Augustus

by Allan Massie

  But the chief delight of that summer for me was to be found in my two little grandsons ... I write these words and know that I can never grow resigned to their loss. Every time I try to describe them, my heart fails. All I can say now is that that summer seemed then to lay open before me a garden of perfect felicity. The boys were so lively, loving and natural as flowers. 'Grandpa,' they would say, pulling at my hands, or climbing on to my knee, 'come and play ball, come and play dice, tell us a story . . .' 'Grandpa,' Gaius would say, 'have you heard the joke about the elephant and the mouse . . .' It was to me that little Lucius would run in tears when he had fallen and cut his knee . . .

  I felt a patriarch that summer, and put the cares of state aside. We picnicked in the uplands above Sorrento, and lay in meadows abundant in flowers that only Livia could name. The sea sparkled below, meadow birds called happily about us, and we ate simply, disdaining the elaborate dishes of Roman tables, rough country food: wind-cured hams, red mullet and sardines rushed from the coast that morning in baskets of snow, sprinkled with oregano or fennel or thyme picked in the meadow, and grilled over charcoal, rough bread and salami, the white tangy cheese the shepherds make from their sheep-milk and the dewy and dripping mozzarella brought from the girls who tend the buffalo in the marshlands. Livia always brought a basket of dried figs and apricots for which we both had a passion, and there were strawberries to be picked in the woods that fringed the meadows. How clear and vivid is my picture - as if time was arrested at that moment - of the three girls, all great with child, strolling back from the woods, ankle-deep in the meadow grass, dangling baskets overflowing with the sweet berries from those woods that always had a lingering aftertaste that was fresh and tart. I see too little Lucius, naked as a baby Cupid and his face pink and white with the crushed strawberries and mozzarella.

  If only time could indeed have stopped.

  EIGHT

  Agrippa came home ill to his Campanian villa. His face was streaked with grey and there were deep lines of pain running down from his mouth. I besought Julia, who was about to have her fifth child, to take the greatest care of the hero who was her husband. 'I depend more on Agrippa than on all other Romans,' I said, and my exaggeration was pardonable. I sat long hours by his bedside, and watched his light flicker. Livia, who had learned to love him too, who had rejoiced by reason of her own incorruptible virtue, in his fidelity, moral worth and good sense, herself nursed him tenderly. She was angry because Julia seemed less caring, and refused to accept either her pregnancy or her youth as an excuse. 'She is no longer a girl, but a woman of twenty-eight,' she snapped.

  I assured Agrippa I would care tenderly for his children, even though I knew he had no need of reassurance. I would adopt my grandsons. 'They shall rule the Empire we have won together,' I promised.

  'Take care, Caesar,' he murmured through his cracked lips, in a voice that had lost any echo of the parade ground, 'take care not to breed them as princes. Remember we are all only citizens of the Republic.'

  That was Agrippa's strength. The doubts which afflicted me that we had corrupted the Republic by the manner of our restoration never disturbed him. No historian, he believed that the great Scipio Africanus would have lived happily in our Rome, content with its forms, and did not realize that he could have done so only as Agrippa or Augustus. No great man has ever had so modest a sense of his own merit as Agrippa, and yet I have known none prouder. Perhaps in the end every character remains an enigma.

  The better you know a man, the less clear your picture of him. Perhaps again that is as it should be. Who would care for the world to know him as he knows himself? Looking back over this autobiography, I shudder at what it reveals to the world. I should kill the slaves to whom I dictate it. (No, if you have taken that down, cross it out; it's a joke for your own benefit. You find it a sour one? The best jokes so often are.)

  Agrippa died peacefully in the hour before dawn when Death is most greedy. I decreed him the posthumous honour of burial in our family mausoleum. Having assumed the office of Pontifex Maximus the previous year on the long-delayed death of the wretched Lepidus, I conducted the funeral service, and delivered the laudatory oration myself. Because of this I had had to absent myself from the moment of death, for it is written that a Pontifex Maximus may not look on the dead. Of course, in the nature of things, this is a prohibition impossible to enforce, since it is usual for the High Priest also to be a military commander. (Remember that Julius was Pontifex Maximus as he slaughtered Gauls and citizens.) But I was deterrnined to do all in correct form, lest careless neglect of what was right might offend the Gods, and sour Agrippa's reception in the Shades.

  My peroration summed up the significance of Agrippa's life, after I had recounted the many feats he had performed:

  'His birth, as I have said, was insignificant; yet no man has done more for Rome. Moreover, unlike many men of comparatively humble birth, he did not allow this accident of fortune to make him envious of those who were nobly born. Rather, he set himself to demonstrate that, if some men acquire merit from their ancestors, a single man of virtue and great qualities can confer honour and nobility on his descendants. Whatever has been achieved for Rome in the last three decades owes much to Agrippa. He has been a great general, a great proconsul, a great administrator and a great builder. He was never corrupted by ambition or riches. He refused many honours and triumphs. He worked selflessly for the public good, and found his reward in the work he accomplished. He himself used to say: "From concord, small seeds grow to great trees, from discord stem great disasters."

  'My right hand is burned in the pyre. I have lost my noblest friend, my daughter has lost the truest and tenderest of husbands, Rome has lost her greatest son. His work only remains to sweeten our grief. His monument may be found in the happy condition of the Republic . . .'

  What more could I have said? At such moments words are inadequate. Agrippa himself was no man of words. The memoirs he left behind are plaguey dull and do him no justice. Indeed, they might be read as the work of a quite unremarkable man. My grief was intense. With Agrippa departed my sense that I might still build. My youth slipped into the shadows, and I felt myself old. I would never leave Italy again, as it happened, for without the security of his support, my disinclination to travel intensified.

  Agrippa made me his principal heir. I am always of course proud and pleased to receive legacies, for nothing else so surely lets one know the esteem in which one is held by one's friends; in this case, of course, I regarded the inheritance as being held in trust for the boys.

  Julia gave birth a month after her husband's death. Whether this cast some malign influence on the child's fate, I do not know, but this boy, known as Agrippa Postumus, was very different from his brothers and sisters. He grew up dull and even brutish, and has been a sore trial to us all. To my great grief he has proved unable to take the place in the State that should have been his. Yet he has, more than Gaius and Lucius, a look of his father (they took after Julia and myself); but it is an Agrippa without insight or fortitude, an Agrippa, as it were, who had never left the family fields, one who plodded behind oxen and cursed the weather.

  My heart went out to Julia, widowed a second time, and left with five children, though of course I made myself responsible for the older boys. I was also disturbed by thoughts of my own mortality, for in our youth Agrippa's robust health had seemed to mock my own illnesses. I was fifty-one, and Gaius was only eight. What would happen if I died? I knew there were many rancorous nobles who would be happy to avenge on the beautiful and innocent children the slights they imagined they had suffered at my hands. It was essential their safety should be secured. It was essential Julia should marry again, and marry someone who could be trusted to protect the boys' interests if I died. Livia agreed with me.

  She said, 'I respect your love and care for Gaius and Lucius, and of course I share it. You may rely on me to do all I can to safeguard them, but I am of course only a woman, and so cannot have any constitutiona
l status. I am enough of a realist to know that any influence I now have is only what you choose to allow me, and has been earned only by the trust that has grown between us in the long years of our marriage. But I am sensible, my dear, that this influence will wane, should I be so unhappy as to survive you. In any case, I don't know that I would wish to take any part in political life if that happened. I imagine my mourning would be too profound and prolonged. So you are right: it is essential that Julia marry again.'

  I pressed her hand and touched it with my lips.

  She continued: 'There's another argument which I feel bound to advance even though you won't like it. Even if there were no children, Julia would need a husband. Otherwise, I'm sorry, but she is likely to disgrace us. Sex isn't a subject I have ever felt comfortable talking about. Nevertheless I've got to. Julia has appetites. That's all I can bring myself to say, except this. I've always tried to behave as if I was indeed her mother, but I'm not of course. And you've always regarded her as your child entirely. Well, that's understandable, but she ism fact Scribonia's daughter, and we all know what she's like. It's nonsense to suppose that children don't inherit qualities from both their parents, even though I'm happy to say that I don't see anything of their wretched father in Tiberius and Drusus. So we're agreed Julia must have a husband. The question is: who should it be?'

  We argued that matter for some time. Julia had a good many friends of her own age among the nobility, and as far as birth went, there was a fair choice of suitable candidates. Some of them, though by no means all, had character and achievement to recommend them too. But they all suffered from one irremediable defect: there was none I could trust to act as a guardian for Gaius and Lucius.

  Livia herself failed to suggest a solution. I therefore decided to consult Julia. I pointed out how important it was that she should marry for the boys' sake. I spoke more openly to her about this than I have ever done to anyone else.

  'Listen, darling,' I said, 'you are my only child and your happiness is of the first importance to me. Never forget that . . . My dearest wish is that you and your children should enjoy enduring good fortune . . . Now I am already old, and in the nature of things may die at any moment. I have had two passions in life: Rome and my family. They are inextricably interwoven in my love and my ambition. I have, as you know, restored the Republic . . .'

  'I know those,' she said, 'who consider that a fraud. They say it's only a fagade. That behind it you're a king in all but name . . .'

  'I'm the First Citizen, that's all,' I said. 'Your friends are mischievous talkers, my dear. At another time I'd ask you for their names.' (I hardly needed to of course; I could put names to them without difficulty.) 'What I've done,' I said, 'is restore order and stability. You can hardly, thank goodness, recall the Civil Wars. They were horrible, and I've made it my mission to see that we don't have any more. That's meant, I admit, a curtailment of some liberty. Well, liberty is only good when it is obedient to the law. I don't want to give you a lecture on political philosophy, you'd soon be yawning your pretty head off if I did, but what I say is true. No state can exist without an organizing intelligence. I hope that that will be supplied by Gaius and Lucius, in time.'

  'They're charming,' she said, 'and I dote on them, but we can't really measure their ability. Poor Gaius isn't even nine yet. Besides, they might be happier as private citizens. None of my friends has to work as hard as you - you won't allow them to of course, but then it's true too that they mostly delight in leisure. The art of life is seen among those with leisure, not among the worker bees. All I'm saying is that you're wrong to assume everyone wants to work as hard as you. Or that it's necessarily a good thing. You may be trying to force the boys into a mould that doesn't suit them.'

  She was wrong, absolutely wrong. I knew it then, and it angered me. The boys' lives were to prove how wrong she was. I caught a glimpse of Julia and her idle friends, laughing away everything I valued. I heard the tinkle of mockery that ran through the Smart Younger Set. What had I done? I had outlived my time and emasculated Rome. I felt that in a moment of horror like the emptiness that comes when you awake from sleep in the black of night and hear only silence.

  'Besides,' she said, and laughed, 'I seem to have been always married. I rather fancy a freedom from husbands.'

  She kissed me on the top of the head and flitted away, not even conscious of my anger. Or was she conscious, and did not care? It might be that it pleased her to have made me angry.

  Of course I turned to Maecenas for advice, as I had always done. Though our relations had grown more distant Maecenas enjoyed poor health (with some stress on the enjoyment) and declared himself frankly bored with public affairs nowadays, a residual loyalty which we felt for each other could be relied on. But, whereas I would once have strolled to his house on the Esquiline, I now sent a message in advance. That would allow him to get Bathyllus, whom I found repellent even in his stage performances, out of the way.

  Maecenas kept me waiting in a room over-furnished and cluttered with bibelots. The wall-paintings depicted a variety of acts of congress. It was a tease asking me to wait there; there had always been a sharp streak of malice in my friend.

  'Of course you're out of place here,' he said, 'these decorations aren't your taste now, are they? You've gone all stuffy. But it's just as well to remind you, old dear, that there are other sides of life.'

  He was a frightful colour and mere skin and bone. That took my anger away. Even his mockery was now interrupted by a hacking cough.

  He grimaced, and said, 'Not that there's much life left in me, ducky. Still, always smiling, always smiling, as the Greeks say.

  You want something. It can't be a boy, which I could perhaps provide, so it must be advice. Julia?' 'That's clever of you.'

  'Obvious, my dear. Poor Julia. I saw her at a dinner-party last week. She looked stunning, and so eager and yet wasted. I said to myself, poor dear, you haven't really got a lot out of life, have you? Not for a fun-loving chap, which you are. Of course, I have a certain empathy with Julia. She's my sort of girl, old dear.'

  It was far too hot in the room and a sickly scent wafted through it.

  'You're just the same as always though, when I speak in a way you don't like.' Maecenas poured wine and passed me a glass; too sweet as usual. 'You just sit there like a demure little cat and wash your face with your paws. But I'm not going to let you get away with it. You don't understand Julia and I'm going to tell you a few unwelcome truths. She loathed being married to Agrippa. She had to close her eyes and grit her teeth when he made love to her. Don't ask me how I know, I just know. And don't put my words down to spite. I know just what Agrippa was worth, but I know Julia too. She's a big strong girl and she likes men (or boys) who are softer than herself. She's androgynous enough not to feel happy with anyone but a fellow androgyne. You've forgotten your own youth, that's the trouble with you, old dear. The first marriage to Marcellus might have worked if it hadn't been that she knew that you and Marcellus and she made a triangle. She was besotted with you then, old dear, and you were besotted with Marcellus who was alas, alas - a charming girl but one who couldn't look away from the mirror. So really that was no good. Have some more wine. You can't think how I've been dying to tell you this.'

  He stretched out on the couch ('I can't stand for long these days, in any sense of the word,' he giggled), and dangled his jewelled hand.

  'So what did you do then? You married her off to old Agrippa who was quite the wrong sort of father-figure, and who bored the poor girl silly with his boasting, as well as disgusting her physically. She turned against you then. It was one thing being married off to Marcellus, whom she was jealous of, but fancied, quite another being handed over to that old bruiser. But she's game, your daughter, and she did her best. She toed the line. And now at last she's free.'

  Maecenas could never tell the truth about people. The disability had grown more acute with the years. He was a slave of gossip and innuendo. You could discount most of what
he said. You could never discount the core. I sat there, neglecting the too sweet wine, oppressed by the cloying perfumes blown through the room, and waited for what I had after all invited.

  'Love,' he said, and let it hang in the air. 'You know, old dear, till Bathyllus came along I fought shy of love. Oh yes, I have never been without my loves, none knows that better than yourself. But I avoided, except in one case, love's degradation. You know the case of course. What do I mean by degradation? Enslavement, what else? Knowing you can never please, knowing you can never possess, longing to possess fully, utterly, and yet at the same time longing for your beloved to trample on you. Isn't it strange, after all these years, to be saying this to you, and you still can't understand. You still have to be in control. You find my association - that's the word you use, isn't it? - my association with Bathyllus degrading. It's abject, isn't it, my surrender to him? You've never surrendered to anyone, not even Livia. I'll go further. You chose a wife who would be embarrassed by surrender. Oh yes, you're subject to her in little things and everyone laughs at it because it makes you seem human. But not in big things, eh? All your life everyone's had to yield to your monstrous will. Monstrous.'

  He broke off in a fit of coughing. His skin shone yellow. I couldn't move, in fact I waited for him to continue. I felt nothing but impatience. There was absolute silence when he finished coughing. Nothing moved in the house. Whatever fan had been blowing the perfume through the room must have been stopped. We were held there, like prisoners, in the room's cloying stillness.