The Historians' History of the World 06

A second rival to the youthful Marcellus arose in the person of his own brother-in-law Agrippa, the famous general to whom Augustus chiefly owed his victories over Sext. Pompeius and Antony, and whom he himself had encouraged to cherish the most daring hopes by high distinctions and proofs of favour. When the enmity between Agrippa and Marcellus grew too plainly manifest, the emperor despatched the former to Asia under pretext of an honourable mission. But Agrippa, looking upon this as a kind of banishment, ruled the province through his legate, while he himself remained at Lesbos, his gaze riveted upon Rome. Fate intervened to save Augustus from painful experience of the affronted pride of an ambitious man. Marcellus died in the year 23, universally lamented by the Roman people, whose darling he was. It was shrewdly suspected that he had fallen a victim to the rancour and intrigues of Livia, who, by birth a member of the Claudian family, had inherited all the pride and jealous ambition of their old patrician blood. Augustus, dismayed by the disturbances at Rome in the year 22, and the evidences of a conspiracy against his life which then came to light, made haste to be reconciled with Agrippa, and, by marrying him to Julia, assured him of the first place after his own and the prospect of the succession. Octavia, the emperor’s sister, moved by envy and jealousy of Livia, gladly agreed to Agrippa’s divorce from her daughter Marcella, that so she might thwart the ambitious schemes of the emperor’s consort. A few years later Agrippa journeyed to the East, accompanied by Julia, to set in order the complications and struggles for the throne which had arisen in various districts from the Bosporus to Syria. His presence was a blessing to the Asiatic provinces and dependent states; he reconciled the wrangling members of the empire by admonitions and commands, and perpetuated the name of his wife by founding on the site of the ancient and ruinous seaport of Berytus the colony of Julia Felix, which was provided with a garrison of two legions and became the centre of Roman dominion in Syria. As Agrippa was returning to Italy after a stay of some years in the East, he succumbed to sickness in the fifty-first year of his age. He died in Campania in 12 B.C.

Augustus rendered the highest honours to the man to whom he owed so much, and who had devoted himself as fully to the welfare of the state as to the cause of his imperial friend. He had the body interred with the most solemn obsequies in the imperial vault, himself delivering the funeral oration, and not only made over the baths and gardens of Agrippa to the city of Rome according to the wishes of the deceased, but distributed considerable donations of money among the people in his name.

Livia now conceived fresh hopes for her sons. By her intrigues she succeeded in procuring the divorce of Tiberius, her first-born, who was at that time thirty years of age, from his wife, and his marriage with the emperor’s widowed daughter, who had borne three sons to Agrippa—Caius, Lucius, and Agrippa, and two daughters, Julia and Agrippina. Augustus with difficulty suppressed his dislike of his ambitious, overbearing, and sullen stepson.

Within a very few years the circle of friends which Augustus had gathered about him had been sadly thinned by death. Agrippa, Octavia, Drusus, and Mæcenas had sunk into the tomb within the space of four years (from 12 to 8 B.C.). Thus with declining age the emperor fixed his affections all the more exclusively upon his two grandsons, Caius and Lucius, the children of his daughter Julia and his friend Agrippa. He admitted them by adoption into the Julian family, conferred the title of Cæsar upon them, and had them brought up under his own eye; he even devoted part of his own leisure to their instruction and education. They were his usual companions at table, and were treated with such distinction that all men regarded them as the future heirs of the empire. The populace and the senate vied with each other in offering homage and adulation to the imperial grandsons of Augustus, and they were loaded with fresh honours and dignities every year.