Augustus

by Anthony Everitt

  Postumus continued to do badly. Augustus was worried about letting him out of his sight, although he had no qualms about sending Germanicus to serve in the army. This was a pity, because military experience might have calmed Postumus down. No courtier, the young man spent much of his time fishing, and called himself Neptune after the god of the sea. He had bouts of rage and spoke angrily about Livia. He blamed his new paterfamilias for withholding his paternal inheritance from him. He also probably felt that he lacked advancement.

  Matters grew so difficult that Augustus formally severed Postumus’ ties with the Julian family and packed him off to Surrentum (today’s Sorrento), probably in A.D. 6. The popular resort was not far from Cape Misenum, the naval base for one of Rome’s fleets that his father had founded, and if Postumus was misbehaving politically as well as personally he could have been tampering with the loyalty of the sailors (the nickname of Neptune is suggestive). In any event, Suetonius records that “because [his] conduct, so far from improving, grew daily more irresponsible, he was transferred to an island, and held under military surveillance.”

  This took place in A.D. 7, and the island was low-lying Planasia, south of Elba (today’s Pianosa; until recently, it housed an Italian army prison). It had been owned in the first century B.C. by a leading Roman family, and on it stood a villa, some baths, and a tiny open-air theater; it may have been another of Augustus’ luxury bolt-holes like Pandateria, and exile there will not have been too incommodious.

  In the following year, a mysterious scandal engulfed the younger Julia. She was banished to the tiny limestone island of Trimerus, off the Apulian coast (today’s San Nicola in the Tremiti Islands). With a surface area of less than thirty-five acres, this was an isolated and confined spot, far from Rome. No grand villa has been discovered. Julia’s living costs were paid by Livia.

  The princeps’ granddaughter’s offense, like that of the elder Julia, was sexual promiscuity. The charge is likely to have had a basis in fact, for she gave birth to a child on the island, whom Augustus refused to acknowledge or have reared. Her lover was Decius Junius Silanus; Augustus revoked his amicitia and the young nobleman left Rome.

  These misdemeanors may have concealed a more serious matter. The younger Julia’s husband was Lucius Aemilius Paullus. It appears that he was accused of plotting against the life of the princeps and was executed. If his wife was accused of adultery, he must have been alive at the time of her banishment (one late commentator says she was once recalled, only to be exiled again) and his conspiracy probably took place in A.D. 8; so the banishment and the conspiracy may have been linked.

  Whatever the politics of his troubles, Augustus’ emotions were fully engaged. In future years, when anyone mentioned Agrippa or the two Julias in conversation, he would sigh deeply and sometimes quote a line from the Iliad:

  Ah, never to have married, and childless to have died!

  He referred to Agrippa and the Julias as “my three boils” and “my three running sores.”

  In A.D. 9, Augustus exiled Ovid to the semibarbarous outpost of Tomis (modern Constanta) on the Black Sea. His offense was made a state secret, although the poet dropped numerous hints in two sequences of poems, Tristia (“Sad Things”) and Epistulae ex Ponto (“Letters from Pontus”), with which he bombarded his friends in Rome, begging for forgiveness and describing the miseries of life in distant Thrace.

  The mystery has exercised and amused scholars for centuries. In summary, Ovid committed an error—a mistake—not a crime; he took no action himself, but witnessed others doing something that he should have reported to Augustus but did not. He caused the princeps deep pain. Ovid compares himself to the guiltless huntsman who inadvertently stumbled on the goddess Diana bathing in a spring; she turned him into a stag and set his dogs on him.

  Why did I see what I saw? Why render my eyes guilty?

  Why unwittingly take cognizance of a crime?

  Actaeon never intended to see Diana naked,

  but still was torn to bits by his own hounds.

  His poem Ars Amatoria, especially the didactic pose he struck as a “tutor in love-making,” was not the cause of his dismissal, but it did not help his case.

  It is hard to make sense of this sequence of enigmatic events, but two factors may throw light on them. First, the years A.D. 6 and 7 were extremely testing for the regime. Military campaigns were under way abroad, but as yet victories had not been won. In Rome there was a severe famine, and emergency security measures had to be taken. Gladiators were banned, and to prevent the dumping of hungry mouths any slaves who were up for sale were banished to a hundred miles from the city.

  Augustus and senior officials dismissed most of their staff, and senators were encouraged to leave Rome. Grain and bread were rationed, except for the poorest section of the population, whose grain dole was doubled. There was trouble, too, abroad. Pirates harassed shipping in some parts of the Mediterranean, and rebellions occurred in a number of provinces. King Juba of Mauretania required help from a Roman army to put down a serious revolt in northern Africa. Worse followed, for a great fire destroyed much of the city.

  In Rome, the masses became restive and people talked openly of revolution. Dissident posters were distributed at night. An investigation was launched, only adding to the general commotion and apparently not coming to any conclusion. Do we have here telltale signs of the Julian faction at work, currying favor with the people as the elder Julia may have done when she garlanded the statue of Marsyas in the Forum?

  As for the sad fate of Ovid, learned men have imagined that the poet accidentally saw Livia having a bath, or caught the princeps in an act of pedophilia, or came upon Julia and Postumus engaging in incestuous sex. The poet’s own statements point to a political blunder. If he overheard or witnessed some act or conversation preparatory to a coup, the need for official secrecy is perfectly understandable. His reputation for celebrating sexual indecency provided a convincing cover story that distracted from Julia’s real offense.

  Ovid may have hinted at what this was. When he wrote what he did not do, he may have been pointing to what others did.

  I never sought to procure universal ruin by threatening

  Caesar’s head, the head of the world;

  I said nothing, my tongue never shaped words of violence,

  no seditious impieties escaped me in my cups.

  Careless talk at a drunken party is what seems to have done for Julia and implicated her poetical fellow guest in her ruin. Ovid with foolish tact “forgot” what he had heard or pretended not to have heard it. But presumably someone else present quietly informed the princeps of the conversation and who else had been within earshot.

  It was not Augustus’ fault that fate kept unpicking his arrangements for the succession, but his ruthless rearrangement of the lives of his close relatives led to one after another refusing to serve and perhaps even conspiring against him—Agrippa perhaps, Tiberius, Gaius, the two Julias, Agrippa Postumus. The consequence was the almost complete destruction of the divine family as an effective, mutually loyal group. The only survivors were the patient wife and her suspicious son.

  Over the years, the princeps had allowed his household to be corrupted into a court where a family’s ordinary loves and tiffs gradually mutated into political struggle. Maybe this was an inevitable development, but it was Augustus who set the inhumane tone. His insensitivity to the feelings of others (one thinks of Tiberius’ thwarted love for Vipsania), his treatment of his relatives as pawns, created a deadly environment. It would not be surprising if, in time, blood relations came to bloody conclusions.

  XXIV

  THE BITTER END

  A.D. 4–14

  * * *

  Competent generals had asserted Roman dominion. One of them marched an army north from the Danube up to the river Elbe, on the far side of which he erected an altar dedicated to Augustus as a symbol of imperial power; he took care, however, to winter his troops on the Rhine. But while the lands between
the Rhine and the Elbe were increasingly dependent on Rome, what the Romans called Germania was by no means entirely pacified.

  Tiberius had last commanded an army in 8 B.C., the year after Drusus’ death. In A.D. 4, when he was forty-six, he picked up where the two young brothers had left off all those years ago. His aim was to complete the imperial strategy. A powerful and hostile tribe, the Marcomanni, occupied land near the heads of the Elbe and the Danube (in modern Bohemia). It was essential to defeat them and take control of their territory. Then at last Rome would have a secure frontier running without interruption from the North Sea to the Black Sea. A synchronized pincer movement was devised for the culminating campaign of A.D. 6. The army of the Rhine was to advance from the river Main to Nuremberg and the army of Illyricum would move north under Tiberius’ personal command.

  Brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed, the plan saw the two armies within a few days of converging on the Marcomanni, when news came of a great revolt in Dalmatia and Pannonia. Tiberius immediately came to terms with the king of the Marcomanni and rushed off to Pannonia, where he was to spend the next three years fighting the rebels.

  He was replaced in Germania by his fellow consul of 13 B.C., a competent but lackluster administrator named Publius Quinctilius Varus. The new proconsul believed that Tiberius’ victories had silenced all opposition; he saw his task as the transformation of a defeated territory into a Roman province.

  Back at Rome, the elderly princeps went on governing. In A.D. 4, he conducted a census, to register citizens and their property. The purpose was to revise taxation indebtedness, doubtless upward. However, in light of the uneasy public mood he applied the findings of the census only to those who owned property in Italy worth more than 200,000 sesterces.

  The terms of military service were reformed: new recruits were now required to serve twenty years rather than the former sixteen; the cash gratuity at the end of a soldier’s service was set at twelve thousand sesterces, the equivalent of fourteen years’ pay. Centurions were rewarded at a much higher rate and could become wealthy men. The cost of these gratuities was becoming hard to bear and in A.D. 6 Augustus established an aerarium militare, or military exchequer, which arranged for the payment of gratuities (the state treasury continued to maintain the standing legions). It was financed, unpopularly, by a death duty and a tax on the proceeds of public auctions. Providing in this way for retired soldiers was a wise move, for it cut the personal link between a general and his men, who in the days of the Republic expected him to guarantee their future.

  In A.D. 9 the princeps responded to agitation to repeal the law concerning unmarried and childless individuals by consolidating his moral legislation with the lex Papia Poppaea.* The previous laws were confirmed, but some concessions were made. Married people without children were no longer treated as unmarried in the matter of inheritance. Childless widows and divorced women were given a longer period of grace—two years and eighteen months, respectively—before they were required to remarry. Men debarred from receiving legacies because they were unmarried were granted some time after being named in a will to marry.

  The news of the Pannonian revolt, which had brought Tiberius’ German campaign to an untimely halt, deeply shocked Augustus and the Roman establishment. It was reported (perhaps with a touch of exaggeration) that the Pannonians had more than two hundred thousand infantry and nine thousand cavalry in arms. Velleius points out that the Pannonians were well-trained soldiers: “The Pannonians possessed not only a knowledge of Roman discipline but also of the Roman tongue, many also had some measure of literary culture, and the exercise of the intellect was not uncommon among them.”

  The rebel forces overwhelmed Macedonia with fire and the sword. Roman traders were massacred. The princeps reported to the Senate that Italy was at risk of invasion. He moved for a time to Ariminum (today’s Rimini), to be closer to the theater of war and able to advise on developments.

  Fresh from Germania, Tiberius did not have enough troops to quell the Pannonians decisively, but was able to make a stand with five legions. More legions were urgently summoned from the eastern provinces, but it would take them some time to reach the scene. The citizenry of Italy, in these uneasy times, refused to flock to the legionary standards, and Augustus raised levies from among the slaves of the wealthy, who were given their freedom when they enlisted. This was a bitter expedient, for throughout Rome’s history, the recruitment of slaves had been a last, shameful resort.

  Eventually the reinforcements from the east arrived, and Tiberius now mustered an army of a hundred thousand men. In A.D. 7 he launched a tough, brutal two-year campaign. He avoided pitched battles, preferring to divide his forces into separate columns and occupying all points of importance. Everywhere the legions devastated the countryside, while maintaining their own supply lines, and subdued the enemy by starving it.

  Augustus wrote to his collega imperii in flattering terms: “Your summer campaigns, dear Tiberius, deserve my heartiest praise; I am sure that no other man alive could have conducted them more capably than yourself in the face of so many difficulties and the war-weariness of the troops.” These generous words, however, concealed anxiety. The public mood was discontented, and Dio claims that the princeps believed Tiberius was marking time in order to remain under arms for as long as possible. His suspicion was that Tiberius wanted to strengthen his political position by building the army’s personal loyalty to him.

  If Augustus did believe this, he was surely mistaken; Tiberius had his hands full in what was widely held to be Rome’s most dangerous war since that against Hannibal and the Carthaginians two centuries before. Whatever his reason (one senses a loss of nerve), the princeps sent the twenty-two-year-old Germanicus, quaestor in A.D. 7, with the levies of liberated slaves to join an irritated Tiberius, who said he had plenty of soldiers now, and sent some of the newcomers back.

  By A.D. 8 the Pannonians had been vanquished; now that they had come to terms, the following year was devoted to dealing with the less problematic Dalmatians. The fighting was bitter and scrappy. Eventually the rebels accepted defeat and surrendered.

  There is no doubt that Tiberius was a general of a very high order. He was a good strategist, a most efficient organizer, and well-liked by his troops; the empire was lucky to have him. He traveled back to Rome for victory celebrations, but the promised triumphs were never held, for within a few days, dispatches arrived from Germany, bearing disastrous tidings.

  It was September and rain was falling. The territory west of the river Weser through which the Romans marched was a mix of wetlands, woods, and fields. Oak mingled with birch, beech, and alder. In the forest’s densest parts there was little direct light and the pathways were narrow. In other places the soldiers passed cultivated fields and meadows with the occasional farmhouse or barn.

  A Roman army on the march was an impressive sight. On this occasion the XVIIth, XVIIIth, and XIXth legions (about fifteen thousand men) were advancing through the countryside in column of route. In addition, there were archers, light-armed scouts, and cavalry, as well as artillery and baggage trains. At the head of this magnificent force was the proconsul Publius Quinctilius Varus.

  His policy was to transform vanquished Germania into a Roman province as expeditiously as he could. That meant building roads and towns, encouraging trade, and introducing the tribespeople to Roman law. It appears that the Romans also levied taxes. Many of the legionaries were distributed in small detachments to local German communities that had asked for protection against outlaws and guards for supply columns. As Varus saw it, the army was there on a policing rather than a military mission.

  In fact, the Romans were regarded as unwanted occupiers and a plot was formed to entrap and destroy the legions. The ringleader was a young Germanic chieftain, known to us only by his Romanized name of Arminius. In his late twenties, he understood the Romans and their war methods well, for he had served in the Roman army, probably in Pannonia. He had obviously made a good im
pression, for he received Roman citizenship and was appointed an eques. He was on Varus’ staff and was constantly in his company.

  Arminius’ idea was not to rise in open rebellion, for he knew that a German horde would be unlikely to defeat the Romans in open battle. Instead, he intended to lure Varus away from the Rhine by sending him false reports of an uprising. Arminius would then lay an ambush for the Romans in what was supposed to be friendly country.

  The plot was betrayed, but Varus could not bring himself to distrust his friendly Germans. Believing in Arminius’ honesty, he took the bait, gathered his scattered forces, and marched off to put down the supposed rebellion. The conspirators, purporting to be loyalists, rode with the legions for a time, but then one by one made their excuses and slipped away.

  Arminius had chosen the location for the ambush with great care. Archaeologists have discovered the site (at Kalkriese in Lower Saxony) and have unearthed the detritus of a battle. A level pathway led through woods, running between a steep hill and a great bog. Along the hillside the Germans built a camouflaged turf rampart at least seven hundred yards long, where the ambushers could lie in wait for the enemy, out of sight and out of mind. When the Roman column arrived, Arminius’ men launched volleys of spears from behind the turf rampart and then charged. They achieved total surprise.

  What happened next is uncertain, but, despite many casualties, a good number of legionaries and most of the officer corps survived and pushed on, under constant attack, passing through open country and then plunging into woods again.

  On the third day after the ambush, the situation became hopeless and Varus and his staff realized that there was no escape. Even if it meant leaving their remaining soldiers leaderless, they agreed that there was only one honorable course of action. They nerved their courage for the “dreaded but unavoidable act” and committed suicide, running themselves through with their swords.