Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [11]
Apparently, Gaius was lucky to survive this procedure, for an astrologer had given him a bad prognosis and he narrowly escaped infanticide. If Gaius had been rejected, he would have been abandoned in the open air and left to die; this was a fate to which illegitimate children and girls were especially liable, as were (one may surmise) sickly or disabled babies. Rejected infants were left on dunghills, or near cisterns. They were often picked up there by slave traders (although the family might reclaim the child later, if it so wished) or, more rarely, rescued by a kindly passerby. Otherwise, they would starve, unless eaten by stray dogs.
Rome, with about a million inhabitants, was an unhygienic, noisy, crowded megalopolis, no place for rearing a child, and there is evidence that Gaius spent much of his infancy at his grandfather’s country house near Velitrae. More than a century later, Suetonius reported that the house still existed and was open to the public: “a small room, not unlike a butler’s pantry, is still shown and described as [his] nursery.”
Helped by the link, through Atia, to Julius Caesar, Octavius’ political career was advancing rapidly. After serving as quaestor, he could move up to the next rung, as one of the four aediles. The aedileship being optional, it is not known whether Octavius held this office, but he could probably have afforded it.
At the age of thirty-nine, Octavius was eligible to run for praetor. According to Velleius Paterculus, he was regarded as “a dignified person, of upright and blameless life, and [was] extremely rich.” In the praetorian election for 61 B.C., he came in first even though he was running against a number of aristocratic competitors.
The two-year-old Gaius would have seen little of his father, who spent a year in Rome discharging his judicial duties as praetor. Then, as was usual for senior government officials after their period of office, at the end of 61 B.C. Octavius went overseas for a twelve-month stint as governor, or propraetor, of the province of Macedonia.
Octavius was due to sail from Brundisium, a major port on the heel of Italy, but before he did so, the Senate asked him to make a detour to the town of Thurii on the toe and disperse a group of outlawed slaves.
More than ten years previously, these men had joined the great slave revolt of Spartacus, following him during the years when he won one victory after another over incompetently led Roman legions. They managed to avoid the terrible penalty exacted on the survivors of Spartacus’ final defeat: thousands were crucified along the length of the road from Rome to Capua, where the rebellion had started at a school for slave gladiators.
Somehow the escapees managed to keep going as a group, reemerging briefly to join the forces of Lucius Sergius Catilina. In the year of Gaius’ birth, this dissident aristocrat had plotted the violent overthrow of the Republic and its replacement by a regime of radicals which he would lead. The alert consul, Marcus Tullius Cicero, was a new man like Octavius; a fine public speaker and an able and honest administrator, he outwitted the conspirator and finessed him into a botched military insurrection.
The Romans depended on, but also feared, the hundreds of thousands of slaves who in large part ran their economy, providing labor for agricultural estates and manufacturing businesses. Slaves could also be found in every reasonably well-off home, cooking, cleaning, acting as secretaries and managers. If they were young and good-looking, slaves of either sex could well find themselves providing sexual services.
A slave was something one could own, like a horse or a table. In the Roman view, he or she was “a talking instrument.” Slaves could not marry, although they could make and save money and could receive legacies. If a master was murdered by a slave, all the slaves in his ownership were killed.