From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 133 B.C. to A.D. 68 (35 page)

If Italy was to be fully integrated into the Roman tradition, she must be made increasingly aware of and loyal to that tradition. But if she turned her eyes on the capital she would see much that was unworthy of Rome’s past. It is easy to draw an unpleasant picture of the Roman aristocracy at the end of the Republic, of luxury, vulgar ostentation, money-grabbing, legacy-hunting, and the licence of women like Clodia or of young rakes like Caelius, but exaggeration must be avoided (cf. above pp. 150 ff.). Demoralization was largely limited to part of the governing class in Rome itself, while throughout most of Italy family life remained normal and healthy. But if Rome was to be a worthy leader of Italy, and still more if she felt that she had an imperial mission to the wider world, she must not only infuse fresh blood from Italy into the old Roman oligarchy, but also reform the heart of Roman society itself. Realizing therefore that only so could Rome fulfil the mission to which Augustus believed she was called, he attempted to regenerate society by social reform. For this task, despite his own alleged marital infidelities, he was not unsuited by temperament and birth: his family came from Velitrae, a small town in Latium whence he derived older ideas of family and religious duties.

A body of legislation, presented to the People by Augustus in person (
leges Iuliae
), was designed to stabilize and encourage marriage and to discourage childlessness.
³³
A
lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis
, probably of 18 B.C., by a striking innovation, made adultery a public crime as well as private offence. After divorcing his wife, a husband could prosecute both her and her lover; penalties were severe, including banishment to an island. In certain circumstances he might even kill the lover. A
lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus
was passed about the
same time; later, in A.D. 9 it was amended and supplemented by a
lex Papia Poppaea
. The former removed a barrier to marriage by recognizing the validity of marriages between free-born and freed, with the exception of senators and their sons who might not marry freedwomen. Disabilities, based on the assumption that it was the duty of men between twenty-five and sixty and women between twenty and fifty to marry, were imposed on those who failed to comply and on those who married but remained childless; the chief penalty was a varying limitation on the right to inherit. These disabilities were increasingly removed and exemption was correspondingly gained by marriage and the birth of children; the number of a man’s children gave him precedence when he stood for office, and he could stand as many years before the legal minimum age as he had children (
ius liberorum
). Such measures naturally provoked opposition, and one of the modifications introduced by the
lex Papia Poppaea
was to remove the unfair lack of distinction between the childless and the unmarried, and also to allow women who had been divorced or widowed a longer unpenalized period before they remarried. The success of these measures is difficult to gauge. The census figures of A.D. 13 (probably all adult citizens) were a million higher than those of 28 B.C.; the return of peace and prosperity must have been the basic cause, but Augustus’ legislation will have played its part within the area that it affected.

Augustus wished not only to increase the Italian element in the Roman citizen body, but also to limit the foreign element that was mixing with it, especially as a result of manumission (see p. 152). In order to evade the tax on manumission some masters had adopted an informal method of freeing their slaves who thereby gained neither legal freedom nor citizenship.
³⁴
By a
lex Iunia
(probably in 17 B.C.) such freedmen were granted the intermediate status of ‘Latins’ which gave them statutory freedom but imposed some limitations (e.g. the inability to receive legacies or make a will). The children, however, of these Junian Latins were full Latins and so might look forward to Roman citizenship. Manumission was further checked by two laws: a
lex Fufia Caninia
of 2 B.C. limited the number of slaves that could be set free under the will of their master, and a
lex Aelia Sentia
of A.D. 4 restricted manumission during his lifetime by imposing some age limits, e.g. he must be twenty and the slave thirty. Freedmen, though Roman citizens, laboured under certain disabilities, e.g. they were debarred from holding office in Rome or the Italian municipalities and from serving in the legions, and in private life their social status was inferior, but Augustus was not unmindful of their needs. Some were absorbed into the administrative work of his own household, while in many Italian towns the richer freedmen were given an outlet for their social and local patriotism by the institution of the
Seviri Augustales
, a group of six, who were responsible for the cult of Augustus and some local entertainments. Another municipal institution, the
Iuvenes
or
Iuventus
, helped to unite Rome and
Italy and to promote loyalty to the new order. These were clubs of freeborn young men, organized for physical exercise, especially riding; the skill of the younger members was shown at a display known as the Lusus Troiae. They had antecedents in the Republic, but Augustus now encouraged them both at Rome and in the municipalities in order to invigorate the youth of Italy. His favour was shown when he chose as an honour for his grandsons Gaius and Lucius the title Princeps Iuventutis.

More than social legislation was needed to achieve a moral regeneration. While poets and writers proclaimed the ideals that Augustus wished to instil into the Roman people, he himself was busy reviving old religious rites and ceremonies which had fallen into neglect. It is true that Roman religious practice had very little influence on private morality, but there were certain old fundamental ideas which, if rekindled, might appeal to the conscience of the people. Chief among these was the primitive desire to ensure prosperity for man and beast, for farmer and city-dweller by securing the
pax deorum
; this could be achieved by due observation of the
ius divinum
and by the individual exercise of
pietas
. Despite widespread scepticism and rationalism, despite the exploitation of religion for political ends, despite the attraction of foreign cults, there still lurked in many a Roman heart the belief that Rome’s success had been due to Rome’s piety and that peril could be averted by propitiating the gods by means of the traditional ceremonies. Roman conservatism proclaimed that the Augustan peace must rest upon the
pax deorum
.

As early as 35 B.C. Horace could refer to Octavian as one who cared for ‘Italy and the shrines of the gods’ (‘delubra deorum’:
Sat.
1.6.35), and during his fight for power Octavian had increasingly championed the traditions of the West against the religious beliefs of the East which were reflected in the threat from Antony and Cleopatra (cf. p. 175). After Actium, supported by the general enthusiasm for the restorer of peace, he was free to go further in his attempt to rebuild national faith. His restoration of old shrines and the building of many fine new temples have already been mentioned (p. 192). He himself became a member of the sacred colleges and orders of the pontiffs, augurs, fratres Arvales, fetiales, and others; on the death of Lepidus in 12 B.C. he became Pontifex Maximus. He increased the privileges of the Vestal Virgins and appointed a Flamen Dialis, a post that had been vacant since 87 B.C. because of the primitive taboos that hindered the incumbent. This policy found splendid outward expression in his celebration of the Ludi Saeculares in 17 (see p. 183) when emphasis was laid on the worship not of the underworld deities, Dis Pater and Proserpina (to whom the Games had earlier been sacred), but of Apollo and Diana. Following closely upon the
social legislation of 18, this ceremony will have drawn together all the hopes for the new age and have reminded men that ‘moribus antiquis stat res Romana’.

Among the cults that Augustus revived was that of the Lares, spirits that guarded crossroads as well as homes. The worship of the
Lares compitales
at shrines at crossroads was brought into relation with the
vici
and placed under the supervision of the
vicomagistri
(see p. 194).
³⁵
One result was to provide a religious interest for the humbler population of the city, including freedmen; but, more important, the worship of the Lares was now linked to that of the Genius of Augustus, the divine spirit that guarded and promoted his family and fortunes. Thus the plebs of Rome, and many others as the cult of the Lares Augusti spread through Italy and the provinces, were encouraged, not to worship the emperor himself, but to regard him as their guardian.

To have sought worship for himself would have contradicted the nature of the Principate that he was trying to establish and to have created a cult would have accorded ill with the worship of the old gods of Rome that he was reviving.
³⁶
But the matter was by no means simple: in gratitude for the restoration of peace and order Rome and Italy were eager to heap exceptional honours on their human benefactor, of whom Virgil could say ‘deus nobis haec otia fecit’, while the Empire included provinces in the East where the population was accustomed to emperor-worship. In one respect Octavian had long been unique: since 42 B.C. and the consecration of Divus Julius he had been the son of a god, ‘Divi filius’. After Actium his birthday was celebrated as a public holiday; libations were poured in his honour at public and private banquets; from 29 B.C. his name was added to those of the gods in hymns; two years later he received the title of Augustus; his Genius, perhaps in 12 B.C., was inserted in official oaths between the names of Juppiter and the Di Penates; in A.D. 13 an altar was dedicated by Tiberius in Rome to the Numen Augusti; and, as has been said, his Genius had been linked with the worship of the Lares, and freedmen
seviri Augustales
had been established in Italian cities. But all this, although very near to deification, probably just fell short of it, and Augustus himself certainly deprecated any real worship of himself in Rome or Italy.

In the East Hellenistic kings had been deified while still living. This did not mean that all their subjects thought that they were in fact beings of an essentially different nature from themselves, but only that as an act of gratitude or homage, rather than of worship, the subjects were willing to accord to them in an official cult many of the honours that were normally given to gods. Thus when Roman generals had gone to the East and had then overthrown or circumscribed the power of a Hellenistic king, his subjects would not unnaturally tend to offer extravagant or even divine honours to his conqueror. As far back as 196 B.C. Flamininus, who had defeated Philip the
king of Macedon and had proclaimed the freedom of Greece, had been hailed by the grateful Greeks as divine; Caesar, M. Antony and others had received similar honours. The cities of Greece and Asia had also begun to worship a personification of the Roman state, the goddess Roma, when she became obviously more powerful than their own rulers: thus Smyrna had erected a temple to Rome as early as 195. It was a natural development therefore when in 29 Pergamum and Nicomedia sought and received permission to dedicate temples to Roma and Augustus. Augustus encouraged such cults as an expression of loyalty, and most of the eastern provinces established one; they were maintained by Koina, groups of cities who sent delegates for this purpose to a common assembly, which came to play an important role in the life of the province. Such federations, formed for religious or social purposes, had long been common in the East, but they were unknown in the West. Augustus therefore, seeing in the imperial cult a valuable instrument to promote unity within a province and a bond of loyalty between the various provinces and himself, deliberately introduced the cult in the West. In 12 B.C. an altar to Roma and Augustus, built by sixty tribes from the three Gallic provinces at Lugdunum (Lyons), was dedicated by Drusus; the cult was to be administered by a
concilium Galliarum
comprising delegates sent annually by the three districts. Between 9 B.C. and A.D. 4 a similar altar was built at Oppidum Ubiorum (Cologne) to form a centre for the projected new province of Germany.

Thus while deprecating worship of himself alone, Augustus welcomed the cult of
Roma et Augustus
when it emerged spontaneously in the East, and he encouraged its spread to the West. All this of course involved his official sanction, but when individuals, groups or towns, both in the East and in Italy, began voluntarily to worship him or his Genius, it was less easy to check them. His official attitude was to discourage any move by Roman citizens in this direction: he was their fellow-citizen, not a king, and still less a Hellenistic Basileus or a god. But nevertheless municipal cults developed, though less in the West than the East, and they could scarcely be denied when Horace could imagine Augustus as being Mercury (
Carm.
1. 2) or write (
Carm.
3. 4)

Patronage, a pervasive element in Roman life, had cast its mantle over literature from early days. It was natural therefore that Augustus and some of his friends
should be patrons of writers, and no less natural that he should gradually gather these, as so many other, threads into his own hand, because even in Augustan Rome, without printed books and the broadcast word, writers could exercise great influence on public opinion. He wished to spread abroad the ideals and hopes of the new age. He might command the pens of publicists, but he was in fact most fortunate in winning the loyal and enthusiastic support of three writers who proved to be among the greatest that the world has known. Virgil and Horace started indeed as poets of the revolutionary triumviral period but they became the evangelists of the settlement. That their co-operation with Augustus was advantageous does not mean that it was insincere. Both men had suffered enough from the civil war to relish the restoration of peace and both loved Italy. Little can be said here about the greatness of their poetry; it can only be touched upon.

P. Vergilius Maro was born in 70 B.C. near Mantua, a district that suffered severely from the land confiscations in 41. Educated at Cremona, Milan and Rome, he had won the patronage of Asinius Pollio and then of Augustus’ great friend and adviser C. Maecenas. Though he lost his paternal farm, he later recovered it or received greater compensation from Octavian. These early difficulties are echoed in some of his
Eclogues
, pastoral sketches written between 42 and 37; though modelled on the poems of the Sicilian Greek Theocritus, they breathe a genuine delight in the countryside, while one at least (the fourth: cf. p. 162) reflects some of the hopes of a troubled age. During the next seven years, when latterly Virgil was living in Naples, he composed the
Georgics
at the suggestion of Maecenas. This was a didactic poem, influenced by Hesiod’s
Works and Days
and giving practical advice to farmers on the cultivation of crops, fruit-trees and vines and on stock-breeding and bee-keeping. In the attempt to reestablish Italian agriculture after the long years of civil war, such advice would not come amiss, but the
Georgics
were far more than this. They are imbued with Virgil’s intense sympathy with nature and the Italian countryside, and they reveal the deep satisfaction that a man may win from unremitting labour on his native soil.

Virgil recited the
Georgics
to Octavian after his return from the East in 29 and was encouraged by him to compose an epic poem. Work on this was not completed when in 19 B.C. he was taken ill in Greece where he had met Augustus; together they returned to Italy but Virgil died at Brundisium and was buried at Naples. In the
Aeneid
, as in his other poems, Virgil owed much to earlier poets, both Greek (here especially Homer) and Roman, and fructified by these various influences that worked upon his natural genius he produced a national epic that unfolded the origin and achievements of the Romans, who now embraced all Italy, and that looked forward also to the culminating achievement, the rebirth of Rome under Augustus. Virgil adopted the legend that Rome’s origins went back to the Trojan hero Aeneas. The first six books
describe the wanderings of Aeneas and his followers after the sack of Troy, and not least how duty led him to desert Dido the queen of Carthage in order that he might sail on to Italy and fulfil his destiny of founding the Roman people. The last six books portray the arrival of the Trojans at the Tiber, the betrothal of Aeneas to Lavinia, daughter of king Latinus, and the subsequent struggle by which he asserted his settlement in Latium against the hostile clans: ‘tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem’. And many of Virgil’s readers might reflect on the weight of the task that the new founder of Rome was shouldering, though it was a task that was lightened by Virgil’s co-operation. The poet’s pride in Rome’s past, his faith in the peoples of Italy and his confidence in Rome’s future sprang from deep conviction. He might write of wars but he had no love of fighting: rather, he had a profound compassion for mankind’s sufferings (‘sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt’), and it was this tenderness, love of nature and a natural piety, rather than his belief in Rome’s majestic imperial mission that led many later to feel that Virgil was the most ‘Christian’ of the pagan poets. Written in ‘the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man’, the
Aeneid
won immediate recognition and ever since has continued to exercise a profound influence on the Roman and the later world.

Q. Horatius Flaccus was a friend of Virgil and another protégé of Maecenas. Like Virgil also, he was not of Roman origin but the son of a freedman of Venusia in Apulia. He had, however, been sent to school at Rome and had continued his studies at Athens. There he was caught up in the civil war and served in the army of M. Brutus at Philippi. Back in Italy in 42 he found that his father’s farm had been confiscated, but his poverty was relieved by Maecenas to whom Virgil had introduced him. As the friend of Maecenas, Horace now entered Roman society and swung over to support Octavian, whose forces he had faced at Philippi. With the gift of a Sabine farm about 33 B.C., his financial position was assured and he devoted much of his time to writing poetry: in the years between Virgil’s death in 19 and his own in 8 B.C., he was Rome’s outstanding poet. His earliest poems were the
Epodes
, written between 41 and 31 B.C., and two books of
Satires
or miscellanies, published
c.
35 and
c.
30 B.C. Here Horace was developing the tradition of Lucilius (p. 163), but with more genial wit and less personal invective. In subject-matter they range far, autobiographical and moralistic, and cast a bright light on varied aspects of contemporary life and human nature in general. In his lyrical
Odes (Carmina)
he rose on occasion to greater heights; three books were published in 23 B.C. and a fourth in 13. In the first six odes of the third book in particular, the so-called ‘Roman Odes’, he expounded the traditional virtues of the race and nobly reflected Augustus’ policy of social regeneration; though an Epicurean, he applauded frugality and the simple life. Other themes are less solemn, such as love and wine, but all are clothed
in unparalleled economy and charm of language. There followed the
carmen saeculare
(see p. 183), two books of
Epistles
, further mellow comments on life and literature, and a discussion of poetry, the
Ars Poetica
. The wide appeal of his attractive and balanced personality, the shrewdness, if not the depths, of his comments on human nature, and the skill of metre and diction in which they were clothed, have alike combined to ensure his perennial attraction.

A third great writer, who did much to shape Rome’s thought about the past and to bring it into line with Augustus’ hopes for the present and future, was Titus Livius (59 B.C.–A.D. 17). Little is known about his life. He was born at Patavium (Padua); later at Rome he gained the friendship of Augustus who called him Pompeianus, meaning perhaps not a republican so much as an admirer of Pompey, who had represented a wider Italian background than some of the Roman aristocrats. Livy also taught the future emperor Claudius whom he encouraged in historical studies. Livy set himself the task of composing an epic account in prose of Rome’s history that would balance Virgil’s epic in verse and emphasize some of the same moral qualities. It was a pageant of the Roman state from its beginnings down to Livy’s own day and stressed the men and their virtues that had made Rome great in the past and which if revived could make her great again. His whole work therefore was infused with a moral purpose. His history (
ab urbe condita libri
) was written in 142 books, of which only 35 survive, but we have summaries (
Periochae
) of the missing books which dealt with the years between the battle of Pydna (167) and the death of Drusus (9 B.C.). He followed the annalistic tradition of historiography and for the earlier periods made great use of the Sullan annalists Valerius Antias and Quadrigarius (p. 167); for later years he turned to Caesar and the
Memoirs
of Augustus among other works. If he is judged by the standards of modern historical scholarship, it is easy to point to some of his shortcomings, such as an insufficiently critical use of his sources, but much of such criticism is beside the point in relation to his purposes. He is sincere and aimed at the truth, which no doubt became easier to ascertain as he approached his own times. His powers of historical reconstruction and imagination are great. Rhetorical in manner, he presents a vivid and living narrative, varying the style to suit the events: he displayed ‘clarissimus candor’ and ‘lactea ubertas’. The work was an immediate success, but since it was perhaps three times the length of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
, there was soon a demand for epitomes of his new ‘classic’ which were widely read. All earlier histories of Rome were overshadowed, and later writers (as Florus, Licinianus, Orosius, Obsequens) made great use of it. Asinius Pollio might mock Livy’s ‘Patavinitas’, which probably refers not to any supposed provincialisms of style or even to his personal accent, but to Livy’s moral and romantic approach to history. But this is just what was needed: an account of the
mos maiorum
and the exploits of their ancestors that through its imaginative
appeal might stir contemporary Romans to action and imitation. Seldom can any statesman-reformer have been as fortunate as Augustus when he gained the friendship and sympathetic support of three such men of genius as Livy, Horace and Virgil.