Augustus

by Allan Massie

  No, his withdrawal to Rhodes must, I thought, have deeper roots. (I know now of course that my explanation was too metaphysical.) It seemed to represent a profound dissatisfaction with the way things were, a hunger for some assurance of significance. Consider how he occupied himself on Rhodes, with his astronomical studies.

  When he gazed into the heavens, and I into the mouth of Avernus, were we not both seeking the same thing?

  ELEVEN

  For the last three weeks I have been sleepless and irresolute. My nerves jangle. Every now and then, two or three times a day in fact, a mist has swum across my eyes. I have a pain in my left side, and my appetite cannot be tempted even by anchovies, cheese or peaches. I have caught Livia observing me with a measuring scrutiny, and I cannot work. Even my correspondence has fallen behind.

  I have told myself all this is the unavoidable working of old age, that I can feel Death's dusty breathing. I know this is no more than a half-truth, and all my life I have tried to go beyond half-truths; not for any moral reason, but because, whatever one says in public, a politician cannot rest content with the knowledge of half-truths. Ability to see things as they are is the pre-condition of judgement.

  And I cannot escape the conclusion that it is this autobiography that has made me ill.

  Oh, I have troubles enough. As ever the family worries me. The next generation, how remote from me. Drusus' son Germanicus is a fine boy, with the coltish confidence of youth, but he irritates Tiberius who sees him only as a poor version of his father. There is enough of Drusus in the boy to remind Tiberius of the brother with whom alone of men he was easy; and yet the differences - Germanicus' callow optimism which renders him inferior to his father - are such that Tiberius views him with suspicious resentment, not unmixed with contempt. I see rough water ahead in that relationship.

  Then Drusus' other boy, Claudius, is a sad problem. He stammers and slobbers. (It is disgusting to be near him at mealtimes.) His own mother, Antonia, though the best and noblest of women, describes him as 'a monster'. 'Nature began to make a man, but gave up on the job,' she once said to me. Livia can hardly bear to look at him. She has often said that she can't understand how Drusus and Antonia, both splendid creatures, could have produced such a . . . and then she snaps her finger and seems lost for a word that will adequately describe the unfortunate boy.

  Naturally his presence has been embarrassing and we have had all sorts of family discussions about it. Can he be permitted for instance to appear in public? 'The question is,' Tiberius once said to me, 'whether he has full command of his five senses.' 'Until we can decide on that,' I replied, 'he had better be kept in the background. The public mustn't be given the chance to laugh at him, and I'm afraid they would.' Yet the boy is not altogether a fool; he has brains of a sort; but he looks the sort of freak they display at fairs. I'm afraid he will have no sort of future at all, for he is clearly unsuited to public life.

  And then there is my own grandson Agrippa Postumus, given to fits of uncontrollable violence . . .

  Still, it is a May morning, and the sun is shining. The sea sparkles as if the world was young . . .

  I must bring myself to it. I have this absurd notion - no, I don't think it is really absurd - that I won't be well again till I have done so. And what is the point of autobiography if it doesn't tell the truth? (A question I remember Horace asking, with a smile so self-consciously impudent as to be in fact apologetic, when he told me he had been perusing Caesar's memoirs again, and found them disingenuous; I was so pleased that I sent him some Rhaetian wine, telling him it was much better than the Falernian he was in the habit of praising, though I didn't actually say why I was sending him the present. I wonder if he guessed.)

  But I digress. I digress because I want to. There is always truth in digression - it reveals the speaker's mind. And mine is uneasy.

  It was just such a morning as this. I remember that bird-like lightness of morning spirit when sunlight dances on the young leaves, and the day is not yet hot. Finches flitted, pink, gold and green with a flash of white among the fruit trees, and a blackbird was singing in an ilex at the bottom of the garden. I had not yet retired to the loggia but was dictating a letter to Lucius, who was then in Spain. As I spoke, I could see him clearly, and it was as if I heard his affectionate chatter.

  And then Livia emerged from the house. It was going to be a hot day but she wore a dark gown. I remember thinking: how worn her face is.

  She sat down beside me, and told the slaves to go away. She was holding a document, perhaps a letter, in her hand, which shook slightly, and, perhaps to disguise this, she raised it before her face and began to fan herself with it. . .

  I don't suppose the birds really stopped singing . . .

  She said, 'I don't know how to tell you what I have to tell you.'

  'Which of them is it?'

  'No,' she said, 'it's not the boys.'

  It was as if a crab released its claws from my heart.

  'It's worse, because it's not only sad but disgraceful too.'

  From the farm across the lake a cock crew, loudly, several times while we sat frozen in the climbing sun.

  At last she said: 'I had decided as I came down the garden just to let you read this. It's a police report. But now I find I can't - just lay it before you. I can't be so cowardly.'

  And then she told me. Her words have died away, though the cock still crows its derisive challenge to the morning, and I cannot piece them together in my broken and disordered memory. She spoke as gently and, as it were, lovingly, as she knew how. I am sure of that.

  The police report concerned my daughter Julia. Agents had watched her for a long time, for she had been suspected of contravention of the laws against immorality. At last her behaviour had become blatant - Livia pressed the document into my hands, and the fingers that touched mine were icy-cold - 'Subject, after a dinner-party, where much wine had been consumed, staggered with her companions into the forum, and there mounted the Rostra from which position she solicited the custom of chance passers-by, to the pleasure of her associates, who called out, "Roll up, roll up, for the best-born f…. in Rome . . ."'

  'Have you read this?'

  Livia nodded.

  I had to order a thorough investigation. In Sicily there is an expression: 'to swallow a toad'. It is employed when one has to accept an unacceptable fact. My own daughter was the monstrous and slimy toad I was compelled to swallow. The catalogue of her lovers and debauchery was long, detailed, and nauseating. As I read, I felt her loving and deceitful arms pressed round my neck, her soft lips proclaiming love against my cheek. But where else had those ruby lips been? What noisome work had that tongue done?

  The pictures in my mind ... I forced the toad down.

  The catalogue of lovers ranged from members of the old nobility to lusty slaves and freedmen.

  'Augustus,' said my chief of police, 'we have evidence of worse than immorality. There is criminal conspiracy here too. Look at these names, Iullus Antonius, grandson of the triumvir, Sempronius Gracchus, Cornelius Scipio, Appius Claudius Pulcher, it's a roll-call of the disaffected old nobility. We have evidence which suggests that there was a plan to poison Tiberius so that Antonius might marry the widow and be in a position, in the event of your death, to supplant her sons the Princes. We have a letter too which suggests that the poison that would be employed on Tiberius should then be used on you. I am sorry to tell you this, but you have been kept ignorant too long. I urged your wife to tell you some months ago . . .'

  Maecenas had called Iullus Antonius 'a pretty boy'. 'We have evidence that the affair with Gracchus goes back even to the days of her marriage to Marcus Agrippa . . .' So Agrippa wore horns? 'We have evidence . . .' 'We have evidence . . .' 'We have evidence . . .'

  She asked to see me. I saw her eyes swimming with tears and her body slack with apprehension, and I heard soft lies, and declined. 'We have evidence . . .'

  Screeds and screeds of eye-witness accounts, too horrid to brood
on, depositions taken from slaves, some tortured to extract the truth, some spouting evidence like fountains to escape torture. (But tortured all the same, to test their story.)

  'We have evidence . . .' crowing vice and defiance to the morning air.

  'We have evidence . . .' secret meetings, plots laid, seditious talk, laughter and resentment, the mockery of soft men who had never ventured to the frontier camps, the anger of empty men who resented government. . .

  'We have evidence . . .'

  'Prepare a digest for Gaius and Lucius, the Princes of the Youth Movement'; but when the digest, which recorded their mother's vice in the barest terms, had been made, I could not bring myself to send it.

  How could I tell them what I had feared to know myself?

  'We have evidence . . .' The cock crew, the documents piled up unfolding, in the May sunshine, the record of loveless coupling, debauchery and treason. Julia wrote again, a long epistle, now grovelling, now whining, now defiant, now abject in self-justification: my love had always been selfish and domineering; I had never asked her what she wanted; I had made her my instrument; I had forced her into loveless marriages; I had sought to steal the love of her first husband and I had stolen the love of her sons. She was repentant, she promised she would amend her life; her disgrace was my disgrace; any pain she suffered would be compensated by the pain she was inflicting on me, for I deserved it, I had brought it on myself by my callous manipulation of her life, and it was my fault. And in the next sentence she promised me enduring love and swore she would be dutiful.

  'We have evidence . . .' Livia never once, by any flicker of a cold and satisfied eye, reminded me of her thirty years of warnings.

  'We have evidence . . .' Julia's handmaiden, a Greek called Phoebe, alarmed by its weight piling against her own reputation, rose before dawn and hanged herself from the lintel of my daughter's house. 'I would I were Phoebe's father!' I cried out; but Julia, my agents reported, wept to hear of the girl's death. Were they lovers too? 'We have evidence that. . .'

  Tiberius wrote to me from Rhodes. His letter was calm, dignified and laconic . . .

  My wife, suffering perhaps from a species of desperation that can, my doctors tell me, afflict women as they approach middle-life, has behaved in a manner that is worse than foolish. The peculiarly public nature of her conduct must touch the bounds of forgiveness, for, as princeps, you can hardly fail to interpret it as a public challenge to the admirable legislation you have caused to be passed. Yet I appeal to you, in your public and private capacity, to show clemency. Clemency would become you both as Father of our Country, and as father of your unfortunate daughter. I would beg you to consider that my own absence, the result of my intense weariness of spirit and body, and of my desire to allow Gaius and Lucius to flourish, may have contributed to my wife's aberrations. Clemency is good in itself. The harsh letter of justice will be like a knife you yourself drive into your own heart. . .

  When news of Tiberius' plea became known - as these things always do - there were many quick to say that he was anxious primarily to safeguard his own position as my son-in-law; but I am now convinced that his plea on his wife's behalf was an illustration of his true nobility of character.

  At the time I felt differently. It seemed impertinent. Perhaps in my heart I agreed with the reproach he directed at himself. If he had done his duty as Julia's husband we would have been spared this. I would have been spared. I did not then comprehend the part played by Julia's conduct in his decision to withdraw to Rhodes.

  As it was, I immediately commanded a bill of divorce to be drawn up in his name. I wrote informing him of this. As if to reprove me, he allowed Julia to keep the presents which he had given her. This is not of course normal custom, and it could only be interpreted as a protest.

  The evidence overwhelmed me. I wrote in guarded terms to the boys, merely telling them that their mother had disgraced herself, imperilled the whole family's future, willingly associated herself with a group of dissidents, and must suffer the appropriate penalties. They were horrified, but saw reason, welcome and reassuring proof of their civic virtue, which I had never doubted. But then, till the cock crew evidence to the open air, I had never doubted Julia's love for me.

  I was left no choice. Had I been a private citizen, I would still have had to punish my daughter's crimes. Their nature and their full extent could not be hidden. I therefore forwarded the evidence to the Senate, asking them to take the appropriate action against her lovers, who had offended against both the laws of morality and the statutes of treason. Their sedition was manifest. The court had no hesitation in condemning Antonius, Gracchus, Appius Claudius Pulcher, Cornelius Scipio and the vile T. Quinctius Crispinus, whose presence in the list had made me choke and spew, to the death they merited. All five were consigned to the Mamertine prison, historic execution-chamber of Rome. The sentence relieved the public mind of the fear of Revolution; yet deepened my depression. It was forty-two years since Julius' murder, forty since Philippi, twenty-nine since Actium, and it was now revealed that numerous members of the old political class had not reconciled themselves to the New Order, but still craved the savage excitements of disorderly faction. After long study of the evidence, I recommended that only Iullus Antonius should be put to death, and that the others should be sent into perpetual exile. That fate would, I hoped, be sufficient warning to other dissidents. I could not bring myself however to ask for mercy to be extended to Iullus Antonius, for I regarded him as the engineer of my daughter's fate. This son of Antony and Fulvia inherited the beauty of both parents (though his was of a more effeminate stamp than either his mother's or his father's) and the selfish and vicious temperament of Fulvia; there was nothing in him of that generosity of spirit which shone among Antony's vices like a jewel in a dunghill; I shuddered to think how he would have disposed of Gaius and Lucius had he achieved his ambition of marrying Julia.

  I could not bring myself to see my daughter, though Livia reported her to be penitent. She had hurt me too deeply. Livia suggested that she be required to live on one of my country estates, but I knew that she would soon resume her former way of life in such circumstances. When a woman has once become a whore, no reform is possible; she is like a dog which has turned to killing sheep. I therefore determined that her exile should be more complete, and banished her to the island of Pandataria. I ordered that she should not be permitted to drink wine, but this command was not intended primarily as a punishment. Julia was in danger of becoming an habitual drunkard, and I believed that compelled to abstain from wine she might come in time to review her conduct and arrive at a correct judgement of her behaviour. For obvious reasons I also ordered that she be denied male company.

  I have never seen her since, though some years ago, learning that her quiet and narrow life had indeed had some of the consequences for which I hoped, I permitted her to live on the mainland of Italy, at Reggio Calabria.

  Julia's beauty and charm had always made her popular with the Roman people. When they received the news of her sentence, a deputation approached me begging that I rescind it and permit her to return to Rome. I read in their faces a condemnation of what they judged to be my harshness; they pitied Julia, careless of how she had wounded me.

  I put an angry stop to their nonsense.

  'If you ever bring up this matter again,' I said, 'may the Gods curse you with daughters as lecherous as mine, and with wives as adulterous as Julia.'

  TWELVE

  It was painful writing that chapter about Julia's disgrace, and when I had at last brought myself to do so, I sickened of this memoir. It felt as if the bile deposited by that episode had collected itself in a ball, and made it impossible for me to continue. I laid the task aside, and only resume it now, in this the seventy-seventh year of my life because I hate things to be incomplete, and because death now stares me in the face. It is necessary to make some kind of summing-up, and to ask myself to judge how I have played my part in this comedy of life.

  A pai
nful comedy, where promise is so often dulled, and where the Gods work with a keen and cruel irony.

  I could not help myself blaming Tiberius for his part in Julia's disgrace, even though in my heart I knew that he had fled to Rhodes because he was as disgusted by her behaviour as I was to be, and because he knew that he was impotent to control her. Nevertheless, it seemed to me in my misery that he had abdicated his domestic responsibility as completely as his responsibility as a servant of the Empire, and, so, when the term of his tribunician power expired, I saw no reason to renew it. Let him crumble in Rhodes, I said to myself, let him taste leisure.

  He was himself alarmed by this lapse in his nominal authority, or perhaps he had become bored with his narrow life on the island. At any rate he now wrote to me requesting permission to return to Rome:

  'Now that my stepsons, Gaius and Lucius, are full-grown and taking their places with distinction in the government of the Empire,' he wrote, 'I may say clearly that my principal reason for retiring from public life, apart from weariness, and the long fatigue of service on the harsh frontiers of Empire, was to avoid the suspicion of any rivalry with them. But, since they are now acknowledged as the heirs to the Principate, that reason is no longer valid, and I am anxious to return to the city if only to visit my family, whom I sorely miss, and in particular to be whatever comfort I may be to my beloved mother and you, my gracious stepfather, in your old age.'

  Tiberius has no gift for correspondence. This letter seemed to me as insolent as that in which he had announced his desire to settle on Rhodes.

  My reply was brief:

  'It was of your own choice that you settled on Rhodes, against my will, denying me your help. You had better remain there and abandon all hope of visiting your family, whom you were so eager to desert. Your mother is in excellent health . . .'