Mary Beard

I don't think Romans didn't shake hands, but he says, hello, Marcus Tallis, how are you?

Now, that must have taken hours, if it's true.

But there's this sense that he has a kind of patronal sense.

command of the structures of power.

Now, he's also got a military command, because one way of seeing Augustus's regime would be a very, very iron fist in a velvet glove.

And one of the things he does is effectively nationalize the army.

The Republican army is

had been paid for by state funds in ways that we would probably expect, but it nevertheless was an army that was essentially owned by its commanders.

Now Augustus says, every soldier is beholden to me.

To me, I'm the state.

And he merges me and the state in the way that clever dictators often do manage to merge me and the state.

And he effectively buys the loyalty of the army so that very effectively there are very few military rebellions for the next couple of hundred years.

He does that by fixing a salary for being a soldier, fixing terms and conditions of service, and giving them a retirement pension.

So he has undercut the idea that the soldiers might feel loyalty to their commanders rather than to him.

It's still kind of not easy to see quite how that adds up to a new deal in which, as I said, there probably were some, and we know there were a few dissidents who didn't like this, but it looks as if the whole thing changed.

was not hugely challenged.

He does it in other ways.

I mean, I think I've been calling him Augustus.

I said that his original name is Octavius.

At some point, when he's come back from defeating Antony and Cleopatra, he decides he wants a new name.