THE LOST MEMOIRS OF AUGUSTUS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ROMAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Editors Christopher Smith and Anton Powell Contributors Tim Cornell, Christopher Pelling, Anton Powell, John Rich, Christopher Smith, Alexander Thein, Mark Toher, Kathryn Welch, Peter Wiseman The Classical Press of Wales First published in 2009 by The Classical Press of Wales 15 Rosehill Terrace, Swansea SA1 6JN Tel: +44 (0)1792 458397 Fax: +44 (0)1792 464067 www.classicalpressofwales.co.uk Distributor in the United States of America ISD, LLC 70 Enterprise Dr., Suite 2, Bristol, CT 06010 Tel: +1 (860) 584–6546 www.isdistribution.com © 2009 The authors All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN 978-1-910589-42-7 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset, printed and bound in the UK by Gomer Press, Llandysul, Ceredigion, Wales ––––––––––––––––– The Classical Press of Wales, an independent venture, was founded in 1993, initially to support the work of classicists and ancient historians in Wales and their collaborators from further afield. More recently it has published work initiated by scholars internationally. While retaining a special loyalty to Wales and the Celtic countries, the Press welcomes scholarly contributions from all parts of the world. The symbol of the Press is the Red Kite. This bird, once widespread in Britain, was reduced by 1905 to some five individuals confined to a small area known as ‘The Desert of Wales’ – the upper Tywi valley. Geneticists report that the stock was saved from terminal inbreeding by the arrival of one stray female bird from Germany. After much careful protection, the Red Kite now thrives – in Wales and beyond. CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements vii Introduction Anton Powell ix 1. The Memoirs of Augustus: testimonia and fragments Christopher Smith (ed.) 1 2. Cato the Elder and the origins of Roman autobiography Tim Cornell 15 3. Was there an ancient genre of ‘autobiography’? Or, did Augustus know what he was doing? Christopher Pelling 41 4. Sulla’s Memoirs Christopher Smith 65 5. Felicitas and the memoirs of Sulla and Augustus Alexander Thein 87 6. Augustus, Sulla and the supernatural T. P. Wiseman 111 7. Divining a lost text: Augustus’ autobiography and the Bivoς Kaivsaroς of Nicolaus of Damascus Mark Toher 125 8. Cantabrian closure: Augustus’ Spanish war and the ending of his memoirs John Rich 145 9. Augustus’ age of apology: an analysis of the Memoirs – and an argument for two further fragments Anton Powell 173 10. Alternative memoirs: tales from the ‘other side’ of the civil war Kathryn Welch 195 Index 225 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book arises from a conference held at Baskerville Hall, near Hay-on- Wye in Wales, on 18–19 July 2005, and entitled ‘The Lost Memoirs of Augustus’. The conference met under the auspices of the then University of Wales Institute of Classics and Ancient History, and also of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London – as well as of the Classical Press of Wales. The conference was conceived and organized by Anton Powell. It was chaired jointly by Powell and Christopher Smith. The organizer was aware from the beginning of the conference’s great good fortune in attracting the contributors it did. Their book speaks for itself. An especial debt is due to Christopher Smith and to Tim Cornell. They, and their publishers Oxford University Press, have freely allowed us to include in this volume – in advance of publication by OUP – the Testimonia and Fragments of Augustus’ memoirs, edited by Smith, as they will appear in T. J. Cornell et al. (eds.) Fragments of the Roman Historians. For this exceptional and generous act we wish also to thank Oxford University Press itself and its representative in Classics, Hilary O’Shea. Anton Powell vii INTRODUCTION That the emperor Augustus wrote a work of autobiography far longer than the extant Res Gestae is a fact too little known and exploited. Only a few fragments survive. Had all its 13 books been preserved, there is no doubt that we should have vastly more knowledge of the political climate in which these memoirs were written. But, perhaps more importantly, we would probably then approach the whole period of rule by Octavian–Augustus with a different perspective. As things are, we tend to study Augustan rule prospectively, both as scholars and teachers. It is thus, for example, as commonplace as it is sensible to study Augustus’ various provisions for the succession. We wish to trace the origins of the Principate; a great syllabus is in the works. It is far less common to study the early years of Augustan autocracy retrospectively, with a view to understanding how that autocracy had been gained and how its emergence through repeated civil wars was presented and justified during Augustus’ reign. Yet even the few existing fragments of the Memoirs make clear what we might anyway have realized on first principles: that for one in Augustus’ position, prospect and retrospect were inseparable. The chances that Augustus’ eventual death would be followed by a smooth succession, rather than by renewed civil war, depended on how political passions developed among those Romans – probably a majority – who had at some stage opposed, or disliked, him. In handling opposition, the autocrat could choose between, at the extremes, diplomacy and an iron fist. The nature of his choice would, of course, affect the prospects for a succession. That Augustus’ choice, after 31, tended towards the former extreme is eloquently illustrated even by the surviving fragments of his Memoirs, as we shall see. But the Memoirs may reveal more than an occasionally soothing and apparently respectful attitude to some of his former opponents. They also suggest that the emperor presented his past as establishing a prospect in the crucial matter of divine support: the history even of his darkest moments in the civil wars, perhaps especially of his darkest moments, might suggest that divinity was with him, that he would endure, that to oppose him and his succession would accordingly be futile. Augustus, that is, understood perhaps rather better than many modern historians – who have tended to neglect the history of the civil wars – that he could establish his regime only by establishing in the political public a ix Introduction certain attitude to those recent wars. The Memoirs, as we have them, are retrospective; but by engaging with the surviving fragments we better understand how their author, his successor as emperor, and the system they created, survived as long as they did. Our volume begins with CHRISTOPHER SMITH’s edition of the Testimonia (T) and Fragments (F) of the Memoirs, the latter divided into ‘Fragments’, ‘Possible fragments’ and one ‘Doubtful fragment’. (The numbering assigned by Smith is followed in the other contributions to this volume.) How conventional (or surprising) was it for a Roman politician or general to write autobiographically, and in what terms might that be done? The study of the literary antecedents of (and possible successors to) Augustus’ Memoirs is necessary for understanding both the mentality of the author and reactions among his readership. TIM CORNELL traces autobiographical elements in historical prose of the middle and late Republic, as well as during post-Augustan times. His main focus is on Cato the elder. He notes the (appealing) role of eye-witness testimony, as offered by Cato, but also observes that Cato ‘was obsessed with the projection of his own image’, especially in the matter of personal virtue. In this respect, we may add that Cato could have provided a fortifying precedent for Augustus: in the latter’s Memoirs the question of the author’s virtue was evidently of primary importance, affecting as it did not merely the prospects for his career or posthumous reputation, but indeed his chances of survival. Augustus’ problematic predecessor in autocracy, Julius Caesar, reportedly contrasted himself with an earlier dictator, Sulla, and interestingly did so with reference to Sulla’s literacy: ‘Sulla in giving up the dictatorship showed that he didn’t know his political abc’ (Sullam nescisse litteras qui dictaturam deposuerit, Suet. DJ 77). Now Sulla had, like Julius Caesar himself, composed voluminous memoirs concerning his own activity in wars, civil and otherwise. It would be appropriate if Caesar, when making this remark, had been thinking of Sulla’s literary as well as political performance. For it is a theme of several contributions to the present volume that the Memoirs of Caesar’s heir, Augustus, themselves show significant points of resemblance (and of contrast) with those of Sulla. CHRISTOPHER SMITH treats Sulla’s memoirs in this light. He finds that ‘few Romans before [Sulla] had lavished so much attention on their public image’. Sulla seemingly dwelt long on the subject of his own ancestry, while the bulk of his autobiography was probably military in nature. All this recalls Augustus’ Memoirs. Sulla, like Augustus in his own autobiographical writings, seems to have been much interested in omens pointing to divine favour for his career. Smith concludes, ‘Of all the models x Introduction before him, perhaps appropriately, Augustus did not flinch from choosing that of Sulla’. ALEXANDER THEIN also treats the theme of resemblance between the two sets of largely-military memoirs. He focuses especially on the theme of felicitas, divinely-given good fortune, in Sulla’s self-presentation, and contrasts Julius Caesar’s tendency to avoid such claims. In this respect, Sulla was the closer model for Augustus. Augustus’ claim to divine support evidently bolstered his legitimacy. But legitimacy definitely would not accrue from any explicit claim to be a successor to Sulla.