The situation of the Second Cæsar, at the crisis of the great Dictator's
assassination, was so hazardous and delicate, as to confer interest upon
a character not otherwise attractive. To many, we know it was positively
repulsive, and in the very highest degree. In particular, it is recorded
of Sir William Jones, that he regarded this emperor with feelings of
abhorrence so _personal_ and deadly, as to refuse him his customary
titular honors whenever he had occasion to mention him by name. Yet
it was the whole Roman people that conferred upon him his title of
_Augustus_. But Sir William, ascribing no force to the acts of a people
who had sunk so low as to exult in their chains, and to decorate with
honors the very instruments of their own vassalage, would not recognise
this popular creation, and spoke of him always by his family name
of Octavius. The flattery of the populace, by the way, must, in this
instance, have been doubly acceptable to the emperor, first, for what it
gave, and secondly, for what it concealed. Of his grand-uncle, the first
Cæsar, a tradition survives--that of all the distinctions created in his
favor, either by the senate or the people, he put most value upon
the laurel crown which was voted to him after his last campaigns--a
beautiful and conspicuous memorial to every eye of his great public
acts, and at the same time an overshadowing veil of his one sole
personal defect. This laurel diadem at once proclaimed his civic
grandeur, and concealed his baldness, a defect which was more mortifying
to a Roman than it would be to ourselves, from the peculiar theory which
then prevailed as to its probable origin. A gratitude of the same mixed
quality must naturally have been felt by the Second Cæsar for his title
of _Augustus_, which, whilst it illustrated his public character by
the highest expression of majesty, set apart and sequestrated to public
functions, had also the agreeable effect of withdrawing from the general
remembrance his obscure descent. For the Octavian house [_gens_] had
in neither of its branches risen to any great splendor of civic
distinction, and in his own, to little or none. The same titular
decoration, therefore, so offensive to the celebrated Whig, was, in the
eyes of Augustus, at once a trophy of public merit, a monument of public
gratitude, and an effectual obliteration of his own natal obscurity.
But, if merely odious to men of Sir William's principles, to others the
character of Augustus, in relation to the circumstances which surrounded
him, was not without its appropriate interest. He was summoned in early
youth, and without warning, to face a crisis of tremendous hazard, being
at the same time himself a man of no very great constitutional courage;
perhaps he was even a coward. And this we say without meaning to adopt
as gospel truths all the party reproaches of Anthony. Certainly he was
utterly unfurnished by nature with those endowments which seemed to be
indispensable in a successor to the power of the great Dictator. But
exactly in these deficiencies, and in certain accidents unfavorable to
his ambition, lay his security. He had been adopted by his grand-uncle,
Julius. That adoption made him, to all intents and purposes of law, the
son of his great patron; and doubtless, in a short time, this adoption
would have been applied to more extensive uses, and as a station of
vantage for introducing him to the public favor. From the inheritance
of the Julian estates and family honors, he would have been trained to
mount, as from a stepping-stone, to the inheritance of the Julian power
and political station; and the Roman people would have been familiarized
to regard him in that character. But, luckily for himself, the
finishing, or ceremonial acts, were yet wanting in this process--the
political heirship was inchoate and imperfect. Tacitly understood,
indeed, it was; but, had it been formally proposed and ratified, there
cannot be a doubt that the young Octavius would have been pointed out
to the vengeance of the patriots, and included in the scheme of the
conspirators, as a fellow-victim with his nominal father; and would have
been cut off too suddenly to benefit by that reaction of popular
feeling which saved the partisans of the Dictator, by separating the
conspirators, and obliging them, without loss of time, to look to their
own safety. It was by this fortunate accident that the young heir and
adopted son of the first Cæsar not only escaped assassination, but was
enabled to postpone indefinitely the final and military struggle for the
vacant seat of empire, and in the mean time to maintain a coequal rank
with the leaders in the state, by those arts and resources in which he
was superior to his competitors. His place in the favor of Caius Julius
was of power sufficient to give him a share in any triumvirate which
could be formed; but, wanting the formality of a regular introduction to
the people, and the ratification of their acceptance, that place was
not sufficient to raise him permanently into the perilous and invidious
station of absolute supremacy which he afterwards occupied. The
_felicity_ of Augustus was often vaunted by antiquity, (with whom
success was not so much a test of merit as itself a merit of the highest
quality,) and in no instance was this felicity more conspicuous than
in the first act of his entrance upon the political scene. No doubt
his friends and enemies alike thought of him, at the moment of Cæsar's
assassination, as we now think of a young man heir-elect to some person
of immense wealth, cut off by a sudden death before he has had time to
ratify a will in execution of his purposes. Yet in fact the case was far
otherwise. Brought forward distinctly as the successor of Cæsar's
power, had he even, by some favorable accident of absence from Rome, or
otherwise, escaped being involved in that great man's fate, he would at
all events have been thrown upon the instant necessity of defending his
supreme station by arms. To have left it unasserted, when once
solemnly created in his favor by a reversionary title, would have been
deliberately to resign it. This would have been a confession of weakness
liable to no disguise, and ruinous to any subsequent pretensions. Yet,
without preparation of means, with no development of resources nor
growth of circumstances, an appeal to arms would, in his case, have been
of very doubtful issue. His true weapons, for a long period, were the
arts of vigilance and dissimulation. Cultivating these, he was enabled
to prepare for a contest which, undertaken prematurely, must have ruined
him, and to raise himself to a station of even military pre-eminence
to those who naturally, and by circumstances, were originally every way
superior to himself.
The qualities in which he really excelled, the gifts of intrigue,
patience, long-suffering, dissimulation, and tortuous fraud, were thus
brought into play, and allowed their full value. Such qualities
had every chance of prevailing in the long run, against the noble
carelessness and the impetuosity of the passionate Anthony--and they
_did_ prevail. Always on the watch to lay hold of those opportunities
which the generous negligence of his rival was but too frequently
throwing in his way--unless by the sudden reverses of war and the
accidents of battle, which as much as possible, and as long as possible,
he declined--there could be little question in any man's mind, that
eventually he would win his way to a solitary throne, by a policy so
full of caution and subtlety. He was sure to risk nothing which could be
had on easier terms; and nothing, unless for a great overbalance of gain
in prospect; to lose nothing which he had once gained; and in no case to
miss an advantage, or sacrifice an opportunity, by any consideration
of generosity. No modern insurance office but would have guaranteed an
event depending upon the final success of Augustus, on terms far below
those which they must in prudence have exacted from the fiery and
adventurous Anthony. Each was an ideal in his own class. But Augustus,
having finally triumphed, has met with more than justice from succeeding
ages. Even Lord Bacon says, that, by comparison with Julius Cæsar, he
was "_non tam impar quam dispar_," surely a most extravagant encomium,
applied to whomsoever. On the other hand, Anthony, amongst the most
signal misfortunes of his life, might number it, that Cicero, the great
dispenser of immortality, in whose hands (more perhaps than in any one
man's of any age) were the vials of good and evil fame, should happen to
have been his bitter and persevering enemy. It is, however, some balance
to this, that Shakspeare had a just conception of the original grandeur
which lay beneath that wild tempestuous nature presented by Anthony to
the eye of the undiscriminating world. It is to the honor of Shakspeare,
that he should have been able to discern the true coloring of this most
original character, under the smoke and tarnish of antiquity. It is no
less to the honor of the great triumvir, that a strength of coloring
should survive in his character, capable of baffling the wrongs and
ravages of time. Neither is it to be thought strange that a character
should have been misunderstood and falsely appreciated for nearly
two thousand years. It happens not uncommonly, especially amongst an
unimaginative people like the Romans, that the characters of men are
ciphers and enigmas to their own age, and are first read and interpreted
by a far distant posterity. Stars are supposed to exist, whose light has
been travelling for many thousands of years without having yet reached
our system; and the eyes are yet unborn upon which their earliest
rays will fall. Men like Mark Anthony, with minds of chaotic
composition--light conflicting with darkness, proportions of colossal
grandeur disfigured by unsymmetrical arrangement, the angelic in close
neighborhood with the brutal--are first read in their true meaning by an
age learned in the philosophy of the human heart. Of this philosophy the
Romans had, by the necessities of education and domestic discipline not
less than by original constitution of mind, the very narrowest visual
range. In no literature whatsoever are so few tolerable notices to
be found of any great truths in Psychology. Nor could this have been
otherwise amongst a people who tried every thing by the standard
of _social_ value; never seeking for a canon of excellence, in man
considered abstractedly in and for himself, and as having an independent
value--but always and exclusively in man as a gregarious being, and
designed for social uses and functions. Not man in his own peculiar
nature, but man in his relations to other men, was the station from
which the Roman speculators took up their philosophy of human nature.
Tried by such standard, Mark Anthony would be found wanting. As a
citizen, he was irretrievably licentious, and therefore there needed
not the bitter personal feud, which circumstances had generated between
them, to account for the _acharnement_ with which Cicero pursued him.
Had Anthony been his friend even, or his near kinsman, Cicero must still
have been his public enemy. And not merely for his vices; for even
the grander features of his character, his towering ambition, his
magnanimity, and the fascinations of his popular qualities,--were
all, in the circumstances of those times, and in _his_ position, of a
tendency dangerously uncivic.
So remarkable was the opposition, at all points, between the second
Cæsar and his rival, that whereas Anthony even in his virtues seemed
dangerous to the state, Octavius gave a civic coloring to his most
indifferent actions, and, with a Machiavelian policy, observed a
scrupulous regard to the forms of the Republic, after every fragment
of the republican institutions, the privileges of the republican
magistrates, and the functions of the great popular officers, had been
absorbed into his own autocracy. Even in the most prosperous days of the
Roman State, when the democratic forces balanced, and were balanced
by, those of the aristocracy, it was far from being a general or common
praise, that a man was of a civic turn of mind, _animo civili_. Yet this
praise did Augustus affect, and in reality attain, at a time when the
very object of all civic feeling was absolutely extinct; so much are
men governed by words. Suetonius assures us, that many evidences were
current even to his times of this popular disposition (_civilitas_) in
the emperor; and that it survived every experience of servile adulation
in the Roman populace, and all the effects of long familiarity with
irresponsible power in himself. Such a moderation of feeling, we are
almost obliged to consider as a genuine and unaffected expression of his
real nature; for, as an artifice of policy, it had soon lost its uses.
And it is worthy of notice, that with the army he laid aside those
popular manners as soon as possible, addressing them as _milites_, not
(_according_ to his earlier practice) as _commilitones_. It concerned
his own security, to be jealous of encroachments on his power. But of
his rank, and the honors which accompanied it, he seems to have been
uniformly careless. Thus, he would never leave a town or enter it by
daylight, unless some higher rule of policy obliged him to do so; by
which means he evaded a ceremonial of public honor which was burdensome
to all the parties concerned in it. Sometimes, however, we find that
men, careless of honors in their own persons, are glad to see them
settling upon their family and immediate connections. But here again
Augustus showed the sincerity of his moderation. For upon one occasion,
when the whole audience in the Roman theatre had risen upon the entrance
of his two adopted sons, at that time not seventeen years old, he
was highly displeased, and even thought it necessary to publish
his displeasure in a separate edict. It is another, and a striking
illustration of his humility, that he willingly accepted of public
appointments, and sedulously discharged the duties attached to them, in
conjunction with colleagues who had been chosen with little regard to
his personal partialities. In the debates of the senate, he showed the
same equanimity; suffering himself patiently to be contradicted, and
even with circumstances of studied incivility. In the public elections,
he gave his vote like any private citizen; and, when he happened to be
a candidate himself, he canvassed the electors with the same earnestness
of personal application, as any other candidate with the least possible
title to public favor from present power or past services. But, perhaps
by no expressions of his civic spirit did Augustus so much conciliate
men's minds, as by the readiness with which he participated in their
social pleasures, and by the uniform severity with which he refused
to apply his influence in any way which could disturb the pure
administration of justice. The Roman juries (_judices_ they were
called), were very corrupt; and easily swayed to an unconscientious
verdict, by the appearance in court of any great man on behalf of one of
the parties interested: nor was such an interference with the course
of private justice any ways injurious to the great man's character. The
wrong which he promoted did but the more forcibly proclaim the warmth
and fidelity of his friendships. So much the more generally was the
uprightness of the emperor appreciated, who would neither tamper with
justice himself, nor countenance any motion in that direction, though it
were to serve his very dearest friend, either by his personal presence,
or by the use of his name. And, as if it had been a trifle merely to
forbear, and to show his regard to justice in this negative way, he even
allowed himself to be summoned as a witness on trials, and showed no
anger when his own evidence was overborne by stronger on the other side.
This disinterested love of justice, and an integrity, so rare in the
great men of Rome, could not but command the reverence of the people.
But their affection, doubtless, was more conciliated by the freedom with
which the emperor accepted invitations from all quarters, and shared
continually in the festal pleasures of his subjects. This practice,
however, he discontinued, or narrowed, as he advanced in years.
Suetonius, who, as a true anecdote-monger, would solve every thing,
and account for every change by some definite incident, charges this
alteration in the emperor's condescensions upon one particular party at
a wedding feast, where the crowd incommoded him much by their pressure
and heat. But, doubtless, it happened to Augustus as to other men; his
spirits failed, and his powers of supporting fatigue or bustle, as years
stole upon him. Changes, coming by insensible steps, and not willingly
acknowledged, for some time escape notice; until some sudden shock
reminds a man forcibly to do that which he has long meditated in an
irresolute way. The marriage banquet may have been the particular
occasion from which Augustus stepped into the habits of old age, but
certainly not the cause of so entire a revolution in his mode of living.
It might seem to throw some doubt, if not upon the fact, yet at
least upon the sincerity, of his _civism_, that undoubtedly Augustus
cultivated his kingly connections with considerable anxiety. It may have
been upon motives merely political that he kept at Rome the children of
nearly all the kings then known as allies or vassals of the Roman power:
a curious fact, and not generally known. In his own palace were reared a
number of youthful princes; and they were educated jointly with his own
children. It is also upon record, that in many instances the fathers
of these princes spontaneously repaired to Rome, and there assuming
the Roman dress--as an expression of reverence to the majesty of the
omnipotent State--did personal 'suit and service' (_more clientum_)
to Augustus. It is an anecdote of not less curiosity, that a whole
'college' of kings subscribed money for a temple at Athens, to be
dedicated in the name of Augustus. Throughout his life, indeed, this
emperor paid a marked attention to all the royal houses then known to
Rome, as occupying the thrones upon the vast margin of the empire. It
is true that in part this attention might be interpreted as given
politically to so many lieutenants, wielding a remote or inaccessible
power for the benefit of Rome. And the children of these kings might be
regarded as hostages, ostensibly entertained for the sake of education,
but really as pledges for their parents' fidelity, and also with a view
to the large reversionary advantages which might be expected to arise
upon the basis of so early and affectionate a connection. But it is not
the less true, that, at one period of his life, Augustus did certainly
meditate some closer personal connection with the royal families of the
earth. He speculated, undoubtedly, on a marriage for himself with some
barbarous princess, and at one time designed his daughter Julia as a
wife for Cotiso, the king of the Getæ. Superstition perhaps disturbed
the one scheme, and policy the other. He married, as is well known, for
his final wife, and the partner of his life through its whole triumphant
stage, Livia Drusilla; compelling her husband, Tiberius Nero, to divorce
her, notwithstanding she was then six months advanced in pregnancy. With
this lady, who was distinguished for her beauty, it is certain that
he was deeply in love; and that might be sufficient to account for the
marriage. It is equally certain, however, upon the concurring
evidence of independent writers, that this connection had an oracular
sanction--not to say, suggestion; a circumstance _which was long
remembered_, and was afterwards noticed by the Christian poet
Prudentius:
"Idque Deûm sortes et Apollinis antra dederunt
Consilium: nunquam meliùs nam cædere tædas
Responsum est, quàm cum prægnans nova nupta jugatur."
His daughter Julia had been promised by turns, and always upon reasons
of state, to a whole muster-roll of suitors; first of all, to a son of
Mark Anthony; secondly, to the barbarous king; thirdly, to her first
cousin--that Marcellus, the son of Octavia, only sister to Augustus,
whose early death, in the midst of great expectations, Virgil has so
beautifully introduced into the vision of Roman grandeurs as yet unborn,
which Æneas beholds in the shades; fourthly, she was promised (and this
time the promise was kept) to the fortunate soldier, Agrippa, whose low
birth was not permitted to obscure his military merits. By him she had
a family of children, upon whom, if upon any in this world, the wrath of
Providence seems to have rested; for, excepting one, and in spite of all
the favors that earth and heaven could unite to shower upon them, all
came to an early, a violent, and an infamous end. Fifthly, upon the
death of Agrippa, and again upon motives of policy, and in atrocious
contempt of all the ties that nature and the human heart and human laws
have hallowed, she was promised, (if that word may be applied to the
violent obtrusion upon a man's bed of one who was doubly a curse--first,
for what she brought, and, secondly, for what she took away,) and given
to Tiberius, the future emperor. Upon the whole, as far as we can at
this day make out the connection of a man's acts and purposes, which,
even to his own age, were never entirely cleared up, it is probable
that, so long as the triumvirate survived, and so long as the condition
of Roman power or intrigues, and the distribution of Roman influence,
were such as to leave a possibility that any new triumvirate should
arise--so long Augustus was secretly meditating a retreat for himself at
some barbarous court, against any sudden reverse of fortune, by means
of a domestic connection, which should give him the claim of a kinsman.
Such a court, however unable to make head against the collective power
of Rome, might yet present a front of resistance to any single partisan
who should happen to acquire a brief ascendancy; or, at the worst, as a
merely defensive power, might offer a retreat, secure in distance,
and difficult access; or might be available as a means of delay for
recovering from some else fatal defeat. It is certain that Augustus
viewed Egypt with jealousy as a province, which might be turned to
account in some such way by any aspiring insurgent. And it must have
often struck him as a remarkable circumstance, which by good luck had
turned out entirely to the advantage of his own family, but which might
as readily have had an opposite result, that the three decisive battles
of Pharsalia, of Thapsus, and of Munda, in which the empire of the world
was three times over staked as the prize, had severally brought upon the
defeated leaders a ruin which was total, absolute, and final. One hour
had seen the whole fabric of their aspiring fortunes demolished; and no
resource was left to them but either in suicide, (which, accordingly,
even Cæsar had meditated at one stage of the battle of Munda, when it
seemed to be going against him,) or in the mercy of the victor.
That a victor in a hundred fights should in his hundred-and-first,
[Footnote:
"The painful warrior, famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foil'd,
Is from the book of honor razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toil'd."
_Shakespeare's Sonnets._]
as in his first, risk the loss of that particular battle, is inseparable
from the condition of man, and the uncertainty of human means; but that
the loss of this one battle should be equally fatal and irrecoverable
with the loss of his first, that it should leave him with means no more
cemented, and resources no better matured for retarding his fall, and
throwing a long succession of hindrances in the way of his conqueror,
argues some essential defect of system. Under our modern policy,
military power--though it may be the growth of one man's life--soon
takes root; a succession of campaigns is required for its extirpation;
and it revolves backwards to its final extinction through all the
stages by which originally it grew. On the Roman system this was mainly
impossible from the solitariness of the Roman power; co-rival nations
who might balance the victorious party, there were absolutely none; and
all the underlings hastened to make their peace, whilst peace was yet
open to them, on the known terms of absolute treachery to their former
master, and instant surrender to the victor of the hour. For this
capital defect in the tenure of Roman power, no matter in whose hands
deposited, there was no absolute remedy. Many a sleepless night, during
the perilous game which he played with Anthony, must have familiarized
Octavius with that view of the risk, which to some extent was
inseparable from his position as the leader in such a struggle carried
on in such an empire. In this dilemma, struck with the extreme necessity
of applying some palliation to the case, we have no doubt that
Augustus would devise the scheme of laying some distant king under such
obligations to fidelity as would suffice to stand the first shock of
misfortune. Such a person would have power enough, of a direct military
kind, to face the storm at its outbreak. He would have power of another
kind in his distance. He would be sustained by the courage of hope, as
a kinsman having a contingent interest in a kinsman's prosperity. And,
finally, he would be sustained by the courage of despair, as one who
never could expect to be trusted by the opposite party. In the worst
case, such a prince would always offer a breathing time and a respite to
his friends, were it only by his remoteness, and if not the _means_ of
rallying, yet at least the _time_ for rallying, more especially as the
escape to his frontier would be easy to one who had long forecast it. We
can hardly doubt that Augustus meditated such schemes; that he laid them
aside only as his power began to cement and to knit together after the
battle of Actium; and that the memory and the prudential tradition of
this plan survived in the imperial family so long as itself survived.
Amongst other anecdotes of the same tendency, two are recorded of Nero,
the emperor in whom expired the line of the original Cæsars, which
strengthen us in a belief of what is otherwise in itself so probable.
Nero, in his first distractions, upon receiving the fatal tidings of
the revolt in Gaul, when reviewing all possible plans of escape from
the impending danger, thought at intervals of throwing himself on the
protection of the barbarous King Vologesus. And twenty years afterwards,
when the Pseudo-Nero appeared, he found a strenuous champion and
protector in the king of the Parthians. Possibly, had an opportunity
offered for searching the Parthian chancery, some treaty would have been
found binding the kings of Parthia, from the age of Augustus through
some generations downwards, in requital of services there specified, or
of treasures lodged, to secure a perpetual asylum to the prosperity of
the Julian family.
The cruelties of Augustus were perhaps equal in atrocity to any which
are recorded; and the equivocal apology for those acts (one which might
as well be used to aggravate as to palliate the case) is, that they were
not prompted by a ferocious nature, but by calculating policy. He once
actually slaughtered upon an altar, a large body of his prisoners; and
such was the contempt with which he was regarded by some of that number,
that, when led out to death, they saluted their other proscriber,
Anthony, with military honors, acknowledging merit even in an enemy, but
Augustus they passed with scornful silence, or with loud reproaches.
Too certainly no man has ever contended for empire with unsullied
conscience, or laid pure hands upon the ark of so magnificent a prize.
Every friend to Augustus must have wished that the twelve years of his
struggle might for ever be blotted out from human remembrance. During
the forty-two years of his prosperity and his triumph, being above fear,
he showed the natural lenity of his temper.
That prosperity, in a public sense, has been rarely equalled; but far
different was his fate, and memorable was the contrast, within the
circuit of his own family. This lord of the universe groaned as often
as the ladies of his house, his daughter and grand-daughter, were
mentioned. The shame which he felt on their account, led him even
to unnatural designs, and to wishes not less so; for at one time he
entertained a plan for putting the elder Julia to death--and at another,
upon hearing that Phoebe (one of the female slaves in his household) had
hanged herself, he exclaimed audibly,--"Would that I had been the father
of Phoebe!" It must, however, be granted, that in this miserable affair
he behaved with very little of his usual discretion. In the first
paroxysms of his rage, on discovering his daughter's criminal conduct,
he made a communication of the whole to the senate. That body could do
nothing in such a matter, either by act or by suggestion; and in a short
time, as every body could have foreseen, he himself repented of his
own want of self-command. Upon the whole, it cannot be denied, that,
according to the remark of Jeremy Taylor, of all the men signally
decorated by history, Augustus Cæsar is that one who exemplifies, in the
most emphatic terms, the mixed tenor of human life, and the equitable
distribution, even on this earth, of good and evil fortune. He
made himself master of the world, and against the most formidable
competitors; his power was absolute, from the rising to the setting
sun; and yet in his own house, where the peasant who does the humblest
chares, claims an undisputed authority, he was baffled, dishonored, and
made ridiculous. He was loved by nobody; and if, at the moment of his
death, he desired his friends to dismiss him from this world by the
common expression of scenical applause, (_vos plaudite!_) in that
valedictory injunction he expressed inadvertently the true value of his
own long life, which, in strict candor, may be pronounced one continued
series of histrionic efforts, and of excellent acting, adapted to
selfish ends.