Lecture 27: The Dictatorships of Sulla and Caesar and the Augustan Settlement

The policies of three leaders adequately express the evolving solution to the failure of the Roman Republican form of government. Two leaders, L. Cornelius Sulla and C. Julius Caesar, received the mandate as Dictator Rei Publicae Constituendae (Dictator for purposes of restoring the republic) to reform the republican government. A third leader, C. Octavius, the great grandnephew of Caesar adopted ex testimento and hence known as Octavian, ultimately crafted the solution to become known as the Principate.

I. Dictatorship of Sulla (82-79 BC)

Sulla demanded and received the dictatorship after retaking Rome through violent civil war (82-79 BC). Opportunistic and uncaring about any legitimate grievances on the part of his opponents, he employed coldly simplistic logic to restore order to the state. He attempted to restore the authority of the Senate and the curule magistrates at the expense of the political organs of the Plebeian Assembly. As dictator he prohibited the veto and legislative power of the tribunes, abolished the Plebeian Assembly, and made the office of tribune a dead-end by prohibiting its holders from seeking election to all other offices. He buttressed the Senate meanwhile by adlecting hundreds of his supporters to its membership and by strengthening their financial resources through participation in his public auctions.

For his opponents in the civil war he engaged in a scorched-earth policy.  Outside Rome, he expelled opposing communities from their lands and imposed neighboring garrison colonies of his soldiers to monitor their behavior. He proscribed thousands of his opponents (including 40 Roman senators and several hundred Roman Knights), posting their names on wanted lists throughout Italy with a price on their heads. Their properties were seized and the civil rights of themselves and their families were abolished. Confiscated lands were then auctioned off to his followers at reduced prices, essentially serving as blood money that tied their fortunes to the survival of his "settlement."

He also settled 23 legions, on paper some 138,000 veterans but probably closer to half that number, on land seized from opponents. He thus became the first commander of a private army to follow through on promises to settle his troops on public land.

The antagonism to his settlement was not surprising. Thousands reportedly fled to seek asylum with the renegade Roman general, Q. Sertorius, in Spain (78-72 BC). A rebellion in Italy, led by the duly elected consul of 78, challenged the "Sullan aristocracy" outside the walls of the city of Rome, a few months after the dictator's demise. King Mithradates of Pontus, with whom Sulla had come to terms in 84 BC in order to attend to the civil war back in Italy, continued to suborn adversaries such as the Cilician pirates (left undefeated until 67). When order was at last "restored" by former Sullan lieutenants, Pompey and Crassus, they abandoned Sulla's constitutional "reforms" and encouraged the popular tribunes to challenge the authority of the Senate and curule magistrates once again. Political confusion persisted during the following two decades as a result.

The Sullan Settlement proved to be no solution, therefore; it traded short-term intimidation and restructuring for long-term animosity and confusion. Despite the undeniable fact that in many respects Sulla merely responded to atrocities that his enemies had committed against himself, it remains difficult to put a positive spin on his solution. Sulla emerged as the first of several "evil geniuses" of the Late Republic.

II. Dictatorship of Caesar, 46-44 BC.

Julius Caesar was faced with a quite different predicament when he refused to abandon his Gallic command as directed by the Senate in 49 BC. Instead, he left his province and crossed the Rubicon River to initiate the second Civil War (48-46 BC). Caesar had attained his provincial command through the support of Pompey and Crassus, when he forged the First Triumvirate and attaining the consulship in 59 BC. He used occasionally violent and technically illegal procedures to secure legislation to satisfy his allies. In exchange he received a 5-year "extraordinary command" to the provinces of Cis- and Transalpine Gaul (later renewed for 5 additional years). With an army of 30,000 he conquered and pacified a native population n excess of 1 million, conquering the regions of modern France and the Low Countries, carrying Roman legionary banners to the shores of Britain, and establishing himself as one of Rome's most successful generals. Through bribery and political manipulation he secured the right to seek a second consulship in absentia, in order to avoid having to return to Rome in 50 BC. (Had he put down his imperium to reenter the city to seek office, he would have faced numerous judicial indictments for his behavior previously as consul, thus blocking his bid for reelection).

However, following the death of Crassus in 53, Pompey formed an alliance with leading oligarchs against Caesar, resulting in the decision to rescind not only Caesar's legal right to stand for office in absentia, but his command over the two provinces of Gaul as well. The oligarchy insisted that he put down his armies and return to Rome as a private citizen, where he would most certainly be prosecuted, convicted, and forcibly exiled. To make matters worse, Pompey, who had married Caesar's daughter, Julia, to seal the pact of the First Triumvirate (the surprising love affair was cut off tragically by her death during childbirth in 54), was now cooperating with the oligarchy, determined to see Caesar's influenced reduced to an inferior level.

Caerar therefore embarked on the path of civil war. Unlike Sulla, however, he sought to isolate his opponents and to allow all others to retire from the conflict. Despite warnings by the oligarchs that Caesar's invasion would spell proscriptions, debt annulments, and seizures of property, he announced his policy of clementia. Anyone found fighting against him, but willing to surrender, would be allowed to return to his home unharmed. Caesar pointedly allowed some of his most inveterate enemies the chance to escape capture in battle, many of whom quickly returned to the armies arrayed against him. Most people, however, were unable to discern the difference between Caesar and the leaders who opposed him, including Pompey and the stalwart Republican, M. Porcius Cato the Younger. Most people withdrew to their homes, thus enabling Caesar to isolate his most diehard opponents. Throughout the conflict he maintained a posture of exerting every conceivable effort to negotiate a peaceful solution, all the while maintaining the appearance of a duly elected, properly functioning government. After defeating Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus, establishing Cleopatra to the Ptolemaic throne of Egypt, defeating King Pharnabazus in Pontus, and Cato the Younger at the Batle of Thapsus in North Africa, Caesar returned to Rome in 46 BC to celebrate 4 triumphs (Gaul, Egypt, Asia, and Africa) and to assume a 10-year grant of dictatorship for the purpose of restoring the republic. Whatever his ultimate intentions, he shrouded them with the appearance of a restoration of Republican political institutions, seeing to the election of magistrates, enabling young aristocrats to strike coins exhibiting the heraldic badges of their families.

In 45 BC his program of political restoration and good will toward his former adversaries was interrupted by an undeniable rebellion in Spain, fomented and commanded by the two sons of his former father-in-law and erstwhile friend, Cn. Pompey. To make matters worse, Caesar learned that several prominent Pompeians to whom he had formerly extended his clementia, were now enlisting with the forces of Pompey's sons in Spain. Caesar had no choice but to suspend his plans for Roman renewal and to assume the command of the army to suppress the rebellion in Spain.

One interpretation holds that at this point Caesar recognized that his surviving opponents would never agree to cooperate with him in restoring the republic and thus pursued an autocratic course that he might not have chosen otherwise. Another insists that he never did deliberately pursue an autocratic course, but rather was pushed in that direction by followers who hoped to gain inordinate power by acting as the subordinates to a newly ensconced Roman king. A third view insists, however, that Caesar had pursued absolute power from the outset, supposedly remarking in 45 BC when reminded that Sulla had put down his dictatorship to allow the republican government to function, that Sulla did not know his "A, B, Cs" about politics.

Whatever the motivation, once returned from Spain Caesar embarked on a highly orchestrated program to establish himself as the supreme authority in the Roman state. The popular assembly heaped honors on him bearing questionable legal authority, such as his right to use Imperator, triumphing Roman general, as his first name, the award of tribunician potestas for life, the right to place his statues in all the temples to the gods, and the right to conduct a formal cult in reverence of the "genius" that warded over his person (with his follower Mark Antony acting as chief priest to the cult). He doubled the size of the senate and peremptorily ran elections not only for the coming year, but for 5 years in advance, because he planned to leave Rome again to conduct a long term campaign against the Parthian empire in central Asia. In late January 44 BC he struck a sizable issue of coins that declared him DICTATOR IN PERPETUO (dictator for life). In mid-February he or his followers staged an event during the foot race of the Lupercalia in which Mark Antony suddenly approached him with a diadem, the crown worn by Hellenistic Kings in the East and attempted to place it on his head. The negative reaction of the crowd present convinced Caesar to push the crown away. Seated in his newly constructed temple of Venus Genetrix (Venus the mother of his family), he refused to rise to greet members of the Senate when they approached him to offer up yet another honor. For the oligarchs his intentions now seemed clear -- he was attempting to establish himself as King of Rome in everything except the name King, or Rex, itself. To make matters worse, he had invited his mistress, Cleopatra, the Ptolemaic queen of Egypt to come reside at his villa across the Tiber River from the city. She brought with her an infant son whom she named Caesarion, "Little Caesar," in honor of his father.

Just prior to Caesar's departure for his Parthian campaign, on the Ides of March, 44 BC, he was assassinated by some 67 senators at a senate meeting convened in Pompey's Temple of Venus, beneath the statue of Pompey the Great himself. His assassins included not only the likes of M. Brutus, whom Caesar had elevated to the rank of consul despite having fought against him during the Civil War, but several of his own most loyal officers, including Dec. Iunius Brutus Albinus, who had loyally served Caesar since the outset of his Gallic command in 58 BC. Caesar had obviously miscalculated the willingness of the oligarchy, including those who had supported his career, to yield power to rule by one man. There were still too many aristocrats alive who longed for their own chance to become Caesar.

III. The Augustan Settlement

Another decade of violence was required before a solution was achieved. After Octavian managed successfully to defeat Caesar's assassins in 41 BC, and then to dispatch his Caesarian rivals, Mark Antony and Cleopatra, in 31, he stood undefeated and supreme throughout the Roman Mediterranean world. He had received his power through formal grants of imperium as member of a "second" triumvirate from the Roman assembly, and had behaved largely as a warlord throughout the decade. To secure his place in Italy he resorted to Sulla's methods of restoring order, utilizing proscriptions and confiscations of property to put Caesar's veterans on land. Once defeating Antony and Cleopatra, he seized Egypt as his own private domain, to be governed by personal attendants so that he could harness its resources to feed the burgeoning population of Rome.

He then returned to Italy to renounce his authority. He proclaimed that all he had done as triumvir he had done illegally, but out of necessity to bring back republican rule. Now that he had accomplished this, he asked to be allowed to return to private life to live the life of an ordinary Roman citizen. The thought of enduring further conflict and confusion was unbearable even to the aristocracy, however, and through a deliberate and careful process of negotiation; a solution to the political question was achieved.

In much the same manner as Caesar, Octavian saw numerous titles and honors voted to him by the Roman Senate and People. However, unlike Caesar, he was careful about which ones he accepted, paying careful attention to perceptions and sensitivities at large among the aristocracy. Avoiding all titles that conveyed the aura of military or autocratic authority, he selected instead those that conveyed a sense of peace, prosperity, and civic duty.

The Roman people awarded him the title of Princeps, or First citizen of Rome. This was purely an honorific title with no legally constituted authority; however, it set him apart in Roman society as the leading citizen of his times. And who other than Rome's most distinguished citizen could the body politic count on to run the affairs of state? As a result of his elevated position in society he received 10 year grants of consular imperium over all provinces (more than 15) where Roman armies were garrisoned, as well as 5-year grants of tribunician power. As proconsul in charge of the military provinces of the empire, he maintained his control over the roman legions, and assumed responsibility for their recruitment, maintenance in the field, and discharge with bounties at the end of service. As one of the 10 tribunes he could use his veto power to block political activity he opposed as well as to pass legislation and to offer his auxilium to Roman citizens on appeal.

Octavian learned early on to do more with less: the authority vested in these two appointments essentially gave him all the authority he needed to run the city and the provinces. Consequently, he avoided the consulship, in order to enable aristocrats to rise through the cursus honorum as before and to make themselves eligible to serve as commanders of his provincial armies (his provincial appointments, called imperial legates, required consular rank in the Senate). He also accepted the title "Augustus", meaning "well augured", or that when the sacrifices for his rule had been taken, the omens were "auspicious" or positive for the future. Henceforth, he became known as the Princeps, Caesar Augustus; in none of these terms could the odious implications of Dictator, Imperator, or Rex be discerned. Augustus carefully covered his tracks with the appearances of power sharing with the Roman Senate and People. The more cynical aristocrats could refuse to recognize the character of his authority, seek office, hold commands in non-military provinces and continue to participate as independent senators in the Senate. But if an aristocrat wished to enjoy a customary career and to command Roman legions, he had to become an "organizational man" and work within the system of rewards and promotions constructed by Augustus. By assuming sole responsibility for the army,

Augustus finally brought accountability to Roman provincial rule. Civil wars, military requisitions, and tax abuses in the provinces ceased. The Roman Mediterranean world emerged from the chaos of the late Republic to experience 2 centuries of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Augusts accomplished this success not only by exerting his authority on the Roman oligarchy, but by working diligently to make himself beloved by senators and commoners alike. He worked crowds with tremendous energy, glad-handing people throughout the city, looking after individual senators and their families, spending lavishly on construction, festivals, and games for the Roman population. He tried to set the example of a model citizen and paterfamilias, dressing simply, seen often in the streets dressed in a simple tunic with a broad straw hat to shield him from the sun. He remained remarkably approachable to any and everyone and established himself as a beloved, avuncular authority throughout the Senate and the city of Rome. By the end of his career (27 BC - 14 AD), few alive could remember the bad days of the Late Republic, let alone his own violent role in proscriptions and civil wars. Most knew him only as a kindly old man who gave his all to secure Roman peace and prosperity. Augustus succeeded where Sulla and Caesar failed, therefore, by dint of his own personal behavior. The Roman Principate worked because he made it work, and by doing so he laid the foundation for the most stable era the Mediterranean world had ever known.