Augustus Stepped In To Save The Race

A well-ordered state has no need of great men, and no room for them. The last century of the Free State witnessed a succession of striking individuals—a symptom of civic degeneration and a cause of disaster. It was the Greek period of Roman History, stamped with the sign of the demagogue, the tyrant and the class war; and many of the principal actors of the tragedy had little of the traditional Roman in their character. Augustus paid especial honor to the great generals of the Republic. To judge by the catalog of worthies as retailed by patriotic poets—he had to go a long way back to find his favorites—before the age of the Gracchi. Marius was an exemplar of ‘Itala virtus’; Sulla Felix was much more a traditional Roman aristocrat than many may have believed; and Sulla sought to establish an ordered state. Both were damned by the crime of ambition and ‘impia arma’. Augustus, like the historian Tacitus, would have none of them; and so they received no praise from the poets. Pompeius was no better, though he has the advantage over Caesar in Virgil’s solemn exhortation against civil war. As for Antonius, he was the archetype for foreign vices—‘extreni mores ac vitia non Romana’.

It was not merely the vices of the principes that barred them from recognition. Their virtues had been pernicious. Pompeius’ pursuit of gloria, Caesar’s jealous cult of his dignitas and his magnitude animi, the candor and the chivalry Antonius—all these qualities had to be eradicated from the principes of the New State. If anything of them remained in the Commonwealth, it was to be monopolized by the one Princeps, along with clementia. The governing class was left with the satisfaction of the less decorative virtues: if it lacked them, it must learn them.

The spirit of a people is best revealed in the words its employs with emotional content. To a Roman, such a word was ‘antiquus’; and what Rome now required was men like those of old, and ancient virtues. As the poet had put it long ago, moribus antiquis res stat Romana virisque.

The Roman aristocrat requited privilege with duty to the State. Then individuals were poor, but the State was rich. His immoral and selfish descendants had all but ruined the Roman People. Conquest, wealth and alien ideas corrupted the ancient ideals of duty, piety, chastity and frugality. How could they be restored?

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The principal laws designed to curb license, establish morality and encourage the production of offspring, in a word, to restore the basis of civic virtue, were the Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus and the Lex Julia de adulteriis, both of this year; there were subsequent changes and additions, the most important being the Lex Papia Poppaea of the year 9 A.D. Regeneration was now vigorously at work upon the Roman People. The New Age could confidently be inaugurated. The Secular Games were therefore held in 17 B.C. Q. Horatius Flaccus, who composed the hymn extolled, along with peace and prosperity, the return of the old morality: iam Fides et Pax Honos Pudorque priscus et neglecta redire Virtus audit.

It had not been easy. Opposition arose in the Senate, and public demonstrations. A cuirass, concealed under the toga of the First Citizen, guarded him from assassination—for plots were discovered in this year, conspirators punished. Legislation concerning the family, that was a novelty, but the spirit was not, for it harmonized both with the traditional activities of the censorial office and with the aspirations of the conservative reformers. Augustus claimed both to revive the past and set standards for the future. In this matter there stood a valid precedent: Augustus inexorably read out to a recalcitrant Senate the whole of the speech which a Metellus had once delivered in the vain attempt to arrest a declining birth-rate.

The aim of the new code was no less than this, to bring the family under the protection of the State—a measure quite superfluous so long as Rome retained her ancient self. In the aristocracy of the last age of the Republic marriage had not always been blessed with either offspring or permanence. Matches contracted for the open and avowed end of money, politics, or pleasure were lightly dissolved according to the interest of whim of either party. Few indeed of the great ladies would have been able—or eager—to claim, like Cornelia, the epitaph in lapide hoc uni nuota fuisse legar.

Though some might show a certain restraint in changing husbands or lovers, they were seldom exemplars of the domestic virtues of the Roman matron—the Claudia who domum ervavit, lanam fecit. Their names were often heard in public than was expedient for honest women: the became politicians and patrons of the arts. They were formidable and independent, retaining control of their own property in marriage. The emancipation of women had its reaction upon the men, who, instead of a partner from their own class, preferred alliance with a freedwoman, or none at all.

With marriage and without it, the tone and habits of high society were gay and abandoned. The New State supervened, crushing and inexorable. The Lex Julia converted adultery, from a private offense with mild remedies and incomplete redress, into a crime. The wife, it is true, had no more rights than before. But the husband, after divorcing, could prosecute both the guilty partner and her paramour. The penalty was severe—relegation to the islands and deprivation of a large part of their fortune. 

The tightening of the matrimonial bond would hardly induce the aristocracy to marry and propagate. Material encouragement was required. Many old families had died out through lack of heirs, the existence of others was precarious. The wealth needed to support the political and social dignity of a senatorial family imposed a rigorous limit upon size. Augustus therefore devised rewards for husbands and fathers in the hope of more rapid promotion in the senatorial career, with corresponding restrictions on the unmarried and the childless in the matter of inheriting property. 

The education of the young also came in for the attention of the Princeps. For the formation of character equal to the duties of war and government, the sciences, the fine arts and mere literature were clearly superfluous, when not positively noxious. Philosophy studied to excess did not fit a Roman and a senator. Only law and oratory were held to be respectable. But they must not be left to specialists or to mere scholars. To promote physical strength and corporate feeling in the Roman youth, Augustus revived ancient military exercises, like the Lusus Troiae. In the towns of Italy there was a counterpart—the collegia iuvenum, clubs of young men of the officer class. These bodies provided an apprenticeship for military service, opportunities for social and political advancement—and centers for the propagation of correct sentiments about the government. Augustus awarded commissions in the militia equestris to men approved by their towns (perhaps ex-magistrates). The municipia, or rather the local dynasts who controlled them, were sufficiently aware of the qualities which the Princeps expected.

To the governing class the penalties were in proportion to the duties of their high station. Marriage with freedwomen, though now forbidden to senators, was condoned in others—for it was better than no marriage. The Roman People was to contemplate and imitate the ancient ideals, personified in their betters: but it was to be a purified Roman People.

At Rome the decline of the native stock was palliated and compensated by virtue singularly lacking in the city states of Greece but inculcated from early days at Rome by the military needs of the Republic, namely readiness to admit new members to the citizen body. This generosity, which in the past had established Rome’s power in Italy on the broad basis that alone could bear it, was accompanied by certain grave disadvantages. Slaves, not only could be emancipated with ease but were emancipated in hordes. The wars of conquest flooded the market with captives of alien and often inferior stocks. Their descendants swelled and swamped the ranks of the Roman citizens: nil patrium nisi nomen habet Romanus alumnus.

Augustus stepped in to save the race, imposing restriction upon the freedom of individual owners in liberating their slaves. Yet even freedmen were given corporate dignity and corporate duties by the institution of the cult of the Lares compitales and the genius of Augustus at Rome, and by priesthood in the towns.

The Roman People could not be pure, strong and confident without pietas, the honor due to the gods of Rome. On some tolerable accommodation with supernatural powers, ‘pax deorum’, the prosperity of the whole community clearly depended. There were manifold signs of its absence. The ruinous horror of the Civil Wars, with threatened collapse of Rome and the Empire, engendered a feeling of guilt—it all came from neglect of the ancient gods. The evil went back much farther than Caesar or Pompeius, being symptom and product of the whole unhallowed and un-Roman era of Roman history. Temples had crumbled, ceremonies and priesthoods lapsed. No peace for the Roman, but the inherited and cumulative curse would propagate, from one generation of corruption to the next, each worse than the last, till the temples should be repaired. Whose hand would Heaven guide to begin the work of restoration?

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It was not Rome alone but Italy, perhaps Italy more than Rome, that prevailed in the War of Actium. The Principate itself may, in a certain sense, be regarded as a triumph of Italy over Rome: Philippi, Perusia and even Actium were victories of the Caesarian party over the nobiles. Being recruited in so large measure from Roman knights of the towns of Italy, it found itself rewarded with power in the Senate and in the council of the Princeps. The Roman aristocracy, avidly grasping the spoils of conquest, luxury, wealth and power, new tastes and new ideas, had discarded without repining the rugged ancestral virtues. But the ancient piety and frugality, respect for the family and loyalty to bonds of sentiment and duty were retained, with a consciousness of superiority, with pride and with resentment, in the towns of Italy. The Roman noble sneered at the municipal man—he was priggish and parsimonious, successful in business life, self-righteous and intolerably moral. The Italian bourgeoisie had their sweet revenge when the New State was erected at the expense of the nobiles, as a result of their feuds and follies.

That will not suffice to prove that the Princeps was merely a docile instrument in the hands of an uncompromising party of puritan nationalists. Augustus himself came of a municipal family. 

-excerpted from “The Roman Revolution” by Ronald Syme (1939)