by Allan Massie
'What do you seek?' a priest asked at the gate of the chapterhouse to which we had been led. 'We seek truth,' Virgil answered. 'Enter.'
Our clothes were taken from us and we bathed, and were anointed with sweet-smelling unguents, and were given saffron-coloured robes. All this was performed in silence, and, though the rooms were crowded, there was no noise but the shuffling of feet and the rustle of vestments.
'You must clear your mind of the past if you wish a vision of the future,' the priest said when we were ready.
For two days we prayed and fasted, and drank only the pure water of the Springs, obeying the silence still enjoined on us. I watched Virgil carefully, and in doing so began to understand something of the mystery of the poetic spirit. He was emptying himself of all but the desire to imbibe knowledge.
On the third night we were led out after dark. We proceeded between lines of torches, held by chanting initiates. The moon was up and the temple of the Goddess of Mysteries shone candid in its pure light. Shadows dappled the earth which was still warm under our bare feet. The chanting grew more resonant as we advanced: stranger, wilder, as if it came from a great distance, recalling what we had never known and yet seemed always to have known. A priestess stood at the portico of the temple, a flamen raised in her right hand. She spoke in a soft and sibilant voice. 'Are you prepared?' A cry of assent rose.
'Here,' she whispered, 'is neither life nor death, past nor future, but the eternal present. Here is neither rich nor poor, bond nor free, but the immortal soul. Here, for a passage of time that belongs to all time, we offer you escape from the thralldom of the body and union with the Goddess who is the primal source of life, from whom all things grow, without whom is dearth and death.'
Then the torches were extinguished. Lit only by the moon we mounted the steps, entered the temple and were escorted to the sanctuary.
It is forbidden to relate what happened there, to what rites we assented and what promises were given. And yet, though I cannot reveal what we experienced, I cannot leave the matter, for to do so, would be to deny those for whom I write, my… children, Rome's children (though not alas, the children of my body) of such illumination as I have received. There are those of course who say that wisdom which is partaken at second hand, is no true wisdom. I do not know. I write what I feel I must.
It was the next day, for we were both weary and I slept long, that I spoke of the Mysteries to Virgil. Fatigue showed in his face; his eyes were dark and remote pools. I did not know how best to approach the matter, and so did so clumsily. But he took no notice of this, and smiled…
'It confirmed,' he said, 'what I needed to be reassured of… I have not slept, but have been working, for I know now that little life is left to me, but I must soon go down into the underworld. I fear I may do so before I have revised my poem, and, if that is indeed so, I must ask you to destroy it as an imperfect thing. Will you do so?'
I was silent, knowing myself. But he urged me, and at last, to calm him, I promised I would carry out his will.
'But,' he said, 'I may be spared. I must believe I shall be spared, and I have been working all morning on a passage in the Sixth Book, which I knew did not express what I meant it to express, and yet, before I came to Greece it told all that I knew. Now, I think I have broken through. Caesar,' he said, 'we do not die for ever. Listen, everything, sky, land, sea, sun, stars and moon, is strengthened by Spirit and enlivened by Mind.' 'But what is the distinction?' I said.
'Spirit is the life-force, mind the conscious intelligence. All created things – men, beasts, fish – all derive their life from Spirit and Mind. What strength they have is the strength of fire and comes like fire from heaven. Their weakness resides in the body's evil and those earthly parts which are corruptible by death. The body itself is not evil, but it contains evil. It is the cause of fear and desire and of sorrow and joy. Because we are chained to the body, we cannot look open-eyed on free air, as the Gods can. Even when we pass from this earth, dying as we call it, all the evil and ills of the body do not pass from the soul, for long habit has engrafted them on it. So souls must endure retribution and be punished for their old offences. The punishments are numerous and diverse – they must be, as sins are. Each of us finds a world of death suited to ourselves. Fire, wind, or water cleanses us in the Shades. We are at last set free to wander in the Elysian Fields till the last corruption has been removed, and our eyes are clear, and we become a spark of elemental fire. Then, finally, the Divine Spirit calls us in long procession to the river Lethe, that we may visit the sky's vault purged of memory and then in time may feel a desire to enter bodily life again. For that we do so, I cannot doubt. All this I felt before, and now know…'
It was at that moment that I saw what I must next do for Rome. Virgil told me how Anchises (to whom he allotted this revelation of the meaning of Life) then displayed to Aeneas his whole destiny, how he showed him 'what manner of men will be your descendants of Italian birth, souls of renown now awaiting life who shall succeed to our name… 'It is this noble passage which tells how I myself, 'Augustus Caesar, son of a God, will bring back a Golden Age to Italy, in lands where Saturn reigned'; this passage too which concludes with the invocation of my beloved and too soon departed Marcellus. And, as I say, listening to him, I conceived the purpose of holding once again the Secular Games, instituted in the year of the foundation of the Republic and repeated every century. The fifth celebration should have been held in that ill-starred year when Julius Caesar led his troops, to the tune played by the Piper at the gates of a cold dawn, across the Rubicon, and exposed our dear Italy to the horror of civil war. There would be difficulties in holding them soon, I could see that, but had no doubt that we would find means to overcome them, for, listening to Virgil, I knew that we required to consecrate our restored Republic, the New Order of Rome, by a ceremony which would join its future to our past. (And in fact it did prove easy to correct the date, for my lawyer Ateius Capito recalled that an Etruscan century lasted one hundred and ten years and that the Games were therefore due to be held in two years' time; he raked up a Sybilline prophecy to support his opinion.)
The time was ripe. The Sibyl had announced the coming reign of Apollo. Virgil himself, divinely inspired, promised an Age of Gold, established by me. Some philosophers of the school of Pythagoras teach that after four hundred and forty years body and soul live in their former state and society returns to its former condition. The ceremony would proclaim and prove the regeneration of the world, even as the mysteries of Eleusis promised the regeneration of the soul.
The next weeks were occupied with the details of provincial administration, and I saw little of Virgil, who was working with a like intensity on revising the Sixth Book of The Aeneid'… Letters from Livia were loving and contented – she asked several times if I had fixed the date of my return. Julia was with her husband in Spain and I was overjoyed, though at the same time worried, to hear that she was with child. Tiberius had pleased me by his conduct in Armenia; it was clear that both he and his brother Drusus would be of great service to Rome. I felt, more than ever, that my long years of toil were bearing fruit.
Towards the end of the first week in September, I was ready to sail back to Italy. Virgil would accompany me. The night before our departure, he was looking dreadfully ill. He had lost flesh even from his lean frame, his face was lined with pain, and his eyes were great black hollows. He asked me if we might postpone our departure for a day.
'I shall not see Athens again,' he said. 'It would please me if we could pass a day on the slopes of Hymettus.'
The air was full of honey and the mingled scent of thyme, myrtle and oregano. Bees hummed around us and a lark soared high in the sky, trilling its song of praise. The meadow slope where we lay was richly flowered, and our companions rested in the warmth of the sun some way apart from us. I told Virgil he had been working too hard, too long indoors. He needed the sun.
He smiled and shook his head, but with his perfect manners decline
d to talk about his health. We looked down on the city. The Parthenon shone with a brilliance such as I had never seen. He said, 'I have valued this last time in Athens. Nowhere in the world has truth been sought with such diligence; nowhere has beauty been better apprehended and created; nowhere has the human spirit flourished so finely.'
'And yet,' I said, 'for all their speculations about the art and end of politics, how slight was their achievement. Why did the Greeks, with all their genius, fail to establish a polity that would endure?'
'The Greek spirit,' he said, 'was ever one of enquiry. Asking the questions was more important than answering them. We are their heirs, and Rome would be a lesser place and a lesser thing without the achievement of Athens. Those who doubt a divine purpose must consider how Rome and Greece have been entangled since the Achaeans burned the topless towers of Troy and sent our father Aeneas on his travels. So many generations ago, and now Rome, the child of Greece as well as of Aeneas, rules an unimagined Empire and Mycenae is a little village where pigs run to and fro through the Lion Gate.' Our crossing was foul. The equinoctial gales came early and buffeted our ship. We lay a week anchored off Corfu not daring to trust ourselves windward of the island. Then the wind changed and we scudded across the Tyrrhenian, but still sometimes plunging and heaving. It was the worst weather for a sick man, and Virgil lay strapped to a bunk, the miserable prisoner of Neptune's wrath and his own weakness. I did the little I could to alleviate his sufferings, but he could not retain even the spoonfuls of chicken broth which I fed him. He was delirious when we reached Brindisi.
He rallied briefly in the villa outside the town to which I had him carried, but his brow was still damp, his throat charged and he was miserably feeble. I knew the end could not be long delayed. On the last night he babbled again of failure and reproached the Gods that they had not granted him time to refine his poem. He reiterated the request that I would destroy it, as unworthy of his genius and of Rome's, and he would not rest till I consented.
He died just before dawn as the cock threw its vulgar message to the world. He died in my arms, and his last words were 'peace, longing, destiny, the shades glimmer before me…'
So died the best and rarest man I have known. I cannot pretend that I could enter that secret world of poetic magic where he communed with the spirits that gave birth to the world and shape its course. There were half-lights in his soul and in his work, which I can only dimly understand. No poet has equalled him in range and none could play on so many instruments to touch the heart. None so truthfully and nobly admired whatever is good and noble in man. He moved from the exquisite artifice of the Eclogues through the self-denying honesty of the Georgics to the sublimity of this epic of Rome. He drew for us our Italy in a form that made the familiar strange and magical; he made us conscious of the duties of Empire, as of our greatness. I am but an indifferent literary critic, and I leave it to those with more skill in letters to indicate the beauties of his work and to try to account for his genius. All I can say now is to repeat the thought that repeated itself in my mind as I knelt by his bier, my eyes full of tears: of all men I have known, Virgil most completely exemplified what we mean by virtue; he was everything that may become a man.
The executors of his will were terrified when they came on his instruction to destroy the manuscript of his epic, and, knowing my long interest in the work, approached me to ask whether they should obey. It is of course wrong to tamper with testamentary depositions or to set them aside, but despite my own promise to Virgil twice-given, I had no hesitation in doing so. The instruction was partly due to his final delirium, partly an expression of his innate perfectionism. No doubt the poem was in detail unfinished. No doubt he would have added further felicities. I respected his request, but I could not accede to it. 'The Aeneid' had passed out of Virgil's possession and belonged to Rome, to the city and the world. I gave instructions that it should be published, and, if it was wrong to ignore the poet's wishes, I took that responsibility on myself. The wonder with which it was received justified my action. I was sure I was right. I am still sure. Yet I did wrong too, and that wrong has not gone unpunished. So Aeneas himself was driven from Carthage and the loving arms of Dido by the divine imperative which set him to sail to Italy to be the father of our People. In executing that divine command, he destroyed the unhappy Dido and when he encountered her in the Underworld she withdrew from him, no more moved by his words 'than if she had been hard flint or a block of Parian marble'. Aeneas, who loved Dido and obeyed the Gods, destroyed the queen to fulfil his destiny. I, who loved Virgil and am also obedient to the divine word, broke my promise to him that I might keep my promise to Rome, and let all Romans see how their destiny had unfolded. I was wrong to break my oath, but I would have been wrong to destroy the poem. Should I then have denied my friend my word, and denied him comfort at the hour of death? And do not think Aeneas did not suffer. Will Virgil withdraw himself from me when we meet in the Shades?
I have suffered for Rome. Cruel fate tore my sons Gaius and Lucius from me. Was that the awful price I paid for foreswearing Virgil? Can there be worse to come? Oh Varus… Enough. I travelled by slow sad stages from Brindisi to Naples, where the poet was laid in his simple tomb: Mantua gave me life, Calabria death. I lie In Naples – poet of herdsmen, farms and heroes.
I arrived in Rome in October. There had been trouble in the city over the consular elections. In my view the trouble arose from maladministration of the food supplies, but it alarmed some senators. A deputation met me in Campania to urge me to make a public entrance to the city in order to impress the people. I declined to do so, and refused to celebrate the Triumph they also urged on me. I was not a monarch returning, merely the first citizen, and anyway I was hardly in the frame of mind for pomp and ceremony. Public adulation grows more irksome with the years, for all but the vainest of men.
Agrippa and Julia returned from Spain, and my first grandchild, Gaius, delighted me. Since Agrippa was now my son-in-law and the father of a child of my blood, I thought it proper to associate him even more closely in the government of the Republic. He therefore was now also granted the tribunician power and a supreme imperium. My personal authority ensured that I still held the chief place, but I had no more power than Agrippa. If I died, his imperium and authority would ensure that Rome did not revert to the selfish struggle for power which had disfigured the years before the Civil Wars. Moreover, Agrippa would in time in like manner associate Gaius with himself.
Business was unremitting, but business makes no story. The details of administration can hardly delight the reader. What does he care that I assumed the powers of a censor again, and removed unsatisfactory members from the Senate?
About this time too however I embarked on my campaign to reform the manners and morals of the age. Livia was an enthusiastic supporter of this necessary but unpopular venture. We both agreed that dissolute and immoral behaviour could corrupt public life as well as private. Measures were taken to punish adultery and fornication, to control speech, to protect minors, to make divorce more difficult, to give wives more power over their own estates and so elevate their condition. I recognized that marriage is an institution which must be healthy if society is to be stable, and so I taxed unmarried men more heavily than married ones, and granted substantial privileges to the parents of large families.
Many opposed these measures; others were sceptical. The aged and wicked Plancus, whose services had won him a measure of tolerance from me which his general conduct hardly deserved, openly laughed at me, and said that you can't legislate people into morality. I asked if if might not be possible to legislate them out of immorality. No, he said, all you do is drive it into dark corners. Better than the Forum itself, I said.
Though I was anxious to elevate the condition of women, I still thought that they were properly subject to their husbands' control, and I told the Senate that it was their duty to reprove their wives and correct their misbehaviour. 'Come off it, Augustus,' someone called out 'when d
id you last reprove Livia?' Td like to see you try,' shouted another humorist. 'Fortunately,' I said, 'my wife doesn't merit reproof. I wish you were all as fortunate.' Meanwhile preparations advanced for the Secular Games. The Senate sanctioned the Festival and entrusted arrangements to the priestly order of the College of Fifteen, who chose Agrippa and myself as their representatives. In previous celebrations the principal deities had been (we discovered) the Gods of the Underworld, Dis and Proserpina. I acknowledged their power, but could not believe that gloomy Dis was the deity Rome should most reverence on this occasion. Virgil had agreed with me. The great ceremonies should be held under the auspices of the Gods of the Upper World, Apollo and Diana, for we were celebrating light and reason as well as the antiquity and historic mission of Rome.
I have discovered a note I made during those distant ceremonies. It gives my mood then better than anything I could now write: It will not be dark tonight. Already, if I step out of my house and look towards the east, I might see the Alban Hills fringed with rose-touches of a new day. It is but three hours since we returned from the Field of Mars, and I cannot sleep. I sent the boy a moment ago to fetch me bread and dunked a piece in the jar of wine from my own municipality of Velletri, and held it to my lips. The wine, poured a little early in anticipation that the ceremony would be over at the appointed hour, is already sharp with a faint musty tang of vinegar; it is always thin and yellow; yet I suck it from the bread gratefully.
Down in the plain tonight, before the altar in the Field of Mars, with Agrippa by my side, I slit, with one sweep of the curved blade, the throat of a pregnant sow. The pig's blood spurted out – the sleeve of my toga stank of it so that I was glad when we came home to exchange the garment for this dressing-gown; then it trickled down the steps of the altar, and seeped through cracks in the marble to the imbibing earth. But there was one pool formed from an errant spurt, that escaped the marble and formed on the bare earth, which parched by our long hot May refused at first to receive it. It lay on the earth in a viscous pool. I do not believe anyone noticed it but myself, and I am glad of that; they would be sure to see it as an evil omen when it is only the slow working of nature.
