by Allan Massie
To come to the point at issue, that action of mine of which you so strongly disapprove and which fills you indeed with disgust and even hatred. What can I say? I have a great respect for what is sacrosanct, and would never, in my private life as a citizen, violate a sacred place or sacred obligations. Yet in my capacity as a public man I must sometimes see things differently. A man holding public office must sometimes be conscious of necessity. He must be prepared to do wrong himself if it is in the public interest. Such a recognition informed my actions as Triumvir. Do you think that in my private capacity I could ever have consented to measures so appalling to the moral sense as the Proscriptions? Yet Rome required them. So also with the case of Antony's will. I asked the Vestals to deliver it to me, having carefully explained why I deemed it necessary. They rejected my request. Alas. What could I do? Should I say Rome requires that the will be made public so that Rome and all Italy should understand the peril in which we stand, but, notwithstanding this necessity, I shall refrain from action because I must not do what I know as a private citizen to be wrong? That would indeed have been dereliction of duty.
I cannot put my private conscience above my duty to Rome.
I told you what Virgil said about Cincinnatus and the priest at Nemi. I beg you to brood on his words, and try to understand my position.
Thank you for all you have told me about the children. Julia of course has such charm and beauty that she thinks all should be forgiven her. You are right to reprove her, but she is young and will, I am sure, come to hand. I hope our dear Tiberius, whose intelligence and character have already won my respect, will not fall into melancholy. You are right to be wary of his inheritance. Your ever loving husband, Octavianus.
The last paragraph was perhaps injudicious, but I had to show I had read her letter. Her reply was swift and unrelenting:
That letter was absolutely typical. I don't know why you think I'm afraid or reluctant to say what I feel, but this time I shall play it your way and put it in writing.
What threatens our marriage is whenever you fall below the moral level I have a right to expect of you, for when you do that, I really detest you. There I have said it, and I would wish you to understand clearly that I mean precisely that. I detest you also when you then equivocate and find specious explanations for what you know to be wrong. It is all too easy to console yourself with what Virgil says. I don't know why you should think that likely to impress me. He is only a poet and everyone knows that poets are clever liars, skilful in making good seem bad and vice versa. They are every bit as bad as lawyers, and your arguments are lawyerly.
What you say about my character shows that you have never troubled to try to understand me. I don't recognize myself in your description, but I do see one thing: being in the wrong yourself, as you tacitly confess by your long and sophistical defence, you have tried to put the blame on me, and blame whatever is going wrong between us on me, on my attitudes, my Claudian pride and so on. This is downright dishonest and quite unworthy of any husband, let alone one of your rank, a rank to which, I may add, you have been helped to rise by my family connections.
You had better not write to me again in that fashion. I won't endure it. If you want to divorce me, you will of course do so. But if we are to remain married, well then, I shall have to insist on your abandoning this tone. It really is outrageous, that you should try to make me seem the guilty party.
Julia told me the most shameless lie today. I was obliged to have her whipped.
Please don't write unless you can write in a different manner. By the way, there are unpleasant stories circulating about you and your nephew Marcellus. It is unwise to show such obvious favour to a handsome boy, and it is unfair to him. You know yourself what damage was done to your own reputation by the way you allowed that man Caesar to pet you. I am not saying you were morally at fault then, or even now. But in both cases you have shown a lack of that judicious temper on which you normally pride yourself. Octavia is both perturbed and hurt by the stories that circulate in Rome about you and Marcellus. I don't need to tell you that your friend Maecenas takes pleasure in spreading them.
What could I reply? Only this:
Livia, I love you, and so will accept your reproof without further attempt at justification. I shall even thank you for the warning you convey about Marcellus. It had not occurred to
me that my affection for this remarkable and virtuous boy could be so construed. Certainly I love him, but I love him as I love Drusus, Tiberius and Julia. He is one of the family. Maecenas of course has a mischievous tongue (and I think it grows more mischievous the longer he lives). I shall write to tell him to stop it. All the same, do please remember that Maecenas has been more useful to me than any man - even Agrippa . . . Meanwhile, pray for me . . . the reckoning with Cleopatra cannot be long distant.
Antony sent messengers to me. They arrived on the morning that news came from Agrippa of a great victory at sea against Antony's admiral Sosius. I myself broke the news of this triumph for us to Antony's envoys, M. Junius Silvanus and Quintus Dellius.
'You see,' I said, 'your cause is hopeless. You may reply to your general that the only matter to be negotiated is the terms of his surrender.'
Dellius grimaced. 'The Queen,' he said, 'will never permit it. Caesar,' he said. 'We're on the wrong side. It's hardly proper for Romans to take orders from a foreign woman, and that's what it amounts to . . .'
Not only Romans were now abandoning Antony. The next morning Amyntas, King of Galatia in Asia Minor, rode out with his cavalry on a reconnaissance mission, wheeled his men round the flank of the hills, and presented himself in surrender at our outposts. He was brought to me, a lean leering Oriental, ready to offer treasure to keep his kingdom, self-abasement to win my clemency. Though disgusted by his servility, I prudently enrolled him in our ranks.
As I rode through the camp, I saw Dellius sitting outside a tent, guzzling pork, with a wine-flask before him.
'Food and drink, Caesar,' he called out, 'that's more than old Antony can offer.'
I could not but reflect that men like Dellius would have abandoned my cause as happily and with as little compunction; and a thought came to me: I have more in common with Antony than with anyone in either camp.
News was brought that Antony's stoutest general, C. Domitius Ahenobarbus, had also slipped from the camp. Antony, with that self-conscious and theatrical nobility which was an essential part of his strange character, and which so often prompted gestures that caught the imagination of nobles and soldiers alike, ordered that Ahenobarbus' equipment, arms and treasure be sent after him. When Marcellus heard of this, he called out to me, 'Why do we find ourselves at war with such a man?' What could I answer?
Let me pause here and dwell a moment, not on Antony's theatrical gesture, which cost him nothing and may indeed for a brief moment have restored to him the sense of his own virtue, but rather on Ahenobarbus himself. His career encapsulates the waste of civil war. No man was a more persistent enemy of mine. There was none I would rather have won to my side. But he was deaf to all blandishment, all persuasion, eventually to all reason.
He was an obstinate and virtuous Republican, wedded to a vanished and perhaps always imaginary world. His father, Cato's brother-in-law, as stern and self-righteous as Cato himself, fought and died at Pharsalus. The son adhered to Brutus and Cassius, fought against us at Philippi, and then resisted for years with a fleet based on the west coast of Greece. Pollio persuaded him to join with Antony, which we all understood to mean reconciliation to the new order we were trying to build. I wrote to him, I remember, in welcome. He replied coldly: he had joined Antony, not me, for he could never be reconciled with the heir of the man who had made it his life's work to destroy the Free State. I shrugged my shoulders in despair. What could he understand by that dead term? There had been no freedom from fear, coercion, political dishonesty and corruption, for three generations. But Ahenobarbus belonged to a dead age, when personal and familial loyalty, the cla
n spirit, was all; when only lip-service was given to the idea of Rome. Cato had been the same. He would have dismembered the Empire for the sake of a purely imaginary politics. How could I have patience with such fools?
And yet I could not but admire Ahenobarbus, even while I recognized that such admiration represented a longing for the infancy of Rome. Again I saw the wisdom of Virgil's words, and I saw too that the story of Cincinnatus was not only a legend but a temptation. The likes of Cato and Ahenobarbus were men who played at living in the past, and assumed an impossible virtue, which enabled them to act with a selfish disregard for the real interests of the State. Beware the idealist, was all I could tell Marcellus; but Marcellus, with his clear and dark-blue eyes, his high carriage, his neat close-curled head carried proudly, his strong straight legs and his candid smile, and even the proud frown that would disturb his beauty when he encountered what seemed reprehensible, was at the age for impossible Catos. Like any noble youth he lived in a world of moral certainty.
And yet the virtue of a man like Ahenobarbus was never to be disprized. I knew that. Almost alone of those around Antony, he had constantly deplored Cleopatra's power over the general. If only Antony had listened ... if only Ahenobarbus had trusted me. He refused even to grant Cleopatra the name of Queen. He was with all his faults a true Roman. The last time I saw him, when as consul in 32, he had departed the city for Antony's camp. I had begged him not to. He had looked me in the eye and said, 'Antony is no despot.' No argument could move him and I let him go.
Now Antony too had lost this noble and misguided man . . .
Antony's best general, Canidius, urged him, we later learned, to retreat to Macedonia and seek to settle the issue there where they might hope to find help from barbarian allies. That itself would have been a dangerous and ignoble precedent, but I suppose Canidius argued that it was no more unwise or disgraceful to rely on such northern barbarians than on the Queen of Egypt. Certainly, such a move would have embarrassed us. We would have had to follow, with an ever lengthening supply line, across difficult country, eventually to give battle in a place of
Antony's choosing. Anticipating that they might follow this course, I threw the left wing of my army across the passes, but I could not position a strong force there without endangering the main army. However, Dellius reassured me. Cleopatra, he said, would never permit Antony to follow a course which would expose Egypt to our fleet. 'You can be quite certain, Caesar, that the Queen will win any argument. Antony can no more leave her now than a dog can trot off from a bitch in heat. He is bewitched, there's no other word for it. He knows it, and is powerless. It's pitiful to see and to watch him drown his shame in wine.'
Dellius was quite right. We had reduced Antony to the point where he had to fight his way out.
THIRTEEN
The storms of late August had died away, and the morning of 2 September dawned bright, fresh and clear. A gentle breeze blew landward and the fleet swayed at anchor, a movement I have always found disagreeable. We had taken up position perhaps a mile beyond the entrance to the Channel where Antony's ships were pinned. I had been roused shortly before first light and called to the deck. My captain, a Greek called Melas, pointed to the land, where the morning grey was pierced with shafts of lurid red.
'What's happening?' I asked, brushing the sleep from my eyes.
'It's beginning,' he said, 'Antony is burning those ships which he does not need. Our information was correct. He is planning a break-out, this day.'
A little rowing-boat approached our ship. A rope ladder was lowered and Agrippa climbed aboard. His face had the tense eagerness that the moment of decision always called forth from him.
'This is it, Caesar,' he called out. 'This is the hour to which all the campaign has tended. Or rather,' he corrected himself, dropping the rhetorical tone which he had adopted for the benefit of the soldiers who stood around, 'we have a few hours to go.'
'How can you be sure?' I asked. (I have always hated the sea and naval warfare, and found its principles mysterious.)
'Haven't you noticed?' he said. 'Or have you forgotten? The wind is likely to shift in the afternoon, and move round to the north-west. That will enable Antony to run before it. He hopes it will cut us off from our land base, and aid him to break our line . . . but if he fails, then the wind will aid his flight. He will be able to run fast before it . . .'
'It sounds,' I said, 'a desperate gamble.'
'What else is left for him?' Agrippa said.
We had had the conversation before. At staff meetings we had analysed the options open to Antony, and concluded that what would be attempted to-day offered him the only chance of avoiding the slow and humiliating surrender which the crumbling and demoralization of his army, pinned in our blockade, otherwise threatened. I could have wished that his nerve had failed him and he had desisted from this last attempt. For one thing I have always found it uncanny when your adversary does just what you have predicted. I am ever inclined to fear that it will lead to a change of fortune. But Agrippa was buoyed up and excited by the success of his forecast.
A little later, when we had checked all dispositions and wished each other luck (for however well-laid your plans, chance is the arbiter of war), and taken the auspices and sacrificed to the lords of destiny, Agrippa climbed back to his little boat, and was rowed away. I watched till the boat became a speck on the ocean and then disappeared behind the line of galleys on our left.
Towards noon the proud high sails of Antony's fleet could be seen rounding the point and, then, like a dream unfolding, they deployed, and stood off in battle array some half a mile distant. The world held its breath while the soft breeze still rippled landward.
I dunked a piece of bread in the resin-flavoured wine of Greece (which survives better on shipboard than our more delicate Italian wines) and so broke my fast.
For the hundredth time and more I rehearsed the arguments we had held. My own wish had been to avoid this encounter. I would have let Antony clear the straits unchallenged and make a dash for Egypt. I was sure such precipitate flight would dishearten the Romans and Italians in his force. They would, I said, feel that Antony had finally thrown in his lot with Egypt, that he had abandoned all hope of winning the West and resigned himself to being Cleopatra's lapdog. When they felt this, I suggested, many would desert their general; and we would achieve success without a battle. Agrippa heard my argument out, then banged his fist on the table.
'No, no, and again, no,' he cried, and I could see that our officers were impressed by the vehemence of his tone. 'No,' he said again, quietly, to emphasize his sincerity. 'That is no more than conjecture. What is fact is this. Antony's ships are bigger than ours and much faster under full sail. If we shirk the contest and let him run, the chances are he will escape without suffering any damage to his fleet. Then our whole summer campaign will have been wasted. It will all be to begin again. And do you imagine, Caesar, we can tax Italy another year as we have this one? I tell you, on both military and political grounds, we must bring the matter to issue.'
I heard him and assented. I have always been ready to be impressed by solid argument. Indeed, one reason for my success has been that I have never obstinately maintained my own point of view from pride. I have always been willing to concede that in certain areas others know more than I.
So I had assented, and now watched Antony's fleet rock on the water. Sea-gulls screamed overhead. The men shifted their feet and kept their eyes fixed on the enemy, all but a few old sweats who had lain down on deck and were chatting among themselves. They were men who had been in so many battles that they had long ceased to anticipate what might happen. They had seen enough death to know that they might not see the moon rise that night; they would therefore take their ease and conserve their strength. I envied their fatalism.
The sun passed the zenith and still the wind neither rose nor shifted. The light shimmered in noonday heat. Sweat ran down the backs of my legs. My mouth felt dry and sour. The whole world r
ocked in a pregnant and awful silence.
Then, very gently at first, my nostrils were pricked with the tang of smoke. The black fumes which had been rising almost straight from the burning ships before drifting thinly away over the camp could now be seen shifting towards the open sea.
Melas shouted orders to his sailors, and my centurions called their men to stand to. With sails set and oars flailing, Antony's fleet moved against us in battle order. When they were still some hundred paces distant, I could hear the cry of battle from our left where Agrippa was already engaged.
Literary art such as Caesar's can make sense and order of battles. All those I have taken part in have left me with a confused welter of impressions: I see a young boy by my side fall with an arrow in this throat, his hands closing on the shaft and locking there; he fell, half-turnng so that the point was driven deeper in his neck before the shaft split and he was left holding the upper part, broken and useless, and his face turned towards me, as he lay on one cheek, his innocent eye glazing over, and indignant surprise fading from it... I see a burning brand tossed in a wide arc through the air to land among the sheets of an enemy ship, and I hear the screams of terrified and burning sailors. I hear the thud of grappling irons joining our ships to theirs, the hoarse execrations and the clash of swords. And, high up on our bridge, I see the whole ocean turned into a mimic and ghastly theatre, the water running purple with blood, and hear the splash of bodies and everywhere the cries of death.
