Augustus: The Life and Times of the Founder of the Roman Empire

by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh

Suddenly the disgrace that had been gathering round his house was revealed to him. We are not told who enlightened him and turned the suspicions which he had persistently put away into certainty. Of course the natural suggestion is that it was Livia, between whom and Iulia, as mother of the two young heirs who stood in the way of Livia’s son Tiberius, there was no cordial feeling. The contrast in their ways of life, and the remarks caused by it, no doubt reported by good-natured friends, had not helped to make these relations any more pleasant. But whoever was the informant, Augustus was at last thoroughly roused, and thrown into the greatest state of agitation. Whatever may have been his own private vices in the past, the decorum of the palace in which Livia presided was unimpeached and highly valued by him. The pure atmosphere of the Augustan house—Horace says—and the paternal care of the Emperor were mainly the causes of the manly characters of Tiberius and Drusus, and Horace always echoes what Augustus at any rate wished to be thought true. To have the secrets of the family thus revealed to the multitude, to the scorn of the hostile and the pity of the well-disposed, was no doubt galling. He shunned society for some time and kept away from Rome. He had also the additional annoyance of reflecting that the publicity was greatly his own fault. In the heat of his anger he wrote to the Senate and put the affair, more or less, in its hands. In cooler moments he repented of this, and exclaimed that “it would never have happened if Agrippa and Mæcenas had been alive.” Several men are said to have suffered death on the charge, though we only know of two names, Iulius Antonius and Sempronius Gracchus, the former of whom committed suicide, while the latter was banished to an island on the African coast. Seneca, who generally makes the worst of Augustus, says that he spared their lives and punished them by banishment. The case of Iulius Antonius was particularly bad. He was the son of Antony by Fulvia, had been brought up by Octavia, married to her daughter Marcella, and by her influence and the kindness of Augustus, had been prætor (B.C. 13) and consul (B.C. 10). He had therefore been treated as a member of the family, and a highly favoured one. Gracchus is said to have begun his intrigue while Iulia was the wife of Agrippa, and to have helped to irritate her against her husband Tiberius. But however guilty Iulia may have been, she did not forfeit the popular affections. Again and again Augustus was assailed by petitions to recall her. He passionately refused, exclaiming at last to a more than usually persistent meeting, that he “would wish them all daughters and wives like her.” The most that he could be persuaded to grant was that at the end of five years she should be allowed to exchange her island (Pandateria) for Rhegium, and to live under less stringent conditions as to dress and food, and the servants who attended her. Her mother, Scribonia, accompanied her into exile, and though Tiberius, acting under the authority of Augustus, sent from Rhodes a message of divorce, he made a formal request that she might be allowed to retain whatever he had given her. The sincerity of such an intercession was illustrated by the fact that on the death of Augustus he immediately deprived her of all allowances. She, however, only survived her father a few weeks. All this severity is perhaps best accounted for if we accept the statement of Dio and Pliny, that she was charged not only with adultery, but with joining in some plot against her father in favour of her lover, Iulius Antonius.[310] At any rate it is difficult not to feel some sympathy with a woman, married and re-married without choice on her part or any question of affection, for nine years the wife of a man as old as her father, and then transferred to another, whose heart was fixed elsewhere, and whom his warmest admirers cannot describe as one likely to be sympathetic or expansive, one in fact who began with a strong prejudice against her. She knew also that her own mother, with whom she seems to have kept up affectionate relations, had been turned off immediately after her birth for no assignable reason, just as she had been married for a momentary political object. She could have grown up with no very deep reverence for her father’s morality or lofty ideas of the marriage relationship.

Death of Gaius and Lucius Cæsar, A.D. 2-4.

From this time forward family misfortunes seemed to dog the steps of Augustus for some years to come. The next blow was the death of the two young sons of Iulia, Gaius and Lucius, whom he had adopted, had personally educated in their childhood, and was training for their great future. When the elder was only 15 (B.C. 5) he had been designated consul for A.D. 1, and the Senate had voted that he and his brother might at that age “take part in public business,” that is, might be employed in any capacity the Emperor might choose directly they assumed the toga virilis. Accordingly, in B.C. 1, Gaius was sent to the East, with a pretty wide commission to visit the Eastern provinces. He seems to have travelled considerable distances, and even entered Arabia. Tiberius, who was then at Rhodes, crossed to Samos to greet him. The meeting, however, was not a happy one. M. Lollius, the head of Gaius’s staff, seems to have influenced the young prince against Tiberius, and induced him to send home a report to the Emperor of certain indications that he was contemplating some treasonable measures. Augustus candidly informed Tiberius of this, and it was it seems partly from the necessity of clearing himself, that at the earnest entreaty of his mother, he, two years later, sought and obtained the permission of Augustus to return to Rome. Meanwhile there had been wild talk among the staff of Gaius, one of them expressing his readiness to sail to Rhodes and bring the head of “the exile” back. He does not, however, appear to have forfeited the confidence or affection of Augustus, who writes to him on the 23rd September, A.D. 1: “Good day to you, Gaius, apple of my eye, whom by heaven I continually miss when away. But it is especially on days such as this one that my eyes seek for my Gaius; and wherever you have spent it I hope that you have kept my sixty-fourth birthday in good health and spirits. For you see I have safely passed the grand climacteric, which for all old men is their 63rd year. Pray heaven that whatever time remains for me I may spend with the knowledge that you and your brother are safe and sound and the republic supremely prosperous, with you playing the man and preparing to take up my work.” But these hopes were doomed to be disappointed, as we have seen, by the treacherous wound received at Artagera in Armenia in A.D. 4. Two years earlier his younger brother, Lucius, had died suddenly and somewhat mysteriously at Marseilles at the beginning of a progress through the Western provinces, which was to form part of his political education. The fact that his death corresponded nearly with the return of Tiberius from Rhodes gave rise to suspicions that it had been caused by the machinations of Livia, anxious to secure the succession for her son. Even the death of Gaius, though so far away, was put down to the same malignant influence; for it was argued that his wound was slight and had not been expected to end fatally. Tacitus records that the detractors of the imperial family were accustomed to remark that “Livia had been a fatal mother to the republic, a fatal stepdame to the family of the Cæsars.” There is, however, no scrap of evidence to connect her with either event. It is doubtful whether the young men had shewn much promise; but their death was treated as a matter for public mourning. At Pisæ, of which colony they were “patrons,” there still exist two long and pompous inscriptions (Cenotaphia) recording their death, speaking of the successful campaign of Gaius in the East, ordering mourning “in view of the magnitude of so great and unexpected a calamity,” and decreeing various honours to the memory of Lucius “princeps iuventutis,” and of Gaius “princeps designate.”

The succession.

These losses were followed by the adoption of Tiberius by Augustus, and that of Germanicus by Tiberius. The former had already several children, so that the sons and grandsons and great-grandsons—by adoption—of Augustus in A.D. 7, as recorded on the arch at Pavia, were Tiberius; Germanicus; Drusus, son of Tiberius; Nero and Drusus, sons of Germanicus, and Claudius, his brother. All these survived Augustus. But Tiberius and Claudius alone reigned, Caligula was not born till five years later (A.D. 12).

Fresh troubles. The younger Iulia.

Augustus thus felt that the succession was well secured; but the last decade of his life was destined in some ways to be the most troubled of all. The German wars began again in A.D. 4, and culminated in the Varian disaster of A.D. 9; while the difficulties and alarm were increased by the dangerous risings in Pannonia and Dalmatia (A.D. 6-9), during which Augustus remained for some time at Ariminum, to be within moderate distance of the seat of war. A renewed outbreak of piracy also compelled him to take over the management of Sardinia from the Senate for three years (A.D. 6-9). This was partly the cause, perhaps, of the distress at Rome in B.C. 6 from a rise in the price of corn, intensified by various disastrous fires. The unrest thus created led to some more or less dangerous conspiracies, such as that of Plautius Rufus, who was accused of abetting disturbances and spreading seditious libels. Others were connected with attempts to rescue Iulia at Rhegium and Agrippa Postumus in Planasia, an island near Elba. We also hear of a plot of one Cornelius Cinna, who however was pardoned and allowed to be consul in A.D. 4. Seneca asserts that after this act of clemency the life of Augustus was never attempted again; and Dio has recorded a conversation between him and Livia in that year, in which, seeing her husband sleepless and torn with continued anxieties, she recommended this policy of leniency. But one last mortification remained for him. In A.D. 9 his granddaughter Iulia was discovered to have followed her mother’s example. She was married to Æmilius Paulus Lepidus, and had a son and a daughter Lepida, once betrothed to the future Emperor Claudius, but never married to him. Her lover, D. Silanus, was not banished to any definite place, but was obliged to leave Rome, to which he was not allowed to return till A.D. 20, and then under disabilities for State employment. Iulia herself was banished to the island Tremesus (St. Domenico), on the coast of Apulia, where she remained till her death in A.D. 27, supported by an allowance from Livia. We do not know enough of the affair to judge of her guilt; but in some mysterious way her husband was involved in a charge of treason about this time. In the same year the poet Ovid was banished to Tomi, forty miles south of the mouth of the Danube, in a district exposed to constant raids of the Sarmatians and Dacians. It has always been supposed that this severity was connected with the affair of Iulia, and that either he was one of her lovers, or was privy to some of her intrigues, amatory or political. The reason assigned in the edict appears to have been the licentiousness of his verse, and as Augustus was just then engaged in reinforcing his laws against various forms of immorality, and trying to encourage marriage as against concubinage, this may have been partly the reason. Only as his most licentious poems had been published seven years before it seems a little late in the day. His own account of his misfortune—never outspoken—goes through two phases. At first he seems to wish to attribute it all to his amatory poems. “He is a poet destroyed by his own genius: his verses have been his undoing: they deserved punishment, but sure not so heavy a one.” But presently he began to own that there was something else: “Not,” he says, “any political offence, no plot against the Emperor, no plan of violence against the state. He had seen something he should not have seen. He is ruined by his own simplicity and want of prudence, combined with treachery on the part of friends and slaves. The exact cause he dare not reveal, and yet it is well known at Rome.” Ovid was now fifty-two and married for a third time to a wife connected distantly with the imperial family. The chances are therefore against an intrigue with Iulia. There is one other possible explanation; Ovid was at Elba when he got notice of the edict, staying with his wife’s connection, Paulus Fabius Maximus, who afterwards incurred the suspicion of Livia as favouring Agrippa Postumus, confined in the neighbouring island of Planasia since B.C. 7. We know from Suetonius that there was at least one plot to remove him, and it may be that Ovid knew of it and even saw some of the conspirators.

However that may be, the other explanation is also possible: that Augustus meant what he said, and regarded Ovid’s works as unwholesome. He was what would be called in our time a “decadent” poet. He represents the worst side of Roman society, as it began to be unfavourably affected by that abstention from practical politics, which came to be the fashion in the latter half of the reign of Augustus. He had himself refused to take any office that would give him a seat in the Senate, and seemed to think that to be the natural conduct of a man of taste and literature. He was the mouthpiece of the gilded youth who sought in amorous intrigue, and a fastidious dalliance with the Muses, a more congenial employment than the performance of those duties to the state which no longer held out promises of unlimited wealth or power. He was only cleverer than the ruck of such men, and Augustus may possibly have selected him as the representative of a tendency at which he was alarmed. Ovid was precisely the sort of man to create the tone of society which had been the ruin of his daughter and granddaughter. It is quite possible that being intimate with such circles the poet may have known, or been supposed to know, something inconvenient about the last scandal, and, at any rate, he would be on the side of Iulia as against her grandfather. At the time of his exile he was engaged, at the Emperor’s suggestion or request, on the composition of the poetical Calendar or Fasti, which was incidentally to celebrate the chief events of Roman history, and it has been suggested that the story of Claudia’s vindication of her chastity (Fast. iv. 305 sqq.) was intended as a veiled defence of the elder or younger Iulia. Whatever the offence given, neither Augustus nor Tiberius could ever be induced to allow his recall.

The poet’s abject language in praying to be allowed to return illustrates incidentally the absolute supremacy of the Emperor, and the attribution to him of divine honours and powers, the steady progress of which has been noted in a previous chapter. We may also note that what Paris is to the Parisians, Rome is to Ovid. Augustus and his ministers or friends had made it the home of splendour and luxury. The poet fondly dwells on all its beauties, pleasures, and conveniences, and, like a true Parisian, can hardly conceive of life away from it, its games, its theatres, the sports on the Campus, the lounge in the forum, or the wit and poetry heard at the tables of the great. As the spring comes round in his dreary, treeless dwelling on the Pontus, he thinks of the flowers and vines of Italy, but, above all, of the pleasures of the city in April, the month of festivals: “It is holiday with you now, and the wordy war of the wrangling forum is giving place to the unbroken round of festivals. The horses are in request, and the light foils are in play. The young athletes, their shoulders glistening with oil, are bathing wearied limbs in baths supplied by the virgin stream. The stage is in full swing, and the audiences are clapping their favourite actors, and the three theatres are echoing instead of the three forums. Oh four times, oh beyond all counting, happy he who may enjoy the city unforbidden!” It had been the object of Augustus to make the city splendid and attractive, and to keep the citizens comfortable and contented and proud of their home. He had doubtless succeeded; but it was sometimes at the cost of a lowered standard of public duty and a growing devotion to personal ease and enjoyment.