Augustus: The Life and Times of the Founder of the Roman Empire

by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh

There were other reforms equally beneficial. Among the many curæ (commissions) which he established was one for superintending public works, which would thus not depend on private munificence; another of the streets; of the water supply; and, above all, of the Tiber. Rome was, as it still is, extremely subject to floods. Quite recently there were five or six feet of water in the Pantheon, and in B.C. 27 the rise of the Tiber was so serious that the lower parts of the city were covered, and the augurs declared it to be an omen of the universal prevalence of the power of the new princeps. In B.C. 23 it swept away the pons Sublicius.[298] He could not of course prevent these floods, but he gave some relief by dredging and widening the river-bed, which was choked with rubbish and narrowed by encroachments. The commission thus established remained an important one for many generations, but in B.C. 8 he superintended the business himself.

Fire brigades.

A danger at Rome, more frequent and no less formidable than flood, was fire. So frequent were fires that the most stringent laws had been passed against arson, which it seems was even punishable by burning alive. In B.C. 23 Augustus formed a kind of fire brigade of public slaves under the control of the curule-ædiles. But the old magistracies were no longer objects of desire, and it was difficult to get men of energy to fill them, a state of things which was one of the chief blots in the new imperial system. At any rate in this case they were not found efficient, and in the later years of his reign (A.D. 6), a new brigade in four divisions was formed of freedmen with an equestrian præfect, who turned out to be so effective that they became regularly established.

The Sibylline Books and Sacred Colleges.

Another part in the scheme of Augustus for the reconstruction of society was to revive the influence of the Sacred Colleges and brotherhoods, and to renew the ceremonies with which they were connected. One method of doing this was to become a member of them all himself, much as the king of England is sovereign of all the Orders. Thus according to the Monumentum (ch. 7) he was pontifex, augur, quindecemvir for religious rites, septemvir of the Epulones, an Arval brother, a fetial and a sodalis Titius. Nor was he only an honorary or idle member. He attended their meetings and joined in their business, and took part in whatever rites they were intended to perform. Thus his membership of the Arval brethren is recorded in the still existing acta; as a fetial he proclaimed war against Cleopatra. The sodales Titii, a college of priests of immemorial antiquity, had almost disappeared until the entrance of Augustus into their college revived them and their ritual. He not only joined these colleges, but revived and even increased their endowments,[299] and, above all, those of the six Vestal Virgins, to whom he presented the regia, once the official residence of the Pontifex Maximus, and an estate at Lanuvium. The restoration of the College of Luperci, which had celebrated on the 15th of February the old ceremony of “beating the bounds” almost from the foundation of the city, was more or less a political matter. It had gone out of fashion, and its ceremonies had got to be looked upon as undignified. Iulius Cæsar had revived and re-endowed them. The Senate for that very reason in the reaction after his death had deprived them of these endowments, which Augustus now restored. We have already noticed his renewal of the augurium salutis, the old ceremonial prayer at the beginning of the year that could only be offered in time of peace. He also induced some one to accept the office of flamen Dialis in B.C. 11, after it had been vacant since B.C. 87, because the restrictions under which its holder laboured were so numerous and tiresome that in spite of its dignity—its seat in the Senate and curule chair and lictor—no one would accept it. He took pains again to restore the Sibylline Books to their old place of importance. The originals were lost in the fire of B.C. 82, and a commission had at once been issued to collect others from towns in Greece and Greek Italy. But some of them were getting illegible from age, and some were of doubtful authenticity, and consequently all kinds of prophetic verses got into circulation, giving rise at times to undesirable rumours and panics. Augustus in B.C. 18 ordered them to be re-copied and edited, and the authorised edition was then deposited in his new temple of Apollo on the Palatine, and continued to be consulted till late in the third century. After an attempt by Iulian to revive its authority it was finally burnt by Stilicho about A.D. 400.

Pontifex Maximus.

As one of the quindecemvirs Augustus had charge of these books, but he formally took the official headship of Roman religion by becoming Pontifex Maximus. He was elected and ordained to that office in March B.C. 12. The people had wished him to take it in B.C. 30, but he would not violate what was a traditional and sacred rule that the office was lifelong, and though Lepidus was degraded from the triumvirate in B.C. 36, he was still Pontifex Maximus. It is true that he was not allowed to do any of the duties, or only those of the most formal kind, but still he had the office. The ground for asking Augustus to take it was that the election of Lepidus had been irregular; he had managed to get put in during the confusion following the assassination of Cæsar, and therefore might be deposed. Augustus however takes credit for his scrupulous observance of a religious rule, and was particularly gratified by the crowds of people who came up to vote for him, a sort of ecclesiastical coronation.[300]

The ludi sæculares, May 31-June 2, B.C. 17.

In B.C. 17 he gave an emphasis to some of these religious revivals by celebrating the ludi sæculares, the centenary of the city, in virtue of some verses found in this Sibylline volume. We need not trouble ourselves as to whether his calculation of the year was a right one (the sæculum was really 110 years), it is enough to note that they were meant, like a centenary of a college or university, to call out patriotic and loyal feelings which should embrace both the country and the country’s religion. They are made interesting to us by the fact that Horace—always ready to further his master’s purposes—was selected to write the Anthem or Ode to be sung by a chorus of twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls. An inscription, found in 1871 in the bed of the Tiber, gives the official program of this festival, and ends with the words Carmen composuit Q. Horatius Flaccus.[301] The poet probably had before him, when he wrote it, the general scheme of the festival, which included solemn sacrifices and prayer to Iuno, Diana, Iupiter, and Ilithyia. Augustus and Agrippa took the leading part in the religious functions—as members of quindicemviri—and both repeated the prayers, which in the case of all these deities invoked a blessing on the “Populus Romanus Quiritium.” In short, everything was done to mark it as a national festival, to make the Romans recall their glorious inheritance and unique position, and at the same time to show that the princeps represented that greatness before gods and men. Whatever else Augustus may have thought of the national religion, he evidently regarded it as the surest bond of national life, and the inclusion of a prayer to Ilithyia, goddess of childbirth, joined with his contemporaneous attempt to encourage marriage and the production of children (which the obedient Horace echoes[302]), shews that he also connected that religion with morality. The restoration of religion, in fact, in his mind, goes side by side with the purification of morals. It is the practical statesman’s view of religion as a necessary police force and perhaps something more. Napoleon restored the Catholic Church in France with a similar sagacity, and the people blessed him, as they did Augustus, for giving them back le bon Dieu.

The reformation of morals.