The victory of Octavian over Antonius and Cleopatra at Actium in 31, and still more the process, beginning in 28 and culminating in the reordering of his powers and, on 16 January 27, the conferral by the senate and people of the name Augustus marked a change which was rapidly known throughout the Roman world and which altered for ever the nature of the Rome's empire. It was inevitable that so great a change in the distribution and the management of the provinciae and the concentration of imperium in the hands of one individual would affect the ways in which the words were used, and such language in turn reveals a different way of thinking about empire, certainly when compared with the patterns we have seen in Cicero, but even with the more ‘imperial’ ideas of Pompeius. In this chapter it is these shifts in meaning, or rather the addition of meanings, of imperium and provincia which will form the centre of attention, and in particular any evidence for the use of imperium in a geographical sense, of ‘empire’ rather than ‘power’.

AUGUSTUS AND THE RES GESTAE

The obvious place to start such an investigation is with Augustus himself in the record he himself left in the Res Gestae. By the end of the reign of Augustus, it is clear that the change for which we are searching had come about. In the Res Gestae the princeps refers to the closing of the gates of the temple of Janus and writes that the intention of the ancestors had been to close them ‘[cum p]er totum i[mperium po]puli Roma[ni terra marique es]set parta vic|[torii]s pax’ (‘when through the whole imperium of the Roman people by land and sea peace had been gained by victories’).