Augustus (41 page)

I was sure I was right. I am still sure. Yet I did wrong too, and that wrong has not gone unpunished. So Aeneas himself was driven from Carthage and the loving arms of Dido by the divine imperative which set him to sail to Italy to be the father of our People. In executing that divine command, he destroyed the unhappy Dido and when he encountered her in the Underworld she withdrew from him, no more moved by his words 'than if she had been hard flint or a block of Parian marble'. Aeneas, who loved Dido and obeyed the Gods, destroyed the queen to fulfil his destiny. I, who loved Virgil and am also obedient to the divine word, broke my promise to him that I might keep my promise to Rome, and let all Romans see how their destiny had unfolded. I was wrong to break my oath, but I would have been wrong to destroy the poem. Should I then have denied my friend my word, and denied him comfort at the hour of death? And do not think Aeneas did not suffer. Will Virgil withdraw himself from me when we meet in the Shades?

I have suffered for Rome. Cruel fate tore my sons Gaius and Lucius from me. Was that the awful price I paid for foreswearing Virgil? Can there be worse to come? Oh Varus . . .

Enough. I travelled by slow sad stages from Brindisi to Naples, where the poet was laid in his simple tomb:

Mantua gave me life, Calabria death.
I lie

In Naples -
poet of herdsmen, farms and heroes.

I arrived in Rome in October. There had been trouble in the city over the consular elections. In my view the trouble arose from maladministration of the food supplies, but it alarmed some senators. A deputation met me in Campania to urge me to make a public entrance to the city in order to impress the people. I declined to do so, and refused to celebrate the Triumph they also urged on me. I was not a monarch returning, merely the first citizen, and anyway I was hardly in the frame of mind for pomp and ceremony. Public adulation grows more irksome with the years, for all but the vainest of men.

Agrippa and Julia returned from Spain, and my first grandchild, Gaius, delighted me. Since Agrippa was now my son-in-law and the father of a child of my blood, I thought it proper to associate him even more closely in the government of the Republic. He therefore was now also granted the tribunician power and a supreme imperium. My personal authority ensured that I still held the chief place, but I had no more power than Agrippa. If I died, his imperium and authority would ensure that Rome did not revert to the selfish struggle for power which had disfigured the years before the Civil Wars. Moreover, Agrippa would in time in like manner associate Gaius with himself.

Business was unremitting, but business makes no story. The details of administration can hardly delight the reader. What does he care that I assumed the powers of a censor again, and removed unsatisfactory members from the Senate?

About this time too however I embarked on my campaign to reform the manners and morals of the age. Livia was an enthusiastic supporter of this necessary but unpopular venture. We both agreed that dissolute and immoral behaviour could corrupt public life as well as private. Measures were taken to punish adultery and fornication, to control speech, to protect minors, to make divorce more difficult, to give wives more power over their own estates and so elevate their condition. I recognized that marriage is an institution which must be healthy if society is to be stable, and so I taxed unmarried men more heavily than married ones, and granted substantial privileges to the parents of large families.

Many opposed these measures; others were sceptical. The aged and wicked Plancus, whose services had won him a measure of tolerance from me which his general conduct hardly deserved, openly laughed at me, and said that you can't legislate people into morality. I asked if if might not be possible to legislate them out of immorality. No, he said, all you do is drive it into dark corners. Better than the Forum itself, I said.

Though I was anxious to elevate the condition of women, I still thought that they were properly subject to their husbands' control, and I told the Senate that it was their duty to reprove their wives and correct their misbehaviour. 'Come off it, Augustus,' someone called out 'when did you last reprove Livia?' Td like to see you try,' shouted a
nother humorist. 'Fortunately,'
I said, 'my wife doesn't merit reproof. I wish you were all as fortunate.'

Meanwhile preparations advanced for the Secular Games. The Senate sanctioned the Festival and entrusted arrangements to the priestly order of the College of Fifteen, who chose Agrippa and myself as their representatives. In previous celebrations the principal deities had been (we discovered) the Gods of the Underworld, Dis and Proserpina. I acknowledged their power, but could not believe that gloomy Dis was the deity Rome should most reverence on this occasion. Virgil had agreed with me. The great ceremonies should be held under the auspices of the Gods of the Upper World, Apollo and Diana, for we were celebrating light and reason as well as the antiquity and historic mission of Rome.

I have discovered a note I made during those distant ceremonies. It gives my mood then better than anything I could now write:

It will not be dark tonight. Already, if I step out of my house and look towards the east, I might see the Alban Hills fringed with rose-touches of a new day. It is but three hours since we returned from the Field of Mars, and I cannot sleep. I sent the boy a moment ago to fetch me bread and dunked a piece in the jar of wine from my own municipality of Velletri, and held it to my lips. The wine, poured a little early in anticipation that the ceremony would be over at the appointed hour, is already sharp with a faint musty tang of vinegar; it is always thin and yellow; yet I suck it from the bread gratefully.

Down in the plain tonight, before the altar in the Field of Mars, with Agrippa by my side, I slit, with one sweep of the curved blade, the throat of a pregnant sow. The pig's blood spurted out - the sleeve of my toga stank of it so that I was glad when we came home to exchange the garment for this dressing-gown; then it trickled down the steps of the altar, and seeped through cracks in the marble to the imbibing earth. But there was one pool formed from an errant spurt, that escaped the marble and formed on the bare earth, which parched by our long hot May refused at first to receive it. It lay on the earth in a viscous pool. I do not believe anyone noticed it but myself, and I am glad of that; they would be sure to see it as an evil omen when it is only the slow working of nature.

I am tired, and yet cannot sleep. I know the mood. It has come on me before, on the eve of great occasions, and I have learned to recognize it as an expression of divine intimations. Tomorrow is consecrated to Apollo and Diana - her chariot sails high now above the Tiber, I can see her glint on the marble of the Forum that is sleeping almost below me, and very soon the Sun-God's rosy fingers will touch the Palatine and her own temple here on my Palatine hill; touch them with the new light I have been instrumental in giving Rome. I say tomorrow, but it is already by some hours today, first of tomorrows. And there will be no blood in our sacrifices to sun and moon. The children will sing the new Carmen Saeculare to bring these Games to full conclusion: I have instructed that every purpose of our four days' ritual be woven into the song: the first night's ancient ceremonies with prayers in an antique Latin none now understands; then the recognition of our dependence on the bounty of Mother Earth; our prayers by day to the old tutelary Gods of Rome, and our welcome to the Gods of Light. How I wish Virgil had lived to write the piece, for his spirit broods over these ceremonies which are designed and, I trust, also destined, to fulfil what he promised: 'Caesar Augustus, son of a God, who shall establish the age of gold in Latium, over fields that once were Saturn's realm.' But Horace has done a commendable job; he has taste if not vision . . .

I look to the east, as once, under the mountains of Illyria in a cold dawn of March, I gazed westwards . . .

Strange reflective note, written in high emotion. I did right to associate these Games and ceremonies with that sleepless night when I brooded over what Caesar's murder meant for me and for Rome. The Secular Games represented - I see still more clearly now - the completion of the task I had set myself, they were the apogee of my life. Of course I must admit that the young student who found himself Caesar's heir hardly thought of what he could do for Rome. The city was for him merely a field of opportunity. That young man now seems impossibly remote to me. Trying to remember his feelings is like trying to understand an historical character. I am amazed by his nerve. When I consider the arguments that his stepfather Philippus advanced, I wonder at his temerity in rejecting them. I am staggered to consider how he set himself to outwit Cicero, and even more so by his success in doing so. Yet one thing still rankles: Cicero's gibe: 'The young man must be praised, decorated and disposed of . . .' He should not have said that.

Always, in my dreaming memories of those days (and my sleep now is ever shallow, disturbed by dreams) the figure of Antony rises before me, in its beauty, panache and vulgarity. How I envied him . . . How I wished that I had his power to arouse devotion with a careless word, a smile breaking from his frowning face like the sun emerging from behind clouds. Yet how little judgement he had. 'You, boy, who owe everything to a name.' Had he been generous to me, had he even refrained from swindling me, how willingly I would have thrown myself at his feet. Even the horror he had inspired in me in Spain had changed to a sort of glamour.

When I met him that first time after the murder, on a late May morning in a house that had been Pompey's, he was insol
ent and unsm
iling, and I sat in silence. Why did he disdain to employ his charm on me? I was still so young, and afraid in my heart. I yearned for him to take me in his arms, and promise . . . what? That he would see me right? That he would avenge Caesar? I do not know. I recall the flickering mood, as the light flashed on his jewelled hand. I see him lying back, tawny and full-throated, the wide generous mouth drawn down at sneering corners. My flesh crawled when I remembered that night in Spain; yet, if he had approached me . . . The truth is, I was at least half in love with him. Remember, I was only eighteen, still a boy, and for six months schooled in love by Maecenas. Was he deterred by my Spanish negative?

These are the maunderings of senility. Love could no more have held us together, than it was love that made Antony turn to Cleopatra. Nor was it merely ambition caused my break with

Antony. We were divided by our different visions of Rome. For Antony the State existed to be plundered. I trust I have shown what my view has always been. Yet now, looking back, how full of regrets my memories of Antony are. What we regret most in life are not the crimes we have committed, but the opportunities which we let slip to be someone other than the person one has become. In a small secret tucked-away part of my nature, I have always desired to be Antony's lover and to have lived as such without responsibility.

Of course, when we came together again, it was too late. I had grown up, pushed Maecenas to the hinterland of my affection, formed other tastes. Moreover, Antony and I then did in concert that which made any intimacy impossible. The Proscriptions were a crime. My name is stained with the blood of those we pricked. They were necessary, an imperative imposed by the fact of civil war. I have never doubted that. Yet I have never been able to forget the children we made fatherless, the sons we slew who should have been the joy and stay of their fathers. Antony and I were divided by the deed that joined us together. On the one hand we were partners against a revengeful world. On the other I could not look him in the eye.

And the Fates, which give so much, drawing out a long thread of promise and fulfilment, never fail to act without savage irony. The scissors cut the thread, promise is buried, fulfilment turns to smoky ash in the mouth. The crimes I committed on other unknown fathers have not gone unpunished. The mocking Fates have destroyed my own hopes and joy in living.

How little of that I foresaw as I gazed to the Alban Hills and dawn brought roses to the sky that would overlook our bloodless sacrifices to the deities of Light.

SEVEN

Yet the next years were the happiest of my life. I look back on them now as a man shivering in January wind may pine for the beneficent skies of June, hardly able to believe their reality. Well is it said, whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad. My euphoria these years now seems to have been an idiot's joy. It was as if I trusted that the laws of the world, the inexorable working of action and consequence, had been suspended for me. It was as if I was being rewarded for my struggles with happiness, and it did not occur to me that you are never allowed to pay for happiness in advance.

The Republic was calm and orderly. True, the Germans threatened on the Rhine, and even defeated Marcus Lollius, capturing an eagle of the Vth legion; but this defeat was more humiliating than serious. The following year I arrived in the province myself, with my stepsons Tiberius and Drusus, and taught the barbarians a sharp lesson. That brief campaign pleased me, for it showed that both the boys were ready to take their full part in the government of the Empire. Both revealed military talent. Tiberius was a stern disciplinarian, but unlike many such was admired and trusted by the soldiers; they knew he would never be prodigal of their lives, and he never has been. Every advance was meticulously planned. However, though prudent to the point of caution, he was never indecisive; he took time to brood over a decision. Once taken, he saw to it that execution was brisk and efficient. There has been no general of Rome, not even Agrippa, to whom I have more happily and confidently entrusted my soldiers. Drusus had more dashing qualities, and a charm of manner his brother lacked (though it is one of Tiberius' qualities that he has never felt this lack; he has been aware of it of course, but it has never perturbed him, and he was never jealous of his younger brother).