LATER LIFE AND FAMILY TROUBLES
_Edepol, Senectus, si nil quidquam_
_aliud viti apportes tecum, cum_
_advenis, unum id sat est quod diu_
_vivendo multa quæ non volt videt._
[Sidenote: The situation in B.C. 20-17.]
After the restoration of the standards and prisoners from the Parthians
in B.C. 20, and when the peaceful settlement of the Eastern provinces
and subordinate kingdoms had been carried through or fairly started,
Augustus appears to have thought that the greater part of his life’s
work had been accomplished. The frontiers of the Empire had been settled
and secured. The Eastern provinces had been visited, necessary reforms
introduced, and great works of public utility set on foot. He wrote word
to the Senate that the Empire was sufficiently extensive, and that he had
no intention of adding to it by further annexations. He returned to Rome
the following year (B.C. 19) to find that the renewed trouble in Northern
Spain had been settled, or was on the point of being settled, by Agrippa.
He proposed to devote himself henceforth to internal reforms and the
superintendence of the peaceful improvements which he contemplated in the
provinces. He no doubt had in mind the necessity of a personal visitation
of distant parts of the Empire from time to time; but by associating
the able and trustworthy Agrippa with himself in the tribunician power
(B.C. 18) he might feel that he would always have a support in the
administration at home or abroad on which he could rely. It was at this
time, therefore, that the reforms and restorations were accomplished
which have been described in the last chapter, crowned by the national
festival, the _ludi sæculares_, in which he and Agrippa stood side by
side as mouthpieces of the whole people before the gods.
We have seen, however, how these peaceful hopes were disappointed.
Scarcely were the secular games over than news came of the serious
disturbances in Gaul, Pannonia, Dalmatia, and Thrace, which led to his
three years’ absence from Rome and his long residence in Gaul and Spain.
He had only returned to Rome from this absence little more than a year
when he lost Agrippa, who died in March, B.C. 12, and he was obliged
to fall back upon the support of Tiberius, as his two grandsons were
only eight and five years old respectively. It was in B.C. 11 that he
compelled him to divorce his wife, Vipsania, to whom he was devotedly
attached, and marry Iulia, left a widow by Agrippa. The change was
thoroughly distasteful to Tiberius. He loved Vipsania, and he had good
reason to suspect Iulia of at least levity. So strong were his feelings
for his divorced wife that means had to be taken to prevent the two
meeting, for on a chance _rencontre_ he was observed to follow her with
straining eyes and tears. The arrangement, indeed, was wholly the work
of Augustus, with a view to a possible failure in the succession (which
did actually occur), for by this time he had evidently imbibed the idea
of a dynasty, and of the necessity of having some one connected with
him to take his place, who would be regarded as a natural successor
by all classes of citizens. But it proved the origin of a sorrow and
mortification which did much to overcloud his later days.
[Illustration: JULIA, DAUGHTER OF AUGUSTUS.
_From the Bust in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence._
_To face page 234._
LIVIA, WIFE OF AUGUSTUS.
_From the Bust in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence._
_Page 274._]
[Sidenote: Iulia, b. B.C. 39; ob. A.D. 14.]
At first, we are told, the marriage seemed likely to be a happy one.
Iulia accompanied her husband on his campaigns in Dalmatia (B.C. 11-10),
or at any rate awaited him at Aquileia, where a child was born and
died. But from that time forward the breach between them was always
widening. Tiberius seems to have remembered certain passages that had
passed between them while she was still the wife of Agrippa, and she
regarded him as her social inferior, and wrote a violent complaint of
his character and habits to Augustus—supposed to have been composed for
her by her lover, Sempronius Gracchus, who paid for that service by his
life in the first year of the next reign; and when in B.C. 6 Tiberius
retired to Rhodes, his motive seems to have been as much to escape her
company as to avoid the awkwardness of his political position. Left
thus to her own devices in the midst of a corrupt society, she seems
soon to have outdone all former excesses. She was beautiful—except that
she early had grey hair—witty and wilful: so wilful and capricious that
Augustus used to say that he had “two fanciful daughters whom he was
obliged to put up with—the state and Iulia.” She drew round her all the
rich and extravagant youth. At the amphitheatre, on one occasion, some
one pointed out the contrast between the respectable elderly personages
who surrounded Livia and the wild youth who formed her own train. “Oh!
they will grow old along with me!” she replied. To a graver friend, who
suggested that she would do better to imitate the economical habits of
her father, she retorted: “He forgets that he is a Cæsar; I remember that
I am Cæsar’s daughter.” Once the Emperor entered the room while she was
at her toilet and noticed that her tire women had been plucking out her
grey hairs. He stayed chatting on all kinds of subjects, and insensibly
led the conversation to the subject of old age. “Which would you prefer?”
he asked, “to be grey or bald?” “Oh, grey,” she replied. “Then I wonder,”
said he, “that you let these women make you bald so soon.” She had at
times given him some unpleasant doubts as to her conduct. She came to
see him once dressed in a meretricious style, which she knew would vex
him. Next day she reappeared dressed with complete decorum. He had said
nothing the day before, but now exclaimed, “Isn’t this a style more
becoming to a daughter of Augustus?” “Oh,” said she, “I dressed to-day
for my father to see, yesterday for my husband.”
He had never liked her mixing in general society as a girl. She and
his granddaughters, who lived in his house, were trained to spend
their time in women’s work, spinning wool, and the like, and to have
no secret conversations or idle talk; and he once wrote to a young
noble who had called on her while staying at Baiæ that “he had taken
a great liberty.” But in spite of such seclusion she had developed a
considerable knowledge of and taste for literature, and her cheerful
good nature made her popular at court and in society. Her father watched
her career as a married woman, and from time to time gave her half-grave
and half-playful hints as to her extravagance in dress and the style of
people that surrounded her. But he does not seem to have entertained
serious suspicions. Meanwhile she is said by our authorities not only
to have been indulging in numerous intrigues, but to have violated all
propriety and decency by joining in noisy revelry at night in the streets
and forum, and to have been present at parties where men stayed late and
drank deep. The crash came at a moment that seemed a culminating one in
the Emperor’s career, when a scandal must have been peculiarly trying.
[Sidenote: _Pater patriæ_, B.C. 2.]
Since the beginning of B.C. 8 Augustus had been at home. In that year
a fresh period of his various powers had been duly renewed by a vote
of the Senate, which had also honoured him by naming the month
Sextilis after him as “August,” and he had had the gratification of
welcoming Tiberius home from Germany victorious, and witnessing his
triumph. His young grandson Gaius was designated consul in B.C. 5 for
the sixth year from that time, and the next year he himself took that
office after an interval of eighteen years, that he might add dignity
to the ceremony of Gaius taking the _toga virilis_. Though vexed at
Tiberius’s retirement to Rhodes, he had good reason to hope that in the
two young Cæsars the succession was well provided for. In spite of some
uneasiness on the German frontier and among the Parthians, there was for
the time profound peace. At the beginning of B.C. 2 he was again consul,
in order to introduce the second grandson to the forum; and to show their
appreciation of his achievements, and their affection for his person, the
Senate at length voted to give him the title of “_pater patriæ_.” It was
first offered him by a popular deputation in his villa at Antium. He made
some difficulty about accepting it; but the next time he appeared at the
theatre or circus he was met by loud shouts, the whole people addressing
him by that title, and at the following meeting of the Senate on the
5th of February Valerius Messala was put up to address him formally:
“With prayers for your person and your house, Cæsar Augustus—for in
offering them we deem ourselves to be praying for the perpetual felicity
of the Republic and the prosperity of this city—we, the Senate, in full
accord with the Roman people, unanimously salute you as _Father of your
country_.” Augustus, rising with tears in his eyes and voice, could just
answer briefly, “My dearest wishes have been fulfilled, Fathers of the
Senate, and what is there left for me to ask of the immortal gods except
that I may retain this unanimous feeling of yours to the last day of my
life?”
Though the title had long been popularly applied to Augustus, this
was the first official recognition of it. It had very old historical
precedent, from Romulus to Iulius Cæsar. It was meant to be the highest
compliment which could be paid, but it conferred no new powers, though
in after-times some of the Emperors regarded it as giving them a kind of
paternal authority. Augustus was evidently highly gratified. The shows
given at his expense this year were of unusual magnificence: gladiators,
wild beast hunts, sham sea-fights on the flooded Transtiberine fields,
had all roused great enthusiasm, and a special festival in his honour
had been held at Naples—in the Greek fashion—as an expression of thanks
to him for assistance rendered in the distress caused by a recent
earthquake and eruption of Vesuvius. The year thus opened with unusual
cheerfulness, and though now past sixty he might feel encouraged by the
popular enthusiasm to continue his work with unabated energy.
[Sidenote: Detection of Iulia.]
Suddenly the disgrace that had been gathering round his house was
revealed to him. We are not told who enlightened him and turned the
suspicions which he had persistently put away into certainty. Of course
the natural suggestion is that it was Livia, between whom and Iulia,
as mother of the two young heirs who stood in the way of Livia’s son
Tiberius, there was no cordial feeling. The contrast in their ways of
life, and the remarks caused by it, no doubt reported by good-natured
friends, had not helped to make these relations any more pleasant. But
whoever was the informant, Augustus was at last thoroughly roused, and
thrown into the greatest state of agitation. Whatever may have been his
own private vices in the past, the decorum of the palace in which Livia
presided was unimpeached and highly valued by him. The pure atmosphere
of the Augustan house—Horace says—and the paternal care of the Emperor
were mainly the causes of the manly characters of Tiberius and Drusus,
and Horace always echoes what Augustus at any rate wished to be thought
true. To have the secrets of the family thus revealed to the multitude,
to the scorn of the hostile and the pity of the well-disposed, was no
doubt galling. He shunned society for some time and kept away from Rome.
He had also the additional annoyance of reflecting that the publicity
was greatly his own fault. In the heat of his anger he wrote to the
Senate and put the affair, more or less, in its hands. In cooler moments
he repented of this, and exclaimed that “it would never have happened
if Agrippa and Mæcenas had been alive.” Several men are said to have
suffered death on the charge, though we only know of two names, Iulius
Antonius and Sempronius Gracchus, the former of whom committed suicide,
while the latter was banished to an island on the African coast. Seneca,
who generally makes the worst of Augustus, says that he spared their
lives and punished them by banishment. The case of Iulius Antonius was
particularly bad. He was the son of Antony by Fulvia, had been brought up
by Octavia, married to her daughter Marcella, and by her influence and
the kindness of Augustus, had been prætor (B.C. 13) and consul (B.C. 10).
He had therefore been treated as a member of the family, and a highly
favoured one. Gracchus is said to have begun his intrigue while Iulia
was the wife of Agrippa, and to have helped to irritate her against her
husband Tiberius. But however guilty Iulia may have been, she did not
forfeit the popular affections. Again and again Augustus was assailed
by petitions to recall her. He passionately refused, exclaiming at last
to a more than usually persistent meeting, that he “would wish them all
daughters and wives like her.” The most that he could be persuaded to
grant was that at the end of five years she should be allowed to exchange
her island (Pandateria) for Rhegium, and to live under less stringent
conditions as to dress and food, and the servants who attended her. Her
mother, Scribonia, accompanied her into exile, and though Tiberius,
acting under the authority of Augustus, sent from Rhodes a message of
divorce, he made a formal request that she might be allowed to retain
whatever he had given her. The sincerity of such an intercession was
illustrated by the fact that on the death of Augustus he immediately
deprived her of all allowances. She, however, only survived her father a
few weeks. All this severity is perhaps best accounted for if we accept
the statement of Dio and Pliny, that she was charged not only with
adultery, but with joining in some plot against her father in favour
of her lover, Iulius Antonius.[310] At any rate it is difficult not to
feel some sympathy with a woman, married and re-married without choice
on her part or any question of affection, for nine years the wife of a
man as old as her father, and then transferred to another, whose heart
was fixed elsewhere, and whom his warmest admirers cannot describe as
one likely to be sympathetic or expansive, one in fact who began with a
strong prejudice against her. She knew also that her own mother, with
whom she seems to have kept up affectionate relations, had been turned
off immediately after her birth for no assignable reason, just as she had
been married for a momentary political object. She could have grown up
with no very deep reverence for her father’s morality or lofty ideas of
the marriage relationship.
[Sidenote: Death of Gaius and Lucius Cæsar, A.D. 2-4.]
From this time forward family misfortunes seemed to dog the steps of
Augustus for some years to come. The next blow was the death of the
two young sons of Iulia, Gaius and Lucius, whom he had adopted, had
personally educated in their childhood, and was training for their great
future. When the elder was only 15 (B.C. 5) he had been designated consul
for A.D. 1, and the Senate had voted that he and his brother might at
that age “take part in public business,” that is, might be employed in
any capacity the Emperor might choose directly they assumed the _toga
virilis_. Accordingly, in B.C. 1, Gaius was sent to the East, with a
pretty wide commission to visit the Eastern provinces. He seems to have
travelled considerable distances, and even entered Arabia. Tiberius,
who was then at Rhodes, crossed to Samos to greet him. The meeting,
however, was not a happy one. M. Lollius, the head of Gaius’s staff,
seems to have influenced the young prince against Tiberius, and induced
him to send home a report to the Emperor of certain indications that he
was contemplating some treasonable measures. Augustus candidly informed
Tiberius of this, and it was it seems partly from the necessity of
clearing himself, that at the earnest entreaty of his mother, he, two
years later, sought and obtained the permission of Augustus to return
to Rome. Meanwhile there had been wild talk among the staff of Gaius,
one of them expressing his readiness to sail to Rhodes and bring the
head of “the exile” back. He does not, however, appear to have forfeited
the confidence or affection of Augustus, who writes to him on the 23rd
September, A.D. 1: “Good day to you, Gaius, apple of my eye, whom by
heaven I continually miss when away. But it is especially on days such
as this one that my eyes seek for my Gaius; and wherever you have spent
it I hope that you have kept my sixty-fourth birthday in good health
and spirits. For you see I have safely passed the grand climacteric,
which for all old men is their 63rd year. Pray heaven that whatever
time remains for me I may spend with the knowledge that you and your
brother are safe and sound and the republic supremely prosperous, with
you playing the man and preparing to take up my work.” But these hopes
were doomed to be disappointed, as we have seen, by the treacherous
wound received at Artagera in Armenia in A.D. 4. Two years earlier his
younger brother, Lucius, had died suddenly and somewhat mysteriously at
Marseilles at the beginning of a progress through the Western provinces,
which was to form part of his political education. The fact that his
death corresponded nearly with the return of Tiberius from Rhodes gave
rise to suspicions that it had been caused by the machinations of Livia,
anxious to secure the succession for her son. Even the death of Gaius,
though so far away, was put down to the same malignant influence; for
it was argued that his wound was slight and had not been expected to
end fatally. Tacitus records that the detractors of the imperial family
were accustomed to remark that “Livia had been a fatal mother to the
republic, a fatal stepdame to the family of the Cæsars.” There is,
however, no scrap of evidence to connect her with either event. It is
doubtful whether the young men had shewn much promise; but their death
was treated as a matter for public mourning. At Pisæ, of which colony
they were “patrons,” there still exist two long and pompous inscriptions
(_Cenotaphia_) recording their death, speaking of the successful campaign
of Gaius in the East, ordering mourning “in view of the magnitude of so
great and unexpected a calamity,” and decreeing various honours to the
memory of Lucius “princeps iuventutis,” and of Gaius “princeps designate.”
[Sidenote: The succession.]
These losses were followed by the adoption of Tiberius by Augustus, and
that of Germanicus by Tiberius. The former had already several children,
so that the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons—by adoption—of
Augustus in A.D. 7, as recorded on the arch at Pavia, were Tiberius;
Germanicus; Drusus, son of Tiberius; Nero and Drusus, sons of Germanicus,
and Claudius, his brother. All these survived Augustus. But Tiberius and
Claudius alone reigned, Caligula was not born till five years later (A.D.
12).
[Sidenote: Fresh troubles. The younger Iulia.]
Augustus thus felt that the succession was well secured; but the last
decade of his life was destined in some ways to be the most troubled of
all. The German wars began again in A.D. 4, and culminated in the Varian
disaster of A.D. 9; while the difficulties and alarm were increased by
the dangerous risings in Pannonia and Dalmatia (A.D. 6-9), during which
Augustus remained for some time at Ariminum, to be within moderate
distance of the seat of war. A renewed outbreak of piracy also compelled
him to take over the management of Sardinia from the Senate for three
years (A.D. 6-9). This was partly the cause, perhaps, of the distress at
Rome in B.C. 6 from a rise in the price of corn, intensified by various
disastrous fires. The unrest thus created led to some more or less
dangerous conspiracies, such as that of Plautius Rufus, who was accused
of abetting disturbances and spreading seditious libels. Others were
connected with attempts to rescue Iulia at Rhegium and Agrippa Postumus
in Planasia, an island near Elba. We also hear of a plot of one Cornelius
Cinna, who however was pardoned and allowed to be consul in A.D. 4.
Seneca asserts that after this act of clemency the life of Augustus was
never attempted again; and Dio has recorded a conversation between him
and Livia in that year, in which, seeing her husband sleepless and torn
with continued anxieties, she recommended this policy of leniency. But
one last mortification remained for him. In A.D. 9 his granddaughter
Iulia was discovered to have followed her mother’s example. She was
married to Æmilius Paulus Lepidus, and had a son and a daughter Lepida,
once betrothed to the future Emperor Claudius, but never married to him.
Her lover, D. Silanus, was not banished to any definite place, but was
obliged to leave Rome, to which he was not allowed to return till A.D.
20, and then under disabilities for State employment. Iulia herself
was banished to the island Tremesus (_St. Domenico_), on the coast of
Apulia, where she remained till her death in A.D. 27, supported by an
allowance from Livia. We do not know enough of the affair to judge of
her guilt; but in some mysterious way her husband was involved in a
charge of treason about this time. In the same year the poet Ovid was
banished to Tomi, forty miles south of the mouth of the Danube, in a
district exposed to constant raids of the Sarmatians and Dacians. It has
always been supposed that this severity was connected with the affair of
Iulia, and that either he was one of her lovers, or was privy to some of
her intrigues, amatory or political. The reason assigned in the edict
appears to have been the licentiousness of his verse, and as Augustus
was just then engaged in reinforcing his laws against various forms of
immorality, and trying to encourage marriage as against concubinage,
this may have been partly the reason. Only as his most licentious poems
had been published seven years before it seems a little late in the
day. His own account of his misfortune—never outspoken—goes through two
phases. At first he seems to wish to attribute it all to his amatory
poems. “He is a poet destroyed by his own genius: his verses have been
his undoing: they deserved punishment, but sure not so heavy a one.”
But presently he began to own that there was something else: “Not,” he
says, “any political offence, no plot against the Emperor, no plan of
violence against the state. He had seen something he should not have
seen. He is ruined by his own simplicity and want of prudence, combined
with treachery on the part of friends and slaves. The exact cause he dare
not reveal, and yet it is well known at Rome.” Ovid was now fifty-two and
married for a third time to a wife connected distantly with the imperial
family. The chances are therefore against an intrigue with Iulia. There
is one other possible explanation; Ovid was at Elba when he got notice of
the edict, staying with his wife’s connection, Paulus Fabius Maximus, who
afterwards incurred the suspicion of Livia as favouring Agrippa Postumus,
confined in the neighbouring island of Planasia since B.C. 7. We know
from Suetonius that there was at least one plot to remove him, and it may
be that Ovid knew of it and even saw some of the conspirators.
However that may be, the other explanation is also possible: that
Augustus meant what he said, and regarded Ovid’s works as unwholesome.
He was what would be called in our time a “decadent” poet. He represents
the worst side of Roman society, as it began to be unfavourably affected
by that abstention from practical politics, which came to be the fashion
in the latter half of the reign of Augustus. He had himself refused to
take any office that would give him a seat in the Senate, and seemed to
think that to be the natural conduct of a man of taste and literature. He
was the mouthpiece of the gilded youth who sought in amorous intrigue,
and a fastidious dalliance with the Muses, a more congenial employment
than the performance of those duties to the state which no longer held
out promises of unlimited wealth or power. He was only cleverer than the
ruck of such men, and Augustus may possibly have selected him as the
representative of a tendency at which he was alarmed. Ovid was precisely
the sort of man to create the tone of society which had been the ruin of
his daughter and granddaughter. It is quite possible that being intimate
with such circles the poet may have known, or been supposed to know,
something inconvenient about the last scandal, and, at any rate, he would
be on the side of Iulia as against her grandfather. At the time of his
exile he was engaged, at the Emperor’s suggestion or request, on the
composition of the poetical Calendar or Fasti, which was incidentally to
celebrate the chief events of Roman history, and it has been suggested
that the story of Claudia’s vindication of her chastity (_Fast._ iv. 305
_sqq._) was intended as a veiled defence of the elder or younger Iulia.
Whatever the offence given, neither Augustus nor Tiberius could ever be
induced to allow his recall.
The poet’s abject language in praying to be allowed to return illustrates
incidentally the absolute supremacy of the Emperor, and the attribution
to him of divine honours and powers, the steady progress of which has
been noted in a previous chapter. We may also note that what Paris is to
the Parisians, Rome is to Ovid. Augustus and his ministers or friends had
made it the home of splendour and luxury. The poet fondly dwells on all
its beauties, pleasures, and conveniences, and, like a true Parisian,
can hardly conceive of life away from it, its games, its theatres, the
sports on the Campus, the lounge in the forum, or the wit and poetry
heard at the tables of the great. As the spring comes round in his
dreary, treeless dwelling on the Pontus, he thinks of the flowers and
vines of Italy, but, above all, of the pleasures of the city in April,
the month of festivals: “It is holiday with you now, and the wordy war of
the wrangling forum is giving place to the unbroken round of festivals.
The horses are in request, and the light foils are in play. The young
athletes, their shoulders glistening with oil, are bathing wearied limbs
in baths supplied by the virgin stream. The stage is in full swing, and
the audiences are clapping their favourite actors, and the three theatres
are echoing instead of the three forums. Oh four times, oh beyond all
counting, happy he who may enjoy the city unforbidden!” It had been the
object of Augustus to make the city splendid and attractive, and to
keep the citizens comfortable and contented and proud of their home. He
had doubtless succeeded; but it was sometimes at the cost of a lowered
standard of public duty and a growing devotion to personal ease and
enjoyment.