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Augustus | |
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| Born | Gaius Octavius Thurinus 23 September 63 BC Rome, Roman Republic |
| Died | 19 August AD 14 (aged 75) Nola, Roman Empire |
Caesar Augustus (23 September 63 BC – 19 August AD 14), born Gaius Octavius, was the first Emperor of Rome, the merger of the Roman slave state. He ruled from 27 BCE until his death in 14 CE. Augustus was the political instrument through which the Roman slave-owning class resolved its own internal crisis, crushed the resistance of slaves and dispossessed free farmers, and built a state powerful enough to continue the exploitation of the majority for generations to come.[1]
Biography[edit | edit source]
Gaius Octavius was born on September 23, 63 BCE, into a family of Roman aristocracy wealthy, well-connected, but not of the highest senatorial rank. His father was a senator and administrator; his mother, Atia, was the niece of Julius Caesar. This family position placed him squarely within the propertied ruling class of Rome, and his entire subsequent career was a defense of that class's interests.[1]
His great uncle Julius Caesar had been a popularis, a politician who appealed to the popular assemblies and the urban poor against the senatorial oligarchy. Caesar's appeal to the masses was a tactical instrument in a struggle for power within the ruling class. His proposed reforms. land redistribution, debt relief, and the extension of citizenship were designed to rebuild the social base of a stable slave state. He remained, throughout his career, a slave-owner and a defender of the property relations on which Roman society rested.[1]
Caesar's decision to adopt Octavian in his will transformed the Octavian’s political position overnight. He was now the heir to Caesar, with a claim on the loyalty of Caesar's veteran men who had been promised land grants and whose economic futures depended on the fulfillment of those promises.[1]
A ruling class, faced with a crisis it cannot resolve through its old institutions, constructs new ones that serve the same fundamental purpose. Augustus did not end the class struggle in Rome. He suppressed it, institutionalized it, and gave it new forms. The conflicts between masters and enslaved people, between landowners and dispossessed peasants, between the exploiting class and the exploited majority continued beneath the surface of imperial stability, and eventually erupted again in the long crisis of the third century and the final disintegration of the western empire.[1]
The state is a special organization of force and an organization of violence for the suppression of some class. In Rome the Senate, the magistracies, the legions, the grain distributions, the gladiatorial games, the divine honors heaped on the emperor, all of it served this single fundamental purpose.[1]
Augustus died on August 19, 14 CE, at the age of seventy-five, having ruled for over forty years. The Roman Senate voted him divine honors, and the title Augustus was adopted by every subsequent emperor. The Principate survived, with modifications, for over two centuries.[1]
Rise to Power[edit | edit source]
The assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE by the senatorial faction around Brutus and Cassius was was a desperate and ultimately futile attempt by one section of the slave-owning aristocracy to defend the political prerogatives of the Senate against what it saw as the encroachment of one-man rule. The "liberty" they were defending was the liberty of the Roman ruling class to manage its own affairs through its traditional institutions. The slaves who worked their estates, the dispossessed farmers in the Italian countryside, the urban poor in Rome, none of them were considered.[1]
Caesar's murder descended into a round of civil war among competing factions of the same ruling class. Octavian, understanding that his only leverage was his name and his ability to mobilize Caesar's veterans, recruited an army through the direct appeal to soldiers' with promises of land, money, and security for men whose welfare depended on powerful patrons.[1]
The Second Triumvirate formed in 43 BCE between Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus was a temporary alliance of three powerful military commanders, each with his own army and his own political base, who recognized that fighting each other while the republican faction remained armed was suicidal. Their first act was a systematic political massacre, the proscriptions, in which thousands of their political enemies were killed and their property confiscated. Cicero, the great orator and ideologist of the senatorial republic, was among those killed. This was the ruling class settling accounts among itself with extreme violence, as it had done repeatedly throughout the preceding century.[1]
The victory over Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 BCE ended the organized military resistance of the old republican faction, but the underlying social tensions remained unresolved. The Perusine War of 41 BCE, an uprising provoked by the brutal dispossession of Italian farmers to provide land for demobilized veterans, showed that the class conflict between the propertied and the propertyless had not gone away. The ruling class could fight among itself endlessly, but every time it needed to pay its armies or reward its supporters, it did so at the expense of the free poor below it.[1]
The conflict between Octavian and Mark Antony was the final settling of accounts within the ruling class over who would govern the Roman world. Octavian portrayed Antony as a man who had abandoned Roman values for an eastern queen, who was under the spell of the foreign ruler Cleopatra, who threatened to move the center of power to Alexandria. This was political propaganda designed to mobilize Roman nationalist sentiment, the same kind of appeal to cultural solidarity across class lines that ruling classes have used throughout history to obscure real social antagonisms.[1]
It was a conflict based on the western half of the Roman world, with its armies and its Italian base, against the eastern half, with Egypt's enormous agricultural wealth. The winner would control everything.[1]
The Battle of Actium in 31 BCE and the subsequent invasion and annexation of Egypt in 30 BCE gave Octavian control of the Roman world and its resources. The deaths of Antony and Cleopatra removed the last military rivals. The occupation of Egypt, its vast grain surplus, its centralized bureaucratic administration, and its revenue gave Octavian the financial foundation for a stable imperial system.[1]
In 27 BCE, Octavian staged an act to deceit the population in which he "returned" his powers to the Senate. The Senate, populated by men who owed their positions to him, promptly handed them back in formalized, legally codified form, adding the title of Augustus. The Principate was born.[1]
Rule over Rome[edit | edit source]
As the state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, an instrument through which the dominant class maintains its rule over the exploited. The lie that Augustus was merely "first among equals," just a citizen with unusual honors, was a pretense. Its purpose was to obscure the reality of military monarchy in legitimizing the traditional republican institutions to which the Roman ruling class was emotionally and ideologically attached to.[1]
‘’Democracy’’ in antiquity was always based on slavery. The same is true of the Principate's republican trappings. The Senate still met. Elections were still formally held. But the real power rested on three concrete class foundations: control of the armies, control of the grain supply, and the unquestioned protection of slave-owners' property rights, which hasn’t changed till this day.[1]
Augustus held complete military command over all the provinces where troops were stationed. He controlled the grain supply of Rome through his direct occupation on Egypt and his authority over the distribution system in the capital. And ensured in every piece of legislation and every administrative decision he made, that the slave system would be defended without compromise.[1]
In the Roman imperial system the army was the supreme support of the government, and Augustus understood this with. the Senate, the magistracies, the civic ritual of Roman political life was secondary. The army was the foundation.[1]
Augustus's military reforms were a systematic project to transform the army from an instrument that any sufficiently ambitious commander could use against the state into a permanent, professional force whose loyalty was tied to the imperial system itself. Long-term service, typically twenty years for legionaries, created a body of professional soldiers whose entire adult lives were spent in the army and whose futures depended on the grants of land or cash that came at the end of their service. Veterans' colonies were planted across the empire. Former soldiers became a privileged stratum of the free men with a direct interest in the stability of the system that had created them.[1]
The Praetorian Guard, stationed in Rome and Italy, gave the emperor a personal military force in the capital itself. Its existence was a reminder of where real power resided. In later centuries the Praetorian Guard would play an increasingly open role in making and unmaking emperors.[1]
Augustus's social legislation was a conscious effort to stabilize and reinforce the slave mode of production and the class relations built upon it. The decades of civil war had been deeply unsettling to the slave-owning class in multiple ways. Slave revolts, most notably the revolt of Spartacus, had shown the potential of the enslaved population. The repeated willingness of military commanders during the civil wars to promise freedom to runaway slaves in exchange for military service had created a precedent that terrified the slave-owning class. Sextus Pompeius, in particular, had given refuge to enormous numbers of escaped slaves. Augustus made the decisive reversal of these precedents one of the central acts of his consolidation of power.[1]
His laws on the legal freeing of slaves were explicitly designed to limit and control the process, because the uncontrolled freeing of slaves threatened their labor supply and undermined the authority of the master. Laws on the family, on marriage, and on inheritance among the citizen class served to reinforce the stability of the property-holding unit of the family through which ruling-class wealth was transmitted and consolidated across generations.[1]
Concessions to the urban poor through regular grain distributions, cash gifts, and lavish public entertainments was political calculation famously an act of bread and circuses. The dispossessed free poor of Rome had been a politically active and a dangerous force in the late Republic, capable of violence and agitation. Augustus pacified them by keeping them fed, entertained, and politically inert. Cheap grain and the public games were instruments of social control. They bought the passivity of the urban masses while the work of surplus extraction was carried out in the countryside, the mines, and the workshops by enslaved labor.[1]
It was precisely Rome's capacity to maintain a most intense and ultimately destructive economic exploitation of the great mass of the people, whether slave or free that characterized and ultimately destroyed it. The reorganization of the provinces into senatorial and imperial categories, the development of an equestrian administrative class, the regularization of taxation, and the construction of the Praetorian prefecture and the prefectship of Egypt were the construction of a more durable machinery for the extraction and upward distribution of surplus from the exploited classes across the entire empire.[1]
The old system of tax farming, in which private contractors purchased the right to collect taxes in a given region had been brutally exploitative, but also unpredictable. Augustus's move toward more direct collection methods was a rationalization in the interests of the imperial state, which now sought a more reliable and controllable revenue stream. The census of 28 BCE gave the state a more accurate picture of the taxable resources of the empire. The development of the equestrian civil service created a more professional and more loyal administrative apparatus than the old system of senatorial governors, who had their own political ambitions and independent class interests.[1]