The Morals of Augustus.

Manners can be known only from facts, which facts must be incontestable. It is beyond doubt that this man, so immoderately praised as the restorer of morals and of laws, was long one of the most infamous debauchees in the Roman commonwealth. His epigram on Fulvia, written after the horrors of the proscriptions, proves that he was no less a despiser of decency in his language than he was a barbarian in his conduct. This abominable epigram is one of the strongest testimonies to Augustus’ infamous immorality. Sextus Pompeius also reproached him with shameful weaknesses: “Effeminatum infectatus est.” Antony, before the triumvirate, declared that C?sar, great-uncle to Augustus, had adopted him as his son only because he had been subservient to his pleasures: “Adoptionem avunculi stupro meritum.”

Lucius C?sar charged him with the same crime, and even asserted that he had been base enough to sell himself to Hirtius for a very considerable sum. He was so shameless as to take the wife of a consul from her husband in the midst of a supper; he took her to a neighboring closet, staid with her there for some time, and brought her back to table without himself, the woman, or her husband blushing at all at the proceeding.

We have also a letter from Antony to Augustus, couched in these terms: “Ita valeas ut hanc epistolam cum leges, non inieris Testullam, aut Terentillam, aut Russillam, aut Salviam, aut omnes. Anne refert ubi et in quam arrigas?” We are afraid to translate this licentious letter.

Nothing is better known than the scandalous feast of five of the companions of his pleasures with five of the principal women of Rome. They were dressed up as gods and goddesses, and imitated all the immodesties invented in fable —“Dum nova Divorum c?nat adulteria.” And on the stage he was publicly designated by this famous line:

Videsne ut cinaedus orbem digito temperet?

Almost every Latin author that speaks of Ovid asserts that Augustus had the insolence to banish that Roman knight, who was a much better man than himself, merely because the other had surprised him in an incest with his own daughter Julia; and that he sent his daughter into exile only through jealousy. This is the more likely, as Caligula published aloud that his mother was born from the incest of Augustus with Julia. So says Suetonius, in his life of Caligula.

We know that Augustus repudiated the mother of Julia the very day she was brought to bed of her, and on the same day took Livia from her husband when she was pregnant of Tiberius — another monster, who succeeded him. Such was the man to whom Horace said: “Res Italas armis tuteris, moribus ornes, Legibus emendes. . . . ”

It is hard to repress our indignation at reading at the commencement of the Georgics that Augustus is one of the greatest of divinities; and that it is not known what place he will one day deign to occupy in heaven; whether he will reign in the air, or become the protector of cities, or vouchsafe to accept the empire of the seas:

An Deus immensi venias maris, ac tua nauta

Numina sola celant tibi serviat ultima Thule.

Ariosto speaks with much more sense as well as grace, when he says in his fine thirty-fifth canto:

Non fu si santo ne benigno Augusto

?Come la tromba di Virgilio sonna;

L’aver avuto in poesia buon gusto

?La proscriptione iniqua gli perdona.

Augustus was not quite so mild and chaste

?As he’s by honest Virgil represented;

But then, the tyrant had poetic taste;

?With this the poet fully was contented.
The Cruelties of Augustus.

If Augustus was long abandoned to the most shameful and frantic dissipation, his cruelty was no less uniform and deliberate. His proscriptions were published in the midst of feasting and revelry; he proscribed more than three hundred senators, two thousand knights, and one hundred obscure but wealthy heads of families, whose only crime was their being rich. Antony and Octavius had them killed, solely that they might get possession of their money; in which they differed not the least from highway robbers, who are condemned to the wheel.

Octavius, immediately after the Persian war, gave his veterans all the lands belonging to the citizens of Mantua and Cremona, thus recompensing murder by depredation.

It is but too certain that the world was ravaged, from the Euphrates to the extremities of Spain, by this man without shame, without faith, honor, or probity, knavish, ungrateful, avaricious, bloodthirsty, cool in the commission of crime, who, in any well-regulated republic, would have been condemned to the greatest of punishments for the first of his offences.

Nevertheless, the government of Augustus is still admired, because under him Rome tasted peace, pleasure and abundance. Seneca says of him: “Clementiam non voco lassam crudelitatem” —“I do not call exhausted cruelty clemency.”

It is thought that Augustus became milder when crime was no longer necessary to him; and that, being absolute master, he saw that he had no other interest than to appear just. But it appears to me that he still was pitiless rather than clement; for, after the battle of Actium, he had Antony’s s............