The Augustan Empire 43 BC

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.