Power Play: Time, Theatricality, and Consent in Augustus’s Res Gestae 34

INTRODUCTION

Two thousand years after his death, Augustus is still very much alive.¹ This bimillennial anniversary has been the occasion for numerous events and academic congresses.² And even earlier, Augustus enjoyed renown among monarchs and emperors as their ideal founding father. This paper will explore the deeper mechanisms with which Augustus forged such a long-lasting positive image. This image is chiefly the result of the type of government he instituted and the political persona³ that he created and disseminated. At the core of the discussion will be Augustus’s Res Gestae (hereafter RG), with a particular focus on the programmatic last two chapters and, especially, chapter 34. By looking back at the emperor’s life and deeds, the text enshrines his strategies of posthumous “self-propaganda.”

34.1–3: In consulatu sexto et septimo, postquam bella civilia extinxeram per consensum universorum potens rerum omnium rem publicam ex mea potestate in senatus populique Romani arbitrium transtuli. 2. Quo pro merito senatus consulto Augustus appellatus sum et laureis postes aedium mearum vestiti publice coronaque civica super ianuam meam fixa est et clupeus aureus in curia Iulia positus quem mihi senatum populumque Romanum dare virtutis clementiaeque iustitiae et pietatis caussa testatum est per eius clupei inscriptionem. 3. Post id tempus auctoritate omnibus praestiti, potestatis autem nihilo amplius habui quam ceteri qui mihi quoque in magistratu conlegae fuerunt.

In my sixth and seventh consulships [28–27 b.c.e.], after I had put an end to civil wars, having (Cooley: although) by everyone’s agreement (Cooley: I had) power over everything, I transferred the state from my power to the control of the Roman senate and people. 2. 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 set up in the Julian senate house; through an inscription on this shield, the fact was declared that the Roman senate and people were giving it to me because of my valour, clemency, justice, and piety. 3. After this time, I excelled everyone in influence, but I had no more power than the others who were my colleagues in each magistracy.

(trans. Cooley 2009, with my modifications⁴)

As a consequence of the fact that, like Janus, our text looks both backwards and forwards in time (cf. Davis 1999.2), the first part of my paper will dwell on its structuring of time. Next, given that the concept of the persona originates in the theater, my second section will clarify the construction of Augustus’s persona using the idea of theatricality. In his Ars Poetica and Epistulae, Horace, who addresses the emperor in these works and was personally close to him, uses the word populus (originally a political term whose most common meaning was “a constituted people”), to denote a theatrical audience (Lowrie 2014.121–22). This shift in meaning inspires me to explore the concept of theatricality in the political arena. This concept has hitherto been applied only in passing to Augustus (Levick 2010.205–06, Freudenburg 2014.105–09), though it is used systematically in discussions of the later stages of the principate (Bartsch 1994). Like Shadi Bartsch (1994.10–11), I use theatricality as a model for analyzing role-playing in social interactions. Still I propose to modify her analysis in two respects: first, I redefine the optical aspect of her “gaze” as presentation and visuality, i.e., not only in regard to the beholder, but also in regard to the presenting agent and the object beheld. Second, I do not analyze the “unequal distribution of power between participants in any human interaction” as the source of “an element of acting” (Bartsch 1994.10). Instead, I see role-playing and the acceptance of this political play by a socially inferior group as the necessary prerequisites of effective power and rule. This shift or inversion of perspective takes into account the different phases of the principate: in its foundation stage, for example, it was Octavian...