Privileges to parents. The ius trium liberorum.

The beneficiary clauses of the law were those which relieved married men or women and men or women with children from these disabilities, and gave them exemption from certain onerous public duties and special places of honour in the theatres. The fathers of three children at Rome, four in Italy, five in the provinces, had also certain preferences for offices and employments and other honorary distinctions, such as taking precedence of a colleague in the consulship. This was not a new idea, for it had in one shape or another existed in many Greek states, and in B.C. 59 Iulius Cæsar had in his agrarian law given the preference to fathers of three children in the distribution of land.

Opposition to the law.

The disabilities imposed on the unmarried were met with vehement resistance, in consequence of which the clause was introduced giving the three years’ grace between the attainment of the legal age and the actual marriage. After the passing of the Papia Poppæa (A.D. 9) the Emperor in the theatre or circus was received with loud shouts from the equestrian seats demanding its repeal. He is said to have sent for the children of Germanicus and held them up as an example for all to follow; and he afterwards summoned two meetings of the equites, one of those married, and the other of the single. To each he delivered a speech, which Dio reports or invents. He pointed with dismay to the fact that the first meeting was so much less numerous than the second. He commended the married men for having done their duty to the State, but to the unmarried he addressed a longer and more vehement appeal. He argued that they were defeating the purpose of the Creator, were contributing to the disappearance of the Roman race, which was being replaced by foreigners necessarily admitted to the franchise in order to keep up the numbers of the citizens; that he had only followed in his legislation the precedent of ancient laws with increased penalties and rewards, and that while he acknowledged that marriage was not without its troubles, yet that was true of everything else, and they were compensated by other advantages and the consciousness of duty done.[308]

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

The character of Augustus in view of this legislation.

Though a line is often drawn between a man’s public and private character, it still remains hard to reconcile the earnestness of Augustus in pressing these laws and his severity in punishing offences of this nature with the reports of his own personal habits. I have already expressed my disbelief in the stories of his youthful immoralities. Suetonius, who spares no emperor the inevitable chapter summing up his sins of the flesh, asserts that not even his friends deny the intrigues of his later years, but merely urge that they were conducted not for the gratification of his passions, but for motives of policy, that he might gain information of secret plots. He mentions no names and gives no evidence; the only names that have come down are those mentioned in Antony’s extraordinary letter justifying his own connection with Cleopatra. Antony, however, could only have known Roman gossip at second or third hand in Alexandria, and the whole tone of the letter is so reckless and violently coarse that it goes for very little by way of evidence. Dio indeed mentions the wife of Mæcenas. But his statements do not hang together or amount to very much. In one place he tells us that Augustus was annoyed with Mæcenas because the latter had told his wife something as to measures being taken against her brother Murena. At another he says that some gossips attributed his journey to Gaul in B.C. 16 to a wish to enjoy her society without exciting popular remark, “for he was so much in love with her that he once made her dispute with Livia as to the superiority in beauty.” Even if the gossip was worth anything, this hardly looks like a secret intrigue. Nor is it a confirmation of it that Mæcenas at his death left Augustus his heir. However, the fact may nevertheless be so. Livia is said elsewhere by Dio to have explained her lasting influence over Augustus by the fact that she was always careful not to interfere in his affairs, and, while remaining strictly chaste herself, always pretended not to know anything of his amours. If Livia did say this, it would of course be a sufficiently strong proof of the allegations against him. But such reported sayings rest ultimately on gossip and tittle-tattle, and do not go for much. The story told by Dio, and amplified by Zonaras, of Athenodorus of Tarsus getting himself conveyed into his chamber in the covered sedan intended for some mistress, and springing out of it sword in hand and then appealing to Augustus as to whether he did not often run such risks, is not very likely in itself, and at any rate must refer to the triumviral days. For about B.C. 30 Athenodorus was sent back to govern Tarsus. The one epigram by the hand of Augustus, which has been preserved by Martial,[309] is undeniably outspoken and coarse, but it is the coarseness of disgust, not of lubricity, and to my mind is evidence—so far as it may be called so—for him rather than against him. If, however, all that Suetonius and Dio allege against his middle life is true, we must still remember that in the eyes of his contemporaries, and indeed in Roman society generally from Cato downwards, such indulgence in itself was not reprehensible. It entirely depended on circumstances, and whether other obligations—such as friendship, public duty, family honour—were or were not violated. From that point of view the only crime of Augustus would be in the case of Terentia, wife of Mæcenas, if the tale is true. As among the other emperors whose life Suetonius wrote, with the exception of Vespasian, the character of Augustus stands out clear. One age cannot judge fairly of another, and it is not seldom that we find ourselves at as great a loss to reconcile theory and practice, as to account for lives such as those of Augustus and Horace in conjunction with the legislation of the former and the moral sentiments occasionally expressed by the latter.

CHAPTER XIII
LATER LIFE AND FAMILY TROUBLES

Edepol, Senectus, si nil quidquam