Octavian, if you’re new around here, is far better known as Augustus, the founder of the Principate. Over at SteynOnline, Tal Bachman continues his interesting series by touching on what the Roman Republic looked like to Octavian at the end of the civil wars:
Augustus of Prima Porta
Currently in the Chiaramonti Museum of the Vatican Museums (image from Wikimedia Commons).
So as Octavian thought about his grand plans for renewing Rome, he naturally thought of Virgil. He didn’t need anyone like Horace telling everyone to give up. He needed positivity. He needed the guy who might even have been prophesying about him as Rome’s savior (Octavian was only 23 when Virgil wrote about Rome’s boy-rescuer).
Besides, Virgil’s prophecy had so far proved quite correct: the oft-heralded imminent demise of Rome hadn’t arrived yet. Maybe it never would. In fact, for the first time in over a century, things were looking up. And they were looking up because of what had happened in the previous year and a half.
The most important thing had been Octavian’s victory over the traitor Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium, September of 31 BC. (None other than Octavian’s best friend, Marcus Agrippa, had masterminded the victory as commander of the navy. Over the years of tumult and civil war since Caesar‘s assassination, Marcus had revealed himself to be as much of a natural military genius as Octavian was a political genius).
With his victory over Antony, Octavian had demolished the last of the traitorous military contingents threatening Rome. Less than a year later, Antony and his lover, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, committed suicide in Alexandria. Suddenly, after decades of bloodshed, the civil war had come to an end.
Or so it seemed. Octavian was too smart to count on that. After all, in politics, an end is never really an end; a beginning is never really a beginning. Each is only a connecting point in time between what has come before, and what will now come to pass. Above everything else, politics is the art of shaping those moments.
It was at just this sort of moment Octavian now stood. Finding himself the undisputed great man of Roman politics, he now controlled (in reality, if not always in law) Rome’s senate, all its provinces, its vast military, its vast resources, its bureaucracy and administration, its appointments, and the immensely valuable, recently-acquired grain powerhouse of Egypt. He also held great influence over the city’s religious activity as part of the sixteen member College of Pontiffs. Moreover, after Actium and Antony’s suicide, no internal or external threat remained. Octavian had spent years making war. Now, with every last foe vanquished, he needed to make — and preserve — peace. The question was how.
A full description of Octavian’s comprehensive answer to that question is beyond our scope here. But what we can explore briefly is how he pushed cultural, spiritual, religious, and even psychological renewal — particularly through Virgil’s Aeneid — and how translation can best communicate that to us.
On that note, it’s worth pointing out that Octavian’s intention wasn’t quite to Make Rome Great Again. It was far more ambitious: he wished to make Rome much greater than anyone had ever imagined it could be, and much greater than any other nation had ever been, or ever would be again. For this to happen, Rome, in a real way, had to start over.
For Octavian, starting over meant laying the right foundation in the right way. What was that foundation? Devout reconnection to the gods. Everything, he believed, would flow from this: peace, identity, cohesion, stability, lawful behavior, ethical behavior, contentment, prosperity, flourishing, valor, self-discipline, excellence, and more. Octavian would do what he could in politics to initiate this renewal; Virgil would do what he could in literature. Together with others in their circle, they would remind people what it meant to be truly Roman, starting with the very first Romans of all. They would tell, and re-tell, in a hundred different ways, the story of who they were, who they weren’t, where they’d come from, and what the gods wanted.
I’ve added links to my Roman Glossary for some of the names and events mentioned in the article.
