BROWNING, “Imperante Augusto”—
I
THE town of Apollonia on the Illyrian shore, an old colony of Corinth, was in the spring of the year 44 B.C. the centre of a varied life. It was a busy port, for it was one of the debouchments on the Adriatic of the great Via Egnatia, the highroad from Rome to the East; it was a military station; and for some years its bland air and its position as a half-way house between East and West had drawn to it scholars whose fame brought them many pupils. As seaport, garrison and university town, it was a pleasant dwelling-place for youth.
Among those who walked its streets in the mild March weather there was one on whom many turned to look a second time, for he was the great-nephew of him who was now master of the world. But he was a young man who on his own account would anywhere have attracted notice. His name was Gaius Octavius Thurinus,1 and he had come to Apollonia in the previous autumn to complete an education which had been interrupted by the wars in Spain. He was now half-way through his nineteenth year, having been born on the 23rd of September, 63, in the consulship of Cicero. In build he was small and slight, not quite five feet seven, but he was well-proportioned, and his short stature did not catch the eye. His features were so delicately modelled as to be almost girlish, for the Julian strain had a notable fineness, but the impression left on the spectator was not one of effeminacy. The firm mouth and the high-bridged nose forbade that, but above all the steady, luminous grey eyes. Wonderful eyes they were, so penetrating, so intense in their regard, that those on whom he bent them had to avert their gaze.1 His complexion was pale, for he had always been a delicate boy, but now and then he would flush delightfully. His voice was quiet and pleasant, and his whole air was of calm and self-control, with just a hint of suffering. For his years he seemed preposterously mature, and he had few youthful irregularities; he drank little wine, and ate no more than a bird, having a miserable digestion. But, though nothing of a boon companion, there was a grace about him which charmed, and a hint of latent power which impressed.
He looked the scholar which he had been since his childhood. He had declaimed orations when scarcely out of his cradle, and during his teens he had been a serious student of what went in Rome by the name of philosophy. Like all the Roman youth he had given much time to rhetoric, the science which taught literary style and the arts of persuasion; but he had not been one of the younger set that Cicero despised, whose craze was for extravagant tropes and novel idioms. Like his great-uncle he had a dry taste in letters, preferring the Attic to the Corinthian manner. This same austerity appeared in his philosophical interests. An indifferent Greek scholar, he was not a devotee of any Hellenic master, but after the Roman fashion was something of a free-lance and an eclectic. Like his great-uncle again, he had fallen under the spell of Posidonius,1 a Stoic who borrowed from many schools, and who tried to marry the thought of Greece and the East with Roman tradition, seeking what might be a universal creed for a universal empire. Unlike many of his young contemporaries, Octavius had no contempt for ancient Roman ways or any undue love of the exotic.
This discreet young man had brought with him a tutor, one Apollodorus, an ancient savant from Pergamum, whose chief task was to improve his halting Greek. But his friends were not limited to his fellow-students at the Academy. Six legions were quartered in Illyria and Macedonia, and, as befitted one who had been appointed to Julius’s staff, he lived a good deal in military society. He was popular among the officers, for he could tell them at first hand of the recent Spanish campaign, and he had the glamour of his kinship and friendship with the chief soldier of the age. Also there was about him an air of high destiny, and the omens which had accompanied his birth and childhood were common talk in the mess-rooms. Once at Apollonia he had visited the astrologer Theogenes, who had been so overwhelmed by the splendour of his horoscope that he had flung himself in worship at his feet. The boy had in him a vein of superstition, and the incident had increased his self-confidence, as it had greatly enlarged his popular prestige.2
Besides his tutor Apollodorus, and another savant, one Athenodorus of Tarsus, he had several intimates of his own age. One was Salvidienus Rufus, whose friendship was destined to have a tragic end. Closer to him was Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, a man a few years his senior, who claimed to be sprung from the old royal house of Etruria. Maecenas was a striking figure, with hollow eyes, and strong, harsh features that lacked the Roman modelling. His manner, in spite of his rugged appearance, was oddly effeminate; sometimes his dress was fantastic, and his chief interest appeared to be in letters and connoisseurship. But Octavius valued his advice, given always with complete candour, and he had no doubt about his affection. The ambition of Maecenas seemed to be never for himself but only for his friends.
Closest of all was his exact coeval, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. Of no particular family, Roman or Etruscan, Agrippa had been already the comrade of Octavius in his brief campaign, and had won a love and confidence which were to remain unshaken for thirty years.1 He was a most impressive young man, with his straight eyebrows, his deeply-sunk penetrating eyes, his massive jaw, and his mouth as delicately modelled as that of Julius himself.2 He had all the sagacity of Maecenas, but already it was clear that he was more than a counsellor and diplomatist, and in a crisis might be a leader of men. The officers in the mess-rooms respected his military judgment, and found in him a spirit after their own hearts, and his devotion to Octavius exalted the latter in their esteem. He was not the great-nephew of the world’s master, but he was himself the stuff of which masters of the world were made. This stripling of eighteen was one of the most competent of living men, but all his powers were laid on the altar of friendship. He is the supreme example in history of a man of the first order whom loyalty constrained to take the second place.
Octavius had been born in Rome, in a house at the east end of the Palatine, but his family was of the provinces. His grandfather, a member of the plebeian Octavian clan, had been a banker in the Volscian town of Velitrae, a profession which in Roman eyes did not dignify those who followed it. His father, however, had raised the family into the official nobility, for he had served the state as quaestor, plebeian aedile, and praetor, and had governed Macedonia with honesty and competence, fighting several successful little campaigns against the hill tribes.3 More, he had allied himself by marriage with one of the proudest of the patrician houses, the Julian, for his wife Atia was the daughter of a Velitran bourgeois, M. Atius Balbus, and Julia, the sister of Gaius Julius Caesar. He might have been consul, had he not died in 58 at his villa at Nola, when his son was not yet five years old. The boy was brought up in the country, mainly at Velitrae, but also at the other country houses of his well-to-do family. Presently Atia married again, the consular L. Marius Philippus, a son of the famous orator of that name, and a close friend of Cicero. But this association with the larger life of Rome was not allowed to interfere with the strictness of Octavius’s upbringing. He was held close to his books, the regime of his life was Spartan, and he was rarely permitted to visit the capital. Once only before he assumed the dress of manhood did he appear in public, when at the age of twelve he delivered the customary eulogy at the funeral of his grandmother Julia, and Roman society looked with interest at the modest, handsome child, kin to a great man who had no son of his own.
For in those years Julius was striding towards the first place in the world. While Octavius was with his tutor at Velitrae or Nola or at his stepfather’s Campanian villa, the struggle with Pompey was at its height. The stepfather was a moderate Pompeian in sympathies, but his family connections kept him neutral, and the household was never drawn into the war. When, in 49, Julius crossed the Rubicon the boy was fourteen, living in the depths of the country; but, as the campaign proceeded and Italy fell into the conquerer’s hands, he was brought more often to Rome and treated with some of the respect due to a prince of the blood. After Pharsalus, when scarcely sixteen, he officially entered upon manhood, and about the same time was elected to the college of pontifices, a significant honour for so young a man. He now undertook certain public duties, occasionally presiding, as the pontifices were entitled to do, in the praetorian courts, but he still lived a retired life under his mother’s stern eye, and this seclusion and mystery increased the popular interest. For he was now very generally regarded as the heir apparent of one