First Constitutional Settlement; 'Augustus' Conferred

Victory creates a problem: how to keep it without becoming a king. In early 27 BCE, Octavian walked into the Curia on the Forum’s north side and performed a constitutional drama. He proposed to lay down his extraordinary commands, to transfer the res publica back to the Senate and People. The Palatine Hill, where he lived, lay within view; the Campus Martius, where citizens voted, was a short walk away. The geography itself staged the gesture [1][16].

The Senate replied with gratitude—and with a plan. Octavian would “restore” the state, but the provinces that demanded armies—Hispania, Gaul, Syria, and Egypt among them—would remain under his control. The Senate retained the safer, older provinces like Asia and Africa. It was a partition by risk and reward. Octavian’s soldiers stayed his soldiers [1][16].

They added a name: Augustus. The honorific, connoting venerability and auspiciousness, lifted the man beyond ordinary magistrates without calling him ‘rex.’ The Res Gestae would later memorialize the moment with crafted modesty: “When I had put an end to the civil wars… by universal consent I transferred the Republic from my own dominion back to the authority of the Senate and Roman People” [9]. The language rang like polished bronze.

This first settlement was law as theater. Senators in crimson-bordered togas stood on gleaming marble; the murmur beneath the Curia’s coffered roof rose and subsided as motions were read. Outside, on the Via Sacra, citizens heard that peace had been secured and liberty restored. Inside, Augustus kept the levers that mattered: provincial legions and the right to command them [1][9][16].

Campus Martius markers—new monuments and old—began to whisper a single story. The Mausoleum of Augustus rose as a circular promise of continuity; elsewhere, the lines of a solar meridian would later cut time itself to imperial measure. The city’s stones aligned with the settlement’s sentences to tell Romans that one man’s auctoritas could be their stability [16].

The arrangement included term limits—initially ten years for his provincial commands—but everyone understood the arithmetic. The man who controlled Egypt’s grain and legions on the Rhine was not a temporary appointee. He was, as his preferred title suggested, the first among citizens—princeps—whose presence the Senate would now honor at every meeting [1][16].