The Classical World (70 page)

On the final day, a specially commissioned hymn was sung by two fine choruses, one of twenty-seven boys, one of twenty-seven girls, all of whose parents were still living. The hymn was performed twice by these trusting young patriots, once to Apollo at the recently built temple on the Palatine hill, once to Jupiter on the Capitol, the ‘father’ god of the Romans. The hymn was written by the poet Horace and we can see how it goes beyond the rituals which had preceded it. It prays for the success of the recent marriage legislation (the ‘decrees of the fathers on the yoking of women’); it evokes Rome’s Trojan past which Virgil’s great
Aeneid
had made so famous only two years before; it praises Augustus and asks for his every prayer to be heard; he is the descendant of Venus, the one (echoing Virgil) who is ‘superior to the one who wages war, gentle to the fallen enemy’.
¹
He rules far to the east, even being petitioned by ‘proud Indians’ (an Indian embassy had come to Augustus in 25
BC
and agreed ‘friendship’ in 20).

Horace’s hymn evokes the birthrate, conquest and moral values (Honour and ancient Modesty). It refers to Augustus’ legendary family, the fertility of the land and Rome’s future. Such a poem was quite new for this sort of occasion. It was followed by theatrical shows, chariot racing and ‘hunts’ of wild animals which would delight the people for another week. Among the fun, nobody, least of all Horace, could have guessed that Augustus, ‘the glorious blood of Anchises and Venus’, would rule for so many more years. Horace would continue to link these themes together in his
Odes
, but his praises were no truer at the end of Augustus’ life than at the beginning. Prominent themes of Augustus’ dominance were to be foreign campaigns (but not always conquest), organized attention to Rome and its people (but riots and natural crises still occurred) and attempts to promote his own family and assure a successor (the one coup which repeatedly eluded him). These concerns were to be the concerns of every subsequent Roman emperor.

Before celebrating the ‘new age’, Augustus had adopted his two

grandsons, the children of his one daughter Julia and the loyal Agrippa. For once, he was surrounded bya cluster of family members, a sister, a wife and heirs. Importantly, the boys added the magic name of Caesar to their own. At the festival in 17 Augustus prayed for ‘me, my house and household’
²
and over the next fifteen years, he set about marking out his two obvious successors. At a very early age, the grandsons were given magistracies; they were designated as consul years in advance (Gaius Caesar would be only twenty-one when holding this top job, usually held when about forty-two); they were tact-fully presented to the armies; they were advertised on the coinage in provincial cities. In 5
BC
Gaius was made ‘head of the youth’, a special title which allowed him to preside over the order of Roman knights. Outside Rome, they and other family members received divine honours in provincial cities. Far inland, in western Asia, we find people in
c.
3
BC
swearing an oath of loyalty to Augustus, ‘his children and his descendants’.
³

There was a large unanswered question here. The troops would like to have a family successor, another ‘Caesar’ from the line of Julius Caesar. If the heir was adopted, as in Augustus’ case, adoption did not matter to them. Such, too, was the wish of the common people of Rome, who also responded to youth and beauty. They would have loved our modern magazines and pictures of princes and princesses. But in the eyes of any thoughtful senator, the Republic was not a family affair, to be passed on by inheritance. In due course, senators would prefer to be able to elect a successor from their own number.

Between 18 and 12
BC
Augustus had a junior partner whom he himself had chosen: the loyal Agrippa. It was only a sop to traditionalist opinion that his powers were formally renewable, like Augustus’ own. When Agrippa inconveniently died in 12
BC
Augustus pronounced a funerary eulogy over him and the speech was circulated to provincial governors: no doubt they circulated it locally in translations. There were two branches to the emerging ‘dynasty’: Augustus’ descendants through his first wife Scribonia and their daughter Julia (the Julians), and his stepsons and descendants through his able second wife Livia (the Claudians). From these two branches, the dynasty of the next eight decades is known as the Julio-Claudians (to
AD
68).

The Claudian branch began by being older and proved itself much
abler. Up in the Alps, Augustus’ two Claudian stepsons turned out to be far better soldiers than he could ever be. In 9
BC
the younger of the two, Drusus, died; we have recently learned that his funeral was splendid and his eulogy by Augustus was circulated through the provinces too. Probably it was accompanied by moral ‘encouragement’ to the public: when Drusus’ equally popular son died in October 19, the emperor’s testimony to him was also circulated for the benefit of ‘the youth of our children and descendants’.
⁴
‘Improvement’ of the young was a part of Augustus’ gratuitous programme. It impinged on the sons of senators who dressed formally and attended their fathers’ meetings, or the young knights who processed on horseback. They were parts of a vision which we still recognize: set the young examples, give them public functions and try to smother independent thought.

There was also, we realize increasingly, Augustus’ second wife, the redoubtable Livia: if only we had a memoir by her (she lived right on to
AD
29). Wicked gossip claimed that she poisoned rivals and procured young girls for the moral Augustus and had them smuggled secretly into the house on the Palatine. Her public image was quite different, but these rumours show that it was not the Romans’ only perception of her. Back in 36
BC
Livia had shared the ‘sacrosanctity’ of a tribune with her husband: it was a most unrepublican honour for a female, but it marked her off from Antony’s Eastern women. She then received other small honours and she helped to restore temples in Rome for cults which were associated with respectable women. In 7
BC
she gave her name to a splendid public Portico in Rome which included colonnades with
trompe l’
œ
il
landscape paintings and a public display of works of art (Agrippa was already said to have wanted to confiscate all private works of art and display them publicly, one reason why the Roman nobles boycotted the vulgar man’s funeral). The site of Livia’s Portico was significant. Previously, it had housed the enormous private mansion of the disreputable Vedius Pollio who had served Augustus in the East. He was denounced for his excessive luxury, including the bad example (men said) of throwing slaves into his pond of man-eating fish. His palace was demolished on its site and Livia publicized sober Concord (a matrimonial virtue) and a ‘people’s walk’ where looted Greek statues were displayed. How differently she was presenting herself from the bad women of Cicero’s
rhetoric, from people like Antony’s Fulvia whose personal greed and cruelty had been alleged so as to emphasize her husband’s ‘tyrannical’ character.

Rhetoric then outran the restraint and consideration which these actions projected. After the death of Livia’s son Drusus in 9
BC
, a Roman knight even wrote a poem to console her, obsequiously, as ‘the First Lady’. A spectacular recent find of inscriptions in Spain has shown us how the Senate dwelt on her virtues in an effusive response to an imperial family crisis. In
AD
20 they publicly praised Livia not only for having given birth to the austere Emperor Tiberius but also for ‘her many great favours to men of every rank; she could rightly and deservedly have supreme influence in what she asked from the Senate, though she used that influence sparingly’.
⁵
Republican traditionalists would have been horrified. Once again, this long decree was to be publicly set up for the instruction of posterity. It was to be displayed in conspicuous places in the provinces and even in the army-camps.

The moral purpose of the new age extended to buildings too. Augustus’ boast in Rome was that he found the city made of brick and left it marble. Certainly, the Rome of 30
BC
had had none of the planned grandeur of the great cities of the Greek East. Even its civic centre was a rambling jumble, not fit to be the showpiece of the world. There was to be much Augustan work in the city centre, and in keeping with the new moral order, sculptors and architects tended to favour a restrained classicism. The tall marble columns of the public temples were more showy, favouring the Corinthian style of capital, but admirable though the craftsmanship is, the main sculpted monuments with Augustan themes have a controlled range of allusion and form which veer to ghastly good taste. Frequently, they express ideals of his own moral and familyr hetoric. The 30s
BC
had been a great era of political publicityin buildings, coins and literature. Augustan Rome continued its use of sculpture and architecture for a message.

As a result, the new Augustan era has one of its claims to be a ‘classical’ age. It is, in fact, ‘classicizing’, dependent on fifth- and fourth-century Greece: without it, Augustan public art would never have taken this direction. In its Roman context, this style implied dignity, authority and restraint in a way which had never been so in
its original setting: ‘we see in the political choice of classicism an expression of the Roman order of state.’ Order, dignity and structure were also the qualities of much early Augustan literature, especially the poems of Horace and Virgil. Here, the ‘new age’ can claim to be ‘classic’, in the simple sense of first class. But its great poets, like the great oratorical prose of Cicero, had matured in the pre-Augustan age of liberty.

Apart from the classicism of the new bold stonework and the best of the new poetry, there was still the other Rome, now a teeming city of (probably) a million inhabitants, far the biggest city in the world. Social contrasts had remained amazingly extreme here. The rich lived in grand houses, but the very poor bedded down where they could; the relatively poor were crammed into tall wooden apartment blocks with thin dividing walls, the speculative landlord’s dream. Narrow winding streets surrounded these hastily built and overcrowded ‘vertical receptacles’, while erratic supplies of water went with a total absence of public transport. Most people’s Rome was both a wonder and a nightmare. It was also, of course, a slave-society. A single senator, in the 60s, owned no less than 400 slaves in his household: ‘the Senate’ (good men and true) would thus own about 250,000 of Rome’s human beings if this senator was at all typical.
⁶
Perhaps two-fifths of the city’s (approximate) million inhabitants were slaves, and many of the rest were ex-slaves, freed but still ‘obliged’ to their ex-masters. The common citizens were the plebs, but among the plebs those who were attached to the great households were not to be confused with those of the plebs who were not. For there were ‘respectable’ plebs, and downright ‘sordid’ plebs, people who begged what they could. The modern cardboard cities of refugees in Egypt or Pakistan are the nearest we can come to imagining this ‘other Rome’, though they lack Rome’s openly accepted slavery.

This ‘other Rome’ had proved beyond the capacity, or concern, of Cicero’s beloved Republic. Under Augustus, it took its first few steps towards health and safety. By stages, a much-needed fire brigade was introduced, the Watch or
vigiles
, whose name lives on in modern Rome’s equivalent. The public water supply was vastly improved by new aqueducts and, in due course, by new overseers and public slaves to maintain it. In reply, rich families moved up to the hills above
previously marshy ground and continued to develop new parks and fine palazzi there. A committee was appointed to attend to flooding from the river Tiber. The height of apartment blocks was limited to about seven storeys, no doubt to the speculators’ annoyance. The grain-supply acquired a new prefect; the regular gifts of free grain to designated citizens continued (about 250,000 people were now on the list). Like the public shows, the dole did not extend ‘bread and circuses’ to all the free poor, because they amounted to more than half a million people. But when backed by the grain of Egypt, the general supply of grain on sale became more stable.

As one reform succeeded another, each social order in Rome began to have defined roles, and these roles were made to seem to be worth having. The Senate continued to be very busy and senators’ functions multiplied, and yet ultimate power resided elsewhere, with the emperor. As time passed, therefore, it became harder to assure a quorum for senatorial meetings. Privileged knights had their annual processions; the common people, too, began to be more closely regulated. There were hundreds of thousands of them, after all, potentially a seething mass, as they had shown briefly after Caesar’s murder. Augustus left them with their ancient ‘tribes’, all thirty-five of them, through which gifts of corn were distributed and assemblies organized. However, he continued Julius Caesar’s controls. He strictly regulated their right to form ‘clubs’, or
collegia
, those political and social dangers in the republican city. Instead, the plebs had ever more shows to watch, but even here, they were to be regulated in a hierarchy of seating. This orderliness was only possible because the common spectators accepted it and were not rebellious against it. There was still no designated police force, although the fire-watchers did go on patrol. But Augustus had stationed soldiers in or near the city, the Praetorian guards and his German horse guards. They could always intervene in a crisis.