INTRODUCING THE PRINCIPATE 11dictatorship, an ‘annual and perpetual’ consulship, and a supervision of law
and morals. There is disagreement over whether he took ‘consular’ imperium
in 19 BC (which would have given him imperium both inside and outside
Rome), in compensation, as it were, for his abandonment of the consulship.
He had held that offi ce, to the displeasure of the aristocracy, every year from
31 to 23 BC. Some scholars have reacted against the arid character of such
debates by advocating an analysis of the emperor’s actions that is not tied to
the issue of their legal justifi cation. The epigram ‘the emperor was what the
emperor did’ is a denial of the primacy of the constitutional question.^25
The constitutional arrangements of Augustus do matter – they mattered
to him and to the aristocracy – and an attempt should be made to comprehend
them. But they only give us a partial understanding of the emperor’s standing
and infl uence. To get to the bottom of that , we would have to examine the
way he and his successors legimitized their position in the eyes of Romans
of Rome, Italians, provincials, soldiers – by public munifi cence, ceremonial
display, restoration and innovation in cult and ritual, and self- promotion
through the media of epigraphy, coinage, art and architecture.^26
To return to the constitutional question, which is our present concern:
there is an issue as to whether the gap between what the emperor did and
what he was legally entitled to do (or at least what someone holding his
magisterial powers might ordinarily have been expected to do) narrowed
signifi cantly in the period after Augustus – whether the prerogatives of the
emperor received defi nition that corresponded more closely to imperial
behaviour.
The bronze tablet inscribed with the text known as the ‘lex de imperio
Vespasiani’ was probably issued shortly after the death of Vespasian’s
defeated predecessor, Vitellius (20–21 December 69). It contains part of a
comitial law conferring powers on Vespasian, preceded no doubt by a formal
act of approval in the senate. Vespasian had been acclaimed as emperor by
his soldiers at Alexandria on 1 July 69, and, signifi cantly, marked this day as
the date of his accession. The fi rst clauses, those granting the basic powers,
are missing. What we have is a series of specifi c prerogatives, for example, the
right to extend the pomerium (the sacred boundary of Rome), and the right
of commending candidates to magistracies for automatic election. The crucial
problem of interpretation is raised by the sixth surviving clause, which reads:
‘... and that, whatever he judges to be in accordance with the interest of the
state and the maiestas of divine and human and public and private affairs, he
shall have the right and power to do and perform, as the divine Augustus, and
Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus, and Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus
Germanicus, had’. Is this a formal grant of total power to act at will, as some
have thought? If so, the preceding clauses in the law would appear to be
redundant. The fact that Augustus is named as the fi rst precedent should give
us pause. As we saw, he took great pains to emphasize that his power was
exercised within a Republican framework. Vespasian made it clear, from the
inception of his rule, that he wished to be seen as following in the tradition