Augustus

“ For Augustus, who detested above all things going to bed with little boys, was ever more knave than fool, and the trapper who was wily enough to ensnare him had achieved something notable. Augustus, when he realised that his fate was sealed, and his night's lodging settled, wisely made the best of things, and listened, with a languorous air of complete comprehension, to the incoherent babble concerning pigs and heroes, moles and bonfires, which served Harold for a self-sung lullaby. Yet it may be doubted whether Augustus was one of those rare fellows who thoroughly understood. ”

“ He grew some more and he fell in love, And he chose himself a bride; But the morning of their wedding day all her friends took her aside, And said, My dear! Have you seen Augustus? He does look queer, But then you can trust us, Then the blushing bride replied with cheeks aglow, "Well I don't know!" (SPOKEN.) But you are quite right dears. There's something rather odd about Augustus! It almost sets one thinking, Augustus has been Oh! No! He is so nice, he is so kind! But all the same well, never mind, There's something rather odd about Augustus. ”

“ Such was Augustus when an old man, or when growing old: in his youth he was hasty and passionate, and did many things upon which he looked back with regret. No one will venture to compare the rule of the blest Augustus to the mildness of your own, even if your youth be compared with his more than ripe old age: he was gentle and placable, but it was after he had dyed the sea at Actium with Roman blood; after he had wrecked both the enemy's fleet and his own at Sicily; after the holocaust of Perusia and the proscriptions. But I do not call it clemency to be wearied of cruelty ”

“ Only the fire of love for her and the serenity of infinite peace.
"Dear lord," she said, "when the sceptre of Augustus is in thine hands thou canst wield it at thy pleasure. I know not the way of which thou speakest; the mountain of Calvary is unknown to me and thou speakest of things that are strange to mine ear.... But the gods have placed it within my power to make thee great above all men, the ruler of the mightiest Empire in the world, and on my knees do I thank them that they have shown me the way whereby I can guide thy footsteps even to the throne of Augustus." ”

“ THE NEW RULER Few persons have set their stamp more indelibly on the pages of history than Octavian, whom we may now call by his more familiar name Augustus ("Majestic") . Augustus was no military genius to dazzle the world with his achievements. He was a cool and passionless statesman who took advantage of a memorable opportunity to remake the Roman state, and who succeeded in the attempt. Absolute power, which destroys weaker men, with Augustus brought out the nobler elements of character. From the successful leader of a party he became the wise and impartial ruler of an empire. ”

“ Yet at her heart she knew that if Augustus had been a different man, she would not now be planning her career but the furnishing of her house, and she was honest enough to realize that one occupation would have been as absorbing as the other. Augustus! what a white rabbit of a man, and so good, so uncarnal, so considerate of her purity. Not many men like that ”

“ It was the boast of Augustus—it formed part of the glare in which the perfidies of his earlier years were lost,—that he found Rome of brick, and left it of marble; a praise not unworthy a great prince, and to which the present reign also has its claims. But how much nobler will be the sovereign's boast when he shall have it to say, that he found law dear, and left it cheap ”

“ Horace exactly represents this feeling when he addresses Augustus in his absence in Gaul: “Oh scion of the gracious gods, oh best guardian of the race of Romulus ... return! Your country calls for you with vows and prayer ... for when you are here the ox plods up and down the fields in safety; Ceres and bounteous blessing cheer our farms; our sailors speed o’er seas that know no fear of pirates; credit is unimpaired; no foul adulteries stain the home; punishment follows hard on crime.... Who fears Parthian, Scythian, German, or Spaniard with Cæsar safe? ”

“ Augustus resembled him not at all. He was a colorless monarch; an emperor in everything but dignity, a prince in everything but grace; a tactician, not a soldier; a superstitious braggart, afraid of nothing but danger; seducing women to learn their husband's secrets ”

“ He spared no effort, for he well realised that human omnipotence, the mastery of mankind and the world, lay in that reunion of sovereignty, in being both king and priest, emperor and pope. All the sap of a mighty race, all the victories achieved, and all the favours of fortune yet to be garnered, blossomed forth in Augustus, in a unique splendour which was never again to shed such brilliant radiance. ”

“ Augustus has been much less attractive to biographers than Iulius [1] ; perhaps because the soldier is more interesting than the statesman ; perhaps because the note of genius conspicuous in the Uncle was wanting in the Nephew. Yet Augustus was the most successful ruler known to us. He found his world, as it seemed, on the verge of complete collapse. ”

“ From the point of view of the world’s history, then, Augustus appears as a far greater figure than Napoleon III. Antiquity spoke, we speak yet to-day, of the Age of Augustus with reason, and this is an honour that weighs more than the name of Great; a man gives his name to his time only when he has really stamped that time with his image, opening up new roads, not only to his own nation but to the history of his time. ”

“ This, the highest and mightiest of all ambitions, one, too, that is perfectly logical, was attained by Augustus, emperor and pontiff, master of all the known world; and it is the glorious figure of Augustus, ever rising anew from among the ruins of ancient Rome, which has always haunted the popes; it is his blood which has pulsated in their veins.
But power had become divided into two parts amidst the crumbling of the Roman empire ”

“ AUGUSTUS and the Augustan Age. The name of Augustus was the title of honour given by the Romans to the emperor Caius Julius Cassar Octavianus, or, as he was originally designated, Caius Octavius. This title was intended to be hereditary in his family, but all the succeeding Caesars or emperors of Rome continued to adopt it, long after they had ceased to be connected with the first Augustus by blood. The era of Augustus formed an illustrious epoch in Roman history, and was distinguished for its splendid attainments in arts and arms, and more especially in literature. ”

“ The great Emperor Augustus, who, to the common herd seemed some strange omnipotent in his remote and sumptuous paradise of Rome, had issued a decree that all the world of his subjects should be enrolled, and every man, woman, and child must enroll himself in his own city. And to the little town of Bethlehem all these travelers were wending their way, to the place of their nativity, in obedience to the great Caesar's command. ”

“ Augustus threw all business aside and hastened to his house, but arrived too late. Never had ruler a more faithful or abler friend and servant. At every crisis of his life Agrippa had been by his side, and wherever danger was most threatening he had taken the post of difficulty and honour. ”

“ And lastly such opposition as still existed was no longer of irreconcilables who had known “liberty”; a new generation had grown up which on the whole acquiesced in the peace and security of a benevolent despotism. It was a new era, and Augustus became a new man. Full of honours and possessed with irresistible powers, feeling the responsibility heavily, and often in vain desiring rest, he had no farther personal object to gain beyond the credit of having served his country and saved the Empire. ”

“ We may also note that what Paris is to the Parisians, Rome is to Ovid. Augustus and his ministers or friends had made it the home of splendour and luxury. The poet fondly dwells on all its beauties, pleasures, and conveniences, and, like a true Parisian, can hardly conceive of life away from it, its games, its theatres, the sports on the Campus, the lounge in the forum, or the wit and poetry heard at the tables of the great. ”

“ He was come, he said, a second Augustus ; like Augustus he was eighteen years of age (an obvious lie, and they knew it, but an Emperor of fourteen did not sound well) ; like Augustus his reign started with a victory which revenged the murder of his father, and the success, with which both he and Augustus had met, was a good omen for the people, who might expect great things from a prince who proposed to unite the wisdom of Augustus with that of the philosopher Marcus Aurelius, and to rule after these truly admirable examples. ”

“ The reign of Augustus lasted forty-four years, from 31 B.C. to A.D. 14. It embraced the most splendid period of the annals of Rome. Under the patronage of the emperor, and that of his favorite minister Mæcenas, poets and writers flourished and made this the "golden age" of Latin literature. During this reign Virgil composed his immortal epic of the Æneid, and Horace his famous odes; while Livy wrote his inimitable history, and Ovid his Metamorphoses. Many who lamented the fall of the republic sought solace in the pursuit of letters ”

“ It has often happened to me to find, a propos of the volumes written on Augustus, that my contradiction of tradition creates a kind of instinctive diffidence. Many say: "Yes, this book is interesting; but is it possible that for twenty centuries everybody has been mistaken?--that it was necessary to wait till 1908 to understand what occurred in the year 8?" But those twenty centuries reduce themselves, as far as regards the possibility of understanding Augustus, to little more than a hundred years. ”

“ There is nothing to prove that Augustus regarded him otherwise than affectionately. If he turned out to be the monster represented by his enemies, Augustus no doubt made a grave mistake. It is a ridiculous suggestion that he deliberately designated him his successor in order that people might regret himself. Such recondite [170] snares for posthumous fame are more like the cunning of a madman than the motives influencing a reasonable being. ”

“ If they were not very brilliant nor very good, they were probably—with defects of temper and shortcomings in high resolve—pretty much like the best of those we know in life. Augustus, with a certain small vanity that tormented him into thinking that he had a lesson to read to the world, and that he was a much finer creature than he seemed or looked, was really a generously minded and warm-hearted fellow, who loved his neighbor—meaning his brother or his sister—a great deal better than himself. ”

“ In the Augustan age of Rome rose and flourished, in rapid succession, a large proportion of those great writers to whose works we have given the name of classics. This brilliant summer-time of literature was owing to various causes—to the increase of cultivation and refinement, to the leisure and quiet which followed after long years of war and civil commotion; but in part also it was owing to the character of the Roman emperor himself. Both Augustus and his intimate friend and counsellor Mæcenas were the professed patrons of letters and of the fine arts. ”

“ This sort of fool’s flattery has been very acceptable, it may be observed, to all despotic princes, from Augustus down to the Czar Nicholas. The most amusing of Roman historians tells us that Augustus was always well pleased with those persons who, in addressing him, looked upon the ground, as though there were a divine splendour in his eyes, too dazzling for them to gaze upon. ”

“ Placing a chair I gave him a mouthful of whisky by way of a stimulant. Augustus was the black body-servant who had come with us from the Hermitage. I knew what the summoning of Augustus argued, yet was handless to interfere. The General when stricken—as he had been many times—in the fashion I have named, was used to open a vein, and so bleed himself comfortably till he felt relief. More than once I had denounced such backwoods surgery as not only dangerous but revolting, and wanting foundations of common sense. ”

“ Situation of Augustus.Every barrier of the Roman constitution had been levelled by the vast ambition of the dictator; every fence had been extirpated by the cruel hand of the triumvir. After the victory of Actium, the fate of the Roman world depended on the will of Octavianus, surnamed Caesar, by his uncle's adoption, and afterwards Augustus, by the flattery of the senate. The conqueror was at the head of forty-four veteran legions [1] , conscious of their own strength, and of the weakness of the constitution ; habituated, during twenty years' civil war, to every act of blood and violence ”

“ When a great piece of work has been done in the world it is not difficult to find fault with it. A man seldom if ever sees the bearing and ultimate results of his own actions, or carries out all that he intended to do. Even when he seems to have done so, time reveals faults, miscalculations, failures. At an age when among us a boy is just leaving school, Augustus found himself the heir of a great policy and a great name amidst the ruins of a constitution and the disjecta membra of a great Empire. ”

“ Though Augustus returned to Rome amidst loud congratulations, the Western part of the Empire was not yet at peace, and in fact there were many threatening signs of future trouble. Agrippa, indeed, in the very year of the Emperor’s return from the East, crushed the rebellious Cantabri and Astures, not without severe fighting; but though Augustus was able now to remain at home, passing laws, holding the secular games, and strengthening his family by adopting Agrippa’s children, the Empire was not at peace, the Ianus Quirinus still stood open. ”