THE REFORMER AND LEGISLATOR
_Quid leges sine moribus_
_vanæ proficiunt?_
[Sidenote: The earliest reforms in the Empire.]
The activity of Augustus as reformer in the city and Italy, and to a
great extent in the provinces also, was subsequent to the settlement of
his constitutional position in B.C. 23, after which date changes in it
were generally consequential, and in matters of detail. But it began
long before. In B.C. 36 he had taken effective measures to suppress the
brigandage which had pushed its audacity nearly up to the very gates
of Rome. In B.C. 34-3 Agrippa, under his influence, had started the
improvement in the water supply of Rome by restoring the Aqua Marcia;
had cleansed and enlarged the cloacæ, repaired the streets, and begun
many important buildings. In B.C. 31 we have evidence that Augustus
was turning his attention to the details of administration in the
provinces,[289] and in the next year, in his resettlement of Asia, he
restored to Samos, Ephesus, Pergamus, and the Troad, works of art which
Antony had taken from them to bestow upon Cleopatra.[290] In B.C. 28,
measures of relief were adopted for state debtors, and a term fixed
beyond which those who were in actual possession of properties could not
be disturbed by legal proceedings.
[Illustration: AUGUSTUS AS SENATOR.
_Photographed from the Statue in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence._
_To face page 212._]
[Sidenote: The roads and police patrols, B.C. 27.]
The first need of the country was security. How difficult this had long
been to maintain, and how ill the senatorial government at the end of the
Republic had been able to cope with the evil is shewn by the fact that
remnants of the bands of Spartacus and Catiline were in B.C. 61 still
infesting the district of Thurii. In spite of the repressive measures
of B.C. 36, which seem to have been successful as far as the immediate
neighbourhood of Rome was concerned, at the end of the civil war armed
bands still openly appeared in various parts of Italy, seized and carried
off travellers, confined them in the slave-barracks, or _ergastula_,
or put them to ransom. These _ergastula_ were originally slave-prisons
used for keeping refractory slaves, who worked during the day in chains,
and were shut up in separate cells at night, often underground or only
lighted by windows high up and out of reach of the inmates. In some
parts of Italy—chiefly the north—they were not known, and chained slaves
were not employed; but in other parts they were numerous, and afforded
convenient hiding-places. The chief abuse connected with them was that
men properly free could be carried off and concealed in them as though
they were slaves, while they afforded a leader in rebellion convenient
sources from which to draw recruits; the miserable inmates being only
too ready to join any one who gave them a hope of freedom and release
from those horrible dens. Accordingly a review of the _ergastula_ is
constantly heard of, till they were finally abolished by Hadrian. Among
the measures for the suppression of brigandage now taken was a visitation
of these places. It was not done in mercy to the slaves. Augustus, though
he treated his own servants with kindness, took the sternest Roman view
of the absolute power of a master, and boasts that after the war with
Sextus Pompeius he handed over 30,000 slaves—who had been serving with
the enemy—to their masters “to be punished.”[291] When we remember what
the “punishment” of a Roman slave meant, it is difficult to think without
horror of the sum total of human misery which this implies.
[Sidenote: The great roads of Italy secured.]
A more effective and permanent measure, however, was to secure the
roads and make them fit for rapid military movements. A system of road
commissions (_curæ viarum_) was started in B.C. 27, commissioners
(_curatores_) being appointed to superintend each of the great roads
leading from Rome to various parts of Italy. The duty at first was
usually imposed upon men who had enjoyed triumphs, and Augustus himself,
after his triple triumph, undertook the _via Flaminia_, the great north
road from Rome to Ariminum on the Adriatic, from which place other roads
branched off through the valley of the Po, and to the Alpine passes. The
pavement of the road was relaid, the bridges repaired, and the completion
of the work was commemorated by the still existing arch at Rimini, with
its partially surviving inscription.[292] For greater safety, also,
military pickets were stationed at convenient points along the roads,
which put a stop to brigandage.
In close connection with the roads were the twenty-eight military
colonies established by Augustus in Italy. Of these seven were along the
line of the Flaminia, or near it; one of them (Bononia) was the point
where the main roads to Rome converge. Others guarded the entrances to
the Alpine passes, or the road through Venetia to Istria—which Augustus
included in Italy—while another group protected the main roads through
Campania. Thus these colonies were not only centres of loyalty to the
Empire, but served to keep open the great routes. The object of the
division of Italy into eleven regions, the exact date of which is not
known, was probably for the purpose of the census, and the taxation
which was connected with it, but it was also for other administrative
purposes, as for the regulation of the military service of the young
men in each of them.[293] The regions followed the natural divisions of
the country and of nationalities, but the importance of the roads in
connection with them is shown by the fact that before long they became
known in many cases by the name of the chief road that traversed them,
as Æmilia, Flaminia, and others. What Augustus was doing for Italy his
legates under his authority were doing for the most important provinces.
Great roads—_viæ Augustæ_—were being laid everywhere. We have evidence of
them from inscribed tablets in Dalmatia, Pisidia, and Cilicia, Bætica,
Northern Spain, Gallia Narbonensis, and elsewhere.[294] These works
went on throughout his reign, but in B.C. 20 he commemorated his formal
appointment as head commissioner of all roads by placing a pillar covered
with gilded bronze in the forum near the temple of Saturn, with the
distances of all the chief places along the great roads from one of the
thirty-seven city gates from which these roads branch out. The base of
this _milliarium aureum_ is still in its place.
[Sidenote: The collegia.]
Another source of mischief were the _collegia_, or guilds. Under cover
of promoting the interests of certain trades and professions these
guilds were used, or were believed to be used, for all kinds of illegal
purposes. Some of them were of great antiquity, but they had come to
be so often misused for political terrorism (especially the _collegia
opificum_) that the Senate had suppressed many of them in B.C. 63. But
Clodius shortly afterwards got a law passed authorising their meetings,
and he employed them freely for promoting his own riotous proceedings.
Iulius Cæsar had dissolved all except the most ancient and respectable,
but during the civil wars they seem to have revived. Under a law passed
in B.C. 22 Augustus held a visitation of them. Some were dissolved and
some reformed, and a licence was henceforth required from Senate and
Emperor for their meetings.
[Sidenote: Feeding the city.]
In the city itself the first need was food. It depended very largely on
imported corn. Again and again we hear of dearth and famine prices at
Rome. The people, often, no doubt, rightly, believed that this dearness
of provisions arose from artificial causes. When Sextus Pompeius and
his confederates were scouring the seas and pouncing upon corn-ships
the cause was clear enough, and the gratitude to Augustus for crushing
him was very natural. But even when there was no such evident danger
great distress was often caused by sudden rise of prices. The idea
had always been in such times to appoint some powerful man _præfectus
annonæ_, with a naval force enabling him to secure that the corn fleets
should have free passage to Italy, should be able to unload their
cargoes without difficulty, and dispose of them at a moderate price. A
well-known instance of this was the appointment of Pompey in B.C. 57.
But in less troublous times a separate commissioner was appointed to
watch the several places of corn export, Sicily, Sardinia, and Africa.
These were not posts of very great dignity, and Brutus and Cassius in
B.C. 44 looked upon their nomination to them as a kind of insult. But
besides the dangers of the sea and of pirates certain merchants had hit
upon means—practised long before at Athens—of artificially raising the
price. They made what we should call “a corner” in corn. Either they
bought it up and kept it back from the market, or they contrived various
ways of delaying the ships and producing a panic among the dealers. As
in all difficulties, the people looked to Augustus for help, and in
B.C. 22 begged him to accept the office of _præfectus annonæ_, “chief
commissioner of the corn market.” While declining the dictatorship
offered him at the same time with passionate vehemence, he accepted this
commissionership; and the law which he caused to be passed now or some
time later on shews how necessary some State interference was. By this
law penalties were inflicted on any one “who did anything to hinder the
corn supply, or entered into any combination with the object of raising
its price; or who hindered the sailing of a corn-ship, or did anything of
_malice propense_ whereby its voyage was delayed.”[295]
[Sidenote: Distribution of corn free or below market value.]
But besides a free and unmolested corn market, the Roman populace had
long come to look for another means of support—a distribution of corn
either altogether free or considerably below the market price. Detached
instances of this practice occur in the earlier history of Rome, the corn
sometimes coming as a present from some foreign sovereign, sometimes
being distributed by private liberality. It had always been objected to
by the wiser part of the Senate, and had laid the donors open to the
charge of trying to establish a tyranny. It was reserved for the tribune
Gaius Gracchus to make it into a system (B.C. 122). Since his time it had
been submitted to as a matter of course by nearly all magistrates. Sulla,
indeed, seems to have suspended it for a time, but the first measure of
the counter revolution that followed his death was to re-establish it.
Iulius Cæsar had restricted it to citizens below a certain census, but
had not the courage to abolish it. It was, indeed, a kind of poor-law
relief, but of the worst possible sort. It not only induced a number of
idle and useless people to prefer the chances of city life to labour
in the country, but it unnaturally depressed the price of corn, and
therefore discouraged the Italian farmer, already nearly ruined by the
competition of foreign corn; it exhausted the treasury, and, after all,
did not relieve the poor. Livy regards it as one of the causes which
denuded Italy of free cultivators, and left all the work to slaves.
Cicero always denounced it on much the same grounds, and Appian points
out how it brought the indigent, careless, and idle flocking into the
city.[296] The system, moreover, was open to gross abuses, slaves being
manumitted that they might take their share, under contract to transfer
it to their late masters. Augustus saw that by these distributions
injustice was done both to farmers and merchants, and that agriculture
in Italy was being depressed by it. He says in his memoirs[297] that
he had at one time almost resolved to put a stop to the practice, but
refrained from doing so because he felt sure that the necessity of
courting the favour of the populace would induce his successors to
restore it. However unsound this reasoning may be, it would no doubt have
been an heroic measure for one in his position to have carried out the
half-formed resolution. As a matter of fact, his distributions were on a
large scale, and in times of distress were entirely gratis. _Tesseræ_, or
tickets, entitling the holders to a certain amount of corn or money, were
distributed again and again. The value of the corn tickets was generally
supplied from the _fiscus_ or his private revenue; but that after all was
only a question of accounts, it did not affect the economical or moral
results in any way.
[Sidenote: State loans.]
A better economical measure was a system of State loans. Immediately
after the end of the civil war the transference to the Roman treasury of
the enormous wealth in money and jewels of the Ptolemies at Alexandria
caused the price of money to go down and the money value of landed
property consequently to go up. For a time at least the common rate of
interest sank from 12 to 4 per cent. Augustus took advantage of this
state of things to relieve landowners who were in difficulties, by
lending them money free of interest, if they could show property of
double the value as security for repayment.
[Sidenote: The Tiber.]
There were other reforms equally beneficial. Among the many _curæ_
(commissions) which he established was one for superintending public
works, which would thus not depend on private munificence; another of the
streets; of the water supply; and, above all, of the Tiber. Rome was,
as it still is, extremely subject to floods. Quite recently there were
five or six feet of water in the Pantheon, and in B.C. 27 the rise of
the Tiber was so serious that the lower parts of the city were covered,
and the augurs declared it to be an omen of the universal prevalence
of the power of the new _princeps_. In B.C. 23 it swept away the _pons
Sublicius_.[298] He could not of course prevent these floods, but he
gave some relief by dredging and widening the river-bed, which was
choked with rubbish and narrowed by encroachments. The commission thus
established remained an important one for many generations, but in B.C. 8
he superintended the business himself.
[Sidenote: Fire brigades.]
A danger at Rome, more frequent and no less formidable than flood, was
fire. So frequent were fires that the most stringent laws had been passed
against arson, which it seems was even punishable by burning alive. In
B.C. 23 Augustus formed a kind of fire brigade of public slaves under
the control of the curule-ædiles. But the old magistracies were no
longer objects of desire, and it was difficult to get men of energy to
fill them, a state of things which was one of the chief blots in the new
imperial system. At any rate in this case they were not found efficient,
and in the later years of his reign (A.D. 6), a new brigade in four
divisions was formed of freedmen with an equestrian præfect, who turned
out to be so effective that they became regularly established.
[Sidenote: The Sibylline Books and Sacred Colleges.]
Another part in the scheme of Augustus for the reconstruction of society
was to revive the influence of the Sacred Colleges and brotherhoods,
and to renew the ceremonies with which they were connected. One method
of doing this was to become a member of them all himself, much as
the king of England is sovereign of all the Orders. Thus according
to the _Monumentum_ (ch. 7) he was pontifex, augur, quindecemvir for
religious rites, septemvir of the Epulones, an Arval brother, a fetial
and a sodalis Titius. Nor was he only an honorary or idle member. He
attended their meetings and joined in their business, and took part in
whatever rites they were intended to perform. Thus his membership of the
Arval brethren is recorded in the still existing _acta_; as a fetial
he proclaimed war against Cleopatra. The _sodales Titii_, a college
of priests of immemorial antiquity, had almost disappeared until the
entrance of Augustus into their college revived them and their ritual.
He not only joined these colleges, but revived and even increased their
endowments,[299] and, above all, those of the six Vestal Virgins, to whom
he presented the _regia_, once the official residence of the Pontifex
Maximus, and an estate at Lanuvium. The restoration of the College of
Luperci, which had celebrated on the 15th of February the old ceremony of
“beating the bounds” almost from the foundation of the city, was more or
less a political matter. It had gone out of fashion, and its ceremonies
had got to be looked upon as undignified. Iulius Cæsar had revived and
re-endowed them. The Senate for that very reason in the reaction after
his death had deprived them of these endowments, which Augustus now
restored. We have already noticed his renewal of the _augurium salutis_,
the old ceremonial prayer at the beginning of the year that could only be
offered in time of peace. He also induced some one to accept the office
of _flamen Dialis_ in B.C. 11, after it had been vacant since B.C. 87,
because the restrictions under which its holder laboured were so numerous
and tiresome that in spite of its dignity—its seat in the Senate and
curule chair and lictor—no one would accept it. He took pains again
to restore the Sibylline Books to their old place of importance. The
originals were lost in the fire of B.C. 82, and a commission had at once
been issued to collect others from towns in Greece and Greek Italy. But
some of them were getting illegible from age, and some were of doubtful
authenticity, and consequently all kinds of prophetic verses got into
circulation, giving rise at times to undesirable rumours and panics.
Augustus in B.C. 18 ordered them to be re-copied and edited, and the
authorised edition was then deposited in his new temple of Apollo on the
Palatine, and continued to be consulted till late in the third century.
After an attempt by Iulian to revive its authority it was finally burnt
by Stilicho about A.D. 400.
[Sidenote: Pontifex Maximus.]
As one of the quindecemvirs Augustus had charge of these books, but
he formally took the official headship of Roman religion by becoming
Pontifex Maximus. He was elected and ordained to that office in March
B.C. 12. The people had wished him to take it in B.C. 30, but he would
not violate what was a traditional and sacred rule that the office was
lifelong, and though Lepidus was degraded from the triumvirate in B.C.
36, he was still Pontifex Maximus. It is true that he was not allowed to
do any of the duties, or only those of the most formal kind, but still
he had the office. The ground for asking Augustus to take it was that
the election of Lepidus had been irregular; he had managed to get put in
during the confusion following the assassination of Cæsar, and therefore
might be deposed. Augustus however takes credit for his scrupulous
observance of a religious rule, and was particularly gratified by the
crowds of people who came up to vote for him, a sort of ecclesiastical
coronation.[300]
[Sidenote: The _ludi sæculares_, May 31-June 2, B.C. 17.]
In B.C. 17 he gave an emphasis to some of these religious revivals by
celebrating the _ludi sæculares_, the centenary of the city, in virtue
of some verses found in this Sibylline volume. We need not trouble
ourselves as to whether his calculation of the year was a right one
(the _sæculum_ was really 110 years), it is enough to note that they
were meant, like a centenary of a college or university, to call out
patriotic and loyal feelings which should embrace both the country and
the country’s religion. They are made interesting to us by the fact
that Horace—always ready to further his master’s purposes—was selected
to write the Anthem or Ode to be sung by a chorus of twenty-seven boys
and twenty-seven girls. An inscription, found in 1871 in the bed of the
Tiber, gives the official program of this festival, and ends with the
words _Carmen composuit Q. Horatius Flaccus_.[301] The poet probably
had before him, when he wrote it, the general scheme of the festival,
which included solemn sacrifices and prayer to Iuno, Diana, Iupiter, and
Ilithyia. Augustus and Agrippa took the leading part in the religious
functions—as members of quindicemviri—and both repeated the prayers,
which in the case of all these deities invoked a blessing on the “Populus
Romanus Quiritium.” In short, everything was done to mark it as a
national festival, to make the Romans recall their glorious inheritance
and unique position, and at the same time to show that the _princeps_
represented that greatness before gods and men. Whatever else Augustus
may have thought of the national religion, he evidently regarded it as
the surest bond of national life, and the inclusion of a prayer to
Ilithyia, goddess of childbirth, joined with his contemporaneous attempt
to encourage marriage and the production of children (which the obedient
Horace echoes[302]), shews that he also connected that religion with
morality. The restoration of religion, in fact, in his mind, goes side
by side with the purification of morals. It is the practical statesman’s
view of religion as a necessary police force and perhaps something more.
Napoleon restored the Catholic Church in France with a similar sagacity,
and the people blessed him, as they did Augustus, for giving them back
_le bon Dieu_.
[Sidenote: The reformation of morals.]
But the state of things required in his judgment, not only a religious
revival, but more stringent laws. Horace again reflects his master’s
views in the making, before they find expression in act. The sixth ode
of the first book (written about B.C. 25) joins to the necessity of a
restoration of the temples and a return to religion a warning as to the
relaxation of morals, tracing the progress in vice of the young girl
and wife, with the shameful connivance of the interested husband, and
exclaims: “Not from such parents as these sprang the youth that dyed the
sea with Punic blood, and brake the might of Pyrrhus and great Antiochus
and Hannibal, scourge of God.” Again in the twenty-fourth ode of the
same book, also written about B.C. 25, he warmly urges a return to the
old morality, and promises immortality to the statesman who shall secure
it: “If there be one who would stay unnatural bloodshed and civic fury,
if there be one who seeks to have inscribed on his statue the title of
‘Father of the Cities,’ let him pluck up heart to curb licentiousness.
His shall be a name for the ages!” And when Augustus has acted on the
resolution, to the formation of which the poet was privy, he tells him
ten years later that by his presence family life is cleansed from its
foul stains, that he has curbed the licence of the age and recalled
the old morality.[303] This he would represent as the result of the
Emperor’s legislation, the _lex marita_ of the secular hymn.
It was after his return from the East in B.C. 19 that Augustus first
received censorial powers for five years. Whether this amounted to a
definite office—a _præfectura moribus_ or _regimen morum_, as Dio and
Suetonius assert—does not much matter. The experiment of appointing
censors in the ordinary way had been tried in B.C. 22 for the last time
and had not been successful, and the _censoria potestas_ now given to
Augustus practically put into his hands that control over the conduct
of private citizens which the censors had exercised by their power of
inflicting “ignominy” upon them. The ancient censorial stigma had been
applied to irregularities in almost every department of life, but it
depended on the will of the censors themselves, not on laws. Feeling now
directly responsible for the morals and general habits of the citizens he
began a series of legislative measures designed to suppress extravagance
and debauchery, and to encourage marriage and family life, which would
have permanent validity. He believed in externals, even trivial ones,
as indicating a growing laxity; making, for instance, a point of men
appearing in the forum and on official occasions in the old Roman toga.
The lighter and more comfortable _lacerna_ or _pallium_ was as abominable
in his eyes as a suit of flannels would seem to a martinet of to-day
in the Park or on parade.[304] Before all things the Romans were to be
national, in dress no less than in other respects.
[Sidenote: Sumptuary laws.]
But the failure which always attends such regulations was no less
inevitable in regard to the first of his new reforming measures, his
sumptuary laws, regulating the exact amount that it was legal to spend
on a _cena_ in ordinary days, on festivals, and at wedding feasts, or
the _repotia_ which the bridegroom gave on the afternoon following his
marriage. This was no new thing. It had been tried at various times
throughout Roman history. Beginning with a very ancient law regulating
the amount of silver plate each man might legally possess, the rent he
might pay for his house, and the provisions of the Twelve Tables, we have
laws in the third and second centuries B.C., limiting the cost of dress
and jewels for women, the number of guests that might be entertained at
banquets, and the amount that might be spent upon them. Sulla had also a
sumptuary law, among his other acts, of the same kind. But Iulius Cæsar
had gone farther than any one in B.C. 46. He had not only regulated the
cost of furniture and jewels, according to the rank of the owners, and
the amounts to be spent upon the table, but he had sent agents into
the provision markets, who seized all dainties beyond the legal price,
and even entered private houses and removed dishes from the table. Of
course such measures were not only annoying, they were ineffective
also. Directly he left Rome the rules were neglected. Our own Statute
Book has many laws of the same kind, which rapidly became dead letters.
Nearly the one and only permanent effect of the old sumptuary laws had
been to create a sentiment against large and crowded dinner parties as
vulgar.[305] Nor did Augustus succeed much better. Towards the end of his
reign he issued an edict extending the legal amount which might be spent
on banquets, hoping to secure some obedience to the law. But nothing
that we know of Roman life afterwards leads us to think that this form
of paternal government—though quite in harmony with Roman ideas—ever
attained its object. Human nature was stronger than political theory.
[Sidenote: The Iulian laws of marriage, adultery and divorce.]
Nor were the laws, carried about the same time,[306] on marriage,
divorce, and kindred subjects, much more effective. In part they
re-enacted rules which had always been acknowledged and always disobeyed,
and so far as they did not punish a crime, but endeavoured to enforce
marriage, they were continually resisted or effectually evaded.
They consisted of a series of enactments—whether we regard them as
separate laws or chapters in the same law—for restraining adultery and
libitinage, for regulating divorce, and for encouraging the marriage of
all ranks.[307] They were passed in B.C. 18-17, and were supplemented
by a law of A.D. 9, called the _lex Papia Poppæa_. The text of none of
them survives, and we have to trust to scattered notices in the later
legal writers. They may be roughly classed as restrictive, penal, and
beneficiary. In the first may be placed the regulation that no senator
or member of a senatorial family might marry a freed-woman, courtesan,
actress, or the daughter of an actor; though other men might marry a
freed-woman or even emancipate a slave in order to marry her. And under
the same head came the regulations as to divorce. The legal doctrine
appears to have been that marriage contracted with the old religious
ceremony called _confarreatio_ was indissoluble, except in the case of
the wife’s adultery, on whose condemnation to death the execution was
preceded by a solemn dissolution of the marriage or _diffareatio_. It was
also a common belief that no divorce had ever taken place at Rome until
that of Carvilius in B.C. 231. Yet the laws of the Twelve Tables (B.C.
450) contained provisions as to divorce, so that it had certainly been
known before; and perhaps the truth was that Carvilius was the first to
divorce his wife without any plea of adultery, in which case he would
have to give security for the repayment of her dowry. Since that time
the religious _confarreatio_ had become extremely rare. Both men and
women avoided an indissoluble tie. The fashion was to be married _sine
manu_, that is, without the woman passing into the _manus_ or power of
her husband. She still remained subject to the _patria potestas_, or to
that of her guardian, or was _sui iuris_ according to her circumstances
at the time. Such marriages could be dissolved by either party, and
without charge of misconduct. Public opinion seems to have restrained
both men and women for some time from taking advantage of their freedom,
but its force steadily diminished, till towards the end of the republic
divorce became so common as to provoke little remark. It was an
arrangement—as in the case of Augustus and his family—governed almost
entirely by considerations of convenience or advantage, and generally
left all parties concerned on a friendly footing. This of course was
not always the case when the divorce was the result of misconduct, or
at least of misconduct on the wife’s part, nor even if it resulted
from incompatibility of temper or money disputes, which left a feeling
of soreness behind them. It was a system—however disastrous to family
life—too deeply rooted for Augustus to attempt to change it, even if
he had wished to do so. His law seems to have dealt only with certain
formalities and conditions of divorce—such as the necessity of having
witnesses, and in case of a charge of misconduct a kind of family council
or court of inquiry—not with the freedom of divorce itself, except that
in the case of a freed-woman, she was prevented from divorcing her
husband or marrying again without his consent. That, however, rested
on the idea of the rights of a patronus rather than on the sanctity of
marriage. Otherwise the law chiefly dealt with questions of property,
restraining the husband from alienating his wife’s estate without her
consent, and re-enacting (with what modifications we do not know) the
provisions for the repayment of dowry.
[Sidenote: Penalties (1) for adultery or seduction.]
The _penal_ enactments affected (1) those guilty of adultery or seduction
(_stuprum_), and (2) those who remained unmarried or without children.
In adultery both parties were punished by transportation (_deportatio
in insulam_) and a partial confiscation of property. A husband’s
unfaithfulness incurred no penalty except that he lost all claim to
retain any part of the wife’s dowry, even for the benefit of children.
But the old barbarous principle of the injured husband’s right to kill
both wife and paramour, if detected by himself, was retained, though
under certain conditions. If he allowed the guilty wife to remain with
him, he was bound to release the man; and if he connived at the adultery
for gain, he was subject to a fine. _Stuprum_ was formerly defined as
the forcible detention of a free woman for immoral purposes, and could
be punished by flogging or imprisonment. Under the Iulian law it was
extended to the seduction of an unmarried woman or a widow who had been
living chastely.
[Sidenote: (2) For remaining unmarried.]
The penalties upon those who remained unmarried between certain ages were
in the form of a direct tax or of certain disabilities. The former, under
the name of _uxorium_, was of great antiquity, and had been levied by
the censors of B.C. 404, but it was light and intermittent; the Iulian
law revived and increased it. The disabilities were that an unmarried
man between the legal ages could not take a legacy from a testator
not related to him within the sixth degree, unless he married within
a hundred days of being informed of the legacy. This was extended by
the _lex Papia Poppæa_ (A.D. 9) to the childless, who could only take
half any legacy from a testator unconnected with them within the sixth
degree. One child saved a man from coming under this law, three children
a freeborn woman, four a freed-woman. Again, a husband and wife who were
childless could only receive a tenth of a legacy left by one to the
other, though, if there were children by another marriage, a tenth was
added for each, or if they had had children who had died. For all alike
there were numerous exemptions founded on absence from home on public
service, age, or ill-health; and a certain time of grace (_vacatio_) was
given between the attainment of the legal age and the actual marriage, or
between two marriages, or after a divorce.
[Sidenote: Privileges to parents. The _ius trium liberorum_.]
The beneficiary clauses of the law were those which relieved married
men or women and men or women with children from these disabilities,
and gave them exemption from certain onerous public duties and special
places of honour in the theatres. The fathers of three children at Rome,
four in Italy, five in the provinces, had also certain preferences for
offices and employments and other honorary distinctions, such as taking
precedence of a colleague in the consulship. This was not a new idea, for
it had in one shape or another existed in many Greek states, and in B.C.
59 Iulius Cæsar had in his agrarian law given the preference to fathers
of three children in the distribution of land.
[Sidenote: Opposition to the law.]
The disabilities imposed on the unmarried were met with vehement
resistance, in consequence of which the clause was introduced giving
the three years’ grace between the attainment of the legal age and the
actual marriage. After the passing of the Papia Poppæa (A.D. 9) the
Emperor in the theatre or circus was received with loud shouts from the
equestrian seats demanding its repeal. He is said to have sent for the
children of Germanicus and held them up as an example for all to follow;
and he afterwards summoned two meetings of the equites, one of those
married, and the other of the single. To each he delivered a speech,
which Dio reports or invents. He pointed with dismay to the fact that the
first meeting was so much less numerous than the second. He commended
the married men for having done their duty to the State, but to the
unmarried he addressed a longer and more vehement appeal. He argued that
they were defeating the purpose of the Creator, were contributing to the
disappearance of the Roman race, which was being replaced by foreigners
necessarily admitted to the franchise in order to keep up the numbers of
the citizens; that he had only followed in his legislation the precedent
of ancient laws with increased penalties and rewards, and that while he
acknowledged that marriage was not without its troubles, yet that was
true of everything else, and they were compensated by other advantages
and the consciousness of duty done.[308]
But though the Emperor carried his point at the time and passed a law
which remained in force for more than three centuries, it did not really
benefit morality. It was constantly evaded by colourable marriages, often
with quite young children. “Men did not marry to have heirs, but in order
to become heirs,” it was said. And though Augustus attempted to prevent
this by an edict enacting that no betrothal was to count which was not
followed by a marriage within two years, other means of evading the law
were found which gave rise to the intrusion of spies and informers who
made their profit by thus violating the secrets of the family. Again,
the granting of the _ius trium liberorum_ became gradually a matter of
form, and the idea of the superiority of the married state necessarily
disappeared with the rise of certain Christian ideals. The law was
repealed by the sons of Constantine.
[Sidenote: The character of Augustus in view of this legislation.]
Though a line is often drawn between a man’s public and private
character, it still remains hard to reconcile the earnestness of Augustus
in pressing these laws and his severity in punishing offences of this
nature with the reports of his own personal habits. I have already
expressed my disbelief in the stories of his youthful immoralities.
Suetonius, who spares no emperor the inevitable chapter summing up his
sins of the flesh, asserts that not even his friends deny the intrigues
of his later years, but merely urge that they were conducted not for
the gratification of his passions, but for motives of policy, that he
might gain information of secret plots. He mentions no names and gives
no evidence; the only names that have come down are those mentioned
in Antony’s extraordinary letter justifying his own connection with
Cleopatra. Antony, however, could only have known Roman gossip at second
or third hand in Alexandria, and the whole tone of the letter is so
reckless and violently coarse that it goes for very little by way of
evidence. Dio indeed mentions the wife of Mæcenas. But his statements
do not hang together or amount to very much. In one place he tells us
that Augustus was annoyed with Mæcenas because the latter had told his
wife something as to measures being taken against her brother Murena. At
another he says that some gossips attributed his journey to Gaul in B.C.
16 to a wish to enjoy her society without exciting popular remark, “for
he was so much in love with her that he once made her dispute with Livia
as to the superiority in beauty.” Even if the gossip was worth anything,
this hardly looks like a secret intrigue. Nor is it a confirmation of
it that Mæcenas at his death left Augustus his heir. However, the fact
may nevertheless be so. Livia is said elsewhere by Dio to have explained
her lasting influence over Augustus by the fact that she was always
careful not to interfere in his affairs, and, while remaining strictly
chaste herself, always pretended not to know anything of his amours. If
Livia did say this, it would of course be a sufficiently strong proof of
the allegations against him. But such reported sayings rest ultimately
on gossip and tittle-tattle, and do not go for much. The story told
by Dio, and amplified by Zonaras, of Athenodorus of Tarsus getting
himself conveyed into his chamber in the covered sedan intended for
some mistress, and springing out of it sword in hand and then appealing
to Augustus as to whether he did not often run such risks, is not very
likely in itself, and at any rate must refer to the triumviral days. For
about B.C. 30 Athenodorus was sent back to govern Tarsus. The one epigram
by the hand of Augustus, which has been preserved by Martial,[309] is
undeniably outspoken and coarse, but it is the coarseness of disgust,
not of lubricity, and to my mind is evidence—so far as it may be called
so—for him rather than against him. If, however, all that Suetonius and
Dio allege against his middle life is true, we must still remember that
in the eyes of his contemporaries, and indeed in Roman society generally
from Cato downwards, such indulgence in itself was not reprehensible. It
entirely depended on circumstances, and whether other obligations—such
as friendship, public duty, family honour—were or were not violated.
From that point of view the only crime of Augustus would be in the case
of Terentia, wife of Mæcenas, if the tale is true. As among the other
emperors whose life Suetonius wrote, with the exception of Vespasian, the
character of Augustus stands out clear. One age cannot judge fairly of
another, and it is not seldom that we find ourselves at as great a loss
to reconcile theory and practice, as to account for lives such as those
of Augustus and Horace in conjunction with the legislation of the former
and the moral sentiments occasionally expressed by the latter.