AUGUSTUS—THE REVIVAL OF THE ROMAN SPIRIT
The death of Julius Cæsar seemed to plunge the world once more into
darkness. We have evidence enough of the general feeling of horror and
despair,—a despair hard to realise in our days, when settled and orderly
government saves us from all serious anxiety about our lives and
property. Power fell into the hands of a far more unscrupulous man than
Cæsar, the Mark Antony of Shakespeare’s play; but he had a rival in
Cæsar’s nephew and adopted son, afterwards known as Augustus. Civil war,
of course, followed: first, war between these two and the murderers of
Julius, and then war between the two victors. Antony, who had in a
division of the Empire taken the eastern half, and married Cleopatra,
the beautiful queen of Egypt, was crushed at the naval battle of Actium:
the Empire became once more united, and hope began to spring up afresh.
Instead of following the melancholy history of these years (44 to 31
B.C.) let us try to realise the need of a complete change in men’s minds
and in the ways of government, if the Roman Empire was to be preserved,
and Mediterranean civilisation with it. We can best do this by learning
something of the two men who more than all others brought about the
change: Virgil, the greatest of Roman poets, and Augustus, the most
fortunate and discerning of Roman statesmen. Augustus began a new system
of government, based, no doubt, on the ideas of Julius, which lasted,
gradually developing itself, till the fifth century of our era. Virgil,
the poet of the new Roman spirit, kept that spirit alive into the Middle
Ages, and rightly read, he keeps it still before us.
If Virgil had lived in an ordinary age, when the flow of events was
smooth and unruffled, he might have been a great poet, but hardly one of
the world’s greatest. But he lived in a crisis of the history of
civilisation, and he was called to do his part in it. For a century
before he wrote, the one great fact in the world was the marvellous
growth of the Roman dominion. When he was born, seventy years before the
Christian era, Rome was the only great civilised power left, and a few
years later it looked as if she had not even a barbarian rival to menace
her, except the Parthians far away in the East. The Roman was
everywhere, fighting, trading, ruling; nothing of importance could be
done without the thought—What will Rome say to it?
Yet just as Virgil was growing to manhood it became obvious, as we have
seen, that this great power was in reality on the verge of breaking up.
She had abandoned justice and duty, and given herself to greed and
pleasure. Her government was rapacious: she was sucking the life-blood
of the nations. She had lost her old virtues of self-sacrifice, purity
of family life, reverence for the divine. The rulers of the world had
lost the sense of duty and discipline; they were divided into jarring
political factions, and had felt the bitterness of civil war, in which
men killed each other in cold blood almost for the sake of killing. But
with Julius Cæsar’s strong hand and generous temper it must have seemed
to many that a better time was coming, and among these was the young
poet from Mantua under the rampart of the Alps.
No one who knows Virgil’s poems well can have any doubt that all his
hopes for himself and his family, for Italy and the Empire, were bound
up with the family of the Cæsars. The sub-alpine region in which he was
born and bred had been for ten years of his boyhood and youth under the
personal rule of the great Julius, and had supplied him with the flower
of that famous army that had conquered first Gaul and then the world. It
is possible that the poet owed his position as a Roman citizen to the
enlightened policy of Cæsar. Even now we cannot read without a thrill of
horror the splendid lines in which he records the eclipse of the sun and
the mourning of all nature when the great man was murdered by so-called
patriots.[12] With such patriots, with the rapacious republican
oligarchy, he could have had no sympathy, and there is not a trace of it
in his poems. When, during the civil wars that followed the murder, he
was turned out of his ancestral farm near Mantua to make room for
veteran soldiers, he owed the recovery of it to the master of those
soldiers, the second Cæsar, whom henceforward he regarded not only as
his own protector and friend, but as the one hope of the Empire.
Now this younger Cæsar, nephew and adopted son of Julius, though not a
great soldier or a hero in any sense, was yet one of those rare men who
learn wisdom in adversity, and use it to overcome passion and violence
in themselves and others. He came gradually to see that Italy and the
world could not be rescued from misery and despair by war and strong
government alone. He grasped the fact, which Sulla had missed, that the
one thing wanting was loyalty—loyalty to himself and belief in his
mission: loyalty to Rome and Italy, and belief in their mission in the
world. Confidence in him, and in the destiny of Rome, might create in
men’s minds a hope for the future, a new self-respect, almost a new
faith. Divided and depressed as they were, he wanted to set new ideals
before them, and to get them to help him loyally towards the realisation
of those ideals. Economically, morally, religiously, Italy was to rise
to new life in an era of peace and justice.
This may seem too grand an ideal for a man like Augustus Cæsar, who (as
I have said) was no hero, and who certainly was no philosopher. But it
is none the less true that he understood that “peace hath her victories
no less renowned than war”: and that his own conviction, based, perhaps,
on shrewd political reasonings, inspired his poets and historians to
hail a new age of peace and prosperity. In one way or another they all
fell in with his ideas. Their themes are the glory and beauty of Italy,
the greatness of Rome, the divine power which had given her the right to
rule the world, and the story of the way in which she had come to
exercise that right. But as Virgil is the greatest figure in the group,
so is his _Æneid_ the greatest work in which those ideas are
immortalised. The Roman Empire has vanished, the ancient city, which
rose in fresh magnificence under Augustus, has crumbled away; but the
_Æneid_ remains the one enduring monument of that age of new hope.
It is said that Augustus himself suggested to the poet the subject of
the _Æneid_. If so, it was characteristic of a man who used every chance
of extending his own fame and influence without forcing them on the
attention of his people. If a poem was to be written on the great theme
of the revival of Rome and Italy, Augustus himself could not of course
be the hero of it, nor even Julius: political and artistic feeling alike
forbade. But a hero it must have, and he must be placed, not in the
burning light of the politics of the day, but in the dim distance of the
past. Such a hero was found in the mythical ancestor of the Julian
family, Æneas, son of Venus and Anchises. A legend, familiar to educated
Romans, told how this Trojan hero, whose personality appears in Homer,
wandered over the seas after the fall of Troy, and landed at last in
Italy; how he subdued the wild tribes then dwelling in Latium, brought
peace and order and civilisation, and was under the hand of destiny the
founder of the great career of Rome. His son Iulus, whose name the Julii
believed themselves to bear, was in the legend the founder of the city
from which Rome herself was founded; and thus the family of the Cæsars,
the rescue of Italy from barbarism, and the foundation of the Eternal
City, might all be brought into connexion with the story of Æneas the
Trojan. Here, then, was the hero, the type of which the antitype was to
be found in Augustus.
And this is how the _Æneid_ became a great national and a great imperial
poem. It created a national hero, and endowed him with the best
characteristics of his race, and especially with that sense of duty
which the Romans called _pietas_: this is why it became a great national
poem. It connected him with the famous stories of Greece and of Troy,
and made him prophetically the ancestor of the man who was rescuing the
Empire from ruin: this is why it became a great imperial poem. The idea
was a noble one, and Virgil rose to his subject. Though the _Æneid_ has
drawbacks which for a modern reader detract from the general effect, yet
whenever the poet comes upon his great theme the tone is that of a full
organ. Even in a translation, though he cannot feel the witchery of
Virgil’s magic touch, the reader may recognise and welcome the
recurrence of that great theme, and so learn how its treatment made the
poem the world’s second great epic. It instantly took a firm hold on the
Roman mind; it came to be looked on almost as a sacred book, loved and
honoured as much by Christian Fathers as by pagan scholars. Italy has
given the world two of the greatest poems ever written: the _Æneid_ of
Virgil, and the _Divina Commedia_ of Dante, in which the younger poet
took the imaginary figure of his predecessor as his guide and teacher in
his travel through the scenes of the nether world.
But we must now leave poetry for fact and action, and try to gain some
idea of that work of Augustus which laid the solid foundation of a new
imperial system; a system of which we moderns not only see the relics
still around us, but feel unconsciously the influence in many ways.
Augustus had found time to discover, since the death of Julius, that the
work to be done would fall mainly into two great departments: (1) Rome
and Italy must be loyal, contented, and at peace; (2) the rest of the
Empire must be governed justly and efficiently. To this we must add that
the whole must contribute, each part in due proportion, to its own
defence and government, both by paying taxes and by military service.
1. The city of Rome, with a population of perhaps half a million, of all
races and degrees, had been a constant anxiety to Augustus so far, and
had exercised far more power in the Empire than such a mixed and idle
population was entitled to. He saw that this population must be well
policed, and induced to keep itself in order as far as possible; that it
must be made quite comfortable, run no risk of starvation, have
confidence in the good-will of its gods, and enjoy plenty of amusement.
Above all, it must believe in himself, in order to be loyal to his
policy. When he returned to Rome after crushing Antony and Cleopatra,
the Romans were already disposed to believe in him, and he did all he
could to make them permanently and freely loyal. He divided the city
into new sections for police purposes, and recruited corps of “watchmen”
from the free population; he restored temples and priesthoods, erected
many pleasant and convenient public buildings (thus incidentally giving
plenty of employment), organised the supply of corn and of water, and
encouraged public amusements by his own presence at them. He took care
that no one should starve, or become so uncomfortable as to murmur or
rebel.
But, on the other hand, he did not mean this motley population to
continue to have undue influence on the affairs of the Empire. True, he
gave them back their Free State (_respublica_), and you might see
magistrates, Senate, and assemblies in the city, just as under the
Republic. But the people of the city had henceforth little political
power. The consuls and Senate were indeed far from idle, but the
assemblies for election and legislation soon ceased to be realities. In
elections no money was now to be gained by a vote, and in legislation
the “people” were quite content with sanctioning the wisdom of Augustus
and his advisers. At the beginning of the next reign it was possible to
put nearly the whole of this business into the hands of the Senate, and
the Roman people made no objection. Seeing that they were only a
fraction of the free population of the Empire, it was as well that this
should be so; the rest of the citizen body could not use their votes at
a distance from Rome, and the Senate and the _princeps_[13] (as Augustus
and his immediate successors were called) represented the interests of
the Empire far better than the crowd of voters.
Of the work of Augustus in Italy we unluckily know very little, but what
we do know shows that he worked on much the same principles as in the
city. Italy was made safe and comfortable, and was now free from all
warlike disturbance for a long period. Brigandage was suppressed: roads
were repaired: agriculture and country life were encouraged in all
possible ways. A book on agriculture written even in Augustus’s earlier
years boasts of the prosperity of rural Italy, and Virgil’s poem on
husbandry is full of the love and praise of Italian life and scenery.
Here is a specimen—
“But no, not Medeland with its wealth of woods,
Fair Ganges, Hermus thick with golden silt,
Can match the praise of Italy....
Here blooms perpetual spring, and summer here
In months that are not summer’s; twice teem the flocks:
Twice does the tree yield service of her fruit.
. . . . . . .
Mark too her cities, so many and so proud,
Of mighty toil the achievement, town on town
Up rugged precipices heaved and reared,
And rivers gliding under ancient walls.”[14]
2. The peaceful state of Rome and Italy made it possible for Augustus to
undertake, in person to a great extent, the more important work of
organising the rest of the Empire. He found it in a state of chaos
almost as great as that of the Turkish Empire in our own time. He left
it a strongly compacted union of provinces and dependent kingdoms
grouped around the Mediterranean, which for a long time to come served
two valuable purposes. First, it protected Mediterranean civilisation
against barbarian attack, the most valuable thing done for us (as I said
in my first chapter) by Roman organisation. Secondly, it gave free
opportunity for the growth of that enlightened system of law which has
been the other chief gift of Rome to modern civilisation. And also,
though without any purpose on the part of the government—nay, in spite
of its strenuous opposition—it made possible the rapid growth of
Christianity, during the next half-century, which seized on the great
towns and the main lines of communication to spread itself among the
masses of the people.
Augustus was able to do all this work beyond Italy quite legally, and as
a servant of the State. He had succeeded in identifying himself, his
family, and all his interests, with the State and its interests, in a
way of which Sulla had never dreamt, and which had not been possible for
Julius Cæsar. When he restored the Free State he divided the work of
government with the Senate and the magistrates, and in this division he
took care that the whole range of what we should call imperial and
foreign affairs should fall to himself, with the sole command of the
army. Thus he became supreme ruler of all provinces on or near the
frontiers, appointed their governors, and kept them responsible to
himself. If there was war on a frontier, it was carried through by his
lieutenants, under his _imperium_ and his auspices. For a governor to
wage war on his own account was no longer possible, for it was made high
treason under a new and stringent law. The safety of the Empire, and
especially of the frontier provinces, depended on the army, and the army
was now identified once more in interest through Augustus with the
State.
But of course a system like this would not work of itself; it needed
constant looking after. Augustus knew this well, and knew also that he
could not by himself either set it going or continue to look after it.
It was part of his good fortune that he found a really capable and loyal
helper in Agrippa, a tried soldier and organiser, who till his death in
12 B.C., during the most prosperous years of Augustus’s power, was able
to identify his own interests with those of his friend and the State.
The two worked admirably together, and between them found time to travel
over the whole Empire, working hard at settlements of all kinds, and
conducting military operations where they were absolutely necessary. It
was the same kind of work, but on a far larger scale, as that of
Pompeius after his conquests in the East: founding new cities, and
settling the status of old ones: making treaties with kings and
chieftains: arranging the details of finance, land-tenure, and so on.
Let us notice two important points in all this work of organisation,
which will help to show how greatly in earnest Augustus was in his task
of welding the Empire into real unity, and ruling it on rational
principles.
First, he instituted for the first time (though Julius is said to have
contemplated it) a complete survey, or _census_ as the Romans called it,
of all the material resources of the Empire, in order to ascertain what
taxes all its free inhabitants ought to pay for purposes of government.
Under the Republic there had never been such a survey, and the result
was that abundant opportunity had been found for unfair taxation, and
for extortion by corrupt officials. Now every house, field, and wood was
duly valued by responsible officials, so that unjust exactions could be
easily detected. By accurate keeping of accounts the government was able
to tell what sums it ought to receive, and how much it had to spend; and
we know that Augustus’s foreign policy was greatly influenced by such
financial considerations. He kept a kind of yearly balance-sheet
himself, and his successor found the affairs of the Empire in perfect
order.
Secondly, each province was now for the first time given a kind of
corporate existence, and became something more than the military command
of a Roman magistrate. A council of the province met once a year at its
chief town, and transacted a certain amount of business. True, this did
not give the province any measure of real self-government, but it had
some useful results, and it is not impossible that Augustus may have
intended that more should eventually follow. This meeting of a
provincial council brought each province into direct touch with the home
government, and in particular enabled it to make complaint of its
governor if he had been unpopular and oppressive. And one most
interesting feature of these councils was that they had a worship of
their own, meant, no doubt, to dim the lustre of local and tribal
worships, and to keep the idea of Rome and her rulers constantly before
the minds of the provincials. For the divine objects of worship were
Augustus himself or his Genius, in combination with the new goddess
Roma. The most famous example of this worship is found at Lugdunum, now
Lyons, where there was an altar dedicated to Rome and Augustus, at the
junction of Rhone and Saone, which served as a religious centre for the
three provinces into which Augustus now divided the great area of the
Gallic conquests of Julius.
Though his object was undoubtedly peace, Augustus could not, of course,
entirely escape war on his frontiers. He could not have finally settled
the frontier on the line of the Danube, which was far the most valuable
military work of his time, without wars which were both long and
dangerous. It was absolutely necessary to cover Italy on the northeast,
where the passes over the Alps are low and comparatively easy, and also
to shield the Greek peninsula from attack by the wild tribes to the
north of it. I have already alluded to the great work of Tiberius (the
stepson of Augustus) in this quarter, which marks him as the third of
the great generals who saved the civilisation of the Mediterranean for
us. At one time Augustus thought of advancing the frontier from the
Rhine to the Elbe, and so of connecting Elbe and Danube in one
continuous line of defence. But this plan made it necessary to enclose
all Germany west of the Elbe in the Roman Empire, and it was soon found
that the Germans were not to be made into Roman provincials without a
prolonged struggle for which Augustus had neither money nor inclination.
So the frontier came back to the Rhine, and the Rhine and the sea marked
the Roman frontier on north and west, until Claudius, the third
successor of Augustus, added our island, or rather the southern part of
it, to the Empire, in A.D. 43.
In the East Augustus contrived to do without war, trusting, and rightly
trusting, to the enormous prestige he had won by overcoming Antony and
Cleopatra, and annexing the ancient kingdom of Egypt. His fame spread to
India, and probably even to China, with the caravans of merchants who
then as now passed along fixed routes from Syria and Egypt to the Far
East. We Britons know what _prestige_ can do among Orientals; it is a
word that has often been in disfavour, but it means that there are ways
of avoiding war without withdrawing just claims to influence. Augustus
contrived on the strength of his prestige to keep an honourable peace
with the Parthians and Armenians who bordered on the Empire along the
line of the Euphrates, and his successors would have kept it too had
they always followed out his policy. Tiberius, his faithful pupil and
successor, did follow out that policy, and showed consummate skill in
handling it.
The mention of Tiberius, who succeeded to the position of Augustus at
the end of his long life, suggests a few words about a weak point in the
new system, which was to give some trouble in the future. How was the
succession to be effected? Augustus had not made a new constitution; he
had only engrafted his own position of authority on the old republican
constitution. So at least he wished his position to be understood, and
so he was careful to describe it in the record of his deeds which he
left behind him, engraved on the walls of the great tomb which he built
for himself and his family. In dignity and consequence he wished to be
considered the first citizen; and this he expressed by the word
_Princeps_, _i.e._ the first man in the State: by the name Augustus,
which suggested to a Roman ear something in the nature of religious
sanctity: by the honorary title _pater patriæ_ (father of his country),
and in other ways. The real power in his hands had its basis and
guarantee in the army, of which his _imperium_ made him (as we should
say) commander-in-chief; but the army was on the frontiers doing duty
for the Empire, all but invisible to the Roman and Italian. Thus his
_imperium_, though it might be legally used in Italy, was primarily a
military power indispensable for the guardian of the frontiers. To the
Italians it might well seem that the Free State was still maintained,
and that no new permanent power had been established; though Greeks and
foreigners might be, and indeed were, more discerning as to what had
really happened.
But when Augustus died, in A.D. 14, how was a succession to be effected?
Or was there to be a succession at all—would it not be better to let the
State pass back again into the hands of the Senate and people? This last
was the only logical way, and it was the plan actually adopted in form.
A position like that of Augustus could not pass to a successor, unless
the State in its old constitutional form chose to appoint such a
successor with the same authority as that of Augustus. To this, however,
we must add (and it well shows the real change that had been effected by
the long revolution) that no choice of Senate and people could hold good
unless the consent of the army could be had.
Of course, Augustus had considered all this, and had made his own plans.
He would choose a member of his own family, one, that is, who inherited
the name and fame of Cæsar by blood or adoption, would adopt him as a
son (for he had no son of his own), make him his heir, associate him as
far as possible in his own dignity and authority, and thus mark him out
as the natural heir to the principate. This would make it difficult for
Senate or army to refuse him; beyond that Augustus knew that he could
not go. He was unlucky in losing one after another the youths whom he
thus destined to succeed him, and eventually had to fall back on his
stepson Tiberius: a great soldier, as we have seen, and a man of
integrity and ability, but of reserved and even morose temper, and one
with whom the shrewd and genial Augustus had little in common.
When Augustus died there was an anxious moment. There was no reason why
the principate should be confined to the family of the Cæsars, nor any
reason but expediency for having a _princeps_ at all. But, after all,
the will of the dead ruler prevailed, and Tiberius slipped into his
place without opposition; the Senate accepted him as plainly marked out
by Augustus, and the army raised no difficulty, though his nephew
Germanicus Cæsar was young, popular, and in actual command of the army
on the Rhine. Some mocking voices were heard, and throughout his
principate of twenty-three years Tiberius had to endure continual
annoyance from the old republican families, but there was no real
attempt to quarrel with the principate as an institution of the Roman
State.
I have dwelt on this point at some length in order to show what a
singular creation this principate of Augustus was. To proclaim monarchy
outright would probably have been fatal; to take the whole work on
himself would be to leave the old governing families idle and
discontented; on the other hand, to do the necessary work as a yearly
elected magistrate, according to the old practice, was plainly
impossible. Election by the people of the Roman city would have little
force in the eyes of the Empire, and it was this Empire as a whole that
Augustus wished to represent. The course he took shows him a shrewd,
observant, tactical diplomatist, if ever there was one. He is not a man
on whose character we dwell with sympathy or enthusiasm; he does not
kindle our admiration like C. Gracchus or Cæsar; but he was essentially
the man for the hour.
To him we owe in large measure the glories of “the Augustan age,” with
its poets, historians, and artists; it was the “Augustan peace,” and the
encouragement and patronage of Augustus, that enable Horace to write his
perfect lyrics and his good-natured comments on human life, Ovid to pour
forth his abundant stream of beautiful versification, Tibullus and
Propertius to sing of the Italian country and its deities and festivals,
and Livy, the greatest of Roman historians, to do in noble prose what
Virgil had done in noble verse—to inspire Romans and Italians with
enthusiasm for the great deeds of their ancestors. But the world owes
Augustus a still greater debt than this; for he laid securely the
foundations of an imperial system strong enough to save for us, through
centuries of danger, the priceless treasures of Græco-Roman
civilisation.