Augustus. Buchan John
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the world.
It was a situation which might well have turned a lighter head. But the young man kept his own counsel and appeared content to be dutiful and obscure. Yet his mind was very full of his great-uncle and he longed ardently for his return. In all his life he had scarcely seen him, for Julius had gone to Gaul when he was still a little child, and it is not likely that the two met in the feverish months before the former embarked for the campaign that ended at Pharsalus. But when the victor returned from Alexandria in the autumn of 47 there was a meeting, and the heart of the older man went out to the handsome youth, who was the chief male left of his race. He would have taken Octavius with him to Africa, and Octavius longed to go, but his health at the time was weak and his mother forbade the journey. But after Thapsus he became virtually a member of the dictator’s household, though he was not as yet formally adopted.1 He shared in his triumph, riding in a chariot close behind him; he induced him to pardon Agrippa’s Pompeian brother, who had been made prisoner in Africa; he stood by his side at the sacrifices and sat by him in the theatre; he took precedence of all his suite, and seemed destined, in spite of his years, to be the dictator’s constant associate and his virtual chief-of-staff.
But his health served him ill. The hot weather in Rome brought on a fever, and he was a sick man when Julius started for Spain in December 46 to fight his last battle. Early in the new year he was sufficiently recovered to follow him, and after a dangerous and difficult journey he joined him at Calpe on the morrow of Munda. With him he crossed to Carthage, and shared in the preliminary councils about the new ordering of the empire. He returned alone to Rome, where he had now to walk discreetly, for he was courted on all sides as the intimate of the conqueror. A Parthian campaign was in prospect, and as one of the two masters of the horse he was in the heart of the business. Moreover, the Senate, at Julius’s request, had made him a patrician. But in those difficult months Octavius moved so warily that he made no enemies, and committed himself to no faction or intrigue. He was Julius’s great-nephew, but he was only a youth, he said, with his education still to complete, and all business must wait on Julius’s return. For a moment in September he met the master of the world, when he came home to see about the reconstruction of the empire. But presently he left with his tutor for Apollonia—probably by his own desire. He had become the object of a great man’s affection and the confidant of his schemes, but his mind was still in a turmoil. He needed leisure to reflect upon those tremendous problems of government of which he had now an inkling, and on what seemed to be his own high but unpredictable destiny.
II
To most men at the time the world appeared a tangle of knots waiting to be cut by the sword. But Octavius had imbibed sufficient philosophy to distrust the sword as a cure for all ills, he had in his bones the Roman sense of the past, and his mind in those quiet months had been working back upon the long record of his people, and striving to assess the many elements upon which Rome’s future depended.
He saw behind him one of the miracles of history. A little fortified town, the centre of a community of yeomen, had within four centuries of her foundation made herself the mistress of all Italy. Two centuries later she controlled the shores of the Mediterranean and a large part of the empire of Alexander; her inconsiderable hills had become as famous as the Acropolis or the Pyramids; the mountain torrent which washed her walls was a name as familiar to men as the River of Egypt; and her commercial expansion had kept pace with her conquests. The hammer-blows of fate seemed not to weaken but to temper her strength, and to quicken it to fresh achievements. But in this amazing development there had been no corresponding adjustment of her constitution.1 She still maintained the antique forms of the old city-state, forms continually transgressed or disregarded, but still in theory inviolate. A municipality attempted to govern half the world, and a most curious and delicately balanced municipality at that. The extension of her boundaries had been achieved rather by accident than by design, for it was her desire to be secure in Italy that had forced an empire into her reluctant hands. Her settled policy had always been anti-expansionist, which explains her slowness to revise her mechanism of government.
In that government the cardinal principle, since the Law of the Twelve Tables, was the sovereignty of the Roman people. But the people were only the ultimate authority, and they reigned rather than governed—inevitably, since in practice they meant only the half-million dwellers within the city boundaries. Their power lay in the choice of magistrates, and the actual work of government was in the hands of these magistrates, and of the Senate which represented the collective wisdom and the essential tradition of Rome. The old distinction of patrician and plebeian had now little meaning; the new aristocracy was a nobility of office, made up of those families which had held high posts in the state. The aversion of such a body to foreign conquests is intelligible enough when it is remembered that a new province meant an additional governor, and that an increase in magistrates by swelling its numbers diminished its exclusive pride and effective control.2
Destiny proved too strong for the Senate, and undesired conquests tumbled into its lap, for there was in Rome a fierce instinct of growth which defied limits. It made halting efforts to preserve its ancient prestige. The number of praetors was increased, and the system of promagistracies enabled it to give the existing officers double duties. But this did not solve the problem, for the number of foreign governorships soon exceeded the desired quota. If human ingenuity fails in an urgent task, fate may take a hand. There was still a residuum of power in the Roman Assembly, and in a crisis which seriously affected them the Roman people could insist on appointing some favourite general or politician to a special and overruling command. With this innovation the Republic in its strict sense came to an end. The new empire had grown too big and too difficult for the old machine. When the Senate or People appointed a great man to meet some urgent need and gave him an army, the ancient governance was sapped in its foundations. An emergency expedient, tacked on to the old forms, proved more potent than them all.
These were facts which every thinking Roman of the day admitted. A vast empire had been unwillingly won, an empire of which the natural frontiers were recognized as destined sooner or later to be the Atlantic, the African desert, the Euphrates, the Danube, and the Rhine. In the East there was the menace of Parthia, and the thunder-cloud of the Germanic peoples hung darkly in the North. Inside the Roman bounds many of the provinces were muttering volcanoes. No serious mechanism of provincial government had been evolved. There was no permanent civil service. The governors were changed annually, and it depended wholly on their individual characters whether their terms of office were equitable or oppressive. The revenues from the provinces, which were the chief source of Rome’s income, were farmed out to joint-stock companies of Roman capitalists. There was inadequate control by the Senate; indeed, the fact that money and men could be got from the provinces without the Senate’s authority was a direct peril to the Senate’s prestige. The Roman people had no craving for a dapper uniformity, and, being raw to the business, were content to accept any system that would work; “they value,” said one of their later historians, “the reality of empire and disregard its empty forms.”1 But some principles there must be, however elastic, and serious system there was none. “All the provinces are mourning,” Cicero told his countrymen; “all the free peoples are complaining. . . . The Roman people can no longer withstand . . . their complaints, their lamentations and their tears.”2
Rome herself had been for a century the arena of a struggle between the Optimates, the conservative nobility of office which desired to perpetuate the rule of the Senate, and the Populares, the radical reformers who sought change by the medium of the Assembly. Both claimed a constitutional warrant for their deeds; both consistently crashed through the fundamentals of the constitution. The chief weapon of both was the emergency appointment of a High Command, a special magistrate with dictatorial powers,3 a Sulla, a Pompey, a Caesar—always permissible in a crisis, but now a regular practice. The extreme medicine of the constitution, in Burke’s phrase, had become its daily bread. For four hundred years the centre of gravity had been in the Senate; now it was shifting no man could say whither. “The accretions of ages had changed a curious but comparatively simple type of polity into a jumble of constitutional law and custom, through which even the keen eyes of a Roman jurist could not pierce, and which even his capacity for fictitious interpretation and the invention of compromises could not reduce to a system.”4 But the theoretic anomaly mattered