Lessons from Caesar Augustus

Men supposedly think about the Roman Empie every day. So let's go there

Gaius Octavius was a nepo baby. Great-nephew of Julius Caesar, he was the only serious candidate for leadership left standing when the civil wars of Caesar’s time, and those that followed his assassination, ended. Julius Caesar was on the verge of making himself what we would call an absolute monarch when defenders of the Roman republic used a sort of heavy-handed political acupuncture to impeach him. The treatment succeeded in ridding them of Julius, but in a few years, they got Octavian and he didn’t screw around with niceties like “mercy”.

The whole story — Caesar’s rise; his murder and the irony of being killed by Brutus, whose ancestor had rid Rome of its first kings centuries before; the role of women in Roman politics; the incredible squandering of human talent, Roman blood and the empire’s wealth — is worth knowing. But let’s dig into how Augustus ruled, because there are some life lessons for us.

First, a few words about terminology. The word “dictator” almost ended up in the paragraphs above, but it had a different meaning to Romans. If the nation was in trouble, the Roman republic’s leadership (the Senate, mainly, though often working under public pressure) could appoint a dictator for a set time, often a year or two. Usually, if a dictator stayed too long, he was quickly transformed into an inanimate object. “Emperor” is problematic, too. Julius Caesar, in his last years, was, by our standards, an emperor. But that’s a modern word. “Imperator” is the Latin term that was used on our coinage when British monarchs were emperors of India (IMP was on Canadian coins until 1947), but a Roman impetator was a successful general, awarded the title by his men. In real terms, it means “winner”.

Then there’s “caesar”, which we mispronounce. The “c” in Latin was never soft. The right pronunciation is “guy-oos yulioos kaiser”. That name later became the title of the junior partner of the imperial ruling system, with the “Augustus” being the title of top dog. A man’s name was able to sum up the job description better than any title.

Notice the word “king” doesn’t show up anywhere.

After Octavian killed off all his potential challengers including Julius Caesar’s natural son with Cleopatra, the Senate made him “princeps”. That’s not a prince. He was just the principal citizen of Rome. The title did not appear on his coinage.

He lived relatively modestly. People could drop around to his house if they had a problem with government. Yet, through most of his reign, he had no official government position. All his authority came from the support of the army and from the vast amount of money that flowed to him from the provinces he owned.

Augustus created a system where all the institutions of the republic survived… in name. He was just a special guy, the father of the country, the placed where the buck stopped.

Every year, two consuls were elected to, officially, lead the government. (For a while, he picked himself but eventually put puppets into the job.) The people were represented by a tribune. The senate kept meeting. The senate rubber-stamped the appointments of provincial governors and senior bureaucrats, who then got their instructions from Augustus.

The facade of a republic remained, right to the end and even afterwards. Rome’s senate kept going for two hundred years after Rome’s fall, even when the city was almost depopulated and ruled nothing around it. No one is sure when the Roman senates topped meeting. Its last flicker wasn’t worth recording, or the record is lost.

The Roman state was always intertwined with its official religion, so the princeps was also chief priest, or “pontifex maximus”, a title that survives today in the Vatican. (This helps to partly explain why Christians were often persecuted. Failing to submit to Rome’s gods was also treason against Rome’s chief priest.) Augustus never let that title go. On our coins, the king’s title is “Charles III DG (Dei Gratia, or “by the grace of God) Rex”. A claim to power has to be rooted in something, either a mandate from the people, from God’s choice, or from the brute strength of the army.

Through all the pre-assassination and post-assassination civil wars, all the political players pretended to be loyal to the republic. Their ancestors had fought hard to create it. They’d bumped off the early Roman kings and fought the neighbouring city states to build the first big nation in Europe. They’d also taken care of anyone among them who was overly ambitious.

During Augustus’ reign and, long afterwards, there was a large faction in Rome that despised one-man rule tarted up as “first among equals”. Augustus had life-and-death power over men who (in the elite classes) would have been relatively free during the republic. Supporters of the new imperial system couldn’t know Augustus was the best they’d get: the three emperors who came after Augustus were insane, the three who followed them lasted just a few months, the one who restored order (Vespasian) was alright but one of his sons was a dud, the other was a bloodthirsty paranoic (if you believe Roman historians). There was handful of good ones before the system when down the crapper. A century and a half after Augustus, army coups and incompetence coughed up new emperors every year or two. The economy fed cash into a system that wasted it on troops who attacked the state rather than fought for the empire and the people.

From 211 CE to the fall of Rome (more like an acceptance of reality than a “fall”) in 476 CE, there were only two emperors who (a) had any staying power and (b) were worth a damn. Within two centuries after Augustus died, Rome’s mints were putting out fake money (bronze coins with a thin silver plating). Members of what had been Rome’s governing classes, the people who could afford to take on unpaid civic offices, hoarded gold and stopped doing their duties. They also went on a tax strike. Silver and gold flowed out of the empire to India and China to pay for the excesses of the rich.

And then there were the plagues...

Diocletian, one of the rare decent late-stage emperors and the only one to retire unperforated, tried to fix the economy with a sledgehammer: he locked people into jobs and classes. If your father was a bricklayer, that’s what you became, whether you were suited to the work or not. Making smart people do the jobs of their stupid fathers or decreeing that the half-bright son of a physician had to be a doctor was no way to exploit talent or inspire job satisfaction. And he froze wages and prices. Diocletian managed to hold the barbarians in check, clip the wings of the army and fix the bureaucracy, but he simply papered over his empire’s financial problems and turned ordinary Romans into law-breakers.

So if the imperial system didn’t usually work, why didn’t they bring back the republic, which had fostered talent and had governed Rome far longer than the imperial system?

This brings us back to Augustus.

Not only was he the first and arguably the best of the emperors, he also reigned the longest: 37 years. By the time he died, two generations of potential leadership had come and gone. People who might have revived the republic had no clear personal knowledge or real memory of it: a man who was 25 when the dust settled after Octavian won his civil war was into his 60s when Augustus died. Nor did the Roman people.

And after Rome had endured the next three freaks — Caligula, Claudius and Nero —91 years had passed since Augustus took power. And, for more than a decade before that, the republic was dysfunctional. Nero’s death would have been a good time to revive the republic, but, by then, there was no one alive who could remember anything but one-man government. They didn’t know how a republican government made policy or ran an administration. Romans had been conditioned to be governed by narcissistic psychos who simply sent out orders. Government was, after Augustus, something to be manipulated by the rich and worked around by everyone else. The army understood its power and was accustomed to using it. That was the real power.

Freedom and agency (again, for the privileged) became memories and fables, not things that had a realistic chance of being restored. There was, in the centre of Rome, always the pretence: the powerless legislature, the public offices with titles but no real responsibility. It was uninspiring.

We mythologize the glory of the Roman empire but it was lousy government. One-man rule does not instill loyalty to the nation and generate real productivity. People need opportunity, class mobility, and a feeling of belonging (even partnership), with the state. People will get behind an Augustus when he’s a winner. But in all of Rome’s history, there was just one Augustus, and dozens upon dozens of duds.