Augustus also ordered that if there were any children living of those who had left him their money, such money should be restored to those children, but only on their attaining their majority, and together with the arrears of revenue; and he was accustomed to say that a father of a family only deprived his children of the inheritance they were entitled to when the prince was a tyrant.
When the Senate had verified and confirmed this will by a senatus consultum, they presented to the conscript-fathers the four rolls above mentioned; they were partly written by the emperor’s own hand. It was Drusus who made the Senate acquainted with their contents.
In the first, Augustus prescribed the order that was to be observed at his interment.
The second was a journal of his most memorable actions, destined to be engraved on bronze and placed on the façade of his mausoleum. An ancient marble, found in the excavations of the city of Ancyra in the sixteenth century, has preserved to us a portion of this journal; and this monument, mutilated as it is, becomes precious from the certainty it gives us as to the dates of certain events in the history of Augustus.
The third contained a statement of the forces of the empire, of the troops then constituting the standing army, of the sums contained in the public treasury and in that of the emperor, of the tributes and imposts still due, and of the expenses required in times of peace and in times of war.
The fourth was a collection of instructions, addressed equally to Tiberius and to the republic, to maintain both the splendor and the tranquillity of the empire. Among other counsels he advised them to choose only wise, discreet, and virtuous men for the administration of every department of the state; he added at the same time that it was dangerous to confide to any single individual the entire authority, for then it might be feared that the power of the monarch might degenerate into tyranny, and that its ruin might involve that of the state and precipitate the Romans into irretrievable misfortunes. He recommended, above all, to those who should follow him in the cares of the government, not to preoccupy themselves about extending the limits of the empire by new conquests, but rather to apply themselves to the maintenance and good government of what they already held.
The remainder of these councils was simply the summary of the policy he had himself pursued during his reign.
These books as well as his will were approved and indorsed by the Senate. They then decreed him a costly and magnificent funeral; his corpse, or rather its image in wax, was laid upon an ivory bed, incrusted with massive gold and draped with a tissue of purple silk woven with gold; the procession, of the same extent as a triumphal progress, traversed the streets of Rome with great pomp. It halted twice; on the first occasion Drusus pronounced the funeral oration over the body; on the second Tiberius spoke another, which has been preserved, and may be considered a model of eloquence.
When the procession arrived at the Campus Martius the body was enclosed in a bier, and placed on a funeral pile to which the centurions set fire; while the clouds of smoke and flame were ascending to the sky an eagle suddenly appeared in the midst of them and took its flight to heaven, in the midst of the acclamations of the assembled people, who declared that the bird sacred to Jupiter was carrying the emperor’s soul aloft to the bosom of the king of the gods.
Will of a Pig