Founder of the Roman Empire in 27 BC, Augustus is a man full of ambiguities: republican but autocrat, conqueror but peacemaker, inventor of a tradition, he governs like a sphinx. A biography highlights the news of his reign.
Augustus always discouraged his biographers. From Velleius Paterculus, his contemporary, to Claude Nicolet (1930-2010), specialist in ancient Rome, many people have given up writing the life of the first Roman emperor. Because he, a master of ambiguities, has given historians little leverage: he is a sphinx who governs as such. We can hardly say that he was the man of the “permanent coup d’état”, taking care not to define the regime that he helped to establish.
Another emperor, Julian the Apostate (IVe century AD BC), just as undulating as his distant predecessor, characterized Augustus well: “Chameleon changing color, by turns pale, red, black, brown, dark, and then afterwards charming like Venus and the Graces, ( who) wants to have eyes as piercing as the rays of the great Sun so that no one can bear its gaze.”
The emperor often changed his face, but also his name: born Octavian, he became “Octavian” after his adoption by Caesar, then “Augustus” by decision of the Roman Senate. With him, duplicity is embodied in power: republican but autocrat, conqueror but peacemaker, inventor of tradition.
The disturbing news of Auguste
The tortuous journey of this head of state ideally lent itself to a mirror story, like the one offered to us by Frédéric Hurlet, professor at the University of Paris X Nanterre, the author of this new biography. That the posterity of the Augustan myth is as important as its reign strictly understood (27 BC to 14 AD), this book says it forcefully, against those who would have wanted everything to be stopped when the great man died.
Today’s reader, living in the France of 2016, will be struck by the news of this Augustus. At the end of the civil wars, the Romans also experienced a prolonged “state of emergency” to the point of dissolving into institutions: this was the coup de force of January 27 BC. BC, which allowed the emperor to be granted exceptional powers, although on the surface preserving traditional political forms.
Add that, under the principate of Augustus, the Romans experienced a redivision of Italy into eleven large regions; which testifies to administrative rationalization and a policy of geographical expertise, closely linked to a refinement of taxation.
Finally, Auguste’s subjects were, like the French, filled with discourse on the “social divide”, the dissensiowhich the emperor claimed to absorb. His government wanted to be a return to the good old days, to the golden age. The closing of the doors of the temple of Janus in 29 BC. AD, a gesture which proclaims the end of wars, goes in this direction, as does the construction of the Altar of Peace, between 13 and 9 BC. Augustus boasts of restoring harmony between citizens, universal consensus.
A 12 year old speaker
Fortunately, like any good history book, Hurlet’s work is not reduced to an analogy with present times. Roman Antiquity is disorienting and destabilizing. This is one of its great anthropological virtues. So, how can we not be surprised by the criticisms leveled against Auguste’s family origins?
Some of his political enemies point out that he is only the son of a banker. Today, this way of disqualifying him would miss its goal. Among the Romans, on the contrary, banking is a commercial activity which betrays the “bourgeois”, the one who cannot count on the income from vast agricultural properties to ensure his lifestyle.
Among the ancestors of Augustus, the Roman aristocracy also believed to find a perfumer, a baker, so many professions considered shameful. And this lackluster family, what’s more, has as its original homeland the small town of Velitrae (today Velletri): a piece of the world, a wild land! However, it is only about forty kilometers from Rome.
Initially, Octave/Auguste is therefore a man without qualities – or almost. But his mother, Atia, had the good idea of having him born in a very symbolic place (p. 27): in a house located on the Palatine, the hill where Rome is said to have been founded by Romulus. A coincidence soon exploited by the future head of state, who wants to be a re-founder of the Roman city. Orphaned very early on, Octave was also a precocious adolescent, capable of delivering a eulogy for his grandmother Julia in the middle of a forum, at only 12 years old (p. 35).
He pleases his great-uncle, who is none other than Julius Caesar. Without delay, his youth took a warlike turn. Civil conflicts, which occupy a good part of the Ier century BC BC, forced Octavian to take a position, especially since he was from Caesar’s family. Thus he can summarize, all to his glory, the way in which he rushed into these internal wars: “At the age of 19, by personal decision and at my own expense, I raised an army with which I restored freedom to the Republic. »
The Republic for the benefit of one man
The whole issue of the period lies precisely in the future of this Res publicato its declared agony, to its suckers. The republican regime born five centuries earlier changed shape to the point of no longer belonging to itself. With Augustus, it is the Republic continued for the benefit of a single man. All known institutions are left as they are, except that they are emptied of part of their substance. Augustan policy is the opposite of a blank slate (see, in particular, the pages on “co-regency”, p. 145 et seq.).
The emperor retains, but confuses the cards of the republican game. He pretends not to want this immense auctoritas with which he is adorned. He claims to save what can be saved. He deals with a Roman oligarchy that emerged bloodless from the civil wars. And the majority of his “opinion” follows him.
Since no Roman jurist, no “constitutionalist” was able to give it a name, how can we define this new Augustan State, destined to last until 476 AD? AD? It is here that the third part of the book (“The metamorphoses of the myth of Augustus”), devoted to the variety of historiographical interpretations, reveals all its interest. Hurlet shows the difficulties encountered by the Moderns in the face of this institutional monster: the imperial regime.
In The Six Books of the Republic (1576), Jean Bodin wanted to believe in popular sovereignty preserved under the principate. Montesquieu made Augustus a monarch who “gently” led the Romans to “lasting servitude”. Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), best specialist on Roman issues in the XIXe century, saw in the government of Augustus a diarchy, that is to say a sharing of power between the emperor and the Senate, a state with two heads. Closer to us, Ronald Syme (1903-1989) described the emperor-in-chief as a “syndicate”, at the top of an authoritarian regime, which hides with great difficulty its main actors: an oligarchy disinclined to share powers.
If – very fortunately – it does not provide a definitive answer to the mystery of the Augustan regime, this new biography of Augustus has the great merit of confronting a character who, as Velleius Paterculus anticipated, exhausts his exegetes. A strange head of state who, throughout his life, looked for successors, who died one after the other, to finally fall back on his son-in-law, Tiberius, in order to prolong the imperial “experience”.
Augustus is this prince whose image fossilizes during his reign; the beautiful notebook of images, in the center of the book, shows this forcefully. In statuary, on coins, and ultimately forever, he remains this man with a calm and inscrutable face, this eternal thirty-year-old who takes power never to give it back again.