Augustus (43 page)

Augustus knew and liked Virgil. Indeed, in 19
B.C.,
when returning to Rome after his Parthian success, the
princeps
met him in Greece shortly before the poet died at the age of fifty-two. Virgil was dissatisfied with his masterpiece, which he had finished but not corrected, and when his health began to fail he asked his friend the poet Lucius Varius Rufus to burn it in the event of his death. Varius refused to obey his orders and, acting under the authority of Augustus, published the epic.

The reason for Augustus’ tolerance of these rehabilitations, and his cultivation of revisionists such as Livy and Virgil, was simple. The ideology of the regime was to restore the Republic. This could be advocated, in the first instance, by praising the ideal commonwealth of Rome’s early centuries, but also, it necessarily followed, by championing its more recent standard-bearers, the men whom Julius Caesar had destroyed. It followed that Augustus was obliged to reject his revolutionary past (and by implication, his adoptive father) and show that he was a true republican.

To this end, freedom of speech was essential. The
princeps
had to let the regime’s opponents celebrate their lost leaders, so that he could be seen to agree. It would have been too odd, too barefaced for him to bury Julius Caesar and exhume Cato and Pompey himself. He needed an opposition, so that he could quietly join it.

To revisit the heroic past was not just a retrieval, but a rebirth. Virgil drew an analogy between the original founding of Rome and its refoundation by Augustus, between his sober and devout Trojan hero, Aeneas, and the sober and devout
princeps
.

Rome’s destiny, Virgil wrote, was to “rule an Italy fertile in leadership / And loud with war…and bring the whole world under a system of law.” History culminates in the inaugurator of new
Saturnica regna,
the reign of Jupiter’s father, Saturn, when men lived in virtuous simplicity:

And here, here is the man, the promised one you know of—

Caesar Augustus, son of a god, destined to rule

Where Saturn ruled of old in Latium,

and there

Bring back the age of gold.

The point was that Romans would not merit their imperial role unless they also tackled excessive consumption, sexual immorality, and the general failure of moral fiber. Once again the
princeps
recruited his constellation of great poets to assist him. Horace mostly celebrates a happily amoral sensuality outside the bonds of marriage, but in his
Odes,
the first three books of which were published in 23
B.C
., he devoted a group of poems to the untypical theme of moral renaissance. He wrote of the “large inconvenience of wealth” and compared the citizens of Rome, to their disadvantage, with the barbarous Scythians, unexpectedly cast as noble savages.

Family pride

Is their rich dower, chastity shy to glance aside,

Faith in the marriage tie;

Sin is abhorred; the price of scandal is to die.

This censoriousness chimed with Augustus’ thinking. For some years during the twenties
B.C.
he meditated on social legislation, designed to purify morals and encourage the family. Among respectable opinion, there was a consensus about the failings of Rome’s ruling class: divorce was easy; young people were reluctant to marry; the birthrate appeared to be falling; sexual license was widespread; some rich men avoided a public career.

By contrast, traditional standards of behavior in provincial society in Italy were still upheld and the patterns of family life were little changed. This was the world in which Augustus had spent his childhood; his memories of Velitrae may have given a personal edge to his desire to restore Roman values.

Legislation concerning the family would be a distinct and probably unpopular innovation, and the
princeps
took his time before laying any proposals before the Senate. He may have sought to do so in or around 29
B.C.
, but stayed his hand. Now, probably in 18
B.C.
, he brought forward a body of laws designed to encourage marriage and procreation. His aim was not only to foster traditional values, but also to create new generations of imperial soldiers and administrators.

Augustus drew an explicit link with a more austere and fecund past when he read out to the Senate the entire text of an old speech on the need for larger families, made by a censor, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus, in the middle of the second century
B.C.
The dry and unsentimental Metellus said:

If we could get on without a wife, Romans, we would all avoid that annoyance; but since nature has ordained that we can neither live very comfortably with them nor at all without them, we must take thought for our lasting well-being rather than for the pleasure of the moment.

The
princeps
presented the so-called Julian laws (
leges Juliae,
after his clan name) in person to an assembly of the people. For the first time, the
lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis
transformed a woman’s adultery from a private offense into a public crime. Since time immemorial, a rough-and-ready custom allowed a husband (in theory, at least) to kill his wife if taken in adultery, either on his own account or upon the judgment of a family council. His only alternative, and the one usually chosen, was divorce. The woman lost all or part of her dowry.

The
princeps
felt that this was unsatisfactory. According to his new law, an offended husband was obliged to divorce his wife immediately and then prosecute her for adultery in a special court. Penalties included banishment and confiscation of half the male lover’s property (if the couple were caught in flagrante, the husband was allowed to kill him). The woman was forbidden to marry a freeborn citizen in the future.

The law was not quite so severe in practice as appears at first sight, for unless a husband divorced his wife, she could not be prosecuted. A husband who took no action could be charged with condoning the offense, but only if he had actually caught his wife with another man, or if he could be shown to have profited by her activity—say, by pimping for her.

These were both unlikely circumstances and, in a generally permissive climate, it is uncertain that many husbands took advantage of the new legislation. They may have reflected that they themselves might be caught by it if (as was not uncommon) they were conducting an affair with a married woman. According to Suetonius, this was a situation in which Augustus often found himself. Moral campaigns are most likely to succeed if led by someone who has nothing with which to reproach himself.

Unsurprisingly, the
princeps
faced skepticism and laughter at his philandering. Unfazed, he advised senators to “guide and command your wives as you see fit,” he said. “That is what I do with mine.”

The amused senators pressed the
princeps
to tell them exactly what guidance he gave Livia. He uttered a few unwilling words about a modest appearance and seemly behavior, but seemed quite untroubled by the inconsistency between his words and deeds.

On another occasion, when Augustus was sitting as judge, a young man was brought before him who had taken as wife a married woman with whom he had previously committed adultery. This was most embarrassing, for it was exactly how the
princeps
had behaved when he married Livia in 38
B.C.
Uncomfortably aware of the coincidence, he recovered his composure only with difficulty. “Let us turn our minds to the future,” he said, “so that nothing of this kind can happen again.”

A
lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus
addressed the low birthrate in the upper classes (if Suetonius is to be believed, the general population was rising). It was revised in
A.D
. 9 as the
lex Papia Poppaea;
exactly what was in the original legislation cannot now be certainly known, but the general thrust was philoprogenitive.

The legislation set penalties for bachelors and childless couples, mainly limiting their right to inheritance under wills. After divorce or widowhood, women were expected to remarry within a fixed time. There were incentives, too: a father of one child was allowed to stand for public office one year earlier than the age stipulated in the regulations. The siring of three children (four in Italy outside of Rome; five in the provinces) exempted a man from certain legal duties.

How effective were his measures? No statistics survive; we have only anecdotes. The literary record gives the impression that, legislation or no legislation, many men of the ruling class did marry and have children. Perhaps some took their time before doing so, but a glance at the family trees of leading personalities shows that most of them produced two or three children who survived to adulthood, and some had larger families (Agrippa, for example, fathered five children).

On the other side of the account, piquantly, Marcus Papius Mutilus and Gaius Poppaeus Sabinus, the consuls who brought in the
lex Papia Poppaea,
were both unmarried, as unkind observers noted. Augustus and Livia were childless, albeit involuntarily, and for all his fine words Horace never married.

Over the years the legislation was repeatedly reviewed and amended, which rather suggests that those against whom it was aimed found their way around its prohibitions.

Roman society depended on millions of slaves from every corner of the empire—Gaul and Spain, northern Africa, Greece, the eastern provinces. To function properly, Rome required their passivity, if not their loyalty.

The continuing flow of wealth into Italy in the first century
B.C.
was accompanied by a huge increase in the number of slaves, and so of those who could be freed. Enfranchisement (and, with citizenship) was popular not only as a reward for long and loyal service; ex-slaves were also a source of votes at election time, and manumission freed an owner of the duty of supporting old or sick slaves. A freedman, or
libertus,
was still linked to his former owner, for he had to join his
clientela
and owed him a continuing duty of loyalty and support.

Much of the Roman public believed that there were too many
liberti:
they were swamping the citizen body, diluting its Italianness. This appears to have worried Augustus too, who expressed a wish in his will to “preserve a significant distinction between Roman citizens and the peoples of subject nations.” It is reported that when Livia once asked him to make a Gallic dependent of hers from a tribute-paying province a citizen, he refused, offering exemption from tribute instead. He said: “I would rather forfeit whatever he may owe the Privy Purse than cheapen the value of Roman citizenship.”

Remarks of this kind seem to have been aimed at assuaging public fears rather than representing his real opinion, however, for in practice the
princeps
encouraged freedmen who showed energy, enthusiasm, and talent.

The formal methods of enfranchisement all took time to bring into effect, so owners were allowed to free slaves informally, by a simple written or verbal declaration. However, this did not confer citizenship; probably in 17
B.C.
, a
lex Junia
gave these informal enfranchisees a form of “Latin rights,” a second-class citizenship without voting rights.

In later years a
lex Fufia Caninia
limited the number of slaves whom an owner could free in his will, and a
lex Aelia Sentia
imposed some age limits: an owner had to be over twenty years old before he could give a slave freedom, and a slave over thirty before he could receive it. But these measures were designed to regulate manumission, not to prevent it.

Social reform was insufficient by itself to renew Rome. Writing before 28
B.C.
, Horace addressed his fellow citizens:

You shall pay for each ancestral crime,

Until our mouldering temples are rebuilt

And the gods’ statues cleansed of smoke and grime.

Only as servants of the gods in heaven