Augustus

by John Williams

  A white ox, never yoked to the plough, was led to the altar by the attendants; its horns were gilded, and its head was garlanded by a wreath of laurel. The rope was slack; the ox came forward willingly, its head raised. Its eyes were blue, and they seemed to be looking at me, as if the beast recognized who was to be its executioner. The attendant crumbled the salt cake on its head; it did not move; the attendant tasted the wine, and then poured the libation between its horns. Still the ox did not move. The attendant said: “Shall it be done?”

  I raised my ax; the blue eyes were upon me; they did not waver. I struck, and said: “It is done.” The ox quivered and sank slowly to its knees; still its head was upraised, and its eyes were upon me. The attendant drew his dagger and slit the throat, catching the blood in his goblet. And even as the blood flowed the blue eyes seemed to look into mine, until at last they glazed and the body toppled to one side.

  That was more than fifty years ago; I was in my twenty-third year. It is curious that I should dream of that after so long a time.

  EPILOGUE

  Letter: Philippus of Athens to Lucius Annaeus Seneca, from Naples (A.D. 55)

  I was surprised and pleased, my dear Seneca, to receive your letter; I trust that you will forgive my delay in replying. Your inquiry reached me in Rome on the very day that I was leaving the city, and I have only just begun to get settled in my new home. You will be pleased to learn that at last I have taken the advice you have given me, both to my face and in your writings, and have retired from the bustle and confusion of my practice, so that I might devote myself to the quiet dignity of learning, and pass on to others what little knowledge I have gained through the years. I write these words from my villa outside Naples; the sunlight, dispersed by the budding grapevines that arch over my terrace, dances over the paper upon which these words appear; and I am as happy as you promised I would be in my retirement. For that assurance and the truth of it, I wish to thank you.

  Over the years our friendship has, indeed, been too sporadic; I am only grateful to you for remembering me, and for overlooking the fact that I did not speak out on your behalf during that unfortunate time that you were forced to spend on the barren waste of Corsica; you have understood better than most, I suspect, that a poor physician without worldly power, nor even a hundred like him, could have prevailed against the will of one so erratic as our late Emperor Claudius. All of us who have admired you, even in our silence, are elated that once again your genius may brighten the Rome that you have loved.

  You ask me to write about that matter of which we have spoken upon those too infrequent occasions that we have had to converse—my brief acquaintance with the Emperor Caesar Augustus. I am happy to accede to your request, but you must know that I am consumed with a friendly curiosity: may we expect a new essay? an Epistle? or perhaps, even, a tragedy? I shall wait eagerly to learn the use to which you intend to put my few memories.

  When we have spoken of the Emperor before, perhaps desiring a friendship which I imagined might be enhanced by your continued curiosity, I have been somewhat too mysterious and selfish with the information I would impart. But now I am in my sixty-sixth year—ten years younger than Octavius Caesar when he died. And I believe that I have at last gone beyond that vanity against which you have so often inveighed, yet have been kind enough to except me. I shall tell you what I remember.

  As you know, I was physician to Octavius Caesar for only a few months; but in those few months, I was always near him, more often than not within a distance from which I could hear him call; and I was with him when he died. I do not know even now why he chose me to attend him during those months that he knew were to be his last; there were many others more famous and more experienced than I; and I was only in my twenty-sixth year at the time. Nevertheless, he did choose me; and though I could not conceive it in my youth, I suspect now that he was fond of me, in that curious detached way that he seemed to have. And though I was able to do nothing for him in his last days, he saw to it that I was a rich man after his death.

  After a leisurely voyage of several days south from Ostia, we debarked at Capri; and though it was clear that his health was failing, he would not be so impolite as to ignore the throng that awaited him. He chatted with many of them, calling them by name, though upon occasion in his weakness he had to lean on my arm. Since most of the inhabitants of Capri are Greek, he spoke to them in that language, apologizing from time to time for his rather strange accent. At last he was content to bid his neighbors farewell, and we made our way to the Emperor’s villa, which commanded a remarkable view of the Bay of Naples, not many miles away. I persuaded him to rest, and he seemed content to do so.

  He had promised the island youths to observe the gymnastic competition that had been arranged to select those who would represent the island in the games at Naples the following week; and despite my protestations, he insisted upon fulfilling that promise; and again despite my wishes, he invited them all to his villa that evening for a banquet in their honor.

  He was extraordinarily gay at the banquet. He invented licentious epigrams in Greek, and encouraged the young men to groan at their badness; he joined them in their boyish games of throwing crusts of bread at each other; and in the face of their strenuous activities of the afternoon, he jokingly insisted upon calling them the “Idle-landers” rather than the “Islanders,” because of the leisurely life that they ordinarily led. He promised to attend the games in Naples, in which they were to compete; and insisted that he was gambling his entire fortune on their success.

  We remained at Capri for four days. Most of the time the Emperor sat quietly, gazing at the sea, or at the Italian coast line to the east. There was a quiet smile on his face, and every once in a while he would nod slightly, as if he were remembering something.

  On the fifth day we crossed to Naples. By this time the Emperor was so weak that he could not walk unassisted. Nevertheless, he insisted that he be taken to the games at which he had promised the young athletes he would be present; and I confess that, though I knew his end was near, I could not but assent to his going. It was clear that it would have made the difference of only a few days, at the most. He sat all afternoon in the blazing sun, cheering the Caprian Greeks to their victories; and when the contests were over, he found himself unable to rise from his chair.

  We carried him from the stadium on a litter, and he let it be known that he wished to go at once to one of his childhood homes, at Nola. Since it was a journey of only eighteen miles, I consented; and we arrived at his old home in the early hours of the morning.

  Knowing that the end was near, I had word sent to Benevento where Livia and her son Tiberius had been staying for several days. According to the Emperor’s instructions, I made it clear that he did not wish to see Tiberius, though he would allow the information to be spread that Tiberius had indeed attended him during his last hours.

  On the morning of the day he died, he said to me:

  “Philippus, it is near, is it not?”

  There was something in his manner that forbade me to dissemble with him.

  “One cannot be sure,” I said. “But it is near. Yes.”

  He nodded tranquilly. “Then I must fulfill the last of my obligations.”

  A number of his acquaintances—I believe he had no one then whom he would have called a friend—had heard of his illness in Rome, and had made haste to Nola. He received them, bade them farewell, and admonished them to assist in the orderly transference of his power, and obliged them to support Tiberius in his accession to authority. When one of them made a show of weeping, he became displeased, and said:

  “It is unkind of you to weep upon the occasion of my contentment.”

  He wished to see Livia alone, then. But when I made a movement to leave the room, he beckoned me to stay.

  When he spoke to Livia, I could tell that he was weakening rapidly. He made a gesture to her; she knelt and kissed him on the cheek.

  “Your son—” he said. “Your son—”


  He breathed hoarsely for a moment; his jaw went slack; and then, by an apparent effort of his will, he regained a little of his strength.

  “We need not forgive ourselves,” he said. “It has been a marriage. It has been better than most.”

  He fell back upon his bed; I rushed to his side; he still breathed. Livia touched his cheek. She lingered beside him for a moment, and left the room.

  Some moments later, he opened his eyes suddenly and said to me:

  “Philippus, my memories. . . . They are of no use to me now.”

  For a moment, then, it seemed that his mind wandered, for he suddenly cried out: “The young! The young will carry it before them!”

  I put my hand upon his brow; he looked at me again, raised himself upon one elbow, and smiled; then those remarkable blue eyes glazed; his body twitched once; and he toppled on his side.

  Thus died Gaius Octavius Caesar, the August; it was at three o’clock in the afternoon, on the nineteenth day of August, in the consulships of Sextus Pompeius and Sextus Appuleius. He died in the same room that his natural father, the elder Octavius, had died in seventy-two years before.

  Of that long letter which Octavius wrote to his friend Nicolaus in Damascus, I must say one thing. It was entrusted to my care for delivery; but in Naples, I received word that Nicolaus himself had died two weeks before. I did not inform the Emperor of this, for it seemed to me at the time that he was happy in the thought that his old friend would read his last words.

  Within a few weeks after his death, his daughter Julia died in her confinement at Reggio; it was whispered by some that her former husband, the Emperor Tiberius, allowed her to starve. Of that rumor I do not know the truth, nor I suspect does anyone who is now alive.

  It is the fashion of the day, and it has been the fashion for more than thirty years, for many of the younger citizens to speak with some condescension of the long reign of Octavius Caesar. And he himself, toward the end of his life, thought that all of his work had been for nothing.

  Yet the Empire of Rome that he created has endured the harshness of a Tiberius, the monstrous cruelty of a Caligula, and the ineptness of a Claudius. And now our new Emperor is one whom you tutored as a boy, and to whom you remain close in his new authority; let us be thankful for the fact that he will rule in the light of your wisdom and virtue, and let us pray to the gods that, under Nero, Rome will at last fulfill the dream of Octavius Caesar.

  Rome, Northampton, Denver, 1967–1972