How Augustus Saved Rome from Total Collapse
By its final century, the Roman Republic was a living nightmare for its people. Gaius Octavian remade Rome for a Golden Age.
On this day, the 16th January 27 BC, an awed Roman Senate bestowed upon Gaius Octavius the title of Augustus. Thus after nearly a century of civil war, the great-nephew and heir of Julius Caesar was confirmed at last as the man chosen by Providence to rule in Rome.
The strife and misrule of the Roman Republic was no more. The Pax Romana of the Roman Empire had dawned — and it was birthed, consolidated and legitimised by the figure of her extraordinary first emperor.
So how did one man achieve the impossible, and not only prevent the apparently terminal decline of a superpower, but raise her to a glory she had not know in centuries?
The Ungovernability of the Roman Republic
From its earliest days, the Roman Republic had been defined by the so-called ‘Struggle of the Orders’. When Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh of the Roman kings, was overthrown in 509 BC, the plebeian classes of Rome were in for a rude awakening if they imagined that the oligarchs who orchestrated the coup had intended to share power.
The acrimony which resulted would, for the near entirety of the five centuries of the Republic, see a steady crescendo of political violence in Rome. On multiple occasions, the situation deteriorated so markedly that amid widespread riots, the plebeians paralysed the Eternal City by refusing to serve in the army and withdrawing, or ‘seceding’, to the Aventine Hill, in arguably the first true examples of a general strike in Western history.
The concessions these forced, however, would not be enough to prevent the unrest from escalating into all-out civil war as the Republic entered her final, tortured century. The brutal murder of Tiberius Gracchus in 133 BC, following his doomed attempt to break the oligarchic stranglehold over the Roman state, would see the legitimacy of the Roman Senate collapse with record speed.
With the Roman state entirely subject to the ambitions of private individuals, overseen by a Senate that held no real collective authority or monopoly of force, conflict on the streets soon gave way to the battlefield. Enormous slave revolts in Sicily, and the uprising of cities all over Italy in 91 BC, would all cement a growing climate of existential emergency.
The dictatorship of Sulla temporarily restored senatorial authority at the price of extreme violence. The rise of the First Triumvirate a generation later would unambiguously demonstrate the irrelevance of the ‘constitutional’ republican order.
Staunching the Haemorrhage
It is the most damning indictment of the Roman Republic that by its end, force had entirely supplanted law as the prerequisite of order. It is the most exalted mark of the career of Gaius Octavius, or Octavian, that he was able to navigate this anarchy and not only staunch the haemorrhage of Roman civilisation, but remake it into a stable, multicontinental superpower, ushering in her golden age.
It is also to the credit of Octavian’s genius that he would achieve power by demonstrating a mastery of all that characterised the Republic, and upon gaining it, renounced the most egregious of those ways. The proscriptions (state sanctioned murders) perpetrated by the Second Triumvirate followed the road already paved by Sulla. The discrediting of Mark Antony was a masterful result of calculating politics and propaganda, and the military victory over him and Cleopatra at Actium was made possible by Octavian earning the loyalty of the armies to him personally.
Yet gaining power in such a system was comparatively easy to any man whose ambitions outstripped his ethics. Holding it for any length of time, however, was the challenge that had bested all of his predecessors — including his great uncle, Julius Caesar himself. Octavian, however, learned from their fatal missteps.
Stabilising the Patient
With the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra in 30 BC, Octavian was the last man of stature who was still standing. He correctly anticipated that despite this, the Senate still harboured many personal foes who would simply see him as a new Sulla or Caesar — and that an assassin’s blade could undo everything in an instant. Octavian knew he had to keep the people on his side without giving the Senate an excuse to publicly accuse him of aspiring to tyranny.
Upon his return to Rome following the victory in Egypt, Octavian received a triumph. But despite the public acclaim, he still proceeded with calculated tact — he paid off his debts, cancelled those of others to him, and used the spoils of war to beautify the temples of the gods and reward both his own troops and ordinary Romans with financial bounties.
All of this he did while harbouring the restraint to refuse the most outlandish honours heaped upon him. With near every man having some material gain to celebrate, it became extremely difficult to accuse Octavian of acting out of pure personal ambition.
Then in 29 BC, in a moment where symbolism and reality dovetailed most powerfully, Octavian presided over the closing of the Doors of Janus — an act traditionally held to mark the end of war, and which had not been performed in over two centuries. The wars of Roman against Roman were, at last, at an end.
To openly move against the man responsible for bringing them to a close would have been political suicide.
Taming the Political Classes
The ‘bold caution’ of Octavian had largely disarmed his foes, but not yet convinced them. Yet whereas his great uncle had treated the Senate with open contempt, the new Caesar would apply the carrot and stick.
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