IV
Augustus
In the year 27 B.C., four years after the battle of Actium, the power of Octavian was so firmly established, his services to the civilized world were so obviously unique, that there was a general desire to express by some honourable addition to his title a recognition of those services. After much discussion the Senate fixed upon the adjective “Augustus” as the only epithet which would adequately define the position in which Octavian stood in relation to Rome and the Empire. This epithet is deeply significant; the modern habit of using it as a name has destroyed its significance; even in antiquity the necessity of distinguishing between the different members of the Cæsarian dynasty led to its occasional use by historians in place of the name of Cæsar, but the ancients never lost sight of its meaning, as the modern is apt to do; they were as conscious of using a title for a name when they spoke of Augustus, as we are when we use the phrases “His Majesty” or “His Highness,” in speaking of royal personages.
Various alternatives had been suggested, and been rejected either as deficient in dignity, as having been used before, or as being applicable to Rome alone and not to the whole Empire; the man who hit upon the word which satisfied public opinion, both in Rome and the provinces, was, strangely enough, no other than that Plancus, whose undignified floppings had amused Cleopatra and the Eunuchs of her Court. The etymology of the word may be held to be still uncertain, but the associations which it suggested to the ancients are indisputable; it was used of things or places, and especially the latter, marked out by the gods as the abodes of divinity or particularly connected with their service; the association of ideas was somewhat similar to that implied in our own use of the word “consecrated”; but a place which was “augustus” was rather more than “consecrated”; it was not merely devoted to the service of the deities, but the gods themselves had signified their will that it should be so; its transference to a man was a declaration that the gods had selected him as their instrument; it did not ascribe divinity to the man, but it asserted that the man was entitled to the respect due to one who was specially under the protection of the gods; he was not a god, but the divine will was manifested in him. The distinction, though clear, is too subtle for the ordinary human intelligence, and the use of the epithet and its Greek equivalent rapidly led to an actual worship of the man, which, though discountenanced in Italy, was permitted, and eventually encouraged in the provinces. Such a thing appears to us impossible; we are even shocked at its impiety; for us there has been one Incarnation, and one only; we can more readily transfer ourselves to the mental condition of those who made their gods in the likeness of men than of those who in men saw gods. While some of us do not shrink from the irreverence of attributing to tables and chairs and hats and bits of deal supernatural powers, and from believing them to be channels of communication between ourselves and the spiritual world, we shrink from declaring, what surely should be simpler and more reverent, that certain human beings have been elected by the Deity to declare His will to men, that to treat them with insufficient respect is to rebel against the divine will, and that to worship them is to worship the Deity who is pleased to permit a portion of His Divine essence to reside in them. So far have we travelled from the conception of godship prevalent among the ancients, and even among our subjects in India at the present day, that it is hardly possible to present the views of the contemporaries of Augustus without using language suspected of irreverence. That danger, however, must be faced, if we would understand one of the forces which helped to bind the Roman Empire together, for though the idea of assigning Divine honours to a man is repugnant to us, to the ancients it was natural.
At all times and in all countries it is difficult to define the current convictions of human beings as to non-human or supra-human agencies; we always find a minority who reflect and study and discuss, a majority who tremble; if we pay attention only to the enlightened men of any particular period, we find a certain resemblance in their speculations, a similar tendency to distinguish between superstition and religion, a disinclination to ascribe to the divine agencies vulgar and petty interference with human concerns; on the other hand, if we fix our attention upon the voiceless multitude, we find no distinction between religion and superstition, and a strong inclination to see even in trivial occurrences an intervention of the divinity. We cannot gather from Plato or Cicero the religious faith of the majority of the active men of their day; still less can we infer it from the mythologies of the poets. Polytheism had no dogmatic faith; it did not ask a man to state what he believed; it took note of what he did. Deference to accepted forms of worship was expected; men paid a mutual respect to one another’s observances; all methods of conciliating the favour of the gods were good; the dangerous man was the man of no observances; there was no knowing what wrath he might bring down upon the community. Many of the ancients developed eclectic tendencies in the matter of religion; the temper of Herodotus was a common one among the enlightened, and the inclination to see points of resemblance in various cults rather than to emphasize differences. Germanicus was travelling from shrine to shrine in the East when he caught the fever which killed him; Apuleius at a later date travelled widely with a view to being initiated into the different mysteries. The conception that there was One God and One God only who ought to be worshipped, and that acts of adoration to other divinities, or powers in which divinity was recognized, constituted an act of treason to Him, was an impossible conception to the ancients; in spite of the unitarian tendencies, which we may detect even in Hesiod, and which became increasingly prevalent among the speculative philosophers, a deity was local rather than universal; it would have been dangerous to attempt to substitute the worship of Pallas Athene at Ephesus for that of Artemis, to remove Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome and put Melkarth in his place; but no Ephesian thought the Athenian wrong in worshipping Pallas, no Roman saw a dangerous heresy in the cult of Melkarth at Tyre or Carthage.
The association between religion and morality was only slowly established; the god was not better than the man; he was stronger than the man; thus mere power unaccompanied by moral excellence had a divine character even in a man. To us the Incarnate God is necessarily the perfection of moral excellence; to the ancients the manifestation of power was in itself an indication of the divine favour; and similarly in the case of his worshippers, provided the priest did not infringe the regulations of the prescribed ritual in preparing for or conducting an act of worship; his moral character was a matter of indifference; he might bring down the divine wrath upon the community by paring his nails at the wrong time, just as much as by the infringement of social obligations, or by personal debauchery; ritual and not morality was the province of religion.
In the didactic work of Hesiod, the Farm and the Calendar, which was used by the Greeks much as we use a catechism, minute and trivial points of cleanliness and decency rank with perjury and violence; to neglect the former, to commit the latter, alike involved the displeasure of the immortals. The Italians were enslaved by minute ritual even more than the Greeks; they were more superstitious; the worship of the Lares and of the ancestors, the faith in fortune, the dread of the unlucky, survived among cultivated Italians to a late period. Italy is still profoundly superstitious; men who have shaken off the authority of the Church still dread the evil eye, and witchcraft of a peculiar kind is still firmly believed in by the peasants of central Italy; the strega is still a power in the villages of the Bolognese.
The ancients had nothing to set against the ascription of Divine powers to a man, though for the enlightened it was possible to distinguish between ceremonial acts whose purpose was to propitiate the Divinity behind the man, and the worship of the man himself as a divine being; nor did death terminate the power of the favoured individual; the spirit was even more powerful when released from the accidents of humanity. Among the Italians faith in the power of the dead, and a considerable dread of their continued interference in the concerns of the living, was a lively faith, and exemplified in many curious ways; and thus the worship of Augustus, which was officially recognized only in the provinces during his lifetime, was extended to Italy after his death. This worship was not an exclusive worship; it did not destroy or even impair the cults of other divinities; it was only another god added to the celestial hierarchy, another saint canonized; but this particular worship was alone in being universal throughout the Empire and officially sanctioned; in Gaul it was imposed.
It is particularly worthy of attention that the care of the worship of Augustus was assigned to freedmen; the Augustales, whose duty it was in each town to maintain the cult, were to be “libertini”; in Rome the Prætor Peregrinus, the foreigner’s judge, presided over its feasts, and it was associated with the worship of the Lares of the Compitalia, that is to say, with the oratories in the streets at which the slaves paid their devotions. Men of all nationalities driven together as slaves in the great cities, far from their native gods, found a common cult and a common protector in Augustus. It was not long before the worship of Augustus became indistinguishable from the worship of the Empire, and each successive Emperor received divine honours, as manifesting that abstraction; to deny the divinity of the Emperor, to refuse to spill a little wine, or cast a few grains of incense in his honour, was to rebel against the civil organization accepted by mankind; it was as difficult to evade the obligation as for an English soldier to refuse to drink to the health of his sovereign. The Jews alone protested, and for a long while their protest was accepted; they did not pray to the Emperor, but they prayed for him.
Augustus met his worshippers halfway; his own temperament was profoundly religious, as religion was understood by his contemporaries; he substituted the divine right of the Emperor for the divine right of the Senate; he was not a madman like Caligula, jealous of other divinities; on the contrary, he made every effort to restore cults which were being abandoned, and to revive both public and private observances. If he did not believe in his own divinity in the sense which the words would convey to us, he was equally removed from the robust scepticism of Vespasian, who remarked in his last moments: “Bah! I feel I am turning into a god!” His attitude towards his own divinity was a reverential one; it did not encourage him to set human laws at defiance, and flagrantly override the rights of other men; on the contrary he practised a studied humility, and seemed to feel that if he was himself a god, it was incumbent upon him to see that due respect was paid to other members of the same fraternity; in dealing with men he anticipated the Popes in assuming the attitude of the “Servus Servorum Dei.” There was no deliberate imposture, no conscious pose. When Cromwell enumerated to an unruly assembly the successive events in his career which had placed him at the head of affairs, and claimed that they bore witness to a special Providence, he expressed in the language of his time and country the same association of ideas which convinced Octavian that there was something supernatural in the chain of events, in the unbroken success, which had given him power far greater than Cromwell’s. There was no arrogance in the claim; there was humility; he ascribed to powers not his own a series of successes in which a less reverently minded man would have seen nothing but the evidence of his own surpassing ability. It was not merely political astuteness which led him to act in everything as an ordinary citizen, to vote, to ask for votes, to live without magnificence or ostentatious expenditure; such conduct was the result partly of personal inclination, partly of a sense of the infinite smallness of such things as marble columns and silken raiment, costly banquets and trains of servants in comparison with the greatness of the destiny imposed upon him. If at the great shows in the circus he sat on the platform on which were placed the statues of the gods, he did not thereby assert equality with them, but claimed their protection and bore witness to the favour which they bestowed not only on him, but on the people whose destinies he guided with their approbation and in virtue of the powers which they had granted. In the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius we may detect a certain flavour of approbation when these historians tell us that Tiberius or other Emperors refused divine honours or limited them, and we might be tempted to infer from this that the assumption of divinity by the Emperors was contrary to the feeling of the times; but both Tacitus and Suetonius wrote more than a century after Octavian had been declared “Augustus,” and in their days the unitarian faith of the Jews had begun generally to influence the educated classes at Rome; Horace could jest lightly at the Jewish Sabbath; in the time of Suetonius, if it was not observed as a day of rest all over the Empire, as Josephus boasts, it was certainly a well known institution.
It might be urged that whatever the religious attitude of Augustus in other respects, he cannot have believed in his descent from the goddess Venus, and that Virgil’s great poem in all that concerns Æneas and Anchises is conscious imposture. To argue in this way is again to misinterpret polytheism. The faith in Fauns and Satyrs is not absolutely extinct in Italy even today; the survival of such a faith suggested the plot of Hawthorne’s exquisite romance, Transformation. Charles Leland discovered traces of it in Tuscany and Umbria.
The ancients had not arrived at our modern accuracy of definition with regard to the divine and the human, the natural and the supernatural; even the most enlightened contemporary of Augustus might hold a faith as to mixed marriages between gods and men not dissimilar to that held by many orthodox Protestants as to miracles—they might believe that such things did not happen in their own day, but that they had happened. In the curious classification of events affecting the lives of the Emperors adopted by Suetonius a place is always assigned for portents. Xiphilinus, the Christian who epitomized Dio Cassius, apologises for the long lists of portents in his author, and for having cut out the more trivial of these occurrences, but he leaves a large number. Faith in portents is in fact always at hand, and even in these critical days readily springs to life at a favourable opportunity. With the ancients it was universal; in those days, as in our own, men preferred sensation to evidence, and the critical faculty, even when developed, had no very satisfactory apparatus which could be applied. As a rule, the significance of portents was seen after the event which they portended. Then, as now, nurses and mothers recalled remarkable circumstances which had attended the birth and education of children who afterwards became distinguished; and there are few men distinguished or obscure who have not at some period of their lives encountered strange coincidences, or suffered unusual experiences, which, interpreted by the light of subsequent events, may be held to have been fraught with mystery. There is no reasonable doubt that the entrance of Octavian into Rome when he returned to claim his uncle’s inheritance was attended by some unusual disposition of the sun’s rays, possibly a solar halo in which only one of the mock suns was clearly visible, that the event attracted notice at the time, and that it inclined men to believe that the fortunate youth was reserved for a remarkable destiny—an anticipation which led to its own fulfilment. Virgil may well have been in earnest when he hailed the procession of the star of Cæsar and worked up convenient fragments of legends into the Æneid; even if he had occasional misgivings, his inclination was to believe, and to hope that his glorious web was woven in threads of fact.
Faith in his divine ancestry, faith in his divine mission did not enervate Augustus, nor render him unpractical; he treated his power as a sacred trust, and used all the resources of a cool intellect and industrious temperament to further the interests which he believed to have been committed to his charge. We are told that in his later years he liked to believe that there was something superhuman in his glance, and was pleased when men were unable to look him in the face—a weakness which was encouraged by studious flatterers. If this is true, we may well believe that, like many other men and women, he was insensibly influenced by the attitude of those around him, and dropped into the place assigned for him by the universal opinion.
In any case, Augustus, whether in public or private, did nothing to jar upon the prejudices of those who were prepared to believe in his divine mission. He led such a life as has since been led by many of the better Popes, and at least one English statesman. Gossip, always busy with the supposed amatory proclivities of great men, has not spared him in this respect, but even if there were any foundation for the idle stories which have been handed down, the ancients would not have been scandalized; the somewhat coarse pleasantries which have also been attributed to him would have scarcely attracted attention in his own day.
By his peculiar personality Augustus was able to stamp upon the Roman Empire a character which has never left it—he made it a religion as well as a state; and it was due to his work, and to his sense of the sacredness of his work, that there are still men living even in England who cannot feel happy in the regulation of what they believe to be their most important concerns, unless they are assured that their actions are in accordance with the dictates of the authority from across the mountains, which is resident in Rome.
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.