Augustus

by John Williams

  “I have put away my boyhood,” Salvidienus said, pointing to the box. “And now I may receive your message.”

  Carfulenus, so moved that he could not speak, gave him the letter. Salvidienus read it standing, nodded, and then sat down at his table, still facing Carfulenus.

  “Do you wish to reply?” asked Carfulenus at last.

  “No,” Salvidienus said, and then he said: “Yes. I will reply.” Slowly but without hesitation he removed a dagger from the folds of his toga, and with his strength and in Carfulenus’s sight, he plunged it into his breast. Carfulenus leaped toward him, but Salvidienus raised his left hand to stay his advance. And in a low voice, only a little breathless, he said: “Tell Octavius that if I cannot remain his friend in life, I may do so in death.”

  He remained seated at his table until his eyes dulled, and he toppled to the dust.

  XIII. Letter: Anonymous to Marcus Tullius Cicero, at Rome (November, 43 B.C.)

  One who cherishes for you the tranquillity and rest that you might have in your retirement, urges you to quit the country that you love. You are in mortal and immediate danger, so long as you stay in Italy. A cruel necessity has forced one to go against his more humane and natural inclinations. You must act at once.

  XIV. The History of Rome. Titus Livius: Fragment (A.D. 13)

  Marcus Cicero, shortly before the arrival of the triumvirs, had left the city, rightly convinced that he could no more escape Antonius than Cassius and Brutus could escape Octavius Caesar: at first he had fled to his Tusculan villa, then he set out by cross-country roads to his villa at Formia, intending to take ship from Gaeta. He put out to sea several times, but was driven back by contrary winds: and since there was a heavy ground swell and he could no longer endure the tossing of the ship, he at last became weary of flight and of life, and returned to his villa on the high ground, which was little more than a mile from the sea.

  “Let me die,” he said, “in my own country, which I have often saved.”

  It is known that his slaves were ready to fight for him with bravery and loyalty: but he ordered them to set down the litter, and to suffer quietly the hard necessity of fate. As he leaned from the litter and kept his neck still for the purpose, his head was struck off. But that did not satisfy the brutality of the soldiers: they cut off his hands, too, reviling them for having written against Antonius. So the head was brought to Antonius and by his order set between the two hands on the rostrum where he had been heard as consul and as consular, where in that very year his eloquent invectives against Antonius had commanded unprecedented admiration. Men were scarcely able to raise their tearful eyes and look upon the mangled remains of their countryman.

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  I. Letters: Strabo of Amasia to Nicolaus of Damascus, from Rome (43 B.C.)

  My dear Nicolaus, I send you greetings, as does our old friend and tutor, Tyrannion. I send you greetings from Rome, where I arrived only last week, after a long and most wearying journey —from Alexandria, by way of Corinth; by sail and by oar; by cart, wagon, and horseback; and sometimes even on foot, staggering beneath the weight of my books. One looks at maps, and does not truly apprehend the extent and variety of the world. It is a new sort of education, the gaining of which does not require a master. Indeed, if one travels enough, the pupil may become the master; our Tyrannion, so learned in all things, has been at some pains to question me about what I have seen during my travels.

  I am staying with Tyrannion in one of a little group of cottages on a hill overlooking the city. It is a sort of colony, I suppose; several established teachers (one does not call them philosophers in Rome, where philosophy is somewhat suspect) live here, and a few younger scholars who, like myself, have been invited to live and study with their former masters.

  I was surprised when Tyrannion brought me here, so far away from the city; and I was even more surprised when he explained the reason. It seems that the public library in Rome is worse than useless; an incredibly small collection, often badly copied, and as many books in this dreadful Latin tongue as in our own Greek! But Tyrannion assures me that whatever texts I may need are available, though in private collections. One of his friends, who lives here with us, is that Athenodorus of Tarsus of whom we heard so much at Alexandria; he has, Tyrannion assures me, access to the best private collections in the city, to which we wandering scholars always are welcome.

  Of this Athenodorus I must say a few words. He is a most impressive man. He is only a few years older than Tyrannion—perhaps in his middle fifties—but he gives one the impression that he has the wisdom of all the ages somehow within his power. He is aloof and hard, but not unkind; he speaks seldom, and never engages in those playful debates with which the rest of us amuse ourselves; and we seem to follow him, though he does not lead. It is said that he has powerful friends, though he never drops a name; and his personage is such that we hardly dare to discuss such matters, even out of his presence. Yet for all his power in the world and of the mind, there is a sadness within him, the source of which I cannot discover. I have resolved to talk to him, despite my trepidation, and to learn what I may.

  Indeed, you will be getting these letters through his auspices; he has access to the diplomatic pouch that goes weekly to Damascus, and he has let me know that he will have these letters included.

  Thus, my dear Nicolaus, begins my adventure in the world. According to my promise, I shall write you regularly, sharing whatever new learning I get. I regret that you could not come with me, and I hope that the family affairs that keep you in Damascus soon are solved, and that you can join me in this strange new world.

  You must think me a bad friend and a worse philosopher; I am not the former, but I may be on my way to becoming the latter. I had resolved to write you every week—and it is nearly a month since I have put pen to paper.

  But this is the most extraordinary of cities, and it threatens to engulf even the strongest of minds. Days tumble after each other in a frenzy such as neither of us could have imagined during our quiet years of study together in the calm of Alexandria. I wonder if, in the balm and somnolence of your beloved Damascus, you can even conceive the quality that I am trying to convey to you.

  With some frequency I am struck by the suspicion (perhaps it is only a feeling) that we are too complacent in our Greek pride of history and language, and that we too easily assume a superiority to the “barbarians” of the West who are pleased to call themselves our masters. (I am, you see, becoming somewhat less the philosopher and somewhat more the man of the world.) Our provinces have their charm and culture, no doubt; but there is a kind of vitality here in Rome that a year ago I could not have been persuaded was even remotely attractive. A year ago, I had only heard of Rome; now I have seen it; and at this moment I am not sure that I will ever return to the East, or to my native Pontus.

  Imagine, if you will, a city which occupies perhaps half the area of that Alexandria where we studied as boys—and then think of that same city containing within its precincts more than twice the number of people that crowded Alexandria. That is the Rome that I live in now—a city of nearly a million people, I have been told. It is unlike anything I have ever seen. They come here from all over the world—black men from the burning sands of Africa, pale blonds from the frozen north, and every shade between. And such a polyglot of tongues! Yet everyone speaks a little Latin or a little Greek, so that no one need feel a stranger.

  And how they crowd themselves together, these Romans. Beyond the walls of the city lies some of the most beautiful countryside that you can imagine; yet the people huddle together here like fish trapped in a net and struggle through narrow, winding little streets that run senselessly, mile after mile, through the city. During the daylight hours, these streets—all of them—are literally choked with people; and the noise and stench are incredible. A few months before his death, the great Julius Caesar decreed that only in the dark hours between dusk and dawn might wagons and carts and beasts of burden be allowed in the city; one wonder
s what it must have been like before that decree, when horses and oxen and goods-wagons of all descriptions mingled with the people on these impossible streets.

  Thus the ordinary Roman who lives in the city proper must never have any sleep. For the noise of the day becomes the din of the night, as drovers curse their horses and oxen, and the great wooden carts groan and clatter over the cobblestones.

  No one ventures out alone after dark, except those tradespeople who must and the very rich who can afford a bodyguard; even on moonlit nights the streets are pitch dark, since the rickety tenements are built so high that it is impossible for even a vagrant ray of moonlight to find its way down into the streets. And the streets are filled with the desperate poor who would rob you and cut your throat for the clothes you wear and the little silver you might carry with you.

  Yet those who live in these towering ramshackle buildings are little safer than those who would wander the streets at night; for they live in constant danger of fire. At night, in the safety of my hillside cottage, I can see in the distance the fires break out like flowers blooming in the darkness, and hear the distant shouts of fear or agony. There are fire brigades, to be sure; but they are uniformly corrupt and too few to accomplish much good.

  And yet in the center of this chaos, this city, there is, as if it were another world, the great Forum. It is like the fora that we have seen in the provincial cities, but much grander—great columns of marble support the official buildings; there are dozens of statues, and as many temples to their borrowed Roman gods; and many more smaller buildings that house the various offices of government. There is a good deal of open space, and somehow the noise and stench and smoke from the surrounding city seem not to penetrate here at all. Here people walk in sunlight in open space, converse easily, exchange rumors, and read the news posted at the various rostra around the Senate House. I come here to the Forum nearly every day, and feel that I am at the center of the world.

  I begin to understand this Roman disdain for philosophy. Their world is an immediate one—of cause and consequence, of rumor and fact, of advantage and deprivation. Even I, who have devoted my life to the pursuit of knowledge and truth, can have some sympathy for the state of the world which has occasioned this disdain. They look at learning as if it were a means to an end; at truth as if it were only a thing to be used. Even their gods serve the state, rather than the other way around.

  Here is a copy of a poem found this morning on every gate of importance that leads into the city. I shall not attempt a translation; I transcribe it in its Latin:

  Stop, traveler, before you enter this farmhouse, and look to yourself. There is a boy lives here with the name of a man. You will dine with him at your peril. Oh, he’ll ask you, never fear; he asks everyone. Last month his father died; now the boy carouses on the stinking wine of his freedom and lets the livestock run wild beyond the broken fences—except for one, the farrow of a pet pig he has taken into his household. Do you have a daughter? Look to her, also. This boy once had a taste for girls lovely as she. He may change again.

  I offer a gloss, in the manner of our old teachers. The “boy with the name of a man” is, of course, Gaius Octavius Caesar; the “father” who gave him the name is Julius Caesar; the “farrow” is one Clodia, daughter of the “pig” (that is the nickname given her by enemies), Fulvia, wife of Marcus Antonius, with whom Octavius alternately battles and reconciles. The “girl” alluded to in the last line is one Servilia, daughter of an ex-consul to whom Octavius was engaged, before (as it is said) under pressure from his own and Antonius’s troops, he accepted a marriage agreement with Antonius’s stepdaughter. There is, of course, more form than substance to the contract; the girl, I understand, is only thirteen years old. But it apparently has placated those forces that want to see Octavius and Antonius on amicable terms. The poem itself, no doubt, has other local allusions that I do not understand; it was almost certainly commissioned by one of the senatorial party who does not want a conciliation of Octavius and Antonius; it is a vulgar thing. . . . But it does have something of a ring to it, does it not?

  I am forever surprised. The name of Octavius Caesar is on everyone’s lips. He is in Rome; he is out of Rome. He is the savior of the nation; he will destroy it. He will punish the murderers of Julius Caesar; he will reward them. Whatever the truth, this mysterious youth has captured the imagination of Rome; and I, myself, have not been immune.

  So, knowing that our Athenodorus has long lived in and around Rome, I took the occasion yesterday evening, after we had dined, to ask him a few questions. (Gradually, he has unbent toward me, and now we may exchange as many as half a dozen words at a time.)

  I asked him what manner of man this was, this Octavius Caesar, as he calls himself. And I showed him a copy of the poem that I sent you earlier.

  Athenodorus looked at it, his thin, hooked nose almost touching the paper, his thin cheeks drawn inward, his thin lips pursed. Then he handed it back to me, with the same gesture that he has when he returns a paper I have given him for his emendations.

  “The meter is uncertain,” he said. “The matter is trivial.”

  I have learned patience with Athenodorus. Again, I questioned him about this Octavius.

  “He is a man like any other,” he said. “He will become what he will become, out of the force of his person and the accident of his fate.”

  I asked Athenodorus if he had ever seen this youth, or talked to him. Athenodorus frowned and growled:

  “I was his teacher. I was with him at Apollonia when his uncle was killed and he took the path that has led him where he is today.”

  For a moment I thought that Athenodorus was speaking in metaphor; and then I saw his eyes and knew he was speaking the truth. I stammered: “You—you know him?”

  Athenodorus almost smiled. “I dined with him last week.”

  But he would not speak more of him, nor answer my questions; he seemed to think them unimportant. He said only that his former student could have become a good scholar, had he chosen to do so.

  So I am even more nearly at the center of the world than I imagined.

  I have attended a funeral.

  Atia, the mother of Octavius Caesar, is dead. A herald came through the streets, announcing that the services would be held the next morning in the Forum. So I have at last set eyes upon that man whose person now is the most powerful in Rome, and hence (I suppose) in the world.

  I got to the Forum early, so that I would have a good place to see, and waited at the rostrum where Octavius Caesar was to deliver the oration. By the fifth hour of the morning, the Forum was nearly filled.

  And then the procession came—the ushers with their flaming torches, the oboists and the buglers and the clarionists playing the slow march, the bier with the body propped upon it, the mourners—and behind the procession, walking alone, a slight figure, whom I took at first to be a youth, since his toga was bordered with purple; it did not occur to me that he might be a senator. But it soon became clear that it was Octavius himself, for the crowd stirred as he passed, trying to get a better view of him. The bearers set the bier before the rostrum, the chief mourners seated themselves on little chairs in front, and Octavius Caesar walked slowly to the bier and looked for a moment at the body of his mother. Then he mounted the rostrum and looked at the people—a thousand, or more—who had gathered for the occasion.

  I was standing very close—not more than fifteen yards away. He seemed very pale, very still, almost as if he himself were the corpse. Only his eyes were alive—they are a most startling blue. The crowd became very quiet; from the distance, I could hear the faint careless rumble of the city that went its way like a dumb beast.

  Then he began to speak. He spoke very quietly, but in a voice so clear and distinct that he could be heard by everyone who had gathered.

  I send you his words; the scribes with their tablets were there, and the next day copies of the oration were in every bookstall in the city.

  He said: “Rome wi
ll not again see you, Atia, you who were Rome. It is a loss that only the example of your virtue makes endurable, which tells us that our grief, if held too deeply and too long, offends the very purpose of your living.

  “You were a faithful wife to the father of my blood, that Gaius Octavius who was praetor and governor of Macedonia, and whose untimely death intervened between his person and the consulship of Rome. You were a stern and loving mother to your daughter, Octavia, who weeps now before your bier, and to your son, who stands before you for the last time and speaks these poor words. You were the dutiful and proper niece of that man who gave at last to your son the father of whom he had been cheated by fate, that Julius Caesar who was villainously murdered within earshot of this very spot where you so nobly lie.

  “Of an honored Roman name, you had in full degree those old virtues of the earth which have nurtured and sustained our nation throughout its history. You spun and wove the cloth that furnished your household its clothing; your servants were as your own children; you honored the gods of your house and of your city. Through your gentleness you had no enemy but time, who takes you now.

  “Oh Rome, look upon the one who lies here now, and see the best of your nature and your heritage. Soon we shall take these remains beyond the city walls, and there the funeral pyre will consume the receptacle of all that Atia was. But I charge you, citizens, do not let her virtues be entombed with her ashes. Rather let that virtue become your Roman lives, so that, though Atia’s person be but ash, yet the better part of her will live on, entombed in the living souls of all Romans who come after her.

  “Atia, may the spirits of the dead keep your rest.”

  A long silence stayed upon the crowd. Octavius stood for a moment on the rostrum. Then he descended, and they bore the body outside the Forum, and beyond the city walls.