The Augustan Principate

The Principate was successfully maintained from 27 BCE to AD 14 due to Augusts’

  • auctoritas (personal influence)

  • military power

  • constitutional arrangments

  • propaganda

  • reforms and reorganisation that promoted efficiency, justice, old virtues, security, prosperity and prestige.

Augustus an the Senate 

Three factors influenced August in his relationship with senate and magistrates: 

  1. The experiences of Julius Caesar 

  2. His own conservative inclinations 

  3. His need for cooperation in running the vast empire

Augustus’ relationship with the senate and magistrates 

The Senate 

Augustus wanted to raise the tone of the senate, reduce its number, restore it’s former dignity, increase responsibility of its members and improve its efficiency. He did this by:

  • Reducing the senate from 900 to 600 

  • changed the qualification for membership

  • Increased fines for non-attendance and insisted that senators did not leave Italy without permission 

  • Called on speakers at random rather than by seniority to make sure that they were alert

  • Reduced the number of sessions of the senate to two a month, and to make things more efficient, he set up a senate committee of himself, the two consuls, one of each of the boards of magistrates and 15 senators to prepare an agenda for the senate. 

Religious changes

  • He revived the priestly colleges, paying partuicular attention to the Vestals, defunct brotherhoods and festivals.

  • He restores temples and shrines throughout Itraly that had fallen into disrepair

  • He realised the propaganda value of religion by promoting those gods associated with the Julian clan and its divine nature, as well as those gods that glorified his own achievements

  • He gave official status to the worship of deities that had emerged during the civil war, such as fortune and peace.

  • He restricted some of the more alien cults for Romans, but not for provincials, and approved of some such as the Eleusinian Mysteries.

The cult of Caesar worship 

After 12 BCE there was a growth of Caesar worship which took the form of fthe cults of' ‘Romae and Augustus’ and ‘Rome and the Defied Julius’.

Morality and social legalisation

Standards of morality among the Roman upper class had declined, and Augustus appeared genuinely concerned that marriage was often taken lightly, adultery not only tolerated but even fashionable, divorce common and many people remaining unmarried or childless.

Administrative reforms in Rome and Italy

By his administrative reforms Augustus:

  • addressed the problem of unemployment with an ambitious building program

  • took over control of the grain supply from the aediles after a serious famine in 22 BCE and later established an equestrian office of Curator of the Grain supply

  • Relied on Agrippa, prior to 12 BCE, to build and maintain the aqueducts, reservoirs and collection basins. Agrippa kept his own gang of 240 workers for this purpose.

  • Divided Rome into 265 wards each with four magistrates for policing the city. Three semi-military cohorts (each 1500 men) led by a consular prefect acted as a special police force

  • Introduced measures to prevent the Tiber River flooding the city by clearing the Tiber channel which had become blocked by rubbish. Only temporary and in AD 15 he set up a board for this purpose.

  • Organised a fire brigade in AD 6 of seven cohorts of freedmen under equestrian prefect.

  • Promoted civic pride by setting annual magistrates over each of the 265 city wards