The Twelve Caesars by Matthew Dennison Read Free Book Online Page A

presaged his birth in a small house on the Palatine on 23 September 63 BC . At the turning points in his life omens and portents abound. For the early biographer, this
sanction of the numinous serves the essential purpose of exempting Augustus from culpability: the fates have decreed the course of his life – the completion of the transition from Republic to
Empire. It is a dialectic which seeks to erase ambition and which Augustus himself contradicted in those actions and edicts which asserted his dynastic intent and his craving for long continuance
of his settlement: ‘bear with me the hope when I die that the foundations which I have laid for the State will remain unshaken.’ Unrivalled in life in authorityand renown, after his death he received from a grateful state the sanction of divinity. Suetonius subscribes to the irresistibility of that impulse, discounting the political
expediency to Augustus’ successors of his own status as a god.
    His first and best-known opponent, Mark Antony, insisted that Augustus owed everything to a name, the name of Julius Caesar bestowed on him by testamentary adoption following Caesar’s
bloody death. Caesar was Augustus’ great-uncle, though in Rome, inevitably, rumour construed the young Augustus, then called Octavian and described as ‘unusually handsome and
exceedingly graceful’, as the older man’s catamite. (A habit of softening the hairs of his thighs by singeing them with hot walnut shells cannot have helped in the emergence of such a
tradition; Lucius Antonius also claimed that Octavian had offered himself to Aulus Hirtius for 3,000 gold pieces.) But the connection of great-uncle and nephew transcended heredity (or lust): their
affinity was one of character and spirit. Augustus’ mother and stepfather vigorously opposed Octavian’s assumption of Caesar’s name. Atia’s admonishments fell on stony
ground. ‘His divine soul... spurned the counsels of human wisdom,’ Velleius Paterculus records, ‘and he determined to pursue the highest goal with danger rather than a lowly
estate and safety.’ 2 It was indeed the avowal of a ‘Caesar’.
    Cato, we have seen, claimed that Caesar was the only man who undertook to overthrow the Roman state when sober. It was an accusation better levelled at Augustus. For while Caesar, punch-drunk
with ambition, lost sight of political realities, Augustus’ focus never wavered: his sobriety was central to that cult of personality which underpinned his rule. Amassing unprecedented power
and riches – in his final two decades he received 1,400 million sesterces in bequests from friends – he offered Romans a display of considered modesty as accomplishedin its dramatic mendacity as anything presented on the classical stage by those pantomime actors whom he so admired. ‘You must take great care not to write and talk
affectedly,’ he cautioned his granddaughter Agrippina: his instincts recoiled from ostentation even in speech, ‘the noisomeness of far-fetched words’, or the florid style of his
friend Maecenas, sponsor of Virgil, Horace and Propertius, which he dismissed as ‘unguent-dripping curls’. Only Augustus’ ease and affability mitigated a deliberate austerity
inspired by the customs of the Republic, with its emphasis on communal wellbeing. Suetonius pulls no punches: ‘In the... details of his life it is generally agreed that he was most temperate
and without even the suspicion of any fault.’
    He lived in the same small house on the Palatine for forty years. His furniture was such as would stifle pride in a middling citizen of Hadrian’s reign, the time of Suetonius’
writing. There was a cultivated ordinariness to his clothes, which he claimed his sister Octavia, his wife Livia or his daughter Julia made for him (incredible claims in relation to Livia and
Julia). He ate simple food sparingly: green figs, coarse bread, small fishes, handmade moist cheese, a handful of dates or firm grapes, sharp