ANNOS VNDEVIGINTI NATVS EXERCITVM PRIVATO CONSILIO ET PRIVATA IMPENSA COMPARAVI

Augustus opens the Res Gestae with his age: ‘nineteen years old’ (annos undeviginti natus). This places the reader firmly in the autumn of 44, rather than the aftermath of Caesar's assassination on the Ides when Octavian had been eighteen, presumably because the credibility of Octavian's claim to have liberated the res publica rested on his military intervention against Antony and the senate's commendation of it. Velleius Paterculus' summation (which echoes Augustus' formulation in the RG Footnote ⁷) is clear enough: although the domination of Antony was universally resented, no one was willing to take action against him ‘until Gaius Caesar, shortly after his nineteenth birthday, with marvellous daring and supreme success, on his private initiative (privatum consilium) showed a courage on behalf of the res publica which exceeded that of the senate. He summoned his father's veterans first from Calatia then from Casilinum; other veterans followed their example, and in a short time they united to form a regular army’.Footnote ⁸ By raising an army, Octavian made himself politically relevant, but his move was strikingly illegal in two respects: he was too young (the entrance of politicians into public life had been subject to regulation since the formalization of the cursus honorum in 180 b.c.;Footnote ⁹ Octavian, entering public life at the age of nineteen, was too young to have set foot on the lowest rung of the ladder, the quaestorship, for which the minimum age was thirtyFootnote ¹⁰) and he was a private citizen with no authorization whatsoever to do anything of the sort. None the less, he advertises both aspects in the opening sentence: why?

The least problematic element of this clause concerns Octavian's age. There had always been exceptions from the rules, such as Scipio Aemilianus, who stood for the aedileship in 148 b.c. but was exempted from the lex annalis by popular decree and elected consul instead.Footnote ¹¹ Similarly Sulla's reaffirmation of the lex annalis did nothing to curb his protégé Pompey's remarkable career, which began in 83 b.c. at the age of twenty-three with the raising of a private army in Sulla's cause.Footnote ¹² Velleius Paterculus, that trusty barometer of other people's propaganda, describes Pompey's advent in suspiciously familiar terms: ‘Just before the arrival of Lucius Sulla in Italy, Gnaeus Pompeius … though but twenty-three years of age … through his private resources (opes) and plans (consilia) conceived and brilliantly executed a daring attempt. To avenge the fatherland and restore its dignity he raised a strong army from the district of Picenum which was filled with the clients of his father’.Footnote ¹³ It seems likely that Velleius (who evidently admires Pompey: ‘to do justice to the greatness of this man would require many volumes’, cuius viri magnitudo multorum voluminum instar exigit, Vell. Pat. 2.29) is here reading backwards from Augustus, who emphasizes his youth in the opening of his Res Gestae and thereby establishes a comparison with his Republican predecessors: he, like them, deserved to bypass the cursus honorum at a time of crisis. He claims not to be unique, but rather to be placed in an existing tradition of outstanding individuals. His precision (undeviginti) is competitive, however. Aemilianus and Pompey were both in their twenties when they first achieved notoriety; Octavian, stressing his extreme youth, makes a tacit claim to surpass his extraordinary predecessors.Footnote ¹⁴

More troublesome is Augustus' emphasis on his lack of public authorization for recruiting his army, in which (as Velleius' thumbnail of the Sullan episode makes clear) he also followed in Pompey's footsteps.Footnote ¹⁵ Only magistrates with imperium (consuls, praetors, proconsuls, propraetors, and the dictator and his magister equitum) were legally empowered to command armies. Octavian, raising an army on his private initiative and at his private expense from Caesar's veterans in Campania from mid October 44 b.c., had been elected to no office; no lex curiata had been passed, so he had neither regular nor military imperium; he had no right to hold the auspices; and he had not been assigned military tribunes to levy his troops and administer the oath for him.Footnote ¹⁶ He was not a magistrate commanding a legitimate detachment of soldiers under oath; rather, he was an unauthorized warlord commanding troops raised during an outbreak of violent disorder.Footnote ¹⁷ In both cases, praetorian imperium (and thus legitimacy) was retrospectively conferred: Pompey was granted imperium by the (Sullan) senate,Footnote ¹⁸ which voted Octavian his in January 43 as he recalls at RG 1.2–3. This was qualitatively different from the various ways in which other privati had acquired imperium in the past (the prorogation of consuls and praetors and the appointment of ex-magistrates to consular or praetorian imperium in order to make up for an increasing dearth of magistrates available to govern Rome's increasingly large and complicated empire; appointments made to cover the gap when a commander left his province before his successor arrived;Footnote ¹⁹ special commands for unelected individuals, especially PompeyFootnote ²⁰): it was not a grant of imperium intended to serve a practical purpose for specific anticipated future circumstances, but rather a way to retrospectively legitimize illegal past conduct that (so the senate decided) had proven to be in the interests of the res publica.

Augustus, however, opens his Res Gestae not with the grant of imperium but by valorizing the illegal behaviour it was required to redress. The term privatum consilium is paradoxical on the face of it, given the centrality to Republican politics of consultation and concerted actionFootnote ²¹ – after all, the Romans themselves believed there was an etymological link between ‘consul’ and consilium.Footnote ²² Privately, a consilium of family members and friends would be convened by the paterfamilias prior to taking important decisions;Footnote ²³ this was a matter of tradition rather than law and a specifically Roman mode of risk management by means of shared responsibility where the final decision remained with the convenor of the consilium, but ‘his obligation to consult was absolute’.Footnote ²⁴ Similarly, the magistrate was formally obliged to consult his consilium,Footnote ²⁵ and the role of the senate in relation to the magistrates, in particular the consuls, earned it the occasional name of publicum consilium.Footnote ²⁶ A magistrate who sought the consilium of the senate (like a paterfamilias who sought the consilium of friends and family) was not obliged to accept its advice; however, given the senate's entrenched auctoritas,Footnote ²⁷ it was usually in his interests to gain its approval. Politicians are commonly found acting publico consilio (or conversely nullo consilio), where publicum consilium takes on the technical aspect of the outcome of senatorial consultation, a motion that lacked legal backing (which could only be conferred by a vote of the people) but none the less carried considerable authority, being voted on, written down, publicly posted and stored in the treasury as the senatus consultum.Footnote ²⁸ An action taken publico consilio has the full weight of the civic body behind it;Footnote ²⁹ the lack of publicum consilium delegitimizes actions or actors;Footnote ³⁰ and civic bodies may disclaim responsibility for the actions of individuals who work nullo publico consilio.Footnote ³¹ To act privato consilio was therefore to remove oneself from the Republican realm of consultation and concerted effort; in short, a euphemism. Augustus' claim to have acted privato consilio is obtrusive, because it stresses precisely what his younger self had lacked: the authority of publicum consilium and the public office or political support that would have enabled him to gain it.

Augustus characterizes his behaviour as commendable by explaining that the res publica had been oppressed by a dominatio factionis; that is, that the system had not been functioning properly and so he had been justified in embarking on a wholly unauthorized civil war in order to remove the political blockage, a justification accepted and approved by the senate when it belatedly voted him imperium. As others have recognized,Footnote ³² and as I shall discuss further below, Augustus' formulation here echoes Caesar's self-defence at BCiv. 1.22; the defence of Octavian's flagrantly illegal privatum consilium as a laudable liberation of the res publica, however, is generally acknowledged to stem from the Third Philippic, where Cicero, railing against Antony, proclaims that, ‘From that scourge, Caesar by his private initiative (privato consilio) – there was no other way for it to be accomplished – delivered the res publica’,Footnote ³³ a claim drawing on a tradition of justifying private heroics that can be traced most easily in Cicero's own corpus.Footnote ³⁴ In the near-contemporary De officiis Cicero had praised a historic outbreak of privatum consilium in very similar language: ‘Nor did Africanus, though a great man and a soldier of extraordinary ability, do more for the res publica by destroying Numantia than was done at the same time by the private citizen Publius Nasica, when he killed Tiberius Gracchus.’Footnote ³⁵ There was a precedent, in other words, for heroic privati taking action without authorization to save the res publica – or, at least, P. Scipio Nasica's killing of Ti. Sempronius Gracchus could be pressed into action to serve that purpose. This precedent could not be invoked straightforwardly, however. For one thing, Nasica's privatum consilium was the act of an individual who aimed to shut down the political activity of a troublesome citizen, rather than a civil war intervention, and for another Nasica was hardly feted as a hero in the aftermath: even though the pontifex maximus was supposed to remain in Italy, Tiberius' death made him so unpopular that he left the country and eventually died in Pergamum.Footnote ³⁶ Later historians remembered Tiberius' death as a watershed moment; Velleius Paterculus, for example, casts it as ‘the beginning in Rome of civil bloodshed, and of the licence of the sword’ (Vell. Pat. 2.3; cf. likewise App. B Civ. 1.2, Plut. Ti. Gracch. 20.1). Cicero had previously invoked Nasica's precedent only as a negative foil: in possession of consular imperium and supported by senatorial auctoritas expressed in the form of a senatus consultum ultimum (SCU) when taking on Catiline in 63, he used the exemplum of the heroic privatus Nasica to sharpen the contrast between his (really the senate's) inaction and the decisive action of consuls such as L. Opimius, the first wielder of the SCU (Cic. Cat. 1.3–4, 4.4; cf. Mur. 85, where the crisis will be resolved by ‘the measures taken by the magistrates and the watchful care of private citizens’, et magistratuum consiliis et privatorum diligentia). Later, when attacked for cowardice after his retreat into exile in 58, Cicero protested that since he had been a private citizen facing a tribune (P. Clodius Pulcher) supported by both consuls (L. Piso and A. Gabinius), resorting to violence would have resulted only in public chaos (so Cic. Sest. 43, 47, Red. sen. 6)Footnote ³⁷ – ‘not that I disapproved of the violence employed against Tiberius Gracchus by Publius Scipio, the bravest of men, when he acted in a private capacity’ (non quo mihi P. Scipionis, fortissimi viri, vis in Ti. Graccho privati hominis displiceret, Cic. Dom. 91).Footnote ³⁸

There was an excellent reason why public action taken privato consilio, whether demonstrably pro re publica or not, was both rare and controversial, and that reason was eloquently demonstrated by Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon. It is worth reading Cicero's later rhetoric in the context of a letter he wrote to Atticus in January 49:

Caesar, acting nullo publico consilio (or, in other words, privato consilio) had neither constitutional legitimacy nor honestas on his side; he provided a timely illustration of how, when generals felt entitled to act without resort to or indeed against publicum consilium, a free-for-all could result. An echo of this may be heard in Sallust's version of L. Marcius Philippus' invective against M. Aemilius Lepidus, the rogue proconsul of 77, whom Philippus accuses of ‘leading an army raised from the very worst enemies of the res publica on his private initiative towards the city against the authority of this order’ (exercitum privato consilio paratum cum pessumis et hostibus rei publicae contra huius ordinis auctoritatem ad urbem ducit, Sall. Hist. 1.77.22).Footnote ³⁹ Lepidus' supporters, Philippus complains, say that Lepidus has done nothing irrevocable ‘even though he took up arms on his own responsibility to overthrow freedom’ (cum privata arma opprimundae libertatis cepisset, Sall. Hist. 1.77.6). Praise of privatum consilium in public affairs was a dangerous rhetorical game to play and the qualification that there was no way for the res publica to be delivered other than through Octavian's private initiative demonstrates that Cicero, at least, felt obliged to excuse his young champion's startling behaviour.

Augustus, unsurprisingly, felt differently. The similarity between Phil. 3.5 and RG 1.1 is certainly striking; Galinsky notes the parallels of private initiative and (the deliverance from) Antonian oppression, the similarity of the clause endings (comparavi/comparavit match in libertatem vindicavi/liberavit), and the emphasis on the res publica.Footnote ⁴⁰ That said, however, Cicero's emphasis that this was a last resort is important: certainly Octavian is praised for his actions privato consilio, but Cicero flags this up as a necessary measure taken in desperate times, rather than the sort of behaviour that would be commendable in everyday politics. A little earlier in the speech, Cicero had echoed the quo usque tandem abutere opening of his first consular speech against Catiline:

The private initiatives are plural because this refers not only to Octavian but also to Decimus Brutus, whose activities in Gallia Citerior are central to the speech. Significantly, privatum consilium is paired with publica auctoritas: certainly those currently acting privatis consiliis are acting correctly but Cicero stresses the vital importance of confirming and backing up these private actions with public authority as soon as possible.Footnote ⁴² That the heroes of Cicero's speech are obliged to act privato consilio clearly denotes their lack of publicum consilium, a lack that condemns the senate's inaction, rather than Decimus or Octavian's unscrupulous and illegal behaviour, and which must be remedied as swiftly as possible. The rhetorical strategy recalls the sheathed SCU of the First Catilinarian that brings shame on the inactive consuls.Footnote ⁴³ By rhetorically revisiting his own consulship, Cicero seeks to couch a rather different debate in the same terms – although now, rather than claiming the authority of a pre-existing SCU as legitimacy for dubiously legal consular actions, he calls upon the senate to swing its weight behind the waging of civil war by private persons on a Roman consul, an act with potentially disastrous consequences.Footnote ⁴⁴ Now it is not the consuls who are accused of failing the res publica, as in the Catilinarians,Footnote ⁴⁵ but rather the senate, which withholds its consilium and auctoritas from the res publica (or, more precisely, from the private initiatives of Decimus and Octavian) in this crisis. Where Cicero is exculpatory, however, Augustus is triumphalist: the version he presents at RG 1.1 foregrounds how his younger self had acted outside the usual sphere of Republican politics and enables him to advertise the measures that the senate was obliged to take to reconcile his actions with the established political framework. Augustus discards Cicero's caveats because he is not interested in achieving conformity with legal and traditional protocols. Rather, he presents his entry into politics as a crucial intervention in a crisis of such magnitude that the legality or otherwise of his actions is irrelevant. It is a programmatic opening that establishes from the start a special relationship between the res publica and the first princeps.

The claim to have acted privato consilio is stressed by its juxtaposition with the claim that the army was raised privata impensa, which is later matched by the lengthy account of private donatives to individuals and the state at §§15–18. The point is not just to highlight Octavian's actions as a privatus; it can also be read as an implicit counterclaim to the accusation that an individual was seeking kingship (adfectio regni), since one of the common tyrannical motifs was high-handedness with other people's property. So the agrarian legislation of Tiberius Gracchus made him vulnerable to charges of would-be tyrannyFootnote ⁴⁶ and so too, throughout his speeches against Rullus' agrarian law in 63, Cicero characterizes the proposed decemvirs as potential kingsFootnote ⁴⁷ who will be able to redistribute (public) property at whim, unconstrained by law or precedent.Footnote ⁴⁸ Similarly, if more subtly, at De officiis 1.43 Cicero condemns the liberalitas of Caesar and Sulla on the grounds that they had handed out other people's property in the name of generosity: ‘for nothing is generous if it is not at the same time just’ (nihil est enim liberale, quod non idem iustum). Augustus throughout the Res Gestae therefore insists on the private sources of his generosity towards the stateFootnote ⁴⁹ – he is not a tyrant; he has not stolen wealth from others in order to share it out among the undeserving. Furthermore, as already observed, his raising of an army at private expense in the interests of the res publica puts him neatly in comparison with Pompey and Scipio Aemilianus. The rhetoric of RG 1.1 recalls Aemilianus in particular, since Pompey's private army had been raised more for Sulla than for the res publica, whereas Aemilianus (as a consul at odds with the senate) had levied a legitimate army using private funds with which to fight a foreign enemy of Rome.Footnote ⁵⁰ In reality, of course, Octavian's actions aligned more closely with those of Pompey, as a young adventurer taking advantage of troubled times – and his rhetoric benefits from the careful omission of two sources of privata impensa: the annual tribute from Asia and the war chest intended for Caesar's projected Parthian campaign.Footnote ⁵¹

This line of self-aggrandizement also has its difficulties, however. While confiscation of other people's property might mark the established tyrant, excessive liberalitas with one's own property had similarly unpleasant overtones in the Roman tradition. Hence the tradition of figures such as Spurius Maelius, depicted as a would-be tyrant who bought popular support through the distribution of excessive largesseFootnote ⁵² – and so too, perhaps, the more historical snideness of Catullus on the subject of Caesar's liberalitas (29.16). Through liberalitas the wealthy might buy a smoother path for their political ambitions, something that struck a decidedly off note in Republican political life.Footnote ⁵³ Furthermore liberalitas (outside philosophical contexts) was the virtue of a superior towards an inferior – and one that Augustus (unlike Caesar) was careful to avoid.Footnote ⁵⁴Liberalitas explicitly acknowledged or not, by the time of the RG's publication the whole (Republican) point was largely moot; consider §17, where Augustus records that a military treasury had been established ‘on my advice’ (meo consilio) and using 170,000,000 HS ‘from my patrimony’ (ex patrimonio meo) for the purposes of rewarding veteran soldiers. The young privatus hero had grown up into the patron of the res publica.

IN LIBERTATEM VINDICAVI REM PUBLICAM A DOMINATIONE FACTIONIS OPPRESSAM

Moving into the second clause of RG 1.1., it is easy to say that ‘claims to be protecting the people's libertas were a common motif in political discourse’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Untangling the implications of this motif is more complicated, since the nuances of libertas vary depending on who uses the term and in what context.Footnote ⁵⁶ For example, Caesar was assassinated in the name of libertas and the letters of Brutus to Cicero demonstrate his sincerityFootnote ⁵⁷ – yet Caesar at BCiv. 1.22 had partly justified his illegal departure from his province by the intention ‘to restore his own liberty and that of the Roman people, who were oppressed by a faction of the few’ (ut se et populum Romanum factione paucorum oppressum in libertatem vindicaret). Nor need this be read merely as a cynical appeal to a ‘common motif’. Libertas serves as a catholic catchphrase because Caesar's libertas is not the libertas of Brutus – just as it is not the libertas of Cicero, who had once described Milo as ‘the champion of your liberty’ (vindicem vestrae libertatis) before a jury of senators, equestrians and tribuni aerarii (Sest. 144).Footnote ⁵⁸ The underlying meaning of libertas is opposed to slavery: this being ‘a legal institution whereby one person is subjected to the mastery (dominium) of another person’, libertas ‘therefore consists in the capacity for the possession of rights, and the absence of subjugation’.Footnote ⁵⁹ In a political context, however, such a definition becomes problematic: what is conceived of as dominium? Whose rights are at stake and what do those rights comprise? Does unbridled libertas without respect for constitutional institutions and traditional sources of political authority (auctoritas) become licence (licentia)?Footnote ⁶⁰ As a result, multiple strands of polemic concerned with libertas appear in the political discourse of the Late Republic: principally that of Brutus, Cicero and the senatorial elite, for whom libertas meant the maintenance of the senate's auctoritas and established order; and that of those politicians who claimed (as Caesar did) to champion instead the liberty of the Roman people, under threat from the undue influence and power (factio, potentia, dominatio) of a wealthy elite.Footnote ⁶¹ All sides of the Late Republic's defining political debates could claim sincerely to defend libertas – they just had different ideas of what libertas was.

It has been argued that vindicatio in libertatem was so overused during this period as to become ‘a kind of “speciosum nomen” which everyone was glad to use because of its emotional value, but it retained little of its original positive meaning’, and that Augustus in RG 1.1 uses it to denote ‘a public-spirited intention and little, if anything, else’.Footnote ⁶² As Mouritsen notes, however, ‘the difficulty we have in defining the exact content of libertas is indicative not of its insignificance but of its fundamental importance as the key political concept of the Roman Republic’;Footnote ⁶³ furthermore, in using the political language of the Late Republic to express his public-spirited intention, Augustus necessarily inherits the nuances of the same. In other words, Augustus's appeal to libertas (which also features on coinage issued after ActiumFootnote ⁶⁴) indicates his participation in a long-established tradition of Republican political discourse,Footnote ⁶⁵ even though important elements of this discourse had been rendered null and void by the time the RG was published. Cooley relates RG 1.1 to a passage describing Pompey's youthful exploits as a private citizen who restored to liberty (in libertatem vindicavit) Italy and the city of Rome, which had been ‘almost utterly oppressed and destroyed’ (paene oppressam funditus et deletam).Footnote ⁶⁶ This is an awkward parallel, however, since the speech is placed in the mouth of Cato Uticensis addressing Pompey's son in a work from the Caesarian corpus, the Bellum Africum; the resonances are complicated and not necessarily helpful to Augustus, especially if his aim (as Cooley suggests) is to compare himself to Pompey. A better match may be found by returning to the intention proclaimed by Caesar at BCiv. 1.22 ‘to restore his own liberty and that of the Roman people, who were oppressed by a faction of the few’ (ut se et populum Romanum factione paucorum oppressum in libertatem vindicaret),Footnote ⁶⁷ not least because the linguistic parallels to RG 1.1 are obvious and very close. Augustus's use of libertas at RG 1.1 can therefore be read not only as Augustus fitting himself into a long-standing Republican tradition,Footnote ⁶⁸ but also as a discreetly adapted echo of his adoptive father Caesar, who had declared his dedication to libertas before marching on Rome.

Although both the echo and the adaptation may have implications for the issue of how Augustus positioned himself in relation to Caesar, a close comparison suggests that the differences are mostly due to the different circumstances of the texts' authors. Whether or not Augustus is deliberately adapting a Caesarian catchphrase at RG 1.1, it is significant that the entity restored to libertas in RG 1.1 is not the populus Romanus of Caesar's formulation.Footnote ⁶⁹ Hellegouarc'h observes that by the Late Republic, populus as a political term had achieved parity with plebs, such that Cicero was obliged to qualify populus with universus when he used it in the more politically neutral sense of the Roman people as a whole.Footnote ⁷⁰ Caesar had been a consistently popularis politician until his dictatorship and his libertas is the libertas of the people.Footnote ⁷¹ There is more to Caesar's (and Augustus') choice than this, however. Caesar had not been shy to associate himself with the res publica in his Gallic commentarii, where he explicitly labels insults or injuries to the res publica as insults or injuries to himself and vice versa: at BGall. 1.33, for example, the sorry state of the pro-Roman Aedui is considered ‘to be an utter disgrace (turpissimum) to himself and to the res publica’ (BGall. 1.33; cf. also 1.20, 2.5, 5.7, 6.1). As Raditsa notes, ‘there is no discrepancy, certainly no antagonism between his self-respect and the public interest’.Footnote ⁷² In Gaul, however, Caesar held the position of proconsul; we need not take these references as indicating a uniquely self-aggrandizing perspective (although Caesar's overriding aim throughout the Bellum Gallicum probably was to justify the more dubious aspects of his Gallic conquestsFootnote ⁷³), but rather as a reflection of the close relationship with the res publica enjoyed by those specific individuals legitimately elected or appointed to act in its interests. Cicero, dispatching official letters from Cilicia in 51, uses much the same idiom: ‘I considered that I should best conform to my duty and the public interest (officium meum resque publica) by making appropriate provisions for the army and for military security’, he wrote to the senate and magistrates in September 51, for example (Cic. Fam. 15.2.1; cf. also Fam. 13.57.1, 2.19.2). It is certainly true that Caesar links himself with the populus Romanus in the Bellum Gallicum,Footnote ⁷⁴ but he does so largely in international contexts: twice when addressed by non-Roman leaders, where it is those leaders, Diviciacus and Ariovistus, who compound Caesar with the populus Romanus (BGall. 1.31 and 1.34), and three times in reference to benefits conferred on Ariovistus by the populus Romanus during Caesar's consulship (BGall. 1.35, 1.40, 1.42). Rather than addressing the res publica, Caesar's external interlocutors address the Roman civic body as a whole, the populus Romanus, through its local representative: Caesar.

When Caesar links himself with the populus Romanus in the Bellum Civile, however, the context is not international diplomacy but civil war; the events he narrates are part of Rome's internal political business, in which context it might seem natural for him to invoke the Roman res publica. His opponents certainly did; refusing L. Domitius Ahenobarbus' request for military support at Corfinium in February 49, for example, Pompey wrote, ‘I do not have enough confidence in the disposition of the men I have with me to fight a battle on which the whole future of the res publica would be staked’ (Att. 8.12D.1).Footnote ⁷⁵ Caesar does invoke the populus Romanus elsewhere in the Bellum Civile: at 1.9, he reports himself writing to tell Pompey that he is upset because, among other things, a favour granted to him by the populus (that of standing for the consulship in his absence) has been snatched away, a complaint recapped at 1.32, when Caesar, having reached Rome, reiterates it to what remains of the senate.Footnote ⁷⁶ But set against the Bellum Gallicum and Cicero's letters, Caesar's decision to liberate the populus Romanus rather than the res publica at Bellum Civile 1.22 looks dangerously close to an admission of illegitimacy: he cannot make the magisterial claim to represent the res publica in the Bellum Civile, as he could for his activities as proconsul in Gaul in the Bellum Gallicum, because his command had expired and the measures taken by the magistrates and senate in response to his invasion, not least their evacuation of Rome, had made it amply clear that he did not.Footnote ⁷⁷ He was acting, as Cicero recognized at Att. 7.11.1, nullo publico consilio: as a privatus. Of course Caesar might have ignored this and claimed to be fighting to liberate himself and the res publica anyway, but given the circumstances that would have looked decidedly hollow. He therefore embarks on a subtler strategy: he falls back into the arms of the populus Romanus (which also has the attraction of a faint popularis flavour) and resorts to implying that he would have had such legitimacy, if not for the machinations of the opposition, while simultaneously undermining the opposition's claim to represent the res publica themselves. Hence he makes the pointed complaint at BCiv. 1.9 that he had been robbed of a gift bestowed by the populus Romanus (six months of his governorship and the right to stand for the consulship in absentia), while the whole opening section (BCiv. 1.1–6) is designed to show Pompey and friends behaving as the illegitimate factio paucorum Caesar accuses of oppressing the populus.Footnote ⁷⁸

Unlike Caesar, who probably wrote his Bellum Civile as part of his propaganda campaign during the civil wars and left it unfinished for his successors to propagate in furtherance of theirs,Footnote ⁷⁹ when Augustus came to compose his Res Gestae he was in the happy position of being able to make a remotely credible claim for his younger self to have liberated the res publica, principally because the senate, strong-armed initially by Cicero's rhetoric in the Philippics and shortly thereafter by Octavian himself, told everyone that he had done so. Qualified or not, Cicero had proclaimed at Phil. 3.5 that Octavian had delivered the res publica from that pestis Antony, a line reiterated ad nauseam throughout the Philippics, which feature Antony as the villain whose return to Rome (even a peaceful one) would crush the res publica (Cic. Phil. 12.15; cf. also Phil. 2.1–2, 2.51, 2.54–5, 4.8, 10.12) and Octavian as the young champion of the res publica who by Phil. 14 has reached the giddy heights of having been born for the res publica through the favour of the gods (Cic. Phil. 14.25; cf. also Cic. Phil. 4.2, 4.4, 5.23, 5.28, 5.42, 5.47, 8.5, 10.16, 11.20, 12.9, 13.19, 13.46, 14.4). To support his preferred interpretation of Octavian's illegal activities, Cicero first proposed and then repeatedly recalled in his speeches the honours voted for Octavian and his men in December 44 (Cic. Phil. 3.5–7, 3.14, 3.37–9, 4.2, 5.3–4, 5.28–9, 7.10) and the vote of January 43 that endowed Octavian with propraetorian imperium, among other things (Phil. 5.42–51, 14.28). This was political currency of the highest value and Augustus duly makes use of it: because he had liberated the res publica, he tells us, ‘the senate passed honorific decrees admitting me to its body in the consulship of Gaius Pansa and Aulus Hirtius, at the same time giving me consular precedence in stating my opinion, and it gave me imperium’ (RG 1.2).Footnote ⁸⁰ The passage culminates, however, with a discreet elision of Octavian's reconciliation with Antony and subsequent march on Rome at the head of his private army: ‘In the same year, moreover, the people appointed me consul, after both consuls had fallen in war, and triumvir for settling the res publica’ (RG 1.4).Footnote ⁸¹ Octavian's methods were far from ‘Republican’, but the result was congenial; not only had his actions taken privato consilio been recognized by the senate as pro re publica, but he had now gained access to consular imperium and publicum consilium. Furthermore, by the time the Res Gestae was actually written, Augustus' relationship to the res publica was unlikely to be challenged. He was consequently free to dispense with the claims of the populus Romanus and take up instead the cause of the res publica, thereby making a rather broader statement than the admitted popularis Caesar had done.Footnote ⁸² It is possible to read this as evidence for a general tendency on the princeps Augustus' part to downplay his by now problematic adoptive father,Footnote ⁸³ resulting in the ‘paradoxical combination of association and disassociation’ identified by Ramage,Footnote ⁸⁴ who argues that Augustus throughout the Res Gestae appears to be setting himself up in contrast to Caesar even while treating Caesar ‘with an anonymity that smacks of denigration’.Footnote ⁸⁵ It may be better, however, to view the move from populus Romanus to res publica as simply a manifestation of Augustus' stronger discursive position.

If Augustus' change from the populus Romanus to the res publica broadens a politically partisan formula into a more expansive phrase, what is accomplished by changing Caesar's factio paucorum to the dominatio factionis of RG 1.1? A comprehensive answer requires a closer look at the term factio, which is derived from facio, ‘to do’ and appears (a) with a verbal force (either active: ‘way of doing things’ or potential: ‘capacity to do things or get things done’), and (b) with a collective force (‘faction’).Footnote ⁸⁶ The connection between factio and wealth is prominent in Hellegouarc'h's survey, beginning with our earliest surviving examples in fragments of Cato the ElderFootnote ⁸⁷ and C. GracchusFootnote ⁸⁸ – both cases of politicians inveighing against the nobilitas. On Hellegouarc'h's analysis, factio is to be seen as a perverted form of amicitia; the term applies when a politician uses his wealth (divitiae) and friends and clients (opes) to carve out a personal power base.Footnote ⁸⁹ The association of personal wealth and political power explains why Sallust places factio in the mouths of populares railing against their noble opponents,Footnote ⁹⁰ Caesar used it to describe his senatorial enemies,Footnote ⁹¹ and twelve out of Livy's fourteen uses of factio in a Roman context refer to groups of patricians or nobiles.Footnote ⁹² Even Cicero's (collective) use in De republica applies to the perverted version of an aristocracy.Footnote ⁹³ In short, and in line with Caesar's resort to the populus Romanus, the word had a popularis flavour.Footnote ⁹⁴

Caesar's factio paucorum at BCiv. 1.22 is ‘poised between its verbal and collective senses … it would be hard (and for practical purposes pointless) to choose between “by a group of a few men” and “by the concerted action of a few men”’.Footnote ⁹⁵ It is nebulous and unspecific, although obviously negative: pauci in a political context is inevitably pejorative,Footnote ⁹⁶ and when attached to potentes and principes, it indicates a (tyrannical) oligarchic regime.Footnote ⁹⁷ Caesar thereby characterizes his opponents as a tyrannical oligarchy illegitimately oppressing the populus Romanus through their wealth and resources. For Augustus at RG 1.1, however, factio functions collectively:Footnote ⁹⁸ the state was oppressed by the dominatio of a (presumably wealthy and resourceful) clique. In private life dominatio refers to the position of the paterfamilias; its equivalent in political rhetoric denotes the position of an absolute or arbitrary ruler, or that of a tyrannical body or ruling clique. As such, dominatio can substitute for regnum, although its meaning is broader.Footnote ⁹⁹ In fact, dominatio generally appears as the perverted auctoritas of an oligarchy and in the Late Republic was normally used to designate the power of the nobilitas and the pauci. Factio carries connotations of the illegitimate exploitation of wealth in furtherance of personal power; dominatio straightforwardly indicates the tyranny of an elite. Furthermore, the intersection between dominatio and libertas is fruitful ground: a dominatio in the public sphere imposes slavery (servitus) on those affected and is therefore fundamentally inimical to libertas.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Augustus' dominatio factionis is therefore more concrete (and also more damning) than Caesar's factio paucorum. The instrument of oppression shifts from the nebulous and implicitly unpleasant factio to the straightforward and explicitly tyrannical dominatio; the agent of oppression shifts from the (negative) pauci to the rather unusual (and even more negative) collective factio. The result could be easily recognized by contemporaries such as Velleius Paterculus as a careful circumlocution for Cicero's bête noire Antony; so Velleius, echoing Augustus once again, records that prior to Octavian's appearance on the scene ‘the civitas languished, oppressed by the dominatio of Antony’ (torpebat oppressa dominatione Antonii civitas).Footnote ¹⁰¹ Such a forceful allusion to Antony at the start of the Res Gestae both evokes the battle of Actium (which would not take place for more than a decade) and downplays Augustus' original motivation for entering Rome's turbulent political sphere, that is, to avenge his murdered adoptive father, Caesar.