Part 15

As long as these two men and Drusus, the younger son of Livia, were alive, even as Tacitus already remarks, Augustus’ government was really praiseworthy; but after their death there was a change for the worse. Augustus in his earlier years had very precarious health, and his life was several times endangered by illness; one of these was in Gaul, and another was that from which Antonius Musa recovered him by cold baths: it was not until about his fiftieth year, that his health became better. Long before this, whilst Marcellus was yet a child, and he himself still very young, he had once, when he thought himself dying, given his ring to Agrippa: in his will he had made no arrangements about the succession to his throne. When Marcellus grew up, differences arose between him and Agrippa. Velleius, who when he chooses to speak out, hits off many characters with masterly touches, says of Agrippa, “_Parendi, sed uni, scientissimus_.” To Augustus, he would submit himself; but against all those who rose after him, he was very bitter, nor would he be the servant of Marcellus who was much younger than himself: in all likelihood, had Augustus died then, he would not have scrupled to put Marcellus and the sons of Livia aside. Once Agrippa altogether withdrew to Mitylene, where he would have nothing more to do with the affairs of Rome; yet the way in which men paid their court to him in the east, showed clearly that they all looked upon him as their future master. But Marcellus died in his twenty-third year, and a great hope of the Roman world seems to have died with him; Agrippa now incontestably stood in the first place, and Augustus gave him in marriage his daughter Julia, the widow of Marcellus. Yet though this alliance went far to secure the succession for him and his sons, it very sadly embittered the last years of his life, owing to the shameful depravity of his wife; for he kept it secret from Augustus, who was very fond of his daughter. Agrippa died before Augustus’ eyes were opened to Julia’s conduct, and left three sons, one of whom was born after his death, and a daughter, Agrippina, who afterwards became the wife of Germanicus. She had all the pride and fine qualities of her father; she was an admirable woman, not unlike Octavia. The two eldest sons, Caius and Lucius, Augustus adopted into the family of the Cæsars, as he meant one of them, namely Caius, to succeed him. Whilst these young men were growing up, Julia was married to the eldest step-son of Augustus, Tiberius Claudius Nero. This young man had quite the character of the Claudian race: he was uncommonly proud of his high birth, and he held Augustus himself to be nothing better than a municipal upstart from Velitræ, who had been adopted into the Julian family; the _gens Julia_ he certainly looked upon as below the _gens Claudia_, and therefore upon his marriage with Julia as a match which was beneath him. Above all, he was deeply galled by the infamous life of Julia, though for fear of Augustus, he did not dare to complain of her. Being on bad terms with Augustus, he withdrew on some pretext or other to Rhodes, by which indeed he left the field open for Agrippa’s family. At Rhodes he lived for seven years, in the course of which the profligate life of Julia was discovered, and Augustus now treated her with unrelenting harshness: he had her transported to Pandataria. (Drusus had already died in Germany, a year before his elder brother went to Rhodes.) In vain did Tiberius repent of the rash step which he had taken; Livia for a whole year was unable to bring about a reconciliation, Augustus having been so much hurt by his going away that he would not hear of him, nor see him, although he had asked for leave to return. Augustus now employed L. and C. Cæsar in public business: Lucius was sent to Gaul and Spain, to superintend the registration of the land; Caius to Armenia. This Caius Cæsar, Velleius speaks of in such a way, that, though to pay his court to Tiberius, he may have represented some things as worse than they were, we may well believe that he was good for nothing, and that the Roman empire would have been as unhappy under him, as it was under Tiberius himself. In Armenia, where he had executed Augustus’ commissions, he was treacherously wounded by an Asiatic, who very likely was got to do it by the king of the Parthians. From this wound he never could recover, and it was generally thought by the ancients that it was poisoned by Livia: this is perhaps nothing but prejudice; bus it is quite possible. Lucius had already died before him, and it is pretty certain that it was _dolo novercæ_. Tiberius, on his return after seven years, was completely master of the field; and of Agrippa’s family, Agrippa Postumus and Agrippina were all that was left: that the former of these might not be altogether set aside, he adopted him together with Tiberius 754. From that time, Tiberius was heir presumptive; and it was not long before he got the _tribunicia potestas_: as for Agrippa Postumus, he was still a boy, an insignificant fellow, who did not stand in the other’s way.

It is a well known boast of Augustus, that he had found Rome brick, and had left it marble; and this was not saying too much: what is still left of his buildings bears it out. He has built an immense deal, and stamped upon Rome quite another character; his buildings were in a style of extraordinary grandeur, which altogether ceases in the later ones, the Colosseum alone excepted. There still remains what was formerly called _Forum Nervæ_, but what Palladio in his day, and among the moderns Hirt, have recognised as the _Forum Augustum_. The judicious Stefano Piali has shown that the three colossal pillars which were formerly thought to have been portions of the temple of Jupiter Stator, are of Augustus, and belonged to the _Curia Julia_. The great wall round the _Forum Augustum_, proves that at that time the old grand style was still prevalent, which lasted until the reign of the emperor Claudius, and first changed under that of Nero: thus people came to fancy that that wall was of the age of the kings. By Augustus himself was built the Mausoleum, the inside work of which still lasts indestructible; by Agrippa in Augustus’ reign, the Gate of St. Lorenzo and the Pantheon, besides the Theatre of Marcellus,—where the Palazzo Savelli is, in which I used to live,—in the old massive Greek-Etruscan style which had long been out of date in Greece: hard by is the Portico of Octavia, of which the entrance is still standing. Whatever on the Palatine is said to be of Augustus, is at best very problematical: of the temple of Apollo there is nothing left. Augustus was the first to bring the Carrara marble into use. A great number of high roads, both in Italy and in the provinces, and very magnificent aqueducts were made by him; among others, that of Narni, which indeed is built of brick. Notwithstanding all these great buildings, and all this magnificence, no one felt burthened, as the Romans paid scarcely any taxes but a few indirect ones; and therefore it is no wonder that Augustus was exceedingly popular. We must also take into the account the gloomy forebodings with which men looked upon Tiberius: the words of Horace, _Divis orte bonis!_ came from his heart; people prayed in right earnest to Heaven for his preservation.

WARLIKE ENTERPRISES OF AUGUSTUS. HIS DEATH. GENERAL SURVEY OF THE EMPIRE.

The first foreign war which he waged, happened between the peace of Brundusium and the battle of Actium. It was a campaign against the Dalmatians, and he displayed in it considerable activity, and personal courage, being wounded himself. The task of subduing these countries was exceedingly difficult; but he broke the power of the Dalmatians who dwelt on the coast. Soon after the battle of Actium, the Cantabrian war began. Very nearly the same countries which afterwards held out against the Moors, Biscay, Asturias, the north of Gallicia, and the confines of Leon, held out also then. Augustus set himself the task of extending the Roman empire as far as the sea, the Rhine, and the Danube. During the first year, he was, partly by illness, and partly by business, kept in Gaul, where he settled the affairs of the province; in Tarragona also, he fell sick once more, and was thus delayed in his campaigns. We have no details of these wars: Appian became tired here, and perhaps he did not find them in any Greek writer. Augustus’ memoirs must have had very little value, as hardly any notice is taken of them: he also tried poetry; but as far as we may judge from his letters, he was a tasteless and worthless writer. In the third year, the Asturians and Cantabrians made their submission, and gave hostages. The Basques maintain that they still have a poem on this war in their own language; and Wilhelm Von Humboldt possesses a copy of it, which I only know from his translation.[37] I hold it to be as little genuine as the poems of Ossian; Humboldt is of a different opinion, yet he decides nothing. How should anything have been preserved among the Cantabrians about this war, which after all was of no importance whatever to them? On the Moorish wars, which must have been much more important to them, nothing whatever remains. Nowhere else, either among Germans or other nations, have accounts of the Roman wars been preserved: when Wittekind of Corvey wrote, all memory of them had entirely vanished, and this was certainly the case there as well. The Cantabrians, goaded by the ill treatment of the Roman governors, revolted again; thus it took some more campaigns before they were altogether subdued. Augustus founded several colonies,—Cæsar Augusta (Saragossa), Julia Emerita (Merida, down to the Arabian times a first-rate town), Pax Augusta (Badajoz), Pax Julia (Beja), Legio (Leon).

About the time of this war, Tiberius, who was no longer a youth, carried on another in Dalmatia, which he reduced. Before that, a Roman governor named Crassus, had already made war in Mœsia, and had driven back the Sarmatians across the Danube, and extended the empire as far as that river. Pannonia likewise had submitted during the Dalmatian campaign of Tiberius.

It was between the Dalmatian and Cantabrian war, that Augustus shut the temple of Janus: according to Suetonius, he seems to have closed it thrice; yet this may have been a mistake. It had been done once before in the Mythic age of Numa; and again, between the first and second Punic wars, in the consulship of T. Manlius Torquatus, 517.

Augustus had before this already directed his attention to the Alpine races, such as the Salassians and all the tribes of Rhætia in the widest sense of the word,—even from the valley of Aosta, all through the Valais and the Tyrol, as far as Noricum, which had a king, and kept under Roman protection: they were mostly of Etruscan stock. It is my belief that the abodes of the Rhætians did not reach at farthest beyond the valley of the Upper Inn, whilst the Vindelicians dwelt on the northern slopes of the Tyrolese Alps, from the valley of the Lower Inn to the Danube. These last were of Liburnian race, as were also the Pannonians, who were neither Illyrians nor Gauls, and were called Pæonians by the Greeks, from whom we likewise learn that they had a language of their own. The Helvetians had submitted since the days of Julius Cæsar; of the subjugation of the Rhætians and Vindelicians under Drusus and Tiberius, we know but very little: the accounts which we have of it, are very vague and confused. Yet Von Hormayr has made up a romance from them, wishing to prove that Italian and German Tyrol ought to hold together: the notion is a correct one, but is not to be deduced by treating history in this way; nor did he do any good by it. It is evident that the war was carried on by the Romans according to a regular plan; and that the attacks were made from Italy, and on the other side from the Lake of Constance. The Romans everywhere penetrated by degrees through the inmost recesses of the Alps, where at that time there were no carriage roads, but only footpaths, as was likewise the case in the middle ages; and they so completely reduced those tribes, that they never made an attempt to raise their heads again. It was then that Augustus founded in Vindelicia the city of Augsburg, a colony of veterans, like all the colonies which he now established. At this time, they began to let the veterans settle where they had been encamped in war; and thus they gradually became peaceful citizens: afterwards their sons were liable to military service on better terms. As for the exact period when this new arrangement began, I do not think that any thing can be found about it in the ancient writers. Owing to these conquests in the Alps, there now arose the German wars in 740: now first the Romans could act on the offensive in Germany. The Sigambri, it is true, had made before that an inroad into the country beyond the Rhine, from whence they were driven back, but without any permanent result. Until then, the Romans had never reached farther than the Westerwald; new they attacked the Germans from the Lower Rhine and from the Danube: that they never came to the Upper Rhine, but went up no higher than the Lahn on the Lower Rhine, shows that Swabia was not as yet a German country, and that it was first made so by the Alemanni. These wars we would gladly detail more fully; but unfortunately Dio Cassius is mutilated here. In the Venetian manuscript, from which the rest are derived, the gaps have been disguised to take in the buyers, and this has been copied in all the others: the defective fragments discovered and edited by Morelli, but which are not found in the common editions, give one a little light, but only very little. In one of these campaigns, as Roth conjectures, Domitius Ahenobarbus may for the first time have crossed the Elbe in Bohemia; whereas formerly most of the expeditions were led from the Lower Rhine against the Elbe. Their wars were carried on by Nero Claudius Drusus (the younger brother of Tiberius), who made three campaigns: he crossed the Weser, and penetrated towards the Elbe. He reduced the Bructeri, the Sigambri who were then so renowned, the Cherusci and other tribes: this is all that we know of his wars. Nor in any of these accounts is there once the name of a locality given; for the enemy had no towns, and the villages were swept away, and are not mentioned by the Romans: the Germans did not possess any strong places in which they could hold out, and their only protection was the impassable nature of the country. Being unable to stand their ground against regular tactics, they were almost always beaten by the Romans in the field; whole districts were laid waste, the women and children dragged away into slavery, and the men hunted down and killed like wild beasts. Although Drusus is praised for his humanity,—and considering that he was a Roman, justly so,—yet he was ἀλιτήριος against Germany, and he may have done the people as much harm as Varus himself did. He died in his camp, Tiberius being strongly suspected of having been the instigator of his murder: but this after all may only have been believed on account of the hatred which he had against the family of his brother, especially against Germanicus. At most, Tiberius might have been afraid lest Drusus should dream _de reddenda re publica_, a fine day-dream which Germanicus really fostered. Drusus had a monument on the Rhine, which for generations was held sacred both by Romans and foreigners: where it was is now unknown.

After his death in 745, Tiberius took the command. But soon afterwards followed his absence of seven years, during which little happened except that the Bructeri defeated the legate M. Lollius, annihilated his legion, and took his eagles. When Tiberius returned from Rhodes, his stepfather bestowed upon him the command in Gaul, that he might complete the conquest of Germany. Tiberius subdued the Sigambri, Bructeri, and Cherusci, and penetrated as far as the Elbe: there he was joined by the Roman fleet, which had either been equipped in the Ems, or had come from the Rhine to the Ems. How far it went up the Elbe cannot be made out; it may be that it got as far as Magdeburg, yet the Roman galleys were not able, like steam-boats, to run against the stream. After these campaigns, Tiberius again left Germany, as his predecessor had done, and as many of his successors did after him. The Romans wished to crush the Germans; but it did not seem worth their while to keep the country.

Whilst the tribes about the Hartz, and in the Thuringian forest, had their country invaded by the Romans, there existed in Bohemia the great kingdom of Marbod, which is indeed a perplexing phenomenon: we read of a large city in this realm, of an army of seventy thousand men, and of a body guard. Moeser rightly observes, that one is not to believe the Germans of those days to have been less civilized than the peasantry of Westphalia and Lower Saxony are now; only they were wanting in the refinement of those who live in towns:—their houses were certainly built like the worse ones which we have; the dwellings of the princes were very much the same as the buildings of the middle ages. Nothing is more preposterous than to take them for rude savages, when they were merely rough country people. Venantius Fortunatus, in his poem to Radagunda, speaks of the fallen splendour of the kingdom of her house, and of the bronze covered palaces of her forefathers, the Thuringian kings. There were indeed some things different from what they are now: in winter, for instance, they had certainly to burn candles by day, and when it rained to shut up everything with boards, because they had no glass windows; yet this was the case in Rome itself where there are houses of this kind to this day. Marbod, however, must have really had a civilized kingdom. He had immigrated with his Sueves into Bohemia, and subdued the Celtic Boians there: his seventy thousand men betoken something feudal. Against Marbod, Tiberius now armed himself; he meant to attack him on two sides, himself advancing from Noricum and Vindelicia, and Sentius Saturninus from the Rhine through Northern Germany, the Hercynian, and the Thuringian Forests. The Romans made great preparations, laying down for many miles, across the Dutch and Westphalian fens, large wooden causeways and wooden bridges—the bridge over the Elbe near Hamburgh—of which remains are found even to this day: the wood has stood exceedingly well, except that it has become black in the bogs. It was then that the consequences of the dissensions among the Germans began to show themselves. The northern Germans did not trust Marbod, and were afraid of losing by him their freedom, like the Marcomanni: these he had once left in the lurch, and hence they were so broken down, that they could not now come to his help. But whilst Tiberius was preparing himself for the attack, Dalmatia and Pannonia revolted. During this insurrection which lasted for three years, Marbod remained inactive: the Getæ also, and the Dacians, who had formerly often crossed the Danube, and fallen upon the Roman frontiers, now kept still, luckily for Rome, which otherwise might have been brought into fearful trouble. Augustus, quite appalled, trembled at the danger: it was reckoned that there were two hundred thousand men able to bear arms among these tribes; two Dalmatians, both of them called Bato, and a Pannonian, Pinnes, were their leaders. Velleius, who served in this war, tells us of their high state of civilization, especially of the Pannonians, nearly all of whom had Roman manners and spoke Latin: they must have been very much akin to the Romans, otherwise this would be hardly conceivable, as the Roman dominion there was still so recent. In this war the rebels spread as far as Macedonia, once driving back a Roman army which had come from Asia; and it was only by the extraordinary bravery of their soldiers that the Romans gained the victory after all. At last the nations fell out, and one of the Batos treacherously gave up the Pannonian general Pinnes to the Romans. The Pannonians were the first who submitted, and the Romans seem to have granted them very favourable conditions. Tiberius was now free to go against Marbod, who would have thus met with his punishment for having kept aloof, had not another event taken place.