Caesar and Christ

93:

Persecution of Jews, Christians, and philosophers

96-98:

Principate of Nerva

98:

Tacitus consul

98-117:

Principate of Trajan

101-2:

Trajan’s first war against the Dacians

105:

Tacitus’ Histories

105-7:

Trajan’s second war against the Dacians

111:

Pliny the Younger curator of Bithynia

113:

Forum and column of Trajan

114-6:

Trajan’s campaigns against Parthia

116:

Tacitus’ Annals; Juvenal’s Satires

117-38:

Principate of Hadrian

119:

Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars

121-34:

Hadrian’s tour of the Empire

134:

Fl. Salvius Julianus, jurist

138-61:

Principate of Antoninus Pius

139:

Mausoleum of Hadrian

161-80:

Principate of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

161-9:

Co-reign of Lucius Verus

161:

Institutiones of Gaius

162-5:

War against Parthia

166-7:

Plague spreads through the Empire

166-80:

War with the Marcomanni

174 (?):

Marcus writes the Meditations

175:

Rebellion of Avidius Cassius

180:

Death of Marcus Aurelius

180-92:

Principate of Commodus

183:

Conspiracy of Lucilla

185:

Execution of Perennis

189:

Famine; execution of Cleander

190:

Pertinax, prefect

193

(Jan. 1): Murder of Commodus

CHAPTER XI

Augustan Statesmanship

30 B.C..-A.D. 14

I. THE ROAD TO MONARCHY

FROM Alexandria Octavian passed to Asia and continued the reallotment of kingdoms and provinces. Not till the summer of 29 did he reach Italy. There almost all classes welcomed and feted him as a savior and joined in a triumph that lasted three days. The Temple of Janus was closed as a sign that for a moment Mars had had his fill. The lusty peninsula was worn out with twenty years of civil war. Its farms had been neglected, its towns had been sacked or besieged, much of its wealth had been stolen or destroyed. Administration and protection had broken down; robbers made every street unsafe at night; highwaymen roamed the roads, kidnaped travelers, and sold them into slavery. Trade diminished, investment stood still, interest rates soared, property values fell. Morals, which had been loosened by riches and luxury, had not been improved by destitution and chaos, for few conditions are more demoralizing than poverty that comes after wealth. Rome was full of men who had lost their economic footing and then their moral stability: soldiers who had tasted adventure and had learned to kill; citizens who had seen their savings consumed in the taxes and inflation of war and waited vacuously for some returning tide to lift them back to affluence; women dizzy with freedom, multiplying divorces, abortions, and adulteries. Childlessness was spreading as the ideal of a declining vitality; and a shallow sophistication prided itself upon its pessimism and cynicism. This was not a full picture of Rome, but a dangerous disease burning in its blood. On the sea piracy had returned, rejoicing in the suicide of states. Cities and provinces licked their wounds after the successive exactions of Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey, Gabinius, Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Antony, and Octavian. Greece, which had been the battlefield, was ruined; Egypt was despoiled; the Near East had fed a hundred armies and bribed a thousand generals; their peoples hated Rome as a master who had destroyed their freedom without giving them security or peace. What if some leader should arise among them, discover the exhaustion of Italy, and unite them in another war of liberation against Rome?

Once a virile Senate would have faced these dangers, raised sturdy legions, found for them able captains, and guided them with far-seeing statesmanship. But the Senate was now only a name. The great families that had been its strength had died out in conflict or sterility, and the traditions of statecraft had not been transmitted to the businessmen, soldiers, and provincials who had succeeded them. The new Senate gratefully yielded its major powers to one who would plan, take responsibility, and lead.

Octavian hesitated before abolishing the old constitution, and Dio Cassius represents him as discussing the matter at great length with Maecenas and Agrippa. Since in their judgment all governments were oligarchies, the problem could not present itself to them as a choice among monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; they had to decide whether, under the given conditions of space and time, oligarchy was to be preferred in a monarchical form based upon an army, or an aristocratic form rooted in heredity, or a democratic form resting on the wealth of the business class. Octavian combined them all in a “principate” that mingled the theories of Cicero, the precedents of Pompey, and the policies of Caesar.

The people accepted his solution philosophically. They were no longer enamored of freedom, but wearily wished for security and order; any man might rule them who guaranteed them games and bread. Vaguely they understood that their clumsy comitia, clogged with corruption and racked with violence, could not govern the Empire, could not restore health to Italy, could not even administer Rome. The difficulties of freedom multiply with the area it embraces. When Rome ceased to be a city-state, empire drove it inexorably toward the imitation of Egypt, Persia, and Macedon. Out of the collapse of freedom into individualism and chaos a new government had to be created to forge a new order for a widened realm. All the Mediterranean world lay in disorder at Octavian’s feet, waiting for statesmanship.

He succeeded where Caesar had failed, because he was more patient and devious, because he understood the strategy of words and forms, because he was willing to move cautiously and slowly where his great-uncle had been forced by the brevity of time to wound living traditions and crowd a generation of changes into half a year of life. Moreover, Octavian had money. When he brought the treasury of Egypt to Rome, says Suetonius, “money became so abundant that the interest rate fell” from twelve to four per cent, and “the value of real estate rose enormously.” As soon as Octavian made it clear that property rights were again sacred, that he was through with proscriptions and confiscations, money came out of hiding, investment took courage, trade expanded, wealth resumed its accumulation, and some of it trickled down to the workers and the slaves. All ranks in Italy were pleased to learn that Italy was to remain the beneficiary, and Rome the capital, of the Empire; that the threat of a resurrected East had for a time been laid; and that Caesar’s dream of a commonwealth with equal rights had been replaced by a quiet return to the privileges of the master race.

From this bountiful rapine Octavian first paid his debts to his soldiers. He kept 200,000 men in service, each bound to him by an oath of personal loyalty; the remaining 300,000 he discharged with an allotment of agricultural land; and to each soldier he gave a substantial gift of money. He lavished presents upon his generals, his supporters, and his friends. On several occasions he made up deficits in the public treasury from his private funds. To provinces suffering from political depredations or acts of God he remitted a year’s tribute and sent large sums for relief. He forgave property owners all tax arrears and publicly burned the records of their debts to the state. He paid for the corn dole, provided prodigal spectacles and games, and presented cash to every citizen. He undertook great public works to end unemployment and beautify Rome, and paid for them out of his purse. Was it any wonder that the nations looked upon him as a god?

While all this money slipped through his hands this bourgeois empereur lived simply, shunning the luxuries of the nobles and the emoluments of office, wearing the garments woven by the women in his home, and sleeping always in one small room of what had been the palace of Hortensius. When this burned down after he had occupied it for twenty-eight years, he built his new palace on the plan of the old, and slept in the same narrow cubiculum as before. Even when away from the eyes of the city he lived like a philosopher rather than a prince. His sole indulgence was to escape from public affairs by sailing leisurely along the Campanian coast.

Step by step he persuaded, or graciously permitted, the Senate and the assemblies to grant him powers that in their total made him in all but name a king. He kept always the title of imperator, as commander in chief of all the armed forces of the state. As the army remained for the most part outside the capital and usually outside Italy, the citizens could forget, while they went through all the forms of the dead Republic, that they were living under a military monarchy in which force was hidden so long as phrases could rule. Octavian was chosen consul in 43 and 33, and in every year from 31 to 23. By the tribunician authority conferred upon him in 36, 30, and 23, he had for life the inviolability of a tribune, the right to initiate legislation in the Senate or the Assembly, and the power to veto the actions of any official in the government. No one protested against this amiable dictatorship. The businessmen who were making hay under the sun of peace, the senators who sniffed Octavian’s Egyptian spoils, the soldiers who held their lands or status by his bounty, the beneficiaries of Caesar’s laws, appointments, and will-all were now agreed with Homer that the rule of one man is best, at least if he should be so free with his funds as Octavian, so industrious and competent, and so visibly devoted to the good of the state.

In 28, as co-censor with Agrippa, he took a census of the people, revised the membership of the Senate, reduced it to 600, and was himself named permanently princeps senatus. The title had meant “first on the roll call of the Senate”; soon it would mean “prince” in the sense of ruler, just as imperator, through Octavian’s life tenure of the name, would come to mean “emperor.” History rightly calls his government, and that of his successors for two centuries, a “principate” rather than strictly a monarchy; for until the death of Commodus all the “emperors” recognized, at least in theory, that they were only the leaders (principes) of the Senate. To make the constitutional façade of his authority more imposing, Octavian in 27 surrendered all his offices, proclaimed the restoration of the Republic, and expressed his desire (at thirty-five) to retire to private life. Perhaps the drama had been arranged; Octavian was one of those cautious men who believe that honesty is the best policy, but that it must be practiced with discrimination. The Senate countered his abdication with its own, returned to him nearly all his powers, implored him to continue his guidance of the state, and conferred upon him the title of Augustus which history has mistaken as his name. Hitherto the word had been applied only to holy objects and places, and to certain creative or augmenting divinities (augere, to increase); applied to Octavian it clothed him with a halo of sanctity, and the protection of religion and the gods.

The people of Rome seem to have thought for a while that the “restoration” was real, and that they were receiving back the Republic in return for an adjective. Did not the Senate and the assemblies still make the laws, still elect the magistrates? It was so; Augustus or his agents merely “proposed” the laws and “nominated” the more important candidates. As imperator and consul he ruled the army and the Treasury and administered the laws; and by his tribunician privileges he controlled all other activities of the government. His powers were not much greater than those of Pericles or Pompey, or any energetic American president; the difference lay in their permanence. In 23 he resigned the consulate, but received from the Senate a “proconsular authority” that gave him control of all officials in all provinces. Again no one objected; on the contrary, when a scarcity of grain threatened, the people besieged the Senate with demands that Augustus be made dictator. They had fared so ill under the Senatorial oligarchy that they were inclined toward a dictatorship, which would presumably cultivate their favor as a foil to the power of wealth. Augustus refused; but he took charge of the annona, or food supply, quickly ended the shortage, and earned such gratitude that Rome looked on with complacency as he remolded its institutions in his image.

II. THE NEW ORDER

Let us study this principate government in some detail, for in many ways it was one of the subtlest political achievements in history.

The powers of the prince were at once legislative, executive, and judicial: he could propose laws or decrees to assemblies or Senate, he could administer and enforce them, he could interpret them, he could penalize their violation. Augustus, says Suetonius, regularly sat as a judge, sometimes till nightfall, “having a litter placed upon the tribunal if he was indisposed. . . . He was highly conscientious and very lenient.”¹ Bearing the duties of so many offices, Augustus organized an informal cabinet of counselors like Maecenas, executives like Agrippa, generals like Tiberius, and an incipient clerical and administrative bureaucracy chiefly composed of his freedmen and slaves.

Caius Maecenas was a wealthy businessman who devoted half his life to helping Augustus in war and peace, in politics and diplomacy, at last, unwillingly, in love. His palace on the Esquiline was famous for its gardens and its swimming pool of heated water. His enemies described him as an effeminate epicurean, for he flaunted silks and gems and knew all the lore of a Roman gourmet. He enjoyed and generously patronized literature and art, restored Virgil’s farm to him and gave another to Horace, inspired the Georgics and the Odes. He refused public office, though he might have had almost any; he labored for years over principles and details of administration and foreign policy; he had the courage to reprove Augustus when he thought him seriously wrong; and when he died (8 B.C..) the Prince mourned his loss as beyond repair.

Perhaps it was on his advice that Augustus—himself of middle-class origin, and free from the aristocrat’s contempt of trade—named so many businessmen to high administrative posts, even to provincial governorships. To a Senate offended by this innovation he made amends by many obeisances, by giving exceptional powers to Senatorial commissions, and by gathering about him a concilium principis of some twenty men, nearly all senators. In the course of time the decisions of this council acquired the force of senatusconsulta, or decrees of the Senate; its powers and functions grew as those of the Senate waned. However he might lavish courtesies upon it, the Senate was merely his highest instrument. As censor he four times revised its membership; he could, and did, eject individuals from it for official incompetence or private immorality; most of its new members were nominated by him; and the quaestors, praetors, and consuls who entered it after their term of office had been chosen by him or with his consent. The richest businessmen of Italy were enrolled in the Senate, and the two orders were in some measure brought together in that concordia of united domination which Cicero had proposed. The power of wealth checked the pride and privilege of birth, and an hereditary aristocracy checked the abuses and irresponsibility of wealth.

At the suggestion of Augustus the meetings of the Senate were confined to the first and fifteenth of each month and usually lasted but a day. As the princeps senatus presided, no measure could be submitted without his consent; and in fact all measures presented had been prepared by himself or his aides. The judicial and executive functions of the Senate now outweighed its lawmaking. It served as a supreme court, governed Italy through commissions, and directed the performance of various public works. It ruled those provinces which required no extensive military control, but foreign relations were now controlled by the Prince. Shorn in this way of its ancient authority, the Senate grew negligent in even its limited functions, and yielded ever more responsibility to the Emperor and his staff.

The assemblies still met, though with decreasing frequency; they still voted, but only on measures or nominations approved by the Prince. The right of the plebs to hold office was practically ended in 18 B.C.. by a law restricting office to men having a fortune of 400,000 sesterces ($60,000) or more.² Augustus ran for the consulate thirteen times and canvassed for votes like the rest; it was a gracious concession to dramatic technique. Corruption was hindered by requiring every candidate to deposit, before election, a financial guarantee that he would abstain from bribery.³ Augustus himself, however, once distributed a thousand sesterces to each voting member of his tribe to make sure that its vote would be correct.⁴ Tribunes and consuls continued to be elected till the fifth century A.D.; ⁵ but as their major powers had fallen to the Prince, these offices were administrative rather than executive and finally became mere dignities. The actual government of Rome was placed by Augustus in the hands of salaried regional officials, equipped with a force of 3000 police under a praefectus urbi, or municipal police commissioner. Further to assure order of the desired kind, and support his own power, Augustus, seriously violating precedent, kept six cohorts of a thousand soldiers each near Rome and three cohorts within it. These nine cohorts became the Praetorian Guard—i.e., guard of the praetorium, or headquarters of the commander in chief. It was this body that in A.D. 41 made Claudius emperor and began the subjection of the government to the army.

From Rome the administrative care of Augustus passed to Italy and the provinces. He conferred Roman citizenship, or the limited franchise of “Latin rights,” upon all Italian communities that had borne their share in the war against Egypt. He helped the Italian cities with gifts, embellished them with new buildings, and devised a plan whereby their local councilors might vote by mail in the assembly elections at Rome. He divided the provinces into two classes: those that required active defense, and those that did not. The latter (Sicily, Baetica, Narbonese Gaul, Macedonia, Achaea, Asia Minor, Bithynia, Pontus, Cyprus, Crete and Cyrene, and north Africa) he allowed the Senate to rule; the others—“imperial provinces”—were governed by his own legates, procurators, or prefects. This pleasant arrangement allowed him to keep control of the army, which was mostly quartered in the “endangered” provinces; it gave him the lush revenue of Egypt; and it enabled him to keep an eye on the Senatorial governors through the procurators whom he appointed to collect the tribute in all the provinces. Each governor now received a fixed salary, so that his temptation to mulct his subjects was moderately reduced; furthermore, a body of civil servants provided a continuing administration and a check upon the malfeasance of their temporary superiors. The kinglets of client states were treated with wise courtesy and gave Augustus full allegiance. He persuaded most of them to send their sons to live in his palace and receive a Roman education; by this generous arrangement the youths served as hostages until their accession, and then as unwitting vehicles of Romanization.

In the flush aftermath of Actium, and possessed of an enormous army and navy, Augustus apparently planned to extend the Empire to the Atlantic, the Sahara, the Euphrates, the Black Sea, the Danube, and the Elbe; the pax Romana was to be maintained not by passive defense but by an aggressive policy on every frontier. The Emperor in person completed the conquest of Spain and so ably reorganized the administration of Gaul that it remained at peace for nearly a century. In the case of Parthia he contented himself with the return of the standards and surviving captives taken from Crassus in 53; but he restored to the throne of Armenia a Tigranes favorable to Rome. He sent abortive expeditions to conquer Ethiopia and Arabia. In the decade from 19 to 9 B.C.. his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus subjugated Illyria, Pannonia, and Raetia. Agreeably provoked by German invasions of Gaul, Augustus ordered Drusus to cross the Rhine, and rejoiced to learn that the brilliant youth had fought his way to the Elbe. But Drusus suffered internal injuries from a fall, lingered in pain for thirty days, and died. Tiberius, who loved Drusus with all the intensity of a restrained but passionate nature, rode 400 miles on horseback from Gaul into Germany to hold his brother in his arms in the final hours; then he conveyed the body to Rome, walking before the cortege all the way (9 B.C.). Returning to Germany, Tiberius in two campaigns (8-7 B.C., A.D. 4-5) forced the submission of the tribes between the Elbe and the Rhine.

Two disasters, coming almost together, changed this fever of expansion into a policy of peace. In A.D. 6 the lately won provinces of Pannonia and Dalmatia revolted, massacred all the Romans in their territory, organized an army of 200,000 men, and threatened to invade Italy. Tiberius quickly made peace with the German tribes and led his depleted forces into Pannonia. With patient and ruthless strategy he captured or destroyed the crops that could supply the enemy, and by guerrilla warfare prevented new plantings, while he saw to it that his own troops were well fed. For three years he persisted in this policy despite universal criticism at home; at last he had the satisfaction of seeing the starving rebels disband, and of re-establishing the Roman power. But in that same year (A.D. 9) Arminius organized a revolt in Germany, lured the three legions of Varus, the Roman governor, into a trap, and killed every man of them except those who, like Varus, fell upon their own swords. When Augustus heard of this he was “so deeply affected,” says Suetonius, “that for several months he cut neither his beard nor his hair; and sometimes he would dash his head against a door, and cry out, ‘Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!’”⁶ Tiberius hastened to Germany, reorganized the army there, stood off the Germans, and, by Augustus’ orders, withdrew the Roman boundary to the Rhine.

It was a decision costly to the Emperor’s pride but creditable to his judgment. Germany was surrendered to “barbarism”—i.e., to a nonclassic culture—and was left free to arm its growing population against Rome. However, the same reasons that had argued for the conquest of Germany would have demanded the subjection of Scythia—southern Russia. Somewhere the Empire had to stop; and the Rhine was a better frontier than any other west of the Urals. Having annexed northern and western Spain, Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia, Moesia, Galatia, Lycia, and Pamphylia, Augustus felt that he had sufficiently earned his title of “the increasing god.” At his death the Empire covered 3,340,000 square miles, more than the mainland of the United States, and over a hundred times the area of Rome before the Punic Wars. Augustus advised his successor to be content with this, the greatest empire yet seen; to seek rather to unite and strengthen it within than to extend it without. He expressed his surprise “that Alexander did not regard it as a greater task to set in order the empire that he had won than to win it.”⁷ The Pax Romana had begun.

III. SATURNIA REGNA

It could not be said that Augustus had made a desert and called it peace. Within a decade after Actium the Mediterranean knew such economic quickening as no tradition could parallel. The restoration of order was in itself a stimulus to recovery. The renewed safety of the seas, the stability of government, the conservatism of Augustus, the consumption of Egypt’s hoarded treasure, the opening of new mines and mints, the reliability and accelerated circulation of the currency, the easing of congested population into agricultural allotments and colonial settlements—how could prosperity resist so unanimous an invitation? A group of Alexandrian sailors, landing at Puteoli when Augustus was near by, approached him in festal dress and offered him incense as to a deity. It was because of him, they said, that they could voyage in safety, trade in confidence, and live in peace.⁸

Augustus was convinced, as became the grandson of a banker, that the best economy was one that united freedom with security. He protected all classes with well-administered laws, guarded the highways of trade, lent money without interest to responsible land-owners,⁹ and mollified the poor with state grain, lotteries, and occasional gifts; for the rest he left enterprise, production, and exchange freer than before. Even so, the works directed by the state were now of unprecedented magnitude, and played some part in restoring economic life. Eighty-two temples were built; a new forum and basilica were added to facilitate the operations of finance and the courts; a new senate house replaced the one that had incinerated Clodius; colonnades were erected to temper the sun; the theater that Caesar had begun was completed and named after Marcellus, son-in-law of Augustus; and rich men were prodded by the Emperor into spending part of their fortunes in adorning Italy with basilicas, temples, libraries, theaters, and roads. “Those that celebrated triumphs,” says Dio Cassius, “he commanded to erect out of their spoils some public work to commemorate their deeds.”^9a Augustus hoped to make the majesty of Rome enhance and symbolize her power and his own. Toward the close of his life he remarked that he had found Rome a city of brick and had left it a city of marble.^9b It was a forgivable exaggeration: there had been much marble there before, and much brick remained. But seldom had any man done so much for a city.

His indispensable aide in the reconstruction of Rome was Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. This perfect friend had shared with Maecenas the guidance of Augustus’ policy. In his year as aedile (33 B.C..) Agrippa had won the public to Octavian by opening 170 public baths, distributing free oil and salt, presenting games for fifty-five successive days, and providing free barbers for all citizens for a year—apparently all at his own expense. His ability might have made him another Caesar; he preferred to serve Augustus for a generation. So far as we know, his life was unstained by public or private scandal; Roman gossip, which sooner or later besmirched everyone else, left him untouched. He was the first Roman to realize the importance of sea power. He planned, built, and commanded the fleet, defeated Sextus Pompey, suppressed piracy, and won a world for Augustus at Actium. After these victories and his pacification of Spain, Gaul, and the Bosporan kingdom, he was thrice offered a triumph and always refused. Enriched by a grateful prince, he continued to live without luxury, and devoted himself as ardently to public works as he had done to the preservation of the state. Out of his own purse he hired hundreds of laborers to repair roads, buildings, and sewers, and reopen the Marcian aqueduct. He constructed a new aqueduct, the Julian, and further improved the water supply of Rome with 700 wells, 500 fountains, and 130 reservoirs. When the people complained of the high price of wine Augustus slyly remarked, “My son-in-law Agrippa has seen to it that Rome shall not go thirsty.”¹⁰ This greatest of Roman engineers created a spacious harbor and shipbuilding center by connecting the Lucrine and Avernian lakes with the sea. He built the first of the imposing public baths that were to distinguish Rome among the cities. He constructed, again out of his own funds, a temple to Venus and Mars, which was rebuilt by Hadrian, is known to us as the Pantheon, and still bears on its portico the words, M. AGRIPPA . . . FECIT. He organized a thirty-year survey of the Empire, wrote a treatise on geography, and made in painted marble a map of the world. Like Leonardo he was a scientist, an engineer, an inventor of military projectiles, and an artist. His early death at the age of fifty (12 B.C.) was among the many sorrows that darkened the later years of Augustus, who had given him his daughter Julia in marriage, and had hoped to bequeath the Empire to him as the man best fitted to govern it honestly and well.

Costly public works combined with extended governmental services to raise state expenditures beyond precedent. Salaries were now paid to provincial and municipal officials, bureaucrats and police; a large army and navy were maintained; buildings were put up or restored without number; corn and games bribed the populace to peace. Since expenses were met out of current revenue, and no national debt was laid upon the future, taxation under Augustus became a science and an unremitting industry. Augustus was not relentless; often he forgave taxes to harassed individuals and cities or paid them out of his personal funds. He returned to the municipalities 35,000 pounds of gold offered him as a “coronation gift” on the occasion of his fifth consulate; and he refused many other donations.¹² He abolished the land tax laid upon Italy in the Civil War; in its stead he levied upon all citizens in the Empire a five per cent tax on bequests to any persons except near relatives and the poor.¹³ A tax of one per cent was placed upon auction sales, four per cent upon the sale of slaves, five per cent upon their manumission; and custom dues from two and a half to five per cent were collected on nearly all ports of entry. All citizens were subject also to municipal taxes, and Roman realty did not share in Italy’s exemption from the tax on land. Taxes were paid for water supplied from the public mains. Considerable revenue came from the leasing of public lands, mines, and fisheries, from the state monopoly of salt, and the fines imposed by the courts. The provinces paid a tributum soli, or land tax, and a tributum capitis—literally a head or poll tax, actually a tax on personal property. Taxes flowed into two coffers at Rome, both stored in temples: the national Treasury (aerarium) controlled by the Senate, and the imperial Treasury (fiscus) owned and managed by the Emperor.^* To the latter came the income not only from his vast personal properties, but bequests from well-wishers and friends. Such legacies, in the lifetime of Augustus, amounted to 1,400,000,000 sesterces.

All in all, taxation under the Principate was not oppressive, and until Commodus the results were worth the cost. The provinces prospered and raised altars of gratitude or expectation to Augustus the god; even in sophisticated Rome he had to censure the people for the extravagance of their eulogies One enthusiast ran through the streets calling upon men and women to “devote” themselves to Augustus—i.e., promise to kill themselves when he died. In 2 B.C.. Messala Corvinus, who had captured Octavian’s camp at Philippi, proposed that the title of pater patriae should be conferred upon Augustus. The Senate, pleased to have so little responsibility while retaining honors and wealth, gladly heaped upon the Emperor this and other titles of praise. The business classes, now richer than ever, celebrated his birthday with a two-day festival year after year. “All sorts and conditions of men,” says Suetonius,¹⁴ “brought him gifts on the kalends of January”—New Year’s Day. When fire destroyed his old palace every city, apparently every tribe and guild, in the Empire sent him a contribution to rebuild it; he refused to take more than a denarius from any individual, but nevertheless he had more than enough. All the Mediterranean world, after its long ordeal, seemed happy; and Augustus might believe that his patience and labor had accomplished his great task.

IV. THE AUGUSTAN REFORMATION

He destroyed his own happiness by trying to make people good as well as happy; it was an imposition that Rome never forgave him. Moral reform is the most difficult and delicate branch of statesmanship; few rulers have dared to attempt it; most rulers have left it to hypocrites and saints.

Augustus began modestly enough by seeking to check the racial transformation of Rome. Population there was not declining; on the contrary, it was growing by mass and dole attraction and the import of wealth and slaves. Since freedmen were included in the dole, many citizens freed old or sickly slaves to have them fed by the state; kinder motives freed more, and many slaves saved enough to buy their liberty. As the sons of freedmen automatically became citizens, the emancipation of slaves and the fertility of aliens combined with the low birth rate of the native stocks to change the ethnic character of Rome. Augustus wondered what stability there could be in so heterogeneous a population, and what loyalty to the Empire might be expected of men in whose veins ran the blood of subject peoples. By his urging, the lex Fufia Caninia (2 B.C.) and later measures enacted that an owner of not more than two slaves might free them all, the owner of from three to ten slaves might free half of them, the owner of from eleven to thirty one-third, the owner of from thirty-one to one hundred one-fourth, the owner of from 101 to 300 one-fifth; and no master might free more than a hundred.

One might wish that Augustus had limited slavery instead of freedom. But antiquity took slavery for granted, and would have contemplated with horror the economic and social effects of a wholesale emancipation, just as the employers of our time fear the sloth that might come from security. Augustus was thinking in terms of race and class; he could not conceive a strong Rome without the character, courage, and political ability that had marked the old Roman; above all, the old aristocracy. The decay of the ancient faith among the upper classes had washed away the supernatural supports of marriage, fidelity, and parentage; the passage from farm to city had made children less of an asset, more of a liability and a toy; women wished to be sexually rather than maternally beautiful; in general the desire for individual freedom seemed to be running counter to the needs of the race. To accentuate the evil, legacy hunting had become the most profitable occupation in Italy.¹⁶ Men without children were sure to be courted in their declining years by expectant ghouls; and so large a number of Romans relished this esurient courtesy that it became an added cause of childlessness. Protracted military service drew a considerable proportion of young men from marriage in their most nubile years. A large number of native-stock Romans avoided wedlock altogether, preferring prostitutes or concubines even to a varied succession of wives. Of those who married, a majority appear to have limited their families by abortion, infanticide, coitus interruptus, and contraception.¹⁸

Augustus was disturbed by these insignia of civilization. He began to feel that a movement backward to the old faith and morals was necessary. Respect for the mos maiorum revived in him as the years cleared his vision and tired his frame. It was not good, he felt, for the present to break too sharply with the past; a nation must have a continuity of traditions to be sane, as a man must have memory. He read with aging seriousness the historians of Rome, and envied the virtues they ascribed to the ancients. He relished the speech of Quintus Metellus on marriage, read it to the Senate, and recommended it to the people by imperial proclamation. A large part of the older generation agreed with him; it formed a kind of puritan party eager to reform morals by law; and probably Livia lent them her influence. By his powers as censor and tribune Augustus promulgated—or passed through the Assembly—a series of laws of now uncertain date and sequence, aimed at restoring morals, marriage, fidelity, parentage, and a simpler life. They forbade adolescents to attend public entertainments except in the company of an adult relative; excluded women from athletic exhibitions, and restricted them to the upper seats at gladiatorial games; limited expenditure on homes, servants, banquets, weddings, jewels, and dress. The most important of these “Julian laws”^* was the lex lulia de pudicitia et de coercendis adulteriis (18 B.C..)—“The Julian law of chastity and repressing adultery.” Here for the first time in Roman history marriage was brought under the protection of the state, instead of being left to the patria potestas. The father retained the right to kill an adulterous daughter and her accomplice as soon as he discovered them; the husband was allowed to kill his wife’s paramour if caught in the husband’s house, but he might kill his wife only if he found her sinning in his own home. Within sixty days of detecting a wife’s adultery, the husband was required to bring her before the court; if he failed to do this, the woman’s father was required to indict her; if he too failed, any citizen might accuse her. The adulterous woman was to be banished for life, was to lose a third of her fortune and half her dowry, and must not marry again. Like penalties were decreed for a husband conniving at his wife’s adultery. A wife, however, could not accuse her husband of adultery, and he might with legal impunity have relations with registered prostitutes. The law applied only to Roman citizens.

Probably at the same time Augustus passed another law, usually named lex lulia de maritandis ordinibus, from its chapter on marriage in the “orders”—i.e., the two upper classes. Its purpose was threefold: to encourage and yet restrict marriage, to retard the dilution of Roman with alien blood, and to restore the old conception of marriage as a union for parentage. Marriage was to be obligatory upon all marriageable males under sixty and women under fifty. Bequests conditional on the legatee remaining unmarried were made void. Penalties were imposed upon celibates: they could not inherit, except from relatives, unless they were married within a hundred days after the testator’s death; and they could not attend public festivals or games. Widows and divorcees might inherit only if remarried within six months after the death or divorce of the husband. Spinsters and childless wives could not inherit after fifty, nor before if they possessed 50,000 sesterces ($7500). Men of the Senatorial class could not marry a freedwoman, an actress, or a prostitute; and no actor or freedman could marry a senator’s daughter. Women owning above 20,000 sesterces were to pay a one per cent annual tax till married; after marriage this tax decreased with each child until the third, with whose coming it ceased. Of the two consuls the one with more children was to have precedence over the other. In appointments to office the father of the largest family was as far as feasible to be preferred to his rivals. The mother of three children acquired the ius trium liberorum—the right to wear a special garment, and freedom from the power of her husband.

These laws offended every class, even the puritans—who complained that the “right of three children” dangerously emancipated the mother from male authority. Others excused their celibacy on the score that the “modern woman” was too independent, imperious, capricious, and extravagant. The exclusion of bachelors from public shows was considered too severe and impossible to enforce; Augustus had the clause rescinded in 12 B.C.. In A.D. 9 the lex Papia Poppaea further softened the Julian laws by easing the conditions under which celibates might inherit, doubling the period in which widows and divorcees must remarry to inherit, and increasing the amount that childless heirs could receive. Mothers of three children were freed from those limits which the lex Voconia (169 B.C..) had placed upon bequests to women. The age at which a citizen might stand for the various offices was lowered in proportion to the size of his family. After the law was passed men noted that the consuls who had framed it and given it their names were childless celibates. Gossip added that the reform laws had been suggested to Augustus, who had only one child, by Maecenas, who had none; and that while the laws were being enacted Maecenas was living in sybaritic luxury, and Augustus was seducing Maecenas’ wife.¹⁹

It is difficult to estimate the effectiveness of this, the most important social legislation in antiquity. The laws were loosely drawn, and recalcitrants found many loopholes. Some men married to obey the law and divorced their wives soon afterwards; others adopted children to secure offices or legacies and then “emancipated”—i.e., dismissed—them.²⁰ Tacitus, a century later, pronounced the laws a failure; “marriages and the rearing of children did not become frequent, so powerful are the attractions of a childless state.”²¹ Immorality continued, but was more polite than before; in Ovid we see it becoming a fine art, the subject of careful instructions from experts to apprentices. Augustus himself doubted the efficacy of his laws, and agreed with Horace that laws are vain when hearts are unchanged.²² He struggled heroically to reach people’s hearts: in his box at the games he displayed the numerous children of the exemplary Germanicus; gave a thousand sesterces to parents of large families; ²³ raised a monument to a slave girl who (doubtless without patriotic premeditation) had borne quintuplets; ²⁴ and rejoiced when a peasant marched into Rome with eight children, thirty-six grand-children, and nineteen great-grandchildren in his train.²⁵ Dio Cassius pictures him making public addresses denouncing “race suicide.”²⁶ He enjoyed, perhaps inspired, the moral preface of Livy’s history. Under his influence the literature of the age became didactic and practical. Through Maecenas or in person he persuaded Virgil and Horace to lend their muses to the propaganda of moral and religious reform; Virgil tried to sing the Romans back to the farm in the Georgics, and to the old gods in the Aeneid; and Horace, after a large sampling of the world’s pleasures, tuned his lyre to stoic themes. In 17 B.C.. Augustus presented the ludi saeculares ^*- three days of ceremonies, contests, and spectacles, celebrating the return of Saturn’s Golden Age; and Horace was commissioned to write the carmen saeculare to be chanted in procession by twenty-seven boys and as many girls. Even art was used to point a moral: the lovely Ara Pacis showed in relief the life and government of Rome; magnificent public buildings rose to represent the strength and glory of the Empire; scores of temples were erected to stir again a faith that had almost died.

FIG. 1—Caesar (black basalt) Altes Museum, Berlin

FIG. 2—An Etruscan Tomb at Cervetri

FIG. 3—Head of a Woman From an Etruscan tomb at Corneto

FIG. 4—Apollo of Veii Villa di Papa Giulio, Rome

FIG. 5—The Orator Museo Archeologico, Florence

FIG. 6—Pompey Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen

FIG. 7—Caesar Museo Nazionale, Naples

FIG. 8—The Young Augustus Vatican, Rome

FIG. 9—Augustus Imperator, from the Villa of Livia at Prima Porta Vatican, Rome

FIG. 10—Vespasian Museo Nazionale, Naples

FIG. 11—Relief from the Arch of Titus

FIG. 12—The Roman Forum

FIG. 13—Temple of Castor and Pollux Roman Forum

FIG. 14—Two Roman Mosaics Top, Museo Nazionale, Naples. Bottom, Capitoline Museum, Rome

FIG. 15—The Gemma Augusta Vienna Museum

FIG. 16—An Arretine Vase From the Loeb Collection, Harvard University

In the end Augustus, skeptic and realist, became convinced that moral reform awaited a religious renaissance. The agnostic generation of Lucretius, Catullus, and Caesar had run its course, and its children had discovered that the fear of the gods is the youth of wisdom. Even the cynical Ovid would soon write, Voltaireanly: expedit esse deos, et ut expedit esse putemus: “it is convenient that there should be gods, and that we should think they exist.”²⁷ Conservative minds traced the Civil War, and the sufferings it had brought, to neglect of religion and the consequent anger of Heaven. Everywhere in Italy a chastened people was ready to turn back to its ancient altars and thank the deities who, it felt, had spared it for this happy restoration. When, in 12 B.C.., Augustus, having waited patiently for the tepid Lepidus to die, succeeded him as pontifex maximus, “such a multitude from all Italy assembled for my election,” the Emperor tells us, “as is never recorded to have been in Rome before.”²⁸ He both led and followed the revival of religion, hoping that his political and moral reconstruction would win readier acceptance if he could entwine it with the gods. He raised the four priestly colleges to unprecedented dignity and wealth, chose himself to each of them, took upon himself the appointment of new members, attended their meetings faithfully, and took part in their solemn pageantry. He banned Egyptian and Asiatic cults from Rome, but he made an exception in favor of the Jews, and permitted religious freedom in the provinces. He lavished gifts upon the temples and renewed old religious ceremonies, processions, and festivals. The ludi saeculares were not secular; every day of them was marked with religious ritual and song; their chief significance was the return of a happy friendship with the gods. Nourished with such sovereign aid, the ancient cult took on fresh life, and touched again the dramatic impulses and supernatural hopes of the people. Amid the chaos of competing faiths that flowed in upon Rome after Augustus, it held its own for three centuries more; and when it died it was at once reborn, under new symbols and new names.

Augustus himself became one of the chief competitors of his gods. His great-uncle had set the example: two years after being murdered, Caesar had been recognized by the Senate as a deity, and his worship spread throughout the Empire. As early as 36 B.C.. some Italian cities had given Octavian a place in their pantheon; by 27 B.C.. his name was added to those of the gods in official hymns at Rome; his birthday became a holy day as well as a holiday; and after his death the Senate decreed that his genius, or soul, was thereafter to be worshiped as one of the official divinities. All this seemed quite natural to antiquity; it had never recognized an impassable difference between gods and men; the gods had often taken human form, and the creative genius of a Heracles, a Lycurgus, an Alexander, a Caesar, or an Augustus seemed, especially to the religious East, miraculous and divine. The Egyptians had thought of the Pharaohs, of the Ptolemies, even of Antony, as deities; they could hardly think less of Augustus. The ancients were not in these cases such simpletons as their modern counterparts would like to believe. They knew well enough that Augustus was human; in deifying his genius, or that of others, they used deus or theos as equivalent to our “canonized saint”; indeed, canonization is a descendant of Roman deification; and to pray to such a deified human being seemed no more absurd then than prayer to a saint seems now.

In Italian homes the worship of the Emperor’s genius became associated with the adoration given to the Lares of the household and the genius of the paterfamilias; there was nothing difficult in this for a people which through centuries had deified their dead parents, built altars to them, and given the name of temples to the ancestral tombs. When Augustus visited Greek Asia in 21 B.C.. he found that his cult had made rapid headway there. Dedications and orations hailed him as “Savior,” “Bringer of Glad Tidings,” “God the Son of God”; some men argued that in him the long-awaited Messiah had come, bringing peace and happiness to mankind.²⁹ The great provincial councils made his worship the center of their ceremonies; a new priesthood, the Augustales, was appointed by provinces and municipalities for the service of the new divinity. Augustus frowned upon all this, but finally accepted it as a spiritual enhancement of the Principate, a valuable cementing of church and state, a uniting common worship amid diverse and dividing creeds. The moneylender’s grandson consented to become a god.

V. AUGUSTUS HIMSELF

What sort of man was this who was heir to Caesar at eighteen, master of the world at thirty-one, ruler of Rome for half a century, and architect of the greatest empire in ancient history? He was at once dull and fascinating; no one more prosaic, yet half the world adored him; a physical weakling not particularly brave, but able to overcome all enemies, regulate kingdoms, and fashion a government that would give the vast realm an unexampled prosperity for two hundred years.

Sculptors spent much marble and bronze in making images of him: some showing him in the timid pride of a refined and serious youth, some in the somber pose of a priest, some half covered with the insignia of power, some in military garb—the philosopher unwillingly and uneasily playing the general. These effigies do not reveal, though sometimes they suggest, the ailments that made his war against chaos depend precariously at every step upon his fight for health. He was unprepossessing. He had sandy hair, a strangely triangular head, merging eyebrows, clear and penetrating eyes; yet his expression was so calm and mild, says Suetonius, that a Gaul who came to kill him changed his mind. His skin was sensitive and intermittently itched with a kind of ringworm; rheumatism weakened his left leg and made him limp a bit; a stiffness akin to arthritis occasionally incapacitated his right hand. He was one of many Romans attacked in 23 B.C. by a plague resembling typhus; he suffered from stones in the bladder, and found it hard to sleep; he was troubled each spring by “an enlargement of the diaphragm; and when the wind was in the south he had catarrh.” He bore cold so poorly that in winter he wore “a woolen chest protector, wraps for his thighs and shins, an undershirt, four tunics (blouses), and a heavy toga.” He dared not expose his head to the sun. Horseback riding tired him, and he was sometimes carried in a litter to the battlefield.³⁰ At thirty-five, having lived through one of the most intense dramas in history, he was already oldnervous, sickly, easily tired; no one dreamed that he would live another forty years. He tried a variety of doctors, and richly rewarded one, Antonius Musa, for curing an uncertain illness (abscess of the liver?) with cold fomentations and baths; in Musa’s honor he exempted all Roman physicians from taxation.³¹ But for the most part he doctored himself. He used hot salt water and sulphur baths for his rheumatism; he ate lightly and only the plainest food—coarse bread, cheese, fish, and fruit; he was so careful of his diet that “sometimes he ate alone either before a dinner party or after it, taking nothing during its course.”³² In him, as in some medieval saints, the soul bore its body like a cross.

His essence was nervous vitality, inflexible resolution, a penetrating, calculating, resourceful mind. He accepted an unheard-of number of offices, and took upon himself responsibility only less than Caesar’s. He fulfilled the duties of these positions conscientiously, presided regularly over the Senate, attended innumerable conferences, judged hundreds of trials, suffered ceremonies and banquets, planned distant campaigns, governed legions and provinces, visited nearly every one of them, and attended to infinite administrative detail. He made hundreds of speeches, and prepared them with proud attention to clarity, simplicity, and style; he read them instead of speaking extemporaneously, lest he should utter regrettable words. Suetonius would have us believe that for the same reason he wrote out in advance, and read, important conversations with individuals, even with his wife.³³

Like most skeptics of his time, he retained superstitions long after losing his faith. He carried a sealskin about him to protect against lightning; he respected omens and auspices and sometimes obeyed warnings derived from dreams; he refused to begin a journey on what he reckoned to be unlucky days.³⁴ At the same time he was remarkable for the objectivity of his judgment and the practicality of his thought. He advised young men to enter soon upon an active career, so that the ideas they had learned from books might be tempered by the experience and necessities of life.³⁵ He kept to the end his bourgeois good sense, conservatism, parsimony, and caution. Festina lente—“make haste slowly”—was his favorite saw. Far more than most men of such power, he could take advice and bear reproof humbly. Athenodorus, a philosopher who was returning to Athens after living with him for years, gave him some parting counsel: “Whenever you get angry do not say or do anything before repeating to yourself the twenty-four letters of the alphabet.” Augustus was so grateful for the caution that he begged Athenodorus to stay another year, saying, “No risk attends the reward that silence brings.”³⁶

Even more surprising than Caesar’s development from a roistering politician into a great general and statesman was the transformation of the merciless and self-centered Octavian into the modest and magnanimous Augustus. He grew. The man who had allowed Antony to hang Cicero’s head in the Forum, who had moved without scruple from one faction to another, who had run the gamut of sexual indulgence, who had pursued Antony and Cleopatra to the death unmoved by friendship or chivalry—this tenacious and unlovable youth, instead of being poisoned by power, became in his last forty years a model of justice, moderation, fidelity, magnanimity, and toleration. He laughed at the lampoons that wits and poets wrote about him. He advised Tiberius to be content with preventing or prosecuting hostile actions and not seek to suppress hostile words. He did not insist upon others living as simply as himself; when he invited guests to dinner he would retire early to leave their appetite and merriment unrestrained. He had no pretentiousness; he buttonholed voters to ask their suffrages; he substituted for his lawyer friends in court; he left or entered Rome secretly, abhorring pomp; in the reliefs of the Ara Pacis he is not set apart from the other citizens by any mark of distinction. His morning receptions were open to all citizens, and all were affably received. When one man hesitated to present a petition he jokingly chided him for offering the document “as if he were giving a penny to an elephant.”³⁷

In his senile years, when disappointments had embittered him, and he had grown accustomed to omnipotence, even to being a god, he lapsed into intolerance, prosecuted hostile writers, suppressed histories of too critical a stamp, and gave no ear to Ovid’s penitent verse. Once, it is said, he had the legs of his secretary Thallus broken for taking 500 denarii to reveal the contents of an official letter; and he forced one of his freedmen to kill himself when found guilty of adultery with a Roman matron. All in all, it is hard to love him. We must picture the frailty of his body and the sorrows of his old age before our hearts can go out to him as to the murdered Caesar or the beaten Antony.

VI. THE LAST DAYS OF A GOD

His failures and his tragedies were almost all within his home. By his three wives—Claudia, Scribonia, Livia—he had but one child: Scribonia unwittingly avenged her divorce by giving him Julia. He had hoped that Livia would bear him a son whom he might train and educate for government; but though she had rewarded her first husband with two splendid children—Tiberius and Drusus—her marriage with Augustus proved disappointingly sterile. Otherwise their union was a happy one. She was a woman of stately beauty, firm character, and fine understanding; Augustus rehearsed his most vital measures with her and valued her advice as highly as that of his maturest friends. Asked how she had acquired such influence over him, she replied, “by being scrupulously chaste . . . never meddling with his affairs, and pretending neither to hear of nor to notice the favorites with whom he had amours.”³⁸ She was a model of the old virtues, and perhaps expounded them too persistently. In her leisure she devoted herself to charity, helping parents of large families, providing dowries for poor brides, and maintaining many orphans at her own expense. Her palace itself was almost an orphanage; for there, and in the home of his sister Octavia, Augustus supervised the education of his grandsons, nephews, nieces, and even the six surviving children of Antony. He sent the boys off early to war, saw to it that the girls should learn to spin and weave, and “forbade them to do or say anything except without concealment, and such as might be recorded in the household diary.”³⁹

Augustus learned to love Livia’s son Drusus, adopted and reared him, and would gladly have left him his wealth and power; the youth’s early death was one of the Emperor’s first bereavements. Tiberius he respected but could not love, for his future successor was a positive and imperious character, inclined to sullenness and secrecy. But the comeliness and vivacity of his daughter Julia must have given Augustus many happy moments in her childhood. When she had reached the age of fourteen he persuaded Octavia to allow the divorce of her son Marcellus, and induced the youth to marry Julia. Two years later Marcellus died; and Julia, after brief mourning, set out to enjoy a freedom she had long coveted. But soon the matchmaking Emperor, craving a grandson as heir, coaxed the reluctant Agrippa to divorce his wife and marry the merry widow (21 B.C..). Julia was eighteen, Agrippa forty-two; but he was a good and great man and agreeably rich. She made his town house a salon of pleasure and wit, and became the soul of the younger and gayer set in the capital as against the puritans who took their lead from Livia. Rumor accused Julia of deceiving her new husband, and ascribed to her an incredible reply to the incredible question why, despite her adulteries, all the five children she gave Agrippa resembled him: Numquam nisi nave plena tollo vectorem.⁴⁰ When Agrippa died (12 B.C.) Augustus turned his hopes to Julia’s oldest sons, Gaius and Lucius, overwhelmed them with affection and education, and had them promoted to office far sooner than was legally warranted by their years.

Again a widow, Julia, richer and lovelier than ever, entered with saucy abandon upon a succession of amours which became at once the scandal and the joy of a Rome that fretted under the “Julian laws.” To quiet this gossip, and perhaps to reconcile his daughter with his wife, Augustus made a third match for Julia. Livia’s son Tiberius was compelled to divorce his pregnant wife, Vipsania Agrippina, daughter of Agrippa, and to marry the equally reluctant Julia (9 B.C..). The young old Roman did his best to be a good husband; but Julia soon gave up the effort to adjust her epicurean to his stoic ways, and resumed her illicit loves. Tiberius bore the infamy for a time in furious silence. The lex Iulia de adulteriis required the husband of an adulteress to denounce her to the courts; Tiberius disobeyed the law to protect its author, and perhaps himself, for he and Livia had hoped that Augustus would adopt him as his son and transmit to him the leadership of the Empire. When it became clear that the Emperor favored, instead, Julia’s children by Agrippa, Tiberius resigned his official posts and retired to Rhodes. There for seven years he lived as a simple private citizen, devoting himself to solitude, philosophy, and astrology. Freer than ever, Julia passed from one lover to another, and the revels of her set filled the Forum with turmoil at night.⁴¹

Augustus, now (2 B.C..) an invalid of sixty, suffered all that a father and ruler could bear from the simultaneous collapse of his family, his honor, and his laws. By these laws the father of an adulteress was bound to indict her publicly if her husband had failed to do so. Proofs of her misconduct were laid before him, and the friends of Tiberius let it be known that unless Augustus acted they would accuse Julia before the court. Augustus decided to anticipate them. While the merrymaking was at its height, he issued a decree banishing his daughter to the island of Pandateria, a barren rock off the Campanian coast. One of her lovers, a son of Antony, was forced to kill himself, and several others were exiled. Julia’s freedwoman Phoebe hanged herself rather than testify against her; the distraught Emperor, hearing of the act, said, “I would rather have been Phoebe’s father than Julia’s.” The people of Rome begged him to forgive his daughter, Tiberius added his request to theirs, but pardon never came. Tiberius, enthroned, merely changed her place of residence to a less narrow confinement at Rhegium. There, broken and forgotten after sixteen years of imprisonment, Julia died.

Her sons Gaius and Lucius had long preceded her in death: Lucius of an illness in Marseilles (A.D. 2), Gaius of a wound received in Armenia (A.D. 4). Left without aide or successor at a time when Germany, Pannonia, and Gaul were threatening revolt, Augustus reluctantly recalled Tiberius (A.D. 2), adopted him as son and coregent, and sent him off to put down the rebellions. When he returned (A.D. 9), after five years of arduous and successful campaigning, all Rome, which hated him for his stern puritanism, resigned itself to the fact that though Augustus was still prince, Tiberius had begun to rule.

Life’s final tragedy is unwilling continuance—to outlive one’s self and be forbidden to die. When Julia went into exile Augustus was not in years an old man; others were still vigorous at sixty. But he had lived too many lives, and died too many deaths, since he had come to Rome, a boy of eighteen, to avenge Caesar’s murder and execute his will. How many wars and battles and near-defeats, how many pains and illnesses, how many conspiracies and perils, and bitter miscarriages of noble aims, had befallen him in those crowded forty-two years—and the snatching away of one hope and helper after another, until at last only this dour Tiberius remained! Perhaps it had been wiser to die like Antony, at the peak of life and in the arms of love. How sadly pleasant must have seemed, in retrospect, the days when Julia and Agrippa were happy, and grandchildren frolicked on the palace floor. Now another Julia, daughter of his daughter, had grown up and was following her mother’s morals as if resolved to illustrate all the amatory arts of her friend Ovid’s verse. In A.D. 8, having received proofs of her adultery, Augustus exiled her to an isle in the Adriatic, and at the same time banished Ovid to Tomi on the Black Sea. “Would that I had never married,” mourned the feeble and shrunken Emperor, “or that I had died without offspring!” Sometimes he thought of starving himself to death.

All the great structure that he had built seemed to be in ruins. The powers that he had assumed for order’s sake had weakened into degeneration the Senate and the assemblies from which he had taken them. Tired of ratifications and adulations, the senators no longer came to their sessions, and a mere handful of citizens gathered in the comitia. Offices that had once stirred creative ambition by the power they brought were now shunned by the able as empty and expensive vanities. The very peace that Augustus had organized, and the security that he had won for Rome, had loosened the fibre of the people. No one wanted to enlist in the army, or recognize the inexorable periodicity of war. Luxury had taken the place of simplicity, sexual license was replacing parentage; by its own exhausted will the great race was beginning to die.

All these things the old Emperor keenly saw and sadly felt. No one then could tell him that despite a hundred defects and half a dozen idiots on the throne, the strange and subtle principate that he had established would give the Empire the longest period of prosperity ever known to mankind; and that the Pax Romana, which had begun as the Pax Augusta, would in the perspective of time be accounted the supreme achievement in the history of statesmanship. Like Leonardo, he thought that he had failed.

Death came to him quietly at Nola in the seventy-sixth year of his age (A.D. 14). To the friends at his bedside he uttered the words often used to conclude a Roman comedy: “Since well I’ve played my part, clap now your hands, and with applause dismiss me from the stage.” He embraced his wife, saying, “Remember our long union, Livia; farewell”; and with this simple parting he passed away.⁴² Some days later his corpse was borne through Rome on the shoulders of senators to the Field of Mars, and there cremated while children of high degree chanted the lament for the dead.

CHAPTER XII

The Golden Age

30 B.C.-A.D. l8

I. THE AUGUSTAN STIMULUS

IF peace and security are more favorable than war to the production of literature and art, yet war and profound social disturbances turn up the earth about the plants of thought and nourish the seeds that mature in peace. A quiet life does not make great ideas or great men; but the compulsions of crisis, the imperatives of survival, weed out dead things by the roots and quicken the growth of new ideas and ways. Peace after successful war has all the stimulus of a rapid convalescence; men then rejoice at mere being, and sometimes break into song.

The Romans were grateful to Augustus because he had cured, even if by a major operation, the cancer of chaos that had been consuming their civic life. They were astonished to find themselves rich so soon after devastation; and they were elated to note that despite their recent defenseless disorder they were still masters of what seemed to them the world. They looked back upon their history, from the first to this second Romulus, from creator to restorer, and judged it epically wonderful; they were hardly surprised when Virgil and Horace put their gratitude, their glory, and their pride into verse, and Livy into prose. Better still, the region they had conquered was only partly barbarous; a large area of it was the realm of Hellenistic culture—of refined speech, subtle literature, enlightening science, mature philosophy, and noble art. This spiritual wealth was now pouring into Rome, stirring imitation and rivalry, compelling language and letters to spruce up and grow. Ten thousand Greek words slipped into the Latin vocabulary, ten thousand Greek statues or paintings entered Roman forums, temples, streets, and homes.

Money was passing down, even to poets and artists, from the captors of Egypt’s treasure, the absentee owners of Italy’s soil, and the exploiters of the Empire’s resources and trade. Writers dedicated their works to rich men in the hope of receiving gifts that would finance their further toil; so Horace addressed his odes to Sallust, Aelius Lamia. Manlius Torquatus, and Munatius, Plancus. Messala Corvinus gathered about him a coterie of authors whose star was Tibullus, and Maecenas redeemed his wealth and poetry by presents to Virgil, Horace, and Propertius. Until his final irascible years, Augustus followed a liberal policy toward literature; he was glad to have letters and art take up the energies that had disturbed politics; he would pay men to write books if they would let him govern the state. His generosity to poets became so renowned that a swarm of them buzzed around him wherever he went. When a Greek persisted, day after day, in pressing verses into his hand as he left his palace, Augustus retaliated by stopping, composing some lines of his own, and having an attendant give them to the Greek. The latter offered the Emperor a few denarii and expressed his regret that he could not give more. Augustus rewarded his wit, not his poetry, with 100,000 sesterces.¹

The stream of books swelled now to proportions unknown before. Everyone from fool to philosopher wrote poetry.² Since all poetry, and most literary prose, were designed to be read aloud, gatherings were formed at which authors read their productions to invited or general audiences or, in rare moments of tolerance, to one another. Juvenal thought that a compelling reason for living in the country was to escape the poets who infested Rome.³ In the bookshops that crowded a district called the Argiletum, writers assembled to compute literary genius, while impecunious bibliophiles furtively read snatches of the books they could not buy. Placards on the walls announced new titles and their cost. Small volumes sold for four or five sesterces, average volumes for ten ($1.50); elegant editions like Martial’s epigrams, usually illustrated with a portrait of the author, brought some five denarii ($3).⁴ Books were exported to all parts of the Empire, or were published simultaneously in Rome, Lyons, Athens, and Alexandria;^4a Martial was pleased to learn that he was bought and sold in Britain. Even poets now had private libraries; Ovid affectionately describes his.⁵ We gather from Martial that there were already book fanciers who collected de luxe editions, or rare manuscripts. Augustus established two public libraries; Tiberius, Vespasian, Domitian, Trajan, and Hadrian built others; by the fourth century there were twenty-eight in Rome. Foreign students and writers came to study in these libraries and in public archives; so Dionysius came from Halicarnassus, and Diodorus from Sicily. Rome was now the rival of Alexandria as the literary center of the Western world.

This efflorescence transformed both literature and society. Letters and the arts took on new dignity. Grammarians lectured on living authors; people sang snatches from them in the streets. Writers mingled with statesmen and highborn ladies in luxurious salons such as history would never know again until the flowering of France. The aristocracy became literary, literature became aristocratic. The lusty vigor of Ennius and Plautus, Lucretius and Catullus, was exchanged for a delicate beauty, or a teasing complexity, in expression and thought. Writers ceased to mingle with the people, ceased therefore to describe their ways or speak their language; a divorce set in between literature and life that finally sucked the sap and spirit out of Latin letters. Forms were set by Greek models, themes by Greek tradition or Augustus’ court. Poetry, when it could spare time from Theocritean shepherds or Anacreontic love, was to sing didactically the joys of agriculture, the morality of ancestors, the glory of Rome, and the splendor of its gods. Literature became a handmaiden of statesmanship, a polyphonic sermon calling the nation to Augustan ideas.

Two forces opposed this conscription of letters by the state. One was Horace’s hated and “profane crowd,” which liked the salty tang and independence of the old satires and plays rather than the curled and perfumed beauty of the new. The other was that demimonde of jollity and sin to which Clodia and Julia belonged. This younger set was in full rebellion against the Julian laws, wanted no moral reform, had its own poets, circles, and norms. In letters as in life the two forces fought each other, crossing in Tibullus and Propertius, matching the chaste piety of Virgil with the obscene audacities of Ovid, crushing two Julias and one poet with exile, and at last exhausting each other in the Silver Age. But the ferment of great events, the releasing leisure of wealth and peace, the majesty of a world acknowledging Rome’s sway, overcame the corrosion of state subsidies and produced a Golden Age whose literature was the most perfect, in form and utterance, in all the memory of men.

II. VIRGIL

The most lovable of Romans was born in 70 B.C. on a farm near Mantua, where the river Mincio wanders slowly toward the Po. The capital would henceforth give birth to very few great Romans; they would come from Italy in the century that was divided by the birth of Christ, and thereafter from the provinces. Perhaps Virgil’s veins contained some Celtic blood, for Mantua had long been peopled by Gauls; technically he was a Gaul by birth, for it was only twenty-one years later that Cisalpine Gaul received the Roman franchise from Caesar. The man who most eloquently sang the majesty and destiny of Rome would never show the hard masculinity of the Roman stock, but would touch Celtic strings of mysticism, tenderness, and grace rare in the Roman breed.

His father saved enough as a court clerk to buy a farm and raise bees. In that murmurous quietude the poet spent his boyhood; the full foliage of the well-watered north lingered in his later memory, and he was never really happy away from those fields and streams. At twelve he was sent to school at Cremona, at fourteen to Milan, at sixteen to Rome. There he studied rhetoric and allied subjects under the same man who was to teach Octavian. Probably after this he attended the lectures of Siro the Epicurean at Naples. Virgil tried hard to accept the philosophy of pleasure, but his rural background had ill-equipped him. He seems to have returned north after his education, for in 41 B.C. we find him swimming for life to escape a soldier who seized by force his father’s farm; Octavian and Antony had confiscated it because the region had favored their enemies. Asinius Pollio, the learned governor of Cisalpine Gaul, tried to have the farm returned, but failed. He atoned by giving his patronage to the young man, and encouraging him to continue the Eclogues he was composing.

By the year 37 Virgil was drinking in the wine of fame in Rome. The Eclogues (“Selections”) had just been published and had been well received; some verses had been recited on the stage by an actress and had been enthusiastically applauded.⁶ The poems were pastoral sketches in the manner, sometimes the phrases, of Theocritus, beautiful in style and rhythm, the most melodious hexameters that Rome had yet heard, full of pensive tenderness and romantic love. The youth of the capital had been long enough detached from the soil to idealize country life; everyone was pleased to imagine himself a shepherd moving with his flocks up and down the Apennine slopes, and breaking his heart with love unreturned.

Realer than these Theocritan ghosts were the rural scenes. Here, too, Virgil idealized, but he did not have to imitate. He had heard the woodman’s lusty song and the hovering restlessness of bees;⁸ and he had known the emptyhearted despair of the farmer who, like thousands then, had lost his land.⁹ Above all, he felt intensely the hopes of the age for an end to faction and war. The Sibylline Books had predicted that after the Age of Iron the Golden Age of Saturn would return. When, in 40 B.C., a son was born to Virgil’s patron, Asinius Pollio, the poet announced in his Fourth Eclogue that this birth would usher in utopia:

Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas;

magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.

Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;

iam nova progenies, caelo demittitur alto.

Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum

desinet, ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,

casta fave Lucina; tuus iam regnat Apollo—

“Now comes the final age [announced] in the Cumean [Sibyl’s] chant; the great succession of epochs is born anew. Now the Virgin ^* returns, the reign of Saturn returns; now a new race descends from heaven on high. O chaste Lucina [goddess of births]! smile upon the boy just born, in whose time the race of iron shall first cease, and a race of gold shall arise throughout the world. Thine own Apollo is now king.”

Ten years later these prophecies were fulfilled. The iron tools of war were laid aside; a new generation took charge, armed and infatuated with gold. Through the brief remainder of Virgil’s life Rome would know no further turmoil; prosperity and happiness increased, and Augustus was hailed as a savior, though not an Apollo. The quasi-royal court welcomed the optimism of the poet’s verse; Maecenas invited him, liked him, and saw in him a popular instrument of Octavian’s reforms. This judgment showed insight; for to all appearances Virgil, now thirty-three, was an awkward rustic, shy to the point of stammering, shunning any public place where he might be recognized and pointed out, ill at ease in the voluble and aggressive fashionable society of Rome. Besides, even more than Octavian, he was an invalid, suffering from headaches, throat ailments, stomach disorders, and frequent spitting of blood. Virgil never married, and seems to have felt no more than his Aeneas the full abandon of love. Apparently he consoled himself for a time with the affection of a boy slave; for the rest he was known, at Naples, as “the virgin.”¹⁰

Maecenas treated the youth generously, had Octavian restore his farm, and suggested to him some poems glorifying agricultural life. At that moment (37 B.C..) Italy was paying a penalty for letting so much of her soil go to pasturage, orchards, and vines; Sextus Pompey was blocking the import of food from Sicily and Africa, and a shortage of grain threatened another revolution. City life was enervating the young manhood of Italy; from every standpoint the health of the nation seemed to require the restoration of farming. Virgil readily agreed; he knew rural life; and though too frail now to bear its hardships, he was just the man to paint its attractive features with affectionate memory. He hid himself in Naples, and after seven years of file work emerged with his most perfect poems, the Georgics—literally “the labor of the land.” Maecenas was delighted, and brought Virgil south with him to meet Octavian, then (29 B.C..) returning from his victory over Cleopatra. At the little town of Atella the weary general rested and listened for four enchanted days to the 2000 lines. They fell in with his policies more completely than even Maecenas had foreseen. For he proposed now to disband the larger part of the immense armies that had won the world for him, to settle his veterans on the land, and at once to quiet them, feed the cities, and preserve the state, through rural toil. From that moment Virgil was free to think only of poetry.

In the Georgics a great artist deals with the noblest of the arts—the cultivation of the earth. Virgil borrows from Hesiod, Aratus. Cate Varro; but he transforms their rough prose or limping lines into finely chiseled verse. He covers dutifully the diverse branches of husbandry—the variety and treatment of soils, the seasons for sowing and reaping, the culture of the olive and the vine, the raising of cattle, horses, and sheep, and the care of bees. Every aspect of farming interests and beguiles him; he has to caution himself to get on;

Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus,

Singula dum capti circum vectamur amore—¹¹

“But meanwhile time flies, flies irreparably, while we, charmed with love [of our theme], linger around each single detail.” He has a word about the diseases of animals and how to treat them. He describes the common farm animals with understanding and sympathy; he is never through admiring the simplicity of their instincts, the power of their passions, the perfection of their forms. He idealizes rural life, but he does not ignore the hardships and vicissitudes, the crippling toil, the endless struggle against insects, the torturing pendulum of drought and storm. Nevertheless, labor omnia vincit;¹² there is in such toil a purpose and result that give it dignity; no Roman need feel ashamed to guide a plow. Moral character, says Virgil, grows on the farm; all the old virtues that made Rome great were planted and nourished there; and hardly any process of seed sowing, protection, cultivation, weeding, and harvesting but has its counterpart in the development of the soul. And out of the fields, where the miracle of growth and the whims of the sky bespeak a thousand mystic forces, the soul, more readily than in the city, perceives the presence of creative life, and is deepened with religious intuition, humility, and reverence. Here Virgil breaks into his most famous lines, beginning with a noble echo of Lucretius, but passing into a pure Virgilian strain:

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,

atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum

subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari;

fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestis,

Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores—¹³

“Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things, and has put under foot all fear and inexorable fate, and the noise of a greedy Hell. But happy too he who knows the rural deities, Pan and old Silvanus and the sister Nymphs.” The peasant is right in seeking to propitiate the gods with sacrifice and enlist their good will; these exercises of piety brighten the round of toil with festivals and clothe earth and life with meaning, drama, and poetry.

Dryden considered the Georgics “the best poem of the best poet.”¹⁴ It shares with the De Rerum Natura the rare distinction of being at once didactic and beautiful. Rome did not take it seriously as a handbook of agriculture; we do not hear that anyone, having read it, exchanged the Forum for a farm; indeed, as Seneca chought, Virgil may have written these rural ecstasies precisely to please an urban taste. In any case, Augustus felt that Virgil had performed Maecenas’ assignment marvelously well. He called the poet to his palace and suggested a harder task, a vastly larger theme.

III. THE AENEID

At first the plan was to sing the battles of Octavian.¹⁵ But the supposed descent of his adoptive father from Venus and Aeneas led the poet—perhaps the Emperor—to conceive an epic on the founding of Rome. As the theme developed it came to include, by preview through prophecy, the expansion of Rome into the Augustan empire and peace. It would also show the role of Roman character in these achievements and seek to make the ancient virtues popular; it would picture its hero as reverent of the gods and guided by them, and would fall in with the Augustan reformation of morals and faith. Virgil retired to various lairs in Italy and spent the next ten years (29-19) on the Aeneid. He wrote slowly, with the devotion of a Flaubert, dictating a few lines in the fresh morning and rewriting them in the afternoon. Augustus waited impatiently for the poem’s completion, repeatedly inquired about its progress, and importuned Virgil to bring him any finished fragment. Virgil put him off as long as he could, but finally read to him the second, fourth, and sixth books. Octavia, Antony’s widow, fainted at the passage describing her son Marcellus, but lately dead.¹⁶ The epic was never completed, never finally revised. In 19 B.C.. Virgil visited Greece, met Augustus in Athens, was sunstruck in Megara, started home, and died soon after reaching Brundisium. On his deathbed he begged his friends to destroy the manuscript of his poem, saying that at least three years more would have been necessary to give it finished form. Augustus forbade them to carry out the request.

Every schoolboy knows the story of the Aeneid. As Troy burns, the ghost of the slain Hector appears to the leader of his Dardanian allies, the “pious Aeneas,” and bids him resume from the Greeks the “holy things and household gods” of Troy—above all, the Palladium, or image of Pallas Athene, on the retention of which the preservation of the Trojans was believed to depend. “Seek for these” sacred symbols, says Hector, “the city which, when you have wandered over the sea, you shall at last establish.”¹⁷ Aeneas escapes with his old father Anchises and his son Ascanius. They set sail and stop at divers places; but always the voices of the gods command them to go on. Winds drive them ashore near Carthage, where a Phoenician princess, Dido, is founding a city. (When Virgil wrote this, Augustus was carrying out Caesar’s plan for rebuilding Carthage.) Aeneas falls in love with her. A convenient storm enables them to take refuge in the same cave and to consummate what Dido considers their marriage. For a time Aeneas accepts her interpretation, and shares with her and his willing men the tasks of construction. But the relentless gods—who, in classic myth, never cared much for marriage—warn him to depart; this is not the capital that he must make. Aeneas obeys, and leaves the mourning queen with a theme song in his words:

I will never deny, O Queen, that thou hast deserved of me the utmost thou canst set forth in speech. ... I never held out the bridegroom’s torch, nor took the marriage vow. . . . But now Apollo has bidden me sail. . . . Cease then to consume thyself and me with these complaints. Not of my own will do I seek Italy.¹⁸

Italiam non sponte sequor: this is the secret of the tale. We who, after eight centuries of sentimental literature, judge Virgil and his hero in its terms, attach far more significance to romantic love, and to extramarital relations, than did either Greece or Rome. Marriage was to the ancients a union of families rather than of bodies or souls; and the demands of religion or fatherland were placed above the rights or whim of the individual. Virgil treats Dido sympathetically, and rises to one of his finest passages in telling how she flings herself upon a funeral pyre and is burned alive; then he follows Aeneas to Italy.

Landing at Cumae, the Trojans march into Latium and are welcomed by its king, Latinus. His daughter Lavinia is betrothed to Turnus, the handsome chief of the neighboring Rutuli. Aeneas alienates her affection and her father; Turnus declares war upon him and Latium, and mighty battles ensue. To refresh and encourage Aeneas the Cumaean Sibyl takes him through the grotto of Lake Avernus into Tartarus. As Virgil writes an Odyssey of Aeneas’ wanderings and a short Iliad of his wars, so now he takes a lead from Odysseus’ tour of Hades, and becomes in turn an exemplar and guide for Dante. Facilis descensus Averni—“easy is the descent to Hell”—says Virgil;¹⁹ but his hero finds the way tortuous, and the lower world confusingly complex. There he meets Dido, who scorns his protestations of love; there he sees the varied torments with which earthly sin is punished and the prison house where suffer, Lucifer-like, rebellious demigods. Then the Sibyl takes him through mystic passages to the Blissful Groves where those who led good lives bask in green valleys and endless joys. His father Anchises, who has died en route, expounds to him here the Orphic doctrine of heaven, purgatory, and hell, and reveals to him in panoramic vision the future glory and heroes of Rome. In a later vision Venus shows him the battle of Actium and the triumphs of Augustus. His spirits revived, Aeneas returns to the living world, kills Turnus, and scatters death about him with epic hand. He marries the shadowy Lavinia, and when her father dies he inherits the throne of Latium. Soon afterward he falls in battle and is transported to the Elysian Fields. His son Ascanius or Iulus builds Alba Longa as the new capital of the Latin tribes, and thence his descendants Romulus and Remus go forth to establish Rome.

It seems unmannerly to criticize so gentle a soul as Virgil for all these grateful flatteries to his country and his Emperor, or to find flaws in a work that perhaps he had never wished to write and never lived to complete. Of course it imitates Greek models; so does practically all Roman literature except the satire and the essay. The battle scenes are weak echoes of the Iliad’s clanging frays, and Aurora rises as often as Homer’s rosy-fingered Dawn. Naevius, Ennius, and Lucretius lend the poet episodes and phrases, sometimes whole lines; and Apollonius of Rhodes, through his Argonautica, provides a model for Dido’s tragic love. Such borrowings were judged legitimate in Virgil’s as in Shakespeare’s days; all Mediterranean literature was viewed as the heritage and storehouse of every Mediterranean mind. The mythological background tires us, now that we are making our own; but these divine allusions and interpositions were familiar and pleasant even to skeptical readers of Roman poetry. We miss in the smooth epic of the ailing Virgil the torrential narrative of Homer, the life-and-blood reality that moves the giants of the Iliad or the homely folk of Ithaca. Virgil’s story often lags, and his characters are almost all anemic except those whom Aeneas abandons or destroys. Dido is a living woman, gracious, subtle, passionate; Turnus is a simple and honest warrior, betrayed by Latinus, and doomed to an unmerited death by ridiculous gods. After ten cantos of cant we resent the “piety” of Aeneas, which leaves him no will of his own, excuses his treachery, and brings him success only by supernatural intervention. We do not enjoy the windy speeches with which he kills good men, adding a rhetorical boredom to that competitive perforation which is humanity’s final test of truth.

To understand and appreciate the Aeneid we must at every turn remind ourselves that Virgil was writing not a romance, but a sacred scripture for Rome. Not that he offers any clear theology. The gods who pull the strings of his drama are as vicious as Homer’s and not as humorously human; indeed, all the mischief and suffering in the story are caused not by men and women but by deities. Probably Virgil conceived these divinities as poetical machinery, symbols of tyrannous circumstance and disruptive chance; in general he oscillates between Jove and an impersonal Fate as the ruler of all things. He likes the gods of the village and the field better than those of Olympus; he loses no opportunity to commemorate them and describe their rites; and he wishes that his fellow men could recapture the pietas—the reverence toward parents, fatherland, and gods—which was nourished by that primeval rural creed. Heu pietas! heu prisca fides! he mourns—“alas for the old piety and faith!” But he rejects the traditional conception of a Hades in which all the dead bear alike a gloomy fate; he plays with Orphic and Pythagorean ideas of reincarnation and a future life, and makes as vivid as he can the notion of a rewarding heaven, a cleansing purgatory, and a punishing hell.

The real religion of the Aeneid is patriotism, and its greatest god is Rome. The destiny of Rome moves the plot, and all the tribulations of the tale find meaning in “the heavy task of establishing the Roman race”—tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem. The poet is so proud of the Empire that he looks with no envy upon the superior culture of the Greeks. Let other peoples transform into living figures marble and bronze, and chart the courses of the stars:

But thou, O Roman, must the peoples rule.

Thine arts shall be to teach the ways of peace,

To spare the humbled, and throw down the proud.²⁰

Nor does Virgil resent the death of the Republic; he knows that class war, not Caesar, killed it; at every stage of his poem he foreshadows the restorative rule of Augustus, hails it as Saturn’s reign returned, and promises him, as reward, admission to the company of the gods. No man ever fulfilled a literary commission more perfectly.

Why do we retain a warm affection for this pietistic, moralistic, chauvinistic, imperialistic propagandist? Partly because the gentleness of his spirit is on every page; because we feel that his sympathies have spread from his own fair Italy to all men, even to all life. He knows the sufferings of the lowly and the great, the obscene ghastliness of war, the brief mortality that stalks the noblest men, the griefs and pains, the lacrimae rerum, or “tears in things,” that mar and accentuate the sunshine of our days. He is not merely imitating Lucretius when he writes of “the nightingale mourning beneath the poplar’s shade the loss of her young ones, whom some hard plowman has seen and torn unfledged from their nest; all night long she cries, and perched on a spray, renews her pitiful song, filling the woods with her sad lament.”²¹ But what draws us back to Virgil again and again is the persistent loveliness of his speech. It is not in vain that he pored over every line, “licking it into shape as the she-bear does her cubs”;²² and only the reader who has tried to write can guess the toil that made this narrative so smooth and adorned it with so many passages of sonorous melody that every second page cries out for quotation, and tempts the tongue. Perhaps the poem is too uniformly beautiful; even beauty palls upon us if its eloquence is prolonged. There is a delicate feminine charm in Virgil, but seldom the masculine power and thought of Lucretius or the surging tide of that “many-billowed sea” called Homer. We begin to understand the melancholy ascribed to Virgil when we picture him preaching beliefs that he could never recapture, writing for ten years an epic whose every episode and line required the effort of artificial art, then dying with the haunting thought that he had failed, that no spark of spontaneity had set his imagination on fire or spurred his figures into life. But over his medium, if not over his subject, the poet won a complete victory. Artifice has seldom achieved a brighter miracle.

Two years after his death his executors gave the poem to the world. There were some detractors: one critic published an anthology of his defects, another listed his pilferings, another printed eight volumes of Resemblances between lines in Virgil and in earlier poetry.²³ But Rome soon forgave this literary communism. Horace ranked Virgil fondly with Homer, and schools inaugurated nineteen hundred years of memorizing the Aeneid. Plebeian and aristocrat mouthed him; artisans and shopkeepers, tombstones and scribbled walls, quoted him; temple oracles gave responses through ambiguous verses of his epic; the custom began—and lasted till the Renaissance—of opening Virgil at random and finding some counsel or prophecy in the first passage that struck the eye. His fame grew until in the Middle Ages he was considered a magician and a saint. Had he not, in the Fourth Eclogue, predicted the coming of the Saviour and, in the Aeneid, described Rome as the Holy City, from which the power of religion would uplift the world? Had he not in that terrible Book VI pictured the Last Judgment, the sufferings of the wicked, the cleansing fire of purgatory, the happiness of the blessed in paradise? Virgil too, like Plato, was anima naturaliter Christiana, despite his pagan gods. Dante loved the elegance of his verse, and took him as guide not only through hell and purgatory, but also in the art of flowing narrative and beautiful speech. Milton thought of him when writing Paradise Lost and the pompous orations of devils and men. And Voltaire, of whom we should have expected a harsher judgment, ranked the Aeneid as the finest literary monument left us by antiquity.²⁴

IV. HORACE

One of the pleasantest pictures in the world of letters—where jealousy is only less rife than in love—is Virgil introducing Horace to Maecenas. The two poets had met in 40 B.C., when Virgil was thirty and Horace twenty-five. Virgil opened the doors of Maecenas to him a year later, and all three remained fast friends till death.

In 1935 Italy celebrated the two thousandth birthday of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. He was born in the little town of Venusia, in Apulia. His father was an ex-slave who had risen to the dignity of a tax collector—or, some said, a fishmonger.²⁵ Flaccus meant flap-eared; Horatius was probably the name of the master whom the father had served. Somehow the freedman prospered, sent Quintus to Rome for rhetoric, and to Athens for philosophy. There the youth joined the army of Brutus, and received command of a legion. It was dulce et decorum pro patria mori—“sweet and honorable to die for one’s country”;²⁶ but Horace, who often imitated Archilochus, dropped his shield in the midst of battle and took to his heels. After the war was over he found himself shorn of all property and patrimony, and “barefaced poverty drove me to writing verses.”²⁷ Actually, however, he buttered his bread by being a quaestor’s clerk.

He was short and stout, proud and shy, disliking the common crowd and yet not having the garb or means to move in circles whose education might equal his own. Too cautious to marry, he contented himself with courtesans who may have been real or may have been forms of poetic license invented to demonstrate maturity. He wrote of prostitutes with scholarly restraint and intricate prosody, and thought he deserved much for not seducing married women.²⁸ Too poor to ruin himself sexually, he took to books and composed Greek and Latin lyrics in the most recondite of Greek meters. Virgil saw one of these poems and praised it to Maecenas. The kindly epicure was complimented by Horace’s stammering timidity and found a sly relish in his sophisticated thought. In 37 Maecenas took Virgil, Horace, and some others on a jaunt by canal boat, stagecoach, litter, and foot across Italy to Brundisium. Shortly afterward he introduced Horace to Octavian, who proposed that Horace should become his secretary. The poet excused himself, having no passion for work. In 34 Maecenas gave him a house and income-producing farm in the Sabine valley of Ustica, some forty-five miles from Rome. Horace was now free to live in the city or the country, and to write as authors dream of writing—with lazy leisure and laborious care.^*

For a while he stayed in Rome, enjoying the life of an amused spectator of the hurrying world. He mingled with all ranks, studying the types that made up Rome, contemplating with clinical pleasure the follies and vices of the capital. He pictured some of these types in two books of Satires (34 and 30 B.C..) modeled at first on Lucilius and later in a milder and more tolerant strain. He called these poems sermones—not by any means sermons, but informal conversations, sometimes intimate dialogues, in almost colloquial hexameters; he confessed that they were prose in everything but meter, “for you would not call one a poet who writes, as I do, lines more akin to prose.” In these racy verses we meet the living men and women of Rome and hear them talking as Romans talked: not the shepherds, peasants, and heroes of Virgil, nor the legendary lechers and heroines of Ovid, but the saucy slave, the vain poet, the pompous lecturer, the greedy philosopher, the gabbing bore, the eager Semite, the businessman, the statesman, the streetwalker: this at last, we feel, is Rome. With homicidal playfulness Horace lays down for the hunter of legacies the rules for success in that ghoulish game.²⁹ He laughs at the gourmets who feast on delicacies and limp with gout.³⁰ He reminds the laudator temporis acti—the “praiser of times past”—that “if some god were for taking you back to those days you would refuse every time”;³¹ the chief charm of the past is that we know we need not live it again. He wonders, like Lucretius, at the restless souls who in the city long for the country, and there long for the city; who can never enjoy what they have because there is someone who has more; who, not content with their wives, hanker with too great and yet too little imagination for the charms of other women who have in turn become prose to other men. Money-madness, he concludes, is the basic disease of Rome. He asks the itching gold-seeker, “Why do you laugh at Tantalus, from whose thirsty lips the water always moves away? Change the name, and the story is about you”: mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur.³² He satirizes himself, too: he represents his slave telling him to his face that he, the moralist, is hot-tempered, never knows his own mind or purpose, and is the menial of his passions like anybody else. It is doubtless to himself, as well as to others, that he recommends the golden mean, aurea mediocritas;³³ est modus in rebus, he says—“there’s a limit, a measure in things,”³⁴ which the intelligent man will neither fall short of nor exceed. In opening his second series of Satires he complains to a friend that the first group were criticized as too savage and too weak. He asks advice and is told, “Take a rest.” “What?” the poet objects, “not write verses at all?” “Yes.” “But I can’t sleep.”³⁵

He would have done well to take the advice for a time. His next publication, the Epodes, or “Refrains” (29 B.C.), is the least worthy of his works: harsh and coarse, ungenerous, tastelessly and bisexually obscene, forgivable only as an experiment in the iambic meters of Archilochus. Perhaps his disgust with the “smoke and wealth and noise of Rome”³⁶ had mounted to bitterness; he could not bear the pressure of the “ignorant and evil-thinking crowd.” He pictures himself jostled and jostling in the human flotsam of the capital, and cries out: “O rural home! when shall I behold you? When shall I be able, now with the books of the ancients, now with sleep and idle hours, to quaff sweet forgetfulness of life’s cares? When will beans, the very brethren of Pythagoras, be served to me, and greens well larded with fat bacon? O nights and feasts divine!”³⁷ His stays in Rome became shorter; he spent so much time in his Sabine villa that his friends, even Maecenas, complained that he had cut them out of his life. After the heat and dust of the city he found the pure air, the peaceful routine, and the simple workmen on his farm a cleansing delight. His health was poor, and like Augustus he lived for the most part on a vegetarian diet. “My stream of pure water, my few acres of woodland, my sure trust in a crop of corn, bring me more blessing than the lot of the dazzling lord of fertile Africa.”³⁹ In him, as in the other Augustan poets, the love of country life finds a warm expression rare in the literature of Greece. Beatus ille qui procul negotiis—

Happy is he who far from business cares,

Even as the oldest race of men,

Tills with his own oxen his patrimonial fields,

Freed from every debt. . . .

How sweet it is to lie under the ancient ilex tree,

Or on the matted grass,

While the stream flows on between high banks,

And the woodland birds sing,

And springs with leaping waters plash,

Inviting to soft sleep! ⁴⁰

It should be added, however, that these lines are put with Horatian irony into the mouth of a city moneylender, who, having uttered them, at once forgets them and loses himself in his coins.

Probably it was in those quiet haunts that he labored with “painstaking happiness”—curiosa felicitas^*—over those odes by which he knew that his name would live or die. He was tired of hexameters, the endless march of their measured feet, the sharp caesura cleaving the line like some inexorable guillotine. He had enjoyed in his youth the subtle and vivacious meters of Sappho, Alcaeus, Archilochus, and Anacreon; he proposed now to transplant these “sapphics” and “alcaics,” these iambics and hendecasyllabics, into Roman lyric form, to express his thoughts on love and wine, religion and the state, life and death, in stanzas refreshingly new, epigrammatically compact, modeled for music, and teasing the mind with the complex skein of their weaving. He did not intend them for simple or hurried souls; indeed, he warned such away by the bluenosed opening of the third group:

Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.

Favete linguis. Carmina non prius

audita Musarum sacerdos

virginibus puerisque canto:—

“I hate and shun the profane crowd. Be silent! I, priest of the Muses, sing for maidens and youths songs never heard before.”

The maidens, if they had cared to tread and skip their way through Horace’s playful inversions of speech and desire, might have been pleasantly shocked by the chiseled epicureanism of these odes. The poet pictures the pleasures of friendship, eating and drinking, and making love; one would hardly surmise from such lauds that their author was a recluse who ate little and drank less. Why disturb ourselves with Roman politics and distant wars? he asks (anticipating the reader of these pages). Why plan so carefully a future whose shape will laugh at our plans? Youth and beauty touch us and flit away; let us enjoy them now, “reclining under the pine trees, our gray locks garlanded with roses and perfumed with Syrian nard.”⁴² Even as we speak, envious time runs out; seize the occasion, carpe diem, “snatch the day.”⁴³ He intones a litany of loose ladies whom he claims to have loved: Lalage, Glycera, Neaera, Inacha, Cinara, Candia, Lyce, Pyrrha, Lydia, Tyndaris, Chloe, Phyllis, Myrtale. We need not believe all his protestations of guilt; these were literary exercises almost compulsory among the poets of the day; the same ladies or names had served other pens. The now virtuous Augustus was not deceived by these iambic fornications; he was pleased to find, among them, stately praises of his reign, his victories, his aides, his moral reforms, and the Augustan peace. Horace’s famous drinking song—Nuncest bibendum⁴⁴—was composed on receipt of the news that Cleopatra was dead and Egypt taken; even his sophisticated soul thrilled at the thought of the Empire victorious and expanding as never before. He warned his readers that new laws could not take the place of old morals; mourned the spread of luxury and adultery, of frivolity and cynical unbelief. “Alas!” he says, referring to the latest war, “the shame of our scars and crimes, and of brothers slain! What have we of this hard generation shrunk from? What iniquity have we left untouched?”⁴⁵ Nothing could save Rome but a return to the simplicity and steadfastness of ancient ways. The skeptic who found it difficult to believe anything bent his hoary head before the ancient altars, acknowledged that without a myth the people perish, and lent his pen graciously to the ailing gods.

There is nothing in the world’s literature quite like these poems—delicate and yet powerful, exquisite and masculine, subtle and intricate, hiding their art with perfect art, and their toil with seeming ease. This is music in another scale than Virgil’s, less melodious and more intellectual, meant not for youths and maidens but for artists and philosophers. There is rarely any passion here, or enthusiasm, or “fine writing”; the diction is simple even where the sentence stands on its head. But in the greater odes there is a pride and majesty of thought, as if an emperor were speaking and not in letters but in bronze:

Exegi monumentum aere perennius

regalique situ pyramidum altius,

quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens

possit diruere, aut innumerabilis

annorum series et fuga temporum.

Non omnis moriar.⁴⁶

I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze,

Loftier than the royal peak of pyramids;

No biting storm can bring it down,

No impotent north wind, nor the unnumbered series

Of the years, nor the swift course of time.

I shall not wholly die.

The slandered crowd ignored the Odes, the critics denounced them as tiresome artifice, the puritans declaimed against the songs of love. Augustus pronounced the poems immortal, asked for a fourth group that would celebrate the exploits of Drusus and Tiberius in Germany, and chose Horace to write the carmen saeculare for the Secular Games. Horace complied, but without inspiration. The effort of the Odes had exhausted him. In his final work he relaxed into the conversational hexameters of the Satires, and wrote his Epistles as from an easy chair. He had always wanted to be a philosopher; now he abandoned himself to wisdom, even while remaining a causeur. Since a philosopher is a dead poet and a dying theologian, Horace, old at forty-five, was ripe to discuss God and man, morals and literature and art.

The most famous of these letters, named by later critics “The Art of Poetry,” was addressed Ad Pisones—to some uncertain members of the Piso clan; it was no formal treatise, but a bit of friendly advice on how to write. Choose a subject suited to your powers, Horace says; beware of laboring like a mountain and producing a mouse.⁴⁷ The ideal book is that which at the same time instructs and entertains; “he who has mingled the useful with the pleasant wins every vote”—omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci.⁴⁸ Avoid words that are new, obsolete, or “sesquipedalian”—foot-and-a-half words. Be as brief as clarity allows. Go straight to the heart of the matter—in medias res. In writing poetry do not imagine that emotion is everything. It is true that you must feel an emotion yourself if you wish the reader to feel it (si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi tibi).⁴⁹ But art is not feeling; it is form (here again is the challenge of the classic to the romantic style).^* To achieve form, study the Greeks day and night; erase almost as much as you write; delete every “purple patch” (purpureus pannus); submit your work to a competent critic, and beware of your friends. If it survives all this, put it away for eight years; if then you do not perceive the uses of oblivion, publish it, but remember that it can never be recalled except by time: verba volant, scripta manent. If you write drama let the action, not your words, tell the story and delineate the characters. Do not represent horror on the stage. Obey the unities of action, time, and place: let the story be one and occur within a brief time in one place. Study life and philosophy, for without observation and understanding even a perfect style is an empty thing. Sapere aude: dare to know.

Horace himself had obeyed all these precepts but one—he had not learned to weep. Because his feelings were too thin, or had been stifled into silence, he seldom rose to the high art that gives form to sincere sympathy, or to “emotion remembered in tranquillity.” He was too urbane. Nil admirari, “to marvel at nothing,”⁵⁰ was poor advice; to the poet everything should be a miracle, even when, like the sunrise or a tree, it greets him every day. Horace observed life, but not too deeply; he studied philosophy, but kept so persistently an “even mind”⁵¹ that only his Odes rise above a “golden mediocrity.”⁵² He honored virtue like a Stoic, and respected pleasure like an Epicurean. “Who, then, is free?” he asks, and answers, like Zeno, “The wise man, he who is lord over himself, whom neither poverty nor death nor bonds affright, who defies his passions, scorns ambition, and is in himself a whole.”⁵³ One of his noblest poems sings a Stoic strain:

Iustum et tenacem propositi virum

si fractus inlabatur orbis

impavidum ferient ruinae—

“If a man is just and resolute, the whole world may break and fall upon him and find him, in the ruins, undismayed.”⁵⁴ But despite all this he calls himself, with engaging honesty, “a pig from Epicurus’ sty.”⁵⁵ Like Epicurus he placed more store on friendship than on love; like Virgil he lauded the reforms of Augustus, and remained a bachelor. He did his best to preach religion, but he had none. Death, he felt, ends all.⁵⁶

His last days were clouded with this thought. He had his share of pains—stomach trouble, rheumatism, and much else. “The years as they pass,” he mourned, “rob us of all joys, one by one.”⁵⁷ And to another friend: “Alas, O Postumus, the fleeting years slip by; nor shall piety hold back our wrinkles, or pressing age, or indomitable death.”⁵⁸ He recalled how, in his first satire, he had hoped, when his time came, to quit life contentedly, “like a guest who has had his fill.”⁵⁹ Now he told himself: “You have played enough, eaten enough, drunk enough; it is time for you to go.”⁶⁰ Fifteen years have passed since he had told Maecenas that he would not long survive the financier.⁶¹ In 8 B.C.. Maecenas died, and a few months later Horace followed him. He left his property to the Emperor, and was laid to rest near Maecenas’ tomb.

V. LIVY

Augustan prose achieved no triumphs equal to those of Augustan verse. Oratory subsided as the making of laws and decisions passed in reality if not in form from Senate and assemblies to the secret chambers of the prince. Scholarship continued its quiet course, sheltered from present storms by its ghostly interests. It was only in the writing of history that the age achieved a masterpiece in prose.

Born in Patavium (Padua) in 59, Titus Livius came to the capital, devoted himself to rhetoric and philosophy, and gave the last forty years of his life (23 B.C—A.D. 17) to writing a history of Rome. That is all we know of him; “Rome’s historian has no history.”⁶³ Like Virgil he came from the region of the Po, retained the old virtues of simplicity and piety, and—perhaps through the pathos of distance—developed a passionate reverence for the Eternal City. His work was planned on a majestic scale and was completed; of its 142 “books” only thirty-five have come down to us; as these fill six volumes we may judge the magnitude of the whole. Apparently it was published in parts, each with a separate title, and all under the general heading, Ab urbe condita—“From the city’s foundation.” Augustus could forgive its republican sentiments and heroes, since its religious, moral, and patriotic tone accorded well with the Emperor’s policies. He took Livy into his friendship and encouraged him as a prose Virgil who was beginning where the poet had left off. Halfway on his long journey from 753 to 9 B.C., Livy thought of stopping, on the ground that he had already won lasting fame; he went on, he says, because he found himself restless when he ceased to write.⁶⁴

Roman historians looked upon history as a hybrid child of rhetoric and philosophy: if we may believe them, they wrote to illustrate ethical precepts with eloquent narrative—to adorn a moral with a tale. Livy was trained as an orator; finding oratory censured and dangerous, “he took to history,” says Taine, “so that he could still be an orator.”⁶⁵ He began with a stern preface, denouncing the immorality, luxury, and effeminacy of the age; he buried himself in the past, he tells us, to forget the evils of his time, “when we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.” He would set forth, through history, the virtues that had made Rome great—the unity and holiness of family life, the pietas of children, the sacred relation of men with the gods at every step, the sanctity of the solemnly pledged word, the stoic self-control and gravitas. He would make that stoic Rome so noble that its conquest of the Mediterranean would appear as a moral imperative, a divine order and law cast over the chaos of the East and the barbarism of the West. Polybius had ascribed Rome’s triumph to its form of government; Livy would make it a corollary of the Roman character.

The chief faults of his work derive from this moral intent. He gives many signs of being privately a rationalist; but his respect for religion is so great that he accepts almost any superstition, and litters his pages with omens, portents, and oracles, until we feel that here too, as in Virgil, the real actors are the gods. He expresses his doubts concerning the myths of early Rome; he gives the less credible ones with a smile; but as he goes on he ceases to distinguish legend from history, follows his predecessors with scant discrimination, and accepts at their face value the laudatory romances that earlier historians had composed to ennoble their ancestry.⁶⁶ He rarely consults original sources or monuments, and never bothers to visit the scene of an action. Sometimes he paraphrases Polybius for pages.⁶⁷ He adopts the old priestly method of annals, narrating events by consulates; consequently there is in him, aside from his moral theme, no tracing of causes, but only a succession of brilliant episodes. He makes no distinction between the rude patres of the early Republic and the aristocracy of his day, nor between the virile plebs that had created Roman democracy and the venal mob that had destroyed it. His prejudices are always patrician.

The patriotic pride that makes Rome forever right in Livy was the secret of his greatness. It gave him an enduring happiness in his long toil; seldom has any writer executed so vast a plan so faithfully. It gave his readers, and still gives us, a sense of Rome’s grandeur and destiny. This imperial consciousness contributed to the energy of Livy’s style, the vigor of his characterizations, the brilliance and power of his descriptions, the majestic march of his prose. The invented speeches in which his history abounds are masterpieces of oratory, and became models for the schools. The charm of good manners pervades the work: Livy never shouts, never severely condemns; his sympathy is broader than his scholarship and deeper than his thought. It fails him forgivably when he comes to Hannibal; but he atones with a sweep and splendor of narrative that reaches its zenith in describing the Second Punic War.

His readers did not mind his inaccuracies or his bias. They liked his style and story, and gloried in the vivid picture that he had drawn of their past. They took the Ab urbe condita as a prose epic, one of the noblest monuments of the Augustan age and mood. From that time onward it was Livy’s book that would color for eighteen centuries men’s conception of Rome’s history and character. Even readers in subject lands were impressed by this massive record of unprecedented conquests and titanic deeds. The younger Pliny tells of a Spaniard who was so moved by Livy’s work that he traveled from far Cádiz to Rome in the hope of seeing him. Having accomplished his purpose and tendered his worship, he neglected other sights and returned content to his Atlantic home.⁶⁸

VI. THE AMOROUS REVOLT

Meanwhile poetry continued to flourish, but not quite on the lines of Augustus’ desire. Only supreme artists like Virgil or Horace can produce good verse to governmental specifications; greater men would refuse, lesser men are unable to comply. Of the three major sources of poetry—religion, nature, love—two had been brought under imperial sway; the third remained lawless, even in Horace’s Odes. Now, mildly in Tibullus and Propertius, recklessly in Ovid, poetry escaped from the bureau of propaganda and staged a rebellion that proceeded with mounting gaiety to a tragic end.

Albius Tibullus (54-19), like Virgil, lost his ancestral lands when the Civil War reached the little town of Pedum–near Tibur—that had seen his birth. Messala rescued him from poverty and took him in his train to the East, but Tibullus fell ill on the way and returned to Rome. He was happy to be free from war and politics; now he could give himself to genderless love and the polishing of elegiac verse in the manner of the Alexandrian Greeks. To Delia (otherwise unknown, and perhaps one name for many) he addressed the usual supplications, “sitting like a gatekeeper [ianitor] before her stubborn doors”⁶⁹ and reminding her, as so many maids have been reminded, that youth comes but once and soon steals away. It did not disturb him that Delia was married; he put the husband to sleep with undiluted wine—but fumed when her new lover played the same trick upon him.⁷⁰ These ancient themes might not have harassed Augustus; what made Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid really disagreeable to a government that was finding it hard to enlist recruits for the army was the persuasive anti-militarism of this love-loose set. Tibullus laughs at warriors who forage for death when they might have been seducing women. He mourns for the age of Saturn, when, he imagines,

there were no armies, no hatred, and no war. . . . There was no war when men drank from wooden cups. . . . Give me but love, and let others go to war. . . . The hero is he whom, when his children have been begotten, old age overtakes in his humble cottage. He follows his sheep, his son follows the lambs, while the good wife heats the water for his weary limbs. So let me live till the white hairs glisten on my head, and I tell in my old man’s fashion of the days gone by.⁷¹

Sextus Propertius (49-15) sang less simply and tenderly, and with more learned ornaments, the same idyl of peaceful lechery. Born in Umbria, educated in Rome, he soon lapsed into verse; and though few readers could fetch his thought from the wells of his pedantry, Maecenas took him into his circle on the Esquiline. He describes with pride and pleasure the dinners there on the banks of the Tiber, when he would drink the wine of Lesbos in cups chiseled by great artists, and, “seated as on a throne amid merry women,” would watch the vessels gliding by on the river below.⁷² To please his patron and his prince Propertius now and then plucked his lyre in praise of war; but to his mistress Cynthia he sang another tune: “Why should I raise sons for Parthian triumphs? No child of ours shall be a soldier.”⁷³ Not all the martial glory in the world, he assured her, could equal one night with Cynthia.⁷⁴

Of all these epicureans, light of heart and head, who spent their lives climbing and descending the mount of Venus, Publius Ovidius Naso was the happy model and poet laureate. Sulmo (Soloma) saw his birth (43 B.C..) in a pleasant valley of the Apennines some ninety miles east of Rome; how beautiful, from the cold exile of his later years, would seem Sulmo’s vineyards, olive groves, cornfields, and streams! His rich middle-class father sent him to Rome to study law, and was shocked to hear that the boy wished to be a poet; he held up to the lad the awful fate of Homer, who, according to the best authorities, had died blind and poor. So warned, Ovid managed to rise to the post of a judge in the praetorial courts. Then, to his father’s dismay, he refused to run for the quaestorship (from which he would have emerged a senator), and retired to the cultivation of literature and love. He pleaded that he could not help being a poet; “I lisped in numbers and the numbers came.”⁷⁵

Ovid traveled leisurely to Athens, the Near East, and Sicily, and, returning, joined the loosest circles in the capital. Possessed of charm, wit, education, and money, he was able to open all doors. He married twice in early manhood, was twice divorced, and then grazed for a time in public pastures. “Let the past please others,” he sang; “I congratulate myself on being born into this age, whose morals are so congenial to my own.”⁷⁶ He laughed at the Aeneid, and merely concluded from it that since the son of Venus had founded Rome, it should, if only out of piety, become the city of love.⁷⁷ He lost his head to a pretty courtesan, whose anonymity or multiplicity he hides under the name of Corinna. His racy couplets about her had no trouble in finding a publisher; under the title of Amores they were soon (14 B.C.) on the lips and lyres of youthful Rome. “On every hand people want to know who is this Corinna that I sing about.”⁷⁸ He mystified them, in a second series of Amores, by writing a pronunciamento of promiscuity:

It is no fixed beauty that calls my passion forth; there are a hundred causes to keep me always in love. If it is some fair one with modest eyes downcast upon her lap, I am aflame, and her innocence is my ensnaring; if it is some saucy jade, I am smitten because she is not rustic simple, and gives me hope of enjoying her supple embrace on the soft couch. If she seems austere, and affects the rigid Sabine dame, I judge she would yield, but is deep in her conceit. If you are versed in books you win me by your rare accomplishments. . . . One treads softly, and I fall in love with her step; another is hard, but can be softened by the touch of love. Because this one sings sweetly ... I would snatch kisses as she sings; this other runs with nimble fingers over the complaining strings—who could but fall in love with such cunning hands? Another takes me by her movement, swaying her arms in rhythm and curving her tender side with supple art—to say naught of myself, who take fire from every cause; put Hippolytus in my place, and he will be Priapus! . . . Tall and short are after the wish of my heart; I am undone by both. . . . My love is candidate for the favors of them all.⁷⁹

Ovid apologizes for not chanting the glory of war; Cupid came and stole a foot from his verse and left it lame.⁸⁰ He wrote a lost play, Medea, which was well received, but for the most part he preferred “the slothful shade of Venus,” and was content to be called “the well-known singer of his worthless ways.”⁸¹ Here are the lays of the troubadours a thousand years beforetime, addressed like them to married ladies, and making flirtation the main business of life. Ovid instructs Corinna how to communicate with him by signs as she lies on her husband’s couch.⁸² He assures her of his eternal fidelity, his strictly monogamous adultery: “I am no fickle philanderer, not one of those who love a hundred women at a time.” At last he wins her and intones a paean of victory. He commends her for having denied him so long, and advises her to deny him again, now and then, so that he may love her forever. He quarrels with her, strikes her, repents, laments, and loves her more madly than before. Romeo-like he begs the dawn to delay, and hopes some blessed wind will break the axle of Aurora’s car. Corinna deceives him in his turn, and he is furious on finding that she holds her favors insufficiently rewarded by the homage of his verse. She kisses him into forgiveness, but he cannot pardon the new skill of her loving; some other master has been teaching her.⁸³ A few pages later he is “in love with two maids at once, each beautiful, each tasteful in dress and accomplishment.”⁸⁴ Soon, he fears, his simultaneous duties will undo him; but he will be happy to die on the field of love.⁸⁵

These poems were tolerantly received by Roman society four years after the passing of the Julian reform laws. Great Senatorial families like the Fabii, the Corvini, the Pomponii continued to entertain Ovid in their homes. Buoyant with success, the poet issued a manual of seduction called Ars amatoria (2 B.C.). “I have been appointed by Venus,” he says, “as tutor to tender love.”⁸⁶ He chastely warns readers that his precepts must be applied only to courtesans and slaves; but his pictures of whispered confidences, secret assignations, billets-doux, raillery and wit, deceived husbands, and resourceful handmaids suggest the middle and upper classes of Rome. Lest his lessons should prove too apt, he added another treatise, Remedia amoris, on curing love. The best remedy is hard work; next, hunting; third, absence; “it is also useful to surprise your lady in the morning, before she has completed her toilette.”⁹⁰ Finally, to make the balance even, he wrote De medicamina faciei feminineae, a metrical manual of cosmetics, pilfered from the Greeks. These little volumes sold so well that Ovid soared to heights of insolent fame. “So long as I am celebrated all the world over, it matters not to me what one or two pettifoggers say about me.”⁹¹ He did not know that one of these pettifoggers was Augustus, that the Prince resented his poems as an insult to the Julian laws, and would not forget the insult when imperial scandal should touch the poet’s careless head.

About the third year of our era Ovid married a third time. His new wife belonged to one of the most distinguished families in Rome. Now forty-six, the poet settled down to domestic life and seems to have lived in mutual faith and happiness with Fabia. Age did to him what law could not; it cooled his fires and made his poetry respectable. In the Heroides he told again the love stories of famous women—Penelope, Phaedra, Dido, Ariadne, Sappho, Helen, Hero; told them, perhaps, at too great length, for repetition can make even love a bore. Startling, however, is a sentence in which Phaedra expresses Ovid’s philosophy: “Jove decreed that virtue is whatever brings us pleasure.”⁹² About A.D. 7 the poet published his greatest work, the Metamorphoses. These fifteen “books” recounted in engaging hexameters the renowned transformations of inanimate objects, animals, mortals, and gods. Since almost everything in Greek and Roman legend changed its form, the scheme permitted Ovid to range through the whole realm of classical mythology from the creation of the world to the deification of Caesar. These are the old tales that until a generation ago were de rigueur in every college, and whose memory has not yet been erased by the revolution of our time: Phaëthon’s chariot, Pyramus and Thisbe, Perseus and Andromeda, the Rape of Proserpine, Arethusa, Medea, Daedalus and Icarus, Baucis and Philemon, Orpheus and Eurydice, Atalanta, Venus and Adonis, and many more; here is the treasury from which a hundred thousand poems, paintings, and statues have taken their themes. If one must still learn the old myths there is no more painless way than by reading this kaleidoscope of men and gods—stories told with skeptical humor and amorous bent, and worked up with such patient art as no mere trifler could ever have achieved. Little wonder that at the end the confident poet announced his own immortality: per saecula omnia vivam—“I shall live forever.”

He had hardly written the words when news came that Augustus had banished him to cold and barbarous Tomi on the Black Sea—even today unalluring as Constanta. It was a blow for which the poet, rounding fifty-one, was wholly unprepared. He had just composed, toward the close of the Metamorphoses, an elegant tribute to the Emperor, whose statesmanship he now recognized as the source of that peace, security, and luxury which Ovid’s generation had enjoyed. He had half completed, under the title of Fasti, an almost pious poem celebrating the religious feasts of the Roman year. In these verses he was on the way to making an epic out of a calendar, for he applied to the tales of the old religion, and to the honoring of its shrines and gods, the same lucid facility, delicacy of word and phrase, and even flow of racy narrative that he had devoted to Greek mythology and Roman love. He had hoped to dedicate the work to Augustus as a contribution to the religious restoration and as an apologetic palinode to the faith he once had scorned.

The Emperor gave no reason for his edict, and no one today can fathom its causes confidently. He offered some hint, however, by at the same time banishing his granddaughter Julia, and ordering that Ovid’s works should be removed from the public libraries. The poet had apparently played some role in Julia’s misconduct—whether as witness, accomplice, or principal. He himself declared that he was punished for “an error” and his poems, and implied that he had been the unwilling observer of some indecent scene.⁹³ He was given the remaining months of the year (A.D. 8) to arrange his affairs. The decree was relegatio, softer than exile in allowing him to retain his property, harsher in commanding him to stay in one city. He burned his manuscripts of the Metamorphoses, but some readers had made copies, and preserved them. Most of his friends avoided him;⁹⁴ a few dared the lightning by staying with him till his departure; and his wife, who remained behind at his bidding, supported him with affection and loyalty. Otherwise Rome took no notice as the bard of its joys sailed out of Ostia on the long voyage from everything that he had loved. The sea was rough nearly all the days of that trip, and the poet thought once that the waves would engulf the vessel. When he saw Tomi he regretted that he had survived, and gave himself over to grief.

On the voyage he had begun those verses which we know as Tristia, “Sorrows.” Now he continued them, and sent them to his wife, his daughter, his stepdaughter, and his friends. Probably the sensitive Roman exaggerated the horrors of his new home: a treeless rock where nothing would grow, and yet shut out from the sun by the Euxine mists; the cold so bitter that in some years the snow remained all summer long; the Black Sea stiff with ice through gloomy winters, and the Danube so frozen that it offered no bar to the raids of hinterland barbarians upon the city’s mixture of knife-wearing Getae and half-breed Greeks. When he thought of Roman skies and Sulmo’s fields his heart broke, and his poetry, still beautiful in form and phrase, took on a depth of feeling that it had never fathomed before.

These Tristia, and the poetic letters to his friends Ex Ponto—“From the Pontus” or Black Sea—have nearly all the charms of his greater works. A simple vocabulary that made him a pleasure even in school, scenes vividly realized by insight and imagery, characters brought to life by touches of psychological subtlety, phrases compact with experience or thought,^* an unfailing grace of speech and flowing ease of line: all these stayed with him in his exile, attended by a seriousness and tenderness whose absence makes the earlier poems unworthy of a man. Strength of character never came to him; as once he had spoiled his verse with superficial sensuality, so now he flooded his lines with tears and suppliant adulation of the Prince.

He envied these poems which could go to Rome. “Go, my book, and in my name greet the places I love” and “the dear soil of my native land”;⁹⁵ perhaps, he tells it, some brave friend will hand it to a relenting emperor. In every letter he still hopes for pardon, or pleads for at least some milder home. He thinks each day of his wife and calls her name in the night; he prays that he may kiss her whitened hairs before he dies.⁹⁶ But no pardon came. After nine years of exile the broken man of sixty welcomed death. His bones, as he had begged, were brought to Italy and buried near the capital.

His prediction of lasting fame was justified by time. His hold on the Middle Ages rivaled Virgil’s; his Metamorphoses and Heroides became rich sources of medieval romance; Boccaccio and Tasso, Chaucer and Spenser, drew upon him without stint; and the painters of the Renaissance had a treasure trove of subjects in his sensuous verse. He was the great romanticist of a classic age.

With his passing ended one of the great flowering epochs in the history of letters. The Augustan was not a supreme literary age, like the Periclean or Elizabethan; even at its best there is in its prose a pompous rhetoric, and in its verse a formal perfection, that seldom come from soul to soul. We find no Aeschylus here, no Euripides, no Socrates, not even a Lucretius or a Cicero. Imperial patronage inspired and nourished, repressed and narrowed, the literature of Rome. An aristocratic age—like that of Augustus, or Louis XIV, or eighteenth-century England—exalts moderation and good taste and tends in letters to a “classic” style in which reason and form dominate feeling and life. Such literature is more finished and less powerful, more mature and less influential, than the literature of passionately creative periods or minds. But within the classic range this age deserved the compliment of its name. Never had sober judgment found expression in such perfect art; even the madcap revelry of Ovid was cooled into a classic mold. In him and Virgil and Horace the Latin language as a poetic medium reached its zenith. It would never be so rich and resonant, so subtle and compact, so pliant and melodious again.

CHAPTER XIII

The Other Side of Monarchy

A.D. 14-96^*

I. TIBERIUS

WHEN great men stoop to sentiment the world grows fonder of them; but when sentiment governs policy empires totter. Augustus had chosen Tiberius wisely, but too late. When Tiberius was saving the state with patient generalship the Emperor had almost loved him. “Farewell,” one of his letters ended, “most agreeable of men . . . most valiant of men, most conscientious of commanders.”¹ Then the pathos of propinquity blinded Augustus, as later Aurelius; he set Tiberius aside for his pretty grandsons; compelled him to renounce a fortunate marriage to become the cuckold of Julia; resented his resentment, and let him grow old with philosophy in Rhodes. When at last Tiberius reached the principate he was already fifty-five, a disillusioned misanthrope who found no happiness in power.

To understand him we must remember that he was a Claudian; with him began the Claudian branch of that Julio-Claudian dynasty which ended with Nero. Through both parents he inherited the proudest blood in Italy, the narrowest prejudices, the strongest will. He was tall, powerful, and well featured; but acne accentuated his shyness, his awkward manners, his moody diffidence, and his love of seclusion.² The fine head of Tiberius in the Boston Museum shows him as a young priest, with broad forehead, large deep eyes, and pensive countenance; he was so serious in youth that wags called him “the old man.” He received all the education that Rome, Greece, environment, and responsibility could afford; he learned the two classic languages and literatures well, wrote lyrics, dabbled in astrology, and “neglected the gods.”³ He loved his brother Drusus despite the young man’s superior popularity; he was a devoted husband to Vipsania, and so generous to his friends that they could safely give him presents in the expectation of a fourfold return. The severest as well as the ablest general of his time, he gained the admiration and affection of his soldiers because he watched over every detail of their welfare, and won his battles by strategy rather than by blood.

His virtues ruined him. He believed the stories told about the mos maiorum, and wished to see the stern qualities of old Rome reborn in the new Babylon; he approved the moral reforms of Augustus and made clear his intention to enforce them. He had no liking for the ethnic farrago that steamed in the caldron of Rome; he gave it bread but no circuses, and offended it by not attending the games presented by rich men. He was convinced that Rome could be saved from a vulgar degeneration only by an aristocracy stoic in conduct and refined in taste. But the aristocracy could no more than the people bear his “stiff neck” and sober countenance, his long silences and slow speech, his visible awareness of his own excellence, and, worst of all, his grim husbanding of the public funds. He had been misborn a stoic in an epicurean age, and he was too coldly honest to learn Seneca’s art of preaching the one doctrine in beautiful language and practicing the other with graceful constancy.

Four weeks after the death of Augustus, Tiberius appeared before the Senate and asked it to restore the Republic. He was unfit, he told them, to rule so vast a state; “in a city so well provided with men of illustrious character . . . the several departments of public business could be better filled by a coalition of the best and ablest citizens.”⁴ Not daring to take him at his word, the Senate exchanged bows with him until at last he accepted power “as a wretched and burdensome slavery,” and in the hope that someday the Senate would permit him to retire to privacy and freedom.⁵ The play was well acted on both sides. Tiberius wanted the principate, or he would have found some way to evade it; the Senate feared and hated him, but shrank from re-establishing a republic based, like the old, upon theoretically sovereign assemblies. It wanted less democracy, not more; and it was pleased when Tiberius (A.D. 14) persuaded it to take over from the comitia centuriata the power of choosing the public officials. The citizens complained for a time, mourning the loss of the sums they had received for their votes. The only political power now left to the common man was the right of electing the emperor by assassination. After Tiberius democracy passed from the assemblies to the army, and voted with the sword.

He seems to have sincerely disliked monarchy and to have considered himself the administrative head and arm of the Senate. He refused all titles that savored of royalty, contented himself with that of princeps senatus, stopped all efforts to deify him or offer worship to his genius, and made evident his distaste for flattery. When the Senate wished to name a month after him, as it had done for Caesar and Augustus, he turned the compliment aside with dry humor: “What will you do if there should be thirteen Caesars?”^{6 *} He rejected a proposal that he should revise the Senatorial list. Nothing could surpass his courtesy to this ancient “assembly of kings”; he attended its meetings, referred “even the smallest matters” to its judgment, sat and spoke as merely a member, was often in the minority, and made no protest when decrees were passed contrary to his expressed opinion.⁷ “He was self-contained and patient,” according to Suetonius, “in the face of abuse, slander, and lampoons against himself and his family; in a free country, he said, there should be freedom of speech and thought.”⁸ His nominations, the hostile Tacitus admits,

were made with judgment. The consuls and the praetors enjoyed the ancient honors of their rank. The subordinate officials exercised their functions free from imperial control. The laws, if we except those of violated majesty, flowed in their regular channel. . . . The revenues were administered by men of distinguished probity. . . . In the provinces no new burdens were imposed, and the old duties were collected without cruelty or extortion. . . . Good order prevailed among his slaves. . . . In all questions of right between the emperor and individuals the courts of justice were open, and the law decided.⁹

This Tiberian honeymoon lasted nine years, during which Rome, Italy, and the provinces enjoyed government as good as any in their history. Without additional taxes, despite many benefactions to stricken families and cities, the careful repair of all public property, the absence of booty-yielding wars, and the rejection of bequests made to the Prince by persons with children or near relatives, Tiberius, who had found 100,000,000 sesterces in the Treasury on his accession, left 2,700,000,000 there at his death. He tried to check extravagance by example rather than by law. He labored carefully on every aspect of domestic and foreign affairs. To provincial governors anxious to collect more revenues he wrote that “it was the part of a good shepherd to shear his flock, not fleece it.”¹⁰ Though skilled in the art of war, he denied himself, as Prince, the glories of the battlefield; and after the third year of his long reign he kept the Empire at peace.

It was this pacific policy that marred the progress of his rule. His handsome and popular nephew, Germanicus, whom he had adopted as his son at Drusus’ death, had won some victories in Germany and wished to go on to its conquest. Tiberius advised against it, to the disgust of the imperialistic populace. Because Germanicus was a grandson of Mark Antony, those who still dreamed of restoring the Republic used him as a symbol for their cause. When Tiberius transferred him to the East, half of Rome called the young commander a martyr to the Prince’s jealousy; and when Germanicus suddenly took sick and died (19), nearly all Rome suspected that Tiberius had had him poisoned. Cnaeus Piso, an appointee of Tiberius in Asia Minor, was accused of the crime and was tried by the Senate; foreseeing condemnation, he killed himself to save his property for his family. No facts appeared to indicate Tiberius’ innocence or guilt; we know only that he asked the Senate to give Piso a fair trial, and that Germanicus’ mother, Antonia, remained to the end of her life the most faithful friend of Tiberius.¹¹

The excited participation of the public in the celebrated case, the scurrilous tales circulated about the Emperor, and the agitation now aroused against him by Germanicus’ widow, Agrippina, induced Tiberius to avail himself of that lex lulia de maiestate, or law of treason, which Caesar had passed to define crimes against the state. Since Rome had no public prosecutor or attorney general, and (before Augustus) no police, every citizen was empowered and requested to accuse before the courts any person whom he knew to have violated a law. If the accused was condemned, the delator or informer was awarded a fourth of the convicted man’s goods, while the state confiscated the rest. Augustus had used this dangerous procedure to enforce his marriage laws. Now, as plots multiplied against Tiberius, delatores sprang up to profit from denouncing them; and the supporters of the Prince in the Senate were ready to prosecute such accusations vigorously. The Emperor sought to restrain them. He interpreted the law strictly in the case of persons charged with defaming the memory or statues of Augustus; but “personalities leveled against himself,” says Tacitus, “were to be let pass unpunished.” He assured the Senate that his mother Livia wished a similar leniency shown to assailants of her good name.¹²

Livia herself was now a major problem of state. Tiberius’ failure to remarry left him with no protection against a strong-minded woman accustomed to exercise authority over him. She felt that her maneuvers had cleared his way to the throne, and she gave him to understand that he held it only as her representative.¹³ During the earlier years of Tiberius’ reign, though he was approaching sixty, his official letters were signed by her as well as by himself. “But not satisfied to rule on equal terms with him,” says Dio, “she wished to assert a superiority over him . . . and undertook to manage everything like a sole ruler.”¹⁴ Tiberius long bore this situation patiently; but as Livia survived Augustus fifteen years, he at last built himself a separate palace and left his mother in undisputed possession of that which Augustus had raised. Gossip accused him of cruelty to her, and of having starved his exiled wife. Meanwhile Agrippina was pushing her son Nero to succeed—if possible, to replace—Tiberius.¹⁵ This, too, he bore with hot patience, merely chiding her with a Greek quotation: “Do you think a wrong is done you, dear daughter, if you are not empress?”^* Hardest of all for him to bear was the realization that his only son, Drusus, borne to him by his first wife, was a worthless rake, cruel, ill-mannered, and lecherous.

The self-control with which Tiberius supported these tribulations left his nerves on edge. He retired more and more into himself, and developed a gloom of countenance and severity of speech that scattered all but his most hopeful friends. One man seemed unfailingly loyal to him—Lucius Aelius Sejanus. As prefect of the Praetorian Guard, Sejanus professed it his duty to protect the Prince; soon no one was admitted to the Emperor’s presence except through the hands and under the watch of the crafty vizier. Gradually Tiberius entrusted to him more and more of the government. Sejanus persuaded him that the imperial safety required the closer presence of the Praetorian Guard. Augustus had stationed six of its nine cohorts outside the city limits; Tiberius now allowed all nine to pitch their camp at the Viminal Gate, only a few miles from the Palatine and the Capitol; there they became first the protectors, then the masters, of the emperors. So supported, Sejanus exercised his powers with increasing boldness and venality. He began by recommending men for office, he advanced his fortune by selling offices to the highest bidders, he ended by aspiring to the principate. A senate of real Romans would soon have overthrown him; but the Senate had, with many exceptions, become an epicure’s club too listless to wield competently even the authority that Tiberius had urged it to retain. Instead of unseating Sejanus, it crowded Rome with statues voted by it in his image and honor, and at his suggestion it banished one after another of Agrippina’s followers. When Tiberius’ son Drusus died, Rome whispered that Sejanus had poisoned him.

Overcome with disappointment and bitterness, Tiberius, now a lonely and melancholy man of sixty-seven, left the hectic capital and removed to the inaccessible privacy of Capri. But gossip followed him without impediment. People said that he wished to conceal his emaciated figure and scrofulous face, and to indulge himself in drink and unnatural vice.¹⁶ Tiberius drank considerably, but was no drunkard; the story of his vices was probably calumny;¹⁷ most of his companions on Capri, says Tacitus, “were Greeks distinguished in nothing but literature.”¹⁸ He continued to administer carefully the affairs of the Empire, except that he communicated his views and desires to officials and the Senate through Sejanus. Since the Senate increasingly feared him, or Sejanus, or the hovering Guard, it accepted the wishes of the Emperor as commands; and without any change in the constitution, and with no clear insincerity on Tiberius’ part, the principate became a monarchy under the man who had proposed to restore the Republic.

Sejanus took advantage of his position to exile more of his enemies by having them accused under the “law of majesty,” and the weary Emperor no longer interfered. If we may believe Suetonius, Tiberius was now often guilty of cruelty;¹⁹ and we have the word of the unreliable Tacitus that he asked and obtained the death penalty for Poppaeus Sabinus on the ground that spies had overheard him plot against the government.²⁰ A year later (27) Livia died, sad and lonely in the home of her former husband; Tiberius, who had seen her but once since leaving Rome, did not attend her funeral. Freed from the restraint that the “Mother of her Country” might have exercised, Sejanus now persuaded Tiberius that Agrippina and her son Nero had been involved in the conspiracy of Sabinus. The mother was banished to Pandateria, and the son to the island of Pontia, where shortly afterward he killed himself.

Having won everything else, Sejanus now reached for the throne. Irked by a letter which Tiberius had written to the Senate recommending Gaius, son of Agrippina, as successor to the principate, Sejanus formed a plot to kill the Emperor (31). Tiberius was saved by Germanicus’ mother, Antonia, who risked her life to send him a warning. The old Prince, not yet destitute of resolution, secretly placed a new prefect over the Praetorians, had Sejanus arrested, and accused him to the Senate. Never had that body so gladly complied with the imperial wishes. It condemned Sejanus with expedition and had him strangled that very night. A reign of terror followed, led partly by senators whose interests, relatives, or friends had been injured by Sejanus, and partly by Tiberius, whom fear and anger, topping an accumulation of disillusionments, had plunged into a fury of revenge. Every important agent or supporter of Sejanus was put to death; even his young daughter was condemned; and since the law forbade the execution of a virgin, she was first deflowered and then strangled. Apicata, his divorced wife, committed suicide, but only after she had sent Tiberius a letter assuring him that Antonia’s daughter Livilla had joined with Sejanus in poisoning her husband Drusus, the Emperor’s son. Tiberius ordered Livilla tried, but she refused food until she died. Two years later (33) Agrippina killed herself in exile; and another of her sons, having been imprisoned, starved himself to death.

Tiberius lingered for six years after the fall of Sejanus. Probably his mind was now disordered; only on this supposition can we explain the incredible cruelties attributed to him. We are told that he now supported, instead of checked, accusations for maiestas; all in all sixty-three persons were indicted on this charge during his reign. He begged the Senate to provide protection for “an old and lonely man.” In 37 he left Capri after nine years of self-imprisonment, and visited some cities in Campania. While stopping at Lucullus’ villa in Misenum he fell in a fainting fit, and seemed dead. The courtiers at once flocked about Gaius, soon to be Emperor, and then were shocked to learn that Tiberius was recovering. A friend of all concerned ended the embarrassment by smothering Tiberius with a pillow (37).²¹

He was, said Mommsen, “the ablest ruler the Empire ever had.”²² Almost every misfortune had come to him during his life; and after his death he fell upon the pen of Tacitus.

II. GAIUS

The populace celebrated the old Emperor’s passing with cries of “Tiberius to the Tiber!” and hailed the Senate’s ratification of Gaius Caesar Germanicus as his successor. Born to Agrippina as she was accompanying Germanicus on his northern campaigns, Gaius had been brought up among soldiers, had imitated their dress, and had been affectionately named Caligula, or Little Boot, from the half boot (caliga) worn in the army. He now announced that he would follow the principles of Augustus in his policy and would co-operate respectfully with the Senate in everything. He distributed among the citizens the 90,000,000 sesterces that Livia and Tiberius had bequeathed them, and added a gift of 300 sesterces to each of the 200,000 recipients of state corn. He restored to the comitia the power to choose the magistrates, promised low taxes and rich games, recalled the banished victims of Tiberius, and brought his mother’s ashes piously to Rome. He seemed to be in all ways the opposite of his predecessor—prodigal, cheerful, humane. Within three months of his accession the people had sacrificed 160,000 victims to the gods in gratitude for so charming and beneficent a prince.²³

They had forgotten his lineage. His father’s mother was the daughter of Antony, his mother’s mother was the daughter of Augustus; in his blood the war between Antony and Octavian was renewed, and Antony won. Caligula was proud of his skill as a dueler, a gladiator, and a charioteer; but he was “troubled with the falling sickness,” and at times was “hardly able to walk or collect his thoughts.”²⁴ He hid under the bed when it thundered, and fled in terror from the sight of Aetna’s flames. He found it hard to sleep and would wander through his enormous palace at night crying for the dawn. He was tall, huge, hairy, except for a bald crown; his hollow eyes and temples made him look forbidding, to his delight; he “practiced all kinds of fearsome expressions before a mirror.”²⁵ He had received a good schooling, was an eloquent orator, had a keen wit, and a sense of humor that knew no scruple and no law. Infatuated with the theater, he subsidized many performers and himself privately acted and danced; desiring an audience, he summoned the leaders of the Senate as if to some vital conference, and then displayed his steps before them.²⁶ A quiet life of responsible labor might have steadied him, but the poison of power made him mad. Sanity, like government, needs checks and balances; no mortal can be omnipotent and sane. When Caligula’s grandmother Antonia gave him some advice he rebuked her with the remark, “Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody.” In the midst of a banquet he reminded his guests that he could have them all killed where they reclined; and while embracing his wife or mistress he would say pleasantly, “Off comes this beautiful head whenever I give the word.”²⁷

Soon therefore the young Prince who had been so respectful of the Senate began to give it orders and exact an Oriental subservience. He let senators kiss his feet in homage, and senators thanked him for the honor.²⁸ He admired Egypt and its ways, introduced many of these to Rome, and longed to be worshiped, Pharaoh-like, as a god. He made the religion of Isis one of the official cults of the Roman state. He did not forget that his great-grandfather had planned to unite the Mediterranean region under an Oriental monarchy; he too thought of making his capital at Alexandria, but distrusted the wit of its people. Suetonius describes him as living in “habitual incest with all his sisters”;²⁹ it seemed to him an excellent Egyptian custom. Ill, he made his sister Drusilla heir to his throne; when she married he made her divorce her husband, and “treated her as his lawful wife.”³⁰ To other desired women he sent letters of divorce in their husbands’ names, and invited them to his embraces; there was scarcely one woman of rank whom he did not approach. Amid these and some homosexual amours he found time for four marriages. Attending the wedding of Livia Orestilla and Gaius Piso, he took the bride to his own house, married her, and in a few days divorced her. Hearing that Lollia Paulina was very beautiful, he sent for her, divorced her from her husband, married her, divorced her, and forbade her to have relations with any man thereafter. His fourth wife, Caesonia, was pregnant by her husband when he married her. She was neither young nor fair, but he loved her faithfully.

In this imperial frolic government was an aside, and could usually be left to inferior minds. Caligula ably revised the roster of the business class and promoted its best members to the Senate. But his extravagance soon exhausted the full treasuries left him by Tiberius. He took his baths not in water but in perfumes; on one banquet he spent 10,000,000 sesterces.³¹ He built great pleasure barges with colonnades, banquet halls, baths, gardens, fruit trees, and gem-set sterns. He had his engineers span Baiae’s bay with a bridge resting on so many boats that Rome suffered famine for lack of ships to import corn. When the bridge was completed a great celebration took place, illuminated by flood lights in the modern manner; the people drank merrily, boats overturned, and many were drowned. From the roof of the Basilica Julia he would scatter gold and silver coins among the people below and watch with glee their fatal scrambling. He was so devoted to the green faction at the races that he gave a charioteer 2,000,000 sesterces. He built a marble stall and an ivory manger for the race horse Incitatus, invited it to dinner, and proposed to make it consul.

To raise funds for his lifelong Saturnalia, Caligula restored the custom of presenting gifts to the emperor; he accepted these in person, on his palace terrace, from all who came to give. He encouraged citizens to name him heir in their wills. He levied taxes upon everything: a sales tax on all food, a tax on all legal processes, a twelve and a half per cent tax on the wages of porters. “On the earnings of prostitutes,” Suetonius avers, he laid a tax of “as much as each received for one embrace; and the law provided that those who had ever been prostitutes should remain subject to this tax even after they married.”³² He had rich men accused of treason and condemned to death as an aid to the Treasury. He personally auctioned off gladiators and slaves, and forced aristocrats to attend and bid; when one of these slept, Caligula interpreted his nods as bids, so that the sleeper, waking, found himself richer by thirteen gladiators and poorer by 9,000,000 sesterces.³³ He compelled senators and knights to fight as gladiators in the arena.

After three years a conspiracy was formed to end this humiliating buffoonery. Caligula detected it and revenged himself by a reign of terror enhanced by his maniac joy in inflicting pain. The executioners were instructed to kill his victims “by numerous slight wounds, so that they may feel that they are dying.”³⁴ If we may believe Dio Cassius, he forced his saintly grandmother Antonia to kill herself.³⁵ Suetonius recounts that when meat ran short for feeding the beasts kept for gladiatorial games, Caligula ordered “all bald-headed” prisoners to be fed to the animals for the public good; that he had men of high rank branded with irons, condemned to mines, thrown to beasts, or shut up in cages and then sawn in two.³⁶ These are stories that we have no means of disproving and must record as the tradition; but Suetonius loved gossip, the senator Tacitus hated the emperors, and Dio Cassius wrote two centuries after the event.³⁷ More credible is the report that Caligula began the war between the principate and philosophy by exiling Carrinas Secundus and sentencing two other teachers to death. The young Seneca was marked for execution, but was spared because he was sickly and might be relied upon to die without prodding. Claudius, uncle of Caligula, escaped because he was, or pretended to be, an insignificant book-ridden dolt.

Caligula’s final pleasantry was to announce himself as a god, equal to Jupiter himself. Famous statues of Jove and other deities were decapitated and crowned with heads of the Emperor. He enjoyed sitting on a throne in the Temple of Castor and Pollux and receiving divine worship. At times he would converse with an image of Jupiter, often in terms of reproof; and he had a contrivance made by which he could reply to Jove’s thunder and lightning peal for peal and stroke for stroke.³⁹ He set up a temple to his godhead, with a corps of priests and a supply of select victims, and he appointed his favorite horse as one of the priests. He pretended that the moon-goddess had come down to embrace him, and asked Vitellius could he not see her. “No,” answered that wise courtier, “only you gods can see one another.”⁴⁰ The people were not deceived. When a Gallic cobbler saw Caligula masquerading as Jupiter, and was asked what he thought of the Emperor, he said, simply, “A big humbug.” Caligula heard, but did not punish such refreshing courage.⁴¹

At twenty-nine this god was an old man, worn out by excesses, probably venereally diseased, with a small and half-bald head upon a fat body, with a livid complexion, hollow eyes, and a sinister glance. His fate came suddenly, and from that Praetorian Guard whose support he had long purchased with gifts. A tribune of the Guard, Cassius Chaerea, insulted by the obscenities that Caligula gave him as passwords day after day, killed him in a secret passage of the palace (41). When the news went out, the city hesitated to believe it; men feared that this was a trick of the imperial prankster to find out who would rejoice at his death. To clarify the issue the assassins killed Caligula’s final wife and dashed out his daughter’s brains against a wall. On that day, says Dio, Caligula learned that he was not a god.⁴²

III. CLAUDIUS

Caligula had left the Empire in a dangerous condition: the Treasury empty, the Senate decimated, the people alienated, Mauretania in rebellion, Judea in arms at his insistence on placing his cult statue in the Temple of Jerusalem. No one knew where to find a ruler fit to face these problems. The Praetorians, coming upon the apparently imbecile Claudius hiding in a corner, proclaimed him imperator. The Senate, in terror of the army, and perhaps relieved by the prospect of dealing with a harmless pedant instead of a reckless lunatic, confirmed the choice of the Guard; and Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus hesitantly mounted the throne.

He was the son of Antonia and Drusus, the brother of Germanicus and Livilla, the grandson of Octavia and Antony, of Livia and Tiberius Claudius Nero. He had been born at Lugdunum (Lyons) in the year 10 B.C.. and was now fifty years old. He was tall and stout, with white hair and an amiable face; but infantile paralysis and other diseases had weakened his frame. His legs were precariously thin and gave him a shambling gait; his head wobbled as he walked. He loved good wines and rich food and suffered from gout. He stuttered a bit, and his laughter seemed too boisterous for an emperor. In anger, says the merciless gossiper, “he would foam at the mouth and trickle at the nose.”⁴³ He had been brought up by women and freedmen, had developed a timidity and sensitivity hardly advantageous to a ruler, and had had few opportunities to practice government. His relatives had looked upon him as a feeble-minded invalid; his mother, who had inherited Octavia’s gentleness, called him “an unfinished monster,” and when she wished to stress a man’s dullness she would term him “a bigger fool than my Claudius.” Scorned by all, he lived in safe obscurity, absorbed in gambling, books, and drink. He became a philologist and antiquarian, learned in “ancient” art, religion, science, philosophy, and law. He wrote histories of Etruria, Carthage, and Rome, treatises on dice and the alphabet, a Greek comedy, and an autobiography. Scientists and savants corresponded with him and dedicated their tomes to him; Pliny the Elder cites him four times as an authority. As Emperor he told his people how to cure snakebite, and forestalled superstitious fears by predicting a solar eclipse on his birthday and explaining its cause. He spoke Greek well, and wrote several of his works in that language. He had a good mind; perhaps he was sincere when he told the Senate that he had pretended stupidity in order to save his head.

His first act as Emperor was to reward with a donative of 15,000 sesterces every soldier of that Guard which had raised him to the throne. Caligula had given such gifts, but not so clearly in payment for the Empire; now Claudius acknowledged the sovereignty of the army, while canceling again the power of the Assembly to choose the magistrates. With wiser generosity he ended accusations de maiestate, released persons imprisoned on such charges, recalled all exiles, restored confiscated property, returned to Greece the statues that Gaius had stolen, and abolished the taxes that Gaius had introduced. But he put to death Caligula’s assassins, on the theory that it was unsafe to condone the murder of an emperor. He ended the practice of prostration, and announced simply that he was not to be worshiped as a god. Like Augustus he repaired the temples and with antiquarian fervor sought to reanimate the old religion. He applied himself personally and conscientiously to public affairs; he even “made the rounds of those who sold goods and let buildings, and corrected whatever he deemed to be abuses.”⁴⁴ But in truth, though he emulated the moderation of Augustus, his actual policies went beyond that cautious conservatism to the bold and varied plans of Caesar: the reform of government and law, the construction of public works and services, the elevation of the provinces, the enfranchisement of Gaul, and the conquest and Romanization of Britain.

He surprised everyone by showing will and character as well as learning and intellect. Like Caesar and Augustus, he was convinced that the local magistrates were too few and untrained, the Senate too proud and impatient to do the complex work of municipal and imperial administration. He bowed to the Senate, and left it many powers and more dignities; but the real labor of government was performed by himself, a cabinet of his appointees, and a civil service gradually organized, as under Caesar, Augustus, and Tiberius, out of the freedmen of the Emperor’s household, and using “public” slaves for clerical and minor tasks. Four cabinet members headed this bureaucracy: a secretary of state (ab epistulis—“for communications”), a treasurer (a rationibus—“for accounts”), another secretary (a libellis—for petitions), and an attorney general (a cognitionibus—“for actions at law”). Able freedmen—Narcissus, Pallas, and Callistus—held the first three posts. Their rise to power and wealth was the symbol of a wide elevation of the freedman class, which had been going on for centuries and reached a new height in Claudius’ reign. When the aristocracy protested against the empowerment of these parvenus, Claudius revived the office of censor, had himself chosen to it, revised the list of persons eligible to the Senate, eliminated the chief opponents of his policies, and added new members from the knights and the provinces.

Equipped with these administrative organs, he set himself an ambitious program of construction and reform. He improved the procedure of the courts, decreed penalties for the law’s delays, sat patiently as judge many hours every week, and forbade the application of torture to any citizen. To prevent the floods that endangered Rome all the more frequently as the Apennines were being denuded of timber, he had an additional channel dug for the lower course of the Tiber. To expedite the import of grain he had a new harbor (Portus) built near Ostia, with commodious warehouses and docks, two great moles to break the fury of the sea, and a channel connecting the harbor with the Tiber above the river’s silted mouth. He finished the “Claudian” aqueduct begun by Caligula, and constructed another, the Anio Novus, both immense works and notable for the beauty of their lofty arches. Observing that the lands of the Marsians were periodically swamped by the overflow of Lake Fucinus, he provided state funds for the labor of 30,000 men during eleven years, digging a three-mile tunnel from the lake through a mountain to the river Ciris. Before releasing the waters of the lake he staged on it a sham naval battle between two fleets manned by 19,000 condemned criminals, before spectators gathered from all Italy upon the slopes of the surrounding hills. The combatants saluted the Emperor with a historic phrase: Ave Caesar! morituri salutamus te—“Hail Caesar! we who are about to die salute you.”⁴⁵

The provinces prospered under him as in Augustan days. He punished decisively the malfeasance of officials, except in the case of Felix, procurator of Judea, whose misrule was concealed from him by Pallas, brother of Saint Paul’s inquisitor. He busied himself with every phase of provincial affairs; his edicts and inscriptions, found throughout the Empire, are marked by his characteristic fussiness and prolixity, but they show a mind and will intelligently devoted to the public good. He labored to improve communication and transport, to protect travelers from brigandage, and to reduce the cost of the official post to the communities it served. Like Caesar he wished to raise the provinces to the level of Italy in a Roman commonwealth. He carried out Caesar’s design in granting full citizenship to Transalpine Gaul; if he had had his way he would have enfranchised all freemen in the Empire.⁴⁶ A bronze tablet unearthed at Lyons in 1524 has preserved for us part of the rambling speech in which he persuaded the Senate to admit to its membership and to imperial office those Gauls who held the Roman franchise. Meanwhile he did not allow the army to deteriorate or the frontiers to be infringed; his legions were kept busy and fit, and great generals like Corbulo, Vespasian, and Paulinus developed under his choice and encouragement. Again deciding to complete Caesar’s plans, he invaded Britain in 43, conquered it, and was back in Rome within six months of setting out. In the triumph accorded him he violated precedent by pardoning the captured British king, Caractacus. The people of Rome laughed at their strange Emperor, but loved him; and when, on one of his absences from the capital, a false rumor spread that he had been killed, so great a turmoil of sorrow swept the city that the Senate had to issue official assurances that Claudius was safe and would soon be in Rome.

From that great height he fell because he had built a government too complex for his personal supervision, and because his amiable spirit was too easily deceived by his freedmen and his family. The bureaucracy had improved administration and had made a thousand new openings for corruption. Narcissus and Pallas were excellent executives, who considered their salaries unequal to their merits. To make up the difference they sold offices, extorted bribes by threats, and brought charges against men whose estates they wished to confiscate. They ended by being the richest individuals in all antiquity. Narcissus had 400,000,000 sesterces ($60,000,000); Pallas was miserable because he had only 300,000,000.⁴⁷ When Claudius complained of a deficit in the imperial Treasury, Roman wags remarked that he would have enough and to spare if he would take his two freedmen into partnership.⁴⁸ The old aristocratic families, now comparatively poor, looked with horror upon these accumulations and powers, and burned with anger when they had to court ex-slaves to obtain a word with the Emperor.

Claudius was busy writing to appointees and scholars, preparing edicts and speeches, and attending to the needs of his wife. Such a man should have lived like a monk and barricaded himself against love; his wives proved a ruinous distraction, and his domestic policy was not as successful as his foreign. Like Caligula he married four times. His first wife died on her wedding day, the next two he divorced; then, aged forty-eight, he married Valeria Messalina, sixteen. She was not unusually pretty: her head was flat, her face florid, her chest malformed;⁴⁹ but a woman need not be beautiful to commit adultery. When Claudius became Emperor she assumed the rights and manners of a queen, rode in his triumph, and had her birthday celebrated throughout the Empire. She fell in love with the dancer Mnester; when he rejected her advances she begged her husband to bid him to be more obedient to her requests; Claudius complied, whereupon the dancer yielded to her patriotically. Messalina rejoiced at the simplicity of her formula, and adopted it with other men; those who still refused her were accused of invented crimes by officials pliant to her influence, and found themselves deprived of their property and their liberty, sometimes of their lives.⁵⁰

Perhaps the Emperor tolerated these irregularities to secure indulgence for his own. “He was immoderate in his passion for women,” says Suetonius, who adds, as a startling distinction, that Claudius “was wholly free from unnatural vice.”⁵¹ Messalina, says Dio, “gave him some attractive housemaids for bedfellows.”⁵² Needing funds for her escapades, the Empress sold offices, recommendations, and contracts. Juvenal has handed down the story that she would disguise herself, enter a brothel, receive all comers, and gladly pocket their fees; the tale was probably taken from the lost memoirs of Messalina’s successor and foe, the younger Agrippina. While Claudius, says Tacitus, “devoted all his time to the duties of his censorial office”⁵³—including the supervision and improvement of Roman morals—Messalina “gave a loose to love,” and at last, while her husband was in Ostia, formally married a handsome youth, Caius Silius, “with pomp and all accustomed rites.”⁵⁴ Narcissus informed the Emperor through the latter’s concubines⁵⁵ and told him that an uprising was being planned to kill him and put Silius on the throne. Claudius rushed back to Rome, summoned the Praetorian Guard, had Silius and other lovers of Messalina slain, and then retired in nervous exhaustion to his rooms. The Empress hid herself in those gardens of Lucullus which she had confiscated for her pleasure. Claudius sent her a message inviting her to come and plead her cause. Fearing that the Emperor would forgive her and turn against him, Narcissus dispatched some soldiers with instructions to kill her. They found her alone with her mother, slew her with one blow, and left her corpse in her mother’s arms (48). Claudius told the Praetorian Guard that if he should every marry again they would be justified in killing him. He never mentioned Messalina again.^*

Within a year he was hesitating whether to marry Lollia Paulina or the younger Agrippina. Lollia, ex-wife of Caligula, was rich; sometimes, we are told, she wore jewelry worth 40,000,000 sesterces;⁵⁹ perhaps Claudius admired her money more than her taste. Agrippina was the daughter of the elder Agrippina and Germanicus; she too, had in her the unreconciled blood of Octavian and Antony, and had succeeded to the beauty, ability, resolution, and unscrupulous vindictiveness of her mother. She was already twice a widow. By her first husband, Cnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, she had a son Nero, whose enthronement became the ruling passion of her life; and from her second husband Caius Crispus, whom rumor accused her of poisoning, she inherited the wealth that sinewed her aims. Her problem was to become the wife of Claudius, to get rid of his son Britannicus, and make Nero, by adoption, heir to the Empire. The fact that she was Claudius’ niece did not deter her, but gave her opportunities for fond intimacies that stirred the aging ruler in no avuncular way. Suddenly he appeared before the Senate and asked it to bid him marry again for the good of the state. The Senate complied, the Praetorians laughed, and Agrippina reached the throne (48).

She was thirty-two, Claudius fifty-seven. His energies were failing; hers were at their height. Playing upon him with all her charms, she persuaded him to adopt Nero as his son, and to give his thirteen-year-old daughter Octavia to the sixteen-year-old youth in marriage (53). She assumed more and more political power with each year, and finally sat beside him on the imperial dais. She recalled the philosopher Seneca from the exile to which Claudius had condemned him, and made him the tutor of her son (49); and she had her friend Burrus appointed prefect of the Praetorian Guard. So poised, she ruled with a virile hand and established order and economy in the imperial household. Her ascendancy might have been a boon to Rome had she not indulged her avarice and her revenge. She had Lollia Paulina put to death because Claudius, in a careless moment which no wife forgives, remarked on the elegance of Lollia’s figure. She had Marcus Silanus poisoned because she feared that Claudius might name him his heir. She conspired with Pallas to overthrow Narcissus, and this moneyed potentate, as faithful as he was corrupt, ended his career in a dungeon. The Emperor, weakened by ill-health, many labors, and sexual enterprise, allowed Pallas and Agrippina to establish another reign of terror. Men were accused, exiled, or killed because the Treasury was exhausted by public works and games and needed replenishment by confiscated wealth. Thirty-five senators and 300 knights were condemned to death in the thirteen years of Claudius’ reign. Some of these executions may have been justified by actual conspiracy or crime; we do not know. Nero later claimed that he had examined all the papers of Claudius, and that from these it appeared that not one prosecution had been set on foot by the Emperor’s order.⁶⁰

After five years of his fifth marriage Claudius awakened to what Agrippina was doing. He resolved to put an end to her power, and circumvent her plans for Nero, by naming Britannicus his heir. But Agrippina had more determination and less scruple. Perceiving the Emperor’s intentions she risked everything: she fed Claudius poisonous mushrooms, and he died after twelve hours of agony, without being able to utter a word (54). When the Senate deified him, Nero, already enthroned, remarked that mushrooms must be the food of the gods, since by eating them Claudius had become divine.⁶¹

IV. NERO

On his father’s side Nero belonged to the Domitii Ahenobarbi—so named from the bronzelike beards that ran in the family. For five hundred years they had been famous in Rome for ability, recklessness, haughtiness, courage, and cruelty. Nero’s paternal grandfather had a passion for games and the stage; drove a chariot in the races, spent money with open hand on wild beasts and gladiatorial shows, and had to be reproved by Augustus for barbarous treatment of his employees and slaves. He married Antonia, daughter of Antony and Octavia. Their son Cnaeus Domitius enhanced the reputation of the family by adultery, incest, brutality, and treason. In A.D. 28 he married the second Agrippina, then thirteen years old. Knowing his wife’s ancestry and his own, he concluded that “no good man can possibly be born from us.”⁶² They named their only child Lucius, and added the cognomen Nero, meaning, in the Sabine tongue, valiant and strong.

The chief authors of his education were Chaeremon the Stoic, who taught him Greek, and Seneca, who taught him literature and morals but not philosophy. Agrippina forbade the last on the ground that it would unfit Nero for government;⁶³ the result was creditable to philosophy. Like many a teacher, Seneca complained that his labors were thwarted by the mother: the boy would run to her when reproved, and was sure to be comforted. Seneca sought to train him in modesty and courtesy, simplicity and stoicism. If he could not retail to him the doctrines and disputes of the philosophers, he could at least dedicate to him the eloquent philosophical treatises that he was composing, and hope that someday his pupil might read them. The young prince was a good student, wrote forgivable poetry, and addressed the Senate in the graceful manner of his master. When Claudius died, Agrippina had no great difficulty in securing the confirmation of her son on the throne, especially since her friend Burrus brought to him the full support of the Guard.

Nero rewarded the soldiers with a donative, and gave 400 sesterces to every citizen. He pronounced over his predecessor a eulogy composed by the same Seneca ⁶⁴ who would soon publish, anonymously, a pitiless satire (Apocolocyntosis or Pumpkinification) on the late Emperor’s ejection from Olympus. Nero made the usual obeisance to the Senate, modestly excused his youth, and announced that of the powers heretofore taken by the prince he would keep only the command of the armies—a highly practical choice for the pupil of a philosopher. The promise was probably sincere, since Nero kept it faithfully for five years ⁶⁵—that quinquennium Neronis which Trajan later accounted the best period in the history of the imperial government.⁶⁶ When the Senate proposed that statues of gold and silver should be raised in his honor, the seventeen-year-old Emperor rejected the offer; when two men were indicted for favoring Britannicus, he had the accusations withdrawn; and in a speech to the Senate he pledged himself to observe throughout his reign that virtue of mercy which Seneca was then extolling in an essay De clementia. Asked to sign a death warrant for a condemned criminal, he sighed, “Would that I had never learned to write!” He abolished or reduced oppressive taxes, and gave annuities to distinguished but impoverished senators. Recognizing his immaturity, he allowed Agrippina to administer his affairs; she received embassies, and had her image engraved beside his own on the imperial coins. Alarmed by this matriarchate, Seneca and Burrus conspired, by playing upon Nero’s pride, to win from her the administration of his powers. The infuriated mother announced that Britannicus was the true heir to the throne, and threatened to unmake her son as decisively as she had made him. Nero countered by having Britannicus poisoned. Agrippina retired to her villas and wrote her Memoirs as a last vindictive stroke—blackening all the enemies of herself and her mother, and providing Tacitus and Suetonius with that museum of horrors from which they drew the darker colors for their portraits of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero.

Under the guidance of the philosopher-premier, and on the impetus of the administrative organization already devised, the Empire prospered within and without. The frontiers were well guarded, the Black Sea was cleared of pirates, Corbulo brought Armenia back under Rome’s protectorate, and Parthia signed a peace that endured for fifty years. Corruption was reduced in the courts and the provinces, bureaucratic personnel was improved, the Treasury was managed with economy and wisdom. Probably at Seneca’s suggestion Nero made the far-reaching proposal to abolish all indirect taxes, especially the customs duties collected at frontiers and ports, and so establish free trade throughout the Empire. The measure was defeated in the Senate through the influence of the tax-gathering corporations—a defeat which indicates that the Principate was still recognizing its constitutional limits.

To divert Nero from interference with state affairs, Seneca and Burrus allowed him to indulge his sensuality unrestrained. “At a time when vice had charms for all orders of men,” says Tacitus,⁶⁷ “it was not expected that the sovereign should lead a life of austerity and self-denial.” Nor could religious belief encourage Nero to morality; a smattering of philosophy had liberated his intellect without maturing his judgment. “He despised all cults,” says Suetonius, “and voided his bladder upon an image of the goddess whom he most respected, Cybele.”⁶⁸ His instincts inclined him to excessive eating, exotic desires, extravagant banquets where the flowers alone cost 4,000,000 sesterces;⁶⁹ only misers, he said, counted what they spent. He admired and envied Caius Petronius, for that rich aristocrat taught him new ways of combining vice with taste. Petronius, says Tacitus in a classic description of the epicurean’s ideal,

passed his days in sleep, and his nights in business, joy, and revelry. Indolence was at once his passion and his road to fame. What others did by vigor and industry, he accomplished by his love of pleasure and luxurious ease. Unlike the men who profess to understand social enjoyment, and ruin their fortunes, he led a life of expense without profusion; an epicure, yet not a prodigal; addicted to his appetites, but with refinement and judgment; an educated and elegant voluptuary. Gay and airy in his conversation, he charmed by a certain graceful negligence, the more engaging as it flowed from the natural frankness of his disposition. With all his delicacy and careless ease, he showed, when he was governor of Bithynia, and again when consul, that vigor of mind and softness of manners may unite in the same person. . . . From his public offices he returned to his usual gratifications, fond of vice, or of pleasures that bordered on it. . . . Cherished by Nero and his companions . . . he was allowed to be the arbiter of taste and elegance. Without his sanction nothing was exquisite, nothing delightful or rare.⁷⁰

Nero was not subtle enough to achieve this artistic epicureanism. He disguised himself and visited brothels; he roamed the streets and frequented taverns at night with the comrades of his mood, robbing shops, insulting women, “practicing lewdness on boys, stripping those whom they encountered, striking, wounding, murdering.”⁷¹ A senator who defended himself vigorously against the disguised Emperor was soon afterward forced to kill himself. Seneca sought to divert the royal lust by condoning Nero’s relations with an ex-slave, Claudia Acte. But Acte was too faithful to him to keep his affections; he soon exchanged her for a woman of superlative refinement in all the ways of love. Poppaea Sabina was of high family and great wealth; “she had everything,” says Tacitus, “except an honest mind”; she was one of those women who spend all the day in adorning their persons, and exist only when they are desired. Her husband, Salvius Otho, boasted of her beauty to Nero; the Emperor at once commissioned him to govern Lusitania (Portugal), and laid siege to Poppaea. She refused to be his mistress, but agreed to be his wife if he would divorce Octavia.

Octavia had borne the transgressions of Nero silently, and had preserved her own modesty and chastity amid the stream of sexual license in which she had been forced to live from her birth. It is to the honor of Agrippina that she lost her life in defending Octavia against Poppaea. She used every plea against the proposed divorce, even, says Tacitus, to offering her own charms to her son. Poppaea fought back with hers and won; youth was served. She taunted Nero with being afraid of his mother, and led him to believe that Agrippina was plotting his fall. Finally, in the madness of his infatuation, he consented to kill the woman who had borne him and given him half the world. He thought of poisoning her, but she had guarded against this by the habitual use of antidotes. He tried to have her drowned, but she swam to safety from the shipwreck he had arranged. His men pursued her to her villa; when they seized her she bared her body and said, “Plunge your sword into my womb.” It took many blows to kill her. The Emperor, viewing the uncovered corpse, remarked, “I did not know I had so beautiful a mother.”⁷² Seneca, it is said, had no share in the plot; but the saddest lines in the history of philosophy tell how he penned the letter in which Nero explained to the Senate how Agrippina had plotted against the Prince and, being detected, had killed herself.⁷³ The Senate gracefully accepted the explanation, came in a body to greet Nero returning to Rome, and offered thanks to the gods for having kept him safe.

It is hard to believe that this matricide was a youth of twenty-two with a passion for poetry, music, art, drama, and athletic games. He admired the Greeks for their varied contests of physical and artistic ability, and sought to introduce like competitions to Rome. In 59 he instituted the ludi iuvenales, or Youth Games; and a year later he inaugurated the Neronia on the model of the quadrennial festival at Olympia, with contests in horse racing, athletics, and “music”—which included oratory and poetry. He built an amphitheater, a gymnasium, and a magnificent public bath. He practiced gymnastics with skill, became an enthusiastic charioteer, and finally decided to compete in the games. To his philhellenic mind this seemed not only proper, but in the best tradition of Greek antiquity. Seneca thought it ridiculous, and tried to confine the imperial exhibitions to a private stadium. Nero overruled him and invited the public to witness his performance. It came, and applauded lustily.

But what this uninhibited satyr really wanted was to be a great artist. Having every power, he longed also for every accomplishment. It is to his credit that he applied himself with painstaking seriousness to engraving, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry.⁷⁴ To improve his singing “he used to lie upon his back with a leaden plate upon his chest, purge himself by a syringe or by vomiting, and deny himself fruits and all foods injurious to the voice”;⁷⁵ on certain days, for the same purpose, he ate nothing but garlic and olive oil. One evening he summoned the foremost senators to his palace, showed them a new water organ, and lectured to them on its theory and construction.⁷⁶ He was so fascinated by the music which Terpnos drew from the harp that he spent entire nights with him in practicing on that instrument. He gathered artists and poets about him, competed with them in his palace, compared his paintings with theirs, listened to their poetry, and read his own. He was deceived by their praise, and when an astrologer predicted that he would lose his throne he replied cheerfully that he would then make a living by his art. He dreamed of performing publicly in one day on the water organ, the flute, and the pipes, and then appearing as actor and dancer in the part of Virgil’s Turnus. In 59 he gave a semipublic concert as a harpist (citharoedus) in his gardens on the Tiber. For five years more he controlled his longing for a larger audience; at last he dared it in Naples; there the Greek spirit ruled, and the people would forgive and understand him. The auditorium was so overcrowded for his exhibition that it crumbled to pieces shortly after the audience had left. Encouraged, the young Emperor appeared as singer and harpist in the great theater of Pompey at Rome (65). In these recitals he sang poems apparently composed by himself;^* some fragments have survived and show a moderate talent. Besides many lyrics, he wrote a long epic on Troy (with Paris as hero), and began a still longer one on Rome. To complete his versatility, he came upon the boards as an actor, playing the roles of Oedipus, Heracles, Alcmaeon, even the matricide Orestes. The populace was delighted to have an emperor entertain it and kneel on the stage, as custom required, to ask for its applause. It took up the songs that Nero sang and repeated them in the taverns and the streets. His enthusiasm for music spread through all ranks. His popularity, instead of waning, grew.