Peter Wiseman's Reading List

"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."

"Andrew’s a good friend, and this is a terrific book. He called it Rome’s Cultural Revolution in deliberate allusion to the great masterpiece of Roman history written by Ronald Syme in 1939, called The Roman Revolution . That was an account of Augustus’s rise to power, a very political story, and Syme had absolutely no time at all for the idea that Augustus might have been a popular champion. On the contrary, for Syme he was a dangerous demagogue with paramilitaries at his back. But Syme was writing at the time of Hitler and Mussolini, and he knew what demagogues with paramilitaries behind them looked like. That’s another story, which I talk about a bit in chapter 10 of The House of Augustus. But because The Roman Revolution was such a hugely influential book—certainly for my generation but also later on—Andrew alluded to it in his title. His line, which he works out brilliantly I think, is that politics is not enough. There was a revolution in the way Rome became a different kind of place. In 100 BC Rome was still a city-state among other city-states in Italy. It was a disproportionately powerful one and had all kinds of political power over its ‘allies’ elsewhere in Italy, but it was still only one city-state among others. A hundred years later Rome was a world empire. That change is not only political, it’s a cultural change as well, and that’s what Andrew wants to explore. The book is a wide-ranging account of the cultural background of Augustan Rome, as it had developed over two centuries in creative interaction both with Greek culture and with that the of other Italian peoples and their languages. In particular, the reason I like the book is because in 2 BC, one of the great moments of the Augustan principate, when the Senate and People of Rome were conspicuously acting in consensus after two generations of being at each other’s throats, they hailed him as pater patriae : ‘father of the country’, ‘father of the native land’. It’s an honorific title, of course, but what is the patria ? Is it Rome? No, it’s not. It’s Italy, because by now the whole of Italy had Roman citizenship. That had happened two generations earlier, during what’s called the Social War. Socius mean ‘ally’ in Latin, so the bellum sociale is the War of the Allies against Rome. Roman power in Italy had depended largely on alliances with other notionally independent city-states, but they got more and more dissatisfied with the way Rome arrogantly assumed it could simply take their manpower and use it for overseas conquests without giving anything significant back. They rose in rebellion against Rome in 90 BC, and it was a very nasty war. The only way the Romans got out of it was by immediately conceding Roman citizenship to the whole of Italy. Against the background of all that, what Andrew does is look at the evidence of material culture. As an ex-Director of the British School at Rome, he’s a master of the archaeological record. What you get in his book is a brilliant analysis of the independent life and culture of various Italian cities. It’s part of what ancient historians have called ‘hellenization’: the influence of Greek culture around the rest of the ancient world. Of course, that’s something everyone has known about for years; a famous example is the hellenization of what we call the Middle East as a result of the conquests of Alexander the Great. That’s back in the 4th century BC. But there was also the hellenization of the western Mediterranean, which starts a lot earlier than most people think, and applies in many different ways. Some places were much more hellenized than others, and the way each of these individual city-states in Italy developed during the fourth, third, second, even into the first century BC, was unique to itself. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Then, in the first century BC, suddenly all these places were technically Roman. They all now had Roman citizenship, because it had become so desirable and they’d fought a great war in order to get it. Two generations later, one of the things that Augustus had to do—quite apart from healing the wounds of polarized politics in Rome itself—was to make sense of an Italy which was now a coherent entity for the first time. He was ‘the father of the native land’, and that native land was Italy itself. The great literary statement of Augustan Rome, Virgil’s Aeneid , is all about the arrival of Aeneas and his Trojans after the fall of Troy, not specifically to Rome—Rome itself hardly comes into it—but to Italy. Virgil himself came from northern Italy, what we would now call the Veneto. So you have this concept of a city-state first dominating its neighbours and then morphing over a couple of generations into ‘Italy’ in the way we now understand the term, a kind of nation-state with a single citizenship. “The way scholarship works, people are tempted to be specialists in literature, specialists in political history, specialists in archaeology, specialists in ancient religion. That’s great, but not if the specialists then never talk to each other and never look sideways” During the desperate times of the late republic there was no time for any cultural assimilation to take place. What Andrew argues is not that the cultural revolution is different from the political revolution. It’s not that it’s the same thing as the political revolution, either. The two things were happening simultaneously and independently, but you can’t understand one without the other. It’s a way of understanding the Augustan age that broadens the question out, and also helps to overcome a constant danger in academic studies, namely specialization. In the nature of things, the way scholarship works, people are tempted to be specialists in literature, specialists in political history, specialists in archaeology, specialists in ancient religion. That’s great, but not if the specialists then never talk to each other and never look sideways. The great thing about Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is that he has a mastery of several of these fields, and knows what these different subsets of scholarship are about. He can make them talk to each other and create a coherent narrative that makes sense at a cultural level. He also writes very well. On the other hand, it’s a subtle argument with a lot of complex material, so from that point of view it’s not an easy read. But it’s a very important book. No other book gives such a broad sense of what 1st-century BC Rome and Italy were like, and how Augustus was able to get beyond politics and offer a sense of common culture that everyone could be loyal to."

"If Wallace-Hadrill shows us what the Augustan age was like for people who could afford posh furniture and read books in Greek, Lott’s book does the same for the common people of the city of Rome. Although the book is very technical, and on a very specific, quite limited subject area, it’s important because it gets you into the streets of Rome. It gets you into the world of the people of Rome, whom Augustus knew very well he had to have on his side as a popular champion. In 8 BC Augustus organised Rome into 14 regions subdivided into ‘neighbourhoods’ ( uici ), with each uicus centred on a ‘cross-roads shrine.’ He funded these mini-temples and provided statues, and created a kind of humble priesthood for them. He gave people, a lot of them ex-slaves, the dignity of the responsibility for looking after these neighbourhood cult centres. The neighbourhood chapels had lots of different gods and goddesses whose statues were put up there, but the main cult was that of the Lares , young twin gods who were thought of as protectors. Lares were the ‘guardian gods’ who protected households. So a Roman house would have a lararium , a little shrine in which the household’s Lares were honoured and worshipped. There was also a big public temple of the Lares for the city of Rome itself, because they were thought of also as protectors of the city. In between were the little chapels for the Lares of individual neighbourhoods, as set up by Augustus. There must have been hundreds of them. So at the grand politics level, he was saying, ‘I’m standing up for you, the Roman people, against a dominant and oppressive oligarchy.’ But he’s also saying at the street level, ‘I’m looking after you, I’m giving you a way to belong.’ I think that’s terrific. It’s something you don’t normally think about , and the literary sources don’t mention it. But it’s there in the archaeology, the inscribed altars and architectural fragments that Bert Lott has collected up and discussed. I like the book because although it’s very specialist, it shines a light on an area of the ancient world that otherwise you just don’t see."

"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."