And meanwhile the old Rome that he found on his return in 29,— brick-built ignobly at best, and now decaying and half in ruins, —was giving place to a true imperial city. In 28, eighty-two temples were built or rebuilt in marble; among the rest, one to Apollo on the Palatine, most magnificent, with a great public library attached. The first public library in Rome had been built by Asinius Pollio nine years before; soon they became common. Agrippa busied himself building the Pantheon; also public baths, of which he was responsible for a hundred and seventy within the limits of the city. Fair play to the Romans, they washed. All classes had their daily baths; all good houses had hot baths and swimming-tanks. The outer Rome he found in brick and left in marble:—but the inner Rome he had to rebuild was much more ruinous than the outer; as for the material he found it built of—well, it would be daring optimism and euphemism to call those Romans bricks—says someone.
Time had brought southern Europe to the point where national distinctions were disappearing. No nation could now stand apart. Greek or Egyptian or Gaul, all were, or might be, or soon would be, Romans; and if any ego with important things to say should incarnate anywhere, what he said should be heard all round the Middle Sea. This too is a part of the method of natural Law; which now splits the world into little fragments, the nations, and lets them evolve apart, bringing to light by the intensive culture of their nationalisms what hidden possibilities lie latent in their own soils and atmospheres;—an anon welds them into one, that all these accomplished separate evolutions may play upon each other, interact,—every element quickening and quickened by the contact. In the centrifugal or heterogenizing cycles national souls are evolved; in the centripetal or homogenizing they are given freedom to affect the world. We have seen what such fusion meant for China; perhaps some day we may see what such fusion may mean for the world entire. In Augustus' time, fusion was to do something for the Mediterranean basin. If he had been an Occultist, to know it, his great cards lay in Italy and Spain: the former with her cycle of productiveness due to continue, shall we say until about 40 A.D.?—the latter with hers due soon to begin.
Well, it does look rather as if he knew it. We shall see presently how he dealt with Italy; within two years of his triumph he was turning his attention to Spain, still only partly conquered. We may picture that country, from its first appearance in history until this time we are speaking of, as in something like modern Balkan conditions. Hamilcar Barca, a great proud gentlman, the finest fruit of an ancient culture, had thought no scorn to marry a Spanish lady; as a king of Italy nowadays found it nowise beneath him to marry a Montenegrin princess. In either case it meant no unbridgable disparity in culture. Among any of the Spanish people you should have found men who would have been at home in Greek or Carthaginian drawing-rooms, so to say; though the break-up of a forgotten civilization there had left the country in fragments and small warfares and disorder. If you read the earliest Spanish accounts of their conquests in the new world, you cannot escape the feeling that, no such long ages ago, Spain was in touch with America; not so many centuries, say, before Hamilcar went to Spain. Such accounts are no doubt unscientific; but may be the more intuitional and true and indicative for that. When Augustus turned his eyes on Spain, Basque and Celtic chieftains in the northern mountains and along the shores of Biscay, the semi-decivilized membra disjecta of past civilizations, were always disposed to make trouble for the Roman south. He could not have left them alone, except at the cost of keeping huge garrisons along the border, with perpetual alarms for the province. So he went there in person, and began the work of conquering those mountains in B.C. 27. It was a long and difficult war with hideous doings on both sides: the Romans crucified the Spaniards, and the Spaniards jeered at them from their crosses. This because Augustus was too sick to attend to things himself; half the time he was at death's door. Not till he could afford to take Agrippa from work elsewhere was any real progress made. But at one point we see his own hand strike into it; and the incident is very instructive.
Spain had her Vercingetorix in one Corocotta, a Celt who kept all Roman efforts useless and all Roman commanders tantalized and nervous till a reward of fifty thousand dollars was offered for his capture. Augustus, recovered a little, was in camp; and things were going ill with the Spainiards. One day an important-looking Celt walked in, and demanded to see the Caesar upon business connected with the taking of Corocotta. Led into the Caesar's presence, he was asked what he wanted.—"Fifty-thousand dollars," said he; "I am Corocotta." Augustus laughed long and loud; shook hands with him heartily; paid him the money down, and gave him his liberty into the bargain; whereafter soon this Quijote espanol married a Roman wife, and as Caius Julius Corocottus "lived happily ever after." It was a change from the 'generous' Julius' treatment of Vercingetorix; but that Rome profited by the precedent thus established, we may judge from Claudius' treatment of the third Celtic hero who fell into Roman hands,—Caradoc of Wales.
Spain was only one of the many places where the frontier had to be settled. The empire was a nebulous affair; you could not say where it began and ended; and to bring all out of this nebulosity was one of the labors that awaited Augustus. Even a Messenger of the Gods is limited by the conditions he finds in the world; and is as great as his age will allow him to be. Though an absolute monarch, he cannot change human nature. He must concentrate on points attackable, and do what he can; deflect currents in the right direction; above all, sow ideals, and wait upon the ministrations of time. He must take conditions as he finds them, following the lines of least resistance. It is nothing to him that posterity may ask, Why did he not change this or that?—and add he was no better than he should be. At once to change outer things and ways of feeling that have grown up through centuries is not difficult but impossible; and sometimes right courses, violently taken, are wronger than wrong ones. Augustus was a man of peace, if anybody ever was, yet (as in Spain) made many wars. The result of this Spanish conquest was that the Pax Romana came into Spain, bringing with it severa centuries of high prosperity; the world-currents flowed in there at once and presently the light of Spain, such as it was at that time, shone out over the Roman world. Most of the great names of the first century A.D. are those of Spaniards.
After Spain, the most immediate frontier difficulty was with Parthia; and there Augustus won his greatest victory. At Carrhae the Parthians had routed Crassus and taken the Roman eagles. Rome was responsible for the provinces of Asia; and she was nominally at war with Parthia,—so those provinces were in trim to be overrun at any time. The war, then, must be finished; and could Rome let it end on terms of a Parthian victory? Where (it would be argued) would then be Roman prestige? Where Roman authority (a more real and valuable thing)? Where the Pax Romana?—All very true and sound; everybody knew that for the war to reopen was only a question of time;—Julius had been on the point of marching east when the liberators killed him. Yes, said Augustus; the matter must be attended to. But Parthia was a more of less civilized power: a state at least with an established central government; and when you have that, there is generally the chance to settle things by tact instead of by fighting. He found a means. He opened negotiations, and brought all his tact to bear. He was the chief, and a bridge again. Over which presently came Phraates king of Parthia, amenable and well-disposed, to return the eagles and such of the prisoners as were still alive. Rome had won back her prestige; Parthia was undegraded; peace had won a victory that war would have spent itself in vain striving after.
But the frontier was enormous, and nowhere else marched with that of an established power. There was no winning by peace along that vast northern line from the Black to the North Sea, at the most vital spot of which an unlucky physical geography makes Italy easily invadable and rather hard to defend. Negotiations would not work here, since there was no union to negotiate with; only ebullient German tribes whose game was raiding and whose trade plunder. So the Alps had to be held, and a line drawn somewhere north of them,—say along the Danube and the Rhine or Elbe; a frontier that could be made safe with a minimum of soldiers. All this he did; excluding adventurous schemes: leaving Britain, for example, alone;—and was able to reduce the army, before he died, to a mere handful of 140,000 men.—Varus and his lost legions? Well; there is something to be said about that. Augustus was old, and the generals of the imperial family, who knew their business, were engaged elsewhere. And Germany was being governed by a good amiable soul by the name of Quintilius Varus, who persisted in treating the Germans as if they had been civilized Italians. And there was a young Cheruscan who had become a Roman citizen, spoke Latin fluently, and had always been a good ally of Rome. His Latin cognomen was Arminius; of which German patriotism has manufactured a highly improbable Hermann. The trustful Varus allowed himself to be lured by this seemingly so good friend into the wilds of the Saltus Teutobergiensis, where the whole power of the Cheruscans fell on and destroyed him. Then Tiberius came, and put the matter right; but there was an ugly half hour of general panic first. There had been no thought of adding Germany to the empire but only as to whether the frontier should be on the Elbe or the Rhine. Varus' defeat decided Augustus for the Rhine.
Now we come to what he did for Italy: his second trump card, if we call Spain his first. Spain belonged to the future, Italy to the present. Her cycle was half over, and she had done nothing (in B.C. 29) very worthy with it. First, an effort should be made towards the purificatior of family-life: a pretty hopeless task, wherein at last he was forced to banish his own daughter for notorious evil-living. He made laws; and it may be supposed that they had some effect in time. A literary impulse towards high dignified ideals, however, may be much more effective than laws. He had Maecenas with his circle of poets.
Of course, poetry written to order, or upon imperial suggestion, is not likely to be of the highest creative kind. But the high creative forces were not flowing in that age; and we need not blame Augustan patronage for the limitations of Augustan literature. There is no time to argue the question; this much we may say: the two poets who worked with the emperor, and wrote under his influence and sometimes at his suggestion, left work that endures in world-literature; that is noble and beautiful, and still interesting. I mean Virgil and Horace, of course. Ovid, who was not under that influence, but of the faction opposed to it, wrote stuff that it would be much better were lost entirely.
The poet's was the best of pulpits, in those days: poets stood much nearer the world then than for all the force of the printing-press they can hope to do now. So, if they could preach back its sacredness to the soil of Italy; if they could recreate the ideal of the old agricultural life; something might be done towards (among other things) checking the unwholesome crowding to the capital,—as great an evil then as now. Through Maecenas and directly Augustus influenced Virgil, the laureate; who responded with his Georgics.