Augustus: Two Traditions

A Reflection on James Hankins

The New Digest is pleased to present a guest post by Professor Simon Malloch of the Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Nottingham.

A preliminary note from Professor Malloch follows: “Professor Vermeule’s recent essay, Dominus Mundi, drew my attention to James Hankins’s article about Augustus for First Things. Hankins’s consideration of the ancient traditions on Augustus prompted the following thoughts about Tacitus’s place in that tradition; for a more detailed treatment see my essay, which is available to download free here. This is the first of two contributions to The New Digest; a second, to be published later this year, will consider Tacitus’s views on the constitutional arrangements of the Roman Republic and Principate.”

James Hankins offers a balanced assessment of Rome’s most important emperor in his essay, ‘Augustus and the Salvation of Rome’ (First Things, II.7.23). He sees in Augustus a warlord who emerged from the crisis of the Roman Republic to become the model statesman of a Rome re-founded in his own image. The reassuring moral of the story, Hankins writes, is that ‘crises eventually pass, and bad times can summon great leaders from the most unexpected sources’.

Hankins is rightly attentive to the ancient traditions about Augustus. Nicolaus of Damascus, writing under Augustus, and Velleius Paterculus, writing under Tiberius, were adulatory. They illustrate how regime-friendly history could be written under Rome. Suetonius, writing in the second century, provides ‘a mixed portrait’ of Augustus’s character and activities. The Roman senator of Greek origin, Cassius Dio, writing in the third century, ‘highlights Augustus’s extraordinary accomplishments in refounding the Roman state and discounts the sins of his early career as driven by necessity’. Dio ‘had a better grasp of the obvious’ because he could assess Augustus from the safe and sober distance of two hundred years.

Tacitus’s handling of Augustus fares less well:

Historians in the republican tradition since Tacitus have held that Augustus remained the same scheming tyrant he had always been, pretending to restore the Republic while actually laying the foundations of his own autocracy. Others more appreciative of his statesmanship have seen Octavian’s earlier repulsive behavior as driven by Machiavellian necessity, imposed by the corruption of the late republic; whereas, after Actium, unchallenged control of the state revealed in him a virtue and a genius for wise leadership hitherto hidden from the world. When Octavian became Augustus, a populist warlord was somehow transformed into a visionary statesman.’

For Hankins, the hostile ‘republican tradition’ originated in Tacitus’s treatment of Augustus in the first book of the Annals. Tacitus stands in stark contrast to ‘others’ transmitting a more favourable appraisal. The truth is that both these traditions are found in Tacitus.

Tacitus offers a panorama of views on Augustus at his funeral in A.D. 14. Different preoccupations and interpretations are attributed to different groups of spectators. ‘The majority’ were preoccupied with idle observations about Augustus’s life and with toting up his public offices and honours. Then a pointed contrast: ‘Sensible men (prudentes), however, spoke variously of his life with praise and censure’ (Annals 1.9, trans Church and Brodribb). Tacitus proceeds to articulate first the favourable and then the censorious reading of Augustus’s career.

The apologia of Augustus offered by the friendly prudentes is basically Hankins’s ‘appreciative’ tradition:

Dutiful feeling towards a father, and the necessities of the res publica (tempora rei publicae) in which laws had then no place, drove him into civil war, which can neither be planned nor conducted on any right principles. He had often yielded to Antonius, while he was taking vengeance on his father's murderers, often also to Lepidus. When the latter sank into feeble dotage and the former had been ruined by his profligacy, the only remedy for his distracted country was the rule of a single man. Yet the State had been organized under the name neither of a kingdom nor a dictatorship, but under that of a princeps. The ocean and remote rivers were the boundaries of the empire; the legions, provinces, fleets, all things were linked together; there was law for the citizens; there was respect shown to the allies. The capital had been embellished on a grand scale; only in a few instances had he resorted to force, simply to secure general tranquillity (Annals 1.9.3-5, trans Church and Brodribb).

The apologists take the line that Augustus was a virtuous and wise leader forced by circumstances into a bloody civil war or to use violence as a means to a noble end. The blackest stain of Augustus’s role in the proscriptions was not, in Hankins’s words, ‘hard... to dismiss’. It was excused: Augustus yielded to necessity, his hand forced by his Triumviral peers.

The ‘other’ prudentes urge a dark interpretation that Hankins identifies with Tacitus and his followers: ‘Augustus remained the same scheming tyrant he had always been, pretending to restore the Republic while actually laying the foundations of his own autocracy’. This tradition filtered Augustus’s action through the lens of dissimulation:

Filial duty and necessities of the res publica were merely assumed as a mask. It was really from a lust of sovereignty (cupidine dominandi) that he had excited the veterans by bribery, had, when a young man and a subject, raised an army, tampered with the Consul's legions, and feigned an attachment to the faction of Pompeius (1.1o.1, trans Church and Brodribb).

The consuls Hirtius and Pansa, the opponents continue, perhaps died by Augustus’s ‘treacherous machinations’ (1.1o.2). Pompey was ‘deluded by the phantom of peace’, Lepidus ‘by the mask of friendship’ , and Antony was ‘lured’ into, and paid the penalty for, a ‘treacherous alliance’ (1.10.3).

Tacitus and the detractors share common ground in their emphasis on Augustus’s dissimulation. Tacitus has already introduced the notion in his treatment of Augustus at the start of the Annals. Achieving sole supremacy saw Augustus drop the title of triumvir, parade himself as consul, and content himself with the tribunician power (1.2.1). This language of ‘parading’ and ‘contenting’ is carefully chosen. In Augustus’s hands the consulship and tribunician power were limited, legal expressions of a power that was in reality total, above and beyond constitutional limits – dominatio (‘despotism’), as Tacitus calls it (1.3.1). Augustus, in Tacitus’s view, wore a mask of legitimate power that disguised illegitimate power.

Dissimulation becomes a leitmotiv of the Annals, strongly characterising in particular the principate of Tiberius. But it would be wrong to suppose that this shared concept is a sign that Tacitus identified himself totally with the negative tradition about Augustus. Tacitus does not, for example, simply blame Augustus for the deaths of Hirtius and Pansa. He does not have the detractors respond to all the claims made by the apologists about Rome and her empire under the pax Augusta (1.9.5); the detractors’ concentration on the bloodshed of this peace loses some of its sting because the apologists foresaw that objection (Augustus, again, acted out of necessity). While Tacitus and the detractors share the language of dominatio, Tacitus and the apologists share the language of princeps, the informal designation of Augustus’s supreme status, and res publica, the form of state that he (re)established. Above all, it is revealing that Tacitus transmitted a positive assessment of Augustus at all: he took the apologists as seriously as the detractors, preferring the dual perspective of ‘sensible men’ over the trifling observations of the majority.

It is fairer than simply identifying Tacitus with a hostile reading of Augustus to observe that his trick of presenting contrasting perspectives produced the ultimate ‘mixed portrait’ of Augustus to survive from Antiquity.  To Hankins’ moral we can therefore add another. Tacitus’s presentation of Augustus as complex figure offers encouragement to resist one-dimensional moralising about the past and to embrace the complexity of history and its actors.