Augustus_ The Life of Rome's First Emperor - Anthony Everitt [162]
Cripple my hand,
my foot and my hip;
shake out my loose teeth.
So long as I’m alive,
everything’s all right.
Maecenas feared death, and Horace reassured him with a touching ode, in which he promised not to outlive his patron
The same day shall heap earth
over us both. I take the soldier’s oath:
you lead, and we shall go together, both
ready to tread the road that ends
all roads, inseparable friends.
It was many years since Maecenas had talent-spotted Horace and introduced him to Augustus. The princeps had grown very fond of the tubby little poet. He used to call him “my purest of pricks” (purissimum penem) and “little charmer” (homuncionem lepidissimum). They shared a certain dry and cool realism about life.
Once Augustus asked Horace to work for him as a secretary to help him draft his correspondence. This was the last sort of job the poet would enjoy, and he declined. The princeps showed no resentment. He wrote to him good-humoredly: “Even if you were so arrogant as to spurn my friendship, I decline to return your scorn!”
Augustus greatly admired Horace’s poetry and was always trying to persuade him to write on political or public themes. The “Secular Hymn” and the odes about Tiberius and Drusus were the result. When Augustus was piqued at finding that he made no appearance in Horace’s satires and epistles, many of which took the form of conversations with friends, he protested: “I have to say I am most displeased with you, that in your copious writings of this sort you ‘converse’ with other people and not with me. Are you afraid that posterity will condemn you if you appear to have been my friend?”
When Horace’s health was in decline, Augustus wrote again: “Do as you please in my house, as if you were living with me, for this is how I always wanted our relationship, if only your health permitted it.”
In September of 8 B.C., Maecenas died. Two months later Horace fulfilled his promise, only a little late, and followed him. He was buried close to his friend’s tomb.
The deaths of Agrippa and Drusus within four years of each other transformed Roman politics. The ages of the key players throw light on the realities of the situation. The princeps was fifty-four years old (a year younger than Julius Caesar had been when he died). Tiberius was thirty-three and in his prime. The young hopeful gentlemen, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, were eleven and eight respectively; it would be a good ten years before they were ready to play a full part in public life, by which time Augustus would be in his mid-sixties, a ripe old age for the period.
Two things must have been clear to Augustus. If his dynastic plans were to succeed, then, by hook or by crook, he needed to survive for another decade, for if he did not Tiberius would have to succeed him, just as Agrippa would have done rather than Marcellus in far-off 23 B.C. And Tiberius was the only senior and experienced adult on hand to help Augustus run the empire. His stepson was essential, for now.
Augustus was an autocrat who valued and acted on advice, but the persons on whom he depended emotionally and professionally were falling away. Agrippa; Octavia, who had died in 11 B.C.; Drusus; Maecenas—all gone. The astute Livia was on hand, of course, and the taciturn Tiberius, more experienced on the battlefield than at court. But from now on one senses a growing rigidity of mind in the princeps.
XXII
A FAMILY AT WAR
7 B.C.–A.D. 9
* * *
In 7 B.C., Augustus’ powers were renewed, this time for ten years. Tiberius held his second consulship, but, despite the fact that he was tacitly expected to assume Agrippa’s role as deputy to the princeps, he received no official acknowledgment that he had become collega imperii, or sharer of power.
He had plenty of work to do, taking over Drusus’ command and campaigning for two years on the German frontier. (Meanwhile Augustus went