The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Women of the Caesars, by Guglielmo Ferrero
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Women of the Caesars
Author: Guglielmo Ferrero
Release Date: July 18, 2005 [EBook #16324]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMEN OF THE CAESARS ***
Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: Livia, the wife of Augustus, superintending the weaving
of robes for her family.]
THE WOMEN OF THE CAESARS
BY
GUGLIELMO FERRERO
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
MCMXI
Copyright, 1911, by
THE CENTURY CO.
Published, October, 1911
THE DEVINNE PRESS
CONTENTS
I WOMAN AND MARRIAGE IN ANCIENT ROME
II LIVIA AND JULIA
III THE DAUGHTERS OF AGRIPPA
IV TIBERIUS AND AGRIPPINA
V THE SISTERS OF CALIGULA AND THE MARRIAGE OF MESSALINA
VI AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Livia, the Wife of Augustus, Superintending the Weaving of Robes for
her Family . . . _Frontispiece_
A Roman Marriage Custom
Eumachia, a Public Priestess of Ancient Rome
The Forum under the Caesars
The So-called Bust of Cicero
Julius Caesar
The Sister of M. Nonius Balbus
Livia, the Mother of Tiberius, in the Costume of a Priestess
The Young Augustus
The Emperor Augustus
A Silver Denarius of the Second Triumvirate
Silver Coin Bearing the Head of Julius Caesar
The Great Paris Cameo
Octavia, the Sister of Augustus
A Reception at Livia's Villa
Mark Antony
Antony and Cleopatra
Tiberius, Elder Son of Livia and Stepson of Augustus
Drusus, the Younger Brother of Tiberius
Statue of a Young Roman Woman
A Roman Girl of the Time of the Caesars
Costumes of Roman Men, Women, and Children in the Procession of a Peace
Festival
Bust of Tiberius in the Museo Nazionale, Naples
Types of Head-dresses Worn in the Time of the Women of the Caesars
A Roman Feast in the Time of the Caesars
Depositing the Ashes of a Member of the Imperial Family in a Roman
Columbarium
The Starving Livilla Refusing Food
Costume of a Chief Vestal (Virgo Vestalis Maxima)
Remains of the House of the Vestal Virgins
Bust, Supposed to be of Antonia, Daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia,
and Mother of Germanicus, in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Caligula
A Bronze Sestertius (Slightly Enlarged), Showing the Sisters of
Caligula (Agrippina, Drusilla, and Julia Livilla) on One Side and
Germanicus on the Other Side
A Bronze Sestertius with the Head of Agrippina the Elder, Daughter of
Agrippa and Julia, the Daughter of Augustus
Claudius, Messalina, and Their Two Children in What is Known as the
"Hague Cameo"
Remains of the Bridge of Caligula in the Palace of the Caesars
The Emperor Caligula
Claudius
The Emperor Claudius
Messalina, Third Wife of Claudius
The Philosopher Seneca
The Emperor Nero
Agrippina the Younger, Sister of Caligula and Mother of Nero
Britannicus
Statue of Agrippina the Younger, in the Capitoline Museum, Rome
Agrippina the Younger
The Emperor Nero
The Death of Agrippina
WOMEN OF THE CAESARS
I
WOMAN AND MARRIAGE IN ANCIENT ROME
"Many things that among the Greeks are considered improper and
unfitting," wrote Cornelius Nepos in the preface to his "Lives," "are
permitted by our customs. Is there by chance a Roman who is ashamed to
take his wife to a dinner away from home? Does it happen that the
mistress of the house in any family does not enter the anterooms
frequented by strangers and show herself among them? Not so in Greece:
there the woman accepts invitations only among families to which she is
related, and she remains withdrawn in that inner part of the house
which is called the _gynaeceum_, where only the nearest relatives are
admitted."
This passage, one of the most significant in all the little work of
Nepos, draws in a few, clear, telling strokes one of the most marked
distinctions between the Greco-Asiatic world and the Roman. Among
ancient societies, the Roman was probably that in which, at least among
the better classes, woman enjoyed the greatest social liberty and the
greatest legal and economic autonomy. There she most nearly approached
that condition of moral and civil equality with man which makes her his
comrade, and not his slave--that equality in which modern civilization
sees one of the supreme ends of moral progress.
The doctrine held by some philosophers and sociologists, that military
peoples subordinate woman to a tyrannical régime of domestic servitude,
is wholly disproved by the history of Rome. If there was ever a time
when the Roman woman lived in a state of perennial tutelage, under the
authority of man from birth to death--of the husband, if not of the
father, or, if not of father or husband, of the guardian--that time
belongs to remote antiquity.
When Rome became the master state of the Mediterranean world, and
especially during the last century of the republic, woman, aside from a
few slight limitations of form rather than of substance, had already
acquired legal and economic independence, the condition necessary for
social and moral equality. As to marriage, the affianced pair could at
that time choose between two different legal family régimes: marriage
with _manus_, the older form, in which all the goods of the wife passed
to the ownership of the husband, so that she could no longer possess
anything in her own name; or marriage without _manus_, in which only
the dower became the property of the husband, and the wife remained
mistress of all her other belongings and all that she might acquire.
Except in some cases, and for special reasons, in all the families of
the aristocracy, by common consent, marriages, during the last
centuries of the republic, were contracted in the later form; so that
at that time married women directly and openly had gained economic
independence.
During the same period, indirectly, and by means of juridical evasions,
this independence was also won by unmarried women, who, according to
ancient laws, ought to have remained all their lives under a guardian,
either selected by the father in his will or appointed by the law in
default of such selection. To get around this difficulty, the fertile
and subtle imagination of the jurists invented first the _tutor
optivus_, permitting the father, instead of naming his daughter's
guardian in his will, to leave her free to choose one general guardian
or several, according to the business in hand, or even to change that
official as many times as she wished.
To give the woman means to change her legitimate guardian at pleasure,
if her father had provided none by will, there was invented the _tutor
cessicius_, thereby allowing the transmission of a legal guardianship.
However, though all restrictions imposed upon the liberty of the
unmarried woman by the institution of tutelage disappeared, one
limitation continued in force--she could not make a will. Yet even
this was provided for, either by fictitious marriage or by the
invention of the _tutor fiduciarius_. The woman, without contracting
matrimony, gave herself by _coemptio_ (purchase) into the _manus_ of a
person of her trust, on the agreement that the _coemptionator_ would
free her: he became her guardian in the eyes of the law.
[Illustration: A Roman marriage custom. The picture shows the bride
entering her new home in the arms of the bridegroom.]
There was, then, at the close of the republic little disparity in legal
condition between the man and the woman. As is natural, to this almost
complete legal equality there was united an analogous moral and social
equality. The Romans never had the idea that between the _mundus
muliebris_ (woman's world) and that of men they must raise walls, dig
ditches, put up barricades, either material or moral. They never
willed, for example, to divide women from men by placing between them
the ditch of ignorance. To be sure, the Roman dames of high society
were for a long time little instructed, but this was because, moreover,
the men distrusted Greek culture. When literature, science, and
Hellenic philosophy were admitted into the great Roman families as
desired and welcome guests, neither the authority, nor the egoism, nor
yet the prejudices of the men, sought to deprive women of the joy, the
comfort, the light, that might come to them from these new studies. We
know that many ladies in the last two centuries of the republic not
only learned to dance and to sing,--common feminine studies,
these,--but even learned Greek, loved literature, and dabbled in
philosophy, reading its books or meeting with the famous philosophers
of the Orient.
Moreover, in the home the woman was mistress, at the side of and on
equality with her husband. The passage I have quoted from Nepos proves
that she was not segregated, like the Greek woman: she received and
enjoyed the friends of her husband, was present with them at festivals
and banquets in the houses of families with whom she had friendly
relations, although at such banquets she might not, like the man,
recline, but must, for the sake of greater modesty, sit at table. In
short, she was not, like the Greek woman, shut up at home, a veritable
prisoner.
She might go out freely; this she did generally in a litter. She was
never excluded from theaters, even though the Roman government tried as
best it could for a long period to temper in its people the passion for
spectacular entertainments. She could frequent public places and have
recourse directly to the magistrates. We have record of the assembling
and of demonstrations made by the richest women of Rome in the Forum
and other public places, to obtain laws and other provisions from the
magistrates, like that famous demonstration of women that Livy
describes as having occurred in the year 195 B.C., to secure the
abolition of the Oppian Law against luxury.
What more? We have good reason for holding that already under the
republic there existed at Rome a kind of woman's club, which called
itself _conventus matronarum_ and gathered together the dames of the
great families. Finally, it is certain that many times in critical
moments the government turned directly and officially to the great
ladies of Rome for help to overcome the dangers that menaced public
affairs, by collecting money, or imploring with solemn religious
ceremonies the favor of the gods.
One understands then, how at all times there were at Rome women much
interested in public affairs. The fortunes of the powerful families,
their glory, their dominance, their wealth, depended on the
vicissitudes of politics and of war. The heads of these families were
all statesmen, diplomats, warriors; the more intelligent and cultivated
the wife, and the fonder she was of her husband, the intenser the
absorption with which she must have followed the fortunes of politics,
domestic and foreign; for with these were bound up many family
interests, and often even the life of her husband.
[Illustration: Eumachia, a public priestess of ancient Rome.]
Was the Roman family, then, the reader will demand at this point, in
everything like the family of contemporary civilization? Have we
returned upon the long trail to the point reached by our far-away
forebears?
No. If there are resemblances between the modern family and the Roman,
there are also crucial differences. Although the Roman was disposed to
allow woman judicial and economic independence, a refined culture, and
that freedom without which it is impossible to enjoy life in dignified
and noble fashion, he was never ready to recognize in the way modern
civilization does more or less openly, as ultimate end and reason for
marriage, either the personal happiness of the contracting parties or
their common personal moral development in the unifying of their
characters and aspirations. The individualistic conception of
matrimony and of the family attained by our civilization was alien to
the Roman mind, which conceived of these from an essentially political
and social point of view. The purpose of marriage was, so to speak,
exterior to the pair. As untouched by any spark of the metaphysical
spirit as he was unyielding--at least in action--to every suggestion of
the philosophic; preoccupied only in enlarging and consolidating the
state of which he was master, the Roman aristocrat never regarded
matrimony and the family, just as he never regarded religion and law,
as other than instruments for political domination, as means for
increasing and establishing the power of every great family, and by
family affiliations to strengthen the association of the aristocracy,
already bound together by political interest.
For this reason, although the Roman conceded many privileges and
recognized many rights among women, he never went so far as to think
that a woman of great family could aspire to the right of choosing her
own husband. Custom, indeed, much restricted the young man also, at
least in a first marriage. The choice rested with the fathers, who
were accustomed to affiance their sons early, indeed when mere boys.
The heads of two friendly families would find themselves daily together
in the struggle of the Forum and the Comitia, or in the deliberations
of the Senate. Did the idea occur to both that their children, if
affianced then, at seven or eight years of age, might cement more
closely the union of the two families, then straightway the matter was
definitely arranged. The little girl was brought up with the idea that
some day, as soon as might be, she should marry that boy, just as for
two centuries in the famous houses of Catholic countries many of the
daughters were brought up in the expectation that one day they should
take the veil.
Every one held this Roman practice as reasonable, useful, equitable; to
no one did the idea occur that by it violence was done to the most
intimate sentiment of liberty and independence that a human being can
know. On the contrary, according to the common judgment, the
well-governing of the state was being wisely provided for, and these
alliances were destroying the seeds of discord that spontaneously
germinate in aristocracy and little by little destroy it, like those
plants sown by no man's hand, which thrive upon old walls and become
their ruin.
This is why one knows of every famous Roman personage how many wives he
had and of what family they were. The marriage of a Roman noble was a
political act, and noteworthy; because a youth, or even a mature man,
connecting himself with certain families, came to assume more or less
fully the political responsibilities in which, for one cause or
another, they were involved. This was particularly true in the last
centuries of the republic,--that is, beginning from the Gracchi,--when
for the various reasons which I have set forth in my "Greatness and
Decline of Rome," the Roman aristocracy divided into two inimical
parties, one of which attempted to rouse against the other the
interests, the ambitions, and the cupidity, of the middle and lower
classes. The two parties then sought to reinforce themselves by
matrimonial alliances, and these followed the ups and downs of the
political struggle that covered Rome with blood. Of this fact the
story of Julius Caesar is a most curious proof.
The prime reason for Julius Caesar's becoming the chief of the popular
party is to be found neither in his ambitions nor in his temperament,
and even less in his political opinions, but in his relationship to
Marius. An aunt of Caesar had married Caius Marius, the modest
bankrupt farmer of revenues, who, having entered politics, had become
the first general of his time, had been elected consul six times, and
had conquered Jugurtha, the Cimbri, and the Teutons. The self-made man
had become famous and rich, and in the face of an aristocracy proud of
its ancestors, had tried to ennoble his obscure origin by taking his
wife from an ancient and most noble, albeit impoverished and decayed,
patrician family.
But when there broke out the revolution in which Marius placed himself
at the head of the popular party, and the revolution was overcome by
Sulla, the old aristocracy, which had conquered with Sulla, did not
forgive the patrician family of the Julii for having connected itself
with that bitter foe, who had made so much mischief. Consequently,
during the period of the reaction, all its members were looked upon
askance, and were suspected and persecuted, among them young Caesar,
who was in no way responsible for the deeds of his uncle, since he was
only a lad during the war between Sulla and Marius.
This explains how it was that the first wife of Caesar, Cossutia, was
the daughter of a knight; that is, of a financier and revenue-farmer.
For a young man belonging to a family of ancient senatorial nobility,
this marriage was little short of a _mésalliance_; but Caesar had been
engaged to this girl when still a very young man, at the time when, the
alliance between Marius and the knights being still firm and strong,
the marriage of a rich knight's daughter would mean to the nephew of
Marius, not only a considerable fortune, but also the support of the
social class which at that moment was predominant. For reasons unknown
to us, Caesar soon repudiated Cossutia, and before the downfall of the
democratic party he was married to Cornelia, who was the daughter of
Cinna, the democratic consul and a most distinguished member of the
party of Marius. This second marriage, the causes of which must be
sought for in the political status of Caesar's family, was the cause of
his first political reverses. For Sulla tried to force Caesar to
repudiate Cornelia, and in consequence of his refusal, he came to be
considered an enemy by Sulla and his party and was treated accordingly.
[Illustration: The Forum under the Caesars.]
It is known that Cornelia died when still very young, after only a few
years of married life, and that Caesar's third marriage in the year 68
B.C., was quite different from his first and second, since the third
wife, Pompeia, belonged to one of the noblest families of the
conservative aristocracy--was, in fact, a niece of Sulla. How could
the nephew of Marius, who had escaped as by miracle the proscriptions
of Sulla, ever have married the latter's niece? Because in the dozen
years intervening between 80 and 68, the political situation had
gradually grown calmer, and a new air of conciliation had begun to blow
through the city, troubled by so much confusion, burying in oblivion
the bloodiest records of the civil war, calling into fresh life
admiration for Marius, that hero who had conquered the Cimbri and the
Teutons. In that moment, to be a nephew of Marius was no longer a
crime among any of the great families; for some, on the contrary, it
was coming to be the beginning of glory. But that situation was
short-lived. After a brief truce, the two parties again took up a
bitter war, and for his fourth wife Caesar chose Calpurnia, the
daughter of Lucius Calpurnius Piso, consul in 58, and a most
influential senator of the popular party.
Whoever studies the history of the influential personages of Caesar's
time, will find that their marriages follow the fortunes of the
political situation. Where a purely political reason was wanting,
there was the economic. A woman could aid powerfully a political
career in two ways: by ably administering the household and by
contributing to its expenses her dower or her personal fortune.
Although the Romans gave their daughters an education relatively
advanced, they never forgot to inculcate in them the idea that it was
the duty of a woman, especially if she was nobly born, to know all the
arts of good housewifery, and especially, as most important, spinning
and weaving. The reason for this lay in the fact that for the
aristocratic families, who were in possession of vast lands and many
flocks, it was easy to provide themselves from their own estates with
the wool necessary to clothe all their household, from masters to the
numerous retinue of slaves. If the _materfamilias_ knew sufficiently
well the arts of spinning and weaving to be able to organize in the
home a small "factory" of slaves engaged in such tasks, and knew how to
direct and survey them, to make them work with zeal and without theft,
she could provide the clothing for the whole household, thus saving the
heavy expense of buying the stuffs from a merchant--notable economy in
times when money was scarce and every family tried to make as little
use of it as possible. The _materfamilias_ held, then, in every home,
a prime industrial office, that of clothing the entire household, and
in proportion to her usefulness in this office was she able to aid or
injure the family.
More important still were the woman's dower and her personal fortune.
The Romans not only considered it perfectly honorable, sagacious, and
praiseworthy for a member of the political aristocracy to marry a rich
woman for her wealth, the better to maintain the luster of his rank, or
the more easily to fulfil his particular political and social duties,
but they also believed there could be no better luck or greater honor
for a rich woman than for this reason to marry a prominent man. They
exacted only that she be of respectable habits, and even in this regard
it appears that, during certain tumultuous periods, they sometimes shut
one eye.
Tradition says, for example, that Sulla, born of a noble family, quite
in ruin, owed his money to the bequest of a Greek woman whose wealth
had the most impure origin that the possessions of a woman can possibly
have. Is this tradition only the invention of the enemies of the
terrible dictator? In any event, how people of good standing felt in
this matter in normal times is shown by the life of Cicero.
Cicero was born at Arpino, of a knightly family, highly respectable,
and well educated, but not rich. That he was able to pursue his
brilliant forensic and political career, was chiefly due to his
marriage to Terentia, who, although not very rich, had more than he,
and by her fortune enabled him to live at Rome. But it is well known
that after long living together happily enough, as far as can be
judged, Cicero and Terentia, already old, fell into discord and in 46
B.C. ended by being divorced. The reasons for the divorce are not
exactly clear, but from Cicero's letters it appears that financial
motives and disputes were not wanting. It seems that during the civil
wars Terentia refused to help Cicero with her money to the extent he
desired; that is to say, at some tremendous moment of those turbulent
years she was unwilling to risk all her patrimony on the uncertain
political fortune of her husband.
[Illustration: The so-called bust of Cicero. All but the head is
modern. Now in the Museo Capitolino, it was formerly in the Palazzo
Barberini.]
Cicero's divorce, obliging him to return the dower, reduced him to the
gravest straits, from which he emerged through another marriage. He
was the guardian of an exceedingly rich young woman, named Publilia,
and one fine day, at the age of sixty-three, he joined hands with this
seventeen-year-old girl, whose possessions were to rehabilitate the
great writer.
This conception of matrimony and of the family may seem unromantic,
prosaic, materialistic; but we must not suppose that because of it the
Romans failed to experience the tenderest and sweetest affections of
the human heart. The letters of Cicero himself show how tenderly even
Romans could love wife and children. Although they distrusted and
combatted as dangerous to the prosperity and well-being of the state
those dearest and gentlest personal affections that in our times
literature, music, religion, philosophy, and custom have educated,
encouraged, and exalted, as one of the supreme fountains of civil life,
should we therefore reckon them barbarians? We must not forget the
great diversity between our times and theirs. The confidence which
modern men repose in love as a principle, in its ultimate wisdom, in
its beneficial influence or the affairs of the world; in the idea that
every man has the right to choose for himself the person of the
opposite sex toward whom the liveliest and strongest personal
attraction impels him--these are the supreme blossoms of modern
individualism, the roots of which have been able to fasten only in the
rich soil of modern civilization.
The great ease of living that we now enjoy, the lofty intellectual
development of our day, permit us to relax the severe discipline that
poorer times and peoples, constrained to lead a harder life, had to
impose upon themselves. Although the habit may seem hard and
barbarous, certainly almost all the great peoples of the past, and the
majority of those contemporary who live outside our civilization, have
conceived and practised matrimony not as a right of sentiment, but as a
duty of reason. To fulfil it, the young have turned to the sagacity of
the aged, and these have endeavored to promote the success of marriage
not merely to the satisfaction of a single passion, usually as brief as
it is ardent, but according to a calculated equilibrium of qualities,
tendencies, and material means.
The principles regulating Roman marriage may seem to us at variance
with human nature, but they are the principles to which all peoples
wishing to trust the establishment of the family not to passion as
mobile as the sea, but to reason, have had recourse in times when the
family was an organism far more essential than it is to-day, because it
held within itself many functions, educational, industrial, and
political, now performed by other institutions. But reason itself is
not perfect. Like passion, it has its weakness, and marriage so
conceived by Rome produced grave inconveniences, which one must know in
order to understand the story, in many respects tragic, of the women of
the Caesars.
The first difficulty was the early age at which marriages took place
among the aristocracy. The boys were almost always married at from
eighteen to twenty; the girls, at from thirteen to fifteen. This
disadvantage is to be found in all society in which marriage is
arranged by the parents, because it would be next to impossible to
induce young people to yield to the will of their elders in an affair
in which the passions are readily aroused if they were allowed to reach
the age when the passions are strongest and the will has become
independent Hardly out of childhood, the man and the woman are
naturally more tractable. On the other hand, it is easy to see how
many dangers threatened such youthful marriages in a society where
matrimony gave to the woman wide liberty, placing her in contact with
other men, opening to her the doors of theaters and public resorts,
leading her into the midst of all the temptations and illusions of life.
The other serious disadvantage was the facility of divorce. For the
very reason that matrimony was for the nobility a political act, the
Romans were never willing to allow that it could be indissoluble;
indeed, even when the woman was in no sense culpable, they reserved to
the man the right of undoing it at any time he wished, solely because
that particular marriage did not suit his political interests. And the
marriage could be dissolved by the most expeditious means, without
formality--by a mere letter! Nor was that enough. Fearing that love
might outweigh reason and calculation in the young, the law granted to
the father the right to give notice of divorce to the daughter-in-law,
instead of leaving it to the son; so that the father was able to make
and unmake the marriages of his sons, as he thought useful and fitting,
without taking their will into account.
The woman, therefore, although in the home she was of sovereign
equality with the man and enjoyed a position full of honor, was,
notwithstanding, never sure of the future. Neither the affection of
her husband nor the stainlessness of her life could insure that she
should close her days in the house whither she had come in her youth as
a bride. At any hour the fatalities of politics could, I will not say,
drive her forth, but gently invite her exit from the house where her
children were born. An ordinary letter was enough to annul a marriage.
So it was that, particularly in the age of Caesar when politics were
much perturbed and shifting, there were not a few women of the
aristocracy who had changed husbands three or four times, and that not
for lightness or caprice or inconstancy of tastes, but because their
fathers, their brothers, sometimes their sons, had at a certain moment
besought or constrained them to contract some particular marriage that
should serve their own political ends.
It is easy to comprehend how this precariousness discouraged woman from
austere and rigorous virtues, the very foundation of the family; how it
was a continuous incitement to frivolity of character, to dissipation,
to infidelity. Consequently, the liberty the Romans allowed her must
have been much more dangerous than the greater freedom she enjoys
today, since it lacked its modern checks and balances, such as personal
choice in marriage, the relatively mature age at which marriages are
nowadays made, the indissolubility of the matrimonial contract, or,
rather, the many and diverse restrictions placed upon divorce, by which
it is no longer left to the arbitrary will or the mere fancy of the man.
In brief, there was in the constitution of the Roman family a
contradiction, which must be well apprehended if one would understand
the history of the great ladies of the imperial era. Rome desired
woman in marriage to be the pliable instrument of the interests of the
family and the state, but did not place her under the despotism of
customs, of law, and of the will of man in the way done by all other
states that have exacted from her complete self-abnegation. Instead,
it accorded to her almost wholly that liberty, granted with little
danger by civilizations like ours, in which she may live not only for
the family, for the state, for the race, but also for herself. Rome
was unwilling to treat her as did the Greek and Asiatic world, but it
did not on this account give up requiring of her the same total
self-abnegation for the public weal, the utter obliviousness to her own
aspirations and passions, in behalf of the race.
[Illustration: Julius Caesar]
This contradiction explains to us one of the fundamental phenomena of
the history of Rome--the deep, tenacious, age-long puritanism of high
Roman society. Puritanism was the chief expedient by which Rome
attempted to solve the contradiction. That coercion which the Oriental
world had tried to exercise upon woman by segregating her, keeping her
ignorant, terrorizing her with threats and punishments, Rome sought to
secure by training. It inculcated in every way by means of education,
religion, and opinion the idea that she should be pious, chaste,
faithful, devoted alone to her husband and children; that luxury,
prodigality, dissoluteness, were horrible vices, the infamy of which
hopelessly degraded all that was best and purest in woman. It tried to
protect the minds of both men and women from all those influences of
art, literature, and religion which might tend to arouse the personal
instinct and the longing for love; and for a long time it distrusted,
withstood, and almost sought to disguise the mythology, the arts, and
the literature of Greece, as well as many of the Asiatic religions,
imbued as they were with an erotic spirit of subtle enticement.
Puritanism is essentially an intense effort to rouse in the mind the
liveliest repulsion for certain vices and pleasures, and a violent
dread of them; and Rome made use of it to check and counterbalance the
liberty of woman, to impede and render more difficult the abuses of
such liberty, particularly prodigality and dissoluteness.
It is therefore easy to understand how this puritanism was a thing
serious, weighty, and terrible, in Roman life; and how from it could be
born the tragedies we have to recount. It was the chief means of
solving one of the gravest problems that has perplexed all
civilizations--the problem of woman and her freedom, a problem earnest,
difficult, and complex which springs up everywhere out of the
unobstructed anarchy and the tremendous material prosperity of the
modern world. And the difficulty of the problem consists, above all,
in this: that, although it is a hard, cruel, plainly iniquitous thing
to deprive a woman of liberty and subject her to a régime of tyranny in
order to constrain her to live for the race and not for herself, yet
when liberty is granted her to live for herself, to satisfy her
personal desires, she abuses that liberty more readily than a man does,
and more than a man forgets her duties toward the race.
She abuses it more readily for two reasons: because she exercises a
greater power over man than he over her; and because, in the wealthier
classes, she is freer from the political and economic responsibilities
that bind the man. However unbridled the freedom that man enjoys,
however vast his egoism, he is always constrained in a certain measure
to check his selfish instincts by the need of conserving, enlarging,
and defending against rivals his social, economic, and political
situation.
But the woman? If she is freed from family cares, if she is authorized
to live for her own gratification and for her beauty; if the opinion
that imposes upon her, on pain of infamy, habits pure and honest,
weakens; if, instead of infamy, dissoluteness brings her glory, riches,
homage, what trammel can still restrain in her the selfish instincts
latent in every human being? She runs the mighty danger of changing
into an irresponsible being who will be the more admired and courted
and possessed of power--at least as long as her beauty lasts--the more
she ignores every duty, subordinating all good sense to her own
pleasure.
This is the reason why woman, in periods commanded by strong social
discipline, is the most beneficent and tenacious among the cohesive
forces of a nation; and why, in times when social discipline is
relaxed, she is, instead, through ruinous luxury, dissipation, and
voluntary sterility, the most terrible force for dissolution.
[Illustration: The sister of M. Nonius Balbus.]
One of the greatest problems of every epoch and all civilizations is to
find a balance between the natural aspiration for freedom that is none
other than the need of personal felicity--a need as lively and profound
in the heart of woman as of man--and the supreme necessity for a
discipline without which the race, the state, and the family run the
gravest danger. Yet this problem to-day, in the unmeasured
exhilaration with which riches and power intoxicate the
European-American civilization, is considered with the superficial
frivolity and the voluble dilettantism that despoil or confuse all the
great problems of esthetics, philosophy, statesmanship, and morality.
We live in the midst of what might be called the Saturnalia of the
world's history; and in the midst of the swift and easy labor, the
inebriety of our continual festivities, we feel no more the tragic in
life. This short history of the women of the Caesars will set before
the eyes of this pleasure-loving contemporary age tragedies among whose
ruins our ancestors lived from birth to death, and by which they
tempered their minds.
II
LIVIA AND JULIA
In the year 38 B.C. it suddenly became known at Rome that C. Julius
Caesar Octavianus (afterward the Emperor Augustus), one of the
triumvirs of the republic, and colleague of Mark Antony and Lepidus in
the military dictatorship established after the death of Caesar, had
sent up for decision to the pontifical college, the highest religious
authority of the state, a curious question. It was this: Might a
divorced woman who was expecting to become a mother contract a marriage
with another man before the birth of her child? The pontifical college
replied that if there still was doubt about the fact the new marriage
would not be permissible; but if it was certain, there would be no
impediment. A few days later, it was learned that Octavianus had
divorced his wife Scribonia and had married Livia, a young woman of
nineteen. Livia's physical condition was precisely that concerning
which the pontiffs had been asked to decide, and in order to enter into
this marriage she had obtained a divorce from Tiberius Claudius Nero.
The two divorces and the new marriage were concluded with unwonted
haste. The first husband of Livia, acting the part of a father, gave
her a dowry for her new alliance and was present at the wedding. Thus
Livia suddenly passed into the house of her new husband where, three
months later, she gave birth to a son, who was called Drusus Claudius
Nero. This child Octavianus immediately sent to the house of its
father.
To us, marriage customs of this sort seem brutal, shameless, and almost
ridiculous. We should infer that a woman who lent herself to such
barter and exchange must be a person of light manners and of immoral
inclinations. At Rome, however, no one would have been amazed at such
a marriage or at the procedure adopted, had it not been for the
extraordinary haste, which seemed to indicate that it was undesirable
or impossible to wait until Livia should have given birth to her child,
and which made it necessary to trouble the pontifical college for its
somewhat sophistical consent. For all were accustomed to seeing the
marriages of great personages made and unmade in this manner and on
such bases. Why, then, were these nuptials so precipitately concluded,
apparently with the consent of all concerned? Why did they all, Livia
and Octavianus not less than Tiberius Claudius Nero, seem so impatient
that everything should be settled with despatch?
[Illustration: Livia, the mother of Tiberius, in the costume of a
priestess.]
The legend which then formed about the family of Augustus, a legend
hostile at almost every point, has interpreted this marriage as a
tyrannical act, virtually an abduction, by the dissolute and perverse
triumvir. I, too, in my "Greatness and Decline of Rome" expressed my
belief that this haste, at least, was the effect not of political
motives but of a passionate love inspired in the young triumvir by the
very beautiful Livia. A longer reflection upon this episode has
persuaded me, however, that there is another manner, less poetic
perhaps, but more Roman, of explaining, at least in part, this famous
alliance, which was to have so great an importance in the history of
Rome.
To arrive at the motives of this marriage we must consider who was
Livia and who was Octavianus. Livia was a woman of great beauty, as
her portraits prove. But this was not all. She belonged also to two
of the most ancient and conspicuous families of the Roman nobility.
Her father, Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus, was by birth a Claudius,
adopted by a Livius Drusus. He was descended from Appius the Blind,
the famous censor and perhaps the most illustrious personage of the
ancient republic. His grandfather, his great-grand-father, and his
great-great-grandfather had been consuls, and consuls and censors may
be found in the collateral branches of the family. A sister of his
grandfather had been the wife of Tiberius Gracchus; a cousin of his
father had married Lucullus, the great general. He came, therefore, of
one of the most ancient and glorious families. Not less noble was the
family of the Livii Drusi who had adopted him. It counted eight
consulships, two censorships, three triumphs, and one dictatorship.
Thus the father of Livia belonged by birth and adoption to two of those
ancient, aristocratic families which for a long time and even in the
midst of the most tremendous revolutions the people had venerated as
semi-divine and into whose story was interwoven the history of the
great republic. Nor had the first husband given to Livia been less
noble, for Tiberius Claudius Nero was descended like Livia from Appius
the Blind, though through another son of the great censor. In Livia
was concentrated the quintessence of the great Roman aristocracy: she
was at Rome what in London to-day the daughter of the Duke of
Westminster or the Duke of Bedford would be, and her noble rank
explains the rôle which her family had played during the Civil War. In
the great revolution which broke out after the death of Caesar, the
father of Livia in the year 43 had been proscribed by the triumvirs; he
had fought with Brutus and Cassius and had died by his own hand after
Philippi. In 40, after the Perusinian war and only two years before
Livia's marriage with Octavianus, Tiberius Claudius Nero and Livia had
been forced to flee from Italy in fear of the vengeance of Octavianus.
Who on the other hand was Octavianus? A parvenu, with a nobility
altogether too recent! His grandfather was a rich usurer of Velitrae
(now Velletri), a financier and a man of affairs; it was only his
immediate father who succeeded by dint of the riches of the usurer
grandfather in entering the Roman nobility. He had married a sister of
Caesar and, though still young when he died, had become a senator and
pretor. Octavianus was, therefore, the descendant, as we should
express it in Europe to-day, of rich bourgeois recently ennobled.
Although by adopting him in his will Caesar had given him his name,
that of an ancient patrician family, the modest origin of Octavianus
and the trade of his grandfather were known to everybody. In a country
like Rome where, notwithstanding revolutions, the old nobility was
still highly venerated by the people and formed a closed caste, jealous
of its exclusive pride of ancestry, this obscurity of origin was a
handicap and a danger, especially when Octavianus had as colleagues
Antony and Lepidus, who could boast a much more ancient and illustrious
origin than his own.
We can readily explain, therefore, even without admitting that Livia
had aroused in him a violent passion, why the future Augustus should
have been so impatient to marry her in 38 B.C. The times were stormy
and uncertain; the youthful triumvir, whom a caprice of fortune had
raised to the head of a revolutionary dictatorship, was certainly the
weakest of the three colleagues, because of his youth, his slighter
experience, the feebler prestige among his soldiers, and, last of all,
the greater obscurity of his lineage. Antony, especially, who had
fought in so many wars, with Caesar and alone, who belonged to a family
of really ancient nobility, was much more popular than he among the
soldiers and had stronger relations with the great families. He was
therefore more powerful than Octavianus both in high places and in low.
A marriage with Livia meant much to the future Augustus. It would open
for him a door into the old aristocracy; it would draw him closer to
those families which, in spite of the revolution, were still so
influential and venerable; it would be the means of lessening the
hatred, contempt, and distrust in which these families held him. It
was for him what Napoleon's marriage with Marie Louise and the
consequent connection with the imperial family of Austria had been for
the former Corsican officer, become Emperor of the French. Since, now,
a lady who belonged to one of these great families was disposed to
marry him, it would have been foolish to put obstacles in the way; it
was necessary to act with despatch; time and fortune might change.
Such are the motives that may have induced Augustus to hasten the
nuptials. But what were the motives of Livia in accepting this
marriage, in such stormy times, when the fortunes of the future
Augustus were still so uncertain? A passage in Velleius Paterculus
would lead us to believe that he who devised this historic marriage was
none other than that same first husband of Livia, Tiberius Claudius
Nero himself! According to our ideas it is inconceivable; but not at
all strange according to the ideas of the Roman. It is probable that
Tiberius Claudius Nero, feeling that the triumph of the revolution was
now assured, had wished by this marriage to attach to the cause of the
old aristocracy the youngest of the three revolutionary leaders.
Already well along in years and infirm,--he was to die shortly
after,--Nero, who well knew the intelligence of his young wife, was
perhaps planning to place her in the house of the man in whom all saw
one of the future lords of Rome. Thus he would bind him to the
interests of the aristocracy. In the person of Livia there entered
into the house of Octavianus the old Roman nobility, which, defeated at
Philippi, was striving to reacquire through the prestige and the
cleverness of a woman what it had not been able to maintain by arms.
All her life long, with constancy, moderation, and wonderful tact,
Livia fulfilled her mission. She succeeded in resolving into the
admirable harmony of a long existence that contradiction between the
liberty conceded to her sex and the self-denial demanded of it by man
as a duty. She was assuredly one of the most perfect models of that
lady of high society whom the Romans in all the years of their long and
tempestuous history never ceased to admire. Even and serene,
completely mistress of herself and of her passions, endowed with a
robust will, she accommodated herself without difficulty to all the
sacrifices which her rank and situation imposed upon her. She changed
husbands without repugnance, though her marriage to Octavianus occurred
but five years after the proscriptions, while he was still red with the
blood of her family and friends. Likewise she renounced her two sons,
the future emperor Tiberius, who had been born before her second
marriage, as well as the one who had been born after. So too when, a
few years later, Tiberius Claudius Nero died, appointing Augustus their
guardian, with equal serenity she took them back and educated them with
the most careful motherly solicitude. To the second husband, whom
politics had given her, she was a faithful companion. Scandal imputed
to her absurd poisonings which she did not commit, and accused her of
insatiable ambitions and perfidious intrigues. No one ever dared
accuse her of infidelity to Augustus or of dissolute conduct. The
great fame, power, and wealth of her husband did not disturb the calm
poise of her spirit. In that palace of Augustus, adorned with
triumphal laurel, toward which the eyes of the subjects were turned
from every part of the empire, in that palace where, in little councils
with the most eminent men of the senate, were debated the supreme
interests of the world,--laws and elections, wars and peace,--she
preserved the beautiful traditions of simplicity and industry. These
she had learned as a child in the house of her father,--a house as much
more illustrious with inherited glory as it was poorer in wealth than
that which Victory had prepared for Augustus on the Palatine.
[Illustration: The young Augustus.]
We know--it is Suetonius who tells us--that this house on the Palatine
built by Augustus, in which Livia spent the larger part of her life,
was small and not at all luxurious. In it there was not a single piece
of marble nor a precious mosaic; for forty years Augustus slept in the
same bedchamber, and the furniture of the house was so simple that in
the second century of our era it was exhibited to the public as an
extraordinary curiosity. The imperial pair had several villas, at
Lanuvium, at Palestrina, at Tivoli, but all of them were unpretentious
and simple. Nor was there any more pomp and ceremony about the dinners
to which they invited the conspicuous personages of Rome, the
dignitaries of the state and the heads of the great families. Only on
very special occasions were six courses served; usually there were but
three. Moreover, Augustus never wore any other togas than those woven
by Livia; woven not indeed and altogether by Livia's hands,--though she
did not disdain, now and then, to work the loom,--but by her slaves and
freed-women. Faithful to the traditions of the aristocracy, Livia
counted it among her duties personally to direct the weaving-rooms
which were in the house. As she carefully parceled out the wool to the
slaves, watching over them lest they steal or waste it, and frequently
taking her place among them while they were at work, she felt that she
too contributed to the prosperity and the glory of the empire.
Simplicity, loyalty, industry, an absolute surrender of one's own
personality to the family and its interests,--these, in the great
families, were the traditional feminine virtues which lived again in
Livia to the admiration of her contemporaries. But with these virtues
were associated also the need and the pride of participating in the
affairs and work of her husband, that interest in politics which had
been common to the intelligent women of the nobility. No one at Rome
was astonished, especially in the upper classes, that Livia should
occupy herself actively with politics; that Augustus should frequently
come to her for counsel, or that he should not make any serious
decision without having consulted her; that, in short, she should at
the same time attend to her husband's clothes and aid him in governing
the empire. For so had done from time immemorial all the great ladies
of the aristocracy, mindful of their good repute and the prosperity of
their families. And Livia must have tried the more earnestly to fulfil
all that her education had taught her to consider a sacred duty, since
to a woman of her old-fashioned breeding the times must have appeared
especially difficult and perilous.
The civil wars had greatly reduced in numbers the historic aristocracy
of Rome, and the peace which followed after so long a time and which
had been so anxiously invoked, very soon began to threaten the
prosperity of the remnant of that nobility with a more insidious but
more inevitable ruin. About 18 B.C., when Livia was approaching her
fortieth year, the men of the new generation who had not seen the civil
wars, for when these ended they were either unborn or only in their
infancy, were already beginning to come to the front. They brought
with them a previously unknown spirit of luxury, of enjoyment, of
dissipation, of rebellion against discipline, of egotism and fondness
for the new, which rendered very difficult, not to say impossible, the
continuation of the aristocratic régime. Women submitted with more and
more repugnance to those obligatory marriages, arranged for reasons of
state, which had formerly been the tradition and the sure bulwark of
dominion for the aristocracy. The increase of celibacy was rendering
sterile the most celebrated stocks; the most lamentable vices and
disorders became tolerated and common in the most illustrious families,
and ruinous habits of extravagance spread generally among that
aristocracy, once so simple and austere. All this had grown up after
the conquest of Egypt, which had established more points of contact
with the East; and it increased in proportion as those industries and
the commerce in articles of luxury which had flourished at Alexandria
under the Ptolemies were gradually transplanted to Rome, where the
merchants hoped to establish among their conquerors the clientele which
had been lost with the fall of the Kingdom of the Nile. The ladies
especially took up with the new oriental customs, and, preferring
expensive stuffs and jewels, turned from the loom, which Livia had
wished to preserve as the emblem of womanhood. Many young men of the
great families were beginning to show a distaste for the army, for the
government of the state, for jurisprudence, for all those activities
which had been the jealous privilege of the nobility of the past. One
gave himself up to literary pursuits, another cultivated philosophy,
another busied himself only with the increase of his inherited fortune,
while another lived only in pleasure and idleness. So it happened that
there began to appear descendants of great houses who refused to be
senators; every year an effort had to be made to find a sufficient
number of candidates for the more numerous positions like the
questorship, and in the army it was no easy matter to fill all the
posts of the superior officers which were reserved for members of the
nobility.
[Illustration: The Emperor Augustus. This statue was found in 1910 in
the Via Labicana, not far from the Colosseum.]
The Roman aristocracy then, that glorious Roman aristocracy which had
escaped the massacres of the proscriptions and of Philippi, ran grave
danger of dying out through a species of slow suicide, if energetic
measures were not taken to supply the necessary remedies. It is
certain that Livia had a conspicuous part in the policy of restoring
the aristocracy, to which Augustus was impelled by the old nobility,
especially toward the year 18 B.C., when with this purpose in view he
proposed his famous social laws. The _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_
attempted by various penalties and promises to constrain the members of
the aristocracy to contract marriage and to found a family, thus
combatting the increasing inclination to celibacy and sterility. The
_Lex de adulteriis_ aimed to reestablish order and virtue in the
family, by threatening the unfaithful wife and her accomplice with
exile for life and the confiscation of a part of their substance. It
obliged the husband to expose the crime to the tribunals; if the
husband could not or would not make the accusation, it provided that
the father should do so; and in case both husband and father failed, it
authorized any citizen to step forth as accuser. Finally the _Lex
sumptuaria_ was designed to restrain the extravagance of wealthy
families, particularly that of the women, prohibiting them from
spending too large a part of the family fortune in jewels, apparel,
body slaves, festivities, or buildings, especially in the building of
sumptuous villas, then a growing fashion. In short, it was the purpose
of these laws to bring the ladies of the Roman aristocracy to a course
of conduct patterned upon the example of Livia. In the protracted
discussions concerning these laws, which took place in the senate,
Augustus on one occasion made a long speech in which he cited Livia as
a model for the ladies of Rome. He set forth minutely the details of
her household administration, telling how she lived, what relations she
had with outsiders, what amusements she thought proper for a person of
her rank, how she dressed and at what expense. And no one in the
senate judged it unworthy of the greatness of the state or contrary to
custom thus to introduce the name and person of a great lady into the
public discussion of so serious a matter of governmental policy.
Livia, then, about 18 B.C. personified in the eyes of the Romans the
perfect type of aristocratic great lady created by long tradition.
Having been safely preserved by good fortune through the long civil
wars, this model was now set back again upon a fitting pedestal in the
most powerful and richest family of the empire. She was the living
example of all the virtues which the Romans most cherished, a beloved
wife and a heeded counselor to the head of the state, honored with that
veneration which power, virtue, nobility of birth, and the dignified
beauty of face and figure drew from every one; furthermore, there were
her two sons, Tiberius and Drusus, both intelligent, handsome, full of
activity, docile to the traditional education which she sought to give
them in order that they might be the worthy continuators of the great
name they bore. Livia, with all this in her favor, might have been
expected to live a happy and tranquil life, serenely to fulfil her
mission amid the admiration of the world.
[Illustration: A silver denarius of the Second Triumvirate. The
portrait at the right (obverse) is of Caesar Octavianus (Augustus),
with a slight beard to indicate mourning, and at the left (reverse), of
Mark Antony. The date is 41 B.C.]
[Illustration: Silver coin bearing the head of Julius Caesar. This
coin, a denarius, worth about seventeen cents, represents Caesar as
Pontifex Maximus. Together with all the other Roman coins bearing
Caesar's image, it was struck in the year before his death--44-45 B.C.
The fact that Caesar placed his image on these coins may have
strengthened the suspicion of his enemies that he wished to make
himself king.]
But opposition and difficulties sprang up in her own family. In 39
B.C. Augustus had had by Scribonia a daughter, Julia. Following in the
government of his family, as in so large a part of his politics, the
traditions of the old nobility, Augustus gave his daughter in marriage
when very young,--she was not yet past seventeen,--just as he early
gave wives to Livia's two sons, whose guardian he was. In each case in
order to assure within his circle harmony and power, he chose the
consort in his own family or from among his friends. To Tiberius he
gave Agrippina, a daughter of Agrippa, his close friend and most
faithful collaborator; to Drusus he gave Antonia, the younger daughter
of Mark Antony and Octavia, sister of Augustus. To Julia he gave
Marcellus, his nephew, the son of Octavia and her first husband. But
while the marriages of Drusus and Tiberius proved successful and the
two couples lived lovingly and happily, such was not the case with the
marriage of Julia and Marcellus. As a result, disagreeable
misunderstandings and rancors soon made themselves felt in the family.
We do not know exactly what were the causes of these disagreements. It
seems that Marcellus, under the influence of Julia, assumed a tone
somewhat too haughty and insolent, such as was not becoming in a youth
who, although the nephew of Augustus, was still taking his first steps
in his political career; and it seems too that this conduct of his was
especially offensive to Agrippa, who, next to Augustus, was the first
person in the empire.
In short, at seventeen, Julia desired that her husband should be the
second personage of the state in order that she might come immediately
after Livia or even be placed directly on an equality with her.
According to the Roman ideas of the family and of its discipline, this
was a precocious and excessive ambition, unbecoming a matron, much less
a young girl. For the duty of the woman was to follow faithfully and
submissively the ambitions of her lord and not to impart to him her own
ambitions or make him her tool. In contrast to Livia, who was so
docile and placid in her respect for the older traditions of the
aristocracy, so firm and strong in her observance of the duties, not
infrequently grievous and difficult, which this tradition imposed,
Julia represented the woman of that new generation which had grown up
in the times of peace--a type more rebellious against tradition, less
resigned to the serious duties and difficult renunciations of rank;
much more inclined to enjoy its prerogatives than disposed to bear that
heavy burden of obligations and sacrifices with which the previous
generations had balanced privilege. Beautiful and intelligent, even in
the early years of her first marriage she showed a great passion for
studies, and a fine artistic and literary taste, and with these a
lively inclination toward luxury and display which hardly suited with
the spirit or the letter of the _Lex sumptuaria_ which her father had
carried through in that year. But fraught with greater danger than all
this was her ardent and passionate temperament, which both in the
family and in politics was altogether too frequently to drive her to
desire and to carry through that which, rightly or wrongly, was
forbidden to a woman by law, custom, and public opinion.
It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that a young woman endowed with
so fiery and ambitious a nature did not become in the hands of Augustus
as docile a political instrument as Livia. Julia wished to live for
herself and for her pleasure, not for the political greatness of her
father; and indeed, Augustus, who had a fine knowledge of men, was so
impressed by this first unhappy experiment that when Marcellus, still a
very young man, died in 23 B.C., he hesitated a long time before
remarrying the youthful widow. For a moment, indeed, he did think of
bestowing her not upon a senator but upon a knight, that is, a person
outside of the political aristocracy, evidently with the intention of
stifling her too eager ambitions by taking from her all means and hope
of satisfying them. Then he decided upon the opposite expedient, that
of quieting those ambitions by entirely satisfying them, and so gave
Julia, in 21 B.C., to Agrippa, who had been the cause of the earlier
difficulties. Agrippa was twenty-four years older than she and could
have been her father, but he was in truth the second person of the
empire in glory, riches, and power. Soon after, in 18 B.C., he was to
become the colleague of Augustus in the presidency of the republic and
consequently his equal in every way.
Thus Julia suddenly saw her ambitions gratified. She became at
twenty-one the next lady of the empire after Livia, and perhaps even
the first in company with and beside her. Young, beautiful,
intelligent, cultured, and loving luxury, she represented at Livia's
side and in opposition to her, the trend of the new generation in which
was growing the determination to free itself from tradition. She
lavished money generously, and there soon formed about her a sort of
court, a party, a coterie, in which figured the fairest names of the
Roman aristocracy. Her name and her person became popular even among
the common people of Rome, to whom the name of the Julii was more
sympathetic than that of the Claudii, which was borne by the sons of
Livia. The combined popularity of Augustus and of Agrippa was
reflected in her. It may be said, therefore, that toward 18 B.C., the
younger, more brilliant, and more "modern" Julia began to obscure Livia
in the popular imagination, except in that little group of old
conservative nobility which gathered about the wife of Augustus. So
true is this that about this time, Augustus, wishing to place himself
into conformity with his law _de maritandis ordinibus_, reached a
significant decision. Since that law fixed at three the number of
children which every citizen should have, if he wished to discharge his
whole duty toward the state, and since Augustus had but a single
daughter, he decided to adopt Caius and Lucius, the first two sons that
Julia had borne to Agrippa. This was a great triumph for her, in so
far as her sons would henceforth bear the very popular name of Caesar.
But the difficulties which the first marriage with Marcellus had
occasioned and which Augustus had hoped to remove by this second
marriage soon reappeared in another but still more dangerous form, for
they had their roots in that passionate, imperious, bold, and imprudent
temperament of Julia. This temperament the Roman education had not
succeeded in taming; it was strengthened by the undisciplined spirit of
the times. And with it Julia soon began to abuse the fortune, the
popularity, the prestige, and the power which came to her from being
the daughter of Augustus and the wife of Agrippa. Little by little she
became possessed by the mania of being in Rome the antithesis of Livia,
of conducting herself in every case in a manner contrary to that
followed by her stepmother. If the latter, like Augustus, wore
garments of wool woven at home, Julia affected silks purchased at great
price from the oriental merchants. These the ladies of the older type
considered a ruinous luxury because of the expense, and an indecency
because of the prominence which they gave to the figure. Where Livia
was sparing, Julia was prodigal. If Livia preferred to go to the
theater surrounded by elderly and dignified men, Julia always showed
herself in public with a retinue of brilliant and elegant youths. If
Livia set an example of reserve, Julia dared appear in the provinces in
public at the side of her husband and receive public homage. In spite
of the law which forbade the wives of Roman governors to accompany
their husbands into the provinces, Julia prevailed upon Agrippa to make
her his companion when in the year 16 B.C. he made his long journey
through the East. Everywhere she appeared at his side, at the great
receptions, at the courts, in the cities; and she was the first of the
Latin women to be apotheosized in the Orient. Paphos called her
"divine" and set up statues to her; Mitylene called her the New
Aphrodite, Eressus, Aphrodite Genetrix. These were bold innovations in
a state in which tradition was still so powerful; but they could
scarcely have been of serious danger to Julia, if her passionate
temperament had not led her to commit a much more serious imprudence.
Agrippa, compared to her, was old, a simple, unpolished man of obscure
origin who was frequently absent on affairs of state. In the circle
which had formed about Julia there were a number of handsome, elegant,
pleasing young men; among others one Sempronius Gracchus, a descendant
of the famous tribunes. Julia seems toward the close to have had for
him, even in the lifetime of Agrippa, certain failings which the _Lex
de adulteriis_ visited with terrible punishments.
[Illustration: The great Paris Cameo. This is the largest ancient
cameo known, and is said to have been sent from Constantinople by
Baldwin II. to Louis IX. It represents the living members of the
imperial family protected by the deified Augustus. In the center
Tiberius is shown seated, as Jupiter, with his mother, Livia, at his
left, as Ceres. In front of them stand Germanicus and his mother
Antonia.]
It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if from this time on there
should have been fostered between Julia and Livia a half-suppressed
rivalry. The fact is, in itself, very probable and several indications
of it have remained in tradition and in history. We know also that two
parties were already beginning to gather about the two women. One of
these might be called the party of the Claudii and of the old
conservative nobility, the other the party of the Julii and of that
youthful nobility which was following the modern trend. As long as
Agrippa lived, Augustus, by holding the balance between the two
factions, succeeded in maintaining a certain equilibrium. With the
death of Agrippa, which occurred in 12 B.C., the situation was changed.
Julia was now for the second time a widow, and by the provisions of the
_Lex de maritandis ordinibus_ should remarry. Augustus in the
traditional manner sought a husband for her, and, seeking him only with
the idea of furthering a political purpose, he found for her Tiberius,
the elder son of Livia. Tiberius was the stepbrother of Julia and was
married to a lady whom he tenderly loved; but these were considerations
which could hardly give pause to a Roman senator. In the marriage of
Tiberius and Julia, Augustus saw a way of snuffing out the incipient
discord between the Julii and the Claudii, between Julia and Livia,
between the parties of the new and of the old nobility. He therefore
ordered Tiberius to repudiate the young, beautiful, and noble Agrippina
in order to marry Julia. For Tiberius the sacrifice was hard; we are
told that one day after the divorce, having met Agrippina at some
house, he began to weep so bitterly that Augustus ordered that the
former husband and wife should never meet again. But Tiberius, on the
other hand, had been educated by his mother in the ancient ideas, and
therefore knew that a Roman nobleman must sacrifice his feelings to the
public interest. As for Julia, she celebrated her third wedding
joyfully; for Tiberius, after the deaths of Agrippa and of his own
brother Drusus, was the rising man, the hope and the second personage
of the empire, so that she was not forced to step down from the lofty
position which the marriage with Agrippa had given her. Tiberius,
furthermore, was a very handsome man and for this reason also he seems
not to have been displeasing to Julia, who in the matter of husbands
considered not only glory and power.
The marriage of Julia and Tiberius began under happy auspices. Julia
seemed to love Tiberius and Tiberius did what he could to be a good
husband. Julia soon felt that she was once more to become a mother and
the hope of this other child seemed to cement the union between husband
and wife. But the rosy promises of the beginning were soon
disappointed. Tiberius was the son of Livia, a true Claudius, the
worthy heir of two ancient lines, an uncompromising traditionalist,
therefore a rigid and disdainful aristocrat, and a soldier severe with
others as with himself. He wished the aristocracy to set the people an
example of all the virtues which had made Rome so great in peace and
war: religious piety, simplicity of customs, frugality, family purity,
and rigid observance of all the laws. The luxury and prodigality which
were becoming more and more wide-spread among the young nobility had no
fiercer enemy than he. He held that a man of great lineage who spent
his substance on jewels, on dress, and on revels was a traitor to his
country, and no one demanded with greater insistence than he that the
great laws of the year 18 B.C., the sumptuary law, the laws on marriage
and adultery, should be enforced with the severest rigor. Julia, on
the other hand, loved extravagance, festivals, joyous companies of
elegant youths, an easy, brilliant life full of amusement.
[Illustration: Octavia, the sister of Augustus.]
For greater misfortune, the son who was born of their union died
shortly after and discord found its way between Julia and Tiberius.
Sempronius Gracchus, who knew how to profit by this, reappeared and
again made advances to Julia. She again lent her ear to his bland
words and the domestic disagreement rapidly became embittered.
Tiberius,--this is certain,--soon learned that Julia had resumed her
relations with Sempronius Gracchus, and a new, intolerable torment was
added to his already distressed life. According to the _Lex de
adulteriis_, he as husband should have made known the crime of his wife
to the pretor and have had her punished. He had been one of those who
had always most vehemently denounced the nobility for their weakness in
the enforcement of this law. Now that his own wife had fallen under
the provisions of the terrible statute, to which so many other women
had been forced to submit, the moment had come to give the weak that
example of unconquerable firmness which he had so often demanded of
others. But Julia was the daughter of Augustus. Could he call down,
without the consent of Augustus, so terrible a scandal upon the first
house of the empire, render its daughter infamous, and drive her into
exile? Augustus, though he desired his daughter to be more prudent and
serious, yet loved and protected her; above all, he disliked dangerous
scandal, and Julia dared to do whatever she wished, knowing herself
invulnerable under his protection and his love.
To this hard and false situation Tiberius, fuming with rage, had to
adjust himself. He lived in a separate apartment, keeping up with
Julia only the relations necessary to save appearances, but he could
not divorce her, much less publish her guilt. The situation grew still
worse when political discontent began to use for its own ends the
discord between Julia and Tiberius. Tiberius had many enemies among
the nobility, especially among the young men of his own age; partly
because his rapid, brilliant career had aroused much jealousy, partly
because his conservative, traditionalist tendencies toward authority
and militarism disturbed many of them. More and more among the
nobility there was increasing the desire for a mild and easy-going
government which should allow them to enjoy their privileges without
hardship and which should not be too severe in imposing its duties upon
them.
On the other hand, Julia was most ambitious. Since, after the
disagreements with Tiberius had broken out, she could no longer hope to
be the powerful wife of the first person of the empire after Augustus,
she sought compensation. Thus there formed about Julia a party which
sought in every way to ruin the lofty position which Tiberius occupied
in the state, by setting up against him Caius Caesar, the son of Julia
by Agrippa, whom Augustus had adopted and of whom he was very fond. In
6 B.C., Caius Caesar was only fourteen years old, but at that period an
agitation was set on foot whereby, through a special privilege conceded
to him by the senate, he was to be named consul for the year of Rome
754, when Caius should have reached twenty. This was a manoeuver of
the Julian party to attract popular attention to the youth, to prepare
a rival for Tiberius in his quality as principal collaborator of
Augustus, and to gain a hold upon the future head of the state.
The move was altogether very bold; for this nomination of a child
consul contradicted all the fundamental principles of the Roman
constitution, and it would probably have been fatal to the party which
evolved it, had not the indignant rage of Tiberius assured its triumph.
Tiberius opposed this law, which he took as an offense, and he wished
Augustus to oppose it, and at the outset Augustus did so. But then,
either because Julia was able to bend him to her desires or because in
the senate there was in truth a strong party which supported it out of
hatred for Tiberius, Augustus at last yielded, seeking to placate
Tiberius with other compensations. But Tiberius was too proud and
violent an aristocrat to accept compensations and indignantly demanded
permission to retire to Rhodes, abandoning all the public offices which
he exercised. He certainly hoped to make his loss felt, for indeed
Rome needed him. But he was mistaken. This act of Tiberius was
severely judged by public opinion as a reprisal upon the public for a
private offense. Augustus became angry with him and in his absence all
his enemies took courage and hurled themselves against him. The honors
to Caius Caesar were approved amid general enthusiasm and the Julian
party triumphed all along the line; it reached the height of power and
popularity, while Tiberius was constrained to content himself with the
idle life of a private person at Rhodes.
[Illustration: A reception at Livia's villa. The scene evidently is at
Livia's country palace at Prima Porta. Agrippa is seen descending the
steps to be received by Augustus and Livia (who are not shown in the
picture). The original of the status of Augustus, here shown, was
found in the ruins of Livia's villa close to the flight of marble steps
and its base. The remains of the steps and the base of the statue are
standing to-day at Prima Porta.]
But at Rome Livia still remained. From that moment began the mortal
duel between Livia and Julia.
III
THE DAUGHTERS OF AGRIPPA
Tiberius had now broken with Augustus, he had lost the support of
public opinion, he was hated by the majority of the senate. At Rhodes
he soon found himself, therefore, in the awkward position of one who
through a false move has played into the hands of his enemies and sees
no way of recovering his position. It had been easy to leave Rome; to
reënter it was difficult, and in all probability his fortune would have
been forever compromised, and he would never have become emperor, had
it not been for the fact that in the midst of this general defection
two women remained faithful. They were his mother, Livia, and his
sister-in-law, Antonia, the widow of that brother Drusus who, dying in
his youth, had carried to his grave the hopes of Rome.
Antonia was the daughter of the emperor's sister Octavia and of Mark
Antony, the famous triumvir whose name remains forever linked in story
with that of Cleopatra. This daughter of Antony was certainly the
noblest and the gentlest of all the women who appear in the lugubrious
and tragic history of the family of the Caesars. Serious, modest, and
even-tempered, she was likewise endowed with beauty and virtue, and she
brought into the family and into its struggles a spirit of concord,
serenity of mind, and sweet reasonableness, though they could not
always prevail against the violent passions and clashing interests of
those about her. As long as Drusus lived, Drusus and Antonia had been
for the Romans the model of the devoted pair of lovers, and their
tender affection had become proverbial; yet the Roman multitude, always
given to admiring the descendants of the great families, was even more
deeply impressed by the beauty, the virtue, the sweetness, the modesty,
and the reserve of Antonia. After the death of Drusus, she did not
wish to marry again, even though the _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_ made
it a duty. "Young and beautiful," wrote Valerius Maximus, "she
withdrew to a life of retirement in the company of Livia, and the same
bed which had seen the death of the youthful husband saw his faithful
spouse grow old in an austere widowhood." Augustus and the people were
so touched by this supreme proof of fidelity to the memory of the
ever-cherished husband that by the common consent of public opinion she
was relieved of the necessity of remarrying; and Augustus himself, who
had always carefully watched over the observance of the marital law in
his own family, did not dare insist. Whether living at her villa of
Bauli, where she spent the larger part of her year, or at Rome, the
beautiful widow gave her attention to the bringing up of her three
children, Germanicus, Livilla, and Claudius. Ever since the death of
Octavia, she had worshiped Livia as a mother and lived in the closest
intimacy with her, and, withdrawn from public life, she attempted now
to bring a spirit of peace into the torn and tragic family.
Antonia was very friendly with Tiberius, who, on his side, felt the
deepest sympathy and respect for his beautiful and virtuous
sister-in-law. It cannot be doubted, therefore, that in this crisis
Antonia, who was bound to Livia by many ties, must have taken sides for
Livia's son Tiberius. But Antonia was too gentle and mild to lead a
faction in the struggle which during these years began between the
friends and the enemies of Tiberius, and that rôle was assumed by
Livia, who possessed more strength and more authority.
The situation grew worse and worse. Public opinion steadily became
more hostile to Tiberius and more favorable to Julia and her elder son,
and it was not long before they wished to give to her younger son,
Lucius, the same honors which had already been bestowed upon his
brother Caius. Private interest soon allied itself with the hatred and
rancor against Tiberius; and scarcely had he departed when the senate
increased the appropriation for public supplies and public games. All
those who profited by these appropriations were naturally interested in
preventing the return of Tiberius, who was notorious for his opposition
to all useless expenditures. Any measure, however dishonest, was
therefore considered proper, provided only it helped to ruin Tiberius;
and his enemies had recourse to every art and calumny, among other
things actually accusing him of conspiracies against Augustus. Even
for a woman as able and energetic as Livia it was an arduous task to
struggle against the inclinations of Augustus, against public opinion,
against the majority of the senate, against private interest, and
against Julia and her friends. Indeed, four years passed during which
the situation of Tiberius and his party grew steadily worse, while the
party of Julia increased in power.
Finally the party of Tiberius resolved to attempt a startlingly bold
move. They decided to cripple the opposition by means of a terrible
scandal in the very person of Julia. The _Lex Julia de adulteriis_,
framed by Augustus in the year 18, authorized any citizen to denounce
an unfaithful wife before the judges, if the husband and father should
both refuse to make the accusation. This law, which was binding upon
all Roman citizens, was therefore applicable even to the daughter of
Augustus, the widow of Agrippa, the mother of Caius and Lucius Caesar,
those two youths in whom were centered the hopes of the republic. She
had violated the _Lex Julia_ and she had escaped the penalties which
had been visited on many other ladies of the aristocracy only because
no one had dared to call down this scandal upon the first family of the
empire. The party of Tiberius, protected and guided by Livia, at last
hazarded this step.
It is impossible to say what part Livia played in this terrible
tragedy. It is certain that either she or some other influential
personage succeeded in gaining possession of the proofs of Julia's
guilt and brought them to Augustus, threatening to lay them before the
pretor and to institute proceedings if he did not discharge his duty.
Augustus found himself constrained to apply to himself his own terrible
law. He himself had decreed that if the husband, as was then the case
of Tiberius, could not accuse a faithless woman, the father must do so.
It was his law, and he had to bow to it in order to avoid scandals and
worse consequences. He exiled Julia to the little island of
Pandataria, and at the age of thirty-seven the brilliant, pleasing, and
voluptuous young woman who had dazzled Rome for many years was
compelled to disappear from the metropolis forever and retire to an
existence on a barren island. She was cut off by the implacable hatred
of a hostile party and by the inexorable cruelty of a law framed by her
own father!
[Illustration: Mark Antony.]
The exile of Julia marks the moment when the fortunes of Tiberius and
Livia, which had been steadily losing ground for four years, began to
revive, though not so rapidly as Livia and Tiberius had probably
expected. Julia preserved, even in her misfortune, many faithful
friends and a great popularity. For a long time popular demonstrations
were held in her favor at Rome, and many busied themselves tenaciously
to obtain her pardon from Augustus, all of which goes to prove that the
horrible infamies which were spread about her were the inventions of
enemies. Julia had broken the _Lex Julia_,--so much is certain,--but
even if she had been guilty of an unfortunate act, she was not a
monster, as her enemies wished to have it believed. She was a
beautiful woman, as there had been before, as there are now, and as
there will be hereafter, touched with human vices and with human
virtues.
As a matter of fact, her party, after it had recovered from the
terrible shock of the scandal, quickly reorganized. Firm in its
intention of having Julia pardoned, it took up the struggle again, and
tried as far as it could to hinder Tiberius from returning to Rome and
again taking part in political life, knowing well that if the husband
once set foot in Rome, all hope of Julia's return would be lost. Only
one of them could reënter Rome. It was either Tiberius or Julia; and
more furiously than ever the struggle between the two parties was waged
about Augustus.
Caius and Lucius Caesar, Julia's two youthful sons, of whom Augustus
was very fond, were the principal instruments with which the enemies of
Tiberius fought against the influence of Livia over Augustus. Every
effort was made to sow hatred and distrust between the two youths and
Tiberius, to the end that it might become impossible to have them
collaborate with him in the government of the empire, and that the
presence of Julia's sons should of necessity exclude that of her
husband. A further ally was soon found in the person of another child
of Julia and Agrippa, the daughter who has come down into history under
the name of the Younger Julia. Augustus had conceived as great a love
for her as for the two sons, and there was no doubt that she would aid
with every means in her power the party averse to Tiberius; for her
mother's instincts of liberty, luxury, and pleasure were also inherent
in her. Married to L. Aemilius Paulus, the son of one of the greatest
Roman families, she had early assumed in Rome a position which made
her, like her mother, the antithesis of Livia. She, too, gathered
about her, as the elder Julia had done, a court of elegant youths, men
of letters, and poets,--Ovid was of the number,--and with this group
she hoped to be able to hold the balance of power in the government
against that coterie of aged senators who paid court to Livia. She,
too, took advantage of the good-will of her grandfather, just as her
mother had done, and in the shadow of his protection she displayed an
extravagance which the laws did not permit, but which, on this account,
was all the more admired by the enemies of the old Roman Puritanism.
As though openly to defy the sumptuary law of Augustus, she built
herself a magnificent villa; and, if we dare believe tradition, it was
not long before she, too, had violated the very law which had proved
disastrous to her mother.
Thus, even after the departure of Julia, her three children, Caius,
Lucius, and Julia the Younger, constituted in Rome an alliance which
was sufficiently powerful to contest every inch of ground with the
party of Livia; for they had public opinion in their favor, they
enjoyed the support of the senate, and they played upon the weakness of
Augustus. In the year 2 A.D., after four years of exhaustive efforts
spent in struggle and intrigue, all that Livia had been able to obtain
was the mere permission that Tiberius might return to Rome, under the
conditions, however, that he retire to private life, that he give
himself up to the education of his son, and that he in no wise mingle
in public affairs. The condition of the empire was growing worse on
every side; the finances were disordered, the army was disorganized,
and the frontiers were threatened, for revolt was raising its head in
Gaul, in Pannonia, and especially in Germany. Every day the situation
seemed to demand the hand of Tiberius, who, now in the prime of life,
was recognized as one of the leading administrators and the first
general of the empire. But, for all Livia's insistence, Augustus
refused to call Tiberius back into the government. The Julii were
masters of the state, and held the Claudii at a distance.
[Illustration: Antony and Cleopatra.]
Perhaps Tiberius would never have returned to power in Rome had not
chance aided him in the sudden taking off, in a strange and unforeseen
manner, of Caius and Lucius Caesar. The latter died at Marseilles,
following a brief illness, shortly after the return of Tiberius to
Rome, August 29, in the year 2 A.D. It was a great grief to Augustus,
and, twenty months after, was followed by another still more serious.
In February of the year 4, Caius also died, in Lycia, of a wound
received in a skirmish. These two deaths were so premature, so close
to each other, and so opportune for Tiberius, that posterity has
refused to see in them simply one of the many mischances of life.
Later generations have tried to believe that Livia had a hand in these
fatalities. Yet he who understands life at all knows that it is easier
to imagine and suspect romantic poisonings of this sort than it is to
carry them out. Even leaving the character of Livia out of
consideration, it is difficult to imagine how she would have dared, or
have been able, to poison the two youths at so great a distance from
Rome, one in Asia, the other in Gaul, by means of a long train of
accomplices, and this at a moment when the family of Augustus was
divided by many hatreds and every member was suspected, spied upon, and
watched by a hostile party. Furthermore, it would have been necessary
to carry this out at a time when the example of Julia proved to all
that relationship to Augustus was not a sufficient defense against the
rigors of the law and the severity of public opinion when roused by any
serious crime. Besides, it is a recognized fact that people are always
inclined to suspect a crime whenever a man prominent in the public eye
dies before his time. At Turin, for example, there still lives a
tradition among the people that Cavour was poisoned, some say by the
order of Napoleon III, others by the Jesuits, simply because his life
was suddenly cut off, at the age of fifty-two, at the moment when Italy
had greatest need of him. Indeed, even to-day we are impressed when we
see in the family of Augustus so many premature deaths of young men;
but precisely because these untimely deaths are frequent we come to see
in them the predestined ruin of a worn-out race in history. All
ancient families at a certain moment exhaust themselves. This is the
reason why no aristocracy has been able to endure for long unless
continually renewed, and why all those that have refused to take in new
blood have failed from the face of the earth. There is no serious
reason for attributing so horrible a crime to a woman who was venerated
by the best men of her time; and the fables which the populace, always
faithful to Julia, and therefore hostile to Livia, recounted on this
score, and which the historians of the succeeding age collected, have
no decisive value.
The deaths of Caius and Lucius Caesar were therefore a great good
fortune for Tiberius, because it determined his return to power. The
situation of the empire was growing worse on every hand; Germany was in
the midst of revolt, and it was necessary to turn the army over to
vigorous hands. Augustus, old and irresolute, still hesitated, fearing
the dislike which was brewing both in the senate and among the people
against the too dictatorial Tiberius. At last, however, he was forced
to yield.
The more serious, more authoritative, more ancient party of the
senatorial nobility, in accord with Livia and headed by a nephew of
Pompey, Cnaeus Cornelius Cinna, forced him to recall Tiberius,
threatening otherwise to have recourse to some violent measures the
exact character of which we do not know. The unpopularity of Tiberius
was a source of continual misgivings to the aging Augustus, and it was
only through this threat of a yet greater danger that they finally
overcame his hesitation. On June 26, in the fourth year of our era,
Augustus adopted Tiberius as his son, and had conferred upon him for
ten years the office of tribune, thus making him his colleague.
Tiberius returned to power, and, in accordance with the wishes of
Augustus, adopted as his son Germanicus, the elder son of Drusus and
Antonia, his faithful friend. He was an intelligent, active lad of
whom all entertained the highest hopes.
[Illustration: Tiberius, elder son of Livia and stepson of Augustus.
Augustus, lacking a male heir, first adopted his younger stepson
Drusus, who died 9 B.C. owing to a fall from his horse. In 4 A.D. he
adopted Tiberius, and was succeeded by him as Emperor in 14 A.D.]
On his return to power, Tiberius, together with Augustus, took measures
for reorganizing the army and the state, and sought to bring about by
means of new marriages and acts of clemency a closer union between the
Julian and Claudian branches of the family, then bitterly divided by
the violent struggles of recent years. The terms of Julia's exile were
made easier; Germanicus married Agrippina, another daughter of Julia
and Agrippa, and a sister of Julia the Younger; the widow of Caius
Caesar, Livilla, sister of Germanicus and daughter of Antonia, was
given to Drusus, the son of Tiberius, a young man born in the same year
as Germanicus. Drusus, despite certain defects, such as irascibility
and a marked fondness for pleasure, gave evidence that he possessed the
requisite qualities of a statesman--firmness, sound judgment, and
energy. The policy which dictated these marriages was always the
same--to make of the family of Augustus one formidable and united body,
so that it might constitute the solid base of the entire government of
the empire. But, alas! wise as were the intentions, the ferments of
discord and the unhappiness of the times prevailed against them. Too
much had been hoped for in recalling Tiberius to power. During the ten
years of senile government, the empire had been reduced to a state of
utter disorder. The measures planned by Tiberius for reestablishing
the finances of the state roused the liveliest discontent among the
wealthy classes in Italy, and again excited their hatred against him.
In the year 6 A.D., the great revolt of Pannonia broke out and for a
moment filled Italy with unspeakable terror. In an instant of mob
fury, they even came to fear that the peninsula would be invaded and
Rome besieged by the barbarians of the Danube. Tiberius came to the
rescue, and with patience and coolness put down the insurrection, not
by facing it in open conflict, but by drawing out the war to such a
length as to weary the enemy, a method both safe and wise, considering
the unreliable character of the troops at his command. But at Rome,
once the fear had subsided, the long duration of the war became a new
cause for dissatisfaction and anger, and offered to many a pretext for
venting their long-cherished hatred against Tiberius, who was accused
of being afraid, of not knowing how to end the war, and of drawing it
out for motives of personal ambition. The party averse to Tiberius
again raised its head and resorted once more to its former policy--that
of urging on Germanicus against Tiberius. The former was young,
ambitious, bold, and would have preferred daring strokes and a war
quickly concluded. It is certain that there would have risen then and
there a Germanican and a Tiberian party, if Augustus, on this occasion,
had not energetically sustained Tiberius from Rome. But the situation
again became strained and full of uncertainty.
In the midst of these conflicts and these fears, a new scandal broke
out in the family of Augustus. The Younger Julia, like her mother,
allowed herself to be caught in violation of the _Lex Julia de
adulteriis_, and she also was compelled to take the road of exile. In
what manner and at whose instance the scandal was disclosed we do not
know; we do know, however, that Augustus was very fond of his
granddaughter, whence we can assume that in this moment of turbid
agitation, when so much hatred was directed against his family and his
house, and when so many forces were uniting to overthrow Tiberius
again, notwithstanding the fact that he had saved the empire, Augustus
felt that he must a second time submit to his own law. He did not dare
contend with the puritanical party, with the more conservative minority
in the senate,--the friends of Tiberius,--over this second victim in
his family. Without a doubt everything possible was done to hush up
the scandal, and there would scarcely have come down to us even a
summary notice of the exile of the second Julia had it not been that
among those exiled with her was the poet Ovid, who was to fill twenty
centuries with his laments and to bring them to the ears of the latest
generations.
Ovid's exile is one of those mysteries of history which has most keenly
excited the curiosity of the ages. Ovid himself, without knowing it,
has rendered it more acute by his prudence in not speaking more clearly
of the cause of his exile, making only rare allusions to it, which may
be summed up in his famous words, _carmen et error_. It is for this
reason that posterity has for twenty centuries been asking itself what
was this error which sent the exquisite poet away to die among the
barbarous Getae on the frozen banks of the Danube; and naturally they
have never compassed his secret. But if, therefore, it is impossible
to say exactly what the error was which cost Ovid so dearly, it is
possible, on the other hand, to explain that unique and famous episode
in the history of Rome to which, after all, Ovid owes a great part of
his immortality. He was not the victim, as has been too often
repeated, of a caprice of despotism; and therefore he cannot be
compared with any of the many Russian writers whom the administration,
through fear and hatred, deports to Siberia without definite reason.
Certainly the error of Ovid lay in his having violated some clause of
the _Lex Julia de adulteriis_, which, as we know, was so comprehensive
in its provisions that it considered as accessories to the crime those
guilty of various acts and deeds which, judged even with modern rigor
and severity, would seem reprehensible, to be sure, but not deserving
of such terrible punishment. Ovid was certainly involved under one of
these clauses,--which one we do not, and never shall, know,--but his
error, whether serious or light, was not the true cause of his
condemnation. It was the pretext used by the more conservative and
puritanical part of Roman society to vent upon him a long-standing
grudge the true motives of which lay much deeper.
What was the standing of this poet of the gay, frivolous, exquisite
ladies whom they wished to send into exile? He was the author of that
graceful, erotic poetry who, through the themes which he chose for his
elegant verses, had encouraged the tendencies toward luxury, diversion,
and the pleasures which had transformed the austere matron of a former
day into an extravagant and undisciplined creature given to
voluptuousness; the poet who had gained the admiration of women
especially by flattering their most dangerous and perverse tendencies.
The puritanical party hated and combatted this trend of the newer
generations, and therefore, also, the poetry of Ovid on account of its
disastrous effects upon the women, whom it weaned from the virtues most
prized in former days--frugality, simplicity, family affection, and
purity of life. The Roman aristocracy did not recognize the right of
absolute literary freedom which is acknowledged by many modern states,
in which writers and men of letters have acquired a strong political
influence. The theory, held by many countries to-day that any
publication is justifiable, provided it be a work of art, was not
accepted by the Romans in power. On the contrary, they were convinced
that an idea or a sentiment, dangerous in itself, became still more
harmful when artistically expressed. Therefore Rome had always known
the existence of a kind of police supervision of ideas and of literary
forms, exercised through various means by the ruling aristocracy, and
especially in reference to women, who constituted that element of
social life in which virtue and purity of customs are of the greatest
consequence. The Roman ladies of the aristocracy, as we have seen,
received considerable instruction. They read the poets and
philosophers, and precisely for this reason there was always at Rome a
strong aversion to light and immoral literature. If books had
circulated among men only, the poetry of Ovid would perhaps not have
enjoyed the good fortune of a persecution which was to focus upon it
the attention of posterity. The greater liberty conceded to women thus
placed upon society an even greater reserve in the case of its
literature. This Ovid learned to his cost when he was driven into
exile because his books gave too much delight to too many ladies at
Rome. By the order of Augustus these books were removed from the
libraries, which did not hinder their coming down to us entire, while
many a more serious work--like Livy's history, for example--has been
either entirely or in large part lost.
[Illustration: Drusus, the younger brother of Tiberius.]
After the fall of the second Julia up to the time of his death, which
occurred August 23, in the year 14 A.D., Augustus had no further
serious griefs over the ladies of his family. The great misfortune of
the last years of his government was a public misfortune--the defeat of
Varus and the loss of Germany. But with what sadness must he have
looked back in the last weeks of his long life upon the history of his
family! All those whom he had loved were torn from him before their
time by a cruel destiny: Drusus, Caius, and Lucius Caesar by death; the
Julias by the cruelty of the law and by an infamy worse than death.
The unique grandeur to which he had attained had not brought fortune to
his family. He was old, almost alone, a weary survivor among the tombs
of those dear to him who had been untimely lost through fate, and with
the still sadder memories of those who had been buried in a living
grave of infamy. His only associates were Tiberius, with whom he had
become reconciled; Antonia, his sweet and highly respected
daughter-in-law; and Livia, the woman whom destiny had placed at his
side in one of the most critical moments of his life, the faithful
companion through fifty-two years of his varied and wonderful fortune.
We can therefore understand why it was that, as the historians tell us,
the last words of the old emperor should have been a tender expression
of gratitude to his faithful wife. "Farewell, farewell, Livia!
Remember our long union!" With these words, rendering homage to the
wife whom custom and the law had made the faithful and loving
companion, and not the docile slave, of her husband, he ended his life
like a true Roman.
If the family of Augustus had undergone grievous vicissitudes during
his life, its situation became even more dangerous after his death.
The historian who sets out with the preconceived notion that Augustus
founded a monarchy, and imagines that his family was destined to enjoy
the privileges which in all monarchies are accorded the sovereign's
house, will never arrive at a complete understanding of the story of
the first empire. His family did, to be sure, always enjoy a
privileged status, if not at law, at least in fact, and through the
very force of circumstances; but it was not for naught that Rome had
been for many centuries an aristocratic republic in which all the
families of the nobility had considered themselves equal, and had been
subject to the same laws. The aristocracy avenged itself upon the
imperial family for the privileges which the lofty dignity of its head
assured it by giving it hatred instead of respect. They suspected and
calumniated all of its members, and with a malicious joy subjected
them, whenever possible, to the common laws and even maltreated with
particular ferocity those who by chance fell under the provisions of
any statute. As a compensation for the privileges which the royal
family enjoyed, they had to assume the risk of receiving the harshest
penalties of the laws. If any of them, therefore, fell under the rigor
of these laws, the senatorial aristocracy especially was ever eager to
enjoy the atrocious satisfaction of seeing one of the favored tortured
as much as or more than the ordinary man. There is no doubt, for
example, that the two Julias were more severely punished and disgraced
than other ladies of the aristocracy guilty of the same crime. And
Augustus was forced to waive his affection for them in order that it
might not be said, particularly in the senate, that his relatives
enjoyed special favors and that Augustus made laws only for others.
[Illustration: Statue of a young Roman woman.]
Yet as long as Augustus lived, he was a sufficient protection for his
relatives. He was, especially in the last twenty years of his life,
the object of an almost religious veneration. The great and stormy
epoch out of which he had risen, the extraordinary fortune which had
assisted him, his long reign, the services both real and imaginary
which he had rendered the empire--all had conferred upon him such an
authority that envy laid aside its most poisonous darts before him.
Out of respect for him even his family was not particularly calumniated
or maltreated, save now and then in moments of great irritation, as
when the two Julias were condemned. But after his death the situation
grew considerably worse; for Tiberius, although he was a man of great
capacity and merit, a sagacious administrator and a valiant general,
did not enjoy the sympathy and respect which had been accorded to
Augustus. Rather was he hated by those who had for a long time sided
with Caius and Lucius Caesar and who formed a considerable portion of
the senate and the aristocracy. It was not the spontaneous admiration
of the senate and of the people, but the exigencies of the situation,
which had made him master of the government when Augustus died. The
empire was at war with the Germans, and the Pannonico-Illyrian
provinces were in revolt, and it was necessary to place at the head of
the empire a man who should strike terror to the hearts of the
barbarians and who on occasion should be able to combat them.
Tiberius, furthermore, was so well aware that the majority of the
senate and the Roman people would submit to his government only through
force, that he had for a long time been in doubt whether to accept the
empire or not, so completely did he understand that with so many
enemies it would be difficult to rule.
Under the government of Tiberius the imperial family was surrounded by
a much more intense and open hatred than under Augustus. One couple
only proved an exception, Germanicus and Agrippina, who were very
sympathetic to the people. But right here began the first serious
difficulties for Tiberius. Germanicus was twenty-nine years old when
Tiberius took over the empire, and about him there began to form a
party which by courting and flattering both him and his wife began to
set him up against Tiberius. In this they were unconsciously aided by
Agrippina. Unlike her sister Julia, she was a lady of blameless life;
faithfully in love with her husband; a true Roman matron, such as
tradition had loved; chaste and fruitful, who at the age of twenty-six
had already borne nine children, of whom, however, six had died. But
Agrippina was to show that in the house of Augustus, in those
tumultuous, strange times, virtue was not less dangerous than vice,
though in another way and for different reasons. She was so proud of
her fidelity to her husband and of the admiration which she aroused at
Rome that all the other defects of her character were exaggerated and
increased by her excessive pride in her virtue. And among these
defects should be counted a great ambition, a kind of harum-scarum and
tumultuous activity, an irreflective impetuosity of passion, and a
dangerous lack of balance and judgment. Agrippina was not evil; she
was ambitious, violent, intriguing, imprudent, and thoughtless, and
therefore could easily adapt her own feelings and interests to what
seemed expedient. She had much influence over her husband, whom she
accompanied upon all his journeys; and out of the great love she bore
him, in which her own ambition had its part, she urged him on to
support that hidden movement which was striving to oppose Germanicus to
the emperor.
That two parties were not formed was due very largely to the fact that
Germanicus was sufficiently reasonable not to allow himself to be
carried too far by the current which favored him, and possibly also to
the fact that during the entire reign of Tiberius his mother Antonia
was the most faithful and devoted friend of the emperor. After his
divorce from Julia, Tiberius had not married again, and the offices of
tenderness which a wife should have given him were discharged in part
by his mother, but largely by his sister-in-law. No one exercised so
much influence as Antonia over the diffident and self-centered spirit
of the emperor. Whoever wished to obtain a favor from him could do no
better than to intrust his cause to Antonia. There is no doubt,
therefore, that Antonia checked her son, and in his society
counterbalanced the influence of his wife.
But even if two parties were not formed, it was not long before other
difficulties arose. Discord soon made itself felt between Livia and
Agrippina. More serious still was the fact that Germanicus, who, after
the death of Augustus, had been sent as a legate to Gaul, initiated a
German policy contrary to the instructions given him by Tiberius. This
was due partly to his own impetuous temperament and partly to the
goadings of his wife and the flatterers who surrounded him. Tiberius,
whom the Germans knew from long experience, no longer wished to molest
them. The revolt of Arminius proved that when their independence was
threatened by Rome they were capable of uniting and becoming dangerous;
when left to themselves they destroyed one another by continual wars.
It was advisable, therefore, according to Tiberius, not to attack or
molest them, but at the proper moment to fan the flames of their
continual dissensions and wars in order that, while destroying
themselves, they should leave the empire in peace. This wise and
prudent policy might please a seasoned soldier like Tiberius, who had
already won his laurels in many wars and who had risen to the pinnacle
of glory and power. It did not please the pushing and eager youth
Germanicus, who was anxious to distinguish himself by great and
brilliant exploits, and who had at his side, as a continual stimulus,
an ambitious and passionate wife, surrounded by a court of flatterers.
Germanicus, on his own initiative, crossed the Rhine and took up the
offensive again all along the line, attacking the most powerful of the
German tribes one after the other in important and successful
expeditions. At Rome this bold move was naturally looked upon with
pleasure, especially by the numerous enemies of Tiberius, either
because boldness in politics rather than prudence always pleases those
who have nothing to lose, or because it was felt that the glory which
accrued to Germanicus might offend the emperor. And Tiberius, though
he did disapprove, allowed his adopted son to continue for a time,
doubtless in order that he might not have to shock public opinion and
that it might not seem that he wished to deprive the youthful
Germanicus of the glory which he was gaining for himself.
[Illustration: A Roman girl of the time of the Caesars.]
He was nevertheless resolved not to allow Germanicus to involve Rome
too deeply in German affairs, and when it seemed to him that the youth
had fittingly proved his prowess and had made the enemies of Rome feel
its power sufficiently, he recalled him and in his stead sent Drusus,
who was his real, and not his adopted, son. But this recall did not at
all please the party of Germanicus, who were loud and bitter in their
recriminations. They began to murmur that Tiberius was jealous of
Germanicus and his popularity; that he had recalled him in order to
prevent his winning glory by an immortal achievement. Tiberius so
little thought of keeping Germanicus from using his brilliant qualities
in the service of Rome that shortly after, in the year 18 A.D., he sent
him into the Orient to introduce order into Armenia, which was shaken
by internal dissensions, and he gave him a command there not less
important than the one of which he had deprived him. At the same time
he was unwilling to intrust things entirely to the judgment of
Germanicus, in whom he recognized a young man of capacity and valor,
but, nevertheless, a young man influenced by an imprudent wife and
incited by an irresponsible court of flatterers. For this reason he
placed at his side an older and more experienced man in whom he had the
fullest confidence--Cnaeus Piso, a senator who belonged to one of the
most illustrious families in Rome.
It was the duty of Cnaeus Piso to counsel, to restrain, and to aid the
young Germanicus, and doubtless also to keep Tiberius informed of all
that Germanicus was doing in the East. When we remember that Tiberius
was responsible for the empire, no one will deny him the right of
setting a guard upon the young man of thirty-three, into whose hands
had been intrusted many and serious interests. But though this idea
was warrantable in itself, it became the source of great woe.
Germanicus was offended, and, driven on by his friends, he broke with
Piso. The latter had brought with him his wife Plancina, who was a
close friend of Livia, just as Germanicus had brought Agrippina. The
two wives fell to quarreling no less furiously than their husbands, and
two parties were formed in the Orient, one for Piso and one for
Germanicus, who accused each other of illegality, extortion, and
assuming unwarranted powers; and each thought only of undoing what the
other had accomplished. It is difficult to tell which of the two was
right or in how far either was right or wrong, for the documents are
too few and the account of Tacitus, clouded by an undiscerning
antipathy, sheds no light upon this dark secret. In any case, we are
sure that Germanicus did not always respect the laws and that he
occasionally acted with a supreme heedlessness which now and then
forced Tiberius to intervene personally, as he did on the occasion when
Germanicus left his province with Agrippina in order that, dressed like
a Greek philosopher, he might make a tour of Egypt and see that
country, which then, as now, attracted the attention of persons of
culture. But at that time, unlike the present, there was an ordinance
of Augustus which forbade Roman senators to set foot in Egypt without
special permission. As he had paid no attention to this prohibition,
we need not be astonished if we find that Germanicus did not respect as
scrupulously as Tiberius wished all the laws which defined his powers
and set limits to his authority.
However that may be, the dissension between Germanicus and Piso filled
the entire Orient with confusion and disorder, and it was early echoed
at Rome, where the party hostile to Tiberius continued to accuse him,
out of motives of hatred and jealousy, of forever laying new obstacles
in the way of his adopted son. Livia, too, now no longer protected by
Augustus, became a target for the accusations of a malevolent public
opinion. It was said that she persecuted Germanicus out of hatred for
Agrippina. Tiberius was much embarrassed, being hampered by public
opinion favorable to Germanicus and at the same time desiring that his
sons should set an example of obedience to the laws.
A sudden catastrophe still further complicated the situation. In 19
A.D. Germanicus was taken ill at Antioch. The malady was long and
marked by periods of convalescence and relapses, but finally, like his
father and like his brothers-in-law, Germanicus, too, succumbed to his
destiny in the fullness of youth. At thirty-four, when life with her
most winning smiles seemed to be stretching out her arms to him, he
died. This one more untimely death brought to an abrupt end a most
dangerous political struggle. Is it to be wondered at, then, that the
people, whose imagination had been aroused, should have begun to murmur
about poison? The party of Germanicus was driven to desperation by
this death, which virtually ended its existence, and destroyed at a
single stroke all the hopes of those who had seen in Germanicus the
instrument of their future fortune. They therefore eagerly collected,
embellished, and spread these rumors. Had Agrippina been a woman of
any judgment or reflection, she would have been the first to see the
absurdity of this foolish gossip; but as a matter of fact no one placed
more implicit faith in such reports than she, now that affliction had
rendered her even more impetuous and violent.
It was not long before every one at Rome had heard it said that
Germanicus had been poisoned by Piso, acting, so it was intimated in
whispers, at the bidding of Tiberius and Livia. Piso had been the tool
of Tiberius; Plancina, the tool of Livia. The accusation is absurd; it
is even recognized as such by Tacitus, who was actuated by a fierce
hatred against Tiberius. We know from him how the accusers of Piso
recounted that the poison had been drunk in a health at a banquet to
which Piso had been invited by Germanicus and at which he was seated
several places from his host; he was supposed to have poured the poison
into his dishes in the presence of all the guests without any one
having seen him! Tacitus himself says that every one thought this an
absurd fable, and such every man of good sense will think it to-day.
But hatred makes even intelligent persons believe fables even more
absurd; the people favorable to Germanicus were embittered against Piso
and would not listen to reason. All the enemies of Tiberius easily
persuaded themselves that some atrocious mystery was hidden in this
death and that, if they instituted proceedings against Piso, they might
bring to light a scandal which would compromise the emperor himself.
They even began to repeat that Piso possessed letters from Tiberius
which contained the order to poison Germanicus.
[Illustration: Costumes of Roman men, women, and children in the
procession of a peace festival. These reliefs formed part of the outer
frieze of the right wall of the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace), erected by
Augustus and dedicated 9 B.C. This and another well-preserved section
are in the Uffizi Palace, Florence. One of two other fragments in the
Villa Medici contains the head and bust of Augustus, and with the
section here shown completes what is supposed to be a group of the
family of Augustus.]
At last Agrippina arrived at Rome with the ashes of her husband, and
she began with her usual vehemence to fill the imperial house, the
senate, and all Rome with protests, imprecations, and accusations
against Piso. The populace, which admired her for her fidelity and
love for her husband, was even more deeply stirred, and on every hand
the cry was raised that an exemplary punishment ought to be meted out
to so execrable a crime.
If at first Piso had treated these absurd charges with haughty disdain,
he soon perceived that the danger was growing serious and that it was
necessary for him to hasten his return to Rome, where a trial was now
inevitable. One of Germanicus's friends had accused him; Agrippina, an
unwitting tool in the hands of the emperor's enemies, every day stirred
public opinion to still higher pitches of excitement through her grief
and her laments; the party of Germanicus worked upon the senate and the
people, and when Piso arrived at Rome he found that he had been
abandoned by all. His hope lay in Tiberius, who knew the truth and who
certainly desired that these wild notions be driven out of the popular
mind. But Tiberius was watched with the most painstaking malevolence.
Any least action in favor of Piso would have been interpreted as a
decisive proof that he had been the murderer's accomplice and therefore
wished to save him. In fact, it was being reported at Rome with
ever-increasing insistence that at the trial Piso would show the
letters of Tiberius. When the trial began, Livia, in the background,
cleverly directed her thoughts to the saving of Plancina; but Tiberius
could do no more for Piso than to recommend to the senate that they
exercise the most rigorous impartiality. His noble speech on this
occasion has been preserved for us by Tacitus. "Let them judge," he
said, "without regard either for the imperial family or for the family
of Piso." The admonition was useless, for his condemnation was a
foregone conclusion, despite the absurdity of the charges. The enemies
of Tiberius wished to force matters to the uttermost limit in the hope
that the famous letters would have to be produced; and they acted with
such frenzied hatred and excited public opinion to such a pitch that
Piso killed himself before the end of the trial.
The violence of Agrippina had sent an innocent victim to follow the
shade of her young husband. Despite bitter opposition, the emperor,
through personal intervention, succeeded in saving the wife, the son,
and the fortune of Piso, whose enemies had wished to exterminate his
house root and branch. Tiberius thus offered a further proof that he
was one of the few persons at Rome who were capable in that trying and
troubled time of passing judgment and of reasoning with calm.
IV
TIBERIUS AND AGRIPPINA
The blackest and most tragic period in the life of Tiberius begins with
the death of Germanicus and the terrible scandal of the suit against
Piso. It was to pass into history as the worst period of the "Tiberian
tyranny"; for it was at this time that the famous _Lex de majestate_
[1] (on high treason), which had not been applied under Augustus, came
to be frequently invoked, and through its operation atrocious
accusations, scandalous trials, and frightful condemnations were
multiplied in Rome, to the terror of all. Many committed suicide in
despair, and illustrious families were given over to ruin and infamy.
[Illustration: Tiberius.]
Posterity still holds Tiberius to account for these tragedies; his
cruel and suspicious tyranny is made responsible for these accusations,
for the suits which followed, and for the cruel condemnations in which
they ended. It is said that every free mind which still remembered
ancient Roman liberty gave him umbrage and caused him distress, and
that he could suffer to have about him only slaves and hired assassins.
But how far this is from the truth! How poorly the superficial
judgment of posterity has understood the terrible tragedy of the reign,
of Tiberius! We always forget that Tiberius was the next Roman emperor
after Augustus; the first, that is, who had to bear the weight of the
immense charge created by its founder, but without the immense prestige
and respect which Augustus had derived from the extraordinary good
fortune of his life, from the critical moment in which he had taken
over the government, from the general opinion that he had ended the
civil wars, brought peace back to an empire in travail, and saved Rome
from the imminent ruin with which Egypt and Cleopatra had threatened
it. For these reasons, while Augustus lived, the envy, jealousy,
rivalry, and hatred of the new authority were held in check in his
presence; but they were ever smoldering in the Roman aristocracy, which
considered itself robbed of a part of its privileges, and always felt
itself humiliated by this same authority, even when it was necessary to
submit to it in cases of supreme political necessity. But all this
envy, all these jealousies, all these rivalries,--I have said it
before, but it is well to repeat it, since the point is of capital
importance for the understanding of the whole history of the first
empire,--were unleashed when Tiberius was exalted to the imperial
dignity.
What in reality was the situation of Tiberius after the death of
Germanicus? We must grasp it well if we wish to understand not only
the cruelty of the accusations brought under the law of high treason,
but also the whole family policy followed by the second emperor. It
was he who had to bear the burden of the whole state, of the finances,
of the supplies, of the army, of the home and foreign policies; his was
the will that propelled, and the mind that regulated, all. To him
every portion of the empire and every social class had recourse, and it
was to him that they looked for redress for every wrong or
inconvenience or danger. It was to him that the legions looked for
their regular stipend, the common people of Rome for abundant grain,
the senate for the preservation of boundaries and of the internal
order; the provinces looked to him for justice, and the sovereign
allies or vassals for the solution of all internal difficulties in
which they became involved. These responsibilities were so numerous
and so great that Tiberius, like Augustus, attempted to induce the
senate to aid him by assuming its share, according to the ancient
constitution; but it was in vain, for the senate sought to shield
itself, and always left to him the heavier portion.
[Illustration: Types of head-dresses worn in the time of the women of
the Caesars.]
Is it conceivable that a man could have discharged so many
responsibilities in times when the traditions of the government were
only beginning to take form if he had not possessed a commanding
personal authority, if he had not been the object of profound and
general respect? Augustus would not have been able to govern so great
an empire for more than forty years with such slight means had it not
been for the fact, fortunate alike for himself and for the state, that
he did enjoy this profound, sincere, and general admiration. Tiberius,
on the other hand, who was already decidedly unpopular when he came
into power, had seen this unpopularity increase during the first six
years of his rule, despite all the efforts he had put forth to govern
well. His solicitude about maintaining a certain order within the
state was described as haughtiness and harshness, his preoccupation
lest the precarious resources of the government be dissipated in
useless expenditures was dubbed avarice, and the prudence which had
impelled him to restrain the rash policy of expansion and aggression
which Germanicus had tried to initiate beyond the Rhine was construed
as envy and surly malignity. Against all considerations of justice,
logic, or good sense, this accusation was repeated, and now that
destiny had cut down Germanicus, he was accused _sotto voce_ of being
responsible for his death by many of the great families of Rome and
even in senatorial circles. They treated it as most natural that
through jealousy he should poison his own nephew, his adopted son, the
popular descendant of Drusus, the son of that virtuous Antonia who was
his best and most faithful friend! But if, after having been accepted
as true by the great families of Rome who sent it on its rounds, such a
report had been allowed to circulate through the empire, how much
authority would have been left to an emperor who was suspected of so
terrible a crime? How could he have maintained discipline in the army,
of which he was the head, and order among the people of Rome, of whom,
as tribune, he was the great protector? How could he have directed,
urged on, or restrained the senate, of which he was, in the language of
to-day, the president? The various Italian peoples from whom the army
was drawn did not yet consider the head of the state a being so
superior to the laws that it would be permissible for him to commit
crimes which were branded as disgustingly repulsive to ordinary human
nature.
No historian who understands the affairs of the world in general, and
the story of the first century of the empire in particular, will
attribute to ferocity or to the tyrannical spirit of Tiberius the
increasingly harsh application of the _Lex de majestate_ which followed
the death of Germanicus and the trial of Piso. This harshness was the
natural reaction against the delirium of atrocious calumnies against
Tiberius which raged in the aristocracy of that time and especially in
the house of Agrippina. For she, in spite of the undeniably virtuous
character of her private life, was influenced by friends who, for
motives of political advancement took advantage of her passions and
inexperience.
Too credulous of Tacitus, many writers have severely characterized the
facility and the severity with which the senate condemned those accused
under the _Lex de majestate_: they consider it an indication of ignoble
servility toward the emperor. Yet we know very well that the Roman
senate at that time was not composed merely of adulators and hirelings;
it still included many men of intelligence and character. We can
explain this severity only by admitting that there were many persons in
the senate who judged that the emperor could not be left defenseless
against the wild slanders of the great families, since these
extravagant and insidious calumnies compromised not only the prestige
and the fame of the ruler, but also the tranquillity, the power, and
the integrity of the empire. Undoubtedly the _Lex de majestate_ did
give rise in time to false accusations, to private reprisals, and to
unjust sentences of condemnation. Although it had been devised to
defend the prestige of the state in the person of the magistrates who
represented it, the law was frequently invoked by senators who wished
to vent their fiercest personal hatreds. Nor can it be denied that
cupidity was the cause of many iniquitous calumnies directed against
wealthy persons whose fortunes were coveted by their accusers. Yet we
must go slow in accusing Tiberius of these excesses. Tacitus himself,
who was averse to the emperor, recounts several incidents which show
him in the act of intervening in trials of high treason for the benefit
of the accused precisely for the purpose of hindering these excesses of
private vengeance. The accounts which we have of many other trials are
so brief and so biased that it is not fair for us to hazard a judgment.
We do know, however, that after the death of Germanicus there was
formed at Rome, in the imperial family and the senate, a party of
Agrippina, which began an implacable war upon Tiberius, and that
Tiberius, the so-called tyrant, was at the beginning very weak,
undecided, and vacillating in his resistance to this new opposition.
His opponents did not spare his person; they did their best to spread
the belief that the emperor was a poisoner, and persecuted him
relentlessly with this calumny; they were already pushing forward Nero,
the first-born son of Germanicus, though in 21 A.D. he was only
fourteen years old, in order that he might in time be made the rival of
Tiberius. The latter, indeed, tried at first to moderate the charges
of high treason, his supreme defense; he feigned that he did not know
or did not see many things, and instead of resisting, he began to make
long sojourns away from Rome, thus turning over the capital, in which
the pretorian guard remained, to the calumnies of his enemies. Of all
these enemies the most terrible was Agrippina, who, passionate,
vehement, without judgment, abused in good faith both the relationship
which protected her and the pity which her misfortune had aroused. She
allowed no occasion for taunting Tiberius with his pretended crime to
escape her, using to this end not only words, but scenes and actions,
which impressed the public even more strongly than open accusations
could have done. A supper to which Tiberius had invited her became
famous at Rome, for at it she refused obstinately and ostentatiously to
touch any food or drink whatever, to the astonishment of the guests,
who understood perfectly what her gestures meant. And such calumnies
and such affronts Tiberius answered only with a weary and disdainful
inertia; at most, when his patience was exhausted, some bitter and
concise reproof would escape him.
I have no doubt that Tiberius had resolved at the beginning to avoid
all harsh measures as far as possible; for unpopular, misunderstood,
and detested as he was, he did not dare to use violence against a large
part of the aristocracy and against his own house. Furthermore,
Agrippina was the least intelligent of the women of the family, and her
senseless opposition could be tolerated as long as Livia and Antonia,
the two really serious ladies of the family, sided with Tiberius. But
it is easy to understand that this situation could not long endure. A
power which defends itself weakly against the attacks of its enemies is
destined to sink rapidly into a decline, and the party of Agrippina
would therefore quickly have gained favor and power had there not
arisen, to sustain the vacillating strength of Tiberius, a man whose
name was to become sadly famous--Sejanus--the commander of the
pretorian guard.
Sejanus belonged to an obscure family of knights--to what we should now
call the _bourgeoisie_. He was not a senator, and he held no great
political position; for his charge as commander of the guard was a
purely military office. In ordinary times he would have remained a
secondary personage, exclusively concerned with the exacting duties of
his command; but the party of Agrippina with its intrigues, and the
weakness and uncertainty of Tiberius, made of him, however, for a
certain time, a formidable power. It is not difficult to see whence
this power arose. The loyalty of the pretorian guard, upon which
depended the security and the safety of the imperial authority, was one
of the things which must seriously have preoccupied Tiberius,
particularly in the face of the persistent and insidious intrigues and
accusations of the party of Agrippina. The guard lived at Rome, in
continual contact with the senate and the imperial house. Everything
which was said in the senatorial circles or in the palaces of the
emperor or of his relatives was quickly repeated among the cohorts, and
the memory of Drusus and Germanicus was deeply venerated by the
pretorians. If the guard could have been persuaded that the emperor
was a poisoner of his kindred, their loyalty would have been exposed to
numberless intrigues and attempts at seduction. In such a condition of
affairs, a commander of the guard who could inspire Tiberius with a
complete and absolute trust might easily acquire a great influence over
him. Sejanus knew how to inspire this trust. This was partly by
reason of his origin, for the equestrian order, on account of its
ancient rivalry with the senatorial nobility, was more favorably
inclined than the latter toward the imperial authority; and partly also
on account of certain reforms which he had succeeded in introducing
into the pretorian guard.
[Illustration: A Roman feast in the time of the Caesars.]
Once he had acquired the emperor's confidence, the ambitious and
intelligent prefect of the pretorians proceeded to render himself
indispensable in all things. The moment was favorable; Tiberius was
becoming more and more wearied of his many affairs, of his many
struggles, of his countless responsibilities; more and more disgusted
with Rome, with its society, with the too frequent contact with the men
whom it was his fate to govern. He was in the earlier stages of that
settled melancholy which grew deeper and deeper in the last ten years
of his life, and which had grown upon him as the result of long
antagonisms, of great bitterness, and of continual terrors and
suspicions; and if it is true that Tiberius was addicted to the vice of
heavy drinking, as we hear from ancient writers, the abuse of wine may
also have had its part in producing it. The tyrant, as historians have
been pleased to call him, did actually seem to weaken in the fight for
those ideals in which he had so long and so ardently believed. He
tried to please the people by advocating no measures that might seem
harsh or excessive to them. He even resisted, in the year 22 A.D., the
pressure that his own party--his own puritan party--brought to bear
upon him to apply with the utmost severity and discipline the laws
against the fast increasing luxury of the men and women of his day.
His reply to such pressure was a letter to the senate in which he
deplored, among other things, the passion that so many women were
showing for jewels and precious stones imported from distant countries.
He maintained that it was the fault of such women that so much gold
left the country and pointed out how much more wisely the money could
be spent in fortifying the boundaries of the empire.
In view of all this it is not difficult to understand why the man who
for many years had done everything for himself, who had never wished to
have either counselors or confidants about him, now that he was growing
old needed the support of younger energies and of stronger wills. But
in his family he could rely only upon his son Drusus, who had now
become a serious and trustworthy man, and in the year 22 A.D. he asked
the senate that it concede to his son the tribunician power; that is,
that they make him his colleague. But the son did not suffice, and
Sejanus therefore succeeded in making himself, together with Drusus, in
fact, if not in name, the first and most active and influential
collaborator and counselor of Tiberius. He was even more active and
influential than Drusus, for the latter was frequently absent on
distant military missions to the confines of the empire, while Sejanus,
as commander of the pretorian guard, was virtually always at Rome,
where the emperor now appeared less and less frequently.
Such was the origin of the anomalous power of this man, who was not
even a senator--a power which was the result of the weakness of
Tiberius and of the fierce discords which divided the aristocracy; and
it was a power which must of necessity prove disastrous, especially to
the party of Agrippina and Germanicus. Although indications are not
lacking that there was no great harmony or friendship between Sejanus
and Drusus, it is evident that Sejanus, as the energetic representative
of the interests of Tiberius, must have directed all his efforts
against the friends of Agrippina, who was arousing the fiercest
opposition to the emperor. But in the year 23, an unforeseen event
seemed suddenly to change the situation and to render possible a
reconciliation between Tiberius and the party of Agrippina. In this
year, Drusus also, like so many other members of his family, died
prematurely, at the age of thirty-eight, and on this occasion, for the
time being, at least, no one raised the cry of poisoning. This
unexpected misfortune moved Tiberius profoundly, for he dearly loved
his son, and it seemed for a moment to determine the triumph of
Agrippina's party. Now that his son had been taken from him, where, if
not among the sons of Germanicus and Agrippina, could Tiberius look for
a successor? And, as a further proof that Tiberius desired as far as
possible to avoid conflict in the bosom of his family, he did not
hesitate a moment, despite all the annoyances and difficulties which he
had suffered at the hands of Agrippina and her friends. He officially
recognized that in the sons of Germanicus were henceforth placed the
future hopes of his family and of the empire. Of the two elder, Nero
was now sixteen and Drusus was somewhat younger, though we do not know
his exact age. These he summoned to appear before the senate, and he
presented them to the assembly with a noble discourse the substance of
which Tacitus has preserved for us, exhorting the youths and the senate
to fulfil their respective duties for the greatness and the prosperity
of the republic.
[Illustration: Depositing the ashes of a member of the imperial family
in a Roman columbarium.]
After the death of Drusus, therefore, a reconciliation became possible
in the family of the Caesars. The latent rivalry between the families
of Tiberius and Germanicus was extinguished. Indeed, even in the midst
of the tears shed for the early death of Drusus, a gleam of concord
seems to have shone down upon the house desolated by many tragedies,
while Sejanus, whose power depended upon the strife of the factions,
was for a moment set aside and driven back into the shadows. But it
was not to continue long; for soon the flames of discord broke out more
violently than ever. Whom shall we blame, Sejanus or Agrippina?
Tacitus says that it was the fault of Sejanus, whom he accuses of
having tried to destroy the descendants of Germanicus, in order to
usurp their place: but he himself is forced to admit in another passage
(Annals iv., 59) that virtually a little court of freedmen and
dependents gathered about Nero, the leader of the sons of Germanicus,
urging him on against Tiberius and Sejanus, and begging him to act
quickly. "This," they said, "is the will of the people, the desire of
the armies. Nor would Sejanus, who was even then making light of the
patience of the old man and of the dilatoriness of the youth, have
dared to resist him." From such speeches it is only a short step to
plans for rebellion and conspiracy. In all probability the blame for
this later and more bitter dissension must, as usually happens, be
divided between the two factions. The party of Agrippina, emboldened
by its good fortune and by the weakness of Tiberius, was, after the
death of Drusus, conscious of its own supremacy. Its members had only
a single aim; even before it was possible they wished to see Nero, the
first-born son of Germanicus, in the position of Tiberius. They
therefore took up again their struggles and intrigues against Tiberius,
and attempted to incite Nero against the emperor. But this time
Sejanus was blocking their pathway. The death of Drusus had even
further increased the trust and affection which the emperor had for his
assistant, and he was henceforth the only confidant and the only friend
of the emperor; a war without quarter between him and Agrippina, her
sons and the party of Germanicus, was inevitable. And Sejanus opened
the action by attempting to exclude from the magistracy and from office
all the friends of Agrippina and all the members of the opposing
faction. At this time it was difficult to arrive at any of the more
important offices without being recommended to the senate by the
emperor, against whose choice the senate no longer dared to rebel;
since the emperor was held responsible for the conduct of the
government, it was only just that he should be allowed to select his
more important collaborators. Sejanus was therefore able, by using his
influence over Tiberius, to lay a thousand difficulties and obstacles
in the way of even the legitimate ambitions of the most eminent men of
the opposite faction. Nor were these the only weapons employed; others
no less efficacious were called into play, and intrigues, calumnies,
accusations, and trials were set on foot without scruple and with a
ferocity the horror of which Tacitus has painted with indelible colors.
Among these intrigues two matrimonial projects must be mentioned. In
the year 25 Sejanus attempted a bold stroke; he repudiated his wife
Apicata, and asked Tiberius for the hand of Livilla (Livia), the widow
of Drusus. Sejanus had frequented the political aristocracy of the
empire, and, despite his equestrian origin, was quick to adopt not only
their ambitions and their manners, but also their ideas on marriage.
He, too, considered it as simply a political instrument, a means of
acquiring and consolidating power. He had therefore disrupted his
first family in order to contract this marriage, which would have
redoubled his power and his influence and have introduced him into the
imperial household. But his bold stroke failed, because Tiberius
refused; and he refused, Tacitus tells us, above all because he was
afraid that this marriage would still further irritate Agrippina. The
emperor is supposed to have told Sejanus that too many feminine
quarrels were already disturbing and agitating the house of the
Caesars, to the serious detriment of his nephew's sons. And what would
happen, he asked, if this marriage should still further foment existing
hatreds? _Quid si intendatur certamen tali conjugio_? The reply is
significant, because it proves to us that Tiberius, who is accused of
harboring a fierce hate against the sons of Germanicus and Agrippina,
was still seeking, two years after the death of Drusus, to appease both
factions, attempting not to irritate his adversaries and to preserve a
reasonable equanimity in the midst of these animosities and these
struggles.
[Illustration: The starving Livilla refusing food.]
In any case, Sejanus was refused, and this refusal was a slight success
for the party of Agrippina, which, a year later, in 26, attempted on
its own account an analogous move. Agrippina asked Tiberius for
permission to remarry. If we are to believe Tacitus, Agrippina made
this request on her own initiative, impelled by one of those numerous
and more or less reasonable caprices which were continually shooting
through her head. But are we to suppose that suddenly, after a long
widowhood, Agrippina put forth so strange a proposal without any
_arrière-pensée_ whatever? Furthermore, if this proposal had been
merely the momentary caprice of a whimsical woman, would it have been
so seriously debated in the imperial household, and would the daughter
of Agrippina have recounted the episode in her memoirs? It is more
probable that this marriage, too, had a political aim. By giving a
husband to Agrippina, they were also seeking to give a leader to the
anti-Tiberian party. The sons of Germanicus were too young, and
Agrippina was too violent and tactless, to be able alone to cope
successfully with Sejanus, supported as he was by Tiberius, by Livia,
and by Antonia. We can thus explain why Tiberius opposed and prevented
the marriage: Agrippina, unassisted, had caused him sufficient trouble;
it would have been entirely superfluous for him to sanction her taking
to herself an official counselor in the guise of a husband.
This time Sejanus triumphed over the ill success of his rivals, and the
struggle continued in this manner between the two parties, but with an
increasing advantage to Sejanus. Beginning with the year 26, we see
numerous indications that the party of Agrippina and Germanicus was no
longer able to resist the blows and machinations of Sejanus, who
detached from it, one after another, all the men of any importance. He
either won them over to himself through his favors and his promises, or
he frightened them with his threats; and those who resisted most
tenaciously, he destroyed with his suits.
Tiberius was the storm-center of these struggles, and contrary to what
legend has reported, he attempted as far as he was able to prevent the
two parties from going to extremes. But what pain, repugnance, and
fatigue it must have cost him to make the effort necessary for
maintaining a last ray of reason and justice among so many evil
passions, animosities, ambitions, and rivalries! It must have cost him
dearly, for he had grown up in the time when the dream of a great
restoration of the aristocracy was luring the upper classes of Rome
with its fairest and most luminous smile. As a young man he had known
and loved Vergil, Horace, and Livy, the two poets and the historian of
this great dream; like all the elect spirits of those now distant
years, he had seen behind this vision a great senate, a glorious and
terrible army, an austere and revered republic like that which Livy had
pictured with glowing colors in his immortal pages.
Instead of all this, he was now forced to take his place at the head of
this decadent and wretched nobility, which seemed to be interested only
in rending itself asunder with calumnies, denunciations, suits, and
scandalous condemnations, and which repaid him for all that he had done
and was still doing for its safety and the prosperity of the empire by
directing against his name the most atrocious calumnies, the fiercest
railleries, and every sort of ridiculous and infamous legend. He had
dreamed of victories over the enemies of Rome, and he had to resign
himself to struggling day and night against the hysterical extravagance
of Agrippina: he had to be content, even without the sure hope of
success, if he could convince the majority that he was not a poisoner.
Authority without glory or respect, power divorced from the means
sufficient for its exercise--such was the situation in which the
successor of Augustus, the second emperor, after twelve years of a
difficult and trying reign, found himself. He no longer felt himself
safe at Rome, where he feared rightly or wrongly that his life was
being continually threatened, and it is not astonishing that, old,
wearied, and disgusted, between the years 26 and 27 he should have
retired definitely to Capri, seeking to hide his misanthropy, his
weariness, and his disgust with men and things in the wonderful little
isle which a delightful caprice of nature had set down in the lap of
the divine Bay of Naples.
But instead of the peace he sought at Capri, Tiberius found the infamy
of history. How dark and terrible are the memories of him associated
with the charming isle, which, violet-tinted, on beautiful sunny days
emerges from an azure sea against an azure sky! That fragment of
paradise fallen upon the shore of one of the most beautiful seas in the
world is said to have been for about ten years a hell of fierce
cruelties and abominable vices. Tiberius passed sentence upon himself,
in the opinion of posterity, when he secluded himself in Capri. Ought
we, without a further word, to transcribe this sentence? There are, to
be sure, no decisive arguments to prove false the accounts about the
horrors of Capri which the ancients, and especially Suetonius, have
transmitted to us; there are some, however, which make us mistrust and
withhold our judgment. Above all, we have the right to ask ourselves
how, from whom, and by access to what sources did Suetonius and the
other ancients learn so many extraordinary details. It must be
remembered that all the great figures in the history of Rome who had
many enemies, like Sylla, Caesar, Antony, and Augustus himself, were
accused of having scandalous habits. Precisely because the puritan
tradition was strong at Rome, such an accusation did much harm, and for
this reason, whether true or false, enemies were glad to repeat it
whenever they wished to discredit a character. Lastly, all the ancient
writers, even the most hostile, tell us that up to a ripe age Tiberius
preserved his exemplary habits. Is it likely, then, that suddenly,
when already old, he should have soiled himself with all the vices? At
all events, if there is any truth contained in these accounts, we can
at most conclude that as an old man Tiberius became subject to some
mental infirmity and that the man who took refuge at Capri was no
longer entirely sane.
Certain it is, in any case, that after his retirement to Capri,
Tiberius seriously neglected public affairs, and that Sejanus was
finally looked upon at Rome as the _de facto_ emperor. The bulletins
and reports which were sent from the empire and from Rome to the
emperor passed through his hands, as well as the decisions which
Tiberius sent back to the state. At Rome, in all affairs of serious or
slight importance, the senators turned to Sejanus, and about him, whom
all fell into the habit of considering as the true emperor, a court and
party were formed. In fear of his great power, the senators and the
old aristocracy suppressed the envy which the dizzy rise of this
obscure knight had aroused. Rome suffered without protest that a man
of obscure birth should rule the empire in the place of a descendant of
the great Claudian family, and the senators of the most illustrious
houses grew accustomed to paying him court. Worse still, virtually all
of them aided him, either by openly favoring him or by allowing him a
free hand, to complete the decisive destruction of the party and the
family of Germanicus,--of that same Germanicus of whom all had been
fond and whose memory the people still venerated.
[Illustration: Costume of a chief vestal (virgo vestalis maxima).]
After the retirement of Tiberius to Capri, all felt that Agrippina and
her sons were inevitably doomed sooner or later to succumb in the duel
with the powerful, ambitious, and implacable prefect of the pretorians
who represented Tiberius at Rome. Only a few generous idealists
remained faithful to the conquered, who were now near their
destruction; such supporters as might possibly ease the misery of ruin,
but not ward it off or avoid it. Among these last faithful and heroic
friends was a certain Titius Sabinus, and the implacable Sejanus
destroyed him with a suit of which Tacitus has given us an account, a
horrible story of one of the most abominable judicial machinations
which human perfidy can imagine. Dissensions arose to aggravate the
already serious danger in which Agrippina and her friends had been
placed. Nero, the first-born son, and Drusus, the second, became
hostile at the very moment when they should have united against the
ruthless adversary who wished to exterminate them all. A last rock of
refuge remained to protect the family of Germanicus. It was Livia, the
revered old lady who had been present at the birth of the fortunes of
Augustus and the new imperial authority, and who had held in her arms
that infant world which had been born in the midst of the convulsions
of the civil wars, and a little later had watched it try its first
steps on the pathway of history. Livia did not much love Agrippina,
whose hatred and intrigues against Tiberius she had always blamed; but
she was too wise and too solicitous of the prestige of the family to
allow Sejanus entirely to destroy the house of Germanicus. As long as
she lived, Agrippina and Nero could dwell safely in Rome. But Livia
was feeble, and in the beginning of 29, at the age of eighty-six, she
died. The catastrophe which had been carefully prepared by Sejanus was
now consummated; a few months after the death of Livia, Agrippina and
Nero were subjected to a suit, and, under an accusation of having
conspired against Tiberius, were condemned to exile by the senate.
Shortly after his condemnation, Nero committed suicide.
The account which Tacitus gives us of this trial is obscure, involved,
and fragmentary, for the story is broken off at its most important
point by an unfortunate lacuna in the manuscript. The other historians
add but little light with their brief phrases and passing allusions.
We do not therefore entirely understand either the contents of the
charges, the reason for the condemnation, the stand taken by the
accused, or the conduct of Tiberius with regard to the accusation. It
seems hardly probable that Agrippina and Nero could have been truly
guilty of a real conspiracy against Tiberius. Isolated as they had
been by Sejanus after the retirement of Tiberius to Capri, they would
scarcely have been able to set a conspiracy on foot, even if they had
so desired. They were paying the penalty for the long war of calumnies
and slanders which they had waged upon Tiberius, for the aversion and
the scorn which they had always shown for him. In this course of
conduct many senators had encouraged them as long as Tiberius alone had
not dared to have recourse to violent and cruel measures in order to
make himself respected by his family. But such acts of disrespect
became serious crimes for the unfortunate woman and her hapless son,
even in the eyes of the senators who had encouraged them to commit
them, now that Sejanus had reinvigorated the imperial authority with
his energy, and now that all felt that behind Tiberius and in his name
and place there was acting a man of decision who knew how to punish his
enemies and to reward his friends.
The trial and condemnation of Agrippina and Nero were certainly the
machinations of Sejanus, who carried along with him not only the senate
and the friends of the imperial family, but perhaps even Tiberius
himself. They prove how much Sejanus had been able to strengthen
imperial authority, which had been hesitating and feeble in the last
decade. Sejanus had dared to do what Tiberius had never succeeded in
doing; he had destroyed that center of opposition which gathered about
Agrippina in the house of Germanicus. It is therefore scarcely
necessary to say that the ruin of Agrippina still further increased the
power of Sejanus. All bowed trembling before the man who had dared
humiliate the very family of the Julio-Claudii. Honors were showered
upon his head; he was made senator and pontifex; he received the
proconsular power; there was talk of a marriage between him and the
widow of Nero; and it was finally proposed that he be named consul for
five years. Indeed, in 31, through the will of Tiberius, he actually
became the colleague of the emperor himself in the consulate. He
needed only the tribunician power to make him the official collaborator
of the emperor and his designated successor. Every one at Rome,
furthermore, considered him the future prince.
[Illustration: Remains of the House of the Vestal Virgins.]
But having arrived at this height, Sejanus's head was turned, and he
asked himself why he should exercise the rule and have all its burdens
and dangers while he left to others the pomp, the honors, and the
advantages. Although Tiberius allowed the senate to heap honors upon
his faithful prefect of the pretorians, and though he himself showed
his gratitude to him in many ways, even going to the point of being
willing to give him the widow of Nero in marriage, he never really
expected to take him as his colleague or to designate him as his
successor. Tiberius was a Claudian, and that a knight without ancestry
should be placed at the head of the Roman aristocracy was to him
unthinkable; after the exile of Nero he had cast his eyes upon Caius,
another son of Germanicus, as his possible successor. Nor had he
hidden his intention: he had even clearly expressed it in different
speeches to the senate. Therefore Sejanus must finally have come to
the conclusion that if he continued to defend Tiberius and his
interests, he could no longer hope for anything from him, and might
even compromise the influence and the popularity which he had already
acquired. Tiberius was hated and detested, there was a numerous party
opposed to him in the senate, and he was extremely unpopular among the
masses. Many admired Sejanus through spiteful hatred of Tiberius, for
it amounted to saying that they preferred to be governed by an obscure
knight rather than by an old and detested Claudian who had shut himself
up in Capri.
And thus Sejanus seems to have deluded himself into believing that if
he succeeded in doing away with the emperor, he could easily take his
position by setting aside the young son of Germanicus and profiting by
the popularity which the fall of Tiberius would bring him. Little by
little he came to an understanding with the enemies of Tiberius and
prepared a conspiracy for the final overthrow of the odious government
of the son of Livia. Many senators had agreed to this, and certainly
few conspiracies were ever organized under more favorable auspices.
Tiberius was old, disgusted with everything and everybody, and alone in
Capri; he had virtually not a single friend in Rome; what happened in
the world he knew only through what Sejanus told him. He was therefore
entirely in the hands of the man who was preparing to sacrifice him to
the tenacious hatred of the people and the senatorial aristocracy.
Young, energetic, and the favorite of fortune, Sejanus had with him a
formidable party in the senate, he was the commander of the pretorian
guard,--that is, of the only military force stationed in Italy,--and he
had terrified with his implacable persecutions all those whom he had
failed to win over through his promises or his favors. Could the duel
between this misanthropic old man and this vigorous, energetic,
ruthless climber end in any other way than with the defeat of the
former?
[Illustration: Bust, supposed to be of Antonia--daughter of Mark Antony
and Octavia--and mother of Germanicus.]
But now stepping forward suddenly from the shadows to which she had
retired, a lady appeared, threw herself between the two contestants,
and changed the fate of the combat. It was Antonia, the daughter of
the famous triumvir, the revered widow of Drusus.
After the death of Livia, Antonia was the most respected personage of
the imperial family in Rome. She still watched, withdrawn but alert,
over the destiny of the house now virtually destroyed by death,
dissensions, the cruelty of the laws, and the relentless anger of the
aristocracy. It was she who scented out the plot, and quickly and
courageously she informed Tiberius. The latter, in danger and in
Capri, displayed again the energy and sagacity of his best period. The
danger was most threatening, especially because Sejanus was the
commander of the pretorian guard. Tiberius beguiled him with friendly
letters, dangling in front of him the hope that he had conceded to him
the tribunician power.--that is, that he had made him his
colleague,--while at the same time he secretly took measures to appoint
a successor for him. Suddenly Sejanus learned that he was no longer
commander of the guard, and that the emperor had accused him before the
senate of conspiracy. In an instant, under this blow, the fortunes of
Sejanus collapsed. The envy and the latent hatred against the parvenu,
the knight who had risen higher than all others, and who had humiliated
the senatorial aristocracy with his good fortune, were reawakened, and
the senate and public opinion turned fiercely against him. Sejanus,
his family, his friends, his accomplices, and those who seemed to be
his accomplices, were put to death after summary trials by the fury of
the mob; and in Rome blood flowed in torrents.
Antonia might now have enjoyed the satisfaction of having saved through
her foresight not only Tiberius, but the entire family, when suddenly
one of the surges of that fierce tempest of ambitions and hatreds tore
from her side even her own daughter, Livilla, the widow of Drusus, and
cast her as a prey into that sea of blind popular frenzy. The reader
has perhaps not forgotten that eight years before, when Sejanus was
hoping to marry Livilla, he had repudiated his first wife, Apicata.
Apicata had not wished to outlive the ruin of her former husband, and
she killed herself, but only after having written Tiberius a letter in
which she accused Livilla of having poisoned Drusus through connivance
with Sejanus, whom she wished to marry. I confess that this accusation
seems to me hardly probable, and I do not believe that the denunciation
of Apicata is sufficient ground for admitting it. Above all, it is
well to inquire what proofs Apicata could have had of this crime, and
how she could have procured them even if the crime had been committed.
Since the two accomplices would have been obliged to hide their
infamous deed from all, there was no one from whom they would have
concealed it more carefully than from Apicata. We must further note
that it is not probable that a cautious man, as Sejanus was in the year
23, would have thought of committing so serious a crime as that of
poisoning the son of his protector. For what reason would he have done
so? He did not then think of succeeding Tiberius; by removing Drusus,
he would merely have improved the situation of the family of
Germanicus, which at that time was already hostile to him and with
which he was preparing to struggle. Instead, might not this accusation
_in extremis_ be the last vengeance of a repudiated woman against the
rival who for a moment had threatened to take the position from which
she herself had been driven? Apicata did not belong to the
aristocracy, and, unlike the ladies of the senatorial families, she had
not therefore been brought up with the idea of having to serve docilely
as an instrument for the political career of her own husband. Perhaps
her denunciation was the revenge of feminine jealousy, of that passion
which the lower orders of Roman society did not extinguish in the
hearts of their women as did the aristocracy.
This denunciation, however,--we know this from the pages of ancient
writers,--was one of the most terrible griefs of Tiberius's old age.
He had loved his son tenderly, and the idea of leaving so horrible a
crime unpunished, in case the accusation was true, drove him to
desperation. Yet, on the other hand, Livilla, the presumptive
criminal, was the daughter of his faithful friend, of that Antonia who
had saved him from the treacheries of Sejanus. As for the public, ever
ready to believe all the infamies which were reported of the imperial
house, it was firmly convinced that Livilla was an abominable poisoner.
A great trial was set on foot; many suspects were put to torture, which
is evidence that they were arriving at no definite conclusions, and
this was probably because they were seeking for the proofs of an
imaginary crime. Livilla, however, did not survive the scandal, the
accusations, the suspicions of Tiberius, and the distrust of those
about her. Because she was the daughter of Drusus and the
daughter-in-law of Tiberius, because she belonged to the family which
fortune had placed at the head of the immense empire of Rome, she would
not be able to persuade any one that she was innocent. The obscure
woman, without ancestry, who was accusing her from the grave, would be
taken at her word by every one; she would convince posterity and
history; against all reason she would prevail over the greatness of
Livilla! So Livilla took refuge in her mother's house and starved
herself to death, for she was unable to outlive an accusation which it
was impossible to refute.
Tiberius's reign continued for six years after this terrible tragedy,
but it was only a species of slow death-agony. The year 33 saw still
another tragic event--the suicide of Agrippina and her son Drusus. Of
the race of Germanicus there remained alive only one son, Caius (the
later Emperor Caligula), and three daughters, of whom the eldest,
Agrippina, the mother of Nero, had been married a few years before to
the descendant of one of the greatest houses of Rome, Cnaeus Domitius
Enobarbus. Tiberius still remained as the last relic of a bygone time
to represent ideas and aspirations which were henceforth lost causes,
amid the ruins and the tombs of his friends. Posterity, following in
the footsteps of Tacitus, has held him and his dark nature alone
responsible for this ruin. We ought to believe instead that he was a
man born to a loftier and more fortunate destiny, but that he had to
pay the penalty for the unique eminence to which fortune had exalted
him. Like the members of his family who had been driven into exile,
who had died before their time, who had been driven to suicide in
despair, he, too, was the victim of a tragic situation full of
insoluble contradictions; and precisely because he was destined to
live, he was perhaps the most unfortunate victim of them all.
[1] There was in the Roman legal system no public prosecutor and
virtually no police. Every Roman citizen was supposed to watch over
the laws and see that they were not infringed. On his retirement from
office, any governor or magistrate ran the risk of being impeached by
some young aspirant to political honors, and not infrequently oratory,
an art much cultivated by the Romans, triumphed over righteousness. In
the earlier period the ground on which charges were usually brought was
malversation; in the time of the empire they were also frequently
brought under the above-mentioned law _de majestate_. It has been said
that this common act of accusation, the birthright of the Roman
citizen, the greatly esteemed palladium of Roman freedom, became the
most convenient instrument of despotism. Since he who could bring a
criminal to justice received a fourth of his possessions and estates,
and since it brought the accuser into prominence, delation was
recklessly indulged in by the unscrupulous, both for the sake of gain
and as a means of venting personal spite. The vice lay at the very
heart of the Roman system, and was not the invention of Tiberius. He
could hardly have done away with it without overthrowing the whole
Roman procedure.
V
THE SISTERS OF CALIGULA AND THE MARRIAGE OF MESSALINA
After the death of Tiberius (37 A.D.), the problem of the succession
presented to the senate was not an easy one. In his will, Tiberius had
adopted, and thereby designated to the senate as his successors, Caius
Caligula, the son of Germanicus, and Tiberius, the son of his own son
Drusus. The latter was only seventeen, and too young for such a
responsibility. Caligula was twenty-seven, and therefore still very
young, although by straining a point he might be emperor; yet he did
not enjoy a good reputation. If we except him, there was no other
member of the family old enough to govern except Tiberius Claudius
Nero, the brother of Germanicus and the only surviving son of Drusus
and Antonia. He was generally considered a fool, was the
laughing-stock of freedmen and women, and such a gawk and clown that it
had been impossible to put him into the magistracy. Indeed, he was not
even a senator when Tiberius died.
[Illustration: Caligula.]
As they could not consider him, there remained only Caligula, unless
they wished to go outside the family of Augustus, which, if not
impossible, was at least difficult and dangerous. For the provinces,
the German barbarians, and especially the soldiers of the legions, were
accustomed to look upon this family as the mainstay of the empire. The
legions had become specially attached to the memory and to the race of
Drusus and Germanicus, who still lived in the minds of the soldiers as
witnesses to their former exploits and virtues. During the long
watches of the night, as their names were repeated in speech and story,
their shades, idealized by death, returned again to revisit the camps
on the banks of the Rhine and the Danube. The veneration and affection
which the armies had once felt for the Roman nobility were now centered
about the family of Augustus. In this difficulty, therefore, the
senate chose the lesser evil, and, annulling a part of the testament of
Tiberius, elected Caligula, the son of Germanicus, as their emperor.
The death of Tiberius, however, was destined to show the Romans for the
first time that although it was hard to find an emperor, it might even
be harder to find an empress. During the long reign of Augustus, Livia
had discharged the duties of this difficult position with incomparable
success. Tiberius had succeeded Augustus, and after his divorce from
Julia had never remarried. There had therefore been a long interregnum
in the Roman world of feminine society, during which no one had ever
stopped to think whether it would be easy or difficult to find a woman
who could with dignity take over the position of Livia. The problem
was really presented for the first time with the advent of Caligula;
for, at twenty-seven, he could not solve it as simply as Tiberius had
done. In the first place, it was to be expected that a man of his age
would have a wife; secondly, the _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_ made
marriage a necessity for him, as for all the senators; furthermore, the
head of the state needed to have a woman at his side, if he wished to
discharge all his social duties. The celibacy of Tiberius had
undoubtedly contributed to the social isolation which had been fatal
both to him and to the state.
Therefore in Caligula's time the Roman public became aware that the
problem confronting it was a most difficult one. A most exacting
public opinion, hesitating between the ideals of two epochs, wished to
see united in the empress the best part, both of the ancient and of the
modern customs, and was consequently demanding that the second Livia
should possess virtually every quality. It was necessary that she
should be of noble birth; that is, a descendant of one of those great
Roman families which with every year were becoming less numerous, less
prolific, less virtuous, and more fiercely divided among themselves by
irreconcilable hatreds. This latter was a most serious difficulty; for
by marrying into one of these lines, the emperor ran the risk of
antagonizing all those other families which were its enemies. The
empress, furthermore, must be the model of all the virtues; fruitful,
in order to obey the _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_; religious, chaste,
and virtuous, that she might not violate the _Lex de adulteriis_;
simple and modest, in deference to the _Lex sumptuaria_. She must be
able to rule wisely over the vast household of the emperor, full of his
slaves and freedmen, and she must aid her husband in the fulfilment of
all those social duties--receptions, dinners, entertainments--which,
though serious concerns for every Roman nobleman, were even more
serious for the emperor. That she should be stupid or ignorant was of
course out of the question. In fact, from this time to the downfall of
Nero the difficulties of the imperial family and its authority arise
not so much from the emperors as from their wives; so that it may truly
be said that it was the women who unwittingly dragged down to its ruin
the great Julio-Claudian house.
[Illustration: A bronze sestertius (slightly enlarged), showing the
sisters of Caligula (Agrippina, Drusilla, and Julia Livilla) on one
side and Germanicus on the other side.]
[Illustration: A bronze sestertius with the head of Agrippina the
Elder, daughter of Agrippa and Julia, the daughter of Augustus. She
was the wife of Germanicus, and their daughter, Agrippina the younger,
was the mother of the Emperor Nero.]
But if the difficulty was serious, there never was a man so little
fitted and so ill prepared to face it as this young man of twenty-seven
who had been exalted to the imperial dignity after the death of
Tiberius. Four years before his election as emperor, he had married a
certain Julia Claudilla, a lady who doubtless belonged to one of the
great Roman families, but about whom we have no definite information.
We cannot say, therefore, whether or not at the side of a second
Augustus she might have become a new Livia. In any case, it is certain
that Caligula was not a second Augustus. He was probably not so
frenzied a lunatic as ancient writers have pictured him, but his was
certainly an extravagant, unbalanced mind, given to excesses, and
unhinged by the delirium of greatness, which his coming to the throne
had increased the more because it had been conferred upon him at a time
when he was too young and before he had been sufficiently prepared.
For many years Caligula had never even hoped to succeed Tiberius; he
had continually feared that the fate of his mother and his two brothers
was likewise waiting for him. Far from having dreamed that he would be
raised to the imperial purple, he had merely desired that he might not
have to end his days as an exile on some desert island in the
Mediterranean. So much good fortune after the long persecutions of his
family profoundly disturbed his mental faculties, which had not
originally been well balanced, and it fomented in him that delirium of
grandeur which violently directed his desires toward distant Egypt, in
the customs of which, rather than in those of Rome, he, in the
exaltation of power, sought satisfaction for his imperial vanity. From
his earliest youth Caligula had shown a great inclination for the
products and the men of that far country, then greatly admired and
greatly feared by the Romans. For instance, we know that all his
servants were Egyptians, and that Helicon, his most faithful and
influential freedman, was an Alexandrian. But shortly after his
elevation this admiration for the land of the Ptolemies and the
Pharaohs broke forth into a furor of Egyptian exoticism, which impelled
him to an attempt to bring his own reign into connection with the
policies of his great-grandfather Mark Antony. He sought to introduce
into Rome the ideas, the customs, the sumptuousness, and the
institutions of the Pharaoh-Ptolemaic monarchy, to make of his palace a
court similar to that of Alexandria, and of himself a divine king,
adored in flesh and blood, as sovereigns were adored on the banks of
the Nile.
Caligula was undoubtedly mad, but his madness would have seemed less
chaotic and incomprehensible, and a thread of sense would have been
discovered even in his excesses and in the ravings of his unsettled
mind, if it had been understood that many of his most famous freaks
were moved and inspired by this Egyptian idea and tendency. In the
madness of Caligula, as in the story of Antony and the tragedy of
Tiberius, there is forever recurring, under a new form, the great
struggle between Italy and the East, between Rome and Alexandria, which
can never be divorced from the history of the last century of the
republic and the first century of the empire. Whoever carefully sifts
out the separate actions in the disordered conduct of the third Roman
emperor will easily rediscover the thread of this idea and the trace of
this latent conflict. For instance, we see the new emperor scarcely
elected before he introduced the worship of Isis among the official
cults of the Roman state and assigned in the calendar a public festival
to Isis. In short, he was favoring those Egyptian cults which
Tiberius, with his "old-Roman" sympathies, had fiercely combatted.
Furthermore, we see Caligula prohibiting the festival in commemoration
of the battle of Actium, which had been celebrated every year for more
than half a century. At first sight the idea seems absurd; but it must
not be considered a caprice; for with this act Caligula was intending
to initiate the historical rehabilitation of Mark Antony, the man who
had tried to shift the center of Roman politics from Rome to
Alexandria. The emperor meant to make plain to Rome that she was no
longer to boast of having humiliated Alexandria with arms, since
Alexandria would henceforth be taken as a model in all things.
[Illustration: Claudius, Messalina, and their two children in what is
known as the "Hague Cameo."]
Just as the dynasty of the Ptolemies had been surrounded by a
semi-religious veneration, Caligula, inspired as he was by Egyptian and
Ptolemaic conceptions, sought to have this same veneration bestowed
upon his entire family--that family which under Tiberius had been
persecuted and defamed by suits and decimated by suicides through the
envy of the aristocracy, which was forever unwilling to forgive its too
great prestige. Caligula not only hastened to set out in person to
gather up the bones of Agrippina, his mother, and of his brother, in
order to bring them to Rome and deposit them piously in the tomb of
Augustus,--that was a natural duty of filial piety,--but he also
prohibited any one to name among his ancestors the great Agrippa, the
builder of the Pantheon, because his very obscure origin seemed a blot
upon the semi-divine purity of his race. He had the title of Augusta
and all the privileges of the vestal virgins bestowed upon his
grandmother Antonia, the daughter of Mark Antony and the faithful
friend of Tiberius; he had these same vestal privileges bestowed upon
his three sisters, Agrippina, Drusilla, and Livilla; he had assigned to
them a privileged position equal to his own at the games in the circus;
he even had it decreed that their names should be included in the vows
which the magistrates and pontiffs offered every year for the
prosperity of the prince and of his people, and that in the prayers for
the conservation of his power there should also be included a prayer
for their felicity. This was a small revolution from the
constitutional point of view; for the Romans, though allowing their
women ample freedom to occupy themselves with politics from the
retirement of their homes, had never recognized for them any official
capacity. Tiberius, faithfully adhering in this also to tradition, had
gone as far as to prevent the senate, at the time of Livia's death,
from voting public honors to her memory, which, he thought, might have
justified the belief that his mother had been, not a matron of the old
Roman stamp, but a public personage. Caligula, however, was quite
indifferent to tradition, and by his expressed will, as if in reaction
against the persecutions and the humiliations which the imperial family
had suffered under Tiberius, even the sisters of the emperor acquired a
sacred character and a privileged position in the state. For the first
time the women of the imperial family acquired the character of
official personages.
It cannot be denied that the transition from atrocious prosecutions to
divine honors was somewhat sudden, but this is merely a further proof
that Caligula was endowed with a violent, impulsive, and irreflective
temperament. In any case, there was neither scandal nor protest at
that time. Caligula during the first months of his rule was popular,
not for his measures in favor of the women of his family, but for
reasons of far greater importance. He had inaugurated a régime which
promised to be more indulgent, more prodigal, less harsh than that of
Tiberius. Extravagance had made rapid strides, especially in the ranks
of the aristocracy, during the twenty-two years of Tiberius's rule: and
although the latter, especially toward the end of his life, had ceased
struggling against this tendency, nevertheless his well-known aversion
to sumptuous living, and the example of simplicity which he set before
the eyes of all, had always been a cause of preoccupation to the
aristocracy--to men as well as women. There was no certainty that the
emperor might not again, some day, try to enforce the sumptuary laws.
When Caligula therefore began his career, indicating very clearly his
sympathies with the modernizing party by his eagerness to do away with
the old Roman simplicity, the young aristocracy of both sexes did not
conceal their satisfaction. After a long period of old-fashioned
traditional policy, enforced by the two preceding emperors, they
welcomed with joy the young reformer who set out to introduce in the
imperial government the spirit of the new generations. No one was
sorry that all the purveyors of voluptuousness,--mimes, singers,
actors, dancers of both sexes, cooks, and puppets,--should with noisy
joy break into the imperial palace, which had been official, severe,
and cold under Tiberius, and bring back pleasure, luxury, and
festivals. All hoped that under the rule of this indulgent, youthful
emperor, life, especially at Rome, would become more pleasant and gay;
and no one therefore felt disposed to protest against the official
honors which, contrary to custom, had been bestowed upon the women of
the imperial family.
In truth, if he, still harking back to Egyptian ideas and customs, had
been content with surrounding his family, especially its women, with a
respect which would have protected them against the infamous
accusations and iniquitous persecutions to which many had fallen
victims, he might have had credit for an action which was good, just,
and useful to the state. That strange condition of affairs which had
been growing up under Tiberius was both absurd and dangerous to the
country: the emperor was honored with extraordinary powers and made the
object of a semi-religious veneration; but his family, and especially
its women, were, as a sort of retribution, set outside the laws and
fiercely assailed in a thousand insidious ways. But the lunatic
Caligula was not the man to keep even a wise proposal within reasonable
limits. Power, popularity, and praise quickly aroused all that was
warped and excessive in his nature, and very soon, as he showed at the
end of the year 37, he entertained an idea which must have seemed to
the Romans a horrible impiety. His wife died soon after he became
emperor. Another marriage seemed obligatory, and he decided that he
would marry his sister Drusilla.
Historians have represented this intention as the perverse delirium of
an unbridled sensuality. It was certainly the gross act of a madman,
but there was perhaps more politics in his madness than perversity; for
it was an attempt to introduce into Rome the dynastic marriages between
brothers and sisters which had been the constant tradition of the
Ptolemies and the Pharaohs of Egypt. This oriental custom certainly
seems a horrible aberration to us, who have been educated according to
the strict and austere doctrines of Christianity, which, inheriting in
these matters the fine flower of Greco-Latin ideas, has purified and
rendered them more rigorous. But for centuries in Egypt,--that is, in
the most ancient of the Mediterranean civilizations,--this horrible
aberration was looked upon as a sovereign privilege which brought the
royal dynasty into relationship with the gods. By means of it, this
family preserved the semi-divine purity of its blood; and perchance
this custom, which had survived up to the fall of the Ptolemies, was
only the projection of ideas and customs which in most ancient times
had had a much wider diffusion along the Mediterranean world, for
traces of it can be found even in Greek mythology. For were not
Jupiter and Juno, who constituted the august Olympian couple, at the
same time also brother and sister? Gradually restricted through the
spreading of Greek civilization, this custom was finally eradicated at
the shores of the Mediterranean by Rome after the destruction of the
kingdom of the Ptolemies.
The lunatic Caligula now suddenly took it into his head to transplant
this custom to Rome--to transplant it with all the religious pomp of
the Egyptian monarchy, and thus transform the family of Augustus, which
up to the present had been merely the most eminent family of the Roman
aristocracy, into a dynasty of gods and demigods, whose members were to
be united by marriage among themselves in order not to pollute the
celestial purity of their blood. A fraternal and divine pair were to
rule at Rome, like another Arsinoë and Ptolemy, whom the Alexandrian
throngs had worshiped on the banks of the Nile. The idea had already
matured in his mind at the end of the year 37, and among his three
sisters he had already chosen Drusilla to be his wife. This is proved
by a will made at the time of an illness which he contracted in the
autumn of the first year of his rule. In this will he appointed
Drusilla heir not only of his goods, but also of his empire, a wild
folly from the point of view of Roman ideas, which did not admit women
to the government; but it proves that Caligula had already thought and
acted like an Egyptian king.
[Illustration: Remains of the Bridge of Caligula in the Palace of the
Caesars.]
It is easy to understand why the peace and harmony which had been
reestablished for a moment in the troubled imperial family by the
advent of Caligula should have been of brief duration. His grandmother
and his sisters were Romans, educated in Roman ideals, and this exotic
madness of his could inspire in them only an irresistible horror. This
brought confusion into the imperial family, and after having suffered
the persecutions of Sejanus and his party, the unhappy daughters of
Germanicus found themselves in the toils of the exacting caprices of
their brother. In fact, in 38, Caligula had already broken with his
grandmother, whom the year before he had had proclaimed Augusta; and
between the years 38 and 39, catastrophes followed one another in the
family with frightful rapidity. His sister Drusilla, whom, as
Suetonius tells us, he already treated as a lawful wife, died suddenly
of some unknown malady while still very young. It is not improbable
that her health may have been ruined by the horror of the wild
adventure, which was neither human nor Roman, into which her brother
sought to drag her by marriage. Caligula suddenly declared her a
goddess, to whom all the cities must pay honors. He had a temple built
for her, and appointed a body of twenty priests, ten men and ten women,
to celebrate her worship; he decreed that her birthday should be a
holiday, and he wished the statue of Venus in the Forum to be carved in
her likeness.
But in proportion as Caligula became more and more fervid in this
adoration of his dead sister, the disagreement between himself and his
other two sisters became more embittered. Julia Livilla was exiled in
38; Agrippina, the wife of Domitius Enobarbus, in 39, and about this
same time the venerable Antonia died. It was noised about that
Caligula had forced her to commit suicide, and that Agrippina and
Livilla had taken part in a conspiracy against the life of the emperor.
How much truth there may be in these reports it is difficult to say,
but the reason for all these catastrophes may be affirmed with
certainty. Life in the imperial palace was no longer possible,
especially for women, with this madman who was transforming Rome into
Alexandria and who wished to marry a sister. Even Tiberius, the son of
Drusus and co-heir to the empire with Caligula, was at about this time
defeated in some obscure suit and disappeared.
Caligula therefore remained alone at Rome to represent in the imperial
palace the family which only ironically can be considered as the most
fortunate in Rome. Of three generations, upon whom fate seemed to have
showered all the gifts of life, there remained at his side only
Claudius, the clownish old man, the plaything of slaves and freedmen,
whom no one molested because all could make game of him. A madman and
an imbecile,--or at least one who was reputed such by everybody,--this
was all that remained of the family of Augustus seventy years after the
battle of Actium.
Alone, with no sisters now to elevate to the divine honors of the Roman
Olympus, Caligula was reduced to hunting for wives in the families of
the aristocracy. But it seems that even there could be found no great
abundance of women who had all the necessary qualities to make them the
Olympian consorts of so capricious a god. In three years he married
and repudiated three--and in a very strange manner, if we are to trust
the ancient accounts of Caligula's loves. The first was Livia
Orestilla, the wife of Caius Piso. The emperor, who had seen the woman
at the marriage celebration, became, we are told, so infatuated with
her that he obliged the husband to divorce her; he then married her,
and a few days later repudiated her. Caligula is said to have compared
himself on this occasion to Romulus who ravished the Sabine woman, and
to Augustus who raped Livia. The second was Lollia Paulina, wife of
Caius Memmius, proconsul of a distant province. Caligula heard of the
prodigious beauty of Lollia's grandmother. The portrayal of her charms
made him fall in love with her granddaughter, though absent and
distant. He gave orders for her immediate recall to Rome, and as soon
as she could be divorced from her husband he married her. This union,
like the former one, lasted only a brief time. The third wife was
Milonia Caesonia, and to her Caligula was more faithful, though from
the accounts of ancient writers she appears to have been much older
than he, rather homely, and already a mother of three daughters when he
first loved her. It is difficult to determine how much truth there is
in these reports: Caligula was, it is true, a raving maniac, and his
frenzy became more accentuated when under the sway of love--a passion
which deranges somewhat even wise men. It is not strange, therefore,
that in regard to women he may have been guilty of even greater
excesses than he was capable of in his dealings with men. Yet some of
these accounts seem a little incredible even when ascribed to a madman.
However that may be, Livia Orestilla, Lollia Paulina, Milonia Caesonia
are figures without relief, shades and ghosts of empresses, no one of
whom had time enough even to occupy the highest post. In vain the
people expected that there would appear in the imperial palace a worthy
successor to Livia. Caligula, like all madmen, was by nature solitary,
and could not live with other human beings: he was to remain alone, a
prey to his ravings, which became even stranger and more violent. He
now wished to impose upon the empire the worship of his own person,
without considering any opposition or local traditions and
superstitions. In doing this he did violence not only to the civic and
republican sentiment of Italy, which detested this worship of a living
man as an ignoble oriental adulation, but also to the religious feeling
of the Hebrews, to whom this cult appeared most horrible and idolatrous.
[Illustration: The Emperor Caligula.]
In this way difficulties, dissatisfaction, and sedition arose in all
parts of the empire. The extravagances, the wild expenditures, the
riotous pleasures, and the cruelties of Caligula increased the
discontent and disgust on every hand. We need not take literally all
the accounts of his cruelty and violence which ancient writers have
transmitted to us,--even Caligula has been blackened,--but it is
certain that his government in the last two years of his reign
degenerated into a reckless, extravagant, violent, and cruel tyranny.
One day the empire awoke in terror to the fact that the imperial
family--that family in which the legions, the provinces, and the
barbarians saw the keystone of the state--no longer existed; that in
the vast imperial palace, empty of women, empty of children, empty of
hope, there wandered a raging madman of thirty-one, who divorced a wife
every six months, who foolishly wasted the treasure and the blood of
his subjects, and who was concerned with no other thought than that of
having himself worshiped like a god in flesh and blood by all the
empire. A conspiracy was formed in the palace itself, and Caligula was
killed.
The senate was much perplexed when it heard of the death of Caligula.
What was to be done? The majority was inclined to restore the former
republican government by abolishing the imperial authority, and to give
back to the senate the supreme direction of the state, which little by
little had passed into the hands of the emperor. But many recognized
that this return to the ancient form of government would be neither
easy nor without danger. Could the senate, neglected, divided, and
disregarded as it was, succeed in governing the immense empire? On the
other hand, it was not much easier to find an emperor, granted that an
emperor was henceforth necessary. In the family of Augustus there was
only Claudius, too foolish and ridiculous for them to think of making
him the head of the state. It seems that some eminent senator offered
his candidacy, but the senate hesitated in perplexity, on the ground
that if the authority of the members of the family of Augustus was
already so uncertain, so debatable, and so darkly threatened, what
would happen to a new emperor, unknown to the legions and the
provinces, and unsupported by the glory of his ancestors? While the
senate was debating in such uncertainty, the pretorians discovered
Claudius in a corner of the imperial palace, where he had been cowering
through fear lest he too be killed. Recognizing in him the brother of
Germanicus, the pretorians proclaimed him emperor. An act of will is
always more powerful than a thousand scruples or hesitations: the
senate yielded to the legions, and recognized Claudius the imbecile as
emperor.
[Illustration: Claudius.]
But Claudius was not an imbecile, although he appeared such to many.
Instead, he was, so to speak, a man half-grown, in whom certain parts
of the mind were highly developed, but whose character had remained
that of a child, timid, capricious, impulsive, giddy, and incapable of
self-mastery. In intellect he was learned, even cultivated; he was
fond of studies, of history, literature, and archaeology, and spoke and
wrote well. But Augustus had been forced to give up the attempt to
have him enter upon a political career because he had been unable to
make him acquire even that exterior bearing which confers the necessary
dignity upon him who exercises great power, to say nothing of the
firmness, precision, and force of will required in governing men.
Credulous, timorous, impressionable, and at the same time obstinate,
gluttonous, and sensual, this erudite, overgrown boy had become in the
imperial palace a kind of plaything for everybody, especially for his
slaves, who, knowing his defects and his weaknesses, did with him what
they wished.
He did not lack the intellectual qualities necessary for governing
well, but of the moral qualities he had none. He was intelligent, and
he looked stupid: he was able to consider the great questions of
politics, war, and finance with breadth of view, with original and
acute intelligence, but he never succeeded in having himself taken
seriously by the persons who surrounded him. He dared undertake great
projects, like the conquest of Britain, and he lost his head at the
wildest fable about conspiracy which one of his intimates told him; he
had mind sufficient to govern the empire as well as Augustus and
Tiberius had done, but he could not succeed in getting obedience from
four or five slaves or from his own wife.
Such a man was destined to turn out a rather odd emperor, at once great
and ridiculous. He made important laws, undertook gigantic public
works and conquests of great moment; but in his own house he was a weak
husband, incapable of exercising any sort of authority over his wife.
With these conjugal weaknesses he seriously compromised the imperial
authority, while at the same time he was consolidating it and rendering
it illustrious with beautiful and wise achievements, especially in the
first seven years of his rule, while he lived with Valeria Messalina.
We must admit in his justification that in this matter he had not been
particularly fortunate; for fate had given him to wife a lady who,
notwithstanding her illustrious ancestors,--she belonged to one of the
greatest families of Rome, related to the family of Augustus,--was not
exactly suited to be his companion in the imperial dignity. Every one
knows that the name of Valeria Messalina has become in history
synonymous with all the faults and all the vices of which a woman can
be guilty. This, as usual, is the result of envy and malevolence which
never offered truce to the family of Augustus as long as any of its
members lived. Many of the infamies which are attributed to her are
evidently fables, complacently repeated by Tacitus and Suetonius, and
easily believed by posterity. But it is certain that if Messalina was
not a monster, she was a beautiful woman, capricious, gay, powerful,
reckless, avid of luxury and of money, who had never scrupled to abuse
the weakness of her husband in any way either by deceiving him or by
obliging him to follow her will and her caprice in everything. She was
a woman, in short, neither very virtuous nor serious. There are such
women at all times and in all social classes, and they are generally
considered by the majority not as monsters, but as a pleasing, though
dangerous, variety of the feminine sex. Under normal conditions,
nevertheless, when the husband exercises a certain energy and sagacity,
even the danger which may result from them is relatively slight.
But chance had made of Messalina an empress, and Messalina was not a
sufficiently intelligent or serious woman to understand that if she had
been able to abuse the weakness of Claudius with impunity while he had
been the most obscure member of the imperial family, it was a much more
difficult matter to continue to abuse it after he had become the head
of the state. It was from this error that all their difficulties
arose. Elated by her new position, Messalina more than ever took
advantage of her husband's infirmity. She began by starting new
dissensions in the imperial family. Claudius had recalled to Rome the
two victims of Caligula's Egyptian caprices, Agrippina and Julia
Livilla; but if the latter no longer found a brother in Rome to
persecute them, they did find their aunt, and they had gained but
little by the exchange. Messalina soon took umbrage at the influence
which the two sisters acquired over the mind of their weak-willed
uncle, and it was not long before Julia Livilla was accused under the
_Lex de adulteriis_, and exiled with Seneca, the famous philosopher,
whom they wished rightly or wrongly to pass off as her lover.
Agrippina, like her mother, was a virtuous woman, as is proved by the
fact that she could not be attacked with such weapons and was enabled
to remain in Rome; though she also had to live prudently and beware of
her enemy, and much the more as she had only recently become a widow
and could therefore not even count upon the protection of a husband.
Though Agrippina remained at Rome, she was isolated and reduced to a
position of helplessness.
Messalina alone, together with four or five intelligent and
unscrupulous freedmen, hedged Claudius about, and there began the
period of their common government--a government of incredible waste and
extortion. Among these freedmen there were, to be sure, men like
Narcissus and Pallas, intelligent and sagacious, who did not aim merely
at putting money into their purses, but who helped Claudius to govern
the empire properly. Messalina, on the other hand, thought only of
acquiring wealth, that she might dissipate it in luxury and pleasures.
The wife of the emperor had been selling her influence to the sovereign
allies and vassals, to all the rich personages of the empire, who
desired to obtain any sort of favor from the imperial authority; she
had been seen bartering with the contractors for public works, mingling
in the financial affairs of the state every time that there was any
occasion to make money. And with the money thus amassed she indulged
in ostentatious displays which violated all the prohibitions of the
_Lex sumptuaria_, leading a life of unseemly pleasures, in which it is
easy to imagine what sort of example of all the finer feminine virtues
she set. Claudius either knew nothing of all this or else submitted
without protest.
Messalina then, with her peculiar levity of character and violence of
temperament, continued to emphasize the modernizing Asiatic tendency
introduced by Caligula into the state, and was influential in
destroying the puritanic traditions of Rome and replacing them by the
corruption and pomp of Asia. Her rôle was exactly the opposite of that
of Livia. The latter had been the embodiment of the conservative
virtues of traditionalism: the former by her egoism, her extravagance,
and her wantonness was in a fair way to destroy all such traditions.
Livia had been almost a vestal in her fight for the puritanism of old
Rome: Messalina most ardently and violently fought to destroy it.
Such an empress, however, could hardly please the public. While those
who profited by her dissipations greatly admired Messalina, a lively
movement of protest was soon started among the people, for they, unlike
many of the aristocrats, who affected modern views and who pretended to
scorn the traditions of ancient Rome, were faithful to all such
puritanical traditions and wished to see at their emperor's side a lady
adorned with all the fairer virtues of the ancient matron--with those
virtues, in short, which Livia had personified with such dignity. How
could they tolerate this sort of dissipated Bacchante, who should have
been condemned to infamy and exile with the many other Roman women who
had been faithless to their husbands; who with the effrontery of her
unpunished crimes dishonored and rendered ridiculous the imperial
authority?
To the middle classes the emperor was a semi-sacred magistrate, charged
with maintaining by law and example the purity of the family, fidelity
in marital relations, and simplicity of customs. Now, to their
amazement, they saw in the person of the empress all the dissipations,
corruptions, and perversions of the woman who wished to live only for
her pleasure, to enjoy her beauty, and to have others enjoy it,
enthroned, to the scandal of all honest minds, in the palace of the
emperor. Furthermore, it seemed to every one a scandal that one who
was an emperor should at the same time be a weak husband; for the
simple good sense of the Latin would not admit that a man who could
govern an empire should not be able to command a woman. It soon became
the general opinion of all reasonable people that Messalina, in the
position of Livia upon the Palatine, and with so weak a husband, was
not only a scandal, but also a continual menace to the public.
[Illustration: The Emperor Claudius.]
Nevertheless, it would now have been no easy matter, even if the
emperor had wished it, to convict an empress of infidelity and
disobedience to one of the great laws of Augustus. Caligula was a
madman and had been able to secure three divorces, but a wiser emperor
would have to think for a long time before rendering public the shame
and scandals of his family, especially when confronted with an
aristocracy which was as eager to suspect and calumniate as was the
aristocracy of Rome. But the problem became hopeless as soon as the
emperor did not see or did not wish to see the faults of his wife.
Would any one dare to step forward and accuse the empress?
The situation gradually became grave and dangerous. The state,
governed with intelligence, but without energy, with vast
contradictions and hesitations, was being strengthened along certain
lines and was going to pieces along others. The power and extortions
of the freedmen were breeding discontent on every hand. Both through
what she really did, and what the populace said she had done, Messalina
was being transformed by the people into a legendary personage whose
infamous deeds aroused general indignation; but all in vain.
It now became quite evident that an empress was virtually invulnerable,
and that, once enthroned upon the Palatine, there was no effective
means of protesting against the various ways in which she could abuse
her lofty position unless the emperor wished to interfere. In its
exasperation, the public finally vented upon Claudius the anger which
the violence and misconduct of Messalina had aroused. They declared
that it was his weakness which was responsible for her conduct; and
intrigues, deeds of violence, conspiracies, and attempts at civil war
became, as Suetonius says, every-day occurrences at Rome.
A sense of insecurity and doubt was spreading throughout the state as a
result of the indecision of the emperor, and all began to ask
themselves how long a government could last which was at the mercy of a
wanton. The violent death of Caligula, which was still fresh in the
minds of the people, added to this wide-spread feeling of insecurity
and alarm. As Caligula, notwithstanding the pontifical sacredness of
his person, had been slain, to the apparent satisfaction of everybody,
in his palace by a handful of his supposed friends and supporters, it
seemed possible that the tragedy might easily be repeated in the case
of Claudius. Could not the whole Claudian government be
overturned,--in a single night, perhaps, as that of Caligula had been
overturned? All hearts were filled with suspicion, distrust, and
alarm, and many concluded that since Claudius had not succeeded in
ridding the empire of Messalina it would be well to rid it of Claudius.
[Illustration: Messalina, third wife of Claudius.]
So for seven years Messalina remained the great weakness of a
government which possessed signal merits and accomplished great things.
Of all the emperors in the family of Augustus, Claudius was certainly
the one whose life was most seriously threatened, especially because of
his wife. Such a situation could not endure.
It finally resolved itself into a tragic scandal, which, if we could
believe Suetonius and Tacitus, would certainly have been the most
monstrous extravagance to which an imagination depraved by power could
have abandoned itself. According to these writers, Messalina, at a
loss for some new form of dissipation, one fine day took it into her
head to marry Silius, a young man with whom she was very much in love,
who belonged to a distinguished family, and who was the
consul-designate. According to them, for the pleasure of shocking the
imperial city with the sacrilege of a bigamous union, she actually did
marry him in Rome, with the most solemn religious rites, while Claudius
was at Ostia! But is this credible, at least without admitting that
Messalina had suddenly gone insane? To what end and for what reason
would she have committed such a sacrilege, which struck at the very
heart of popular sentiment? Dissolute, cruel, and avaricious Messalina
certainly was, but mad she was not. And even if we are willing to
admit that she had gone mad, is it conceivable that all those who would
have had to lend her their services in the staging of this revolting
farce had also gone mad? It is difficult to suppose that they acted
through fear, for the empress had no such power in Rome that she could
constrain conspicuous persons publicly to commit such sacrilege.
This episode would probably be an unfathomable enigma had not Suetonius
by chance given us the key to its solution: "Nam illud omnem fidem
excesserit, quod nuptiis, quas Messalina cum adultero Silio fecerat,
tabellas dotis et ipse consignaverit" ("For that which would pass all
belief is the fact that in the marriage which Messalina contracted with
the adulterer Silius, he himself [Claudius] should have signed the
figures for the dowry"). If Claudius himself gave a dowry to the
bride, he therefore knew that the marriage of Messalina and Silius was
to take place; and it is precisely this fact which seems so incredible
to Suetonius. But we know that in the Roman aristocracy a man could
give away his own wife in this manner; for have we not recounted in
this present history how Livia was dowered and given in marriage to
Augustus by her first husband, the grandfather of Claudius? The
deeding of a wife with a dowry was a part of the somewhat bizarre
marriage customs of the Roman aristocracy, which gradually lost ground
in the first and second century of our era in proportion as the
prestige and power of that aristocracy declined, and in proportion as
the middle classes acquired influence in the state and succeeded in
imposing upon it their ideas and sentiments. The passage in Suetonius
proves to us that he no longer understood this matrimonial custom, and
it is doubtful whether even Tacitus thoroughly understood it. Nor is
it improbable that it should have seemed strange even to many of the
contemporaries of Claudius. We could therefore explain how, not really
understanding what had happened, the historians of the following
century should have believed that Messalina had married Silius while
she was still the wife of Claudius.
In short, Claudius had been persuaded to divorce Messalina and to marry
her to Silius. The passage from Suetonius, if carefully interpreted,
clearly tells us this. What means were employed to persuade Claudius
to consent to this new marriage we do not know. Suetonius refers to
this, but he is not clear. In any case, this point is less important
than that other question: Why was Messalina, after seven years of
empire, willing to divorce Claudius and marry Silius? The problem is
not an easy one, but after long examination I have decided to accept
with slight modification the explanation given by Umberto Silvagni in
his beautiful work, "The Empire and the Women of the Caesars," a book
which contains many original ideas and much acute observation.
[Illustration: The philosopher Seneca.]
Silvagni, who is an excellent student of Roman history, has well
brought out how Silius belonged to a family of the aristocracy famous
for its devotion to the party of Germanicus and Agrippina. His father,
who had been a great friend of Germanicus, had been one of the victims
of Sejanus, and accused in the time of Tiberius under the law of high
treason, he had committed suicide. His mother, Sosia Galla, had been
condemned to exile on account of her devotion to Agrippina. Starting
out with these considerations, and examining acutely the accounts of
all the ancient historians, Silvagni concluded that behind this
marriage there lay a conspiracy to ruin Claudius and to put Caius
Silius in his place. Messalina must sooner or later have felt that the
situation was an impossible one, that Claudius was not a sufficiently
strong or energetic emperor to be able to impose the disorganized
government of himself and his freedmen upon the empire, and that any
day he might fall a prey to a plot or an assassination. What would
happen, she must have asked herself, if Claudius, like Caligula, should
some day be despatched by a conspiracy? The same fate would doubtless
be waiting for her, for, having killed him, the conspirators would
certainly murder her also. Consequently she entertained the idea of
ruining the emperor herself in order to contribute to the elevation of
his successor, and thus to preserve at his side the position which she
had occupied in the court of Claudius. But once Claudius had been
slain, there would be no other member of the family of Augustus old
enough to govern. She therefore decided to choose him in a family
famous for its devotion to Germanicus and the more popular branch of
the house, thus hoping the more easily to win over the legions and the
pretorians to the cause of the new emperor, Since the descendants of
Drusus were dead, what other option remained to her than to choose a
successor in the families of the aristocracy who had shown for them the
greatest devotion and love?
Thus, for the first time, a woman was placed at the head of a really
vast political conspiracy destined to wrest the supreme power from the
family of Augustus; and this woman proved her sagacity by knowing how
to organize this great plot so well and so opportunely that the most
intelligent and influential among the freedmen of Claudius debated for
a long time whether they would join her or throw in their lot with the
emperor. So doubtful seemed the issue of this struggle between the
weak husband and the energetic, audacious, and unscrupulous wife! They
allowed Messalina and Silius to enlist friends and partisans in every
part of Roman society, to come to an understanding with the prefect of
the guards, to obtain the divorce from Claudius, even to celebrate
their marriage, without opening the eyes of the emperor. Claudius
would probably have been destroyed if at the last moment Narcissus had
not decided to rush to the emperor, who was at Ostia, and, by
terrifying him in some unspeakable way, had not induced him to stamp
out the conspiracy with a bold and unexpected stroke. There followed
one of those periods of judicial murder which for more than thirty
years had been costing much Roman blood, and in this slaughter
Messalina, too, was overthrown.
After the discovery of the conspiracy, Claudius made a harangue to the
soldiers, in which he told them that as he had not been very successful
in his marriages he did not intend to take another wife. The proposal
was wise, but difficult of execution, for there were many reasons why
the emperor needed to have a woman at his side. We very soon find
Claudius consulting his freedmen on the choice of a new wife. There
was much discussion and uncertainty, but the choice finally fell upon
Agrippina. That choice was significant. Agrippina was the niece of
Claudius, and marriages between uncle and niece, if not exactly
prohibited, were looked upon by the Romans with a profound revulsion of
feeling. Claudius and his freedmen could not have decided to face this
repugnance except for serious and important reasons. Among these the
most serious was probably that after the experience with Messalina, it
seemed best not to go outside the family. An empress belonging to the
family would not be so likely to plot against the descendants of
Augustus as had been this strange woman, who belonged to one of those
aristocratic families who deeply hated the imperial house. Agrippina,
furthermore, was the daughter of Germanicus. This was a powerful
recommendation with the people, the pretorian cohorts, and the legions.
In addition, she was intelligent, cultured, simple, and economical; she
had grown up in the midst of political affairs, she knew how the empire
was governed, and up to this point she had lived a life above reproach.
She seemed to be the woman above all others destined to make the people
forget Messalina and to reestablish among the masses respect for the
family of Augustus, now seriously compromised by many scandals and
dissensions. Furthermore, she did not seem to suffer too much by
comparison with Livia.
Claudius asked the senate to authorize marriages between uncles and
nieces, as he did not dare to assume the responsibility of going
counter to public sentiment. And thus the daughter of Germanicus and
the sister of Caligula became an empress.
VI
AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO
It is possible, as Tacitus says, that marriage with Claudius was the
height of Agrippina's ambition, but it is also possible that it was an
act of supreme self-sacrifice on the part of a woman who had been
educated in the traditions of the Roman aristocracy, and who therefore
considered herself merely a means to the political advancement of her
relatives and her children.
I am rather inclined to accept this second explanation. When she
married Claudius, Agrippina not only married an uncle who was much
older than herself, and who must necessarily prove a rather difficult
and disagreeable husband, but she bound up her fate with that of a weak
emperor whose life was continually threatened by plots and revolts, and
whose hesitations and terrors plainly portended that he would one day
end by precipitating the imperial authority and government into some
bizarre and terrible catastrophe. For Agrippina it meant that she was
blindly staking her life and her honor, and that she would lose them
both should she fail to compensate for the innumerable deficiencies of
her strange husband through her own intelligence and strength of will.
Every one will recognize how difficult was the task which she had
undertaken.
But at the beginning fortune favored Agrippina as she boldly took up
the work that lay before her. The wild pranks of Caligula and the
scandals of Messalina had aroused an immeasurable disgust in Rome and
Italy. Every one was out of patience. The senate as well as the
people were demanding a stronger, more coherent, and respectable
government, which would end the scandals, suits, and atrocious personal
and family quarrels which were dividing Rome. Agrippina was the
daughter of Germanicus, the granddaughter of Drusus, and she had in her
veins the blood of the Claudii, with all their pride, their energy,
their puritanical, conservative, and aristocratic spirit, and the
moment she appeared, all hopes were centered in her. Although she was
a sort of feminine Tiberius, and in the purity of her life resembled
her mother and her great-grandmother Livia, Tacitus nevertheless
maligns her for her relationships with Pallas and Seneca. The fact
that Messalina, even with her implacable hatred, failed to bring about
her downfall under the _Lex de adulteriis_, proves the unreliability of
these statements, and Tacitus proves it himself when he says that she
suffered no departure from chastity unless it helped her power (_Nihil
domi impudicum nisi dominationi expediret_). This means that Agrippina
was a lady of irreproachable life; for if there is one thing which
stands out clearly in the history of this remarkable woman, it is that
both her rise and her fall depended upon causes of such a nature that
not even her womanly charms could have increased her power or retarded
her ruin. All hearts were therefore filled with hope when they saw
this respectable, active, and energetic woman take her place at the
side of Claudius the weakling, for she brought back the memory of the
most venerated personages of the family of Augustus.
[Illustration: The Emperor Nero.]
The new empress, encouraged by this show of favor, applied herself with
all the strength of her impassioned nature to the task of again making
operative in the state those traditional ideas of the nobility in which
Livia had educated first Tiberius and Drusus, then Germanicus, and then
Agrippina herself. In this descendant of hers the spirit of the
great-grandmother finally reappeared, for it had been eclipsed by the
fatal and terrible struggle between Tiberius and Agrippina, by the
madness of Caligula, and the comic scandals of the first part of the
reign of Claudius. All this served to bring back into the state a
little of that authoritative vigor which the nobility in the time of
its splendor had considered the highest ideal of government. Tacitus
says of her rule that it was as rigid as if a man's (_adductum et quasi
virile_). This signifies that under the influence of Agrippina the
laxity and disorder of the first years of Claudius's reign gave place
to a certain order and discipline. Severity there was, and more often
haughtiness (_palam severitas ac saepius superbia_). The freedmen who
had formerly been so powerful and aggressive, now stepped aside, which
is an evident sign that their petulance had now found a check in the
energy of Agrippina. The state finances and the fortune of the
imperial house were reorganized, for Agrippina, like Livia and like all
the ladies of the great Roman nobility, was an excellent administrator,
frugal, and ever watchful of her slaves and freedmen, and careful of
all items of income and expense. The Roman aristocracy, like all other
aristocracies, hated the parvenus, the men of sudden riches,
traffickers who had too quickly become wealthy, and all persons whose
only aim was to amass money. We know that Agrippina sought to prevent
as far as possible the malversations of public funds by which the
powerful freedmen of Claudius had been enriching themselves. After she
became empress we hear accounts of numerous suits instituted against
personages who had been guilty of wasting public treasure, while under
Messalina no such cases were brought forward. We know, furthermore,
that she reestablished the fortune of the imperial family, which in all
probability had been seriously compromised by the reckless expenditures
of Messalina. This is what Tacitus refers to in one of his sentences,
which, as usual, is colored by his malignity: _Cupido auri immensa
obtentum habebat quasi subsidium regno pararetur_ (She sought to enrich
the family under the pretext of providing for the needs of the empire).
What Tacitus calls a "pretext" was, on the contrary, the ancient
aristocratic conception of wealth, which in the eyes of the great
families was destined to be a means of government and an instrument of
power: the family possessed it in order to use it for the benefit of
the state.
In short, Agrippina attempted to revive the aristocratic traditions of
government which had inspired the policies of Augustus and Tiberius.
Not only did she attempt to do this, but, strange as it may seem, she
succeeded almost without a struggle. The government of Agrippina was
from the first a great success. From the moment when she became
empress there is discernible in the entire administration a greater
firmness and consistency of policy. Claudius no longer seems, as
formerly, to be at the mercy of his freedmen and the fleeting impulses
of the moment, and even the dark shadows of the time are lighted up for
some years. A certain concord and tranquillity returned to the
imperial house, to the aristocracy, to the senate, and to the state.
Although Tacitus accuses Agrippina of having made Claudius commit all
sorts of cruelties, it is certain that trials, scandals, and suicide
became much less frequent under her rule. During the six years that
Claudius lived after his marriage with Agrippina, scandalous tragedies
became so rare that Tacitus, being deprived of his favorite materials,
set down the story of these six years in a single book. In other
words, Agrippina encountered virtually no opposition, while Tiberius
and even Augustus, when they wished to govern according to the
traditions of the ancient nobility, had to combat the party of the new
aristocracy, with its modern and oriental tendencies. This party no
longer seemed to exist when Agrippina urged Claudius to continue
resolutely in the policy of his ancestors, for one party only, that of
the old nobility, seemed with Agrippina to control the state. This
must have been the result partly of the disgust for the scandals of the
previous decade, which had made every one realize the need of restoring
more serious discipline in the government, and partly of the exhaustion
which had come upon both parties as the result of so many struggles,
reprisals, suits, and scandals. The force of the opposition in the two
factions gradually diminished. A greater gentleness induced all to
accept the direction of the government without resistance, and the
authority of the emperor and his counselors acquired greater importance
in proportion as the strength of the opposition in the aristocracy and
the senate became gradually weaker.
[Illustration: Agrippina the Younger, sister of Caligula and mother of
Nero.]
In any case, the empire was no longer to have forced upon it the
ridiculous and scandalous spectacle of such weaknesses and
incongruities as had seriously compromised the prestige of the highest
authority in the first period of the reign of Claudius. But Agrippina
was not content with merely making provision as best she could for the
present; she also looked forward to the future. She had had a son by
her first husband, and at the time of her marriage with Claudius this
youth was about eleven years old. It is in connection with her plans
for this son that Tacitus brings his most serious charges against
Agrippina. According to his story, from the first day of her marriage
Agrippina attempted to make of her son, the future Emperor Nero, the
successor of Claudius, thereby excluding Britannicus, the son of
Messalina, from the throne.
To obtain this end, she spared, he says, neither intrigues, fraud, nor
deceit; she had Seneca recalled from exile and appointed tutor of her
child. She removed from office the two commanders of the pretorian
guard, who were creatures of Messalina, and in their stead she had
elected one of her own, a certain Afranius Burrhus. She laid pitfalls
for Britannicus and surrounded him with spies, and in the year 50, by
dint of much intrigue and many caresses, she finally succeeded in
having Claudius adopt her son. But this whole story is merely a
complicated and fantastic romance, embroidered about a truth which in
itself is comparatively simple. Tacitus himself tells us that
Agrippina was a most exacting mother; that is, a mother of the older
Roman type--in his own words, _trux et minax_. She did not follow the
gentle methods of the newer education, which were gradually being
introduced into the great families, and she had brought up her son in
the ancient manner with the greatest simplicity. It is well to keep in
mind, furthermore, that neither Britannicus nor Nero had any right to
the throne of Claudius. The hereditary principle did not yet exist in
the imperial government: the senate was free to choose whomsoever it
wished. To be sure, up to that time the choice had always fallen upon
a member of the Augustan family; but it had only been because it was
easier to find there persons who were known and respected, who
commanded the admiration of the soldiers in distant regions, and who
had received a certain preparation for the diverse and often difficult
duties of their office. And it was precisely for this reason that
Augustus and Tiberius had always sought to prepare more than one youth
for the highest office, both in order that the senate might have a
certain freedom of choice, and also that there might be some one in
reserve, in case one of these young men should disappoint the hopes of
the empire or should die prematurely, as so many others had died. That
she should have persuaded Claudius to adopt her son does not mean,
therefore, that she wished to set Britannicus aside and give the
advantage to Nero. It merely proves that she did not wish the family
of Augustus to lose the supreme power, and for this reason she intended
to prepare not only one successor, but two possible successors, to
Claudius, just as Augustus had for a long time trained both Drusus and
Tiberius.
[Illustration: Britannicus.]
In order to understand how wise and reasonable the conduct of Agrippina
really was, we must also remember that Nero was four years older than
Britannicus, and that, therefore, in the year 50, when Nero was
adopted, Britannicus was a mere lad of nine. As Claudius was already
sixty, it would have been most imprudent to designate a nine-year-old
lad as his only possible successor, when Nero, who was four years his
senior, would have been better prepared than Britannicus to take up the
reign. There is a further proof that Agrippina had no thought of
destroying the race of Claudius and Messalina, for before his adoption
she had married Nero to Octavia, the daughter of the imperial pair.
Octavia was a woman possessed of all the virtues which the ancient
Roman nobility had cherished. She was chaste, modest, patient, gentle,
and unselfish, and she would be able to assist in strengthening the
power of her house. Agrippina had therefore, in the ancient manner,
affianced the young pair at an early age, and hoped that she might make
a couple which would serve as an example to the families of the
aristocracy.
In short, Agrippina, far from seeking to weaken the imperial house by
destroying the descendants of Messalina, was attempting to bring her
son into the family precisely for the purpose of giving it strength.
And, sensible woman that she was, she could hardly have acted
otherwise. She had seen the family of Augustus, once so prosperous,
reduced to a state of exhaustion and virtually destroyed by the fatal
discord between her mother and Tiberius and the quarrels between her
brothers. The state had suffered greatly through the madness of
Caligula and the reckless hatred of the first Agrippina, and the
present empress, her daughter, who was not merely fond of her son, but
endowed in addition with the gift of reflection, sought as far as
possible to make amends for the evils which had unconsciously been
wrought. The hopes of the future were henceforth to abide in
Britannicus and in Nero. In Agrippina there reappeared the wisdom of
her greatest predecessors, and the people were so well satisfied that
they conferred upon her the very highest honor, such as in her time
even Livia herself had not received. She was given the title Augusta;
she was allowed to ride into the precincts of the Capitol in a gilded
coach (carpentum), though this was an honor which in old time had been
conceded only to priests and to the images of the gods. This last
descendant of Livia and Drusus, in whom the virtues of a venerated past
seemed to reappear, was surrounded by a semi-religious adoration. This
is an evidence of sincere and profound respect, for though the Romans
often showered marks of human adulation upon their potentates, it was
not often that they bestowed honors of so sacred a character.
The unforeseen death of Claudius suddenly cut short the work which
Agrippina had well under way. Claudius was sixty-four years old, and
one night in the month of October of the year 54 he succumbed to some
mysterious malady after a supper of which, as usual, he had partaken
inordinately. Tacitus pretends to know that Agrippina had secretly
administered poison to Claudius in a plate of mushrooms. During the
night, however, fearing lest Claudius would survive, she had called
Claudius's physician, Xenophon, who was a friend of hers. The latter,
while pretending to induce vomiting, had painted his throat with a
feather dipped in a deadly poison, and had killed him. This version is
so strange and improbable that Tacitus himself does not dare affirm it,
but says that "many believe" that it was in this manner that Claudius
met his death. But if there are still people credulous enough to
believe that the head of a great state can be poisoned in the twinkling
of an eye by a doctor who brushes his throat with a feather, it is more
difficult to understand what grounds Agrippina could have had for
poisoning her husband. According to Tacitus, it was because she was
disturbed by the fact that Claudius had for some time shown that he
preferred Britannicus to Nero; but even if the fact were true, as a
motive it would be ridiculous. Augustus was much fonder of Germanicus
than he was of Tiberius; and yet at his death the senate chose
Tiberius, and not Germanicus, because at that moment the situation
clearly called for the former as head of the empire. When Claudius
died, Britannicus was thirteen and Nero seventeen years old. They were
both, therefore, mere lads, and it was most probable that if the
imperial seat fell vacant, the senate would choose neither, since they
were both too young and inexperienced. This is so true that other
historians have supposed, on the contrary, that Agrippina had fallen
out with some one of the more powerful freedmen of Claudius, and seeing
Claudius waver, had despatched him in order that she herself should not
end like Messalina. But this hypothesis also is absurd. An empress
was virtually invulnerable. Messalina had proved this, for she had
committed every excess and abuse with impunity. Agrippina, protected
as she was by the respect of all, invested with honors that gave her
person a virtually sacred character, had nothing to fear either from
the weak Claudius or from his powerful freedmen.
This accusation of poisoning, therefore, seems to be of precisely the
same sort as, and not a whit more serious than, all those other similar
accusations which were brought against the members of the Augustan
family. Claudius, who was already sixty-four, in all probability died
a sudden but natural death, and from the point of view of the interests
of the house of Augustus, which Agrippina had strongly at heart, he
died much too soon. It was a dangerous and difficult matter to ask the
Roman senate to appoint one of these striplings commander of the armies
and emperor, even though they were the only survivors of the race of
Augustus. So true is this that Tacitus tells us that Agrippina kept
the death of Claudius secret for many hours and pretended that the
physicians were still struggling to save him, when in reality he was
already dead, _dum res firmando Neronis imperio componuntur_ (while
matters were being arranged to assure the empire to Nero).
Consequently, if everything had to be hurried through in confusion at
the last moment, it is plain that Agrippina herself must have been
taken by surprise by the illness and death of Claudius. She therefore
cannot be held responsible for having caused it.
It is not, however, difficult to reconstruct the course of events. On
the nights of the twelfth and thirteenth of October, soon after
Claudius had been suddenly stricken down by his violent malady, the
doctors announced to Agrippina that the emperor was lost. Agrippina
immediately understood that since the family of Augustus could at that
moment present no full-grown man as candidate for the imperial office,
there was grave danger that the senate might refuse to confer the
supreme power either upon Nero or Britannicus. The only means of
avoiding this danger was to bring pressure to bear upon the senate
through the pretorian cohorts, which were as friendly to the family of
Augustus as the senate was hostile. She must present one of the two
youths to the guards and have him acclaimed not head of the empire, but
head of the armies. The senate would thereby be constrained to
proclaim him head of the empire, as they had done in the case of
Claudius.
But which one of the two youths was it best to choose, Claudius's son
by blood or his son by adoption? Nero was chosen as the result of the
unrighteous ambition of Agrippina, so Tacitus says. It is very
probable that Agrippina was more eager to see her own son at the head
of the empire than to see Britannicus there; but this does not seem to
have been the real reason of her choice, for it could not have been
otherwise, even if Agrippina had detested Nero and had cherished
Britannicus with a maternal affection. Nero was four years older than
Britannicus, and therefore he had to be given the preference over the
latter. It was a very bold move to propose that the senate make a
youth of seventeen emperor; it would have been nothing less than folly
to ask that they accept a thirteen-year-old lad as commander-in-chief
of the imperial armies of Rome.
Through the help of Seneca and Burrhus, the plan developed by Agrippina
was carried out with rapidity and success. On the thirteenth of
October, after matters had been arranged with the troops, the doors of
the imperial palace were thrown open at noon; Nero, accompanied by
Burrhus, advanced to the cohort which was on guard. He was received
with joyous welcome, placed in a litter, borne to the quarters of the
pretorians, and acclaimed head of the army. The senate grudgingly
confirmed his election. There resulted in Rome a most extraordinary
situation: a youth of seventeen, educated in the antique manner, and,
though already married, still entirely under the tutelage of a strict
mother, had been elevated to the highest position in the immense
empire. He was ignorant of the luxury, pleasure, and elegance which
were becoming general in the great families; outside of a lively
disposition and docility toward his mother, he had up to this point
shown no special quality, and no particular vice. Only one peculiarity
had been noticed in him: he had studied with great zest music,
painting, sculpture, and poetry, and had made himself proficient in
these arts, which were considered frivolous and useless for a Roman
noble. On the contrary, he had neglected oratory, which was held a
necessary art by an aristocracy like the Roman, whose duty it was to
use speech at councils, in the tribunals, and in the senate, just as it
used the sword on the fields of battle. But the majority believed that
this was merely a passing caprice of youth.
[Illustration: Statue of Agrippina the Younger, in the Capitoline
Museum, Rome.]
Agrippina, then, with the assistance of Seneca and Burrhus, had kept
the highest office in the state in the family of Augustus, and she had
done so by a bold move which had not been without its dangers. She was
too intelligent not to foresee that a seventeen-year-old emperor could
have no authority, and that his position would expose him to all sorts
of envy and intrigue, and to open as well as secret opposition. She
succeeded in mitigating this evil and in parrying this danger by
another very happy suggestion--the virtually complete restoration of
the old republican constitution. After the funeral of Claudius, Nero
introduced himself to the senate, and in a polished and modest
discourse, seemingly intended to excuse his youth, he declared that of
all the powers exercised by his predecessors he wished to keep only the
command of the armies. All other civil, judicial, and administrative
functions he turned over to the senate, as in the times of the republic.
This "restoration of the republic" was Agrippina's masterpiece, and
marks the zenith of her power. It followed, as a result of her
decision, that Nero, who was to go down to posterity as the most
terrible of tyrants, was that one of all the Roman emperors who had the
most limited power; and furthermore it was likewise the result of her
activity that the constitution of the empire had never been so close to
that of the ancient republic as under the government of Nero. Most
historians, hallucinated by Tacitus, have not noticed this, and they
have consequently not recognized that in carrying out this plan
Agrippina is neither more nor less than the last continuator of the
great political tradition founded by Augustus. In the minds of both
Augustus and Tiberius the empire was to be governed by the aristocracy.
The emperor was merely the depositary of certain powers of the nobility
conceded to him for reasons of state. If these reasons of state should
disappear, the powers would naturally revert to the nobles. It was
therefore expedient at this time to make the senate forget, in the
presence of a seventeen-year-old emperor, the pressure which had been
brought to bear upon it by the cohorts, and to wipe out the rancor
against the imperial power which was still dormant in the aristocracy.
This restoration was not, therefore, a sheer renunciation of privileges
and powers inherent in the sovereign authority, but an act of political
sagacity planned by a woman whose knowledge of the art of government
had been received in the school of Augustus.
[Illustration: Agrippina the Younger.]
The move was entirely successful. The illusion that the imperial
authority was only a transitory expedient made necessary by the civil
wars, and that it might one day be entirely abolished, was still deeply
grounded in the Roman aristocracy. Every relaxation of authority was
specially pleasing to the senatorial circles. The government of Nero
therefore began under the most favorable auspices, with joyous hope in
the general promise of concord. The disaffection which had been felt
in the last six years of Claudius's government was changed into a
general and confident optimism, which the first acts of the new
government and the signs of the future seemed to justify. Agrippina
continued to keep Nero subject to her authority, as she had done before
the election: together with his two masters, Seneca and Burrhus, she
suggested to him every word and deed. The senate resumed its ancient
functions; and governed by Seneca, Burrhus, and Agrippina in
conjunction with the senate, the empire seemed to be progressing
wonderfully, and in the eyes of the senators the entire government was
in a better way than it ever yet had been.
But the situation soon changed. Agrippina, to be sure, had given her
son a strictly Roman education, and had brought him up with a
simplicity and rigor long since out of fashion; and though she had
early given him a wife, she continued to keep him subject to maternal
authority. But, with all this, it is doubtful if there ever was a
temperament which rebelled against this species of education as
strongly as did Nero's. His taste for the arts of drawing and singing,
the indifference which he had shown for the study of oratory from his
childhood, these were the seeds from which as time went on his raging
exoticism was to be developed through the use and abuse of power. His
was one of those rioting, contrary, and undisciplined temperaments
which feel that they must do precisely the opposite of what tradition,
education, and the general opinion of the society in which they live
have prescribed as necessary and recognized as lawful. In the case of
Nero the defects and the dangers in the ancient Roman education were to
become apparent.
The first of these dangers declared itself when Nero entered upon one
of those early marriages of which we have spoken in the first of these
studies. Agrippina had early arranged an alliance with a young lady
who, because of her virtues, nobility of ancestry, and Roman education,
might have become his worthy companion; but a year after his elevation
to the imperial dignity, the eighteen-year-old youth made the
acquaintance of a woman whose beauty inflamed his senses and
imagination to the point of making him entirely forget Octavia, whom he
had married from a sense of duty and not for love. This person was
Acte, a beautiful Asiatic freedwoman, and the inexperienced, ardent
youth, already given up to exotic fancies, became so enamoured that he
one day proposed to repudiate Octavia and to marry Acte. But a
marriage between Nero and Acte was not possible. The _Lex de
maritandis ordinibus_ prohibited marriages between senators and
freedwomen. It was therefore natural that Agrippina should have
opposed it with all her strength. She, the great-granddaughter of
Livia, the granddaughter of Drusus, the daughter of Germanicus,
educated in the strictest ideas of the old Roman aristocracy, could not
permit her son to compromise the prestige of the entire nobility in the
eyes of the lower orders by so scandalous a _mésalliance_. But on this
occasion the youth, carried away by his passion, resisted. If he did
not actually repudiate Octavia, he disregarded her, and began to live
with Acte as if she were his wife. Agrippina insisted that he give up
this scandalous relationship; but in vain. The mother and son
disagreed, and very shortly after having resisted his mother in the
case of Acte, Nero began to resist her on other occasions. With
increasing energy he shook off maternal authority, which up to that
time he had accepted with docility.
This, however, was a crisis which was sooner or later inevitable.
Agrippina had certainly made the mistake of attempting to treat Nero
the emperor too much as she had treated Nero the child; but that the
crisis should have been reached in this manner as the result of a
love-affair, and that it should have provoked a misunderstanding
between the mother and son that was soon to degenerate into hatred, was
most unfortunate. Agrippina, though she enjoyed great prestige, had
also many hidden enemies. Everybody knew that she represented in the
government the old aristocratic, conservative, and economical tendency
of the Claudii,--of Tiberius and of Drusus,--that she looked askance
upon the development of luxurious habits, the relaxation of morals, and
the increase of public and private expenditures. They understood that
she exerted all her influence to prevent wastefulness, the malversation
of public moneys, and in general all outlays for pleasures either in
the state or the imperial family. Her virtues and her stand against
Messalina had given her a great prestige, and the reverence which the
emperor had shown for her had for a long time obliged her enemies to
keep themselves hidden and to hold their peace. But this ceased to be
the case after the incipient discord between her and Nero had allowed
many to foresee the possibility of using Nero against her. In
proportion as Nero became attached to Acte he drew away from his
mother, and in proportion as he withdrew from his mother his
capricious, fantastic, and rebellious temper was encouraged to show
itself in its true light. The party of the new nobility, with its
modern and oriental tendencies, had for ten years been held in check by
the preponderating influence of Agrippina. But gradually, as the
exotic and anti-Roman inclinations of the emperor declared themselves,
this party again became bolder. The memories of the scandals of
Caligula and Messalina were becoming effaced by time, the rather severe
and economical government of Agrippina was showing signs of weakening,
and all minds were beginning to entertain a vague desire for something
new.
[Illustration: The Emperor Nero.]
The two parties which in the times of Augustus had rent Rome asunder
were now being realined in the imperial house and in the senate--the
party of the old nobility, which had Agrippina at its head, and the
party of the modernizing nobility, which was gathering about the
emperor and trying to claim him as its own. Tacitus clearly tells us
that the older and more respectable families of the Roman nobility were
with Agrippina; and even if he had neglected to tell us so, we might
easily have guessed it. For a moment the old, old struggle which had
been the cause of so many tragedies in the upper classes of Rome seemed
once more ready to break forth. But even though Agrippina was the soul
of the party of the old nobility, the party needed a man whom it could
oppose to Nero as a possible and better candidate for the imperial
dignity.
Agrippina, like a true Roman matron of the old type, looked upon the
family merely as an instrument of political power, and therefore
subjected her personal affections to the public interest. She began to
cast her eyes upon Britannicus, the son of Messalina, who was now
becoming a young man and who seemed to be more serious-minded than
Nero. It was even muttered that she thought of giving her own son's
place to the son of Messalina, when suddenly, in 55, Britannicus died
at a dinner at which Nero was present. Was he poisoned by Nero, as
Tacitus says? Although there is no lack of obscurities and
improbabilities in the account of Tacitus, this time the accusation, if
it is not true, is at least much more probable than the other
accusations of the same kind. It is certain that the report that
Britannicus had been poisoned was soon current at Rome, and that it was
believed; and the death of Britannicus was likewise a fatal blow to
Agrippina and her party. Tacitus tells us that the death of
Britannicus caused Agrippina great terror and unspeakable
consternation, and it is not difficult to divine the reasons. Nero now
remained the last and only survivor of the family of Augustus, and it
was therefore no longer possible to bring any effective opposition to
bear upon him by setting up some other member of the family who would
be capable of governing. The new nobility, with its modern tendencies,
now rapidly gained strength, and the influence of Agrippina declined
proportionately.
As a result of the lofty qualities of genius and character with which
she had been endowed, Agrippina had been able to hold the balance of
power in the state as long as she had succeeded in keeping the emperor
under her influence. This had been true in the cases of both Claudius
and Nero. After Nero escaped from her influence, or, rather, after he
had turned against her, her prestige and her power rapidly diminished,
and her party lost greatly in size and in power. Although personally
the emperor was youthful and weak, the dignity of his office made him
more powerful than all the members of his family, however energetic and
intelligent they might be. At this period, furthermore, Nero was
supported by an entire party which was daily increasing in strength and
in numbers, for, as always happens in eras of prosperity and peace, the
temper of the time was tending toward a milder, gentler, more liberal
government, and consequently one which would be less authoritative and
severe.
Agrippina, however, was an energetic woman, not easily discouraged, and
she continued the struggle. Consequently for two years longer, even in
the midst of strife, intrigues, and suspicions, she preserved a
considerable influence, and was able to check the progress of the
government in its new direction. This was either because Nero, though
no longer exactly obedient to his mother's will, was still too weak,
too undecided, and too deeply involved in the ideas of his earlier
education to attempt an open revolt against her, or it was because
Seneca and Burrhus wisely sought to conciliate the ultra-conservative
ideas of the mother with the newer tendencies of the son.
The definitive break with his mother and with her political
ideas,--that is, with the ideas which had been professed by her
ancestors,--came in 58, when Nero forgot Acte for Poppaea Sabina. The
latter belonged to one of those great Roman families into which the new
spirit and the new customs had most deeply penetrated. Rich,
beautiful, avaricious of luxuries and pleasures, possessed of an
unbridled personal ambition, she had attracted Nero to herself, and, in
order to become empress, gave the uncertain youth the decisive impulse
which was to transform the disciple of Agrippina and the grandson of
Germanicus into the prodigal and dissolute emperor of history. She
encouraged in him his desire to please the populace, and certainly
never checked his love for Greece and the Orient, which resulted
finally in his mania of everywhere imitating the example of Asia and of
taking up again, though to be sure less wildly, the policies of
Caligula. Tacitus tells us that she continually reproved Nero for his
simple customs, his inelegant manners, and his rude tastes. She held
up to him, both as an example and as a reproach, the elegance and
luxury of her husband, who was indeed one of the most refined and
pompous members of the degenerate Roman nobility. Poppaea, in short,
gave herself up to the task of reshaping the education of Nero and of
destroying the results of Agrippina's patient labor. Nor was this all.
She even became, with her restricted intelligence, his adviser in
politics. She persuaded him that the policy of authority and economy
which his mother had desired was rendering him unpopular, and she
suggested the idea of a policy of liberality toward the people which
would win him the affection of the masses. After he had fallen in love
with Poppaea Sabina, Nero, who up to that time had shown no
considerable initiative in affairs of state, elaborated and proposed to
the senate many revolutionary projects for favoring the populace. He
finally proposed that they abolish all the _vectigalia_ of the empire;
that is, all indirect taxes, all tolls and duties of whatever sort.
The measure would certainly have been most popular, and there was much
discussion about it in the senate; but the conservatives showed that
the finances of the empire would be ruined and persuaded Nero not to
insist. Nero, however, wished to bring about some reform which would
help the masses, and he gave orders in an edict that the rates of all
the _vectigalia_ be published; that at Rome the pretor, and in the
provinces the propretor and proconsul, should summarily decide all
suits against the tax-farmers and that the soldiers should be exempt
from these same _vectigalia_.
[Illustration: The death of Agrippina.]
Though some of these reforms were just, this new policy was also the
cause of the final rupture with his mother. Agrippina and Nero, to all
intents and purposes, no longer saw each other, and Nero, on the few
visits which he was obliged to pay her in order to save appearances,
always arranged it so as never to be left alone in her presence. In
this manner the influence of Agrippina continued to decline, while the
popularity of Nero steadily increased as the result of his youth, of
these first reforms, and of the hopes to which his prodigality had
given rise. The public, whose memory is always brief, forgot what
Agrippina had done and how she had brought back peace to the state, and
began to expect all sorts of new benefits from Nero. Poppaea,
encouraged by the increasing popularity of the emperor, insisted more
boldly that Nero, in order to make her his wife, should divorce Octavia.
But Agrippina was not the woman to yield thus easily, and she continued
the struggle against her son, against his paramour, and against the
growing coterie which was gathering about the emperor. She opposed
particularly the repudiation of Octavia, which, being merely the result
of a pure caprice, would have caused serious scandal in Rome. But Nero
was even now hesitating and uncertain. He still had too clearly before
him the memory of the long authority of his mother; he feared her too
much to dare step forth in open and complete revolt. At last Poppaea
understood that she could not become empress so long as the mother
lived, and from that moment the doom of Agrippina was sealed. Poppaea
was goaded on by all the new friends of Nero, who wished to destroy
forever the influence of Agrippina, and by her words and deeds she
finally brought him to the point where he decided to kill his mother.
But to murder his mother was both an abominable and dangerous
undertaking, for it meant killing the daughter of Germanicus--killing
that woman whom the people regarded with a semi-religious veneration as
a portent of fortune; for she was the daughter of a man whom only a
premature death had prevented from becoming the head of the empire, and
she had been the sister, the wife, and the mother of emperors. For
this reason the manner of her taking-off had been long debated in order
that it might remain secret; nor would Nero make his decision until a
seemingly safe means had been discovered for bringing about the
disappearance of Agrippina.
It was the freedman Anicetus, the commander of the fleet, who, in the
spring of 59, made the proposal when Nero was with his court at Baiae,
on the Bay of Naples. They were to construct a vessel which, as
Tacitus says, should open artfully on one side. If Nero could induce
his mother to embark upon that vessel, Anicetus would see to it that
she and the secret of her murder would be buried in the depths of the
sea. Nero gave his consent to this abominable plan. He pretended that
he was anxious to become reconciled with his mother, and invited her to
come from Antium, where she then was, to Baiae. He showed her all
regard and every courtesy, and when Agrippina, reassured by the
kindness of her son, set out on her return to Antium, Nero accompanied
her to the fatal vessel and tenderly embraced her. It was a calm,
starry night. Agrippina stood talking with one of her freedwomen about
the repentance of her son and the reconciliation which had taken place,
when, after the vessel had drawn some distance away from the shore, the
plotters tried to carry out their infernal plan. What happened is not
very clear. The seemingly picturesque description of Tacitus is in
reality vague and confusing. It appears that the ship did not sink so
rapidly as the plotters had hoped, and in the confusion which resulted
on board, the emperor's mother, ready and resolute, succeeded in making
her escape by casting herself into the sea and swimming away, while the
hired assassins on the ship killed her freedwoman, mistaking her for
Agrippina.
In any case, it is certain that Agrippina arrived safely at one of her
villas along the coast, with the help, it seems, of a vessel which she
had encountered as she swam, and that she immediately sent one of her
freedmen to apprise Nero of the danger from which she had escaped
through the kindness of the gods and his good fortune! Agrippina had
guessed the truth, but for this one time she gave up the struggle and
sent her messenger, that it might be understood, without her saying so,
that she forgot and pardoned. Indeed, what means were left her, a
lonely woman, of coping with an emperor who dared raise his hand
against his own mother?
However, fear prevented Nero from understanding. No sooner had he
learned that Agrippina had escaped than he lost his head. In his
imagination he saw her hastening to Rome and denouncing the horrible
matricide to the soldiers and the senate; and beside himself with
terror, he sent for Seneca and Burrhus in order to take counsel with
them. It is easy to imagine what the feelings of the two teachers of
the youth must have been as they listened to the terrible story. Even
they failed to understand that Agrippina recognized and declared
herself conquered. They, too, feared that she would provoke the most
frightful scandal which Rome had yet seen, and not knowing what advice
to give, or rather seeing only a single way out, which was, however,
too serious and horrible, they held their peace while Nero begged them
to save him. At last Seneca, the humanitarian philosopher, turned to
Burrhus and asked him what would happen if the pretorians should be
ordered to kill Agrippina. Burrhus understood that Seneca, though he
was the first to give the terrible advice, yet wished to leave to him
the more serious responsibility of carrying it into execution; for
Burrhus, as commander of the guards, would have had to give the order
for the murder. He therefore hastened to say that the pretorians would
never kill the daughter of Germanicus, and then added that if they
really wished to do away with Agrippina, the best plan would be for
Anicetus to carry out the work which he had begun. His advice was the
same as Seneca's, but he turned over to a third person the very grave
responsibility for its execution. He had, however, chosen this third
person more wisely than Seneca, for Anicetus could not refuse. If
Agrippina lived, it was he who ran the risk of becoming the scapegoat
for all this bloody and horrible adventure.
As a matter of fact, Anicetus accepted. The freedman whom Agrippina
had sent to announce her misfortune was imprisoned and put in chains,
in order to convey the impression that he had been captured carrying
concealed weapons and in the act of making an attempt upon the
emperor's life by the order of his mother. Anicetus then hastened to
the villa of Agrippina and surrounded it with a body of sailors. He
entered the house, and with two officers rushed into the room where
Agrippina, reclining upon a couch, was talking with a servant, and
killed her. Tacitus tells us that when Agrippina saw one of the
officers unsheathe his sword, she asked him to thrust her through the
body which had borne her son.
Thus died the last woman of the house of Augustus, and, with the
exception of Livia, the most remarkable feminine figure in that family.
She died like a soldier, on duty and at her post, bravely defending the
social and political traditions of the Roman aristocracy and the
time-honored principles of Romanism against the influx of those new
forces of a later age which were seeking to orientalize the ancient
Latin republic. She died for her family, for her caste, and for Rome,
without even having the reward of being remembered with dutiful regard
by posterity; for in this struggle she had sacrificed not merely her
life, but even her honor and her fame. Such, furthermore, was the
common destiny of all the members of this family, and if we except
Livia and Augustus, the privileged pair who founded it, we are at a
loss to know whether to call it the most fortunate or the most unhappy
of all the families of the ancient world. It is impossible for the
historian who understands this terrible drama, filled with so many
catastrophes, not to feel a certain impression of horror at the
vindictive ferocity that Rome showed to this house, which, in order to
bring back Rome's peace and to preserve her empire, had been fated to
exalt itself a few degrees above the ordinary level of the ancient
aristocracy. Men and women, the young and the old, the knaves and the
large-hearted, the sages and the fools of the family, alike, all
without exception, were persecuted and plotted against. And again, if
we except the persons of the two founders, and those who, like Drusus
and Germanicus, had the good fortune to die young, Rome deprived them
all, deprived even Antonia, of either their life or their greatness or
their honor, and not infrequently it robbed them of all these three
together. Those who, like Tiberius and Agrippina, defended the ancient
Roman tradition, were hated, hounded, and defamed with a no less angry
fury than Caligula and Nero, who sought to destroy it. No one of them,
whatever his tendencies or intentions, succeeded in making himself
understood by his times or by posterity; it was their common fate to be
misunderstood, and therefore horribly calumniated. The destiny of the
women was even more tragic than that of the men, for the times demanded
from them, as a compensation for the great honor of belonging to this
privileged family, that they possess all the rarest and most difficult
virtues.
What was the cause of all this? we ask. How were so many catastrophes
possible, and how could tradition have erred so grievously? It is
almost a crime that posterity should virtually always have studied and
pondered this immense tragedy of history on the basis of the crude and
superficial falsification of it which Tacitus has given us. For few
episodes in general history impress so powerfully upon the mind the
fact that the progress of the world is one of the most tragic of its
phenomena. Especially is such knowledge necessary to the favored
generations of prosperous and easy times. He who has not lived in
those years when an old world is disappearing and a new one making its
way cannot realize the tragedy of life, for at such times the old is
still sufficiently strong to resist the assaults of the new, and the
latter, though growing, is not yet strong enough to annihilate that
world on the ruins of which alone it will be able to prosper. Men are
then called upon to solve insoluble problems and to attempt enterprises
which are both necessary and impossible. There is confusion
everywhere, in the mind within and in the world without. Hate often
separates those who ought to aid one another, since they are tending
toward the same goal, and sympathy binds men together who are forced to
do battle with one another. At such times women generally suffer more
than men, for every change which occurs in their situation seems more
dangerous, and it is right that it should be so. For woman is by
nature the vestal of our species, and for that reason she must be more
conservative, more circumspect, and more virtuous than man. There is
no state or civilization which has comprehended the highest things in
life which has not been forced to instil into its women rather than
into its men the sense for all those virtues upon which depend the
stability of the family and the future of the race. And for every era
this is a question of life and death. In such periods when one world
is dying and another coming to birth, all conceptions become confused,
and all attempts bring forth bizarre results. He who wishes to
preserve, often destroys, so that virtue seems vice, and vice seems
virtue. Precisely for this reason it is more difficult for a woman
than for a man to succeed in fulfilling her proper mission, for she is
more exposed to the danger of losing her way and of missing her
particular function; and since she is more likely to fail in realizing
her natural destiny, she is more likely to be doomed to a life of
misfortune.
Such was the fate of the family of Augustus, and such especially was
the fate of its women. The strangers who visit Rome often go out on
Sunday afternoons to listen to the excellent music that can be heard in
a room which is situated in one of the little streets near the Piazza
del Popolo and which used to be called the Corea. This hall was built
over an ancient Roman ruin of circular form which any one can still see
as he enters. That ruin is the entrance to the tomb which Augustus
built on the Flaminian Way for himself and his family. Nearly all of
the personages whose story we have told were buried in that mausoleum.
If any reader who has followed this history should one day find himself
at Rome, listening to a concert in that old Corea, which has now been
renamed after the Emperor Augustus, let him give a thought to those
victims of a terrible story of long ago, and may he remember that here,
where at the beginning of the twentieth century he listens to the flow
of rivers of sweet sound--here only, twenty centuries ago, could the
members of the family of Augustus find refuge from their tragic fate,
and after so much greatness, resolved to dust and ashes, rest at last
in peace.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Women of the Caesars, by Guglielmo Ferrero
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WOMEN OF THE CAESARS ***
***** This file should be named 16324-8.txt or 16324-8.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
https://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/3/2/16324/
Produced by Al Haines
Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.
Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.
*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
https://gutenberg.org/license).
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that
- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg-tm works.
- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
of receipt of the work.
- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
https://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
[email protected]. Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at https://pglaf.org
For additional contact information:
Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and Director
[email protected]
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit https://pglaf.org
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
https://www.gutenberg.org
This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
*** END: FULL LICENSE ***
