John Buchan - Augustus

(LORD TWEEDSMUIR)

Immensa Romanae pacis majestas.

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John Buchan, first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield, was born in Perth, Scotland in 1875. In his youth, his father immersed him in the history, legends and myths of Scotland, and he was an avid reader, stating some years later that John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress was a constant companion to him. Buchans education was uneven, but at the age of seventeen he obtained a scholarship to study classics at Glasgow University, where he began to write poetry. His first work, The Essays and Apothegms of Francis Lord Bacon, was published in 1894, and a year later he enrolled at Oxford University to study law.

In 1900, Buchan moved to London, and two years later accepted a civil service post in South Africa. In the years leading up to World War I, he worked at a publishers, and also wrote Prester John (1910) which later became a school reader, translated into many languages as well as a number of biographies. In 1915, Buchan became a war correspondent for The Times, and published his most well-known book, the thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps. After the war he became a director of the news agency Reuters.

Over the course of his life, Buchan would eventually publish some one hundred books, forty or so of which were novels, mostly wartime thrillers. In the latter part of his life he worked in politics, serving as Conservative MP for the Scottish universities and Lord High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland (1933-34). In 1935, Buchan moved to Canada, where he became the thirty-fifth Governor General of Canada. He died in 1940, aged 64.

AUGUSTUS

Museo Civico, Ancona

TO MY FRIEND

WILLIAM LYON MACKENZIE KING

FOUR TIMES PRIME MINISTER OF CANADA

PREFACE

THIS book is an attempt to understand a little part of the mind of a great man. In my youth I was fascinated by Julius Caesar, and was ready to believe, with Mommsen and his school, that the constructive ideas commonly attributed to his great-nephew were born of his genius. As my studies continued I felt this view to be untenable, and not less that other which seems to be taking its place to-day, and which would make Agrippa the true architect of the Roman empire. I came to see that Augustus, while he had able colleaguesand one of his gifts was his power to choose collaboratorswas always the master designer and the chief executant. I seemed to find in his work a profound practical intelligence which is even rarer in history than a seminal idealism. Consequently since my undergraduate days Augustus has inspired me with a lively interest, which has been sustained by such experience as I have had, under varied conditions, of those problems of government which are much the same in every age. Two Canadian winters have enabled me to complete a task begun many years ago.

Gibbon complained that he had to collect the actions of Trajan from the glimmerings of an abridgment or the doubtful light of a panegyric. The authorities for Augustus are scarcely more satisfactory. The chief contemporary sources are lost: the thirteen books of Augustuss own autobiography; the three books of the correspondence between him and Cicero; the memoirs of Agrippa; the works of Asinius Pollio and Messalla Corvinus; the thirty books of Livy which covered the period from 44 to 9 B.C.; the pamphlets of men like Oppius and Julius Saturninus, and most of Nicolaus of Damascus. Much of our material, too, for the understanding of Roman thought and society is gone: nearly all the minor poets; a good deal of Cicero; the plays which were not paraphrases from the Greek, after Plautus or Terence, but true transcripts of Roman life. Some of these lost sources are no doubt embodied in the work of later chroniclers, but it is impossible to know what is an authentic borrowing and what is the authors gloss. Apart from minor contemporaries like Strabo and Velleius, we are chiefly dependent on authors who lived from half a century to two centuries laterPlutarch, Appian, Suetonius, the two Plinys, and Dio Cassius, and these were moralists or gossip-writers, with little historical conscience. The one man of genius, Tacitus, also wrote long after the event, and, as was said of Carlyle, he preferred seriousness to truth.

Happily the imperfect literary sources can be supplemented by important archaeological and epigraphical matter. Since the envoys of the Emperor Ferdinand II first copied the Monumentum Ancyranum in 1555, every century has brought new discoveries. Papyri have made clear many points in the administration of Egypt, and inscriptions containing laws, edicts and senatusconsults have extended our knowledge of provincial government. The brilliant work of the excavators has shed new light upon Augustan sculpture and architecture. But, when all has been said, we have still scanty materials to estimate the man and his work. A principal guide must still be tradition; we know that succeeding ages believed certain things about him, and a long-continued belief cannot be without warrant.

A great scholar has written of the fallibility of all historical reconstruction: The tradition yields us only ruins. The more closely we test and examine them, the more clearly we see how ruinous they are, and out of ruins no whole can be built. Tradition is dead; our task is to revivify life that has passed away. We know that ghosts cannot speak until they have drunk blood, and the spirits which we evoke demand the blood of our hearts. We give it to them gladly, and if they then abide our question something from us has entered into them. I am conscious that my interpretation of Augustus is a personal thing, coloured insensibly by my own beliefs. But, since the historian is most at home in an age which resembles his own, I hope that the convulsions of our time may give an insight into the problems of the early Roman empire which was perhaps unattainable by scholars who lived in easier days.