The very many statues and busts which yet remain of Augustus, bear out the statement of Suetonius, that he was an uncommonly fine man. His decora facies he still had even in his old age; we may trace the likeness in his busts throughout the different periods of his life. He is so beautiful that I very nearly got his bust; but his personal character deterred me. He was however a remarkable man in every respect. What he was reproached with by the ancients, was want of courage; but this is an imputation which is easily made, especially if there is some foundation for it after all; yet there were, on the other hand, instances also in which he undeniably showed courage. In the war of Philippi, there is indeed some ground for such a charge: at Mutina, he perhaps was guilty of treachery; but in the Pompeian war, no reproach of the kind attaches to him. He was a bad general, and had no more luck in the field than he had in his domestic relations. His falseness and cruelty, I have before described; yet he had also his good qualities: he was a friend to his friends, and put up with many things from them; which considering his pride, is very surprising: towards Agrippa and Mæcenas, he was neither faithless nor unthankful. In his domestic relations, he was regardless of character. He had at first been betrothed to Antony’s stepdaughter Clodia, but the match was broken off; then he married Scribonia, who bore him Julia of unhappy notoriety; and then he put her away, and compelled Tib. Claudius Nero, who had once been proscribed as a partisan of Brutus, and who was also one of the best of the family of the Claudii, to give up to him Livia. Livia, whose ambition and thirst of power for her own family knew no bounds, and who shrank from no crime, had gradually gotten the most absolute sway over Augustus. However much he sought to bring back purity of morals, he himself was a thorough profligate; and this Livia winked at. They were married to each other nearly fifty years; and the longer they lived together, the greater became her power. She must have been wondrously beautiful in her youth, and amazingly clever: for a long course of years, she strove with quiet patience to get the dominion for her race; and for this purpose she estranged Augustus from the whole of his family. The only child she had borne him was still-born. So long as Octavia, the half-sister of Augustus, and one of the most respectable of the later Roman matrons, was alive and had prospects for her son Marcellus, who was married to Julia, she herself seemed to have been altogether set aside. But after the death of Marcellus, Agrippa became more powerful than ever, though he had already gained such an ascendancy, that Augustus, had he not loved him much, must have been afraid of him; and now the emperor bound him to him by the marriage with Julia, because he really feared him: Julia had by Marcellus one daughter only. Agrippa was much older than Augustus, with whom he had been as a sort of tutor in Apollonia; it is not unlikely that Cæsar had meant him to accompany his nephew as custos to the Parthian war, as was generally done when the youthful Roman at seventeen first joined the army: thus Lollius went with C. Cæsar. Before that time, nothing is mentioned about him, nor can any one tell where he came from; in Cæsar’s campaigns, he is not once named: he is said to have been ignobili, even humili loco natus. He afterwards shows himself to have been an experienced general. Augustus’ best time was that during which Agrippa’s influence was paramount with him; that is to say, almost the whole unbroken period from the battle of Actium to the death of Agrippa, whom no one accuses of having had any share in the earlier crimes of his pupil. It is he, above all men, who gave the state its form; he is, more than Augustus, the author of the most useful institutions,—perhaps also of some artful ones, but certainly of all that had any good in them. Besides which, there was something grand about him. We have but one building left of his, the Pantheon, which indeed is the finest relic of ancient Rome. He had a genius for vast and magnificent works, for roads, canals, aqueducts, baths: he so laid out the whole of the Campus Martius, that Strabo is quite in ecstacies whilst describing it. In the war against Pompey, he displayed tried ability: moreover, he then built a fleet and the portus Julius. He was thrice consul, and openly laid claim to the highest honours: for he looked upon them as his due, being anything but cowed and daunted before Augustus. He died, I believe, in 740; Mæcenas in 744, in the same year as Horace.

The friendship of Augustus was shared with Agrippa by C. Cilnius Mæcenas, of the illustrious Etruscan house of the Cilnii (Etrusci reges, reges atavi):—it must have been a δυναστεία; the name is also met with innumerable times on monuments at Arretium. This clan must have had the Roman franchise even before the lex Julia; for as early as Livius Drusus, a Mæcenas, as we are told by Cicero,^[36] was already among the equites splendidissimi. Horace seems to hint that the forefathers of Mæcenas’ line, both on the father and mother’s side, had been raised to the highest magistracy in the days of Etruscan freedom:—

in all likelihood, both of these branches belonged to Arretium: Mæcenas himself was merely a Roman knight. With posterity, he has earned the honour of having been a patron of the poets: we may rejoice that he showed kindness to Horace and Virgil, without indeed troubling ourselves about his motives for it, which we have no means of finding out. He was a strange man, an epicurean in the very worst sense; and he unblushingly avowed it, as he set up ease and comfort as the highest good in life. He displayed a more than womanish love of life; for though in a wretchedly broken state of health, he was glad to live, even in torture, if only live he could (vita dum superest, bene est). There was also something childish and trifling about him: he had a foppish delight in trinkets and jewels, for which Augustus often laughed at him. To the latter, he was a convenient friend and a most agreeable companion; and for all honours he expressed an epicurean contempt, looking upon Agrippa’s love of distinction as folly. Yet for all that, he may have cared not a little for having influence; whenever Augustus consulted him, he got very sensible advice. Once only he behaved in a manly way. When Augustus, in the time of the triumvirate, or in that of the Perusian war, was seated on his tribunal, and was pronouncing one sentence of death after another, Mæcenas sent him a note with the words “Get up then, you executioner!” This looks like a man whose heart is much better than his philosophy.

As long as these two men and Drusus, the younger son of Livia, were alive, even as Tacitus already remarks, Augustus’ government was really praiseworthy; but after their death there was a change for the worse. Augustus in his earlier years had very precarious health, and his life was several times endangered by illness; one of these was in Gaul, and another was that from which Antonius Musa recovered him by cold baths: it was not until about his fiftieth year, that his health became better. Long before this, whilst Marcellus was yet a child, and he himself still very young, he had once, when he thought himself dying, given his ring to Agrippa: in his will he had made no arrangements about the succession to his throne. When Marcellus grew up, differences arose between him and Agrippa. Velleius, who when he chooses to speak out, hits off many characters with masterly touches, says of Agrippa, “Parendi, sed uni, scientissimus.” To Augustus, he would submit himself; but against all those who rose after him, he was very bitter, nor would he be the servant of Marcellus who was much younger than himself: in all likelihood, had Augustus died then, he would not have scrupled to put Marcellus and the sons of Livia aside. Once Agrippa altogether withdrew to Mitylene, where he would have nothing more to do with the affairs of Rome; yet the way in which men paid their court to him in the east, showed clearly that they all looked upon him as their future master. But Marcellus died in his twenty-third year, and a great hope of the Roman world seems to have died with him; Agrippa now incontestably stood in the first place, and Augustus gave him in marriage his daughter Julia, the widow of Marcellus. Yet though this alliance went far to secure the succession for him and his sons, it very sadly embittered the last years of his life, owing to the shameful depravity of his wife; for he kept it secret from Augustus, who was very fond of his daughter. Agrippa died before Augustus’ eyes were opened to Julia’s conduct, and left three sons, one of whom was born after his death, and a daughter, Agrippina, who afterwards became the wife of Germanicus. She had all the pride and fine qualities of her father; she was an admirable woman, not unlike Octavia. The two eldest sons, Caius and Lucius, Augustus adopted into the family of the Cæsars, as he meant one of them, namely Caius, to succeed him. Whilst these young men were growing up, Julia was married to the eldest step-son of Augustus, Tiberius Claudius Nero. This young man had quite the character of the Claudian race: he was uncommonly proud of his high birth, and he held Augustus himself to be nothing better than a municipal upstart from Velitræ, who had been adopted into the Julian family; the gens Julia he certainly looked upon as below the gens Claudia, and therefore upon his marriage with Julia as a match which was beneath him. Above all, he was deeply galled by the infamous life of Julia, though for fear of Augustus, he did not dare to complain of her. Being on bad terms with Augustus, he withdrew on some pretext or other to Rhodes, by which indeed he left the field open for Agrippa’s family. At Rhodes he lived for seven years, in the course of which the profligate life of Julia was discovered, and Augustus now treated her with unrelenting harshness: he had her transported to Pandataria. (Drusus had already died in Germany, a year before his elder brother went to Rhodes.) In vain did Tiberius repent of the rash step which he had taken; Livia for a whole year was unable to bring about a reconciliation, Augustus having been so much hurt by his going away that he would not hear of him, nor see him, although he had asked for leave to return. Augustus now employed L. and C. Cæsar in public business: Lucius was sent to Gaul and Spain, to superintend the registration of the land; Caius to Armenia. This Caius Cæsar, Velleius speaks of in such a way, that, though to pay his court to Tiberius, he may have represented some things as worse than they were, we may well believe that he was good for nothing, and that the Roman empire would have been as unhappy under him, as it was under Tiberius himself. In Armenia, where he had executed Augustus’ commissions, he was treacherously wounded by an Asiatic, who very likely was got to do it by the king of the Parthians. From this wound he never could recover, and it was generally thought by the ancients that it was poisoned by Livia: this is perhaps nothing but prejudice; bus it is quite possible. Lucius had already died before him, and it is pretty certain that it was dolo novercæ. Tiberius, on his return after seven years, was completely master of the field; and of Agrippa’s family, Agrippa Postumus and Agrippina were all that was left: that the former of these might not be altogether set aside, he adopted him together with Tiberius 754. From that time, Tiberius was heir presumptive; and it was not long before he got the tribunicia potestas: as for Agrippa Postumus, he was still a boy, an insignificant fellow, who did not stand in the other’s way.

It is a well known boast of Augustus, that he had found Rome brick, and had left it marble; and this was not saying too much: what is still left of his buildings bears it out. He has built an immense deal, and stamped upon Rome quite another character; his buildings were in a style of extraordinary grandeur, which altogether ceases in the later ones, the Colosseum alone excepted. There still remains what was formerly called Forum Nervæ, but what Palladio in his day, and among the moderns Hirt, have recognised as the Forum Augustum. The judicious Stefano Piali has shown that the three colossal pillars which were formerly thought to have been portions of the temple of Jupiter Stator, are of Augustus, and belonged to the Curia Julia. The great wall round the Forum Augustum, proves that at that time the old grand style was still prevalent, which lasted until the reign of the emperor Claudius, and first changed under that of Nero: thus people came to fancy that that wall was of the age of the kings. By Augustus himself was built the Mausoleum, the inside work of which still lasts indestructible; by Agrippa in Augustus’ reign, the Gate of St. Lorenzo and the Pantheon, besides the Theatre of Marcellus,—where the Palazzo Savelli is, in which I used to live,—in the old massive Greek-Etruscan style which had long been out of date in Greece: hard by is the Portico of Octavia, of which the entrance is still standing. Whatever on the Palatine is said to be of Augustus, is at best very problematical: of the temple of Apollo there is nothing left. Augustus was the first to bring the Carrara marble into use. A great number of high roads, both in Italy and in the provinces, and very magnificent aqueducts were made by him; among others, that of Narni, which indeed is built of brick. Notwithstanding all these great buildings, and all this magnificence, no one felt burthened, as the Romans paid scarcely any taxes but a few indirect ones; and therefore it is no wonder that Augustus was exceedingly popular. We must also take into the account the gloomy forebodings with which men looked upon Tiberius: the words of Horace, Divis orte bonis! came from his heart; people prayed in right earnest to Heaven for his preservation.