The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  It was a decision costly to the Emperor’s pride but creditable to his judgment. Germany was surrendered to “barbarism”—i.e., to a nonclassic culture—and was left free to arm its growing population against Rome. However, the same reasons that had argued for the conquest of Germany would have demanded the subjection of Scythia—southern Russia. Somewhere the Empire had to stop; and the Rhine was a better frontier than any other west of the Urals. Having annexed northern and western Spain, Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia, Moesia, Galatia, Lycia, and Pamphylia, Augustus felt that he had sufficiently earned his title of “the increasing god.” At his death the Empire covered 3,340,000 square miles, more than the mainland of the United States, and over a hundred times the area of Rome before the Punic Wars. Augustus advised his successor to be content with this, the greatest empire yet seen; to seek rather to unite and strengthen it within than to extend it without. He expressed his surprise “that Alexander did not regard it as a greater task to set in order the empire that he had won than to win it.”7 The Pax Romana had begun.

  III. SATURNIA REGNA

  It could not be said that Augustus had made a desert and called it peace. Within a decade after Actium the Mediterranean knew such economic quickening as no tradition could parallel. The restoration of order was in itself a stimulus to recovery. The renewed safety of the seas, the stability of government, the conservatism of Augustus, the consumption of Egypt’s hoarded treasure, the opening of new mines and mints, the reliability and accelerated circulation of the currency, the easing of congested population into agricultural allotments and colonial settlements—how could prosperity resist so unanimous an invitation? A group of Alexandrian sailors, landing at Puteoli when Augustus was near by, approached him in festal dress and offered him incense as to a deity. It was because of him, they said, that they could voyage in safety, trade in confidence, and live in peace.8

  Augustus was convinced, as became the grandson of a banker, that the best economy was one that united freedom with security. He protected all classes with well-administered laws, guarded the highways of trade, lent money without interest to responsible land-owners,9 and mollified the poor with state grain, lotteries, and occasional gifts; for the rest he left enterprise, production, and exchange freer than before. Even so, the works directed by the state were now of unprecedented magnitude, and played some part in restoring economic life. Eighty-two temples were built; a new forum and basilica were added to facilitate the operations of finance and the courts; a new senate house replaced the one that had incinerated Clodius; colonnades were erected to temper the sun; the theater that Caesar had begun was completed and named after Marcellus, son-in-law of Augustus; and rich men were prodded by the Emperor into spending part of their fortunes in adorning Italy with basilicas, temples, libraries, theaters, and roads. “Those that celebrated triumphs,” says Dio Cassius, “he commanded to erect out of their spoils some public work to commemorate their deeds.”9a Augustus hoped to make the majesty of Rome enhance and symbolize her power and his own. Toward the close of his life he remarked that he had found Rome a city of brick and had left it a city of marble.9b It was a forgivable exaggeration: there had been much marble there before, and much brick remained. But seldom had any man done so much for a city.

  His indispensable aide in the reconstruction of Rome was Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. This perfect friend had shared with Maecenas the guidance of Augustus’ policy. In his year as aedile (33 B.C..) Agrippa had won the public to Octavian by opening 170 public baths, distributing free oil and salt, presenting games for fifty-five successive days, and providing free barbers for all citizens for a year—apparently all at his own expense. His ability might have made him another Caesar; he preferred to serve Augustus for a generation. So far as we know, his life was unstained by public or private scandal; Roman gossip, which sooner or later besmirched everyone else, left him untouched. He was the first Roman to realize the importance of sea power. He planned, built, and commanded the fleet, defeated Sextus Pompey, suppressed piracy, and won a world for Augustus at Actium. After these victories and his pacification of Spain, Gaul, and the Bosporan kingdom, he was thrice offered a triumph and always refused. Enriched by a grateful prince, he continued to live without luxury, and devoted himself as ardently to public works as he had done to the preservation of the state. Out of his own purse he hired hundreds of laborers to repair roads, buildings, and sewers, and reopen the Marcian aqueduct. He constructed a new aqueduct, the Julian, and further improved the water supply of Rome with 700 wells, 500 fountains, and 130 reservoirs. When the people complained of the high price of wine Augustus slyly remarked, “My son-in-law Agrippa has seen to it that Rome shall not go thirsty.”10 This greatest of Roman engineers created a spacious harbor and shipbuilding center by connecting the Lucrine and Avernian lakes with the sea. He built the first of the imposing public baths that were to distinguish Rome among the cities. He constructed, again out of his own funds, a temple to Venus and Mars, which was rebuilt by Hadrian, is known to us as the Pantheon, and still bears on its portico the words, M. AGRIPPA . . . FECIT. He organized a thirty-year survey of the Empire, wrote a treatise on geography, and made in painted marble a map of the world. Like Leonardo he was a scientist, an engineer, an inventor of military projectiles, and an artist. His early death at the age of fifty (12 B.C.) was among the many sorrows that darkened the later years of Augustus, who had given him his daughter Julia in marriage, and had hoped to bequeath the Empire to him as the man best fitted to govern it honestly and well.

  Costly public works combined with extended governmental services to raise state expenditures beyond precedent. Salaries were now paid to provincial and municipal officials, bureaucrats and police; a large army and navy were maintained; buildings were put up or restored without number; corn and games bribed the populace to peace. Since expenses were met out of current revenue, and no national debt was laid upon the future, taxation under Augustus became a science and an unremitting industry. Augustus was not relentless; often he forgave taxes to harassed individuals and cities or paid them out of his personal funds. He returned to the municipalities 35,000 pounds of gold offered him as a “coronation gift” on the occasion of his fifth consulate; and he refused many other donations.12 He abolished the land tax laid upon Italy in the Civil War; in its stead he levied upon all citizens in the Empire a five per cent tax on bequests to any persons except near relatives and the poor.13 A tax of one per cent was placed upon auction sales, four per cent upon the sale of slaves, five per cent upon their manumission; and custom dues from two and a half to five per cent were collected on nearly all ports of entry. All citizens were subject also to municipal taxes, and Roman realty did not share in Italy’s exemption from the tax on land. Taxes were paid for water supplied from the public mains. Considerable revenue came from the leasing of public lands, mines, and fisheries, from the state monopoly of salt, and the fines imposed by the courts. The provinces paid a tributum soli, or land tax, and a tributum capitis—literally a head or poll tax, actually a tax on personal property. Taxes flowed into two coffers at Rome, both stored in temples: the national Treasury (aerarium) controlled by the Senate, and the imperial Treasury (fiscus) owned and managed by the Emperor.I To the latter came the income not only from his vast personal properties, but bequests from well-wishers and friends. Such legacies, in the lifetime of Augustus, amounted to 1,400,000,000 sesterces.

  All in all, taxation under the Principate was not oppressive, and until Commodus the results were worth the cost. The provinces prospered and raised altars of gratitude or expectation to Augustus the god; even in sophisticated Rome he had to censure the people for the extravagance of their eulogies One enthusiast ran through the streets calling upon men and women to “devote” themselves to Augustus—i.e., promise to kill themselves when he died. In 2 B.C.. Messala Corvinus, who had captured Octavian’s camp at Philippi, proposed that the title of pater patriae should be conferred upon Augustus. The Senate, pleased to have so little responsibi
lity while retaining honors and wealth, gladly heaped upon the Emperor this and other titles of praise. The business classes, now richer than ever, celebrated his birthday with a two-day festival year after year. “All sorts and conditions of men,” says Suetonius,14 “brought him gifts on the kalends of January”—New Year’s Day. When fire destroyed his old palace every city, apparently every tribe and guild, in the Empire sent him a contribution to rebuild it; he refused to take more than a denarius from any individual, but nevertheless he had more than enough. All the Mediterranean world, after its long ordeal, seemed happy; and Augustus might believe that his patience and labor had accomplished his great task.

  IV. THE AUGUSTAN REFORMATION

  He destroyed his own happiness by trying to make people good as well as happy; it was an imposition that Rome never forgave him. Moral reform is the most difficult and delicate branch of statesmanship; few rulers have dared to attempt it; most rulers have left it to hypocrites and saints.

  Augustus began modestly enough by seeking to check the racial transformation of Rome. Population there was not declining; on the contrary, it was growing by mass and dole attraction and the import of wealth and slaves. Since freedmen were included in the dole, many citizens freed old or sickly slaves to have them fed by the state; kinder motives freed more, and many slaves saved enough to buy their liberty. As the sons of freedmen automatically became citizens, the emancipation of slaves and the fertility of aliens combined with the low birth rate of the native stocks to change the ethnic character of Rome. Augustus wondered what stability there could be in so heterogeneous a population, and what loyalty to the Empire might be expected of men in whose veins ran the blood of subject peoples. By his urging, the lex Fufia Caninia (2 B.C.) and later measures enacted that an owner of not more than two slaves might free them all, the owner of from three to ten slaves might free half of them, the owner of from eleven to thirty one-third, the owner of from thirty-one to one hundred one-fourth, the owner of from 101 to 300 one-fifth; and no master might free more than a hundred.

  One might wish that Augustus had limited slavery instead of freedom. But antiquity took slavery for granted, and would have contemplated with horror the economic and social effects of a wholesale emancipation, just as the employers of our time fear the sloth that might come from security. Augustus was thinking in terms of race and class; he could not conceive a strong Rome without the character, courage, and political ability that had marked the old Roman; above all, the old aristocracy. The decay of the ancient faith among the upper classes had washed away the supernatural supports of marriage, fidelity, and parentage; the passage from farm to city had made children less of an asset, more of a liability and a toy; women wished to be sexually rather than maternally beautiful; in general the desire for individual freedom seemed to be running counter to the needs of the race. To accentuate the evil, legacy hunting had become the most profitable occupation in Italy.16 Men without children were sure to be courted in their declining years by expectant ghouls; and so large a number of Romans relished this esurient courtesy that it became an added cause of childlessness. Protracted military service drew a considerable proportion of young men from marriage in their most nubile years. A large number of native-stock Romans avoided wedlock altogether, preferring prostitutes or concubines even to a varied succession of wives. Of those who married, a majority appear to have limited their families by abortion, infanticide, coitus interruptus, and contraception.18

  Augustus was disturbed by these insignia of civilization. He began to feel that a movement backward to the old faith and morals was necessary. Respect for the mos maiorum revived in him as the years cleared his vision and tired his frame. It was not good, he felt, for the present to break too sharply with the past; a nation must have a continuity of traditions to be sane, as a man must have memory. He read with aging seriousness the historians of Rome, and envied the virtues they ascribed to the ancients. He relished the speech of Quintus Metellus on marriage, read it to the Senate, and recommended it to the people by imperial proclamation. A large part of the older generation agreed with him; it formed a kind of puritan party eager to reform morals by law; and probably Livia lent them her influence. By his powers as censor and tribune Augustus promulgated—or passed through the Assembly—a series of laws of now uncertain date and sequence, aimed at restoring morals, marriage, fidelity, parentage, and a simpler life. They forbade adolescents to attend public entertainments except in the company of an adult relative; excluded women from athletic exhibitions, and restricted them to the upper seats at gladiatorial games; limited expenditure on homes, servants, banquets, weddings, jewels, and dress. The most important of these “Julian laws”II was the lex lulia de pudicitia et de coercendis adulteriis (18 B.C..)—“The Julian law of chastity and repressing adultery.” Here for the first time in Roman history marriage was brought under the protection of the state, instead of being left to the patria potestas. The father retained the right to kill an adulterous daughter and her accomplice as soon as he discovered them; the husband was allowed to kill his wife’s paramour if caught in the husband’s house, but he might kill his wife only if he found her sinning in his own home. Within sixty days of detecting a wife’s adultery, the husband was required to bring her before the court; if he failed to do this, the woman’s father was required to indict her; if he too failed, any citizen might accuse her. The adulterous woman was to be banished for life, was to lose a third of her fortune and half her dowry, and must not marry again. Like penalties were decreed for a husband conniving at his wife’s adultery. A wife, however, could not accuse her husband of adultery, and he might with legal impunity have relations with registered prostitutes. The law applied only to Roman citizens.

  Probably at the same time Augustus passed another law, usually named lex lulia de maritandis ordinibus, from its chapter on marriage in the “orders”—i.e., the two upper classes. Its purpose was threefold: to encourage and yet restrict marriage, to retard the dilution of Roman with alien blood, and to restore the old conception of marriage as a union for parentage. Marriage was to be obligatory upon all marriageable males under sixty and women under fifty. Bequests conditional on the legatee remaining unmarried were made void. Penalties were imposed upon celibates: they could not inherit, except from relatives, unless they were married within a hundred days after the testator’s death; and they could not attend public festivals or games. Widows and divorcees might inherit only if remarried within six months after the death or divorce of the husband. Spinsters and childless wives could not inherit after fifty, nor before if they possessed 50,000 sesterces ($7500). Men of the Senatorial class could not marry a freedwoman, an actress, or a prostitute; and no actor or freedman could marry a senator’s daughter. Women owning above 20,000 sesterces were to pay a one per cent annual tax till married; after marriage this tax decreased with each child until the third, with whose coming it ceased. Of the two consuls the one with more children was to have precedence over the other. In appointments to office the father of the largest family was as far as feasible to be preferred to his rivals. The mother of three children acquired the ius trium liberorum—the right to wear a special garment, and freedom from the power of her husband.

  These laws offended every class, even the puritans—who complained that the “right of three children” dangerously emancipated the mother from male authority. Others excused their celibacy on the score that the “modern woman” was too independent, imperious, capricious, and extravagant. The exclusion of bachelors from public shows was considered too severe and impossible to enforce; Augustus had the clause rescinded in 12 B.C.. In A.D. 9 the lex Papia Poppaea further softened the Julian laws by easing the conditions under which celibates might inherit, doubling the period in which widows and divorcees must remarry to inherit, and increasing the amount that childless heirs could receive. Mothers of three children were freed from those limits which the lex Voconia (169 B.C..) had placed upon bequests to women. The age at which a citizen might stand
for the various offices was lowered in proportion to the size of his family. After the law was passed men noted that the consuls who had framed it and given it their names were childless celibates. Gossip added that the reform laws had been suggested to Augustus, who had only one child, by Maecenas, who had none; and that while the laws were being enacted Maecenas was living in sybaritic luxury, and Augustus was seducing Maecenas’ wife.19

  It is difficult to estimate the effectiveness of this, the most important social legislation in antiquity. The laws were loosely drawn, and recalcitrants found many loopholes. Some men married to obey the law and divorced their wives soon afterwards; others adopted children to secure offices or legacies and then “emancipated”—i.e., dismissed—them.20 Tacitus, a century later, pronounced the laws a failure; “marriages and the rearing of children did not become frequent, so powerful are the attractions of a childless state.”21 Immorality continued, but was more polite than before; in Ovid we see it becoming a fine art, the subject of careful instructions from experts to apprentices. Augustus himself doubted the efficacy of his laws, and agreed with Horace that laws are vain when hearts are unchanged.22 He struggled heroically to reach people’s hearts: in his box at the games he displayed the numerous children of the exemplary Germanicus; gave a thousand sesterces to parents of large families; 23 raised a monument to a slave girl who (doubtless without patriotic premeditation) had borne quintuplets; 24 and rejoiced when a peasant marched into Rome with eight children, thirty-six grand-children, and nineteen great-grandchildren in his train.25 Dio Cassius pictures him making public addresses denouncing “race suicide.”26 He enjoyed, perhaps inspired, the moral preface of Livy’s history. Under his influence the literature of the age became didactic and practical. Through Maecenas or in person he persuaded Virgil and Horace to lend their muses to the propaganda of moral and religious reform; Virgil tried to sing the Romans back to the farm in the Georgics, and to the old gods in the Aeneid; and Horace, after a large sampling of the world’s pleasures, tuned his lyre to stoic themes. In 17 B.C.. Augustus presented the ludi saeculares III- three days of ceremonies, contests, and spectacles, celebrating the return of Saturn’s Golden Age; and Horace was commissioned to write the carmen saeculare to be chanted in procession by twenty-seven boys and as many girls. Even art was used to point a moral: the lovely Ara Pacis showed in relief the life and government of Rome; magnificent public buildings rose to represent the strength and glory of the Empire; scores of temples were erected to stir again a faith that had almost died.