Part 7

Velleius Paterculus, the historian to whom we owe a conception of the early days of the Empire different from that suggested by Cicero and Tacitus, was hereditarily associated with the family of Tiberius Nero; his grandfather was his most intimate friend; he calls Tiberius Nero a man of generous spirit, and strongly inclined to learning. A man of this nature would be attracted to Cæsar by a similarity of character and tastes. The ambition of Cæsar was a generous ambition; he was one of those born organizers to whom muddling is a painful and personal annoyance; he valued power for no vulgar reason, but because it gave him the opportunity of realizing his conception of a well ordered world. Endowed with an enormous intellectual ability, inexhaustible physical vitality, an irresistible personal charm, Cæsar attracted to himself all the men who really meant work. Cicero himself very nearly succumbed, and would have done so entirely had his uneasy vanity allowed him to work in a subordinate position. There is a limit to the incompetence of constituted authorities; a time comes when all earnest men in a State, whose public business has gradually been monopolized by respectable incompetents, look eagerly for a deliverer; such men do not welcome the noisy reformer, or the narrow doctrinaire, and so long as these alone present themselves, the earnest men hold back, but as soon as the really capable hard-working man appears, they give him their confidence, and pass naturally into his service. Cæsar’s campaigns in Gaul enabled him to select his men; at first the fashionable young men of Rome hurried to his standards attracted by the prospect of a pleasant picnic in charming country with an agreeable climate; no serious danger was anticipated, and there was a pleasing prospect of loot. The behaviour of these gentlemen, when it was realized that the advance of Ariovistus meant serious business, supplies the one comic interlude in Cæsar’s commentaries. During the nine years which Cæsar gave to the conquest of Gaul, the earnest workers found their leader; the intercourse between Cæsar’s camp and the capital was constant; men learned to contrast the vigorous administration of the Governor of the two Gauls with the imbecility of the Senate; it was not foreseen that the contrast would result in the absorption of the powers of government by this one man. When the time came at which Cæsar had either to abandon all his work or force the Senate to give him a continuance of office, his fellow workers were naturally disposed to give him their continued support. Men who had learned what good work was, and had had their share in it, were inclined to hope for the best; there were many self-seekers, doubtless, but it was possible to follow the fortunes of Cæsar under the influence of the highest motives. The man who had done such magnificent work in the two Gauls might be trusted to reorganize the Government. The reaction came, when the continuance of opposition at Rome forced Cæsar to become an autocrat; his work was only half done when he had beaten the Senatorial armies in Macedonia, in Egypt, in Africa, in Spain, in Asia Minor; he had further to clear away all the obstructions, get rid of all customs and precedents by which the machinery of the administration was impeded; it was root and branch work; and Cæsar was impatient; he attacked everything at once; no ties of affection, no sentimental associations were spared, no prejudices; he saw everything in the clear light of reason; he knew what was best for the Empire, and he was determined to have his own way.

To Cæsar the Senate was the embodiment of obstruction and incompetence; he did not propose to repeat the mistake of Sulla and give it a new lease of power, for his contempt for the Senators was unbounded; but the Senate had a name; it could not be disbanded; the better course seemed to be to swamp the Senate of Rome in the Senate of the Empire, to make it almost a titular body. He enlarged its numbers, added to it distinguished provincials, his personal adherents among the noblemen of Gaul. The figures that are given us may not be absolutely trustworthy, but there can be no doubt that the Senate was increased to a number which destroyed its capacity for united action. By this measure Cæsar alienated the affection and destroyed the confidence of the liberal members of the old aristocracy; they had been prepared to pay a heavy price for good government; they were at one with Cæsar in recognizing the expansion of Rome, but they had not anticipated a time when a Julius Florus or Cornelius Gallus would not only be dignified with Roman names, but would have the same social rank as a Claudian or Sempronian. So determined was Cæsar to convince the Senate that its day was over, that in transacting business with it he neglected even the ordinary courtesies, and received its deputations without rising from his seat. The dagger of Brutus was the result.

In some respects the assassination of Cæsar was fortunate for his reputation; there was no widespread conspiracy; his government had been of so short a duration that the disaffected men had no time to find one another out; their victim had never realized that there was a formidable opposition, and he fell before his qualities of clemency and moderation were put to the severest test, which tries the virtue and capacity of a successful reformer. The men who murdered him were his chosen friends and servants, many of them were either holding or were awaiting their turn for holding important provincial appointments. The conspiracy was not organized; no provision was made for carrying on the Government after the keystone of the fabric had been removed; it was enough to kill the tyrant. In one respect the conspirators had correctly estimated the result; there were men who, bound to Cæsar by various ties, would not take an active part in any conspiracy against his person, but who, if once that obstacle to the restoration of the Senatorial Government were removed, would declare their detestation of autocracy, and assist in remodelling the State. Tiberius Nero was one of these; Cicero was another, and there were many others who, during the last four years, had been ill at ease in the attempt to reconcile their personal affection for Cæsar and confidence in his ability with their conception of what constituted political righteousness. Unfortunately for these men, they were but few in number; within three months’ time it had become clear that neither the Army, nor the provincials, nor the subordinate officials had any objection to an autocrat; the myth of the Senate had been replaced by the myth of Cæsar; the only question was who would become the centre of the cult.

Two men considered themselves most likely to attract to themselves the passionate adoration with which the soldiers of Cæsar had regarded their general; they were his trusted lieutenants, Marcus Lepidus and Marcus Antonius, the former a Proconsul in command of an army, the latter Cæsar’s colleague in the Consulship at the time of his death, and his intimate friend; Cæsar’s widow placed all her husband’s papers in his hands. Antonius had the advantage of being constitutional head of the Government, and as soon as it was clear that the popular feeling at Rome was strongly adverse to the Liberators, he procured a decree from the frightened Senate sanctioning all Cæsar’s arrangements. Any other course would in fact have produced intolerable confusion. The most important consequence of this measure was that the Liberators were put into positions of great power and influence by the voice of the man they had killed, and were protected from the consequences of their own imprudence. Cicero threw aside his literary work and rushed to Rome, to assist in the restoration of the Republic, and to revive the party of Pompeius. Antonius, however, had no intention of letting the reins of Government slip from his grasp; being possessed of the dead Cæsar’s papers, he was able to produce at his pleasure decrees which the constitutional party had already sanctioned by anticipation, and the partisans of the dead man were bound to support. Moderation was no part of the character of Antonius; he prepared himself to enjoy thoroughly the wealth which was poured into his hands; with Cæsar’s soldiers at his back, he felt that he could do what he pleased. An unexpected event shook his self-confidence, and revived the prospects of the constitutional party by dividing the Cæsarians.

The young Octavian crossed from Apollonia and landed at Brundisium.

Cæsar had left no direct descendants except an illegitimate son by Cleopatra, but he had distinguished his great-nephew Octavius by such indications of his confidence and affection as a Roman would bestow upon his destined heir. The year before his death he had taken the young man with him to Spain, on the expedition against the sons of Pompeius, which ended in their defeat at Munda; he had attached him closely to his person, shared his tent with him, conducted all his business in his presence, had in fact begun his political apprenticeship. Apparently Cæsar came to the conclusion that his nephew’s education was inadequate, and on the return from Spain he sent him to Apollonia on the Illyrian coast, a Greek town of considerable commercial importance, which was the seat of a University largely frequented by Roman students. So far Cæsar had not taken the final step of adopting Octavius, but he did so by his will.

Octavius was at this time little over eighteen years of age; his mother and stepfather were alive, both of them devoted to his interests, but nobody seems as yet to have thought of him as a possible factor in the politics of the future.

By removing him to Apollonia his uncle had to some extent withdrawn him from political life, and the Liberators had forgotten his existence. He was of weakly health, and had shown no particular aptitude for military pursuits. Antonius thought him of such small importance, that he disregarded those portions of Cæsar’s will which referred to him, and actually seized the private treasure which had been bequeathed to him.

Friends and relatives were alike urgent that Octavian should either remain where he was, or delay his journey to Italy till he was assured of the support of an Army. The young man wisely relied on his own judgment; he was Cæsar’s heir and adopted son, but Cæsar could only bequeath to him his private inheritance; it was not in his power to transfer the reins of Government; the nature of the conspiracy against Cæsar and its extent was still unknown; Antonius and other leading Cæsarians had been spared, it was clear that no proscription of the adherents of Cæsar had been contemplated, or, if contemplated, it had been abandoned. If Octavian were marked out for slaughter, he was already doomed; nothing could save him but the affection of Cæsar’s veterans; they were all in Italy, and there was as yet no evidence that they were prepared to transfer their allegiance to so distant a relative of their late commander. To appear with an army would be to invite attack, and Octavian knew his own limitations better than anybody else; he knew that he was no general, and he had not as yet a general in whom he could trust. By appearing in Italy simply as a private person engaged in an ordinary matter of private business, the formal succession to an inheritance, he disarmed prejudice. If Antonius wished to put him out of the way, he could do so in any case. On the other hand, by appearing simply as a defrauded heir, he might attract popular sympathy; Cæsar’s will had already proved to be a political force; and the Constitutional party might be glad of a counterpoise to Antonius.

Such considerations may well have influenced Octavian in the adoption of the important step which he took contrary to advice. It is even possible that he contemplated nothing more than the assertion of his undeniable right; and that the consequences of his daring step took him by surprise. It is certain that he had no sooner landed at Brundisium than he found himself a power; the soldiers flocked to meet him, and his march to Rome was a triumphal progress.

The events of the next three years are difficult to disentangle; to the actors they must have been perplexing in the extreme. The factor which had been omitted from the calculations of all the leaders was the character of the army, which Cæsar had created. As fast as Cæsar made way in Gaul he enlisted the Gauls in his service; his legions were in the end less Italian than Gallic; to the Gauls the abstraction called the Roman Senate had no more significance than the House of Commons to Sikhs and Gurkhas; they had not got beyond, or not fallen behind, the conceptions of personal fidelity to a chieftain which are developed by the clan system. Not only was it natural to them to transfer their fidelity from the person of a father to that of his son and successor, but such personal ties were their strongest political passion. They would obey Antonius and even Lepidus as Cæsar’s friends and trusted subordinates, but their affection for Cæsar’s heir was of a different character; to avenge their dead commander, to put his son in his rights, were to them matters of the first importance; as for the Roman Constitution and theoretical Republics, they neither cared about them nor understood them. At first Octavian did not grasp the situation; his temperament was legal and formal; his first preoccupation was to assert his legal rights against Antonius, and in order to do this effectively, he had no objection to using such help as might be given him by Cicero and the Constitutional party, who for their part proposed to use against him Antonius and then put him out of the way. The first serious operation in the field showed Octavian his mistake; the Senate sent him with the Consuls to relieve Decimus Brutus, brother of Marcus Brutus, who was being besieged by the Cæsarians under Antonius at Mutina; both Consuls, old Cæsarians, were killed, and the soldiers insisted on bringing Octavian back to Rome and making him Consul; it was not long before they also insisted on a reconciliation between the Cæsarian leaders, compelling Antonius, Lepidus, and Octavian to work together and unite in the task of punishing the enemies of Cæsar. The proscription was partly the work of the army; so far as it was a punishment of the enemies of Cæsar, Octavian was an accomplice, though an unwilling accomplice; Antonius and Lepidus both took advantage of it to satisfy old grudges and make large confiscations. Meanwhile the general disorganization invited any man who found himself in command of troops, or was otherwise favourably circumstanced, to fish in troubled waters; Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella, the dissolute little gentleman who was “tied to a sword,” was not the only man who saw an opportunity of doing something to his own advantage. Adventures of this kind disturbed the world for a few months, but after Brutus and Cassius had been beaten near Philippi a fairly definite division declared itself; the world was again divided between Cæsarians and Pompeians, and the chief Pompeian leader was Sextus Pompeius. Antonius had gone off to the East to meet Cleopatra and his fate on the Cydnus. Lepidus, though in command of an army and Governor of Africa, was a negligible quantity, destined to suffer a very remarkable disillusionment as soon as he ventured to assert himself in an independent position.

Few men have ever been so fortunate as Octavian in the mistakes of their adversaries, and few have ever turned them to such good advantage.

East and West alike were taught to adore the memory of the great Cæsar by the incompetence of the men who proposed to succeed to his power; under his sway the commercial cities of Asia Minor had thriven; Cassius plundered them in the name of the Senate, Dolabella on his own responsibility, Antonius as the successor of Cæsar; Italy had no sooner begun to look forward to relief from civil war on the departure of Antonius than the Constitutional party allied itself with Lucius Antonius and Fulvia, the brother and wife of Marcus Antonius, to impede the settlement. Tiberius Nero was among those who joined the new movement. Relieved of the presence of Antonius, who in spite of all his faults was a general of ability, the Pompeians hoped to be able to crush Octavian, who was no general; the proscription had left very bitter feelings; Octavian had so far had no opportunity of indicating his pacific inclinations; he had had to do what his soldiers required of him; Antonius was obviously a self-indulgent adventurer, with whose fortunes no self-respecting man could ally himself; Fulvia was a virago, and Lucius Antonius no less greedy than his brother, though less amiable; still it seemed that these latter with their adherents embodied the Republican principle; and the remnants of the Constitutional party joined them. Incompetent generalship allowed their forces to be locked up in Perusia, and after a siege of three months the soldiers of Octavian glutted their vengeance upon the enemies of Cæsar; the terror that was inspired served its purpose in two ways: there were no more conspiracies in Italy, and Octavian made up his mind never again to be the slave of his own army.

Tiberius Nero either escaped from Perusia before the town was completely invested, or had started on a special mission to Campania with the object of creating a diversion in Southern Italy. He still held the office of Prætor though his legal term had expired, and thus invested his enterprise with a legal and constitutional aspect. The territory of Capua had been confiscated by Rome after the second Punic War, the penalty of the destructive friendship which that city had conferred on Hannibal; the Senate of those days had appropriated the land to its own purposes; the redivision of this land had been part of the programme of the popular party from the days of the Gracchi, and their heirs the Cæsarians now proposed to assign it to Octavian’s veterans. Tiberius Nero took up the cause of the proprietors, who were threatened with expropriation, thus adopting the old Senatorial standpoint; he doubtless expected to find that the Campanians, to whom the existing conditions, sanctioned as they were by the precedents of a century and a half, caused no grievance, would flock to his standards; but he met with languid support from the beginning, and the fall of Perusia with the subsequent atrocities destroyed every prospect of success; the Campanians preferred a peaceful spoliation to the chances of war. Tiberius Nero was obliged to fly for his life; accompanied by his wife, his eldest son barely two years of age, and only one attendant, he made his way to Naples. Here a romantic incident took place. C. Velleius Paterculus, the grandfather of the historian, had been associated with Tiberius Nero in all his enterprises; he had been his friend all his life; he had served under him as Chief Engineer at Alexandria, and in his subsequent campaigns; it is not clear whether he had been the sole companion of the flight from Campania, but in any case he rejoined his friend at Naples; but Naples was no safe refuge; Octavian was pressing southwards; it was necessary to cross to Sicily; when it proved to be difficult to provide for the escape of the whole party, the old man committed suicide rather than be an impediment to his friend.

Tiberius Nero had suffered two disappointments: he had been disappointed in Cæsar; he had been disappointed in the attempt to form a constitutional party in opposition to Cæsar’s heir; a third and severer disappointment awaited him in Sicily.

Of the two sons of Pompeius, the elder had been killed in Spain at or after the battle of Munda; the younger, Sextus, had escaped, and adopted the life of a corsair in the Mediterranean; during the confusion which reigned in Italy after the death of Cæsar he had escaped notice, and had been able to get together a formidable fleet of pirates; he had seized Sicily, and now hoped to be able to secure the restitution of his father’s property by imposing terms on Rome, for he controlled the food supply of the capital. The proscription had sent him many valuable allies, and the anti-Cæsarian party began to look to him to take his father’s place as their leader. Sextus, however, was no politician; he was a mere marauder; the corsairs whom his father had dispersed reassembled from the bays and islands of the Mediterranean, and joined in an organized system of brigandage; the subordinates of Sextus were adventurers of the type which has been the perennial curse of the inland sea, repeatedly stamped out, and ever ready to reassert itself till the advent of steam power made such operations too dangerous. It was not the policy of Sextus, but circumstances beyond his control, which elevated him from being a leader of bandits to the position of an umpire between parties in the threatened break up of the Empire. Outlaws and broken men of all kinds gathered to his headquarters, and the grave Senators of Rome found themselves strangely out of place in this assemblage of cut-throats and their mistresses. Tiberius Nero was among the last to arrive; he attempted to assume the position of a Roman official, and to exact the respect due to one before whom the prætorian fasces were carried. Sextus, however, was by no means inclined to put himself under the orders of men of respectability; still less so the Greek corsairs, who looked forward to unlimited plunder under his flag.

When Octavian arrived in due course he temporized; his advisers saw that for the time being nothing could be done; the Cæsarians had no fleet; on the other hand, Sextus was glad to disembarrass himself of the Roman notables; and the result was that the victims of the proscription were pardoned and received into the Cæsarian ranks. This was the first occasion on which Octavian was able to manifest his moderation, and to begin his career of conquest by diplomacy. Sextus was recognized, admitted to a share in the dismembered Empire; there was no alternative; Rome was relieved from the danger of starvation, and Octavian was left free to deal with the veterans and the consolidation of Italy.

Tiberius Nero was not among those who accepted the amnesty; he again fled, this time to Corinth, which was associated with his family by ancient ties of patronage. He became a wanderer, a hunted man; romantic adventures are assigned to the months of danger and hardship which followed; he even sought the protection of Antonius; at length he too made terms with Octavian and returned to Rome, where a further disappointment awaited him; his young wife attracted the notice of Octavian; she accepted his attentions, and shortly afterwards an amicable divorce and re-marriage were arranged. Six months later Livia bore a second son, who was sent to her first husband by Octavian, and acknowledged by him as his own. The families lived on terms of intimacy, and when Tiberius Nero died five years later, both his sons passed under the care of their mother and Octavian, whose family now consisted of his own daughter Julia by a previous wife, Scribonia, and his two stepsons. Julia was a little over a year younger than Tiberius the future Emperor.