Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [139]
To revisit the heroic past was not just a retrieval, but a rebirth. Virgil drew an analogy between the original founding of Rome and its refoundation by Augustus, between his sober and devout Trojan hero, Aeneas, and the sober and devout princeps.
Rome’s destiny, Virgil wrote, was to “rule an Italy fertile in leadership / And loud with war…and bring the whole world under a system of law.” History culminates in the inaugurator of new Saturnica regna, the reign of Jupiter’s father, Saturn, when men lived in virtuous simplicity:
And here, here is the man, the promised one you know of—
Caesar Augustus, son of a god, destined to rule
Where Saturn ruled of old in Latium,
and there
Bring back the age of gold.
The point was that Romans would not merit their imperial role unless they also tackled excessive consumption, sexual immorality, and the general failure of moral fiber. Once again the princeps recruited his constellation of great poets to assist him. Horace mostly celebrates a happily amoral sensuality outside the bonds of marriage, but in his Odes, the first three books of which were published in 23 B.C., he devoted a group of poems to the untypical theme of moral renaissance. He wrote of the “large inconvenience of wealth” and compared the citizens of Rome, to their disadvantage, with the barbarous Scythians, unexpectedly cast as noble savages.
Family pride
Is their rich dower, chastity shy to glance aside,
Faith in the marriage tie;
Sin is abhorred; the price of scandal is to die.
This censoriousness chimed with Augustus’ thinking. For some years during the twenties B.C. he meditated on social legislation, designed to purify morals and encourage the family. Among respectable opinion, there was a consensus about the failings of Rome’s ruling class: divorce was easy; young people were reluctant to marry; the birthrate appeared to be falling; sexual license was widespread; some rich men avoided a public career.
By contrast, traditional standards of behavior in provincial society in Italy were still upheld and the patterns of family life were little changed. This was the world in which Augustus had spent his childhood; his memories of Velitrae may have given a personal edge to his desire to restore Roman values.
Legislation concerning the family would be a distinct and probably unpopular innovation, and the princeps took his time before laying any proposals before the Senate. He may have sought to do so in or around 29 B.C., but stayed his hand. Now, probably in 18 B.C., he brought forward a body of laws designed to encourage marriage and procreation. His aim was not only to foster traditional values, but also to create new generations of imperial soldiers and administrators.
Augustus drew an explicit link with a more austere and fecund past when he read out to the Senate the entire text of an old speech on the need for larger families, made by a censor, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus, in the middle of the second century B.C. The dry and unsentimental Metellus said:
If we could get on without a wife, Romans, we would all avoid that annoyance; but since nature has ordained that we can neither live very comfortably with them nor at all without them, we must take thought for our lasting well-being rather than for the pleasure of the moment.
The princeps presented the so-called Julian laws (leges Juliae, after his clan name) in person to an assembly of the people. For the first time, the lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis transformed a woman’s adultery from a private offense into a public crime. Since time immemorial, a rough-and-ready custom allowed a husband (in theory, at least) to kill his wife if taken in adultery, either on his own account or upon the judgment of