Augustus was concerned with the family, status, and manumission of slaves due to the widely held Roman belief that moral decline had led to civil war. As princeps, Augustus sought to restore traditional Roman values through legislation regulating manumission, promoting marriage, and reducing adultery. However, his laws met with limited success, as many Romans continued extramarital relationships and found ways to avoid the requirements of marriage and childbearing. Overall, Augustus' social reforms did not substantially change Roman culture or demographics.
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Why Was Augustus Concerned With the Family, Status and Manumission
Augustus was concerned with the family, status, and manumission of slaves due to the widely held Roman belief that moral decline had led to civil war. As princeps, Augustus sought to restore traditional Roman values through legislation regulating manumission, promoting marriage, and reducing adultery. However, his laws met with limited success, as many Romans continued extramarital relationships and found ways to avoid the requirements of marriage and childbearing. Overall, Augustus' social reforms did not substantially change Roman culture or demographics.
Augustus was concerned with the family, status, and manumission of slaves due to the widely held Roman belief that moral decline had led to civil war. As princeps, Augustus sought to restore traditional Roman values through legislation regulating manumission, promoting marriage, and reducing adultery. However, his laws met with limited success, as many Romans continued extramarital relationships and found ways to avoid the requirements of marriage and childbearing. Overall, Augustus' social reforms did not substantially change Roman culture or demographics.
Why was Augustus concerned with the family, status and
manumission? How successful was he?
The overriding mindset which seems to have permeated all Roman discussions or beliefs about social issues is one that directly correlated moral rectitude of the people and the upper classes with success and prosperity as a whole. As a consequence, it was thought that the major explicatory factor for the turbulence which Rome had endured in the twenty or so years before the Battle of Actium must have been some sort of moral decline. This perception is seen in Horaces works, which directly attribute the civil wars to the debasement of the marriage-bed, of the Roman race as a whole and of individual homes (Odes 3.6). This philosophy was the foundation of Augustus concern with social issues such as the family, legal status and the manumission of slaves. We cannot be sure how sincerely he himself shared this view and there were probably other factors involved anyway, to a greater or lesser extent, such as political expediency and the desire to consolidate his dynasty, but his role as a triumvir and later princeps was (nominally, at least) all to do with the state of society. His mandate was to restore the Republic, and in doing so to remove all traces of wickedness (or scelus) which had tainted the original values of the Republic and had caused so much damage. Roman guilt about scelus gave Augustus the justification for his position and they saw this scelus as rooted in domestic sins such as adultery. Augustus actions had the appearance, and maybe even some substance, of moral restoration and his persistence over time suggests that his concern with these issues stretched further than merely justifying his role in the new Rome. Although his legal approach was fairly unsuccessful, we must be careful not to underestimate the significance of what he was doing.
Before we discuss Augustus legislation about sexual conduct, one of the areas in which Romans were thought to have fallen away from the principles of the Old Republic with negative consequences was the area of Roman citizens granting freedom and Roman citizenship to slaves. There were two major concern with this namely, that the emancipation of slaves was harming the quality of the pool of Roman citizens, and that slaves were being manumitted for less-than- wholesome reasons. Dionysius of Halicarnassus relates that some slaves were buying their freedom with money that had been obtained criminally, that some were being freed as a reward for doing something shady or illegal for their master, and that some masters were manumitting their slaves solely for their own gain whether to obtain votes or favours, or to embellish their own reputations 1 . In addition, it may have been the case that the extensive availability of slaves was undermining other sources of manpower, such as the citizen-body. Augustus main response to the issue of manumission and its effects lay in the Lex Iunia, which probably was issued in 17 BC, but later on there was the 2 BC Lex Fufia Caninia and the 4 AD Lex Aelia Sentia. The Lex Fufia limited the numbers of manumissions that were allowed in wills, while the latter restricted who could manumit and which slaves could become citizens (primarily based on age requirements). When we look at his legislation, we see that Augustus was definitely not trying to destroy the culture of manumission. Rather, he was trying to regulate it and remove undesirable elements of it as part of a wider theme of returning to the supposedly more morally sound and beneficial values of the Old Republic. As a
1 Braund p. 261 Samuel Taylor result, it became the case that (in theory) only slaves whose good moral character made them worthy of citizenship should be manumitted. The laws dont seem to have been part of a racial policy of keeping Roman blood pure, as Suetonius suggests, so much as attempts to eliminate immoral and illegal manumissions. Overall, it seems that actually Augustus policies about manumission and the status of those freed were rather limited. This partly makes it difficult to assess how successful he was. Both particular instances such as being able to refuse exceptions at the requests of Tiberius and Livia (Suetonius 40) and the general sense in which his reforms were not challenged very much suggest that he was successful in his limited aims.
We now come to Augustus policies about sexual conduct, which can be broadly divided into two categories: measures seeking to reduce the levels of adultery and sexual promiscuity, and those trying to promote marriage and childbirth. At the root of Roman guilt about scelus, mentioned earlier, there was a particular concern about adultery, and it fell to Augustus to tackle this issue because of his appointment by the people and the Senate as the supervisor and corrector of morals. We know that Augustus himself was widely thought to be something of a philanderer (Suetonius 67, Dio 54.16) and as such it seems odd for him to regulate this issue strictly and thus somewhat hypocritically. However, the Senate wanted even stricter regulations than Augustus was prepared to put in place (Dio 54.16) and it seems that there was a real drive behind anti-adultery laws because it was thought to be particularly associated with instability and misfortune. As such, moral regeneration was needed to regain stability and mythical greatness of the Old Republic. The two main acts of Augustus on this topic, the Lex Iulia and the later Lex Papia Poppaea, were designed to suppress adultery in quite restrictive ways. Under the Lex Iulia, adultery was openly associated with treason and political subversion, and became a public offence for the first time. In this supposed re-instatement of worthy, traditional, values, the link between sexual waywardness and public disarray was emphasised by how adultery was treated as a destructive power. Making the punishment for adultery more severe, as well as other things such as restricting who adulterers could marry and promoting marriage itself, resulted in a Rome that was praised by Horace for being undefiled by that sin (Odes 4.5). Despite this, it seems that Augustus anti-adultery measures were relatively ineffective. His earlier attempts, in the 20s BC, failed rather miserably (Propertius 2.7), while a lot of extra-marital sex remained legal even after the Lex Iulia 2 . Ultimately, Augustus could not even stop his daughter and granddaughter from committing adultery, and had to punish them accordingly. While in some ways, particularly in some of the poets, it might seem that Augustus succeeded in cleansing Rome sexually, this was by no means the case. Propertius rejoicing in his affair with Cynthia is just one example of how sexual promiscuity continued under Augustus just as it had done before, despite the clamouring of the senate.
The close corollary of Augustus policy on adultery was the promotion of marriage. This was both a practical concern and a moral one. On one level, some would argue, using Horaces Carmen Saeculare among other things, that Rome was undergoing a birthrate problem 3 . The decimation of the upper classes in the turbulent first century BC combined with a lack of offspring to replenish their ranks meant that there was a need for marriage and childbirth to be encouraged. Yet because of the negative associations with adultery, there was a sense in which marriage was more than a
2 Wallace-Hadrill 1993 p. 67 3 Williams p. 29 Samuel Taylor pragmatic matter. In laws such as the Lex Papia Poppaea, Augustus provided benefits of rights and privileges to couples who had children, while images emphasising the importance of families witness the productively fertile women on the Ara Pacis tried to portray families as a joy rather than a burden. Child-bearing was now not purely a private matter but required the intervention and provision of the state. The most important fact about Roman marriage seems to have been that the law about marriage was fulfilled by having children (Carmen Saeculare 19). This is reinforced by the fact that opposition to the changes from the people and equestrian order seemed to be based on the desire to avoid having offspring hence why some individuals married pre-pubescent girls and changed wives frequently to try to get around the laws. Metellus Macedonius, the censor, used to say that marriage was a boring duty to the state which had to be done 4 . We see Propertius valuing his existing relationship with Cynthia above being a father. The laws encouraging marriage and penalising singleness were actually probably relatively easy to evade, since they only really affected the small group of people who were trying to obtain public office in Rome and the municipalities. One effect of the legislation was the men seem to have started marrying younger, but overall the laws tended to fail in their general aim. A law promoting marriage promoted childbirth, and the fact that Augustus legislation probably had little demographic effect in the form of increasing numbers of Roman citizens 5 , is probably indicative of an ineffectual measure. In the end, a culture of either celibacy or childless sexual relationship was probably too embedded in Roman society for Augustus top-down approach to work.
In conclusion, Augustus concern with issues surrounding the family, status and manumission stemmed from a sense of the duty of his position to combat scelus and a practical sense of the need to replenish a weakened upper class with a strong birth rate. In regulating the process of manumission and putting laws into place about sex and marriage, Augustus was justifying his own control and trying to secure the future of his rule with a feeling of returning to the values of the Old Republic. The legislation itself was fairly unsuccessful, only having a moderate (at best) impact on Roman society, but perhaps Augustus success in the social sphere lay in another area. His own family was set up as the model for this new Roman family based on mythical Republican values. Augustus himself (apart from his own adultery) lived reasonably simply and morally, which lent him a degree of moral authority. He maintained a very tight rein on the activities of his family, for example, strictly supervising the upbringing of the female members of his family, controlling their marriages in forcing Agrippa and Tiberius to leave their wives and advancing Caius and Lucius to state offices in such an unprecedented way. Despite his constant and intense presence in the lives of his family, it is fair to say that they failed him. The adultery of his daughter and granddaughter showed the futility of his anti-adultery measures, while the death of his grandsons was a huge setback to his dynastic ambitions. His family failed to act as appropriate models of Augustan morality, but that fact that his family played such a decisive role as the example in social matters shows just how effectively Augustus had cemented the Julii as the imperial family.
4 Wallace-Hadrill 1985 5 Brunt p. 565 Samuel Taylor Bibliography Res Gestae Divi Augusti Suetonius, Augustus Cassius Dio, The Roman History Horace, Carmen Saeculare and Odes Propertius Ovid, Fasti David C. Braund, Augustus to Nero (Croon Helm 1985) C. Pelling and J.A. Crook, Cambridge Ancient History, Volume 10 (Cambridge University Press 1996) Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, The Golden Age and Sin in Augustan Ideology, Past & Present, No. 95 (May, 1982) Synnve des Bouvrie, Augustus legislation on morals which morals and what aims?, Symbolae Osloenses: Norwegian Journal of Greek and Latin Studies, 59:1 (1984) Gordon Williams, Poetry in the Moral Climate of Augustan Rome, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 52, Parts 1 and 2 (1962) Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Propaganda and Dissent? Augustan Moral Legislation and the Love-Poets, Klio, 67:1 (1985) Karl Galinsky, Augustus' Legislation on Morals and Marriage, Philologus, 125:1 (1981) Jasper Griffin, Augustan Poetry and the Life of Luxury, The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 66 (1976) Catharine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press 1993) P.A. Brunt, Italian Manpower (Oxford University Press 1971) Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Augustan Rome (Bristol Classical Press 1993) Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution (The Folio Society 2009) Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge University Press 1978) K.R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire (Latomus 1984) Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (University of Michigan Press 1988) J.A. Crook, Law and Life of Rome (Thames and Hudson 1967) Charles Brian Rose, Dynastic Commemoration and Imperial Portraiture in the Julio-Claudian Period (Cambridge University Press 1997)
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