[Frontispiece: Livia, the wife of Augustus, superintending the weavingof robes for her family. ]

THE WOMEN OF THE CAESARS

BY

GUGLIELMO FERRERO

NEW YORK

THE CENTURY CO. 

MCMXI

Copyright, 1911, by

THE CENTURY CO. 

Published, October, 1911

THE DEVINNE PRESS

CONTENTS

 I WOMAN AND MARRIAGE IN ANCIENT ROME

 II LIVIA AND JULIA

 III THE DAUGHTERS OF AGRIPPA

 IV TIBERIUS AND AGRIPPINA

 V THE SISTERS OF CALIGULA AND THE MARRIAGE OF MESSALINA

 VI AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Livia, the Wife of Augustus, Superintending the Weaving of Robes forher Family . . . _Frontispiece_

A Roman Marriage Custom

Eumachia, a Public Priestess of Ancient Rome

The Forum under the Caesars

The So-called Bust of Cicero

Julius Caesar

The Sister of M. Nonius Balbus

Livia, the Mother of Tiberius, in the Costume of a Priestess

The Young Augustus

The Emperor Augustus

A Silver Denarius of the Second Triumvirate

Silver Coin Bearing the Head of Julius Caesar

The Great Paris Cameo

Octavia, the Sister of Augustus

A Reception at Livia's Villa

Mark Antony

Antony and Cleopatra

Tiberius, Elder Son of Livia and Stepson of Augustus

Drusus, the Younger Brother of Tiberius

Statue of a Young Roman Woman

A Roman Girl of the Time of the Caesars

Costumes of Roman Men, Women, and Children in the Procession of a PeaceFestival

Bust of Tiberius in the Museo Nazionale, Naples

Types of Head-dresses Worn in the Time of the Women of the Caesars

A Roman Feast in the Time of the Caesars

Depositing the Ashes of a Member of the Imperial Family in a RomanColumbarium

The Starving Livilla Refusing Food

Costume of a Chief Vestal (Virgo Vestalis Maxima)

Remains of the House of the Vestal Virgins

Bust, Supposed to be of Antonia, Daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia, and Mother of Germanicus, in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence

Caligula

A Bronze Sestertius (Slightly Enlarged), Showing the Sisters ofCaligula (Agrippina, Drusilla, and Julia Livilla) on One Side andGermanicus on the Other Side

A Bronze Sestertius with the Head of Agrippina the Elder, Daughter ofAgrippa and Julia, the Daughter of Augustus

Claudius, Messalina, and Their Two Children in What is Known as the"Hague Cameo"

Remains of the Bridge of Caligula in the Palace of the Caesars

The Emperor Caligula

Claudius

The Emperor Claudius

Messalina, Third Wife of Claudius

The Philosopher Seneca

The Emperor Nero

Agrippina the Younger, Sister of Caligula and Mother of Nero

Britannicus

Statue of Agrippina the Younger, in the Capitoline Museum, Rome

Agrippina the Younger

The Emperor Nero

The Death of Agrippina

WOMEN OF THE CAESARS

I

WOMAN AND MARRIAGE IN ANCIENT ROME

"Many things that among the Greeks are considered improper andunfitting, " wrote Cornelius Nepos in the preface to his "Lives, " "arepermitted by our customs. Is there by chance a Roman who is ashamed totake his wife to a dinner away from home? Does it happen that themistress of the house in any family does not enter the anteroomsfrequented by strangers and show herself among them? Not so in Greece:there the woman accepts invitations only among families to which she isrelated, and she remains withdrawn in that inner part of the housewhich is called the _gynaeceum_, where only the nearest relatives areadmitted. "

This passage, one of the most significant in all the little work ofNepos, draws in a few, clear, telling strokes one of the most markeddistinctions between the Greco-Asiatic world and the Roman. Amongancient societies, the Roman was probably that in which, at least amongthe better classes, woman enjoyed the greatest social liberty and thegreatest legal and economic autonomy. There she most nearly approachedthat condition of moral and civil equality with man which makes her hiscomrade, and not his slave--that equality in which modern civilizationsees one of the supreme ends of moral progress. 

The doctrine held by some philosophers and sociologists, that militarypeoples subordinate woman to a tyrannical régime of domestic servitude, is wholly disproved by the history of Rome. If there was ever a timewhen the Roman woman lived in a state of perennial tutelage, under theauthority of man from birth to death--of the husband, if not of thefather, or, if not of father or husband, of the guardian--that timebelongs to remote antiquity. 

When Rome became the master state of the Mediterranean world, andespecially during the last century of the republic, woman, aside from afew slight limitations of form rather than of substance, had alreadyacquired legal and economic independence, the condition necessary forsocial and moral equality. As to marriage, the affianced pair could atthat time choose between two different legal family régimes: marriagewith _manus_, the older form, in which all the goods of the wife passedto the ownership of the husband, so that she could no longer possessanything in her own name; or marriage without _manus_, in which onlythe dower became the property of the husband, and the wife remainedmistress of all her other belongings and all that she might acquire. Except in some cases, and for special reasons, in all the families ofthe aristocracy, by common consent, marriages, during the lastcenturies of the republic, were contracted in the later form; so thatat that time married women directly and openly had gained economicindependence. 

During the same period, indirectly, and by means of juridical evasions, this independence was also won by unmarried women, who, according toancient laws, ought to have remained all their lives under a guardian, either selected by the father in his will or appointed by the law indefault of such selection. To get around this difficulty, the fertileand subtle imagination of the jurists invented first the _tutoroptivus_, permitting the father, instead of naming his daughter'sguardian in his will, to leave her free to choose one general guardianor several, according to the business in hand, or even to change thatofficial as many times as she wished. 

To give the woman means to change her legitimate guardian at pleasure, if her father had provided none by will, there was invented the _tutorcessicius_, thereby allowing the transmission of a legal guardianship. However, though all restrictions imposed upon the liberty of theunmarried woman by the institution of tutelage disappeared, onelimitation continued in force--she could not make a will. Yet eventhis was provided for, either by fictitious marriage or by theinvention of the _tutor fiduciarius_. The woman, without contractingmatrimony, gave herself by _coemptio_ (purchase) into the _manus_ of aperson of her trust, on the agreement that the _coemptionator_ wouldfree her: he became her guardian in the eyes of the law. 

[Illustration: A Roman marriage custom. The picture shows the brideentering her new home in the arms of the bridegroom. ]

There was, then, at the close of the republic little disparity in legalcondition between the man and the woman. As is natural, to this almostcomplete legal equality there was united an analogous moral and socialequality. The Romans never had the idea that between the _mundusmuliebris_ (woman's world) and that of men they must raise walls, digditches, put up barricades, either material or moral. They neverwilled, for example, to divide women from men by placing between themthe ditch of ignorance. To be sure, the Roman dames of high societywere for a long time little instructed, but this was because, moreover, the men distrusted Greek culture. When literature, science, andHellenic philosophy were admitted into the great Roman families asdesired and welcome guests, neither the authority, nor the egoism, noryet the prejudices of the men, sought to deprive women of the joy, thecomfort, the light, that might come to them from these new studies. Weknow that many ladies in the last two centuries of the republic notonly learned to dance and to sing, --common feminine studies, these, --but even learned Greek, loved literature, and dabbled inphilosophy, reading its books or meeting with the famous philosophersof the Orient. 

Moreover, in the home the woman was mistress, at the side of and onequality with her husband. The passage I have quoted from Nepos provesthat she was not segregated, like the Greek woman: she received andenjoyed the friends of her husband, was present with them at festivalsand banquets in the houses of families with whom she had friendlyrelations, although at such banquets she might not, like the man, recline, but must, for the sake of greater modesty, sit at table. Inshort, she was not, like the Greek woman, shut up at home, a veritableprisoner. 

She might go out freely; this she did generally in a litter. She wasnever excluded from theaters, even though the Roman government tried asbest it could for a long period to temper in its people the passion forspectacular entertainments. She could frequent public places and haverecourse directly to the magistrates. We have record of the assemblingand of demonstrations made by the richest women of Rome in the Forumand other public places, to obtain laws and other provisions from themagistrates, like that famous demonstration of women that Livydescribes as having occurred in the year 195 B. C. , to secure theabolition of the Oppian Law against luxury. 

What more? We have good reason for holding that already under therepublic there existed at Rome a kind of woman's club, which calleditself _conventus matronarum_ and gathered together the dames of thegreat families. Finally, it is certain that many times in criticalmoments the government turned directly and officially to the greatladies of Rome for help to overcome the dangers that menaced publicaffairs, by collecting money, or imploring with solemn religiousceremonies the favor of the gods. 

One understands then, how at all times there were at Rome women muchinterested in public affairs. The fortunes of the powerful families, their glory, their dominance, their wealth, depended on thevicissitudes of politics and of war. The heads of these families wereall statesmen, diplomats, warriors; the more intelligent and cultivatedthe wife, and the fonder she was of her husband, the intenser theabsorption with which she must have followed the fortunes of politics, domestic and foreign; for with these were bound up many familyinterests, and often even the life of her husband. 

[Illustration: Eumachia, a public priestess of ancient Rome. ]

Was the Roman family, then, the reader will demand at this point, ineverything like the family of contemporary civilization? Have wereturned upon the long trail to the point reached by our far-awayforebears?

No. If there are resemblances between the modern family and the Roman, there are also crucial differences. Although the Roman was disposed toallow woman judicial and economic independence, a refined culture, andthat freedom without which it is impossible to enjoy life in dignifiedand noble fashion, he was never ready to recognize in the way moderncivilization does more or less openly, as ultimate end and reason formarriage, either the personal happiness of the contracting parties ortheir common personal moral development in the unifying of theircharacters and aspirations. The individualistic conception ofmatrimony and of the family attained by our civilization was alien tothe Roman mind, which conceived of these from an essentially politicaland social point of view. The purpose of marriage was, so to speak, exterior to the pair. As untouched by any spark of the metaphysicalspirit as he was unyielding--at least in action--to every suggestion ofthe philosophic; preoccupied only in enlarging and consolidating thestate of which he was master, the Roman aristocrat never regardedmatrimony and the family, just as he never regarded religion and law, as other than instruments for political domination, as means forincreasing and establishing the power of every great family, and byfamily affiliations to strengthen the association of the aristocracy, already bound together by political interest. 

For this reason, although the Roman conceded many privileges andrecognized many rights among women, he never went so far as to thinkthat a woman of great family could aspire to the right of choosing herown husband. Custom, indeed, much restricted the young man also, atleast in a first marriage. The choice rested with the fathers, whowere accustomed to affiance their sons early, indeed when mere boys. The heads of two friendly families would find themselves daily togetherin the struggle of the Forum and the Comitia, or in the deliberationsof the Senate. Did the idea occur to both that their children, ifaffianced then, at seven or eight years of age, might cement moreclosely the union of the two families, then straightway the matter wasdefinitely arranged. The little girl was brought up with the idea thatsome day, as soon as might be, she should marry that boy, just as fortwo centuries in the famous houses of Catholic countries many of thedaughters were brought up in the expectation that one day they shouldtake the veil. 

Every one held this Roman practice as reasonable, useful, equitable; tono one did the idea occur that by it violence was done to the mostintimate sentiment of liberty and independence that a human being canknow. On the contrary, according to the common judgment, thewell-governing of the state was being wisely provided for, and thesealliances were destroying the seeds of discord that spontaneouslygerminate in aristocracy and little by little destroy it, like thoseplants sown by no man's hand, which thrive upon old walls and becometheir ruin. 

This is why one knows of every famous Roman personage how many wives hehad and of what family they were. The marriage of a Roman noble was apolitical act, and noteworthy; because a youth, or even a mature man, connecting himself with certain families, came to assume more or lessfully the political responsibilities in which, for one cause oranother, they were involved. This was particularly true in the lastcenturies of the republic, --that is, beginning from the Gracchi, --whenfor the various reasons which I have set forth in my "Greatness andDecline of Rome, " the Roman aristocracy divided into two inimicalparties, one of which attempted to rouse against the other theinterests, the ambitions, and the cupidity, of the middle and lowerclasses. The two parties then sought to reinforce themselves bymatrimonial alliances, and these followed the ups and downs of thepolitical struggle that covered Rome with blood. Of this fact thestory of Julius Caesar is a most curious proof. 

The prime reason for Julius Caesar's becoming the chief of the popularparty is to be found neither in his ambitions nor in his temperament, and even less in his political opinions, but in his relationship toMarius. An aunt of Caesar had married Caius Marius, the modestbankrupt farmer of revenues, who, having entered politics, had becomethe first general of his time, had been elected consul six times, andhad conquered Jugurtha, the Cimbri, and the Teutons. The self-made manhad become famous and rich, and in the face of an aristocracy proud ofits ancestors, had tried to ennoble his obscure origin by taking hiswife from an ancient and most noble, albeit impoverished and decayed, patrician family. 

But when there broke out the revolution in which Marius placed himselfat the head of the popular party, and the revolution was overcome bySulla, the old aristocracy, which had conquered with Sulla, did notforgive the patrician family of the Julii for having connected itselfwith that bitter foe, who had made so much mischief. Consequently, during the period of the reaction, all its members were looked uponaskance, and were suspected and persecuted, among them young Caesar, who was in no way responsible for the deeds of his uncle, since he wasonly a lad during the war between Sulla and Marius. 

This explains how it was that the first wife of Caesar, Cossutia, wasthe daughter of a knight; that is, of a financier and revenue-farmer. For a young man belonging to a family of ancient senatorial nobility, this marriage was little short of a _mésalliance_; but Caesar had beenengaged to this girl when still a very young man, at the time when, thealliance between Marius and the knights being still firm and strong, the marriage of a rich knight's daughter would mean to the nephew ofMarius, not only a considerable fortune, but also the support of thesocial class which at that moment was predominant. For reasons unknownto us, Caesar soon repudiated Cossutia, and before the downfall of thedemocratic party he was married to Cornelia, who was the daughter ofCinna, the democratic consul and a most distinguished member of theparty of Marius. This second marriage, the causes of which must besought for in the political status of Caesar's family, was the cause ofhis first political reverses. For Sulla tried to force Caesar torepudiate Cornelia, and in consequence of his refusal, he came to beconsidered an enemy by Sulla and his party and was treated accordingly. 

[Illustration: The Forum under the Caesars. ]

It is known that Cornelia died when still very young, after only a fewyears of married life, and that Caesar's third marriage in the year 68B. C. , was quite different from his first and second, since the thirdwife, Pompeia, belonged to one of the noblest families of theconservative aristocracy--was, in fact, a niece of Sulla. How couldthe nephew of Marius, who had escaped as by miracle the proscriptionsof Sulla, ever have married the latter's niece? Because in the dozenyears intervening between 80 and 68, the political situation hadgradually grown calmer, and a new air of conciliation had begun to blowthrough the city, troubled by so much confusion, burying in oblivionthe bloodiest records of the civil war, calling into fresh lifeadmiration for Marius, that hero who had conquered the Cimbri and theTeutons. In that moment, to be a nephew of Marius was no longer acrime among any of the great families; for some, on the contrary, itwas coming to be the beginning of glory. But that situation wasshort-lived. After a brief truce, the two parties again took up abitter war, and for his fourth wife Caesar chose Calpurnia, thedaughter of Lucius Calpurnius Piso, consul in 58, and a mostinfluential senator of the popular party. 

Whoever studies the history of the influential personages of Caesar'stime, will find that their marriages follow the fortunes of thepolitical situation. Where a purely political reason was wanting, there was the economic. A woman could aid powerfully a politicalcareer in two ways: by ably administering the household and bycontributing to its expenses her dower or her personal fortune. Although the Romans gave their daughters an education relativelyadvanced, they never forgot to inculcate in them the idea that it wasthe duty of a woman, especially if she was nobly born, to know all thearts of good housewifery, and especially, as most important, spinningand weaving. The reason for this lay in the fact that for thearistocratic families, who were in possession of vast lands and manyflocks, it was easy to provide themselves from their own estates withthe wool necessary to clothe all their household, from masters to thenumerous retinue of slaves. If the _materfamilias_ knew sufficientlywell the arts of spinning and weaving to be able to organize in thehome a small "factory" of slaves engaged in such tasks, and knew how todirect and survey them, to make them work with zeal and without theft, she could provide the clothing for the whole household, thus saving theheavy expense of buying the stuffs from a merchant--notable economy intimes when money was scarce and every family tried to make as littleuse of it as possible. The _materfamilias_ held, then, in every home, a prime industrial office, that of clothing the entire household, andin proportion to her usefulness in this office was she able to aid orinjure the family. 

More important still were the woman's dower and her personal fortune. The Romans not only considered it perfectly honorable, sagacious, andpraiseworthy for a member of the political aristocracy to marry a richwoman for her wealth, the better to maintain the luster of his rank, orthe more easily to fulfil his particular political and social duties, but they also believed there could be no better luck or greater honorfor a rich woman than for this reason to marry a prominent man. Theyexacted only that she be of respectable habits, and even in this regardit appears that, during certain tumultuous periods, they sometimes shutone eye. 

Tradition says, for example, that Sulla, born of a noble family, quitein ruin, owed his money to the bequest of a Greek woman whose wealthhad the most impure origin that the possessions of a woman can possiblyhave. Is this tradition only the invention of the enemies of theterrible dictator? In any event, how people of good standing felt inthis matter in normal times is shown by the life of Cicero. 

Cicero was born at Arpino, of a knightly family, highly respectable, and well educated, but not rich. That he was able to pursue hisbrilliant forensic and political career, was chiefly due to hismarriage to Terentia, who, although not very rich, had more than he, and by her fortune enabled him to live at Rome. But it is well knownthat after long living together happily enough, as far as can bejudged, Cicero and Terentia, already old, fell into discord and in 46B. C. Ended by being divorced. The reasons for the divorce are notexactly clear, but from Cicero's letters it appears that financialmotives and disputes were not wanting. It seems that during the civilwars Terentia refused to help Cicero with her money to the extent hedesired; that is to say, at some tremendous moment of those turbulentyears she was unwilling to risk all her patrimony on the uncertainpolitical fortune of her husband. 

[Illustration: The so-called bust of Cicero. All but the head ismodern. Now in the Museo Capitolino, it was formerly in the PalazzoBarberini. ]

Cicero's divorce, obliging him to return the dower, reduced him to thegravest straits, from which he emerged through another marriage. Hewas the guardian of an exceedingly rich young woman, named Publilia, and one fine day, at the age of sixty-three, he joined hands with thisseventeen-year-old girl, whose possessions were to rehabilitate thegreat writer. 

This conception of matrimony and of the family may seem unromantic, prosaic, materialistic; but we must not suppose that because of it theRomans failed to experience the tenderest and sweetest affections ofthe human heart. The letters of Cicero himself show how tenderly evenRomans could love wife and children. Although they distrusted andcombatted as dangerous to the prosperity and well-being of the statethose dearest and gentlest personal affections that in our timesliterature, music, religion, philosophy, and custom have educated, encouraged, and exalted, as one of the supreme fountains of civil life, should we therefore reckon them barbarians? We must not forget thegreat diversity between our times and theirs. The confidence whichmodern men repose in love as a principle, in its ultimate wisdom, inits beneficial influence or the affairs of the world; in the idea thatevery man has the right to choose for himself the person of theopposite sex toward whom the liveliest and strongest personalattraction impels him--these are the supreme blossoms of modernindividualism, the roots of which have been able to fasten only in therich soil of modern civilization. 

The great ease of living that we now enjoy, the lofty intellectualdevelopment of our day, permit us to relax the severe discipline thatpoorer times and peoples, constrained to lead a harder life, had toimpose upon themselves. Although the habit may seem hard andbarbarous, certainly almost all the great peoples of the past, and themajority of those contemporary who live outside our civilization, haveconceived and practised matrimony not as a right of sentiment, but as aduty of reason. To fulfil it, the young have turned to the sagacity ofthe aged, and these have endeavored to promote the success of marriagenot merely to the satisfaction of a single passion, usually as brief asit is ardent, but according to a calculated equilibrium of qualities, tendencies, and material means. 

The principles regulating Roman marriage may seem to us at variancewith human nature, but they are the principles to which all peopleswishing to trust the establishment of the family not to passion asmobile as the sea, but to reason, have had recourse in times when thefamily was an organism far more essential than it is to-day, because itheld within itself many functions, educational, industrial, andpolitical, now performed by other institutions. But reason itself isnot perfect. Like passion, it has its weakness, and marriage soconceived by Rome produced grave inconveniences, which one must know inorder to understand the story, in many respects tragic, of the women ofthe Caesars. 

The first difficulty was the early age at which marriages took placeamong the aristocracy. The boys were almost always married at fromeighteen to twenty; the girls, at from thirteen to fifteen. Thisdisadvantage is to be found in all society in which marriage isarranged by the parents, because it would be next to impossible toinduce young people to yield to the will of their elders in an affairin which the passions are readily aroused if they were allowed to reachthe age when the passions are strongest and the will has becomeindependent Hardly out of childhood, the man and the woman arenaturally more tractable. On the other hand, it is easy to see howmany dangers threatened such youthful marriages in a society wherematrimony gave to the woman wide liberty, placing her in contact withother men, opening to her the doors of theaters and public resorts, leading her into the midst of all the temptations and illusions of life. 

The other serious disadvantage was the facility of divorce. For thevery reason that matrimony was for the nobility a political act, theRomans were never willing to allow that it could be indissoluble;indeed, even when the woman was in no sense culpable, they reserved tothe man the right of undoing it at any time he wished, solely becausethat particular marriage did not suit his political interests. And themarriage could be dissolved by the most expeditious means, withoutformality--by a mere letter! Nor was that enough. Fearing that lovemight outweigh reason and calculation in the young, the law granted tothe father the right to give notice of divorce to the daughter-in-law, instead of leaving it to the son; so that the father was able to makeand unmake the marriages of his sons, as he thought useful and fitting, without taking their will into account. 

The woman, therefore, although in the home she was of sovereignequality with the man and enjoyed a position full of honor, was, notwithstanding, never sure of the future. Neither the affection ofher husband nor the stainlessness of her life could insure that sheshould close her days in the house whither she had come in her youth asa bride. At any hour the fatalities of politics could, I will not say, drive her forth, but gently invite her exit from the house where herchildren were born. An ordinary letter was enough to annul a marriage. So it was that, particularly in the age of Caesar when politics weremuch perturbed and shifting, there were not a few women of thearistocracy who had changed husbands three or four times, and that notfor lightness or caprice or inconstancy of tastes, but because theirfathers, their brothers, sometimes their sons, had at a certain momentbesought or constrained them to contract some particular marriage thatshould serve their own political ends. 

It is easy to comprehend how this precariousness discouraged woman fromaustere and rigorous virtues, the very foundation of the family; how itwas a continuous incitement to frivolity of character, to dissipation, to infidelity. Consequently, the liberty the Romans allowed her musthave been much more dangerous than the greater freedom she enjoystoday, since it lacked its modern checks and balances, such as personalchoice in marriage, the relatively mature age at which marriages arenowadays made, the indissolubility of the matrimonial contract, or, rather, the many and diverse restrictions placed upon divorce, by whichit is no longer left to the arbitrary will or the mere fancy of the man. 

In brief, there was in the constitution of the Roman family acontradiction, which must be well apprehended if one would understandthe history of the great ladies of the imperial era. Rome desiredwoman in marriage to be the pliable instrument of the interests of thefamily and the state, but did not place her under the despotism ofcustoms, of law, and of the will of man in the way done by all otherstates that have exacted from her complete self-abnegation. Instead, it accorded to her almost wholly that liberty, granted with littledanger by civilizations like ours, in which she may live not only forthe family, for the state, for the race, but also for herself. Romewas unwilling to treat her as did the Greek and Asiatic world, but itdid not on this account give up requiring of her the same totalself-abnegation for the public weal, the utter obliviousness to her ownaspirations and passions, in behalf of the race. 

[Illustration: Julius Caesar]

This contradiction explains to us one of the fundamental phenomena ofthe history of Rome--the deep, tenacious, age-long puritanism of highRoman society. Puritanism was the chief expedient by which Romeattempted to solve the contradiction. That coercion which the Orientalworld had tried to exercise upon woman by segregating her, keeping herignorant, terrorizing her with threats and punishments, Rome sought tosecure by training. It inculcated in every way by means of education, religion, and opinion the idea that she should be pious, chaste, faithful, devoted alone to her husband and children; that luxury, prodigality, dissoluteness, were horrible vices, the infamy of whichhopelessly degraded all that was best and purest in woman. It tried toprotect the minds of both men and women from all those influences ofart, literature, and religion which might tend to arouse the personalinstinct and the longing for love; and for a long time it distrusted, withstood, and almost sought to disguise the mythology, the arts, andthe literature of Greece, as well as many of the Asiatic religions, imbued as they were with an erotic spirit of subtle enticement. Puritanism is essentially an intense effort to rouse in the mind theliveliest repulsion for certain vices and pleasures, and a violentdread of them; and Rome made use of it to check and counterbalance theliberty of woman, to impede and render more difficult the abuses ofsuch liberty, particularly prodigality and dissoluteness. 

It is therefore easy to understand how this puritanism was a thingserious, weighty, and terrible, in Roman life; and how from it could beborn the tragedies we have to recount. It was the chief means ofsolving one of the gravest problems that has perplexed allcivilizations--the problem of woman and her freedom, a problem earnest, difficult, and complex which springs up everywhere out of theunobstructed anarchy and the tremendous material prosperity of themodern world. And the difficulty of the problem consists, above all, in this: that, although it is a hard, cruel, plainly iniquitous thingto deprive a woman of liberty and subject her to a régime of tyranny inorder to constrain her to live for the race and not for herself, yetwhen liberty is granted her to live for herself, to satisfy herpersonal desires, she abuses that liberty more readily than a man does, and more than a man forgets her duties toward the race. 

She abuses it more readily for two reasons: because she exercises agreater power over man than he over her; and because, in the wealthierclasses, she is freer from the political and economic responsibilitiesthat bind the man. However unbridled the freedom that man enjoys, however vast his egoism, he is always constrained in a certain measureto check his selfish instincts by the need of conserving, enlarging, and defending against rivals his social, economic, and politicalsituation. 

But the woman? If she is freed from family cares, if she is authorizedto live for her own gratification and for her beauty; if the opinionthat imposes upon her, on pain of infamy, habits pure and honest, weakens; if, instead of infamy, dissoluteness brings her glory, riches, homage, what trammel can still restrain in her the selfish instinctslatent in every human being? She runs the mighty danger of changinginto an irresponsible being who will be the more admired and courtedand possessed of power--at least as long as her beauty lasts--the moreshe ignores every duty, subordinating all good sense to her ownpleasure. 

This is the reason why woman, in periods commanded by strong socialdiscipline, is the most beneficent and tenacious among the cohesiveforces of a nation; and why, in times when social discipline isrelaxed, she is, instead, through ruinous luxury, dissipation, andvoluntary sterility, the most terrible force for dissolution. 

[Illustration: The sister of M. Nonius Balbus. ]

One of the greatest problems of every epoch and all civilizations is tofind a balance between the natural aspiration for freedom that is noneother than the need of personal felicity--a need as lively and profoundin the heart of woman as of man--and the supreme necessity for adiscipline without which the race, the state, and the family run thegravest danger. Yet this problem to-day, in the unmeasuredexhilaration with which riches and power intoxicate theEuropean-American civilization, is considered with the superficialfrivolity and the voluble dilettantism that despoil or confuse all thegreat problems of esthetics, philosophy, statesmanship, and morality. We live in the midst of what might be called the Saturnalia of theworld's history; and in the midst of the swift and easy labor, theinebriety of our continual festivities, we feel no more the tragic inlife. This short history of the women of the Caesars will set beforethe eyes of this pleasure-loving contemporary age tragedies among whoseruins our ancestors lived from birth to death, and by which theytempered their minds. 

II

LIVIA AND JULIA

In the year 38 B. C. It suddenly became known at Rome that C. JuliusCaesar Octavianus (afterward the Emperor Augustus), one of thetriumvirs of the republic, and colleague of Mark Antony and Lepidus inthe military dictatorship established after the death of Caesar, hadsent up for decision to the pontifical college, the highest religiousauthority of the state, a curious question. It was this: Might adivorced woman who was expecting to become a mother contract a marriagewith another man before the birth of her child? The pontifical collegereplied that if there still was doubt about the fact the new marriagewould not be permissible; but if it was certain, there would be noimpediment. A few days later, it was learned that Octavianus haddivorced his wife Scribonia and had married Livia, a young woman ofnineteen. Livia's physical condition was precisely that concerningwhich the pontiffs had been asked to decide, and in order to enter intothis marriage she had obtained a divorce from Tiberius Claudius Nero. 

The two divorces and the new marriage were concluded with unwontedhaste. The first husband of Livia, acting the part of a father, gaveher a dowry for her new alliance and was present at the wedding. ThusLivia suddenly passed into the house of her new husband where, threemonths later, she gave birth to a son, who was called Drusus ClaudiusNero. This child Octavianus immediately sent to the house of itsfather. 

To us, marriage customs of this sort seem brutal, shameless, and almostridiculous. We should infer that a woman who lent herself to suchbarter and exchange must be a person of light manners and of immoralinclinations. At Rome, however, no one would have been amazed at sucha marriage or at the procedure adopted, had it not been for theextraordinary haste, which seemed to indicate that it was undesirableor impossible to wait until Livia should have given birth to her child, and which made it necessary to trouble the pontifical college for itssomewhat sophistical consent. For all were accustomed to seeing themarriages of great personages made and unmade in this manner and onsuch bases. Why, then, were these nuptials so precipitately concluded, apparently with the consent of all concerned? Why did they all, Liviaand Octavianus not less than Tiberius Claudius Nero, seem so impatientthat everything should be settled with despatch?

[Illustration: Livia, the mother of Tiberius, in the costume of apriestess. ]

The legend which then formed about the family of Augustus, a legendhostile at almost every point, has interpreted this marriage as atyrannical act, virtually an abduction, by the dissolute and perversetriumvir. I, too, in my "Greatness and Decline of Rome" expressed mybelief that this haste, at least, was the effect not of politicalmotives but of a passionate love inspired in the young triumvir by thevery beautiful Livia. A longer reflection upon this episode haspersuaded me, however, that there is another manner, less poeticperhaps, but more Roman, of explaining, at least in part, this famousalliance, which was to have so great an importance in the history ofRome. 

To arrive at the motives of this marriage we must consider who wasLivia and who was Octavianus. Livia was a woman of great beauty, asher portraits prove. But this was not all. She belonged also to twoof the most ancient and conspicuous families of the Roman nobility. Her father, Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus, was by birth a Claudius, adopted by a Livius Drusus. He was descended from Appius the Blind, the famous censor and perhaps the most illustrious personage of theancient republic. His grandfather, his great-grand-father, and hisgreat-great-grandfather had been consuls, and consuls and censors maybe found in the collateral branches of the family. A sister of hisgrandfather had been the wife of Tiberius Gracchus; a cousin of hisfather had married Lucullus, the great general. He came, therefore, ofone of the most ancient and glorious families. Not less noble was thefamily of the Livii Drusi who had adopted him. It counted eightconsulships, two censorships, three triumphs, and one dictatorship. Thus the father of Livia belonged by birth and adoption to two of thoseancient, aristocratic families which for a long time and even in themidst of the most tremendous revolutions the people had venerated assemi-divine and into whose story was interwoven the history of thegreat republic. Nor had the first husband given to Livia been lessnoble, for Tiberius Claudius Nero was descended like Livia from Appiusthe Blind, though through another son of the great censor. In Liviawas concentrated the quintessence of the great Roman aristocracy: shewas at Rome what in London to-day the daughter of the Duke ofWestminster or the Duke of Bedford would be, and her noble rankexplains the rôle which her family had played during the Civil War. Inthe great revolution which broke out after the death of Caesar, thefather of Livia in the year 43 had been proscribed by the triumvirs; hehad fought with Brutus and Cassius and had died by his own hand afterPhilippi. In 40, after the Perusinian war and only two years beforeLivia's marriage with Octavianus, Tiberius Claudius Nero and Livia hadbeen forced to flee from Italy in fear of the vengeance of Octavianus. 

Who on the other hand was Octavianus? A parvenu, with a nobilityaltogether too recent! His grandfather was a rich usurer of Velitrae(now Velletri), a financier and a man of affairs; it was only hisimmediate father who succeeded by dint of the riches of the usurergrandfather in entering the Roman nobility. He had married a sister ofCaesar and, though still young when he died, had become a senator andpretor. Octavianus was, therefore, the descendant, as we shouldexpress it in Europe to-day, of rich bourgeois recently ennobled. Although by adopting him in his will Caesar had given him his name, that of an ancient patrician family, the modest origin of Octavianusand the trade of his grandfather were known to everybody. In a countrylike Rome where, notwithstanding revolutions, the old nobility wasstill highly venerated by the people and formed a closed caste, jealousof its exclusive pride of ancestry, this obscurity of origin was ahandicap and a danger, especially when Octavianus had as colleaguesAntony and Lepidus, who could boast a much more ancient and illustriousorigin than his own. 

We can readily explain, therefore, even without admitting that Liviahad aroused in him a violent passion, why the future Augustus shouldhave been so impatient to marry her in 38 B. C. The times were stormyand uncertain; the youthful triumvir, whom a caprice of fortune hadraised to the head of a revolutionary dictatorship, was certainly theweakest of the three colleagues, because of his youth, his slighterexperience, the feebler prestige among his soldiers, and, last of all, the greater obscurity of his lineage. Antony, especially, who hadfought in so many wars, with Caesar and alone, who belonged to a familyof really ancient nobility, was much more popular than he among thesoldiers and had stronger relations with the great families. He wastherefore more powerful than Octavianus both in high places and in low. A marriage with Livia meant much to the future Augustus. It would openfor him a door into the old aristocracy; it would draw him closer tothose families which, in spite of the revolution, were still soinfluential and venerable; it would be the means of lessening thehatred, contempt, and distrust in which these families held him. Itwas for him what Napoleon's marriage with Marie Louise and theconsequent connection with the imperial family of Austria had been forthe former Corsican officer, become Emperor of the French. Since, now, a lady who belonged to one of these great families was disposed tomarry him, it would have been foolish to put obstacles in the way; itwas necessary to act with despatch; time and fortune might change. 

Such are the motives that may have induced Augustus to hasten thenuptials. But what were the motives of Livia in accepting thismarriage, in such stormy times, when the fortunes of the futureAugustus were still so uncertain? A passage in Velleius Paterculuswould lead us to believe that he who devised this historic marriage wasnone other than that same first husband of Livia, Tiberius ClaudiusNero himself! According to our ideas it is inconceivable; but not atall strange according to the ideas of the Roman. It is probable thatTiberius Claudius Nero, feeling that the triumph of the revolution wasnow assured, had wished by this marriage to attach to the cause of theold aristocracy the youngest of the three revolutionary leaders. Already well along in years and infirm, --he was to die shortlyafter, --Nero, who well knew the intelligence of his young wife, wasperhaps planning to place her in the house of the man in whom all sawone of the future lords of Rome. Thus he would bind him to theinterests of the aristocracy. In the person of Livia there enteredinto the house of Octavianus the old Roman nobility, which, defeated atPhilippi, was striving to reacquire through the prestige and thecleverness of a woman what it had not been able to maintain by arms. 

All her life long, with constancy, moderation, and wonderful tact, Livia fulfilled her mission. She succeeded in resolving into theadmirable harmony of a long existence that contradiction between theliberty conceded to her sex and the self-denial demanded of it by manas a duty. She was assuredly one of the most perfect models of thatlady of high society whom the Romans in all the years of their long andtempestuous history never ceased to admire. Even and serene, completely mistress of herself and of her passions, endowed with arobust will, she accommodated herself without difficulty to all thesacrifices which her rank and situation imposed upon her. She changedhusbands without repugnance, though her marriage to Octavianus occurredbut five years after the proscriptions, while he was still red with theblood of her family and friends. Likewise she renounced her two sons, the future emperor Tiberius, who had been born before her secondmarriage, as well as the one who had been born after. So too when, afew years later, Tiberius Claudius Nero died, appointing Augustus theirguardian, with equal serenity she took them back and educated them withthe most careful motherly solicitude. To the second husband, whompolitics had given her, she was a faithful companion. Scandal imputedto her absurd poisonings which she did not commit, and accused her ofinsatiable ambitions and perfidious intrigues. No one ever daredaccuse her of infidelity to Augustus or of dissolute conduct. Thegreat fame, power, and wealth of her husband did not disturb the calmpoise of her spirit. In that palace of Augustus, adorned withtriumphal laurel, toward which the eyes of the subjects were turnedfrom every part of the empire, in that palace where, in little councilswith the most eminent men of the senate, were debated the supremeinterests of the world, --laws and elections, wars and peace, --shepreserved the beautiful traditions of simplicity and industry. Theseshe had learned as a child in the house of her father, --a house as muchmore illustrious with inherited glory as it was poorer in wealth thanthat which Victory had prepared for Augustus on the Palatine. 

[Illustration: The young Augustus. ]

We know--it is Suetonius who tells us--that this house on the Palatinebuilt by Augustus, in which Livia spent the larger part of her life, was small and not at all luxurious. In it there was not a single pieceof marble nor a precious mosaic; for forty years Augustus slept in thesame bedchamber, and the furniture of the house was so simple that inthe second century of our era it was exhibited to the public as anextraordinary curiosity. The imperial pair had several villas, atLanuvium, at Palestrina, at Tivoli, but all of them were unpretentiousand simple. Nor was there any more pomp and ceremony about the dinnersto which they invited the conspicuous personages of Rome, thedignitaries of the state and the heads of the great families. Only onvery special occasions were six courses served; usually there were butthree. Moreover, Augustus never wore any other togas than those wovenby Livia; woven not indeed and altogether by Livia's hands, --though shedid not disdain, now and then, to work the loom, --but by her slaves andfreed-women. Faithful to the traditions of the aristocracy, Liviacounted it among her duties personally to direct the weaving-roomswhich were in the house. As she carefully parceled out the wool to theslaves, watching over them lest they steal or waste it, and frequentlytaking her place among them while they were at work, she felt that shetoo contributed to the prosperity and the glory of the empire. 

Simplicity, loyalty, industry, an absolute surrender of one's ownpersonality to the family and its interests, --these, in the greatfamilies, were the traditional feminine virtues which lived again inLivia to the admiration of her contemporaries. But with these virtueswere associated also the need and the pride of participating in theaffairs and work of her husband, that interest in politics which hadbeen common to the intelligent women of the nobility. No one at Romewas astonished, especially in the upper classes, that Livia shouldoccupy herself actively with politics; that Augustus should frequentlycome to her for counsel, or that he should not make any seriousdecision without having consulted her; that, in short, she should atthe same time attend to her husband's clothes and aid him in governingthe empire. For so had done from time immemorial all the great ladiesof the aristocracy, mindful of their good repute and the prosperity oftheir families. And Livia must have tried the more earnestly to fulfilall that her education had taught her to consider a sacred duty, sinceto a woman of her old-fashioned breeding the times must have appearedespecially difficult and perilous. 

The civil wars had greatly reduced in numbers the historic aristocracyof Rome, and the peace which followed after so long a time and whichhad been so anxiously invoked, very soon began to threaten theprosperity of the remnant of that nobility with a more insidious butmore inevitable ruin. About 18 B. C. , when Livia was approaching herfortieth year, the men of the new generation who had not seen the civilwars, for when these ended they were either unborn or only in theirinfancy, were already beginning to come to the front. They broughtwith them a previously unknown spirit of luxury, of enjoyment, ofdissipation, of rebellion against discipline, of egotism and fondnessfor the new, which rendered very difficult, not to say impossible, thecontinuation of the aristocratic régime. Women submitted with more andmore repugnance to those obligatory marriages, arranged for reasons ofstate, which had formerly been the tradition and the sure bulwark ofdominion for the aristocracy. The increase of celibacy was renderingsterile the most celebrated stocks; the most lamentable vices anddisorders became tolerated and common in the most illustrious families, and ruinous habits of extravagance spread generally among thataristocracy, once so simple and austere. All this had grown up afterthe conquest of Egypt, which had established more points of contactwith the East; and it increased in proportion as those industries andthe commerce in articles of luxury which had flourished at Alexandriaunder the Ptolemies were gradually transplanted to Rome, where themerchants hoped to establish among their conquerors the clientele whichhad been lost with the fall of the Kingdom of the Nile. The ladiesespecially took up with the new oriental customs, and, preferringexpensive stuffs and jewels, turned from the loom, which Livia hadwished to preserve as the emblem of womanhood. Many young men of thegreat families were beginning to show a distaste for the army, for thegovernment of the state, for jurisprudence, for all those activitieswhich had been the jealous privilege of the nobility of the past. Onegave himself up to literary pursuits, another cultivated philosophy, another busied himself only with the increase of his inherited fortune, while another lived only in pleasure and idleness. So it happened thatthere began to appear descendants of great houses who refused to besenators; every year an effort had to be made to find a sufficientnumber of candidates for the more numerous positions like thequestorship, and in the army it was no easy matter to fill all theposts of the superior officers which were reserved for members of thenobility. 

[Illustration: The Emperor Augustus. This statue was found in 1910 inthe Via Labicana, not far from the Colosseum. ]

The Roman aristocracy then, that glorious Roman aristocracy which hadescaped the massacres of the proscriptions and of Philippi, ran gravedanger of dying out through a species of slow suicide, if energeticmeasures were not taken to supply the necessary remedies. It iscertain that Livia had a conspicuous part in the policy of restoringthe aristocracy, to which Augustus was impelled by the old nobility, especially toward the year 18 B. C. , when with this purpose in view heproposed his famous social laws. The _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_attempted by various penalties and promises to constrain the members ofthe aristocracy to contract marriage and to found a family, thuscombatting the increasing inclination to celibacy and sterility. The_Lex de adulteriis_ aimed to reestablish order and virtue in thefamily, by threatening the unfaithful wife and her accomplice withexile for life and the confiscation of a part of their substance. Itobliged the husband to expose the crime to the tribunals; if thehusband could not or would not make the accusation, it provided thatthe father should do so; and in case both husband and father failed, itauthorized any citizen to step forth as accuser. Finally the _Lexsumptuaria_ was designed to restrain the extravagance of wealthyfamilies, particularly that of the women, prohibiting them fromspending too large a part of the family fortune in jewels, apparel, body slaves, festivities, or buildings, especially in the building ofsumptuous villas, then a growing fashion. In short, it was the purposeof these laws to bring the ladies of the Roman aristocracy to a courseof conduct patterned upon the example of Livia. In the protracteddiscussions concerning these laws, which took place in the senate, Augustus on one occasion made a long speech in which he cited Livia asa model for the ladies of Rome. He set forth minutely the details ofher household administration, telling how she lived, what relations shehad with outsiders, what amusements she thought proper for a person ofher rank, how she dressed and at what expense. And no one in thesenate judged it unworthy of the greatness of the state or contrary tocustom thus to introduce the name and person of a great lady into thepublic discussion of so serious a matter of governmental policy. 

Livia, then, about 18 B. C. Personified in the eyes of the Romans theperfect type of aristocratic great lady created by long tradition. Having been safely preserved by good fortune through the long civilwars, this model was now set back again upon a fitting pedestal in themost powerful and richest family of the empire. She was the livingexample of all the virtues which the Romans most cherished, a belovedwife and a heeded counselor to the head of the state, honored with thatveneration which power, virtue, nobility of birth, and the dignifiedbeauty of face and figure drew from every one; furthermore, there wereher two sons, Tiberius and Drusus, both intelligent, handsome, full ofactivity, docile to the traditional education which she sought to givethem in order that they might be the worthy continuators of the greatname they bore. Livia, with all this in her favor, might have beenexpected to live a happy and tranquil life, serenely to fulfil hermission amid the admiration of the world. 

[Illustration: A silver denarius of the Second Triumvirate. Theportrait at the right (obverse) is of Caesar Octavianus (Augustus), with a slight beard to indicate mourning, and at the left (reverse), ofMark Antony. The date is 41 B. C. ]

[Illustration: Silver coin bearing the head of Julius Caesar. Thiscoin, a denarius, worth about seventeen cents, represents Caesar asPontifex Maximus. Together with all the other Roman coins bearingCaesar's image, it was struck in the year before his death--44-45 B. C. The fact that Caesar placed his image on these coins may havestrengthened the suspicion of his enemies that he wished to makehimself king. ]

But opposition and difficulties sprang up in her own family. In 39B. C. Augustus had had by Scribonia a daughter, Julia. Following in thegovernment of his family, as in so large a part of his politics, thetraditions of the old nobility, Augustus gave his daughter in marriagewhen very young, --she was not yet past seventeen, --just as he earlygave wives to Livia's two sons, whose guardian he was. In each case inorder to assure within his circle harmony and power, he chose theconsort in his own family or from among his friends. To Tiberius hegave Agrippina, a daughter of Agrippa, his close friend and mostfaithful collaborator; to Drusus he gave Antonia, the younger daughterof Mark Antony and Octavia, sister of Augustus. To Julia he gaveMarcellus, his nephew, the son of Octavia and her first husband. Butwhile the marriages of Drusus and Tiberius proved successful and thetwo couples lived lovingly and happily, such was not the case with themarriage of Julia and Marcellus. As a result, disagreeablemisunderstandings and rancors soon made themselves felt in the family. We do not know exactly what were the causes of these disagreements. Itseems that Marcellus, under the influence of Julia, assumed a tonesomewhat too haughty and insolent, such as was not becoming in a youthwho, although the nephew of Augustus, was still taking his first stepsin his political career; and it seems too that this conduct of his wasespecially offensive to Agrippa, who, next to Augustus, was the firstperson in the empire. 

In short, at seventeen, Julia desired that her husband should be thesecond personage of the state in order that she might come immediatelyafter Livia or even be placed directly on an equality with her. According to the Roman ideas of the family and of its discipline, thiswas a precocious and excessive ambition, unbecoming a matron, much lessa young girl. For the duty of the woman was to follow faithfully andsubmissively the ambitions of her lord and not to impart to him her ownambitions or make him her tool. In contrast to Livia, who was sodocile and placid in her respect for the older traditions of thearistocracy, so firm and strong in her observance of the duties, notinfrequently grievous and difficult, which this tradition imposed, Julia represented the woman of that new generation which had grown upin the times of peace--a type more rebellious against tradition, lessresigned to the serious duties and difficult renunciations of rank;much more inclined to enjoy its prerogatives than disposed to bear thatheavy burden of obligations and sacrifices with which the previousgenerations had balanced privilege. Beautiful and intelligent, even inthe early years of her first marriage she showed a great passion forstudies, and a fine artistic and literary taste, and with these alively inclination toward luxury and display which hardly suited withthe spirit or the letter of the _Lex sumptuaria_ which her father hadcarried through in that year. But fraught with greater danger than allthis was her ardent and passionate temperament, which both in thefamily and in politics was altogether too frequently to drive her todesire and to carry through that which, rightly or wrongly, wasforbidden to a woman by law, custom, and public opinion. 

It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that a young woman endowed withso fiery and ambitious a nature did not become in the hands of Augustusas docile a political instrument as Livia. Julia wished to live forherself and for her pleasure, not for the political greatness of herfather; and indeed, Augustus, who had a fine knowledge of men, was soimpressed by this first unhappy experiment that when Marcellus, still avery young man, died in 23 B. C. , he hesitated a long time beforeremarrying the youthful widow. For a moment, indeed, he did think ofbestowing her not upon a senator but upon a knight, that is, a personoutside of the political aristocracy, evidently with the intention ofstifling her too eager ambitions by taking from her all means and hopeof satisfying them. Then he decided upon the opposite expedient, thatof quieting those ambitions by entirely satisfying them, and so gaveJulia, in 21 B. C. , to Agrippa, who had been the cause of the earlierdifficulties. Agrippa was twenty-four years older than she and couldhave been her father, but he was in truth the second person of theempire in glory, riches, and power. Soon after, in 18 B. C. , he was tobecome the colleague of Augustus in the presidency of the republic andconsequently his equal in every way. 

Thus Julia suddenly saw her ambitions gratified. She became attwenty-one the next lady of the empire after Livia, and perhaps eventhe first in company with and beside her. Young, beautiful, intelligent, cultured, and loving luxury, she represented at Livia'sside and in opposition to her, the trend of the new generation in whichwas growing the determination to free itself from tradition. Shelavished money generously, and there soon formed about her a sort ofcourt, a party, a coterie, in which figured the fairest names of theRoman aristocracy. Her name and her person became popular even amongthe common people of Rome, to whom the name of the Julii was moresympathetic than that of the Claudii, which was borne by the sons ofLivia. The combined popularity of Augustus and of Agrippa wasreflected in her. It may be said, therefore, that toward 18 B. C. , theyounger, more brilliant, and more "modern" Julia began to obscure Liviain the popular imagination, except in that little group of oldconservative nobility which gathered about the wife of Augustus. Sotrue is this that about this time, Augustus, wishing to place himselfinto conformity with his law _de maritandis ordinibus_, reached asignificant decision. Since that law fixed at three the number ofchildren which every citizen should have, if he wished to discharge hiswhole duty toward the state, and since Augustus had but a singledaughter, he decided to adopt Caius and Lucius, the first two sons thatJulia had borne to Agrippa. This was a great triumph for her, in sofar as her sons would henceforth bear the very popular name of Caesar. 

But the difficulties which the first marriage with Marcellus hadoccasioned and which Augustus had hoped to remove by this secondmarriage soon reappeared in another but still more dangerous form, forthey had their roots in that passionate, imperious, bold, and imprudenttemperament of Julia. This temperament the Roman education had notsucceeded in taming; it was strengthened by the undisciplined spirit ofthe times. And with it Julia soon began to abuse the fortune, thepopularity, the prestige, and the power which came to her from beingthe daughter of Augustus and the wife of Agrippa. Little by little shebecame possessed by the mania of being in Rome the antithesis of Livia, of conducting herself in every case in a manner contrary to thatfollowed by her stepmother. If the latter, like Augustus, woregarments of wool woven at home, Julia affected silks purchased at greatprice from the oriental merchants. These the ladies of the older typeconsidered a ruinous luxury because of the expense, and an indecencybecause of the prominence which they gave to the figure. Where Liviawas sparing, Julia was prodigal. If Livia preferred to go to thetheater surrounded by elderly and dignified men, Julia always showedherself in public with a retinue of brilliant and elegant youths. IfLivia set an example of reserve, Julia dared appear in the provinces inpublic at the side of her husband and receive public homage. In spiteof the law which forbade the wives of Roman governors to accompanytheir husbands into the provinces, Julia prevailed upon Agrippa to makeher his companion when in the year 16 B. C. He made his long journeythrough the East. Everywhere she appeared at his side, at the greatreceptions, at the courts, in the cities; and she was the first of theLatin women to be apotheosized in the Orient. Paphos called her"divine" and set up statues to her; Mitylene called her the NewAphrodite, Eressus, Aphrodite Genetrix. These were bold innovations ina state in which tradition was still so powerful; but they couldscarcely have been of serious danger to Julia, if her passionatetemperament had not led her to commit a much more serious imprudence. Agrippa, compared to her, was old, a simple, unpolished man of obscureorigin who was frequently absent on affairs of state. In the circlewhich had formed about Julia there were a number of handsome, elegant, pleasing young men; among others one Sempronius Gracchus, a descendantof the famous tribunes. Julia seems toward the close to have had forhim, even in the lifetime of Agrippa, certain failings which the _Lexde adulteriis_ visited with terrible punishments. 

[Illustration: The great Paris Cameo. This is the largest ancientcameo known, and is said to have been sent from Constantinople byBaldwin II. To Louis IX. It represents the living members of theimperial family protected by the deified Augustus. In the centerTiberius is shown seated, as Jupiter, with his mother, Livia, at hisleft, as Ceres. In front of them stand Germanicus and his motherAntonia. ]

It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if from this time on thereshould have been fostered between Julia and Livia a half-suppressedrivalry. The fact is, in itself, very probable and several indicationsof it have remained in tradition and in history. We know also that twoparties were already beginning to gather about the two women. One ofthese might be called the party of the Claudii and of the oldconservative nobility, the other the party of the Julii and of thatyouthful nobility which was following the modern trend. As long asAgrippa lived, Augustus, by holding the balance between the twofactions, succeeded in maintaining a certain equilibrium. With thedeath of Agrippa, which occurred in 12 B. C. , the situation was changed. 

Julia was now for the second time a widow, and by the provisions of the_Lex de maritandis ordinibus_ should remarry. Augustus in thetraditional manner sought a husband for her, and, seeking him only withthe idea of furthering a political purpose, he found for her Tiberius, the elder son of Livia. Tiberius was the stepbrother of Julia and wasmarried to a lady whom he tenderly loved; but these were considerationswhich could hardly give pause to a Roman senator. In the marriage ofTiberius and Julia, Augustus saw a way of snuffing out the incipientdiscord between the Julii and the Claudii, between Julia and Livia, between the parties of the new and of the old nobility. He thereforeordered Tiberius to repudiate the young, beautiful, and noble Agrippinain order to marry Julia. For Tiberius the sacrifice was hard; we aretold that one day after the divorce, having met Agrippina at somehouse, he began to weep so bitterly that Augustus ordered that theformer husband and wife should never meet again. But Tiberius, on theother hand, had been educated by his mother in the ancient ideas, andtherefore knew that a Roman nobleman must sacrifice his feelings to thepublic interest. As for Julia, she celebrated her third weddingjoyfully; for Tiberius, after the deaths of Agrippa and of his ownbrother Drusus, was the rising man, the hope and the second personageof the empire, so that she was not forced to step down from the loftyposition which the marriage with Agrippa had given her. Tiberius, furthermore, was a very handsome man and for this reason also he seemsnot to have been displeasing to Julia, who in the matter of husbandsconsidered not only glory and power. 

The marriage of Julia and Tiberius began under happy auspices. Juliaseemed to love Tiberius and Tiberius did what he could to be a goodhusband. Julia soon felt that she was once more to become a mother andthe hope of this other child seemed to cement the union between husbandand wife. But the rosy promises of the beginning were soondisappointed. Tiberius was the son of Livia, a true Claudius, theworthy heir of two ancient lines, an uncompromising traditionalist, therefore a rigid and disdainful aristocrat, and a soldier severe withothers as with himself. He wished the aristocracy to set the people anexample of all the virtues which had made Rome so great in peace andwar: religious piety, simplicity of customs, frugality, family purity, and rigid observance of all the laws. The luxury and prodigality whichwere becoming more and more wide-spread among the young nobility had nofiercer enemy than he. He held that a man of great lineage who spenthis substance on jewels, on dress, and on revels was a traitor to hiscountry, and no one demanded with greater insistence than he that thegreat laws of the year 18 B. C. , the sumptuary law, the laws on marriageand adultery, should be enforced with the severest rigor. Julia, onthe other hand, loved extravagance, festivals, joyous companies ofelegant youths, an easy, brilliant life full of amusement. 

[Illustration: Octavia, the sister of Augustus. ]

For greater misfortune, the son who was born of their union diedshortly after and discord found its way between Julia and Tiberius. Sempronius Gracchus, who knew how to profit by this, reappeared andagain made advances to Julia. She again lent her ear to his blandwords and the domestic disagreement rapidly became embittered. Tiberius, --this is certain, --soon learned that Julia had resumed herrelations with Sempronius Gracchus, and a new, intolerable torment wasadded to his already distressed life. According to the _Lex deadulteriis_, he as husband should have made known the crime of his wifeto the pretor and have had her punished. He had been one of those whohad always most vehemently denounced the nobility for their weakness inthe enforcement of this law. Now that his own wife had fallen underthe provisions of the terrible statute, to which so many other womenhad been forced to submit, the moment had come to give the weak thatexample of unconquerable firmness which he had so often demanded ofothers. But Julia was the daughter of Augustus. Could he call down, without the consent of Augustus, so terrible a scandal upon the firsthouse of the empire, render its daughter infamous, and drive her intoexile? Augustus, though he desired his daughter to be more prudent andserious, yet loved and protected her; above all, he disliked dangerousscandal, and Julia dared to do whatever she wished, knowing herselfinvulnerable under his protection and his love. 

To this hard and false situation Tiberius, fuming with rage, had toadjust himself. He lived in a separate apartment, keeping up withJulia only the relations necessary to save appearances, but he couldnot divorce her, much less publish her guilt. The situation grew stillworse when political discontent began to use for its own ends thediscord between Julia and Tiberius. Tiberius had many enemies amongthe nobility, especially among the young men of his own age; partlybecause his rapid, brilliant career had aroused much jealousy, partlybecause his conservative, traditionalist tendencies toward authorityand militarism disturbed many of them. More and more among thenobility there was increasing the desire for a mild and easy-goinggovernment which should allow them to enjoy their privileges withouthardship and which should not be too severe in imposing its duties uponthem. 

On the other hand, Julia was most ambitious. Since, after thedisagreements with Tiberius had broken out, she could no longer hope tobe the powerful wife of the first person of the empire after Augustus, she sought compensation. Thus there formed about Julia a party whichsought in every way to ruin the lofty position which Tiberius occupiedin the state, by setting up against him Caius Caesar, the son of Juliaby Agrippa, whom Augustus had adopted and of whom he was very fond. In6 B. C. , Caius Caesar was only fourteen years old, but at that period anagitation was set on foot whereby, through a special privilege concededto him by the senate, he was to be named consul for the year of Rome754, when Caius should have reached twenty. This was a manoeuver ofthe Julian party to attract popular attention to the youth, to preparea rival for Tiberius in his quality as principal collaborator ofAugustus, and to gain a hold upon the future head of the state. 

The move was altogether very bold; for this nomination of a childconsul contradicted all the fundamental principles of the Romanconstitution, and it would probably have been fatal to the party whichevolved it, had not the indignant rage of Tiberius assured its triumph. Tiberius opposed this law, which he took as an offense, and he wishedAugustus to oppose it, and at the outset Augustus did so. But then, either because Julia was able to bend him to her desires or because inthe senate there was in truth a strong party which supported it out ofhatred for Tiberius, Augustus at last yielded, seeking to placateTiberius with other compensations. But Tiberius was too proud andviolent an aristocrat to accept compensations and indignantly demandedpermission to retire to Rhodes, abandoning all the public offices whichhe exercised. He certainly hoped to make his loss felt, for indeedRome needed him. But he was mistaken. This act of Tiberius wasseverely judged by public opinion as a reprisal upon the public for aprivate offense. Augustus became angry with him and in his absence allhis enemies took courage and hurled themselves against him. The honorsto Caius Caesar were approved amid general enthusiasm and the Julianparty triumphed all along the line; it reached the height of power andpopularity, while Tiberius was constrained to content himself with theidle life of a private person at Rhodes. 

[Illustration: A reception at Livia's villa. The scene evidently is atLivia's country palace at Prima Porta. Agrippa is seen descending thesteps to be received by Augustus and Livia (who are not shown in thepicture). The original of the status of Augustus, here shown, wasfound in the ruins of Livia's villa close to the flight of marble stepsand its base. The remains of the steps and the base of the statue arestanding to-day at Prima Porta. ]

But at Rome Livia still remained. From that moment began the mortalduel between Livia and Julia. 

III

THE DAUGHTERS OF AGRIPPA

Tiberius had now broken with Augustus, he had lost the support ofpublic opinion, he was hated by the majority of the senate. At Rhodeshe soon found himself, therefore, in the awkward position of one whothrough a false move has played into the hands of his enemies and seesno way of recovering his position. It had been easy to leave Rome; toreënter it was difficult, and in all probability his fortune would havebeen forever compromised, and he would never have become emperor, hadit not been for the fact that in the midst of this general defectiontwo women remained faithful. They were his mother, Livia, and hissister-in-law, Antonia, the widow of that brother Drusus who, dying inhis youth, had carried to his grave the hopes of Rome. 

Antonia was the daughter of the emperor's sister Octavia and of MarkAntony, the famous triumvir whose name remains forever linked in storywith that of Cleopatra. This daughter of Antony was certainly thenoblest and the gentlest of all the women who appear in the lugubriousand tragic history of the family of the Caesars. Serious, modest, andeven-tempered, she was likewise endowed with beauty and virtue, and shebrought into the family and into its struggles a spirit of concord, serenity of mind, and sweet reasonableness, though they could notalways prevail against the violent passions and clashing interests ofthose about her. As long as Drusus lived, Drusus and Antonia had beenfor the Romans the model of the devoted pair of lovers, and theirtender affection had become proverbial; yet the Roman multitude, alwaysgiven to admiring the descendants of the great families, was even moredeeply impressed by the beauty, the virtue, the sweetness, the modesty, and the reserve of Antonia. After the death of Drusus, she did notwish to marry again, even though the _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_ madeit a duty. "Young and beautiful, " wrote Valerius Maximus, "shewithdrew to a life of retirement in the company of Livia, and the samebed which had seen the death of the youthful husband saw his faithfulspouse grow old in an austere widowhood. " Augustus and the people wereso touched by this supreme proof of fidelity to the memory of theever-cherished husband that by the common consent of public opinion shewas relieved of the necessity of remarrying; and Augustus himself, whohad always carefully watched over the observance of the marital law inhis own family, did not dare insist. Whether living at her villa ofBauli, where she spent the larger part of her year, or at Rome, thebeautiful widow gave her attention to the bringing up of her threechildren, Germanicus, Livilla, and Claudius. Ever since the death ofOctavia, she had worshiped Livia as a mother and lived in the closestintimacy with her, and, withdrawn from public life, she attempted nowto bring a spirit of peace into the torn and tragic family. 

Antonia was very friendly with Tiberius, who, on his side, felt thedeepest sympathy and respect for his beautiful and virtuoussister-in-law. It cannot be doubted, therefore, that in this crisisAntonia, who was bound to Livia by many ties, must have taken sides forLivia's son Tiberius. But Antonia was too gentle and mild to lead afaction in the struggle which during these years began between thefriends and the enemies of Tiberius, and that rôle was assumed byLivia, who possessed more strength and more authority. 

The situation grew worse and worse. Public opinion steadily becamemore hostile to Tiberius and more favorable to Julia and her elder son, and it was not long before they wished to give to her younger son, Lucius, the same honors which had already been bestowed upon hisbrother Caius. Private interest soon allied itself with the hatred andrancor against Tiberius; and scarcely had he departed when the senateincreased the appropriation for public supplies and public games. Allthose who profited by these appropriations were naturally interested inpreventing the return of Tiberius, who was notorious for his oppositionto all useless expenditures. Any measure, however dishonest, wastherefore considered proper, provided only it helped to ruin Tiberius;and his enemies had recourse to every art and calumny, among otherthings actually accusing him of conspiracies against Augustus. Evenfor a woman as able and energetic as Livia it was an arduous task tostruggle against the inclinations of Augustus, against public opinion, against the majority of the senate, against private interest, andagainst Julia and her friends. Indeed, four years passed during whichthe situation of Tiberius and his party grew steadily worse, while theparty of Julia increased in power. 

Finally the party of Tiberius resolved to attempt a startlingly boldmove. They decided to cripple the opposition by means of a terriblescandal in the very person of Julia. The _Lex Julia de adulteriis_, framed by Augustus in the year 18, authorized any citizen to denouncean unfaithful wife before the judges, if the husband and father shouldboth refuse to make the accusation. This law, which was binding uponall Roman citizens, was therefore applicable even to the daughter ofAugustus, the widow of Agrippa, the mother of Caius and Lucius Caesar, those two youths in whom were centered the hopes of the republic. Shehad violated the _Lex Julia_ and she had escaped the penalties whichhad been visited on many other ladies of the aristocracy only becauseno one had dared to call down this scandal upon the first family of theempire. The party of Tiberius, protected and guided by Livia, at lasthazarded this step. 

It is impossible to say what part Livia played in this terribletragedy. It is certain that either she or some other influentialpersonage succeeded in gaining possession of the proofs of Julia'sguilt and brought them to Augustus, threatening to lay them before thepretor and to institute proceedings if he did not discharge his duty. Augustus found himself constrained to apply to himself his own terriblelaw. He himself had decreed that if the husband, as was then the caseof Tiberius, could not accuse a faithless woman, the father must do so. It was his law, and he had to bow to it in order to avoid scandals andworse consequences. He exiled Julia to the little island ofPandataria, and at the age of thirty-seven the brilliant, pleasing, andvoluptuous young woman who had dazzled Rome for many years wascompelled to disappear from the metropolis forever and retire to anexistence on a barren island. She was cut off by the implacable hatredof a hostile party and by the inexorable cruelty of a law framed by herown father!

[Illustration: Mark Antony. ]

The exile of Julia marks the moment when the fortunes of Tiberius andLivia, which had been steadily losing ground for four years, began torevive, though not so rapidly as Livia and Tiberius had probablyexpected. Julia preserved, even in her misfortune, many faithfulfriends and a great popularity. For a long time popular demonstrationswere held in her favor at Rome, and many busied themselves tenaciouslyto obtain her pardon from Augustus, all of which goes to prove that thehorrible infamies which were spread about her were the inventions ofenemies. Julia had broken the _Lex Julia_, --so much is certain, --buteven if she had been guilty of an unfortunate act, she was not amonster, as her enemies wished to have it believed. She was abeautiful woman, as there had been before, as there are now, and asthere will be hereafter, touched with human vices and with humanvirtues. 

As a matter of fact, her party, after it had recovered from theterrible shock of the scandal, quickly reorganized. Firm in itsintention of having Julia pardoned, it took up the struggle again, andtried as far as it could to hinder Tiberius from returning to Rome andagain taking part in political life, knowing well that if the husbandonce set foot in Rome, all hope of Julia's return would be lost. Onlyone of them could reënter Rome. It was either Tiberius or Julia; andmore furiously than ever the struggle between the two parties was wagedabout Augustus. 

Caius and Lucius Caesar, Julia's two youthful sons, of whom Augustuswas very fond, were the principal instruments with which the enemies ofTiberius fought against the influence of Livia over Augustus. Everyeffort was made to sow hatred and distrust between the two youths andTiberius, to the end that it might become impossible to have themcollaborate with him in the government of the empire, and that thepresence of Julia's sons should of necessity exclude that of herhusband. A further ally was soon found in the person of another childof Julia and Agrippa, the daughter who has come down into history underthe name of the Younger Julia. Augustus had conceived as great a lovefor her as for the two sons, and there was no doubt that she would aidwith every means in her power the party averse to Tiberius; for hermother's instincts of liberty, luxury, and pleasure were also inherentin her. Married to L. Aemilius Paulus, the son of one of the greatestRoman families, she had early assumed in Rome a position which madeher, like her mother, the antithesis of Livia. She, too, gatheredabout her, as the elder Julia had done, a court of elegant youths, menof letters, and poets, --Ovid was of the number, --and with this groupshe hoped to be able to hold the balance of power in the governmentagainst that coterie of aged senators who paid court to Livia. She, too, took advantage of the good-will of her grandfather, just as hermother had done, and in the shadow of his protection she displayed anextravagance which the laws did not permit, but which, on this account, was all the more admired by the enemies of the old Roman Puritanism. As though openly to defy the sumptuary law of Augustus, she builtherself a magnificent villa; and, if we dare believe tradition, it wasnot long before she, too, had violated the very law which had proveddisastrous to her mother. 

Thus, even after the departure of Julia, her three children, Caius, Lucius, and Julia the Younger, constituted in Rome an alliance whichwas sufficiently powerful to contest every inch of ground with theparty of Livia; for they had public opinion in their favor, theyenjoyed the support of the senate, and they played upon the weakness ofAugustus. In the year 2 A. D. , after four years of exhaustive effortsspent in struggle and intrigue, all that Livia had been able to obtainwas the mere permission that Tiberius might return to Rome, under theconditions, however, that he retire to private life, that he givehimself up to the education of his son, and that he in no wise minglein public affairs. The condition of the empire was growing worse onevery side; the finances were disordered, the army was disorganized, and the frontiers were threatened, for revolt was raising its head inGaul, in Pannonia, and especially in Germany. Every day the situationseemed to demand the hand of Tiberius, who, now in the prime of life, was recognized as one of the leading administrators and the firstgeneral of the empire. But, for all Livia's insistence, Augustusrefused to call Tiberius back into the government. The Julii weremasters of the state, and held the Claudii at a distance. 

[Illustration: Antony and Cleopatra. ]

Perhaps Tiberius would never have returned to power in Rome had notchance aided him in the sudden taking off, in a strange and unforeseenmanner, of Caius and Lucius Caesar. The latter died at Marseilles, following a brief illness, shortly after the return of Tiberius toRome, August 29, in the year 2 A. D. It was a great grief to Augustus, and, twenty months after, was followed by another still more serious. In February of the year 4, Caius also died, in Lycia, of a woundreceived in a skirmish. These two deaths were so premature, so closeto each other, and so opportune for Tiberius, that posterity hasrefused to see in them simply one of the many mischances of life. Later generations have tried to believe that Livia had a hand in thesefatalities. Yet he who understands life at all knows that it is easierto imagine and suspect romantic poisonings of this sort than it is tocarry them out. Even leaving the character of Livia out ofconsideration, it is difficult to imagine how she would have dared, orhave been able, to poison the two youths at so great a distance fromRome, one in Asia, the other in Gaul, by means of a long train ofaccomplices, and this at a moment when the family of Augustus wasdivided by many hatreds and every member was suspected, spied upon, andwatched by a hostile party. Furthermore, it would have been necessaryto carry this out at a time when the example of Julia proved to allthat relationship to Augustus was not a sufficient defense against therigors of the law and the severity of public opinion when roused by anyserious crime. Besides, it is a recognized fact that people are alwaysinclined to suspect a crime whenever a man prominent in the public eyedies before his time. At Turin, for example, there still lives atradition among the people that Cavour was poisoned, some say by theorder of Napoleon III, others by the Jesuits, simply because his lifewas suddenly cut off, at the age of fifty-two, at the moment when Italyhad greatest need of him. Indeed, even to-day we are impressed when wesee in the family of Augustus so many premature deaths of young men;but precisely because these untimely deaths are frequent we come to seein them the predestined ruin of a worn-out race in history. Allancient families at a certain moment exhaust themselves. This is thereason why no aristocracy has been able to endure for long unlesscontinually renewed, and why all those that have refused to take in newblood have failed from the face of the earth. There is no seriousreason for attributing so horrible a crime to a woman who was veneratedby the best men of her time; and the fables which the populace, alwaysfaithful to Julia, and therefore hostile to Livia, recounted on thisscore, and which the historians of the succeeding age collected, haveno decisive value. 

The deaths of Caius and Lucius Caesar were therefore a great goodfortune for Tiberius, because it determined his return to power. Thesituation of the empire was growing worse on every hand; Germany was inthe midst of revolt, and it was necessary to turn the army over tovigorous hands. Augustus, old and irresolute, still hesitated, fearingthe dislike which was brewing both in the senate and among the peopleagainst the too dictatorial Tiberius. At last, however, he was forcedto yield. 

The more serious, more authoritative, more ancient party of thesenatorial nobility, in accord with Livia and headed by a nephew ofPompey, Cnaeus Cornelius Cinna, forced him to recall Tiberius, threatening otherwise to have recourse to some violent measures theexact character of which we do not know. The unpopularity of Tiberiuswas a source of continual misgivings to the aging Augustus, and it wasonly through this threat of a yet greater danger that they finallyovercame his hesitation. On June 26, in the fourth year of our era, Augustus adopted Tiberius as his son, and had conferred upon him forten years the office of tribune, thus making him his colleague. Tiberius returned to power, and, in accordance with the wishes ofAugustus, adopted as his son Germanicus, the elder son of Drusus andAntonia, his faithful friend. He was an intelligent, active lad ofwhom all entertained the highest hopes. 

[Illustration: Tiberius, elder son of Livia and stepson of Augustus. Augustus, lacking a male heir, first adopted his younger stepsonDrusus, who died 9 B. C. Owing to a fall from his horse. In 4 A. D. Headopted Tiberius, and was succeeded by him as Emperor in 14 A. D. ]

On his return to power, Tiberius, together with Augustus, took measuresfor reorganizing the army and the state, and sought to bring about bymeans of new marriages and acts of clemency a closer union between theJulian and Claudian branches of the family, then bitterly divided bythe violent struggles of recent years. The terms of Julia's exile weremade easier; Germanicus married Agrippina, another daughter of Juliaand Agrippa, and a sister of Julia the Younger; the widow of CaiusCaesar, Livilla, sister of Germanicus and daughter of Antonia, wasgiven to Drusus, the son of Tiberius, a young man born in the same yearas Germanicus. Drusus, despite certain defects, such as irascibilityand a marked fondness for pleasure, gave evidence that he possessed therequisite qualities of a statesman--firmness, sound judgment, andenergy. The policy which dictated these marriages was always thesame--to make of the family of Augustus one formidable and united body, so that it might constitute the solid base of the entire government ofthe empire. But, alas! wise as were the intentions, the ferments ofdiscord and the unhappiness of the times prevailed against them. Toomuch had been hoped for in recalling Tiberius to power. During the tenyears of senile government, the empire had been reduced to a state ofutter disorder. The measures planned by Tiberius for reestablishingthe finances of the state roused the liveliest discontent among thewealthy classes in Italy, and again excited their hatred against him. In the year 6 A. D. , the great revolt of Pannonia broke out and for amoment filled Italy with unspeakable terror. In an instant of mobfury, they even came to fear that the peninsula would be invaded andRome besieged by the barbarians of the Danube. Tiberius came to therescue, and with patience and coolness put down the insurrection, notby facing it in open conflict, but by drawing out the war to such alength as to weary the enemy, a method both safe and wise, consideringthe unreliable character of the troops at his command. But at Rome, once the fear had subsided, the long duration of the war became a newcause for dissatisfaction and anger, and offered to many a pretext forventing their long-cherished hatred against Tiberius, who was accusedof being afraid, of not knowing how to end the war, and of drawing itout for motives of personal ambition. The party averse to Tiberiusagain raised its head and resorted once more to its former policy--thatof urging on Germanicus against Tiberius. The former was young, ambitious, bold, and would have preferred daring strokes and a warquickly concluded. It is certain that there would have risen then andthere a Germanican and a Tiberian party, if Augustus, on this occasion, had not energetically sustained Tiberius from Rome. But the situationagain became strained and full of uncertainty. 

In the midst of these conflicts and these fears, a new scandal brokeout in the family of Augustus. The Younger Julia, like her mother, allowed herself to be caught in violation of the _Lex Julia deadulteriis_, and she also was compelled to take the road of exile. Inwhat manner and at whose instance the scandal was disclosed we do notknow; we do know, however, that Augustus was very fond of hisgranddaughter, whence we can assume that in this moment of turbidagitation, when so much hatred was directed against his family and hishouse, and when so many forces were uniting to overthrow Tiberiusagain, notwithstanding the fact that he had saved the empire, Augustusfelt that he must a second time submit to his own law. He did not darecontend with the puritanical party, with the more conservative minorityin the senate, --the friends of Tiberius, --over this second victim inhis family. Without a doubt everything possible was done to hush upthe scandal, and there would scarcely have come down to us even asummary notice of the exile of the second Julia had it not been thatamong those exiled with her was the poet Ovid, who was to fill twentycenturies with his laments and to bring them to the ears of the latestgenerations. 

Ovid's exile is one of those mysteries of history which has most keenlyexcited the curiosity of the ages. Ovid himself, without knowing it, has rendered it more acute by his prudence in not speaking more clearlyof the cause of his exile, making only rare allusions to it, which maybe summed up in his famous words, _carmen et error_. It is for thisreason that posterity has for twenty centuries been asking itself whatwas this error which sent the exquisite poet away to die among thebarbarous Getae on the frozen banks of the Danube; and naturally theyhave never compassed his secret. But if, therefore, it is impossibleto say exactly what the error was which cost Ovid so dearly, it ispossible, on the other hand, to explain that unique and famous episodein the history of Rome to which, after all, Ovid owes a great part ofhis immortality. He was not the victim, as has been too oftenrepeated, of a caprice of despotism; and therefore he cannot becompared with any of the many Russian writers whom the administration, through fear and hatred, deports to Siberia without definite reason. Certainly the error of Ovid lay in his having violated some clause ofthe _Lex Julia de adulteriis_, which, as we know, was so comprehensivein its provisions that it considered as accessories to the crime thoseguilty of various acts and deeds which, judged even with modern rigorand severity, would seem reprehensible, to be sure, but not deservingof such terrible punishment. Ovid was certainly involved under one ofthese clauses, --which one we do not, and never shall, know, --but hiserror, whether serious or light, was not the true cause of hiscondemnation. It was the pretext used by the more conservative andpuritanical part of Roman society to vent upon him a long-standinggrudge the true motives of which lay much deeper. 

What was the standing of this poet of the gay, frivolous, exquisiteladies whom they wished to send into exile? He was the author of thatgraceful, erotic poetry who, through the themes which he chose for hiselegant verses, had encouraged the tendencies toward luxury, diversion, and the pleasures which had transformed the austere matron of a formerday into an extravagant and undisciplined creature given tovoluptuousness; the poet who had gained the admiration of womenespecially by flattering their most dangerous and perverse tendencies. The puritanical party hated and combatted this trend of the newergenerations, and therefore, also, the poetry of Ovid on account of itsdisastrous effects upon the women, whom it weaned from the virtues mostprized in former days--frugality, simplicity, family affection, andpurity of life. The Roman aristocracy did not recognize the right ofabsolute literary freedom which is acknowledged by many modern states, in which writers and men of letters have acquired a strong politicalinfluence. The theory, held by many countries to-day that anypublication is justifiable, provided it be a work of art, was notaccepted by the Romans in power. On the contrary, they were convincedthat an idea or a sentiment, dangerous in itself, became still moreharmful when artistically expressed. Therefore Rome had always knownthe existence of a kind of police supervision of ideas and of literaryforms, exercised through various means by the ruling aristocracy, andespecially in reference to women, who constituted that element ofsocial life in which virtue and purity of customs are of the greatestconsequence. The Roman ladies of the aristocracy, as we have seen, received considerable instruction. They read the poets andphilosophers, and precisely for this reason there was always at Rome astrong aversion to light and immoral literature. If books hadcirculated among men only, the poetry of Ovid would perhaps not haveenjoyed the good fortune of a persecution which was to focus upon itthe attention of posterity. The greater liberty conceded to women thusplaced upon society an even greater reserve in the case of itsliterature. This Ovid learned to his cost when he was driven intoexile because his books gave too much delight to too many ladies atRome. By the order of Augustus these books were removed from thelibraries, which did not hinder their coming down to us entire, whilemany a more serious work--like Livy's history, for example--has beeneither entirely or in large part lost. 

[Illustration: Drusus, the younger brother of Tiberius. ]

After the fall of the second Julia up to the time of his death, whichoccurred August 23, in the year 14 A. D. , Augustus had no furtherserious griefs over the ladies of his family. The great misfortune ofthe last years of his government was a public misfortune--the defeat ofVarus and the loss of Germany. But with what sadness must he havelooked back in the last weeks of his long life upon the history of hisfamily! All those whom he had loved were torn from him before theirtime by a cruel destiny: Drusus, Caius, and Lucius Caesar by death; theJulias by the cruelty of the law and by an infamy worse than death. The unique grandeur to which he had attained had not brought fortune tohis family. He was old, almost alone, a weary survivor among the tombsof those dear to him who had been untimely lost through fate, and withthe still sadder memories of those who had been buried in a livinggrave of infamy. His only associates were Tiberius, with whom he hadbecome reconciled; Antonia, his sweet and highly respecteddaughter-in-law; and Livia, the woman whom destiny had placed at hisside in one of the most critical moments of his life, the faithfulcompanion through fifty-two years of his varied and wonderful fortune. We can therefore understand why it was that, as the historians tell us, the last words of the old emperor should have been a tender expressionof gratitude to his faithful wife. "Farewell, farewell, Livia!Remember our long union!" With these words, rendering homage to thewife whom custom and the law had made the faithful and lovingcompanion, and not the docile slave, of her husband, he ended his lifelike a true Roman. 

If the family of Augustus had undergone grievous vicissitudes duringhis life, its situation became even more dangerous after his death. The historian who sets out with the preconceived notion that Augustusfounded a monarchy, and imagines that his family was destined to enjoythe privileges which in all monarchies are accorded the sovereign'shouse, will never arrive at a complete understanding of the story ofthe first empire. His family did, to be sure, always enjoy aprivileged status, if not at law, at least in fact, and through thevery force of circumstances; but it was not for naught that Rome hadbeen for many centuries an aristocratic republic in which all thefamilies of the nobility had considered themselves equal, and had beensubject to the same laws. The aristocracy avenged itself upon theimperial family for the privileges which the lofty dignity of its headassured it by giving it hatred instead of respect. They suspected andcalumniated all of its members, and with a malicious joy subjectedthem, whenever possible, to the common laws and even maltreated withparticular ferocity those who by chance fell under the provisions ofany statute. As a compensation for the privileges which the royalfamily enjoyed, they had to assume the risk of receiving the harshestpenalties of the laws. If any of them, therefore, fell under the rigorof these laws, the senatorial aristocracy especially was ever eager toenjoy the atrocious satisfaction of seeing one of the favored torturedas much as or more than the ordinary man. There is no doubt, forexample, that the two Julias were more severely punished and disgracedthan other ladies of the aristocracy guilty of the same crime. AndAugustus was forced to waive his affection for them in order that itmight not be said, particularly in the senate, that his relativesenjoyed special favors and that Augustus made laws only for others. 

[Illustration: Statue of a young Roman woman. ]

Yet as long as Augustus lived, he was a sufficient protection for hisrelatives. He was, especially in the last twenty years of his life, the object of an almost religious veneration. The great and stormyepoch out of which he had risen, the extraordinary fortune which hadassisted him, his long reign, the services both real and imaginarywhich he had rendered the empire--all had conferred upon him such anauthority that envy laid aside its most poisonous darts before him. Out of respect for him even his family was not particularly calumniatedor maltreated, save now and then in moments of great irritation, aswhen the two Julias were condemned. But after his death the situationgrew considerably worse; for Tiberius, although he was a man of greatcapacity and merit, a sagacious administrator and a valiant general, did not enjoy the sympathy and respect which had been accorded toAugustus. Rather was he hated by those who had for a long time sidedwith Caius and Lucius Caesar and who formed a considerable portion ofthe senate and the aristocracy. It was not the spontaneous admirationof the senate and of the people, but the exigencies of the situation, which had made him master of the government when Augustus died. Theempire was at war with the Germans, and the Pannonico-Illyrianprovinces were in revolt, and it was necessary to place at the head ofthe empire a man who should strike terror to the hearts of thebarbarians and who on occasion should be able to combat them. Tiberius, furthermore, was so well aware that the majority of thesenate and the Roman people would submit to his government only throughforce, that he had for a long time been in doubt whether to accept theempire or not, so completely did he understand that with so manyenemies it would be difficult to rule. 

Under the government of Tiberius the imperial family was surrounded bya much more intense and open hatred than under Augustus. One coupleonly proved an exception, Germanicus and Agrippina, who were verysympathetic to the people. But right here began the first seriousdifficulties for Tiberius. Germanicus was twenty-nine years old whenTiberius took over the empire, and about him there began to form aparty which by courting and flattering both him and his wife began toset him up against Tiberius. In this they were unconsciously aided byAgrippina. Unlike her sister Julia, she was a lady of blameless life;faithfully in love with her husband; a true Roman matron, such astradition had loved; chaste and fruitful, who at the age of twenty-sixhad already borne nine children, of whom, however, six had died. ButAgrippina was to show that in the house of Augustus, in thosetumultuous, strange times, virtue was not less dangerous than vice, though in another way and for different reasons. She was so proud ofher fidelity to her husband and of the admiration which she aroused atRome that all the other defects of her character were exaggerated andincreased by her excessive pride in her virtue. And among thesedefects should be counted a great ambition, a kind of harum-scarum andtumultuous activity, an irreflective impetuosity of passion, and adangerous lack of balance and judgment. Agrippina was not evil; shewas ambitious, violent, intriguing, imprudent, and thoughtless, andtherefore could easily adapt her own feelings and interests to whatseemed expedient. She had much influence over her husband, whom sheaccompanied upon all his journeys; and out of the great love she borehim, in which her own ambition had its part, she urged him on tosupport that hidden movement which was striving to oppose Germanicus tothe emperor. 

That two parties were not formed was due very largely to the fact thatGermanicus was sufficiently reasonable not to allow himself to becarried too far by the current which favored him, and possibly also tothe fact that during the entire reign of Tiberius his mother Antoniawas the most faithful and devoted friend of the emperor. After hisdivorce from Julia, Tiberius had not married again, and the offices oftenderness which a wife should have given him were discharged in partby his mother, but largely by his sister-in-law. No one exercised somuch influence as Antonia over the diffident and self-centered spiritof the emperor. Whoever wished to obtain a favor from him could do nobetter than to intrust his cause to Antonia. There is no doubt, therefore, that Antonia checked her son, and in his societycounterbalanced the influence of his wife. 

But even if two parties were not formed, it was not long before otherdifficulties arose. Discord soon made itself felt between Livia andAgrippina. More serious still was the fact that Germanicus, who, afterthe death of Augustus, had been sent as a legate to Gaul, initiated aGerman policy contrary to the instructions given him by Tiberius. Thiswas due partly to his own impetuous temperament and partly to thegoadings of his wife and the flatterers who surrounded him. Tiberius, whom the Germans knew from long experience, no longer wished to molestthem. The revolt of Arminius proved that when their independence wasthreatened by Rome they were capable of uniting and becoming dangerous;when left to themselves they destroyed one another by continual wars. It was advisable, therefore, according to Tiberius, not to attack ormolest them, but at the proper moment to fan the flames of theircontinual dissensions and wars in order that, while destroyingthemselves, they should leave the empire in peace. This wise andprudent policy might please a seasoned soldier like Tiberius, who hadalready won his laurels in many wars and who had risen to the pinnacleof glory and power. It did not please the pushing and eager youthGermanicus, who was anxious to distinguish himself by great andbrilliant exploits, and who had at his side, as a continual stimulus, an ambitious and passionate wife, surrounded by a court of flatterers. Germanicus, on his own initiative, crossed the Rhine and took up theoffensive again all along the line, attacking the most powerful of theGerman tribes one after the other in important and successfulexpeditions. At Rome this bold move was naturally looked upon withpleasure, especially by the numerous enemies of Tiberius, eitherbecause boldness in politics rather than prudence always pleases thosewho have nothing to lose, or because it was felt that the glory whichaccrued to Germanicus might offend the emperor. And Tiberius, thoughhe did disapprove, allowed his adopted son to continue for a time, doubtless in order that he might not have to shock public opinion andthat it might not seem that he wished to deprive the youthfulGermanicus of the glory which he was gaining for himself. 

[Illustration: A Roman girl of the time of the Caesars. ]

He was nevertheless resolved not to allow Germanicus to involve Rometoo deeply in German affairs, and when it seemed to him that the youthhad fittingly proved his prowess and had made the enemies of Rome feelits power sufficiently, he recalled him and in his stead sent Drusus, who was his real, and not his adopted, son. But this recall did not atall please the party of Germanicus, who were loud and bitter in theirrecriminations. They began to murmur that Tiberius was jealous ofGermanicus and his popularity; that he had recalled him in order toprevent his winning glory by an immortal achievement. Tiberius solittle thought of keeping Germanicus from using his brilliant qualitiesin the service of Rome that shortly after, in the year 18 A. D. , he senthim into the Orient to introduce order into Armenia, which was shakenby internal dissensions, and he gave him a command there not lessimportant than the one of which he had deprived him. At the same timehe was unwilling to intrust things entirely to the judgment ofGermanicus, in whom he recognized a young man of capacity and valor, but, nevertheless, a young man influenced by an imprudent wife andincited by an irresponsible court of flatterers. For this reason heplaced at his side an older and more experienced man in whom he had thefullest confidence--Cnaeus Piso, a senator who belonged to one of themost illustrious families in Rome. 

It was the duty of Cnaeus Piso to counsel, to restrain, and to aid theyoung Germanicus, and doubtless also to keep Tiberius informed of allthat Germanicus was doing in the East. When we remember that Tiberiuswas responsible for the empire, no one will deny him the right ofsetting a guard upon the young man of thirty-three, into whose handshad been intrusted many and serious interests. But though this ideawas warrantable in itself, it became the source of great woe. Germanicus was offended, and, driven on by his friends, he broke withPiso. The latter had brought with him his wife Plancina, who was aclose friend of Livia, just as Germanicus had brought Agrippina. Thetwo wives fell to quarreling no less furiously than their husbands, andtwo parties were formed in the Orient, one for Piso and one forGermanicus, who accused each other of illegality, extortion, andassuming unwarranted powers; and each thought only of undoing what theother had accomplished. It is difficult to tell which of the two wasright or in how far either was right or wrong, for the documents aretoo few and the account of Tacitus, clouded by an undiscerningantipathy, sheds no light upon this dark secret. In any case, we aresure that Germanicus did not always respect the laws and that heoccasionally acted with a supreme heedlessness which now and thenforced Tiberius to intervene personally, as he did on the occasion whenGermanicus left his province with Agrippina in order that, dressed likea Greek philosopher, he might make a tour of Egypt and see thatcountry, which then, as now, attracted the attention of persons ofculture. But at that time, unlike the present, there was an ordinanceof Augustus which forbade Roman senators to set foot in Egypt withoutspecial permission. As he had paid no attention to this prohibition, we need not be astonished if we find that Germanicus did not respect asscrupulously as Tiberius wished all the laws which defined his powersand set limits to his authority. 

However that may be, the dissension between Germanicus and Piso filledthe entire Orient with confusion and disorder, and it was early echoedat Rome, where the party hostile to Tiberius continued to accuse him, out of motives of hatred and jealousy, of forever laying new obstaclesin the way of his adopted son. Livia, too, now no longer protected byAugustus, became a target for the accusations of a malevolent publicopinion. It was said that she persecuted Germanicus out of hatred forAgrippina. Tiberius was much embarrassed, being hampered by publicopinion favorable to Germanicus and at the same time desiring that hissons should set an example of obedience to the laws. 

A sudden catastrophe still further complicated the situation. In 19A. D. Germanicus was taken ill at Antioch. The malady was long andmarked by periods of convalescence and relapses, but finally, like hisfather and like his brothers-in-law, Germanicus, too, succumbed to hisdestiny in the fullness of youth. At thirty-four, when life with hermost winning smiles seemed to be stretching out her arms to him, hedied. This one more untimely death brought to an abrupt end a mostdangerous political struggle. Is it to be wondered at, then, that thepeople, whose imagination had been aroused, should have begun to murmurabout poison? The party of Germanicus was driven to desperation bythis death, which virtually ended its existence, and destroyed at asingle stroke all the hopes of those who had seen in Germanicus theinstrument of their future fortune. They therefore eagerly collected, embellished, and spread these rumors. Had Agrippina been a woman ofany judgment or reflection, she would have been the first to see theabsurdity of this foolish gossip; but as a matter of fact no one placedmore implicit faith in such reports than she, now that affliction hadrendered her even more impetuous and violent. 

It was not long before every one at Rome had heard it said thatGermanicus had been poisoned by Piso, acting, so it was intimated inwhispers, at the bidding of Tiberius and Livia. Piso had been the toolof Tiberius; Plancina, the tool of Livia. The accusation is absurd; itis even recognized as such by Tacitus, who was actuated by a fiercehatred against Tiberius. We know from him how the accusers of Pisorecounted that the poison had been drunk in a health at a banquet towhich Piso had been invited by Germanicus and at which he was seatedseveral places from his host; he was supposed to have poured the poisoninto his dishes in the presence of all the guests without any onehaving seen him! Tacitus himself says that every one thought this anabsurd fable, and such every man of good sense will think it to-day. But hatred makes even intelligent persons believe fables even moreabsurd; the people favorable to Germanicus were embittered against Pisoand would not listen to reason. All the enemies of Tiberius easilypersuaded themselves that some atrocious mystery was hidden in thisdeath and that, if they instituted proceedings against Piso, they mightbring to light a scandal which would compromise the emperor himself. They even began to repeat that Piso possessed letters from Tiberiuswhich contained the order to poison Germanicus. 

[Illustration: Costumes of Roman men, women, and children in theprocession of a peace festival. These reliefs formed part of the outerfrieze of the right wall of the Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace), erected byAugustus and dedicated 9 B. C. This and another well-preserved sectionare in the Uffizi Palace, Florence. One of two other fragments in theVilla Medici contains the head and bust of Augustus, and with thesection here shown completes what is supposed to be a group of thefamily of Augustus. ]

At last Agrippina arrived at Rome with the ashes of her husband, andshe began with her usual vehemence to fill the imperial house, thesenate, and all Rome with protests, imprecations, and accusationsagainst Piso. The populace, which admired her for her fidelity andlove for her husband, was even more deeply stirred, and on every handthe cry was raised that an exemplary punishment ought to be meted outto so execrable a crime. 

If at first Piso had treated these absurd charges with haughty disdain, he soon perceived that the danger was growing serious and that it wasnecessary for him to hasten his return to Rome, where a trial was nowinevitable. One of Germanicus's friends had accused him; Agrippina, anunwitting tool in the hands of the emperor's enemies, every day stirredpublic opinion to still higher pitches of excitement through her griefand her laments; the party of Germanicus worked upon the senate and thepeople, and when Piso arrived at Rome he found that he had beenabandoned by all. His hope lay in Tiberius, who knew the truth and whocertainly desired that these wild notions be driven out of the popularmind. But Tiberius was watched with the most painstaking malevolence. Any least action in favor of Piso would have been interpreted as adecisive proof that he had been the murderer's accomplice and thereforewished to save him. In fact, it was being reported at Rome withever-increasing insistence that at the trial Piso would show theletters of Tiberius. When the trial began, Livia, in the background, cleverly directed her thoughts to the saving of Plancina; but Tiberiuscould do no more for Piso than to recommend to the senate that theyexercise the most rigorous impartiality. His noble speech on thisoccasion has been preserved for us by Tacitus. "Let them judge, " hesaid, "without regard either for the imperial family or for the familyof Piso. " The admonition was useless, for his condemnation was aforegone conclusion, despite the absurdity of the charges. The enemiesof Tiberius wished to force matters to the uttermost limit in the hopethat the famous letters would have to be produced; and they acted withsuch frenzied hatred and excited public opinion to such a pitch thatPiso killed himself before the end of the trial. 

The violence of Agrippina had sent an innocent victim to follow theshade of her young husband. Despite bitter opposition, the emperor, through personal intervention, succeeded in saving the wife, the son, and the fortune of Piso, whose enemies had wished to exterminate hishouse root and branch. Tiberius thus offered a further proof that hewas one of the few persons at Rome who were capable in that trying andtroubled time of passing judgment and of reasoning with calm. 

IV

TIBERIUS AND AGRIPPINA

The blackest and most tragic period in the life of Tiberius begins withthe death of Germanicus and the terrible scandal of the suit againstPiso. It was to pass into history as the worst period of the "Tiberiantyranny"; for it was at this time that the famous _Lex de majestate_[1] (on high treason), which had not been applied under Augustus, cameto be frequently invoked, and through its operation atrociousaccusations, scandalous trials, and frightful condemnations weremultiplied in Rome, to the terror of all. Many committed suicide indespair, and illustrious families were given over to ruin and infamy. 

[Illustration: Tiberius. ]

Posterity still holds Tiberius to account for these tragedies; hiscruel and suspicious tyranny is made responsible for these accusations, for the suits which followed, and for the cruel condemnations in whichthey ended. It is said that every free mind which still rememberedancient Roman liberty gave him umbrage and caused him distress, andthat he could suffer to have about him only slaves and hired assassins. But how far this is from the truth! How poorly the superficialjudgment of posterity has understood the terrible tragedy of the reign, of Tiberius! We always forget that Tiberius was the next Roman emperorafter Augustus; the first, that is, who had to bear the weight of theimmense charge created by its founder, but without the immense prestigeand respect which Augustus had derived from the extraordinary goodfortune of his life, from the critical moment in which he had takenover the government, from the general opinion that he had ended thecivil wars, brought peace back to an empire in travail, and saved Romefrom the imminent ruin with which Egypt and Cleopatra had threatenedit. For these reasons, while Augustus lived, the envy, jealousy, rivalry, and hatred of the new authority were held in check in hispresence; but they were ever smoldering in the Roman aristocracy, whichconsidered itself robbed of a part of its privileges, and always feltitself humiliated by this same authority, even when it was necessary tosubmit to it in cases of supreme political necessity. But all thisenvy, all these jealousies, all these rivalries, --I have said itbefore, but it is well to repeat it, since the point is of capitalimportance for the understanding of the whole history of the firstempire, --were unleashed when Tiberius was exalted to the imperialdignity. 

What in reality was the situation of Tiberius after the death ofGermanicus? We must grasp it well if we wish to understand not onlythe cruelty of the accusations brought under the law of high treason, but also the whole family policy followed by the second emperor. Itwas he who had to bear the burden of the whole state, of the finances, of the supplies, of the army, of the home and foreign policies; his wasthe will that propelled, and the mind that regulated, all. To himevery portion of the empire and every social class had recourse, and itwas to him that they looked for redress for every wrong orinconvenience or danger. It was to him that the legions looked fortheir regular stipend, the common people of Rome for abundant grain, the senate for the preservation of boundaries and of the internalorder; the provinces looked to him for justice, and the sovereignallies or vassals for the solution of all internal difficulties inwhich they became involved. These responsibilities were so numerousand so great that Tiberius, like Augustus, attempted to induce thesenate to aid him by assuming its share, according to the ancientconstitution; but it was in vain, for the senate sought to shielditself, and always left to him the heavier portion. 

[Illustration: Types of head-dresses worn in the time of the women ofthe Caesars. ]

Is it conceivable that a man could have discharged so manyresponsibilities in times when the traditions of the government wereonly beginning to take form if he had not possessed a commandingpersonal authority, if he had not been the object of profound andgeneral respect? Augustus would not have been able to govern so greatan empire for more than forty years with such slight means had it notbeen for the fact, fortunate alike for himself and for the state, thathe did enjoy this profound, sincere, and general admiration. Tiberius, on the other hand, who was already decidedly unpopular when he cameinto power, had seen this unpopularity increase during the first sixyears of his rule, despite all the efforts he had put forth to governwell. His solicitude about maintaining a certain order within thestate was described as haughtiness and harshness, his preoccupationlest the precarious resources of the government be dissipated inuseless expenditures was dubbed avarice, and the prudence which hadimpelled him to restrain the rash policy of expansion and aggressionwhich Germanicus had tried to initiate beyond the Rhine was construedas envy and surly malignity. Against all considerations of justice, logic, or good sense, this accusation was repeated, and now thatdestiny had cut down Germanicus, he was accused _sotto voce_ of beingresponsible for his death by many of the great families of Rome andeven in senatorial circles. They treated it as most natural thatthrough jealousy he should poison his own nephew, his adopted son, thepopular descendant of Drusus, the son of that virtuous Antonia who washis best and most faithful friend! But if, after having been acceptedas true by the great families of Rome who sent it on its rounds, such areport had been allowed to circulate through the empire, how muchauthority would have been left to an emperor who was suspected of soterrible a crime? How could he have maintained discipline in the army, of which he was the head, and order among the people of Rome, of whom, as tribune, he was the great protector? How could he have directed, urged on, or restrained the senate, of which he was, in the language ofto-day, the president? The various Italian peoples from whom the armywas drawn did not yet consider the head of the state a being sosuperior to the laws that it would be permissible for him to commitcrimes which were branded as disgustingly repulsive to ordinary humannature. 

No historian who understands the affairs of the world in general, andthe story of the first century of the empire in particular, willattribute to ferocity or to the tyrannical spirit of Tiberius theincreasingly harsh application of the _Lex de majestate_ which followedthe death of Germanicus and the trial of Piso. This harshness was thenatural reaction against the delirium of atrocious calumnies againstTiberius which raged in the aristocracy of that time and especially inthe house of Agrippina. For she, in spite of the undeniably virtuouscharacter of her private life, was influenced by friends who, formotives of political advancement took advantage of her passions andinexperience. 

Too credulous of Tacitus, many writers have severely characterized thefacility and the severity with which the senate condemned those accusedunder the _Lex de majestate_: they consider it an indication of ignobleservility toward the emperor. Yet we know very well that the Romansenate at that time was not composed merely of adulators and hirelings;it still included many men of intelligence and character. We canexplain this severity only by admitting that there were many persons inthe senate who judged that the emperor could not be left defenselessagainst the wild slanders of the great families, since theseextravagant and insidious calumnies compromised not only the prestigeand the fame of the ruler, but also the tranquillity, the power, andthe integrity of the empire. Undoubtedly the _Lex de majestate_ didgive rise in time to false accusations, to private reprisals, and tounjust sentences of condemnation. Although it had been devised todefend the prestige of the state in the person of the magistrates whorepresented it, the law was frequently invoked by senators who wishedto vent their fiercest personal hatreds. Nor can it be denied thatcupidity was the cause of many iniquitous calumnies directed againstwealthy persons whose fortunes were coveted by their accusers. Yet wemust go slow in accusing Tiberius of these excesses. Tacitus himself, who was averse to the emperor, recounts several incidents which showhim in the act of intervening in trials of high treason for the benefitof the accused precisely for the purpose of hindering these excesses ofprivate vengeance. The accounts which we have of many other trials areso brief and so biased that it is not fair for us to hazard a judgment. 

We do know, however, that after the death of Germanicus there wasformed at Rome, in the imperial family and the senate, a party ofAgrippina, which began an implacable war upon Tiberius, and thatTiberius, the so-called tyrant, was at the beginning very weak, undecided, and vacillating in his resistance to this new opposition. His opponents did not spare his person; they did their best to spreadthe belief that the emperor was a poisoner, and persecuted himrelentlessly with this calumny; they were already pushing forward Nero, the first-born son of Germanicus, though in 21 A. D. He was onlyfourteen years old, in order that he might in time be made the rival ofTiberius. The latter, indeed, tried at first to moderate the chargesof high treason, his supreme defense; he feigned that he did not knowor did not see many things, and instead of resisting, he began to makelong sojourns away from Rome, thus turning over the capital, in whichthe pretorian guard remained, to the calumnies of his enemies. Of allthese enemies the most terrible was Agrippina, who, passionate, vehement, without judgment, abused in good faith both the relationshipwhich protected her and the pity which her misfortune had aroused. Sheallowed no occasion for taunting Tiberius with his pretended crime toescape her, using to this end not only words, but scenes and actions, which impressed the public even more strongly than open accusationscould have done. A supper to which Tiberius had invited her becamefamous at Rome, for at it she refused obstinately and ostentatiously totouch any food or drink whatever, to the astonishment of the guests, who understood perfectly what her gestures meant. And such calumniesand such affronts Tiberius answered only with a weary and disdainfulinertia; at most, when his patience was exhausted, some bitter andconcise reproof would escape him. 

I have no doubt that Tiberius had resolved at the beginning to avoidall harsh measures as far as possible; for unpopular, misunderstood, and detested as he was, he did not dare to use violence against a largepart of the aristocracy and against his own house. Furthermore, Agrippina was the least intelligent of the women of the family, and hersenseless opposition could be tolerated as long as Livia and Antonia, the two really serious ladies of the family, sided with Tiberius. Butit is easy to understand that this situation could not long endure. Apower which defends itself weakly against the attacks of its enemies isdestined to sink rapidly into a decline, and the party of Agrippinawould therefore quickly have gained favor and power had there notarisen, to sustain the vacillating strength of Tiberius, a man whosename was to become sadly famous--Sejanus--the commander of thepretorian guard. 

Sejanus belonged to an obscure family of knights--to what we should nowcall the _bourgeoisie_. He was not a senator, and he held no greatpolitical position; for his charge as commander of the guard was apurely military office. In ordinary times he would have remained asecondary personage, exclusively concerned with the exacting duties ofhis command; but the party of Agrippina with its intrigues, and theweakness and uncertainty of Tiberius, made of him, however, for acertain time, a formidable power. It is not difficult to see whencethis power arose. The loyalty of the pretorian guard, upon whichdepended the security and the safety of the imperial authority, was oneof the things which must seriously have preoccupied Tiberius, particularly in the face of the persistent and insidious intrigues andaccusations of the party of Agrippina. The guard lived at Rome, incontinual contact with the senate and the imperial house. Everythingwhich was said in the senatorial circles or in the palaces of theemperor or of his relatives was quickly repeated among the cohorts, andthe memory of Drusus and Germanicus was deeply venerated by thepretorians. If the guard could have been persuaded that the emperorwas a poisoner of his kindred, their loyalty would have been exposed tonumberless intrigues and attempts at seduction. In such a condition ofaffairs, a commander of the guard who could inspire Tiberius with acomplete and absolute trust might easily acquire a great influence overhim. Sejanus knew how to inspire this trust. This was partly byreason of his origin, for the equestrian order, on account of itsancient rivalry with the senatorial nobility, was more favorablyinclined than the latter toward the imperial authority; and partly alsoon account of certain reforms which he had succeeded in introducinginto the pretorian guard. 

[Illustration: A Roman feast in the time of the Caesars. ]

Once he had acquired the emperor's confidence, the ambitious andintelligent prefect of the pretorians proceeded to render himselfindispensable in all things. The moment was favorable; Tiberius wasbecoming more and more wearied of his many affairs, of his manystruggles, of his countless responsibilities; more and more disgustedwith Rome, with its society, with the too frequent contact with the menwhom it was his fate to govern. He was in the earlier stages of thatsettled melancholy which grew deeper and deeper in the last ten yearsof his life, and which had grown upon him as the result of longantagonisms, of great bitterness, and of continual terrors andsuspicions; and if it is true that Tiberius was addicted to the vice ofheavy drinking, as we hear from ancient writers, the abuse of wine mayalso have had its part in producing it. The tyrant, as historians havebeen pleased to call him, did actually seem to weaken in the fight forthose ideals in which he had so long and so ardently believed. Hetried to please the people by advocating no measures that might seemharsh or excessive to them. He even resisted, in the year 22 A. D. , thepressure that his own party--his own puritan party--brought to bearupon him to apply with the utmost severity and discipline the lawsagainst the fast increasing luxury of the men and women of his day. His reply to such pressure was a letter to the senate in which hedeplored, among other things, the passion that so many women wereshowing for jewels and precious stones imported from distant countries. He maintained that it was the fault of such women that so much goldleft the country and pointed out how much more wisely the money couldbe spent in fortifying the boundaries of the empire. 

In view of all this it is not difficult to understand why the man whofor many years had done everything for himself, who had never wished tohave either counselors or confidants about him, now that he was growingold needed the support of younger energies and of stronger wills. Butin his family he could rely only upon his son Drusus, who had nowbecome a serious and trustworthy man, and in the year 22 A. D. He askedthe senate that it concede to his son the tribunician power; that is, that they make him his colleague. But the son did not suffice, andSejanus therefore succeeded in making himself, together with Drusus, infact, if not in name, the first and most active and influentialcollaborator and counselor of Tiberius. He was even more active andinfluential than Drusus, for the latter was frequently absent ondistant military missions to the confines of the empire, while Sejanus, as commander of the pretorian guard, was virtually always at Rome, where the emperor now appeared less and less frequently. 

Such was the origin of the anomalous power of this man, who was noteven a senator--a power which was the result of the weakness ofTiberius and of the fierce discords which divided the aristocracy; andit was a power which must of necessity prove disastrous, especially tothe party of Agrippina and Germanicus. Although indications are notlacking that there was no great harmony or friendship between Sejanusand Drusus, it is evident that Sejanus, as the energetic representativeof the interests of Tiberius, must have directed all his effortsagainst the friends of Agrippina, who was arousing the fiercestopposition to the emperor. But in the year 23, an unforeseen eventseemed suddenly to change the situation and to render possible areconciliation between Tiberius and the party of Agrippina. In thisyear, Drusus also, like so many other members of his family, diedprematurely, at the age of thirty-eight, and on this occasion, for thetime being, at least, no one raised the cry of poisoning. Thisunexpected misfortune moved Tiberius profoundly, for he dearly lovedhis son, and it seemed for a moment to determine the triumph ofAgrippina's party. Now that his son had been taken from him, where, ifnot among the sons of Germanicus and Agrippina, could Tiberius look fora successor? And, as a further proof that Tiberius desired as far aspossible to avoid conflict in the bosom of his family, he did nothesitate a moment, despite all the annoyances and difficulties which hehad suffered at the hands of Agrippina and her friends. He officiallyrecognized that in the sons of Germanicus were henceforth placed thefuture hopes of his family and of the empire. Of the two elder, Nerowas now sixteen and Drusus was somewhat younger, though we do not knowhis exact age. These he summoned to appear before the senate, and hepresented them to the assembly with a noble discourse the substance ofwhich Tacitus has preserved for us, exhorting the youths and the senateto fulfil their respective duties for the greatness and the prosperityof the republic. 

[Illustration: Depositing the ashes of a member of the imperial familyin a Roman columbarium. ]

After the death of Drusus, therefore, a reconciliation became possiblein the family of the Caesars. The latent rivalry between the familiesof Tiberius and Germanicus was extinguished. Indeed, even in the midstof the tears shed for the early death of Drusus, a gleam of concordseems to have shone down upon the house desolated by many tragedies, while Sejanus, whose power depended upon the strife of the factions, was for a moment set aside and driven back into the shadows. But itwas not to continue long; for soon the flames of discord broke out moreviolently than ever. Whom shall we blame, Sejanus or Agrippina?Tacitus says that it was the fault of Sejanus, whom he accuses ofhaving tried to destroy the descendants of Germanicus, in order tousurp their place: but he himself is forced to admit in another passage(Annals iv. , 59) that virtually a little court of freedmen anddependents gathered about Nero, the leader of the sons of Germanicus, urging him on against Tiberius and Sejanus, and begging him to actquickly. "This, " they said, "is the will of the people, the desire ofthe armies. Nor would Sejanus, who was even then making light of thepatience of the old man and of the dilatoriness of the youth, havedared to resist him. " From such speeches it is only a short step toplans for rebellion and conspiracy. In all probability the blame forthis later and more bitter dissension must, as usually happens, bedivided between the two factions. The party of Agrippina, emboldenedby its good fortune and by the weakness of Tiberius, was, after thedeath of Drusus, conscious of its own supremacy. Its members had onlya single aim; even before it was possible they wished to see Nero, thefirst-born son of Germanicus, in the position of Tiberius. Theytherefore took up again their struggles and intrigues against Tiberius, and attempted to incite Nero against the emperor. But this timeSejanus was blocking their pathway. The death of Drusus had evenfurther increased the trust and affection which the emperor had for hisassistant, and he was henceforth the only confidant and the only friendof the emperor; a war without quarter between him and Agrippina, hersons and the party of Germanicus, was inevitable. And Sejanus openedthe action by attempting to exclude from the magistracy and from officeall the friends of Agrippina and all the members of the opposingfaction. At this time it was difficult to arrive at any of the moreimportant offices without being recommended to the senate by theemperor, against whose choice the senate no longer dared to rebel;since the emperor was held responsible for the conduct of thegovernment, it was only just that he should be allowed to select hismore important collaborators. Sejanus was therefore able, by using hisinfluence over Tiberius, to lay a thousand difficulties and obstaclesin the way of even the legitimate ambitions of the most eminent men ofthe opposite faction. Nor were these the only weapons employed; othersno less efficacious were called into play, and intrigues, calumnies, accusations, and trials were set on foot without scruple and with aferocity the horror of which Tacitus has painted with indelible colors. Among these intrigues two matrimonial projects must be mentioned. Inthe year 25 Sejanus attempted a bold stroke; he repudiated his wifeApicata, and asked Tiberius for the hand of Livilla (Livia), the widowof Drusus. Sejanus had frequented the political aristocracy of theempire, and, despite his equestrian origin, was quick to adopt not onlytheir ambitions and their manners, but also their ideas on marriage. He, too, considered it as simply a political instrument, a means ofacquiring and consolidating power. He had therefore disrupted hisfirst family in order to contract this marriage, which would haveredoubled his power and his influence and have introduced him into theimperial household. But his bold stroke failed, because Tiberiusrefused; and he refused, Tacitus tells us, above all because he wasafraid that this marriage would still further irritate Agrippina. Theemperor is supposed to have told Sejanus that too many femininequarrels were already disturbing and agitating the house of theCaesars, to the serious detriment of his nephew's sons. And what wouldhappen, he asked, if this marriage should still further foment existinghatreds? _Quid si intendatur certamen tali conjugio_? The reply issignificant, because it proves to us that Tiberius, who is accused ofharboring a fierce hate against the sons of Germanicus and Agrippina, was still seeking, two years after the death of Drusus, to appease bothfactions, attempting not to irritate his adversaries and to preserve areasonable equanimity in the midst of these animosities and thesestruggles. 

[Illustration: The starving Livilla refusing food. ]

In any case, Sejanus was refused, and this refusal was a slight successfor the party of Agrippina, which, a year later, in 26, attempted onits own account an analogous move. Agrippina asked Tiberius forpermission to remarry. If we are to believe Tacitus, Agrippina madethis request on her own initiative, impelled by one of those numerousand more or less reasonable caprices which were continually shootingthrough her head. But are we to suppose that suddenly, after a longwidowhood, Agrippina put forth so strange a proposal without any_arrière-pensée_ whatever? Furthermore, if this proposal had beenmerely the momentary caprice of a whimsical woman, would it have beenso seriously debated in the imperial household, and would the daughterof Agrippina have recounted the episode in her memoirs? It is moreprobable that this marriage, too, had a political aim. By giving ahusband to Agrippina, they were also seeking to give a leader to theanti-Tiberian party. The sons of Germanicus were too young, andAgrippina was too violent and tactless, to be able alone to copesuccessfully with Sejanus, supported as he was by Tiberius, by Livia, and by Antonia. We can thus explain why Tiberius opposed and preventedthe marriage: Agrippina, unassisted, had caused him sufficient trouble;it would have been entirely superfluous for him to sanction her takingto herself an official counselor in the guise of a husband. 

This time Sejanus triumphed over the ill success of his rivals, and thestruggle continued in this manner between the two parties, but with anincreasing advantage to Sejanus. Beginning with the year 26, we seenumerous indications that the party of Agrippina and Germanicus was nolonger able to resist the blows and machinations of Sejanus, whodetached from it, one after another, all the men of any importance. Heeither won them over to himself through his favors and his promises, orhe frightened them with his threats; and those who resisted mosttenaciously, he destroyed with his suits. 

Tiberius was the storm-center of these struggles, and contrary to whatlegend has reported, he attempted as far as he was able to prevent thetwo parties from going to extremes. But what pain, repugnance, andfatigue it must have cost him to make the effort necessary formaintaining a last ray of reason and justice among so many evilpassions, animosities, ambitions, and rivalries! It must have cost himdearly, for he had grown up in the time when the dream of a greatrestoration of the aristocracy was luring the upper classes of Romewith its fairest and most luminous smile. As a young man he had knownand loved Vergil, Horace, and Livy, the two poets and the historian ofthis great dream; like all the elect spirits of those now distantyears, he had seen behind this vision a great senate, a glorious andterrible army, an austere and revered republic like that which Livy hadpictured with glowing colors in his immortal pages. 

Instead of all this, he was now forced to take his place at the head ofthis decadent and wretched nobility, which seemed to be interested onlyin rending itself asunder with calumnies, denunciations, suits, andscandalous condemnations, and which repaid him for all that he had doneand was still doing for its safety and the prosperity of the empire bydirecting against his name the most atrocious calumnies, the fiercestrailleries, and every sort of ridiculous and infamous legend. He haddreamed of victories over the enemies of Rome, and he had to resignhimself to struggling day and night against the hysterical extravaganceof Agrippina: he had to be content, even without the sure hope ofsuccess, if he could convince the majority that he was not a poisoner. Authority without glory or respect, power divorced from the meanssufficient for its exercise--such was the situation in which thesuccessor of Augustus, the second emperor, after twelve years of adifficult and trying reign, found himself. He no longer felt himselfsafe at Rome, where he feared rightly or wrongly that his life wasbeing continually threatened, and it is not astonishing that, old, wearied, and disgusted, between the years 26 and 27 he should haveretired definitely to Capri, seeking to hide his misanthropy, hisweariness, and his disgust with men and things in the wonderful littleisle which a delightful caprice of nature had set down in the lap ofthe divine Bay of Naples. 

But instead of the peace he sought at Capri, Tiberius found the infamyof history. How dark and terrible are the memories of him associatedwith the charming isle, which, violet-tinted, on beautiful sunny daysemerges from an azure sea against an azure sky! That fragment ofparadise fallen upon the shore of one of the most beautiful seas in theworld is said to have been for about ten years a hell of fiercecruelties and abominable vices. Tiberius passed sentence upon himself, in the opinion of posterity, when he secluded himself in Capri. Oughtwe, without a further word, to transcribe this sentence? There are, tobe sure, no decisive arguments to prove false the accounts about thehorrors of Capri which the ancients, and especially Suetonius, havetransmitted to us; there are some, however, which make us mistrust andwithhold our judgment. Above all, we have the right to ask ourselveshow, from whom, and by access to what sources did Suetonius and theother ancients learn so many extraordinary details. It must beremembered that all the great figures in the history of Rome who hadmany enemies, like Sylla, Caesar, Antony, and Augustus himself, wereaccused of having scandalous habits. Precisely because the puritantradition was strong at Rome, such an accusation did much harm, and forthis reason, whether true or false, enemies were glad to repeat itwhenever they wished to discredit a character. Lastly, all the ancientwriters, even the most hostile, tell us that up to a ripe age Tiberiuspreserved his exemplary habits. Is it likely, then, that suddenly, when already old, he should have soiled himself with all the vices? Atall events, if there is any truth contained in these accounts, we canat most conclude that as an old man Tiberius became subject to somemental infirmity and that the man who took refuge at Capri was nolonger entirely sane. 

Certain it is, in any case, that after his retirement to Capri, Tiberius seriously neglected public affairs, and that Sejanus wasfinally looked upon at Rome as the _de facto_ emperor. The bulletinsand reports which were sent from the empire and from Rome to theemperor passed through his hands, as well as the decisions whichTiberius sent back to the state. At Rome, in all affairs of serious orslight importance, the senators turned to Sejanus, and about him, whomall fell into the habit of considering as the true emperor, a court andparty were formed. In fear of his great power, the senators and theold aristocracy suppressed the envy which the dizzy rise of thisobscure knight had aroused. Rome suffered without protest that a manof obscure birth should rule the empire in the place of a descendant ofthe great Claudian family, and the senators of the most illustrioushouses grew accustomed to paying him court. Worse still, virtually allof them aided him, either by openly favoring him or by allowing him afree hand, to complete the decisive destruction of the party and thefamily of Germanicus, --of that same Germanicus of whom all had beenfond and whose memory the people still venerated. 

[Illustration: Costume of a chief vestal (virgo vestalis maxima). ]

After the retirement of Tiberius to Capri, all felt that Agrippina andher sons were inevitably doomed sooner or later to succumb in the duelwith the powerful, ambitious, and implacable prefect of the pretorianswho represented Tiberius at Rome. Only a few generous idealistsremained faithful to the conquered, who were now near theirdestruction; such supporters as might possibly ease the misery of ruin, but not ward it off or avoid it. Among these last faithful and heroicfriends was a certain Titius Sabinus, and the implacable Sejanusdestroyed him with a suit of which Tacitus has given us an account, ahorrible story of one of the most abominable judicial machinationswhich human perfidy can imagine. Dissensions arose to aggravate thealready serious danger in which Agrippina and her friends had beenplaced. Nero, the first-born son, and Drusus, the second, becamehostile at the very moment when they should have united against theruthless adversary who wished to exterminate them all. A last rock ofrefuge remained to protect the family of Germanicus. It was Livia, therevered old lady who had been present at the birth of the fortunes ofAugustus and the new imperial authority, and who had held in her armsthat infant world which had been born in the midst of the convulsionsof the civil wars, and a little later had watched it try its firststeps on the pathway of history. Livia did not much love Agrippina, whose hatred and intrigues against Tiberius she had always blamed; butshe was too wise and too solicitous of the prestige of the family toallow Sejanus entirely to destroy the house of Germanicus. As long asshe lived, Agrippina and Nero could dwell safely in Rome. But Liviawas feeble, and in the beginning of 29, at the age of eighty-six, shedied. The catastrophe which had been carefully prepared by Sejanus wasnow consummated; a few months after the death of Livia, Agrippina andNero were subjected to a suit, and, under an accusation of havingconspired against Tiberius, were condemned to exile by the senate. Shortly after his condemnation, Nero committed suicide. 

The account which Tacitus gives us of this trial is obscure, involved, and fragmentary, for the story is broken off at its most importantpoint by an unfortunate lacuna in the manuscript. The other historiansadd but little light with their brief phrases and passing allusions. We do not therefore entirely understand either the contents of thecharges, the reason for the condemnation, the stand taken by theaccused, or the conduct of Tiberius with regard to the accusation. Itseems hardly probable that Agrippina and Nero could have been trulyguilty of a real conspiracy against Tiberius. Isolated as they hadbeen by Sejanus after the retirement of Tiberius to Capri, they wouldscarcely have been able to set a conspiracy on foot, even if they hadso desired. They were paying the penalty for the long war of calumniesand slanders which they had waged upon Tiberius, for the aversion andthe scorn which they had always shown for him. In this course ofconduct many senators had encouraged them as long as Tiberius alone hadnot dared to have recourse to violent and cruel measures in order tomake himself respected by his family. But such acts of disrespectbecame serious crimes for the unfortunate woman and her hapless son, even in the eyes of the senators who had encouraged them to committhem, now that Sejanus had reinvigorated the imperial authority withhis energy, and now that all felt that behind Tiberius and in his nameand place there was acting a man of decision who knew how to punish hisenemies and to reward his friends. 

The trial and condemnation of Agrippina and Nero were certainly themachinations of Sejanus, who carried along with him not only the senateand the friends of the imperial family, but perhaps even Tiberiushimself. They prove how much Sejanus had been able to strengthenimperial authority, which had been hesitating and feeble in the lastdecade. Sejanus had dared to do what Tiberius had never succeeded indoing; he had destroyed that center of opposition which gathered aboutAgrippina in the house of Germanicus. It is therefore scarcelynecessary to say that the ruin of Agrippina still further increased thepower of Sejanus. All bowed trembling before the man who had daredhumiliate the very family of the Julio-Claudii. Honors were showeredupon his head; he was made senator and pontifex; he received theproconsular power; there was talk of a marriage between him and thewidow of Nero; and it was finally proposed that he be named consul forfive years. Indeed, in 31, through the will of Tiberius, he actuallybecame the colleague of the emperor himself in the consulate. Heneeded only the tribunician power to make him the official collaboratorof the emperor and his designated successor. Every one at Rome, furthermore, considered him the future prince. 

[Illustration: Remains of the House of the Vestal Virgins. ]

But having arrived at this height, Sejanus's head was turned, and heasked himself why he should exercise the rule and have all its burdensand dangers while he left to others the pomp, the honors, and theadvantages. Although Tiberius allowed the senate to heap honors uponhis faithful prefect of the pretorians, and though he himself showedhis gratitude to him in many ways, even going to the point of beingwilling to give him the widow of Nero in marriage, he never reallyexpected to take him as his colleague or to designate him as hissuccessor. Tiberius was a Claudian, and that a knight without ancestryshould be placed at the head of the Roman aristocracy was to himunthinkable; after the exile of Nero he had cast his eyes upon Caius, another son of Germanicus, as his possible successor. Nor had hehidden his intention: he had even clearly expressed it in differentspeeches to the senate. Therefore Sejanus must finally have come tothe conclusion that if he continued to defend Tiberius and hisinterests, he could no longer hope for anything from him, and mighteven compromise the influence and the popularity which he had alreadyacquired. Tiberius was hated and detested, there was a numerous partyopposed to him in the senate, and he was extremely unpopular among themasses. Many admired Sejanus through spiteful hatred of Tiberius, forit amounted to saying that they preferred to be governed by an obscureknight rather than by an old and detested Claudian who had shut himselfup in Capri. 

And thus Sejanus seems to have deluded himself into believing that ifhe succeeded in doing away with the emperor, he could easily take hisposition by setting aside the young son of Germanicus and profiting bythe popularity which the fall of Tiberius would bring him. Little bylittle he came to an understanding with the enemies of Tiberius andprepared a conspiracy for the final overthrow of the odious governmentof the son of Livia. Many senators had agreed to this, and certainlyfew conspiracies were ever organized under more favorable auspices. Tiberius was old, disgusted with everything and everybody, and alone inCapri; he had virtually not a single friend in Rome; what happened inthe world he knew only through what Sejanus told him. He was thereforeentirely in the hands of the man who was preparing to sacrifice him tothe tenacious hatred of the people and the senatorial aristocracy. Young, energetic, and the favorite of fortune, Sejanus had with him aformidable party in the senate, he was the commander of the pretorianguard, --that is, of the only military force stationed in Italy, --and hehad terrified with his implacable persecutions all those whom he hadfailed to win over through his promises or his favors. Could the duelbetween this misanthropic old man and this vigorous, energetic, ruthless climber end in any other way than with the defeat of theformer?

[Illustration: Bust, supposed to be of Antonia--daughter of Mark Antonyand Octavia--and mother of Germanicus. ]

But now stepping forward suddenly from the shadows to which she hadretired, a lady appeared, threw herself between the two contestants, and changed the fate of the combat. It was Antonia, the daughter ofthe famous triumvir, the revered widow of Drusus. 

After the death of Livia, Antonia was the most respected personage ofthe imperial family in Rome. She still watched, withdrawn but alert, over the destiny of the house now virtually destroyed by death, dissensions, the cruelty of the laws, and the relentless anger of thearistocracy. It was she who scented out the plot, and quickly andcourageously she informed Tiberius. The latter, in danger and inCapri, displayed again the energy and sagacity of his best period. Thedanger was most threatening, especially because Sejanus was thecommander of the pretorian guard. Tiberius beguiled him with friendlyletters, dangling in front of him the hope that he had conceded to himthe tribunician power. --that is, that he had made him hiscolleague, --while at the same time he secretly took measures to appointa successor for him. Suddenly Sejanus learned that he was no longercommander of the guard, and that the emperor had accused him before thesenate of conspiracy. In an instant, under this blow, the fortunes ofSejanus collapsed. The envy and the latent hatred against the parvenu, the knight who had risen higher than all others, and who had humiliatedthe senatorial aristocracy with his good fortune, were reawakened, andthe senate and public opinion turned fiercely against him. Sejanus, his family, his friends, his accomplices, and those who seemed to behis accomplices, were put to death after summary trials by the fury ofthe mob; and in Rome blood flowed in torrents. 

Antonia might now have enjoyed the satisfaction of having saved throughher foresight not only Tiberius, but the entire family, when suddenlyone of the surges of that fierce tempest of ambitions and hatreds torefrom her side even her own daughter, Livilla, the widow of Drusus, andcast her as a prey into that sea of blind popular frenzy. The readerhas perhaps not forgotten that eight years before, when Sejanus washoping to marry Livilla, he had repudiated his first wife, Apicata. Apicata had not wished to outlive the ruin of her former husband, andshe killed herself, but only after having written Tiberius a letter inwhich she accused Livilla of having poisoned Drusus through connivancewith Sejanus, whom she wished to marry. I confess that this accusationseems to me hardly probable, and I do not believe that the denunciationof Apicata is sufficient ground for admitting it. Above all, it iswell to inquire what proofs Apicata could have had of this crime, andhow she could have procured them even if the crime had been committed. Since the two accomplices would have been obliged to hide theirinfamous deed from all, there was no one from whom they would haveconcealed it more carefully than from Apicata. We must further notethat it is not probable that a cautious man, as Sejanus was in the year23, would have thought of committing so serious a crime as that ofpoisoning the son of his protector. For what reason would he have doneso? He did not then think of succeeding Tiberius; by removing Drusus, he would merely have improved the situation of the family ofGermanicus, which at that time was already hostile to him and withwhich he was preparing to struggle. Instead, might not this accusation_in extremis_ be the last vengeance of a repudiated woman against therival who for a moment had threatened to take the position from whichshe herself had been driven? Apicata did not belong to thearistocracy, and, unlike the ladies of the senatorial families, she hadnot therefore been brought up with the idea of having to serve docilelyas an instrument for the political career of her own husband. Perhapsher denunciation was the revenge of feminine jealousy, of that passionwhich the lower orders of Roman society did not extinguish in thehearts of their women as did the aristocracy. 

This denunciation, however, --we know this from the pages of ancientwriters, --was one of the most terrible griefs of Tiberius's old age. He had loved his son tenderly, and the idea of leaving so horrible acrime unpunished, in case the accusation was true, drove him todesperation. Yet, on the other hand, Livilla, the presumptivecriminal, was the daughter of his faithful friend, of that Antonia whohad saved him from the treacheries of Sejanus. As for the public, everready to believe all the infamies which were reported of the imperialhouse, it was firmly convinced that Livilla was an abominable poisoner. A great trial was set on foot; many suspects were put to torture, whichis evidence that they were arriving at no definite conclusions, andthis was probably because they were seeking for the proofs of animaginary crime. Livilla, however, did not survive the scandal, theaccusations, the suspicions of Tiberius, and the distrust of thoseabout her. Because she was the daughter of Drusus and thedaughter-in-law of Tiberius, because she belonged to the family whichfortune had placed at the head of the immense empire of Rome, she wouldnot be able to persuade any one that she was innocent. The obscurewoman, without ancestry, who was accusing her from the grave, would betaken at her word by every one; she would convince posterity andhistory; against all reason she would prevail over the greatness ofLivilla! So Livilla took refuge in her mother's house and starvedherself to death, for she was unable to outlive an accusation which itwas impossible to refute. 

Tiberius's reign continued for six years after this terrible tragedy, but it was only a species of slow death-agony. The year 33 saw stillanother tragic event--the suicide of Agrippina and her son Drusus. Ofthe race of Germanicus there remained alive only one son, Caius (thelater Emperor Caligula), and three daughters, of whom the eldest, Agrippina, the mother of Nero, had been married a few years before tothe descendant of one of the greatest houses of Rome, Cnaeus DomitiusEnobarbus. Tiberius still remained as the last relic of a bygone timeto represent ideas and aspirations which were henceforth lost causes, amid the ruins and the tombs of his friends. Posterity, following inthe footsteps of Tacitus, has held him and his dark nature aloneresponsible for this ruin. We ought to believe instead that he was aman born to a loftier and more fortunate destiny, but that he had topay the penalty for the unique eminence to which fortune had exaltedhim. Like the members of his family who had been driven into exile, who had died before their time, who had been driven to suicide indespair, he, too, was the victim of a tragic situation full ofinsoluble contradictions; and precisely because he was destined tolive, he was perhaps the most unfortunate victim of them all. 

[1] There was in the Roman legal system no public prosecutor andvirtually no police. Every Roman citizen was supposed to watch overthe laws and see that they were not infringed. On his retirement fromoffice, any governor or magistrate ran the risk of being impeached bysome young aspirant to political honors, and not infrequently oratory, an art much cultivated by the Romans, triumphed over righteousness. Inthe earlier period the ground on which charges were usually brought wasmalversation; in the time of the empire they were also frequentlybrought under the above-mentioned law _de majestate_. It has been saidthat this common act of accusation, the birthright of the Romancitizen, the greatly esteemed palladium of Roman freedom, became themost convenient instrument of despotism. Since he who could bring acriminal to justice received a fourth of his possessions and estates, and since it brought the accuser into prominence, delation wasrecklessly indulged in by the unscrupulous, both for the sake of gainand as a means of venting personal spite. The vice lay at the veryheart of the Roman system, and was not the invention of Tiberius. Hecould hardly have done away with it without overthrowing the wholeRoman procedure. 

V

THE SISTERS OF CALIGULA AND THE MARRIAGE OF MESSALINA

After the death of Tiberius (37 A. D. ), the problem of the successionpresented to the senate was not an easy one. In his will, Tiberius hadadopted, and thereby designated to the senate as his successors, CaiusCaligula, the son of Germanicus, and Tiberius, the son of his own sonDrusus. The latter was only seventeen, and too young for such aresponsibility. Caligula was twenty-seven, and therefore still veryyoung, although by straining a point he might be emperor; yet he didnot enjoy a good reputation. If we except him, there was no othermember of the family old enough to govern except Tiberius ClaudiusNero, the brother of Germanicus and the only surviving son of Drususand Antonia. He was generally considered a fool, was thelaughing-stock of freedmen and women, and such a gawk and clown that ithad been impossible to put him into the magistracy. Indeed, he was noteven a senator when Tiberius died. 

[Illustration: Caligula. ]

As they could not consider him, there remained only Caligula, unlessthey wished to go outside the family of Augustus, which, if notimpossible, was at least difficult and dangerous. For the provinces, the German barbarians, and especially the soldiers of the legions, wereaccustomed to look upon this family as the mainstay of the empire. Thelegions had become specially attached to the memory and to the race ofDrusus and Germanicus, who still lived in the minds of the soldiers aswitnesses to their former exploits and virtues. During the longwatches of the night, as their names were repeated in speech and story, their shades, idealized by death, returned again to revisit the campson the banks of the Rhine and the Danube. The veneration and affectionwhich the armies had once felt for the Roman nobility were now centeredabout the family of Augustus. In this difficulty, therefore, thesenate chose the lesser evil, and, annulling a part of the testament ofTiberius, elected Caligula, the son of Germanicus, as their emperor. 

The death of Tiberius, however, was destined to show the Romans for thefirst time that although it was hard to find an emperor, it might evenbe harder to find an empress. During the long reign of Augustus, Liviahad discharged the duties of this difficult position with incomparablesuccess. Tiberius had succeeded Augustus, and after his divorce fromJulia had never remarried. There had therefore been a long interregnumin the Roman world of feminine society, during which no one had everstopped to think whether it would be easy or difficult to find a womanwho could with dignity take over the position of Livia. The problemwas really presented for the first time with the advent of Caligula;for, at twenty-seven, he could not solve it as simply as Tiberius haddone. In the first place, it was to be expected that a man of his agewould have a wife; secondly, the _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_ mademarriage a necessity for him, as for all the senators; furthermore, thehead of the state needed to have a woman at his side, if he wished todischarge all his social duties. The celibacy of Tiberius hadundoubtedly contributed to the social isolation which had been fatalboth to him and to the state. 

Therefore in Caligula's time the Roman public became aware that theproblem confronting it was a most difficult one. A most exactingpublic opinion, hesitating between the ideals of two epochs, wished tosee united in the empress the best part, both of the ancient and of themodern customs, and was consequently demanding that the second Liviashould possess virtually every quality. It was necessary that sheshould be of noble birth; that is, a descendant of one of those greatRoman families which with every year were becoming less numerous, lessprolific, less virtuous, and more fiercely divided among themselves byirreconcilable hatreds. This latter was a most serious difficulty; forby marrying into one of these lines, the emperor ran the risk ofantagonizing all those other families which were its enemies. Theempress, furthermore, must be the model of all the virtues; fruitful, in order to obey the _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_; religious, chaste, and virtuous, that she might not violate the _Lex de adulteriis_;simple and modest, in deference to the _Lex sumptuaria_. She must beable to rule wisely over the vast household of the emperor, full of hisslaves and freedmen, and she must aid her husband in the fulfilment ofall those social duties--receptions, dinners, entertainments--which, though serious concerns for every Roman nobleman, were even moreserious for the emperor. That she should be stupid or ignorant was ofcourse out of the question. In fact, from this time to the downfall ofNero the difficulties of the imperial family and its authority arisenot so much from the emperors as from their wives; so that it may trulybe said that it was the women who unwittingly dragged down to its ruinthe great Julio-Claudian house. 

[Illustration: A bronze sestertius (slightly enlarged), showing thesisters of Caligula (Agrippina, Drusilla, and Julia Livilla) on oneside and Germanicus on the other side. ]

[Illustration: A bronze sestertius with the head of Agrippina theElder, daughter of Agrippa and Julia, the daughter of Augustus. Shewas the wife of Germanicus, and their daughter, Agrippina the younger, was the mother of the Emperor Nero. ]

But if the difficulty was serious, there never was a man so littlefitted and so ill prepared to face it as this young man of twenty-sevenwho had been exalted to the imperial dignity after the death ofTiberius. Four years before his election as emperor, he had married acertain Julia Claudilla, a lady who doubtless belonged to one of thegreat Roman families, but about whom we have no definite information. We cannot say, therefore, whether or not at the side of a secondAugustus she might have become a new Livia. In any case, it is certainthat Caligula was not a second Augustus. He was probably not sofrenzied a lunatic as ancient writers have pictured him, but his wascertainly an extravagant, unbalanced mind, given to excesses, andunhinged by the delirium of greatness, which his coming to the thronehad increased the more because it had been conferred upon him at a timewhen he was too young and before he had been sufficiently prepared. For many years Caligula had never even hoped to succeed Tiberius; hehad continually feared that the fate of his mother and his two brotherswas likewise waiting for him. Far from having dreamed that he would beraised to the imperial purple, he had merely desired that he might nothave to end his days as an exile on some desert island in theMediterranean. So much good fortune after the long persecutions of hisfamily profoundly disturbed his mental faculties, which had notoriginally been well balanced, and it fomented in him that delirium ofgrandeur which violently directed his desires toward distant Egypt, inthe customs of which, rather than in those of Rome, he, in theexaltation of power, sought satisfaction for his imperial vanity. Fromhis earliest youth Caligula had shown a great inclination for theproducts and the men of that far country, then greatly admired andgreatly feared by the Romans. For instance, we know that all hisservants were Egyptians, and that Helicon, his most faithful andinfluential freedman, was an Alexandrian. But shortly after hiselevation this admiration for the land of the Ptolemies and thePharaohs broke forth into a furor of Egyptian exoticism, which impelledhim to an attempt to bring his own reign into connection with thepolicies of his great-grandfather Mark Antony. He sought to introduceinto Rome the ideas, the customs, the sumptuousness, and theinstitutions of the Pharaoh-Ptolemaic monarchy, to make of his palace acourt similar to that of Alexandria, and of himself a divine king, adored in flesh and blood, as sovereigns were adored on the banks ofthe Nile. 

Caligula was undoubtedly mad, but his madness would have seemed lesschaotic and incomprehensible, and a thread of sense would have beendiscovered even in his excesses and in the ravings of his unsettledmind, if it had been understood that many of his most famous freakswere moved and inspired by this Egyptian idea and tendency. In themadness of Caligula, as in the story of Antony and the tragedy ofTiberius, there is forever recurring, under a new form, the greatstruggle between Italy and the East, between Rome and Alexandria, whichcan never be divorced from the history of the last century of therepublic and the first century of the empire. Whoever carefully siftsout the separate actions in the disordered conduct of the third Romanemperor will easily rediscover the thread of this idea and the trace ofthis latent conflict. For instance, we see the new emperor scarcelyelected before he introduced the worship of Isis among the officialcults of the Roman state and assigned in the calendar a public festivalto Isis. In short, he was favoring those Egyptian cults whichTiberius, with his "old-Roman" sympathies, had fiercely combatted. Furthermore, we see Caligula prohibiting the festival in commemorationof the battle of Actium, which had been celebrated every year for morethan half a century. At first sight the idea seems absurd; but it mustnot be considered a caprice; for with this act Caligula was intendingto initiate the historical rehabilitation of Mark Antony, the man whohad tried to shift the center of Roman politics from Rome toAlexandria. The emperor meant to make plain to Rome that she was nolonger to boast of having humiliated Alexandria with arms, sinceAlexandria would henceforth be taken as a model in all things. 

[Illustration: Claudius, Messalina, and their two children in what isknown as the "Hague Cameo. "]

Just as the dynasty of the Ptolemies had been surrounded by asemi-religious veneration, Caligula, inspired as he was by Egyptian andPtolemaic conceptions, sought to have this same veneration bestowedupon his entire family--that family which under Tiberius had beenpersecuted and defamed by suits and decimated by suicides through theenvy of the aristocracy, which was forever unwilling to forgive its toogreat prestige. Caligula not only hastened to set out in person togather up the bones of Agrippina, his mother, and of his brother, inorder to bring them to Rome and deposit them piously in the tomb ofAugustus, --that was a natural duty of filial piety, --but he alsoprohibited any one to name among his ancestors the great Agrippa, thebuilder of the Pantheon, because his very obscure origin seemed a blotupon the semi-divine purity of his race. He had the title of Augustaand all the privileges of the vestal virgins bestowed upon hisgrandmother Antonia, the daughter of Mark Antony and the faithfulfriend of Tiberius; he had these same vestal privileges bestowed uponhis three sisters, Agrippina, Drusilla, and Livilla; he had assigned tothem a privileged position equal to his own at the games in the circus;he even had it decreed that their names should be included in the vowswhich the magistrates and pontiffs offered every year for theprosperity of the prince and of his people, and that in the prayers forthe conservation of his power there should also be included a prayerfor their felicity. This was a small revolution from theconstitutional point of view; for the Romans, though allowing theirwomen ample freedom to occupy themselves with politics from theretirement of their homes, had never recognized for them any officialcapacity. Tiberius, faithfully adhering in this also to tradition, hadgone as far as to prevent the senate, at the time of Livia's death, from voting public honors to her memory, which, he thought, might havejustified the belief that his mother had been, not a matron of the oldRoman stamp, but a public personage. Caligula, however, was quiteindifferent to tradition, and by his expressed will, as if in reactionagainst the persecutions and the humiliations which the imperial familyhad suffered under Tiberius, even the sisters of the emperor acquired asacred character and a privileged position in the state. For the firsttime the women of the imperial family acquired the character ofofficial personages. 

It cannot be denied that the transition from atrocious prosecutions todivine honors was somewhat sudden, but this is merely a further proofthat Caligula was endowed with a violent, impulsive, and irreflectivetemperament. In any case, there was neither scandal nor protest atthat time. Caligula during the first months of his rule was popular, not for his measures in favor of the women of his family, but forreasons of far greater importance. He had inaugurated a régime whichpromised to be more indulgent, more prodigal, less harsh than that ofTiberius. Extravagance had made rapid strides, especially in the ranksof the aristocracy, during the twenty-two years of Tiberius's rule: andalthough the latter, especially toward the end of his life, had ceasedstruggling against this tendency, nevertheless his well-known aversionto sumptuous living, and the example of simplicity which he set beforethe eyes of all, had always been a cause of preoccupation to thearistocracy--to men as well as women. There was no certainty that theemperor might not again, some day, try to enforce the sumptuary laws. When Caligula therefore began his career, indicating very clearly hissympathies with the modernizing party by his eagerness to do away withthe old Roman simplicity, the young aristocracy of both sexes did notconceal their satisfaction. After a long period of old-fashionedtraditional policy, enforced by the two preceding emperors, theywelcomed with joy the young reformer who set out to introduce in theimperial government the spirit of the new generations. No one wassorry that all the purveyors of voluptuousness, --mimes, singers, actors, dancers of both sexes, cooks, and puppets, --should with noisyjoy break into the imperial palace, which had been official, severe, and cold under Tiberius, and bring back pleasure, luxury, andfestivals. All hoped that under the rule of this indulgent, youthfulemperor, life, especially at Rome, would become more pleasant and gay;and no one therefore felt disposed to protest against the officialhonors which, contrary to custom, had been bestowed upon the women ofthe imperial family. 

In truth, if he, still harking back to Egyptian ideas and customs, hadbeen content with surrounding his family, especially its women, with arespect which would have protected them against the infamousaccusations and iniquitous persecutions to which many had fallenvictims, he might have had credit for an action which was good, just, and useful to the state. That strange condition of affairs which hadbeen growing up under Tiberius was both absurd and dangerous to thecountry: the emperor was honored with extraordinary powers and made theobject of a semi-religious veneration; but his family, and especiallyits women, were, as a sort of retribution, set outside the laws andfiercely assailed in a thousand insidious ways. But the lunaticCaligula was not the man to keep even a wise proposal within reasonablelimits. Power, popularity, and praise quickly aroused all that waswarped and excessive in his nature, and very soon, as he showed at theend of the year 37, he entertained an idea which must have seemed tothe Romans a horrible impiety. His wife died soon after he becameemperor. Another marriage seemed obligatory, and he decided that hewould marry his sister Drusilla. 

Historians have represented this intention as the perverse delirium ofan unbridled sensuality. It was certainly the gross act of a madman, but there was perhaps more politics in his madness than perversity; forit was an attempt to introduce into Rome the dynastic marriages betweenbrothers and sisters which had been the constant tradition of thePtolemies and the Pharaohs of Egypt. This oriental custom certainlyseems a horrible aberration to us, who have been educated according tothe strict and austere doctrines of Christianity, which, inheriting inthese matters the fine flower of Greco-Latin ideas, has purified andrendered them more rigorous. But for centuries in Egypt, --that is, inthe most ancient of the Mediterranean civilizations, --this horribleaberration was looked upon as a sovereign privilege which brought theroyal dynasty into relationship with the gods. By means of it, thisfamily preserved the semi-divine purity of its blood; and perchancethis custom, which had survived up to the fall of the Ptolemies, wasonly the projection of ideas and customs which in most ancient timeshad had a much wider diffusion along the Mediterranean world, fortraces of it can be found even in Greek mythology. For were notJupiter and Juno, who constituted the august Olympian couple, at thesame time also brother and sister? Gradually restricted through thespreading of Greek civilization, this custom was finally eradicated atthe shores of the Mediterranean by Rome after the destruction of thekingdom of the Ptolemies. 

The lunatic Caligula now suddenly took it into his head to transplantthis custom to Rome--to transplant it with all the religious pomp ofthe Egyptian monarchy, and thus transform the family of Augustus, whichup to the present had been merely the most eminent family of the Romanaristocracy, into a dynasty of gods and demigods, whose members were tobe united by marriage among themselves in order not to pollute thecelestial purity of their blood. A fraternal and divine pair were torule at Rome, like another Arsinoë and Ptolemy, whom the Alexandrianthrongs had worshiped on the banks of the Nile. The idea had alreadymatured in his mind at the end of the year 37, and among his threesisters he had already chosen Drusilla to be his wife. This is provedby a will made at the time of an illness which he contracted in theautumn of the first year of his rule. In this will he appointedDrusilla heir not only of his goods, but also of his empire, a wildfolly from the point of view of Roman ideas, which did not admit womento the government; but it proves that Caligula had already thought andacted like an Egyptian king. 

[Illustration: Remains of the Bridge of Caligula in the Palace of theCaesars. ]

It is easy to understand why the peace and harmony which had beenreestablished for a moment in the troubled imperial family by theadvent of Caligula should have been of brief duration. His grandmotherand his sisters were Romans, educated in Roman ideals, and this exoticmadness of his could inspire in them only an irresistible horror. Thisbrought confusion into the imperial family, and after having sufferedthe persecutions of Sejanus and his party, the unhappy daughters ofGermanicus found themselves in the toils of the exacting caprices oftheir brother. In fact, in 38, Caligula had already broken with hisgrandmother, whom the year before he had had proclaimed Augusta; andbetween the years 38 and 39, catastrophes followed one another in thefamily with frightful rapidity. His sister Drusilla, whom, asSuetonius tells us, he already treated as a lawful wife, died suddenlyof some unknown malady while still very young. It is not improbablethat her health may have been ruined by the horror of the wildadventure, which was neither human nor Roman, into which her brothersought to drag her by marriage. Caligula suddenly declared her agoddess, to whom all the cities must pay honors. He had a temple builtfor her, and appointed a body of twenty priests, ten men and ten women, to celebrate her worship; he decreed that her birthday should be aholiday, and he wished the statue of Venus in the Forum to be carved inher likeness. 

But in proportion as Caligula became more and more fervid in thisadoration of his dead sister, the disagreement between himself and hisother two sisters became more embittered. Julia Livilla was exiled in38; Agrippina, the wife of Domitius Enobarbus, in 39, and about thissame time the venerable Antonia died. It was noised about thatCaligula had forced her to commit suicide, and that Agrippina andLivilla had taken part in a conspiracy against the life of the emperor. How much truth there may be in these reports it is difficult to say, but the reason for all these catastrophes may be affirmed withcertainty. Life in the imperial palace was no longer possible, especially for women, with this madman who was transforming Rome intoAlexandria and who wished to marry a sister. Even Tiberius, the son ofDrusus and co-heir to the empire with Caligula, was at about this timedefeated in some obscure suit and disappeared. 

Caligula therefore remained alone at Rome to represent in the imperialpalace the family which only ironically can be considered as the mostfortunate in Rome. Of three generations, upon whom fate seemed to haveshowered all the gifts of life, there remained at his side onlyClaudius, the clownish old man, the plaything of slaves and freedmen, whom no one molested because all could make game of him. A madman andan imbecile, --or at least one who was reputed such by everybody, --thiswas all that remained of the family of Augustus seventy years after thebattle of Actium. 

Alone, with no sisters now to elevate to the divine honors of the RomanOlympus, Caligula was reduced to hunting for wives in the families ofthe aristocracy. But it seems that even there could be found no greatabundance of women who had all the necessary qualities to make them theOlympian consorts of so capricious a god. In three years he marriedand repudiated three--and in a very strange manner, if we are to trustthe ancient accounts of Caligula's loves. The first was LiviaOrestilla, the wife of Caius Piso. The emperor, who had seen the womanat the marriage celebration, became, we are told, so infatuated withher that he obliged the husband to divorce her; he then married her, and a few days later repudiated her. Caligula is said to have comparedhimself on this occasion to Romulus who ravished the Sabine woman, andto Augustus who raped Livia. The second was Lollia Paulina, wife ofCaius Memmius, proconsul of a distant province. Caligula heard of theprodigious beauty of Lollia's grandmother. The portrayal of her charmsmade him fall in love with her granddaughter, though absent anddistant. He gave orders for her immediate recall to Rome, and as soonas she could be divorced from her husband he married her. This union, like the former one, lasted only a brief time. The third wife wasMilonia Caesonia, and to her Caligula was more faithful, though fromthe accounts of ancient writers she appears to have been much olderthan he, rather homely, and already a mother of three daughters when hefirst loved her. It is difficult to determine how much truth there isin these reports: Caligula was, it is true, a raving maniac, and hisfrenzy became more accentuated when under the sway of love--a passionwhich deranges somewhat even wise men. It is not strange, therefore, that in regard to women he may have been guilty of even greaterexcesses than he was capable of in his dealings with men. Yet some ofthese accounts seem a little incredible even when ascribed to a madman. However that may be, Livia Orestilla, Lollia Paulina, Milonia Caesoniaare figures without relief, shades and ghosts of empresses, no one ofwhom had time enough even to occupy the highest post. In vain thepeople expected that there would appear in the imperial palace a worthysuccessor to Livia. Caligula, like all madmen, was by nature solitary, and could not live with other human beings: he was to remain alone, aprey to his ravings, which became even stranger and more violent. Henow wished to impose upon the empire the worship of his own person, without considering any opposition or local traditions andsuperstitions. In doing this he did violence not only to the civic andrepublican sentiment of Italy, which detested this worship of a livingman as an ignoble oriental adulation, but also to the religious feelingof the Hebrews, to whom this cult appeared most horrible and idolatrous. 

[Illustration: The Emperor Caligula. ]

In this way difficulties, dissatisfaction, and sedition arose in allparts of the empire. The extravagances, the wild expenditures, theriotous pleasures, and the cruelties of Caligula increased thediscontent and disgust on every hand. We need not take literally allthe accounts of his cruelty and violence which ancient writers havetransmitted to us, --even Caligula has been blackened, --but it iscertain that his government in the last two years of his reigndegenerated into a reckless, extravagant, violent, and cruel tyranny. One day the empire awoke in terror to the fact that the imperialfamily--that family in which the legions, the provinces, and thebarbarians saw the keystone of the state--no longer existed; that inthe vast imperial palace, empty of women, empty of children, empty ofhope, there wandered a raging madman of thirty-one, who divorced a wifeevery six months, who foolishly wasted the treasure and the blood ofhis subjects, and who was concerned with no other thought than that ofhaving himself worshiped like a god in flesh and blood by all theempire. A conspiracy was formed in the palace itself, and Caligula waskilled. 

The senate was much perplexed when it heard of the death of Caligula. What was to be done? The majority was inclined to restore the formerrepublican government by abolishing the imperial authority, and to giveback to the senate the supreme direction of the state, which little bylittle had passed into the hands of the emperor. But many recognizedthat this return to the ancient form of government would be neithereasy nor without danger. Could the senate, neglected, divided, anddisregarded as it was, succeed in governing the immense empire? On theother hand, it was not much easier to find an emperor, granted that anemperor was henceforth necessary. In the family of Augustus there wasonly Claudius, too foolish and ridiculous for them to think of makinghim the head of the state. It seems that some eminent senator offeredhis candidacy, but the senate hesitated in perplexity, on the groundthat if the authority of the members of the family of Augustus wasalready so uncertain, so debatable, and so darkly threatened, whatwould happen to a new emperor, unknown to the legions and theprovinces, and unsupported by the glory of his ancestors? While thesenate was debating in such uncertainty, the pretorians discoveredClaudius in a corner of the imperial palace, where he had been coweringthrough fear lest he too be killed. Recognizing in him the brother ofGermanicus, the pretorians proclaimed him emperor. An act of will isalways more powerful than a thousand scruples or hesitations: thesenate yielded to the legions, and recognized Claudius the imbecile asemperor. 

[Illustration: Claudius. ]

But Claudius was not an imbecile, although he appeared such to many. Instead, he was, so to speak, a man half-grown, in whom certain partsof the mind were highly developed, but whose character had remainedthat of a child, timid, capricious, impulsive, giddy, and incapable ofself-mastery. In intellect he was learned, even cultivated; he wasfond of studies, of history, literature, and archaeology, and spoke andwrote well. But Augustus had been forced to give up the attempt tohave him enter upon a political career because he had been unable tomake him acquire even that exterior bearing which confers the necessarydignity upon him who exercises great power, to say nothing of thefirmness, precision, and force of will required in governing men. Credulous, timorous, impressionable, and at the same time obstinate, gluttonous, and sensual, this erudite, overgrown boy had become in theimperial palace a kind of plaything for everybody, especially for hisslaves, who, knowing his defects and his weaknesses, did with him whatthey wished. 

He did not lack the intellectual qualities necessary for governingwell, but of the moral qualities he had none. He was intelligent, andhe looked stupid: he was able to consider the great questions ofpolitics, war, and finance with breadth of view, with original andacute intelligence, but he never succeeded in having himself takenseriously by the persons who surrounded him. He dared undertake greatprojects, like the conquest of Britain, and he lost his head at thewildest fable about conspiracy which one of his intimates told him; hehad mind sufficient to govern the empire as well as Augustus andTiberius had done, but he could not succeed in getting obedience fromfour or five slaves or from his own wife. 

Such a man was destined to turn out a rather odd emperor, at once greatand ridiculous. He made important laws, undertook gigantic publicworks and conquests of great moment; but in his own house he was a weakhusband, incapable of exercising any sort of authority over his wife. With these conjugal weaknesses he seriously compromised the imperialauthority, while at the same time he was consolidating it and renderingit illustrious with beautiful and wise achievements, especially in thefirst seven years of his rule, while he lived with Valeria Messalina. 

We must admit in his justification that in this matter he had not beenparticularly fortunate; for fate had given him to wife a lady who, notwithstanding her illustrious ancestors, --she belonged to one of thegreatest families of Rome, related to the family of Augustus, --was notexactly suited to be his companion in the imperial dignity. Every oneknows that the name of Valeria Messalina has become in historysynonymous with all the faults and all the vices of which a woman canbe guilty. This, as usual, is the result of envy and malevolence whichnever offered truce to the family of Augustus as long as any of itsmembers lived. Many of the infamies which are attributed to her areevidently fables, complacently repeated by Tacitus and Suetonius, andeasily believed by posterity. But it is certain that if Messalina wasnot a monster, she was a beautiful woman, capricious, gay, powerful, reckless, avid of luxury and of money, who had never scrupled to abusethe weakness of her husband in any way either by deceiving him or byobliging him to follow her will and her caprice in everything. She wasa woman, in short, neither very virtuous nor serious. There are suchwomen at all times and in all social classes, and they are generallyconsidered by the majority not as monsters, but as a pleasing, thoughdangerous, variety of the feminine sex. Under normal conditions, nevertheless, when the husband exercises a certain energy and sagacity, even the danger which may result from them is relatively slight. 

But chance had made of Messalina an empress, and Messalina was not asufficiently intelligent or serious woman to understand that if she hadbeen able to abuse the weakness of Claudius with impunity while he hadbeen the most obscure member of the imperial family, it was a much moredifficult matter to continue to abuse it after he had become the headof the state. It was from this error that all their difficultiesarose. Elated by her new position, Messalina more than ever tookadvantage of her husband's infirmity. She began by starting newdissensions in the imperial family. Claudius had recalled to Rome thetwo victims of Caligula's Egyptian caprices, Agrippina and JuliaLivilla; but if the latter no longer found a brother in Rome topersecute them, they did find their aunt, and they had gained butlittle by the exchange. Messalina soon took umbrage at the influencewhich the two sisters acquired over the mind of their weak-willeduncle, and it was not long before Julia Livilla was accused under the_Lex de adulteriis_, and exiled with Seneca, the famous philosopher, whom they wished rightly or wrongly to pass off as her lover. Agrippina, like her mother, was a virtuous woman, as is proved by thefact that she could not be attacked with such weapons and was enabledto remain in Rome; though she also had to live prudently and beware ofher enemy, and much the more as she had only recently become a widowand could therefore not even count upon the protection of a husband. Though Agrippina remained at Rome, she was isolated and reduced to aposition of helplessness. 

Messalina alone, together with four or five intelligent andunscrupulous freedmen, hedged Claudius about, and there began theperiod of their common government--a government of incredible waste andextortion. Among these freedmen there were, to be sure, men likeNarcissus and Pallas, intelligent and sagacious, who did not aim merelyat putting money into their purses, but who helped Claudius to governthe empire properly. Messalina, on the other hand, thought only ofacquiring wealth, that she might dissipate it in luxury and pleasures. The wife of the emperor had been selling her influence to the sovereignallies and vassals, to all the rich personages of the empire, whodesired to obtain any sort of favor from the imperial authority; shehad been seen bartering with the contractors for public works, minglingin the financial affairs of the state every time that there was anyoccasion to make money. And with the money thus amassed she indulgedin ostentatious displays which violated all the prohibitions of the_Lex sumptuaria_, leading a life of unseemly pleasures, in which it iseasy to imagine what sort of example of all the finer feminine virtuesshe set. Claudius either knew nothing of all this or else submittedwithout protest. 

Messalina then, with her peculiar levity of character and violence oftemperament, continued to emphasize the modernizing Asiatic tendencyintroduced by Caligula into the state, and was influential indestroying the puritanic traditions of Rome and replacing them by thecorruption and pomp of Asia. Her rôle was exactly the opposite of thatof Livia. The latter had been the embodiment of the conservativevirtues of traditionalism: the former by her egoism, her extravagance, and her wantonness was in a fair way to destroy all such traditions. Livia had been almost a vestal in her fight for the puritanism of oldRome: Messalina most ardently and violently fought to destroy it. 

Such an empress, however, could hardly please the public. While thosewho profited by her dissipations greatly admired Messalina, a livelymovement of protest was soon started among the people, for they, unlikemany of the aristocrats, who affected modern views and who pretended toscorn the traditions of ancient Rome, were faithful to all suchpuritanical traditions and wished to see at their emperor's side a ladyadorned with all the fairer virtues of the ancient matron--with thosevirtues, in short, which Livia had personified with such dignity. Howcould they tolerate this sort of dissipated Bacchante, who should havebeen condemned to infamy and exile with the many other Roman women whohad been faithless to their husbands; who with the effrontery of herunpunished crimes dishonored and rendered ridiculous the imperialauthority?

To the middle classes the emperor was a semi-sacred magistrate, chargedwith maintaining by law and example the purity of the family, fidelityin marital relations, and simplicity of customs. Now, to theiramazement, they saw in the person of the empress all the dissipations, corruptions, and perversions of the woman who wished to live only forher pleasure, to enjoy her beauty, and to have others enjoy it, enthroned, to the scandal of all honest minds, in the palace of theemperor. Furthermore, it seemed to every one a scandal that one whowas an emperor should at the same time be a weak husband; for thesimple good sense of the Latin would not admit that a man who couldgovern an empire should not be able to command a woman. It soon becamethe general opinion of all reasonable people that Messalina, in theposition of Livia upon the Palatine, and with so weak a husband, wasnot only a scandal, but also a continual menace to the public. 

[Illustration: The Emperor Claudius. ]

Nevertheless, it would now have been no easy matter, even if theemperor had wished it, to convict an empress of infidelity anddisobedience to one of the great laws of Augustus. Caligula was amadman and had been able to secure three divorces, but a wiser emperorwould have to think for a long time before rendering public the shameand scandals of his family, especially when confronted with anaristocracy which was as eager to suspect and calumniate as was thearistocracy of Rome. But the problem became hopeless as soon as theemperor did not see or did not wish to see the faults of his wife. Would any one dare to step forward and accuse the empress?

The situation gradually became grave and dangerous. The state, governed with intelligence, but without energy, with vastcontradictions and hesitations, was being strengthened along certainlines and was going to pieces along others. The power and extortionsof the freedmen were breeding discontent on every hand. Both throughwhat she really did, and what the populace said she had done, Messalinawas being transformed by the people into a legendary personage whoseinfamous deeds aroused general indignation; but all in vain. 

It now became quite evident that an empress was virtually invulnerable, and that, once enthroned upon the Palatine, there was no effectivemeans of protesting against the various ways in which she could abuseher lofty position unless the emperor wished to interfere. In itsexasperation, the public finally vented upon Claudius the anger whichthe violence and misconduct of Messalina had aroused. They declaredthat it was his weakness which was responsible for her conduct; andintrigues, deeds of violence, conspiracies, and attempts at civil warbecame, as Suetonius says, every-day occurrences at Rome. 

A sense of insecurity and doubt was spreading throughout the state as aresult of the indecision of the emperor, and all began to askthemselves how long a government could last which was at the mercy of awanton. The violent death of Caligula, which was still fresh in theminds of the people, added to this wide-spread feeling of insecurityand alarm. As Caligula, notwithstanding the pontifical sacredness ofhis person, had been slain, to the apparent satisfaction of everybody, in his palace by a handful of his supposed friends and supporters, itseemed possible that the tragedy might easily be repeated in the caseof Claudius. Could not the whole Claudian government beoverturned, --in a single night, perhaps, as that of Caligula had beenoverturned? All hearts were filled with suspicion, distrust, andalarm, and many concluded that since Claudius had not succeeded inridding the empire of Messalina it would be well to rid it of Claudius. 

[Illustration: Messalina, third wife of Claudius. ]

So for seven years Messalina remained the great weakness of agovernment which possessed signal merits and accomplished great things. Of all the emperors in the family of Augustus, Claudius was certainlythe one whose life was most seriously threatened, especially because ofhis wife. Such a situation could not endure. 

It finally resolved itself into a tragic scandal, which, if we couldbelieve Suetonius and Tacitus, would certainly have been the mostmonstrous extravagance to which an imagination depraved by power couldhave abandoned itself. According to these writers, Messalina, at aloss for some new form of dissipation, one fine day took it into herhead to marry Silius, a young man with whom she was very much in love, who belonged to a distinguished family, and who was theconsul-designate. According to them, for the pleasure of shocking theimperial city with the sacrilege of a bigamous union, she actually didmarry him in Rome, with the most solemn religious rites, while Claudiuswas at Ostia! But is this credible, at least without admitting thatMessalina had suddenly gone insane? To what end and for what reasonwould she have committed such a sacrilege, which struck at the veryheart of popular sentiment? Dissolute, cruel, and avaricious Messalinacertainly was, but mad she was not. And even if we are willing toadmit that she had gone mad, is it conceivable that all those who wouldhave had to lend her their services in the staging of this revoltingfarce had also gone mad? It is difficult to suppose that they actedthrough fear, for the empress had no such power in Rome that she couldconstrain conspicuous persons publicly to commit such sacrilege. 

This episode would probably be an unfathomable enigma had not Suetoniusby chance given us the key to its solution: "Nam illud omnem fidemexcesserit, quod nuptiis, quas Messalina cum adultero Silio fecerat, tabellas dotis et ipse consignaverit" ("For that which would pass allbelief is the fact that in the marriage which Messalina contracted withthe adulterer Silius, he himself [Claudius] should have signed thefigures for the dowry"). If Claudius himself gave a dowry to thebride, he therefore knew that the marriage of Messalina and Silius wasto take place; and it is precisely this fact which seems so incredibleto Suetonius. But we know that in the Roman aristocracy a man couldgive away his own wife in this manner; for have we not recounted inthis present history how Livia was dowered and given in marriage toAugustus by her first husband, the grandfather of Claudius? Thedeeding of a wife with a dowry was a part of the somewhat bizarremarriage customs of the Roman aristocracy, which gradually lost groundin the first and second century of our era in proportion as theprestige and power of that aristocracy declined, and in proportion asthe middle classes acquired influence in the state and succeeded inimposing upon it their ideas and sentiments. The passage in Suetoniusproves to us that he no longer understood this matrimonial custom, andit is doubtful whether even Tacitus thoroughly understood it. Nor isit improbable that it should have seemed strange even to many of thecontemporaries of Claudius. We could therefore explain how, not reallyunderstanding what had happened, the historians of the followingcentury should have believed that Messalina had married Silius whileshe was still the wife of Claudius. 

In short, Claudius had been persuaded to divorce Messalina and to marryher to Silius. The passage from Suetonius, if carefully interpreted, clearly tells us this. What means were employed to persuade Claudiusto consent to this new marriage we do not know. Suetonius refers tothis, but he is not clear. In any case, this point is less importantthan that other question: Why was Messalina, after seven years ofempire, willing to divorce Claudius and marry Silius? The problem isnot an easy one, but after long examination I have decided to acceptwith slight modification the explanation given by Umberto Silvagni inhis beautiful work, "The Empire and the Women of the Caesars, " a bookwhich contains many original ideas and much acute observation. 

[Illustration: The philosopher Seneca. ]

Silvagni, who is an excellent student of Roman history, has wellbrought out how Silius belonged to a family of the aristocracy famousfor its devotion to the party of Germanicus and Agrippina. His father, who had been a great friend of Germanicus, had been one of the victimsof Sejanus, and accused in the time of Tiberius under the law of hightreason, he had committed suicide. His mother, Sosia Galla, had beencondemned to exile on account of her devotion to Agrippina. Startingout with these considerations, and examining acutely the accounts ofall the ancient historians, Silvagni concluded that behind thismarriage there lay a conspiracy to ruin Claudius and to put CaiusSilius in his place. Messalina must sooner or later have felt that thesituation was an impossible one, that Claudius was not a sufficientlystrong or energetic emperor to be able to impose the disorganizedgovernment of himself and his freedmen upon the empire, and that anyday he might fall a prey to a plot or an assassination. What wouldhappen, she must have asked herself, if Claudius, like Caligula, shouldsome day be despatched by a conspiracy? The same fate would doubtlessbe waiting for her, for, having killed him, the conspirators wouldcertainly murder her also. Consequently she entertained the idea ofruining the emperor herself in order to contribute to the elevation ofhis successor, and thus to preserve at his side the position which shehad occupied in the court of Claudius. But once Claudius had beenslain, there would be no other member of the family of Augustus oldenough to govern. She therefore decided to choose him in a familyfamous for its devotion to Germanicus and the more popular branch ofthe house, thus hoping the more easily to win over the legions and thepretorians to the cause of the new emperor, Since the descendants ofDrusus were dead, what other option remained to her than to choose asuccessor in the families of the aristocracy who had shown for them thegreatest devotion and love?

Thus, for the first time, a woman was placed at the head of a reallyvast political conspiracy destined to wrest the supreme power from thefamily of Augustus; and this woman proved her sagacity by knowing howto organize this great plot so well and so opportunely that the mostintelligent and influential among the freedmen of Claudius debated fora long time whether they would join her or throw in their lot with theemperor. So doubtful seemed the issue of this struggle between theweak husband and the energetic, audacious, and unscrupulous wife! Theyallowed Messalina and Silius to enlist friends and partisans in everypart of Roman society, to come to an understanding with the prefect ofthe guards, to obtain the divorce from Claudius, even to celebratetheir marriage, without opening the eyes of the emperor. Claudiuswould probably have been destroyed if at the last moment Narcissus hadnot decided to rush to the emperor, who was at Ostia, and, byterrifying him in some unspeakable way, had not induced him to stampout the conspiracy with a bold and unexpected stroke. There followedone of those periods of judicial murder which for more than thirtyyears had been costing much Roman blood, and in this slaughterMessalina, too, was overthrown. 

After the discovery of the conspiracy, Claudius made a harangue to thesoldiers, in which he told them that as he had not been very successfulin his marriages he did not intend to take another wife. The proposalwas wise, but difficult of execution, for there were many reasons whythe emperor needed to have a woman at his side. We very soon findClaudius consulting his freedmen on the choice of a new wife. Therewas much discussion and uncertainty, but the choice finally fell uponAgrippina. That choice was significant. Agrippina was the niece ofClaudius, and marriages between uncle and niece, if not exactlyprohibited, were looked upon by the Romans with a profound revulsion offeeling. Claudius and his freedmen could not have decided to face thisrepugnance except for serious and important reasons. Among these themost serious was probably that after the experience with Messalina, itseemed best not to go outside the family. An empress belonging to thefamily would not be so likely to plot against the descendants ofAugustus as had been this strange woman, who belonged to one of thosearistocratic families who deeply hated the imperial house. Agrippina, furthermore, was the daughter of Germanicus. This was a powerfulrecommendation with the people, the pretorian cohorts, and the legions. In addition, she was intelligent, cultured, simple, and economical; shehad grown up in the midst of political affairs, she knew how the empirewas governed, and up to this point she had lived a life above reproach. She seemed to be the woman above all others destined to make the peopleforget Messalina and to reestablish among the masses respect for thefamily of Augustus, now seriously compromised by many scandals anddissensions. Furthermore, she did not seem to suffer too much bycomparison with Livia. 

Claudius asked the senate to authorize marriages between uncles andnieces, as he did not dare to assume the responsibility of goingcounter to public sentiment. And thus the daughter of Germanicus andthe sister of Caligula became an empress. 

VI

AGRIPPINA, THE MOTHER OF NERO

It is possible, as Tacitus says, that marriage with Claudius was theheight of Agrippina's ambition, but it is also possible that it was anact of supreme self-sacrifice on the part of a woman who had beeneducated in the traditions of the Roman aristocracy, and who thereforeconsidered herself merely a means to the political advancement of herrelatives and her children. 

I am rather inclined to accept this second explanation. When shemarried Claudius, Agrippina not only married an uncle who was mucholder than herself, and who must necessarily prove a rather difficultand disagreeable husband, but she bound up her fate with that of a weakemperor whose life was continually threatened by plots and revolts, andwhose hesitations and terrors plainly portended that he would one dayend by precipitating the imperial authority and government into somebizarre and terrible catastrophe. For Agrippina it meant that she wasblindly staking her life and her honor, and that she would lose themboth should she fail to compensate for the innumerable deficiencies ofher strange husband through her own intelligence and strength of will. Every one will recognize how difficult was the task which she hadundertaken. 

But at the beginning fortune favored Agrippina as she boldly took upthe work that lay before her. The wild pranks of Caligula and thescandals of Messalina had aroused an immeasurable disgust in Rome andItaly. Every one was out of patience. The senate as well as thepeople were demanding a stronger, more coherent, and respectablegovernment, which would end the scandals, suits, and atrocious personaland family quarrels which were dividing Rome. Agrippina was thedaughter of Germanicus, the granddaughter of Drusus, and she had in herveins the blood of the Claudii, with all their pride, their energy, their puritanical, conservative, and aristocratic spirit, and themoment she appeared, all hopes were centered in her. Although she wasa sort of feminine Tiberius, and in the purity of her life resembledher mother and her great-grandmother Livia, Tacitus neverthelessmaligns her for her relationships with Pallas and Seneca. The factthat Messalina, even with her implacable hatred, failed to bring abouther downfall under the _Lex de adulteriis_, proves the unreliability ofthese statements, and Tacitus proves it himself when he says that shesuffered no departure from chastity unless it helped her power (_Nihildomi impudicum nisi dominationi expediret_). This means that Agrippinawas a lady of irreproachable life; for if there is one thing whichstands out clearly in the history of this remarkable woman, it is thatboth her rise and her fall depended upon causes of such a nature thatnot even her womanly charms could have increased her power or retardedher ruin. All hearts were therefore filled with hope when they sawthis respectable, active, and energetic woman take her place at theside of Claudius the weakling, for she brought back the memory of themost venerated personages of the family of Augustus. 

[Illustration: The Emperor Nero. ]

The new empress, encouraged by this show of favor, applied herself withall the strength of her impassioned nature to the task of again makingoperative in the state those traditional ideas of the nobility in whichLivia had educated first Tiberius and Drusus, then Germanicus, and thenAgrippina herself. In this descendant of hers the spirit of thegreat-grandmother finally reappeared, for it had been eclipsed by thefatal and terrible struggle between Tiberius and Agrippina, by themadness of Caligula, and the comic scandals of the first part of thereign of Claudius. All this served to bring back into the state alittle of that authoritative vigor which the nobility in the time ofits splendor had considered the highest ideal of government. Tacitussays of her rule that it was as rigid as if a man's (_adductum et quasivirile_). This signifies that under the influence of Agrippina thelaxity and disorder of the first years of Claudius's reign gave placeto a certain order and discipline. Severity there was, and more oftenhaughtiness (_palam severitas ac saepius superbia_). The freedmen whohad formerly been so powerful and aggressive, now stepped aside, whichis an evident sign that their petulance had now found a check in theenergy of Agrippina. The state finances and the fortune of theimperial house were reorganized, for Agrippina, like Livia and like allthe ladies of the great Roman nobility, was an excellent administrator, frugal, and ever watchful of her slaves and freedmen, and careful ofall items of income and expense. The Roman aristocracy, like all otheraristocracies, hated the parvenus, the men of sudden riches, traffickers who had too quickly become wealthy, and all persons whoseonly aim was to amass money. We know that Agrippina sought to preventas far as possible the malversations of public funds by which thepowerful freedmen of Claudius had been enriching themselves. After shebecame empress we hear accounts of numerous suits instituted againstpersonages who had been guilty of wasting public treasure, while underMessalina no such cases were brought forward. We know, furthermore, that she reestablished the fortune of the imperial family, which in allprobability had been seriously compromised by the reckless expendituresof Messalina. This is what Tacitus refers to in one of his sentences, which, as usual, is colored by his malignity: _Cupido auri immensaobtentum habebat quasi subsidium regno pararetur_ (She sought to enrichthe family under the pretext of providing for the needs of the empire). What Tacitus calls a "pretext" was, on the contrary, the ancientaristocratic conception of wealth, which in the eyes of the greatfamilies was destined to be a means of government and an instrument ofpower: the family possessed it in order to use it for the benefit ofthe state. 

In short, Agrippina attempted to revive the aristocratic traditions ofgovernment which had inspired the policies of Augustus and Tiberius. Not only did she attempt to do this, but, strange as it may seem, shesucceeded almost without a struggle. The government of Agrippina wasfrom the first a great success. From the moment when she becameempress there is discernible in the entire administration a greaterfirmness and consistency of policy. Claudius no longer seems, asformerly, to be at the mercy of his freedmen and the fleeting impulsesof the moment, and even the dark shadows of the time are lighted up forsome years. A certain concord and tranquillity returned to theimperial house, to the aristocracy, to the senate, and to the state. Although Tacitus accuses Agrippina of having made Claudius commit allsorts of cruelties, it is certain that trials, scandals, and suicidebecame much less frequent under her rule. During the six years thatClaudius lived after his marriage with Agrippina, scandalous tragediesbecame so rare that Tacitus, being deprived of his favorite materials, set down the story of these six years in a single book. In otherwords, Agrippina encountered virtually no opposition, while Tiberiusand even Augustus, when they wished to govern according to thetraditions of the ancient nobility, had to combat the party of the newaristocracy, with its modern and oriental tendencies. This party nolonger seemed to exist when Agrippina urged Claudius to continueresolutely in the policy of his ancestors, for one party only, that ofthe old nobility, seemed with Agrippina to control the state. Thismust have been the result partly of the disgust for the scandals of theprevious decade, which had made every one realize the need of restoringmore serious discipline in the government, and partly of the exhaustionwhich had come upon both parties as the result of so many struggles, reprisals, suits, and scandals. The force of the opposition in the twofactions gradually diminished. A greater gentleness induced all toaccept the direction of the government without resistance, and theauthority of the emperor and his counselors acquired greater importancein proportion as the strength of the opposition in the aristocracy andthe senate became gradually weaker. 

[Illustration: Agrippina the Younger, sister of Caligula and mother ofNero. ]

In any case, the empire was no longer to have forced upon it theridiculous and scandalous spectacle of such weaknesses andincongruities as had seriously compromised the prestige of the highestauthority in the first period of the reign of Claudius. But Agrippinawas not content with merely making provision as best she could for thepresent; she also looked forward to the future. She had had a son byher first husband, and at the time of her marriage with Claudius thisyouth was about eleven years old. It is in connection with her plansfor this son that Tacitus brings his most serious charges againstAgrippina. According to his story, from the first day of her marriageAgrippina attempted to make of her son, the future Emperor Nero, thesuccessor of Claudius, thereby excluding Britannicus, the son ofMessalina, from the throne. 

To obtain this end, she spared, he says, neither intrigues, fraud, nordeceit; she had Seneca recalled from exile and appointed tutor of herchild. She removed from office the two commanders of the pretorianguard, who were creatures of Messalina, and in their stead she hadelected one of her own, a certain Afranius Burrhus. She laid pitfallsfor Britannicus and surrounded him with spies, and in the year 50, bydint of much intrigue and many caresses, she finally succeeded inhaving Claudius adopt her son. But this whole story is merely acomplicated and fantastic romance, embroidered about a truth which initself is comparatively simple. Tacitus himself tells us thatAgrippina was a most exacting mother; that is, a mother of the olderRoman type--in his own words, _trux et minax_. She did not follow thegentle methods of the newer education, which were gradually beingintroduced into the great families, and she had brought up her son inthe ancient manner with the greatest simplicity. It is well to keep inmind, furthermore, that neither Britannicus nor Nero had any right tothe throne of Claudius. The hereditary principle did not yet exist inthe imperial government: the senate was free to choose whomsoever itwished. To be sure, up to that time the choice had always fallen upona member of the Augustan family; but it had only been because it waseasier to find there persons who were known and respected, whocommanded the admiration of the soldiers in distant regions, and whohad received a certain preparation for the diverse and often difficultduties of their office. And it was precisely for this reason thatAugustus and Tiberius had always sought to prepare more than one youthfor the highest office, both in order that the senate might have acertain freedom of choice, and also that there might be some one inreserve, in case one of these young men should disappoint the hopes ofthe empire or should die prematurely, as so many others had died. Thatshe should have persuaded Claudius to adopt her son does not mean, therefore, that she wished to set Britannicus aside and give theadvantage to Nero. It merely proves that she did not wish the familyof Augustus to lose the supreme power, and for this reason she intendedto prepare not only one successor, but two possible successors, toClaudius, just as Augustus had for a long time trained both Drusus andTiberius. 

[Illustration: Britannicus. ]

In order to understand how wise and reasonable the conduct of Agrippinareally was, we must also remember that Nero was four years older thanBritannicus, and that, therefore, in the year 50, when Nero wasadopted, Britannicus was a mere lad of nine. As Claudius was alreadysixty, it would have been most imprudent to designate a nine-year-oldlad as his only possible successor, when Nero, who was four years hissenior, would have been better prepared than Britannicus to take up thereign. There is a further proof that Agrippina had no thought ofdestroying the race of Claudius and Messalina, for before his adoptionshe had married Nero to Octavia, the daughter of the imperial pair. Octavia was a woman possessed of all the virtues which the ancientRoman nobility had cherished. She was chaste, modest, patient, gentle, and unselfish, and she would be able to assist in strengthening thepower of her house. Agrippina had therefore, in the ancient manner, affianced the young pair at an early age, and hoped that she might makea couple which would serve as an example to the families of thearistocracy. 

In short, Agrippina, far from seeking to weaken the imperial house bydestroying the descendants of Messalina, was attempting to bring herson into the family precisely for the purpose of giving it strength. And, sensible woman that she was, she could hardly have actedotherwise. She had seen the family of Augustus, once so prosperous, reduced to a state of exhaustion and virtually destroyed by the fataldiscord between her mother and Tiberius and the quarrels between herbrothers. The state had suffered greatly through the madness ofCaligula and the reckless hatred of the first Agrippina, and thepresent empress, her daughter, who was not merely fond of her son, butendowed in addition with the gift of reflection, sought as far aspossible to make amends for the evils which had unconsciously beenwrought. The hopes of the future were henceforth to abide inBritannicus and in Nero. In Agrippina there reappeared the wisdom ofher greatest predecessors, and the people were so well satisfied thatthey conferred upon her the very highest honor, such as in her timeeven Livia herself had not received. She was given the title Augusta;she was allowed to ride into the precincts of the Capitol in a gildedcoach (carpentum), though this was an honor which in old time had beenconceded only to priests and to the images of the gods. This lastdescendant of Livia and Drusus, in whom the virtues of a venerated pastseemed to reappear, was surrounded by a semi-religious adoration. Thisis an evidence of sincere and profound respect, for though the Romansoften showered marks of human adulation upon their potentates, it wasnot often that they bestowed honors of so sacred a character. 

The unforeseen death of Claudius suddenly cut short the work whichAgrippina had well under way. Claudius was sixty-four years old, andone night in the month of October of the year 54 he succumbed to somemysterious malady after a supper of which, as usual, he had partakeninordinately. Tacitus pretends to know that Agrippina had secretlyadministered poison to Claudius in a plate of mushrooms. During thenight, however, fearing lest Claudius would survive, she had calledClaudius's physician, Xenophon, who was a friend of hers. The latter, while pretending to induce vomiting, had painted his throat with afeather dipped in a deadly poison, and had killed him. This version isso strange and improbable that Tacitus himself does not dare affirm it, but says that "many believe" that it was in this manner that Claudiusmet his death. But if there are still people credulous enough tobelieve that the head of a great state can be poisoned in the twinklingof an eye by a doctor who brushes his throat with a feather, it is moredifficult to understand what grounds Agrippina could have had forpoisoning her husband. According to Tacitus, it was because she wasdisturbed by the fact that Claudius had for some time shown that hepreferred Britannicus to Nero; but even if the fact were true, as amotive it would be ridiculous. Augustus was much fonder of Germanicusthan he was of Tiberius; and yet at his death the senate choseTiberius, and not Germanicus, because at that moment the situationclearly called for the former as head of the empire. When Claudiusdied, Britannicus was thirteen and Nero seventeen years old. They wereboth, therefore, mere lads, and it was most probable that if theimperial seat fell vacant, the senate would choose neither, since theywere both too young and inexperienced. This is so true that otherhistorians have supposed, on the contrary, that Agrippina had fallenout with some one of the more powerful freedmen of Claudius, and seeingClaudius waver, had despatched him in order that she herself should notend like Messalina. But this hypothesis also is absurd. An empresswas virtually invulnerable. Messalina had proved this, for she hadcommitted every excess and abuse with impunity. Agrippina, protectedas she was by the respect of all, invested with honors that gave herperson a virtually sacred character, had nothing to fear either fromthe weak Claudius or from his powerful freedmen. 

This accusation of poisoning, therefore, seems to be of precisely thesame sort as, and not a whit more serious than, all those other similaraccusations which were brought against the members of the Augustanfamily. Claudius, who was already sixty-four, in all probability dieda sudden but natural death, and from the point of view of the interestsof the house of Augustus, which Agrippina had strongly at heart, hedied much too soon. It was a dangerous and difficult matter to ask theRoman senate to appoint one of these striplings commander of the armiesand emperor, even though they were the only survivors of the race ofAugustus. So true is this that Tacitus tells us that Agrippina keptthe death of Claudius secret for many hours and pretended that thephysicians were still struggling to save him, when in reality he wasalready dead, _dum res firmando Neronis imperio componuntur_ (whilematters were being arranged to assure the empire to Nero). Consequently, if everything had to be hurried through in confusion atthe last moment, it is plain that Agrippina herself must have beentaken by surprise by the illness and death of Claudius. She thereforecannot be held responsible for having caused it. 

It is not, however, difficult to reconstruct the course of events. Onthe nights of the twelfth and thirteenth of October, soon afterClaudius had been suddenly stricken down by his violent malady, thedoctors announced to Agrippina that the emperor was lost. Agrippinaimmediately understood that since the family of Augustus could at thatmoment present no full-grown man as candidate for the imperial office, there was grave danger that the senate might refuse to confer thesupreme power either upon Nero or Britannicus. The only means ofavoiding this danger was to bring pressure to bear upon the senatethrough the pretorian cohorts, which were as friendly to the family ofAugustus as the senate was hostile. She must present one of the twoyouths to the guards and have him acclaimed not head of the empire, buthead of the armies. The senate would thereby be constrained toproclaim him head of the empire, as they had done in the case ofClaudius. 

But which one of the two youths was it best to choose, Claudius's sonby blood or his son by adoption? Nero was chosen as the result of theunrighteous ambition of Agrippina, so Tacitus says. It is veryprobable that Agrippina was more eager to see her own son at the headof the empire than to see Britannicus there; but this does not seem tohave been the real reason of her choice, for it could not have beenotherwise, even if Agrippina had detested Nero and had cherishedBritannicus with a maternal affection. Nero was four years older thanBritannicus, and therefore he had to be given the preference over thelatter. It was a very bold move to propose that the senate make ayouth of seventeen emperor; it would have been nothing less than follyto ask that they accept a thirteen-year-old lad as commander-in-chiefof the imperial armies of Rome. 

Through the help of Seneca and Burrhus, the plan developed by Agrippinawas carried out with rapidity and success. On the thirteenth ofOctober, after matters had been arranged with the troops, the doors ofthe imperial palace were thrown open at noon; Nero, accompanied byBurrhus, advanced to the cohort which was on guard. He was receivedwith joyous welcome, placed in a litter, borne to the quarters of thepretorians, and acclaimed head of the army. The senate grudginglyconfirmed his election. There resulted in Rome a most extraordinarysituation: a youth of seventeen, educated in the antique manner, and, though already married, still entirely under the tutelage of a strictmother, had been elevated to the highest position in the immenseempire. He was ignorant of the luxury, pleasure, and elegance whichwere becoming general in the great families; outside of a livelydisposition and docility toward his mother, he had up to this pointshown no special quality, and no particular vice. Only one peculiarityhad been noticed in him: he had studied with great zest music, painting, sculpture, and poetry, and had made himself proficient inthese arts, which were considered frivolous and useless for a Romannoble. On the contrary, he had neglected oratory, which was held anecessary art by an aristocracy like the Roman, whose duty it was touse speech at councils, in the tribunals, and in the senate, just as itused the sword on the fields of battle. But the majority believed thatthis was merely a passing caprice of youth. 

[Illustration: Statue of Agrippina the Younger, in the CapitolineMuseum, Rome. ]

Agrippina, then, with the assistance of Seneca and Burrhus, had keptthe highest office in the state in the family of Augustus, and she haddone so by a bold move which had not been without its dangers. She wastoo intelligent not to foresee that a seventeen-year-old emperor couldhave no authority, and that his position would expose him to all sortsof envy and intrigue, and to open as well as secret opposition. Shesucceeded in mitigating this evil and in parrying this danger byanother very happy suggestion--the virtually complete restoration ofthe old republican constitution. After the funeral of Claudius, Nerointroduced himself to the senate, and in a polished and modestdiscourse, seemingly intended to excuse his youth, he declared that ofall the powers exercised by his predecessors he wished to keep only thecommand of the armies. All other civil, judicial, and administrativefunctions he turned over to the senate, as in the times of the republic. 

This "restoration of the republic" was Agrippina's masterpiece, andmarks the zenith of her power. It followed, as a result of herdecision, that Nero, who was to go down to posterity as the mostterrible of tyrants, was that one of all the Roman emperors who had themost limited power; and furthermore it was likewise the result of heractivity that the constitution of the empire had never been so close tothat of the ancient republic as under the government of Nero. Mosthistorians, hallucinated by Tacitus, have not noticed this, and theyhave consequently not recognized that in carrying out this planAgrippina is neither more nor less than the last continuator of thegreat political tradition founded by Augustus. In the minds of bothAugustus and Tiberius the empire was to be governed by the aristocracy. The emperor was merely the depositary of certain powers of the nobilityconceded to him for reasons of state. If these reasons of state shoulddisappear, the powers would naturally revert to the nobles. It wastherefore expedient at this time to make the senate forget, in thepresence of a seventeen-year-old emperor, the pressure which had beenbrought to bear upon it by the cohorts, and to wipe out the rancoragainst the imperial power which was still dormant in the aristocracy. This restoration was not, therefore, a sheer renunciation of privilegesand powers inherent in the sovereign authority, but an act of politicalsagacity planned by a woman whose knowledge of the art of governmenthad been received in the school of Augustus. 

[Illustration: Agrippina the Younger. ]

The move was entirely successful. The illusion that the imperialauthority was only a transitory expedient made necessary by the civilwars, and that it might one day be entirely abolished, was still deeplygrounded in the Roman aristocracy. Every relaxation of authority wasspecially pleasing to the senatorial circles. The government of Nerotherefore began under the most favorable auspices, with joyous hope inthe general promise of concord. The disaffection which had been feltin the last six years of Claudius's government was changed into ageneral and confident optimism, which the first acts of the newgovernment and the signs of the future seemed to justify. Agrippinacontinued to keep Nero subject to her authority, as she had done beforethe election: together with his two masters, Seneca and Burrhus, shesuggested to him every word and deed. The senate resumed its ancientfunctions; and governed by Seneca, Burrhus, and Agrippina inconjunction with the senate, the empire seemed to be progressingwonderfully, and in the eyes of the senators the entire government wasin a better way than it ever yet had been. 

But the situation soon changed. Agrippina, to be sure, had given herson a strictly Roman education, and had brought him up with asimplicity and rigor long since out of fashion; and though she hadearly given him a wife, she continued to keep him subject to maternalauthority. But, with all this, it is doubtful if there ever was atemperament which rebelled against this species of education asstrongly as did Nero's. His taste for the arts of drawing and singing, the indifference which he had shown for the study of oratory from hischildhood, these were the seeds from which as time went on his ragingexoticism was to be developed through the use and abuse of power. Hiswas one of those rioting, contrary, and undisciplined temperamentswhich feel that they must do precisely the opposite of what tradition, education, and the general opinion of the society in which they livehave prescribed as necessary and recognized as lawful. In the case ofNero the defects and the dangers in the ancient Roman education were tobecome apparent. 

The first of these dangers declared itself when Nero entered upon oneof those early marriages of which we have spoken in the first of thesestudies. Agrippina had early arranged an alliance with a young ladywho, because of her virtues, nobility of ancestry, and Roman education, might have become his worthy companion; but a year after his elevationto the imperial dignity, the eighteen-year-old youth made theacquaintance of a woman whose beauty inflamed his senses andimagination to the point of making him entirely forget Octavia, whom hehad married from a sense of duty and not for love. This person wasActe, a beautiful Asiatic freedwoman, and the inexperienced, ardentyouth, already given up to exotic fancies, became so enamoured that heone day proposed to repudiate Octavia and to marry Acte. But amarriage between Nero and Acte was not possible. The _Lex demaritandis ordinibus_ prohibited marriages between senators andfreedwomen. It was therefore natural that Agrippina should haveopposed it with all her strength. She, the great-granddaughter ofLivia, the granddaughter of Drusus, the daughter of Germanicus, educated in the strictest ideas of the old Roman aristocracy, could notpermit her son to compromise the prestige of the entire nobility in theeyes of the lower orders by so scandalous a _mésalliance_. But on thisoccasion the youth, carried away by his passion, resisted. If he didnot actually repudiate Octavia, he disregarded her, and began to livewith Acte as if she were his wife. Agrippina insisted that he give upthis scandalous relationship; but in vain. The mother and sondisagreed, and very shortly after having resisted his mother in thecase of Acte, Nero began to resist her on other occasions. Withincreasing energy he shook off maternal authority, which up to thattime he had accepted with docility. 

This, however, was a crisis which was sooner or later inevitable. Agrippina had certainly made the mistake of attempting to treat Nerothe emperor too much as she had treated Nero the child; but that thecrisis should have been reached in this manner as the result of alove-affair, and that it should have provoked a misunderstandingbetween the mother and son that was soon to degenerate into hatred, wasmost unfortunate. Agrippina, though she enjoyed great prestige, hadalso many hidden enemies. Everybody knew that she represented in thegovernment the old aristocratic, conservative, and economical tendencyof the Claudii, --of Tiberius and of Drusus, --that she looked askanceupon the development of luxurious habits, the relaxation of morals, andthe increase of public and private expenditures. They understood thatshe exerted all her influence to prevent wastefulness, the malversationof public moneys, and in general all outlays for pleasures either inthe state or the imperial family. Her virtues and her stand againstMessalina had given her a great prestige, and the reverence which theemperor had shown for her had for a long time obliged her enemies tokeep themselves hidden and to hold their peace. But this ceased to bethe case after the incipient discord between her and Nero had allowedmany to foresee the possibility of using Nero against her. Inproportion as Nero became attached to Acte he drew away from hismother, and in proportion as he withdrew from his mother hiscapricious, fantastic, and rebellious temper was encouraged to showitself in its true light. The party of the new nobility, with itsmodern and oriental tendencies, had for ten years been held in check bythe preponderating influence of Agrippina. But gradually, as theexotic and anti-Roman inclinations of the emperor declared themselves, this party again became bolder. The memories of the scandals ofCaligula and Messalina were becoming effaced by time, the rather severeand economical government of Agrippina was showing signs of weakening, and all minds were beginning to entertain a vague desire for somethingnew. 

[Illustration: The Emperor Nero. ]

The two parties which in the times of Augustus had rent Rome asunderwere now being realined in the imperial house and in the senate--theparty of the old nobility, which had Agrippina at its head, and theparty of the modernizing nobility, which was gathering about theemperor and trying to claim him as its own. Tacitus clearly tells usthat the older and more respectable families of the Roman nobility werewith Agrippina; and even if he had neglected to tell us so, we mighteasily have guessed it. For a moment the old, old struggle which hadbeen the cause of so many tragedies in the upper classes of Rome seemedonce more ready to break forth. But even though Agrippina was the soulof the party of the old nobility, the party needed a man whom it couldoppose to Nero as a possible and better candidate for the imperialdignity. 

Agrippina, like a true Roman matron of the old type, looked upon thefamily merely as an instrument of political power, and thereforesubjected her personal affections to the public interest. She began tocast her eyes upon Britannicus, the son of Messalina, who was nowbecoming a young man and who seemed to be more serious-minded thanNero. It was even muttered that she thought of giving her own son'splace to the son of Messalina, when suddenly, in 55, Britannicus diedat a dinner at which Nero was present. Was he poisoned by Nero, asTacitus says? Although there is no lack of obscurities andimprobabilities in the account of Tacitus, this time the accusation, ifit is not true, is at least much more probable than the otheraccusations of the same kind. It is certain that the report thatBritannicus had been poisoned was soon current at Rome, and that it wasbelieved; and the death of Britannicus was likewise a fatal blow toAgrippina and her party. Tacitus tells us that the death ofBritannicus caused Agrippina great terror and unspeakableconsternation, and it is not difficult to divine the reasons. Nero nowremained the last and only survivor of the family of Augustus, and itwas therefore no longer possible to bring any effective opposition tobear upon him by setting up some other member of the family who wouldbe capable of governing. The new nobility, with its modern tendencies, now rapidly gained strength, and the influence of Agrippina declinedproportionately. 

As a result of the lofty qualities of genius and character with whichshe had been endowed, Agrippina had been able to hold the balance ofpower in the state as long as she had succeeded in keeping the emperorunder her influence. This had been true in the cases of both Claudiusand Nero. After Nero escaped from her influence, or, rather, after hehad turned against her, her prestige and her power rapidly diminished, and her party lost greatly in size and in power. Although personallythe emperor was youthful and weak, the dignity of his office made himmore powerful than all the members of his family, however energetic andintelligent they might be. At this period, furthermore, Nero wassupported by an entire party which was daily increasing in strength andin numbers, for, as always happens in eras of prosperity and peace, thetemper of the time was tending toward a milder, gentler, more liberalgovernment, and consequently one which would be less authoritative andsevere. 

Agrippina, however, was an energetic woman, not easily discouraged, andshe continued the struggle. Consequently for two years longer, even inthe midst of strife, intrigues, and suspicions, she preserved aconsiderable influence, and was able to check the progress of thegovernment in its new direction. This was either because Nero, thoughno longer exactly obedient to his mother's will, was still too weak, too undecided, and too deeply involved in the ideas of his earliereducation to attempt an open revolt against her, or it was becauseSeneca and Burrhus wisely sought to conciliate the ultra-conservativeideas of the mother with the newer tendencies of the son. 

The definitive break with his mother and with her politicalideas, --that is, with the ideas which had been professed by herancestors, --came in 58, when Nero forgot Acte for Poppaea Sabina. Thelatter belonged to one of those great Roman families into which the newspirit and the new customs had most deeply penetrated. Rich, beautiful, avaricious of luxuries and pleasures, possessed of anunbridled personal ambition, she had attracted Nero to herself, and, inorder to become empress, gave the uncertain youth the decisive impulsewhich was to transform the disciple of Agrippina and the grandson ofGermanicus into the prodigal and dissolute emperor of history. Sheencouraged in him his desire to please the populace, and certainlynever checked his love for Greece and the Orient, which resultedfinally in his mania of everywhere imitating the example of Asia and oftaking up again, though to be sure less wildly, the policies ofCaligula. Tacitus tells us that she continually reproved Nero for hissimple customs, his inelegant manners, and his rude tastes. She heldup to him, both as an example and as a reproach, the elegance andluxury of her husband, who was indeed one of the most refined andpompous members of the degenerate Roman nobility. Poppaea, in short, gave herself up to the task of reshaping the education of Nero and ofdestroying the results of Agrippina's patient labor. Nor was this all. She even became, with her restricted intelligence, his adviser inpolitics. She persuaded him that the policy of authority and economywhich his mother had desired was rendering him unpopular, and shesuggested the idea of a policy of liberality toward the people whichwould win him the affection of the masses. After he had fallen in lovewith Poppaea Sabina, Nero, who up to that time had shown noconsiderable initiative in affairs of state, elaborated and proposed tothe senate many revolutionary projects for favoring the populace. Hefinally proposed that they abolish all the _vectigalia_ of the empire;that is, all indirect taxes, all tolls and duties of whatever sort. The measure would certainly have been most popular, and there was muchdiscussion about it in the senate; but the conservatives showed thatthe finances of the empire would be ruined and persuaded Nero not toinsist. Nero, however, wished to bring about some reform which wouldhelp the masses, and he gave orders in an edict that the rates of allthe _vectigalia_ be published; that at Rome the pretor, and in theprovinces the propretor and proconsul, should summarily decide allsuits against the tax-farmers and that the soldiers should be exemptfrom these same _vectigalia_. 

[Illustration: The death of Agrippina. ]

Though some of these reforms were just, this new policy was also thecause of the final rupture with his mother. Agrippina and Nero, to allintents and purposes, no longer saw each other, and Nero, on the fewvisits which he was obliged to pay her in order to save appearances, always arranged it so as never to be left alone in her presence. Inthis manner the influence of Agrippina continued to decline, while thepopularity of Nero steadily increased as the result of his youth, ofthese first reforms, and of the hopes to which his prodigality hadgiven rise. The public, whose memory is always brief, forgot whatAgrippina had done and how she had brought back peace to the state, andbegan to expect all sorts of new benefits from Nero. Poppaea, encouraged by the increasing popularity of the emperor, insisted moreboldly that Nero, in order to make her his wife, should divorce Octavia. 

But Agrippina was not the woman to yield thus easily, and she continuedthe struggle against her son, against his paramour, and against thegrowing coterie which was gathering about the emperor. She opposedparticularly the repudiation of Octavia, which, being merely the resultof a pure caprice, would have caused serious scandal in Rome. But Nerowas even now hesitating and uncertain. He still had too clearly beforehim the memory of the long authority of his mother; he feared her toomuch to dare step forth in open and complete revolt. At last Poppaeaunderstood that she could not become empress so long as the motherlived, and from that moment the doom of Agrippina was sealed. Poppaeawas goaded on by all the new friends of Nero, who wished to destroyforever the influence of Agrippina, and by her words and deeds shefinally brought him to the point where he decided to kill his mother. 

But to murder his mother was both an abominable and dangerousundertaking, for it meant killing the daughter of Germanicus--killingthat woman whom the people regarded with a semi-religious veneration asa portent of fortune; for she was the daughter of a man whom only apremature death had prevented from becoming the head of the empire, andshe had been the sister, the wife, and the mother of emperors. Forthis reason the manner of her taking-off had been long debated in orderthat it might remain secret; nor would Nero make his decision until aseemingly safe means had been discovered for bringing about thedisappearance of Agrippina. 

It was the freedman Anicetus, the commander of the fleet, who, in thespring of 59, made the proposal when Nero was with his court at Baiae, on the Bay of Naples. They were to construct a vessel which, asTacitus says, should open artfully on one side. If Nero could inducehis mother to embark upon that vessel, Anicetus would see to it thatshe and the secret of her murder would be buried in the depths of thesea. Nero gave his consent to this abominable plan. He pretended thathe was anxious to become reconciled with his mother, and invited her tocome from Antium, where she then was, to Baiae. He showed her allregard and every courtesy, and when Agrippina, reassured by thekindness of her son, set out on her return to Antium, Nero accompaniedher to the fatal vessel and tenderly embraced her. It was a calm, starry night. Agrippina stood talking with one of her freedwomen aboutthe repentance of her son and the reconciliation which had taken place, when, after the vessel had drawn some distance away from the shore, theplotters tried to carry out their infernal plan. What happened is notvery clear. The seemingly picturesque description of Tacitus is inreality vague and confusing. It appears that the ship did not sink sorapidly as the plotters had hoped, and in the confusion which resultedon board, the emperor's mother, ready and resolute, succeeded in makingher escape by casting herself into the sea and swimming away, while thehired assassins on the ship killed her freedwoman, mistaking her forAgrippina. 

In any case, it is certain that Agrippina arrived safely at one of hervillas along the coast, with the help, it seems, of a vessel which shehad encountered as she swam, and that she immediately sent one of herfreedmen to apprise Nero of the danger from which she had escapedthrough the kindness of the gods and his good fortune! Agrippina hadguessed the truth, but for this one time she gave up the struggle andsent her messenger, that it might be understood, without her saying so, that she forgot and pardoned. Indeed, what means were left her, alonely woman, of coping with an emperor who dared raise his handagainst his own mother?

However, fear prevented Nero from understanding. No sooner had helearned that Agrippina had escaped than he lost his head. In hisimagination he saw her hastening to Rome and denouncing the horriblematricide to the soldiers and the senate; and beside himself withterror, he sent for Seneca and Burrhus in order to take counsel withthem. It is easy to imagine what the feelings of the two teachers ofthe youth must have been as they listened to the terrible story. Eventhey failed to understand that Agrippina recognized and declaredherself conquered. They, too, feared that she would provoke the mostfrightful scandal which Rome had yet seen, and not knowing what adviceto give, or rather seeing only a single way out, which was, however, too serious and horrible, they held their peace while Nero begged themto save him. At last Seneca, the humanitarian philosopher, turned toBurrhus and asked him what would happen if the pretorians should beordered to kill Agrippina. Burrhus understood that Seneca, though hewas the first to give the terrible advice, yet wished to leave to himthe more serious responsibility of carrying it into execution; forBurrhus, as commander of the guards, would have had to give the orderfor the murder. He therefore hastened to say that the pretorians wouldnever kill the daughter of Germanicus, and then added that if theyreally wished to do away with Agrippina, the best plan would be forAnicetus to carry out the work which he had begun. His advice was thesame as Seneca's, but he turned over to a third person the very graveresponsibility for its execution. He had, however, chosen this thirdperson more wisely than Seneca, for Anicetus could not refuse. IfAgrippina lived, it was he who ran the risk of becoming the scapegoatfor all this bloody and horrible adventure. 

As a matter of fact, Anicetus accepted. The freedman whom Agrippinahad sent to announce her misfortune was imprisoned and put in chains, in order to convey the impression that he had been captured carryingconcealed weapons and in the act of making an attempt upon theemperor's life by the order of his mother. Anicetus then hastened tothe villa of Agrippina and surrounded it with a body of sailors. Heentered the house, and with two officers rushed into the room whereAgrippina, reclining upon a couch, was talking with a servant, andkilled her. Tacitus tells us that when Agrippina saw one of theofficers unsheathe his sword, she asked him to thrust her through thebody which had borne her son. 

Thus died the last woman of the house of Augustus, and, with theexception of Livia, the most remarkable feminine figure in that family. She died like a soldier, on duty and at her post, bravely defending thesocial and political traditions of the Roman aristocracy and thetime-honored principles of Romanism against the influx of those newforces of a later age which were seeking to orientalize the ancientLatin republic. She died for her family, for her caste, and for Rome, without even having the reward of being remembered with dutiful regardby posterity; for in this struggle she had sacrificed not merely herlife, but even her honor and her fame. Such, furthermore, was thecommon destiny of all the members of this family, and if we exceptLivia and Augustus, the privileged pair who founded it, we are at aloss to know whether to call it the most fortunate or the most unhappyof all the families of the ancient world. It is impossible for thehistorian who understands this terrible drama, filled with so manycatastrophes, not to feel a certain impression of horror at thevindictive ferocity that Rome showed to this house, which, in order tobring back Rome's peace and to preserve her empire, had been fated toexalt itself a few degrees above the ordinary level of the ancientaristocracy. Men and women, the young and the old, the knaves and thelarge-hearted, the sages and the fools of the family, alike, allwithout exception, were persecuted and plotted against. And again, ifwe except the persons of the two founders, and those who, like Drususand Germanicus, had the good fortune to die young, Rome deprived themall, deprived even Antonia, of either their life or their greatness ortheir honor, and not infrequently it robbed them of all these threetogether. Those who, like Tiberius and Agrippina, defended the ancientRoman tradition, were hated, hounded, and defamed with a no less angryfury than Caligula and Nero, who sought to destroy it. No one of them, whatever his tendencies or intentions, succeeded in making himselfunderstood by his times or by posterity; it was their common fate to bemisunderstood, and therefore horribly calumniated. The destiny of thewomen was even more tragic than that of the men, for the times demandedfrom them, as a compensation for the great honor of belonging to thisprivileged family, that they possess all the rarest and most difficultvirtues. 

What was the cause of all this? we ask. How were so many catastrophespossible, and how could tradition have erred so grievously? It isalmost a crime that posterity should virtually always have studied andpondered this immense tragedy of history on the basis of the crude andsuperficial falsification of it which Tacitus has given us. For fewepisodes in general history impress so powerfully upon the mind thefact that the progress of the world is one of the most tragic of itsphenomena. Especially is such knowledge necessary to the favoredgenerations of prosperous and easy times. He who has not lived inthose years when an old world is disappearing and a new one making itsway cannot realize the tragedy of life, for at such times the old isstill sufficiently strong to resist the assaults of the new, and thelatter, though growing, is not yet strong enough to annihilate thatworld on the ruins of which alone it will be able to prosper. Men arethen called upon to solve insoluble problems and to attempt enterpriseswhich are both necessary and impossible. There is confusioneverywhere, in the mind within and in the world without. Hate oftenseparates those who ought to aid one another, since they are tendingtoward the same goal, and sympathy binds men together who are forced todo battle with one another. At such times women generally suffer morethan men, for every change which occurs in their situation seems moredangerous, and it is right that it should be so. For woman is bynature the vestal of our species, and for that reason she must be moreconservative, more circumspect, and more virtuous than man. There isno state or civilization which has comprehended the highest things inlife which has not been forced to instil into its women rather thaninto its men the sense for all those virtues upon which depend thestability of the family and the future of the race. And for every erathis is a question of life and death. In such periods when one worldis dying and another coming to birth, all conceptions become confused, and all attempts bring forth bizarre results. He who wishes topreserve, often destroys, so that virtue seems vice, and vice seemsvirtue. Precisely for this reason it is more difficult for a womanthan for a man to succeed in fulfilling her proper mission, for she ismore exposed to the danger of losing her way and of missing herparticular function; and since she is more likely to fail in realizingher natural destiny, she is more likely to be doomed to a life ofmisfortune. 

Such was the fate of the family of Augustus, and such especially wasthe fate of its women. The strangers who visit Rome often go out onSunday afternoons to listen to the excellent music that can be heard ina room which is situated in one of the little streets near the Piazzadel Popolo and which used to be called the Corea. This hall was builtover an ancient Roman ruin of circular form which any one can still seeas he enters. That ruin is the entrance to the tomb which Augustusbuilt on the Flaminian Way for himself and his family. Nearly all ofthe personages whose story we have told were buried in that mausoleum. If any reader who has followed this history should one day find himselfat Rome, listening to a concert in that old Corea, which has now beenrenamed after the Emperor Augustus, let him give a thought to thosevictims of a terrible story of long ago, and may he remember that here, where at the beginning of the twentieth century he listens to the flowof rivers of sweet sound--here only, twenty centuries ago, could themembers of the family of Augustus find refuge from their tragic fate, and after so much greatness, resolved to dust and ashes, rest at lastin peace.