The Augustan Revolution: On Ancient Rome with Reece Edmends
By Ryan Shinkel
Welcome to “Madison’s Footnotes.”
This is the substack for Madison’s Notes, the official podcast of Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. Here in Season 5, Episode 2, I interview Dr. Reece Edmends, a Roman historian, to talk about all things ancient Rome, from the Republic’s fall to the Empire’s founding by the first emperor, Caesar Augustus.
Along the way we also discuss his adopted father, Julius Caesar, his friend-enemy, Mark Anthony, Brutus and Caesar’s other assassins, as well as Cicero the philosopher versus Cicero the politician. We also get into historians Ronald Syme and Theodor Mommsen, philosophers Montesquieu and Fustel du Coulanges, along with authors Dante, William Shakespeare, and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, among many others.
Debating the nature of ancient propaganda, the involvement of the gods in Roman politics, as well as beauty of Roman coins, we ask about how the Romans envisioned liberty even as they practiced slavery, how Augustus took power without ever being officially crowned, and whether the Ides of March should have been prevented. As the latter’s anniversary rounds the corner this week, it’s good to see the full benefits of a classical education on display.
Dr. Reece Edmends is a graduate of Kings College, Cambridge, and a member of the junior faculty in the Princeton Classics Department at Princeton. He recently completed his Princeton PhD dissertation on propaganda under Augustus.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. Please enjoy.
Dr. Edmends, welcome to the Madison’s Note podcast.
Hello Ryan. Thank you for having me here.
Please tell me a little bit about your background.
I’m a Roman historian. I’m at the Classics Department in Princeton, and primarily I research the politics of the Roman Republic and the political ideas which infused the developments in that period. In particular, I’m interested in the rise of Augustus, whom we call Roman’s first emperor.
How did you get interested in the subject?
So I first got interested in the Roman world in early childhood, actually. My parents would take me around Roman forts, because we lived in England where there were lots of abandoned Roman forts there.
I used to really love the Roman army. I would really love drawing Roman legionaries, Roman soldiers with their armor and their red tunics. I also read a lot of historical fiction when I was a kid. I was particularly taken by Robert Harris’s trilogy about the life of Cicero, a leading Roman politician in the Late Republic, and also a series of books by Colleen McCullough, which aren’t read that much these days, called Masters of Rome.
I became really fascinated by the Roman Republic, in particular how it fell and how it became a monarchy. I was really interested in these great world historical figures, people like Cicero, Julius Caesar, Pompey, Augustus, and the massive wars they have between them. And I read a book of narrative and popular history, which I absolutely recommend to everyone, by a man named Tom Holland. It’s called Rubicon.
This is a really great narrative history of the fall of the Roman Republic and the creation of the Roman Empire. I read it when I was in my early teens and I decided this is really for me and I really love Roman history. And I was good at that in school, so I got to do classics at Cambridge and wrote my senior thesis on the Roman voting system and how it operated, and I’ve been doing classics pretty much since then.
Something about ancient Rome fascinates people immensely. Victorians in England and then Americans since the mid-20th century have been always comparing themselves to ancient Rome, both in questions about self-government and the collapse of one’s empire.
I want to ask you about the transformation from the Republic to the Empire. What was the Roman regime before and after Augustus, whom you have so much studied?
This is a really good question which has fascinated people in the West for thousands of years, ever since their own Republic fell. It happened during the 60 years or so before the birth of Christ, right about 60 BC till about the time of the birth of Christ.
It’s the most recorded period in all of classical antiquity. This is pretty much the only period in classical antiquity where we can where we can almost record what events are happening each day. There are certain years, like 44 BC and 43 BC, where we can actually say what’s going on every single day.
It’s a really exciting time to study, and it’s one of the reasons I study it, but it also has a lot of residences for today because Rome started off as a republic, similar in some ways to the American republic. These similarities are very much intended by the American founders. Rome had a Senate, it had a Capitol hill on which the Senate sat, and this was replaced by a monarchy in which all the power was controlled by one man, and particularly volatile monarchy at that.
But you asked specifically about the Roman Republic, the republican regime, and how that operated. Firstly, the Roman people: by which I mean the free citizen population of the city of Rome and Roman Italy. The free citizen male population—at least they had real power. From what I understand, the people passed laws directly.
It wasn’t in that respect direct democracy. No law could be passed without the people gathering collectively in the forum and voting on it. At the same time, the people also elected their magistrates, their government, as it were, and these members of the government were directly elected by the people for fixed terms of office. They were meant to share their power, but this is where it went wrong.
This republic collapsed and became a monarchy because these elected officials began to accrue sometimes with the consent of the people, sometimes without, more and more power to themselves, and they began to chafe against the constitutional term limits and the rules about collegiality that had constrained them.
They began to take control of vast armies, conquer vast provinces, take control of vast amounts of money all around the Roman world. They used those resources to become personally powerful and to take armies and lead them against Rome. This became a very unstable system. It was racked by coups, by revolutions. Every decade or so there were great civil wars fought, and in the end, the guy who won out is the guy that I’ve studied, the guy who became the supposedly first Emperor Augustus.
He was the adopted son of Julius Caesar, and he managed to use the financial inheritance that Julius Caesar had given him to recruit troops on his own without anyone else’s consent, and to take over the political system, and to consolidate power in himself. To the extent that he could rule unchallenged for five decades or so and die in his own bed as emperor, as sole ruler of the Roman world, and hand over power to his chosen successor, who was his adopted son Tiberius.
So just to set some context, Roman history, according to the myths, would go back to when Aeneas comes over circa 1200 BC as a very distant imaginary start date. Then Romulus and Remus found the city of Rome, circa 800 BC or thereabouts. The Republic would’ve been founded when Brutus in the mythology kicked out the Tarquin kings after the rape of Lucrecia, and her suicide. That’d be in the 500s.
510, yeah.
510 BC. Rome is fighting the Sabeans. It’s kidnapping the women. It’s fighting the Latins, the Etruscans. It’s eventually conquering all of Italy. And then the idea was that because they had to defend themselves against different groups of people—as when the Celts sack Rome—they have to go out, fight, and then subjugate these groups. So the self-justification for Roman expansion is in self-defense and it grows into a Mediterranean power.
There are the three Punic wars against the city of Carthage in North Africa. By the second one, they have supremacy over the Mediterranean. And then with the destruction of Carthage comes supreme rule over the Mediterranean for the most part. They expand into North Africa, secure their position in Europe, and in Asia.
The wealth and the plunder from this empire, while they still have the republican system, corrupts the system, creates huge wealth disparities and many soldiers without land. And this exacerbates the regime within the city and that creates greater stakes for the factions. So the Grachii brothers are assassinated, there are the Social Wars, then you have Sulla and Marius, which is before Julius Caesar and Augustus’s time.
Then it’s Julius Caesar, first after his conquest of Gaul and then versus Pompey. He’s then assassinated, and then it’s Octavian, later Augustus, adopted son of Julius Caesar, plus Mark Antony against Brutus and Cassius, the assassins of Julius Caesar.
Once Brutus and Cassius are taken out at Philippi, then it’s Mark Antony versus Augustus when their Triumvirate breaks down. Augustus defeats Mark Antony and Cleopatra famously at Actium, and is the sole rule of the Roman world.
He’s a quiet guy in Shakespeare’s play, in the background, waiting to make his presence known, but he is able to defeat everyone. He defeats Sextus Pompeii, he defeats Mark Antony and Cleopatra. He defeats pretty much anyone who is a potential rival. The other guy: Lepidus or something?
The other guy is Lepidus.
In your dissertation, you go a lot into the Res Gestae, his summary of his deeds which came about near the end of his life. in that he’s always talking about how “I personally sponsored, I paid for this, or I paid for that, and they wanted to honor me, but I said no, thank you. I’m too modest, I’m just the first citizen.” He was able to accrue all this power without ever really taking a central official position, whether it’s dictator for life or whether it’s the old kingship. So how did he do that? Who is Augustus? How is he able to secure his position?
Yeah, that’s a very good question. And thank you so much for summarizing Roman history prior to the accession to the throne of Augustus, because as you say, it was doing well before it all fell apart. They conquered a lot of territory before the republic fell apart, and all these warring factions broke out into civil war.
You ask particularly about the personality of Augustus, why he was able to take control of the state and about the themes which he appealed to in his propaganda, if you like, which were successful.
The subject of your research.
The subject of my research. No, absolutely. So Augustus is an interesting guy because he did have one thing going for him.
One big thing is that he was the nephew and the adopted son of Julius Caesar, who had become through a military coup the dictator for life of the Roman state. That didn’t necessarily mean that much in itself because that was simply a private matter. He was the private heir of Caesar by virtue of Caesar’s will, and many of his contemporaries expected that he would simply behave as Caesar’s private heir.
He would simply take the money that was given to him by Julius Caesar’s will, and live as a private citizen. He didn’t do that. He seeks to take his father’s place as the ruler of the Roman world, and he’s actually a lot more successful at sustaining it than his adopted father Julius Caesar was.
He wasn’t a particularly good general from what we know. People, other people tended to fight his battles for him.
Agrippa.
Agrippa, exactly. The Battle of Actium is his great military success against his big rival Mark Antony. That’s a big naval battle. It’s Agrippa who’s commanding the fleet.
Other people were much better generals. Julius Caesar was a much better general than Augustus. He wasn’t also a particularly good speaker in person from what we know. But clearly, he was very good at appealing to people. He was very good at hitting certain political themes. And that’s what I call propaganda, and that’s what I discuss in my PhD dissertation.
And to get to the other point that you mentioned, in that these themes tended to be conservative, small-c conservative, in that they were themes that other politicians had used before him. They were intended to be perceived as small-r republican and respectable. He didn’t present himself as something very new and radical, even though he was. He was the sole ruler of the entire Mediterranean world for five decades, but he presented himself as something that was very normal, very republican, and very constitutional, and that’s part of the reason why he was successful.
The theme I’ve been researching all these years, the theme I’m particularly interested in, is the theme of liberty.
He presented himself as the liberator of the Roman state. And the Latin for liberator, the Latin that he uses, is adsertor libertatis, or vindex libertatis. This is a real thing in Rome. The adsertor libertatis was a real Roman judicial position. An actual adsertor libertatis in the real world was someone who went to court to free someone else who’d been illegally enslaved.
Loads of people were enslaved legally or illegally in the Roman world. So most Romans were familiar with this idea. They knew the assertor libertatis. And what I found out in my research is that you’re meant to defer to them, and you’re meant to honor your assertor libertatis.
That’s one of the themes that Augustus is hitting on, because he represents himself as the metaphorical adsertor libertatis, the metaphorical liberator of the Roman state or the Roman people, and he therefore expects people to defer to him. That’s very useful when you’re establishing a monarchy. It’s very familiar, it’s very constitutional, it’s very respectable, but it contains within it the idea that you are meant to bow down to this guy, that he’s in charge now. He’s liberated you, but there are strings attached. He’s a powerful and very good propagandist.
He says at the beginning of the Res Gestae that “at my own expense, I raised an army with which I successfully championed the liberty of the republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.”
Now, as when we use words like “I freed this person,” or “I got him out of jail,” or “I paid his bail,” you’re saying Augustus is drawing from the language of: ‘You are a Roman citizen. You are someone who is a free person. You’ve been falsely enslaved…” As happens in all these civil wars and social chaos.
And you need someone, because you cannot stand in your own defense, to come and act as your own litigator in Roman court. They prove somehow that you were freeborn. You’re then freed from that, but then you’re indebted to this person, and this person is now your benefactor. So while you cannot fully repay such a debt, you can honor him with gifts, with praise, with your companionship, always going whenever he has dinner.
You always have to go and become a guest even if he’s serving bad food. And this is the metaphor that the language of Augustus and other politicians, both before, during, and after his time, are using. Each faction, whether it’s Mark Antony, whether it’s Julius Caesar, Pompey, it’s Sulla or Marius, they’re all claiming: ‘I have freed Rome from being enslaved.’
Now this is different, however, from someone who is actually a slave within the Roman system and is then freed. That manumission still means that while you’re now free, you still have this stain of slavery. You’re still looked down upon and on the outside of mainstream Roman society. Instead, this situation with the vindex...
Yeah, the vindex.
The vindex.
Or the adsertor.
The adsertor. Translated to English. How would that be exactly said?
“Vindicator of Liberty,” “ Claimer for Liberty.”
The “Vindicator of Liberty” would have restored you back to where you actually were. So you were always free the whole time, even if you were living in a state of slavery.
In a kind of a reverse, if someone who’s actually a slave—born a slave—could be in ignorance, or covertly, living in a state of liberty, they themselves are not intrinsically a free person. So for Augustus, he and people like him were not claiming to have taken Rome, which was actually enslaved, and then to which—via manumission—made them free. Instead, this is saying, “No, we’re restoring you back to your free condition that is innate to you as Romans.”
That’s perfect.
That’d be the right way of putting it?
Yeah. If you really want me to get into the nitty gritty of this, I can.
Yes, please.
In Rome, everybody had a status libertatis, a status of freedom. They were either free or they were a slave. That was a matter of legal status. I know this is hard to understand for us. It didn’t necessarily correspond to the fact whether you were enslaved or not, right? So there were free people who were properly free under law, who were illegally enslaved, and there were slaves who were living in freedom.
I think we can understand the idea that a slave might be living in freedom. An escaped slave, right? We can understand that. But the reason someone might be illegally enslaved is because if you were born free, you were free all your life in law. That couldn’t be legally taken away from you, but of course in practice it was. People were kidnapped. They were left outside by their parents at birth, and they were taken away by slave dealers. They were sold into slavery. All these things were illegal. And everybody had the right, if they had been illegally enslaved, to go to court and to get their liberty back. But they needed someone else to represent them, and that was the adsertor libertatis.
The broader point to make here is that in our world, we throw words like freedom and liberty around quite a lot. In Rome they did the same as well. They talked about political freedom a lot as well. But the difference between our world and their world is that their world had a lot of actual slaves, millions and millions of actual enslaved people in their society, which we don’t have in our society today. So when they talked about political freedom and, being freed politically and being enslaved politically, the minds of the audience instantly went to the social reality of not being a slave; and everything they said, when they were talking metaphorically about politics, was colored by that.
So if you represented yourself as Augustus did, and many of his contemporaries and Julius Caesar also did, if you represented yourself as the “Vindicator of liberty”—the Vindex Libertatis, the Adsertor Libertatis—people’s minds would instantly go to what an actual adsertor libtertatis was in the Roman world, in a way that isn’t quite the same when we talk about freedom today.
So if Augustus freed Rome from the faction of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, or from Brutus and Cassius, he’s basically saying, “I’ve delivered you from these people who were trying to enslave you.
Exactly.
“...and therefore you are indebted to me as your protector, as your benefactor.” And that’s something that he continued throughout all his actions.
As I understand, the way Ronald Syme puts it in The Roman Revolution—a book written in 1939 that is quite influential in this field—Augustus formally kept a lot of the institutions of the old Republic. However, he changed a lot of the meaning and purposes of it, absorbing a lot of their specific powers.
For instance, when he formally restored powers to the Republic, he would bail them out, saying, “Hey, I will restore grain. I will restore the funds.” They’re constantly in a state of being indebted and depending on him.
Tell me about this role. What kind of role did he informally create that established the emperor’s position?
There was no moment at which he was crowned emperor. There was no moment in which he took the throne, although I perhaps implied that. He was an autocrat; he did die as sole ruler of the Roman world, but there was no moment at which he officially became so. But there were moments at which he deliberately set it up so that people would ask him to take certain powers constitutionally, and that’s definitely what happened.
There were, for instance, grain crises. And probably the people were pushed to do this, but there were moments at which supposedly the people would ask him, “Please Caesar,” or “Please Augustus, become dictator of the Roman state.” And he would say, “No, I don’t want to be dictator, but I will reluctantly take on this power. I will reluctantly take on the power of Commissioner for Grain.” And that would give him command over all the fleets and all the ports of the Roman world. He would do this with the Senate as well. He had this big moment in 27 BC, which we talk about as Augustus’ great constitutional settlement.
He said that the triumvirate—which was this temporary extraordinary power that he’d taken over to deal with the civil wars with his colleague, Mark Antony, whom he fought a war against in the end...
And Lepidus
And Lepidus as well. Yes.
You can’t forget Lepidus.
Can’t forget Lepidus.
He said that the triumvirate is over: “These extraordinary powers are over. We’re going back to constitutional government.” He said, “I’m giving up all my powers. I’m just going to be a normal senator, a normal citizen.” And then the Senate would say, “No, no. Don’t do that. We can’t live without you.” And of course they were being heavily pushed to say this. And so he said, “Okay. Well, I will reluctantly take on a few extra powers, a few extra magistracies, to tide things over.”
Just some breadcrumbs, some scraps from the table.
Exactly. And these would turn out to be half the provinces of the Roman world—and it would also be the provinces that mattered.
Egypt, which is the breadbasket.
Yeah, exactly, where all the food was, where all the soldiers were. He’d take over command of all of that.
So all the legions formally swear an oath to him. And he has hundreds of thousands of troops. I think the Roman Army was 450,000 in the later part of the empire. But it would be 2-300,000 average. It depended on...
It’s less than it was in the later empire.
But that is not enough to command the whole Mediterranean, even without major rival kingdoms in rebellion or anyone who’s trying to create a civil war against him. Instead, he has a lot of different factions that he has to placate and keep in line: the provincial aristocracy, the senators.
What are these factions, who are these people that he has to keep as his supporters, and how does he do that?
This was quite a blessed moment in European history in that it was a moment in which the Mediterranean world was not particularly threatened by forces from outside in the way that it was in later periods. There weren’t in this period great migrations of tribes across the Siberian step to come and threaten the empire.
The Huns, for example.
Yeah, none of that stuff was happening at this time. I don’t know, maybe there are ecological reasons why that wasn’t happening, but it wasn’t happening at that particular point.
There were rival kingdoms, of course, but the threats that he faced were mainly internal. He was constantly threatened by usurpers, by palace coups, by people who’d favored his civil war rivals. They’d favored Brutus and Cassius, the republicans, or they’d favored Mark Antony, and so on.
So there was still a lot of people that he had to appease. And he did this partly through meaningful political grants to them, giving them power, giving them offices, and so on. That did absolutely matter. But what I’ve been researching primarily in my PhD is the way in which he did this through propaganda. Political messages transmitted through inscriptions, through coins, through rhetoric, even through pamphlets, were important in getting these constituencies on board.
The constituencies being the imperial aristocracy—like the imperial upper classes, the elites in the provinces, the Greek-speaking elites of the east, or the Gallic-speaking elites of what is now France—and also the free population of the city itself. He had to keep these people vaguely on board. He couldn’t have the rebelling too much. He couldn’t have too many riots. He didn’t want them supporting usurpers. He at least needed the absence of opposition, if not active support.
So he’s not someone who ever wants to appear like he’s formally taking power. He wants to appear like someone who’s refusing it, like Julius Caesar when Mark Antony hands him the crown. At least in Shakespeare, he’s like, “No, no, no. I can’t. I can’t.” And that makes the people all more implore to him, “Look how humble he is.”
There’s this line from the movie Dune 2, which is: “He says that he’s not the Mahdi. He’s so humble, he cannot say it, but therefore it proves that he is the Mahdi.”
You know what Shakespeare says in Julius Caesar?
What does he say?
Mark Antony’s speech to the people where he’s talking about...
At the funeral?
Yeah, the funeral: “Thou all did see that on the Lupercal I thrice presented him a kingly crown, to which he did refuse. Was this ambition? Yet Brutus says he was ambitious and sure he is an honorable man.”
“An honorable man.”
Yes.
“And Brutus is an honorable man.”
“Brutus is an honorable man.”
He says it several times and the meaning keeps changing every time he says it.
It does.
Then there’s a riot and then Cinna the Poet is killed. He says, ‘I’m not Cinna the senator.’ And they say, ‘Yeah, we know, but we’re going to kill you for your bad verses.’
Yeah, kill him for his bad verses.
So tell me a bit about this propaganda.
At the end of your dissertation, you distinguish between modern propaganda—we think of campaign political messages sent out everywhere through advertisements—from ancient propaganda. Instead, it’s an informal small group of people who are putting a message in the art that he is sponsoring, specifically Horace and Virgil. And it’s not meant to convince people who are his hated enemies or diehard republican Catoists. Instead it’s meant to confirm the people who are already his supporters in their faith.
Can you tell me a bit about that—about Horace and Virgil and the others?
I think of that as informal propaganda, if you like.
I do think there was an imperial center. This is debated among scholars, but I go with the idea that there actually was an imperial center. There was Augustus and there were propagandists around who were pushing out messages. But there also the kind of informal propaganda that you are talking about.
These poets—people like Horace and Virgil—these famous writers—Livy, a historian—these were elite men. They weren’t accountable particularly to anyone. They weren’t, in my view, being explicitly told what to write, but, nonetheless, they pick up on the themes which appear in Augustan propaganda, which show that to some extent it’s working.
At least, as you say, it’s working with sympathetic parties. Simply saying that you’re a liberator probably wouldn’t persuade a diehard supporter of Mark Antony, but it might persuade someone who was vaguely on the fence and sympathetic to the idea that things might get better under Augustus.
What Horace and Virgil and others do is pick up these propagandistic themes, and the theme I’ve been researching is the theme of liberation. Both of these guys present Octavian Augustus as a liberator in their verse. Do you want me to give you examples?
Eclogue 1 is a fascinating poem by Virgil. It’s written very early on in Virgil’s career, in probably the late 40s or the early 30s BC. It claims to be apolitical. It presents itself as a retreat from politics. He’s just talking about these shepherds who are in the countryside, who are piping and chatting amongst themselves.
And for many years it was thought of as an apolitical group of poems. This is the Eclogues as a whole, the Eclogue 1 being part of this. But I’d argue, and many people now argue, that these were political poems.
In Eclogue 1, one of the poetic shepherds talks about going to the city of Rome and meeting a divine young man who liberates him, who gives him liberty, who gives him libertas as a gift. And I’d argue that in the context of this period, talking about a divine young man who gives you liberty and who makes your life better is a reference to Octavian.
Usually scholars have thought that the main character is someone who was a slave that had been manumitted. But you’re saying that he is someone who was falsely enslaved, and then it’s actually a case of the Vindex Libertatis.
I’d argue that, yeah. It fits the poem better.
It convinced me, actually.
Thank you.
I think that’s the right interpretation.
Yeah. He talks about liberation as a restoration. Virgil explicitly talks about the shepherd being restored to a former state.
There’s this line from Seamus Haney’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 6: “But you, Roman, remember to you will fall the exercise of power over the nations, and these will be your gifts: to impose peace and justify your sway, spare those you conquer, crush those who overbear.” Also known as ‘ subdue the proud.’
Is this kind of imperial civilizing mission very widespread, that comes within the Roman world, that’s been around for a long time? I remember at his death, Tiberius reads out a will saying ‘Augustus said we’re going to stop expanding the borders. We’re just going to keep them where they’re at. We’re just going to maintain the system now. No more conquest.’ Was that a reverse of the position?
What was the ethos at this time? What is Augustus thinking about in terms of trying to build up Roman Empire?
So I should say the ethos of imperial conquest is nothing new in the time of Augustus. Romans have been thinking in these terms for centuries. That’s part of the reason why they were able to conquer so much territory. You talked earlier on about the Punic Wars, the wars against Carthage, and the fact that they were able to expand so much.
Although, as you did say, they did like to think that they were only conquering places because they’d been attacked, at other moments they were quite happy about talking about conquest as a virtue in itself. They were quite proud of the fact they would go and conquer other territories, and take them over, and take their territory and wealth. And Augustus is absolutely working in this tradition and boasts about it.
Although we think of Augustus maybe as more of a consolidating figure, he does conquer territory. Firstly, he conquers Egypt, of course, in the defeat of Cleopatra. He fights also a major campaign in Spain, the so-called Cantabrian Wars, which we’ve lost much of the evidence about, but he boasted about it at the time. He wrote an autobiography, actually, which finished there, which talked about his big achievement in subduing the Spanish warrior tribes. He also fights in what is now Switzerland.
And so he expands the empire a lot and he boasts about it in the Res Gestae. In the list of these achievements, he talks about all the foreign nations that he’s conquered. And although the emperors do end up conquering less over subsequent generations—the Empire does consolidate a bit, although there’s always new conquests—it continues to think of itself in these terms absolutely.
When Augustus dies, he dies as a very old man for the time. And while he was always thought to be sickly over the course of his life—he even has prayers instituted in Rome always for his health—he is actually the last of his generation. Tacitus’ line that at Augustus’s death: “few indeed were left who had seen the Republic.” There was no memory left among the Roman people of the actual republic before Augustus—which is to say: is Augustus near his death the last one who remembers the Republic?
Pretty much, yeah. That’s what Tacitus says. He talks about the crowds at his funeral. Some of them liked to Augustus, some of them didn’t, but there were none of them that could remember the Republic.
If Augustus has this memory, is this something that he would’ve mourned? Get inside the head of Augustus. What is he thinking? What is he trying to accomplish?
That’s a very difficult thing for a historian to do.
Well, this is a podcast.
This is a podcast.
We can do what we want.
We can do what we want.
Clearly, he wants to establish power for himself. He clearly wants to win control over the Roman world, and he’s very ruthless about doing it. That wasn’t particularly controversial at the time. Pursuing your own glory, pursuing your ambition: this is completely consistent with Roman heroic ethos. It’s not thought of as in any way immoral. He was looking after number one to some extent. He was trying to get power for himself.
But also, I imagine he did want peace. He did want to bring an end to the internal conflicts which had racked the Roman world for decades. You know, hundreds of thousands of people had died in these civil wars. There’d been recession. There’d been famine. There’d been great migratory patterns. There’d been enslavement of lots and lots of free people. It had been an appalling time: brigandage all over Italy, piracy.
It had been an appalling time: he could clearly see that, and he clearly wanted to bring stability to the Roman world, and he was thanked for that.
What Augustus achieves: is this something that we should admire? Is this something that we should detest?
I remember, at the end of your dissertation, you get into the ancient-modern difference, the difference between ancient liberty and modern liberty. The Romans would’ve conceived of freedom—I imagine the way it’s usually put—in terms of its participation in the public thing. My own glory is synonymous with the glory of the city. What I’m doing, I’m building something for my family, I’m building something for my clients, I’m building something for the city.
I’m trying to achieve something that will give lasting fame, but it’s fundamentally outward-oriented; it’s goal-oriented; it’s civic-oriented. Here, that’s how I am a free man. I’m not dependent upon anyone, people are dependent upon me. I am self-ruling. I am achieving these things.
We think of freedom, however, as this sort of interior state, it’s freedom from constraint. It’s a lack of imposition from someone around me or from the government. It’s something where I can be by myself. It’s Henry David Thoreau: he’s just mainly in Emerson’s backyard, but away he’s a free man. It’s Huck Finn: “I’m going to walk away and head out west. I can just do my own thing apart from everyone else,” almost like returning to a state of nature.
Tell me a bit about how the Romans instead would’ve thought of freedom and glory, about the strangeness of their way of life compared to ours.
Obviously, a fundamental value for the modern world is liberty. Our discussion of it today is very dominated by this guy called Benjamin Constant. He’s a French philosopher, politician in the early 19th-century, one of the first liberals.
One of the Restoration liberals who would’ve been an influence on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
A profoundly important political, philosophical figure. He regrets the French Revolution, at least the excesses of it. A lot of the French revolutionaries saw themselves as restoring the Roman Republic and restoring Roman liberty, which is a fascinating subject in its own right. They would dress up in togas, and they would call themselves Brutus, that kind of thing. They really took the Roman stuff seriously. He really regrets that.
But he also regrets the excesses of the reactionary, revanchist Catholic monarchy that has been restored in France. He wants what we now call classical liberalism. He wants the government to get out of people’s business, let people worship in the way that they want, let them make money, let them trade, and so on. And he gives this really important lecture called, “The Liberty of the Ancients and the Liberty of the Moderns,” where he sets up this dichotomy.
The liberty of the ancients he associates with Rome, with Greece, and with the classical period in which, as you say, liberty was about political participation. To be a free man was to play a part in the polity. You weren’t free without that. You weren’t free unless you were a citizen of a free republic without a king, and you were taking part in its political life. The liberty of the moderns, by contrast, doesn’t necessarily matter what kind of political regime you have in charge, as long as they leave you alone, as long as they restrain you as little as possible. Defining liberty in quite different terms, negatively as freedom from constraint.
This gets taken up in later generations by Isaiah Berlin’s famous Cold War liberal political philosophy. The liberty of the ancients—he calls that “positive liberty,” freedom to. Liberty is political participation. And modern liberty, classical liberty—he calls that “negative liberty,” like not being restrained, not having anyone interfering in your business.
That often dominates the way we think about the Roman world. I don’t think it’s entirely irrelevant as a theory to use. But what I would emphasize is that in the Roman world, liberty just wasn’t that theorized.
It wasn’t that philosophical, because it was fundamentally a metaphor which was colored by the social reality of being a slave or not being a slave. Everybody’s thoughts about political liberty were so grounded in that base social reality of not being a slave, that it was hard to think too much about liberty or autonomy, or freedom from restraint, or that kind of thing. If someone talked about liberty, you thought about not being a slave, because you knew what being a slave was like, and you knew it was awful, and you wanted to avoid that, and you wanted to avoid anything that had metaphorical resonances connected with that.
So if a Roman was put under an inquisitor and asked, ‘Define freedom for me,’ they would say: “Not being a slave,” or “not being slavish.”
Yeah, absolutely.
So would you also say they found slavery and the subjugation that came with conquest necessary for them to value their liberty, or necessary for their self-conception? To say, “I am not that, I’m above that.” Like Athenians: “We’re Greeks. We’re freeborn, we’re free peoples, we’re not like those barbarians.” This contrast is necessary for us to envision what our status is. Without that necessary component for our self-conception, we don’t know what it means to be free.
Yes, yes, exactly. In order to be free, there had to be slaves. Like one was either a free person or a slave. And if you talked about a particular form of political regime, a form of government, and you compare that to slavery, they would then immediately start looking for the parts of that government that resembled slavery to them.
As we understand it, the abolition of slavery was not thinkable. It was not conceivable. They couldn’t imagine a world in which there weren’t slaves. And all they’re thinking about freedom was dominated by this brute fact. There were lots and lots of slaves around you, and the real goal in life was not to be a slave.
The Roman way of life also had a lot of cruelty in it. There was child exposure, infanticide, the treatment of people who lost wars. I remember, for Spartacus and the gladiators after the final battle, Crassus has 6,000 men crucified along the Appian way.
We moderns constantly look back to Rome, but it was Peter Brown who said that the closer you get to classical antiquity, the stranger it becomes. It’s like an inverted mirror: from far away it looks like you, but the closer and closer you get, the more bizarre and the weirder it gets.
Can we get into a little bit of the weirdness of the Romans. I remember they have death masks that they bring out at funerals. What are some of their customs, their rituals, their religion, the divinity of the republic?
I absolutely can. It’s a really barbaric, brutal world.
And as much as we glorify it and we think about the heroes of the republic, it’s worth emphasizing that outside of a few intellectual, philosophical circles, this wasn’t a world in which there was a widespread understanding that every human being, every human life had value and dignity. That wasn’t really a going concern in the Roman world. As we’ve talked about for a while now, there were millions of people who were enslaved, and everybody was completely fine with that. Abolishing it wasn’t thinkable, even for the enslaved themselves from what we can tell.
What’s interesting actually about this is that more modern cultures—which have sought, at least in the West, to institute systems of slavery, racial prejudice, suppression of various groups—have sought to do that by dehumanizing those involved, whether through quasi-biological racism or something like that. They’ve sought to say, “These people are less human than you. Therefore, they can be treated in this fashion.”
The Romans didn’t need to do that, because they didn’t have the same concept of a person having value and dignity and having natural rights as we do. People ask actually about the Roman world: “Were slaves things or were they people in law?” And the answer is: they were both.
In some circumstances, they were treated as people by the system; in some circumstances they were treated as things by the system, because being a person didn’t have the same value that it has the same weight that it has in our world. A lot of really quite unpleasant things flow from this.
For instance, rape was completely normalized. The life of children was not valued as is today. You had the right to kill your own children—less common to kill them when they were grown, although certainly tolerated in many circumstances. It was acceptable until the 4th century AD after a child had been born, if you didn’t want it, o expose it to the elements. Sometimes they were picked up, and that’s why they get illegally enslaved and then get involved in these trials that I’ve just been talking about, but a lot of the time they died.
Is this brutality unique to the Romans or was it widespread in classical antiquity?
From what we understand, it was common in many other contemporary cultures as well. Certainly in Classical Greece.
There is a kind of barbarity and cruelty that existed in the ancient world, but it also went in hand with some of these political goods—love of glory, sense of exploration—that are all enmeshed together, where you get the nitty gritty, really horrible stuff alongside the more admirable traits that we like to look to.
Gibbons said later in the Empire from the Good Emperors—so from Nerva through Marcus Aurelius—that it was the peak of civilization, which, for GDP when he wrote that in 1776 was actually economically not an insane comment.
The average person in Europe had more food during that period Gibbon is alluding to. The average person could consume more calories in that period than in pretty much any other time up until about 1800.
So would Augustus, the peace that he instituted, have improved the daily lives of Romans and subjects of the Empire?
Yeah. The grain shipments started arriving again.
What’s the line from Tacitus? “They make a desert and call it peace.” Well, then comes plenty of food along with it.
Made the trains run on time.
They made the chariots run on time.
To focus more on the admirable stuff: when the transition happens from the republic to the empire, Ronald Syme makes the argument: “The empire of the Roman people” was “perishing of its own greatness…therein lay the tragedy—the empire gave no scope for the display of civic virtue at home and abroad, for it sought to abolish war in politics. There could be no great men anymore: the aristocracy was degraded and persecuted.” And as time went on, also thanks to Nero, a lot of the original Roman families were wiped out.
And Tacitus would say that the true republican citizens weren’t in Rome. They were the last of the Brits or the Germans who were fighting and resisting the conquest of Rome. The true Romans were the ones who are at the borders of the empire trying to remain free—these tribal, uncivilized groups of people.
Someone like Syme is drawing a lot from Tacitus. Is that critique correct about the empire that ate away at what were these admirable traits and exhausted it that way? How does this work in your mind?
A bit, because, as I emphasized earlier, throughout antiquity, Romans retain this commitment to military conquest and military glory as an ideal. We can’t take that away. They carried on thinking in this way. But Ronald Syme and you do have a point: because the Empire did expand more slowly after the Republic fell. Under the emperors less territory was conquered.
There might be big picture reasons for this, but there was an internal reason for this as well, and one of the reasons was: the top job was now filled. If you’re an ambitious general, your career advancement could only go so far.
In the republic, all these politicians, all these generals, all these elected magistrates were incentivized to conquer as much territory as possible, to win as much glory as they could, to win as much money and resources for the Roman people as they could, in order that they could get elected to the top job.
In the Roman Empire, there was one guy who had the top job, and not only that, but he was often jealous about other people who rose too far. So there was less of a structural incentive to conquer so much territory and win as much glory as there was before. And it’s actually one of the reasons I’m so interested in the late Republic and why it fell.
One of the really interesting tensions about the Republic, that’s brought out so well by later readers of the Roman Empire—like Machiavelli, Montesquieu, people like that—is that the reason it was so successful was part of the reason it fell.
It was so successful because it gave its elected magistrates. These armies, this huge power to go out and conquer places and to do really well and to win all the glory for the Roman people. But it fell for the same reason. It fell because these guys had got too much power and they used it to destroy the system.
You were referencing Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline.
Yes.
Which is a very short book. You can read it in an afternoon.
If you’re interviewing Augustus. What would you ask him? What is it you want to know?
I’d want to know what really motivates him. Because you asked me and, of course, I don’t know. Like: “Fundamentally, what you see yourself doing? Really, what’s the end goal here? What are you trying to achieve for the Roman people? Do you see yourself as something really new, or do you see yourself as this prop propping up the system that was falling apart?”
So the republic ends, but a lot of the institutions do continue, and the Senate keeps going until the fall of Western Rome in the 400s.
Even later, actually. Until Justinian, I think.
Did the Republic actually fall? I mean, is it more of a transition period? Is this the best thing that could have happened for Rome?
Maybe if you asked him, Augustus would say, “Look, this thing was falling apart. The old way of life was gone. I was doing the best one can to bring order to the system and stabilize it. And this was the only way.”
This is what I would like to know. He might have genuinely seen what he was doing as the most conservative option possible, the most restorationist option possible. He might have thought in the words of the guy from di Lampedusa’s The Leopard: he thought “in order for things to stay the same, things must change.”
“...Everything must change.”
Yeah. Everything must change, yeah.
He might have seen himself in those terms, although of course he was very keen on personal power.
But it’s impossible to say. Nonetheless, it must be remembered that he led a violent coup; that he was an autocrat; that he made free elections a joke; that he turned the Senate into a rubber stamp; that he made; the magistrates of the Roman state irrelevant; that his accession to power was a revolutionary change; and that he died as an autocrat, and he left power to his adopted son. Yeah, a republic changes into a monarchy.
Now, you also have a paradigm-shifting idea that you’ve described to me before. Please tell me about it.
If I did want to inaugurate a paradigm shift in the historical study of the Roman Republic, it would be this. Ever since Theodor Mommsen, and particularly in the 20th-century with people like Ronald Syme who you’ve mentioned, we’ve tended to interpret the fall of the Republic, the inauguration of the Empire, Augustus, the monarchy, all of that in very, very, very secular terms. It’s all about secular politics.
It’s about the powers of the people. And I’ve given you this just now. That’s the interpretation I’ve given you now. It’s how I’ve been brought up to think. It’s about the powers of the people. It’s about the Senate. It’s about generals getting too much power, broaching constitutional term limits. It’s about agrarian bills, people promising this to the people, promising that to the people, blocking that to the people.
And that’s all perfectly true, but every moment of every day, every time they’re getting up to speak, they’re talking about the gods. They’re saying the gods back this decision. The gods don’t back this decision. We assume this is all flimflam. Right? The typical reading is that this is all nonsense. And they don’t believe in this.
For instance, there’s a famous example where Julius Caesar is advancing this very radical suite of proposals. He’s giving lots of land to the poor, giving lots of land to the people, anyway. He has a colleague, Bibulus, who’s conservative. He opposes these generous distributions of land to the people. And Bibulus keeps saying the birds in the sky are flying the wrong way. He’s saying the gods don’t back this, so there can be no business today in the assembly. The gods are not on the side.
And the absolutely unanimous conventional way to read this is: that’s because he doesn’t support agrarian reform. But actually, maybe we should, start reading this stuff slightly differently. I don’t totally know how we would go about doing this. But maybe we should assume that if they said the birds in the sky weren’t on the side, they actually believed this stuff. Maybe they actually believed that the gods had a role to play in Roman politics.
And I’m influenced to some extent by Coulanges.
Fustel du Coulanges, the French author of The Ancient City.
Exactly. The great French author of The Ancient City who supposed that the Romans did believe that the gods played this role in the fall of the republic, in the politics of the ancient city, which we’ve pushed to one side in the 19th and 20th century because we’ve interpreted this in very secular political terms.
This is partly perhaps influenced by my own move towards greater spirituality. I’m wondering if we should return to the spiritual to some extent. And we should imagine that the divine was thought of as having a really meaningful role to play in political life.
The gods are intimately involved with political life. Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus were both Pontifex Maximus. They were priests. This is something where the religion of Rome and the Republic are fundamentally intertwined. The Republic is a divine-orchestrated institution. It’s something given by the gods.
If I’m a Roman citizen and I’m seeing these different factions fighting in the civil wars...
Yeah.
...how do I know if the gods are on this side versus the gods are on that side? What is Jove wanting to do? How do they view their institutions in its place in the cosmos?
My understanding is they believed that the divine was everywhere. That it was manifested in the physical world all the time. They didn’t believe there was a moment of revelation in the way that Christians do. They really believed that the gods were popping up all around us. And they believed that this could be perceived through things like omens in the sky, watching the birds in the sky, and watching which way they flew. And they believed that showed the intention of the gods.
Or things like strange portents and prodigies happening, like the cattle being barren that year, or a bolt of lightning hitting a temple, that sort of thing. They believed that the gods were everywhere and that their will was being made manifest all the time.
Tell me about the Roman Sibyl. What was the Sybil? Was it real? How was it used?
Yeah, the Sibyl was a prophetess. And, she had these books. They were consulted at times of great danger for the Roman state.
Their being consulted was documented many times throughout Roman history by different sources.
During the second Punic war, the Sybil was consulted and they performed a burial of a living person.
You once said to me that you don’t think something like that was real. That someone might have been coming up with a statement that was just necessary in the moment in order for the political need to be met of the given emergency.
Was religion something that was easing, manipulated by Roman leaders when they were participating in these ceremonies and rituals? How did it function with politics on a day-to-day basis?
The common view is yes, because there was no separation of church and state.
Political office holders were also priests, religious figures. And, when they would perform these religious ceremonies, they would seek and interpret the will of the gods in a certain way, for instance, by observing the birds in the sky or by looking at the livers of chicken, as they did that sort of thing as well. The conventional view is, at least in the late Republic, that politics was primary. That if they said that the gods didn’t approve of a certain political action, that was because they themselves didn’t support that political action ideologically.
But I’m suggesting that maybe they thought that the gods themselves had something to do with this as well.
W.H. Auden in his poem, “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratio,” has Augustus appear and give a long speech.
In it, Rome has exhausted itself as the last of the imperial world. It’s extinguished all the last of the free cities and conquering everything brought all of classical antiquity to its logical conclusion, which is: it doesn’t have anything left. Everything has been tried. Everything human that humans can try to envision for themselves, try to achieve—it’s all been done. There’s really nothing left. It’s “an end of history” kind of ethos, and that’s when Christianity comes into play.
Jumping on that: a lot of Christians like Dante and others would’ve seen the Pax Romana that Augustus establishes as having a unique providential role in the spread of Christianity. Now, is there actually any historical basis for that? In thinking that there was something special about the Roman Empire establishing peace, which allowed a lot of eastern cults to be migrating over to the west, is there anything to that account?
Historically it’s outside my period, but you could say that one of the reasons why Christianity was so successful in spreading across the European world was because it was politically unified, and because it was also unified under the role of one man who adopted the Christian religion. And in historical terms, it would be hard to explain the spread of Christianity without that.
It seems hard to think that it could spread during the Republic, which is everything. You need a pacification to open up this sense of the spiritual.
If you try and read Antony and Cleopatra a little esoterically, Mark Antony is always making quotes from Revelation. And then Herod from the Bible shows up here and there. It’s like the empire has taken the ambitions that would’ve been channeled politically and applied them into a new spiritual direction. For Antony and Cleopatra, it’s romantic love, but you can also imagine it’s these deeper longings that on a more cosmic basis have been unleashed.
That’s why this leads to rejuvenation of classical antiquity with the Antinous cult under Hadrian. But a lot of eastern things are moving westward, and Christianity is one of them. It’s the one that ultimately wins.
Reading your dissertation, I kept noticing a lot of language used about being “ransomed,” about being “indebted to,” about “a benefaction,” about “the sacramentum.” A lot of language involved in this late Republican and early Imperial propaganda seems to have been adopted by the Christian Church. Did you notice at all a connection there?
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely., The Christian Church inherited trappings of the Roman Empire. The Pope, the head of the Catholic Church, is the Bishop of Rome. He’s actually inherited some of the titles, the main one being Pontifex Maximus, the Chief Priest of the Roman World.
Which was Augustus’ and Julius Caesar’s title.
Yes, exactly. It was a pagan priesthood that belonged ultimately to the Roman emperors, which the Bishop Bishops of Rome took for themselves after the pagan empire collapsed. So in many ways, the Catholic Church in particular and Christianity preserves continuously a lot of the Roman inheritance for us today.
So this is going to be a bonus round. Favorite ancient historian of Rome?
Tacitus.
Tacitus, not Livy?
Livy is great as well.
If you could get one book from the ancient world that we don’t have, what would it be?
Augustus’s Memoirs.
What would be in them besides the conquest in Spain?
There’d be a lot of stuff about liberty. There’d be a lot of stuff about his role just after Caesar’s death and his immediate assumption of power, which I’d really like to know more about.
Another one. The pronunciation of Julius Caesar’s quote before he crossed the Rubicon (Veni vidi vici): ‘Weni widi wici’ or ‘Veni vidi vici’?
‘Weenie weedy wiki.’
That would be the right way?
Yes.
It’s less impressive when you do it with the W than the V, you know?
If Caesar hadn’t crossed the Rubicon, what would’ve happened?
Doubtless some other general might have come along and made themselves dictator and destroyed the Republic in some other way. It was quite an unstable system.
Would someone like Caesar be inevitable...
You think.
...Given enough time?
It did seem that way, didn’t it? Yeah, considering that they killed Caesar, they ended up getting the same result.
Was it right for the assassins to go after Caesar? Was it right that they killed him on the Ides of March? As a historian, would you favor Brutus and Cassius, or were you more on the side of Caesar? It’s been 2000 years, so it’s okay…
It’s okay to pick a side.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you had to…
…I had to pick a side.
It’s a podcast.
It’s a podcast.
I’ve always been very attracted to Brutus and Cassius. I know not everybody has been. Dante wasn’t, for instance. He put them in the lowest circle of hell.
Next to Judas.
Next to Judas being held by Satan, right?
Yeah.
Wasn’t it? Yeah.
He puts Trajan in Heaven, and Cato at the bottom of Purgatory because he didn’t betray his master.
But Dante was an imperialist, right? Dante was a supporter of the Emperor against the Pope. Yeah, Dante favored monarchical rule. That’s a big influence on Dante.
He liked the empire
He liked empire.
And you’re with Tacitus, and you liked the Republic.
Yeah, I liked Republic and I love Brutus. He was not only an important politician, but he was intellectual as well.
He was a great capital-A academic philosopher, which means he was a follower of Plato. He wrote philosophical treatises on virtue. He was a correspondent of Cicero. He thought deeply about what the virtuous thing to do was in 43 BC, and he decided that ultimately it was more virtuous to overthrow the tyrant, even though it meant breaking a personal relationship that he had with Caesar, rather than be complicit in his dictatorship.
So yeah, I’m quite sympathetic to what he did.
So you’re with Brutus and Cassius at the battle Philippi over Mark Antony and Octavian?
Yes.
But at Actium, are you in favor of Mark Antony or are you in favor of Augustus?
Augustus.
Augustus?
Yeah.
Do you find him more sympathetic to the republic among the people who are trying to conquer for themselves?
He certainly claimed to be. He certainly seems to be more sympathetic to the continuation of at least a facade of republican government than Antony is. Antony, by this point, for whatever reason, is really playing at being a Hellenistic king. He’s really playing at being king of Egypt in a way that Romans find quite unpleasant.
Favorite Roman besides Brutus and Cassius?
Cicero, who we’ve barely talked about.
Please go into him.
What can I say of whom I’m a big fan?
He did want to kill the Catilines. And Julius Caesar was the only one who objected to them not being given the formal trial. Do you think it was right for Cicero to go after the Catilines?
Yes.
Was he correct in his interpretation of what happened?
Yes. Yes.
It wasn’t just bluster?
No, because at the time the Senate was deciding whether to kill these people, and firstly, it was the Senate who decided to kill these people. He obviously had a position, but his action was authorized by senatorial decree.
But, at the time, there was a revolutionary army within miles of the city. This was a fifth column of traitors inside the city. He captures them. They barely had a prison at the time. These are traitors who are trying to overthrow the city. They’re being held in the houses of leading Romans. He asks the Senate what to do with them.
There’s a debate. Cato, who’s one of Cicero’s allies sometimes, favors putting them to death. Caesar favors imprisonment for them. The Senate decides that, given the threat to the public of a literal army of slaves and gladiators and revolutionaries who are going march into the city and kill everybody, it’s probably wise not to leave a group of fifth columnists in this kind of quasi-imprisoned situation that they’re in.
There seemed to be two Ciceros, a Das Cicero Problem. There’s the Cicero the philosopher, the Cicero whose writings we have, the most of any authors in Latin. But there’s also Cicero the politician. He’s not part of the assassination of Julius Caesar, but then he praises Brutus and Cassius. As a politician, he would criticize Mark Antony, but he would raise Augustus against that, and that ultimately went against him when they did the proscriptions. Tell me about Cicero the politician. Was he successful? What did he actually want to do? Get me inside his head.
Specifically about 44 BC. He’s not part of the conspiracy because it’s primarily conspiracy of younger men. But as soon as Caesar’s dead in the Senate house with all the stab wounds in him, Brutus holds up the bloody dagger, he calls for liberty, and he appeals to Cicero to support him.
He sees Cicero as the foundation of the restored Republic. Cicero then becomes the biggest advocate for the killing of Cesar that you can imagine. He gives all these speeches explaining why the assassination was necessary. Not necessarily successfully in all cases, but he tries to persuade the Senate to give honors to Brutus.
There’s this kind of unstable amnesty where Cicero’s group, Brutus, and the supporters of Caesar led by Antony, reach an unstable compromise where they just pretend that Caesar’s died naturally. So they don’t honor the assassins, but nor do they prosecute them. This obviously doesn’t last.
Cicero realizes that they probably should have killed Antony as well, that Antony’s going to take over from Caesar. Antony was a Caesarian; he was Caesar’s second-in-command, his main adjutant. He realized that Antony is the biggest threat to the Republic and that Antony is going to take control of really important provinces. He’s going to take control of exactly the same provinces that Julius Caesar had taken control of a few years before, and he’s going to raise big armies, and he’s going to threaten Rome.
Cicero is willing to do absolutely anything to stop that, including raising up this 18-year-old kid who suddenly arrived in Rome calling himself Caesar’s heir. And Cicero is obviously a bit distrustful of anyone calling himself Caesar’s heir. But this guy seems to have support from some veterans, some mercenaries. He’s raising troops. He’s happy to back this guy temporarily to block Antony. Although in the end it doesn’t work out, because they join up, march on Rome together, and kill Cicero.
To start rounding things out: who are the best modern historians of ancient Rome to read? Modern including even Gibbon.
Gibbon’s excellent. Of course. There was a great 19th century historian of Rome called Theodor Mommsen. He’s the GOAT, really. He’s the big one, and he actually won the Nobel Prize of Literature for his work on Rome in the 20th century. Sir Ronald Syme has been a great influence on me. He wrote a book called, The Roman Revolution.
Which I’ve quoted from several times.
Which you’ve quoted from several times, which is a superb book, which is written on the eve of war in 1939.
So when he is thinking of Augustus, he’s thinking about Mussolini and Hitler, like the shadow of fascism is hanging over it. And he explodes the idea that Augustus is in any sense a constitutional ruler in reality. Even if maybe, as you say, he did think of himself in these terms, but Syme does see this as a facade. He sees Augustus as an autocrat. It should be recognized as such.
If you were transported with Dr. Who back in time towards ancient Rome, and you had a few acting classes, so you know how to impersonate people a little bit and pass off as a Roman, and you have 24 hours to spend, what would you visit? Where would you go? Who would you want to see? What would you want to do?
Can I go to the Ides of March?
Yes.
Yes. Well, then I go to the Ides of March, 44 BC.
Would you just be a spectator? Would you join in? Would you try to prevent it?
I wouldn’t try to prevent it. I’d like to be in the Senate, and I’d like to talk to Cicero and Brutus and Cassius, and see what they’re up to.
Okay. So you just want to interview anthropologically?
Yeah.
You’re not wanting to get involved?
Maybe I give a speech or two.
I would try to save Cesar. I just want to see what would happen.
No one did, which shows you what kind of a ruler he was. He had friends in the room, and no one went to save him.
Although he did forgive—including Brutus, who was basically almost his son—all of them after fighting against him in the civil war...
Yes.
...with Pompeii. So they did betray the guy who did forgive them and spared them.
They did, and that’s the ethical problem that Brutus is having to deal with. Is it more virtuous to honor my relationship with my friend? Or is it more virtuous to kill the tyrant because he’s a tyrant?
Although, then it led to Augustus, and Caesar was just dictator for life, and so did it accelerate the contradictions, right? You decide we’re going to take him out, but then it only creates something even more transformative along the way.
There are many things about the republic of Rome, many qualities in their way of life, that we would find abhorrent, or that would contradict a lot of our moral intuitions, but there are a lot of things that we find admirable, a lot of things we find strange. What are the things that we should admire? What are the lessons we should take away from ancient Rome?
I think there’s a lot to admire about the republican system of government and about the seriousness with which many (not all) political actors took their roles. I think politics today lacks an ethical sense from its protagonists. Politicians don’t always have a sense of the end of politics. A lot of these people did, and I think that’s very much to be admired.
What is your favorite thing about ancient Rome as the final question?
I like Roman coins. I think Roman coins a beautiful, if you haven’t seen one, go to your local museum. Go and find one. They’re gorgeous works of art and beautifully designed. They’re made of precious metal. You can see them in gold or silver or bronze. And they are for a historian profoundly important, because they are some of the only pieces of visual media which ordinary people could have accessed.
You mentioned Montesquieu earlier. There’s a line from Chesterton that I really like: “There was nothing left that could conquer Rome; but there was also nothing left that could improve it.” Rome was a peak of a certain form of human existence.
Dr. Reece Edmends: you’ve given us a lot to think about, chew on, and digest. We are grateful to have talked about all things ancient Rome, what happened to the Republic, and the figures of Augustus and all those around him.
