84. When the funeral arrangements had been announced, his friends raised a pyre on the Campus Martius near his daughter Julia’s tomb, and a gilded shrine on the Rostra resembling that of Mother Venus. In it they set an ivory couch, spread with purple and gold cloth, and from a pillar at its head hung the gown in which he had been murdered. Since a procession of mourners, filing past the pyre in orderly fashion and laying funeral gifts on it, would probably take more than a day to organize, everyone was invited to come there by whatever route he pleased, regardless of precedence. Emotions of pity and indignation were aroused at the funeral games by a line from Pacuvius’s play Contest for the Arms of Achilles:
What, did I save these men that they might murder me?
and by a similar sentiment from Atilius’s Electra. Mark Antony dispensed with a formal eulogy; instead, he instructed a herald to read, first, the recent decree simultaneously voting Caesar all divine and human honours, and then the oath by which the entire Senate had pledged themselves to watch over his safety. Antony added a few short words of comment. When the ivory funeral couch had been carried down into the Forum by a group of magistrates and ex-magistrates, and a dispute arose as to whether the body should be cremated in the Temple of Capitoline Juppiter or in Pompey’s Assembly Hall, two divine forms (perhaps the Twin Brethren) suddenly appeared, javelin in hand and sword at thigh, and set fire to the couch with torches. Immediately the spectators assisted the blaze by heaping on it dry branches and the judges’ chairs, and the court benches, with whatever else came to hand. Thereupon the musicians and the masked professional mourners, who had walked in the funeral train wearing the robes that he had himself worn at his four triumphs, tore these in pieces and flung them on the flames—to which veterans who had assisted at his triumphs added the arms they had then borne. Many women in the audience similarly sacrificed their jewellery together with their children’s golden buttons and embroidered tunics. Public grief was enhanced by crowds of foreigners lamenting in their own fashion, especially Jews who loved Caesar for the friendship he had shown them, and came flocking to the Forum for several nights in succession.
85. As soon as the funeral was over, the commons, snatching firebrands from the pyre, ran to burn down the houses of Brutus and Cassius, and were repelled with difficulty. Mistaking Helvius Cinna for the Cornelius Cinna who had delivered a bitter speech against Caesar on the previous day, and whom they were out to kill, they murdered him and paraded the streets with his head stuck on the point of a spear. Later they raised a twenty-foot-high column of Numidian marble in the Forum, and inscribed on it: ‘To the Father of His Country’. For a long time afterwards they used to offer sacrifices at the foot of this column, make vows there and settle disputes by oaths taken in Caesar’s name.
86. Some of his friends suspected that, having no desire to live much longer because of his failing health, he had taken no precautions against the conspiracy, and neglected the warnings of soothsayers and well-wishers. It has also been suggested that he placed such confidence in the Senate’s last decree and in their oath of loyalty, that he dispensed even with the armed Spaniards who had hitherto acted as his permanent escort. A contrary view is that as a relief from taking constant precautions, he deliberately exposed himself, just this once, to all the plots against his life which he knew had been formed. Also, he is quoted as having often said: ‘It is more important for Rome than for myself that I should survive. I have long been sated with power and glory; but, should anything happen to me, Rome will enjoy no peace. A new Civil War will break out under far worse conditions than the last.’
87. Almost all authorities, at any rate, believe that he welcomed the manner of his death. He had once read in Xenophon’s Boyhood of Cyrus the paragraph about the funeral instructions given by Cyrus on his deathbed, and said how much he loathed the prospect of a lingering end—he wanted a sudden one. And on the day before his murder he had dined at Marcus Lepidus’s house, where the topic discussed happened to be ‘the best sort of death’—and ‘Let it come swiftly and unexpectedly,’ cried Caesar.
88. He was fifty-five years old when he died, and his immediate deification, formally decreed by the loyalists in the Senate, convinced the City as a whole; if only because, on the first day of the Games given by his successor Augustus in honour of this apotheosis, a comet appeared about an hour before sunset and shone for seven days running. This was held to be Caesar’s soul, elevated to Heaven; hence the star, now placed above the forehead of his divine image.
The Senate voted that the Assembly hall where he fell should be walled up; that they should never again meet in it; and that the Ides of March should be known ever afterwards as ‘The Day of Parricide’.
89. Very few, indeed, of the assassins outlived Caesar for more than three years, or died naturally. All were condemned to death under the Pedian Law, and all met it in different ways—some in shipwreck, some in battle, some using the very daggers with which they had treacherously murdered Caesar to take their own lives.
II
AUGUSTUS
AFTERWARDS DEIFIED
The Octavians, by all accounts, were famous in ancient Velitrae. An ‘Octavian Street’ runs through the busiest part of the city, and an altar is shown there consecrated by one Octavius, a local commander. Apparently news of an attack by a neighbouring city reached him while he was sacrificing a victim to Mars; snatching the intestines from the fire, he offered them only half-burned, and hurried away to win the battle. The Velitraean records include a decree that all future offerings to Mars must be made in the same fashion, the carcase of every victim becoming a perquisite of the Octavians.
2. King Tarquinius Priscus admitted the Octavians, among other plebeian families, to the Roman Senate, and though Servius Tullius awarded them patrician privileges, they later reverted to plebeian rank until eventually Julius Caesar made them patricians once more. Gaius Rufus was the first Octavian elected to office by the popular vote—he won a quaestorship. His sons Gaius and Gnaeus fathered two very different branches of the family. Gnaeus’s descendants held all the highest offices of state in turn; but Gaius’s branch, either by accident or choice, remained simple knights until the entry into the Senate of that Gaius Octavius who became famous as Augustus’s father. Augustus’s great-grandfather had fought as a colonel under Aemilius Papus12 in Sicily during the Second Punic War. His grandfather, who enjoyed a comfortable income, was apparently content with a municipal magistracy, and lived to an advanced age. These historical details are not derived from Augustus’s own memoirs, which merely record that he came of a rich old equestrian family, and that his father had been the first Octavian to enter the Senate. Mark Antony wrote scornfully that Augustus’s great-grandfather had been only a freedman, a ropemaker from the neighbourhood of Thurii; and his grandfather, a money-changer. This is as much information as I have managed to glean about Augustus’s family history.
3. I cannot believe that Gaius Octavius, the father, was also a money-changer who distributed bribes among the voters in the Campus and undertook other electioneering services. He was certainly born rich enough to achieve office without having to engage in such practices; and proved a capable administrator. After his praetorship, he became governor of Macedonia, and the Senate commissioned him to pass through Thurii on his way there and disperse a group of outlawed slaves who, having fought under Spartacus and Catiline, were now terrorizing the district. He governed Macedonia courageously and justly, winning a big battle in Thrace, mainly against the Bessians; and letters survive from Cicero reproaching his brother Quintus, then proconsular governor of Asia, for inefficiency, and advising him to make Octavius his model in all diplomatic dealings with allies.
4. Gaius died suddenly on his return to Rome, before he could stand as a candidate for the Consulship. He left three children: Octavia the Elder, Octavia the Younger, and Augustus. The mother of Octavia the Elder was Ancharia; the other two were his children by Atia, daughter of Marcus Atius Balbus and Julius Caesar’s sister
Julia. Balbus’s family originated in Atricia, and could boast of many ancestral busts of senators; his mother was also closely related to Pompey the Great. Balbus served first as praetor, and then with a Commission of Twenty appointed under the Julian Law to divide estates in Campania among the commons. Mark Antony likewise tried to belittle Augustus’s maternal line by alleging that his great-grandfather Balbus had been born in Africa, and kept first a perfumery and then a bakehouse at Africa. Cassius of Parma similarly sneers at Augustus as the grandson of a baker and a money-changer, writing in one of his letters: ‘Your mother’s flour came from a miserable Arician bakery, and the coin-stained hands of a Nerulian money-changer kneaded it.’
5. Augustus was born just before sunrise on 23 September,13 while Cicero and Gaius Antonius were Consuls, at Ox Heads, in the Palatine district; a shrine to him, built soon after his death, marks the spot. The case of a young patrician, Gaius Laetorius by name, figures in the published book of Senatorial Proceedings. Pleading his youth and position to escape the maximum punishment for adultery, he further described himself as ‘the occupant and, one might even say, guardian of the place first touched at his birth by the God Augustus’. Laetorius begged for pardon in the name of his ‘own especial god’. The Senate afterwards consecrated that part of the building by decree.
6. In the country mansion, near Velitrae, which belonged to Augustus’s grandfather, a small room, not unlike a butler’s pantry, is still shown and described as Augustus’s nursery; the local people firmly believe that he was also born there. Religious scruples forbid anyone to enter except for some necessary reason, and after purification. It had long been believed that casual visitors would be overcome by a sudden awful terror; and recently this was proved true when, one night, a new owner of the mansion, either from ignorance or because he wanted to test the truth of the belief, went to sleep in the room. A few hours later he was hurled out of bed by a supernatural agency and found lying half-dead against the door, bedclothes and all.
7. I can prove pretty conclusively that as a child Augustus was called Thurinus (‘the Thurian’), perhaps because his ancestors had once lived at Thurii, or because his father had defeated the slaves in that neighbourhood soon after he was born; my evidence is a bronze statuette which I once owned. It shows him as a boy, and a rusty, almost illegible inscription in iron letters gives him this name. I have presented the statuette to the Emperor Hadrian, who has placed it among the household-gods in his bedroom. Moreover, Augustus was often sneeringly called ‘The Thurian’ in Antony’s correspondence. Augustus answered by confessing himself puzzled: why should a name which he had outgrown be thrown in his face as an insult?
Later he adopted the surname Caesar to comply with the will of his mother’s uncle, the Dictator; and then the title Augustus,14 after a motion to that effect had been introduced by Munatius Plancus. Some senators wished him to be called Romulus, as the second founder of the City; but Plancus had his way. He argued that ‘Augustus’ was both a more original and a more honourable title, since sanctuaries and all places consecrated by the augurs are known as ‘august’—the word being either an enlarged form of auctus, implying the ‘increase’ of dignity thus given such places, or a worn-down form of the phrase avium gestus gustus-ve, ‘the behaviour and appetite of birds’, which the augurs observed. Plancus supported his point by a quotation from Ennius’s Annals:
‘When glorious Rome had founded been, by augury august.’
8. At the age of four Augustus lost his father. At twelve he delivered a funeral oration in honour of his grandmother Julia, Julius Caesar’s sister. At sixteen, having now come of age, he was awarded military decorations when Caesar celebrated his African triumph, though he had been too young for overseas service. Caesar then went to fight Pompey’s sons in Spain; Augustus followed with a very small escort, along roads held by the enemy, after a shipwreck, too, and in a state of semi-convalescence from a serious illness. This energetic action delighted Caesar, who soon formed a high estimate of Augustus’s character.
Having recovered possession of Spain, Caesar planned a war against the Dacians and Parthians, and sent Augustus ahead to Apollonia, in Illyria, where he spent his spare time studying Greek literature. News then came that Caesar had been assassinated, after naming him his heir, and Augustus was tempted, for awhile, to put himself under the protection of the troops quartered near by. However, deciding that this would be rash and injudicious, he returned to Rome and there entered upon his inheritance, despite his mother’s doubts and the active opposition of his step-father, Marcius Philippus the ex-Consul. Augustus now took command of the Army, and governed the Empire: first with Mark Antony and Lepidus as his colleagues; next, for nearly twelve years, with Antony alone; finally by himself for another forty-four years.
9. After this brief outline of Augustus’s life, I shall fill in its various phases; but the story will be more readable and understandable if, instead of keeping chronological order, I use subject headings and begin with the civil wars that he fought.
There were five campaigns in all; associated respectively with the geographical names of Mutina, Philippi, Perugia, Sicily, and Actium. Those of Mutina and Actium were against Mark Antony; that of Philippi against Brutus and Cassius; that of Perugia against Antony’s brother Lucius; that of Sicily against Sextus Pompey, son of Pompey the Great.
10. The underlying motive of every campaign was that Augustus felt it his duty, above all, to avenge Caesar and keep his decrees in force. On his return from Apollonia, he decided to punish Brutus and Cassius immediately; but they foresaw the danger and escaped, so he had recourse to the law and prosecuted them for murder. Finding that the officials who should have celebrated Caesar’s victory with public Games did not dare to carry out their commission, he undertook the task himself. Because stronger authority was needed to implement his other plans, Augustus announced his candidature for a tribuneship of the people—death had created a vacancy—although neither a patrician nor a senator, and thus doubly disqualified from standing. Mark Antony, one of the two Consuls, on whose assistance Augustus had particularly counted, opposed this action and denied him even his ordinary legal rights, except on payment of a heavy bribe. Augustus therefore deserted the popular party and went over to the aristocrats, well aware that they hated Antony, who was now besieging Decimus Brutus at Mutina and trying to expel him from the province to which he had been appointed by Caesar with the Senate’s approval. On the advice of certain aristocrats, Augustus actually engaged assassins to murder Antony and, when the plot came to light, spent as much money as he could raise on enlisting a force of veterans to protect himself and the Constitution. The Senate awarded him praetorian rank, gave him the command of this army, and instructed him to join Hirtius and Pansa, the two new Consuls, in the relief of Mutina. Augustus brought the campaign to a successful close within three months, after fighting a couple of battles. According to Antony, he ran away from the first of these and did not reappear until the next day, having lost both his charger and his purple cloak. But it is generally agreed that in the second engagement he showed not only skill as a commander but courage as a soldier: when, at a crisis in the fighting, the standard-bearer of his legion was seriously wounded, Augustus himself shouldered the Eagle and carried it for some time.
11. Because Hirtius fell in battle, and Pansa later succumbed to a wound, a rumour went about that Augustus had engineered both deaths with the object of gaining sole control over their victorious armies after Antony’s defeat. Pansa certainly died in such suspicious circumstances that Glyco, his physician, was arrested on a charge of poisoning the wound; and Aquilius Niger goes so far as to assert that in the confusion of battle Augustus despatched Hirtius with his own hand.
12. However, when Augustus heard that Mark Antony had been taken under Lepidus’s protection and that the other military commanders, supported by their troops, were coming to terms with these two, he at once deserted the aristocratic party. His excuse was that some of them had co
ntemptuously called him ‘the boy’, while others had not concealed their view that, once publicly honoured, he should be done away with—to avoid having to pay his veterans and himself what they expected. Augustus showed regret for this temporary defection from the popular cause by imposing a heavier fine on the Nursians than they could possibly meet, and then exiling them from their city; they had offended him by erecting a monument to fellow-citizens killed at Mutina, with the inscription: ‘Fallen in the cause of freedom!’
13. As member of a triumvirate consisting of Antony, Lepidus, and himself, Augustus defeated Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, though in ill-heath at the time. In the first of the two battles fought he was driven out of his camp, and escaped with some difficulty to Antony’s command. After the second and decisive one he showed no clemency to his beaten enemies, but sent Brutus’s head to Rome for throwing at the feet of Caesar’s divine image; and insulted the more distinguished of his prisoners. When one of these humbly asked for the right of decent burial, he got the cold answer: ‘That must be settled with the carrion-birds.’ And when a father and his son pleaded for their lives, Augustus, it is said, told them to decide which of the two should be spared, by casting lots. The father sacrificed his life for the son, and was executed; the son then committed suicide; Augustus watched them both die. His conduct so disgusted the remainder of the prisoners, including Marcus Favonius, a well-known disciple of Cato’s, that while being led off in chains they courteously saluted Antony as their conqueror, but abused Augustus to his face with the most obscene epithets.
The Twelve Caesars Page 6