Chapter XVIII: The Retirement at Capreæ 418 (5)

In the didactic work of Hesiod, the Farm and the Calendar, which was used by the Greeks much as we use a catechism, minute and trivial points of cleanliness and decency rank with perjury and violence; to neglect the former, to commit the latter, alike involved the displeasure of the immortals. The Italians were enslaved by minute ritual even more than the Greeks; they were more superstitious; the worship of the Lares and of the ancestors, the faith in fortune, the dread of the unlucky, survived among cultivated Italians to a late period. Italy is still profoundly superstitious; men who have shaken off the authority of the Church still dread the evil eye, and witchcraft of a peculiar kind is still firmly believed in by the peasants of central Italy; the strega is still a power in the villages of the Bolognese.

The ancients had nothing to set against the ascription of Divine powers to a man, though for the enlightened it was possible to distinguish between ceremonial acts whose purpose was to propitiate the Divinity behind the man, and the worship of the man himself as a divine being; nor did death terminate the power of the favoured individual; the spirit was even more powerful when released from the accidents of humanity. Among the Italians faith in the power of the dead, and a considerable dread of their continued interference in the concerns of the living, was a lively faith, and exemplified in many curious ways; and thus the worship of Augustus, which was officially recognized only in the provinces during his lifetime, was extended to Italy after his death. This worship was not an exclusive worship; it did not destroy or even impair the cults of other divinities; it was only another god added to the celestial hierarchy, another saint canonized; but this particular worship was alone in being universal throughout the Empire and officially sanctioned; in Gaul it was imposed.

It is particularly worthy of attention that the care of the worship of Augustus was assigned to freedmen; the Augustales, whose duty it was in each town to maintain the cult, were to be “libertini”; in Rome the Prætor Peregrinus, the foreigner’s judge, presided over its feasts, and it was associated with the worship of the Lares of the Compitalia, that is to say, with the oratories in the streets at which the slaves paid their devotions. Men of all nationalities driven together as slaves in the great cities, far from their native gods, found a common cult and a common protector in Augustus. It was not long before the worship of Augustus became indistinguishable from the worship of the Empire, and each successive Emperor received divine honours, as manifesting that abstraction; to deny the divinity of the Emperor, to refuse to spill a little wine, or cast a few grains of incense in his honour, was to rebel against the civil organization accepted by mankind; it was as difficult to evade the obligation as for an English soldier to refuse to drink to the health of his sovereign. The Jews alone protested, and for a long while their protest was accepted; they did not pray to the Emperor, but they prayed for him.

Augustus met his worshippers halfway; his own temperament was profoundly religious, as religion was understood by his contemporaries; he substituted the divine right of the Emperor for the divine right of the Senate; he was not a madman like Caligula, jealous of other divinities; on the contrary, he made every effort to restore cults which were being abandoned, and to revive both public and private observances. If he did not believe in his own divinity in the sense which the words would convey to us, he was equally removed from the robust scepticism of Vespasian, who remarked in his last moments: “Bah! I feel I am turning into a god!” His attitude towards his own divinity was a reverential one; it did not encourage him to set human laws at defiance, and flagrantly override the rights of other men; on the contrary he practised a studied humility, and seemed to feel that if he was himself a god, it was incumbent upon him to see that due respect was paid to other members of the same fraternity; in dealing with men he anticipated the Popes in assuming the attitude of the “Servus Servorum Dei.” There was no deliberate imposture, no conscious pose. When Cromwell enumerated to an unruly assembly the successive events in his career which had placed him at the head of affairs, and claimed that they bore witness to a special Providence, he expressed in the language of his time and country the same association of ideas which convinced Octavian that there was something supernatural in the chain of events, in the unbroken success, which had given him power far greater than Cromwell’s. There was no arrogance in the claim; there was humility; he ascribed to powers not his own a series of successes in which a less reverently minded man would have seen nothing but the evidence of his own surpassing ability. It was not merely political astuteness which led him to act in everything as an ordinary citizen, to vote, to ask for votes, to live without magnificence or ostentatious expenditure; such conduct was the result partly of personal inclination, partly of a sense of the infinite smallness of such things as marble columns and silken raiment, costly banquets and trains of servants in comparison with the greatness of the destiny imposed upon him. If at the great shows in the circus he sat on the platform on which were placed the statues of the gods, he did not thereby assert equality with them, but claimed their protection and bore witness to the favour which they bestowed not only on him, but on the people whose destinies he guided with their approbation and in virtue of the powers which they had granted. In the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius we may detect a certain flavour of approbation when these historians tell us that Tiberius or other Emperors refused divine honours or limited them, and we might be tempted to infer from this that the assumption of divinity by the Emperors was contrary to the feeling of the times; but both Tacitus and Suetonius wrote more than a century after Octavian had been declared “Augustus,” and in their days the unitarian faith of the Jews had begun generally to influence the educated classes at Rome; Horace could jest lightly at the Jewish Sabbath; in the time of Suetonius, if it was not observed as a day of rest all over the Empire, as Josephus boasts, it was certainly a well known institution.

It might be urged that whatever the religious attitude of Augustus in other respects, he cannot have believed in his descent from the goddess Venus, and that Virgil’s great poem in all that concerns Æneas and Anchises is conscious imposture. To argue in this way is again to misinterpret polytheism. The faith in Fauns and Satyrs is not absolutely extinct in Italy even today; the survival of such a faith suggested the plot of Hawthorne’s exquisite romance, _Transformation_. Charles Leland discovered traces of it in Tuscany and Umbria.

The ancients had not arrived at our modern accuracy of definition with regard to the divine and the human, the natural and the supernatural; even the most enlightened contemporary of Augustus might hold a faith as to mixed marriages between gods and men not dissimilar to that held by many orthodox Protestants as to miracles--they might believe that such things did not happen in their own day, but that they had happened. In the curious classification of events affecting the lives of the Emperors adopted by Suetonius a place is always assigned for portents. Xiphilinus, the Christian who epitomized Dio Cassius, apologises for the long lists of portents in his author, and for having cut out the more trivial of these occurrences, but he leaves a large number. Faith in portents is in fact always at hand, and even in these critical days readily springs to life at a favourable opportunity. With the ancients it was universal; in those days, as in our own, men preferred sensation to evidence, and the critical faculty, even when developed, had no very satisfactory apparatus which could be applied. As a rule, the significance of portents was seen after the event which they portended. Then, as now, nurses and mothers recalled remarkable circumstances which had attended the birth and education of children who afterwards became distinguished; and there are few men distinguished or obscure who have not at some period of their lives encountered strange coincidences, or suffered unusual experiences, which, interpreted by the light of subsequent events, may be held to have been fraught with mystery. There is no reasonable doubt that the entrance of Octavian into Rome when he returned to claim his uncle’s inheritance was attended by some unusual disposition of the sun’s rays, possibly a solar halo in which only one of the mock suns was clearly visible, that the event attracted notice at the time, and that it inclined men to believe that the fortunate youth was reserved for a remarkable destiny--an anticipation which led to its own fulfilment. Virgil may well have been in earnest when he hailed the procession of the star of Cæsar and worked up convenient fragments of legends into the _Æneid_; even if he had occasional misgivings, his inclination was to believe, and to hope that his glorious web was woven in threads of fact.

Faith in his divine ancestry, faith in his divine mission did not enervate Augustus, nor render him unpractical; he treated his power as a sacred trust, and used all the resources of a cool intellect and industrious temperament to further the interests which he believed to have been committed to his charge. We are told that in his later years he liked to believe that there was something superhuman in his glance, and was pleased when men were unable to look him in the face--a weakness which was encouraged by studious flatterers. If this is true, we may well believe that, like many other men and women, he was insensibly influenced by the attitude of those around him, and dropped into the place assigned for him by the universal opinion.

In any case, Augustus, whether in public or private, did nothing to jar upon the prejudices of those who were prepared to believe in his divine mission. He led such a life as has since been led by many of the better Popes, and at least one English statesman. Gossip, always busy with the supposed amatory proclivities of great men, has not spared him in this respect, but even if there were any foundation for the idle stories which have been handed down, the ancients would not have been scandalized; the somewhat coarse pleasantries which have also been attributed to him would have scarcely attracted attention in his own day.

By his peculiar personality Augustus was able to stamp upon the Roman Empire a character which has never left it--he made it a religion as well as a state; and it was due to his work, and to his sense of the sacredness of his work, that there are still men living even in England who cannot feel happy in the regulation of what they believe to be their most important concerns, unless they are assured that their actions are in accordance with the dictates of the authority from across the mountains, which is resident in Rome.

It is a curious fact that many of those men and women whose personal appearance was felt by their own contemporaries to be in the highest degree awe-inspiring were small: Napoleon was small, Louis XIV was small, among Queens Elizabeth was small, and Her late Majesty Victoria unusually small. Augustus was no exception--he was short, slight, and halted perceptibly in his gait; but these personal disadvantages did not detract from his dignity. If we compare the portrait of Julius Cæsar in the British Museum with the bust of the young Augustus, or the head of the magnificent statue of the Emperor found in Livia’s villa near the Prima Porta, we are struck by a remarkable difference. It is possible to bring the face of Cæsar to life again; we can recall the dark and liquid eyes, and set the strongly marked muscles of the face in motion; we would hardly be astonished were the lips to open, and we can anticipate the clear even enunciation of the words to which they would give utterance. But with the portraits of Augustus it is otherwise; they are strangely inscrutable. The bust known as the young Augustus is the portrait of a boy, or at the oldest of a lad of sixteen. It must have been modelled at a time when the future even of Julius Cæsar was not assured. The artist may have flattered, but that particular form of flattery can hardly have been designed; the habit of thoughtfulness is seldom expressed to the same degree in the features of boys and young men. Similarly in the older portrait there is an aloofness; it is the face of a man who would always tempt a careful observer to wish to know more about him, and who would always elude curiosity. The next Emperor who was canonized was Claudius. Of him, too, we have many authentic portraits; even in the most idealized we can see something of the man whose apotheosis gave Seneca the materials for a merry jest. It is the face of a man who was perpetually puzzled, whereas the face of Augustus is the countenance of one who perpetually puzzled other men.

The great work of establishing the Roman Empire was not the work of a charlatan or a criminal, in both of which characters Augustus has been represented. It was the work of a man who shared many of the crude beliefs of his own time and unconsciously used them for his own purposes, and those purposes were not self regarding. An Antonius could squander great gifts in the pursuit of what earthly happiness is afforded by dissolute excesses--he could allow his soldiers to perish of hunger and disease while he hastened to the embraces of an accomplished courtesan; he could shamelessly desert loyal veterans at the bidding of a licentious woman, and seek salvation in the wake of her purple sails; such was the hero whom Augustus annihilated, such the conception of responsibility which he replaced by a devotion to duty which has rarely been equalled and never surpassed.

The reign of Augustus was monotonous, his policy unadventurous. If these are defects, we are at least at liberty to prefer them to the excellences of those more brilliant reigns and more adventurous rulers who succeeded in dazzling the world, but failed to lay the foundations for a long era of prosperity. The career of Napoleon is more startling than that of Augustus, his military record incomparable with the simple successes of the earlier Emperor, but Napoleon left France with a diminished frontier, and Augustus left Italy the undoubted mistress of the civilized world.

V

Education of Tiberius

Though the apparent results of a careful education are often disappointing, the impressions received in early childhood are permanent in their effects. The man who has been brought up in a particular atmosphere retains the influence through life, even though his acts may seem to be in strong contrast with his training; the son of a Quaker family may break with all the traditions of the Society of Friends in his maturity, but he is never quite the same as a man who has not been under the rigid family discipline of that estimable sect. A man may throw off all the bonds imposed by the severe domestic arrangements of a Scotch Elder, he may elect to bring up his own children on liberal lines, and banish the shorter Catechism from his household, but he cannot shake off the consciousness of another kind of life which was forced upon him by his early experiences. In the case of Tiberius we can trace to the very end of his life the influences to which his youth and early manhood were subjected. There was no break with early traditions; the aspect of details changed, the estimate of their relative mutual importance was modified, but the spirit with which they were approached was always the same.

The antiquaries have much to tell us of the material arrangements of a Roman house, but we are not so well informed by them as to its occupants. There is a disposition to ascribe all that was good in Roman family life to an indeterminate period anterior to that progressive decay of good manners and good morals which, according to our authorities, was the distinguishing feature of the Empire. Exceptional instances of extravagance are quoted as texts for the supposed rule, the humorous or declamatory exaggerations of satirists are treated as if they were the evidence of sober witnesses, and the spirit which works behind the whole of Roman history is dealt with as of no account in comparison with the letter of promiscuous citations.

If we wish to revive the ideas which were associated by the Romans with their princely houses, we must think rather of such Roman palaces as are described by Mr. Marion Crawford in his Italian Romances; we must add to this conception something of a mediæval court, something too of the great mercantile house of the Renascence. So far as the family was concerned which inhabited such a house as Pompeius built for himself in the Carinæ, it was often composed of many generations, and of persons connected by various degrees of affinity; it was a patriarchal establishment, at whose head stood the eldest man of full age descended in the line of primogeniture from the founder--it was not merely the home of a man and his wife and their children. Nor again was the house only a place of residence: it was a place of business, and the business was of many kinds--some of it was political, some financial, some legal, some industrial. In private as in public life at Rome there was not that strict differentiation of functions, and fine division of labour and responsibility, which comparatively recent experiences have caused our contemporaries to regard as a law of existence.

The Roman Empire was not built upon the foundations afforded by the assembly of the Tribes, or the assembly of the Centuries, or even by the Senate itself, but upon the surpassing ability of the great families and the suitability of their organization for the work which fell into their hands. Collectively as the Senate they exhibited similar ability during a period which was long enough to fix the reputation of Rome, but this period was both preceded and followed by times in which the work of individual houses was supremely effective. The Imperial household differed in nothing but the greater extent of its responsibilities from other households. Augustus was not the only Roman noble who lived upon the Palatine Hill, and his establishment was ostentatiously modest; many of his contemporaries lived in finer palaces, and exhibited greater magnificence in private, but the moderation of Augustus was only relative, and his house was able to find room at different times for two successive commanders-in-chief, Agrippa and Tiberius, with their families and dependents. If Roman history was presented to young Romans in a form which drew their attention largely to such purely constitutional questions as the quarrels between the Patricians and Plebeians, it did not omit the legends of the great houses. The Senatorial dynasty had its heroic mythology; Horatius who kept the bridge, Cincinnatus who left his plough to command the army, the Fabians who all died in one day for their country, Curtius who leapt into the gulf, occupied in the imagination of Roman boys much the same place as King Alfred and his cakes occupy in the mind of the English boy. Every funeral of a member of one of the great families paraded before the eyes of Rome the effigies of men associated with stirring events in the history of the city, and filled their ears with the stories of great deeds. So far as the Romans knew their own history, they knew it in connexion with the names of the great houses, with whom indeed it was so closely associated that it was considered somewhat scandalous in the reign of Tiberius that a man who did not belong to one of these houses should take upon himself to write and publish a history.

For many years a comparatively small group of families at Rome managed the affairs of an area which has since found work for the statesmen and administrators of several kingdoms. Collectively they worked through the Senate and constitutional officials, individually through the system of clientele which was expanded from a domestic institution to a world-embracing system. Communities, as well as private persons, put themselves in connexion with great families at Rome, who were pledged to watch their interests; over and above the public official connexion with the Senate there was the private non-official connexion with individual senatorial families. Slaves and freedmen gathered from all parts of the civilized world strengthened and extended the family connexions. The sons of minor potentates were sent to reside with Roman noblemen, and receive a Roman education; capable adventurers such as the Herod family scented out the strong men of Rome and allied themselves to their fortunes. The minute subdivision of ancient society even after the creation of the Roman Provinces continued the patronage system beyond the time at which it might seem to have been naturally extinguished. Sicily might be a Roman Province, but individual Sicilian cities might still feel the need of a permanent advocate at Rome. The Roman Governor changed from year to year, but the dynasty of an Æmilian or a Claudian was perpetual.

Thus in one of its aspects, and not its least important aspect, a Roman family was a community in itself, with many and far-reaching interests; the capacity of its chief personage was a matter of importance to a very large number of men and women; his failure involved the ruin of a hierarchy of relatives and dependents. Even in the earlier and simpler days of Rome the sons of the family were carefully trained to represent the family in the Forum and the Senate, to manage its estates, to conduct its financial relations and the extension of the family connexions, to hold office, to command armies. Greek culture added to the conception of obligation to the family, obligation to the state; Greek and Roman ideals alike forbade the young Roman noble to neglect himself. Even his deportment, his manners, his gestures were serious matters; he could not afford to be ungainly, or to express himself awkwardly. If a son proved to be physically or morally incapable of receiving the required training, Roman sentiment was not shocked by his supersession or removal. We have a curious illustration of this in the story of the Emperor Claudius. He was the younger brother of Germanicus, the son of Drusus, the grandson of Livia. In the ordinary course of events he would have been introduced to public life like his brother, but he was awkward, he rolled in his gait, his tongue was too large for his mouth, he stammered and sputtered, his family, and even his mother, were ashamed of him, he was kept in the background, and practically pensioned off. He was, however, a serious student, a linguist, or at any rate a philologist; as Emperor he planned and carried out works of great public utility; he was an extensive writer, an industrious worker. He may have been of feeble character, easily led by favourites and women, but his reign was by no means a disastrous one. No ancient writer, however, protests against the prejudice, which deprived Claudius of all opportunities of advancement, till a supposed freak of the soldiers made him Emperor; they unanimously accept with approval the verdict of Augustus, that he was unfitted by his personal defects for public life. Similarly the youngest son of Agrippa and Julia, the youngest grandson of Augustus himself, was removed from Rome, and sequestered in an island “on account of his intractability”; but though his subsequent fate is one of the many counts in the process against the reputation of Tiberius, no fault is found with Augustus for thus eliminating a member of his family who did not prove amenable to discipline.

Duty to the family, duty to the State, or it might be first duty to the State, then duty to the family, were impressed upon the young Roman noble as the conditions of his existence; he lived, like the heir-apparent to a throne, in a court which forced upon him the traditions and observances which the maintenance of the court demanded. If the father neglected his children, and evaded the responsibility of training them, there were numerous other persons ready and willing to undertake his work. The presiding genius of a Roman family was not infrequently an aged lady, or a trusted freedman, deeply imbued with the importance of the house and the sanctity of its traditions.

For the first nine years of his life Tiberius lived with his father--a man serious, fond of learning, full of the republican tradition. It is not impossible that, in spite of the association with Octavian through Livia, the house was to some extent a meeting place of the remnant of the Republican party. We at least know that one of these men made the young Tiberius his heir, and adopted him by his will; he seems to have been allowed to take the succession, but had to refuse the adoption, because his benefactor was anti-Cæsarian. The elder Tiberius, not being engaged in public business, would have plenty of time to give to his children, and Roman children in a Roman family of the old-fashioned type were much with their parents. We are told that Tiberius was very carefully educated; at his father’s death he was already sufficiently well advanced in recitation to pronounce the customary eulogy at his funeral. Up to this time everything in his surroundings would tend to encourage a naturally severe temperament; it can hardly have been a cheerful home, this house of the lost cause. The affections of the boy expanded themselves upon his brother Drusus, his junior by more than two years, to whom his attachment was deep and lasting.

On the death of their father the two boys were transferred to the care of their mother and stepfather, who was now their guardian. Tiberius was old enough to resent such an arrangement, but there is no evidence that he did so; he accepted his stepfather loyally, and Octavian himself was scrupulously careful of the interests of his stepsons. Diplomatic divorces and re-marriages were of such common occurrence in the Roman houses at this period that no slight was felt or intended, and as a rule the divorced parties maintained friendly relations. Octavia, the sister of Octavian, was neglected and eventually repudiated by Antonius, but she nevertheless took good care of his children by a former marriage, the children of the tigress Fulvia.

Scribonia, the divorced wife of Octavian, continued to be on sufficiently friendly terms with his family to watch over her daughter Julia, not altogether to the latter’s advantage, and eventually accompanied her into exile. Where marriage was treated entirely as a business arrangement, there was no room for wounded feelings, and children were not tempted to feel themselves aggrieved by a change of parents, or to cherish resentment. When a wife was repudiated on account of infidelity, and therefore disgraced, there was room for ill-feeling, but not otherwise.

As Octavian at a later date set up a school in his own house for the benefit of his grandchildren and the children of friends, it is not improbable that a somewhat similar arrangement was adopted for the young Neros; the course of grammar, the course of rhetoric, the course of philosophy would be duly followed out. Except in the far greater attention paid to elocution, the formal education will have differed little from that of an Eton boy in the middle of the nineteenth century. Both Roman and English boy learned Greek, and the Roman boy had the advantage of learning it as a spoken language; neither had a systematic instruction in mathematics, though the Roman had the advantage of being drilled in keeping accounts. But far more valuable than the formal instruction was the informal education given by the circumstances of the family. The Romans kept early hours, and it was customary for the children to dine in the same room with their parents, though at different tables. Octavian, partly from choice, partly from necessity imposed upon him by weak health, was not given to large entertainments. His table was a simple one, old-fashioned observances were rigorously maintained, but the company was choice. The children could sit and listen while the conversation was being conducted by Horace and Virgil; all the latest inventions, all the newest literature, everything that did not pertain to secret diplomacy, was discussed at that table. There was Mæcenas with his charming manners and casual dress; Agrippa, somewhat silent as a rule, but animated enough when the roof of the Pantheon or the model of a light galley had to be described to an appreciative audience; there too was Cornelius Gallus, the brilliant gentleman and poet, betraying by his passionate vivacity his Gallic origin; Varius too would be there ready to recite his last heroic poem. After dinner there would be amusements, sometimes games of chance for small stakes, sometimes recitations; or the last fashionable preacher, some Greek or Greek-speaking Jew, would discourse of virtue to the admiration of Livia and the ladies. Chieftains from Gaul and Spain, Princes from the East or Africa, wealthy citizens from Antioch or Alexandria or the cities of Asia Minor, were all to be met at that simple table, wondering at the exiguity of the repast, but none the less impressed by the personality of their host. The opportunity was a rare one for a youth who was bent on self-improvement, and it was not neglected by Tiberius or his brother.

Along with them was brought up Julia, the spoiled child of the family, and cousin Marcellus with his two sisters, the children of Octavia, whose other daughter, Antonia, was to be the wife of Drusus, and the lifelong friend of Tiberius, perhaps the most beautiful of Roman women.

There could be no better preparation for a life devoted to the public service than this household, in which power only served to increase the sense of responsibility, in which the routine of every day was a routine of duty, and the command of the resources of the civilized world did not add a dish to the table, a garment to the wardrobe, or a superfluous slave to the servants’ hall.

The atmosphere of the household of Augustus is not to be found in the scandalous gossip occasionally repeated by Suetonius or Tacitus, but in the works of Horace and Virgil; both poets repeatedly insist on the merits of simplicity, not because they were commissioned to do so, but because their own personal tastes and habits fell into line with those of the master of the civilized world.

The education of a young Roman was not confined to his home; he accompanied his father to war when he was old enough, and on peaceful expeditions at all times, where a great train did not involve inconvenience. Tiberius was probably still too young to attend Octavian on his Eastern tour after the battle of Actium, but when he was only seventeen he accompanied him to Spain, and there took his first lessons in the field, just as Octavian himself had previously been trained under Cæsar. A Roman was considered to be of age when he was sixteen, and he was quickly tested by being called upon to undertake minor responsibilities. In all departments of public life Tiberius had the advantage of the example and precept of the best authorities. The staff of Agrippa, and perhaps Agrippa himself, were ready to instruct him in the latest developments of the art of war; for finance and diplomacy he could go to Mæcenas. Octavian was a practised and careful orator; no one of these men could afford to slumber on his laurels; they were all hard at work modifying the old, organizing the new. The secrets of the Empire so frequently alluded to by Tacitus were not so very mysterious; hard work, discretion, tact, public spirit, formed the bulk of them. The time for intriguing came after the apprenticeship of Tiberius was finished, and the intriguers were not the men who had taught him his business.

Of the personal influences to which Tiberius was submitted in his youth the one best known to us is that of Horace, who incidentally throws a light upon his character as a young man. In the year 21 B.C. Augustus made a progress to the East, visiting notable cities on the way, and regulating their affairs. The chief object of the tour was, however, to settle the Eastern frontier of the Empire. Syria was to Rome what the North-West Provinces of India are to England; Herod and Aretas of Arabia with the princes of Armenia played the part of the Ameer of Afghanistan; they were the buffer states between Roman civilization and the aggressive powers of Central Asia. Their fidelity was by no means beyond suspicion, and from the mountains of Armenia, all along the west of the Euphrates down to the borders of Egypt, continuous intriguing prevailed, every ambitious kinglet making use of one or the other of the great powers to strengthen his position against his rivals. The strongest of these chieftains were the rulers of Armenia and Herod the Idumæan; the former were unquestionably treacherous, and their proximity to the Parthians rendered them peculiarly liable to wavering; the latter played skilfully for his own hand. So long as Rome was strong, Herod was her obedient servant, but if Rome showed signs of weakness, Herod had no scruples against making friends with a stronger power in order to further his own ends.

Since Cæsar had conquered Pharnaces, the son of Mithridates, by his mere apparition, the prestige of Rome in the East had been considerably damaged. The expeditions of Antonius against the Parthians had been unsuccessful, and a serious catastrophe had only been averted by the valour of his lieutenant, Ventidius Bassus, a former mule-driver; by submitting Herod to the demands of Cleopatra’s cupidity, he had to some extent alienated the Idumæan, and encouraged him to distrust Roman politicians. Now that the Spanish war was over and the Western half of the Empire in good order, Augustus wisely determined to study his Eastern questions on the spot, and make such a demonstration of power as would determine the judgment of waverers in favour of Rome. The plan of operations was to send an army through Asia Minor into Armenia, and thence if necessary along the Tigris into Parthia, while the possible allies of the Parthians in Syria were to be overawed simultaneously by the presence of the Emperor. The command of the army destined for Armenia was given to Tiberius, now twenty-one years of age. Both operations were successful; there was not much fighting, but the Parthians saw that Rome was in earnest, and made terms, sending back the standards which had been taken from Crassus some thirty years before; the Roman party in Armenia was strengthened by a change of rulers, and Tiberius returned in triumph. His first essay in war and diplomacy was successful.

Tiberius had taken with him a staff of secretaries, or literary companions, with whom Horace was in correspondence, the chief of whom seems to have been Julius Florus, a Romanized Gaul. From the tone of Horace’s letters to these young men we learn much of the future Emperor. It would seem that Tiberius had formed the idea of surrounding himself with what Horace on one occasion humorously calls “a gang” of earnestly minded young men. Their characteristics may be inferred from the following letter:--

“I am very anxious to know, Julius Florus, the quarter of the world in which Claudius the stepson of Augustus is campaigning. Are you in Thrace, or on the Bosphorus, or the rich plains and hills of Asia? What works is the studious company a-building? I should like to know this too. Who is undertaking to write the history of Augustus? Who is going to give immortality to his wars and peaceful exploits? What is Titius writing, Titius whom all Romans will sing, who has not been afraid to tap the Pindaric sources, and has ventured to turn away from commonplace pools and streams? Is he well? Does he think of me? Does he labour with the aid of the Muse to fit the Theban metres to Latin strings, or does he rage and bluster in tragedy? Tell me what Celsus is doing? Warn him against plagiary, tell him to beware of the fate of the daw in borrowed plumes. And what are your own ventures? What are the thyme beds about which you lightly hover? You have no mean ability, you are polished, refined, and will win the first prize as an advocate in private or public suits, or as a poet of the lighter kind. But if you could give up the chilling pursuit of business, you would go where inspired wisdom would lead you. This is the work and interest which should be sped by us all, whether small or great, if we wish to live in peace with our country and ourselves. You must also tell me this when you write, mind you do, how are you getting on with Munatius? Does the badly patched fellowship join and split again to no purpose? And are your independent spirits galled either by hot-headedness or misunderstanding? Wherever you both may happen to be, you who should not break the bond of brotherhood, I shall be very glad indeed to see you back again.”

Here is another letter to Celsus, the young gentleman who made somewhat too free use of the poems in the Palatine Library:--

“I beg you, Muse, to convey my compliments to Celsus Albinovanus, the companion and secretary of Nero. If he asks what I am doing, tell him that though I threaten all kinds of fine things, I am neither living properly nor pleasantly; not because my vines have been smashed by the hail, or my olives parched with the heat, or my cattle sick on the outlying lands, but because, more ill at ease in mind than body, I refuse to hear or learn anything that is good for an invalid, am annoyed with my faithful physicians, furious with my friends, because they try to deliver me from my deadly laziness; I am bent on what is bad for me, I avoid what I know to be good for me; I am fickle enough to be in love with Tibur at Rome, with Rome at Tibur. After this ask him how he is, how he manages his business and himself, how he gets on with his young chief and the company. If he says ‘well,’ first congratulate him, and then don’t forget to whisper just this little bit of advice into his ear, ‘Our treatment of you, Celsus, will depend upon the way you treat your own good fortune.’”

Other letters to Bullatius, to Albius, to Municius, to Secius, to Lollius are much in the same strain. Though these young men were not demonstrably included in the inner circle of the friends of Tiberius, they belonged to the same social rank; in all there is the same playfulness, in all good advice is conveyed in tactful form. In Lollius Horace seems to have felt a special interest; he too was a companion to some notable person, probably Drusus. Horace gives Lollius many practical directions, somewhat in the style of Polonius, as to his behaviour to his patron, Lollius being of an independent spirit, and irascible. Horace is particularly fond of impressing upon his young friends the duty of “living for themselves,” of considering wealth, fame, and even public usefulness, as of less importance than a good conscience. The moral earnestness of Horace is often underrated, as the moral earnestness of R. L. Stevenson is underrated, and of many other writers whose teaching has not run in the grooves prescribed by the professional preachers of their day. Horace had no love for the worthy gentlemen who improved the occasion after dining with Augustus; the red eyes of Crispinus affected him as the red nose of Stiggins affected Dickens; he had equally little patience with those men who labelled themselves Stoic or Epicurean or Cyrenaic, and professed to live according to the authorized manuals of the sects; the pretentiousness of the professors of virtue and the proselytising Jews disgusted him, as similar manifestations are wont to disgust humorous men at all ages and in all places, but these men have had their revenge in the solemnity with which for nearly two thousand years they have deplored his levity. Few men, however, have lived more consistently with their professions than Horace, and the world would be none the worse if his example were less unfrequently followed. The friendship of Mæcenas, a genuine personal affection, and not a mere literary or convivial sympathy, gave Horace many opportunities of enriching himself, or at least of parading his power; it was something to be the friend of the second or third man in the Roman Empire. But Horace studiously resisted every temptation to make use of this friendship; he would not even allow himself to be made the recognised channel of introduction for his literary friends. The time came when Augustus wished to transfer him to his own household--the letter is still extant in which the offer was made, and the greater opportunities hinted at--but Horace would not hear of such an advancement. It speaks well for Augustus that he was not offended by the refusal. From Mæcenas Horace accepted a moderate independence, sufficient for his needs, but a small gift to come from one of the richest men of his day. He was grateful, but he refused to sell his soul, and we still have the letter in which he bids Mæcenas take back his bounty, if it is to involve obligations which the poet cannot meet without injury to his health, or undue disturbance of his comfort. He adds with characteristic humour and strict justice, “but if you take back the Sabine Farm, you must restore to me the youth and vigour I enjoyed when I first entered your service.”

Men who cannot distinguish an official ode written to order and the forms imposed by such conditions from the genuine effusions of a literary artist are fond of accusing Horace of excessive adulation, but there is no adulation in offering unpalatable advice, or in pointing out to a patron that he is exceeding his prerogative. Instances may be found in the Odes, as well as in the Epistles, of not altogether complimentary exhortation. The truth was that Augustus was surprisingly the right man in the right place, and the compliments paid to him by Horace and Virgil and other literary contemporaries, though expressed in a liberal style, were not in spirit other than the occasion demanded. Epitaphs and dedications have a language of their own--Italy is more given to hyperbolical compliment than England--but the men who declared their admiration of Augustus, however extravagantly to our ears, had sound reason for admiring and wishing others to admire a very capable man surrounded by capable advisers and seconded by able lieutenants.

It is not probable that the first book of the letters of Horace was published in the lifetime of the poet, for they are often too intimate for publication. Lollius would not be likely to give the world the benefit of his castigation, or Mæcenas to allow contemporaries to enjoy the protest against his thoughtless insistence on the poet’s company. The collection was most probably made after the death of the writer, and the dedicatory letter placed at the beginning may equally well have referred to some other publication. Horace is not the only facile writer of verse who has occasionally amused himself with writing to his friends in metre, and the sting of some things which he wished to say was to some extent dulled by the adoption of a metrical form. We may take it that in the first book of the Epistles, if nowhere else, we have the genuine Horace writing without respect of persons, and without regard to the public. A peculiar interest therefore attaches to the one short letter in the collection which is written to Tiberius himself; it is a letter of introduction.

“Septimius I presume has some special information as to the esteem in which you hold me, Claudius; for in begging and prayerfully compelling me to try to say a good word for him, and introduce him as worthy of the intellect and family of that sound reader Nero, in asserting that I enjoy the privileges of an intimate friend, he sees and knows my power better than I do myself. I certainly gave a good many reasons for being let off with an excuse, but I was afraid of being thought to have falsely pretended incompetence, and to be given to disguising my real influence, and reserving it for my own sole use. So, in dread of the disgrace of a greater obloquy, I have entered for the prize awarded to impudence. If, however, you do not disapprove of my breach of good manners, committed at the request of a friend, enroll him in your ‘gang,’ and believe him to be staunch and good.”

Knowing as we do from other sources how strongly Horace objected to turning a private friendship to account, and how specially careful he was in the matter of introductions, we can see through this letter a real intimacy with Tiberius; the apology of Horace is addressed rather to his own conscience than to the recipient of the letter. We need not infer that Tiberius was particularly difficult of approach.

The qualities which were to render Septimius acceptable to Tiberius are worth notice; he would be in sympathy with a man whose standard of reading, or--for the phrase is ambiguous--choice of pursuit was dignified, he would be staunch, he would be good. Good is the epithet which Horace applies to Tiberius himself in writing to Julius Florus--“Florus faithful friend to the brilliant and good Nero”; he uses the same epithet in the Odes in speaking of a former mistress--“I am not what I was under the reign of good Cinara.” Without pressing the sense of the word too closely, it can hardly have been applied to an ungenial man, such as Tiberius is represented to have been, and may have afterwards become. The future Emperor had a weary road to travel before he became, if he ever did become, what the elder Pliny says that he was, “a most dismal man.”

Thus at the outset of his administrative career we find Tiberius in excellent company; it is pleasant to think that he may on some occasion have made an expedition to Tibur or the Sabine Farm, like Torquatus or Mæcenas, and spent an evening with the genial poet, drinking old wine laid down in the consulship of Manlius, watching the wood fire crackling on the hearth, enjoying the jokes of the pert slaves, or perhaps listening while his host sang to his own accompaniment words which the world has not yet forgotten. We may be sure that there were rejoicings when the “company” returned from Asia Minor, that the kid was duly sacrificed, and that if Tiberius himself was not present, Florus and Celsus, and let us hope Munatius told the story of their adventures to the kindly ears of their middle-aged friend.

VI

The Family of Augustus

The principle of the transmission of the chief power by heredity was never recognized as a fundamental part of the constitution of the Roman Empire, though the natural tendency is to allow a son to take his father’s place, and the necessities of ancestor worship made the succession of a real son or an adopted son agreeable to Roman feeling. Neither Cæsar nor Augustus ever had legitimate sons; Tiberius had a son, but he died before his father; Caligula was childless; the ambition of an unscrupulous woman deprived the son of Claudius of the succession and his life; Nero was childless, and in him the Cæsarean strain ended. Circumstances were adverse to the hereditary principle. Short dynasties, such as those of the Flavians, the Antonines, and the Constantines, appear from time to time, but the ordinary method of peaceful succession was the nomination and adoption of a successor or successors by the reigning Emperor.

For many years Augustus himself avoided the definite establishment of his own position as even a life tenancy. His office of Imperator was renewed every ten years; the Tribunician power was granted to him afresh every year in form, though not in fact; the Censorian office was taken up every five years; he did not become Pontifex Maximus till eighteen years after the battle of Actium; the only office which he held without a break--that of Princeps Senatus--was not considered to be an office at all, the dignity of the first man in the Senate being constitutionally purely of respect. Under these circumstances it would be strange if the historians were correct in assuming that the chief preoccupation of his life was in providing for a successor of his own blood. Tacitus, who is full of the dynastic question, informs us, with his customary inconsistency, that Augustus himself at the end of his life mentioned three men not connected with the Cæsarean race as possible candidates for the succession, which he could hardly have done had he accepted the hereditary principle, seeing that the Cæsarean stock was by no means extinct.

For a short time the vision of hereditary succession probably attracted the imagination of Augustus, and certainly always occupied the attention of members of his family; but the early deaths of two of his grandsons and the insubordination of a third quickly dispelled the attractive vision.

The acquiescence of other Roman families in the Cæsarean rule was bought partly by admission to a share in the administration, partly by the very fact that the dynastic ideal was not forced in such a manner as to preclude all possibility of a change in the form of government, and a reversion to the happy days of the Senatorial oligarchy. Opposition was further disarmed by intermarriages with the houses least likely to submit contentedly to the domination of one family; both stocks of the Claudians, the Antonians, the Domitians, the Æmilians, the Junians, and others were thus united with the Julians in the lifetime of Augustus or his successor. The consular lists for the reign of Augustus recall the names of the noblest Roman families, and though the old city offices had now become titular rather than effective, men still liked sitting in Curule chairs, and taking the lead in the pageantry which survived the reality of power; the process by which administrative functions gradually passed from the old offices to the new hierarchy was a slow one, and an ambitious young man might still think he had embarked on a career when he had been dignified with the lowest of the old magistracies. The new men were employed less in Italy than in the imperial provinces, where indeed it was important that the officials should be attached to the person of the Emperor rather than to the abstraction called the Senate and the people of Rome. Neither Augustus nor Tiberius were afraid to entrust the really effective powers of Prefect of the City of Rome to members of the old aristocracy.

But if Augustus himself was less interested in the dynastic question than the historians represent, the ladies of his family were by no means equally indifferent; their feuds were shared in by their ladies and freedmen, and the apparently peaceful home of the suave and unconscious Augustus was a raging battlefield, in which the weapons of calumny and innuendo were freely hurled, and the external forms of politeness concealed a state of civil war. Wily Greeks and Jews or other Orientals used to palace intrigues found a field for their special talents in the households of Livia or Julia; holding the confidential positions of physicians, preachers, tutors, and astrologers, they transferred to the Palatine the atmosphere of the Courts of the Ptolemies or Herod. Under this subtle influence mere drawing-room conspiracies sometimes took a serious complexion; young men were impelled by their female relatives to dangerous courses, secret information sped from Roman boudoirs to the palaces of Syria and Armenia.