But this was not the time, and Augustus was not the man, for dazzling conquests. “Hasten slowly” was his favourite motto, and his empire policy was founded on the same principle. For the present the Ocean, then called British, was boundary enough. Augustus was reducing the army and Britain would have taken at least a legion to keep it quiet. So Britain had to delay its prospects of civilisation until Gaul and Spain were organised and the German frontier settled. We have the record of British chiefs coming to Rome with unknown petitions during the period, but beyond that there is silence on our island. As for Gaul, Julius had done the work of conquest thoroughly enough, and the Gauls as an adaptable people were taking to Roman civilisation with avidity. There were indeed corners of it not yet enlightened and the whole government required organisation. Augustus went straight to the capital of the old province, Narbonne, and there he arranged a census and a land register, not, as Ferrero observes, out of mere statistical curiosity. Probably no tribute had come in from Gaul during the civil wars, and Augustus was much concerned with finance. For the moment an outbreak in Spain called the emperor away, but five years later he returned to complete his work. The old province, which has passed into history as Provence, was now handed back to the senate as completely pacified, and the rest of Gaul was eventually divided into three parts: Aquitania, the half-Spanish south-west; Lugdunensis (the east and centre stretching right across France with its capital Lyons or Lugdunum on its eastern border); and Belgica (the northern part with Trier—Augusta Treverorum, not yet founded—and Rheims as its chief towns). This division was mainly, though not entirely, based on racial considerations. Together the three formed one of Cæsar’s provinces as Gallia Comata.

The treatment of the conquered land was wise and humane. Druidical religion, already a waning force, was permitted to exist, though it included human sacrifice and was hostile to the Romans. In the reign of Claudius it was forbidden. But other native deities were actually encouraged by the state, and Augustus himself built an altar to some strange Gallic spirits. But side by side with the native religion he fostered the new cult, as in Asia, of “Rome and Augustus.” There had always been tribal councils which culminated in a great national gathering at Lugdunum once a year. Apparently the presiding priests had been elected from the well-born natives and were in opposition to the Druids. Augustus made skilful use of this organisation and fostered it in order to make it a centre for Roman patriotism. He set up a great altar at Lugdunum inscribed “to Rome and Augustus.” It was constructed in a sacred grove, and was surrounded by statues emblematic of the sixty Gallic tribes. The elected priest had to be a Roman citizen of Gallic birth. It soon became a distinction coveted by the grandsons of those who had fought against Julius. This is very characteristic of the systematic empire-building which went on in the days of Augustus. Lugdunum rose to be a great imperial city, the only city in Gaul which possessed full Roman citizenship and had a mint of its own. From it a great and elaborate road system radiated to all parts of France very much in the same directions as the modern railways. Schools were founded and the study of Latin encouraged though not enforced. The Gauls took very ardently to their new studies, displaying in particular a remarkable faculty for rhetoric. The principle came into force that when a town or district could show that it spoke Latin it received important rights of citizenship, including that great privilege, the use of Roman law. The land system of Gaul differed essentially from that of Italy in that it was based on tribes and cantons instead of cities. Already the towns were growing as centres for the tribes, but to this day many of the names of French cities are those of tribes rather than towns: thus Lutetia of the Parisii is Paris, Durocortorum of the Remi is Rheims, Divodurum of the Mediomatrici is Metz, and Agedincum of the Senones is Sens. The tribute ultimately fixed was a high one but on the whole justly regulated. It is probable that the ugly story of Licinius and his extortions is told as an exceptional occurrence. In any case Gaul was taught how to grow rich and prosperous. Mines of silver and gold were successfully exploited, the culture of flax was encouraged, and the soil was found to be admirably suited to cereal crops. Gaul became a hive of industry and a source of ever-increasing wealth. She purchased oil and wine from Italy as well as the articles of Eastern luxury which passed through the hands of Roman merchants. A 2½ per cent. duty was charged at the frontier both on imports and exports. Such were some of the methods by which the Romanisation of Gaul was effected, and the foundations so well and truly laid that through all the invasions of Franks and Burgundians, Gaul remained Roman in speech and thought, and remains so to this day.[46]

Of all the momentous problems which Augustus had to face, the delimitation of the northern frontier was the weightiest. It has always been one of the disputed questions of Roman history, why Augustus, who was generally so cautious and so unwilling to embark upon adventures, deliberately chose to cross the Rhine and plunge into those impenetrable forests of whose dangers and difficulties Julius Cæsar had left so clear a warning. Was it his aim to forestall the danger of a German invasion of Gaul? On the other hand, the Rhine might well seem a sufficient frontier, as indeed for many centuries it was. Was it his aim to exercise his troops in difficult warfare and perhaps secure military renown for the young men whom he had destined for the succession? These are scarcely adequate motives for a man like Augustus. Did he hope to acquire wealth out of Germany as he had done out of Gaul? He must have known that the virgin forests and undrained morasses of Germany would scarcely balance the difficulties and dangers of a campaign there, and that the Germans were far behind their Gallic cousins in civilisation. The problem seems to me insoluble unless we accept the theory that the whole scheme was part of the search for a natural strategic frontier undertaken with false notions of geography. It is certain that many of the ancients believed that they would find the Ocean again where Russia is, and that the Caspian Sea was part of it. In that case the Romans may have hoped to round off their empire satisfactorily in this direction. It would explain the curious tactics by which Roman expeditions crossing the Rhine and plunging into the heart of Germany ordered their fleets to coast along the Dutch and Danish shores.

From whatever motives it was undertaken, this penetration of Germany and its ultimate failure was a fact of vast consequence in the history of Europe. From one point of view the history of Europe may be described as a record of the various relations between the Roman and the German elements, with occasional incursions from the Celtic or Turanian fringes. It is one long contest between Latin and Teutonic race, religion, language, law, and ideas political and economic. Hence it is impossible to overrate the importance of the moment when the first round of that age-long contest was fought out and settled. Hidden among the forests in those mysterious wildernesses beyond the Rhine were the numerous tribes who were destined one day to form the nations of Europe. Here were the Saxons of Saxony and England, the Swabians, the Franks, the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Goths, the Lombards, and many others, yet unnamed, the germs of the nations.

It was by no means their first entrance on the stage of history. We believe that the dominant races of historical Greece, and perhaps of historical Rome, traced back their ancestry to the central regions of Europe. Since then history had recorded several alarming incursions of northern barbarians, and in a general sense the story of the Mediterranean peoples shows how wave after wave of strong warriors from the North descended upon the fertile peninsulas of the South, which always absorbed and assimilated them, until finally they became a prey to the enervating influences of climate, melted into the native strain, and had to make room for a fresh wave of untamed northerners. Read in this light, extraordinary interest attaches to the moment when all-conquering Rome attempted to conquer the wilds which sheltered these mighty tribes. If she had succeeded in taming and Romanising the Germans also, as she had done with the Spaniards and Gauls, the course of history might have been very different. But even then, though she knew it not, behind the Teutonic peoples lay the Slavs, and behind them the Tartars and the Huns. The task of civilising the world from a single centre was impossible. Augustus would have been wiser to choose a strong frontier first and then proceed gradually by peaceful penetration. Probably Augustus judged that the policy of buffer states which he had applied in the East was not applicable to barbarians. As it was, conquest was the method he selected, contrary to his usual custom and contrary to his natural inclination. Herein success led to over-confidence and so to disaster.

We always term the people over the wall “barbarians,” but the Germans had their various political and social systems and some of their tribes were more civilised than others. By comparing the Commentaries of Cæsar with the Germania of Tacitus we get a fairly comprehensive notion of German institutions, which, it must be remembered, were those of our own ancestors. They had no cities. Like the Gauls they were grouped in tribes and the tribes were subdivided into cantons, the cantons into villages. They lived on the produce of their flocks and herds, on the chase, and on a primitive type of “extensive” agriculture, which involved fresh ploughlands every year and thus caused continual unrest and jostling of tribe against tribe. This was what made them such troublesome neighbours to the Gauls, and led to those gigantic “treks” which meet us from time to time in history. Their only political system was a fighting organisation; hereditary chiefs and princes led them in battle and the general in a large movement was elected from amongst the princes by the freemen of the tribe. In peace there was no general magistracy, but the elders and priests administered justice in the villages. Among the warriors there was a rough freedom and equality. The free warrior had very considerable rights, but only as a warrior. Among the Suevi, according to Cæsar, there were a hundred cantons, each of which furnished a thousand men to the army for a year’s service while the rest stayed at home to carry on agriculture and hunting. But this seems, if it is accurate, to be an exceptional degree of organisation. The chastity, the patriotism, the honesty of these barbarians as well as their courage and gigantic stature were favourite themes for Roman eloquence. It is likely enough that Tacitus heightened their virtues with his satirical instinct in order to point a moral to his fellow-countrymen.

Julius Cæsar had left the Rhine as the frontier of his Gallic provinces, though he had crossed it twice by way of reconnaissance. Quite at the beginning of Augustus’s presidency, the Suevi had had to be chased back across the Rhine, and the Treveri across the Moselle. At this time, Germany was still for administrative purposes a part of the Gallic provinces, and as a rule there was some high officer in charge of both. The Rhine was not impassable to the barbarians, and moreover there were Germanic tribes on both sides of it, such as the Treveri of Trier and the Ubii of Cologne, who were in frequent intercourse with their neighbours on the other side. This made the river a somewhat insufficient boundary. There were inroads of German barbarians in 29, 25, 20 and 16 B.C. In the latter case a Roman legate was surprised and defeated, and the eagle of the Fifth Legion carried off in triumph.

This brought Augustus to the spot, and he spent two years in studying the problems of Gaul and Germany. In 12 B.C. the first campaign was undertaken under the command of Drusus, his younger stepson. Drusus, who was not yet twenty-five, was the most brilliant figure of his day, brave, handsome, virtuous, adored by the soldiers, and a thoroughly capable general. On this occasion he crossed the Rhine and descended into Dutch territory, laying waste the lands of the Sygambri and the other hostile tribes who had provoked these punitive measures. He accepted the submission of the Frisians who lived on the coast of North Holland. During the winter his troops seem to have been employed in cutting a canal from the Rhine to the Zuyder Zee. Next year he crossed again, marched on, and threw a bridge across the Lippe, crossed the territory of the Cherusci—the most warlike of all the tribes—and halted on the banks of the Weser. He built a great fort at the junction of the Lippe and the Alme or Ems, and cut a highway along the banks of the Lippe to join the new fort Aliso with a great camp on the Rhine near Xanten. In the next year there was more building and settling, and in 9 B.C. came the great effort. Drusus marched out into Suabia and Cheruscia, crossed the Weser, ravaging everywhere, and reached the Elbe. This river he essayed to cross, but he could not, and, as the historians put it, omens appeared to forbid further progress. This then was the Roman limit. Somewhere between the Saale and the Weser, Drusus fell from his horse and sustained injuries which resulted in his death. Augustus, though greatly grieved, determined to continue his operations. Tiberius was sent to continue the work, and 40,000 Sygambrians were transported into Roman territory.

We know little of the work of the next dozen years. Another legate reached the Elbe. A great viaduct was constructed between the Ems and the Rhine. During this period the pacification was apparently proceeding with rapidity. Many of the young Germans came into the Roman camp and learnt Roman ways and Latin speech. The head-quarters were still at Vetera Castra near Xanten and at Mogontiacum (Mainz), with summer quarters at Aliso. In A.D. 4 fresh campaigns were undertaken by Tiberius. For many of these expeditions the Roman historians offer no excuse or justification. They record with pride the immense slaughter and devastation that accompanied them. It is hard to resist the conclusion that much of this fighting was undertaken for its own sake, or to exercise the legions. In A.D. 5 the greatest expedition of all was undertaken. There was a great “durbar” at which the wild Chauci and Cherusci handed in their weapons and did obeisance to the Roman general. The Langobardi—later known as the Lombards—submitted, and Tiberius crossed the Elbe itself, while the fleet which had “circumnavigated the recesses of the Ocean” sailed up the river to meet the army with supplies. All seemed to be going well: Germany was nearly conquered. There only remained the powerful kingdom of the Marcomanni under King Marbod, who dwelt in the fastnesses of Bohemia. Marbod was an able ruler who alone in Germany had succeeded in establishing a strong throne, and had drilled a powerful army of 70,000 foot and 4000 horse. As the historian Velleius observes, his Alpine boundaries were only two hundred miles from Italy, and this formidable power was a real menace to the safety of the empire. Accordingly elaborate plans were made for his destruction by an invasion from three sides at once. Unfortunately just at the moment when the armies were converging upon their prey, there broke out the great Pannonian and Illyrian revolt of A.D. 6, which brought all the tribes of Austria down upon the Romans. It was one of the most dangerous moments in Roman history. Fifteen legions were employed against them, and the military resources of the Empire strained almost to breaking-point. Luckily for Rome, Marbod made no attempt to join the revolt, and the barbarians were under divided leadership. Germanicus, the son of Drusus, helped Tiberius to crush them, but it took three or four years to accomplish it.

Meanwhile Germany itself had to be content with inferior legates. Quintilius Varus was one of those amiable men who cause mutinies by kindness. He fancied that Germany was tranquil. He went about founding cities, holding assizes, collecting tribute and giving justice according to Roman law precisely “as if he had been a city prætor in the Forum at Rome and not a general in the German forests.” Accordingly in A.D. 9 a plot was hatched against him. He was enticed away into the recesses of the Saltus Teutoburgiensis and slaughtered. Then the Cheruscan army swept down upon the three Roman legions and destroyed them.

In itself the disaster was not overwhelming. Three legions had perished, but fifteen more, flushed with their recent victory over the Illyrians, were at hand to avenge them. The Cheruscans immediately submitted and Germanicus found no serious opposition when he penetrated Germany on an errand of chastisement. But for Augustus the reverse was decisive. He was now an old enfeebled man. When he heard of the disaster he beat his head against the wall and was often heard to cry: “Varus, give me back my legions.” He saw that there was no end to these adventures in the forest and no profit in them. As a frontier the Elbe was no better than the Rhine. Therefore he had the supremely good sense to accept the Rhine as his frontier. Henceforth Rhine and Danube with roads and forts along them, and with special arrangements to strengthen the angle where the rivers run small—that should be bulwark enough for the present. And so it was.

The patriotism of German historians has made of this defeat of Varus rather more than it deserves. Arminius the young Cheruscan who led the attack was a patriot though a traitor. He had been, says Velleius, a faithful ally in previous campaigns and had even attained Roman citizenship and equestrian rank. He spoke Latin fluently. His very name is most probably a Latin cognomen, though the patriotism of the Germans will call him “Hermann.” So the German student of to-day sings over his beer:

It was not half so gallant an act of revolt as that of our British lady, Boadicea, but it had the merit of success. The Germans were able to develop their strength behind the artificial ramparts of the Rhine and Danube until the time came for them to burst through in conquest.

It is commonly said that Augustus immediately after A.D. 9 formed two provinces called Upper and Lower Germany along the Rhine as if to conceal his loss of the real Germany. This is not exact. In the warfare of Tiberius’s days the historians speak only of the Upper or the Lower Army in Germany, and Augustus in his monument speaks of Germany in the singular. Under Tiberius ample revenge was taken for the defeat and Germanicus again and again traversed Germany. The Varus disaster was only one of the episodes which decided the Romans to halt at the Rhine. Aliso was long retained as an outpost, and colonies of Roman veterans were planted on German soil. The Cheruscans and Arminius were defeated in a tremendous battle at Idistavisus near Minden on the Weser in A.D. 16. But on the way back the Roman fleet was shipwrecked and a great many prisoners fell into the hands of the Germans. Some of these were sold as slaves to the Britons and many eventually returned to Rome bringing back marvellous stories of their adventures. As for Marbod, he was defeated in a battle with the Cheruscans and took refuge on Roman soil, where he lived for eighteen years at Ravenna. Arminius, his conqueror, began to play the tyrant in his native tribe and was slain by the treachery of his kinsmen at the age of thirty-seven. His wife Thusnelda and his son had long ago fallen into the hands of the Romans and the boy grew up as a Roman citizen.

The headquarters of the Rhine legions continued to be at Mainz and Xanten with summer quarters at the new Colonia which became Cologne. Four legions of the Upper Army were stationed at the former, and four of the Lower Army at the latter. In due course, we cannot say when, these became the centres of two separate provinces. On the Danube there were three legions in Pannonia, the great new Austrian province. Along this frontier there was now a double line of Cæsarian provinces. Rhætia and Noricum were conquered in 15 B.C. Then there were tedious and unprofitable campaigns in the southern Swiss valleys as the result of which a row of little Alpine prefectures was established. There is still a fine monument to Augustus on the heights above Monaco enumerating forty-six Alpine tribes made subject to Rome. It was erected by the gratitude of the Italian farmers, for the Alpine tribes had always scourged the plains. Roads were constructed here and there over the Alps. The principal pass to Germany lay by way of Turin and the St. Bernard with Augusta (Aosta) to guard it. In Pannonia the old route from Aquilegia over the Julian Alps was restored and a new Via Claudia constructed up the valley of the Adige from Tridentum (Trent) to Augusta (Augsburg). To round off the Danube frontier Mœsia or Mysia was conquered quite at the beginning of the period and added as an Imperial province, probably in A.D. 6, under a prefect. It stretched along the south bank of the Danube, down to the Black Sea, and embraced part of the Balkan high lands. Thus with strong legions posted in permanent encampments all along the Rhine and Danube, Rome had now a satisfactory northern frontier which only required guarding to keep Rome and Italy in security.

Spain had never been entirely subjugated though it had been in the possession of the Republic for nearly two centuries. Parts of it indeed were almost as Roman as Rome. Gades and Corduba, for example, were centres of learning and literature, soon to produce citizens of renown in Lucan, Seneca, Martial, Quintilian, and an emperor in Trajan—a most distinguished galaxy. But a great part of Spain was still in the hands of wild and chivalrous barbarians. Particularly in the north-west the Cantabrians and Asturians were a menace to the peaceful province. For eight years and more the Romans continued to fight them with brief intervals termed “victories.” Augustus himself came over in 26 B.C. and directed operations comfortably from Tarraco. The leader of the rebels was a hero-chief called Corocotta who so exasperated the Romans that

Augustus offered £10,000 for his capture. This sum the brigand earned by walking into the Roman camp to surrender, and Augustus, charmed at the idea, gave him his liberty as well as the reward. He married a Roman wife and died a Roman citizen as Gaius Julius Caracuttus. Cæsar himself fell seriously ill in the course of the long campaign. Both sides increased in ferocity. The Romans crucified their prisoners and the Spaniards mocked them from the cross. Finally Augustus had to send for Agrippa to finish the business, which he did in 19 B.C. Now Spain was really conquered for ever and even the northern highlanders laid down their arms and accepted civilisation. Bætica, the southern part of the peninsula, was given to the senate to govern, and the northern half divided into the two imperial provinces, Tarraconensis and Lusitania, the latter corresponding roughly to modern Portugal. In Spain also altars were erected to Rome and Augustus. Roads radiated out from Tarraco. Many towns were founded, such as Cæsar Augusta (Saragossa), Augusta Emerita (Merida), Pax Julia (Beja), Legiones (Leon), Asturica Augusta (Astorga). The Celtic religion and probably the very language quickly became extinct. Even in the time of Augustus there were fifty communities with full Roman citizenship. New mines were discovered and vigorously worked, new industries, especially in metal, carefully fostered.

This brief and imperfect sketch of the Roman Empire, as it took shape under the all-seeing eye of Augustus, should indicate, more than all the triumphs she won in battle, more, even, than the story of the Punic Wars, the real “Grandeur that was Rome.” The true greatness of the Roman lies in his indomitable energy and his practical good sense, not to be obscured by the surface of rhetorical culture which had come to overlay it in these latter generations. Now that Rome had at last secured for herself a reasonably secure and sensible form of government, she was able to exercise her natural capacity for affairs and to play the part which destiny had assigned to her of propagating civilisation throughout Europe. If the historians would allow us, we should gladly turn away from the wars and proscriptions to study the quiet useful work which she was performing now and henceforth in every corner of her empire. The motive was, no doubt, self-interest, but it was that broad and far-seeing selfishness which in the realm of public affairs is the nearest approach to altruism. The Republic that sucked the blood of her provinces is detestable to all right-thinking men. The autocracy that cleared out the canals in Egypt, planted flax and encouraged pottery in Gaul, irrigated Africa and taught agriculture to the Moorish nomads, set the wild Iberians to mining and weaving, built aqueducts and roads everywhere, established a postal system and policed land and sea so effectively that a man might fare from York to Palmyra, or from Trier to Morocco “with his bosom full of gold,” may be tyranny governing in its own interests, but it is an institution for which the world has every reason to be grateful.

V

AUGUSTAN ROME

THROUGHOUT his great task of repairing a world which had fallen to pieces, Augustus was by no means ignorant of the fact that it is the “spirit that maketh alive.” Indeed it was his constant endeavour to alter facts without changing their names. He was well aware that Sulla had failed miserably when he tossed the Romans a constitution and left nothing but an oath to support it. To adjust frontiers and organise new provinces with the help of his trusty and invincible little legionaries was probably the pleasantest and the easiest part of Cæsar’s task. To reform the ancient imperial city with her centuries of proud and brutal tradition was equally essential, but it was desperate work. For the Empire of Augustus was born into the world suffering from degeneration of the heart. The nobility, upon which everything that was great and glorious in Roman history depended, was morally corrupt, intellectually inert, spiritually void, and even physically decrepit and sterile. The civil wars and proscriptions had systematically pruned away all that was virile and spirited in its ranks. The trimmers and nonentities had survived. The women, long since deprived of the iron control which had kept them in order under the old system of the Roman family, dominated society with an influence that was generally evil. The Roman boudoir with its throng of slaves and parasites was not only profligate, but it had already begun to produce the type of murderous intriguers which we meet more prominently in the Messalinas and Faustinas of imperial history. But as there were virtuous exceptions like Octavia and Agrippina among the women, so there were among the men a few nobles of probity and honour who had somehow, probably by hiding themselves away on their country estates, survived all the conflicts of the past generation. But these, who read Roman history in the same light as Livy, were lovers of the old regime, suspicious and bitterly jealous of the new. We have seen that one of the first official acts of Augustus was to restore the patriciate. But it is easier to make peers than patricians, and we may be sure that there was little love between the old aristocracy and the new. Augustus himself, though the “son of the god Julius” and descended through his mother from Venus and Anchises, was on the father’s side only just respectable. By nature and instinct, however, he was an aristocrat. All his life long he strove to win over the aristocracy to the support of his regime. But he failed, and failed disastrously. Whence throughout the history of the Empire we have in existence more or less prominently a conservative opposition of old nobles, genuine or spurious, sometimes plotting manfully and dying nobly, but more often sneering and writing in secret against the emperors.

But most of the old aristocracy lacked the spirit to oppose Augustus. The few plots which came to light were contemptible affairs. Some of the nobles came down to the senate and devoted their intellects to the choice of a new cognomen for the new Cæsar, or vied with one another in proposing fresh titles of honour for him. But they soon discovered that flattery was not very lucrative in the face of their chilly and statuesque master. Politics at Rome had lost their savour when there was no chance of blood to follow. The noble senators had to be coerced into attending at the curia; they devoted their gifts to drawing-room battles, they collected objets de luxe, they wrote bad verses and sometimes bad histories, and they practised all the vices. They had no religion and very little philosophy. Above all the old Roman family upon which the piers of Roman society had rested was now in ruins. To be the husband of one wife from marriage to death was, so far as the records go, a rare exception. This was no innovation of the Empire. For a century or more men had changed their wives every few years for the sake of a fortune or a political alliance.

Augustus set before himself, as one of the most important phases of his task of regeneration, the moral purification of this society. He had provided the provinces with a new religion which involved a new social organisation. But the cloak of republicanism in which he had chosen to drape his autocracy forbade him to make himself a god in Rome. On the contrary he steadily forbade extravagant flattery. He was not even to be called “dominus.” It is true that the mayors of the new boroughs into which he divided Rome were allowed to set up altars to the Lares and Genius of Augustus.[47] Outside the city throughout Italy there were temples to Augustus and priests in his service. As usual it was a mere quibble when he declined divine honours in Rome. Vergil had plainly called him a god at the very moment when he was dyeing his hands in Roman blood. Julius Cæsar had been formally deified and Augustus regularly styled himself “divi filius.” The title of “augustus” itself carried the notion of transcendent power. Thus the emperor stood on the threshold of heaven, at any rate for the poorer classes, even in Rome itself. But for the aristocracy something else was needed: it is of little profit to claim divinity in a society of atheists. For Roman society, as typified by Ovid, the gods were little more than a literary convention, and it would do a respectable man little credit to be enrolled in their company.

For the reformation of Roman society Augustus had recourse to three methods—legislation, culture, and example. The legislation consisted of a whole series of laws solemnly passed through senate and comitia in the years 18 and 17 B.C. To give them additional sanctity they were called Julian laws. There was one enacting heavier penalties for adultery, another permitting marriage between citizens and freedwomen, designed to meet the circumstance that men outnumbered women in the ranks of the aristocracy. There were also sumptuary laws to curb extravagance. There were laws imposing penalties on celibacy and discouraging the fortune-hunters who lay in wait for the rich bachelor’s legacies. Fiscal privileges were granted to the fathers of families, and Augustus himself went down to the house and read the senate an old speech of Metellus on the increase of population. Unfortunately the emperor himself had not set a good example in the matter of parentage. He had had three wives but only one child, a daughter. Still he exhibited himself in the theatre in the capacity of a father by collecting the children of Germanicus about his knees. Of course legislation proved quite helpless in the matter, besides arousing a good deal of ill-feeling which was chiefly displayed in the ranks of the knights.

Augustus was in a very difficult position when it came to setting an example. The principal evils which his social code was designed to remedy were the prevalence of adultery, the frequency of divorce, voluntary celibacy and formal marriages contracted without intention of producing offspring, and finally, as a consequence of celibacy, the prevalence of a regular profession of fortune-hunting. There was scarcely one of these necessary reforms to which Cæsar himself came with clean hands. He had begun his matrimonial career by repudiating his young betrothed; he had then married an immature virgin, and divorced her for political reasons before the marriage was consummated; in the third place he had married Scribonia, who had already had two husbands, and whose son was already a man at the time of her marriage to Augustus. She was many years older than he, and the marriage was intended to secure a reconciliation with Sextus Pompeius. This third matrimonial venture was terminated in a manner which shocked even Roman society.

On the very day when Scribonia became a mother by him, Augustus put her away charging her with immorality, though he kept her infant Julia as his own and only child. He had been fascinated, it seems, by the fair face and brilliant abilities of Livia Drusilla. Livia was of the highest ancestry in Rome, a descendant of Appius Claudius, and attached by adoption to another very noble family, the Livii. Also she had married another scion of the illustrious Claudian house, the proudest in Rome, and at the age of fifteen had become the mother of Tiberius. Her father had chosen the losing side at Philippi, and committed suicide after the battle. Her husband, Claudius Nero, had taken arms against Augustus—or Octavian, as he then was—in the Perusine War, and his life was forfeited. His beautiful wife sued the conqueror for mercy, and mercy was granted upon conditions. Nero was compelled not only to divorce his wife, but to act the part of a father and give her away in marriage to Augustus. She was then not only the mother of Tiberius, but just about to become the mother of Drusus, who was born in the house of Augustus three months after the marriage. This, then, was the model family on the Palatine which was to set an example to the Roman aristocracy—a daughter whose mother had been divorced on the day of her birth, a mother who had been sold by her husband, and two stepsons whose father had been divorced. The sequel scarcely improved matters. Julia grew up and was married first to the boy Marcellus, then to Agrippa, by whom she had a large family, and when Agrippa died, Tiberius was forced to put away his wife, Agrippa’s daughter Vipsania, whom he really loved, and marry the widow Julia, whose immorality he knew and detested. At last the profligacy of Julia grew so open and notorious that Augustus was informed of it and compelled to banish her in company with her mother Scribonia, who had survived to see her shame. Later on a second Julia, the daughter of the first, suffered a precisely similar fate.

As for Livia the empress, if we choose to call her by that title, there is no doubt that she was a singularly beautiful and clever woman, who managed to retain the affections of Augustus for over forty years—in itself a remarkable feat in Roman society. History records in her favour many acts of royal mercy and charity. She seconded her husband’s efforts at reform, and established a powerful ascendancy over him and over Tiberius. There is no whisper against her chastity when once she entered the household of Augustus. But on the other hand there are very serious charges of crime made by contemporaries and recorded by Tacitus, charges which are supported by the strongest circumstantial evidence. The suspicion is that she was fighting all her life long without remorse or scruple for the succession of her son Tiberius. Augustus did not intend to be succeeded by a Claudius. This he showed again and again in the most public manner. His aim, as soon as he knew that he was destined to leave no male offspring of his own body, was to leave the succession in the sacred Julian line, the family descended from Venus, the house of the star. But that could only be secured through the female line. His first choice was the brilliant young Marcellus, son of his sister Octavia. Marcellus, who had been the first husband of Julia, died of a mysterious complaint just as he came of age. Then Augustus married Julia to Agrippa, and two of her sons, Gaius and Lucius, were next chosen for the succession. They grew up and came of age. Just as they were beginning public life, Tiberius having been banished to make way for them, they too died in the same year, Lucius on board ship as he was sailing to Marseilles, Gaius as the sequel to an assassin’s blow given him in Armenia. In the first case we have no details. In the second, Gaius was recovering from his wound, but he turned aside to an obscure town on the southern coast of Asia Minor, refused the warship which had been sent to convey him home, and begged to be allowed to live there in obscurity. The circumstance is full of suspicion and mystery. Moreover, before his rivals were dead Tiberius had word, from a well-informed prophet, of their approaching decease, and returned to Rome. He himself, living in banishment, must be acquitted of active complicity in the crime. Julia was banished to a lonely island. Her third son was also put out of sight for no crime but sulkiness and grumbling against his stepmother. Deprived of all his hopes, Augustus with very marked reluctance adopted Tiberius, but in his old age he still cherished the idea of a reconciliation with Julia’s third son, Agrippa Postumus, and actually visited in secret the remote island where he was interned. But as soon as Augustus was dead—and his death was carefully concealed as long as possible—Agrippa Postumus was murdered, and this time we have direct evidence that the crime was Livia’s. This sort of domestic intrigue, marked by hideous murders, is one of the blackest features of imperial history at Rome. It arose very largely from the illegitimate character of the imperial throne, and the absence of any legalised system of succession.

Nevertheless, out of these unpromising materials Augustus endeavoured to organise a model Roman family of the old style. Livia and Julia were set to work at spinning and weaving. Augustus would wear no cloaks but of their making. Julia was solemnly counselled never to do or say anything which she would be ashamed to write in her diary. Once when she built a palace for herself Augustus had it demolished. The house on the Palatine was of the simplest character, with a humble portico of the local tufa from Alba and no decorated pavements. In food and drink he was most abstemious, and indeed the prodigious industry of his life left little time for banquets. A slice of bread made from inferior flour, with a relish of pickled fish or dates or olives, often served him for the day. He never drank more than a pint of wine. He slept winter and summer in the same room, and spent most of the year in the city, unless he was travelling. His favourite country seat was on the island of Capri where he could be sure of freedom. His pleasures were simple and almost childish. He liked a little mild gambling, he was fond of playing knuckle-bones with little slave-boys. He attended the circus as a matter of duty and was very strict in enforcing decency of behaviour there. He set his face against changes of fashion and insisted that Roman citizens should wear the old-fashioned toga in public. All his instincts seem to have been for simplicity and clemency. He never permitted a freedman to appear at his dinner-table, but when a slave of his once pushed his master into the way of a charging wild boar in order to shield himself Augustus dismissed the matter with a joke. On the other hand, when the tutor and servants of Gaius showed themselves tyrannical and overbearing to the provincials after their young master’s death, Cæsar had them drowned like rats. Towards personal abuse of himself he was singularly indifferent. It remains difficult to visualise the character of Augustus. Originally he was a typical Roman, as callous towards bloodshed and suffering as the rest of them and quite unscrupulous in his progress towards power. But when he had attained it he had the greatness of mind to perceive that his work of repair could only be done by setting an example of virtuous living and moderation. Self-control was perhaps his most powerful quality.

Twice his self-command broke down. Once when he heard of the defeat of Varus in Germany with the loss of his three legions, and again when some one, probably Livia, revealed to him the scandal concerning Julia. Apart from the blow to his honour as a man, it was the undoing of all his measures for reform and the open publication of their futility. “Her orgies,” men said, “had been conducted upon the very rostra whence her father’s laws against adultery had been proclaimed.” Her accomplices included the flower of the old aristocracy, a Scipio and a Gracchus. Augustus hid himself from the sight of men, banished his daughter to a remote island and officially informed the senate by letter of her disgrace. He was heard to cry out that he envied the father of Phœbe, one of Julia’s slaves who had hanged herself when the scandal went abroad. He quoted a Greek verse:

and he spoke of his wicked daughter as the cancer of his life.

Legislation was obviously futile, and example had broken down. It was only from within that Roman society could be reformed, only by supplying a spiritual influence which could counteract the materialism and immorality of the day. Augustus had tried in the provinces to raise up a new religion of loyalty and patriotism centred round the altar “to Rome and Augustus.” But that was obviously impossible in Rome itself. The only inspiring motive—in addition to Stoicism which could never be a popular creed—had been, for the last two or three centuries, patriotism, the worship of the sacred city and her glorious destinies. But even that had been shattered by the civil wars. Augustus now set himself deliberately to the task of creating a new Rome and a new Roman culture. He himself, like most of the nobles of his day, had received a Greek education. It was what we should call a good classical education in philosophy, literature, and rhetoric. Besides that he had been initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries at Athens, and they were probably the most powerful source of inspiration in the Mediterranean world, for even eclectics like Cicero admitted that they carried with them a hope of immortality. Augustus was himself deeply imbued with Greek culture and like most Roman nobles had dabbled in literature. Thus it is not surprising that the type of civilisation which he fostered in the new Rome was quite as much Greek as Italian. The age of Augustus was in fact the culmination of Græco-Roman culture alike in arts and letters because the fusion between the two races was now complete.

Elsewhere I have ventured to rebel against the current practice in history of subordinating the arts to politics and declaring that artistic production depends upon political facts. It is not so. Literary and artistic results are due to literary and artistic causes. The Roman literary language had only just attained perfection. Cicero had perfected it for prose, and it only remained for poetry to produce a Vergil. Everybody at Rome from Augustus downwards was busily writing hexameters in his spare time, and the recitals which were given at every dinner-party formed one of the social inflictions of the day. Just as Julius Cæsar and Cicero had thrown off their epics, so the great men of the succeeding age were poets—Augustus, Pollio, Mæcenas, Gallus, and all of them except Agrippa. But alongside of these distinguished amateurs, professional literary men of humble birth were now coming to the front. Vergil and Horace are not originally the products of the Augustan age, for they were both established poets before it began. But the conditions of art at Rome were such that a professional man of letters depended very closely upon a patron. That was the tradition handed on from the days of Plautus, when the writers had nearly always been foreign slaves or clients. Cicero, Cæsar, Lucretius, and Catullus had not been of the client class. They had flourished in that brief interval when it still seemed possible for Rome to develop a genuine free literature of her own. But that possibility had been killed like so many other hopes by the civil wars, and now the choice lay mainly between distinguished scribblers or obsequious literary craftsmen. Thus we get a second courtly period of literature like that of the Ptolemies at Alexandria, like that of Louis XIV. or of our own Stuart age when poets wrote to please individual patrons. The patron, if he be a man of taste, generally demands a very high degree of finish, and thus it is the courtly ages which produce the finished craftsmanship. It may be remarked that the ages of private patronage have given the world much of its greatest literature.

In the age of Augustus there was no censorship of letters such as generally prevailed under the stricter emperors of later days. Livy was permitted to publish his great history without curtailment of its strong republican tendency. When libels and pasquinades appeared against Cæsar he was content to contradict them in a proclamation. Nevertheless he made his influence weightily felt in the world of letters. He gave more than £10,000 to Varius for a tragedy which posterity has not thought worth while to preserve. He was himself a kindly and patient listener at the recitation of poems and history, speeches and dialogues, which formed the usual mode of first publication in those days. He only insisted that his own deeds should not form the subject of trivial composition by inferior authors. Horace appears at first to have been warned off from treatment of imperial politics. Vergil too in his early days received a hint not to sing of wars and kings. But later on both these writers were explicitly enlisted in the service of the state. In this part of the work Mæcenas was the emperor’s chief agent. Mæcenas, whose name has come to symbolise literary patronage, was a wealthy noble of an old Etruscan family who was content, like Cicero’s friend Atticus, to pull the wires of state largely by keeping generous hospitality and knowing all the important characters of his day. Luxurious and effeminate in his tastes, he gathered a group of talented authors round his table, and very distinctly suggested to them the lines upon which he desired them to work. Vergil, Varius, Horace, and Propertius were members of his salon. Another noble of high lineage, M. Valerius Messalla, maintained a rival coterie whose most prominent member was the elegiac poet Tibullus. Vergil, a half-Italian native of Mantua, who was not even a citizen by birth, had sprung into fame with his Bucolics, a series of pastoral idylls in the style of Theocritus. But though he was a provincial by birth, though he writes of shepherds and sings pathetically of his ancestral farm, nothing is more untrue than to regard him as a son of the soil, or an inspired ploughboy after the manner of Robert Burns. On the contrary he had received an elaborate education in the style of the day under Greek masters at Cremona, Milan, and Rome. He was steeped in Greek philosophy and letters. His shepherds are not the unsophisticated rustics of the Mantuan plain. They are shepherds “à la Watteau,” borrowed from the pages of Theocritus, and though many a brilliant epithet displays the Italian’s loving observation of nature, the background of the work is artificial and literary rather than rustic or natural. His shepherds, like Sidney’s, talk politics under a transparent disguise, which is often extremely incongruous.