that suffered all, are in their time two extreme antitheses: with
the passing of centuries, they become two collaborators. While one
suffered hunger and persecution to preach the doctrine of redemption,
the other called to Italy and to Rome, to amuse himself, the
goldsmiths, weavers, sculptors, painters, architects, musicians, whom
Rome had always rebuffed.
Both disappeared, cut off by the violent current of their epoch;
centuries went by: the name of the Emperor grew infamous, while that
of the tent-maker radiated glory. In the midst of the immense disorder
that accompanied the dissolution of the Roman Empire, as the bonds
among men relaxed, and the human mind seemed to be incapable of
reasoning and understanding, the disciples of the saint realised
that the goldsmiths, weavers, sculptors, painters, architects, and
musicians of the Emperor could collect the masses around the churches
and make them patiently listen to what they could still comprehend of
Paul's sublime morality. When you regard St. Mark or Notre Dame or any
other stupendous cathedral of the Middle Ages, like museums for the
work of art they hold, you see the luminous symbol of this paradoxical
alliance between victim and executioner.
Only through the alliance of Paul and Nero could the Church dominate
the disorder of the Middle Ages, and, from antiquity to the modern
world, carry through that formidable storm the essential principles
from which our civilisation developed: a decisive proof that, if
history in its details is a continuous strife, as a whole it is the
inevitable final reconciliation of antagonistic forces, obtained in
spite of the resistance of individuals and by sacrificing them.
Julia and Tiberius
"He walked with head bent and fixed, the face stern, a taciturn man
exchanging no word with those about him.... Augustus realised these
severe and haughty manners, and more than once tried to excuse them
in the Senate and to the people, saying that they were defects of
temperament, not signs of a sinister spirit."
This is the picture that Suetonius gives us of Tiberius, the man
who, in 9 B.C., after the death of Agrippa and Drusus, stood next to
Augustus, his right hand and pre-established successor. At that time
Augustus was fifty-four years old; not an old man, but he was ill and
had presided over the Republic for twenty-one years. Many people must
have asked themselves what would happen if Augustus should die,
or should definitely retire to private life. The answer was not
uncertain: since Rome was engaged in the conquest of Germany, the
chief of the Empire and of the army ought to be a valiant general and
a man of expert acquaintance with Germanic affairs. Tiberius was the
first general of his time and knew Germany and the Germans better than
any other Roman.
The passage from Suetonius, just quoted, indicates that Tiberius was
not altogether popular, yet it was the accepted opinion that Rome
and Italy might well be content to rely upon so capable a general and
diplomat, if Augustus failed. This attitude, however, changed when
the death of Drusus entirely removed the alternative of choice between
himself and Tiberius, and the latter, up to that time universally
admired, began to be met, even among the nobility, by a strong
opposition. How can this apparently inexplicable fact be made clear?
The theory of corruption so dear to the ancients, which I have already
explained, gives us the key to the mystery. Those who have been
disposed to see in that theory merely a plaything of poets, orators,
philosophers, will now realise that it had power enough to kill the
person and destroy the family of the first citizen of the Empire. That
kind of continuous fear of luxury, of amusements, of prodigality, on
account of which the ancients called corruption so many things that
we define as progress, was not a sentiment always equally alive in the
mind of the multitude. The Romans, like ourselves, loved to live and
to enjoy; this is so true that philosophers and legislators constantly
took pains to remind them of the danger of allowing too much liberty
to the appetites; but more effective than the counsels of philosophers
and the threats of the law, great public calamities inspired in the
masses, at least temporarily, a spirit of puritanism and austerity.
Of this the consequences of the battle of Actium afforded noteworthy
proof.
Those who have read the fourth volume of _The Greatness and Decline of
Rome_ may perhaps remember how I have described the conservative
and traditionalist movement of the first decade of the government
of Augustus. Frightened by the revolution, men's minds had reverted
precipitously to the past. A new party, which one might call the
traditionalist, had sought to re-establish the old-time order, in the
state, in customs, in ideas; to combat the corruption of customs; and
of this party Augustus had been the right arm. Indeed, to so great
an extent had this party stirred up public spirit and prevailed upon
those in power that in 18 B.C. it succeeded in passing some great
social laws on luxury, on matrimony, on dress. With these laws, Rome
proposed to remake, by terrible measures, the old, prolific, austere
nobility of the aristocratic era. The _lex de maritandis_ _ordinibus_
aimed with a thousand vexatious restrictions to constrain the nobility
to marry and have children; the _lex sumptuaria_ studied to restrain
extravagance; the _lex de adulteriis_ proclaimed martial law in the
family, menacing an unfaithful wife and her accomplice with exile for
life and the confiscation of half their substance; legislation of the
harshest, this, which should scourge Rome to blood, to keep her from
falling anew into the inveterate vices from which the civil wars were
born.
The impression of the civil wars could not last forever. In fact,
in the decade that followed the promulgation of the social laws, the
puritan fervour, which had up to that time heated all Italy, began
to cool. Wealth increased; the confidence that order and peace were
actually re-established, spread everywhere; the generation that had
seen the civil wars, disappeared; peace and growing prosperity stirred
in the next generation a desire for freedom and pleasure that would
not endure the narrow traditionalism and the puritanism of the
preceding generation; consequently also the laws of 18 B.C. became
intolerable.
To understand this change in public spirit which had such serious
consequences, there is no better way than by studying the most
celebrated writer of this new generation, Ovid, who represents it most
admirably both in life and works. Ovid was born at Sulmona in 43 B.C.
He was about the same age as Tiberius,--of a knight's family--that
is, of the wealthy middle class. He was destined by his father to the
study of oratory and jurisprudence, evidently to make a political man
of him, a senator, a future consul or proconsul, and to contribute to
the great national restoration that his generation proposed to itself
and of which Augustus was architect, preparing a new family for the
political aristocracy that was governing the Empire. Ovid's father
had all the requirements demanded by law and custom: a considerable
fortune, the half-nobility of the equestrian order, an intelligent
son, the means to give him the necessary culture--a favourable
combination of circumstances which was wholly undone by a bit of
unforeseen contrariety, the son's invincible inclination for what his
father called, with little respect, a "useless study," literature.
The young man had indifferently studied oratory and law, gone to Rome,
married, made friendships in the high society of the capital, been
elected to the offices preceding the quæstorship; but when the time
arrived for presenting himself as candidate for the quæstorship
itself--that is, the time for beginning the true _curriculum_ of the
magistracies, he had declared that he would rather be a great poet
than a consul, and there was no persuading him farther on the long
road opened to political ambitions.
With the episode of Julia and Tiberius in mind, I have stated that
Ovid's life epitomises the new generation, because it shows us
in action the first of the forces that dissolved the aristocratic
government and the nobility artificially reconstituted by Augustus
at the close of the civil wars--intellectualism. The case of Ovid
demonstrates that intellectual culture, literature, poetry, instead
of being, for the Roman aristocracy, as in older times, a simple
ornament, secondary to politics, had already a prime attraction for
the man of genius; that even among the higher classes, devoted by
tradition only to military and political life, there appeared, by the
side of the leaders in war and politics, the professional literary
man. The study of Ovid's work shows something even more noteworthy:
that, profiting by the discords in the ruling class, these literary
men feared no longer to express and to re-enforce the discontent,
the bad feeling, the aversion, that the efforts of the State to
re-establish a more vigorous social order was rousing in one part of
the public.
Ovid's first important work was the _Amores_, which was certainly out
by the year 8 B.C. although in a different form from that in which
we now have it. To understand what this book really was when it was
published, one must remember that it was written, read, and what
is more, _admired_, ten years after the promulgation of the _lex de
maritandis ordinibus_ and of the _lex de adulteriis_; it should be
read with what remains of the text of those laws in hand.
We are astonished at the book, full of excitements to frivolity, to
dissipation, to pleasure, to those very activities that appeared to
the ancients to form the most dangerous part of the "corruption."
Extravagances of a libertine poet? The single-handed revolt of a
corrupt youth, which cannot be considered a sign of the times? No. If
there had not been in the public at large, in the higher classes, in
the new generation, a general sympathy with this poetry, subversive of
the solemn Julian laws, Ovid would never have been recognised in the
houses of the great, petted and admired by high society. The great
social laws of Augustus, the publication of which had been celebrated
by Horace in the _Carmen Seculare_, wounded too many interests,
tormented too many selfishnesses, intercepted too many liberties.
His revolutionary elegies had made Ovid famous, because these
interests and these selfishnesses finally rebelled with the new
generation, which had not seen the civil wars. Other incidents before
and after the publication of the _Amores_ also show this reaction
against the social laws. Therefore Augustus proposed about this time
to abolish the provision of the _lex de maritandis ordinibus_ that
excluded celibates from public spectacles; and by his personal
intervention sought to put a check upon the scandalous trials for
adultery that his law had originated--two acts that were so much
admired by a part of the public that statues were erected to him by
popular subscription.
In short, this new movement of public opinion explains the opposition
exerted from this time on against Tiberius and makes us understand how
there arose the conflict in which this mysterious personage was to be
entangled for the rest of his life, and to lose, by no fault of his
own, so great a part of his reputation. I hope to prove that the
Tiberius of Tacitus and Suetonius is a fantastic personality, the hero
of a wretched and improbable romance, invented by party hatred;
that Tiberius remained, as a German historian has defined it, an
undecipherable enigma, simply because there has never been the will to
recognise how much alive the aristocratic republican traditions
still were, and what force they still exerted in the State and in the
family.
Tiberius was but an authentic Claudius--that is, a true descendant of
one of the oldest, the proudest, the most aristocratic families of the
Roman nobility, a man with all the good qualities and all the defects
of the old Roman aristocracy, a man who regarded things and men with
the eyes of a senator of the times of Scipio Africanus--a living
anachronism, a fossil, if you will, from a by-gone age, in a world
that wished to tolerate no more either the vices or the virtues of the
old aristocracy. He thought that the Empire ought to be governed by a
limited aristocracy of diplomats and warriors, rigidly authoritative,
exclusively Roman, which should know how to check the general
corrupting of customs, the current extravagance and dissipation,
beginning its task by imposing upon itself an inexorable
self-discipline. Even though he belonged to the generation of Ovid--to
the generation that had not seen the civil wars--Tiberius, by
singular exception, kept aloof from the undisciplined frivolity of his
contemporaries. He desired the severe application of the social
laws of the year 18, as of all the traditional norms of aristocratic
discipline. His generation therefore soon found him an enemy,
especially after Drusus's death seemed to leave neither doubt nor
choice as to the successor of Augustus. From this contemporary
attitude arises the tacit aversion in the midst of which, after the
lapse of so many centuries, we still feel Tiberius living and working,
an aversion which steadily grows even while he renders the most signal
services to the Empire.
There was between him and his generation irreconcilable discord.
However, it is not likely that this blind and secret hatred alone
could have seriously injured Tiberius, whose power and merits were so
great, if it had not been considerably helped by incidents of various
nature. The first and most important of these was the discord that had
arisen, shortly after the death of Drusus, between Tiberius and his
wife Julia, the daughter of Augustus and the widow of Agrippa.
Tiberius had married her against his will in the year 11, after the
death of Agrippa, by order of Augustus, and had at first tried to
live in accord with her; the attempt was vain, and the spirits of the
husband and wife were soon parted in fatal disagreement. "He lived at
first," writes Suetonius, "in harmony with Julia; but soon grew cool
toward her, and finally the estrangement reached such a point after
the death of their boy born at Aquileia, that Tiberius lived in a
separate apartment"--a separation, as we would call it, in "bed and
board." What was the reason of this discord? No ancient historian has
revealed it; however, we can guess with sufficient probability from
what we know of the characters of the pair and the discord that
divided Roman society. If Tiberius was not the monster of Capri, Julia
was certainly not the miserable Bacchante of the scandalous Roman
chronicle. Macrobius has pictured her in human lights and shadows, a
probable image, describing her as a highly cultured woman, lavish
in tastes and expenditure, fond of beautiful literature, of the
fine arts, and of the company of handsome and elegant young men. She
belonged to the new generation of which Ovid was spokesman and poet;
while Tiberius represented archaic traditionalism, the spirit of a
past generation.
It is easy to understand how these two persons, incarnating the
irreconcilable opposition of two epochs, two _morales_, two societies,
of Roman militarism and of Oriental culture, could not live together.
A man like Tiberius, severe, simple, who detested frivolous pleasures,
caring more for war than for society life, could not live in peace
with this beautiful and vivacious creature, who loved luxury,
prodigality, brilliant company. It is not rash to suppose that
the _lex sumptuaria_ of the year 18 was the first grave cause of
disagreement. Julia, given, as Macrobius describes her, to profuse
expenditure and pretentious elegance, could not take this law
seriously; while it was the duty of Tiberius, who always protested by
deed as by word against the barren pomp of the rich, to see that his
wife serve as an example of simplicity to the other matrons of Rome.
Very soon there occurred an accident, not uncommon in unfortunate
marriages, but which for special reasons was, in the family of
Tiberius, far more than wontedly dangerous. Tacitus tells us that
after Julia was out of favour with Tiberius, she contracted a relation
with an elegant young aristocrat, one Sempronius Gracchus, of the
family of the famous tribunes. Accepting as true the affirmation of
Tacitus, in itself likely, we can very well explain the behaviour and
acts of Tiberius in these years. The misdoing of Julia offended
not only the man and husband, but placed also the statesman, the
representative of the traditionalist party, in the gravest perplexity.
According to the _lex de adulteriis_, made by Augustus in the year
18, the husband ought either to punish the unfaithful wife himself or
denounce her to the prætor. Could he, Tiberius, provoke so frightful
a scandal in the house of the "First Citizen of the Republic"; drive
from Rome, defamed, the daughter of Augustus, the most noted lady of
Rome, who had so many friends in all circles of its society? Suetonius
speaks of the disgust of Tiberius for Julia, "_quam neque criminari
aut demittere auderet_"--whom he dared neither incriminate nor
repudiate. On the other hand, did not he, the intransigeant
traditionalist, who kept continually reproving the nobility for their
laxity in self-discipline, merit rebuke, for allowing this thing to
go on, not applying the law? The difficulty was serious; the _lex de
adulteriis_ began to be a torment to its creators. Unable to separate
from, unwilling to live with, this woman who had traduced him and whom
he despised, Tiberius was reduced to maintaining a merely apparent
union to avoid the scandal of a trial and divorce.
This proceeding, however, was an expedient in that condition of things
both insufficient and dangerous. The discord between Tiberius and
Julia put into the hands of the young nobility, up to that time
unarmed, a terrible weapon against the illustrious general, who was,
meanwhile, fighting the Germans. The young nobility, inimical to the
social laws and to Tiberius, rallied about Julia, and the effects of
this alliance were not slow in appearing. Julia had had five sons by
Agrippa, of whom the eldest two, Caius and Lucius, had been adopted
by Augustus. In the year 6 B.C., the eldest, Caius, reached the age of
fourteen. He was therefore but a lad; notwithstanding his youth, there
was suddenly brought forward the strange, almost incredible, proposal
to make a law by which he might at once be elected consul for the year
754 A.U.C, when he would be twenty years old.
Who made this proposal? Augustus, if we believe Suetonius, out of
excessive fondness for his adopted sons. Dion, on the contrary, tells
these things differently. He says that from the beginning Augustus
opposed the law, and so leads us to doubt that it was either proposed
or desired by that Prince. The facts are that a party in Rome kept
insisting till Augustus supported this law with his authority, and
that from the first he was unwilling to be accessory to an election
that overturned without reason every Roman constitutional right.
Who then were these strange admirers of a child of fourteen, who to
make him consul did not hesitate to do violence to tradition, to the
laws, to good sense, and, finally, to the adoptive father? It was the
opposition to Tiberius, the party of the young nobility and Julia, who
were seeking a rule less severe, and, if not the abolition, at least
the mitigated application of the great social laws. They aimed to put
forward the young Caius, to set him early before public attention, to
hasten his political career, in order to oppose a rival to Tiberius;
to prepare another collaborator and successor of Augustus, to make
Tiberius less indispensable and therefore less powerful.
In brief, here was the hope of using against Tiberius at once the
maternal pride and affection of Julia, the tenderness of Augustus, and
the popularity of the name of Cæsar, which Caius carried. The people
had never greatly loved the name of the Claudii, a haughty line of
invincible aristocrats, always hard and overbearing with the poor,
always opposed to the democratic party. The party against Tiberius
hoped that when to a Claudius there should be opposed a Cæsar, the
public spirit would revert to the dazzling splendour of the name.
Now we understand why Augustus had at first objected. The privileges
that he had caused to be conceded to Marcellus, to Drusus, to
Tiberius, were all of less consequence than those demanded for
Caius and had all been justified either by urgent needs of State, or
services already rendered; but how could it be tolerated that without
any reason, without the slightest necessity, there should be made
consul a lad of fourteen, of whom it would be difficult to predict
even whether he would become a man of common sense? Moreover Augustus
could not so easily bring himself to offend Tiberius, who would not
admit that the chief of the Republic should help his enemies offer him
so great an affront. How could it be, that while he, amid fatigues
and perils in cold and savage regions, was fighting the Germans and
holding in subjection the European provinces, that _jeunesse dorée_
of good-for-nothings, cynics, idlers, poets, which infested the new
generation, was conniving with his wife to set against him a child
of fourteen?--to gain, as it were, sanction from a law that the State
would not be safe till by the side of this Claudius should be placed a
Cæsar, beardless and inexpert, as if the name of the latter outweighed
the genius and experience of the former? And Augustus, the head of the
Republic, would he have tolerated such an outrage? Tiberius not only
resisted the law but exacted the open disapproval of Augustus; in
fact, at the beginning, Augustus stood out against it as Tiberius
wished; but difficulties grew by the way and became grave.
Julia and her friends knew how to dispose public opinion ably in
their own favour, to intrigue in the Senate, to exploit the increasing
unpopularity of the social laws, of the spreading aversion to Tiberius
and the admiration for other members of Augustus's family. The
proposal to make Caius consul became in a short time so popular
for one or another of these reasons, and as the symbol of a future
government less severe and traditionalistic, that Augustus felt less
and less able to withstand the current. On the other hand, to yield
meant mortally to offend Tiberius. Finally, as was his wont, this
astute politician thought to extricate himself from the difficulty by
a transaction and an expedient. Dion, shortly after having said that
Augustus finally yielded to the popular will, adds that, to make Caius
more modest, he gave Tiberius the tribunician power for five years and
charged him with subduing the revolt in Armenia. Augustus's idea is
clear: he was trying to please everybody--the partisans of Caius Cæsar
by not opposing the law, and Tiberius, by giving the most splendid
compensation, making him his colleague in place of Agrippa.