Augustan Culture

"And having gone into all this rather obscure stuff, all these different kinds of evidence, I now thought your readers will probably want something where they can get an overall sense of what the Augustan age was about. That’s why I chose Karl Galinsky’s Augustan Culture (1996). He is a master of all these different areas, and he deals with stuff that we haven’t been talking about—literature, religion and so forth. The book is very, very reliable and level-headed. He’s an excellent scholar and it’s a super book. Yes, it’s first-rate, still the go-to book for the Augustan age as a whole. It’s very intelligently argued, very well illustrated, the work of a master communicator. Yes, as I mentioned before, it was one of the effects of the conquest of Egypt and the huge resources that became available. As I try to explain in Chapter 2 of The House of Augustus , the late republic was a time when the super-rich were forever building spectacular houses for themselves, tearing them down and then rebuilding and expanding them. They were importing all kinds of exotic marbles from all over the world, at huge expense for their own private pleasure. What the young Caesar did after the Battle of Philippi—and one person we haven’t mentioned is Agrippa, his loyal organiser—was confiscate the very same houses and marble columns the oligarchs had bought for themselves. With his huge resources, the future Augustus pumped everything into public works, and that meant above all public architecture. So you had these wonderful, grand temples and public buildings being created on the most lavish scale. That was done deliberately, because in the bad old days of the late republic this had been the sort of stuff that only the super-rich could have, while ordinary plebeians had to make do as best they could. Augustus was now saying, ‘No, this expensive material is for everyone, we’re going to produce a city which really will be the envy of the world.’ Now, we know from Cicero that the late-republican city wasn’t very impressive. A lot of people visiting Rome were quite disappointed. They thought it was pretty scruffy, the housing was in poor shape, and so on. And you have to remember that Rome in the late republic was five centuries old and still had all sorts of relics of the past. The beginning of a change was already happening with the people’s champions in the late republic—Pompey in the 60s BC and then Julius Caesar. There were now some grand public works: Pompey’s theatre, for instance, and Caesar’s building program that was cut short by his death. But Augustus took that over and hugely expanded it. So the city of brick is the city of ordinary tenement housing. The city of marble is the city of the grand public buildings. It’s got to be the poets. The greatest of them are Horace, Virgil and Ovid. Virgil’s Aeneid is not only a great document for the early years of Augustus, but an undisputed world masterpiece. Horace’s lyric Odes are beautifully subtle, Ovid’s love poetry entertainingly cynical and tongue-in-cheek, like the famous spoof of didactic poems, the Ars Amatoria : two books for men on how to pick up women and then a third for women on how to pick up men. Ovid then produced an epic even longer than the Aeneid called Metamorphoses , a huge compendium of mythological stories from the creation of the world right up to Augustus’ own time. They’re just wonderful. If you want to understand what Rome under Augustus was capable of producing, just read those three poets. What is there in Rome that’s of the Augustan period? That’s not easy. One of the things that seems to be of the Augustan period and is supremely worth seeing is the Pantheon . It’s an absolutely wonderful building—one of very, very few buildings of ancient Rome which is actually still standing in pretty well its original form, not a ruin or a reconstruction. The great inscription across the facade of the Pantheon says it was built by Marcus Agrippa in his third consulship, which was in 28 BC. His colleague in that consulship was the future Augustus. Agrippa actually made the first Pantheon, and this one is a reconstruction of it by Hadrian. But it’s a great thing to see. Otherwise, if you’re looking for Augustus, your best bet is to go to the site of his mausoleum. This is just off the Via del Corso, the old Via Flaminia. The mausoleum itself isn’t much to look at. It’s just the concrete core and it’s very overgrown. But just next to it in the piazza are the remains of the Augustan Altar of Peace. He erected it around 8 or 9 BC, and it’s an example of Augustan art at its greatest. The museum to house the Ara Pacis was created by Mussolini in the 30s, but his version has now been replaced by a more modern one. It’s something you mustn’t miss, especially as on the wall outside the museum is the entire text of Augustus’s Res Gestae . It was an era of great relief, leading to great confidence. The civil wars had lasted pretty well 20 years—from Caesar crossing the Rubicon in 49 BC down to the fall of Alexandria in 30—and had been very, very damaging. An enormous number of people were killed, an enormous number uprooted, cities destroyed. It was a dreadful, dreadful time. Horace’s Odes are full of a sense of relief and gratitude to Augustus for having put an end to all that. There’s also a sense of foreboding: if we Romans have been capable of that kind of behaviour, where are we going to find ourselves now? What Augustus was able to do, I think, was to channel that sense of having narrowly escaped disaster into a sense of confidence and enthusiasm. It didn’t last all that long, because his successors simply took his achievement for granted. His immediate successor, Tiberius, was deeply unpopular, and with him everything starts falling apart again. But between the dystopia of the civil wars at one end and the dystopia of Tiberian Rome at the other, there was this moment of confidence and success, peace and prosperity, great authors and great art, architecture and sculpture that reflect all that. That’s what I think Augustus should be given credit for. That’s why I think the knee-jerk cynics who regard him as a despotic autocrat have got it all wrong."