There was another woman in the household of Augustus, who represented
the new age on its worst and most dangerous side. In Julia we have the
woman who lived to amuse herself, and left a name which has become
a synonym for the appalling corruption of Roman society. No one was
placed so high, no one fell so low; and no one has been so often quoted
to “point a moral or adorn a tale.” But it has often been the wrong
moral and the wrong tale. Bred austerely for a throne, versed in all
the culture of her time, this brilliant, haughty, impetuous daughter
of the emperor led the fast set at Rome for a few years, dazzled the
world with her wit and her toilets, shocked it with her escapades, only
to sink at last from her lofty pedestal to untold depths of infamy and
a living tomb.
Given, a woman with the sensual, dominating inheritance of the Cæsars
and the pride of a new race that knows no law but its own will,
without the pride of character which serves always as a balance-wheel
to the passions; imagine her a widow at seventeen, and married again,
with no choice, to a plain but distinguished soldier, nearly thrice
her age, whose lack of patrician birth humiliated her, and whose
_bourgeois_ habits were not to her liking; surround her with
idle and conscienceless men who make love a pursuit and the arts of
flattery a study--and we have already the elements of a tragedy. This
hard-headed husband wearied her; his ways were foreign to her; his
world of interest was not hers. Even the public spirit which led him
to give so many fine temples and works of art to the city that honored
him annoyed her. She had the tastes of a dilettante, but she believed
firmly in the divine right of emperors and emperors’ daughters to
command all things for themselves.
Nor did this petted child like any better the provincial notions of
her old-fashioned father. It did not suit her to sew and spin with her
stepmother, whose staid decorum irritated her. She belonged to the
pleasure-loving set of an age in which luxury was uppermost and vice
was a fine art. Fatal hour in any age when fashion laughs at morals and
glories in the _cachet_ of would-be elegant sin! “If my father
forgets that he is Cæsar, I who am his daughter have the right to
remember it,” said Julia, by way of comment on his democratic ways.
One day at the theater he noticed the contrast between the dignified
Livia, simply attired, but surrounded by grave statesmen and men of
distinction, and the gaily dressed Julia with her train of gilded,
dissolute youth. After his usual fashion of writing little notes when
he had anything to say, he sent the latter a line of reproof. “Do not
blame my young friends,” was her ready answer; “they will grow old
with me.” On another occasion, after he had found fault with her showy
appearance, she presented herself the next day in a plain and modest
costume. To his compliment on the becoming change, she replied: “To-day
I am dressed for my father; yesterday it was for my husband.” The
subtle satire in this remark was only apparent to those who knew that
she dressed for all the world rather than for either.
She was gifted, witty, and cultured, we are told; but to be lettered
in the age of the Cæsars did not necessarily mean learning or serious
tastes. One must dabble a little in philosophy, read the Hellenic
poets, patronize famous Roman writers, and be able to talk of the
Greek artists who were designing temples and flooding the imperial
city with sculpture of various grades. It was even possible to have a
long-haired philosopher to dress the intellect, as the maid dressed
the person--the one a slave like the other. But all this might end
in little more than the trifling of the dilettante, and was quite
consistent with very bad morals--as it has always been and is to-day.
To discourse of Ovid’s “Art of Love” was agreeable enough, and not
mentally exacting. To be sure, the poet did not bring his admirers
into very respectable society; indeed, we should think it not only
altogether vulgar, but altogether base. But it appealed to the tastes
of these spoiled darlings of fortune who had nothing else to do but
amuse themselves--it did not matter how, so long as due regard was
paid to the so-called elegancies. From love, as the Romans understood
it, to unlimited license was but a step. They did not live in the
“beyond” of refined sentiment. They mixed very little intellect or
imagination with their passions, though they put a certain art into
the stimulants of their sensations. When Catullus wished to add a last
touch of seriousness to what he called his emotions, he said that he
loved Lesbia “not merely as men commonly loved a mistress, but as a
father loves his sons and his sons-in-law.” There was little romance
in this epicurean life, in spite of a great deal of simple family
affection outside of it, which these perfumed sybarites looked upon
as _bourgeois_. Splendor and not too decorous pleasure were
all-sufficient. Anything else they would have laughed at as moonshine.
“When Queen Money gave a dowry,” said Horace, with his inimitable
satire, “she gave beauty, nobility, friends, and fidelity.” With the
exception of Horace and Vergil, who had already grown too moral for the
highest fashion, Roman poetry was incredibly coarse and demoralizing;
but this was the literary food of the reckless and dashing group that
gravitated from the palace on the Palatine to Baiæ, the Newport of the
Roman world, rushing from one novelty to another, from one excess to a
deeper and more highly spiced one, until its rapid course was run.
Of this society Julia was the center, the life, and the inspiration.
The days were past when the stern father put a man of high lineage
peremptorily in his place for presuming to address her in the beautiful
city by the sea. The complaisant husband, absorbed in affairs, no
doubt thought it best to let her go her own way, but he died possibly
unsuspecting. Again the still youthful widow was married in the
interest of the State and of Livia--to Livia’s son. The brooding,
gloomy student was equally far from filling the heart of the graceful
woman who was overflowing with the joy of life, and intoxicated with a
sense of power that knows no law. Livia may have been faulty enough,
but she was above the degradation of the senses. In Julia the virtues
of the Roman matron seem to have been lost. When her conduct came to
the knowledge of her inflexible father, he was as bitter as he had
been tender. Her maid hung herself, and Augustus only said: “I would
rather be the father of Phœbe than of Julia.” Of the youth entangled
with her, some were exiled and some took themselves out of a world
that was no longer possible for them. Among the latter was the clever,
fascinating, but dissolute son of Antony, who had been carefully reared
by Octavia and befriended by the emperor, only to repay their kindness
by striking both in the tenderest point. But Julia, the beautiful,
brilliant, flattered queen of society, was sent away from all her
pleasures, her luxuries, her gay companions, her matchless position, to
languish for fifteen years in a desolate exile, with no friend but the
mother who shared with her the bare necessaries of a squalid existence.
No wine, no luxury, no fine clothes, no men-servants without special
restrictions and surveillance. A rock for a home, the sea and the sky
for companions, and not even hope for consolation. And she was little
past thirty-five! Once she was removed to a stronghold of Calabria,
with a larger guard and no added comforts, but a little less severity.
Many times the Roman people, who had loved her buoyant spirit and
winning personality, begged her inexorable father to forgive her. “I
wish you all had such daughters and such wives,” was his only reply.
She died shortly after her father, to lie, unsung and forgotten, far
from her kindred in an unknown grave. Not a word is left to tell us the
details of that long tragedy. Her daughter Julia inherited her vices
and suffered a like fate.