Augustus’ presentation of “empire” in his Res Gestae

Having defeated all his political enemies and expanded the rule of Rome enormously, Octavian, from 27 BC known as Augustus, ended the civil wars which had plagued the Late Republic and founded the system known as the Roman Principate. The Res Gestae purports to be a retrospective survey by Augustus of his own public achievements in restoring the res publica and conquering the world. It was published in Rome but the only surviving copies were found in the new and distant province of Galatia. In this paper I will try to explain how Augustus, as the founder of the new era known today as ‘the Roman Empire’, envisages and presents Roman rule under his leadership by analysing the content of the Res Gestae. From it we can see that there indeed emerges a concept similar to our ‘empire’. The narrative structure of the Res Gestae shows that Roman imperial rule is conceived of by Augustus in a scheme of core-periphery, in which the core is composed of the provinces under direct Roman control, while the periphery is an area of more vaguely subject people or places maintained by threats and intervention, or more weakly by ‘friendship’ (amicitia), which vary according to the historical specifics of contact between these areas or peoples and Rome. In both cases, whether subjection is in the name of the ‘rule’ or the ‘friendship’ of Roman people, it is Augustus’ personal authority that appears to matter the most, which indicates that Augustus’ institution of a monarchic system was a decisive element in the development of this new holistic concept of Roman imperial rule.

Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the reasons for Locke’s and Rousseau’s turn against absolutist congruence theory and toward a defense of authoritarian families in liberal states. They saw that the absolutists had failed to adequately grapple with the power of public opinion to undermine the sovereign authority that was supposed to control it, and they understood the enormous influence of opinion over our ideas and its potential to foreclose intellectual freedom. To defend that freedom for adults, they leaned on the family and its domestic education of children as a buttress and counterinfluence against the power of fashion and opinion. Recognizing this pedagogical role of personal authority in the foundations of liberalism may help us to resolve our own inability to find a place for the basic but private experience of personal authority, which, however much we wish it away, remains central to forming liberal public life

Locke’s Authoritarian Education

Locke’s pedagogy follows from his political and epistemic theory, counterposing an authoritarian pedagogy against limited formal parental authority. In light of his fears about the power of public opinion, Locke argued that personal authority in childhood was necessary for intellectual independence in adulthood, and the personal authority of parents was required to shield children against competing authorities in society. Locke’s account of human development reveals that the intervention of a unitary, personal authority to direct the will at the beginning is necessary for the will to be self-directing afterward. The inward-directed Lockean family forms a counterforce against the prevailing fashions outside. The private guidance of familial and pedagogical authority in childhood is a fence against the potential dangers of Locke’s political philosophy. His pedagogy argues that a state grounded in equality and individual liberty requires a hierarchical, authoritarian family to sustain itself.

Marvell

Chapter 2 revisits the question of Marvell’s place in the Engagement controversy, to map his ambivalent use of arguments from sovereignty. It contextualizes the mode of cavaliering activism celebrated in several of Marvell’s poems within contemporary republican and Engager challenges to the royalist doctrine of passive obedience. This includes a rapprochement with, and appropriation of, Davenant. This context provides the basis for, first, a new reading of Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ in comparison with the Engagers Marchamont Nedham and Anthony Ascham; and, second, a survey of Marvell’s poetic engagements with Davenant, and their political implications, in the 1650s poems ‘Tom May’s Death’, ‘Upon Appleton House’, and ‘Music’s Empire’. Marvell’s habitual emphasis on modest and participatory government is strategically suspended when he uses defactoist and absolutist arguments to magnify the personal authority of Oliver Cromwell.

Blowing Hot and Cold: The Role of Estoppel

This chapter provides a detailed account of a particular kind of estoppel. It argues that the law knows of a doctrine of “formal estoppel,” as contrasted with other, more familiar, variants. Formal estoppel is an extension of estoppel by deed, whereby a person who makes a formal statement as to their rights is estopped from subsequently denying that statement. It explains the nature and normative significance of formal estoppel in terms of the personal authority wielded by right-holders over the determination of their rights. Part of what it means to have a private right, as this chapter shows, is for the right-holder to have personal authority in relation to others’ understanding of their rights. The exercise of this authority extends to public statements made in respect of an individual’s rights. Statements by right-holders are an important way in which clarity can be reached in what an individual owes another. Recognition of the authority and responsibility of right-holders for public statements as to their rights implies that the law should treat them as binding and final. Formal estoppel is, then, the means by which courts recognize a question as to private rights as having been irrevocably decided by the right-holder.

Thomas Pennant’s Highlands

Thomas Pennant’s two Scottish Tours stabilized the generic norms for writing about the Highlands in the period, for which reason they lie at the heart of the book. The Welsh traveller sought to appease Scottish public opinion by publishing a favourable account of a nation in the early throes of improvement, combining the personal authority of the informed traveller’s eye with the encyclopaedic protocols of enlightenment knowledge, gleaned from correspondence and pre-circulated questionnaires to Highland ministers, gentlemen, and naturalists. Pennant was the first traveller to offer an adequate visual documentation of Scotland: his 1772 Tour contains ninety-one engraved plates, many of them the work of his artist Moses Griffith. Notable here, especially in connection with the previous chapter, is Pennant’s ‘vision at Ardmaddie’ at the end of his 1772 Voyage to the Hebrides, when he is visited by an Ossianic spectre critical of Highland landlords for abandoning their duties of trusteeship in pursuit of personal profit.