Octavian had now attained the summit of his ambition, and at the age of thirty-three found himself the undisputed master of the Roman world. The Republican party and the Republic itself had lain buried for twelve years in the graves of Brutus and Cassius. The mausoleum of Cleopatra at Alexandria contained the body of his last and most dangerous rival. To whatever quarter he turned his eyes, danger threatened from none. Every legion had taken the oath to him. Rome itself was in the safekeeping of his two trusted councilors, Maecenas and Agrippa. A son of his old colleague, the now humiliated Lepidus, had, it is true, recklessly attempted to form a conspiracy against him in the capital, but the vigilant Maecenas swooped down upon the conspirator and transported him under a strong guard to Octavian in the East, where he paid the penalty for his mad folly with his life. There can be no more striking testimony, both to the absolute sense of security felt by Octavian and to the absolute acquiescence of public opinion in his personal domination, than the fact that the conqueror of Antonius was able to spend nearly two entire years without showing himself in Rome. He had quitted the city in the midsummer of 31. He did not return to it until the August of 29.
Octavian destroyed the throne of the Ptolemies and incorporated Egypt in the Roman dominion. We shall consider more closely this important step in a later chapter. In this place, it will suffice to state that he definitely annexed the land of the Nile, placed it under the control of his friend, Cornelius Gallus, and, leaving three legions to overawe its passive and unwarlike population, quitted Alexandria and spent the winter in Samos. But before he left Egypt, he thoroughly despoiled the treasuries and palaces of Cleopatra, and the plunder he thus acquired paid for the war which he had now brought to a triumphant conclusion. Throughout his career, Octavian's most constant need had been for ready money. His inability to pay his troops the bounties, which he had been compelled from time to time to promise them, had led to constant mutinies and revolts. His uncle's legacy, the generous contributions of his friends, and the confiscation of the property of the proscribed had scarcely enabled him to meet his most pressing obligations. We can hardly doubt that his policy of inflaming public opinion against the Queen of Egypt had been dictated, at least in part, by his desire to get possession of the enormous accumulations of wealth which she had inherited from the long line of kings who had preceded her on the throne of Egypt. Gnaeus Pompeius, Gabinius, Julius Caesar, and Marcus Antonius had all dipped their hands freely into that inexhaustible store, but enough still remained to free Octavian from his pecuniary embarrassments. By making Egypt his own private domain, and carefully regulating its finances and revenues, he rarely lacked for money again. If the spoils of Egypt paid for his rise to an imperial position, the tribute which continued to flow steadily into his exchequer from that country oiled the wheels of the imperial machine for the remainder of his life.
As we have said, Octavian returned to Rome in August 29 B.C. He was then enjoying his fifth consulship. Throughout his absence, both Senate and people had been compliant to his will. They had rejoiced, and with sincerity, over his triumph at Actium. They had heard with relief — if with a sense of pity — of the final tragedy at Alexandria. The question for them had not been a choice between liberty and subjection, but a choice between two masters, and they preferred Octavian, whose victory was a guarantee of peace, order, and decent administration. The enlightened and well-calculated selfishness of the younger competitor promised the security and stability to which they had long been strangers. And as they could only guess his plans for the future, they hastened to shower decorations upon him. They formally confirmed all his acts. They permitted him on all occasions to wear the scarlet mantle and laurel crown of the conqueror. They instituted in his honor a quinquennial festival. They added his name to the hallowed formula in which the sacred colleges prayed for the welfare of the Senate and the people. They bade the Vestal Virgins go forth to meet him when he should approach the gates of Rome, and they accorded to him the rare honor of a triple triumph. Octavian signified his gracious acceptance of these honorific decrees while he still lingered in the East busy with the work of reorganization, but at length he entered the city in the garb of a conqueror. The trophies, he had won six years before in Dalmatia and Pannonia adorned his first triumph. Then came the spoils gained in the seafight at Actium, while the third triumph represented his victory over the Queen of Egypt. Cleopatra, by her self-inflicted death, had escaped the crowning indignity of being borne as a living captive through the streets of Rome, but her children were there, and the effigy of the Queen upon her couch, as his lieutenants had found her in her death chamber, was placed upon a triumphal car and was the cynosure of all eyes upon that eventful day. True as ever to the crafty policy by which he sought to convince the Romans that the war in which he had been engaged was a foreign war, and his victory the victory of the Western over the Eastern civilization, Octavian took care that no trophies of the dead Antonius should figure in the procession. He wished, as far as might be possible, to bury all memories of the Triumvirate which had destroyed the constitution.
Passing to the Capitol, the conqueror paid the usual homage of sacrifice to Jupiter, Best and Greatest, and then descending to the Forum, he dedicated a new temple to Minerva, opened with great pomp the recently completed Basilica of Julius, and placed therein a statue of the goddess Victory. By these religious celebrations, Octavian seemed to claim the sanction of heaven for the new regime which he was about to inaugurate. Nor did he forget to amuse the people of Rome with a series of lavish entertainments and spectacles, to conciliate their favor by a generous largesse, and to reward his veterans with the bounties they had richly earned. He knew the advantage of starting well, of disarming covert criticism as well as open opposition, and of persuading the world that an era of prosperity and peace was about to open. As an earnest thereof, he poured out in Rome the wealth of plundered Egypt, which, according to the testimony of Suetonius, had so immediate an effect upon the money market that it brought down with a run the high rates of interest, which had prevailed for many years, and greatly increased the price of land and all other commodities. But still more important and significant was the pledge of peace, which he gave by closing the doors of the Temple of Janus, which stood on the fringe of the Roman Forum. Within living memory those doors had always remained open, as a sign that war was afoot in some part, either near or remote, of the Roman dominions, and that the legionaries were either facing the barbarians in battle or were turning their swords upon one another. Now they were solemnly closed, for the third time only in the history of the city, and the world, which was tired and exhausted with continued strife, hailed the act with universal acclamation. A campaign, it is true, was in progress on the Danube, where Crassus was waging successful war against the Daci, Bastarnae, and Getae, and was carving out the new province of Moesia, but at such an hour the people were not inclined to stand out for pedantic accuracy of diction or literal truth. What they gladly seized hold of was the symbolic meaning of the ceremony and its implicit indication of future policy. Hence the chorus of praise which arose at the prospect of peace, the memories of which roused Velleius Paterculus to genuine eloquence, as he described how the civil wars that had raged for twenty years had at length drawn to a close, how foreign strife had been buried, peace recalled once more, and everywhere the fury of arms lulled to sleep. It is, indeed, impossible to lay too much stress upon the exhaustion of the Roman world, if we would understand the absolutely passive acquiescence with which it accepted the new regime. No one felt this more strongly than Tacitus — writing long after the event — whose sympathies were all on the side of the fallen Republic. Again and again, in those terse, epigrammatic sentences of his, he reveals this dominating truth, and we see the eagerness of the world to turn its back upon a hateful past, full of murder, war, rapine, and all imaginable horrors, and to look to the future and to the one man who held the future in his hands.
Moreover, Octavian had carefully prepared the ground for the seed he was about to sow. He had been virtually master of Rome and of the West for twelve years, ever since the Treaty of Brundisium in 40 B.C. His victory over Sextus Pompeius — whereby he had reestablished the security of Rome and Italy — and the overthrow of Lepidus in 36 B.C., combined with the withdrawal to the East of Antonius, who, as the years passed by, lost touch with Western affairs and became almost an alien power, had enabled him to consolidate his position. The Battle of Actium is naturally taken as the date from which the new regime starts, but it had really begun many years before.
When, therefore, Octavian returned to Rome to take up his residence in the capital, there were three alternatives open to him. He might genuinely restore the Republic and the republican forms of government; or he might destroy the republican forms of government and frankly create a monarchy; or he might effect a sort of compromise between the two, and retain the forms of the old constitution while safeguarding his own unconstitutional and unrepublican position as supreme Head of the State. There is no real evidence to show that he hesitated for long in making up his mind to select the path of compromise. To restore the Republic, to create anew an organism which had died a violent death, was impossible. The Republic had proved itself during the two previous generations incapable of governing a world empire such as the Roman dominion had now become. It had been rotten and corrupt to the core in its administration of the provinces. Its constitution, with its elaborate series of checks and counterchecks, had utterly broken down. The rise of a professional army had merely hastened and completed its downfall. Every attempt to create a great constitutional party, as a counterpoise to the narrow ideas of the oligarchical clique on the one hand and to the turbulence of mob rule on the other, had failed ignominiously. The Senate had been unable in Cicero's day to rise to the conception of decent and honest administration. What hope was there that they would rise to it after the carnage of the civil wars? Even, therefore, if Octavian had genuinely desired to restore the status quo antea, as a statesman he must have known that this would entail renewed disorder. The first ambitious proconsul with resources sufficient to raise and pay an army, and with enough military genius to win his soldiers' confidence, would have the careers of Julius, of Pompeius, of Antonius, and of Octavian himself ever before his eyes, and would be drawn irresistibly along the same perilous path. Again, even supposing such a restoration of the Republic had been feasible, how could Octavian have guaranteed his own safety? If he had descended to a private station, after restoring the oligarchs to power, they would, sooner or later, have invented a pretext for his destruction, and, to save himself, he would again have had to call upon the services of his veterans. But self-abnegation was no part of the character of Octavian. He had aspired to rule at the age of nineteen. It was not likely that he would abdicate just at the moment when he had attained to universal dominion. Sulla had abdicated the dictatorship in 79, and within ten years the constitution he had set up was overthrown. Gnaeus Pompeius withdrew from public life in 70, but was compelled in self-defense to reenter it three years later. He had disbanded his army in 62, and the Senate had promptly refused the ratification of his acts. Political disinterestedness paid no better then than now. Octavian could not have resigned his position in 28 without making himself the target for all his foes.
When, therefore, Suetonius tells us that Octavian twice had thoughts of restoring the Republic — de reddenda republica bis cogitavit — once at the period we are now considering and a second time when he was weakened by continued ill-health and the cares of office, we cannot accept the statement without the gravest qualifications. He felt compunctions, says the historian, because he had so often cast it in the teeth of Antonius that but for him the Republic might safely be restored. No doubt Octavian had frequently employed this argument, when justifying to others the unconstitutional position which he held, and had thrown upon his colleague and rival all the odium of the Triumvirate. But throughout he had been playing for absolute not for divided power, for the whole and not for the half of the Roman world, and it is ridiculous to suppose that he seriously considered the question of abdication merely because his enemies might find, in certain of his earlier speeches, passages in which he had protested that he would thankfully be content with a private station. The same story appears in Cassius Dio, but it is by him elaborated with abundant detail. According to his account, Octavian summoned Maecenas and Agrippa to his councils and debated with them the policy he should pursue. The historian purports to give in full the speeches of both, and attributes to Agrippa the extraordinary advice that Octavian should abdicate. But the reasoning by which he justifies this counsel is even more extraordinary than the counsel itself. Agrippa's speech is little more than a rhetorical thesis in praise of personal ease. He recommends the delights of obscurity as contrasted with the cares and burdens of office, and urges upon Octavian the craven argument that to be safe he must not arouse the envy or hatred of his contemporaries, and that he must prove the sincerity of his filial piety to Julius by abdicating now that he has avenged his murder. If sentiments such as these were ever uttered by Agrippa, they little agree with all else that we know of his character.
The speech of Maecenas, on the other hand, is a much more valuable historical document. The historian represents him as advising Octavian to adopt the measures which he subsequently carried out, and the reconstruction he advocates practically represents the imperial system as it existed when Cassius Dio wrote his history. Maecenas's main argument is that for Octavian to give back to the Senate and the people their old freedom would be like placing a sword in the hands of a mad child. He was bound to grasp power firmly with both hands. If he did not, he might expect the certain rise of a constant succession of men like Lepidus, Sertorius, Brutus, and Cassius to throw the State into confusion and to compass his destruction. He must, therefore, repress the turbulence of the mob and mob assemblies and restrict all political power to himself and a few wise counsellors. In other words, Maecenas resolutely advocated the establishment of an empire in all but name, and the advice, whether actually given or not, was acted on by Octavian. He had not waded through slaughter to a throne in order to stultify himself by an act of Quixotic and mischievous resignation at the very moment of victory. His personal ambitions made this impossible. His knowledge of what the welfare of the State required rendered it equally impossible. None knew better than he that the stability of the Roman dominion rested upon himself and upon the reconstruction which he alone was strong enough to carry through.
Then, as a genuine restoration of the Republic was out of the question, Octavian had to decide whether he should establish a monarchy. That this was a practical alternative is beyond all doubt. His power and his will were absolute. If, after leading his veterans in triumph through the streets of Rome, he had closed the doors of the Senate and abolished by a single edict all the higher magistracies; if he had at once boldly assumed the diadem and the insignia of monarchy, it is difficult to see how any effective opposition could have been offered to his designs. But the very name of king was an abomination. However far the Romans had separated from the old Republican ideas, they still regarded with detestation the trappings of royalty. To them the word king was synonymous with tyrant and betokened an alien and un-Roman civilization. Antonius had deeply outraged public sentiment and public opinion by wearing the diadem and playing at royalty in the court of Cleopatra, and the great Julius himself had dealt a severe blow at his popularity by his evident hankering after the glittering symbols of monarchy. It is hard for the modern student to appreciate the strength of this rooted prejudice in the Roman mind — a prejudice which survived even the first two centuries of the Roman Empire — but Octavian was fully aware of its intensity and did not fail to take it into account. He had never been a mere reckless adventurer. The older he grew the more ready he became to follow the line of least resistance. Why then should he run risks which might prove to be desperate, simply for the sake of a high-sounding name and a few baubles? Why should he exasperate and alienate public opinion? Why invite conspiracy and rebellion? Why create a stubborn and relentless opposition merely that his ears might be flattered with the title of king? He may have been tempted, like other conquerers both before and since his day, by the idea of a crown, and by the hope of founding a regular dynasty, but, if he was, he put the temptation from him.
And thus he was inevitably thrown back upon the third alternative, upon, that is to say, the middle path of compromise. He would retain the semblance of a republic, the semblance of liberty and freedom, and the semblance of the old constitution, and yet at the same time retain his absolute ascendency. There should be a republic in form. Others should share with him the insignia of office, but he alone would be supreme. We shall see with what astuteness, and with what insight into the character of those whom he governed, he pressed towards the accomplishment of his designs, until in the end the creator of the Roman Empire dared to inscribe in marble the living lie that he had restored the Roman Republic. An organized hypocrisy, perhaps, but one which fully served its purpose and helped to smooth the transition from the old to the new.