Deeds of the Divine Augustus

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The elegant simplicity of Augustus's writing is well reflected in the Deeds of the Divine Augustus. The text consists of simple declarative statements of fact, not complicated explanations and justifications. Although the result builds up Augustus's image, the style is not boastful or exaggerating. The text projects Augustus's favored image of himself as the restorer of the republic and protector of the Roman people.

The Deeds does not answer charges made against Augustus by his enemies, as his earlier literary autobiography (now lost except for a few fragments) did. Rather, the later text presents an ideal vision of the state Augustus built. It is a state in which the leader rights injustice and guarantees peace, liberty, and prosperity. The document is not in any sense a full historical accounting of Augustus's reign but instead offers listings of what he did for the Roman people and the Roman state in very practical terms—and only after that of the glory he derived from those benefactions. The style of the Deeds grew out of the genre of the eulogium, an oration made by a son or other relative at the funeral of a great man, listing his deeds. At times these deeds were recorded as inscriptions. Augustus himself had developed this kind of writing, and in the Forum of Augustus he set up statues of many of the leading figures of Roman history together with their eulogia. But the Deeds of the Divine Augustus transformed this biographical approach into a personal narrative of extraordinary emotive power as well as of profound historical richness (for all that it glosses over many suspect aspects of Augustus's rule). The first-person account of Augustus's own reign is a unique historical source for a period that lacks many contemporary sources comparable to the letters of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) or Pliny the Younger (ca. 61–113 CE).

A comparison of the Deeds of the Divine Augustus to other historical sources shows that it omits as much as it reveals about Augustus's reign. Although Augustus admits to holding unconstitutional extraordinary office as a triumvir, nothing is said about the triumvirate's policy of proscription (whereby opponents, including hundreds of senators, were legally murdered), or of his resettlement of military veterans loyal to himself on land confiscated illegally from Roman citizens in Italy, or of his suppression of the consequent resistance movement by massacre. He mentions his recovery of Roman military standards lost before his time to the Parthians (at Carrhae, in Mesopotamia, in 53 BCE) but not the loss of three more standards in Germany by his legate Publius Quinctilius Varus, whose army was destroyed in one of the greatest military disasters in Roman history at Teutoburg Forest (9 CE). Augustus's enemies in civil wars, who held grants of imperium from the Roman Senate (making them official officers of the state) no different from his own, are described as a faction or as pirates or assassins. Augustus could hardly have been unaware of his shortcomings in these respects compared with the ideal he presents in the document, but perhaps one of its purposes was to offer guidance for how emperors ought to act in times to come.

Res gestae divi Augusti is provided as the document's title on the Monumentum Ancyranum, a temple to Augustus in modern-day Ankara, Turkey, and on the other inscribed copies from Phrygia. A summary of the text is attached to the end of the Monumentum Ancyranum inscription, composed certainly not by Augustus but rather probably by the provincial administration in Ancyra.

Sections 1 and 2: Threat to the Republic

Augustus first of all portrays himself as the savior of the republic. The event being described—the 43 BCE march on Rome with an army of Caesar's veterans—may also be seen as Augustus's making sure that Mark Antony (the faction mentioned in the document) did not seize dictatorial power for himself without giving Augustus a share. Indeed, after the presence of his army in the city forced the senate to give him a grant of imperium—the executive power that enabled Roman magistrates to enforce law and carry out their duties—and then the consulship, Augustus did enter into the shared dictatorship known as the triumvirate with Antony and the relatively insignificant Lepidus. By the same token, the two battles at Philippi against Caesar's assassins in October 42 BCE more accurately constituted a civil war, and although Augustus's troops certainly participated, the victories were won under the command of Antony.

Sections 3–14: Augustus's Victories and Honors

The most important traditional measure of a Roman politician was his war record, and Augustus dutifully supplies his. He had three triumphs (the ovation is a lesser form of the triumph), famous military parades through the city awarded to victorious generals, and more besides that he declined out of modesty (section 4). Military victories were of service to the Roman people in that they extended the empire as well as humbled the proud foreign kings who had dared exult themselves above ordinary Romans. Augustus also tells his audience that his victories accomplished something unique in living memory and which had happened only twice in all of Roman history: They brought peace. In Rome this rarity was signaled by the closing of the doors of the temple of Janus, which Augustus achieved three times (section 13). Here Augustus had no need to fabricate. His rule brought an end to civil wars as well as to foreign wars of conquest fueled by competition between rival magistrates vying for political power.

Augustus begins in this section the meticulous numerical cataloging of his achievements, with the numbers of soldiers loyal to him in the hundreds of thousands (as noted in section 3), and the increase in the number of Roman citizens counted by his censuses in the millions (from section 8). He employs this cataloging technique throughout the Deeds. The use of such precise numbers certainly lends an aura of plausibility to the whole text, while their size would have been awe-inspiring to a largely innumerate Roman populace. The frequent recourse to figures may also relate to the document's genre as an inscription, a form that dealt with the realities of government—such as amounts of taxation, sizes of naval expenditures, and topics of that kind—rather than literary matters. Augustus gives dates in the usual Roman manner by citing the names of the two consuls for a given year. This was the standard practice, rather than reckoning dates from some absolute mark such as the BCE/CE divide now used.

Augustus also lists the various magistracies he held (sections 6 and 8) and, just as important, those he did not hold (section 5). He was hailed as imperator (commander) by his troops, and this is the same title that eventually became most closely associated with the Roman emperors; indeed, it is the etymological origin of the English word emperor. However, at that time any successful general would receive such acclamation, and the association of this title with the sole Roman ruler was not yet firmly established. The variety of titles he held indicates the difficulties Augustus faced in finding the right constitutional form to legitimize his power. After his highly irregular office as the sole surviving triumvir lapsed, Augustus held the consulship each year from 27 BCE to 23 BCE, but this soon proved unnecessary and prevented him from rewarding loyal senators with the office that he himself occupied, the highest one available. After Augustus set aside his consulship (while retaining a permanent grant of imperium superior to the consuls'), he was offered the dictatorship by the senate but declined it. Although it was a traditional office, it had been used only in times of national crisis. The use of the title to keep permanent power in peacetime looked like what it was, a subterfuge—one that had made Julius Caesar unpopular enough to be assassinated.

In 23 BCE Augustus reached a new constitutional settlement, and he began to date his reign from that time. (Later historians like Dio Cassius would claim that this amounted to the restoration of the republic.) In this dispensation the mechanism of Augustus's rule became the “tribunician power” (section 10). This obscure term most likely referred to the plebeian magistrates from much earlier in the history of the republic, called tribunes, who protected the interests of the common people from the aristocratic classes; Augustus, as a patrician, could not be a tribune, so he was instead granted the powers of one. This symbolic role of protecting the common man was probably more important than the actual power of the office to veto any government action. Other titles were traditional and honorific, such as princeps senatus (noted in section 7), which meant that he had the right to speak first in senatorial debate. Inasmuch as Roman religion was a function of the state, Augustus held all of the most important priestly offices, including that of high priest (section 7), or “pontifex maximus,” once it was vacated by the death in 12 BCE of the triumvir Lepidus, who had been under house arrest since 36 BCE.

Sections 15–24: Augustus's Benefactions

In these sections Augustus lists his outright gifts, beginning with gifts of money and food paid to the population of the city of Rome, that is, to its masses of urban poor (sections 15 and 18). He then lists the payments in cash and land that he gave to military veterans who had served under him (section 16). He mentions only after these instances where he made up a deficit in the government's budget from his private resources, which, of course, also benefited the Roman citizens in a broader collective sense. Augustus next turns to his building program (sections 19–21). He rebuilt nearly all the public buildings in Rome, including not only infrastructure such as aqueducts, bridges, and roads but also temples, theaters, and stadia for chariot racing and gladiatorial sport (22 and 23). He also catalogues all of the public shows he put on, which besides the entertainment provided also entailed additional gifts of cash and food to the spectators. Last, he mentions his restoration of treasures looted by Mark Antony from temples in Asia (meaning the Ionian coast of modern-day Turkey) and his exchange of statues dedicated in his own honor into treasures devoted to the gods, marks of public piety (section 24).

If Augustus's many titles and magistracies were a search for an acceptable expression of his political power, this section begins to suggest its actual source. Roman society and government had an intricate mixture of public and official and private and unofficial power relationships. A powerful man was a patron to a vast array of clients encompassing his family, his political allies, and men with whom he had economic connections. The patron provided protection, for example, in the law courts, but also ensured the survival as well as the prosperity of his clients. In return, the clients provided political backing in the form of votes and military support. Figures like Antony, Brutus, and Augustus were the heads of large clientage networks that included all classes, from senators down to the ranks of the urban poor. In his rise to power, Augustus consolidated all of the patronage relations in Rome under his control to pave the way for his official political advancement. The gifts Augustus mentions in this document constituted his recompense for the support of the people as a whole as his clients. The unified support of the Roman people eventually made it impossible for anyone to oppose Augustus at a political level. This was why the specific political form given to Augustus's political power was a secondary consideration.

Sections 25–33: Civil War and Foreign Successes

Although Augustus here omits more than he says, these sections begin with a description of his victories in civil wars. The pirates (section 25) he rather dramatically refers to were led by Sextus Pompey, the son of Pompey the Great and the last republican opponent of the triumvirs. Augustus indeed gained victory in a war waged intermittently over several years until Sextus Pompey's final defeat in 36 BCE. Far from being a pirate, however, Sextus, by the agreement of Octavian and Antony themselves, was governor of Sicily and Sardinia and consul designate. The “war in which I was victorious at Actium” was the last civil war against Antony. As described in sections 26–28, Augustus's expansion of the empire was quite modest, except for his annexation of Egypt, brought about by Queen Cleopatra's support of Antony. He attempted to organize Germany as a province, but the terrible military defeat in the Teutoburg Forest that ended his plans is not mentioned. In general, Augustus tried to find defensible borders for the empire without greatly expanding its size—in contrast, for example, to Julius Caesar, who had planned before his assassination to conquer Parthia (present-day Iraq and Iran). In fact, Augustus's greatest diplomatic success was the recovery from Parthia of the three legionary standards or eagles (section 29) that had been lost in a military disaster under the republic-era general Marcus Licinius Crassus.

Sections 34–35: The Restoration of the Republic

At the end of the document, Augustus recounts his grant by the Roman Senate of the titles Augustus (January 16, 27 BCE) and “Father of my Country” (February 5, 2 BCE). He begins to address the truth of the source of his power when he says that he received “by universal consent the absolute control of affairs.” He was able to relinquish the constitutional form of absolute power and allow the republic to work as it had always done precisely because he retained universal consent and no one would use the machinery of government to challenge him. Those who might have challenged him on ideological grounds, such as Cicero, had long since been proscribed. No power base among the people outside Augustus's control existed after the defeat of the republicans (Brutus, Cassius, and Sextus Pompey) and Antony. Those who survived wanted peace and the prosperity it brought, and Augustus was able to give them both. Augustus found a more politic way to present this reality: “I took precedence of all in rank, but of power I possessed no more than those who were my colleagues in any magistracy.”