Samuel Taylor

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
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