Prætorian guards named prefects; they were always to be taken from the equestrian order. At Ravenna in the Upper, and Misenum in the Lower Sea, were stationed fleets of galleys, with their due complement of rowers, and each with its legion of marines attached to it; there also lay at Forum Julii, (Frejus,) on the coast of Gaul, a fleet composed of the ships taken at Actium.* The pay of the legionary soldier was ten asses a day; that of the prætorian was double; the former had to serve twenty, the latter sixteen years before he could claim his discharge. The former then received a gratuity of 3000, the latter of 5000 denars, answering to the pension of modern times. The pay and rewards of so large an army, the salaries of the numerous public officers, and the other indispensable expenses of government, required a considerable revenue. From the time when Æmilius Paulus brought the treasures of Perseus to Rome, the citizens had been free from the payment of the annual tributes or direct taxes hitherto levied, and so often, in the early days of the republic, the cause of seditions. An annual tribute was imposed on every conquered state; and as the tide of conquest rolled eastwards and westwards, a larger amount of revenue flowed annually to Rome. In the time of Augustus, the annual tributes of Asia, Egypt, Africa, Spain, and Gaul, produced a sum which has been estimated at from fifteen to twenty millions sterling. Yet even this large revenue did not suffice for the exigencies of the state, and Augustus found it necessary not merely to continue the port duties, (portoria,) or customs which had been imposed by the dictator, but to establish an excise, and to lay on some direct taxes. In all commercial states, at all ages of the world, duties have been levied on imported foreign commodities; they originated, probably, in the mistaken idea, that it was on the foreign merchant, and not on the domestic consumer, that they fell. They were levied at Rome as elsewhere till the * Tac. Ann. iv. 5. Suet. Oct. 49. Vegetius, v. 1. + Gibbon, i. ch. vi. [This sum is just equal to the annual expenditure of the British government at present, though the British dominions are far more extensive than those of Rome in her most powerful days, and though that expenditure is commonly, and not unjustly, considered to be on a very lavish scale. How wasteful, then, must have been the expenditure of Rome, for which even this sum did not suffice!-J. T. S.] CONTIN. 4 end of the Mithridatic war, when they were abolished; but Julius Cæsar caused them to be again collected.* They were levied ad valorem by Augustus, and varied from twelve and a half to two and a half per cent.; articles of luxury, such as the precious stones, silks, and spices, of the East, being, of course, the most highly taxed. The excise was imposed by Augustus chiefly with the view of providing a fund for the payment of the troops; it was a duty of one per cent. (centesima) levied on all articles, great and small, sold in the markets or by auction at Rome or throughout Italy. This not proving sufficient, he imposed (759) a duty of five per cent. on all legacies and inheritances, except in the case of the poor, or of very near relations.† This equitable tax, however, proving very odious to the legacy-hunting nobility of Rome, in order to stop their murmurs, he sent (766) to the senate, requesting them to suggest some less onerous imposition to the same amount; and when they could not, yet declared that they would pay any thing rather than it, he substituted a property tax, and sent out officers to make an estimate of the property in lands, houses, etc., throughout Italy. This brought them to reason, and there was no further opposition to the legacy duty.‡ The treasury of the prince, whence the pay of the army was to issue, was named the Fisc, (Fiscus,) and was distinct from the public treasury, (Erarium,) and managed by dif ferent officers; but the distinction was more apparent than real, as both were equally at the devotion of the master of the legions. Such was the form of the Roman empire, as reduced into order, and regulated by the wisdom and prudence of Augustus. While the civilized world thus formed one body, ruled by one mind, it pleased the Ruler of the universe to send his Son into it, as the teacher of a religion unrivalled in sublimity, purity, and beneficence, and which was gradually to spread to the remotest ends of the earth. In the year of Rome 752 by the Catonian, 754 by the Varronian computation, Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judæa.§ *Cic. Att. ii. 16. Dion, xxxvii. 51. Suet. Jul. 43. § We shall henceforth reckon by the Christian era. CHAPTER III.* TIBERIUS CLAUDIUS NERO CESAR. A. U. 767-790. A. D. 14-37. FUNERAL OF AUGUSTUS. RIES OF GERMANICUS. OF TIBERIUS. MUTINY OF THE LEGIONS. -VICTO HIS DEATH. CIVIL GOVERNMENT RISE AND FALL OF SEJANUS. DEATH OF AGRIPPINA AND HER CHILDREN. DEATH OF TIBERIUS. THE death of Augustus was kept secret by Livia and Tiberius till the danger of a disputed succession should be removed by the death of Agrippa Posthumus. Orders in the name of Augustus were therefore sent to the officer who had him in charge, to put him to death. The orders were forthwith executed; but when the centurion, who was the agent, made his report to Tiberius, according to the usual custom, the latter made answer that he had not ordered it, and that the centurion must account to the senate for it. The matter, however, ended there, for no inquiry was ever instituted. When the death of Augustus was at length made known at Rome, the senate, the knights, the army, and the people, hastened to swear obedience to Tiberius, who had already assumed the command of the army as Imperator. The body of Augustus was conveyed by night from town to town by the decurions or councilmen of each. At Bovillæ it was met by the Roman knights, who carried it into the city, and deposited it in the vestibule of his house on the Palatine. Tiberius, by virtue of his tribunitian authority, convoked the senate to consult about the funeral and the honors to be decreed to the deceased. These, had the real or pretended wishes of the senate prevailed, would have been excessive; but Tiberius set a limit to their adulation, and only consented that the senators should carry the body to the pyre. The will of Augustus, which was in the custody of the Vestals, was then produced and read. The funeral orations were pronounced by Tiberius himself and his son Drusus. The body was borne on the shoulders of the senate to the Campus Martius, and there burnt; the ashes were collected * Authorities: Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dion. by the principal men of the equestrian order, and deposited in the Mausoleum, which he had built in his sixth consulate, (726,) between the Flaminian road and the Tiber, and surrounded with plantations and public walks. An eagle had been let to ascend from the flaming pyre, as the bearer of the soul of the deceased to heaven; and Numinius Atticus, a man of prætorian rank, swore publicly that he saw Augustus mounting to the skies; for which falsehood Livia gratified him with a gift of 25,000 denars. A Heroum was therefore decreed to be raised to Augustus, as to one who had not shared the fate of ordinary mortals, but, like Hercules or Romulus, was become a god. By his last will, Augustus had made Tiberius and Livia (whom he had placed in the Julian family, and named Augusta) his heirs, the former of two thirds, the latter of one third, of the property which would remain after payment of the numerous legacies which he left. He bequeathed a sum of 43,500,000 sesterces to the Roman people; to the Prætorians 1000 sesterces each; half that sum to each of the Urbans, and 300 to each of the legionaries. He also bequeathed various sums to his friends. He expressly forbade either of the Julias to be laid in his monument when they died. Beside his will, Augustus left three pieces in writing, the one containing the directions about his funeral, another an account of his actions, which he directed to be cut on brazen tables, and set up before his Mausoleum, and a third giving a view of the condition of the whole empire, the number of soldiers under arms, the quantity of money in the treasury and fisc, or elsewhere, adding the names of the freedmen and slaves who might be called on to account for it. The man into whose hands the supreme power was now transferred, was in character diametrically opposite to Augustus. Tiberius Claudius Nero, who was by adoption a member of the Julian house, was nearly fifty-four years of age. He had exercised all the principal offices in the state, and had commanded armies with reputation. He was fond of literature and science, and of the society of learned men ; but he had all the innate haughtiness of the Claudian family; he was suspected of an inclination to cruelty; yet so profound was his power of dissimulation, that he had attained to that mature age without his character being generally understood.* *In his first campaigns, the soldiers, noticing his love of wine, called him Biberius Caldius Mero. Suet. Tib. 42. His manners and carriage were repulsive and forbidding; he was generally silent, and did not unbend and decline into familiarity. When all due honors had been decreed to Augustus, the senate turned to Tiberius, imploring him to assume the supreme power; but he feigned reluctance, spoke of the difficulty of the task, and his own incompetence, saying that, in a state possessing so many illustrious men, such power should not be committed to any single person. This only caused them to urge him the more; they called on the gods and on the statue of Augustus: Tiberius marked the words of each, and for some incautious speakers he laid up future vengeance. At length, yielding as it were to compulsion, he accepted the wretched and onerous servitude, as he termed it, until the senate should see fit to grant some repose to his old age. In this affected reluctance, Tiberius, no doubt, was acting according to his natural character of dissimulation, and seeking to learn the real sentiments of the leading senators; but he had other reasons and causes of apprehension. He was uncertain how the two great armies, which were stationed in Pannonia and Germany, would act when they heard of the death of Augustus; and he feared lest Germanicus, who commanded the latter, and who was universally beloved, might choose to grasp the supreme power when within his reach, rather than wait for it to come to him by the more tedious course of succession. He did, however, the noble Germanicus injustice; but his suspicions of the legions were not unfounded, for they broke out into mutiny when intelligence reached them of the late events. The mutiny commenced in the Pannonian army of three legions under the command of Junius Blæsus. The soldiers complained of the smallness of their pay and the length of their service, and demanded to be placed on an equality in both these points with the Prætorians. Blæsus having succeeded, in some measure, in calming them, they selected his own son as their deputy, to lay their grievances before Tiberius; but when he was gone, the mutiny broke out anew, and they killed one of their officers, drove the rest out of the camp, and plundered their baggage. When Tiberius heard of the mutiny, he sent off his son Drusus with a guard of the Prætorians, and bearing letters to the troops, in which he promised to lay their grievances before the senate, adding that Drusus was authorized to concede at once all that could be granted without a decree of the senate. |