The Grandeur That Was Rome: a survey of Roman culture and civilisation

by J. C. Stobart

ERGIL’S Fourth Eclogue, from which my text is quoted, is often called the “Messianic Eclogue.” It is a strange poem. In the midst of a book of pastoral eclogues very closely modelled on the Idylls of Theocritus, the young poet from Mantua inserts one in which he invites the Sicilian Muses, that is, the Muses of Theocritus, to assist him in a loftier strain than usual. His poem is a vision, a prophecy of a return of the golden age to accompany the birth of a child. It is not easy to determine what child. The poem was written for the consulship of Pollio, who had helped Vergil to recover his paternal farm. Thus it is very probable that the poem was really a piece of very gross flattery directed to a patron. Nevertheless the prophecies of peace on earth which it foreshadows chime so strangely with the Messianic language of Isaiah that the scholars of the Middle Ages alternatively placed Vergil among the prophets or condemned him as a wizard. But apart from that approaching event to be witnessed in an obscure village of the client-princedom of Judæa there was even in secular history a general expectation of better days to come. The Virgin Justice did in sober fact return to the Roman world when Octavian, in 29 B.C., came home to celebrate his triumph over the three continents.

FIG. 1. INTERIOR OF ROMAN TEMPLE, NISMES	FIG 2. LOWER CORRIDOR OF ARENA, NISMES
Plate XXX.

I make high claims for Octavian[41]—or as he may now be called by anticipation “Augustus”—in history. Julius Cæsar has usurped the credit of inventing that wonderful system the Roman Empire. The credit really belongs to Augustus. Monarchy, indeed, had for two generations at the least become inevitable at Rome, as everybody, from Catiline to Cicero, was bound to admit. In the scramble to realise it Julius Cæsar had won the day and had thereupon proceeded to introduce his conception of its proper form. He died before his plans were perfected and we have no means of knowing his inner purpose. But we know that he had spurned the dignity of the senate, had taken some of the paraphernalia of royalty and set up his statue alongside of the old kings of Rome. His plan of a naked despotism had failed, because he had not reckoned with the tyrannicide sentiment of the Roman nobles. His assassination was no mere episode or accident. It was impossible to live like an oriental despot in the republican city without an oriental bodyguard. Julius Cæsar had failed through pride. When he fell, the whole dreary round of proscriptions, triumvirate, and civil wars had to begin again. The inevitable monarchy had to be devised afresh on a different basis: that was the task of Augustus. He devised it in such a manner that it lasted in the West for just five centuries and in the East for nearly fifteen. Indeed it can hardly be said to be totally extinct now in the twentieth. Judged by results then, the work of Augustus was clearly a consummate piece of statesmanship. When we consider the methods by which that result was obtained we shall, I think, esteem Augustus as the greatest statesman in the history of the world.

Augustus has never been a popular hero. The pure statesman who has no dashing feats of arms to his credit, and who has left us no records of impassioned eloquence, does not lend himself to idealisation. Augustus had no contemporary biographer, nor even any very great historian ancient or modern. The early Empire is in the gap between the end of Mommsen and the beginning of Gibbon. Dr. Gardthausen has collected all the available material about Augustus but has scarcely succeeded in making him clear or real to us as a man. Tacitus touched him off in a few satirical epigrams as the crafty tyrant who “bribed the army with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and the world with the blessings of peace, and so grew greater by degrees while he concentrated in his own hands the functions of the senate, the magistrates, and the laws.” For biographical particulars we have to go to Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Cæsars, a most unsatisfactory source. Suetonius’s pages teem with human interest, but for purposes of history they are provoking and baffling. He is a patient bookworm who compiles systematic little biographies without a glimmer of the biographical sense. As imperial librarian he had access to most valuable sources of information but he had no critical instinct in using them. He simply collected scraps from various sources and grouped them under headings. For a list of virtues he would go to a courtier’s panegyrics and then turn to a seditious pamphlet for a catalogue of vices. His own instinctive preference being for scandal, he has touched nothing which he has not defiled. It is chiefly due to Suetonius that Augustus appears as a selfish hypocrite, Tiberius as a libidinous tyrant, Gaius as a maniac, Claudius as a pedantic clown, and Nero as a monster of wickedness. And yet under these five reigns the Empire was growing steadily in peace and prosperity. The rulers who were omnipotent cannot have been altogether such as they are described. The factious senators who still dreamed of unreal republican glories and still treasured the memories of Cato as a saint and Brutus as a martyr were not, of course, allowed free criticism of their monarchs. They revenged themselves by writing secret libels, many but not all of which logic and common sense can easily disprove. When it came to popular reigns like those of Vespasian or Hadrian the censorship of the press was removed for a time, and then the senatorial Republicans like Tacitus and Juvenal took ample revenge upon the dead. The scurrilous pamphlets were unearthed and exalted into historical documents and so passed down to our historians as history. It is a suspicious and thankless task to attempt the rehabilitation of these emperors. The world is rightly sceptical of the process which it calls “whitewashing.” Moreover the necessary data are wanting. We can only allow our imaginations to suggest how different the story would look if it had been told from a sympathetic point of view.

Plate XXXI. THE ARENA, NISMES

It is very difficult to form any complete idea of the character of Augustus as a man. He had shown daring and ambition when as an obscure lad he had crossed to Italy in 44 B.C. to take up his perilous inheritance as Cæsar’s heir. He had been cool and diplomatic even in those earliest days in the way he intrigued with the senate against Antony, and then with Antony and Lepidus against the senate. He had had extraordinary luck when both the consuls died in the engagements round Modena, and left him, the prætor, in charge of a great army. Then we have the infamous acts of the triumvirate, when the unfortunate senators and knights were proscribed in hundreds, and Cicero, with whom the young Cæsar had been on intimate terms, was handed over without apparent compunction to Antony’s vengeance. Admirers said that in this he was overborne by his older colleague, and yielded reluctantly to a stern necessity for destroying the tyrannicide party. Enemies declared that even if he had been reluctant to begin the bloodshed he was the most cruel of persecutors when it started. In the fourteen years of civil war that followed, he had succeeded in winning his way through to victory more by coolness and luck than by any display of generalship. I do not think that we can fairly accuse him of cowardice. It was a bold act when he rode alone and unarmed into the camp of the rebellious and hostile Lepidus, and took his legions away from him without a blow. He had not the dashing gallantry of Antony, or the fiery vigour of Julius, but he must have had the gift of nerve and coolness. He had certainly come through the most terrible difficulties and dangers from open enemies and rebellious armies by land and sea. In the last duel with Antony luck had been with him once more. Like the rake and gambler that he was, Antony had thrown away his game for the sake of Eastern ambitions and Eastern dalliance. Then there was that last scene of Cleopatra’s tragedy, when the conqueror came to her palace after Antony had committed suicide. She tried to win him by the same arts that had won his “father” and his rival. Dressed in her finest robes she came weeping to him, and displayed the picture and the letters of Julius wet with her tears. He judged her splendour coldly as a future ornament for his triumph at Rome, and when she disappointed him of that by a suicide staged as all her life had been for theatrical effect, he hunted down her two elder children with the same cold ferocity as before. Policy forbade them to survive. That was all he thought of.