The Classical World (65 page)

Morals and Society

The divine Augustus banished his daughter who was shameless beyond the very limits of the word. He made public the scandals of the Emperor’s household, that adulterers had been admitted in droves, that the city had been roamed through on nocturnal revels and that the very Forum and Rostrum from which her father had passed the law on adultery had been her preferred places for her debaucheries… from being an adulteress, she had turned to selling her person for money and had sought the right to every sort of indulgence with partners whose names she did not know
.

Seneca,
On Benefits
6.32

I myself saw in Africa someone who changed sex and became a man on the day of his marriage: Lucius Constitius, a citizen of the town of Thysdrus
.

Elder Pliny,
Natural History
7.36

Augustus’ conservative revolution did not stop with the constitution: it also extended to religion and social and sexual behaviour. These dimensions are directly relevant to personal freedom and to what it would mean to be a prominent Roman man or woman henceforward under the Empire. They are also the context for some of the most admired poetry of the Augustan age, especially poems by Horace, Ovid and Propertius. They continued to concern each subsequent emperor, with varying responses. Under Hadrian, the senators still had to rule on vexed points of the Augustan laws on marriage and sexual relations. They also had to cope with Hadrian himself. Excelling even Augustus’ concern, he was later alleged to have used army supply officers
to spy on his friends’ private lives. When he intercepted letters in which a wife complained about her husband’s preference for ‘pleasures’ and the baths, the husband, when confronted, is said to have asked Hadrian, ‘Has my wife complained to you as well as to me?’
¹

Why ever had such matters become public business? The dreadful troubles of the Civil War could be traced to neglect of the gods, the collapse of ancient morality and guilt inherited from Rome’s Trojan past. These facile explanations were taken up by Virgil and also by Horace and even those who did not really believe them were aware of the climate of opinion. In the 40s and 30s most of Rome’s religious rites and yearly observances were not seriously in abeyance or even in sceptical decay. What had decayed, as so often in ancient cities, was the temples. Restoration of the temples was not a new idea of Augustus’, either. In the 30s temple-building had been part of the competitive rivalry in Rome: even Cicero’s friend, the non-political and cultured Atticus, had been urging such action.
²
But Augustus restored at least eighty-two temples. He added new ones as well, for gods connected with his own career. Like Augustus, Hadrian would also restore old temples in the city, including the magnificent Pantheon, the ancient distinction of modern Rome. He repeated the temple’s great dedicatory inscription by the self-made man Agrippa, but, like so many of Augustus’ restorations, his was not an exact repeat.

Augustus’ religious restoration was radically new, and what made it so was his own increasing dominance. He was made a new member, like nobody else, of all Rome’s priestly colleges. Cults and festivals increasingly included prayers and references to himself and his family; above all, the calendar grew to include new festival days commemorating crucial dates for ‘Caesar’ in the 30s and for his father Julius Caesar during his dictatorship. Time, in the restored Republic, acquired profoundly unrepublican markers. So did the religious map. The ancient Sibylline Books were moved to Augustus’ new temple of Apollo, next to his house on Rome’s Palatine hill. The ancient goddess of the Hearth (Vesta) received a new cult-site here, also next to his home.

‘Whoever wishes to take awayimpious slaughter,’ wrote Horace in an ode in the early 20s
BC
,‘if he aims to have the words “Father of
cities” inscribed beneath his statues, let him dare to curb unbroken licence.’
³
The verses were suitably prophetic. From 18
BC
onwards, the ‘Father of the Fatherland’ (as Augustus became in 2 bc) encouraged laws against ‘licence’ in sex and marriage. While aspiring to go back to basics, they were tendentious, intrusive and quite often hated. One answer was to evade them, but they continued to be revised and feared for centuries. In our age, the ‘problems of the family’ are problems of divorce and single parents, with public discussions of homosexual relations and racial integration. None of these problems was addressed in Augustan Rome.

Like the restoration of the temples, legislation on sex and the family touched a pre-existing chord. It was not only that the likes of Cicero had written of the need for Julius Caesar, as dictator, to encourage the birth of more children and to curb the ‘licence’ of women or that Julius had stood forward as ‘prefect of morals’. On a longer view, Roman education had always been strongly based in the family and in the lessons which parents transmitted to children. For centuries, too, the censors and their reviews of Rome’s upper orders had put moral standards at the centre of Roman public life. Laws, then, would rest on a strong undercurrent of custom and long-repeated examples. By now there were stories of Roman matrons who had been prosecuted in the distant past for adulterybefore the Roman people. Way back in 405
BC
, it was alleged, a tax had been introduced on Roman bachelors. Laws against the unmarried may even have been revived in the 30s
BC
.
⁴
At that time Augustus had widely publicized the ‘immorality’ of ‘Egyptian’ Antony, a spin which Virgil enlarged on in parts of his
Aeneid
. After victory, a return to old Roman values was a natural next step for a self-styled ‘restorer’. The antiquarian scholar, Varro, had recentlywritten a book,
On the Life of the Roman People
, which gave a highlymoralizing account of its ancient ideals. A ‘return’ to them would enhance Augustus’ artful claim to be restoring ancient rights to the people. But it was only worth trying because it had a constituency. The 30s, like the 40s, had echoed to moralizing rhetoric, and they had also been a disorderly time for class-distinctions: an ex-slave was even found to have tried to stand as a praetor. Horace, himself a social nobody, had capitalized on such outrages by protesting in his poems during the 30s at jumped-up holders of prized positions.
⁵
The Senate, too, had grown too large, with many members of dubious merit. In 28 it had already had to be slimmed by the young ‘Caesar’. Survivors were aware that there had recentlybeen too much social confusion.

The plebs in Rome, at bottom conservatives, might also welcome this sort of restoration: it clipped upper-class excesses and few of the new legal penalties would affect them personally. There was also a marked change in the upper classes. The Civil Wars had brought more men from outlying Italy into greater prominence at Rome, ‘dim characters with fantastic names’
⁶
whose youth had often been spent in narrow and priggish home towns. Italy was a varied place, but some of its townsmen might rallyto a call of ‘back to basics’, like the residents of modern Idaho or Tunbridge Wells. A reassertion of ancient dignity would appeal to new men who were newly arrived in high places; it persuaded them, Catos and Ciceros at heart, that their new eminence was indeed as sound and traditional as they had expected. Augustus may even have started to believe in his own early rhetoric as Octavian. For he too was a man from ‘little Italy’, from a family of petty status which lacked the breadth and assurance of Rome’s great families and their awareness that ‘moral dignity’ was so often the limited value of those who had not been told any better. He later wrote how he had brought back ‘many examples of our ancestors which were disappearing from our age’.
⁷

The first major laws came in 18
BC
, a year after Augustus’ reception back in Italy and a year before he declared a symbolic ‘new age’ of his own. One target was childlessness among Roman citizens, a long-running item for social rhetoric. When addressing it, Augustus read to the Senate an ancient speech on the topic which had been delivered by the censor in 131
BC
. The Civil Wars had claimed nearly twenty years’ worth of Roman casualties, but there was probably a widespread feeling that Rome’s legions should still be manned by Italian-born citizens only. The unmarried and the childless were now to be penalized by diminished rights to inherit property (the childless man had to surrender up to half of a legacy, although later versions of the law, perhaps as a concession, allowed him the right of free inheritance from close members of his family). Husbands with children were rewarded with the right to earlier tenure of a magistracy
(one child sufficed here, including one killed in war), and various other privileges, including escape from the burdensome task of being a guardian of a child or a woman (three children were needed for this). Three children also exempted a woman from the need for her and her property to be under a guardian’s control. Between couples, each child increased the capacity of a husband and wife to inherit from one another. If they were childless, they were limited to inheriting only one-tenth, and gifts between husband and wife were invalid (although a husband could buy something, for instance, and let the wife use it or regard it as acquired for her). There were also advantages for fertile freedmen and freedwomen who had recently received citizenship. Many of them were still liable to perform ‘tasks’ for the patrons who had freed them. Henceforward, two children, in most cases, would exempt them from these burdens. Freed persons who had several children could also exclude their patrons from a major menace, inheritance by the patron of their property on their death. This rule was most attractive to those freedmen who had gone on to make money and become rich.

In ancient Sparta, fathers of three or more children were also said to have been rewarded, but nonetheless, the male Spartiate population had declined drastically. Whywould the result at Rome be any different? In the upper classes, at least, girls were already married off by their fathers when young, sometimes as young as twelve to sixteen. An early age of females at marriage is a crucial determinant of the birthrate in a pre-industrial population, but Augustus’ laws did nothing directly to change it. They did, however, keep down the marriage age for ambitious men: the sooner a man married, the quicker his career would now be. There was also a very intrusive change for women later in life. Widows or divorcees were penalized if they failed to remarry promptly, within an interval which was later extended by Augustus to two years. Many women had been widowed by the recent Civil Wars and were still young, so there was quite a constituency here to bring back to family life: even in peacetime, wives, who married young, would expect to survive their husbands (childbirth permitting). The penalties were radical. It was also proposed, initially, that unmarried men should be excluded from watching the games and the theatre, but the proposal proved too much for the public’s tolerance.

Only in families with property would most of the new privileges for fertilityhave had any relevance. There were, however, grave consequences to this insistence on big families. Knights had to own property above a fixed valuation, and, by new rules set by Augustus, so did senators. On a Roman father’s death, properties were split between surviving children (there was no primogeniture), but if families were big, the property would be broken into smaller bits: those near the borderline would find their children pushed below its financial limit. Augustus’ two ideals of a populous citizenry and well-defined social orders were contradictory. There was also a resentment among some of the better-off of the ‘bore’ (
taedium
) of bringing up brats, as we hear from the younger Pliny (
c
. ad 100), complaining about the habits of his Italian home townsmen.
⁸

It is understandable, then, that members of the order of the knights at Rome protested openly before Augustus when these laws were revised in ad 9. It was all very well for Augustus to reply by publicizing his own grandson’s behaviour and displaying his two young grandchildren on his lap: a prince of the imperial house was nowhere near the borderline of any social order. The display was only the latest of several of his publicity stunts in this sphere. When an old man from Faesulae (modern Fiesole, near Florence) was discovered to have sixty-one living descendants, he was brought down to Rome to make a religious sacrifice on the Capitol which was recorded in official records. The ironywas that Augustus himself fathered only one daughter and no sons at all. Publicizing fertility, he himself had none of the fertility of Pompey, let alone the teeming Mark Antony. As for Hadrian, he found his wife Sabina moody and difficult and so he remained childless. The laws would have penalized him, too.

Did Roman citizens respond to Augustus’ wishes bybreeding faster? The recorded census figures at Rome do rise sharply after 28
BC
, but the rise may only be a change in the numbers of citizens who registered, and the demographic meaning of these figures is still disputed. More obviously, there were so many obstacles and evasions to the laws, old and new. How can a law assure fertility? The important questions here are whether contraception of any effective sort was being used during marriage. Probably it was not: it was a slander that Hadrian’s wife Sabina was said to boast ‘that she had taken steps to make sure
that she did not become pregnant by him: his children would harm the human race’.
⁹
In its absence, there was scope for abortion, but again we do not know whether wives in a high property class often practised it. If they did, the Augustan laws might indeed make them hesitate. Among poor families, certainly, unwanted children were exposed, especially girls, the wombs of the future (they were more expensive for fathers as they needed dowries in order to be married off). No Augustan laws addressed these age-old obstacles to a big, surviving family among people with scarce resources.