When Octavian arrived in due course he temporized; his advisers saw that for the time being nothing could be done; the Cæsarians had no fleet; on the other hand, Sextus was glad to disembarrass himself of the Roman notables; and the result was that the victims of the proscription were pardoned and received into the Cæsarian ranks. This was the first occasion on which Octavian was able to manifest his moderation, and to begin his career of conquest by diplomacy. Sextus was recognized, admitted to a share in the dismembered Empire; there was no alternative; Rome was relieved from the danger of starvation, and Octavian was left free to deal with the veterans and the consolidation of Italy.
Tiberius Nero was not among those who accepted the amnesty; he again fled, this time to Corinth, which was associated with his family by ancient ties of patronage. He became a wanderer, a hunted man; romantic adventures are assigned to the months of danger and hardship which followed; he even sought the protection of Antonius; at length he too made terms with Octavian and returned to Rome, where a further disappointment awaited him; his young wife attracted the notice of Octavian; she accepted his attentions, and shortly afterwards an amicable divorce and re-marriage were arranged. Six months later Livia bore a second son, who was sent to her first husband by Octavian, and acknowledged by him as his own. The families lived on terms of intimacy, and when Tiberius Nero died five years later, both his sons passed under the care of their mother and Octavian, whose family now consisted of his own daughter Julia by a previous wife, Scribonia, and his two stepsons. Julia was a little over a year younger than Tiberius the future Emperor.
So far there had been nothing discreditable in the life of Tiberius Nero, and it was never attacked even by the bitterest enemies of his son. He followed the fortunes of Cæsar, so did many men who saw in Cæsar the only hope of a reformed constitution; he was frightened by Cæsar’s root and branch reforms, so were many moderate men; he saw in Cæsar the tyrant, and applauded the men who cut him down, so did Cicero and many honourable men; in the confusion that ensued he steadily clung to any power that seemed to make for the restoration of the Republic; in this he may have been mistaken, but was not dishonourable; he eventually made terms with the one party which promised a restoration of order—no other policy was open to a wise and prudent man; he surrendered his wife to the conqueror; at this point we withdraw our approval; we think of Cæsar, who refused to put away his wife at the bidding of Sulla, and our inclination is to see in the action of Tiberius Nero contemptible weakness.
Apart, however, from the fact that marriages of convenience and divorces of convenience were of frequent occurrence among the members of the princely houses of Rome at this period, the personal conditions in this case may have been such as to render the divorce in question as little disgraceful to the injured husband as such an event can be. There is nothing contrary to probability in assuming that Tiberius Nero at the time of his marriage to Livia was an elderly, if not an old man; his intimate friend Velleius Paterculus was certainly an old man when he killed himself at Naples. The father of Livia had been a political and possibly personal friend of Tiberius Nero; he fought on the losing side at the battle of Philippi, and was among those who killed themselves after their cause seemed to be irreparably lost; immediately afterwards Tiberius Nero married Livia, who, if she was eighty-six at the time of her death in A.D. 29, can have been little more than fourteen at the time of her first marriage. According to Paterculus the historian, the Emperor Tiberius was less than two years old when his parents fled to Naples after the fall of Perusia in B.C. 40; this places the marriage somewhere in 43 B.C., or at the latest very early in 42 B.C. We have no mention of brothers or other relatives of Livia in her later life; it would seem that her father’s death left her alone and friendless; it is a possible conjecture that Tiberius Nero married the daughter of an old friend, partly in order to save her life and fortune. The disparity of age must have been great in any case, and Livia must have accepted the marriage as the only way out of a position of great peril. It is in accordance with all that we know of Livia that she should have conducted herself with the strictest propriety as a Roman matron, though the youthful wife of an elderly or aged husband; and it is more than probable that he became strongly attached to her, even though her feeling towards him was dutiful rather than affectionate. When she met Octavian, she met a man but little older than herself, who fell passionately in love with her; of their mutual attachment there can be no doubt; it lasted through the whole of their life together, and on his deathbed Augustus bade her never to forget their union. Under these circumstances what was the best thing that Tiberius Nero could do to secure the happiness of the child whom he had taken to his home, and who now wished to leave him? By the custom of his time and race no disgrace attached to a divorce in itself; the Romans had no conception of a holy estate of matrimony indissoluble except under scandalous circumstances; it was better that Livia should be transferred peaceably to the man of her choice than that her good name should suffer. Tiberius Nero accepted the inevitable, not necessarily because Octavian could have compelled, but because Livia had given to her young lover the affections which she had never been able to give to her elderly protector.
Tiberius Nero died in B.C. 33; his eldest son was then only nine years old, but had already been sufficiently well trained to be able to recite the customary oration as chief mourner at his father’s funeral; both he and his brother are said to have been exceptionally well educated. We may imagine the solitary father with his strong love of learning, the victim of so many disappointments, finding some alleviation to his sorrows in bringing up his boys in the strictest traditions of an old Roman house.
III
Octavian
To the student of even the clearest narrative of the events which followed the assassination of Cæsar, the impression conveyed is one of absolute chaos; officials are appointed and removed, decrees passed and rescinded, provinces assigned and redistributed, leaders combine and separate only to combine again; it is difficult to distinguish any guiding principle, any organized force, by which order might be restored. War and spoliation seem to be universal and continuous, and the direction of the march of events to be subject to the caprices of a licentious soldiery, led by rapacious adventurers, who can keep hold of their troops only by extravagant largess and promises of plunder. Licensed brigandage rules the world. And yet this turmoil was immediately succeeded, and in part accompanied by such prosperity as the civilized world had not yet known; trade flourished in spite of piracy, great public improvements were designed and completed, young men went to universities, travellers passed from one end of the Empire to the other.
The exact date of the journey which Horace took from Rome to Brundisium in attendance upon Mæcenas is still a subject of dispute among scholars, but it certainly cannot be placed later than the battle of Actium, and is generally assigned to a time before Sextus Pompeius had been driven from Sicily; neither Italy nor the world were at peace, and Italy had recently been the scene of civil war. There is, however, nothing in the description of this journey to suggest a ruined or disordered country; before Horace caught up the suite of his patron he travelled by the ordinary conveyances along the road or the canal to the South; the misadventures of his journey are only such as happen to travellers in a well ordered country in times of the profoundest peace. The ordinary routine of life can have been but little disturbed by the marchings and counter-marchings of armies; and the habits of order must have been too firmly established to be much shaken by the apparent anarchy at the capital.
In one respect the accounts of these times are necessarily misleading; as our information comes from Rome and Rome alone, we forget the enormous area over which the transactions took place. We should not to-day be surprised to find France prosperous when war was raging in Italy; we should not expect Spain to be affected by occurrences in the Balkan Peninsula, or Egypt to be ruined by marauders in Asia Minor; and we can even imagine a war in Lombardy which would leave Calabria undisturbed. Roman history gives us all the military operations of all the countries in Europe South of the Alps and West of the Rhine, and of all the East that is washed by the Mediterranean, as the history of one state, and we forget that large though the armies were which disputed the Empire of the world, they fought over a very large area, and that the greater part of the Empire was only for short periods or indirectly affected. Even inside Italy the fighting was carried on at a distance from the capital; the scenes of actual war were Lombardy or Northern Tuscany or again the coast opposite Sicily; the marching of the troops along the great roads did not disturb the country between the scenes of operations. In all periods of social disturbance the attention is drawn so exclusively to the sensational events, that the continuance of the ordinary routine alongside of the confusion escapes notice. A community which has long been settled parts unwillingly with its fixed habits; it is only very long periods of war that leave their mark permanently on a country. Perpetual disorder and perpetual invasions prevent progress, but even such violent outbreaks of disorder as the early years of the French Revolution may be followed by a speedy recovery.