Augustus (55 page)

But it could not eliminate the need entirely. The new son did not altogether trust the new father, and visited Rome as often as his military duties permitted—in Dio’s words, “because he was afraid that Augustus might take advantage of his absence to show preference to somebody else.” In his absence, the Julian faction might regain lost ground.

The family disputes were not yet over, although the ancient sources are scanty and cryptic. We hear distant detonations but do not witness the battle. The focus of a crisis that unrolled over three years or so were the remaining children of Marcus Agrippa and Julia—Postumus and his sister, the younger Julia, who must have been in her late teens or early twenties.

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.