The prudent forethought of Augustus in regard to the succession answered its purpose. There was practically no break in the government. Tiberius was possessed of tribunicia potestas, which enabled him to summon and consult the Senate. He also, in virtue of his proconsular imperium, gave the watchword to the prætorian guard, and despatched orders to the legions in service in the provinces. There was, indeed, some question as to whether this imperium legally terminated with the death of the princeps, but the matter was settled by all classes taking the oath (sacramentum) to him, and all the powers and honours (except the title of pater patriæ, which he would not accept) were shortly afterwards voted to him in the Senate and confirmed by a lex. His professed reluctance to accept the whole burden only brought out more clearly how the work of Augustus had made the rule of a single man inevitable: “I ask you, sir, which part of the government you wish to have committed to you?” said Asinius Gallus. No answer was possible. A man could not control the provinces without command of the army. But he could not control the army if another man controlled the exchequer. He could not keep order in Rome and Italy, if another had command of all the legions and fleets abroad, and could at any moment invade the country or starve it out by stopping the corn-ships. And if a man had the full control of the purse and the sword, the rest followed. It was well enough for the officials to have the old titles and perform some of the old work, but if the central authority were once removed there would be chaos. The Senate had attempted to exercise that central authority and failed. It could not secure the loyalty of men who, exercising undisturbed power in distant lands, soon grew impatient of the control of a body of mixed elements and divergent views, which they often conceived to be under the influence of cliques inimical to themselves. The provinces too as they became more Romanised were certain to claim to be put on a more equal status with Italy: they could only be held together by a man who had equal authority everywhere, never by a local town council. Augustus, indeed, did not realise this development, or rather he feared its advent. In his eyes Rome ought still to rule, but could only do so by all its powers being centred in one man, who could consult the interest and attract the reverence of all parts of the Empire alike. The success of this plan depended, of course, on the character of the man, and perhaps, above all, on his abilities as a financier; but, at any rate, it was impossible to return to a system of divided functions, and constitutional checks, which were shewn to be inoperative the moment a magistrate drew the sword and defied them. So far the work of Augustus stood, and admitted of no reaction. Republican ideals could only be entertained as pious opinions, not more practical than some of the republican virtues, on the belief in which they were founded.
CHAPTER XV
THE EMPEROR AUGUSTUS, HIS CHARACTER AND AIMS, HIS WORK AND FRIENDS
Hic vir hic est, tibi quem
promitti sæpius audis.
The early career and change of character.
When a great piece of work has been done in the world it is not difficult to find fault with it. A man seldom if ever sees the bearing and ultimate results of his own actions, or carries out all that he intended to do. Even when he seems to have done so, time reveals faults, miscalculations, failures. At an age when among us a boy is just leaving school, Augustus found himself the heir of a great policy and a great name amidst the ruins of a constitution and the disjecta membra of a great Empire. A comparatively small city state had conquered the greater part of the known world, and proposed to govern it by the machinery which had sufficed when its territory was insignificant, not extending at any rate beyond the shores of Italy. A close corporation, greedy and licentious, had divided amongst its members the vast profits from the gradually extending dominions. The central authority which should have restrained the rulers of distant provinces and the collection of their revenues was composed to a great extent of those most deeply interested in the corruptions which it was their duty to judge and condemn. Loyalty to this central authority grew weaker and weaker, party spirit grew stronger and less scrupulous. In the desperate struggle for wealth and luxury men stuck at nothing. Bloodshed bred bloodshed, violence provoked violence, till good citizens and honourable men (and there were always such) found themselves helpless; and the constitution which had rested on the loyalty of magistrates and citizens was ready to fall at the first touch of resolute disobedience. Then a great man appeared. Iulius Cæsar had not been free from the vices or corruption of his contemporaries; but party connections at home led him to sympathise with the people, and the ten years of war and government in Gaul, during which his enemies at home were constantly threatening and thwarting him, had convinced him that the existing constitution was doomed. He was resolved to attempt its reconstruction, even at the risk of civil war. But civil war is a sea of unknown extent. Conqueror though he was in all its battles, it left him only a few months to elaborate reforms. In those he did some great things; but his revival of the Sullan Dictatorship was too crude a return to monarchy, while the exigencies of civil war forced him to employ inferior agents. The aristocratic clique saw themselves about to lose their cherished privilege of tyranny and extortion, and they killed him.
When Octavian came home to take up his inheritance, he would naturally have joined Antony, and taken immediate vengeance on the guilty clique. But he found him intent upon the consolidation of his own position, and not inclined to admit his claim to the inheritance or to any share of power. He therefore outwardly joined the leaders of the party which he detested in order to get rid of Antony and forestall his bid for autocracy. The vicissitudes of the struggle which followed, ending in the triumvirate and the division of the Roman world, infected him with the poison of civil strife—the cruelty which treats honourable enemies as outlaws, and regards personal triumph as the only end of political exertion. This period in his career and in the development of his character ends with the victory over Sextus Pompeius, in B.C. 36, and the additional security gained by the successes of Agrippa in Gaul during the two preceding years. From that time he began to regard himself as the champion of law and order, as the defender of Italy, and the guarantee of peace in the Western Provinces.
Then came a great danger—the danger of a separation of East and West. Under the influence of his passion for Cleopatra, Antony was building up a new empire of subordinate kings, it is true, but subordinate to Alexandria not Rome: and Alexandria was being adorned with the spoils of Asiatic temples to make it a worthy capital of the Eastern world. How far this was really to involve a diminution of the Roman Empire was probably not clear to Antony himself. The old provinces were not formally separated, but they were pared and diminished to round off the new kingdoms for his and Cleopatra’s children. At Rome the danger was looked upon as a real one; and once more Augustus felt that if he was to have a free hand in the renovation of the Empire which he contemplated, Antony must disappear. No doubt every artifice was employed to discredit his opponent, and to convince the Roman people that their dominion in the East was slipping from them. But, however Machiavellian his tactics, there was a solid basis of fact beneath them; a real danger of separation had existed. The victory of Actium settled that question; and when the few severities which followed it were over, we are happily called thenceforth to contemplate the legislator and reformer, the administrator of, on the whole, a peaceful Empire. There were no more civil wars, and no serious conspiracies. With rare exceptions—perhaps only the Arabian expedition—the wars in which Augustus was henceforth engaged were the necessary consequences of a long frontier. War was often prevented by diplomacy, and such wars as were undertaken were always successful, with the exception of those with the Germans, and even in their case immediate danger was averted.
The moral problem presented by the change from ruthless cruelty to wise and persistent clemency has exercised the minds of philosophers and historians ever since. “It was not clemency,” says Seneca, “but a surfeit of cruelty.” But this explains nothing. If Augustus had ever been cruel for cruelty’s sake, the increased opportunities of exercising it would have whetted his appetite for blood as it did in some of his successors. It was circumstances that had changed, not altogether the man. Still, no doubt, success softened (it does not always) Augustus’s character. His ministers were humane men and in favour of milder methods; his wife was a high-minded woman, and always ready to succour distress, as she shewed during the proscriptions, and afterwards in her son’s reign. He had among his immediate friends philosophers and men of letters, whose influence, so far as it went, was humanising. And lastly such opposition as still existed was no longer of irreconcilables who had known “liberty”; a new generation had grown up which on the whole acquiesced in the peace and security of a benevolent despotism. It was a new era, and Augustus became a new man. Full of honours and possessed with irresistible powers, feeling the responsibility heavily, and often in vain desiring rest, he had no farther personal object to gain beyond the credit of having served his country and saved the Empire. The apologia of the index rerum, brief and bald as it is, was intended to shew that he had done this.