The Alternative Augustan Age by Josiah Osgood;Kit Morrell;Kathryn Welch;

Author:Josiah Osgood;Kit Morrell;Kathryn Welch;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Augustus’ choice of Agrippa as son-in-law was recognition that there was no more eligible man in Rome than his old friend.40 To choose anyone else would have been to accept an inferior. Agrippa had spent decades curating that profile as Rome’s finest soldier and foremost builder, with achievements exceeding the confines of the cursus honorum and expressed in a range of unheralded honors. The status he acquired as a result was unavoidable in Rome’s traditional political culture, and it is always necessary to situate it in the context of the Republic that all contemporaries knew, instead of a principate that had not yet grown its roots. Nor, moreover, was that a problem for Augustus. On the contrary, Augustus, ever-aware that Caesar’s hoarding of pre-eminence had earned him the daggers of his friends, was keen to show that he encouraged his peers’ elevation. It allowed him to follow Agrippa’s example without shame or belittlement. It allowed him to satisfy the ambitions of his most precious colleague. But more than anything, it allowed Agrippa’s cooperation to appear not as the service of a dependent, but as an endorsement from a truly great man of proven judgment. That a man so demonstrably capax imperii (capable of rule) thrived alongside Augustus was reassurance for all that the dark days of civil war were in the past.41

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