I.
The first characteristic that we notice when we read the Ancyran inscription, is its majestic tone. It is impossible not to be struck by it. We see at once, by a certain air of authority, that the man who is speaking has governed the whole world for more than fifty years. He knows the importance of the things he has done: he knows that he has introduced a new state of society, and presided over one of the greatest changes of human history. Accordingly, although he only recapitulates facts and quotes figures, all he says has a grand air, and he knows how to give so majestic a turn to these dry enumerations that we feel ourselves seized by a sort of involuntary respect in reading them. We must, however, be on our guard. A majestic tone may be a convenient veil to hide many weaknesses; the example of Louis XIV., so near to our own times, ought to teach us not to trust it without examination. We must not forget, besides, that dignity was so truly a Roman characteristic, that its appearance was preserved long after the reality had disappeared. When we read the inscriptions of the latter years of the empire we scarcely perceive that it is about to perish. Those wretched princes who possessed but a few provinces speak as though they ruled over the entire universe, and their grossest falsehoods are expressed with an incredible dignity. If we wish, then, to avoid being deceived when studying the monuments of Roman history, we must be on our guard against a first impression, which may be deceptive, and look at things closely.
Although the inscription that we are studying is called “An account of the deeds of Augustus,” it was not really his whole life that Augustus meant to relate. There are great and intentional lacunae; he did not intend to tell everything. When, at the age of seventy-six, and in the midst of the admiration and respect of the whole world, the aged prince reviewed his past life to make a rapid summary of it, many memories must have disturbed him. There is no doubt, for instance, that he must have been very reluctant to recall the earlier years of his political life. It was needful, however, to say something about them, and it was more prudent to try and gloss them over than to preserve a silence that might give rise to much talk. He extricated himself in the following manner: “At nineteen years of age,” he says, “I raised an army by my own exertions and at my own expense; with it I restored liberty to the republic, which had been dominated by a faction that oppressed it. In return, the senate, by its decrees, admitted me into its number, among the consulars, conferred upon me the right of commanding the troops, and charged me together with the consuls C. Pansa and A. Hirtius to watch over the safety of the state with the title of pro-praetor. Both the consuls having died the same year, the people put me in their place, and appointed me triumvir to put in order the republic.” In these few lines, which form the beginning of the inscription, there are already some very singular omissions. One would infer from them that he had obtained all the dignities that he enumerates, in serving the same cause, and that nothing had happened between the first offices that he had received and the triumvirate. Thanks to the Philippics we know those decrees of the senate which are here alluded to with a certain shamelessness. The senate congratulates the young Caesar “for defending the liberty of the Roman people,” and for having defeated Antony; now, it was after having concerted with Antony to enslave the Roman people, in that dismal interview at Bologna, that he received, or rather took the title of triumvir. The inscription preserves a prudent silence on all these things.
What followed this interview was still more difficult to relate. Here especially Augustus desired forgetfulness. “I exiled those who had killed my father, punishing their crime by the regular tribunals. Then, as they made war against the republic, I conquered them in two battles.” It will be remarked that there is no mention of the proscriptions. What, indeed, could he say about them? Could any artifice of language diminish their horror? On the whole it was more becoming not to speak of them. But as, according to the fine reflection of Tacitus, it is easier to keep silence than to forget, we may be assured that Augustus, who says nothing here of the proscriptions, thought of them more than once during his life. Even if he did not feel remorse, he must often have been embarrassed by the terrible contradiction between his past and his later policy; for, whatever he might do, the memory of the proscriptions always belied his official character as a clement and honourable man. Even here, it seems to me, he betrays his embarrassment. His silence does not entirely satisfy him, he feels that in spite of his discretion unpleasant memories cannot fail to be awakened in the minds of his readers; and, therefore, to anticipate and disarm them, he hastens to add: “I carried my arms by land and sea over the whole world in my wars against the citizens and foreigners. After my victory, I pardoned the citizens who had survived the combat, and I chose to preserve rather than to destroy those foreign nations whom I could spare without danger.”
This difficult place once passed it became easier to relate the rest. Nevertheless, he is still very brief with respect to the earlier times. Perhaps he feared lest the memory of the civil wars should interfere with that reconciliation of parties which the universal exhaustion had brought about after Actium? There is certainly not a single word in the whole inscription to revive the former rancours. He says scarcely anything of his old rivals. There is at the most but a single disdainful word about Lepidus, and an ill-natured but passing accusation against Antony of having seized the treasures of the temples. The following is all he says of his war with Sextus Pompey which gave him so much trouble, and of those valiant seamen who had vanquished him: “I cleared the sea of pirates, and in that war I captured thirty thousand fugitive slaves, who had fought against the republic, and delivered them to their masters to be chastised.” As to that great victory of Actium, which had given him the empire of the world, he only recalls it to state the eagerness of Italy and the western provinces to declare themselves in his favour.
Naturally he prefers to dwell upon the events of the later years of his reign, and we feel that he is more at ease when he speaks of victories in which the vanquished were not Romans. He is justly proud to recall how he had avenged the insults the national pride had suffered before him: “I re-took, after victories gained in Spain and over the Dalmatians, the standards that some generals had lost. I forced the Parthians to restore the spoils and ensigns of three Roman armies, and humbly to come and demand our friendship. I placed these ensigns in the sanctuary of Mars the Avenger.” We can understand also that he speaks with satisfaction of the campaigns against the Germans, being careful, however, to pass over in silence the disaster of Varus, and that he is anxious to preserve the memory of those distant expeditions that impressed so strongly the imagination of his contemporaries. “The Roman fleet,” he says, “sailed from the mouth of the Rhine towards the quarter where the sun rises, as far as those distant countries where no Roman had yet penetrated either by land or sea. The Cimbri, the Charydes, the Semnones and other German tribes of those countries sent ambassadors to ask my friendship and that of the Roman people. Under my orders and direction two armies were sent almost at the same time to Arabia and Ethiopia. After having conquered many nations, and taken many prisoners, they reached the city of Nabata, in Ethiopia, and the boundaries of the Sabaeans and the city of Mariba, in Arabia.”
But whatever interest we may find in these historical recollections, the interest of the Ancyra monument does not specially lie in them. Its real importance consists in what it tells us of the internal government of Augustus.
Here again we must read with caution. Politicians are very seldom in the habit of posting up on the walls of temples the principles that guide them, and of imparting the secrets of their conduct so generously to the public. It is evident that Augustus, who wrote here for all the world, did not intend to tell everything, and that if we wish to learn the exact truth, and to know thoroughly the character of his institutions, we must look elsewhere. The historian, Dio Cassius, gives us the most complete information on this subject. Dio is very little read, and it is not surprising, for he has none of the qualities that attract readers. His narrative is constantly interrupted by interminable harangues, which repel the most patient reader. He was a man of narrow mind, without political capacity, taken up with ridiculous superstitions, and he attributes the same characteristics to his historical personages. Truly it was worth while to have been twice consul in order to tell us seriously that, after a great defeat, Octavius took courage on seeing a fish leap out of the sea to his feet! What adds to the annoyance he gives us is, that as he has often treated of the same subjects as Tacitus, he constantly suggests comparisons that are unflattering to himself. We must, however, take care not to underrate him; tedious as he is, he renders us very useful services. If he has not the broad views of Tacitus, he devotes himself to details and does wonders. No one has ever been more exact and minute than he. I think of him as a zealous government official who has passed through all the grades and grown old in his profession. He knows thoroughly that official and administrative world in which he has lived; he speaks of it accurately, and loves to speak of it. With these inclinations, it is natural that he should be interested in the reforms introduced by Augustus into the internal government of the empire. He is anxious to let us know them in detail; and, true to his rhetorician’s habits and to his unbridled love for fine speeches, he assumes that it was Maecenas who proposed to Augustus to establish them, and he takes advantage of the opportunity to make him speak at great length.[[382]] The discourse of Maecenas contains, in truth, what we may call the general theory of the empire. This interesting sketch, which was realized later, aids us greatly in understanding that part which we have still to examine of the inscription of Ancyra. We should always bear it in mind in order to apprehend thoroughly the spirit of the institutions of Augustus, the motive of his liberalities, the hidden meaning of the facts he mentions, and above all the character of his relations with the different classes of citizens.
Let us begin by studying the relations of Augustus with his soldiers. “About ... thousand Romans,”[[383]] says he, “bore arms under me. I established in colonies, or sent back to their municipia after their term of service, rather more than three hundred thousand. I gave land, or money to buy it, to all of them.” On two different occasions, after the wars against Sextus Pompey, and against Antony, Augustus was at the head of about fifty legions; he had only twenty-five when he died. But this number, reduced as it was, still weighed intolerably upon the finances of the empire. The immense increase of expenditure that the creation of great standing armies threw upon the treasury prevented Augustus for a long time, notwithstanding the prosperity of his reign, from having what we should now call a budget in equilibrium. Four times he was obliged to aid the public treasury from his private fortune, and he reckons the amounts that he presented to the state at one hundred and fifty million sesterces (£1,200,000). He had much trouble to remedy these financial difficulties, of which the expenses of the army were the principal cause. This gave him the idea of creating a sort of military pension fund, and of appealing, in order to fill it, to the generosity of the allied kings and cities, and of the richest Roman citizens; and in order to stimulate others by his own example, he gave one hundred and seventy million sesterces (£1,360,000) at one time. But these voluntary gifts being insufficient it was necessary to impose new taxes, and to fill the treasury of the army with the proceeds of a tax of a twentieth on inheritances and a hundredth on sales. Yet it seems that, notwithstanding these efforts, pensions were ill paid, since this was one of the grievances that the legions of Pannonia alleged in their revolt against Tiberius. It is certain that the army of Augustus was one of the greatest anxieties of his administration. His own legions gave him as much trouble as those of the enemy. He had to do with soldiers who felt that they were the masters, and who for ten years had been corrupted by flattery and promises. On the eve of battle they were very exacting because they knew how much they were required; after victory they became unmanageable from the pride with which it inspired them. In order to satisfy them, it would have been necessary to expropriate all the inhabitants of Italy in a body. Octavius had consented to this at first, after Philippi; but later, when his policy changed, when he understood that he could not found a stable government if he drew on himself the hatred of the Italians, he resolved to pay the proprietors handsomely for the lands that he gave his veterans. “I reimbursed the municipia,” he says, “in money, the value of the lands that I gave to my soldiers in my fourth consulship, and later under the consulship of M. Crassus and Cn. Lentulus. I paid six hundred million sesterces (£4,800,000) for the lands situated in Italy, and two hundred and sixty million sesterces (£2,080,000) for those situated in the provinces. Of all those who have established colonies of soldiers in the provinces and in Italy, I am, up to now, the first and only one who has acted thus.” He was right in boasting of it. It was not at all the habit of the generals of that time to pay for what they took, and he himself had given another example for a long time. When, a little later, he dared to resist the demands of his veterans, he had to maintain terrible struggles in which his life was more than once in danger. In every way, his demeanour towards his soldiers at that time is one of the things that do him most honour. He owed everything to them, and he had none of the qualities which were necessary to master them, neither the abilities of Caesar nor the defects of Antony; and yet he dared to make head against them, and succeeded in obtaining the mastery. It is very remarkable that, although he had gained his power solely by war, he was able to maintain the predominance of the civil element in the government that he founded. If the empire, in which there was no longer any other element of strength and life than the army, did not become from that period a military monarchy, it is assuredly owing to his firmness.
Nothing is more simple than the relations of Augustus with the people. The information that the Ancyra inscription furnishes upon this subject is quite in accord with the discourse of Maecenas: he fed them and amused them. Here, to begin with, is the exact account of the sums he expended to feed them: “I reckoned to the Roman people three hundred sesterces (£2 8s.) a head according to my father’s testament, and four hundred sesterces (£3 4s.) in my own name, out of the spoils of the war during my fifth consulship. Another time, in my tenth consulship, I gave a gratuity of four hundred sesterces to each citizen, from my private fortune. During my eleventh consulship I made twelve distributions of corn at my own cost. When I was invested for the twelfth time with the tribunitian power, I again gave four hundred sesterces a head to the people. All these distributions were made to no fewer than two hundred and fifty thousand persons. Invested for the eighteenth time with the tribunitian power, and consul for the twelfth, I gave sixty denarii (£1 10s. 4d.) a head to three hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants of Rome. During my fourth consulship I had one thousand sesterces (£8) for each of my soldiers, previously deducted from the spoil, and distributed in the colonies formed by them. About one hundred and twenty thousand colonists received their share in the distribution that followed my triumph. Consul for the thirteenth time, I gave sixty denarii to each of those who then received distributions of corn; there were rather more than two hundred thousand.” After these truly startling liberalities Augustus mentions the public games he gave to the people, and although the text has several lacunae here, we may suppose that it did not cost him less to amuse the people than to feed them. “I gave shows of gladiators[[384]] ... times in my own name, and five times in the names of my children or grandchildren. In these different fêtes about ten thousand men fought. Twice in my own name, and three times in the names of my son and grandson, I had combats of wrestlers whom I had brought from all countries. I celebrated public games four times in my own name, and twenty-three times in place of magistrates who were absent or could not support the expense of these games.... I showed twenty-six times in my own name, or in the names of my sons and grandsons, African wild beast hunts, in the circus, on the Forum, or in the amphitheatres, and about three thousand five hundred of these beasts were killed. I gave the people the spectacle of a naval combat, beyond the Tiber, where the wood of the Caesars now is. I had a canal dug there one thousand eight hundred feet long by one thousand two hundred feet broad. There thirty ships armed with rams, triremes, biremes, and a large number of smaller vessels fought together. These vessels contained, besides their rowers, a crew of three thousand men.” Here, as it seems to me, is a curious and official commentary on the famous expression of Juvenal, panem et circenses. We see clearly that it was not a sally of the poet, but a veritable principle of policy happily invented by Augustus that his successors preserved as a tradition of government.
The relations of Augustus with the senate, we can well understand, were more difficult and complicated. Even after Pharsalia and Philippi it was still a great name that it was necessary to treat with consideration. Depressed as it was, the old aristocracy still caused some fear, and seemed to deserve some regard. This is well seen by the care that Augustus takes in his testament never to speak of the senate but with respect. Its name comes up at every turn with a sort of affectation. We should say indeed, if we trusted to appearances, that the senate was then the master, and that the prince was contented to execute its decrees. This is what Augustus wished to be believed. He passed all his life in dissembling his authority or lamenting about it. From his royal dwelling on the Palatine he wrote the most pathetic letters to the senate asking to be relieved of the burden of public affairs, and he never appeared to have a greater aversion for power than at the moment when he was concentrating all powers in his own hands. It is not extraordinary that we find these methods again in his testament: they had succeeded too well with his contemporaries for him not to be tempted to make use of them with posterity. Accordingly he continues to play the same comedy of moderation and disinterestedness. He affects, for instance, to insist as much upon the honours that he refused as upon those that he accepted. “During the consulship of M. Marcellus and L. Arruntius,” he says, “when the senate and people asked me to accept an absolute authority,[[385]] I did not accept it. But I did not refuse to undertake the supervision of supplies in a great famine, and by the expenditure that I made I delivered the people from their fears and dangers. When, in return, they offered me the consulship annually or for life, I refused it.” This is not the only time that he dwells on his own moderation. More than once again he refers to dignities or presents that he would not accept. But here, indeed, is something that passes all bounds; “In my sixth and seventh consulship, after having suppressed the civil wars, when the common voice of all the citizens offered me the supreme power, I restored the government of the republic to the senate and people. As a recompense for this action I received the title of Augustus by a decree of the senate, my door was encircled with laurels and surmounted by a civic crown, and a golden shield was placed in the Julian curia with an inscription recording that this honour was awarded me as a mark of respect to my virtue, clemency, justice, and piety. From this moment, although I was above the rest in dignity in the offices with which I was invested, I never claimed more power than I allowed to my colleagues.” This curious passage shows how inscriptions may deceive if we trust them blindly. Would it not seem that we should be right in concluding that in the year of Rome 726, the republic had been re-established by the generosity of Augustus? Now it was exactly at this period that the absolute power of the emperor was delivered from all fear of attack from without and, being quietly accepted by everybody, was finally established. Dio himself, the official Dio, who is so ready to take the word of the emperor, cannot accept this falsehood of Augustus; he ventures to show that he is not deceived, and has no difficulty in proving that this government, under whatever name it is disguised, was at bottom a monarchy; he might have added that there was never a more absolute monarchy. A single man constituted himself the heir of all the magistrates of the republic, and united all their powers in himself. He ignored the people whom he no longer consulted; he is the master of the senate, which he chooses and forms at will; at once consul and pontif, he regulates actions and beliefs; invested with the tribunitian power, he is inviolable and sacred, that is to say, that the least word let fall against him becomes a sacrilege; as censor, under the title of praefect of morals, he can control the conduct of private persons, and interfere, when he likes, in the most private affairs of life.[[386]] Everything is subordinated to him, private as well as public life, and his authority can penetrate everywhere from the senate to the most humble and obscure hearths. Add to this that the boundaries of his empire are those of the civilized world; barbarism begins where slavery ends, and there is not even the sad resource of exile against this despotism. Yet it is the man who possesses this appalling power, whom nothing in his immense empire escapes, and from whose empire it is impossible to escape, it is he who has just told us with a bare-faced assurance that he refused to accept absolute power!
It must be acknowledged that this absolute power, which he veiled with so much precaution, sought also by every possible means to reconcile men to itself. All the compensations which might make a people forget its liberty were given to the Romans by Augustus with a free hand. I do not speak only of that material prosperity which made the number of citizens increase by nearly a million in his reign;[[387]] nor even of the repose and security which, at the close of the civil war, was the most imperious need of the whole world, but also of that incomparable splendour with which he adorned Rome. This was a sure means of pleasing the people. Caesar knew this well, and had expended one hundred million sesterces (£800,000) at one time, simply in buying the ground on which his Forum was to stand. Augustus did still more. The Ancyra inscription contains a list of the public buildings he constructed, but it is so long that it is impossible to quote it all. He mentions fifteen temples, several porticoes, a theatre, a senate house, a Forum, a basilica, aqueducts, public roads, etc.; in truth Rome was entirely reconstructed by him. We may say that no public building was passed over by him, and that he restored all those that he did not rebuild. He completed Pompey’s theatre and the Forum of Caesar, and rebuilt the Capitol; in a single year he repaired eighty-two temples that were falling into ruin. He did not expend so many millions without a purpose, and all this profusion in such a careful ruler covered a profound political design. He wished to dazzle the people, to intoxicate them with luxury and magnificence in order to divert them from the intrusive memories of the past. That Rome of marble that he built was intended to make them forget the Rome of brick.
This was not the only compensation that Augustus offered to the people; he made them nobler amends, and thus sought to legitimatize his power. If he demanded the sacrifice of their liberty he took care to gratify their national pride in every way. No man compelled the respect of foreign nations for Rome more than he; no man gave her more reason for pride in the ascendency she enjoyed among her neighbours. The latter part of the inscription is filled with the gratifying recital of the marks of respect that the remotest countries of the world paid to Rome under his reign. He was eager to direct their attention towards this external glory, lest they should fix it with some regret on what was taking place at home. Those citizens whom the aspect of the deserted Forum and the obedient senate depressed, he pointed to the Roman armies penetrating among the Pannonians and the Arabs, to the Roman fleets navigating the Rhine and the Danube, to the kings of the Britons, the Suevi, and the Marcomanni, refugees at Rome, imploring the support of the legions, to the Medes and Parthians, those terrible enemies of Rome, who asked of her a king, to the most distant nations, the least known and the best protected by their distance and their obscurity, moved by this great name that reaches them for the first time and soliciting the Roman alliance. “Ambassadors came to me from India, from kings who had never yet sent to any Roman general. The Bastarnae, the Scythians, and the Sarmatians who dwell on this side the Tanaïs, and beyond that river, the kings of the Albanians, the Hiberi and the Medes sent ambassadors to me asking our friendship.” It was very difficult for the most discontented to hold out against so much grandeur. But his greatest master-stroke was that he extended this consideration for the glory of Rome even to the past. He honoured all who had laboured for her at all times, says Suetonius,[[388]] almost as much as the gods; and to show that none was excluded from this veneration, he raised again the statue of Pompey, at the base of which Caesar had fallen, and set it up in a public place. This generous conduct was also a wise policy. By claiming a share in the glories of the past, he disarmed, by anticipation, those men who might be tempted to use them against him, and, at the same time, gave a species of sanction to his authority by attaching it in some sort to these old memories. Whatever difference might distinguish the government that he founded from that of the republic, both agreed on one point: they sought the greatness of Rome. Augustus tried to reconcile the past with the present on this common ground. He also had adorned Rome, defended her frontiers, extended her empire, and made her name respected. He had continued and completed that work on which they had laboured for seven centuries. He might, then, call himself the continuator and heir of all those who had set their hand to it; of Cato, Paulus Emilius, and Scipio, and rank himself among them. He did not fail to do so when he built the Forum that bore his name; we know from Suetonius that, under those porticoes raised by him and filled with the records of his actions, he ranged all the great men of the republic in triumphal costume. This was the highest point of his political skill, for by connecting them with his glory he received in turn a share of theirs, and thus turned to his own advantage the greatness of the political order which he had overturned.
These compensations that Augustus offered to the Romans in exchange for their liberty seem to have satisfied them. Every one quickly got accustomed to the new government, and it may be said that Augustus reigned without opposition. The plots which more than once threatened his life were the crimes of a few isolated malcontents, of young thoughtless fellows whom he had disgraced, or of vulgar and ambitious men who desired his position; they were not the work of political parties. Can it even be said that there were any political parties at this moment? Those of Sextus Pompey and Antony had not survived the death of their chiefs; and, since Philippi, there were scarcely any republicans. From that moment all wise men adopted the maxim “that the vast body of the empire could not stand upright and stable without some one to direct it.” A few obstinate men alone, who were not yet converted, wrote violent declamations in the schools under the name of Erutus and Cicero, or allowed themselves to speak freely in those polite gatherings which were the salons of that time: in conviviis rodunt, in circulis vellicant. But those were unimportant exceptions which disappeared in the midst of the universal admiration and respect. During more than fifty years the senate, the knights, and the people used all their ingenuity to find new honours for him who had given Rome internal peace, and who maintained her grandeur so vigorously abroad. Augustus has been careful to recall all this homage in the inscription we are studying, not in a fit of puerile vanity, but to represent that agreement of all orders in the state which seemed to legitimatize his authority. This idea is shown especially in the last lines of the inscription, where he recalls that circumstance of his life which was most dear to him, because in it the agreement of all citizens had most strikingly appeared: “While I was consul for the thirteenth time, the senate, the order of knights, and all the people gave me the name of Father of our Country, and desired that this should be inscribed in the vestibule of my house, in the curia, and in my Forum, below the quadrigae which had been placed there in my honour by a decree of the senate. When I wrote these things I was in my seventy-sixth year.” It was not without reason that he reserved this detail for the end. This title of Father of his Country, by which he was saluted in the name of all the citizens by Messala, the old friend of Brutus, seemed to be the legal consecration of a power acquired by illegal means and a sort of amnesty that Rome accorded to the past. We can well understand that Augustus, even when dying, dwelt with satisfaction on a recollection which seemed like an absolution, and that he was anxious to terminate in this fashion his review of his political life.