Augustus (59 page)

Claudius was more or less forgotten until brought to court by the emperor Caligula, who treated him as an unpaid clown. When Caligula was assassinated, Praetorian Guardsmen found Claudius hiding behind a curtain in the palace, took him to their camp, and hailed him as emperor. A nervous Senate agreed.

To general surprise, Claudius turned out to be rather a good emperor. He annexed the remote island of Britannia to the Roman empire. Despite the fact that the long dead Livia had made his early life a misery, he generously arranged for her deification.

Claudius had bad luck with his wives. The beautiful and wayward Messalina shared the elder Julia’s taste for lively parties in the Forum where she mixed sex with politics. Her cuckolded husband reluctantly put her to death.

Messalina was followed by Germanicus’ strong-minded daughter Agrippina, who persuaded Claudius to adopt her son Nero, and in
A.D.
54 killed the gourmand emperor with a dish of delicious but poisoned (or perhaps poisonous) mushrooms.

In
A.D.
15, Germanicus led an army across the Rhine and visited the battle sites where Varus lost his legions and his life. Tacitus gave an unforgettable description of the eerie scene:

On the open ground were whitening bones, scattered where men had fled, heaped up where they had stood and fought back. Fragments of spears and of horses’ limbs lay there—also human heads, fastened to tree-trunks. In groves nearby were the outlandish altars at which the Germans had massacred the Roman colonels and senior company-commanders.

The Romans never again attempted to expand their territory beyond the Rhine, and excitable historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have argued that we owe to the
Variana clades
the millennia-long division of Europe into two parts—one touched by Rome, the other not: Britain and the Romance countries, and the Teutonic peoples of central and northern Europe. If Augustus had had his way and brought the frontier of his empire to the Elbe, there would have been “no Charlemagne, no Louis XIV, no Napoleon, no Kaiser Wilhelm II, and no Hitler.”

This binary approach to European history oversimplifies a complicated story. The distance between the Rhine and the Elbe is not so great as to have brought about such dizzying consequences. Also, we must not forget that Roman culture spread its influence far beyond the imperial lands themselves. Rome’s true inheritor, the Roman Catholic Church, was able to create a unified Europe that stretched from the Atlantic to the Urals, the culture of Christendom.

That said, the massacre at Kalkriese did mark a turning point in the history of Rome. With a few exceptions, such as the ephemeral conquests of the emperor Trajan in the second century
A.D.
, the empire had more or less reached its natural extent by the death of Augustus. Rome’s military and administrative capacity did not allow it to govern a larger territory.

There was much discussion at Rome about the late Augustus’ virtues and vices. It was elegantly summarized by Tacitus:

Intelligent people praised or criticized him in varying terms. One opinion was as follows. Filial duty and a national emergency, in which there was no place for law-abiding conduct, had driven him to civil war—and this can be neither initiated nor maintained by decent methods. He had made many concessions to Antony and to Lepidus for the sake of vengeance on his father’s murderers. When Lepidus grew old and lazy, and Antony’s self-indulgence got the better of him, the only possible cure for the distracted country had been government by one man. However, Augustus had put the state in order not by making himself king or dictator, but by creating the Principate. The empire’s frontiers were on the ocean, or distant rivers. Armies, provinces, fleets, the whole system was interrelated. Roman citizens were protected by the law. Provincials were decently treated. Rome itself had been lavishly beautified. Force had been sparingly used—merely to preserve peace for the majority.

According to a second and opposing opinion, “filial duty and national crisis had been merely pretexts. In actual fact, the motive of Octavian, the future Augustus, was lust for power…. There had certainly been peace, but it was a blood-stained peace of disasters and assassinations.”

Down the centuries, judgments have oscillated between these poles. But opposites do not have to be mutually exclusive, and we are not obliged to choose one or the other. The story of his career shows that Augustus was indeed ruthless, cruel, and ambitious for himself. This was only in part a personal trait, for upper-class Romans were educated to compete with one another and to excel. However, he combined an overriding concern for his personal interests with a deep-seated patriotism, based on a nostalgic idea of Rome’s antique virtues. In his capacity as
princeps,
selfishness and selflessness were elided in his mind.

While fighting for dominance, he paid little attention to legality or to the normal civilities of political life. He was devious, untrustworthy, and bloodthirsty. But once he had established his authority, he governed efficiently and justly, generally allowed freedom of speech, and promoted the rule of law. He was immensely hardworking and tried as hard as any democratic parliamentarian to treat his senatorial colleagues with respect and sensitivity. He suffered from no delusions of grandeur.

Augustus lacked the flair of his adoptive father, Julius Caesar, but he possessed one valuable quality to which Caesar could not lay claim: patience. He had the practical common sense of an Italian country gentleman, for it was from that stock that he grew. He made haste slowly, seeking permanent solutions rather than easy answers. He did not revel in power; he sought to understand it. Plutarch has an anecdote that sums up Augustus’ approach to his responsibilities. Hearing that Alexander the Great had been at a loss about what to do next after his vast conquests, the
princeps
remarked: “I am surprised the king did not realize that a far harder task than winning an empire is putting it into order once you have won it.”

Perhaps the most instructive aspect of Augustus’ approach to politics was his twin recognition that in the long run power was unsustainable without consent, and that consent could best be won by associating radical constitutional change with a traditional and moralizing ideology.

And what of the man himself? His public persona, the imperturbably calm young man of the statues, is unrevealing—to borrow Tennyson’s phrase, “faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null.” But luckily some of the ancient literary sources—above all, Suetonius—reveal the
princeps
in undress. Here is someone who loved his sister and spent fifty years happily married to his childless wife. In his personal life, he was not greatly interested in appearances, was a good friend, and had a self-deprecating sense of humor and sound judgment. It is impossible not to warm to the old man who adored his “little donkey” Gaius, and to sense the depth of his tragedy when, in their various ways, his closest relatives turned their backs on him—all except Livia.

The contrast between the splendor of state ceremonial and Rome’s restored monumental center, on the one hand, and Augustus’ austere lifestyle on the other, was, of course, a conscious policy, which magnified Rome while seeking to counter individual decadence. It would appear, though, that his simple habits had a basis in modest personal tastes.

Of course, there were two sides to Augustus’ personality, which looked Janus-like in opposing directions: the affectionate family man was also the ancient lecher; the plain-living Roman built a secret holiday palazzo; loyal to his intimates, he was blind to their excesses and sometimes criminal failings; the loving parent with high expectations sometimes behaved like a demanding bully who insisted on having his own way; the cultivated patron of the arts could be a heartless killer when crossed in politics.

One senses, above all, that the suppression of ordinary human emotions which his public duties demanded of the
princeps
pulled against deep and powerful currents of feeling for those closest to him. This internal struggle may have fueled the fury with which he reacted to betrayals of trust.

But for all his flaws, the balance sheet ends in credit. For the most part, the private man lived decently according to the standards of the time, and the public man did terrible things, but usually for the public good.

It is argued that Augustus was merely the last in a line of unruly, Republic-busting dynasts who came and went throughout the first century
B.C.
Like a surfer, he rode a wave of change that was already rolling.

There is something in this. If the Actium campaign had had a different outcome, the trend toward autocracy might well have continued unabated. But would the careless and unfocused Antony have been able to build such an enduring edifice? One doubts it.

Augustus once wrote in an edict: “May I achieve the reward to which I aspire…of carrying with me, when I die, the hope that these foundations I have established for the state will abide secure.” His hope was fulfilled. Of all Rome’s emperors, he reigned the longest; and his work lasted, with modifications, for many generations. His successors all called themselves Augustus and cited his example (however differently they in fact behaved). State institutions continued to evolve in ways he did not predict, but in the main along the lines he set down.

Augustus devoted his long reign to perfecting and implementing two core policies—constitutional reform, and imperial expansion under one-man rule. But no less important was his management of the provinces. Working with his friend and partner, Agrippa, he spent many years touring the empire. He disciplined, if he did not entirely eliminate, the rapacity of imperial proconsuls; he encouraged urbanization and the Roman way of life; and he extended Roman citizenship to many thousands of provincials throughout the empire.

This had a hugely important consequence. It generated loyalty and gratitude to Rome. It made people feel that they were not victims of the empire, but its stakeholders. They were members of an imperial commonwealth. It was this shared consciousness that helped to bind Europe and the lands of the Mediterranean basin together for half a millennium and more.

How many statesmen in human history can lay claim to such a record of enduring achievement?

NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

Full publication data for modern works appears in the Sources section.