The Pax Romana of the early Principate was a Roman peace, not a barbarian one. The settling dust of the civil wars revealed a vast Mediterranean empire. Ptolemaic Egypt was gone, now a Roman province. Galatia too, in the Anatolian highlands, was soon gobbled up. The emperor Augustus’ legions marched against the tribes of the Lower Danube. In northern Spain, the emperor’s men waged a decade-long conquest of the Cantabri of Asturias. In the wake of Antony’s fall, Rome’s boundaries were again expanding as they had in Julius Caesar’s day.
In this way, the foreign policy of Augustus seemed a return to the expansionary tendency that had long held sway over the old Republic. Having restored order within the imperium after the chaos and civil wars of the Late Republic, Augustus thought it was again time to look beyond it.
“Yet Augustus,” Suetonius tells us, “never wantonly invaded any country, and felt no temptation to increase the boundaries of the empire to enhance his military glory [bellica gloria]; indeed, he made certain barbarian chieftains swear in the Temple of Mars Ultor that they would faithfully keep the peace for which they sued.”
Here, Suetonius implicitly draws a distinction between the motives behind Augustus’ warmaking and those of the Republic’s great captains. Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar were all steeped in a profoundly militarized politics wherein ‘military glory’ was the Republic’s most valued credential. Republican consulship and generalship went hand in hand, while the social strata of Rome’s voting menfolk defined the structure of the Republic’s armed forces until the Marian reforms of the early first century BC.
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