His failures and his tragedies were almost all within his home. By his three wives—Claudia, Scribonia, Livia—he had but one child: Scribonia unwittingly avenged her divorce by giving him Julia. He had hoped that Livia would bear him a son whom he might train and educate for government; but though she had rewarded her first husband with two splendid children—Tiberius and Drusus—her marriage with Augustus proved disappointingly sterile. Otherwise their union was a happy one. She was a woman of stately beauty, firm character, and fine understanding; Augustus rehearsed his most vital measures with her and valued her advice as highly as that of his maturest friends. Asked how she had acquired such influence over him, she replied, “by being scrupulously chaste . . . never meddling with his affairs, and pretending neither to hear of nor to notice the favorites with whom he had amours.”38 She was a model of the old virtues, and perhaps expounded them too persistently. In her leisure she devoted herself to charity, helping parents of large families, providing dowries for poor brides, and maintaining many orphans at her own expense. Her palace itself was almost an orphanage; for there, and in the home of his sister Octavia, Augustus supervised the education of his grandsons, nephews, nieces, and even the six surviving children of Antony. He sent the boys off early to war, saw to it that the girls should learn to spin and weave, and “forbade them to do or say anything except without concealment, and such as might be recorded in the household diary.”39
Augustus learned to love Livia’s son Drusus, adopted and reared him, and would gladly have left him his wealth and power; the youth’s early death was one of the Emperor’s first bereavements. Tiberius he respected but could not love, for his future successor was a positive and imperious character, inclined to sullenness and secrecy. But the comeliness and vivacity of his daughter Julia must have given Augustus many happy moments in her childhood. When she had reached the age of fourteen he persuaded Octavia to allow the divorce of her son Marcellus, and induced the youth to marry Julia. Two years later Marcellus died; and Julia, after brief mourning, set out to enjoy a freedom she had long coveted. But soon the matchmaking Emperor, craving a grandson as heir, coaxed the reluctant Agrippa to divorce his wife and marry the merry widow (21 B.C..). Julia was eighteen, Agrippa forty-two; but he was a good and great man and agreeably rich. She made his town house a salon of pleasure and wit, and became the soul of the younger and gayer set in the capital as against the puritans who took their lead from Livia. Rumor accused Julia of deceiving her new husband, and ascribed to her an incredible reply to the incredible question why, despite her adulteries, all the five children she gave Agrippa resembled him: Numquam nisi nave plena tollo vectorem.40 When Agrippa died (12 B.C.) Augustus turned his hopes to Julia’s oldest sons, Gaius and Lucius, overwhelmed them with affection and education, and had them promoted to office far sooner than was legally warranted by their years.
Again a widow, Julia, richer and lovelier than ever, entered with saucy abandon upon a succession of amours which became at once the scandal and the joy of a Rome that fretted under the “Julian laws.” To quiet this gossip, and perhaps to reconcile his daughter with his wife, Augustus made a third match for Julia. Livia’s son Tiberius was compelled to divorce his pregnant wife, Vipsania Agrippina, daughter of Agrippa, and to marry the equally reluctant Julia (9 B.C..). The young old Roman did his best to be a good husband; but Julia soon gave up the effort to adjust her epicurean to his stoic ways, and resumed her illicit loves. Tiberius bore the infamy for a time in furious silence. The lex Iulia de adulteriis required the husband of an adulteress to denounce her to the courts; Tiberius disobeyed the law to protect its author, and perhaps himself, for he and Livia had hoped that Augustus would adopt him as his son and transmit to him the leadership of the Empire. When it became clear that the Emperor favored, instead, Julia’s children by Agrippa, Tiberius resigned his official posts and retired to Rhodes. There for seven years he lived as a simple private citizen, devoting himself to solitude, philosophy, and astrology. Freer than ever, Julia passed from one lover to another, and the revels of her set filled the Forum with turmoil at night.41
Augustus, now (2 B.C..) an invalid of sixty, suffered all that a father and ruler could bear from the simultaneous collapse of his family, his honor, and his laws. By these laws the father of an adulteress was bound to indict her publicly if her husband had failed to do so. Proofs of her misconduct were laid before him, and the friends of Tiberius let it be known that unless Augustus acted they would accuse Julia before the court. Augustus decided to anticipate them. While the merrymaking was at its height, he issued a decree banishing his daughter to the island of Pandateria, a barren rock off the Campanian coast. One of her lovers, a son of Antony, was forced to kill himself, and several others were exiled. Julia’s freedwoman Phoebe hanged herself rather than testify against her; the distraught Emperor, hearing of the act, said, “I would rather have been Phoebe’s father than Julia’s.” The people of Rome begged him to forgive his daughter, Tiberius added his request to theirs, but pardon never came. Tiberius, enthroned, merely changed her place of residence to a less narrow confinement at Rhegium. There, broken and forgotten after sixteen years of imprisonment, Julia died.
Her sons Gaius and Lucius had long preceded her in death: Lucius of an illness in Marseilles (A.D. 2), Gaius of a wound received in Armenia (A.D. 4). Left without aide or successor at a time when Germany, Pannonia, and Gaul were threatening revolt, Augustus reluctantly recalled Tiberius (A.D. 2), adopted him as son and coregent, and sent him off to put down the rebellions. When he returned (A.D. 9), after five years of arduous and successful campaigning, all Rome, which hated him for his stern puritanism, resigned itself to the fact that though Augustus was still prince, Tiberius had begun to rule.
Life’s final tragedy is unwilling continuance—to outlive one’s self and be forbidden to die. When Julia went into exile Augustus was not in years an old man; others were still vigorous at sixty. But he had lived too many lives, and died too many deaths, since he had come to Rome, a boy of eighteen, to avenge Caesar’s murder and execute his will. How many wars and battles and near-defeats, how many pains and illnesses, how many conspiracies and perils, and bitter miscarriages of noble aims, had befallen him in those crowded forty-two years—and the snatching away of one hope and helper after another, until at last only this dour Tiberius remained! Perhaps it had been wiser to die like Antony, at the peak of life and in the arms of love. How sadly pleasant must have seemed, in retrospect, the days when Julia and Agrippa were happy, and grandchildren frolicked on the palace floor. Now another Julia, daughter of his daughter, had grown up and was following her mother’s morals as if resolved to illustrate all the amatory arts of her friend Ovid’s verse. In A.D. 8, having received proofs of her adultery, Augustus exiled her to an isle in the Adriatic, and at the same time banished Ovid to Tomi on the Black Sea. “Would that I had never married,” mourned the feeble and shrunken Emperor, “or that I had died without offspring!” Sometimes he thought of starving himself to death.
All the great structure that he had built seemed to be in ruins. The powers that he had assumed for order’s sake had weakened into degeneration the Senate and the assemblies from which he had taken them. Tired of ratifications and adulations, the senators no longer came to their sessions, and a mere handful of citizens gathered in the comitia. Offices that had once stirred creative ambition by the power they brought were now shunned by the able as empty and expensive vanities. The very peace that Augustus had organized, and the security that he had won for Rome, had loosened the fibre of the people. No one wanted to enlist in the army, or recognize the inexorable periodicity of war. Luxury had taken the place of simplicity, sexual license was replacing parentage; by its own exhausted will the great race was beginning to die.
All these things the old Emperor keenly saw and sadly felt. No one then could tell him that despite a hundred defects and half a dozen idiots on the throne, the strange and subtle principate that he had established would give the Empire the longest period of prosperity ever known to mankind; and that the Pax Romana, which had begun as the Pax Augusta, would in the perspective of time be accounted the supreme achievement in the history of statesmanship. Like Leonardo, he thought that he had failed.
Death came to him quietly at Nola in the seventy-sixth year of his age (A.D. 14). To the friends at his bedside he uttered the words often used to conclude a Roman comedy: “Since well I’ve played my part, clap now your hands, and with applause dismiss me from the stage.” He embraced his wife, saying, “Remember our long union, Livia; farewell”; and with this simple parting he passed away.42 Some days later his corpse was borne through Rome on the shoulders of senators to the Field of Mars, and there cremated while children of high degree chanted the lament for the dead.
I The fisci were, in the Republic, the sealed baskets in which the provincial money tribute was brought to Rome.
II So named from the clan to which Augustus belonged by adoption.
III Literally, century games, because given only at long intervals.