Augustus (52 page)

Tiberius then did an extraordinary thing. Before setting off from Rome to take up his commission, he announced without warning his immediate retirement from public life. The official reason he gave was that “he was weary of office and needed a rest.” Everyone was bemused. How was it that a thirty-six-year-old man, in excellent health, famous and successful, had decided to throw in his cards?

Tiberius’ personality and motives are confusing and in many ways irrecoverable. A gloomy fatalist, he was more used to wielding power than ambitious to win it. If not a republican, he was a believer in senatorial government, and he seems to have been oppressed by the responsibilities he shouldered as Augustus’ stepson. He took well to warfare and was more at ease among the simplicities of military life than the soiling compromises of politics.

A popular explanation at the time, and still the most plausible, was that he voluntarily resigned his place to make way for Gaius and Lucius, as Agrippa was supposed to have done for Marcellus. But was he acting from self-effacement, or frustrated anger? We do not know. The situation may not have been as simple as our inadequate sources imply. One fact to be borne clearly in mind is that Tiberius’ abdication was partial and provisional. He resigned activity, not office. He retained the
imperium
and tribunician status he had just been awarded. He could have handed his powers back, and presumably Augustus could have arranged for their removal. Neither man did so.

It may be wise to consider the likely tensions at court. It would be very surprising if there were not factions on the Palatine Hill jockeying for position. Livia and her influential circle would support her two sons, now reduced to one; and Julia would wish to assure herself that Gaius’ and Lucius’ progress to supreme power was unimpeded. These groupings would surely have had action plans ready for immediate implementation in the event of Augustus’ incapacity or death.

It may be that Tiberius’ retirement was an acknowledgment of defeat in a sophisticated (and now irrecoverable) game. The Julian faction was in the ascendant and he could even have begun to worry about his personal safety in the long run (a good reason for retaining his powers). Alternatively, Tiberius may have felt that his services could not be dispensed with, and that a temporary absence would strengthen his position. He would have to be recalled. Did he even hope to arm-twist the
princeps
to rescind, tone down, or delay his plans to promote Gaius?

Augustus, of course, resisted any pressure to change his dynastic strategy, but he was too aware of the uncertainties of life to remove Tiberius from the board entirely. Circumstances could possibly arise in the future, unwelcome though they were to contemplate, that would call for his return to power.

Augustus did his best to persuade Tiberius to change his mind. So did Livia, but to no avail. Family quarrels often descend into childishness, and Tiberius went on hunger strike for four days to prove that he was serious. The
princeps
admitted defeat and announced the retirement to the Senate. He characterized it bitterly as an act of betrayal. It was a very long time since someone had said no to him.

Tiberius left Rome at once, hurrying down to the port of Ostia without saying a word to the troop of friends who had come to offer their farewells, and kissing only very few of them before he boarded his ship and sailed off. He traveled as a private citizen, accompanied by one little-known senator and a few
equites
. As he was coasting past Campania on his journey south, he received news that Augustus was ill. He cast anchor for a time, but soon guessed that the
princeps
was applying moral blackmail. He did not want to appear to be awaiting an opportunity to seize power. So he resumed his journey.

He decided he would live on Rhodes in the eastern Mediterranean, where he had had an enjoyable holiday many years before on his return from Armenia. The diamond-shaped island is nearly fifty miles long and in those days had between sixty thousand and eighty thousand inhabitants. Until the arrival of Rome, it had been a leading sea power; it was still a center of Greek culture. The land was fertile and figs, pears, pistachios, and olives were grown, as they are today.

Tiberius settled in a modest town house and acquired a villa not far away in the countryside. He behaved unassumingly, keeping his lictors (the guards who symbolized his authority) and his runners out of sight. He often strolled around the Gymnasium, where, Suetonius reports, “he greeted and chatted with simple Greeks as if they were his equals.”

Tiberius wanted Augustus, and perhaps especially supporters of Gaius and Lucius, the “Julian faction,” to believe that he was politically inactive, as indeed he was. It was awkward that distinguished Romans, traveling to eastern provinces on one commission or another, made a point of stopping off at Rhodes to pay their respects, but he could hardly refuse to receive them. Many governors had friendly connections with the self-made exile and, according to Velleius Paterculus, a military officer who served under Tiberius, lowered their
fasces
to him in acknowledgment that “his retirement was more worthy of respect than their official positions.”

Nobody quite believed that the career of Tiberius was over.

Little is known of public affairs during the next few years. A regular system of suffect or replacement consuls, who took over from the original officeholders in mid-term, was reintroduced. The
princeps
reformed the procedures by which a provincial governor could be arraigned for extortion, and in 4 and 3
B.C.
further settlements of military veterans were founded.

On the domestic front, a new generation was beginning to emerge. The dead Drusus had had several children by his much-loved wife, Antonia, three of whom survived. The eldest, Germanicus, was born in 15
B.C.
and grew up into a courageous and good-natured boy. He was handsome, although his legs were somewhat spindly, a fault he tried to remedy by constant horseback riding after meals. He learned to become an excellent public speaker in Latin and Greek, enjoyed literature, and in adulthood wrote a number of comedies in Greek. Augustus became extremely fond of Germanicus.

Drusus’ other son, Claudius, born in 10
B.C.
, was a problem. His childhood was marred by frequent illnesses. He was physically weak and he limped (perhaps the result of a polio attack); he developed a stutter and a nervous twitching of the head. His mother, Antonia, loathed him. She called him “a monster, not finished but merely begun by nature.” Accusing anyone of stupidity, she would say: “He’s as big a fool as my son Claudius.” Livia also treated him with contempt and rarely spoke to him.

In fact, Claudius matured into an intelligent and studious youth. As a child, he set his sights on becoming a historian. Encouraged by the greatest historian of the age, Livy, he started work on a history of Rome. It opened with the murder of Julius Caesar, but skipped the civil wars that followed when Livia and Antonia warned him that he would not be allowed to publish an uncensored account of those years.

The third child was a girl, Livilla, whom Augustus regarded, as he did all his female relatives, as little more than dynastic marriage fodder. That no record of her early years survives is a reminder of the low value Romans placed on girls.

Like previous years of crisis, 2
B.C.
opened well. The
princeps
held his thirteenth consulship, this time to mark the entry into the adult world of the fifteen-year-old Lucius, whom he designated consul for
A.D
. 4.

A popular campaign was launched to confer on him the title
pater patriae,
“father of his country.” This would be a very great honor, seldom bestowed. It had been last awarded to Julius Caesar after the battle of Munda and before that in 63
B.C.
to the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, when he unmasked Catilina’s conspiracy against the state.

Messalla was an honorable turncoat (by contrast, say, with the egregious Plancus) and continued to refer to Cassius, under whom he had fought, as “my general” even after he became one of the
princeps’
closest friends. He joined Mark Antony after the defeat at Philippi, and switched sides one final time, foreseeing the ruin that Antony’s partnership with Cleopatra would bring about. He distinguished himself at Actium.

After that battle, the then Octavian joked: “You have fought for me as well as you did against me at Philippi.”

Messalla cleverly replied: “I have always chosen the best and justest side!”

On February 5, at a meeting of the Senate, this distinguished man addressed his leader: “Caesar Augustus, the Senate agrees with the People of Rome in saluting you as Father of your Country.” It was one of the proudest moments in Augustus’ life, for the honor was clearly more than flattery: it reflected genuine respect.

With tears in his eyes, he replied: “Fathers of the Senate, I have at last achieved my highest ambition. What more can I ask of the immortal gods than that they may permit me to enjoy your approval until my dying day?”

After long years of construction, the Temple of Mars Ultor, or Avenging Mars, and the huge new Forum of Augustus of which the temple was the grand centerpiece, were opened to the public. To mark the occasion, Gaius and Lucius presided over horse races and their younger brother, Agrippa Postumus, aged ten (as his name suggests, he had been born after his father’s death), took part in a staging of the Troy Game, with other teenaged riders from good families.

Entertainments included a gladiatorial contest and the slaughter of thirty-six crocodiles. The most ambitious event was a naval battle between “Persians” and “Athenians,” for which a large artificial lake, eighteen hundred feet long and twelve hundred feet wide, was excavated beside the Tiber. This was spectacle on a scale that only Hollywood, two millennia later, would be able to imitate—with the difference that in Rome, real blood was spilled and real ships torched or sunk. Thirty triremes and biremes, equipped with rams, were set against one another, alongside many small vessels. Augustus proudly asserts that three thousand men, in addition to the rowers, fought in the engagement, although he does not record how many of them lost their lives. As at the original battle of Salamis in the fifth century
B.C.
, the Athenians won the day.

Much to Augustus’ dismay, his social legislation of 18 and 17
B.C.
seemed not to have had the desired effect on Rome’s ruling class. Young men-about-town behaved as badly as ever, spending most of their time chasing women instead of settling down and pursuing politics with due
gravitas
.

One of their trend-setters was the poet Publius Ovidius Naso (or, in English, Ovid). He was born into a well-to-do and ancient equestrian family in 43
B.C.
, and his dominating father did not want him to waste time writing poetry. But this was exactly what delighted young Ovid. Once when his father reprimanded him for scribbling verses instead of doing his homework, the boy cheekily replied by improvising a perfect pentameter, a line of verse with five feet:
“Parce mihi! Numquam versicabo, pater!”
—“Forgive me, Dad! I’ll never write a verse.”

Unlike Virgil and Horace, Ovid never entered Augustus’ circle. This was hardly surprising, considering the subject matter of much of his poetry—namely, the obsessive pursuit of pretty girls. His
Amores,
“Love Affairs,” first appeared in 16
B.C.
and the
Ars Amatoria,
or “Art of Love,” about 2
B.C.

Ovid did not believe in paying for sex and, although many of his poems may be about his wife, he enjoyed hunting down married women. He wrote a poem about trying to pick one up at a popular cruising ground, Augustus’ Temple of Apollo on the Palatine. The only trouble is that she is guarded by a eunuch attendant. The poet begs him:

All we need is your consent to some quiet love-making—

It’s hard to imagine a more harmless request.

Ovid was a well-known member of the smart set, whose first lady was Augustus’ daughter, Julia, now thirty-eight years old and off the leash with Tiberius absent in Rhodes. She had been brought up strictly. Suetonius notes that she was under instruction “not to say or do anything, either publicly or in private, that could not decently figure in the imperial day-book.” Among other things, this meant not consorting with young men, and any who were so bold as to make even the most innocuous advance risked being told off by the
princeps
. He wrote to Lucius Vinicius, for example, a young man of good position and conduct: “You have acted presumptuously in coming to Baiae to call on my daughter.”

Despite or perhaps because of her upbringing, Julia grew into a free-spirited woman, with contradictory personality traits. She was well read and reportedly had a gentle and humane personality. However, anecdotes also survive of her sharp tongue and willfulness. Once she entered Augustus’ presence wearing a revealing dress. On the following day she appeared in the most conservative of stolas. Her father expressed his delight and said: “This dress is much more becoming in the daughter of Augustus.”

Julia replied: “Yes, today I am dressed to meet my father’s eyes; yesterday it was for my husband’s.”

Augustus knew better than to shout at his daughter, but he repeatedly advised her to show more restraint. He believed she was just high-spirited, and once observed that he had two spoiled daughters to put up with—Rome and Julia.

Among friends, Julia acted and spoke without reserve; like Ovid, she saw nothing harmful in some quiet lovemaking. However, she took precautions. Contraception in ancient Rome was a hit-and-miss affair. Some women practiced coitus interruptus; others applied sticky substances, such as old olive oil, to the mouth of the uterus, or used vaginal suppositories. All these methods were unreliable, and Julia is said to have restricted full intercourse to times when she was pregnant. She once remarked: “Passengers are never allowed on board till the hold is full.”