Augustus

by Anthony Everitt

  Little is known of public affairs during the next few years. A regular system of suffect or replacement consuls, who took over from the original officeholders in mid-term, was reintroduced. The princeps reformed the procedures by which a provincial governor could be arraigned for extortion, and in 4 and 3 B.C. further settlements of military veterans were founded.

  On the domestic front, a new generation was beginning to emerge. The dead Drusus had had several children by his much-loved wife, Antonia, three of whom survived. The eldest, Germanicus, was born in 15 B.C. and grew up into a courageous and good-natured boy. He was handsome, although his legs were somewhat spindly, a fault he tried to remedy by constant horseback riding after meals. He learned to become an excellent public speaker in Latin and Greek, enjoyed literature, and in adulthood wrote a number of comedies in Greek. Augustus became extremely fond of Germanicus.

  Drusus’ other son, Claudius, born in 10 B.C., was a problem. His childhood was marred by frequent illnesses. He was physically weak and he limped (perhaps the result of a polio attack); he developed a stutter and a nervous twitching of the head. His mother, Antonia, loathed him. She called him “a monster, not finished but merely begun by nature.” Accusing anyone of stupidity, she would say: “He’s as big a fool as my son Claudius.” Livia also treated him with contempt and rarely spoke to him.

  In fact, Claudius matured into an intelligent and studious youth. As a child, he set his sights on becoming a historian. Encouraged by the greatest historian of the age, Livy, he started work on a history of Rome. It opened with the murder of Julius Caesar, but skipped the civil wars that followed when Livia and Antonia warned him that he would not be allowed to publish an uncensored account of those years.

  The third child was a girl, Livilla, whom Augustus regarded, as he did all his female relatives, as little more than dynastic marriage fodder. That no record of her early years survives is a reminder of the low value Romans placed on girls.

  Like previous years of crisis, 2 B.C. opened well. The princeps held his thirteenth consulship, this time to mark the entry into the adult world of the fifteen-year-old Lucius, whom he designated consul for A.D. 4.

  A popular campaign was launched to confer on him the title pater patriae, “father of his country.” This would be a very great honor, seldom bestowed. It had been last awarded to Julius Caesar after the battle of Munda and before that in 63 B.C. to the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, when he unmasked Catilina’s conspiracy against the state.

  Messalla was an honorable turncoat (by contrast, say, with the egregious Plancus) and continued to refer to Cassius, under whom he had fought, as “my general” even after he became one of the princeps’ closest friends. He joined Mark Antony after the defeat at Philippi, and switched sides one final time, foreseeing the ruin that Antony’s partnership with Cleopatra would bring about. He distinguished himself at Actium.

  After that battle, the then Octavian joked: “You have fought for me as well as you did against me at Philippi.”

  Messalla cleverly replied: “I have always chosen the best and justest side!”

  On February 5, at a meeting of the Senate, this distinguished man addressed his leader: “Caesar Augustus, the Senate agrees with the People of Rome in saluting you as Father of your Country.” It was one of the proudest moments in Augustus’ life, for the honor was clearly more than flattery: it reflected genuine respect.

  With tears in his eyes, he replied: “Fathers of the Senate, I have at last achieved my highest ambition. What more can I ask of the immortal gods than that they may permit me to enjoy your approval until my dying day?”

  After long years of construction, the Temple of Mars Ultor, or Avenging Mars, and the huge new Forum of Augustus of which the temple was the grand centerpiece, were opened to the public. To mark the occasion, Gaius and Lucius presided over horse races and their younger brother, Agrippa Postumus, aged ten (as his name suggests, he had been born after his father’s death), took part in a staging of the Troy Game, with other teenaged riders from good families.

  Entertainments included a gladiatorial contest and the slaughter of thirty-six crocodiles. The most ambitious event was a naval battle between “Persians” and “Athenians,” for which a large artificial lake, eighteen hundred feet long and twelve hundred feet wide, was excavated beside the Tiber. This was spectacle on a scale that only Hollywood, two millennia later, would be able to imitate—with the difference that in Rome, real blood was spilled and real ships torched or sunk. Thirty triremes and biremes, equipped with rams, were set against one another, alongside many small vessels. Augustus proudly asserts that three thousand men, in addition to the rowers, fought in the engagement, although he does not record how many of them lost their lives. As at the original battle of Salamis in the fifth century B.C., the Athenians won the day.

  Much to Augustus’ dismay, his social legislation of 18 and 17 B.C. seemed not to have had the desired effect on Rome’s ruling class. Young men-about-town behaved as badly as ever, spending most of their time chasing women instead of settling down and pursuing politics with due gravitas.

  One of their trend-setters was the poet Publius Ovidius Naso (or, in English, Ovid). He was born into a well-to-do and ancient equestrian family in 43 B.C., and his dominating father did not want him to waste time writing poetry. But this was exactly what delighted young Ovid. Once when his father reprimanded him for scribbling verses instead of doing his homework, the boy cheekily replied by improvising a perfect pentameter, a line of verse with five feet: “Parce mihi! Numquam versicabo, pater!”—“Forgive me, Dad! I’ll never write a verse.”

  Unlike Virgil and Horace, Ovid never entered Augustus’ circle. This was hardly surprising, considering the subject matter of much of his poetry—namely, the obsessive pursuit of pretty girls. His Amores, “Love Affairs,” first appeared in 16 B.C. and the Ars Amatoria, or “Art of Love,” about 2 B.C.

  Ovid did not believe in paying for sex and, although many of his poems may be about his wife, he enjoyed hunting down married women. He wrote a poem about trying to pick one up at a popular cruising ground, Augustus’ Temple of Apollo on the Palatine. The only trouble is that she is guarded by a eunuch attendant. The poet begs him:

  All we need is your consent to some quiet love-making—

  It’s hard to imagine a more harmless request.

  Ovid was a well-known member of the smart set, whose first lady was Augustus’ daughter, Julia, now thirty-eight years old and off the leash with Tiberius absent in Rhodes. She had been brought up strictly. Suetonius notes that she was under instruction “not to say or do anything, either publicly or in private, that could not decently figure in the imperial day-book.” Among other things, this meant not consorting with young men, and any who were so bold as to make even the most innocuous advance risked being told off by the princeps. He wrote to Lucius Vinicius, for example, a young man of good position and conduct: “You have acted presumptuously in coming to Baiae to call on my daughter.”

  Despite or perhaps because of her upbringing, Julia grew into a free-spirited woman, with contradictory personality traits. She was well read and reportedly had a gentle and humane personality. However, anecdotes also survive of her sharp tongue and willfulness. Once she entered Augustus’ presence wearing a revealing dress. On the following day she appeared in the most conservative of stolas. Her father expressed his delight and said: “This dress is much more becoming in the daughter of Augustus.”

  Julia replied: “Yes, today I am dressed to meet my father’s eyes; yesterday it was for my husband’s.”

  Augustus knew better than to shout at his daughter, but he repeatedly advised her to show more restraint. He believed she was just high-spirited, and once observed that he had two spoiled daughters to put up with—Rome and Julia.

  Among friends, Julia acted and spoke without reserve; like Ovid, she saw nothing harmful in some quiet lovemaking. However, she took precautions. Contraception in ancient Rome was a hit-and-miss affair. S
ome women practiced coitus interruptus; others applied sticky substances, such as old olive oil, to the mouth of the uterus, or used vaginal suppositories. All these methods were unreliable, and Julia is said to have restricted full intercourse to times when she was pregnant. She once remarked: “Passengers are never allowed on board till the hold is full.”

  But she was very aware of her social position, and let no one forget it.

  Very probably Julia’s way of life differed little in kind from that of other fashionable women of her class, although it may have done so in degree. We are told that she took part in drinking parties in the Forum, walked the streets looking for excitement, and committed adultery with various leading Romans, among them Mark Antony’s son by Fulvia, the forty-three-year-old Iullus Antonius. Despite these indiscretions, she and her friends took care for many years that no reports of sexual promiscuity reached her father’s ears.

  In 2 B.C., however, convincing evidence of her behavior was passed to the princeps, although the identity and motives of the informant are unknown. His reaction revealed a total loss of emotional control. He was so shocked and, it would seem, ashamed that he refused for a time to receive visitors. He wrote a letter informing the Senate of the case, but stayed at home and allowed a quaestor to read it out on his behalf. When he heard that a confidante of Julia, a freedwoman called Phoebe, had hanged herself, he cried out: “I should have preferred to be Phoebe’s father!”

  Iullus was either executed or forced to kill himself, and the other men in Julia’s circle were banished to various parts of the empire. Nor was there much mercy toward Julia: Augustus sent her into exile; arranged Tiberius’ divorce from her without consulting him; and gave orders that “should anything happen to her” after his death she should not be buried in the Mausoleum. He never forgave her and never saw her again.

  The striking feature of these events is not so much Julia’s immodesty, but her father’s overreaction. Augustus’ own private life could not stand scrutiny, but he had no qualms about applying a double standard. His anger leaps from the pages of the ancient sources, and was surely sincere. Julia’s behavior defied the central beliefs of the regime. For a quarter of a century the princeps had promoted the old ways and the old days—tradition, sobriety, duty, womanly modesty, marriage. And now his own family, of whose virtues he had boasted, was shown to harbor rot in its core! He had expected his daughter to be a virtuous matron, on the model of Cornelia, but it turned out that she was a moral descendant of the vicious Sempronia, who had conspired with Catilina. Like her, Julia was witty, intelligent, and shameless.

  Far exceeding the penalties specified by his own legislation, Augustus used the “solemn names of sacrilege and treason for the common offence of misconduct between the sexes.” The men involved were probably tried in a treason court, although if the official version of what happened is the whole story, Julia’s offense was personal and not really a crime against the state.

  However, it is likely that Julia’s disgrace had a political dimension. It would not have been the first time that a Roman woman making a political intervention was smeared with charges of sexual license (that is probably what happened to Sempronia). Interestingly, three of the men with whom Julia was supposed to have committed adultery were members of Rome’s oldest families: Cornelius Scipio, Appius Claudius Pulcher, and Titus Sempronius Gracchus. These were once names to conjure with and evoked some of the most famous pages in the history of the Republic. Another of the men had been consul a few years earlier—Quinctius Crispinus Sulpicianus, to whom Velleius attributes “unique depravity disguised by forbidding eyebrows.”

  Tacitus has a telling paragraph about Gracchus:

  This shrewd, misguidedly eloquent aristocrat had seduced Julia while she was Marcus Agrippa’s wife. Nor was that the end of the affair, for when she transferred to Tiberius this persistent adulterer made her defiant and unfriendly to her new husband. A letter abusing Tiberius, which Julia wrote to her father Augustus, was believed to have been Gracchus’ work.

  Here is evidence, admittedly obscure and partial, of infighting between two factions—one centered on Julia and her sons, and the other on Tiberius and, we may suppose, Livia. It is not known when Julia delivered her letter about Tiberius; perhaps she was defending herself against allegations he may have made against her, or alternatively she could have been taking advantage of his withdrawal to Rhodes. Even if the essence of the matter was a difference of personality, the conflicting dynastic interests of the parties meant that Julia’s intervention must have had political implications.

  One of the accusations leveled against Julia sounds innocuous, but it especially infuriated the princeps. In the Forum there was a small pool, called the Lacus Curtius, near which stood an enclosure containing a fig tree, an olive tree, and a vine (now replanted for today’s tourists) alongside a statue of Marsyas with a wineskin over his shoulder. Marsyas was a satyr, a companion of the god Dionysus. He was skilled with the flute and challenged the god Apollo, who played the lyre, to a musical competition; he lost and the god punished him by skinning him alive.

  The Marsyas story bore two meanings. First, it symbolized the eternal struggle between the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of human nature. Second, the satyr came to be regarded as an emblem of liberty. That is why his statue in the Forum wore a pileus or Phrygian cap, such as slaves were given when they were freed.

  Julia placed a wreath on Marsyas’ head, presumably during one of her late-night sessions in the Forum. Decorating a statue in this way without official permission was not allowed, but, on the face of it, hardly qualifies as a serious offense.

  Why did Julia honor Marsyas? According to one report, she prostituted herself in the privacy of the enclosure, so the wreath could simply have been discarded party gear. However, it is conceivable that she was making an antigovernment demonstration, calling for a return to Rome’s lost freedoms. Bearing in mind her father’s expropriation of Apollo as his tutelary favorite among the Olympians, and Marsyas’ association with Dionysus, she could also have been signaling her disapproval of the princeps—even evoking the memory of the “New Dionysus,” her lover’s father, Mark Antony.

  It may be no coincidence that in this year the people are reported to have pressed for some (unspecified) reforms. They sent the tribunes to talk with Augustus, who attended an assembly of the people and discussed their demands in person with them. Perhaps the agitation had something to do with his decision to restrict the number of citizens who could receive free grain (Rome’s only concession to state-funded social welfare); and he distributed a possibly conciliatory grant of 240 sesterces to each citizen.

  All this is speculation. However, Pliny, writing about Augustus in the middle of the following century, remarks (in passing, as of a fact which everyone knows) on “his daughter’s adultery and the revelation of her plots against her father’s life.” This implies a common opinion that there was more to Julia’s downfall than sexual promiscuity.

  If there was an assassination plot, it is difficult to see what Julia and her supporters were hoping to achieve. We can reasonably assume that she loved her sons; killing Augustus at this time would have damaged rather than advanced their interests. Gaius and Lucius were much too young to succeed the princeps, and Tiberius, well liked by the legions, could be counted on to fill the power gap.

  There is only one explanation that is psychologically and politically plausible. This is that Julia believed her sons’ position would be weak in the event of her father’s death in the coming five years or so, before they were mature enough to assert their rights and defend themselves. She would have found it useful to attract the support of an experienced male political figure. If she could marry her lover, Iullus Antonius, she would not only be satisfying her appetites, but Gaius and Lucius would have a high-profile protector during an awkward and dangerous interregnum. It is possible that the letter she sent to her father complaining about Tiberius was part of a campaign to engineer a divorce, for
which she would need Augustus’ permission. In a word, a conspiracy to control events after the princeps was dead has been misinterpreted as a conspiracy to see the princeps dead.

  This line of thought suggests a fairly benign scheme, with whose aims Augustus would have had some sympathy. He would have been irritated by Julia’s interference in his dynastic business, but surely not furious as we know him to have been. It follows that at least some of the tales about his daughter’s rackety private life must have been true, or at least that he believed them.

  Here, then, to summarize, is a best guess at the real story behind Julia’s downfall. She headed a political faction, dedicated to promoting her sons’ interests as eventual successors to Augustus. The boys, encouraged by him, were very popular with the people, and Julia as their mother spoke up for the concerns and grievances of Rome’s citizenry. Her role was that of a loyal opposition within the regime. Her father found this a useful safety device for the release of political pressure, but she risked overstepping the line of acceptable lobbying.

  When the scandal broke, a number of factors came together at the same time. With Tiberius’ withdrawal to Rhodes, Julia was pursuing an innocuous plot to get permission to divorce him and marry Iullus Antonius, her purpose being to strengthen her position and her sons’ in the event of the princeps’ early death; she was associating herself (Marsyas) with growing popular discontent in Rome; and she and her private life discredited her father’s conservative social policies.

  Augustus was irritated by the first issue, alarmed by the second, outraged only by the third. He was accustomed to obedience within the family circle, and, assuming Julia’s promiscuity to be public knowledge, he could hardly bear the ridicule and disgrace it would bring on him; it was this that powered his vengeful reaction. Throughout his life, Augustus was a master of self-control, but every now and again we can detect an overflow of deep and powerful feeling. He dearly loved his closest relatives—his wife, Livia; his sister Octavia; his grandsons Gaius and Lucius; and, it would seem, Julia. Perhaps his rage expressed an unspoken, unadmitted bitterness at the truth that he had bought his high place in the world by subduing the claims of affection to the imperatives of power.