Augustus i-1

by Allan Massie

  'Like a right royal bitch,' Agrippa said. 'You never saw the like. I have attended theatres in many cities, but I never saw an actress like the Queen. You'd better be on your guard, lest she seduce you too. It would make a notable haul, wouldn't it? First Himself, then Antony and then you, Octavian. And she's capable of it. Don't fool yourself otherwise.' She was simply attired, in mourning white, her hair loose; and she wore no jewels. She looked older than her age, with little crevices of lines running from the corners of her eyes and mouth. Only the eyes themselves contradicted this impression. Almond-coloured and rather large, they sparkled with an unquenchable vivacity. When she spoke her voice was deeper and harsher than I remembered it as being. Her manner was composed and confident.

  She began with compliments. Her dead lord had spoken much of the nobility of my character. The war between us had been unfortunate, the result of a concatenation of circumstance and misunderstanding. She understood of course that I had been angered by Antony's abandonment of my sister, and his preference for her. But where the God Eros struck, mortals were powerless. Egypt had no quarrel with Rome, and indeed Egypt was sensible that its prosperity depended on the strength and vigour of Rome. She had been taught that early, by none other than my father.

  So far, she had spoken as if to persuade me by reason. Though I was of course aware of the depths of her hypocrisy, I still felt the charm of her manner and personality and the strength of her intellect working on my mind and imagination. Now, having introduced Julius' name, she paused.

  'Everything I know I learned from your great and most noble father,' she said. 'He was my teacher and master as well as my lover. His presence was intoxicating. He came on me with the freshness of a spring morning, and I blossomed like a summer flower in his Sun's rays. You, Caesar, are, I see now, his most worthy heir, the inheritor of his genius and his vision. He told me he saw Egypt as the garden and granary of Rome, and I as its gardener and farmer. An unromantic role for a young girl, you may say, but he told me that with a laugh, and I found him as convincing as he was irresistible. Caesar, I have erred in opposing you, and my error rested in my willingness to be guided by my dead lord. Antony was a great man, and a noble man, and there is no shame in my memory of him. But there is regret. Regret, because my love for Antony led me to stray from Caesar's precepts, and to follow Antony in his mad ambition which led to war against Caesar's heir. Only now that Antony's splendour can no longer dazzle me, do I see the error of my ways. And so, Caesar, I have come to lay Egypt at your royal and conquering feet, to throw myself on your generous mercy, to remind your father's son of what I meant to your father and to pray that we may together resume the work, the great work of harmony between Rome and Egypt on which we embarked, Caesar and I. For, most noble General, I say this to you: Rome and Egypt are bound together as Egypt is wedded to the Nile and Rome to the Middle Sea; and I am Egypt and you, most puissant General, are Rome'; and, saying this, she threw her head back in proud self-assertion, and sank to her knees before me. What a performance.

  I felt her power, her quite remarkable seductiveness. It was like listening to the deepest most desirable temptation; it held promises of bliss and power. I understood how Antony had found himself caught like a beast in a net. I looked away.

  'Great Queen,' I said, 'your words touch me. I too loved Antony and regret the separation of our ways. I too revere the memory of my father, and I recognize that Egypt and Rome are bound together. But this great war has displaced much, and this is not the moment to make any speedy decision on the nature of the future relationship between our countries. I shall ponder all you have said. Rest assured that you will be treated in a manner worthy of your great name and nature, and that your fate will not be less than your deserts.'

  Her face grew pale. She quivered a moment, then, very slowly and now unwaveringly, rose to her feet. The audience was over.

  I gave orders that she be escorted to the Palace, and kept there with due honour, but under secure guard.

  'She shall appear in my Triumph,' I said to Agrippa, 'in chains, that Rome may be relieved of its long anxiety. And then we shall see what should be done.' A letter was brought me from Livia: Do not forget that the Queen is a woman and you honour yourself in treating her with honour and moderation. But I should be nervous and unhappy my dear, if you expose yourself to her charms. Her reputation frightens me… Octavia wrote: No woman, and no man either, has done me more bitter wrong than Cleopatra. And yet I find I pity her. To have dared so much and to have lost so completely stops my heart. I rejoice in your victory, brother, but I mourn Antony as the father of my children… What do you plan to do with his children by the Queen? I shudder to think of their significance. Cleopatra's fate was not of course my only concern, hardly even the chief one. The most urgent was the treatment of Egypt itself. I decided it was too rich and too important to be left in its semi-independent state; Julius had surely blundered in deciding so. Egypt must become a Roman province, for the food supply of Rome itself depended on its harvests. Moreover, I thought it best to keep it, for the time being at least, under my direct control. I therefore appointed Cornelius Gallus, a man in whom I reposed infinite trust, as its governor.

  Antony's legions had all laid down their arms. Some I incorporated into my own army, but it was obvious that with the triumphal end of the Civil Wars, it would be both possible and desirable to reduce the military establishment, and so I began to plan for the demobilization and settlement in colonies of the greater number of Antony's men. This work of reduction and resettlement was to dominate the next three years, and I may fairly but modestly claim that in its performance I met with a success that none of the great generals of the Republic had equalled, not even Pompey.

  Among those who tried to resist and were captured were Antyllus, Antony's son by Fulvia, and the boy called Caesarion, who had been proclaimed Julius' son by Cleopatra. Antyllus behaved shamefully, having to be dragged from the Temple of the Divine Julius, screaming for mercy. He tried indeed to cling to my father's image and the soldiers had to prise his fingers off it. Caesarion was captured by a cavalry patrol and accepted his fate with a dignity that did credit to his putative paternity. I ordered both to be put to death; they were too obvious foci for disaffection to make it possible to spare their lives.

  Cleopatra cheated my intentions. Fearing the mockery of the Roman crowd, realizing that her plea to be treated as a reigning Queen and confirmed in office had failed, she contrived to have a little snake, called an asp, smuggled to her bedchamber in a basket of figs. She then applied it to her breast. They say she did so lovingly and smiled as the poison worked. I could not be sorry, for, though she would have made a splendid show in my Triumph, I knew that I would have been unable to condemn her to death afterwards (as custom decrees) and that indeed Livia would not permit me to do so. Her continued presence could only be an embarrassment, and, on reflection, I was glad she had removed herself.

  I gave orders that she be buried beside Antony, and that their mausoleum be completed. May I be paid like honour by those I have wronged when my time comes!

  I was eager to leave Egypt, for its vice and corruption continued to disgust me, and I felt evil in the air. Only the pink delicacy of early mornings before the extreme heat of the day, when the Nile shimmered in awakening light, gave me any pleasure. But there is that in Egypt that can demean a man, and I felt both fear and loathing of the brooding presence of its ancient and obscene gods.

  Before leaving however, I fulfilled a last ambition. I ordered the sarcophagus which contains the mummified body of the Great Alexander to be removed from its Mausoleum in Alexandria, and gazed in wonder on the face of the most noble and brilliant of men, whose achievements none has matched, whose glory it is hard even to imagine. Its features were serene and beautiful. I crowned the head with a golden diadem and strewed the trunk with roses, violets and sweet-scented lemon-flowers.

  They asked me afterwards if I would now like to view the Mausoleum of the Ptolemies, and a
sked it with that sycophantic relish which the thought of Death brings to Egyptians. I replied, 'I have come to see a King, not a row of corpses'; but it is fitting that the last word of Egypt should lie with Death.

  BOOK TWO

  PREFACE

  The reader will, I trust, now find himself in full agreement with my judgement that the first Book of these Memoirs, from its happy and impudent denunciation of Caesar's De Bello Gallico to its painful Egyptian finale, is written with a brio rare in Ancient, or, at least, Latin literature. He will, I trust, share my pleasure in the delight with which the Emperor so evidently wrote, and it seems to me that it would be but a mean spirit which did not respond joyfully, while hardly managing to restrain a certain envy for the fortunate young princes for whom this record was unrolled.

  Alas, the second Book is a different, and grimmer, matter. All is now oppressed with a sad sense of waste and desolation… 'Eheu, eheu, fugaces, Postume…' Alternatively one may recall those noble lines which Dryden gave to Aurungzebe: 'When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat. Yet fool'd by hope, men favour the deceit.' This is a book made grey by the Emperor's knowledge of whither it was tending. It echoes Virgil's 'lacrimae rerum', or, as Matthew Arnold put it, with felicitous gloom, 'the sense of tears in mortal things'.

  Who shall deny that Augustus had cause for grief? The hopes he had rested in his grandsons were destroyed by their untimely death; he could do no more for them than strew the garlands of his loving praise on their sad tomb! Moreover the book opens at the moment of receiving news of the greatest military disaster of his life, when Quintilius Varus, heedless of Augustus' warnings, rashly led three legions to utter destruction in the German forests.

  Here the Book starts and it covers a wide swathe of time as the restless Emperor moves forward and back in memory, forever seeking to account to himself for the afflictions that have befallen his latter years, that withdrawal of the favour of the Gods which brought his 'grey hairs in sorrow to the grave'.

  That this Book is harsher reading than the First goes without saying. It is in the first place less compact. It ignores strict sequence of events. Its mood is dark, only occasionally lightened by sunlit passages of domestic happiness or public achievement. There are also passages of an intense yearning which find no equal in the earlier Book or indeed in Latin literature outside Virgil himself. There are fewer vivid descriptions of public conflict, for Augustus had established his superiority, and there are – it must be said – some passages which modern readers may find pedestrian, in which he describes his constitutional settlement or recounts his handling of foreign affairs. Yet without such stuff the book would be incomplete. It is clear that Augustus intended to leave posterity a rounded picture of his work and his achievement; he could not do so if he eschewed the arid pastures of politics. Yet one has only to read these pages, and set them beside those in which he treats of his personal life, and then make a comparison with even the liveliest of modern political memoirs, to see how sparing Augustus has been of the pomposity and verbiage in which such records are generally cloaked; and if one does so, one will appreciate his forbearance and humanity.

  That a note of self-justification runs through these memoirs, it were vain to deny. Augustus committed great crimes, and knew it. It was natural that he should seek to explain them to himself and to whomsoever should read his book. There is truth in the old adage, qui s'excuse, s'accuse, and yet again one has only to read memoirs of modern political sinners such as ex-President Nixon or ex-Premier Wilson, whose confessions never rise beyond their own justification, to admire the flinty dignity with which Augustus refuses to deny the truth. In this context, one must add that this second Book is indeed more truthful than the first. In particular it affords us an understanding of the relationship between the young Augustus and Mark Antony which he could not bring himself to offer to his grandsons. It appears that the second Book was written intermittently over a period of five years, the last entries being made on the eve of his death. There are discrepancies: for instance, Chapter I treats with admirable honesty of his Res Gestae, that record of his Acts which he caused to be published throughout the Empire, and in this he states that he was then in his seventy-sixth year. Yet, at the beginning of the chapter, he has just received news of Varus' disaster. It would seem either that a preliminary version of the Res Gestae was in fact made earlier, and that a contemporary editor then corrected the Emperor's statement of his age to fit the published version, or that the passage relating to the Res Gestae was indeed written later than subsequent chapters and inserted here, for dramatic effect, by the same editor. Such questions are not likely however to disturb the common reader.

  It must be said that this is an old man's book. The style is sometimes loose, sometimes relapses into a weary formality; it lacks the vivacity of the earlier essay in autobiography. Myself, I find this appealing. Some readers will not agree, and will regret Gaius' and Lucius' deaths all the more for the literary loss it entailed. Clearly this Book was never revised, and sometimes the Emperor's memory is faulty: so, for instance, in Chapter IV he confuses the order of Agrippa's wives. It was not Caecilia Attica whom Agrippa divorced in order to marry Augustus' daughter Julia, but Augustus' own niece Marcella, the daughter of his sister Octavia and C. Claudius Marcellus. One wonders what caused this lapse of memory. Was it perhaps an unwillingness to recall that Marcella then married Iullus Antonius, himself later Julia's most notorious lover, the agent of her disgrace and victim of Augustus' anger, who was executed for treason as recounted in Chapter XI? One cannot tell. There may be no such deep reason. Augustus was clearly distressed while he wrote this fourth chapter for there is interpolated in it, almost at random, a letter from Tiberius written on the Rhine in which he describes the arrival in camp of a miserable remnant of Varus' legionaries – a truly horrible story which brought intense pain, grief and shame to Augustus. Such questions are perhaps for the psychologist rather than the classical scholar to ponder. Let it suffice to say here that the reader must be ever alert to follow the wanderings of the imperial mind through the years transversed in this second Book, and I would urge him (or her) to be ready to forgive the occasional mistakes and self-deception. That the man laboured heroically to be honest I have no doubt!

  It is hardly the duty of the editor to play the critic, but there are two beauties in the work to which I should like to draw the reader's attention. The first is the manner in which the Emperor treats of his relationship with Virgil. It is moving (to me at least) to see the humility with which the man of action regards the poet, and the awe in which he holds him. The second is his treatment of his marriage. The distinguished British novelist, Mr Anthony Powell, has remarked on the difficulty, even perhaps impossibility, of treating marriage, particularly a happy marriage, in a work of fiction. Unhampered by fictional demands as he was, it seems to me that the Emperor made a fair attempt! At the very least his sober and loving portrayal of Livia, though never hiding her faults or their disagreements, should rescue that great lady from the vile calumnies fathered on her grandson Claudius by the fecund imagination of the late Robert Graves, itself infected by the most scurrilous rumour-mongers of Ancient Rome.

  I may state in my capacity as Chairman of the Editorial Committee that Mr Massie has happily approached the task of translating this second Book with more sobriety than he showed in his version of the first. He shows greater respect for the Latin text (sometimes, it has been objected, even excessive respect), and engages in fewer colloquialisms of the type to which he was attracted by a misplaced desire for liveliness -surely one of the innumerable banes of modem life!

  Finally, I cannot resist adding an expression of my gratification at having been associated with this great work, however much I may deplore the commercialism that taints this particular edition, and, on a purely personal note, in which even the indulgent reader may detect a yet pardonable vanity, express my hitherto secret joy at the coincidence of my own first name with that of the hero who was father of the Roman
People, the subject of Virgil's Epic, the Emperor's exemplar, and, as one might say, prototype: AENEAS. Aeneas Fraser-Graham, Quondam Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Director of the Institute of Classical Strategies, Chairman of the International Editorial Committee established to superintend and guide

  THE AUGUSTUS PROJECT.

  ONE

  I reviewed these troops before they left Aries for the frontier. They were prime legionaries from the lands north-east of Mantua, from the Abruzzi, from Calabria and Apulia, and there was one legion recruited in Transalpine Gaul itself. Many of the women and children of the Gallic legionaries crowded into Aries to weep, or wave, farewell to their sons, lovers, husbands and fathers. I looked on all with pride, and a love in which even then I felt the tender and ready tears of old age prick my eyes. I warned Varus of the dangers which brood in the mirk recesses of the German forests. I said to him: 'Advance carefully, behind a fringe of scouts; guard your flanks and rear; remember always, do not for a moment forget, that the most valuable and necessary members of your army in such an expedition are the scouts; it is on the quality of your intelligence that the safety of our soldiers depends.' I repeated the warning again and again till he sighed (I am sure) to be so oppressed by the timid alarms of an old man. This is the curse of age: to find experience discounted, set at naught. I took the auspices, which were good, and assured the troops of my love and confidence.

  Tonight there is curfew in the city. I have ordered that the Praetorians patrol the streets till dawn, that they post guards by the Senate House to forbid entry and by the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter, and that the Field of Mars be occupied by at least a cohort. Guards at the gates have been doubled.

  I cannot sleep. I sleep little now, rarely more than two hours at a stretch, and am accustomed to require slaves to be on hand to read to me through the black silence of night. But there is no solace in words now, however well-arranged. Should I send an order to Tiberius to return to Rome? Or send him straight to the Rhine? Decisions, which used to be prompted by instinct, intuition, guided by the counsel of those I trusted, now perturb me. Only Livia remains… and she… enough of this vein.