But if we stick to the ambience of the governing elite at the political centre, there, particularly, though not exclusively, in Augustus' later years, things were done that we do associate with the behaviour of 'police states': the widening of the range of offences counting as treason
135 Prop. 11.7.14. 136 If that is what he wanted, as argued by La Penna 196} (в 102).
(with the inevitable encouragement of informers); banishments and exiles without trial; the sudden courier and the enforced suicide; the suppression of literature and the banning, and worse, of authors. And those things were a legacy: they formed part of the apparatus of rule of Augustus' successors, used from time to time as raison d'etat demanded.
Yet, though they were a characteristic, they were not the dominant characteristic, nor even the dominant ultimate weakness, of Augustus' creation. The work known as the Dialogus, attributed to Tacitus, contains, through the mouth of an 'opposition' writer, a well-known expression of the view that the ending of the creative phase of, at least, Roman eloquence was directly due to the loss of freedom.137 That was not the only view then,138 nor need it be now; but historians are not wrong to perceive a general loss of momentum supervening on the Augustan triumphs. The late Republic had been moving fast; the very fact of Augustus' rule, let alone his ideals and policies, applied a brake that brought his whole society to a relative standstill. The 'New Age' was conceived of as a 'return to the Age of Saturn', not a great leap into the future; and just as the Greek literature of the age swung back from 'Asianism' to 'Atticism', so did the visual arts return from Hellenistic 'baroque' to serene Classicism and even a curious cult of the Archaic.139 It is likely that to most of the upper classes in the Roman world, in most respects, that result was welcome rather than otherwise, for their interest was in stability, and Augustus had to fit in with their career ambitions and social expectations as much as they with his proddings and exhortations. Certainly, his revolution was no social revolution: the maintenance, and strengthening, of status hierarchy was high on its priorities,140 and some historians have seen its principal historical effect as the consolidation of the 'slave society'. Be that as it may, 'it is a fair criticism of the new order, that its temptation was to be static in high matters',141 and stability is, of the political virtues, the least heartwarming to read about.
/. An estimate
Tacitus offers an appraisal of Augustus, in contrasting paragraphs: what can be said in his favour and what against.142 For Tacitus, as for many historians after him, the bad outweighed the good. Nevertheless, whether for good or ill, Tacitus lived in a political world of which Augustus had been the principal architect; and for an estimation of
K. Heldmann, Antikt Tbeoritn ŭbtr EntwUkhmgund Vtrjallier Redthmst vi.i, Munich, 1982, esp. 271-86.
It is not even the only view in the Dialogur, and in 'On the Sublime', ch. 44, expressed more broadly, it is rejected by the author of that work himself; see Heldmann, Antikt Tbeorien vi.2.
Literature: Gabba 1982 (в 57); visual arts: Simon 1986 (f 577) 110-36, with the illustrations.
IW Rawson 1987 (f 56). 1,1 Adcock, САН x" 606. 142 Tac. Ann. 1.9-10.
Augustus' achievement, for good or ill, it is as necessary to look at what followed him as at what preceded him. For we can then see that his was not a 'blueprint' creation, but experimental, and that it underwent much further change. Neither was it in all respects successful, even in his own time and terms:143 there was more propaganda than reality about some of the military enterprises, and the programme of social reform probably had little good effect and certainly had some bad. As for the subsequent changes, some represent practical breakdowns in his scheme of things. For instance, the transmission of power broke down with Nero, and it is doubtful whether Augustus envisaged the rise of any of the new equestrian officials to formal political influence, and virtually certain that he would have been appalled at the political power of freedmen.
But if we look from the political world of Cicero to that of Tacitus, we ought to be able to discern what structures Augustus left (in principle, at least, and for good or ill) to the Roman world after him. First, the ideology, as well as the reality, of a single ruler (supported, it might be, by a collega imperii). Secondly, a system for the transmission of power and authority, namely dynasty, by birth or adoption, coupled with the bringing of the chosen successor into proper relation with the legitimizations of power as early as possible, which, though sometimes nullified in practice, was always, in principle, revived and never supplanted. Thirdly, a rule of law - for the ruler was not, in principle, 'above the law' — intended normally to prevail, although raison d'etat overrode it all too readily in crises.[291] Fourthly, the preservation of strict social hierarchy, the leading role being still assigned to the senatorial order, the governing class of the empire remaining a tiny elite. Fifthly, unchanged also from the Republic, the principle of 'government without bureaucracy',145 by which the local management of the vast empire was left to the municipalities and imperial administration could remain unprofessiona- lized and economical of manpower and cost. Sixthly, by contrast, armed forces that were, in the lower ranks, professional. They were composed partly of Roman citizens and partly of non-citizens, and by careful budgeting they were supported on a scale enabling them to achieve some modest further expansion of Rome's dominions down to the time of Trajan — though they were destined, in the 'Year of the Four Emperors', to be the vehicle of renewed civil war. Lastly, it would be unfair to rob Augustus of his part in turning the city of Rome into a monumental imperial capital.
'Achievement', however, may seem too biographical a term in which to estimate the place of Augustus in history: more neutrally, we could substitute 'results' or 'effects', and the observed effects may have had a multiplicity of causes, amongst which Augustus was only one. He stands between what we recognize (or have created for our own convenience) as two ages of European history, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. But was he, after all, the 'architect' of the Empire? Or was he just the culminating 'dynast' thrown up by the 'Roman Revolution',146 a process of change that began with Sulla, or even the Gracchi, and had its own momentum, so that even if Antony had won at Actium or Augustus had died in 23 в.с. the Roman Republic would still have been succeeded by the Roman Empire? What specific contribution is it possible to attribute to Augustus within that massive historical process? Perhaps just this much (if only by slipping back into biography): if Julius Caesar or Antony had been the culminating dynast there would, very likely, still have been a Roman Empire, but it would, very likely, have had a different face. The characteristic structure of the Empire, in which so much of what was new was based so firmly on what was old, is likely to have owed something to the particular cast of mind of its first ruler - narrow, pragmatic and traditionalist. Augustus was equated, in his time, with most of the gods of the Roman pantheon; today, we might think him best fitted by one he was not equated with, Janus, as he steered the Roman world into the future with his eyes fixed on the values of the past. Plutarch records a saying of his (it matters little whether vero or ben trovato): when somebody told him that Alexander, after his conquests, had been at a loss what to do next, Augustus said he was surprised that Alexander had not realized that a greater job than acquiring empire was getting it into shape when you had acquired it.[292] The shape of the Roman Empire was his contribution.