Italiæ dominæque Romæ.
Popular feeling towards Augustus.
After the settlement of the constitution in B.C. 23 Augustus was only absent from Italy three times, from B.C. 22 to B.C. 19 in Sicily and the East, from B.C. 16 to B.C. 13 in Gaul and Spain, and B.C. 9-10 in Gaul. At the outbreak of the Pannonian and Dalmatian wars A.D. 6-9 he stayed for some time at Ariminum. For the rest of the time he lived at Rome, with the usual visits to his country houses, made by land or yacht. His return to the city after any prolonged absence was celebrated with every sign of rejoicing, with sacrifices, music, and a general holiday. On his return from Gaul in B.C. 13 an altar was dedicated to Fortuna redux.[270] Nor was this mere adulation. The people had come to look upon him as the best guarantee of peace and security. The troubles of the days preceding the civil wars, the street fighting and massacres, the horrors of the civil war itself, were not forgotten: but his own part in them was ignored or forgiven; it was only remembered that he had put an end to them; that he had restored the ruinous city in unexampled splendour; that it was owing to his liberality, or that of his friends acting under his influence, that at Rome there were luxurious baths, plentiful water, abundant food, streets free from robbers, help ready in case of fire, and cheerful festivals nearly always in progress. It was thanks to him that the roads in Italy were not beset by brigands, that the corn-ships from Egypt crowded the harbour of Puteoli unmolested by pirates on their course,[271] that not only the dreaded Parthian, but princes from the ends of the earth were sending embassies desiring the friendship of Rome. At the least sign of the old disorders they clamoured for his return and besought him to become Dictator, director of the corn trade, perpetual guardian of morals, anything, convinced that under his absolute rule there would be peace, plenty, and security. Horace exactly represents this feeling when he addresses Augustus in his absence in Gaul: “Oh scion of the gracious gods, oh best guardian of the race of Romulus ... return! Your country calls for you with vows and prayer ... for when you are here the ox plods up and down the fields in safety; Ceres and bounteous blessing cheer our farms; our sailors speed o’er seas that know no fear of pirates; credit is unimpaired; no foul adulteries stain the home; punishment follows hard on crime.... Who fears Parthian, Scythian, German, or Spaniard with Cæsar safe? Each man closes a day of peace on his native hills, trains his vines to the widowed trees, and home returning, light of heart, quaffs his wine and ends the feast with blessings on thee as a god indeed.”[272]
The worship of Augustus.
These feelings found expression in a form which in our day is apt to appear, according to our temperament, ridiculous or profane. In plain terms this was to treat Augustus as divine, a god on earth. The various expressions of Horace[273] may perhaps be put down to poetical exaggeration or conventional compliment, though there is a real meaning at their back; but though Augustus refused to allow temples and altars to himself in Rome and Italy,[274] and even ordered certain silver statuettes to be melted down, the evidence of inscriptions makes it certain that the cult began in his lifetime in several places, as at Pompeii, Puteoli, Cumæ in Campania, and in other parts of Italy.[275] In Rome itself, when Augustus reorganised the vici, the old worship of the Lares Compitales at some consecrated spot in each vicus or “parish” was restored, but they were commonly spoken of as Lares Augusti, and the Genius Augusti was associated with them. It is this fact that, to a certain extent, explains and renders less irrational an attitude of mind which we are apt to dismiss as merely absurd. Each man had a Genius—a deity to whom he was a particular care. We speak of a man’s “mission,” implying by the word itself some external and directing power, probably divine. The step is not a long one which identifies the man and his genius, especially when his mission seems to be to bring us peace and prosperity. “Oh Melibæus, ’twas a god that wrought this ease for us!” exclaims the countryman in Vergil, who had got back his lands. This confusion between the inspirer and the inspired, between the mission and the man, was everywhere apparent. Among the statues in the temples, and in the sacred hymns and other acts of worship, the figure or the name of Augustus was associated with those of the gods in a way that admitted, indeed, of a distinction being drawn between a memorial to an almost divine man and an act of devotion to a god, but often obscured that distinction for ordinary folk. When we dedicate a church to a saint, or “to the glory of God and in memory of So-and-so,” the distinction is of course clear, but the confusion which has from time to time resulted is also notorious. Thus in the Cuman Calendar of a sacred year, in which the anniversaries of striking events in the career of Augustus are marked for some act of worship, sometimes the supplicatio is bluntly stated as Augusto; sometimes in honour of some abstract idea as imperio Augusti, Fortunæ reduci, Victoriæ Augustæ; at others to a god—Iovi sempiterno, Vestæ, Marti Ultori, Veneri. In fact, the supplicatio always had a double reference, it was an act of prayer or thanksgiving to a god, but it was also an honour to a successful man. The two ideas properly distinct easily coalesced. A supplicatio in honour of Augustus, without much violence, became a supplicatio to him.
Altar dedicated to the Lares of Augustus in B.C. 2 by a Magister Vici.
Photographed from the Original in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
To face page 196.
Of the still more formal cult which arose after his death with a temple regularly dedicated to him by Livia on the Palatine, and a new college of Augustales to keep up the worship in all parts of the Empire, an explanation somewhat analogous may be given. He was declared divus by the Senate, he was the late Emperor of blessed memory, a sainted soul, the very spirit or genius of eternal Rome. The traditions in early Roman history of the god-born and deified founder, the hero-worship of Greece, the veil which concealed (as it still conceals) the state of the departed, combined with the tolerant spirit of polytheism to make it almost as easy for the men of that time to admit a new deity into the Olympian hierarchy, as for mediæval Europe to admit a new saint into the Calendar.