Then he proclaimed: He also transferred Pompey's statue from the hall in which Julius Caesar had been assassinated to a marble arch facing the main entrance of the Theatre. One of the them was a military genius, one murdered his mother and fiddled while Rome burned, another earned the nickname “sphincter artist”. 11. betizare (be a beetroot) for: languere (be languid) — on the analogy of the colloquial form lachanizare . His homecomings after tours of the Empire were always acclaimed with respectful good wishes and songs of joy as well; and it became a custom to cancel all punishments on the day he set foot in Rome. It was no more than the promise he had made the pirates when first they captured him. He not only dated every letter, but entered the exact hour of the day or night when it was composed. The first seal Augustus used for safe-conducts, dispatches, and private letters was a sphinx; next came a head of Alexander the Great; lastly, his own head, cut by Dioscurides, the seal which his successors continued to employ. When a Roman knight cut off the thumbs of his two young sons to incapacitate them for Army service, Augustus had him and his property publicly auctioned; but, realizing that a group of tax-collectors were bidding for the man, knocked him down to an imperial freedman-with instructions that he should be sent away and allowed a free existence in some country place. He next crossed over to Naples, although his stomach was weak from an intermittent recurrence of the same trouble, and watched an athletic competition which was held in his honour every five years. Suetonius commends his horsemanship, his skill in arms, that vitality which never flagged: On the march he headed his army, sometimes on horseback but oftener on foot, bareheaded both in the heat of the sun and in rain. He also often urged leading citizens to embellish the City with new public monuments or to restore and improve ancient ones, according to their means. Julius Marathus, Augustus's freedman and recorder, makes his height 5 feet 7 inches; but this is an exaggeration, although, with body and limbs so beautifully proportioned, one did not realize how small a man he was, unless someone tall stood close to him. These so weakened his constitution that either hot or cold weather caused him great distress. He built his Forum because the two already in existence could not deal with the recent great increase in the number of law-suits caused by a corresponding increase in population; which was why he hurriedly opened it even before the Temple of Mars had been completed. His military dispositions were as follows. For, although nobody could call him a legacy-hunter-indeed, he could never bear to benefit under the will of a man personally unknown to him — yet he was almost morbid in his careful weighing of a friend's death-bed tributes. He had held the dictatorship before, as early as December 49: opportunities for repudiation had surely not been lacking. Suetonius was a 1st century CE Roman historian best known for his work Life of the Caesars, which chronicled the life and deeds of the first twelve Roman Emperors. Assassinated in Suetonius’ account, he may have died in an outbreak of politically motivated gang violence on the Appian Way outside Rome. The mother of Octavia the Elder was Ancharia; the other two were his children by Atia, daughter of Marcus Atius Balbus and Julius Caesar's sister Julia. He led by inspiration, without undue recourse to the mumbo-jumbo of omens and portents, trusting in that lodestar which seldom deserted him on the battlefield, his generalship as much a matter of speed and novelty as of tactical finesse; and he treated his soldiers, whom he addressed as ‘comrades’, with something approaching love. Undoubtedly, personal animosity aside, Sulla’s record impressed him. 55. At Thapsus, on the African coast, Caesar’s men overwhelmed fourteen legions of the Republican army. The tree then suddenly put out a new shoot which, a few days later, had grown so tall as to overshadow it. Augustus gave Gaius and Lucius reading, swimming and other simple lessons, for the most part acting as their tutor himself; and was at pains to make them model their handwriting on his own. ‘I have heard,’ Pliny wrote, ‘that Caesar was accustomed to write or dictate and read at the same time, simultaneously dictating to his secretaries four letters on the most important subjects or, if he had nothing else to do, as many as seven.’ (As dictator, Caesar later courted popular disfavour by dictating and reading letters while watching gladiatorial fights.) An irremovable coloured mark in the shape of a serpent, which then appeared on her body, made her ashamed to visit the public baths any more; and the birth of Augustus nine months later suggested a divine paternity. Nero, the last of Julius’ line, would pay more heavily for playing the woman’s part and subverting Roman expectations of male and female, active and passive, dominant and submissive. Covetousness killed him: the longing for absolute power. Arrogant in eminence, he offended senate and commons alike. These kings would often leave home, dressed in the gowns of their honorary Roman citizenship, without any emblems of royalty whatsoever, and visit Augustus at Rome, or even while he was visiting the provinces; they would attend his morning audiences with the simple devotion of family dependants. omen which, experts in soothsaying agreed, presaged a wonderful future for him. Ancient sources, including Cicero’s letters, betray this ambivalence: they omit to unravel any motive bar vaunting self-belief. In winter-quarters on Samos, after this victory, Augustus heard the alarming news of a mutiny at Brindisi among troops whom he had picked from every corps in the Army. Augustus also standardized the pay and allowances of the entire Army — at the same time fixing the period of service and the bounty due on its completion — according to military rank; this would discourage them from revolting, when back in civil life, on the excuse that they were either too old or had insufficient capital to earn an honest living. 32. 49. This was not heroism in the cause of the senate and the people of Rome. It ought not to surprise us.) Antony also writes that Scribonia was divorced for having said a little too much when 'a rival' got her claws into Augustus; and that his friends used to behave like Toranius, the slave-dealer, in arranging his pleasures for him — they would strip mothers of families, or grown girls, of their clothes and inspect them as though they were up for sale. They have come down to posterity as the “twelve Caesars”—Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. In 81 BC, in Bithynia, his surrender to Nicomedes is a lone instance both of sexual passivity and of homosexuality. When Cassius Severus had brought a charge of poisoning against Augustus's close friend Nonius Asprena, Augustus asked the Senate what they wished him to do. Spanish proconsulship earned him a triumph in Rome. On awakening, she purified herself, as if after intimacy with her husband. And this is what happened. 18. 19. He also brought up many of their children with his own, and gave them the same education. This was possible only if he retained proconsular imperium, which obtained only so long as he remained outside Rome. Once, when Augustus and his steward Diomedes were out walking together and a wild boar suddenly charged at them, Diomedes took fright and dodged behind his master. Finding that certain city-states which had treaties of alliance with Rome were ruining themselves through political irresponsibility, he took away their independence; but also granted subsidies to others crippled by public debts, rebuilt some cities which had been devastated by earthquakes, and even awarded full citizenship to states that could show a record of faithful service in the Roman cause. For the next eight years, acting upon his own initiative, Caesar divided each year into two seasons. Caesar would not compromise. Augustus did his best to avoid leaving or entering any city in broad daylight, because that would have obliged the authorities to give him a formal welcome or send-off. ’Twas ever thus. His body is said to have been marred by blemishes of various sorts — a constellation of seven birthmarks on his chest and stomach, exactly corresponding with the Great Bear; and a number of hard, dry patches suggesting ringworm, caused by an itching of his skin and a too vigorous use of the scraper at the baths. Indeed, he pampered his health, especially by not bathing too often and being usually content with an oil rub — or with a sweat-bath, after which he took a douche of water either warmed over a fire or allowed to stand in the sun until it had lost its chill. 30. ‘The die is cast,’ cries Suetonius’ hero, admitting the possibility of fatalism, then tearfully he implores his troops, tearing the clothes from his breast. 86 He cultivated a simple and easy oratorical style, avoiding purple passages, artfully contrived prose-rhythms, and 'the stink of farfetched phrases', as he called it; his main object being to say what he meant as plainly as possible. Their mistake had been to ‘[attribute] his boldness of speech to a certain simplicity and boyish mirth’. 3. 81. Augustus commanded armies in only two foreign wars: against the Dalmatians while he was still in his teens, and against the Cantabrians after defeating Antony. Mark Antony wrote scornfully that Augustus's great-grandfather had been only a freedman, a rope-maker from the neighbourhood of Thurii; and his grandfather, a money-changer. This energetic action delighted Caesar, who soon formed a high estimate of Augustus's character. Authoritarianism then it must be, a policy which precluded the senate’s self-regarding inertia. News then came that Caesar had been assassinated, after naming him his heir, and Augustus was tempted, for awhile, to put himself under the protection of the troops quartered near by. That Caesar himself betrayed aspects of ‘carnivorousness’ is undeniable: Plutarch estimates that a million Gauls were killed in the Gallic campaign, with another million taken into slavery. Agrippa went first and was prophesied such almost incredibly good fortune that Augustus expected a far less encouraging response, and felt ashamed to disclose his nativity. The Senate also voted him the task of supervising public morals and scrutinizing the laws-another lifelong appointment. There were public banquets, gifts of grain and oil; a payment of 300 sesterces to members of the public, booty to Caesar’s foot-soldiers and land for their retirement. There, at Pharsalus, Caesar won a decisive victory; Pompey escaped only to be murdered by the king of Egypt. What was more, a flock of doves began to nest in the fronds, although doves notoriously dislike hard, spiny foliage. Caesar’s response determined the future of his life. Then again hearing, at an inquiry into the case of Aemilius Aelianus the Cordoban, that the most serious of the many charges brought against him was one of 'vilifying Caesar', Augustus pretended to lose his temper and told the counsel for the prosecution: He then dropped the whole inquiry and never resumed it. The degree of affection that Augustus won by such behaviour can easily be gauged. He also made powerful enemies. He returned to the province in 61 BC as proconsul, his first overseas command. The worst was after his Cantabrian conquest, when abscesses on the liver reduced him to such despair that he consented to try a remedy which ran counter to all medical practice: because hot fomentations afforded him no relief, his physician Antonius Musa successfully prescribed cold ones. The cost of so personal a victory included wholesale destruction of two tribes: the men, women and children of the Tencteri and Usipetes, mown down by Roman cavalry in a day of fighting which yielded a death toll estimated by Caesar at 430,000. Augustus's new Forum is so narrow because he could not bring himself to evict the owners of the houses which would have been demolished had his original plan been carried out. He was also nearly captured in Calabria: as he walked along the road to Reggio by way of Epizephyrian Locri, he saw a flotilla of two-oared naval vessels heading for the shore and, not realizing that they were Pompeians, went down to greet them on the beach. Caesar served as aedile in 65 (two years ahead of the minimum age qualification of thirty-seven) and praetor in 62. Augustus, finding that he could do nothing else to pacify or reassure them, left his own box and sat in what seemed to be the most threatened part of the auditorium. His morning audiences were open to commoners as well as knights and senators, and he behaved very sociably to all who came with requests — once a petitioner showed such nervousness that Augustus laughed and said: 'Anyone would think you were offering an elephant a small gratuity!' The will of more than one householder directed that his heirs should take sacrificial victims to the Capitol and carry a placard before them as they went, inscribed with an expression of their gratitude for Augustus's having been allowed to outlive the testator. 85. In military terms it represented a total of four legions at Caesar’s disposal. But whenever any testator, of whatever Order, left him either legacies or shares in promised inheritances, Augustus at once resigned his rights in favour of the man's grown-up sons or daughters, if he had any; and, in the case of minors, kept the money until the boys came of age or the girls married, whereupon he handed it over, increased by the accumulated interest. 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