No honour could make up for the insult Augustus had done him, though
yielding but in part to his enemies, because by so doing even Augustus
had seemed to think it necessary to set him beside a lad of fourteen;
he would go away; they might do as they pleased and charge Caius with
directing the war in Germany. Indignant at the timid opportunism of
Augustus, disgusted with the wife whom he could neither accuse nor
repudiate, Tiberius demanded permission of Augustus to retire to
Rodi to private life, saying that he was tired and in need of repose.
Naturally Augustus was frightened, begged and pleaded with him to
remain, sent his mother Livia to beseech him, but every effort was
futile; Tiberius was obstinate, and finally, since Augustus did not
permit his departure, he threatened to let himself die of hunger.
Augustus still tried to stand firm; one day, two days, three days, he
let him fast without giving the required consent. At the end of the
fourth day, Augustus had to recognise that Tiberius had serious intent
to kill himself, and yielded. The Senate granted him permission to
depart; and Tiberius at once started for Ostia, "without saying a
word," writes Suetonius, "to those who accompanied him, and kissing
but a few."
It would be impossible to decide whether this retaliation of
Tiberius's self-love was equal to the offence; and perhaps it is
useless to discuss the point. It is certain, however, that the
consequences of the departure of Tiberius were weighty. The first
result was that the party of the young nobility, the party averse to
the laws of the year 18, found itself master of the field; perhaps
because the opposing party lost with Tiberius its most authoritative
leader; perhaps because Augustus, irritated against Tiberius, inclined
still more toward the contrary party; perhaps because public opinion
judged severely the departure of Tiberius, who, already little
admired, became decidedly unpopular. Julia and her friends triumphed,
and not content with having conquered, wished to domineer; shortly
afterward they obtained the concession of the same privileges as those
granted to Caius for his younger brother Lucius. At the same
time, Augustus prepared to make Caius and Lucius his two future
collaborators in place of Tiberius; Ovid set his hand to a book still
more scandalous and subversive than the _Amores_, the _Ars Amandi_;
public indulgence covered with its protection all those accused on
grounds of the laws of the year 18; and finally, the two boys, Caius
and Lucius, became popular, like great personages, all over
Italy. There have been found in different cities of the peninsula
inscriptions in their honour, one of which, very long and curious, is
at Pisa; it is full of absurd eulogies of the two lads, who had as yet
done nothing, good or bad. Italy must have been tired enough of a too
conservative government, which had lasted twenty-five years, of an
Empire reconquered by traditional ideas, if, in order to protest, it
lionised the two young sons of Agrippa in ways that contradicted every
idea and sentiment of Roman tradition.
In conclusion, the departure of Tiberius, and the severe judgment the
public gave it, still further weakened the conservative party, already
for some years in decline, by a natural transformation of the public
spirit. Perhaps the party of tradition would have been entirely spent,
had not events soon reminded Rome that its spirit was the life of the
military order. The departure of Tiberius, the man who represented
this spirit, rapidly disorganised the army and the external policy
of Rome. Up to that time Augustus had had beside him a powerful
helper--first Agrippa, afterwards Tiberius; but then he found himself
alone at the head of the Empire, a man already well on in years; and
for the first time it appeared that this zealous bureaucrat, this
fastidious administrator, this intellectual idler, who could do an
enormous amount of work on condition that he be not forced to issue
from his study and encounter currents of air too strong for him, was
insufficient to direct alone the politics of an immense empire, which
required, in addition to the sagacity of the administrator and the
ingenuity of the legislator, the resoluteness of the warrior and the
man of action.
The State rapidly fell into a stupor. In Germany, where it was
necessary to proceed to the ordering of the province, everything was
suspended; the people, apparently subdued, were not bound to pay any
tribute, and were left to govern themselves solely and entirely
by their own laws--a strange anomaly in the history of the Roman
conquests, which only the departure of Tiberius can explain. At such
a distance, when he was no longer counselled by Tiberius who so well
understood German affairs, Augustus trusted no other assistants,
fearing lack of zeal and intelligence; distrusting himself also, he
dared initiate nothing in the conquered province. The Senate, inert
as usual, gave it not a thought. So Germany remained an uncertainty,
neither a province nor independent, for fifteen years, a fact wherein
is perhaps to be found the real cause of the catastrophe of Varus,
which ruined the whole German policy of Rome.
Furthermore, in Pannonia and Dalmatia, when it was known that the most
valiant general of Rome was in disgrace at Rodi, the malcontents took
fresh courage, reopened an agitation that could but terminate in
a revolt, much more dangerous than any preceding. In the Orient,
Palestine arose in 4 B.C., on the death of Herod the Great, against
his son, Archelaus, and against the Hellenised monarchy, demanding
to be made a Roman province like Syria, and a frightful civil war
illumined with its sinister glare the cradle of Jesus. The governor
of Syria, Quintilius Varus, threw himself into Judea and succeeded in
crushing the revolt; but Augustus, unable to bring himself either to
give full satisfaction to the Hebrew people or to execute entirely the
testament of Herod, decided as usual on a compromise: he divided
the ancient kingdom of Herod the Great among three of his sons, and
changed Archelaus's title of king to the more modest one of ethnarch.
Then new difficulties arose with the Empire of the Parthians. In
short, vaguely, in every part of the Empire and beyond its borders,
there began to grow the sense that Rome was again weakening; a sense
of doubt due to the decadence of the spirit of tradition and of the
party representing it; to the new spirit of the new generation; and
finally, to the absence of Tiberius, the one capable general of the
time, which gradually disorganised even the western armies, the best
in the Empire.
This dissolution of the State naturally fed in the traditionalist
party the hope of reconquering. Tiberius had sincere friends and
admirers, especially among the nobility, less numerous than those of
Julia, but more serious, because his merits were real. Many people
among the higher classes--even though, like Augustus, they considered
the obduracy of Tiberius excessive--thought that Rome no more
possessed so many examples of illustrious men as to be able to retire
its best general at thirty-seven. Very soon there arose in the circles
about Augustus, in the Senate, in the comitia, a bitter contention
between Tiberius's friends and his enemies; this was really a struggle
between the traditionalist party, which busied itself conserving,
together with the traditions of the old Romanism, the military and
political power of Rome, and the party of the young nobility, which,
without heeding the external dangers, wished to impel habits, ideas,
the public spirit, toward the freer, broader forms of the Oriental
civilisation, even at the risk of dissolving the State and the army.
Julia and Tiberius personify the two parties; between them stands
Augustus, who ought to decide, and is more uncertain than ever.
Theoretically Augustus always inclined more toward Tiberius, but from
disgust at his departure, from solicitude for domestic peace, from
his little sympathy with his step-son, he was driven to the opposite
party.
In this duel, what was the behaviour and the part of Livia, the mother
of Tiberius? The ancient historians tell us nothing; it is, at all
events, hardly probable that Livia remained an inactive witness of
the long struggle waged to secure the return of Tiberius and his
reinstatement in the brilliant position once his. Moreover, Suetonius
says that during his entire stay at Rodi, Tiberius communicated with
Augustus by means of Livia. At any rate, the party of Tiberius was
not long in understanding that he could not re-enter Rome, as long as
Julia was popular and most powerful there; that to reopen the gates of
Rome to the husband, it was necessary to drive out the wife. This was
a difficult enterprise, because Julia was upheld by the party already
dominant; she had the affection of Augustus; she was the mother
of Caius and Lucius Cæsar, the two hopes of the Republic, whose
popularity covered her with a respect and a sympathy that made her
almost invulnerable. Tiberius, instead, was unpopular. However, there
is no undertaking impossible to party hate. Exasperated by the growing
disfavour of public opinion, the party of Tiberius decided on a
desperate expedient to which Tiberius himself would not have dared set
hand; that is, since Julia had a paramour, to adopt against her the
weapon supplied by the _lex Julia de adulteriis_, made by her father,
and so provoke the terrible scandal that until then every one had
avoided in fear.
Unfortunately, we possess too few documents to write in detail the
history of this dreadful episode; but everything becomes clear enough
if one sees in the ruin of Julia a kind of terrible political and
judicial blackmailing, tried by the friends of Tiberius to remove the
chief obstacle to his return, and if one takes it that the friends
of Tiberius succeeded in procuring proofs of the guilt of Julia and
carried them to Augustus, not as to the head of the State, but to the
father.
Dion Cassius says that "Augustus finally, although tardily, came to
recognise the misdeeds of his daughter," which signifies that at a
given moment, Augustus could no longer feign ignorance of her sins,
because the proofs were in the power of irreconcilable enemies, who
would have refused to smother the scandal. These mortal enemies of
Julia could have been no other than the friends of Tiberius. Julia had
violated the law on adultery made by himself; Augustus could doubt it
no more.
To understand well the tragic situation in which Augustus was placed
by these revelations, one must remember various things: first that
the _lex de adulteriis_, proposed by Augustus himself, obliged the
father--when the husband could not, or would not--to punish the guilty
daughter, or to denounce her to the prætor, if he had not the courage
to punish her himself; second, that this law arranged that if the
father and the husband failed to fulfil their proper duty, any one
whoever, the first comer, might in the name of public morals make
the denunciation to the prætor and stand to accuse the woman and her
accomplice. Tiberius, the husband, being absent at Rodi, he, Augustus,
the father, must become the Nemesis of his daughter--must punish her
or denounce her; if not, the friends of Tiberius could accuse her
to the prætor, hale her before the quæstor, unveil to the public the
shame of her private life.
What should he do? Many a father had disdainfully refused to be the
executioner of his own daughter, leaving to others the grim office of
applying the _lex Julia_. Could he imitate such an example? He was the
head of the Republic, the most powerful man of the Empire, the founder
of a new political order; he could decide peace and war, govern the
Senate at his pleasure, exalt or abase the powerful of the earth with
a nod; and exactly for this reason he dared not evade the bitter task.
He feared the envy, the moral and levelling prejudices of the middle
classes, which needed every now and then to slaughter in the courts
some one belonging to the upper classes, in order to delude themselves
that justice is equal for all. To him had been granted the greatest
privileges; but precisely on this account was it dangerous to try to
cover his daughter with a privileged protection as prey too delicate
for public attack. And then, if he himself gave the example of
disobeying his law, who would observe it? The tremendous scandal would
unnerve all the moral force of his legislation, which was the base
of his prestige. The moment was terrible. Imagine this old man of
sixty-two wearied by forty-four years of public life, embittered
by the difficulties that sprang up about him, disquieted by the
dissolution of State of which he was the impotent witness, finding
himself all at once facing these alternatives--either destroy his
daughter, or undo all the political work over which he had laboured
for thirty years; and no temporising possible!
Augustus was not a naturally cruel man, but before these alternatives
his mind seems to have been for a moment convulsed by an access of
grief and rage, the distant echo of which has come down to us. One
moment, as Suetonius says, he had the idea of killing Julia. Then
reason, pity, affection, gentler habits, prevailed. He did not give
the sentence of death, but he was too practised a politician not
to understand that she could not be saved; and as he had immolated
Cicero, Lepidus, Antony, so he immolated her also to the necessity
of preserving before Italy his prestige of severe legislator and
impartial magistrate. To avoid the trial, he resolved to punish her
himself with his power of _pater familias_ according to the _lex
Julia_, exiling her to Pandataria and announcing the divorce to her
in the name of Tiberius. He then despatched to the Senate a record of
what he had done, and went away to the country, where he remained a
long time, says Suetonius, seeing no one, the prey to profound grief.
It seems that Julia's fall was a surprise to the public. In a day
it learned that the highly popular daughter of Augustus had been
condemned to exile by her father. This unexpected revelation let
a storm loose in the metropolis. Even though there were not then
published in Rome those vile newspapers, the pests of modern
civilisation, that hunt their _soldi_ in the mud and slime of the
basest human passions, the taste for scandalous revelations, the
envy of genius and fortune, the pleasure of wreaking cruelty upon
the unarmed, the low delight in pouring the basest feelings upon the
honour of a woman abandoned by all--these passions animated minds
then, as they do to-day; nor were there then wanting, more than
now, wretches that profited by them, to gather money or satisfy bad
instincts, without being able to dispose of a single, miserable
sheet of paper. On every side delators sprang up, and an epidemic of
slanders embittered Rome; every man who had name or wealth or some
relation with the family of Augustus, ran the risk of being accused as
a lover of Julia. Several youths of high society, frightened by these
charges, committed suicide; others were condemned. About Julia
were invented and spread the most atrocious calumnies, which formed
thereafter the basis for the infamous legends that have remained
in history attached to her name. The traditionalist party naturally
abetted this furor of accusations and inventions, made to persuade the
public that a fearful corruption was hidden among the upper classes
and that to cure it fire and sword must be used without pity.
The friends of Julia, the party of the young nobility, disconcerted at
first by the explosion, did not delay to collect themselves and react;
the populace of Rome made some great demonstrations in favour of Julia
and demanded her pardon of Augustus. Many indeed, recognising that her
punishment was legal, protested against the ferocity of her enemies,
who had not hesitated to embitter with so terrible a scandal the old
age of Augustus; protested against the mad folly of incrimination with
which every part of Rome was possessed. Most people turned, the more
envenomed, against Tiberius, attacking him with renewed fury as the
cause of all the evil. He it was, they insisted, who had conceived the
abominable scandal, willed it, imposed it upon Rome and the Empire!
If Livia and the friends of Tiberius had thought to bring him in
by the gate where Julia went out, they were not slow in recognising
themselves deceived. The fall of Julia struck Tiberius on the rebound
in his distant island. His unpopularity, already great, grew by all
the disgust that the scandal about Julia had provoked, and became
so formidable that one day about this time the inhabitants of Nimes
overturned his statues. It was the beginning of the Christian era, but
a dark silence brooded over the Palatine; the defamed Julia was making
her hard way to Pandataria; Tiberius, discredited and detested, was
wasting himself in inaction at Rodi; Augustus in his empty house,
disgusted, distrustful, half paralysed by deep grief, would hear to
no counsels of peace, of indulgence, of reconciliation. Tiberius and
Julia were equally hateful to him, and as he did not allow himself
to be moved by the friends of Julia, who did not cease to implore her
pardon, so he resisted the friends of Tiberius, who tried to persuade
him to reconciliation. What mattered it to him if the administration
of the State fell to pieces on all sides; if Germans threatened
revolt; if Rome had need of the courage, of the valour, of the
experience of Tiberius?
Tiberius from his retreat in Rodi kept every one in Rome afraid,
beginning with Augustus. Too rich, too eager now for pleasures and
comforts, Rome was almost disgusted with the virtues and the
defects that had in fact created it, and which survived in
Tiberius--aristocratic pride, the spirit of rigour in authority,
military valour, simplicity. Peace had come, extending everywhere,
with wealth, the desire for enjoyment, happiness, pleasure, freedom,
loosening everywhere the firmest bonds of social discipline,
persuading Rome to lay down the heavy armour it had worn for so many
centuries.
In this family quarrel, which comprises a struggle of everlasting
tendencies, Julia represented the new spirit that will prevail,
Tiberius, the old, destined to perish; but for the time being, both
spirits, however opposed, were necessary; for peace did not expand its
gifts in the Empire without the protection of the great armies
that fought on the Rhine and on the Danube. If the spirit of peace
refreshed Rome, Italy, the Provinces, only the old aristocratic and
military spirit could keep the Germans on the Rhine. As in all great
social conflicts, the two opposing parties were both, in a certain
measure and each from its own point of view, right. Just for that
reason, the equilibrium could be found only by a continual struggle
in which men on one side and on the other were destined in turn to
triumph or fall according to the moment; a struggle in which Augustus,
fated to act the part of judge--that is, to recognise, with a final
formal sanction, a sentence already pronounced by facts--had against
his will in turn to condemn some and reward others.
Julia will remain at Pandataria, and Tiberius will return to Rome
when the danger on the Rhine becomes too threatening, yet without much
lessening the conclusive vengeance of Julia. That will come in the
long torment of the reign of Tiberius; in the infamy that will pursue
him to posterity. After having been pitilessly hated and persecuted in
life, this man and this woman, who had personified two social forces
eternally at war with each other, will both fall in death into the
same abyss of unmerited infamy: tragic spectacle and warning lesson on
the vanity of human judgments!
Wine in Roman History
In history as it is generally written, there are to be seen only great
personages and events, kings, emperors, generals, ministers, wars,
revolutions, treaties. When one closes a huge volume of history,
one knows why this state made a great war upon that; understands the
political thinking, the strategic plans, the diplomatic agreements
of the powerful, but would hardly be able to answer much more simple
questions: how people ate and drank, how the warriors, politicians,
diplomats, were clad, and in general how men lived at any particular
time.
History does not usually busy itself with little men and small facts,
and is therefore often obscure, unprecise, vague, tiresome. I believe
that if some day I deserve praise, it will be because I have tried
to show that everything has value and importance; that all phenomena
interweave, act, and react upon each other--economic changes and
political revolutions, costumes, ideas, the family and the state,
land-holding and cultivation. There are no insignificant events
in history; for the great events, like revolutions and wars, are
inevitably and indissolubly accompanied by an infinite number of
slight changes, appearing in every part of a nation: if in life there
are men without note, and if these make up the great majority of
nations--that which is called the "mass"--there is no greater mistake
than to believe they are extraneous to history, mere inert instruments
in the hands of the oligarchies that govern. States and institutions
rest on this nameless mass, as a building rests upon its foundations.
I mean to show you now by a typical case the possible importance of
these little facts, so neglected in history. I shall speak to you
neither of proconsuls nor of emperors, neither of great conquests nor
of famous laws, but of wine-dealers and vine-tenders, of the fortuned
and famous plant that from wooded mountain-slopes, mirrored in the
Black Sea, began its slow, triumphal spread around the globe to
its twentieth century bivouac, California. I shall show you how the
branches and tendrils of the plant of Bacchus are entwined about the
history and the destiny of Rome.
For many centuries the Romans were water-drinkers. Little wine was
made in Italy, and that of inferior quality: commonly not even the
rich were wont to drink it daily; many used it only as medicine during
illness; women were never to take it. For a long time, any woman in
Rome who used wine inspired a sense of repulsion, like that excited in
Europe up to a short time ago by any woman who smoked. At the time
of Polybius, that is, toward the middle of the second century B.C.,
ladies were allowed to drink only a little _passum_,--a kind of sweet
wine, or syrup, made of raisins. About the women too much given to the
beverage of Dionysos, there were terrifying stories told. It was said,
for instance, that Egnatius Mecenius beat his wife to death, because
she secretly drank wine; and that Romulus absolved him (Pliny, _Nat.
Hist._, bk. 14, ch. 13). It was told, on the word of Fabius Pictor,
who mentioned it in his annals, that a Roman lady was condemned by
the family tribunal to die of hunger, because she had stolen from
her husband the keys of the wine-cellar. It was said the Greek judge
Dionysius condemned to the loss of her dower a wife who, unknown to
her husband, had drunk more than was good for her health: this story
is one which shows that women began to be allowed the use of wine as a
medicine. It was for a long time the vaunt of a true Roman to despise
fine wines. For example, ancient historians tell of Cato that, when
he returned in triumph from his proconsulship in Spain, he boasted
of having drunk on the voyage the same wine as his rowers; which
certainly was not, as we should say now, either Bordeaux or Champagne!
Cato, it is true, was a queer fellow, who pleased himself by throwing
in the face of the young nobility's incipient luxury a piece of almost
brutal rudeness; but he exaggerated, not falsified, the ideas and the
sentiments of Romanism. At that time, it was a thing unworthy of a
Roman to be a practised admirer of fine wines and to show too great
a propensity for them. Then not only was the vine little and ill
cultivated in Italy, but that country almost refused to admit its
ability to make fine wines with its grapes. As wines of luxury, only
the Greek were then accredited and esteemed--and paid for, like French
wines to-day; but, though admiring and paying well for them, the
Romans, still diffident and saving, made very spare use of them.
Lucullus, the famous conqueror of the Pontus, told how in his father's
house--in the house, therefore, of a noble family--Greek wine was
never served more than once, even at the most elegant dinners.
Moreover, this must have been a common custom, because Pliny says,
speaking of the beginning of the last century of the Republic, "Tanta
vero vino græco gratia erat ut singulæ potiones in convitu darentur";
that is, translating literally, "Greek wine was so prized that only
single potions of it were given at a meal." You understand at once the
significance of this phrase; Greek wine was served as to-day--at least
on European tables--Champagne is served; it was too expensive to give
in quantity.