Augustus

by John Williams

  In reply to your questions:

  Did Marcus Antonius plead for his life? Yes. It is a matter best forgotten. I had a copy of the letter once. I have destroyed it. Octavius did not reply to the letter. Antonius was not murdered; he did commit suicide, though he bungled the job and died slowly. Let him remain in peace; do not pursue these matters too far.

  The matter of Cleopatra: (1) No, Octavius did not arrange her murder. (2) Yes, he did speak to her in Alexandria before she took her life. (3) Yes, he would have spared her life; he did not want her dead. She was an excellent administrator, and could have retained titular control of Egypt. (4) No, I do not know what went on in the interview at Alexandria; he has never chosen to speak of it.

  The matter of Caesarion: (1) Yes, he was only seventeen years old. (2) Yes, it was our decision that he be put to death. (3) Yes, it is my judgment that he was the son of Julius. (4) No, he was not put to death because of his name, but because of his ambition, which was inarguable. I spoke to Octavius about his youth, and Octavius reminded me that he himself had been seventeen once, and ambitious.

  The matter of Antyllus, the son of Marcus Antonius. Octavius had him put to death. He also was seventeen years of age. He was much like his father.

  The matter of Octavius’s return to Rome: (1) He was thirty-three years of age. (2) Yes, he received the triple triumph then, at the beginning of his fifth consulship. (3) Yes, that was the same year he fell ill, and we despaired again of his life.

  You must, my dear Livy, forgive the curtness of my replies. I am not offended; I am only tired. I look back upon those days as if they happened to someone else, almost as if they were not real. If the truth were known, I am bored with remembering. Perhaps I shall feel better tomorrow.

  BOOK TWO

  1

  I. Statement: Hirtia to Her Son, Quintus, Velletri (2 B.C.)

  I am Hirtia. My mother, Crispia, was once a slave in the household of Atia, wife to Gaius Octavius the Elder, niece to Julius Caesar the God, and mother to that Octavius whom the world knows now as Augustus. I cannot write, so I speak these words to my son Quintus, who manages the estates of Atius Sabinus in Velletri. He writes these words so that our posterity may know of the time before them, and of the part their ancestors had in that time. I am in my seventy-second year, and the end of my life comes toward me; I wish to say these words before the gods close my eyes forever.

  Three days ago my son took me into Rome, so that before my eyes dimmed beyond sight I might look again upon the city that I remembered from my youth; and there an event befell me which raised memories of a past so distant that I thought I could never return to it. After more than fifty years, I saw again that one who is now master of the world and who has more titles than my poor mind can remember. But once I called him “my Tavius,” and held him in my arms as if he were my own. I shall speak later of that; now I must say my memories of an earlier time.

  My mother was born a slave in the Julian household. She was given to Atia first as a playmate, and then as a servant. But even when she was young, she was granted her freedom for faithful service, so that she might, in the law, marry the freedman Hirtius, who became my father. My father was overseer of all the olive groves on the Octavian estate at Velletri; and it was in a cottage near the villa, on the hill above the groves, that I was born, and where I lived in the kindness of that household for the first nineteen years of my life. Now I have returned to Velletri; and if the gods are willing, I shall die in that cottage in the contentment of my childhood.

  My mistress and her husband did not stay often at the villa; they lived in Rome, for Gaius Octavius the Elder was a man of importance in the government of those days. When I was ten years old, my mother informed me that Atia had given birth to a son; and because he was sickly, she decided that he would spend his infancy in the country air, away from the stench and smoke of the city. My mother had recently given birth to a stillborn child, and could nurse her mistress’s son. And as my mother took a child to her breast as if it were her own, so did my young heart, which was beginning to stir toward the dream of motherhood.

  As young as I was, I washed his body; swaddled him; held his tiny hand when he took his first steps; saw him grow. In my childhood game of motherhood, he was my Tavius.

  When that one whom I then called Tavius was five years old, his father returned from a long stay in the land of Macedonia and visited with his family for a few days; he planned to move southward to another of his residences in Nola, where we were to join him for the winter season. But he became suddenly ill, and died before we could take the journey; and my Tavius lost the father whom he had never known. I held him in my arms to comfort him. I remember that his little body quivered; he did not cry.

  For four more years he remained in our care, though a teacher was sent from Rome to attend him; and occasionally his mother visited. When I was in my nineteenth year, my mother died; and my mistress Atia—who after her time of mourning and in her duty had married again—decided that her son must return to Rome so that he might begin to prepare himself for manhood. And in her kindness and for the safety of my future, Atia gave into my keeping a portion of land sufficient to keep me from ever living in want; and for the well-being of my person, she gave me in marriage to a freedman of her family, who had a modest but safe prosperity in a flock of sheep that grazed in the mountain country near Mutina, north of Rome.

  Thus I went from my youth and became a woman, and in the way of things had to say good-by to the child I had pretended was mine. The days of play were over for me; yet it was I who wept when I had to take leave of Tavius. As if I were the child who needed comfort, he embraced me, and told me he would not forget me. We vowed that we would see each other again; we did not believe that we would. And so the child that had been my Tavius went his way to become the ruler of the world, and I found the happiness and purpose for which the gods had destined me.

  How might an ignorant old woman understand greatness in one whom she has known as an infant, as a toddling child, as a boy who ran and shouted with his playmates? Now everywhere outside of Rome, in the villages and towns of the countryside, he is a god; there is a temple in his name in my own town of Mutina, and I have heard that there are others elsewhere. His image is on the hearths of the country folk throughout the land.

  I do not know the ways of the world or of the gods; I remember a child who was almost my own, though not born of my body; and I must say what I remember. He was a child with hair paler than the autumn grain; a fair skin that would not take the sun. At times he was quick and gay; at other times quiet and withdrawn. He could be made quickly angry, and as easily removed from that anger. Though I loved him, he was a child like any other.

  It must be that even then the gods had given him the greatness that all the world has learned; but if they had, I swear he did not know it. His playmates were his equals, even the children of the lowest slaves; he gave as he received in his tasks or his play. Yes, the gods must have touched him, and yet in their wisdom prevented him from knowing; for I heard in later years that there were many portents at his birth. It is said that his mother dreamed that a god in the form of a serpent entered her, and that she conceived; that his father dreamed that the sun rose from the loins of his wife; and that miracles beyond understanding took place all over Italy at the moment of his birth. I say only what I have heard, and speak of the memories of those days.

  And now I must tell of that meeting which raised these thoughts in my head.

  My son Quintus wanted me to see the great Forum where he often went to take care of business matters for his employer; and so he aroused me at the first hour of the day, so that we could walk the streets before they were crowded. We had seen the new Senate House, and were walking up the Via Sacra toward the Temple of Julius Caesar, which was white as mountain snow in the morning sunlight. I remembered that once when I was a child I had seen this man who has become a god; and I wondered at the greatness of that world of which I had been a part.
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  We paused for a moment to rest beside the temple. In my age I tire easily. And as we rested, I saw walking up the street toward us a group of men whom I knew to be senators; they wore the togas with the purple stripes. In their midst was a slight figure, bowed as I am bowed, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and with a staff in one hand. The others seemed to be directing their words toward him. My eyes are weak; I could not make out his features; but some power of knowledge came upon me, and I said to Quintus:

  “It is he.”

  Quintus smiled at me, and asked: “It is who, Mother?”

  “It is he,” I said, and my voice trembled. “It is that master of whom I have spoken, who once was in my care.”

  Quintus looked at him again, and took my arm, and we went closer to the street so that we could watch his passing. Other citizens had noticed his approach, and we crowded among them.

  I did not intend to speak; but as he passed, those memories of my childhood came up within me, and the word was spoken.

  “Tavius,” I said.

  The word was hardly more than a whisper, but it was said as he passed me; and the one whom I had not intended to address paused and looked at me as if he were puzzled. Then he gestured to the men around him to remain where they were, and he came up to me.

  “Did you speak, old mother?” he asked.

  “Yes, Master,” I said. “Forgive me.”

  “You said a name by which I was known as a child.”

  “I am Hirtia,” I said. “My mother was your foster nurse when you were a child in Velletri. Perhaps you do not remember.”

  “Hirtia,” he said, and he smiled. He came a step nearer, and looked at me; his face was lined and his cheeks sunken, but I could see that boy I had known. “Hirtia,” he said again, and touched my hand. “I remember. How many years. . .”

  “More than fifty,” I said.

  Some of his friends approached him; he waved them away.

  “Fifty,” he said. “Have they been kind to you?”

  “I have raised five children, of whom three live and prosper. My husband was a good man, and we lived in comfort. The gods have taken my husband, and now I am content that my own life draws to an end.”

  He looked at me. “Among your children,” he said, “were there daughters?”

  I thought it a strange question. I said: “I was blessed only with sons.”

  “And they have honored you?”

  “They have honored me,” I said.

  “Then your life has been a good one,” he said. “Perhaps it has been better than you know.”

  “I am content to go when the gods call me,” I said.

  He nodded, and a somberness came upon his face. He said with a bitterness I could not understand: “Then you are more fortunate than I, my sister.”

  “But you—” I said, “—you are not like other men. In the countryside your image protects the hearth. And at the crossroads, and in the temples. Are you not happy in the honor of the world?”

  He looked at me for a moment, and did not answer. Then he turned to Quintus, who stood beside me. “This is your son,” he said. “He has your features.”

  “It is Quintus,” I said. “He is manager of all the estates of Atius Sabinus at Velletri. Since I was widowed, I have been living with Quintus and his family there. They are good people.”

  He looked at Quintus for a long time without speaking. “I did not have a son,” he said. “I had only a daughter, and Rome.”

  I said, “All the people are your children.”

  He smiled. “I think now I would have preferred to have had three sons, and to have lived in their honor.”

  I did not know what to say; I did not speak.

  “Sir,” my son said; his voice was unsteady. “We are humble people. Our lives are what they have been. I have heard that today you speak to the Senate, and thus give to the world your wisdom and your counsel. Beside yours, our fortune is nothing.”

  “Is it Quintus?” he said. My son nodded. He said: “Quintus, today in my wisdom, I must counsel—I must order the Senate to take from me that which I have loved most in this life.” For a moment his eyes blazed, and then his face softened, and he said: “I have given to Rome a freedom that only I cannot enjoy.”

  “You have not found happiness,” I said, “though you have given it.”

  “It is the way my life has been,” he said.

  “I hope that you become happy,” I said.

  “I thank you, my sister,” he said. “There is nothing that I can do for you?”

  “I am content,” I said. “My sons are content.”

  He nodded. “I must perform this duty now,” he said; but for a long while he was silent, and did not turn away. “We did see each other again, as we promised long ago.”

  “Yes, Master,” I said.

  He smiled. “Once you called me Tavius.”

  “Tavius,” I said.

  “Good-by, Hirtia,” he said. “This time, perhaps we shall—”

  “We shall not meet again,” I said. “I go to Velletri, and I shall not return to Rome.”

  He nodded, and he put his lips to my cheek, and he turned away. He walked slowly down the Via Sacra to join those who waited for him.

  These words I have spoken to my son, Quintus, on the third day before the Ides of September. I have spoken them for my sons and for their children, now and to come, so that for as long as this family endures it might know something of its place in the world that was Rome, in the days that are gone.

  II. The Journal of Julia, Pandateria (A.D. 4)

  Outside my window, the rocks, gray and somber in the brilliance of the afternoon sun, descend in a huge profusion toward the sea. This rock, like all the rock on this island of Pandateria, is volcanic in origin, rather porous and light in weight, upon which one must walk with some caution, lest one’s feet be slashed by hidden sharpnesses. There are others on this island, but I am not allowed to see them. Unaccompanied and unwatched, I am permitted to walk a distance of one hundred yards to the sea, as far as the thin strip of black-sand beach; and to walk a like distance in any direction from this small stone hut that has been my abode for five years. I know the body of this barren earth more intimately than I have known the contours of any other, even that of my native Rome, upon which I lavished an intimacy of almost forty years. It is likely that I shall never know another place.

  On clear days, when the sun or the wind has dispersed the mists that often rise from the sea, I look to the east; and I think that I can sometimes see the mainland of Italy, perhaps even the city of Naples that nestles in the safety of her gentle bay; but I cannot be sure. It may be only a dark cloud that upon occasion smudges the horizon. It does not matter. Cloud or land, I shall not approach closer to it than I am now.

  Below me, in the kitchen, my mother shouts at the one servant we are allowed. I hear the banging of pots and pans, and the shouting again; it is a futile repetition of every afternoon of these years. Our servant is mute; and though not deaf, it is unlikely that she even understands our Latin tongue. Yet indefatigably my mother shouts at her, in the unflagging optimism that her displeasure will be felt and will somehow matter. My mother, Scribonia, is a remarkable woman; she is nearly seventy-five, yet she has the energy and the will of a young woman, as she goes about setting in some peculiar order a world that has never pleased her, and berating it for not arranging itself according to some principle that has evaded them both. She came with me here to Pandateria, not, I am sure, out of any maternal regard, but out of a desperate pursuit of a condition that would confirm once again her displeasure with existence. And I allowed her to accompany me out of what I believe was an appropriate indifference.

  I scarcely know my mother. I saw her upon few occasions when I was a child, even less frequently when I was a girl, and we met only at more or less formal social gatherings when I was a woman. I was never fond of her; and it gives me now some assurance to know, after these five years of enforced intimacy, that my feeling f
or her has not changed.

  I am Julia, daughter of Octavius Caesar, the August; and I write these words in the forty-third year of my life. I write them for a purpose of which the friend of my father and my old tutor, Athenodorus, would never have approved; I write them for myself and my own perusal. Even if I wished it otherwise, it is unlikely that any eyes save my own shall see them. But I do not wish it otherwise. I would not explain myself to the world, and I would not have the world understand me; I have become indifferent to us both. For however long I may live in this body, which I have served with much care and art for so many years, that part of my life which matters is over; thus I may view it with the detached interest of the scholar that Athenodorus once said I might have become, had I been born a man and not the daughter of an Emperor and god.

  —Yet how strong is the force of old habit! For even now, as I write these first words in this journal, and as I know that they are written to be read only by that strangest of all readers, myself, I find myself pausing in deliberation as I seek the proper topic upon which to found my argument, the appropriate argument itself, the constitution of the argument, the effective arrangement of its parts, and even the style in which those parts are to be delivered. It is myself whom I would persuade to truth by the force of my discourse, and myself whom I would dissuade. It is a foolishness, yet I believe not a harmful one. It occupies my day at least as fully as does the counting of the waves that break over the sand upon the rocky coast of this island where I must remain.

  Yes: it is likely that my life is over, though I believe I did not fully apprehend the extent to which I knew the truth of that until yesterday, when I was allowed to receive for the first time in nearly two years a letter from Rome. My sons Gaius and Lucius are dead, the former of a wound received in Armenia and the latter of an illness whose nature no one knows on his way to Spain, in the city of Marseilles. When I read the letter, a numbness came upon me, which in a removed way I judged to have resulted from the shock of the news; and I waited for the grief which I imagined would ensue. But no grief came; and I began to look upon my life, and to remember the moments that had spaced it out, as if I were not concerned. And I knew that it was over. To care not for one’s self is of little moment, but to care not for those whom one has loved is another matter. All has become the object of an indifferent curiosity, and nothing is of consequence. Perhaps I write these words and employ the devices that I have learned so that I may discover whether I may rouse myself from this great indifference into which I have descended. I doubt that I shall be able to do so, any more than I should be able to push these massive rocks down the slope into the dark concern of the sea. I am indifferent even to my doubt.