Part 10

The association between religion and morality was only slowly established; the god was not better than the man; he was stronger than the man; thus mere power unaccompanied by moral excellence had a divine character even in a man. To us the Incarnate God is necessarily the perfection of moral excellence; to the ancients the manifestation of power was in itself an indication of the divine favour; and similarly in the case of his worshippers, provided the priest did not infringe the regulations of the prescribed ritual in preparing for or conducting an act of worship; his moral character was a matter of indifference; he might bring down the divine wrath upon the community by paring his nails at the wrong time, just as much as by the infringement of social obligations, or by personal debauchery; ritual and not morality was the province of religion.

In the didactic work of Hesiod, the Farm and the Calendar, which was used by the Greeks much as we use a catechism, minute and trivial points of cleanliness and decency rank with perjury and violence; to neglect the former, to commit the latter, alike involved the displeasure of the immortals. The Italians were enslaved by minute ritual even more than the Greeks; they were more superstitious; the worship of the Lares and of the ancestors, the faith in fortune, the dread of the unlucky, survived among cultivated Italians to a late period. Italy is still profoundly superstitious; men who have shaken off the authority of the Church still dread the evil eye, and witchcraft of a peculiar kind is still firmly believed in by the peasants of central Italy; the strega is still a power in the villages of the Bolognese.

The ancients had nothing to set against the ascription of Divine powers to a man, though for the enlightened it was possible to distinguish between ceremonial acts whose purpose was to propitiate the Divinity behind the man, and the worship of the man himself as a divine being; nor did death terminate the power of the favoured individual; the spirit was even more powerful when released from the accidents of humanity. Among the Italians faith in the power of the dead, and a considerable dread of their continued interference in the concerns of the living, was a lively faith, and exemplified in many curious ways; and thus the worship of Augustus, which was officially recognized only in the provinces during his lifetime, was extended to Italy after his death. This worship was not an exclusive worship; it did not destroy or even impair the cults of other divinities; it was only another god added to the celestial hierarchy, another saint canonized; but this particular worship was alone in being universal throughout the Empire and officially sanctioned; in Gaul it was imposed.

It is particularly worthy of attention that the care of the worship of Augustus was assigned to freedmen; the Augustales, whose duty it was in each town to maintain the cult, were to be “libertini”; in Rome the Prætor Peregrinus, the foreigner’s judge, presided over its feasts, and it was associated with the worship of the Lares of the Compitalia, that is to say, with the oratories in the streets at which the slaves paid their devotions. Men of all nationalities driven together as slaves in the great cities, far from their native gods, found a common cult and a common protector in Augustus. It was not long before the worship of Augustus became indistinguishable from the worship of the Empire, and each successive Emperor received divine honours, as manifesting that abstraction; to deny the divinity of the Emperor, to refuse to spill a little wine, or cast a few grains of incense in his honour, was to rebel against the civil organization accepted by mankind; it was as difficult to evade the obligation as for an English soldier to refuse to drink to the health of his sovereign. The Jews alone protested, and for a long while their protest was accepted; they did not pray to the Emperor, but they prayed for him.

Augustus met his worshippers halfway; his own temperament was profoundly religious, as religion was understood by his contemporaries; he substituted the divine right of the Emperor for the divine right of the Senate; he was not a madman like Caligula, jealous of other divinities; on the contrary, he made every effort to restore cults which were being abandoned, and to revive both public and private observances. If he did not believe in his own divinity in the sense which the words would convey to us, he was equally removed from the robust scepticism of Vespasian, who remarked in his last moments: “Bah! I feel I am turning into a god!” His attitude towards his own divinity was a reverential one; it did not encourage him to set human laws at defiance, and flagrantly override the rights of other men; on the contrary he practised a studied humility, and seemed to feel that if he was himself a god, it was incumbent upon him to see that due respect was paid to other members of the same fraternity; in dealing with men he anticipated the Popes in assuming the attitude of the “Servus Servorum Dei.” There was no deliberate imposture, no conscious pose. When Cromwell enumerated to an unruly assembly the successive events in his career which had placed him at the head of affairs, and claimed that they bore witness to a special Providence, he expressed in the language of his time and country the same association of ideas which convinced Octavian that there was something supernatural in the chain of events, in the unbroken success, which had given him power far greater than Cromwell’s. There was no arrogance in the claim; there was humility; he ascribed to powers not his own a series of successes in which a less reverently minded man would have seen nothing but the evidence of his own surpassing ability. It was not merely political astuteness which led him to act in everything as an ordinary citizen, to vote, to ask for votes, to live without magnificence or ostentatious expenditure; such conduct was the result partly of personal inclination, partly of a sense of the infinite smallness of such things as marble columns and silken raiment, costly banquets and trains of servants in comparison with the greatness of the destiny imposed upon him. If at the great shows in the circus he sat on the platform on which were placed the statues of the gods, he did not thereby assert equality with them, but claimed their protection and bore witness to the favour which they bestowed not only on him, but on the people whose destinies he guided with their approbation and in virtue of the powers which they had granted. In the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius we may detect a certain flavour of approbation when these historians tell us that Tiberius or other Emperors refused divine honours or limited them, and we might be tempted to infer from this that the assumption of divinity by the Emperors was contrary to the feeling of the times; but both Tacitus and Suetonius wrote more than a century after Octavian had been declared “Augustus,” and in their days the unitarian faith of the Jews had begun generally to influence the educated classes at Rome; Horace could jest lightly at the Jewish Sabbath; in the time of Suetonius, if it was not observed as a day of rest all over the Empire, as Josephus boasts, it was certainly a well known institution.

It might be urged that whatever the religious attitude of Augustus in other respects, he cannot have believed in his descent from the goddess Venus, and that Virgil’s great poem in all that concerns Æneas and Anchises is conscious imposture. To argue in this way is again to misinterpret polytheism. The faith in Fauns and Satyrs is not absolutely extinct in Italy even today; the survival of such a faith suggested the plot of Hawthorne’s exquisite romance, _Transformation_. Charles Leland discovered traces of it in Tuscany and Umbria.

The ancients had not arrived at our modern accuracy of definition with regard to the divine and the human, the natural and the supernatural; even the most enlightened contemporary of Augustus might hold a faith as to mixed marriages between gods and men not dissimilar to that held by many orthodox Protestants as to miracles--they might believe that such things did not happen in their own day, but that they had happened. In the curious classification of events affecting the lives of the Emperors adopted by Suetonius a place is always assigned for portents. Xiphilinus, the Christian who epitomized Dio Cassius, apologises for the long lists of portents in his author, and for having cut out the more trivial of these occurrences, but he leaves a large number. Faith in portents is in fact always at hand, and even in these critical days readily springs to life at a favourable opportunity. With the ancients it was universal; in those days, as in our own, men preferred sensation to evidence, and the critical faculty, even when developed, had no very satisfactory apparatus which could be applied. As a rule, the significance of portents was seen after the event which they portended. Then, as now, nurses and mothers recalled remarkable circumstances which had attended the birth and education of children who afterwards became distinguished; and there are few men distinguished or obscure who have not at some period of their lives encountered strange coincidences, or suffered unusual experiences, which, interpreted by the light of subsequent events, may be held to have been fraught with mystery. There is no reasonable doubt that the entrance of Octavian into Rome when he returned to claim his uncle’s inheritance was attended by some unusual disposition of the sun’s rays, possibly a solar halo in which only one of the mock suns was clearly visible, that the event attracted notice at the time, and that it inclined men to believe that the fortunate youth was reserved for a remarkable destiny--an anticipation which led to its own fulfilment. Virgil may well have been in earnest when he hailed the procession of the star of Cæsar and worked up convenient fragments of legends into the _Æneid_; even if he had occasional misgivings, his inclination was to believe, and to hope that his glorious web was woven in threads of fact.

Faith in his divine ancestry, faith in his divine mission did not enervate Augustus, nor render him unpractical; he treated his power as a sacred trust, and used all the resources of a cool intellect and industrious temperament to further the interests which he believed to have been committed to his charge. We are told that in his later years he liked to believe that there was something superhuman in his glance, and was pleased when men were unable to look him in the face--a weakness which was encouraged by studious flatterers. If this is true, we may well believe that, like many other men and women, he was insensibly influenced by the attitude of those around him, and dropped into the place assigned for him by the universal opinion.

In any case, Augustus, whether in public or private, did nothing to jar upon the prejudices of those who were prepared to believe in his divine mission. He led such a life as has since been led by many of the better Popes, and at least one English statesman. Gossip, always busy with the supposed amatory proclivities of great men, has not spared him in this respect, but even if there were any foundation for the idle stories which have been handed down, the ancients would not have been scandalized; the somewhat coarse pleasantries which have also been attributed to him would have scarcely attracted attention in his own day.

By his peculiar personality Augustus was able to stamp upon the Roman Empire a character which has never left it--he made it a religion as well as a state; and it was due to his work, and to his sense of the sacredness of his work, that there are still men living even in England who cannot feel happy in the regulation of what they believe to be their most important concerns, unless they are assured that their actions are in accordance with the dictates of the authority from across the mountains, which is resident in Rome.

It is a curious fact that many of those men and women whose personal appearance was felt by their own contemporaries to be in the highest degree awe-inspiring were small: Napoleon was small, Louis XIV was small, among Queens Elizabeth was small, and Her late Majesty Victoria unusually small. Augustus was no exception--he was short, slight, and halted perceptibly in his gait; but these personal disadvantages did not detract from his dignity. If we compare the portrait of Julius Cæsar in the British Museum with the bust of the young Augustus, or the head of the magnificent statue of the Emperor found in Livia’s villa near the Prima Porta, we are struck by a remarkable difference. It is possible to bring the face of Cæsar to life again; we can recall the dark and liquid eyes, and set the strongly marked muscles of the face in motion; we would hardly be astonished were the lips to open, and we can anticipate the clear even enunciation of the words to which they would give utterance. But with the portraits of Augustus it is otherwise; they are strangely inscrutable. The bust known as the young Augustus is the portrait of a boy, or at the oldest of a lad of sixteen. It must have been modelled at a time when the future even of Julius Cæsar was not assured. The artist may have flattered, but that particular form of flattery can hardly have been designed; the habit of thoughtfulness is seldom expressed to the same degree in the features of boys and young men. Similarly in the older portrait there is an aloofness; it is the face of a man who would always tempt a careful observer to wish to know more about him, and who would always elude curiosity. The next Emperor who was canonized was Claudius. Of him, too, we have many authentic portraits; even in the most idealized we can see something of the man whose apotheosis gave Seneca the materials for a merry jest. It is the face of a man who was perpetually puzzled, whereas the face of Augustus is the countenance of one who perpetually puzzled other men.

The great work of establishing the Roman Empire was not the work of a charlatan or a criminal, in both of which characters Augustus has been represented. It was the work of a man who shared many of the crude beliefs of his own time and unconsciously used them for his own purposes, and those purposes were not self regarding. An Antonius could squander great gifts in the pursuit of what earthly happiness is afforded by dissolute excesses--he could allow his soldiers to perish of hunger and disease while he hastened to the embraces of an accomplished courtesan; he could shamelessly desert loyal veterans at the bidding of a licentious woman, and seek salvation in the wake of her purple sails; such was the hero whom Augustus annihilated, such the conception of responsibility which he replaced by a devotion to duty which has rarely been equalled and never surpassed.

The reign of Augustus was monotonous, his policy unadventurous. If these are defects, we are at least at liberty to prefer them to the excellences of those more brilliant reigns and more adventurous rulers who succeeded in dazzling the world, but failed to lay the foundations for a long era of prosperity. The career of Napoleon is more startling than that of Augustus, his military record incomparable with the simple successes of the earlier Emperor, but Napoleon left France with a diminished frontier, and Augustus left Italy the undoubted mistress of the civilized world.

V

Education of Tiberius

Though the apparent results of a careful education are often disappointing, the impressions received in early childhood are permanent in their effects. The man who has been brought up in a particular atmosphere retains the influence through life, even though his acts may seem to be in strong contrast with his training; the son of a Quaker family may break with all the traditions of the Society of Friends in his maturity, but he is never quite the same as a man who has not been under the rigid family discipline of that estimable sect. A man may throw off all the bonds imposed by the severe domestic arrangements of a Scotch Elder, he may elect to bring up his own children on liberal lines, and banish the shorter Catechism from his household, but he cannot shake off the consciousness of another kind of life which was forced upon him by his early experiences. In the case of Tiberius we can trace to the very end of his life the influences to which his youth and early manhood were subjected. There was no break with early traditions; the aspect of details changed, the estimate of their relative mutual importance was modified, but the spirit with which they were approached was always the same.

The antiquaries have much to tell us of the material arrangements of a Roman house, but we are not so well informed by them as to its occupants. There is a disposition to ascribe all that was good in Roman family life to an indeterminate period anterior to that progressive decay of good manners and good morals which, according to our authorities, was the distinguishing feature of the Empire. Exceptional instances of extravagance are quoted as texts for the supposed rule, the humorous or declamatory exaggerations of satirists are treated as if they were the evidence of sober witnesses, and the spirit which works behind the whole of Roman history is dealt with as of no account in comparison with the letter of promiscuous citations.

If we wish to revive the ideas which were associated by the Romans with their princely houses, we must think rather of such Roman palaces as are described by Mr. Marion Crawford in his Italian Romances; we must add to this conception something of a mediæval court, something too of the great mercantile house of the Renascence. So far as the family was concerned which inhabited such a house as Pompeius built for himself in the Carinæ, it was often composed of many generations, and of persons connected by various degrees of affinity; it was a patriarchal establishment, at whose head stood the eldest man of full age descended in the line of primogeniture from the founder--it was not merely the home of a man and his wife and their children. Nor again was the house only a place of residence: it was a place of business, and the business was of many kinds--some of it was political, some financial, some legal, some industrial. In private as in public life at Rome there was not that strict differentiation of functions, and fine division of labour and responsibility, which comparatively recent experiences have caused our contemporaries to regard as a law of existence.

The Roman Empire was not built upon the foundations afforded by the assembly of the Tribes, or the assembly of the Centuries, or even by the Senate itself, but upon the surpassing ability of the great families and the suitability of their organization for the work which fell into their hands. Collectively as the Senate they exhibited similar ability during a period which was long enough to fix the reputation of Rome, but this period was both preceded and followed by times in which the work of individual houses was supremely effective. The Imperial household differed in nothing but the greater extent of its responsibilities from other households. Augustus was not the only Roman noble who lived upon the Palatine Hill, and his establishment was ostentatiously modest; many of his contemporaries lived in finer palaces, and exhibited greater magnificence in private, but the moderation of Augustus was only relative, and his house was able to find room at different times for two successive commanders-in-chief, Agrippa and Tiberius, with their families and dependents. If Roman history was presented to young Romans in a form which drew their attention largely to such purely constitutional questions as the quarrels between the Patricians and Plebeians, it did not omit the legends of the great houses. The Senatorial dynasty had its heroic mythology; Horatius who kept the bridge, Cincinnatus who left his plough to command the army, the Fabians who all died in one day for their country, Curtius who leapt into the gulf, occupied in the imagination of Roman boys much the same place as King Alfred and his cakes occupy in the mind of the English boy. Every funeral of a member of one of the great families paraded before the eyes of Rome the effigies of men associated with stirring events in the history of the city, and filled their ears with the stories of great deeds. So far as the Romans knew their own history, they knew it in connexion with the names of the great houses, with whom indeed it was so closely associated that it was considered somewhat scandalous in the reign of Tiberius that a man who did not belong to one of these houses should take upon himself to write and publish a history.

For many years a comparatively small group of families at Rome managed the affairs of an area which has since found work for the statesmen and administrators of several kingdoms. Collectively they worked through the Senate and constitutional officials, individually through the system of clientele which was expanded from a domestic institution to a world-embracing system. Communities, as well as private persons, put themselves in connexion with great families at Rome, who were pledged to watch their interests; over and above the public official connexion with the Senate there was the private non-official connexion with individual senatorial families. Slaves and freedmen gathered from all parts of the civilized world strengthened and extended the family connexions. The sons of minor potentates were sent to reside with Roman noblemen, and receive a Roman education; capable adventurers such as the Herod family scented out the strong men of Rome and allied themselves to their fortunes. The minute subdivision of ancient society even after the creation of the Roman Provinces continued the patronage system beyond the time at which it might seem to have been naturally extinguished. Sicily might be a Roman Province, but individual Sicilian cities might still feel the need of a permanent advocate at Rome. The Roman Governor changed from year to year, but the dynasty of an Æmilian or a Claudian was perpetual.