Augustus (5 page)

Octavius was already married to a woman of whom history has recorded nothing except for her name, Ancharia. The couple had a daughter, and perhaps Ancharia died in childbirth, for families with only one child were rare, especially if the child was a girl. Her family was of obscure origin; she may have come from Velitrae or thereabouts. She would have been no help to an ambitious young man’s career and, if alive, must have been divorced. Her removal from the scene enabled Octavius to achieve a splendid alliance, when he married Atia, a member of the Julian family.

The Julii traced their ancestry to before the city’s foundation, traditionally set at 753
B.C.
The legend went that when, after a ten-year siege, the Greeks sacked the city of Troy on what is now the Turkish coast near the Dardanelles, they killed or enslaved most of the leading Trojans. One exception was Aeneas, the son of the love goddess Venus and a handsome young warrior. He escaped the city’s destruction with some followers and after many adventures made landfall in Latium. His son Iulus (sometimes also called Ascanius) founded the Julian dynasty.

By the first century
B.C.
, high birth was not sufficient to guarantee political success. Money was also required, and in large quantities. The Julii were impoverished; for long generations few of them had won important posts in the honors race. Like aristocratic families before and since that fall on hard times, they used marriage as a means of income generation.

The current head of the family, Gaius Julius Caesar, was a rising politician in his late thirties, about the same age as Octavius. Talented, amusing, and fashionable, he had a voracious appetite for cash and had built up enormous debts to feed both his lifestyle and his career. One of his sisters married Marcus Atius Balbus, a local worthy from Aricia, a town not far from Velitrae. Balbus was not prominent in public life and his greatest attraction must have lain in the fact that he was a man of substance.

As a new man, Octavius knew that his dubious ancestry would damage his career. A commodious dowry would be of value in a wife, but what he really needed was entrée into the Roman nobility. As a niece of Julius Caesar, Balbus’ daughter Atia was well placed to make that possible. Because the Balbi lived not far from Octavius’ home base of Velitrae, they may well have traveled in the same social circles. In that case, Atia formed an ambitious man’s bridge from provincial life to Rome.

Sometime before 70
B.C.
, the couple married and, in due course, Atia became pregnant. Disappointingly, the outcome was a second daughter. Five or six years passed before another child arrived: a son, this time, Gaius. He was born just before sunrise on September 23, 63
B.C.
, at Ox Heads, a small property on the slopes of the fashionable Palatine Hill, a few minutes’ walk from Rome’s main square, the Forum, and the Senate House.

By tradition, the
paterfamilias
held the power of life and death over his household, both his relatives and his slaves. When a child was born, the midwife took the infant and placed it on the floor in front of the father. Should the father wish to acknowledge his paternity, he would lift the baby into his arms if it was a boy; if a girl, he would simply instruct that she be fed. Only after this ritual had taken place did the child receive his or her first nourishment.

Apparently, Gaius was lucky to survive this procedure, for an astrologer had given him a bad prognosis and he narrowly escaped infanticide. If Gaius had been rejected, he would have been abandoned in the open air and left to die; this was a fate to which illegitimate children and girls were especially liable, as were (one may surmise) sickly or disabled babies. Rejected infants were left on dunghills, or near cisterns. They were often picked up there by slave traders (although the family might reclaim the child later, if it so wished) or, more rarely, rescued by a kindly passerby. Otherwise, they would starve, unless eaten by stray dogs.

Rome, with about a million inhabitants, was an unhygienic, noisy, crowded megalopolis, no place for rearing a child, and there is evidence that Gaius spent much of his infancy at his grandfather’s country house near Velitrae. More than a century later, Suetonius reported that the house still existed and was open to the public: “a small room, not unlike a butler’s pantry, is still shown and described as [his] nursery.”

Helped by the link, through Atia, to Julius Caesar, Octavius’ political career was advancing rapidly. After serving as quaestor, he could move up to the next rung, as one of the four aediles. The aedileship being optional, it is not known whether Octavius held this office, but he could probably have afforded it.

At the age of thirty-nine, Octavius was eligible to run for praetor. According to Velleius Paterculus, he was regarded as “a dignified person, of upright and blameless life, and [was] extremely rich.” In the praetorian election for 61
B.C.
, he came in first even though he was running against a number of aristocratic competitors.

The two-year-old Gaius would have seen little of his father, who spent a year in Rome discharging his judicial duties as praetor. Then, as was usual for senior government officials after their period of office, at the end of 61
B.C.
Octavius went overseas for a twelve-month stint as governor, or propraetor, of the province of Macedonia.

Octavius was due to sail from Brundisium, a major port on the heel of Italy, but before he did so, the Senate asked him to make a detour to the town of Thurii on the toe and disperse a group of outlawed slaves.

More than ten years previously, these men had joined the great slave revolt of Spartacus, following him during the years when he won one victory after another over incompetently led Roman legions. They managed to avoid the terrible penalty exacted on the survivors of Spartacus’ final defeat: thousands were crucified along the length of the road from Rome to Capua, where the rebellion had started at a school for slave gladiators.

Somehow the escapees managed to keep going as a group, reemerging briefly to join the forces of Lucius Sergius Catilina. In the year of Gaius’ birth, this dissident aristocrat had plotted the violent overthrow of the Republic and its replacement by a regime of radicals which he would lead. The alert consul, Marcus Tullius Cicero, was a new man like Octavius; a fine public speaker and an able and honest administrator, he outwitted the conspirator and finessed him into a botched military insurrection.

The Romans depended on, but also feared, the hundreds of thousands of slaves who in large part ran their economy, providing labor for agricultural estates and manufacturing businesses. Slaves could also be found in every reasonably well-off home, cooking, cleaning, acting as secretaries and managers. If they were young and good-looking, slaves of either sex could well find themselves providing sexual services.

A slave was something one could own, like a horse or a table. In the Roman view, he or she was “a talking instrument.” Slaves could not marry, although they could make and save money and could receive legacies. If a master was murdered by a slave, all the slaves in his ownership were killed. It was believed that a slave could give true evidence only under torture. Perhaps a third of the population of Italy were slaves in the late Republic—as many as three million people.

For Octavius, dealing with the surviving Spartacans was an important task. They did not pose a great threat in themselves; it was the principle that counted. No rebellious runaway should be allowed to enjoy the fruits of his illicit freedom.

As a victorious general, Octavius could acquire an honorific and hereditary title and it seems that he added Thurinus to his name to mark his defeat of the slaves, passing it on to his infant son. Suetonius, writing in the first century
B.C.
, asserted:

I can prove pretty conclusively that as a child [Gaius] was called Thurinus, perhaps…because his father had defeated the slaves in that neighborhood 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.

The truth is that Octavius was making himself slightly ridiculous, for the defeat of slaves conferred no great honor on the victor. In adult life his son was often insultingly referred to as the Thurian.

The new governor of Macedonia administered his province “justly and courageously” and won a high reputation in leading circles in Rome. It was clear to all that, despite his provincial origins, Octavius was well qualified for the top job in Roman politics, the consulship. But in 58
B.C.
, when he must have been only in his mid-forties, he died unexpectedly en route from Brundisium to Rome, before he had a chance to launch his candidacy.

It is not known what killed Octavius. An accident of some kind is a possibility, although one would suppose that the ancient sources would have mentioned that. He died in his bedroom at a country villa belonging to the family that stood on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius—a fact that suggests illness.

Most probably, he fell victim to one of the many health hazards in the Roman world. One of these was food poisoning; stomach upset was among the most common recorded complaints, and analysis of Roman sewage deposits suggests that certain intestinal parasites were often endemic, borne by bad fish and meat, among other sources. Despite the growing availability of fresh water brought in through aqueducts, standards of sanitation for most people were low, although the rich were able to afford separate kitchens, underfloor heating, domestic bathhouses, and private latrines. Few understood that human waste matter could spread disease. Oil lamps and open hearths or braziers generated irritant smoke, which caused and spread respiratory infections. Epidemics of all kinds regularly swept through Rome as a result of overcrowding and the fact that the capital of a great empire witnessed a continual influx of visitors, traders, and returning government officials and soldiers.

Gaius was only four years old when his father died. In addition to the sadness of his loss, his premature death will have caused a family crisis. Domestic life was rigorously patriarchal. A widow, especially one of independent means, was often expected to marry again at the earliest opportunity, although if she remained true to the memory of her dead husband she would deserve praise for being a
univira,
a one-man woman.

This may not always have been easy for a woman of a certain age with a growing family; but Atia was still young, and her connections made her highly eligible. A year or two after Octavius’ death, she landed another apparently rising politician, Lucius Marcius Philippus, an aristocrat who proudly claimed descent from the royal line of Macedon. He had just returned from Syria, where he had been provincial governor, and he stood successfully for one of the two consulships of 56
B.C.

He backed his brother-in-law Julius Caesar as Caesar climbed the political ladder—but only cautiously so. Unlike his dashing ancestors, the Macedonian king Philip and Philip’s son Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian empire in the fourth century
B.C.
, Philippus was temperamentally risk-averse—a neutral who preferred diplomacy to commitment.

After his father’s death, little Gaius seems to have been brought up by his maternal grandmother, Julius Caesar’s sister, in whose house Atia may well have passed her brief widowhood. That he stayed with her after his mother’s remarriage is a little odd; it could be explained by mutual affection or by Philippus’ lack of interest in a small stepson. It may have been in this house that he first met his famous great-uncle, Julius Caesar.

Romans of high social status took very seriously the education of children, and especially of boys. During his early years, a boy was looked after by the women of a household, but once he reached the age of seven he usually passed into the control of his father, whose duty was to instill in his offspring the qualities of a good man, a
vir bonus
. High among these were
pietas,
loyalty and a due respect for authority and traditional values;
gravitas,
a serious (sometimes oversolemn) approach to the challenges of life; and
fortitudo,
manliness and courage. A son was expected to learn by observation; he helped his father on the land and, wearing his smart little
toga praetexta,
an all-enveloping cloaklike garment with a red stripe indicating the wearer’s childhood status, trotted around after him as he went about on public business or conducted religious ceremonies. In this way the boy would learn how the political system worked and how grownups were expected to behave.

It is not clear who, if anyone, played this paternal role for the orphaned Gaius. For a time a friend of Octavius, one Gaius Toranius, was the boy’s guardian, but he left little mark (we know that the adult Gaius did not value him highly). However, Atia won a reputation as a strict and caring mother, even if she was not always directly involved in her son’s day-to-day supervision. One positive masculine influence is recorded: a slave called Sphaerus was Gaius’ “attendant” during his childhood. He seems to have been much loved; he was given his freedom and, when he died many years later, his charge, now adult and famous, gave him a public funeral.

Boys from affluent families were sometimes taught at home, but many went to private elementary schools,
ludi litterarii,
which inculcated reading, writing, and arithmetic. Girls might also attend, but their schooling ended with puberty, although they were trained in the domestic arts by their mothers and some received private tuition in their teens. It is probable that Gaius attended classes in Velitrae or Rome, accompanied by Sphaerus.

Teaching methods were painstaking, but hardly inspired, a matter of imitation and repetition. The school day opened with a breakfastless dawn and ran on into the afternoon. No attention was paid to games or gymnastics (fathers looked after boys’ physical exercise), but the long hours of instruction ended with a bath. Pupils had to learn the names of the letters of the alphabet before being shown what they looked like; they chanted the letters all in order forward and backward. They then graduated to groups of two or three letters, and finally to syllables and words.