Lecture for Reed College Humanities, Spring 2000

[5800]

INTRODUCTION

It is often said that the winners write the history books, but that’s not quite true. It’s the survivors who write the history books. This distinction is important for the student of Roman history, because so much of that history was written by partisans of some particular faction in the ultra-politicized Roman state. The historians of Rome we read were partial to the elite faction of the senate. The elites were not always the winners &emdash; certainly they lost a Civil War to Julius Caesar, and for their opposition to the future Augustus Caesar in the proscriptions of 43 they were slaughtered wholesale for cash bounties, their severed heads put on public display.

The interval from Caesar’s victory over Pompeius in 48 until the supposed "restoration of the Republic" in 27 was the darkest period for the Roman senate, as its elite faction was violently eliminated and its constitutional powers diminished. The senate as a political institution never recovered its former influence, but it survived. It survived to produce men who would see the extreme political turbulence of the first century BCE as a straightforward decline from virtuous to vicious government &emdash; the fall of a free Republic and the rise of an Emperorship. Livy and Tacitus are fine examples &emdash; two losers who wrote history books, if you like. From these elite partisans we have received a paradigmatic history of the first century, and indeed a language in which further history can be done. As Professor Kierstead argued last week, the rhetoric of a lost virtuous republic proved to be of enduring appeal. The language of this rhetoric, in particular the term "res publica" from which we derive "Republic" and "Republican", is one focus of my lecture today. I want to show the details of how Augustus managed the use of such terms in his political propaganda, including the Res Gestae which you have read for today. A major element in any explanation of Augustus’s extraordinary political career must be his mastery of propaganda. In future lectures you’ll hear more about his literary, architectural and decorative programs; for today we’ll focus on his political language, his brilliant use of words to suggest, to advocate, to innovate, to justify &emdash; to remold the Roman political order in light of his own anti-nostalgic vision of a future Golden Age of the roman republic, what I will characterize as an amaranthine republic.

My purpose is not to endorse Augustus’s conception of an amaranthine republic, of course &emdash; that would be absurd for several reasons. My aim is to explain this conception and to argue that it was a conception present and perhaps dominant in the decades of the Augustan era. Since it would be the chief rival to the conception of a virtuous Republic it must be understood in any attempt to understand the Roman political self-conception in the Augustan age and its aftermath. But also, I wish to say, the contrasts between this conception and the nostalgic conception of a lost virtuous Republic are themselves worthy of study. It is easy to see why Livy became a great influence on the Western imagination. Augustus has exercised some such influence as well, albeit on darker minds than yours or mine. It is necessary to understand his conception of a new res publica as we try to understand how its hopefulness and optimism led to the disasters that seem to justify the despair and cynicism latent in Livy.

Politics

Let me begin with a little about the political realities of the contexts in which the texts you have been reading &emdash; Livy, Augustus, Suetonius -- were produced. The politics of Julius Caesar entrenched two political factions in the senate. Caesar led the po-pu-la-res -- the "popular" faction. The other faction, the op-ti-ma-tes &emdash; is sometimes called the Senatorial faction, but I’ll refer to them as the "elite" faction; that seems to me less likely to mislead, because there were plenty of popular partisans in the Senate. The elite faction tried to control affairs by means of the senate in accord with the recent constitution of the Roman government, roughly the tradition from the Punic Wars to Julius Caesar. The popular faction was more willing to use the assemblies and the personal loyalties of men under arms. These factions clashed on the battlefield when Caesar defeated Pompieus, champion of the elites. Caesar’s popularity and his unopposable military power led to his dictatorship, and then to the conspiracy to assassinate him. The elite assassins left alive his ally and fellow consul Marcus Antonius, and Gaius Octavius, a 19 year old nephew who was posthumously adopted as heir. Young Gaius styled himself Caesar, son of Caesar, though skeptics called him Octavius. Historians have opted for the formally correct Octavian &emdash; which name implies its holder was a member of the Octavius family adopted by someone else. In time, he would come to be called Augustus, and many other things besides.

Octavian’s political life was shaped by these factions and the interests that underlay them. The one incontrovertible achievement of Octavian was the final suppression of political violence stemming from these tensions. His success in this endeavor inaugurated the period of so-called Augustan peace, which was of course a peace only in the sense that members of the senate stopped killing each other. And it came in part at the cost of the proscriptions of 43, in which perhaps 300 senators and 2000 equestrians were killed and their estates confiscated for their real or imagined opposition the leaders of the popular faction. [On your handout there’s a partial rendering of the notice of proscriptions from Appian].

Normal politics is not a game of formal allegiances, and there’s little hope of our understanding all of the nuances of these factions. But it’s pretty easy to learn their characteristic markings. Livy was an unabashed partisan of the elites; it is famously reported that Augustus called him a Pompeian (Tacitus Annals IV). "Liberty" is the watchword of the elites, especially because of its anti-monarchical connotation. Equally telling is the fact that Livy uses res publica to refer to the constitution of a Golden Age of a free and virtuous Rome.

You’ve now read something by Augustus himself. It is natural to assume that Augustus was a popular partisan. However, he was always willing to use support of both the populars and of the elites, and eventually he did all but eradicate that factional division. In a time of elites and populars, Augustus achieved a kind of impartiality by rising above these factions and taking their political powers into his own hands. However this impartiality cannot be mistaken for objectivity. Augustus was a partisan all right, he was 100 percent pro-Augustus.

You’ll have noticed that Suetonius doesn’t say much about the free and virtuous republic. As palace official to the Emperor Hadrian in the second century CE he was far removed from these political animosities &emdash; his allegiance was to his emperor, and he seems to have had little interest in the politics of the past. His history of Twelve Caesars reads as the story of the glorious predecessors of the emperor Nerva, Hadrian’s grandfather and the founder of his dynasty. It is not too surprising that Suetonius is immune to the myth that the Caesars inaugurated a fallen age of vice by destroying the virtuous Republic. [But it is disappointing that he offers us such howlers as this one: "Augustus gave all possible encouragement to intellectuals: he would politely and patiently attend readings not only of their poems and historical works, but of their speeches and dialogues… [p.99]" I wonder if Hadrian ever read that. If he did I bet he had a really good laugh.]

Thesis

Now I’ll lay out what I want to argue from these texts. The term "res publica" was extremely plastic in it use, and the precise manner of its use was of political significance. The elites typically used it one way, the populars another; Augustus used it in each when it served his particular purpose, and in new ways as well. Perhaps the plasticity of the term "res publica" is one reason why the myth of the virtuous republic proved so enduring &emdash; the republic could be understood in different ways by different nostalgists. Here’s a related point worthy of some consideration: perhaps the roman republic endured the Age of Augustus, endured the development of the principate, because the term "republic" is sufficiently plastic to apply before, during, and after Augustus. This point Augustus would have found very appealing, as I think the Res Gestae shows.

Tacitus, a pro-elite historian, wrote that there was an "official myth" during the principate that the Republic had been restored, even though those in the know saw through it. But according to Augustus it was a partisan myth that the categories of republic and principate were mutually exclusive. That is why Augustus could claim to have restored the republic and also have developed a new form of constitution for it, the principate. This he claims in the texts we’ve read for today. To make that claim at all plausible he needed to promote an understanding of the res publica opposed to that of the elite partisans, for example Livy.

In Augustan propaganda the res publica was something like that mythical Greek flower the amaranth. The amaranth, it was said, never lost its bloom. Whatever faded away with the appearance of Augustus couldn’t have been the res publica, according to him, because that term was meant to be used for something that couldn’t fade. Indeed, in what was undeniably an official myth of the principate, the Romans had a divine destiny to rule the known world for the rest of history. [You’ll see this myth in the Aeneid. Jupiter promises for the Roman people the following: "I set no limits to their fortunes and no time; I give them empire without end [Virgil, I. 389]"] The res publica, according to this myth, would have to be the instrument of this eternal order. Of course this story cannot be mistaken for anything but a myth &emdash; just like the story of the flower that never fades. The cost of this vision of an eternal republic is the level-headed conclusion that that republic could never become actual. But why should propaganda defer to mere reality anyway? If it suited Augustus’s purposes to define the res publica as an immortal, if mythological, institution, why not? Remember, his opponents, and the opponents of his successors, defined the res publica as a mythical lost golden age of liberty and virtue, and there’s little to be said for the propaganda of nostalgia. At least Augustus was a progressive &emdash; an optimist rather than a nostalgist.

The Res Gestae as Elegy

Let’s turn to the Res Gestae to trace these aims and see something of its method. The Res Gestae was written for multiple audiences. It was included with Augustus’s will and read aloud in the senate after his death. It was installed on a monument at Rome, but how easily it could be read there is subject to some doubt. It was inscribed in a variety of monuments or memorials set up in the provinces &emdash; that is the source for the text you have received in translation.

Pat Southern has argued that Augustus’s most persistent administrative challenge was the growing administrative apathy of the nobility. The competitive ethos of the ruling class of the pre-Augustan era was damaged by the diminished autonomy, power, and prestige available to individuals, and no doubt also by the fact that advancement now came mainly through the patronage of the princeps. If that’s correct, it gives us a way to see the Res Gestae as something besides posthumous bragging. One traditional way of celebrating individual ambition, initiative and achievement, and thereby promoting it, was the Roman funeral elegy. The Res Gestae can be read as a fairly traditional example of this genre. Its content and significance are exceptional because its author was so exceptional, but its form is pretty traditional.

The Roman elegy, like the funeral in which it had its place, was oriented toward the family. Thus the Res Gestae mentions Augustus’s adopted father Julius Caesar and his own sons, but other actors receive only oblique references &emdash; his colleagues in the triumvirate Marcus Antonius and Marcus Lepidus are never named, and his arch-enemy Sextus Pompey is implied to be merely a pirate.

Other inscriptions we have from this genre show that a traditional elegy would focus on the offices and honors achieved in a public career and deeds done in service of the state. If Augustus’s lists seem tedious, remember he enjoyed a public career of about 58 years, and in that time achieved virtually every office and honor Rome had to offer. The Res Gestae is a very selective list of achievements, of course &emdash; it not only accentuates the positive it eliminates the negative. This bias befits a monument, and not for sentimental reasons. The portrayal of his public career as a model for others could hardly have included the numerous illegal, treacherous and murderous actions by which Augustus gained and maintained sole power. That said, the fashion in which Augustus attempts to spin such actions into noble deeds is sometimes outrageous. The first paragraph is a particularly wild example.

The Res Gestae as Propaganda

Section 1 of the Res Gestae reads:

At the age of 19, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised in army by means of which I liberated the Republic, which was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction. For which reason the senate, with honorific degrees, made me a member of its order... giving me at the same time consular rank in voting, and granted me the imperium. It ordered me as propraetor, together with the consuls, to see to it that the state suffered no harm. Moreover, in the same year, when both consuls had fallen in the war, the people elected me consul and a triumvir for the settlement of the Commonwealth.

Here’s a rough account of what happened. Marcus Antonius, consul with Julius Caesar and leader of the populars after his death, attempted to reduce the tension between the factions in the senate. But Antonius and the senate quarreled over which province he was to govern in the following year. The assembly, instrument of the popular faction, voted that Antonius should have Cisalpine Gaul as he wanted, but the senate favored Decimus Brutus, an assassin of Caesar, for that governorship and refused to defer. The conflict led Antonius to march an army to oust Decimus Brutus by force. Meanwhile, Octavian was unsuccessfully agitating to get his odd posthumous adoption ratified, and successfully raising an illegal army under the name of Caesar in case violence should come again. Through an alliance with Cicero, leader of the elite faction, Octavian was given the legal right to command his army in order to participate in the fight against Antonius. To legalize his command he was made senator, granted imperium, and authorized to act as propraetor with the consuls for the protection of the res publica. All this, remember, to assist the elite faction in military campaign against Antonius. So Octavian and the consuls marched to the defense of Decimus Brutus. A bloody series of battles was fought; apparently Octavian guarded the camp. Both consuls eventually died, and Antonius retreated north across the Alps; Decimus Brutus followed in pursuit but Octavian refused to move. At the end of the summer, with the other generals safely stuck on the north side of the Alps, Octavian turned and marched eight legions on Rome and took the city. The elite faction fled. This is how Octavian was elected consul without holding any previous office, had his adoption legally recognized, and organized a show trial to convict the assassins, making them outlaws despite their high offices. Meanwhile, Antonius had collected his ally Marcus Lepidus and eliminated Decimus Brutus. Next, Octavian, Antonius and Lepidus met in Cisalpine Gaul to negotiate a compact, and had their partisans, now in control of both the assembly and the senate, ratify their new titles: "triumvirs."

Well, one can see why this telling of the story didn’t make it into Augustus’s elegy or onto the monument. The extra-legal military adventures, the unprincipled party-hopping, the treason, the political killings &emdash; stories of these survived only in private histories. But survive they did, and the nobility continued to remember their ancestors who fought for the elite faction, or in their view, who fought for liberty and the free republic.

The Res Gestae represented the official history, or if you like, the imperial myth. Such contrasts make the Res Gestae a nice resource to place against the histories written by elites. But the Res Gestae is not a history, strictly speaking. Its aims may have been similar to those of Roman historians, for whom history was unashamedly a political activity, but the methods it used to achieve those aims are more straightforward examples of political propaganda, as I will now argue.

The phrase "res publica" connoted many different things to Romans. Literally it might mean "public matter" or "public business" but it came to signify the state or the government as well; in the mouths of senators it often meant the traditional form of constitution present from the Punic wars to the Civil wars, whereby the senate was able to dominate political affairs. Since these concepts are highly abstract ones, the phrase "res publica" was subject to loose interpretation, hence to manipulation and willful ambiguity.

The phrase occurs three times in the first paragraph of the Res Gestae. Your translation might obscure this fact &emdash; though not without some justification, for the multivalent connotations of "res publica" do suggest a multiplicity of translations. Yet it is worth pointing out the repetition of the phrase at the outset of the Res Gestae for two reasons. First, the most obvious way to establish a theme for a work is to repeat a theme at the outset, and clearly the dominant theme of the Res Gestae concerns Augustus’s care for the public business, the state and its government, in sum his care for the res publica. Second, in a more subtle fashion, the repetition allows the phrase to lose precision, because it is used in three different ways.

To begin, Augustus writes of his service to the senate: "I liberated the Republic which was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction " -- an overly literal rendering might be "I claimed the Republic for freedom". The implication is that the popular faction had gained inappropriate power, and to liberate the Republic meant to return to the norm that the traditional constitution represented, as the elites would naturally desire. In the case of the years 44 and 43, Antonius and the populars were likely oppressing the senate with his popularity among the masses. This popularity allowed him to push his legislation through the popular assembly, thereby bypassing opposition from the senate. The elites could call this oppression by a faction, but no one else would; anyone else would call it democracy. Yet in the minds of the elites the domination of the senate represented the best form of constitution. Hence, in their minds, and in their words as well, true Republican government meant that specific form of rule. Augustus’s claim at the outset to have liberated the republic as a young man sets as his theme his enduring care for the res publica. As a secondary point, it also shows how willing he was to adopt shamelessly the rhetorical formulae of the elites when it suited his purpose.

Second, Augustus writes that the senate "ordered me as propraetor, together with the consuls, to see to it that the state [res publica] suffered no harm." This order of the senate was a specific modification of a traditional formula; it placed Octavian in a subordinate position to the consuls. In practice an order to the consuls to insure that the res publica suffer no harm gave them unconditional financial, diplomatic, military and police powers. The senate first developed this formula in 121 when the tribune Gaius Gracchus threatened to use his power and popularity to disempower the senate. It was understood in that case that whatever actions the consuls took &emdash; and it was expected that these would include seizures of property, torture, summary execution, and other police-state kinds of fun &emdash; the consuls would act in the interests of Senatorial power. In the first century BCE, by precedent it implied that part of what was to be defended was the traditional form of the Roman constitution whereby the senate had been able to dominate the affairs of state. The formula said: protect the res publica; it meant: protect our power!

Octavian exploited this slippage between what was said and what was meant masterfully. Charged to do whatever he and the consuls deemed necessary, he was technically just following orders when, after the consuls had fallen, he took command of the better part of their legions and marched on Rome. He likely told his army this was necessary to protect the res publica, the public business -- for example, the business about his army getting paid. The elite faction in the senate fled, no doubt because they knew the game was up. Octavian had the loyalty of the only army in Italy, and he had no intention to protect the old order or to defer to the old linguistic conventions concerning "res publica."

The third use of "res publica" in the first section of the Res Gestae occurs in another formula that presented an opportunity for creative interpretation. The traditional formula used to appoint a dictator was "Dictator rei publicae constituendae" This special office could not easily be understood as a charge to protect the traditional system, as it put the traditional system aside in favor of unchecked rule by a single man. The innovative title "tresviri rei publicae constituendae " echoed this office without the nasty associations of the dictatorship. To capture the sense of "res publica" in this use our translators offer us "Commonwealth" &emdash; which I think does an excellent job of capturing in English an idiomatic yet still somewhat literal term parallel to that of "res publica". A commonwealth connotes something yet more abstract than a government, a constitution, or even, I think, a state. And this is how Octavian chose to understand "res publica".

The phrase "rei publicae constituendae" could be taken in a conservative manner to mean: "for settlement of what already is" or in a radical manner to mean "for arrangement of what does not yet exist". I’d guess, though this is only a guess, that the traditional formula for a dictatorship was meant to be taken in a pretty conservative way. But the office invented by Antonius, Lepidus, and Octavian was interpreted by them radically. Their actions demonstrate this amply &emdash; including their use of the language of "res publica". The edict of Augustus that Suetonius’s records supports the point nicely: "May I be privileged to build firm and lasting foundations for the government of Rome [salvam ac sospitem rem publicam sistere -- literally: to set up a sound and secure republic]. May I also achieve the reward to which I aspire: that of being known as the author of the best possible constitution, and of carrying with me, when I die, the hope that these foundations will abide secure [fundamenta rei publicae quae iecero -- literally: foundations of the republic which I will have laid down] [p.66]. (thanks to Wally Englert for help with translating that verb!) There’s no doubt that in this edict Augustus portrayed the republic as a work in progress, and the constitution a system for the future that it was his personal responsibility to create. This is how he chose to understand his office and the entity, the res publica, it served. Or at least, that is the understanding he emphasizes in his propaganda.

The Res Gestae goes on to monumentalize Augustus’s achievements for the res publica. That is the theme that unifies the long and quite diverse list.

Augustan Nationalism

Another aspect of Augustus’s success can be seen in his promotion of a consciousness of national unity among a population accustomed to the consciousness of the divisions that fed the Civil Wars. In the Res Gestae Augustus does not speak of his service to the patricians nor to the plebians. He balances the account of honors from and services to the people and senate, occasionally mentioning the equestrians as well. Whenever possible, he refers to the res publica or to the populi Romani &emdash; the people of Rome. And whereas the Senate often used the term "res publica" as a synonym for the interests of the Senate, Augustus worked to emphasize the Roman in the Roman Republic.

In short, I would argue that Augustus understood well how a kind of Nationalist propaganda could be used to distract the public imagination from the social divisions and violent conflicts that had plagued Rome. [That is why his politics served as a paradigm for such 20th century figures as Hitler and Mussolini. In Augustus they rightly saw a model for how to use Nationalist propaganda to defuse the internal conflicts that inevitably result from individual identification with social classes.] Propaganda could accomplish this without the elimination of the divisions themselves. The power of the propagandist lies in his ability to change perception rather than reality directly.

[1519 or 960 to go]

Digression on Cleopatra?

[557]

The most dramatic example of Augustus’s Nationalist propaganda at work is his smear of the Eqyptian queen Cleopatra. In the late 30s Octavian’s triumviral colleague Marcus Antonius remained in the East and had taken Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, as his wife. At the time Egypt was the only power in the Mediterranean that could plausibly resist Roman aggression, and it was a source of unequalled material and agricultural wealth. From Rome Octavian successfully portrayed the union of Antonius and Cleopatra as a deadly threat to Rome’s national identity. First, he portrayed Cleopatra, with some plausibility, as a symbol for eastern despotism to which Antonius was becoming dangerously sympathetic; and if anything exercised the Roman imagination more than the thought of Rome being betrayed to a foreign king it could only have been the thought of Rome being betrayed to a foreign queen. Next, despite the fact that Antonius and Cleopatra were raising a family together, Octavian began to slander her as an Egyptian harlot, seducing Antonius away from his Roman wife and their Roman family life. Antonius responded in a famous letter to Octavian, saying, in effect, you have as little interest in your Roman wife as I have in mine &emdash; so shut up, you hypocrite. By this time Rome was inflamed with fear, resentment, and blind rage against Cleopatra. When Octavian played his final card, reading aloud in the Senate what he claimed to be a stolen copy of Antonius’s will disinheriting his Roman family in favor of his new family with Cleopatra, the response was a declaration of war on Cleopatra -- not war on Antonius, not war on Egypt, but war on Cleopatra herself.

Thus Octavian was able to muster an army to fight what was in reality a very risky and very personal Civil War against Antonius, all under the guise of a national vendetta against a single promiscuous queen. Eventually Antonius and Cleopatra were defeated; Egypt, left undefended, was annexed, and Octavian assumed unrivaled control of an empire that stretched around the Mediterranean from Gibraltar in Spain to Hippo in Numidia. In time Octavian allowed the War on Cleopatra to be called the Egyptian War. But even Suetonius recognized that it was a civil war against Antonius [sect. 9].

As conqueror of Egypt Octavian gained sole control of its wealth. What he did with that wealth we can only infer indirectly. The lengthy catalogue of his public expenditures in the Res Gestae is proof that he spent very freely. But given that he administered Egypt as a private estate, he could afford to do anything he wanted. Octavian never allowed Egypt to be governed by senatorial proconsuls. He personally appointed a prefect of mere equestrian rank to govern it, and he even forbade senators from visiting it. It may be that as the granary of Rome Egypt was too important to the people of Rome to allow the senate to get their hands on it; but there’s an interesting archeological clue that suggests another explanation for the strange arrangement: at a temple in Egypt there has been found a typical representation of a Pharoah in traditional dress, with an intriguing inscription that identifies this ruler as Pharoah Augustus. Perhaps that’s a little sample of the realities of the principate to set against the propaganda of the Res Gestae.

The Success of Augustus’s Rhetoric

The narrative of service to the res publica reaches its climax in Section 34 of the Res Gestae. This section includes a very ambiguous description of the settlement between Octavian and the senate that led to him being named Augustus and the savior of the citizens. The text says something like "I transferred the state [res publica] from my power to the control of the people and senate." But the people and senate exercised this new control primarily by demanding that the majority of power remain with Augustus. Likely the settlement involved ceding back to the senate some of its traditional privileges, such as issuing coinage, and powers, such as the military imperium of the consuls and the appointment of governors in some provinces. Whatever the details of the actual situation after this point, Augustus succeeded in getting all sides to agree to describe the political situation in his preferred terms &emdash; he was now merely the princeps, the leading citizen, of the restored res publica.

There is good evidence from Tacitus that this agreement about terms proved stable. After Augustus’s death in 14 CE, his chosen successor Tiberius was championed in the senate in Augustus’s favored terms. He was called on to admit that the res publica was a single organic whole requiring the control of a single mind, by implication, his [Tacitus, Annals I.12]. More blatantly he was asked: "How long, Caesar, will you allow the res publica to have no head?" [Tacitius Annals I. 13] Tacitus might quote from the senatorial record here, or he might have reconstructed this language. In either case, it is telling that Tacitus places the term "res publica" in the mouths of these senators, thereby showing them using it just the way Augustus would have liked. And this use is in stark contrast to the way Tacitus himself uses "res publica" to refer to a form of constitution lost in the Civil Wars [Most famously at Annal I.5: "few were left who had seen the Republic"].

Eventually the Roman elites would find a way, in private at least, to reclaim the res publica as a nostalgic state of virtue and freedom. Hence Livy and Tacitus, and their representation of the noble Republic disintegrating into the vicious emperorship. No doubt the ugly experience of the western world with dictators, their propaganda, and their idealized visions of order have made us more naturally sympathetic to this history.

Conclusion

I have tried in passing to bring out a few of the less pleasant realities of how Augustus actually governed the Roman empire. There’s no doubt that he was a dictator and a monarch in all but name. Yet a monarchy in all but name is different from a monarchy. I’ve argued that he marketed his rule to the home audience as care for the republic, which he himself did not wish to have in his power. The republican propaganda of Augustus was not simply some pleasant lies about the current situation. It was a systematic attempt to appropriate the notion of a roman republic for the benefit of his political vision, a vision in which the best days of the republic were yet to come.

From the elite point of view the Res Gestae is a vicious attempt to establish the official myth that the republic survived Augustus, when in fact Augustus destroyed forever the free Republic. But the only sense in which the republic was destroyed is the sense in which the Republic was a form of constitution in which the Senate dominated affairs; and no one denies that Augustus reformed the constitution.

From the popular point of view Augustus really did restore the republic. He was charged as a young man with the re-organization of the republic, after the final civil war he established the republic on new foundations and returned control of it to the senate and people of Rome. They had the good sense to support the continued rule of the princeps because the point of a republic was to have a working government; and no one denies that Augustus as princeps made the government work. But then of course he did radically alter the constitution, and what shall we call that period of senatorial liberty between Tarquin the Proud and Augustus if not the Republican period?

These two points of view do not really disagree about the facts, they differ in the values they represent and how they want to use the term republic. I’ve tried to argue that the details of how the roman term res publica was used mattered because its use encoded and supported a host of attitudes, values, and allegiances. And so its use was seldom innocent.

Finally, I’d like to close with something of a broader observation about the use of language in political activity. Political activity &emdash; and when the writing of history constitutes political activity then the writing of history as well &emdash; does not so much take for granted a language in which ideas must be expressed. Rather linguistic political activity is in part a reshaping of language, a creative application of existing linguistic conventions with specific political aims. The threat of propaganda, as the case of the Res Gestae demonstrates, is not simply that it tells us only a few of the facts, or that it might distort the facts. As a political activity it shapes the way words are used and hence the way words are understood. In times and places where propaganda is univocal &emdash; where one institution monopolizes the language of political activity -- this activity amounts to nothing less than a form of control over the thoughts and imaginations of its audience. That is why it is always a good thing when some losers survive to write their own history books.

----------------------

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brunt, P. and J. Moore, Res Gestae Divi Augusti: the Achievements of the Divine Augustus, London, Oxford U.P., 1967.

Lewis, Naphtali and Meyer Reinhold, eds. Roman Civilization, two volumes, 3^rd edition, NY: Columbia U. Press, 1990.

Southern, Pat, Augustus, NY: Rutledge, 1998.