The Twelve Caesars (10 page)

Augustus was a hypocrite. Mark Antony had known it. He taunted Augustus with the knowledge of those double standards by which he criticized Antony’s affair with Cleopatra
at the same time as himself sleeping with a bevy of married women across Rome. Suetonius states, ‘That [Augustus] was given to adultery not even his friends deny.’ Antony chose as an
example of Augustus’ feet of clay his ‘taking the wife of an ex-consul from her husband’s dining room before his very eyes into a bedchamber, and bringing her back to the table
with her hair in disorder and her ears glowing’. As we will see, it was an act of cavalier fornication worthy of Gaius. So too was the punishment he demanded of his favourite freedman Polus,
whom ‘he forced to take his own life because he was convicted of adultery with Roman matrons’.

Yet Antony was dead while Augustus lived. Both shared talent, charisma, riches. Both were capable of decision, strategy, ruthlessness. But it was Augustus who, in the phoney war of the latter
period of the Second Triumvirate, made political capital in Rome. Among Augustus’ talents was his ability to satisfy appearances, a guiding principle of his principate, part of
that policy which blended emollience with self-serving. ‘There’s beggary in the love that can be reckoned,’ Shakespeare’s Antony tells Cleopatra with splendid
carelessness: Augustus was never so unguarded. In Suetonius’ account, his domestic policy as
princeps
included reviving ‘certain obsolescent rites and appointments: the augury of
the Goddess Safety, the office of Flamen Dialis, the Lupercalian Festival, the Secular Games and the Cross-Roads Festival’. His policy embraced consciously archaic elements, a
billet-doux
offered by the first servant of the Republic to the glories of its vanished past. He rebuilt temples. He took measures to revive ancient cults. He sought to restore the prestige
of priesthoods and reinvigorate religious observance with reverence and awe. His reinvented Secular Games of 17
BC
included his sacrifice of a pregnant sow to Mother Earth,
an act attributed by Virgil to Rome’s legendary founder Aeneas,
¹²
and the ‘Centennial Hymn’ specially composed for the occasion by Horace. In bright Roman sunshine on a day of early
June, twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls implored the firmament for moral renewal: ‘Goddess, make strong our youth and bless the Senate’s decrees rewarding parenthood and
marriage, that from the new laws Rome may reap a lavish harvest of boys and girls.’
¹³
As a prayer it was pretty and pious and pertinent. Propagandist, too. But its hope was vain, and hopelessly
impractical, for it sought to regulate private lives by bill, an incursion of the state behind Rome’s closed doors.

The previous year the
princeps
had determined on a course of moral renewal. His focus was not his own ambulatory libido but the sexual habits of Rome’s upper classes, louche,
loose-living and lustful. As Augustus himself makes clear in the
Res gestae
, it was the legislative aspect of that broader policy of old-fashioned conservatism which found physical
expression in his spur to a city-wide religious renaissance. ‘By
new laws passed on my proposal I brought back into use many exemplary practices of our ancestors which
were disappearing in our time, and in many ways I myself transmitted exemplary practices to posterity for their imitation.’
¹⁴
(He does not stipulate the nature of his own ‘exemplary
practices’.) The initiatives of 18
BC
targeted women’s fidelity and the birth rate. The
lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis
addressed the sexual constancy
of married women and, for the first time in Roman history, made adultery a criminal act (with stronger penalties inevitably for the errant wife, who potentially faced banishment; and an obligation
for the wronged husband to institute immediate divorce proceedings). The
lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus
, revised in
AD
9 as the
lex Papia Poppaea
, penalized
unmarried men and childless couples in an attempt to increase the birth rate. Augustus evidently felt little need to lead by example. There are no indications that he adapted his own sex life along
the lines he prescribed for others, while his marriage to Livia, herself a model of old-fashioned rectitude in no need of reform, was childless, despite surviving for more than half a century. In
the first instance, Augustus’ token lip-service to his moral crusade made an example of his daughter Julia, whom he promptly married again following the deaths of her first and second
husbands, Marcellus and Agrippa.

He could hardly have chosen worse. Handsome, witty, haughty and irreverent, Julia was unsuited to embodying moral precepts. She had inherited a streak of wilful sensuousness to rival her
father’s. Her indiscretions were of long vintage: during her marriage to Agrippa, she conceived a passion for Tiberius which would be disappointed in their eventual loveless union. Her
misdemeanours embraced full-scale affairs and casual encounters: Seneca records the rumour that at night in the centre of Rome she offered herself as a tart to any passer-by. Augustus
responded with incredulousness to the news of her unmasking; fury succeeded disbelief. ‘A calamity broke out in the emperor’s household which is shameful to narrate and
dreadful to recall,’ Velleius reports. ‘For his daughter Julia, utterly regardless of her great father... left untried no disgraceful deed untainted with either extravagance or lust of
which a woman could be guilty... and was in the habit of measuring the magnitude of her fortune only in the terms of licence to sin, setting up her own caprice as a law unto itself.’
¹⁵
Incandescent and dizzy with shock, Augustus discussed Julia’s downfall even in the senate. Then he expelled his only child from Rome. Her destination was the volcanic island of Pandateria in
the Tyrrhenian Sea. Despite popular demonstrations in her favour, Augustus never relented. He never saw his daughter again and left instructions that her body be barred from his mausoleum. It was a
cruel and ironic ending to a policy intended to champion the family; and offers startling confirmation of the importance attached by Augustus to appearances (when it suited him) and to obedience
within his own household.

Augustus was sixty-one years old at the time of Julia’s disgrace, a greater age in Rome than today. For nearly four decades he had occupied a place of singular prominence in Roman public
life. With vigour he had dedicated himself to restoring Rome’s fortunes after the tardy cataclysms of civil war which reached back into his ‘father’s’ lifetime and beyond.
Some of his policies were practical: he fixed soldiers’ pay and organized the Praetorian Guard; he moved to minimize corruption in elections; he created new appointments to enable more men to
take part in the administration of the state – supervisors of aqueducts, of public buildings and of the roads. He conjured up romantic visions of the Rome of his forefathers, enforcing
toga-wearing in the Forum, teaching his daughter and his granddaughter spinning
and weaving, and himself taking the lead in filial devotion to his mother and his sister. He
was affable and approachable in his mien: when a senator he scarcely knew fell blind and resolved to commit suicide as a result, ‘Augustus called on him and by his consoling words induced him
to live.’ Most of all, he defined the role of
princeps
as one of service, an old-fashioned idea in which the greater good of the greater number was seen to count for more than personal
gain: ‘May it be my privilege to establish the state in a firm and secure position, and reap from that act the fruit that I desire; but only if I may be called the author of the best possible
government.’ His personal contribution included measures for fire and flood protection, restoration of the Via Flaminia and his unparalleled programme of public building. Observers noticed
that he was tired, Julia’s downfall a turning point. It was followed by the deaths of Gaius and Lucius Caesar and then, equally dramatically, Augustus’ banishment in
AD
8 of Julia’s daughter, Julia the Younger. Augustus’ granddaughter was accused of adultery like her mother; in her case suspicion of conspiracy further muddied the waters.
Her brother was involved in the same plan, Agrippa Postumus, the last remaining son of Julia the Elder and Agrippa. Then the following year, in his third year of campaigning in Germania,
Quinctilius Varus lost all three Roman legions under his command in a disastrous encounter with Germanic tribes in the Teutoburg Forest. Augustus may have suffered something approaching a nervous
breakdown, albeit he appears to have recovered with time: ‘they say that he was so greatly affected that for several months in succession he cut neither his beard nor his hair, and sometimes
he would dash his head against a door, crying: “Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!”’

So much had changed in Rome; some things not at all. Deep-engrained in the city’s psyche was that mistrust of female power which Octavian had
exploited to destroy Cleopatra. At the moment of Augustus’ death, it found expression in a lurid vignette which makes better television than history.

It was August
AD
14 and the emperor, travelling in Campania, fell prey to a recurrence of an intestinal complaint which had plagued him for some time; in its wake,
attacks of chronic diarrhoea, difficult to manage on the road or at sea. Augustus altered his plans. He headed for Nola. His house there, by chance, was the same one in which his father, Gaius
Octavius, had died. He asked that his bed be placed in the very room in which Gaius breathed his last. The instinct was one of peacefulness more than mawkishness: this then was the end.
‘Since no care could withstand the fates,’ writes Velleius Paterculus, ‘in his seventy-sixth year... he was resolved into the elements from which he sprang and yielded up to
heaven his divine soul.’
¹⁶

But it is not to be. Into this atmosphere of gentle fading away, a single source interjects a jarring note. Dio claims poisoning, Livia the culprit, her purpose to speed Tiberius’ progress
to the purple before Augustus could change his mind and nominate as his principal heir his grandson Agrippa Postumus – insolent, brutish, possibly mentally deficient. ‘So she smeared
with poison some figs which were still ripening on trees from which Augustus was in the habit of picking the fruit with his own hands. She then ate those which had not been smeared, and offered the
poisoned fruit to him.’
¹⁷

Poisoning plays its part in our story. A convicted poisoner called Locusta removes obstacles from Nero’s path to the throne. Those crimes were well known to Dio, writing in the second
century. Velleius died too soon to hear the rumours – misdeeds attributed to Augustus’s great-granddaughter Agrippina. His
Livia is not present at Augustus’
death, hers is not the applause the dying actor invites. Instead, Velleius’ Augustus dies ‘with the arms of his beloved Tiberius about him, commending to him the continuation of their
joint work’.
¹⁸
He escapes poisoning – even the toxic knowledge of the nature of Tiberius’ continuation.