Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [138]
About the same age as the princeps, Livy was born in Patavium (today’s Padua) in Cisalpine Gaul. He made no effort to follow a public career, instead devoting his long life to the writing of a monumental history of Rome, from the foundation to 9 B.C. He was one of Rome’s first professional historians, for until then history had usually been a pastime for retired politicians.
Livy’s worldview was moral and romantic, and most thinking people of his age shared it. In the preface to his magnum opus, he stated that writing history was a way of escaping the troubles of the modern world: “Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every kind of sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death both individual and collective.”
The trouble was seen to have begun in the second century B.C., when, somewhat absentmindedly, the Senate acquired its empire in the east—first Greece and Macedonia, then Asia Minor and Syria. Leading Romans began to copy the extravagant lifestyle of Asiatic Greeks. The culminating metaphor for Roman decadence was the career of Mark Antony and his sexual subversion by Cleopatra.
This perceived moral decline was accompanied by political collapse at the hands of a succession of selfish dynasts. The greatest of them, Julius Caesar, broke the Republic, which for centuries had embodied in constitutional form the traditional Roman virtues, now lost. Although himself a dynast, Pompey the Great, who opposed Caesar in the civil war, gave his life for the republican cause, and came to be a symbol of it.
According to Tacitus, Livy “praised Pompey so warmly that Augustus [whom he knew personally] called him ‘the Pompeian.’” The historian never called Brutus and Cassius bandits and parricides, their “fashionable designations today.”
Livy was not alone in his overt republican sympathies. In the Aeneid, Augustus’ poet laureate dared to rehabilitate that most die-hard of republicans, the pigheaded purist Marcus Porcius Cato, who led the optimates against Julius Caesar and died by his own hand after his defeat in Africa.
The victor of Actium was not the only great Roman to be depicted on the shield of Aeneas. In a vision of the underworld various historical figures are shown waiting for their lives to begin. Virgil points to where “the righteous are set apart, with Cato as their lawgiver.” Elsewhere, the poet delivers Julius Caesar a veiled rebuke: “Turn not your country’s hand against your country’s heart!”
The princeps did not demur from this kind of talk. He transferred the statue of Pompey the Great from the hall where Caesar had been assassinated to a much more prominent position on an arch facing the grand door of Pompey’s Theater. He remarked of Cato that “to seek to keep the constitution unchanged argues a good citizen and a good man.”
Augustus knew and liked Virgil. Indeed, in 19 B.C., when returning to Rome after his Parthian success, the princeps met him in Greece shortly before the poet died at the age of fifty-two. Virgil was dissatisfied with his masterpiece, which he had finished but not corrected, and when his health began to fail he asked his friend the poet Lucius Varius Rufus to burn it in the event of his death. Varius refused to obey his orders and, acting under the authority of Augustus, published the epic.
The reason for Augustus’ tolerance of these rehabilitations, and his cultivation of revisionists such as Livy and Virgil, was simple. The ideology of the regime was to restore the Republic. This could be advocated, in the first instance, by praising the ideal commonwealth of Rome’s early centuries, but also, it necessarily followed, by championing its more recent standard-bearers, the men whom Julius Caesar had destroyed. It followed that Augustus was obliged to reject his revolutionary past (and by implication, his adoptive father) and show that he was a true republican.
To this end, freedom of speech