Wall Of The Temple Of Rome And Augustus At Ankara, showing the Res Gestae. Augustus' propagandist account of his achievements was inscribed on bronze tablets and set up
outside his Mausoleum in Rome after his death. The original is lost, but the text was replicated on public monuments in the provinces; the copy at Ankara is the best preserved.
Some four years later, in 23, after recovering from a near-fatal illness, Augustus resigned his consulship. (He was consul twice later, in 5 and in 2 B.C., but on both occasions for
only part of the year.) In its place he was voted tnbunician power for life, and his command (imperium) as proconsul and governor of the 'imperial' provinces was specifically
declared superior (mains) to that of any governor of a non-imperial or 'public' province. These changes and the reasons behind them have occasioned much argument: they were
probably influenced both by the practical experience of the working of the earlier settlement and by certain dimly detectable, but elusive, stirrings in a section of the ruling
aristocracy and even among his own leading supporters. Some have judged the revisions of 23 as constituting a tactical withdrawal by Augustus, to be balanced by a new advance in
19 with the grant to him in that year of the consular power for life. (His provinces were always voted him for set periods and renewed at ten- or five-year intervals.) Others see the
grant in 19 as one merely of outward trappings and appearances rather than of any substance of power. In the long-term perspective it hardly matters which view one takes. Augustus
had consular imperium from 28/7 B.C. until the day he died, either as consul or as proconsul. After 23 his I imperium was not only explicitly superior to that of any other pro-
magistrate, but also exercisable within Rome itself; and in that year he had received, not only a life tenure of the tribunician power with its wide discretion to veto the administrative
and legislative acts of others, succour aggrieved and injured citizens, and initiate legislation in the tribal assembly, but also a consular priority in convening the Senate and ordering
its agenda. Moreover, we later find him conducting censuses and revising the Senate-roll and appointing commissioners and superintendents of several new metropolitan
departments. Given all that, his pre-eminent and wide-ranging powers at and in, as well as outside, Rome were and are plain for all to see, whether we choose to attribute them to a
general 'consular power' for life or alternatively to piecemeal enactments empowering Augustus to use his imperium in particular areas and to the gradual establishment of accepted
conventions.