The Statesmanship of Augustus 30 BC – 14 AD

On the Road to Monarchy

Octavian went from Alexandria to Asia and continued the work of redistributing countries and provinces. He did not reach Italy until the summer of 29 BC. Upon entering Italy almost all classes of Rome welcomed him as a savior, celebrated him, and rejoiced in his victory for three days and nights. They closed the temple of Janus as a sign that Mars (the god of war) had at last had his fill of slaughter. The strong and powerful peninsula of Italy was exhausted by twenty years of civil war. People had neglected their fields, cities had been plundered or besieged, and much of the peninsula’s wealth had been looted or destroyed. Administration had broken down and public support had collapsed; night-time robbers left no street safe; highwaymen controlled the roads, kidnapped travelers, and sold them into slavery. Commerce was crippled, capital lay idle, interest rates rose, and land prices fell. Moral principles, already weakened by luxury and the growth of wealth, had of course not improved amid the chaos and poverty, for few things ruin a man’s moral foundation as surely as poverty following affluence. Rome was filled with people who had lost their economic base and, with it, their moral stability: soldiers who had tasted adventure and learned the trade of killing, city-dwellers who had watched their savings vanish through wartime taxation and inflation and now wandered idle, waiting for better times, and women who, in the excess of their freedom, busied themselves with divorce, abortion, and adultery. As the vital spirit declined, people increasingly embraced the ideal of childlessness, and shallow pedants prided themselves on pessimism and Cynic thoughts.

This situation did not represent the whole of Rome, but it revealed a dangerous disease that had taken root in its veins. Pirates were active again and rejoiced in the self-destruction of the provinces. The people of the cities and towns, after successive exactions by Sulla, Lucullus, Pompey, Gabinius, Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Antony, and Octavian, struggled to heal their wounds. Greece, the theater of war, lay in ruins; Egypt had been plundered; and the Near East had fed hundreds of armies and paid bribes to thousands of generals. The peoples of these lands hated Rome and saw it as a master that had trampled their freedom without giving them peace or security in return. What if a leader rose among them, learned of Italy’s exhaustion, united them, and launched another war of liberation against Rome?

There had been a time when the Roman Senate manfully confronted such dangers, raised powerful armies, appointed able commanders, and guided them with prudent statesmanship. But now only the name of the Senate remained. The great families that had formed the Senate’s strength had declined through war, strife, or sterility, and the traditions of statesmanship had not passed to the merchants, soldiers, and provincials who had replaced them. The new Senate gratefully surrendered its chief powers to the one man ready to draw up plans, accept responsibility, and lead.

Before abolishing the old order, Octavian hesitated for a time, and Dio Cassius says that he discussed the matter at length with Maecenas and Agrippa. Since in their view every government was essentially an oligarchy, the question for them was not to choose between monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, but which form of oligarchy to adopt: a military-based monarchy, a hereditary aristocracy, or a plutocratic democracy. Octavian combined all three in his empire, blending Cicero’s theories, Pompey’s precedent, and Caesar’s policy.

The people accepted Octavian’s solution in a philosophic spirit. They were no longer enamored of liberty; weary and exhausted, they longed for security and order, and anyone who could guarantee them games, amusements, and bread could rule them. They vaguely understood that their turbulent assemblies, corrupted by bribery and stripped of dignity, could no longer govern an empire or restore health to Italy; they could not even govern Rome itself. The wider the sphere of liberty, the greater its difficulties. When Rome ceased to be a city-state, its empire inevitably drew it toward the models of Egypt, Persia, and Macedonia. Out of the chaos born of liberty’s collapse into individualism and disorder, a new government had to arise to impose a new order on that vast domain. The entire Mediterranean world, troubled and disordered, lay at Octavian’s feet, waiting for statesmanship.

Where Caesar had failed, Octavian emerged victorious, for Octavian was more patient and cunning than Caesar and understood the art of using words and appearances. In some matters his great-uncle had been forced by lack of time to break established customs and compress the changes of a generation into half a year of men’s lives. Octavian preferred to move cautiously and slowly in such cases. Moreover, Octavian possessed great wealth. Suetonius says that when Octavian brought the treasures of Egypt to Rome “money became so abundant that interest rates fell” from twelve percent to four percent and “land prices rose sharply.” As soon as Octavian made it clear that the rights of property were once again sacred and that he no longer favored compulsory service or confiscation, money came out of hiding, capital went to work, commerce expanded, wealth accumulated again, and a little of it even reached workers and slaves. All classes in Italy were pleased to hear that the profits of empire would go to Italy and that Rome would remain the capital; they were relieved that the threat of an Eastern rising had been postponed for a time, and that Caesar’s dream of a commonwealth in which all men’s rights were equal had quietly given way to the restoration of the privileges of a superior race.

From this blessed plunder Octavian first paid his debt to the soldiers. He kept 200,000 men in the army, each bound to him personally by an oath of loyalty. The remaining 300,000 he discharged with grants of agricultural land and, in addition, gave each soldier a substantial cash gift. He bestowed great wealth and favors on his generals, supporters, and friends. In several cases he made up the deficit in the public treasury from his own funds. To towns suffering from political pillage or natural disasters he remitted a year’s tribute and sent large sums for relief. He canceled all arrears of taxes for landowners and publicly burned the bonds of their debts to the state. He paid the price of the grain distributed as charity. For lavish spectacles and entertainments he spent huge sums and distributed cash to all citizens. He undertook great public works to end unemployment and beautify Rome, paying for them all from his own purse. Was it any wonder that the nations regarded him as a god?

While all this money flowed from his hands, the emperor himself lived the simple life of a bourgeois, shunning the luxuries and privileges of the nobility. He wore clothes woven by the women of his household and always slept in a small room of the old Hortensius palace. When that palace burned after twenty-eight years of his residence, Octavian rebuilt his new palace on the plan of the old one and continued to sleep in the same small enclosure. Even when away from the eyes of the citizens he lived more like a philosopher than a monarch. His only pleasure was to escape from the business of government and sail leisurely in the waters off the Campanian coast.

Step by step Octavian satisfied or gently persuaded the Senate and assemblies to grant him powers that in sum made him a king in everything but name. He always retained the title of Imperator as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the state. The army, for the most part, remained outside the capital and usually outside Italy itself; thus the people, while continuing all the old republican ceremonies, could forget that they lived under a military monarchy, and in this system, so long as government by words was possible, force and power remained hidden. Octavian was elected consul every year from 43, 33, and from 31 to 23 BC, and by the tribunician powers granted him in 36, 30, and 23 BC he enjoyed for life the tribune’s immunity and the right to propose laws in the Senate or assembly and to veto the actions of any official. No one protested against this friendly dictatorship. The merchants who baked their bread in the warm oven of peace, the senators who disliked Octavian’s plunder of Egypt, the soldiers who owed their land or rank to him, those who benefited from Caesar’s laws, appointments, and will—all these now joined Homer in declaring that the rule of one man is the best government, or at least the best when that one man, like Octavian, has a familiar hand with the purse, is as capable and worthy as he, and so openly sacrifices himself for the good of the country.

In 28 BC, while conducting the census and supervising public morals with Agrippa, he counted the population of Italy, revised the conditions of Senate membership and reduced its number to 600, and had himself named Princeps Senatus for life. This title originally meant “first man of the Senate” and “senior senator,” but before long it acquired the sense of a prince who was also a ruler; just as the word Imperator, meaning commander-in-chief of the army, through Octavian’s lifelong tenure came to mean emperor. History rightly calls the government of Octavian and his successors for two centuries an empire rather than a monarchy. Until the death of Commodus all the emperors at least verbally acknowledged that they were merely “leaders” of the Senate. In 27 BC Octavian resigned all his offices, proclaimed the restoration of the Republic, and (at the age of thirty-five) expressed a desire to retire from public business and live a private life. Perhaps the performance had been rehearsed. Octavian was one of those cautious men who believe that truth is the best policy, provided it is used with knowledge. The Senate, in response to his resignation, resigned from its own work, restored almost all powers to him, begged him to continue leading the state, and bestowed upon him the title Augustus (revered, majestic). History has mistakenly taken this title for his name. Until then it had been applied only to sacred objects and places and to certain creative or augmenting gods; once Octavian received it, an aura of sanctity and the protection of religion and the gods surrounded him.

The New Order

We now turn to a relatively detailed study of this imperial government, for in several respects it was one of the most subtle and precise works of statesmanship in all history.

The emperor held in his own hands the legislative, executive, and judicial powers: he could propose laws or decrees to the assemblies or Senate, carry them into effect, interpret them, and, in cases of violation, punish the offenders. Suetonius says that Augustus regularly sat on the bench and sometimes continued working until evening. “If he was unwell he would sit on a litter of straw … He was very learned and extremely just.” Because he held the duties of several offices, Augustus formed an unofficial cabinet in which advisers like Maecenas, administrators like Agrippa, and generals like Tiberius took part; he also created new administrative departments whose staff consisted mostly of his freedmen and household slaves.

Cassius Maecenas was a merchant and statesman who devoted half his life to helping Augustus in war and peace, in politics and world government, and finally, with reluctance, in matters of love. His palace on the Esquiline was famous for its gardens and swimming pool filled with warm water. His enemies described him as an Epicurean and a womanizer, for he always walked about in silken robes and various ornaments and was familiar with every refinement of Roman gastronomy. He loved literature and with generous hand patronized poets and artists. He restored Virgil’s farm to him and gave another to Horace, and became the inspiration for Virgil’s Georgics and Horace’s Odes. He refused all official posts, although he could have had almost any he wished; for many years he labored over the principles and details of administration and foreign policy. He was bold enough to rebuke Augustus when he saw him clearly in error; and when he died (8 BC) the emperor mourned his loss as an incurable grief.

Perhaps on Maecenas’ advice, Augustus—who himself came from a middle-class family and was free of the contempt that the nobility felt for commerce—appointed so many merchants to administrative posts and even to provincial governorships. With repeated humble deference and the granting of exceptional powers to Senate commissions and the formation of a “Council of Leaders” of about twenty members, most of them senators, he soothed the Senate that had been offended by this innovation. In the course of time the decisions of this council came to be regarded as “the Senate’s advisory opinion,” and as the Senate’s powers and functions declined, those of the council increased. However much Augustus showed deference and respect to the Senate, it remained essentially his chief instrument. As censor he revised the conditions of membership four times; he had the power to expel senators for administrative incompetence or personal immorality, and he did so; he nominated most of the new members himself; the quaestors, praetors, and consuls who entered the Senate after their term of office had either been chosen by him or with his consent. The wealthiest merchants of Italy sat in the Senate, and these two groups had to some extent been brought together by that concord of the orders that Cicero had proposed. The power of wealth bridled the pride and privilege of birth, and hereditary aristocracy checked the abuses and license of the wealthy.

On Augustus’ proposal the Senate’s meetings were limited to the first and fifteenth of each month and usually lasted only one day. Since Augustus presided as “senior senator,” no law could be proposed without his consent; and in truth every law or bill that was proposed had been prepared by him or his assistants. At this time the Senate’s judicial and executive functions far outweighed its legislative work. The Senate acted as a supreme court, governed Italy through commissions, and directed the administration of various public services. It governed those provinces that did not require strong military oversight, but foreign relations remained in the emperor’s hands. The Senate, having thus lost its ancient powers, neglected even its limited duties and increasingly left responsibility to the emperor and his organs.

The assemblies still met, though at longer intervals; they still voted, but their votes concerned only laws or the nomination of candidates approved by the emperor. The plebs’ right to hold public office effectively ended in 18 BC with a law that restricted office to persons possessing at least 400,000 sesterces (600,000 dollars) or more. Augustus ran for the consulship thirteen times and, like other candidates, begged the people for their votes—an act of courteous deference to the art of showmanship. Corruption was prevented by requiring every candidate to deposit a financial guarantee that he would not bribe. Nevertheless Augustus himself once gave a thousand sesterces to each voter of his own tribe to ensure a correct vote. Tribunes and consuls continued to be elected until the fifth century AD, but since the chief powers had passed to the emperor these offices became more administrative than executive and finally merely titular. Augustus placed the real government of the people in the hands of salaried local officials equipped with a force of 3,000 police under a “prefect of the urban police.” To guarantee his desired order and strengthen his power, Augustus, in a sharp break with precedent, kept six cohorts of 1,000 men each near the city and three inside Rome. These nine cohorts became the “emperor’s guards” or the commander-in-chief’s staff. It was this staff that in 41 AD made Claudius emperor and took the first step toward the subjection of government to the army.

After Rome, Augustus turned his attention to Italy and the provinces. He granted all the Italian communities that had done their share in the war against Egypt either full Roman citizenship or a limited share in the “Latin rights.” He helped the Italian cities with gifts, adorned them with new buildings, and drew up a plan by which members of local councils could vote in the Roman assembly by post. He divided the provinces into two groups: those that required active defense and those that did not. He left the government of the latter (Sicily, Baetica, Narbonese Gaul, Macedonia, Achaia, Asia Minor, Bithynia, Pontus, Cyprus, Crete, Cyrene, and North Africa) to the Senate; the other provinces, or “imperial provinces,” were administered by his legates, envoys, and personal oversight. This convenient arrangement gave Augustus control of the army, which was mostly stationed in the “dangerous” provinces; it also placed in his hands the rich revenue from Egypt and allowed him, through the procurators he appointed to collect tribute in all provinces, to supervise the work of the Senate’s governors. At this time each governor received a fixed salary, and the temptation for governors to extort money from their subjects was thereby somewhat reduced. Moreover, the existence of a corps of civil servants ensured the continuity of administration and prevented the misconduct of short-term superior officials. Client kings were treated with prudent courtesy and gave complete obedience to Augustus. Augustus had persuaded most of them to send their sons to his palace to be educated in the Roman manner; by this generous arrangement the young men served as hostages until they ascended the throne and afterward became willing instruments for the Romanization of their own lands.

The Augustan Reforms

Augustus destroyed his own happiness by trying to make the people good and happy—an imposition that Rome never forgave him. Moral reform is the most difficult and delicate branch of statesmanship; except for a few rulers, no one has dared to attempt it, and most rulers have left it to hypocrites and saints.

Augustus began this work with humble efforts to prevent the transformation of the Roman race. The population of Rome was not declining; on the contrary, it was increasing through the feeding and enrichment of slaves. Since freedmen were eligible for public charity, many city-dwellers freed their old or sick slaves so that the state would feed them. Some freed slaves out of human feeling, and many slaves saved enough to buy their own freedom. Because the sons of freedmen automatically became citizens, the freeing of slaves and the high birth-rate of foreigners, combined with the low birth-rate of the native population, had begun to change the racial character of Rome. Augustus was astonished that any stability could come from so heterogeneous a population, and wondered what loyalty could be expected from those who had the blood of conquered races in their veins. At his insistence the Lex Fufia Caninia (2 BC) and other laws provided that an owner of two slaves or fewer could free them all, an owner of three to ten could free half, an owner of eleven to thirty could free one third, an owner of thirty-one to a hundred could free one quarter, an owner of 101 to 300 could free one fifth—and no owner could free more than a hundred slaves.

Perhaps someone may wish that Augustus, instead of limiting the freedom of slaves, had limited slavery itself. But in that age slavery was taken for granted, and people of the time were horrified at the thought of the economic and social consequences of a general and simultaneous emancipation of slaves. Just as modern employers fear the laziness that might result from guaranteeing workers’ livelihood. Augustus was thinking of race and class, and could not imagine a strong Rome without the Roman qualities of courage and political ability that had marked the old Romans, and above all without the old aristocracy. The decline of the old faith among the upper classes had removed the supernatural sanction for marriage, fidelity, and fatherhood. The change from rural to urban life had made children seem more of a burden and a plaything than an asset. Women wished to be sexually attractive rather than maternal; in general, the desire for individual freedom took the road contrary to racial needs. What made the evil worse was that eyeing other people’s legacies and inheritance-hunting had become the most profitable occupation in Italy. Childless men were sure that in their last years they would be courted by eager fortune-hunters; and many Roman men so enjoyed this avid attention that it became an additional reason for remaining childless. The prolongation of military service kept large numbers of young men away from marriage during the years when they were most fit for it. Many native Romans in general avoided marriage and preferred relations with prostitutes or concubines, even taking several wives in succession. Apparently the majority of those who did marry limited the size of their families by abortion, infanticide, withdrawal, and contraception.

Augustus was alarmed by these symptoms of a civilization coming apart. Gradually he came to see that a movement backward—toward the old faith and morality—was necessary. As the years passed and sharpened his insight while wearing down his body, respect for the “ways of the ancestors” revived in him. He saw that it would do the present no good to break completely with the past; just as a man needs memory to be wise, a nation needs continuous traditions to keep its reason. With the earnestness of old age he read the works of Roman historians and envied the virtues they attributed to the ancient Romans. He delighted in the speech of Quintus Metellus on marriage; he read it to the Senate and recommended it to the people by an imperial edict. Much of the older generation that agreed with him formed a sort of puritanical sect eager for moral reform through law, and perhaps Livia with her influence helped them. Using his powers as censor, Augustus proclaimed or secured the passage of a series of laws (whose exact history and sequence are now uncertain) aimed at restoring morality, marriage, fidelity, fatherhood, and a simpler way of life. These laws forbade the presence of minors in public entertainments except when accompanied by adult relatives, prohibited women from attending athletic contests, and required them to sit in the upper seats when watching gladiatorial sports. Expenditure on houses, servants, banquets, weddings, jewelry, and clothing was restricted. The most important of these laws was the Julian Law “on chastity and the repression of adultery” (18 BC). For the first time in Roman history this law placed marriage under the protection of the state instead of leaving it to the father’s whim. The father’s right to kill a daughter caught in adultery and her lover was preserved if the discovery was immediate. A husband was allowed to kill the lover if he found him in his own house, but could kill his wife only if he caught her in the act in his own house. The husband was required to bring the adulterous wife before the court within sixty days of discovery; if he failed to do so, the father was obliged to prosecute his daughter. If the father also failed, any citizen could accuse the woman. An adulterous wife was exiled for life, lost one third of her property and half her dowry, and was forbidden to remarry. Similar penalties were laid down for a husband who falsely accused his wife of adultery. Nevertheless a wife could not accuse her husband of adultery. A husband could safely have relations with registered prostitutes; the law applied only to Roman citizens.

It is probable that at about the same time Augustus secured the passage of another law, usually called the “Julian Law on the marriage of the upper classes” because of the chapter dealing with the marriage of the two higher orders. The aim of this threefold law was to encourage and at the same time restrict marriage, to prevent the contamination of Roman blood by mixing with foreign blood, and to restore the old Roman concept of marriage as a union for the production of children. Marriage was made compulsory for men under sixty and women under fifty who were able to marry. Wills that conditioned inheritance on remaining unmarried were declared void. Unmarried persons were penalized: if they did not marry within a hundred days of the testator’s death they lost the right to inherit—except from close relatives—and were barred from public games and entertainments. Widows and divorced women could inherit only if they remarried within six months of the husband’s death or the divorce; spinsters and childless women over fifty received no inheritance, and even if they owned 50,000 sesterces (7,500 dollars) and were under fifty they were still disinherited. Men of senatorial rank were forbidden to marry freedwomen, actresses, or prostitutes, and no actor or freedman could marry a senator’s daughter. Women with more than 20,000 sesterces in wealth had to pay one percent annual tax as long as they remained unmarried. After marriage this tax was reduced with the birth of each child and canceled with the birth of a third. Of two consuls, the one with more children took precedence. In appointments to public office preference was to be given, as far as possible, to the man with the largest family. Every woman who bore three children gained “the right to wear special dress and to be freed from her husband’s control.”

These laws offended all classes, even the pious. They complained that the “right of three children” dangerously freed the wife from the husband’s control. Others offered childlessness as an excuse on the grounds that the “modern woman” was too independent, domineering, capricious, and extravagant. Barring unmarried persons from public games and entertainments was felt to be too severe to be enforceable; on Augustus’ orders that clause was repealed in 12 BC. In 9 AD the Lex Papia Poppaea further softened the Julian laws by easing the conditions of inheritance for the unmarried, doubling the period allowed to widows and divorced women for remarriage in order to inherit, and increasing the share of childless heirs. Women who bore three children were freed from the restrictions that the Lex Voconia (169 BC) had placed on female heirs. The age at which any citizen could stand for various offices was reduced in proportion to the number of his children. After the law was passed people noticed that the consuls who had drafted it and given it their names were themselves unmarried and childless. It was rumored that the reform laws had been suggested to Augustus (who had one child) by Maecenas (who had none); and it was also rumored that when the laws were being enacted Maecenas was busy with pleasure and Augustus was seducing Maecenas’ wife.

It is difficult to determine the actual effect and operation of this law, the most important social law of antiquity. The drafting was imprecise and opponents found many loopholes. Some men married to obey the law and divorced shortly afterward. Others adopted children to obtain rank or inheritance and then emancipated (i.e., dismissed) the adopted children. A century later Tacitus called these laws the breath of impotence: “The charm of childlessness is so strong that it cannot be overcome by the incentives of marriage and parenthood.” Moral offenses continued, but in a more polite form. In Ovid’s poems vice became a refined art and a subject on which experts gave precise instruction to novices. Augustus himself doubted the efficacy of his laws and agreed with Horace that if hearts are not changed, laws will be fruitless. Augustus tried hard to reach people’s hearts: in the place he occupied in the gladiatorial arena he displayed the numerous children of Germanicus as an example; he gave a thousand sesterces to fathers and mothers with many children; he built a monument in memory of a slave girl who (undoubtedly without patriotic intent) had given birth to quintuplets; and when a peasant entered Rome followed by eight children, thirty-six grandchildren, and nineteen great-grandchildren, he rose in delight. Dio Cassius relates how Augustus in speeches to the people condemned “racial suicide.” He delighted in the moral preface to Livy’s history and may himself have inspired it. Under Augustus’ influence the literature of the age took on an instructive and practical character. Through Maecenas or personally, he persuaded Virgil and Horace to devote their poetic genius to the propaganda of moral and religious reform. Virgil tried to bring Roman hearts back to agricultural life in the Georgics; in the epic Aeneid he called them toward the old gods; and Horace, after singing every bodily pleasure, tuned his lyre to the strains of austere ideas. In 17 BC Augustus instituted the “Secular Games”—three days of ceremonies, contests, and spectacles to celebrate the return of Saturn’s golden age—and commissioned Horace to compose the Carmen Saeculare, which twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls sang in procession. Even art served to drive home the moral lesson. The beautiful “Ara Pacis” vividly depicted the life and government of Rome, magnificent public buildings were erected as symbols of the empire’s strength and glory, and dozens of temples were built to rekindle a faith that had almost died.

In the end Augustus, skeptical and realistic, became convinced that moral reform required religious renewal. The agnostic generation of Lucretius, Catullus, and Caesar had run its course, and the children of that generation had learned that fear of the gods is the infancy of reason. Even the Cynic Ovid later wrote in Voltaire’s manner: it is fitting that there should be gods, and it is fitting that we should think there are. The traditionalists found the cause of the civil wars and the miseries they brought in the neglect of religion and the anger of the gods. All over Italy the suffering people were ready to return to the old altars and thank their gods, believing that the gods had preserved them for such a day, for the understanding of a return to an age of happiness. When Augustus, after patiently waiting for the death of the feeble Lepidus, succeeded him as Pontifex Maximus (12 BC), “such crowds came from all Italy for his election,” he said, “as Rome had never seen before.” Augustus both led and followed the religious revival, hoping that the rebuilding of moral and political life would be more readily accepted if blended with the idea of the gods. He raised the four great priestly colleges to unprecedented dignity and wealth and placed himself at the head of all four by election. He took upon himself the appointment of new members, regularly attended the meetings of all four, and participated in their solemn ceremonies. He suppressed the Egyptian and Asiatic cults in Rome but exempted the Jews, and allowed freedom of religion in the provinces. Gifts rained upon the temples and the old processions and religious festivals were revived. The “Secular Games” had no secular character; every day of the three was filled with ceremonies and religious hymns. Their chief significance was the renewal of friendly relations with the gods. The ancient cult, supported by so exalted an authority, took on new life and once more caressed the ardent spirits and supernatural hopes of the people. Amid the confused market of rival religions that spread through Rome after Augustus, the old Roman cult endured for three centuries and, when it died, was reborn with new names and symbols.

Augustus himself became one of the chief rivals of his own gods. His great-uncle had laid the foundation. Two years after Caesar’s murder the Senate granted him divine honors and his worship spread throughout the empire. In the same year 36 BC some Italian cities had already given him a place among their gods. In 27 BC his name was included among those of the gods invoked in the official hymns of Rome; his birthday became a sacred day and public holiday; and when he died the Senate decreed that his “spirit” should thereafter be worshiped as one of the official gods. All this seemed natural in that ancient age. The people of that time never drew a sharp line between man and gods; gods often took human form, and the creative spirit of men like Hercules, Lycurgus, Alexander, Caesar, or Augustus seemed miraculous and divine, especially in the eyes of the religious East. The Egyptians had deified their pharaohs, the Ptolemies, and even Antony, and Augustus was little less than they. The ancients were not the simpletons that their modern counterparts like to imagine. They knew perfectly well that Augustus was a man. When they gave his spirit or the spirits of others divine status they used the word “deus” or “theos,” which corresponds to “saint” in the papal sense of Christianity, and in truth the canonization of saints is the inheritance that passed from Roman deification to Christianity; praying to a man thus made divine seemed no more absurd then than praying to saints seems today.

In the homes of Italy the worship of the emperor’s “spirit” was joined with the special veneration of the Lares (household gods) and the spirit of the father of the family. This was no difficulty for a people who for centuries had deified their dead ancestors, built altars to them, and placed the names of temples on ancestral tombs. When Augustus went to Greek Asia in 21 BC he found that the cult of his worship had already spread rapidly there. In dedications and addresses he was called “savior,” “bringer of good tidings,” and “god, son of god.” Some people said that the long-awaited Messiah had appeared in the person of Augustus and had brought peace, order, and happiness to mankind. The great provincial councils made the worship of Augustus the center of their ceremonies. Towns and municipalities appointed new priests called Augustales to arrange pilgrimages and the worship of the new god. Augustus frowned at these developments but finally accepted the cult as a factor in the spiritual elevation of the empire, the precious mortar binding state and church, and a common shrine uniting conflicting and divergent beliefs. Thus the banker’s son consented to deification.

The Person of Augustus

What sort of man was this who at eighteen became Caesar’s heir, at thirty-one the master of the world, and for half a century ruler of Rome and architect of the greatest empire in ancient history? This man was at once dull and fascinating; no one was more ordinary than he; yet half the world worshiped him. He had a weak body and lacked any particular courage, yet he could overcome all enemies, organize countries, and create a government that for two centuries gave that vast domain unparalleled happiness.

Sculptors used much marble and bronze to make his statues. Some show Augustus as a serious and refined youth with modest pride, others as a dignified priest, some with an air of power, and some in military dress—in which case Augustus has the face of a philosopher who, without his own consent, plays the part of a commander. These portraits, except on some occasions, do not well reveal the suffering of his constant illness, which always made his war against disorder conditional on his war to preserve his health. Augustus lacked physical charm: he had reddish hair, a strikingly triangular head, joined eyebrows, and bright, penetrating eyes. Yet his face was so gentle and calm that, according to Suetonius, a Gaul who had come to kill him changed his mind upon seeing him. He had sensitive skin that itched every now and then from a kind of parasitic mite; rheumatism had weakened his left leg and made him limp slightly; and stiffness of the joints, a form of arthritis, sometimes disabled his right hand. Like many Romans, Augustus suffered in 23 BC from an illness resembling typhus; he had bladder stones and could not sleep easily; every spring he “suffered from distension of the diaphragm; and when the south wind blew he caught a cold.” He was so sensitive to cold that in winter he wore “a woolen chest-protector, leggings for thighs and shins, an undershirt, four woolen tunics, and a thick cloak.” He did not dare go out bareheaded in the sun. He grew tired of riding and sometimes went to the battlefield in a litter. At thirty-five, after living through one of the most dramatic periods in history, he looked old—nervous, ill, and weary—and no one thought he would live another forty years. He tried various doctors; he rewarded one, Antonius Musa, who had cured an obscure illness (a liver abscess?) with cold compresses and strengthening remedies, and in his honor exempted all Roman physicians from taxes. But he often treated himself. For his rheumatism he took warm salt-and-sulfur baths. He ate light, simple food—wholemeal bread, cheese, fish, and fruit—and was so attentive to his diet that “sometimes before or after a banquet he ate alone and took nothing at the banquet itself.” Augustus’ spirit, like the spirit of many medieval saints, carried the burden of his body.

The essence of the man was nervous vitality, inflexible decision, and a penetrating, calculating, active mind. The number of offices he accepted was unprecedented, and the responsibility he assumed was second only to Caesar’s. He performed the duties of these offices with conscientiousness, regularly presided over the Senate, attended countless conferences, judged hundreds of cases, appeared at ceremonies and banquets, drew up plans for distant campaigns, governed legions and provinces, visited nearly all of them, and attended to a mass of administrative details. He delivered hundreds of speeches and prepared them with proud attention to clarity, simplicity, and style. Instead of speaking extemporaneously he read the text of his speeches lest he utter some regrettable word. If we accept Suetonius’ account, Augustus wrote out in advance the conversations he wished to have with individuals and even with his wife, and then read them.

Like most skeptics of his time, he clung to superstitions long after he had discarded faith. He wrapped sealskin around his body to protect himself from lightning, respected omens and auguries, and sometimes obeyed warnings heard in dreams; on days he considered unlucky he did not travel. At the same time his judgment and practicality were remarkable. He advised young men to take up some active occupation early so that the ideas they had learned from books would be tempered by experience and the needs of life. Until the end of his life he retained his good sense, caution, practical intelligence, and bourgeois alertness. His favorite saying was festina lente—“make haste slowly.” He was far more willing than most men who have reached such power to accept advice and to receive rebuke with humility. Athenodorus, a philosopher who had lived with Octavian for several years, on his return to Athens gave him a few pieces of advice: “When you are angry, repeat the twenty-four letters of the alphabet before you say or do anything.” Augustus was so grateful for this counsel that he said, “The reward that silence brings has no danger,” and asked Athenodorus to stay another year.

The transformation of Caesar from a verbose politician into a great general and statesman was remarkable, but even more remarkable was the change of the ruthless and selfish Octavian into the humble and generous Augustus. Augustus evolved. The youth who had once allowed Antony to hang Cicero’s head in the Roman Forum, who had shifted without scruple from one faction to another, who had carried sexual debauchery to extremes, and who had relentlessly pursued Antony and Cleopatra to their deaths—this stubborn and unpleasant young man, instead of being poisoned by the toxin of power, became in the last forty years of his life a model of justice, moderation, loyalty, and generosity. He laughed at the lampoons that wits and poets wrote about him. He advised Tiberius to content himself with preventing or prosecuting open hostility and not to seek to suppress hostile utterances. He did not insist that others live as simply as he did; when he invited people to dinner he would leave the table early so as not to spoil their appetite or enjoyment. He was not boastful; he humbly begged the people for their votes, appeared in court on behalf of his friends who were advocates, and entered or left Rome quietly—because he hated pomp. In the reliefs of the “Ara Pacis” there is no mark of distinction between his figure and those of other Romans. In the mornings he held public audiences and treated all who came before him with gentleness. Once a man hesitated while presenting a petition. Augustus good-naturedly rebuked him and said, “You act as if you were giving a penny to an elephant.”

In old age, when disappointment had made him irritable and he had grown accustomed to absolute power and even to divinity, he became impatient; he persecuted hostile writers, prevented the publication of histories that contained too much criticism, and closed his ears to Ovid’s lamentations. It is said that he once ordered the legs of his secretary Thallus broken for accepting 500 denarii and revealing the contents of an official letter, and when he heard that one of his freedmen had committed adultery with a Roman matron he forced him to commit suicide. On the whole it is hard to like Octavian. To give our hearts to him as we do to the murdered Caesar or the defeated Antony, we must first picture his physical weakness and the sorrows of his old age.

The Last Days of a God

His defeats and sorrows were almost all within his own house. Of his three wives—Claudia, Scribonia, and Livia—he had only one child, Julia, whom Scribonia, without intending it, avenged by her divorce. Augustus hoped that Livia would bear him a son whom he could train for government. But Livia, though she had borne two worthy sons—Tiberius and Drusus—to her first husband, found her marriage with Augustus unexpectedly barren. In every other respect, however, their union was happy. Livia was a beautiful, dignified woman of character and understanding. Augustus discussed with her the most fundamental measures he wished to take and valued her opinion as highly as that of his most mature friends. When asked how she had gained such influence over Augustus she replied: “By scrupulous chastity … by never meddling in his affairs, and by pretending not to notice or see the mistresses with whom he had relations.” Livia was a model of the old virtues and perhaps displayed them with excessive zeal. She devoted her leisure to charity, helping fathers and mothers with many children, providing dowries for poor brides, and maintaining several orphans at her own expense. Her palace was, in its way, an orphanage, for in it and in the house of her sister-in-law Octavia she supervised the upbringing of grandchildren, nephews, nieces, and even the six surviving children of Antony. She sent the boys to war very early, saw that the girls learned spinning and weaving, and “forbade them to do or say anything that could not be recorded in the household diary.”

Gradually Augustus became fond of Drusus, Livia’s son; he adopted him, educated him, and from the bottom of his heart was ready to surrender his power and wishes to him. The premature death of the promising youth was one of the emperor’s first great sorrows. He respected Tiberius but could not love him, for his future successor had a positive and imperious character and tended toward harshness and secrecy. But the grace and liveliness of his daughter Julia must have given Augustus happy moments in her childhood. When Julia reached the age of fourteen Augustus persuaded Octavia to allow her son Marcellus to be divorced and induced Marcellus to marry Julia. Two years later Marcellus died, and Julia began the period of freedom she had long desired. But soon the busy emperor, longing for a grandson who would succeed him, gently persuaded Agrippa, against his will, to divorce his wife and marry the merry widow Julia (21 BC). Julia was eighteen and Agrippa forty-two; but Agrippa was a good, great, and suitably wealthy man. Julia turned Agrippa’s town house into a salon of pleasures and, in contrast to Livia, who was the inspiration of the pious, became the soul of the younger and merrier section of the capital. It was rumored that Julia was deceiving her new husband, and it was also rumored that when asked the strange question why, despite all her adulteries, all five children she had borne resembled Agrippa, she gave an even stranger answer: “I never take passengers unless the ship is already full.” When Agrippa died (12 BC) Augustus placed all his hopes on Gaius and Lucius, Julia’s elder sons by Agrippa, and lavished excessive affection and education on them, advancing them to public office before it was legally possible.

Julia, widowed again and more beautiful and wealthy than ever, became bold and unrestrained and passed from one lover’s arms to another; her amours were at once the delight and the shame of a Rome that was suffering under the Julian laws. Augustus, to silence rumor and perhaps to reconcile his daughter with his wife, found a third husband for Julia. Tiberius, Livia’s son, was forced to divorce his pregnant wife, Vipsania Agrippina, daughter of Agrippa, and marry Julia, who was equally unwilling (9 BC). The young man, brought up in the old Roman discipline, tried to be a good husband, but Julia soon tired of the effort to reconcile her pleasure-loving ways with Tiberius’ austere code and returned to her illicit loves. Tiberius endured the scandal for a time with a silence full of inner turmoil. The “Julian law on adultery” obliged a husband to bring an adulterous wife before the court. Tiberius disobeyed the law to protect its author and perhaps himself, for he and his mother Livia hoped that Augustus would adopt him and entrust him with the leadership of the empire. When it became clear, contrary to their hopes, that the emperor favored Julia’s sons by Agrippa, Tiberius resigned his public offices and withdrew to Rhodes. There for seven years he lived simply as an ordinary citizen and devoted his time to solitude, philosophy, and astronomy. Julia, freer than ever, passed from one lover’s arms to another and her revels filled the Roman Forum with noise at night.

Augustus, now (2 BC) sixty years old and infirm, suffered all the pain that a father and ruler can feel when his family, his honor, and his own laws collapse at the same time. Under these laws a father whose daughter committed adultery was obliged, if the husband failed to prosecute, to bring charges against her himself. The proofs of Julia’s misconduct were laid before him, and Tiberius’ friends made it clear that if Augustus took no action against his daughter they would go to court. Augustus resolved to forestall them. At the very moment when Julia’s dissipation had reached its height, Augustus issued an edict and banished his daughter to the island of Pandateria, a barren rock off the coast of Campania. One of Julia’s friends, a son of Antony, was forced to commit suicide and several others were exiled. Julia’s freedwoman Phœbe preferred to hang herself rather than testify against her mistress. The angry emperor, hearing this news, said, “I wish I had been Phœbe’s father instead of Julia’s.” The people of Rome begged Augustus to pardon his daughter; Tiberius joined the plea, but no pardon came from Augustus. When Tiberius later ascended the throne he merely moved Julia’s place of exile to Regium, which was a little more open. There, after sixteen years of imprisonment, broken and forgotten, Julia died.

Julia’s sons, Gaius and Lucius, had died long before their mother. Lucius had died of illness at Marseilles (2 AD), and Gaius from a wound received in Armenia (4 AD). While Germany, Pannonia, and Gaul threatened revolt, Augustus, left without support or successor, reluctantly recalled Tiberius (2 AD), adopted him, named him heir to the throne, and sent him to suppress the uprisings. When Tiberius returned after five years of hard and victorious fighting (9 AD), all Rome, which hated Tiberius for his dry Puritanism, accepted the reality that although Augustus was still emperor, Tiberius had begun to rule.

The last sad story of his life is that of living without pleasure in life, of surviving beyond his own desire and being denied death. When Julia went into exile Augustus was not yet old. Others at sixty were still full of life. But Augustus, from the time he came to Rome at eighteen to avenge Caesar’s murder and carry out his will, had lived countless lives and died countless deaths. In those forty-two stormy years how many battles and half-defeats, how much pain and illness, how many plots and alarms had he endured, and how often had he tasted the bitterness of failure in pursuit of his high aims. His hopes and his friends had vanished one by one, and in the end nothing remained but this harsh Tiberius! Perhaps it would have been wiser to die like Antony in the prime of youth in a lover’s arms. When Augustus looked back over the past, how delightful and yet how sorrowful must have seemed the happy days of Julia and Agrippa and the laughter and noise of his grandchildren in the palace courtyard. Now his granddaughter, who was also named Julia, had grown up and followed her mother’s moral example. It seemed as if she were determined to embody in herself all the arts of love that her friend Ovid had described in verse. In 8 AD, after Julia’s adultery was proved, Augustus banished her to an island in the Adriatic and at the same time exiled Ovid to Tomi on the Black Sea. The weak and broken emperor lamented, “Would that I had never married or had died childless.” Sometimes he thought of starving himself to death.

The whole vast edifice he had built seemed to be collapsing. The powers he had taken for the sake of order had weakened and corrupted the Senate and assemblies from which he had taken them. The senators, weary of approving and applauding, no longer attended meetings, and only a handful of citizens appeared in the comitia. Offices that had once carried power and stimulated creative ambition were now set aside by able men as expensive and empty honors. The peace and security that Augustus had established had undermined the foundations of the people. No one wanted to enlist in the army or accept the inescapable alternation of war. Luxury had replaced simplicity, and sexual license had taken the place of marriage; the great race with its exhausted will was on the verge of extinction.

The old emperor saw all this with clear insight and felt it with sorrow. No one at that time had the knowledge to tell him that, despite hundreds of defects and five or six fools who sat on the throne, the astonishing and precise empire he had founded would give the Roman world the longest period of prosperity and happiness in ancient history; or that the “Roman Peace” which had begun under the name “Augustan Peace” would, after the passing of centuries, rank as the greatest achievement in the history of statesmanship. Like Leonardo, he thought he had failed.

At the age of seventy-six he died peacefully at Nola (14 AD). To the friends gathered at his deathbed he said something that had often been used at the end of Roman comedies: “Since I have played my part well, now applaud and dismiss me from the stage with your clapping.” He embraced his wife and said, “Livia, remember our long union—farewell,” and with this simple farewell he died. A few days later his body was carried on the shoulders of senators through Rome to the Field of Mars, where, while the leading children sang the dirge, it was cremated.