There are certain common features shared by the chief Augustan authors which distinguish them from those of the closing Republic. While the latter were men of birth and eminence in the state, the former were mostly Italians or provincials, [1] often of humble origin, neither warriors nor statesmen, but peaceful, quiet natures, devoid of ambition, and desiring only a modest independence and success in prosecuting their art. Horace had indeed fought for Brutus; but he was no soldier, and alludes with humorous irony to his flight from the field of battle. [2] Virgil prays that he may live without glory among the forests and streams he loves. [3] Tibullus [4] and Propertius [5] assert in the strongest terms their incapacity for an active career, praying for nothing more than enjoyment of the pleasures of love and song. Spirits like these would have had no chance of rising to eminence amid the fierce contests of the Republic. Gentle and diffident, they needed a patron to call out their powers or protect their interests; and when, under the sway of Augustus, such a patron was found, the rich harvest of talent that arose showed how much letters had hitherto suffered from the unsettled state of the times. [6] It is true that several writers of the preceding period survived into this. Men like Varro, who kept aloof from the city, nursing in retirement a hopeless loyalty to the past; men like Pollio and Messala, who accepted the monarchy without compromising their principles, and who still appeared in public as orators or jurists; these, together with a few poets of the older school, such as Furius Bibaculus, continued to write during the first few years of the Augustan epoch, but cannot properly be regarded as belonging to it. [7] They pursued their own lines of thought, uninfluenced by the Empire, except in so far as it forced them to select more trivial themes, or to use greater caution in expressing their thoughts. But the great authors who are the true representatives of Augustus's reign, Virgil, Livy, and Horace, were brought into direct contact with the emperor, and much of their inspiration centres round his office and person.
The conqueror of Actium was welcomed by all classes with real or feigned enthusiasm. To the remnant of the republican families, indeed, he was an object partly of flattery, partly of hatred, in no case, probably, of hearty approval or admiration; but by the literary class, as by the great mass of the people, he was hailed as the restorer of peace and good government, of order and religion, the patron of all that was best in literature and art, the adopted son of that great man whose name was already a mighty power, and whose spirit was believed to watch over Rome as one of her presiding deities. It is no wonder if his opening reign stamped literature with new and imposing features, or if literature expressed her sense of his protection by a constant appeal to his name.
Augustus has been the most fortunate of despots, for he has met with nothing but praise. A few harsh spirits, it seems, blamed him in no measured terms; but he repaid them by a wise neglect, at least as long as Maecenas lived, who well knew, from temperament as well as experience, the value of seasonable inactivity. As it is, all the authors that have come to us are panegyrists. None seem to remember his early days; all centre their thoughts on the success of the present and the promise of the future. Yet Augustus himself could not forget those times. As chief of the proscription, as the betrayer of Cicero, as the suspected murderer of the consul Hirtius, as the pitiless destroyer of Cleopatra's children, he must have found it no easy task to act the mild ruler; as a man of profligate conduct he must have found it still less easy to come forward as the champion of decency and morals. He was assisted by the confidence which all, weary of war and bloodshed, were willing to repose in him, even to an unlimited extent. He was assisted also by able administrators, Maecenas in civil, and Agrippa in military affairs. But there were other forces making themselves felt in the great city. One of these was literature, as represented by the literary class, consisting of men to whom letters were a profession not a relaxation, and who now first appear prominently in Rome. Augustus saw the immense advantage of enlisting these on his side. He could pass laws through the senate; he could check vice by punishment; but neither his character nor his history could make him influence the heart of the people. To effect real reforms persuasive voice must be found to preach them. And who so efficacious as the band of cultured poets whom he saw collecting round him? These he deliberately set himself to win; and that he did win then, some to a half-hearted, others to an absolute allegiance, is one of the best testimonies to his enlightened policy. Yet he could hardly have effected his object had it not been for the able co- operation of Maecenas, whose conciliatory manners well fitted him to be the friend of literary men. This astute minister formed a select circle of gifted authors, chiefly poets, whom he endeavoured to animate with the enthusiasm of succouring the state. He is said to have suggested to Augustus the necessity of restoring the decayed grandeur of the national religion. The open disregard of morality and religion evinced by the ambitious party-leaders during the Civil Wars had brought the public worship into contempt and the temples into ruin. Augustus determined that civil order should once more repose upon that reverence for the gods which had made Rome great. [8] Accordingly, he repaired or rebuilt many temples, and both by precept and example strove to restore the traditional respect for divine things. But he must have experienced a grave difficulty in the utter absence of religious conviction which had become general in Rome. The authors of the De Divinatione and the De Rerum Natura could not have written as they did, without influencing many minds. And if men so admirable as Cicero and Lucretius denied, the one the possibility of the science he professed, [9] the other the doctrine of Providence on which all religion rests, it was little likely that ordinary minds should retain much belief in such things. Augustus was relieved from this strait by the appearance of a new literary class in Rome, young authors from the country districts, with simpler views of life and more enthusiasm, of whom some at least might be willing to consecrate their talents to furthering the sacred interests on which social order depends. The author who fully responded to his appeal, and probably exceeded his highest hopes, was Virgil; but Horace, Livy, and Propertius, showed themselves not unwilling to espouse the same cause. Never was power more ably seconded by persuasion; the laws of Augustus and the writings of Virgil, Horace, and Livy, in order to be fully appreciated, must be considered in their connection, political and religious, with each other.
The emperor, his minister, and his advocates, thus working for the same end, beyond doubt produced some effect. The Odes of Horace in the first three books, which are devoted to politics, show an attitude of antagonism and severe expostulation; he boldly rebukes vice, and calls upon the strong hand to punish it:
"Quid tristes querimoniae,
Si non supplicio culpa reciditur?
Quid leges sine moribus
Vanae proficiunt?" [10]
But when, some years later, he wrote the Carmen Saeculare, and the fourth book of the Odes, his voice is raised in a paean of unmixed triumph. "The pure home is polluted by no unchastity; law and morality have destroyed crime; matrons are blessed with children resembling their fathers; already faith and peace, honour and maiden modesty, have returned to us," &c. [11] This can hardly be mere exaggeration, though no doubt the picture is coloured, since the popularity of Ovid's Art of Love, even during Horace's lifetime, is a sufficient proof that profligacy did not lack its votaries.
To the student of human development the most interesting feature in this attempted reform of manners is the universal tendency to connect it with the deification of the emperor. It was in vain that Augustus claimed to return to the old paths; everywhere he met this new apotheosis of himself crowning the restored edifice of belief; so impossible was it for him, as for others, to reconstruct the past. As the guardian of the people's material welfare, he became, despite of himself, the people's chief divinity. From the time that Virgil's gratitude expressed itself in the first Eclogue—
"Namque erit ille mihi semper deus: illius aram
Saepe tener nostris ab ovilibus imbuet agnus," [12]
the emperor was marked out for this new form of adulation, and succeeding poets only added to what Virgil had begun. Even in his Epistles, where the conventionalities of mythology are never employed, Horace compares him with the greatest deities, and declares that altars are raised to his name, while all confess him to be the greatest person that has been or will be among mankind. [13] Propertius and Ovid [14] accept this language as proper and natural, and the striking rapidity with which it established itself in universal use is one of the most speaking signs of the growing degeneracy. Augustus himself was not cajoled, Tiberius still less, but Caius and his successors were; even Vespasian, when dying, in jest or earnest used the words "ut puto deus fio." As the satirist says, "Power will believe anything that Flattery suggests." [15]
Side by side with this religious cultus of the emperor was a willingness to surrender all political power into his hands. Little by little he engrossed all the offices of state, and so completely had proscription and indulgence in turn done their work that none were found bold enough to resist these insidious encroachments. [16] The privileges of the senate and the rights of the people were gradually abridged; and that pernicious policy so congenial to a despotism, of satisfying the appetite for food and amusement and so keeping the people quiet, was inaugurated early in his reign, and set moving in the lines which it long afterwards followed. Freedom of debate, which had been universal in the senate, was curtailed by the knowledge that, as often as not, the business was being decided by a secret council held within the palace. Eloquence could not waste itself in abstract discussions; and even if it attempted to speak, the growing servility made it perilous to utter plain truths. Thus the sphere of public speaking was greatly restricted. Those who had poured forth before the assembled people the torrents of their oratory were now by what Tacitus so graphically calls the pacification of eloquence [17] confined to the tamer arena of the civil law courts. All those who felt that without a practical object eloquence cannot exist, had to resign themselves to silence. Others less serious-minded found a sphere for their natural gift of speech in the halls of the rhetoricians. It is pitiable to see men like Pollio content to give up all higher aims, and for want of healthier exercise waste their powers in noisy declamation.