Chapter XVIII: The Retirement at Capreæ 418 (3)

The slave could earn money for himself, and we can see through the minute regulations of the codes as to the conditions under which he could earn and hold money, a recognition of the fact that a man’s free labour is generally more effective than his forced labour; the slave’s opportunity of earning put him, as we should now say, upon piece work; he earned so much for his master, so much for himself; his master gave him the advantages of organization, of capital, of a commercial reputation, and for these he paid in a proportion fixed from time to time by legislation, keeping the remainder of his earnings; that he paid more highly for these advantages than the present value of money, and the general security of society would render equitable, is quite true; but then the whole scale of interest on capital was far higher than it is now. The slave who traded, as he often did, with his master’s capital, paid less for its use than the interest which would have been demanded of a stranger. We must not think of the “peculium,” the slave’s private earnings, as we may think of the purse accumulated by a modern domestic servant from gratuities and other sources of private revenue, but as a real wage earned even by a slave. The regulations which still bound the enfranchized slave to his master in the new relation of patron seem at first sight harsh, the liberty in reference to the former master remaining incomplete, but their aspect changes when we reflect that they rendered manumission more easy, and that the slave’s opportunities of earning money both before and after manumission were made for him by his connexion with his master. The proprietor of a large business might have every feeling of kindliness and consideration for a trusted slave, who managed some department of that business, but he might think twice before rewarding him with his liberty, if that act involved not only the loss of the slave’s services, but the creation of a commercial competitor.

Much has been written in condemnation of Roman agricultural slavery, and justly so, if the agricultural slave was dealt with in the spirit of the elder Cato; but here again we must be careful to distinguish. The ergastula, the slave barracks, did not account for all the agricultural slaves, and in the later days of Augustus the ergastula were preferred by free men to military service; nor can the system of the ergastula have been as rigorous in practice as in theory; the two great servile insurrections which proved so serious a danger to Rome could not have assumed such alarming dimensions, had not the slaves who organized them been in possession of means of communication. Nor must it be forgotten that there were many slaves who would now be convicts, many who had been sold into slavery from a conquered country, never having known any other condition of life. The ancients did not often make the mistake of setting a delicately nurtured man to hard menial labour, for his value in that capacity was small; similarly the increasing difficulty of finding slaves after Rome ceased to extend her conquests increased the value even of navvies, and their condition was improved by the exigencies of sound economy; even a Cato, when slaves were dear, took care not to wear them out before their time. Though a slave was not protected except by public opinion against his master, who might beat and even kill him, he was protected against all other men, who could not injure him without incurring damages for wanton destruction of another man’s property. There were cruel savage men among the ancients as there are among the moderns, but on the whole the servile condition does not seem to have been abused. Roman masters and even mistresses occasionally beat their slaves, but vapulation was a constant feature of human existence till a very few years ago even in Europe. Shakespeare’s masters frequently strike their servants; that worthy though foolish citizen, M. Jourdain, after frequent threats and much aggravation, slapped his maidservant on the face; the use of the stick is not an exclusive prerogative of the slave owner.

The more domestic of the Latin authors, such as Cicero and Horace, do not give us a disagreeable picture of slavery; the relations between slaves and masters in their day seem to have been in every respect as pleasant as those between employers and servants in these days; and the taunt of servile origin so frequent in the Classics amounts to little more than the taunt of connexion with trade so common in some circles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact the frequency of this disparagement tends to prove that it was easy to rise from the servile condition to positions of great wealth, and even political influence. The two vulgar rich men in the Satyricon of Petronius, Trimalchio and Habinna, had both been slaves; and the latter is made to say that he had become a slave voluntarily, as that was the easiest method of becoming a Roman citizen; this may be wilful exaggeration on the part of Petronius for a satirical purpose; but it would have no point if it did not carry a certain element of truth. Pallas and his brother Felix, the freedmen of the Emperor Claudius, were, the former practically Prime Minister, the latter Procurator of Judæa; numerous similar instances show that a man might have been a slave and yet rise to high office; the intermediate step seems generally to have been through the Equestrian Order--in one of its aspects, as we have seen, the financial department of the Civil Service.

This introduces us to another feature of slavery as practised in antiquity, viz. its cosmopolitan influence, which was at work in every class of society, but in the highest class most of all; nothing else so effectually broke down the barrier between the Greek and the Roman, between the Eastern and Western half of the Mediterranean, between North and South.

War in ancient times had many of the aspects of a speculation, and among the profits of war the sale of captives was reckoned; the conquered had no rights against the conqueror except under special terms. When the victim was a civilized State, the free men who were thus sold into slavery had the opportunity of buying back their own freedom; they practically paid a ransom; the transaction was a rough and ready and efficacious method of exacting an indemnity. There would be a certain proportion who could not pay the indemnity, and these became slaves, but in their new status they were not wasted on unprofitable occupations; the philosopher, the physician, the accountant, the merchant, continued their various occupations in the service of their master, and if they proved their efficiency rapidly passed through the stage of slavery to that of freedmen.

Of the twenty famous schoolmasters whom Suetonius honours with short biographies, three only were certainly not freedmen, Orbilius, the teacher of Horace, Pomponius Marcellus, and a certain Valerius Probus, who hailed from Beyrout, and must have been himself free, whatever his parentage, as he began life with the endeavour to get a centurion’s commission; fifteen were certainly freedmen, and two probably. Their nationalities are strangely varied; three were certainly Italians, three others possibly, two were Syrians, if we so class Probus, three Gauls, one Spaniard, one Illyrian, six certainly Greek, and one probably. Of the three Gauls, one, M. Antonius Gnipho, gave lessons first in the house of Julius Cæsar during the latter’s boyhood; he was a man of exceptional intellectual brilliance and generous character. Suetonius does not state that Gnipho actually taught Cæsar, though the inference suggests itself, and in any case the youthful Cæsar must have known him, and have received impressions, if not information, which may have influenced the future conqueror of Gaul. These men were for the most part highly respected and made large professional incomes; they taught either in houses of their own, or by special arrangement in the houses of their patrons; one of them, M. Verrius Flaccus, taught on these terms the grandchildren of Augustus, who paid him a handsome annual stipend on condition that he only admitted such pupils to his classes as were approved of by his employer; he had previously taught independently; a statue was erected to his memory at Præneste; this indicates that in spite of his servile origin he was held in high honour. Horace must have known Verrius Flaccus, even if he were not actually a relative, and Horace’s allusion to the persuasive schoolmasters, who coax children to learn the elements by giving them biscuits, suggests a well known trait of this Verrius Flaccus, who was the first schoolmaster to offer prizes, “some ancient book handsome or scarce,” says Suetonius. It is interesting to note that the most fashionable of these schoolmasters, and the one who made the largest fortune, was a man who, in the opinion of the Emperors Tiberius and Claudius, both good judges, was totally unfit to be entrusted with the charge of youth; while the one of whom it is recorded that in his old age he sank into extreme poverty is Horace’s old friend, the freeborn Italian Orbilius. This man also was honoured with a statue.

The proportion of men of servile origin in this one profession was very large, if we may infer that the short list given by Suetonius of its leaders indicates conditions which prevailed through the rank and file; nor was it held in special disrepute. Tacitus mentions a schoolmaster not included in this list who became a Senator; another, M. Pomponius Marcellus, was admitted to the inner council of Tiberius, and anticipated the “supra grammaticam” episode of a much later age; he reproved the Emperor for a solecism in the wording of a decree, telling him, “You can give the citizenship to men, Cæsar, but not to a word.”

Men who had been freeborn in their native countries, but had passed into servitude by fortune of war, found new and wider careers open to them in the service of their conquerors; they obtained access to the masters of the world, and were able to direct their thoughts to new channels, and directly influence their policy; they were further able to push the fortunes of their relatives and connexions at home; for as freedmen, and even as slaves, they were not cut off from correspondence with the countries which they had left.

Their influence, great as it was in breaking down the intellectual barriers between Rome and her allies and subjects, and in forming the conception of a world-wide empire, was even greater in the world of finance. Even the great Cæsar failed to throw open the Roman Senate to the civilized world, and admission to that body continued to be jealously guarded, in spite of occasional exceptions, till the Senate had been practically superseded by the Imperial Household; but admission to the Equestrian Order was a relatively easy matter; no sanctity attached to the Order, no historic glamour; and a skilled financier found his way into its ranks with comparative ease. Roman bankers such as Cicero’s friend Atticus, needed the assistance of clever Jews and Greeks, for Roman money was invested privately as well as publicly in all parts of the Empire; municipal securities, then as now, were a favourite investment; cities and colonies were in the habit of borrowing money for local improvements; the knowledge possessed by men, who had been acquainted with the local and personal conditions was a valuable commodity; and any Roman, who aspired to play a great part in the financial world, drew into his service men from all parts of the Empire; these men were not infrequently rewarded by admission to the Equestrian Order; some of them were free men, the majority were slaves to begin with. The process was so common that the term “Libertus” is used much in the same way as we employ the terms “agent,” or “man of business.” Not the least important consequence of the system was the admission of the Jews to a share in the control of administration; “they of Cæsar’s Household” were not domestic servants, but financial secretaries of considerable importance.

Slavery has been reproached with being responsible for the horrors of the arena, and a general indifference to the sanctity of human life; but this love of spectacular bloodshed, this indifference to the sufferings and death of human beings and animals, is by no means an exclusive feature of societies in which slavery is an accepted institution. Bull fights are being extended at the present day from Spain to France; bull baiting, bear baiting, badger baiting, prize fighting, cock fighting, were accepted amusements in England till the beginning of the present century, some of them are not unknown to our contemporaries; nor is it easy to distinguish that delight in the sufferings of condemned criminals, or in the encounters between trained combatants, which filled the Roman amphitheatres, from the excitement which drew crowds to look on at the merciless tortures and executions of the period of the Reformation, and led the fashionable friends of Madame de Sevignê to watch a woman being burned alive. So far were gladiatorial combats from being one of the hardships imposed by slavery, that we have repeated references in the early Imperial period to the misconduct of Roman knights, and even Senators, who exhibited themselves in the arena. A skilled gladiator risked his life, as does a skilled toreador, and he enjoyed the same measure of popular favour; there were statues of gladiators as well as of schoolmasters.

The tendency of the Empire was to break down the barriers between the free man and the slave; as political power ceased to be the privilege of a caste, and became the reward of recognized merit bestowed by the head of the administration, the importance of free descent was diminished; the spiteful remarks about freedmen and servile origin, which we occasionally find in the Latin authors, were suggested by the improved position of slaves and freedmen; they represent the impotent malice of a caste, which saw that the sceptre was departing from between its knees; the distinction was long preserved by literature, for the boys of the Roman Empire, like the boys of England, were brought up on the works of the great Athenians, who spoke of the slave as the slave was spoken of when the free citizens in the most liberal of Greek States were really an aristocracy of birth entrusted with the conduct of affairs among a population by which they were far outnumbered, and which included many men as wealthy as the freeborn citizens, and no less enlightened.

It was largely through slavery that men of letters, men of science, architects, engineers, sailors, and even soldiers, found their way from all parts of the world into the executive services of the Empire. Rome had become cosmopolitan without being aware of the fact, long before the genius of Cæsar finally started her on an admittedly cosmopolitan career.

In spite of the pleasant personal relations which often prevailed between slaves and their owners, emancipation on a large scale was not regarded with favour, the statesmen who on different occasions of emergency released slaves in large numbers in order to fill up vacancies in the army were spoken of reproachfully; the step was always felt to be a desperate one.

The reason, however, of the objection to such emancipations was less fear of the slaves, or dislike, than the interference which it involved with industrial pursuits; it amounted to a wholesale confiscation of property; an analogous process at the present day would be summarily to impress large bodies of operatives; this would bring many industrial communities to a standstill. Similarly when at a later period we find restrictions imposed upon the custom of emancipating slaves by testament, this may well have become a means of throwing the responsibility of maintaining superfluous slaves upon the public dole fund, and of exempting the heir from the necessity of supporting them. Emancipation does not seem to have been regarded as an unmixed blessing. We have the well known case of Cicero’s secretary Tiro; Tiro was a slave, but he was his master’s friend; the relations between them were of a most affectionate nature; Cicero’s letters to him are full of anxious inquiries after his health, of demands that he shall run no risk of over fatigue; that he shall take the best medical advice; and yet it was only late in his life that Cicero bestowed liberty on Tiro. The letters in which Cicero’s relatives, and especially his son, congratulate Tiro on his elevation, show that, slave though he was, he was no less respected than loved. That such relations were common we may infer from the statement made by Paterculus, that in the proscription of B.C. 43 the fidelity of sons to their fathers was least; the merit of wives stood first, of freedmen second, of slaves third.

The institution of slavery did not demoralize the ancients in the same way that negro slavery is said to have demoralized the Americans, or coloured slavery in general to demoralize white men; it was a totally different institution.

In this, as in all other details of ancient history, the memory of the bad, the exceptional, the sensational, is preserved; the normal conditions are forgotten; and as it is much easier to declaim than to inquire, the essential but unobtrusive features of any particular institution escape notice. On the whole, the action of slavery in ancient times was beneficial to civilization, and the eventual dismemberment of the Empire was not due chiefly to the existence of slavery. The races who broke up the Empire themselves recognized slavery, and it was long before agricultural slavery disappeared even from England.

I

The Death of Augustus

In the hottest weather of the year 14 A.D., a hush fell upon the streets of old Rome, as the news rapidly circulated that her foremost citizen was dead, and that the man whose name had spelled peace and prosperity for the whole civilized world was no longer at the head of affairs. Few men were still living who could remember any rule but his; for forty-five years he had controlled without serious opposition the destinies of an Empire which stretched from the Euphrates to the English Channel; the men who had taken an active part in the events before the reins of government dropped into his skilful hands were now but few, and if they ever spoke of the days which immediately preceded his reign, it was to contrast fourteen years of anarchy with nearly half a century of order. Here and there in the palaces of the few old Roman families that had survived the revolutions of the middle of the last century the good old times were bewailed, when the spoils of the world were distributed between the members of a few princely houses theoretically associated in administering the affairs of only one Italian town, and bitter epigrams were circulated at the expense of the monarch who posed as the first man of a free city; but the vast body of the population had long forgotten the days of a liberty in whose privileges they had never shared, while they had suffered from its concomitant licence; the streets were no longer the scene of furious fights between the retainers of great noblemen, the citizens regularly received their supplies of corn, holidays were frequent and the amusements of the public provided for on a liberal scale; the Prince himself had been the foremost to enjoy all that delighted the hearts of his fellow citizens.

As the fierceness of the hot Italian sun diminished, and the streets began to fill, the praises of the dead man passed from mouth to mouth; one would remember the humility with which he had pressed the claims of his chosen candidates for public office, and the courtesy with which he had asked for a vote; another would recall him studiously fulfilling the sacred duty of a patron, and pleading in the Forum on behalf of a humble client; yet another would describe him standing at his own door once a year dressed in white begging for alms to bestow on the needy; others would speak of the modesty of his household, the model of an ancient Roman family where Livia his consort herself superintended the weaving of her maids; nor would the gayer sort forget his interest in the shows of the circus, or fail to tell stories of his modest bets, and somewhat liberal jokes; the scholar would speak of his simple entertainments in which the poet and the historian shared in the conversation on terms of equality with their host; those of more serious mind would dwell on his scrupulous attention to the ordinances of religion, his restoration of temples and shrines and their various cults; while the tender-hearted would deplore his private sorrows, the premature deaths that had snatched away his grandsons, the scandals that had bereft his home of his daughter and granddaughter; nor would they fail to bewail the fact that the only possible successor to his heritage and his power was an alien in blood.

As the days wore on the symptoms of the public sorrow increased, and the authorities began to fear that the order of the funeral might be marred by some such frantic outburst as had attended the obsequies of the first great Cæsar, whose body had been seized by an excited mob and burned in the public market place; regulations were issued to ensure such order as the Prince himself would have commanded, and to prevent the licences into which an orgy of sorrow might degenerate. Day by day was reported the slow progress of the procession from the small country house in Campania in which he had died to the gates of the city; here the body had been guarded and carried by soldiers, there by the knights, the second order in the State, and lastly the Senators themselves were waiting to receive it, and conduct it on the final stage of its journey into Rome.

The day came at length when the long train of mourners filed through the narrow streets, at its head the ivory bier draped in purple, behind it the effigy of the dead man, and a stately series of similar effigies leading back through the great Cæsar himself to mythical Æneas and Anchises and the goddess Venus; there were no deep-voiced bells, no dull minute guns to express and intensify the public sorrow, but the silence was broken by the shrieks of dishevelled women and the monotonous blare of hoarse trumpets. After the images came the chief mourner, a tall and stately man with bowed head, the Commander-in-chief of the Roman armies, descended from the noblest blood of ancient Rome; behind him walked members of the family, high officials, statesmen, senators, the representatives of kings and cities. Principalities and powers were all assembled to do honour to the dead. The heat of the season had rendered it necessary to conduct the ceremony by night, and the flare of torches fell fitfully on the procession and on the faces of the spectators. At length the tedious ritual was completed, the wine, the oil and the spices were thrown on the pyre, thrice was the dead man called by name, and the silence was broken by no answer; the chief mourner applied the torch with averted face, the crackling flames rose to the sky, the soldiers ran round the burning pile, an eagle sped heavenwards through the smoke; when the fire had at length died down, and wine had been sprinkled on the ashes, a cry arose of Farewell, and yet again Farewell; then the mourners departed to their homes, and the Roman people dispersed to magnify the events of the last few hours, and to remember portents: stars had fallen from their places in the sky, the earth had been shaken, rivers had reversed their course, the kindly rain had been turned into blood, and even small domestic catastrophes were now known to have had their significance; a Senator had seen the soul of the deceased rise to heaven from the midst of the flames, and the credulous were comforted by reflecting that the Genius of Augustus still watched over the destinies of the Roman people.

Meanwhile in the palaces of the Senators one question of supreme interest was debated: What was to be the new order of things? and, indeed, was there to be a new order?

It was fortunate for the destinies of civilized humanity that a successor was ready at hand to take up the reins of government which had dropped from the tired hands of Augustus, and that the question of succession was not left to be settled by debate in the Senate, or the result of a civil war. Tiberius was on the spot; he had been for all practical purposes his stepfather’s colleague for ten years; he was acting Commander-in-chief of the Roman armies; he was of ripe age and ripe experience; his personal knowledge of the Empire was almost co-extensive with its limits; he does not seem to have visited Africa or Egypt, but he had served or commanded armies, and conducted negotiations over the whole area between the sources of the Euphrates and the North Sea. There was no living Roman with equal knowledge of affairs, or of superior rank; his succession was inevitable, if there was to be a successor to Augustus.

The life of Tiberius is from every point of view profoundly interesting; it began in the middle of the great revolution which eventually substituted the rule of one man for the rule of the Senate, and which left the city of Rome the capital rather than the mistress of an Empire; it ended after nearly fourscore years, during which the constitution of that Empire was so firmly established that the incapacity of individual rulers, and the mutual rivalries of aspirants to the chief power, though sometimes resulting in civil war, failed to shake its stability; it coincided with a great step in the forward march of civilization which has left its impress upon all subsequent history. If the political events which occurred during the life of Tiberius are of supreme interest, his personal history is no less attractive to the student of character, and of the strange vicissitudes which may occur in the life of a human being; not the least of the many contradictions in this life is the fact that the man, who is called by the great German historian, Mommsen, “the ablest of the Roman Emperors,” should have become the recognized type of all that is most evil in a ruler, and left a name which is seldom mentioned without an expression of detestation.

II

Parents and Childhood of Tiberius

The connexion of the Claudian clan with Rome was referred by the Roman historians to the very beginnings of her history; they had no doubt of the antiquity of the event; it was only debated whether this Sabine stock was received into the community on the Tiber at the suggestion of Titus Tatius, the consort of Romulus, or four years after the expulsion of the Kings. The headquarters of the Claudians were the region round Tusculum, in which town its chiefs had a fortress; their domain gave its name to one of the later electoral divisions of the Roman territory. From the beginning the Claudian stock was credited with an unusual measure of aristocratic pride and public spirit; the legends said that one Claudius caused by his intemperance the secession of the plebs to the Mons Sacer, and that the unbridled lust of another brought about the downfall of the Decemvirate; we are on firmer ground in attributing to the Appius Claudius who was Censor in B.C. 312 the inception, if not the completion, of two works of great public utility, the Appian Aqueduct, and the even more famous Appian Way, the great South Road, the first link in the chain of highways which bound the Empire together. Appius Claudius the Censor had two sons, who took the additional names of the Handsome and the Strong; the descendants of both were to do good service to their country; a Claudius Pulcher fought the Carthaginians in Sicily, a Claudius Nero defeated Hasdrubal at the battle of the Metaurus. The Censor is further credited with having been the earliest Roman writer in prose and verse. Intellectual and administrative eminence was thus ascribed to the Claudians, also a touch of arrogance extending to relations in which arrogance was out of place; for it was Appius Claudius Pulcher the Admiral who, when the unwonted abstemiousness of the Sacred Chickens portended disaster, threw them into the sea, and was deservedly rewarded by a defeat.

Both the leading Claudian families were united in the person of the Emperor; his father was a Nero, his mother was a Pulcher, for though her father belonged legally to the Livian Gens, he had been adopted from the Claudian. The family enumerated among its distinctions thirty-three consulships, five dictatorships, seven censorships, six triumphs, and two ovations.

In the last century and a half of the Republic the Neronic branch was less distinguished than that of Pulcher; no records survive of the immediate ancestors of the Emperor on the father’s side, and no Claudius Nero appears in the consular list after 204 B.C. When Horace wished to remind the Romans of their debt to the Neros, he had to go back to the battle of the Metaurus. The family had become so obscure that the genuine descent of the Emperor from the conqueror of Hasdrubal has been questioned; but it was not questioned by his contemporaries, who would have been only too glad to add the reproach of an obscure ancestry to the other indignities which they fastened upon him. It would be in accordance with the pride, and even rectitude of conduct, ascribed to the Claudians, that this branch of the family preferred comparative poverty to taking part in the scrambles for office, and interested intrigues, which marked the decadence of the Senate; and that its successive chiefs chose the dignified life of a Roman noble of the old-fashioned type, concentrating their energies rather upon the management of their ancestral domains than upon pushing themselves into the inner circle of Senators who sped to exploit the Roman conquests.

Tiberius Claudius Nero, the father of the Emperor, appears first in the party of Cæsar; he was already a quæstor, and while holding that office commanded the fleet which besieged Alexandria, and rescued Cæsar from the insurrection of the Alexandrians; he was rewarded by being made a Pontifex, and entrusted with the establishment of colonies in Gaul, at Narbonne and Arles among other places. This was work which required considerable tact; it was not always easy to satisfy both the veterans who formed the colony and the population whom they displaced. Cæsar was not in the habit of employing incompetent agents, and the selection of Tiberius Nero for this work is an evidence of his capacity. After the assassination of Cæsar he became a warm partisan of the Liberators; he is even said to have proposed in the Senate that the Tyrannicides should be rewarded, when others thought that an amnesty was sufficient for their deserts. It is not clear whether he was Prætor at this time or shortly afterwards, but he certainly held that office when Lucius Antonius and Fulvia making a diversion against Octavian at Præneste; before the fall of Præneste he had slipped away to Campania, and endeavoured to form an army from the proprietors in that district who were threatened with the confiscation of their land for the benefit of Octavian’s soldiers; in this enterprise he was unsuccessful, and had to flee for his life to Sicily, where he took refuge for a short time with Sextus Pompeius.

As we afterwards find Tiberius Nero in the closest association with Octavian under circumstances which, judged by our standards of conduct, are discreditable, it is advisable to stop to consider whether a man could with any measure of consistency serve under Cæsar, and then join hands with his murderers; on the solution of this question depends the claim of Tiberius to be considered an honourable man; for in this relation we can measure him by standards which are applicable to ancient and modern life alike.

Velleius Paterculus, the historian to whom we owe a conception of the early days of the Empire different from that suggested by Cicero and Tacitus, was hereditarily associated with the family of Tiberius Nero; his grandfather was his most intimate friend; he calls Tiberius Nero a man of generous spirit, and strongly inclined to learning. A man of this nature would be attracted to Cæsar by a similarity of character and tastes. The ambition of Cæsar was a generous ambition; he was one of those born organizers to whom muddling is a painful and personal annoyance; he valued power for no vulgar reason, but because it gave him the opportunity of realizing his conception of a well ordered world. Endowed with an enormous intellectual ability, inexhaustible physical vitality, an irresistible personal charm, Cæsar attracted to himself all the men who really meant work. Cicero himself very nearly succumbed, and would have done so entirely had his uneasy vanity allowed him to work in a subordinate position. There is a limit to the incompetence of constituted authorities; a time comes when all earnest men in a State, whose public business has gradually been monopolized by respectable incompetents, look eagerly for a deliverer; such men do not welcome the noisy reformer, or the narrow doctrinaire, and so long as these alone present themselves, the earnest men hold back, but as soon as the really capable hard-working man appears, they give him their confidence, and pass naturally into his service. Cæsar’s campaigns in Gaul enabled him to select his men; at first the fashionable young men of Rome hurried to his standards attracted by the prospect of a pleasant picnic in charming country with an agreeable climate; no serious danger was anticipated, and there was a pleasing prospect of loot. The behaviour of these gentlemen, when it was realized that the advance of Ariovistus meant serious business, supplies the one comic interlude in Cæsar’s commentaries. During the nine years which Cæsar gave to the conquest of Gaul, the earnest workers found their leader; the intercourse between Cæsar’s camp and the capital was constant; men learned to contrast the vigorous administration of the Governor of the two Gauls with the imbecility of the Senate; it was not foreseen that the contrast would result in the absorption of the powers of government by this one man. When the time came at which Cæsar had either to abandon all his work or force the Senate to give him a continuance of office, his fellow workers were naturally disposed to give him their continued support. Men who had learned what good work was, and had had their share in it, were inclined to hope for the best; there were many self-seekers, doubtless, but it was possible to follow the fortunes of Cæsar under the influence of the highest motives. The man who had done such magnificent work in the two Gauls might be trusted to reorganize the Government. The reaction came, when the continuance of opposition at Rome forced Cæsar to become an autocrat; his work was only half done when he had beaten the Senatorial armies in Macedonia, in Egypt, in Africa, in Spain, in Asia Minor; he had further to clear away all the obstructions, get rid of all customs and precedents by which the machinery of the administration was impeded; it was root and branch work; and Cæsar was impatient; he attacked everything at once; no ties of affection, no sentimental associations were spared, no prejudices; he saw everything in the clear light of reason; he knew what was best for the Empire, and he was determined to have his own way.

To Cæsar the Senate was the embodiment of obstruction and incompetence; he did not propose to repeat the mistake of Sulla and give it a new lease of power, for his contempt for the Senators was unbounded; but the Senate had a name; it could not be disbanded; the better course seemed to be to swamp the Senate of Rome in the Senate of the Empire, to make it almost a titular body. He enlarged its numbers, added to it distinguished provincials, his personal adherents among the noblemen of Gaul. The figures that are given us may not be absolutely trustworthy, but there can be no doubt that the Senate was increased to a number which destroyed its capacity for united action. By this measure Cæsar alienated the affection and destroyed the confidence of the liberal members of the old aristocracy; they had been prepared to pay a heavy price for good government; they were at one with Cæsar in recognizing the expansion of Rome, but they had not anticipated a time when a Julius Florus or Cornelius Gallus would not only be dignified with Roman names, but would have the same social rank as a Claudian or Sempronian. So determined was Cæsar to convince the Senate that its day was over, that in transacting business with it he neglected even the ordinary courtesies, and received its deputations without rising from his seat. The dagger of Brutus was the result.

In some respects the assassination of Cæsar was fortunate for his reputation; there was no widespread conspiracy; his government had been of so short a duration that the disaffected men had no time to find one another out; their victim had never realized that there was a formidable opposition, and he fell before his qualities of clemency and moderation were put to the severest test, which tries the virtue and capacity of a successful reformer. The men who murdered him were his chosen friends and servants, many of them were either holding or were awaiting their turn for holding important provincial appointments. The conspiracy was not organized; no provision was made for carrying on the Government after the keystone of the fabric had been removed; it was enough to kill the tyrant. In one respect the conspirators had correctly estimated the result; there were men who, bound to Cæsar by various ties, would not take an active part in any conspiracy against his person, but who, if once that obstacle to the restoration of the Senatorial Government were removed, would declare their detestation of autocracy, and assist in remodelling the State. Tiberius Nero was one of these; Cicero was another, and there were many others who, during the last four years, had been ill at ease in the attempt to reconcile their personal affection for Cæsar and confidence in his ability with their conception of what constituted political righteousness. Unfortunately for these men, they were but few in number; within three months’ time it had become clear that neither the Army, nor the provincials, nor the subordinate officials had any objection to an autocrat; the myth of the Senate had been replaced by the myth of Cæsar; the only question was who would become the centre of the cult.

Two men considered themselves most likely to attract to themselves the passionate adoration with which the soldiers of Cæsar had regarded their general; they were his trusted lieutenants, Marcus Lepidus and Marcus Antonius, the former a Proconsul in command of an army, the latter Cæsar’s colleague in the Consulship at the time of his death, and his intimate friend; Cæsar’s widow placed all her husband’s papers in his hands. Antonius had the advantage of being constitutional head of the Government, and as soon as it was clear that the popular feeling at Rome was strongly adverse to the Liberators, he procured a decree from the frightened Senate sanctioning all Cæsar’s arrangements. Any other course would in fact have produced intolerable confusion. The most important consequence of this measure was that the Liberators were put into positions of great power and influence by the voice of the man they had killed, and were protected from the consequences of their own imprudence. Cicero threw aside his literary work and rushed to Rome, to assist in the restoration of the Republic, and to revive the party of Pompeius. Antonius, however, had no intention of letting the reins of Government slip from his grasp; being possessed of the dead Cæsar’s papers, he was able to produce at his pleasure decrees which the constitutional party had already sanctioned by anticipation, and the partisans of the dead man were bound to support. Moderation was no part of the character of Antonius; he prepared himself to enjoy thoroughly the wealth which was poured into his hands; with Cæsar’s soldiers at his back, he felt that he could do what he pleased. An unexpected event shook his self-confidence, and revived the prospects of the constitutional party by dividing the Cæsarians.

The young Octavian crossed from Apollonia and landed at Brundisium.

Cæsar had left no direct descendants except an illegitimate son by Cleopatra, but he had distinguished his great-nephew Octavius by such indications of his confidence and affection as a Roman would bestow upon his destined heir. The year before his death he had taken the young man with him to Spain, on the expedition against the sons of Pompeius, which ended in their defeat at Munda; he had attached him closely to his person, shared his tent with him, conducted all his business in his presence, had in fact begun his political apprenticeship. Apparently Cæsar came to the conclusion that his nephew’s education was inadequate, and on the return from Spain he sent him to Apollonia on the Illyrian coast, a Greek town of considerable commercial importance, which was the seat of a University largely frequented by Roman students. So far Cæsar had not taken the final step of adopting Octavius, but he did so by his will.

Octavius was at this time little over eighteen years of age; his mother and stepfather were alive, both of them devoted to his interests, but nobody seems as yet to have thought of him as a possible factor in the politics of the future.

By removing him to Apollonia his uncle had to some extent withdrawn him from political life, and the Liberators had forgotten his existence. He was of weakly health, and had shown no particular aptitude for military pursuits. Antonius thought him of such small importance, that he disregarded those portions of Cæsar’s will which referred to him, and actually seized the private treasure which had been bequeathed to him.

Friends and relatives were alike urgent that Octavian should either remain where he was, or delay his journey to Italy till he was assured of the support of an Army. The young man wisely relied on his own judgment; he was Cæsar’s heir and adopted son, but Cæsar could only bequeath to him his private inheritance; it was not in his power to transfer the reins of Government; the nature of the conspiracy against Cæsar and its extent was still unknown; Antonius and other leading Cæsarians had been spared, it was clear that no proscription of the adherents of Cæsar had been contemplated, or, if contemplated, it had been abandoned. If Octavian were marked out for slaughter, he was already doomed; nothing could save him but the affection of Cæsar’s veterans; they were all in Italy, and there was as yet no evidence that they were prepared to transfer their allegiance to so distant a relative of their late commander. To appear with an army would be to invite attack, and Octavian knew his own limitations better than anybody else; he knew that he was no general, and he had not as yet a general in whom he could trust. By appearing in Italy simply as a private person engaged in an ordinary matter of private business, the formal succession to an inheritance, he disarmed prejudice. If Antonius wished to put him out of the way, he could do so in any case. On the other hand, by appearing simply as a defrauded heir, he might attract popular sympathy; Cæsar’s will had already proved to be a political force; and the Constitutional party might be glad of a counterpoise to Antonius.

Such considerations may well have influenced Octavian in the adoption of the important step which he took contrary to advice. It is even possible that he contemplated nothing more than the assertion of his undeniable right; and that the consequences of his daring step took him by surprise. It is certain that he had no sooner landed at Brundisium than he found himself a power; the soldiers flocked to meet him, and his march to Rome was a triumphal progress.

The events of the next three years are difficult to disentangle; to the actors they must have been perplexing in the extreme. The factor which had been omitted from the calculations of all the leaders was the character of the army, which Cæsar had created. As fast as Cæsar made way in Gaul he enlisted the Gauls in his service; his legions were in the end less Italian than Gallic; to the Gauls the abstraction called the Roman Senate had no more significance than the House of Commons to Sikhs and Gurkhas; they had not got beyond, or not fallen behind, the conceptions of personal fidelity to a chieftain which are developed by the clan system. Not only was it natural to them to transfer their fidelity from the person of a father to that of his son and successor, but such personal ties were their strongest political passion. They would obey Antonius and even Lepidus as Cæsar’s friends and trusted subordinates, but their affection for Cæsar’s heir was of a different character; to avenge their dead commander, to put his son in his rights, were to them matters of the first importance; as for the Roman Constitution and theoretical Republics, they neither cared about them nor understood them. At first Octavian did not grasp the situation; his temperament was legal and formal; his first preoccupation was to assert his legal rights against Antonius, and in order to do this effectively, he had no objection to using such help as might be given him by Cicero and the Constitutional party, who for their part proposed to use against him Antonius and then put him out of the way. The first serious operation in the field showed Octavian his mistake; the Senate sent him with the Consuls to relieve Decimus Brutus, brother of Marcus Brutus, who was being besieged by the Cæsarians under Antonius at Mutina; both Consuls, old Cæsarians, were killed, and the soldiers insisted on bringing Octavian back to Rome and making him Consul; it was not long before they also insisted on a reconciliation between the Cæsarian leaders, compelling Antonius, Lepidus, and Octavian to work together and unite in the task of punishing the enemies of Cæsar. The proscription was partly the work of the army; so far as it was a punishment of the enemies of Cæsar, Octavian was an accomplice, though an unwilling accomplice; Antonius and Lepidus both took advantage of it to satisfy old grudges and make large confiscations. Meanwhile the general disorganization invited any man who found himself in command of troops, or was otherwise favourably circumstanced, to fish in troubled waters; Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella, the dissolute little gentleman who was “tied to a sword,” was not the only man who saw an opportunity of doing something to his own advantage. Adventures of this kind disturbed the world for a few months, but after Brutus and Cassius had been beaten near Philippi a fairly definite division declared itself; the world was again divided between Cæsarians and Pompeians, and the chief Pompeian leader was Sextus Pompeius. Antonius had gone off to the East to meet Cleopatra and his fate on the Cydnus. Lepidus, though in command of an army and Governor of Africa, was a negligible quantity, destined to suffer a very remarkable disillusionment as soon as he ventured to assert himself in an independent position.

Few men have ever been so fortunate as Octavian in the mistakes of their adversaries, and few have ever turned them to such good advantage.

East and West alike were taught to adore the memory of the great Cæsar by the incompetence of the men who proposed to succeed to his power; under his sway the commercial cities of Asia Minor had thriven; Cassius plundered them in the name of the Senate, Dolabella on his own responsibility, Antonius as the successor of Cæsar; Italy had no sooner begun to look forward to relief from civil war on the departure of Antonius than the Constitutional party allied itself with Lucius Antonius and Fulvia, the brother and wife of Marcus Antonius, to impede the settlement. Tiberius Nero was among those who joined the new movement. Relieved of the presence of Antonius, who in spite of all his faults was a general of ability, the Pompeians hoped to be able to crush Octavian, who was no general; the proscription had left very bitter feelings; Octavian had so far had no opportunity of indicating his pacific inclinations; he had had to do what his soldiers required of him; Antonius was obviously a self-indulgent adventurer, with whose fortunes no self-respecting man could ally himself; Fulvia was a virago, and Lucius Antonius no less greedy than his brother, though less amiable; still it seemed that these latter with their adherents embodied the Republican principle; and the remnants of the Constitutional party joined them. Incompetent generalship allowed their forces to be locked up in Perusia, and after a siege of three months the soldiers of Octavian glutted their vengeance upon the enemies of Cæsar; the terror that was inspired served its purpose in two ways: there were no more conspiracies in Italy, and Octavian made up his mind never again to be the slave of his own army.

Tiberius Nero either escaped from Perusia before the town was completely invested, or had started on a special mission to Campania with the object of creating a diversion in Southern Italy. He still held the office of Prætor though his legal term had expired, and thus invested his enterprise with a legal and constitutional aspect. The territory of Capua had been confiscated by Rome after the second Punic War, the penalty of the destructive friendship which that city had conferred on Hannibal; the Senate of those days had appropriated the land to its own purposes; the redivision of this land had been part of the programme of the popular party from the days of the Gracchi, and their heirs the Cæsarians now proposed to assign it to Octavian’s veterans. Tiberius Nero took up the cause of the proprietors, who were threatened with expropriation, thus adopting the old Senatorial standpoint; he doubtless expected to find that the Campanians, to whom the existing conditions, sanctioned as they were by the precedents of a century and a half, caused no grievance, would flock to his standards; but he met with languid support from the beginning, and the fall of Perusia with the subsequent atrocities destroyed every prospect of success; the Campanians preferred a peaceful spoliation to the chances of war. Tiberius Nero was obliged to fly for his life; accompanied by his wife, his eldest son barely two years of age, and only one attendant, he made his way to Naples. Here a romantic incident took place. C. Velleius Paterculus, the grandfather of the historian, had been associated with Tiberius Nero in all his enterprises; he had been his friend all his life; he had served under him as Chief Engineer at Alexandria, and in his subsequent campaigns; it is not clear whether he had been the sole companion of the flight from Campania, but in any case he rejoined his friend at Naples; but Naples was no safe refuge; Octavian was pressing southwards; it was necessary to cross to Sicily; when it proved to be difficult to provide for the escape of the whole party, the old man committed suicide rather than be an impediment to his friend.

Tiberius Nero had suffered two disappointments: he had been disappointed in Cæsar; he had been disappointed in the attempt to form a constitutional party in opposition to Cæsar’s heir; a third and severer disappointment awaited him in Sicily.