The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  In the end Augustus, skeptic and realist, became convinced that moral reform awaited a religious renaissance. The agnostic generation of Lucretius, Catullus, and Caesar had run its course, and its children had discovered that the fear of the gods is the youth of wisdom. Even the cynical Ovid would soon write, Voltaireanly: expedit esse deos, et ut expedit esse putemus: “it is convenient that there should be gods, and that we should think they exist.”27 Conservative minds traced the Civil War, and the sufferings it had brought, to neglect of religion and the consequent anger of Heaven. Everywhere in Italy a chastened people was ready to turn back to its ancient altars and thank the deities who, it felt, had spared it for this happy restoration. When, in 12 B.C.., Augustus, having waited patiently for the tepid Lepidus to die, succeeded him as pontifex maximus, “such a multitude from all Italy assembled for my election,” the Emperor tells us, “as is never recorded to have been in Rome before.”28 He both led and followed the revival of religion, hoping that his political and moral reconstruction would win readier acceptance if he could entwine it with the gods. He raised the four priestly colleges to unprecedented dignity and wealth, chose himself to each of them, took upon himself the appointment of new members, attended their meetings faithfully, and took part in their solemn pageantry. He banned Egyptian and Asiatic cults from Rome, but he made an exception in favor of the Jews, and permitted religious freedom in the provinces. He lavished gifts upon the temples and renewed old religious ceremonies, processions, and festivals. The ludi saeculares were not secular; every day of them was marked with religious ritual and song; their chief significance was the return of a happy friendship with the gods. Nourished with such sovereign aid, the ancient cult took on fresh life, and touched again the dramatic impulses and supernatural hopes of the people. Amid the chaos of competing faiths that flowed in upon Rome after Augustus, it held its own for three centuries more; and when it died it was at once reborn, under new symbols and new names.

  Augustus himself became one of the chief competitors of his gods. His great-uncle had set the example: two years after being murdered, Caesar had been recognized by the Senate as a deity, and his worship spread throughout the Empire. As early as 36 B.C.. some Italian cities had given Octavian a place in their pantheon; by 27 B.C.. his name was added to those of the gods in official hymns at Rome; his birthday became a holy day as well as a holiday; and after his death the Senate decreed that his genius, or soul, was thereafter to be worshiped as one of the official divinities. All this seemed quite natural to antiquity; it had never recognized an impassable difference between gods and men; the gods had often taken human form, and the creative genius of a Heracles, a Lycurgus, an Alexander, a Caesar, or an Augustus seemed, especially to the religious East, miraculous and divine. The Egyptians had thought of the Pharaohs, of the Ptolemies, even of Antony, as deities; they could hardly think less of Augustus. The ancients were not in these cases such simpletons as their modern counterparts would like to believe. They knew well enough that Augustus was human; in deifying his genius, or that of others, they used deus or theos as equivalent to our “canonized saint”; indeed, canonization is a descendant of Roman deification; and to pray to such a deified human being seemed no more absurd then than prayer to a saint seems now.

  In Italian homes the worship of the Emperor’s genius became associated with the adoration given to the Lares of the household and the genius of the paterfamilias; there was nothing difficult in this for a people which through centuries had deified their dead parents, built altars to them, and given the name of temples to the ancestral tombs. When Augustus visited Greek Asia in 21 B.C.. he found that his cult had made rapid headway there. Dedications and orations hailed him as “Savior,” “Bringer of Glad Tidings,” “God the Son of God”; some men argued that in him the long-awaited Messiah had come, bringing peace and happiness to mankind.29 The great provincial councils made his worship the center of their ceremonies; a new priesthood, the Augustales, was appointed by provinces and municipalities for the service of the new divinity. Augustus frowned upon all this, but finally accepted it as a spiritual enhancement of the Principate, a valuable cementing of church and state, a uniting common worship amid diverse and dividing creeds. The moneylender’s grandson consented to become a god.

  V. AUGUSTUS HIMSELF

  What sort of man was this who was heir to Caesar at eighteen, master of the world at thirty-one, ruler of Rome for half a century, and architect of the greatest empire in ancient history? He was at once dull and fascinating; no one more prosaic, yet half the world adored him; a physical weakling not particularly brave, but able to overcome all enemies, regulate kingdoms, and fashion a government that would give the vast realm an unexampled prosperity for two hundred years.

  Sculptors spent much marble and bronze in making images of him: some showing him in the timid pride of a refined and serious youth, some in the somber pose of a priest, some half covered with the insignia of power, some in military garb—the philosopher unwillingly and uneasily playing the general. These effigies do not reveal, though sometimes they suggest, the ailments that made his war against chaos depend precariously at every step upon his fight for health. He was unprepossessing. He had sandy hair, a strangely triangular head, merging eyebrows, clear and penetrating eyes; yet his expression was so calm and mild, says Suetonius, that a Gaul who came to kill him changed his mind. His skin was sensitive and intermittently itched with a kind of ringworm; rheumatism weakened his left leg and made him limp a bit; a stiffness akin to arthritis occasionally incapacitated his right hand. He was one of many Romans attacked in 23 B.C. by a plague resembling typhus; he suffered from stones in the bladder, and found it hard to sleep; he was troubled each spring by “an enlargement of the diaphragm; and when the wind was in the south he had catarrh.” He bore cold so poorly that in winter he wore “a woolen chest protector, wraps for his thighs and shins, an undershirt, four tunics (blouses), and a heavy toga.” He dared not expose his head to the sun. Horseback riding tired him, and he was sometimes carried in a litter to the battlefield.30 At thirty-five, having lived through one of the most intense dramas in history, he was already oldnervous, sickly, easily tired; no one dreamed that he would live another forty years. He tried a variety of doctors, and richly rewarded one, Antonius Musa, for curing an uncertain illness (abscess of the liver?) with cold fomentations and baths; in Musa’s honor he exempted all Roman physicians from taxation.31 But for the most part he doctored himself. He used hot salt water and sulphur baths for his rheumatism; he ate lightly and only the plainest food—coarse bread, cheese, fish, and fruit; he was so careful of his diet that “sometimes he ate alone either before a dinner party or after it, taking nothing during its course.”32 In him, as in some medieval saints, the soul bore its body like a cross.

  His essence was nervous vitality, inflexible resolution, a penetrating, calculating, resourceful mind. He accepted an unheard-of number of offices, and took upon himself responsibility only less than Caesar’s. He fulfilled the duties of these positions conscientiously, presided regularly over the Senate, attended innumerable conferences, judged hundreds of trials, suffered ceremonies and banquets, planned distant campaigns, governed legions and provinces, visited nearly every one of them, and attended to infinite administrative detail. He made hundreds of speeches, and prepared them with proud attention to clarity, simplicity, and style; he read them instead of speaking extemporaneously, lest he should utter regrettable words. Suetonius would have us believe that for the same reason he wrote out in advance, and read, important conversations with individuals, even with his wife.33

  Like most skeptics of his time, he retained superstitions long after losing his faith. He carried a sealskin about him to protect against lightning; he respected omens and auspices and sometimes obeyed warnings derived from dreams; he refused to begin a journey on what he reckoned to be unlucky days.34 At the same time he was remarkable for the objectivity of his judgment and the practicality of his thought. He advised young m
en to enter soon upon an active career, so that the ideas they had learned from books might be tempered by the experience and necessities of life.35 He kept to the end his bourgeois good sense, conservatism, parsimony, and caution. Festina lente—“make haste slowly”—was his favorite saw. Far more than most men of such power, he could take advice and bear reproof humbly. Athenodorus, a philosopher who was returning to Athens after living with him for years, gave him some parting counsel: “Whenever you get angry do not say or do anything before repeating to yourself the twenty-four letters of the alphabet.” Augustus was so grateful for the caution that he begged Athenodorus to stay another year, saying, “No risk attends the reward that silence brings.”36

  Even more surprising than Caesar’s development from a roistering politician into a great general and statesman was the transformation of the merciless and self-centered Octavian into the modest and magnanimous Augustus. He grew. The man who had allowed Antony to hang Cicero’s head in the Forum, who had moved without scruple from one faction to another, who had run the gamut of sexual indulgence, who had pursued Antony and Cleopatra to the death unmoved by friendship or chivalry—this tenacious and unlovable youth, instead of being poisoned by power, became in his last forty years a model of justice, moderation, fidelity, magnanimity, and toleration. He laughed at the lampoons that wits and poets wrote about him. He advised Tiberius to be content with preventing or prosecuting hostile actions and not seek to suppress hostile words. He did not insist upon others living as simply as himself; when he invited guests to dinner he would retire early to leave their appetite and merriment unrestrained. He had no pretentiousness; he buttonholed voters to ask their suffrages; he substituted for his lawyer friends in court; he left or entered Rome secretly, abhorring pomp; in the reliefs of the Ara Pacis he is not set apart from the other citizens by any mark of distinction. His morning receptions were open to all citizens, and all were affably received. When one man hesitated to present a petition he jokingly chided him for offering the document “as if he were giving a penny to an elephant.”37

  In his senile years, when disappointments had embittered him, and he had grown accustomed to omnipotence, even to being a god, he lapsed into intolerance, prosecuted hostile writers, suppressed histories of too critical a stamp, and gave no ear to Ovid’s penitent verse. Once, it is said, he had the legs of his secretary Thallus broken for taking 500 denarii to reveal the contents of an official letter; and he forced one of his freedmen to kill himself when found guilty of adultery with a Roman matron. All in all, it is hard to love him. We must picture the frailty of his body and the sorrows of his old age before our hearts can go out to him as to the murdered Caesar or the beaten Antony.

  VI. THE LAST DAYS OF A GOD

  His failures and his tragedies were almost all within his home. By his three wives—Claudia, Scribonia, Livia—he had but one child: Scribonia unwittingly avenged her divorce by giving him Julia. He had hoped that Livia would bear him a son whom he might train and educate for government; but though she had rewarded her first husband with two splendid children—Tiberius and Drusus—her marriage with Augustus proved disappointingly sterile. Otherwise their union was a happy one. She was a woman of stately beauty, firm character, and fine understanding; Augustus rehearsed his most vital measures with her and valued her advice as highly as that of his maturest friends. Asked how she had acquired such influence over him, she replied, “by being scrupulously chaste . . . never meddling with his affairs, and pretending neither to hear of nor to notice the favorites with whom he had amours.”38 She was a model of the old virtues, and perhaps expounded them too persistently. In her leisure she devoted herself to charity, helping parents of large families, providing dowries for poor brides, and maintaining many orphans at her own expense. Her palace itself was almost an orphanage; for there, and in the home of his sister Octavia, Augustus supervised the education of his grandsons, nephews, nieces, and even the six surviving children of Antony. He sent the boys off early to war, saw to it that the girls should learn to spin and weave, and “forbade them to do or say anything except without concealment, and such as might be recorded in the household diary.”39

  Augustus learned to love Livia’s son Drusus, adopted and reared him, and would gladly have left him his wealth and power; the youth’s early death was one of the Emperor’s first bereavements. Tiberius he respected but could not love, for his future successor was a positive and imperious character, inclined to sullenness and secrecy. But the comeliness and vivacity of his daughter Julia must have given Augustus many happy moments in her childhood. When she had reached the age of fourteen he persuaded Octavia to allow the divorce of her son Marcellus, and induced the youth to marry Julia. Two years later Marcellus died; and Julia, after brief mourning, set out to enjoy a freedom she had long coveted. But soon the matchmaking Emperor, craving a grandson as heir, coaxed the reluctant Agrippa to divorce his wife and marry the merry widow (21 B.C..). Julia was eighteen, Agrippa forty-two; but he was a good and great man and agreeably rich. She made his town house a salon of pleasure and wit, and became the soul of the younger and gayer set in the capital as against the puritans who took their lead from Livia. Rumor accused Julia of deceiving her new husband, and ascribed to her an incredible reply to the incredible question why, despite her adulteries, all the five children she gave Agrippa resembled him: Numquam nisi nave plena tollo vectorem.40 When Agrippa died (12 B.C.) Augustus turned his hopes to Julia’s oldest sons, Gaius and Lucius, overwhelmed them with affection and education, and had them promoted to office far sooner than was legally warranted by their years.

  Again a widow, Julia, richer and lovelier than ever, entered with saucy abandon upon a succession of amours which became at once the scandal and the joy of a Rome that fretted under the “Julian laws.” To quiet this gossip, and perhaps to reconcile his daughter with his wife, Augustus made a third match for Julia. Livia’s son Tiberius was compelled to divorce his pregnant wife, Vipsania Agrippina, daughter of Agrippa, and to marry the equally reluctant Julia (9 B.C..). The young old Roman did his best to be a good husband; but Julia soon gave up the effort to adjust her epicurean to his stoic ways, and resumed her illicit loves. Tiberius bore the infamy for a time in furious silence. The lex Iulia de adulteriis required the husband of an adulteress to denounce her to the courts; Tiberius disobeyed the law to protect its author, and perhaps himself, for he and Livia had hoped that Augustus would adopt him as his son and transmit to him the leadership of the Empire. When it became clear that the Emperor favored, instead, Julia’s children by Agrippa, Tiberius resigned his official posts and retired to Rhodes. There for seven years he lived as a simple private citizen, devoting himself to solitude, philosophy, and astrology. Freer than ever, Julia passed from one lover to another, and the revels of her set filled the Forum with turmoil at night.41

  Augustus, now (2 B.C..) an invalid of sixty, suffered all that a father and ruler could bear from the simultaneous collapse of his family, his honor, and his laws. By these laws the father of an adulteress was bound to indict her publicly if her husband had failed to do so. Proofs of her misconduct were laid before him, and the friends of Tiberius let it be known that unless Augustus acted they would accuse Julia before the court. Augustus decided to anticipate them. While the merrymaking was at its height, he issued a decree banishing his daughter to the island of Pandateria, a barren rock off the Campanian coast. One of her lovers, a son of Antony, was forced to kill himself, and several others were exiled. Julia’s freedwoman Phoebe hanged herself rather than testify against her; the distraught Emperor, hearing of the act, said, “I would rather have been Phoebe’s father than Julia’s.” The people of Rome begged him to forgive his daughter, Tiberius added his request to theirs, but pardon never came. Tiberius, enthroned, merely changed her place of residence to a less narrow confinement at Rhegium. There, broken and forgotten after sixteen years of imprisonment, Julia died.

  Her sons Gaius and Lucius had long preceded her in death: Lucius of
an illness in Marseilles (A.D. 2), Gaius of a wound received in Armenia (A.D. 4). Left without aide or successor at a time when Germany, Pannonia, and Gaul were threatening revolt, Augustus reluctantly recalled Tiberius (A.D. 2), adopted him as son and coregent, and sent him off to put down the rebellions. When he returned (A.D. 9), after five years of arduous and successful campaigning, all Rome, which hated him for his stern puritanism, resigned itself to the fact that though Augustus was still prince, Tiberius had begun to rule.

  Life’s final tragedy is unwilling continuance—to outlive one’s self and be forbidden to die. When Julia went into exile Augustus was not in years an old man; others were still vigorous at sixty. But he had lived too many lives, and died too many deaths, since he had come to Rome, a boy of eighteen, to avenge Caesar’s murder and execute his will. How many wars and battles and near-defeats, how many pains and illnesses, how many conspiracies and perils, and bitter miscarriages of noble aims, had befallen him in those crowded forty-two years—and the snatching away of one hope and helper after another, until at last only this dour Tiberius remained! Perhaps it had been wiser to die like Antony, at the peak of life and in the arms of love. How sadly pleasant must have seemed, in retrospect, the days when Julia and Agrippa were happy, and grandchildren frolicked on the palace floor. Now another Julia, daughter of his daughter, had grown up and was following her mother’s morals as if resolved to illustrate all the amatory arts of her friend Ovid’s verse. In A.D. 8, having received proofs of her adultery, Augustus exiled her to an isle in the Adriatic, and at the same time banished Ovid to Tomi on the Black Sea. “Would that I had never married,” mourned the feeble and shrunken Emperor, “or that I had died without offspring!” Sometimes he thought of starving himself to death.