CHAPTER XII. AUGUSTUS, THE REFORMER AND LEGISLATOR

 

The activity of Augustus as reformer in the city and Italy, and to a great extent in the provinces also, was subsequent to the settlement of his constitutional position in BC23, after which date changes in it were generally consequential, and in matters of detail. But it began long before. In B.C. 36 he had taken effective measures to suppress the brigandage which had pushed its audacity nearly up to the very gates of Rome. In BC 34—3 Agrippa, under his influence, had started the improvement in the water supply of Rome by restoring the Aqua Marcia; had cleansed and enlarged the cloacae, repaired the streets, and begun many important buildings. In BC31 we have evidence that Augustus was turning his attention to the details of administration in the provinces, and in the next year, in his resettlement of Asia, he restored to Samos, Ephesus, Pergamus, and the Troad, works of art which Antony had taken from them to bestow upon Cleopatra. In BC28, measures of relief were adopted for state debtors, and a term fixed beyond which those who were in actual possession of properties could not be disturbed by legal proceedings.

The first need of the country was security. How difficult this had long been to maintain, and how ill the senatorial government at the end of the Republic had been able to cope with the evil is shown by the fact that remnants of the bands of Spartacus and Catiline were in BC 61 still infesting the district of Thurii. In spite of the repressive measures of BC36, which seem to have been successful as far as the immediate neighbourhood of Rome was concerned, at the end of the civil war armed bands still openly appeared, in various parts of Italy, seized and carried off travellers, confined them in the slave-barracks, or ergastula, or put them to ransom. These ergastula were originally slave-prisons used for keeping refractory slaves, who worked during the day in chains, and were shut up in separate cells at night, often underground or only lighted by windows high up and out of reach of the inmates. In some parts of Italy—chiefly the north—they were not known, and chained slaves were not employed; but in other parts they were numerous, and afforded convenient hiding-places. The chief abuse connected with them was that men properly free could be carried off and concealed in them as though they were slaves, while they afforded a leader in rebellion convenient sources from which to draw recruitt; the miserably inmates being only too ready to join any one who gave them a hope of freedom and release from those horrible dens. Accordingly a review of the ergastula is constantly heard of, till they were finally abolished by Hadrian. Among the measures for the suppression of brigandage now taken was a visitation of these places. It was not done in mercy to the slaves. Augustus, though he treated his own servants with kindness, took the sternest Roman view of the absolute power of a master, and boasts that after the war with Sextus Pompeius he handed over 30,000 slaves—who had been serving with the enemy—to their masters “to be punished.”  When we remember what the “punishment” of a Roman slave meant, it is difficult to think without horror of the sum total of human misery which this implies.

A more effective and permanent measure, however, was to secure the roads and make them fit for rapid military movements. A system of road commissions (curae viarum) was started in BC27, commissioners (curatores) being appointed to superintend, each of the great roads leading from Rome to various parts of Italy. The duty at first was usually imposed upon men who had enjoyed triumphs, and Augustus himself, after his triple triumph, undertook the via Flaminia, the great north road from Rome to Ariminum on the Adriatic, from which place other roads branched off through the valley of the Po, and to the Alpine passes. The pavement of the road was repaired, the bridges repaired, and the completion of the work was commemorated by the still existing arch at Rimini, with its partially surviving inscription. For greater safety, also, military pickets were stationed at convenient points along the roads, which put a stop to brigandage.

In close connection with the roads were the twenty-eight military colonies established by Augustus in Italy. Of these seven were along the line of the Flaminia, or near it; one of them (Bononia) was the point where the main roads to Rome converge. Others guarded the entrances to the Alpine passes, or the road through Venetia to Istria—which Augustus included in Italy—while another group protected the main roads through Campania. Thus these colonies were not only centres of loyalty to the Empire, but Served to keep open the great Routes. The object of the division of Italy into eleven regions, the exact date of which is not known, was probably for the purpose of the census, and the taxation which was connected with it, but it was also for other administrative purposes, as for the regulation of the military service of the young men in each of them. The regions followed the natural divisions of the country and of nationalities, but the importance of the roads in connection with them is shown by the fact that before long they became known in many cases by the name of the chief road that traversed them, as Aemilia, Flaminia, and others. What Augustus was doing for Italy his legates under his authority were doing for the most important provinces. Great roads—via Augusta—were being laid everywhere. We have evidence of them from inscribed tablets in Dalmatia, Pisidia, and Cilicia, Baetica, Northern Spain, Gallia Narbonensis, and elsewhere. These works went on throughout his reign, but in BC20 he commemorated his formal appointment as head commissioner of all roads by placing a pillar covered with gilded bronze in the forum near the temple of Saturn, with the distances of all the chief places along the great roads from one of the thirty-seven city gates from which these roads branch out. The base of this milliarium aureum is still in its place.

Another source of mischief were the collegia, or guilds. Under cover of promoting the interests of certain trades and professions these guilds were used, or were believed to be used, for all kinds of illegal purposes. Some of them were of great antiquity, but they had come to be so often misused for political terrorism (especially the collegia opificum) that the Senate had suppressed.many of them in BC63. But Clodius shortly afterwards got a law passed authorising their meetings, and he employed them freely for promoting his own riotous proceedings. Iulius Caesar had dissolved all except the most ancient and respectable, but during the civil wars they seem to have revived. Under a law passed in BC22 Augustus held a visitation of them. Some were dissolved and some reformed, and a licence was henceforth required from Senate and Emperor for their meetings.

In the city itself the first need was food. It depended very largely on imported corn. Again and again we hear of dearth and famine prices at Rome. The people, often, no doubt, rightly, believed that this dearness of provisions arose from artificial causes. When Sextus Pompeius and his confederates were scouring the seas and pouncing upon corn-ships the cause was clear enough, and the gratitude to Augustus for crushing him was very natural. But even when there was no such evident danger great distress was often caused by sudden rise of prices. The idea had always been in such times to appoint some powerful man praefectus annona, with a naval force enabling him to secure that the corn fleets should have free passage to Italy, should be able to unload their cargoes without difficulty, and dispose of them at a moderate price. A well-known instance of this was the appointment of Pompey in BC57. But in less troublous times a separate commissioner was appointed to watch the several places or corn export, Sicily, Sardinia, and Africa. These were not posts of very great dignity, and Brutus and Cassius in BC44 looked upon their nomination to them as a kind of insult. But besides the dangers of the sea and of pirates certain merchants had hit upon paeans—practised long before at Athens—of artificially raising the price. They made what we should call “a corner” in corn. Either they bought it up and kept it back from the market, or they contrived various ways of delaying the ships and producing a panic among the dealers. As in all difficulties, the people looked to Augustus for help, and in BC22 begged him to accept the office of praefectus annona, “chief commissioner of the corn market”. While declining the dictatorship offered him at the same time with passionate vehemence, he accepted this commissionership; and the law which he caused to be passed now or some time later on shows how necessary some State interference was. By this law penalties were inflicted on any one “who did anything to hinder the corn supply, or entered into any combination with the object of raising its price; or who hindered the sailing of a corn-ship, or did anything of malice propense whereby its voyage was delayed.”

But besides a free and unmolested corn market, the Roman populace had long come to look for another means of support—a distribution of corn either altogether free or considerably below the market price. Detached instances of this practice occur in the earlier history of Rome, the corn sometimes coming as a present from some foreign sovereign, sometimes being distributed by private liberality. It had always been objected to by the wiser part of the Senate, and had laid the donors open to the charge of trying to establish a tyranny. It was reserved for the tribune Gaius Gracchus to make it into a system (BC122). Since his time it had been submitted to as a matter of course by nearly all magistrates. Sulla, indeed, seems to have suspended it for a time, but the first measure of the counter revolution that followed his death was to re-establish it. Iulius Caesar had restricted it to citizens below a certain census, but had not the courage to abolish it. It was, indeed, a kind of poor-law relief, but of the worst possible sort. It not only induced a number of idle and useless people to prefer the chances of city life to labour in the country, but it unnaturally depressed the price of corn, and therefore discouraged the Italian farmer, already nearly ruined by the competition of foreign corn; it exhausted the treasury, and, after all, did not relieve the poor. Livy regards it as one of the causes which denuded Italy of free cultivators, and left all the work to slaves. Cicero always denounced it on much same grounds, and Appian points out how it brought the indigent, careless, and idle flocking into the city. The system, moreover, was open to gross abuses, slaves being manumitted that they might take their share, under contract to transfer it to their late masters. Augustus saw that by these distributions injustice was done both to farmers and merchants, and that agriculture in Italy was being depressed by it. He says in his memoirs that he had at one time almost resolved to put a stop to the practice, but refrained from doing so because he felt sure that the necessity of courting the favour of the populace would induce his successors to restore it. However unsound this reasoning may be, it would no doubt have been an heroic measure fur one in his position to have carried out the half-formed resolution. As a matter of fact, his distributions were on a large scale, and in times of distress were entirely gratis. Tesserae, or tickets, entitling the holders to a certain amount of corn or money, were distributed again and again. The value of the corn tickets was generally supplied from the fiscus or his private revenue; but that after all was only a question of accounts, it did not affect the economical or moral results in any way.

A better economical measure was a system of State loans. Immediately after the end of the civil war the transference to the Roman treasury of the enormous wealth in money and jewels of the Ptolemies at Alexandria caused the price of money to go down and the money value of landed property consequently to go up. For a time at least the common rate of interest sank from 12 to 4 per cent. Augustus took advantage of this state of things to relieve landowners who were in difficulties, by lending them money free of interest, if they could show property of double the value as security for repayment.

There were other reforms equally beneficial. Among the many curae (commissions) which he established was one for superintending public works, which would thus not depend on private munificence; another of the streets; of the water supply; and, above all, of the Tiber. Rome was, as it still is, extremely subject to floods. Quite recently there were five or six feet of water in the Pantheon, and in BC27 the rise of the Tiber was so serious that the lower parts of the city were covered, and the augurs declared it to be an omen of the universal prevalence of the power of the new princeps. In BC 23 it swept away the pons Sublicius. He could not of course prevent these floods, but he gave some relief by dredging and widening the river-bed, which was choked with rubbish and narrowed by encroachments. The commission thus established remained an important one for many generations, but in BC8 he superintended the business himself.

A danger at Rome, more frequent and no less formidable than flood, was fire. So frequent were fires that the most stringent laws had been passed against arson, which it seems was even punishable by burning alive. In BC23 Augustus formed a kind of fire brigade of public slaves under the control of the curule-aediles. But the old magistracies were no longer objects of desire, and it was difficult to get men of energy to fill them, a state of things which was one of the chief blots in the new imperial system. At any rate in this case they were not found efficient, and in the later years, of his reign (A.D. 6), a new brigade in four divisions was formed of freedmen with an equestrian praefect, who turned out to be so effective that they became regularly established.

Another part in the scheme of Augustus for the reconstruction of society was to revive the influence of the Sacred Colleges and brotherhoods, and to renew the ceremonies with which they were connected. One method of doing this was to become a member of them all himself, much as the king of England is sovereign of all the Orders. Thus according to the Monumentum he was pontifex, augur, quindecemvir for religious rites, septemvir of the Epulones, an Arval brother, a fetial and a sodalis Titii. Nor was he only an honorary or idle member. He attended their meetings and joined in their business, and took part in whatever rites they were intended to perform. Thus his membership of the Arval brethren is recorded in the still existing acta; as a fetial he proclaimed war against Cleopatra. The sodales Titii, a college of priests of immemorial antiquity, had almost disappeared until the entrance of Augustus into their college revived them and their ritual. He not only joined these colleges, but revived and even increased their endowment, and, above all, those of the six Vestal Virgins, to whom he presented the regia, once the official residence of the Pontifex Maximus, and an estate at Lanuvium. The restoration of the College of Luperci, which had celebrated on the 15th of February the old ceremony of “beating the bounds” almost from the foundation of the city, was more or less a political matter. It had gone out of fashion, and its ceremonies had got to be looked upon as undignified. Iulius Caesar had revived and re-endowed them. The Senate for that very reason in the reaction after his death had deprived them of these endowments, which Augustus now restored. We have already noticed his renewal of the augurium salutis, the old ceremonial prayer at the beginning of the year that could only be offered in time of peace. He also induced some one to accept the office of flamen Dialis in BC11, after it had been vacant since BC87, because the restrictions under which its holder laboured were so numerous and tiresome that in spite of its dignity—its seat in the Senate and curule chair and lictor—no one would accept it. He took pains again to restore the Sibylline Books to their old place of importance. The originals were lost in the fire of BC82, and a commission had at once been issued to collect others from towns in Greece and Greek Italy. But some of them were getting illegible from age, and some were of doubtful authenticity, and consequently all kinds of prophetic verses got into circulation, giving rise at times to undesirable rumours and panics. Augustus in BC18 ordered them to be re-copied and edited, and the authorised edition was then deposited in his new temple of Apollo on the Palatine, and continued to be consulted till late in the third century. After an attempt by Iulian to revive its authority it was finally burnt by Stilicho A.D. 400.

As one of the quindecemvirs Augustus had charge of these books, but he formally took the official headship of Roman religion by becoming Pontifex Maximus. He was elected and ordained to that office in March BC12. The people had wished him to take it in BC30, but he would not violate what was a traditional and sacred rule that the office was lifelong, and though Lepidus was degraded from the triumvirate in BC36, he was still Pontifex Maximus. It is true that he was not allowed to do any of the duties, or only those of the most formal kind, but still he had the office. The ground for asking Augustus to take it was that the election of Lepidus had been irregular; he had managed to get put in during the confusion following the assassination of Caesar, and therefore might be deposed. Augustus however takes credit for his scrupulous observance of a religious rule, and was particularly gratified by the crowds of people who came up to vote for him, a sort of ecclesiastical coronation.

In BC 17 he gave an emphasis to some of these religious revivals by celebrating the ludi saeculares, the centenary of the city, in virtue of some verses found in this Sibylline volume. We need not trouble ourselves as to whether his calculation of the year was a rigth one (the seaculum was really 110 years), it is enough to note that they were meant, like a centenary of a college or university, to call out patriotic and loyal feelings which should embrace both the country and the country religion. They are made interesting to us by the fact that Horace—always ready to further his master’s purposes—was selected to write the Anthem or Ode to be sung by a chorus of twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls. An inscription, found in 1871 in the bed of the Tiber, gives the official program of this festival, and ends with the words Carmen composuit Q. Horatius Flaccus. The poet probably had before him, when he wrote it, the general scheme of the festival, which included solemn sacrifices and prayer to Iuno, Diana, lupiter, and Ilithyia. Augustus and Agrippa took the leading part in the religious functions—as members of quindicemviri—and both repeated the prayers, which in the case of all these deities invoked a blessing on the “Populus Romanus Quiritium”. In short, everything was done to mark it as a national festival, to make the Romans recall their glorious inheritance and unique position, and at the same time to show that the princeps represented that greatness before gods and men. Whatever else Augustus may have thought of the national religion, he evidently regarded it as the surest bond of national life, and the inclusion of a prayer to Ilithyia, goddess of childbirth, joined with his contemporaneous attempt to encourage marriage and the production of children (which the obedient Horace echoes), shows that he also connected that religion with morality. The restoration of religion, in fact, in his mind, goes side by side with the purification of morals. It is the practical statesman’s view of religion as a necessary police force and perhaps something more. Napoleon restored the Catholic Church in France with a similar sagacity, and the people blessed him, as they did Augustus, for giving them back le bon Dieu.

But the state of things required in his judgment, not only a religious revival, but more stringent laws. Horace again reflects his master’s views in the making, before they find expression in act. The sixth ode of the first book (written about BC 25) joins to the necessity of a restoration of the temples and a return to religion a warning as to the relaxation of morals, tracing the progress in vice of the young girl and wife, with the shameful connivance of the interested husband, and exclaims : “Not from such parents as these sprang the youth that dyed the sea with Punic blood, and brake the might of Pyrrhus and great Antiochus and Hannibal, scourge of God.” Again in the twenty-fourth ode of the same book, also written about BC25, he warmly urges a return to the old morality, and promises immortality to the statesman who shall secure it : “If there be one who would stay unnatural bloodshed and civic fury, if there be one who seeks to have inscribed on his statue the title of ‘Father of the Cities,’ let him pluck up heart to curb licentiousness. His shall be a name for the ages!”. And when Augustus has acted on the resolution, to the formation of which the poet was privy, he tells him ten years later that by his presence family life is cleansed from its foul stains, that he has curbed the licence of the age and recalled the old morality. This he would represent as the result of the Emperor’s legislation, the lex marita of the secular hymn.

It was after his return from the East in BC19 that Augustus first received censorial powers for five years. Whether this amounted to a definite office—a prafectura moribus or regimen morum, as Dio and Suetonius assert—does not much matter. The experiment of appointing censors in the ordinary way had been tried in BC22 for the last time and had not been successful, and the censoria potestas now given to Augustus practically put into his hands that control over the conduct of private citizens which the censors had exercised by their power of inflicting “ignominy” upon them. The ancient censorial stigma had been applied to irregularities in almost every department of life, but it depended on the will of the censors themselves, not on laws. Feeling now directly responsible for the morals and general habits of the citizens he began a series of legislative measures designed to suppress extravagance and debauchery, and to encourage marriage and family life, which would have permanent validity. He believed in externals, even trivial ones, as indicating a growing laxity; making, for instance, a point of men appearing in the forum and on official occasions in the old Roman toga. The lighter and more comfortable lacerna or pallium was as abominable in his eyes as a suit of flannels would seem to a martinet of today in the Park or on parade. Before all things the Romans were to be national, in dress no less than in other respects.

But the failure which always attends such regulations was no less inevitable in regard to the first of his new reforming measures, his sumptuary laws, regulating the exact amount that it was legal to spend on a cena in ordinary days, on festivals, and at wedding feasts, or the repotia which the bridegroom gave on the afternoon following his marriage. This was no new thing. It had been tried at various times throughout Roman history. Beginning with a very ancient law regulating the amount of silver plate each man might legally possess, the rent he might pay for his house, and the provisions of the Twelve Tables, we have laws in the third and second centuries BC, limiting the cost of dress and jewels for women, the number of guests that might be entertained at banquets, and the amount that might be spent upon them. Sulla had also a sumptuary law, among his other acts, of the same kind. But Iulius Caesar had gone farther than any one in BC46. He had not only regulated the cost of furniture and jewels, according to the rank of the owners, and the amounts to be spent upon the table, but he had sent agents into the provision markets, who seized all dainties beyond the legal price, and even entered private houses and removed dishes from the table. Of course such measures were not only annoying, they were ineffective also. Directly he left Rome the rules were neglected. Our own Statute Book has many laws of the same kind, which rapidly became dead letters. Nearly the one and only permanent effect of the old sumptuary laws had been to create a sentiment against large and crowded dinner parties as vulgar, nor did Augustus succeed much better. Towards the end of his reign he issued an edict extending the legal amount which might be spent on banquets, hoping to secure some obedience to the law. But nothing that we know of Roman life afterwards leads us to think that this form of paternal government—though quite in harmony with Roman ideas—ever attained its object. Human nature was stronger than political theory.

Nor were the laws, carried about the same time, on marriage, divorce, and kindred subjects, much more effective. In part they reenacted rules which had always been acknowledged and always disobeyed, and so far they did not punish a crime, but endeavoured to enforce marriage, they were continually resisted or effectually evaded. They consisted of a series of enactments— whether we regard them as separate laws or chapters in the same law—for restraining adultery and libertinage, for regulating divorce, and for encouraging the marriage of all ranks. They were passed in BC 18-17, and were supplemented by a law of A.D. 9, called the lex Papia Poppaea. The text of none of them survives, and we have to trust to scattered notices in the later legal writers. They may be roughly classed as restrictive, penal, and beneficiary. In the first may be placed the regulation that no senator or member of a senatorial family might marry a freed-woman, courtesan, actress, or the daughter of an actor; though other men might marry a freed-woman or even emancipate a slave in order to marry her. And under the same head came the regulations as to divorce. The legal doctrine appears to have been that marriage contracted with the old religious ceremony called confarreatio was indissoluble, except in the case of the wife’s adultery, on whose condemnation to death the execution was preceded by a solemn dissolution of the marriage or diffareatio. It was also a common belief that no divorce had ever taken place at Rome until that of Carvilius in BC231. Yet the laws of the Twelve Tables (BC450) contained provisions as to divorce so that it had certainly been known before; and perhaps the truth was that Carvilius was the first to divorce his wife without any plea of adultery, in which case he would have to give security for the repayment of her dowry. Since that time the religious confarreatio had become extremely rare; both men and women avoided an indissoluble tie. The fashion was to be married sine manu, that is, without the woman passing into the manus or power of her husband. She still femained subject to the patria potestas, or to that of her guardian, or was sui iuris according to her circumstances at the time. Such marriages could be dissolved by either party, and without charge of misconduct. Public opinion seems to have restrained both men and women for some time from taking advantage of their freedom, but its force steadily diminished, till towards the end of the republic divorce became so common as to provoke little remark. It was an arrangement—as in the case of Augustus and his family—governed almost entirely by considerations of convenience or advantage, and generally left all parties concerned on a friendly footing. This of course was not always the case when the divorce was the result of misconduct, or at least of misconduct on the wife’s part, nor even if it resulted from incompatibility of temper or money disputes, which left a feeling of soreness behind them. It was a system—however disastrous to family life—too deeply rooted for Augustus to attempt to change it, even if he had wished to do so. His law seems to have dealt only with certain formalities and conditions of divorce—such as the necessity of having witnesses, and in case of a charge of misconduct a kind of family council or court of inquiry—not with the freedom of divorce itself, except that in the case of a freed-woman, she was prevented from divorcing her husband or marrying again without his consent. That, however, rested on the idea of the rights of a patronus rather than on the sanctity of marriage. Otherwise the law chiefly dealt with questions of property, restraining the husband from alienating his wife’s estate without her consent, and re-enacting (with what modifications we do not know) the provisions for the repayment of dowry.

The penal enactments affected (1) those guilty of adultery or seduction (stuprum), and (2) those who remained unmarried or without children. In adultery both parties were punishcd by transportation (deportatio in insulam) and a partial confiscation of property. A husband’s unfaithfulness incurred no penalty except that he lost all claim to retain any part of the wife’s dowry, even for the benefit of children. But the old barbarous principle of the injured husband’s right to kill both wife and paramour, if detected by himself, was retained, though under certain conditions. If he allowed the guilty wife to remain with him he was bound to release the man; and if he connived at the adultery for gain, he was subject to a fine. Stuprum was formerly defined as the forcible detention of a free woman for immoral purposes, and could be punished by flogging or imprisonment. Under the Iulian law it was extended to the seduction of an unmarried woman or a widow who had been living chastely.

The penalties upon those who remained unmarried between certain ages were in the form of a direct tax or of certain disabilities. The former, under the name of uxarium, was of great antiquity, and had been levied by the censors of BC404, but it was light and intermittent; the Iulian law revived and increased it. The disabilities were that an unmarried man between the legal ages could not take a legacy from a testator not related to him within the sixth degree, unless he married within a hundred days of being informed of the legacy. This was extended by the lex Papia Poppaea (A.D. 9) to the childless, who could only take half any legacy from a testator unconnected with them within the sixth degree. One child saved a man from coming under this law, three children a freeborn woman, four a freed-woman. Again, a husband and wife who were childless could only receive a tenth of a legacy left by one to the other, though, if there were children by another marriage, a tenth was added for each, or if they had had children who had died. For all alike there were numerous exemptions founded on absence from home on public service, age, or ill-health; and a certain time of grace (vacatio) was given between the attainment of the legal age and the actual marriage, or between two marriages, or after a divorce.

The beneficiary clauses of the law were those which relieved married men or women and men or women with children from these disabilities, and gave them exemption from certain onerous public duties and special places of honour in the theatres. The fathers of three children at Rome, four in Italy, five in the provinces, had also certain preferences for offices and employments and other honorary distinctions, such as taking precedence of a colleague in the consulship. This was not a new idea, for it had in one shape or another existed in many Greek states, and in BC59 Iulius Caesar had in his agrarian law given the preference to fathers of three children in the distribution of land.

The disabilities imposed on the unmarried were met with vehement resistance, in consequence of which the clause was introduced giving the three years’ grace between the attainment of the legal age and the actual marriage. After the passing of the Papia Poppaea the Emperor in the theatre or circus was received with loud shouts from the equestrian seats demanding its repeal. He is said to have sent for the children of Germanicus and held them up as an example for all to follow; and he afterwards summoned two meetings of the equites, one of those married, and the other of the single. To each he delivered a speech, which Dio reports or invents. He pointed with dismay to the fact that the first meeting was so much less numerous than the second. He commended the married men for having done their duty to the State, but to the unmarried he addressed a longer and more vehement appeal. He argued that they were defeating the purpose of the Creator, were contributing to the disappearance of the Roman race, which was being replaced by foreigners necessarily admitted to the franchise in order to keep up the numbers of the citizens; that he had only followed in his legislation the precedent of ancient laws with increased penalties and rewards, and that while he acknowledged that marriage was not without its troubles, yet that was true of everything else, and they were compensated by other advantages and the consciousness of duty done.

But though the Emperor carried his point at the time and passed a law which remained in force for more than three centuries, it did not really benefit morality. It was constantly evaded by colourable marriages, often with quite young children. Men did not marry to have heirs, but in order to become heirs, it was said. And though Augustus attempted to prevent this by an edict enacting that no betrothal was to count which was not followed by a marriage within two years, other means of evading the law were found which gave rise to the intrusion of spies and informers who made their profit by thus violating the secrets of the family. Again, the granting of the ius trium liberorum became gradually a matter of form, and the idea of the superiority of the married state necessarily disappeared with the rise of certain Christian ideals. The law was repealed by the sons of Constantine.

Though a line is often drawn between a man’s public and private character, it still remains hard to reconcile the earnestness of Augustus in pressing these laws and his severity in punishing offences of this nature with the reports of his own personal habits. I have already expressed my disbelief in the stories of his youthful immoralities. Suetonius, who spares.no emperor the inevitable chapter summing up his sins of the flesh, asserts that not even his friends deny the intrigues of his later years, but merely urge that they were conducted not for the gratification of his passions, but for motives of policy, that he might gain information of secret plots. He mentions no names and gives no evidence; the only names that have come down are those mentioned in Antony’s extraordinary letter justifying his own connection with Cleopatra. Antony, however, could only have known Roman gossip at second or third hand in Alexandria, and the whole tone of the letter is so reckless and violently coarse that it goes for very little by way of evidence. Dio indeed mentions the wife of Maecenas. But his statements do not hang together or amount to very much. In one place he tells us that Augustus was annoyed with Maecenas because the latter had told his wife something as the measures being taken against her brother Murtena. At another he says that some gossips attributed his journey to Gaul in BC16 to a wish to enjoy her society without exciting popular remark, “for he was so much in love with her that he once made her dispute with Livia as to the superiority in beauty.” Even if the gossip was worth anything, this hardly looks like a secret intrigue. Nor is it a confirmation of it that Maecenas at his death left Augustus his heir. However, the fact may nevertheless be so. Livia is said elsewhere by Dio to have explained her lasting influence over Augustus by the fact that she was always careful not to interfere in his affairs, and, while remaining strictly chaste herself, always pretended not to know anything of his amours. If Livia did say this, it would of course be a sufficiently strong proof of the allegations against him. But such reported sayings rest ultimately on gossip and tittle-tattle, and do not go for much. The story told by Dio, and amplified by Zonaras, of Athenodorus of Tarsus getting himself conveyed into his chamber in the covered sedan intended for some mistress, and springing out of it sword in hand and then appealing to Augustus as to whether he did not often run such risks, is not very likely in itself, and at any rate must refer to the triumviral days. For about BC30 Athenodorus was sent back to govern Tarsus. The one epigram by the hand of Augustus, which has been preserved by Martial, is undeniably outspoken and coarse, but it is the coarseness of disgust, not of lubricity, and to my mind is evidence—so far as it may be called so—for him rather than against him. If, however, all that Suetonius and Dio allege against his middle life is true, we must still remember that in the eyes of his contemporaries, and indeed in Roman society generally from Cato downwards, such indulgence in itself was not reprehensible. It entirely depended on circumstances, and whether other obligations—such as friendship, public duty, family honour—were or were not violated. From that point of view the only crime of Augustus would be in the case of Terentia, wife of Maecenas, if the tale is true. As among the other emperors whose life Suetonius wrote, with the exception or Vespasian, the character of Augustus stands out clear. One age cannot judge fairly of another, and it is not seldom that we find ourselves at as great a loss to reconcile theory and practice, as to account for lives such as those of Augustus and Horace in conjunction with the legislation of the former and the moral sentiments occasionally expressed by the latter.

 

 

CHAPTER XIII

LATER LIFE AND FAMILY TROUBLES