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Evil genius is a phrase that could have been invented to describe Augustus, the first emperor of Rome.
He butchered his way to power in the chaos that followed Julius Caesar's assassination, and then showed the political cunning necessary to remain there for four decades.
In conversation with Spencer Mizzen.
In this Life of the Week episode, Ed Watts considers the secrets of the success of an extraordinary individual who transformed the ancient worlds.
So Ed, we're here today to talk about one of the most significant figures in, I think, the entire span of ancient Roman history, and that is Octavian, who is better known as the first Emperor Augustus.
So, Ed, can you start by spending a couple of minutes introducing us to Augustus?
Who was he in a nutshell?
So I guess, in a nutshell, Augustus is the figure who refashions the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.
And the way that he does this, it's, I think, quite amazing that Rome was in a way fortunate enough to have a figure like this and also unfortunate enough to have a figure like this.
Because I think, when you're talking about Augustus, It is really useful to disaggregate the career of Augustus from the career of Octavian.
If you were to talk about the career of Octavian, you would be talking about somebody who is a mass murderer, a very willing civil warrior, a person who is completely able to tolerate killing people for just instrumental reasons, and somebody who is very willing to use people and discard them in whatever fashion serves his best interest.
He's an incredibly destructive figure.
And with Augustus, even though it's the same man, you have a figure who is actually incredibly constructive.
So Octavian, I think, bears very significant responsibility for the destruction of the Roman Republic.
And Augustus unquestionably bears responsibility for the creation of an imperial system that ends up lasting, in various forms, for another 1200 years.
And so you know it really is, I think, in some ways useful for us to see them as two figures, even though they are very much the same figure.
And I think the characteristics that you see in Augustus were there in Octavian.
And similarly, you know Augustus and the reconstruction he did would not have been possible without the incredible violence that Octavian inflicted on fellow Romans.
Those things always work together.
But in a sense, the constructive aspect kind of comes forward when it needs to.
And Rome was, I think, very lucky that it did.
So was he a character who reinvented himself and in doing so reinvented ancient Rome as well?
Yeah, I mean, I think, in a way, what he does is he is very, very savvy in reinventing his public image.
And he's very flexible and very smart in understanding how that public image should be deployed.
There are some moments where he makes missteps, but for the most part, this is somebody who comes into Roman political life when he's about 19 years old a little less than 19 years old and sticks around until he's 76.
He lives an entire lifetime in Roman politics and And he does make mistakes, but he doesn't make major mistakes.
And when he makes mistakes, he's smart enough to understand how to correct them.
And so I think the baseline character there.
I mean it's pretty remarkable that when he's 18 he pretty much has the political skills that he's going to deploy for the next almost 60 years.
And so I think he understands how to manifest them in different ways.
He understands when he makes a mistake, how to fix the mistake.
But it's really, really remarkable.
You know, as someone who spends a lot of time in classrooms with 18 year olds, I've never met anybody like that.
Okay, so let's go back to his early life then.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Tell us a little bit about Octavian before he becomes Augustus.
I was especially hoping you might be able to sort of Explain how key his relationship with Julius Caesar was to his rise through the ranks of Roman power at a young age.
Yeah, I think Octavian is the nephew of Julius Caesar.
And there's a lot of mystery about what exactly Caesar is thinking, because nobody actually imagines in 44 BC.
So Caesar is assassinated on the Ides of March in 44 BC.
And Octavian at this point is hanging out with Caesar's army that Caesar hoped to lead on campaign against Parthia, which is basically modern Iraq, in the sort of spring and summer of that year.
And when Caesar is assassinated, everybody in Rome assumes that his heir is going to be Mark Antony, in all likelihood, including Mark Antony.
And when they open the will they're sort of shocked that there's this kid that nobody's very aware of, who has been named the heir of Caesar.
And I think what we have to understand is Caesar grasped who this person was from a very young age.
I mean we don't know exactly when, but it's very clear Caesar had been preparing him and giving him some kind of de facto training in how to do Roman politics, probably because he recognized how naturally talented Octavian was.
I mean, we don't have any idea what actually was going on, like what it is that tipped Caesar off to the fact that his nephew is a genius.
I mean, a sort of world-class, world-historical figure of incredible significance.
But something did.
And Caesar, I think, recognized, didn't expect that he would be summoned at the age of 18 to 19.
But I think Caesar recognized that what you have here is a very real heir, someone who really could take Caesar's project and continue it, maybe in 10 years, but still somebody with great significance.
And so I think that that relationship, it's a bit opaque for us.
And there is even a slander that Mark Antony launches where he says in essence he capitalizes on this idea that nobody knows how this relationship came about.
And he says Octavian actually prostituted himself to Caesar and that's actually why he became the heir, which is totally untrue.
But I think it captures this sense that a lot of Romans had of.
You know, Caesar is, before Octavian, probably the greatest political operator in Roman history, certainly in at least recent Roman history.
And nobody understands why Caesar would make this choice.
So you have to have some explanation.
And Antony is well, the explanation is sexual, because simply no one could imagine any other explanation.
It's wrong, but it's, I think, interesting.
So did Octavian's rivals underestimate him at this moment?
And if so, how did that benefit him?
Oh, they perpetually underestimated him.
And I think the biggest example of this is Cicero, who is very open about the fact that he thinks Octavian is a figure who he can introduce into political life and support and then discard.
And I think what's interesting about this is Octavian not only understood that, but he understood that that's a weapon.
If somebody underestimates you and you're aware they're doing it, you have quite a bit of freedom of action there to play along until you decide you don't want to.
So the big moment that we see in this context is Octavian.
Part of the condition of Caesar's will that made Octavian.
His heir is Octavian would have to legally take the name Gaius Julius Caesar.
In a sense he would be adopted by Caesar, and then Caesar would give him his property, but also give him his name.
And the idea was, this would of course be a significant political advantage that would allow Octavian to sort of launch his political career.
What happens is following the publication of the will, Antony realizes that this is a tremendous gift.
And he, along with incidentally, Octavian's mother, start pushing Octavian to not accept the will, which was something you could do in Roman law.
Within a month, though, Octavian shows up.
So Caesar dies in March of 44.
Octavian shows up in Rome in April of 44.
And Antony starts doing things like, oh, legally, we're not going to recognize the adoption yet.
Or legally, we're not going to give you possession of Caesar's property.
So you can't give the gifts to Romans that Caesar's will dictates that you need to give.
And Octavian very quickly understands.
You know, Antony just gave me a tremendous gift because Antony believed he was Caesar's heir.
He now is trying to basically block Caesar's heir.
And Octavian makes it clear to everybody in Rome, that's what's happened.
And so he turns the people who were pro-Caesar against Antony.
Then later that year, Antony is sort of scrambling to recapture his political initiative.
He gets into a conflict with the senators and Cicero trots Octavian out as somebody who can lead a pro-Caesar military force against Antony.
And so Octavian does this.
He actually wins a victory over Antony.
And Cicero writes this letter that talks about a speech cicero gives, in which he gives honors and rewards and triumphs and like everything you can imagine, to everybody leading this campaign, except octavian.
But he makes it clear in this oh i, i gave octavian, you know, some kind words before the senate and you know, for somebody, his age.
That's perfectly appropriate.
And this is the moment where octavian says okay well, we've played this game long enough and he turns his army on rome.
He, you know, seizes the city And makes an alliance with Antony and Cicero is executed not long after this.
So, you know, you see in this a figure who not only is underestimated, but understands that it's a tool.
And he understands that there's a longer game to play.
And if you are underestimated, yes, it's an ego blow.
But he doesn't care because he recognizes that someone is not able to anticipate your next move.
You can take that move without any resistance whatsoever.
And Octavian is always doing this.
So for a short period, then we've got this alliance between Octavian and Mark Antony.
How did that fall apart?
And how did Octavian outwit Mark Antony, ultimately defeat him and become the number one force in Rome?
Yeah, I mean, this thing is really fraught because they do not like each other.
But there are various moments where you know, as the heir of Caesar, in these various moments they do have to cooperate.
In one case, you know they try to actually fight each other and their troops say you know, we're both Caesarian armies, like we're not going to fight.
And so they're forced a number of times to collaborate with each other.
And so the alliance kind of goes back and forth.
At one point, Octavian arranges for his sister Octavia to marry Mark Antony.
And again, Octavian, and I think Octavia too, understand that this is a trap, right?
They know Antony doesn't want to marry Octavia.
They know that Antony, first of all, has a wandering eye and, second of all, is going to the East and is, you know, not going to be around very much.
And what Octavian and I think Octavia both realize is there's a way to make this marriage something that symbolically represents a reunification but in practice is a trap.
And so when antony falls in love with cleopatra and starts, you know, having a family with cleopatra, octavia gets to be the pious wife who's raising antony's children And raising Antony's children with Antony's previous wife in Rome.
And she's a force of good.
And they are very careful.
They say Antony is besotted by Cleopatra, right?
Cleopatra seduced Antony.
It's not even Antony's fault, right?
It's all Cleopatra's fault.
But Octavian is able to turn what was something that was supposed to solidify an alliance against Antony and make it into something that discredits him.
And so for most of the 30s BC there's this propaganda bouncing back and forth, where Antony is trying to undermine Octavian and Octavian is trying to undermine Antony.
But Octavian is just simply better at it.
And so ultimately, when those two forces do conflict with each other, there's a battle at Actium.
And it's a confusing battle because there's both a land force loyal to Antony and a naval force loyal to Antony.
But the naval force is backed by an Egyptian fleet loyal to Cleopatra.
And what Octavian's general Agrippa is able to do is win a naval victory that forces Antony and the Egyptian fleet to flee.
And they sail back to Egypt.
And then the troops on shore look at this and they say, Octavian's propaganda is right.
He's not actually loyal to Rome anymore.
He's just in love with this Egyptian queen, and we're fighting for Egypt.
We're not fighting for Rome.
And so they surrender.
And this is how the war ends.
It is a military victory, but I think overall, it's actually a propaganda victory.
And the seeds of this were sown a few years ago.
And Octavian knew what the plan would be and how it would unfold.
And so again, what you have is somebody who is able to think very long term in a fashion that the people who are opposing him just simply are unable to do and can't imagine that he's capable of doing either.
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You said earlier that Octavian was ruthless.
He was brutal.
I think you might describe him as a mass murderer.
Can you elaborate on that, please?
Give us some examples.
What did he do to earn that reputation?
I mean, I think the biggest thing is when he makes this alliance with Antony almost the first thing that they do.
It's actually a threefold alliance with Antony and then a man named Lepidus who controlled some of Caesar's forces.
And the first thing they do is issue a list of people that they want killed, you know, including Cicero.
What Octavian then does is he, you know, tries to blame this on Antony.
So, you know, so Cicero's murder is really brutal.
You know, he's decapitated and his hands are cut off.
And, you know, that's brought to the speaker's platform in the Roman Forum.
And it's nailed to the speaker's platform to communicate to everybody do not speak against the triumvirs.
Do not speak against Antony and Lepidus and Octavian.
Octavian is certainly on board with this, but Octavian somehow manages to pin this on Antony.
What you then see is, as the triumvirate unfolds, Octavian gets responsibility for some pretty significant and expensive things, like paying for the retirement of a bunch of soldiers that had served under Caesar.
He doesn't have the money, and so he literally confiscates all of the property belonging to 18 entire Italian towns and then just takes it and uses it to pay his soldiers.
And when people complain, they have to go into hiding.
It's totally illegal, right?
You as a Roman can't do this sort of thing.
It's just what he needed to do, though.
And then what's interesting is once things stabilize.
You know, once Octavian becomes Augustus, he goes and he pays them back.
And so he understands, first of all, in that moment he needs to do something that is a greater expropriation of property than probably anyone in Roman history had done.
The only thing that's even comparable is what Sulla did in the 80s.
And I think what you see with Octavian is it's actually probably more disruptive than anything Sulla did.
And he understands that, and he's willing to do it.
And he doesn't sit back and say, well, that's unconstitutional or that's illegal.
He does it because he needs to do it.
But then he does go back and say well OK, like it would be really good PR for me to then make good on this.
And I think this is just somebody who probably at the outset understood you can do horrible things.
But when the horrible things stop, you know you don't need to do them anymore or you've recovered enough.
It actually is a really good thing for you to go back and say OK well, you know yes, I condemned you to death in the 40s BC.
But somehow, you know, your wife hid you and we didn't find you.
And you know, now it's 10 years later and I'm going to pardon you because that's the right thing to do.
Or, yes, I stole all your property from you.
But now, 20 years later, I'm going to give you some recompense because it's the right thing to do.
In a sense, you do these horrible, horrible things and then you let yourself be the hero who fixes the problem that you yourself caused.
I think we can imagine that that's probably in his mind at the time.
Yeah, I can do this, but if I win— great, you know, I can fix this too.
And then I get the benefit of doing the horrible thing, but I also somehow get the credit for fixing the horrible thing.
You know later, after I don't need to do it anymore.
Is that what you describe as evil genius?
Yeah.
But I think, like it's so rare, you know, I mean, history gives us lots of people who are incredibly skilled at destroying things, right.
Alexander the Great is incredibly skilled at destroying the Persian empire.
Genghis Khan is incredibly skilled at destroying a lot of things.
Attila the Hun is incredibly skilled at destroying things.
They are not incredibly good at building things.
So Alexander conquers the Persian Empire and frankly has no idea what to do with it.
And Augustus in a sense destroys the Roman Republican order and then knows how to rebuild something that's better and more stable and will last longer.
And that's super rare.
There's almost nobody in history who can do something like that.
So that leads me on nicely to my next question, because Octavius defeated Antony.
He's become the ultimate power in Rome.
Now, he goes about cementing an autocracy.
I think it was safe to say that many Romans were very proud of the Republic.
It was an ideal that many of them cherished.
Given that did Octavian, now Augustus face much opposition in sort of establishing himself as an autocrat.
How did he sell this concept to the people and avoid meeting the same fate as Julius Caesar?
He's very careful.
And I think that that is, again, part of his genius.
What he recognizes and I think this is something that we in the 21st century struggle with is that democracy and autocracy is a spectrum.
And you can move something that is.
And Rome's democracy was an imperfect democracy.
It's a representative democracy where your rights as a citizen were supposed to be equal, but your voting representation and your ability to make decisions in the state were not equal.
And everyone in Rome kind of accepted that.
And what Octavian when he becomes Augustus.
What he basically tries to do is take a model of how the Republic had been de facto functioning since the 50s, which was the system was so unstable that Romans wanted somebody in charge who was, in a sense, a stabilizing influence.
So in the 50s, it was Pompey.
In the 40s, it was Caesar.
And so what Octavian realized is if I can recreate that role as the person who is the stabilizer, but I can do it in terms that are acceptable, broadly speaking, and consistent with the republic.
What I do is I move that spectrum from flawed representative democracy to semi-autocratic.
But what he again, because he's Augustus and because he's so smart, what he does is he in essence figures out.
What are the things I need?
What are the powers I need to do that job?
And everything else, I'm going to give back to the Republic.
So there are still consuls.
There are still praetors.
There are still aediles and quaestors.
There's still a Senate.
And what he does is he says OK, I need ultimate control of the armies, but I don't need control of the armies in a day-to-day way everywhere.
So I will appoint people to command the armies in certain provinces.
If provinces don't have an army, they're no threat to me.
So I'm going to let the senators appoint the governors for those provinces.
And that's fine.
In terms of managing the city.
There are officials who are put in charge of managing the city of Rome.
And when they can't do their job or there's a problem, Octavian will bail them out.
But for the most part, he doesn't want to be the person you go to when like your sewer is backed up.
I guess they didn't really have running sewers.
They had certain things like that.
But, you know, your street needs paving like he doesn't want that responsibility.
And so all of the day to day annoyances, all of this sort of petty corruption and bad government.
The Senate handled that.
If there's a big issue, he'll weigh in.
But I think the genius that he has is he says look, the republic is something that is a very useful thing because it spreads responsibility around.
And the more of that that I allow to exist, it's good PR, but it's also good management.
And so you know there are moments where he in the 20s, he struggles to figure out exactly how to assemble those powers.
And so for part of the 20s, he dominates one of the consulships.
And this ultimately becomes a problem, not because senators want to actually do anything as consuls, but because the consulship is the highest honor that anybody can have.
And so if his power is coming from a consulship, that leaves one consulship that senators can't have and they get upset about this.
And so he then redefines his power in such a way that it's, in a sense, floating.
It's not attached to any particular office.
It's instead a set of powers that are consistent with those of other officeholders.
And so what he's able to say is I don't have any more power than my colleagues and various magistracies.
I just have more authority because, in essence, I have the combined powers of multiple magistracies.
But he, again, treads relatively lightly.
I mean his goal there really is to exercise the power he has to exercise to keep the state stable and to keep himself safe.
But he doesn't want to do anything more than that.
And this is, I think, part of his genius again.
He understands that the more annoying stuff that you offload onto other people, the more you get to be the hero when that stuff breaks.
And so the stuff he has to do, he does.
The stuff he doesn't have to do he has other people do, understanding full well that a lot of times they're going to fail.
And then he can step in and fix it and look like the hero.
And so it actually reinforces the sense that this is a republic that's being stabilized by this one great figure.
And again, I think what you see there is just extreme foresight and an incredible political genius.
Now it's interesting that some of the most celebrated writers of the entire ancient Roman period, men such as Ovid, Horace and Virgil, were operating while Augustus was in power.
What impact did he have on the culture of ancient Rome?
It's pretty immense.
I think Ovid is a bit of a problem because Ovid eventually falls afoul of Augustus and he gets sent to Romania and nobody wanted to go to Romania in the first century.
But Horace and Virgil are immensely important in portraying what this Augustan age is like and providing discussions of what he's rebuilt and why it's important, you know, and why Romans should value it.
And I think one of the great challenges that I think historians and classicists have is trying to figure out how sincere they were.
I mean, Virgil was one of these people who, and he did lose his property.
Like he's one of the people that Augustus, you know, when he was Octavian and took those towns, like Virgil, was affected by that.
And yet I think there is in Virgil probably, and in Horace definitely, genuine enthusiasm for what Augustus has built.
And I think especially people living in the middle 20th century looking at say, communist propaganda wanted to see this as people who were court propagandists and forced to do it because they didn't really feel great about the regime.
But what are you going to do, right?
You're a poet.
You got asked by Augustus to write something, so you do it.
And they look for subtext and they look for subtle criticisms.
I think they're actually enthusiastic.
If you've actually lived through and you've looked at some of the things, like where Virgil talks about the horrors of Civil War and he talks about fields that are fertilized with blood that's not abstract to them.
That's real.
They lived it.
They saw it.
They knew people who died in that way.
It's extremely traumatic.
And so when you have somebody who comes in and fixes that, it means something.
And I think that that's hard for us to understand.
Because we, as 20th century people living in North America or Northwestern Europe, that's not our life.
We never saw anything like that.
We never experienced anything like that.
And so we don't know what it's like to come into a society that not only isn't doing that anymore, but looks like it's created a structure that, in their view, is probably going to permanently prevent it and in practice, does prevent it for 100 years.
That's immensely important, and so I think we should take them seriously.
We should see, yes, they did not like civil war.
They didn't agree with everything Octavian did, but they do appreciate what he created.
It's also famously being said that Augustus found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble.
Is there any truth to that?
Absolutely.
One of the things that the Republic did poorly was build infrastructure for the city of Rome.
So the city of Rome, by the time Augustus takes power, has a million people in it.
The biggest burst of infrastructure was done when the city had maybe 250,000 people in it.
And so it didn't have enough water.
It didn't have good sanitation.
The housing and public monuments were shoddy.
And starting even before he won the Civil War with Antony.
We see that he's using his own resources and he's using significant private resources to do things like connect new aqueducts and improve sanitation in the city.
But after he establishes full control over the city, what changes is?
Now you have one figure who's there for his lifetime, who's incentivized to build nice things.
So what had happened under the Republic is people would have magistracies for a single year.
So you can't build a major project in a single year.
And so if you started it, it wouldn't get finished in your term and somebody else would finish it.
Or if you were a censor, then you had five years potentially to do it.
But to do something like an aqueduct or a major piece of infrastructure, it could consume more than five years.
And so again, you start it and you don't get credit.
So the Republic didn't incentivize large infrastructure building.
The empire did.
And it also incentivized grandiose infrastructure building.
And so what Augustus realized is, you know, he can do this.
You know, he can do this.
It's good politics.
It's straight out of the ancient authoritarian playbook to build big nice things when you build a regime that is more permanent, right.
The tyrants in ancient Greece would do this frequently.
They would build giant things so that you could look at them and say oh, Kypsilis did this or Pisistratus did this.
But what Augustus, I think, does better is a lot of the stuff he builds is functional because the city was remarkably underserved by the infrastructure it had.
There had never been a Mediterranean city of that size.
You know, it had grown very, very rapidly in the previous century and people needed public space.
They needed open space.
They needed water supplies.
They needed the stuff that he was building.
And so not only was it nice looking, it was essential for the city to work the way it needed to work.
And again, he understood it.
And you can see he understood it because he was already doing it in the lead up to the war with Antony.
He understood that this was politically beneficial and also had real material benefits that people could appreciate.
Do we get any senses from the sources?
I mean, what kind of person Augustus was?
As in.
You know how did the people who actually met him, came into contact with him face to face, describe him?
Do we know what he looked like, for example?
We have a great portrait of him from Suetonius, where you know again because he's in public life for so long.
It's a bit of a struggle, right.
To capture like who this guy actually was.
So I think we have to imagine he's incredibly charismatic.
I mean, I think every Roman emperor, nearly without exception.
Child emperors may be accepted, but nearly every Roman emperor was incredibly charismatic and they had to be to even be considered for the job.
Claudius famously was not charismatic, and this was disqualifying.
But I think what you see is that charisma.
Our sources suggest that charisma was something he understood, he possessed and he deployed selectively and he deployed it strategically.
And so, you know, he was, I think, very handsome when he was young.
As he aged, we're told his teeth rotted.
He apparently had cataracts and maybe was even blind in one eye.
Still, though, that charisma was there.
And he understood, again, that's a tool.
We do have some accounts that talk about his wife, Livia.
They were very devoted to one another.
But he was also serially unfaithful.
And Suetonius, who's an imperial biographer working about a hundred years after Augustus died.
He has access to the imperial archives because he actually is a court official under the emperor Hadrian and Trajan.
And so he's looking at some of this stuff from Augustus and he says, yeah, it's true.
He was serially unfaithful, but it's strategic.
You know he was only having those affairs with women because he wanted to like have the pillow talk afterwards to find out what their husbands were thinking, which actually might be true, right?
I think it's not the only reason he's having those affairs.
But I think it's also something that, if you're doing it anyway, why not take advantage of the aftermath and people will talk to you because you're Augustus and not because you're compelling them, but because you have this charisma like people want to talk to you.
But didn't he sell himself as a kind of a champion of ancestral, traditional virtue and morality?
Was it a case of do what I say, not what I do.
Yes, exactly.
And this is where I think you see that viciousness, that willingness to use people under the empire.
You actually see this reflected most prominently among family members.
So with already with Octavia.
You know he arranges this marriage with Antony as a political tool and knows full well what it is.
But Octavia, I think, also knew full well what it was and was willing to play along.
With Julia, this is his only daughter.
It's his only biological child.
And he sort of marries her off to the people that he believes will be his heir.
So the first person she's married off to is Agrippa, who is the general who won the Battle of Actium.
And he's Augustus's age, and she's his daughter.
So already you can see she's being treated as a commodity.
When he dies.
Ultimately, she's married off to Tiberius, who is Augustus' stepson, who was happily married.
I mean, very happily married and loved his wife.
And Augustus.
Instead of letting that marriage take, he immediately sends Tiberius off and makes him go campaign.
And so Tiberius is forced to divorce his wife, marry his stepsister, and then isn't even allowed to see if the marriage can actually develop into something that's meaningful.
And while he's gone, she starts having affairs.
So Augustus exiles her.
Just because she is not upholding the moral standards that he wants the Empire to uphold, although he also is not upholding them.
That's not a problem, right?
It's just a problem in her case.
And didn't that happen again with his granddaughter?
Yeah.
They are, in a sense, representatives of the Imperial family.
And so they need to embody the propaganda.
And if they don't, he's going to punish them, even though, like, he can do what he wants.
But how corrosive was that to his reputation?
Surely he must have sustained a little bit of reputational damage through these affairs.
You see it mentioned, but again, excused.
Like, Suetonius says, yes, it's known that he did this.
Okay.
Okay.
Yes, it's known.
But really, he's playing like ninth dimensional chess, right?
Like these are political actions that he's undertaking.
And so it's not that he's a bad guy.
It's like he needed to do this because, you know, that's what you do.
Was his rule a time of imperial expansion?
Did Rome extend its territories extensively during his rule?
Yeah.
And this is another thing.
That Augustus realized the Republic just wasn't doing efficiently, right?
The same way that the Republic wasn't managing the capital efficiently, managing the frontiers efficiently either.
And so you had a lot of territory that, under the Republic, had been conquered, because the cities were rich and there was a lot of plunder that could be taken.
Some of that was slaves.
Some of that was just stuff.
But what that meant is you had a lot of territory that wasn't particularly defensible, and the frontiers were not particularly defensible, especially in Europe.
Because, as you got out of the mountain ranges that separated the Mediterranean coastal areas from mainland Europe, the climate is different, the areas are not economically developed and there's just no incentive under the republic for a general who's going to have command for a year to Maybe to do anything there.
You might lose.
It's tough to fight there.
You're not going to get much of anything out of a victory there.
So like, why bother?
And what Augustus realized is, well, you know, why bother?
Because I'm here now for my entire life.
And this, you know, these rich cities along the Mediterranean are. are not defensible, right?
The coastal plain in Croatia, it's not very big.
The cities in Greece.
You get over those mountains and into what's now sort of Thrace or Macedonia.
You can just run right down through all those cities very easily.
This is not a very sustainable situation.
And so what Augustus does is he decides to establish defensible frontiers using the Danube River.
And then in Germany, initially, he chooses the Elbe.
And he campaigns out in this territory that is not particularly urbanized, not particularly developed.
There's no real incentive for you to do this, except for the long-term benefit of having a defensible frontier.
But he does that work because he understood that this is something an emperor could do, that a republic couldn't.
And he does it with professional armies.
So it's not like he's drafting a million Romans to go and fight in Bulgaria now.
He's doing it with professional soldiers who serve and are paid to do it.
And so the impact on the state is not as significant as say, a Republican campaign would have been, where you draft a bunch of people and disrupt the Italian economy so they can go and fight like in the woods in you know what's now Serbia.
OK, so how did he die and what kind of condition did he leave the Roman world in when he died?
He actually was a very unhealthy young man.
And so he actually thought that he was going to die relatively young.
And so there's succession planning already going on, like in the 20s and teens BC.
And so I don't think he ever expected that he would live to be 76.
But what ends up happening is that the people that he selected as his possible successors all die right.
So Marcellus dies, Agrippa dies.
Tiberius is selected as a sort of stand-in, but Tiberius steps down.
So Augustus then chooses his two grandsons who both die.
And so, in the end, Tiberius is brought back, even though he doesn't want to do the job, and Augustus ends up more or less dying of old age.
And when he does, Tiberius is already sharing his powers.
So Augustus dies in 14 AD.
Tiberius is already sharing his powers.
After 13 AD, they are both sort of equally empowered.
And so at this point Augustus' health was failing and he understood the easiest way to be sure that the succession would go through was to be sure that Tiberius already had all of the power he needed and all of the authority he needed to run the empire.
We have a story that Tiberius is not in the place in Italy where Augustus is when he dies.
And so Augustus's wife, Tiberius's mother Livia, shuts down all news of what's going on with Augustus until Tiberius can get there.
And so, a couple days, few days later, Tiberius shows up, and then they announce Augustus has died and Tiberius is in power.
Our sources talk about this like it's suspicious, but it's not at all suspicious, right?
Tiberius already was fully empowered to do anything he wanted to do as emperor.
Augustus's death legally changes nothing.
And so it's really about managing, sort of symbolically, the fact that you want Tiberius there, just so that you have a sort of seamless acknowledgement of Augustus's death without any chance of any kind of funny business happening.
But legally, there's nothing weird going on there at all.
Our sources like to suggest that, but there isn't really, I think, any sign of that.
One thing that is a little weird is that Augustus has a grandson named Agrippa Posthumus, who was supposed to be in the line of succession.
And it seems part of the final directives that Augustus gives when he dies is for him to be assassinated.
So Tiberius won't have any rivals at all.
And there you again see that ruthlessness.
You know, it's there for his entire life.
It didn't leave him even in old age.
Yeah.
No, even after death, right?
It's clear this is Augustus's order.
It would not have been Livia's.
It definitely wouldn't have been Tiberius's.
The sources suggest, well, maybe they had something to do with it.
I don't think they had anything to do with it.
I mean, this is Augustus, like pure and simple.
This is just Augustus doing what Augustus did for his entire life, right?
Being sure that There is a clear and unchallenged person in charge of maintaining the stability of Rome.
And if there's something that threatens it, get rid of it.
And finally, what do you see as being Augustus's greatest legacies?
I mean, I think the legacy is that 1,200 years of an imperial system that he built.
I don't think he built it with the idea that it will last for 1,200 years, though he may have.
Right.
I mean, I think that there is something in there where his first goal is to build something that will keep him alive and in power.
But I think he's smart enough to realize that building a system that will keep him alive and in power means it has to basically be so durable that it will last forever in theory.
Right.
If it's maintained, it should last for a very long time, because you don't know how long you're going to live.
So you want to build something that's not a 20-year project, but a project that extends indefinitely.
And so he may well have thought that he built something that will last for centuries.
It wasn't why he built it, but he did build it.
And he may have been aware of that, because I think he's incredibly smart and incredibly astute in the kinds of decisions that he's making
I think he should have credit for that.
I think the biggest challenge that I find as a historian talking about Augustus is I admire what he built.
He saved millions of lives by building this.
He created, in a sense, a system that we're still living with.
The structures, the religions, the economic systems, even the infrastructure in much of the world, in the Mediterranean, but then also the places the Mediterranean societies have touched right.
That's him.
He built that.
That's a tremendous legacy.
And yet it's really, really hard to speak about this person without also acknowledging the horrible things he did before he had that legacy and before he built the infrastructure that created that.
And I really struggle with that.
You know like I really struggle with how you can take somebody who, in the first part of his life, is one of the great villains of ancient history.
And, in the second part of his life, is probably the greatest sort of architect of long term political structures and even, you know, nonpolitical structures.
It's very, very hard to sort of square those two things.
And I struggle with it.
That was Ed Watts speaking to Spencer Mizzen.
Ed is a professor of history at the University of San Diego.
His latest book is The Romans, a 2000 year history.
