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

apples, cucumber and young lettuce, that diet Tityrus
offers Meliboeus in Virgil’s first Eclogue ; occasionally he soaked his bread in cold water. He drank with similar restraint. Assiduous in the service of the state, he worked late into
the night free from the befuddlement of gluttony or hard drinking. His study was small, squirrelled out of sight at the top of the house and called ‘Syracuse’ in reference to the
mathematician and philosopher Archimedes. Physical discomfort was a badge of honour, proof of the wholeheartedness of his dedication to Rome’s custodianship. When his granddaughter Julia
built a particularly sumptuous country retreat, Augustus pulled it down. So easily was luxury sacrificed to a political manifesto.Cynical sources may doubt the sincerity of
this affectation of the mundane: none can deny the rigour of Augustus’ stance.
    His legacy is fecund, the cultural and economic efflorescence of his reign symptomatic of fertility at a moment when Roman strength burgeoned at home and abroad. But Augustus himself, although a
dedicated philanderer whose interest in sex never faltered, had only a single child. Julia was his daughter by his first wife, Scribonia, a stern-faced matron of the old school whom he divorced on
the day of Julia’s birth on the flimsy pretext that he was ‘unable to put up with her shrewish disposition’. (In fact he was consumed with lust for Livia and, conspicuously
parvenu in a political environment of entrenched snobbery, equally desperate for the unique political legitimacy of Livia’s aristocratic Claudian heritage.) The story of Augustus’ reign
is one of consistent political realignment, of the transference of powers associated with formerly elected offices to an unelected head of state. The human drama, first played out behind closed
doors on the Palatine and afterwards in the more public arena of coinage and consulships, focuses on Augustus’ quest, in the absence of a son of his own, for an heir for these greedily
hoarded powers. In itself it indicates the success of the princeps ’ process of encroachment and monopoly. It was a search which would consume significant energies on Augustus’
part. His eventual choice of successor shaped the course of the principate as surely as any of his actions.

    In 44 BC , Gaius Octavianus, a sickly and catarrhal young man of equestrian stock, described by Suetonius as well endowed with birthmarks but inclining to
shortness and even limping on occasion, recognized a challenge: ‘he considered nothingmore incumbent on him than to avenge his uncle’s death.’ The uncle in
question was a great-uncle, the brother of his maternal grandfather’s wife Julia. Julius Caesar’s death on the Ides of March elevated him to the position of most famous man in the Roman
world. He would afterwards become a god; in the meantime he was the first of many casualties of the death-throes of the Roman Republic. Without a son of his own, he had divided his immense fortune
between the people of Rome, bequeathing to every man 300 sesterces and gardens beyond the Tiber, and the studious youth in whom we assume he glimpsed something of himself. He also offered to Gaius
Octavianus that lustrous name whose incalculable value his fellow consul Mark Antony correctly estimated, and the combined loyalty of troops and clients across the Roman world. Under the Republic,
no man could leave more. The unprecedented position occupied by Caesar was his by gift of the senate and the people of Rome, an amalgam of constitutional empowerments invested in him personally,
not his to bestow. For a puny stripling studying rhetoric in Illyricum, its august resonance represented nevertheless a sonorous wake-up call.
    To the friends who greeted Octavian on his return to Rome in early May 44 BC , the exact nature of his inheritance from Caesar was clear: ‘at the moment of his
entering the city, men saw above his head the orb of the sun with a circle above