essential Roman than all the rest of Roman literature put together. We have the innocent pleading of the April lover in:

and the awful simplicity of his wrath at betrayal:

We have a more genuine-sounding love of nature in his praises of Sirmio, and a more natural pathos in the famous lament for his brother, than any other Latin poet can give us. In one species of composition, the Epithalamium, he is supreme. For example:

The music of this, with its beautiful imagery and refrains, is no doubt based upon an Alexandrian foundation. There is a distinct echo of Theocritus. But it is also distinctively Italian, and the greatest of modern Italian poets, Carducci, writes like a legitimate descendant of Catullus. Catullus has as little biography as Lucretius. He must have died at an early age in the fifties B.C. He was a poor man. He had only a town house and two villas, one on the Lago di Garda and one at Tivoli. He hated Cæsar and loved Cicero. That his “Lesbia” was the infamous Clodia is generally asserted. I do not believe it.

These two poets, Lucretius and Catullus, then, stand almost alone as representatives of Republican Roman literature on the poetical side. Both are Romanising various Alexandrian Greek modes, but both have something genuinely Roman, a quality which we may best describe as virility, to add to their originals. This was the point from which a genuine Roman literature might have taken its departure. Instead of that, the next era is that of a courtly school of classicists, largely writing to order, who gave to Latin its distinctively classical bent.

Cicero, the most classical of all classics, is, however, far the greatest literary product of the Republic. He is, indeed, far too vast a figure for these modest pages. By his colossal industry and immense fertility of genius his influence dominates the whole field of Latin prose literature. He is not only the greatest of all orators, but he stands as the type of the orator in life as in literature. We of this generation, who live in the eclipse of rhetoric, do not find it easy to be just to him. With such gifts of eloquence, such a power of uttering tremendous phrases about duty and patriotism, we cannot but feel affronted at his political incapacity. Mommsen, who is all for action, peppers him with contemptuous expressions—“a statesman without insight, opinion or purpose”; “a short-sighted egoist”; “a journalist of the worst description”; “his lawyer’s talent of finding excuses—or, at any rate, words—for everything.” And, indeed, among men like Cæsar with legions at their backs, or creatures like Clodius with their packs of hooligans, a man of golden words and honest principles does cut a sorry figure on the pages of history—so much the worse for history! He had, as we have seen, a policy, his talents made him a leader among the moderates of the senate, and his character made him genuinely popular among all the more respectable classes of society. But Rhetoric is one of the feminine Muses, and Cicero’s nature was as soft and sympathetic as a woman’s. So he turns his coat at a word from Pompeius, utters brave words one day and eats them on the next, publishes magnificent denunciations which he has not had the courage to deliver. Moreover, we see his intimate thoughts revealed in all the frankness of an unexpurgated private correspondence—and there are few statesmen, certainly very few orators, whose reputations can sustain that test. Thus the golden words often ring hollow. His vanity is often ludicrous, as when he writes to Lucceius, to beseech a conspicuous place in his history, even if the truth has to be distorted for the purpose; or when he loiters at Brundisium, with his lictors’ rods continually wreathed in laurel for the futile hope of a triumph. Certainly he was an egoist. Probably in their private correspondence all men are. But he was also a gentleman, one of the few Romans of his day with whom one would care to shake hands in Elysium.

To Mommsen, Cæsar is the “sole creative genius” of Roman history. We may well ask what he created. Certainly not the empire, for that fell to pieces at his death, and had to be re-created on a new plan by his successor. Not even the Gallic province, for though he conquered it, he left the problem of its organisation to Augustus. Possibly the Lex Julia municipalis. But Cicero[26] created Latin prose out of next to nothing and left it to the world as its grandest form of literary expression. The splendid Latin period, with its clear logical order, its chain of dependent clauses each in its place with absolute precision, a thought built of words as a temple is built of marble, is the best expression of Roman grandeur, as typical and as enduring as a Roman road or wall. It was not mere art. It was the natural expression of a Roman mind trained in law and rhetoric. It was perhaps the finest thing the Romans ever made, and the Latin period is the true justification for retaining Latin in its place for the education of young barbarians accustomed to string their random ideas together like dish-clouts on a line. Although it was the result of long training under all the most distinguished masters of Rome and Greece, and was perfected with infinite labour, Cicero’s style, when once achieved, was extraordinarily rapid and fluent, as the number of his works can testify. It is true that, like many great stylists—Dryden, for example—he came to believe that style was everything. He was prepared to write a geography of the world or a history of Rome. He only wanted a few notes from his brother Quintus to write an account of Britain. His multitudinous philosophical works were, as we have seen, more style than philosophy, thrown off in a few months to while away the time at his Tusculan villa at intervals when the temperature of Rome, literally or politically, was too high to suit his health. In such work he may fairly be called a journalist, though a very great one. When he writes of a subject he really understands, such as rhetoric, he is at his best. Again, in his forensic speeches or writings he is much better as an advocate than as a lawyer. His mind is not capable of juristic precision, he is neither deep nor subtle, and so far his influence is wholly detrimental in the history of Roman law. He would probably infuriate a trained judge; but give him a jury, and, if possible, a large Italian one, and he is irresistible, now with translucent rapid narrative, now with clever mystification, breaking off into thundering appeals to conscience or heaven, or again with passionate denunciation of his opponent or majestic encomium for his client. In the senate he is not at his best. We are told that a few blunt words from Cato had more power to move that assembly of practical men than all the Catilinarian orations. But if Rome had been governed as Greece was, by orations in the market-place, Cicero would have been in Cæsar’s place as dictator of the world. Imagine the Roman mob assembling in 63 B.C. to hear their consul’s account of Catiline’s flight—

—his voice screams with passion, or sinks into pathos; presently he drops into the tones of calm reason or fluent narrative; as he nears his peroration his eyes flash, his hands gesticulate, his body sways from side to side, his foot stamps the ground, he seems to foam at the mouth:

“Why, you did not even stamp your foot!” he exclaims in rebuking the coolness of an opposing counsel. It is true that there were purists of the severer school of Roman oratory who thought such vehemence meretricious and undignified. The true Roman eloquence of the old school is to be found in that ambassador who came to the Carthaginian senate with “peace or war,” gathered in the folds of his mantle and briefly commanded them to choose; or that other who drew a circle in the dust round the Great King and demanded an answer before he left the circle. Cicero had studied his art both in the flowery Asiatic and the severer Attic schools. There was still, his critics complained, too much Asia in his style. But that was part of the tendency of his age. The austerity of Cato, with his simple formulæ, was gone for ever. The Romans of this age are more emotional, more sentimental, more characteristically Southern.

If we reproach Cicero with weakness and cowardice in his political life, the story of his end may atone for it. After Cæsar’s murder, when Antony was master of Rome, a man utterly unscrupulous and wedded to a still more unscrupulous wife, Cicero flung away all his timidity and hesitation. Convinced that the consul was trying to re-establish a monarchy, the old orator came down to the senate and launched at him the series of ferocious but most eloquent philippics. Some were spoken, some merely written and published. It was courting death in the cause of liberty. Cicero was not blind to the danger he was running. But he is probably sincere when he says that life has no more attractions for him.

As he foresaw so plainly, the philippics caused his doom. When the triumvirate drew up its proscription-lists, Octavian is said to have pleaded for his life. But Antony’s wrath was implacable. Cicero’s head and his hands were nailed to the rostra from which he had so often poured out his rhetoric, and the virago Fulvia, so the story goes, thrust her needle through his eloquent, venomous tongue.

Julius Cæsar, that miracle of energy, beside being a competent grammarian and no mean poet, was reputed the second of Roman orators. Of that we have little means of judging. Certainly he could quell a mutiny by a speech, and his Commentaries were not the least wonderful of his achievements. Professedly they are mere notes for a real historian—by “historian” the Romans always meant “orator”—to dress up for literature. They are mere despatches intended to inform the senate and the world of the progress of his campaigns. They were written at odd moments in a prodigiously active life. Their style is so simple and so correct that we cast them as pearls before the fourth-form schoolboy. Yet they are in reality a triumphant product of the rhetorical art; so simple, they must be honest; so modest, they must be candid. You would scarcely think that they are a defence or a vindication. In the same easy flow of narrative breathless escapes are concealed. Who remembers from his schooldays Cæsar’s description of that moment, so pregnant with human destiny, when the eagle first alighted on our shores in the hands of the gallant centurion of the Tenth Legion? Cæsar seems more like a Greek than a Roman in his directness as in his reticence. Fortunately for history Cæsar had far more natural curiosity than most of the Romans. It is surprising how little Cicero really tells us of Roman or Cilician life in all his voluminous correspondence. But Cæsar went out to explore as well as to conquer. It may even be true that his visit to Britain was, as he asserts, partly due to curiosity. He notes our little insular peculiarities—our custom of sharing wives, our habit of keeping the hare, the hen, and the goose as pets because our religion forbids us to eat them. He sees the superior civilisation of Kent. He observes our clothing of skins, our dyeing ourselves blue with woad, our long hair and moustaches, our horsemen and charioteers, our innumerable population and crowded buildings, our plenteous store of cattle, our metals—bronze, iron, and tin. He is equally observant in Gaul and Germany. The debt that history owes to him for these records is incalculable.

Lesser lights such as Sallust and Nepos dabbled in history and have had the good fortune to survive. Livy, though he wrote under Augustus, is a true Republican in mind and sympathy. His majestic history of Rome is the work of a rhetorician setting out to extol the glories of the Republic. Although he sometimes displays a rudimentary critical instinct in comparing his authorities, his main task was to Latinise Polybius and to embellish with first-century style the dry annals of Fabius Pictor and Licinius Macer. It is not the least of our many grievances against the monks that they allowed so much of Livy to disappear.

The golden age of classical literature covers this last half-century of the Republic and the first half-century of the Empire. There is, on the whole, little trace of division between the general character of Republican and Imperial letters except that with Augustus the principal writers are definitely engaged under the Emperor’s banner of reform. The main characteristic of both is rhetoric and convention. It is to Alexandria and its state-fostered writing-club that the world owes convention in literature. The Romans drew their inspiration from Greece but mainly from Alexandria, and as literature at Rome was now chiefly in the hands of a clique of nobles it was possible for a classical style to grow strong there. Cicero and his friends evolved a style, not only of literature but even of thought, which could pronounce itself as “urbane,” and all else as barbarian or rustic. Roman literature of the first centuries before and after Christ was as much under the domination of epithets like “urbane” and “humane” as was the literature of the eighteenth century under “elegant” and “ingenious.” Even Livy as an outsider was suspected of mingling “Patavinity” with his Latinity. It is the aristocracies of literature, such as the court of Louis XIV. or of Charles II., or such as the coffee-house cliques of Addison’s day or the Johnsonian clubs, which create and maintain our periods of classical convention.

Literature, as we have already seen occasion to remark, since it works in the most plastic medium, is generally the first of the arts to develop; and literature is only yet beginning. But then Rome borrowed her arts wholesale from Greece, and thus her culture has no true infancy. The burning problem of Roman originality in Art must be reserved until we reach the Augustan age. For the present we must still deny the existence of any really spontaneous art growth at Rome during the Republic. Where native art may be looked for with the highest probability of finding it is in architecture, portrait-sculpture, and painting; in architecture, partly because the Romans had a natural passion for building and partly because their religious and social habits called for quite distinct types of construction in palaces, halls, amphitheatres, triumphal arches, fora, and other secular buildings upon which the Greeks had wasted little of their attention; in portraiture because it was a peculiar custom at Rome to make and display images of their ancestors, whereas the Greeks in their love of the ideal had until latterly shrunk from the presentation of casual human lineaments and still idealised them as far as possible, and also because the Etruscans, who were the first nurses of Roman culture, had developed portraiture for themselves; and in painting, partly owing to the same Etruscan influence and partly because the Romans, using inferior building materials such as brick, limestone, and terra-cotta covered with stucco, were naturally drawn to mural painting for the sake of ornament. But if we look for originality here we are disappointed. Undoubtedly hundreds of magnificent villas were being run up all over Italy from Como to Sorrento, but a Roman villa was more an affair of landscape gardening than of architecture. It consisted mainly of a series of courts and colonnades sprawling at large over the ground. The walls were built of coarse tufa or peperino; they were only just beginning to be incrusted with marble slabs. As a city Rome was still contemptible—a huddled mass of narrow, tortuous alleys. Augustus swept away as much of it as he could afford to demolish, and his historians remark that “he found Rome built of brick and left it built of marble.” There were of course ancient temples, venerable with dignity, and no doubt to us they would have seemed beautiful with the picturesqueness of antiquity. But with Gracchans and Marians and Clodians rioting at large through the city, many of these venerable shrines were destroyed by fire. The Roman ruins as seen by the modern traveller are almost all of Imperial times. The great Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol was rebuilt four times. The round temple of Vesta was frequently destroyed and restored. Although for religious reasons the plan of the original was generally preserved in these rebuildings, the details were in accordance with the style of the day. Nevertheless the plans are interesting. The round shrines of Vesta and Mater Matuta[30] are clearly an architectural development from a round hut constructed of wood with a thatched roof. Indeed the Temple of Vesta is said to have been modelled on the hut of Romulus. It was perhaps originally the king’s house in which the princesses tended the sacred fire. The Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus also was, if we may trust the coins, built on an un-Greek plan with three naves instead of a single nave with aisles.

The only two considerable relics of Republican architecture are the Tabularium and the Temple of Fortuna Virilis, both dating from the period of Sulla. In that period, when Rome had just discovered Greek culture, when the armies of Sulla and Lucullus came home laden with Greek spoil, there was a temporary outburst of artistic activity at Rome. It was, however, entirely in the hands of foreign artists. In 143, Metellus, the victor of Macedonia, built the first marble temple at Rome in the Campus Martius. Sulla himself carried off the huge columns of the unfinished temple of Olympian Zeus at Athens to adorn the Roman Capitol. The Cyprian Greek Hermodorus was employed to construct temples and docks. The Romans had indeed their native principles of building, which from a merely constructive point of view were in advance of anything that the Greeks had evolved for themselves. Greek architecture of the best period had been almost exclusively devoted to the service of religion. Their efforts were almost limited to the perfecting of the Doric and Ionic temple, and when they had to build a secular building like the gate of the Acropolis, they were still content with a mere adaptation of Doric temple to their new purpose. Their building material was marble, and with their peculiar artistic discretion the Greeks saw that marble was at its best in the austere lines of pediment and columns. But the Romans, before they imported marble, had made a beginning with brick and cement, which require quite different methods of architecture. In prehistoric “Servian” days they had discovered or learnt from the Etruscans the use of the vault and arch, at any rate for tunnels, but it is characteristic of their artistic poverty that they had made little architectural use of these important principles. The triumphal arch seems to have been a Roman invention, and several triumphal arches were built in republican days, but unfortunately we have no information as to their style. The Sullan revival of art was purely an importation of foreign models. In the Temple of Fortuna Virilis built in 78 B.C. we see how the Romans used their imported architecture.[31] The graceful Ionic columns support nothing. They are used for ornament as the West African native uses his European clothes. The Greeks had indeed used engaged columns, as in the Erechtheum, to complete the design where there was no space for a free colonnade, but the Romans built them into their walls for the sake of ornament. This is typical. Culture was to the Greeks a vital part of their existence, to the Romans it was an embellishment.

But Roman architecture, having made this effort, had relapsed again until the days of the Cæsars. There was more destroying than building in the evil days of Cicero’s prime. The selfish plutocrats were too busy building their villas to give a thought to the gods’ or the city’s adornment.

It was much the same with the other arts. Take the coins, for example. The clumsy copper As, with the head of Janus on the obverse and the prow of a ship on the reverse,[32] had of old weighed 12 ounces. All through republican history it was gradually shrinking; in 217 B.C. it was fixed at one ounce, in 89 B.C. at half an ounce. Long before that, however, silver had taken its place. As we have remarked, silver was not coined, though no doubt it circulated, at Rome before 268 B.C.. From 217 onwards silver became the real standard of value, and about 80 B.C. the copper coinage ceased altogether for a time. Not only were the original designs of the “heavy copper” borrowed from Greece, but there is not the least sign in the Roman coinage of any artistic development as time progresses. Simply, as Head remarks, “the degree of excellence attained in any particular district depended upon the closeness of its relations, direct or indirect, with some Greek city, or at least with a population imbued with the spirit of Greek art.” There are coins of Sulla, both silver and gold, doubtless of Greek workmanship, which display fairly artistic designs.[33] But the coins of Antony and Cleopatra, interesting as they are historically, and designed, of course, in the Hellenised East, are much inferior.[33] We notice an attempt at portraiture, but the striking resemblance between the Roman triumvir and the Egyptian queen suggests the question which of the pair was the original.

In sculpture, too, the most ardent supporters of Roman originality can find little to comfort them in the closing century of the Republic. We have seen how the victories of Mummius and his successors had created a taste and a market for Greek works of art. With those of Sulla and Lucullus immense quantities of loot had crossed the Adriatic, and Rome began to be what New York is now, the home of connoisseurs and collectors. As connoisseurs are wont to do, the Roman millionaires studied commercial values rather than artistic qualities. No doubt in time their taste improved from the days when Mummius had warned his men that any of the Greek masterpieces destroyed in transit would have to be replaced by new ones. But they still went very largely by the names of the artists: a genuine Praxiteles or Scopas was worth immense sums. Every villa now required statues for its adornment—Greek originals, if possible; if not, copies. For the most part they were reckoned purely as objects of value along with handsome tables, vases, bowls, and signet-rings. When Cicero buys Greek statues he prefers Muses to Bacchantes as being more appropriate to his studies. The question of artistic value scarcely enters his mind. The most famous named sculptor of this period is the Italian-Greek Pasiteles, who visited Rome about 90 B.C. and there made original statues for Roman temples. Pasiteles, of course, was of the Hellenic decline. He was a metal-worker by training, and his work is like that of Cellini, more decorative than creative. It is jewellery on a large scale. He evolved no new style of his own, but set himself to copy and elaborate ancient types to meet the artificial demand for antiquities. Many of the “archaistic” works in our museums belong to this period of production, and as decoration many of them are extremely charming. We have other names of the Pasitelean school, all Greek, such as Stephanus and Menelaus, but there is very little originality or interest in them. The Venus Genetrix in the Louvre is undoubtedly a fine statue, and is probably a faithful copy of the original by Arcesilaus of the first century B.C.[34] But the face, at any rate, quite visibly goes back to the Greek sculpture of the fifth century, and perhaps, as has been suggested, to Alcamenes. It is in the treatment of the transparent drapery that the present artist shows his skill. Skill there was in abundance in those Greek chisels of the first century; even the Farnese Hercules of Glycon and the Medici Venus[35] are astonishing as efforts of chisel-craft, utterly debased and debasing as they are.

We know from history that portrait statues had long been common at Rome. The forum was full of them. We saw in an earlier chapter how the old Etruscans had placed terra-cotta portraits of the deceased upon their tombs, and how the old Romans preserved wax images of their forefathers for use at funerals. Most primitive peoples have an instinctive dread of portraiture as a sort of blasphemy. Perhaps the early growth of facial portraiture at Rome was helped by the worship of a man’s genius, his luck, his spirit, his guardian angel. The genius naturally was depicted in the likeness of the man himself. So the imagines in a Roman atrium were no mere portraits of defunct ancestors. Rather they were visible presentments of invisible presences. Unfortunately very few unquestionably genuine examples of republican portraiture have survived. Portraits of ancient celebrities were freely constructed at all times, and it is not easy to date them. We have not at Rome as we have in Greece a clear line of artistic development which enables the trained archæologist to date any casual work of art to within half a century almost at a glance. It is now a question of employing more or less skilful Greeks. It is probable that most of the portraits already illustrated in this book were executed under the Cæsars, but they may well go back to earlier if ruder likenesses, and in any case the portraits are interesting for their own sake. The portraits of Julius Cæsar, both the white marble bust in the Vatican Museum[36] and the still more striking example in black basalt in the Barracco Museum at Rome, are, however, almost certainly of contemporary or, at the latest, Augustan date, so real and vivid is the portraiture. There is another very fine black basalt head of Julius in Berlin,[37] but its authenticity has been questioned. It certainly corresponds very closely with the profile of the dictator on his coins.[38] The bust of M. Brutus may also be identified by comparison with the coins. That of Cicero is probable but not so certain.

This art of realistic portraiture, then, is claimed as the great contribution of ancient Rome to artistic progress. It yet remains to be shown that any part of the work was done by native artists. At present the evidence is all in favour of Greek authorship. But the Romans may claim the credit of demanding or even inspiring realism. Roman archæologists, especially those who, like Wickhoff and Mrs. Strong, are concerned to plead the cause of Roman originality in art, often seem to assume that the Greeks of the best period could not express individuality, in fact that the ideal tendency of their statues, portraits included, is due to convention if not to the sheer limitations of their craftsmanship. Elsewhere we have seen that much of the apparent simplicity of Greek work of the best period is really elaborate self-restraint. All their religious ideas forbade them to express divinity with any marks of time or place upon face or feature. So when it came—as it came slowly—to portraying a statesman like Pericles, or a monarch like Alexander, they deliberately honoured them by idealising them and smoothing away the accidentals. Thus they concealed the inordinately long skull of Pericles by depicting him in a helmet. They could be realistic enough when they chose to be, but that was never in the adornment of temples except just so far as to indicate the barbarity of Centaurs or Giants in contrast to the perfection of the Greek. Myron’s Cow has perished without offspring, but the slave-boys on the tombstones are realistic enough—to say nothing of the Ludovisi Reliefs. Realism was no new discovery of the Romans. On the contrary, so far as it was an innovation it was an act of indulgence, a breaking down of self-imposed barriers. Even then, was it inspired by any abstract passion for the naked truth, such as moved Cromwell to command his portrait-painter to include the warts? Not entirely. The Romans were a rhetorical, not a realistic people. I believe that Roman realism in portraiture is chiefly due to the national custom of preserving the imagines taken from the death-masks of the illustrious dead. On Greek soil the Greek artists were still idealising their portraits—witness the fine head of Mithradates on the coins of Pontus;[39] but when their Roman sitters asked for realism they gave it—gave it sometimes with the unexpected thoroughness of Mr. Sargent. Besides coins and statues there are very fine portraits on the gems of the first century B.C.

Towards painting too we saw that the Romans had inherited some traditional bent. We hear of Greek painters highly esteemed at Rome in this period as well as of imported Greek pictures fetching enormous prices. The Romans loved colour, and their villa walls were commonly stuccoed and painted, if not incrusted with marble, while their floors began to be inlaid with pictorial mosaic. But we have little or nothing of this date to show. It should, however, be noted that the graphic taste of the Romans together with their habit of treating art as mere decoration was now leading to a new phase of pictorial sculpture which will have important effects in the bas-relief work of the Augustan period. In revenge Italy was now turning out a system of plastic decoration for vases in the Aretine pottery[40] which was new and full of possibilities.

On the whole the verdict must go against Rome—at any rate republican Rome—as regards artistic originality. The Rome of Cicero’s day was amazingly rich and dreadfully poor. It had a high culture in some respects, but it was too corrupt, morally and politically, to produce good work of its own. If there had been any possible rival in the field, Rome would assuredly have perished in the course of that distracted century. If she had perished then, what would she have left to the world? A few second-hand comedies, Lucretius, Catullus, and Cicero; a small equivalent for all the blood that she had shed, and all the groans of her provincials.

IV

AUGUSTUS

VERGIL’S Fourth Eclogue, from which my text is quoted, is often called the “Messianic Eclogue.” It is a strange poem. In the midst of a book of pastoral eclogues very closely modelled on the Idylls of Theocritus, the young poet from Mantua inserts one in which he invites the Sicilian Muses, that is, the Muses of Theocritus, to assist him in a loftier strain than usual. His poem is a vision, a prophecy of a return of the golden age to accompany the birth of a child. It is not easy to determine what child. The poem was written for the consulship of Pollio, who had helped Vergil to recover his paternal farm. Thus it is very probable that the poem was really a piece of very gross flattery directed to a patron. Nevertheless the prophecies of peace on earth which it foreshadows chime so strangely with the Messianic language of Isaiah that the scholars of the Middle Ages alternatively placed Vergil among the prophets or condemned him as a wizard. But apart from that approaching event to be witnessed in an obscure village of the client-princedom of Judæa there was even in secular history a general expectation of better days to come. The Virgin Justice did in sober fact return to the Roman world when Octavian, in 29 B.C., came home to celebrate his triumph over the three continents.

I make high claims for Octavian[41]—or as he may now be called by anticipation “Augustus”—in history. Julius Cæsar has usurped the credit of inventing that wonderful system the Roman Empire. The credit really belongs to Augustus. Monarchy, indeed, had for two generations at the least become inevitable at Rome, as everybody, from Catiline to Cicero, was bound to admit. In the scramble to realise it Julius Cæsar had won the day and had thereupon proceeded to introduce his conception of its proper form. He died before his plans were perfected and we have no means of knowing his inner purpose. But we know that he had spurned the dignity of the senate, had taken some of the paraphernalia of royalty and set up his statue alongside of the old kings of Rome. His plan of a naked despotism had failed, because he had not reckoned with the tyrannicide sentiment of the Roman nobles. His assassination was no mere episode or accident. It was impossible to live like an oriental despot in the republican city without an oriental bodyguard. Julius Cæsar had failed through pride. When he fell, the whole dreary round of proscriptions, triumvirate, and civil wars had to begin again. The inevitable monarchy had to be devised afresh on a different basis: that was the task of Augustus. He devised it in such a manner that it lasted in the West for just five centuries and in the East for nearly fifteen. Indeed it can hardly be said to be totally extinct now in the twentieth. Judged by results then, the work of Augustus was clearly a consummate piece of statesmanship. When we consider the methods by which that result was obtained we shall, I think, esteem Augustus as the greatest statesman in the history of the world.

Augustus has never been a popular hero. The pure statesman who has no dashing feats of arms to his credit, and who has left us no records of impassioned eloquence, does not lend himself to idealisation. Augustus had no contemporary biographer, nor even any very great historian ancient or modern. The early Empire is in the gap between the end of Mommsen and the beginning of Gibbon. Dr. Gardthausen has collected all the available material about Augustus but has scarcely succeeded in making him clear or real to us as a man. Tacitus touched him off in a few satirical epigrams as the crafty tyrant who “bribed the army with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and the world with the blessings of peace, and so grew greater by degrees while he concentrated in his own hands the functions of the senate, the magistrates, and the laws.” For biographical particulars we have to go to Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Cæsars, a most unsatisfactory source. Suetonius’s pages teem with human interest, but for purposes of history they are provoking and baffling. He is a patient bookworm who compiles systematic little biographies without a glimmer of the biographical sense. As imperial librarian he had access to most valuable sources of information but he had no critical instinct in using them. He simply collected scraps from various sources and grouped them under headings. For a list of virtues he would go to a courtier’s panegyrics and then turn to a seditious pamphlet for a catalogue of vices. His own instinctive preference being for scandal, he has touched nothing which he has not defiled. It is chiefly due to Suetonius that Augustus appears as a selfish hypocrite, Tiberius as a libidinous tyrant, Gaius as a maniac, Claudius as a pedantic clown, and Nero as a monster of wickedness. And yet under these five reigns the Empire was growing steadily in peace and prosperity. The rulers who were omnipotent cannot have been altogether such as they are described. The factious senators who still dreamed of unreal republican glories and still treasured the memories of Cato as a saint and Brutus as a martyr were not, of course, allowed free criticism of their monarchs. They revenged themselves by writing secret libels, many but not all of which logic and common sense can easily disprove. When it came to popular reigns like those of Vespasian or Hadrian the censorship of the press was removed for a time, and then the senatorial Republicans like Tacitus and Juvenal took ample revenge upon the dead. The scurrilous pamphlets were unearthed and exalted into historical documents and so passed down to our historians as history. It is a suspicious and thankless task to attempt the rehabilitation of these emperors. The world is rightly sceptical of the process which it calls “whitewashing.” Moreover the necessary data are wanting. We can only allow our imaginations to suggest how different the story would look if it had been told from a sympathetic point of view.

It is very difficult to form any complete idea of the character of Augustus as a man. He had shown daring and ambition when as an obscure lad he had crossed to Italy in 44 B.C. to take up his perilous inheritance as Cæsar’s heir. He had been cool and diplomatic even in those earliest days in the way he intrigued with the senate against Antony, and then with Antony and Lepidus against the senate. He had had extraordinary luck when both the consuls died in the engagements round Modena, and left him, the prætor, in charge of a great army. Then we have the infamous acts of the triumvirate, when the unfortunate senators and knights were proscribed in hundreds, and Cicero, with whom the young Cæsar had been on intimate terms, was handed over without apparent compunction to Antony’s vengeance. Admirers said that in this he was overborne by his older colleague, and yielded reluctantly to a stern necessity for destroying the tyrannicide party. Enemies declared that even if he had been reluctant to begin the bloodshed he was the most cruel of persecutors when it started. In the fourteen years of civil war that followed, he had succeeded in winning his way through to victory more by coolness and luck than by any display of generalship. I do not think that we can fairly accuse him of cowardice. It was a bold act when he rode alone and unarmed into the camp of the rebellious and hostile Lepidus, and took his legions away from him without a blow. He had not the dashing gallantry of Antony, or the fiery vigour of Julius, but he must have had the gift of nerve and coolness. He had certainly come through the most terrible difficulties and dangers from open enemies and rebellious armies by land and sea. In the last duel with Antony luck had been with him once more. Like the rake and gambler that he was, Antony had thrown away his game for the sake of Eastern ambitions and Eastern dalliance. Then there was that last scene of Cleopatra’s tragedy, when the conqueror came to her palace after Antony had committed suicide. She tried to win him by the same arts that had won his “father” and his rival. Dressed in her finest robes she came weeping to him, and displayed the picture and the letters of Julius wet with her tears. He judged her splendour coldly as a future ornament for his triumph at Rome, and when she disappointed him of that by a suicide staged as all her life had been for theatrical effect, he hunted down her two elder children with the same cold ferocity as before. Policy forbade them to survive. That was all he thought of.

And now at the age of thirty-four, with this record behind him, he had come back to Rome to celebrate his many triumphs. No doubt the few remaining nobles at Rome trembled at his coming. Remembering the proscriptions some of them might well tremble, especially those who had sided with his enemies, with Sextus Pompeius, or with L. Antonius, or with Marcus. On the other hand, some might remember the clemency which Julius Cæsar had displayed in his hour of triumph.