Augustus

Livia died in A.D. 29 at the considerable age of eighty-six. Tiberius outlasted her only by eight years, and expired old and lonely in his island retreat in A.D. 37. He was alleged to have spent his last years engaged in elaborate pedophiliac pursuits.

Germanicus’ son Gaius, nicknamed Little Boots, Caligula, by the troops when he was a small child, succeeded to the purple. Although intelligent, Caligula made poor decisions and almost certainly suffered from severe mental illness. Unkind gossip had it that he wanted to make his favorite horse a consul. He played practical jokes on his guards, who eventually lost their sense of humor and assassinated him, in A.D. 41.

For many years Drusus’ lame son, Claudius, continued to be ignored. He lived quietly and lazily, moving between a suburban mansion and a villa in the country. Augustus left him the insulting sum of four thousand sesterces in his will, and Tiberius declined to employ him. He divided his time between drinking and gambling with low-life acquaintances, and writing copiously. He published an autobiography, a defense of Cicero, and an authoritative history of the Etruscans.

Claudius was more or less forgotten until brought to court by the emperor Caligula, who treated him as an unpaid clown. When Caligula was assassinated, Praetorian Guardsmen found Claudius hiding behind a curtain in the palace, took him to their camp, and hailed him as emperor. A nervous Senate agreed.

To general surprise, Claudius turned out to be rather a good emperor. He annexed the remote island of Britannia to the Roman empire. Despite the fact that the long dead Livia had made his early life a misery, he generously arranged for her deification.

Claudius had bad luck with his wives. The beautiful and wayward Messalina shared the elder Julia’s taste for lively parties in the Forum where she mixed sex with politics. Her cuckolded husband reluctantly put her to death.

Messalina was followed by Germanicus’ strong-minded daughter Agrippina, who persuaded Claudius to adopt her son Nero, and in A.D. 54 killed the gourmand emperor with a dish of delicious but poisoned (or perhaps poisonous) mushrooms.

In A.D. 15, Germanicus led an army across the Rhine and visited the battle sites where Varus lost his legions and his life. Tacitus gave an unforgettable description of the eerie scene:

On the open ground were whitening bones, scattered where men had fled, heaped up where they had stood and fought back. Fragments of spears and of horses’ limbs lay there—also human heads, fastened to tree-trunks. In groves nearby were the outlandish altars at which the Germans had massacred the Roman colonels and senior company-commanders.

The Romans never again attempted to expand their territory beyond the Rhine, and excitable historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have argued that we owe to the Variana clades the millennia-long division of Europe into two parts—one touched by Rome, the other not: Britain and the Romance countries, and the Teutonic peoples of central and northern Europe. If Augustus had had his way and brought the frontier of his empire to the Elbe, there would have been “no Charlemagne, no Louis XIV, no Napoleon, no Kaiser Wilhelm II, and no Hitler.”

This binary approach to European history oversimplifies a complicated story. The distance between the Rhine and the Elbe is not so great as to have brought about such dizzying consequences. Also, we must not forget that Roman culture spread its influence far beyond the imperial lands themselves. Rome’s true inheritor, the Roman Catholic Church, was able to create a unified Europe that stretched from the Atlantic to the Urals, the culture of Christendom.

That said, the massacre at Kalkriese did mark a turning point in the history of Rome. With a few exceptions, such as the ephemeral conquests of the emperor Trajan in the second century A.D., the empire had more or less reached its natural extent by the death of Augustus. Rome’s military and administrative capacity did not allow it to govern a larger territory.

There was much discussion at Rome about the late Augustus’ virtues and vices. It was elegantly summarized by Tacitus: