by Allan Massie
'You won't die,' he said, 'your work's but half-done. Nevertheless…'
Livia entered. Even with my vision misty I could see that she immediately grasped what was happening. I knew her gaze had fixed itself on my ring. I heard a sharp intake of breath.
'Take care of it, Agrippa,' she said. 'My husband despairs too easily. He's not going to die. I've found a new physician…'
She was though relieved to find Agrippa there and not Marcellus, for though she never fully appreciated Agrippa, being prejudiced against him by her birth and manner, she trusted him. 'A loyal old dog,' was her description, and having said that, she thought she had him satisfactorily placed. Such confidence in her judgement was Livia's strength and her weakness. On the one hand, it meant that both decision and action came easily to her; being never doubtful she was rarely prey to that indecision which can afflict those who realize the subtleties and duality of the world. On the other hand, this speed of judgement and complete self-confidence made it impossible for her to have anything more than a rough-and-ready appreciation of character. She was no politician for she saw everything (and everybody) in black and white. So, for instance, she thought that because Agrippa had always seemed content to serve me, he had reached the summit of his ambition. She did not discern Agrippa's certainty of his own merit, which, in the years since Actium, had smouldered jealously. I knew it even before, without a moment's hesitation or a word of demur, he slipped the ring from my finger and eased it on to his, even while he told me that I wasn't going to die.
The new physician was a Greek freedman called Antonius Musa, and it was indeed Timotheus who had sought him out and recommended him to Livia. Had Timotheus, I have always wondered, affection for me, or was he merely protecting his position? Probably the latter, for a man such as Timotheus makes powerful enemies who can render transfer from a dead patron to a living one rather difficult.
'Your fever,' the man said, 'has been wrongly treated. They have wrapped you in rugs and bled you. Both these weaken the body rather than fortifying it.'
He prescribed a regime of cold baths (four a day) and beef and olives. I have never cared for beef, but very soon, I was eating two sizeable steaks a day.
'The blood needs fortifying,' he said, and made me drink red wine instead of the white I have always preferred.
'You have taken no care of your diet and digestion for years, Augustus,' he said. 'No wonder when you catch an infection you catch it more severely than another man might. Not only are you over-worked. You are under-nourished. I can't think what your wife's been doing to let you get in this state. A regular diet and a cold bath form the basis of health.'
'I have always hated and suffered from the cold,' I said in protest. 'Precisely. That is why a cold bath is so good for you. It gets your blood moving. You should eat fish too.' 'Good,' I said, 'at least I like fish.'
His treatment may have been eccentric, but it worked. My health, poor in my youth, improved enormously when he took charge of it. I have been faithful to his regime of cold baths, always starting the day with one, but I have found more difficulty in following his diet. My work has simply not permitted me – as I often assured him – to take regular meals. Many a day I have kept myself going with little snacks. 'If you can't eat a proper meal, at least eat something,' Musa would say. Bread, pecorino cheese, dried figs or dates, and a sour apple have kept me going. 'That's all right,' he would say, nodding his head. 'Most Roman nobles eat far too much. All this gourmandizing is as bad for the health as the long periods of starvation you used to inflict on yourself. Regularity is the thing, Caesar. Do you clear your bowels every morning? You should, you know; it not only promotes health, but improves the judgement…'
I owe a lot – long life and health – to Antonius Musa, and I rewarded him with a small estate in the Sabine hills. When Timotheus sought leave to retire from my service, on account of failing eyesight, he went to live with Antonius there. Their conduct gave rise to some scandal, since those who live in the Sabine hills are mostly conservative and respectable folk with little experience of Syrian dancing-boys and no time for them. But, as I say, I owed much to both Antonius and Timotheus, and so ignored all protests. Their amusements harmed no one, for their catamites were already corrupted beyond redemption.
On my recovery I not only resumed my ring (which Agrippa of course returned without waiting to be asked) but I resolved to make some adjustments in my constitutional practice. I would no longer hold one of the consulships. There were three reasons for this decision. First, the experience of sharing a consulship with Terentius Murena had convinced me of the potential embarrassment of the office. Both consuls were nominally equal, and, had Murena been more intelligent and circumspect in his opposition, he might well have been able to summon up specious constitutional justification for his obduracy. I could see no value in putting myself in a position where I might appear at loggerheads with a nominal equal, and indeed there was nothing to be said for having anyone in such a position. Second, I found the official and ceremonial duties of the post irksome and time-consuming. Third, realizing how many of the nobility valued the honour of the office, even though it was shorn of its power, I saw that there were advantages in having more consulships to offer. Moreover, it was useful to increase the numbers of men of consular rank. Accordingly since then I have only held the consulship when I have wished to grant the honour to a member of my own family, with whom it has pleased me to associate myself in the office.
Giving up the consulship deprived me of legal authority in Rome and in those provinces whose government I had allotted to the Senate. Such a position was unacceptable. However, Plancus' fertile brain suggested a solution, and he proposed in the Senate that I be granted a maius imperium, that is to say, a legally constituted authority over-riding all other authority in the Republic. Consequently I now possessed paramount authority. I was supreme military commander, enlisting troops, commissioning officers, controlling promotions; all soldiers took an oath of loyalty to me. I alone was responsible for the distribution of public lands and the settlement of veterans in colonies. Responsibility for the declaration of war and conclusion of peace and treaties was mine too. Moreover, I could intervene even in the Senatorial provinces in any cases of misgovernment or incompetence, and the Senate graciously restored to me those privileges belonging to the consuls which I had abdicated by my resignation of the office: that is to say, I was permitted to introduce business into the Senate, to convene that august body, to settle the agenda for each session and to issue senatorial decrees.
At the same time, the People chose to grant me the tribunician power for life, though, for dating purposes, I requested that this be formally renewed every year. I have spoken before of the importance I attached to this office. As a tribune, I spoke directly to, and on behalf of, the People. And my person was sacrosanct.
These reforms worked admirably, and I have found no occasion since to augment my power, or in any way to reconstitute the structure of the Republic. Be it noted however: all my powers rested firmly on regular laws passed in the Senate. They in no way offended the principles of the Republic, and, as I have already observed, on several subsequent occasions, I declined the dictatorship.
FOUR
Call no man happy till he is dead. Yet it seemed that year, as in the last sun of September we holidayed as a family in an old villa I had bought on the Bay of Naples, as if twenty years of struggle had at last been stilled. I was happy with the reforms I had effected. With the recovery of my health the doubts and depressions which had afflicted me ever since Actium seemed to have dissipated as the morning sun scattered the sea-mists in the bay. Livia and I were reconciled. My new vigour made our love-making warm and eager; a man's heart rests most truly in his marriage bed. No other love affairs can equal the felicity to be found there, and Livia, now in her thirty-eighth year, was in the full summer bloom of her beauty. Her reticence in public had never failed to enflame me. The knowledge I had developed over the years of her vul
nerability, the self-doubt that she concealed behind a manner that seemed to everyone else brisk and decisive, gave my love a tenderness it had lacked before. I saw her indeed as a rose, a rose that would never cease to bloom; but each summer's flower was easily bruised by cold wind or rotted by untimely rain. Yet that year, whether my illness had frightened her or whether my new health, making me franker and more open in my happiness, removed constraints between us, and in particular that resentment she had sometimes expressed, I can't tell, but our communion seemed perfect and absolute. I recall long afternoons of love-making while the world slept drugged in the most bountiful of Septembers; and as I picture her nakedness approach our couch, her high carriage, small breasts (which I have always preferred) and strong, well muscled, but ever shapely thighs, desire pricks me even now, and my heart aches at the shipwreck of old age. Of the poets, only my beloved Virgil has even hinted at the joys of married love, which he never experienced himself but could nonetheless discern. It is my knowledge of the reality of married love which makes me so despise pernicious and trivializing twaddlers like Ovid. His 'Art of Loving' is a disgusting, meretricious and vulgar book. He reduces love merely to artifice, subterfuge and manipulation; a matter of conquest and a degrading search for novelty. Of course we all experience such desires from time to time, and most of us yield to them, and in yielding do not damage our character if we realize how little such love-making matters, and do not confuse excitement of the flesh, even the lift of the heart, with the reality of love. The love that matters, that enriches and comforts the heart, is of a different order. It depends always on time and shared experience. Time changes its expression; we even pass beyond love's ripeness when we attain its culminating joy. But even in its decline, which comes with the infirmities of age and the dulling of the heart, a long-lasting love takes on a tenderness, an unwillingness to pain, which has its own beauty. Married love, whatever empty fools like Ovid may think, is never unchanging. It has its own mystery; it endures, like a landscape that is always with one, always familiar, always the same and yet always different. It is new and familiar at the same time.
The children, Livia's boys, were with us that September. How different they were: Tiberius, cold, haughty, yet diffident, withdrawn, taking little part in our games and picnics, burying himself in his books and mathematical studies, unsociable to the point of rudeness, yet saved from rudeness by a natural dignity of manner; Drusus warm, friendly, handsome with the glow of youth and laughter, kind and generous, never selfish. I found it as easy to respond to Drusus, whose affection I never doubted, as I found it hard to be just to Tiberius in those days. Was it for that reason that Livia preferred her elder son? Or is it always a mother's instinct to love better the child who will have the most difficult passage through life? Or was it simply because he was the elder and she remembered him as the consolation of her unhappy first marriage, while her joy in Drusus' infancy, though real enough as I remembered, had yet been swallowed up in the delight and excitement of our first year together?
For all my reservations about Tiberius in those days, and the preference for Drusus which I found hard to conceal, I nevertheless recognized the older boy's qualities. I recall saying to Livia that she was rearing two boys who would be heroes of the Republic; how I remember too her grave smile of pride and how she touched wood when she heard my words.
Julia and Marcellus joined us towards the end of the month, coming from the Capri villa I had given them as a wedding present. I was a little nervous before they arrived, not only in case the difficulties between them persisted but because I knew how Livia was unsettled by them, and I feared lest the perfect happiness of September would be disturbed. But Livia, secure in my love and praise for her sons, smiled to see them. They too glowed with health and pride and happiness and seemed at one together; and on the second morning Julia made my joy complete by telling me that she was with child. I was nervous too of course, as one must be in such a case. Any child may prove difficult to bear, a first one most of all. But Julia shone with health, and assured me that she had suffered no ill-effects in the first weeks of pregnancy.
Then, 'You remember,' she said, 'how I told you we weren't getting on. What a fool I was. Marcellus is a perfect dear, he couldn't be sweeter. Really, Daddy, I'm as happy as… oh, I don't know what, I can't imagine anyone or anything as happy as I am, I'm happy as the flowers would be if they knew what happiness is. Poor flowers, not to know…' Flowers… I hardly noticed them when I was a young man, and even that day, took Julia's words as being merely conventional. After all, the brevity of a flower's life has long been a commonplace of poets, though few have expressed the idea as felicitously as Horace. But I could not understand Livia's enthusiasm for gardening and flowers, could not see that a garden is to be valued because at one and the same time it denies whatever is discordant in life, and affirms mortality. Now it is with melancholy irony that I recall Julia's words.
October brought wind and rain, a sudden drop in temperature, and squalls throwing up sea-foam on the rocks below the villa. Marcellus caught a chill. I found him shivering over a game of dice and, irritated by his carelessness, snapped him to bed. His condition worsened during the night. Julia sent to wake me, and I found her crouching by his bedside, her face swollen with fearful weeping. I sent urgently for Antonius Musa, but even as I waited for him, despair stabbed me. Marcellus choked and struggled for breath, sweated, tossed and babbled. I ordered Julia to be led from the chamber, for her grief added only to her husband's distress. I knew he was going to die, and yet could not believe it. His eyes opened in momentary lucidity and I read terror in his gaze. I pressed his hand, but I do not know that he recognized me, or drew any comfort from it. In the hour before nightfall I saw him weaken, and with the dark, he crossed the Styx. Later, I could hear Julia howl among her maids. I begged Livia to comfort her, but she was unable to do so. Between waking and sleeping our world was torn apart. The next day Julia miscarried.
There are many who say I over-valued Marcellus. Tiberius, I know, is certain he would have disappointed me. Perhaps it is true. Perhaps his charm would have died as he lost the ardour of youth and he would have seemed less remarkable. Perhaps Livia is right, and he was never indeed remarkable. I cannot tell, and it is so long ago. But I was not alone in what I thought. In Book VI of 'The Aeneid' Virgil honoured my nephew by having Aeneas meet him in the Shades: I cannot recall his lines, even now, without tears and an aching heart. Whom the Gods love die young, and I am old. Fortune and misfortune rattle against each other throughout my life like dice in a box, they fall to the table as capriciously. Marcellus died but the work of the Republic was unceasing. I had sent Agrippa to the East. Now stories were put about that he had gone there in pique, resenting Marcellus. What nonsense! I needed him to report on the administration and morale of the Eastern provinces, especially Syria and Judaea. Both were troublesome for different reasons, Syria because it had been mismanaged, Judaea because it was unmanageable. Its inhabitants, the Jews, are a nation of narrow cantankerous monotheists, as reluctant to pay Roman taxes as to honour Roman Gods. They needed a few cuts from Agrippa's swagger-stick. How best to govern the Jews is difficult to know. I have tried direct rule, and also governing through a client-king, Herod. They like neither one nor the other. Revolt always simmers below the surface, for they are religious fanatics who believe, absurdly, that they are the chosen people of the one true God. I say, absurdly, for two reasons. First, we have no cause to believe there is only one God, and indeed all rational enquiry and observation of human history suggest that it is nonsensical to believe there is. Why should the Jews alone march in step? Secondly, if they were indeed the Chosen People, one would have thought they might have made more of God's favour. As it is, they live, squabbling like monkeys among themselves, pinned between the sea and the desert. One cannot avoid the conclusion that their assumption of God's favour is the most ridiculous evidence of man's infinite vanity and ability to deceive himself. What was to be done with Julia? I w
as not surprised to find her grief for Marcellus shorter-lasting than my own. She was young, still at an age when six months can seem an eternity. But I was displeased when Timotheus, tremblingly, warned me that she was frequenting disreputable late-night parties at the houses of dissolute young aristocrats. Such conduct was both unseemly and dangerous. I upbraided her. 'So you're spying on me,' she said. 'Well, that's delightful.'
'I don't have to spy on you, your behaviour is apparently common knowledge even though I am one of the last to hear of it.' 'Then it's Livia.' The blood flooded to her cheeks and her eyes sparkled. She had never looked lovelier. 'Really, Daddy, your wife's an old cat,' she said, and giggled. One of her most charming features was her inability to maintain a sour or angry mood. 'Livia knows nothing of the matter.'
'Don't be naive, Daddy. Your wife knows everything that's going on in the Palace, and especially anything concerning me. She's never approved of me, and she's always on the look-out to see if I slip up.'
'You mustn't talk like that,' I said, though I knew of course that I couldn't stop her. 'Marcellus has been dead less than half a year. Don't you ever think of that?'
'Oh Daddy, just because I go to parties doesn't mean I don't miss Marcellus. But I would miss him more if I didn't go and lay around at home. Don't you see that?' 'It's a matter though of decent behaviour.'
'Oh really, decent behaviour! All my friends think that old-fashioned mourning awfully stuffy. It's just not done nowadays. I bet if it was me that was dead, Marcellus wouldn't be glooming at home. No, and I don't suppose you'd be ticking him off for gadding about either. So there.' I would have to provide her with a new husband. It was, as I said to Livia (who sniffed on hearing it) unnatural to expect a girl as full of life as Julia to deny herself; besides we had to consider the effect on her of losing a child; and finally, if she didn't marry again soon, I was afraid she might get into trouble. A scandal was the last thing we wanted.