Lost Episodes in Augustan History
I started above to explore the symbolic value of the complex of images made up by the BR cup, the Ara Pacis, the Lugdunum coinage, and the cup's prototype. To get at the full panegyric value of this propaganda, one needs to be as precise as possible about why the barbarians are handing over their children and what the event has to do both with Drusus' actual activities and with their acknowledgment by the emperor. The study of Augustan history will be well served if we can answer these questions, for we will supply historical information not available from any textual source. This event, so thoroughly proclaimed by Augustan propaganda in the years immediately before and after Drusus' death, has left none but artistic traces—a phenomenon that is itself worthy of note.
Why are the BR children being handed over? The easy solution, always taken before, has been to describe these children as hostages (obsides ), in the primary modern definition of the term. Their people have just been beaten in war by Drusus acting for Augustus, and so, lest this people offer any future military threat, their leaders have been coerced into handing over their children. The Roman state receives them as a cold and suspicious warden, to hold them prisoner against future misbehavior by their parents, and their presence in Rome or in Roman hands is simply an emblem of Roman military victory. This interpretation describes the opposite of what the BR cup in fact depicts. The alien adults are not shown as savage, disheveled, or humiliated, as they ought to be according to Greco-Roman standards for the depiction of beaten barbarians. Their young children are unafraid and joyful. Neither Drusus nor Augustus appears minatory. Drusus, the general who would have faced these people in battle had that in fact been the prelude to this scene, stands in their midst with
no other soldier near him, appearing as one of their party acting as its sponsor, physically assisting these children just as their fathers do. Angustus meets them affably, with a gesture of welcome in response to the eager outreach of the children, It is very important that this emperor, whose demeanor must set the tone of the event, is in the toga of a magistrate carrying out diplomatic and administrative duties, not in the armor of a commander in chief viewing the submission of just-humbled adversaries: of all the many true submissio scenes in Roman art, not one shows the Roman leader receiving foreigners in a toga instead of paludatus . The same general tone of benevolent patronage is maintained on the Ara Pacis (discussed above) and is manifest even on the coin types, which on their limited scale manage to keep the gestures that establish this tone, the reaching out of the trusting infant and the welcoming response of the emperor in his toga; I have just shown how, in terms of numismatic inconography, this coin image was meant to be read as one of free gift-giving by a valued donor.
These children are being welcomed to Rome's authority, then, rather than dragged there. Not only that, but they are being welcomed into the imperial domus . The visual language of the cup, and the coins, makes it quite clear that the fathers involved are handing their children out of their own patria potestas into Augustus' fatherly authority. This is not something distinct from the children's reception by the wider authority of the Roman state, for Augustus' unique position at the head of the state (in a few years he was to be formally saluted as pater patriae ) means that he receives them into his own tutela/clientela and into Rome's patronage at one and the same time. The Ara Pacis makes it quite clear that the infant shown there is to be understood as equal in status to the patently regal Oriental child behind Agrippa.[68]
Brought to Rome and reared at court, such children did still have the value of hostages, and naturally so. However, though Latin tends to use the same word, obses, to describe both a "real" hostage and a guest at court, that distinction was, and is, still meaningful. The BR children are not to be reckoned among the "ôtages barbares" catalogued by A. Aymard;[69] rather, like the children of Phraates of Parthia, like Cleopatra's daughter Cleopatra Selene, like the sons of Herod of Judea,[70] they are meant to be raised under direct imperial supervision until grown, then returned to take their parents' places of leadership to instill in their native people filial allegiance to Rome and to the imperial house.[71]
Suetonius attests that this was a notable and typical practice of Augustus, stating it as plain fact without bothering to enumerate the individuals
involved: "plurimorum [sc. regum] liberos et educavit simul cum suis et instituit ("he reared and educated the children of very many kings along with his own," Aug. 48). Suetonius describes the practice as an integral part of Augustus' general policy toward client-rulers, of simultaneously sanctioning and exploiting their authority for the governance of the empire. The emperor made it plain that such ruling elites were to be cherished (when loyal) by their Roman masters as vital to the maintenance of empire, making as necessary a contribution to that empire as the limbs make to the body: "nec aliter universos quam membra partesque imperii curae habuit" (Aug. 48).
Of course, on occasion such "hostages" could also be displayed as emblems of Roman triumph and superiority, and this could be done simultaneously with an effort to give them open honor. Augustus first displayed the children of Phraates in the arena, and then seated them in the row of seats immediately behind himself (Suet. Aug. 43.4); Gaius was to drive across the bay at Baiae in a triumphal chariot with the Parthian prince Darius at his side (Suet. Calig. 19.2), at once a trophy and an esteemed companion in a traditional place of honor (traditional, note, for the triumphator's children). There is no question that the same linked themes of imperium and cura are illustrated on the BR cup, celebrating Augustus' rule over foreigners, in his own right and exercised through his agents. Still, the attempt to give visual form to a benevolent image of Roman rule is worth noting, as a development of Roman imperialism in general and as part of Augustan ideology in particular. The phenomenon has recently been illuminated as a historical practice in D. Braund's study, Rome and the Friendly King . I will review his arguments and expand, where possible, on his observations.
From the second century B. C. , kings are known to have sent their sons to Rome for education; the first known to have done so is Ariarathes IV of Cappadocia (Braund 1984, 9), just before the Third Macedonian War. However, "only with Augustus did the phenomenon become anything like a custom" (Braund, 10); this distinctive phenomenon is the background for Augustan practice.
Before the Principate, such royal offspring were commanded to the paternal authority of the Senate, to receive a crucial portion of their paideia under the tutelage of the Roman state. This reflects Rome's growing dominance in the Hellenistic world: princes might now come to Rome, as well as to Athens or any other Hellenic center of culture, to receive their paideia, which was seen by their fathers in such cases as an education primarily political in nature (Braund, 11). As Livy says of Ariarathes, "re-
gem educandum filium Roman misisse ut iam inde a puero adsuesceret moribus Romanis hominibusque, petere ut eum non sub hospitum modo privatorum custodia sed publice etiam curae ac velut tutelae vellent esse" (43. 19). Later, one such royal scion (Demetrius I of Syria) himself declared in the Senate that Rome was his homeland and nurse, the sons of senators his brothers, and the senators—patres —themselves his fathers (patres ) (Polyb. 31.2.6f.). Under the Republic, these guests were in the care of the SPQR and housed in a dwelling of their own at public expense under the direction of the praetor urbanus (Braund, 9f.); Augustus took them under his own tutela and incorporated them into the imperial family (Suet. Aug. 48). The practice was of course but "one part of the increased integration of kings into the Roman sphere at just this time" (Braund, 11); when individual Romans began in the late Republic to enjoy extraordinary power in the state, this was a practice that they could turn to their own aggrandizement, a further refinement of the webs of patronage such aristocrats typically built up with individual foreigners and foreign political entities. This development culminated with Augustus, whom allied kings were wont to attend exactly like clients, removing their royal garb and donning the toga to appear in attendance at his morning audiences (Suet. Aug. 60).
Braund (12) notes as Augustus' Republican predecessors in this respect Sertorius and Antony in their respective spheres of influence outside Rome. Sertorius in Spain gathered together the children of the Spanish nobles to be educated in Roman fashion, in manners, language, and culture; Antony in Alexandria assembled a great number of the offspring of the Eastern dynasts to adorn his court and as hostages—for a direct transmission of example, note that when Augustus took Alexandria he did not return all of these children, who had been ordered to court, but kept a number of them (Plut. Sert. 14.2; Dio 51. 16.2). Certainly, it is the case that neither of these men operated from the city of Rome itself, and thus could not be said actually to usurp the functions of the Senate and the praetor urbanus as they operated with regard to hostages in Rome. However, Antony did hold his court as a consul and in other ways acted as if "Rome" was where he was—notably in his transfer of his triumph celebration to Alexandria, the first time a triumph had been staged in a foreign city and not in the capital. I think that Antony here simply assumed the role of the SPQR in demanding and hosting hostages, without paying any heed at all to traditional practice. Antony's behavior was the steppingstone, as it were, by which Augustus passed over to incorporating "hostages" into his own domus at the very capital; the first step will have been
his taking of the remnants of Antony's group of foreign princes under his own personal protection in "delivering" them from the hands of Antony and Cleopatra.
In regard to Sertorius, Braund notes the "central ambiguity" (12) explored above: that is, the children of the Spanish nobles, though sent ostensibly as students, were also seen as potential hostages for their people's good behavior. Ancient observers were well aware of this (Plut. Sert. 14.2; App. BCiv. 1.114; Dio 51.16).[72] Sertorius and Antony also demanded the presence of these children, breaking with the established ritual that royal parents sent their children into Roman hands on their own initiative; for Braund, Augustus rejected their example and returned to Republican convention: "Unlike Sertorius and Antony, Augustus is not known to have actively encouraged kings to send their sons to him at Rome."
The evidence seems to show that, originally, Hellenistic rulers set up this practice, themselves suggesting to their powerful neighbor the role of benevolent patron. The Romans quickly took to the practice and assimilated this role fully, to the point where the Roman plebs could be at least temporarily swayed by appeal to its role of patronage in this respect: Sallust in the Jugurthine Wars shows both the political capital to be made by foreign royals from the institution and the place it held in late Republican morality, in his partisan depiction of the urging of Adherbal's cause. Antony and Sertorius show Roman leaders indisputably self-conscious of the political and propagandistic gains to be made, in the same late Republican time frame.[73]
The institution of royal fosterage, then, was a recognized, if limited, facet of that ideology of benevolent and morally justifiable imperialism that begins to be openly formulated in the first century B.C.; the space given by Livy to the cases noted above is itself part of this phenomenon. That ideology achieves a special climax in the Augustan period, when love is injected into the relationship between Romans and non-Romans in Ovid's prayer to Pax that those lands that do not fear Rome should come to love her (Fast. 1.718). The ideology of benevolent imperialism had developed two distinct models by the Augustan period. One was the "organic" model, the empire as a body with its members governed by the head—namely, Rome. Augustus' own trumpeting of this model (documented by Suetonius) is immediately reminiscent of the use of the same model by his contemporary Livy to describe the interior structure of Rome as a city-state.[74] The other model is that of a familia or domus in which foreign leaders stand to Rome's leaders as children to their parents, or favored clients to their patrons. This is the model of imperialism whose
expression in the province group of the allegory BR I:1 I explored above; while the emphasis there was on a kind of clientship, on this side of the cup we see the model of child-parent, in very literal form. We can view the emphasis placed by both the cup and the Ara Pacis on the depiction of very young foreigners as expressing Augustus' attitude to the exploitation of the institution of fosterage; the linking of these children to amor /Amor on the monuments illuminates the climate of thought in which a prayer like Ovid's could be formulated.
Another historical phenomenon is to be noted when we place Braund's evidence next to the cup event: the deliberate imposition of this institution of fosterage on parts of the Empire that would not have generated it spontaneously. The practice developed as a "spontaneous" act in the Hellenized parts of the Mediterranean; Sertorius and then Augustus can now be seen to be imposing this practice on the Celtic peoples of the Western part of the Empire. It is moot whether Sertorius was a Romanizer for anything but his own advantages;[75] it is certainly the case, however, that he saw perfectly promising raw material for such Romanization in the Spanish elites.[76] In this he should remind us of Caesar, who saw equally promising material for Romanization in the elites of many of his Gallic allies. Augustus certainly can be said to have deliberately imposed this institution of "son-giving" on the peoples of Gaul, given the act itself and its documentation in the visual material assembled here; it fits a distinct new strain in triumphal art in his reign, which honors the contribution of non-Roman auxiliaries to Rome's empire, especially with regard to Gaul. Unfortunately, in his Res gestae Augustus drew attention only to the children sent him by elites totally outside the boundaries of Roman rule (does this show reticence to acknowledge his alteration of Republican custom?); he omitted thus not only instances for which we have alternative evidence, such as Herod's children, but also instances like that illustrated by the BR cup, for which there are no alternative texts. Even in this section (RG 32.1), however, he is careful to report sendings from the West as well as the East and to group his citations from these two halves of the Empire to underscore the point of a worldwide practice: Parthorum, Medorum, Adiabenorum [East], Britannorum, Sugambrorum, Marcomanorum, Sueborum [West].
The BR cup should be understood as showing Augustus at a stage-managed occasion, where a whole group of Gallic chieftains have been organized to present their children at the same time; in actual fact this is reminiscent of Sertorius' actions, but in presentation (as on the Ara Pacis) it is made out to be an exact replication of "spontaneous" Hellenistic mo-
narchical practice. Its organization then corresponds to the state-managed inauguration of organized imperial cults in the West, where corporate ruler-cults like that at Lugdunum were caused to be founded to replicate institutions of the Greek East,[77] like the cult of the Koinon of Asia. Roman statesmen had learned that such mechanisms could be useful, and so imported them into the West. It is also legitimate to see in such importations. the desire to standardize in and of itself, to replicate the mechanisms of Roman control throughout the oikoumene .[78]
This analysis contradicts Braund's statement (12) that "Augustus is not known to have actively encouraged kings to send their sons to him at Rome."[79] The BR children are not the children of kings, as such—they come from a tribal society, not a monarchic society on the Eastern model—but their position was felt at the time to be analogous. Not only is their coming to Rome to be seen as the result of imperial direction; the intensification of the custom in the East must also reflect a strong degree of imperial encouragement. When a practice consisting of an exchange between two parties solidifies into custom, both parties must somehow be involved. In the case of "son-giving," as in the analogous case of the granting of religious honors and cult to Roman leaders, the appearance of a free gift is itself part of the gift. Because of this, all that contemporary testimonia can be expected to show on the surface is an offer from low to high. Almost never are we privileged to look directly at the eliciting of honors by high from low. A process can continue in the same way that it originates, as a series of apparently free and spontaneous acts; in its continuation, however, it comes to be taken for granted, and its flourishing is as much a product of unwritten law imposed from above as it is a product of real emotions directed upward from below. Testimonia such as the BR cup and the ancient accounts of Sertorius, like the evidence on the organization of the Lugdunum imperial cult, are interesting not least because they give direct hints about the kinds of official direction that were usually hidden behind a veil of "spontaneous" gift.