Augustus i-1

by Allan Massie

  Agrippa now captured Patrae and Leucas, and as a result was able to place his fleet across Antony's communications. He would have to fight his way back to Egypt and we could meanwhile intercept his supplies.

  I had only to wait. We had got ourselves in a position which we could only lose by making a false stroke. I was determined to sit tight and compel Antony to move.

  There were only two clouds. First, my health was poor all that summer, though no doubt I suffered less on the heights than Antony's wretched army beset by flies, fever and on famine rations, in the plain below. Every day we could see fatigue parties sent beyond the lines to dig mass graves for the fever-victims. But I myself suffered from a persistent sore throat. My skin was dry and hot. I slept ill at nights. My digestion was poor and already I was a slave to the kidney-disease which, as you know, has compelled me to follow a strict diet.

  And then there was Livia. She had stayed behind in Rome (where I had left Maecenas in charge) to look after the children. I missed her for she had been my companion on my happiest campaigns. Worse, though, were her letters. She could neither forgive nor forget the affair of the will. She wrote coldly and brusquely about the children's health. Here is a specimen: We leave to-morrow first for your villa at Velletri, then for the house my father left us on the Bay of Naples. I shall be glad to be out of the city which is now disagreeably hot. The children are well and send you respectful greetings. Drusus, I am glad to say, shows sign of developing his athletic abilities. He really rides very well now. Tiberius has been in a silent and withdrawn state. I would pray that he does not fall a victim to the congenital malady of low spirits which so easily affects Claudians. I cannot but remember how his father would sink into supine depression. It is too often the fate of proud and sensitive natures which lack that capacity for self-approbation that enables many much less well-born to achieve more, since their equanimity permits them to do even what they know to be wrong without self-reproach. Tiberius is not like that. When he errs (as all children do) and has to suffer merited reproof, his self-esteem is sorely wounded, and he is then very likely to refrain from any further effort. It is the dark side of that Claudian pride which has on the other hand spurred so many of his family to do great service to the Republic. Julia, of course, has no such inhibitions. She dislikes being reproved (as I am sorry to say she frequently has to be), but it is not pride that is wounded in her case. She has, I am afraid, little natural sense of morality, which is to be regretted even if it hardly surprises me now. Her dislike of reproof is rather an expression of injured vanity – something quite different from pride, as different indeed as the true buffalo-milk cheese of Campania is from the cheap imitations sold in Rome. It offends her that anyone should dare not to think her perfect – I am afraid she is very spoiled – but instead of considering whether the reproof be deserved, and examining her own conscience – which indeed she could hardly do, for Octavia agrees with me that she possesses no such thing – she takes umbrage and is ready to reproach whoever has corrected her; usually, I am sorry to say, myself. Yet, I must say too that she and Tiberius are very close to each other. He is very loving and patient though she teases him endlessly and it may be therefore that his noble character will have some influence over hers, and do something to mitigate the selfishness, waywardness, conceit and capriciousness that are her chief faults. Still I must confess myself doubtful. Julia is so convinced of her own perfections that it is hard to believe her susceptible to any influence. I am sorry to hear that you are in poor health; still, your constitution is such that you cannot expect ever to be free of ailments or infirmities. Moreover, I understand that the Greek climate is too frequently enervating. I am well myself, though as I say, I shall be glad to be out of the city. Your obedient wife, Livia. Ouch, you might say, what a letter; not a word of love and a sting in every sentence. Everything she said about poor little Julia was clearly intended for me. When I replied I tried to mollify her: Livia, I know you think you have cause to write to me in the cold and unloving tone of your letters. Believe me when I say that though your voice and words pain me, they only add to the love and respect I feel for you. I know the cause and respect it. Do you wish me to defend my actions? Perhaps I should do so. Perhaps I can only do so when the sea is between us, and I am poised here on the mountains overlooking Antony's camp and waiting, with a touch of fever in soul as well as body, for the battle that will determine whether my life will be of service to Rome, or will only be remembered as a bitter comedy of trivial ambition. You see, my dear and only girl, the state I find myself in. Do not, pray, be offended that, despite your coldness and your anger that throbs below that coldness and inspires it, I address you in this way. You are the only woman I have ever loved, fully as a man can love a woman, that is to say utterly, and if you withdraw that love from me then there is very little in my private life that could comfort me, that could protect me from the ravages that public life very surely inflicts on a man. You are my strength and my refuge. Do not deny me. You are not only the one woman I have loved in this way, but I know in my bones there will never be another.

  I can write these words, though I could not say them to you. And this is perhaps the one flaw in our marriage, and the rock that could break the fragile little raft on which we sail down life's river. In one sense – perhaps more than one, but certainly this one – We are too alike. We are both reticent. We both find difficulty in talking about what we feel. We both retreat when we find ourselves in disagreement into a silence that grows more and more bitter and unforgiving the longer it lasts. And it is this silence which could corrupt and kill our love. Not a single action, but a long brooding in which resentment festers. I do not know if I could survive that. You are in many ways stronger than I am, but, if that happened, if the love we have developed for each other, a love which has matured over the years of our marriage, should be poisoned, something would die in you too. You would, I think, be confined in the bonds of a narrow and unforgiving rectitude. You have, if you will allow me to say so (and try to remember that I speak out of love), a certain timidity which expresses itself in an unwillingness to contemplate the way others live and think. Perhaps this is the form that the Claudian pride takes in you. Indeed I am sure it is. What I can give you is true confidence and gaiety. Do not cut yourself off from what I can provide.

  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 husban
d, 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 clan 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 un
wise 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.