Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar

by Tom Holland

The security of the Roman people, so Augustus had come to feel in his old age, was more important than any right to freedom of speech. Already, Ovid had been dispatched into exile. Then, ‘imposing an unprecedented punishment on literature’,115 the Princeps had condemned to the bonfire copies of a subversive history of the civil wars by a lawyer named Titus Labienus – a sentence so devastating to the author that he had committed suicide in protest. Finally, in a salutary demonstration of the new limits that were coming to be set upon the licence of libel, a second lawyer, a witty and waspish orator by the name of Cassius Severus, was banished to Crete for the crime of diminishing the maiestas, the ‘majesty’, of the Roman people. Here, for those concerned to uphold their city’s traditional liberties, was a chilling and ominous precedent. The charge of maiestas, as it was familiarly known, had long been applied to treasonable actions – but never before to words. That, though, in effect, was the offence for which Severus had been condemned: ‘defaming with vituperative writings eminent men and women’.116 What punishment might be imposed for defaming the most eminent of them all – the men and women of the August Family – was left hanging in the air.