Nothing is better known than the scandalous feast of five of the companions of his pleasures with five of the principal women of Rome. They were dressed up as gods and goddesses, and imitated all the immodesties invented in fable—"Bum nova Divorum cœnat adulteria." And on the stage he was publicly designated by this famous line:
Videsne ut cinaedus orbem digito temperet?
Almost every Latin author that speaks of Ovid asserts that Augustus had the insolence to banish that Roman knight, who was a much better man than himself, merely because the other had surprised him in an incest with his own daughter Julia; and that he sent his daughter into exile only through jealousy. This is the more likely, as Caligula published aloud that his mother was born from the incest of Augustus with Julia. So says Suetonius, in his life of Caligula.
We know that Augustus repudiated the mother of Julia the very day she was brought to bed of her, and on the same day took Livia from her husband when she was pregnant of Tiberius—another monster, who succeeded him. Such was the man to whom Horace said: "Res Italas armis tuteris, moribus ornes, Legibus emendes...."
It is hard to repress our indignation at reading at the commencement of the Georgics that Augustus is one of the greatest of divinities; and that it is not known what place he will one day deign to occupy in heaven; whether he will reign in the air, or become the protector of cities, or vouchsafe to accept the empire of the seas:
An Deus immensi venias maris, ac tua nauta
Numina sola celant tibi servial ultima Thule.
Ariosto speaks with much more sense as well as grace, when he says in his fine thirty-fifth canto:
Non fu si santo ne benigno Augusto
Come la tromba di Virgilio sonna;
L'aver avuto in poesia buon gusto
La proscriptione iniqua gli perdona.
Augustus was not quite so mild and chaste
As he's by honest Virgil represented;
But then, the tyrant had poetic taste;
With this the poet fully was contented.
The Cruelties of Augustus.
If Augustus was long abandoned to the most shameful and frantic dissipation, his cruelty was no less uniform and deliberate. His proscriptions were published in the midst of feasting and revelry; he proscribed more than three hundred senators, two thousand knights, and one hundred obscure but wealthy heads of families, whose only crime was their being rich, Antony and Octavius had them killed, solely that they might get possession of their money; in which they differed not the least from highway robbers, who are condemned to the wheel.