What was more, there was no need to restrict citizens’ rights to self-expression, for there was little outright opposition. The whole point of his constitutional settlement was that it attracted a broad consent among the ruling class. What critics there were could be allowed their say without risking revolution.
This is not to say that rising men did not practice self-censorship, or that poets and historians failed to flatter. As we have seen, the princeps and his unofficial “minister of culture,” Maecenas, well understood the power of literature to promote official values.
But there was another, more subtle and more compelling reason for the license Augustus allowed commentators—historians and poets. This concerned his core beliefs. Like many of his fellow Romans, he deeply disapproved of the decadent society around him, which had abandoned the severe Roman virtues of the past. He wanted writers like Titus Livius (in English, Livy) to speak their minds on this subject without fear or favor.
About the same age as the princeps, Livy was born in Patavium (today’s Padua) in Cisalpine Gaul. He made no effort to follow a public career, instead devoting his long life to the writing of a monumental history of Rome, from the foundation to 9 B.C. He was one of Rome’s first professional historians, for until then history had usually been a pastime for retired politicians.
Livy’s worldview was moral and romantic, and most thinking people of his age shared it. In the preface to his magnum opus, he stated that writing history was a way of escaping the troubles of the modern world: “Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every kind of sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death both individual and collective.”
The trouble was seen to have begun in the second century B.C., when, somewhat absentmindedly, the Senate acquired its empire in the east—first Greece and Macedonia, then Asia Minor and Syria. Leading Romans began to copy the extravagant lifestyle of Asiatic Greeks. The culminating metaphor for Roman decadence was the career of Mark Antony and his sexual subversion by Cleopatra.
This perceived moral decline was accompanied by political collapse at the hands of a succession of selfish dynasts. The greatest of them, Julius Caesar, broke the Republic, which for centuries had embodied in constitutional form the traditional Roman virtues, now lost. Although himself a dynast, Pompey the Great, who opposed Caesar in the civil war, gave his life for the republican cause, and came to be a symbol of it.
According to Tacitus, Livy “praised Pompey so warmly that Augustus [whom he knew personally] called him ‘the Pompeian.’” The historian never called Brutus and Cassius bandits and parricides, their “fashionable designations today.”
Livy was not alone in his overt republican sympathies. In the Aeneid, Augustus’ poet laureate dared to rehabilitate that most die-hard of republicans, the pigheaded purist Marcus Porcius Cato, who led the optimates against Julius Caesar and died by his own hand after his defeat in Africa.
The victor of Actium was not the only great Roman to be depicted on the shield of Aeneas. In a vision of the underworld various historical figures are shown waiting for their lives to begin. Virgil points to where “the righteous are set apart, with Cato as their lawgiver.” Elsewhere, the poet delivers Julius Caesar a veiled rebuke: “Turn not your country’s hand against your country’s heart!”
The princeps did not demur from this kind of talk. He transferred the statue of Pompey the Great from the hall where Caesar had been assassinated to a much more prominent position on an arch facing the grand door of Pompey’s Theater. He remarked of Cato that “to seek to keep the constitution unchanged argues a good citizen and a good man.”
Augustus knew and liked Virgil. Indeed, in 19 B.C., when returning to Rome after his Parthian success, the princeps met him in Greece shortly before the poet died at the age of fifty-two. Virgil was dissatisfied with his masterpiece, which he had finished but not corrected, and when his health began to fail he asked his friend the poet Lucius Varius Rufus to burn it in the event of his death. Varius refused to obey his orders and, acting under the authority of Augustus, published the epic.
The reason for Augustus’ tolerance of these rehabilitations, and his cultivation of revisionists such as Livy and Virgil, was simple. The ideology of the regime was to restore the Republic. This could be advocated, in the first instance, by praising the ideal commonwealth of Rome’s early centuries, but also, it necessarily followed, by championing its more recent standard-bearers, the men whom Julius Caesar had destroyed. It followed that Augustus was obliged to reject his revolutionary past (and by implication, his adoptive father) and show that he was a true republican.
To this end, freedom of speech was essential. The princeps had to let the regime’s opponents celebrate their lost leaders, so that he could be seen to agree. It would have been too odd, too barefaced for him to bury Julius Caesar and exhume Cato and Pompey himself. He needed an opposition, so that he could quietly join it.
To revisit the heroic past was not just a retrieval, but a rebirth. Virgil drew an analogy between the original founding of Rome and its refoundation by Augustus, between his sober and devout Trojan hero, Aeneas, and the sober and devout princeps.
Rome’s destiny, Virgil wrote, was to “rule an Italy fertile in leadership / And loud with war…and bring the whole world under a system of law.” History culminates in the inaugurator of new Saturnica regna, the reign of Jupiter’s father, Saturn, when men lived in virtuous simplicity:
And here, here is the man, the promised one you know of—
Caesar Augustus, son of a god, destined to rule
Where Saturn ruled of old in Latium,
and there
Bring back the age of gold.
The point was that Romans would not merit their imperial role unless they also tackled excessive consumption, sexual immorality, and the general failure of moral fiber. Once again the princeps recruited his constellation of great poets to assist him. Horace mostly celebrates a happily amoral sensuality outside the bonds of marriage, but in his Odes, the first three books of which were published in 23 B.C., he devoted a group of poems to the untypical theme of moral renaissance. He wrote of the “large inconvenience of wealth” and compared the citizens of Rome, to their disadvantage, with the barbarous Scythians, unexpectedly cast as noble savages.
Family pride
Is their rich dower, chastity shy to glance aside,
Faith in the marriage tie;
Sin is abhorred; the price of scandal is to die.
This censoriousness chimed with Augustus’ thinking. For some years during the twenties B.C. he meditated on social legislation, designed to purify morals and encourage the family. Among respectable opinion, there was a consensus about the failings of Rome’s ruling class: divorce was easy; young people were reluctant to marry; the birthrate appeared to be falling; sexual license was widespread; some rich men avoided a public career.
By contrast, traditional standards of behavior in provincial society in Italy were still upheld and the patterns of family life were little changed. This was the world in which Augustus had spent his childhood; his memories of Velitrae may have given a personal edge to his desire to restore Roman values.
Legislation concerning the family would be a distinct and probably unpopular innovation, and the princeps took his time before laying any proposals before the Senate. He may have sought to do so in or around 29 B.C., but stayed his hand. Now, probably in 18 B.C., he brought forward a body of laws designed to encourage marriage and procreation. His aim was not only to foster traditional values, but also to create new generations of imperial soldiers and administrators.