What sort of man was this who was heir to Caesar at eighteen, master of the world at thirty-one, ruler of Rome for half a century, and architect of the greatest empire in ancient history? He was at once dull and fascinating; no one more prosaic, yet half the world adored him; a physical weakling not particularly brave, but able to overcome all enemies, regulate kingdoms, and fashion a government that would give the vast realm an unexampled prosperity for two hundred years.
Sculptors spent much marble and bronze in making images of him: some showing him in the timid pride of a refined and serious youth, some in the somber pose of a priest, some half covered with the insignia of power, some in military garb—the philosopher unwillingly and uneasily playing the general. These effigies do not reveal, though sometimes they suggest, the ailments that made his war against chaos depend precariously at every step upon his fight for health. He was unprepossessing. He had sandy hair, a strangely triangular head, merging eyebrows, clear and penetrating eyes; yet his expression was so calm and mild, says Suetonius, that a Gaul who came to kill him changed his mind. His skin was sensitive and intermittently itched with a kind of ringworm; rheumatism weakened his left leg and made him limp a bit; a stiffness akin to arthritis occasionally incapacitated his right hand. He was one of many Romans attacked in 23 B.C. by a plague resembling typhus; he suffered from stones in the bladder, and found it hard to sleep; he was troubled each spring by “an enlargement of the diaphragm; and when the wind was in the south he had catarrh.” He bore cold so poorly that in winter he wore “a woolen chest protector, wraps for his thighs and shins, an undershirt, four tunics (blouses), and a heavy toga.” He dared not expose his head to the sun. Horseback riding tired him, and he was sometimes carried in a litter to the battlefield.30 At thirty-five, having lived through one of the most intense dramas in history, he was already oldnervous, sickly, easily tired; no one dreamed that he would live another forty years. He tried a variety of doctors, and richly rewarded one, Antonius Musa, for curing an uncertain illness (abscess of the liver?) with cold fomentations and baths; in Musa’s honor he exempted all Roman physicians from taxation.31 But for the most part he doctored himself. He used hot salt water and sulphur baths for his rheumatism; he ate lightly and only the plainest food—coarse bread, cheese, fish, and fruit; he was so careful of his diet that “sometimes he ate alone either before a dinner party or after it, taking nothing during its course.”32 In him, as in some medieval saints, the soul bore its body like a cross.
His essence was nervous vitality, inflexible resolution, a penetrating, calculating, resourceful mind. He accepted an unheard-of number of offices, and took upon himself responsibility only less than Caesar’s. He fulfilled the duties of these positions conscientiously, presided regularly over the Senate, attended innumerable conferences, judged hundreds of trials, suffered ceremonies and banquets, planned distant campaigns, governed legions and provinces, visited nearly every one of them, and attended to infinite administrative detail. He made hundreds of speeches, and prepared them with proud attention to clarity, simplicity, and style; he read them instead of speaking extemporaneously, lest he should utter regrettable words. Suetonius would have us believe that for the same reason he wrote out in advance, and read, important conversations with individuals, even with his wife.33
Like most skeptics of his time, he retained superstitions long after losing his faith. He carried a sealskin about him to protect against lightning; he respected omens and auspices and sometimes obeyed warnings derived from dreams; he refused to begin a journey on what he reckoned to be unlucky days.34 At the same time he was remarkable for the objectivity of his judgment and the practicality of his thought. He advised young men to enter soon upon an active career, so that the ideas they had learned from books might be tempered by the experience and necessities of life.35 He kept to the end his bourgeois good sense, conservatism, parsimony, and caution. Festina lente—“make haste slowly”—was his favorite saw. Far more than most men of such power, he could take advice and bear reproof humbly. Athenodorus, a philosopher who was returning to Athens after living with him for years, gave him some parting counsel: “Whenever you get angry do not say or do anything before repeating to yourself the twenty-four letters of the alphabet.” Augustus was so grateful for the caution that he begged Athenodorus to stay another year, saying, “No risk attends the reward that silence brings.”36
Even more surprising than Caesar’s development from a roistering politician into a great general and statesman was the transformation of the merciless and self-centered Octavian into the modest and magnanimous Augustus. He grew. The man who had allowed Antony to hang Cicero’s head in the Forum, who had moved without scruple from one faction to another, who had run the gamut of sexual indulgence, who had pursued Antony and Cleopatra to the death unmoved by friendship or chivalry—this tenacious and unlovable youth, instead of being poisoned by power, became in his last forty years a model of justice, moderation, fidelity, magnanimity, and toleration. He laughed at the lampoons that wits and poets wrote about him. He advised Tiberius to be content with preventing or prosecuting hostile actions and not seek to suppress hostile words. He did not insist upon others living as simply as himself; when he invited guests to dinner he would retire early to leave their appetite and merriment unrestrained. He had no pretentiousness; he buttonholed voters to ask their suffrages; he substituted for his lawyer friends in court; he left or entered Rome secretly, abhorring pomp; in the reliefs of the Ara Pacis he is not set apart from the other citizens by any mark of distinction. His morning receptions were open to all citizens, and all were affably received. When one man hesitated to present a petition he jokingly chided him for offering the document “as if he were giving a penny to an elephant.”37
In his senile years, when disappointments had embittered him, and he had grown accustomed to omnipotence, even to being a god, he lapsed into intolerance, prosecuted hostile writers, suppressed histories of too critical a stamp, and gave no ear to Ovid’s penitent verse. Once, it is said, he had the legs of his secretary Thallus broken for taking 500 denarii to reveal the contents of an official letter; and he forced one of his freedmen to kill himself when found guilty of adultery with a Roman matron. All in all, it is hard to love him. We must picture the frailty of his body and the sorrows of his old age before our hearts can go out to him as to the murdered Caesar or the beaten Antony.