Republic Restored, Empire Established: Augustus

2. The Reality of Empire
(III) Republic Restored, Empire Established: Augustus

The many scholarly debates about Augustus have included the question: did he really claim to have restored the republic? If he did, what did he mean by that, and was it true? Was he, as the highly influential Ronald Syme argued half a century ago, a ruthless and relentless dictator such as Europe knew in parts of the twentieth century?28 Or was he more genuinely concerned for the good of the Roman people and, finding himself at the sharp end of things at a time of enormous social upheaval, feeling his way forward with a perfectly natural measure of self-interest but also with the interests of the people genuinely at heart? More obliquely, one might debate the extent to which ‘the empire’ itself only really came into being under Augustus. Rome had effectively ruled a fair amount of the Mediterranean world for many years before his day. There was, as we shall see, a cult of Dea Roma, the goddess ‘Rome’, and similar formulations in various places in the eastern empire as early as 195 BC.29 There had been sole rulers before, as we have seen, though none of them lasted long – a point which will not have been lost on Octavian, still in his thirties and finding himself to be the last man standing in Rome’s half century of blood and fear. He was now imperator, a military title with which soldiers hailed a victorious general and with which, on some occasions, the Senate hailed such a returning victor. It now became clear to all that the title was to belong primarily to Augustus, and he took it as a sort of praenomen: Imperator Caesar Augustus, Emperor Caesar the Exalted. Rome had an empire for a long time; now she had an emperor as well. An occasional title had become an official position. And of course the empire itself changed, culturally and in other ways we shall shortly examine, to conform to the new reality...