Augustus Becomes First Emperor
Augustus took a new name in January 27 BC and spent the next forty-one years running an empire while insisting he had restored the Republic. He had won the civil wars, held Egypt as private property, and controlled the armies. The problem was that his adoptive father had been murdered for looking like a king, and the political class that had done it was still there. His solution was the settlement of 27 BC. He announced in the senate that he was returning his powers and provinces to the senate and people, and the senate begged him to keep them, and voted him a ten-year command over the provinces that contained almost all the legions. It also voted him the name Augustus, meaning something like revered, which carried religious weight without a constitutional definition. He called himself princeps, first citizen, an old republican word for the senior senator, and held the consulship repeatedly and then stopped, taking instead the tribunician power for life and a proconsular authority that outranked any governor. The offices were all republican; the accumulation was not. The Republic's forms continued: the senate met, magistrates were elected, the assemblies voted. Tacitus's summary is that he seduced the army with bonuses, the people with grain and everyone with the sweetness of peace, and that the elderly had by then been born into civil war and knew nothing else. He reorganised the finances, the army, the provinces, the water supply and the priesthoods, and rebuilt the city in marble. He died in 14 and was made a god.
- Category: Political
