June 10, 2024 • 17 mins
Conocido como Octavio de 63 a 44 a.C., como Octaviano de 44 a 27 a.C. y como Augusto a partir de entonces, el primer emperador romano es para muchos historiadores, asimismo, el más importante y significativo de todos ellos. En el último siglo antes de Cristo, Roma había sufrido sangrientas guerras civiles y desuniones provocadas por las maniobras de sus generales, ansiosos de poder. La llegada de Augusto lo cambiaría todo. Desde el principio buscó un nexo que uniera a los romanos: quería que creyeran que compartían pasado y futuro, y basó su estrategia en dos pilares. Por un lado, actuó como un imperialista a ultranza, deshaciéndose de sus rivales y unificando los territorios desperdigados para formar un Imperio ordenado. Por otro, dio a este un nuevo orgullo, empezando por un completo lavado de cara a su capital. Su objetivo era canalizar el orgullo colectivo, “nacional”, en su persona, y para ello grabó su leyenda en piedra. Escucha la historia completa en el podcast. Déjanos tu comentario en Ivoox o Spotify, o escríbenos a podcast@zinetmedia.es Comparte nuestro podcast en tus redes sociales, puedes realizar una valoración de 5 estrellas en Apple Podcast o Spotify. Texto: Alberto Porlán Dirección, locución y producción: Iván Patxi Gómez Gallego Contacto de publicidad en podcast: podcast@zinetmedia.es
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:12):
Or the great reports of very historypresents the Roman Empire, chapter three,
(00:42):
the first Emperor, a text byAlberto Porlan known as Octavius forty- four
a. C, like Octavian fromforty- four to twenty- seven.
(01:04):
C, and Augusto. From thenon, the first Roman Emperor is for
many historians as well, the mostimportant and significant of them all. In
(01:29):
the last century A Christ, Romehad suffered bloody wars, civil wars,
and disunities caused by the maneuvers ofits generals eager for power. Augusto'
s arrival would change everything. Fromthe beginning. He sought a link that
united the Romans, wanted them tobelieve, to share past and future,
and based his strategy on two pillars. On the one hand, he acted
(01:53):
as an ultra- imperialist, riddinghimself of his rivals and unifying in the
wasteful territories for an empire ordered byanother. He gave this one a new
pride, starting with a complete washin front of his capital. His aim
was to channel national collective pride intohim and to that end he recorded his
(02:15):
legend in stone. Besides, hetook great care of his image. According
to Suetonius, his biographer was blond, of medium size and prominent nose and
with few teeth, but his imageswere unrealistic, showing him with heroic proportions.
(02:37):
Born in sixty- three BC,Octavius Turino was the grandson of a
sister of Julius Caesar and, ashe named him Heredero, he adopted the
name Octaviano in his honor from thatmoment on. During the first years of
his public life he was skillful,allying with his main opponents waiting for the
(02:57):
best time to eliminate them. Willinglydisposed of everything by power, he did
not hesitate to face Caesar' sright hand militarily. Marco Antonio and his
ambition led him to sacrifice Cicero's life to achieve the alliance of the
second triumvirate he formed together with MarcoAntonio and Lépido, who had been Caesar
' s most faithful collaborators. Still, he never stood out as a soldier,
(03:31):
although they are attributed to some triumphs, such as the Battle of Philippi
in forty- two before Christ infront of Caesar' s assassins, in
reality they were achieved by Marco Antonioand in time it would be General Marco
agripa his great friend who would helphim to fight his former allies. A
Gripa always acted the precise moments,but Octaviano took the success. A good
(03:54):
example is the naval battle of Achioagainst Marco Antonio and his ally to Cleopatra.
Apart from power, two distinct imperialpolitical models were at stake. Octaviano
was about to lose according to thebad tongues, he got dizzy undercover and
it was to Gripa that he hadto act alone to defeat them. If
(04:21):
he proved his worth in politics throughthe reforms he would give in place to
the regime called the Principality of Augusto, for having received his title of Prínceps.
Probably his best weapon was patience.Unlike Caesar, he did not want
to rush by imposing a monarchical reform, he preferred to give time to the
(04:46):
clearly republican oligarchy to accept his reformsand, although to reinstate the Republic in
a new context, the principality hadto eliminate some opponents. In general,
he used the policy of covenants symbolically, returned power to the Senate and ended
with personal regimes the dictatorship of CaesarI the Triumvirates. In return, he
(05:09):
was granted certain powers and honors,the principal of which was the title of
Augustos, which means noble, venerableand sacred and which also comes from booming
to magnify. He had achieved aname with holiness Augustus the revered, but
(05:30):
to be omnipotent he needed more authority, so he decided to honor the memory
of his father, his adoptive father, and commissioned a statue of Julius Caesar
for a temple, placing it nextto Mars and Venus. So if Caesar
was a God, he was theson of a God. This opened the
door to the autocracy and implied theconstruction of temples and altars in honor of
(05:56):
Augustus, a name that all emperorswould bear ever since. Among the extraordinary
powers received by the Government of theprovinces was in broad legislative power, still
to pacify the management of the treasuryand the census and the official creation of
(06:19):
the Pretorian Guard, the first armedforce under the command of a Roman leader
on a permanent basis capable of maintainingorder in the capital. In time he
would receive another honorary title from theSenate, father of the homeland, and
apparently made him visibly excited in thehands of Octavio. The Republic had died
(06:53):
to give way to the pseudo-monartic model and proved to be very skilled
in camouflageing its absolutism under a democraticappearance. Its reforms were based on citizens
' fear of a new civil war. As a de facto monarch and with
the excuse of consolidating a new imperialsystem beyond the cities. The State carried
(07:14):
out profound reforms, both political andsocial and territorial. He intended to bridge
the imbalances that had led the Republicto the crisis. Thus he left to
the Senate the government of many provincesand granted to these quite economic autonomy,
although barely political capacity. Since thenumber of senators had greatly increased. He
(07:35):
used his defense office to purge theSenate and eliminate those who were less willing
to lose power. He managed tosubdue them, but the dream of the
Republic' s return was not over. Thus, in the twenty- three
year before Christ, there was afailed plot to assassinate him. Augustus was
(08:01):
particularly prominent in his foreign policy,based on the founding of colonies throughout the
empire, where he gave power tothe local elites, the distribution of land
to veteran soldiers and the consolidation ofa permanent army that maintained security at the
borders and made it the central axisof the administration and control of the tributes.
(08:22):
Thus, the Roman pax greatly favoredeconomic integration between provinces and territories,
giving trade, cultural and ethnic exchangesunparalleled. Until then, so Augusto succeeded
(08:46):
in administrative and economic management, butfailed in social and ideological politics. He
believed that the abandonment of traditions hadresulted in a breakdown of the social order
and great corruption. And to regainvirtue it was necessary to start by respecting
status. How could a senator marrya prostitute or a freeman be richer than
(09:09):
his former owner. The pre-eminence of the senatorial and economic elites must
be maintained, and provincial nobility mustbe given access to the mechanisms of power
while maintaining the stability of the middleclasses. Of course, their measures did
(09:31):
not benefit the plebs, the lowergroups, which were to be maintained by
the elites, and even less benefitedthe slaves and the libertarians. However,
in Rome he developed a policy ofgrain distribution and public shows that was well
received. He tried to re-establish the old social rules through laws and
(09:52):
political measures, but it was useless. Its legal model turned out to be
more ideological than realistic, as itwas impon psible to realize such a dynamic
society with outdated measures. The realityended up setting a good example are the
laws related to the family, aimedat limiting the role of women in securing
(10:13):
the birth. They tried to stopadultery and the high number of divorces and
penalized unmarried and childless couples, grantingprivileges to married couples with three or more.
Despite his great effort to return tothe model practices of our model ancestors
in his own words, it wasimpossible for Augustus to limit the changing high
(10:37):
imperial society. On the other hand, her private environment was very far from
following the model she intended to impose, as shown by the case of her
daughter, Julia the eldest, Whenshe was fourteen years old, she married
her cousin Marco Marcelo, who diedat the age of two without offspring.
(11:00):
Then she remarried her this time withher friend to Gripa who gave her three
sons, two of them boys,Callo and Lucius. When he died to
Gripa in the year twelve B C. He married her for the third time
to Tiberius, the eldest son ofhis wife Lydia, but Tiberius preferred to
abandon his career as a successor andexile to Rhodes. Apparently, Julia has
(11:31):
been collecting lovers ever since. Senecaspeaks of their flocks and describes her as
an unfaithful woman transformed into a prostitute. Right or not. In the year
two before Christ, her own fatheraccused her of immorality and confined her to
a small island and her alleged accomplicesin a plot to assassinate Augustus were executed.
(11:56):
It is unknown whether she consciously participatedor a very relative Roman pax was
used. Ten years later, Julia' s daughter and Augustus' granddaughter was
(12:18):
accused of adultery and also exiled.A few months later it was Ovidio'
s turn, who, after beingaccused of immorality, was ordered to go
to the last border of the Empire, to a fortress on the Black Sea.
There he would spend his last yearsand all his requests to return were
fruitless. It is still unknown whatexactly caused his fall. Unfortunately, Rome
(12:48):
had grown almost uninterruptedly since the fourthcentury B C, and this expansion was
really difficult to stop and also tomaintain. More slaves, tributes and lands
were constantly needed. So, despitedeclaring himself a supporter of the Roman pax,
Augustus was forced to continue. Theconquests. Only undeveloped areas where the
(13:13):
strategy of the Roman army was muchless effective remained to be mastered. He
first chose mountainous areas such as thePyrenees and the Cantabrian Cornisa in the Vérica
Peninsula or the Alps in Gaul.Once subdued, these were done with the
inner ilyria in present- day Serbia. However, things were very different in
(13:39):
the East. They had a seriousproblem on the Roman border of the Euphrates
River, where they ran into twoterrible enemies, the births and the Armenians.
The first ones. Even Marco Antoniohad not managed to bend them,
so Augusto thought that the best thingwas to agree, as the important thing
(14:00):
was to expect Armenia' s dominationunder far- off influence. He got
King Partus to return to him theinsignia lost by Licinio Crasso in the battle
of Carras, in present- dayTurkey in forty- three BC and that
there were kings of Rome in Armenia. With this, Armenia' s recovery
was lived as if it were areal triumph. It will be about,
(14:22):
when there really was no fight.Moreover, Armenian subjects in theory were in
practice totally independent. This was,to be sure, a victory for diplomacy.
That' s very effective. Finally, he focused his interests on Germania.
(14:46):
His men did not have much troublereaching the Alba Valley and, although
no fully effective control was achieved,a prominent part of the German tribes ended
up delivering their weapons and tributes.Everything was going well until in the ninth
year this expansion by Germania ended drastically. Commander Romano, in the ring Publio.
(15:09):
Quintilio Varo trusted for his withdrawal akerosene chief who had been an assistant
to the Roman troops. Arminius wasbetrayed in the Teutoburg forest. Three Roman
legions were almost completely annihilated. Apartfrom expansion, the other major problem in
(15:37):
his last years was succession. Howto preserve the principality at his death without
another legitimate prince. What' smore, how could he pass his powers
on to someone if in theory hewasn' t a monarch. Augustus had
no sons, so his grandchildren,Callo and Lucio, seemed to be his
best assets. That' s whyyou assure them. He lasted a political
(16:00):
career, but just in case healso bet on other candidates, including his
wife' s second son, LiviaDruso. Fate wanted me not to be
any of them. Druso died unexpectedlyin the year nine and pike and fell
(16:23):
also in the middle of youth andwith only eighteen months of difference. There
was talk of murders of a plotby Lydia to promote her son, Tiberius,
and it wouldn' t be crazyto think about it. After the
(16:44):
death of his grandchildren, Augustus focusedon Tiberius, who had married his daughter
Julia a few years earlier. Hewas not the ideal, but there was
no alternative, so he gave himenough powers to have his death, which
happened in Nola in the fourteenth year, happen to Augustus. That' s
(17:06):
why he built a mausoleum, someonelike him couldn' t just disappear.
A senator claimed to have seen hissoul rise to heaven. Thus began the
cult of Diebus Augustos, whose firstpriestess was Lydia herself. Temples were erected
in his honor and all future emperorsbore his name. Nothing seems to be
(17:30):
able to erase the legacy of thefirst Roman Emperor. So much so that
when the last Augustulo rumble abdicated infour hundred seventy- six, its name
became that of a month August anduntil today
Or the great reports of very historypresents the Roman Empire, chapter three,
(00:42):
the first Emperor, a text byAlberto Porlan known as Octavius forty- four
a. C, like Octavian fromforty- four to twenty- seven.
(01:04):
C, and Augusto. From thenon, the first Roman Emperor is for
many historians as well, the mostimportant and significant of them all. In
(01:29):
the last century A Christ, Romehad suffered bloody wars, civil wars,
and disunities caused by the maneuvers ofits generals eager for power. Augusto'
s arrival would change everything. Fromthe beginning. He sought a link that
united the Romans, wanted them tobelieve, to share past and future,
and based his strategy on two pillars. On the one hand, he acted
(01:53):
as an ultra- imperialist, riddinghimself of his rivals and unifying in the
wasteful territories for an empire ordered byanother. He gave this one a new
pride, starting with a complete washin front of his capital. His aim
was to channel national collective pride intohim and to that end he recorded his
(02:15):
legend in stone. Besides, hetook great care of his image. According
to Suetonius, his biographer was blond, of medium size and prominent nose and
with few teeth, but his imageswere unrealistic, showing him with heroic proportions.
(02:37):
Born in sixty- three BC,Octavius Turino was the grandson of a
sister of Julius Caesar and, ashe named him Heredero, he adopted the
name Octaviano in his honor from thatmoment on. During the first years of
his public life he was skillful,allying with his main opponents waiting for the
(02:57):
best time to eliminate them. Willinglydisposed of everything by power, he did
not hesitate to face Caesar' sright hand militarily. Marco Antonio and his
ambition led him to sacrifice Cicero's life to achieve the alliance of the
second triumvirate he formed together with MarcoAntonio and Lépido, who had been Caesar
' s most faithful collaborators. Still, he never stood out as a soldier,
(03:31):
although they are attributed to some triumphs, such as the Battle of Philippi
in forty- two before Christ infront of Caesar' s assassins, in
reality they were achieved by Marco Antonioand in time it would be General Marco
agripa his great friend who would helphim to fight his former allies. A
Gripa always acted the precise moments,but Octaviano took the success. A good
(03:54):
example is the naval battle of Achioagainst Marco Antonio and his ally to Cleopatra.
Apart from power, two distinct imperialpolitical models were at stake. Octaviano
was about to lose according to thebad tongues, he got dizzy undercover and
it was to Gripa that he hadto act alone to defeat them. If
(04:21):
he proved his worth in politics throughthe reforms he would give in place to
the regime called the Principality of Augusto, for having received his title of Prínceps.
Probably his best weapon was patience.Unlike Caesar, he did not want
to rush by imposing a monarchical reform, he preferred to give time to the
(04:46):
clearly republican oligarchy to accept his reformsand, although to reinstate the Republic in
a new context, the principality hadto eliminate some opponents. In general,
he used the policy of covenants symbolically, returned power to the Senate and ended
with personal regimes the dictatorship of CaesarI the Triumvirates. In return, he
(05:09):
was granted certain powers and honors,the principal of which was the title of
Augustos, which means noble, venerableand sacred and which also comes from booming
to magnify. He had achieved aname with holiness Augustus the revered, but
(05:30):
to be omnipotent he needed more authority, so he decided to honor the memory
of his father, his adoptive father, and commissioned a statue of Julius Caesar
for a temple, placing it nextto Mars and Venus. So if Caesar
was a God, he was theson of a God. This opened the
door to the autocracy and implied theconstruction of temples and altars in honor of
(05:56):
Augustus, a name that all emperorswould bear ever since. Among the extraordinary
powers received by the Government of theprovinces was in broad legislative power, still
to pacify the management of the treasuryand the census and the official creation of
(06:19):
the Pretorian Guard, the first armedforce under the command of a Roman leader
on a permanent basis capable of maintainingorder in the capital. In time he
would receive another honorary title from theSenate, father of the homeland, and
apparently made him visibly excited in thehands of Octavio. The Republic had died
(06:53):
to give way to the pseudo-monartic model and proved to be very skilled
in camouflageing its absolutism under a democraticappearance. Its reforms were based on citizens
' fear of a new civil war. As a de facto monarch and with
the excuse of consolidating a new imperialsystem beyond the cities. The State carried
(07:14):
out profound reforms, both political andsocial and territorial. He intended to bridge
the imbalances that had led the Republicto the crisis. Thus he left to
the Senate the government of many provincesand granted to these quite economic autonomy,
although barely political capacity. Since thenumber of senators had greatly increased. He
(07:35):
used his defense office to purge theSenate and eliminate those who were less willing
to lose power. He managed tosubdue them, but the dream of the
Republic' s return was not over. Thus, in the twenty- three
year before Christ, there was afailed plot to assassinate him. Augustus was
(08:01):
particularly prominent in his foreign policy,based on the founding of colonies throughout the
empire, where he gave power tothe local elites, the distribution of land
to veteran soldiers and the consolidation ofa permanent army that maintained security at the
borders and made it the central axisof the administration and control of the tributes.
(08:22):
Thus, the Roman pax greatly favoredeconomic integration between provinces and territories,
giving trade, cultural and ethnic exchangesunparalleled. Until then, so Augusto succeeded
(08:46):
in administrative and economic management, butfailed in social and ideological politics. He
believed that the abandonment of traditions hadresulted in a breakdown of the social order
and great corruption. And to regainvirtue it was necessary to start by respecting
status. How could a senator marrya prostitute or a freeman be richer than
(09:09):
his former owner. The pre-eminence of the senatorial and economic elites must
be maintained, and provincial nobility mustbe given access to the mechanisms of power
while maintaining the stability of the middleclasses. Of course, their measures did
(09:31):
not benefit the plebs, the lowergroups, which were to be maintained by
the elites, and even less benefitedthe slaves and the libertarians. However,
in Rome he developed a policy ofgrain distribution and public shows that was well
received. He tried to re-establish the old social rules through laws and
(09:52):
political measures, but it was useless. Its legal model turned out to be
more ideological than realistic, as itwas impon psible to realize such a dynamic
society with outdated measures. The realityended up setting a good example are the
laws related to the family, aimedat limiting the role of women in securing
(10:13):
the birth. They tried to stopadultery and the high number of divorces and
penalized unmarried and childless couples, grantingprivileges to married couples with three or more.
Despite his great effort to return tothe model practices of our model ancestors
in his own words, it wasimpossible for Augustus to limit the changing high
(10:37):
imperial society. On the other hand, her private environment was very far from
following the model she intended to impose, as shown by the case of her
daughter, Julia the eldest, Whenshe was fourteen years old, she married
her cousin Marco Marcelo, who diedat the age of two without offspring.
(11:00):
Then she remarried her this time withher friend to Gripa who gave her three
sons, two of them boys,Callo and Lucius. When he died to
Gripa in the year twelve B C. He married her for the third time
to Tiberius, the eldest son ofhis wife Lydia, but Tiberius preferred to
abandon his career as a successor andexile to Rhodes. Apparently, Julia has
(11:31):
been collecting lovers ever since. Senecaspeaks of their flocks and describes her as
an unfaithful woman transformed into a prostitute. Right or not. In the year
two before Christ, her own fatheraccused her of immorality and confined her to
a small island and her alleged accomplicesin a plot to assassinate Augustus were executed.
(11:56):
It is unknown whether she consciously participatedor a very relative Roman pax was
used. Ten years later, Julia' s daughter and Augustus' granddaughter was
(12:18):
accused of adultery and also exiled.A few months later it was Ovidio'
s turn, who, after beingaccused of immorality, was ordered to go
to the last border of the Empire, to a fortress on the Black Sea.
There he would spend his last yearsand all his requests to return were
fruitless. It is still unknown whatexactly caused his fall. Unfortunately, Rome
(12:48):
had grown almost uninterruptedly since the fourthcentury B C, and this expansion was
really difficult to stop and also tomaintain. More slaves, tributes and lands
were constantly needed. So, despitedeclaring himself a supporter of the Roman pax,
Augustus was forced to continue. Theconquests. Only undeveloped areas where the
(13:13):
strategy of the Roman army was muchless effective remained to be mastered. He
first chose mountainous areas such as thePyrenees and the Cantabrian Cornisa in the Vérica
Peninsula or the Alps in Gaul.Once subdued, these were done with the
inner ilyria in present- day Serbia. However, things were very different in
(13:39):
the East. They had a seriousproblem on the Roman border of the Euphrates
River, where they ran into twoterrible enemies, the births and the Armenians.
The first ones. Even Marco Antoniohad not managed to bend them,
so Augusto thought that the best thingwas to agree, as the important thing
(14:00):
was to expect Armenia' s dominationunder far- off influence. He got
King Partus to return to him theinsignia lost by Licinio Crasso in the battle
of Carras, in present- dayTurkey in forty- three BC and that
there were kings of Rome in Armenia. With this, Armenia' s recovery
was lived as if it were areal triumph. It will be about,
(14:22):
when there really was no fight.Moreover, Armenian subjects in theory were in
practice totally independent. This was,to be sure, a victory for diplomacy.
That' s very effective. Finally, he focused his interests on Germania.
(14:46):
His men did not have much troublereaching the Alba Valley and, although
no fully effective control was achieved,a prominent part of the German tribes ended
up delivering their weapons and tributes.Everything was going well until in the ninth
year this expansion by Germania ended drastically. Commander Romano, in the ring Publio.
(15:09):
Quintilio Varo trusted for his withdrawal akerosene chief who had been an assistant
to the Roman troops. Arminius wasbetrayed in the Teutoburg forest. Three Roman
legions were almost completely annihilated. Apartfrom expansion, the other major problem in
(15:37):
his last years was succession. Howto preserve the principality at his death without
another legitimate prince. What' smore, how could he pass his powers
on to someone if in theory hewasn' t a monarch. Augustus had
no sons, so his grandchildren,Callo and Lucio, seemed to be his
best assets. That' s whyyou assure them. He lasted a political
(16:00):
career, but just in case healso bet on other candidates, including his
wife' s second son, LiviaDruso. Fate wanted me not to be
any of them. Druso died unexpectedlyin the year nine and pike and fell
(16:23):
also in the middle of youth andwith only eighteen months of difference. There
was talk of murders of a plotby Lydia to promote her son, Tiberius,
and it wouldn' t be crazyto think about it. After the
(16:44):
death of his grandchildren, Augustus focusedon Tiberius, who had married his daughter
Julia a few years earlier. Hewas not the ideal, but there was
no alternative, so he gave himenough powers to have his death, which
happened in Nola in the fourteenth year, happen to Augustus. That' s
(17:06):
why he built a mausoleum, someonelike him couldn' t just disappear.
A senator claimed to have seen hissoul rise to heaven. Thus began the
cult of Diebus Augustos, whose firstpriestess was Lydia herself. Temples were erected
in his honor and all future emperorsbore his name. Nothing seems to be
(17:30):
able to erase the legacy of thefirst Roman Emperor. So much so that
when the last Augustulo rumble abdicated infour hundred seventy- six, its name
became that of a month August anduntil today
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