Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

by Tom Holland

It remained the proud boast of the Roman people that their conquests were never made for conquest’s sake. Their wars were fought, not out of avarice or blood lust, but rather to safeguard their city’s honour and the interests of their allies. They had subdued the world, in effect, in self-defence. This was why, in the opinion of Roman statesmen, ‘our global dominion may more properly be termed a protectorate’.

The security of the Roman people, so Augustus had come to feel in his old age, was more important than any right to freedom of speech. Already, Ovid had been dispatched into exile. Then, ‘imposing an unprecedented punishment on literature’,115 the Princeps had condemned to the bonfire copies of a subversive history of the civil wars by a lawyer named Titus Labienus – a sentence so devastating to the author that he had committed suicide in protest. Finally, in a salutary demonstration of the new limits that were coming to be set upon the licence of libel, a second lawyer, a witty and waspish orator by the name of Cassius Severus, was banished to Crete for the crime of diminishing the maiestas, the ‘majesty’, of the Roman people. Here, for those concerned to uphold their city’s traditional liberties, was a chilling and ominous precedent. The charge of maiestas, as it was familiarly known, had long been applied to treasonable actions – but never before to words. That, though, in effect, was the offence for which Severus had been condemned: ‘defaming with vituperative writings eminent men and women’.116 What punishment might be imposed for defaming the most eminent of them all – the men and women of the August Family – was left hanging in the air.

The fate of Cremutius, destroyed because of what he had written about the past, offered to senators the glimpse of a terrifying future. It was one in which every bond of citizenship, every link of friendship, every web of favour and obligation, threatened a snare. A shared confidence at a dinner party, a snatch of conversation in the Forum: risk suddenly lurked everywhere. ‘To comment on anything was to risk prosecution.

Back in 12 BC, Augustus had confiscated and burned more than two thousand books which claimed to reveal the future; two years into Tiberius’s reign, the Senate had ordered all astrologers out of Italy. Particularly prominent ones risked being thrown off a cliff. Knowledge of where the world was heading had become far too sensitive to be permitted the average citizen.

The days when the plebs had agitated for political rights were gone, and no one in Rome’s slums greatly missed them. Why bother with elections, after all, when they never changed anything? This was why Caligula’s restoration to the Roman people of their right to vote had been greeted with such yawns of indifference that it had soon discreetly been abandoned. Realities had changed – and everybody knew it. What mattered most to the poor, in a city so vast that many had never even seen a cornfield, still less harvested one, was to banish the spectre of famine – and only Caesar could guarantee that.

journey: the reloading of the grain, half a million tons of it each year, onto smaller vessels, and the journey up the coast to the mouth of the Tiber.39 There, surrounded by marshes and salt-flats, stood the port of Ostia; and beyond Ostia, lining the sixteen miles of quays that separated it from Rome, warehouse after giant warehouse, each one with windows so high and slit-like that they seemed a line of fortresses. There was much that could go wrong between Puteoli and the safe arrival of the grain in these depots;