Deeds of the Divine Augustus

Context

Throughout the first century BCE the Roman Empire suffered a general crisis. The extent of the empire already included most of the Mediterranean basin, yet it was still governed by a political system—the republic—that originally evolved to serve a small city-state. The result was that the offices of magistrates such as the two consuls, the republic's elected heads of government, tended to grow and gain new powers that the city's constitution had never planned, leading to the creation of private armies and civil wars. As a result, the last century of the Roman Republic saw periods of dictatorship under Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Julius Caesar, while attempts to restore stability to the government only ended in renewed chaos. The mood of the time was suggested by the poet Horace, who imagined civil war as a curse brought down on Rome when the city's mythical founder, Romulus, killed his twin brother, Remus.

On the ides of March in 44 BCE, Julius Caesar was assassinated by a conspiracy of aristocratic leaders including the generals Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, possibly with the complicity of his own lieutenant Mark Antony. Caesar's heir Octavian, the future Augustus, swiftly moved to protect himself and his interests. He marched on Rome with an army composed of Caesar's veterans, whom he paid with illegally seized funds that had been collected to pay for Caesar's planned invasion of Parthia. He drove Antony out of Rome as Antony had driven out the assassins. The next year Octavian and Antony's forces skirmished in northern Italy, but by the fall the two had joined forces together with Marcus Aemilius Lepidus to form the triumvirate, an extralegal body that seized dictatorial control over Rome and eventually defeated its rivals, the assassins Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, in Macedonia in 42 BCE and the last surviving republican leader, Sextus Pompey, the son of Caesar's enemy Pompey the Great, in 36 BCE. Lepidus proved to be a minor figure, and Octavian and Antony split the Roman Empire in 40 BCE, with Octavian receiving the western half, including Italy. Since the two leaders were rivals more than allies, this situation could not last and finally led to a civil war decided at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, resulting in Octavian's control of the entire Roman world. Octavian, who was granted the title Augustus in 27 BCE, tried various constitutional reforms to organize his rule and adopted a defensive posture at Rome's borders, expanding them only slightly, to militarily logical frontiers. In this way the last decades of his life were dedicated to consolidating power and strengthening the internal cohesion of the empire so that it could survive his death without falling into chaos.

After Augustus's death, Tiberius, his stepson and heir, read out the will in the Roman Senate, including instructions to post the Deeds of the Divine Augustus on bronze plaques on his mausoleum. An updated copy of the text covering Augustus's last year of life was also inscribed in the cities of the Roman province of Galatia, providing the only surviving source for the text. The Deeds of the Divine Augustus thus presents an account of his reign viewed from its end in 14 CE. Its message, put briefly, is that Augustus “restored liberty to the republic.” Yet this is not the only possible interpretation of his reign. His career of civil war, massacre (at times so outrageous that some of his enemies accused him of committing human sacrifices with the lives of Roman citizens), and self-aggrandizement looked very different as it was being conducted than it did when, at the end, he had finally achieved peace and stability. The historian Cornelius Tacitus, writing a century later in the beginning of his Annals, describes Augustus as having actually founded a monarchy. Another century later, the historian Dio Cassius was able to unify the different interpretations, portraying Augustus as both liberator of the people and enslaver of the republic. These repeated reevaluations show in the first place the continued importance Romans assigned to the reign of Augustus in thinking about their government. Indeed, what Augustus achieved was the establishment of a monarchy that maintained all the outward forms of a republic. The evolution of Augustus's titles and offices recorded in the Deeds of the Divine Augustus is not a history of his quest for power but rather a recounting of his pursuit of a form to express his power that would satisfy the people and yet not alienate the aristocratic classes whose support he also needed.

The beginning of the Roman Empire is ambiguous. There are many important events in the reign of Augustus—his first grant of imperium (executive power), his victory over Antony, his two constitutional settlements—none of which mark a precise beginning of the Roman Empire or even a definite end of the Roman Republic. The process of Augustus's political career, its length and success, created a new situation that could never have been planned or foreseen. If his whole reign is the gestation of the empire, there is no single moment when one can say it was given birth, although its enduring success was by no means clear until his successor, Tiberius, took power without opposition or political disturbance.