Transcriber's Note

Cover created by Transcriber by combining portions of the original Title page with the Frontispiece. The result remains in the Public Domain.

TIBERIUS THE TYRANT

Art Repro C^o.

Tiberius.

TIBERIUS THE
TYRANT

By J. C. TARVER
AUTHOR OF “LIFE AND LETTERS OF GUSTAVE FLAUBERT”
“SOME OBSERVATIONS OF A FOSTER PARENT”
ETC ETC

WESTMINSTER
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE AND CO LTD
2 WHITEHALL GARDENS
1902

Butler & Tanner,
The Selwood Printing Works,
Frome, and London.

CONTENTS

Introduction

I
The Expansion of Rome and the Equestrian Order

Used as we are to the terminology and conditions of hereditary monarchy and territorial sovereignty, we find it hard to appreciate, or even to express in terms of modern politics the difficulties which beset the statesmen of Rome at the death of Augustus; and we are further tempted to read into the story of that critical period ideas, which were only conceivable after the crisis was over; we can hardly avoid seeing those days in the light of subsequent events, or speaking of them in language which involves anachronism. Our information is principally derived from historians, who wrote a century and a half after the death of Julius Cæsar, when the Government of the Emperor and the Senate was established; but the position of the Emperor of those days was not the position of Augustus, and the Senate of Trajan was not the Senate of Tiberius. The experienced officials who formed the majority of the Senate of the Flavian Emperors were no longer the hereditary oligarchy by whose capacity Rome had been brought to be first among the city states of the world, but which was unequal to the task of organizing the Roman empire. The change had, however, escaped observation, and the warmest admirers of the Senate of the Republic were men whose position had been won for them by the Emperors. Between the death of Augustus and the death of Vespasian we have but few contemporary historians; we have no letters of Cicero to throw light on the inner life of the statesmen of those days; there were private records, private letters, and private biographies; we can gather their tone from the extracts that have been preserved for us, but we have no opportunity of comparing them or checking them. Velleius Paterculus is the only contemporary historian of the reign of Tiberius, a portion of whose work still exists unabridged; and his narrative stops just at the period when we require most light—at the conspiracy of Sejanus—where there is also a gap in the annals of Tacitus. From the books of the New Testament we may infer much as to how the Empire appeared at a comparatively early period to the inhabitants of Greater Rome, much also from Josephus, a little from Philo, but we cannot re-people the Rome of Tiberius, as we can re-people the Rome of Augustus and the Rome of Cicero. Two facts stand clear to us from the pages of Tacitus, and in a less degree from those of Suetonius, that the Imperial Family was divided, that the old Roman princely houses never forgave the Empire, and that there was a Republican reaction in opinion at the centre of the Empire. History has repeated itself; just as the Curia of to-day cannot forgive the monarchy which represents the unity of Italy, so the Curia of the first century of the Christian era was irreconcilable to the monarchical constitution which represented the unity of the Empire. The Roman princes who wrote the memoirs of their houses for the edification of their children, and the delectation of their friends never inquired into the authority of a story derogatory to the Emperors, and the one Emperor, who was never spared was Tiberius; it is no exaggeration to say that the madness of Caligula, and the monstrous freaks of Nero are dealt with tenderly by the writers of the silver age, if we compare the accounts of these with the deliberate malignity which attends on every word and action of Tiberius; and yet common sense tells us that only a very able man could have succeeded Augustus without breaking up his work. At the death of Augustus it was still possible that there would be no second Emperor; at the death of Tiberius the Roman Emperor had become an institution, the pivot upon which the whole machinery of civilized existence turned throughout the world. Hence the peculiar bitterness against Tiberius; the Curia felt that in his reign their last chance had gone, and more than this, that he had been in some sense a traitor to his own caste. Neither the Julian nor the Octavian families had been among the foremost houses of Rome, till the genius of the first Cæsar raised them from their comparative obscurity; but many of the most important events in the history of Rome, no less than her buildings, her roads, her aqueducts, and many of her public monuments, were associated with the Claudian stock, and the Livian, with which it was inter-married, was only less distinguished. Augustus had been tolerated, for his services to the State could not be disregarded, but some day Augustus would die; he did die; his power fell into the hands of the most prominent representative of the old Roman nobility; the opportunity for a restoration of the narrow oligarchy of the Republic came, and it passed away for ever. Two years after the death of Tiberius his lunatic successor was stabbed by a soldier whom he had insulted; the State was left a few days without a head, and the Curia was so inanimate that it could neither restore its own rule, nor provide a new Emperor; it had to accept apparently at the dictation of the soldiers in the Prætorian barracks a man of letters who had hitherto been the laughing stock of the Imperial family.

The contemporary history of the years during which the Roman Empire took organic form is written in terms which tend to disguise the real significance of the change; our attention is attracted almost exclusively to the internal politics of the city of Rome; it is withdrawn from the politics of the Empire; the long struggle which ended by giving the whole civilized world one system of Government, which welded together in orderly association Italians, Greeks, Syrians, Africans, Egyptians, Spaniards, Gauls, Germans, and even Britons, is represented to us as being little more than a constitutional revolution inside the city; we see the external pressure, which forced a revised constitution upon the Roman oligarchy, but we only see it dimly; no Roman historian has been at the pains to trace out the process by which the civil administration of the Roman Empire was developed—surely no less wonderful an achievement than the conquests of the Roman generals. We have seen other conquerors, and more brilliant feats of arms than any Roman general achieved, but we have not seen any other nation impress its language and its law upon the populations of so wide an area or so permanently. Alexander did much, but the effects of the conquests of Rome have been more lasting than those of the conquests of Alexander; except in Asia there is not a civilized people in the world which does not somewhere or other bear the impress of Rome, or cannot trace the pedigree of its religion and its law back to the Italian city. This great destiny was concealed from the makers of the Empire, but the immediate possibility, the consolidation of the conquests of Rome, and the permanent establishment of order over the whole area which drains into the Mediterranean was present to their minds; unfortunately the makers of the Empire have been mostly silent, and the only voices which have reached our ears are those of men who could only grasp the great idea intermittently, if at all, or who were annoyed by its insistence. Under Augustus for the first time the Empire became conscious, Virgil and Horace spoke in terms of the larger conception, but the grip of the Roman oligarchy has never relaxed its hold upon the imagination of educated men.

Conquest did not involve in ancient times any responsibility towards the conquered; war was believed to be, and was, a profitable investment; as Rome pushed her conquests, the organization which she gave to the conquered peoples was one which suited her own purposes, she did not consult their convenience, external pressure alone forced her to modify the conditions of conquest which were universally accepted by the ancient world; very gradually and very reluctantly she broke down the barriers which surrounded the city state of antiquity, and admitted first her immediate neighbours, and lastly the whole of Italy to some sort of constitutional communion with her. For a long time war had been forced upon Rome, the invasions of the Gauls, the domination of Carthage in the Mediterranean, the invasion of Pyrrhus, the invasion of Hannibal, and lastly the invasion of the Cimbrians and Teutons involved her in a succession of defensive wars; the city itself could not find a sufficient supply of soldiers, and the price which Rome had to pay for being allowed to recruit over Italy was the partial incorporation of the Italians in the State. Wars of defence were accompanied and followed by wars of aggression; success encouraged speculation; after the happy issue of the second war with Carthage the Roman oligarchy began seriously to turn its attention to the Eastern Mediterranean, and another century found it entering upon the heritage of Alexander. This is the turning point of Roman history; from this time onwards a new conception occupied the minds of ambitious Romans; alongside of the ideal of the city State there existed the ideal of an extended Empire, of a world-wide organization, of something more permanent than conquest; alongside of the men who dreamed of Platonic republics in which perfect justice would be realized, there grew up men who formed a yet grander and no less civilized ambition. Pompey triumphed over Mithridates wearing a robe which had been worn by Alexander; Augustus used a head of Alexander for his signet ring; it was by the example of Alexander that Cleopatra seduced Mark Antony.

Alexander was no vulgar adventurer; he solved a problem which had hitherto baffled the most highly civilized race of the ancient world; he combined the city state of the Greeks with the Imperial organization of the Persians; and though, when the Romans came into close contact with Alexander’s Empire it had fallen into fragments, each fragment preserved the impress of the great whole, and Roman generals could converse at Pergamus, at Antioch, or at Alexandria, with men trained to administer states in terms of the wider conceptions derived from Alexander and possibly through him from Aristotle; at the same time many men accustomed to deal with financial problems on a large scale passed into the service of the Roman conquerors as slaves or honoured dependants.

While the possibility of a beneficent organization of the conquests of Rome was thus presented to one order of mind, to another the same events introduced another set of ideas; while some Romans studied Alexander in the vestiges of his work, others entered into the full possession of the Greek historians and philosophers; the ideals of the Greek city state were replanted in a virgin soil, and the Romans for the first time began to theorise about their own Constitution. The men who were taken captive by Plato and Demosthenes did not see that Rome had long outgrown the conditions under which the theories of these men were applicable to her political life. The true liberal policy was the policy of Alexander, the false liberal policy unintentionally gave a new lease of life to the blind selfishness of the narrow oligarchy which had governed Rome. The daggers which struck down Cæsar were aimed by admirers of Verres no less than by students of Plato; and Cicero’s effusions over the merits of the tyrannicides were effectively stopped by the unforeseen but necessary emergence of Mark Antony, a tyrant of the conventional type.

From the moment when a year’s office as Consul or Prætor in the city of Rome was followed by a term of practically irresponsible government in a dependency, the Civic Constitution was doomed; the magistracies of Rome were now of minor importance compared with the career to which they opened the way; it was impossible any longer to discuss the politics of Rome in terms of the politics of Athens or Plato’s Republic with any practical advantage, and indeed without inviting anarchy; but it was highly convenient to the hereditary aristocracy of Rome and its adherents that it should pose as representing the principles of Harmodius and Aristogiton; it found a clever man of letters and a skilled advocate, who had his own reasons for falling in with this conception, and who perpetuated it long after the facts had demonstrated its hollowness even to himself. Cicero as a politician is alternately a tragic and a comic figure; he is comic because he lived complacently in a world of his own imagining, which seldom lost its hold on his imagination, in spite of the rudest shocks, for it satisfied the promptings of his child-like vanity; he is tragic because he had his moments of seeing the realities clearly, and because combined with his vanity there was a genuine admiration for fine conduct, which led him to face danger manfully in his old age, and in some sense invite the death of a political martyr; he is yet further tragic, because he became the father of an equally blind posterity of politicians, who wasted their energies in spoiling the work of men of greater enlightenment; it is perhaps due to Cicero, more than to any other man, that the city of Rome has persistently filled a larger space than that of the Roman Empire in the works of subsequent historians.

In an expanding community the actual facts of the administration are seldom in exact correspondence with the forms; apparent rigidity, real elasticity, enable business to be carried on in accordance with the claims of new social factors without any sense of insecurity. The Roman, like the Englishman, preferred making new laws to repealing old ones; and when he made a fresh departure, he was at pains to represent it as a development of something by which it had been preceded; in both cases this profound respect for the historical aspect of law has been the foundation of national greatness; it has been extended beyond the races in which it originated, and in the case of England, as in that of Rome, has resulted in an exceptionally successful government of alien communities; laws and customs which are sanctified by immemorial usage appeal to the sympathy of the Englishman and command his respect; it was the same with the Roman. England has had her periods of aberration when she has given way to the proselytizing tendencies of sections of her population, but the broad lines of her policy in dealing with subject nationalities have followed the principle of accepting the existing conditions; in the same way Rome accepted the laws and customs of the Eastern Mediterranean and of Western Europe; she supplied a common law for her Empire, which applied where the local law had no application; its excellence was such that it became predominant, but she did not insist on remodelling every community over which she held supreme power in terms of her own constitution. This respect for antiquity and adherence to established forms has resulted in a misrepresentation of some of the facts of Roman constitutional development, and especially of those which concern the development of the Empire, which is in the highest degree embarrassing to the student of the period in which the change took place. There was a time when the constitution of Rome and her political history differed little from that of any other city state of antiquity, but it would not be easy to state when that period began or ended; of one thing we may be quite certain, viz., that after the destruction of Carthage and the completion of the first great period of conquest in the Eastern Mediterranean in 145 B.C., the political life of the city of Rome was no longer comparable to that of any other city state; the forms remained, and the faith in the forms remained, but the substance was gone. There is for instance no term so misleading as one which was seldom out of the mouth of Cicero, “the Roman people”; there unquestionably was a time when the Roman people was an organized part of the Roman constitution, when it voted in an orderly fashion according to a property qualification for the election of certain magistrates, and the ratification of certain laws; when it voted according to a residential organization for the election of other magistrates, and to pass other laws; but the forms of popular government were maintained long after the reality of popular government had departed. It suited the convenience of noble agitators, such as the Gracchi, to see in the rabble of the streets the Comitia Tributa, it was equally convenient to the princely houses to dignify their own private arrangements with the forms of an election in the Comitia Centuriata, it was particularly pleasing to the middle class Roman to share in the spoils of the Empire by exacting direct or indirect payment for his vote, and so the forms were maintained; an outward deference to them answered everybody’s purpose, but the real political power and the real political struggles lay outside and beyond them. The Roman people, as a body of civilians, could riot, as the raw material of the Roman army it could strike, it was necessary to keep it in good humour, and to allow it to regard itself as an organized part of the constitution, as a body of free and independent electors; but to accept its own estimate of itself as an important factor in the politics of the Empire is to misread history; popular Government in any sense which would commend itself to the intelligence of an Englishman of to-day, or of an Athenian who listened to Demosthenes, did not and could not exist in the Rome which had begun to control the destinies of the Mediterranean; it was a legal fiction which it was convenient to maintain, the attempt to make it once again a reality resulted in the revolutionary excesses which preceded the Empire.

The real government of Rome was in the hands of the Senate, an assembly of nobles and capitalists, who shared between themselves the profits of the Roman conquests. Like all such assemblies, the senators had their good times and their bad; between the second and the third wars with Carthage they so conducted themselves as to impress the imagination of the civilized world; the successes of their armies, their fidelity to engagements, their comparative moderation in conquest, were the wonder of men; admiration for these qualities tempted Judas Maccabæus to engage their assistance in checking the aggressions of the Greek rulers of Antioch; their mediation was invited by the chieftains of Gaul; it was recognized as an honour to them to be called friends of the Roman people, and the honour was attended by practical advantages. Success was followed by intoxication, and the time came when the sense of responsibility was lost in the secure accumulation of riches, and when the unscrupulous venality of the Senate became a by-word. Then the power of Rome seemed to be tumbling to decay; Jugurtha defied her in Africa, Mithridates in Asia, Spain threatened to organize itself against her under a Roman general, the Cimbrians and Teutons swarmed over her borders, her Italian allies made war upon her, she could with difficulty suppress an organized revolt of her rural slaves, at home she was at the mercy of the savage mob in her streets; out of this confusion she emerged victorious, and greater than before. The reason is a simple one; during her period of good behaviour Rome had become the financial capital of the world; she was indispensable, and when she could no longer help herself, others were ready to help her. Left to itself the Roman Senate would have brought ruin on the Roman Empire in the first half of the century preceding the Christian era; but it was not left to itself; its incompetence involved the ruin of too many other interests. We have the story of the Roman generals in full, but nobody has yet written the story of the Roman bankers; we are accustomed to think of the Romans as soldiers and lawyers, we forget that they were also shrewd financiers; with the Romans, as with ourselves, commerce usually preceded the flag; the soldier completed the work begun by the capitalist. We are told that the first war with Mithridates began with a massacre of 80,000 Roman citizens in Asia Minor; the figures are probably exaggerated, but they are not questioned by any Roman historians; it did not appear improbable to them that the Roman residents in Asia should have been so numerous at that comparatively early date; and though part of the country was already a Roman province, and we may assume that the popular fury was largely directed against collectors of taxes, even the rich towns of Asia Minor can hardly have acquired the services of so large a body of revenue officials.

The political genius of a nation is shown by nothing so much as the success with which it supplements the deficiencies of its formal constitution by informal but recognized agencies. Rome was provided with a machinery for collecting and distributing her domestic revenue; she had a treasury and a staff of clerks, but she had no separate civil service for the Empire; the constitution of a city state did not admit of such a thing, and the collection of the revenue of a province was left to semi-private agencies, its taxes being farmed. At fixed periods the right of collecting the taxes assigned to the public treasury from the provinces was sold by public auction; the purchaser paid a lump sum to the treasury, and made the best of his bargain in the provinces; the speculation was an exceedingly profitable one, but its profits threatened to disappear owing to excessive competition among the farmers of taxes; in order to eliminate competition the farmers of taxes formed themselves into a close corporation, the taxes were bought in the name of an individual, but in fact by an association.

Alongside of the Senate there thus gradually grew an organized body which formed the permanent civil executive of the provinces, the body which was known as the Equestrian Order. As in our own history, so in Roman history, the value of terms alters from period to period, almost from year to year; it would therefore be rash to declare that at any one period every titular Roman knight was an active member of the Financial Corporation which farmed the taxes, or that the collection of revenue was the sole business of the corporation as a whole, or of its individual members. Again, that differentiation of functions in the case of the individual, or the association, which is to us almost a law of existence, was unknown to the ancients, or worked on lines of division not readily comprehensible to ourselves; there was, for instance, nothing absurd to Roman conceptions in sending out an advocate like Cicero to govern a frontier province, and placing him on active service in command of an army, for civil, military, and judicial functions of the highest responsibility were exercised simultaneously or successively by the same individual as a matter of course. But though it is difficult to draw fixed lines, there is quite sufficient evidence to warrant us in asserting that the Equestrian Order held a recognized position in the State, that it practically formed the Civil Service of the provinces, that its interests were repeatedly opposed to those of the Senate, that it roughly represented Greater Rome, as opposed to the city of Rome, that through all the disturbances of the Civil Wars it kept the machinery of Government outside Italy in working order, that it was the channel through which the leading provincials gradually passed into the Civil Administration, and that eventually the Imperial Executive was built up on the foundation, not of the Senate, but of the Equestrian Order, and the Imperial Household.

The origin of the Equestrian Order is to be found in the Servian Constitution; we may not altogether believe in the Servian Constitution, which, as it is presented to us in the pages of Livy, looks like the clever guess of an antiquarian who was familiar with the Constitution provided for Athens by Cleisthenes, but we have no difficulty in believing that there was a time, when every citizen possessed of a certain amount of property was obliged to keep a horse for the service of the State, and was expected to take the field as a cavalry man; or that he was allowed certain distinctions of dress, and other privileges indicating public consideration; it is also easy to imagine the process by which the yeomanry force so constituted was replaced by more efficient cavalry soldiers, and the military significance of the Equestrian Order disappeared, while the name remained; of the intermediate steps which followed we have no detailed account; in theory every Roman citizen possessing more than a definite amount of property was entitled to be enrolled in the list of the Equestrian Order by the Censor, and if his property reached a yet higher value to be similarly called to the Senate, but the practice must have been different; not every man became a senator or a knight, who had the necessary property qualification, though demonstrated want of means might be a disqualification, and entail a loss of position when the Censor was rigorous, or when an excuse was wanted for reducing the numbers of the Senate or the Order, or setting aside an undesirable personality. The time came when two political careers were open to the ambitious Roman; he could become a candidate for Public Office, and under the forms of public election eventually gain admission to the Senate through the Quæstorship, or he could be enrolled on the lists of the Equestrian Order. In the first case he might eventually become Prætor, Consul, and then Viceroy of a Province; in the second he became a member of the great financial corporation which supplied the Civil Service of the Empire; in the first case he might command armies and figure prominently before the eyes of men; in the second he might make a large fortune, but would not enjoy some of the sweets of power which attract ambitious men.

The relative positions are fairly comparable to those of an English member of Parliament, and an English clerk in a Public Department in the days before the Reform Bill; a young Englishman of good position could be nominated in those days by an influential friend either to a seat in the House of Commons, or to a subordinate place in one of the Executive Departments; in the former case he might ultimately become Prime Minister, in the latter Permanent Head of his department. In the one case he would be widely known and possibly respected; in the latter he might do work of the highest public utility, and never be heard of outside official circles.

To be successful in a senatorial career was an expensive and arduous process; it was necessary to pay a heavy initiatory fee in the form of direct and indirect bribery to the electors; it was then necessary to force a way into the inner circle, which distributed the honours and emoluments; a new man could only do so by showing that he had a very strong force of public opinion behind him, and that he could make himself felt; admission to the Equestrian Order was less costly, and there was less risk; in consequence the career was deliberately chosen by large numbers of Romans, whose wealth and family connections might have tempted them to enter the ranks of the Senate; further, admission to the Equestrian Order was less jealously guarded; it probably had its hierarchy, and its inner circle like all similar organizations; and the summons of the Censor was possibly a mere formality, the nominations made by him having been previously determined by others; but it was much easier for an Italian, and eventually for a Provincial to become a Roman Knight than a Roman Senator. A Provincial, who had once secured the status of a Roman citizen, could secure the further dignity of a Roman Knight by processes which we may surmise, but cannot definitely prescribe; once a Roman Knight, he might look forward to a share in the financial administration of the provinces during the reign of the Senate, and to a Governorship under the Emperors.

It would be a mistake to assume that all Roman Knights were members of the Civil Service, that is to say, that they all belonged to the hierarchy which farmed the taxes and managed other business necessarily connected therewith; there were doubtless many Equestrians whose dignity was chiefly titular; others who as private financiers and contractors only were connected with the Order, but the continued allusions to the status of “Eques Romanus,” which multiply as the Empire takes shape, forbid us to believe that this was in all cases a purely honorary dignity, which could be assumed by any wealthy man on application to the Censor. Were there no other evidence, the fact that we find the Equestrian Order ranged formally against the Senate at the beginning of the great constitutional struggle which ended in the Empire, shows that we have to do with no haphazard collection of wealthy individuals, distinguished from their fellow-citizens by an honorary precedence.

Cicero made his first triumphant appearance as a public man at Rome, when he conducted the case against Verres; whatever may have been the misconduct of Verres, and it was undoubtedly very serious, the action against him was not promoted by pure philanthropy; the case was a test case, it was part of a campaign directed against the provincial administration of the Senate by the Equestrian Order, whose interests were imperilled by rapacious Viceroys. The only check upon the proceedings of a Roman Proconsul lay in the possibility of bringing an action against him for improper exactions; in the purer days of the Senatorial administration such an action when instituted by the provincials might be successful, and the possibility of its success might be a deterrent, because though the offending Senator was in such a case tried by his peers, those peers, even if influenced by no higher motive, were interested in preventing the exhaustion of a province; any one of them might succeed to the wasted estate; the Proconsul who succeeded a Verres was not likely to make much out of his office, for he found the estate stripped. As the Senate became reckless, having found fresh and apparently inexhaustible pastures in the East, scant attention was paid to the complaints of provincials till their cause was taken up by the Equestrian Order.

The Roman Proconsul was supreme Judge and supreme executive authority in his province; he imposed, sanctioned, and sometimes encouraged public works, such as roads, harbours and buildings; he regulated the mutual relations of the different independent communities within the area over which his authority extended; he had ample opportunities for indirect and direct extortion, but he did not collect the taxes; the collection of revenue was in the hands of the farmers of the taxes, that is to say, as time went on, of the Equestrian Order. A divergency of interests soon declared itself: if the Proconsul harried the province unmercifully, the tax gatherer found little or no revenue to collect, and could not reimburse himself. The Proconsul had the unfair advantage, that cases between the collectors of revenue and the provincials were tried in his court; thus the farmers of the taxes found that they had an interest in promoting appeals to Rome, and in aiding the provincials to bring actions for extortion against the provincial Governors at the end of their term of office. So long as the Senate acted equitably no great harm was done, but as soon as the Senate was found invariably to acquit its own members, the Equestrian Order became ranged formally against it, and pressed for reforms; it succeeded for a time in getting these case tried before a court composed entirely of its own members; Sulla the reactionary gave back the jurisdiction to the Senate. One consequence of the trial of Verres was the establishment of a mixed court composed partly of Senators, partly of Equestrians. The net result was that the Equestrian Order formed an organized party, commanding enormous financial resources, in sympathy with the provinces, and more thoroughly conversant with the details of provincial business than the Senate. Thus eventually the Equestrian Order came to represent the party of the Empire, as opposed to the Senate which was the party of the ancient oligarchy of the city; for with the internal politics of the city the Order was only concerned so far as they affected or were affected by the standing quarrel between itself and the Senate. There were men of high moral standards at Rome both in the Senate and in the Order, who wished to deal justly with the provinces; but they were few. Either party left to itself would have plundered the provincials unmercifully; circumstance ruled that the selfishness of the Equestrians should be enlightened, that of the Senate unenlightened, while financial relations with men of business in the provinces, with skilled Greeks and Jews, taught the Order sounder views of political economy than were open to the average Senator. However oppressive the methods of the Equestrian Order might appear when judged by modern standards, they commended themselves to the favour of antiquity; the Roman Civil Service worked better than its predecessors, otherwise there would have been no Roman Empire. The ultimate collector of taxes is never a popular character, and the Roman Publicans enjoyed to the full the unpopularity which has been the fate of their brethren at all times, and in all places; but the revenues of the provinces were collected by the Roman Knights with less friction, and less capriciously, than by the representatives of Perseus of Macedon, or Mithridates, or Antiochus; and in their own interests the Equestrian Order discountenanced other extortioners, whether high-placed officials or private adventurers. When the Civil Wars came the Order was interested in finding a counterpoise to the Senate, and eventually in arresting the progress of anarchy. Cæsar backed by the Order could confidently face the Senate and Pompeius; similarly his nephew having once gained its confidence was a match for the spendthrift Marcus Antonius. The Cæsars and the Order were of one mind in putting an end to the Senatorial misgovernment of the provinces, therefore Greater Rome recognized its champions in the Cæsars, and supported the organization of which they were the head without stopping to inquire whether the officials whom they employed were Freedmen or of the purest Roman nobility.

In order not to form a mistaken conception of the process by which the Roman Empire was built up, it is important to bear in mind that the term “province” only gradually acquired the territorial significance with which it is now inseparably associated. Any responsibility outside the city of Rome and the domain governed directly by the annually elected magistrates of the city might be called “a province.” The “province” at one time assigned to Pompeius was the duty of repressing piracy throughout the Mediterranean. The territorial aspect of a “province” was in fact accidental. The first territorial provinces, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, happened to be islands, and a natural limitation was thus fixed to the responsibilities of the Roman Governors, whose duty was to maintain the Roman interests in Sicily and the other islands against the aggressions of Carthage; the result was the unification of Sicily, and the realization of a political condition closely resembling though not absolutely identical with the modern conception of a province. As the dominions of Alexander successively passed into the hands of the Senate, it was convenient to use previously existing boundaries for the delimitation of the several spheres of influence for which the Roman Proconsuls were responsible, and thus a territorial significance increasingly attached to the words province and provincial. Similarly modern usage perverts the significance of the word “provincial” as applied to the inhabitants of those cities which passed under the protectorate of Rome. There was not quite the same quality of disparagement in the ancient use of the words as in the modern. The units of the Roman Empire were not originally territories, but individual cities, then, as the conquests of the Roman Generals extended to peoples not living under the city organization of the Greeks, Italians and Phœnicians, tribes or nationalities. Rome was first the universal peacemaker; only at a later time and by a gradual process did she become the universal ruler, and the centre of a hierarchy of officials. Such centralization of the details of Government as we are now familiar with was never realized by the Roman Empire; the inhabitants of the great cities of the East did not consider themselves “provincial” in our sense of the word.

II
The Roman People

The official style of the Roman Government was that of the Senate and the Roman people. It is not easy to form an estimate of what constituted the Roman people at any particular date. In these days of individual freedom and independence the term people has a definite meaning; we know that for political purposes the English people means every registered voter, and that the process by which any resident within the limits of His Majesty’s dominions can acquire a vote are comparatively simple for white men; but citizenship was not so simple a matter in ancient times, and antiquarian research fails in some measure to enlighten us, because the Romans had a habit of keeping the old names and the old forms long after their original significance and the powers implied had passed to new institutions or suffered complete change.

The very phrase the Senate and the Roman people is deeply significant, for it excludes the Senate from the people. Whatever may have been the original meaning of the word “Populus,” it was clearly something distinct from the Senate, which was not representative of the people, but another power. The fusion between the two powers was in fact never completed till the predominance of the Imperial Hierarchy practically eliminated the Senate. There was a time in the history of the Republic when this fusion seemed to be approaching completion, and when the Senate moved in the direction of becoming a representative body; but the Roman conquests threw such preponderating influence into the hands of the Senate, that the constitutional position which had been slowly won for the “people” became nominal rather than real. The oligarchy of Rome was never in the Republican period disestablished as the oligarchies of many Greek cities were disestablished.

The Roman historians have preserved for us a constitution based on property qualifications, which might tempt us to imagine that there was a time when a Government with something approaching to a democratic organization controlled the destinies of Rome. It is possible that there was a time when the Roman people was divided into classes according to their assessed property, and when each class voted separately; but it is exceedingly improbable that even in that golden age of liberty there was anything approaching to free and independent elections as we understand them.

The independence of the individual has always been tempered by the necessity of belonging to some form of organization. In these days a man belongs to a party, or a trades union or an association, and sacrifices a portion of his independence to the advantages gained by sharing in the strength of an organized coherent body; in ancient times even a modified independence of this kind was not possible, and in early times at Rome a man was expected to vote for his patron through thick and thin. To us it would appear that a man lost personal dignity by following blindly the fortunes of a greater man than himself; to a Roman it would seem that the individual had no personal dignity, if he were not recognizably attached to a patron.

Individual independence is only possible in a very highly civilized society. Men may be technically equal in the eyes of the law long before they are so practically; even in modern England it has been found necessary to form associations whose members are bound to mutual assistance in defending or instituting some actions-at-law. The difference between ancient and modern society, and indeed between modern society before and after the French Revolution, lies in this, that the modern association is most commonly one of equal individuals for certain definite purposes, while the ancient association was one of inferiors of various degrees with a superior for all purposes. It would be rash to attempt to define too closely, but the general statement that in ancient Roman society there was no such thing as a free and independent individual, except among the wealthiest or otherwise most powerful, is near the truth. Numberless conditions unknown to modern society contributed to produce the same result; among them the following may be mentioned.

Residence as a means of acquiring political status was not recognized by the ancients; a man might reside in the same town all his life, and his children might succeed him, but neither he nor they could buy or sell, plead in the law courts, intermarry with the citizens, acquire real property, or in fact enjoy any of the benefits of civilized society, without making special arrangements; the resident was an alien until the authorities of the town in which he dwelt had conferred upon him a political status. Towns such as Rome and Athens, which admitted resident aliens comparatively readily to a modified form of citizenship, expanded more quickly than other towns, and the history of the expansion of Rome is from this point of view the history of the processes by which she gradually admitted the stranger within her gates, and then the stranger without her walls to the privileges of citizenship.

The privileges of a citizen according to ancient ideas were separated into two classes: they were private and public; to the first class belonged the rights of buying and selling, intermarrying, making valid contracts, and acquiring by various tenures real property; to the second the right of voting in all or some elections, and, as the climax, of standing for some or all magistracies. The various degrees of citizenship might be conceded to individuals or to communities; Rome might admit all full citizens of Arpinum to all or some of the rights of Roman citizenship, and vice versâ, or similarly favour an individual citizen of Arpinum. Long before an alien community or individual received the benefits of citizenship business relations might be necessary, and in order to get over the difficulty of conducting business with persons who had no legal status, it was customary for aliens to form private relations with full citizens through whom their business was conducted; and here again the alien might be a whole community or a single individual. At Rome the citizen who thus took charge of an alien’s business was called his patron, and the alien was called a client. The principal service rendered by the patron was to appear on his client’s behalf in those law courts to which the client had otherwise no access; the case was dealt with as the patron’s case by a convenient legal fiction. The service rendered by the client was not definitely prescribed in this case; it could not be, for he was unknown to the Roman law; but we have no reason to suspect the Roman patrons of not exacting a satisfactory equivalent for their services. The same men who were clients at Rome would be patrons in their own towns, and transact business for their Roman friend at Ephesus or Alexandria in return for his services at Rome. In the same way aliens resident at Rome, who for various reasons were unable or unwilling to acquire rights of citizenship, enrolled themselves among the clients of a patron. The system added enormously to the wealth and influence of the powerful men at Rome; for much in the same way that the status of citizen in its various degrees was personal and transmitted by descent, only to be revoked by a solemn process, so the relation of patron and client was personal and heritable on both sides. This combination of personal with business relationships is one of the peculiarities that make ancient society so difficult for us to understand.

Even after an alien had acquired the rights of citizenship the tie between his family and the patron’s family would continue. It would not be easy to prove that it was strictly obligatory in the eye of the law, but it was recognized by sentiment, and ingratitude on the part of the client, or neglect on the part of the patron, were severely punished by the unwritten law, and in certain cases by the written law.

Thus one form of the relation of patron and client arose out of the difficulties of intercourse between communities and individuals for business purposes in a state of society which regarded citizenship as a special personal qualification, and not as an incident of residence.

A second form was the relation between a Roman noble and his freeborn dependants in various degrees.

Such a city as Rome was not comparable to a modern city in many particulars; even after the definite establishment of the Empire when it had approached the modern conception, there were still survivals from a previous state of things. It would not, for instance, occur to a wealthy citizen of London to start from his residence in Park Lane with a pack of hounds, and all the other paraphernalia of a hunting expedition, in order to impress his fellow-citizens with a sense of his importance as a territorial magnate; such a thing was possible at Rome even in the reign of Domitian, or there would be no point in one of Martial’s epigrams. The heads of the great Roman families were not originally rich men who conducted their business in Rome, and possessed houses in the country to which they went to enjoy sport and the amenities of Nature; they were originally territorial magnates, whose importance was due to the fact that they were such; it was a later development which made them approach to the position of our great commercial princes in London. The ancient city community was not a thing enclosed within walls; it extended over a considerable area. The land outside the city walls might be held under some form of communal tenure and subdivided into small plots, but it might also be occupied by large holders in positions analogous to our conceptions of a tenant-in-chief, whose subtenants were free citizens with full civic rights in the eye of the law, but who were also in many respects vassals. Dionysius has a statement of the relations between patron and client which may be inaccurate in the letter, but which in its spirit at once suggests the feudal system. It is inevitable in certain stages of social development that the small man should associate himself in some way or other with the big man, in order to be able to render effective the rights which the law gives him. The Roman noble took charge of his client’s interests in the law courts, the client voted as his patron directed at the polling booths. The free and independent electors who swarmed in from the country to give their votes were pledged to support the candidates and measures recommended to them by their patrons; had they failed to do so, they would have been thought deficient in a Roman virtue.

There was a third relationship of patron and client which was fairly strictly defined by law; when a man emancipated a slave, the relations between them were changed from those of master and slave to those of patron and client. The slave did not always receive full citizenship on emancipation, but all through the various degrees by which he passed from the servile status to that of full citizen, he and his descendants continued in the position of client to the original manumittor and his descendants; the relationship was so close that the property of an intestate freedman went to his patron or his patron’s representatives. The legal statements on this subject are somewhat obscure, but enough remains to show that the connection was recognized by the law as a close one, and that there were rights on both sides; the relationship was not purely a matter of personal choice nor readily dissoluble.

All these three ways in which the relation of patron and client might be created tended even in the purest days of the Roman Republic to make an election a struggle between big families and groups of big families rather than a political struggle in which each elector formed an opinion upon a question of policy and gave his vote independently. The Senate, that is to say, the assembly of heads of houses, divided into parties or groups, and each head of a house could bring so many electors to vote at the polling booths with tolerable certainty. The ultimate political unit for practical purposes was not the individual but the group formed by a patron and his clients, who in their different degrees voted as the patron directed.

A free Government controlled by an electorate, in which each individual elector votes according to his own judgment, is a dream of political theorists. It may have existed for a short time in some of the small city states of antiquity, but in practice the individual elector is too lazy to exert his own judgment; he votes, if it is made worth his while to vote, either by the pressure of some extra constitutional association to which he belongs, or by direct bribery, or by the more insidious indirect bribery of party leaders who promise pecuniary or sentimental satisfaction.

In political life the letter of the statute book is always in process of modification by custom and convenience. No state which is expanding can hope to keep the letter of its constitution up to date; the changes are too rapid, too subtle. Constitution makers are thus commonly disappointed in the results of their labours, partly because they are not in possession of all the facts, and partly because the conditions have changed even in the time required to frame a constitution. At Rome the letter of the constitution was but slightly changed during the two centuries preceding the Empire; there were the same magistrates, the same Senate, the same electoral and legislative bodies, very nearly the same methods of voting, and the same qualifications of an elector, but the working of the constitution changed; the admission of large numbers of fresh citizens expanding the mass of voters beyond manageable numbers, the changed responsibilities of the magistrates, the widened career open to successful politicians rendered the old terminology almost meaningless in reference to the actual working of the constitution.

There was a time when the extra constitutional organization of the electors was entirely in the hands of the great families; this arrangement broke down gradually before the influx of new citizens; direct bribery took its place alongside of personal influence. Up to the year 180 B.C. Rome had pursued a policy in relation to her allies which, judged by the standards of antiquity, was liberal; she admitted her immediate neighbours to a modified form of citizenship, she gave the citizens of certain towns the right of voting in some of the Roman elections, and she even gave those citizens of these towns who had held the highest offices in their own towns, the right of standing for the magistracies at Rome; she pursued a policy of expansion; at that date her policy changed; she began to check the admission to citizenship, which was afterwards only wrung from her by war, till the city constitution was all but lost in the building of the Empire.

On the one hand, the great families discovered that they had entered upon the possession of a magnificent property, which they were not disposed to share with an indefinite number of partners; on the other hand, they felt that owing to the influx of numbers they had lost their grip of the electorate, for the men who came to vote from outlying towns were often sheep without a shepherd. It proved, however, impossible to keep the electorate restricted. Rome herself could not supply the armies necessary to carry on the career of conquest upon which she had embarked; she was forced to depend upon allies to supply the men whom she organized, and she was forced in various ways to pay the price. One form of payment was the citizenship, which enabled the Samnite or other Italian soldier to come to Rome for the elections, and extort extra payment for his military services; whether he was feasted, or amused, or actually paid for his vote, he shared with his Roman fellow-soldier in the spoil of the provinces which he had helped to conquer. Every fresh concession of citizenship rendered the electorate more unwieldy, till the Roman people of whose favours Cicero so often boasts had become little better than a mob.

While the Roman Electorate was thus outgrowing all possible organization, and the constitution of a city state was breaking down in every direction under the weight of burdens which it was not constructed to carry, the minds of liberal statesmen at Rome were unhappily occupied largely with city constitutions. The enlightened circle of the Roman nobility, which was represented by such men as Scipio Æmilianus, studied the Greek political writers rather than the events which were going on around them, and were tempted to see in the creation of a really democratic constitution the remedy for the disorders which were only too obvious. They were liberal in one sense, but it was in terms of the city state, which no longer existed.

We have had an analogous process in our own history. The expansion of England for a long time escaped the notice of men, who, frightened by the French Revolution, were concerned in demonstrating the incomparable merit of representative government, and of establishing the fact that the English constitution had always contained in it the democratic principle. One of these men rewrote for us the history of Greece in terms of the praise of democracy; another proclaimed the merits of liberty and representative government; a whole school of historians is interested in showing the popular share in such events as the extortion of Magna Charta from an unwilling King, and in the constitution of the Parliament summoned in the King’s name by Simon de Montfort; as the result of the labours of these and other men our attention was drawn for many years exclusively to problems of domestic government; the far greater problem, the relations of England to her colonies and dependencies, and the necessary modifications in her internal constitution, escaped notice.

At Rome the first important act of the new Liberal school was the attempted agrarian legislation of Tiberius Gracchus; Rome was to deal with her conquered territory in the terms of a city state; conquered land was public land; in such states it had always belonged to the whole people, and had been shared between them; Rome had neglected this salutary arrangement; her public land had passed into the possession of the wealthy few; it must be resumed, and redivided. The proposal was about as practical as an attempt to restore all the common lands to the English peasantry would be at present; it failed; the originator was assassinated.

Ten years later his brother proposed further liberal schemes; he was less of a dreamer; he looked forward rather than back; he saw that Rome must provide for her time-expired soldiers, and must give non-Roman Italians who had fought under her standards a larger share in her conquests; but he was before his time, and was in his turn assassinated; a similar fate befell a leader from the ranks of the Conservative nobility, a Livius Drusus, who a few years later advanced the same political programme. The expansion of Rome to include Italy had thus become part of the policy of a definite party at Rome; but this party was not always a popular party, for the men who idled about the streets of Rome, living on the profits of citizenship, were no more disposed than the great families to add to the number of the partners.

During the second century before the Christian era, the forms of popular government were maintained at Rome ready to become more than forms when an organization was also ready to use them. The most important effect of the political work of the Gracchi was to breathe fresh life into the popular assembly; but this was no sooner done than the constitution proved to be unworkable; then followed a period of anarchy in Rome itself, which lasted for seventy years; during this period one party, the party of Greater Rome, steadily grew, and eventually left the constitution so modified that the local politics of the capital no longer had a predominant weight in the Empire. The first great step towards this end was made in the period during which C. Marius had an overpowering influence in Roman politics. Marius is represented to us by the historians from an unfriendly point of view; it is not easy to get at the real man through the mass of legend which obscures his real story. We see him a capable general who reorganized the Roman Army; we also see him incapable as a politician; he figures as the rough brutal demagogue whose violence stands in unpleasing contrast to the suave manners of Sulla; but whatever he may have been personally he represented definite political tendencies. The Marian party survived Marius, and found its most distinguished representative in the great Cæsar, who was a nephew of Marius.

A significant fact about Marius is that he was not a Roman; he came from the small town of Arpinum. Technically he was a Roman citizen, for Arpinum was a community which had enjoyed for nearly a century the privileges of Roman citizenship; but his connexion with Rome was not the connexion of a Cornelius or an Æmilius. He was one of the many men from Italian towns who used their Roman citizenship to push a career at Rome; Cicero, also from Arpinum, and Pompeius from Picenum are well-known examples of the same class of men.

Each of these three men failed as a politician at Rome, and in much the same way each of them transferred to the wide arena of Roman politics the limitations imposed by the traditions of a small city state. Marius could not manage the Electorate nor the Senate; Pompeius could not manage the Senate; Cicero saw in Rome a magnified Arpinum. Of the three, Marius, in spite of the clumsiness which defeated his own purposes, had grasped the one political idea which was to conquer all others in the end; he saw that the men who fought in the armies of the Empire must have a share in the government of the Empire; he contributed to this end, perhaps unconsciously, by his reorganization of the Army. The reforms of Marius in military organization were in the first place technical, and unfortunately we cannot assign the several details to their responsible authors. We do not know exactly what was done by Marius himself, what by his successors; but we do know that his administration marks the period at which the Roman Army took the form of a professional standing army as distinct from a militia. The change had been long in progress, military necessities had imposed it; occasional service had been practically replaced by continuous service. Marius substituted in fact, if not in every form, a military organization in the army for a civil organization; the change was forced upon the Roman by the dangerous invasions from the north which had found the Government unprepared. Marius dispersed the invaders; he stood forth as the saviour not only of Rome, but of Italy, and he was able to reorganize the army in terms not of the Roman constitution but of military necessities. The Roman Armies at this date were not recruited exclusively or even in the greater proportion from Rome herself; not only was each legion supported by auxiliaries, such as cavalry and light armed skirmishers, drawn from non-Italian territories, but the legion itself was recruited from the allies in Italy as well as from Rome, and the balance of military strength was against the capital.

The State at once found itself confronted with a difficult problem: what was to be done with the professional soldiers when their time of service had expired? Men who had served for a term of years found their previous employments closed to them. Alongside with the expansion of the Empire went the depression of Italian agriculture; the food supplies of the capital were increasingly drawn from Sicily, Africa and Sardinia; soldiers who had been free agricultural labourers found their places taken by the captives whom they had themselves reduced to slavery. The remedy that suggested itself was to assign lands to the soldiers; they could either be sent to form military colonies in conquered territory, or be provided with land in Italy confiscated on various pretexts, or simply taken without further excuse. This remedy was not in all respects successful. Men who had become used to the excitements of war and the pleasures of looting, did not settle down readily to the drudgery of farming; some parted with their farms, others in cases where the farm had been one appropriated by the State, allowed the proprietor who had been defrauded to retain possession on condition of paying a rent; some of these men re-enlisted, others went to swell the mob of the capital and enjoy its amusements. The Roman people of Cicero’s days largely consisted of men drawn from many parts of Italy, who had been, or still were, soldiers, and who had no objection to being bribed to give their votes; if they had any political convictions they were Italian rather than Roman; if they resisted any further extension of the privileges of citizenship it was from interested motives, and not because they loved the Conservative party in the Senate. As Rome was the only place in which votes could be given, the tendency was for all Italians possessing the status of Roman citizens to drift into Rome, if they had no occupations to detain them elsewhere. Men who aspired to be political leaders had to win the favour of this increasing multitude.

The Roman people so constituted had no particular affection for Rome, and none for the Senate of Rome as a body; its affections were centred on those who could promote its own interests, on those who were lavish in providing it with amusements and distributing doles, on generals who promised large rewards to their soldiers, on orators who flattered the vanity of the mob; if it had any genuine political sympathies they were with the Army, and with Italy rather than with the hierarchy at Rome. The greatness of the Roman statesmen lies in this, that though nominally the magistrates were elected and laws passed by this rabble, and the whole administration lay at its mercy, outside Italy the Roman Government steadily grew in strength; the love of order and faith in law were so deeply implanted in the Roman character that the administration was not shattered by years of apparent anarchy, in which the constitution seemed to have fallen into abeyance, and the fate of the civilized world to depend upon the caprices of a mob or the loyalty of soldiers to their leaders. The Roman resembled the Englishman in being able to make the best of a bad government or no government; disorder called his reserve of moral strength into action; the executive was always superior to the constitution; however unruly the city, the Roman citizen in the provinces preserved the qualities which had made Rome the ruling power in the Mediterranean.

The character of the Roman people having changed, the mass of citizens being no longer Romans and nothing else, the ruling classes at Rome did their best to organize the numbers who filled the streets. All the methods by which elections may be controlled were resorted to: political clubs were formed, the great families looked up their clients, some of them provided themselves with armed bands of retainers, bribery was systematic and constant; but all efforts to introduce order into the unwieldy body of the Roman people alike failed. It is possible that if the popular assembly had had no further voice in public affairs than to elect magistrates, a way might have been found out of the difficulty; but the mob was not only the electorate, it was also the legislative body, or rather a legislative body. It could not only pass laws, but it could prevent through its representatives, the tribunes, any laws being passed, or any business being conducted. The rule of the Roman people under these conditions was simply authorized anarchy, and the deeply lamented fall of the Republic with which school histories are apt to close, was the restoration of order. In fact just at the time when the history of Rome became the history of the civilized world, there was no longer any political meaning in the term “the Roman People”; it was a survival from previous conditions. The attempt to call to life the forms of popular government resulted, as it was bound to result, not in government, but in anarchy.

III
The Senate

If the Roman people acquired a political significance in the later days of the Republic only to show that it was an unmanageable part of the constitution, the Roman Senate had always been an organized power. Had it pursued the comparatively liberal policy which prevailed in its councils immediately after the second Punic War, the Empire would probably have come, but it might have come without the intervening period of revolution; this, however, was not to be; the temptations of wealth and power were too strong. While, however, we are at liberty to condemn the Senate as it is revealed to us by the transactions with Jugurtha and other scandalous incidents, we must not forget that the same body which failed so deplorably at one period of its career produced the men by whom the Empire was made. It was the embodiment of all that was politically good in the Roman character, as well as of much that was evil; its faults were the faults inherent to a close corporation of nobles enjoying vast responsibilities which it did not altogether comprehend; its virtues have impressed themselves upon subsequent history.

A peculiarity of the Roman constitution in the later centuries of the Republic is that it was practically unworkable even as a city government, unless everybody was agreed to exercise forbearance, and not to push constitutional powers to their legitimate extremes. Two chief magistrates were elected every year, each of whom could neutralize the work of the other; all public business could be stopped at a moment’s notice on religious grounds; the magistrates elected by the popular assembly could impose their veto upon the action of all other magistrates. As long as the Senatorial families worked together, and abandoned their mutual differences in the presence of external pressure, the popular element in the constitution could be disregarded; but when the Senate became divided against itself, or when individual Senators chose to ignore the traditional checks by which the whole body was enabled to work in the interests of the order rather than of the individuals composing the order, it was possible to paralyze the Government without departing from the strict letter of the constitution.

The Senate was a strictly aristocratical body, practically a co-optative body, for every five years the Censor, himself a Senator, revised the list of the Senate. It was in his power to remove members, who had in various ways disgraced themselves, or who had fallen below the property qualification demanded of a Senator; he could summon new members, and though, after Sulla had passed a decree to that effect, he was bound to summon all men who had held the elective office of Quæstor, so long as the Senate was united, it could control the elections, and take care that no undesirable politician should in this way effect his admission to the order. This quality of an Aristocratical Order still hung about the Senate in the early days of the Empire; it was felt even then to be a public misfortune that a Senatorial family should be unequal to maintaining its position, and such families were occasionally subsidised by the Emperors.

The Senate was chiefly composed of men who belonged to an aristocracy by birth, and it admitted new men very unwillingly; a Marius with the power of the Army behind him could force his way into the Senate; a useful advocate like Cicero, or general like Pompeius, could be summoned to its ranks, but such men were unwelcome; they were accepted as a disagreeable necessity; all three learned at different times by bitter experience, that they were, at the best, tolerated.

An indication of the aristocratic nature of the Senate is afforded by the fact that Senators were forbidden to engage in trade, a prohibition which however they contrived to evade.

The school of writers which is interested in representing all forms of government, which have been successful as democratic, has done its best both in ancient and modern times to minimise the aristocratic character of the Roman Senate no less than its legislative supremacy; but the whole tone of Roman history is against them. A Roman Senator was distinctly a nobleman. Inside the Senate rank went by office; those Senators who had held the higher offices took precedence of others according to dignity of office; those families were most highly honoured who could show the greatest number of dignitaries among their ancestors, but the qualification of birth co-existed with rank, derived from office or a long ancestry of office holders. Long after the distinction between patrician and plebeian had ceased to have any meaning except in reference to certain priesthoods and religious ceremonies, the distinction between patrician and plebeian families was remembered, and occasionally reasserted itself practically; and it was some time before the official rank of Senator conferred by an Emperor was respected unless the recipient was entitled to Senatorial rank by descent. Among the few acts of the early Emperors which win the respect of contemporary historians, purgations of the Senate are included. Julius Cæsar tried to make the Senate a council of the Empire by enrolling in it non-Italians; but he was before his time, and his astute successor acted in a contrary spirit.

During all the constitutional changes of the last centuries of the Republic, the position of the Roman Senate remained unchanged in two particulars: it was the fountain head of Roman religion and of Roman law, and though the former might be held to be of transitory importance, the latter was undeniably permanent in its effects.

The Roman Senate did not alone make law, though it alone through the Prætors interpreted law. As a legislative body it shared its functions with the popular assemblies; its decrees were rather administrative than legislative, but it has never been rivalled, except, perhaps, by the English judges, in its power of expanding the application of existing laws and creating a legal system. This peculiarity of the Roman mind, its conservatism combined with a capacity for readjustment, gave us the Roman Empire; without it the Roman conquests would have gone for nothing. The Greek, far quicker witted than the Roman, was ready to change his laws at a moment’s notice. It was to him an open question whether his state should be democratic or oligarchic; the question could be settled according to convenience, by voting or by force; a new constitution could be framed to suit new emergencies. The Roman mind worked differently; with the Roman the new had, if possible, to be read into the old. The Roman did not become a constitution maker till he had passed under Greek influence, and he was remarkably unsuccessful in the task. He soon abandoned it, but he never failed in his casuistry; there was no conceivable adjustment of human relations which the Roman jurisconsult could not refer back to the Twelve Tables; he never troubled himself as to what was to the advantage of the greatest number, or as to the precise definition of justice; he simply took his law, his precedents, his authorised interpretations, and worked the new circumstances into line with the old forms.

Till the Greek influence modified Roman habits the education of the young Roman noblemen was largely legal; while the Greek youth was discussing morality speculatively, the Roman youth was being instructed in the application of law. He sat at the feet of some Mucius Scævola, and heard his solutions of knotty entanglements; the oratory in which he was trained was not the florid rhetoric, which may be addressed successfully to a mob, but forensic oratory addressed to trained intelligence.

With the legal temperament, the Roman combined the religious temperament, the habit of looking to authority rather than to speculation as a guide for his actions. The Sibylline books continued to be consulted in form, if not in fact, on occasions of emergency, long after the cultivated Roman had become familiar with the rationalistic speculations of the Greeks and the mathematicians.

The Senate might under these influences have easily degenerated into a futile subservience to stereotyped forms and habits which would have rendered expansion impossible; it might have opposed a Chinese rigidity to necessary innovations; but the destinies of Rome had ordained that from the beginning the principle of modification should exist alongside with a strong conservative tendency. It may be left to the antiquaries to decide exactly how much truth survives in the legends which form the chief part of early Roman history, but even if it were not demonstrable that the population of Rome was a composite population at a very early time, the fact would remain that the Romans themselves believed it to be composed of three elements: they believed that Latins, Sabines and Etruscans had been welded together under the Kings, and that the titular distinction between patrician and plebeian families survived from a further process of incorporation of aliens; thus there was ancient authority for innovation in such an important matter as the admission of new citizens. Athens was in this respect more conservative than Rome; the citizens of the most democratic state of the ancient world boasted of their pure native descent, while the conservative Roman found in his history a continuous process of immigration to the hills by the Tiber, repeated coalition, continued absorption.

While the Roman Senate was in one aspect a body of trained lawyers, in another it was a body of priests. The evolution of the priesthood as a separate profession is a comparatively modern process. In the history of Rome we see the first step in the process, the changes by which the men appointed to maintain the state religion or to conduct the ceremonial observances paid to particular gods became elected officials, after having been the representatives of certain families upon whom those obligations rested. The duties of religion which had previously been family duties became state duties; but this change did not relieve the Senate of its charge of the national religion. Just as the Senator was an expert in law, so he was an expert in ritual; he did not discuss questions of faith, but he decided points of ceremonial. Though the Colleges of Pontiffs and Augurs were not in the later days of the Republic necessarily drawn from the Senators, and though for a short period a restricted form of public election was applied to the former, practically the Senatorial families held these offices in their own hands, and the power which they thus wielded could only be taken from them by the expedient of combining in the person of the chief of the State the functions of chief Pontifex and chief Augur. Any public business could be suspended by the declaration of a Pontifex or Augur, that it was contrary to established ritual, or that the gods had by means of recognized signs and omens signified the occasion to be unfavourable.

The Senate was also an assembly of heads of families; when a Roman youth of Senatorial descent came of age, his father presented him to the Senate. Though inside his family the father was omnipotent, the Senate decided what actually was the family law; and in this respect the Senate dealt with the family, not with the individual. If the head of the family failed to rule his family properly, and thereby occasioned scandal, he might be marked by the Censor and degraded from his rank. In the family were included many persons whom we consider to be outside the family; slaves, freedmen and certain clients had rights as well as duties; the father of a family who contravened the regulations of the Senate in his relations with such persons caused a scandal, no less than in irregular relations with his wife or children. We are frequently surprised in reading the history of the early Emperors by the freedom with which they appeal to the Senate for commiseration in their private misfortunes, by their habit of assuming that the Senate is interested in their family affairs, but in this they were only acting as any other Senator would act. The point of view may be well illustrated from the procedure in divorce; divorce was a purely family affair with the Romans; a wife guilty of misconduct was divorced by her husband without any appeal to a law court. With ourselves a man is at liberty to apply for a divorce; if under certain circumstances he does not do so, we may admire his forbearance or despise his laxity, but there is no constituted authority which can force him to start an action; whereas a Roman Senator who permitted flagrantly scandalous conduct on the part of his wife could be, and sometimes was, degraded by the Censor, the good order of the State being imperilled by the irregularities in his family; cruelty to slaves or neglect of freedmen and clients were in the same way matters that came under the observation of the Senate, and of the Emperors as the leaders of the Senate.

These characteristics of the Roman Senate, that it was broadly speaking an assembly of lawyers, priests and heads of families, of which any individual might and often did combine all three functions in his own person, were most strongly marked in the period during which it commanded the respect of Polybius and Judas Maccabæus; the policy of Augustus was to restore these characteristics; they were partly in abeyance during the period of the greatest prosperity of the Republic, when the attention of the individual Senator of Rome was irresistibly drawn to the administration of her conquered territories, and to the regulation of her relations with potentates on the confines of her Empire.

At the beginning of the first century before the Christian era, the Senate was divided into parties evolved by the new responsibilities, and the changes in opinion caused by the influx of Greek ideals. The most important problem was the administration of the provinces, but along with it there had to be considered the organization of the internal constitution of the city itself. Thus there were two groups of reformers, those who were chiefly concerned in the adjustment of the relations between the city and the Empire, and those who were more actively interested in the reorganization of her local constitution. The questions which presented themselves to the individual Senator were three in number: first, were the provinces to be governed rigorously as conquered territories, or were they to be admitted to a share in their own government and the government of the Empire? secondly, if they were to be governed by Rome and for Rome, was the administration to continue to be exclusively in the hands of the Senate? thirdly, whatever might be Rome’s relations with her provinces, was it not necessary to give reality to those germs of popular government which existed in the Roman constitution, and to make the Senate directly or indirectly an elected assembly of notable men?

Thus a Senator might be Conservative with reference to the provinces, but liberal with reference to the city, or he might hold that the Senate must be the centre of government, and yet be capable of such internal reforms as to make it the best protector of provincial interests; or he might say that the rule of the Senate was good for the city, but unworkable in the provinces.

Outside the Senate there was the Equestrian Order representing both the Civil Administration of the Empire, and non-Roman as well as Roman financiers, supporting any man or group in the Senate which seemed favourable to its interests; there was also the body of Roman citizens partly composed of men who were still bound by various ties to individual members of the Senate, and partly of men who had served in the Roman armies, and supported the policy of distinguished generals by whom they were organized and in various ways paid for their help.

A peculiar quality of the Roman Senate was the romantic affection with which it was regarded by its members and adherents; it was no mere house of representatives; it was a dynasty. Men not only in Rome, but in the provinces, tolerated its scandalous misgovernment after the third Punic War, as men have tolerated the government of a bad King without losing their faith in monarchy and their affection for the institution. Hard-headed politicians may see in the suicide of Cato at Utica nothing but contemptible weakness; to them the Roman Senate is only one of many political organizations; but Cato’s act was otherwise regarded in antiquity. To find a parallel we have to search among those adherents of the Stuart Dynasty in England and Scotland, to whom the cause for which they fought was not merely a political cause, but a religion. We do not condemn men who committed political suicide after 1715, and abstained from public affairs, or even left their country; we feel that, for men believing as they did, no other course was open; it was precisely in this light that the death of Cato appeared to his contemporaries.

The resistance of the Senate to the various reforms pressed upon it from 131 B.C. onwards has been represented as simply a resistance of vested interests; that it was so in some measure even at first, and increasingly so as time went on, is indisputably true, but Cato did not kill himself as a martyr to the cause of vested interests. The Senatorial position was that of a monarch by divine right; the Senate could not accept reforms in deference to external pressure without in a measure abdicating; it was in itself both Church and Crown; it could no more make terms with a Gracchus or a Livius Drusus than could Charles I. with a Pym or a Cromwell.

This point has been largely concealed from us by the Greek influences under which the history of Rome has been written; we are tempted to think of the Roman Senate as of the Athenian Boulé, as of an Upper House, whose powers and privileges could be curtailed or prescribed at the will of a popular assembly; but to concede that point was to concede everything. The bad faith of the Roman Senate, its desperate expedients to maintain its position alike against the rising power of the Army, the organization of the Equestrians, the body of Roman citizens, or the reformers within its ranks, become in a measure respectable when we reflect that the Senate believed itself to rule by divine right.

Similarly faith in the detestation of monarchy ascribed to the Senate is the result, in some measure, of giving undue weight to Greek prejudices, and to the words of men who were unconsciously enthralled by them.

The Senate so arranged matters that no member of the oligarchy should acquire a preponderant position, and disturb the equality which in theory prevailed between individual Senators; hence various enactments as to the intervals between holding the Consulate twice over, the limited period of a provincial appointment and the disbanding of a Consul’s army outside Rome. In the decadence of the Senate piracy was not quelled in the Mediterranean, and inadequate provision was made to repel the Teutonic invasion from the North, because the immense power wielded by the man to whom either of these enterprises was entrusted threatened to overbalance the constitution. The Senate felt, and rightly felt, that its greatness had been achieved by the relatively unselfish co-operation of its members; when the sentiment, which had rendered that unselfish co-operation possible, had given way before the immense opportunities offered by provincial governorships and the successful command of Roman armies, the Senate endeavoured to restore the effects of that sentiment by insisting more and more strongly upon regulations which tended to equality; but this was something different from the Greek antipathy to the tyrant. Equality between its members was a fundamental theory of the Senate, but it had so little antipathy to monarchy as to provide for the rule of one man in the event of great dangers. The Dictatorship, so long as it lasted, was an absolute monarchy; to the Greek a Dictator was the negation of civil order; hence in a Greek town the assumption of the supreme power by one man, however great the emergency, was a revolutionary proceeding; at Rome the appointment of a Dictator was a recognized constitutional expedient.

Thus the divine right of the Senate did not exclude the possibility of making one of their own number supreme executive magistrate; and monarchy was abhorrent to the Senator, not because it was a thing contrary to nature, as some Greek philosophers held, but because it disturbed the balance of the Senatorial constitution.

By laying undue stress on the Senatorial objection to the rule of one man, writers of the school of Cicero have concealed the real position of an orthodox Roman Senator. Cæsar was hated by the old Senatorial party, less because he was in fact King than because he had changed the constitution of the Senate, and endeavoured to make it a council of the Empire by inviting provincials to its ranks.

There is this essential difference between the suicide of Cato and the subsequent suicide of Brutus: the former was a legitimist, to whom the defeat of his cause meant the destruction of all that was holy, the final collapse of law and order and religion; the latter, if an honest man at all, was a fanatical doctrinaire who had been disappointed in his expectation of regenerating society; Cato died because he could not live under the new conditions, Brutus partly because he was disgusted with his failure, partly because he preferred death by his own hand to death at the hands of the ruffians of Antonius.

The conservative Senator objected to a King, it is true, but he objected no less and perhaps even more to such a reconstitution of the Senate as commended itself to Cicero and other reformers, who wished to remodel the political arrangements of Rome in terms of the Athenian Constitution or of some less extravagant ideal republic than that imagined by Plato.

While the Senate contained a party of irreconcilables whom we may call the Legitimists, it also contained a party who believed in the possibility of a genuine reform, and adaptation of the Senatorial constitution to the needs of the Empire; there was a liberal tradition as well as a conservative tradition inside the Senate; the men who had gradually broken down the barriers between Patrician and Plebeian in the early days of the Republic, and who had gone some distance in admitting the allies to a place in the constitution, had been succeeded by the men who had recognized the claims of the Equestrian order, and saw that some equitable distribution of the rewards of victory among the rank and file of the army was necessary to the well being of the State. The names of the men who took the lead in forcing reforms upon the Senate are Senatorial names, Glaucia, Fimbria, Saturninus, Livius Drusus, Cinna, no less than the Gracchi were Senators; and though they were ill advised in mistaking the Roman mob for a constitutional party, they were not demagogues in the sense that Danton was a demagogue; they belonged to the body which they wished to reform; their methods were injudicious, as was proved by the result, but it is not easy to see what other methods were open to them. After Cicero had pledged himself to the cause of the Conservative party in the Senate, he spoke of these men and other men who had proposed and passed measures of reform in terms of unmeasured reprobation, but we are no more bound to accept his condemnation as historically accurate than we are at liberty to accept the current terminology of political abuse in our own day as indicating anything more than the malignity of the speaker. Even the moderate reformer is stigmatized as a demagogue by those who object to his reforms.

Had Marius been as capable a politician as he was a general, it is possible that the reform party in the Senate might have brought about a gradual transition from the rule of the Senate to the inevitable monarchy, but the incapacity of Marius gave the reins to violence, and brought on the proscription of Cinna to be followed by the reaction and yet more violent proscription of Sulla.

Constitutional reform failed, but the breed of constitutional reformers was not extinguished even by the second proscription. Sulla had recognized this party, and had adopted two of its projects of reform; he had, in a measure, unified Italy, and he had provided for a quasi-representative constitution of the Senate by ordaining that men who had held the elective office of Quæstor should after their term of office pass into the Senatorial ranks; this did not exclude other means of admission to the Senate, but it partly broke down the exclusive system of co-optation through the Censor, and it gave a capable and pushing man from an Italian municipality, such as Cicero, a better chance of attaining the highest position at Rome.

The party of moderate reform was divided into two sections, the section which recognized the Empire, and the section which thought in the first place of the city; the former became the mainstay of Cæsar, the latter soon ceased to have any practical weight except in literature. When the great crisis came, it ranged itself for the most part with the Pompeians; but the former section was not able to accept Cæsar’s radical reforms, and became after his death anti-Cæsarian, till after being frightened by the extravagance of Antonius and the brigandage of Sextus Pompeius, it was won over by the moderate and cautious policy of Octavian. These were the men who fought beside Brutus and Cassius, and joined Lucius Antonius in the Perusine war, but when they saw that the choice was between anarchy and Octavian, gave their adhesion finally to his cause; the reign of Augustus bears the impress of their influence throughout. Among them were two men of note, Livius Drusus, father of Livia and grandfather of Tiberius, and Tiberius Nero, the father of the future Emperor.

The reign of Augustus did not finally conclude the reign of the Senate, but it removed from practical politics the party who could not see beyond the city State, and it definitely concluded the pretensions of the rabble of the streets to act in the capacity of the Roman people. It was only gradually that the Senate became an advisory council to the Emperors, recruited from the distinguished officials of the Empire, or from the legal profession; it retained for a long time its hereditary and domestic character.

It might have been anticipated that there would be a clear division of functions between the officials of Greater Rome and of the city itself, that the Emperor with his staff would manage the concerns of the Empire, and the Senate would govern the city; but it was long before the Government of the city sank to the position of an ordinary municipal Government. The division of the provinces into Senatorial and Imperial ultimately broke down, and was indeed from the beginning formal rather than real; it was a compromise by which the old nobility was conciliated, but the honours conceded to the old aristocracy became more and more titular as time went on; the Roman Senate could not step down, and it refused to accept the position of the city Council of Rome, or even of the Council of Italy. It was never formally disestablished, but it was eventually crowded out, though it was still sufficiently self-conscious, when Tacitus and the younger Pliny were writing, to resent the predominance of the Imperial Household, and to worship the traditions of an omnipotence which it believed to have been the realization of those dreams of liberty so dear to the Greek philosophers. So long as Rome continued to be the centre of the administration of the Empire, the Senate of Rome was always something more than a municipal council, and the name of the body which had once governed the Empire was always dignified by associations which could attach to no other assembly.

IV
Slavery

The politician of to-day is as incapable of imagining a wholesome state of society in which slavery is a recognized and universal institution, as he is of believing that any political constitution can be really good without representative government. The Romans, however, contrived to civilize the world, so far as it was accessible to them, without representative government and with slavery. Slavery is, in fact, a necessary condition in the evolution of civilized society, and was an important factor in the evolution of the Roman Empire. Teuton and Celt, no less than Greek or Roman or Phœnician, equally used and doubtless equally abused the institution; no race can claim to have been at all periods of its history free from the curse.

In order to arrive at a fair conception of slavery as it existed in antiquity, it is necessary to clear our minds once for all of prepossessions created by the conditions of slavery in America or other countries, where the slave and the slave owner have been distinguished by such marked racial differences as exist between the white man and the coloured man, between the highly civilized man and the savage. Even in the department of negro slavery, as practised in America, there are two sides to the question, and Tom Cringle’s Log must be set against Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Mr. T. Booker Washington, an American negro who has done perhaps more for the emancipated black men than any living man, himself born a slave, refuses to join in the wholesale condemnation of American slave owners; to him the mischief of the institution lay less in its injurious effects upon the negro than upon the white man, who despised wholesome industry, and tended to become useless rather than cruel.

The political student has to approach the subject without prejudice, and investigate all the consequences and accompaniments of slavery, not only some of them. It is further necessary in dealing with such a question to discount the antipathy to pain and discomfort which is so marked a feature of modern life. Granted that under certain circumstances slavery resulted in a vast amount of hideous suffering, still slavery was not the only condition in ancient life, or mediaeval life, or even modern life, that has resulted in suffering. Wherever a man finds himself in an irresponsible position towards a number of his fellow creatures, wherever a society or the rulers of a society live in terror of any section of that society whether slave or free, there is always the probability of great cruelty. If all the pain and sorrows of humanity from the beginning of time until now could be reckoned up and estimated, and assigned to their various causes, it is questionable whether slavery would show the blackest record.

Antiquity has left us some notorious instances of cruelty to domestic slaves, and the stories of a few sensational cases have been preserved; but even the English domestic servant in Christian London in the nineteenth century is exposed to cruelty, and if the records of our law courts survive, posterity on the evidence of a few exceptional cases will be able to pass a stern sentence upon English men and women of today. Could we estimate all the pains of all the operatives in modern England, all the lives that are shortened, or rendered intolerable by disordered health, could we arrive at a clear understanding of all that is suffered by puddlers in iron foundries, by stokers on our great ships, by men and women employed in lead works, in brick works, in chemical works, in numberless other dangerous industries, we might well pause before condemning slavery as the one social condition predominantly productive of human suffering. True, the modern operative is free, but free to do or to be what? The chain is there; it is only a different kind of chain.

When St. Paul travelled from Puteoli to Rome, he passed through a country in which a form of slavery was universal, which is commonly held to have been the cruellest known to Italy; he passed by the barracks of the agricultural slaves, and the conditions of travelling were such as to give him every opportunity of making observations; he lived certainly for two years after this date, and possibly much longer, but he nowhere lifts up his voice against slavery in general, or even this particular form of slavery. Not long before St. Paul made this journey, it had been necessary to inspect the slave barracks in the same part of Italy, because free men had acquired the habit of adopting servitude in order to escape military service.

In fact that picture of antique slavery which represents it as a scene of whippings and tortures, of rapes and murders, of humiliating or disgusting services exacted by one man from another, and as the exclusive condition under which such things occur, is a false picture.

The importance of slavery as a factor in the life of the ancients does not in fact depend so much upon its moral influence upon individuals as upon its political consequences, which were many and far-reaching in their effects.

The condition of slavery in the ancient world did not in itself involve the same measure of personal degradation with which it is associated in these days; it was only one of many inequalities recognized by society. If a slave could not appear in the law courts of Rome, no more could the resident alien, however rich, however noble in the city from which he came; if the slave could not hold real property, no more could the sons of his master; if he could under certain conditions only acquire personal property, his master’s son was similarly disqualified; the ceremony by which each acquired freedom was the same; neither could make a will, nor work entirely for his own profit; both were included in the family; the domestic disqualifications under which the slave lived were common to him and the children of the house; the political disqualifications he shared with the free citizens of any community not expressly recognized under treaty by the inhabitants of the community in which he lived. Ancient society never contemplated individual independence as the fundamental condition of human existence; it was based on the contrary theory, that individual independence was the exception, and the privilege of the few; only gradually, and as the consequence of established law and habitual order rendering personal security possible for the mean man without the intervention of a powerful protector, did the modern conception of the rights and obligations of the individual human being grow up; and in its perfect development the conception has only very recently been realized.

The slave and his master might be, and commonly were, members of the same race; if they were of different races, the slave might be a more highly civilized man than his master, better educated, more capable in many respects; there were hordes of slaves drawn from less civilized races, and even from savage races, and the work which fell to their share tended to be menial or arduous according to their unfitness for work demanding previous training; but the fact that the slave was by no means universally of an inferior type of humanity to his owner, and frequently quite the reverse, put slavery as an institution on a totally different footing from that which it has held in modern times.

Again, if the slave had to suffer from political disqualifications, he had corresponding immunities; for one thing, he was exempt from military service. One very important consequence of this aspect of slavery was the restriction of the field from which recruits could be drawn for armies; it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that the whole of the industrial population of antiquity was not available for military purposes, but the statement is somewhere near the truth; and from this followed a further consequence, which eventually helped to break up the Empire, viz., that the armies were increasingly recruited from the populations on the confines of the Empire, and ceased to be Italian. First Gaul, Spain and Illyria, and Thrace, then the Teutons from Central Europe, sent free recruits to the Roman armies, till the time came when the less civilized military element threw off the traditions of the civil government, and society returned to the conditions which had prevailed before the Roman Empire inaugurated the reign of peace. Agricultural slavery in Italy is sometimes said to have been the cause of the depletion of the Roman armies; ancient authors complain that the hardy breed of peasants from the central hills of Italy disappeared, and that, because their place had been taken by slaves, the recruiting grounds were barren of the right kind of population. The real state of the case was the reverse: the Roman wars had exhausted the Roman free population, which was then replaced by slaves. Between the end of the second Punic War and Cæsar’s campaigns in Gaul, Rome had been continuously draining Italy of her free population; it was inevitable that the sons of the small farmer should be replaced by slaves, and that eventually small farms should be merged in large holdings, and that the slave barrack should stand alone where the scattered homesteads of the peasant proprietor had adorned the landscape.

Two forms of slavery in antiquity have almost monopolized the attention of most writers on the subject—domestic slavery and agricultural slavery; both lend themselves to sensational treatment; but along with these there was industrial slavery in all its forms; where we have free artisans, antiquity had slaves; and it is questionable whether the slaves employed by a great manufacturing firm in antiquity were less well off than the mill hands of a Lancashire town of today; in many industries they were possibly better off than the class of operatives who are “sweated” in East London; the slave of antiquity was at least provided with the necessaries of life by his employer. It is true that the slave operative could be bought and sold and even mortgaged; he could be bequeathed by will, but these mischances commonly happened to him collectively, and no more affected him individually than a change of owners affects the men working in an English manufactory; indeed, the slave had an advantage over the free artisan; he was part of the capital, his value was relatively greater, he occupied the place now taken by the machinery. A body of well trained, well organized slaves stood in much the same relation to capital in ancient times as the plant of a manufactory to the modern capitalist; and a new owner would no more have thought of disbanding or disabling the slaves employed in a publishing establishment, or brick works, than a modern owner would break up the machines in a cotton mill which he had acquired. When we read of the enormous number of slaves owned by some ancient millionaire, we must not think of butlers and grooms and footmen, but of clerks and “hands”; where we now say that such and such a capitalist employs so many thousand men, the ancients said that he owned so many thousand slaves.

The slave could earn money for himself, and we can see through the minute regulations of the codes as to the conditions under which he could earn and hold money, a recognition of the fact that a man’s free labour is generally more effective than his forced labour; the slave’s opportunity of earning put him, as we should now say, upon piece work; he earned so much for his master, so much for himself; his master gave him the advantages of organization, of capital, of a commercial reputation, and for these he paid in a proportion fixed from time to time by legislation, keeping the remainder of his earnings; that he paid more highly for these advantages than the present value of money, and the general security of society would render equitable, is quite true; but then the whole scale of interest on capital was far higher than it is now. The slave who traded, as he often did, with his master’s capital, paid less for its use than the interest which would have been demanded of a stranger. We must not think of the “peculium,” the slave’s private earnings, as we may think of the purse accumulated by a modern domestic servant from gratuities and other sources of private revenue, but as a real wage earned even by a slave. The regulations which still bound the enfranchized slave to his master in the new relation of patron seem at first sight harsh, the liberty in reference to the former master remaining incomplete, but their aspect changes when we reflect that they rendered manumission more easy, and that the slave’s opportunities of earning money both before and after manumission were made for him by his connexion with his master. The proprietor of a large business might have every feeling of kindliness and consideration for a trusted slave, who managed some department of that business, but he might think twice before rewarding him with his liberty, if that act involved not only the loss of the slave’s services, but the creation of a commercial competitor.

Much has been written in condemnation of Roman agricultural slavery, and justly so, if the agricultural slave was dealt with in the spirit of the elder Cato; but here again we must be careful to distinguish. The ergastula, the slave barracks, did not account for all the agricultural slaves, and in the later days of Augustus the ergastula were preferred by free men to military service; nor can the system of the ergastula have been as rigorous in practice as in theory; the two great servile insurrections which proved so serious a danger to Rome could not have assumed such alarming dimensions, had not the slaves who organized them been in possession of means of communication. Nor must it be forgotten that there were many slaves who would now be convicts, many who had been sold into slavery from a conquered country, never having known any other condition of life. The ancients did not often make the mistake of setting a delicately nurtured man to hard menial labour, for his value in that capacity was small; similarly the increasing difficulty of finding slaves after Rome ceased to extend her conquests increased the value even of navvies, and their condition was improved by the exigencies of sound economy; even a Cato, when slaves were dear, took care not to wear them out before their time. Though a slave was not protected except by public opinion against his master, who might beat and even kill him, he was protected against all other men, who could not injure him without incurring damages for wanton destruction of another man’s property. There were cruel savage men among the ancients as there are among the moderns, but on the whole the servile condition does not seem to have been abused. Roman masters and even mistresses occasionally beat their slaves, but vapulation was a constant feature of human existence till a very few years ago even in Europe. Shakespeare’s masters frequently strike their servants; that worthy though foolish citizen, M. Jourdain, after frequent threats and much aggravation, slapped his maidservant on the face; the use of the stick is not an exclusive prerogative of the slave owner.

The more domestic of the Latin authors, such as Cicero and Horace, do not give us a disagreeable picture of slavery; the relations between slaves and masters in their day seem to have been in every respect as pleasant as those between employers and servants in these days; and the taunt of servile origin so frequent in the Classics amounts to little more than the taunt of connexion with trade so common in some circles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact the frequency of this disparagement tends to prove that it was easy to rise from the servile condition to positions of great wealth, and even political influence. The two vulgar rich men in the Satyricon of Petronius, Trimalchio and Habinna, had both been slaves; and the latter is made to say that he had become a slave voluntarily, as that was the easiest method of becoming a Roman citizen; this may be wilful exaggeration on the part of Petronius for a satirical purpose; but it would have no point if it did not carry a certain element of truth. Pallas and his brother Felix, the freedmen of the Emperor Claudius, were, the former practically Prime Minister, the latter Procurator of Judæa; numerous similar instances show that a man might have been a slave and yet rise to high office; the intermediate step seems generally to have been through the Equestrian Order—in one of its aspects, as we have seen, the financial department of the Civil Service.

This introduces us to another feature of slavery as practised in antiquity, viz. its cosmopolitan influence, which was at work in every class of society, but in the highest class most of all; nothing else so effectually broke down the barrier between the Greek and the Roman, between the Eastern and Western half of the Mediterranean, between North and South.

War in ancient times had many of the aspects of a speculation, and among the profits of war the sale of captives was reckoned; the conquered had no rights against the conqueror except under special terms. When the victim was a civilized State, the free men who were thus sold into slavery had the opportunity of buying back their own freedom; they practically paid a ransom; the transaction was a rough and ready and efficacious method of exacting an indemnity. There would be a certain proportion who could not pay the indemnity, and these became slaves, but in their new status they were not wasted on unprofitable occupations; the philosopher, the physician, the accountant, the merchant, continued their various occupations in the service of their master, and if they proved their efficiency rapidly passed through the stage of slavery to that of freedmen.

Of the twenty famous schoolmasters whom Suetonius honours with short biographies, three only were certainly not freedmen, Orbilius, the teacher of Horace, Pomponius Marcellus, and a certain Valerius Probus, who hailed from Beyrout, and must have been himself free, whatever his parentage, as he began life with the endeavour to get a centurion’s commission; fifteen were certainly freedmen, and two probably. Their nationalities are strangely varied; three were certainly Italians, three others possibly, two were Syrians, if we so class Probus, three Gauls, one Spaniard, one Illyrian, six certainly Greek, and one probably. Of the three Gauls, one, M. Antonius Gnipho, gave lessons first in the house of Julius Cæsar during the latter’s boyhood; he was a man of exceptional intellectual brilliance and generous character. Suetonius does not state that Gnipho actually taught Cæsar, though the inference suggests itself, and in any case the youthful Cæsar must have known him, and have received impressions, if not information, which may have influenced the future conqueror of Gaul. These men were for the most part highly respected and made large professional incomes; they taught either in houses of their own, or by special arrangement in the houses of their patrons; one of them, M. Verrius Flaccus, taught on these terms the grandchildren of Augustus, who paid him a handsome annual stipend on condition that he only admitted such pupils to his classes as were approved of by his employer; he had previously taught independently; a statue was erected to his memory at Præneste; this indicates that in spite of his servile origin he was held in high honour. Horace must have known Verrius Flaccus, even if he were not actually a relative, and Horace’s allusion to the persuasive schoolmasters, who coax children to learn the elements by giving them biscuits, suggests a well known trait of this Verrius Flaccus, who was the first schoolmaster to offer prizes, “some ancient book handsome or scarce,” says Suetonius. It is interesting to note that the most fashionable of these schoolmasters, and the one who made the largest fortune, was a man who, in the opinion of the Emperors Tiberius and Claudius, both good judges, was totally unfit to be entrusted with the charge of youth; while the one of whom it is recorded that in his old age he sank into extreme poverty is Horace’s old friend, the freeborn Italian Orbilius. This man also was honoured with a statue.

The proportion of men of servile origin in this one profession was very large, if we may infer that the short list given by Suetonius of its leaders indicates conditions which prevailed through the rank and file; nor was it held in special disrepute. Tacitus mentions a schoolmaster not included in this list who became a Senator; another, M. Pomponius Marcellus, was admitted to the inner council of Tiberius, and anticipated the “supra grammaticam” episode of a much later age; he reproved the Emperor for a solecism in the wording of a decree, telling him, “You can give the citizenship to men, Cæsar, but not to a word.”

Men who had been freeborn in their native countries, but had passed into servitude by fortune of war, found new and wider careers open to them in the service of their conquerors; they obtained access to the masters of the world, and were able to direct their thoughts to new channels, and directly influence their policy; they were further able to push the fortunes of their relatives and connexions at home; for as freedmen, and even as slaves, they were not cut off from correspondence with the countries which they had left.

Their influence, great as it was in breaking down the intellectual barriers between Rome and her allies and subjects, and in forming the conception of a world-wide empire, was even greater in the world of finance. Even the great Cæsar failed to throw open the Roman Senate to the civilized world, and admission to that body continued to be jealously guarded, in spite of occasional exceptions, till the Senate had been practically superseded by the Imperial Household; but admission to the Equestrian Order was a relatively easy matter; no sanctity attached to the Order, no historic glamour; and a skilled financier found his way into its ranks with comparative ease. Roman bankers such as Cicero’s friend Atticus, needed the assistance of clever Jews and Greeks, for Roman money was invested privately as well as publicly in all parts of the Empire; municipal securities, then as now, were a favourite investment; cities and colonies were in the habit of borrowing money for local improvements; the knowledge possessed by men, who had been acquainted with the local and personal conditions was a valuable commodity; and any Roman, who aspired to play a great part in the financial world, drew into his service men from all parts of the Empire; these men were not infrequently rewarded by admission to the Equestrian Order; some of them were free men, the majority were slaves to begin with. The process was so common that the term “Libertus” is used much in the same way as we employ the terms “agent,” or “man of business.” Not the least important consequence of the system was the admission of the Jews to a share in the control of administration; “they of Cæsar’s Household” were not domestic servants, but financial secretaries of considerable importance.

Slavery has been reproached with being responsible for the horrors of the arena, and a general indifference to the sanctity of human life; but this love of spectacular bloodshed, this indifference to the sufferings and death of human beings and animals, is by no means an exclusive feature of societies in which slavery is an accepted institution. Bull fights are being extended at the present day from Spain to France; bull baiting, bear baiting, badger baiting, prize fighting, cock fighting, were accepted amusements in England till the beginning of the present century, some of them are not unknown to our contemporaries; nor is it easy to distinguish that delight in the sufferings of condemned criminals, or in the encounters between trained combatants, which filled the Roman amphitheatres, from the excitement which drew crowds to look on at the merciless tortures and executions of the period of the Reformation, and led the fashionable friends of Madame de Sevignê to watch a woman being burned alive. So far were gladiatorial combats from being one of the hardships imposed by slavery, that we have repeated references in the early Imperial period to the misconduct of Roman knights, and even Senators, who exhibited themselves in the arena. A skilled gladiator risked his life, as does a skilled toreador, and he enjoyed the same measure of popular favour; there were statues of gladiators as well as of schoolmasters.

The tendency of the Empire was to break down the barriers between the free man and the slave; as political power ceased to be the privilege of a caste, and became the reward of recognized merit bestowed by the head of the administration, the importance of free descent was diminished; the spiteful remarks about freedmen and servile origin, which we occasionally find in the Latin authors, were suggested by the improved position of slaves and freedmen; they represent the impotent malice of a caste, which saw that the sceptre was departing from between its knees; the distinction was long preserved by literature, for the boys of the Roman Empire, like the boys of England, were brought up on the works of the great Athenians, who spoke of the slave as the slave was spoken of when the free citizens in the most liberal of Greek States were really an aristocracy of birth entrusted with the conduct of affairs among a population by which they were far outnumbered, and which included many men as wealthy as the freeborn citizens, and no less enlightened.

It was largely through slavery that men of letters, men of science, architects, engineers, sailors, and even soldiers, found their way from all parts of the world into the executive services of the Empire. Rome had become cosmopolitan without being aware of the fact, long before the genius of Cæsar finally started her on an admittedly cosmopolitan career.

In spite of the pleasant personal relations which often prevailed between slaves and their owners, emancipation on a large scale was not regarded with favour, the statesmen who on different occasions of emergency released slaves in large numbers in order to fill up vacancies in the army were spoken of reproachfully; the step was always felt to be a desperate one.

The reason, however, of the objection to such emancipations was less fear of the slaves, or dislike, than the interference which it involved with industrial pursuits; it amounted to a wholesale confiscation of property; an analogous process at the present day would be summarily to impress large bodies of operatives; this would bring many industrial communities to a standstill. Similarly when at a later period we find restrictions imposed upon the custom of emancipating slaves by testament, this may well have become a means of throwing the responsibility of maintaining superfluous slaves upon the public dole fund, and of exempting the heir from the necessity of supporting them. Emancipation does not seem to have been regarded as an unmixed blessing. We have the well known case of Cicero’s secretary Tiro; Tiro was a slave, but he was his master’s friend; the relations between them were of a most affectionate nature; Cicero’s letters to him are full of anxious inquiries after his health, of demands that he shall run no risk of over fatigue; that he shall take the best medical advice; and yet it was only late in his life that Cicero bestowed liberty on Tiro. The letters in which Cicero’s relatives, and especially his son, congratulate Tiro on his elevation, show that, slave though he was, he was no less respected than loved. That such relations were common we may infer from the statement made by Paterculus, that in the proscription of B.C. 43 the fidelity of sons to their fathers was least; the merit of wives stood first, of freedmen second, of slaves third.

The institution of slavery did not demoralize the ancients in the same way that negro slavery is said to have demoralized the Americans, or coloured slavery in general to demoralize white men; it was a totally different institution.

In this, as in all other details of ancient history, the memory of the bad, the exceptional, the sensational, is preserved; the normal conditions are forgotten; and as it is much easier to declaim than to inquire, the essential but unobtrusive features of any particular institution escape notice. On the whole, the action of slavery in ancient times was beneficial to civilization, and the eventual dismemberment of the Empire was not due chiefly to the existence of slavery. The races who broke up the Empire themselves recognized slavery, and it was long before agricultural slavery disappeared even from England.

I
The Death of Augustus

In the hottest weather of the year 14 A.D., a hush fell upon the streets of old Rome, as the news rapidly circulated that her foremost citizen was dead, and that the man whose name had spelled peace and prosperity for the whole civilized world was no longer at the head of affairs. Few men were still living who could remember any rule but his; for forty-five years he had controlled without serious opposition the destinies of an Empire which stretched from the Euphrates to the English Channel; the men who had taken an active part in the events before the reins of government dropped into his skilful hands were now but few, and if they ever spoke of the days which immediately preceded his reign, it was to contrast fourteen years of anarchy with nearly half a century of order. Here and there in the palaces of the few old Roman families that had survived the revolutions of the middle of the last century the good old times were bewailed, when the spoils of the world were distributed between the members of a few princely houses theoretically associated in administering the affairs of only one Italian town, and bitter epigrams were circulated at the expense of the monarch who posed as the first man of a free city; but the vast body of the population had long forgotten the days of a liberty in whose privileges they had never shared, while they had suffered from its concomitant licence; the streets were no longer the scene of furious fights between the retainers of great noblemen, the citizens regularly received their supplies of corn, holidays were frequent and the amusements of the public provided for on a liberal scale; the Prince himself had been the foremost to enjoy all that delighted the hearts of his fellow citizens.

As the fierceness of the hot Italian sun diminished, and the streets began to fill, the praises of the dead man passed from mouth to mouth; one would remember the humility with which he had pressed the claims of his chosen candidates for public office, and the courtesy with which he had asked for a vote; another would recall him studiously fulfilling the sacred duty of a patron, and pleading in the Forum on behalf of a humble client; yet another would describe him standing at his own door once a year dressed in white begging for alms to bestow on the needy; others would speak of the modesty of his household, the model of an ancient Roman family where Livia his consort herself superintended the weaving of her maids; nor would the gayer sort forget his interest in the shows of the circus, or fail to tell stories of his modest bets, and somewhat liberal jokes; the scholar would speak of his simple entertainments in which the poet and the historian shared in the conversation on terms of equality with their host; those of more serious mind would dwell on his scrupulous attention to the ordinances of religion, his restoration of temples and shrines and their various cults; while the tender-hearted would deplore his private sorrows, the premature deaths that had snatched away his grandsons, the scandals that had bereft his home of his daughter and granddaughter; nor would they fail to bewail the fact that the only possible successor to his heritage and his power was an alien in blood.

As the days wore on the symptoms of the public sorrow increased, and the authorities began to fear that the order of the funeral might be marred by some such frantic outburst as had attended the obsequies of the first great Cæsar, whose body had been seized by an excited mob and burned in the public market place; regulations were issued to ensure such order as the Prince himself would have commanded, and to prevent the licences into which an orgy of sorrow might degenerate. Day by day was reported the slow progress of the procession from the small country house in Campania in which he had died to the gates of the city; here the body had been guarded and carried by soldiers, there by the knights, the second order in the State, and lastly the Senators themselves were waiting to receive it, and conduct it on the final stage of its journey into Rome.

The day came at length when the long train of mourners filed through the narrow streets, at its head the ivory bier draped in purple, behind it the effigy of the dead man, and a stately series of similar effigies leading back through the great Cæsar himself to mythical Æneas and Anchises and the goddess Venus; there were no deep-voiced bells, no dull minute guns to express and intensify the public sorrow, but the silence was broken by the shrieks of dishevelled women and the monotonous blare of hoarse trumpets. After the images came the chief mourner, a tall and stately man with bowed head, the Commander-in-chief of the Roman armies, descended from the noblest blood of ancient Rome; behind him walked members of the family, high officials, statesmen, senators, the representatives of kings and cities. Principalities and powers were all assembled to do honour to the dead. The heat of the season had rendered it necessary to conduct the ceremony by night, and the flare of torches fell fitfully on the procession and on the faces of the spectators. At length the tedious ritual was completed, the wine, the oil and the spices were thrown on the pyre, thrice was the dead man called by name, and the silence was broken by no answer; the chief mourner applied the torch with averted face, the crackling flames rose to the sky, the soldiers ran round the burning pile, an eagle sped heavenwards through the smoke; when the fire had at length died down, and wine had been sprinkled on the ashes, a cry arose of Farewell, and yet again Farewell; then the mourners departed to their homes, and the Roman people dispersed to magnify the events of the last few hours, and to remember portents: stars had fallen from their places in the sky, the earth had been shaken, rivers had reversed their course, the kindly rain had been turned into blood, and even small domestic catastrophes were now known to have had their significance; a Senator had seen the soul of the deceased rise to heaven from the midst of the flames, and the credulous were comforted by reflecting that the Genius of Augustus still watched over the destinies of the Roman people.

Meanwhile in the palaces of the Senators one question of supreme interest was debated: What was to be the new order of things? and, indeed, was there to be a new order?

It was fortunate for the destinies of civilized humanity that a successor was ready at hand to take up the reins of government which had dropped from the tired hands of Augustus, and that the question of succession was not left to be settled by debate in the Senate, or the result of a civil war. Tiberius was on the spot; he had been for all practical purposes his stepfather’s colleague for ten years; he was acting Commander-in-chief of the Roman armies; he was of ripe age and ripe experience; his personal knowledge of the Empire was almost co-extensive with its limits; he does not seem to have visited Africa or Egypt, but he had served or commanded armies, and conducted negotiations over the whole area between the sources of the Euphrates and the North Sea. There was no living Roman with equal knowledge of affairs, or of superior rank; his succession was inevitable, if there was to be a successor to Augustus.

The life of Tiberius is from every point of view profoundly interesting; it began in the middle of the great revolution which eventually substituted the rule of one man for the rule of the Senate, and which left the city of Rome the capital rather than the mistress of an Empire; it ended after nearly fourscore years, during which the constitution of that Empire was so firmly established that the incapacity of individual rulers, and the mutual rivalries of aspirants to the chief power, though sometimes resulting in civil war, failed to shake its stability; it coincided with a great step in the forward march of civilization which has left its impress upon all subsequent history. If the political events which occurred during the life of Tiberius are of supreme interest, his personal history is no less attractive to the student of character, and of the strange vicissitudes which may occur in the life of a human being; not the least of the many contradictions in this life is the fact that the man, who is called by the great German historian, Mommsen, “the ablest of the Roman Emperors,” should have become the recognized type of all that is most evil in a ruler, and left a name which is seldom mentioned without an expression of detestation.

II
Parents and Childhood of Tiberius

The connexion of the Claudian clan with Rome was referred by the Roman historians to the very beginnings of her history; they had no doubt of the antiquity of the event; it was only debated whether this Sabine stock was received into the community on the Tiber at the suggestion of Titus Tatius, the consort of Romulus, or four years after the expulsion of the Kings. The headquarters of the Claudians were the region round Tusculum, in which town its chiefs had a fortress; their domain gave its name to one of the later electoral divisions of the Roman territory. From the beginning the Claudian stock was credited with an unusual measure of aristocratic pride and public spirit; the legends said that one Claudius caused by his intemperance the secession of the plebs to the Mons Sacer, and that the unbridled lust of another brought about the downfall of the Decemvirate; we are on firmer ground in attributing to the Appius Claudius who was Censor in B.C. 312 the inception, if not the completion, of two works of great public utility, the Appian Aqueduct, and the even more famous Appian Way, the great South Road, the first link in the chain of highways which bound the Empire together. Appius Claudius the Censor had two sons, who took the additional names of the Handsome and the Strong; the descendants of both were to do good service to their country; a Claudius Pulcher fought the Carthaginians in Sicily, a Claudius Nero defeated Hasdrubal at the battle of the Metaurus. The Censor is further credited with having been the earliest Roman writer in prose and verse. Intellectual and administrative eminence was thus ascribed to the Claudians, also a touch of arrogance extending to relations in which arrogance was out of place; for it was Appius Claudius Pulcher the Admiral who, when the unwonted abstemiousness of the Sacred Chickens portended disaster, threw them into the sea, and was deservedly rewarded by a defeat.

Both the leading Claudian families were united in the person of the Emperor; his father was a Nero, his mother was a Pulcher, for though her father belonged legally to the Livian Gens, he had been adopted from the Claudian. The family enumerated among its distinctions thirty-three consulships, five dictatorships, seven censorships, six triumphs, and two ovations.

In the last century and a half of the Republic the Neronic branch was less distinguished than that of Pulcher; no records survive of the immediate ancestors of the Emperor on the father’s side, and no Claudius Nero appears in the consular list after 204 B.C. When Horace wished to remind the Romans of their debt to the Neros, he had to go back to the battle of the Metaurus. The family had become so obscure that the genuine descent of the Emperor from the conqueror of Hasdrubal has been questioned; but it was not questioned by his contemporaries, who would have been only too glad to add the reproach of an obscure ancestry to the other indignities which they fastened upon him. It would be in accordance with the pride, and even rectitude of conduct, ascribed to the Claudians, that this branch of the family preferred comparative poverty to taking part in the scrambles for office, and interested intrigues, which marked the decadence of the Senate; and that its successive chiefs chose the dignified life of a Roman noble of the old-fashioned type, concentrating their energies rather upon the management of their ancestral domains than upon pushing themselves into the inner circle of Senators who sped to exploit the Roman conquests.

Tiberius Claudius Nero, the father of the Emperor, appears first in the party of Cæsar; he was already a quæstor, and while holding that office commanded the fleet which besieged Alexandria, and rescued Cæsar from the insurrection of the Alexandrians; he was rewarded by being made a Pontifex, and entrusted with the establishment of colonies in Gaul, at Narbonne and Arles among other places. This was work which required considerable tact; it was not always easy to satisfy both the veterans who formed the colony and the population whom they displaced. Cæsar was not in the habit of employing incompetent agents, and the selection of Tiberius Nero for this work is an evidence of his capacity. After the assassination of Cæsar he became a warm partisan of the Liberators; he is even said to have proposed in the Senate that the Tyrannicides should be rewarded, when others thought that an amnesty was sufficient for their deserts. It is not clear whether he was Prætor at this time or shortly afterwards, but he certainly held that office when Lucius Antonius and Fulvia making a diversion against Octavian at Præneste; before the fall of Præneste he had slipped away to Campania, and endeavoured to form an army from the proprietors in that district who were threatened with the confiscation of their land for the benefit of Octavian’s soldiers; in this enterprise he was unsuccessful, and had to flee for his life to Sicily, where he took refuge for a short time with Sextus Pompeius.

As we afterwards find Tiberius Nero in the closest association with Octavian under circumstances which, judged by our standards of conduct, are discreditable, it is advisable to stop to consider whether a man could with any measure of consistency serve under Cæsar, and then join hands with his murderers; on the solution of this question depends the claim of Tiberius to be considered an honourable man; for in this relation we can measure him by standards which are applicable to ancient and modern life alike.

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.

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.

Octavian took what was practically in later days the Western Empire, Antonius the Eastern. The marriage of Octavian’s sister with Antonius was held to render hostilities between them impossible; and there are few modern potentates who would not be content with the share which fell to Octavian; to be supreme ruler of France, Spain, Italy, the large islands of the Mediterranean, and the Western portion of the North Coast of Africa, would have satisfied Francis I. or Charles V. Nor were the Spain and Gaul of those days relatively in such a state of barbarism that the ruler of Italy could think of them as semi-savage frontier colonies. Parts of Spain were still imperfectly civilized, but the relation which they bore to the more settled regions was little different from that held by the Celtic fringes of our own islands till comparatively late in our history. Gaul was more united than the France of Louis XI., and no more subject to internal disturbances. Gaul, in fact, began almost from the time of Cæsar’s conquests to advance to a dominant position in the Empire; she supplied soldiers, statesmen, and rhetoricians to Italy; the balance of power gradually inclined to the country, which had not been exhausted by successive wars, and whose population was relatively homogeneous; the time was to come when the Emperors would be Gallic rather than Italian. The Gauls quickly assimilated Roman culture and Roman discipline; two of the greatest writers of the Augustan age, Virgil and Livy, one of an earlier date, Catullus, were natives of Cis-Alpine Gaul, if not Celtic in their nationality; Cornelius Gallus, a Transalpine Gaul, was not only estimated at a high value among the poets of his day, but was the first Viceroy appointed to Egypt by Octavian. In fact, though it may have appeared to the men of the day that Antonius had taken to himself the best share of the Empire, and left Octavian a valueless appanage, the sequel proved that the latter had the best of the bargain; the central part of his dominions was the longest organized and the best organized, while the outlying territories had no time-honoured reputation to set against the extension of Roman civilization; they had everything to gain by closer incorporation with the Empire; they even accepted its language, whereas the Eastern Empire never ceased to be Greek.

The personal qualities of Antonius brought about the union of the Empire; so long as he served under the direction of the great Cæsar he passed for a politician and administrator, no less than for a dashing general; deprived of his great model, he quickly showed himself to be nothing but a greedy soldier. The East learned by successive bitter experiences what it lost in Cæsar; first came little Dolabella to harry Syria, then Cassius and even Brutus extorted all that they could lay their hands on in the rich cities of the Levant and Asia Minor; then came Antonius with further fines and confiscations; there was a general sense of relief when Cleopatra carried him off to Alexandria, only however to prompt him to fresh extortions.

The alliance of Antony and Cleopatra was the salvation of the Roman Empire; it frightened the West into union, and its failure brought about the final submission of the East. This was no mere question of rivalry between two eminent Roman statesmen; it was a turning point in civilization; the issue was once again whether the Mediterranean was to be governed on Oriental or Western lines. The halo of not particularly edifying romance which shines round the figure of Cleopatra averts the attention from the statesman-like qualities which she really possessed; her residence in Rome in the capacity of Cæsar’s mistress was not a glorious episode in the career of the Egyptian Queen, but it taught her, as a similar experience had taught Juba, the weakness of Rome from an Oriental point of view. Cleopatra saw that Rome wanted a despot; on the death of her admirer she went back to Egypt to wait on events; when Antonius appeared in the East, she proposed to annex Italy through Antonius, as Cæsar had through herself annexed Egypt; but, like many others, she had misjudged the man; Antonius was no Cæsar; and though Cleopatra could form magnificent schemes of ambition, she lacked the self-control necessary to carry them out; unfortunately for herself, in the attempt to annex Antonius she fell violently in love with him, and statesmanship became a secondary consideration; she could not deny herself the companionship of her lover; he, too, more than once forgot all the duties of a soldier in his impatience to return to her arms. Their plans for extended conquests in the East were foiled by their maladministration; and even a temporary success proved in its results worse than a series of defeats; for Antonius celebrated his victory over the Parthians by parodying at Alexandria the solemn ritual of a triumph at Rome. This event, more even than a fleeting descent of Antonius at a previous date upon the coast of Iapygia in conjunction with Sextus Pompeius, consolidated the power of Octavian; he became no longer the leader of a party, but the representative of Latin civilization. Nor is it contrary to probability that the luxurious excesses of the Court at Alexandria, at Smyrna, at Samos, frightened the Greek cities, and that frequent emissaries gave Octavian good reason for supposing that the Greek cities were ready to throw themselves into his hands; Cæsar had never acted in the spirit of a Greek tyrant, but the type was abundantly manifested in Antonius. Octavian waited till he was ready; he then produced a document, the will of Antonius, which clearly informed the Roman people of the destiny prepared for them, and when the right moment came, allowed a dispute about his claims over certain cities to end in a declaration of war.

The battle of Actium was the result, and the victory was followed by what was practically a triumphant progress of Octavian round the Mediterranean; the Roman Empire was one again, the unity of civilization was complete. Henceforth the wars of the Empire were conducted on its frontiers, and though they occasionally resulted in an extension of territory, their primary object was self-defence, the maintenance of the ring fence of the “civilized world.” The short war of the Succession, which followed on the death of Nero, hardly disturbed the peace of Gaul and Italy.

The extraordinary success of the man, who at the age of two and thirty was recognized as the supreme arbiter of the civilized world, tempts us, as it tempted his contemporaries, to look for qualities in him beyond the reach of an ordinary man; some who have looked for these qualities and failed to discover them have gone in the opposite direction, and speak of him with scant respect.

Whether Octavian or any other man who has occupied a similar position was a person whose example could be safely recommended to our children, is a less interesting question than that relation between his personal qualities and the needs of the time, which placed him at the head of affairs. The Senate of Rome had failed to produce a great civilian, and a great civilian was precisely what was needed by Greater Rome. The men who, from the time that the problem of the administration of the Empire had begun to make itself felt, had held the chief power successively, were soldiers in the first place, and only in the second, if at all, civil administrators: Marius, Sulla, Pompeius, Cæsar himself imposed their will upon Rome, because they had the legions behind them; relying upon the force of organized armies, they were tempted to overlook all the other forces by which society is held together. An army is so convincing, so obvious, that men who can organize an army may well be excused in their blindness to the existence of any other power. Cæsar was the most enlightened of generals, and had a clearer appreciation of civilian problems than his predecessors, but even Cæsar relied ultimately upon the appeal to force; holding, as he believed, the strongest weapon in his hands, he prepared to change and reconstruct society as appeared most reasonable to his clear scientific intelligence; confident in the integrity of his purposes, he believed that he had only to demonstrate his common sense and benevolence in order to secure adhesion to all his reforms; he did not weigh public opinion; he did not study the currents of prepossession and conviction; wishing well to all men, he never waited to consider whether his actions might wound the self-esteem of any man; he chose his subordinates without inquiry into their private opinions; it was enough for him to have ascertained that they possessed the qualities essential in his opinion to good administration. In one sense the clemency of Cæsar was never tested; had he lived another ten years, and been forced to realize the nature of the opposition which was excited by his reforms, he, like Cromwell, might have been forced to supersede the civil organization by a purely military organization; like Napoleon, he might have been compelled to protect his person and his Government by an army of spies, and meet plots by counterplots; but the opposition declared itself only to be final; the first intimation of its existence to Cæsar was his own death. Had Octavian needed so striking a lesson, he would have learned from this event that civil power resting on military predominance is no more secure than civil power conferred by a popular vote; but he did not need the lesson; his whole temperament was civilian, and the successive humiliations through which the army led him strengthened his dislike to the army; for the army forced him to the alliance with Antonius, in whom he rightly saw his private enemy; the army forced him to marry the daughter of Fulvia the tigress; the army forced the proscription upon him; the army compelled him to deeds of savage cruelty at Perusia; the army forced him to hand over his sister to the embraces of Antonius; he felt that he could not be a free agent so long as the army was the dominant factor in politics. His ideal was not the magnificent stride of the conqueror from continent to continent. Other young men, finding several thousand veterans ready to follow them, might have been tempted to a career of conquest; not so Octavian; circumstances compelled him to temporize with the army, and to use the army, but he naturally preferred the city to the camp, and the Forum to the field. Year by year, and even month by month, he advanced in the favour of the capitalists and constitutionalists, who dreaded nothing so much as a perpetual cock fight of generals. All over the Empire a new ideal had been steadily growing, the conception of war as a permanent condition of society had been replaced by the conception of peace. In the East for two centuries the internecine wars between city States had disappeared; the Macedonian Empire, though broken up and divided, had established permanent umpires; society was united over larger areas; in the West, after the elimination of the discordant Phœnician factor, Rome had held the same position of supreme umpire; great cities had grown up: Smyrna, Ephesus, Antioch, Alexandria in the East, Rome in the West, for whose populations the orderly progress of commerce was a necessity of life; war had ceased to be the only or the most profitable investment; other than military careers were attractive to the ambitious. Octavian presented the combination of qualities which the world wanted; he could command the allegiance of armies without being intoxicated by the possession of that form of power; he respected the civilian, and had the power to protect him. But Octavian did not carry his dislike of military domination to the point of extravagance; he was no intemperate advocate of peace principles; he did not make the mistake of allowing his army to become inefficient; he knew that a well ordered army was a necessary instrument of sound civil Government; he knew that unless the chief of the State demonstrably enjoyed the support of an efficient army his reign would be short; but he took care that no successful officer should be tempted to play the part of an Antonius, or dream that it was in his power to become a second Cæsar. He had the good fortune to find first in his friend Agrippa, and subsequently in his two stepsons Tiberius and Drusus, able generals, who abstained from interfering with the civil administration. Not the least of the remarkable powers of Octavian was his power of commanding willing service from equals and even from superiors, and his recognition of the men who would be useful to him. As the heir of his father and great-uncle, he inherited not only money but connexions; his father had been an Equestrian, who was cut off in the first stages of a more enterprising political career; he had been Governor of Macedonia; the extent of the connexions of Cæsar needs no demonstration. The head of a great Roman House was in a sense the head of a permanent corporation; he could alienate or retain those individuals, families or cities, both with within and outside of the technical limits of the Empire, who had been used to conduct their private or public business through the agency of his House. The use to which he turned an hereditary advantage of this kind depended on his personal qualities; Octavian had the qualities which breed confidence; self-controlled, industrious, courteous, faithful to obligations even where they were not self-imposed, he quickly showed the adherents of the House that there was no breach in the continuity of the Cæsarian succession. Antonius had similar advantages, but he dissipated or squandered them; men learned that his favour was to be won, or its continuance to be secured by gross flattery, and subservience to his caprices; he demanded derogatory services; the Consular Plancus thought to secure his favour at Alexandria by flopping about at a masquerade in the unwieldy and farcical dress of a marine deity; such an act would have disgusted Octavian; it would have shocked him to see a man of rank doing anything inconsistent with his dignity. A natural instinct for what is dignified is a valuable attribute in a ruler, and a punctilious insistence on ceremonial observances is better than an absence of etiquette; but mere ceremony is apt to degenerate into observances which injure the self esteem of those concerned, and to substitute exaggerated forms of respect for the reality. Octavian grasped the true meaning of dignified behaviour; it was not the person of the ruler but the business in hand which was respected; frivolity was not an insult to his person, but to the work in which he was engaged.

Men who were in earnest about anything found that they were in sympathy with Octavian; he could relax, and be charming in his relaxation, but with him, as with all great rulers, the line was rigidly drawn between business and amusement. He could even pardon a refusal to comply with his request for a personal favour; he invited Horace to leave the service of Mæcenas and become his private secretary; the poet refused, but did not in consequence lose the esteem of the Emperor.

Naturally attracted by what was dignified, Octavian was keenly alive to the prestige of the Senate; Cæsar had found in that body an active impediment to necessary reforms; he broke down the barriers of sanctity by which it was surrounded; he treated it with no more respect than Claudius Pulcher had shown to the sacred chickens; he destroyed its organization and overrode its decrees; he admitted aliens to its honours. Antonius was equally reckless in his contempt of Senatorial prerogatives; but the men of rank and position who successively made terms with Octavian found that they were treated with respect, that there was nothing derogatory in working with him; and while a bitter experience had taught them that there was no other alternative, the pain of submission was alleviated by the personal consideration shown to men who had suffered shipwreck. Octavian was the mediator between the new and the old; his practical sagacity inclined him to make the best of the new; his personal sympathies equally inclined him to deal tenderly with the old. Good counsellors, hereditary connexions, the affection of the veterans, would not have put Octavian permanently at the head of affairs, had he not possessed those qualities which enabled him to make the best of these advantages. He had not the dash, the brilliance, the consummate intellectual ability of his uncle; he could not have done his uncle’s work; but when that work had once been done, he was supremely fitted to rebuild on the new foundations; because he was in many respects inferior to his uncle, he was more truly representative of his time; he was no prodigy; he did not thunder and lighten and turn the universe upside down; he made the best of the world as he found it, and that best was so very good that his work lasted.

IV
Augustus

In the year 27 B.C., four years after the battle of Actium, the power of Octavian was so firmly established, his services to the civilized world were so obviously unique, that there was a general desire to express by some honourable addition to his title a recognition of those services. After much discussion the Senate fixed upon the adjective “Augustus” as the only epithet which would adequately define the position in which Octavian stood in relation to Rome and the Empire. This epithet is deeply significant; the modern habit of using it as a name has destroyed its significance; even in antiquity the necessity of distinguishing between the different members of the Cæsarian dynasty led to its occasional use by historians in place of the name of Cæsar, but the ancients never lost sight of its meaning, as the modern is apt to do; they were as conscious of using a title for a name when they spoke of Augustus, as we are when we use the phrases “His Majesty” or “His Highness,” in speaking of royal personages.

Various alternatives had been suggested, and been rejected either as deficient in dignity, as having been used before, or as being applicable to Rome alone and not to the whole Empire; the man who hit upon the word which satisfied public opinion, both in Rome and the provinces, was, strangely enough, no other than that Plancus, whose undignified floppings had amused Cleopatra and the Eunuchs of her Court. The etymology of the word may be held to be still uncertain, but the associations which it suggested to the ancients are indisputable; it was used of things or places, and especially the latter, marked out by the gods as the abodes of divinity or particularly connected with their service; the association of ideas was somewhat similar to that implied in our own use of the word “consecrated”; but a place which was “augustus” was rather more than “consecrated”; it was not merely devoted to the service of the deities, but the gods themselves had signified their will that it should be so; its transference to a man was a declaration that the gods had selected him as their instrument; it did not ascribe divinity to the man, but it asserted that the man was entitled to the respect due to one who was specially under the protection of the gods; he was not a god, but the divine will was manifested in him. The distinction, though clear, is too subtle for the ordinary human intelligence, and the use of the epithet and its Greek equivalent rapidly led to an actual worship of the man, which, though discountenanced in Italy, was permitted, and eventually encouraged in the provinces. Such a thing appears to us impossible; we are even shocked at its impiety; for us there has been one Incarnation, and one only; we can more readily transfer ourselves to the mental condition of those who made their gods in the likeness of men than of those who in men saw gods. While some of us do not shrink from the irreverence of attributing to tables and chairs and hats and bits of deal supernatural powers, and from believing them to be channels of communication between ourselves and the spiritual world, we shrink from declaring, what surely should be simpler and more reverent, that certain human beings have been elected by the Deity to declare His will to men, that to treat them with insufficient respect is to rebel against the divine will, and that to worship them is to worship the Deity who is pleased to permit a portion of His Divine essence to reside in them. So far have we travelled from the conception of godship prevalent among the ancients, and even among our subjects in India at the present day, that it is hardly possible to present the views of the contemporaries of Augustus without using language suspected of irreverence. That danger, however, must be faced, if we would understand one of the forces which helped to bind the Roman Empire together, for though the idea of assigning Divine honours to a man is repugnant to us, to the ancients it was natural.

At all times and in all countries it is difficult to define the current convictions of human beings as to non-human or supra-human agencies; we always find a minority who reflect and study and discuss, a majority who tremble; if we pay attention only to the enlightened men of any particular period, we find a certain resemblance in their speculations, a similar tendency to distinguish between superstition and religion, a disinclination to ascribe to the divine agencies vulgar and petty interference with human concerns; on the other hand, if we fix our attention upon the voiceless multitude, we find no distinction between religion and superstition, and a strong inclination to see even in trivial occurrences an intervention of the divinity. We cannot gather from Plato or Cicero the religious faith of the majority of the active men of their day; still less can we infer it from the mythologies of the poets. Polytheism had no dogmatic faith; it did not ask a man to state what he believed; it took note of what he did. Deference to accepted forms of worship was expected; men paid a mutual respect to one another’s observances; all methods of conciliating the favour of the gods were good; the dangerous man was the man of no observances; there was no knowing what wrath he might bring down upon the community. Many of the ancients developed eclectic tendencies in the matter of religion; the temper of Herodotus was a common one among the enlightened, and the inclination to see points of resemblance in various cults rather than to emphasize differences. Germanicus was travelling from shrine to shrine in the East when he caught the fever which killed him; Apuleius at a later date travelled widely with a view to being initiated into the different mysteries. The conception that there was One God and One God only who ought to be worshipped, and that acts of adoration to other divinities, or powers in which divinity was recognized, constituted an act of treason to Him, was an impossible conception to the ancients; in spite of the unitarian tendencies, which we may detect even in Hesiod, and which became increasingly prevalent among the speculative philosophers, a deity was local rather than universal; it would have been dangerous to attempt to substitute the worship of Pallas Athene at Ephesus for that of Artemis, to remove Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome and put Melkarth in his place; but no Ephesian thought the Athenian wrong in worshipping Pallas, no Roman saw a dangerous heresy in the cult of Melkarth at Tyre or Carthage.

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.

Thus in one of its aspects, and not its least important aspect, a Roman family was a community in itself, with many and far-reaching interests; the capacity of its chief personage was a matter of importance to a very large number of men and women; his failure involved the ruin of a hierarchy of relatives and dependents. Even in the earlier and simpler days of Rome the sons of the family were carefully trained to represent the family in the Forum and the Senate, to manage its estates, to conduct its financial relations and the extension of the family connexions, to hold office, to command armies. Greek culture added to the conception of obligation to the family, obligation to the state; Greek and Roman ideals alike forbade the young Roman noble to neglect himself. Even his deportment, his manners, his gestures were serious matters; he could not afford to be ungainly, or to express himself awkwardly. If a son proved to be physically or morally incapable of receiving the required training, Roman sentiment was not shocked by his supersession or removal. We have a curious illustration of this in the story of the Emperor Claudius. He was the younger brother of Germanicus, the son of Drusus, the grandson of Livia. In the ordinary course of events he would have been introduced to public life like his brother, but he was awkward, he rolled in his gait, his tongue was too large for his mouth, he stammered and sputtered, his family, and even his mother, were ashamed of him, he was kept in the background, and practically pensioned off. He was, however, a serious student, a linguist, or at any rate a philologist; as Emperor he planned and carried out works of great public utility; he was an extensive writer, an industrious worker. He may have been of feeble character, easily led by favourites and women, but his reign was by no means a disastrous one. No ancient writer, however, protests against the prejudice, which deprived Claudius of all opportunities of advancement, till a supposed freak of the soldiers made him Emperor; they unanimously accept with approval the verdict of Augustus, that he was unfitted by his personal defects for public life. Similarly the youngest son of Agrippa and Julia, the youngest grandson of Augustus himself, was removed from Rome, and sequestered in an island “on account of his intractability”; but though his subsequent fate is one of the many counts in the process against the reputation of Tiberius, no fault is found with Augustus for thus eliminating a member of his family who did not prove amenable to discipline.

Duty to the family, duty to the State, or it might be first duty to the State, then duty to the family, were impressed upon the young Roman noble as the conditions of his existence; he lived, like the heir-apparent to a throne, in a court which forced upon him the traditions and observances which the maintenance of the court demanded. If the father neglected his children, and evaded the responsibility of training them, there were numerous other persons ready and willing to undertake his work. The presiding genius of a Roman family was not infrequently an aged lady, or a trusted freedman, deeply imbued with the importance of the house and the sanctity of its traditions.

For the first nine years of his life Tiberius lived with his father—a man serious, fond of learning, full of the republican tradition. It is not impossible that, in spite of the association with Octavian through Livia, the house was to some extent a meeting place of the remnant of the Republican party. We at least know that one of these men made the young Tiberius his heir, and adopted him by his will; he seems to have been allowed to take the succession, but had to refuse the adoption, because his benefactor was anti-Cæsarian. The elder Tiberius, not being engaged in public business, would have plenty of time to give to his children, and Roman children in a Roman family of the old-fashioned type were much with their parents. We are told that Tiberius was very carefully educated; at his father’s death he was already sufficiently well advanced in recitation to pronounce the customary eulogy at his funeral. Up to this time everything in his surroundings would tend to encourage a naturally severe temperament; it can hardly have been a cheerful home, this house of the lost cause. The affections of the boy expanded themselves upon his brother Drusus, his junior by more than two years, to whom his attachment was deep and lasting.

On the death of their father the two boys were transferred to the care of their mother and stepfather, who was now their guardian. Tiberius was old enough to resent such an arrangement, but there is no evidence that he did so; he accepted his stepfather loyally, and Octavian himself was scrupulously careful of the interests of his stepsons. Diplomatic divorces and re-marriages were of such common occurrence in the Roman houses at this period that no slight was felt or intended, and as a rule the divorced parties maintained friendly relations. Octavia, the sister of Octavian, was neglected and eventually repudiated by Antonius, but she nevertheless took good care of his children by a former marriage, the children of the tigress Fulvia.

Scribonia, the divorced wife of Octavian, continued to be on sufficiently friendly terms with his family to watch over her daughter Julia, not altogether to the latter’s advantage, and eventually accompanied her into exile. Where marriage was treated entirely as a business arrangement, there was no room for wounded feelings, and children were not tempted to feel themselves aggrieved by a change of parents, or to cherish resentment. When a wife was repudiated on account of infidelity, and therefore disgraced, there was room for ill-feeling, but not otherwise.

As Octavian at a later date set up a school in his own house for the benefit of his grandchildren and the children of friends, it is not improbable that a somewhat similar arrangement was adopted for the young Neros; the course of grammar, the course of rhetoric, the course of philosophy would be duly followed out. Except in the far greater attention paid to elocution, the formal education will have differed little from that of an Eton boy in the middle of the nineteenth century. Both Roman and English boy learned Greek, and the Roman boy had the advantage of learning it as a spoken language; neither had a systematic instruction in mathematics, though the Roman had the advantage of being drilled in keeping accounts. But far more valuable than the formal instruction was the informal education given by the circumstances of the family. The Romans kept early hours, and it was customary for the children to dine in the same room with their parents, though at different tables. Octavian, partly from choice, partly from necessity imposed upon him by weak health, was not given to large entertainments. His table was a simple one, old-fashioned observances were rigorously maintained, but the company was choice. The children could sit and listen while the conversation was being conducted by Horace and Virgil; all the latest inventions, all the newest literature, everything that did not pertain to secret diplomacy, was discussed at that table. There was Mæcenas with his charming manners and casual dress; Agrippa, somewhat silent as a rule, but animated enough when the roof of the Pantheon or the model of a light galley had to be described to an appreciative audience; there too was Cornelius Gallus, the brilliant gentleman and poet, betraying by his passionate vivacity his Gallic origin; Varius too would be there ready to recite his last heroic poem. After dinner there would be amusements, sometimes games of chance for small stakes, sometimes recitations; or the last fashionable preacher, some Greek or Greek-speaking Jew, would discourse of virtue to the admiration of Livia and the ladies. Chieftains from Gaul and Spain, Princes from the East or Africa, wealthy citizens from Antioch or Alexandria or the cities of Asia Minor, were all to be met at that simple table, wondering at the exiguity of the repast, but none the less impressed by the personality of their host. The opportunity was a rare one for a youth who was bent on self-improvement, and it was not neglected by Tiberius or his brother.

Along with them was brought up Julia, the spoiled child of the family, and cousin Marcellus with his two sisters, the children of Octavia, whose other daughter, Antonia, was to be the wife of Drusus, and the lifelong friend of Tiberius, perhaps the most beautiful of Roman women.

There could be no better preparation for a life devoted to the public service than this household, in which power only served to increase the sense of responsibility, in which the routine of every day was a routine of duty, and the command of the resources of the civilized world did not add a dish to the table, a garment to the wardrobe, or a superfluous slave to the servants’ hall.

The atmosphere of the household of Augustus is not to be found in the scandalous gossip occasionally repeated by Suetonius or Tacitus, but in the works of Horace and Virgil; both poets repeatedly insist on the merits of simplicity, not because they were commissioned to do so, but because their own personal tastes and habits fell into line with those of the master of the civilized world.

The education of a young Roman was not confined to his home; he accompanied his father to war when he was old enough, and on peaceful expeditions at all times, where a great train did not involve inconvenience. Tiberius was probably still too young to attend Octavian on his Eastern tour after the battle of Actium, but when he was only seventeen he accompanied him to Spain, and there took his first lessons in the field, just as Octavian himself had previously been trained under Cæsar. A Roman was considered to be of age when he was sixteen, and he was quickly tested by being called upon to undertake minor responsibilities. In all departments of public life Tiberius had the advantage of the example and precept of the best authorities. The staff of Agrippa, and perhaps Agrippa himself, were ready to instruct him in the latest developments of the art of war; for finance and diplomacy he could go to Mæcenas. Octavian was a practised and careful orator; no one of these men could afford to slumber on his laurels; they were all hard at work modifying the old, organizing the new. The secrets of the Empire so frequently alluded to by Tacitus were not so very mysterious; hard work, discretion, tact, public spirit, formed the bulk of them. The time for intriguing came after the apprenticeship of Tiberius was finished, and the intriguers were not the men who had taught him his business.

Of the personal influences to which Tiberius was submitted in his youth the one best known to us is that of Horace, who incidentally throws a light upon his character as a young man. In the year 21 B.C. Augustus made a progress to the East, visiting notable cities on the way, and regulating their affairs. The chief object of the tour was, however, to settle the Eastern frontier of the Empire. Syria was to Rome what the North-West Provinces of India are to England; Herod and Aretas of Arabia with the princes of Armenia played the part of the Ameer of Afghanistan; they were the buffer states between Roman civilization and the aggressive powers of Central Asia. Their fidelity was by no means beyond suspicion, and from the mountains of Armenia, all along the west of the Euphrates down to the borders of Egypt, continuous intriguing prevailed, every ambitious kinglet making use of one or the other of the great powers to strengthen his position against his rivals. The strongest of these chieftains were the rulers of Armenia and Herod the Idumæan; the former were unquestionably treacherous, and their proximity to the Parthians rendered them peculiarly liable to wavering; the latter played skilfully for his own hand. So long as Rome was strong, Herod was her obedient servant, but if Rome showed signs of weakness, Herod had no scruples against making friends with a stronger power in order to further his own ends.

Since Cæsar had conquered Pharnaces, the son of Mithridates, by his mere apparition, the prestige of Rome in the East had been considerably damaged. The expeditions of Antonius against the Parthians had been unsuccessful, and a serious catastrophe had only been averted by the valour of his lieutenant, Ventidius Bassus, a former mule-driver; by submitting Herod to the demands of Cleopatra’s cupidity, he had to some extent alienated the Idumæan, and encouraged him to distrust Roman politicians. Now that the Spanish war was over and the Western half of the Empire in good order, Augustus wisely determined to study his Eastern questions on the spot, and make such a demonstration of power as would determine the judgment of waverers in favour of Rome. The plan of operations was to send an army through Asia Minor into Armenia, and thence if necessary along the Tigris into Parthia, while the possible allies of the Parthians in Syria were to be overawed simultaneously by the presence of the Emperor. The command of the army destined for Armenia was given to Tiberius, now twenty-one years of age. Both operations were successful; there was not much fighting, but the Parthians saw that Rome was in earnest, and made terms, sending back the standards which had been taken from Crassus some thirty years before; the Roman party in Armenia was strengthened by a change of rulers, and Tiberius returned in triumph. His first essay in war and diplomacy was successful.

Tiberius had taken with him a staff of secretaries, or literary companions, with whom Horace was in correspondence, the chief of whom seems to have been Julius Florus, a Romanized Gaul. From the tone of Horace’s letters to these young men we learn much of the future Emperor. It would seem that Tiberius had formed the idea of surrounding himself with what Horace on one occasion humorously calls “a gang” of earnestly minded young men. Their characteristics may be inferred from the following letter:—

“I am very anxious to know, Julius Florus, the quarter of the world in which Claudius the stepson of Augustus is campaigning. Are you in Thrace, or on the Bosphorus, or the rich plains and hills of Asia? What works is the studious company a-building? I should like to know this too. Who is undertaking to write the history of Augustus? Who is going to give immortality to his wars and peaceful exploits? What is Titius writing, Titius whom all Romans will sing, who has not been afraid to tap the Pindaric sources, and has ventured to turn away from commonplace pools and streams? Is he well? Does he think of me? Does he labour with the aid of the Muse to fit the Theban metres to Latin strings, or does he rage and bluster in tragedy? Tell me what Celsus is doing? Warn him against plagiary, tell him to beware of the fate of the daw in borrowed plumes. And what are your own ventures? What are the thyme beds about which you lightly hover? You have no mean ability, you are polished, refined, and will win the first prize as an advocate in private or public suits, or as a poet of the lighter kind. But if you could give up the chilling pursuit of business, you would go where inspired wisdom would lead you. This is the work and interest which should be sped by us all, whether small or great, if we wish to live in peace with our country and ourselves. You must also tell me this when you write, mind you do, how are you getting on with Munatius? Does the badly patched fellowship join and split again to no purpose? And are your independent spirits galled either by hot-headedness or misunderstanding? Wherever you both may happen to be, you who should not break the bond of brotherhood, I shall be very glad indeed to see you back again.”

Here is another letter to Celsus, the young gentleman who made somewhat too free use of the poems in the Palatine Library:—

“I beg you, Muse, to convey my compliments to Celsus Albinovanus, the companion and secretary of Nero. If he asks what I am doing, tell him that though I threaten all kinds of fine things, I am neither living properly nor pleasantly; not because my vines have been smashed by the hail, or my olives parched with the heat, or my cattle sick on the outlying lands, but because, more ill at ease in mind than body, I refuse to hear or learn anything that is good for an invalid, am annoyed with my faithful physicians, furious with my friends, because they try to deliver me from my deadly laziness; I am bent on what is bad for me, I avoid what I know to be good for me; I am fickle enough to be in love with Tibur at Rome, with Rome at Tibur. After this ask him how he is, how he manages his business and himself, how he gets on with his young chief and the company. If he says ‘well,’ first congratulate him, and then don’t forget to whisper just this little bit of advice into his ear, ‘Our treatment of you, Celsus, will depend upon the way you treat your own good fortune.’”

Other letters to Bullatius, to Albius, to Municius, to Secius, to Lollius are much in the same strain. Though these young men were not demonstrably included in the inner circle of the friends of Tiberius, they belonged to the same social rank; in all there is the same playfulness, in all good advice is conveyed in tactful form. In Lollius Horace seems to have felt a special interest; he too was a companion to some notable person, probably Drusus. Horace gives Lollius many practical directions, somewhat in the style of Polonius, as to his behaviour to his patron, Lollius being of an independent spirit, and irascible. Horace is particularly fond of impressing upon his young friends the duty of “living for themselves,” of considering wealth, fame, and even public usefulness, as of less importance than a good conscience. The moral earnestness of Horace is often underrated, as the moral earnestness of R. L. Stevenson is underrated, and of many other writers whose teaching has not run in the grooves prescribed by the professional preachers of their day. Horace had no love for the worthy gentlemen who improved the occasion after dining with Augustus; the red eyes of Crispinus affected him as the red nose of Stiggins affected Dickens; he had equally little patience with those men who labelled themselves Stoic or Epicurean or Cyrenaic, and professed to live according to the authorized manuals of the sects; the pretentiousness of the professors of virtue and the proselytising Jews disgusted him, as similar manifestations are wont to disgust humorous men at all ages and in all places, but these men have had their revenge in the solemnity with which for nearly two thousand years they have deplored his levity. Few men, however, have lived more consistently with their professions than Horace, and the world would be none the worse if his example were less unfrequently followed. The friendship of Mæcenas, a genuine personal affection, and not a mere literary or convivial sympathy, gave Horace many opportunities of enriching himself, or at least of parading his power; it was something to be the friend of the second or third man in the Roman Empire. But Horace studiously resisted every temptation to make use of this friendship; he would not even allow himself to be made the recognised channel of introduction for his literary friends. The time came when Augustus wished to transfer him to his own household—the letter is still extant in which the offer was made, and the greater opportunities hinted at—but Horace would not hear of such an advancement. It speaks well for Augustus that he was not offended by the refusal. From Mæcenas Horace accepted a moderate independence, sufficient for his needs, but a small gift to come from one of the richest men of his day. He was grateful, but he refused to sell his soul, and we still have the letter in which he bids Mæcenas take back his bounty, if it is to involve obligations which the poet cannot meet without injury to his health, or undue disturbance of his comfort. He adds with characteristic humour and strict justice, “but if you take back the Sabine Farm, you must restore to me the youth and vigour I enjoyed when I first entered your service.”

Men who cannot distinguish an official ode written to order and the forms imposed by such conditions from the genuine effusions of a literary artist are fond of accusing Horace of excessive adulation, but there is no adulation in offering unpalatable advice, or in pointing out to a patron that he is exceeding his prerogative. Instances may be found in the Odes, as well as in the Epistles, of not altogether complimentary exhortation. The truth was that Augustus was surprisingly the right man in the right place, and the compliments paid to him by Horace and Virgil and other literary contemporaries, though expressed in a liberal style, were not in spirit other than the occasion demanded. Epitaphs and dedications have a language of their own—Italy is more given to hyperbolical compliment than England—but the men who declared their admiration of Augustus, however extravagantly to our ears, had sound reason for admiring and wishing others to admire a very capable man surrounded by capable advisers and seconded by able lieutenants.

It is not probable that the first book of the letters of Horace was published in the lifetime of the poet, for they are often too intimate for publication. Lollius would not be likely to give the world the benefit of his castigation, or Mæcenas to allow contemporaries to enjoy the protest against his thoughtless insistence on the poet’s company. The collection was most probably made after the death of the writer, and the dedicatory letter placed at the beginning may equally well have referred to some other publication. Horace is not the only facile writer of verse who has occasionally amused himself with writing to his friends in metre, and the sting of some things which he wished to say was to some extent dulled by the adoption of a metrical form. We may take it that in the first book of the Epistles, if nowhere else, we have the genuine Horace writing without respect of persons, and without regard to the public. A peculiar interest therefore attaches to the one short letter in the collection which is written to Tiberius himself; it is a letter of introduction.

“Septimius I presume has some special information as to the esteem in which you hold me, Claudius; for in begging and prayerfully compelling me to try to say a good word for him, and introduce him as worthy of the intellect and family of that sound reader Nero, in asserting that I enjoy the privileges of an intimate friend, he sees and knows my power better than I do myself. I certainly gave a good many reasons for being let off with an excuse, but I was afraid of being thought to have falsely pretended incompetence, and to be given to disguising my real influence, and reserving it for my own sole use. So, in dread of the disgrace of a greater obloquy, I have entered for the prize awarded to impudence. If, however, you do not disapprove of my breach of good manners, committed at the request of a friend, enroll him in your ‘gang,’ and believe him to be staunch and good.”

Knowing as we do from other sources how strongly Horace objected to turning a private friendship to account, and how specially careful he was in the matter of introductions, we can see through this letter a real intimacy with Tiberius; the apology of Horace is addressed rather to his own conscience than to the recipient of the letter. We need not infer that Tiberius was particularly difficult of approach.

The qualities which were to render Septimius acceptable to Tiberius are worth notice; he would be in sympathy with a man whose standard of reading, or—for the phrase is ambiguous—choice of pursuit was dignified, he would be staunch, he would be good. Good is the epithet which Horace applies to Tiberius himself in writing to Julius Florus—“Florus faithful friend to the brilliant and good Nero”; he uses the same epithet in the Odes in speaking of a former mistress—“I am not what I was under the reign of good Cinara.” Without pressing the sense of the word too closely, it can hardly have been applied to an ungenial man, such as Tiberius is represented to have been, and may have afterwards become. The future Emperor had a weary road to travel before he became, if he ever did become, what the elder Pliny says that he was, “a most dismal man.”

Thus at the outset of his administrative career we find Tiberius in excellent company; it is pleasant to think that he may on some occasion have made an expedition to Tibur or the Sabine Farm, like Torquatus or Mæcenas, and spent an evening with the genial poet, drinking old wine laid down in the consulship of Manlius, watching the wood fire crackling on the hearth, enjoying the jokes of the pert slaves, or perhaps listening while his host sang to his own accompaniment words which the world has not yet forgotten. We may be sure that there were rejoicings when the “company” returned from Asia Minor, that the kid was duly sacrificed, and that if Tiberius himself was not present, Florus and Celsus, and let us hope Munatius told the story of their adventures to the kindly ears of their middle-aged friend.

VI
The Family of Augustus

The principle of the transmission of the chief power by heredity was never recognized as a fundamental part of the constitution of the Roman Empire, though the natural tendency is to allow a son to take his father’s place, and the necessities of ancestor worship made the succession of a real son or an adopted son agreeable to Roman feeling. Neither Cæsar nor Augustus ever had legitimate sons; Tiberius had a son, but he died before his father; Caligula was childless; the ambition of an unscrupulous woman deprived the son of Claudius of the succession and his life; Nero was childless, and in him the Cæsarean strain ended. Circumstances were adverse to the hereditary principle. Short dynasties, such as those of the Flavians, the Antonines, and the Constantines, appear from time to time, but the ordinary method of peaceful succession was the nomination and adoption of a successor or successors by the reigning Emperor.

For many years Augustus himself avoided the definite establishment of his own position as even a life tenancy. His office of Imperator was renewed every ten years; the Tribunician power was granted to him afresh every year in form, though not in fact; the Censorian office was taken up every five years; he did not become Pontifex Maximus till eighteen years after the battle of Actium; the only office which he held without a break—that of Princeps Senatus—was not considered to be an office at all, the dignity of the first man in the Senate being constitutionally purely of respect. Under these circumstances it would be strange if the historians were correct in assuming that the chief preoccupation of his life was in providing for a successor of his own blood. Tacitus, who is full of the dynastic question, informs us, with his customary inconsistency, that Augustus himself at the end of his life mentioned three men not connected with the Cæsarean race as possible candidates for the succession, which he could hardly have done had he accepted the hereditary principle, seeing that the Cæsarean stock was by no means extinct.

For a short time the vision of hereditary succession probably attracted the imagination of Augustus, and certainly always occupied the attention of members of his family; but the early deaths of two of his grandsons and the insubordination of a third quickly dispelled the attractive vision.

The acquiescence of other Roman families in the Cæsarean rule was bought partly by admission to a share in the administration, partly by the very fact that the dynastic ideal was not forced in such a manner as to preclude all possibility of a change in the form of government, and a reversion to the happy days of the Senatorial oligarchy. Opposition was further disarmed by intermarriages with the houses least likely to submit contentedly to the domination of one family; both stocks of the Claudians, the Antonians, the Domitians, the Æmilians, the Junians, and others were thus united with the Julians in the lifetime of Augustus or his successor. The consular lists for the reign of Augustus recall the names of the noblest Roman families, and though the old city offices had now become titular rather than effective, men still liked sitting in Curule chairs, and taking the lead in the pageantry which survived the reality of power; the process by which administrative functions gradually passed from the old offices to the new hierarchy was a slow one, and an ambitious young man might still think he had embarked on a career when he had been dignified with the lowest of the old magistracies. The new men were employed less in Italy than in the imperial provinces, where indeed it was important that the officials should be attached to the person of the Emperor rather than to the abstraction called the Senate and the people of Rome. Neither Augustus nor Tiberius were afraid to entrust the really effective powers of Prefect of the City of Rome to members of the old aristocracy.

But if Augustus himself was less interested in the dynastic question than the historians represent, the ladies of his family were by no means equally indifferent; their feuds were shared in by their ladies and freedmen, and the apparently peaceful home of the suave and unconscious Augustus was a raging battlefield, in which the weapons of calumny and innuendo were freely hurled, and the external forms of politeness concealed a state of civil war. Wily Greeks and Jews or other Orientals used to palace intrigues found a field for their special talents in the households of Livia or Julia; holding the confidential positions of physicians, preachers, tutors, and astrologers, they transferred to the Palatine the atmosphere of the Courts of the Ptolemies or Herod. Under this subtle influence mere drawing-room conspiracies sometimes took a serious complexion; young men were impelled by their female relatives to dangerous courses, secret information sped from Roman boudoirs to the palaces of Syria and Armenia.

Livia herself was a skilled intriguer, and though Dio puts into her mouth a ponderous curtain lecture on the subject of clemency, addressed to Augustus, her inclinations were more monarchical than those of her husband. The very substantial compliments which passed between her and Herod of Judæa are not likely to have been exceptional in their character, nor is that wily potentate likely to have been the only man of his class who discovered that her fingers touched the springs of government. Though by the letters of the law Roman women were in an almost servile position, though they were liable to be divorced and remarried to suit the convenience of their families, methods were found of evading the law, and divorces which tended to further aggrandisement were not unpopular with their apparent victims. By a variety of legal fictions women could hold separate estates, and were often immensely rich independently of their husbands. The wives of provincial governors were notorious for their rapacity, and took full advantage of the weakness of uxorious husbands.

Livia spinning the toga of Augustus with her maids or weighing out the allowances of the slaves, was a pleasing picture for the contemplation of her husband and the Romans, but the head of the thrifty housekeeper had room for other than domestic details, and her name was whispered with awe by many who could not have appreciated her homely virtues, and had good reason for suspecting her of very different occupations.

Owing to the early marriages of the Romans a family quickly became patriarchal; some of these marriages, it is true, were mere contracts, children being sometimes married to secure dowries or successions, or ratify family alliances, almost before they were out of the nursery. Owing again to divorces and remarriages the various degrees of affinity between the members of a group of families are very difficult to trace; adoption adds complications, which are further increased by the paucity of Roman names, especially as women generally retained the feminine form of their father’s names after marriage, and sisters were often indistinguishable.

Five chief families were united in the household of Augustus: the Julian—of this the heads were the Emperor himself and his sister Octavia; the Claudian, represented by Livia and her two sons, Tiberius and Drusus; the Vipsanian, represented by Agrippa; the Claudian Marcellan by Octavia’s three elder children; the Antonian by her two younger children. The heads between whom all matrimonial transactions were arranged were Augustus, Livia, Octavia, and Agrippa. Of these four Agrippa was to the two ladies the unwelcome but inevitable intruder; Livia was disposed to push the Claudians, Octavia the Julians, whom she represented equally with her brother the Emperor. These four high contracting parties were about the same age, Octavia being somewhat the older of the four. If there was to be a dynasty, and if the succession was to follow the strict line of heredity, Julia, the one child of Augustus, was obviously the great matrimonial prize. Matters in her case were somewhat complicated by the existence of her mother, Scribonia, an affectionate but easy-going lady, who seems to have abstained from active interference in her daughter’s affairs till she accompanied her into exile many years later. There was another heiress in the family of the same age as Julia, namely Vipsania, the daughter of the despised but necessary Agrippa. She was the granddaughter of Pomponius Atticus, the very wealthy banker and friend of Cicero. Agrippa had married her mother when his fortunes were still at a low ebb, and when it was desirable to conciliate the Equestrian Order to the advancement of Octavian and his friends. Agrippa owed his position entirely to his great ability, and his single-hearted unselfish devotion to the fortunes of Augustus. Nobody had ever heard of the Vipsanian family till he rose to eminence, and the Claudian and Julian ladies were contemptuous of its degrading associations. We do not know whether Pomponia died or was put away, but in the year B.C. 25 Julia, being of the age of fourteen, was declared marriageable, and a pleasing atmosphere of matrimonial intrigue filled the house on the Palatine. To consolidate the fortunes of Agrippa—a really formidable rival, if he chose to declare himself—with those of Augustus, the right thing to do was to marry Julia to Agrippa, but Livia wanted her for Tiberius. A compromise was hit upon; Tiberius was left out in the cold, Julia was married to young Marcellus, Octavia’s son, her first cousin, now a lad of eighteen, and in order to associate Agrippa with the Julian blood he was given the lad’s sister Marcella.

That Augustus can have seriously intended Marcellus at this time to be heir to anything but his private fortune is impossible; so long as Agrippa lived there was no other possible successor to the Imperial power, and the story that Agrippa went off to the East to keep out of the way of the favours shown to the young Marcellus is absurd. Agrippa was wanted in the East, and the information that he acquired there led to the subsequent Eastern progress of Augustus and Tiberius four years later. When Augustus was so seriously ill in B.C. 23 as to contemplate the possibility of his death, he sent for Agrippa and gave him his ring, thus making him his successor so far as it was possible to do so; on this we are told that Marcellus showed such bitter disappointment that Agrippa again went to the East, and for the same reason. A few months later Marcellus died, and Virgil’s touching allusion to the event in the sixth Æneid is probably the only authority for the assumption that the wise Augustus proposed to set aside the tried and faithful Agrippa, the actual second person in the Empire, in favour of an untried youth. Such an assumption involves a contradiction of the whole policy of Augustus. Whatever his weaknesses, whatever his failures in prevision, the one thing he dreaded was the recrudescence of the wars of adventurers. Steadily through his reign he worked in the direction of giving permanence to order, and of quietly eliminating all elements likely to endanger order. He can hardly have been so blind as not to see that the reign of Marcellus was only possible by the sufferance of Agrippa, or to ignore the fact that Livia would work for the elevation of her sons after his own death.

The premature death of Marcellus threw all the matrimonial schemes again into the melting-pot. His marriage had been a marriage only in name, and had left no offspring. For two years nothing was done, but when the whole Imperial party moved to the East in B.C. 21 marriage was again in the air. There was a sojourn, accompanied with much festivity, at Samos, where Agrippa met the rest of the family. His marriage with Marcella had proved childless, his union with the Julian stock had failed; Julia herself seems to have shown signs of an inclination for Tiberius, but such a union would have strengthened the Claudians too much, and Tiberius himself was attracted, if by anybody, by the daughter of Agrippa. Augustus took matters into his own hands; he persuaded his sister to allow her daughter to be divorced, and married his own daughter to his faithful friend Agrippa, a man at least twenty years older than herself. The line of succession was to be through the children of Agrippa and grandchildren of Augustus; Livia, and Octavia were left out in the cold. The former consoled herself by interchanging amenities with the husband of Mariamne on the Phœnician coast, and both ladies pleased themselves later on with a double marriage project, which to some extent restored the balance; Tiberius married Vipsania, and his brother Drusus the very beautiful younger Antonia. The dates of these two marriages are not determinable, but as Tiberius was the father of only one child, in B.C. 12, when Agrippa died, his marriage at any rate was probably a late one, when he was about thirty years of age. There is reason for believing that this at least was a love match.

Julia proved to be a fertile mother, she brought five grandchildren to the founders of the Empire and if the succession was to depend on the principle of heredity, it was secured, for both the ruling powers were interested in transmitting the succession in the Julian line, and three of the children were sons.

Augustus was delighted; the philoprogenitive passion broke out in him; he insisted that Julia and her husband should live in his house; he provided instructors for the children; he seldom went out unless accompanied by them, and they rode round his litter when he went into the country. The boys he adopted, buying them of their father by the ancient rude ceremony, and the two elder ones were henceforth known as Caius and Lucius Cæsar. Livia was more than ever in need of such consolations as could be won by intriguing with Oriental potentates. It seemed that the Claudians were definitely relegated to a subordinate position, and the young Cæsars began to pay increased attention to the mythology of the Æneid and the story of their mystic descent from the goddess Venus. A marriage between the son of Drusus Nero, afterwards known as Germanicus, and Agrippina, the daughter of Julia and Agrippa, was the sole bright spot in the dynastic fortune of the Claudians.

Destiny, however, had not exhausted her possibilities. In 12 B.C. Agrippa died. In the following year Octavia died, and Livia was free to carry out her favourite matrimonial project; the widowed Julia was married to Tiberius, who divorced his wife, Vipsania, to make room for her. This was the first tragedy in the life of Tiberius, destined to bring upon him not only terrible immediate sorrows, but a whole train of calamity, which pursued him to the end of his days. We are told of many Roman nobles that they divorced their wives. Tiberius is the only Roman of whom we are told that he bitterly regretted the wife from whom he had been separated.

We do not know by whom this tragedy was brought about, but we do know that, so far as dynastic pretensions were concerned, Tiberius was the last person to be influenced by such a consideration. Whatever ambitions his mother may have formed for her sons, both of them, now men in the prime of life, enjoyed the confidence of Augustus because they had hitherto shown themselves superior to vulgar ambition. Both were by this time experienced generals, for though the command of Tiberius in Armenia may have been nominal rather than real, both he and his brother had conducted a series of campaigns in the difficult regions to the north of the Balkan Peninsula, in the Alpine valleys, and on the frontier of the Rhine. Tiberius had further shown himself a skilled civilian; he had been entrusted not only with the different Republican magistracies, but he had been made chairman of several of those commissions by which the real administrative work was done; he had presided over a very important commission for regulating the corn supply of Rome, and over another for inquiring into the condition of the agricultural slave barracks, whose owners were accused of kidnapping travellers, and offering shelter to freemen who preferred such a life to military service. After the death of Agrippa he was unquestionably the second person in the Empire, for Mæcenas had no hold on the armies, and Tiberius held this position, not as the stepson of Augustus, but as a representative of the oldest and most highly honoured family in Rome, and as the reward of distinguished public services at home and in the field.

Caius, the eldest son of Julia, cannot at this time have been more than nine years old; it would be some years before he could take any effective part in public business. Augustus, always in weak health, had to provide for the contingency of his own death, and it must be borne in mind that, quite apart from the comparatively ignoble ambition of founding a dynasty, a sense of duty would impel Augustus to obviate as far as he could the disturbance of a disputed succession. Augustus prided himself upon his position as a pacificator; his reign was a reign of peace, its wars were frontier wars; to allow the apple of discord to drop into the centre of this realm of peace was to destroy his own work.

But was it necessary that Tiberius should marry the widowed Julia? Was the match capable of being represented to him as a necessity of state, as a duty so imperative as to override all questions of private inclination?

Certainly it was so, though the public grounds were essentially of a private and personal nature.

The two hostile forces in the Imperial House were Livia and Julia, the former the embodiment of the stern virtues of the Roman matron, personified rectitude and humility in her outward demeanour, inwardly unscrupulous and domineering, free from the more amiable but less dignified weaknesses of a woman, incapable of being led away by the love of admiration, icily regular, intemperate only in her pursuit of the greater ambitions, unmoral rather than immoral, she shunned attracting public notice, preferred the enjoyment of power to the demonstration of power, but was none the less keenly jealous of any encroachment on her domain. It is curious how little we hear of her; the poets do not mention her, gossip did not concern itself with her name; it is only from one or two casual references in Josephus, and a few incidents recorded by Tacitus, that we divine the activity of this force behind the throne. Portraits of Livia survive; her high nose is to be seen behind that of Augustus on the coinage; there are busts, and at least one statue. The countenance is that of a very handsome woman and a very dignified woman, but not of a woman who could laugh readily, the mouth looks as if it could smile to order, but not spontaneously. We may surmise that her virtues were of such an obvious type as to constitute a standing provocation to the wicked, that she was one of those women who are more dangerous to sound morality than a bad example, and against whose standards it is impossible not to rebel secretly if not openly; this is especially the case when it is suspected that behind the genuine inclination to correctness in smaller matters lurk the real deadly sins of the soul, hardness, avarice, lust of power. The story that she was blind to the infidelities of Augustus, and even provided the opportunities, may not be true; the infidelities may be, and probably are, as chimerical as the connivance; but even such a myth may be allowed to indicate the type of character.

Pitted against this calm, correct, implacable woman we have the spoiled child Julia, bent upon enjoying herself to the full, adventurous, audacious, both in deed and word. When her father reproved her for riotous living she is said to have replied that, though he might choose to forget that he was Cæsar, she did not propose to forget that she was Cæsar’s daughter, and doubtless the pert sally, accompanied by some laughing gesture, smoothed away the gravity of the outraged Emperor. For a Roman princess at this resplendent time of Rome’s fortunes three lives were open: she might live as Julia’s aunt Octavia lived, or her first cousin the younger Antonia, in comparative retirement, abstaining from intermeddling with affairs of state, the centre of a refined and possibly literary circle, caring for the domestic interests of those whom she loved, or to whom she was bound by duty; or she might live as Livia lived, darkly intriguing behind the scenes, corresponding with “native” princes, plotting and counter-plotting among the Roman families, or again she might fling herself into the riotous amusements of the gilded youth of Rome, the young gentlemen for whom Ovid wrote his treatises on gallantry.

Gambling and betting were as well known diversions in Roman society as in our own; great ladies made their books upon the circus. Cards were not yet invented, but dice were common. Wealthy young provincials, the sons of great but not ennobled capitalists, were as ready then as now to pay for admission to the highest social circles by dealing leniently with fair ladies whose affairs were involved by debts of honour, and some of them lost their heads and hearts over the business. Masquerading in the unlighted Roman streets after respectable people had gone to their early beds was not an infrequent amusement, and even ladies anticipated at Rome the licence of the Mohawk and Tityre Tu of Queen Anne’s reign in London. Antony and Cleopatra amused themselves thus at Alexandria, to the terror and annoyance of respectable middle class men; the joke of thus playing pranks upon inoffensive persons of humble rank under the protection of a slight disguise is not obvious, but it has at all times presented attractions for a certain order of mind. As for Julia, we are told that her revels were conducted even on the sacred Rostra, the public platform of the government of the world. Her cynical defence of her immoralities is said to have been even more outrageous than her conduct. But for all this Julia did not forget that she was Cæsar’s daughter, and was determined not to submit more than was inevitable to the domination of the woman who was not her mother, but was Cæsar’s wife.

At the death of Agrippa, Julia, though already the mother of four children, and shortly to become the mother of a fifth, was only twenty-seven years of age. During the time of her married life she and Tiberius had been much absent from Rome; they had probably met very little since they were brought up together as children in the house of Augustus. Agrippa may have been an indulgent husband, willing to condone the more innocent levities of his young wife; or Tiberius, remembering his agreeable playfellow, now titularly his mother-in-law, may have chosen to disregard the scandalous whispers which reached his ears from time to time.

On her husband’s death Julia found herself in an awkward position; it is true that her father was her friend, but her father’s wife was her enemy, an enemy whose mysterious influence she had good reason to dread, and whose ambition was menaced by the existence of Julia’s own children, already the darlings of their grandfather. Again it is not improbable that she cherished a purely feminine grudge against Vipsania, who had carried off her handsome playfellow, and was additionally piqued by the happiness which Tiberius had found in his marriage. The personal beauty of Tiberius was remarkable; his accomplishments no less so. He was unusually tall, broad shouldered, well shaped, and well proportioned from head to foot, of great physical strength; he belonged to the fair ruddy type of Italian, and carried a profusion of golden hair, which grew low down on the back of his neck, a family peculiarity, his eyes were exceptionally large, and he was credited with the power of seeing in the dark when first awakened; as he habitually carried his head in a bent position, it is possible that he suffered from some visual defect; he was naturally silent, and a slow talker; he had the reputation of being deeply learned, and indeed versed in occult mysteries, such a man as would attract the curiosity of a woman, and challenge her love of conquest by his intellectual, no less than by his physical, qualities. The few existing portraits of Tiberius fully bear out the descriptions given by Paterculus and Suetonius. The so-called bust of Tiberius in the British Museum is not a portrait of him, and was simply so named because it happened to have been found at Capri.

Personal inclination, no less than policy, would have suggested to Julia that here was the natural protector of herself and children, and there was the additional inducement of delivering a checkmate to Livia by falling in with what had been her favourite scheme. With Tiberius as the stepfather and guardian of the children of Agrippa, there was nothing to be feared from the death of Augustus; Livia’s own son would be in a position to defeat any machinations against the heirs of the Julian race, and it was well known that whatever obligations Tiberius took upon himself, Tiberius would honourably fulfil.

The arguments for the divorce and remarriage were, from the Roman point of view, strong; it was not a question of personal convenience or of advancing personal interests, the object was to maintain the peace of the Roman world. Had Tiberius taken the advice of Mæcenas, it would probably have been to the following effect:—“It is true that you are to be trusted, that no pledge is needed from you to ensure the security of the daughter and grandchildren of Augustus, your whole life shows that you have made your stepfather’s interests your own; but you are not the only person concerned. The two boys will be exposed to every temptation as they grow up; their mother is a fascinating lady, but her best friends can hardly claim for her that she is equal to the task of bringing up a family whose responsibilities will be great. If you do not marry her, somebody else will; it would be a serious risk to expose any possible candidate to the temptations of such a position, to introduce a new claimant to the family honours into the family circle. Julia needs a protector, a husband of her own age; she is said to have a strong personal attachment to yourself, and under your guidance it is not likely that she will repeat pardonable indiscretions, to which perhaps she was driven by want of real sympathy with her previous elderly husband. You say that you and your present wife are devoted to one another. Granted; but you are both called upon by a destiny, which you cannot evade, to sacrifice yourselves to the good of the State.” And Horace too would have argued much in the same strain; he would have sympathized more delicately with the feelings of a united couple rudely torn asunder, but with his shrewd common sense he would have shown that there was no alternative but a retirement into private life, a course which would have amounted to abandoning the post of duty.

The person, however, who most strongly influenced Tiberius in his fatal decision was possibly Vipsania herself. From both parents she inherited businesslike qualities, cool common sense. Neither of them is credited with having been sentimental at any period of his or her career, and though Tiberius was devoted to her, it is quite possible that she herself regarded her marriage dispassionately as an excellent business arrangement, and that, while she fulfilled all the duties of a wife with scrupulous observance, she was prepared to be equally careful of the interests and honour of any husband with whom she was provided by the higher powers of the family council. She had abundant precedent for taking such a line, and Asinius Gallus, the aspirant proposed to her, was in every way a desirable match. She may have been really indifferent, and have wounded Tiberius by her cool acquiescence in the new arrangement; or again, on this side too there may have been a great renunciation, and the unhappy woman, partly terrified by obscure menaces from Livia, partly persuaded by the kindly urgency of Augustus, may have affected an indifference which she did not feel, and deliberately wounded the man whom she loved for his own good, as she was led to believe. If Vipsania thus hurt the sensitive Tiberius, and shook his faith in his previous happiness, there was Julia ready to heal the wound; was he not the man whom she had always really loved? Her first and second marriages had been no real marriages: she and Marcellus had been mere children, and as for Agrippa, worthy man though he was, he could not feel with a wife so much younger than himself; he had always preferred the society of men who talked of bridges and aqueducts, or planned campaigns against the Sarmatians, to his wife and children; he had been good according to his lights, but it had been a dull life, and she had been driven to find relief in foolish though innocent dissipations by which her good name had suffered, and which she now sincerely regretted. If Tiberius would but take pity on her forlorn condition, and do his best to love his old playfellow, she for her part could conceive no greater happiness than to be the partner of his joys and sorrows; she loved him, she had always loved him, and the careless indifference of years had not weakened her attachment.

Whatever the arguments and allurements by which Tiberius was induced to take the fatal step, he unquestionably did so. At first he lived happily with Julia; they had one son, who died in infancy; and then his official duties took the husband from his home; he was placed in charge of a harassing campaign against a mobile enemy in difficult country along the south of the Danube and in Dalmatia, while his brother Drusus was similarly engaged in frontier wars along the Rhine.

At this time a serious misfortune fell upon Tiberius; he lost his brother.

Drusus had conducted a foray into the Black Forest region, which had not been altogether successful. On his return he either fell from his horse or caught some serious fever—both stories are given—and was seen to be in such danger that Augustus, who was then at Lyons, at once sent for Tiberius from Dalmatia. Tiberius hastened to his brother’s bedside. The elder Pliny tells us that on this occasion he achieved a record speed, travelling 200 Roman miles within twenty-four hours. He was in time to close his brother’s eyes, but that was all. Augustus decided that Drusus should be buried at Rome, and Tiberius marched the whole way on foot at the head of the funeral procession from Lyons to the capital. As soon as the ceremonies were over, he returned to continue his brother’s work on the eastern bank of the Rhine, and after two years’ absence was recalled. Mæcenas had died in B.C. 8, and Augustus felt the need of a confidential adviser. Tiberius on his return was invested with the tribunician power, an elevation which, in the opinion of his contemporaries, finally marked him out as the successor of Augustus.

The history of the tribunate, in spite of the many references to the office, is not particularly clear. It seems that the first tribunes were originally the official mouthpieces of that part of the population of Rome whom we should now call “Outlanders.” After the “Outlanders,” or plebeians, had become for all practical purposes fused into the general body of Roman citizens, the tribunes ranked practically among the other magistrates; they enjoyed the special prerogative of being sacrosanct, their persons were inviolable, and thus during their term of office they were nominally above the laws, a privilege which, however, did not prevent their assassination. They had the power of introducing legislation, and of vetoing legislation, and it is perhaps this power which was constitutionally most important to the early Emperors. Further, they had powers of summary jurisdiction, and constituted a supreme court of appeal in cases in which the life of a Roman citizen was in danger; when St. Paul “appealed unto Cæsar,” it was to the tribune that he appealed. The office was hallowed by sentiment, and though as Consul and Censor and Commander-in-chief the Emperor might seem to hold in his hands all the reasonable means of making his power effective, unless he were also Tribune, his actions could be vetoed; thus Augustus was more than usually wise in absorbing the sanctity and the functions of the Tribune into his own person, and he could show no greater proof of his confidence in Tiberius than by thus giving him the power of constitutional opposition and investing his person with inviolability; but, to the astonishment of the Roman world, Tiberius had hardly received this mark of confidence before he summarily left Rome and retired to Rhodes.

VII
The First Retirement of Tiberius

The flight of Tiberius to Rhodes, and his determination to abandon his public career just at the moment when his position as second man in the State was established on a sure foundation, have naturally excited the wonder of modern no less than of contemporary writers. An English historian, equally learned and delightful, speaks of the event as the freak of a moody and irritable man, and declares that such conduct summarily disposes of the claim which has been advanced for Tiberius of having been an astute statesman. His contemporaries, who are followed by the grave Tacitus and the garrulous Suetonius, found an easier explanation; to them the motive for retirement was simply the wish to indulge in licentious excesses too hideous for the starched morality and glaring daylight of Rome; but the same unfriendly or careless writers allow that he was probably disgusted by the wanton conduct of Julia, adding that he was also jealous of the advancement of his stepsons, the young Cæsars, now respectively fourteen and nine years of age.

That Julia had forfeited all claims not only to affection, but even to respect, is an undisputed fact. Soon after his marriage Tiberius had been obliged to take the field, and his wars had been waged in localities not likely to be attractive to a lady who lived in the gallant circles of the poet Ovid. War upon the Illyrian or German frontier did not involve complete absence from home, and the Roman generals were in the habit of returning from their campaigns to the capital when the winter weather made it impossible to take the field. We do not know whether Tiberius followed this custom, or whether he took a more rigorous view of his duties and spent the winter season in winter quarters, but he was certainly much away from home. Some disillusionment as to the depth of Julia’s affection for him, annoying domestic difficulties caused by the ill-advised indulgence of her children by their grandfather, may well have contributed already to make him feel more at home in the camp than in the splendid house in the Carinæ. Julia too may have had her own disappointments; the playfellow of her youth turned out to be another “Colonel Grave Airs,” no less absorbed in military matters than Agrippa, inclined to spend his leisure in the society of a learned and serious circle, and averse to dissipating his time by passing long hours at the great public pageants in which the Romans delighted. So far there had been nothing worse than an amicable estrangement between husband and wife. Julia went her own way, chose her own friends, and lived the life which pleased her best. Tiberius in the same way pursued the studies which were agreeable to him, and made the best of a maimed life. Doubtless he recognized that his private happiness had been wrecked, but there was still duty, and if he could not meet Vipsania in the street without emotion, he at least gave the scandalmongers of the city no opportunity.

But when Tiberius returned from Gaul in B.C. 7 to become practically the colleague of Augustus, he found the state of affairs in his home such as no self-respecting man could tolerate, and there was this additional sting in the wound to his honour, that the very office which had just been bestowed upon him was capable of being represented as the price paid for unworthy toleration and wilful blindness. Rome was ringing with the exploits of Julia, with stories of her drunkenness in the public streets, with the names and number of her gallants. The two men who were most concerned in her misconduct, as being the two men upon whom it brought the deepest disgrace, her father and her husband, were the two men who alone seemed to be ignorant of the state of affairs. The ignorance of the father might be excused, he had no motive, except a not unworthy paternal weakness, for closing his eyes to what was going on, but the husband, so the gossips said, had been prompted by his ambition to accept an already damaged article, for Julia’s irregularities were not of recent date, and actuated by the same unworthy motive he had allowed his house to become a mere brothel: the proofs were only too obvious. That such a chain of reasoning was inconsistent with itself in ascribing both ignorance and full knowledge to Augustus did not concern the gossips. Tiberius had been bribed to be blind, and all the world could see what a magnificent bribe he had extorted.

The best men, the kindest men, the justest men, and the most earnest men make the worst mistakes in dealing with a certain type of woman. Many a woman who has brought disgrace upon her family and ruin upon herself has urged with some justice that if her husband or her father or her brother had been less kind, less blind, less just, but more understanding, she would not have been betrayed into disastrous misconduct. Often and often the question has been asked, “You must have seen what was going on; why did you not stop me?” and as often the answer has been, “I admit I ought to have seen, perhaps I did see, but I could not believe you capable of doing what appearances should have told me that you were doing.”

The higher a man’s ideal of women, the less willing he is to ascribe to any particular woman the wantonness of lust; the more charitable his estimate of the strength of some temptation, the less stern his condemnation, and the greater his readiness to accept excuses for levity; the higher the range of his own ambitions, and the wider the area of his own interests, the less capable he is of imagining how large small slights and imperfect sympathy may appear to a being cast in a narrower mould. Many a man by acquiescing in a discovered want of sympathy between himself and his wife has wounded her pride and provoked her to acts of self-assertion. What was part of his life was perhaps the whole of hers, and in the end he has been astounded at the disproportion of the punishment which she has inflicted. Without any conscious refusal to see things as they really were, any conscious deference to the susceptibilities of Augustus, Tiberius may well have been slow to believe in the case against Julia, whose good nature and frankness might weigh against her want of seriousness.

When, however, Tiberius came to live permanently at Rome, the facts could no longer be concealed from him, though they were possibly still concealed from Augustus. He could repudiate Julia, but that would have caused a public scandal, and have wounded a man in his most sensitive spot whom he had always known as his truest friend; he could not, however, continue to live with her, that would justify the charge of guilty connivance, and expose him to countless humiliations; further, there was always the sting of the price at which his forbearance up to the present moment seemed to have been bought.

The course which Tiberius actually took was an heroic one. True he might have ignored the susceptibilities of Augustus, have repudiated his daughter, and in the case of resistance have used his now established power to force the Emperor into private life; he might have held that he was justified in so doing, that he had been wilfully deceived, and that his pretended friend had deliberately used him for his own purposes. But if ever he was tempted to conduct so violent, and yet under the supposed circumstances so justifiable, he put away the temptation; he decided that if there was to be a retirement, he was himself the right man to retire. This course had the further attraction that it put a summary end to that ugly suspicion of corrupt connivance.

Tiberius matured his plan secretly. Nobody outside his family knew that he had definitely left Rome till he was already sailing down the coast of Italy. A fast galley was sent after him, with letters imploring him to return, and not to desert the Emperor in his old age; it overtook him before he had passed the Straits of Messina, but the messengers were abruptly dismissed. No further attempt was made to recall him till after he had arrived at Rhodes, his ultimate destination, though he seems to have lingered on his way, and to have spent some time at Athens, long enough to enable him to be the first Roman who sent a chariot to compete at the Olympic games.

It was not long before the real cause of his departure became known to Augustus. Julia’s extravagant conduct was so notorious that it could no longer be concealed from her father. Livia is credited with having engineered the ultimate discovery, and even aided and abetted the grievous misconduct with ulterior motives. Augustus, in the name of Tiberius, wrote a bill of divorcement, and banished his daughter to the island of Pandateria off the coast of Campania. The list of corespondents was a long one. Julius Antonius, the son of Marcus Antonius, and stepson of Octavia, was among them; he committed suicide on the discovery of the scandal. After him Paterculus mentions Quintius Crispinus, Appius Claudius, Sempronius Gracchus, Scipio, a relative of Julia through her mother, “and other men of less reputation of both orders.” It was a comprehensive list, and inclines us to suspect that Tacitus is right in saying that something more alarming than mere adultery had taken place, and that Julia had allowed herself to be involved in a plot against her husband and father. It is curious that Paterculus should confine the list of nameless admirers to members of the Senatorial and Equestrian Orders. If Julia had been merely a licentious woman, we should expect to find slaves and gladiators among the company of her lovers. Amorous intrigues in the atmosphere of Rome were apt to end in more dangerous conspiracies, and though the self-esteem of the pious and patriarchal Augustus must have been deeply wounded by his daughter’s guilt, the punishment of exile awarded to her, and of death to her gallants, strikes us as disproportionate. It is most probable that there really was a conspiracy in which Julia allowed herself to be used, prompted by a desire to settle up accounts with that veteran intriguer Livia, and that this was the concluding scene of the first act in the long drama of the feud between the Julians and Claudians in the Imperial household.

Tiberius behaved on this occasion with dignity and generosity. He wrote to Augustus deprecating extreme severity to Julia, and begging that she might be allowed to retain for her own use any gifts that he had made to her. Such gifts will not have been inconsiderable, for Tiberius must have been a very rich man; it required a large fortune to inhabit the famous palace of Pompeius, and on his return to Rome Tiberius lived in the no less splendid villa of Mæcenas on the Esquiline.

On withdrawing from public affairs Tiberius decided to live as a private citizen; this he had every right to do. His motive in selecting Rhodes for his place of residence has to do with features in his intellectual inclinations upon which we have not as yet touched. The silly story that Tiberius elected to reside in Rhodes because he could there enjoy unlimited debauchery may be at once dismissed on the ground of inherent absurdity. A man who wishes to conceal his vices does not select a university town, a great commercial town, the house of call for the mercantile service of the world, the spot visited by all officials on their way back to and from the capital, an island where everybody knows everybody else’s business, as the scene of his loathsome excesses; and Rhodes was all these things. Possibly an advantage enjoyed by Rhodes in being free from the direct control of a Roman Proconsul rendered it desirable as a place of residence for a man in the position of Tiberius, who wished to avoid friction with the Roman authorities. Most of the famous cities on the Greek mainland were now in a decayed condition; Corinth alone retained something of its mercantile importance, Athens had become an agreeable place of residence as well as a university town; but the cities on the coast of Asia Minor, Smyrna and Ephesus, and the islands off the coast, Samos and Rhodes, flourished as they had never flourished before. The corn ships from Alexandria frequently touched at Rhodes; she lay in the path between Antioch and Rome, and had become the meeting place between East and West. This gave a special character to her university. Athens was purely Greek, but Rhodes was both Oriental and Greek.

Rhodes, though largely despoiled of its trees, is still among the most agreeable of the Greek islands, and in the days of its luxuriance was particularly beautiful. Tiberius shared that taste for islands which inspires the day dreams of many of our own contemporaries. Men only learn by experience that the secluded charms of a sea-girt residence are balanced by its inconvenience; but the inconvenience of restricted and precarious supplies would not be felt at Rhodes, the island being large enough to be self-dependent, besides being the calling place of shipping: thus Tiberius could look forward to a life spent in the pursuit of congenial and serious studies, in delightful scenery, and in the full stream of the world’s traffic.

The studies which especially attracted Tiberius were then called mathematical—we should now call them scientific—but neither was the science of the ancients our science, nor their mathematics our mathematics. The special branch of science which interested Tiberius was astronomy; but astronomy in his time was merged in astrology, and with astrology were associated other supposed means of predicting the future, that vain preoccupation of mankind. Great skill in judicial astrology was attributed by the ancients to Tiberius, and it is not likely that he escaped the intellectual contagions of his age; but we must be cautious in refusing to concede the possession of a truly scientific temperament to men of his age, or of much later ages, solely because they were credited by their contemporaries with sharing in what we now believe to be frivolous superstitions.

Nearly a century after the death of Tiberius, Apuleius, the compiler and in part author of the famous Golden Ass, was accused before a Roman Proconsul of magic, and of having bewitched the somewhat elderly lady who had become his wife; his defence is still extant. There are many interesting points in it, not the least interesting being the inclusion of Moses in a list of eminent magicians; but the most striking features of the apology are the contemptuous way in which Apuleius deals with the current superstitions as to magic, and the indications that he was pursuing research on lines which would now be recognized as scientific—“You say I use mirrors; certainly I do; so did Archimedes. I am studying their influence on light and heat. You say that I have collected strange fishes; yes, I am interested in comparing the structure of their skeletons.” It is strange how old are modern superstitions. Among the charges against Apuleius was one of hypnotism, based upon the fact that a boy had been seen to fall senseless in his presence. Apuleius had no difficulty in proving that the boy was an epileptic. Hypnotism is still uncanny to the non-scientific world.

Tiberius could not study astronomy or any other branch of science in his own day without being suspected of magic and divination; the things were almost mutually convertible terms, but the ancients had made considerable advances in the direction of the applied sciences, and had found out many working hypotheses, which were strictly scientific so far as the then sources of information allowed, even though further researches have proved them to be untenable. We should do injustice to Tiberius if we believed, as his contemporaries were ready to believe, that he spent his time at Rhodes in casting the horoscopes of himself and all other persons in whose destiny he had reason to be interested; but at the same time we must admit that the dividing line between science and pure charlatanry scarcely existed in those days, and that men such as Simon Magus and Elymas the Sorcerer frequently mistook the nature of their own proficiencies. Along with much sound astronomical knowledge, and with many equally sound results of experimental research, the East sent through various channels to the West a strange farrago of religion and so-called magical arts in which the esoteric learning of the Magicians, the Chaldeans, the Jews, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and even the Brahmins, was monstrously mixed up with popular superstitions and wilful imposture. The strong common sense which Tiberius exhibited in his public actions at a later time forbids us to believe that he lost his head at this period in hazardous and illusory speculations. We know that he took his place as an ordinary citizen of a free Greek town, and joined in the debates of its assembly, that he attended the lectures of the professors, and that his chosen associate was Thrasyllus, “a mathematician.” There is a pleasant story to the effect that Tiberius once went to a schoolmaster at Rhodes who called himself Diogenes, and was used to lecture on Sabbath days, asking for the honour of a special audience. Diogenes did not even admit him, but sent a verbal message by a dirty little slave boy, bidding him come back on the seventh day. Tiberius took no notice of the rudeness at the time, but when, after he had become Emperor, he was told that Diogenes was waiting outside his door at Rome in order to convey his congratulations, he sent out to tell him to come back in seven years.

For some time Tiberius lived contentedly in his retreat; he was visited by all men of any distinction, who were passing on their way between Rome and the East; he maintained a friendly correspondence with Augustus, and doubtless concluded that he was at liberty to do what Horace had so repeatedly urged upon his friends, “to live to himself.” But this life of moral introspection and scientific investigation was not allowed to last; Tiberius was rudely waked out of his dream, and learned that men who have once held a great position in the world cannot abdicate. Sinister influences were at work; not only did his own life seem to be in danger, but there were signs that the government of Augustus was itself in peril.

VIII
The Return of Tiberius

During the first five years of his residence at Rhodes, Tiberius, though he abstained from public business, was still the second person in the Empire, and still protected by the awe-inspiring atmosphere which hung round a Roman Tribune. He was, indeed, obliged to reside in the interior of the island in order to avoid the interruption caused by throngs of unwelcome visitors, who were anxious to pay their court to the great personage. Suetonius has two stories of his residence at Rhodes, which show him in no unamiable light. Tiberius once, in drawing up his programme for the day, had happened to say that he proposed to visit all the sick persons in the city. Zealous attendants immediately went out, and ordered all the invalids of the town to be taken into a public portico, and arranged according to the nature of their maladies. Tiberius was taken by surprise and considerably embarrassed, but recovered himself, spoke to each one, and apologized for the mistake individually, even to the humblest. On one occasion only he used his official position; when he was attending a disputation at the University the wrangling one day became so fierce that a heated professor made a violent personal attack upon Tiberius, as unfairly supporting his opponent. Tiberius quietly withdrew, and returned in official splendour with his train, summoned the intemperate professor in due legal form, and sent him to prison to meditate upon the enormity of provoking a breach of the Roman peace.

At the end of the five years Tiberius might well think that he could return to Rome without being suspected of a wish to exercise political influence, so plainly had he shown his indifference to public life. He had left his son at Rome, and there were others to whom he was attached; there were the three children of his brother Drusus, with their charming mother Antonia; and in spite of their awkward mutual relations, he had a genuine affection for Augustus. The family entanglements had been straightened out; Julia was in exile; the young Cæsars were beginning to take their part in public affairs. Surely their stepfather could live in dignified retirement at Rome, ready to advise and help, when counsel and assistance were demanded of him, but otherwise unmolested and unobserved.

This, however, was not to be. Augustus himself had acquiesced in the departure of Tiberius, if not before, certainly after the revelation of the intemperance of Julia, and was not improbably touched by the consideration which Tiberius had shown for his personal difficulties in the matter. But Livia had been bitterly disappointed; all her schemes had come to nothing just at the moment when the victory seemed to have been won, and her son had been declared heir-apparent, as far as the constitutional forms of Rome permitted. Consequently when Tiberius wrote, expressing an intention of returning to Rome and his wish to see his relatives, further declaring his determination to acquiesce in whatever arrangements Augustus might be disposed to make for the advancement of the young Cæsars, and pointing to his voluntary retirement as irrefutable evidence of the fact that he wished to stand out of their way, he received an exceedingly unamiable answer, and was told that he need not concern himself about the affairs of relatives, whom he had been so very ready to abandon. We are not told whether this letter was written by Livia or by Augustus; but it was surely written at the instance of Livia. No man was more willing to forgive and to forget than the Emperor; his whole life had been a record of successful conciliation of declared enemies; both by policy and inclination he was averse to the maintenance of personal feuds. Livia, too, may have seen in the stiffness of Tiberius a reason for advancing the young Cæsars, over whom, as more pliable, she hoped to secure influence.

This letter changed the position of Tiberius. His retirement was no longer voluntary; he had become an exile, and the difficulties of his situation were only slightly modified by the concession of “a free legation,” a nominal office frequently bestowed upon men of wealth and distinction, who wished to travel with the advantages attached to an official position. Tiberius, in fact, had to learn that there are responsibilities and positions which render abdication impossible; that having once been acting Commander-in-Chief and Prime Minister, he must always be a political personage, a force to be reckoned with; and if this fact was not apparent to him, it was very apparent to the advisers of the young Cæsars, and the worshippers of the rising sun.

During the absence of Tiberius these young men had been carefully put through the training, which had been successful in the case of the stepsons of Augustus. Caius, the elder, was now nineteen years of age, Lucius two or three years younger; there was a third brother, Agrippa, born after his father’s death, and still a child, showing signs of intractability. Like Tiberius and Drusus, they were sent to learn the organization of the Empire and the administration of the Roman Legions. Lucius went to Gaul, on his way to Spain; Caius was sent to the East, and like Tiberius was entrusted with the management of the difficult concerns of the Parthian frontier; he was provided with an adviser in the person of Marcus Lollius.