Reading the Roman Revolution 27: The Cabinet

By Chapter XXVII, the message should by clear by now to any reader of Ronald Syme’s : Augustus paid lip service to the republican institutions while creating wholly new sources of power and authority. Syme puts it bluntly: “Yet once again, behind the nominal authority and government of the Roman Senate the real and ultimate power needs to be discovered.”

For Syme, this power was “the cabinet.” The cabinet remains ill-defined as an institution. It was mostly a group of close advisors to Augustus. Agrippa and Maecenas are the best known (well, to me, at least, owing mostly to my recent reading of Williams’ Augustus). The intimacy of the core group of advisors reflected a trajectory established at the end of the republic by Caesar and the other triumvirs. Syme puts it succinctly: “The hazards and intrigues of the revolutionary era set a high premium on secret counsel and secret diplomacy; and the Princeps retained unimpaired his native distrust of oratory, of democracy and of public debate.” Syme acknowledges that this “native distrust” reflected Augustus’s position of weakness and the lack of institutional and structural basis for his authority. Of course, Augustus’s control over the legions was unmatched.

Unfortunately, how he administered this control was more variable especially after the death of Agrippa and the passing of his chose successors. Tiberius’s tantrum and retirement to Rhodes complicated matters further, but the influence of Livia, Augustus’s wife and Tiberius’s mother, have have filled the gap left by her son’s departure. Augustus’s family, in the end, formed a key base of power that even promoted equites, childhood friends, and nobles who rose to prominence during revolutionary age could not fill.

Syme manages to do what other ancient historians bemoaned: “When he comes to narrate the Principate of Augustus, Cassius Dio complains that the task of the historian has been aggravated beyond all measure under the Republic the great questions of policy had been the subject of open and public debate: they were now decided in secret by a few men… [yet] secret policy and secret strife in the counsels of the Princeps determine the government of Rome, the future succession and the destiny of the whole world.”

oOo

This 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.