Octavian was now made Imperator, and Censor of the Empire for life. This does not mean that all of the forms of a republic were at once destroyed, but that the government was administered in the spirit of an absolute monarchy.
Octavian retained the family name of Cæsar, which was also assumed by his successors, as an official designation, even when they belonged to other lines of descent; just as are the modern titles of “Kaiser” in Germany and “Czar” in Russia, which are, indeed, derived from the Roman name.
Octavian was a man of great ambition and had overcome the violence and perfidy of others by often using their own methods. He was reserved in speech and bearing, and was somewhat simple in his manner of living. He had a large degree of coolness and self-control. He was shrewd, politic, and far-seeing in adapting means to his ends. He gathered all the lines of power into his hands almost before the people realized that he was doing it. We are told that he had under his direct management “the disposal of revenues, the movements of the army, the execution of the laws, the administration of internal reforms and the adjustment of foreign relations.” First the senators then the plebians yielded to him many of their long-cherished rights. Under his management the famed Republic became an empire; and he was the emperor indeed. His dominions extended from the Atlantic to Arabia and from the islands of Britain to the sands of Africa.
CICERO
While Rome had been conquering the world she had been losing her liberties at home. Nothing had really been left of liberty except its name. But it must be admitted that, intense and stern as Octavian was in grasping after power, he showed wise moderation in its exercise. He reconciled the people to the loss of their freedom by securing to them greater material prosperity and many exciting amusements. He expended great sums on public roads and splendid buildings, sewers, reservoirs, bridges, quays, parks, gardens, and public offices in great profusion. Many of his associates followed his example and erected costly edifices, ornamented with columns and statues in marble and bronze. It was his boast that he had found Rome built of brick and would leave it made of marble. He patronized the arts and the sciences. He gathered around him men of brilliant talents,—statesmen, orators, philosophers, historians, painters, sculptors and poets. Vipsanius Agrippa, his prime minister, Mæcenas, Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, besides many lesser lights, distinguished his reign and adorned his court. What the age of Pericles was to Greece and that of Elizabeth was to England the reign of this man was to the Roman empire. In religion he was not much more than a stoic philosopher, but he recognized the value of a religious faith among the people and so was glad to encourage them in the maintenance of pagan altars and temples, many of which he built. It is said that in the year 28 B. C. not less than eighty-two temples were rebuilt in Rome itself. He erected and restored the temple of Apollo upon the Palatine, and near it he established a splendid library. The Senate decreed that he should have the then unique title of Augustus,—THE AUGUST ONE. It was a title that Octavian’s successors tried to retain, but it has become his own special and superb designation in the pages of history, so that we now often forget that it was really only an adjective and not his proper name. The eighth month in the year was called August, in his honor, just as the seventh month had been called July, in honor of Julius Cæsar.
Augustus, as we must now call him, was the Cæsar for whom was named the city of Cæsarea, which Herod the Great built on the seacoast of Palestine, to be the political capital of that country, and which the book of the Acts has led us to associate later with the centurion Cornelius, in whose house the Apostle Peter preached. It was the home city of the Evangelist Philip and his four daughters (Acts xxi:8, 9) and the scene of Paul’s great speeches before the Roman governors, Felix and his wife Drusilla, Festus, and King Agrippa II, and his sister, Bernice. (Acts xxiv:24; xxv:13.) Herod, as another act of obsequious flattery, also built a marble temple to Augustus at Paneas, at one of the sources of the Jordan, near the base of Mount Hermon, at the place that his son Herod Philip II, the tetrarch, afterward rebuilt and called,—from the emperor and himself,—Cæsarea Philippi, whither Jesus Christ once came during his ministry, the most northern point he ever visited, and held one of the most significant conversations with his disciples.
My memory recalls with great pleasure the day when a little group of tourists in Palestine (one of which I had the privilege of being), there pitched after a weary day’s journey their white tents, amid desolation and fragmentary ruins, and gazed upon the spring waters rushing, fresh and cold, from the venerated cave under the hill. Around this cave some architectural niches for statues are cut into the natural rock, but the statues have long since disappeared. Its original name of Paneas, derived from the rustic god Pan, is now corrupted into Baneas. A massive castle of the crusaders frowns down from a great height, but in the valley only wrecks of man’s ambitious structures make a pathetic contrast with the beauties of nature. It was in that region, probably, on one of the foothills of Mount Hermon, that the Transfiguration took place.
If we turn to consider the family life of the Emperor Augustus, we learn that after one or two betrothals in his early youth, which engagements were not followed up, he married a lady of high rank named Scribonia, by whom he had one child, a daughter, named Julia. Afterward, when he was known as Octavian, and was one of the triumvirs, he either fell desperately in love with another man’s wife or he was swayed by his intense ambition at the time to ally himself with the aristocratic families of Rome. At any rate, he divorced Scribonia and carried off as his wife Livia Drusilla, who was the wife of a prominent citizen, Tiberius Claudius Nero. By him Livia had one son, who afterward became the Emperor Tiberius. She was soon to be the mother of another, the celebrated general Drusus. So far was Tiberius Claudius Nero from resisting her divorce from him to marry Augustus, that, it is said, he gave her a dowry and was present at the wedding. Some historians, indeed, think that it was in accordance with his own plans. He was old and infirm. His wife was only nineteen and he may have been glad to provide for her marriage, possibly, with the young and rising triumvir, and thus conciliate him to a better treatment of the aristocratic party.
However this may have been, it illustrates the loose Roman views of marriage in that day. It put Livia in a strange and trying position. Her own father had been among those aristocrats whom the triumvirs had proscribed and hunted. He had fought with Brutus and Cassius and had died by his own hand after being defeated with them by the army of Augustus at the battle of Philippi. Two years before this marriage Livia had fled from Italy with her husband, Tiberius Claudius Nero, to escape the vengeance of Octavian. Now she leaves the former to become the wife of the latter. She had to turn away for a time from her own son Tiberius and, three months later, when her child Drusus was born in the home of Augustus, this second son was sent to the house of his father, Tiberius Claudius Nero.