He destroyed his own happiness by trying to make people good as well as happy; it was an imposition that Rome never forgave him. Moral reform is the most difficult and delicate branch of statesmanship; few rulers have dared to attempt it; most rulers have left it to hypocrites and saints.
Augustus began modestly enough by seeking to check the racial transformation of Rome. Population there was not declining; on the contrary, it was growing by mass and dole attraction and the import of wealth and slaves. Since freedmen were included in the dole, many citizens freed old or sickly slaves to have them fed by the state; kinder motives freed more, and many slaves saved enough to buy their liberty. As the sons of freedmen automatically became citizens, the emancipation of slaves and the fertility of aliens combined with the low birth rate of the native stocks to change the ethnic character of Rome. Augustus wondered what stability there could be in so heterogeneous a population, and what loyalty to the Empire might be expected of men in whose veins ran the blood of subject peoples. By his urging, the lex Fufia Caninia (2 B.C.) and later measures enacted that an owner of not more than two slaves might free them all, the owner of from three to ten slaves might free half of them, the owner of from eleven to thirty one-third, the owner of from thirty-one to one hundred one-fourth, the owner of from 101 to 300 one-fifth; and no master might free more than a hundred.
One might wish that Augustus had limited slavery instead of freedom. But antiquity took slavery for granted, and would have contemplated with horror the economic and social effects of a wholesale emancipation, just as the employers of our time fear the sloth that might come from security. Augustus was thinking in terms of race and class; he could not conceive a strong Rome without the character, courage, and political ability that had marked the old Roman; above all, the old aristocracy. The decay of the ancient faith among the upper classes had washed away the supernatural supports of marriage, fidelity, and parentage; the passage from farm to city had made children less of an asset, more of a liability and a toy; women wished to be sexually rather than maternally beautiful; in general the desire for individual freedom seemed to be running counter to the needs of the race. To accentuate the evil, legacy hunting had become the most profitable occupation in Italy.16 Men without children were sure to be courted in their declining years by expectant ghouls; and so large a number of Romans relished this esurient courtesy that it became an added cause of childlessness. Protracted military service drew a considerable proportion of young men from marriage in their most nubile years. A large number of native-stock Romans avoided wedlock altogether, preferring prostitutes or concubines even to a varied succession of wives. Of those who married, a majority appear to have limited their families by abortion, infanticide, coitus interruptus, and contraception.18
Augustus was disturbed by these insignia of civilization. He began to feel that a movement backward to the old faith and morals was necessary. Respect for the mos maiorum revived in him as the years cleared his vision and tired his frame. It was not good, he felt, for the present to break too sharply with the past; a nation must have a continuity of traditions to be sane, as a man must have memory. He read with aging seriousness the historians of Rome, and envied the virtues they ascribed to the ancients. He relished the speech of Quintus Metellus on marriage, read it to the Senate, and recommended it to the people by imperial proclamation. A large part of the older generation agreed with him; it formed a kind of puritan party eager to reform morals by law; and probably Livia lent them her influence. By his powers as censor and tribune Augustus promulgated—or passed through the Assembly—a series of laws of now uncertain date and sequence, aimed at restoring morals, marriage, fidelity, parentage, and a simpler life. They forbade adolescents to attend public entertainments except in the company of an adult relative; excluded women from athletic exhibitions, and restricted them to the upper seats at gladiatorial games; limited expenditure on homes, servants, banquets, weddings, jewels, and dress. The most important of these “Julian laws”II was the lex lulia de pudicitia et de coercendis adulteriis (18 B.C..)—“The Julian law of chastity and repressing adultery.” Here for the first time in Roman history marriage was brought under the protection of the state, instead of being left to the patria potestas. The father retained the right to kill an adulterous daughter and her accomplice as soon as he discovered them; the husband was allowed to kill his wife’s paramour if caught in the husband’s house, but he might kill his wife only if he found her sinning in his own home. Within sixty days of detecting a wife’s adultery, the husband was required to bring her before the court; if he failed to do this, the woman’s father was required to indict her; if he too failed, any citizen might accuse her. The adulterous woman was to be banished for life, was to lose a third of her fortune and half her dowry, and must not marry again. Like penalties were decreed for a husband conniving at his wife’s adultery. A wife, however, could not accuse her husband of adultery, and he might with legal impunity have relations with registered prostitutes. The law applied only to Roman citizens.
Probably at the same time Augustus passed another law, usually named lex lulia de maritandis ordinibus, from its chapter on marriage in the “orders”—i.e., the two upper classes. Its purpose was threefold: to encourage and yet restrict marriage, to retard the dilution of Roman with alien blood, and to restore the old conception of marriage as a union for parentage. Marriage was to be obligatory upon all marriageable males under sixty and women under fifty. Bequests conditional on the legatee remaining unmarried were made void. Penalties were imposed upon celibates: they could not inherit, except from relatives, unless they were married within a hundred days after the testator’s death; and they could not attend public festivals or games. Widows and divorcees might inherit only if remarried within six months after the death or divorce of the husband. Spinsters and childless wives could not inherit after fifty, nor before if they possessed 50,000 sesterces ($7500). Men of the Senatorial class could not marry a freedwoman, an actress, or a prostitute; and no actor or freedman could marry a senator’s daughter. Women owning above 20,000 sesterces were to pay a one per cent annual tax till married; after marriage this tax decreased with each child until the third, with whose coming it ceased. Of the two consuls the one with more children was to have precedence over the other. In appointments to office the father of the largest family was as far as feasible to be preferred to his rivals. The mother of three children acquired the ius trium liberorum—the right to wear a special garment, and freedom from the power of her husband.
These laws offended every class, even the puritans—who complained that the “right of three children” dangerously emancipated the mother from male authority. Others excused their celibacy on the score that the “modern woman” was too independent, imperious, capricious, and extravagant. The exclusion of bachelors from public shows was considered too severe and impossible to enforce; Augustus had the clause rescinded in 12 B.C.. In A.D. 9 the lex Papia Poppaea further softened the Julian laws by easing the conditions under which celibates might inherit, doubling the period in which widows and divorcees must remarry to inherit, and increasing the amount that childless heirs could receive. Mothers of three children were freed from those limits which the lex Voconia (169 B.C..) had placed upon bequests to women. The age at which a citizen might stand for the various offices was lowered in proportion to the size of his family. After the law was passed men noted that the consuls who had framed it and given it their names were childless celibates. Gossip added that the reform laws had been suggested to Augustus, who had only one child, by Maecenas, who had none; and that while the laws were being enacted Maecenas was living in sybaritic luxury, and Augustus was seducing Maecenas’ wife.19
It is difficult to estimate the effectiveness of this, the most important social legislation in antiquity. The laws were loosely drawn, and recalcitrants found many loopholes. Some men married to obey the law and divorced their wives soon afterwards; others adopted children to secure offices or legacies and then “emancipated”—i.e., dismissed—them.20 Tacitus, a century later, pronounced the laws a failure; “marriages and the rearing of children did not become frequent, so powerful are the attractions of a childless state.”21 Immorality continued, but was more polite than before; in Ovid we see it becoming a fine art, the subject of careful instructions from experts to apprentices. Augustus himself doubted the efficacy of his laws, and agreed with Horace that laws are vain when hearts are unchanged.22 He struggled heroically to reach people’s hearts: in his box at the games he displayed the numerous children of the exemplary Germanicus; gave a thousand sesterces to parents of large families; 23 raised a monument to a slave girl who (doubtless without patriotic premeditation) had borne quintuplets; 24 and rejoiced when a peasant marched into Rome with eight children, thirty-six grand-children, and nineteen great-grandchildren in his train.25 Dio Cassius pictures him making public addresses denouncing “race suicide.”26 He enjoyed, perhaps inspired, the moral preface of Livy’s history. Under his influence the literature of the age became didactic and practical. Through Maecenas or in person he persuaded Virgil and Horace to lend their muses to the propaganda of moral and religious reform; Virgil tried to sing the Romans back to the farm in the Georgics, and to the old gods in the Aeneid; and Horace, after a large sampling of the world’s pleasures, tuned his lyre to stoic themes. In 17 B.C.. Augustus presented the ludi saeculares III- three days of ceremonies, contests, and spectacles, celebrating the return of Saturn’s Golden Age; and Horace was commissioned to write the carmen saeculare to be chanted in procession by twenty-seven boys and as many girls. Even art was used to point a moral: the lovely Ara Pacis showed in relief the life and government of Rome; magnificent public buildings rose to represent the strength and glory of the Empire; scores of temples were erected to stir again a faith that had almost died.
In the end Augustus, skeptic and realist, became convinced that moral reform awaited a religious renaissance. The agnostic generation of Lucretius, Catullus, and Caesar had run its course, and its children had discovered that the fear of the gods is the youth of wisdom. Even the cynical Ovid would soon write, Voltaireanly: expedit esse deos, et ut expedit esse putemus: “it is convenient that there should be gods, and that we should think they exist.”27 Conservative minds traced the Civil War, and the sufferings it had brought, to neglect of religion and the consequent anger of Heaven. Everywhere in Italy a chastened people was ready to turn back to its ancient altars and thank the deities who, it felt, had spared it for this happy restoration. When, in 12 B.C.., Augustus, having waited patiently for the tepid Lepidus to die, succeeded him as pontifex maximus, “such a multitude from all Italy assembled for my election,” the Emperor tells us, “as is never recorded to have been in Rome before.”28 He both led and followed the revival of religion, hoping that his political and moral reconstruction would win readier acceptance if he could entwine it with the gods. He raised the four priestly colleges to unprecedented dignity and wealth, chose himself to each of them, took upon himself the appointment of new members, attended their meetings faithfully, and took part in their solemn pageantry. He banned Egyptian and Asiatic cults from Rome, but he made an exception in favor of the Jews, and permitted religious freedom in the provinces. He lavished gifts upon the temples and renewed old religious ceremonies, processions, and festivals. The ludi saeculares were not secular; every day of them was marked with religious ritual and song; their chief significance was the return of a happy friendship with the gods. Nourished with such sovereign aid, the ancient cult took on fresh life, and touched again the dramatic impulses and supernatural hopes of the people. Amid the chaos of competing faiths that flowed in upon Rome after Augustus, it held its own for three centuries more; and when it died it was at once reborn, under new symbols and new names.
Augustus himself became one of the chief competitors of his gods. His great-uncle had set the example: two years after being murdered, Caesar had been recognized by the Senate as a deity, and his worship spread throughout the Empire. As early as 36 B.C.. some Italian cities had given Octavian a place in their pantheon; by 27 B.C.. his name was added to those of the gods in official hymns at Rome; his birthday became a holy day as well as a holiday; and after his death the Senate decreed that his genius, or soul, was thereafter to be worshiped as one of the official divinities. All this seemed quite natural to antiquity; it had never recognized an impassable difference between gods and men; the gods had often taken human form, and the creative genius of a Heracles, a Lycurgus, an Alexander, a Caesar, or an Augustus seemed, especially to the religious East, miraculous and divine. The Egyptians had thought of the Pharaohs, of the Ptolemies, even of Antony, as deities; they could hardly think less of Augustus. The ancients were not in these cases such simpletons as their modern counterparts would like to believe. They knew well enough that Augustus was human; in deifying his genius, or that of others, they used deus or theos as equivalent to our “canonized saint”; indeed, canonization is a descendant of Roman deification; and to pray to such a deified human being seemed no more absurd then than prayer to a saint seems now.
In Italian homes the worship of the Emperor’s genius became associated with the adoration given to the Lares of the household and the genius of the paterfamilias; there was nothing difficult in this for a people which through centuries had deified their dead parents, built altars to them, and given the name of temples to the ancestral tombs. When Augustus visited Greek Asia in 21 B.C.. he found that his cult had made rapid headway there. Dedications and orations hailed him as “Savior,” “Bringer of Glad Tidings,” “God the Son of God”; some men argued that in him the long-awaited Messiah had come, bringing peace and happiness to mankind.29 The great provincial councils made his worship the center of their ceremonies; a new priesthood, the Augustales, was appointed by provinces and municipalities for the service of the new divinity. Augustus frowned upon all this, but finally accepted it as a spiritual enhancement of the Principate, a valuable cementing of church and state, a uniting common worship amid diverse and dividing creeds. The moneylender’s grandson consented to become a god.