Chapter C: Julius Cæsar (5)

This was truly the age of the poets. Living at the same time, but not quite of the same standing, were Lucretius, Catullus, and Calvus, the rival of Catullus, the greatest poets of that day. Lucretius, whom men have long tried to exclude from the poets altogether, is now at length acknowledged in his high excellence as such; not but what, had he chosen a more favourable theme than that wretched philosophical system, he might have done far greater things. But the greatest poet Rome ever had, is Catullus. He never strains after words or expressions: poetry flows from his tongue, it is with him the very language which the impulse of the moment brings out; every thought, every word of his, is the expression of what he actually feels. He has the same perfections as the Greek Lyric poets down to Sophocles, and is fully equal to them. Other poets there were, who, though undoubtedly his inferiors, were still eminent. If we had C. Helvius Cinna; if we had other poems than those still extant of Valerius Cato (whose _Diræ_ are still very doubtful); if we had Valgius,[32] and Ticida; we should read them with considerable pleasure, we should acknowledge still more that the age was rich in distinguished men, even though they were not equal to Catullus: and this is certainly more than can be said of any other period. Poetry is now becoming inured to the strict rules of metrical forms: the greater poems are composed in hexameters; the smaller lyric pieces, in foreign or Greek measures; and the old Latin forms are laid aside. The hexameter is rightly constructed, and the _cæsuræ_ carefully observed: in trifles only, the Roman poets of those times have some peculiarities to which they take a fancy; as for instance, in the construction of the pentameter. Dec. Laberius, the well known composer of mimes, no doubt was very original: this sort of poetry consisted very much of improvisation, being like the _Sermones_ of Horace. Furius Bibaculus was very pleasing; Varro Atacinus, the translator of Apolonius Rhodius, is by no means to be despised. Comedy had quite gone down, not even mediocrities being mentioned.

This full bloom of poetry fades away at the time of Cæsar and Cicero’s death, and a new generation takes the place of the old one. Few eloquent men of that period survive; Asinius Pollio, for example, who when Cæsar died, was about thirty-four years of age, and therefore had already formed his mind. As a writer, however, he belongs to a somewhat later date, after the war of Brundusium; for it was not till then that he had completely retired from public life. From the fragments of him in Seneca the father, we may gather that his style was very unequal, but that he sometimes could write very well, especially when impelled by passion; as he did with justice against the Pompeians, and with great injustice against Cicero. His was a soured and embittered nature, without any kindly feelings. Another skilful orator was Munatius Plancus. Hirtius indeed still belongs to the former age, but is not the less excellent: he is a most elegant writer, although his whole life was spent in the midst of arms. Asinius Pollio is the connecting link between the two generations (which might be called _proventus_,[33] φορά); just as Lessing is between Klopstock, Winkelmann, Kant, Kästner, Gellert, Cramer, on the one side, and Göthe, Voss, Friederich Leopold von Stolberg on the other, not reacting upon those who were older than himself, but paving the way for the rising generation. Thus Asinius stands between the time of Cicero and Virgil; for the latter may indeed be mentioned as his contemporary.

It is a very just remark, that it is incorrect to speak, as we do in Germany, of the Augustean age; we ought only to call it the Augustan age, Αὐγούστειοι being met with in Greek authors[34] only. Except in the case of Livy, prose had entirely fallen off: besides him, there was only Messalla, of whom, however, nothing is left to us. And the cause of this lay in the state of things at that time, as is shown by Tacitus in his excellent _Dialogus de Oratoribus_. Prose was in times of old always developed by oratory; it was poor as soon as people ceased to speak in public. For this, however, there was no more a free opportunity: the _rostra_ were dumb, the _curia_ was hushed, and if there were still any speeches, they were only λόγοι ἐπιδεικτικοί,—dismal signs of the times! The only field therefore for prose was history, which was written by Asinius Pollio and Livy: Valerius Messalla alone, who was much older than Asinius, and about the same standing as Virgil, was of any importance as an orator. It may also be that he was more remarkable for his nobleness of mind and his personal excellence, than for extraordinary talent.

To the first half of the reign of Augustus, belong the brilliant days of Virgil and Horace, and of many other contemporaries of less eminence. In Horace poetry is still lyric; but afterwards it loses this character. It adapts itself more and more to the Greek; the old licences of metre are altogether set aside, and the Greek being law in everything, it is a mere translating of the Greek: it is Grecian poetry in Latin words. The language—except in particular cases, for the sake of embellishment,—carefully eschews every obsolete phrase, and the written phraseology is in perfect harmony with the spoken one. Though Virgil says _olli_, _aulai_, he never does so in the Bucolics and Georgics, but in the Æneid; and that from the same grammatical reasons which the Alexandrian writers had for their rules for the Greek epic style.

Virgil was born on the fifteenth of October 682, and he died in 733, on the twenty-second of September; Horace was born on the eighth of December 687, and he died the twenty-seventh of November 744. We cannot allow of the adoration with which the later Romans regarded Virgil: he is wanting in that fertility and richness of invention which his theme required. His Eclogues are far from being a happy imitation of Theocritus, as they try to produce something on the Roman soil which could not be there. Theocritus’ shepherds have sprung from true Siculian, and not from Greek materials; they bear the stamp of genuine nationality: Daphnis is a Sicilian hero. But when Virgil wishes to transfer them to the sky of Lombardy, he places Greek names and Greek peculiarities in a spot where they could not exist at all. More happy is his didactic poem on husbandry: he keeps himself in a middle sphere, and one cannot speak otherwise than in its praise. The whole of the Æneid, from the beginning to the end, is a misconceived idea: but this does not prevent its being full of beauties in its details; and it also displays a learning from which the historian can never glean too much. No epic poem can be successful, unless it be a lively, hearty narrative of some achievement of which the whole story has become a kind of national heir-loom. It is a silly remark of a still living historian, that an epic poem would never tell with the people, unless the subject were sufficiently old: if the events are such as every one knows, and as can be made to receive a certain impress of originality without losing their own distinguishing character, then they are fit for epic poetry, and for the arts in general. This is the reason why subjects from Sacred History are so well adapted for the historical painter: it is because the beholder understands at once what the artist wants to represent, and is able to bring to mind the whole of the associations with which the picture is connected. Subjects from mythology are far more hazardous, inasmuch indeed as the artist himself, and with him the many, are too little acquainted with them, and they cannot therefore but seem somewhat unmeaning: in ancient times, however, such mythological subjects were as much household words among the people as the Sacred History is with us. Generally known events in modern history would now be perfectly well suited to be dealt with by the artist. So long as in a nation there be legends which every body is sure to sing and know by heart, there will always be something which one may choose as one thinks good, and pick out as the subject for an epic poem. Thus the epos makes choice of a single part, whilst the cyclic poem, on the other hand, takes in a whole series of tales. Such is the wretched Pharsalia of Lucan. Virgil took a Latin story, and dove-tailed it into Greek legends; whereas had he wanted to have anything out of the Roman legends, he ought to have treated it in the Italian style: this might indeed have been very difficult, as that kind of knowledge was no longer general; but it would have been the only means of making a poem with much life in it. Virgil is one of the remarkable instances of the way in which a man can miss his true calling. His was lyric poetry. The little poem on the _Villa Syronis_ and the _Si mihi susceptum fuerit decurrere munus_, show that he would have been a poet like Catullus, had he not made the mistake of wishing to write nothing but Grecian-Latin poems. It is a pity that posterity so much overrated the very work which was but a failure; yet we may well account for it, as people were not able to compare it with Homer, whom they did not know at all, and its extraordinary beauties had their full effect. Nor was the superiority of Catullus acknowledged until the end of the eighteenth century. The first who spoke without prejudice about Virgil, was Jeremy Markland: amidst a terrible outcry, as if he had committed high treason, he openly said what he thought. It was certainly no affectation that Virgil wished to burn the Æneid; that poem was the task of his life, and he had in his last moments a feeling that it was a failure. I am glad that he did not do so; but still we must in all things learn to keep our judgment free, and even then we cannot but love and honour him. It may be that the tomb on Posilipo, which during the whole of the middle ages was already shown as that of Virgil,—yet I know not why,—is not his, and that the laurel on it may have been replanted many a time; but notwithstanding, I have gone to see it as a pilgrim, and the laurel branches which I also plucked off at his grave, are dear to me as relics.

Venusia, the birthplace of Horace, was a Latin colony, founded between the third Samnite war and that of Pyrrhus. This town, which had always been true to the Romans, is mentioned by Appian (whose accounts of this are very trustworthy) among those which revolted in the Social War: it must therefore have lost its Latin character, and, like the other peoples in those parts, have rather become Lucanian and Oscan in feeling. Horace says, that he went to school with the sons of centurions: this is a hint that Venusia must have been a military colony, and in fact one of Sylla’s, which may be accounted for by that rebellion. Moreover, when Horace wrote the second book of his _Sermones_, a new military colony must have been established there; for Ofellus, whom Horace when a boy had still seen well off, had had his allotment of land given away to a soldier. Horace’s father was a _libertinus_; the cognomen of Flaccus, if the father had it as well, would prove that he was not of foreign, but of Italian race: his father may indeed have been taken prisoner in the Social War, and sold for a slave; for otherwise the children of freedmen have different names. The father gave his son a very liberal education: when Brutus came to Greece, Horace, who was twenty-two years old, was staying at Athens whither his father had sent him. He with several other young Romans entered the army, and, what was an immense honour for the son of a freedman, was promoted by Brutus to be a tribune. This raised a good deal of envy; but it shows him to have been a distinguished young man, as there were at that time not more than six tribunes to every legion. After the battle of Philippi, he made his escape like many others, and was perhaps under the protection of Messalla; then he went to Rome, where he was recommended to Mæcenas, who soon became exceedingly fond of him, interesting himself for him even more than he did for Virgil: this kindness of Mæcenas, Horace received with great gratitude. Mæcenas made him a present of a small farm on the Sabine hills, where, as he had indeed but few wants, he lived retired and happy: in his latter years especially, he was almost always there. The life of Horace by Suetonius is very interesting; and from this work, as well as from the poet’s own writings, Wieland in his commentary, particularly on the Epistles, has said many very fine things on his personal character and his position in the world, and has cleared him of many a calumny: he has shown that Horace deserves the reproach of being a flatterer far less in truth than Virgil, as unfortunately we cannot help allowing. His praises are the outpouring of a general feeling, which he very fairly shared with other persons of his day. Wieland moreover points out how he tries to keep himself from being dependent on Mæcenas, and to push the golden chains aside as far as he could do so without seeming ungrateful. Augustus was not at all pleased when Horace did not dedicate to him the first book of the _Sermones_, and also when he wanted to have him for his secretary and he declined it: he could not have hidden from himself, that Horace was one of those who, notwithstanding all the good that he had done, would not forget his former life, and always judged of him by it. Wieland calls our attention to a letter of Augustus, in which he betrays how much he felt Horace’s indifference, and says, _An vereris ne apud posteros infame tibi sit quod videaris familiaris nobis esse?_ We can hardly have the odes in chronological order: some of them were written very early, perhaps even as far back as the time that he lived in Athens: of many indeed it is impossible to give the exact date; and though most of them were composed before the war of Actium, the first three books were not published till afterwards. Some of the _Sermones_ also belong to a very early period: the earliest that we have of his, is perhaps the banquet of Nasidienus, that is to say, Salvidienus, according to the undoubtedly correct remark of the scholiast; just as Malthinus stands for Mæcenas, so that the fictitious name has the same quantity as the real one. Against a man who had become unfortunate, Horace would not have written after his execution; and therefore the poem must date soon after the battle of Philippi, 710. To the last years of his life belong the fourth book of the Odes, and the second of the Epistles.

Horace, as a poet, was once admired beyond all bounds; but for the last thirty years or more, he has not had justice done to him. His imitations from the Greeks are of wonderful beauty, and they have also much in them which is his own. Yet for all that he has many faults. When searching for an original expression, he sometimes contents himself with another which is none of the most appropriate or the most terse: if one keeps this remark well in mind, many of Bentley’s emendations fall to the ground. Moreover he has two great failings. One is quite annoyed at his misappreciation of the earlier writers; the times had quite changed, and hence he took a dislike to many things because they were strange in his day, more especially to archaisms. How he could have been blind to the merits of Plautus, is quite inconceivable: the age to which he belonged had wrought on him the same effects which difference of nationality has on other men; many an expression may have quite gone down to the common people, and thus have become vulgar, so that Horace was shocked by it. This feeling may have been much increased by his disgust at those who made a ridiculous parade of quaintness, playing the same farce as the exaggerated admirers of the middle ages among us. And besides this, painful is the impression which is made upon us by the irony of Horace’s Epicurean philosophy, owing to which he, in fact, looks upon everything as a folly, and tries to sneer at everything, treating what is most venerable with irreverence: this becomes at last a bad habit with him. Yet there is excuse for this in the age in which he lived; in better times, it would not have been thus. One sees in him a mild and quiet man, who in truth was always constrained and reserved; the wild, reckless Catullus, with his loud laugh, and his loud wailings, comes more home to our hearts: the same tone which there is in Horace may also have been that of Menander, and the latest Athenian comedy. Horace did not choose to let his heart bleed, and thus he puts us indeed into a sadder frame of mind. When a real good is lost for the people, one should not deaden the feelings to it, and try to make the world thoughtless; but one should carry the grief for it within one’s breast, and let it have free course, yet without cherishing or artificially fostering it. “He who has lost a real good,” says Friederick Leopold Von Stolberg, “has often much left to him, if he retains the consciousness of what he has lost.” Horace with all this is still ever noble and amiable: he has only misunderstood an unhappy age. He lived nearly to his fifty-seventh year.

Of the same standing as Horace was Tibullus an _Eques Romanus_: he was one of those whose fortune had somewhat suffered in those stormy times. The year of his birth is unknown to us: from an epigram which is ascribed to Domitius Marsus (_Te quoque Virgilio comitem non æqua, Tibulle_, &c.), we merely gather that he died soon after Virgil. Yet there is some doubt about that epigram: the way in which Horace addresses Tibullus, seems to bespeak a contemporary. Of Tibullus, the first two books are not to be doubted; but the third cannot possibly be his, although the name of the author can hardly be Lygdamus: for it may only be substituted for the right one, as being of the same quantity. Thus it is also with the names of women: that of the mistress of Propertius, whom he calls Cynthia, was Hostia; that of Tibullus’ Delia, was Plania. Owing to party spirit, people will not admit the truth of Voss’s remark, that in the third book there is quite a different metrical character, and also quite another turn of expression: he who does not see this, is in my opinion no judge of questions either of grammar or of metre. A distich has been rejected as spurious because it clashes with the chronology of Tibullus: the poet of the third book was born, like Ovid, in 709, under the consulship of Hirtius and Pansa, as he says himself:—

Natalem primo nostrum videre parentes,
Cum cecidit fato consul uterque pari.

These verses cannot be struck out. The fourth book is just as little Tibullus’ own: the panegyric on Messalla is the production of some poor fellow who was in want of a patron, and certainly not that of a knight. Both books, the third and the fourth, are by authors who are inferior to Tibullus. The smaller poems which bear the names of Sulpicia and Cerinthus, may be Tibullus’ own; but they are almost too good to be his: there is too much strength and boldness in them. To me, Tibullus is an unpleasing poet: this womanish and maudlin grief, this unantique sentimentality, are mistaken tones of Mimnermus, which to me are unbearable; and above all, in a Roman.

Somewhat older perhaps than Horace was Cornelius Gallus, a man of rank who had also tried his fortune in war, and whom Augustus had appointed governor of Egypt, in which post indeed he behaved shamefully. He must, however, have had his amiable qualities, as Virgil was so fond of him, and introduced his praise in the fourth book of the Georgics: it was to replace it, that the poet had afterwards to put in the episode of Aristæus. Having been convicted of very disgraceful things, Gallus put an end to his own life. He had translated Euphorion, and written elegies, of which, however, one line only remains. He must have been a distinguished poet, though what goes under his name, all but a few fragments, is not genuine. If he is called _durior_, this perhaps implies that he had the old language and versification of Catullus and Lucretius, which Quinctilian might indeed have found harsh.

One who also lived at the same time as these men, was Varius. Of him we have unfortunately but a few verses; the ancients, however, ranked him with Virgil and Horace among the great poets of that age; he was especially renowned for his tragedy of Thyestes. This is a very unhappy subject; and I am afraid that there was a good deal of rant in that piece, and that it stood in the same relation to Greek tragedy as the Æneid to the Iliad. The tragic poets of that age in all likelihood no longer had before them the old Athenian tragedy, like Pacuvius and Attius, but the Alexandrian; for what was called the Pleias, was certainly something quite different from the old tragic poets. One may get an idea of it from Seneca, whose pieces are certainly not of Roman home-growth, but evidently formed after foreign models: his lyrical part is limited to anapæsts, and very rarely contains quite simple strophes of four lines. If I had the choice, I would rather have Varius’ poem _De Morte_ than his tragedy.

This was the noble group of the poets of that age, such as seldom have met together in this world. These poets Augustus found living when he made himself master of the state; they have passed the shortest part of their lives under his rule. But now a second generation arose, which is really to be called the Augustan. It begins with Propertius, whose poems are evidently imitations from the Alexandrian school; whereas Horace kept to the older lyric style, although Virgil already begins to follow somewhat in the track of the poets of Alexandria and Pergamus. Propertius must have been born about 700. He was a native of Umbria, and his youth was about the time of the assignments of land: it was his ambition to be the Roman Callimachus or Philetas.

Much greater than he,—in fact, of all the Roman poets whose works have come down to us, by far the most poetical after Catullus,—was Ovid, born in 709. Virgil is evidently disheartened by his lot; Horace’s mind was painfully distracted in another way, as he fondly loved Brutus; Tibullus, with his feeling heart, was weighed down by evil times; Propertius was so affected by the early loss of his property, that free enjoyment of life and perfect ease never returned to him: but as for Catullus, on the other hand, the unbounded freedom of his humour sprang from the independence of his fortune. His father must have been one of the most eminent men in his province; he was a guest-friend of Cæsar. Ovid was born with one of the most happy dispositions that heaven can give, at a time when the troubles of the Perusian war could only reach him in his cradle; he was in his thirteenth year when Cæsar Octavianus conquered at Actium: thus his lightheartedness and cheerfulness arose from the circumstances of the age in which he lived. On this we are all of us dependent: my own tone of mind is quite different from what it would have been had I been born thirty years sooner or later. Ovid was a young man of rank and wealth at Sulmo, who began the world adorned with every gift of mind and body: a greater facility no man could have, and in this respect, he is among the very first poets. In Schiller’s poems, one may every where remark his struggle with the forms of verse, and the toil with which he worked; whilst in Goethe’s early productions, everything is as if written off-hand. The Greek lyric poets also are never far-fetched; it is as if they could express themselves only in the way in which they did, and in none other: Horace, unlike them, is plodding, and it is but seldom that anything, as it were, bubbles out of him. In Ovid, all comes fresh from the heart: his faults, which also run through his poetry, are well known. The cause of his misfortune is a riddle which no human sagacity will ever be able to make out; and the endless stories which have been spread about it are but so many absurdities. The utter depression of his mind during his abode in Tomi has been turned into a reproach against him; but I am rather struck with admiration, that in this dreadful exile among barbarians, his freshness and liveliness forsook him so little.

One of his contemporaries was Cornelius Severus, of whom we have a fragment which strengthens the opinion that had he lived longer, he would have become an eminent epic poet, infinitely superior to Lucan.

Pedo Albinovanus must also have been distinguished. Whether he is the author of the poem to Livia on the death of her son Drusus, seems not to be so certain as is generally believed.

Livy was born in the consulship of Cæsar, 693, and lived to his seventy-fifth, or seventy-seventh year;[35] he thus reached far into Tiberius’ reign. I have already spoken of him before. History was the only thing that one could then write in prose; eloquence had sunk into wretched declamation, or mere lawyer’s pleading. He was fifty years of age, or somewhat older, when he began to write his history. The unfavourable opinion which Asinius Pollio gave of him, certainly arose from party spirit, as the latter could not abide anything that was Pompeian. Livy’s great fame, in which no one of his day has equalled him, is all built upon his historical work; and this is the reason why he is not once mentioned in Horace: very likely, he lived at first as a teacher of rhetoric in complete retirement. A man came all the way from Cadiz to Rome to see him.

In the literature of the Cæsarian period, I forgot to mention Dec. Laberius, who was very distinguished and original as a writer of mimes. If men like Laberius and P. Syrus acted their mimes themselves, these were evidently a kind of improvisation, a description of poetry which was akin to the _sermones_ of Horace, and partook very little of the peculiarities of dramatic verse. P. Syrus also ranked very high. Comedy had at that time quite gone off; we do not even meet with mediocrities. Of tragedies, the Thyestes of Varius only is mentioned.—Valgius also belongs still to the time of Virgil.

The political weakness of Greece in those days, before the might of Rome, is not greater than the absolute nullity of Greek literature as compared with the richness of the Roman one. The Greeks were then nothing but rhetoricians and grammarians, though these certainly deserve an honourable mention: of poems, there are none worth speaking of; even of epigrammatic talent there never yet was such a dearth: only a few wretched epigrams date from that age. Dionysius of Halicarnassus stands alone as a man distinguished for sense and judgment: it is therefore not to be wondered at, that the Romans in this respect also felt superior to the Greeks; and they did not perhaps feel it as much as they should have done. In the latter days of Augustus, literature again went down hill most rapidly; and under Tiberius it had completely run itself out. Those who were the leaders of taste, and brought on the silver era, were Greek rhetoricians, mostly from the Levant. From old Greece, as far as I know, Plutarch is for many centuries after Polybius the only writer of eminence.

PRIVATE LIFE OF AUGUSTUS. AGRIPPA. MÆCENAS. FAMILY CONNEXIONS.
BUILDINGS.

The very many statues and busts which yet remain of Augustus, bear out the statement of Suetonius, that he was an uncommonly fine man. His _decora facies_ he still had even in his old age; we may trace the likeness in his busts throughout the different periods of his life. He is so beautiful that I very nearly got his bust; but his personal character deterred me. He was however a remarkable man in every respect. What he was reproached with by the ancients, was want of courage; but this is an imputation which is easily made, especially if there is some foundation for it after all; yet there were, on the other hand, instances also in which he undeniably showed courage. In the war of Philippi, there is indeed some ground for such a charge: at Mutina, he perhaps was guilty of treachery; but in the Pompeian war, no reproach of the kind attaches to him. He was a bad general, and had no more luck in the field than he had in his domestic relations. His falseness and cruelty, I have before described; yet he had also his good qualities: he was a friend to his friends, and put up with many things from them; which considering his pride, is very surprising: towards Agrippa and Mæcenas, he was neither faithless nor unthankful. In his domestic relations, he was regardless of character. He had at first been betrothed to Antony’s stepdaughter Clodia, but the match was broken off; then he married Scribonia, who bore him Julia of unhappy notoriety; and then he put her away, and compelled Tib. Claudius Nero, who had once been proscribed as a partisan of Brutus, and who was also one of the best of the family of the Claudii, to give up to him Livia. Livia, whose ambition and thirst of power for her own family knew no bounds, and who shrank from no crime, had gradually gotten the most absolute sway over Augustus. However much he sought to bring back purity of morals, he himself was a thorough profligate; and this Livia winked at. They were married to each other nearly fifty years; and the longer they lived together, the greater became her power. She must have been wondrously beautiful in her youth, and amazingly clever: for a long course of years, she strove with quiet patience to get the dominion for her race; and for this purpose she estranged Augustus from the whole of his family. The only child she had borne him was still-born. So long as Octavia, the half-sister of Augustus, and one of the most respectable of the later Roman matrons, was alive and had prospects for her son Marcellus, who was married to Julia, she herself seemed to have been altogether set aside. But after the death of Marcellus, Agrippa became more powerful than ever, though he had already gained such an ascendancy, that Augustus, had he not loved him much, must have been afraid of him; and now the emperor bound him to him by the marriage with Julia, because he really feared him: Julia had by Marcellus one daughter only. Agrippa was much older than Augustus, with whom he had been as a sort of tutor in Apollonia; it is not unlikely that Cæsar had meant him to accompany his nephew as _custos_ to the Parthian war, as was generally done when the youthful Roman at seventeen first joined the army: thus Lollius went with C. Cæsar. Before that time, nothing is mentioned about him, nor can any one tell where he came from; in Cæsar’s campaigns, he is not once named: he is said to have been _ignobili_, even _humili loco natus_. He afterwards shows himself to have been an experienced general. Augustus’ best time was that during which Agrippa’s influence was paramount with him; that is to say, almost the whole unbroken period from the battle of Actium to the death of Agrippa, whom no one accuses of having had any share in the earlier crimes of his pupil. It is he, above all men, who gave the state its form; he is, more than Augustus, the author of the most useful institutions,—perhaps also of some artful ones, but certainly of all that had any good in them. Besides which, there was something grand about him. We have but one building left of his, the Pantheon, which indeed is the finest relic of ancient Rome. He had a genius for vast and magnificent works, for roads, canals, aqueducts, baths: he so laid out the whole of the Campus Martius, that Strabo is quite in ecstacies whilst describing it. In the war against Pompey, he displayed tried ability: moreover, he then built a fleet and the _portus Julius_. He was thrice consul, and openly laid claim to the highest honours: for he looked upon them as his due, being anything but cowed and daunted before Augustus. He died, I believe, in 740; Mæcenas in 744, in the same year as Horace.

The friendship of Augustus was shared with Agrippa by C. Cilnius Mæcenas, of the illustrious Etruscan house of the Cilnii (_Etrusci reges, reges atavi_):—it must have been a δυναστεία; the name is also met with innumerable times on monuments at Arretium. This clan must have had the Roman franchise even before the _lex Julia_; for as early as Livius Drusus, a Mæcenas, as we are told by Cicero,[36] was already among the _equites splendidissimi_. Horace seems to hint that the forefathers of Mæcenas’ line, both on the father and mother’s side, had been raised to the highest magistracy in the days of Etruscan freedom:—

“—_quod avus tibi maternus fuit atque paternus,
Olim qui magnis legionibus imperitarent_:”

in all likelihood, both of these branches belonged to Arretium: Mæcenas himself was merely a Roman knight. With posterity, he has earned the honour of having been a patron of the poets: we may rejoice that he showed kindness to Horace and Virgil, without indeed troubling ourselves about his motives for it, which we have no means of finding out. He was a strange man, an epicurean in the very worst sense; and he unblushingly avowed it, as he set up ease and comfort as the highest good in life. He displayed a more than womanish love of life; for though in a wretchedly broken state of health, he was glad to live, even in torture, if only live he could (_vita dum superest, bene est_). There was also something childish and trifling about him: he had a foppish delight in trinkets and jewels, for which Augustus often laughed at him. To the latter, he was a convenient friend and a most agreeable companion; and for all honours he expressed an epicurean contempt, looking upon Agrippa’s love of distinction as folly. Yet for all that, he may have cared not a little for having influence; whenever Augustus consulted him, he got very sensible advice. Once only he behaved in a manly way. When Augustus, in the time of the triumvirate, or in that of the Perusian war, was seated on his tribunal, and was pronouncing one sentence of death after another, Mæcenas sent him a note with the words “Get up then, you executioner!” This looks like a man whose heart is much better than his philosophy.

As long as these two men and Drusus, the younger son of Livia, were alive, even as Tacitus already remarks, Augustus’ government was really praiseworthy; but after their death there was a change for the worse. Augustus in his earlier years had very precarious health, and his life was several times endangered by illness; one of these was in Gaul, and another was that from which Antonius Musa recovered him by cold baths: it was not until about his fiftieth year, that his health became better. Long before this, whilst Marcellus was yet a child, and he himself still very young, he had once, when he thought himself dying, given his ring to Agrippa: in his will he had made no arrangements about the succession to his throne. When Marcellus grew up, differences arose between him and Agrippa. Velleius, who when he chooses to speak out, hits off many characters with masterly touches, says of Agrippa, “_Parendi, sed uni, scientissimus_.” To Augustus, he would submit himself; but against all those who rose after him, he was very bitter, nor would he be the servant of Marcellus who was much younger than himself: in all likelihood, had Augustus died then, he would not have scrupled to put Marcellus and the sons of Livia aside. Once Agrippa altogether withdrew to Mitylene, where he would have nothing more to do with the affairs of Rome; yet the way in which men paid their court to him in the east, showed clearly that they all looked upon him as their future master. But Marcellus died in his twenty-third year, and a great hope of the Roman world seems to have died with him; Agrippa now incontestably stood in the first place, and Augustus gave him in marriage his daughter Julia, the widow of Marcellus. Yet though this alliance went far to secure the succession for him and his sons, it very sadly embittered the last years of his life, owing to the shameful depravity of his wife; for he kept it secret from Augustus, who was very fond of his daughter. Agrippa died before Augustus’ eyes were opened to Julia’s conduct, and left three sons, one of whom was born after his death, and a daughter, Agrippina, who afterwards became the wife of Germanicus. She had all the pride and fine qualities of her father; she was an admirable woman, not unlike Octavia. The two eldest sons, Caius and Lucius, Augustus adopted into the family of the Cæsars, as he meant one of them, namely Caius, to succeed him. Whilst these young men were growing up, Julia was married to the eldest step-son of Augustus, Tiberius Claudius Nero. This young man had quite the character of the Claudian race: he was uncommonly proud of his high birth, and he held Augustus himself to be nothing better than a municipal upstart from Velitræ, who had been adopted into the Julian family; the _gens Julia_ he certainly looked upon as below the _gens Claudia_, and therefore upon his marriage with Julia as a match which was beneath him. Above all, he was deeply galled by the infamous life of Julia, though for fear of Augustus, he did not dare to complain of her. Being on bad terms with Augustus, he withdrew on some pretext or other to Rhodes, by which indeed he left the field open for Agrippa’s family. At Rhodes he lived for seven years, in the course of which the profligate life of Julia was discovered, and Augustus now treated her with unrelenting harshness: he had her transported to Pandataria. (Drusus had already died in Germany, a year before his elder brother went to Rhodes.) In vain did Tiberius repent of the rash step which he had taken; Livia for a whole year was unable to bring about a reconciliation, Augustus having been so much hurt by his going away that he would not hear of him, nor see him, although he had asked for leave to return. Augustus now employed L. and C. Cæsar in public business: Lucius was sent to Gaul and Spain, to superintend the registration of the land; Caius to Armenia. This Caius Cæsar, Velleius speaks of in such a way, that, though to pay his court to Tiberius, he may have represented some things as worse than they were, we may well believe that he was good for nothing, and that the Roman empire would have been as unhappy under him, as it was under Tiberius himself. In Armenia, where he had executed Augustus’ commissions, he was treacherously wounded by an Asiatic, who very likely was got to do it by the king of the Parthians. From this wound he never could recover, and it was generally thought by the ancients that it was poisoned by Livia: this is perhaps nothing but prejudice; bus it is quite possible. Lucius had already died before him, and it is pretty certain that it was _dolo novercæ_. Tiberius, on his return after seven years, was completely master of the field; and of Agrippa’s family, Agrippa Postumus and Agrippina were all that was left: that the former of these might not be altogether set aside, he adopted him together with Tiberius 754. From that time, Tiberius was heir presumptive; and it was not long before he got the _tribunicia potestas_: as for Agrippa Postumus, he was still a boy, an insignificant fellow, who did not stand in the other’s way.

It is a well known boast of Augustus, that he had found Rome brick, and had left it marble; and this was not saying too much: what is still left of his buildings bears it out. He has built an immense deal, and stamped upon Rome quite another character; his buildings were in a style of extraordinary grandeur, which altogether ceases in the later ones, the Colosseum alone excepted. There still remains what was formerly called _Forum Nervæ_, but what Palladio in his day, and among the moderns Hirt, have recognised as the _Forum Augustum_. The judicious Stefano Piali has shown that the three colossal pillars which were formerly thought to have been portions of the temple of Jupiter Stator, are of Augustus, and belonged to the _Curia Julia_. The great wall round the _Forum Augustum_, proves that at that time the old grand style was still prevalent, which lasted until the reign of the emperor Claudius, and first changed under that of Nero: thus people came to fancy that that wall was of the age of the kings. By Augustus himself was built the Mausoleum, the inside work of which still lasts indestructible; by Agrippa in Augustus’ reign, the Gate of St. Lorenzo and the Pantheon, besides the Theatre of Marcellus,—where the Palazzo Savelli is, in which I used to live,—in the old massive Greek-Etruscan style which had long been out of date in Greece: hard by is the Portico of Octavia, of which the entrance is still standing. Whatever on the Palatine is said to be of Augustus, is at best very problematical: of the temple of Apollo there is nothing left. Augustus was the first to bring the Carrara marble into use. A great number of high roads, both in Italy and in the provinces, and very magnificent aqueducts were made by him; among others, that of Narni, which indeed is built of brick. Notwithstanding all these great buildings, and all this magnificence, no one felt burthened, as the Romans paid scarcely any taxes but a few indirect ones; and therefore it is no wonder that Augustus was exceedingly popular. We must also take into the account the gloomy forebodings with which men looked upon Tiberius: the words of Horace, _Divis orte bonis!_ came from his heart; people prayed in right earnest to Heaven for his preservation.

WARLIKE ENTERPRISES OF AUGUSTUS. HIS DEATH. GENERAL SURVEY OF THE
EMPIRE.

The first foreign war which he waged, happened between the peace of Brundusium and the battle of Actium. It was a campaign against the Dalmatians, and he displayed in it considerable activity, and personal courage, being wounded himself. The task of subduing these countries was exceedingly difficult; but he broke the power of the Dalmatians who dwelt on the coast. Soon after the battle of Actium, the Cantabrian war began. Very nearly the same countries which afterwards held out against the Moors, Biscay, Asturias, the north of Gallicia, and the confines of Leon, held out also then. Augustus set himself the task of extending the Roman empire as far as the sea, the Rhine, and the Danube. During the first year, he was, partly by illness, and partly by business, kept in Gaul, where he settled the affairs of the province; in Tarragona also, he fell sick once more, and was thus delayed in his campaigns. We have no details of these wars: Appian became tired here, and perhaps he did not find them in any Greek writer. Augustus’ memoirs must have had very little value, as hardly any notice is taken of them: he also tried poetry; but as far as we may judge from his letters, he was a tasteless and worthless writer. In the third year, the Asturians and Cantabrians made their submission, and gave hostages. The Basques maintain that they still have a poem on this war in their own language; and Wilhelm Von Humboldt possesses a copy of it, which I only know from his translation.[37] I hold it to be as little genuine as the poems of Ossian; Humboldt is of a different opinion, yet he decides nothing. How should anything have been preserved among the Cantabrians about this war, which after all was of no importance whatever to them? On the Moorish wars, which must have been much more important to them, nothing whatever remains. Nowhere else, either among Germans or other nations, have accounts of the Roman wars been preserved: when Wittekind of Corvey wrote, all memory of them had entirely vanished, and this was certainly the case there as well. The Cantabrians, goaded by the ill treatment of the Roman governors, revolted again; thus it took some more campaigns before they were altogether subdued. Augustus founded several colonies,—Cæsar Augusta (Saragossa), Julia Emerita (Merida, down to the Arabian times a first-rate town), Pax Augusta (Badajoz), Pax Julia (Beja), Legio (Leon).

About the time of this war, Tiberius, who was no longer a youth, carried on another in Dalmatia, which he reduced. Before that, a Roman governor named Crassus, had already made war in Mœsia, and had driven back the Sarmatians across the Danube, and extended the empire as far as that river. Pannonia likewise had submitted during the Dalmatian campaign of Tiberius.

It was between the Dalmatian and Cantabrian war, that Augustus shut the temple of Janus: according to Suetonius, he seems to have closed it thrice; yet this may have been a mistake. It had been done once before in the Mythic age of Numa; and again, between the first and second Punic wars, in the consulship of T. Manlius Torquatus, 517.

Augustus had before this already directed his attention to the Alpine races, such as the Salassians and all the tribes of Rhætia in the widest sense of the word,—even from the valley of Aosta, all through the Valais and the Tyrol, as far as Noricum, which had a king, and kept under Roman protection: they were mostly of Etruscan stock. It is my belief that the abodes of the Rhætians did not reach at farthest beyond the valley of the Upper Inn, whilst the Vindelicians dwelt on the northern slopes of the Tyrolese Alps, from the valley of the Lower Inn to the Danube. These last were of Liburnian race, as were also the Pannonians, who were neither Illyrians nor Gauls, and were called Pæonians by the Greeks, from whom we likewise learn that they had a language of their own. The Helvetians had submitted since the days of Julius Cæsar; of the subjugation of the Rhætians and Vindelicians under Drusus and Tiberius, we know but very little: the accounts which we have of it, are very vague and confused. Yet Von Hormayr has made up a romance from them, wishing to prove that Italian and German Tyrol ought to hold together: the notion is a correct one, but is not to be deduced by treating history in this way; nor did he do any good by it. It is evident that the war was carried on by the Romans according to a regular plan; and that the attacks were made from Italy, and on the other side from the Lake of Constance. The Romans everywhere penetrated by degrees through the inmost recesses of the Alps, where at that time there were no carriage roads, but only footpaths, as was likewise the case in the middle ages; and they so completely reduced those tribes, that they never made an attempt to raise their heads again. It was then that Augustus founded in Vindelicia the city of Augsburg, a colony of veterans, like all the colonies which he now established. At this time, they began to let the veterans settle where they had been encamped in war; and thus they gradually became peaceful citizens: afterwards their sons were liable to military service on better terms. As for the exact period when this new arrangement began, I do not think that any thing can be found about it in the ancient writers. Owing to these conquests in the Alps, there now arose the German wars in 740: now first the Romans could act on the offensive in Germany. The Sigambri, it is true, had made before that an inroad into the country beyond the Rhine, from whence they were driven back, but without any permanent result. Until then, the Romans had never reached farther than the Westerwald; new they attacked the Germans from the Lower Rhine and from the Danube: that they never came to the Upper Rhine, but went up no higher than the Lahn on the Lower Rhine, shows that Swabia was not as yet a German country, and that it was first made so by the Alemanni. These wars we would gladly detail more fully; but unfortunately Dio Cassius is mutilated here. In the Venetian manuscript, from which the rest are derived, the gaps have been disguised to take in the buyers, and this has been copied in all the others: the defective fragments discovered and edited by Morelli, but which are not found in the common editions, give one a little light, but only very little. In one of these campaigns, as Roth conjectures, Domitius Ahenobarbus may for the first time have crossed the Elbe in Bohemia; whereas formerly most of the expeditions were led from the Lower Rhine against the Elbe. Their wars were carried on by Nero Claudius Drusus (the younger brother of Tiberius), who made three campaigns: he crossed the Weser, and penetrated towards the Elbe. He reduced the Bructeri, the Sigambri who were then so renowned, the Cherusci and other tribes: this is all that we know of his wars. Nor in any of these accounts is there once the name of a locality given; for the enemy had no towns, and the villages were swept away, and are not mentioned by the Romans: the Germans did not possess any strong places in which they could hold out, and their only protection was the impassable nature of the country. Being unable to stand their ground against regular tactics, they were almost always beaten by the Romans in the field; whole districts were laid waste, the women and children dragged away into slavery, and the men hunted down and killed like wild beasts. Although Drusus is praised for his humanity,—and considering that he was a Roman, justly so,—yet he was ἀλιτήριος against Germany, and he may have done the people as much harm as Varus himself did. He died in his camp, Tiberius being strongly suspected of having been the instigator of his murder: but this after all may only have been believed on account of the hatred which he had against the family of his brother, especially against Germanicus. At most, Tiberius might have been afraid lest Drusus should dream _de reddenda re publica_, a fine day-dream which Germanicus really fostered. Drusus had a monument on the Rhine, which for generations was held sacred both by Romans and foreigners: where it was is now unknown.