Pater argentarius, ego Corinthiarius.
Anonymous satire on Augustus quoted by Suetonius
HROUGHOUT his great task of repairing a world which had fallen to pieces, Augustus was by no means ignorant of the fact that it is the “spirit that maketh alive.” Indeed it was his constant endeavour to alter facts without changing their names. He was well aware that Sulla had failed miserably when he tossed the Romans a constitution and left nothing but an oath to support it. To adjust frontiers and organise new provinces with the help of his trusty and invincible little legionaries was probably the pleasantest and the easiest part of Cæsar’s task. To reform the ancient imperial city with her centuries of proud and brutal tradition was equally essential, but it was desperate work. For the Empire of Augustus was born into the world suffering from degeneration of the heart. The nobility, upon which everything that was great and glorious in Roman history depended, was morally corrupt, intellectually inert, spiritually void, and even physically decrepit and sterile. The civil wars and proscriptions had systematically pruned away all that was virile and spirited in its ranks. The trimmers and nonentities had survived. The women, long since deprived of the iron control which had kept them in order under the old system of the Roman family, dominated society with an influence that was generally evil. The Roman boudoir with its throng of slaves and parasites was not only profligate, but it had already begun to produce the type of murderous intriguers which we meet more prominently in the Messalinas and Faustinas of imperial history. But as there were virtuous exceptions like Octavia and Agrippina among the women, so there were among the men a few nobles of probity and honour who had somehow, probably by hiding themselves away on their country estates, survived all the conflicts of the past generation. But these, who read Roman history in the same light as Livy, were lovers of the old regime, suspicious and bitterly jealous of the new. We have seen that one of the first official acts of Augustus was to restore the patriciate. But it is easier to make peers than patricians, and we may be sure that there was little love between the old aristocracy and the new. Augustus himself, though the “son of the god Julius” and descended through his mother from Venus and Anchises, was on the father’s side only just respectable. By nature and instinct, however, he was an aristocrat. All his life long he strove to win over the aristocracy to the support of his regime. But he failed, and failed disastrously. Whence throughout the history of the Empire we have in existence more or less prominently a conservative opposition of old nobles, genuine or spurious, sometimes plotting manfully and dying nobly, but more often sneering and writing in secret against the emperors.
But most of the old aristocracy lacked the spirit to oppose Augustus. The few plots which came to light were contemptible affairs. Some of the nobles came down to the senate and devoted their intellects to the choice of a new cognomen for the new Cæsar, or vied with one another in proposing fresh titles of honour for him. But they soon discovered that flattery was not very lucrative in the face of their chilly and statuesque master. Politics at Rome had lost their savour when there was no chance of blood to follow. The noble senators had to be coerced into attending at the curia; they devoted their gifts to drawing-room battles, they collected objets de luxe, they wrote bad verses and sometimes bad histories, and they practised all the vices. They had no religion and very little philosophy. Above all the old Roman family upon which the piers of Roman society had rested was now in ruins. To be the husband of one wife from marriage to death was, so far as the records go, a rare exception. This was no innovation of the Empire. For a century or more men had changed their wives every few years for the sake of a fortune or a political alliance.
FIG. 1.
RELIEF FROM A SARCOPHAGUS
FIG. 2.
ROMAN AND DACIAN
Plate LVII.