Reading the Roman Revolution 24: The Party of Augustus

In contemporary US politics it is often easy to think about political parties as institutional vessels for ambition. One’s goal was to win the party’s support both formally and informally. The former involves nominations and financial support; the latter involves influence and the willingness of a party to amplify one’s influence.

For Augustus, the formal control over the state depended in no small way upon his ability to control a diverse group of supporters. In Chapter 24 of The Roman Revolution, Syme shifts from considering the institutional mechanisms necessary for the principate, to the informal assemblage of individuals attached to Augustus who amplified and maintained his influence.

Syme argued that Augustus was able to draw ambitious members of the Equestrian class, small town elites from Italy, and over time members of the Senatorial class. The tumultuous decades of civil war allowed this unlikely collection of individuals to coalesce around Augustus. In the case of Italian elites and Equites, the Civil War produced enough instability to allow individuals to ascend to positions of power improbable in the days of the Republic (although as Syme notes they often quickly adopted Republican predispositions once in power). This new coalition not only allowed Augustus to distance himself from individuals who could rival his power from his own status (namely the traditional Republican elites) and ultimately, his new foundation of authority in the army and the urban plebs (maintained by promoted Equites and Italian elites) made room to welcome back scions of traditional Republican families.

Syme was blunt in his reasoning and the echos of the changing order of the mid-century Europe were clear:

Vested interests were now more widely spread, more tenacious, more tightly organized. Capital felt secure. A conservative party may be very large and quite heterogeneous. Cicero, when defining the Optimates (or champions of property and the existing dispensation), boldly extended the term from the senatorial order to cover every class in society, not shutting out freedmen. What in Cicero’s advocacy was propaganda for the moment or mere ideal had become palpable reality as the result of a violent redistribution of power and property. The aristocratic Republic had disguised and sometimes thwarted the power of money: the new order was patently, though not frankly, plutocratic.

As the kids today say: C.R.E.A.M.

oOo

The short essay is part of my Reading The Roman Revolution at 80 project. It’s so awesome that I have two hashtags: #ReadingRomanRevolution and #ReadingRonaldat80. I explain the project here. You can read the rest of the entries here.