Augustus

As for the sad fate of Ovid, learned men have imagined that the poet accidentally saw Livia having a bath, or caught the princeps in an act of pedophilia, or came upon Julia and Postumus engaging in incestuous sex. The poet’s own statements point to a political blunder. If he overheard or witnessed some act or conversation preparatory to a coup, the need for official secrecy is perfectly understandable. His reputation for celebrating sexual indecency provided a convincing cover story that distracted from Julia’s real offense.

Ovid may have hinted at what this was. When he wrote what he did not do, he may have been pointing to what others did.

I never sought to procure universal ruin by threatening

Caesar’s head, the head of the world;

I said nothing, my tongue never shaped words of violence,

no seditious impieties escaped me in my cups.

Careless talk at a drunken party is what seems to have done for Julia and implicated her poetical fellow guest in her ruin. Ovid with foolish tact “forgot” what he had heard or pretended not to have heard it. But presumably someone else present quietly informed the princeps of the conversation and who else had been within earshot.

It was not Augustus’ fault that fate kept unpicking his arrangements for the succession, but his ruthless rearrangement of the lives of his close relatives led to one after another refusing to serve and perhaps even conspiring against him—Agrippa perhaps, Tiberius, Gaius, the two Julias, Agrippa Postumus. The consequence was the almost complete destruction of the divine family as an effective, mutually loyal group. The only survivors were the patient wife and her suspicious son.

Over the years, the princeps had allowed his household to be corrupted into a court where a family’s ordinary loves and tiffs gradually mutated into political struggle. Maybe this was an inevitable development, but it was Augustus who set the inhumane tone. His insensitivity to the feelings of others (one thinks of Tiberius’ thwarted love for Vipsania), his treatment of his relatives as pawns, created a deadly environment. It would not be surprising if, in time, blood relations came to bloody conclusions.

XXIV

THE BITTER END

A.D. 4–14

Competent generals had asserted Roman dominion. One of them marched an army north from the Danube up to the river Elbe, on the far side of which he erected an altar dedicated to Augustus as a symbol of imperial power; he took care, however, to winter his troops on the Rhine. But while the lands between the Rhine and the Elbe were increasingly dependent on Rome, what the Romans called Germania was by no means entirely pacified.

Tiberius had last commanded an army in 8 B.C., the year after Drusus’ death. In A.D. 4, when he was forty-six, he picked up where the two young brothers had left off all those years ago. His aim was to complete the imperial strategy. A powerful and hostile tribe, the Marcomanni, occupied land near the heads of the Elbe and the Danube (in modern Bohemia). It was essential to defeat them and take control of their territory. Then at last Rome would have a secure frontier running without interruption from the North Sea to the Black Sea. A synchronized pincer movement was devised for the culminating campaign of A.D. 6. The army of the Rhine was to advance from the river Main to Nuremberg and the army of Illyricum would move north under Tiberius’ personal command.

Brilliantly conceived and brilliantly executed, the plan saw the two armies within a few days of converging on the Marcomanni, when news came of a great revolt in Dalmatia and Pannonia. Tiberius immediately came to terms with the king of the Marcomanni and rushed off to Pannonia, where he was to spend the next three years fighting the rebels.

He was replaced in Germania by his fellow consul of 13 B.C., a competent but lackluster administrator named Publius Quinctilius Varus. The new proconsul believed that Tiberius’ victories had silenced all opposition; he saw his task as the transformation of a defeated territory into a Roman province.

Back at Rome, the elderly princeps went on governing. In A.D. 4, he conducted a census, to register citizens and their property. The purpose was to revise taxation indebtedness, doubtless upward. However, in light of the uneasy public mood he applied the findings of the census only to those who owned property in Italy worth more than 200,000 sesterces.