BLOG: The Passing of Augustus

1brookallen
2 days ago
6 min read

Just the other day, someone asked me, "What's your favorite period to write about?" As much as I love and value all of history, it wasn't a tough question to answer. My response was easy--the ancient world. There's something just mesmerizing about bygone eras two-thousand or more years ago. Yes, they were different in many ways, but also in some things, they were exactly the same.

They loved their children, worshipped their god(s), strived to better themselves through working hard or rising the social ladder somehow. Their entertainment may have been different and rough, deadly, or full of crass humor or mime, but they loved sports and theater--just like us.

And finally, just like us, they grew old, they sickened or died in combat or sometimes by their own hand. But they died, just like we do.

One of Rome's most famous poets from the Augustan Age was Ovidius--known by most as just "Ovid". Author Fiona Forsyth has reintroduced him to literature by making him a main character in her book, DEATH AND THE POET. It takes place during his exile in a remote place called Tomis, located on a peninsula in what is now Romania's Black Sea region. As Ovid passed time in his lonly banishment, the world held its breath, awaiting dark news--news of Augustus's death. For his reign had at last brought iron-fisted peace throughout the Roman Empire, and there was much unease as to who would wind up as his successor.

Ovid was among the many people of his day, wondering who that person would be and whether it would change his own circumstances.

So scroll down to read about this uncertain time--one in which the most powerful man on earth finally passed into posterity. And thanks, Fiona, for sharing more about this period with my readers! Please know that Roman writers are always welcome on my blog!

Read on, everyone!

THE PASSING OF AUGUSTUS

By Fiona Forsyth

The death of Augustus in the summer of 14 CE was a crucial time for the Roman Empire, because never before had an emperor died. Of course the very title “Emperor” came later, but whether you called him “Princeps” as those around him did, or “Emperor”, nobody can deny that Augustus had carved out a unique position in Roman history. He and his advisors planned carefully for the time of transition but nerves must have been on edge. It was an opportunity to think about leaving one-man-rule and going back to the Republican system – the traditional Senate and People of Rome - but it also reminded people that Augustus had dragged Rome out of civil war and clothed her in marble. For many in the Empire, Augustus was their one and only ruler, in sole command since defeating Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, so by 14 CE only those in their fifties (an advanced age for the times!) would remember anything else.

As history has shown, it was already too late for a Republic to make a comeback, and I suspect that most people throughout the Empire desired nothing more than a quiet and bloodless transition. This meant swallowing one’s disquiet at the thought of Rome becoming an inheritance and accepting that the Emperor now named his own heir.

Augustus himself had been prepared for this handover from a relatively young age – he had not enjoyed good health, suffering several bouts of serious illness since his adolescence, and preparing for the worst had been part of his strategy since at least the midtwenties BCE. He had one child, Julia, from an early and short-lived marriage, but in the fifty years and more with his redoubtable wife Livia, there were no children. Livia brought two useful sons by her first husband but Augustus wanted a male heir of his own blood. Shades of Henry the Eighth…

Augustus looked to his immediate family – he had a daughter, his sister had a son, so Marcellus and Julia were married to one another when they were both young. This perfect solution was foiled by Marcellus’ early death, so Augustus looked around once more and found another husband for Julia, his faithful friend Marcus Agrippa. This marriage was successful in terms of five children in ten years, and Augustus swiftly adopted the two elder sons Gaius and Lucius, designing their education, even teaching them swimming himself.

But over time, death and disgrace ripped Augustus’ hopes apart, and by 4CE, with Gaius and Lucius dead and their mother in shameful exile, Augustus had to move again. This time, he adopted Livia’s son Tiberius, who at 46 years old was an efficient administrator and a respected general, the safe pair of hands Augustus needed. Agrippa’s third boy Postumus, born a few months after his father’s death, was still just a teenager, but at least through his mother Julia he had that all-important blood, so he was adopted alongside Tiberius. It was an uneasy combination – the ancient historians are on the whole uncomplimentary about Tiberius and Postumus. Read Tacitus and Suetonius and you would be forgiven for wondering how on earth Augustus could leave the Empire to an unsmiling misanthropist and a boy already descending into madness.

Now in his mid-sixties, Augustus must have hoped he was safe in his heirs, but things did not go well. The last years of Augustus’ reign were marked by personal and public disaster. Ordinary people bore the brunt of food shortages and disease, while in about 8 CE Postumus and his sister went into exile just like their mother, though the reasons are hard to uncover. It was at the end of 8 CE that the poet Ovid was sent in disgrace by the Emperor to Tomis on the coast of the Black Sea. The timing suggests that Ovid was somehow involved with Postumus and his sister, but we shall probably never know for sure. And to top it all, the worst disaster of Augustus’ reign came in 9CE when three full legions of the Roman army were lost in the German Teutoburger forest. “I, Claudius” fans will remember Augustus shouting to the world “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!”

Ovid was still in Tomis, and when Augustus died on the 19th August 14 CE. Like everyone else, he would have waited on tenterhooks to see if Tiberius had stepped smoothly into his stepfather’s place – maybe hoping that his own punishment would soon end under a new regime. Alas, Tiberius showed no sign of forgiveness. The first act of Tiberius’ rule was the execution of young Postumus in exile, though Tiberius always denied giving that order.

And there is the saddest part of this story, I feel. Postumus died at the age of only 26, having spent the last six years of his life in exile. Thanks to the way Augustus had designed his rule and its continuation, Postumus had no time to make his mark, to fulfil his part in Augustus’ plans – indeed, no choice in anything in his life. He knew a great deal of loss though, bereft of mother, brothers and sister before he was twenty. Our sources hint at a violent personality and madness, but that was not why he died. Because of his birth he would always be a threat to Tiberius and could not be allowed to live. Augustus got the succession he had planned for but at a price.

ALL ABOUT THE BOOK

14 AD.

When Dokimos the vegetable seller is found bludgeoned to death in the Black Sea town of Tomis, it’s the most exciting thing to have happened in the region for years. Now reluctantly settled into life in exile, the disgraced Roman poet Ovid helps his friend Avitius to investigate the crime, with the evidence pointing straight at a cuckolded neighbour.

But Ovid is also on edge, waiting for the most momentous death of all. Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome, is nearing his end, and the future of the whole Roman world is uncertain.

Even as far away as Tomis, this political shadow creates tension as the pompous Roman legate Flaccus thinks more of his career than solving a local murder.

Avitius and Ovid become convinced that an injustice has been done in the case of the murdered vegetable seller. But Flaccus continues to turn a deaf ear.

When Ovid’s wife, Fabia, arrives unexpectedly, carrying a cryptic message from the Empress Livia, the poet becomes distracted - and another crime is committed.

Ovid hopes for a return to Rome - only to discover that he is under threat from an enemy much closer to home.

ALL ABOUT FIONA

Fiona studied Classics at Oxford before teaching it for 25 years. A family move to Qatar gave her the opportunity to write about ancient Rome, and she is now back in the UK, working on her seventh novel.