Emperor of Rome Augustus

“ So the senate approached Augustus with the twenty-four fasces (insignia of dictatorship, the consul having only twelve) , and begged him to accept the dictatorship and the administration of the food supply. He did indeed undertake the latter charge, and ordered that duumvirs, who had held the praetorship five years before, should be yearly appointed to have charge of the distribution of grain, but would by no means accept the dictatorship. When neither by words nor prayers he could move the people, he tore his garments. ”

“ The government of Egypt was in many points wholly exceptional. Julius Cæsar had deliberately abstained from making it a province of the country (cf. Suet., Jul. 35) ; and when Augustus added it to the empire he subjected it to an altogether exceptional treatment. The country was his private property, or rather the Emperor’s private property; it passed as a matter of course, that is, from emperor to emperor. Augustus appointed a præfect to represent him in the province, just as in earlier times the urban prætors had sent prefects to represent them in the municipalities of Italy. ”

“ Suet. Aug. 27, says: “He accepted the control of laws and morals for life, as he had the tribunitial power; and in the exercise of this control, altho’ without the honor of the censorship, he yet thrice took the census of the people, the first and third times with a colleague, the second time alone.” Dio, LIV, 10, 30, says that in 735 and 742 Augustus accepted this office for periods of five years. But the inscription shows that Suetonius and Dio were wrong, and that a natural but incorrect inference had been drawn from the poets. ”

“ Upon private ground I have built with the spoils of war the temple of Mars the Avenger, and the Augustan Forum.105 Beside the temple of Apollo, I built upon ground, bought for the most part at my own expense, a theatre, to bear the name of Marcellus, my son-in-law.106 From the spoils of war I have consecrated gifts in the Capitol, and in the temple of the divine Julius, and in the temple of Apollo, and in the temple of Vesta, and in the temple of Mars the Avenger ”

“ Cf. C. I. L., III, pp. 489, 374, 304, 287, 291. Mommsen thinks this omission was intended by Augustus; that he had been able to satisfy some of his veterans, to whom Italian farms had been promised, with lands over the Italian border in Illyricum, and because he could not call it a province, nor yet a part of Italy, he eludes the difficulty by omitting the Illyrian colonies.
The names of the twenty-eight Italian colonies are somewhat difficult to establish. Several perplexing questions rise in the attempt. What of the colonies founded by Antony and Octavian as triumvirs? ”

“ It was part of Augustus’ policy to seem to keep wholly within the lines of the constitution. Hence his refusal to accept any extraordinary office. Yet his tribunitial power was new and extraordinary. Tacitus’ comment is caustic, Ann., III, 56: “That specious title (the tribunitial power) importing nothing less than sovereign power, was invented by Augustus at a time when the name of king or dictator was not only unconstitutional but universally detested. ”

“ Fortunae reduci constituta. There are also gold and silver coins (Eckhel VI, 100; Cohen, Aug. nos. 102-108) with the inscription, Fortunae reduci, Cæsari Augusto senatus populusque Romanus, Dio, LIV, 10, tells that Augustus after having arranged matters in Sicily, Greece, Asia and Syria, returned to Rome, and that many honors were decreed to him, but that he would accept none of them, “but that an altar should be consecrated to Fortune the Restorer, that the day should be accounted a feast day, and that it should be called the Augustalia.” ”

“ After Actium, Augustus disbanded the legions numbered above twelve (cf. his colonies of veterans at this time, numbering 120,000 men, c. XV) . But by reason of the repetitions above alluded to, the legions bearing the numbers up to twelve, really amounted to eighteen. These duplications may have risen from the absorption into Augustus’ army of legions bearing the same numbers from the forces of Lepidus and later from those of Antony. In 759, eight new legions, the thirteenth to the twentieth, seem to have been enrolled, in view of the German and Pannonian wars. ”

“ While I was consul for the thirteenth time the senate and the equestrian order and the entire Roman people gave me the title of father of the fatherland, and decreed that it should be inscribed upon the vestibule of my house and in the Curia, and in the Augustan Forum beneath the quadriga which had been, by decree of the senate, set up in my honor.156 When I wrote these words I was in my seventy-sixth year.157
Supplement. ”

“ I. History of the Inscription.
Suetonius in his Life of Augustus tells us that that Emperor had placed in charge of the Vestal virgins his will and three other sealed documents; and the four papers were produced and read in the senate immediately after his death. One of these additional documents gave directions as to his funeral; another gave a concise account of the state of the empire; the third contained a list of “his achievements which he desired should be inscribed on brazen tablets and placed before his mausoleum.” ”

“ From this situation of the copy comes the common title, Monumentum Ancyranum. Buysbecche made some attempt to copy the Latin inscription, but his work was very hasty and incomplete. What he had discovered was of extreme importance, and his report stimulated such interest that European scholars never rested till as complete a copy as possible was finally made in our own time. The temple on whose walls the inscription was found was one dedicated to Augustus and Rome, as was a common custom during the lifetime of that Emperor. ”

“ For Augustus implies the voluntary coming of a reigning king, not the delivery of an abducted prince. We know that in 731 Tiridates was in Rome asking that Parthia be assigned to him, and that at the same time Phraates sent an embassy begging the restitution of his son. Cf. Dio, LIII, 33. Augustus laid the matter before the senate, and by their advice restored the prince in exchange for the standards, but did not yield to the plea of Tiridates. ”

“ The Capitol and the Pompeian theatre have been restored by me at enormous expense for each work, without any inscription of my name.100 Aqueducts which were crumbling in many places by reason of age I have restored, and I have doubled the water which bears the name Marcian by turning a new spring into its course.101 The Forum Julium and the basilica which was between the temple of Castor and the temple of Saturn, works begun and almost completed by my father, I have finished ”

“ Mommsen does not comment on the incorrectness of this statement, but Wölfflin regards the Greek verb as a blunder of the stone-cutter at Ancyra, and thinks there was no verb at all at the end of this chapter, but that the mason by mistake took the last word of the preceding chapter which is ἐπόησα. A substitution of ἐπόησα for the proper verb seems more likely, as it seems improbable that the sentence would end without a verb.
These repairs are attested by an inscription on an arch at Ariminum, thus restored by Bormann: Cf. C. I. L. XI, 365. ”

“ Cf. Dio, LV, 23. In LV, 25, Dio writes of this year 759: “Augustus contributed, in his own name and in that of Tiberius, money for that treasury which is called the military.” The sum so given was $8,500,000. Tributary states and kings also assisted. But income could not keep pace with expenses. The old tax of a twentieth on bequests, except when the heir was a very near relative, or very poor, was revived, much to the discontent of the Roman people. ”

“ Antony had stripped various temples at Samos, Ephesus, Pergamos, and Rhœteum, all in the province of Asia, and had given the spoils to Cleopatra. Dio, LI, 17, says that great numbers of such things were found in her palace when Alexandria was captured. Pliny, Hist. Nat., XXXIV, 8, 58, says: “He (Myro) made an Apollo, which was taken away by the triumvir Antony, but restored to the Ephesians by the divine Augustus.” Strabo, XIII, 1, 30, writes of Rhœteum: “Cæsar Augustus gave back to the Rhœtians the shrine and statue of Ajax which Antony had taken away and given to Egypt. ”

“ I undertook civil and foreign wars by land and sea throughout the whole world, and as victor I showed mercy to all surviving citizens.17 Foreign peoples, who could be pardoned with safety, I preferred to preserve rather than to destroy. About five hundred thousand Roman citizens took the military oath of allegiance to me.18 Of these I have settled in colonies or sent back to their municipia,19 upon the expiration of their terms of service,20 somewhat over three hundred thousand, and to all these I have given lands purchased by me, or money for farms,21 out of my own means. ”

“ The Saenian law, passed by the people in 724, authorized this proceeding, and the senate’s decree followed. Hence the order, “people and senate.” Cf. Tac. Ann. XI, 25; Dio, LII, 42. An earlier creation of patricians is assigned by Dio to the year 721. But he is probably mistaken, as Tacitus, in the passage just noted, says that Claudius was obliged to create more patricians, “because the number had declined even after being recruited by the dictator Cæsar under the Cassian law, and by Augustus the princeps under the Saenian law.” Such a creation was not a right of the principate. ”

“ Cf. Livy, Epit., CXXXIV. The Greek Strabo, also a contemporary, writes, XVII, 3, 25: “The country committed to him the headship of her sovereignty, and made him lord of peace and war for life.” Later writers, even the Romans, are equally free in their judgments. Dio, LII, I, says: “From this time (725) the affairs of Rome began to be in the control of one man (μοναρχεῖσθαι) .” Cf. Suet. Aug., 28; Tac. Ann., III, 28. Dio’s account of the conference in which Agrippa advises a real abdication by Augustus, and Mæcenas urges a bold assumption of supreme power (LII, 1-40) is regarded as fictitious. ”

“ These tablets perished in the decline of Rome. Centuries passed; men had ceased to ask about them, and there was no idea that they would ever be brought to light. Nor were the original tablets ever found. But in 1555 Buysbecche, a Dutch scholar, was sent on an embassy from the Emperor Ferdinand II. to the Sultan Soliman at Amasia in Asia Minor; and a letter of his, published among others at Frankfort in 1595, tells the story of the discovery of a copy of this epitaph of Augustus. He writes: “On our nineteenth day from Constantinople we reached Ancyra. ”

“ With the crown is generally ob civis servatos, “for preserving the citizens.” The civic crown being the reward of any soldier who saved a citizen’s life, Augustus was pre-eminently deemed worthy of it, because he had saved so many by putting an end to the civil wars, and by his clemency. Cf. Dio, LIII, 16 ”

“ In its present form, the title cannot be the same as that over the original at Rome. All from “as engraved” is certainly an addition, probably made by the Galatian legate who ordered the magistrates of Ancyra to have the inscription placed on the temple of Augustus. The last two words in the Latin (placed first in the English) , were probably inserted only by a blunder at Ancyra. “A copy subjoined,” doubtless stood in the legate’s letter, just as we might write “see enclosure.” But what of the remainder of the inscription, “Of the deeds ... Roman people”? ”

“ No colonies are assigned to Sardinia, the three Gauls and two Germanies, Raetia, Noricum, Bithynia, Pontus, Galatia, Galatian Pontus, Paphlagonia, part of Phrygia, Lycaonia, Isauria, Cilicia, Cyprus, Crete, Egypt, Cyrenaica. As for parts of the empire under subject kings, such as Thrace, Cappadocia, Mauretania, no account is taken of them, though there were certainly colonies in Mauretania, at Cartenna and Tupusuctu. Cf. Pliny, Hist. Nat., V, 2, 20; C. I. L., VIII, 8857.
134 Cf. an article by Mommsen, Hermes, XVIII, 161 ff. on the “Colonies of Italy from Sulla to Vespasian.” ”

“ The Armenians made Artaxes, son of the late Artavasdes, their king. When Octavian overcame Antony he did not befriend all the Oriental enemies of the latter, but for purposes of his own set up a rival to Phraates of Parthia in Tiridates. Cf. c. 32. And, angered at the Armenians, who had dealt harshly with certain Romans in that kingdom, he held as hostages the brothers of king Artaxes, and set Artavasdes of Media over Armenia Minor as a check upon Artaxes. Cf. Dio, LI, 16; LIV, 9. In 734 Augustus went to the East to arrange affairs there. ”

“ This is poorly written both in the Latin and in the Greek; and it is also a very imperfect summary of the document, summing up only what was spent upon games, donations and buildings. The fact that it is in the third person also proves that it is not the work of Augustus. The reckoning by denarii rather than by sesterces points to a Greek origin, and the mention of favors shown by Augustus to provincial towns (cf. c. 4 and notes) would indicate one outside of Rome. ”

“ Embassies have been many times sent to me from the kings of India, a thing never before seen in the case of any ruler of the Romans.140 Our friendship has been sought by means of ambassadors by the Bastarnae and the Scythians, and by the kings of the Sarmatae, who are on either side of the Tanais, and by the kings of the Albani, the Hiberi, and the Medes.141
c. 32. ”

“ This charge is made because Augustus omits all mention of the disaster under Varus. Against this charge Johannes Schmidt defends Augustus, (Philologus, XLV, p. 394, ff.) . The contest between Schmidt and Hirschfeld is based really upon opposing views of the purpose of the Res Gestae. Schmidt believed it to be an epitaph. In this there would be no place for anything save the fortunate events of a life. If nil de mortuis nisi bonum be wise, Augustus might well have adapted the adage to his own case and said, nil de me morituro nisi bonum. ”