An August Memory
— The twin star in the Roman sky known as Octavian Augustus has always given me a confused impression, doubtless aggravated in that he springs full-armed upon the scene, as — nay, it is no hackneyed Minerva from Jove’s head we offer for our comparison, but — as parentless as the Emperor Charles V. This long-headed, cold-hearted, dissolute old man in knicker—in toga prætexta, we should say, — who uses Cicero and Antony alike as stepping-stones, outwitting either at will ; this repellent stripling, who, himself without a grievance, shares, if he did not originate, proscriptions that outdid the fierce, hot-blooded massacres of Marius or Sulla; Octavian, I say, unworthy heir to the name of great Julius (whom Romans at least found, ever generous and forgiving), comes uigli to a preeminence of abhorrent badness in all that century of violence from Nasiea’s bludgeon to Cleopatra’s asp.
The long, wise reign of tlie Emperor Augustus is perhaps the most successful piece of quiet statecraft tlie world has ever seen. The new order gave the still-vext Roman world such peace, such unity, such material prosperity, as it had never seen before. The capital was not merely rebuilt, it was architecturally transfigured. “ Brick I found thee, marble I leave thee,” was no empty boast by any means. Hundreds of desecrated shrines rose taller and lovelier from their ashes. Even the faith of an earlier nobler day for a moment seemed to raise its languid head while scholastic Virgil and Epicurean Horace sang. Intellectual genius, no matter how humble its origin, was sought out and cherished. For such wisely selfish generosity an Humid or a Carmen iSiecularo was indeed a princely recompense ; but how many autocrats have realized this, and courted their poet with the lit humility of an ephemeral superior ? Can Grande did not, nor Chesterfield !
All this wonderful transformation from the age of blood and iron to what seemed almost the Saturnian age returned, this real order and imperial rule just when Rome and civilization were about to sink together into the rift of civil strife, too wide for any Curtins to close, —all this new world centres in one quiet, unpretentious man, who, avoiding so far as he may all splendid pomp and insidious titles, grasps the substance, indeed, but not the insignia of power. It is in Ins own despite that he is deified while yet living.
Though practically despot over the haughtiest of races, he does not, like Tarquin and Julius, meet a tyrant’s fate. After a reign almost as long and unshaken as Victoria’s, he dies peacefully in his bed, while his sceptre passes without question to the unloved heir of his choice. How spotless, we think, must have been the whole life of this philosophic prince, so to enshrine him in the heart of a lordly nation ! Where is there a greater contrast between all that should accompany honored and reverend old age and that most merciless, treacherous, and repulsive of boy conspirators ! Once again we had quite forgotten tliat they are one and the same man !
To be sure, if we turn away from the heroic outlines of imperial annals, and eon the chronique seandaleuse of, for example, Suetonius, the later portrait will blend more readily into the earlier. In particular, the home-happiness of the Emperor’s closest friends found in him as dangerous a guest as any Stuart can have been. Maecenas himself seems to have hail good cause for jealousy. Again, even the fiery Terentia, the prime minister’s wife, could not wiu as a boon from her imperial lover the life of her brothers (or near kinsmen), who were entangled in a conspiracy against him.
Even literary men found Rome in the “ Augustan age ” no paradise, if once their master’s resentment was kindled. Thus the belated Pompeian and abusive orator Labiemis was cruelly Sentenced to have all his books burned ! This anticipation of posterity’s doom of oblivion broke liis heart and drove him to suicide. Tiie more prolonged sufferings of poor Ovid will he remembered, though his precise offense may never he revealed.
Is it certain that authorship owes so heavy a debt of gratitude to Augustus? Literature flourished, no doubt, in tlie imperial gardens and hothouses. Possibly the delicate flower of Virgiliau geuius would else never have bloomed at all. On the other hand, republican Horace lost his sturdier traits all too soon in that languid air. Poetry, above all arts, perhaps, requires the atmosphere of freedom ; and here early death was involved in the very sources of life. Perhaps for a time more men of ability were turned to literature, if only because other paths of ambition were closed. Yet the paralysis of despotic rule soon fell upon this as on all noble arts. Horace is indeed the last who, by an occasional flash of bolder reminiscence, recalls that he had known and shared the vain final struggle of the tyrannicides. Virgil’s first note is in the extremist tone of adulation : —
The empire, it is often asserted, was inevitable, and beneficent, for Rome in the last eeutury n. e. Perhaps so. Death also may he inevitable, and beneficent, for nations as for men. Certainly the empire was better than unceasing turmoil and civil war. Paralysis is preferable to convulsions.
As for Augustus the author, all the glories of Augustus the emperor have not saved him from the limbo appointed for the commonplace. His chief usefulness was as a frank, judicious critic, safe from any petty jealousy in his supremacy of power. Suetonius mentions a poem on Sicily in hexameters. Of his epigrams, composed and dictated during the interminable daily baths, Martial has preserved one, thereby assuaging all our regret for the rest ; there are hardly six coarser verses in Martial him-self ! Augustus began also a tragedy, Ajax, but when questioned as to its fate, answered wittily that his hero had “ fallen upon the sponge ; alluding to the scene in Sophocles’ play, doubtless copied generally in tragedy, where Ajax throws himself upon the sword which had been presented him by Hector at the close of their duel. We regret the loss of the Vita Sua, in thirteen books, though it was probably even less in genuous than his great-uncle’s Commentarii. One weighty historical document we do still owe to Augustus, though it may not be, in style and language, the creature of his brain. It is the Monumentum Ancyranum, chiefest of Latin inscriptions. This account of the Emperor’s life and exploits, more truthful and less boastful than Darius’s panegyric at Behistun, covered the walls of a temple dedicated to Augustus and Rome.” In Apollonia of Pisidia fragments from a monumental Greek version of the same document have been found. Here, indeed, the greatness of the first Roman Emperor stands clearly revealed. In authorship proper he hardly plays a part at all ; though a clear conception both of his public and his private character will, for obvious reasons, always be of importance to any serious study in the history of literature. Like Pericles’ Lorenzo or Elizabeth, he is an essential part of the environment, the background as it were wherever the record of authorship is delineated.