The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]

Roman Death Mask

CHAPTER XXXII. THE LAST YEARS OF AUGUSTUS

Octavian divorced his first two wives, the daughter of Publ. Servilius, to whom he had been married at eighteen, and Clodia, daughter of Antony’s wife Fulvia by her first husband P. Clodius the triumvir, after a short period of wedded life; and a year after she had borne him a daughter, Julia by name, he put away his third wife Scribonia, being captivated by the charms of Livia, the wife of Ti. Claudius Nero, who came into his house as his fourth wife with the consent of her former husband. Her two sons, Tiberius (born 42 B.C.) and Drusus, whom she brought into the world three months after her union with Augustus, were brought up in the house of their father Cl. Nero, but were received by Augustus into his own house on the death of the former, who had appointed him their guardian.

The person who had the likeliest prospect of the succession seemed to be M. Marcellus, the son of the emperor’s sister Octavia by her first marriage. He was treated with the utmost distinction by Augustus, who loaded him with honours in quick succession and married him at an early age to his daughter Julia, to the great mortification of the haughty and ambitious Livia, who, having borne no children to her imperial spouse, desired to secure the first place after the monarch and the reversion of the throne for her sons Tiberius and Drusus.

[21 B.C.-2 A.D.]

A second rival to the youthful Marcellus arose in the person of his own brother-in-law Agrippa, the famous general to whom Augustus chiefly owed his victories over Sext. Pompeius and Antony, and whom he himself had encouraged to cherish the most daring hopes by high distinctions and proofs of favour. When the enmity between Agrippa and Marcellus grew too plainly manifest, the emperor despatched the former to Asia under pretext of an honourable mission. But Agrippa, looking upon this as a kind of banishment, ruled the province through his legate, while he himself remained at Lesbos, his gaze riveted upon Rome. Fate intervened to save Augustus from painful experience of the affronted pride of an ambitious man. Marcellus died in the year 23, universally lamented by the Roman people, whose darling he was. It was shrewdly suspected that he had fallen a victim to the rancour and intrigues of Livia, who, by birth a member of the Claudian family, had inherited all the pride and jealous ambition of their old patrician blood. Augustus, dismayed by the disturbances at Rome in the year 22, and the evidences of a conspiracy against his life which then came to light, made haste to be reconciled with Agrippa, and, by marrying him to Julia, assured him of the first place after his own and the prospect of the succession. Octavia, the emperor’s sister, moved by envy and jealousy of Livia, gladly agreed to Agrippa’s divorce from her daughter Marcella, that so she might thwart the ambitious schemes of the emperor’s consort. A few years later Agrippa journeyed to the East, accompanied by Julia, to set in order the complications and struggles for the throne which had arisen in various districts from the Bosporus to Syria. His presence was a blessing to the Asiatic provinces and dependent states; he reconciled the wrangling members of the empire by admonitions and commands, and perpetuated the name of his wife by founding on the site of the ancient and ruinous seaport of Berytus the colony of Julia Felix, which was provided with a garrison of two legions and became the centre of Roman dominion in Syria. As Agrippa was returning to Italy after a stay of some years in the East, he succumbed to sickness in the fifty-first year of his age. He died in Campania in 12 B.C.

Augustus rendered the highest honours to the man to whom he owed so much, and who had devoted himself as fully to the welfare of the state as to the cause of his imperial friend. He had the body interred with the most solemn obsequies in the imperial vault, himself delivering the funeral oration, and not only made over the baths and gardens of Agrippa to the city of Rome according to the wishes of the deceased, but distributed considerable donations of money among the people in his name.

Livia now conceived fresh hopes for her sons. By her intrigues she succeeded in procuring the divorce of Tiberius, her first-born, who was at that time thirty years of age, from his wife, and his marriage with the emperor’s widowed daughter, who had borne three sons to Agrippa—Caius, Lucius, and Agrippa, and two daughters, Julia and Agrippina. Augustus with difficulty suppressed his dislike of his ambitious, overbearing, and sullen stepson.

Within a very few years the circle of friends which Augustus had gathered about him had been sadly thinned by death. Agrippa, Octavia, Drusus, and Mæcenas had sunk into the tomb within the space of four years (from 12 to 8 B.C.). Thus with declining age the emperor fixed his affections all the more exclusively upon his two grandsons, Caius and Lucius, the children of his daughter Julia and his friend Agrippa. He admitted them by adoption into the Julian family, conferred the title of Cæsar upon them, and had them brought up under his own eye; he even devoted part of his own leisure to their instruction and education. They were his usual companions at table, and were treated with such distinction that all men regarded them as the future heirs of the empire. The populace and the senate vied with each other in offering homage and adulation to the imperial grandsons of Augustus, and they were loaded with fresh honours and dignities every year.

But this brilliant position was fated to be the ruin of the young princes. It not only filled their own hearts with presumption and self-conceit; Livia and Tiberius turned eyes of envy and hatred upon the favoured pair. When Augustus, who was not blind to their sentiments, attempted to remove his stepson from the capital by giving him the honourable task of conducting a campaign in Armenia, the latter declined the proffered honour out of mortified pride, and begged leave to spend some years in learned leisure in the island of Rhodes. The leave was granted, and extended even beyond his desires. For seven years he stayed in the Greek island; busy with philosophical and mathematical studies, and observing the constellations in the night hours under the guidance of Thrasyllus, to draw auguries for the future from their position. His absence was at first associated with demonstrations of honour, through the splendour of the tribunician office which Augustus had conferred on him before his departure; but in course of time it assumed more and more the character of an exile, and Julia took advantage of it to increase her father’s aversion for the husband she abhorred.