The Portable Roman Reader (Portable Library) (31 page)

 

“Unto nobody,” my woman saith, “she had rather a wife
be
Than to myself; not though Jove grew a suitor of hers.”
These be her words, but a woman’s words to a love that
is eager,
In wind or water’s streame do require to be writ.

 

I hate and love. You question “How?” I lack
An answer, but I feel it on the rack.

 

From wandering through the nations, o‘er the waves,
Brother, I come, and stand beside thy tomb
To give thee the death-offering of the grave,
To call thee, vainly, dumb in Hades’ gloom.
Oh, weary is the fortune that bereft me,
I give or gave our fathers long ago
The sad fraternal duty that is left me,
The dreary gifts unto the shades below.
Accept them, dewy with a brother’s tears;
Accept the sorrow that they cannot tell,
And through the long eternity of years,
Brother, farewell, for ever fare thee well!

(42 B.C.-17 A.D.)

 

T
HE assassination of Julius Cæsar led to another period of chaos, which was brought to an end when Octavius, Julius’s nephew and heir, defeated his only remaining rival, Mark Antony, at the Battle of Actium. On his return Octavius was greeted not as the victor in a civil war, but as a sovereign who had crushed a rebellion. And he proceeded to restore, if not the fact, at least the forms, of the Republic. Like Julius Cæsar, he governed through a multiplicity of offices; he was sole consul, re-elected, every year, by an understood agreement, which gave him a position at least equal to that of President; he was governor of all the provinces; he was Commander-in-Chief of the Army, that most important post. In addition, the Senate conferred on him two complimentary titles, which may be said to mark respectively the power which he admitted and that which he actually possessed: the first was Princeps, “First Citizen of the Republic”; the second was Augustus, which means something between “His Majesty” and “His Holiness” (using the words not as conventional titles but in their original meaning). Julius Cæsar had renamed the month Quintilis after himself, July, placing his name among the months dedicated to the gods Janus, Mars, and Maia; he had substituted his image for those of the gods on the coinage. Not to be outdone, Augustus renamed Sextilis, August, and stole a day from February to keep his month from being shorter than his predecessor’s. Divine honors were paid to him after his death, though the head of the Roman state was not regarded as a god on earth as yet. Horace indeed speaks of Augustus as a
præsens divus,
a deity among us (contrasted with Jupiter in heaven); but this is in a poem admonishing Augustus as to his duty ( not to readmit to citizenship the deserters from Crassus’s army who had gone over to the enemy), and is held out as a title consequent on good behavior. “We believe,” says Horace, “that Jupiter is in heaven because we hear him thunder; we shall regard Augustus as a deity here present for having added the Britons and the troublesome Parthians to the Empire.”

Augustus has been called a constitutional monarch, and so he was, if it is remembered that the constitution was strongly monarchical and that it was not merely unwritten but was supported by no guarantees. The best solution for Roman government might have been a genuine constitutional monarchy, with provision for an imperial council, and, above all, the establishment of the succession to the throne. The absence of a fixed succession was the cause of one of the most important of the reforms by which Diocletian gave the Empire a new lease on life; but such a provision was of course impossible so long as the pretense was maintained that Augustus was the restorer of the Republic. Nevertheless, Augustus did govern through the forms of the Republic, and not only that, but the Senate, the Assembly, and the magistrates had important functions in the state. It was possible to believe that the Republic had in fact been restored and that the extraordinary powers granted to the First Citizen by the Senate would lapse with the passing of the emergency. The ordinary Roman had all the freedom he cared for, and much more than he had had during the irregular dictatorships of the past half-century; he had two things which he greatly valued, law and order; and he had peace.

For almost the first time in history Rome was at peace at home and abroad. It was the beginning of the
Pax Romana,
the Roman Peace, which, within the Empire at least, was to endure for centuries. For the first time in their lives men had time to get their breath and look about them; and what they saw was an empire that, as Gibbon said, “comprised the fairest part of the habitable world.” They knew that they were living in a great age; they believed that they were on the threshold of a veritable Age of Gold. Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, whose historic meaning is disputed but which probably refers to the birth of an heir to Augustus, salutes so rapturously the child and the age he is to usher in that it was long believed to be a divinely inspired prophecy of the birth of the Messiah, so soon to be born. (That is one reason why Virgil was allowed to guide Dante as far as the Earthly Paradise.)

The writers of the time were moved to celebrate the greatness of Rome, past, present, and to come. The great monument is, of course, Virgil’s
Æneid,
which links the foundation of Rome to the fall of Troy, traces the ancestry of Julius Caesar to the gods, and makes the greatness of Rome the subject of divine intervention and prophecy. If to all moderns (unless they make a special imaginative effort to see Virgil’s point of view) Æneas seems a heartless prig when he deserts Dido, he does so because the founding of Rome was a sacred cause, which could demand and justify the breaking of every earthly tie. But Virgil was by no means alone.
“Antiquam exquirite matrem,”
Æneas was charged, “Seek the ancient mother,” and the historian Livy was also moved to seek the foundations of Rome’s greatness in the heroism and frugality of her early days. Of Livy as a historian, it may be said mildly that he is not reliable, and he has not always been spoken of mildly. Gibbon said of the ancient historians generally, “They said what it would have been meritorious to omit, and omitted what it was essential to say”; and Dr. Arnold of Rugby said, “The use of Livy as an historian is like that of the drunken helot—he shows what history should not be.” But Livy was not writing as a historian in the modem sense but almost as a fabulist. He presents his characters as examples of good and evil, as good and bad examples; and he has no doubt that whatever may be the truth of particular stories, the greatness of Rome is in fact founded on
virtus.
He speaks almost in the words of Virgil in declaring that the greatness of Rome was hard-earned.
“Tantæ molis erat Romanam condere gentem,”
says Virgil, “So great a toil it was to found the race of Rome.”
“Quanta rerum moles!”
cries Livy, “What a succession of toils!”

The lighter writers share the feeling. That delightful book of fairy-tales for grownups, the
Metamorphoses
of Ovid, manages to hold a fairly chronological course through its labyrinth of wonders, beginning with the shaping of the world out of chaos. It ends with the deification of Julius Cæsar, who shines in heaven as a new star, and with the clear prophecy that his successor will surpass him. In much of his verse Horace deliberately tries to give the impression of an elegant trifler; and one need not compare him with the ardent Catullus to say that in most matters of emotion he is a trifler. He has had affairs with several girls, and his general feeling is, as he says in “Quis multa gracilis,” that he is well out of it; or as he says at the beginning of the Fourth Book (written after an interval, when he was older), “Oh, Lord, is
that
beginning again? I thought I was too old!” He can even make fun, in “Integer vitæ,” of the sacred Roman concept of virtue, beginning with what is apparently a celebration of virtue and then in a kind of burlesque revealing that the virtue he means is constancy in love—which was to most Romans far less important than
pietas
and
virtus,
and not a virtue for which Horace himself was distinguished. For the rest, he is the poet of strictly rational enjoyments. Let us eat and drink, for we shall soon be dead, and what good will the wine be to us then? But let us not eat and drink too much, or we may have a headache tomorrow. It is sensible and agreeable; it is also, in the magic of Horace’s word order, extremely charming; but as an emotional attitude it is apt to seem a little chilly to anyone brought up in a more romantic tradition. The great group of patriotic poems at the beginning of the Third Book, however, the Regulus ode and the rest, show an emotion as deep and intense as anything that poetry can show. It can be said that there were two things that Horace took seriously: Rome and the art of poetry.