Triumvirs, Actium, and Augustus — forty-four years of civil slaughter, grain wars, eastern dynasts, and the ingenious invention of the Principate.
Julius Caesar lay dead on the stone floor of the Curia of Pompey, pierced by twenty-three wounds, his body covered by a stained toga at the foot of his old rival's statue. The sixty senators who had drawn daggers raised their bloody hands, called upon the name of Cicero, and ran through the streets shouting that tyranny was ended. Yet when they climbed to the summit of the Capitoline hill and looked down over the city, no spontaneous commonwealth rose to meet them.
The conspirators, led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, possessed high principles and a company of hired gladiators, but they had prepared no plan for governing Rome. They had assumed that once the dictator was removed, the ancient machinery of the Republic would resume motion of its own accord. It did not. The institutions capable of arbitrating competition between aristocrats had already been shattered by a century of factional warfare, private armies, and agrarian dislocation.
Marcus Antonius, Caesar’s fellow consul, had survived the assassination through Brutus’s scruples—Brutus having insisted that no blood other than the tyrant’s be shed. Antony fled in the garb of a slave during the confusion, but discovering that no general massacre followed, he re-emerged that night in the full authority of his office. He took possession of Caesar’s private papers, his state records, and the imperial treasury stored in the Temple of Ops, amounting to seven hundred million sesterces.
Click to enlarge
Two days later, in the Temple of Tellus, Antony convened the Senate and brokered a masterly, unstable compromise: the assassins received full legal amnesty to avert immediate civil slaughter, while all of Caesar's appointments, acts, and unpublished decrees were declared valid. Yet when Caesar’s will was opened in Antony’s house and read publicly by Lucius Piso, the political balance collapsed. Caesar had left his vast private gardens across the Tiber to the people of Rome, and to every citizen individually a legacy of three hundred sesterces (seventy-five denarii)—several months' wages for an ordinary labourer.
At the public funeral in the Roman Forum, Antony mounted the Rostra. He displayed the bloodied garment pierced by daggers, read the decrees by which the Senate had sworn to guard Caesar's life, and inflamed the veterans and plebeians into fury. Rioting crowds seized furniture, timber, and the benches of the courts to build a pyre on the spot; bystanders hurled their clothes and the soldiers their weapons into the flames. The conspirators, fearing for their lives, slipped out of Rome one by one into the countryside.
Across the Adriatic, in the Macedonian town of Apollonia, an eighteen-year-old student named Gaius Octavius was completing his education and military training for Caesar's planned Parthian campaign. When couriers brought news of the murder, accompanied by the extraordinary disclosure that Caesar had adopted him as his son and heir to three-quarters of his fortune, his family urged caution. His mother Atia and stepfather Philippus begged him to renounce the dangerous inheritance and seek safety in private life.
Octavius refused. In April 44 B.C. he landed near Brundisium, where garrisoned veterans greeted him with shouts of acclamation. He made the defining choice of his life: he formally claimed the testamentary adoption, and in Roman law and everyday speech assumed his adoptive father’s name—Gaius Julius Caesar. Modern historians refer to him as "Octavian" (Octavianus) between 44 and 27 B.C. to avoid confusing him with Julius Caesar, but to Roman soldiers, veterans, and common citizens, he presented himself simply as Caesar.
Arriving in Rome in May, the young Caesar confronted Antony and demanded the restitution of the dictator's money to pay the legacies promised to the Roman populace. Antony treated him with condescending contempt, declaring that state revenues were exhausted and that the adoption was legally questionable. Undeterred, Octavian sold off his own patrimony, borrowed heavily from his family and supporters, and paid out the seventy-five denarii to every registered citizen out of his own pocket. The urban mob and the veterans instantly recognized who bore Caesar's mantle.
“The young man is completely devoted to me, but his name is Caesar, and he is surrounded by men who threaten destruction to our friends. Can he be trusted when he comes into power? I fear not.” Marcus Tullius Cicero, Letters to Atticus XVI.9 (November 44 B.C., trans. E. S. Shuckburgh)
By autumn, relations between Antony and Octavian had deteriorated into armed rivalry. When Antony journeyed south to Brundisium to take command of four veteran legions brought over from Macedonia, Octavian rode into the veteran colonies of Campania. Armed with nothing more than his dead great-uncle’s name and a bag of gold offering five hundred denarii per recruit, the nineteen-year-old raised an illegal private army of three thousand veterans. The Roman Republic was once again confronted with its terminal disease: armed forces loyal to a private pocketbook rather than to the magistrates of the state.
In the winter of 44 B.C., Antony marched north with four legions to seize the strategic province of Cisalpine Gaul, shutting up Decimus Brutus—one of Caesar's assassins—in the fortress city of Mutina (modern Modena). At Rome, the veteran orator Marcus Tullius Cicero seized control of the Senate. In a torrential sequence of fourteen speeches known as the Philippics, Cicero attacked Antony with savage rhetorical violence, branding him a public enemy, a drunken brigand, and a tyrant worse than Catiline.
To crush Antony, Cicero needed legions. He proposed an extraordinary gamble that horrified conservative constitutionalists: the Senate should legalise young Octavian’s private army, grant the nineteen-year-old the rank of propraetor with imperium, enroll him among the senators with the right to speak among the consuls, and dispatch him alongside the newly elected consuls of 43 B.C., Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Vibius Pansa, to relieve Mutina. Cicero believed he could manipulate the boy: “He is to be praised, honoured, and set aside,” Cicero was reported to have quipped (*laudandum, ornandum, tollendum*).
Click to enlarge
In April 43 B.C., the senatorial forces engaged Antony in two desperate engagements near Mutina: Forum Gallorum and Mutina itself. Antony was defeated and driven into retreat toward Transalpine Gaul. But the victory cost the Senate everything. Consul Pansa died of his wounds in the field; Consul Hirtius was killed storming Antony’s camp. In a single week, the state was stripped of both its chief magistrates, leaving Octavian in sole command of eight veteran legions.
When the Senate attempted to discard him—assigning the command of the consular armies to Decimus Brutus and offering the young Caesar only minor honours—Octavian refused to budge. He dispatched a deputation of four hundred centurions to Rome. When the Senate hesitated, a centurion named Cornelius threw back his military cloak, placed his hand on the hilt of his gladius, and declared to the assembled senators: “If you will not give him the consulship, this will.”
In August 43 B.C., Octavian crossed the Rubicon with eight legions and marched into Rome without resistance. On 19 August, at the age of nineteen years and eleven months, he was elected consul alongside his cousin Quintus Pedius. The Senate’s illusion that it could rule through other men’s swords had dissolved in an afternoon.
Having seized the consulship, Octavian executed a ruthless reversal. He rescinded the decrees outlawing Antony and Lepidus and arranged a meeting on a low, willow-fringed island in the river Lavinius near Bononia (Bologna). For three days, seated in full view of their respective armies, the three warlords divided the Roman world between them.
Unlike the private political compact forged by Pompey, Crassus, and Caesar seventeen years earlier, this alliance was enacted into statutory law. On 27 November 43 B.C., the tribune Publius Titius carried the Lex Titia through the popular assembly, establishing the tresviri rei publicae constituendae—the "Triumvirs for Settling the Commonwealth"—for a five-year term. They were granted absolute power to appoint all magistrates, enact laws without senatorial approval, command all armies, and partition the western provinces: Antony took northern and central Gaul; Lepidus received southern Gaul and Spain; Octavian received Africa, Sicily, and Sardinia.
To fund the forty-three legions needed to wage war against Brutus and Cassius in the East, the triumvirs revived Sulla’s bloodiest weapon: the proscription lists. Whitened tablets were posted in the Forum bearing the names of citizens marked for death. Anyone who killed a proscribed person was promised a reward of twelve thousand five hundred denarii for a free citizen or freedom and seven thousand denarii for a slave; anyone who sheltered a victim faced instant death on the same list.
“No public calamity ever produced such scenes of horror. Sons betrayed their fathers, wives their husbands, slaves their masters. Some threw themselves from roofs, some leaped into wells or the Tiber; others starved in foul hiding-places, awaiting the headsman's sword.” Appian, Civil Wars IV.13 (trans. Horace White, Loeb Classical Library)
Between three hundred senators and two thousand equites were hunted down and butchered. Cicero was among the first names inscribed, demanded by Antony as the price of alliance; Octavian, who had owed his early rise to the orator's sponsorship, traded his patron's life after two days of nominal resistance. On 7 December 43 B.C., Antony’s horsemen overtook Cicero’s litter on the coast near Formiae. The sixty-three-year-old orator thrust his neck out of the curtains and bade the centurion strike cleanly. His severed head and the hands that had written the Philippics were brought to Rome and nailed to the Rostra in the Forum, where Fulvia, Antony’s wife, reportedly pierced the dead tongue with her golden hairpin.
While Italy bled under the proscriptions, Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus had mobilized the human and financial wealth of the East. Stripping Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece of ten years' tribute in a single season and plundering the ancient cities of Rhodes and Xanthus, the "Liberators" assembled nineteen legions—nearly eighty thousand infantry and twenty thousand cavalry—promising their troops that they fought to restore the laws of their ancestors.
In the summer of 42 B.C., Antony and Octavian shipped twenty-two legions across the Adriatic, bypassing republican naval squadrons under Sextus Pompey and Ahenobarbus, and advanced along the Via Egnatia into eastern Macedonia. The two colossal armies met at Philippi, on an alluvial plain flanked by steep wooded mountains on the north and an impassable malarial marsh on the south.
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
The conflict was decided in two pitched battles twenty days apart. In the first encounter, on 3 October, the lines tore across each other. Brutus shattered Octavian's wing, capturing his camp and forcing the young triumvir—ill with fever—to hide in the nearby marshes. But on the southern wing, Antony displayed the brilliant tactical audacity that had made him Caesar's master of horse: his legionaries charged across the marshland on raised causeways, stormed Cassius's camp, and scattered his legions. Cassius, unaware that Brutus had triumphed on the right and believing all was lost, retreated to a hill and ordered his freedman Pindarus to run him through.
Cassius had been the military mind of the republican cause. On 23 October, when supplies in the marshy camps ran low and winter approached, Brutus was forced by his restive troops into a second battle. Antony smashed the republican center in a furious hand-to-hand grapple of heavy infantry. Brutus fled into the surrounding crags with a remnant of his officers and, quoting the tragedy of Euripides, fell upon his own sword. When Antony discovered his body, he draped his own scarlet general's cloak over his fallen enemy and sent the ashes to Brutus’s mother Servilia; Octavian sent the severed head to Rome to be cast at the foot of Caesar’s statue.
Philippi destroyed the senatorial army, but victory instantly generated a crisis that nearly devoured the triumvirs. One hundred thousand discharged veterans demanded the lands and bounties promised to them before the campaign. The task of settling them fell not to Antony, who remained in the East to reorganize its wealthy provinces and enjoy its fruits, but to Octavian, who returned to an impoverished and terrified Italy.
Click to enlarge
With no money in the treasury to purchase land, Octavian carried out sweeping, brutal confiscations. The entire territories of eighteen prosperous Italian cities—including Capua, Cremona, Mantua, and Ariminum—were seized wholesale, their native populations evicted without compensation to make way for the veteran colonists. The poet Vergil lost his family farm near Mantua during the evictions, lamenting in his Eclogues: “Shall some rude soldier possess these so well-tilled fields; a barbarian these standing corn? See to what misery civil discord has brought our wretched citizens!”
Famine soon compounded the outrage. Sextus Pompey, operating from Sicily with an armada of war galleys, captured grain freighters and severed Rome’s food supply. Riots erupted in the streets; mobs stoned Octavian and Antony's officers in the Forum. Exploiting this widespread hatred, Antony’s wife Fulvia and his brother Lucius Antonius, who was consul in 41 B.C., raised the standard of revolt, presenting themselves as protectors of the dispossessed Italians and defenders of the ancient consular constitution.
The resulting conflict—the Perusine War (41–40 B.C.)—ended when Octavian’s generals, Agrippa and Salvidienus Rufus, trapped Lucius Antonius and his legions inside the formidable Etruscan hill-city of Perusia (modern Perugia). After a winter of gruesome famine, during which citizens ate grass and boiled leather while lead sling-bullets inscribed with obscene insults were hurled across the ramparts, Perusia surrendered. Octavian spared Lucius and Fulvia to avoid an immediate rupture with Antony, but he executed three hundred leading senators and magistrates of Perusia at an altar raised to Divus Julius on the Ides of March, and allowed his soldiers to plunder the city until it burned to the ground.
When Antony sailed to Italy with an armada in the spring of 40 B.C., open war seemed inevitable. But the veteran soldiers on both sides, exhausted by fratricidal slaughter and sharing common origins in the Italian countryside, flatly refused to fight each other. Centurions forced their commanders to the negotiating table at Brundisium. The resulting Treaty of Brundisium (September 40 B.C.) formally partitioned the Roman Mediterranean: Antony took everything east of the Adriatic; Octavian received the entire western world; Lepidus was left with Africa. To seal the compact, Antony, whose wife Fulvia had just died in Greece, married Octavian’s elder sister, the virtuous and widely respected Octavia.
For all the territorial divisions agreed at Brundisium, Rome remained under siege. Sextus Pompey had transformed Sicily into an independent maritime kingdom, manned by escaped slaves, proscribed patricians, and veteran pirate captains from Cilicia. Calling himself the "Son of Neptune" and donning a sea-blue military cloak, Sextus held the throat of the Mediterranean, strangling the grain convoys from Egypt and North Africa.
Octavian was no admiral. In 38 B.C., attempting to invade Sicily with improvised fleets, his squadrons were twice battered by Sextus’s sailors and smashed against the rocks of the Italian coast by summer gales. Over half his ships were lost, and Rome faced starvation. In his extremity, Octavian turned to his boyhood companion and military genius: Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa.
Agrippa recognized that Rome could not defeat seasoned mariners with ordinary methods. In 37 B.C., on the coast of Campania near Baiae, he undertook an extraordinary feat of civil and naval engineering: he cut a channel through the sand spit separating Lake Lucrinus from the sea, linked it to the deep, extinct volcanic crater of Lake Avernus, and created Portus Julius—a secret, storm-sheltered military harbor where twenty thousand oarsmen could be trained away from enemy scouts. He built four hundred heavy galleys equipped with reinforced bulwarks, raised catapult towers, and a deadly technical innovation: the harpax, a heavy iron-bound beam tipped with a grappling hook, fired from a ballista and retracted with a winch, allowing Roman boarding crews to snare fast light ships at long distance.
Click to enlarge
On 3 September 36 B.C., off the northeastern coast of Sicily near Naulochus, Agrippa engaged Sextus's fleet of three hundred ships. In a crushing display of Roman engineering and discipline, the harpax neutralized the superior maneuvering of the Sicilian pilots; two hundred and eighty of Sextus’s ships were captured, sunk, or burned. Sextus fled to Asia Minor, where he was captured and executed the following year.
The campaign had an unexpected political consequence. Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who had landed twenty-two legions from Africa to assist in Sicily, demanded that the island be annexed to his own territory and ordered Octavian’s garrisons to withdraw. Octavian rode boldly into Lepidus’s camp with only a handful of cavalry, appealing directly to the legionaries, who were weary of war and had no respect for their sluggish commander. Entire cohorts began deserting to Octavian on the spot. Lepidus threw himself at Octavian’s feet, begging for his life. Octavian stripped his former colleague of his triumviral command, his provinces, and his army, exiling him to an isolated seaside villa at Circeii. Only one consideration saved Lepidus from execution: he was Pontifex Maximus, and Roman religious law forbade the murder of the high priest. The three triumvirs were now two.
While Octavian secured Italy and established an image of order and religious renewal, Marcus Antonius was drawn ever deeper into the dynastic politics of the Hellenistic East. In 41 B.C., summoning the monarchs of the East to account for their conduct during the civil war, Antony met Cleopatra VII of Egypt at Tarsus in Cilicia. She sailed up the river Cydnus in a barge with a gilded stern, purple sails, and silver oars that beat time to the music of flutes and harps, reclining beneath a canopy of cloth-of-gold dressed as Aphrodite.
The relationship was not merely romantic fascination; it was a grand strategic alliance. Antony needed Egypt’s immense agricultural wealth and silver reserves to mount a campaign against the Parthian Empire, which had annihilated Crassus's legions at Carrhae and invaded Roman Syria. Cleopatra needed the sword of Rome's greatest general to guarantee the survival of the Ptolemaic dynasty and regain the ancestral territories of Phoenicia, Coele-Syria, and Cyprus.
In 36 B.C., Antony launched his long-prepared invasion of Parthia with sixteen legions and tens of thousands of allied cavalry. It was an unmitigated disaster. Overextending his supply lines through the rugged highlands of Media Atropatene (modern Azerbaijan), his siege train was intercepted and destroyed. Confronted by swarms of mounted horse-archers and bitter mountain blizzards, Antony was forced into a desperate twenty-seven-day retreat through Armenia, losing more than twenty thousand infantry and four thousand cavalry to hunger, frostbite, and arrows. Though he preserved his army from annihilation, the military aura of the Caesarian veteran was shattered.
Click to enlarge
Two years later, in 34 B.C., Antony staged an inflammatory ceremony in the gymnasium of Alexandria known to history as the Donations of Alexandria. Seated beside Cleopatra on twin thrones of gold, Antony proclaimed Caesarion—Cleopatra’s son by Julius Caesar—the legitimate heir of the dictator with the title "King of Kings." To his own infant children by Cleopatra, he distributed Roman provinces and client thrones: Alexander Helios was assigned Armenia, Media, and the unconquered realm of Parthia; Ptolemy Philadelphus received Syria and Phoenicia; Cleopatra Selene was given Cyrenaica and Libya.
In Rome, Octavian seized upon the Donations with devastating propaganda effect. When Antony formally divorced the beloved Octavia in 32 B.C., the young Caesar took an unconstitutional step that electrified the Roman world: he entered the sacred precinct of the Vestal Virgins, demanded the custody of Antony’s sealed private will, and read its contents aloud to the assembled Senate. Antony, the document stated, confirmed Caesarion’s legitimacy, bequeathed enormous Roman treasures to his foreign children, and directed that upon his death his body should be buried in Alexandria beside Cleopatra.
The Senate and citizens of Rome were outraged. Italy and the western provinces took a spontaneous oath of personal fidelity to Octavian—the celebrated coniuratio totius Italiae. With calculated political genius, Octavian did not declare war on his fellow Roman triumvir Marcus Antonius; on the Ides of October 32 B.C., dressed in the ancient garb of a Fetial priest, he hurled a spear before the Temple of Bellona, declaring war solely against the foreign queen of Egypt.
In the spring of 31 B.C., Antony and Cleopatra assembled a colossal invasion force on the western coast of Greece: five hundred warships, nineteen legions, and tens of thousands of light-armed allied troops. They established their main base on the southern promontory of Actium, guarding the narrow half-mile entrance to the Gulf of Ambracia. Yet before a single legion had formed line of battle, Marcus Agrippa decided the campaign by sea.
While Octavian landed eight legions north of the gulf and entrenched on the heights of Mikhalitzi, Agrippa struck with lightning naval raids around the Peloponnese. He seized the fortress port of Methone, cutting off Antony’s supply freighters from Alexandria; he captured Patrae and Corinth, severed Antony's communications with Greece, and bottled up the Antonian fleet inside the Gulf of Ambracia. Throughout the scorching summer of 31 B.C., Antony’s bottled army suffered catastrophic losses from malaria, dysentery, and desertion. Prominent Roman aristocrats and client kings, including King Deiotarus of Galatia and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, defected to Octavian's camp daily.
By late August, with supplies exhausted and oarsmen dying faster than they could be buried, Antony had no choice but to attempt a breakout. On 2 September 31 B.C., under a clearing northerly breeze, Antony led his remaining two hundred and thirty galleys through the narrow straits into the open Ionian Sea. His ships were massive, multi-banked quinqueremes and octeres with bronze-armoured prows, carrying towering catapult wooden towers and hundreds of legionaries on their high decks. Octavian and Agrippa waited with four hundred light, nimble Liburnian galleys, formed in a wide crescent two miles offshore.
“The struggle resembled a land battle, or more properly the storming of a walled town. Three or four of Caesar’s ships clustered around each of Antony’s leviathans, assailing them with javelins, flaming darts, and stones from engines, while the soldiers on the higher decks hurled missiles from above.” Plutarch, Life of Antony 66 (trans. Stewart & Long)
Agrippa refused to engage prow-to-prow against the heavy Antonian rams. Drawing his wings outward into the open sea, he tempted Antony’s flank commanders to extend their line. As the gaps widened, Agrippa’s swift Liburnians darted in, breaking oars, shearing rudders, and raining burning pitch onto the heavy timber hulls. In the early afternoon, realizing that the breakout had failed and the fleet was becoming surrounded, Cleopatra in her purple-sailed flagship Antonias hoisted sail with sixty Egyptian vessels, caught the southerly wind, and broke clean through the center of the fray heading for the open sea.
Seeing his queen's sails flying away, Antony committed the fatal act that branded his memory for centuries: abandoning the soldiers who were dying for him, he transferred from his flagship to a swift ten-oared galley and fled across the sea in her wake. The abandoned fleet fought on in stubborn desperation until late afternoon, when fire devoured the remaining hulls. Seven days later, Antony’s nineteen legions on the shore, seeing their commander vanished and realizing they were abandoned, surrendered to Octavian without striking another blow.
In the summer of 30 B.C., Octavian marched through Syria into Egypt, while his general Gaius Cornelius Gallus advanced from Cyrene. Cornered inside Alexandria, his remaining cavalry and fleet defecting to the conqueror before his eyes, Antony received a false report that Cleopatra had committed suicide in her mausoleum. Drawing his gladius, he stabbed himself in the stomach; discovering she was still alive, he was carried, bleeding and dying, to the tower and hoisted through a window to die in her arms.
Cleopatra attempted to negotiate with Octavian, hoping to preserve Egypt’s crown for her children. But when she discovered that she was to be led in chains through the streets of Rome behind the victor’s chariot, the thirty-nine-year-old queen took her own life on 10 August 30 B.C.—tradition reporting the bite of an asp smuggled in a basket of figs, though poison carried in a hair-pin was equally probable. Octavian had Caesarion tracked down and executed without trial, repeating the chilling Greek proverb of the philosopher Arius Didymus: “Too many Caesars is not a good thing” (*ouk agathon polukaisarie*).
The three-century-old Ptolemaic dynasty was extinguished, and with it the last surviving successor kingdom of Alexander the Great. Yet Octavian did not convert Egypt into a standard Roman province. Recognizing its immense strategic wealth and its ability to starve Rome by withholding grain, he claimed Egypt as the personal patrimony of the Caesars, governed by an equestrian prefect directly answerable to himself; no senator was permitted even to set foot in Egypt without the prince’s express written permission.
The seizure of the Ptolemaic royal treasury flooded Rome with unprecedented liquidity. Interest rates dropped from twelve to four percent, property values soared, and Octavian possessed the personal capital to pay every cent of veteran bounty, settle three hundred thousand soldiers in newly purchased colonies, and embark upon the rebuilding of Rome. In August 29 B.C., Octavian returned to the capital and celebrated a magnificent three-day triumph: for his campaigns in Illyricum, for the naval victory at Actium, and for the conquest of Egypt. An effigy of Cleopatra lying on a couch with an asp twined around her arm was paraded through the streets.
A few days later, by decree of the Senate, the bronze doors of the ancient Temple of Janus Quirinus were ceremonially bolted shut. In the seven hundred years since Romulus, the doors had stood open continuously in time of war, closed only twice before: under King Numa and after the First Punic War. The civil wars were finished. At thirty-three years of age, the sickly boy from Velitrae was master of the Mediterranean world.
Yet absolute power was a death warrant in Rome. Julius Caesar had possessed total military dominance, had reformed the calendar, settled veterans, and extended citizenship—and had been murdered in the Senate house because he flaunted the symbols of permanent autocracy. Octavian understood that if monarchy were to survive, it had to be disguised in the revered vocabulary of the Republic.
In 28 B.C., holding the consulship alongside Agrippa, Octavian annulled all unconstitutional acts of the triumvirate and conducted a census of the Senate, purging one hundred and ninety unworthy or impoverished members to restore senatorial dignity. Then, on 13 January 27 B.C., before a packed Curia, he performed the supreme theatrical act of ancient politics: he formally laid down all his extraordinary powers and announced the complete restoration of the res publica into the hands of the Senate and People of Rome.
The Senate responded with orchestrated panic, begging him not to abandon the state he had saved. Three days later, on 16 January, a compromise—the First Settlement—was enacted. Augustus divided the Roman provinces into two classes: the peaceful, civilized interior provinces (such as Baetica, Africa, Sicily, and Macedonia) were left to senatorial proconsuls chosen by lot; the frontier provinces containing almost all twenty-eight legions (Spain, Gaul, Syria, and Egypt) were assigned to Octavian for a ten-year term as proconsul. By this stroke, he maintained absolute military command under the guise of an emergency provincial assignment.
To honour his virtue, the Senate voted him the civic crown (*corona civica*) of oak leaves for saving the lives of citizens, ordered laurel trees planted outside his Palatine residence, placed a golden shield (*clupeus virtutis*) in the Curia inscribed with his courage, clemency, justice, and piety, and bestowed upon him a new, sacred title: Augustus. Derived from *augurium* and *auctoritas*, the name carried no monarchical taint, suggesting religious reverence rather than political domination.
“In my sixth and seventh consulships, after I had extinguished civil wars, being in possession of all things by universal consent, I transferred the republic from my power into the control of the Senate and People of Rome. After that time I surpassed all others in auctoritas, yet I possessed no more official power (potestas) than those who were my colleagues in the several magistracies.” Augustus, Res Gestae Divi Augusti 34 (trans. William Fairley, 1898)
Yet the First Settlement proved unstable. Holding the consulship every year from 31 to 23 B.C. blocked ambitious aristocratic families from competing for Rome's highest magistracy and bred senatorial conspiracies. In 23 B.C., after falling dangerously ill and nearly dying, Augustus enacted the Second Settlement: he permanently resigned the annual consulship, opening it to ordinary senators. In compensation, the Senate voted him two supreme constitutional prerogatives that formed the permanent bedrock of the Principate:
Egypt was now the emperor’s private possession, closed to senators without his leave and governed by a prefect of equestrian rank whom he appointed and could recall at will. Its second prefect, Aelius Gallus, received an order unlike any other of the reign: to march south into the incense kingdoms of Arabia, and either befriend them or take them. Strabo, who was Gallus’ friend and who had the story from him, gives the reason plainly — the report, old as memory, that the Arabians sold aromatics and precious stones for gold and silver and never spent any of it abroad. Augustus expected to gain either rich friends or rich enemies.
The expedition went wrong before it began. Gallus built eighty warships at Cleopatris, at the head of the Gulf of Suez, for a war that no fleet was ever going to fight; the Arabians, as Strabo observes, were traders and barely warlike on land, still less at sea. Realising the mistake, he built a hundred and thirty transports instead and embarked some ten thousand men — Romans and allies out of Egypt, with five hundred Jews and a thousand Nabataeans. His guide was Syllaeus, chief minister of the Nabataean king Obodas, and in Strabo’s account every disaster that followed was his work: a fleet steered onto a harbourless coast, an army led where there was no road, long circuits through country with nothing in it. Fifteen days brought them to Leuce Come with many ships lost and not an enemy sighted. The camel-traders of Petra made the same journey overland, Strabo notes acidly, in complete safety.
They lay at Leuce Come a summer and a winter while the sick recovered from two diseases of the country, one of the mouth and one of the legs. Then the march inland: thirty days through the friendly territory of Aretas, kinsman to Obodas, by the hardest road Syllaeus could find; fifty more across the desert of Ararene, whose king was named Sabos, the water carried on camels. Out of it the army came down into cultivated land, stormed the city of the Negrani at the first onset, and six days later met the only real battle of the campaign at a river — ten thousand Arabians fell, Strabo reports, and two Romans, against men who fought with bows, slings, and double-headed axes. Asca its king abandoned. Athrula surrendered, took a garrison, and gave up its corn and dates for the road on.
Then, before the walls of Marsiaba, the expedition stopped. Gallus assaulted the place for six days and raised the siege — not beaten, but out of water. His prisoners told him that the aromatic country itself lay two days’ march ahead. He turned back, and only on the road home understood how he had been handled: the outward march had taken six months, the return took sixty days. Strabo makes Marsiaba the farthest point reached; Pliny, drawing on the same official report, ends the list at a town called Caripeta instead — and the disagreement has never been settled. What is certain is the arithmetic of the losses. Seven men died in battle. The rest — and they were most of the army — died of disease, hunger, thirst, and bad roads.
“He was two days’ march from the aromatic region, as he was informed by his prisoners.” Strabo, Geography XVI.iv.24 (trans. H. C. Hamilton & W. Falconer)
The bill arrived from the other direction. With a large part of the garrison of Egypt away in Arabia, the kingdom of Kush came down the Nile, overran Syene, Elephantine and Philae, carried off the inhabitants, and threw down the statues of Caesar. The prefect Gaius Petronius drove them back to Pselchis, broke their army, took Premnis, and burned Napata, the royal seat of the queen the Greeks called Candace. Rome held the Nile. But the incense road was left to the traders, and no Roman army ever marched into southern Arabia again. Augustus, recording the reign in his own words, wrote only that his army advanced into Arabia as far as the territory of the Sabaeans and the town of Mariba. Syllaeus was tried at Rome for this and other offences, and beheaded.
Scroll to follow the one Roman army that ever marched on the incense kingdoms — and stopped two days short of them.
Rome believed the Arabians sold aromatics and stones for gold and never spent a coin of it abroad. Augustus ordered Aelius Gallus, his prefect of Egypt, to explore the country and either befriend or conquer it. Gallus built eighty warships at Cleopatris — for a war no fleet would fight — then a hundred and thirty transports, and shipped ten thousand men.
The Nabataean minister Syllaeus guided him, and Strabo says he betrayed the expedition from the first hour, steering the fleet onto a harbourless coast. Ships and crews were lost to the water, none to an enemy. The army reached Leuce Come sick — the mouth and the legs — and lay there a summer and a winter. Camel caravans made the same journey overland in safety.
Marching inland, the column carried its own water on camels for days together. It came at last to the land of Aretas, a kinsman of King Obodas, who received the Romans kindly and gave presents. Syllaeus then took them through it by the hard road: thirty days for a passage that need not have taken so long, on barley, a few dates, and butter in place of oil.
Beyond lay Ararene, desert country of nomads under a king named Sabos — fifty days to cross for want of roads. Out of it the army came down into cultivated land and took the city of the Negrani at the first rush; its king had already fled. Six days further, at a river, the Arabians gave battle and were broken: ten thousand of them fell, and two Romans.
The towns opened one after another. Asca its king had abandoned. Athrula submitted without a fight; Gallus put a garrison in it and drew corn and dates for the road ahead. Pliny, working from the general's own report, lists seven towns destroyed on this march whose names no earlier writer had recorded. Nothing had yet stopped a Roman army in Arabia.
Gallus assaulted Marsiaba of the Rhammanitae for six days and then broke off the siege — not beaten, but out of water. Prisoners told him the aromatic country lay two days' march ahead. He turned back. Strabo makes Marsiaba the farthest point; Pliny, using the same report, names Caripeta instead. The march had taken six months, and he now knew why.
By another road the return took sixty days: Negrana in nine, then the Seven Wells, Chaalla and Malothas — places nobody has since located — and so to Egra on the sea, across to Myos Hormos, and down the Nile. Seven men had died in battle; the rest went to disease, hunger and thirst. Behind him, Kush had walked into Syene and Philae and thrown down the statues of Caesar. Syllaeus was beheaded at Rome.
Itinerary from Strabo, Geography 16.4.22–24 and 17.1.53–54 (Strabo was Gallus' friend and had it from him), with the town list and Caripeta from Pliny, Natural History 6.160–161. Land, lakes and rivers: Natural Earth (public domain); sites: Pleiades, by id. All march legs are schematic — no ancient road is recorded. Cleopatris is plotted at Clysma, the port at the head of the gulf where Strabo's "old canal which leads from the Nile" ended; Leuce Come has never been located and is shown at both surviving candidates; the return stations Strabo names as the Seven Wells, Chaalla and Malothas are unlocated and are not plotted.
“I found Rome a city of brick, and left it a city of marble,” Augustus was reported by Suetonius to have boasted in his final days. The claim was more than architectural vanity: Augustus transformed the physical fabric of Rome to make the new imperial order visible, majestic, and permanent.
Using white Luna marble from newly opened quarries near Carrara, Augustus erected the Forum of Augustus, anchored by the colossal Temple of Mars Ultor ("Mars the Avenger") dedicated to the god who had avenged Caesar's murder at Philippi. Flanking the temple were colonnades containing statues of Rome’s legendary heroes from Aeneas and Romulus down to the triumphant generals of the Republic, with Augustus placed at their center in a four-horse chariot as the culmination of Roman history. On the Campus Martius, Agrippa built the original Pantheon, the Saepta Julia for voting, and Rome's first public baths, while the Ara Pacis Augustae—the Altar of Augustan Peace, dedicated in 9 B.C.—immortalized the imperial family in processional friezes alongside the founding legends of the city.
The same political language entered provincial worship. At Pola on the Adriatic, a temple built during Augustus’s lifetime joined his name to the goddess Roma. The pairing turned allegiance to the new ruler into a civic rite without calling him a king: the cult image stood within the sanctuary, while incense, libation, and sacrifice were offered at the altar outside.
Click to enlarge
Architecture was accompanied by sweeping moral and social legislation. Believing that factional violence had been unleashed by the decline of traditional Roman religion and the decay of family virtue, Augustus carried the Leges Juliae (18 B.C.): criminalizing adultery with public trial and exile, penalizing unmarried senators and bachelors with heavy financial restrictions on inheritances, and offering legal exemptions and social honors to citizens who produced three or more children (*ius trium liberorum*).
Click to enlarge
In 17 B.C., Augustus staged the Ludi Saeculares—the Secular Games—announcing to the Roman world that the age of civil slaughter was closed and a new Golden Age of peace, fertility, and piety had dawned. The poet Horace composed the official hymn, the Carmen Saeculare, sung on the Palatine by a choir of twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls of patrician birth. When Marcus Aemilius Lepidus died at last in 12 B.C., Augustus was elected Pontifex Maximus, consolidating the supreme priesthood of the Roman religion into the person of the prince.
The celebrated Pax Augusta did not mean that Rome was at peace. Under Augustus, the Roman legions conquered more territory than under any republican commander or previous generation in Roman history. Abandoning the old Mediterranean shoreline empire, Augustus pushed the frontiers of Rome north to the natural river lines of continental Europe: the Rhine and the Danube.
His stepsons, Nero Claudius Drusus and Tiberius Claudius Nero, carried out massive, coordinated campaigns through the Alpine passes and down the rivers of Germany. Raetia and Noricum (modern Switzerland and Austria) were incorporated; Pannonia and Moesia were subdued, establishing a fortified river frontier along the entire course of the Danube from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. Drusus campaigned four times across the Rhine into the dense oak forests of Germania, reaching the Weser and the Elbe before his horse stumbled and he died of a fractured leg in 9 B.C.
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
Yet the imperial machinery nearly broke under its own weight. In A.D. 6, a desperate revolt erupted among the Illyrian and Pannonian tribes behind the Danube frontier. For three years, fifteen legions—nearly half the entire army of the empire—were locked in savage counter-insurgency warfare under Tiberius, while famine and financial panic gripped Rome.
Click to enlarge
No sooner had Tiberius stamped out the Illyrian fire in A.D. 9 than catastrophe struck in the north. The governor of Germany, Publius Quinctilius Varus, attempting to impose Roman courts, law, and taxation upon the tribes east of the Rhine as if they were already a docile province, was lured deep into the trackless marshland and dense beech woods of the Teutoburg Forest by Arminius, a chieftain of the Cherusci who had served as a prefect in the Roman auxiliary cavalry and held Roman citizenship.
Trapped in an autumnal torrential storm on a narrow strip of land between the Kalkriese hill and an impassable bog, Varus’s three legions (XVII, XVIII, and XIX), three cavalry wings, and six auxiliary cohorts—twenty thousand seasoned men—were surrounded and annihilated in three days of butchery. Varus and his senior officers fell upon their swords; legionary eagles were captured; Roman centurions were sacrificed at wooden altars in sacred groves. When the news reached Rome, Augustus tore his clothes in grief, let his hair and beard grow for months, and repeatedly banged his head against the door of his bedchamber, crying: “Quinctili Vare, legiones redde!” (“Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!”).
The numbers XVII, XVIII, and XIX were never used again in the Roman army. The Elbe was abandoned forever; the Rhine hardened into the permanent northern boundary between Roman civilization and the Germanic world.
The frontier pushed to the Danube, won and lost beyond the Rhine, and carried into Britain.
In January 27 Octavian returns the state to the Senate and people and receives the name Augustus, with the great frontier provinces for his own command. Egypt he keeps under a prefect of his choosing. The Alps, the northwest of Spain and the Balkans below the Danube are still unconquered.
When King Amyntas is killed in 25, Galatia becomes a province; the same year Mauretania is given to Juba II as a client kingdom. The Cantabrian and Asturian wars, begun under Augustus himself in 26, are finished by Agrippa in 19, and all Spain is Roman after two centuries of fighting.
Augustus' stepsons, Drusus and Tiberius, strike into the Alps from the south and from Gaul in a single summer and take Raetia and the lands up to the Danube. Noricum, a kingdom long friendly to Rome, is annexed about the same time. The trophy at La Turbie later lists forty-five Alpine peoples subdued.
Tiberius conquers Pannonia (12–9), carrying the frontier to the middle Danube. Across the Rhine, Drusus campaigns every year from Mogontiacum and reaches the Elbe in 9, then dies after a fall from his horse. Roman bases and markets begin to be built east of the Rhine.
Herod's son Archelaus is deposed and Judaea becomes a province under a prefect. A command in Moesia is now attested on the lower Danube. Then Pannonia and Dalmatia rise; for three years Tiberius, with the largest Roman army assembled since the civil wars, fights to recover them.
The Pannonian revolt is crushed in 9. Weeks later, in the forests of northern Germany, Arminius of the Cherusci destroys Quinctilius Varus and three legions; the battlefield near Kalkriese has been identified by excavation. Rome keeps the Rhine but never again governs the land beyond it.
Augustus dies in 14; Germanicus leads punitive campaigns over the Rhine (14–16) and is recalled. Under Tiberius the kingdom of Cappadocia is annexed at the death of Archelaus, and Commagene is placed under Syria. The empire's revenue from Cappadocia allowed Tiberius to halve the sales tax, as Tacitus reports.
Gaius has the king of Mauretania put to death (40), and after a hard war two provinces are made there. In 43 Claudius sends four legions to Britain and takes Camulodunum; Lycia is annexed the same year. In 46 the client kingdom of Thrace is ended, and the whole southern bank of the Danube is Roman.
In Britain Boudica's rising (60–61) burns Camulodunum, Londinium and Verulamium before it is crushed. In the East Corbulo's wars end with a compromise: Tiridates, a Parthian prince, is crowned king of Armenia by Nero in Rome (66). The same year Judaea rises, and the garrison of Jerusalem is destroyed.
Nero's death ends the house of Augustus. Galba, Otho and Vitellius follow in a year; the armies fight two battles near Bedriacum and sack Cremona before Vespasian, commanding in Judaea, is recognised. On the lower Rhine the Batavian Julius Civilis rises and besieges the legions at Vetera.
Province outlines: Ancient World Mapping Center, “Roman Empire c. 60 BC”, “c. AD 117 extent” and “c. AD 200 extent and provinces” (ODbL; after the Barrington Atlas). Each territory is drawn at its c. 60 BC or c. AD 200 extent from the date it came under Roman rule, so earlier inland limits are drawn too large. Thrace is divided from Asia across the straits, and Galatia from Cappadocia along a meridian; the second division is an approximation. The Roman advance to the Elbe is shown by labels only, since no border was ever settled there. Coastlines and rivers: Natural Earth. Sites: Pleiades.
The fundamental weakness of the Augustan Principate lay in its central fiction. Because Augustus denied that he was a king, he could establish no legal right of hereditary succession. Yet because his power rested upon the loyalty of twenty-five legions and a vast personal fortune, the state could not be handed back to a divided, unarmed Senate without instantly reigniting civil war.
For forty years, Augustus wrestled with mortality. He systematically promoted candidates within his own household, and watched them die one by one: his beloved nephew Marcus Claudius Marcellus died in 23 B.C.; Marcus Agrippa, whom he married to his daughter Julia, died in 12 B.C.; his brilliant stepson Drusus died in 9 B.C.; his two adored grandsons and adopted heirs, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, died of wounds and fever in Spain and Gaul in A.D. 2 and 4.
In the end, only one candidate survived: his sombre, brilliant, unloved stepson Tiberius Claudius Nero. In A.D. 4, Augustus formally adopted Tiberius as his son and colleague, granting him tribunician power and superior proconsular command, while requiring Tiberius to adopt the charismatic young general Germanicus to secure the dynastic succession for another generation. The hereditary monarchy had found its path through the legal mechanism of Roman adoption.
In August A.D. 14, at the age of seventy-five, Augustus fell ill at Nola in Campania while journeying toward Naples. Sensing the end, he summoned his friends to his bedside. Calling for a mirror, he had his hair combed and his sunken cheeks arranged. Looking around at the assembled companions who had helped him steer forty-four years of revolution, he spoke his dying words in the traditional Greek formula of an actor leaving the stage:
“Since well I’ve played my part, all clap your hands, and from the stage dismiss me with applause.” Suetonius, Life of Augustus 99 (trans. Alexander Thomson)
Augustus died on 19 August A.D. 14. His body was borne back to Rome along the Appian Way by the decurions of the Italian municipalities and cremated on the Campus Martius. An eagle was released from the pyre to carry his soul to heaven; the Senate enrolled him among the gods of Rome as Divus Augustus.
When the Senate met to acknowledge Tiberius's accession, there was no resistance, no call for the restoration of the assemblies, no voice raised for the free commonwealth of Cicero and Cato. Augustus had ruled for forty-four years—so long that not a single senator living in A.D. 14 had ever cast a ballot in a free republican election before the civil wars. The Senate possessed its ancestral robes, the consuls had their lictors, the courts sat in the Forum, and magistrates carried out their duties under ancient names. Yet all power flowed from one house on the Palatine Hill. The Republic had not fallen in a day; it had quietly expired behind the ceremonial mask of its own restoration.
Under Augustus, Rome passed from a Mediterranean city-republic torn apart by warlords into a continental, professional military monarchy. The price of peace was the surrender of political liberty; the reward was two centuries of domestic security known as the Pax Romana.