Augustus

This took place in A.D. 7, and the island was low-lying Planasia, south of Elba (today’s Pianosa; until recently, it housed an Italian army prison). It had been owned in the first century B.C. by a leading Roman family, and on it stood a villa, some baths, and a tiny open-air theater; it may have been another of Augustus’ luxury bolt-holes like Pandateria, and exile there will not have been too incommodious.

In the following year, a mysterious scandal engulfed the younger Julia. She was banished to the tiny limestone island of Trimerus, off the Apulian coast (today’s San Nicola in the Tremiti Islands). With a surface area of less than thirty-five acres, this was an isolated and confined spot, far from Rome. No grand villa has been discovered. Julia’s living costs were paid by Livia.

The princeps’ granddaughter’s offense, like that of the elder Julia, was sexual promiscuity. The charge is likely to have had a basis in fact, for she gave birth to a child on the island, whom Augustus refused to acknowledge or have reared. Her lover was Decius Junius Silanus; Augustus revoked his amicitia and the young nobleman left Rome.

These misdemeanors may have concealed a more serious matter. The younger Julia’s husband was Lucius Aemilius Paullus. It appears that he was accused of plotting against the life of the princeps and was executed. If his wife was accused of adultery, he must have been alive at the time of her banishment (one late commentator says she was once recalled, only to be exiled again) and his conspiracy probably took place in A.D. 8; so the banishment and the conspiracy may have been linked.

Whatever the politics of his troubles, Augustus’ emotions were fully engaged. In future years, when anyone mentioned Agrippa or the two Julias in conversation, he would sigh deeply and sometimes quote a line from the Iliad:

Ah, never to have married, and childless to have died!

He referred to Agrippa and the Julias as “my three boils” and “my three running sores.”

In A.D. 9, Augustus exiled Ovid to the semibarbarous outpost of Tomis (modern Constanta) on the Black Sea. His offense was made a state secret, although the poet dropped numerous hints in two sequences of poems, Tristia (“Sad Things”) and Epistulae ex Ponto (“Letters from Pontus”), with which he bombarded his friends in Rome, begging for forgiveness and describing the miseries of life in distant Thrace.

The mystery has exercised and amused scholars for centuries. In summary, Ovid committed an error—a mistake—not a crime; he took no action himself, but witnessed others doing something that he should have reported to Augustus but did not. He caused the princeps deep pain. Ovid compares himself to the guiltless huntsman who inadvertently stumbled on the goddess Diana bathing in a spring; she turned him into a stag and set his dogs on him.

Why did I see what I saw? Why render my eyes guilty?

Why unwittingly take cognizance of a crime?

Actaeon never intended to see Diana naked,

but still was torn to bits by his own hounds.

His poem Ars Amatoria, especially the didactic pose he struck as a “tutor in love-making,” was not the cause of his dismissal, but it did not help his case.

It is hard to make sense of this sequence of enigmatic events, but two factors may throw light on them. First, the years A.D. 6 and 7 were extremely testing for the regime. Military campaigns were under way abroad, but as yet victories had not been won. In Rome there was a severe famine, and emergency security measures had to be taken. Gladiators were banned, and to prevent the dumping of hungry mouths any slaves who were up for sale were banished to a hundred miles from the city.

Augustus and senior officials dismissed most of their staff, and senators were encouraged to leave Rome. Grain and bread were rationed, except for the poorest section of the population, whose grain dole was doubled. There was trouble, too, abroad. Pirates harassed shipping in some parts of the Mediterranean, and rebellions occurred in a number of provinces. King Juba of Mauretania required help from a Roman army to put down a serious revolt in northern Africa. Worse followed, for a great fire destroyed much of the city.

In Rome, the masses became restive and people talked openly of revolution. Dissident posters were distributed at night. An investigation was launched, only adding to the general commotion and apparently not coming to any conclusion. Do we have here telltale signs of the Julian faction at work, currying favor with the people as the elder Julia may have done when she garlanded the statue of Marsyas in the Forum?