The man who would later be called Augustus was born Gaius Octavius on the 23rd of September 63 BC, the son of a respectable but not distinguished family from the Italian town of Velitrae. His mother Atia was the niece of Julius Caesar, which made the boy Caesar's grand-nephew and, by the will Caesar drew up in 45 BC, his posthumously adopted son. When Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March, 44 BC, Octavian was eighteen and studying in Apollonia (Albania). He returned to Italy at once, claimed the inheritance over the protests of his elder relatives, took Caesar's name and his political base among the Caesarian veterans, and put himself forward, at nineteen, as the heir of the murdered dictator. In the civil wars that followed — first against the senatorial faction at Mutina, then in the alliance with Mark Antony and Lepidus (the Second Triumvirate, formalised in November 43 BC), then against Antony at Actium in September 31 BC — he was, every time, on the winning side. He was thirty-two when the last of his rivals committed suicide in Alexandria in August 30 BC. He was master of the Roman world.
The political problem he faced — and solved, in three iterations between 27 BC and 23 BC — was that the Republic, formally, still existed. The Senate still met. The consuls were still elected. The magistracies, the assemblies, the law courts, were all functioning. The political theory of the Roman Republic held that the murder of Julius Caesar had been a justified act against a man who had tried to make himself king. Octavian's task, in the years after his victory, was to take effective monarchical power without using any of the words — king, dictator, master — that had got Caesar killed.
The Res Publica Restituta
His solution was announced in a famous Senate session on the 13th of January 27 BC. Octavian formally renounced his triumviral powers, declared that the Republic was restored to the Senate and the Roman people, and made it understood that he expected the Senate to ask him to take charge again. The Senate, in a session whose script had clearly been prepared in advance, did so. Octavian was granted a ten-year proconsular command over the provinces that contained Roman armies (essentially: Spain, Gaul, Syria, Egypt — all the provinces where soldiers were stationed). He was granted the new honorific title Augustus — "the revered one," with strong religious connotations — which he would use for the rest of his life and which would become the standard title of every Roman emperor for the next two hundred years. He was given the right to wear a wreath of laurel and to have a wreath of oak hung over his door, marking him as the saviour of the citizens. He was not given any office not already known to the Republic. The whole arrangement was, formally, a senatorial honour to a private citizen.
The substantive effect was that Augustus controlled the armies and the provinces that mattered, while the Senate ran the (already pacified) interior provinces and the city of Rome. A second settlement in 23 BC tidied up the remaining problems: he resigned the consulship he had held since 27 BC, but was granted the tribunician power for life (the legal protection of the people's tribune, plus the right to convene the Senate and propose legislation) and the higher form of proconsular authority that overrode the ordinary provincial governors. He was now formally a private citizen with the legal authority of a tribune and the military command of every important army. In Latin he was princeps — "first citizen" — a deliberately modest term. We call the system that resulted the Principate, though no Roman ever used that word.
The constitutional fiction
The fiction that Augustus had not changed the constitution was important to him and, for a generation, to the political class. It was preserved with care. Augustus was scrupulous about consulting the Senate, attending its meetings, voting his single vote in the consular elections, and avoiding any ceremonial that suggested kingship. He refused the dictatorship (offered to him by the people during a grain shortage in 22 BC). He insisted on being treated as one Roman among others. When his colleague Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa died in 12 BC, Augustus delivered the funeral oration himself; when his beloved nephew Marcellus had died in 23 BC, Augustus had simply attended the funeral as a family member. The public character of the regime was that of a slightly first-among-equals senator.
The private reality was that the Roman state was now a hereditary monarchy in everything but name. The treasury, the army, the appointments, and the policy were Augustus's. By 14 AD, when he died at Nola at the age of seventy-five, the principle of dynastic succession had been quietly established by a series of adoptions (Marcellus, Agrippa, Lucius and Gaius Caesar, finally Tiberius), and the Senate confirmed Augustus's stepson Tiberius as the new princeps within days. Tiberius held all the titles and powers that Augustus had held; the constitutional position was inherited, not re-issued. The Roman Republic had been over, in substance, since 27 BC. It would now also be over, in substance, in the next generation's eyes.
"I transferred the Republic from my power to the dominion of the Senate and the people of Rome." — Augustus, Res Gestae Divi Augusti, c. 14 AD
The achievements of the reign
The forty-one years of Augustus's effective rule (31 BC – 14 AD) are the longest single period in Roman history without civil war. The borders of the empire were stabilised on the Rhine, the Danube, the Euphrates, and the Sahara, where they would remain, with minor adjustments, for the next four hundred years. The standing army was professionalised as a paid career of twenty-five years, with a fixed pay scale and a generous retirement bonus paid from a new state veterans' fund (the aerarium militare, set up in 6 AD). The provincial administration was reorganised; the worst of the Republican-era extortion by provincial governors was suppressed. The grain dole that fed the urban population of Rome was put on a stable footing under an imperial prefect.
The capital itself was visibly transformed. Augustus and his colleague Agrippa built or rebuilt twelve major temples, a new senate house, three forums (the Forum of Caesar, the Forum of Augustus, and the so-called Temple of Mars Ultor), a new theatre (of Marcellus), the first stone amphitheatre, a new mausoleum (in which Augustus and his family were buried), the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace, dedicated 9 BC), the Pantheon (in its original Agrippan form; the surviving building is Hadrian's reconstruction), and a network of new aqueducts to bring water to the new public baths. Augustus's claim, in old age, that he had "found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble," was substantively accurate, if rhetorically polished. He also reformed the urban infrastructure of fire-fighting, policing, flood control, and water supply. The institutional shape of the city, and of the empire's relationship to it, was set for the next three centuries.
The succession
The dynasty's central weakness — and the central weakness of the Principate as a system — was the succession. Augustus had no surviving sons; his daughter Julia was his only child by Scribonia, his second wife. His successors had to be made: by adoption, by marriage, by careful grooming of the next generation. The first two candidates (his nephew Marcellus, his step-grandsons Gaius and Lucius Caesar) all died young in unrelated circumstances. The eventual heir, Tiberius — son of Augustus's third wife Livia by her previous marriage — was an able and experienced military commander, but a sour personality whom Augustus disliked and to whom he turned only after every other option had died. The pattern would repeat: many of the worst Roman emperors came to the throne because they were the only adult male relative left alive.
Augustus died at Nola on the 19th of August, 14 AD, having outlived almost everyone whose succession he might have preferred. His last reported words, in Suetonius's account, were a joke about life as a stage play: "Since I have played my part well, all clap your hands, and from the stage dismiss me with applause." He was deified by the Senate within a month. Tiberius succeeded without incident, holding the same titles and the same powers. The Principate, born as a personal arrangement between one man and the Senate, was now an institutional office. The Empire was beginning.
End of Chapter I