Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Rome, Italy and Empire: themes, Succession and the dynasty, Constitution…
Rome, Italy and Empire: themes
Succession and the dynasty
Potential successors
Agrippa
Germanicus
Marcellus
Seneca, On Consolation 2.3: "A... had already begun to depend on him and to lay upon his shoulders the burden of empire. ... He chose well; those foundations would not sink beneath any weight". Highly complimentary
Tiberius
Drusus (the elder)
Gaius
Lucius
Agrippa Postumua
Return to Res Publica
Aftermath of Caesar's assassination
Plan of the assassins?
Impossibility - Tacitus writing in e2ndc
Weakness of Senate
Marking out heirs
Adoption
Honours
toga virilis
tribunicia potestas, imperium proconsulare
princeps iuventutis
consulship and coconsulship with current princeps
priesthoods
Marriage to women in the family
Tiberius's accession - hesitant and gradual
Accession of Caligula - seizure of power with the assent of the Senate
"When he entered the city, ius arbitriumque omnium rerum was at once put into his hands by the unanimous consent of the senate and of the mob, which forced its way into the House" (Sue 14.1)
"No attention was paid to the wishes of Tiberius, who in his will had named his other grandson, still a boy, joint heir with Caligula" (Sue 14.1)
"He took in one day all the honours which Augustus had with difficulty been induced to accept, and then only as they were voted to him one at a time during the long event of his reign, some of which indeed Tiberius had refused to accept at all?
Assassinated by Praetorian Guard
Claudius dragged into power
How were heirs chosen?
pleasing the army
chance - who was alive, who was the right age
women - Agrippina and Messalina
pleasure of the senate and senatorial elite
reputation with the populus
Constitution and framework
Res Publica
Families in power
Elections
Under Tiberius "The elections were now for the first time transferred from the Campus to the Senate: up to that day, while the most important were determined by the will of the sovereign, a few still had been left to the predilections of the Tribes"
The constitutional position of Augustus through time
"I transferred the republic from my power to the dominion of the senate and people of Rome. For this service of mine I was named Augustus by decree of the senate, and the door-posts of my house were publicly wreathed with bay leaves and a civic crown was fixed over my door and a golden shield was set in the Curia Julia, which, as attested by the inscription thereon, was given me by the senate and people of Rome on account of my courage, clemency, justice and piety. 3 After this time I excelled all in influence [auctoritas], although I possessed no more official power [potestas] than others who were my colleagues in the several magistracies." RG 34
balancing of constitutional and unconstitutional powers
Role of the Senate
Property and censuses
"Since the number of the senators was swelled by a low-born and ill-assorted rabble ... he restored it to its former limits and distinction by two enrolments, one according to the choice of the members themselves, each man naming one other, and a second made by Agrippa and himself."
(Sue, Aug. 35)
Seems from CD 54.13 that in at least one occasion, Augustus created a system by which senators would choose each other, but after "abuses crept in", Augustus essentially chose the rest
New property qualifications under Augustus - higher, but disagreements as to amount. Frequent suggestion that he would pay them the difference if honourable men lacked
Honours and respect
"To enable more men to take part in the administration of the State, he devised new offices" (eg. of roads, aqueducts, the Tiber, grain, etc)
"He also demanded that whenever the consulship was conferred on him, he should have two colleagues instead of one; but this was not granted, since all cried out that it was sufficient offence to his supreme dignity that he held the office with another and not alone" (Sue Aug 37)
"To enable senators' sons to gain an earlier acquaintance with public business, he allowed them to assume the broad purple stripe immediately after the gowns of manhood and to attend meetings of the senate; and when they began their military career, he gave them not merely a tribunate in legion but the command of a division of cavalry as well; and to furnish all of them with experience in camp life, he usually appointed two senators/ sons to command each division." (Sue, Aug.38)
"The senate, relieved from the necessity of buying or begging votes, was glad enough to embrace the change" when Tiberius removed the final popular voting from the political arena (Tac Ann 1.74)
Augustus's privy council
"He also adopted the plan of privy councils chosen by lot for terms of six months, with which to discuss in advance matters which were to come before the entire body." (Sue Aug 35)
"It was also voted that any measure should be valid, as being satisfactory to the whole senate, which should be resolved upon by him in deliberation with Tiberius and with these counsellors, as well as the consuls of the year and the consuls designate, together with his grandchildren (the adopted ones, I mean) and such others as he might at any time called on for advice. having gained by this decree these privileges, which in reality he had possessed in any case, he continued to transact most of the public business, though he sometimes reclined while doing so." (CD 56.28)
Legal - any lex had to be approved by popular assembly, but in the early principate the Senatus Consulta took the status of laws, but this doesn't necessarily signify senatorial power
Decisions of the privy council/small committee were equivalent to senatus consults; Tiberius abolished this?
Moments of change
Triumvirate
Powers and responsibilities
Proscriptions
Contemporary perception
Devolution into Civil War
Claudius's principate
the ius honorum
"omnia, patres conscripti, quae nunc vetustissima creduntur, nova fuere" about Gauls becoming part of the Senate (Tac 11.24)
Augustan Settlements
Maiestas trials
Caesar's assassination
Liberty vs slavery
"The City of Rome from its inception was held by kings; freedom and the consulship were established by L. Brutus." 1.1
The nomination of candidates for magistracies
"speciosa verbis, re inania aut subdola, quantoque maiore libertatis imagine tegebantur, tanto eruptura ad infensius servitium." (Tac 1.81)
eagerness to recognise Tiberius as princeps: "a rush into servitude"
"“Thus the State had been revolutionised, and there was not a vestige left of the old sound morality. Stripped of equality, all looked up to the commands of a sovereign without the least apprehension for the present,” Tac 1.4
"But so tainted was the age, so mean its sycophancy... that all senators of consular rank, a large proportion of the ex-praetors, many ordinary members even, vied with one another in rising to move the most repulsive and extravagant resolutions. The tradition runs that Tiberius, on leaving the curio, had a habit of ejaculating in Greek, 'These men! how ready they are for slavery!" (Tac Ann 3.65)
Culture and public sentiment
Entertainment
Ludi Saeculares
Prominence of the Imperial family
Personal nature of power
palaces being brought to plead with Claudius
the Augustan Mausoleum on the Field of Mars
exclusion of the two Iuliae and Nero (buried in the family tomb of Domiti Ahenobarbi)
inclusion of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Marcellus, Octavia, Agrippa, G and L Caesar, Germanicus, Agrippina the Elder, Poppaea, and many more
Presentations of emperors
Foreigners
Greek influence
Egypt and Cleopatra
Innovation vs tradition
"By new laws passed on my proposal I brought back into use many exemplary practices of our ancestors which were disappearing in our time, and in many ways I myself transmitted exemplary practices to posterity for their imitation."
Religion and divinity
Deification
Who made the decisions?
Augustus
"The senate consecrated the altar of Fortuna Redux before the temples of Honour and Virtue at the Porta Capena in honour of my return, and it ordered that the pontifices and Vestal Virgins should make an annual sacrifice there on the anniversary of my return to the city from Syria in the consulship of Quintus Lucretius and Marcus Vinicius [12 October 19 BC], and it named the day the Augustalia from my cognomen." RG 11
Links with the gods
temple of Apollo
studied in Apollonia, dressed up as Apollo, battle against A&C was won with help of Apollo
Venus - the Aeneas myth
"There was even an ex-praetor who took oath that he had seen the form of the Emperor, after he had been reduced to ashes, on its way to heaven." (Suet Aug 100)
"At the time they declared Augustus immortal, assigned to him priests and sacred rites, and made Livia, who was already called Julia and Augusta, his priestess; they also permitted her to employ a lictor when she exercised her sacred office. On her part, she bestowed a million sesterces upon a certain Numerius Atticus, a senator and ex-praetor, because he swore that he had seen Augustus ascending to heaven after the manner of which tradition tells concerning Proculus and Romulus."
"A shrine voted by the senate and built by Livia and Tiberius was erected to the dead emperor in Rome, and others in many different places, some of the communities voluntarily building them and others unwillingly." (CD 56.46)
Caesar
"He died in his fifty-sixth year and was numbered among the gods, not only by a formal decree, but also in the conviction of the common people. For at the first games which his heir Augustus gave in honour of his apotheosis, a comet shone for seven successive days, rising about the eleventh hour, and was believed to be the soul of Caesar, who have been taken to heaven; and this is why a star is set upon the crown of his head in his statue." (Sue Case 88)
Claudius
"buried with regal pomp and enrolled among the gods, an honour neglected and finally annulled but later restored to him by Vespasian." (Suet Claud 45)
deification of imperial women
further legitimates succession to children of deified women etc
Deference to the gods
"You rule because you keep yourself lesser than the gods: with them all things begin, to them refer each outcome. Neglected, the gods have brought man woes on sorrowing Italy." (Horace, Odes, 3.6)
Augustus's piety
Temple of Mars "built in fulfilment of a vow made during the war of Philippi, undertaken by him to avenge his father's murder" (Sue Aug 29) and the temple of Apollo "in that part of his house on the Palatine hill which had been struck with lightning, and which, on that account, the soothsayers declared the God to have chosen"
"Consul for the sixth time <28BC>, I rebuilt eighty-two temples of the gods in the city by the authority of the senate, omitting nothing which ought to have been rebuilt at that time" RG 20
swore he would make his granddaughter a Vestal Virgin if they were the right age
Ara Pacis features a procession led by Augustus, Agrippa, PM, heads of 4 state cults, etc
Precedent for ruler cults?
Governance and policy
Augustus
Marriage
Manumission
Sumptuary legislation
Control of elections
modo subtractis candidatorum nominibus originem cuiusque et vitam et stipendia descriptif ut qui forent intellegeretur" Tac 1.81