Augustus (40 page)

Our religion is a matter of duty and reciprocal obligation. It is informed with light. So are the Olympian Gods of Greece, who are mostly our own Gods under a different name. Thus our Jupiter becomes their Zeus, our Juno their Hera, our Diana their Artemis, and our Mars their Ares. But Greek religion is also rich in the mystery cults, which are not masculine and reasonable like our Roman ones, but feminine and emotional. They speak with a strange music to parts of our nature that we do not, and cannot, know. All Romans fear them in their hearts, and, without Virgil, I do not think I would have gone to Eleusis.

We approached the valley in the late afternoon. It was surprisingly small and green, and large pines glowed with a deep greenness in the golden light of the westering Apollo. Soon he would decline below the mountains and leave Earth to the Goddess. The beauty of the scene caught at my heart, and I was impressed by the silent reverence of the troops of worshippers. My doubts were allayed: there was no fearful frenzy here.

'What do you seek?' a priest asked at the gate of the chapterhouse to which we had been led.

'We seek truth,' Virgil answered.

'Enter.'

Our clothes were taken from us and we bathed, and were anointed with sweet-smelling unguents, and were given saffron-coloured robes. All this was performed in silence, and, though the rooms were crowded, there was no noise but the shuffling of feet and the rustle of vestments.

'You must clear your mind of the past if you wish a vision of the future,' the priest said when we were ready.

For two days we prayed and fasted, and drank only the pure water of the Springs, obeying the silence still enjoined on us. I watched Virgil carefully, and in doing so began to understand something of the mystery of the poetic spirit. He was emptying himself of all but the desire to imbibe knowledge.

On the third night we were led out after dark. We proceeded between lines of torches, held by chanting initiates. The moon was up and the temple of the Goddess of Mysteries shone candid in its pure light. Shadows dappled the earth which was still warm under our bare feet. The chanting grew more resonant as we advanced: stranger, wilder, as if it came from a great distance, recalling what we had never known and yet seemed always to have known.

A priestess stood at the portico of the temple, a flamen raised in her right hand. She spoke in a soft and sibilant voice. 'Are you prepared?' A cry of assent rose.

'Here,' she whispered, 'is neither life nor death, past nor future, but the eternal present. Here is neither rich nor poor, bond nor free, but the immortal soul. Here, for a passage of time that belongs to all time, we offer you escape from the thralldom of the body and union with the Goddess who is the primal source of life, from whom all things grow, without whom is dearth and death.'

Then the torches were extinguished. Lit only by the moon we mounted the steps, entered the temple and were escorted to the sanctuary.

It is forbidden to relate what happened there, to what rites we assented and what promises were given. And yet, though I cannot reveal what we experienced, I cannot leave the matter, for to do so, would be to deny those for whom I write, my . . . children, Rome's children (though not alas, the children of my body) of such illumination as I have received. There are those of course who say that wisdom which is partaken at second hand, is no true wisdom. I do not know. I write what I feel I must.

It was the next day, for we were both weary and I slept long, that I spoke of the Mysteries to Virgil. Fatigue showed in his face; his eyes were dark and remote pools. I did not know how best to approach the matter, and so did so clumsily. But he took no notice of this, and smiled . . .

'It confirmed,' he said, 'what I needed to be reassured of. . . I have not slept, but have been working, for I know now that little life is left to me, but I must soon go down into the underworld. I fear I may do so before I have revised my poem, and, if that is indeed so, I must ask you to destroy it as an imperfect thing. Will you do so?'

I was silent, knowing myself. But he urged me, and at last, to calm him, I promised I would carry out his will.

'But,' he said, 'I may be spared. I must believe I shall be spared, and I have been working all morning on a passage in the Sixth Book, which I knew did not express what I meant it to express, and yet, before I came to Greece it told all that I knew. Now, I think I have broken through. Caesar,' he said, 'we do not die for ever. Listen, everything, sky, land, sea, sun, stars and moon, is strengthened by Spirit and enlivened by Mind.'

'But what is the distinction?' I said.

'Spirit is the life-force, mind the conscious intelligence. All created things - men, beasts, fish - all derive their life from Spirit and Mind. What strength they have is the strength of fire and comes like fire from heaven. Their weakness resides in the body's evil and those earthly parts which are corruptible by death. The body itself is not evil, but it contains evil. It is the cause of fear and desire and of sorrow and joy. Because we are chained to the body, we cannot look open-eyed on free air, as the Gods can. Even when we pass from this earth, dying as we call it, all the evil and ills of the body do not pass from the soul, for long habit has engrafted them on it. So souls must endure retribution and be punished for their old offences. The punishments are numerous and diverse - they must be, as sins are. Each of us finds a world of death suited to ourselves. Fire, wind, or water cleanses us in the Shades. We are at last set free to wander in the Elysian Fields till the last corruption has been removed, and our eyes are clear, and we become a spark of elemental fire. Then, finally, the Divine Spirit calls us in long procession to the river Lethe, that we may visit the sky's vault purged of memory and then in time may feel a desire to enter bodily life again. For that we do so, I cannot doubt. All this I felt before, and now know . . .'

It was at that moment that I saw what I must next do for Rome. Virgil told me how Anchises (to whom he allotted this revelation of the meaning of Life) then displayed to Aeneas his whole destiny, how he showed him 'what manner of men will be your descendants of Italian birth, souls of renown now awaiting life who shall succeed to our name . . . 'It is this noble passage which tells how I myself, 'Augustus Caesar, son of a God, will bring back a Golden Age to Italy, in lands where Saturn reigned'; this passage too which concludes with the invocation of my beloved and too soon departed Marcellus. And, as I say, listening to him, I conceived the purpose of holding once again the Secular Games, instituted in the year of the foundation of the Republic and repeated every century. The fifth celebration should have been held in that ill-starred year when Julius Caesar led his troops, to the tune played by the Piper at the gates of a cold dawn, across the Rubicon, and exposed our dear Italy to the horror of civil war. There would be difficulties in holding them soon, I could see that, but had no doubt that we would find means to overcome them, for, listening to Virgil, I knew that we required to consecrate our restored Republic, the New Order of Rome, by a ceremony which would join its future to our past. (And in fact it did prove easy to correct the date, for my lawyer Ateius Capito recalled that an Etruscan century lasted one hundred and ten years and that the Games were therefore due to be held in two years' time; he raked up a Sybilline prophecy to support his opinion.)

The time was ripe. The Sibyl had announced the coming reign of Apollo. Virgil himself, divinely inspired, promised an Age of Gold, established by me. Some philosophers of the school of Pythagoras teach that after four hundred and forty years body and soul live in their former state and society returns to its former condition. The ceremony would proclaim and prove the regeneration of the world, even as the mysteries of Eleusis promised the regeneration of the soul.

The next weeks were occupied with the details of provincial administration, and I saw little of Virgil, who was working with a like intensity on revising the Sixth Book of The Aeneid' . . . Letters from Livia were loving and contented - she asked several times if I had fixed the date of my return. Julia was with her husband in Spain and I was overjoyed, though at the same time worried, to hear that she was with child. Tiberius had pleased me by his conduct in Armenia; it was clear that both he and his brother Drusus would be of great service to Rome. I felt, more than ever, that my long years of toil were bearing fruit.

Towards the end of the first week in September, I was ready to sail back to Italy. Virgil would accompany me. The night before our departure, he was looking dreadfully ill. He had lost flesh even from his lean frame, his face was lined with pain, and his eyes were great black hollows. He asked me if we might postpone our departure for a day.

'I shall not see Athens again,' he said. 'It would please me if we could pass a day on the slopes of Hymettus.'

The air was full of honey and the mingled scent of thyme, myrtle and oregano. Bees hummed around us and a lark soared high in the sky, trilling its song of praise. The meadow slope where we lay was richly flowered, and our companions rested in the warmth of the sun some way apart from us. I told Virgil he had been working too hard, too long indoors. He needed the sun.

He smiled and shook his head, but with his perfect manners declined to talk about his health. We looked down on the city. The Parthenon shone with a brilliance such as I had never seen.

He said, 'I have valued this last time in Athens. Nowhere in the world has truth been sought with such diligence; nowhere has beauty been better apprehended and created; nowhere has the human spirit flourished so finely.'

'And yet,' I said, 'for all their speculations about the art and end of politics, how slight was their achievement. Why did the Greeks, with all their genius, fail to establish a polity that would endure?'

'The Greek spirit,' he said, 'was ever one of enquiry. Asking the questions was more important than answering them. We are their heirs, and Rome would be a lesser place and a lesser thing without the achievement of Athens. Those who doubt a divine purpose must consider how Rome and Greece have been entangled since the Achaeans burned the topless towers of Troy and sent our father Aeneas on his travels. So many generations ago, and now Rome, the child of Greece as well as of Aeneas, rules an unimagined Empire and Mycenae is a little village where pigs run to and fro through the Lion Gate.'

Our crossing was foul. The equinoctial gales came early and buffeted our ship. We lay a week anchored off Corfu not daring to trust ourselves windward of the island. Then the wind changed and we scudded across the Tyrrhenian, but still sometimes plunging and heaving. It was the worst weather for a sick man, and Virgil lay strapped to a bunk, the miserable prisoner of Neptune's wrath and his own weakness. I did the little I could to alleviate his sufferings, but he could not retain even the spoonfuls of chicken broth which I fed him. He was delirious when we reached Brindisi.

He rallied briefly in the villa outside the town to which I had him carried, but his brow was still damp, his throat charged and he was miserably feeble. I knew the end could not be long delayed. On the last night he babbled again of failure and reproached the Gods that they had not granted him time to refine his poem. He reiterated the request that I would destroy it, as unworthy of his genius and of Rome's, and he would not rest till I consented.

He died just before dawn as the cock threw its vulgar message to the world. He died in m
y arms, and his last words were
'peace, longing, destiny, the shades glimmer before me . . .'

So died the best and rarest man I have known. I cannot pretend that I could enter that secret world of poetic magic where he communed with the spirits that gave birth to the world and shape its course. There were half-lights in his soul and in his work, which I can only dimly understand. No poet has equalled him in range and none could play on so many instruments to touch the heart. None so truthfully and nobly admired whatever is good and noble in man. He moved from the exquisite artifice of the Eclogues through the self-denying honesty of the Georgics to the sublimity of this epic of Rome. He drew for us our Italy in a form that made the familiar strange and magical; he made us conscious of the duties of Empire, as of our greatness. I am but an indifferent literary critic, and I leave it to those with more skill in letters to indicate the beauties of his work and to try to account for his genius. All I can say now is to repeat the thought that repeated itself in my mind as I knelt by his bier, my eyes full of tears: of all men I have known, Virgil most completely exemplified what we mean by virtue; he was everything that may become a man.

The executors of his will were terrified when they came on his instruction to destroy the manuscript of his epic, and, knowing my long interest in the work, approached me to ask whether they should obey. It is of course wrong to tamper with testamentary depositions or to set them aside, but despite my own promise to Virgil twice-given, I had no hesitation in doing so. The instruction was partly due to his final delirium, partly an expression of his innate perfectionism. No doubt the poem was in detail unfinished. No doubt he would have added further felicities. I respected his request, but I could not accede to it. 'The Aeneid' had passed out of Virgil's possession and belonged to Rome, to the city and the world. I gave instructions that it should be published, and, if it was wrong to ignore the poet's wishes, I took that responsibility on myself. The wonder with which it was received justified my action.