Part 8

So far there had been nothing discreditable in the life of Tiberius Nero, and it was never attacked even by the bitterest enemies of his son. He followed the fortunes of Cæsar, so did many men who saw in Cæsar the only hope of a reformed constitution; he was frightened by Cæsar’s root and branch reforms, so were many moderate men; he saw in Cæsar the tyrant, and applauded the men who cut him down, so did Cicero and many honourable men; in the confusion that ensued he steadily clung to any power that seemed to make for the restoration of the Republic; in this he may have been mistaken, but was not dishonourable; he eventually made terms with the one party which promised a restoration of order--no other policy was open to a wise and prudent man; he surrendered his wife to the conqueror; at this point we withdraw our approval; we think of Cæsar, who refused to put away his wife at the bidding of Sulla, and our inclination is to see in the action of Tiberius Nero contemptible weakness.

Apart, however, from the fact that marriages of convenience and divorces of convenience were of frequent occurrence among the members of the princely houses of Rome at this period, the personal conditions in this case may have been such as to render the divorce in question as little disgraceful to the injured husband as such an event can be. There is nothing contrary to probability in assuming that Tiberius Nero at the time of his marriage to Livia was an elderly, if not an old man; his intimate friend Velleius Paterculus was certainly an old man when he killed himself at Naples. The father of Livia had been a political and possibly personal friend of Tiberius Nero; he fought on the losing side at the battle of Philippi, and was among those who killed themselves after their cause seemed to be irreparably lost; immediately afterwards Tiberius Nero married Livia, who, if she was eighty-six at the time of her death in A.D. 29, can have been little more than fourteen at the time of her first marriage. According to Paterculus the historian, the Emperor Tiberius was less than two years old when his parents fled to Naples after the fall of Perusia in B.C. 40; this places the marriage somewhere in 43 B.C., or at the latest very early in 42 B.C. We have no mention of brothers or other relatives of Livia in her later life; it would seem that her father’s death left her alone and friendless; it is a possible conjecture that Tiberius Nero married the daughter of an old friend, partly in order to save her life and fortune. The disparity of age must have been great in any case, and Livia must have accepted the marriage as the only way out of a position of great peril. It is in accordance with all that we know of Livia that she should have conducted herself with the strictest propriety as a Roman matron, though the youthful wife of an elderly or aged husband; and it is more than probable that he became strongly attached to her, even though her feeling towards him was dutiful rather than affectionate. When she met Octavian, she met a man but little older than herself, who fell passionately in love with her; of their mutual attachment there can be no doubt; it lasted through the whole of their life together, and on his deathbed Augustus bade her never to forget their union. Under these circumstances what was the best thing that Tiberius Nero could do to secure the happiness of the child whom he had taken to his home, and who now wished to leave him? By the custom of his time and race no disgrace attached to a divorce in itself; the Romans had no conception of a holy estate of matrimony indissoluble except under scandalous circumstances; it was better that Livia should be transferred peaceably to the man of her choice than that her good name should suffer. Tiberius Nero accepted the inevitable, not necessarily because Octavian could have compelled, but because Livia had given to her young lover the affections which she had never been able to give to her elderly protector.

Tiberius Nero died in B.C. 33; his eldest son was then only nine years old, but had already been sufficiently well trained to be able to recite the customary oration as chief mourner at his father’s funeral; both he and his brother are said to have been exceptionally well educated. We may imagine the solitary father with his strong love of learning, the victim of so many disappointments, finding some alleviation to his sorrows in bringing up his boys in the strictest traditions of an old Roman house.

III

Octavian

To the student of even the clearest narrative of the events which followed the assassination of Cæsar, the impression conveyed is one of absolute chaos; officials are appointed and removed, decrees passed and rescinded, provinces assigned and redistributed, leaders combine and separate only to combine again; it is difficult to distinguish any guiding principle, any organized force, by which order might be restored. War and spoliation seem to be universal and continuous, and the direction of the march of events to be subject to the caprices of a licentious soldiery, led by rapacious adventurers, who can keep hold of their troops only by extravagant largess and promises of plunder. Licensed brigandage rules the world. And yet this turmoil was immediately succeeded, and in part accompanied by such prosperity as the civilized world had not yet known; trade flourished in spite of piracy, great public improvements were designed and completed, young men went to universities, travellers passed from one end of the Empire to the other.

The exact date of the journey which Horace took from Rome to Brundisium in attendance upon Mæcenas is still a subject of dispute among scholars, but it certainly cannot be placed later than the battle of Actium, and is generally assigned to a time before Sextus Pompeius had been driven from Sicily; neither Italy nor the world were at peace, and Italy had recently been the scene of civil war. There is, however, nothing in the description of this journey to suggest a ruined or disordered country; before Horace caught up the suite of his patron he travelled by the ordinary conveyances along the road or the canal to the South; the misadventures of his journey are only such as happen to travellers in a well ordered country in times of the profoundest peace. The ordinary routine of life can have been but little disturbed by the marchings and counter-marchings of armies; and the habits of order must have been too firmly established to be much shaken by the apparent anarchy at the capital.

In one respect the accounts of these times are necessarily misleading; as our information comes from Rome and Rome alone, we forget the enormous area over which the transactions took place. We should not to-day be surprised to find France prosperous when war was raging in Italy; we should not expect Spain to be affected by occurrences in the Balkan Peninsula, or Egypt to be ruined by marauders in Asia Minor; and we can even imagine a war in Lombardy which would leave Calabria undisturbed. Roman history gives us all the military operations of all the countries in Europe South of the Alps and West of the Rhine, and of all the East that is washed by the Mediterranean, as the history of one state, and we forget that large though the armies were which disputed the Empire of the world, they fought over a very large area, and that the greater part of the Empire was only for short periods or indirectly affected. Even inside Italy the fighting was carried on at a distance from the capital; the scenes of actual war were Lombardy or Northern Tuscany or again the coast opposite Sicily; the marching of the troops along the great roads did not disturb the country between the scenes of operations. In all periods of social disturbance the attention is drawn so exclusively to the sensational events, that the continuance of the ordinary routine alongside of the confusion escapes notice. A community which has long been settled parts unwillingly with its fixed habits; it is only very long periods of war that leave their mark permanently on a country. Perpetual disorder and perpetual invasions prevent progress, but even such violent outbreaks of disorder as the early years of the French Revolution may be followed by a speedy recovery.

Julius Cæsar did not hold absolute power for more than four years; during those years he had time to remove obstructions, but not to build; his death did not involve a general collapse of the Government; the permanent officials continued in their places, the ordinary routine of public and private business remained much as before. The real danger which threatened society was the domination of the army under the command of a licentious adventurer such as Antonius, or the breaking up of the Empire and its distribution among similar leaders. That this did not happen is due chiefly to the personal qualities of one man, and that man a youth, who at the present day would be just leaving school to begin his career at the University.

It is possible to overrate as well as to underrate Octavian, to ascribe to him much that he could not possibly have done, as well as to refuse to him the credit due for what he actually performed.

In contrast with the achievements of his adoptive father, Octavian stands out in history as the great civilian; he hardly ever fought a successful battle; even his personal courage was suspected, but he succeeded where a long line of predecessors had failed and his success was in part due to the fact that he was not a soldier; he was never tempted to conquer for the sake of conquest, or to enter on campaigns in order that he might win glory; he was entirely free from the weaknesses of a Napoleon.

The precocity of the young Romans of the great families continually astonishes us, but Octavian would indeed be a marvel if, alone and unaided, he had placed himself among the four competitors for universal dominion at the age of twenty. Had he really been the son of Cæsar, and not a comparatively distant relative, had Cæsar himself been a constitutional monarch, and the monarchy an institution sanctioned by long precedent, his succession would not have surprised us; dynasties are upheld in spite of the youth or feebleness of the successor to the dynasty; but in this case there was no recognized dynasty, no prejudice outside the army in favour of the dynast, and the heir could not expect to inherit anything from his predecessor except his private property. This was his own view of his own position; he claimed no more.

Octavian was probably no less surprised than the Liberators or Cicero by his own popularity; the depth of the affection and admiration inspired by the great Cæsar was not at once comprehended by his contemporaries; they did not realize that he had become a myth in his lifetime, and on his death a god; the strength of the sentiments which he had evoked escaped the notice of the constructors of Utopian Republics and devotees of the rule of the Sacred Senate. Here was a new cult, and even a new incarnation of divinity. So little did Octavian understand the real foundations of his popularity that on his first arrival in Italy he made overtures to Cicero and the Constitutional party, to the men who approved of his adoptive father’s murder; so little did they understand the hold which he had upon the affection of the soldiers that they prepared to use him for their own purposes and then throw him over; they wanted a piece to play against Antonius, Octavian wanted power to force Antonius to disgorge his inheritance. His first important step was a masterly one. Upon Cæsar’s heir devolved the duty of paying Cæsar’s bequests to the Roman people, and expending money upon the great shows in honour of the dead hero. Antonius refused to surrender the treasures which he had seized. Octavian, whose natural father had been a very rich man, sold all his private property, sold all Cæsar’s property that had escaped Antonius, persuaded two of his relatives to forego their own share of the inheritance, and fulfilled the obligations imposed by the will. The contrast between him and Antonius was thus emphasized; Antonius had seized, confiscated, squandered upon his personal pleasures; Octavian gave, and paid for the pleasures of the people. It was this characteristic of Octavian, his indifference to personal display and personal luxury, that was one source of his strength throughout life; nobody could be more magnificent or spend more lavishly when such a course was required by the public interest, but in his personal expenditure he was rigidly economical. No Roman or provincial ever felt that his property was held in jeopardy, because Octavian needed money for his private pleasures. The ruler himself set the example of that moderation in expenditure which Horace so repeatedly commends to his contemporaries.

The moderation of Octavian recommended him to the financiers, and he at once found a valuable friend in the person of C. Cilnius Mæcenas. The Roman historians, in accordance with their invariable custom, ignore this great permanent official; they have no eyes for any man who has not held the great magistracies of the Republic, and the share of Mæcenas in building up the power of Octavian occupies but a small place in their writings; it is in fact only as a patron of literary men that Mæcenas is widely known, and the superficial observer might be tempted to infer that Mæcenas was a private friend of Octavian, whose influence was due solely to the Emperor’s favour. We know when Mæcenas died, but we do not know when he was born; his death occurred twenty-two years before that of Octavian, and as there is no indication that the event was considered premature, we are justified in assuming that he was so much older than Octavian as to have had considerable experience of affairs, and a sufficiently recognized position, when the younger man was seen to be a possible successor to the great Cæsar. Mæcenas was a prominent member of the Equestrian Order, of the body which had been supported in its struggles for recognition against the Senate by the Marian party, and by Cæsar himself; its interests coincided with those of the whole body of permanent salaried officials, who owed their appointments to Cæsar; the collection of the revenue of the Empire was in its hands; of the candidates for power, the one who secured the confidence of the Equestrians was the most likely to be successful. We do not know what had been the previous connexion between Octavian and Mæcenas, but we do no violence to probability by assuming that Mæcenas was known to Cæsar, and had enjoyed a measure of his confidence, that he belonged to the inner circle of financiers whom Cæsar must have repeatedly consulted, and that he had frequent opportunities for forming an opinion as to the capacity of the young Octavian.

In any case, and however the connexion was brought about, the man who formed the alliance between Octavian and Mæcenas acted more wisely than Octavian had acted when he placed himself at the feet of Cicero. By himself Octavian might have appeared to be a risky speculation to the orderly men who were gradually attracted to his party; backed by the great financier he was safe; the clients of Cæsar in all parts of the Empire were provided with a guarantee which encouraged them to transfer to the nephew the allegiance which they had previously given to the uncle. Octavian’s merit lies in the fact that he was able to use the wisdom of this cautious adviser and submit to his diplomacy; his head was not turned by the popular declarations in his favour. He is frequently reproached with a lack of initiative, with a cynical indifference to the higher morality, with a cool calculation of his own interests, and of his own interests to the exclusion of all others; but to judge thus is to fall into the common error of condemning a man on his success; there is a natural tendency to ascribe to every man who eventually succeeds a deliberate intention of success from the commencement, and the careful working out of a preconceived plan. Royalists after the Restoration in England could only see in Cromwell a crafty plotter, who had proposed to himself the usurpation of the throne. It is assumed that the power of the men who rise to great positions was at the beginning the same that it was at the end, and that in the first stages of their career they could have refused to do things of which they disapproved.

When Octavian made overtures to Cicero and called him his “father,” he was in earnest, and acted according to his own inclinations, but he took a false step from which he was forced to recede; he quickly learned that he commanded sympathy as the avenger of his father’s murderer, that on those terms he was the darling of the fierce legionaries; he also learned that the Constitutional Party, to whom his temperament inclined him, regarded him as a necessary evil, and that his “father” proposed to use him and then remove him; after the publication of the Second Philippic, in which Cæsar was denounced no less savagely than Antonius, Octavian could no longer keep on terms of friendship with Cicero; he would have been treated as a renegade by his own soldiers; he had not even the alternative of retiring into private life; he was too dangerous to both parties alike; had he rejected the devotion of the legions, the daggers of the Constitutionalists or of the emissaries of Antonius would have struck him down; nominally a leader, he was really a hunted beast. The soldiers forced him into alliance with Antonius, the soldiers forced him to marry the daughter of the tigress Fulvia, the combination of ferocity drove him to his share in the proscription. To Antonius the proscription was a means of filling his ever leaky purse; to Fulvia, the sister of Clodius, it was a vengeance, she had an old score to settle with Cicero, to the soldiers it was the merited punishment of the murderers of Cæsar; Octavian could not hold back; he, however, did the best thing that was permitted by the circumstances, as soon as Antonius departed for the East he let the pursuit of the proscribed lapse; he broke with Fulvia and sent back her daughter; he proved singularly placable to those who wished to make terms with him.

At this period Octavian can hardly have designed the universal dominion to which he afterwards succeeded; it was enough to enjoy comparative security in Italy, and to be recognized as the chief agent in restoring safety to the peninsula; none of his military operations were aggressive, and he preferred diplomacy to war; he was content to let Antonius carry off the richest part of the Empire; he was content to make terms with Sextus Pompeius, and allow him to take his share of the provinces, provided the commercial interests of Rome were respected, and the corn ships allowed to find their way into the harbour. He required time to deal with the most difficult of tasks, the reabsorption of Cæsar’s veterans in the civilian population; in order that Octavian might be personally safe, it was necessary gradually to break up the army which had dictated to him, and replace it by one of which he would be master.

This operation must have required consummate skill and coolness; the financial problem alone must have been serious; it was, however, rendered much easier by the departure of Antonius to the East; to the Roman soldiers, as to ourselves for many centuries, the East was the El Dorado, and service or even settlement in Italy presented small attractions to the legionary compared with service on the Euphrates; the gold which had tempted Crassus still glittered in the imagination of the centurions. Octavian and his advisers were glad to see the more restless spirits stream after Antonius, it lightened their burden.

Meanwhile Octavian had the good fortune to find a War Minister of rare genius and unexampled personal devotion; if the career of Octavian is marvellous, that of his friend Agrippa is no less so; the two men were of the same age; they were fellow students at Apollonia when the death of Cæsar summoned Octavian to Rome; they had already laid the foundations of a friendship which is among the most noteworthy in history.

Agrippa as a military genius has received scant consideration; but the man must have been a genius, who at the age of twenty-seven made a navy for Rome and re-organized an army, and who further contrived to place that army on a footing, which restored it to its proper position of subordination to the civil administration. All Agrippa’s projects bear witness to the mind of a daring planner and a consummate master of detail. It was necessary to build and train a fleet in the face of the opposition of Sextus Pompeius, who held the command of the sea; Agrippa at once bethought himself of an inland lake in which his ships could be built and then manœuvred; when the work of preparation was complete he cut a channel into the Mediterranean, and sailed out to attack and defeat his enemy. In preparation for the subsequent operations against Antonius at Actium, he was not misled by the example of the naval experts of the day; he saw that rapidity of manœuvring was more important in a man-of-war than size and weight, and instead of competing with the ship builders of Alexandria, constructed a large number of light galleys, and manned them with skilled crews.

The one great building for which Agrippa was responsible survives to our time, and still testifies to the originality of his genius; the dome of the Pantheon is remarkable even now; in its own day it was unexampled.

Agrippa was even greater in his moral qualities, in the self-restraint, or perhaps absence of a morbid ambition, which forbade him to become a rival to the man whose superiority he had elected to recognize. In the later days of the Republic a man could hardly become a great general without threatening the balance of the constitution; the death of Cæsar brought into prominence ambitious soldiers; it seemed that it was enough to be a successful leader of troops in order to enter upon the enjoyment of all things that ambitious men most covet; but to this kind of ambition Agrippa was superior; if he had a conscious ambition over and above the satisfaction of doing his work well, it was to make Octavian.

His example was most valuable to the fortunes of the Empire; his character impressed itself upon the young men at a later time, upon the youthful Tiberius his son-in-law among others. Henceforth the old loyalty to the Republic which restored victorious consuls to their proper place in civil life, when their wars were finished, was replaced by the loyalty of the army to a possibly civilian Imperator, whose military work was delegated to subordinate commanders; it was possible for a man to command an army without feeling that he lost dignity by submitting to the control of the head of the State.

If Octavian is to be admired for learning in a few years the trade of a statesman, Agrippa is no less to be admired for the celerity with which he acquired the detailed knowledge of a naval and military commander; both young men started with a rare power of submitting themselves to the guidance of men of experience; the eventual result was a combination of administrative ability, which was able to use other men without impairing its own supremacy.

After Sextus Pompeius had disappeared, and Lepidus had found himself in the unenviable position of a general without an army, and a provincial governor without a province, the delimitation of authority which followed may well have seemed to the sharers in power to be final.