A Family Man

Oh sure…you think you know Caesar Augustus — grandnephew and son of Julius, victor over Mark Antony, longest ruling princeps of the ancient Roman Empire, yadda, yadda — but do you really know Caesar the man?

It is the sort of turgid question that our author, Adrian Goldsworthy, studiously avoids in today’s volume, Augustus. In fact, Mr. Goldsworthy’s interest seems to lie with military history, or at least he has a gift for describing battles and their political importance. The book he offers us is well balanced and factual, covering political action, economics, military issues, and with it a surprising amount of information about the Romans’ personal lives. The personal is hard to avoid, since Roman aristocrats who entered politics tended to live their whole lives out in the open, with less division between the private and the public than one might desire.

Poor politics by our standards, but excellent for our purposes: human foibles and plain old gossip add so much to history.

Augustus himself entered the political sphere early, as did most aristocratic boys. There was, in fact, this whole set of rules for a young man’s political education that specified the earliest age he could serve in various offices; our author tells us that an ambitious man set great store by being elected to office “in his year,” which is to say the first year he was eligible. (The Kennedys felt the same way in the twentieth century.) By Augustus’ day those rules were frayed around the edges…the first century B.C. was a time of political upheaval in Rome, and many of the norms around who could be elected to what office and when had been set aside for pragmatic reasons, various.

Enter Augustus’ great-uncle, Julius Caesar. …I mean, he literally entered, across the Rubicon.

Julius matters because without him, Augustus Caesar would still be a minor aristocrat named Caius Octavius, and we’d never have heard of him. Julius was Augustus’ great-uncle and head of the Julius family, the Julii. At some point Julius settled on Augustus as the most promising of the Julii kids, the one most likely to succeed. Julius formally adopted Augustus in his will and named him his principal heir. When Julius was publicly murdered in 44 B.C. Augustus found himself an eighteen-year-old with inherited lands and wealth yet unclaimed, and he had absolutely no political power or means to claim them. He did, however, have name recognition, a legal right to his adoptive father’s property, and both an education in politics and a flair for it. Parlaying a round of debt financing, he found troops loyal to their former commander, Julius, and made himself a great military force, knocked off his opponents, and installed himself as emperor of Rome in all but name, its princeps.

Sheesh…makes the rest of us feel like underachievers.

Augustus’ public life of military success, political maneuvering, and civic building programs is well known and well beyond the scope of this review. His private life is more tractable, however. The first thing you need to know is that Augustus — now styled “Caesar” to reinforce the connection to Julius — was straight. Very straight. He and his third wife Livia did not have kids but did succeed in making a life-long marriage. And it was known in the day that Caesar was carrying on affairs with a number of married women. Rude gossip even had it that Livia was procuring for him. No, Romans were not nice people.

Caesar was straight, but he was not narrowminded: for most of his life, Caesar relied on two advisors, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa and Caius Maecenas. Of the two advisors, Agrippa was Caesar’s second in command and the one who held official rank. Maecenas, however, was more than just a social friendship: although Maecenas never held official titles, that fact didn’t stop Caesar from leaving Rome under his administration at points when he and Agrippa were off putting down troubles in the provinces. Maecenas, like Caesar, was married but childless; however, in his case it was widely known that he was gay and an item with an actor named Bathyllus. (It’s always an actor/model/waiter, that much has not changed in two millennia.) It was Maecenas who ran with the arts circle generally, and it was he who introduced guys like Virgil and Horace to Caesar. Caesar, in fact, had a personal interest in the Aeneid and saw to its wrap-up and publication following Virgil’s death. The princeps found Horace lecherous and nicknamed him “the perfect penis” for his ongoing efforts in the field.

Before we make the princeps a gay icon, however, we should consider his views on marriage. In 18 B.C. Caesar proposed and the Senate passed the lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus and the lex Julia de adulteriis. The first of these laws gave incentives to men who (legally) fathered three children or more and penalized those who were unmarried or childless; senators and above were forbidden to marry freedwomen (slaves who had been manumitted). The second law laid down penalties for adultery and for any sex with a freedwoman unless you were married to her. The Senate debate on these laws was one for the ages. Given Caesar’s own pattern of adultery, and knowing his wife, Livia, to be firm-minded at minimum (Caligula later called her “Ulysses in a frock”), the senators asked Caesar how he instructed and controlled the women of his own family. For once Caesar chewed his tongue and said something about offering fashion advice.

Marriage and child-rearing are always lively topics with the Romans, because divorce was so central to the political process. Roman marriages were easily dissolved (essentially, the husband made a ritual declaration that he was divorcing the wife and that was that) and divorcing and remarrying for political gain was seen as completely normal. Caesar was married three times: first to an inconsequential woman named Claudia, who was also underage. When the political advantage of that union faded, Caesar divorced her and declared the marriage unconsummated, which it may well have been. He then married a woman named Scribonia, with whom he had his only legitimate child, Julia; but ten years later he divorced Scribonia to make a more politically advantageous marriage to Livia. Julia in her turn was first married to her father’s old ally Agrippa, with whom she had five children before Agrippa’s death. She then married Tiberius, who was her stepmother Livia’s first son by her first marriage, to Tiberius Claudius Nero.

Confusing? You bet…Roman family trees more nearly resemble network diagrams, or Hollywood marriages.

Their family troubles, however, are pretty relatable. Julia grew up the wealthy and privileged daughter of a powerful man: the girl had a lifestyle. Also numerous lovers: she herself claimed never to have had sex with a lover unless she was already pregnant by her husband…it avoided any nasty paternity questions. You gotta admire a woman who sees to the details. Agrippa seems to have coped with Julia, at least well enough to father three sons and two daughters, although it’s worth remembering he was off campaigning a lot of the time. Julia’s second husband, Tiberius, took it for years before Julia’s indiscretions got so bad that her own father, Caesar, divorced the couple on Tiberius’s behalf. (Tiberius was off in Rhodes, originally on a military undertaking, although his commission had expired; Caesar did not consult but at least informed him that he was divorced.) In fairness to Julia, not only did she have demands, but her father expected total devotion on Tiberius’s part to administering the state. Tiberius remained in Rhodes, ultimately returning to Rome to live as a private citizen. And to his credit, he did not carp from the side, he really did stay out of things.

Oddly, given his own rise to power, Caesar had a bad habit of not naming heirs. Like Alexander before him and Charlemagne who followed, Caesar thought no single person could take over all of his duties. Which may have been correct, but he underestimated (as did Alexander and Charlemagne) his successors’ desire to give it a go. In Caesar’s case the succession was also troubled by the fact that the princeps outlived most of his would-be heirs and assigns. Near the end of his life he found himself without many options: Tiberius was the obvious and ultimate successor, although as we have seen he had initially bowed out of the running.

Goldsworthy is admirably objective, but he makes clear that the Romans had allowed the social upheavals of the first century B.C. to derail many of the political and societal institutions that had created their success. Caesar Augustus was politically astute enough to gain power in the turmoil, but he was ultimately conservative: having attained control of the state, he did not try to remake it in his own image. Rather, he worked to re-establish the political framework of the past, or at least as much of it as was consistent with his own power. He also seems to have been genuinely religious and set about reforming the population’s relationship with the gods. Critics would point out the excesses of Caesar’s rule (there were many, he was Roman) and that it finally put paid to the Roman Republic. Our author reports it all.

He also assumes a decent amount of background in Roman history. It is outside the scope of Goldsworthy’s book, but Rome was originally a kingdom, and remained so for centuries. The last king, Tarquinius Superbus, was so awful (“With Tarquin’s ravishing strides,” from Shakespeare) that they swore off monarchy in 509 B.C. and established the Republic. Caesar Augustus was famous for turning down titles and honors pressed on him, specifically the title of “emperor.” Our author does not explain, but emperor, king, or similar titles would have been a tad too redolent of the former, still-unhappily remembered monarchy; and Caesar seems to have been smart enough to realize the fact. Plus, it was great PR: Caesar’s restraint was, as our author puts it, “modesty meant to be celebrated.”

Goldsworthy saves his editorializing for his Conclusion, and even that is mild by current standards. The conventional narrative is that Augustus started out a brash young man and then attained a statesman’s wisdom while in office. Caesar late in life was in fact extremely popular with the Romans: the combination of peace at home and national expansion, coupled with legislative and civil restraint (by Roman standards of the term) was a winner. Our author reminds us that such a pattern is rare, and that he started out as nothing less than a warlord, as have many others before and since, although few have been as successful. Born into relative obscurity, Caesar Augustus died on 19 August 14 A.D. as a man whose fame was unequalled in the Western world.

Such, children, is the role of family connections in history.