At this point we may turn aside to take note of the men who stood on the steps of this new and anomalous throne, which bore the monogram, not of Augustus, but of the Republic. Adroitness alone would never have carried its occupant to an eminence thus supreme. He possessed the rare faculty, itself a form of genius, of selecting capable lieutenants and of trusting them when chosen. Augustus did not win his way to empire, like the first Napoleon, by a dazzling series of victories. His success reminds us rather of the founder of the German Empire, for he owed almost as much as Kaiser Wilhelm I to his great ministers of state, and he owed most of all to Maecenas and Agrippa.
Gaius Cilnius Maecenas was some years older than his master. Of his early career nothing is known, nor does his name emerge from obscurity until the time of the Perusian War and the Treaty of Brundisium. He traced his descent — or rather others traced it for him, for he himself laughed at pedigrees — from the ancient kings of Etruria, and his family, which belonged to the equestrian order, had taken little part in the politics of the Republic. Maecenas too, was a typical eques. Office had no charm for him. Soon — though the precise date is uncertain — after Augustus had firmly established his position, Maecenas retired gladly to his business and his pleasures. Yet, for many a long year, whenever delicate negotiations were afoot which called for careful handling, or whenever a diplomatist was required to strike a bargain or patch up a quarrel, Augustus had always relied upon the shrewd common sense and the infinite tact of Maecenas. It was he who had arranged the Treaties of Brundisium and Tarentum in B.C. 40 and 37; he who had schemed the earlier matrimonial alliances of Augustus, first with Clodia, the daughter of Fulvia and Publius Clodius — a union which was speedily dissolved by the Perusian War — and secondly with Scribonia, the sister of Lucius Scribonius Libo, who was the father-in-law of Sextus Pompeius. This too lasted no longer than the needs of the political situation demanded, for on the very day that Scribonia bore him his only child — the daughter who was afterwards to bring disgrace upon his house — Augustus divorced the mother and married Livia, whom he had snatched from the side of her husband, Tiberius Claudius Nero. The ill-omened union between Octavia and Marcus Antonius which was designed to cement the Treaty of Brundisium, though subsequently it introduced a new and bitter source of discord between the Triumvirs, was also due to the advice of Maecenas. It was to him too that Octavian had turned whenever the murmurs of discontent in the capital grew serious during his own long and repeated absences from Rome. When the issue of the war with Sextus Pompeius seemed to be hanging doubtfully in the balance, when Rome was starving because the corn ships failed to come up the Tiber and the people were clamoring for peace at any price with the corsair son of Gnaeus Pompeius, it was Maecenas who was despatched in haste to silence the grumblers and overawe the discontented. And when eventually, at the supreme moment, Octavian and Agrippa sailed with their armaments to bring Antonius to battle, Maecenas was left behind in Italy to forward supplies and reinforcements and, above all, to keep Rome quiet until the decisive blow had been struck. Clearly therefore, Maecenas was a man of sterling capacity and played a great part between the years B. C. 40 and 27. Yet he had no political ambitions, and he closed his public career without a sigh.
The explanation is simple. Maecenas was an eques. The only reward he asked for his services was liberty to live his own life in his own way. He had no wish to enter the Senate, or wear the senatorial ornamenta. Maecenas was enormously rich, a man of the world, a bon viveur who thoroughly loved the elegancies of life, a man of taste in literature and the arts, and a discriminating connoisseur. Yet, though he retired from politics in the sense that he held no office, his political influence for long remained unimpaired. If the Emperor wanted advice, he still turned for it to Maecenas. He was not a minister in the modern sense of the term, but, as the friend of Caesar, his wise counsel was ever at his master's disposal. Nor was this the sole service which Maecenas rendered. As one of the leading financiers of the Roman world, his indirect political influence must have been enormous, and he was, moreover, the chief patron of literature and the arts. It was of inestimable advantage to Augustus that there should be in the capital a brilliant man like Maecenas, who kept open house on a scale of great magnificence, and gave endless banquets and entertainments, where political asperities might be softened and political conversions might be made. His splendid mansion on the Esquiline Hill formed precisely such a center, partly social, partly literary and artistic, and partly political. The guests of Maecenas, even amid their revels, did not forget that their host was the "friend of Caesar" — a phrase which henceforth acquired a significance of its own, almost as distinct as the title of one of the new imperial ofifices. Velleius Paterculus has sketched Maecenas' character in a striking sentence which brings out the two sides of his nature. "He was," says the historian, "sleeplessly alert and prompt to act in any critical moment; but when business was not pressing, he carried his luxurious idleness beyond even the point of effeminacy." The times were breeding extraordinary men — none was more extraordinary than Maecenas, whose whole manner of life was opposed to the ideal which Augustus set before his people. The Emperor might preach simplicity, austerity, and public duty. His friend's answer was to build a princely mansion on the Esquiline and live in luxurious retirement.
Yet it is impossible to overestimate the service which he rendered to Augustus by the skillful way in which he dispensed his patronage. To reconcile Roman society to the political revolution which had been wrought was one of the great objects of Augustus. Maecenas accomplished this, as far as it was capable of accomplishment, by the aid of the writers and publicists of the day. There was no public press to be inspired, but there were at least poets in abundance. Maecenas tuned their lyres, and set them singing the praises of Augustus. Maecenas, Asinius Pollio, and Messala — these were the three chief patrons of literature in the Augustan era, and they founded, with the active sympathy and encouragement of the Emperor himself, what Valerius Maximus justly described as a "College of Poets." It was a college with definite political ends in view, and it was their triumph, their almost unique triumph, that they wrote not only good politics but good poetry. Let us see then who belonged to this famous Academy of Immortals in the real as well as in the technical sense of the term. It contained Virgil, the nature worshipper, and Horace, the urbane. It contained the neurotic Sextus Propertius, who gave a new flexibility and richness to the elegiac meter; and Tibullus, "the pure and fine." These four can be matched by few succeeding literary eras, and surpassed, perhaps, by none. But it also contained others, of almost equal reputation, whose names alone have come down to us. There was Lucius Varius Rufus, the friend and literary executor of Virgil, who is bracketed by Horace in immortal association with the Mantuan, and whose tragedy of Thyestes pronounced by Quintilian to equal the greatest masterpieces of the Greek tragedians. There was Cornelius Gallus, declared by Ovid to be the most consummate artist in elegiac verse. There was Valgius, of whom Tibullus said that none came nearer to Homer. There was Lucius Junius Calidus, "our most brilliant poet" — it is Cornelius Nepos who is speaking — "since Lucretius and Catullus." There was Rabirius, "the mighty-mouthed," who composed a poem on the Alexandrine War; Cotta, who anticipated Lucan in describing in epic verse the campaign of Pharsalus, and Cornelius Severus, who sang the Sicilian War against Sextus Pompeius. There was Fundanius, who wrote comedies, and Pollio, author as well as literary patron, who wrote tragedies.
All these are now merely names. It is, of course, absolutely impossible to say whether, if their works had survived, posterity would have endorsed the verdict of their contemporaries. In some cases it almost certainly would not. Virgil's noble theme however suited him to perfection. Horace was a light-hearted man of the world. The real interest of Tibullus and Propertius lay in their own all-absorbing love affairs. Certainty is out of the question, but we may surmise that they were not all geniuses who sat at the hospitable board of Maecenas, and that some at least of the lost authors were better politicians and courtiers than poets. Virgil, incomparably the greatest of them all, drew his inspiration from the country, and rarely went to court. He has shed a reflected glory over his contemporaries. When we think of the Augustan age of literature, we think chiefly of him — of him and of Livy, the solitary prose writer of the first rank of the reign of Augustus. Only one quarter of the great History of Rome, written by Livy, which he brought down to the death of Drusus in 9 B.C., has survived. The rest is known to us merely from brief analyses of the work, which were themselves compiled from an abridged edition of the original. Livy was not a critical historian. He was not careful to sift his facts. Content with broad outlines, his main object was to paint an impressive picture of the development of Rome, and his opulence of diction and matchless style were eminently suited to his subject. He was not a courtier. There is little or no trace in his writing of the influence either of Maecenas or of Augustus himself. His sympathies, indeed, were republican rather than imperial. Yet they were expressed in language which was fraught with no danger to the imperial government. If he idealized the early days of the Republic, so, too, did Augustus. His denunciation of the disorders through which the State had passed, his laments over the growth of luxury and the loss of the ancient virtues might have been inspired by the Emperor himself. The lesson which he preached in prose was precisely the same as that which Virgil was preaching in verse and Augustus in his edicts — the need for order, moderation, and religion.
In other words, the literature of the day was wholly on the side of the court. The opposition, such as it was, was voiceless or anonymous. We cannot doubt that this fact alone exercised an incalculable influence over a public opinion which was in the main entirely favorable to Augustus. That influence would have been great even if the court authors had been men of no special distinction. But they were, on the contrary, the most brilliant group which Rome had known. They made their appeal to all classes of men. Society might be corrupt, but it liked to listen to so noble a teacher as Virgil. The world has seen that phenomenon many times since Augustus' day, notably, perhaps, at the court of Louis XIV, where, though religion and piety were at a heavy discount, the court went regularly to church and listened with rapture to Bossuet and Fénelon. But the real representatives of Augustan society were Horace and Ovid — Horace of the earlier part of the reign, Ovid of the latter. There is hardly a trace of real moral earnestness in Horace. In Ovid, the quality is not only absent, but, in its place, we find cynical flippancy and scepticism. Horace laments the degeneracy of his time with an exquisite urbanity which conceals the smile that lies underneath. He is elaborating a text given him by another. His task finished, he rises to go and dine with Maecenas, where the fare is very different from that which he has been praising as having sufficed for the "Sabella proles." Horace is a very comfortable satirist. His strokes do not hurt. The golden mean, a judicious blend of not too disagreeable virtue with not too flagrant vice, best suits his easy temper. But though his famous "Secular Hymn," composed for the great religious festival of 17 B.C., leaves the reader cold, there are life and movement and sincerity in his lines when he shows us the emperor immersed in endless toil and bearing the burden of empire on his shoulders, and describes the victories which, under his direction, the Roman arms have won. To be acclaimed by Virgil as a "very god," and by Horace as the pillar and prop of the State — this was no trifling benefit even to the commander-in-chief of all the legions. It is the fate of most monarchs to have their achievements sung by mediocrities whose adulation is nauseating and whose flattery is laid on with a trowel. Augustus fared better. The literary genius of Rome was enlisted in his service by Maecenas, and for twenty years the most gracious of the Nine Muses never failed to extol his work.
Virgil died in 19 B.C. Maecenas and Horace both died in 8 B.C. There is evidence to show that during the later years of Maecenas' life he and the Emperor became gradually estranged from one another. According to one account, Augustus complained that Maecenas had been indiscreet in the matter of the conspiracy of Murena in 22 B.C., and had confided State secrets connected therewith to his wife, Terentia. According to another, the Emperor himself paid this lady unwarranted attentions, which were resented by Maecenas. Whatever the reason, the result was a cooling of the old friendship. Tacitus, in speaking of the death of Sallustius Crispus, the adopted son of the historian, a knight like Maecenas, "who, without rising to a senator's rank, surpassed in power many who had won praetorships and consulships," says that Crispus for long stood next in favor to Maecenas, and afterwards became the chief depository of imperial secrets, until in advanced age he retained the shadow rather than the substance of Augustus' friendship. "The same, too," adds the historian in one of his most sententious phrases, "had happened to Maecenas; so rarely is it the destiny of power to be lasting, or perhaps a sense of weariness steals over princes when they have bestowed everything, and over favorites when there is nothing left for them to desire." Yet, despite this coolness, Augustus remembered with gratitude to his dying day the faithful service which Maecenas had rendered to him in earlier years, and in the hour of misfortune or disaster it was his wont to exclaim, "This would never have happened if Maecenas or Agrippa had been alive." "Maecenatis erunt vera tropaea fides" — so Propertius had sung years before. His loyalty to Augustus was constant. He dared to give honest counsel, couched even in the language of reproof. There is a well-known story which relates how one day, when Augustus was presiding in a court of law and was pressing the accused with undue severity, Maecenas wrote the two words, "Up, Hangman!" on a scrap of paper and threw it into the folds of Augustus' toga. The Emperor smoothed out the paper, read the message, accepted the rebuke, and quitted the court without a word. Maecenas was credited by his contemporaries with having been the real author of "the clemency of Augustus," and with having brought his chief round to the view that moderation and clemency were the true policy for him to adopt. If this honorable distinction be his, it is not the least conspicuous feather in his well-plumed cap. If his retirement from active public life and public duty seems selfish, according to the modern idea of the responsibility of wealth, it must be remembered that it did not present itself in that aspect to his contemporaries. He did all that was expected of a knight, and we find Propertius singling out this very fact of his retirement for special praise:
"Parcis, et in tenues humilem te colligis umbras,
Velorum plenos subtrahis ipse sinus.
Crede mihi, magnos aequabunt ista Camillos
Judicia, et venies tu quoque in ora virum."
The parallel with Camillus is an extraordinary one even when we remember that Maecenas was the patron, and that Propertius was entertaining lively hopes of favors to come. But the metaphors, at least, were well chosen. Maecenas preferred to draw in his sails just when they were filled with a favoring breeze. He could have had whatever he had asked for. He preferred, in the poet's almost untranslatable phrase, to live "intra fortunam suam." He knew Augustus better than we can hope to know him. Perhaps he chose the safer, though the less noble, part.
But there was another to whom Augustus owed even more than he did to Maecenas. This was Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the friend of his student days at Apollonia and his constant associate and loyal helper throughout the years when he was climbing to supreme power. Without Agrippa, it is more than doubtful whether Augustus would have succeeded in the struggle. It was he who had broken the insurrection of Fulvia and Lucius Antonius in the Perusian War, and had created the navy which destroyed Sextus Pompeius at what was perhaps the most critical juncture of Augustus' fortunes. It was he, too, who had crushed Marcus Antonius in the sea-fight at Actium. In other words, Augustus had to thank Agrippa for the victories he had won both by land and sea, and he frankly recognized the debt by loading his lieutenant with richly merited honors. Agrippa had been rewarded with the consulship in 37 B.C. He had been given the hand of Augustus' niece, Marcella, in marriage, and was joint consul with his chief in 28 and 27 B.C., the years during which Augustus carried out his revision of the Senate. Agrippa was the second man in the Roman world — the alter ego of the Princeps — and his loyal cooperation was steadfast and sure. For many years no differences arose between them. When Augustus was absent from Rome, busy with the reorganization of the provinces, Agrippa took up the reins of government. Or if any serious war broke out which called for the presence of the first general of the day, Agrippa was invariably entrusted with the command and invariably returned to Rome in triumph. Naturally, therefore, he regarded himself, and was regarded throughout the Roman world, as the heir to Augustus' political power in case of the Emperor's death, and there can be little doubt that if the illness of Augustus had terminated fatally, either at Tarraco in 25 B.C. or in Rome two years later, Agrippa would have stepped forward as a claimant for the Principate.
But the cordial relations existing between Augustus and Agrippa now began to be affected by the fact that the younger members of the imperial family were growing up to manhood. Augustus had but one child of his own, his daughter Julia, born to him of his marriage with Scribonia, in the year 37 B.C. The Empress Livia had borne him no children, and his hopes of an heir were growing faint. But Livia had had two sons by her first husband, Tiberius Nero, the second of whom was born three months after her marriage with Augustus, and these two boys, Tiberius and Drusus, were ready to enter public life. Moreover, besides his daughter Julia and his two stepsons, there were the children of his sister Octavia, by her two marriages with Marcellus and Marcus Antonius, and the tender regard which Augustus had always shown for his sister was extended to her children, notably to the young Marcus Marcellus, her son by her first marriage. In the year 25 B.C., the favorite of the Emperor was unquestionably Marcellus, a youth of engaging presence and great promise, and it was to him that he gave the hand of his daughter in marriage. Marcellus was then in his eighteenth, while Julia was in her fourteenth year, and the circumstance that this marriage was celebrated while Augustus was absent in Spain seems to show his anxiety that the union should take place without delay. Agrippa resented a marriage which clearly portended the blighting of his own hopes, and took it ill that the only daughter of Augustus should have been bestowed on any but himself. There was no open rupture, but Augustus gave renewed proof of his goodwill towards Marcellus by appointing him aedile for the year 23 B.C., and public opinion in Rome seems to have leaped to the conclusion that Marcellus would be Augustus' heir. This was the year of the Emperor's grave illness, during which he handed over his signet ring to Agrippa and puzzled everyone to know what he meant thereby. Augustus recovered, but the confidence between the two friends was broken, and Agrippa was sent to the East in charge of an important mission. According to the gossip of the day, Agrippa withdrew from Rome hurt and angry, and, instead of going to Syria, went no farther than Lesbos. Whether this gossip is trustworthy, no one can say. Josephus, in speaking of Agrippa's mission, writes as though he were actually associated with Augustus in the Empire. Yet it is probable enough that Agrippa, who had such good ground for jealousy and suspicion, actually entertained the sentiments ascribed to him and thought it hard that he who had done so much for Augustus should be supplanted by a mere stripling. The death of Marcellus, however, during his aedileship, removed this formidable competitor out of Agrippa's path. Augustus grieved bitterly at his loss. It was the first death in the imperial family, the first check to his dynastic ambitions, which were to suffer, as the years went on, a succession of blows so cruel and unlooked for that they seemed to have been administered by malignant fate.
Nor was the old cordiality between Augustus and Agrippa immediately restored. Reconciliation was deferred for two years, until Augustus, then in Sicily, bade Agrippa come and confer with him, and sent him to Rome to take charge of the city. In the meantime, we may be sure that Livia was scheming her hardest to obtain the Emperor's favor for her own sons, and to replace the lost Marcellus in his regard by Tiberius. It is somewhat strange that she met with no better success, for Livia was one of the ablest women of her time. Though she bore Augustus no children, she contrived to retain intact her powerful ascendency over his mind. She devoted her life to securing the succession for Tiberius and in the end her efforts were triumphant, yet for many years they seemed foredoomed to failure, and Tiberius was only adopted by the Emperor when practically every other possible condidate had been removed by death. It can scarcely be doubted that Livia had done her utmost to persuade Augustus to bestow Julia upon Tiberius in preference to Marcellus, or that she renewed those efforts when Marcellus died. Yet she failed and had the mortification of seeing Agrippa reconciled to her husband and married to the girl widow, Julia, in 21 B.C. Marcella was divorced, at the suggestion, it is said, of her own mother Octavia, who, in the interests of her brother's house, was ready to sacrifice the happiness of a daughter, and by this marriage Agrippa stood forth as the recognized heir of the Emperor. Three years later, on his return from Gaul and Spain, he received an even more flattering distinction at the hands of Augustus, for the Emperor made him his colleague in the tribunicia potestas, and thus publicly admitted him to a partnership in the Principate.
Whether Augustus, in elevating Agrippa to this exalted position, acted entirely of his own free will it is more difficult to say. There is, of course, no question that Agrippa was the fittest to succeed him and that he had fully earned the reversion of the Principate in the event of the Emperor's death. But it was universally believed at the time that Augustus was actuated by considerations of policy, rather than of personal inclination, in thus giving Agrippa the hand of his daughter Julia. According to Velleius Paterculus, Agrippa was quite willing to be the second man in the Empire, provided that Augustus was the first. He was prepared to be the servant of Augustus, but of Augustus alone, and would acknowledge no other master. If this judgement be right, and it certainly seems to be confirmed by his jealousy of Marcellus and the estrangement which followed, Augustus may well have come to the conclusion that it was safer for him to take his too powerful subject into partnership. There is a remarkable — though probably fictitious — story in Cassius Dio which represents Maecenas advising the Emperor either to make Agrippa his son-in-law or to put him out of the way. Augustus chose the former alternative, and thereby thought that he had settled the question of the succession. It must have been a bitter blow to the Empress Livia and to the hopes she entertained for her son Tiberius, but apparently she acquiesced in the decision and was content to bide her time.
Agrippa's marriage with Julia was fruitful. She bore him two sons, Gaius and Lucius, in quick succession, and these infant princes were formally adopted by Augustus in the year 17 B.C. before Agrippa and his wife left Rome for the East, where they remained for four years. On their return, Agrippa again received the tribunicia potestas for another term of five years and was then sent in command of an army to Pannonia, where he died in the following year (12 B.C.) at the age of fifty-one. Augustus in person delivered the funeral panegyric on his dead colleague and buried him in his own splendid mausoleum, but it was strongly suspected that he was secretly relieved at the death of his greatest minister and most successful general. It is probable enough that the relations between them had long been strained, and that each had been uneasily suspicious of the motives of the other. "The glad confident morning" of their early association had vanished. Yet there is not a shred of evidence to show that Agrippa swerved at any single moment from his perfect loyalty to Augustus.