The battle of Actium was the result, and the victory was followed by what was practically a triumphant progress of Octavian round the Mediterranean; the Roman Empire was one again, the unity of civilization was complete. Henceforth the wars of the Empire were conducted on its frontiers, and though they occasionally resulted in an extension of territory, their primary object was self-defence, the maintenance of the ring fence of the “civilized world.” The short war of the Succession, which followed on the death of Nero, hardly disturbed the peace of Gaul and Italy.
The extraordinary success of the man, who at the age of two and thirty was recognized as the supreme arbiter of the civilized world, tempts us, as it tempted his contemporaries, to look for qualities in him beyond the reach of an ordinary man; some who have looked for these qualities and failed to discover them have gone in the opposite direction, and speak of him with scant respect.
Whether Octavian or any other man who has occupied a similar position was a person whose example could be safely recommended to our children, is a less interesting question than that relation between his personal qualities and the needs of the time, which placed him at the head of affairs. The Senate of Rome had failed to produce a great civilian, and a great civilian was precisely what was needed by Greater Rome. The men who, from the time that the problem of the administration of the Empire had begun to make itself felt, had held the chief power successively, were soldiers in the first place, and only in the second, if at all, civil administrators: Marius, Sulla, Pompeius, Cæsar himself imposed their will upon Rome, because they had the legions behind them; relying upon the force of organized armies, they were tempted to overlook all the other forces by which society is held together. An army is so convincing, so obvious, that men who can organize an army may well be excused in their blindness to the existence of any other power. Cæsar was the most enlightened of generals, and had a clearer appreciation of civilian problems than his predecessors, but even Cæsar relied ultimately upon the appeal to force; holding, as he believed, the strongest weapon in his hands, he prepared to change and reconstruct society as appeared most reasonable to his clear scientific intelligence; confident in the integrity of his purposes, he believed that he had only to demonstrate his common sense and benevolence in order to secure adhesion to all his reforms; he did not weigh public opinion; he did not study the currents of prepossession and conviction; wishing well to all men, he never waited to consider whether his actions might wound the self-esteem of any man; he chose his subordinates without inquiry into their private opinions; it was enough for him to have ascertained that they possessed the qualities essential in his opinion to good administration. In one sense the clemency of Cæsar was never tested; had he lived another ten years, and been forced to realize the nature of the opposition which was excited by his reforms, he, like Cromwell, might have been forced to supersede the civil organization by a purely military organization; like Napoleon, he might have been compelled to protect his person and his Government by an army of spies, and meet plots by counterplots; but the opposition declared itself only to be final; the first intimation of its existence to Cæsar was his own death. Had Octavian needed so striking a lesson, he would have learned from this event that civil power resting on military predominance is no more secure than civil power conferred by a popular vote; but he did not need the lesson; his whole temperament was civilian, and the successive humiliations through which the army led him strengthened his dislike to the army; for the army forced him to the alliance with Antonius, in whom he rightly saw his private enemy; the army forced him to marry the daughter of Fulvia the tigress; the army forced the proscription upon him; the army compelled him to deeds of savage cruelty at Perusia; the army forced him to hand over his sister to the embraces of Antonius; he felt that he could not be a free agent so long as the army was the dominant factor in politics. His ideal was not the magnificent stride of the conqueror from continent to continent. Other young men, finding several thousand veterans ready to follow them, might have been tempted to a career of conquest; not so Octavian; circumstances compelled him to temporize with the army, and to use the army, but he naturally preferred the city to the camp, and the Forum to the field. Year by year, and even month by month, he advanced in the favour of the capitalists and constitutionalists, who dreaded nothing so much as a perpetual cock fight of generals. All over the Empire a new ideal had been steadily growing, the conception of war as a permanent condition of society had been replaced by the conception of peace. In the East for two centuries the internecine wars between city States had disappeared; the Macedonian Empire, though broken up and divided, had established permanent umpires; society was united over larger areas; in the West, after the elimination of the discordant Phœnician factor, Rome had held the same position of supreme umpire; great cities had grown up: Smyrna, Ephesus, Antioch, Alexandria in the East, Rome in the West, for whose populations the orderly progress of commerce was a necessity of life; war had ceased to be the only or the most profitable investment; other than military careers were attractive to the ambitious. Octavian presented the combination of qualities which the world wanted; he could command the allegiance of armies without being intoxicated by the possession of that form of power; he respected the civilian, and had the power to protect him. But Octavian did not carry his dislike of military domination to the point of extravagance; he was no intemperate advocate of peace principles; he did not make the mistake of allowing his army to become inefficient; he knew that a well ordered army was a necessary instrument of sound civil Government; he knew that unless the chief of the State demonstrably enjoyed the support of an efficient army his reign would be short; but he took care that no successful officer should be tempted to play the part of an Antonius, or dream that it was in his power to become a second Cæsar. He had the good fortune to find first in his friend Agrippa, and subsequently in his two stepsons Tiberius and Drusus, able generals, who abstained from interfering with the civil administration. Not the least of the remarkable powers of Octavian was his power of commanding willing service from equals and even from superiors, and his recognition of the men who would be useful to him. As the heir of his father and great-uncle, he inherited not only money but connexions; his father had been an Equestrian, who was cut off in the first stages of a more enterprising political career; he had been Governor of Macedonia; the extent of the connexions of Cæsar needs no demonstration. The head of a great Roman House was in a sense the head of a permanent corporation; he could alienate or retain those individuals, families or cities, both with within and outside of the technical limits of the Empire, who had been used to conduct their private or public business through the agency of his House. The use to which he turned an hereditary advantage of this kind depended on his personal qualities; Octavian had the qualities which breed confidence; self-controlled, industrious, courteous, faithful to obligations even where they were not self-imposed, he quickly showed the adherents of the House that there was no breach in the continuity of the Cæsarian succession. Antonius had similar advantages, but he dissipated or squandered them; men learned that his favour was to be won, or its continuance to be secured by gross flattery, and subservience to his caprices; he demanded derogatory services; the Consular Plancus thought to secure his favour at Alexandria by flopping about at a masquerade in the unwieldy and farcical dress of a marine deity; such an act would have disgusted Octavian; it would have shocked him to see a man of rank doing anything inconsistent with his dignity. A natural instinct for what is dignified is a valuable attribute in a ruler, and a punctilious insistence on ceremonial observances is better than an absence of etiquette; but mere ceremony is apt to degenerate into observances which injure the self esteem of those concerned, and to substitute exaggerated forms of respect for the reality. Octavian grasped the true meaning of dignified behaviour; it was not the person of the ruler but the business in hand which was respected; frivolity was not an insult to his person, but to the work in which he was engaged.
Men who were in earnest about anything found that they were in sympathy with Octavian; he could relax, and be charming in his relaxation, but with him, as with all great rulers, the line was rigidly drawn between business and amusement. He could even pardon a refusal to comply with his request for a personal favour; he invited Horace to leave the service of Mæcenas and become his private secretary; the poet refused, but did not in consequence lose the esteem of the Emperor.
Naturally attracted by what was dignified, Octavian was keenly alive to the prestige of the Senate; Cæsar had found in that body an active impediment to necessary reforms; he broke down the barriers of sanctity by which it was surrounded; he treated it with no more respect than Claudius Pulcher had shown to the sacred chickens; he destroyed its organization and overrode its decrees; he admitted aliens to its honours. Antonius was equally reckless in his contempt of Senatorial prerogatives; but the men of rank and position who successively made terms with Octavian found that they were treated with respect, that there was nothing derogatory in working with him; and while a bitter experience had taught them that there was no other alternative, the pain of submission was alleviated by the personal consideration shown to men who had suffered shipwreck. Octavian was the mediator between the new and the old; his practical sagacity inclined him to make the best of the new; his personal sympathies equally inclined him to deal tenderly with the old. Good counsellors, hereditary connexions, the affection of the veterans, would not have put Octavian permanently at the head of affairs, had he not possessed those qualities which enabled him to make the best of these advantages. He had not the dash, the brilliance, the consummate intellectual ability of his uncle; he could not have done his uncle’s work; but when that work had once been done, he was supremely fitted to rebuild on the new foundations; because he was in many respects inferior to his uncle, he was more truly representative of his time; he was no prodigy; he did not thunder and lighten and turn the universe upside down; he made the best of the world as he found it, and that best was so very good that his work lasted.
IV
Augustus
In the year 27 B.C., four years after the battle of Actium, the power of Octavian was so firmly established, his services to the civilized world were so obviously unique, that there was a general desire to express by some honourable addition to his title a recognition of those services. After much discussion the Senate fixed upon the adjective “Augustus” as the only epithet which would adequately define the position in which Octavian stood in relation to Rome and the Empire. This epithet is deeply significant; the modern habit of using it as a name has destroyed its significance; even in antiquity the necessity of distinguishing between the different members of the Cæsarian dynasty led to its occasional use by historians in place of the name of Cæsar, but the ancients never lost sight of its meaning, as the modern is apt to do; they were as conscious of using a title for a name when they spoke of Augustus, as we are when we use the phrases “His Majesty” or “His Highness,” in speaking of royal personages.
Various alternatives had been suggested, and been rejected either as deficient in dignity, as having been used before, or as being applicable to Rome alone and not to the whole Empire; the man who hit upon the word which satisfied public opinion, both in Rome and the provinces, was, strangely enough, no other than that Plancus, whose undignified floppings had amused Cleopatra and the Eunuchs of her Court. The etymology of the word may be held to be still uncertain, but the associations which it suggested to the ancients are indisputable; it was used of things or places, and especially the latter, marked out by the gods as the abodes of divinity or particularly connected with their service; the association of ideas was somewhat similar to that implied in our own use of the word “consecrated”; but a place which was “augustus” was rather more than “consecrated”; it was not merely devoted to the service of the deities, but the gods themselves had signified their will that it should be so; its transference to a man was a declaration that the gods had selected him as their instrument; it did not ascribe divinity to the man, but it asserted that the man was entitled to the respect due to one who was specially under the protection of the gods; he was not a god, but the divine will was manifested in him. The distinction, though clear, is too subtle for the ordinary human intelligence, and the use of the epithet and its Greek equivalent rapidly led to an actual worship of the man, which, though discountenanced in Italy, was permitted, and eventually encouraged in the provinces. Such a thing appears to us impossible; we are even shocked at its impiety; for us there has been one Incarnation, and one only; we can more readily transfer ourselves to the mental condition of those who made their gods in the likeness of men than of those who in men saw gods. While some of us do not shrink from the irreverence of attributing to tables and chairs and hats and bits of deal supernatural powers, and from believing them to be channels of communication between ourselves and the spiritual world, we shrink from declaring, what surely should be simpler and more reverent, that certain human beings have been elected by the Deity to declare His will to men, that to treat them with insufficient respect is to rebel against the divine will, and that to worship them is to worship the Deity who is pleased to permit a portion of His Divine essence to reside in them. So far have we travelled from the conception of godship prevalent among the ancients, and even among our subjects in India at the present day, that it is hardly possible to present the views of the contemporaries of Augustus without using language suspected of irreverence. That danger, however, must be faced, if we would understand one of the forces which helped to bind the Roman Empire together, for though the idea of assigning Divine honours to a man is repugnant to us, to the ancients it was natural.
At all times and in all countries it is difficult to define the current convictions of human beings as to non-human or supra-human agencies; we always find a minority who reflect and study and discuss, a majority who tremble; if we pay attention only to the enlightened men of any particular period, we find a certain resemblance in their speculations, a similar tendency to distinguish between superstition and religion, a disinclination to ascribe to the divine agencies vulgar and petty interference with human concerns; on the other hand, if we fix our attention upon the voiceless multitude, we find no distinction between religion and superstition, and a strong inclination to see even in trivial occurrences an intervention of the divinity. We cannot gather from Plato or Cicero the religious faith of the majority of the active men of their day; still less can we infer it from the mythologies of the poets. Polytheism had no dogmatic faith; it did not ask a man to state what he believed; it took note of what he did. Deference to accepted forms of worship was expected; men paid a mutual respect to one another’s observances; all methods of conciliating the favour of the gods were good; the dangerous man was the man of no observances; there was no knowing what wrath he might bring down upon the community. Many of the ancients developed eclectic tendencies in the matter of religion; the temper of Herodotus was a common one among the enlightened, and the inclination to see points of resemblance in various cults rather than to emphasize differences. Germanicus was travelling from shrine to shrine in the East when he caught the fever which killed him; Apuleius at a later date travelled widely with a view to being initiated into the different mysteries. The conception that there was One God and One God only who ought to be worshipped, and that acts of adoration to other divinities, or powers in which divinity was recognized, constituted an act of treason to Him, was an impossible conception to the ancients; in spite of the unitarian tendencies, which we may detect even in Hesiod, and which became increasingly prevalent among the speculative philosophers, a deity was local rather than universal; it would have been dangerous to attempt to substitute the worship of Pallas Athene at Ephesus for that of Artemis, to remove Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome and put Melkarth in his place; but no Ephesian thought the Athenian wrong in worshipping Pallas, no Roman saw a dangerous heresy in the cult of Melkarth at Tyre or Carthage.