Augustus

XIX

THE CULT OF VIRTUE

20S B.C.–A.D. 9

The princeps understood that independence of spirit was central to a Roman’s idea of himself. His claim to have restored the Republic would not have been acquiesced to, nor his rule accepted, if he had attempted to muzzle opinion. In fact, he would have found it hard to do so, for he did not have a secret police at his disposal.

What was more, there was no need to restrict citizens’ rights to self-expression, for there was little outright opposition. The whole point of his constitutional settlement was that it attracted a broad consent among the ruling class. What critics there were could be allowed their say without risking revolution.

This is not to say that rising men did not practice self-censorship, or that poets and historians failed to flatter. As we have seen, the princeps and his unofficial “minister of culture,” Maecenas, well understood the power of literature to promote official values.

But there was another, more subtle and more compelling reason for the license Augustus allowed commentators—historians and poets. This concerned his core beliefs. Like many of his fellow Romans, he deeply disapproved of the decadent society around him, which had abandoned the severe Roman virtues of the past. He wanted writers like Titus Livius (in English, Livy) to speak their minds on this subject without fear or favor.

About the same age as the princeps, Livy was born in Patavium (today’s Padua) in Cisalpine Gaul. He made no effort to follow a public career, instead devoting his long life to the writing of a monumental history of Rome, from the foundation to 9 B.C. He was one of Rome’s first professional historians, for until then history had usually been a pastime for retired politicians.

Livy’s worldview was moral and romantic, and most thinking people of his age shared it. In the preface to his magnum opus, he stated that writing history was a way of escaping the troubles of the modern world: “Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every kind of sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death both individual and collective.”

The trouble was seen to have begun in the second century B.C., when, somewhat absentmindedly, the Senate acquired its empire in the east—first Greece and Macedonia, then Asia Minor and Syria. Leading Romans began to copy the extravagant lifestyle of Asiatic Greeks. The culminating metaphor for Roman decadence was the career of Mark Antony and his sexual subversion by Cleopatra.

This perceived moral decline was accompanied by political collapse at the hands of a succession of selfish dynasts. The greatest of them, Julius Caesar, broke the Republic, which for centuries had embodied in constitutional form the traditional Roman virtues, now lost. Although himself a dynast, Pompey the Great, who opposed Caesar in the civil war, gave his life for the republican cause, and came to be a symbol of it.

According to Tacitus, Livy “praised Pompey so warmly that Augustus [whom he knew personally] called him ‘the Pompeian.’” The historian never called Brutus and Cassius bandits and parricides, their “fashionable designations today.”

Livy was not alone in his overt republican sympathies. In the Aeneid, Augustus’ poet laureate dared to rehabilitate that most die-hard of republicans, the pigheaded purist Marcus Porcius Cato, who led the optimates against Julius Caesar and died by his own hand after his defeat in Africa.

The victor of Actium was not the only great Roman to be depicted on the shield of Aeneas. In a vision of the underworld various historical figures are shown waiting for their lives to begin. Virgil points to where “the righteous are set apart, with Cato as their lawgiver.” Elsewhere, the poet delivers Julius Caesar a veiled rebuke: “Turn not your country’s hand against your country’s heart!”

The princeps did not demur from this kind of talk. He transferred the statue of Pompey the Great from the hall where Caesar had been assassinated to a much more prominent position on an arch facing the grand door of Pompey’s Theater. He remarked of Cato that “to seek to keep the constitution unchanged argues a good citizen and a good man.”

Augustus knew and liked Virgil. Indeed, in 19 B.C., when returning to Rome after his Parthian success, the princeps met him in Greece shortly before the poet died at the age of fifty-two. Virgil was dissatisfied with his masterpiece, which he had finished but not corrected, and when his health began to fail he asked his friend the poet Lucius Varius Rufus to burn it in the event of his death. Varius refused to obey his orders and, acting under the authority of Augustus, published the epic.

The reason for Augustus’ tolerance of these rehabilitations, and his cultivation of revisionists such as Livy and Virgil, was simple. The ideology of the regime was to restore the Republic. This could be advocated, in the first instance, by praising the ideal commonwealth of Rome’s early centuries, but also, it necessarily followed, by championing its more recent standard-bearers, the men whom Julius Caesar had destroyed. It followed that Augustus was obliged to reject his revolutionary past (and by implication, his adoptive father) and show that he was a true republican.

To this end, freedom of speech was essential. The princeps had to let the regime’s opponents celebrate their lost leaders, so that he could be seen to agree. It would have been too odd, too barefaced for him to bury Julius Caesar and exhume Cato and Pompey himself. He needed an opposition, so that he could quietly join it.

To revisit the heroic past was not just a retrieval, but a rebirth. Virgil drew an analogy between the original founding of Rome and its refoundation by Augustus, between his sober and devout Trojan hero, Aeneas, and the sober and devout princeps.

Rome’s destiny, Virgil wrote, was to “rule an Italy fertile in leadership / And loud with war…and bring the whole world under a system of law.” History culminates in the inaugurator of new Saturnica regna, the reign of Jupiter’s father, Saturn, when men lived in virtuous simplicity:

And here, here is the man, the promised one you know of—

Caesar Augustus, son of a god, destined to rule

Where Saturn ruled of old in Latium,

and there

Bring back the age of gold.

The point was that Romans would not merit their imperial role unless they also tackled excessive consumption, sexual immorality, and the general failure of moral fiber. Once again the princeps recruited his constellation of great poets to assist him. Horace mostly celebrates a happily amoral sensuality outside the bonds of marriage, but in his Odes, the first three books of which were published in 23 B.C., he devoted a group of poems to the untypical theme of moral renaissance. He wrote of the “large inconvenience of wealth” and compared the citizens of Rome, to their disadvantage, with the barbarous Scythians, unexpectedly cast as noble savages.

Family pride

Is their rich dower, chastity shy to glance aside,

Faith in the marriage tie;

Sin is abhorred; the price of scandal is to die.

This censoriousness chimed with Augustus’ thinking. For some years during the twenties B.C. he meditated on social legislation, designed to purify morals and encourage the family. Among respectable opinion, there was a consensus about the failings of Rome’s ruling class: divorce was easy; young people were reluctant to marry; the birthrate appeared to be falling; sexual license was widespread; some rich men avoided a public career.

By contrast, traditional standards of behavior in provincial society in Italy were still upheld and the patterns of family life were little changed. This was the world in which Augustus had spent his childhood; his memories of Velitrae may have given a personal edge to his desire to restore Roman values.

Legislation concerning the family would be a distinct and probably unpopular innovation, and the princeps took his time before laying any proposals before the Senate. He may have sought to do so in or around 29 B.C., but stayed his hand. Now, probably in 18 B.C., he brought forward a body of laws designed to encourage marriage and procreation. His aim was not only to foster traditional values, but also to create new generations of imperial soldiers and administrators.

Augustus drew an explicit link with a more austere and fecund past when he read out to the Senate the entire text of an old speech on the need for larger families, made by a censor, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus, in the middle of the second century B.C. The dry and unsentimental Metellus said:

If we could get on without a wife, Romans, we would all avoid that annoyance; but since nature has ordained that we can neither live very comfortably with them nor at all without them, we must take thought for our lasting well-being rather than for the pleasure of the moment.

The princeps presented the so-called Julian laws (leges Juliae, after his clan name) in person to an assembly of the people. For the first time, the lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis transformed a woman’s adultery from a private offense into a public crime. Since time immemorial, a rough-and-ready custom allowed a husband (in theory, at least) to kill his wife if taken in adultery, either on his own account or upon the judgment of a family council. His only alternative, and the one usually chosen, was divorce. The woman lost all or part of her dowry.

The princeps felt that this was unsatisfactory. According to his new law, an offended husband was obliged to divorce his wife immediately and then prosecute her for adultery in a special court. Penalties included banishment and confiscation of half the male lover’s property (if the couple were caught in flagrante, the husband was allowed to kill him). The woman was forbidden to marry a freeborn citizen in the future.

The law was not quite so severe in practice as appears at first sight, for unless a husband divorced his wife, she could not be prosecuted. A husband who took no action could be charged with condoning the offense, but only if he had actually caught his wife with another man, or if he could be shown to have profited by her activity—say, by pimping for her.

These were both unlikely circumstances and, in a generally permissive climate, it is uncertain that many husbands took advantage of the new legislation. They may have reflected that they themselves might be caught by it if (as was not uncommon) they were conducting an affair with a married woman. According to Suetonius, this was a situation in which Augustus often found himself. Moral campaigns are most likely to succeed if led by someone who has nothing with which to reproach himself.

Unsurprisingly, the princeps faced skepticism and laughter at his philandering. Unfazed, he advised senators to “guide and command your wives as you see fit,” he said. “That is what I do with mine.”

The amused senators pressed the princeps to tell them exactly what guidance he gave Livia. He uttered a few unwilling words about a modest appearance and seemly behavior, but seemed quite untroubled by the inconsistency between his words and deeds.

On another occasion, when Augustus was sitting as judge, a young man was brought before him who had taken as wife a married woman with whom he had previously committed adultery. This was most embarrassing, for it was exactly how the princeps had behaved when he married Livia in 38 B.C. Uncomfortably aware of the coincidence, he recovered his composure only with difficulty. “Let us turn our minds to the future,” he said, “so that nothing of this kind can happen again.”

A lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus addressed the low birthrate in the upper classes (if Suetonius is to be believed, the general population was rising). It was revised in A.D. 9 as the lex Papia Poppaea; exactly what was in the original legislation cannot now be certainly known, but the general thrust was philoprogenitive.

The legislation set penalties for bachelors and childless couples, mainly limiting their right to inheritance under wills. After divorce or widowhood, women were expected to remarry within a fixed time. There were incentives, too: a father of one child was allowed to stand for public office one year earlier than the age stipulated in the regulations. The siring of three children (four in Italy outside of Rome; five in the provinces) exempted a man from certain legal duties.

How effective were his measures? No statistics survive; we have only anecdotes. The literary record gives the impression that, legislation or no legislation, many men of the ruling class did marry and have children. Perhaps some took their time before doing so, but a glance at the family trees of leading personalities shows that most of them produced two or three children who survived to adulthood, and some had larger families (Agrippa, for example, fathered five children).

On the other side of the account, piquantly, Marcus Papius Mutilus and Gaius Poppaeus Sabinus, the consuls who brought in the lex Papia Poppaea, were both unmarried, as unkind observers noted. Augustus and Livia were childless, albeit involuntarily, and for all his fine words Horace never married.

Over the years the legislation was repeatedly reviewed and amended, which rather suggests that those against whom it was aimed found their way around its prohibitions.

Roman society depended on millions of slaves from every corner of the empire—Gaul and Spain, northern Africa, Greece, the eastern provinces. To function properly, Rome required their passivity, if not their loyalty.

The continuing flow of wealth into Italy in the first century B.C. was accompanied by a huge increase in the number of slaves, and so of those who could be freed. Enfranchisement (and, with citizenship) was popular not only as a reward for long and loyal service; ex-slaves were also a source of votes at election time, and manumission freed an owner of the duty of supporting old or sick slaves. A freedman, or libertus, was still linked to his former owner, for he had to join his clientela and owed him a continuing duty of loyalty and support.

Much of the Roman public believed that there were too many liberti: they were swamping the citizen body, diluting its Italianness. This appears to have worried Augustus too, who expressed a wish in his will to “preserve a significant distinction between Roman citizens and the peoples of subject nations.” It is reported that when Livia once asked him to make a Gallic dependent of hers from a tribute-paying province a citizen, he refused, offering exemption from tribute instead. He said: “I would rather forfeit whatever he may owe the Privy Purse than cheapen the value of Roman citizenship.”

Remarks of this kind seem to have been aimed at assuaging public fears rather than representing his real opinion, however, for in practice the princeps encouraged freedmen who showed energy, enthusiasm, and talent.

The formal methods of enfranchisement all took time to bring into effect, so owners were allowed to free slaves informally, by a simple written or verbal declaration. However, this did not confer citizenship; probably in 17 B.C., a lex Junia gave these informal enfranchisees a form of “Latin rights,” a second-class citizenship without voting rights.

In later years a lex Fufia Caninia limited the number of slaves whom an owner could free in his will, and a lex Aelia Sentia imposed some age limits: an owner had to be over twenty years old before he could give a slave freedom, and a slave over thirty before he could receive it. But these measures were designed to regulate manumission, not to prevent it.

Social reform was insufficient by itself to renew Rome. Writing before 28 B.C., Horace addressed his fellow citizens:

You shall pay for each ancestral crime,

Until our mouldering temples are rebuilt

And the gods’ statues cleansed of smoke and grime.

Only as servants of the gods in heaven

Can you rule earth.

From a couple of years or so before Actium, Augustus recognized the importance of encouraging the state religion. In addition to the Temple of Apollo interconnecting with his house on the Palatine, and that of Jupiter Tonans on the Capitol, Augustus built or refurnished many temples, all of them associated with him, his family, and the regime.

One of the most splendid was the Temple of Mars Ultor (Avenging Mars) on the Capitol. Vowed at the battle of Philippi, it was the centerpiece of a huge new Forum of Augustus which was dedicated in 2 B.C. Like the Parthenon in Athens, the temple was large enough to have eight columns across the front. In its cella, or hall, stood images of Augustus’ ancestors, and Rome’s long ago recovered legionary standards were displayed. Here the princeps received foreign embassies; here the Senate debated questions of war, and young Roman boys celebrated their coming of age.

However, something more than marble buildings was required to bring about a religious renaissance. Some great event was called for, a sacred ceremony that would bring citizens together to celebrate the dawning of a new age. It was found in an unusual quarter.

A little to the north of the city in the Campus Martius was a volcanic cleft, at the bottom of which stood a subterranean altar known as the Tarentum or Terentum. Here a nocturnal festival was held in honor of Dis and Proserpina, the gloomy deities of the underworld. Called the Ludi Tarentini, the festival took place over three nights once every century (the interval was set so that no one would be able to attend more than once).

Augustus and his religious advisers decided to rebrand the festival, naming it the Ludi Saeculares, Centennial (or Secular) Games, in the summer of 17 B.C. (and decreasing the periodicity to 110 years).

The ceremonies themselves needed some cheering up. Torches, sulfur, and asphalt were distributed to the entire citizenry, to encourage mass participation in a fiery purification rite. Dis and Proserpina were dismissed, being replaced by the Fates, divine beings who watched over the fertility of nature and of humankind, by the goddess of childbirth, and by Mother Earth. Some daytime celebrations were added in honor of Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, and Apollo’s sister Diana. In other words, the old melancholy emphasis on death and the passing of an era was transformed into a forward-looking invocation of the future.

The Ludi culminated in a splendid ritual in the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine. An inscription recorded the program for the day: “After a sacrifice was completed by those thereunto appointed, twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls who had lost neither father nor mother, sang a hymn, and so likewise on the Capitol. The hymn was written by Q. Horatius Flaccus.”

The chubby little poet of the pleasures of private life kept a straight face for once and produced something as solemn and grand as the occasion warranted. He struck all the notes that his master and friend expected.

Goddess [Diana], make strong our youth and bless the Senate’s

Decrees rewarding parenthood and marriage,

That from the new laws Rome may reap a lavish

Harvest of boys and girls.

The main message was that the princeps had brought back old Rome and breathed new life into the mos maiorum. A procession of abstract personifications was conjured up in calm, high-flying verse:

Now Faith and Peace and Honour and old-fashioned

Conscience and unremembered Virtue venture

To walk again, and with them blessed Plenty

Pouring her brimming horn.

Ten years had passed since the “restoration” of the Republic. Augustus, now aged forty-six, had established his power without getting himself assassinated. Once a faction leader who had expropriated the Republic, he had successfully recast himself as a new Romulus. The regime had laid claim to embodying the Roman state, and few of those who attended the Ludi Saeculares will have gainsaid it.

However, almost invisible cracks, beyond evidence but not beyond the scrutiny of suspicion, hint at strains in the heart of government. The execution of Murena, the estrangement from Maecenas, the impression of an alliance between Agrippa and Livia to put a brake on the princeps’ dynastic plans, the brushes with death—these all stood in uneasy contrast with the public symbolism of order, stability, and permanence.