The correspondence of Octavius and Cicero was published, and we know that it formed at least three books. It would have been very interesting had it been preserved. In reading it we might follow all the phases of that friendship of a few months which was to end in such a terrible manner. Probably the earlier letters of Cicero would show him distrustful at first, doubtful and coldly polite. Notwithstanding what has been said, it was not he who called Octavius to the help of the republic. Octavius came of his own accord. He wrote to Cicero every day;[[376]] he overwhelmed him with protestations and promises, he assured him of a devotion that could not fail. Cicero hesitated for a long time to put this devotion to the proof. He thought Octavius was intelligent and resolute, but rather young. He dreaded his name and his friends. “He has too many bad men around him,” said he, “he will never be a good citizen.”[[377]] Nevertheless he allowed himself to be gained over; he forgot his mistrust, and when the boy, as he affected to call him, had raised the siege of Modena, his gratitude was carried to an excess that the prudent Atticus disapproved, and which displeased Brutus. The joy that he felt at the defeat of Antony made him forget all restraint; he was blinded and carried away by his hatred. When he saw “that drunkard fall into the snares of Octavius, on coming from his debauches,”[[378]] he was beside himself. But this joy did not last long, for he learnt of the treason of the general almost at the same time as of his victory. It is at this moment above all that his letters would become interesting. They would throw a light on the last months of his life, the history of which we do not know well. The efforts that he then made to soften his old friend have been imputed to him as a crime, and I admit that, consulting only his dignity, it would have been better not to have asked anything from him who had so basely betrayed him. But it was not a question of himself alone. Rome had no soldiers to oppose to those of Octavius. The sole resource that remained in order to disarm him, was to remind him of the promises he had made. No hope remained of success in reviving any sparks of patriotism in that selfish mind; but the attempt at least should be made. The republic was in danger as well as the life of Cicero, and what it was not proper for him to do to prolong his own life, it was necessary to attempt in order to save the republic. Supplication is not base when a man defends the liberty of his country, and there is no other way of defending it. It was, no doubt, at this terrible moment that he wrote those very humble words to Octavius that we find in the fragments of his letters: “Let me know for the future what you wish me to do, I shall exceed your expectation.”[[379]] Far from reproaching him for his entreaties, I admit that I cannot see without emotion this glorious old man humble himself thus before the boy who had betrayed his confidence, who had played with his credulity, but who has the power to save or destroy the republic!
Unfortunately there only remain fragments of these letters, which can teach us nothing. If we wish to know him who held so great a place in the last events of Cicero’s life we must look elsewhere. It would be easy and instructive to reproduce here the opinions that the historians of the empire give of him. But I prefer to keep to the method that I have followed in this work to the end, and if it is possible, to judge Octavius, like Cicero, by what he tells us himself, by his admissions and his confidences. In the absence of his correspondence and memoirs which are lost, let us take the great inscription at Ancyra, which is sometimes called the political testament of Augustus, because he sums up his whole life in it. Fortunately it has come down to us. We know from Suetonius that he had ordered it to be engraven on brass plates fixed on his tomb.[[380]] It is probable that it was very widely diffused in the first century of the Christian era, and that flattery or gratitude had multiplied copies everywhere, at the same time that the worship of the founder of the empire extended throughout the universe. Fragments have been found among the ruins of Apollonia, and it still exists entire at Angora, the ancient Ancyra. When the inhabitants of Ancyra erected a temple to Augustus, who had been their benefactor, they thought they could not honour his memory better than by engraving this account, or rather this glorification of his life that he had himself composed. Since that time, the monument consecrated to Augustus has more than once changed its destination; to the Greek temple a Byzantine church succeeded, and to the church a Turkish school. The roof has fallen in, dragging with it the ornaments of the summit, the columns of the porticoes have disappeared, and to the ancient ruins has been added the rubbish of the Byzantine and Turkish buildings, which are already also in ruins. But by singular good fortune the slabs of marble which recount the actions of Augustus have remained solidly attached to the indestructible walls.
This is a favourable opportunity for studying this monument. M. Perrot[[381]] has just brought from Galatia a more correct copy of the Latin text, and an altogether new part of the Greek translation which elucidates and completes the Latin. Thanks to him, with the exception of a few lacunae of little importance, the inscription is now complete, and can be read from beginning to end. We can therefore now perceive and interpret its general sense.
I.
The first characteristic that we notice when we read the Ancyran inscription, is its majestic tone. It is impossible not to be struck by it. We see at once, by a certain air of authority, that the man who is speaking has governed the whole world for more than fifty years. He knows the importance of the things he has done: he knows that he has introduced a new state of society, and presided over one of the greatest changes of human history. Accordingly, although he only recapitulates facts and quotes figures, all he says has a grand air, and he knows how to give so majestic a turn to these dry enumerations that we feel ourselves seized by a sort of involuntary respect in reading them. We must, however, be on our guard. A majestic tone may be a convenient veil to hide many weaknesses; the example of Louis XIV., so near to our own times, ought to teach us not to trust it without examination. We must not forget, besides, that dignity was so truly a Roman characteristic, that its appearance was preserved long after the reality had disappeared. When we read the inscriptions of the latter years of the empire we scarcely perceive that it is about to perish. Those wretched princes who possessed but a few provinces speak as though they ruled over the entire universe, and their grossest falsehoods are expressed with an incredible dignity. If we wish, then, to avoid being deceived when studying the monuments of Roman history, we must be on our guard against a first impression, which may be deceptive, and look at things closely.
Although the inscription that we are studying is called “An account of the deeds of Augustus,” it was not really his whole life that Augustus meant to relate. There are great and intentional lacunae; he did not intend to tell everything. When, at the age of seventy-six, and in the midst of the admiration and respect of the whole world, the aged prince reviewed his past life to make a rapid summary of it, many memories must have disturbed him. There is no doubt, for instance, that he must have been very reluctant to recall the earlier years of his political life. It was needful, however, to say something about them, and it was more prudent to try and gloss them over than to preserve a silence that might give rise to much talk. He extricated himself in the following manner: “At nineteen years of age,” he says, “I raised an army by my own exertions and at my own expense; with it I restored liberty to the republic, which had been dominated by a faction that oppressed it. In return, the senate, by its decrees, admitted me into its number, among the consulars, conferred upon me the right of commanding the troops, and charged me together with the consuls C. Pansa and A. Hirtius to watch over the safety of the state with the title of pro-praetor. Both the consuls having died the same year, the people put me in their place, and appointed me triumvir to put in order the republic.” In these few lines, which form the beginning of the inscription, there are already some very singular omissions. One would infer from them that he had obtained all the dignities that he enumerates, in serving the same cause, and that nothing had happened between the first offices that he had received and the triumvirate. Thanks to the Philippics we know those decrees of the senate which are here alluded to with a certain shamelessness. The senate congratulates the young Caesar “for defending the liberty of the Roman people,” and for having defeated Antony; now, it was after having concerted with Antony to enslave the Roman people, in that dismal interview at Bologna, that he received, or rather took the title of triumvir. The inscription preserves a prudent silence on all these things.
What followed this interview was still more difficult to relate. Here especially Augustus desired forgetfulness. “I exiled those who had killed my father, punishing their crime by the regular tribunals. Then, as they made war against the republic, I conquered them in two battles.” It will be remarked that there is no mention of the proscriptions. What, indeed, could he say about them? Could any artifice of language diminish their horror? On the whole it was more becoming not to speak of them. But as, according to the fine reflection of Tacitus, it is easier to keep silence than to forget, we may be assured that Augustus, who says nothing here of the proscriptions, thought of them more than once during his life. Even if he did not feel remorse, he must often have been embarrassed by the terrible contradiction between his past and his later policy; for, whatever he might do, the memory of the proscriptions always belied his official character as a clement and honourable man. Even here, it seems to me, he betrays his embarrassment. His silence does not entirely satisfy him, he feels that in spite of his discretion unpleasant memories cannot fail to be awakened in the minds of his readers; and, therefore, to anticipate and disarm them, he hastens to add: “I carried my arms by land and sea over the whole world in my wars against the citizens and foreigners. After my victory, I pardoned the citizens who had survived the combat, and I chose to preserve rather than to destroy those foreign nations whom I could spare without danger.”
This difficult place once passed it became easier to relate the rest. Nevertheless, he is still very brief with respect to the earlier times. Perhaps he feared lest the memory of the civil wars should interfere with that reconciliation of parties which the universal exhaustion had brought about after Actium? There is certainly not a single word in the whole inscription to revive the former rancours. He says scarcely anything of his old rivals. There is at the most but a single disdainful word about Lepidus, and an ill-natured but passing accusation against Antony of having seized the treasures of the temples. The following is all he says of his war with Sextus Pompey which gave him so much trouble, and of those valiant seamen who had vanquished him: “I cleared the sea of pirates, and in that war I captured thirty thousand fugitive slaves, who had fought against the republic, and delivered them to their masters to be chastised.” As to that great victory of Actium, which had given him the empire of the world, he only recalls it to state the eagerness of Italy and the western provinces to declare themselves in his favour.
Naturally he prefers to dwell upon the events of the later years of his reign, and we feel that he is more at ease when he speaks of victories in which the vanquished were not Romans. He is justly proud to recall how he had avenged the insults the national pride had suffered before him: “I re-took, after victories gained in Spain and over the Dalmatians, the standards that some generals had lost. I forced the Parthians to restore the spoils and ensigns of three Roman armies, and humbly to come and demand our friendship. I placed these ensigns in the sanctuary of Mars the Avenger.” We can understand also that he speaks with satisfaction of the campaigns against the Germans, being careful, however, to pass over in silence the disaster of Varus, and that he is anxious to preserve the memory of those distant expeditions that impressed so strongly the imagination of his contemporaries. “The Roman fleet,” he says, “sailed from the mouth of the Rhine towards the quarter where the sun rises, as far as those distant countries where no Roman had yet penetrated either by land or sea. The Cimbri, the Charydes, the Semnones and other German tribes of those countries sent ambassadors to ask my friendship and that of the Roman people. Under my orders and direction two armies were sent almost at the same time to Arabia and Ethiopia. After having conquered many nations, and taken many prisoners, they reached the city of Nabata, in Ethiopia, and the boundaries of the Sabaeans and the city of Mariba, in Arabia.”
But whatever interest we may find in these historical recollections, the interest of the Ancyra monument does not specially lie in them. Its real importance consists in what it tells us of the internal government of Augustus.