the one best known to us is that of Horace, who incidentally throws a
light upon his character as a young man. In the year 21 B.C. Augustus
made a progress to the East, visiting notable cities on the way, and
regulating their affairs. The chief object of the tour was, however,
to settle the Eastern frontier of the Empire. Syria was to Rome what
the North-West Provinces of India are to England; Herod and Aretas of
Arabia with the princes of Armenia played the part of the Ameer of
Afghanistan; they were the buffer states between Roman civilization and
the aggressive powers of Central Asia. Their fidelity was by no means
beyond suspicion, and from the mountains of Armenia, all along the west
of the Euphrates down to the borders of Egypt, continuous intriguing
prevailed, every ambitious kinglet making use of one or the other of
the great powers to strengthen his position against his rivals. The
strongest of these chieftains were the rulers of Armenia and Herod
the Idumæan; the former were unquestionably treacherous, and their
proximity to the Parthians rendered them peculiarly liable to wavering;
the latter played skilfully for his own hand. So long as Rome was
strong, Herod was her obedient servant, but if Rome showed signs of
weakness, Herod had no scruples against making friends with a stronger
power in order to further his own ends.
Since Cæsar had conquered Pharnaces, the son of Mithridates, by his
mere apparition, the prestige of Rome in the East had been considerably
damaged. The expeditions of Antonius against the Parthians had been
unsuccessful, and a serious catastrophe had only been averted by the
valour of his lieutenant, Ventidius Bassus, a former mule-driver; by
submitting Herod to the demands of Cleopatra’s cupidity, he had to
some extent alienated the Idumæan, and encouraged him to distrust
Roman politicians. Now that the Spanish war was over and the Western
half of the Empire in good order, Augustus wisely determined to study
his Eastern questions on the spot, and make such a demonstration of
power as would determine the judgment of waverers in favour of Rome.
The plan of operations was to send an army through Asia Minor into
Armenia, and thence if necessary along the Tigris into Parthia, while
the possible allies of the Parthians in Syria were to be overawed
simultaneously by the presence of the Emperor. The command of the army
destined for Armenia was given to Tiberius, now twenty-one years of
age. Both operations were successful; there was not much fighting, but
the Parthians saw that Rome was in earnest, and made terms, sending
back the standards which had been taken from Crassus some thirty years
before; the Roman party in Armenia was strengthened by a change of
rulers, and Tiberius returned in triumph. His first essay in war and
diplomacy was successful.
Tiberius had taken with him a staff of secretaries, or literary
companions, with whom Horace was in correspondence, the chief of whom
seems to have been Julius Florus, a Romanized Gaul. From the tone
of Horace’s letters to these young men we learn much of the future
Emperor. It would seem that Tiberius had formed the idea of surrounding
himself with what Horace on one occasion humorously calls “a gang” of
earnestly minded young men. Their characteristics may be inferred from
the following letter:--
“I am very anxious to know, Julius Florus, the quarter of the world
in which Claudius the stepson of Augustus is campaigning. Are you in
Thrace, or on the Bosphorus, or the rich plains and hills of Asia?
What works is the studious company a-building? I should like to know
this too. Who is undertaking to write the history of Augustus? Who is
going to give immortality to his wars and peaceful exploits? What is
Titius writing, Titius whom all Romans will sing, who has not been
afraid to tap the Pindaric sources, and has ventured to turn away from
commonplace pools and streams? Is he well? Does he think of me? Does
he labour with the aid of the Muse to fit the Theban metres to Latin
strings, or does he rage and bluster in tragedy? Tell me what Celsus
is doing? Warn him against plagiary, tell him to beware of the fate of
the daw in borrowed plumes. And what are your own ventures? What are
the thyme beds about which you lightly hover? You have no mean ability,
you are polished, refined, and will win the first prize as an advocate
in private or public suits, or as a poet of the lighter kind. But if
you could give up the chilling pursuit of business, you would go where
inspired wisdom would lead you. This is the work and interest which
should be sped by us all, whether small or great, if we wish to live
in peace with our country and ourselves. You must also tell me this
when you write, mind you do, how are you getting on with Munatius?
Does the badly patched fellowship join and split again to no purpose?
And are your independent spirits galled either by hot-headedness or
misunderstanding? Wherever you both may happen to be, you who should
not break the bond of brotherhood, I shall be very glad indeed to see
you back again.”
Here is another letter to Celsus, the young gentleman who made somewhat
too free use of the poems in the Palatine Library:--
“I beg you, Muse, to convey my compliments to Celsus Albinovanus, the
companion and secretary of Nero. If he asks what I am doing, tell him
that though I threaten all kinds of fine things, I am neither living
properly nor pleasantly; not because my vines have been smashed by
the hail, or my olives parched with the heat, or my cattle sick on
the outlying lands, but because, more ill at ease in mind than body,
I refuse to hear or learn anything that is good for an invalid, am
annoyed with my faithful physicians, furious with my friends, because
they try to deliver me from my deadly laziness; I am bent on what is
bad for me, I avoid what I know to be good for me; I am fickle enough
to be in love with Tibur at Rome, with Rome at Tibur. After this ask
him how he is, how he manages his business and himself, how he gets
on with his young chief and the company. If he says ‘well,’ first
congratulate him, and then don’t forget to whisper just this little bit
of advice into his ear, ‘Our treatment of you, Celsus, will depend upon
the way you treat your own good fortune.’”
Other letters to Bullatius, to Albius, to Municius, to Secius, to
Lollius are much in the same strain. Though these young men were not
demonstrably included in the inner circle of the friends of Tiberius,
they belonged to the same social rank; in all there is the same
playfulness, in all good advice is conveyed in tactful form. In Lollius
Horace seems to have felt a special interest; he too was a companion
to some notable person, probably Drusus. Horace gives Lollius many
practical directions, somewhat in the style of Polonius, as to his
behaviour to his patron, Lollius being of an independent spirit, and
irascible. Horace is particularly fond of impressing upon his young
friends the duty of “living for themselves,” of considering wealth,
fame, and even public usefulness, as of less importance than a good
conscience. The moral earnestness of Horace is often underrated, as the
moral earnestness of R. L. Stevenson is underrated, and of many other
writers whose teaching has not run in the grooves prescribed by the
professional preachers of their day. Horace had no love for the worthy
gentlemen who improved the occasion after dining with Augustus; the red
eyes of Crispinus affected him as the red nose of Stiggins affected
Dickens; he had equally little patience with those men who labelled
themselves Stoic or Epicurean or Cyrenaic, and professed to live
according to the authorized manuals of the sects; the pretentiousness
of the professors of virtue and the proselytising Jews disgusted him,
as similar manifestations are wont to disgust humorous men at all
ages and in all places, but these men have had their revenge in the
solemnity with which for nearly two thousand years they have deplored
his levity. Few men, however, have lived more consistently with their
professions than Horace, and the world would be none the worse if his
example were less unfrequently followed. The friendship of Mæcenas,
a genuine personal affection, and not a mere literary or convivial
sympathy, gave Horace many opportunities of enriching himself, or at
least of parading his power; it was something to be the friend of the
second or third man in the Roman Empire. But Horace studiously resisted
every temptation to make use of this friendship; he would not even
allow himself to be made the recognised channel of introduction for his
literary friends. The time came when Augustus wished to transfer him to
his own household--the letter is still extant in which the offer was
made, and the greater opportunities hinted at--but Horace would not
hear of such an advancement. It speaks well for Augustus that he was
not offended by the refusal. From Mæcenas Horace accepted a moderate
independence, sufficient for his needs, but a small gift to come from
one of the richest men of his day. He was grateful, but he refused to
sell his soul, and we still have the letter in which he bids Mæcenas
take back his bounty, if it is to involve obligations which the poet
cannot meet without injury to his health, or undue disturbance of his
comfort. He adds with characteristic humour and strict justice, “but
if you take back the Sabine Farm, you must restore to me the youth and
vigour I enjoyed when I first entered your service.”
Men who cannot distinguish an official ode written to order and the
forms imposed by such conditions from the genuine effusions of a
literary artist are fond of accusing Horace of excessive adulation, but
there is no adulation in offering unpalatable advice, or in pointing
out to a patron that he is exceeding his prerogative. Instances may
be found in the Odes, as well as in the Epistles, of not altogether
complimentary exhortation. The truth was that Augustus was surprisingly
the right man in the right place, and the compliments paid to him by
Horace and Virgil and other literary contemporaries, though expressed
in a liberal style, were not in spirit other than the occasion
demanded. Epitaphs and dedications have a language of their own--Italy
is more given to hyperbolical compliment than England--but the men who
declared their admiration of Augustus, however extravagantly to our
ears, had sound reason for admiring and wishing others to admire a
very capable man surrounded by capable advisers and seconded by able
lieutenants.
It is not probable that the first book of the letters of Horace was
published in the lifetime of the poet, for they are often too intimate
for publication. Lollius would not be likely to give the world the
benefit of his castigation, or Mæcenas to allow contemporaries to enjoy
the protest against his thoughtless insistence on the poet’s company.
The collection was most probably made after the death of the writer,
and the dedicatory letter placed at the beginning may equally well
have referred to some other publication. Horace is not the only facile
writer of verse who has occasionally amused himself with writing to his
friends in metre, and the sting of some things which he wished to say
was to some extent dulled by the adoption of a metrical form. We may
take it that in the first book of the Epistles, if nowhere else, we
have the genuine Horace writing without respect of persons, and without
regard to the public. A peculiar interest therefore attaches to the one
short letter in the collection which is written to Tiberius himself; it
is a letter of introduction.
“Septimius I presume has some special information as to the esteem in
which you hold me, Claudius; for in begging and prayerfully compelling
me to try to say a good word for him, and introduce him as worthy of
the intellect and family of that sound reader Nero, in asserting that
I enjoy the privileges of an intimate friend, he sees and knows my
power better than I do myself. I certainly gave a good many reasons
for being let off with an excuse, but I was afraid of being thought to
have falsely pretended incompetence, and to be given to disguising my
real influence, and reserving it for my own sole use. So, in dread of
the disgrace of a greater obloquy, I have entered for the prize awarded
to impudence. If, however, you do not disapprove of my breach of good
manners, committed at the request of a friend, enroll him in your
‘gang,’ and believe him to be staunch and good.”
Knowing as we do from other sources how strongly Horace objected to
turning a private friendship to account, and how specially careful he
was in the matter of introductions, we can see through this letter a
real intimacy with Tiberius; the apology of Horace is addressed rather
to his own conscience than to the recipient of the letter. We need not
infer that Tiberius was particularly difficult of approach.
The qualities which were to render Septimius acceptable to Tiberius
are worth notice; he would be in sympathy with a man whose standard
of reading, or--for the phrase is ambiguous--choice of pursuit
was dignified, he would be staunch, he would be good. Good is the
epithet which Horace applies to Tiberius himself in writing to Julius
Florus--“Florus faithful friend to the brilliant and good Nero”; he
uses the same epithet in the Odes in speaking of a former mistress--“I
am not what I was under the reign of good Cinara.” Without pressing
the sense of the word too closely, it can hardly have been applied to
an ungenial man, such as Tiberius is represented to have been, and may
have afterwards become. The future Emperor had a weary road to travel
before he became, if he ever did become, what the elder Pliny says that
he was, “a most dismal man.”
Thus at the outset of his administrative career we find Tiberius in
excellent company; it is pleasant to think that he may on some occasion
have made an expedition to Tibur or the Sabine Farm, like Torquatus
or Mæcenas, and spent an evening with the genial poet, drinking old
wine laid down in the consulship of Manlius, watching the wood fire
crackling on the hearth, enjoying the jokes of the pert slaves, or
perhaps listening while his host sang to his own accompaniment words
which the world has not yet forgotten. We may be sure that there were
rejoicings when the “company” returned from Asia Minor, that the kid
was duly sacrificed, and that if Tiberius himself was not present,
Florus and Celsus, and let us hope Munatius told the story of their
adventures to the kindly ears of their middle-aged friend.
VI
The Family of Augustus
The principle of the transmission of the chief power by heredity was
never recognized as a fundamental part of the constitution of the
Roman Empire, though the natural tendency is to allow a son to take
his father’s place, and the necessities of ancestor worship made the
succession of a real son or an adopted son agreeable to Roman feeling.
Neither Cæsar nor Augustus ever had legitimate sons; Tiberius had
a son, but he died before his father; Caligula was childless; the
ambition of an unscrupulous woman deprived the son of Claudius of the
succession and his life; Nero was childless, and in him the Cæsarean
strain ended. Circumstances were adverse to the hereditary principle.
Short dynasties, such as those of the Flavians, the Antonines, and the
Constantines, appear from time to time, but the ordinary method of
peaceful succession was the nomination and adoption of a successor or
successors by the reigning Emperor.
For many years Augustus himself avoided the definite establishment of
his own position as even a life tenancy. His office of Imperator was
renewed every ten years; the Tribunician power was granted to him
afresh every year in form, though not in fact; the Censorian office
was taken up every five years; he did not become Pontifex Maximus till
eighteen years after the battle of Actium; the only office which he
held without a break--that of Princeps Senatus--was not considered
to be an office at all, the dignity of the first man in the Senate
being constitutionally purely of respect. Under these circumstances it
would be strange if the historians were correct in assuming that the
chief preoccupation of his life was in providing for a successor of
his own blood. Tacitus, who is full of the dynastic question, informs
us, with his customary inconsistency, that Augustus himself at the end
of his life mentioned three men not connected with the Cæsarean race
as possible candidates for the succession, which he could hardly have
done had he accepted the hereditary principle, seeing that the Cæsarean
stock was by no means extinct.
For a short time the vision of hereditary succession probably attracted
the imagination of Augustus, and certainly always occupied the
attention of members of his family; but the early deaths of two of his
grandsons and the insubordination of a third quickly dispelled the
attractive vision.
The acquiescence of other Roman families in the Cæsarean rule was
bought partly by admission to a share in the administration, partly
by the very fact that the dynastic ideal was not forced in such a
manner as to preclude all possibility of a change in the form of
government, and a reversion to the happy days of the Senatorial
oligarchy. Opposition was further disarmed by intermarriages with the
houses least likely to submit contentedly to the domination of one
family; both stocks of the Claudians, the Antonians, the Domitians, the
Æmilians, the Junians, and others were thus united with the Julians
in the lifetime of Augustus or his successor. The consular lists for
the reign of Augustus recall the names of the noblest Roman families,
and though the old city offices had now become titular rather than
effective, men still liked sitting in Curule chairs, and taking the
lead in the pageantry which survived the reality of power; the process
by which administrative functions gradually passed from the old offices
to the new hierarchy was a slow one, and an ambitious young man might
still think he had embarked on a career when he had been dignified with
the lowest of the old magistracies. The new men were employed less in
Italy than in the imperial provinces, where indeed it was important
that the officials should be attached to the person of the Emperor
rather than to the abstraction called the Senate and the people of
Rome. Neither Augustus nor Tiberius were afraid to entrust the really
effective powers of Prefect of the City of Rome to members of the old
aristocracy.
But if Augustus himself was less interested in the dynastic question
than the historians represent, the ladies of his family were by
no means equally indifferent; their feuds were shared in by their
ladies and freedmen, and the apparently peaceful home of the suave
and unconscious Augustus was a raging battlefield, in which the
weapons of calumny and innuendo were freely hurled, and the external
forms of politeness concealed a state of civil war. Wily Greeks and
Jews or other Orientals used to palace intrigues found a field for
their special talents in the households of Livia or Julia; holding
the confidential positions of physicians, preachers, tutors, and
astrologers, they transferred to the Palatine the atmosphere of the
Courts of the Ptolemies or Herod. Under this subtle influence mere
drawing-room conspiracies sometimes took a serious complexion; young
men were impelled by their female relatives to dangerous courses,
secret information sped from Roman boudoirs to the palaces of Syria and
Armenia.
Livia herself was a skilled intriguer, and though Dio puts into her
mouth a ponderous curtain lecture on the subject of clemency, addressed
to Augustus, her inclinations were more monarchical than those of her
husband. The very substantial compliments which passed between her
and Herod of Judæa are not likely to have been exceptional in their
character, nor is that wily potentate likely to have been the only man
of his class who discovered that her fingers touched the springs of
government. Though by the letters of the law Roman women were in an
almost servile position, though they were liable to be divorced and
remarried to suit the convenience of their families, methods were found
of evading the law, and divorces which tended to further aggrandisement
were not unpopular with their apparent victims. By a variety of legal
fictions women could hold separate estates, and were often immensely
rich independently of their husbands. The wives of provincial
governors were notorious for their rapacity, and took full advantage of
the weakness of uxorious husbands.
Livia spinning the toga of Augustus with her maids or weighing out the
allowances of the slaves, was a pleasing picture for the contemplation
of her husband and the Romans, but the head of the thrifty housekeeper
had room for other than domestic details, and her name was whispered
with awe by many who could not have appreciated her homely virtues, and
had good reason for suspecting her of very different occupations.
Owing to the early marriages of the Romans a family quickly became
patriarchal; some of these marriages, it is true, were mere contracts,
children being sometimes married to secure dowries or successions, or
ratify family alliances, almost before they were out of the nursery.
Owing again to divorces and remarriages the various degrees of affinity
between the members of a group of families are very difficult to trace;
adoption adds complications, which are further increased by the paucity
of Roman names, especially as women generally retained the feminine
form of their father’s names after marriage, and sisters were often
indistinguishable.