Res Gestae Divi Augusti: Text, Translation, and Commentary

Name: Res Gestae Divi Augusti: Text, Translation, and Commentary
Author: Alison Cooley (editor) & Augustus
ISBN: 351100358X

by Alison Cooley (editor) & Augustus

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No, not funerary. He wrote it knowing that he didn’t have long to live, but it’s not specifically to do with his funeral. There would of course have been a funeral speech at the time, but that’s lost. What we happen to have is this text that Augustus chose to compose, probably six months to a year before he died. He wanted to set out his res gestae , a list of his achievements, and that’s what we have. We know it from a copy—both in the original Latin and in a Greek translation—that was inscribed on the walls of a temple at Ancyra (modern Ankara) in the province of Galatia (now central Turkey) and discovered and transcribed in the 16th century. Originally, the Res Gestae was designed to be inscribed on to bronze columns placed in front of Augustus’s monumental tomb on the Campus Martius in Rome. If you look at the inscription, what he says right at the beginning, the very first thing he wants us to know, is this: “Aged 19 years old, I mustered an army at my personal decision and at my personal expense, and with it I liberated the republic, which had been oppressed by a despotic faction … In this same year,” he continues (which is 43 BC), “the people appointed me consul, after both consuls had fallen in war, and Triumvir for settling the state.” So the point he wants us to get immediately is that on his own initiative he liberated the republic from a ‘despotic faction’, by which he means the oligarchy. Much later, in the penultimate chapter (34), he writes: “In my 6th and 7th consulship”—that’s 28 to 27 BC—“after I had put an end to civil wars, although by everyone’s agreement I had power over everything, I transferred the republic from my power into the control of the Roman Senate and People. For this service I was named Augustus by senatorial decree, and the doorposts of my house were publicly clothed with laurels, and a civic crown was fastened above my doorway, and a golden shield was put up in the Julian senate house. Through an inscription on the shield, the fact was declared that the Roman senators and people were giving it to me because of my valour, clemency, justice and piety. After this time, I excelled everyone in influence but I had no more power than the others, who were my colleagues in each magistracy.” You can see what he’s doing. He’s saying, ‘Look, my position was absolutely unique. I put an end to the civil wars and then, when they were over, I made a conscious, formal transfer of power back to the Senate and People of Rome, where it belongs. The republic was thereby restored. After that, I excelled everyone in influence, because I had what you might call unofficial authority, but no more legal power than any of my colleagues in other magistracies at any given time.’ Because after 27 BC, he was elected consul again and again. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Many modern historians, especially academics, have what I think of as a knee-jerk cynicism. We live in a pretty privileged and self-enclosed world, but our subject matter is the world of high politics and high drama. It’s very tempting for academics to want to say, ‘Well yes, of course that’s what he says , but we know better, don’t we? We understand, we can see through it.’ So people have always been tempted to say, ‘This is what Augustus said. This is what he wanted people to believe. But we don’t want to believe it.’ “Many modern historians, especially academics, have what I think of as a knee-jerk cynicism” My feeling is, ‘You don’t have to believe it. But in that case you’d better have pretty good evidence to show that it’s false.’ And that’s the point: there is no evidence that shows that it’s false. On the contrary, the evidence of contemporaries, much of which is in poetry (that’s just the accident of the survival of texts), is unanimously favourable. They certainly didn’t think of him as a despot. They thought of him as the ruler of Rome in a way, but not in any formal sense. He was simply the man who had earned this position of de facto authority. The republic was still there; he was just the most influential person in the republic. That was why the term that Augustus used for himself was ‘ princeps .’ This wasn’t a new term. It was one traditionally used: the principes rei publicae were the chief men of the republic. I don’t know. I think it’s been coming on gradually over the years. Way back in the late 80s, I was writing for The Cambridge Ancient History , which is a huge, multi-volume work that tries to cover the entire ancient world. I was asked to do two chapters on the 60s and 50s BC, that critical bit of the late republic before the civil wars break out. Narrative history is something that classicists don’t often write—I certainly hadn’t. But for something as formal as a narrative history, I was thinking pretty hard. How do I do this? And obviously you go to the primary sources and immerse yourself in them. You try to work out from first principles what was likely to have been happening. That was the point when I first started realizing that most of the narrative history about the late republic is prejudicially weighted towards the ‘optimate’ point of view, which as I said earlier is largely the effect of people internalizing the way Cicero saw things. Cicero was an honest man, but his correspondence contains some pretty contemptuous comments about the Roman people. He thought they were the scum of the earth. That was when I started thinking that the populares had had a pretty raw deal in the way the late republic has been portrayed. I’ve also always been interested in the city of Rome, ever since I was first a graduate student and had the good fortune to spend a year at the British School at Rome. This was in 1962-63, and there’s a sense in which the legend about the Trevi fountain is right: you throw your coin in and it means you come back. The city of Rome is an addictive drug. Once you’ve been, and you’ve had enough time to immerse yourself in it and feel your way around, if you’re at all interested in history it becomes a never-ending obsession. So I was interested in the ancient city and got involved with its topography. The archaeology is difficult to work out, because you can’t systematically excavate a city that has been continuously occupied for 2,000 years. So the particular places where excavation is possible because they’ve never been built on—the Forum and the Palatine—become disproportionately important. For a long time I simply believed what people said about the house Gianfilippo Carettoni excavated in the late 50s and 60s. He identified it as the house of Augustus, and I assumed he was right. There’s plenty of stuff published by me which assumes that, and indeed discusses it as the ‘house of Augustus’, how one approached it and so on. So anyone who wants to attack my current book by saying ‘this isn’t what you used to say’ is perfectly right. But I take the view that scholarship is cumulative, and there are many things that I believe I understand better now than I did 30 years ago. I don’t have any hang-ups about changing my mind. I began thinking about the Palatine site, and how short a time the Augustine Palatine lasted. Augustus created his Palatine from 36 BC through to about 28. It was a period of less than a decade in which he redeveloped the Palatine, destroying several of the aristocrats’ posh houses and replacing them with this huge public-works complex of the piazza, the Apollo temple and the porticos behind it. Then in AD 64, a century later, it was all destroyed in the great fire. What was then built on the tabula rasa of the Palatine was Nero’s palace. Not that he had long to enjoy it: it was the Flavians, his successors, who really developed the palace. The remains of it are what you’re walking on when you go to the Palatine now. “Everyone had got the Apollo temple facing the wrong way” It’s very, very difficult to visualize not only what the republican Palatine was like, but even what the Augustan Palatine was like. The name Palatium came to mean ‘palace’, and so we think of it as always and necessarily the palace of the Caesars, the palace of the emperors. It was sometime in 2011 or 2012 that I was talking to Amanda Claridge, an expert archaeologist whom I knew from the British School a long time ago, and she was trying to persuade me that everyone had got the Apollo temple facing the wrong way. At first I thought, ‘I can’t really believe this.’ But we got into an ongoing conversation and I came to realize that she was quite right. The corollary of that is that I also came to realize that the supposed ‘house of Augustus’—which Carettoni believed was connected with the temple of Apollo, and the two buildings could only be understood as a complex—was nonsense. It didn’t work. The evidence implies that the Apollo temple faced out on to the summit of the hill, where the piazza must have been, and the portico was behind it. The house of Augustus must have been somewhere else. And we should know where the house of Augustus was, because one of the big post-Neronian palace complexes, what is nowadays called ‘the Flavian palace’, was actually called domus Augustana in the ancient world. So it must have been on the site of the original house of Augustus. Another stimulus for the book came in 2014, which was the bimillenary of Augustus’s death. I was invited to give a talk at the University of Lisbon, which was having a big Augustus conference, and I gave what in the book becomes chapter one. I called it ‘Augustus and the Roman people’, and I set out my ideas about Augustus as a popularis . The people at the conference were pretty sceptical, but the more I thought about this, the more the two arguments that had been going on in the back of my mind all this time—the political one about Augustus as a popularis , and the archaeological one about Carettoni’s house not really being Augustus’s house at all—fitted together with each other. It was also because, as Carettoni’s house was further explored, it was revealed as demonstrably ‘palatial’. It had two grand matching peristyle colonnades, and a frontage of about 150 meters. It was a huge building. When Carettoni started he’d only excavated a bit of it and it looked quite modest. That’s one of the reasons he thought it was Augustus’s house—because we know from Suetonius that his house was modest. Now that didn’t work. So that was how it began.

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Peter Wiseman

"No, not funerary. He wrote it knowing that he didn’t have long to live, but it’s not specifically to do with his funeral. There would of course have been a funeral speech at the time, but that’s lost. What we happen to have is this text that Augustus chose to compose, probably six months to a year before he died. He wanted to set out his res gestae , a list of his achievements, and that’s what we have. We know it from a copy—both in the original Latin and in a Greek translation—that was inscribed on the walls of a temple at Ancyra (modern Ankara) in the province of Galatia (now central Turkey) and discovered and transcribed in the 16th century. Originally, the Res Gestae was designed to be inscribed on to bronze columns placed in front of Augustus’s monumental tomb on the Campus Martius in Rome. If you look at the inscription, what he says right at the beginning, the very first thing he wants us to know, is this: “Aged 19 years old, I mustered an army at my personal decision and at my personal expense, and with it I liberated the republic, which had been oppressed by a despotic faction … In this same year,” he continues (which is 43 BC), “the people appointed me consul, after both consuls had fallen in war, and Triumvir for settling the state.” So the point he wants us to get immediately is that on his own initiative he liberated the republic from a ‘despotic faction’, by which he means the oligarchy. Much later, in the penultimate chapter (34), he writes: “In my 6th and 7th consulship”—that’s 28 to 27 BC—“after I had put an end to civil wars, although by everyone’s agreement I had power over everything, I transferred the republic from my power into the control of the Roman Senate and People. For this service I was named Augustus by senatorial decree, and the doorposts of my house were publicly clothed with laurels, and a civic crown was fastened above my doorway, and a golden shield was put up in the Julian senate house. Through an inscription on the shield, the fact was declared that the Roman senators and people were giving it to me because of my valour, clemency, justice and piety. After this time, I excelled everyone in influence but I had no more power than the others, who were my colleagues in each magistracy.” You can see what he’s doing. He’s saying, ‘Look, my position was absolutely unique. I put an end to the civil wars and then, when they were over, I made a conscious, formal transfer of power back to the Senate and People of Rome, where it belongs. The republic was thereby restored. After that, I excelled everyone in influence, because I had what you might call unofficial authority, but no more legal power than any of my colleagues in other magistracies at any given time.’ Because after 27 BC, he was elected consul again and again. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Many modern historians, especially academics, have what I think of as a knee-jerk cynicism. We live in a pretty privileged and self-enclosed world, but our subject matter is the world of high politics and high drama. It’s very tempting for academics to want to say, ‘Well yes, of course that’s what he says , but we know better, don’t we? We understand, we can see through it.’ So people have always been tempted to say, ‘This is what Augustus said. This is what he wanted people to believe. But we don’t want to believe it.’ “Many modern historians, especially academics, have what I think of as a knee-jerk cynicism” My feeling is, ‘You don’t have to believe it. But in that case you’d better have pretty good evidence to show that it’s false.’ And that’s the point: there is no evidence that shows that it’s false. On the contrary, the evidence of contemporaries, much of which is in poetry (that’s just the accident of the survival of texts), is unanimously favourable. They certainly didn’t think of him as a despot. They thought of him as the ruler of Rome in a way, but not in any formal sense. He was simply the man who had earned this position of de facto authority. The republic was still there; he was just the most influential person in the republic. That was why the term that Augustus used for himself was ‘ princeps .’ This wasn’t a new term. It was one traditionally used: the principes rei publicae were the chief men of the republic. I don’t know. I think it’s been coming on gradually over the years. Way back in the late 80s, I was writing for The Cambridge Ancient History , which is a huge, multi-volume work that tries to cover the entire ancient world. I was asked to do two chapters on the 60s and 50s BC, that critical bit of the late republic before the civil wars break out. Narrative history is something that classicists don’t often write—I certainly hadn’t. But for something as formal as a narrative history, I was thinking pretty hard. How do I do this? And obviously you go to the primary sources and immerse yourself in them. You try to work out from first principles what was likely to have been happening. That was the point when I first started realizing that most of the narrative history about the late republic is prejudicially weighted towards the ‘optimate’ point of view, which as I said earlier is largely the effect of people internalizing the way Cicero saw things. Cicero was an honest man, but his correspondence contains some pretty contemptuous comments about the Roman people. He thought they were the scum of the earth. That was when I started thinking that the populares had had a pretty raw deal in the way the late republic has been portrayed. I’ve also always been interested in the city of Rome, ever since I was first a graduate student and had the good fortune to spend a year at the British School at Rome. This was in 1962-63, and there’s a sense in which the legend about the Trevi fountain is right: you throw your coin in and it means you come back. The city of Rome is an addictive drug. Once you’ve been, and you’ve had enough time to immerse yourself in it and feel your way around, if you’re at all interested in history it becomes a never-ending obsession. So I was interested in the ancient city and got involved with its topography. The archaeology is difficult to work out, because you can’t systematically excavate a city that has been continuously occupied for 2,000 years. So the particular places where excavation is possible because they’ve never been built on—the Forum and the Palatine—become disproportionately important. For a long time I simply believed what people said about the house Gianfilippo Carettoni excavated in the late 50s and 60s. He identified it as the house of Augustus, and I assumed he was right. There’s plenty of stuff published by me which assumes that, and indeed discusses it as the ‘house of Augustus’, how one approached it and so on. So anyone who wants to attack my current book by saying ‘this isn’t what you used to say’ is perfectly right. But I take the view that scholarship is cumulative, and there are many things that I believe I understand better now than I did 30 years ago. I don’t have any hang-ups about changing my mind. I began thinking about the Palatine site, and how short a time the Augustine Palatine lasted. Augustus created his Palatine from 36 BC through to about 28. It was a period of less than a decade in which he redeveloped the Palatine, destroying several of the aristocrats’ posh houses and replacing them with this huge public-works complex of the piazza, the Apollo temple and the porticos behind it. Then in AD 64, a century later, it was all destroyed in the great fire. What was then built on the tabula rasa of the Palatine was Nero’s palace. Not that he had long to enjoy it: it was the Flavians, his successors, who really developed the palace. The remains of it are what you’re walking on when you go to the Palatine now. “Everyone had got the Apollo temple facing the wrong way” It’s very, very difficult to visualize not only what the republican Palatine was like, but even what the Augustan Palatine was like. The name Palatium came to mean ‘palace’, and so we think of it as always and necessarily the palace of the Caesars, the palace of the emperors. It was sometime in 2011 or 2012 that I was talking to Amanda Claridge, an expert archaeologist whom I knew from the British School a long time ago, and she was trying to persuade me that everyone had got the Apollo temple facing the wrong way. At first I thought, ‘I can’t really believe this.’ But we got into an ongoing conversation and I came to realize that she was quite right. The corollary of that is that I also came to realize that the supposed ‘house of Augustus’—which Carettoni believed was connected with the temple of Apollo, and the two buildings could only be understood as a complex—was nonsense. It didn’t work. The evidence implies that the Apollo temple faced out on to the summit of the hill, where the piazza must have been, and the portico was behind it. The house of Augustus must have been somewhere else. And we should know where the house of Augustus was, because one of the big post-Neronian palace complexes, what is nowadays called ‘the Flavian palace’, was actually called domus Augustana in the ancient world. So it must have been on the site of the original house of Augustus. Another stimulus for the book came in 2014, which was the bimillenary of Augustus’s death. I was invited to give a talk at the University of Lisbon, which was having a big Augustus conference, and I gave what in the book becomes chapter one. I called it ‘Augustus and the Roman people’, and I set out my ideas about Augustus as a popularis . The people at the conference were pretty sceptical, but the more I thought about this, the more the two arguments that had been going on in the back of my mind all this time—the political one about Augustus as a popularis , and the archaeological one about Carettoni’s house not really being Augustus’s house at all—fitted together with each other. It was also because, as Carettoni’s house was further explored, it was revealed as demonstrably ‘palatial’. It had two grand matching peristyle colonnades, and a frontage of about 150 meters. It was a huge building. When Carettoni started he’d only excavated a bit of it and it looked quite modest. That’s one of the reasons he thought it was Augustus’s house—because we know from Suetonius that his house was modest. Now that didn’t work. So that was how it began."

Augustus · fivebooks.com