THE AUGUSTAN EMPIRE (44 B.C.—A.D. 70)

CHAPTER XIV.

THE SOCIAL POLICY OF AUGUSTUS

I

THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

SIXTY years before Actium a large part of the Italian population was engaged in an attempt to throw off the leadership of Rome. Justice demanded that an empire won by the joint efforts of Rome and the Italians should be regarded as the empire not of Rome but of Italy: yet for over a century Rome had been always more openly treating it as her own. For the Roman Republic the Social War marked the crisis of its history and the culmination of its achievement. By its outbreak Italian unity was threatened: its end was secured by a daring innovation which was the most valuable contribution made by Rome before the Principate to the political ideas of Western Europe. The citizenship of a single city was turned into the citizenship of the whole peninsula. The Allies were retained because they became Romans; and, if the empire remained Roman in name, that was only because the extension of the Roman franchise made Rome and Italy politically identical.

The reception of the Italians into the body politic of Rome was a momentous step. When the civitas Romana was made the common citizenship of Italy, the nature of the citizenship itself was changed. It grew into an imperial citizenship, recognized as compatible with active membership of smaller communities within the whole. Indeed, the local citizenships lost little of their importance; for it was still through them that men controlled their own affairs and retained that sense of responsibility for their surroundings which is the most valuable product of political freedom. The public rights of a Roman citizen could only be enjoyed at Rome; and, though ‘civis Romanus sum’ were words which a man might utter when he was in danger from the law, to the inhabitants of Italy at large their Roman citizenship in practice implied few of the activities for which citizenship had stood during the earlier ages of Graeco-Roman civilization. Its extension to the whole of Italy went far towards emptying the Roman civitas of meaning: and though the enfranchisement of the Allies was a long step towards their final unification, the unity of which their Roman citizenship might become a symbol would not be complete until the people of Italy came to think of themselves, no longer primarily as members of this small community or that, but as parts of a single whole—the body politic of Rome. Only when a strong and universal consciousness of Italian solidarity had been called into being would Italy be ready to assume with confidence the ‘patrocinium orbis terrae.’ And, as has been seen again in the years since i860, to create a political unity in Italy is one task, to create Italians a second.

From its earliest days the power of Rome had been built round the solid core of Roman patriotism: in war the Romans had never asked their friends to do more than they would do themselves. And now that the Italians had won their way to partnership in empire, Italy at large must be stirred by the spirit for which Rome had been famous in the best days of the Republic. To awaken Italy to a consciousness of itself was a task imposed on the states­manship of the early Empire, not by any doctrines of nationalism like those which have spread wide since the days of the reaction against Napoleon, but by the sound instincts of a people with a gift for the tasks of government. When the Gallic rebellion of 52 b.c. was afoot, Julius Caesar had sent home for reinforcements, ‘magni interesse etiam in reliquum tempus ad opinionem Galliae existimans tantas videri Italiae facultates ut, si quid esset in bello detrimenti acceptum, non modo id brevi tempore sarciri, sed etiam maioribus adaugeri copiis posset.’ If Italy was to be equal to its burdens, it must be convinced of its imperial mission; and to create that conviction something more was needed than a mere statement of Rome’s destiny—even if the statement came from Virgil himself.

The history of Hellenism since Alexander had shown that an ecumenical State could only be constructed round the solid core of a people strong in numbers, with a culture of its own and a tenacity of the traditions of its native land which would save that culture from submergence when it came to be carried into the empire at large, and preserve it to be the common property of stocks which were ethnically distinct. The non-Greek populations of the Hellenistic kingdoms in the East were never hellenized: they did not look to Greece as the home of their civilization. But the problem which had baffled the Greeks in Asia was solved in Europe by Rome. The non-Roman populations of Western Europe were romanized: the time was to come when Gauls and Illyrians would show themselves more zealous Romans than the inhabitants of Italy itself. And this romanization of Western Europe was of all Rome’s achievements by far the richest in its effects on later history. The task of Rome was, indeed, easier than that which Asia had presented to the Greeks: the Celts were nearer akin to the Romans than were the Asiatic peoples to the Greeks, and Rome was challenging no culture so ancient or so high as that which was to be found in the dominions of the Persian king. But, more than that, the Greek effort was made by a disunited homeland whose culture was already past its prime, the Roman was based on an Italy which stood solid, believing in its mission and with a civilization, despite disquieting symptoms, still in essence sound. For the choice of Rome’s method the man responsible was Augustus, and it is in his social programme that the manner of his choosing is revealed.

When Augustus became supreme, much still remained to be done before Rome could be ready to guide an empire into a new phase of its development. The age of war was ended; the world for the first time was to be organized for peace; the period of romanization was to begin; and in the Romans themselves patriotism of the mere martial order would no longer be enough. The imperial people must be taught its mission, and the duties which the Roman civitas implied must not need the stimulus of war to bring them into conscious recognition. The first step of all was to unify the Roman People. Italy had been the foundation of Octavian’s resistance to Antony, and men did not doubt that the conflict which reached its end at Actium was a struggle between West and East. To that extent Italy and the provinces which had looked to the young Caesar for a lead could claim a certain character in common; but the most superficial glance would reveal that even then Italy could make no adequate reply to the taunt that it was still a geographical expression. Politically its free inhabitants were all citizens of Rome: yet Virgil’s stress on the promise which Juppiter is made to give is only one of many reminders that in Augustan days the promise had yet to be redeemed. In Southern Italy large parts of the population still spoke Greek. Farther North, it was only after the Social War that Latin had begun to make rapid headway in the regions where Oscan or Umbrian was the native speech, and the evidence from Pompeii is enough to show that at the beginning of our era Oscan was by no means dead. In a land where such variety prevailed, where more than half the population belonged to stocks which had been brought into the Roman State less than sixty years before, and where these men had still to learn that their Roman citizenship was something more than a mere protection against the whims of Roman magistrates, much had to be changed before it could be said with truth that the peoples had been welded into one.

This was the end which Augustus sought. His method for its attainment was to instil into the peoples of Italy the great traditions of the Roman past, to make them the conscious heirs of a proud inheritance, and so to implant a sense of responsibility to their successors which might supply an adequate ideal for their future conduct. His work, however, was made more difficult by the peculiar conditions which prevailed at the end of the Civil Wars. Besides other influences more local in their effects, there was one potent factor affecting the whole peninsula alike. Slavery, which had played its part in creating the unemployment of the second century, and had also threatened to make the countryside unsafe, was now producing a still graver result. Julius Caesar had twice taken steps to encourage parenthood, and some hint of his reason may be found in the rule that at least one third of the herdsmen employed on the ranches of Italy must be drawn from the free population. Abounding supplies of slaves seem to have restricted the demand for free labour, and this restriction was reflected in the birth-rate among the humbler sections of the citizen-community. However remote, the threat which had already proved disastrous to Greece was now hanging dangerously over Italy.

It is not to be supposed that there was any dearth of men legally entitled to be called ‘cives Romani.’ Apart from the vast additions which had been made to the citizen body after the Social War, its numbers were being constantly recruited by the enfranchisement of slaves, and it appears that manumissions on which the vicesima libertatis was paid amounted during the period between 80 and 50 B.c. to a total in the neighbourhood of half a million. Nor was this all. If, as is highly probable, this tax was not levied on informal manumissions, there was a further mass of people whose slavery had in practice been terminated by this process and who, although in the eyes of the law they were still not free, had progressed so far along the road to liberty as to secure praetorian protection against any arbitrary recall to effective servitude. The steady flow of slaves into Italy and their prolific unions meant that the country was in no danger of desolation; and the frequency of manumission was a guarantee that the total number of the free inhabitants would not decline. The menace to a programme like that of Augustus was different: if the population of Italy was only maintained by immigration, it must soon become a nondescript farrago, with the Roman element too weak to leaven the whole lump. The traditions which were to be the foundation of Italian nationality were the traditions of the Latin stock, and they would not readily be communicated to the rest of Italy if the free population of the country were penetrated by heirs of the Hellenistic culture who affected to regard Italy as barbarian. The first business of Augustus was to define the limits of his task: so far as circumstances allowed, he must mark off the material which he was to mould into an imperial people. For this reason he was involved in measures which, by arresting the extension of the Roman civitas and above all by setting limits to the numbers of those Greeks and Orientals who, coming to Italy as slaves, were merged on manumission into the general body of Roman citizens, would preserve that material from uncontrolled contamination. The second part of his work was to raise the morale of Rome itself and, having done so, to pass on its ideals to the rest of the Italian people.

III

NFORMAL MANUMISSION: THE LEX JUNIA

The steady importation of slaves and the readiness with which these slaves were freed—often without regard to their moral fitness for a place in any ordered State—had confronted Italy at the end of the Civil Wars with two distinct problems. One concerned the Italian civilization, which was threatened by this invasion of men whose culture had its roots elsewhere and to whom Italy was at best a step-mother. The other was a question of law, but not of law alone; for the structure of Roman society would remain to some extent disordered until this question received a satisfactory answer. The process of formal manumission was neither easy nor cheap. Since its result was legally to confer the Roman citizenship on a slave, it was an act which demanded the cognizance of the State: for this reason it had in theory to be performed in the presence of a magistrate, and, though manumissio vindicta—the normal variety of this procedure—was often made before praetors out of court, a praetor even in his leisure hours was not always readily to be found. Again, five per cent, of the value of a slave thus formally set free seems to have been claimed by the aerarium sanctius. Both the trouble and, in all probability, the expense might be avoided by ‘informal’ manumission, of which the essence was an announcement by the dominus made in a way which would allow the slave to prove it by evidence if the dominus thereafter attempted to deny his word, that the slave might for the future regard himself as free. This process in theory did no more than establish a private arrangement between master and slave; and, since it made no claim either to admit him to Roman citizenship or even to terminate his slavery before the law, there was no reason for the State to take notice of the ceremony and no good cause why it should levy the tax set upon formal grants of liberty. Nevertheless the results of this institution forced themselves on the notice of the administration. It produced a large body of persons legally bond but in practice free; and at some uncertain period of the Republic the praetors had implied a recognition of the system by giving a measure of protection to the class which it created. Yet much remained to be done, especially for the sake of the children of such persons. So long as the parents, despite informal manumission, remained legally slaves, they were incapable of any union which the law would recognize as marriage, and they could not of right pass on their quasi-liberty to the next generation.

The many anomalies caused by informal manumissions were at length removed by a Lex Junia—a measure of which both date and authorship are uncertain. But if, as well may be, the author was Augustus himself, this law must take a leading place in the story of his social legislation. It did not, indeed, bear directly on his central task or creating an Italian nation, but, by raising to liberty a body of men and women who hitherto had floated uncertainly between slavery and freedom, it simplified and strengthened the structure of society; and the new status which it created played a large part in the social history of the Roman world until, having served its purpose, it was abolished by Justinian in a.d. 531. The essential provision of the Lex Junia was to confer statutory freedom on persons informally manumitted, and to define the legal position which they should hold. Their rights, known as ‘Latinitas Juniana,’ from their resemblance to those of the contemporary Latin colonies, brought them definitely within the category of personae liberae and gave them a limited capacity to acquire, hold and alienate property in accordance with the Civil Law. But the restrictions on this capacity were serious. Though Latini Juniani enjoyed what was tantamount to usufruct of their property during life, they could not receive inheritances or legacies (except in a roundabout and evasive way as beneficiaries of fidei-commissa); nor could they make any kind of independent will, and their property at death reverted to the patrons under rules which, until a.d. 42, were indistinguishable from those governing the peculium of a slave. Justinian is not unfair when he describes them as men ‘ qui licet ut liberi vitam suam peragebant, attamen ipso ultimo spiritu simul animam atque libertatem amittebant.’ Hence, since the patron’s interests were protected by the usual rules against fraudulent alienation of property by freedmen, the patronage of Junian Latins acquired a very special value. Against this, however, must be set the provisions about children. If in the matter of property the Junian Latin was assimilated to the slave, his offspring were unmistakably those of a freedman. Though, if we should follow Gaius rather than ‘Ulpian’ the Lex Junia itself did nothing to allow the Latins it created an avenue to any higher position, children who took their status from a parent holding Junian Latinity counted as free-born Latins and were far on the road to Roman citizenship.

Such in outline were the provisions of a measure chiefly notable for its contribution to the ordered arrangement of society. It cannot be said to have made an addition to the free population of the Roman State, because the freedom of the people it affected was already protected in principle by the praetors. Indeed, if it had any influence on the number of manumissions at all, that influence perhaps rather tended to their diminution. Evidence is lacking: but if the vicesima libertatis is properly so described—if, that is, the tax was a charge for freedom and not for admission to the Roman civitas—it may reasonably be conjectured that, when the Lex Junia granted liberty with the full authority of the Roman People to slaves informally set free, opportunity was taken to make all manumissions liable to this charge and thereby to discourage reckless gifts of freedom. But this, like the date and authorship of the law, is not a matter on which the evidence justifies more than a tentative conclusion.

III

SLAVES AND THE ROMAN CITIZENSHIP:

THE LEX FUFIA CANINIA AND THE LEX AELIA SENTIA

Distinct from the problem presented by domestic manumission, with which the Lex Junia had to deal, was the threat made to the character of the Roman People by the numbers in which slaves were set free by the full procedure which converted them forthwith into Roman citizens. Unlike the Lex Junia, the measures whereby Augustus sought to reduce this unwelcome recruitment of the citizen-body are well attested. In 2 b.c., by a Lex Fufia Caninia, Augustus fixed limits to the reckless generosity with which masters freed their slaves by will. Testamentary manumission, which carried with it both liberty and the Roman citizenship, was an attractive form of charity. It postponed the gift till the donor could not feel the cost, and, by releasing his pent-up benefactions on his death, ensured the concentration at his funeral of the gratitude due to the liberality of a lifetime. So potent were motives such as these that men had been known to leave wills which ordered the manumission of all their slaves without exception. This abuse the Lex Fufia Caninia countered with an arrangement whereby the number of slaves a master might liberate by will was limited to a stated fraction of the number which he owned, and this fraction diminished as the size of the familia increased. At one end of the scale, which did not apply to those with fewer slaves than three, the man who had ten slaves or less might free half, at the other the wealthy proprietor of slaves be­tween one hundred and five hundred might liberate one fifth, provided always that each beneficiary was explicitly named by the testator; and in no case was it possible for more than a hundred to gain liberty by any single will. Thus one of the broadest channels by which foreign blood flowed into the community of Roman citizens was so far dammed as to leave its stream of manageable dimensions, with consequences of which the value may be gathered from the care which was taken to prevent their frustration.

Five years after he had regulated manumissions at death Augustus completed his programme for curbing the enfranchisement of slaves with a measure which cut down the rights of masters to grant liberty during life. This capacity, which had been left untouched by the Lex Fufia Caninia, was drastically curtailed by an elaborate statute known after S. Aelius Catus and C. Sentius Saturninus, consuls in a.d. 4. One of its provisions, framed on a somewhat different principle from the rest, completely shut off a certain class of slave from access to the Roman citizenship. Those who had been condemned to certain specified forms of punishment either by their masters or by the State were consigned on manumission to the status of surrendered enemies (peregrini dediicii). They were compelled to live at least a hundred miles from Rome under pain of return to slavery for life, they could neither take under the will of someone else nor (according to the best opinion) make one of their own, and at death their property passed according to various rules of intestate succession. On the other hand, towards candidates for enfranchisement against whom no moral objection could be urged the law adopted a milder attitude, and its effect, drastic though it might be, was merely to withhold the citizenship in cases where manumission might be reckless. Always provided that the slave was not disqualified by character, if the dominus was over twenty years of age and the slave over thirty, full enfranchisement was possible in the normal way by the ceremony with the vindicta in the presence of a praetor or some other appropriate magistrate. But when either of these two require­ments of age was not fulfilled enfranchisement only followed if, be­fore the ceremony, special reasons for the proposed manumission had been adduced and these reasons had been approved by a body of investigators, composed in Rome of five senators and five eguites who sat for this purpose on stated days and in the provinces of twenty Roman citizens who were available to hear such cases at the end of each assize. In the absence of a successful causae probatin, if the dominus was under twenty no result of any kind could follow: indeed, such was the insistence that the dominus must be of age that a man of less than twenty could not even set a slave free by will.If on the other hand, he was over twenty but the slave was less than thirty, the manumission must be treated as ‘informal’ and the slave became a Latinus Junianus.

The effect of these enactments, which were by no means all that the Lex Aelia Sentia laid down, was to complete the work begun by the Lex Fufia Caninia, These two measures had a common aim-—to check the number of manumissions which involved the enrolment of slaves in the ranks of Roman citizens. The earlier measure had brought testamentary manumission under control: the Lex Aelia Sentia curbed manumission during the lifetime of the owner: and together these laws cannot have failed to secure a drastic reduction in the number of persons alien both by culture and by blood, whom the body politic of Rome was called upon to absorb.

IV

THE STATE OF ROMAN SOCIETY

Thus far the way of Augustus was easy: there was no difficulty in passing laws which would cut down, or even stop, the contamination of the Populus Romanus from outside. But what remained was a harder task—to restore the morale of an enervated people and to rid them of their own inherent ailments. The causes of the social distemper were two. First the influx of wealth, from small beginnings in the third century b.c., had grown to the dimensions of a torrent and had swept away the whole superstructure of the old agrarian community, leaving the place fpee for a mercantile plutocracy new to the use of money. And then had come half a century of domestic war, with all the familiar consequences of a sudden transference of wealth, a dislocation of the economic system and a general loss of responsibility among men reduced to a precarious tenure of their property, and even of their lives. In Italy at large the damage is easy to exaggerate. Since the rising of the Allies in 91 b.c. the country had, indeed, seen frequent wars, but it had not been subjected to widespread or continued devastation. Nevertheless, warfare had wrought a change. The volunteers of the Marian army, who enlisted because the army offered more attractions than any they could find in civil life, were men whom unemployment had driven to the towns; and, if they were not all drawn from the proletariate of Rome itself, at least they had made closer acquaintance with an urban society than was possible for farmers living scattered over the territory of some agrarian community. For such men, when they had spent their active lives as soldiers, pensions had to be provided on discharge, and the grants of land which served this purpose scattered these carriers of a Roman outlook far and wide.

As a contribution to the unification of Italy such settlements of ex-service men cannot be deplored; but their numbers were so large that their claims were only met at the cost of considerable hardship to the civil population. Sulla had found homes for over 100,000 of his men by ruthless seizure of land, and, though Caesar, both as consul and dictator, had shown great consideration for vested interests, in the period of the Second Triumvirate drastic confiscations were renewed: it was not till 30 b.c. that gentler methods were resumed. That the sufferings of the time were severe is beyond dispute; but their severity can be exaggerated, though not excused. The dispossessed were not all condemned to destitution: the farmer Ofellus, a sturdy tenant of the land he once had owned, is not to be regarded as unique. Indeed, the most alarming changes on the land were due to other causes than the return of soldiers from the wars. It was not to them that Virgil sang the praise of Italy and extolled the dignity of the soil. The audience to which the Georgies were addressed was one strange to landed estates—an audience composed of men who had made fortunes in the wars and had rushed to invest their capital in real property, the one gilt-edged security of the ancient world. Interest was all they sought, and it was not likely that their incomes would be sacrificed to the social duties of a landlord. But in Italy, where the physical structure of the country is peculiar, such men might do much harm. Bitter experience had proved that in large parts of the peninsula ranching would yield higher profits than arable cultivation, and experience had shown as well that these profits were won at the expense of the community. For under grass the country needed fewer hands to work it than when it was under plough; and, if town-bred landlords in their zeal for gain reck­lessly increased the grazing, the land of Saturn would cease to be a great mother of men because it would no longer be a great mother of crops.

Though there were anxious symptoms, it was not the country­side or the smaller towns of Italy which presented Augustus with his hardest task. Despite the advent of new owners, whether large proprietors or private soldiers with their humble plots, the character of the rural population was not greatly changed. The newcomers were largely parasitic: they might impoverish the people on whom they battened, but the sturdy virtues of the Italian peasant survived. The crucial problem lay elsewhere. From the earliest beginnings of its history Rome had owed its greatness to an oligarchy. If Italy was to be the heart of an empire, it was no less true that the heart of Italy was, and would remain, the aristocracy of Rome; and at the end of the Civil Wars that aristocracy showed ominous signs of collapse. Until the middle of the second century b.c. its vicissitudes had offered no reason for alarm: as old families sank into insignificance and new ones rose to fame, the heritage of political experience which each generation held in trust was passed on intact to its successor. But now for at least a hundred years signs had not been wanting that more dangerous forces were at work. The eastward advance after the Second Punic War brought wealth to certain sections of the Roman population in a sudden profusion which, even in a society where capital might find employment more easily than it ever could in a world which had not been industrialized, would have given its owners no time to learn its proper use. When conquest yielded wealth and wealth opened prospects of life on a scale unknown before, men trained to the narrow outlook of a rustic folk took time to find their bearings; and, while they sought, much mischief was done. In his penetrating sketch of the Republic in decay, Pliny is not mistaken: ‘ posteris laxitas mundi et rerum amplitjido damno fuit.’

The moral consequences of this economic change have been described at length elsewhere. To the modest aristocracy of the agrarian Republic there succeeded a body of men whose wealth was essential to their position and whose leisure was largely spent on a competition in extravagance. The cost of public life became enormous. Crassus, indeed, is recorded to have said that for a man of high political ambition no amount of wealth could be enough; and it is the prevalence of such an attitude which gives significance to the peremptory demand for a return to financial sanity which is implied in the senatorial census fixed by Augustus. Private life, too, was affected no less: wealth would not lie idle, and men who could find no salutary employment for their capital spent it in ways less easy to defend. Luxury took hold of the upper class; and rivalry in ostentation, even more effectively than the mere prudential motives of other times, provoked that money-madness which, to Horace at least, seemed the most vicious feature of his age.

The effects of this demoralization were many, and among them was one which calls for special mention here. A generation which has seen the spread of motor-cars among the many needs no more reminder that, when opportunities for expenditure increase and fashion allows pleasure to justify its cost, the price of luxuries is found by economies practised in the home. When the standards of living rise faster than incomes, the birth-rate falls; and, though in Rome there were individuals whose fortunes were prodigious, the financial drain of public life was so severe that, until a man had made himself, like Julius or Augustus, master of the Roman world, he could never afford to despise opportunities of saving in the comfortable assurance that his money was enough. Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, had borne a family of twelve, but in the Ciceronian age the great ones were rare whose children numbered more than two or three. By the end of the Republic the old conception of marriage and its obligations to the State had long vanished from the places where it was most to be desired: when Propertius exclaims

nullus de nostro sanguine miles erit,

he is distinguished from many of his nobler contemporaries by nothing save the cynical frankness of his defiance.

*The financial inducements to parsimony at home were reinforced by two other powerful considerations. The first was the result of a feature in Roman life which can claim a greater significance than is generally allowed. Provided that his will was made in proper form, a citizen was under no obligation to choose an heir from his own family; and, more important still, he might diminish the inheritance by legacies which in size and number at first were unrestricted. This latitude of the law was a necessary condition of the custom whereby the wealthier citizens left generous tokens of affection to their friends—a custom which had grown, until to be omitted from the will of an acquaintance could be taken as a calculated insult. It was reckoned a sign of high principle in Pompey that he protected the body of Sulla from dishonour though the Dictator had left out his name from the list of his legatees. The abuses which this practice provoked are a commonplace of the early Empire. When testators were so prodigal with their bequests, the temptation to seek mention in a will grew strong enough to break through the restraints of decency and even honour. If men like Crassus and Hortensius, though they were not its authors, stooped to profit by a testament which was known to have been forged, smaller people might be pardoned the use of flattery in an attempt to win some tangible mark of gratitude from the object of their attentions. Cicero already had condemned the ‘malitiosae blanditiae’ by which inheritances were won, and Horace in the most satirical of his Satire holds up the hunt for dead men’s shoes as the shortest and most certain road to wealth.

When a livelihood could be made from bequests and their acquisition had gained a recognized place among the professions of the age, the practitioners of the art naturally bent their energies with especial zeal to those of the rich whose generosity was not trammelled by the claims of children. Catullus knows the way in which the arrival of a male descendant, even if only a grandson,

suscitat a cano uolturium capiti;

but it was not long before the ingratiating servilities of the captator found victims to whom they were so welcome that celibacy seemed to offer attractions greater than any to be found in marriage. In his shrewd remarks on the lack of intellectual interests at Rome the elder Pliny notices that one of the results produced by the worship of money was to put orbitas ‘in auctoritate summa et potential’ Celibacy was made seductive; the satisfaction which vanity might derive from the obsequiousness of aspiring legatees was added to the expense of self-indulgence as a motive for declining the ties of parenthood; and the evidence for the effect of captatio on the birth-rate among the wealthy is clear enough to show that, besides a certain humour, there was a large measure of justice in the enactment of Augustus to the general effect that, whatever the condition of the testator, people of any substance, other than near relatives, who were to benefit under a will must at least be married themselves.

There remains one other potent force among the factors which combined to discourage marriage. The high conception of the relation between husband and wife attained in early Rome is scarcely more remarkable than the lack of legal regulations to protect it. All unions, except the negligible minority contracted by the elaborate process of confarreatio, might be dissolved without the intervention of the State, and in marriage even the formalities which brought the wife under the manus of her husband had ceased to be necessary before the time of the Twelve Tables. Not only did the woman remain in the potestas of the pater familias., but in course of time arrangements were devised whereby her dowry ceased to pass irrevocably to the husband. Cases, of which the most famous is that in which Licinia, the widow of Gaius Gracchus, recovered her portion from his heirs, show that by the second century b.c. the rights of the husband had been curtailed, and even a legislator so conservative in his outlook as Augustus was ready not only to accept, but to extend, the principle that the dos—and consequently the bride who brought it—at the be­ginning of the union was to be regarded as no more than a Ioan to the husband. With the passage of time he might, indeed, extend his ownership to a larger fraction of the property. If children were born and the wife subsequently became the guilty party in a divorce, he was entitled to retain one-sixth of the dowry for every surviving child up to a maximum of three: but beyond this point nothing short of the wife’s death could increase his claim, and the wife herself remained absolutely free to end the union at her discretion.

The change in the status of the dowry marks a change in the position of women themselves. Though they had enjoyed an honourable prominence in daily life from the earliest times of which records are preserved, there are elements in the Roman law which clearly assume a high degree of subjection to the husband: most famous of all is the denial of remedy for adultery by the husband, though adultery on the other side was an act for which the husband might even put his wife to death. But by the last century of the Republic, females had in practice obtained their independence, and nothing but social convention and a sense of responsibility barred the way to a dangerous exploitation of their privilege. Under the demoralizing temptations of great and sudden wealth the barrier at length broke down, and fashion took a form which could not be safely tolerated. The performances of Clodia and her like, political unions which were marriages in nothing more than name, and the whole development first revealed by Catullus and seen at its climax in the world of Ovid, all have their place in a story which boded ill. Nor were the effects of the new manners confined to those who lived loose themselves. The exaggerated freedom of the womenfolk, which enabled the greatest of them to take their part even in high political concerns, had its repercussions in circles which might even have been called old-fashioned. Neither Quintus Cicero nor Atticus was a moral revolutionary: yet the experience of Quintus with his wife Pom- ponia, Atticus’ sister, was of a kind to warn prudent bachelors against experiments with a mate whom the law would leave immune from a husband’s control. When free women were apt to be froward partners, in wide sections of society men were tempted to seek a substitute for marriage in life with an en­franchised slave over whom they might still retain the authority of a patronus.

Thus in an age when the distinction between wedlock and mere cohabitation was fine, and when it could be seriously argued that bigamy was impossible because a second marriage was by itself a valid dissolution of the first, the stability of the family was endangered by the threat that marriage would be made to serve the pleasure of the parties rather than the needs of the community as a whole. It is not, indeed, to be supposed that the moral outlook of Italy at large had changed: the evidence, though scanty, is enough to show that outside Rome the old ideals had not lost their power. And even in the City itself the new frivolity was confined to a single class. But that class, the governing nobility, was the one which it was essential to preserve; and by the end of the Republic signs were plain that, if it was to survive, the aristocracy must be recalled to some kind of moral sanity. Marriage must be raised again to the dignity of a duty to the State, the hampering activities of the captatores must be curbed, and the licence which had deposed children from their place as the final cause of wedlock must be restrained. Only so would the nobility preserve the solid strength which was essential in the keystone of the whole imperial structure.

V.

THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE LAWS ON THE MARRIAGE OF ROMAN CITIZENS

The sequence of the measures by which Augustus sought this moral reformation cannot be recovered in all its details. Two passages in the poems of Propertius, neither of which can well be dated to a year later than 23 b.c., have been adduced as evidence that legislation on marriage was mooted in the earliest period of the Principate, and Propertius is perhaps confirmed in this by Livy; but the proposal, whatever it may have been, was postponed, if not withdrawn, and the first positive enactment was reserved for the eve of the new era. The Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus was in force by 23 May 17 b.c., and not long afterwards Horace, who had already revealed in the Secular Hymn that morality was a matter of active interest in the highest quarters, provides the first clear evidence for the effects of the Lex Julia de adulteriis. A closer dating of these two fundamental statutes cannot be proved; but the appearance of evidence for their existence in 17 b.c. and soon afterwards lends support to the suggestion of Dio that they belong to the period immediately following the return of Augustus from the East in the autumn of 19 b.c. According to the account of Augustus himself, it was towards the end of this year that he was first offered the cura legum et morum by the Senate and Roman People; but, since the offer had to be repeated within twelve months, it may be inferred that the measures which justified his claim to have carried out the wishes of the Senate without accepting any extraordinary office and on the authority of the tribuniciapotestas alone cannot have been complete, at earliest, before the year 18 b.c. was well advanced. Legislation may well have started soon after the consuls of 18 b.c. took office; the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus at least had been enacted by the early summer of 17 B.c.; and the passage of the whole programme may thus plausibly be placed in the months when the world was approaching the New Age to be inaugurated by the Festival begun on 26 May 17 b.c.

The next measure to be dated with precision is the law which brings the tale of the social legislation to its end—the Lex Papia Poppaea of a. d. 9; but it is clear that this was only the culmination of legislative activity spread over several years, if not over the whole period since 17 B.c. Suetonius seems to imply that the Lex de maritandis ordinibus was amended after its passage, and Dio represents the Lex Papia Poppaea as a concession to protests against a harsher enactment which had been suspended, first for three years after its passage, and then for two more. If it might be assumed that the period of suspension was about to expire at the time when the Lex Papia Poppaea was framed, the severities which it mitigated would belong to a law passed five years before, in a.d. 4; and this may conceivably be true, though it is perhaps more likely that the five years were a period immediately following 17 b.c. during which some provisions of the recent legislation were kept in temporary abeyance. But the common assumption that it is the whole truth has less to commend it: Augustus, himself seems to record that in 11 b.c. there was a repetition of the demand that he should accept extraordinary powers for the purpose of social reform and that, as in 18 and 17 b.c., he so far met the wishes of the Senate as to introduce the desired measures in virtue of his tribumcia potestas. Certainty cannot be attained; but it would be rash to deny the possibility that between 17 b.c. and a.d. 9 the scheme of social legislation was modified and extended more than once. The loss of the evidence for the experiments made during these years is to be regretted. Had it survived, it would have yielded a clue to the stages by which Augustus reached his final conclusions on the proper attitude of the State towards the private lives of its citizens; but, since his enduring contribution to the Civil Law of marriage was made in the measures of 18 b.c. and a.d. 9, it is with these alone that the jurists are concerned, and history is therefore condemned to be content with a knowledge of the finished result, divorced from any adequate information about the experiments from which it was evolved.

VI.

THE REHABILITATION OF MARRIAGE:

THE LEX JULIA DE ADULTERIIS COERCENDIS

The social laws affecting Roman citizens were all designed to secure the permanence of the Italian stock, and for this reason it may be agreed that the stimulation of the birth-rate was their common end. Nevertheless a distinction must be made. The caelebs and the orbus were not the same: it was one thing to encourage marriage, and another to make it productive. But, if marriage could be restored to its pristine honour, some degree of fertility would doubtless follow of itself, and the positive inducements which Augustus offered to parents may reasonably be regarded as a re-inforcement of the measures designed to revive the prestige of the family. The success of Augustus must be judged by his attempts to restore the respect for marriage, and it is because artificial aids to the birth-rate were a mere supplementary undertaking that humour at the expense of the ius liberorum cannot pass for proof that he failed in his main endeavour.

In the story of the social legislation the measure which laid the foundation of reform and can claim the first importance was the Lex Julia de adulteriis. The significance of this famous statute lies in its extension of the field of law by bringing under the protection of the courts an institution which had hitherto been defended by merely private sanctions. Precedents for such intervention were not wholly lacking. At Rome, as in Greece, moral laxity had never been condoned, and the censors had freely penalized persons of notoriously evil life. Traditions were even found to support the more drastic efforts of Augustus to enforce the obligation of marriage. Marriage was said to have been compulsory in ancient times, and in assigning duties to the censors of his ideal Rome so sound a Whig as Cicero was prepared to include among their instructions ‘caelibes esse prohibento.’

The ill-attested custom of the Republic seems to have offered the husband an embarrassing choice of remedies against a peccant wife. If she had been taken in adultery he might kill her, either on his own responsibility or after the death-penalty had been approved by a domestic council: but, if death seemed too drastic, his only alternative was divorce, and her consequent release from a man to whom she had been unfaithful involved no punishment for the wife beyond the forfeiture of her dowry, wholly or in part. The objection to this rough-and-ready system was grave: in an age when puritanism was ill seen it left free opportunity for adultery to be condoned. Public opinion would rarely tolerate a penalty so severe as death, and the only alternative offered nothing but the findings of a family tribunal to protect the husband against the taunts that his own pecuniary profit had increased with the punishment of his wife. The whole institution must be cleared away before the control of social morals could effectively pass to the State, and this Augustus achieved without formally destroying a jurisdiction which could claim the authority of age. The powers of the husband, and of the father, were so hedged about with restrictions that their effective use became difficult, if not dan­gerous. A husband might not kill his wife even if taken in the act, and he was discouraged from violent vengeance on the paramour by the threat of arraignment for murder unless various conditions had been fulfilled. Moreover, the largest fraction of the dowry which he might retain for damages on divorce was fixed at only a sixth of the whole. The father of a married woman still in his potestas had somewhat greater rights. Unlike the husband, he might in certain circumstances kill the woman as well as the adulterer; but the privilege was turned into a deterrent by the rule that the death of the paramour at his hands would expose him to the penalties for murder unless he killed his own daughter at the same time.

With such limitations the jurisdiction of relatives became finally inadequate to maintain the morals of society, and in the New Age its place was to be taken by a public court, armed with authority to pass sentences up to banishment (in the form of relegatio) both on the principals and on those who aided or abetted the offence. The gravest danger was discerned in the fickleness of women, and against this, though Augustus chiefly cared for the manners of the nobility, the court was to protect the dignity of marriage in every section of society: indeed, so comprehensive was the law that, besides covering marriages which were recognized as such in the fullest sense, it extended its sanctions to all those unions which for one reason or another fell into the category of matrimonium iniustum. The general form of procedure was for the husband to divorce his wife and start a prosecution for adultery; and this by itself involved an innovation of importance. The most common form of marriage, which did not transfer the bride to the manus of her husband but left her in her father’s potestas was one which could be dissolved with little ceremony or none; and this absence of formality, besides encouraging contempt for the marriage tie, caused obvious difficulties in proving that divorce had actually occurred. Augustus accordingly ordered a set form to be observed; and this procedure, presumably among other demands, is alleged to have included a requirement that the party taking action should give notice of divorce in the presence of at least seven Roman citizens. Thereby no room was left for doubt that the marriage was at an end, and at the same time it may be surmised that light-hearted divorces were discouraged by the re­flection that the necessary witnesses would expose the whole transaction to the judgment of public opinion.

Divorce was an essential preliminary to any charge of adultery. In the rare cases where the husband had caught his wife in flagranti and had killed her paramour it must be made at once and the affair put into the hands of a magistrate within three days; but in more normal circumstances, when the evidence had to be weighed with care, the right to prosecute was reserved to the husband (and his father-in-law) for sixty dies utiles, at the end of which any accuser more than twenty-five years old might act. If, however, the husband had not divorced his wife, she was immune from prosecution for adultery until the husband had been convicted of condonation —a charge which could only be substantiated if the husband was shown to have taken his wife in the act or to have made profit by her adventure. When such proofs were lacking and the husband shut his eyes to the failings of his wife, prosecution was barred. The reason for this mildness is to seek; but it may perhaps be found in a remark of Ulpian’s that a wife approved by her husband and a peaceful marriage ought not lightly to be disturbed. Augustus was no puritan himself; he was legislating on subjects where intervention by the State might be resented; and he knew better than to risk his main purpose by letting accusers loose among the peccadillos of the aristocracy.

The penalties on conviction were heavy. Both parties were relegated to different islands for life, the paramour losing half his property and the woman a third, as well as half her dowry; and the woman at least was forbidden subsequent marriage with a free-born citizen. But though a wife’s adultery was a major crime, a married man was in no necessary danger merely because he had intercourse with some female acquaintance. Even if he brought himself under the law of adultery, his wife could not accuse him, though husbands were so far expected to set a good example that a man of loose life might find himself in jeopardy if his wife were arraigned on this charge. Nevertheless the re­sponsibilities of men in general were increased. Apart from the penalties of adultery which they incurred by affairs with other people’s wives, by casual intercourse with any free woman not registered with the aedile as a prostitute, or engaged in one of those occupations where moral laxity was assumed, they exposed themselves to equally severe punishment for stuprum —an offence defined and extended by Augustus so as to include a large number of sexual acts subversive of the family which men might commit and to which the provisions against adulterium did not apply. Thus the prohibition which it was the object of the statute to impose—the prohibition ‘ne quis posthac stuprum adulterium facitosciens dolo malo’—had the widest reference, and adulterium and stuprum together were charges which fitted every act by which the permanence of the family might be endangered. This Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis was an outstanding piece of legislation, and one which endured as the basis of Roman law on the subjects with which it was concerned. By bringing the family as an institution under public protection it marked anotable advance in the conception of the proper functions of the State, and, by penalizing the practices of an age when men and women had begun to seek their own pleasure alone, it opened the way for a return to the ancient view of marriage as a union ‘liberorum quaerundorum caussa.’

VII

THE STIMULATION OF THE BIRTH-RATE:

THE LEX JULIA DE MARITANDIS ORDINIBUS

Whatever its effects on the size of families, the attempt of Augustus to restore the dignity of marriage was his boldest project in the social sphere. But by itself it was not enough: positive inducements were thought necessary to check celibacy and encourage procreation, and these were enacted in the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus of 18 b.c. and the Lex Papia Poppaea of a.d. 9. The second of these statutes amended and completed the first, and together they supplied the abiding basis of the law. But so closely were they connected with one another that the jurists rarely distinguished them, and their habit of treating what they name the ‘Lex Julia et Papia Poppaea’ as a single set of rules makes it impossible to disentangle the provisions of the two measures in detail. Nevertheless, there is no room for doubt that the three essential principles of the programme—the removal of unnecessary restrictions on marriage, the use of the law of inheritance to favour parenthood, and the special stimulation of child-bearing in the upper classes by the offer of privileges in public life to the fathers of large families—were all to be found adopted in the law of 18 b.c.

The most valuable of these proposals, and the one most closely allied in aim to the Lex Julia de adulteriis, was the first; but the magnitude of the change it involved is difficult to estimate, because the evidence for the law before this time is defective at the most vital point. Authorities are unanimous that henceforward marriages between free-born and freed were to be valid, with the significant reservation that unions of this kind, and also with play­actors and their families, were denied to senators, their children and their descendants down to the third generation in the male line. The State was to take advantage of the readiness with which men found a mate in their own households, but this concession to custom stopped short of the point at which it would contaminate the governing class with blood necessarily derived from regions outside Italy. The degree of novelty which this implied has been variously assessed. If Mommsen were justified in his belief that it was Augustus who first raised unions between slave-born and ingenui to the status of legal marriage, the reform would have been great: but strong objections can be brought against this theory. When Cicero records that a certain Gellius Publicola, step-son of one consul and probably brother of a second, ‘libertinam duxit uxorem’, he does so in language which certainly suggests that such a match cannot have been due to any honourable cause; but his words imply scarcely less clearly that the union was a legal marriage. A clue to the position both before the time of Augustus and after is perhaps rather to be found in a remark of Ulpian—that, if a patron takes one of his freedwomen as a partner, it is more decent for her to be a concubine than a mater familias. Though it was not forbidden by the law, formal marriage in these circumstances was not well seen in the stricter circles of society, and this prejudice, for his own good reasons, Augustus so far encouraged as to deny the privileges of marriage to members of the nobility who indulged so coarse a taste. Nevertheless, he made no effort to check the practice elsewhere; and he even confirmed its legality, if this had ever been in doubt, by enacting that a freedwoman married to her patron should not have the right to divorce. The bar laid upon the nobility is no sign of failing in the enthusiasm of Augustus for matrimony. Marriages of freed­women into senatorial houses cannot have been many: their prohibition would not make for celibacy to any serious degree, and it cannot have failed to serve a useful purpose by emphasizing the need for the aristocracy to keep itself free from dangerous admixtures of foreign blood. But, if they were out of place in high society, wives of servile birth were not to be discouraged elsewhere.

The general regulations of the Lex Julia which forbade fathers of whatever station to put vexatious obstacles in the way of their children’s marriage and invalidated conditions in general restraint of matrimony attached to bequests were followed in a.d. 4 by clauses in the Lex Aelia Sentia directly benefiting manumitted slaves. For their sake it was enacted that similar restrictions should be set aside when a dominus sought to include them in the terms of his grant of freedom, and that a freedman who was a Junian Latin because he had been manumitted before the age of thirty might obtain the Roman citizenship for himself and his child, if his wife were a Roman citizen—and for his wife as well if she were a Latin—so soon as there was a child of the marriage a year old.

Barriers to matrimony were thus broken down; the way lay open; and all that remained was to guide the flock into the path prepared. This Augustus essayed by using the law of succession with a courage to be measured by the strength of the almost superstitious respect in which Romans were accustomed to hold the dispositions of the dead. For the purpose of the State it was assumed that marriage was a duty for men between the ages of twenty-five and sixty and for women between twenty and fifty. Matches between persons of whom one was still within these limits and the other had left them behind were discouraged by confiscation of the dowry on the husband’s death, and anyone who had passed these periods of life was penalized for a failure to shoulder the burdens of parenthood by partial disability to take under the terms of wills. Like the vicesima hereditatum, which was designed in the same spirit as the more strictly social measures, these pains did not affect inheritance and legacy within the immediate family: blood relatives of the testator up to the sixth, or even the seventh, degree were exempt. But outside these limits the law was severe, and its reply to the parasites who built their highest hopes on the wills of the childless was to debar all but those worth less than 100,000 sesterces from the right to benefit if they had remained incorrigible bachelors themselves. The rules for women were similar but more rigorous. Spinsters and wives without children lost all capacity to take under wills when they reached the age of fifty, though in earlier life they were only deprived if they had property amounting to 50,000 sesterces; but, unlike men, they were also subject to a direct financial tax. By a rule which may well be Augustan, though its authorship is not recorded, women with property exceeding 20,000 sesterces paid to the State a yearly levy of one per cent, on their capital until such time as they might find a husband.

Relief from these restrictions began with marriage, increased with the birth of the first child and became complete with the arrival of the third or fourth. The details of this arrangement cannot be assigned with certainty to the Lex Julia of 18 b.c. It is beyond dispute that the promotion of child-bearing among women was a principal object of the subsequent Lex Papia Poppaea, and many of the recorded rules framed with this purpose may consequently not be earlier than a.d. 9; but the grant of the ius trium liberorum to Livia in 9 b.c. is evidence enough that similar regulations had been enacted before, and it is a plausible suggestion that they were to be found in the Lex Julia itself. Whether in 18 b.c. or later, it was established that, when a child was born, both parents recovered the right to benefit by wills without regard to their wealth, though in the woman—who naturally gained immediate exemption from the spinster’s tax by marriage—this right only became indefeasible if by the age of fifty she had a family of three (or four, if she were a manumitted slave); and it may well have been in 18 b.c. that some beginning also was made in the use of release from the troublesome duties of tutor and curator, or, for freedmen, of dispensation from the performance of operae as a reward for contributions to the population. But, whatever the provisions of the Lex Julia on these subjects, it is certain that they proved so far inadequate as to receive drastic re-inforcement in the Lex Papia Poppaea.

The last feature of the programme was the set of provisions designed to encourage families among the most important class of all—the class which took active part in public life. The details are ill recorded, but it is apparent that in general the regulations gave precedence to fathers, when they came to stand for office, in a measure determined by the number of their children. If votes were equal, the candidate with the larger family was elected, and by this criterion the seniority of the consuls was fixed. But the most cogent use of office as a reward for domestic patriotism lay in an elaboration of the leges annales to make them play on men’s sense of rivalry with their contemporaries. In the senatorial cursus candidates were allowed to stand for the various magistracies as many years before the minimum age otherwise required as was the number of their children, and parents were also given some preference in the appointment of governors to the public provinces. These were not negligible inducements, but they scarcely deserve the prominence they have received in accounts of the Augustan legislation. Their field of application was narrow, and their cogency was small: in days when office no longer brought unlimited opportunities for gain, men knew how to wait their turns. As later history was to show, the social legislation of 18 b.c. was far from being treated as failure; but its success in the encouragement of families was due less to the hopes it held out of a quick career than to the steady pressure of the law of succession.

VIII

THE BIRTH-RATE AGAIN:

THE LEX PAPIA POPPAEA

The development of the social programme in the years after 17 b.c. is almost wholly unrecorded. Though Augustus claims that the measures of 18 b.c. were passed at the Senate’s request, and though there is no reason to doubt that a certain body of opinion was urgent in its demand for an attack on the moral anarchism of the more advanced, the reforms were not carried without resistance. To his own persuasions Augustus thought well to add the arguments of Metellus Macedonicus, whose speech de prole augenda he recited to the Senate at length, the drafts of the laws were amended, and the most offensive pro­posals were toned down; but, even so, the opposition remained strong, and it is probably to the period immediately after 18 b.c. that there should be assigned the successive suspensions by which the application of the rules about inheritances and legacies was postponed, first for three years and then again for two. There may also have been some minor additions to repair flaws in the original enactments. Attempts were made to secure the benefit of marriage without the burden by men who engaged themselves to children, and the rules by which betrothal was forbidden to girls below the age of ten and marriage was required to follow within two years may only have been established when the defects of the Lex Julia had been revealed in practice. But, with the exception of the measures on manumission passed in 2 b.c. and a.d. 4 after 17 b.c. no new statute is recorded before the Lex Papia Poppaea of a.d. 9.

By that year prolonged agitation, in which the equites played a foremost part, had reached a pitch which must have revealed to a less sensitive observer than the Princeps that, if all concession was refused, public opinion would range itself so solidly against the existing rules that the whole scheme would scarcely survive its author. The first object of the Lex Papia Poppaea was to mitigate the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus to a degree which would win it acquiescence: the second was to offer still stronger inducements to marry. From the nature of the new regulations it is clearly to be inferred that the Lex Julia had been less successful with women than with men, and the opportunity provided by the need for fresh legislation seems to have been taken to bring even heavier pressure than before to bear upon potential wives.

Among the changes made to lighten the incidence of the Lex Julia by far the most generous was a widening of the field in which celibacy and spinsterhood did not debar from succession. Not only various blood-relatives, as before, but certain connections by marriage were now exempt. The demand thus met was not without an element of reason; and there was a second like it. In his own experience as a husband Augustus might find reminder enough that sterility was not always a pretence: yet the laws in force before a.d. 9 treated the childless as if they were unmarried. By the Lex Papia Poppaea the hardship of this method was admitted, and orbi were allowed for the future to take under the terms of wills half the amounts they would have received if their marriages had not been barren. Moreover, the periods of six months and a year, within which the Lex Julia had required women to find a new husband after divorce and widowhood, were extended to eighteen months and two years respectively; and there may have been yet another change found necessary in the rules of succession. Roman lawyers held a doctrine expressed by Paul in the formula ‘quod initio vitiosum est non potest tractu temporis convalescere’, and it is possible that ingenious opposition might have invoked this principle to deprive legacies of their value to the social programme. Had it been applied, a legacy only accessible to a husband would have been no inducement to him to marry if he was a bachelor when the will was witnessed. The gravity of this danger is doubtful; but it is clear that, if any such difficulties threatened, they were swept away. Legacies became yet one more encouragement to wedlock, and legatees debarred by celibacy were allowed an interval after the testator’s death in which to remove their disability by marriage.

The spinsters remained. To break down their hesitation the inducements to wedlock offered by the Lex Julia were vigorously re-inforced. According to Dio, whose word there is no reason to doubt, some women—and these may be presumed to have been the mothers of three children—were either partly or com­pletely exempted from the operation of the Lex Voconia—the law of 169 b.c. which had set strict limits to the extent to which females might benefit by wills. Again, the claims of women, whether patronae themselves or daughters of patronae, to the estates of manumitted slaves were greatly increased for the benefit of mothers, and the rights of a patrona with three children were assimilated to those of a patronus, whom praetorian intervention had long given an interest, unknown to the Twelve Tables, in his freedmen’s property. Nor did the freedmen themselves escape attention. Three children were now required by the richest and most vulnerable members of that class to destroy the patron’s hold over some part of their estates; , and freedwomen had to reduce the patron’s portion by bearing children. Four gave the mother exemption from tutela, so that she could make an independent will, but the portion of her estate due to the patron was only reduced as the size of her family increased.

Thus, twenty-six years after its inception, the work begun in 18 b.c. was at an end. Augustus had made an attempt of unprecedented daring to change the outlook of society—to raise marriage again to its old esteem and to restore children to their place as its end and object. His purpose was to preserve the strength of the imperial people, and in particular of that vital stock which was to spread the traditions of Rome through Italy, so that Italy might hand them on to the empire at large; and his success or failure is to be judged rather by the part which Italy came to play in the history of succeeding centuries than by the tales of criticism in Rome or the resentment which fell on delatores who made profit out of offences against these laws. Dio has been followed by many in his remark that of the two consuls who gave their names to the Lex Papia Poppaea both were bachelors, but it is certainly no less relevant to observe that one of the sponsors whom Augustus chose for this last addition to his plans for maintaining the Roman race was a namesake, and almost certainly a relative, of that Papius Mutilus who a century before had been leading the Samnites in the Social War. Nor was the work a failure. The laws of 18 b.c. and a.d. 9 endured, and the care with which they were elaborated from time to time proves more than that they fell short of perfection. Tiberius, Nero, Vespasian, Hadrian, the Antonines and the Severi all revealed their conviction that the social legislation, even down to the rewards for families, must be developed and enforced; and of an achievement which was found good by men responsible for the government of the world for two centuries and more it is impossible to say that it failed. Not until Christianity climbed the imperial throne and impressed its exalted view of celibacy on Constantine were any of the principles adopted by Augustus called into question, and even then the destruction of his work was slow.

IX

URBS ROMA

In the social programme of Augustus the laws on marriage and enfranchisement justly hold the foremost place; and even they did not exhaust his faith in statutes. By sumptuary measures, some of which may well have been passed in 18 b.c., the size of houses was limited and the cost of meals prescribed in a way doubtless designed to encourage a return to the modest ideals of a bygone age when Rome was still merely Roman. But to secure this end no amount of prohibitions would be enough, and the fame of the legislative enactments must not obscure the other means which were pressed into service of the cause. Elements are not lacking in the constitutional and religious reforms which belong to the story of the revival of the Roman ideal. By the lectio senatus of 29-8 b.c. (p. 123) the Senate regained some measure of that select distinction which had been the basis of its prestige in the days before it was vulgarized by Julius Caesar; and the creation of fresh patricians in 29 b.c. under the terms of the Lex Saenia was another mark of deference to the Roman past. So too in religion Augustus aimed above all at a revival of the national cults, and even when he was compelled to compromise with ideas (like some about the relation of his own position in the scale of being to that of ordinary humanity) which had their origin in the Hellenistic East, the alien conceptions were so deftly transmuted that they could be taken up unnoticed into a whole which was unmistakably Italian. The loyalty of Augustus to the traditions of Italy did more than give its character to the Augustan Age. It endowed the Roman Empire with its significance in the history of Western Europe; and all its expressions consequently deserve the closest scrutiny. The Italian bias of the constitutional reforms and the Italian inspiration of the religious revival are noticed elsewhere; but, though it is in his religious and constitutional policies that the mind of Augustus stands most clearly revealed, the legislation on freedmen and marriage was not the only undertaking in the social sphere which had the creation of an Italian patriotism as its end.

It was Augustus who first gave the city of Rome that character which is still conceded by phrases like ‘ the Eternal City.’ During the Hellenistic Age the visible centres of men’s loyalty had been many. The claims of Alexandria could only be acknowledged where Ptolemaic influence was supreme, and in regions under Seleucid control the allegiance of the inhabitants was divided between Antioch, Sardes and Seleuceia-on-the-Tigris. But when the Romans came to end the period of political pluralism, Rome itself inevitably became unique. To the peoples or the eastern provinces it was now the one city of the world hallowed by the presence of a ruler whom it was natural for them, in accordance with the established custom of the Hellenistic world, to regard as in some sense God Manifest; and to the whole empire alike Rome was the one and only source of governmental authority. But to Italy the City clearly stood in a more intimate relation, and that relation called for definition with special insistence since the political structure of the Italian peninsula had been changed beyond recog­nition by the results of the Social War.

Alme Sol, curru nitido diem qui promis et celas aliusque et idem nasceris, possis nihil urbe Roma visere maius.

The hope of Horace was the intention of Augustus. Rome was to become the focus and the stimulus of Italian patriotism, and it was to make the City worthy of the people whose inspiration it should be that Augustus and his friends undertook the works which are described at length elsewhere. Cassius Dio, indeed, emphatically asserts that, in claiming to have left of stone the Rome he found of clay, Augustus referred to the solidity of the empire rather than to the physical aspect of the capital; but  where the juxtaposition of this remark with that contained in section 2 suggests that, whatever Augustus may have meant by the words he used about the City, it was not left for Cassius Dio to invent the interpretation which he accepts. in their literal meaning the words were not untrue as Rome slowly became ‘urbs pro maiestate imperii ornata'.

The exaltation of the City conferred a new dignity on its inhabitants: the people whose home was the capital of the world must neither merit nor receive the treatment which had justly been the lot of the ‘faex Romuli’ in the declining years of the Republic. If the new city was to inspire them with a new self-respect, the government must abandon that attitude to the plebs which the meanness of the masses had richly merited in the days of Cicero. The problem of the surplus proletariate was not less pressing than it had been for the last century and more, but when its members were to be flattered with the suggestion that they formed a valuable part of the imperial race the cavalier methods by which Julius had treated the urban mob must be abandoned. Instead of providing colonies abroad wherein these people might earn their livings and then coercing the desired number to emigrate by curtailing the lists of those to whom free corn was given, Augustus had to keep them in Italy, if not in the City itself. Colonies in the provinces were now designed for veterans alone, and the unemployed remained to await provision at home. The task of protecting them from the destitution which makes men dangerous was still difficult enough, even if it was soon rendered less formid­able than it had been in the past by the success of Augustus in his central undertaking. Among the many effects of the Augustan Peace was a severe restriction of the supply of slaves from abroad: by the beginning of our era slaves seem to have grown so scarce, and consequently so dear, that the profits gained by suppressio (kidnapping) of innocent travellers made the practice common enough to call for drastic action by the government. With servile competition thus reduced the demand for free labour grew, and the problem of the plebs urbana remained within reasonable dimensions. Nevertheless the numbers of those who lived on public charity tended to rise, and when Augustus at length called a halt, as he seems to have done between 5 and 2 b.c., he was compelled to fix a maximum higher by about a third than that which had been enough in the time of Julius.

To these humble inhabitants of the City Augustus made himself both friend and mentor. To the regular dole or corn were added special gifts of food at his own expense, and besides these, to mark occasions of note, there were lavish distributions of cash, on which between 29 and 2 b.c. he seems to have spent a sum in the neighbourhood of fifty million sesterces. But these imperial dependents were no pampered pensioners: in return for favours received they were expected, if not to perform any positive service to the State, at least to abandon their mischievous activities of the past. The Assemblies were not, indeed, abolished; but the dwindling functions they retained were to be exercised under the threat of increased penalties for corruption. At public spectacles praetors were charged with the preservation of order; special seats were reserved for senators and equites, and the descendants of senators were forbidden to demean themselves by performing for the delectation of the mob, which itself was now compelled on occasion to appear wrapped in the dignity of the toga. In the days of this new respectability it was wholly appropriate that the weapons of Clodius should be destroyed: by an enactment of the first importance the most dangerous of the old clubs were abolished, and for the future toleration was promised to none but those which had gained a licence under the provisions of the Lex Julia de collegiis.

There remained one grave problem. In the time of Augustus Rome was in the strange position of being the only city of the Empire whose inhabitants enjoyed no effective citizenship of their own. After the Social War their franchise had become the com­mon franchise of the whole peninsula: its wide extension made it no longer capable of any but the most formal use, and yet in its place they had nothing to put which would correspond to the rights enjoyed by people living in the country-towns under the municipal constitutions of the various communities. For this defect Augustus seems to have sought a remedy: the evidence for his intention, indeed, is to seek, but the end at which he aimed may be divined by conjecture not wholly rash. On 1 August 7 B.C.there was inaugurated the system whereby Rome was divided into fourteen regiones, each of which was divided again into a number of smaller districts known, by a name familiar, at least unofficially, under the Republic, as ‘vici.’ The regiones were put under the charge of (apparently) fourteen magistrates drawn by lot from the praetors, aediles and tribunes of the year, and below them each vicus had annual magistri, normally four in number, chosen by some method now unknown from the inhabitants of the vicus itself. Thus there was erected an organization capable of being used as machinery, however rudimentary, for the purposes of local administration, and there was a possibility that the inhabitants of Rome might find in domestic politics a vent for the political energies which could no longer be dissipated on the affairs of the Populus Romanus.

The measure of responsibility which Augustus intended to lay upon the wards and their officers is impossible to estimate with confidence; but there is no room for doubt that he was alive to the necessity that men, to be contented, must have some interest in institutions which belong to the structure of the State, and it is a plausible conjecture that the organization of the vici was intended to provide a focus for that parochial patriotism which adds a salutary interest to lives otherwise in danger of being wholly self-regarding. The functions of the vici were modest. Until the creation of the Vigiles in a.d. 6, the magistri vicorum were in charge of the arrangements for dealing with fires—a fact which explains their early concern with Volcanus and with Stata Mater, the goddess who stayed the conflagration; and in a.d. 4/5 and 12/13 they are found supervising the weights used in handling gold and silver. But this promise of a system which might in time have allowed the masses some slight independence in their local government was soon belied. The disastrous fire of a.d. 6 seems to have convinced Augustus that a fire-brigade to be effective must be under central control, and the responsibilities of the vicomagistri in this respect were thereupon transferred to the Praefectus Vigilum. Indeed, the organization of the vici had not passed beyond the stage of experiment when it lost even such small administrative significance as it had boasted at the start, and the vicomagistri, so far as we can say, soon found themselves left with none but religious duties. From a date before the death of Augustus himself until the whole system disappeared in the third century, their only business seems to have been with the various shrines and chapels in their respective districts. The divinities to which this allegiance is recorded are many, but only one of the cults under their care could claim any serious importance. It was the vicomagistri who controlled the worship of the Lares Compitales. This was the cult which, when to these deities Augustus added his own Genius, took on so definitely political an air that its objects came to be known as the ‘Lares Augusti,’ and which thus came to serve an invaluable purpose by offering the masses a regular occasion for simple ceremonial, which was at the same time a reminder of their obligation to the man who embodied the ideals of the new Italy wherein they were asked to make them­selves worthy of a place.

X. ITALY

In this new Italy at large the strongest single bond was the common citizenship of its people, but here too Augustus was the author of some minor measures by which the growth of their nascent solidarity can scarcely have failed to be encouraged. Like Rome itself, the focus of their patriotism, the country as a whole was divided into regiones, of which in the case of Italy there were eleven. What part they played in the administrative system cannot now be ascertained: it is a plausible conjecture that they served as a foundation for the machinery by which the census was taken and by which the indirect taxes were collected, but their service to the social programme of the day is to be seen, if anywhere, in the reminder which they supplied that the whole area included in the system—the peninsula from the Straits of Messina to the Alps—was one. The same tendency is to be found again in a remarkable scheme in which Augustus is said to have sought means whereby the opinion of the country towns in Italy might find expression at the elections of the magistrates of the Populus Romanus. According to Suetonius, the decuriones of his new colonies in Italy were to be given the opportunity of recording th’eir votes for the election of magistrates at Rome without leaving their native cities, and these votes were then to be sent under seal  to the capital. It must be admitted that no trace of this arrangement in practice is to be found either during the principate of Augustus himself or in the times of his successors, but the suggestion that he at least toyed with the idea of its introduction is entirely in accord with what is otherwise known of his political ideals. Whatever may have been the difficulties in the way of its execution, a plan which could connect the aristocracy in communities scattered up and down the peninsula by a common interest in the affairs of Rome was typical of Augustus’ hopes for Italy in general, as well as of the part for which he cast the capital itself.

There remains the Juventus—a memorable institution which served at once to unite the youth of Italy and to remind it of the burdens to be borne by an imperial people. Though in course of time they were doubtless influenced by the Greek ephibia, the origin of the collegia iuvenum is almost certainly to be sought far back in Italian history; and their revival at the beginning of the imperial age could with justice be regarded as the revival of something not alien but native. It appears that the custom was for boys of the upper classes, even before they assumed the toga virilis, to join clubs or societies which provided them with some kind of physical exercise and training in horsemanship, the results of which it was their habit to display in the so-called ‘Lusus Troiae.’ At this stage they remained perhaps until they were seventeen, when they passed into the Juventus proper and their activities took a more definitely martial turn, giving some preliminary acquaintance with the use of arms to youths of whom many would soon be serving as officers in the army. The religious aspect of these clubs and the few extant facts about their organization and their officials add little to our knowledge of the social function which it was their business to discharge, but the authorship of the revival which brought them into the prominence they enjoyed during the early Empire is a matter of more moment. That they were under the high patronage of Augustus himself is proved by ample evidence, above all by his choice of ‘Princeps Iuventutis’ as a title of honour for his grandsons Gaius and Lucius; but it is less certain that he was the first to encourage the spread of this ancient institution. The Lusus Troiae, which seems to have been closely connected with the Juventus, had already made an isolated appearance under Sulla; but it is not until the dictatorship of Julius that signs of an interest in its revival become marked. According to Dio the game had been performed at the triumph of 46 b.c., and something of the same sort is implied again in Suetonius’ accountof the displays by iuvenes and pueri which the Dictator had made part of the ceremonies at the inauguration of his improvements to the Circus Maximus. After his death it is recorded in the shows given by Agrippa both as praetor in 40 b.c. and as aedile in 33 b.c., and the prominence it receives at Virgil’s hands suggests that its position was assured at a time earlier than any to which the enactment, if not the first formulation, of other social measures in the Augustan programme can be assigned. Thus indications are not lacking that the Juventus had found favour before the establishment of the Principate; and, if the evidence allows a conjecture that Julius Caesar had not been without some share in the responsibility for its new importance, the conjecture may gain support both from the inclusion of the Trojan game in the contests arranged by Octavian to celebrate the dedication of the Aedes Divi Iuli on 18 August 29 b.c. and from the propriety with which a man whose convictions about the burden of empire were such as those of Julius are known to have been might concern himself with an institution designed to pre­pare the high-born youth of Italy for the military duties proper to an imperial race. But, if a doubt remains whether it was the Dictator or his adopted son who took the first steps to revive its popularity, there can be no dispute at all that the Juventus found a champion in Augustus, and scarcely more that he saw in it a means of fostering throughout Italy the consciousness of common interests and common obligations. ‘Legibus novis me auctore latis multa exempla maiorum exolescentia iam ex nostro saeculo reduxi, et ipse multarum rerum exempla imitanda posteris a me [ ?] tradidi.’ Thus Augustus sums up a large part of his social programme; and of these ‘exempla’ not the least valuable was the Juventus.

Augustan Italy and Augustan Rome were personified on the slabs which formerly flanked the eastern entrance to the enclosure of the Ara Pacis. Italy was to be one, in spirit as in name, and it was to be strong through the fertility of its mothers. By the limitations of his art the sculptor was debarred from an explicit re­ference to the laws on slavery—the Lex Junia, the Lex Fufia Caninia and the Lex Aelia Sentia—whereby the infiltration of foreign blood was brought under control, but the Roman dress and Roman details of the procession carved on the side-walls of the precinct serve as reminders of the ideal set before the population as a whole. All alike were recalled to a sense of moral responsibility by the Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis, and in the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus and the Lex Papia Poppaea the demand for a return to the ancient ways was addressed with special emphasis to the nobility. They were the trustees of the traditions which were to become the traditions of all Italy, and in them was vested the experience of government by the methods which were to be followed throughout the Roman world. They were the custodians of the Latin culture which, under the fostering care of Augustus and his successors, was to grow into the Latin civilization of the West—the civilization of which the new Italy, ‘rectrix parensque mundi altera,’ was the seat, and the new Rome,

cui par est nihil et nihil secundum,

the symbol.

CHAPTER XV.

RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENTS FROM THE CLOSE OF THE REPUBLIC TO THE REIGN OF NERO