It is a curious fact that many of those men and women whose personal appearance was felt by their own contemporaries to be in the highest degree awe-inspiring were small: Napoleon was small, Louis XIV was small, among Queens Elizabeth was small, and Her late Majesty Victoria unusually small. Augustus was no exception—he was short, slight, and halted perceptibly in his gait; but these personal disadvantages did not detract from his dignity. If we compare the portrait of Julius Cæsar in the British Museum with the bust of the young Augustus, or the head of the magnificent statue of the Emperor found in Livia’s villa near the Prima Porta, we are struck by a remarkable difference. It is possible to bring the face of Cæsar to life again; we can recall the dark and liquid eyes, and set the strongly marked muscles of the face in motion; we would hardly be astonished were the lips to open, and we can anticipate the clear even enunciation of the words to which they would give utterance. But with the portraits of Augustus it is otherwise; they are strangely inscrutable. The bust known as the young Augustus is the portrait of a boy, or at the oldest of a lad of sixteen. It must have been modelled at a time when the future even of Julius Cæsar was not assured. The artist may have flattered, but that particular form of flattery can hardly have been designed; the habit of thoughtfulness is seldom expressed to the same degree in the features of boys and young men. Similarly in the older portrait there is an aloofness; it is the face of a man who would always tempt a careful observer to wish to know more about him, and who would always elude curiosity. The next Emperor who was canonized was Claudius. Of him, too, we have many authentic portraits; even in the most idealized we can see something of the man whose apotheosis gave Seneca the materials for a merry jest. It is the face of a man who was perpetually puzzled, whereas the face of Augustus is the countenance of one who perpetually puzzled other men.
The great work of establishing the Roman Empire was not the work of a charlatan or a criminal, in both of which characters Augustus has been represented. It was the work of a man who shared many of the crude beliefs of his own time and unconsciously used them for his own purposes, and those purposes were not self regarding. An Antonius could squander great gifts in the pursuit of what earthly happiness is afforded by dissolute excesses—he could allow his soldiers to perish of hunger and disease while he hastened to the embraces of an accomplished courtesan; he could shamelessly desert loyal veterans at the bidding of a licentious woman, and seek salvation in the wake of her purple sails; such was the hero whom Augustus annihilated, such the conception of responsibility which he replaced by a devotion to duty which has rarely been equalled and never surpassed.
The reign of Augustus was monotonous, his policy unadventurous. If these are defects, we are at least at liberty to prefer them to the excellences of those more brilliant reigns and more adventurous rulers who succeeded in dazzling the world, but failed to lay the foundations for a long era of prosperity. The career of Napoleon is more startling than that of Augustus, his military record incomparable with the simple successes of the earlier Emperor, but Napoleon left France with a diminished frontier, and Augustus left Italy the undoubted mistress of the civilized world.
V
Education of Tiberius
Though the apparent results of a careful education are often disappointing, the impressions received in early childhood are permanent in their effects. The man who has been brought up in a particular atmosphere retains the influence through life, even though his acts may seem to be in strong contrast with his training; the son of a Quaker family may break with all the traditions of the Society of Friends in his maturity, but he is never quite the same as a man who has not been under the rigid family discipline of that estimable sect. A man may throw off all the bonds imposed by the severe domestic arrangements of a Scotch Elder, he may elect to bring up his own children on liberal lines, and banish the shorter Catechism from his household, but he cannot shake off the consciousness of another kind of life which was forced upon him by his early experiences. In the case of Tiberius we can trace to the very end of his life the influences to which his youth and early manhood were subjected. There was no break with early traditions; the aspect of details changed, the estimate of their relative mutual importance was modified, but the spirit with which they were approached was always the same.
The antiquaries have much to tell us of the material arrangements of a Roman house, but we are not so well informed by them as to its occupants. There is a disposition to ascribe all that was good in Roman family life to an indeterminate period anterior to that progressive decay of good manners and good morals which, according to our authorities, was the distinguishing feature of the Empire. Exceptional instances of extravagance are quoted as texts for the supposed rule, the humorous or declamatory exaggerations of satirists are treated as if they were the evidence of sober witnesses, and the spirit which works behind the whole of Roman history is dealt with as of no account in comparison with the letter of promiscuous citations.
If we wish to revive the ideas which were associated by the Romans with their princely houses, we must think rather of such Roman palaces as are described by Mr. Marion Crawford in his Italian Romances; we must add to this conception something of a mediæval court, something too of the great mercantile house of the Renascence. So far as the family was concerned which inhabited such a house as Pompeius built for himself in the Carinæ, it was often composed of many generations, and of persons connected by various degrees of affinity; it was a patriarchal establishment, at whose head stood the eldest man of full age descended in the line of primogeniture from the founder—it was not merely the home of a man and his wife and their children. Nor again was the house only a place of residence: it was a place of business, and the business was of many kinds—some of it was political, some financial, some legal, some industrial. In private as in public life at Rome there was not that strict differentiation of functions, and fine division of labour and responsibility, which comparatively recent experiences have caused our contemporaries to regard as a law of existence.
The Roman Empire was not built upon the foundations afforded by the assembly of the Tribes, or the assembly of the Centuries, or even by the Senate itself, but upon the surpassing ability of the great families and the suitability of their organization for the work which fell into their hands. Collectively as the Senate they exhibited similar ability during a period which was long enough to fix the reputation of Rome, but this period was both preceded and followed by times in which the work of individual houses was supremely effective. The Imperial household differed in nothing but the greater extent of its responsibilities from other households. Augustus was not the only Roman noble who lived upon the Palatine Hill, and his establishment was ostentatiously modest; many of his contemporaries lived in finer palaces, and exhibited greater magnificence in private, but the moderation of Augustus was only relative, and his house was able to find room at different times for two successive commanders-in-chief, Agrippa and Tiberius, with their families and dependents. If Roman history was presented to young Romans in a form which drew their attention largely to such purely constitutional questions as the quarrels between the Patricians and Plebeians, it did not omit the legends of the great houses. The Senatorial dynasty had its heroic mythology; Horatius who kept the bridge, Cincinnatus who left his plough to command the army, the Fabians who all died in one day for their country, Curtius who leapt into the gulf, occupied in the imagination of Roman boys much the same place as King Alfred and his cakes occupy in the mind of the English boy. Every funeral of a member of one of the great families paraded before the eyes of Rome the effigies of men associated with stirring events in the history of the city, and filled their ears with the stories of great deeds. So far as the Romans knew their own history, they knew it in connexion with the names of the great houses, with whom indeed it was so closely associated that it was considered somewhat scandalous in the reign of Tiberius that a man who did not belong to one of these houses should take upon himself to write and publish a history.
For many years a comparatively small group of families at Rome managed the affairs of an area which has since found work for the statesmen and administrators of several kingdoms. Collectively they worked through the Senate and constitutional officials, individually through the system of clientele which was expanded from a domestic institution to a world-embracing system. Communities, as well as private persons, put themselves in connexion with great families at Rome, who were pledged to watch their interests; over and above the public official connexion with the Senate there was the private non-official connexion with individual senatorial families. Slaves and freedmen gathered from all parts of the civilized world strengthened and extended the family connexions. The sons of minor potentates were sent to reside with Roman noblemen, and receive a Roman education; capable adventurers such as the Herod family scented out the strong men of Rome and allied themselves to their fortunes. The minute subdivision of ancient society even after the creation of the Roman Provinces continued the patronage system beyond the time at which it might seem to have been naturally extinguished. Sicily might be a Roman Province, but individual Sicilian cities might still feel the need of a permanent advocate at Rome. The Roman Governor changed from year to year, but the dynasty of an Æmilian or a Claudian was perpetual.