more difficult and complicated. Even after Pharsalia and Philippi it was
still a great name that it was necessary to treat with consideration.
Depressed as it was, the old aristocracy still caused some fear, and
seemed to deserve some regard. This is well seen by the care that
Augustus takes in his testament never to speak of the senate but with
respect. Its name comes up at every turn with a sort of affectation. We
should say indeed, if we trusted to appearances, that the senate was
then the master, and that the prince was contented to execute its
decrees. This is what Augustus wished to be believed. He passed all his
life in dissembling his authority or lamenting about it. From his royal
dwelling on the Palatine he wrote the most pathetic letters to the
senate asking to be relieved of the burden of public affairs, and he
never appeared to have a greater aversion for power than at the moment
when he was concentrating all powers in his own hands. It is not
extraordinary that we find these methods again in his testament: they
had succeeded too well with his contemporaries for him not to be tempted
to make use of them with posterity. Accordingly he continues to play the
same comedy of moderation and disinterestedness. He affects, for
instance, to insist as much upon the honours that he refused as upon
those that he accepted. “During the consulship of M. Marcellus and L.
Arruntius,” he says, “when the senate and people asked me to accept an
absolute authority,[385] I did not accept it. But I did not refuse to
undertake the supervision of supplies in a great famine, and by the
expenditure that I made I delivered the people from their fears and
dangers. When, in return, they offered me the consulship annually or for
life, I refused it.” This is not the only time that he dwells on his own
moderation. More than once again he refers to dignities or presents that
he would not accept. But here, indeed, is something that passes all
bounds; “In my sixth and seventh consulship, after having suppressed the
civil wars, when the common voice of all the citizens offered me the
supreme power, I restored the government of the republic to the senate
and people. As a recompense for this action I received the title of
Augustus by a decree of the senate, my door was encircled with laurels
and surmounted by a civic crown, and a golden shield was placed in the
Julian curia with an inscription recording that this honour was awarded
me as a mark of respect to my virtue, clemency, justice, and piety. From
this moment, although I was above the rest in dignity in the offices
with which I was invested, I never claimed more power than I allowed to
my colleagues.” This curious passage shows how inscriptions may deceive
if we trust them blindly. Would it not seem that we should be right in
concluding that in the year of Rome 726, the republic had been
re-established by the generosity of Augustus? Now it was exactly at this
period that the absolute power of the emperor was delivered from all
fear of attack from without and, being quietly accepted by everybody,
was finally established. Dio himself, the official Dio, who is so ready
to take the word of the emperor, cannot accept this falsehood of
Augustus; he ventures to show that he is not deceived, and has no
difficulty in proving that this government, under whatever name it is
disguised, was at bottom a monarchy; he might have added that there was
never a more absolute monarchy. A single man constituted himself the
heir of all the magistrates of the republic, and united all their powers
in himself. He ignored the people whom he no longer consulted; he is the
master of the senate, which he chooses and forms at will; at once consul
and pontif, he regulates actions and beliefs; invested with the
tribunitian power, he is inviolable and sacred, that is to say, that the
least word let fall against him becomes a sacrilege; as censor, under
the title of praefect of morals, he can control the conduct of private
persons, and interfere, when he likes, in the most private affairs of
life.[386] Everything is subordinated to him, private as well as public
life, and his authority can penetrate everywhere from the senate to the
most humble and obscure hearths. Add to this that the boundaries of his
empire are those of the civilized world; barbarism begins where slavery
ends, and there is not even the sad resource of exile against this
despotism. Yet it is the man who possesses this appalling power, whom
nothing in his immense empire escapes, and from whose empire it is
impossible to escape, it is he who has just told us with a bare-faced
assurance that he refused to accept absolute power!
It must be acknowledged that this absolute power, which he veiled with
so much precaution, sought also by every possible means to reconcile men
to itself. All the compensations which might make a people forget its
liberty were given to the Romans by Augustus with a free hand. I do not
speak only of that material prosperity which made the number of citizens
increase by nearly a million in his reign;[387] nor even of the repose
and security which, at the close of the civil war, was the most
imperious need of the whole world, but also of that incomparable
splendour with which he adorned Rome. This was a sure means of pleasing
the people. Caesar knew this well, and had expended one hundred million
sesterces (£800,000) at one time, simply in buying the ground on which
his Forum was to stand. Augustus did still more. The Ancyra inscription
contains a list of the public buildings he constructed, but it is so
long that it is impossible to quote it all. He mentions fifteen temples,
several porticoes, a theatre, a senate house, a Forum, a basilica,
aqueducts, public roads, etc.; in truth Rome was entirely reconstructed
by him. We may say that no public building was passed over by him, and
that he restored all those that he did not rebuild. He completed
Pompey’s theatre and the Forum of Caesar, and rebuilt the Capitol; in a
single year he repaired eighty-two temples that were falling into ruin.
He did not expend so many millions without a purpose, and all this
profusion in such a careful ruler covered a profound political design.
He wished to dazzle the people, to intoxicate them with luxury and
magnificence in order to divert them from the intrusive memories of the
past. That Rome of marble that he built was intended to make them forget
the Rome of brick.
This was not the only compensation that Augustus offered to the people;
he made them nobler amends, and thus sought to legitimatize his power.
If he demanded the sacrifice of their liberty he took care to gratify
their national pride in every way. No man compelled the respect of
foreign nations for Rome more than he; no man gave her more reason for
pride in the ascendency she enjoyed among her neighbours. The latter
part of the inscription is filled with the gratifying recital of the
marks of respect that the remotest countries of the world paid to Rome
under his reign. He was eager to direct their attention towards this
external glory, lest they should fix it with some regret on what was
taking place at home. Those citizens whom the aspect of the deserted
Forum and the obedient senate depressed, he pointed to the Roman armies
penetrating among the Pannonians and the Arabs, to the Roman fleets
navigating the Rhine and the Danube, to the kings of the Britons, the
Suevi, and the Marcomanni, refugees at Rome, imploring the support of
the legions, to the Medes and Parthians, those terrible enemies of Rome,
who asked of her a king, to the most distant nations, the least known
and the best protected by their distance and their obscurity, moved by
this great name that reaches them for the first time and soliciting the
Roman alliance. “Ambassadors came to me from India, from kings who had
never yet sent to any Roman general. The Bastarnae, the Scythians, and
the Sarmatians who dwell on this side the Tanaïs, and beyond that river,
the kings of the Albanians, the Hiberi and the Medes sent ambassadors to
me asking our friendship.” It was very difficult for the most
discontented to hold out against so much grandeur. But his greatest
master-stroke was that he extended this consideration for the glory of
Rome even to the past. He honoured all who had laboured for her at all
times, says Suetonius,[388] almost as much as the gods; and to show that
none was excluded from this veneration, he raised again the statue of
Pompey, at the base of which Caesar had fallen, and set it up in a
public place. This generous conduct was also a wise policy. By claiming
a share in the glories of the past, he disarmed, by anticipation, those
men who might be tempted to use them against him, and, at the same time,
gave a species of sanction to his authority by attaching it in some sort
to these old memories. Whatever difference might distinguish the
government that he founded from that of the republic, both agreed on one
point: they sought the greatness of Rome. Augustus tried to reconcile
the past with the present on this common ground. He also had adorned
Rome, defended her frontiers, extended her empire, and made her name
respected. He had continued and completed that work on which they had
laboured for seven centuries. He might, then, call himself the
continuator and heir of all those who had set their hand to it; of Cato,
Paulus Emilius, and Scipio, and rank himself among them. He did not fail
to do so when he built the Forum that bore his name; we know from
Suetonius that, under those porticoes raised by him and filled with the
records of his actions, he ranged all the great men of the republic in
triumphal costume. This was the highest point of his political skill,
for by connecting them with his glory he received in turn a share of
theirs, and thus turned to his own advantage the greatness of the
political order which he had overturned.
These compensations that Augustus offered to the Romans in exchange for
their liberty seem to have satisfied them. Every one quickly got
accustomed to the new government, and it may be said that Augustus
reigned without opposition. The plots which more than once threatened
his life were the crimes of a few isolated malcontents, of young
thoughtless fellows whom he had disgraced, or of vulgar and ambitious
men who desired his position; they were not the work of political
parties. Can it even be said that there were any political parties at
this moment? Those of Sextus Pompey and Antony had not survived the
death of their chiefs; and, since Philippi, there were scarcely any
republicans. From that moment all wise men adopted the maxim “that the
vast body of the empire could not stand upright and stable without some
one to direct it.” A few obstinate men alone, who were not yet
converted, wrote violent declamations in the schools under the name of
Erutus and Cicero, or allowed themselves to speak freely in those polite
gatherings which were the _salons_ of that time: _in conviviis rodunt_,
_in circulis vellicant_. But those were unimportant exceptions which
disappeared in the midst of the universal admiration and respect. During
more than fifty years the senate, the knights, and the people used all
their ingenuity to find new honours for him who had given Rome internal
peace, and who maintained her grandeur so vigorously abroad. Augustus
has been careful to recall all this homage in the inscription we are
studying, not in a fit of puerile vanity, but to represent that
agreement of all orders in the state which seemed to legitimatize his
authority. This idea is shown especially in the last lines of the
inscription, where he recalls that circumstance of his life which was
most dear to him, because in it the agreement of all citizens had most
strikingly appeared: “While I was consul for the thirteenth time, the
senate, the order of knights, and all the people gave me the name of
Father of our Country, and desired that this should be inscribed in the
vestibule of my house, in the curia, and in my Forum, below the
quadrigae which had been placed there in my honour by a decree of the
senate. When I wrote these things I was in my seventy-sixth year.” It
was not without reason that he reserved this detail for the end. This
title of Father of his Country, by which he was saluted in the name of
all the citizens by Messala, the old friend of Brutus, seemed to be the
legal consecration of a power acquired by illegal means and a sort of
amnesty that Rome accorded to the past. We can well understand that
Augustus, even when dying, dwelt with satisfaction on a recollection
which seemed like an absolution, and that he was anxious to terminate in
this fashion his review of his political life.
II.
I should like to give, in a few words, the impression that the analysis
of this remarkable inscription makes upon me as to its author.
The whole political life of Augustus is contained in two official
documents which, by singular good fortune, have both come down to us; I
mean the preamble of the edict of proscription that Octavius signed,
and, according to all appearance, drew up himself, which Appian has
preserved; and the inscription found on the walls of the temple of
Ancyra. The former shows us what Octavius was at twenty, fresh from the
hands of the rhetoricians and philosophers, with all the genuine
instincts of his nature; the latter, what he became after fifty-six
years of uncontrolled and unlimited power; it is sufficient to compare
them in order to discover the road he had traversed, and the changes
that the knowledge of men and the practice of public affairs had wrought
in him.
The possession of power had made him better, a thing which is not usual,
and after him Roman history only gives us examples of princes depraved
by power. From the battle of Philippi to that of Actium, or rather to
the moment when he seems formally to ask pardon of the world by
abolishing all the acts of the triumvirate, we feel that he is striving
to become better, and we can almost follow the steps of his progress. I
do not think that we could find another example of so strong an effort
at self-conquest, and so complete a success in overcoming one’s natural
disposition. He was naturally a coward, and hid himself in his tent in
his first battle. I know not how he did it, but he succeeded in
acquiring courage; he became inured to war in fighting against Sextus
Pompey, and even courageous in the expedition against the Dalmatians, in
which he was twice wounded. He was cynical and debauched, and the orgies
of his youth, as related by Suetonius, do not yield to Antony’s; yet he
corrected himself at the very moment that he became absolute master,
that is just when his passions would have met with the fewest obstacles.
He was naturally cruel, and coldly cruel, a disposition which does not
often change; and yet, after having begun by assassinating his
benefactors, he ended by sparing those who attempted his assassination,
and the philosopher Seneca could call the same man a clement prince[389]
whom his best friend, Maecenas, had once called a common executioner.
Certainly the man who signed the edict of proscription hardly seems to
be the same as the man who wrote the testament, and it is indeed matter
for wonder that a man who began as he did was able to change so
completely, and to assume a virtuous character, or the appearance of
one, in the place of all the vices that were natural to him.
Nevertheless we should find it difficult to love him, whatever justice
we are bound to do him. We may be wrong after all; for reason tells us
that we ought to appreciate people more for the qualities they acquire
by thus triumphing over themselves than for those they have by nature,
without taking any trouble. And yet, I hardly know why, it is only the
latter that please us; the former lack a certain charm that nature alone
gives and which wins our hearts. The effort is too apparent in them, and
behind the effort some personal interest; for we always suspect that a
man has taken so much pains only because there was some advantage to be
gained. This sort of acquired goodness, in which reason has a greater
share than nature, attracts no one, because it appears to be the product
of a calculating mind, and it is this feeling that causes all the
virtues of Augustus to leave us unmoved, and to seem at the most but the
results of a profound sagacity. They want a touch of nature and
simplicity in order to affect us. These are qualities that this stiff
and formal personage never knew, although according to Suetonius he
gladly assumed an appearance of plain manners and good-nature in his
familiar intercourse. But one is not a good fellow simply through
wishing to be it, and his private letters, of which we have a few
fragments, show that his pleasantries lacked ease, and that his
simplicity was the result of effort. Do we not know, besides, from
Suetonius himself, that he wrote down what he meant to say to his
friends, in order to leave nothing to chance, and that he even
occasionally wrote down his conversations with Livia beforehand?[390]
But, after all, that which spoils Augustus in our opinion is that he
stands so near Caesar; the contrast between them is complete. Caesar,
not to speak of what was really great and brilliant in his nature,
attracts us at once by his frankness. His ambition may displease us, but
he had at least the merit of not hiding it. I do not know why M. Mommsen
exerts himself in his _Roman History_ to prove that Caesar did not care
for the diadem, and that Antony, when he offered it, had not consulted
him. I prefer to hold to the common opinion which, I think, does not do
him wrong. He wished to be king, and to bear the title as well as to
exercise the power. He never made pretence of waiting to be asked to
accept honours that he passionately desired, as Augustus did. He was not
the man to make us believe that he only retained the supreme authority
with reluctance, and would not have dared to tell us, at the very moment
that he was drawing all powers into his hands, that he had restored the
government of the republic to the people and senate. We know, on the
contrary, that after Pharsalia he said frankly that “the republic” was a
phrase without meaning, and that Sulla was a fool to have abdicated the
dictatorship. In everything, even in questions of literature and
grammar, he was a bold innovator, and he did not display a hypocritical
respect for the past at the very time that he was destroying what had
come down from it. This frankness is more to our taste than the false
appearance of veneration that Augustus lavished on the senate after
reducing it to impotence; and whatever admiration Suetonius may express
for him, when he shows him to us, obsequiously saluting each senator by
name, before the sittings commenced, I am not sure that I do not prefer
the disrespectful behaviour of Caesar to this comedy, Caesar who at last
went so far as not to rise when the senate visited him. Both appeared
weary of power, but it never came into any one’s mind to think that
Augustus was speaking the truth when he asked so earnestly to be
restored to private life. The distaste of Caesar was deeper and more
sincere. That sovereign power, that he had sought after for more than
twenty years with an indefatigable persistence, through so many perils,
and by means of dark intrigues the remembrance of which must have made
him blush, did not answer to his expectations, and appeared unsatisfying
to him though he had so eagerly desired it. He knew that he was detested
by the men whose esteem he most desired; he was constrained to make use
of men whom he despised, and whose excesses dishonoured his victory; the
higher he rose, the more unpleasing did human nature appear to him, and
the more clearly did he see the base greed and cowardly treachery of
those who intrigued at his feet. He came at last, through disgust, to
have no interest in life; it seemed to him to be no longer worth the
trouble of preserving and defending. It is, therefore, the same man who
said, even at the period when Cicero delivered the _pro Marcello_: “I
have lived long enough for nature or for glory;” who later, when he was
pressed to take precautions against his assassins, answered in a tone of
despondency: “I would rather die at once than live in fear;” who might
well have said with Corneille:
“I desired the empire and I have attained to it;
But I knew not what it was that I desired:
In its possession I have found, instead of delights,
Appalling cares, continual alarms,
A thousand secret enemies, death at every turn,
No pleasure without alloy, and never repose.”
These fine lines please me less, I admit, put into the mouth of
Augustus. This cautious politician, so cold, so self-possessed, does not
seem to me to have really known that noble sadness that reveals the man
in the hero, that melancholy of a heart ill at ease, notwithstanding its
successes, and disgusted with power through the very exercise of power.
Whatever admiration I may feel for that fine scene in which Augustus
proposes to abdicate the empire, I cannot avoid being a little vexed
with Corneille that he took so seriously and depicted so gravely that
solemn piece of acting which deceived nobody in Rome, and when I wish to
render my pleasure complete in reading the tragedy of _Cinna_, I am
always tempted to replace the character of Augustus by that of Caesar.
I add, in conclusion, that all these insincere affectations of Augustus
were not only defects of character, but also political errors which left
most unfortunate effects on the government that he had created. It was
precisely the uncertainty that the interested falsehoods of Augustus had
thrown upon the real nature and limits of the power of the earlier
Caesars that rendered their tyranny insupportable. When a government
boldly states its principles we know how to behave towards it; but what
course is to be followed, what language held when the forms of liberty
are united with the reality of despotism, when absolute power hides
under republican fictions? In the midst of this obscurity every course
has danger and threatens ruin. Men are ruined by independence, they may
also be ruined by servility; for, if he who refuses anything to the
emperor is an open enemy who regrets the republic, may not he who
eagerly grants everything be a secret enemy, who wishes to show that the
republic no longer exists? In studying Tacitus we find the statesmen of
this terrible period moving at random among these wilfully accumulated
uncertainties, stumbling at every step over unseen dangers, liable to
displease if they are silent or if they speak, if they flatter or if
they resist, continually asking themselves with dread how they can
satisfy this ambiguous and ill-defined authority whose limits escape
them. This want of sincerity in the institutions of Augustus may be said
to have been the torment of several generations. All the evil came
because Augustus thought more of the present than of the future. He was
an able man, full of resources in escaping from embarrassing and
difficult situations; he was not in reality a great politician, for it
seems that his view seldom extended beyond the difficulties of the
moment. Placed face to face with a people who bore the kingship
uneasily, and who were not fit for anything else, he invented this sort
of disguised kingship, and allowed all the forms of the old government
to exist by its side without endeavouring to conform them to it. But if
he was not so great a politician as it has been pretended, it must be
admitted that he was an excellent administrator; that part of his work
deserves all the praise that has been lavished on it. By co-ordinating
all the wise observances and useful regulations that the republic had
created, by putting in force lost traditions, by himself creating new
institutions for the administration of Rome, the service of the legions,
the handling of the finances and the government of the provinces, he
organized the empire and thus rendered it capable of resisting external
enemies and internal causes of dissolution. If, notwithstanding a
detestable political system, the general lowering of character, and the
vices of the governors and the governed, the empire still had a time of
prosperity and lasted three centuries, it owed it to the powerful
organization it had received from Augustus. This was the really vital
part of his work. It is important enough to justify the testimony that
he bears to himself in that haughty phrase of the Ancyran inscription:
“I made new laws. I restored to honour the examples of our forefathers
which were disappearing from our manners, and I have myself left
examples worthy of being imitated by our descendants.”
III.
It was no doubt about the middle of the reign, when he who was the
absolute master of the republic was pretending to restore the government
to the people and senate, that Cicero’s letters appeared. The exact date
of their publication is unknown; but everything tends to the belief that
it should be placed in the years that followed the battle of Actium. The
power of Augustus, become more popular since it had become more
moderate, felt itself strong enough to allow some liberty of writing. It
was mistrustful before that time because it was not sufficiently
consolidated; it became so again later when it perceived that public
favour was passing from it. This reign, which began by proscribing men,
ended by burning books. Cicero’s correspondence could only have been
published in the interval that separates these periods.
No one has told us what impression it produced on those who read it for
the first time; but it may be fearlessly asserted that it was a very
lively impression. The civil wars had only just ended, up till that time
men were only occupied with present ills; in those misfortunes no man’s
mind was sufficiently free to think of the past, but in the first period
of tranquillity which that troubled generation knew, it hastened to
throw a glance backward. Whether it sought to account for the events
that had happened or wished to enjoy that bitter pleasure which is
found, according to the poet, in the recollections of former sufferings,
it retraced the sad years it had just traversed, and wished to go back
to the very beginning of that struggle whose end it had seen. Nothing
could satisfy their curiosity better than Cicero’s letters, and it
cannot therefore be doubtful that everybody at that time eagerly read
them.