Chapter XVII: Introduction: Cicero’s Letters (14)

Cicero liked young men; he willingly frequented their society and readily became young again with them. Just after he had been praetor and consul, we see him surrounding himself with promising young men like Caelius, Curio, and Brutus, whom he took with him to the Forum and taught to plead at his side. Later, when the defeat of Pharsalia had removed him from the government of his country, he began to live familiarly with those light-hearted young men who had followed the party of the conqueror, and even consented, as a pastime, to give them lessons in oratory. “They are my pupils in the art of speaking well,” he merrily wrote, “and my masters in the art of dining well.”[375] After the death of Caesar events brought him into connection with a still younger generation, which then began to appear in political life. Plancus, Pollio, Messala, whom fate destined to become high dignitaries of a new government, sought his friendship, and the founder of the empire called him father.

The correspondence of Octavius and Cicero was published, and we know that it formed at least three books. It would have been very interesting had it been preserved. In reading it we might follow all the phases of that friendship of a few months which was to end in such a terrible manner. Probably the earlier letters of Cicero would show him distrustful at first, doubtful and coldly polite. Notwithstanding what has been said, it was not he who called Octavius to the help of the republic. Octavius came of his own accord. He wrote to Cicero every day;[376] he overwhelmed him with protestations and promises, he assured him of a devotion that could not fail. Cicero hesitated for a long time to put this devotion to the proof. He thought Octavius was intelligent and resolute, but rather young. He dreaded his name and his friends. “He has too many bad men around him,” said he, “he will never be a good citizen.”[377] Nevertheless he allowed himself to be gained over; he forgot his mistrust, and when the _boy_, as he affected to call him, had raised the siege of Modena, his gratitude was carried to an excess that the prudent Atticus disapproved, and which displeased Brutus. The joy that he felt at the defeat of Antony made him forget all restraint; he was blinded and carried away by his hatred. When he saw “that drunkard fall into the snares of Octavius, on coming from his debauches,”[378] he was beside himself. But this joy did not last long, for he learnt of the treason of the general almost at the same time as of his victory. It is at this moment above all that his letters would become interesting. They would throw a light on the last months of his life, the history of which we do not know well. The efforts that he then made to soften his old friend have been imputed to him as a crime, and I admit that, consulting only his dignity, it would have been better not to have asked anything from him who had so basely betrayed him. But it was not a question of himself alone. Rome had no soldiers to oppose to those of Octavius. The sole resource that remained in order to disarm him, was to remind him of the promises he had made. No hope remained of success in reviving any sparks of patriotism in that selfish mind; but the attempt at least should be made. The republic was in danger as well as the life of Cicero, and what it was not proper for him to do to prolong his own life, it was necessary to attempt in order to save the republic. Supplication is not base when a man defends the liberty of his country, and there is no other way of defending it. It was, no doubt, at this terrible moment that he wrote those very humble words to Octavius that we find in the fragments of his letters: “Let me know for the future what you wish me to do, I shall exceed your expectation.”[379] Far from reproaching him for his entreaties, I admit that I cannot see without emotion this glorious old man humble himself thus before _the boy_ who had betrayed his confidence, who had played with his credulity, but who has the power to save or destroy the republic!

Unfortunately there only remain fragments of these letters, which can teach us nothing. If we wish to know him who held so great a place in the last events of Cicero’s life we must look elsewhere. It would be easy and instructive to reproduce here the opinions that the historians of the empire give of him. But I prefer to keep to the method that I have followed in this work to the end, and if it is possible, to judge Octavius, like Cicero, by what he tells us himself, by his admissions and his confidences. In the absence of his correspondence and memoirs which are lost, let us take the great inscription at Ancyra, which is sometimes called the political testament of Augustus, because he sums up his whole life in it. Fortunately it has come down to us. We know from Suetonius that he had ordered it to be engraven on brass plates fixed on his tomb.[380] It is probable that it was very widely diffused in the first century of the Christian era, and that flattery or gratitude had multiplied copies everywhere, at the same time that the worship of the founder of the empire extended throughout the universe. Fragments have been found among the ruins of Apollonia, and it still exists entire at Angora, the ancient Ancyra. When the inhabitants of Ancyra erected a temple to Augustus, who had been their benefactor, they thought they could not honour his memory better than by engraving this account, or rather this glorification of his life that he had himself composed. Since that time, the monument consecrated to Augustus has more than once changed its destination; to the Greek temple a Byzantine church succeeded, and to the church a Turkish school. The roof has fallen in, dragging with it the ornaments of the summit, the columns of the porticoes have disappeared, and to the ancient ruins has been added the rubbish of the Byzantine and Turkish buildings, which are already also in ruins. But by singular good fortune the slabs of marble which recount the actions of Augustus have remained solidly attached to the indestructible walls.

This is a favourable opportunity for studying this monument. M. Perrot[381] has just brought from Galatia a more correct copy of the Latin text, and an altogether new part of the Greek translation which elucidates and completes the Latin. Thanks to him, with the exception of a few lacunae of little importance, the inscription is now complete, and can be read from beginning to end. We can therefore now perceive and interpret its general sense.

I.

The first characteristic that we notice when we read the Ancyran inscription, is its majestic tone. It is impossible not to be struck by it. We see at once, by a certain air of authority, that the man who is speaking has governed the whole world for more than fifty years. He knows the importance of the things he has done: he knows that he has introduced a new state of society, and presided over one of the greatest changes of human history. Accordingly, although he only recapitulates facts and quotes figures, all he says has a grand air, and he knows how to give so majestic a turn to these dry enumerations that we feel ourselves seized by a sort of involuntary respect in reading them. We must, however, be on our guard. A majestic tone may be a convenient veil to hide many weaknesses; the example of Louis XIV., so near to our own times, ought to teach us not to trust it without examination. We must not forget, besides, that dignity was so truly a Roman characteristic, that its appearance was preserved long after the reality had disappeared. When we read the inscriptions of the latter years of the empire we scarcely perceive that it is about to perish. Those wretched princes who possessed but a few provinces speak as though they ruled over the entire universe, and their grossest falsehoods are expressed with an incredible dignity. If we wish, then, to avoid being deceived when studying the monuments of Roman history, we must be on our guard against a first impression, which may be deceptive, and look at things closely.

Although the inscription that we are studying is called “An account of the deeds of Augustus,” it was not really his whole life that Augustus meant to relate. There are great and intentional lacunae; he did not intend to tell everything. When, at the age of seventy-six, and in the midst of the admiration and respect of the whole world, the aged prince reviewed his past life to make a rapid summary of it, many memories must have disturbed him. There is no doubt, for instance, that he must have been very reluctant to recall the earlier years of his political life. It was needful, however, to say something about them, and it was more prudent to try and gloss them over than to preserve a silence that might give rise to much talk. He extricated himself in the following manner: “At nineteen years of age,” he says, “I raised an army by my own exertions and at my own expense; with it I restored liberty to the republic, which had been dominated by a faction that oppressed it. In return, the senate, by its decrees, admitted me into its number, among the consulars, conferred upon me the right of commanding the troops, and charged me together with the consuls C. Pansa and A. Hirtius to watch over the safety of the state with the title of pro-praetor. Both the consuls having died the same year, the people put me in their place, and appointed me triumvir to put in order the republic.” In these few lines, which form the beginning of the inscription, there are already some very singular omissions. One would infer from them that he had obtained all the dignities that he enumerates, in serving the same cause, and that nothing had happened between the first offices that he had received and the triumvirate. Thanks to the _Philippics_ we know those decrees of the senate which are here alluded to with a certain shamelessness. The senate congratulates the young Caesar “for defending the liberty of the Roman people,” and for having defeated Antony; now, it was after having concerted with Antony to enslave the Roman people, in that dismal interview at Bologna, that he received, or rather took the title of triumvir. The inscription preserves a prudent silence on all these things.

What followed this interview was still more difficult to relate. Here especially Augustus desired forgetfulness. “I exiled those who had killed my father, punishing their crime by the regular tribunals. Then, as they made war against the republic, I conquered them in two battles.” It will be remarked that there is no mention of the proscriptions. What, indeed, could he say about them? Could any artifice of language diminish their horror? On the whole it was more becoming not to speak of them. But as, according to the fine reflection of Tacitus, it is easier to keep silence than to forget, we may be assured that Augustus, who says nothing here of the proscriptions, thought of them more than once during his life. Even if he did not feel remorse, he must often have been embarrassed by the terrible contradiction between his past and his later policy; for, whatever he might do, the memory of the proscriptions always belied his official character as a clement and honourable man. Even here, it seems to me, he betrays his embarrassment. His silence does not entirely satisfy him, he feels that in spite of his discretion unpleasant memories cannot fail to be awakened in the minds of his readers; and, therefore, to anticipate and disarm them, he hastens to add: “I carried my arms by land and sea over the whole world in my wars against the citizens and foreigners. After my victory, I pardoned the citizens who had survived the combat, and I chose to preserve rather than to destroy those foreign nations whom I could spare without danger.”

This difficult place once passed it became easier to relate the rest. Nevertheless, he is still very brief with respect to the earlier times. Perhaps he feared lest the memory of the civil wars should interfere with that reconciliation of parties which the universal exhaustion had brought about after Actium? There is certainly not a single word in the whole inscription to revive the former rancours. He says scarcely anything of his old rivals. There is at the most but a single disdainful word about Lepidus, and an ill-natured but passing accusation against Antony of having seized the treasures of the temples. The following is all he says of his war with Sextus Pompey which gave him so much trouble, and of those valiant seamen who had vanquished him: “I cleared the sea of pirates, and in that war I captured thirty thousand fugitive slaves, who had fought against the republic, and delivered them to their masters to be chastised.” As to that great victory of Actium, which had given him the empire of the world, he only recalls it to state the eagerness of Italy and the western provinces to declare themselves in his favour.

Naturally he prefers to dwell upon the events of the later years of his reign, and we feel that he is more at ease when he speaks of victories in which the vanquished were not Romans. He is justly proud to recall how he had avenged the insults the national pride had suffered before him: “I re-took, after victories gained in Spain and over the Dalmatians, the standards that some generals had lost. I forced the Parthians to restore the spoils and ensigns of three Roman armies, and humbly to come and demand our friendship. I placed these ensigns in the sanctuary of Mars the Avenger.” We can understand also that he speaks with satisfaction of the campaigns against the Germans, being careful, however, to pass over in silence the disaster of Varus, and that he is anxious to preserve the memory of those distant expeditions that impressed so strongly the imagination of his contemporaries. “The Roman fleet,” he says, “sailed from the mouth of the Rhine towards the quarter where the sun rises, as far as those distant countries where no Roman had yet penetrated either by land or sea. The Cimbri, the Charydes, the Semnones and other German tribes of those countries sent ambassadors to ask my friendship and that of the Roman people. Under my orders and direction two armies were sent almost at the same time to Arabia and Ethiopia. After having conquered many nations, and taken many prisoners, they reached the city of Nabata, in Ethiopia, and the boundaries of the Sabaeans and the city of Mariba, in Arabia.”

But whatever interest we may find in these historical recollections, the interest of the Ancyra monument does not specially lie in them. Its real importance consists in what it tells us of the internal government of Augustus.

Here again we must read with caution. Politicians are very seldom in the habit of posting up on the walls of temples the principles that guide them, and of imparting the secrets of their conduct so generously to the public. It is evident that Augustus, who wrote here for all the world, did not intend to tell everything, and that if we wish to learn the exact truth, and to know thoroughly the character of his institutions, we must look elsewhere. The historian, Dio Cassius, gives us the most complete information on this subject. Dio is very little read, and it is not surprising, for he has none of the qualities that attract readers. His narrative is constantly interrupted by interminable harangues, which repel the most patient reader. He was a man of narrow mind, without political capacity, taken up with ridiculous superstitions, and he attributes the same characteristics to his historical personages. Truly it was worth while to have been twice consul in order to tell us seriously that, after a great defeat, Octavius took courage on seeing a fish leap out of the sea to his feet! What adds to the annoyance he gives us is, that as he has often treated of the same subjects as Tacitus, he constantly suggests comparisons that are unflattering to himself. We must, however, take care not to underrate him; tedious as he is, he renders us very useful services. If he has not the broad views of Tacitus, he devotes himself to details and does wonders. No one has ever been more exact and minute than he. I think of him as a zealous government official who has passed through all the grades and grown old in his profession. He knows thoroughly that official and administrative world in which he has lived; he speaks of it accurately, and loves to speak of it. With these inclinations, it is natural that he should be interested in the reforms introduced by Augustus into the internal government of the empire. He is anxious to let us know them in detail; and, true to his rhetorician’s habits and to his unbridled love for fine speeches, he assumes that it was Maecenas who proposed to Augustus to establish them, and he takes advantage of the opportunity to make him speak at great length.[382] The discourse of Maecenas contains, in truth, what we may call the general theory of the empire. This interesting sketch, which was realized later, aids us greatly in understanding that part which we have still to examine of the inscription of Ancyra. We should always bear it in mind in order to apprehend thoroughly the spirit of the institutions of Augustus, the motive of his liberalities, the hidden meaning of the facts he mentions, and above all the character of his relations with the different classes of citizens.

Let us begin by studying the relations of Augustus with his soldiers. “About ... thousand Romans,”[383] says he, “bore arms under me. I established in colonies, or sent back to their municipia after their term of service, rather more than three hundred thousand. I gave land, or money to buy it, to all of them.” On two different occasions, after the wars against Sextus Pompey, and against Antony, Augustus was at the head of about fifty legions; he had only twenty-five when he died. But this number, reduced as it was, still weighed intolerably upon the finances of the empire. The immense increase of expenditure that the creation of great standing armies threw upon the treasury prevented Augustus for a long time, notwithstanding the prosperity of his reign, from having what we should now call a budget in equilibrium. Four times he was obliged to aid the public treasury from his private fortune, and he reckons the amounts that he presented to the state at one hundred and fifty million sesterces (£1,200,000). He had much trouble to remedy these financial difficulties, of which the expenses of the army were the principal cause. This gave him the idea of creating a sort of military pension fund, and of appealing, in order to fill it, to the generosity of the allied kings and cities, and of the richest Roman citizens; and in order to stimulate others by his own example, he gave one hundred and seventy million sesterces (£1,360,000) at one time. But these voluntary gifts being insufficient it was necessary to impose new taxes, and to fill the treasury of the army with the proceeds of a tax of a twentieth on inheritances and a hundredth on sales. Yet it seems that, notwithstanding these efforts, pensions were ill paid, since this was one of the grievances that the legions of Pannonia alleged in their revolt against Tiberius. It is certain that the army of Augustus was one of the greatest anxieties of his administration. His own legions gave him as much trouble as those of the enemy. He had to do with soldiers who felt that they were the masters, and who for ten years had been corrupted by flattery and promises. On the eve of battle they were very exacting because they knew how much they were required; after victory they became unmanageable from the pride with which it inspired them. In order to satisfy them, it would have been necessary to expropriate all the inhabitants of Italy in a body. Octavius had consented to this at first, after Philippi; but later, when his policy changed, when he understood that he could not found a stable government if he drew on himself the hatred of the Italians, he resolved to pay the proprietors handsomely for the lands that he gave his veterans. “I reimbursed the municipia,” he says, “in money, the value of the lands that I gave to my soldiers in my fourth consulship, and later under the consulship of M. Crassus and Cn. Lentulus. I paid six hundred million sesterces (£4,800,000) for the lands situated in Italy, and two hundred and sixty million sesterces (£2,080,000) for those situated in the provinces. Of all those who have established colonies of soldiers in the provinces and in Italy, I am, up to now, the first and only one who has acted thus.” He was right in boasting of it. It was not at all the habit of the generals of that time to pay for what they took, and he himself had given another example for a long time. When, a little later, he dared to resist the demands of his veterans, he had to maintain terrible struggles in which his life was more than once in danger. In every way, his demeanour towards his soldiers at that time is one of the things that do him most honour. He owed everything to them, and he had none of the qualities which were necessary to master them, neither the abilities of Caesar nor the defects of Antony; and yet he dared to make head against them, and succeeded in obtaining the mastery. It is very remarkable that, although he had gained his power solely by war, he was able to maintain the predominance of the civil element in the government that he founded. If the empire, in which there was no longer any other element of strength and life than the army, did not become from that period a military monarchy, it is assuredly owing to his firmness.

Nothing is more simple than the relations of Augustus with the people. The information that the Ancyra inscription furnishes upon this subject is quite in accord with the discourse of Maecenas: he fed them and amused them. Here, to begin with, is the exact account of the sums he expended to feed them: “I reckoned to the Roman people three hundred sesterces (£2 8_s._) a head according to my father’s testament, and four hundred sesterces (£3 4_s._) in my own name, out of the spoils of the war during my fifth consulship. Another time, in my tenth consulship, I gave a gratuity of four hundred sesterces to each citizen, from my private fortune. During my eleventh consulship I made twelve distributions of corn at my own cost. When I was invested for the twelfth time with the tribunitian power, I again gave four hundred sesterces a head to the people. All these distributions were made to no fewer than two hundred and fifty thousand persons. Invested for the eighteenth time with the tribunitian power, and consul for the twelfth, I gave sixty denarii (£1 10_s._ 4_d._) a head to three hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants of Rome. During my fourth consulship I had one thousand sesterces (£8) for each of my soldiers, previously deducted from the spoil, and distributed in the colonies formed by them. About one hundred and twenty thousand colonists received their share in the distribution that followed my triumph. Consul for the thirteenth time, I gave sixty denarii to each of those who then received distributions of corn; there were rather more than two hundred thousand.” After these truly startling liberalities Augustus mentions the public games he gave to the people, and although the text has several lacunae here, we may suppose that it did not cost him less to amuse the people than to feed them. “I gave shows of gladiators[384] ... times in my own name, and five times in the names of my children or grandchildren. In these different _fêtes_ about ten thousand men fought. Twice in my own name, and three times in the names of my son and grandson, I had combats of wrestlers whom I had brought from all countries. I celebrated public games four times in my own name, and twenty-three times in place of magistrates who were absent or could not support the expense of these games.... I showed twenty-six times in my own name, or in the names of my sons and grandsons, African wild beast hunts, in the circus, on the Forum, or in the amphitheatres, and about three thousand five hundred of these beasts were killed. I gave the people the spectacle of a naval combat, beyond the Tiber, where the wood of the Caesars now is. I had a canal dug there one thousand eight hundred feet long by one thousand two hundred feet broad. There thirty ships armed with rams, triremes, biremes, and a large number of smaller vessels fought together. These vessels contained, besides their rowers, a crew of three thousand men.” Here, as it seems to me, is a curious and official commentary on the famous expression of Juvenal, _panem et circenses_. We see clearly that it was not a sally of the poet, but a veritable principle of policy happily invented by Augustus that his successors preserved as a tradition of government.

The relations of Augustus with the senate, we can well understand, were more difficult and complicated. Even after Pharsalia and Philippi it was still a great name that it was necessary to treat with consideration. Depressed as it was, the old aristocracy still caused some fear, and seemed to deserve some regard. This is well seen by the care that Augustus takes in his testament never to speak of the senate but with respect. Its name comes up at every turn with a sort of affectation. We should say indeed, if we trusted to appearances, that the senate was then the master, and that the prince was contented to execute its decrees. This is what Augustus wished to be believed. He passed all his life in dissembling his authority or lamenting about it. From his royal dwelling on the Palatine he wrote the most pathetic letters to the senate asking to be relieved of the burden of public affairs, and he never appeared to have a greater aversion for power than at the moment when he was concentrating all powers in his own hands. It is not extraordinary that we find these methods again in his testament: they had succeeded too well with his contemporaries for him not to be tempted to make use of them with posterity. Accordingly he continues to play the same comedy of moderation and disinterestedness. He affects, for instance, to insist as much upon the honours that he refused as upon those that he accepted. “During the consulship of M. Marcellus and L. Arruntius,” he says, “when the senate and people asked me to accept an absolute authority,[385] I did not accept it. But I did not refuse to undertake the supervision of supplies in a great famine, and by the expenditure that I made I delivered the people from their fears and dangers. When, in return, they offered me the consulship annually or for life, I refused it.” This is not the only time that he dwells on his own moderation. More than once again he refers to dignities or presents that he would not accept. But here, indeed, is something that passes all bounds; “In my sixth and seventh consulship, after having suppressed the civil wars, when the common voice of all the citizens offered me the supreme power, I restored the government of the republic to the senate and people. As a recompense for this action I received the title of Augustus by a decree of the senate, my door was encircled with laurels and surmounted by a civic crown, and a golden shield was placed in the Julian curia with an inscription recording that this honour was awarded me as a mark of respect to my virtue, clemency, justice, and piety. From this moment, although I was above the rest in dignity in the offices with which I was invested, I never claimed more power than I allowed to my colleagues.” This curious passage shows how inscriptions may deceive if we trust them blindly. Would it not seem that we should be right in concluding that in the year of Rome 726, the republic had been re-established by the generosity of Augustus? Now it was exactly at this period that the absolute power of the emperor was delivered from all fear of attack from without and, being quietly accepted by everybody, was finally established. Dio himself, the official Dio, who is so ready to take the word of the emperor, cannot accept this falsehood of Augustus; he ventures to show that he is not deceived, and has no difficulty in proving that this government, under whatever name it is disguised, was at bottom a monarchy; he might have added that there was never a more absolute monarchy. A single man constituted himself the heir of all the magistrates of the republic, and united all their powers in himself. He ignored the people whom he no longer consulted; he is the master of the senate, which he chooses and forms at will; at once consul and pontif, he regulates actions and beliefs; invested with the tribunitian power, he is inviolable and sacred, that is to say, that the least word let fall against him becomes a sacrilege; as censor, under the title of praefect of morals, he can control the conduct of private persons, and interfere, when he likes, in the most private affairs of life.[386] Everything is subordinated to him, private as well as public life, and his authority can penetrate everywhere from the senate to the most humble and obscure hearths. Add to this that the boundaries of his empire are those of the civilized world; barbarism begins where slavery ends, and there is not even the sad resource of exile against this despotism. Yet it is the man who possesses this appalling power, whom nothing in his immense empire escapes, and from whose empire it is impossible to escape, it is he who has just told us with a bare-faced assurance that he refused to accept absolute power!

It must be acknowledged that this absolute power, which he veiled with so much precaution, sought also by every possible means to reconcile men to itself. All the compensations which might make a people forget its liberty were given to the Romans by Augustus with a free hand. I do not speak only of that material prosperity which made the number of citizens increase by nearly a million in his reign;[387] nor even of the repose and security which, at the close of the civil war, was the most imperious need of the whole world, but also of that incomparable splendour with which he adorned Rome. This was a sure means of pleasing the people. Caesar knew this well, and had expended one hundred million sesterces (£800,000) at one time, simply in buying the ground on which his Forum was to stand. Augustus did still more. The Ancyra inscription contains a list of the public buildings he constructed, but it is so long that it is impossible to quote it all. He mentions fifteen temples, several porticoes, a theatre, a senate house, a Forum, a basilica, aqueducts, public roads, etc.; in truth Rome was entirely reconstructed by him. We may say that no public building was passed over by him, and that he restored all those that he did not rebuild. He completed Pompey’s theatre and the Forum of Caesar, and rebuilt the Capitol; in a single year he repaired eighty-two temples that were falling into ruin. He did not expend so many millions without a purpose, and all this profusion in such a careful ruler covered a profound political design. He wished to dazzle the people, to intoxicate them with luxury and magnificence in order to divert them from the intrusive memories of the past. That Rome of marble that he built was intended to make them forget the Rome of brick.

This was not the only compensation that Augustus offered to the people; he made them nobler amends, and thus sought to legitimatize his power. If he demanded the sacrifice of their liberty he took care to gratify their national pride in every way. No man compelled the respect of foreign nations for Rome more than he; no man gave her more reason for pride in the ascendency she enjoyed among her neighbours. The latter part of the inscription is filled with the gratifying recital of the marks of respect that the remotest countries of the world paid to Rome under his reign. He was eager to direct their attention towards this external glory, lest they should fix it with some regret on what was taking place at home. Those citizens whom the aspect of the deserted Forum and the obedient senate depressed, he pointed to the Roman armies penetrating among the Pannonians and the Arabs, to the Roman fleets navigating the Rhine and the Danube, to the kings of the Britons, the Suevi, and the Marcomanni, refugees at Rome, imploring the support of the legions, to the Medes and Parthians, those terrible enemies of Rome, who asked of her a king, to the most distant nations, the least known and the best protected by their distance and their obscurity, moved by this great name that reaches them for the first time and soliciting the Roman alliance. “Ambassadors came to me from India, from kings who had never yet sent to any Roman general. The Bastarnae, the Scythians, and the Sarmatians who dwell on this side the Tanaïs, and beyond that river, the kings of the Albanians, the Hiberi and the Medes sent ambassadors to me asking our friendship.” It was very difficult for the most discontented to hold out against so much grandeur. But his greatest master-stroke was that he extended this consideration for the glory of Rome even to the past. He honoured all who had laboured for her at all times, says Suetonius,[388] almost as much as the gods; and to show that none was excluded from this veneration, he raised again the statue of Pompey, at the base of which Caesar had fallen, and set it up in a public place. This generous conduct was also a wise policy. By claiming a share in the glories of the past, he disarmed, by anticipation, those men who might be tempted to use them against him, and, at the same time, gave a species of sanction to his authority by attaching it in some sort to these old memories. Whatever difference might distinguish the government that he founded from that of the republic, both agreed on one point: they sought the greatness of Rome. Augustus tried to reconcile the past with the present on this common ground. He also had adorned Rome, defended her frontiers, extended her empire, and made her name respected. He had continued and completed that work on which they had laboured for seven centuries. He might, then, call himself the continuator and heir of all those who had set their hand to it; of Cato, Paulus Emilius, and Scipio, and rank himself among them. He did not fail to do so when he built the Forum that bore his name; we know from Suetonius that, under those porticoes raised by him and filled with the records of his actions, he ranged all the great men of the republic in triumphal costume. This was the highest point of his political skill, for by connecting them with his glory he received in turn a share of theirs, and thus turned to his own advantage the greatness of the political order which he had overturned.

These compensations that Augustus offered to the Romans in exchange for their liberty seem to have satisfied them. Every one quickly got accustomed to the new government, and it may be said that Augustus reigned without opposition. The plots which more than once threatened his life were the crimes of a few isolated malcontents, of young thoughtless fellows whom he had disgraced, or of vulgar and ambitious men who desired his position; they were not the work of political parties. Can it even be said that there were any political parties at this moment? Those of Sextus Pompey and Antony had not survived the death of their chiefs; and, since Philippi, there were scarcely any republicans. From that moment all wise men adopted the maxim “that the vast body of the empire could not stand upright and stable without some one to direct it.” A few obstinate men alone, who were not yet converted, wrote violent declamations in the schools under the name of Erutus and Cicero, or allowed themselves to speak freely in those polite gatherings which were the _salons_ of that time: _in conviviis rodunt_, _in circulis vellicant_. But those were unimportant exceptions which disappeared in the midst of the universal admiration and respect. During more than fifty years the senate, the knights, and the people used all their ingenuity to find new honours for him who had given Rome internal peace, and who maintained her grandeur so vigorously abroad. Augustus has been careful to recall all this homage in the inscription we are studying, not in a fit of puerile vanity, but to represent that agreement of all orders in the state which seemed to legitimatize his authority. This idea is shown especially in the last lines of the inscription, where he recalls that circumstance of his life which was most dear to him, because in it the agreement of all citizens had most strikingly appeared: “While I was consul for the thirteenth time, the senate, the order of knights, and all the people gave me the name of Father of our Country, and desired that this should be inscribed in the vestibule of my house, in the curia, and in my Forum, below the quadrigae which had been placed there in my honour by a decree of the senate. When I wrote these things I was in my seventy-sixth year.” It was not without reason that he reserved this detail for the end. This title of Father of his Country, by which he was saluted in the name of all the citizens by Messala, the old friend of Brutus, seemed to be the legal consecration of a power acquired by illegal means and a sort of amnesty that Rome accorded to the past. We can well understand that Augustus, even when dying, dwelt with satisfaction on a recollection which seemed like an absolution, and that he was anxious to terminate in this fashion his review of his political life.

II.

I should like to give, in a few words, the impression that the analysis of this remarkable inscription makes upon me as to its author.

The whole political life of Augustus is contained in two official documents which, by singular good fortune, have both come down to us; I mean the preamble of the edict of proscription that Octavius signed, and, according to all appearance, drew up himself, which Appian has preserved; and the inscription found on the walls of the temple of Ancyra. The former shows us what Octavius was at twenty, fresh from the hands of the rhetoricians and philosophers, with all the genuine instincts of his nature; the latter, what he became after fifty-six years of uncontrolled and unlimited power; it is sufficient to compare them in order to discover the road he had traversed, and the changes that the knowledge of men and the practice of public affairs had wrought in him.

The possession of power had made him better, a thing which is not usual, and after him Roman history only gives us examples of princes depraved by power. From the battle of Philippi to that of Actium, or rather to the moment when he seems formally to ask pardon of the world by abolishing all the acts of the triumvirate, we feel that he is striving to become better, and we can almost follow the steps of his progress. I do not think that we could find another example of so strong an effort at self-conquest, and so complete a success in overcoming one’s natural disposition. He was naturally a coward, and hid himself in his tent in his first battle. I know not how he did it, but he succeeded in acquiring courage; he became inured to war in fighting against Sextus Pompey, and even courageous in the expedition against the Dalmatians, in which he was twice wounded. He was cynical and debauched, and the orgies of his youth, as related by Suetonius, do not yield to Antony’s; yet he corrected himself at the very moment that he became absolute master, that is just when his passions would have met with the fewest obstacles. He was naturally cruel, and coldly cruel, a disposition which does not often change; and yet, after having begun by assassinating his benefactors, he ended by sparing those who attempted his assassination, and the philosopher Seneca could call the same man a clement prince[389] whom his best friend, Maecenas, had once called a common executioner. Certainly the man who signed the edict of proscription hardly seems to be the same as the man who wrote the testament, and it is indeed matter for wonder that a man who began as he did was able to change so completely, and to assume a virtuous character, or the appearance of one, in the place of all the vices that were natural to him.

Nevertheless we should find it difficult to love him, whatever justice we are bound to do him. We may be wrong after all; for reason tells us that we ought to appreciate people more for the qualities they acquire by thus triumphing over themselves than for those they have by nature, without taking any trouble. And yet, I hardly know why, it is only the latter that please us; the former lack a certain charm that nature alone gives and which wins our hearts. The effort is too apparent in them, and behind the effort some personal interest; for we always suspect that a man has taken so much pains only because there was some advantage to be gained. This sort of acquired goodness, in which reason has a greater share than nature, attracts no one, because it appears to be the product of a calculating mind, and it is this feeling that causes all the virtues of Augustus to leave us unmoved, and to seem at the most but the results of a profound sagacity. They want a touch of nature and simplicity in order to affect us. These are qualities that this stiff and formal personage never knew, although according to Suetonius he gladly assumed an appearance of plain manners and good-nature in his familiar intercourse. But one is not a good fellow simply through wishing to be it, and his private letters, of which we have a few fragments, show that his pleasantries lacked ease, and that his simplicity was the result of effort. Do we not know, besides, from Suetonius himself, that he wrote down what he meant to say to his friends, in order to leave nothing to chance, and that he even occasionally wrote down his conversations with Livia beforehand?[390]

But, after all, that which spoils Augustus in our opinion is that he stands so near Caesar; the contrast between them is complete. Caesar, not to speak of what was really great and brilliant in his nature, attracts us at once by his frankness. His ambition may displease us, but he had at least the merit of not hiding it. I do not know why M. Mommsen exerts himself in his _Roman History_ to prove that Caesar did not care for the diadem, and that Antony, when he offered it, had not consulted him. I prefer to hold to the common opinion which, I think, does not do him wrong. He wished to be king, and to bear the title as well as to exercise the power. He never made pretence of waiting to be asked to accept honours that he passionately desired, as Augustus did. He was not the man to make us believe that he only retained the supreme authority with reluctance, and would not have dared to tell us, at the very moment that he was drawing all powers into his hands, that he had restored the government of the republic to the people and senate. We know, on the contrary, that after Pharsalia he said frankly that “the republic” was a phrase without meaning, and that Sulla was a fool to have abdicated the dictatorship. In everything, even in questions of literature and grammar, he was a bold innovator, and he did not display a hypocritical respect for the past at the very time that he was destroying what had come down from it. This frankness is more to our taste than the false appearance of veneration that Augustus lavished on the senate after reducing it to impotence; and whatever admiration Suetonius may express for him, when he shows him to us, obsequiously saluting each senator by name, before the sittings commenced, I am not sure that I do not prefer the disrespectful behaviour of Caesar to this comedy, Caesar who at last went so far as not to rise when the senate visited him. Both appeared weary of power, but it never came into any one’s mind to think that Augustus was speaking the truth when he asked so earnestly to be restored to private life. The distaste of Caesar was deeper and more sincere. That sovereign power, that he had sought after for more than twenty years with an indefatigable persistence, through so many perils, and by means of dark intrigues the remembrance of which must have made him blush, did not answer to his expectations, and appeared unsatisfying to him though he had so eagerly desired it. He knew that he was detested by the men whose esteem he most desired; he was constrained to make use of men whom he despised, and whose excesses dishonoured his victory; the higher he rose, the more unpleasing did human nature appear to him, and the more clearly did he see the base greed and cowardly treachery of those who intrigued at his feet. He came at last, through disgust, to have no interest in life; it seemed to him to be no longer worth the trouble of preserving and defending. It is, therefore, the same man who said, even at the period when Cicero delivered the _pro Marcello_: “I have lived long enough for nature or for glory;” who later, when he was pressed to take precautions against his assassins, answered in a tone of despondency: “I would rather die at once than live in fear;” who might well have said with Corneille:

“I desired the empire and I have attained to it;
But I knew not what it was that I desired:
In its possession I have found, instead of delights,
Appalling cares, continual alarms,
A thousand secret enemies, death at every turn,
No pleasure without alloy, and never repose.”

These fine lines please me less, I admit, put into the mouth of Augustus. This cautious politician, so cold, so self-possessed, does not seem to me to have really known that noble sadness that reveals the man in the hero, that melancholy of a heart ill at ease, notwithstanding its successes, and disgusted with power through the very exercise of power. Whatever admiration I may feel for that fine scene in which Augustus proposes to abdicate the empire, I cannot avoid being a little vexed with Corneille that he took so seriously and depicted so gravely that solemn piece of acting which deceived nobody in Rome, and when I wish to render my pleasure complete in reading the tragedy of _Cinna_, I am always tempted to replace the character of Augustus by that of Caesar.

I add, in conclusion, that all these insincere affectations of Augustus were not only defects of character, but also political errors which left most unfortunate effects on the government that he had created. It was precisely the uncertainty that the interested falsehoods of Augustus had thrown upon the real nature and limits of the power of the earlier Caesars that rendered their tyranny insupportable. When a government boldly states its principles we know how to behave towards it; but what course is to be followed, what language held when the forms of liberty are united with the reality of despotism, when absolute power hides under republican fictions? In the midst of this obscurity every course has danger and threatens ruin. Men are ruined by independence, they may also be ruined by servility; for, if he who refuses anything to the emperor is an open enemy who regrets the republic, may not he who eagerly grants everything be a secret enemy, who wishes to show that the republic no longer exists? In studying Tacitus we find the statesmen of this terrible period moving at random among these wilfully accumulated uncertainties, stumbling at every step over unseen dangers, liable to displease if they are silent or if they speak, if they flatter or if they resist, continually asking themselves with dread how they can satisfy this ambiguous and ill-defined authority whose limits escape them. This want of sincerity in the institutions of Augustus may be said to have been the torment of several generations. All the evil came because Augustus thought more of the present than of the future. He was an able man, full of resources in escaping from embarrassing and difficult situations; he was not in reality a great politician, for it seems that his view seldom extended beyond the difficulties of the moment. Placed face to face with a people who bore the kingship uneasily, and who were not fit for anything else, he invented this sort of disguised kingship, and allowed all the forms of the old government to exist by its side without endeavouring to conform them to it. But if he was not so great a politician as it has been pretended, it must be admitted that he was an excellent administrator; that part of his work deserves all the praise that has been lavished on it. By co-ordinating all the wise observances and useful regulations that the republic had created, by putting in force lost traditions, by himself creating new institutions for the administration of Rome, the service of the legions, the handling of the finances and the government of the provinces, he organized the empire and thus rendered it capable of resisting external enemies and internal causes of dissolution. If, notwithstanding a detestable political system, the general lowering of character, and the vices of the governors and the governed, the empire still had a time of prosperity and lasted three centuries, it owed it to the powerful organization it had received from Augustus. This was the really vital part of his work. It is important enough to justify the testimony that he bears to himself in that haughty phrase of the Ancyran inscription: “I made new laws. I restored to honour the examples of our forefathers which were disappearing from our manners, and I have myself left examples worthy of being imitated by our descendants.”

III.

It was no doubt about the middle of the reign, when he who was the absolute master of the republic was pretending to restore the government to the people and senate, that Cicero’s letters appeared. The exact date of their publication is unknown; but everything tends to the belief that it should be placed in the years that followed the battle of Actium. The power of Augustus, become more popular since it had become more moderate, felt itself strong enough to allow some liberty of writing. It was mistrustful before that time because it was not sufficiently consolidated; it became so again later when it perceived that public favour was passing from it. This reign, which began by proscribing men, ended by burning books. Cicero’s correspondence could only have been published in the interval that separates these periods.