A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (15 page)

Actium was not a glorious finish to the civil war, but it was the end or almost the end of 100 years of conflict between Romans. The entire Senate and equestrian order turned up in Brindisi to
acknowledge Octavian, whose forty-year tenure of power had now emphatically begun. Antony and Cleopatra were back in Egypt and Octavian pursued them in August of the next year. As he approached
they sent him presents, which he kept, and pleas, which he ignored. Antony pathetically reminded Octavian of their happy times in Rome together, an odd note to strike as there were some twenty
years between them and Octavian had never been a gadabout. Cleopatra threatened to destroy herself and
her treasure
but Octavian would not listen to her. He sent a smooth-tongued freedman to
suggest that he was already in love with her at a distance, and that the distance between them would soon vanish. As Octavian approached, Antony’s soldiers left him; told that Cleopatra was
dead, he tried to kill himself; told she was not, he had enough strength to drag himself to her chamber and die in her arms.

The set was now clear for Cleopatra’s interview with the new ruler of the world. When Octavian entered her apartment, she rose from the richly ornamented chaise-longue
where she had carefully and carelessly arranged herself, her asses’ milk complexion enhanced by her mourning, and cried out, ‘Greetings my lord, for the Gods have given
supremacy to you, and taken it from me.’ Her apartment had been filled with busts and memorabilia of Julius Caesar and she had stuffed her bosom with his letters, which she read out in a
soft, plaintive, musical voice. Octavian was unmoved. Then she threw herself on her knees and begged to be allowed to die. Octavian was still unmoved. Perhaps he was considering her part in his
procession down the Via Sacra; she would add gloss to his Triumph so he wanted her alive. Accordingly, he arranged for her food to be monitored. It was a possibility, though, that her extraordinary
presence might backfire. Mobs could be fickle . . . (When the executioner of Charlotte Corday, who murdered Marat in his bath, took her guillotined head by the hair and punched it in the face, he
was fined for misconduct.)

Cleopatra fooled him. She did not want a bit part in someone else’s Triumph. She knew, from experiments on live human beings – no problem in the ancient world – that asps work.
The asp is a small, poisonous, hooded snake, endemic to Egypt and Libya, and its fatal sting guaranteed, according to Cleopatra’s advisers, deification. In the literature of the world, the
asp is only referred to in connection with Cleopatra. She took two. Dio, from whom this account is taken, says that Octavian was shaken by Cleopatra’s death and tried to have her revived. At
least he was able to compensate himself with her treasure. He could also do what he liked with Egypt.

From this moment on, Octavian became benign, lenient, forgiving – he was only horrid to his own daughter. He let go the children of Antony and Cleopatra, the pretentiously styled Helios
(sun) and Selene (moon), and they were brought up by their ever-virtuous stepmother, Octavia. Antyllus,
Antony’s son by his first wife, Fulvia, and Caesarion, being too
dangerous to be left alive, were killed.
²⁴
Egypt was annexed as the possession of the Emperor and administered by a prefect. The Donations of Alexandria
were naturally cancelled but the arrangements made by Antony in Asia remained unchanged. All this, together with amnesties and pardons, was announced to the Egyptians by Octavian in a speech in
Greek. He visited the corpse of Alexander the Great and may have knocked off his nose by mistake. There was enough money in Cleopatra’s treasury, carefully collected from her temples, to give
every soldier a year’s pay. On 11 January 29
BC
, the gates of the temple of Janus (the God of War) in Rome were closed. ‘The Republic and liberty had gone, and
men turned gratefully to their new saviour.’
²⁵

Octavian was careful to preserve the physical appearance of the Republic. Like a taxidermist, he extracted the vital organs from the dead beast, replacing them with stuffing without damaging the
skin. His autocracy came from a series of powers voted to him but never seized, such as the proconsular power and the tribunician power. As Mr Carter explains, ‘The brilliance of this
arrangement lies in its dissociation of the powers of an office.’ Augustus, which he became in 27
BC
and which we shall now call him, was granted the imperium for ten
years (renewable); he had all the powers of officers of state without the bore, uncertainty and expense of elections. He wanted to be called Romulus, but this had echoes of kingship distasteful to
Romans, and he was dissuaded. After 19
BC
, he had ‘the power of the consul without
being a consul, the power of a tribune without being a tribune,
and the power of a proconsul without being a proconsul, for it was his
legati
who occupied that position on his behalf. Through a series of conjuring and confidence tricks (deplored by
Gibbon), Augustus, who had the Senate, the people, the army of Rome and the bourgeoisie of Italy in the palm of his hand, seemed set fair to be Princeps, first amongst equals, for the rest of his
natural life.

Dio Cassius treats us to imaginary monologues from Octavian’s two lieutenants, Agrippa and Maecenas, on how to handle himself from this – 29
BC
– moment
on. Agrippa, the man of action, waffles on but after a résumé of his achievements warns his master against becoming a monarch, for if Romans suspected such an intention, he would be
doomed like his ‘father’, Julius Caesar. Maecenas, the think-tank, is more subtle: Octavian should become a monarch in all but name, he should not allow images of himself or temples in
his honour, but should build images in the hearts of men; he should appoint magistrates and appear to listen to their advice in Rome but the provinces, and therefore the armies, he should control
absolutely himself; he should spare no expense in making the capital beautiful, and, for his own safety, should create
two
prefects to command the Praetorian Guard; finally horse-races
should be confined to Rome so as not to deprive the cavalry of good animals.
²⁶
Knights, Maecenas went on, should be trained from childhood to run the
treasury, state property should be privatized, senators if they misbehave (even towards you, Octavian) should be judged by their peers, but rebellious army commanders should be condemned as public
enemies.

Augustus did not heed this advice, though in his own tactful and duplicitous way he seems to have followed it. He was particularly respectful of the Senate, subsidizing
senators who had lost out in the civil wars, rather like the Duke of Newcastle’s dole to peers in the reign of George III, and he helped old families to keep up their obligations to the
temples. Publicly Augustus was in favour of old-fashioned family virtues and put a telling tax on childless couples. We must also remember that, like all Emperors, he was as rich privately as the
Roman state.

On embarking on his seventh consulship he read a speech beginning, ‘I know very well, Conscript Fathers, that I shall appear to you to have made an incredible choice. I lay down my office
in its entirety and return to you all authority absolutely, authority over the laws, the army and the provinces, not only those territories which you entrusted to me but those which I later secured
for you . . . I restore to you your freedom and the Republic’ It was all completely untrue. But few noticed, fewer cared, and even fewer Romans dared to do anything against the regime. The
conspirators against Augustus throughout his reign were rare and inept and were dealt with by him with a leniency which was almost humiliating. In the case of Gnaeus Cornelius Cinna Magnus, the
grandson of Pompey the Great, Dio has Livia his wife give Augustus such a convincing (and lengthy) lecture on the quality of mercy that he releases all the conspirators and makes the man a consul.
Livia was less concerned with mercy in her husband’s behaviour towards his own immediate family, particularly his only child, Julia. Like Caligula, she could plead (if she could have been
bothered) in justification of her madness and badness, a traumatic childhood and broken homes due to her father’s manipulation of her life and children, but Julia, arrogant, stubborn,
insolent, defiant, libidinous and
deeply tricky, was not inclined to plead. Augustus’ hard treatment of his daughter began on the day she was born when he divorced her
mother, as we have seen. He expected his daughter to inherit his own almost inhuman self-control. He exposed her to the high life of Rome but allowed her no freedom. He married her off three times
without consulting her and, being without male heirs himself, deprived her legally of her first two sons, by Agrippa, the golden boys Gaius and Lucius, whom he brought up as his own (one of the
most beautiful buildings in the world, the Maison Carrée, in Nîmes, currently being done up, is dedicated to them). In revenge Julia tried to outrage him, by sleeping around –
but usually when pregnant by her husbands. Her young lovers bore the great names of Rome, Antonius, Pulcher, Gracchus, Scipio. With them she plotted parricide at a bacchic orgy in the middle of the
night in the middle of the Forum. It was a serious orgy but not much of a conspiracy and Augustus only executed Julius Antonius, Mark Antony’s son, who had been a consul and should have known
better, and banished the rest. He exiled his daughter Julia for the rest of her life, making sure she never had another drop of wine.

He was equally callous towards his granddaughter, the younger Julia, banished when pregnant in
AD
8, obviously through pressure from Livia, who wanted no obstacle to the
inheritance of her son, Tiberius. When the child was born it was declared illegitimate and, on the ancient authority of a Roman
paterfamilias
, starved to death.

At the same time, for reasons unknown, the poet Ovid (famous for his amorous advice – but not a serious plotter, it was thought) was exiled to a freezing port at the mouth of the Danube on
the Black Sea. Ovid, in his autobiography, never says why, but blames ‘the treachery of friends and malice of servants’. That Augustus was able, out of pique, to
banish from Rome, without explanation or protest, its most popular poet shows the extent of his power.

Augustus over-promoted and spoilt rotten his grandchildren, alienating his stepson Tiberius, the other candidate for the succession, who withdrew sulkily to Rhodes for seven years in 6
BC
. Augustus, expecting much from these boys to whom so much had been given, received, as was his wont, nothing in return; in fact they died on him, Lucius in Marseilles of
an illness in
AD
2, and Gaius of melancholy after being wounded in Armenia in
AD
4. So the ageing and increasingly embittered Emperor had to overcome
his distaste for Tiberius – he could not bear the way he chewed his food – and wrote him artificially jocular letters.

He had outlived his own friends, his buddies (but never quite his equals) Agrippa, Maecenas, Horace and Virgil, all of whom left him their fortunes; but he needed their presence and not their
presents, for he was not a greedy man. He spent his time watching the pretty little boys sent to him from all corners of the Empire playing their games in his modest house. He liked being asked out
to dinner and offered and expected little in the way of lavish entertainment, except of course for political purposes. Once when returning from a particularly unpretentious dinner he was heard to
mutter, ‘I did not know I knew him
that
well’; on another occasion, when he was dining with Pollio, who was proud of his collection of crystal, a slave broke a piece and was
about to be thrown to his master’s lampreys for their dinner, when Augustus ordered the man to be given his freedom and all the crystal to be smashed. He did not like other people to play the
tyrant. However, this did not deter Pollio, a terrible snob, from leaving him a beautiful beach-house.

His own house on the Capitoline Hill was as different from his official palace as his private from his public
persona. The first had been bought from the estate of the
orator Hortensius in 44
BC
, when Octavian was still only Caesar’s presumptive heir. The house consisted of twelve rooms and was turned in on itself, being separated
from the street by blank walls. A modest enough establishment, symbolic of the inner Augustus, it was known then as now as Domus Livia, and it was there he lived for forty years, sleeping in the
same room. The Emperor’s adjoining palace had been built after a fire in 3
BC
from a public subscription which exacted no more than one denarius from each citizen and
one gold coin from each municipality. (Augustus was genuinely popular with his subjects.) At home he was a randy little man – five foot five in his stockinged feet – who suffered from
the cold, enjoyed practical jokes, wore simple clothes woven by his own household (like the Emperor of Japan), ate peasant food and nibbled a dried apple or fig between meals. He was not in the
least pompous, often made fun of himself and allowed others to do so. ‘The ruler of the world looked very sheepish when, on going to meet a curtained litter that he had sent to collect a lady
of easy virtue, he saw his old tutor Athenodorus leap out of it. Athenodorus had sent the woman packing and taken her place, and now started to lecture Augustus on his
incontinence.’
²⁷

He was never very healthy and nearly died twice, the first time in Cantabria (northern Spain), where he endured a
crise de foie
– and indeed
de foi
for it was there that he
became a Stoic. His doctor
²⁸
and oculist were never far away and some
of their medicines and artefacts are reproduced in the Museum at
Eur. He suffered from gallstones all his life. His body was covered with blotches, which his flatterers declared were in the configuration of the Great Bear but which were in fact the marks of
endogynous discoid eczema, not contagious and caused, quite simply, by nerves; underneath the armour of a faultless political machine was the body of a frightened little man. (He was constantly
accused of cowardice, notably by Mark Antony, and certainly was terrified of thunder and lightning, putting on a sealskin coat for protection.)