THE AUGUSTEAN EMPIRE (44 B.C.—A.D. 70)

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE ACHIEVEMENT OF AUGUSTUS

I.

THE NEW ORDER

IT is beyond doubt that during the principate of Augustus there was a widespread belief that a new page had been turned in the history of mankind. The belief was not everywhere the same nor due to the same causes. In the client-kingdoms men regarded Rome as the power that upheld the ruling houses and may have judged Rome according to the good or bad government of the kings. Yet it must have been observed that in the main the influence of the princeps was on the side of good government, that the expensive ambitions of kings in foreign policy were prevented, that contingents from client-kingdoms were less and less called upon as the system of auxilia was developed, and that deference to Rome forbade overostentatious extravagance. In the provinces of the Hellenistic East the Principate brought good government and relief from wars. Vague aspirations after a new era for which the leader should be found in the East1 were reduced to unreality by Actium and the fall of Egypt, and there can have been few who did not recognize that the new order, for all its insistence on the primacy of Italy and the supremacy of ernes Romani over all other inhabitants of the world, permitted the Hellenistic East to live its own life with security and self-respect. The freedom to be judged by their own laws which the Greeks prized almost above political independence was not infringed by Rome. Greek culture was admired, though Roman culture claimed its independence. In religion Rome stood by the older gods of Italy and Greece, but permitted freedom of cult and worship in all the provinces.

The seas and roads were secure, and everywhere men could pass freely on their lawful occasions. Beyond the Danube and the Euphrates there might be enemies, but Rome stood on guard on every frontier. For generations before, the provinces and client­kingdoms had seen the power of Rome and had sought to find in it protection even at the price of dependence. The worship of Rome had evinced the desire to find a lasting protector, as the honours paid to Roman generals and governors had evinced the desire to find protection for the moment. But Rome had pursued no steady policy, and the great generals and governors had passed or had fallen. Now stability had entered into Roman affairs, and the provinces and kingdoms that readily realized power in terms of persons saw that the keystone of this stable Rome was the princeps, Augustus. Thus it was not illogical for them to combine the cult of Rome with that of Augustus, the combination of the two ensuring their security and in so far deserving their gratitude. This was not a personal religion in the sense that it had any meaning for the spiritual life of the worshippers, or that it was tinged with any emotion other than gratitude and an interested solicitude for the preservation of the new order. Nor was it directed to a person in the sense that it attributed to Augustus any qualities or powers other than those of a man. Apart from Egypt, where the native Egyptians had for centuries imagined their Pharaohs to be nearer the gods than men1, the Hellenistic East in general had seen in rulers the source of benefits or injuries and in the cult of them the placation or laudation of a power that was wholly of this world. To them, as to Virgil, ‘deus nobis haec otia fecit’, and so long as he did so, ‘erit ille mihi semper deus’. The all-embracing power of Rome was a necessary part of the beneficence of Rome and both of these could readily be personified in the princeps. It is this simple conception that lies behind such dedications as that of the people of the petty town of Myra in Lycia to Augustus as ‘ruler of land and sea; benefactor and saviour of the whole kosmos’.

In the western provinces, especially in Spain and Gaul, Rome had another meaning. To the Gauls outside the old Provincia and to the tribes of northern and western Spain, Rome was a new master. A ruthless war against these tribes had made safe the more civilized parts of Spain and they were becoming romanized. The sentiment of the more urbanized Spain was becoming more akin to that of Italy, whence had come many settlers; elsewhere no violence was done to national or tribal feeling. The Roman auxilia offered a career to Spaniards who could not endure the pax Romana, the rest of Spain welcomed security and order. In Gaul the tribes and their chiefs were won by gentle handling and by protection against the Germans beyond the Rhine. The advance of material civilization and comfort was hastened by the facilitation of trade between the ends of the Empire. The Gauls might well feel that they had sacrificed little more of liberty than the name, and that they had received a high price. Indeed, Rome offered to them a sense of national unity within the Empire; and when Drusus dedicated to Rome and Augustus the altar of Lugdunum built by sixty tribes from the three Gauls he made the new Rome the foster mother of Gallic unity1. Rome had divided in order to conquer; now she united in order to rule.

In Rome, Italy, and among the Roman citizens who lived outside Italy, the Principate meant something far more, and the new order aroused deeper emotions. Civil wars, the proscriptions and requisitions, the dread some men had of an autocrat, the dismay some felt when the removal of the autocrat brought no more than the name of freedom as a losing battle-cry, the fear that Rome itself was to yield pride of place to a queen from the East with a Roman as her led-captain—all these had induced a sense of guilt and insecurity. The Romans had felt the stirring of a new emotion, doubt of themselves and despair of the Republic. In such moments a people will turn with unquestioning and almost savage loyalty to a man who sets himself to exorcize these emotions. Whatever Octavian may have been, however ruthless and self­seeking, he stood for Rome, and all else was forgotten. Caesar had embodied faith in his own star and his own genius; Octavian stood for faith in Rome. At Ilerda, Pharsalus, Thapsus, Munda, it was Caesar who had conquered; at Actium it was Rome and Italy. Caesar had pardoned his enemies; Octavian had watched them perish, and now could honestly declare that he had no enemies among Romans who held by Rome. Policy alone would have dictated to him the championship of Rome and Italy;

‘The same arts that did gain

A power, must it maintain’—

but Octavian was no mere adventurer exploiting emotions which he did not share. The faith which was placed in him was not misplaced. The new order meant the revival of Roman primacy, the assertion of Roman culture, the restoration of Roman self-confidence, the exaltation of Roman religion as the reflection of the State. Yet this nationalism was not. ungrateful. What Greek thought and letters and art had meant to Rome was not denied. It was retained and honoured, but only as having become a part of Roman culture. Apollo on the Palatine might match, even outshine, Juppiter on the Capitol, but he must do so as a god of Rome. New elements from without, such as Oriental cults or old elements of the same kind which had not been taken into the Roman State religion, were kept in their place. Whoever would, might find comfort in the service of Isis and the like, but as Romans and Italians men must recognize the gods of Rome and Italy.

Least of all was Augustus prepared to permit the worship of the State gods to be replaced or rivalled by worship of himself. Rather he prided himself on being the first and the most devout of all their servants and worshippers in the name of Rome. The cult of Divus Julius was another matter: Caesar now belonged to the past of Rome, as would Augustus himself when he was gathered to his fathers. A like sanctity rested on the Senate and the magistracies which had been the channels of Roman power and tradition. These were to remain, and the citizens were to be their own masters within the forms which had been consecrated by time. To Romans faith in their past was the larger part of their faith in their future. There were to be no innovations which would shake this faith. To them the new age meant that they were to wake from a nightmare to find that they were themselves after all. Yet the nightmare had been so long drawn and horrible that much had to be done to drive out its memory and to restore tone to the shaken nerves. Herein the personality of Augustus played a great part. His serenity and his very matter-of-factness combined to assist the cure.

We thus find in the first years of the Augustan age a consciousness of the greatness of the Republic. In the early books of Livy, in the Odes of Horace, and in the Georgics and Aeneid there is heard again and again the note of pride in the past, of belief in the people of Italy and in the sound old qualities of the Republican worthies. Imperial art is full of the same theme, as of the dignity and composure of Roman ceremonial. By the side of the martial spirit in which Rome so readily saw the spring of virtue there is also a new domestic gentleness, an enjoyment of simplicity. The arrogant luxury and self-seeking ambition of the nobles of the failing Republic were rebuked by the modest state kept by the princess and by his untiring devotion to the plain path of duty. The appeal to virtue on the ground that vice was un-Roman linked the national spirit with the desire for a reform in morals. It was natural to connect the agonies of the last decades with a loosening of morality and neglect of religion; it was equally natural to believe that in the revival of religion and morals lay security against such disasters. That one man should control the State had come to be a political necessity, the necessity was made more easily a free choice when the man who was to control the State carried forward into the Principate what was believed to be the most precious heritage of the Republic.

As policy alone would have taught Augustus to champion, at the risk of narrowness, the primacy of Rome and Italy, so it would have inspired him to retain the forms of the Republic. Yet that retention was something more than a screen for effective autocracy. Caesar’s dictatorship had been the crowning reductio ad absurdum of Roman constitutional forms: Augustus meant the old Republic to be a reality so far as it could. He had ever been willing to use and to acknowledge the talents of others and he realized that Rome needed, as he needed, the service of the aristocracy. He cannot well have planned to allow the State to escape from his control, or to stand aside and content himself with protecting a Republican government from dislocation from within or without. The position of a moderator rei publicae fell below his capacity and fell short of the needs of his generation. But he did intend to rule as one among many servants of the State, the greatest, the most powerful, the most permanent of them, but not alone. The last decades of the Republic had shown that the Senate was not equal to all the tasks that fell to Rome. The Senate at the beginning of the Principate was even less capable, for it had been weakened by the Civil Wars and the proscriptions. But for part of the old tasks it was still strong enough, and these it was left to carry on. The remainder the princeps took upon his own shoulders formally at the request of the Senate. It was his commission to provide for it, and he had the power to appoint his own helpers. But, so far as his commission went, he was responsible to the State for his own actions and those of the helpers. The State was no other than the Senate and People of Rome; the princeps was not a third estate by the side of these two. In any activity in which Augustus was a magistrate, he had no more powers than anyone associated with him as colleague1. To call the constitution of the Principate a dyarchy is to miscall it: there was no division of power; what there was, was a division of labour. There was no moment and there was no sphere of activity in which Augustus was not acting in the name of the Senate and People, except that, like other magistrates, he was his own master in his own provincia until his commission to deal with it expired.

It is without doubt true that, in general, the armies of the Republic were under Augustus’ control, but it is inexact to describe his constitutional position as that of a military monarch. His effective control of almost all the army did indeed prevent the rise of a rival. But his power did not formally rest on the army, and the fact that he had assumed the praenomen of Imperator had no constitutional significance. It is true that he had in his hands almost, if not all, the military patronage of the State. But this, in theory, only endured so long as he was entrusted with a commission to govern the provinces in which most of the legions were posted. With the end of that commission his legal control of the army would have ceased. Nor can any constitutional importance be attached to the word princeps. As princeps senatus Augustus enjoyed primacy in the Senate, but outside the Curia, princeps senatus meant nothing, and within the Curia it was no more than primacy. Princeps, apart from princeps senatus, was, as it had always been, a complimentary title and no more. It reflected the fact that Augustus counted for most among the citizens of Rome: it was a convenient though unofficial compendium for the authority which Augustus enjoyed. It was the noun which described what in the Res Gestae Augustus claimed, that he ranked before all others in auctoritas. Such was the setting in which the Principate began.

Yet from the year 23 BC onwards it must have been realized that Augustus did enjoy a constitutional position such as Pompey, for instance, had neither enjoyed nor even, perhaps, desired. He was not the colleague of the tribunes and he had a tribunicia potestas which overrode their office: he was not the colleague of proconsuls but he possessed a proconsular imperium maius which meant that his will went over the will of all proconsuls. Their imperium was derived from the same source as his, but on him was conferred an imperium which was greater than theirs, if their imperium and his came into conflict or comparison. Yet both the imperium proconsulare maius and the tribunicia potestas were powers which Augustus could share without forgoing their practical effectiveness. In the Res Gestae Augustus declared that he five times received from the Senate at his own request a colleague in the possession of the tribunicia potestas, and it is clear that those persons on whom the imperium proconsulare was specially conferred might possess it in the form of the imperium maius, though the sphere within which it was operative was limited by the sphere for which the imperium itself was granted. It is assumed by Mommsen that this imperium was subordinated to that of Augustus, but it may be argued that this distinction, which is nowhere formally attested, did not exist in strict law, but that it was deduced in practice from the superior auctoritas of the princeps and the fact that the appointment of officers within the imperial provinces seems to have remained in the hands of the princeps. How great was the effective validity of the auctoritas of the princeps is, indeed, shown by Augustus’ very willingness to allow others to hold these powers on which his own position formally rested. Even when at the last Tiberius was vested with powers which were hard to distinguish from those of the princeps himself there can have been no doubt whose will counted for most in the State.

If men asked themselves the question whether Rome under the Augustan Principate was or was not a Republic the answer depended on what was contrasted with a Republic. It was not a monarchy in any sense in which the world had hitherto known the word. It was not an autocracy in the sense that the sole initiative in the State sprang from the will of the emperor. It was not a military tyranny in the sense that the emperor’s power formally rested on the will of the army or on the command of the army, or that the emperor either represented or pursued the interests of the army as a power in the State. As against these alternatives the Augustan Principate was Republican. But, once this negative definition is abandoned, it becomes clear that Rome suffered a change from the regime of Senatus populusque Romanus. It has been argued above that in the settlement of 23 BC a group of powers was conferred on the princeps by a legislative act which went beyond the powers inherent in the imperium proconsulare maius and the tribunicia potestas. If this be so, and if such powers as are ascribed to Augustus in the lex de imperia of the time of Vespasian are not rather the statement of what in fact he had come to do without question in the course of his reign, then from the year 23 BC onwards it must have been clear that the Senate and People of Rome had in certain matters abdicated in favour of the princeps. In any event, despite the renewals of the proconsulare imperium which formally implies that the commission expired if it was not renewed, it is not easy, in the face of his tribunicia potestas to see how any alternative commission to anyone else was possible. Even if it was, the administration of the Imperial provinces was so organized as a radiation of power from the princeps that the only practicable alternative to one princeps was another. In fact, the government of this large part of the Empire was not Republican, if by that is meant that the governors were immediately responsible to the Senate and People of Rome. Nor is that all. If in senatorial provinces the will of the princeps could prevail over that of the governors by virtue of his imperium proconsular maius, then these governors, too, were potentially subordinate to a power that was, in action, other than that of the Senate and People. Further, even within Italy itself there grew up a side of the administration which must be called imperial in character, and, as this grew, the centre of gravity in the State moved steadily away from the Senate and People (which in practice meant the Senate) and towards the princeps. During the fourteen years after the settlement of 27 BC. Augustus acquired a firm grasp on the government of most of the provinces in the mere execution of his commission, and during the remaining twenty-seven years of his life his presence at Rome attracted to himself an increasing share of the administration of affairs at home, while he did not cease to extend his authority even within the senatorial provinces. Those who wished to believe that there had been no breach with the Republican constitution as it had existed for centuries might find some real and more formal grounds to encourage their belief, but in point of fact, the weight of evidence was against their conception of the State and refutes those modern scholars who would share it.

II.

THE PERSONALITY OF AUGUSTUS

The record of Augustus’ res gestae that was placed before his Mausoleum in Rome and has thrice been found inscribed in towns of Asia Minor attests his services to the State, above all to the Romans and the people of Italy. But the personality of the man that stood behind that great career is not easy to grasp. Between the passionate outcry from Homer1 with which he faced his first great adventure and the actors’ epilogue with which he claimed applause on his deathbed many changes had altered his mind as well as his fortunes. The strong desire for security and high position working for and through revenge for Caesar, the politic instinct for the way to conquer authority and to rally behind him the forces that made for permanence, the tact that revealed what men hoped for in the Principate and shunned what men might fear or resent, the conquest of bodily weakness and the long-drawn single-minded industry of the first servant of the State mark stages in the development of his character. We may suspect that the features of the Octavian of Mutina and of Philippi did not bear the serenity of the Augustus of Prima Porta1. The courage to dare was transmuted into the courage to endure.

Security and success lulled to sleep and almost destroyed the cruelty and self-seeking that at times mastered him in the first decade of his career. How far in the struggle with Antony the championship of Italian and Roman ideals was an end rather than a means, we cannot say. But when the struggle was over the inspiration of the championship remained with him. More and more he displayed the hard-headed tenacity, the caution, the faith in the past together with the cool appreciation of the present that marked out the most solid parts of the Roman and Italian character.

It may be argued that apart from native shrewdness and painstaking thoroughness his guiding motives were negative; reaction from the dangerous sides of Caesar and of Antony, the ineffective side of Cicero, the unpractical side of Cato, the blind side of Pompey. But this interpretation does Augustus less than justice. His statecraft is not to be explained as dictated by a tradition, or the mere avoidance of refuted policies and expedients. It was the natural expression of his character, so far as we can discover what his own character was and became.

The few extracts from his private letters and the few authentic sayings that have been preserved reveal a man of warm feelings, careful of appearances yet impatient of affectation, with a frank almost naive liking for simple social pleasures, a humour not without a tincture of wit. This is one side of Augustus, something not unlike the figure of a middle-class Roman from the country. He stoutly believed in respectability and decorum and was prepared to face unpopularity to exact from the governing class at least a minimum of both. This is not to say that his own life was always above reproach: we can hardly doubt that there was some truth in Antony’s imputations on his morals; but he was capable of strong demotion, if not entire fidelity, to Livia through their long married life, and he died with her name on his lips.

One quality Augustus possessed by which his other qualities may in part be judged. He was able to hold the loyalty of friends eminent enough to have to make a sacrifice of ambition to serve him. In the last decades of the Republic friendship had been a weapon rather than a bond. The amicitiae of Roman nobles had been jealous and exacting: only rarely, where the tastes of friends made way for each other as was true of those of Atticus and Cicero, was friendship lasting and loyal. Most men in history who have risen as Augustus rose have been very ready to be rid of their helpers, but there was in him a quality which evoked loyalty and was great enough to recognize and cherish it. In his earlier days there stood by his side two men of a different stamp, Agrippa and Maecenas. Of Agrippa it is not too much to say that, had there been no Augustus, he had capacities which might have made him the first man in Rome. A general and administrator of high distinction, his features display a man of resolute character not without subtlety. More intriguing still is the shrewd and useful patron of letters Maecenas, cloaking with indolence and a certain preciosity a penetrating political dexterity. They were both far more than a Berthier or a Fouche or perhaps even a Talleyrand, more than a Bentinck or even a Sully. It may be said that Agrippa lacked the cachet of birth and that Maecenas was soft metal. But it cannot be denied that in arms or diplomacy they earned the right to be counted great men; and they spent themselves in the advancement of Augustus with an abnegation of self that even Caesar was not able to evoke in his friends. There remains one other helper and colleague, Tiberius. Between him and the Princeps, despite affectionate phrases, there was imperfect sympathy. Apart from the sacrifice of Tiberius’ happiness to his stepfather’s dynastic hopes, there was a disharmony between the Claudian by birth and the Julian by adoption. The withdrawal of Tiberius may have outraged the Emperor’s sense of duty, though Tiberius did not fail in the end to show that, grimly and reluctantly, he would serve the State in his own way. Hard though it is to discover the truth through the cloud that suspicion raised around these two figures, it may be suggested that the relation of the two made shipwreck between the affection of Augustus for Livia and of Livia for Tiberius. But at the last, whatever the ingrained discord of their temperaments, their common service refuted the easy epigram of insociabile regnum. One thing may be said, that if the greatness of Augustus is more attested by his achievement than by what the ancient evidence of his character permits us to deduce, there must have been in him a natural dominance of mind if he could be acknowledged as the leader of these men with a leadership which neither they nor others dreamt of challenging.

In the Res Gestae there is the chronicle of Augustus’ services, achievements and benefactions with an interpretation of his career which is not all the truth, for truth is not all its purpose. Written to be made public in Rome when the author was beyond the reach of his enemies, it set out the credit side of the account and left others to make what detraction they could. The man who advised Tiberius not to be too greatly outraged at the thought that there could be anyone who spoke ill of him—‘satis est enim si hoc habemus ne quis nobis male facere possit’—had come to care little for detraction, but the Res Gestae reveals the intention to make it plain that no Roman who condemned him at his death could do so without incurring the reproach of ingratitude. How far the aged Emperor deceived himself about the acts of his early days, we shall never know. Nor can we complain that he presents his constitutional position with more attention to its formal correctness than its actual predominance. So far as the Res Gestae is not a claim in the aristocratic manner to the one kind of immortality for which most Romans cared, it is a State Paper setting out the capital of good will and good services with which the new order was endowed, and Augustus was too good a man of business to understate the assets.

The Res Gestae is, then, concerned with positive and concrete achievements: what is not described is the general order and system which Augustus had brought into being. It is here to be supplemented by the pronouncement, already quoted, which will bear repetition: ‘ita mihi salvam ac sospitem rem publicam sistere in sua sede liceat atque eius rei fructum percipere quem peto, ut optimi status auctor dicar et moriens ut feram mecum spem, mansura in vestigio suo fundamenta rei publicae quae iecero.’ Here is a claim to an achievement and to a reward. Besides the motive thus indicated, there is evidence enough that Augustus was moved by a very strong sense of duty, that he regarded him­self as a soldier at a post which it would be criminal to desert. Something of this idea is found in Hellenistic kings and much in Roman Stoicism1 inspired in part by Augustus’ own example. But there is no need to look beyond the Roman military tradition and the character of the princeps himself. It may fairly be said that in this constant unwavering laborious service of the State Augustus stood first even among Romans. The system of imperial secretaries had not developed so far as to relieve the princeps from personal care about a vast multiplicity of matters in which policy or justice were concerned. What remains of the records of his intervention in the affairs of provincial communities attests the directness of Augustus’ own contact. In his letter to Cnidus and in the decrees at Cyrene can be heard the echoes of his positive practical fair-minded judgment. A generation of unostentatious unremitting activity justified the dictum, whether of Tacitus or of Tiberius—‘solam divi Augusti mentem tantae molis capacem’.

Such an activity might be no more than the routine diligence of an imperial bureaucrat, but until the last few years of his principate, Augustus’ acts show an elasticity of mind and a constructive statesmanship. Augustus himself, like most Romans, was ready to see in his achievements the hand of fortune, and his felicitas was proverbial in the days of his successors. But his determination to sacrifice others as well as himself to the needs of the State was visited with a series of mischances. It seemed as if he was never to be released from his duty and it has been well pointed out how the realization of approaching death induced in him a mood almost of gaiety.

In his misfortunes and in the way in which he met them can be detected the facets of his character. For reasons of State he forced Tiberius to divorce the wife he loved and to marry Julia and he advanced his grandsons, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, until Tiberius withdrew suddenly from public life. This desertion Augustus seems for long not to have forgiven. Yet when the death of his grandsons made it clear that Tiberius was the one man who could become princeps with the prestige of the Imperial House, he did not shrink from adopting him and finally making him the equal colleague of himself in everything except auctoritas. The discovery of the wantonness of his daughter Julia brought him to disgrace her openly and to pursue the poet Ovid with unrelenting anger. The tremendous crisis of the Pannonian revolt roused him to vigorous action. Here was for a moment the need to defend the borders of Italy, and the need found the princeps at his post. The contrast with his reaction to the disaster of Varus is significant perhaps of the weakening of old age, but partly because it reveals the economical mind of the imperator who counted his legions so carefully—‘Quintili Vare, legiones redde.’

It was in his very nature to reject the parade of power, for he was no mere ‘hypocrite of genius’ as he has been called. Resolved that the Roman world should be secure and be well-governed in the interests of Rome, he took for himself, as by instinct, the minimum of power necessary and assumed the minimum of pomp and ceremony. As evidence of this last may be adduced the reliefs of the Ara Pacis, where the princeps is not set apart from his family nor his family set apart from other citizens by any especial marks of distinction. Caesar had endured, probably enjoyed, the splendid garb of a triumphator, Augustus preferred the plain toga which Livia had woven for him. One touch of vanity is recorded of him, that he was pleased when men dropped their eyes before his clear and steady gaze. He avoided military display and did not pander unduly to the ambitions of generals. Himself no great commander, he was ready enough to risk his life in the high places of the field, but only when there was no other way to victory or to the mastery of his legionaries. Caesar had been a soldier among soldiers till the end; Augustus sedulously avoided the appeal that lay in the allocution ‘commilitones.’

His countenance could abash the legionaries that had fought at Actium, but he was ready with tears and gestures to reveal his emotions and, if need be, to move the emotions of others. He studied elocution and cultivated a style of speech which set intelligibility before elegance. Sometimes a homely phrase, sometimes a touch of pedantry gave a personal note to his writing. Yet he had not the foible of believing himself a man of letters, nor the foible of underrating the effectiveness of those who were. For philosophers he had the respect which was dictated by good form. He may have had more: the possibility cannot be denied that the ideas of Plato or Panaetius, reflected in the writings of Cicero, had an influence over him. But no such assumption is necessary; and the auctoritas of Augustus was rooted in Roman ideas conceived before Greek speculation affected the political thought of the Republic. Nor need he have thought that either Greek philosophers or Cicero must teach him statecraft or the duty of a ruler, and abstract speculation can have had little attraction for his matter-of-fact mind. There was in him a trace of superstition in small matters, so that he may have been a valetudinarian in religion, but within strict limits. He loved comfort of body and mind, but held it lightly when there was work to be done. Once power was in his hand, he hated to tempt fortune. Daring as he had been when he could not afford to be anything else, he was not the man to risk hard-won gains, but to wait and wait until he could move cautiously and securely to his purpose. For those who ventured all to win something he had the sardonic reproof that they were like men who fished with a hook of gold, the loss of which would leave them poor, whatever they caught by its use. The assemblage of qualities and capacities that made up his personality are not such as to strike the imagination of the world. In the sense that Alexander, Caesar or Napoleon surpassed other men in intellectual equipment, Augustus cannot be counted a man of genius. That he was not: he was the man that the world needed, and may claim to have been one of the greatest servants of the human race. The highest praise that he coveted was justly given by the sailors of a ship off Puteoli as the Princeps passed them on his way to die—per ilium se vivere, per ilium navigare, libertate atque fortunis per ilium frui.

III.

FOREIGN AND MILITARY POLICY

The foreign and military policy of Augustus, as has been seen, fell short of complete success. In the West and North there can be detected a far-sighted and strong advance of Roman security during the first two decades of his principate. In the East, apart from the abortive expedition to Arabia which may indirectly have had useful economic results, Roman policy in the same period discloses the realization that the Euphrates was a natural limit of the empire. With a comparatively small expense of military effort reinforced by the use of diplomacy and of client-kingdoms, that part of the Mediterranean world was made sufficiently secure. The defeat of Antony followed by a prudent settlement and the playing upon the dynastic cares of the King of Parthia produced a situation suited to the traditional methods of the older Roman statecraft. Twice only was there an important show of force, to support Tiberius and Gaius Caesar in the settlement of Armenia. Thus the main strength of the legions was available in the West: in Spain, on the Rhine or on the Danube, in Illyricum and round the northern borders of Italy itself. The conquest of Spain was completed, the Alps were made peaceful; most important of all, in the North-East the land-routes with Macedonia were secured by the occupation of Illyricum and the expansion of the empire to the Danube. But in these military movements the part played by Augustus himself was small and his campaigns in Spain left work for Agrippa to finish. It may be suspected that the strategy of his early principate sprang from the brain of Agrippa, and it is possible that in Tiberius Agrippa found a worthy inheritor of his plans.

The earlier operations in Germany entrusted to Drusus were, as has been shown, of less vital consequence than the firm hold of the Danube and the communications behind it. But the death of Drusus removed Tiberius from Illyricum, and the failure to pierce that country with roads in the Roman fashion avenged itself later at the time of the great Pannonian Revolt. Yet there are good grounds to suppose that even during the voluntary exile of Tiberius the preparations for the overthrow of Maroboduus were advanced. On the return of Tiberius to the Rhine this plan was brought to the very verge of accomplishment. It was a moment in the history of the Empire which was not to recur until the reign of Marcus Aurelius. But success was snatched away by a revolt which betrays at least one miscalculation by the Princeps or his advisers. Pannonia and Dalmatia had not been made secure by roads and by good or firm government. It is possible that there had been one other mistake in raising too many auxiliary regi­ments in this region without removing them from the influence of local patriotism. Indeed, the Romans had raised and trained against themselves a national army. Granted that the Emperor roused himself to face the emergency and that the Roman generals and legions mastered the revolt and suffered no major disaster, it cannot be denied that the military power of Rome had been roughly shaken.

More striking, although less dangerous, was the achievement of Arminius in destroying the army of Varus. As has been pointed out, it was not necessary for Rome to occupy Germany and the enterprise did not offer positive gains worth the cost. Diplomacy playing on the rivalries of tribes and chiefs was enough for security, once it had been made plain that only the highest leadership could counter the skill and force of the Romans in war. But the disaster and the campaigns that followed it had effects more lasting than the temporary loss of the legend of invincibility. The concentration of eight legions on the Rhine meant that military policy was largely immobilized, and might mean a temptation to emperor-making. Furthermore, the events that attended these successive crises showed that by the last decade of Augustus’ principate there were no natural reserves of men in Italy who could be recruited for the legions on a large scale. This fact attests, no doubt, the prosperity of Italy—for men did not need to become soldiers—but it betrays also a slackening of military spirit and some divorce of sympathy between the armies and the class from which the legions were mainly drawn. The armies were stationed far from Italy and the denial of family life to the legionaries weakened their ties with their own folk. The peasant who farmed in Italy can have had little sense of solidarity with his soldier brother who disappeared from sight for the best part of his life and, if he returned to Italy at all, returned to live as a petty rentier or, if he became a centurion, as a member of a local upper middle class. The wars of the early Empire had little effect on economic or family life, the Roman People had been spared any great effort, and foreign policy was left without public criticism or public support. During the first decade of the Principate poets had echoed the highest hopes of a martial people, but with the development of the shrewd and wise, but unshowy, policy of Augustus, these voices lost their appeal to a people that sought peace and security.

Granted that the standing army was not capable of quick ex­pansion, it is easy to point to the absence of a central strategic reserve, and to see in it a defect of policy. As years went by, the legions in Spain became more available to reinforce the other armies, and much could be done by the dexterous transference of troops from one frontier to another. But, apart from the nine cohorts of the Praetorian guards and the marines of the fleets, the early Empire was short of troops at a central point. This weakness was endured by Augustus partly, we may conjecture, from economy, partly from a political instinct which forbade a concentration of force in Italy which might give to the new system the air of a military monarchy. The world had suffered so much from too many legions that it might well be content to take what risks were involved in having too few. The one great power outside and yet within reach of the Empire was Parthia, and Parthia was ill-equipped to force upon Rome a military emergency1. For a decade Maroboduus had been strong, but unwilling to match himself against the Empire even when the Pannonians and Ar-minius tempted him. Only twice in the reign of Augustus was Roman military action dictated by the will of Rome’s enemies, and so long as the initiative lay with her, the existing military strength might just, though only just, meet all her needs.

It is to be remembered that in Syria and Egypt and for part of this period in Spain the legions were mainly engaged in police­duty and in public works, military or civil, rather than in guarding the frontiers. This had an effect on their efficiency for serious wars, and in the two Eastern provinces these became almost local armies largely recruited from stocks of less military quality. The more active legions in the main avoided the danger of seeing their men grow old together by the steady accession of recruits to replace the casualties of war. But the danger was there, and the military value of the Western armies no doubt varied from time to time, and where there was such variation it may have affected the tempo of military effort. Granted that the Roman government could, in general, choose its time for great enterprises, it was naturally economical to embark upon them when the legions concerned were at the height of their efficiency, because fewer troops needed to be used, and because, when legions were more veteran in character than at other times, each casualty might remove a claimant on the State who had more nearly served it to the end. Such moments were naturally followed by periods of comparative weakness, which could only be rapidly made good by drafts on the good-will of time-expired soldiers. Further, the policy of balancing the legions against the auxilia denied to Augustus the natural counterpart in arms of what had been the ancient Republican policy in citizenship. Had the legions been in part recruited from picked auxiliaries, the military problem would have been less difficult. But Rome and Augustus were not ready for that.

Such are the deductions that may fairly be made from the credit side of Roman military policy as it developed during the reign of Augustus. The loyalty of the army to the home government was secured by the provision, not by their generals but effectively by the princeps, of the grants of money and land that stood for pensions. Promotion, in most, if not all the armies, was ultimately derived from the princeps, and the constant transfer of picked centurions from one legion to another held the armies together by a kind of network of devotion to the imperatori. On the other hand, the almost permanent division of the army into frontier-groups was a new application of the maxim divide ut imperes. As there was little solidarity between the legions and the Italian lower middle class so there was little solidarity between the army groups. As the armies became conscious of their power, they became conscious of their local esprit de corps. Cadets of the imperial family served an apprenticeship in arms, and the elder and younger Drusus, Tiberius, and Germanicus held high commands in the field, but the place of the princeps was in Rome, even if his image stood between the standards of every legion or cohort. When Augustus died, no serving legionary had seen him in the camp, still less in the field, and the same is true of Tiberius. The early Principate was not, as has been seen, a military monarchy beyond all else, nor the creation or creature of the army. There is a great difference between the position of Augustus or of his successors and that of the First or Third Napoleon. If the legions were indifferent, the praetorians might at moments affect the policy of the State, but between the present, though slight, power of the guards and the distant and great, though divided, power of the frontier armies there was no consciousness of a common interest. From emperor to emperor due care was taken to ensure that if the princeps was not above all a soldier on the throne, no general should combine the power and the will to be one, until at last, half a century after Augustus’ death, the ‘secret of empire’ was revealed. The armies and their generals for long remained the servants of the State, and saw in the princeps the head of the State and, as that, the head of the army. 

There is one other topic that needs to be considered before a conclusion is reached. It is natural to think of the Empire as an aggregation of provinces, but it must not be forgotten that Roman policy had for two centuries leaned on client-states, so that her power had had what have been well called ‘invisible frontiers’. This policy Augustus inherited, and he was slow to change it. The armies of client-kingdoms were not to be despised and they played a part in the wars of his principate, though they slowly declined as the new system of the auxilia was developed. On the east and south from the Black Sea to the Pillars of Hercules there ran a chain of states, broken only here and there, which helped to bear the brunt of movements from without the Empire. No one of these was of great importance, but their affairs gave opportunities for statecraft and provided in part a sphere of policy in which the Senate might enjoy a consoling sense of influence. But most of these kingdoms bordered on Imperial provinces, and, besides, their rulers were very aware that at Rome it was the will of the princeps that prevailed. The trend of events, and perhaps the trend of policy, was towards their gradual extinction as opportunity offered, with the absorption of their military strength into the auxilia and the application of their financial resources to the budget of the Empire. In some regions, as in the Alpine districts, local chiefs were recognized so as to relieve the tasks of administration and to facilitate the pacification of the unruly and the employment of the soldierly elements in their population. It was but rarely that Rome had to put forth her power to protect these client-states or to support their rulers, and it cannot be doubted that on the balance the policy of Augustus justified itself.

To sum up the military achievement of Augustus, it may be argued that in the West and North the policy of the princeps met the needs of the Empire, and that, indeed, apart from the failure to secure the country between the Rhine and the Danube, the defence had been made good in the soundest and most economical ways. There is no essential contradiction between Augustus’ claim to have extended the borders of every frontier province, and his final advice to maintain rather than advance the bounds of the empire. In the East, it cannot be denied that his policy for Armenia proved in the end a failure, though the failure was of comparatively slight importance and could be retrieved when necessary as Tiberius quickly showed. It must also be admitted that the last decade of Augustus’ reign witnessed a decline in Roman strength and prestige. There were elements of weakness in the military system on the side of recruiting and power to face a great emergency. The professional character of the army made it a potential menace to the State but the menace was for long kept far from actuality. The seas were kept safe, and the frontiers were held. The Empire became a kernel of peace within a husk of war, and few who have studied with care the history of the last century of the Republic will fail to acknowledge the greatness of what Augustus achieved.

IV.

THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE

In the previous section it has been suggested that one effect of the Empire was to make the citizen of the more civilized parts tend to cease to be homo militaris. In another chapter it is also suggested that the homo politicus tended to become the homo oeconomicus. It may fairly be assumed that the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Empire were more conscious of a steady rise in commercial enterprise and industrial and agrarian prosperity than of the political and military events that fill the pages of the historians. It is not without reason that the most brilliant account of the Empire that has been written in recent times should describe itself as social and economic. Whatever the future might have in store, the principate of Augustus was marked by an increase of happiness so far as that is secured by an increase of material goods and the certainty of their enjoyment. Nor was this enjoyment passive: it was accompanied by a sense of successful endeavour which filled the breast of a Trimalchio, as of his betters, with conscious pride. That with this there went suffering is true: many slaves and free men were driven hard with little or no share in the prosperity which they helped to produce. But in general the material benefits of the new order were widely spread.

The Augustan Empire was not consciously the Empire of a class. Those who live in an age in which class antagonism is promoted by social stresses and fostered by mass suggestion in speech and writing, may not readily realize how the differentiation of classes, which the Augustan regime undoubtedly tended to fix, fell short of producing a divided people. In economic matters the policy of Augustus was to remove hindrances, assist contacts and then leave trade and commerce to their own devices. Industrial advance, within the limits within which it moved, was not linked with a development of machinery which might produce unemployment, or rob skilled craftsmanship of its due reward. In the pursuit of luxuries the Empire might be living beyond its means, but the day when that fact was plain enough to arouse misgivings was yet to come.

To turn first of all to Italy and Rome, the Principate, it is true, brought greater opportunities to classes of the population which had hitherto come short of their share in the advantages of Rome’s progress. This is especially true of the middle class, who profited more than others from the Augustan peace and the economic unification of the Mediterranean world. Yet the aristocracy, the middle class, the poorer citizens and the freedmen were not rivals for power who found the princeps active to assist them to the exclusion of others. Among the nobles pride or unsatisfied ambition or the temptations of leisure might produce sporadic discontent and even, though rarely and weakly, conspiracy. But of any true senatorial opposition there was hardly any sign. Between the apparent and the real position of the Senate there was an inconsistency which in later times was to have serious consequences. But it must not be forgotten that the princeps was also princeps senatus that he shared in the deliberations of the Curia and lent a part of his own personal prestige to that of the patres. The fact that the Senate was involved in a losing battle against the growth of the Imperial administration was probably obscure to most of Augustus’ contemporaries, even if the princeps himself detected the inevitable result of what he was doing, slowly, unobtrusively but surely enough. The events which attended the accession of Tiberius show how little it was realized that the Senate, so far as it was not the recruiting ground for the Imperial administration, was destined to become either the shadow of a name—‘magni nominis umbra’—or an aristocratic fronde. To most of the senators fae, princeps must have seemed most obviously the protector of the Senate against its old opponents, tribunes, generals, popular leaders; and ancient corporations are not quick to observe a slow ebbing of their power. The equites lost some sources of profit unhealthy to the State and the provinces, but the benefits of the extension and quickening of commerce and industry, together with the opportunities for careers of responsi­bility and power, attached them to the new order. The freedmen were given the one thing they needed most, a new self-respect and loyalty to the princeps. The poorer citizens at Rome gained what they prized, a city which received more than only panem et circenses, and lost what they no longer prized, the reality of power. In Italy there was the consciousness of being Romans in being Italians. The general attitude was that the more they had from and through the princess the better, except perhaps more of the reform of manners. The phrase in which Tacitus understates the motives for accepting the Principate—‘militem donis, populum annona, cunctos dulcedine otii pellexit’—becomes less and less an adequate explanation of the continuance of the Imperial system. Had the rule of Augustus been either what it seemed to the age of Tacitus or what it has seemed to some historians, the Principate would hardly have survived his successors.

Throughout the provinces, despite the advantages they derived from economic activity and the spread of commerce, there was certainly not the sense of full active partnership in the benefits of the new order which might have been evoked by a policy less Italian and Roman than was the policy of Augustus. It was plain that many Romans believed that they were born booted and spurred where other men were born saddled and bridled. But so far as we can judge, there was little gross misgovernment or oppression. There is evidence for a malaise that afflicted mankind, and made it seek for means of quieting its perturbed spirit, but the malaise was not associated with the political or economic effects of the Principate.

The long life of Augustus extinguished the desire for any other form of government. What the Roman world wanted was a Principate, thus it was prepared to be ruled by a dynasty rather than have the danger of not being ruled by a princeps or the danger of a conflict for that position. The efforts made by Augustus to secure the succession in the direct line of the Julian house and their frustration have already been described. The final solution, in which the passing of the Principate to Tiberius was secured by the conferment on him of powers comparable with those of Augustus himself, provided for the desired continuity of rule. By the time that Augustus’ will adopted Tiberius’ mother Livia into the Julian house all had been done that could be done to give him the prestige that clung to the name of Divius Julius.

The abilities of Tiberius fully matched the task, but it may well be thought that it was unfortunate that Augustus did not die and make way for him ten years earlier, just as the last decade of Tiberius’ reign might have been a better period for the Empire had he died felix opportunitate mortis and had the government passed to some other princeps, making a break with the strictly dynastic principle. The last decade of Augustus’ principate, so far as can be deduced from the scanty evidence, produced valuable administrative reforms, including the establishment of the aerarium militare, and revealed the progressive trend of government away from the Senate and towards the princess. It is possible that the changes were made the more easily because of the great prestige of the aged Emperor. But Tiberius gained power at a time when he had lost initiative, and the Empire rested upon its oars. In the sphere of social life the tide of regeneration, never very high, had ebbed. In literature the pulse that had beat in the Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil and the Roman Odes of Horace was flagging. In the writings of Livy the sense of Roman greatness seems to have become dulled after his account of the Hannibalic war, and this may not be due alone to the disappearance from the scene of Rome’s most formidable antagonist.

Further, there was in the Rome of the ageing Augustus no high or widespread intellectual or moral idealism. Philosophy was tending to become in part history teaching by examples, in part a conciliation of the mind, in part a guide for life. The day of the philosophic missionary or martyr had not yet come. Stoicism was moving towards Seneca, Epicureanism had won no inspiration from the furor arduus of Lucretius, Neopythagoreanism was a semi-mystical doctrine of release. The lesson of the Principate in all things was ‘ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.’ There was intellectualism, but not high intellectual adventure: there was scholarship, antiquarianism, criticism, but not the triumphs of science, mathematics or speculation. The burden of real government which the new Italians shouldered was stoutly borne, and the bearing of it was a great achievement. It was a ‘glorious servitude,’ not for the princeps alone, and the rewards that went with the great administrative careers were fully earned. The Italian people in the legions and in countless posts of service took on itself the duties to the world which the Populus Romanus had only half fulfilled. As has been shown above, the social policy of Augustus had a deeper purpose than the regimen of a sterile moralist—no less a purpose than the creation of a new Populus Romanus, co-extensive with the Italian people, with an aristocracy fit to lead, trained to lead from youth up, with a civilization strong enough not to lose itself in becoming the Latin civilization of Western Europe which abides to this day. In the provinces there was active local life and some degree of influence exerted on the central power through the activity of concilia. But, in general, outside Italy the sense of membership in the Empire was a sense of receiving direction from an earthly Providence, which gave justice, security and peace and the means of prosperity without demanding too high a price for it. When all is said, it is a fair criticism of the new order, that its temptation was to be static in high matters, that political thought withered, so that the Empire lost the spirit of a common adventure, the welcome for what was new, without which the strongest and shrewdest political system is doomed in the end to become mechanical and sterile. ‘Le tact des choses possibles’, which nature had given to Augustus, was a great gift, and within the compass of his reign his practical achievement was of a kind that was unmatched in the history of antiquity. As will be seen, he left behind him problems which his successors failed to solve by his methods, and the next half- century saw the draining away of the capital of good-will with which he endowed the Principate. But in the creation of the new Roman People Augustus had given to the Empire a solid core, and in the system which he had built up, he had given to the Roman State a framework which stood firm.

CHAPTER XIX

TIBERIUS