by Allan Massie
"Violet pastilles, Mother. My doctor recommends them for heartburn."
"I see. Well, that doesn't matter. You're not making some joke when you mention heartburn, are you?" "No, Mother."
"I've never liked your jokes. I don't understand them, but there's always been a cruel streak in your idea of humour. However, that's neither here nor there. But I wanted to speak to you before this marriage takes place, since I know you don't like it. Well, I confess I don't like it myself. Julia and I are opposites. That's all there is to it. I can't think of a single matter on which we have ever thought the same. Not even Augustus, for I love him for what he is and she only cares for him on account of what he has to give her. And now he is giving her you, my son, and I am not certain that that is what she wants. So I see trouble ahead…"
"In that case, Mother…"
"No, don't interrupt. You are wondering why in the end I have approved the marriage. I say in the end because whether you believe me or not — and you have never believed anything that ran counter to your ingrained opinions, I know that well — I have to tell you I opposed it as long as I could. I told Augustus Vipsania made you happy. I even admitted that I was jealous of her as mothers often are of their sons' wives. But… no good. The fact is that you are a sacrifice to reason of state. Your domestic happiness is being sacrificed to necessity. And necessity imposes its own rules. Julia must have a husband, and the boys must have a father, and her nature is such that it must be a man who is thoroughly admirable, honourable and reliable. That is why you have been compelled to act dishonourably towards Vipsania that you may act honourably in the interests of Rome. People like us cannot live by private impulses for we cannot live private lives."
"I understand that, Mother…" and I did. Political imperatives make sense to me. If that hadn't been true, I would have fought harder.
"I am only sorry," I said, "that it should have to be me…" "There was no one else…"
Was the same thought in both our minds? That Drusus could have been chosen? If so, I didn't raise the question. I had always understood that Drusus was different, that he would not be asked to make the same sacrifice of personal interest that was regularly demanded of me. Drusus was different. Everybody liked him. I was devoted to him myself. He was, to use a weak word, nice. But he was nice perhaps because he had never been emotionally challenged. Livia had kept her relationship with him a happy, sunny one. Augustus smiled when he appeared.
Besides, Drusus was married to Antonia, Octavia's daughter, and, even apart from my stepfather's feeling for his sister, her daughter was not expendable as my poor Vipsania was.
No, Drusus was safe.
I did my best. I have nothing with which to reproach myself. For a moment I was even optimistic. For a little time it seemed as if it might work, as if we could live in afternoon contentment.
Julia bestowed her most radiant smile on me. When we were alone, she murmured, as she had used to do, "Old bear, old bear" and stroked my cheeks with fingers light as a flower's touch…
"What a hard face, old bear, grizzled and weatherbeaten…" She kissed my lips.
"Like Agrippa's," she said. "How strange it will be. Like going back in time and yet coming full circle…"
She slipped out of her shift and stood before me in her full ripe loveliness. Moonlight streaked into the room, casting a silvery-gold sheen over her flesh. She knelt before me and thrust her hands under my tunic.
It is night as I write this. I can hear the waves break on the rocks below and silence rises from the town and I see again Julia's upturned face, lips open, and a dewiness under her eyes. She breathed desire, and I was afraid lest I should not be able to satisfy her. She drew me to the bed… "Come, husband, come, old bear, you delighted me once, and I…" she nuzzled me, "Tiberius, Tiberius, Tiberius.."
"Tiberius, Tiberius, Tiberius…" I was always anxious. Even when I believed I was giving her pleasure, I was anxious, alert for the comparisons I was certain filled her mind… Even when she cried out in ecstasy, my mind seemed to remain apart, and I asked myself whether she was simulating her joy.
Did she try too? I believe she did. I must believe she did. Now that I have nothing urgent to do, I spend hours casting back over my life, weighing my own behaviour and that of others. Too many hours perhaps, for such introspection can become a disease, a potent drug. There are times, however, when I imagine that Julia snatched at the opportunity afforded her by our marriage as a means of escaping the imperatives of her own nature, which she knew well, and sometimes (I think) feared. Like all who experience a strong impulse towards dissipation, a nostalgia for whatever is base and filthy in human existence, she was torn between that attraction and a longing to live a virtuous life, an intermittent longing certainly but one none the less strong for being frequently in abeyance. She lusted after the manifold pleasures of the senses, seeking satisfaction in extremity, yet ever aware of how she received from her debasement diminishing returns. In her best hours she appeared to me as a godlike child of nature, spontaneous, bountiful, joy-giving and joy-enhancing. Yet there was always a desperation in her happiness, as if she pursued pleasure to flee a vision of emptiness. She filled her life with sensation in order not to be compelled to gaze upon a vision of insignificance. Finding no sure foothold in experience, she experienced a sharp and recurrent apprehension that nothing mattered. "We live, we die, and that's that," she said. "Why live except to prolong and intensify pleasure…?" But, when she spoke like that, I seemed to see a dark river mist surround her, chilling the blood and obscuring the future.
She accompanied me, as Piso had recommended, to the armies. She delighted in the life of the camp, and was tireless and uncomplaining on the march. Men and officers adored her, they admired her high spirits and readiness to laugh at discomfort and the accidents inseparable from military life. I found my own popularity — never great, for I had always known that I gained respect rather than affection — grew on her account. To my surprise, Agrippa's widow was more at ease on campaign than Agrippa's daughter had been; for my dear Vipsania's private and retiring nature had been revolted by the inevitable brutality of army life. To some extent Julia shared her feelings, but, whereas Vipsania shrank from them, Julia spoke out against what seemed to her excessively stern punishment. Once I found her rubbing soothing ointment into the back of a soldier who had been flayed for indiscipline. I should have reproved her for her action, which would appear to the soldiers to call in question the justice of the man's punishment, but I could not bring myself to do so, even when the centurion who had flogged the man lodged a complaint.
In other respects the first years of our marriage were less satisfactory. I hesitate even in the privacy of this memoir to write of the intimate details of the bedchamber. It doesn't seem at all the right thing to do. And yet it is impossible to tell the truth about a marriage if one declines to do so, impossible even to confront it. Moreover, one cannot contemplate any marriage — such as, for example, that of Livia and Augustus — without wondering what happens in bed.
Julia never found difficulty in arousing me; yet even when excited to my most ardent, I remained timid, shy or indeed fearful of comparison. I could not then believe that I satisfied her. She flirted with the young officers on my staff and, watching her smile on them and rock with laughter at their callow jokes, I knew that they brought her gifts which I could never match. It went, I was sure, no further than flirtation, though some of the young men were head over heels in love with her. She liked it that way; their admiration delighted her. In the winters we went to the Dalmatian coast, and it was there that our child was conceived.
Something strange happened to me after the birth of our son. I fell in love with my wife. At first I wouldn't admit it even to myself. It seemed disloyal to my memory of Vipsania. Yet it happened, and it began when I saw her lying, exhausted but still radiant, with her hair spread out like a fan on the pillow behind her, and our infant in her arms. I had never thought of Julia as maternal — her attitud
e to her two boys, Gaius and Lucius, was off-hand and sceptical — she refused to agree with their grandfather's estimate of their abilities. But she cooed over little Tiberius (as she had insisted we call him), and, seeing them there, it came to me, "This thing is mine, this woman too is mine, the most desirable prize in Rome is mine, mine, and properly mine alone" and my heart overflowed with love. I fell on my knee at the bedside, seized her hand and covered it with kisses. I took her in my arms and embraced her, with a tender confidence and ardent desire I had never felt in my life before, not even for Vipsania. I was, that night and for months afterwards, a prince among men.
And Julia responded. That was the remarkable thing. We were, for a brief interlude, lost in each other, as, in mountain country, the clouds can all at once and without warning dispel from the peaks, leaving the wanderer bathed in golden and restoring light.
She said to me: "For the first time, old bear, I feel 1 am leading the right sort of life. You can't imagine the frustration I have endured. All my bad behaviour is the result of that frustration, and the boredom… Oh, how bored I have been! I was forced into marriage with Marcellus, then with Agrippa, oh, I know you admired him, but you can count yourself lucky you weren't his dutiful wife. My father wonders that I don't love Gaius and Lucius as he does, and he will be awfully jealous when he sees how 1 dote on little Tiberius. He doesn't understand: it's because that man was their father, and I can't look at them without hearing his voice droning on and on… Maybe I love you because you're so silent, old bear… All I have wanted was to have fun, and all my life my father has tried to squeeze that desire out of me."
She would talk like this, lying naked on our bed, and then she would stretch out her long leg and, with a suppleness that I found enchanting, paint her toenails shell-pink with a delicate brush. Or she would rest, warm and damp and relaxed and happy, in my arms, while her hair tickled my lips and my cheek, and she sank into sleep. Can life, I wondered, have more to offer than to lie thus, with the trusting and satisfied proof of manhood held in sleeping embrace? Can anything equal that drift into oblivion with your girl in your arms?
As I write these words I feel the renewal of desire, then regret and misery invade the defences I have so laboriously constructed.
10
In the autumn of that year when we found ourselves in love, my brother Drusus died. We had been engaged in a two-pronged campaign on the northern frontiers of the empire. While I subdued Pannonia, advancing to the banks of the mighty River Danube, Drusus, with a mixture of prudence and audacity which was wonderful, penetrated deep into the mysterious forests of Germany through the territory of the Cherusci and the Marco-manni to the River Elbe, where he erected a trophy to mark the new limit of Roman control. This was no mere raid, for he built a chain of fortresses on the line of his march to secure his rear, while at the same time the Rhine was defended by new, well-garrisoned fortifications. No man of Rome ever deserved better, or did more for our city, than my dear brother in his German campaigns. Then, crossing a river swollen by the October rains, his horse slipped. He struck his head against a jagged rock, and was dragged insensible from the water. Word of his condition was brought to me and pausing only to make necessary arrangements for my own troops, I hastened to his bedside. I covered four hundred miles in less than sixty hours, and arrived to find his doctors ashen-faced and nervous. They were relieved to see me, however, for they knew that I would be able to testify that they had done everything that was possible. Drusus was only intermittently conscious. I sat by his camp-bed, and prayed useless prayers to the indifferent gods, while he, poor boy, babbled words that I could not understand, and threw himself about in a restless fever.
"He is so weak," the doctors said, "that we do not dare to bleed him further."
Instead they applied compresses of ice to his temples, and sponged his body with water drawn from a deep well.
The sweat dried on his forehead. He opened his eyes, saw me, recognised me, and spoke in a voice which was calm but already sounded as if it came from another world.
"I knew you would come, brother. I have been waiting till you were here… Tell our father" — even then I noticed how easily Drusus used that term of Augustus — "that I have done my duty. But I do not believe that we can ever…" he broke off. I pressed his hand. Again his eyes opened. "Look after my children, brother, and my dear Antonia. She has always liked you, and…" His voice faded and he choked. I held a mug of watered wine to his lips. "I feel like a deserter," he sighed, and closed his eyes, and in a little was no more.
I sat by his bedside as night chilled my bones. I remembered his candour and ease of manner, his probity, his easy affection. Once, he came to me and suggested we should approach Augustus and recommend that the Republic be restored in its antique form. "We both know, brother," he said, "that the restoration our father made was false, and that only a true resuscitation of our ancient institutions can enable Rome to regain its moral health, its old virtue." I placed my hand on his shoulder in agreement, and shook my head, "You are demanding what cannot be," I said. But now, as I heard an owl screech through the long night, I knew that it was Drusus' willingness to attempt the impossible, his refusal to be constrained by the appearance of necessity, which had made me love him.
In the morning his body was disembowelled and embalmed. The next day the funeral cortege began its long journey home. I marched on foot by the wheel of the waggon that carried his coffin. In every village people bared their heads as we passed, for his fame had gone before him. At night I slept on a mattress spread in the waggon beside his coffin. So we crossed the Alps, out of the rains, and marched down through Italy where the peasants were harvesting the vines, and the olive trees groaned under a weight of fruit. We reached Rome, and my brother was laid to rest in the mausoleum which Augustus had constructed for the family; I would have preferred him to lie in a Claudian tomb, but my wishes were not consulted.
Meanwhile Julia had remained at Aquileia in Cisalpine Gaul at the north end of the Adriatic Sea. She was expecting another child and her doctor had forbidden her to travel.
At a dinner-party Augustus spoke of Drusus. He was sincere, and embarrassing. Whenever honey enters his voice, I am aware of what has been cut off. I am made uneasy by my sense of discrepancy: my knowledge that this warm and beautiful voice has spat out orders to kill people and destroy lives. 1 find myself making excuses for him, saying to myself that it is not his fault he has been put into a position in which he has to make intolerable decisions. And then I remember that he is there because he wanted power.
Now he spoke of all those who had left him: of Agrippa, of the poet Vergil, of Maecenas who was dying, and of Drusus himself. He praised my… fidelity, a word you might use of a dog. And then he turned towards his grandsons, my stepsons, who are also — these things become confusing — his adopted sons: Gaius and Lucius. He told them they were the light of his old age, the fire that warmed his heart, and the hope of Rome. Lucius, who is the nicer of the two, and in reality a good and affectionate boy, had the grace to blush.
But the next morning the Princeps was back in charge of Augustus, the sentimentalist who embarrasses me relegated.
"You will have to go to Germany," he said, "to take over from Drusus."
I pointed out that the situation in Pannonia was still unstable.
"You have done wonderfully well there," he said, "and Gnaeus Piso will be competent to consolidate your work. But Germany is another matter. Drusus has made the breach, but all his work will be wasted if we do not follow it up. Don't you see? Germany must be subjugated, the tribes brought within our orbit, or the whole of Drusus' achievement will go for nothing. It will be as if he had never been. And you, Tiberius, are the only man able to achieve the total victory which will be the true memorial to your dear brother, my beloved son…"
The note of embarrassing sincerity returned to his voice in this last sentence. It was the sincerity of the actor.
Then he said, "I think you have doub
ts about the German campaign."
He fidgeted while I remained silent.
"Come on."
"Forgive me, I was gathering my thoughts. Drusus had no doubts.. "
"Which was why I originally sent him to Germany and you, Tiberius, to Pannonia."
"Yes," I said, "the situation on the two fronts appears to me to be quite different. We have only to look at the map. Pannonia — the Danube frontier — is within a short march of Cisalpine Gaul, and though we still use the term, it seems to me that the province now differs but little from Italy itself…"
"So Vergil, who was, you will remember, from Mantua in the north of that province, used to say. And you are both right. So?"
"So we must hold Pannonia and the line of the Danube. But Germany is different. The tribes there do not appear to me to be susceptible to civilisation, while Gaul itself may be adequately protected by the barrier of the Rhine. Therefore I doubt the value of Germany, certainly in relation to the cost of subjugation. I fear some terrible disaster will one day overtake Roman arms in those savage forests. Germany is a wooded desert."
"Nevertheless," he said; and I knew when he pronounced that word that my arguments were vain, that his mind was settled. When he utters that word, it signifies that he accepts the validity of your argument, but will still have his way.
"An empire like Rome's cannot rest. The day it ceases to grow is the day we renege on our duty. The gods promised Aeneas and his descendants an empire without limits. We cannot take on ourselves the responsibility of deciding that we have gone far enough. Of course, for tactical reasons such a decision may be made — for the moment. But no more than that. Besides, it is only our expanding empire which reconciles the Roman nobility to the loss of liberty. Never forget that."