that may belong to them, see Musurillo 1954 (в 381) no. 1; POxy 3020; POxy 2435, verso ( = EJ2 379).
they did not 'rally to the support of the Principate',127 they did not rally against it. The two expatriate Greek intellectuals in Rome of the Augustan time of whose writings the most survives today, Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Strabo of Amaseia, were enthusiastic supporters; if the rest of the Greek world was cooler, it was not estranged.