Free The Twelve Caesars by Matthew Dennison

relented. He never saw his daughter again and left instructions that her body be barred from his mausoleum. It was a
cruel and ironic ending to a policy intended to champion the family; and offers startling confirmation of the importance attached by Augustus to appearances (when it suited him) and to obedience
within his own household.
    Augustus was sixty-one years old at the time of Julia’s disgrace, a greater age in Rome than today. For nearly four decades he had occupied a place of singular prominence in Roman public
life. With vigour he had dedicated himself to restoring Rome’s fortunes after the tardy cataclysms of civil war which reached back into his ‘father’s’ lifetime and beyond.
Some of his policies were practical: he fixed soldiers’ pay and organized the Praetorian Guard; he moved to minimize corruption in elections; he created new appointments to enable more men to
take part in the administration of the state – supervisors of aqueducts, of public buildings and of the roads. He conjured up romantic visions of the Rome of his forefathers, enforcing
toga-wearing in the Forum, teaching his daughter and his granddaughter spinningand weaving, and himself taking the lead in filial devotion to his mother and his sister. He
was affable and approachable in his mien: when a senator he scarcely knew fell blind and resolved to commit suicide as a result, ‘Augustus called on him and by his consoling words induced him
to live.’ Most of all, he defined the role of princeps as one of service, an old-fashioned idea in which the greater good of the greater number was seen to count for more than personal
gain: ‘May it be my privilege to establish the state in a firm and secure position, and reap from that act the fruit that I desire; but only if I may be called the author of the best possible
government.’ His personal contribution included measures for fire and flood protection, restoration of the Via Flaminia and his unparalleled programme of public building. Observers noticed
that he was tired, Julia’s downfall a turning point. It was followed by the deaths of Gaius and Lucius Caesar and then, equally dramatically, Augustus’ banishment in AD 8 of Julia’s daughter, Julia the Younger. Augustus’ granddaughter was accused of adultery like her mother; in her case suspicion of conspiracy further muddied the waters.
Her brother was involved in the same plan, Agrippa Postumus, the last remaining son of Julia the Elder and Agrippa. Then the following year, in his third year of campaigning in Germania,
Quinctilius Varus lost all three Roman legions under his command in a disastrous encounter with Germanic tribes in the Teutoburg Forest. Augustus may have suffered something approaching a nervous
breakdown, albeit he appears to have recovered with time: ‘they say that he was so greatly affected that for several months in succession he cut neither his beard nor his hair, and sometimes
he would dash his head against a door, crying: “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!”’

    So much had changed in Rome; some things not at all. Deep-engrained in the city’s psyche was that mistrust of female power which Octavian had
exploited to destroy Cleopatra. At the moment of Augustus’ death, it found expression in a lurid vignette which makes better television than history.
    It was August AD 14 and the emperor, travelling in Campania, fell prey to a recurrence of an intestinal complaint which had plagued him for some time; in its wake,
attacks of chronic diarrhoea, difficult to manage on the road or at sea. Augustus altered his plans. He headed for Nola. His house there, by chance, was the same one in which his father, Gaius
Octavius, had died. He asked that his bed be placed in the very room in which Gaius breathed his last. The instinct was one of peacefulness more than mawkishness: this then was the end.
‘Since no care could withstand the fates,’ writes Velleius Paterculus, ‘in his