Ronald
Syme
The
Roman Revolution
Oxford
University Press, Paperback, 1960.
8vo. xii+568 pp. Preface by the
author, 1 June 1939 [vii-ix].
Note to Second Impression, 1 January
1951 [ix]. Index [535-68].
First published by the Clarendon
Press, 1939.
Reprinted lithographically in Great
Britain at the University Press, Oxford,
from corrected sheets of the First
Edition, 1952 and 1956.
First issued in Oxford Paperbacks,
1960.
Reprinted, 1960.
NB. The quotes in Greek and
Latin, untranslated in the original, are here supplied with English versions
from the Loeb Classical Library in square brackets. The
notes are otherwise entirely as Sir Ronald wrote them, complete and unabridged;
a few of more specialised interest have been skipped altogether. Occasional
insertions in square brackets not dealing with translation, in the main text or
the notes, are my own.
Preface
The subject of this book is the
transformation of state and society at Rome between 60 B.C. and A.D. 14. It is
composed round a central narrative that records the rise to power of Augustus
and the establishment of his rule, embracing the years 44–23 B.C. (chapters
vii–xxiii). The period witnessed a violent transference of power and property;
and the Principate of Augustus should be regarded as the consolidation of the
revolutionary process. Emphasis is laid, however, not upon the personality and
acts of Augustus, but upon his adherents and partisans. The composition of the
oligarchy of government therefore emerges as the dominant theme of political
history, as the binding link between the Republic and the Empire: it is
something real and tangible, whatever may be the name or theory of the
constitution.
To that end, the space (and significance)
allotted to the biographies of Pompeius, Caesar and Augustus, to warfare, to
provincial affairs and to constitutional history has been severely restricted.
Instead, the noble houses of Rome and the principal allies of the various
political leaders enter into their own at last. The method has to be selective:
exhaustive detail cannot be provided about every family or individual. Even so,
the subject almost baffles exposition. The reader who is repelled by a close
concatenation of proper names must pass rapidly over certain sections, for
example the two chapters (v and vi) that analyse the composition of the
Caesarian party in the form of a long digression.
No less than the subject, the tone and
treatment calls for explanation. In narrating the central epoch of the history
of Rome I have been unable to escape from the influence of the historians
Sallust, Pollio and Tacitus, all of them Republican in sentiment. Hence a
deliberately critical attitude towards Augustus. If Caesar and Antonius by
contrast are treated rather leniently, the reason may be discovered in the
character and opinions of the historian Pollio – a Republican, but a partisan
of Caesar and of Antonius. This also explains what is said about Cicero and
about Livy. Yet, in the end, the Principate has to be accepted, for the
Principate, while abolishing political freedom, averts civil war and preserves
the non-political classes. Liberty or stable government: that was the question
confronting the Romans themselves, and I have tried to answer it precisely in
their fashion (chapter xxxiii, Pax et
Princeps).
The design has imposed a pessimistic
and truculent tone, to the almost complete exclusion of the gentler emotions
and the domestic virtues. [...] The style is likewise direct and even abrupt,
avoiding metaphors and abstractions. It is surely time for some reaction from
the ‘traditional’ and conventional view of the period. Much that has recently
been written about Augustus is simply panegyric, whether ingenuous or edifying.
Yet it is not necessary to praise political success or to idealize the men who
win wealth and honours through civil war.
The history of this age is highly
controversial, the learned literature overwhelming in bulk. I have been driven
to make a bold decision in the interests of brevity and clearness – to quote as
much as possible of the ancient evidence, to refer but seldom to modern
authorities, and to state controversial opinions quite nakedly, without hedging
and without the support of elaborate argumentation. Further, the bibliography
at the end is not intended as a guide to the whole subject: it merely contains,
put together for convenience, the books and papers mentioned in the footnotes.
[...]
The index is mainly prosopographical
in character, and it covers the footnotes as well as the text. If used in
conjunction with the list of consuls and the seven genealogical tables it will
sometimes reveal facts or connexions not explicitly mentioned in the text. In
some way or other most of the consuls and governors of military provinces gain
admittance to the narrative. The immense number of characters mentioned in a
brief and compressed fashion has been the cause of peculiar difficulties. Many
of them are bare names, void of personal detail; their importance has been
deduced from family, nomenclature, or rank; and most of them will be unfamiliar
to any but a hardened prosopographer. For the sake of clearness, conventional
labels or titles have often been attached; and the relevant evidence is
sometimes repeated, in preference to an elaborate system of cross-references.
[...]
Furthermore, I gladly take this
opportunity to acknowledge the constant encouragement and the generous help that
I have received from Mr. Last, the Camden Professor of Ancient History in the
University of Oxford – the more so, precisely, because there is so much in the
present volume that will make him raise his eyebrows. Its imperfections are
patent and flagrant. It has not been composed in tranquillity; and it ought to
be held back several years and rewritten. But the theme, I firmly believe, is
of some importance. If the book provokes salutary criticism, so much the
better.
Oxford, 1 June 1939 R.
S.
Note to
Second Impression
The occasion of a reprint enables the
author to rectify certain mistakes of fact or attribution, and to remove some
blemishes. It was not possible to register, still less to utilize, the writings
and discoveries of the last twelve years, much as I should have liked to insert
various small yet significant details accruing. Essentially, and strictly,
therefore, the book is what it was when it first appeared.
Oxford, 1 January 1951 R.
S.
I.
Introduction: Augustus and History
The greatest of the Roman historians
began his Annals with the accession
to the Principate of Tiberius, stepson and son by adoption of Augustus, consort
in his powers. Not until that day was the funeral of the Free State consummated
in solemn and legal ceremony. The corpse had long been dead. In common usage
the reign of Augustus is regarded as the foundation of the Roman Empire. The
era may be variously computed, from the winning of sole power by the last of
dynasts through the War of Actium, from the ostensible restoration of the
Republic in 27 B.C., or from the new act of settlement four years later, which
was final and permanent.
Outlasting the friends, the enemies
and even the memory of his earlier days, Augustus the Princeps, who was born in
the year of Cicero’s consulate, lived to see the grandson of his granddaughter
and to utter a prophecy of empire concerning Galba, to whom the power passed
when the dynasty of the Julii and Claudii had ruled for a century.[1]
The ascension of Caesar’s heir had been a series of hazards and miracles: his
constitutional reign as acknowledged head of the Roman State was to baffle by
its length and solidity all human and rational calculation. It lasted for forty
years. No astrologer or doctor could have foretold that the frail youth would
outlive, by a quarter of a century, his ally and contemporary, the robust
Agrippa; no schemer could have counted in advance upon the deaths of his nephew
Marcellus, or Drusus his beloved stepson, of the young princes Gaius and
Lucius, grandsons of Augustus and heirs designate to the imperial succession.
Such accidents of duration and fortune the future held. None the less, the main
elements in the party of Augustus and in the political system of the Principate
had already taken shape, firm and manifest, as early as the year 23 B.C., so
that a continuous narrative may run down to that date, thence to diverge into a
description of the character and working of government.
‘Pax et Princeps.’ It was the end of a
century of anarchy, culminating in twenty years of civil war and military
tyranny. If despotism was the price, it was not too high: to a patriotic Roman
of Republican sentiments even submission to absolute rule was a lesser evil
than war between citizens.[2]
Liberty was gone, but only a minority at Rome had ever enjoyed it. The
survivors of the old governing class, shattered in spirit, gave up the contest.
Compensated by the solid benefits of peace and by the apparent termination of
the revolutionary age, they were willing to acquiesce, if not actively to
share, in the shaping of the new government which a united Italy and a stable
empire demanded and imposed.
The rule of Augustus brought manifold
blessings to Rome, Italy and the provinces. Yet the new dispensation, or ‘novus
status’, was the work of fraud and bloodshed, based upon the seizure of power
and redistribution of property by a revolutionary leader. The happy outcome of
the Principate might be held to justify, or at least to palliate, the horrors
of the Roman Revolution: hence the danger of an indulgent estimate of the
person and acts of Augustus.
It was the avowed purpose of that
statesman to suggest and demonstrate a sharp line of division in his career
between two periods, the first of deplorable but necessary illegalities, the
second of constitutional government. So well did he succeed that in later days,
confronted with the separate persons of Octavianus the Triumvir, author of the
proscriptions, and Augustus the Princeps, the beneficent magistrate, men have
been at a loss to account for the transmutation, and have surrendered their reason
to extravagant fancies. Julian the Apostate invoked philosophy to explain it.
The problem does not exist: Julian was closer to the point when he classified
Augustus as a chameleon.[3]
Colour changed, but not substance.
Contemporaries were not deceived. The
convenient revival of Republican institutions, the assumption of a specious
title, the change in the definition of authority, all that made no difference
to the source and facts of power. Domination is never the less effective for
being veiled. Augustus applied all the arts of tone and nuance with the sure
ease of a master. The letter of the law might circumscribe the prerogative of
the First Citizen. No matter: the Princeps stood pre-eminent, in virtue of
prestige and authority tremendous and not to be defined. Auctoritas is the word – his enemies would have called it potentia. They were right. Yet the
‘Restoration of the Republic’ was not merely a solemn comedy, staged by a
hypocrite.
Caesar was a logical man; and the heir
of Caesar displayed coherence in thought and act when he inaugurated the
proscriptions and when he sanctioned clemency, when he seized power by force,
and when he based authority upon law and consent. The Dictatorship of Caesar,
revived in the despotic rule of three Caesarean leaders, passed into the
predominance of one man, Caesar’s grand-nephew: for the security of his own
position and the conduct of affairs the ruler had to devise a formula,
revealing to the members of the governing class how they could co-operate in
maintaining the new order, ostensibly as servants of the Republic and heirs to
a great tradition, not as mere lieutenants of a military leader or subservient
agents of arbitrary power. For that reason ‘Dux’ [leader] became ‘Princeps’. He
did not cease to be Imperator Caesar.
There is no breach in continuity.
Twenty years of crowded history, Caesarian and Triumviral, cannot be annulled. When
the individuals and classes that have gained wealth, honours and power through
revolution emerge as champions of ordered government, they do not surrender
anything. Neglect of the conventions of Roman political terminology and of the
realities of Roman political life has sometimes induced historians to fancy
that the Principate of Caesar Augustus was genuinely Republican in spirit and
in practice – a modern and academic failing. Tacitus and Gibbon knew better.[4]
The narrative of Augustus’ rise to supreme power, supplemented by a brief
analysis of the working of government in the new order, will reinforce their
verdict and reveal a certain unity in the character and policy of Triumvir, Dux
and Princeps.[5]
Whether the Princeps made atonement
for the crime and violence of his earlier career is a question vain and
irrelevant, cheerfully to be abandoned to the moralist or the casuist. The
present inquiry will attempt to discover the resources and devices by which a
revolutionary leader arose in civil strife, usurped power for himself and his
faction, transformed a faction into a national party, and a torn and distracted
land into a nation, with a stable and enduring government.
The tale has often been told, with an
inevitability of events and culmination, either melancholy or exultant. The
conviction that it all had to happen is indeed difficult to discard.[6]
Yet that conviction ruins the living interest of history and precludes a fair
judgement upon the agents. They did not know the future.
Heaven and the verdict of history
conspire to load the scales against the vanquished. Brutus and Cassius lie
damned to this day by the futility of their noble deed and by the failure of
their armies at Philippi; and the memory of Antonius is overwhelmed by the
oratory of Cicero, by fraud and fiction, and by the catastrophe at Actium.
To this partisan and pragmatic
interpretation of the Roman Revolution there stands a notable exception. To one
of the unsuccessful champions of political liberty sympathy has seldom been
denied. Cicero was a humane and cultivated man, an enduring influence upon the
course of all European civilization: he perished a victim of violence and
despotism. The fame and fate of Cicero, however, are one thing: quite different
is the estimate of his political activity when he raised up Caesar’s heir
against Antonius. The last year of Cicero’s life, full of glory and eloquence
no doubt, was ruinous to the Roman People.
Posterity, generous in oblivion,
regards with indulgence both the political orator who fomented civil war to
save the Republic and the military adventurer who betrayed and proscribed his
ally. The reason for such exceptional favour may be largely assigned to one
thing – the influence of literature when studied in isolation from history. The
writings of Cicero survive in bulk, and Augustus is glorified in the poetry of
his age. Apart from flagrant scandal and gossip, there is a singular lack of
adverse testimony from contemporary sources.
Yet for all that, the history of the
whole revolutionary period could be written without being an apologia for Cicero
or for Octavianus – or for both at once. A section of it was so written by C.
Asinius Pollio, in a Roman and Republican spirit. That was tradition,
inescapable. The Roman and the senator could never surrender his prerogative of
liberty or frankly acknowledge the drab merits of absolute rule: writing of the
transition from Republic to Monarchy, he was always of the opposition, whether
passionate or fatalistic.
The art and practice of history demanded
of its exponents, and commonly reveals in their works, a conformity to certain
habits of thought and expression. The debt of Tacitus to Sallustius in style
and colouring is evident enough: their affinity goes much deeper than words. Nor
would it be rash to assert that Pollio was closely akin both to Sallustius and
to Tacitus.[7]
All three sat in the Senate of Rome and governed provinces; new-comers to the
senatorial aristocracy, they all became deeply imbued with the traditional spirit
of that order; and all were preoccupied with the fall of Libertas and the defeat of the governing class. Though symbolized
for all time in the Battle of Philippi, it was a long process, not a single
act. Sallustius began his annalistic record with Sulla’s death and the rise to
power of Pompeius the Great. Pollio, however, chose the consulate of Metellus
and Afranius, in which year the domination of that dynast was established (60
B.C.). Tacitus in his Histories told
of a great civil war, the foundation of a new dynasty, and its degeneration
into despotism; in his Annals he sought to demonstrate that the Principate of
the Julii and Claudii was a tyranny, tracing year by year from Tiberius down to
Nero the merciless extinction of the old aristocracy.
Pollio was a contemporary, in fact no
small part of the transactions which he narrated – a commander of armies and an
arbiter of high diplomacy; and he lived to within a decade of the death of
Augustus. His character and tastes disposed him to be neutral in the struggle
between Caesar and Pompeius – had neutrality been possible. Pollio had powerful
enemies on either side. Compelled for safety to a decision, he chose Caesar,
his personal friend; and with Caesar he went through the wars from the passage
of the Rubicon to the last battle in Spain. Then he followed Antonius for five
years. Loyal to Caesar, and proud of his loyalty, Pollio at the same time
professed his attachment to free institutions, an assertion which his ferocious
and proverbial independence of speech and habit renders entirely credible.[8]
Pollio, the partisan of Caesar and
Antonius, was a pessimistic Republican and an honest man. Of tough Italic
stock, hating pomp and pretence, he wrote of the Revolution as that bitter
theme demanded, in a plain, hard style. It is much to be regretted that he did
not carry his History of the Civil Wars
through the period of the Triumvirate to the War of Actium and the Principate
of Augustus: the work appears to have ended when the Republic went down at
Philippi. That Pollio chose to write no further will readily be understood. As
it was, his path was hazardous. The lava was still molten underneath.[9]
An enemy of Octavianus, Pollio had withdrawn from political life soon after 40
B.C., and he jealously maintained his independence. To tell the truth would
have been inexpedient; and adulation was repugnant to his character. Another
eminent historian was also constrained to omit the period of the Triumvirate
when he observed that he could not treat his subject with freedom and with
veracity. It was no other than Claudius, a pupil of Livy.[10]
His master had less exacting standards.
The great work of Pollio has perished,
save for inconsiderable fragments or supposed borrowings in subsequent
historians. None the less, the example of Pollio and the abundance of
historical material (contemporary or going back to contemporary sources, often
biased, it is true, but admitting criticism, interpretation, or disbelief) may
encourage the attempt to record the story of the Roman Revolution and its
sequel, the Principate of Caesar Augustus, in a fashion that has now become
unconventional, from the Republican and Antonian side. The adulatory or the
uncritical may discover in this design a depreciation of Augustus: his ability
and greatness will all the more sharply be revealed by unfriendly presentation.
But it is not enough to redeem
Augustus from panegyric and revive the testimony of the vanquished cause. That
would merely substitute one form of biography for another. At its worst,
biography is flat and schematic: at the best, it is often baffled by the hidden
discords of human nature. Moreover, undue insistence upon the character and
exploits of a single person invests history with dramatic unity at the expense
of truth. However talented and powerful in himself, the Roman statesman cannot
stand alone, without allies, without a following. That axiom holds both for the
political dynasts of the closing age of the Republic and for their last sole
heir – the rule of Augustus was the rule of a party, and in certain aspects his
Principate was a syndicate. In truth, the one term presupposes the other. The
career of the revolutionary leader is fantastic and unreal if told without some
indication of the composition of the faction he led, of the personality,
actions and influence of the principal among his partisans. In all ages,
whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or
democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the facade; and Roman history, Republican
or Imperial, is the history of the governing class. The marshals, diplomats,
and financiers of the Revolution may be discerned again in the Republic of
Augustus as the ministers and agents of power, the same men but in different
garb. They are the government of the New State.
It will therefore be expedient and
salutary to investigate, not merely the origin and growth of the Caesarian
party, but also the vicissitudes of the whole ruling class over a long period
of years, in the attempt to combine and adapt that cumbrous theme to a
consecutive narrative of events. Nor is it only the biography of Augustus that
shall be sacrificed for the gain of history. Pompeius, too, and Caesar must be
reduced to due subordination. After Sulla’s ordinances, a restored oligarchy of
the nobiles held office at Rome.
Pompeius fought against it; but Pompeius, for all his power, had to come to
terms. Nor could Caesar have ruled without it. Coerced by Pompeius and sharply
repressed by Caesar, the aristocracy was broken at Philippi. The parties of
Pompeius and of Caesar had hardly been strong or coherent enough to seize
control of the whole State and form a government. That was left to Caesar’s
heir, at the head of a new coalition, built up from the wreckage of other
groups and superseding them all.
The policy and acts of the Roman
people were guided by an oligarchy, its annals were written in an oligarchic spirit.
History arose from the inscribed record of consulates and triumphs of the nobiles, from the transmitted memory of
the origins, alliances and feuds of their families; and history never belied
its beginnings. Of necessity the conception was narrow – only the ruling order
could have any history at all and only the ruling city: only Rome, not Italy.[11]
In the Revolution the power of the old governing class was broken, its
composition transformed. Italy and the non-political orders in society
triumphed over Rome and the Roman aristocracy. Yet the old framework and
categories subsist: a monarchy rules through an oligarchy.
Subject and treatment indicated, it
remains to choose a date for the beginning. The breach between Pompeius and Caesar
and the outbreak of war in 49 B.C. might appear to open the final act in the
fall of the Roman Republic. That was not the opinion of their enemy Cato: he
blamed the original alliance of Pompeius and Caesar.[12]
When Pollio set out to narrate the history of the Roman Revolution he began,
not with the crossing of the Rubicon, but with the compact of 60 B.C., devised
by the political dynasts Pompeius, Crassus and Caesar to control the State and
secure the domination of the most powerful of their number.
Motum ex Metello consule
civicum
bellique causas et vitia et
modos
ludumque Fortunae gravisque
principum amicitias et arma
nondum expiatis uncta
cruoribus.[13]
[The civil strife that began with
Metellus’ consulship, the causes, and blunders, and phases of war, Fortune’s
sport, the protagonists’ deadly friendships, weapons smeared with still
unexpiated blood]
That formulation deserved and found
wide acceptance.[14] The menace of despotic
power hung over Rome like a heavy cloud for thirty years from the Dictatorship of
Sulla to the Dictatorship of Caesar. It was the age of Pompeius the Great.
Stricken by the ambitions, the alliances and the feuds of the dynasts,
monarchic fraction-leaders as they were called, the Free State perished in
their open strife.[15]
Augustus is the heir of Caesar or of Pompeius, as you will. Caesar the Dictator
bears the heavier blame for civil war. In truth, Pompeius was no better –
‘occultior non melior’ [no better man than they, but one who concealed his
purpose more cleverly].[16]
And Pompeius is in the direct line of Marius, Cinna and Sulla.[17]
It all seems inevitable, as though destiny ordained the succession of military
tyrants.
In these last and fatal convulsions,
disaster came upon disaster, ever more rapid. Three of the monarchic principes fell by the sword. Five civil
wars and more in twenty years drained the life-blood of Rome and involved the
whole world in strife and anarchy. Gaul and the West stood firm; but the
horsemen of the Parthians were seen in Syria and on the western shore of Asia.
The Empire of the Roman People, perishing of its own greatness, threatened to
break and dissolve into separate kingdoms – or else a renegade, coming like a
monarch out of the East, would subjugate Rome to an alien rule. Italy suffered
devastation and sacking of cities, with proscription and murder of the best
men; for the ambitions of the dynasts provoked war between class and class.
Naked power prevailed.[18]
The anger of Heaven against the Roman
People was revealed in signal and continuous calamities: the gods had no care
for virtue or justice, but intervened only to punish.[19]
Against the blind impersonal forces that drove the world to its doom, human
forethought or human act was powerless. Men believed only in destiny and the
inexorable stars.
In the beginning kings ruled at Rome,
and in the end, as was fated, it came round to monarchy again. Monarchy brought
concord.[20]
During the Civil Wars every party and every leader professed to be defending
the cause of liberty and of peace. Those ideals were incompatible. When peace
came, it was the peace of despotism. ‘Cum domino pax ista venit [when peace
comes, a tyrant will come with it].’[21]
II. The Roman
Oligarchy
When the patricians expelled the kings
from Rome, they were careful to retain the kingly power, vested in a pair of annual
magistrates; and though compelled in time to admit the plebeians to political
equality, certain of the great patrician houses, Valerii, Fabii and Cornelii,
none the less held in turn a dynastic and almost regal position.[22]
The Senate again, being a permanent body, arrogated to itself power, and after conceding
sovranty to the assembly of the People was able to frustrate its exercise. The
two consuls remained at the head of the government, but policy was largely
directed by ex-consuls. These men ruled, as did the Senate, not in virtue of
written law, but through auctoritas;
and the name of principes civitatis
came suitably to be applied to the more prominent of the consulars.
The consulate did not merely confer
power upon its holder and dignity for life: it ennobled a family for ever.
Within the Senate, itself an oligarchy, a narrow ring, namely the nobiles, or descendants of consular
houses, whether patrician or plebeian in origin, regarded the supreme magistracy
as the prerogative of birth and the prize of ambition.
The patricians continued to wield an
influence beyond all relation to their number; and the nobiles, though a wider class, formed yet a distinct minority in
the Senate. The nobiles are predominant:
yet in the last generation of the Free State, after the ordinances of Sulla the
Dictator, there were many senators whose fathers had held only the lower
magistracies or even newcomers, sons of Roman knights. Of the latter, in the
main deriving from the local aristocracies, the holders of property, power and office
in the towns of Italy, the proportion was clearly much higher than has
sometimes been imagined. Of a total of six hundred senators the names of some
four hundred can be identified, many of them obscure or casually known.[23]
The remainder have left no record of activity or fame in a singularly well-documented
epoch of history.
Not mere admission to the Senate but
access to the consulate was jealously guarded by the nobiles. It was a scandal and a pollution if a man without
ancestors aspired to the highest magistracy of the Roman Republic[24]
– he might rise to the praetorship but no higher, save by a rare combination of
merit, industry and protection. The nobilitas
did not, it is true, stand like a solid rampart to bar all intruders. No need
for that-the conservative Roman voter could seldom be induced to elect a man
whose name had not been known for centuries as a part of the history of the
Republic. Hence the novus homo (in
the strict sense of the term the first member of a family to secure the
consulate and consequent ennoblement) was a rare phenomenon at Rome. Before the
sovran people he might boast how he had led them to victory in a mighty contest
and had broken into the citadel of the nobility:[25]
he was less assertive in the Senate, more candid to his intimate friends. There
was no breach in the walls – a faction among the nobiles had opened the gates. Cicero would have preserved both
dignity and peace of mind had not ambition and vanity blinded him to the true
causes of his own elevation.[26]
The political life of the Roman
Republic was stamped and swayed, not by parties and programmes of a modern and
parliamentary character, not by the ostensible opposition between Senate and
People, Optimates and Populares, nobiles and novi homines, but by the strife for power,
wealth and glory. The contestants were the nobiles
among themselves, as individuals or in groups, open in the elections and in the
courts of law, or masked by secret intrigue. As in its beginning, so in its
last generation, the Roman Commonwealth, ‘res publica populi Romani’,
was a name; a feudal order of society still survived in a city-state and
governed an empire. Noble families determined the history of the Republic,
giving their names to its epochs. There was an age of the Scipiones: not less
of the Metelli.
Though concealed by craft or
convention, the arcana imperii of the
nobilitas cannot evade detection.[27]
Three weapons the nobiles held and
wielded, the family, money and the political alliance (amicitia or factio, as it
was variously labelled). The wide and remembered ramifications of the Roman
noble clan won concentrated support for the rising politician. The nobiles were dynasts, their daughters
princesses. Marriage with a well-connected heiress therefore became an act of
policy and an alliance of powers, more important than a magistracy, more
binding than any compact of oath or interest. Not that women were merely the
instruments of masculine policy. Far from it: the daughters of the great houses
commanded political influence in their own right, exercising a power beyond the
reach of many a senator. Of such dominating forces behind the phrases and the
façade of constitutional government the most remarkable was Servilia, Cato’s
half-sister, Brutus’ mother-and Caesar’s mistress.
[...]
As an oligarchy is not a figment of
political theory, a specious fraud, or a mere term of abuse, but very precisely
a collection of individuals, its shape and character, so far from fading away
on close scrutiny, at once stands out, solid and manifest. In any age of the
history of Republican Rome about twenty or thirty men, drawn from a dozen
dominant families, hold a monopoly of office and power. From time to time,
families rise and fall: as Rome’s rule extends in Italy, the circle widens from
which the nobility is recruited and renewed. None the less, though the
composition of the oligarchy is slowly transformed with the transformation of
the Roman State, the manner and fashion of dynastic politics changes but little;
and though noble houses suffered defeat in the struggle for power, and long
eclipse, they were saved from extinction by the primitive tenacity of the Roman
family and the pride of their own traditions. They waited in patience to assert
their ancient predominance.
[...]
III. The
Domination of Pompeius
The Pompeii, a family of recent
ennoblement, were of non-Latin stock, as the name so patently indicates,
probably deriving their origin from Picenum, a region where they possessed large
estates and wide influence.[28]
Cn. Pompeius Strabo, after shattering the Italian insurrection in Picenum, used
his influence and his army for personal ends and played an ambiguous game when
civil war broke out between Marius and Sulla. Brutal, corrupt and perfidious,
Strabo was believed to have procured the assassination of a consul.[29]
When he died of a natural but providential death the populace broke up his
funeral.[30]
Strabo was a sinister character, ‘hated by heaven and by the nobility’, for
good reasons.[31] There were no words to
describe Cn. Pompeius the son. After his father’s death, protected by
influential politicians, he lay low, lurking no doubt in Picenum.[32]
When Sulla landed at Brundisium, the young man, now aged twenty-three, raised
on his own initiative three legions from the tenants, clients and veterans of
his father, and led his army to liberate Rome from the domination of the Marian
faction – for Sulla’s interests and for his own.[33]
The career of Pompeius opened in fraud
and violence. It was prosecuted, in war and in peace, through illegality and
treachery. He held a command in Africa against Marian remnants and triumphed,
though not a senator, adding ‘Magnus’ to his name. After supporting Lepidus to
the consulate and encouraging his subversive designs, he turned upon his ally
and saved the government. Then, coming back to Rome after six years of absence,
when he had terminated the war in Spain against Sertorius, Pompeius combined
with another army commander, Crassus, and carried out a peaceful coup d’etat. Elected consuls, Pompeius and
Crassus abolished the Sullan constitution (70 B.C.). The knights received a
share in the jury-courts, the tribunes recovered the powers of which Sulla had
stripped them. They soon repaid Pompeius. Through a tribune's law the People
conferred upon their champion a vast command against the Pirates, with
proconsular authority over the coasts of the Mediterranean (the Lex Gabinia). No province of the Empire
was immune from his control. Four years before, Pompeius had not even been a
senator. The decay of the Republic, the impulsion towards the rule of one imperator, were patent and impressive.[34]
[...]
IV. Caesar
the Dictator
Sulla was the first Roman to lead an
army against Rome. Not of his own choosing-his enemies had won control of the
government and deprived him of the command against Mithridates. Again, when he
landed in Italy after an absence of nearly five years, force was his only
defence against the party that had attacked a proconsul who was fighting the
wars of the Republic in the East. Sulla had all the ambition of a Roman noble:
but it was not his ambition to seize power through civil strife and hold it,
supreme and alone. His work done, the Dictator resigned.
The conquest of Gaul, the war against
Pompeius and the establishment of the Dictatorship of Caesar are events that
move in a harmony so swift and sure as to appear pre-ordained; and history has
sometimes been written as though Caesar set the tune from the beginning, in the
knowledge that monarchy was the panacea for the world’s ills, and with the
design to achieve it by armed force.[35]
Such a view is too simple to be historical.
[...]
At last the enemies of Caesar had
succeeded in ensnaring Pompeius and in working the constitution against the
craftiest politician of the day: he was declared a public enemy if he did not
lay down his command before a certain day. By invoking constitutional sanctions
against Caesar, a small faction misrepresented the true wishes of a vast
majority in the Senate, in Rome, and in Italy. They pretended that the issue
lay between a rebellious proconsul and legitimate authority. Such venturesome
expedients are commonly the work of hot blood and muddled heads. The error was
double and damning. Disillusion followed swiftly. Even Cato was dismayed.[36]
It had confidently been expected that the solid and respectable classes in the
towns of Italy would rally in defence of the authority of the Senate and the
liberties of the Roman People, that all the land would rise as one man against
the invader. Nothing of the kind happened. Italy was apathetic to the war-cry
of the Republic in danger, sceptical about its champions.
The very virtues for which the
propertied classes were sedulously praised by politicians at Rome forbade
intervention in a struggle which was not their own.[37]
Pompeius might stamp with his foot in the land of Italy, as he had rashly
boasted. No armed legions rose at his call. Even Picenum, his own barony, went over
to the enemy without a blow. No less complete the military miscalculation: the
imperator did not answer to his repute as a soldier. Insecurity and the feeling
of guilt, added to inadequate preparation for war, may have impaired his
decision.[38] Yet his plan was no mere
makeshift, as it appeared to his allies, but subtle and grandiose-to evacuate
Italy, leaving Caesar entrapped between the legions of Spain and the hosts of
all the East, and then to return, like Sulla, to victory and to power.[39]
[...]
Many senators tried to remain neutral,
including several eminent consulars, some of whom Caesar won to sympathy, if
not to active support, by his studious moderation. To the survivors of the
defeated faction he behaved with public and ostentatious clemency. They were
members of his own class: he had not wished to make war upon them or to
exterminate the Roman aristocracy. But these proud adversaries did not always
leap forward with alacrity to be exhibited as object – lessons of the clementia and magnitudo animi of Caesar. They took the gift of life and
restoration with suppressed resentment: some refused even to ask.[40]
Under these unfavourable auspices, a
Sulla but for clementia, a Gracchus
but lacking a revolutionary programme, Caesar established his Dictatorship. His
rule began as the triumph of a faction in civil war: he made it his task to
transcend faction, and in so doing wrought his own destruction. A champion of the
People, he had to curb the People’s rights, as Sulla had done. To rule, he
needed the support of the nobiles,
yet he had to curtail their privileges and repress their dangerous ambitions.
In name and function Caesar’s office
was to set the State in order again (rei
publicae constituendae). Despite odious memories of Sulla, the choice of
the Dictatorship was recommended by its comprehensive powers and freedom from the
tribunician veto. Caesar knew that secret enemies would soon direct that deadly
weapon against one who had used it with such dexterity in the past and who more
recently claimed to be asserting the rights of the tribunes, the liberty of the
Roman People. He was not mistaken. Yet he required special powers: after a
civil war the need was patent. The Dictator's task might well demand several
years. In 46 B.C. his powers were prolonged to a tenure of ten years, an
ominous sign. A gleam of hope that the emergency period would be quite short
flickered up for a moment, to wane at once and perish utterly.[41]
In January 44 B.C. Caesar was voted the Dictatorship for life. About the same
time decrees of the Senate ordained that an oath of allegiance should be taken
in his name.[42] Was this the measure of
his ordering of the Roman State? Was this a res
publica constituta?
It was disquieting. Little had been
done to repair the ravages of civil war and promote social regeneration. For
that there was sore need, as both his adherents and his former adversaries pointed
out. From Pompeius, from Cato and from the oligarchy, no hope of reform. But
Caesar seemed different: he had consistently advocated the cause of the
oppressed, whether Roman, Italian or provincial. He had shown that he was not
afraid of vested interests. But Caesar was not a revolutionary. He soon disappointed
the rapacity or the idealism of certain of his partisans who had hoped for an
assault upon the moneyed classes, a drastic reduction of debts and a programme
of revolution that should be radical and genuine.[43]
Only the usurers approved of Caesar, so Aelius complained quite early in the
Civil War.[44] Not everybody was as
outspoken or as radical as Caelius, who passed from words to deeds and perished
in an armed rising. Cicero, when lauding the clemency and magnanimity of the
Dictator, took the opportunity to sketch a modest programme of moral and social
reform.[45]
Having written treatises about the Roman Commonwealth some years earlier, he
may have expected to be consulted upon these weighty matters. But Cicero’s
hopes of res publica constituta were soon
dashed. The Dictator himself expressed alarming opinions about the res publica – ‘it was only a name:
Sulla, by resigning supreme power, showed that he was an ignorant fellow’.[46]
Caesar postponed decision about the
permanent ordering of the State. It was too difficult. Instead, he would set
out for the wars again, to Macedonia and to the eastern frontier of the Empire.
At Rome he was hampered: abroad he might enjoy his conscious mastery of men and
events, as before in Gaul. Easy victories – but not the urgent needs of the
Roman People.
About Caesar’s ultimate designs there
can be opinion, but no certainty. The acts and projects of his Dictatorship do
not reveal them. For the rest, the evidence is partisan – or posthumous. No
statement of unrealized intentions is a safe guide to history, for it is
unverifiable and therefore the most attractive form of misrepresentation. The
enemics of Caesar spread rumours to discredit the living Dictator: Caesar dead
became a god and a myth, passing from the realm of history into literature and
legend, declamation and propaganda. By Augustus he was exploited in two ways.
The avenging of Caesar fell to his adopted son who assumed the title of Divi filius as consecration for the ruler
of Rome. That was all he affected to inherit from Caesar, the halo. The god was
useful, but not the Dictator: Augustus was careful sharply to discriminate
between Dictator and Princeps. Under his rule Caesar the
Dictator was cither suppressed outright or called up from time to time to
enhance the contrast between the unscrupulous adventurer who destroyed the Free
State in his ambition and the modest magistrate who restored the Republic. In
its treatment of Caesar the inspired literature of the Augustan Principate is
consistent and instructive. Though in different words, Virgil, Horace and Livy
tell the same tale and point the same moral.
Yet speculation cannot be debarred
from playing round the high and momentous theme of the last designs of Caesar
the Dictator. It has been supposed and contended that Caesar either desired to
establish or had actually inaugurated an institution unheard of in Rome and
unimagined there – monarchic rule, despotic and absolute, based upon worship of
the ruler, after the pattern of the monarchics of the Hellenistic East. Thus may
Caesar be represented as the heir in all things of Alexander the Macedonian and
as the anticipator of Caracalla, a king and a god incarnate, levelling class and
nation, ruling a subject, united and uniform world by right divine.[47]
This extreme simplification of long
and diverse ages of history seems to suggest that Caesar alone of contemporary
Roman statesmen possessed either a wide vision of the future or a singular and elementary
blindness to the present. But this is only a Caesar of myth or rational
construction, a lay-figure set up to point a contrast with Pompeius or
Augustus-as though Augustus did not assume a more than human name and found a
monarchy, complete with court and hereditary succession; as though Pompeius,
the conqueror of the East and of every continent, did not exploit for his own
vanity the resemblance to Alexander in warlike fame and even in bodily form.[48]
Caesar was a truer Roman than either of them.
[...]
If Caesar must be judged, it is by
facts and not by alleged intentions. As his acts and his writings reveal him,
Caesar stands out as a realist and an opportunist. In the short time at his
disposal he can hardly have made plans for a long future or laid the foundation
of a consistent government. Whatever it might be, it would owe more to the
needs of the moment than to alien or theoretical models. More important the
business in hand: it was expedited in swift and arbitrary fashion. Caesar made
plans and decisions in the company of his intimates and secretaries: the Senate
voted but did not deliberate. As the Dictator was on the point of departing in
the spring of 44 B.C. for several years of campaigning in the Balkans and the
East, he tied up magistracies and provincial commands in advance by placing
them, according to the traditional Roman way, in the hands of loyal partisans,
or of reconciled Pompeians whose good sense should guarantee peace. For that
period, at least, a salutary pause from political activity: with the lapse of
time the situation might become clearer in one way or another.
At the moment it was intolerable: the
autocrat became impatient, annoyed by covert opposition, petty criticism and
laudations of dead Cato. That he was unpopular he well knew.[49]
‘For all his genius, Caesar could not see a way out’, as one of his friends was
subsequently to remark.[50]
And there was no going back. To Caesar's clear mind and love of rapid decision,
this brought a tragic sense of impotence and frustration-he had been all things
and it was no good.[51]
He had surpassed the good fortune of Sulla Felix and the glory of Pompeius
Magnus. In vain-reckless ambition had ruined the Roman State and baffled itself
in the end.[52] Of the melancholy that
descended upon Caesar there stands the best of testimony – ‘my life has been
long enough, whether reckoned in years or in renown.’ The words were
remembered. The most eloquent of his contemporaries did not disdain to plagiarize
them.[53]
The question of ultimate intentions
becomes irrelevant. Caesar was slain for what he was, not for what he might
become.[54]
The assumption of a Dictatorship for life seemed to mock and dispel all hope of
a return to normal and constitutional government. His rule was far worse than
the violent and illegal domination of Pompeius. The present was unbearable, the
future hopeless. It was necessary to strike at once-absence, the passage of
time and the solid benefits of peace and order might abate men’s resentment
against Caesar, insensibly disposing their minds to servitude and monarchy. A
faction recruited from the most diverse elements planned and carried out the
assassination of the Dictator.
That his removal would be no remedy
but a source of greater ills to the Commonwealth, the Dictator himself
observed.[55] His judgement was
vindicated in blood and suffering; and posterity has seen fit to condemn the
act of the Liberators, for so they were styled, as worse than a crime – a
folly. The verdict is hasty and judges by results. It is all too easy to label
the assassins as fanatic adepts of Greek theories about the supreme virtue of tyrannicide,
blind to the true nature of political catch-words and the urgent needs of the
Roman State. The character and pursuits of Marcus Brutus, the representative figure
in the conspiracy, might lend plausible colouring to such a theory. Yet in no
way evident that the nature of Brutus would have been very different had he
never opened a book of Stoic or Academic philosophy. Morcover, the originator
of the plot, the dour and military Cassius, was of the Epicurean persuasion and
by no means fanatic.[56]
As for the tenets of the Stoics, they could support doctrines quite distasteful
to Roman Republicans, namely monarchy or the brotherhood of man. The Stoic
teaching, indeed, was nothing more than a corroboration and theoretical defence
of certain traditional virtues of the governing class in an aristocratic and
republican state. Hellenic culture does not explain Cato;[57]
and the virtus about which Brutus
composed a volume was a Roman quality, not an alien importation.
[...]
To his contemporaries, Marcus Brutus,
firm in spirit, upright and loyal, in manner grave and aloof, seemed to embody
that ideal of character, admired by those who did not care to imitate. His was not
a simple personality – but passionate, intense and repressed.[58]
Nor was his political conduct wholly to be predicted. Brutus might well have
been a Caesarian-neither he nor Caesar were predestined partisans of Pompeius.
Servilia reared her son to hate Pompeius, schemed for the Caesarian alliance
and designed that Brutus should marry Caesar’s daughter.[59]
Her plan was annulled by the turn of events in the fatal consulate of Metellus.
Caesar was captured by Pompeius: Julia, the bride intended for Brutus, pledged
the alliance.
After this the paths of Brutus and of
Caesar diverged sharply for eleven years. But Brutus, after Pharsalus, at once
gave up a lost cause, receiving pardon from Caesar, high favour, a provincial
command and finally the praetorship in 44 B.C. Yet Cato, no sooner dead,
asserted the old domination over his nephew more powerfully than ever in life.
Brutus came to feel shame for his own disloyalty: he composed a pamphlet in
honour of the Republican who died true to his principles and to his class. ‘Then
he strengthened the family tie and obligation of vengeance yet further by
divorcing his Claudia and marrying his cousin Porcia, Bibulus’ widow. No
mistake about the meaning of that act; and Servilia disapproved. There were
deeper causes still in Brutus’ resolve to slay the tyrant – envy of Caesar and
the memory of Caesar’s amours with Servilia, public and notorious. Above all,
to Brutus as to Cato, who stood by the ancient ideals, it seemed that Caesar,
avid for splendour, glory and power, ready to use his birth and station to
subvert his own class, was an ominous type, the monarchic aristocrat, recalling
the kings of Rome and fatal to any Republic.
Brutus and his allies might invoke
philosophy or an ancestor who had liberated Rome from the Tarquinii, the first
consul of the Republic and founder of Libertas.
Dubious history – and irrelevant. The Liberators knew what they were about.
Honourable men grasped the assassin’s dagger to slay a Roman aristocrat, friend
and a benefactor, for better reasons than that. They stood, not merely for the
traditions and the institutions of the Free State, but very precisely for the
dignity and the interests their own order. Liberty and the laws are
high-sounding words. They will often be rendered, on a cool estimate, as privilege
and vested interests.
It is not necessary to believe that
Caesar planned to establish at Rome a ‘Hellenistic Monarchy’, whatever meaning
may attach to that phrase. The Dictatorship was enough. ‘The rule of the nobiles, he could see, was an anachronism
in a world-empire; and so was the power of the Roman plebs when all Italy
enjoyed the franchise. Caesar in truth was more conservative and Roman than
many have fancied; and no Roman conceived of government save through an
oligarchy. But Caesar was being forced into an autocratic position. It meant
the lasting domination of one man instead of the rule of the law, the
constitution and the Senate; it announced the triumph soon or late of new
forces and new ideas, the elevation of the army and the provinces, the depression
of the traditional governing class. Caesar’s autocracy appeared to be much more
than a temporary expedient to liquidate the heritage of the Civil War and
reinvigorate the organs of the Roman State. It was going to last – and the
Roman aristocracy was not to be permitted to govern and exploit the Empire in
its own fashion. The tragedies of history do not arise from the conflict of
conventional right and wrong. They are more august and more complex. Caesar and
Brutus each had right on his side.
[...]
VII. The
Consul Antonius
Caesar lay dead, stricken by
twenty-three wounds. The Senate broke up in fear and confusion, the assassins
made their way to the Capitol to render thanks to the gods of the Roman State.
They had no further plans – the tyrant was slain, therefore liberty was
restored.
A lull followed and bewilderment.
Sympathizers came to the Capitol but did not stay long, among them the senior
statesman Cicero and the young P. Cornelius Dolabella arrayed in the insignia
of a consul; for Caesar had intended that Dolabella should have the vacant
place when he resigned and departed to the Balkans. The other consul, the
redoubtable M. Antonius, took cover. Repulsing the invitations of the
Liberators, he secured from Calpurnia the Dictator’s papers and then consulted in
secret with the chief men of the Caesarian faction, such as Balbus, the
Dictator’s secretary and confidant, Hirtius, designated consul for the next
year, and Lepidus the Master of the Horse, now left in an anomalous and
advantageous position. Lepidus had troops under his command, with results at
once apparent. At dawn on March 16th he occupied the Forum with armed men. Lepidus
and Balbus were eager for vengeance;[60]
Antonius, however, sided with the moderate and prudent Hirtius. He summoned the
Senate to meet on the following day in the Temple of Tellus.
In the meantime, the Liberators,
descending for a brief space from the citadel, had made vain appeal to the
populace in the Forum. A speech of Marcus Brutus delivered on the Capitol the
next day likewise fell flat. The mob was apathetic or hostile, not to be moved
by the logical, earnest and austere oratory of Brutus. How different, how fiery
a speech would Cicero have composed;[61]
but Cicero was not present. The Liberators remained ensconced upon the Capitol.
Their coup had been countered by the Caesarian leaders, who, in negotiation
with them, adopted a firm and even menacing tone. D. Brutus was in despair.[62]
On the morning of March 17th the
Senate met. Antonius took charge of the debate, at once thwarting the proposal
of Ti. Claudius Nero, who demanded special honours for the tyrannicides. Yet
Antonius did not strive to get them condemned. Rejecting both extremes, he
brought forward a practical measure. Though Caesar was slain as a tyrant by
honourable and patriotic citizens, the acta
of the Dictator – and even his last projects, as yet unpublished-were to have
the force of law. The need of this was patent and inevitable: many senators,
many of the Liberators themselves, held preferment, office, or provinces from the
Dictator. Vested interests prevailed and imposed the respectable pretext of
peace and concord. Cicero made a speech, proposing an amnesty.
In this simple fashion, through a
coalition of Caesarians and Republicans, Rome received constitutional
government again. Concord was advertised in the evening when the Cacsarian leaders
and the Liberators entertained one another to banquets. The next day, further
measures were passed. On the insistence of Caesar’s father-in-law, L. Piso, the
Senate decided to recognize the Dictator’s will, granting a public funeral.
Antonius had played his hand with cool
skill. The Liberators and their friends had lost, at once and for ever, the
chance of gaining an ascendancy over the Senate. The people, unfriendly to
begin with, turned sharply against them. Accident blended with design. The
funeral oration delivered by Antonius (March 20th) may not have been intended
as a political manifesto of the Caesarian party; and the results may have outstripped
his designs. In form, the speech was brief and moderate[63]:
the audience was inflammable. At the recital of the great deeds of Caesar and the
benefactions bestowed by his will upon the people of Rome, the crowd broke
loose and burned the body in the Forum. In fear for their lives, the Liberators
barricaded themselves in their houses. Nor, as the days passed, did it become
safe for them to be seen in public. The mob set up an altar and a pillar in the
Forum, offering prayers and a cult to Caesar. Prominent among the authors of
disorder was a certain Herophilus (or Amatius), who sought to pass himself off as
a grandson of C. Marius. The Liberators departed from Rome early in April, and
took refuge in the small towns in the neighbourhood of the capital.
Long before this, the futility of
their heroic deed was manifest to the assassins and to their sympathizers. The
harm had already been done. Not the funeral of Caesar but the session of March 17th,
that was the real calamity.[64]
Both the acts and the party of Caesar survived his removal. Of necessity, given
the principles and nature of the conspiracy: the slaying of a tyrant, and that action
alone, was the end and justification of their enterprise, not be altered by
wisdom after the event and the vain regrets of certain advisers and critics – ‘a
manly deed but a childish lack of counsel.’[65]
Brutus and Cassius, since they were praetors, should have usurped authority and
summoned the Senate to meet upon the Capitol, it was afterwards urged.[66]
But that was treason. They should not have left the consul Antonius alive. But
there was no pretext or desire for a reign of terror. Brutus had insisted that
Antonius be spared.[67]
Had the faction of Brutus and Cassius forsworn its principles and appealed to
arms, their end would have been rapid and violent. ‘The moderates, the party of
Caesar, the veterans in Italy, and the Caesarian armies in the provinces would
have been too strong.
The Liberators had not planned a
seizure of power. Their occupation of the Capitol was a symbolical act,
antiquarian and even Hellenic. But Rome was not a Greek city, to be mastered from
its citadel. The facts and elements of power were larger than that. To carry
through a Roman revolution in orderly form, in the first place the powers of
the highest magistracy, the auctoritas of
the ex-consuls and the acquiescence of the Senate were requisite. Of the
consuls, Antonius was not to be had, Dolabella an uncertain factor. The consuls
designate for the next year, Hirtius and Pansa, honest Caesarians, were
moderate men and lovers of peace, representing a large body in the Senate,
whether Caesarian or neutral. The Senate, thinned by war and recently replenished
by the nominees of the Dictator, lacked prestige and confidence. The majority
was for order and security. They were not to be blamed. Of consulars, the
casualties in the Civil Wars had been heavy: only two of the Pompeians,
professed or genuine, were left. Hence a lack of experience, ability and
leadership in the Senate, sorely to be felt in the course of the next eighteen months.
Among the survivors, a few Caesarians, of little weight, and some discredited
beyond remedy: for the rest, the aged, the timid and the untrustworthy. Cicero,
who had lent his eloquence to all political causes in turn, was sincere in one
thing, loyalty to the established order. His past career showed that he could
not be depended on for action or for statesmanship; and the conspirators had
not initiated him into their designs. The public support of Cicero would be of
inestimable value-after a revolution had succeeded. Thus did Brutus lift up his
bloodstained dagger, crying the name of Cicero with a loud voice.[68]
The appeal was premature.
Nor could the faction of Brutus and
Cassius reckon upon the citizen-body of the capital. To the cold logic and
legalistic pleas of the Republican Brutus, this motley and excitable rabble
turned deaf ear; for the august traditions of the Roman Senate and the Roman
People they had no sympathy at all. The politicians of the previous age,
whether conservative or revolutionary, despised so utterly the plebs of Rome
that they felt no scruples when they enhanced its degradation. Even Cato
admitted the need of bribery, to save the Republic and secure the election of
his own kinsman Bibulus.[69]
Debauched by demagogues and largess,
the Roman People was ready for the Empire and the dispensation of bread and games.
The plebs had acclaimed Caesar, the popular politician, with his public boast
of the Julian house, descended from the kings of Rome and from the immortal
gods; they buried his daughter Julia with the honours of a princess; they
cheered the games, the shows and the triumphs of the Dictator. In Caesar’s
defiance of the Senate and his triumph over noble adversaries, they too had a
share of power and glory. Discontent, it is true, could be detected among the
populace of Rome in the last months of Caesar’s life, artfully fomented by his
enemies; and Caesar, who had taken up arms in defence of the rights of the tribunes,
was manoeuvred into a clash with the champions of the People. Symptoms only, no
solid ground for optimistic interpretation. Yet even after the funeral of
Caesar and the ensuing disorders, Brutus appears to have persisted in
irrational fancies about that Roman People which he had liberated from
despotism. As late as July he expected popular manifestations of sympathy at
the games furnished by him, in absence, in honour of the god Apollo. Apollo
already had another favourite.
[...]
Marcus Antonius was one of the most
able of Caesar’s young men. A nobilis,
born of an illustrious but impoverished plebeian family (his grandfather was a
great orator, his father a good-natured but careless person), the years of
pleasure and adventure brought him, after service with Gabinius in Syria, to
brighter prospects, to the camps and the councils of Caesar. Antonius was an
intrepid and dashing cavalry leader: yet at the same time a steady and
resourceful general. He commanded the left wing on the field of Pharsalus. But
Antonius’ talents were not those of a mere soldier. Caesar, a good judge of
men, put him in control of Italy more than once during the Civil Wars, in 49
B.C. when Antonius was only tribune of the plebs, and after Pharsalus, as Master
of the Horse, for more than a year. The task was delicate, and Caesar may not
have been altogether satisfied with his deputy. Yet there is no proof of any
serious estrangement.[70]
Lepidus, it is true, was appointed consul in 46 and Master of the Horse: no
evidence, however, that Caesar prized him above Antonius for loyalty or for
capacity. Lepidus was the elder man – and a patrician as well. Lepidus retained
the position of nominal deputy to the Dictator. But Lepidus was to take over a
province in 44, and Antonius, elected consul for that year, would be left in
charge of the government when Caesar departed.
Born in 82 B.C., Antonius was now in
the prime of life, richly endowed with strength of body and grace of manner,
courageous, alert and resourceful, but concealing behind an attractive and imposing
façade certain defects of character and judgement that time and the licence of
power were to show up in deadly abundance. ‘The frank and chivalrous soldier
was no match in statecraft for the astute politicians who undermined his
predominance, stole his partisans, and contrived against him the last coup d’état of all, the national front
and the uniting of Italy.
The memory of Antonius has suffered
damage multiple and irreparable. The policy which he adopted in the East and
his association with the Queen of Egypt were vulnerable to the moral and
patriotic propaganda of his rival. Most of that will be coolly discounted. From
the influence of Cicero it is less easy to escape. The Philippics, the series of speeches in which he assailed an absent
enemy, are an eternal monument of eloquence, of rancour, of misrepresentation.
Many of the charges levelled against the character of Antonius – such as
unnatural vice or flagrant cowardice – are trivial, ridiculous or conventional.
That the private life of the Caesarian soldier was careless, disorderly, and even
disgraceful, is evident and admitted. He belonged to a class of Roman nobles by
no means uncommon under Republic or Empire, whose unofficial follies did not
prevent them from rising, when duty called, to services of conspicuous ability
or the most disinterested patriotism. For such men, the most austere of
historians cannot altogether suppress a timid and perhaps perverse admiration.
A blameless life is not the whole of virtue, and inflexible rectitude may prove
a menace to the Commonwealth.[71]
Though the private conduct of a
statesman cannot entirely be divorced from his public policy and performance,
Roman aristocratic standards, old and new, with their insistence upon civic virtue
or personal liberty, accorded a wide indulgence. The failings of Antonius may
have told against him – but in Rome and in Italy rather than with the troops
and in the provinces. Yet they were nothing new or alarming in the holders of
office and power at Rome. In the end it was not debauchery that ruined Antonius,
but a fatal chain of miscalculations both military and political, and a
sentiment of loyalty incompatible with the chill claims of statesmanship. But
that was later. To gain a fair estimate of the acts and intentions of Antonius
in the year of his consulate, it will be necessary to forget both the Philippics and the War of Actium. The
political advocate and the verdict of conventional history must be constrained
to silence for a time.
[...]
VIII. Caesar’s
Heir
By the terms of his will Caesar
appointed as heir to his name Band fortune a certain C. Octavius, the grandson
of one of his sisters. On the paternal side the youth came of a respectable
family that lacked nobility: his grandfather, a rich banker established at the
small town of Velitrae, had shunned the burdens and the dangers of Roman
politics.1 [72]
Ambition broke out in the son, a model
of all the virtues.[73]
He married Atia, the daughter of M. Atius Balbus, a senator from the
neighbouring town of Aricia, and of Julia, Caesar’s sister.[74]
Hence rapid advancement and honours, the praetorship, the governorship of
Macedonia, and the sure prospect of a consulate.[75]
Death frustrated his intended candidature, but the Caesarian alliance
maintained the fortunes of the family. The widow Atia was at once transferred
in matrimony to L. Marcius Philippus, a safe candidate for the consulate of 56
B.C. Octavius left three children, an Octavia by his first wife, by Atia
another Octavia and a son, C. Octavius. Of the two children of Atia, the
daughter was subsequently married to C. Marcellus (cos. 50 B.C.); the son, in any event assured of a brilliant career
through these influential connexions, was taken up by Caesar.[76]
When C. Octavius passed by adoption
into the Julian House he acquired the new and legal designation of C. Julius
Caesar Octavianus. It will be understood that the aspirant to Caesar’s power
preferred to drop the name that betrayed his origin, and be styled ‘C. Julius
Caesar’. Further, the official deification of his adoptive parent soon provided
the title of ‘Divi Julii filius’; and from 38 B.C. onwards the military leader
of the Caesarian faction took to calling himself ‘Imperator Caesar’.[77]
After the first constitutional settlement and the assumption of the name ‘Augustus’,
the titulature of the ruler was conceived as ‘Imperator Caesar Divi filius
Augustus’. Posterity was to know him as ‘Divus Augustus’. In the early and
revolutionary years the heir of Caesar never, it is true, referred to himself
as ‘Octavianus’; the use of that name, possessing the sanction of literary
tradition, will here be maintained, though it is dubious and misleading. As his
enemies bitterly observed, the name of Caesar was the young man's fortune.[78]
Italy and the world accepted him as Caesar’s son and heir; that the
relationship by blood was distant was a fact of little moment in the Roman
conception of the family, barely known or soon forgotten by the inhabitants of the
provinces.
The custom of prefixing or appending
to historical narratives an estimate of the character and personality of the
principal agent is of doubtful advantage at the best of times – it either imparts
a specious unity to the action or permits apology or condemnation on moral and
emotional grounds. All conventions are baffled and defied by Caesar’s heir. Not
for nothing that the ruler of Rome made use of a signet-ring with a sphinx
engraved. The revolutionary adventurer eludes grasp and definition no less than
the mature statesman. For the early years, a sore lack everywhere of personal,
authentic and contemporary testimony, perpetual hazard in estimating the change
and development between youth and middle age.
The personality of Octavianus will
best be left to emerge from his actions. One thing at least is clear. From the
beginning, his sense for realities was unerring, his ambition implacable. In that
the young man was a Roman and a Roman aristocrat. He was only eighteen years of
age: but he resolved to acquire the power and the glory along with the name of
Caesar. Whether his insistence that Caesar be avenged and the murderers
punished derives more from horror of the deed, traditional sense of the
solidarity of the family, or resentment at the thwarting of his own legitimate
aspirations is a question that concerns the ultimate nature of human character
and the deepest springs of human action.
Exorbitant ambition mated with
political maturity is not enough to explain the ascension of Octavianus. A
sceptic about all else, Caesar the Dictator had faith in his own star. The fortune
of Caesar survived his fall. On no rational forecast of events would his
adopted son have succeeded in playing off the Republican cause against the
Caesarian leaders, survived the War of Perusia and lived to prevail over
Antonius in the end.
The news of the Ides of March found
the young man at Apollonia, a town on the coast of Albania, occupied in the
study of oratory and the practice of military exercises, for he was to accompany
the Dictator on the Balkan and eastern campaigns. He was not slow in reaching a
decision. Crossing the Adriatic, he landed near Brundisium. When he learned
about the will, he conceived high hopes, refusing to be deterred by letters
from his mother and step-father, both of whom counselled refusal of the
perilous inheritance. But he kept his head, neither dazzled by good fortune nor
spurred to rash activity – the appeal to the troops, which certain friends
counselled, was wisely postponed. Nor would he enter Rome until he had got into
touch with persons of influence and had surveyed the political situation. By
the middle of April his presence was signalled in Campania, where he was
staying with his step-father, the consular Philippus.[79]
More important, he had met Balbus, the trusted confidant and secretary of the
Dictator.[80] Other prominent members
of the Caesarian faction were approached: Hirtius and Pansa were certainly in
the neighbourhood.[81]
But the youth was too astute to
confine his attentions to one party. Cicero was living at Cumae at this time.
He had heard rumours about Octavianus, according them scant attention.[82]
Which member of Caesar’s family inherited the remnant of his private fortune
mattered little – for the power rested with the leaders of the Caesarian party.
Foreseeing trouble with Antonius about the disposal of the Dictator’s property,
however, he must have rejoiced in secret.[83]
Then Octavianus called on Cicero. The illustrious orator was flattered: ‘he is
quite devoted to me’, he wrote.[84]
[...]
The Liberators remained, an anomalous factor.
On June 5th, at the instigation of Antonius, the Senate appointed Brutus and Cassius
to an extraordinary commission for the rest of the year: they were to
superintend the collection of corn in the provinces of Sicily and Asia.
Complimentary in appearance, the post was really an honourable pretext for
exile. Brutus and Cassius were in doubts whether to accept. A family conference
at Antium, presided over by Servilia, debated the question.[85]
Cassius was resentful and truculent, Brutus undecided. Servilia promised her
influence to get the measure revoked. No other decision was taken. For the
present, the Liberators remained in Italy, waiting on events.
[...]
In revenge for the Ides of March,
Caesar’s ghost, as all men know, drove Brutus to his doom on the field of
Philippi. The same phantom bore heavily on Antonius and stayed the hand he would
have raised against Caesar’s heir. The word of the veterans silenced the Senate
of Rome. When L. Piso spoke, at the session of August 1st, there was
no man to support him. Of the tone and content of Piso’s proposal there is no
evidence: perhaps he suggested that Cisalpine Gaul should cease to be a
province at the end of the year and be added to Italy. That would preclude competition
for a post of vantage and armed domination. A fair prospect of concord – or a
subtle intrigue against the consul – had been brought to nought.
Antonius, for his part, had been
constrained to an unwelcome decision. In no mood to be thwarted in his
ambitions, he still hoped to avoid an open breach with the party of Brutus and Cassius.
His professions, both public and private, had hitherto been couched in a vein
of conciliation; his recent speech was held to be distinctly amicable.[86]
To their edict he now made reply with a public proclamation and a private
letter, in a tone of some anger and impatience.[87]
Brutus and Cassius retorted with a firm manifesto (August 4th),
taking their stand upon their principles and their personal honour: they told
Antonius that they valued their own libertas
more than his amicitia and bade him
take warning from the fate of Caesar.[88]
Of any immediate intentions the
Liberators said no word in their edict. But they now prepared to depart from
Italy. They had hesitated to take over the corn-commission voted on June 5th.
Now, early in August, Antonius induced the Senate to grant them the harmless
provinces of Crete and Cyrene. Brutus left Italy towards the end of the month,
not before publishing a last edict. He affirmed the loyalty of the Liberators
towards the Roman constitution, their reluctance to provide a cause of civil
war – and their proud conviction that wherever they were, there stood Rome and
the Republic.[89] Cassius, however,
lingered in Italian waters for some time.
As for Antonius, pressure from a
competitor was now beginning to force him to choose at last between the Senate
and the veterans. The Senate was hostile: yet the uneasy reconciliation with
Octavianus could scarcely last. On any count, the outlook was black for the
friends of settled government. Octavianus did not belong to that class.
The rhetoric of the ancients and the
parliamentary theories of the moderns sometimes obscure the nature and sources
of political power at Rome. They were patent to contemporaries. For the
ambitious Octavianus, the gradual advancement of a Roman noble through the
consecrated order of magistracies to the consulate, the command of an army, the
auctoritas of a senior statesman, all
that was too long and too slow. He would have to wait until middle age: his
laurels would repose on grey hairs or none remaining. Legitimate primacy, it is
true, could only be attained at Rome through many extra-constitutional
resources, bribery, intrigue, and even violence; for the short and perilous path
that Octavianus intended to tread, such resources would have to be doubled and
redoubled.
Octavianus was resolute. He had a
cause to champion, the avenging of Caesar, and was ready to exploit every
advantage. In the first place, the urban plebs, fanatically devoted to the memory
of Caesar and susceptible to the youth, the dignified bearing, the demagogy and
the bribes of Caesar’s heir. With what consummate art he worked upon this
material in the month of July has already been narrated. He might invoke the
tribunate, emulating the Gracchi and a long line of demagogues. Rumours went
about in the July days at Rome that Octavianus, though a patrician, had designs
upon this office.[90] Nothing came of it for the
moment: at need, he would always be able to purchase one or other of the ten
members of the tribunician college.
More costly but more remunerative as
an investment were the soldiers of Caesar, active in the legions or settled in
the military colonies of Italy. While at Apollonia, Octavianus made himself
known to the soldiers and officers of Caesar’s great army of the Balkans. They
did not forget him, nor did he neglect opportunities on his journey from
Brundisium to Rome. As the months passed, the Caesarian sentiments of the
legionaries were steadily reinforced – and their appetites whetted by the dissemination
of propaganda, of promises, of bribes.
With his years, his name and his
ambition, Octavianus had nothing to gain from concord in the State, everything
from disorder. Supported by the plebs and the veterans, he possessed the means
to split the Caesarian party. For his first designs he needed funds and a
faction. As many of the most eminent of the Caesarians already held office and
preferment, were loyal to Antonius or to settled government, he must turn his
hopes and his efforts towards the more obscure of the Caesarian novi homines in the Senate, or, failing
them, to knights, to financiers and to individuals commanding influence in the
towns of Italy. Once a compact and devoted following was won, and his power revealed,
he could build up a new Caesarian party of his own.
It was the aim of Octavianus to seduce
the moderate Caesarians by an appeal to their loyalty towards the memory of the
Dictator, to their apprehensions or envy of Antonius: through them he might
hope to influence neutral or Republican elements. The supreme art of politics
is patent – to rob adversaries of their adherents and soldiers, their programme
and their catchwords. If the process goes far enough, a faction may grow into
something like a national party. So it was to be in the end. But this was no
time for an ideal and patriotic appeal.
Such were the resources that
Octavianus gathered in late summer and autumn of the year. Men and money were
the first thing, next the skill and the resolution to use them. An inborn and
Roman distrust of theory, an acute sense of the difference between words and
facts, a brief acquaintance with Roman political behaviour – that he possessed
and that was all he needed. It is a common belief, attested by the existence of
political science as a subject of academic study, that the arts of government
may be learned from books. The revolutionary career of Caesar’s heir reveals
never a trace of theoretical preoсcupations: if it did, it would have been very
different and very short.
[...]
X. The Senior
Statesman
In the Senate three men of consular
rank had spoken against Antonius, namely L. Piso, P. Servilius and Cicero, and
therefore might be said to have encouraged the designs of Octavianus. That was
all they had in common-in character, career and policy the three consulars were
discordant and irreconcilable.
Piso, an aristocrat of character and
discernment, united loyalty to Roman standards of conduct with a lively
appreciation of the literature and philosophy of Hellas: he was the friend and patron
of Philodemus, the poet and scholar.[91]
Though elegant in his tastes, Piso suited his way of living to his family
tradition and to his fortune, which would not have supported ostentatious display
and senseless luxury.[92]
Being the father-in-law of Caesar, and elected through the agency of Pompeius
and Caesar to the consulate, Piso saw no occasion to protect Cicero from the
threat, sentence and consequences of exile. Cicero remembered and attacked Piso
for his conduct of the governorship of Macedonia, both before and after the
proconsul returned, on any excuse. Piso replied, no doubt with some effect.[93]
Nor did any political enemy or ambitious youth come forward to arraign by
prosecution a proconsul alleged to have been corrupt, incompetent and
calamitous. Piso, however, withdrew more and more from active politics. Yet his
repute, or at least his influence, is sufficiently demonstrated by his
election, though reluctant, to the Censorship in 50 B.C., an honour to which
many consulars must have aspired as due recognition of public service and
political wisdom.
The mild and humane doctrines of the
Epicureans, liable as they were to the easy and conventional reproach of
neglecting the public good for the pursuit of selfish pleasure, might still be of
more use to the Commonwealth than the more elevated principles that were
professed, and sometimes followed, with such robust conviction. Piso, a
patriotic Roman, did not abandon all care for his country and lapse into
timorous inactivity under the imminent threat of civil war or during the
contest. He exerted himself for mediation or compromise then and later, both
during the struggle between Caesar and Pompeius and when Roman politics again
appeared to be degenerating into faction strife.[94]
His character was vindicated by his conduct, his sagacity by the course of
events: to few, indeed, among his contemporaries was accorded that double and
melancholy satisfaction.
Piso was an ex-Caesarian turned
independent. P. Servilius Isauricus, the son of a conservative and highly respected
parent, began his political career under the auspices of Cato.[95]
Most of his friends, allies and relatives followed Cato and Pompeius in the
Civil War. Servilius, however, had been ensnared by Caesar, perhaps with a
bribe to his ambition, the consulate of 48 B.C. Servilius may not have been a
man of action-yet he governed the province of Asia for Caesar with some credit
in 46–44 B.C. On his return to Rome late in the summer Servilius embarked upon
a tortuous policy, to enhance his power and that of his clan. His family
connexions would permit an independent and, if he chose, a conciliatory
position between the parties. Being related to Brutus, to Cassius and to
Lepidus he might become the link in a new political alignment between
Caesarians and Republicans. That prospect would certainly appeal to his mother-in-law
Servilia.
Whatever the motive, his earliest acts
caused discomfort to Antonius-he criticized the policy of the consul on
September 2nd. When Octavianus marched on Rome, however, no news was heard of
P. Servilius: like other consulars averse from Antonius but unwilling to commit
themselves too soon, he kept out of the way. Yet he probably lent a tribune:
Ti. Cannutius belonged to the following of Isauricus.[96]
Piso and P. Servilius each had a change
of side to their credit. No politician could compete with Cicero for
versatility, as the attacks of his enemies and his own apologies attest. The
sagacious and disinterested Piso would hardly lend help or sanction to the
levying of a private army against a consul of the Roman People. Servilius,
however, was not altogether blameless, while Cicero stood out as the head and
front of the group of politicians who intended to employ the Caesarian
adventurer to destroy the Caesarian party.
Cicero claimed that he had always been
consistent in his political ideal, though not in the means he adopted to attain
it. His defence can hardly cover the whole of his career. Yet it would be
perverse and unjust to rail and carp at an aspirant to political honours who,
after espousing various popular causes and supporting the grant of an
extraordinary command to Pompeius, from honest persuasion or for political
advancement, afterwards became more conservative when he gained the consulate
and entered the ranks of the governing
oligarchy. Cicero had never been a revolutionary-not even a reformer. In the
years following his consulate he wavered between Pompeius and the enemies of
Pompeius, trusted by neither. In Cato he admired yet deplored the rigid
adherence to principle and denial of compromise; and he claimed that he had
been abandoned by the allies of Cato. Towards Pompeius he continued to profess loyalty,
despite harsh rebuffs and evidences of cold perfidy, for which, through easy
self-deception, he chose to blame Caesar, the agent of his misfortunes, rather
than Pompeius with whom the last word rested. Pompeius was the stronger-from
the earliest years of Cicero’s political career he seemed to have dominated the
stage and directed the action. Twice the predominance of Pompeius was
threatened (in 61–60 B.C. and in 56): each time he reasserted it in a
convincing fashion. Cicero surrendered to the obsession. Otherwise there were
many things that might have brought Cicero and Caesar together – a common taste
for literature, to which Pompeius was notoriously alien, and common friends, a
hankering for applause on the one side and a gracious disposition to please and
to flatter on the other.
Cicero came close to being a neutral
in the Civil War. Returning from his province of Cilicia, he made what efforts
he could to avert hostilities. He showed both judgement and impartiality.[97]
It was too late. He had few illusions about Pompeius, little sympathy with his
allies. Yet he found himself, not unnaturally, on the side of Pompeius, of the
party of the constitution, and of the majority of the active consulars. The
leaders were Pompeius and Cato. It was clearly the better cause – and it seemed
the stronger. Not that Cicero expected war-and when war came, even Cato seemed
willing to go back upon his principles and make concessions to Caesar.[98]
Cicero was induced to accept a
military command under Pompeius, but lingered in Campania, refusing to follow
him across the seas, perhaps from failure to comprehend his strategy. Then Caesar
wooed him assiduously, through the familiar offices of Balbus and Oppius and by
personal approach. But Cicero stood firm: he refused to come to Rome and
condone Caesar’s acts and policy by presence in the Senate. Courage, but also
fear – he was intimidated by the bloodthirsty threats of the absent Pompeians, who
would deal with neutrals as with enemies. Spain might bring them victory after
all. The agonies of a long flirtation with neutrality drove him to join
Pompeius, without waiting for news of the decision in Spain.[99]
It was not passion or conviction, but impatience and despair. Pharsalus
dissolved their embrace. Cicero was persuaded to avail himself of the clemency
and personal esteem of the victor.
The years of life under the
Dictatorship were unhappy and inglorious. The continuance of the struggle with
the last remnants of the Pompeians and the sometimes hoped for but ever delayed
return to settled conditions threw him into a deep depression. He shunned the
Senate, the theatre of his old triumphs. With the passing of time, he might
indeed have silenced his conscience and acquiesced in a large measure of
authoritative government at Rome. He was not a Cato or a Brutus; and Brutus later
remarked ‘as long as Cicero can get people to give him what he wants, to
flatter and to praise him, he will put up with servitude.’[100]
But Cicero was able to hold out against Caesar. Though in the Senate he was
once moved to celebrate the clemency and magnanimity of the Dictator,[101]
he soon set to work upon a vindication of Cato, which he published,
inaugurating a fashion. Caesar answered with praise of the author’s talent and a
pamphlet traducing the memory of the Republican martyr. Through emissaries and
friends he induced Cicero to compose some kind of open letter, expressing
approval of the government. Oppius and Balbus found the result not altogether
satisfactory. Rather than emend, Cicero gave it up, gladly. Caesar did not insist.
Time was short agents like Balbus were of more use to a busy and imperious
autocrat.
Then came the Ides of March and, two
days later, the meeting of the Senate in the Temple of Tellus, when Cicero,
like other statesmen, spoke for security and concord. Peace calls for constant
vigilance. Cicero later claimed that from that day forward he never deserted
his post.[102] Facts refute the
assertion. Between March 17th and September 2nd, a period of nearly six months,
the most critical for the new and precarious concord, Cicero was never even
seen in the Senate. In spring and summer the cause of ordered government was
still not beyond hope: to save it, what better champion than a patriot who
boasted never to have been a party politician? As Antonius had once said to
him, the honest neutral does not run away.[103]
In the autumn, too late: Cicero returning brought not peace but aggravation of
discord and impulsion to the most irrational of all civil wars.[104]
After March 17th, the sharp perception
that neither the policy nor the party of Caesar had been abolished brought a
rapid disillusionment. Even before the Ides of March he thought of departing to
Greece and remaining there till the end of the year, to return under happier
auspices when Hirtius and Pansa were consuls. The legislation of June Ist
deepened his dismay. Nor was any decision or hope to be discerned among the Liberators,
as the congress at Antium showed, or any armed support from the provinces. Early
July brought well-authenticated reports from Spain that Sex. Pompeius had come
to terms with the government. Cicero was sorry.[105]
The domination of the Caesarian faction in the person of Antonius appeared
unshakable. At last, after long doubt and hesitation, Cicero set out for
Greece. He sailed from
Pompeii on July 17th.
[...]
For the moment, a lull in affairs.
Early in October the storm broke. It came from another quarter. The collected
correspondence of Cicero preserved none of the letters he received from Octavianus.
That is not surprising: the editor knew his business. A necessary veil was cast
over the earlier and private preliminaries in the anomalous alliance between
oratory and arms, between the venerable consular and the revolutionary
adventurer. There is a danger, it is true, that the relations of Cicero and
Octavianus may be dated too far back, interpreted in the light of subsequent
history, and invested with a significance foreign even to the secret thoughts
of the agents themselves. Cicero had first made the acquaintance of Caesar's
heir in April. Then nothing more for six weeks. In June, however, he recognized
that the youth was to be encouraged and kept from allying himself with Antonius;[106]
in July, Octavianus became a fact and a force in politics.
Events were moving swiftly. In his
account of the reasons that moved him to return, Cicero makes no mention of the
Ludi Victoriae Caesaris and the
consequent breach between Antonius and Octavianus. Yet of these events he will
perhaps have had cognizance at Leucopetra. Only a domestic quarrel, it might appear,
in the ranks of the Caesarian party: yet clearly of a kind to influence the
public policy of Antonius.
When he made his decision to return,
Cicero did not know that unity had been restored in the Caesarian party. Again,
in the first two speeches against Antonius, no word of the young Caesar: yet
the existence of Antonius’ rival must have been reckoned as a political factor
by Cicero and P. Servilius when they attacked the consul.
However that may be, by the beginning
of October Caesar’s heir was an alarming phenomenon. But even now, during the months
of October and November, Cicero was full of distrust, suspecting the real
designs of Octavianus and doubting his capacity to stand against Antonius.
Octavianus for his part exerted every art to win the confidence of Cicero, or
at least to commit him openly to the revolutionary cause. By the beginning of
November daily letters passed between them. Octavianus now had an army of three
thousand veterans in Campania. He pestered Cicero for advice, sending to him
his trusty agent Caecina of Volaterrae with demands for an interview, for
Cicero was close at hand.[107]
Cicero refused to be compromised in public. Then Octavianus urged Cicero to
come to Rome, to save the State once again, and renew
the memory of the glorious Nones of
December.[108]
Cicero was not to be had. He left
Campania and retired to Arpinum, foreseeing trouble. After Caecina, Octavianus
sent Oppius to invite him, but in vain.[109]
The example – or the exhortations – of Philippus and of Marcellus were likewise
of no weight.[110] Cicero’s path lay
through Aquinum, but apparently he missed Hirtius and Balbus. They were
journeying to Campania, ostensibly to take the waters.[111]
Wherever there was trouble, the secret agent Balbus might be detected in the
background. For Cicero, in fear at the prospect of Antonius’ return with troops
from Brundisium, there was safety in Arpinum, which lay off the main roads. The
young revolutionary marched on Rome without him.
About Octavianus, Cicero was indeed
most dubious. The veterans arose at the call of Caesar’s heir, the towns of
Campania were enthusiastic. Among the plebs he had a great following; and he
might win more respectable backing. ‘But look at his age, his name.’[112]
Octavianus was but a youth, he lacked auctoritas.
On the other hand, he was the heir of the Dictator, a revolutionary under the
sign of the avenging of Caesar. Of that purpose, no secret, no disguise. To be
sure, he offered a safeguard to the conservatives by permitting one of the
assassins of Caesar to be elected tribune[113]
– a merely a political gesture, easily made and easily revoked. More significant
and most ominous was the speech delivered in Rome, the solemn oath with hand
outstretched to the statue of Caesar the Dictator.[114]
Cicero in alarm confessed the ruinous alternatives: ‘if Octavianus succeeded
and won power, the acta of Caesar
would be more decisively confirmed than they were on March 17th; if he failed,
Antonius would be intolerable.’[115]
Cicero was all too often deluded in
his political judgements. No easy optimism this time, however, but an accurate
forecast of the hazards of supporting the Caesarian revolutionary. Octavianus anus
professed the utmost devotion for Cicero and called him ‘father’ – an
appellation which the sombre Brutus was later to recall with bitter rebuke.[116]
Octavianus has sometimes been condemned for cold and brutal treachery towards a
parent and benefactor. That facile and partial interpretation will be repulsed in
the interests, not of Octavianus, but of the truth. The political alliance
between Octavianus and Cicero was not merely the plot of a crafty and
unscrupulous youth.
Cicero was possessed by an overweening
opinion of his own sagacity: it had ever been his hope to act as political
mentor to one of the generals of the Republic. When Pompeius had subdued the
East to the arms of Rome, he received an alarming proposal of this kind: to his
Scipio, Cicero was to play the Laelius. Again, on his return from exile, Cicero
hoped that Pompeius could be induced to go back on his allies, drop Caesar, and
become amenable to guidance: he was abruptly brought to heel by Pompeius, and his
influence as a statesman was destroyed. The experience and wisdom of the
non-party statesman was not invoked by Caesar the Dictator in his organization
of the Roman Commonwealth. Nor was Antonius more susceptible. Cicero was
constrained to lavish his treasures upon an unworthy object – in April of the
year 44 B.C. he wrote to Dolabella a letter which offered that young man the
congratulations, the counsels, and the alliance of a senior statesman.[117]
Of that persistent delusion, Cicero
cannot be acquitted. Aware of the risks, he hoped to use Octavianus against
Antonius and discard him in the end, if he did not prove pliable. It was Cato’s
fatal plan all over again-the doom of Antonius would warn the young man against
aspiring to military despotism and would reveal the strength which the
Commonwealth could still muster. In public pronouncements Cicero went sponsor
for the good conduct and loyalty of the adventurer,[118]
in private letters he vaunted the excellence of his own plan: it may be doubted
whether at any time he felt that he could trust Octavianus. Neither was the
dupe.
When he heard of the failure of the
march on Rome, Cicero must have congratulated himself on his refusal to be
lured into a premature championing of the Republic. He resolved to wait until January
1st before appearing in the Senate. But Octavianus and D. Brutus were
insistent-the former with his illicit army, perilously based on Etruria, Brutus
in the Cisalpina, contumacious against a consul. As they were both acting on
private initiative for the salvation of the State, they clamoured to have their
position legalized. The offensive was therefore launched earlier than had been
expected.
Now came the last and heroic hour, in
the long and varied public life of Cicero. Summoning all his oratory and all
his energies for the struggle against Antonius, eager for war and implacable,
he would hear no word of peace or compromise: he confronted Antonius with the
choice between capitulation and destruction. Six years before, the same policy
precipitated war between the government and a proconsul.
Fanatic intensity seems foreign to the
character of Cicero, absent from his earlier career: there precisely lies the
explanation. Cicero was spurred to desperate action by the memory of all the humiliations
of the past – exile, a fatal miscalculation in politics under the predominance
of Pompeius and the compulsory speeches in defence of the tools of despotism,
Balbus, Vatinius and Gabinius, by the Dictatorship of Caesar and the guilty
know – ledge of his own inadequacy. He knew how little he had achieved for the
Republic despite his talent and his professions, how shamefully he had deserted
his post after March 17th when concord and ordered government might still have
been achieved.
Now, at last, a chance had come to
redeem all, to assert leadership, to free the State again or go down with it in
ruin. Once he had written about the ideal statesman. Political failure, driving
him back upon himself, had then sought and created consolations in literature
and in theory: the ideal derived its shape from his own disappointments. In the
Republic he set forth the lineaments and
design, not of any programme or policy in the present, but simply the ancestral
constitution of Rome as it was – or should have been-a century earlier, namely
a stable and balanced state with Senate and People keeping loyally to their
separate functions in pursuit of the common good, submitting to the guidance of
a small group of enlightened aristocrats.[119]
There was place in the ranks of the principes
for varied talent, for civil as well as military distinction; access lay open
to merit as well as to birth; and the good statesman would not be deserted by
his peers, coerced by military dynasts or harried by tribunes.
This treatise was published in 51 B.C.
About the same time Cicero had also been at work upon the Laws, which described
in detail the institutions of a traditional but liberal oligarchy in a state where
men were free but not equal. He returned to it under the Dictatorship of
Caesar,[120] but never published,
perhaps never completed, this supplement to the Republic. After the Ides of
March, however, came a new impulsion to demonstrate his conception of a
well-ordered state and to corroborate it in the light of the most recent
history. The De officiis is a
theoretical treatment of the obligations which a citizen should render to the
Commonwealth, that is, a manual of civic virtue. Once again the ideal statesman
is depicted in civilian rather than in military garb; and the ambition of
unscrupulous principes is strongly
denounced.[121] The lust for power ends
in tyranny, which is the negation of liberty, the laws and of all civilized
life.[122]
So much for Caesar.
But the desire for fame is not in
itself an infirmity or a vice. Ambition can be legitimate and laudable. De gloria was written in the same year
as a pendant to De officiis.[123]
Cicero defined the nature of glory, no doubt showing how far, for all their
splendour and power, the principes
Crassus, Caesar and Pompeius had fallen short of genuine renown. The good
statesman will not imitate those military dynasts: but he needs fame and praise
to sustain his efforts for the Commonwealth-and he deserves to receive them in
full measure.[124]
Such were Cicero’s ideas and
preoccupations in the summer and autumn of 44 B.C. With war impending, Atticus
took alarm and dissuaded him from action. In November he urged his friend to turn
to the writing of history.[125]
Cicero was obdurate: he hoped to make history. Duty and glory inspired the
veteran statesman in his last and courageous battle for what he believed to be
the Republic, liberty and the laws against the forces of anarchy or despotism.
He would stand as firm as Cato had stood, he would be the leader of the Optimates.
It might fairly be claimed that Cicero
made ample atonement for earlier failures and earlier desertions, if that were
the question at issue. It is not: a natural and indeed laudable partiality for
Cicero, and for the ‘better cause’, may cover the intrusion of special and
irrelevant pleading. The private virtues of Cicero, his rank in the literature
of Rome, and his place in the history of civilization tempt and excuse the
apologist, when he passes from the character of the orator to defend his
policy. It is presumptuous to hold judgement over the dead at all, improper to
adduce any standards other than those of a man's time, class and station. Yet
it was precisely in the eyes of contemporaries that Cicero was found wanting,
incompetent to emulate the contrasted virtues of Caesar and of Cato, whom
Sallustius, an honest man and no detractor of Cicero, reckoned as the greatest
Romans of his time.[126]
Eager to maintain his dignitas as a
consular, to pursue gloria as an orator
and a statesman, Cicero did not exhibit the measure of loyalty and constancy,
of Roman virtus and aristocratic magnitudo animi that would have
justified the exorbitant claims of his personal ambition.
The Second Philippic, though technically perfect, is not a political
oration, for it was never delivered: it is an exercise in petty rancour and impudent
defamation like the invectives against Piso. The other speeches against
Antonius, however, may be counted, for vigour, passion and intensity, among the
most splendid of all the orations. But oratory can be a menace to posterity as
well as to its author or its audience. There was another side-not Antonius
only, but the neutrals. Cicero was not the only consular who professed to be
defending the highest good of the Roman People. The survival of the Philippics
imperils historical judgement and wrecks historical perspective.
Swift, confident and convincing, the Philippics carry the impression that
their valiant author stood in sole control of the policy of the State. The
situation was much more complicated than that, issues entangled, factions and personalities
at variance. The imperious eloquence of Cicero could not prevail over the doubts
and misgivings of men who knew his character and recalled his career. His
hostility towards Antonius was declared and ferocious. But Cicero’s political
feuds, however spirited at the outset, had not always been sustained with
constancy.[127] Cicero might rail at the
consulars: but the advocates of concord and a settlement based upon compromise
were neither fools nor traitors. If they followed Cicero there was no telling
where they would end. When Republicans both distrusted the politician and disapproved
of his methods, the attitude of the Caesarians could be surmised: yet
Caesarians themselves were divided in allegiance, for Antonius, for Octavianus,
or for peace. The new consuls had a policy of their own, if only they were
strong enough to achieve it.
Public pronouncements on matters of
high policy, however partisan in tone, cannot altogether suppress the arguments
of the other side, whether they employ to that end calumny or silence: they
often betray what they strive most carefully to conceal. But certain topics,
not the least important, may never come up for open debate. The Senate listened
to speeches and passed decrees; the Republic, liberated from military despotism,
entered into the possession of its rights again: that is to say, behind the
scenes private ambition, family politics and high finance were at their old
games. Cicero and the ambiguous contest of the Republic against a recalcitrant
proconsul occupy the stage and command the attention of history: in the
background, emerging from time to time, Philippus, Servilius and other
schemers, patent but seldom noticed, and Balbus never even named.
In Cicero the Republic possessed a
fanatical and dangerous champion, boldly asserting his responsibility for the
actions of Octavianus.[128]
His policy violated public law – with what chance of success on a long
calculation, or even on a short? Of the wisdom of raising up Caesar’s heir,
through violence and illegal arms against Antonius, there were clearly two
opinions. Octavianus marched on Rome. Where was Brutus? What a chance he was
missing![129] When Brutus heard of
these alarming transactions, he protested bitterly.[130]
Whatever be thought of those qualities which contemporaries admired as the
embodiment of aristocratic virtus
(without always being able to prevail against posterity or the moral standards
of another age), Brutus was not only a sincere and consistent champion of
legality, but in this matter all too perspicacious a judge of men and politics.
Civil war was an abomination. Victory could only be won by adopting the adversary’s
weapons; and victory no less than defeat would be fatal to everything that an
honest man and a patriot valued. But Brutus was far away.
Winter held up warfare in the north,
with leisure for grim reflections. When Hirtius brought to completion the
commentaries of Caesar, he confessed that he could see no end to civil strife.[131]
Men recalled not Caesar only but Lepidus and armies raised in the name of
liberty, the deeds of Pompeius, and a Brutus besieged at Mutina. There was no
respite: at Rome the struggle was prosecuted, in secret intrigue and open
debate, veiled under the name of legality, of justice, of country.
XI. Political
Catchwords
In Rome of the Republic, not constrained
by any law of libel, the literature of politics was seldom dreary, hypocritical
or edifying. Persons, not programmes, came before the People for their
judgement and approbation. The candidate seldom made promises. Instead, he
claimed office as a reward, boasting loudly of ancestors or, failing that
prerogative, of his own merits. Again, the law-courts were an avenue for
political advancement through prosecution, a battle-ground for private enmities
and political feuds, a theatre for oratory. The best of arguments was personal
abuse. In the allegation of disgusting immorality, de- grading pursuits and
ignoble origin the Roman politician knew no compunction or limit. Hence the
alarming picture of contemporary society revealed by oratory, invective and
lampoon.
Crime, vice and corruption in the last
age of the Republic are embodied in types as perfect of their kind as are the
civic and moral paragons of early days; which is fitting, for the evil and the good
are both the fabrication of skilled literary artists. Catilina is the perfect
monster – murder and debauchery of every degree. Clodius inherited his policy
and his character; and Clodia committed incest with her brother and poisoned
her husband. The enormities of P. Vatinius ranged from human sacrifices to the wearing
of a black toga at a banquet.[132]
Piso and Gabinius were a brace of vultures, rapacious and obscene.[133]
Piso to public view seemed all eyebrows and antique gravity. What
dissimulation, what inner turpitude and nameless orgies within four walls! As domestic
chaplain and preceptor in vice, Piso hired an Epicurean philosopher, and,
corrupting the corrupt, compelled him to write indecent verses.[134]
This at Rome: in his province lust was matched with cruelty. Virgins of the
best families at Byzantium cast themselves down wells to escape the vile
proconsul;[135] and the blameless chieftains
of Balkan tribes, loyal allies of the Roman People, were foully done to death.[136]
Piso’s colleague Gabinius curled his hair, gave exhibitions of dancing at
fashionable dinner-parties and brutally impeded the lawful occupations of
important Roman financiers in Syria.[137]
Marcus Antonius was not merely a ruffian and a gladiator, a drunkard and a debauchee-he
was effeminate and a coward. Instead of fighting at Caesar's side in Spain, he
lurked at Rome. How different was gallant young Dolabella![138]
The supreme enormity – Antonius, by demonstrative affection towards his own
wife, made a mock of Roman decorum and decency.[139]
There were more damaging charges than
mere vice in Roman public life-the lack of ancestors, the taint of trade or the
stage, the shame of municipal origin. On the paternal side, the
greatgrandfather of Octavianus was a freedman, a rope-maker; on the maternal, a
sordid person of native African extraction, a baker or seller of perfumes at
Aricia.[140] As for Piso, his
grandfather did not come from the ancient colony of Placentia at all – it was
Mediolanium, and he was an Insubrian Gaul exercising the ill-famed profession
of auctioneer:[141] or stay, worse than
that, he had immigrated thither from the land of trousered Gauls beyond the
Alps.[142]
The exigencies of an advocate’s
practice or the fluctuations of personal and party allegiance produce startling
conflicts of testimony and miraculous metamorphoses of character. Catilina was not
a monster after all: a blended and enigmatic individual, he possessed many
virtues, which for a time had deceived excellent and unsuspecting persons,
including Cicero himself.[143]
So the orator, when defending Caelius the wayward and fashionable youth. The
speeches in defence of Vatinius and Gabinius have not been preserved. One
learns, however, that the strange garb of Vatinius was merely the badge of
devout but harmless Pythagorean practices;[144]
and Gabinius had once been called a ‘vir fortis’, a pillar of Rome’s empire and
honour.[145] L. Piso, for his stand against
Antonius, acquires the temporary label of a good citizen, only to lapse before
long, damned for a misguided policy of conciliation; and casual evidence
reveals the fact that Piso’s Epicurean familiar was no other than the
unimpeachable Philodemus from Gadara, a town in high repute for literature and
learning.[146] Antonius had attacked
Dolabella, alleging acts of adultery. Shameless and wicked lie![147]
A few months pass and Dolabella, by changing his politics, betrays his true
colours, as detestable as Antonius. From youth he had revelled in cruelty: such
had been his lusts that no modest person could mention them.[148]
In the professed ideals of a landed
aristocracy earned wealth was sordid and degrading. But if the enterprise and
the profits are large enough, bankers and merchants may be styled the flower of
society, the pride of the Empire:[149]
they earn a dignitas of their own and
claim virtues above their station, even the magnitudo
animi of the governing class.[150]
Municipal origin becomes not merely respectable but even an occasion for just
pride – why we all come from the municipia![151]
Likewise the foreigner. Decidius Saxa is derided as a wild Celtiberian:[152]
he was a partisan of Antonius. Had he been on the right side, he would have
been praised no less than that man from Gades, the irreproachable Balbus. Would
that all good men and champions of Rome’s empire might become her citizens!
Where a man came from did not matter at all at Rome – it had never mattered![153]
From the grosser forms of abuse and
misrepresentation the hardy tribe of Roman politicians soon acquired immunity.
They were protected by long familiarity, by a sense of humour, or by skill at
retaliation. Certain charges, believed or not, became standard jests, treasured
by friends as well as enemies. Ventidius was called a muleteer:[154]
the fullest elaboration on that theme belongs to a time when it could do him no
harm.[155]
Nor was it Caesar’s enemies but his beloved soldiery who devised the
appropriate songs of licence at Caesar’s triumph.[156]
The victims of invective did not
always suffer discredit or damage. On the contrary. The Romans possessed a
feeling for humour and a strong sense of the dramatic; and Cicero enjoyed among
contemporaries an immense reputation as a wit and as a humourist. Cato had to
acknowledge it.[157]
The politician Vatinius could give as good as he got – he seems to have borne
Cicero no malice for the speech In
Vatinium.[158] It was a point of honour
a liberal society to take these things gracefully. Caesar was sensitive to
slander: but he requited Catullus for lampoons of unequalled vigour and
indecency by inviting the poet to dinner.[159]
Freedom of speech was an essential part of the Republican virtue libertas, to be regretted more than
political freedom when both were abolished. For the sake of peace and the
common good, all power had to pass to one man. That was not the worst feature of
monarchy – it was the growth of servility and adulation.
Men practised, however, a more subtle
art of misrepresentation, which, if it could not deceive the hardened adept at
the game Roman politics, none the less might influence the innocent the
neutral. Merely to accuse one's opponents of aiming at regnum or dominatio that
was too simple, too crude. It had all been heard before: but it might be hard
to resist the deceitful assertions of a party who claimed to be the champions
of liberty and the laws, of peace and legitimate government. That was precisely
the question at Rome – where and what was the legitimate authority that could
demand the unquestioning loyalty of all good citizens?
Rome had an unwritten constitution:
that is to say, according to the canons of Greek political thought, no
constitution at all. This meant that a revolution could be carried through
without any violation of legal and constitutional form. The Principate of
Augustus was justified by the spirit, and fitted to the fabric, of the Roman
constitution: no paradox, but the supreme and authentic revelation of what each
was worth.
The realities of Roman politics were
overlaid with a double coating of deceit, democratic and aristocratic. In
theory, the People was ultimately sovran, but the spirit of the constitution was
held to be aristocratic. In fact, oligarchy ruled through consent and
prescription. There were two principles of authority, in theory working in
harmony, the libertas of the People
and the auctoritas of the Senate:
either of them could be exploited in politics, as a source of power or as a
plea in justification.
[...]
There is a melancholy truth in the
judgement of the historian Sallustius. After Pompeius and Crassus had restored
the power of the tribunate, Roman politicians, whether they asserted the People’s
rights or the Senate’s, were acting a pretence: they strove for power only.[160]
Sallustius soon went deeper in his pessimism. The root of the trouble lay a
century back, after the fall of Carthage, Rome’s last rival for world-empire.
Since then a few ambitious individuals exploited the respectable names of Senate
and People as a mask for personal domination. The names of good citizens and
bad became partisan appellations; wealth and the power to do harm gave to the
champions of the existing order the advantage of nomenclature.[161]
The political cant of a country is
naturally and always most strongly in evidence on the side of vested interests.
In times of peace and prosperity it commands a wide measure of acquiescence, even
of belief. Revolution rends the veil. But the Revolution did not impede or
annul the use of political fraud at Rome. On the contrary, the vocabulary was
furbished up and adapted to a more modern and deadly technique. As commonly in
civil strife and class-war, the relation between words and facts was inverted.[162]
Party-denominations prevailed entirely, and in the end success or failure
became the only criterion of wisdom and of patriotism.[163]
In the service of faction the fairest of pleas and the noblest of principles
were assiduously enlisted. The art was as old as politics, its exponents
required no mentors. The purpose of propaganda was threefold – to win an
appearance of legality for measures of violence, to seduce the supporters of a
rival party and to stampede the neutral or non-political elements.
First in value come freedom and
orderly government, without the profession of which ideals no party can feel
secure and sanguine, whatever be the acts of deception or violence in prospect.
At Rome all men paid homage to libertas,
holding it to be something roughly equivalent to the spirit and practice of
Republican government. Exactly what corresponded to the Republican constitution
was, however, a matter not of legal definition but of partisan interpretation. Libertas is a vague and negative notion
– freedom from the rule of a tyrant or a faction. It follows that libertas, like regnum or dominatio, is a convenient term of political
fraud. Libertas was most commonly
invoked in defence of the existing order by individuals or classes in enjoyment
of power and wealth. The libertas of
the Roman aristocrat meant the rule of a class and the perpetuation of
privilege.
Yet, even so, libertas could not be monopolized by the oligarchy – or by any
party in power. It was open to their opponents to claim and demonstrate that a
gang (or factio), in control for the moment
of the legitimate government, was oppressing the Republic and exploiting the
constitution in its own interests. Hence the appeal to liberty. It was on this
plea that the young Pompeius raised a private army and rescued Rome and Italy from
the tyranny of the Marian party;[164]
and Caesar the proconsul, trapped by Pompeius and the oligarchs, turned his
arms against the government ‘in order to liberate himself and the Roman People
from the domination of a faction’.[165]
The term was not novel. Nobody ever
sought power for himself and the enslavement of others without invoking libertas and such fair names.[166]
In the autumn of 44 B.C. Caesar’s heir set forth to free Rome from the tyranny
of the consul Antonius.[167]
His ultimate triumph found its consecration in the legend Libertatis p. R. Vindex; and centuries later when the phrase Vindex Libertatis appears on the
coinage, it indicates armed usurpation attempted or successful, the removal of
either a pretender or a tyrant.
It is the excuse of the revolutionary
that the Republic has succumbed to tyranny or to anarchy, it is his ideal to
bring back order again. The decisive act in a policy of treason may be described
as ‘laying the foundations of settled government’; and the crown of the work is
summed up in the claim that the Free State has been ‘preserved’, ‘established’
or ‘restored’.
Next to freedom and legitimate
government comes peace, a cause which all parties professed with such
contentious zeal that they were impelled to civil strife. The non-party
government of March 17th, 44 B.C., was inaugurated under the
auspices of concord and appeasement. It therefore became a reproach to be ‘afraid
of peace’, to be ‘enemies of peace’.[168]
In detestation of civil war, Republicans might honestly hold an unjust peace to
be better than the justest of wars. Then the fair name lost credit. So much
talk was there of peace and concord in the revolutionary period that a new term
makes its appearance, the word ‘pacificatorius’:[169]
not in a favourable sense. The word ‘pacificator’ already had a derisive ring.[170]
The friends of peace had to abandon
their plea when they spoke for war. Peace should not be confused with
servitude;[171] negotiations with an
enemy must be spurned because they were dangerous as well as dishonourable[172]
– they might impair the resolution of the patriotic front.[173]
Then war became just and heroic: rather than seek any accommodation with a
citizen in arms, any hope or guarantee of concord, it is better to fight and to
fall, as becomes a Roman and a Senator.[174]
In open war the language of peace and
goodwill might still suitably be employed to seduce the allies or adherents of
the opposing party. To establish concord among citizens, the most dishonest of
political compacts and the most flagrant treacheries were gaily consummated;
and devotion to the public good was supported by the profession of private
virtues, if such they should be called, being not so much ethical qualities as
standards of an order in society or labels of political allegiance. Virtus itself stands at the peak of the
hierarchy, transcending mores.
Roman political factions were welded
together, less by unity of principle than by mutual interest and by mutual
services (officia), either between
social equals as an alliance, or from inferior to superior, in a traditional
and almost feudal form of clientship: on a favourable estimate the bond was
called amicitia, otherwise factio.[175]
Such alliances either presupposed or provoked the personal feud which, to a
Roman aristocrat, was a sacred duty or an occasion of just pride.
[...]
XII. The
Senate Against Antonius
The Senate met on December 20th,
convened by tribunes on the specious pretext of taking precautions in advance
for the personal safety of the new consuls on the first day of the year, when
momentous transactions were announced – as though any individual or party
wished to strike down that worthy and innocuous pair, Hirtius and Pansa. The
true cause was probably an urgent dispatch from the governor of Cisalpine Gaul.
Though nothing could be done while
Antonius was still consul, Cicero seized the chance to develop a programme for
future action. Octavianus had no standing at all before the law, and Brutus was
insecure. Antonius was patently in the right when summoning him to surrender
the province. That point Cicero could not dispute. He therefore had resort to
the most impudent sophistries, delivering a solemn and patriotic panegyric upon
treason.[176] He demonstrated that if
a private army was raised against Antonius, if his troops were mutinous and
seditious, Antonius could be no true consul of the Roman People. On the other
hand, the adversaries of Antonius deserved full recognition, the soldiery
recompense in land and money.
The claim urged for D. Brutus might
perhaps be defended: he was at least a magistrate and held his province through
legal provisions, namely the acta of
Caesar the Dictator. But what of the official recognition of Caesar’s heir?
Senators could recall how twenty years before a consul had secured the
execution of Roman citizens without trial on the plea of public emergency and
the charge of levying armed forces against the State. Now the champion of the
constitution had become the ally of a Catilina, invoking on the side of
insurgents the authority of the Senate and the liberty of the People. Cicero
spoke before the People as well as in the Curia.[177]
There he boldly inverted the protests of Antonius: Antonius, he said, was an
assassin, a brigand, a Spartacus. He must be crushed and would be crushed, as
once Senate, People and Cicero had dealt with Catilina.
In brief, Cicero proposed to secure
legitimation, publica auctoritas, for
the privatum consilium, the illicit ventures of Octavianus and D. Brutus. This
meant usurpation of power by the Senate – or rather, by a faction in the Senate
– and war against the proconsul Antonius. That prospect was cheerfully
envisaged. What resources might be enlisted for the struggle?
The authority of the Senate was now to
be played against the People and the army commanders. As at present composed, with
its preponderance of Caesarians or neutrals, the Senate was prone to inertia, a
treacherous instrument if cajoled or coerced into action. It showed a lack of
personal energy as well as of social distinction.
[...]
The weakness of the Senate was
flagrantly revealed in the persons of its leading members, the ex-consuls,
whose auctoritas, so custom prescribed, should direct the policy of the State:
they are suitably designated as ‘auctores publici consilii’.[178]
Nowhere else was the havoc of the Civil Wars more evident and irreparable than
in the ranks of the senior statesmen. Of the Pompeian consulars, an eminent but
over-lauded group,[179]
only two were alive at the end of 44 B.С., Сіcего and Ser. Sulpicius Rufus. Nor
had the years of Caesar’s Dictatorship furnished enough consuls of ability and
authority to fill the gaps.[180]
This dearth explains the prominence, if not the primacy, that now at last fell
to Cicero in his old age, after twenty years from his famous consulate, after twenty
years of humiliation and frustration. In this December the total of consulars
had fallen to seventeen: their effective strength was much less. Various in
character, standing and allegiance, as a body they revealed a marked deficiency
in vigour, decision and authority. ‘We have been let down by the principes’; such
was the constant and bitter complaint of Cicero through the months when he
clamoured for war.[181]
‘The consuls are excellent, the consulars a scandal.’[182]
‘The Senate is valiant, the consulars partly timid, partly disloyal.’[183]
Worse than this, some of them were perverted by base emotions, by envy of
Cicero’s renown.[184]
[...]
The programme of Cicero had already
been established and made public on December 20th. On January 1st came the time
for action. Hirtius and Pansa opened the debate. It lasted for four days.
Calenus spoke for Antonius, Cicero for war;[185]
and L. Piso twice intervened on the plea of legality, with arguments for
compromise.
The result was hardly a triumph for
Cicero. One point, indeed, he carried-the troops of D. Brutus and of Octavianus
were converted into legitimate armies recognized by the State; the promises of
money made by Octavianus were solemnly ratified; in addition, dismissal after
the campaign and estates in Italy. It was also decided that governors should
continue to hold their provinces until relieved by the authority of the Senate.
This covered Brutus in the Cisalpina. As for Octavianus, Cicero, bringing
abundant historical parallels for the honouring of youth, merit and patriotism,
found his proposal outstripped by P. Servilius. The Senate adlected Octavianus
into its ranks and assigned to him, along with the consuls, the direction of
military operations against Antonius, with the title of pro-praetor.[186]
Further, by a special dispensation, he was to be allowed to stand for the consulship
ten years before the legal age. Octavianus was now nineteen: he would still
have thirteen years to wait. After this, the vote of a gilded statue on the
motion of Philippus was a small thing.
It was claimed by conservative
politicians and widely admitted by their adversaries that in emergencies the
Senate enjoyed special discretionary powers. The Senate had granted before now imperium and the charge of a war to a
man who had held no public office. But there were limits. The Senate did not choose
its own members, or determine their relative standing. On no known practice or
theory could the auctoritas of the Senate be invoked to confer senatorial rank
upon a private citizen. It had not been done even for Pompeius. That the free
vote of the People, and that alone, decided the choice of magistrates and hence
entry to the Senate was a fundamental principle, whether democratic or
aristocratic, of the Republican state.[187]
That was not the only irregularity
practised by the party of the constitution when it ‘established the Republic
upon a firm basis’. While consul, Antonius was clearly unassailable; when
proconsul, his position, though not so strong, was valid in this, that he held
his extraordinary command in virtue of a plebiscite, as had both Pompeius and
Caesar in the past.[188]
To contest the validity of such grants was to raise a large question in itself,
even if it were not coupled with the official sanction given to a private
adventurer against a proconsul of the Roman People.
The extreme proposal in Cicero’s
programme, the outlawing of Antonius, violated private as well as public law.
As Piso pointed out, perhaps with sharp reminder of the fate of the associates of
Catilina, it would not do to condemn a Roman citizen unheard. At the very least
Antonius should be brought to trial, to answer for his alleged misdeeds. In the
end the proposal of Q. Fufius Calenus, the friend of Antonius, was adopted.
Envoys were to be sent to Antonius; they were to urge him to withdraw his army
from the province of Brutus, not to advance within a distance of two hundred
miles of Rome, but to submit to the authority of the government.
This was a firm and menacing demand.
For the friends of Antonius, however, it meant that a declaration of war had
been averted; for the advocates of concord, a respite and time for negotiation.
Even now the situation was not beyond all hope. Caesarians and neutrals alike
may have expected the swift fall of Mutina. Against that fait accompli nothing
could be done, and Antonius, his rights and his prestige respected, might show
himself amenable to an accommodation. Seven years before a small minority
dominant in the Senate broke off negotiations with a contumacious proconsul and
plunged the world into war. The lesson must have provided arguments against the
adoption of irrevocable measures.
Under the threat of war a compromise
might save appearances: which did not meet the ideas of Cicero. That the
embassy would fail he proclaimed in public and prayed in secret.[189]
The embassy set forth. It comprised
three consulars – Piso, Philippus and Ser. Sulpicius, a respectable and
cautious jurist without strong political ties or sentiments. In the north
winter still held up military operations. At Rome politics lapsed for the rest
of the month. But Cicero did not relent. He proclaimed the revival of the
Senate's authority, the loyalty of the plebs and the unanimity of Italy. The
State now had spirit and leadership, armies and generals. No need for timidity
or compromise. As for the terms that the adversary would offer, he conjectured
that Antonius might yield the Cisalpina but cling to Gallia Comata.[190]
Deceptive and dangerous – there could be no treating with Antonius, for
Antonius was in effect a public enemy and beyond the law. Cicero himself had
always been an advocate of peace. But this was different – a just and holy war.
Thus to the Senate: to Octavianus and to D. Brutus, letters of exhortation.
The war needed men and money, vigour
and enthusiasm. Levies were held. Hirtius, though rising weak and emaciated from
his bed of sickness, set out for the seat of war and marched up the Flaminia to
Ariminum – but not to fight if he could avoid it. He might yet baffle both
Cicero and Antonius. But he could not arrest the mobilization. Patriotism and
private ambition, intimidation, fraud and bribery were already loose in the
land. All Italy must rally for the defence of the ‘legitimate government’:
attempts were therefore made to engineer a spontaneous consensus. The towns
passed decrees. The men of Firmum took the lead in promising money for the war,
the Marrucini (or perhaps rather a faction among them hostile to Pollio)
stimulated recruiting under pain of the loss of citizen rights. Further, a
distinguished knight and an excellent patriot, L. Visidius, who had watched
over Cicero’s safety during his consulate, not merely encouraged his neighbours
to enlist but helped them with generous subsidies.[191]
On the first or second day of February
the envoys returned, lacking Sulpicius, who had perished on the arduous
journey, and announcing terms that aroused Cicero to anger. ‘Nothing could be
more scandalous, more disgusting than the conduct of their mission by Piso and
Philippus.’[192] The conditions upon
which Antonius was prepared to treat were these:[193]
he would give up Cisalpine Gaul, but insisted on retaining Comata: that
province he would hold for the five years following, until Brutus and Cassius
should have become consuls and have vacated their consular provinces, that is,
until the end of the year 39 B.C., probably the date originally named in the
plebiscite of June 1st.
The proposal of Antonius was neither
unreasonable nor contumacious. As justice at Rome derived from politics, with legality
a casual or partisan question, he required guarantees: it was not merely his dignitas that he had to think of, but
his salus. The sole security for that
was the possession of an army. To give up his army and surrender at the
discretion of a party that claimed to be the government, that was folly and
certain extinction. Considering the recent conduct of his enemies at Rome and in
Italy, he had every reason to demand safeguards in return for compromising on
his right to Gallia Cisalpina under a law passed by the Roman People-to say
nothing of condoning the rank conferred upon a private adventurer. As for
Brutus and Cassius, he appears to have recognized their right to the consulate of
41 B.C. The breach was not yet irreparable.
The Senate was obdurate. They rejected
the proposals and passed the ultimate decree – the consuls were to take steps
for the security of the State. With the consuls was associated Octavianus. The
most extreme of sanctions, however, was reserved on the plea of the consular L.
Julius Caesar, the uncle of Antonius, an aged senator of blameless repute and
Republican sentiments. Pansa supported him. Antonius was not declared a public
enemy. But Cicero did not abate his efforts. As a patriotic demonstration he
proposed on the same day yet another statue in the Forum, for the dead
ambassador Sulpicius Rufus, thereby quarrelling with P. Servilius.[194]
A state of war was then proclaimed. It
existed already. For the moment, however, no change in the military situation
in the north. The eastern provinces brought news of sudden and splendid
success. While the Senate negotiated with Antonius, Brutus and Cassius had
acted: they seized the armies of all the lands beyond the sea, from Illyricum
to Egypt. About Cassius there were strong rumours in the first days of February:[195]
from Brutus, an official dispatch to the Senate, which probably arrived in the
second week of the month.[196]
After departing from Italy, Brutus
went to Athens and was seen at the lectures of philosophers. It may be presumed
that his agents were at work in Macedonia and elsewhere. He was aided by the
retiring proconsul of Macedonia, Hortensius, the son of the great orator – and
one of his own near relatives.[197]
When all was ready, and the decision at last taken, he moved with rapidity. The
quaestors of Asia and Syria, on their homeward journey, bearing the revenues of
those provinces, were intercepted and persuaded to contribute their funds[198]
– for the salvation of the State, no doubt. By the end of the year almost all
Macedonia was in his hands; and not only Macedonia – Vatinius the governor of
Illyricum had been unable to prevent his legions from passing over. Such was
the situation that confronted C. Antonius when he landed at Dyrrhachium to take
over the province of Macedonia at the beginning of January. Brutus quickly
defeated Antonius, drove him southward and penned him up in the city of
Apollonia.
Even more spectacular was the success
of Cassius. He went to Syria, a province where he was known and esteemed,
outstripping Dolabella. There he found six legions, under the Caesarian
generals Staius Murcus and Marcius Crispus, encamped outside the city of Apamea
which the Pompeian adventurer Caecilius Bassus was holding with a legion.
Besiegers and besieged alike joined Cassius. That was not all. The Caesarian A.
Allienus was conducting four legions northwards from Egypt through Palestine,
to join Dolabella. They too went to swell the army of Cassius.
[...]
On March 20th came dispatches from
Lepidus and Plancus, acting in concert with each other and presumably with
Antonius. Lepidus at least seems to have made no secret of his agreement with
Antonius: Antonius suppressed, he would be the next of the Caesarian generals
to be assailed. They protested loyalty to the Republic, devotion to concord. To
that end they urged an accommodation. Servilius spoke against it. Cicero
supported him, with lavish praises for the good offices of those patriotic and
high-minded citizens Lepidus and Plancus, but spurning all thought of
negotiation so long as Antonius retained his army.[199]
Cicero had in his hands an open letter sent by Antonius to Hirtius and
Octavianus, spirited, cogent and menacing. Antonius warned them that they were
being used by Pompeians to destroy the Caesarian party, assured them that the
generals stood by him, and reiterated his resolve to keep faith with Lepidus,
with Plancus and with Dolabella.[200]
Cicero could not resist the challenge to his talent. He quoted, mocked and
refuted the Antonian manifesto. On the same evening, in a tone of pained
surprise and earnest exhortation, he wrote to Plancus.[201]
To Lepidus he was abrupt and overbearing – ‘in my opinion you will be wiser not
to make meddling proposals for peace: neither the Senate nor the People approves
of them-nor does any patriotic citizen.’[202]
Lepidus did not forget the insult to his dignitas.
Such was the situation towards the end
of March. The efforts of diplomacy, honest or partisan, were alike exhausted.
The arbitrament now rested with the sword.
Through the month of February the
forces of the consul Hirtius and the pro-praetor Octavianus were encamped along
the Via Aemilia to the south-east of Bononia, at Claterna and at Forum
Cornelii. In March they moved forward in the direction of Mutina, passing
Bononia, which Antonius was forced to abandon; but Antonius drew his lines
closer around Mutina.
Octavianus and Hirtius avoided battle,
waiting for Pansa to come up with his four legions of recruits. Pansa had left
Rome about March 19th. Antonius for his part planned to crush Pansa separately.
He met and broke the army of Pansa at Forum Gallorum some seven miles
south-east of Mutina. In the battle Pansa himself was wounded, but Hirtius
arriving towards evening fell upon the victorious and disordered troops of
Antonius and retrieved the day, no soldier in repute or in ambition, but equal
to his station and duty. The great
Antonius extricated himself only after considerable loss. Octavianus, in the
meantime, held and defended the camp near Mutina. Along with Pansa and Hirtius
he received the imperatorial acclamation. Such was the battle of Forum Gallorum
(April 14th).[203]
Seven days later, Antonius was forced
to risk a battle at Mutina. He was defeated but not routed; on the other side,
Hirtius fell. In the field Antonius was rapid of decision. On the day after the
defeat he got the remnants of his army into order and set out along the Aemilia
towards the west, making for Gallia Narbonensis and the support of Lepidus and
Plancus, assured to him a month earlier, but now highly dubious.
At Rome the exultation was unbounded.
Antonius and his followers were at last declared public enemies. For the
victorious champions of the constitution, the living and the dead, new and extraordinary
honours had already been devised.[204]
A thanksgiving of fifty days was decreed to the immortal gods – unprecedented
and improper in a war between citizens, and never claimed by Sulla or by
Caesar. To a thoughtful patriot it was no occasion for rejoicing. ‘Think rather
of the desolation of Italy and all the fine soldiers slain’, wrote Pollio from
Spain.[205] Cicero had boasted in
the Senate that the Caesarian veterans were on the wane, no match for the
patriotic fervour of the levies of Republican Italy.[206]
When it came to battle at Mutina, the grim and silent swordwork of the veterans
terrified the raw recruits.[207]
The carnage was tremendous.
With a glorious victory to the credit
of the patriotic armies and all the provinces of the East in the hands of
Brutus and Cassius, the Republic appeared to be winning all along the line. The
victory at Mutina was deceptive and ruinous. The ingenious policy of destroying
Antonius and elevating Caesar’s heir commended itself neither to the generals
of the western provinces nor to the Liberators; Cicero and his friends had
reckoned without the military resource of the best general of the day and the
political maturity of the youth Octavianus. The unnatural compact between the
revolutionary leader and the constitutional party crumbled and crashed to the
ground.
XIV. The
Proscriptions
[...]
The rule of the dynast Pompeius in 60
B.C. and during the years following depended upon control, open or secret, of
the organs of government. Pompeius and his allies did not claim to be the
government or the State: it was enough that their rivals should be thwarted and
impotent. Caesar the Dictator pardoned his adversaries and facilitated their
return to public life. The Triumvirs, however, decided to root out their
opponents all at once, alleging in excuse the base ingratitude with which the Pompeians
requited Caesar’s clemency.[208]
The Caesarian leaders had defied public law: they now abolished the private
rights of citizenship no disproportionate revenge for men who had been declared
public enemies.
Rome shivered under fear and portents.
Soothsayers were duly summoned from Etruria. Of these experts the most
venerable exclaimed that the ancient monarchy was returning and died upon the
spot, of his own will.[209]
The scene may have been impressive, but the prophecy was superfluous. The three
leaders marched to Rome and entered the city in ceremonial pomp on separate
days. A Lex Titia, voted on November
27th, established the Triumvirate according to the Pact of Bononia. There were many
men alive who remembered Sulla. Often enough before now proscriptions had been
the cause of secret apprehension, the pretext of hostile propaganda, or the
substance of open menaces: ‘Sulla potuit, ego non potero?’ [What Sulla could
do, I can do][210] The realization
surpassed all memory and all fears. As if to give a measure of their
ruthlessness, the Triumvirs inaugurated the proscriptions by the arrest and
execution of a tribune of the Roman People.[211]
Roman society under the terror
witnessed the triumph of the dark passions of cruelty and revenge, of the
ignoble vices of cupidity and treachery. The laws and constitution of Rome had been
subverted. With them perished honour and security, family and friendship. Yet
all was not unrelieved horror. History was to commemorate shining examples of
courage or defiance, of loyal wives and faithful slaves;[212]
and tales of strange vicissitudes and miraculous escapes adorned the many
volumes which this unprecedented wealth of material evoked.[213]
For the youth of Octavianus, exposed
to an iron schooling and constrained through form of law and not in the heat of
battle to shed the noblest blood of Rome, compassion and even excuse was found
in later generations. He composed his own autobiography; other apologists
artfully suggested that the merciful reluctance of Octavianus was overborne by
the brutal insistence of his older and more hardened colleagues; and terrible
stories were told of the rapacity and blood-lust of Fulvia. It may be doubted
whether contemporaries agreed. If they had the leisure and the taste to draw
fine distinctions between the three terrorists, it was hardly for Octavianus
that they invoked indulgence and made allowances. Regrets there may have
been-to see a fine soldier and a Roman noble like Antonius reduced to such company
and such expedients. For Antonius there was some palliation, at least-when
consul he had been harried by faction and treason, when proconsul outlawed. For
Octavianus there was none, and no merit beyond his name: ‘puer qui omnia nomini
debes’, as Antonius had said, and many another. That splendid name was now
dishonoured. Caesar’s heir was no longer a rash youth but a chill and mature
terrorist.[214] Condemnation and
apology, however, are equally out of place.[215]
The Triumvirs were pitiless, logical
and concordant. On the list of the proscriptions all told they set one hundred
and thirty senators and a great number of Roman knights.[216]
Their victory was the victory of a party.[217]
Yet it was not their principal purpose to wipe out utterly both political
adversaries and dissentient neutrals; and the total of victims was probably
never as high as was believed with horror at the time, or uncritically since,
perpetuated in fiction and in history; and in later days, personal danger and
loss of estates were no doubt invented or enhanced by many astute individuals
who owed security, if not enrichment, to the Caesarian party.
Roman class-feeling and the common
sentiments of humanity were revolted when Lepidus sacrificed his brother
Paullus, Antonius his uncle, the elderly and blameless Republican L. Julius Caesar.
Yet neither of these men perished, and the murderers claimed only one consular
victim, M. Tullius Cicero. The Caesarian leaders proscribed their relatives – and
other personages of distinction – more as a pledge of solidarity among
themselves and to inspire terror among enemies and malcontents than from thirst
for blood. Many of the proscribed got safely away and took refuge with the
Liberators in the East or with Sex. Pompeius on the western seas and in the
islands. There had been delay and warning enough. For the Triumvirs it was
expedient to drive their political enemies out of the land, thus precluding any
armed insurrection in Italy when they settled accounts with the Liberators.
Cicero could have escaped-through indecision he lingered until too late. His
murder disgraced the Triumvirs and enriched literature with an immortal theme.[218]
But the fugitives could not take their
property with them; some of the proscribed remained in Italy, under collusion
and protection, or returned soon, saving their lives but making a sacrifice in
money.[219] There had been an
extenuating feature of faction contests at Rome – the worst extremities could
sometimes be avoided, among the aristocracy at least. Sulla had many enemies among
the nobiles, but certain of the more
eminent, through family connexions and social influence, had been able to evade
proscription, such as the father of Brutus and others. The decadence of legal
authority and the ever-present threat of civil war enhanced the value of the
personal tie and led men to seek powerful protection in advance. The banker
Atticus was not put on the list even for form’s sake or as a warning to others:
he had recently shown conspicuous kindness to the wife and family of Antonius
the public enemy, thereby incurring blame in certain circles,[220]
but trusting his own judgement; and he had already secured a guarantee for the
event of a Republican victory by protecting the mother of Brutus.[221]
Atticus was also able to save the knight L. Julius Calidus, famed as a poet,
but only among his contemporaries;[222]
and the aged M. Terentius Varro, once a soldier and a governor of provinces,
but now a peaceful antiquary, found harbourage in the house of Calenus.[223]
Foresight and good investments
preserved Atticus: his wealth alone should have procured his doom. The
Caesarian party was fighting the Republicans at Rome as it was soon to fight
them in the East. But the struggle was not purely political in character: it
came to resemble a class-war and in the process transformed and consolidated
the Caesarian party.
[...]
XV. Philippi
and Perusia
On the first day of the new year
Senate and magistrates took a solemn oath to maintain the acts of Caesar the
Dictator. More than this, Caesar was enrolled among the gods of the Roman State.[224]
In the Forum a temple was to be built to the new deity, Divus Julius; and another law made provision for the cult in the towns
of Italy.[225] The young Caesar could
now designate himself ‘Divi filius’.
Under the sign of the avenging of
Caesar, the Caesarian armies made ready for war. The leaders decided to employ
twenty-eight legions. Eight of these they dispatched in advance across the Adriatic
under C. Norbanus Flaccus and L. Decidius Saxa, who marched along the Via
Egnatia across Macedonia, passed Philippi, and took up a favourable position.
Antonius and Octavianus proposed to follow. Their colleague Lepidus was left
behind in nominal charge of Rome and Italy. The real control rested with Antonius,
for one of his partisans, Calenus, seems to have commanded two legions
established in Italy,[226]
while Pollio held the Cisalpina with a strong army.[227]
At first there was delay. Octavianus
turned aside to deal with Sex. Pompeius, who by now had won possession of all
Sicily, sending Salvidienus against him.[228]
Lack of ships frustrated an invasion of the island. As for Antonius, he was
held up at Brundisium by a hostile navy under the Republican admiral Staius
Murcus. When Octavianus arrived, the Caesarian fleet was strong enough to force
the passage. Their supremacy at sea was short-lived. Pompeius, it is true, did
not intervene; but Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus, coming up with a large part of the
fleet of Brutus and Cassius, reinforced Murcus and won complete control of the
seas between Italy and the Balkans. The communications of the Caesarians were
cut: they must advance and hope for a speedy decision on land. Antonius pressed
on: the young Caesar, prostrate from illness, lingered at Dyrrhachium.
In the meantime, Brutus and Cassius
had been gathering the wealth and the armies of the East. Not long after the
Battle of Mutina, Brutus departed from the coast of Albania and marched eastwards.
A campaign in Thrace secured money and the loyalty of the native chieftains.
Then, crossing into Asia, he met Cassius at Smyrna towards the end of the year
43. Cassius had a success to report. He had encountered Dolabella, defeated him
in battle and besieged him at Laodicaea in Syria. In despair Dolabella took his
own life: Trebonius was avenged. Except for Egypt, whose Queen had helped
Dolabella, and the recalcitrance of Rhodes and the cities of Lycia, the Caesarian
cause had suffered complete eclipse in the East.
Brutus and Cassius now took counsel
for war. Even when Antonius joined Lepidus and Plancus, Brutus may not have abandoned
all hope of an accommodation with East and West so evenly matched between Republicans
and Caesarians, the doubtful prospect of a long and ruinous struggle was a
potent argument for concord. Brutus and Antonius might have understood each
other and compromised for peace and for Rome: the avenging of Caesar and the
extermination of the Liberators had not been Antonius’ policy when he was
consul. But with Caesar’s heir there could be no pact or peace.[229]
When the Caesarian leaders united to establish a military dictatorship and
inaugurate a class war, there was no place left for hesitation. Under this
conviction a Roman aristocrat and a Roman patriot now had to sever the ties of
friendship, class and country, and bring himself to inflict the penalty of
death upon the brother of Antonius. When Brutus heard of the end of Cicero, it
was not so much sorrow as shame that he felt for Rome.[230]
For good reasons Brutus and Cassius
decided not to carry the war into Italy in winter or even in summer, but to
occupy the time by organizing their resources and raising more money: so several
months of the following year were spent in chastising Rhodians and Lycians and
draining the wealth of Asia. Brutus and Cassius met again at Ephesus. In the
late summer of 42 their armies passed the Hellespont, nineteen legions and
numerous levies from the dependent princes of the East.
Wisdom after the event scores easy
triumphs-the Republican cause, it is held, was doomed from the beginning,
defeat inevitable. Not only this Brutus was prescient and despondent, warned by
the ghost of Caesar. On the contrary, Brutus at last was calm and decided.
After the triumph of the Caesarian generals and the institution of the
proscriptions he knew where he stood.
Brutus himself was no soldier by
repute, no leader of men. But officers and men knew and respected the tried
merit of Cassius. The best of the legions, it is true, were Caesarian veterans.
Yet the soldiers welcomed Cassius when he arrived in Syria more than eighteen
months earlier, and rallied promptly. That was the only weak spot in the forces
of the Republic: would the legions stand against the name and fortune of
Caesar? From his war – chest Cassius paid the men fifteen hundred denarii a
head and promised more.[231]
For the rest, the prospects of Brutus
and Cassius left little to be desired. Their plan was simple-to hold up the enemy
and avoid battle. They commanded both the Ionian Sea and the Aegean. If they
were able to prolong the campaign into the winter months, the lack of supplies
would disperse the Caesarian legions over the desolate uplands of Macedonia or
pen them within the narrow bounds of an impoverished Greece.
Brutus and Cassius marched westwards.
Out-manoeuvring and throwing back the advance guards of the Caesarians under
Norbanus and Saxa, they arrived in the vicinity of Philippi, where they took up
a strong position astride the Via Egnatia, invulnerable on the flanks, which
rested to the north against mountains, to the south on a marsh. Brutus pitched
his camp on the right wing, Cassius on the left. They had leisure to unite and
fortify their front.
Then Antonius arrived. Working his way
through the marsh to the south around the flank of Cassius, he at last forced
on a battle. Octavianus had now come up-though shattered in health and never a
soldier, he could not afford to resign to Antonius the sole credit of victory.
The battle was indecisive. Brutus on the right flank swept over the Caesarian
lines and captured the camp of Octavianus, who was not there. A certain mystery
envelops his movements: on his own account he obeyed a warning dream which had
visited his favourite doctor.[232]
The other wing of the Caesarians, led by Antonius, broke through the front of
Cassius and pillaged his camp. Cassius despaired too soon. Unaware of the
brilliant success of Brutus on the right wing, deceived perhaps, as one account
runs, through a defect of his eyesight[233]
and believing that all was lost, Cassius fell upon his sword. Such was the
first Battle of Philippi (October 23rd).[234]
Both sides drew back, damaged and
resentful. There followed three weeks of inaction or slow manoeuvres in which
the advantage gradually passed to the Caesarians. Otherwise their situation was
desperate, for on the day of the first Battle of Philippi the Republican
admirals in the Ionian Sea intercepted and destroyed the fleet of Domitius
Calvinus, who was conveying two legions to Dyrrhachium.[235]
It was not the ghost of Caesar but an incalculable hazard, the loss of Cassius,
that brought on the doom of the Republic. Brutus could win a battle but not a
campaign. Provoked by the propaganda and the challenges of the Caesarians and impatient
of delay, officers and men clamoured that he should try the fortune of battle
again. Moreover, eastern princes and their levies were deserting. Brutus gave
way at last.
After a tenacious and bloody contest,
the Caesarian army prevailed. Once again the Balkan lands witnessed a Roman
disaster and entombed the armies of the Republic-‘Romani bustum populi’.[236]
This time the decision was final and irrevocable, the last struggle of the Free
State. Henceforth nothing but a contest of despots over the corpse of liberty.
The men who fell at Philippi fought for a principle, a tradition and a class – narrow,
imperfect and outworn, but for all that the soul and spirit of Rome.
No battle of all the Civil Wars was so
murderous to the aristocracy.[237]
Among the fallen were recorded the noblest names of Rome. No consulars, it is
true, for the best of the principes were already dead, and the few survivors of
that order cowered ignominious and forgotten in Rome or commanded the armies that
destroyed the Republic along with their new allies and peers in rank, Ventidius
and Carrinas. On the field of Philippi fell the younger Hortensius, once a
Caesarian, Cato’s son, a Lucullus, a Livius Drusus.[238]
Brutus, their own leader, took his own life. Virtus had proved to be an empty word.[239]
The victor Antonius stripped off his
purple cloak and cast it over the body of Brutus.[240]
They had once been friends. As Antonius gazed in sorrow upon the Roman dead,
the tragedy of his own life may have risen to his thoughts. Brutus had divined it
– Antonius, he said, might have been numbered with Cato, with Brutus and with
Cassius: he had surrendered himself to Octavianus and he would pay for his
folly in the end.[241]
When the chief men surviving of the
Republican cause were led before the victorious generals, Antonius, it is
alleged, they saluted as imperator,
but reviled Octavianus. A number of them were put to death.[242]
A body of nobles had fled to the island of Thasos, among them L. Calpurnius
Bibulus and M. Valerius Messalla.[243]
After negotiation they made an honourable capitulation to Antonius, some
entering his service. One of the friends of Brutus, the faithful Lucilius,
remained with Antonius until the end.[244]
The rest of them, irreconcilable or hopeless, made their escape and joined the
admirals of the Republic, Murcus and Ahenobarbus on the Ionian Sea and Sex.
Pompeius in Sicily.[245]
It was a great victory. The Romans had
never fought such a battle before.[246]
The glory of it went to Antonius and abode with him for ten years. The
Caesarian leaders now had to satisfy the demands of their soldiers for land and
money. Octavianus was to return to Italy to carry out the settlement of the
veterans, Antonius to regulate the affairs of the East and exact the requisite money.
About the provinces of the West they made the following dispositions, treating
Lepidus as negligible. Cisalpine Gaul, they decided, invoking or inventing a
proposal of Caesar the Dictator, must be a province no longer but removed from
political competition by being made a part of Italy.[247]
So Antonius promised to give up the Cisalpina: he retained Comata, however, and
took Narbonensis from Lepidus. Lepidus was also despoiled of Spain, for the
advantage of Octavianus, most of whose original portion was by now in the hands
of Pompeius. As for Africa, should Lepidus make complaint, he might have that
for his share. These engagements were duly recorded in writing, a necessary
precaution, but no bar to dishonesty or dispute. Antonius now departed to the
provinces of the East, leaving to his young colleague the arduous and unpopular
task of carrying out confiscation in Italy.
A victor, but lacking the glory and
confidence of victory, Octavianus returned to Italy. On the way he fell ill
again and lingered at Brundisium, too weak to proceed.[248]
Rumour spoke freely of his death. The rejoicing was premature: Senate and People
steeled themselves to celebrate instead the day of Philippi. Ailing, despondent
and under evil auspices, Octavianus took in hand the confiscation of Italian
property and the settlement of the veterans of Philippi, the remnants of
twenty-eight legions. Of the acts and policy of the dynasts, the share of
Caesar’s heir was arduous, unpopular and all but fatal to himself. No
calculation could have predicted that he would emerge in strength and triumph
from the varied hazards of this eventful year. The eighteen cities of Italy
marked down to satisfy the soldiery were not slow to make open protest: they
suggested that the imposition should be spread out and equalized. Then other cities
in alarm joined the ranks of discontent. Owners of land with their families
flocked to Rome, suppliant and vocal.[249]
The urban plebs cheerfully joined in manifestations against the unpopular
tyranny of the Triumvirs. In the Senate Octavianus proposed measures of
alleviation and compromise, with little effect save to excite the suspicions of
the soldiery. Riots broke out and his life was in danger.
Rome and all Italy was in confusion,
with murderous street battles between soldiers and civilians.[250]
Towns and local magnates armed in self-protection. The opposition to Octavianus
was not merely a revolt of middle-class opinion against the military despotism
of the Triumvirate or an interested alliance of the men of property against a
rapacious proletariat in arms: it blended with an older feud and took on the
colours of an ancient wrong. Political contests at Rome and the civil wars into
which they degenerated were fought at the expense of Italy. Denied justice and
liberty, Italy rose against Rome for the last time. It was not the fierce
peoples of the Apennine as in the Bellum
Italicum, but rather the more prosperous and civilized regions Umbria,
Etruria and the Sabine country, which had been loyal to Rome then, but had
fought for the Marian cause against Sulla. Now a new Sulla shattered their
strength and broke their spirit.
From Lepidus, his triumviral
colleague, and from the consul P. Servilius, Octavianus got no help. He was
actively hindered by the other consul, L. Antonius, who, aided by the faithful and
imperious Fulvia, the wife of M. Antonius, and his agent Manius, sought to
exploit the confusion in the interests of his absent brother.[251]
They played a double game. Before the veterans they laid the blame upon
Octavianus, insisting that a final decision be reserved for Antonius-for the
prestige of the victor of Philippi was overwhelming. On the other side, they
championed liberty and the rights of the dispossessed-again not without
reference to the popular name of M. Antonius and professions of pietas.[252]
Fulvia, if anybody, knew the character of her husband: he neither would nor
could go back upon his pledges of alliance to Octavianus. She must force him-by
discrediting, if not by destroying, the rival Caesarian leader, and thus win
for her absent and unsuspecting consort the sole power which he scarcely seemed
to desire.
Octavianus, while prosecuting the
policy of the Caesarian party, was in danger of succumbing to just such an
alliance of Caesarians and Republicans as he had stirred up against Antonius nearly
three years earlier. In alarm he sent his confidential agent, Caecina of
Volaterrae, and L. Cocceius Nerva, who was a personal friend of Antonius, on an
urgent mission to Syria.[253]
Caecina returned without a definite message, but Nerva stayed with Antonius.
As the year advanced the situation
grew steadily worse. The sentiments of the soldiery veered round to Octavianus
– where their interests clearly lay. Octavianus, for his part, divorced his unwelcome
and untouched bride, the daughter of Fulvia. But the consul and Fulvia, so far
from giving way, alleged instructions from M. Antonius, and prosecuted
Republican propaganda. Officers intervened and called a conference. A
compromise was reached, but the more important articles were never carried out.
War was in the air. Both sides mustered troops and seized temple-treasures. The
consul L. Antonius retired to the strong place of Praeneste in the
neighbourhood of Rome. And now the soldiery took a hand-Caesarian veterans from
Ancona, old soldiers of Antonius, sent a deputation and arranged a meeting of the
adversaries at Gabii, half-way between Rome and Praeneste. It was arrested by
mutual distrust and an interchange of missiles.[254]
Manius produced or invented a letter from M. Antonius sanctioning war, if in defence
of his dignitas.[255]
The consul marched on Rome, easily
routing Lepidus. He was welcomed by the populace and by the Senate with a
sincere fervour such as can have attended none of his more recent predecessors
when they had liberated Rome from the domination of a faction. But L. Antonius
did not hold the city for long. He advanced northward in the hope of effecting
a junction with the generals of his brother who held all the Gallic provinces.
Octavianus, with Agrippa in his
company, had retired to southern Etruria. His situation was precarious. He had
already recalled his marshal Salvidienus, who was marching to Spain with six
legions to take charge of that region. Even if Salvidienus returned in time and
their combined armies succeeded in dealing with L. Antonius, that was the least
of his difficulties. He might easily be overwhelmed by the Antonian generals,
strong in prestige and mass of legions.
But the Antonians were separated by
distance and divided in counsel. In Gallia Cisalpina stood Pollio with an army
of seven legions. The decision to abolish this province and unite the territory
to Italy had not yet, it appears, been carried out, perhaps owing to the
recalcitrance of Pollio, who had adopted an ambiguous and threatening attitude
earlier in the year. For a time he refused to let Salvidienus pass through the
Cisalpina on his way to Spain;[256]
and now he might bar the return of Octavianus’ best marshal and last hope. The
Triumvir’s own province, all Gaul beyond the Alps, was held for him by Calenus
and Ventidius with a huge force of legions: they, too, had opposed Salvidienus.[257]
But that was not all. The Republican
fleets dominated the seas, Ahenobarbus in the Adriatic, Murcus now with Sex. Pompeius.
Pompeius seems to have let slip his opportunity – not the only time. A
concerted effort of the Antonian and Republican forces in Italy and on the seas
adjacent would have destroyed Octavianus. But there was neither unity of
command nor unity of purpose among his motley adversaries. Antonius’ generals
in Italy and the western provinces, lacking instructions, doubted the veracity
of his brother and his wife.
Salvidienus made his way back from
Spain through the Cisalpina; Pollio and Ventidius followed, slow but menacing,
in his rear. The war had already broken out in Italy.[258]
Etruria, Umbria and the Sabine country witnessed a confusion of marches and
counter – marches, of skirmishes and sieges. C. Furnius sought to defend
Sentinum for Antonius: Salvidienus captured the town and destroyed it utterly.[259]
Nursia, remote in the Sabine land, held out for freedom under Tisienus Gallus,
but was forced to a capitulation.[260]
These were episodes: L. Antonius was the central theme. He sought to break away
to the north. Agrippa and Salvidienus out-manoeuvred him. Along with the
defeated generals Furnius, Tisienus and a number of Antonian or Republican
partisans, the consul threw himself into the strong city of Perusia and
prepared to stand a brief siege, expecting prompt relief from Pollio and
Ventidius. He was quickly undeceived. Octavianus at once invested Perusia with
an elaborate ring of fortifications. Then, marching north-eastwards with
Agrippa, he confronted Pollio and Ventidius, who, undecided and at variance, refused
battle and retired through the Apennines.[261]
Nor did help come from the south in time or in adequate strength. Plancus, another
of Antonius’ men, occupied with establishing veterans near Beneventum, enlisted
troops at the bidding of Fulvia,[262]
while the Republican Ti. Claudius Nero raised the standard of revolution in
Campania.[263] Plancus marched
northwards and took up a waiting position, as befitted his character, at
Spoletium.
Still no sign came from the East. In
Perusia the consul professed that he was fighting in the cause of his brother,
and his soldiers inscribed the name of Marcus Antonius as their imperator upon
their sling-bullets;[264]
those of the besiegers bore appeals to Divus Julius or uncomplimentary
addresses to Fulvia and to the bald head of L. Antonius.[265]
No less outspoken was the propaganda of the principals. Octavianus in verses of
‘Roman frankness’ derided the absent Antonius (not omitting a Cappadocian mistress)
and insulted his wife Fulvia.[266]
Further, he composed poems of traditional obscenity about Pollio, who evaded
the challenge with a pointed sneer at the man of the proscriptions.[267]
As the siege continued and hunger
pressed upon the defenders, Ventidius and Pollio resolved to attempt a junction
with Plancus and relieve Perusia. Marching across the Apennines, they were arrested
by Agrippa and Salvidienus at Fulginiae, less than twenty miles from Perusia – their
fire-signals could be seen by the besieged. Ventidius and Pollio were ready to
fight. The caution of Plancus was too strong for them.[268]
There was no mutual confidence in the
counsels of the Antonian generals. The soldierly Ventidius knew that Plancus
had called him a muleteer and a brigand; and Pollio hated Plancus. But there
was a more potent factor than the doubts and dissensions of the generals-their
soldiers had an acute perception of their own interests as well as a strong
distaste for war: it would be plain folly to fight for L. Antonius and the
propertied classes of Italy.
Pollio, Plancus and Ventidius
separated and retired, leaving Perusia to its fate. After a final and fruitless
sortie, L. Antonius made a capitulation (late in February?). Octavianus
received with honour the brother of his colleague and sent him away to be his
governor in Spain, where he shortly died.[269]
The city of Perusia was destined for pillage. The soldiery were thwarted by the
suicide of a prominent citizen, whose ostentatious pyre started a general
conflagration.[270] Such was the end of
Perusia, an ancient and opulent city of the Etruscans.
The captives were a problem. Many
senators and Roman knights of distinction had espoused the cause of liberty and
the protection of their own estates. It may be supposed that the escape of the
greater number was not actively impeded. The remainder were put to death-among
them Ti. Cannutius, the tribune who had presented Caesar's heir before the
people when he marched upon Rome for the first time.[271]
Death was also the penalty exacted of the town council of Perusia, with the
exception, it is said, of one man, an astute person who in Rome had secured for
himself a seat upon the jury that condemned to death the assassins of Caesar.[272]
These judicial murders were magnified by defamation and credulity into a
hecatomb of three hundred Roman senators and knights slaughtered in solemn and
religious ceremony on the Ides of March before an altar dedicated to Divus Julius.[273]
Where Caesar’s heir now stood, Italy
learned in horror at Perusia and in shame at Nursia. On the monument erected in
memory of the war the men of Nursia set an inscription which proclaimed that
their dead had fallen fighting for freedom. Octavianus imposed a crushing fine.[274]
The generals of Antonius dispersed.
Along with Fulvia, Plancus fled to Greece, deserting his army. Ventidius and
Pollio turned back and made for the coast of the Adriatic. Ventidius march and
movements are obscure. Pollio retired north-eastwards and held Venetia for a
time against the generals of Octavianus. Then all is a blank, save that he
negotiated with the Republican admiral Ahenobarbus, whose fleet controlled the
Adriatic, and won his support for Antonius.[275]
The partnership in arms of the young
Caesar, his coeval Agrippa and Salvidienus Rufus their senior had triumphed
over all hazards. Confronted by their vigour and resolution, the most eminent
and the most experienced of the partisans of Antonius had collapsed, two
consulars, the soldier Ventidius and the diplomatic Plancus, and one consul – for
the illustrious year of Pollio had begun.
Yet Octavianus was in no way at the
end of his difficulties. He was master of Italy, a land of famine, desolation and
despair. But Italy was encompassed about with enemies. Antonius was approaching
with an armament from the East, Antonius’ man Calenus still held all Gaul
beyond the Alps. On the coasts Ahenobarbus threatened Italy from the east,
Pompeius from the south and west. If this were not enough, all his provinces
were assailed at once. Pompeius drove out M. Lurius and captured Sardinia;[276]
in Hispania Ulterior Octavianus’ general Carrinas was faced by the invasion of
a Moorish prince whom L. Antonius and Fulvia had incited;[277]
in Africa the ex-centurion Fuficius Fango, fighting with valour and resource in
a confused war against T. Sextius, the former governor, who had remained in the
province, was at last overcome and killed.[278]
Caesar’s heir would soon be trapped and crushed at last. That way all odds
pointed and most men’s hopes.
In his emergency Octavianus sought aid
where he could, an accommodation with the master of the sea. He sent Maecenas
on a diplomatic mission to Sicily and gave pledge of his sentiments by taking
to wife Scribonia,[279]
who was the sister of that Libo whose daughter Sex. Pompeius had married. But
Pompeius, as was soon evident, was already in negotiation with Antonius.
Once again the young Caesar was saved
by the fortune that clung to his name. In Gaul Calenus opportunely died. His
son, lacking experience or confidence, was induced to surrender all Gaul and
eleven legions.[280]
Octavianus left Italy to take over this welcome accession: he placed
Salvidienus in charge of Gaul, confident in the loyalty of his friend.
When Octavianus returned towards the
end of the summer, it was to find that Antonius had come up from the East and
was laying siege to Brundisium, with Ahenobarbus and Pompeius as open and
active allies. The affair of Perusia had been sadly mismanaged. This time the
enemies of Octavianus had a leader. The final armed reckoning for the heritage
of Caesar seemed inevitable; for Rome the choice between two masters. Which of them
had the sympathy of Italy could scarcely be doubted; and, despite the loss of
the Gallic legions, the odds of war were on the side of the great Antonius.
XVI. The
Predominance of Antonius
The victor of Philippi proceeded
eastwards in splendour to re-establish the rule of Rome and extort for the
armies yet more money from the wealthy cities of Asia, the prey of both sides
in Rome’s intestine wars. He exacted nine years’ tribute, to be paid in two.
Antonius distributed fines and privileges over the East, rewarded friends and
punished enemies, set up petty kings or deposed them.[281]
So did he spend the winter after Philippi. Then his peregrinations brought him
to the city of Tarsus, in Cilicia. Through his envoy, the versatile Q. Dellius,
he summoned an important vassal, the Queen of Egypt, to render account of her
policy.[282]
Cleopatra was alert and seductive.[283]
Antonius, fresh from the Cappadocian charmer Glaphyra,[284]
succumbed with good will but did not surrender. The Queen, who was able to
demonstrate her loyalty to the Caesarian party, received confirmation in her possessions
and departed. Antonius, making necessary arrangements in Syria and Palestine,
passed leisurely onwards to Egypt. After a short and merry winter at
Alexandria, he left Egypt in the early spring of 40 B.C. That he had contracted
ties that bound him to Cleopatra more closely than to Glaphyra, there neither
is, nor was, any sign at all. Nor did he see the Queen of Egypt again until
nearly four years had elapsed.
On the havoc of intestine strife a
foreign enemy had supervened. The Parthians, with Roman renegades in their
company, poured into Syria and reduced the governor, Decidius Saxa, to sore
straits. Antonius arrived at Tyre. Of trouble in Italy, the most disquieting
rumours were already current: he soon learned that a new and alarming civil war
had broken out between his own adherents and the Caesarian leader.[285]
The paradox that Antonius went from
Syria to Egypt and lurked in Egypt, while in Italy his wife and his brother not
merely championed his cause and won Republican support, but even raised civil
war with a fair prospect of destroying the rival Caesarian leader, might well
seem to cry out for an explanation. It was easy and to hand – Antonius was
besotted by drink, the luxury of Alexandria and the proverbial charms of an
alien queen,[286] or else his complicity in
the designs of his brother was complete but unavowed. The alternative but not
incongruous accusations of vice and duplicity perhaps do less than justice to the
loyal and open character of Antonius, his position as the colleague of
Octavianus and the slowness of communication by sea in the dead of winter. Of
the earlier stages of the dissensions in Italy, Antonius was well apprised. He
could not intervenethe confiscations and the allotment of lands to the veterans
of Philippi were Octavianus’ share in a policy for which they were jointly
responsible. The victor of Philippi could not forswear his promises and his
soldiers. His own share was the gathering of funds in the East-in which perhaps
he had not been very successful.[287]
He felt that he was well out of the tangle. Of subsequent events in Italy, the
war in Etruria and the investment of Perusia, it may be that he had no
cognizance when he arrived at Tyre in February of the year 40, but learned only
after his departure, when sailing to Cyprus and to Athens.[288]
The War of Perusia was confused and mysterious, even to contemporaries.[289]
All parties had plenty to excuse or disguise after the event; and Antonius, if
adequately informed, may still have preferred to wait upon events.[290]
At last he moved.
The Parthian menace was upon him, but
the Parthians could wait. Antonius gathered forces and sailed for Greece. At Athens
he met Fulvia and Plancus. He heard the reproaches of the one and the excuses
of the other; he learned the full measure of the disaster. Whether for revenge
or for diplomacy, he must be strongly armed: he prepared a fleet and looked about
for allies. From Sex. Pompeius came envoys, with offer of alliance.[291]
Failing a general compact and peace that would include Pompeius, Antonius
agreed to armed co-operation. When he set sail in advance with a few ships from
a port in Epirus, the fleet of Ahenobarbus, superior in strength, was descried
bearing down upon them. Antonius drove on: Plancus was afraid. Ahenobarbus
struck his flag and joined Antonius.[292]
He had already been secured by Pollio.[293]
Brundisium, the gate of Italy, refused
to admit Antonius. He laid siege to the city. Then Sex. Pompeius showed his
hand. He had already expelled from Sardinia M. Lurius the partisan of Octavianus,
and he now made descents upon the coasts of southern Italy.
A complete revolution of alliances
transformed the visage – but not the substance – of Roman politics. Octavianus
the adventurer, after achieving recognition with Republican help against the
domination of Antonius, deserted and proscribed his associates before a year
had passed; again, at Perusia, he stamped out the liberties of Rome and Italy
in blood and desolation, and stood forth as the revolutionary leader, unveiled
and implacable. Antonius, however, a former public enemy, was now invading Italy
with what remained of the Republican armed forces. His admiral was Ahenobarbus,
Cato’s nephew, under sentence of death for alleged complicity in the murder of
Caesar; his open ally was Pompeius, in whose company stood a host of noble Romans
and respectable knights, the survivors of the proscriptions, of Philippi, of
Perusia.
With this moral support Antonius
confronted his Caesarian rival. For war, his prospects were better than he
could have hoped; and he at once demonstrated his old generalship by the sudden
and complete rout of a body of hostile cavalry.[294]
His brother had tried to defend the landed class in Italy from the soldiery;
and Antonius himself had been inactive during the War of Perusia. His errors
had enabled Octavianus to assert himself as the true Caesarian by standing for
the interests of the legions. But his errors were not fatal – Octavianus had
great difficulty in inducing the veterans from the colonies to rally and march
against Antonius; some turned back.[295]
Octavianus might command a mass of legions: they were famished and unreliable,
and he had no ships at all. Not merely did Antonius hold the sea and starve
Italy. Salvidienus with the armies of all Gaul was in negotiation and ready to
desert. If anybody, Salvidienus should have known how the odds lay. Once again,
however, the Caesarian legions bent the Caesarian leaders to their will and
saved the lives of Roman citizens. They refused to fight. On each side
deputations of soldiers made their wishes known.[296]
Tentative negotiations followed. As a sign of goodwill, Antonius sent away
Ahenobarbus, a compromising adherent, to be governor of Bithynia, and he
instructed Pompeius to call off his fleets. Serious conferences began. They were
conducted for Antonius by Pollio, the most honest of men, for Octavianus by the
diplomatic Maecenas. L. Cocceius Nerva was present, a friend of Antonius but
acceptable to the other party.[297]
Under their auspices a full settlement
was reached.[298] The Triumvirate was
re-established. Italy was to be common ground, available for recruiting to both
leaders, while Antonius held all the provinces beyond the sea, from Macedonia
eastwards, Octavianus the West, from Spain to Illyricum. The lower course of the
river Drin in the north of Albania, the boundary between the provinces of
Illyricum and Macedonia, formed their frontier by land. To the inferior Lepidus
the dynasts resigned possession of Africa, which for three years had been the
theatre of confused fighting between generals of dubious party allegiance. The
compact was sealed by a matrimonial alliance. Fulvia, the wife of Antonius, had
recently died in Greece. Antonius took in wedlock the sister of his partner,
the fair and virtuous Octavia, left a widow with an infant son by the opportune
death of her husband, C. Marcellus, in this year.
[...]
Such was the Pact of Brundisium, the
new Caesarian alliance formed in September of the year which bore as its title
the consulate of Pollio and Calvinus.[299]
It might not have happened: the armed confrontation of the angry dynasts at
Brundisium portended a renewal of warfare, proscriptions and the desolation of
Italy, with a victor certain to be worse than his defeated adversary and
destined to follow him before long to destruction, while Rome and the Roman
People perished, while a world-empire as great as that of Alexander, torn
asunder by the generals struggling for the inheritance, broke up into separate
kingdoms and rival dynasties. Was there no end to the strife of citizen
against citizen? No enemy in Italy, Marsian or Etruscan, no foreign foe had
been able to destroy Rome. Her own strength and her own sons laid her low.[300]
The war of class against class, the dominance of riot and violence, the
dissolution of all obligations human and divine, a cumulation of horrors
engendered feelings of guilt and despair. Men yearned for escape, anywhere,
perhaps to some Fortunate Isles beyond the western margin of the world, without
labour and war, but innocent and peaceful.
The darker the clouds, the more
certain was the dawn of redemption. On several theories of cosmic economy it
was firmly believed that one world-epoch was passing, another was coming into
being. The lore of the Etruscans the calculations of astrologers and the speculations
of Pythagorean philosophers might conspire with some plausibility and discover
in the comet that appeared after Caesar’s assassination, the Julium sidus, the sign and herald of a
new age.[301] Vague aspirations and
magical science were quickly adopted for purposes of propaganda by the rulers
of the world. Already coins of the year 43 B.C. bear symbols of power,
fertility and the Golden Age.[302]
It was in this atmosphere of Messianic
hopes, made real by the coming of peace and glorious with relief and rejoicing,
that the poet Virgil composed the most famous and the most enigmatic of his
pastoral poems. The Fourth Eclogue
hails the approach of a new era, not merely to begin with the consulate of his
patron Pollio but very precisely to be inaugurated by Pollio, ‘te duce’. The
Golden Age is to be fulfilled, or at least inaugurated, by a child soon to be
born.
The child appears to be something more
than a personification of an era in its infancy, its parents likewise are
neither celestial nor apocalyptic, but a Roman father with virtus to bequeath to his son, and a Roman matron.[303]
The identification of the child of destiny is a task that has exercised the
ingenuity – and revealed the credulity or ignorance – of scholars and
visionaries for two thousand years; it has been aggravated by a hazard to which
prophetic literature by its very nature is peculiarly liable, that of subsequent
manipulation when exact fulfilment has been frustrated or postponed.[304]
A string of Messianic candidates with
spurious credentials or none at all may summarily be dismissed. A definite
claim was early made. Pollio’s son Gallus (born perhaps in 41 B.C.) informed
the learned Asconius that, as a matter of fact, none other than he, Gallus, was
the wonder-child:[305]
no evidence that Asconius believed him. The Virgilian commentators in late antiquity
with confidence install a younger son of Pollio, Saloninus, who duly smiled at
birth and conveniently perished almost at once.[306]
Yet the very existence, not merely the relevance, of Saloninus may be called
into doubt;[307] further, there is no
reason to imagine that Pollio expected a son of his to rule the world, no indication
in the poem that the consul there invoked was shortly to become a father. The sister
of Octavianus had a son, Marcellus, by her consular husband; but Marcellus was
born two years earlier.[308]
In 40 B.C. Octavianus himself, it is true, had contracted a marriage with
Scribonia; Julia, his only daughter, was born in the following year.
[...]
XVII. The
Rise of Octavianus
[...]
The Senate and People – for these
bodies might suitably be convoked for ceremonial purposes or governmental
proclamations – also decreed that a golden statue should be set up in the Forum
with an inscription to announce that, after prolonged disturbances, order had
been restored by land and sea.[309]
The formulation, though not extravagant, was perhaps a little premature. But it
contained a programme. Octavianus remitted debts and taxes; and he gave public
expression to the hope that the Free State would soon be re-established.[310]
It only remained for his triumviral partner to perform his share and subdue the
Parthians, when there would be no excuse for delay to restore constitutional
government. Few senators can have believed in the sincerity of such
professions. That did not matter. Octavianus was already exploring the
propaganda and the sentiments that might serve him later against Antonius,
winning for personal domination the name and pretext of liberty.
The young military leader awoke to a
new confidence in himself. Of his victories the more considerable part, it is
true, had been the work of his lieutenants. His health was frail, scanty indeed
his military skill. But craft and diplomacy, high courage and a sense of destiny
had triumphed over incalculable odds. He had loyal and unscrupulous friends
like Agrippa and Maecenas, a nucleus of support already from certain families
of the ancient aristocracy and a steadily growing party in Rome and throughout
the whole of Italy.
[...]
The young man became formidable. As a
demagogue he had nothing to learn: as a military leader he needed to show the soldiery
that he was the peer of the great Antonius in courage, vigour and resource. To
this end he devoted his energies in the years 35 and 34 B.C. Antonius might
fight the wars of the Republic or of private ambition far away in the East;
Octavianus chose to safeguard Italy. The victories of Antonius paled with
distance or might be artfully depreciated; his own achievements would be visible
and tangible.
It was on the north-east that Italy
was most vulnerable, over the low pass of the Julian Alps: and the eastern
frontier of the Empire between the Alps and Macedonia was narrow, perilous and inadequate.
Encouraged by Rome’s enforced neglect in nearly twenty years of civil
dissensions, the tribes of the mountainous hinterland extended their
depredations and ravaged northern Italy, Istria and the coast of Dalmatia with
impunity. The inheritance of Empire demanded the conquest of all Illyricum and
the Balkans up to the Danube and the winning of the route by land from northern
Italy by way of Belgrade to Salonika or Byzantium: such was the principal and
the most arduous of the achievements in foreign policy of the long Principate
of Augustus. But Octavianus’ time was short, his aims were restricted. In the
first campaign he conquered Pannonian tribes and seized the strong post of
Siscia, an advanced buttress for the defence of Italy; in the second he
pacified the coast of Dalmatia and subdued the native tribes up to the line of
the Dinaric Alps, but not beyond it. If war came, he would secure Italy in the
north-east from an invasion from the Balkans up the valley of the Save and across
the Julian Alps; and an enemy would win no support along or near the coast of
Dalmatia. These dangers had been threatened or experienced in Caesar’s war
against Pompeius Magnus. By Octavianus' foresight and strategy the double
object was triumphantly achieved.[311]
[...]
Meanwhile, the party grew steadily in
strength. In 33 B.C. Octavianus became consul for the second time, and his
influence, not total but at least preponderating, may perhaps be detected in the
composition of the consular list of that year, of unprecedented length: it
contains seven other names. Hitherto he had promoted in the main his marshals,
with a few patricians, his new allies from the families of the Claudii, the
Aemilii and the Scipiones. In this year the admiral Q. Laronius became consul;
the other six were commended by no known military service to the Triumvirs. Nor
did they achieve great fame afterwards, either the nobiles or the novi homines.[312]
Octavianus may now have honoured men of discreet repute among the Roman
aristocracy, or persons of influence in the towns of Italy: in both he advertised
and extended his power. L. Vinicius was one of the new consuls: he had not been
heard of for nearly twenty years. Complete darkness also envelops the career
and the allegiance of M. Herennius, from the region of Picenum, and of C.
Memmius, consuls in the previous year.[313]
To distribute consulates and triumphs
as patronage to senators, to embellish the city of Rome and to provide the
inhabitants with pure water or cheap food – that was not enough. The services
of Agrippa, the soldier and engineer, were solid and visible: the other
minister Maecenas had been working more quietly and to set purpose. It was his
task to guide opinion gently into acceptance of the monarchy, to prepare not
merely for the contest that was imminent but for the peace that was to follow
victory in the last of all the civil wars.
XVIII. Rome
under the Triumvirs
It was ten years from the
proscriptions, ten years of Triumviral despotism. Despite repeated
disturbances, the lapse of time permitted the Revolution (for such it may with
propriety be called) to acquire permanence and stability. The beneficiaries of
that violent process, dominant in every order of society, were in no way
disposed to share their new privileges or welcome intruders. In a Senate of a
thousand members a preponderance of Caesarians owed status and office, if not
wealth as well, to the Triumvirs; and a mass of Roman knights, by their
incorporation in that order, reinforced the bond between the higher classes of the
holders of property. Veterans by grant, and freedmen by purchase, had acquired
estates, sometimes with improvement of social standing, actual or in prospect:
after the Sicilian War Octavianus accorded to his centurions on discharge the
rank of town-councillors in their municipia.[314]
Hence certain symptoms of consolidation, political and social. There were to be
no more proscriptions, no more expulsions of Italian gentry and farmers. Many
of the exiles had returned, and some through influence or protection got
restitution of property. But the government had many enemies, the victims of
confiscation, rancorous and impotent at the moment, but a danger for the near
future, should the Republicans and Pompeians come back from the East, should Antonius
demand lands for the veterans of his legions, should the dynasts, fulfilling a
solemn pledge, restore the Republic after the end of all the wars. Though a
formidable body of interests was massed in defence of the new order, it lacked
inner cohesion and community of sentiment.
[...]
The pursuit of oratory, interrupted by
civil war, languished and declined under the peace of the Triumvirs, with no
use left in Senate or Forum, but only of service to overcome the recalcitrance
of armed men or allay the suspicions of political negotiators in secret
conclave. Few indeed of the consuls under the Triumvirate even professed or
pretended any attachment to eloquence; and such of them as deserved any
distinction for peaceful studies earned no honour on that account from a
military despotism. Among the earliest consuls, Plancus and Pollio made their
way as commanders of armies and as diplomats.[315]
In a free state the study of law and
oratory might confer the highest rewards. The practice of public speaking at
Rome had recently been carried to perfection when Hortensius, the master of the
florid Asianic style, yielded the primacy to the more restrained but ample and
harmonious style of Cicero, recognized as ultimate and classical even in his
own day. But not without rivals: a different conception and fashion of speech
was supported and defended by reputable champions, vigorous and intense yet
avoiding ornament and refined harmonies of rhythm, in reaction from Hortensius
and from Cicero alike. The young men of promise, C. Licinius Calvus, who stood
in the forefront of political speakers, and the spirited Caelius, were by no
means the only exponents of this Attic tendency in Roman oratory – at the best
all bone and nerve, but liable to be dry, tenuous and tedious.[316]
Caesar’s style befitted the man; and it was generally conceded that Brutus’
choice of the plain and open manner was no affectation but the honest
expression of his sentiments.[317]
Neither Brutus nor Calvus found Cicero firm and masculine enough for their
taste.[318]
Of those great exemplars none had
survived; and they left few enough to inherit or propagate their fame. Pomp and
harmony of language, artful variations of argument and ample development of
theme would scarcely have retained their hold upon a generation that had lost
leisure and illusions and took no pains to conceal their departure. But a
direct, not to say hard and truculent manner of speech would be well matched
with the temper of a military age. Some at least of the merits of the plain
style, which could claim to be traditional and Roman, might be prized and preserved
until threatened by a complete change of taste, by a reversion to Asianism, or
by the rise of a new romanticism. Pollio, after his triumph abandoning public
life, returned to the habits of a youth formed in the circle of Calvus and
Catullus, and in speeches and poetry reproduced some of their Republican vigour
and independence, little of their grace. His style was dry and harsh, carrying
avoidance of rhythm to the extremity of abruptness and so archaic that one
would have fancied him born a century earlier.[319]
Pollio and Messalla were reckoned the greatest orators of the new age.
Messalla, his rival, displayed a cultivated harmony and a gentle elegance well
suited to a period of political calm. The signs of the melancholy future of
eloquence were plainly to be read. Oratory would degenerate into the private practice
of rhetoric: in public, the official panegyric. Freedom of speech could never
return.
Freedom, justice and honesty, banished
utterly from the public honours and transactions of the State, took refuge in
the pursuits and relationships of private life. The revulsion from politics,
marked enough in the generation that had survived the wars of Marius and Sulla,
now gained depth, strength and justification. Men turned to the care of
property and family, to the studies of literature and philosophy. From the
official religion of the Roman People could come scant consolation in evil
days, for that system of ritual, act and formula, necessary in the beginning
for the success of agricultural and military operations, had been carefully
maintained by the aristocracy to intimidate the people, to assert their own
domination and to reinforce the fabric of the Commonwealth. Only philosophy
could provide either a rational explanation of the nature of things or any
comfort in adversity. Stoicism was a manly, aristocratic and active creed; but
the doctrines of Epicurus were available, extolling abstention from politics
and the cultivation of private virtue; and some brand or other of Pythagorean
belief might suitably commend itself to mystical inclinations.
How far Atticus and Balbus, who still
lived on without public signs of their existence, were susceptible to such an
appeal might well be doubted. The aged Varro, the most learned of the Romans,
the parent of knowledge and propagator of many errors, though not averse from
an interest in Pythagoreanism, or in any other belief and practice, was
sustained by an insatiable curiosity, a tireless industry. Long ago he deserted
politics, save for a brief interval of loyal service to Pompeius in Spain, and devoted
his energies to scholarship, taking as his subject all antiquities, human and
divine.[320] Caesar had invoked his
help for the creation of public libraries.[321]
Escaping from proscription, though his own stores of learned books were
plundered, the indefatigable scholar was not deterred. At the age of eighty, discovering,
as he said, that it was time to gather his baggage for the last journey,[322]
he proceeded to compose a monumental work on the theory and practice of
agriculture, of which matter, as a landowner with comfortably situated friends
and relatives, he possessed ample knowledge.
Though the varied compilations of
Varro embraced historical as well as antiquarian works, he had gathered the
materials of history rather than written any annals of note or permanence. The
old scholar lacked style, intensity, a guiding idea. The task fell to another
man from the Sabine country, diverse in character, attainments and allegiance,
C. Sallustius Crispus. From the despotism of the Triumvirate Sallustius turned
aside with disgust.[323]
Ambition had spurred his youth to imprudent political activity, a turbulent
tribune in the third consulate of Pompeius. Expelled from the Senate by the
censors of 50 B.C., he returned with Caesar, holding military command in the
wars and governing a province.[324]
The end of Caesar abated the ambition of Sallustius – and his belief in reform
and progress. He had once composed pamphlets, indicating a programme of order
and regeneration for the new government that should replace the narrow and corrupt
oligarchy of the nobiles.[325]
In his disillusionment, now that Rome had relapsed under a Sullan despotism,
retired from public life but scorning ignoble ease or the pursuits of
agriculture and hunting,[326]
he devoted himself to history, a respectable activity.[327]
After monographs on the Conspiracy of Catilina and the War of Jugurtha, he
proposed to narrate the revolutionary period from the death of Sulla onwards. Though
Sallustius was no blind partisan of Caesar, his aim, it may be inferred, was to
demonstrate how rotten and fraudulent was the Republican government that ruled
at Rome between the two Dictatorships. Not Caesar’s invasion of Italy but the
violent ascension and domination of Pompeius, that was the end of political liberty.
Sallustius studied and imitated the
classic document for the pathology of civil war, the sombre, intense and
passionate chapters of Thucydides. He could not have chosen better, if choice
there was, for he, too, was witness of a political contest that stripped away
all principle, all pretence, and showed the authentic features of a war between
classes. Through experience of affairs, candour of moral pessimism and utter
lack of political illusions the Roman was eminently qualified to narrate the history
of a revolutionary age.
Literary critics did not fear to match
him with Thucydides, admiring in him gravity, concision and, above all, an
immortal rapidity of narrative.[328]
He had certainly forged a style all of his own, shunning the harmonies of
formal rhetoric and formal rhythm, wilfully prosaic in collocation of words,
hard and archaic in vocabulary, with brief broken sentences, reflecting perhaps
some discordance in his own character. The archaisms were borrowed, men said,
lifted from Cato; not less so the grave moral tone, flagrant in contrast with
his earlier life. No matter: Sallustius at once set the fashion of a studied
archaic style and short sentences, ending abruptly;[329]
and he laid down the model and categories of Roman historiography for ever after.
Sallustius wrote of the decay of
ancient virtue and the ruin of the Roman People with all the melancholy
austerity of a moralist and a patriot. In assigning the origin of the decline
to the destruction of Carthage, and refusing to detect any sign of internal discord
so long as Rome had to contend with rivals for empire, he imitated Greek
doctrines of political development and did more than justice to the merits of
Senate and People in earlier days.[330]
There was no idealization in his account of a more recent period-he knew it too
well; and the immediate and palpable present bore heavily upon the historian,
imperatively recalling the men and acts of forty years before, civil strife and
the levying of private armies, conscription of slaves and servile wars,
unending contests in Sicily, Africa and Spain, sieges and destruction of
Etruscan cities, the desolation of the land of Italy, massacre for revenge or
gain and the establishment of despotic power.[331]
With the past returned all the shapes and ministers of evil, great and small – Vettius
the Picene, the scribe Cornelius and the unspeakable Fufidius.[332]
The young Pompeius, fair of face but dark within, murderous and unrelenting,
took on the contemporary features of a Caesarian military leader.[333]
Civil war, tearing aside words, forms
and institutions, gave rein to individual passions and revealed the innermost
workings of human nature: Sallustius, plunging deeper into pessimism, found it
bad from the roots. History, to be real and true, would have to concern itself
with something more than the public transactions of men and cities, the open
debate of political assemblies or the marching of armies. From Sallustius
history acquired that preoccupation with human character, especially in its
secret thoughts and darker operations, which it never lost so long as the art
was practised in the classical manner of the Roman and the senator, archaic yet
highly sophisticated, sombre but not edifying.
Men turned to history for instruction,
grim comfort or political apology, raising dispute over the dead. The
controversy about Cato began it. Then Caesar the Dictator became a subject of
literary warfare, for a time at least, until his heir discountenanced an
uncomfortable theme. Oppius and Balbus came forward to protect the memory of
their friend and patron.[334]
Nor was Sallustius unmindful of his own political career and arguments of
defence or apology: his testimony to the peculiar but contrasted greatness of
Caesar and Cato denied rank of comparison to Pompeius Magnus.[335]
The Pompeians retorted by scandalous imputations about the character of the
Caesarian writer.[336]
In Rome of the Triumvirs men became
intensely conscious of history, not merely of recent wars and monarchic
faction-leaders like Sulla, Pompeius and Caesar, but of a wider and even more menacing
perspective. They might reflect upon the death of Alexander the Macedonian, the
long contests for power among the generals his successors, the breaking of his
empire into separate kingdoms; and they could set before them the heirs and the
marshals of Caesar, owing no loyalty to Rome but feigned devotion to a created
divinity, Divus Julius, assuming for
themselves the names or attributes of gods, and ruling their diverse kingdoms
with the hazardous support of mercenary armies. There was fair evidence at hand
to confirm the deeply-rooted belief, held among the learned and the vulgar
alike, that history repeated itself in cyclical revolutions. For Rome it might
appear to be the time of Sulla come again; in a larger sphere, the epoch of the
kings who inherited the empire of Alexander. To discern which demanded no
singular gift of perspicacity: it is the merit of the least pretentious of
contemporary writers, Cornelius Nepos, who compiled brief historical
biographies designed for use in schools, that he drew the parallel so clearly
when alluding to the behaviour of the veteran armies.[337]
History and oratory furnished suitable
and indeed laudable occupation for members of the governing class: the retired
politician might with propriety occupy his leisure in recording momentous
events, himself no mean part of them, or in digesting the legal and religious
antiquities of the Roman People. The writing of Roman history, adorned in the
past by the names of a Fabius, a Cato, a Calpurnius, was so patently the pride
and monopoly of the senator that it was held a matter of note, if not of
scandal, when an inferior person presumed to tread such august precincts: a
freedman, the tutor of Pompeius Magnus, was the first of his class.[338]
So popular had history become. On the writing of poetry, however, the Roman
aristocrat, though he might turn a verse with ease, or fill a volume, set no
especial value. But it was now becoming evident that poetry, besides and above
mere invective, could be made an instrument of government by conveying a
political message, unobtrusive, but perhaps no less effective, than the spoken
or written word of Roman statesmen.
In little more than twenty years a
generation and a school of Roman poets had disappeared almost to a man. Lucretius,
who turned into epic verse the precepts of Epicurus, the passionate young lyric
poets Calvus and Catullus, all died shortly before the outbreak of the Civil
Wars. C. Helvius Cinna, the learned author of an elaborate and obscure poem
called Smyrna, was torn to pieces by the Roman mob in mistake for one of the assassins
of Caesar; Q. Cornificius, another Caesarian, orator and poet, perished in
Africa, commanding an army for the Re- public; neither Valerius Cato, the
instructor of young poets, nor M. Furius Bibaculus, who wrote epigrams, elegies
and an epic, were probably now alive. The origin of these poets was diverse.
Lucretius stands solitary and mysterious, but Calvus was a nobilis and
Cornificius was born of reputable senatorial stock. The rest all came from the
province of Gallia Cisalpina, Cato, it was alleged (perhaps falsely), a
freedman,[339] the others, however,
sons of wealthy families from the local aristocracies in the towns of the North-Verona,
Brixia, Cremona.[340]
The new poets, as they were called,
possessed a common doctrine and technique: it was their ambition to renovate
Latin poetry and extend its scope by translating the works or adapting the
themes and forms of the Alexandrine poets. In politics, likewise, a common
bond. Many of them had attacked in lampoon and invective the dynast Pompeius,
his ally Caesar and their creature Vatinius. With Caesar reconciliation was
possible, but hardly with Pompeius. Cornificius, Cinna, and others of their
friends were found on Caesar’s side when war came.
The men were dead, and their fashion
of poetry lost favour rapidly. Young Propertius came too late. The consular
Pollio, however, who had ties with the new poets, survived to write verses himself
and extend his patronage to others. Under the rule of the Triumvirate he was
known to be composing tragedies about the monarchs of mythical antiquity;[341]
before that, however, he had earned the gratitude of two poets, Gallus and
Virgil.
C. Cornelius Gallus, of native stock
from Forum Julii in Gallia Narbonensis, a province not unknown to Greek
culture, was an innovator in the Hellenistic vein, renowned as the inventor of Roman
elegy. He first emerges into authentic history when Pollio in a letter to
Cicero mentions ‘my friend, Cornelius Gallus’.[342]
The poet may have served as an equestrian officer on the staff of Pollio when
he governed the Cisalpina for Antonius (41–40 в.С.).[343]
To Pollio fell the duty of
confiscating lands in the north after Philippi; and Pollio is the earliest
patron of Virgil, who was the son of an owner of property from the town of
Mantua. Pollio's good offices may have preserved or restored the poet's estate
so long as he held Cisalpina, but the disturbances of the Perusian War
supervened, and whatever the truth of the matter, a greater than Pollio earned
or usurped the ultimate and enduring credit.[344]
Gallus, losing to a rival the lady of
his passion and ostensible source of his inspiration (he had inherited her from
another),[345] abandoned poetry for a
career of war and politics, disappearing utterly from historical record to
emerge after nine years in splendour and power. He had probably gone eastwards
with Antonius soon after the Pact of Brundisium:[346]
how long he remained an Antonian, there is no evidence at all.
Virgil, however, persevered with poetry,
completing his Eclogues while Pollio
governed Macedonia for Antonius. It was about this time, in the absence of
Pollio, that he was ensnared by more powerful and perhaps more seductive
influences.[347] Maecenas, whose
aesthetic tastes were genuine and varied, though not always creditable, was on
the watch for talent. He gathered an assortment of poets, offering protection,
counsel and subsidy. Virgil passed into the company and friendship of Maecenas.
Before long his poems were made public (38 or 37 B.C.). Maecenas encouraged him
to do better. The mannered frivolity and imitated graces of the Eclogues had
already been touched by contemporary politics and quickened to grander themes
when the pastoral poet celebrated in mystical splendour the nuptials of Antonius,
the peace of Brundisium and the end of all the wars. Maecenas hoped to employ
Virgil’s art in the service of Caesar’s heir. The heroic and military age
demanded an epic poem for its honour; and history was now in favour. Bibaculus
and the Narbonensian poet P. Terentius Varro had sung of the campaigns of
Caesar;[348] and a certain Cornelius
Severus was writing, or was soon to write, the history of the Bellum Siculum as an epic narrative.[349]
But the poet was reluctant, the patron
too wise to insist. Yet something might be done. It was folly not to exploit
the treasures of erudition that Varro had consigned to public use; if not the national
antiquities, then perhaps the land and the peasant. Varro’s books on
agriculture had newly appeared; men had bewailed for years that Italy was
become a desert; and the hardships imposed by the Bellum Siculum, revealing the dependence of Italy on imported corn,
may have reinforced the argument for self-sufficiency, and called up from the
Roman past a figure beloved of sentimental politicians, the sturdy
peasant-farmer. Varro, however, had described the land of Italy as no
desolation but fruitful and productive beyond comparison;[350]
Italy had barely been touched by the wars; and it would have been an anachronism
to revert from vine and olive to the growing of cereals for mere subsistence.
But Virgil intended to compose a poem about Italy, not a technical handbook; he
wrote about the country and the life of the farmer in a grave, religious and patriotic
vein.
Virgil was not the only discovery of
Maecenas. Virgil with short delay had introduced Horace to his new patron. In
the company of statesmen, diplomatists and other poets, such as the tragedian
Varius Rufus, they journeyed together to Brundisium, at that time when the
rulers of the world were to meet not far away at Tarentum (37 B.C.).[351]
Q. Horatius Flaccus was the son of a
wealthy freedman from Venusia, a city of Apulia, who believed in the value of
education and was willing to pay for the best. The young man was sent to
prosecute higher studies at Athens. The arrival of Brutus, noble, a patriot and
a friend of liberal pursuits, aroused enthusiasm in a city that honoured the
memory of tyrannicides. Horace was swept from the lectures of philosophers into
the army of the Liberators. He fought at Philippi, for the Republic – but not
from Republican convictions: it was but the accident of his presence at a
university city, at an impressionable age and in the company of young men of
the Roman aristocracy.
Defeat brought impoverishment and the
constraint to solicit and hold the petty employ of a scribe, with leisure,
however, and scope for literary occupations, in his earliest verses showing the
bitterness of his lot, until a balanced and resilient temperament reasserted its
rights. Horace now composed satires – but not in the traditional manner of
Lucilius. His subject was ordinary life, his treatment not harsh and truculent,
but humane and tolerant: which suited his own temperament. Nor would the times
now permit political satire or free attack upon the existing order in state and
society. Republican libertas, denied
to the nobiles of Rome, could not be
conceded to a freedman’s son.
Horace had come to manhood in an age
of war and knew the age for what it was. Others might succumb to black despair:
Horace instead derived a clear, firm and even metallic style, a distrust of
sentiment and a realistic conception of human life. He insisted upon modernity,
both in style and in subject, already setting forth in practice what he was later
to formulate as a literary theory – a healthy distaste both for archaism and
for Alexandrianism, a proper regard for those provinces of human life which lie
this side of romantic eroticism or mythological erudition. He wished to
transcend and supersede both the archaic Roman classics and the new models of
the preceding generation. Fashions had altered rapidly. A truly modern
literature, disdaining the caprice of individual tastes in love or politics,
would assert the primacy of common sense and social stability.
In Rome under the Triumvirs it was
more easy to witness and affirm the passing of the old order than to discern
the manner and fashion of the new. On the surface, consolidation after change
and disturbance: beneath, no confidence yet or unity, but discord and disquiet.
Italy was not reconciled to Rome, or class to class. As after Sulla, the
colonies of veterans, while maintaining order for the government, kept open the
wounds of civil war. There was material for another revolution: it had threatened
to break out during the Sicilian War.[352]
When public order lapsed, when cities or individuals armed for protection, brigandage
became prevalent: the retainers of an owner of land, once enlisted in his
defence, might escape from control, terrorize their neighbourhood and defy the
government. After the end of the campaigns in Sicily, Calvisius Sabinus was
appointed to a special commission to restore order in the countryside.[353]
With some success – a few years later charges of highway robbery outstanding
against certain senators could at last be annulled.[354]
The Caesarian soldiers were tumultuous
from pride in their exploits, conscious that by their support the government
stood or fell. Grave mutinies broke out in 36 and in 35 B.C.,[355]
harbingers of trouble before – or after – the contest with Antonius. Rome had
witnessed a social revolution, but it had been arrested in time. After the next
subversion of public order it might go farther, embracing not only impoverished
citizens but aliens and slaves. There had been warning signs. The conservative sentiments
of the beneficiaries of the proscriptions, newly acquired along with their
wealth and status, assumed the form of a dislike of freedmen and foreigners.
Aliens had served in the legions of the Roman People; and the dynasts were
lavish in grants of the franchise. In times of peace and unshaken empire the Roman
had been reluctant to admit the claims of foreign peoples: with insecurity his
pride turned, under the goad of fear, into a fanatical hatred.
The Roman could no longer derive
confidence from the language, habits and religion of his own people. It was
much more than the rule of the nobiles
that had collapsed at Philippi. The doom of empire was revealed – the ruling
people would be submerged in the innumerable hordes of its subjects. The revolutionary
years exposed Rome to the full onrush of foreign religions or gross
superstitions, invading all classes. T. Sextius, the Caesarian general in
Africa, carried with him a bull’s head wherever he went.[356]
The credit of omens and astrology grew steadily. The Triumvirs were powerless
to oppose – subservient to popular favour, they built a temple, consecrated to
the service of the Egyptian gods.[357]
When Agrippa in 33 B.C. expelled astrologers and magicians from Rome,[358]
that was only a testimony to their power, an attempt of the government to
monopolize the control of prophecy and propaganda.
Yet in some classes there was stirring
an interest in Roman history and antiquities, a reaction from alien habits of
thought. Inspired by the first beginnings of a patriotic revival, the new taste
for history might be induced to revert to the remotest origins of the Roman
People, august and sanctioned by divine providence; ancient legends could be
employed to advertise in literature and on monuments the glory and the
traditions of a family, a dynasty, a whole people;[359]
and a return to the religious forms and practices of Rome would powerfully
contribute to the restoration of political stability and national confidence.
The need was patent but the rulers of Rome claimed the homage due to gods and
masqueraded, for domination over a servile world, in the guise of divinity,
Caesar’s heir as Apollo, Antonius as Dionysus.[360]
It was by no means evident how they were to operate a fusion between absolute monarchy
and national patriotism, between a world-empire and the Roman People. The new
order in state and society still lacked its shape and final formulation.
This intermediate epoch showed in all
things a strange mixture of the old and the new. Despite the losses of war and
proscriptions, there was still to be found in the higher ranks of the Senate a
number of men who had come to maturity in years when Rome yet displayed the
name and the fabric of a free state. That was not so long ago. But they had
changed with the times, rapidly. Of the Republicans, the brave men and the true
had perished: the survivors were willing to make their peace with the new
order, some in resignation, others from ambition. Ahenobarbus with Antonius,
Messalla and other nobles in the alliance of Caesar’s heir, had shown the way.
The new monarchy could not rule without help from the old oligarchy.
The order of knights had everything to
gain from the coercion of the governing class and the abolition of active
politics: their sentiments concerning state and society did not need to undergo
any drastic transformation. The politician and the orator perished, but the
banker and man of affairs survived and prospered. Atticus by his accommodating
manners won the friendship of Caesar’s heir without needing to break with
Antonius a sign and portent of the unheroic qualities that commanded success,
and even earned repute, in the well-ordered state which he almost lived to see
firmly established.[361]
T. Pomponius Atticus died in 32 B.C., aged seventy-seven: at his bedside stood
old Balbus and Marcus Agrippa, the husband of Caecilia Attica.[362]
The lineaments of a new policy had
become discernible, the prime agents were already at work. But the acts of the
young dynast even now can hardly have foretold the power and splendour of the
future monarch. Antonius was absent from Italy, but Antonius was the senior
partner. His prestige, though waning, was still formidable enough in 33 B.C.;
and it is fatally easy to overestimate the strength and popularity that by now
had accrued to Octavianus. It was great, indeed, not so much by contrast with
Antonius as with his earlier situation. Octavianus was no longer the terrorist
of Perusia. Since then seven years had passed. But he was not yet the leader of
all Italy. In this brief lull when many feared the imminent clash and some favoured
Caesar's heir, none could have foreseen by what arts a national champion was to
prevail and a nation be forged in the struggle.
One thing was clear. Monarchy was
already there and would subsist, whatever principle was invoked in the
struggle, whatever name the victor chose to give to his rule, because it was
for monarchy that the rival Caesarian leaders contended ‘cum se uterque
principem non solum urbis Romae, sed orbis terrarum, esse cuperet.’[363]
XIX. Antonius
in the East
[...]
The clash was now imminent, with
aggression coming from the West, from Octavianus, but not upon an innocent and
unsuspecting ally. Both sides were preparing. The cause – or rather the pretext
– was the policy which had been adopted by Antonius in the East and the
sinister intentions thence deduced and made public by Octavianus and his band
of unscrupulous and clear-headed patriots. The territorial dispositions of 37–36
B.C., including the augmentation of the kingdom of Egypt, passed without
repercussion in Rome or upon Roman sentiment. Nor did any outcry of indignant
patriotism at once denounce the strange pageantry that Alexandria witnessed in
34 B.C. when Antonius returned from the conquest of Armenia.[364]
The Roman general celebrated a kind of triumph, in which Artavasdes, the
dethroned Armenian, was led in golden chains to pay homage to Cleopatra. That
was not all. Another ceremony was staged in the gymnasium. Antonius proclaimed
Ptolemy Caesar true son of the Dictator and ruler in conjunction with
Cleopatra, who was to be ‘Queen of Kings’ over the eastern dependencies. Titles
of kingdoms, not all of them in the power or gift of Antonius, were also
bestowed upon the three children whom Cleopatra had borne him. Hostile
propaganda has so far magnified and distorted these celebrations that accuracy
of fact and detail cannot be recovered: the resplendent donations, whatever
they were, made no difference at all to provincial administration in the East.
Yet even now Antonius’ acts and dispositions were not immediately exploited by
his enemies at Rome. The time was not quite ripe.
The official Roman version of the
cause of the War of Actium is quite simple, consistent and suspect – a just
war, fought in defence of freedom and peace against a foreign enemy: a
degenerate Roman was striving to subvert the liberties of the Roman People, to
subjugate Italy and the West under the rule of an oriental queen. An expedient
and salutary belief. Octavianus was in reality the aggressor, his war was
preceded by a coup d’état: Antonius
had the consuls and the constitution on his side. It was therefore necessary to
demonstrate that Antonius was ‘morally’ in the wrong and ‘morally’ the
aggressor. The situation and the phraseology recur in the history of war and
politics whenever there is a public opinion worth persuading or deceiving.
The version of the victors is palpably
fraudulent; the truth cannot be disinterred, for it has been doubly buried, in
erotic romance as well as in political mythology. Of the facts, there is and
was no authentic record; even if there were, it would be necessary further to
speculate upon the policy and intentions of Antonius, the domination which
Cleopatra had achieved over him and the nature of her own ambitions. A
fabricated concatenation of unrealized intentions may be logical, artistic and
persuasive, but it is not history.
Up to a point the acts of Antonius can
be recovered and explained. When he disposed of kingdoms and tetrarchies in sovran
and arbitrary fashion, he did not go beyond the measure of a Roman proconsul.
Nor did Antonius in fact resign to alien princes any extensive or valuable
territories that had previously been provinces of the Roman People. The system
of dependent kingdoms and of Roman provinces which he built up appears both
intelligible and workable.
Of the Roman provinces which Antonius
inherited in Asia, three were recent acquisitions. To Pompeius Syria owed its annexation,
Bithynia-Pontus and Cilicia an augmentation of territory. His dispositions,
though admirable, were in some respects premature. A province of Cilicia was
now shown to be superfluous. With the suppression of the Pirates vanished the principal
(and original) reason for a provincial command in the south of Asia Minor. The
province itself, vast in extent, and unprofitable to exploit, embraced
difficult mountain country with unsubdued tribes of brigands, Isaurian,
Pisidian and Cilician, eminently suitable to be left to the charge of a native
prince.[365] Amyntas was the man; and
the small coastal tract of Cilicia Aspera conceded to Cleopatra did not come
under direct Roman government until a century had elapsed.
A large measure of decentralization
was inevitable in the eastern lands. The agents and beneficiaries were kings or
cities. For Rome, advantage as well as necessity; and the population preferred
to be free from the Roman tax-gatherer. Caesar took from the companies of publicani the farming of the tithe of
Asia;[366]
he also removed Cyprus from Roman control and resigned it to the kingdom of
Egypt.[367] Antonius in his
consulate decreed the liberation of Crete;[368]
and his grant of the Roman franchise to the whole of Sicily might appear to
portend the coming abolition of another Roman province.[369]
The Triumvir pursued the same policy, to its logical end. The province of
Cilicia was broken up entirely. Kings in the place of proconsuls and publicani meant order, content and
economy – they supplied levies, gifts and tribute to the rulers of Rome.
The Empire of the Roman People was
large, dangerously large. Caesar’s conquest of Gaul brought its bounds to the
English Channel and the river Rhine and thereby created new problems. The
remainder of the northern frontier clamoured to be regulated, as Caesar himself
had probably seen, by fresh conquests in the Balkans and in Illyricum, as far
as the Danube. Only then and only thus could the Empire be made solid, coherent
and secure. In the West municipal self-government was already advancing rapidly
in Gaul and in Spain; elsewhere, however, the burden of administration would
impose a severe strain upon the Roman People. If the Roman oligarchy was to
survive as a governing class it would have to abate its ambitions and narrow the
area of its rule. Rome could not deal with the East as well as the West. The
East was fundamentally different, possessing its own traditions of language,
habit and rule. The dependent kings were already there: let them remain, the
instruments of Roman domination. Not their strength, but their weakness, fomented
danger and embarrassment to Rome.
A revived Egypt might likewise play
its part in the Roman economy of empire. It was doubly necessary, now that Rome
elsewhere in the East had undertaken a fresh commitment – a new province,
Armenia, with a new frontier facing the Caucasus and the dependent kingdom of
Media. Since the Punic Wars the new imperial power of Rome, from suspicion and
fear, had exploited the rivalries and sapped the strength of the Hellenistic monarchies.
Rome spread confusion over all the East and in the end brought on herself wars
foreign and civil. To the population of the eastern lands the direct rule of
Rome was distasteful and oppressive, to the Roman State a cause of
disintegration by reason of the military ambition of the proconsuls and the
extortions of the knights. The empire, and especially the empire in the East,
had been the ruin of the Republic.
Egypt itself, however much augmented,
could never be a menace to the empire of Rome. Ever since Rome had known that
kingdom its defences were weak, its monarchs impotent or ridiculous. Pompeius
or Caesar might have annexed: they wisely preferred to preserve the rich land
from spoliation and ruin by Roman financiers. Egypt was clearly not suited to
be converted into a Roman province: it must remain an ally or an appanage of the
ruler of Rome. Even if the old dynasty lapsed, the monarchy would subsist in
Egypt.
Antonius’ dispositions and Antonius'
vassal rulers were retained almost wholly by the victorious rival, save that in
Egypt he changed the dynasty and substituted his own person for the Ptolemies.
Caesar Augustus was therefore at the same time a magistrate at Rome and a king
in Egypt. But that does not prove the substantial identity of his policy with
that of Antonius. There was Cleopatra. Antonius was not the King of Egypt[370],
but when he abode there as consort of Egypt’s Queen, the father of her children
who were crowned kings and queens, his dual role as Roman proconsul and
Hellenistic dynast was ambiguous, disquieting and vulnerable. Credence might be
given to the most alarming accounts of his ulterior ambitions.
Was it the design of Marcus Antonius
to rule as a Hellenistic monarch either over a separate kingdom or over the
whole world? Again the argument is from intentions-intentions which can hardly
have been as apparent to Antonius’ Republican followers (a nephew and a
grandson of Cato were still with him) as they were to Octavianus’ agents and to
subsequent historians. It might be represented that Antonius was making
provision for the present, not for a long future, for the East but not for
Italy and the West as well.[371]
To absolute monarchy belonged divine honours in the East-but not to monarchy
alone: in any representative of power it was natural and normal. Had the
eastern lands instead of the western fallen by partition to Octavianus, his
policy would hardly have differed from that of Antonius. The first man in Rome,
when controlling the East, could not evade, even if he wished, the rank and
attributes of a king or a god. Years before, in the company of his Roman wife,
Antonius had been hailed as the god Dionysus incarnate.[372]
When he dwelt at Athens with Octavia,
Antonius’ behaviour might be construed as deference to Hellenistic
susceptibilities and politic advertisement. With Cleopatra it was different:
she was a goddess as well as a queen in her own right. The assumption of
divinity presented a more serious aspect – and perhaps a genuine religious
content. Dionysus – Osiris was the consort of Isis. But in this matter
exaggeration and credulity have run riot. When Antonius met Cleopatra at
Tarsus, it was Aphrodite meeting Dionysus, for the blessing of Asia, so one
account goes[373]; and their union has
been represented as a ‘sacred marriage’.[374]
A flagrant anachronism. That ‘ritual
marriage’, though fertile with twin offspring, lapsed after a winter, leaving
no political consequences. By 33 B.C., however, the ambition of Antonius might
have moved farther in this direction. He had not been in Rome for six years:
had his allegiance and his ideas swerved from Rome under the influence of
Cleopatra? If Antonius be denied a complete monarchic policy of his own, it
does not follow that he was merely a tool in the hands of Cleopatra, beguiled
by her beauty or dominated by her intellect. His position was awkward – if he did
not placate the Queen of Egypt he would have to depose her. Yet he was quite
able to repel her insistent attempts to augment her kingdom at the expense of
Judaea. There is no sign of infatuation here-if infatuation there was at all.
Antonius the enslaved sensualist belongs to popular and edifying literature. Cleopatra
was neither young nor beautiful.[375]
But there are more insistent and more dangerous forms of domination-he may have
succumbed to the power of her imagination and her understanding. Yet that is
not proved. Antonius was compelled to stand by Cleopatra to the end by honour
and by principle as well as by the necessities of war. Like Caesar, he never
deserted his friends or his allies. Nobler qualities, not the basest, were his
ruin.
Rome, it has been claimed, feared
Cleopatra but did not fear Antonius: she was planning a war of revenge that was
to array all the East against Rome, establish herself as empress of the world at
Rome and inaugurate a new universal kingdom.[376]
In this deep design Antonius was but her dupe and her agent.
Of the ability of Cleopatra there is
no doubt: her importance in history, apart from literature and legend, is
another matter. It is not certain that her ambition was greater than this, to
secure and augment her Ptolemaic kingdom under the protection of Rome. The clue
is to be found in the character of the War of Actium – as it was designed and
contrived by the party of Octavianus. It was not a war for domination against
Antonius – Antonius must not be mentioned. To secure Roman sanction and
emotional support for the enterprise it was necessary to invent a foreign
danger that menaced everything that was Roman, as Antonius himself assuredly
did not.[377] The propaganda of Octavianus
magnified Cleopatra beyond all measure and decency. To ruin Antonius it was not
enough that she should be a siren: she must be made a Fury – ‘fatale monstrum’
[monster of doom].[378]
That was the point where Antonius was
most vulnerable, Roman sentiment most easily to be worked and swayed. Years before,
Cleopatra was of no moment whatsoever in the policy of Caesar the Dictator, but
merely a brief chapter in his amours, comparable to Eunoe the wife of the
prince of Mauretania;[379]
nor was the foreign woman now much more than an accident in the contest,
inevitable without her, between the two Caesarian leaders. Failing Cleopatra
and her children, Octavianus would have been reduced to inferior expedients,
mere detestation of eastern monarchs and prejudice against the alien allies of
his rival-the low-born Amyntas, the brutal Herod and the presumptuous
Pythodorus.
Created belief turned the scale of
history. The policy and ambitions of Antonius or of Cleopatra were not the true
cause of the War of Actium;[380]
they were a pretext in the strife for power, the magnificent lie upon which was
built the supremacy of Caesar's heir and the resurgent nation of Italy. Yet,
for all that, the contest soon assumed the august and solemn form of a war of ideas
and a war between East and West. Antonius and Cleopatra seem merely pawns in
the game of destiny.[381]
The weapon forged to destroy Antonius changed the shape of the whole world.
XX. Tota Italia
The year 33 B.C. opened with
Octavianus as consul for the second time: with its close, the triumviral powers
were to expire. The rivals manoeuvred for position: of compromise, no act or
thought. Octavianus moved first. Early in the year hedelivered a speech before
the Senate, criticizing the acts of Antonius in the East.[382]
Antonius replied with a manifesto. He took his stand upon legality and upon the
plighted word of covenants, which was a mistake. Antonius complained that he
had been excluded from raising recruits in Italy; that his own men had been
passed over in the allotment of lands; that Octavianus had deposed in arbitrary
fashion a colleague in the Triumvirate.[383]
Antonius had already professed readiness to lay down office and join in
restoring the Republic.[384]
Octavianus evaded the charge of breach
of contract. Preferring a topic with moral and emotional appeal, he turned the
weight of his attack upon Antonius’ alliance with the Queen of Egypt. Then
irony: the grandiose conquests of Antonius would surely be more than enough to
provide bounties or lands for the armies of the East.[385]
Antonius consigned the statement of
his acta and the demand for their
ratification to a document which he dispatched before the end of the year to
the consuls designate, Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus and C. Sosius, his trusted
adherents. The contents of this missive might be guessed: it was to be imparted
to the Senate on the first day of the new year.
So far official documents and public
manifestoes, of which there had been a dearth in the last few years. Lampoon
and abuse had likewise been silent under the rule of the Triumvirs. Now came a
sudden revival, heralded by the private correspondence of the dynasts, frank,
free and acrimonious – and designed for publicity. The old themes, familiar
from reciprocal invective at the time of Octavianus’ first essay in armed
violence and revived during the War of Perusia, were intensified-obscure
ancestry, family scandal, and the private vices of lust, cruelty and cowardice.[386]
Above all Octavianus attacked Antonius’ devotion to drink – and to Cleopatra.
Antonius retorted-it was nothing new, but had begun nine years ago: Cleopatra
was his wife. As for Octavianus, what about Salvia Titisenia, Rufilla, Tertulla
and Terentilla?[387]
Against the other charge he composed an unedifying tract entitled De sua ebrietate.[388]
Poets and pamphleteers took the field
with alacrity. Antonius asserted that Ptolemy Caesar was the true heir as well
as authentic son of the Dictator. Octavianus put up the Caesarian agent Oppius
to disprove paternity.[389]
The Republican Messalla turned his eloquence to political advantage;[390]
he was soon to be requited with the consulate which Antonius should have held.
Republican freedom of speech now revelled in a brief renascence – as though it
were not fettered to the policy of a military despot.
To liberty itself the Republic was now
recalled, bewildered and unfamiliar, from the arbitrary rule of the
Triumvirate. Since the time when the entry into office of new consuls last
portended a change in politics a whole age seemed to have elapsed, and most of
the principal actors were dead: in fact, Sosius and Domitius were only eleven
years from Hirtius and Pansa. Then the new year had been eagerly awaited, for
it brought a chance to secure constitutional sanction for the young adventurer.
Once again Octavianus lacked standing before the law, for the Triumviral powers
had come to an end.[391]
He was not dismayed: he took no steps to have his position legalized. He
respected the constitution-and dispensed with it. When the time came, he went beyond
Senate and People, appealing to a higher sanction, so far had the Roman constitution
declined.
[...]
‘Quo, quo scelesti ruitis?’ [Where,
where are you rushing to in this evil madness?][392]
Another, yet another, criminal war between citizens was being forced by mad
ambition upon the Roman People. In this atmosphere of terror and alarm Octavianus
resolved to secure national sanction for his arbitrary power and a national
mandate to save Rome from the menace of the East. A kind of plebiscite was
organized, in the form of an oath of personal allegiance.
‘All Italy of its own accord swore an
oath of allegiance to me and chose me as its leader in the war which I won at
Actium.’[393] So Augustus wrote in the
majestic memorial of his own life and deeds. When an official document records voluntary
manifestations of popular sentiment under a despotic government, a certain
suspension of belief may safely be recommended. Nor is it to be fancied that
all the land rose as one man in patriotic ardour, clamouring for a crusade
against the foreign enemy. Yet, on the other hand, the united front was not
achieved merely through intimidation. Of the manner in which the measure was
carried out there stands no record at all. The oath of allegiance was perhaps
not a single act, ordered by one decree of the Caesarian leader and executed
simultaneously over all Italy, but rather the culmination in the summer of a
series of local agitations, which, though far from unconcerted, presented a
certain appearance of spontaneity. This fair show of a true vote was enhanced by
the honourable treatment of Bononia, a town bound by especial ties of loyalty
to Antonius.[394] The ostentatious
exemption of Bononia from the necessity of taking the oath manifested the solidarity
of the rest of Italy and riveted the shackles of servitude. Bononia, or any recalcitrant
communities, would pay the price in confiscation of their lands when the war
was over.[395]
In the constitutional crisis of the
year 32, the consuls and a show of legality were on the side of Antonius. An
absurdity the Roman constitution was manifestly inadequate if it was the instrument
of Rome’s enemy. And so Octavianus, like Cicero twelve years earlier when he so
eloquently justified a Catilinarian venture and armed treason against a consul,
was able to invoke the plea of a ‘higher legality’. Against the degenerate
organs of a narrow and outworn constitution he appealed to the voice and sentiments
of the true Roman People – not the corrupt plebs or the packed and disreputable
Senate of the city, but all Italy.
The phrase was familiar from recent
history, whereas idea and practice were older still. Long ago the nobles of
Rome, not least the dynastic house of the patrician Claudii, had enhanced their
power by inducing men of repute and substance in the Italian communities to
contract ties of personal allegiance and mutual support.[396]
When a Claudian faction encouraged a revolutionary agitation at Rome with
tribunes’ laws and the division of lands, Scipio Aemilianus and his friends,
championing Italy against the plebs of Rome, got help from Italian men of property,
themselves menaced.[397]
Aid from Italy could be invoked for revolution, for reaction or for domination,
even for all three ends at once. The tribune Livius Drusus, working in
conservative interests and supported by a powerful group of nobiles, yet accused of monarchic
designs, was the great exemplar. He was the champion, friend and patron
of the leading men in the communities
of Italy;[398] his allies took an oath
of personal loyalty, and the towns of Italy offered public vows for his safety.[399]
[...]
The temporary severance of East and
West between the two dynasts after the Pact of Brundisium had been prejudicial
to Italian economy as well as alarming to Italian sentiment. As it was,
Antonius' system of reducing the burdens of empire by delegating rule in the
East to dependent princes diminished the profits of empire and narrowed the
fields of exploitation open to Roman financiers and tax-farmers.[400]
Interest unconsciously transformed itself into righteous and patriotic
indignation. Landowners, especially the newly enriched, shuddered at the
prospect of impoverishment or another revolution; and business men leapt forward
with alacrity to reconquer the kingdoms of the East and to seize a spoil so
long denied, the rich land of Egypt. The most ardent exponents of the national
unity and the crusade against the East were no doubt to be found in the order
of Roman knights and among those senators most nearly allied to them by the
ties of family or business.[401]
But what if the partition of the world
was to be perpetuated? The limit between the dominions of the two dynasts, the
Ionian Sea, and, by land, a narrow and impassable strip of the mountains of
Montenegro, was the frontier given by nature, by history, by civilization and
by language between the Latin West and the Greek East. The Empire might split
into two parts-very easily. It is one of the miracles of Roman history that in
subsequent ages the division between West and East was masked so well and delayed
so long. The loss of the dominions beyond the sea would be ruinous to an Italy
that had prospered and grown rich from the revenues of the East, the return she
gained from her export of soldiers, financiers and governors. The source of
life cut off, Italy would dwindle into poverty and dishonour. National pride revolted.
Was it for this that the legions of the imperial Republic had shattered and
swept away the kings of the East, carrying the eagles in victory to the
Euphrates and the Caucasus?
[...]
XXI. Dux
The adversary spent the winter in
Greece, ready in his preparations of army and fleet, but not perhaps as
resolute as he might appear. Antonius now had to stand beside Cleopatra there
could be no turning back. Patrae at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth was his
head-quarters. His forces, fed by corn-ships from Egypt, were strung out in a
long line from Corcyra and Epirus to the south-western extremity of
Peloponnesus. The land army under the command of Canidius comprised nineteen of
his legions: the other eleven made up the garrison of Egypt, Cyrene, Syria and
Macedonia.[402]
Antonius could not take the offensive,
for every reason, not merely the political damage of an invasion of Italy in
the company of Egypt’s Queen. On military calculation, to disembark in Italy was
hazardous-the coast lacked good harbours and Brundisium was heavily fortified.
Moreover, the invader would sacrifice the advantages of supply, reinforcement
and communications.
The fleet and the army were tied to
each other. For their combined needs, Antonius abandoned the Albanian coast and
the western end of the Via Egnatia. That might appear an error: it was probably
a ruse. Antonius proposed to leave the approach free to the enemy, to lure
Octavianus onwards, and entrap him with the aid of superior sea-power. Not
perhaps by a battle at sea: the greatest general of the day would prefer to
re-enact the strategy of Pharsalus and of Philippi, reversing the outcome and destroying
the Caesarians. Time, money and supplies were on his side: he might delay and
fight a battle with little loss of Roman blood, as fitted the character of a
civil war in which men fought, not for a principle, but only for a choice of
masters.
In ships Antonius had the
preponderance of strength; as for number of legions it was doubtful whether the
enemy could transport across the Adriatic a force superior to his own-still less
feed them when they arrived. Fighting quality was another matter. Since the
Pact of Brundisium Antonius had been unable to raise recruits in Italy. The
retreat from Media had seriously depleted his army.[403]
But he made up the losses by fresh levies and augmented the total of his
legions to thirty. The new recruits were inferior to Italians, it is true, but
by no means contemptible if they came from the virile and martial populations
of Macedonia and Galatia. Perhaps the picked army which he mustered in Epirus
was composed in the main of the survivors of his veteran legions.[404]
But would Roman soldiers fight for the Queen of Egypt? They had all the old
personal loyalty of Caesarian legions to a general of Caesar's dash and vigour;
but they lacked the moral advantage of attack and that stimulating dose of
patriotic fervour that had been administered to the army of the West. Yet, in
the last resort, Antonius might not need to appeal to the legions to stand in
battle against their kinsmen. He might be able to employ sea-power with a
mastery that neither Pompeius nor the Liberators had achieved when they
contended against invaders coming from Italy.
If that was his plan, it failed.
Antonius had a great fleet and good admirals. But his ships and his officers
lacked recent experience of naval warfare. The admirals of Octavianus were
schooled by their many defeats, invigorated by their final success in the
Sicilian War.
Octavianus did not strike at
Dyrrhachium or Apollonia. Making an early beginning, he moved southwards
instead and took up a position on the peninsula of Actium, on the northern
shore of the gulf of Ambracia, while the fleet under Agrippa captured certain posts
of Antonius in the south and destroyed his lines of communication. Antonius
concentrated his forces in the neighbourhood. Then all is obscure. Months
passed, with operations by land and sea of which history has preserved no
adequate record. Antonius’ admiral Sosius was defeated by Agrippa in a great naval
battle;[405] and Antonius’ attempt to
cut off the camp of Octavianus on the landward side and invest his position
proved a signal failure. The plan had been turned against him-he was now
encompassed and shut in. Famine and disease threatened his forces.
Then the odds moved more heavily
against him. Desertion set in. Certain of the vassal princes went over to the
enemy, among them Amyntas with his Galatian cavalry. Romans too departed, M.
Junius Silanus and the agile Dellius, whose changes of side were proverbial but
not unparalleled.[406]
The ex-Republican M. Licinius Crassus may have made his peace with Octavianus about
the same time-on terms, namely the consulate.[407]
Even Ahenobarbus went, stealthily in a small boat: Antonius dispatched his
belongings after him.[408]
Plancus and Titius had departed on a political calculation. Now the military
situation was desperate, heralding the end of a great career and a powerful
party. Only three men of consular standing remained on Antonius’ side,
Canidius, Sosius and Gellius Poplicola. It would not be long before the
defection of the leaders, Roman senators or eastern princes, spread to the
ships and the legions. Canidius was now in favour of a retreat to Macedonia, to
seek an issue there with the help of barbarian allies.[409]
The battle of Actium was decided before it was fought.
The true story is gone beyond recall.
It is uncertain whether Antonius designed to fight a naval battle for victory
or to escape from the blockade.[410]
On the morning of September 2nd his ships rowed out, ready for action. Of his
admirals, the principal were Sosius and Poplicola; commands were also held by
M. Insteius, a man from Pisaurum, by the experienced ex-Pompeian Q. Nasidius
and by M. Octavius, of a consular family.[411]
On the other side the fleet of Octavianus faced the Antonians. The battle was
to be fought under the auspices of Caesar – Caesar’s heir in the forefront,
stans celsa in puppi,
geminas cui tempora flammas
laeta vomunt, patriumque
aperitur vertice sidus.[412]
[his auspicious brows shoot
forth a double flame, and on his head dawns his father’s star]
But Octavianus, though ‘dux’, was even
less adequate in maritime warfare than on land. Agrippa, the victor of
Naulochus, was in command, supported by the consul Messalla, by L. Arruntius, M.
Lurius and L. Tarius Rufus. Two generals, Statilius Taurus, the greatest of the
marshals after Agrippa, and the renegade Titius were in charge of the Caesarian
legions.
The course, character and duration of
the battle itself is all a mystery – and a topic of controversy. There may have
been little fighting and comparatively few casualties. A large part of the
fleet of Antonius either refused battle or after defeat was forced back into
harbour.[413] Antonius himself with
forty ships managed to break through and follow Cleopatra in flight to Egypt.
Treachery was at work in the land-army. Canidius the commander sought to induce
his soldiers to march away through Macedonia, but in vain. He had to escape to
Antonius. After some days the legions capitulated, an interval perhaps spent in
bargaining for terms: the Antonian veterans subsequently received a share of
colonial assignments.[414]
The chief author of treachery to
Antonius in the naval battle (if treachery there was), and avoidance of
bloodshed to Rome, is not known. Sosius might be suspected. Certain of the
Antonians were executed, but Sosius was spared, at the instance, it was alleged,
of L. Arruntius, an ex-Pompeian.[415]
Sosius’ peril and Sosius’ rescue may have been artfully staged.
Neither of the rivals in the contest
for power had intended that there should be a serious battle if they could help
it. So it turned out. Actium was a shabby affair, the worthy climax to the ignoble
propaganda against Cleopatra, to the sworn and sacred union of all Italy. But
the young Caesar required the glory of a victory that would surpass the
greatest in all history, Roman or Hellenic.[416]
In the official version of the victor, Actium took on august dimensions and an
intense emotional colouring, being transformed into a great naval battle, with
lavish wealth of convincing and artistic detail. More than that, Actium became
the contest of East and West personified, the birth-legend in the mythology of
the Principate. On the one side stood Caesar’s heir with the Senate and People
of Rome, the star of the Julian house blazing on his head; in the air above,
the gods of Rome, contending against the bestial divinities of Nile. Against
Rome were arrayed the motley levies of all the eastern lands, Egyptians, Arabs
and Bactrians, led by a renegade in un-Roman attire, 'variis Antonius armis’.
Worst of all, the foreign woman –
sequiturque,
nefas, Aegyptia coniunx.[417]
[and there
follows him (oh the shame of it!) his Egyptian wife]
The victory was final and complete.
There was no haste to pursue the fugitives to Egypt. Octavianus had a huge army
on his hands, with many legions to be paid, demobilized or employed. He sent
Agrippa at once to Italy. The work must begin without delay. He had not gone
farther east than Samos when he was himself recalled by troubles in Italy.
There had been a plot – or so it was alleged. It was suppressed at once by
Maecenas.[418] The author was a son of
the relegated Lepidus: his wife, Servilia, who had once been betrothed to
Octavianus, bravely followed him in death, true to noble and patrician
tradition. She was the last person of note in a family that claimed descent
from the nobility of Alba Longa. More alarming was the news reported by Agrippa
– veterans clamorous and mutinous. Octavianus crossed the wintry seas to
Brundisium and appeased their demands.[419]
Warfare would provide occupation for
some of his legions. Though no serious outbreak had disturbed the provinces,
the repercussions of a Roman civil war would soon be felt. Some at least of the
triumphs soon to be held by Caesarian marshals (no fewer than six in 28–26 B.C.)
were fairly earned.
Then of came the reckoning with
Antonius. In the summer the year 30 B.C. Octavianus approached Egypt from the
side of Syria, Cornelius Gallus from the west. Pinarius Scarpus, Antonius’
lieutenant in the Cyrenaica, surrendered his four legions and passed into the
service of the victor.[420]
Antonius and his consort spent nearly a year after the disaster in the last
revels, the last illusory plans and the last despondency before death. After
brief resistance Antonius was defeated in battle. He took his own life. The
army of the Roman People entered the capital city of Egypt on the first day of
August. Such was the episode called the Bellum
Alexandrinum.
Cleopatra survived Antonius by a few
days which at once passed into anecdote and legend. To Octavianus the Queen was
an embarrassment if she lived:[421]
but a Roman imperator could not order the execution of a woman. After negotiations
managed through his friends Gallus and Proculeius, he interviewed the Queen.[422]
Diplomacy, veiled intimidation and the pride of Cleopatra found a way out. The
last of the Ptolemies scorned to be led in a Roman triumph. Her firm and
defiant end, worthy of a Roman noble in ferocia, set final consecration on the
myth of Cleopatra:
deliberata morte ferocior
saevis Liburnis scilicet
invidens
privata deduci superbo
non humilis mulier triumpho.[423]
[Once she had resolved to
die she was all the more defiant – determined, no doubt, to cheat the cruel
Liburnians: she would not be stripped of her royalty and conveyed to face a
jeering triumph: no humble woman she.]
In satisfying the honour of Cleopatra,
the bite of the asp served in double measure the convenience of a Roman
politician. The adversary must have been redoubtable indeed! It was not the glorious
battle of Actium and the defeat of the greatest soldier of the day that called
forth the shrillest jubilation from the victors, but the death of the foreign
queen, the ‘fatale monstrum’. ‘Nunc est bibendum’ sang the poet Horace, safe
and subsidized in Rome.
[...]
When a party has triumphed in civil
war, it claims to have asserted the ideals of liberty and concord. Peace was a
tangible blessing. For a generation, all parties had striven for peace: once
attained, it became the spoil and prerogative of the victors. Already the
Senate had voted that the Temple of Janus should be closed, a sign that all the
world was at peace on land and sea.[424]
The imposing and archaic ceremony did not, however, mean that warfare was to
cease: the generals of Rome were active in the frontier provinces. The
exaltation of peace by a Roman statesman might attest a victory, but it
portended no slackening of martial effort. The next generation was to witness
the orderly execution of a programme of rational aggression without match or
parallel as yet in the history of Rome. An assertion of imperial policy and an
omen of victory was then embodied in the dedication of the Ara Pacis Augustae. Which was not unfitting. To the Roman, peace
was not a vague emollient: the word ‘pax’ can seldom be divorced from notions
of conquest, or at least compulsion. It was Rome's imperial destiny to compel
the nations to live at peace, with clemency towards the subject and suppression
of the rest:
pacisque
imponere morem,
parcere subiectis et
debellare superbos.[425]
[to crown peace with
justice, to spare the vanquished and to crush the proud]
But the armies of Rome presented a
greater danger to her stability than did any foreign enemy. After Actium, the
victor who had seduced in turn the armies of all his adversaries found himself
in the embarrassing possession of nearly seventy legions. For the military
needs of the empire, fewer than thirty would be ample: any larger total was
costly to maintain and a menace to internal peace. He appears to have decided
upon a permanent establishment of about twenty-six legions. The remainder were disbanded,
the veterans being settled in colonies in Italy and in the provinces. The land
was supplied by confiscation from Antonian towns and partisans in Italy, or
purchased from the war-booty, especially the treasure of Egypt.[426]
Liberty was gone, but property,
respected and secure, was now mounting in value. The beneficial working of the
rich treasure from Egypt became everywhere apparent.[427]
Above all, security of tenure was to be the watchword of the new order.[428]
Italy longed for the final stabilization of the revolutionary age. The War of Actium
had been fought and won, the menace to Italy’s life and soul averted. But salvation
hung upon a single thread. Well might men adjure the gods of Rome to preserve
that precious life,
hunc saltem
everso iuvenem succurrere saeclo ne prohibete.[429]
[do not
prevent this young prince from succouring a world in ruins]
The poet Virgil had brought to
completion the four books of his Georgics during the War of Actium and
Octavianus’ absence in the East. The Georgics
published, he had already begun to compose a national epic on the origins and destiny
of imperial Rome. To Venus, the divine ancestress of the Julian house, Jupiter unfolded
the annals of the future. On the brightest page stands emblazoned the Caesar of
Trojan stock, destined himself for divinity, but not before his rule on earth
has restored confidence between men and respect for the gods, blotting out the
primal curse of fratricidal strife:
nascetur pulchra Troianus
origine Caesar
imperium Oceano, famam qui
terminet astris
Iulius a magno demissum
nomen Iulo.
hunc tu olim caelo spoliis
Orientis onustum
accipies secura; vocabitur
hic quoque votis.
aspera tum positis
mitescent saecula bellis;
cana Fides et Vesta, Remo
cum fratre Quirinus
iura dabunt.[430]
[From this noble line shall
be born the Trojan Caesar, who shall extend his empire to the ocean, his glory
to the stars, a Julius, 10 name descended from great Iulus! Him, in days to
come, shall you, anxious no more, welcome to heaven, laden with Eastern spoils;
he, too, shall be invoked in vows. Then wars shall cease and savage ages soften;
hoary Faith and Vesta, Quirinus with his brother Remus, shall give laws.]
Caesar’s heir was veritably a
world-conqueror, not in verse only, or by the inevitable flattery of eastern
lands. Like Alexander, he had spread his conquest to the bounds of the world;
and he was acclaimed in forms and language once used of Alexander.[431]
He was now building for himself a royal mausoleum beside the Tiber; and public
sacrifices for his safety had been celebrated by a Roman consul.[432]
The avenging of Caesar, and with it his own divine descent, was advertised by
the inauguration of the temple of Divus Julius in 29 B.C.[433]
But insistence on military monarchy and Trojan ancestry might provoke disquiet.
When the Triumvir Antonius abode for long years in the East men might fear lest
the city be dethroned from its pride of place, lest the capital of empire be
transferred to other lands. The propaganda of Octavianus had skilfully worked
upon such apprehensions. Once aroused they would be difficult to allay: their echo
could still be heard. Horace produces a divine decree, forbidding Troy ever to
be rebuilt;[434] Virgil is quite
explicit;[435] and Livy duly
demonstrates how the patriot Camillus not only saved Rome from the invader but
prevented the citizens from abandoning the destined seat of empire for a new capital.[436]
Camillus was hailed as Romulus, as a second founder and saviour of Rome – ‘Romulus
acac parens patriae conditorque alter urbis’ [a Romulus and Father of his
Country and a second Founder of the City].[437]
In Romulus there was to hand an authentic native hero, a god’s son and himself
elevated to heaven after death as the god Quirinus. Full honour was done to the
founder in the years after Actium. Caesar had set his own statue in the temple
of Quirinus: Caesar’s heir was identified with that god by the poet Virgil.[438]
Not by conquest only but by the foundation of a lasting city did a hero win
divine honours in life and divinity after death. That was the lesson of Romulus:
it was enunciated in prose as well as in verse.[439]
The conqueror of the East and hero of
Actium must now gird himself to the arduous task of rebuilding a shattered
commonwealth and infusing it with new vigour. The attempts of earlier statesmen
had been baulked by fate – or rather by their own ambition, inadequacy or dishonesty.
Sulla established order but no reconciliation in Rome and Italy. Pompeius
destroyed the Sullan system; and when enlisted in an emergency, he turned his
powers to selfish ends. The rule of Caesar and of the Triumvirs bore the title
and pretext of settling the constitution on a stable basis (rei publicae constituendae). Caesar had
put off the task, the Triumvirs had not even begun. The duty could no longer be
evaded on the plea of wars abroad or faction at home. Peace had been
established, there was only one faction left – and it was in power.
[...]
The word ‘princeps’, as applied to
Augustus, is absent from the Aeneid
of Virgil and is not of very common occurrence in the first three books of the Odes of Horace (which appeared in 23 B.C.).
Propertius uses it but once, ‘dux’, however, at least twice.[440]
As late as the publication of the last book of the Odes (13 B.C.) the ruler of Rome can still be called ‘dux’ – but
with a difference and with the appendage of a benevolent and unmilitary
adjective, ‘dux bone!’ [dear leader][441]
Even later Ovid, when writing his Fasti,
discovered in the word ‘dux’ a convenience that was not merely a matter of
metre.[442] Then, after a century,
under the dynasty of the Flavians, an Emperor distrustful of the title of ‘princeps’
and eager for warlike glory was flattered when his poets called him ‘dux’ and ‘ductor’.[443]
So much for Rome, the governing
classes and Italy. But even in Italy, the Princeps by his use of 'imperator' as
a part of his name recalled his Caesarian and military character; and he ruled
the provinces with an authority familiar to them as proconsular and absolute,
whether it resided upon the dictatorial powers of the Triumvirate, pure
usurpation, or act of law at Rome. To translate the term ‘princeps’ Greeks
employed a word that meant ‘dux’.[444]
XXII. Princeps
In his sixth and seventh consulates C.
Julius Caesar Octavianus went through a painless and superficial
transformation. The process was completed in a session of the Senate on January
13th, 27 B.C., when he solemnly announced that he resigned all powers and all
provinces to the free disposal of the Senate and People of Rome. Acclamation
was drowned in protest. The senators adjured him not to abandon the
Commonwealth which he had preserved. Yielding with reluctance to these
manifestations of loyalty and patriotism, the master of the whole world
consented to assume a special commission for a period of ten years, in the form
of proconsular authority over a large provincia,
namely Spain, Gaul and Syria. That and nothing more.[445]
For the rest, proconsuls were to govern the provinces, as before, but
responsible only to the Senate; and Senate, People and magistrates were to
resume the rightful exercise of all their functions.
Three days later the Senate again met,
eager and impatient to render thanks, to confer honours upon the saviour of the
State. They voted that a wreath of laurel should be placed above the door-post
of his dwelling, for he had saved the lives of Roman citizens; that in the
Senate should be hung a golden shield with his virtues inscribed thereon, clemency,
valour, justice and piety.[446]
He had founded-or was soon to found-the Roman State anew. He might therefore
have been called Romulus, for the omen of twelve vultures had greeted him long
ago.[447]
But Romulus was a king, hated name, stained with a brother’s blood and himself
killed by Roman senators, so one legend ran, before his assumption into Heaven.
That was too much like Caesar the Dictator. Moreover, the young Caesar was a
saviour and benefactor beyond any precedent. A new name was devised, expressing
veneration of more than mortal due.[448]
A veteran politician, the consular L. Munatius Plancus, proposed the decree
that conferred on Caesar’s heir the appellation of Augustus.[449]
Nothing was left to chance or to
accident in preparing these exemplary manifestations. The ruler had taken
counsel with his friends and allies-and perhaps with neutral politicians. They knew
what they were about. In name, in semblance and in theory the sovranty of
Senate and People had been restored. It remains to discover what it all
amounted to.
On the face of things, the new powers
of Caesar Augustus were modest indeed, unimpeachable to a generation that knew
Dictatorship and Triumvirate. By consent, for merit achieved and for service
expected, the Senate invested the first citizen with rank and authority. Caesar
Augustus was to govern a provincia in
virtue of imperium proconsulare: as proconsul, he was
merely the equal in public law of any other proconsul. In fact, his province
was large and formidable, comprising the most powerful of the military
territories of the Empire and the majority of the legions; and Egypt stood
apart from the reckoning.
But Augustus did not take all the
legions: three proconsuls had armies under their command, the governors of Illyricum,
Macedonia and Africa.[450]
These regions were close to Italy, a menace from geographical position and the
memory of recent civil wars: yet Augustus graciously resigned them to
proconsuls. Further, Cisalpine Gaul had ceased to be a province. Augustus' own
armies lay at a distance, disposed on the periphery of the Empire-no threat, it
might seem, to a free constitution, but merely guardians of the frontiers. Nor
need the new system be described as a military despotism. Before the law,
Augustus was not the commander-in-chief of the whole army, but a Roman
magistrate, invested with special powers for a term of years.
For the grant of such a mandate there
was plenty of justification. The civil wars were over, but the Empire had not
yet recovered from their ravages. Spain, a vast land, had not been properly
conquered; Gaul cried out for survey and organization; Syria, distant from Rome
and exposed to the Parthians, required careful supervision. Other regions in
turn might be subjected to the same salutary treatment, for nobody could
believe that the frontiers of Illyricum and Macedonia were satisfactory; and
Africa nourished her proverbial wars.
Special commands were no novelty, no
scandal. The strictest champion of constitutional propriety might be
constrained to concede their necessity.[451]
If the grant of extended imperium in the
past had threatened the stability of the State, that was due to the ruinous
ambition of politicians who sought power illegally and held it for glory and
for profit. Rival dynasts rent the Empire apart and destroyed the Free State.
Their sole survivor, warden of the more powerful of the armed provinces, stood
as a guarantee against any recurrence of the anarchy out of which his
domination had arisen.
But Augustus was to be consul as well
as proconsul, year after year without a break. The supreme magistracy, though
purporting no longer to convey enhanced powers, as after the end of the
Triumvirate, still gave him the means to initiate and direct public policy at
Rome if not to control through consular imperium
the proconsuls abroad.[452]
For such cumulation of powers a close parallel from the recent past might
properly have been invoked: is pretty clear that it was not.
The Romans as a people were possessed
by an especial veneration for authority, precedent and tradition, by a rooted
distaste of change unless change could be shown to be in harmony with ancestral
custom, ‘mos maiorum’ – which in practice meant the sentiments of the oldest
living senators. Lacking any perception of the dogma of progress – for it had
not yet been invented – the Romans regarded novelty with distrust and aversion.
The word ‘novus’ had an evil ring. Yet the memory of the past reminded the
Romans that change had come, though slow and combated. Rome’s peculiar
greatness was due not to one man’s genius or to one age, but to many men and
the long process of time.[453]
Augustus sought to demonstrate a doctrine – Roman history was a continuous and
harmonious development.[454]
Augustus himself, so he asserted,
accepted no magistracy that ran contrary to the ‘mos maiorum’.[455]
He did not need to. As it stood, the Roman constitution would serve his purpose
well enough. It is, therefore, no paradox to discover in the Principate of
Augustus both the institutions and the phraseology of Republican Rome. The
historical validity of the inferences thence derived is another question.
It will be doubted whether Augustus,
his counsellors or his critics scanned the records of the past with so anxious
an eye for legal precedents as have the lawyers and historians of more recent
times. Augustus knew precisely what he wanted: it was simple and easily
translated. Moreover, the chief men of his party were not jurists or theorists
– they were diplomats, soldiers, engineers and financiers. The study of law,
the art of casuistry and the practice of public debate had languished for long
years.
[...]
Such was Caesar Augustus. The contrast
of real and personal power with the prerogatives of consul or proconsul as
legally defined appears portentous and alarming. Yet it would be an elementary
error to fancy that the ceremony of January 13th was merely a grim comedy
devised to deceive the ingenuous or intimidate the servile. On the contrary,
the purified Senate, being in a majority the partisans of Augustus, were well
aware of what was afoot. To secure the domination of the Caesarian party, the consolidation
of the Revolution and the maintenance of peace, it was necessary that the
primacy of Caesar’s heir should be strengthened and perpetuated. Not, however,
under the fatal name of dictator or monarch.[456]
On all sides prevailed a conspiracy of decent reticence about the gap between
fact and theory. It was evident: no profit but only danger from talking about
it. The Principate baffles definition.
The ‘constitutional’ settlement of the
years 28 and 27 B.C. was described in official language as ‘res publica reddita’
or ‘res publica restituta’; and certain Roman writers echoed the official description.
Not so Tacitus-in his brief account of Augustus’ feigned moderation and
stealthy aggrandizement after the Civil Wars he has not deigned to allude to
this transaction at all.[457]
In truth, it may be regarded merely as the legalization, and therefore the
strengthening, of despotic power. Such at least was the conception of Tacitus
when he referred elsewhere to the legislation of 28 B.C. – he speaks of ‘pax et
princeps’;[458] others would have said ‘pax
et dominus’. A later historian dates from this ‘constitutional’ settlement the
beginning of a strict monarchical rule; he observed that the pay of Augustus’
military guard was doubled at the same time – and that in virtue of the Senate’s
decree.[459]
The significance of the measure could
be grossly exaggerated by the adulatory or the uncritical. Such was no doubt
the opinion of the suspicious Tacitus, ever alert for the contrast of name and substance.
At Rome, it did not mark an era in dating; in the provinces it passed almost
unnoticed. No change in the foreign or domestic policy of the government, in
currency or in economic activity. Indeed, the precise formulation of the powers
of the military leader in the res publica
which he sought to ‘establish upon a lasting basis’ is not a matter of
paramount importance.
No man of the time, reared among the
hard and palpable realities of Roman politics, could have been deceived. The
Princeps speaks of a restoration of the Republic, and the historian Velleius Paterculus
renders an obedient echo of inspired guidance – ‘prisca illa et antiqua rei
publicae forma revocata’.[460]
[that old-fashioned and ancient form of the commonwealth was recalled] The
words have a venerable and antiquarian ring. That is all; and that is enough to
show them up. Suetonius, however, a student of antiquities, was a scholar not
wholly devoid of historical sense. He states that Augustus twice thought of
restoring the Republic – not that he did so.[461]
To Suetonius, the work of Augustus was the creation of a ‘novus status’.[462]
[...]
XXIII. Crisis
in Party and State
[...]
Two centuries had elapsed since the
armies of the Roman Republic first invaded Spain: the conquest of that vast
peninsula was still far from complete. The intractable Cantabrians and Asturians
of north-western Spain, embracing a wide range of territory from the western
Pyrenees to the north of Portugal, had never yet felt the force of Roman arms;
and in the confusion of the Civil Wars they extended their raids and their
domination southwards over certain of the more highly civilized peoples. Cn.
Domitius Calvinus had governed Spain during a difficult three years (39–36
B.C.);[463] Calvinus and five
proconsuls after him had celebrated Spanish triumphs in Rome. Some of these
campaigns may have prepared the way for Augustus: if so, scant acknowledgement
in history.[464]
In 26 B.C. Augustus took the field in
person.[465] He marched northwards
against the Cantabrians from a base near Burgos. The nature of the land
dictated a division of forces. The Romans operated in three columns of invasion;
and as all glory and all history now concentrate upon a single person, only the
detachment commanded by Augustus himself has left any record. The campaign was
grim and arduous. Augustus fell grievously ill. He sought healing from Pyrenean
springs and solace in the composition of his autobiography, a work suitably
dedicated to Agrippa and Maecenas. In his absence, the two legates in Spain (C.
Antistius Vetus in Citerior and P. Carisius in Ulterior)[466]
dealt with the Asturians by a convergent invasion of their territory. Official
interpretation hailed the complete subjugation of Spain by Augustus. Janus was
once more closed. The rejoicing was premature. The stubborn mountaineers rose
again and again. In Ulterior the brutal P. Carisius, who continued in command,
was a match for them.[467]
In Citerior the next three legates all had hard fighting to do.[468]
Finally in 19 B.C. Agrippa, patient and ruthless, imposed by massacre and
enslavement the Roman peace upon a desolated land. Such was the end of a ten
years’ war in Spain (from 28 to 19 B.C.)[469].
Frail and in despair of life, Augustus
returned to Rome towards the middle of 24 B.C. He had been away about three
years: Rome was politically silent, with no voice or testimony, hoping and fearing
in secret. On the first day of January he entered upon his eleventh consulate
with Murena, a prominent partisan, as his colleague. Three events – a state
trial, a conspiracy and a serious illness of Augustus – revealed the precarious
tenure on which the peace of the world reposed. Meagre and confused, the
sources defy and all but preclude the attempt to reconstruct the true history
of a year that might well have been the last, and was certainly the most
critical, in all the long Principate of Augustus.[470]
From a constitutional crisis, in
itself of no great moment, arose grave consequences for the Caesarian party and
for the Roman State. Late in 24 B.C. or early in 23 a proconsul of Macedonia, a
certain M. Primus, gave trouble. He was arraigned in the courts for high
treason on a charge of having made war against the kingdom of Thrace without
authority. Primus alleged instructions from the Princeps. The First Citizen
appeared in court. His denial upon oath secured condemnation of the offender.[471]
Varro Murena the consul had been among
the defenders of the proconsul of Macedonia. A man of notorious and unbridled
freedom of speech, he took no pains to conceal his opinion of the exercise of auctoritas.[472]
Such old-fashioned libertas was
fatally out of place. Murena soon fell a victim to his indiscretion, or his
ambition. A conspiracy was hatched-or at least discovered. The author was
Fannius Caepio, Republican in family and sentiment.[473]
Murena was implicated. The criminals were condemned in absence, captured when
evading arrest, and put to death. The Senate sanctioned their doom by its publica auctoritas.[474]
The truth of the matter will never be
known: it was known to few enough at the time, and they preferred not to
publish a secret of state. The incident was disquieting. Not merely did the execution
of a consul cast a glaring light on the character of the new Republic and the
four cardinal virtues of the Princeps inscribed on the golden shield and
advertised everywhere. Not only did it reveal a lack of satisfaction with the ‘felicissimus
status’. Worse than all that, it touched the very heart and core of the party. Fannius
was a ‘bad man’ to begin with, a Republican. Not so Murena. Long ago
Salvidienus the marshal betrayed his leader and his friend. Since that
catastrophe until recently the chief men of the Caesarian party had remained
steadfastly loyal to Caesar’s heir even in the absence of a full measure of
mutual trust or of mutual affection – they knew too much for that, and revolutionaries
are not sentimental. Their loyalty to Augustus was also loyalty to Rome-a high
and sombre patriotism could prevail over political principle, if such existed,
or private dislike. Yet even so, only four years earlier, one of the closest of
the associates of Augustus, Cornelius Gallus, the first Prefect of Egypt, had
been recalled and disgraced.
The tall trees fall in the tempest and
the thunderbolt strikes the high peaks.[475]
Another of the party-dynasts had come to grief. Murena was the brother of
Terentia, the wife of the all-powerful Maecenas. Yet neither Maecenas nor
Murena’s half-brother, the virtuous and disinterested Proculeius, an intimate
friend of Augustus, could save him. Proculeius had openly deplored the fate of
Gallus;[476] and Proculeius got
credit for his efforts on behalf of Murena.[477]
What friends or following Murena had is uncertain – but the legate of Syria
about this time bore the name of Varro.[478]
The Republic had to have consuls. To
take the place of Murena in the supreme magistracy, Augustus appointed Cn. Calpurnius
Piso, a Republican of independent and recalcitrant temper. Hitherto Piso had
held aloof from public life, disdaining office. Augustus, in virtue of
arbitrary power, offered the consulate.[479]
Piso’s acceptance sealed his acquiescence in the new dispensation.
Then Augustus broke down: undermined
in Spain and temporarily repaired, his health had grown steadily worse, passing
into a dangerous illness. Close to death, he gave no indication of his last
intentions – he merely handed over certain state papers to the consul Piso, to
Agrippa his signet-ring.[480]
Under their direction the government could have continued – for a time.
Augustus recovered. He was saved by
cold baths, a prescription of the physician Antonius Musa. From that date the Princeps
enjoyed a robust health that baffled his doctors and his enemies. On July 1st
he resigned the consulate. In his place certain L. Sestius took office – another
exercise of auctoritas, it may be
presumed, arbitrary but clothed in a fair pretext. Sestius, once quaestor to M.
Brutus, worshipped the memory of the Liberators.[481]
The choice of Sestius, like the choice of Piso, will attest, not the free
working of Republican institutions, but the readiness of old Republican
adherents to rally to the new régime, for diverse motives-ambition, profit and
patriotism.
The conspiracy of Murena and the
illness of Augustus were a sudden warning. The catastrophe was near. For some
years, fervent and official language had celebrated the crusade of all Italy
and the glorious victory of Actium – for Actium was the foundation-myth of the
new order. There is something unreal in the sustained note of jubilation, as
though men knew its falsity: behind it all there lurked a deep sense of
disquiet and insecurity, still to be detected in contemporary literature. The
past was recent and tangible – the Ides of March, the proscriptions and Philippi
were barely twenty years distant. The corruption of ancient virtue and the
decline of ancient patriotism had brought low a great people. Ruin had been
averted but narrowly, peace and order restored-but would it last? And, more
than security of person and property, whence would come salvation and
regeneration?
Quem vocet divum populus
ruentis
imperi rebus?[482]
[What divinity are the
people to call upon to restore the fortunes of their crumbling power?]
The anxiety was public and widespread:
it has found vivid and enduring expression in the preface of Livy’s great
history and in certain of the Odes of
Horace.[483]
The chief men of the Caesarian party
had their own reasons. If Caesar’s heir perished by disease or by the dagger,
there might come again, as when Caesar the Dictator fell, dissension in their ranks,
ending in civil war and ruin for Rome. Patriotism conspired with personal
interest to discover a solider insurance, a tighter formula of government.
Whatever happened, the new order must endure. Two measures were taken, in the
name of Caesar Augustus. The constitutional basis of his authority was altered.
More important than that, official standing was conferred upon the ablest man
among his adherents, the principal of his marshals – M. Vipsanius Agrippa,
thrice consul. This was the settlement of the year 23 B.C.
Augustus resolved to refrain from
holding the supreme magistracy year by year. In the place of the consulate,
which gave him a general initiative in policy, he took various powers, above
all proconsular imperium over the
whole empire.[484] In fact, but not in
name, this reduced all proconsuls to the function of legates of Augustus. As
for Rome, Augustus was allowed to retain his military imperium within the gates of the city. That was only one part of
the scheme: he now devised a formidable and indefinite instrument of
government, the tribunicia potestas.
As early as 36 B.C. he had acquired the sacrosanctity of a tribune for life, in
30 B.C. certain powers in law. No trace hitherto of their employment.[485]
It was not until this year that the Princeps thought of exerting tribunicia potestas to compensate in
part for the consulate and to fulfil the functions, without bearing the name,
of an extraordinary magistracy; from July Ist 23 B.C. Augustus dated his tenure
of the tribunicia potestas and added
the name to his titulature. This was the ‘summi fastigii vocabulum’ invented by
the founder of a legitimate monarchy.[486]
With his keen taste for realities and
inner scorn (but public respect) for names and forms, Augustus preferred
indefinite and far-reaching powers to the visible and therefore vulnerable
prerogatives of magistracy. His passage from Dux to Princeps in 28 and 27 B.c.
embodied a clear definition and ostensible restriction of his powers-in that
sense a return to constitutional government, in so far as his authority was
legal. The new settlement liberated the consulate but planted domination all
the more firmly. The tribunicia potestas was elusive and formidable; while
imperium is so important that all mention of it is studiously omitted from the
majestic and misleading record of Augustus’ own life and honours. The two
pillars of his rule, proconsular imperium and the tribunician powers, were the
Revolution itself – the Army and the People. On them stood the military and
monarchic demagogue.
For Augustus the consulate was merely
an ornament or an encumbrance; and an absent consul was an impropriety.
Moreover, his continued tenure debarred others. Active partisans clamoured to
be rewarded, legates of recent service like M. Lollius and M. Vinicius; and a
new generation of nobiles was growing up, the sons of men who had fallen in the
last struggle of the Republic, or the descendants of families to which the
consulate passed as an inherited prerogative.
Though the ruler shunned the holding
of a magistracy, his powers in public law might be described as magisterial, an
impression which was carefully conveyed by their definition to a period of
years. The assumption of a colleague confirmed this fair show. In the course of
the year, proconsular imperium was
conferred upon Agrippa for five years. The exact nature and competence of the
grant is uncertain: it probably covered the dominions of the Princeps, east and
west, lacking, however, authority over the provinces of the Senate.[487]
That was to come later – and later too the jealously guarded tribunicia potestas, the veritable ‘arcanum
imperii’.
It was not for ostentation but for use
that the Princeps took a partner and strengthened his powers when he appeared to
divide them. Before the end of the year he dispatched Agrippa to the East. An
invasion of Arabia had failed, and the ill-advised project was abandoned. There
were less spectacular and more urgent tasks. Two years before, Amyntas, the
ruler of Galatia, in the execution of his duty of pacifying the wild tribes of
the Taurus had been killed in battle.[488]
Rome inherited: M. Lollius, an efficient and unpopular partisan of Augustus,
was engaged in organizing the vast province of Galatia and Pamphylia.[489]
Moreover the time might seem to be near for renewing diplomatic pressure upon
the King of the Parthians to regain the standards of Crassus and so acquire
easy prestige for the new government.
XXV. The
Working of Patronage
The Princeps and his friends controlled
access to all positions of honour and emolument in the senatorial career,
dispensing to their adherents magistracies, priesthoods and provincial
commands. The quaestorship admitted a man to the highest order in state and in
society, the consulate brought nobility and a place in the front ranks of the
oligarchy.
No new system was suddenly created in
January, 27 B.C., complete in every organ and function, nor yet by the
settlement of 23 B.C. The former date was celebrated officially: in truth the latter
was the more important. On neither occasion is evidence recorded of vital
changes concerning the magistracies: it is therefore hard to discern under what
conditions they were liberated from control and restored to Republican freedom.
That there was change and development
is clear. The minor magistracies were not definitely regulated all at once.[490]
For the rest, the practice of the revolutionary period seems to have crystallized
into the law of the constitution. Sulla the Dictator had probably fixed thirty
as the age at which the quaestorship could be held, forty-two the consulate.
Caesar had been hasty and arbitrary: the Triumvirs were brutal-among the
grosser anomalies, men designated to the consulate who had never been senators,
such as Balbus the Elder and Salvidienus Rufus. Rome came to witness younger
and younger consuls – Pollio at thirty-six, Agrippa at twenty-six. The
constitution never recovered from its enemies – or from its friends. Augustus
in the first years masked or palliated some of its maladies at least no
juvenile consuls are attested for some time. None the less, in the ordinances
of Augustus as finally established, a man became eligible to assume the
quaestorship in his twenty-fifth year, the consulate in his thirty-third – with
alleviations for favoured relatives, modest for the young Claudii, scandalous
for Marcellus.[491] Distances were preserved.
The young nobilis often became consul
at the prescribed term, but the son of a Roman knight commonly had to wait for
a number of years. Which was fitting. Knights themselves would not have complained.
[...]
Of the use of the dynastic marriage,
Augustus’ own début in politics provided the most flagrant testimony. Betrothed
to a daughter of the moderate Caesarian P. Servilius, the youth proceeded in
four years through a constrained and unconsummated union with a stepdaughter of
Antonius and a political alliance with the unlovable Scribonia to the
advantageous and satisfactory Claudian connexion. Livia, however, gave him no
children. But Julia, his daughter by Scribonia, was consigned in wedlock as
suited the political designs of the Princeps, to Marcellus, to Agrippa and to
Tiberius in turn. To receive Julia, Tiberius was compelled to divorce his
Vipsania, who fell to Gallus, Pollio’s ambitious son.
What would have happened if Augustus –
like that great politician, the censor Appius Claudius – had been blessed with five
daughters for dynastic matches may inspire and baffle conjecture.[492]
Though unprolific, he exploited the progeny of others. The daughter was not the
Princeps’ only pawn. His sister Octavia had children by her two marriages: from
the first, C. Marcellus and two Marcellas, who soon became available for
matrimonial alliances, from the second the two Antonias, daughters of M. Antonius.
The elder Antonia went to L. Domitius Ahenobarbus, to whom she had been
betrothed from infancy, the younger to Augustus’ stepson Drusus. The chaste
daughters of the profligate Antonius knew each a single husband only. Of the
two Marcellas, the elder married Agrippa and then Iullus Antonius; the two
husbands of the younger were Paullus Aemilius Lepidus and M. Valerius Messalla
Barbatus Appianus.[493]
These were the closest in blood, but
by no means the only near relatives of the Princeps. C. Octavius his father and
his mother Atia were each twice married. Hence another Octavia, Augustus’ half-sister:
her sons were Sex. Appuleius and M. Appuleius, both consuls, no doubt at an
early age.
The schemes devised by Augustus in the
ramification of family alliances were formidable and fantastic. He neglected no
relative, however obscure, however distant, no tie whatever of marriage – or of
friendship retained after divorce. As time went on, more and more aristocratic
families were lured by matrimony into the family and following of the Princeps.
Of his allies among the young nobiles the most able, the most eminent and the
most highly prized were the two Claudii, his stepsons, then L. Domitius Ahenobarbus,
L. Calpurnius Piso (the young brother-in-law of Caesar the Dictator) and the
accomplished Paullus Fabius Maximus. By his own match with Livia, the Princeps
long ago had won the Claudian connexion: through the marriages of others he
subsequently ensnared the patrician houses of the Cornelii Scipiones, the
Aemilii Lepidi, the Valerii and the Fabii. As the young generation of nobiles grew up and passed through the avenue
of political honours to the consulate, an imposing collection of principes viri stood massed around the
Princeps – bringing distinction and strength to the new régime, but also feuds
and dissensions in the secret oligarchy of government.
When the social parvenu and
revolutionary adventurer made himself respectable, his adherents shared in his
social ascension. Agrippa’s first wife had been one of the prizes of the Civil
Wars. She was the richest heiress of Rome, Caecilia, the daughter of Atticus.
Then he married Marcella, the niece of Augustus, and lastly the daughter,
Julia. No less resplendent in its way was the fortune that attended upon other
partisans of Augustus. Unfortunately the partners of the great marshals,
Taurus, Lollius, Vinicius and Tarius, elude detection;[494]
and P. Silius married the daughter of a respectable municipal man, a senator of
praetorian rank.[495]
But Titius secured Paullina, sister of the patrician Fabius Maximus.[496]
As for the upstart Quirinius, his first wife was an Appia Claudia, daughter of
one of the earliest noble supporters of the faction.[497]
Then he rose higher – his second was an Aemilia Lepida in whose veins ran the
blood of Sulla and of Pompeius.[498]
She was the destined bride of L. Caesar, the Princeps’ grandson: the youth died,
and Lepida was transferred without delay to the elderly Quirinius.
Power, distinction and wealth, the
Princeps had seized all the prerogatives of the nobility. The youth who had
invested his patrimony for the good of the State found himself the richest man in
all the world. Like the earlier dynasts, he spent for power and ostentation – to
gratify soldiers and plebs, to adorn the city and to subsidize his political
allies. Corruption had been banished from electoral contests: which confirmed
its power in private. With the fortune won from confiscation and the treasure
of the Ptolemies, the nobility could not compete. Even if lucky enough to have
retained their ancestral estates, they were now deprived of the ruinous profits
of political power, debarred from alliances with those financial interests with
whom they once had shared the spoils of the provinces. Augustus was ready
enough to bestow emolument upon impoverished nobles or meritorious novi homines, enabling them to preserve
the dignity of their station and propagate their families. In the year A.D. 4
he thus augmented the census of no fewer than eighty men.[499]
Upon his own adherents the Princeps
bestowed nobility through the consulate, social distinction by advantageous
marriages and endowment in money on a princely scale. Egypt was his, the prize
upon which politicians and financiers had cast greedy eyes a generation before;
and in Egypt large estates were now owned and exploited by members of the
reigning dynasty, by prominent partisans like Agrippa and Maecenas, and by
other adherents like the obscure admiral M. Lurius.[500]
[...]
Influences more secret and more
sinister were quietly at work all the time-women and freedmen. The great
political ladies of the Republic, from the daughters of consular families such
as Sempronia and Servilia down to minor but efficient intriguers like that
Praecia to whose good offices Lucullus owed, it was said, his command in the East,[501]
found successors in the New State; and the freedmen who managed the private
finances and political machinations of the dynasts, such as Pompeius’ agent
Demetrius, the affluent Gadarene, possessor of nearly two hundred million sesterces,
to whom cities paid honour, neglecting magistrates of the Roman People, were
perpetuated in the exorbitant power of imperial freedmen, first the servants
and then the ministers and masters of the Caesars. What in show and theory was
only the family of a Roman magistrate, austere and national, was in reality cosmopolitan
court. These influences were bound up with the faction from the beginning:
active, though studiousły masked under the Principate of Augustus, they grow
with the passage of dynastic politics into monarchical rule and emerge into
open day in the court life of the ruler of the Julio-Claudian house.
A court soon develops, with forms and
hierarchies. The ruler has his intimates, amici
and comites, so designated by terms
which develop almost into titles; and there are grades among his friends.[502]
When the Princeps, offended, declares in due solemnity that he revokes his
favour, the loss of his amicitia
marks the end of a courtier's career, and often of his life. Ceremonial
observances become more complicated: more ornate and visibly monarchic the garb
and attire of the Princeps of the Roman State.[503]
In portraiture and statuary, Augustus and the members of his house are
depicted, not always quiet and unpretentious, like sombre and dutiful servants
of the Roman People, but aloof, majestic and heroic.
Livia might seldom be visible in
public save at religious ceremonies, escorted by Roman matrons, herself the
model and paragon, or weaving garments with her own hands, destined to clothe
her husband, the Roman magistrate. Her private activities were deep and
devious. She secured senatorial rank for M. Salvius Otho, the consulate for M.
Plautius Silvanus, who was the son of her intimate friend Urgulania.[504]
The assiduities of the young patrician Ser. Sulpicius Galba were handsomely
rewarded by legacies in her will.[505]
Much worse than that was suspected and rumoured about Livia – poison and
murder. Her power and her following can be detected in the time of her son,
most distasteful to him. Antonius’ daughter, the widow of Drusus, held a rival court.
Among the most zealous in cultivation of Antonia’s favour was L. Vitellius, a
knight’s son, but a power at the court of Caligula and three times consul,
colleague in the censorship with his friend the Emperor Claudius. T. Flavius Vespasianus
formed a connexion with Caenis, a freedwoman of Antonia;[506]
and it was to the patronage of the great Narcissus that he owed the command of a
legion.[507] The four emperors who
followed Nero in the space of a single year were all persons conspicuous and
influential at Court.
Such were the ways that led to wealth
and honours in the imperial system, implicit in the Principate of Augustus, but
not always clearly discernible in their working. Political competition was
sterilized and regulated through a pervasive system of patronage and nepotism.
Hence and at this price a well ordered state such as Sulla and Caesar might
have desired but could never have created. The power of the People was broken.
No place was left any more for those political pests, the demagogue and the military
adventurer. That did not mean that the direction of the government now rested
in the hands of Senate and magistrates – not for that, but for another purpose,
the solemn and ostensible restoration of their ancient dignity.
XXVI. The
Government
Though by no means as corrupt and
inefficient as might Thastily be imagined, the governing of all Italy and a
wide empire under the ideas and system of a city state was clumsy, wasteful and
calamitous. Many able men lacking birth, protection or desperate ambition stood
aloof from politics. They could hardly be blamed. The consulate was the
monopoly of the nobiles: after the consulate, little occupation, save a
proconsulate, usually brief in tenure. The consulars became ‘senior statesmen’,
decorative, quarrelsome and ambitious, seldom useful to the Roman People.
Within the Senate or without it, a rich fund of ability and experience lay idle
or was dissipated in politics.
The principes of the dying Republic behaved like dynasts, not as
magistrates or servants of the State. Augustus controlled the consulars as well
as the consuls, diverting their energies and their leisure from intrigue and
violence to the service of the State in Rome, Italy and the provinces. The
Senate becomes a body of civil servants: magistracies are depressed and
converted into qualifying stages in the hierarchy of administration.
In a sense, the consulars of the
Republic might be designated as the
government, ‘auctores publici consilii’. But that government had seldom been able
to present a united front in a political emergency. Against Catilina, perhaps,
but not against Pompeius or Caesar. When it came to maintaining public concord
after the assassination of Caesar the Dictator, the consulars had failed lamentably,
from private ambition and personal feuds, from incompetence and from their very
paucity. In December of 43 B.C. there were only seventeen consulars alive,
mostly of no consequence. By the year of Pollio, at the time of the Pact of
Brundisium, their total and their prestige had sunk still further except for
the dynasts Antonius, Octavianus and Lepidus, only four of them find any
mention in subsequent history.
The years before Actium filled up the
gaps. The Senate which acclaimed Augustus and the Republic restored could show
an imposing roll of consulars, perhaps as many as forty. For the future, the
chief purpose of these principes was to be decorative. Except for Agrippa, only
six of them are later chosen to command armies, as legates or proconsuls. There
were good reasons for that.
Rome and Italy could be firmly held
for the Princeps in his absence by party-dynasts without title or official
powers. In 26 B.C. Taurus was consul, it is true; but the authority of Agrippa,
Maecenas and Livia, who ruled Rome in secret, knew no name or definition – and
needed none. The precaution may appear excessive. Not in Rome but with the
provincial armies lay the real resources of power and the only serious danger.
It was not until a century elapsed after the Battle of Actium, until Nero, the
last of the line of Augustus, had perished and Galba assumed the heritage of
the Julii and Claudii, that the great secret was first published abroad – an
emperor could be created elsewhere than at Rome.[508]
Everybody had known about it.
[...]
XXVII. The
Cabinet
‘Eadem magistratuum vocabula.’ [The
officials carried the old names][509]
Names persist everywhere while substance changes. Like the individual senator,
the Senate as a body preserves dignitas
but loses power as the Princeps encroaches everywhere, grasping more and more.
He retains his imperium in the city
of Rome;[510] he controls admission to
the high assembly; he takes charge of public provinces; he appoints proconsuls,
though with respect for forms preserved;[511]
and he conveys requests, modest but firm, to the governors of provinces.[512]
Yet not entirely at the expense of the
Senate. That body even regains for a time the prerogative of coining in gold
and silver.[513] It acquires new
functions, derived from its practice of taking cognizance of matters affecting
the safety of the State in an emergency, and gradually develops into a high
court of justice under the presidency of the consuls.[514]
Augustus had frequent resort to the People for the passing of his laws. But the
practice of comitial legislation soon decays: senatus consulta then became common, gradually acquiring force of
law. Yet once again, behind the nominal authority and government of the Roman
Senate the real and ultimate power needs to be discovered.
When he comes to narrate the Principate
of Augustus, Cassius Dio complains that the task of the historian has been
aggravated beyond all measure – under the Republic the great questions of policy
had been the subject of open and public debate: they were now decided in secret
by a few men.[515] He is right. If Augustus
wished his rule to retain the semblance of constitutional liberty, with free
elections and free debate in the Senate, it is evident that there would have to
be expert preparation and firm control behind the scenes of all public transactions.
The era of cabinet government has set in. The Senate was no longer a sovran
body, but an organ that advertised or confirmed the decisions of the government;
senatorial rank and the tenure of high office were longer an end in themselves
but the qualification for a career the service of the State.
The principes of the Free State might take counsel together, in a more
or less public fashion, about matters of weight; and the power exerted by such
extra-constitutional forces as the auctoritas of senior statesmen holding no
public office, the intrigues of ladies at the centre of high society or hanging
ambiguous about its fringes, the influence of wealthy knights, whether as
individuals or as corporations – all this has sufficiently been demonstrated.
The domination of Pompeius gave a foretaste of secret rule – his Mytilenean
client Theophanes was an intriguer as well as an historian; his friend, the
affluent senator Lucceius, gave valued counsel; and Balbus was instrumental in
forming a famous compact. Cabinet government already existed in the brief
Dictatorship of Caesar. While the Senate held empty debate or none at all, and prominent
dignitaries waited muttering on his threshold, the Dictator quietly worked out
his plans in the company of his intimates. Octavianus inherited the policy – and
no little part of the personnel, for the names of Balbus, Oppius and Matius
soon emerge in the entourage of the young adventurer. The hazards and intrigues
of the revolutionary era set a high premium on secret counsel and secret
diplomacy; and the Princeps retained unimpaired his native distrust of oratory,
of democracy and of public debate.
The taking of counsel before grave
decisions was a habit ingrained in the Roman whether he acted as parent,
magistrate or general. Augustus could have invoked tradition and propriety, had
he needed or cared to justify the various bodies of advisers that are attested
in his Principate. No sooner was the Free State restored than Augustus hastened
to palliate any inconveniences that might arise from that alarming novelty. He
instructed the Senate to appoint a committee to consult with him and prepare public
business. The committee, comprising the consuls, one member from every other
board of magistrates and fifteen senators chosen by lot, was to change every
six months.[516] It appears to have
persisted throughout his reign, being especially useful in the last years, when
the Princeps seldom cared to enter the Curia; in A.D. 13 its composition was
modified and its powers were so far enhanced as to encroach seriously upon the
functions of the full Senate.[517]
But this was not a permanent change; and the committee seems subsequently to
have lapsed.[518]
The Senate no less than the assembly
of the sovran people was a cumbrous and unsatisfactory body to deal with, and
the position of the Princeps was delicate and perilous, being held to repose upon
general consent and modest executive powers. It was therefore advisable for the
government – that is, the Princeps and the party – dynasts-to sound the
feelings of the senators, avoid surprises and shocks each way in their
reciprocal dealings, and gently prepare the way for innovations.
The mechanical choice by lot of a
small council of senators and their inevitable impermanence, restricted as they
were to six months of the year, shows clearly that it was a committee, not a
cabinet – an organ of administration, not of authority. As it was there, it
might suitably be employed by the Princeps as a group of counsellors and
assessors for judicial business as well.[519]
The Princeps possessed magisterial powers and gradually usurped jurisdiction:
to aid him he would summon from time to time a consilium, drawn from personal friends, representative senators and
legal experts.
[...]
Agrippa died and then Drusus, Tiberius
retired morosely to Rhodes. A crisis had supervened, at the very core of the
party. Another followed before long, and Augustus loudly lamented the loss of
his two most trusty counsellors, Agrippa and Maecenas: had they lived, certain
things would never have happened.[520]
In the elaborate fiction of Cassius
Dio, the decision to restore the Republic, or rather, as that historian
believed, to consolidate the monarchy, was formed after private debate with
those two party-magnates, the soldier and the diplomat. The one advocated a
republic, the other monarchy. The contrast was unreal, the choice did not
arise. What was decided by the advisers of the Princeps was merely the
definition of official powers, the phraseology to disguise them and all the
elaborate setting of a solemn political show. The taciturn and business-like
Agrippa would have been of little use. Nor would Taurus, the other soldier and administrator.
Even lawyers could have been dispensed with, for the formulation was of the
simplest. Politicians were needed. They were available among the
party-chieftains.
The historian might with no less
propriety have turned his talents to the elucidation of the ‘constitutional’
crisis of 23 B.C. by composing speeches
for the principal agents in the secret struggle round a moribund despot.
Modesty or ignorance deterred him from the attempt. It would have required
imagination that he did not possess and facts that he could never discover. Dio
was well aware that no authentic record of such momentous transactions was ever
published by their agents.
Contemporary rumour and subsequent
deductions (supported by Tiberius’ voluntary exile in Rhodes), though correctly
diagnosing the nature of the crisis, were rather at a loss to explain Agrippa’s
dispatch to the East. The gossip that so constantly asserted the preponderating
influence of Livia Drusilla in the counsels of the Princeps, though sometimes
exaggerated and always malevolent, was all too well founded. The propaganda of
Octavianus had been merciless against Fulvia, the wife of Antonius; and Rome
had fought a national war against a political woman, the Queen of Egypt. The
moral programme of the New State was designed to keep women in their place: the
name of Livia is never mentioned by an official poet like Horace.
The precaution seems excessive. In a
Republic like that of Pompeius, Livia would have been a political force,
comparable to her kinswoman Servilia. When Augustus took counsel with his consort,
he was careful to set down his views in writing beforehand. The dominance of
Livia was illustrated in a mysterious episode that attracted the inventive
fancy of an unknown rhetorician.[521]
It was reported that Cn. Cornelius Cinna, a grandson of Pompeius Magnus, was
conspiring against the Princeps. Augustus sought the advice of Livia and
received a long curtain-lecture. On the following day he summoned Cinna to his
presence and delivered a hortatory address, inspired by clemency and appealing
to good sense, for the space of two unbroken hours. The malcontent was
overwhelmed and converted.
The Princeps, the members of his
family and his personal adherents were the real government. The Principate
arose out of usurpation. It never forgot, it never entirely concealed, its origin.
But the act of usurpation could be consummated in a peaceful and orderly
fashion, so that the transmission of power appeared to be no different from its
first legitimation, namely, a special mandate conferred for merit and by
consent. In 23 B.C., after an open crisis and a secret struggle, the
modification of the Princeps’ statute and the conferment of special powers upon
his deputy proceeded without any unfortunate incidents in public. With the
death of Augustus, the Princeps' powers lapsed-he might designate, but he could
not appoint, his heir. When the Principate was first transmitted to a
successor, that person already held sufficient powers to preclude any real
opposition.
But the problem was to recur again and
again. The garrison of the city imposed Claudius in succession to his nephew
Caligula, when Rome lacked a government for two days and in the Senate men
debated about a restoration of the Republic, with rival candidates already
asserting their claims to monarchy. The provincial armies elevated Vespasian to
the purple after civil war. But the proclamation of a new Emperor in default of
a clearly designated heir was not always due to threat or exertion of open
violence. The deed could be done in secret-and in advance. The rule of Nerva by
its impotence threatened to precipitate a civil war. It might be conjectured
that the danger was averted by a veiled coup d’état on the part of certain
military men who constrained Nerva to adopt and designate as his successor M.
Ulpius Traianus, the governor of Upper Germany.[522]
Trajan himself in his lifetime gave no unequivocal indication of his ultimate
intentions. Rumour asserted that the adoption of Hadrian was managed, when
Trajan was already defunct, by Plotina his wife and by the Prefect of the Guard.[523]
It is evident that Augustus and his
confidential advisers had given anxious thought to the problem of providing for
the succession to the Principate – or rather, for the continuity of the government.
No less evident the acute differences of opinion about that important matter,
and bitter rivalries. The final and peaceful result was not attained without
dissensions in the cabinet, several political crises and several political
murders.
Agrippa and Livia had thwarted the
dynastic ambitions of the Princeps in the matter of his nephew Marcellus. Their
triumph was brief and transient. The death of Marcellus, a heavy calamity and
much bewailed, was compensated by a new policy, in which Agrippa and the sons
of Livia in turn were to be the instruments of Augustus in ensuring the
succession for heirs of his own blood. Julia was to provide them.
In 21 B.C. the marriage of Agrippa and
Julia was solemnized. In the next year a son was born, named Gaius. When a second
son, Lucius, followed in 17 B.C. the Princeps adopted the two boys as his own.
In all, this fruitful union produced five children – two daughters as well,
namely Julia and Agrippina, and the posthumous infant Agrippa, an ill-favoured
child (12 В.С.).
Tiberius succeeded Agrippa as husband
of Julia, protector of the young princes and minister of the Princeps in war
and government. The marriage was unwelcome, so gossip asserted. Tiberius dearly
loved his own plebeian Vipsania.[524]
The sober reserve of his nature was ill matched with the gay elegance of Julia
– to call it by no more revealing name. It was the duty and the habit of the
Roman aristocrat to subordinate the tender emotions to the advancement of the
family and the good of the Republic. But was Augustus’ design beneficial to the
Roman People? Of that, a patriotic Roman might have his doubts. The New State
was fast turning into the New Monarchy.
As the dynastic aspirations of
Augustus were revealed, more openly and nearer to success with the growth to
manhood of Gaius and Lucius, the position of Tiberius became irksome; and some
spoke of estrangement from his wife, embittered by the politic necessity of
preserving appearances.[525]
Whatever the behaviour of Julia, that was not the prime cause of the crisis of 6
B.C. Tiberius was granted the tribunicia
potestas for a period of five years –
yet even this hardly meant the succession. The measure would be a visible
reminder and check to conspirators. For the rest, Augustus could rely on
Tiberius’ submission and his own prestige.[526]
Tiberius had conquered Illyricum and extended the gains of Drusus in Germany: he
was now to depart from Rome and set in order the affairs of the East (no doubt
with a special imperium). While
Tiberius governed for the Princeps abroad, maintained the stability and
augmented the prestige of the dynasty, the rule of the young princes was to be
consolidated in his absence, at his expense and at the expense of the Roman
People. In the last six years, Tiberius had hardly been seen in Rome; and there
was no urgent need of him in the East. Augustus wished to remove for a time
this unbending and independent character, to prevent him from acquiring
personal popularity in the capital and strengthening the resources of the
Claudian faction.
Tiberius revolted. Obdurate against
the threats of Augustus and the entreaties of his mother, he persisted in his
intention to abandon public life and showed the strength of his determination by
a voluntary fast. They could not stop him. Tiberius retired to the island of
Rhodes, where he remained in exile, nourishing his resentment upon a diet of
science and letters. His enemies called it secret vice.[527]
Like Agrippa, beneath the mask of service and subordination, Tiberius concealed
a high ambition; like Agrippa, he would yield to Augustus – but not in all
things. His pride had been wounded, his dignitas
impaired. But there was more than that. Not merely spite and disappointment
made the first man in the Empire next to the Princeps refuse his services to
the Roman People.
The purpose of Augustus was flagrant,
and, to Tiberius, criminal. It was not until after his departure that Augustus revealed
the rapid honours and royal inheritance that awaited the princes. But that was
all in the situation already. Nobody could have been deceived. In 6 B.C. there
was an agitation that Gaius should be made consul.[528]
Augustus expressed public disapproval – and bided his time with secret
exultation.[529] In the next year it came
out. Gaius was to have the consulate after an interval of five years (that is,
in A.D. 1); and three years later the same distinction was proclaimed for
Lucius, his junior by three years. The Senate voted Gaius this unprecedented
dispensation for the supreme magistracy: the corporation of Roman knights hailed
him as Princeps Iuventutis.[530]
Thus the two orders, which with separate functions but with coalescence of
interests not only represented, but were themselves the governing and
administrative classes, recognized the son of Augustus as a prince and ruler;
and men came to speak of him as a designated Princeps.[531]
To Gaius and Lucius in a private letter Augustus expressed his prayer that they
should inherit his position in their turn.[532]
That was too much. Tiberius and Drusus
had received special dispensations and early distinction, it is true. Tiberius
became consul at the age of twenty-nine-but that was after service in war, as a
military tribune in Spain, a general in Armenia and in the Alpine campaigns.
The stepson of Augustus, he had benefited from that relationship. Yet even had
Livia not been the wife of the Princeps, her son under the revived aristocracy
of the New State would have reached the consulate in his thirty-third year,
like his peers in that generation of nobiles.
Privilege and patronage, and admitted as such – but not outrageous. To bestow the
supreme magistracy of the Roman People upon an untried youth in the twentieth
year of his age, that was much more than a contradiction of the constitutional
usage and Republican language of the Principate: it revolted the genuine
Republican feelings and good sense of a Roman aristocrat. Illicit and
exorbitant power, ‘regnum’ or ‘dominatio’ as it was called, was no new thing in
the history of Rome or in the annals of the Claudian house. The hereditary
succession of a Roman youth to monarchy was something very different.
Tiberius dwelt at Rhodes. His career
was ended, his life precarious. Of that, none could doubt who studied dynastic
politics and the working of human character. It took an astrologer, the very
best of them, to predict his return.[533]
Much happened in that dark and momentous interval, little can be known.[534]
With the steady and public progress of monarchy the importance of cabinet government
is enhanced; secret policy and secret strife in the counsels of the Princeps
determine the government of Rome, the future succession and the destiny of the
whole world.
XXVIII. The
Succession
Three dangers ever beset the
domination of a party – there may arise dissension among its directors, the
nominal leader may emancipate himself from control, or he may be removed by death.
For the moment, Augustus had his way. He was left in 6 B.C. with the two boys,
the one in his fourteenth, the other in his eleventh year. The Princeps had
broken loose from the Caesarian party, alienated his deputy and a section at
least of his adherents. While Augustus lived, he maintained peace and the dynasty.
But Augustus was now aged fifty-seven. The crisis could not long be postponed.
A loyal but not ingenuous historian
exclaims that the whole world felt the shock of Tiberius’ departure.[535]
Not at all: both the Princeps and his party were strong enough to stand the
strain. Though a certain lull prevailed now on the northern frontiers, natural
if not necessary after the great wars of conquest, the effort of Rome did not
flag or fail. The governmental oligarchy could furnish adequate generals and
sagacious counsellors, the most prominent among whom have already been
indicated. The Princeps now had to lean heavily on the loyalty and tried merit of
certain novi homines. For many years
nothing had been heard of Lollius and Vinicius. Their emergence is dramatic and
impressive. Close behind comes Quirinius.
Above all, several groups of nobiles, the peers and rivals of
Tiberius, gain splendour and power from his eclipse. Depressed and decimated by
war and revolution, swept up into one party and harnessed as they had been to
the service of the State, the nobiles
now enjoy a brief and last renascence in the strange but not incongruous
alliance of monarchy. Augustus had passed beyond the measure and proportions of
a Roman politician or party leader. He had assumed the stature of a monarch and
the sure expectation of divinity: his sons were princes and would succeed him.
The aristocracy could tolerate the rule of monarchy more easily than the
primacy of one of their own number. Augustus knew it. The ambition of the nobiles might have appeared the most
serious menace to his rule. On the contrary, it proved his surest support.
[...]
Sex. Appuleius (cos. 29 B.C.), a dim and mysterious figure, but none the less
legate of Illyricum in 8 B.C., was the son of Octavia, the half-sister of the
Princeps. Iullus Antonius (cos. 10 B.C.),
a man of taste and culture, took over from Agrippa the one Marcella, P.
Quinctilius Varus (cos. 13 B.C.) had
married the daughter of the other.[536]
Paullus Fabius Maximus (cos. 11 B.C.)
had taken to wife Marcia, the granddaughter of Augustus stepfather.[537]
Fabius, a cultivated and diplomatic person, was an intimate friend of the
Princeps, whose glorification he had assiduously propagated during his
proconsulate of Asia;[538]
and he drew the bond tighter by giving in marriage his daughter Fabia Numantina
to the son of Sex. Appuleius.[539]
These four consulars were perhaps not
all outstanding in talent or very closely related to the reigning family; and
only two of them are known to have commanded armies in the period of Tiberius’
seclusion. None the less, they were personages to be reckoned with – especially
the son of M. Antonius. More remarkable than any of them, however, is L.
Domitius Ahenobarbus (cos. 16 B.C.),
the husband of Augustus' own niece Antonia, and thus more highly favoured in
the matter of political matches than any save Drusus (the husband of the
younger Antonia) and the successive consorts of his daughter Julia. Ahenobarbus
held in succession the command of the great northern armies, passing from
Illyricum to Germany. He is described as cruel, arrogant and extravagant, a
skilled charioteer.[540]
There was more in him than that-either prudence or consummate guile: his name
finds record in no political transactions, intrigues or conspiracies. The
tumultuous history of the Ahenobarbi may have inculcated a rational distaste
for politics and adventure – two members of his family perished in the wars of
Marius and Sulla; his grandfather, the enemy of both Caesar and Pompeius, had fallen
at Pharsalus; his father was the great Republican admiral.
The Aemilii perpetuated their old
political alliance with the Caesarian cause, but not through the Triumvir. His
nephew and enemy, Paullus Aemilius Lepidus, from the Sicilian War onwards personal
friend of Augustus, had two wives, Cornelia and the younger Marcella. Paullus
was now dead; his two sons by Cornelia, L. Aemilius Paullus (cos. A.D. 1) and M. Aemilius Lepidus (cos. A.D. 6), attained the distinction
due to their family and their mother’s prayers, but not with equal fortune.[541]
The elder took to wife Julia, daughter of Julia and granddaughter of Augustus: the
younger was spared the perils of marrying a princess.
Such was the group of aristocratic
families entwined about the roots of the monarchy. Livia and the Claudian
connexion were in low water: Tiberius lived on in exile and might never return.
On her own side of the family she lacked relatives who might be built up into a
faction.[542] To be sure, there were
her grandchildren, the three children of Drusus and Antonia; two of them were
artfully interlocked with the descendants of Augustus through his daughter
Julia, Germanicus being betrothed to Agrippina, Julia Livia to Gaius Caesar,
the heir presumptive. The youngest child, Claudius, displayed neither grace of
form nor intellectual promise. But even he could serve the political ambitions
of his grandmother; so the young Claudius, after losing his bride Livia Medullina,
married Urgulanilla, the daughter of M. Plautius Silvanus, a politician to whom
the notorious friendship of his mother with Livia brought promotion and a
career. Silvanus became consul along with Augustus in 2 B.C. A political
alliance with the Plautii was good Claudian tradition.[543]
So Livia worked for power. But it is by no means certain that Silvanus was
popular with Tiberius. Lacking Tiberius, the Claudian party lacked a leader of
standing in war and politics. A heavy preponderance of consular nobiles, consolidated by matrimonial
pacts, was massed around the throne and the heirs presumptive and designate, among
them many enemies, the source and seed of remembered rancour and postponed
revenge. Yet Tiberius must have had a following among the nobiles.
[...]
Julia was accused of immoral conduct
by Augustus and summarily banished to an island. He provided the Senate with a document
and full particulars of her misbehaviour, her paramours and her accomplices:
they were said to be numerous, of every order of society. Five nobles were
among them.[544] The consular Iullus
Antonius was put to death;[545]
the others, the consular T. Quinctius Crispinus, described as austere in
appearance, unspeakably wicked within,[546]
the subtle and eloquent Ti. Sempronius Gracchus,[547]
an Ap. Claudius Pulcher, who may have been the son or grandson of the consul of
38 B.C., and a Cornelius Scipio were all relegated.[548]
The offence may have been transgression against the Leges Juliae: the
punishment went beyond that, and the procedure was probably a trial for high
treason.[549]
Circumstantial reports of the revels
of Julia, of the number and variety of her lovers, were propagated by rumour,
embellished with rhetoric and consecrated in history –she disgraced by public and
nocturnal debauch the Forum and the very Rostra from which the Princeps her
father had promulgated the laws that were to sanction the moral regeneration of
Rome.[550]
It may be tempting, but it is not necessary, to rehabilitate her entirely. Julia
may have been immodest, but she was hardly a monster. Granted a sufficient and
damning measure of truth in one or two charges of adultery – Julia was a Roman
aristocrat and claimed the prerogatives of her station and family[551]
– was it necessary that there should be public scandal? Augustus was bitter and
merciless because his moral legislation had been baffled and mocked in his own
family. Yet he could have dealt with the matter there. His programme was
unpopular enough with the aristocracy, and the most circumspect of politicians
could hardly afford in this critical season the luxury of a moral purge of high
society. What induced him to court public scandal and sanction the disgrace on his
daughter?
The influence and hand of Livia might
have been suspected, bearing heavily on the Julii who supplanted her son. But
no ancient testimony makes this easy guess and incriminates the vulnerable
schemer. Moreover the ruin of the erring mother did not impair the succession
of Gaius and Lucius, her sons.
The motive must have been political,
the charges of vice a convenient and impressive pretext.[552]
As a politician, Augustus was ruthless and consequent. To achieve his ambition
he would coolly have sacrificed his nearest and dearest; and his ambition was
the unhindered succession to the throne of Gaius and Lucius. To this end their
mother served merely as an instrument. There may have been a conspiracy.
Whether wanton or merely traduced, Julia was not a nonentity but aa great
political lady. Her paramours the five nobiles
are not innocent triflers or moral reprobates but a formidable faction.
Gracchus bears most of the official blame:[553]
the true principal was probably Iullus Antonius. The son of the Triumvir might
well be politically dangerous. Like the early Christian, it was not the ‘flagitia’
but the ‘nomen’ that doomed him. Iullus Antonius may have aspired to the place of
Tiberius as stepfather of the princes; and Julia may well have found the
accomplished Antonius more amiable than her grim husband. But all is uncertain
– if Augustus struck down Julia and Antonius, it was not from tenderness for
Tiberius. It may be that through the ruin of his daughter he sought finally to
make Tiberius harmless, his own sons secure. Though absent, Tiberius still had
a following; though an exile he still held his tribunicia potestas; and he was still the Princeps’ son-in-law.
Augustus might think that he knew his Tiberius. Still, he preferred to run no
risks. The disgrace of Julia would abolish the only tie that bound Tiberius to
the reigning house. Tiberius was not consulted; when he knew, he vainly
interceded for his wife. Augustus was unrelenting. He at once dispatched a
missive to Julia, breaking off the marriage in the name of Tiberius.[554]
The position of Tiberius had long been
anomalous. It now became doubtful and perilous. In the next year his tribunicia potestas lapsed. Augustus did
not renew it. Gaius Caesar, consul designate and invested with proconsular imperium, after visiting the Danubian
and Balkan armies, now appeared in the East. For some years disturbances in
Armenia, a land over which Augustus claimed sovranty, while not seriously
impairing the interests or the prestige of Rome, none the less called for
attention. Moreover it was advisable to display the heir apparent to provinces
and armies which had seen no member of the syndicate of government since
Agrippa the vicegerent departed from the East twelve years before. In the
meantime, able men had governed Syria – the veteran Titius, not heard of since
Actium, but probably appointed legate of Syria when Agrippa left the East (13
B.C.), C. Sentius Saturninus and P. Quinctilius Varus. But that was not enough.
Gaius was sent out, accompanied by M. Lollius as his guide and counsellor[555]
– it would never do if an ambitious and inexperienced youth embroiled the
Empire in the futility of a Parthian War. On his staff there was a varied
company that included L. Aelius Seianus and the military tribune Velleius
Paterculus.[556]
Tiberius came to Samos with due
submission to pay his respects to the kinsman who had supplanted him; he
returned again to his retreat after a cool reception. Lollius was all-powerful.
Tiberius’ life was in danger – at a banquet in the presence of Gaius Caesar and
Lollius, a hasty careerist offered to go to Rhodes and bring back the head of
the exile.[557] That was excessive. There
were other symptoms. Nemausus, a loyal and patriotic city of Narbonensis, cast
down the statues of Tiberius;[558]
and despicable eastern king, Archelaus of Cappadocia, whose cause Tiberius had
once defended before the Senate, was emboldened to studious neglect of the head
of the Claudian house.[559]
Tiberius, who honoured, if ever a Republican noble did, the sacred claims of
fides, remembered the affront.
In the meantime Gaius prosecuted his
travels. In A.D. 2 the Roman prince conferred with the King of Parthia on an
island in the river Euphrates, with highly satisfactory results. Shortly after
this, Lollius the ‘comes et rector’ fell abruptly from favour and died, of his
own hand, so it was reported. Everybody rejoiced at his death, says Velleius, a
contemporary witness and a flatterer of Tiberius.[560]
If many knew the truth of the whole episode, they were not likely to tell it.
It is evident, and it is demonstrated by another incident nearly twenty years
later, that the task of controlling a crown prince in the East was peculiarly open
to friction, dissension and political intrigue.[561]
Against Lollius it was alleged that he
had taken bribes from eastern kings[562]
– in itself no grave misdemeanour. The charges of rapacity and avarice
elsewhere levelled against this powerful and unpopular ally of the Princeps may
perhaps be held confirmed rather than refuted by Horace’s eager praise of his
disinterested integrity.[563]
The apparent conflict of testimony about the character of Lollius bears its own
easy interpretation. Lollius was favoured by Augustus, loathed by Tiberius. In
17 B.C., when governor of Gaul, Lollius had suffered at the hands of raiding
Germans a trifling defeat, soon repaired but magnified beyond all measure by
his detractors.[564]
In the following year Augustus came to Gaul, Tiberius with him. Tiberius
inherited Lollius’ command of the legions of Gaul and the glory of the Alpine
War. Like P. Silius for the favourite Drusus on the other flank of the convergent
advance, Lollius may have laboured for another to reap. Lollius was supplanted.
Hence a feud, mutual and unremitting.
To the disgraced Lollius in the
delicate function of guiding C. Caesar succeeded P. Sulpicius Quirinius, who
had paid assiduous court to the exile of Rhodes without impairing his own advancement.[565]
His diplomatic foresight was handsomely requited, before death by the
governorship of Syria-and after death. The novus
homo from the small town of Lanuvium was accorded a public funeral on the
instance of Tiberius, who took occasion to remind the Senate of Quirinius’
merits, with pointed contrast and vituperation of Lollius, dead twenty years
before, but not forgotten. Lollius, he said, was responsible for the evil behaviour
of C. Caesar.[566]
The position of Tiberius improved,
though his political prospects grew no brighter. His spirit appears to have
been broken. He had already begged to be allowed to return, and his plea had been
reinforced by the repeated intercession of his mother. Until the fall of
Lollius, Augustus remained obdurate. He now gave way – what Livia had been unable
to achieve was perhaps the work of political influences and powerful advisers
that evade detection. But even now, return was conditional on the consent of
Gaius; and Tiberius was debarred from public life. He dwelt in Rome as a
private citizen. Even though the other Caesar, Lucius, when on his way to Spain
succumbed to illness and died at Massilia a few days after Tiberius’ return,
the Claudian was not restored to his dignitas.[567]
No honour, no command in war awaited him, but a dreary and precarious old age,
or rather a brief term of despair until Gaius succeeded to the throne and the public
safety imposed the ruthless suppression of a rival.
Once again fortune took charge of the
game and shattered Augustus’ ambition of securing the succession for one of his
own blood. He had surmounted scandal and conspiracy, merciless towards Julia
and the five nobiles her allies; and
in A.D. 1, when his son and heir was consul, he came safely through the
climacteric year of a man's life, the sixty-third.[568]
Not three years passed and Gaius was dead. After composing the relations of
Rome and Parthia, in the course of the same year Gaius proceeded to settle order
in the dependent kingdom of Armenia. While laying siege to a small post, he was
treacherously attacked and wounded. The wound refused to heal. His malady
brought on a deep dejection, reinforcing perhaps a consciousness of personal
inadequacy; the young man conceived a violent distaste for the life of active responsibility
to which he was doomed by his implacable master:[569]
it is alleged that he asked for permission to dwell in the East in a private
station. However it be (and scandal has probably embellished the topic in the
interests of Tiberius), Gaius wasted away and perished far from Rome (February
21st, A.D. 4).[570]
There was no choice now. Augustus
adopted Tiberius. The words in which he announced his intention revealed the
bitter frustration of his dearest hopes.[571]
They were not lost upon Tiberius – or upon the principes, his rivals. In this emergency Augustus remained true to
himself. Tiberius had a son; but Tiberius, though designated to replace
Augustus, was to be cheated, prevented from transmitting the power to the
Claudii only. He was constrained to adopt a youth who perpetuated the descent
of the municipal Octavii, Germanicus his brother’s son, grandson of Octavia.
Further, the Princeps adopted Agrippa Postumus, the last surviving son of
Agrippa and Julia.
Of the true sentiments of Senate and
People when the Claudian returned to power, no testimony exists.[572]
In his own order and class, it will be presumed, no lack of open joy and
welcome, to dissemble the ruin of high ambitions. It was expedient to
demonstrate without delay that he was indispensable to the safety of the Empire
– in short, the ‘perpetuus patronus Romani imperii’.[573]
[the perennial patron of the Roman Empire] Tiberius Caesar, now in possession
of tribunicia potestas and a special imperium, was dispatched to the North.
There had been fighting in Germany-with more credit to Rome, perhaps, and more
solid achievement than is indicated by a historian who omits Ahenobarbus and is
as cool about the services of Vinicius as his personal attachment to the family
of that general could with decency permit.[574]
The soldiers at least were quite glad to see Tiberius, a cautious and considerate
general.[575] After two campaigns he
passed to Illyricum. In the interval of his absence, the power of Rome had been
felt beyond the Danube. The peoples from Bohemia eastwards to Transylvania were
compelled to acknowledge Roman suzerainty; Maroboduus, the ruler of a Bohemian
kingdom, was isolated on all sides.[576]
The final blow was to fall in A.D. 6, when the armies of the Rhine and of
Illyricum invaded Bohemia from west and south, in a grand converging movement.
The rebellion of Illyricum cut short the ambitious design, fully engaging the
attention of Tiberius for three years (A.D. 6–9). Then Germany rose. Varus and
three legions perished. Rome did not see her new master for many years.
The adoption of Tiberius should have
brought stability to the régime by discouraging the hopes of rivals or
relatives. One danger, ever menacing, was still averted by the continuous miracle
of Augustus’ longevity. If his death occurred in the midst of the frontier
troubles, in which, close upon the gravest foreign war since Hannibal (for so
the rebellion of Illyricum was designated)[577]
there followed a disaster unparalleled since Crassus, the constitutional crisis
in Rome, supervening when the first man in the Empire was absent, might turn
into a political catastrophe. Against that risk the Princeps and the chief men
of the government must have made careful provision. The way was still rough and
perilous.
Two obstacles remained, Julia and
Agrippa Postumus, the only surviving grandchildren of the Princeps – and they
did not survive for long. In A.D. 8 a new scandal swept and cleansed the
household of the Princeps, to the grief of Augustus, the scorn or delight of
his enemies-and perhaps to the ultimate advantage of the Roman People. Julia,
it was alleged, had slipped into the wayward habits of her gay and careless
mother. She was therefore relegated to a barren island.[578]
Her paramour was D. Junius Silanus[579]
– there may have been others, for the charge of immorality was a convenient
device for removing, as well as for discrediting, a political suspect. This
Silanus was a relative of M. Junius Silanus (cos. A.D. 19) to whom Julia’s daughter Aemilia Lepida was perhaps
already betrothed. L. Aemilius Paullus could hardly be accused of adultery with
Julia, for she was his wife. Connivance in her misconduct may have been invoked
to palliate his execution for conspiracy.[580]
The charges brought against Agrippa
Postumus had been more vague, his treatment more merciful but none the less
arbitrary and effective. Agrippa is described as brutal and vicious.[581]
The strength of body and intractable temper which he had inherited from his
father might have been schooled in the discipline of the camp or the
playing-field: it was out of place at Court. His coeval, Germanicus’ young
brother Claudius, whom some thought stupid and whom his mother Antonia called a
monster, was not a decorative figure. But Claudius was harmless and tolerated.
Not so Agrippa, of the blood of Augustus. This political encumbrance was
dispatched to a suitable island (A.D. 7).
Augustus still lived through the
scandals of his family. The disasters of his armies tried him more sorely and
wrung from his inhuman composure the despairing complaint against Varus for the
lost legions.[582] In A.D. 13 the
succession was publicly regulated as far as was possible. Tiberius became
co-regent, in virtue of a law conferring on him powers equal with the Princeps
in the control of provinces and armies.[583]
After conducting a census as the colleague of Augustus, Tiberius Caesar set out
for Illyricum (August, A.D. 14).
The health of Augustus grew worse and
the end was near, heralded and accompanied by varied exaggerations of rumour. Men
even believed that the frail septuagenarian, accompanied only by his intimate,
Paullus Fabius Maximus, had made a voyage by sea to visit Agrippa Postumus in
secret.[584] More instructive, perhaps,
if no more authentic, was the report of one of his latest conversations, at
which the claims and the dispositions of certain principes were severally canvassed. M. Aemilius Lepidus, he said,
possessed the capacity for empire but not the ambition, Asinius Gallus the
ambition only: L. Arruntius had both.[585]
These were eminent men. Lepidus, of Scipionic ancestry, son of Augustus’ friend
Paullus, held aloof from the politics of the Aemilii and the alliance of his
ill-starred brother, the husband of the younger Julia. He served with
distinction under Tiberius in Illyricum, and in this year was governor of
Hispania Citerior, at the head of three legions.[586]
Tiberius could trust Lepidus – not Gallus, however, the husband of Vipsania.
Gallus, with all his Father’s fierce independence of spirit, was devoured by a
fatal impatience to play the politician. He was not given the command of an
army. L. Arruntius came of a wealthy and talented family, newly ennobled
through his father, admiral at Actium, consul in 22 B.C., and the author of a
history of the Punic Wars in the manner of Sallustius.[587]
The time for such exciting
speculations had passed ten years before. The government party among the
aristocracy old and new, built up with such care by Augustus to support the
monarchy and the succession of his sons, had been transformed both in
composition and in allegiance. Some of the enemies or rivals of Tiberius, such
as Lollius and Iullus Antonius, were dead, others discredited, others
displaced. Astute politicians who had not committed themselves too deeply were
quick to transfer their adherence openly to the prospective Princeps; and neutrals
reaped the fruits of prudent abstention from intrigue. Quirinius had prospered;[588]
likewise P. Quinctilius Varus, a person of consequence at Rome – he had married
Claudia Pulchra, the daughter of Marcella. Varus had other useful connexions.[589]
A new party becomes discernible, dual
in composition, as might be expected. In the six years following the return to
power of Tiberius, along with descendants of the old nobility, like the patricians
M. Aemilius Lepidus, P. Cornelius Dolabella and M. Furius Camillus, or heirs of
recent consuls like the two Nonii L. Arruntius and A. Licinius Nerva Silianus
(son of P. Silius), names entirely new appear on the Fasti-the palpable
influence of the aristocratic Claudian.[590]
Such are the two Vibii from the small town of Larinum in Samnium; Papius
Mutilus, also a Samnite; the two Poppaei from the Picene country; also L. Apronius
and Q. Junius Blaesus. No less significant is the name of Lucilius Longus,
honourably commemorated in history for his loyalty to Tiberius – perhaps the son
of that Lucilius who was the friend of Brutus and of Antonius.[591]
Tiberius did not forget his own Republican and Pompeian antecedents.
Like the departure, the return of
Tiberius will have changed the army commands. Most of the generals of the
earlier wars of conquest were now dead, decrepit or retired, giving place to another
generation, but not their own sons – the young men inherited nobility, that was
enough. Caution, abetted by the memory of old feuds or suppressed rancour,
persuaded Tiberius to defraud them of military glory. The deplorable Lollius
had a son, it is true, but his only claim to fame or history is the parentage of
Lollia Paullina. P. Vinicius and P. Silius, the sons of marshals, began a
military career, commanding the army of the Balkans after their praetorships;[592]
they received the consulate but no consular military province. Silius’ two
brothers attained to the consulate, only one of them, however, to military
command.[593] This being so, few
indeed of the nobiles, the rivals and
equals of Tiberius, could hope that their sons would govern provinces with legionary
armies – certainly not Ahenobarbus or Paullus Fabius Maximus.
Of the earlier generation of Augustus’
marshals, C. Sentius Saturninus alone persisted, commanding on the Rhine:[594]
he was followed by Varus, with L. Nonius Asprenas as his legate.[595]
In the East, L. Volusius Saturninus, a family friend of Tiberius, is attested
as governor of Syria (A.D. 4–5); after him came Quirinius (A.D. 6).[596]
M. Plautius Silvanus governs Asia and then Galatia (A.D. 4–6);[597]
Cn. Piso’s command in Spain probably belongs to this period;[598]
and two Cornelii Lentuli turn up in succession as proconsuls of the turbulent
province of Africa.[599]
When Tiberius invaded Bohemia in A.D.
6, the veteran Sentius Saturninus led the army of Germany eastwards as one
column of the convergent attack, while under Tiberius served M. Valerius Messalla
Messallinus (cos. 3 B.C.) as governor
of the province of Illyricum, ‘vir animo etiam quam gente nobilior’.[600]
[blessed in outcome and brave in endeavor] In the Balkans the experienced
soldier A. Caecina Severus (cos. suff.
1 B.C.) was in charge of Moesia (now that Macedonia had lost its army).[601]
In the three years of the rebellion of Illyricum the following con- sulars
served under Tiberius in various capacities, namely M. Plautius Silvanus
(summoned from Galatia to the Balkans with an army in A.D. 7), M. Aemilius
Lepidus, whose virtues matched his illustrious lineage, C. Vibius Postumus (cos. suff. A.D. 5), L. Apronius (cos. suff. A.D. 8), and probably L.
Aelius Lamia, ‘vir antiquissimi moris’ (cos.
A.D. 3).[602]
The laudatory labels of Velleius tell
their own story. The names of consuls and legates, a blend of the old and the
new, provide some indication of the range and character of Tiberius party.
Members of families that hitherto had not risen to the consulate are prominent
– yet not paradoxical, for this was a Claudian faction. In the background,
however, stand certain noble houses which, for all their social eminence, do
not seem to have been implicated in the matrimonial arrangements of Augustus – the
Calpurnii Pisones and the Cornelii Lentuli. L. Calpurnius Piso (cos. 15 B.C.) was connected, it is true,
with the family of Caesar; but the bond had not been tightened. Piso was an aristocrat
of varied accomplishments, of literary tastes, yet the victor in a great
Thracian war, a hard drinker, the boon companion and intimate counsellor of
Tiberius.[603] He was destined to hold
a long tenure of the post of praefectus
urbi.[604] His successor, though
only for a year, was L. Aelius Lamia, a lively old man who enjoyed high social
distinction although the first consul in his family.[605]
After Lamia came Cossus Cornelius Lentulus (cos.
1 B.C.), the distinguished general of a war in Africa, a somnolent and lazy
person to outward view, but no less trusted by Tiberius than the excellent
Piso.[606]
They never let out a secret. It will be recalled that Seius Strabo had a wife
from one branch of the patrician Cornelii Lentuli.[607]
A powerful coalition of individuals
and of families stands behind Tiberius, mostly with interlocking matrimonial
ties, houses of the ancient nobility like the Calpurnii and the numerous branches
and relatives of the Cornelii Lentuli, men of more recent stocks such as L.
Nonius Asprenas (linked through marriage with L. Calpurnius Piso, with Varus
and with L. Volusius Saturninus), and a firm company of novi homines. A new government is already in being.
Yet this was not enough to preclude
rumours, and even risks. As the health of Augustus began to fail and the end
was near, men’s minds were seized by fear and insecurity – ‘pauci bona libertatis
in cassum disserere, plures bellum pavescere, alii cupere.’[608]
So Tacitus, but he proceeds at once to demolish that impression. Velleius
Paterculus, however, paints an alarming picture of the crisis provoked by the
death of Augustus. The exaggeration is palpable and shameless.[609]
At Rome due provision had been made
for the peaceful transmission of the Principate. Seius Strabo was Prefect of
the Guard, C. Turranius of the corn supply; another knight, M. Magius, held
Egypt. All the provincial armies were in the hands of sure partisans. On the
Rhine were massed eight legions under two legates, the one C. Silius A. Caecina
Largus, the son of one of Augustus’ faithful generals, the other A. Caecina
Severus (perhaps a relative): Germanicus, nephew and adopted son of Tiberius, was
in supreme command.[610]
In Illyricum, now divided into two provinces, Pannonia was held by Q. Junius
Blaesus, the uncle of Seianus, Dalmatia by P. Cornelius Dolabella, of ancient
nobility.[611] The competent and sturdy
novus homo C. Poppaeus Sabinus was legate
of Moesia.[612] In Syria stood Creticus
Metellus Silanus, whose infant daughter was betrothed to the eldest son of
Germanicus.[613] M. Aemilius Lepidus was
in charge of Hispania Citerior.[614]
These were the armed provinces of Caesar. Africa, with one legion, was governed
by the proconsul L. Nonius Asprenas, who was succeeded in that office by L.
Aelius Lamia.[615]
On August 19th, A.D. 14, the Princeps
died at Nola in Campania. Tiberius, who had set out for Illyricum, was recalled
by urgent messages from his mother. He arrived in time to receive the last mandates
from the lips of the dying Princeps – so ran the official and inevitable
version, inevitably mocked and disbelieved. It did not matter. Everything had
been arranged, not merely the designation of his successor.
At Rome, magistrates and Senate,
soldiers and populace at once took a personal oath in the name of Tiberius,
renewing the allegiance sworn long ago to Octavianus before Actium.[616]
This was the essence of the Principate. Certain formalities remained. On April
3rd of the previous year Augustus had drawn up his last will and testament.[617]
About the same time, it may be inferred, three state – papers were composed or
revised, namely, the ceremonial which he desired for his funeral, a list of the
military and financial resources and obligations of the government and the Index rerum a se gestarum, which was to
be set up on tablets of bronze in front of the Mausoleum.
These were official documents. It is
evident that Augustus had taken counsel with the chief men of his party, making
his dispositions for the smooth transference of the supreme power. As in 27
B.C., it was necessary that the Principate should be conferred by consent upon
the first citizen for services rendered and expected. The task might appear too
great for any one man but Augustus alone, a syndicate might appear preferable
to a principate:[618]
none the less, it must be demonstrated and admitted that there could be no
division of the supreme power.
The business of the deification of
Augustus was admirably expedited: there were awkward moments in the public
conferment of the Principate upon the heir whom he had designated. Tiberius
himself was ill at ease, conscious of his ambiguous position and his many
enemies, hesitant and over-scrupulous. The inevitable role of a freely chosen
Princeps and the well-staged deception imposed by Augustus, the least honest
and the least Republican of men, preyed upon the conscience of Tiberius and
revealed itself in his public acts and utterances. On the other hand his
enemies were alert to prosecute their advantage. Tiberius Caesar had the power
– they would not let him enjoy it in security and goodwill. In the critical
session of the Senate certain of the leading men of the State, such as Asinius
Gallus, played without skill the parts for which they had been chosen – perhaps
in feigned and malignant clumsiness.
So far the public spectacle and the
inevitable ratification of Augustus’ disposal of the Roman State. Nothing was
said in the Senate of the summary execution of Agrippa Postumus. It was ordered
and done in secret, through Sallustius Crispus, a secretary of state, in virtue
of the provision of the dead Princeps for this emergency, a deed coolly decided
eighteen months before.[619]
Augustus was ruthless for the good of the Roman People. Some might affect to
believe him unwilling to contemplate the execution of one of his own blood.[620]
That interpretation was not meant to shield Augustus but to incriminate the new
régime. ‘Primumfacinus novi principatus’, so Tacitus describes the execution of
Agrippa. The arbitrary removal of a rival was no less essential to the
Principate than the public conferment of legal and constitutional power. Deed
and phrase recur at the beginning of Nero’s reign.[621]
From first to last the dynasty of the Julii and the Claudii ran true to form,
despotic and murderous.
XXIX. The
National Programme
So far the manner in which power was
seized and held, the working of patronage, the creation of an oligarchy and system
of government. Security of possession, promotion for loyalty or merit and firm
rule in Rome, Italy and the provinces, that was not enough.
Peace came, and order; but the State,
still sorely ailing, looked to its ‘salubris princeps’ for spiritual
regeneration as well as for material reform. Augustus claimed that a national
mandate had summoned him to supreme power in the War of Actium. Whatever the
truth of that contention, he could not go back upon it, even if he had wished.
The mandate was not exhausted when the State was saved from a foreign enemy.
The solid mass of his middle – class partisans was eager and insistent.
‘Magis alii homines quam alii mores.’[622]
[other men rather than other characters.] So Tacitus, not deluded by the
outcome of a civil war that substituted one emperor for another and changed the
personnel, but not the character, of government. The same men who had won the
wars of the Revolution now controlled the destinies of the New State – but
different ‘mores’ needed to be professed and inculcated, if not adopted. It is
not enough to acquire power and wealth: men wish to appear virtuous and to feel
virtuous.
The new policy embodied a national and
a Roman spirit. The contact with the alien civilization of Greece originally
roused the Romans to become conscious of their own individual character as a
people. While they took over and assimilated all that the Hellenes could give,
they shaped their history, their traditions and their concept of what was Roman
in deliberate opposition to what was Greek. Out of the War of Actium, artfully
converted into a spontaneous and patriotic movement, arose a salutary myth which
enhanced the sentiment of Roman nationalism to a formidable and even grotesque
intensity.
Rome had won universal empire
half-reluctant, through a series of accidents, the ever-widening claims of
military security and the ambition of a few men. Cicero and his contemporaries might
boast of the libertas which the Roman
People enjoyed, of the imperium which
it exerted over others. Not until libertas
was lost did men feel the full pride of Rome’s imperial destiny empire without
end in time and space:
his ego nec metas rerum nec
tempora pono:
imperium sine fine dedi.[623]
[For these I set no bounds
in space or time; but have given empire without end.]
The Greeks might have their Alexander
– it was glorious, but it was not Empire. Armies of robust Italian peasants had
crushed and broken the great kings in the eastern lands, the successors of the
Macedonian; and they had subdued to their rule nations more intractable than
the conqueror of all the East had ever seen. In surge of patriotic exaltation,
the writers of Augustan Rome ingenuously debated whether Alexander himself, at
the height and peak of his power, could have prevailed over the youthful vigour
of the martial Republic. They were emboldened to doubt it.[624]
More than that, the solid fabric of law and order, built by the untutored
sagacity of Roman statesmen, would stand and endure for ever. The Romans could
not compete with Greece for primacy in science, arts and letters – they
cheerfully resigned the contest. The Roman arts were war and government:
tu regere imperio
populos, Romane, memento.[625]
[you, Roman,
be sure to rule the world]
But the possession of an empire was
something more than a cause for congratulation and a source of revenue. It was
a danger and a responsibility. By its unwieldy mass the Empire might come
crashing to the ground, involving Rome in the ruins. The apprehensions evoked
by the long series of civil wars were only too well grounded. Actium had
averted the menace – but for how long? Could Rome maintain empire without the
virtues that had won it?[626]
A well-ordered state has no need of
great men, and no room for them. The last century of the Free State witnessed a
succession of striking individuals – a symptom of civic degeneration and cause
of disaster. It was the Greek period of Roman history, stamped with the sign of
the demagogue, the tyrant and the class war; and many of the principal actors
of the tragedy had little of the traditional Roman in their character. Augustus
paid especial honour to the great generals of the Republic. To judge by the
catalogues of worthies as retailed by patriotic poets, he had to go a long way
back to find his favourites – before the age of the Gracchi. Marius was an
exemplar of ‘Itala virtus’; Sulla Felix was much more a traditional Roman
aristocrat than many have believed; and Sulla sought to establish an ordered
state. Both were damned by the crime of ambition and ‘impia arma’. Augustus,
like the historian Tacitus, would have none of them; and so they receive no
praise from the poets.[627]
Pompeius was no better, though he has the advantage over Caesar in Virgil’s
solemn exhortation against civil war. As for Antonius, he was the archetype of
foreign vices – ‘externi mores ac vitia non Romana’.[628]
[foreign habits and un-Roman vices]
It was not merely the vices of the principes that barred them from recognition.
Their virtues had been pernicious. Pompeius’ pursuit of gloria, Caesar’s jealous cult of his dignitas and his magnitudo
animi, the candour and the chivalry of Antonius – all these qualities had
to be eradicated from the principes
of the New State. If anything of them remained in the Commonwealth, it was to
be monopolized by the one Princeps, along with clementia. The governing class was left with the satisfaction of
the less decorative virtues: if it lacked them, it must learn them.
The spirit of a people is best
revealed in the words it employs with an emotional content. To a Roman, such a
word was ‘antiquus’; and what Rome now required was men like those of old, and
ancient virtue. As the poet had put it long ago,
moribus antiquis
res stat Romana virisque.[629]
The Roman aristocrat requited
privilege with duty to the State. Then individuals were poor, but the State was
rich. His immoral and selfish descendants had all but ruined the Roman People. Conquest,
wealth and alien ideas corrupted the ancient ideals of duty, piety, chastity
and frugality.[630] How could they be
restored?
About the efficacy of moral and
sumptuary legislation there might well be doubts, if men reflected on human
nature and past history. Moreover, such regulation was repugnant to
aristocratic breeding and sentiment. The Roman matron could claim that she
needed no written law to guide her, no judge to correct:
mi natura dedit leges a
sanguine ductas
ne possem melior iudicis
esse metu.[631]
[Nature gave me rules of
conduct drawn from my blood, nor could one attain greater virtue through fear
of a judge.]
The same proud insistence on the
inherited virtue of class and family stands out in Horace’s laudation of the
young Claudii:
fortes
creantur fortibus et bonis.[632]
[The brave
are born from the brave and good.]
But that was not enough, even in the
Claudii: the poet proceeds,
doctrina sed vim promovet
insitam,
rectique cultus pectora
roborant.
[But training develops
innate powers, and the inculcation of what is right strengthens the heart. Odes, 4.4.33-34]
Much more necessary was precept and
coercion among nobiles less fortunate
in politics and more exposed to temptation than the stepsons of the Princeps – the
children of war and revolution, enamoured of ease after trouble, and the newly enriched
who aped the extravagances of the aristocracy without their ancestral excuse or
their saving qualities.
[...]
Despite the varied checks and
disappointments in Augustus’ policy of moral and patriotic regeneration, the
effort had not been in vain: it was not one man's idea, and the origins of it
went back before Actium. The different classes in the Commonwealth had been
aroused to a certain consciousness of dignity and duties as members of an
imperial race. The soldiers learned obedience, the veterans the habit of a
regular and useful life – not like Sulla’s men. Even freedmen were not treated
as outcasts. Above all, the aristocracy was sharply recalled to its hereditary
traditions of service; and the men of property, in their own interest and for their
own defence, were made to understand that wealth and station imposed duties to
the community. Like the Princeps himself, the war profiteers became
respectable. ‘Fortuna non mutat genus’ [fortune does not alter breeding], so
Horace exclaimed in the revolutionary period.[633]
The New State did its best to refute that archaic prejudice:
in pretio pretium nunc est;
dat census honores,
census amicitias: pauper
ubique iacet.[634]
[Nowadays nothing but money
counts: fortune brings honours, friendships; the poor man everywhere lies low.]
Laws were not enough. The
revolutionary leader had won power more through propaganda than through force
of arms: some of his greatest triumphs had been achieved with but little shedding
of blood. The Princeps, now a monopolist of the means of influencing opinion,
used all his arts to persuade men to accept the Principate and its programme.
XXX. The
Organization of Opinion
[...]
Propaganda outweighed arms in the
contests of the Triumviral period. Augustus’ chief of cabinet, Maecenas,
captured the most promising of the poets at an early stage and nursed them into
the Principate. Augustus himself listened to recitations with patience and even
with benevolence. He insisted, however, that his praises should be sung only in
serious efforts and by the best poets.[635]
The Princeps succeeded: other patrons of literature were left far behind.
Pollio lost his Virgil. Messalla had to be content with the anaemic Tibullus.
Fabius Maximus, the patrician dilettante, showed some favour to Ovid, and perhaps
to Horace;[636] and Piso satisfied the
philhellenic traditions of his family by supporting a Greek versifier,
Antipater of Thessalonica.[637]
Pollio, it is true, was honoured by Horace in a conspicuous ode. Not so Messalla,
however. As for the plebeian military men promoted under the New State, there
is no evidence that they were interested in fostering letters or the arts.
As was fitting, the poets favoured by
the government proceeded to celebrate in verse the ideals of renascent Rome – the
land, the soldier, religion and morality, the heroic past and the glorious present.
Not merely propaganda – something much greater was afoot, the deliberate
creation of a Roman literature worthy to stand beside the achievement of
Greece, a twin pillar to support the civilization of a world-empire that was
both Roman and Greek. The War of Actium was shown to be a contest not so much
against Greece as against Egypt and the East. The contest was perpetuated under
the Principate by the Augustan reaction from contemporary Hellenism and from
the Alexandrian models of the previous age, by the return to earlier and
classic exemplars, to the great age of Greece. The new Roman literature was designed
to be civic rather than individual, more useful than ornamental. Horace, his lyric
vein now drying up, exerted himself to establish the movement upon a firm basis
of theory –and to claim the rank of classics for the better sort of
contemporary literature.
As in politics, the last generation
was not rich in models to commend or imitate. Horace has never a word to say of
Catullus and Lucretius. Those free and passionate individuals could find no place
or favour in the civic and disciplined academies of a healthy community.
Epicureanism, indeed, was heavily frowned upon, being a morally unedifying
creed and likely to inculcate a distaste for public service. Stoicism, however,
was salubrious and respectable: it could be put to good use. Living in a
changed and more bracing atmosphere, under the watchword of duty and morality,
Lucretius might perhaps have satisfied the fervour of a religious nature by
composing a pantheistic poem to celebrate the pre-ordained harmony of the soul
of man, the whole universe – and the ideal state now realized on earth:
spiritus intus alit,
totamque infusa per artus
mens agitat molem et magno
se corpore miscet.[638]
[a spirit within sustains;
in all the limbs mind moves the mass and mingles with the mighty frame]
Stoicism, indeed, stood for order and
for monarchy. Catullus, however, could not have been domesticated, tamely to
chant the regeneration of high society, the reiterated nuptials of Julia or the
frugal virtues of upstarts enriched by the Civil Wars. His books would have
been burned in the Forum, with the greatest concourse and applause of the Roman
People.
That did not matter. The New State had
its lyric poet, technically superb. Personal misfortune and political despair
wrung from the youthful Horace the hard and bitter invective of his Epodes. Age and prosperity abated his
ardour but did not impair the sceptical realism of his character – there is no
warrant for loose talk about conversion to Stoicism. None the less, this
Epicurean man appeared to surrender to a romantic passion for frugality and
virtue, a fervent sympathy with martial and imperial ideals. In his Odes may be
discovered the noblest expression of the Augustan policy of social regeneration
and the most illuminating commentary upon it. After eloquent discourse upon high
themes Horace recovers himself at the end:
non hoc iocosae conveniet
lyrae:
quo, Musa, tendis?[639]
[This will never do for a
cheerful lyre. Where are you going, Muse?]
After praising the simple life and
cursing wealth he adds:
scilicet
improbae
crescunt divitiae; tamen
curtae nescio quid semper
abest rei.[640]
[There’s no doubt about it:
shameless wealth continues to grow; yet there is always something missing,
making the fortune incomplete.]
Without need of apology and more
naturally came the moral, rustic and patriotic vein to the poet Virgil. The
Georgics completed (c. 30 B.C.), Virgil was engaged in writing an epic poem that
should reveal the hand of destiny in the earliest origins of Rome, the
continuity of Roman history and its culmination in the rule of Augustus. As he
wrote early in the poem,
nascetur pulchra Troianus
origine Caesar
imperium Oceano, famam qui
terminet astris,
Iulius a magno demissum
nomen Iulo.[641]
[From this noble line shall
be born the Trojan Caesar, who shall extend his empire to the ocean, his glory
to the stars, a Julius, 10 name descended from great Iulus!]
Later it is not the conqueror of the
world but the coming inaugurator of the New Age,
hic vir, hic est, tibi quem
promitti saepius audis,
Augustus Caesar, divi
genus, aurea condet
saecula qui rursus Latio.[642]
[And this in truth is he
whom you so often hear promised you, Augustus Caesar, son of a god, who will
again establish a golden age in Latium]
The character of the epic hero is
neither splendid nor striking. That was not intended. The perpetual guidance
lavished upon the hero is likewise repugnant to romantic notions. Aeneas is an instrument
of heaven, a slave to duty. ‘Sum pius Aeneas’ [I am the loyal Aeneas], as he stamps
himself at once. Throughout all hazards of his high mission, Aeneas is sober,
steadfast and tenacious: there can be no respite for him, no repose, no union
of heart and policy with an alien queen. Italy is his goal – ‘hic amor, haec
patria est.’ [There is my love, there my country!] And so Aeneas follows his
mission, sacrificing all emotion to pietas, firm in resolution but sombre and a
little weary. The poem is not an allegory; but no contemporary could fail to
detect in Aeneas a foreshadowing of Augustus. Like the transference of Troy and
her gods to Italy, the building of the New Rome was an august and arduous task:
tantae molis
erat Romanam condere gentem.[643]
[So vast was
the effort to found the Roman race.]
Destiny foretold the coming of a great
ruler in Italy and conqueror of all the world:
sed fore qui gravidam
imperiis belloque frementem
Italiam regeret, genus alto
a sanguine Teucri
proderet, ac totum sub
leges mitteret orbem.[644]
[but he it was who should
rule Italy, a land teeming with empire and clamorous with war, hand on a race
from Teucer’s noble blood, and bring all the world beneath his laws]
None would have believed it, but Rome’s
salvation issued from a Greek city. The priestess of Phoebus announced it:
via prima salutis,
quod minime reris, Graia
pandetur ab urbe.[645]
[The road to safety, little
though you think it, shall first issue from a Grecian city.]
From the first decision in council
with his friends at Apollonia, the young Caesar had not wavered or turned back.
Announced by Apollo, his path lay through blood and war,
bella, horrida bella,
et Thybrim multo spumantem
sanguine cerno.[646]
[Wars, grim wars I see, and
the Tiber foaming with streams of blood.]
Accompanied by his trusty Achates he
was to fight the intractable peoples of Italy and to prevail, to establish
cities and civilized life:
bellum ingens geret Italia
populosque ferocis
contundet, moresque viris
et moenia ponet,[647]
[shall wage a great war in
Italy, shall crush proud nations, and for his people shall set up laws and city
walls]
His triumph did not bring personal
domination, but the unity of Rome and Italy, reconciliation at last. That was
his mission:
nec mihi regna peto:
paribus se legibus ambae
invictae gentes aeterna in
foedera mittant.[648]
[under equal terms let both
nations, unconquered, enter upon an everlasting compact]
In the same years the historian Livy
was already at work upon the majestic and comprehensive theme of his choice,
the prose counterpart of Virgil’s epic:
res Italas Romanorumque
triumphos.[649]
[the story of Italy and the
triumphs of Rome]
Like other literary compositions
fostered by the government, Livy’s history was patriotic, moral and hortatory.
Even antiquarianism had its uses. But history did not need to be antiquarian – it
could be employed, like poetry, to honour the memory of ancient valour, revive
the pride of the nation and educate coming generations to civic virtue.
The story of the first days of the
city, established as the old poet recorded ‘augusto augurio’, called for a
consecrated word and for commemoration of the Founder of Rome – ‘deum deo natum,
regem parentemque urbis Romanae’.[650]
But it would not do to draw too precise a parallel. The Romulus of legend
already possessed too many of the authentic features of Caesar the Dictator,
some of them recently acquired or at least enhanced. Romulus was a king, the
favourite of plebs and army, less acceptable to the Senate.
If the later books of Livy with their
record of recent and contemporary history had been preserved, they would no
doubt set forth the ‘lessons of history’ in a vivid and convincing form. An excellent
source soon became available, no less than the biographical memoir in which the
Princeps recorded his arduous and triumphant career. Livy, like Virgil, was a
Pompeian: he idealized the early career of Pompeius, controverting Sallustius.
When Pompeius thus became a respectable figure, so did Octavianus. It was the
fashion to be Pompeian rather than Caesarian, for that was the ‘better cause’.[651]
It may be presumed that Augustus’ historian also spoke with respect of Brutus
and Cassius – they had fought for the constitution; and even with praise of
Cato – Cato stood for the established order.
Virgil, Horace and Livy are the
enduring glories of the Principate; and all three were on terms of personal
friendship with Augustus. The class to which these men of letters belonged had
everything to gain from the new order. Both Virgil and Horace had lost their
paternal estates in the confiscations that followed Philippi or the disorders
of the Perusine War: they subsequently regained their property, or at least
compensation. History does not record, or legend embroider, any loss sustained
by Livy the historians did not excite the interests of biographers and
scholiasts as did the poets. But the opulent city of Patavium certainly had to
endure severe requisitions when Pollio governed the Cisalpina: the wealthy went
into hiding then, and not a single slave betrayed his master.[652]
If Livy, Horace and Virgil had private and material reasons for gratitude to
Augustus, that fact may have reinforced, but it did not pervert, the sentiments
natural to members of the pacific and non-political order in society. On the
other hand, their genius was not the creation of the Augustan Principate. They
had all grown to manhood and to maturity in the period of the Revolution; and
they all repaid Augustus more than he or the age could give them.
Horace was the son of a wealthy
freedman from Venusia. Virgil and Livy had a more respectable origin. Whatever
racial differences the curious or the uncritical might be disposed to infer
between Mantua, in legend a foundation of the Etruscans, and Patavium, the city
of the Illyrian Veneti, they cannot be detected in the character or in the
political sentiments of Virgil and Livy. Both may be taken as fairly typical
representatives of the propertied classes of the new Italy of the north, which
was patriotic rather than partisan. The North, unlike so many parts of Italy,
had no history of its own, with memories of ancient independence from Rome – or
recent hostility. As far as concerned the politics of Rome, its loyalties were
mixed and confused. There was patriotic recollection of the great Marius who
had saved Italy from the German invader, there was devotion to Caesar who had
championed the communities of Italia Transpadana and secured them full Roman
citizenship. But the men of the North, though alert and progressive, were far
from being revolutionaries. In many respects, indeed, their outlook was notably
old-fashioned and traditional. Republican sympathies were openly expressed.
From his father Cassius inherited a connexion with the Transpadani;[653]
and Brutus’ father had been besieged at Mutina by Pompeius. In the time of
Augustus, Mediolanium preserved with pride the statues of the Liberators.[654]
On the other hand, Bononia was in the clientela
of the Antonii.
[...]
Propertius might have been a highly
remunerative investment for Maecenas. He died young – or abandoned the art
altogether. Ovid, his junior by about ten years, outlasted Augustus and died in
exile at the age of sixty. Ovid in his Amores
sang of illicit love and made fun of the army:
militat omnis
amans, et habet sua castra Cupido.[655]
[Every lover
is a soldier, and Cupid has a camp of his own]
It was not merely improper verse that
incurred the displeasure of Augustus. Poetry, it was agreed, should be useful.
Ovid accepted that principle – and turned it inside out. He might have instructed
the youth of Rome to honour the past, to be worthy of Rome in valour and in
virtue. Instead, he composed a didactic poem on the Art of Love. The tract
was not meant to be taken seriously – it was a kind of parody. Augustus did not
see the joke. Like the early Germans depicted by Tacitus, he did not think that
moral laxity was a topic of innocent amusement.[656]
Nor can Ovid himself be taken
seriously in his role of a libertine or a corrupter of youth. He made the
conventional excuse of the erotic poet – his page may be scabrous, but his life
is chaste:
vita verecunda
est, Musa iocosa mea.[657]
[my life is
moral, my muse is gay]
Despite earlier vaunts of erotic
prowess, he is probably to be believed. The Corinna of the Amores cannot match Propertius’ Cynthia. Corinna is literature, a
composite or rather an imaginary figure. The poet himself, who had married
three times, was not unhappy in his last choice, a virtuous and excellent
woman.[658]
That did not matter. Ovid was a
disgrace. He had refused to serve the State. Sulmo and the Paelignians, a
virile and hardy race, should have made a better contribution to the New Italy and
achieved a nobler repute than to be known as the home of an erotic poet.
Augustus did not forget. It was in vain that Ovid interspersed his trifles with
warm praise of the reigning dynasty and even turned his facile pen to
versifying the Roman religious calendar. The scandal of Augustus' granddaughter
Julia (A.D. 8) provided the excuse. There can be no question of any active complicity
on the part of Ovid; the mysterious mistake to which the poet refers was
probably trivial enough.[659]
But Augustus was vindictive. He wished to make a demonstration-perhaps to find a
scapegoat whose very political harmlessness would divert attention from the
real offences of Julia, her husband and her ostensible paramours, and create
the impression that injured morality was being avenged. The auctoritas of Augustus was enough.[660]
Ovid received instructions to depart to Tomi, a Greek city on the coast of the
Black Sea. He could hardly have been sent farther.
Poetry and history were designed to
work upon the upper and middle classes of a regenerated society. Their
influence and their example would cause the lessons of patriotism and morality
to spread more widely and sink more deeply. For such as were not admitted to
the recitations of the rich, or lacked either the taste for good books or the
means of acquiring them, there were visible admonitions of every kind.
[...]
XXXI. The
Opposition
[...]
The law courts could still provide
scope for oratory, ambition and political intrigue. Augustus was invulnerable.
Not so his friends: a trial might be the occasion either of a direct attack upon
their persons or for occasional and apparently spontaneous criticism of the whole
government. The major scandals, it is true, did not always come before the
courts; but politics are probably at the bottom of a number of recorded causes célèbres. L. Nonius Asprenas, the
brother-in-law of P. Quinctilius Varus and a friend of Augustus, was arraigned
on a charge of poisoning, attacked by Cassius Severus, defended by Pollio and
rescued through the personal intervention of Augustus, who came to the court
and sat there.[661] He did not need to make
a speech. Such was auctoritas. Maecenas
and Sex. Appuleius (a relative of the Princeps) happened to be defending a man
prosecuted for adultery. They were roughly handled by the prosecution. Augustus
intervened on their side, with salutary rebuke of their enemies.[662]
Augustus did not forget his friends and allies: he was able to preserve from
justice a certain Castricius who had given him information about the conspiracy
of Murena.[663]
Political oratory starved and dwindled
in both law courts and Senate; from the assemblies of the People, the function
of which was now to ratify the decisions of the Princeps in legislation or to accept
his candidates for office, it was virtually excluded. Already in the Triumviral
period Pollio was quick to draw the moral of the times, intelligent to
anticipate the future. He did not intend that his retirement from politics
should be either inglorious or silent: he introduced the practice of holding
recitations, though to friends only and not to an indiscriminate public.[664]
The fashion quickly spread and propagated a disease among literature in both prose
and verse, a scourge in the social life of the aristocracy. Messalla vied with
Pollio as a patron of letters. When a mediocre poet from Corduba delivered in
his house a lame panegyric of Cicero,
deflendus Cicero est
Latiaeque silentia linguae,
[I must lament Cicero and
the silence of the Latin tongue.]
the resentful Pollio rose and walked
out.[665]
Pollio professed to find little to his
taste in the New State. Pollio was himself both a historian and an orator; and
in history he was critical as well as creative. Sallustius had died at his
task, carrying his Historiae no farther than the year 67 B.C. Pollio, however,
set himself to describe the fall of the Republic from the compact of Pompeius,
Crassus and Caesar to the Battle of Philippi. Of earlier historians, he blamed
Sallustius for his style and questioned the veracity of Caesar; in his
contemporaries, especially when they dealt with the period of which he had
personal experience, he must have found much to criticize. Certain politicians
had not delayed to produce their memoirs: it may be presumed that they were not
alarmingly outspoken about the career of the Caesarian leader in the
revolutionary wars. Messalla praised Brutus and Cassius;[666]
but he reprehended Antonius in justification of his own adhesion to the better
cause. Q. Dellius described the eastern campaigns of Antonius in which he had
participated;[667] the disasters of
Antonius will not have been underestimated. Even Agrippa took up the pen.[668]
Paramount in the literature of apology stood Augustus’ own autobiographical memoir,
recording his destiny, his struggles and his triumph – a masterly exercise on the
august theme of ‘tantae molis erat’.
It is to be regretted that Pollio’s
comments upon this interesting document have not been preserved. Of the style
at least he will have approved, if it recalled the unpretentious simplicity of the
Princeps’ recorded utterances or the ‘imperatoria brevitas’ of the Res Gestae. Augustus detested alike the
splendid and pompous oratory of M. Antonius, the fantastical conceits of Maecenas
and the perverse archaism of Tiberius. In writing, his first care was to
express his meaning as clearly as possible.[669]
In these matters Pollio’s own taste and practice is well attested. The words,
he said, must follow the sense[670]
Augustus and Pollio were crisp, hard, unsentimental men. Augustus might permit
the cult of Cicero – for his own purposes. Yet it may be that his real opinion
of the character, policy and style of Cicero was not so far from that of
Pollio. Pollio’s native distrust of fine words was intensified by loathing of
the exuberant insincerity of public oratory – and by the wars of the
Revolution, which stripped away shams and revealed the naked realities of
politics. It is in no way surprising that Pollio, like Stendhal, became the
fanatical exponent of a hard, dry and unemotional fashion of writing. ‘Durus et
siccus’, he was well described:[671]
he seemed a century earlier than his own time. A plain, solid style recalled
the earliest annalists of Rome; and archaism was a consistent and laudable
feature of Roman historiography.
Like Sallustius, Pollio imitated the
gravity and concentration of Thucydides as well as the native virtues of Roman
writers. Like Sallustius, too, he turned with distaste from the wars and politics
of his time and became a historian. Both writers had practical experience of
affairs; and it will be a fair inference that Pollio, the eminent consular,
like the senator Tacitus more than a century later, was scornful of the
academic historian.[672]
Livy had come to history from the study of rhetoric. That was not the only
defect that Pollio could discover in Livy.
Pollio, so it is recorded by
Quintilian, criticized Livy for ‘Patavinitas’.[673]
It is by no means certain that Quintilian himself understood the point of the
attack: the most various of interpretations have been advanced. ‘Patavinitas’
has been held to be a characteristic of the literary style of Livy in the
narrower sense, or even of the dialect and spelling of his native city. One thing
is evident, however: the nature of ‘Patavinitas’ cannot be discovered from Livy’s
writings alone, without reference to the character of his critic Pollio and of
Pollio’s theories about the style, substance and treatment appropriate to the
writing of history. Pollio, who came from a poor and infertile region of Italy,
knew what Patavium was – a city notorious for material prosperity and for moral
worth.[674] A critic armed with the
acerbity of Pollio must have delivered a more crushing verdict upon a historian
from Patavium than the obvious and trivial comment that his speech showed
traces of his native dialect. Pollio himself may have had a local accent. Nor
was the judgement merely one of style, as though a Roman of Rome, infallible
arbiter of urban purity, mocked and showed up the provincial. Pollio, an Italian
from the land of the Marrucini, was provincial himself, in a sense. The
original sin of Livy is darker and more detestable. The word ‘Patavinitas’ sums
up, elegantly and finally, the whole moral and romantic view of history.[675]
Pollio knew what history was. It was not like Livy.
Augustus’ historian of imperial Rome
employed for his theme an ample Ciceronian style, strengthened by a Sallustian
and poetical infusion: a rich concoction. The writers and speakers of the
opposition were not confined to a jejune archaism or a bare Attic simplicity: a
new style developed, with brief, ferocious sentences, pointed, rhetorical and
ornate. The most conspicuous exponents of the movement were T. Labienus and
Cassius Severus, neither of whom possessed the social and material advantages
that rendered Pollio secure from reprisals as well as formidable in attack.
Labienus came of a loyal Pompeian family reduced in circumstances: he lived in
poverty and disrepute, hating and hated.[676]
Labienus vented his rancour on class and individual without discrimination and
without fear. Bathyllus, the popular and disreputable actor, a favourite of
Maecenas, was an easy target. The more eminent were not immune. He even criticized
Pollio.[677] Labienus also wrote
history. When reciting his works, he would ostentatiously omit certain
passages, explaining that they would be read after his death.[678]
The last years of Augustus witnessed
stern measures of repression against noxious literature.[679]
Public bonfires were instituted – but not for such trifles as the Ars amatoria of Ovid. Contemporary
political literature provided the cause – and the fuel. Thus did Augustus have
his revenge, imitating the Greek Timagenes, who, quarrelling with his patron and
falling from favour, had boldly consigned to the flames an adulatory history which
he had formerly composed in honour of the Princeps.[680]
Labienus’ writings were officially condemned and publicly burned. That did not
matter, said Cassius Severus, who had them all by heart.[681]
But Cassius did not go unscathed. This man, an able and vigorous orator of
obscure origin, resembling a gladiator in appearance,[682]
was hated and feared for his bitter tongue and incorrigible love of
independence. Cassius prosecuted Augustus’ friend Nonius Asprenas on a charge
of poisoning. His activities were not confined to the courts – he composed
libellous pamphlets, assailing illustrious persons of both sexes, without
restraint or distinction, among them P. Vitellius the procurator, whose
grandfather, he said, was a cobbler, his mother a baker’s daughter turned
prostitute.[683]
It was Cassius who defined for all
time the character and capacity of Paullus Fabius Maximus.[684]
But Cassius was vulnerable and widely hated. Augustus ordered an inquiry under
the law of maiestas. Fabius
prosecuted. The offender was condemned and banished to the island of Crete
(A.D. 12?).[685] Even there he was a
nuisance: twelve years later they removed him to the barren rock of Seriphus.[686]
Not so dangerous as Labienus and
Cassius, or possessing fewer enemies, the Republican historian A. Cremutius
Cordus, whose vivid pages proscribed to all eternity the authors of the proscriptions,[687]
survived the Principate of Augustus. He was prosecuted under Tiberius by a
client of Seianus. Cremutius anticipated conviction by suicide, after a noble
speech defending history against oppression and despotism.[688]
His works were condemned and burnt.
Augustus was able to prevent his
domination from being stamped as the open enemy of freedom and truth. But not
for long. Coerced through official repression, or tainted by servility, history
soon decayed and perished. ‘Magna illa ingenia cessere.’[689]
[all power should be concentrated in the hands of one man] Not history only,
but poetry and eloquence also, now that Libertas
was no more. The Principate inherited genius from the Triumviral period and
claimed it for its own: it could not produce a new crop. The generation that
grew to manhood in the happy prime of the restored Republic makes a poor enough
showing, with Ovid to sustain the splendour and dignity of poetry. Nor could the
new oratory outshine the fame of Messalla and Pollio; and its ablest exponents
were bitter enemies of the government.
It was impossible to tell the truth
about the living, but hate might have its revenge upon the dead. Hence the
contrasted but complementary vices inherent in imperial Roman historiography, flattery
and detraction.[690]
Horace assured Augustus that the envy incurred by the great ones of earth in
their lifetime is silenced in death, being converted into recognition and love:
exstinctus
amabitur idem.[691]
[he, too,
will win affection when his light is quenched.]
This moral platitude became a wild
paradox under the Empire. Augustus’ memory might be safe after death – to
attack or traduce the Founder was an offence against the State. Not all emperors,
however, were succeeded by rulers who had an interest in the deification of
their own predecessors. Death or disgrace delivered up members of the dynasty
or partisans of the government to retribution at last:
curramus
praecipites et,
dum iacet in ripa, calcemus
Caesaris hostem.[692]
[Let’s get a move on and
trample on Caesar’s enemy while he’s lying.]
Velleius, a typical government writer,
is unswervingly loyal to Tiberius and to L. Aelius Seianus, the chief minister
of state. The variations of the technique are curious and instructive. Not enough
to celebrate in fulsome language the ‘inenarrabilis pietas’ and ‘caelestissima
opera’ of the Princeps or the varied virtues of the unassuming and
indispensable Seianus:[693]
his whole account the reign of Augustus is artfully coloured by devotion to Tiberius,
with vituperation of enemies and rivals. The horror and indignation with which
this worthy citizen recounts certain court scandals is matched by his
depreciation of the generals of Augustus who encroached upon Tiberius’ monopoly
of military glory, whether personal enemies of Tiberius or not. Lollius is monster
of rapacity and intrigue, Varus mild-mannered but corrupt and incompetent. The
campaigns of Quirinius and Ahenobarbus were simply left out altogether.
Vinicius could not decently be omitted: the praise of his military achievements
cool and temperate.[694]
Velleius delights in the language of
laudation, or, as he calls it, ‘iustus sine mendacio candor’.[695]
[justified kindness without falsehood] It is lavishly bestowed upon social distinction
or political success. Velleius stands revealed in his literary judgements as
well. Next to Virgil he names among epic poets the grandiloquent Rabirius who
had written about the War of Actium.[696]
Governments change and careerists make mistakes. Seianus fell. The historian
may have been involved in his ruin.
With the accession of Caligula, the
enemies of Augustus and of Tiberius enjoyed a brief and illusory consolation.
Caligula, the great-grandson of M. Antonius, disguising native malignity or a sense
of humour under the garb of piety to his ancestors, encouraged an Antonian and
Republican revival. The condemned works of Cordus, Severus and Labienus returned
to public circulation;[697]
and it was alleged that the Princeps proposed to banish the writings of Virgil
and Livy from the public libraries.[698]
The rule of Caligula brought no
freedom, no benefit to history: it merely poisoned the sources again. Literature
under the Empire was constrained to veiled criticism or delayed revenge upon the
enemies of the government. Satire valiantly attacked the dead and the helpless.
Quintilian, a professor of rhetoric, claimed that this form of composition was
peculiarly and wholly Roman. He did not live to see his verdict confirmed by
Juvenal and by Tacitus, the typical glories of imperial literature – and the
last of the Romans.
XXXII. The
Doom of the Nobiles
‘Stemmata quid faciunt?’[699]
[What’s the use of pedigrees?] The satirist Juvenal makes mock of pedigrees.
Not, however, with all the fierce, free invective of a robust democrat. Juvenal
derives his names and examples from the descendants of the Republican nobility
– but not the living. Few of them, indeed, survived in Juvenal’s day, and they
mattered not at all. The Empire had broken their power and their spirit. The
satirist did not dare to deride the new nobility, the oligarchy of government
in his own day. He makes mock of the needy Greek of low degree, clever, mendacious
and unscrupulous.[700]
A traditional and literary figure. Very different the proud sons of the great
priestly and dynastic houses of Asia, now holding consular rank in the imperial
Senate. Still less does he venture to attack the opulent provincial families
issuing from Spain and Narbonensis. They were now dominant in the social and
political hierarchy of the Empire, they wore the purple of the Caesars.
Juvenal’s poem is not so much a
panegyric of plebeian merit as a lament for the decline of aristocratic virtus. Tacitus, a knight’s son from
Italia Transpadana or from the province of Gallia Narbonensis, recaptures in his
writings the spirit, the prejudices and the resentment of the Roman aristocracy
and reveals the causes and tragedy of their decadence. The nobiles have not spoken themselves. They have left no personal and
authentic record to show what they thought of the Principate of Augustus. They
were preserved, pampered and subsidized by the New State; but they were the
survivors of a catastrophe, doomed to slow and inexorable extinction. The
better cause and the best men, the brave and the loyal, had perished. Not a
mere faction of the nobility had been defeated, but a whole class. The contest had
been not merely political but social. Sulla, Pompeius and Caesar were all more
than mere faction-leaders; yet the personal domination of those dynasts never
meant so drastic a depression of the nobiles.
They were now confronted by an organized party and an organized system of
government.
The nobiles lost power and wealth, display, dignity and honour. Bad
men, brutal, rapacious and intolerable, entered into the possessions of the
dead and usurped privilege and station of the living – Vedius Pollio with his
fish-ponds, Maecenas in princely gardens, Titius and Quirinius acquiring brides
from patrician families, Taurus flaunting in the city of Rome a bodyguard of Germans
like the Princeps himself, Agrippa the solid and conspicuous monument of
military despotism. For the nobiles,
no more triumphs after war, no more roads, temples and towns named in their
honour and commemorating the glory of the great houses that were the Republic
and Rome.
[...]
Even under Trajan and Hadrian there
were venerable relics of the aristocracy, rare and portentous from the
disappearance of their peers. The family of M. Plautius Silvanus from Tibur had
become connected in some way, through marriage or adoption, with a new consular
stock of the time of Augustus, the Aelii Lamiae.[701]
The last Lamia was consul in 116, by which time that name stood for the bluest
blood.[702] The descendants of
another novus homo, L. Nonius
Asprenas (cos. suff. 36 B.C.), lasted
as long and perpetuated the blood of L. Calpurnius Piso in the person of L.
Nonius Calpurnius Torquatus Asprenas, twice consul, under Domitian and under
Hadrian.[703]
For prudence and for success, it might
have seemed that all would be outdone by the Cocceii, Antonian partisans
ennobled in the Triumviral period. Though missing the consulate under Augustus,
they were favoured by subsequent emperors, down to and including Domitian. When
Domitian was assassinated, the elderly and peaceful M. Cocceius Nerva was
elevated to the purple. He had no children – one of the reasons, no doubt, for
the choice. There were others: at this time there can have been in existence few
direct descendants even of a Triumviral consul.[704]
Even Nerva seems an anachronism. He
was succeeded by a man from Spain, M. Ulpius Traianus, the son of a consular
and therefore a person of social as well as of military distinction. With
Trajan, a Spanish and Narbonensian faction comes to power. New men had ever
been pressing forward, able, wealthy or insinuating, devoted to the government
whoever the Princeps might be. The son of the consular Passienus, adopted by
the Augustan secretary of state Sallustius, became a great courtier, an artist
in adulation and the husband of princesses.[705]
That was the end of a Sabine family. Passienus could not compete with L. Vitellius,
three times consul. Vitellius was the son of a knight, procurator of Augustus.
When he died after a brilliant career of service – his enemies called it sordid
adulation – trusted by Tiberius, by Caligula and by Claudius, a statue was
erected in the Forum at Rome bearing an inscription that commemorated his
unswerving loyalty – ‘pietatis immobilis erga principem’.[706]
It might have been set up under any reign. Such men deserved to succeed.
Vitellius was the most versatile politician since Plancus.[707]
One of his sons married Junia Calvina, of the blood of Augustus;[708]
the other enjoyed a brief tenure of the Principate that Augustus had founded.
Ambition, display and dissipation, or
more simply an incapacity to adopt the meaner virtues and ignoble devices that
brought success in a changed and completely plutocratic order of society, steadily
reduced the fortunes of the nobiles.
Frugal and astute men of property from the newer parts of Italy and the
civilized regions of the West prospered in their place. When Claudius proposed
to admit to the Roman Senate certain chieftains of the peoples of Gallia
Comata, there arose indignant protest in his privy council – those wealthy
dynasts would swamp out descendants of noble houses and impoverished senators
from Latium.[709] The harm had already
been done. The millionaires Balbus and Seneca were the real enemies. It is in
every way fitting that Spain and Narbonensis should have supplied the first
provincial emperors, of stock Italian, native or mixed, the descendants or the
peers of colonial magnates or of native dynasts who received the citizenship
from proconsuls of the last century of the Republic – and from Caesar the
Dictator even admission to the Roman Senate.
To explain the fall of the Roman
Republic, historians invoke a variety of converging forces or movements,
political, social and economic, where antiquity was prone to see only the
ambition and the agency of individuals. On any count, Balbus should be added.
The banker Atticus knew all about contemporary history: Balbus had a share in
the making of it, from the dynasts’ pact in 60 B.C. through civil wars and
Dictatorship into the rule of the Triumvirs. The man from Gades, consul in 40
B.C., is a portent, it is true but a portent of the future power of Spaniards
and Narbonensians. By the time of Caligula, Narbonensis provides two consuls, a
Valerius from Vienna and a Domitius from Nemausus, descendants of native
families long enfranchised.[710]
A few years, and Seneca the Corduban and Sex. Afranius Burrus from Vasio, the
Prefect of the Guard, in alliance govern the world for Nero, dispensing
patronage and advancement to their friends or fellow countrymen.[711]
Agricola, one of the principes viri of the Flavian age, and M. Ulpius
Traianus, the son of another, were patrician into the bargain. Trajan was the
first provincial emperor, a Spaniard married to a woman from Nemausus.[712]
Hadrian, his nearest kinsman, followed, then Antoninus Pius, in origin a
Narbonensian from Nemausus. Even had Antoninus Pius not become emperor, he
would still have been one of the wealthiest citizens in all the world.
Hostility to the nobiles was engrained in the Principate from its military and
revolutionary origins. In the first decade of his constitutional rule, Augustus
employed not a single nobilis among
the legates who commanded the armies in his provincia,
and only three men of consular standing. When his position becomes stronger, and
a coalition government based largely on family ties has been built up, nobiles like Ahenobarbus, Piso and
Paullus Fabius Maximus govern the military provinces, it is true. But a
rational distrust persists, confirmed under his successors by certain
disquieting incidents, and leads to the complete exclusion of the nobiles, the delayed but logical end of
Revolution and Empire.
Noble birth still brought the
consulate as of right, and after a long interval of years the proconsulate of
Asia or of Africa. For all else it was perilous. Even if the nobilis forgot his ancestors and his
name, the Emperor could not. Before long the nobiles disappear from the great military commands. Eight legions
on the Rhine, brigaded in two armies, are in themselves a large part of the
history of the first century of the Empire, the makers of emperors. The period
of the Julio-Claudian rulers witnessed steady and sometimes abrupt decline in
the social distinction of the commanders of the Rhine legions. Under Caligula,
after Lentulus Gaetulicus, who conspired with M. Aemilius Lepidus and was
suppressed, came another nobilis,
Ser. Sulpicius Galba.[713]
A few years pass, however, and among the army commanders of Claudius and Nero
are to be found Curtius Rufus, whom some alleged to be the son of a gladiator,
Duvius Avitus from Vasio, Pompeius Paullinus from Arelate, Narbonensians both, and
L. Verginius Rufus from Mediolanium, like them the son of a Roman knight.[714]
But for this defect of birth, Verginius Rufus might have become emperor.[715]
Nero and his advisers had made a prudent choice. They also thought that they
could safely entrust a military province, Hispania Citerior (Tarraconensis), to
a descendant of the Republican nobility and a loyal servant of the government,
Ser. Sulpicius Galba: they should have been right, for Galba was only the
façade of a man, in no way answering to his name or his reputation.[716]
But the prediction made long ago came true fear, folly or ambition spurred
Galba to empire and to ruin.
The lesson was not lost. Nero was the
descendant of Ahenobarbus, of Antonius, of Augustus. Vespasian’s nobility was
his own creation. The Flavians had cause to be suspicious. Though the murderous
tyranny of the Julio-Claudians has all but exhausted the Republican and the
Augustan nobility, there are still on the Fasti
three Republican nobiles and some
seven or eight men sprung from Triumviral or Augustan consuls: only one man of this
class commands an army, and a small one at that. He was Ti. Plautius Silvanus
Aelianus, an old man and a personal friend of Vespasian.[717]
Thenceforward a newer nobility, sons
or grandsons of Roman knights for the most part, govern the great military provinces
of the Empire.
Though all too often arrogant, selfish
and licentious, the governing class of the Republic was fertile in talent of
the most varied orders. It is too simple an explanation of the decline of the nobiles under the Empire to assert their
lack of ability; and much
of the hostile testimony that could be
adduced is nothing more than the perpetuation of the schematic contrast which
virtuous and pushing novi homines of
Republican days were in the habit of drawing between their own ‘industria’ and
the ‘inertia’ of the nobles. The true causes lie deeper: as has been shown,
they are political and economic. It was the acute consciousness of personal insecurity
and political impotence that depressed and perverted the morale of the
aristocracy. There was no field left them now for action or even for display.
Insistence upon dignitas or magnitudo animi was a dangerous
anachronism. Murena would have escaped his doom had he been content with ‘aurea
mediocritas’ [the golden mean].[718]
The last and only refuge of Roman virtue and aristocratic independence of
temper was to die like a gentleman. If he wished to survive, the bearer of a
great name had to veil himself in caution or frivolity and practise with
ostentation the sober virtue of quies
or political quietism an inheritance from a lower and commercial order of
society, the Roman knights. He might have to sink further yet, to make his
peace, through subservience or through adulation, with the real forces in
politics – knights and freedmen, courtiers male and female. Quies preserved the house of the Cocceii
through many generations;[719]
but it could not ultimately protect the grandson of Augustus’ marshal Vinicius
from the resentment of Valeria Messallina.[720]
The nobiles were pushed aside from power, stripped of their estates and
steadily thinned by a progressive proscription. As under the Republic, the
normal method for an ambitious man to secure distinction and advancement was
through the conduct of a successful prosecution. Under the Empire the law
courts became less political, justice less a matter of partisan interpretation.
At the same time, however, a new scourge arose which, for the aristocracy at
least, counterbalanced other benefits. The Senate became a high court of
justice and the Princeps’ own jurisdiction developed: high treason was a
flexible and comprehensive offence. Whether in the Senate or elsewhere, the prosecutor
was tempted to allege maiestas as the
main count or as a subsidiary charge; and the jury were afraid to absolve. Hence
arose the dreaded tribe of prosecutors and informers. The position of Augustus
was so strong that the evil found little encouragement. Tiberius, however, was
insecure. The nobiles suffered from
their own ambitions and feuds. It was a temptation to harass the reluctant
ruler; and there were old scores to pay off. Moreover, the secret struggle for
power and distinction went on as before, enhanced by the rival ambitions of
Seianus’ faction and the family of Germanicus. At all turns the nobiles were imperilled-above all and in
the last resort by the fears of Tiberius and by his reluctance to interfere
with the course of justice, with the procedure of a nominally independent
Senate.
The nobiles might savour a brief taste of revenge when scandal and
crime rent the reigning house or when a powerful upstart, Gallus, Lollius or
Seianus, went crashing to his fall. But they seldom got away unscathed from
such spectacles. The present was ominous, the future offered no consolation.
The forces of revolution, though confined within definite channels and adapted to
a slower rhythm, were none the less advancing remorselessly. The power of the nobiles was passing to the novi homines, to the knights, the army
and the provinces.
After novi homines Etruscan, Samnite or Picene, Spain and Narbonensis
open the roll of provincial consuls. They herald the Empire’s invasion of the
Roman government, they seize supreme power but do not hold it for long. Africa
and the eastern lands are pressing rapidly behind, soon almost to overwhelm Italy
and the western provinces in the cosmopolitan Senate of the Antonines. The
consular Fasti furnish the most patent evidence of the intrusion of alien
elements; but they indicate the climax rather than the origins of the process,
which belong generations earlier when provincials were already equestrian officers
and political or financial agents of the government, not merely under Augustus
but even with Pompeius and Caesar. Once again, Balbus and Theophanes. The
Emperor Claudius, as frank and merciless an enemy to the nobiles as any of his ancestors, or any of the rulers of Rome,
introduced his clients, the tribal dynasts of Comata, into the Senate. This
measure, however, was hasty and provocative, transient in its effects. Less obvious,
less advertised and less discussed is Claudius’ use of Greeks as procurators,
his grant of commissions to Greeks in the militia
equestris.[721]
The movement might only be accelerated
by ‘bad emperors’ or masterful servants of the government. It could not be
arrested. The defeat of the nobiles
was spiritual as well as political. It was not merely that the Principate
engrossed their power and their wealth: worse than that, it stole their saints
and their catchwords. Despotism, enthroned at Rome, was arrayed in robes torn
from the corpse of the Republic. Libertas, as has been sufficiently shown, may
be appropriated by any faction and any government: it soon went the way of Pax and became Libertas Augusta.
Pompeius Magnus was hardly worth resuscitating; and the Republicans never quite
reckoned Cicero among the martyrs in the cause of Libertas. Of the authentic champions of that ideal, Brutus and Cassius,
who had fought against Caesar’s heir at Philippi, could not have been invoked
to support his Principate without scandal or inconvenience. Cato was already
out of the way when Octavianus took up arms against the State. But Cato was worshipped
as a martyr of liberty. Augustus conceived a genial device for thwarting the
cult, suggested perhaps by his own felicitous reply when his friend Seius
Strabo asked his opinion of Cato.[722]
Augustus composed a pamphlet on the subject, which he was in the habit of
delivering as a lecture.[723]
The argument and the moral may readily be inferred – Cato, always an advocate
of ordered government, would have been an enthusiastic supporter of the New
State; the better cause for which Cato fought had prevailed after his death
when the Roman People was saved from despotism and restored to Libertas.
The Roman People grieved at the decline
in power and splendour of the ancient families whose names embodied the history
of Republican Rome. That was not the worst. Political liberty had to go, for
the sake of the Commonwealth. But when independence of spirit and of language
perished also, when servility and adulation took the place of libertas and virtus, that was hard for a patriot and an honest man to bear. It
is not so much the rigour of despotism as the servility and degeneracy of the nobiles that moves Tacitus to the sublimest
indignation. Tiberius, Republican and Pompeian in his loyalties, himself a
representative of the opposition to despotism and the unwilling instrument of the
process, was sickened when men of his own class abandoned their Roman tradition
and behaved like courtiers and flatterers of an oriental monarch. History has
preserved a characteristic remark of this Republican misanthrope.[724]
Succeeding ages looked back with
regret to the freedom enjoyed under the tolerant Principate of Augustus.[725]
Discontent with their own times drove them to idealize the past. Under Augustus
the stage for the grim tragedy of the Julio-Claudians has already been set, the
action has begun. Like Sallustius and Pollio, the senator Tacitus, who admired
Republican virtue but believed in ordered government, wrote a history of the
civil wars that his own generation had witnessed. He had no illusions about the
contestants or the victors in that struggle ‘solum id scires, deteriorem fore
qui vicisset’.[726] [the only thing of which
men were certain was that the victor would be the worse] In his old age Tacitus
turned again to history and composed the Annals of the Empire, from the accession
of Tiberius Caesar down to the end of Nero. Period and subject might also be
described as ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Aristocracy’.
Lucan, who narrated recent and
authentic history in epic verse, a typical and traditional occupation at Rome,
came from Corduba. His Pharsalia
recorded the doom of Republican Libertas.
Tacitus, in a sense his successor, was not a Roman aristocrat either, but a new
man, presumably of provincial extraction, like his father-in-law and like the
best Romans of his day. Captured and enslaved by the traditions of the Roman
governing class and of Roman historical writing, Tacitus abandoned the Empire
and the provinces and turned to what some have regarded as a narrow and outworn
theme.
In style, subject and treatment the
Roman historians clung tenaciously to the memory of the first beginnings of
their art, the record of consulates and triumphs, the elogia of the noble families. The earliest native historian of
note, Cato the Censor, made his protest against this practice, omitting the
names of generals in order to honour instead the ‘gesta populi Romani’;[727]
and Cato wrote of Italy as well as of Rome.[728]
But Cato was powerless against Roman tradition. The banker Atticus was more typical,
if a little narrow, in his conception of real history – he studied the
genealogy of noble families and compiled the public careers of illustrious men.[729]
The theme of history remains, as before, ‘clarorum virorum facta moresque’.[730]
[the works and ways of famous men] Therein lay the tragedy – the Empire gave no
scope for the display of civic virtue at home and abroad, for it sought to
abolish war and politics. There could be no great men any more: the aristocracy
was degraded and persecuted. The record of their ruin might be instructive it
was not a happy task for an historian. The author of the Annals was moved to despair of his work. ‘Nobis in arto et
inglorius labor.’[731]
XXXIII. Pax et Princeps
When a party has triumphed in violence
and seized control of the State, it would be plain folly to regard the new government
as a collection of amiable and virtuous characters. Revolution demands and
produces sterner qualities. About the chief persons in the government of the
New State, namely the Princeps himself and his allies, Agrippa, Maecenas and
Livia, history and scandal have preserved a sufficient testimony to unmask the
realities of their rule. The halo of their resplendent fortune may dazzle, but
it cannot blind, the critical eye. Otherwise there can be no history of these
times deserving the name, but only adulation and a pragmatic justification of success.
One man only of all whom the
Revolution had brought to power deserved any public repute, and that was
Agrippa, so some held.[732]
Candid or malignant informants reveal the most eminent personages in the
national government as a sinister crew, worthy heirs to the terrible marshals
of the Triumvirs – Balbus the proud and cruel millionaire, the treacherous and
ungrateful Titius, the brutal and grasping Tarius, the unprepossessing
Quirinius, bitter, hard and hated in his old age, and Lollius the rapacious intriguer.
Nothing is known to the discredit of T. Statilius Taurus, C. Sentius Saturninus,
M. Vinicius and P. Silius.[733]
More good fortune perhaps than merit that their characters should be colourless
and innocuous. Their descendants enjoyed power and repute, their enemies kept
silence; and the grandson of Vinicius was the patron of a loyal and zealous
historian. On the other hand, Lollius was a political scapegoat, while
Quirinius, Titius and Tarius left no consular sons as objects of fear or
flattery.
It is evident that a traditional Roman
prejudice, sharpened under the domination of the Caesarian party and debarred
from attacking the head of the government, has been at work here, eager to
enhance or to invent an obscure origin, a repulsive character and evil deeds
against the novi homines prominent in
the oligarchy. As among the low – born and unprincipled scoundrels of the previous
age, there were excellent men to be found in this company, sons of the old
Italian aristocracy, whose private virtues did not avail to compensate the
cardinal crime of being on the ‘wrong side’ in politics and profiting at the
expense of their betters. The game of traducing the upstart may have originated
with the aristocracy: it was cheerfully adopted by the snobbish fervour of
other classes in society. It is precisely the sons of Roman knights who have
handed down the most typical and most malicious portraits of novi homines.
The nobiles were comparatively immune. But for that, the aristocratic
partisans of Augustus would have illumined history with a constellation of
characters no less vivid and detestable. The novus homo, avid and thrusting, stripped off all pretence in the
race for wealth and power. The nobilis,
less obtrusive, might be no better. After a social revolution the primacy of
the nobiles was a fraud as well as an anachronism – it rested upon support and
subsidy by a military leader, the enemy of their class, acquired in return for
the cession of their power and ambition. Pride and pedigree returned: it masked
subservience or futility. The nobles, emergent from threatened extinction in
the revolutionary age, learned from adversity no lesson save the belief that poverty
was the extremest of evils. Hence avarice or rapacity to repair their shattered
fortunes, and the hope that the Princeps would provide: Rome owed them a debt
for their ancestors. It was paid by the Principate, under pretext of public
service and distinction in oratory or law, but more and more for the sole reason
of birth.[734]
The Sullan oligarchy made its peace
with the monarchy. By the end of Augustus' reign, however, there remained but
little of the Catonian faction or of the four noble houses that supported Pompeius.
The patrician Lentuli were numerous, but by no means talented in proportion.
The fact that L. Domitius Ahenobarbus was the grandfather of the Emperor Nero
has been enough to redeem him from oblivion or from panegyric – he was
bloodthirsty, overbearing and extravagant.[735]
Augustus himself had to intervene, prohibiting one of his gladiatorial shows.
This Ahenobarbus left a son, entirely detestable.[736]
Augustus set especial store by the
patriciate. The last renascence of the oldest nobility of Rome revealed its
inner falsity in the character of the principes
viri, stupidly proud or perversely brilliant. The Aemilii were flimsy and
treacherous. Of the Sulpicii, Ser. Galba and his ugly hunchback father could
display no real talent, but owed advancement to snobbery and to the favour of
women.[737] P. Quinctilius Varus,
torpid, rapacious and incompetent, bears in those epithets the blame for three
legions lost not all his own fault.[738]
The most eminent of the patricians were the Fabii and the Valerii. The Valerii
produced a scandalous and bloodthirsty proconsul;[739]
and if more were known of the personality of Augustus' intimate, the
accomplished Paullus Fabius Maximus, ‘centum puer artium’, than is revealed by
Horace’s charming ode and by the loyal effusions of Ovid, he might not stand in
such startling contrast to his son, the infamous Persicus, whom Claudius, an
emperor not averse from cruel irony, described as ‘nobilissimus vir, amicus
meus’.[740]
The successful novi homines can stand their ground. Superfluous the effort either
to arraign or to rehabilitate the robust careerists who helped to found the
monarchy. Like violence, guile and treachery prospered. Q. Dellius, proverbial
for agility, deserted every side at the right moment. It is curious that Horace
should have felt impelled to remind him of the need to preserve an even temper
in prosperity as in adversity.[741]
Dellius’ troubles were over. When inciting Plancus to take comfort from wine,
Horace contemplates the possibility that Plancus may go to the wars again.[742]
No chance of that: in the cool shade of Tibur Plancus could take his ease and
reflect with no little complacency that throughout his campaigns, for all his
title of imperator bis, and despite
the frieze of weapons on the mausoleum he was building at Caieta, he had seldom
been responsible for the shedding of Roman blood.[743]
With that to his credit Plancus could smile at the impotent envy of his
detractors and the ignoble appellation of a chronic traitor – ‘morbo proditor’.[744]
Fools or fanatics perished along with lost causes: the traitors and timeservers
survived, earning the gratitude of the Roman People.
More reputable and more independent
characters than Dellius and Plancus were Messalla and Pollio, the consular
patrons of Augustan literature, themselves no mean part of it. The Roman patrician
and the Italian novus homo alike had salvaged honour and fame, yet had done
well for themselves and their families. Messalla changed sides, passing to
Antonius after Philippi and from Antonius before long to Octavianus. Along with
Agrippa, Messalla occupied the house of Antonius on the Palatine.[745]
Pollio had been more intractable during the Civil Wars, the only neutral in the
campaign of Actium; he retained his ‘ferocia’ under the New State. Pollio hated
Plancus and composed a memoir to be published after Plancus’ death;[746]
and it was Messalla who coined as a title for Dellius the phrase ‘desultor
bellorum civilium’.[747]
Yet, on a cool estimate, Pollio as well as Messalla will be reckoned among the
profiteers of the Revolution.[748]
Enriched by both sides, Pollio augmented the dignity as well as the fortunes of
his family. Pollio’s son Gallus married Vipsania, his daughter the son of a
nobleman, almost the last of the
Marcelli.[749] He should have had nothing
to complain of under the new dispensation. Pollio himself lived on to a decade
before the death of Augustus, tough and lively to the end, Messalla with
failing powers until A.D. 13.[750]
In his life and in his writings Pollio
professed an unswerving devotion to Libertas. But Libertas was destroyed when
Virtus was shattered at Philippi. Political liberty, it could be maintained, was
doomed if not dead long before that. Pollio knew the bitter truth about the
last generation of the Free State. The historian Tacitus, commenting on the
stability of the new régime when the power was to pass from Augustus to
Tiberius, remarks that few men were still alive that remembered the Republic – ‘quotus
quisque reliquus qui rem publicam vidisset?’ [few indeed were left who had seen
the Republic][751] His purpose was expressly
to deny the Republic of Augustus, not to rehabilitate anarchy, the parent of
despotism.
The rule of law had perished long ago,
with might substituted for right. The contest for power in the Free State was
splendid and terrible:
certare ingenio, contendere
nobilitate,
noctes atque dies niti
praestante labore
ad summas emergere opes
rerumque potiri.[752]
[the strife of wits, the
fight for precedence, all labouring night and day with surpassing toil to mount
upon the pinnacle of riches and to lay hold on power]
The nobiles, by their ambition and their feuds, had not merely destroyed
their spurious Republic: they had ruined the Roman People.
There is something more important than
political liberty; and political rights are a means, not an end in themselves.
That end is security of life and property: it could not be guaranteed by the constitution
of Republican Rome. Worn and broken by civil war and disorder, the Roman People
was ready to surrender the ruinous privilege of freedom and submit to strict
government as in the beginning of time:
nam genus humanum, defessum
vi colere aevum,
ex inimicitiis languebat;
quo magis ipsum
sponte sua cecidit sub
leges artaque iura.[753]
[For mankind, tired of
living in violence, was fainting from its feuds, and so they were readier of
their own will to submit to statutes and strict rules of law.]
So order came to Rome. ‘Acriora ex eo
vincula’ [thenceforward the fetters were tightened], as Tacitus observes.[754]
The New State might be called monarchy, or by any other name. That did not
matter. Personal rights and private status need not depend upon the form of
government. And even though hereditary succession was sternly banished from the
theory of the Principate, every effort was made to apply it in practice, for fear
of something worse: sober men might well ponder on the apparent ridicule and
solid advantages of hereditary monarchy.[755]
Under the new order, the Commonwealth
was no longer to be a playground for politicians, but in truth a res publica. Selfish ambition and
personal loyalties must give way before civic duty and national patriotism.
With the Principate, it was not merely Augustus and his party that prevailed – it
meant the victory of the non-political classes. They could be safe and happy at
last. As a survivor of the proscriptions stated, ‘pacato orbe terrarum, res[titut]a
re publica, quieta deinde n[obis et felicia] tempora contigerunt’ [After the
world was at peace, the republic was restored, and then quiet and happy times
came upon us.][756]. No longer was the
proletariat of Italy pressed into the legions to shed its blood for ambitious
generals or spurious principles, no longer were the peaceful men of property to
be driven into taking sides in a quarrel not their own or mulcted of their
lands for the benefit of the legions. That was over. The Republic was something
that a prudent man might admire but not imitate: as a wicked opportunist once
observed, ‘ulteriora mirari, praesentia sequi’ [he admired the earlier period,
but adapted himself to the present].[757]
Even among the nobiles there can have been few genuine Republicans in the time of
Augustus; and many of the nobiles were
inextricably bound up with the New State, being indebted to it for their
preservation and standing. As more and more sons of Roman knights passed by
patronage into the ranks of the governing class, the conviction not merely of
the inevitability but also of the benefits of the system must have become more
widely diffused in the Senate. Yet while this process was going on, the Republic
itself became the object of a sentimental cult, most fervently practised among
the members of the class that owed everything to the Empire. The senator
Helvidius Priscus, the son of a centurion, may have been sincere in his
principles:[758] but the Roman knight who
filled his house with the statues of Republican heroes was a snob as well as a
careerist.[759]
The Republican profession was not so
much political as social and moral: it was more often a harmless act of homage
to the great past of Rome than a manifestation of active discontent with the present
state of affairs. It need not be taken as seriously as it was by suspicious
emperors or by artful and unscrupulous prosecutors. While the Republic still
maintained for a season its formal and legal existence, there had been
deception enough in the assertion of Republicanism. With monarchy now firmly
based in habit and theory as well as in fact, the very absence of any alternative
form of rule was an encouragement to the more irresponsible type of serious-minded
person. No danger that they would be challenged to put their ideals into
practice.
The Republic, with its full record of
great wars abroad and political dissensions at home, was a splendid subject for
history. Well might Tacitus look back with melancholy and complain that his own
theme was dull and narrow. But the historian who had experienced one civil war
in his own lifetime, and the threat of another, did not allow his judgement
entirely to be blinded by literary and sentimental conventions. Like Sallustius
and Pollio, he had no illusions about the Republic. The root of the trouble lay
in the nature of man, turbid and restless, with noble qualities as well as evil
– the strife for liberty, glory or domination.[760]
Empire, wealth and individual ambition had ruined the Republic long ago. Marius
and Sulla overthrew libertas by force
of arms and established dominatio.
Pompeius was no better. After that, only a contest for supreme power.[761]
Tacitus does not even admit restoration of the Free State if Brutus and Cassius
had prevailed at Philippi. Such was the conventional and vulgar opinion:[762]
Tacitus himself would have thought it impossible after a civil war.
Like the historian, the student of
oratory was tempted to regret the grand and untrammelled eloquence of the
closing days of the Republic.[763]
He might pause when he reflected that great oratory is a symptom of decay and
disorder, both social and political. Electoral corruption, extortion in the
provinces and the execution of Roman citizens furnished great themes and
orators to match. By definition, the best form of state was spared these evils.
Well-ordered commonwealths, lacking that 'licence which fools call liberty’, left
no record in the annals of eloquence.[764]
Not so Athens and Rhodes – they were democracies, and deplorably so.[765]
Rome too, so long as Rome was on the wrong path, produced vigorous oratory.[766]
There were the Gracchi and Cicero – but was it worth it?[767]
The admirer of ancient eloquence could
not have the advantage both ways, enjoying both Republican liberty and the
benefits of an ordered state. Nor was there need for orators any more, for long
speeches in the Senate or before the People, when one man had the supreme
decision in the Commonwealth, and he the wisest ‘cum de re publica non imperiti
et multi deliberent, sed sapientissimus et unus’ [when it is not the ignorant
multitude that decides a political issue, but a monarch who is the incarnation
of wisdom].[768]
Tacitus is a monarchist, from
perspicacious despair of human nature. There was no escape. Despite the nominal
sovranty of law, one man ruled.[769]
This is his comment on Tiberius. It was no less true of the Principate of
Augustus-rather more so. To be sure, the State was organized under a principate
– no dictatorship or monarchy. Names did not matter much. Before long the eloquent
Seneca, when counselling the young Nero to clemency, could employ with
indifference the names of ‘rex’ or ‘princeps’,[770]
the more so because a respectable tradition of philosophic thought held
monarchy to be the best form of government. It was also primeval, fated to
return again when a state had run through the whole cycle of change.
The Roman, with his native theory of
unrestricted imperium, was familiar
with the notion of absolute power. The Principate, though absolute, was not
arbitrary. It derived from consent and delegation; it was founded upon the
laws. This was something different from the monarchies of the East. The Romans
had not sunk as low as that. Complete freedom might be unworkable, but complete
enslavement was intolerable. The Principate provided the middle way between
these extremes.[771]
It was not long before the Principate
gave birth to its own theory, and so became vulnerable to propaganda. Augustus claimed
to have restored Libertas and the
Republic, a necessary and salutary fraud: his successors paid for it. Libertas in Roman thought and usage had
never quite meant unrestricted liberty; and the ideal which the word now embodied
was the respect for constitutional forms. Indeed, it was inconceivable that a
Roman should live under any other dispensation. Hence Libertas could be invoked as a catchword against unpopular rulers,
to stamp their power as illicit, in a word, as ‘dominatio’, not ‘principatus’.
Libertas, it was widely held in
senatorial circles, should be the very spirit of the Principate. All too long,
soul and body had been severed. It was claimed that they were united in the
Principate of Nerva which succeeded the absolute rule of Domitian.[772]
There was another side to this fair show of phrases, namely, the real and imminent
menace of a civil war. It was averted by the adoption of Trajan, the governor
of the military province of Upper Germany: less was heard about Libertas under his firm regiment. Tacitus
announced an intention of writing in his old age the history of that happy
time, when freedom of thought prevailed and freedom of speech, the Principate
of Nerva and the rule of Trajan.[773]
He turned instead to the sombre theme of the Annals.
As a Roman historian, Tacitus had to
be a Republican: in his life and in his politics he was a monarchist. It was
the part of prudence to pray for good emperors and put up with what you got.[774]
Given the nature of man – ‘vitia erunt donec homines’ [there will be vices so
long as there are men] – it was folly to be utopian.[775]
But the situation was not hopeless. A good emperor would dispense the blessings
of his rule over the whole world, while the harm done by a bad emperor was not boundless:
it fell mostly upon his immediate entourage.[776]
The Roman had once boasted that he
alone enjoyed libertas while ruling
others. It was now evident that obedience was the condition of empire – ‘idemque
huic urbi dominandi finis erit qui parendi fuerit’ [the end of this city’s rule
will be one with the end of her obedience].[777]
This is a far cry from Marcus Brutus. A new conception of civic virtue, derived
from the non-political classes of the Republic and inherent in the New State
from the beginning, was soon formulated, with its own exemplars and its own phraseology.
Quies was a virtue for knights, scorned by senators; and neutrality had seldom
been possible in the political dissensions of the last age of the Republic. Few
were the nobiles who passed unscathed through these trials, from caution like L.
Marcius Philippus (cos. 91 B.C.) and
his son, or from honest independence like Piso.
With the Principate comes a change.
For the senator, as for the State, there must surely be a middle path between
the extremes of ruinous liberty and degrading servility. A sensible man could find
it. And such there were. M. Aemilius Lepidus enjoyed the friendship of
Tiberius; he supported the government without dishonour, his own dignity
without danger.[778]
Likewise the excellent P. Memmius Regulus, a pillar of the Roman State and
secure himself, though married for a time to Lollia Paullina, and the venerable
L. Volusius Saturninus who survived all the perils of the Julio-Claudian age
and died at the age of ninety-three.[779]
As for the family of the Cocceii, they had a genius for safety.
There could be great men still, even
under bad emperors, if they abated their ambition, remembered their duty as
Romans to the Roman People and quietly practised the higher patriotism. It was
not glorious: but glory was ruinous. A surer fame was theirs than the futile
and ostentatious opposition of certain candidates for martyrdom, who might be
admired for Republican independence of spirit but not for political wisdom.[780]
Neither Tacitus nor Trajan had been a party to this folly; the brief unhappy
Principate of Nerva was a cogent argument for firm control of the State. Like
the vain pomp of eastern kings, the fanaticism of the doctrinaire was
distasteful to the Romans ‘vis imperii valet, inania tramittuntur.’[prize the
essentials of sovereignty and ignore its vanities][781]
Tacitus, his father-in-law and his
emperor join hands with the time-servers and careerists a century earlier in
the founding of the New State. Politics were abolished, or at least sterilized.
As a result, history and oratory suffered, but order and concord were safeguarded.
As Sallustius had observed, ‘pauci libertatem, pars magna iustos dominos volunt’
[while few men want freedom, a great many want fair-minded masters].[782]
The two were now to be reconciled, with constitutional monarchy as a guarantee
of freedom such as no Republic could provide:
nunquam libertas gratior
exstat
quam sub rege pio.[783]
[never does liberty show
more fair than beneath a good king]
Such was the ‘felicissimus status’, as
Augustus and Velleius Paterculus termed the Principate, the ‘optimus status’
which Augustus aspired to create and which Seneca knew as monarchy.[784]
Concord and monarchy, Pax and Princeps, were inseparable in fact as in hope and
prayer ‘custodite, servate, protegite hunc statum, hanc pacem, hunc principem’
[guard, preserve, and protect this system, this peace, and this princeps].[785]
The old constitution had been corrupt, unrepresentative and ruinous. Caesar’s
heir passed beyond it. What was a special plea and political propaganda in the
military plebiscite of 32 B.C. became a reality under the Principate – Augustus
represented the Populus Romanus: under his trusteeship the State could in truth
be called the Commonwealth, ‘res publica’.
The last of the dynasts prevailed in violence and bloodshed. But his potentia
was transmuted into auctoritas, and ‘dux’ became beneficent, ‘dux bonus’. Ovid
perhaps went too far when he spoke of ‘dux sacratus’.[786]
But Dux was not enough. Augustus assumed the irreproachable garb of Princeps,
beyond contest the greatest of the principes
and better than all of them. They had been selfish dynasts, but he was ‘salubris
princeps’ He might easily have adopted the title of ‘optimus princeps’: that
was left for Trajan. At the very beginning of Augustus Principate the ideas,
later to crystallize into titles official or conventional, were already there.
It was not until 2 B.C. that Augustus was acclaimed pater patriae. Horace hints at it long before:
hic ames dici
pater atque princeps.[787]
[here may you
be glad to be called Father and First Citizen]
The notion of parent brings with it
that of protector:
optime
Romulae
custos gentis.[788]
[best guardian of Romulus’
folk]
And so Augustus is ‘custos rerum’ [in
charge of affairss];[789]
he is the peculiar warden of Rome and Italy, ever ready to succour and to
guard:
o tutela praesens
Italiae dominaeque Romae![790]
[you, the ever-present
defender of Italy and Rome]
Greeks in the cities of the East
hailed Augustus as the Saviour of the World, the Benefactor of the Human Race,
as a God, God’s son manifest, Lord of Earth and Sea. Sailors from Alexandria paid
public observance to him who was the author of their lives, liberty and
prosperity.[791] The loyal town-council
of the colony of Pisa showed more restraint, but meant the same thing, when
they celebrated the ‘Guardian of the Roman Empire and Governor of the Whole
World’.[792]
That the power of Caesar Augustus was
absolute, no contemporary could doubt. But his rule was justified by merit,
founded upon consent and tempered by duty. Augustus stood like a soldier, ‘in
statione’ – for the metaphor, though it may have parallels in the language of
the Stoics, is Roman and military.[793]
He would not desert his post until a higher command relieved him, his duty done
and a successor left on guard. Augustus used the word ‘statio’: so did
contemporaries.[794]
Augustus’ rule was dominion over all
the world. To the Roman People his relationship was that of Father, Founder and
Guardian. Sulla had striven to repair the shattered Republic; and Cicero, for
saving Rome in his consulate, had been hailed as pater patriae. But Sulla, with well-grounded hate, was styled ‘the
sinister Romulus’;[795]
Cicero, in derision of his pretensions, the ‘Romulus from Arpinum’.[796]
Augustus, however, had a real claim to be known and honoured as the Founder, ‘augusto
augurio', in the phrase of Ennius. The Roman could feel it in his blood and in
his traditions. Again Ennius must have seemed
prophetic:
O Romule, Romule die,
qualem te patriae custodem
di genuerunt!
o pater, o genitor, o
sanguen dis oriundum,
tu produxisti nos intra
luminis oras.[797]
[O Romulus, Romulus divine,
what a guardian of the
fatherland the gods created in you!
O father, O sire, O
bloodline descended from the gods!
you have led us to the
realms of light]
Augustus’ relation to the Roman
Commonwealth might also be described as organic rather than arbitrary or formal.
It was said that he arrogated to himself all the functions of Senate,
magistrates and laws.[798]
Truly – but more penetrating the remark that he entwined himself about the body
of the Commonwealth. The new member reinvigorated the whole and could not have
been severed without damage.[799]
His rule was personal, if ever rule
was, and his position became ever more monarchic. Yet with all this, Augustus
was not indispensable-that was the greatest triumph of all. Had he died in the
early years of the Principate, his party would have survived, led by Agrippa,
or by a group of the marshals. But Augustus lived on, a progressive miracle of
duration. As the years passed, he emancipated himself more and more from the
control of his earlier partisans; the nobiles returned to prominence and the
Caesarian party itself was transformed and transcended. A government was
created.
‘Legiones classes provincias, cuncta
inter se conexa.’[800]
[The legions, the provinces, the fleets, the whole administration, had been
centralized.] So Tacitus described the Empire and its armed forces. The phrase might
fittingly be applied to the whole fabric of the Roman State. It was firm,
well-articulated and flexible. By appeal to the old, Augustus justified the
new; by emphasizing continuity with the past, he encouraged the hope of
development in the future. The New State established as the consolidation of
the Revolution was neither exclusive nor immobile. While each class in society
had its peculiar functions, there was no sharp division between classes. Service
to Rome won recognition and promotion for senator, for knight or for soldier,
for Roman or for provincial. The rewards were not so splendid as in the wars of
the Revolution; but the rhythm, though abated, was steady and continuous.
It had been Augustus’ most fervent
prayer that he might lay the foundations of the new order deep and secure.[801]
He had done more than that. The Roman State, based firmly on a united Italy and
a coherent Empire, was completely renovated, with new institutions, new ideas
and even a new literature that was already classical. The doom of Empire had
borne heavily on Rome, with threatened ruin. But now the reinvigorated Roman
People, robust and cheerful, could bear the burden with pride as well as with
security.
Augustus had also prayed for a successor
in the post of honour and duty. His dearest hopes, his most pertinacious
designs, had been thwarted. But peace and the Principate endured. A successor
had been found, trained in his own school, a Roman aristocrat from among the
principes, by general consent capable of Empire. It might have been better for
Tiberius and for Rome if Augustus had died earlier: the duration of his life,
by accustoming men’s minds to the Principate as something permanent and
enhancing his own prestige beyond that of a mortal man, while it consolidated
his own regime and the new system of government, none the less made the task of
his successor more delicate and more arduous.
The last decade of Augustus’ life was
clouded by domestic scandals and by disasters on the frontiers of empire.[802]
Yet for all that, when the end came it found him serene and cheerful. On his
death-bed he was not plagued by remorse for his sins or by anxiety for the
Empire. He quietly asked his friends whether he had played well his part in the
comedy of life.[803]
There could be one answer or none. Whatever his deserts, his fame was secure and
he had made provision for his own immortality.[804]
During the Spanish wars, when stricken
by an illness that might easily have been the end of a frail life, Augustus
composed his Autobiography. Other
generals before him, like Sulla and Caesar, had published the narrative of
their res gestae or recounted their
life, deeds and destiny for glory or for politics: none can have fabricated
history with such calm audacity. Other generals had their memorial in the
trophies, temples or theatres they had erected; their mailed statues and the
brief inscribed record of their public services adorned Augustus’ Forum of Mars
Ultor. This was the recompense due to ‘boni duces’ after death.[805]
Sulla had been ‘Felix’, Pompeius had seized the title of ‘Magnus’. Augustus, in
glory and fortune the greatest of duces
and principes, intended to outshine
them all. At the very moment when he was engaged upon the ostensible restoration
of the Republic, he constructed in the Campus Martius a huge and dynastic
monument, his own Mausoleum. He may already, in the ambition to perpetuate his
glory, have composed the first draft of the inscription that was to stand
outside his monument, the Res Gestae;[806]
or at the least, it may be conjectured that some such document was included in
the state papers which the Princeps, near to death, handed over to the consul
Piso in 23 B.C. But earlier versions may more easily be surmised than detected.
The Res Gestae in their final form
were composed early in A.D. 13, along with the last will and testament, to be
edited and published by Tiberius.[807]
This precious document, surviving in
provincial copies, bears the hall-mark of official truth: it reveals the way in
which Augustus wished posterity to interpret the incidents of his career, the achievements
and character of his rule. The record is no less instructive for what it omits
than for what it says. The adversaries of the Princeps in war and the victims
of his public or private treacheries are not mentioned by name but are
consigned to contemptuous oblivion. Antonius is masked and traduced as a
faction, the Liberators as enemies of the Fatherland, Sex. Pompeius as a pirate.
Perusia and the proscriptions are forgotten, the coup d'état of 32 B.C. appears as a spontaneous uprising of all
Italy, Philippi is transformed into the victory of Caesar’s heir and avenger
alone.[808] Agrippa indeed occurs
twice, but much more as a date than as an agent. Other allies of the Princeps
are omitted, save for Tiberius, whose conquest of Illyricum under the auspices of
Augustus is suitably commemorated.[809]
Most masterly of all is the
formulation of the chapter that describes the constitutional position of the
Princeps – and most misleading. His powers are defined as legal and
magisterial; and he excels any colleague he might have, not in potestas, but only in auctoritas.[810]
Which is true as far as it goes – not very far. Auctoritas, however, does betray the truth, for auctoritas is also potentia. There is no word in this passage of the tribunicia potestas which, though
elsewhere modestly referred to as a means of passing legislation, nowhere
betrays its formidable nature and cardinal role in the imperial system – ‘summi
fastigii vocabulum’. Again, there is nowhere in the whole document even a hint
of the imperium proconsulare in
virtue of which Augustus controlled, directly or indirectly, all provinces and
all armies. Yet these powers were the twin pillars of his rule, firm and erect
behind the flimsy and fraudulent Republic. In the employment of the tribunes’
powers and of imperium the Princeps
acknowledges his ancestry, recalling the dynasts Pompeius and Caesar. People
and Army were the source and basis of his domination.
Such were the Res Gestae Divi Augusti. It would be imprudent to use the document
as a sure guide for history, petulant and pointless to complain of omission and
misrepresentation. No less vain the attempt to discover ultimate derivation and
exact definition as a literary form.[811]
While the Princeps lived, he might, like other rulers, be openly worshipped as
a deity in the provinces or receive in Rome and Italy honours like those
accorded to gods by grateful humanity: to Romans he was no more than the head of
the Roman State. Yet one thing was certain. When he was dead, Augustus would
receive the honours of the Founder who was also Aeneas and Romulus, and, like Divus Julius, he would be enrolled by
vote of the Roman Senate among the gods of Rome for his great merits-and for
reasons of high politics. None the less, it will not help to describe the Res Gestae as the title-deeds of his
divinity.[812] If explained they must
be, it is not with reference I to the religions and kings of the Hellenistic
East but from Rome and Roman practice, as a combination between the elogium of Roman
general and the statement of accounts of a Roman magistrate.
Like Augustus, his Res Gestae are unique, defying verbal
definition and explaining themselves. From the beginning, from his youthful
emergence as a revolutionary leader in public sedition and armed violence, the
heir of Caesar had endured to the end. He died on the anniversary of the day
when he assumed his first consulate after the march on Rome. Since then,
fifty-six years had elapsed. Throughout, in act and policy, he remained true to
himself and to the career that began when he raised a private army and
‘liberated the State from the domination of a faction’. Dux had become Princeps
and had converted a party into a government. For power he had sacrificed
everything; he had achieved the height of all mortal ambition and in his
ambition he had saved and regenerated the Roman People.
[1] M. Junius Silanus, grandson of the
younger Julia, was born in A.D. 14 (Pliny, NH
7, 58); on Augustus’ remarks about Galba, cf. Suetonius, Galba 4, 1; Dio 64, 1, 1; Tacitus, Ann. 6, 20.
[2] As M. Favonius, the friend of Cato,
observed: χεῖρον εἶναι μοναρχίας
παρανόμου πόλεμον ἐμφύλιον [civil war was worse than illegal monarchy]
(Plutarch, Brutus 12).
[3] In the Caesares of Julian (p. 309 A) Silenus calls Augustus a
chameleon: Apollo objects and claims him for a Stoic.
[4] Tacitus, in his brief summary of the
rise of Augustus (Ann. 1, 2) makes no reference at all
to the ‘Restoration of the Republic’ in 28 and 27 B.C. Gibbon’s remarks (c. III, init.)
may be read with profit.
[5] The Triumviral period is tangled,
chaotic and hideous. To take it all for granted, however, and make a clean
beginning after Actium or in 27 B.C. is an offence against the nature of
history and is the prime cause of many pertinacious delusions about the
Principate of Augustus. Nor is the Augustan period as straightforward or as
well known as the writers of biographies appear to imagine.
[6] Plutarch, Antonius 56: ἔδει
γὰρ εἰς Καίσαρα πάντα περιελθεῖν [since it was destined that everything
should come into Caesar’s hands].
[7] As Pollio has perished, Tacitus and
Sallust can be drawn upon for compensation. For example, the fragments of the
preface of Sallust’s Histories, combined with Tacitus, Hist. 1, 1–3, will give some idea of
the introduction to Pollio’s work on the Civil Wars.
[8] Pollio’s three letters to Cicero are
valuable documents (Ad fam. 10,
31–3), especially the first, where he writes (§
2 f.):
‘natura autem mea et studia trahunt me ad pacis et libertatis cupiditatem.
itaque illud initium civilis belli saepe deflevi. cum vero non liceret mihi
nullius partis esse quia utrubique magnos inimicos habebam, ea castra fugi in
quibus plane tutum me ab insidiis inimici sciebam non futurum. compulsus eo quo
minime volebam, ne in extremis 3essem, plane pericula non dubitanter adii.
Caesarem vero, quod me in tanta fortuna modo cognitum vetustissimorum
familiarium loco habuit, dilexi summa cum pietate et fide.’ [‘my nature and
pursuits lead me to crave for peace and freedom. The outbreak of the former
civil war cost me many a tear. But since I could not remain neutral because I
had powerful enemies on both sides, I avoided the camp where I well knew I
should not be safe from my enemy’s plots. Finding myself forced whither I would
not, and having no wish to trail in the rear, I certainly did not hang back
from dangerous work. As for Caesar, I loved him in all duty and loyalty,
because in his greatness he treated me, a recent acquaintance, as though I had
been one of his oldest intimates.’, Pollio to Cicero, Corduba, 16 March 43].
[9] Horace, Odes 2, 1, 6 ff.:
periculosae
plenum opus aleae
tractas
et incedis per ignis
suppositos
cineri doloso.
[that is your theme, a dangerous
gamble at every point; you walk over fires still burning beneath the
treacherous ash.]
[11] Thus Tacitus, writing
imperial history in the spirit and categories of the Republic, begins his Annals with the words ‘urbem
Romam’.
[15] Appian, BC [The
Civil Wars] 1, 2, 7: δυναστεῖαί τε
ἦσαν ἤδη κατὰ πολλὰ καὶ στασίαρχοι μοναρχικοί [there were now in many cases
dynasties, with faction leaders behaving like monarchs].
[18] Sallust, Hist. 1, 18 M: ‘et relatus inconditae
olim vitae mos, ut omne ius in viribus esset’ [and there was a reversion to the
former custom of living an uncivilized life, such that all right was based on
might]; Tacitus, Ann. 3, 28: ‘exim continua per
viginti annos discordia, non mos, non ius’ [there followed twenty crowded years
of discord, during which law and custom ceased to exist].
[19] Tacitus, Hist. 1, 3: ‘non esse curae deis
securitatem nostram, esse ultionem’ [the gods care not for our safety, but for
our punishment]. Cf. Lucan, Pharsalia
4, 207; 7, 455.
[20] Appian, BC
1, 6, 24: ωδε μὲν ἐκ στάσεων ποικίλων ἡ πολιτεία Ῥωμαίοις ἐς ὁμόνοιαν καὶ
μοναρχίαν περιέστη [it was in this way that the Roman state succeeded in
establishing harmony and monarchy after such a variety of civil disturbances].
[22] Along with Claudii,
Aemilii and Manlii they formed an aristocracy within the patriciate itself,
being the so-called gentes maiores.
On the patrician gentes, cf. Mommsen,
Römische Forschungen 12
(1864), 69 ff.
[23] P. Willems, Le Sénat de la république romaine 1
(1878), 427 ff., established this total for the Senate of 55 B.C.
[24] Sallust, BJ [Bellum
Jugurthinum] 63, 6 (cf. BC [Bellum Catilinae] 23, 6): ‘etiam tum alios
magistratus plebs, consulatum nobilitas inter se per manus tradebat. novos nemo
tam clarus neque tam egregiis factis erat, quin indignus illo honore et is
quasi pollutus haberetur.’ [Even in that period, while the commons bestowed
other political offices, the nobles passed the consulate from hand to hand
among themselves. No “new man” was so famous or so illustrious for his deeds
that he was not considered unworthy of that honor and unclean, so to speak.]
Compare the remarks of L. Sergius Catilina, a noble and a patrician: ‘quod non
dignos homines honore honestatos videbam’ [because I saw the unworthy elevated
to public office] (BC 35, 3); ‘M. Tullius, inquilinus
civis urbis Romae’ [Marcus Tullius, a resident alien in the city of Rome] (ib. 31, 7).
[26] The manual on
electioneering written by Q. Cicero (the Commentariolun
petitionis) reveals much of the truth about his candidature.
[27] Compare Münzer’s comments
on the deliberate concealment by the nobiles,
for their own ends, of the true character of Roman political life, Römische Adelsparteien u. Adelsfamilien
(1920), 427 f.
[28] Velleius 2, 29, 1, &c., cf. M. Gelzer, Die Nobilität der r. Republik, 77 f. A
number of men from Picenum, of the tribus
Velina, are attested in the consilium
of Cn. Pompeius Strabo at Asculum, ILS
8888, cf. C. Cichorius, Römische Studien
(1922), 130 ff., esp. 158 ff. The root of the name is the Oscan cognate of the
Latin ‘quin-que’; and the termination ‘-eius’ has been taken as evidence of
Etruscan influence on the family at some time or other, cf. J. Duchesne, Ant. cl. III (1934), 81 ff.
[29] Namely, his own kinsman,
Q. Pompeius Rufus, cos. 88 B.C., cf. Appian, BC 1, 63, 284.
[31] Cicero, quoted by Asconius 70 (–
p. 79 Clark): ‘hominem dis ac nobilitati perinvisum.’ [a man deeply loathed by
the gods and the nobles]
[32] Plutarch, Pompeius 6. Prosecuted for peculations committed
by his father, he was saved by Philippus, Hortensius – and by the Marian leader
Papirius Carbo (Cicero, Brutus 230; Val. Max. 5, 3, 5; 6, 2, 8).
[33] Plutarch, Pompeius 6 f.; Velleius 2, 29, i; Bell. Afr. [Caesar, De Bello
Africo] 22, 2: ‘gloria et animi
magnitudine elatus privatus atque adulescentulus paterni exercitus reliquiis
collectis paene oppressam funditus et deletam Italiam urbemque Romanam in
libertatem vindicavit.’ [carried away by his ambition and the nobility of his
nature, though a mere private citizen and a callow youth, he mustered the
remnants of his father’s army and emancipated Italy and the city of Rome when
they were all but utterly overwhelmed and destroyed]
[34] H. M. Last, CAH [Cambridge Ancient History] Ix, 349.
This was presumably the conception set forth by Sallust in his Histories.
[35] As, for example, by
Mommsen, and recently by Carcopino, Points
de vue sur l'impérialisme romain (1934), 89 ff.; Histoire romaine 11: César
(1936).
[36] Ad
Att. 7, 15, 2: ‘Cato enim ipse iam
servire quam pugnare mavult.’ [Even Cato now prefers slavery to war. Cicero to
Atticus, Capua, 26 January 49]
[37] Ib. 8, 13, 2: ‘nihil prorsus aliud
curant nisi agros, nisi villulas, nisi nummulos suos.’ [They really think of
nothing except their fields and their bits of farms and investments. Cicero to
Atticus, Formiae, 1 March 49] Cf. ib. 7, 7, 5; 8, 16, 1.
[38] Pompeius’ illness in the
summer of 50 B.C. may not have been wholly due to physical causes.
[39] Cf. E. Meyer, Caesars Monarchie [und das Principat des Pompejus]3 [Stuttgart-Berlin,
1922], 299 ff.
[42] Suetonius, Divus
Iulius 84, 2: ‘senatus consultum, quo
omnia simul ei divina atque humana decreverat, item ius iurandum, quo se cuncti
pro salute unius astrinxerant’ [the decree of the Senate in which it had voted
Caesar all divine and human honours at once, and likewise the oath with which
they had all pledged themselves to watch over his personal safety]; Appian, in
several passages, esp. BC 2, 145, 604: καὶ αὖθις ἀνεγίγνωσκε τοὺς ὅρκους, ἦ μὴν φυλάξειν Καίσαρα καὶ τὸ
Καίσαρος σῶμα παντὶ σθένει πάντας, ἢ εἴ τις ἐπιβουλεύσειεν, ἐξώλεις εἶναι τοὺς
οὐκ ἀμύναντας αὐτῷ. [Antony continued his reading with the oaths by which
they all swore to guard Caesar and Caesar’s person with all their might, and if
anyone plotted against him those failing to defend him were to be damned.] On
which cf. now A. v. Premerstein, ‘Vom Werden und Wesen des Prinzipats’, Abh. der bayer. Ak. der Wiss., phil.-hist. Abt., N.F. 15 (1937), 32 ff. Premerstein
argues that this was a general oath, not confined to senators.
[43] If the Sallustian Epistulae ad Caesarem senem could be taken as genuine, or even
contemporary, they would provide valuable evidence of strong anti-capitalistic
tendencies; cf. 1, 8, 3: ‘verum haec et omnia mala
pariter cum honore pecuniae desinent, si neque magistratus neque alia volgo
cupienda venalia erunt’ [But these and all other evils will cease when money is
no longer held in honor, if neither magistracies nor other things commonly
craved are put up for sale.]; 2, 7, 10: ‘ergo in primis auctoritatem
pecuniae demito.’ [Above all, therefore, deprive money of its influence.]
[45] Pro
Marcello 23: ‘constituenda iudicia,
revocanda fides, comprimendae libidines, propaganda suboles, omnia quae dilapsa
iam diffluxerunt severis legibus vincienda sunt.’ [courts of law must be set on
foot, licentiousness must be checked, and the growth of population fostered;
all that has become disintegrated and dissipated must be knit together by
stringent regulation] Caesar carried moral and sumptuary legislation
(Suetonius, Divus
Iulius 42 f.): the title of praefectus moribus [Prefect of Morals]
did not make him any more popular (Ad
fam. 9, 15, 5).
[46] Suetonius, Divus
Iulius 77, reporting an unsafe
witness, the Pompeian T. Ampius Balbus. But cf. Caesar’s favourite quotation
about tyranny (Cicero, De
off., 3, 82).
[47] Compare especially E.
Meyer, Hist. Zeitschr. XCI (1903),
385 ff. = Kl. Schr 12
(1924), 423 ff.; Caesars Monarchie³,
508 ff. Against, F. E. Adcock, CAН IX
718 ff., and remarks by the present writer, BSR
Papers XIV (1938), I ff.
[48] Sallust, Hist. 3, 88 M: ‘sed Pompeius a prima
adulescentia sermone fautorur similem se fore credens Alexandro regi, facta
consultaque eius quidem aemulus erat’ [But Pompey, believing from his earliest
youth, thanks to the flattery of his supporters, that he would be like King
Alexander, was an emulator of that man’s deeds and intentions.]; Plutarch, Pompeius 2. On the orientalism of Pompeius, cf.
Carcopino Histoire romaine 11, 597.
[49] His imperious and arrogant
temper was noted by contemporaries, who recalled his behaviour towards certain
of the principes of the Sullan oligarchy, Catulus (Velleius 2, 43, 3) and Lucullus (Suetonius, Divus
Iulius 20, 4). Suetonius (ib. 22, 2) reports a boastful remark
in 59 B.C. – ‘invitis et gementibus adversariis adeptum se quae concupisset,
proinde ex eo insultaturum omnium capitibus.’ [having gained his heart’s desire
to the grief and lamentation of his opponents, he would therefore from that
time mount on their heads] For awareness of his unpopularity cf. Ad
Att. 14, 1, 2 (Caesar’s words): ‘ego
dubitem quin summo in odio sim quom M. Cicero sedeat nec suo commodo me
convenire possit? atqui si quisquam est facilis, hic est. tamen non dubito quin
me male oderit.’ [I must be a most unpopular man. There’s M. Cicero sitting waiting
and can’t get to see me at his own convenience. He is the most easygoing of
mankind, but I don’t doubt he detests me]
[50] Matius, quoted in Ad
Att. 14, 1, 1: ‘etenim si ille tali
ingenio exitum non reperiebat, quis nunc reperiet?’ [for if a man of Caesar’s
genius could find no way out, who will find one now?]
[51] As the Historia Augusta, pertinent for once but
not perhaps authentic, reports of an Emperor (SHA Severus 18, 11): ‘omnia fui et nihil
expedit.’ [I have been everything, and it has gained me nothing.]
[52] Cicero, De
off. 1, 26: ‘declaravit id modo
temeritas C. Caesaris, qui omnia iura divina et humana pervertit propter eum,
quem sibi ipse opinionis errore finxerat, principatum. est autem in hoc genere
molestum, quod in maximis animis splendidissimisque ingeniis plerumque
exsistunt honoris imperii potentiae gloriae cupiditates.’ [We saw thisCaesar.
proved but now in the effrontery of Gaius Caesar, who, to gain that sovereign
power which by a depraved imagination he had conceived in his fancy, trod
underfoot all laws of gods and men. But the trouble about this matter is that
it is in the greatest souls and in the most brilliant geniuses that we usually find
ambitions for civil and military authority, for power, and for glory, springing
up]
[54] F. E. Adcock, CАН IX, 724. [Cf. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, New Penguin Shakespeare,
1967, II.1.10-34; Plutarch, Brutus 18.]
[55] Suetonius, Divus
Iulius 86, 2: ‘rem publicam, si quid
sibi eveniret, neque quietam fore et aliquanto deteriore condicione civilia
bella subituram.’ [but if aught befell him, the commonwealth would have no
peace, but would be plunged in civil strife under much worse conditions]
[56] Cassius (Ad
fam. 15, 19, 4) describes Caesar as
‘veterem et clementem dominum’. [the old easygoing master]
[57] Enhanced in importance through Cato’s martyr
– death and posthumous fame, his studies in Greek philosophy were already an
object of misrepresentation to his contemporaries (Cicero, Pro
Murena 61 ff.; cf. Ad
Att. 2, 1, 8: ‘dicit enim tamquam in
Platonis πολιτεία, non tamquam in Romuli faece sententiam’ [He speaks in the
Senate as though he were living in Plato’s Republic instead of Romulus’
cesspool.]). Again, ‘Sallust’ (Ad
Caesarem 2, 9, 3) is neither just nor
relevant when he observes: ‘unius tamen M. Catonis ingenium versutum loquax
callidum haud contemno. parantur haec discıplina Graecorum. sed virtus
vigilantıa labor apud Graecos nulla sunt.’ [Marcus Cato, nevertheless, is the
one man whose versatile, loquacious, and clever talent I by no means despise.
Qualities such as these are the products of Greek training.]
[58] As Caesar observed, ‘magni
refert hic quid velit, sed quicquid vult valde vult’ [It’s a great question what he wants; but whatever he wants, he
wants it badly.] (Ad
Att. 14, 1, 2); Quintilian (10, 1, 123), on the oratory of
Brutus: ‘scias eum sentire quae dicit’ [had the strength to support the weight
of the subject]; cf. Tacitus, Dial.
25, 6: ‘simpliciter et ingenue’
[straightforward and ingenuous].
[59] Before the outbreak of the
Civil War Brutus had refused even to speak to Pompeius: καίτοι πρότερον ἀπαντήσας οὐδὲ προσεῖπε τὸν Πομπήϊον, ἄγος ἡγούμενος
μέγα πατρὸς φονεῖ διαλέγεσθαι [And yet before this he would not even speak
to Pompey when he met him, considering it a great abomination to converse with
the murderer of his father] (Plutarch, Brutus 4, cf. Pompeius 64).
[60] At least according to
Nicolaus, Vita Caesaris 27, 106.
[62] Compare the tone of his
letter to M. Brutus and to Cassius, Ad
fam. 11, 1. The dating of this
crucial document has been much disputed. ‘The early morning of March 17th, ably
argued by O. E. Schmidt, accepted by many and reinforced by Münzer (P-W
[Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie der
classischen Altertumswissenschaft], Supp. v, 375 f.), is certainly
attractive. A case can be made out for March 21st or 22nd, cf. S. Accame, Riv. di fil. LXII (1934), 201 ff.
[63]
Suetonius, Divus Iulius 84, 2: ‘quibus perpauca a
se verba addidit.’ [to which he added a very few words of his own] An
elaborate, passionate and dramatic speech of Antonius is recorded by certain
historians (esp. Appian [The Civil Wars,
II.144. Cf. also
Plutarch, Antony 14, Brutus 20], on whom see E.
Schwartz, P-W [Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie
der classischen Altertumswissenschaft] II, 230), but is suspect. It is by
no means clear that it suited his plans to make a violent demonstration against
the Liberators – neither Antonius nor the Caesarian party were securely in
power. The earliest contemporary evidence (Ad Att. 14, 10, 1, April 19th) does
not definitely incriminate him. By October, however, the situation has changed,
the story has gained colour and strength (Phil. 2, 91). Even if the letter
Ad fam. 11, 1 were to be dated
immediately after the funeral (see the preceding note), it would not prove,
though it might support, the view that Antonius intended to cause trouble. D.
Brutus writes: ‘quo in statu simus, cognoscite. heri vesperi apud me Hirtius
fuit; qua mente esset Antonius demonstravit, pessima scilicet et
infidelissima.’ [Let me tell you how we stand. Yesterday evening Hirtius was at
my house. He made Antony’s disposition clear – as bad and treacherous as can
be.]
[65] Ib. 14, 21, 3: ‘animo virili, consilio
puerili.’ [the courage of men and the policy of children]
[67] Cf. esp. Ad
Att. 15, 11, 2. Cicero, speaking in the
presence of Brutus, studiously suppresses his favourite topic, the failure to
assassinate Antonius.
[70] Apart from Plutarch, Antonius 10, the only evidence is Cicero, Phil. 2, 71 ff, which betrays its own
inadequacy. The fact that Antonius, unlike gallant young Dolabella, did not
participate in the African and Spanish campaigns, will not be put down to his
cowardice or to Caesar’s distrust. Dolabella had been a great nuisance in 47
B.C., during Caesar's absence. If Antonius stayed in Italy, it was precisely
because he was dependable and most useful there, whether as Master of the Horse
or without any official title.
[71] Tacitus commends the
voluptuary Petronius, an excellent proconsul of Bithynia (Ann. 16, 18), Otho, who governed
Lusitania with integrity (ib. 13, 46) and took his own life
rather than prolong a civil war (Hist. 2, 47), and L. Vitellius: ‘eo de
homine haud sum ignarus sinistram in urbe famam, pleraque foeda memorari;
ceterum regendis provinciis prisca virtute egit’ [The man, I am aware, bore a
sinister reputation at Rome, and is the subject of many a disgraceful tale;
yet, as a governor of provinces, he acted with a primitive integrity.] (Ann. 6, 32). The same historian’s
cool treatment of the virtuous Emperor Galba will not escape notice (Hist. 1, 49) – ‘magis extra vitia quam
cum virtutibus’. [rather free from faults than possessing virtues]
[72] On the family, see above
all Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 1 ff., presenting authentic
facts, hostile slander-and irrelevant information about the senatorial gens Octavia. Augustus in his Autobiography saw no occasion to
misrepresent the truth in this matter – ‘ipse Augustus nihil amplius quam
equestri familia ortum se scribit vetere ac locuplete, et in qua primus senator
pater suus fuerit’ [Augustus himself merely writes3 that he came of an old and
wealthy equestrian family, in which his own father was the first to become a
senator.] (ib. 2, 3). For a tessera of his grandfather the banker,
see Münzer, Hermes LXXI (1936), 222
ff.
[73] As Velleius happily says (2, 59, 2), ‘gravis sanctus innocens
dives’. [serious, scrupulous, blameless, and rich]
[74] Balbus himself, on the
maternal side, was a near relative of Pompeius (Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 4, 1).
[76] The young Octavius, in
Spain for a time with Caesar in 45 B.C., was enrolled among the patricians; and
Caesar drew up his will, naming the heir, on September 13th (Suetonius, Divus
Iulius 83, 1).
[77] Perhaps from 40 B.C. The
earliest clear and contemporary evidence for the praenomen comes from coins of Agrippa, struck in Gaul in 38 B.C., ВМС, R. Rep. 11, 411 ff.
[78] Antonius’ own words are
quoted by Cicero, Phil. 13, 24: ‘et te, o puer, omnia
nomini debes.’ [and you, boy, who owe everything to your name]
[82] Ib. 14, 5, 3; 6, 1: ‘nam de Octavio
susque deque.’ [as for Octavius, it’s neither here nor there]
[85] Ad
Att. 15, 11 (June 8th). The wives of
Brutus and Cassius were there, also the faithful Favonius and Cicero, who was
mercilessly snubbed by Servilia when he embarked upon an all too familiar
recital of lost opportunities.
[86] Phil. 1, 8: ‘M. Antoni contionem,
quae mihi ita placuit ut ea lecta de reversion primum coeperim cogitare.’
[Marcus Antonius’ address to the people, which pleased me so much that after
reading it I first began to think of turning back] So at least on the surface,
which is all that we know. Yet Antonius may have spoken as he did in order to
force his enemies to come out into the open. Nor was it likely that he would
consent to surrender his command, hardly even a part of it, the Cisalpina,
which may have been Piso’s proposal (cf. Appian, BC 3, 30, 115). It must be repeated that
the only clear account of the speeches and negotiations leading up to the
session of August 1st is Cicero’s report of what was told him when he was
absent from Rome. In Cicero, however, no mention of the Ludi Victoriae Caesaris, which revealed the Caesarian sentiments of
the mob and the popularity of Caesar’s heir.
[91] Cicero, In
Pisonem 68 ff. The learned Asconius (14
= p. 16 Clark) provides the name of Philodemus.
[92] He lived in a hovel
(‘gurgustium’, In
Pisonem 13), and his entertainments
were lacking in splendour (ib. 67). The fortunes of certain
eminent nobiles were far from ample. The excellent L. Aurelius Cotta (cos. 65
B.C.) lived in a ‘villula sordida et valde pusilla’ [a mean little house, quite
diminutive] (Ad
Att., 12, 27, 1). In contrast, the
mansions of Cicero.
[93] Though it demands faith to
believe that ‘Sallust’, In
Ciceronem,
a brief, vigorous and concentrated attack, was written by Piso, as has been
argued by Reitzenstein and Schwartz, Hermes
XXXIII (1898), 87 ff.: accepted by E. Meyer, Caesars Monarchie³, 163 f.
[94] Caesar, BC 1, 3, 6; Plutarch, Pompeius 58, and Caesar 37; Dio 41, 16, 4; Cicero, Ad
Att. 7, 13, 1; Ad
fam. 14, 14, 2.
[95] Münzer, RA, 355 ff.; P-W IIA, 1798 ff.
[99] He may, however, have been
influenced by circumstantial rumours. It was by no means unlikely that Caesar
would be entangled and defeated in Spain by the experienced Pompeian generals.
[100] Ad
M. Brutum 1, 17, 4: ‘nimium timemus mortem et
exsilium et paupertatem. haec nimirum videntur Ciceroni ultima esse in malis,
et dum habeat a quibusimpetret quae velit, et a quibus colatur ac laudetur,
servitutem, honorificam modo, non aspernatur.’ [We dread death and banishment
and poverty too much. For Cicero I think they are the ultimate evils. So long
as he has people from whom he can get what he wants and who give him attention
and flattery he does not object to servitude if only it be flattering]
[102] Phil. 1, 1: ‘nec vero usquam
discedebam nec a re publica deiciebam oculos ex eo die quo in aedem Telluris
convocati sumus.’ [In fact, from that day on which we were summoned to the Temple
of Tellus, neither did I withdraw anywhere from]
[103] Ad
Att. 10, 10, 2: ‘Nam qui se medium esse
vult in patria manet’ [For a man who wishes to take neither side stays in his
country] (May, 49 В.C.).
[106] Ib. 15, 12, 2: ‘sed tamen alendus est
et, ut nihil aliud, ab Antonio seiungendus.’ [Still he is to be encouraged and,
if nothing else, kept apart from Antony.]
[110] Ib. 16, 14, 2: ‘nec me Philippus aut
Marcellus movet. alia enim eorum ratio est: et, si non est, tamen videtur.’ [Nor
am I impressed by Philippus or Marcellus. Their position is different; and if
it isn’t, it appears to be.]
[116] Ad
M. Brutum 1, 17, 5: ‘licet ergo patrem
appellet Octavius Ciceronem, referat omnia, laudet, gratias agat, tamen illud
apparebit verba rebus esse contraria.’ [Octavius may call Cicero his father,
ask his opinion on everything, flatter him, thank him, but it will be plain to
see that the words contradict the realities.] Cf. Plutarch, Cicero 45.
[118] Phil. 5, 50: ‘omnis habeo cognitos
sensus adulescentis. nihil est illi re publica carius, nihil vestra auctoritate
gravius, nihil bonorum virorum iudicio optatius, nihil vera gloria dulcius.’ [I
know the young man’s mind inside out. He values nothing more than the Republic,
respects nothing more than your authority, desires nothing more than the good
opinion of decent men, relishes nothing more than true glory.]
[119] For this conception of the
De re publica (a book about which too
much has been written), cf. R. Heinze, Hermes
LIX (1924), 73 ff. = Vom Geist des
Römertums (1938), 142 ff.
[122] Ib. 3, 83: ‘ecce tibi qui rex populi
Romani dominusque omnium gentium esse concupiverit idque perfecerit. hanc
cupiditatem si honestam quis esse dicit, amens est; probat enim legum et
libertatis interitum earumque oppressionem taetram et detestabilem gloriosam
putat.’ [Behold, here you have a man who was ambitious to be king of the Roman
People and master of the whole world; and he achieved it! The man who maintains
that such an ambition is morally right is a madman; for he justifies the destruction
of law and liberty and thinks their hideous and detestable suppression
glorious.]
[124] This may perhaps be
supported by what St. Augustine records about the De re publica (De
civ. dei 5, 13): ‘loquitur de instituendo
principe civitatis quem dicit alendum esse gloria.’ [when he spoke about
training the leader of the state, he says that he should be nurtured on glory]
[127] ‘Maiore enim simultates
adpetebat animo quam gerebat’ [for he displayed more spirit in picking quarrels
than in carrying them through], as Pollio wrote (Seneca, Suasoriae 6, 24).
[128] Phil. 3, 19: ‘quorum consiliorum
Caesari me auctorem et hortatorem et esse et fuisse fateor.’ [To such designs I
admit that I have instigated and encouraged Caesar and still do.]
[129] Ad
Att. 16, 8, 2: ‘Ο Brute, ubi es? quantam
εὐκαιρίαν amittis!’ [Ah Brutus, where
are you? What a golden opportunity you are losing]
[131] BG
8, praef. 2: ‘usque ad exitum non
quidem civilis dissensionis, cuius finem nullum videmus, sed vitae Caesaris.’
[up to the end – not, indeed, of dissension among our fellow citizens, to which
we see no endpoint – of Caesar’s life]
[133] ‘Vulturii paludati’ [a pair of vultures] (Pro Sestio
71).
Cf. the speeches of the years 57–55 B.C., рassim.
[140] Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 4 (allegations made by
Antonius and by Cassius of Parma).
[144] According to the Schol. Bob. on In Vat. 14 (p. 146, St.), Cicero made handsome amends in the Pro Vatinio.
[146] lb. 14 (p. 16, Clark).
Cicero himself describes the Epicureans, Siro and Philodemus, as ‘cum optimos
viros, tum homines doctissimos’ [our excellent and learned friends] (De
finibus 2, 119).
[151] Phil. 3, 15: ‘videte quam despiciamur
omnes qui sumus e municipiis, id est omnes plane: quotus enim quisque nostrum
non est?’ [Notice how all of us who come from country towns are looked down
upon – which is to say, just about all of us: for how many of us do not?]
[155] Gellius (15, 4, 3) quotes the popular
verses:
concurrite omnes augures,
haruspices!
portentum inusitatum
conflatum est recens:
nam mulas qui fricabat,
consul factus est.
[Assemble, soothsayers and
augurs all!
A portent strange has taken
place of late;
For he who curried mules is
consul now.]
[156] Suetonius, Divus
Iulius 51:
urbani, servate uxores,
moechum calvum adducimus.
aurum in Gallia effutuisti,
hic sumpsisti mutuum.
[Men of Rome, protect your
wives; we are bringing in the bald adulterer.]
[157] Plutarch, Cato
minor 21: ὡς γελοῖον ὕπατον ἔχομεν. [what a droll fellow our consul is!]
[160] BC 38, 3: ‘bonum publicum
simulantes pro sua quisque potentia certabant.’ [under pretense of the public
good, each in reality strove for his own influence]
[161] Hist. 1, 12 M: ‘bonique et mali cives
appellati non ob merita in rem publicam omnibus pariter corruptis, sed uti
quisque locupletissimus et iniuria validior, quia praesentia defendebat, pro
bono ducebatur.’ [It was not on account of their services to the nation that
citizens were given the name “good” or “bad,” since all were equally corrupt.
Rather, each person in proportion to his enormous wealth and superior strength
resulting from injustice, was regarded as “good” because he was maintaining the
status quo.]
[162] Thucydides 3, 82, 3 [sic: 3, 82, 4]: καὶ τὴν εἰωθυῖαν ἀξίωσιν τῶν ὀνομάτων ἐς τὰ
ἔργα ἀντήλ λαξαν τῇ δικαιώσει. [The ordinary acceptation of words in their
relation to things was changed as men thought fit.]
[163] Dio 46, 34, 5 (with reference to 44–43
B.C.): οἱμὲν γὰρ εὖ πράξαντες καὶ
εὔβουλοι καὶφιλοπόλιδες ἐνομίσθησαν, οἱ δὲ δὴ πταίσαντες καὶ πολέμιοι τῆς
πατρίδος καὶ ἀλιτήριοι ὠνομάσθησαν. [For those who were successful were
considered shrewd and patriotic, while the defeated were called enemies of
their country and accursed.] Like Sallust, he had studied Thucydides with some
attention.
[164] Bell.
Afr. 22, 2: ‘paene oppressam funditus
et deletam Italiam urbemque Romanam in libertatem vindicavit.’ [emancipated
Italy and the city of Rome when they were all but utterly overwhelmed and
destroyed]
[165] Caesar, BC 22, 5: ‘ut se et populum Romanum
factione paucorum oppressum in libertatem vindicaret.’ [to liberate myself and
the Roman people from oppression by a small faction]
[166] Tacitus, Hist. 4, 73: ‘ceterum libertas et speciosa nomina
praetexuntur; nec quisquam alienum servitium et dominationem sibi concupivit ut
non eadem ista vocabula usurparet.’ [freedom, however, and specious names are
their pretexts; but no man has ever been ambitious to enslave another or to win
dominion for himself without using those very same words]
[167] Res
Gestae 1: ‘annos undeviginti natus
exercitum privato consilio et privata impensa comparavi, per quem rem publicam
a dominatione factionis oppressam in libertatem vindicavi.’ [At the age of
nineteen on my own responsibility and at my own expense I raised an army, with
which I successfully championed the liberty of the republic when it was
oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.] [Brunt & Moore, Oxford, 1969]
[171] Phil. 2, 113: ‘et nomen pacis dulce est
et ipsa res salutaris; sed inter pacem et servitutem plurimum interest.’ [The
name of peace is sweet, the reality brings welfare; but there is a world of
difference between peace and servitude.]
[172] Ib. 7, 9: ‘cur igitur pacem nolo?
quia turpis est, quia periculosa, quia esse non potest.’ [Why, then, am I
against peace? Because it is dishonorable, because it is dangerous, because it
is impossible.]
[173] Ib. 13, 1: ‘timui ne condicio
insidiosa pacis libertatis recuperandae studia restingueret.’ [I have been
afraid that a seductive proposal of peace might quell enthusiasm for the
recovery of freedom.]
[174] Ib. 7, 14: ‘dicam quod dignum est et
senatore et Romano hominemoriamur.’ [I shall speak as befits a senator and a
Roman – let us die.]
[175] Sallust, BJ 31, 15: ‘sed haec inter bonos
amicitia, inter malos factio est.’ [Such shared feelings among good men
constitute friendship; among the wicked it is factiousness.]
[176] Phil.
3. In a speech to the People
on the same day he states: ‘deinceps laudatur provincia Gallia meritoque ornatur
verbis amplissimis ab senatu quod resistat Antonio. quem si consulem illa
provincia putaret neque eum reciperet, magno scelere se astringeret: omnes enim
in consulis iure et imperio debent esse provinciae’ [Next the province of Gaul
is commended and deservedly 9honored in the most ample terms by the senate
because it is resisting Antonius. If that province considered him to be a
consul and refused him admittance, it would be guilty of a major crime: for all
provinces ought to be under the jurisdiction and authority of a consul.] (ib. 4, 9). But was that the point?
The fact that Cicero uses this argument to demonstrate that Antonius is not
really a consul at all should excite suspicion. The conception of a consul’s
imperium maius here stated is rather antiquarian in character, to say the
least. In neither of these speeches does Cicero mention Antonius’ legal title
to Gallia Cisalpina, namely the plebiscite of June 1st. Explicitly or not, that
law may have permitted him to take over the province before the end of his
consular year. Nothing extraordinary in that. Compare, in the next year, what
P. Lentulus says (Ad
fam. 12, 14, 5): ‘qua re non puto Pansam
et Hirtium in consulatu properaturos in provincias exire sed Romae acturos consulatum.’
[Thus I do not expect Pansa and Hirtius to leave Rome and hurry to their
provinces during their Consulship, but rather to serve their term of office in
Rome.]
[180] One of them, the patrician
Q. Fabius Maximus (cos. 45 B.C.), had
died in office. That left six consulars of the years 48–45.
[184] Phil. 8, 30: ‘nam illud quidem non
adducor ut credam, esse quosdam qui invideant alicuius constantiae, qui labori,
qui perpetuam in re publica adiuvanda voluntatem et senatui et populo Romano
probari moleste ferant’ [For I cannot bring myself to believe that30 there are
certain people who are jealous of someone’s constancy and hard work, who are
displeased that his unremitting desire to aid the Republic meets with approval
from both the senate and the people of Rome.]; Ad
fam. 12, 5, 3: ‘non nulli invident eorum
laudi quos in re publica probari vident.’ [Some are jealous of the credit of
those whose statesmanship they see gaining approval.]
[187] Pro
Sestio 137: ‘deligerentur autem in id
consilium ab universo populo.’ [they ordained that the members of that Council
should be chosen by the whole people]
[188] Therefore it was legal
until the legislation of Antonius (and of his agents) should have been declared
null and void. That was not done until early in February. The arguments invoked
by Cicero on January 1st for coolly disregarding the law were by no means
adequate or unequivocal (Phil. 5, 7 ff.). Firstly, the law
violated Caesar’s Lex de provinciis,
which fixed two years as the tenure of a consular province: but that might have
been contested, for Antonius’ command was not a normal consular province,
decreed by the Senate and hence subject to Caesar’s ordinance. Secondly, the
law had been passed in defiance of the auspicia:
but that plea was very weak, for the authority of sacred law had been largely
discredited by its partisan and unscrupulous employment, and Antonius perhaps
maintained the validity of the Lex Clodia
of 58 B.C., which had virtually abolished this method of obstruction, cf. S.
Weinstock, JRS XXVII (1937), 221.
Cicero’s proposal to have the proconsul outlawed can hardly be described as
constitutional. ‘Eine staatsrechtliche Unmöglichkeit’, so Schwartz terms it, Hermes XXXIII (1898), 195.
[191] Phil. 7, 24: ‘vicinos suos non
cohortatus est solum ut milites fierent sed etiam facultatibus suis
sublevavit.’ [he has urged his neighbors not only to enlist in the army but
even given them subsidies of his own pocket] The activities of this influential
and wealthy country gentleman could have been described in very different
terms.
[192] Ad
fam. 12, 4, 1: ‘nihil autem foedius
Philippo et Pisone legatis, nihil flagitiosius.’ [The envoys Philippus and Piso
have played a disgusting, scandalous role.]
[197] Phil. 10, 13; ILS 9460 (Delos). On the relationship with Brutus, cf. Münzer, RA, 342 ff.
[198] M. Appuleius (Phil. 10, 24), probably quaestor of
Asia, C. Antistius Vetus of Syria (Ad
M. Brutum 1, 11, 1; Plutarch, Brutus 25). P. Lentulus, Trebonius’ quaestor,
claims that he helped Cassius (Ad
fam. 12, 14, 6).
[201] Ad
fam. 10, 6, 3: ‘haec impulsus
benevolentia scripsi paulo severius.’ [Prompted by good will, I have written
rather gravely.]
[202] Ib. 27, 2: ‘itaque sapientius meo
quidem iudicio facies si te in istam pacifcationem non interpones, quae neque
senatui neque populo nec cuiquam bono probatur.’ [You will therefore, in my
opinion at least, be wiser not to involve yourself in a kind of peacemaking
which is unacceptable to the Senate, the People, and every honest man.]
[205] Ad
fam. 10, 33, 1: ‘quo si qui laetantur in
praesentia, quia videntur et duces et veterani Caesaris partium interisse,
tamen postmodo necesse est doleant cum vastitatem Italiae respexerint. nam et
robur et suboles militum interiit.’ [Some may be rejoicing at the moment,
because the leaders and veterans of Caesar’s party appear to have perished, but
they must needs be sorry ere long, when they contemplate the desolation of
Italy. For the flower of our soldiers, present and to come, has perished]
[206] Phil. 11, 39: ‘nihil enim semper
floret; aetas succedit aetati; diu legions Caesaris viguerunt; nunc vigent
Pansae, vigent Hirti, vigent Caesaris fili, vigent Planci; vincunt numero,
vincunt aetatibus; nimirum etiam auctoritate vincunt.’ [Nothing blooms forever;
generation succeeds generation. Caesar’s legions flourished for a long while;
now it is the turn of Pansa’s legions, and Hirtius’, and young Caesar’s, and
Plancus’. They have the advantage in number, in youth, and also, one might add,
in respect; for they are fighting a war that is approved by all nations.]
[207] Appian, BC 3, 68, 281: θάμβος τε ἦν τοῖς νεήλυσιν ἐπελθοῦσι, τοιάδε ἔργα σὺν εὐταξίᾳ καὶ σιωπῇ
γιγνόμενα ἐφορῶσιν. [When the new recruits arrived, they were amazed at the
sight of such deeds being carried out in good order and silence.]
[209] Ib. 4, 4, 15 – perhaps the haruspex Vulcanius mentioned by Servius
on Ecl. 9, 47.
[212] e.g., the wife praised in ILS 8393.
[213] Ib. 4, 16, 64: πολλὰ δ' ἐστί, καὶ πολλοὶ Ρωμαίων ἐν πολλαῖς βίβλοις αὐτὰ συνέγραψαν
ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν. [The subject is large, and many Romans have written about it
for themselves in many books.] These stories went a long way towards
compensating the lack of prose fiction among the Romans.
[214] Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 27, 1: ‘restitit quidem
aliquamdiu collegis ne qua fieret proscriptio, sed inceptam utroque acerbius
exercuit.’ [though he opposed his colleagues for some time and tried to prevent
a proscription, yet when it was begun, he carried it through with greater
severity than either of them]
[215] Rice Holmes, The Architect of the Roman Empire 1, 71.
[216] Livy, Per. 120 (cf. Orosius 6, 18, 10; Florus 2, 16, 3) – perhaps too low. Appian
gives 300 senators (BС 4, 5, 20, cf. 7, 28) and 2,000 knights.
Plutarch’s figures range from 200 to 300 (Cicero 46; Brutus 27; Antonius 20) – presumably senators. It is to be
regretted that there is such a lack of evidence for the significant category,
that of knights. In all, nearly 100 names of the proscribed have been recorded
(Drumann-Groebe, Gesch. Roms 12,
470 ff.; H. Kloevekorn, De
proscriptionibus, &c., Diss. Königsberg, 1891).
[217] On this, cf. especially M.
A. Levi, Ottaviano Capoparte I, 229
ff. – who perhaps emphasizes too much the impersonal character of the
proscriptions.
[218] There are full accounts of
his end in Livy (quoted by Seneca, Suasoriae 6, 17); Plutarch, Cicero 47 f.; Appian, BC 4, 19, 73 ff. The best obituary notice
was Pollio’s (quoted by Seneca, Suasoriae 6, 24), admitting faults but
condoning – ‘sed quando mortalium nulli virtus perfecta contigit, qua maior
pars vitae atque ingenii stetit, ea iudicandum de homine est.’ [But it has
fallen to no mortal to be perfectly virtuous: one must judge of a man in
accordance with the greater part of his life and character.]
[219] Pardon and return after a
year is attested by ILS 8393.
[220] Nepos, Vita Attici 9, 7: ‘a nonnullis
optimatibus reprehendebatur, quod parum odisse malos cives videretur.’
[222] Nepos, Vita Attici 12, 4: according to Nepos,
he was by far the most elegant poet since Lucretius and Catullus. Otherwise
quite unknown.
[227] There is no evidence of
the whereabouts of P. Ventidius in 42 B.C.: Gallia Comata?
[230] Plutarch, Brutus 28: τῇ
αἰτίᾳ φησὶν αἰσχύνεσθαι μᾶλλον ἢ τῷ πάθει συναλγεῖν, ἐγκαλεῖν δὲ τοῖς ἐπὶ Ρώμης
φίλοις· δουλεύειν γὰρ αὑτῶν αἰτίᾳ μᾶλλον ἢ τῶν τυραννούντων. [he felt more
shame at the cause of Cicero’s death than grief at the event itself, and threw
the blame upon his friends at Rome]
[232] Even admitted by the
apologetic Velleius (2, 70, 1). There was plenty to be
explained away in the Autobiography,
cf. F. Blumenthal, Wiener Studien XXXV
(1913), 280 f. Agrippa and Maecenas did not deny that Octavianus lurked in a
marsh (Pliny, NH 7, 148).
[234] The date is given by the
Calendar of Praeneste, L’ann. ép.,
1922, 96. Cf. C. Hülsen, Strena Buliciana (1924), 193 ff.
[236] As the poet Lucan observed
of Pharsalus (7, 862).
[237] Velleius 2, 71, 2: ‘non aliud bellum
cruentius caede clarissimorum virorum fuit.’ [No other war was gorier in its
death toll of distinguished men.]
[238] Velleius 2, 71, 2 f.: these were all (including
Drusus) related together. Of nobiles
there also perished Sex. Quinctilius Varus (Velleius, ib.), and probably young
P. Lentulus Spinther; and some of the assassins, such as Tillius Cimber and Q.
Ligarius, are not heard of again.
[239] As Brutus exclaimed,
quoting from a lost tragedy (Dio 47, 49, 2),
ὦ
τλῆμον ἀρετή, λόγος ἄρ᾽ ἦσθ᾽, ἐγὼ δέ σε
ὡς
ἔργον ἤσκουν· σὺ δ᾽ ἄρ' ἐδούλευες τύχῃ.
[“O wretched Valour, thou
wert but a name,
And yet I worshipped thee
as real indeed;
But now, it seems, thou
wert but Fortune’s slave.”]
[241] Plutarch, Brutus 29: Μάρκον
δ' ᾿Αντώνιον ἀξίαν φησὶ τῆς ἀνοίας διδόναι δίκην, ὃς ἐν Βρούτοις καὶ Κασσίοις
καὶ Κάτωσι συναριθμεῖσθαι δυνάμενος προσθήκην ἑαυτὸν Ὀκταβίῳ δέδωκε· κἂν μὴ νῦν
ἡττηθῇ μετ' ἐκείνου, μικρὸν ὕστερον ἐκείνῳ μαχεῖται. [Mark Antony was
paying a fitting penalty for his folly, since, when it was in his power to be
numbered with such men as Brutus and Cassius and Cato, he had given himself to
Octavius as a mere appendage; and that if he should not now be defeated with
him, in a little while he would be fighting him.]
[245] Appian, BC 5, 2, 4 ff. Among them were Cicero’s
son and the assassins Cassius of Parma and Turullius. Cn. Piso, C. Antistius
Vetus and L. Sestius also survived.
[249] Appian, BC 5, 12, 49: ἐθρήνουν, οὐδὲν μὲν ἀδικῆσαι λέγοντες, Ἰταλιῶται ১ὄντες ἀνίστασθαι γῆς
τε καὶ ἑστίας οἷα δορίληπτοι. [even though they were Italians, they were
being forced from their land and hearths as if they had been defeated in war]
[251] It is impossible to
discover the ultimate truth of these transactions. The propaganda of
Octavianus, gross and mendacious, exaggerated the role of Fulvia both at the
time and later, putting her person and her acts in a hateful light; and there
was nobody afterwards, from piety or even from perversity, to redeem her
memory. (For a temperate view of Fulvia, the last survivor of a great political
family, cf. Münzer, P-W VII, 283 f.) Further, L. Antonius has been idealized in
the account of Appian, where he appears as a champion of Libertas against military despotism, of the consular power against
the Triumvirate (BC 5, 19, 74; 43, 179 ff.; 54, 226 ff.).
[254] Appian, BC 5, 23, 92 ff. According to Dio,
Antonius and Fulvia derided the soldiers, calling them βoυλὴν καλιγᾶταν [senatus caligatus, i.e. a senate in
boots] (48, 12, 3).
[255] Appian, BC 5, 29, 112: πολεμεῖν ἐάν τις αὑτοῦ τὴν ἀξίωσιν καθαιρῇ. [giving orders to
fight, if anybody tried to damage his reputation]
[258] It is quite impossible to
reconstruct these operations with narrative or with map.
[264] CIL XI, 67211: ‘M. Ant. imp.’ Also indecent abuse of
Octavianus, ib. 67217 and 672111.
[265] Ib. 672126:
‘L(eg.) XI Divom Iulium’; ib. 67215 (against Fulvia); ib. 672113:
‘L. Antoni calve peristi C. Caesarus victoria.’
[266] Martial (11, 20) praises their ‘Romana
simplicitas’ [Roman candour], quoting examples that are quite convincing.
[267] Macrobius 2, 4, 21: ‘at ego taceo: non est
enim facile in eum scribere qui potest proscribere.’ [But I’ll keep my peace:
it’s not easy to have a war of words with a man who can sign your death
warrant.]
[278] lb. 5, 26, 102; Dio 48, 22, 1 ff. T. Sextius had at last
suppressed Q. Cornificius and won Africa for the Caesarians, cf. above, p. 189,
n. 5. Fango had been sent by Octavianus after Philippi to take over from
Sextius.
[283] It will not be necessary
to repeat Plutarch’s dramatic and romantic account of their confrontation.
[286] Dio 48, 27, 1: ὑπό τε τοῦ ἔρωτος καὶ ὑπὸ τῆς μέθης. [under the sway of his passion
and of his drunkenness]
[287] Cf. E. Groag, Klio XIV (1914), 43 ff.
[288] W. W. Tarn, CAH X, 41 f.
[289] There was even a theory
that Octavianus and L. Antonius were acting in collusion, forcing on a war to
facilitate and excuse confiscations (Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 15).
[290] So E. Groag, Klio XIV (1914), 43 ff. He argues that
Antonius committed a serious and irreparable error of political calculation –
which is not so certain.
[291] The envoys were L.
Scribonius Libo and Sentius Saturninus (Appian, BC 5, 52, 217): they brought with them
Julia, the mother of Antonius, who had fled to Sicily. Ti. Claudius Nero and
his wife also came to Greece about this time.
[295] Appian, BC 5, 53, 220. Appian may, however, be
exaggerating the prestige of Antonius.
[299] An approximate date is
provided by the fact that the magistrates of the colony of Casinum set up a
‘signum concordiae’ on October 12th (ILS 3784).
[300] Horace, Epodes
16, 1 f.: altera iam teritur bellis
civilibus aetas
suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit.
[Now another generation is
crushed by civil war, and Rome collapses under its own power!]
The Epode is quoted and utilized here, though it may very well be
several years later in date. The problem of priority between the Epode and the Fourth
Eclogue
is difficult. That Virgil's poem is the earlier is now very plausibly argued by
B. Snell, Hermes LXXIII (1938), 237
ff.
[301] The last Ludi Saeculares at Rome had been
celebrated in 149 B.C. They were therefore due to recur in 39 B.C. – at least
on one calculation. The Etruscan seer Vulcanius announced the end of the ninth
age (Servius on Ecl. 9, 47) and died
upon the spot: the incident is there brought into connexion with the comet –
and said to be referred to in the Autobiography
of Augustus. For Pythagorean doctrines, cf. J. Carcopino, Virgile et le mystère de la IVe églogue (1930), 57 ff.
[302] Cf. A. Alföldi, Hermes LXV (1930), 369.
[303] Ecl. 4, 26 f.: at simul heroum laudes et
facta parentis
iam legere et quae sit
poteris cognoscere virtus.
[But as soon as you can
read of the glories of heroes and your father’s deeds, and can know what valour
is]
[304] It may have been rehandled
and made more allegorical in form.
[305] Servius on Ecl. 4, 1.
[307] Cf. R. Syme, CQ XXXI (1937), 39 ff.
[311] It has sometimes been
argued that Octavianus in these years made vast conquests in Illyricum,
including the whole of Bosnia: which is neither proved nor probable.
[312] L. Volcacius Tullus (pr. 46 B.C.) and M. Acilius were the
sons of consuls of the previous generation, L. Autronius Paetus presumably of
the unsuccessful candidate for 65 B.C. The Antonian, or ex-Antonian, C.
Fonteius Capito came of a highly reputable praetorian family, L. Vinicius
(tribune in 51 B.C.) of equestrian stock from Cales. L. Flavius was an Antonian
(Dio 49, 44, 3). None of these mencever
commanded armies, so far as is known, save Autronius and M. Acilius (Glabrio),
later proconsuls of Africa, in 28 and 25 B.C. respectively, PIR2, A 1680; 71.
[313] Memmius may be the son of
C. Memmius (pr. 58 B.C.) and of
Fausta, Sulla’s daughter (Milo was her second husband).
[315] And although P. Alfenus
Varus (cos. suff. 39) possessed or
was to acquire fame as a jurist (Gellius 7, 5, 1), that was not the reason
of his promotion.
[316] In the Dialogus of Tacitus (25, 3, cf. 17, 1), Calvus, Caelius, Brutus,
Caesar and Pollio are accorded the rank of ‘classical’ orators next to and
below, but comparable to Cicero.
[320] His greatest work, the Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum,
in forty-one books, appears to have been composed in the years 55–47 B.C. It
was dedicated to Caesar.
[322] RR 1, 1, 1: ‘annus octogesimus admonet me ut sarcinas colligam
antequam proficiscar e vita.’ This gives as the date 38 or 37 B.C. Varro lived
on for ten years more (Jerome, Chron.,
р. 164 H).
[324] He was proconsul of Africa
Nova in 46–45 B.С.
[325] Dio 43, 9, 2 – though this may not be
convincing evidence, for it may derive from a belief, natural enough, in the
authenticity of the very plausible Epistulae
ad Caesarem senem.
[326] BC 4, 1: ‘non fuit consilium
socordia atque desidia bonum otium conterere, neque vero agrum colundo aut
venando, servilibus officiis, intentum aetatem agere.’ [it was not my plan to
waste my precious leisure in indolence and sloth, nor yet to spend my life by
devoting myself to the slavish employments of turning the soil or hunting]
[327] BJ 4, 1: ‘ceterum ex aliis
negotiis, quae ingenio exercentur, in primis magno usui est memoria rerum
gestarum.’ [But among sundry intellectual pursuits, the recording of past deeds
is especially serviceable.]
[328] Quintilian 10, 1, 101: ‘nec opponere Thucydidi
Sallustium verear’ [I should have no hesitation in matching Sallust with
Thucydides]; ib. 102: ‘immortalem illam
Sallusti velocitatem.’ [Sallust’s immortal rapidity]
[329] Seneca, Epp. 114, 17: ‘Sallustio vigente
amputatae sententiae et verba ante exspectatum cadentia et obscura brevitas
fuere pro cultu.’ [when Sallust was in his glory, phrases were lopped off,
words came to a close unexpectedly, and obscure conciseness was equivalent to
elegance]
[331] Sallust, Hist. 1, 55, 13 f. M: ‘leges iudicia aerarium
provinciae reges penes unum, denique necis civium et vitae licentia. simul
humanas hostias vidistis et sepulcra infecta sanguine civili.’ [In the power of
one man are the laws, the courts, the treasury, the provinces, kings, in short,
control over the life and death of citizens. You have beheld at the same time
human sacrifices and tombs stained with the blood of citizens.]
[333] Ib. 2, 16 M: ‘oris probi, animo
inverecundo.’ [of honest face but shameless heart]
[336] Varro made the most of
Sallustius’ alleged adultery with Fausta, Sulla’s daughter and Milo’s wife (Gellius 17, 18); and Lenaeus, the
freedman of Pompeius, defended his dead patron by bitter personal invective
(Suetonius, De
gram. 15).
[337] Vita Eumenis 8, 3: ‘quod si quis illorum veteranorum legat facta,
paria horum cognoscat neque rem ullam nisi tempus interesse iudicet.’
[338] L. Voltacilius Pitholaus:
‘primus omnium libertinorum, ut Cornelius Nepos opinatur, scribere historiam
orsus, nonnisi ab honestissimo quoque scribi solitam ad id tempus’ [In the
opinion of Cornelius Nepos, he was the first of all freedmen to take up the
writing of history, which up to that time had been confined to men of the
highest position.] (Suetonius, De
rhet. 3).
[340] Catullus came from Verona.
That Brixia was the home of Cinna has been inferred from fr. 1 of his poems;
and Helvii are not unknown on inscriptions of Brixia. Jerome, Chron., p. 148 H, gives Cremona as the
birth-place of Bibaculus.
[343] Perhaps in the important
post of praefectus fabrum (cf. Balbus and Mamurra under Caesar in Spain and
Gaul respectively).
[344] The various statements
concerning the date and occasion when Virgil’s estate was confiscated, the
manner and agents of its recovery, as retailed by the ancient Lives and
scholiasts with more confidence than consistency, appear to derive from
inferences from the Eclogues themselves, not from ascertained and
well-authenticated facts: they cannot be employed in historical reconstruction.
[345] His Lycoris is alleged to
have been Volumnia (the freedwoman of P. Volumnius Eutrapelus), better known as
Cytheris, formerly the mistress of Antonius. Her subsequent attachments have
not been recorded.
[346] Not that there is any
definite evidence at all: the Arcadian scenery of Ecl. 10 could not safely be
invoked to show that Gallus was in Greece.
[347] In Ecl. 8, 6-13 Virgil addresses Pollio,
anticipating his return and triumph, in a tone and manner that would have been
fitting if the whole collection were being dedicated to him (cf. esp. l. 11, ‘a
te principium, tibi desinet’ [From you is my beginning; in your honour shall I
end.]). This looks like the original dedication: but a poem in honour of
Octavianus stands at the head of the series.
[348] Varro wrote a Bellum Sequanicum (Priscian, GL 2, 497, 10); and Furius, author of Annales belli Gallici (cf. esp. Horace, Sat. 2, 5, 41), may well be Bibaculus,
though this has been disputed.
[350] Varro, RR 1, 2, 3: ‘vos qui multas
perambulastis terras, ecquam cultiorem Italia vidistis?’ [You have all
travelled through many lands; have you seen any land more fully cultivated than
Italy?]
[359] The reliefs showing scenes
from early Roman history recently discovered in the Basilica Aemilia may belong
to Paullus’ work in 34 B.C. (Dio 49, 42, 2): there was, however, a
restoration after damage by fire in 14 B.C. (ib. 54, 24, 2 f.).
[360] On this, cf. especially L.
R. Taylor, The Divinity of the Roman
Emperor (1931), 100 ff.
[361] Nepos, Vita Attici 19 f. Octavianus wrote to
him almost every day (ib. 20, 2): yet Atticus was also in sustained
correspondence with M. Antonius, from the ends of the earth (20, 4). A few
years earlier the infant granddaughter of Atticus, Vipsania, was betrothed to
Ti. Claudius Nero, the step-son of Octavianus (19, 4).
[362] lb. 21, 4. Balbus probably
died not long after this.
[363] Nepos, Vita Attici 20, 5.
[364] Plutarch (Antonius 54) and Dio (49, 41, 1 ff.) are lavish of detail. It
is strange that neither Velleius (2, 82, 2 f.) nor Livy (at least to
judge by Per. 131) fully exploited this
attractive theme. They had no reason to spare Antonius.
[365] As Strabo (p. 671) so
clearly states.
[370] W. W. Tarn, CAH X, 81. The rulers of Egypt were
Cleopatra and her eldest son, Ptolemy Caesar (alleged son of the Dictator, but
probably not, cf. J. Carcopino, Ann. de
l’École des Hautes Études de Gand
1 (1937), 37 ff.).
[371] See the just remarks of
Levi, Ottaviano Capoparte II, 152:
Antonius was not βασιλεύς [king,
emperor].
[372] W. W. Tarn, JRS XXII (1932), 149 ff.
[373] Plutarch, Antonius 26: ὡς
ἡ ᾿Αφροδίτη κωμάζοι παρὰ τὸν Διόνυσον ἐπ᾿ ἀγαθῷ τῆς ᾿Ασίας. [Venus was come
to revel with Bacchus for the good of Asia]
[374] M. A. Levi, Ottaviano Capoparte II, 103 f.; 144.
[376] W. W. Tarn, FRS XXII (1932), 141; САН X, 82 f.
[377] Tarn (CАН X, 76) concedes that Antonius himself was not a danger to Rome.
[379] The unimportance of
Cleopatra in relation to Caesar has been firmly argued by Carcopino, Ann. de l’École des Hautes Études de Gand 1 (1937), 37 ff.
[380] Cf. especially J.
Kromayer, Hermes XXXII (1898), 50; A.
E. Glauning, Die Anhängerschaft des Antonius und des Octavian (Diss.
Leipzig, 1936), 31 ff.
[381] Plutarch, Antonius 56: ἔδει
γὰρ εἰς Καίσαρα πάντα περιελθεῖν. [since it was destined that everything
should come into Caesar’s hands]
[382] The order of events, not
always clearly indicated by Dio and Plutarch, the only full sources for the
years 33 and 32 B.C., has been satisfactorily established by Kromayer, Hermes XXXIII (1898), 37 ff.
[386] For the details, K. Scott,
Mem. Am. Ac. Rome XI (1933), 7 ff.
[387] Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 69: ‘quid te mutavit, quod
reginam ineo? uxor mea est. munc coepi an abhinc annos novem? tu deinde solam
Drusillam inis? ita valeas uti tu, hanc epistolam cum leges, non inieris
Tertullam aut Terentillam aut Rufillam aut Salviam Titiseniam aut omnes. an
refert, ubi et in qua arrigas?’ [“What has made such a change in you? Because I
am humping the queen? She is my wife. Am I just beginning this, or was it nine
years ago? What then of you – do you hump only Drusilla? Good luck to you if
when you read this letter you have not been in Tertulla or Terentilla or
Rufilla or Salvia Titisenia, or all of them. Does it matter where or in whom
you have your stiff prick?”] It is evident that this famous fragment, matching
in frankness an early product of Octavianus (cf. Martial 11, 20) does not furnish either a
satisfactory definition of the word ‘uxor’ or a clear solution of problems
concerning the ‘marriage’ of Antonius. The women alluded to may be the wives of
certain associates of Octavianus – at least Terentilla is presumably Terentia,
the wife of Maecenas, not unknown to subsequent scandal.
[388] Pliny, NH 14, 148: ‘exiguo tempore ante
proelium Actiacum id volume evomuit.’ [it was shortly before the battle of
Actium that he vomited up this volume] Cf. M. P. Charlesworth, CQ XXVII (1933), 172 ff.
[390] Pliny, NH 33, 50 – an allegation that
Antonius like an oriental monarch used vessels of gold for domestic and
intimate purposes. Messalla wrote at least three pamphlets against Antonius
(Charisius, GL 104, 18; 129, 7; 146,
34).
[391] The whole topic, which has
provoked excessive debate, does not need to be discussed here. On the one hand,
the Triumvirs could continue to hold their powers after the date fixed for
their expiry, as in 37 B.C. This was what Antonius did in 32 B.С. On the other,
the statement and attitude of Octavianus is perfectly clear: he had been
Triumvir for ten years (Res
Gestae 7). A master in all the arts
of political fraud did not need to stoop to trivial and pointless deception.
The sudden prominence of consuls and of a tribune at the beginning of 32 B.C.
may be taken as fair proof that the Triumvirate had come to an end, legally at
least.
[393] Res
Gestae 25: ‘iuravit in mea ver[ba]
tota | Italia sponte sua et me be[lli] quo vici ad Actium ducem depoposcit.’
[396] Of one of the Claudii,
presumably the Censor, Suetonius (Tib. 2, 2) records ‘Italiam per
clientelas occupare temptavit.’
[397] Appian, BC 1, 19, 78; Sallust, BJ 42, 1: ‘per socios ac nomen
Latinum.’ [through the allies and those having Latin status] Sallust also
records (ib. 40, 2) how in 109 B.C. the nobiles employed ‘homines nominis Latini
et socios Italicos’. [through men possessing Latin status and the Italian allies]
[398] Plutarch, Cato
minor 2 (Poppaedius). Cf. Florus 2, 5, 1: ‘totiusque Italiae
consensu.’ [the general agreement of all Italy] Livy (Per. 71) recorded the ‘coetus
coniurationesque’ [gatherings and conspiracies] of the chief men of Italy.
[399] Auctor de vir. illustr. 12: ‘vota pro illo per Italiam publice
suscepta.’ [Prayers for him were publicly received throughout Italy.] Diodorus
(37, 11) furnishes the text of an
oath of allegiance to Drusus, which is significant though the phraseology
cannot be genuine, cf. H. J. Rose, Harv.
Th. Rev. XXX (1937), 165 ff.; A. v. Premerstein, ‘Vom Werden und Wesen des
Prinzipats’, Abh. der bayerischen Ak. der
Wiss., phil.-hist. Abt., N.F. 15 (1937).
[400] Cf. M. A. Levi, Ottaviano Capoparte II, 153.
[401] As seventeen years before,
when Caesar’s invasion of Italy was imminent, bankers and men of property
probably received some kind of assurance.
[402] J. Kromayer, Hermes XXXIII (1898), 60 ff.; XXXIV
(1899), 1 ff.; W. W. Tarn, САН X,
100.
[403] The casualties in Media
and Armenia have often been over-estimated.
[404] As Tarn argues, CQ XXVI (1932), 75 ff. It is clear,
however, that provincial levies were heavily drawn upon. Brutus, for example,
raised two legions of Macedonians (Appian, BC
3, 79, 324). As for Antonius, O.
Cuntz (Jahreshefte XXV (1929), 70
ff.) deduced from the gentilicia of a number of soldiers of eastern origin the
fact that they were given the Roman franchise on enlistment by certain
partisans of Antonius. Note also the inscription from Philae in Egypt (OGIS 196), dated to 32 B.C., mentioning
an ἔπαρχος (praefectus), C. Julius
Papius, and some centurions, among them a man called Demetrius. A neglected
passage in Josephus (ВJ
1, 324, cf. AJ 14, 449) attests local recruiting
in Syria in 38 B.C.
[407] Dio 51, 4, 3. There is no indication of
the date of his desertion. He had previously been with Sex. Pompeius.
[409] Plutarch, Antonius
63. Like Pompeius Magnus (SIG3 762), Antonius hoped for
assistance from the Dacians.
[410] For the former view, W. W.
Tarn, JRS XXI (1931), 173 ff.; XXVIII
(1938), 165 ff.; for the latter, J. Kromayer, Hermes XXXIV (1899), 1 ff.; LXVIII (1933), 361 ff.; G. W.
Richardson, JRS XXVI1 (1937), 1 ff.
Against Tarn’s theory it can be argued, with Kromayer, that Antonius had
already been severely defeated at sea, baffled on land.
[413] For the hypothesis,
largely based on Horace, Epodes 9, 19 f., that the whole left wing
refused to fight, cf. W. W. Tarn, FRS
XXI (1931), 173 ff.
[414] Hyginus, De limitibus constituendis, p. 177.
[416] Cf. W. W. Tarn, JRS XXI (1931), 179 ff.
[420] Ib. 51, 9, 1. For the coins of Scarpus,
see BMC, R. Rep. II, 586, corrected
by BMC, R. Emp. I, III.
[421] Cf. E. Groag, Klio XIV (1914), 63.
[424] Res Gestae 13. At the same time the ancient ceremony of the Augurium
Salutis was revived (Dio 51, 20, 4).
[427] Ib. 51, 17, 8: τό τε σύμπαν ἡ τε ἀρχὴ ἡ τῶν ῾Ῥωμαίων ἐπλουτίσθη καὶ τὰ ἱερὰ αὐτῶν
ἐκοσμήθη. [In fine, the Roman empire was enriched and its temples adorned.]
[428] Velleius 2, 89, 4: ‘certa cuique rerum
suarum possessio.’ [to each person the certainty of possessing his own goods]
[431] Cf. A. Alföldi, RM LII (1937), 48 ff., discussing the
symbolic decoration of the cuirass on Augustus’ statue from Prima Porta. Norden
argued that Aen. 6, 794 ff. derives from traditional
laudations of Alexander, the world-conqueror.
[435] Aen. 12, 828: ‘оссidit, occideritque
sinas cum nomine Troia.’ [Troy is fallen, and fallen let her be, together with
her name!]
[438] Georgics 3, 27. On the cult of Romulus
about this time, cf. esp. J. Gagé, Mélanges
XIVII (1930), 138 ff.
[439] The account of Romulus in
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (2, 7 ff.), with its remarkable Caesarian or
Augustan anticipations, probably derives from a source written soon after
Actium, as Premerstein argues, Vom Werden
und Wesen des Prinzipats, 8 ff.
[442] Fasti 1, 613; 2, 60; 5, 145; 6, 92. Nor is this merely, as
might be expected, with definite reference to the victories or to the power of
Augustus. His attention to ancient monuments is described as ‘sacrati provida
cura ducis’ [had it not been for the far-seeing care of our sacred chief] (Fasti 2, 60).
[443] The frequency of these
appellations in the Silvae of Statius
deserves record.
[444] Namely ἡγεμών. On the propriety of this term
for the ruler of the eastern lands, cf. now E. Kornemann, Klio XXXI (1938), 81 ff.
[445] Dio 53, 12 ff. (not quite satisfactory on
the division of the provinces). Dio does not explicitly mention a grant of
proconsular imperium. That such there was, however, is clear enough.
Premerstein (Vom Werden und Wesen des
Prinzipats, 229 ff.) follows Mommsen and assumes that it carried imperium
maius over the provinces of the Senate. Which is by no means necessary, cf. W.
Kolbe, in the volume Aus Roms Zeitwende
(Das Erbe der Alten, Heft XX, 1931),
39 ff., esp. 47 f. According to Diο (53, 12, 1) Augustus took over τὴν μὲν φροντίδα τήν τε προστασίαν τῶν
κοινῶν πᾶσαν ὡς καὶ ἐπιμελείας τινὸς δεομένων. [all the care and oversight
of the public business, on the ground that it required some attention on his
part] From this Premerstein deduces a definite grant by the Senate of a general
‘cura rei publicae’ (o.c., 120 ff.).
That Augustus exercised such a supervision there is no doubt – but in virtue of
his auctoritas. Augustus’ own words (Res
Gestae 6) tell against this theory.
[447] Dio says that Augustus
himself was eager for the name of Romulus (53, 16, 7). Perhaps he was warned
and checked by wise counsellors.
[448] Dio 53, 16, 8: ὡς καὶ πλεῖόν τι ἢ κατ' ἀνθρώπους ὤν. [signifying that he was more
than human] Cf. Ovid, Fasti 1, 609 ff. Romulus founded Rome
‘augusto augurio’ (Ennius, quoted by Varro, RR
3, 1, 2).
[450] Dio’s account is
anachronistic and misleading. He states that Augustus re- signed to the Senate
the peaceful provinces (53, 12, 2, cf. 13, 1): yet in his list of such
provinces occur Africa, Illyricum and Macedonia, where armed proconsuls are
definitely attested in the early years of the Principate. Nor is the
information provided by the contemporary Strabo (p. 840) free of anachronism. He
says that Augustus took as his portion ὅση
στρατιωτικῆς φρουρᾶς ἔχει χρείαν. [all parts that had need of a military
guard]
[452] Augustus claimed to have
exercised no more potestas than any of his colleagues in magistracy (Res
Gestae 34). An enigmatic statement,
but elucidated by Premerstein (Vom Werden
und Wesen des Prinzipats, 227),
who demonstrates that after 27 B.C. the consulate was reduced to its due and
constitutional powers, cf. Velleius 2, 89, 3: ‘imperium magistratuum ad
pristinum redactum modum.’ [the power of magistrates was returned to its former
limits]
[453] Cicero, De
re publica 2, 2: ‘nostra autem res publica
non unius esset ingenio, sed multorum, nec una hominis vita, sed aliquot
constituta saeculis et aetatibus.’ [On the other hand our own commonwealth was
based upon the genius, not of one man, but of many; it was founded, not in one
generation, but in a long period of several centuries and many ages of men.]
[454] Res
Gestae 8: ‘legibus novis m[e
auctore l]atis m[ulta e]xempla maiorum exolescentia iam ex nostro [saecul]o
red[uxi et ipse] multarum rer[um exe]mpla imi tanda pos[teris tradidi].’ [By
new laws passed on my proposal I brought back into use many exemplary practices
of our ancestors which were disappearing in our time, and in many ways I myself
transmitted exemplary practices to posterity for their imitation.]
[456] Tacitus, Ann. 1, 9: ‘non regno tamen neque
dictatura sed principis nomine constitutam rem publicam.’ [Yet he organized the
state, not by instituting a monarchy or a dictatorship, but by creating the
title of First Citizen.]
[457] Ib. 1, 2: ‘posito triumviri nomine
consulem se ferens et ad tuendam plebem tribunicio iure contentum, ubi militem
donis, populum annona, cunctos dulcedine otii pellexit, insurgere paullatim’
&c. [after laying down his triumviral title and proclaiming himself a
simple consul content with tribunician authority to safeguard the commons, he
first conciliated the army by gratuities, the populace by cheapened corn, the
world by the amenities of peace]
[458] Ib. 3, 28: ‘sexto demum consulatu
Caesar Augustus, potentiae securus, quae triumviratu iusserat abolevit deditque
iura quis pace et principe uteremur. acriora ex eo vincula.’ [At last, in his
sixth consulate, Augustus Caesar, feeling his power secure, cancelled the
behests of his triumvirate, and presented us with laws to serve our needs in
peace and under a prince. Thenceforward the fetters were tightened]
[459] Dio 53, 11, 5; cf. 53, 17, 1: καὶ ἀπ᾿ αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀκριβὴς μοναρχία κατέστη. [and from his time there
was, strictly speaking, a monarchy] Cf. also 52, 1, 1.
[464] Apart from the Acta Triumphalia, no record of any
fighting save when Taurus was there (Dio 51, 20, 5). Orosius, however (6, 21, 1), makes Augustus’ war
begin in 28 B.C.
[465] On these campaigns, AYP LV (1934), 293 ff.; for the legates
in Spain in 26–19 B.C., ib. 315 ff. P. Carisius coined at Emerita (BMC, R.
Emp. 1, 51 ff.).
[467] Dio 54, 5, 1 (mentioning the τρυφή [luxurious ways] and ὠμότης [cruelty] of Carisius).
[468] Namely L. Aelius Lamia in
24–22 B.C. (in Dio 53, 29, 1 the name Λούκιος Αἰμίλιος should probably be
corrected, cf. Cassiodorus, Chron. min.
2, 135; cf. PIR2, A 199); C. Furnius (the younger, cos. 17 B.C.) in 22–19 B.C.
(Dio 54, 5, 1 f.); P. Silius Nerva in 19
B.C. (Velleius 2, 90, 4; cf. CIL II, 3414 (Carthago Nova): ‘P. Silio leg. pro | pr. patrono | colonei’).
[469] Dio 54, 11, 1 ff. The mendacious Velleius (2, 90, 4) asserts that Augustus in
person had achieved the conquest of Spain (in 26 and 25 B.C.), and that there
was no trouble ever after – ‘postea etiam latrociniis vacarent.’ [they were
free even from banditry]
[470] The fullest account, that
of Dio, misdates the trial of Primus and conspiracy of Murena to 22 B.C.
Moreover, only one consular list, the Fasti
Capitolini, reveals the fact that Murena was consul ordinarius in 23
B.C. All the others head the year with the suffectus,
Cn. Calpurnius Piso.
[472] Ib. 54, 3, 4: ἐπειδὴ καὶ ἀκράτῳ καὶ κατακορεῖ τῇ παρρησίᾳ πρὸς πάντας ὁμοίως ἐχρῆτο.
[he was immoderate and unrestrained in his outspokenness toward all alike]
[473] But difficult to identify
precisely, cf. P-W VI, 1993 f.
[474] Dio 54, 3, 4 ff.; Velleius 2, 91, 2: ‘erant tamen qui hunc
felicissimum statum odissent; quippe L. Murena et Fannius Caepio diversis
moribus (nam Murena sine hoc facinore potuit videri bonus, Caepio et ante hoc
erat pessimus) cum inissent occidendi Caesaris consilia, oppressi auctoritate
publica, quod vi facere voluerant, iure passi sunt.’
[475] So Horace, ostensibly
prophetic, in an Ode addressed to
Licinius (2, 10, 9 ff.) – who is probably Murena.
[477] Ib. 54, 3, 5: Horace, Odes 2, 2, 5 f.: ‘vivet extento Proculeius
aevo notus in fratres animi paterni.’ [Proculeius will live beyond the mortal
span, well-known, as he is, for his fatherly affection for his brothers]
[483] Livy, Praef. 9:
‘haec tempora, quibus nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus.’ [the present
time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure] Horace, Odes 1, 2, is quite relevant here,
though the poem may well have been composed as early as 29 or 28 B.C.
[484] Dio 53, 32, 5 f. (the only evidence).
Proconsular imperium was conferred, ἐσαεὶ καθάπαξ [once and for all], for
life according to A. v. Premerstein, Vom
Werden u. Wesen des Prinzipats, 232 ff. That Augustus received imperium maius is explicitly stated by
Dio, ought never to have been doubted and is confirmed, if that were needed, by
the five edicts found at Cyrene (for a text of which, cf. J. G. C. Anderson in JRS XVII, 33 ff.). It is reasonable
enough to suppose that the powers granted in this year were sanctioned by the
passing of a lex de imperio.
[487] Cf. M. Reinhold, Marcus Agripра (1933), 167 ff. Dio
mentions no grant of imperium to
Agrippa. That Agrippa at this early date possessed imperium maius over the senatorial provinces in the East has been
argued, but cannot be proved. Nor can precision be extorted from Josephus’
statement (AJ 15, 350): πέμπεται δ᾽ Ἀγρίππας τῶν πέραν Ἰονίου διάδοχος Καίσαρι. [Agrippa
was sent as Caesar’s deputy to the countries beyond the Ionian Sea] Against a
grant of authority over all the East in 23 B.C. can be urged the fact that a
few years later, in 20 and
19 B.C., Agrippa is found, not there,
but in Gaul and Spain (Dio 54, 11, 1 ff.).
[489] Eutropius 7, 10, 2.
[490] Cf. C. Cichorius, R. Studien, 285 ff.
[491] The dispensations accorded
show that the low age limit was in force before 23 B.C.: it was probably
established in 29–28 B.С.
[492] Cicero, Cato
maior 37: ‘quattuor robustos
filios, quinque filias, tantam domum, tantas clientelas Appius regebat et
caecus et senex.’ [Appius, though he was both blind and old, managed four
sturdy sons, five daughters, a great household, and many dependents]
[493] For the evidence about the
two Marcellas, PIR2, C
1102 and 1103. The younger married Paullus after the death of his wife Cornelia
in 16 B.C. He died soon after – and her second husband Barbatus died in his
consulate.
[494] Taurus’ son, however,
married the daughter of a Cornelius Sisenna, his grandson (cos. A.D. 11) a daughter of Valerius Messalla (for the stemma, see
P-W IIIA, 2197). One might also infer a relationship with the Marcii Censorini
(cf. Velleius 2, 14, 3). There is an unexplained
connexion with the Messallae in the family of M. Lollius (Tacitus, Ann. 12, 22, cf. E. Groag, P-W XIII,
1378).
[496] IGRR IV, 1716 SEG 1, 383.
[497] CIL VI, 15626, cf. PIR3,
C 1059. She was the sister of Quirinius’ colleague in the consulate, M.
Valerius Messalla Barbatus Appianus.
[500] For the details, M.
Rostovtzeff, Soc. and Ec. Hist. of the
Roman Empire (1926), 573 1.
[502] Mommsen, Ges. Schr. IV, 311 ff. Note the ‘cohors
primae admissionis’ [the whole inner circle of his court] (Seneca, De
clem. 1, 10, 1), including Sallustius
Crispus, Dellius, the Cocсеіі.
[503] Compare, above all, the
penetrating studies of A. Alföldi, RM
XLIX (1934), 1 ff.; L (1935), 1 ff.
[505] Suetonius, Galba 5, 2. Galba’s father had married a
second wife, Livia Ocellina, from a distant branch of Livia’s own family. If
not exactly seductive, Galba himself was certainly artful: he got on very well
with his stepmother, whose name he took and carried for a time (ib., 4, 1),
and, like his father, was much in demand as a match. After the death of his
wife (an Aemilia Lepida) he withstood the matrimonial solicitations of
Agrippina, the mother of Nero.
[508] Tacitus, Hist. 1, 4: ‘evulgato imperii arcano
posse principem alibi quam Romae fieri.’ [for the secret of empire was now
disclosed, that an emperor could be made elsewhere than at Rome]
[510] As was permitted in 23
B.C. (Dio 53, 32, 5). This does not mean,
however, that he exercised proconsular authority in Rome or in Italy, cf. A. v.
Premerstein, Vom Werden u. Wesen des
Prinzipats, 235 f. According to Dio (54, 10, 5), in 19 B.C. Augustus was
given consular imperium for life: for the interpretation of this, see
Premerstein (ib., 237 f.).
[511] Provinces taken over:
Illyricum in 12 B.C., Sardinia in A.D. 6. Proconsuls nominated, not only in
A.D. 6 (Dio 55, 28, 2), but much earlier, for
example P. Paquius Scaeva again in Cyprus: ‘procos. iterum extra sortem
auctoritate Aug. Caesaris et s.c. misso ad componendum statum in reliquum
provinciae Cypri’ (ILS 915); and,
presumably, M. Lollius c. 19–18 B.C. (Dio 54, 20, 3) in Macedonia; and, no
doubt, many others. The language in which the cities of Asia extol Paullus
Fabius Maximus is suggestive – ἀπὸ τῆς
ἐκείνου δεξιᾶς καὶ γνώμης ἀπεσταλμένος (OGIS
458, II, l. 45).
[512] Compare Augustus’ own
observations (Cyrene Edicts I, l. 13
f.); δοκοῦσί μοι καλῶς καὶ προσηκόντως
ποιήσειν οἱ τὴν Κρητικὴν καὶ Κυρηναϊκὴν ἐπαρχήαν καθ- έξοντες κτλ.
[513] In 19 B.C., but only for a
few years, after which Augustus established an imperial mint at Lugdunum, cf.
H. Mattingly, BMC, R. Emp. 1, xiii
ff.
[514] On this, see M. Hammond, The Augustan Principate (1933), 170 ff.;
Stuart Jones in САН х, 169 ff.; H.
Volkmann, Zur Rechtsprechung im Principat
des Augustus (1935), 93 ff. There can hardly be any doubt that their powers
were developed – and used, though not frequently – in the time of Augustus, cf.
J. G. C. Anderson, JRS XVII (1927),
47 f.
[515] Dio 53, 19, 3: ἐκ δὲ δὴ τοῦ χρόνου ἐκείνου τὰ μὲν πλείω κρύφα καὶ δι᾽ ἀπορρήτων
γίγνεσθαι ἤρξατο, εἰ δ' που τινα καὶ δημοσιευθείη, ἀλλ᾽ ἀνεξέλεγκτά γε ὄντα
ἀπιστεῖται· καὶ γὰρ λέγεσθαι καὶ πράττεσθαι πάντα πρὸς τὰ τῶν ἀεὶ κρατούντων
τῶν τε παραδυναστευόντων σφίσι βουλήματα ὑποπτεύεται. [But after this time
most things that happened began to be kept secret and concealed, and even
though some things are perchance made public, B.C. they are distrusted just
because they can not be verified; for it is suspected that everything is said
and done with reference to the wishes of the men in power at the time and of
their associates.]
[516] Dio 53, 21, 4; Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 35, 3; cf. Cyrene Edicts V, 1. 87, for the description of the consilium: ἐξ ξυμβουλίου γνώμης ὁ ἐκ τῆς συγκλήτου κληρωτὸν ἔσχεν.
[518] Tiberius’ practice was
different, and more Republican – ‘super veteres amicos ac familiares viginti
sibi e numero principum civitatis depoposcerat velut consiliarios in negotiis
publicis’ (Suetonius, Tib. 55).
[520] Seneca, De
ben. 6, 32, 2: ‘horum mihi nihil
accidisset, si aut Agrippa aut Maecenas vixisset.’ [If either Agrippa or
Maecenas had lived, none of this would have happened to me!] Seneca’s comment
is instructive and cynical – ‘non est quod existimemus Agrippam et Maecenatem
solitos illi vera dicere: qui si vixissent, inter dissimulantes fuissent’ [But
the place of Agrippa and Maecenas remained empty all the rest of his life.
What! Am I to suppose that there were no more like them who could take their
place, or that it was the fault of Augustus himself, because he chose rather to
sorrow than to search for others?] (ib. 4).
[521] Reproduced by Dio 55, 14 ff. (A.D. 4), and by Seneca, De
clem. 1, 9 (apparently indicating the
period 16–13 B.C., but inaccurately). Suetonius and Tacitus know nothing of
this ‘conspiracy’. The fact that Cinna was consul in A.D. 5 may have had
something to do with the origin of the story, as well as explaining Dio’s date.
Yet Cinna’s consulate was probably due, not so much to Augustus, as to the
Republican Tiberius, mindful of his Pompeian ties.
[522] Groag inclines to suspect
the agency of L. Licinius Sura (P-W XIII, 475). Pliny, Epp. 9, 13, 11, attests the danger from
the provincial armies. Late in 97 or early in 98 Syria is found to be without a
consular legate (ILS 1055).
[525] Tacitus, Ann. 1, 53; Dio 55, 9, 7. According to Velleius (2,
99, 1 [sic: 2, 99, 2]) Tiberius retired ‘ne
fulgor suus orientium iuvenum obstaret initiis’ [his own brilliance should not
block the initial stages of the young men’s rise]. That was the reason which
Tiberius himself gave – at a later date (Suetonius, Tib. 10, 2).
[526] Tacitus, Ann. 3, 56: ‘sic cohiberi pravas
aliorum spes rcbatur; simulmodestiae Neronis et suae magnitudini fidebat.’ [In
this way, he considered, he would stifle the misconceived hopes of other
aspirants; while, at the same time, he had faith in Nero’s self-restraint and
in his own greatness.]
[527] Tacitus, Ann. 1, 4: ‘iram et simulationem et
secretas libidines.’ [anger, hypocrisy, and secret lasciviousness]
[529] Tacitus, Ann. 1, 3: ‘necdum posita puerili
praetexta principes iuventutis appellari, destinari consules specie recusantis
flagrantissime cupiverat.’ [even during their minority had shown, under a veil
of reluctance, a consuming desire to see them consuls designate with the title
Princes of the Youth.]
[531] Ovid, Ars
am. 1, 194: ‘nunc iuvenum princeps,
deinde future senum.’ [prince now of the youth, but one day of the elders] The
colony of Pisa, mourning his death, describes him as ‘iam designa|tu[m
iļustissumum ac simillumum parentis sui virtutibus principem’ (ILS 140, l. 13 f.).
[532] Quoted by Gellius (15, 7, 3): ‘nam, ut vides, κλιμακτῆρα communem seniorum omnium
tertium et sexagesimum annum evasimus. deos autem oro ut, mihi quantumcumque
superest temporis, id salvis nobis traducere liceat in statu rei publicae
felicissimo ἀνδραγαθούντων ὑμῶν καὶ
διαδεχομένων stationem meam.’ [For, as you see, I have passed the
climacteric common to all old men, the sixty-third year. And I pray the gods
that whatever time is left to me I may pass with you safe and well, with our
country in a flourishing condition, while you5 are playing the man and
preparing to succeed to my position.] This was written later, of course, on
Augustus’ own birthday in A.D. 1.
[534] The narrative of Dio is
brief and fragmentary, in part preserved only in epitomes; while Velleius
records only trouble and disaster for Rome in the absence of Tiberius. For the
internal history cf., above all, E. Groag, Wiener
Studien XL (1918), 150 ff.; XLI (1919), 74 ff.
[535] Velleius 2, 100, 1: ‘sensit terrarum orbis
digressum a custodia Neronem urbis.’ [Nero’s departure from his guardianship of
the City was felt worldwide]
[536] Varus’ wife was Claudia
Pulchra (PIR, C1116), daughter of M.
Valerius Messalla Barbatus Appianus (cos.
12 B.C.) and the younger Claudia Marcella.
[542] Nothing at all is known about
M. Livius Drusus Libo, cos. 15 B.C.
Livia Ocellina, stepmother of Galba, the future emperor (Suetonius, Galba 4, 1), was a distant relative.
Likewise Livia Medullina, who died on her wedding day (Suetonius, Divus
Claudius 26, 1).
[543] On the Plautii, one of the
earliest houses of the new plebeian nobility, see Münzer, RA, 36 ff. One of them was colleague with Ap. Claudius Caecus in
his famous censorship. It is assumed by Münzer that M. Plautius Silvanus (cos. 2 B.C.) and A. Plautius (cos. suff.1 B.C.) descend from that
family: which cannot be proved. As perhaps with certain other families in the
time of Augustus, genealogical claims may be tenuous or dubious. These Plautii
have their mausoleumnear Tibur (ILS
921, &c.).
[544] Velleius alone (2, 100, 4 f.) gives the list. He says
that there were others, both senators and knights.
[546] Velleius 2, 102, 5 [sic: 2, 100, 5]: ‘singularem nequitiam
supercilio truci obtegens.’ [disguising his singular profligacy with a pitiless
frown]
[547] Tacitus, Ann. 1, 53: ‘sollers ingenio et prave
facundus.’ [shrewd wit and perverted eloquence] On his literary
accomplishments, P-W II A, 1372.
[548] For the identity of these
persons, cf. E. Groag, Wiener Studien
XLI (1919), 86. Presumably the last of the Scipiones and the last of the
Claudii Pulchri.
[550] Seneca, De
ben. 6, 32, 1: ‘admissos gregatim
adulteros, pererratam nocturnis comissationibus civitatem, forum ipsum ac
rostra, ex quibus pater legem de adulteriis tulerat, filiae in stupra
placuisse, cotidianum ad Marsyam concursum, cum ex adultera in quaestuariam
versa ius omnis licentiae sub ignoto adultero peteret.’ [she had been accessible
to scores of paramours, that in nocturnal revels she had roamed about the city,
that the very forum and the rostrum, from which her father had proposed a law
against adultery, had been chosen by the daughter for her debaucheries, that
she had daily resorted to the statue of Marsyas,b and, laying aside the rôle of
adulteress, there sold her favours, and sought the right to every indulgence
with even an unknown paramour] This purports to derive from Augustus’
accusations against his daughter. The same source can be detected in Pliny, NH 21, 9; Dio 55, 10, 12.
[551] Velleius 2, 100, 3: ‘magnitudinemque fortunae
suae peccandi licentia metiebatur, quicquid liberet pro licito vindicans.’ [she
measured the greatness of her station by her license to sin, claiming as
legitimate whatever she liked]
[552] For this view, cf. esp. E.
Groag, Wiener Studien XLI (1919), 79
ff.
[553] Tacitus, Ann. 1, 53, describes him as
‘pervicax adulter’ [persevering adulterer], alleging a liaison that went back
to the time when Julia was the wife of Agrippa. On the greater importance of
Iullus Antonius, cf. E. Groag, Wiener
Studien XLI (1919), 84 ff.
[558] Ib. His father had been
active in Narbonensis for Caesar (ib. 4, 1).
[561] As Cn. Piso (cos. 7 B.C.) found to his cost when trying
to control Germanicus.
[562] Pliny, NH 9, 118. Velleius speaks [ib.] of sinister designs of Lollius which
the King of Parthia disclosed – ‘perfida et plena subdoli ac versuti animi
consilia.’ [full of the man’s wily and shifty thoughts]
[563] Odes 4, 9, 37 f.: ‘vindex avarae fraudis et
abstinens ducentis ad se cuncta pecuniae.’ [swift to punish dishonest greed,
and aloof from money that draws everything into its embrace] Compare Velleius (2, 97, 1): ‘sub legato M. Lollio,
homine in omnia pecuniae quam recte faciendi cupidiore et inter summam vitiorum
dissimulationem vitiosissimo.’ [under the legate Marcus Lollius (a man
altogether more desirous of money than of doing right, and highly depraved
despite the utmost dissembling of his depravity)]
[564] Velleius 2, 97, 1. The truth of the matter
is revealed by Dio 54, 20, 4 ff. Too much has been made of the ‘clades
Lolliana’.
[565] Tacitus, Ann. 3, 48: ‘Tiberium quoque Rhodi
agentem coluerat.’ [he had shown himself no less attentive to Tiberius, who was
then residing in Rhodes.] Shortly after this, probably in A.D. 3, he got
Aemilia Lepida for his wife. Groag suspects that Livia had something to do with
the match (P-W IV A, 837).
[566] Tacitus, Ann. 3, 48: ‘incusato M. Lollio, quem
auctorem Gaio Caesari pravitatis et discordiarum arguebat.’ [a condemnation of
Marcus Lollius,3 whom he accused of instigating the cross-grained and provocative
attitude of Gaius Caesar]
[567] Lucius died on August 20th,
A.D. 2 (ILS 139).
[568] Cf. E. Hohl, Klio XXX (1937), 337 ff., who argues
that the conspiracy of L. Aemilius Paullus, husband of the younger Julia,
belongs to this year.
[569] Velleius 2, 102, 3 f.: ‘animum minus utilem rei
publicae habere coepit. Nec defuit conversatio hominum vitia eius assentatione
alentium.’ [his mind less useful for the commonwealth; nor did he lack the
company of men feeding his flaws by their flattery]
[571] Quoted by Suetonius (Tib. 23): ‘quoniam atrox fortuna Gaium et
Lucium filios mihi eripuit’, &c. [Since a cruel fate has bereft me of my
sons Gaius and Lucius...]
[572] But Velleius (2, 103, 4
[sic: 2, 103, 5]) deserves to be quoted:
‘tum refulsit certa spes liberorum parentibus, viris matrimoniorum, dominis
patrimoni, omnibus hominibus salutis, quietis, pacis, tranquillitatis, adeo ut
nec plus sperari potuerit, nec spei responderi felicius.’ [it was then that an
assured hope once again shone out to parents for their children, to husbands
for their marriages, to owners for their estates, and to everyone for safety,
calm, peace, and tranquility, so much so that there could be nothing further to
be hoped for nor a happier response to that hope] These pious prayers were
answered almost at once by famine, pestilence and years of warfare, with grave
disasters.
[574] Ib. 2, 104, 2: ‘in Germaniam misit, ubi
ante triennium sub M. Vinicio, avo tuo, clarissimo viro, immensum exarserat
bellum et erat ab eo quibusdam in locis gestum, quibusdam sustentatum
feliciter.’ [sent him forthwith into Germany, where, three years before, an
interminable war had flared up under Marcus Vinicius, your grandfather, a man
of the utmost distinction: in some places he had been successful in waging it,
in others in checking it]
[580] The whole affair is highly
obscure. The conspiracy and death of Paullus (Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 19, 1) is undated. The scholiast
on Juvenal 6, 158, states that Julia was relegated after her husband had been
put to death, then recalled, but finally exiled when she proved incorrigible in
her vices. If this could be taken as quite reliable, the conspiracy of Paullus
occurred before A.D. 8, perhaps in A.D. 1, as Hohl argues (Klio XXX, 337 ff.).
[581] Tacitus, Ann. 1, 3: ‘rudem sane bonarum
artium et robore corporis stolide ferocem.’ [though guiltless of a virtue, and
confident brute-like in his physical strength]
[582] Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 23, 2: ‘Quintili Vare, legiones
redde!’ [Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!]
[584] Tacitus, Ann. 1, 5. Quite incredible, cf. E. Groag,
P-W VI, 1784 f.
[585] Tacitus, Ann. 1, 13, according to whom some
authorities substituted Cn. Piso (cos.
7 B.C.) for Arruntius. That is not the only uncertainty here. The MS. of
Tacitus has ‘M. Lepidum’. Lipsius altered to ‘M’. Lepiduın’, which most
editors, scholars and historians have followed, supposing M’. Aemilius Lepidus,
cos. A.D. 11 (PIR2, A 363) to be meant. Wrongly – M. Aemilius Lepidus,
cos. A.D. 6 (PIR, A 369), the son of
Paullus and Cornelia, is a more prominent character. His daughter was betrothed
to Drusus, son of Germanicus (Tacitus, Ann. 6, 40). Velleius described M.
Lepidus (2, 114, 5) as being ‘nomini ac
fortunae Caesarum proximus’. [a man very close to the name and fortune of the
Caesars]
[587] L. Arruntius, cos. 22 B.C. (PIR2, A 1129); his son, cos. A.D. 6 (ib., 1130). For their Pompeian connexions, which help
to explain their prominence.
[588] He was now married to an
Aemilia Lepida.
[589] L. Nonius Asprenas (cos. suff. A.D. 6), Sex. Nonius
Quinctilianus (cos. A.D. 8) and P.
Cornelius Dolabella were his nephews. Through the Nonii he was allied with L.
Calpurnius Piso and L. Volusius Saturninus.
[590] For the contrary
interpretation of this evidence (and consequently of the character and policy
of Tiberius), cf. F. B. Marsh, The Reign
of Tiberius (1931), 43 f., cf. 67.
[594] Velleius 2, 105, 1 (A.D. 4). How long he had
been there is not recorded. Velleius says of Sentius ‘qui iam legatus patris
eius in Germania fuerat’ [who at the time was a legate of his father416 in
Germany]. Perhaps from A.D. 3. Possibly on an earlier and separate occasion c.
6–3 B.C.?
[597] IGRR IV, 1362 (Asia); Dio 55, 28, 2 f., cf. SEG VI, 646 (Galatia).
[599] L. Cornelius Lentulus, cos. 3 B.C. (Inst. Iust. 2, 25 pr.),
c. A.D. 4–5, cf. PIR2, C
1384; Cossus Cornelius Lentulus, cos.
1 B.C., proconsul in A.D. 6 (Dio 55, 28, 3 f.; Velleius 2, 116, 2, &c.).
[602] Velleius 2, 112, 4, cf. Dio 55, 34, 6 f.; 56, 12, 2 and ILS 921 (Silvanus); Velleius 2, 114, 5 (Lepidus); 2, 116, 2 (Postumus and Apronius); 2, 116, 3 (Lamia).
[603] About whom Velleius is
lavish of non-committal praise (2, 98, 1 [sic: 2, 98, 3]): ‘de quo viro hoc
omnibus sentiendum ac praedicandum est, esse mores eius vigore ac lenitate
mixtissimos.’ [On the subject of this man, everyone should think and proclaim
that his personality is a blend of energy and mildness] Senecа (Ерр. 83, 14) is more valuable: ‘L.
Piso, urbis custos, ebrius ex quo semel factus est, fuit.’ [Lucius Piso, the
Director of Public Safety at Rome, was drunk from the very time of his
appointment.] On his habits, cf. also Suetonius, Tib. 42, 1.
[606] Seneca, Epp. 83, 15: ‘virum gravem, moderatum,
sed mersum et vino madentem.’ [a man of authority and balance, but so soaked
and steeped in drink]
[607] ILS 8996. Cossus’ son, Lentulus Gaetulicus (legate of Upper
Germany, A.D. 30–39), betrothed his daughter to Seianus’ son (Tacitus, Ann. 6, 30). Tiberius did not remove
him. That was not from fear of a civil war, as Tacitus reports, but because he
could trust these Lentuli.
[609] Velleius 2, 124, 1: ‘quid tunc homines
timuerint, quae senatus trepidatio, quae populi confusio, quis orbis metus, in
quam arto salutis exitique fuerimus confinio, neque mihi tam festinanti
exprimere vacat neque cui vacat potest.’ [The fears of individuals at that
moment, the trepidation of the senate, the consternation of the people, the
dread of the world, the very narrow margin between safety and destruction in
which we found ourselves – all this, in my haste, I have no time to express,
and no one who has the time has the power.]
[613] Coin evidence attests him
there from A.D. 12–13 to 16–17 (for details, PIR, C 64); for the betrothal of his daughter, Tacitus, Ann. 2, 43; ILS 184.
[615] Asprenas (cos. suff. A.D. 6) is attested in A.D.
14/15 (Tacitus, Ann. 1, 53). Lami (cos. A.D. 3) is presumably his
successor. For the evidence for his proconsulate, PIR2, A 200.
[616] Tacitus, Ann. 1, 7: ‘Sex. Pompeius et Sex.
Appuleius consules primi in verba Tiberii Caesaris iuravere, aputque eos Seius
Strabo et C. Turranius, ille praetoriarum cohortium praefectus, hic annonae;
mox senatus milesque et populus.’ [The consuls, Sextus Pompeius and Sextus
Appuleius, first took the oath of allegiance to Tiberius Caesar. It was taken
in their presence by Seius Strabo and Caius Turranius, chiefs respectively of
the praetorian cohorts and the corn department.]
[618] Tacitus, Ann. 1, 11: ‘proinde in civitate tot
inlustribus viris subnixa non ad unum omnia deferrent: plures facilius munia
rei publicae sociatis laboribus exsecuturos.’ [He thought, then, that, in a
state which had the support of so many eminent men, they ought not to devolve
the entire duties on any one person; the business of government would be more
easily carried out by the joint efforts of a number.]
[619] Tacitus, Ann. 1, 6, cf. the acute and
convincing demonstration of E. Hohl, Hermes
LXX (1935), 350 ff.
[620] Ib. 1, 6: ‘ceterum in nullius
unquam suorum necem duravit, neque mortem nepoti pro securitate privigni
inlatam credibile erat.’ [on the other hand, at no time did he harden his heart
to the killing of a relative, and it remained incredible that he should have
sacrificed the life of a grandchild in order to diminish the anxieties of a
stepson.]
[621] Ib. 13, 1: ‘prima novo principatu
mors Iunii Silani proconsulis Asiae.’ [The first death under the new
principate, that of Junius Silanus, proconsul of Asia]
[626] This is the undertone of
the whole preface to Livy’s History of Rome.
[627] On Marius, Sulla and
Pompeius, cf. Tacitus, Hist. 2, 38. Marius and Sulla do not
occur in the list of Roman heroes in Aen. 6, 824 ff., or in Horace, Odes 1, 12. Marius does, however,
just find a mention in Georgics 2, 169.
[629] Ennius, quoted by Cicero
in his De re publica (St. Augustine, De civ. Dei 2, 21).
[630] Livy, Praef. 12: ‘nuper divitiae avaritiam
et abundantes voluptates desiderium per luxum atque libidinem pereundi perdendique
omnia invexere.’ [Of late, riches have brought in avarice, and excessive
pleasures the longing to carry wantonness and licence to the point of ruin for
oneself and of universal destruction.]
[635] Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 89, 3: ‘recitantes et benigne et
patienter audiit, nec tantum carmina et historias, sed et orationes et dialogos.
componi tamen aliquid de se nisi et serio et a praestantissimis offendebatur.’
[listening with courtesy and patience to their readings, not only of poetry and
history, but of speeches and dialogues as well. But he took offence at being
made the subject of any composition except in serious earnest and by the most
eminent writers]
[636] Frequent references in
Ovid, e.g. Ex Ponto 1, 2, 1; 3, 3, 1. Horace dedicates Odes 4, 1 to Fabius, ‘centum puer
artium’ [a young fellow of a hundred accomplishments].
[637] On whom see esp. C.
Cichorius, R. Studien, 325 ff. The
theory that the Ars Poetica was written at a late date in Horace’s life and was
dedicated to two sons of this Piso is so plausible that it can dispense with
the support of Porphyrio.
[651] Tacitus, Ann. 4, 34. The term ‘Pompeianus’,
however, need not denote an adherent of Pompeius. The Romans lacked a word for ‘Republican’.
[656] Tacitus, Germ. 19, 3: ‘nemo enim illic vitia
ridet, nec corrumpere et corrumpi saeculum vocatur.’ [No one laughs at vice
there; no one calls seduction, suffered or wrought, the spirit of the age.]
[659] Tristia 2, 207: ‘duo crimina, carmen et
error.’ [though two crimes, a poem and a blunder] The poet is very discreet
about the precise nature of the ‘error’.
[660] Ib. 131 f.: ‘nec mea decreto damnasti
facta senatus nec mea selecto iudice iussa fuga est.’ [Thou didst not condemn
my deeds through a degree of the senate nor was my exile ordered by a special
court.]
[669] Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 86, 1: ‘genus eloquendi secutus
est elegans et temperatum, vitatis sententiarum ineptiis atque concinnitate et
reconditorum verborum, ut ipse dicit, fetoribus; praecipuamque curam duxit
sensum animi quam apertissime exprimere.’ [He cultivated a style of speaking
that was chaste and elegant, avoiding the vanity of attempts at epigram and an
artificial order, and as he himself expresses it, “the noisomeness of
farfetched words,” making it his chief aim to express his thought as clearly as
possible.]
[670] Porphyrio on Horace, Ars
poetica 311: ‘male hercule eveniat
verbis, nisi rem sequuntur.’ [By Hercules, words can turn out badly if they do
not follow the reality.]
[672] Hist. 1, 1: ‘inscitia rei publicae ut
alienae.’ [men were ignorant of politics as being not any concern of theirs]
[675] The Transatlantic term ‘uplift’
might give a hint of the meaning.
[676] For particulars, cf.
Seneca, Controv. 10, praef. 4 ff.: ‘summa egestas erat, summa infamia, summum odium.’ [He
was very poor, very notorious, very hated. But great indeed must be the
eloquence that pleases even the reluctant] He was called ‘Rabienus’.
[682] Pliny, NH 7, 55; Tacitus, Ann. 4, 21: ‘sordidae originis,
maleficae vitae.’ [of sordid origin and mischievous life]
[684] Seneca, Controv. 2, 4, 11: ‘quasi disertus es, quasi
formosus es, quasi dives es; unum tantum es non quasi, vappa.’ [You are as it
were eloquent, as it were handsome, as it were rich: the only thing you are not
as it were is a good-for-nothing.]
[687] Seneca, Ad
Marciam de consolatione 26, 1: ‘civilia bella deflevit... proscribentis in
aeternum ipse proscripsit.’ [he bewailed the civil wars, in which he himself
proscribed for all time the sponsors of proscription]
[689] Ib., Hist. 1, 1. This is assigned as a
direct result of the Battle of Actium. In Ann., 1, 1, however, Tacitus is more
conciliatory – ‘temporibusque Augusti dicendis non defuere decora ingenia donec
gliscente adulatione deterrerentur.’ [intellects of distinction were not
lacking to tell the tale of the Augustan age, until the rising tide of
sycophancy deterred them] Compare also the elder Seneca on the burnings of
books (Controv. 10, praef. 7):
‘di melius, quod eo saeculo ista ingeniorum supplicia coeperunt quo ingenia
desierant!’ [Thank god that these punishments for genius began in an age when
genius had come to an end!]
[690] Tacitus, Hist. 1, 1: ‘ita neutris cura
posteritatis inter infensos vel obnoxios.’ [So between the hostility of the one
class and the servility of the other, posterity was disregarded.]
[693] Velleius 2, 127, 3 [sic: 2, 127, 4]: ‘virum severitatis
laetissimae, hilaritatis priscae, actu otiosis simillimum, nihil sibi
vindicantem eoque adsequentem omnia, semperque infra aliorum aestimationes se
metientem, vultu vitaque tranquillum, animo exsomnem.’ [a man of old-fashioned
severity and the most delightful cheerfulness, in action very like a man of
leisure, making no claims for himself and therefore achieving everything, and
always measuring himself below the estimation of others, tranquil in his looks
and life, with a mind that never sleeps]
[696] Velleius 2, 36, 3: ‘inter quae maxime nostri
aevi eminent princeps carminum Vergilius Rabiriusque.’ [those of our era that
particularly stand out are Virgil, the principal figure in poetry, and
Rabirius]
[701] Ti. Plautius Silvanus
Aelianus (ILS 986) is probably an
Aelius Lamia by birth, of which house after the consul of A.D. 3 no direct
descendants are known.
[702] Juvenal speaks of Domitian
as ‘Lamiarum caede madenti’ [drenched with the blood of Lamia and his type] (4, 154).
[703] P-W XVII, 877 f.; for the
stemma, ib., 870. Of all noble houses, however, the Acilii Glabriones, not of
great political consequence in the early Principate, survive the longest, PIR2, A 62 ff., with consuls
in the direct line in A.D. 210, and in A.D. 256.
[704] Cf. Groag’s masterly
elucidation of his family connexions, Jahreshefte
XXI-XXІI (1924), Beiblatt 425 ff. If
Groag is correct, the maternal uncle of Nerva married Rubellia Bassa, daughter
of that Rubellius Blandus who was the husband of Julia the granddaughter of
Tiberius. The tie with the Julio-Claudians is surely too tenuous to have
mattered much.
[705] PIR1, P109. For his full name, C. Sallustius Crispus
Passienus, cf. L’ann. ép., 1924, 72.
He was married first to Nero’s aunt, Domitia, then to Nero’s mother, Agrippina.
For examples of his adulation, cf. the scholia on Juvenal 4, 81.
[707] Seneca, NQ 4, praef. 5:
‘Plancus, artifex ante Vitellium maximus.’ [Plancus, the greatest
flattery-artist before Villeius] Passienus is mentioned in the following
section.
[709] Tacitus, Ann. 11, 23: ‘quem ultra honorem
residuis nobilium aut si quis pauper e Latio senator foret? oppleturos omnia
divites illos.’ [All would be submerged by those opulent persons whose
grandfathers and great-grandfathers, in command of hostile tribes, had smitten
our armies by steel and the strong hand]
[710] D. Valerius Asiaticus,
consul under Caligula, cos. II 46,
and Cn. Domitius Afer, cos. suff. 39.
[711] The origin of Burrus is
revealed by ILS 1321. It is no
accident that the governors of Lower Germany early in Nero’s reign were
Pompeius Paullinus and L. Duvius Avitus in succession (Ann. 13, 53 f.). The former was Seneca’s
brother-in-law, from Arelate, Pliny NH
33, 143: the latter came from Vasio (CIL
XII, 1354).
[712] That Pompeia Plotina came
from Nemausus is made probable, but not proved, by SHA Hadr. 12, 2. A slight
confirmation, so far ignored, is the woman of Nemausus Pompeia Marullina,
sister, wife or mother of an eminent military man of the time, whose name is
missing (CIL XII, 3169).
[714] For Paullinus and Avitus,
see above, p. 502, n. 2; for Curtius Rufus, Ann. 11, 21. The origin of Verginius
Rufus is made reasonably certain by combining the evidence of Pliny, Epp. 2, 1, 8 and the inscr. ILS 982, cf. PIR1, V 284.
[715] Tacitus, Hist. 1, 52: ‘merito dubitasse
Verginium equestri familia, ignoto patre.’ [he maintained that Verginius had
hesitated with good reason, for he was of equestrian family, his father was
unknown]
[717] ILS 986. The precise meaning of ‘nobilis’ under the Empire is hard
to establish. E. Stein (Hermes LII
(1917), 564 ff.) argues that it applies to families consular before A.D. 14 –
the year in which election by the People was abrogated. W. Otto’s definition
(ib. LI (1916), 73 ff.) is probably too wide.
[720] Dio 60, 27, 4: τὴν δὲ δὴ ἡσυχίαν ἄγων καὶ τὰ ἑαυτοῦ πράττων ἐσώζετο. [he was
contriving to save his life by keeping quiet and minding his own business]
[721] Note, in the militia equestris, C. Stertinius
Xenophon and his brother (SIG3 804
f.) from Cos, the Ephesian (?) Ti. Claudius Balbillus (L’ann. ép., 1924, 78), the Spartan C. Julius Laco (ib., 1927, 1),
and Ti. Claudius Dinippus (ib., 1917/8, 1 f.: Corinth). This Balbillus is
probably the man who was Prefect of Egypt in A.D. 55 (cf. A. Stein, PIR2, C 813).
[724] Tacitus, Ann. 3, 65: ‘o homines ad servitutem
paratos!’ [These men! – how ready they are for slavery!]
[725] Seneca, De
clem. 1, 1, 6: ‘nemo iam divum Augustum
nec Tiberii Caesaris prima tempora loquitur.’ [no one to-day talks of the
deified Augustus or the early years of Tiberius Caesar]
[728] Dion. Hal. 1, 11, 1;
Fronto, p. 203 N.
[729] Nepos, Vita Attici 18, 4: ‘quibus libris nihil
potest esse dulcius iis qui aliquam cupiditatem habent notitiae clarorum
virorum.’ The method of these prosopographical studies was to set forth ‘quis a
quo ortus, quos honores quibusque temporibus cepisset’. Atticus dealt with the
Junii Bruti, the Marcelli, the Scipiones, the Fabii and the Aemilii.
[732] Seneca, Epp. 94, 46: ‘M. Agrippa, vir ingentis
animi, qui solus ex iis, quos civilia bella claros potentesque fecerunt, felix
in publicum fuit.’ [Marcus Agrippa, a great-souled man, the only person among
those whom the civil wars raised to fame and power whose prosperity helped the
state.]
[735] Suetonius, Nero 4. Velleius, however (2, 72, 3), describes him as
‘eminentissimae ac nobilissimae simplicitatis vir’. [a man of the most
outstanding and noblest straightforwardness]
[736] Suetonius, Nero 5, 1: ‘omni parte vitae
detestabilem.’ [a man hateful in every walk of life] Compare Velleius 2, 10, 2: ‘hunc nobilissimae
simplicitatis iuvenem Cn. Domitium.’ [Gnaeus Domitius, a young man of the
noblest straightforwardness]
[737] C. Sulpicius Galba (cos. suff.
5 в.c.), married to Mummia Achaica and then to the beautiful and wealthy Livia
Ocellina (Suetonius, Galba 3, 4); his son, in favour with
his stepmother (ib. 4, 1), with Livia Drusilla (ib. 5, 2) – and vainly solicited to
marriage by Agrippina (ib. 5, 1).
[738] Varus was the official
scapegoat for the optimism of Augustus’ German policy. Velleius’ label ‘vir
ingenio mitis, moribus quietus, ut corpore ita animo immobilior’ [mild
disposition and quiet habits, rather passive both physically and mentally] (2, 117, 2), like his generalized
allegation of extortion in Syria (‘quam pauper divitem ingressus dives pauperem
reliquit’ [he entered the rich province a poor man, but on leaving he was rich
and the province poor]), is of no independent value whatever. Varus certainly
behaved with decision and competence in Judaea in 4 B.C.
[740] ILS 212 II, 1. 24 f. Commentators on this speech have failed to
notice that Persicus was not only notorious for vice but was even the type of
the degenerate nobilis (Seneca, De
ben. 4, 30, 2).
[741] Odes 2, 3, 1 f.: ‘aequam memento rebus in
arduis | servare mentem.’ [Remember to keep a level head when life’s path is
steep]
[743] ILS 886 gives the inscription on this monument.
[744] Velleius 2, 83, 1. Plancus’ memory was
unpopular. The Domitii kept up their feud (Suetonius, Nero 4); and Plancina his granddaughter,
wife of Cn. Piso (cos. 7 B.C.), was
accused of poisoning Germanicus. Hence the consistent attitude of Velleius.
[746] Pliny, NH, praef.
31.
Plancus made a fine comment – ‘cum mortuis non nisi larvas luctari.’ [Only
phantoms fight with the dead!]
[748] Tacitus, Ann. 11, 7: ‘Asinium et Messallam,
inter Antonium et Augustum bellorum praemiis refertos.’ [Asinius and Messala,
glutted with the prizes of the duel between Antony and Augustus]
[749] Namely the son of
Aeserninus (the grandson was an orator, mentioned along with Messalla and
Pollio by Tacitus, Ann. 11, 6 f.).
[750] Pollio, ‘nervosae
vivacitatis haud parvum exemplum’ [no mean example of vigorous longevity] (Val. Max. 8, 13, 4), died in A.D. 5 (Jerome, Chron., p. 170b H). The date of
Messalla’s death emerges from Frontinus, De
aq. [2,] 102 (though this has been
disputed): cf. PIR1, V 90.
[759] Titinius Capito (Pliny, Epp. 1, 17). This person had been a high secretary of state under
Domitian, Nerva and Trajan, without a break (ILS 1448).
[760] Sallust, Hist. 1, 7 M: ‘nobis primae
dissensiones vitio humani ingenii evenere, quod inquies atque indomitum semper
inter certamina libertatis aut gloriae aut dominationis agit.’ [The earliest
conflicts arose among us as a result of a defect of human nature, which
restlessly and without restraint always engages in a struggle for freedom or
glory or power.] Compare Tacitus, Hist. 2, 38: ‘vetus ac iam pridem
insita mortalibus potentiae cupido cum imperii magnitudine adolevit erupitque,’
[the old greed for power, long ingrained in mankind, came to full growth and
broke bounds as the empire became great] &c. Pollio no doubt had similar
observations to proffer.
[761] Tacitus, Hist. 2, 38: ‘mox e plebe infima C.
Marius et nobilium saevissimus L. Sulla victam armis libertatem in dominationem
verterunt. post quos Cn. Pompcius occultior non melior, et numquam postea nisi
de principatu quaesitum.’ [Gaius Marius, who had sprung from the dregs of the
people, and that most cruel of nobles, Lucius Sulla, defeated liberty with arms
and turned it into tyranny. After them came Gnaeus Pompey, no better man than
they, but one who concealed his purpose more cleverly; and thenceforth there
was never any aim but supreme power]
[762] And, as such, properly
admitted in Hist. 1, 50: ‘mansuram fuisse sub
Pompeio Brutoque rem publicam.’ [the republic would have remained if Pompey and
Brutus had been successful] Not, however, in Hist. 2, 38, where the historian
speaks for himself.
[764] lb. 40, 2: ‘sed est magna illa et
notabilis eloquentia alumna licentiae, quam stulti libertatem vocitant, comes
seditionum, effrenati populi incitamentum, sine obsequio, sine severitate,
contumax, temeraria, adrogans, quae in bene constitutes civitatibus non
oritur.’ [really great and famous oratory is a foster-child of licence, which
foolish men called liberty, an associate of sedition, a goad for the unbridled
populace]
[765] lb. 3: ‘apud quos omnia populus,
omnia imperiti, omnia, ut sic dixerim, omnes poterant.’ [in both communities
all power was in the hands of the populace—that is to say, the untutored
democracy, in fact the mob]
[766] Ib. 4: ‘nostra quoque civitas,
donec erravit, donec se partibus et dissensionibus diseordiis confecit.’ [so
long as the constitution was unsettled, so long as the country kept wearing
itself out with factions and dissensions and disagreements]
[767] Ib. 4: ‘sed nec tanti rei
publicae Graechorum eloquentia fuit, ut pateretur leges, nec bene famam
eloquentiae Cicero tali exitu pensavit.’ [but the benefit derived from the
eloquence of the Gracchi did not make up for what the country suffered from
their laws, and too dearly did Cicero pay by the death he died for his renown
in oratory]
[770] De
clem. 1, 4, 3: ‘principes regesque et
quocumque alio nomine sunt tutores status publici.’ [kings and princes and
guardians of the public order, whatever different name they bear]
[771] Tacitus, Hist. 1, 16: ‘imperaturus es hominibus
qui nec totam servitutem pati possunt nec totam libertatem.’ [you are going to
rule over men who can endure neither complete slavery nor complete liberty]
Compare Dio 56, 43, 4: βασιλευομένους τε ἄνευ δουλείας καὶ δημοκρατουμένους ἄνευ διχοστασίας. [free
alike from the license of a democracy and from the insolence of a tyranny]
[774] Ib. 4, 8: ‘bonos imperatores voto
expetere, qualiscumque tolerarc.’ [he prayed for good emperors, but endured any
sort]
[776] Ib.: ‘saevi proximis ingruunt.’ [the
cruel emperors assail those nearest them]
[778] Tacitus, Ann. 4, 20: ‘unde dubitare cogor fato
et sorte nascendi, ut cetera, ita principum inclinatio in hos, offensio in
illos, an sit aliquid in nostris consiliis liceatque inter abruptam contumaciam
et deforme obsequium pergere iter ambitione ac periculis vacuum.’ [a
circumstance which compels me to doubt whether, like all things else, the
sympathies and antipathies of princes are governed in their incidence by fate
and the star of our nativity, or whether our purposes count and we are free,
between the extremes of bluff contumacy and repellent servility, to walk a
straight road, clear of intrigues and of perils]
[780] Tacitus, Agr. 42, 5: ‘sciant, quibus moris est
inlicita mirari, posse etiam sub malis principibus magnos viros esse,
obsequiumque ac modestiam, si industria ac vigor adsint, eo laudis excedere quo
plerique per abrupta, sed in nullum rei publicae usum, ambitiosa morte
inclaruerunt.’ [Let those whose way it is to admire only what is forbidden
learn from him that great men can live even under bad rulers; and that
submission and moderation, if animation and energy go with them, reach the same
pinnacle of fame, whither more often men have climbed by perilous courses but,
with no profit to the state, have earned their glory by an ostentatious death.]
[784] Augustus’ letter, quoted
by Gellius 15, 7, 3; Velleius 2, 91, 2. On the ‘optimus status’
[the best state], Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 28, 2; Seneca, De
ben. 2, 20, 2.
[790] Ib. 4, 14, 43 f. On this notion and
phraseology, cf. A. v. Premerstein, Vom
Werden u. Wesen des Prinzipats,
127 ff.
[791] Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 98, 2: ‘per illum se vivere, per
illum navigare, libertate atque fortunis per illum frui.’ [it was through him
they lived, through him that they sailed the seas, and through him that they
enjoyed their liberty and their fortunes]
[792] ILS 140, 1. 7 f.: ‘maxsumi custodis imperi Romani totiusque orbis
terrarun prae|si[dis].’
[793] E. Köstermann, Philologus LXXXVII (1932), 358 ff.; 430
ff.
[798] Tacitus, Ann, 1, 2: ‘munia senatus
magistratuum legum in se trahere.’ [to unite in his own person the functions of
the senate, the magistracy, and the legislature]
[799] Seneca, De
clem. 1, 4, 3: ‘olim enim ita se induit
rei publicae Caesar ut seduce alterum non possit sine utriusque pernicie, nam
ut illi viribus opus est, ita et huic capite.’ [At an earlier day, in fact,
Caesar so clothed himself with the powers of state that neither one could be
withdrawn without the destruction of both. For while a Caesar needs power, the
state also needs a head.]
[802] Pliny, NH 7, 149: ‘iuncta deinde tot mala:
inopia stipendi, rebellio Illyrici, servitiorum dilectus, iuventutis penuria,
pestilentia urbis, fames Italiae,’ &c. [then the long series of misfortunes
– lack of army funds, rebellion of Illyria, enlistment of slaves, shortage of
man power, plague at Rome, famine in Italy]
[803] Suetonius, Divus
Aug. 99, 1: ‘ecquid iis videretur
mimum vitae commode transegisse.’ [asking whether it seemed to them that he had
played the comedy of life fitly]
[804] Pliny, NH 7, 150: ‘in summa deus ille
caelumque nescio adeptus magis an meritus.’ [In fine, this god – whether
deified more by his own action or by his merits I know not]
[806] As argued by E. Kornemann,
Klio II (1902), 141 ff. and
elsewhere; cf. now P-W XVI, 217 ff.
[808] Res
Gestae 2: ‘[et] postea bellum
inferentis rei publicae vici b[is a]cie.’ [afterwards, when they made war on
the republic, I twice defeated them in battle]
[809] Ib. 30. Note also the prominence
of the naval expedition in A.D. 5, commanded by Tiberius, though his name is
not mentioned (ib. 26).
[811] As Mommsen observed (in
his edition of 1883, p. vi), ‘arcana imperii in tali scriptione nemo sanus
quaeret.’ [no sane person would seek the secrets of empire in such a writing]
On the nature and purpose of the Res
Gestae, cf. the edition of J. Gagé (Paris, 1935), 23 ff. Dessau’s
insistence that the inscription was primarily designed to be read by the plebs
of Rome, very precisely the clients of the Princeps (Klio XXII (1928), 261 ff.), has not always been sufficiently
regarded.
[812] As W. Weber, Princeps I (1936), 94.
