Reading the Roman Revolution 28: The Succession

This semester, I’ve shifted from reading Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution on my own to reading it with students and colleagues. This has been wonderful in every way and helped me see arguments across the entire book that perhaps I missed.

Chapter 28 deals with the succession. When I first read the book, the placement of this chapter seemed odd. In fact, I wondered vaguely whether Syme intended this to be the final chapter of the book (although I have no evidence for this). This chapter deliberately looks beyond Augustus to the ascension of Tiberius to trace how “the cabinet” introduced in chapter 27 was ephemeral and contingent. As a result, the succession from Augustus to Tiberius was not simply the replacement of a new leader atop an existing political or institutional structure, but an entirely new government filled with individuals loyal to Tiberius and his branch of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

Succession then was fraught because there was so little connective infrastructure in the Empire beyond the Princeps. There was no well defined office of Princeps and even the packet of privileges afforded Augustus were relatively modest and impossible to pass on because of their unprecedented character. Instead, Tiberius’s power rested an a densely interlocked group of family connections and loyal members of the lower orders of the Roman state. 

Augustus was aware of this even if he was a reluctant architect of Tiberius’s ascension. The led Syme to describe the exile of Julia as a move to suppress a potential conspiracy. To wit:  

“As a politician, Augustus was ruthless and consequent. To achieve his ambition he would coolly have sacrificed his nearest and dearest; and his ambition was the unhindered succession to the throne of Gaius and Lucius. To this end their mother served merely as an instrument. There may have been a conspiracy. Whether wanton or merely traduced, Julia was not a nonentity but a great political lady.” 

Syme was hardly a women’s historian, but his prosopographic approach required him to recognize the power of women in orienting dynastic causes as well as subverting them. If prosopography was more than mere structuralism, it admitted to the autonomy of the agents in the web. The exile of Julia and the succession was evidence for just such autonomy.

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.