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Augustus tells the story of Octavian, a shy and scholarly youth of nineteen who, on the death of his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, suddenly finds himself heir to the vast power of the Roman Empire. He is destined to rule that world astonishingly well, given the odds and intrigues against him. He would later be known as Augustus Caesar (63 B. C. – 14 A. D.), the first Roman emperor.

Through the use of fictional letters, memoranda and dispatches, we see how Augustus established his essential base of power and how he was continually obliged to put down, by a subtle combination of force and guile, the challenges of such men as Cicero, Brutus, Cassius and, finally, Mark Antony.

The narrative mosaic John Williams has built on impeccable historical research brings Augustus vividly to life. Williams invests his characters with such profound humanity and treats them with such terrible honesty and compassion that we enter into their very lives and times.

About the Author

John Williams was born on August 29, 1922 in Clarksville, Texas. He served in the United States Army Air Force from 1942 to 1945 in China, Burma and India. The Swallow Press published his first novel, Nothing But the Night, in 1948, as well as his first book of poems, The Broken Landscape, in 1949. Macmillan published Williams’ second novel, Butcher’s Crossing, in 1960.

After receiving his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Denver, and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri, Williams returned in 1954 to the University of Denver where he taught literature and the craft of writing for thirty years. In 1963 Verb Publications published his second book of poems, The Necessary Lie. In the same year, Anchor Books published English Renaissance Poetry, an anthology he edited. Viking published his third novel, Stoner, in 1965. It was in 1963 that Williams received a fellowship to study at Oxford University where he received a Rockefeller grant that enabled him to travel and research in Italy for his last novel, Augustus, published by Viking in 1972. John Williams died in Fayetteville, Arkansas on March 4, 1994.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

IT IS RECORDED that a famous Latin historian declared he would have made Pompey win the battle of Pharsalia had the effective turn of a sentence required it. Though I have not allowed myself such a liberty, some of the errors of fact in this book are deliberate. I have changed the order of several events; I have invented where the record is incomplete or uncertain; and I have given identities to a few characters whom history has failed to mention. I have sometimes modernized place names and Roman nomenclature, but I have not done so in all instances, preferring certain resonances to a mechanical consistency. With a few exceptions, the documents that constitute this novel are of my own invention – I have paraphrased several sentences from the letters of Cicero, I have stolen brief passages from The Acts of Augustus, and I have lifted a fragment from a lost book of Livy’s History preserved by Seneca the Elder.

But if there are truths in this work, they are the truths of fiction rather than of history. I shall be grateful to those readers who will take it as it is intended – a work of the imagination.

I should like to thank the Rockefeller Foundation for a grant that enabled me to travel and begin this novel; Smith College in Northampton, Massachussets, for affording me a period of leisure in which to continue it; and the University of Denver for a sometimes bemused but kind understanding which allowed me to complete it.

INTRODUCTION

Augustus was John Williams’s most successful novel, winning the National Book Award in 1973, and has appeared in America in four editions since then. Using the epistolary form – fictional memoirs, dispatches, letters – it tells the story of Octavius, a sensitive and scholarly nineteen-year-old, who on the death of his great-uncle Julius Caesar finds himself heir to the vast power of the Roman Empire, now plunged in civil strife by Caesar’s murder. Gradually, through a combination of luck, guile, ruthlessness and intelligence, he succeeds in bringing what was then most of the civilized world under the rule of law, giving to Rome an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. He became the first Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar (63 BC–AD 14).

To achieve this, he had to overcome many obstacles, not least his own nature, in order to put down the challenges of such men as Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, and finally Mark Anthony. Late in his life he imprisoned and exiled his daughter Julia to a remote island under a law he had enacted for adultery, a daughter he was so devoted to that he supervised her education at a time when it was unusual for a woman to be given any schooling. What emerges from the brilliant play of lights, that the fictional epistles become, is a fascinating portrait in an extraordinary time of a complicated private and public man. Amidst his family, friends and enemies, he deals with the exactitudes that the use and retention of power imposes, and all is brought to such immediate life that it feels as present as Washington today. This is a man who shaped himself in order to shape the world, who put as much faith in superstition as in his intelligence, who loved to gamble on the races and in private to play at dice, preferring the rigours of the battlefield and the solitude of the study to the luxury and pomp of office. As a friend of Virgil and of Horace he wanted nothing more than to be a scholar/writer in his youth. He played, in his time, so many roles that at the end he was able to come into the knowledge of the contrariness hidden at the heart of all experience and the ultimate futility of power.

It was more nearly an instinct than knowledge, however, that made me understand that if it is one’s destiny to change the world, it is his necessity first to change himself. If he is to obey his destiny, he must find or invent within himself some hard and secret part that is indifferent to himself, to others, and even to the world that he is destined to remake, not to his own desire, but to a nature that he will discover in the process of remaking.

John Williams’s four novels are so different from one another in subject matter, setting and time that it has been said that they could pass for the work of four different writers. This is at once both true and untrue. Williams himself discounted his first novel Nothing But the Night, and while the talent is obvious it is fair to say that it is less achieved than his other novels. In the powerful and savage Butcher’s Crossing, he turns to three men who ride into Colorado to hunt for buffalo. At a time when buffalo herds were hunted to extinction they get wind of an undiscovered valley filled with buffalo in the high Rockies. They find this Eden of woods and streams and lush grass with a great herd grazing at peace. The leader of the gang is Miller, an experienced hunter, and they are all betrayed by Miller’s obsession to kill every head in the herd while the worsening weather cuts off their retreat. In this anti-western there are no heroes and no villains. At times the raw power of the writing is almost unbearable as the story unfolds against all the easy myths Hollywood and the East invented for the West.

Stoner followed, the finest novel I know of university life, and it is the single work that most closely shadows Williams’s own life and career, though it is set a generation back, in the first half of the twentieth-century. Williams grew up poor in Texas during the Depression. His grandparents were dirt farmers, his stepfather a janitor in the post office. Before the Second World War he worked as an announcer at small Texas radio stations. In the war he served in the Army Air Force as a radio operator on aircraft transporting supplies and troops in India, Burma and China, and during breaks in these missions wrote Nothing But the Night. At a loose end after the war, he rewrote the novel several times. It was accepted by Swallow Press in Denver, which was run by Allen Swallow, who had revitalized the reputations of Yvor Winters and Allen Tate. Swallow encouraged Williams to go to college on the GI Bill and get a teaching degree. Not unlike Stoner, he received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Denver, his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri and began his teaching career.

The transition from a buffalo hunt to Stoner is dramatic enough by any standard, but the leap from Stoner to Augustus Caesar, from an unregarded academic to the most powerful man on earth in his time, is even more so. In a rare and fascinating interview Williams gave to Bryan Wooley in 1985, he argues that the transition from Stoner to Augustus wasn’t as great as it might appear:

I was dealing with governance in both instances, and individual responsibilities, and enmities and friendship. In a university, professors and others are always vying for power, and there’s really no power there. If you have any power at all, it’s a nothing. It’s really odd that these things should happen in a university but they do. Except in scale, the machinations for power are about the same in a university as in the Roman Empire or Washington.

Many years before, after Butcher’s Crossing and before starting work on Stoner, a writer Williams knew, Morton Hunt, showed him the page proofs of a book he had written, A Natural History of Love, which was a popular history of various attitudes to love from Greek times to the present. While they were talking casually about the book, Hunt told him the story of Augustus, who had a daughter, Julia, whom he loved, but he exiled and imprisoned her in order to save the State because she had broken the laws on adultery that he had enacted. This fascinated Williams and he started to read about it. Discovering that Julia had been effectively written out of the histories, the more he read the more he was engaged by what he describes as ‘the ambivalence between the public necessity and the private want or need’ which is at the novel’s core. By the time he came to write the novel, he was steeped in that Roman world. In the interview with Wooley he gave his reasons for deciding on the epistolary form. Williams held to the belief that to read anything without joy or pleasure was stupid, that a novel or poem was there to be experienced rather than to be understood or explicated.

I didn’t think I could handle it in a straight narrative style without making it sound like a Cecil B. DeMille movie or a historical romance. And I didn’t want it to sound historical. Those people were very real and contemporaneous to me. I wanted a kind of immediacy in it, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I also knew that all educated Romans were great letter-writers. Cicero would write eight, ten, twelve letters a day. And the Roman postal service was probably as good as our postal service is today . . . I wanted the characters to present themselves. I didn’t want to try to explain them. I didn’t want to have a twentieth-century vision of the Roman times. So the epistolary form lets the people speak for themselves. . . This provincial notion of how much more advanced we are – that’s nonsense.

The novel is a triumphant vindication. The world of the Roman Empire is brought as close to us as our own lives. Any serious reading of Augustus and the other novels soon dispels the notion that all of Williams’s novels are so diverse as to be the work of so many different writers. In Augustus Williams has Gaius Cilnius Maecenas write to Titus Livius (12 BC):

No, it is what I perceive in the tenor of your question that begins to give me offence; for I think (I hope I am wrong) I detect the odor of a moralist. And it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind. And it would be a heavy burden for even the deepest friendship to bear.

As I have said, we lied; and if I give the reasons for the lie, I do not explain in order to defend. I explain to enlarge your understanding and your knowledge of the world.

Judgement is easy. Knowledge, since it involves an act of the imagination on behalf of others and their situations in the exigencies of the world, is difficult. The diversity of all Williams’s novels is for him a method. In order to render the experience of the world, he chooses first to go by the more difficult paths of the Other before entering the closed world of the Self. The same can be said of Williams’s prose as what he wrote of Ben Jonson in the Preface to his edition of English Renaissance Poetty; ‘It is, finally, a language that has passed from the starkness and bareness of outer reality through the dark, luxuriant jungle of the self and has emerged from that journey entire and powerful’. This may be the reason he is able to write so faultlessly of that most difficult subject, sex and sexual love. The love scenes from Stoner are repeated in a lighter, less intense way in Augustus, but they are no less pure. In the letter from Octavius Caesar to Nicholaus of Damascus (AD 14) that closes the novel, Augustus writes:

. . . [I]t is difficult for me to realize that once this body sought release from itself in that of another; and that another sought the same from it. To that instant of pleasure some dedicate all their lives, and become embittered and empty when the body fails, as the body must. They are embittered and empty because they have known only the pleasure, and do not know what that pleasure has meant. For contrary to what we may believe, erotic love is the most unselfish of all the varieties; it seeks to become one with another, and hence to escape the self. This kind of love is the first to die, of course, failing as the body that carries it fails; and for that reason, no doubt, it has been thought by many to be the basest of the varieties. But the fact that it will die, and that we know it will die, makes it more precious; and once we have known it, we are no longer irretrievably trapped and exiled within the self. Yet it alone is not enough.

To one who has not become adept at the game, the steps of a seduction may appear ludicrous; but they are no more so than the steps of a dance. The dancers dance, and their skill is their pleasure. All is ordained, from the first exchange of glances until the final coupling. And the mutual pretence of both participants is an important part of the elaborate game – each pretends helplessness beneath the weight of passion, and each advance and withdrawal, each consent and refusal, is necessary to the successful consummation of the game. And yet the woman in such a game is always the victor; and I believe she must have a little contempt for her antagonist; for he is conquered and used as he believes that he is conqueror and user.

When writing about Stoner, I found that the material was next to impossible to paraphrase, since the prose had already been so distilled. Similarly, the world of Augustus is so various in the brilliant play of lights the different epistles become that selective quotes seem to diminish the richness the whole lights reveal. Neither Stoner nor Augustus is any less or more achieved than the other: they are simply different works by a remarkable writer working at the very height of his powers.

CHAPTER ONE

. . . I WAS WITH him at Actium, when the sword struck fire from metal, and the blood of soldiers was awash on deck and stained the blue Ionian Sea, and the javelin whistled in the air, and the burning hulls hissed upon the water, and the day was loud with the screams of men whose flesh roasted in the armor they could not fling off; and earlier I was with him at Mutina, where that same Marcus Antonius overran our camp and the sword was thrust into the empty bed where Caesar Augustus had lain, and where we persevered and earned the first power that was to give us the world; and at Philippi, where he traveled so ill he could not stand and yet made himself to be carried among his troops in a litter, and came near death again by the murderer of his father, and where he fought until the murderers of the mortal Julius, who became a god, were destroyed by their own hands.

I am Marcus Agrippa, sometimes called Vipsanius, tribune to the people and consul to the Senate, soldier and general to the Empire of Rome, and friend of Gaius Octavius Caesar, now Augustus. I write these memories in the fiftieth year of my life so that posterity may record the time when Octavius discovered Rome bleeding in the jaws of faction, when Octavius Caesar slew the factious beast and removed the almost lifeless body, and when Augustus healed the wounds of Rome and made it whole again, to walk with vigor upon the boundaries of the world. Of this triumph I have, within my abilities, been a part; and of that part these memories will be a record, so that the historians of the ages may understand their wonder at Augustus and Rome.

Under the command of Caesar Augustus I performed several functions for the restoration of Rome, for which duty Rome amply rewarded me. I was three times consul, once aedile and tribune, and twice governor of Syria; and twice I received the seal of the Sphinx from Augustus himself during his grave illnesses. Against Lucius Antonius at Perusia I led the victorious Roman legions, and against the Aquitanians at Gaul, and against the German tribes at the Rhine, for which service I refused a Triumph in Rome; and in Spain and Pannonia, too, were rebellious tribes and factions put down. By Augustus I was given title as commander in chief of our navy, and we saved our ships from the pirate Sextus Pompeius by our construction of the harbor west of the Bay of Naples, which ships later defeated and destroyed Pompeius at Mylae and Naulochus on the coast of Sicily; and for that action the Senate awarded me the naval crown. At Actium we defeated the traitor Marcus Antonius, and so restored life to the body of Rome.

In celebration of Rome’s delivery from the Egyptian treason, I had erected the Temple now called the Pantheon and other public buildings. As chief administrator of the city under Augustus and the Senate, I had repaired the old aqueducts of the city and installed new ones, so that the citizens and populace of Rome might have water and be free of disease; and when peace came to Rome, I assisted in the survey and mapping of the world, begun during the dictatorship of Julius Caesar and made at last possible by his adopted son.

Of these things, I shall write more at length as these memories progress. But I must now tell of the time when these events were set into motion, the year after Julius Caesar’s triumphant return from Spain, of which campaign Gaius Octavius and Salvidienus Rufus and I were members.

You must forgive me, my dear Livy, for having so long delayed my reply. The usual complaints: retirement seems not to have improved the state of my health at all. The doctors shake their heads wisely, mutter mysteriously, and collect their fees. Nothing seems to help—not the vile medicines I am fed, nor even the abstinence from those pleasures which (as you know) I once enjoyed. The gout has made it impossible for me to hold my pen in hand these last few days, though I know how diligently you pursue your work and what need you have of my assistance in the matter of which you have written me. And along with my other infirmities, I have for the past few weeks been afflicted by an insomnia, so that my days are spent in weariness and lassitude. But my friends do not desert me, and life stays; for those two things I must be grateful.

You ask me about the early days of my association with our Emperor. You ought to know that only three days ago he was good enough to visit my house, inquiring after my illnesses, and I felt it politic to inform him of your request. He smiled and asked me whether or not I felt it proper to aid such an unregenerate Republican as yourself; and then we fell to talking about the old days, as men who feel the encroachment of age will do. He remembers things—little things—even more vividly than I, whose profession it has been to forget nothing. At last I asked him if he would prefer to have sent to you his own account of that time. He looked away into the distance for a moment and smiled again and said, “No—Emperors may let their memories lie even more readily than poets and historians.” He asked me to send you his warm regards, and gave me permission to write to you with whatever freedom I could find.

But what freedom can I find to speak to you of those days? We were young; and though Gaius Octavius, as he was called then, knew that he was favored by his destiny and that Julius Caesar intended his adoption, neither he nor I nor Marcus Agrippa nor Salvidienus Rufus, who were his friends, could truly imagine where we would be led. I do not have the freedom of the historian, my friend; you may recount the movements of men and armies, trace the intricate course of state intrigues, balance victories and defeats, relate births and deaths—and yet still be free, in the wise simplicity of your task, from the awful weight of a kind of knowledge that I cannot name but that I more and more nearly apprehend as the years draw on. I know what you want; and you are no doubt impatient with me because I do not get on with it and give you the facts that you need. But you must remember that despite my services to the state, I am a poet, and incapable of approaching anything very directly.

It may surprise you to learn that I had not known Octavius until I met him at Brindisi, where I had been sent to join him and his group of friends on the way to Apollonia. The reasons for my being there remain obscure to me; it was through the intercession of Julius Caesar, I am sure. My father, Lucius, had once done Julius some service; and a few years before, he had visited us at our villa in Arezzo. I argued with him about something (I was, I believe, asserting the superiority of Callimachus’s poems to Catullus’s), and I became arrogant, abusive, and (I thought) witty. I was very young. At any rate, he seemed amused by me, and we talked for some time. Two years later, he ordered my father to send me to Apollonia in the company of his nephew.

My friend, I must confess to you (though you may not use it) that I was in no profound way impressed with Octavius upon that occasion of our first meeting. I had just come down to Brindisi from Arezzo and after more than ten days of traveling, I was weary to the bone, filthy with the dust of the road, and irritable. I came upon them at the pier from which we were to embark. Agrippa and Salvidienus were talking together, and Octavius stood somewhat apart from them, gazing at a small ship that was anchored nearby. They had given no sign of noticing my approach. I said, somewhat too loudly, I imagine: “I am the Maecenas who was to meet you here. Which of you is which?”

Agrippa and Salvidienus looked at me amusedly and gave me their names; Octavius did not turn; and thinking that I saw arrogance and disdain in his back, I said: “And you must be the other, whom they call Octavius.”

Then he turned, and I knew that I was foolish; for there was an almost desperate shyness on his face. He said: “Yes, I am Gaius Octavius. My uncle has spoken of you.” Then he smiled and offered me his hand and raised his eyes and looked at me for the first time.

As you know, much has been said about those eyes, more often than not in bad meter and worse prose; I think by now he must be sick of hearing the metaphors and whatnot describing them, though he may have been vain about them at one time. But they were, even then, extraordinarily clear and piercing and sharp—more blue than gray, perhaps, though one thought of light, not color. . . . There, you see? I have started doing it myself; I have been reading too many of my friends’ poems.

I may have stepped back a pace; I do not know. At any rate, I was startled, and so I looked away, and my eyes fell upon the ship at which Octavius had been gazing.

“Is that the scow that’s going to take us across?” I asked. I was feeling a little more cheerful. It was a small merchant ship, not more than fifty feet in length, with rotting timbers at the prow and patched sails. A stench rose from it.

Agrippa spoke to me. “We are told that it is the only one available.” He was smiling at me a little; I imagine that he thought me fastidious, for I was wearing my toga and had on several rings, while they wore only tunics and carried no ornaments.

Octavius said gravely, “I believe it is going to Apollonia for a load of pickled fish.”

I was silent for a moment; and then I laughed, and we all laughed, and we were friends.

Perhaps we are wiser when we are young, though the philosopher would dispute with me. But I swear to you, we were friends from that moment onward; and that moment of foolish laughter was a bond stronger than anything that came between us later—victories or defeats, loyalties or betrayals, griefs or joys. But the days of youth go, and part of us goes with them, not to return.

Thus it was that we crossed to Apollonia, in a stinking fish boat that groaned with the gentlest wave, that listed so perilously to its side that we had to brace ourselves so that we would not tumble across the deck, and that carried us to a destiny we could not then imagine. . . .

I resume the writing of this letter after an interruption of two days; I shall not trouble you with a detailing of the maladies that occasioned that interruption; it is all too depressing.

In any event, I have seen that I do not give you the kind of thing that will be of much use to you, so I have had my secretary go through some of my papers in search of matters more helpful to your task. You may remember that some ten years ago I spoke at the dedication of our friend Marcus Agrippa’s Temple of Venus and Mars, now popularly called the Pantheon. In the beginning I had the idea, later discarded, of doing a rather fanciful oration, almost a poem, if I may say so, which made some odd connections between the state of Rome as we had found it as young men and the state of Rome as this temple now represents it. At any rate, as an aid to my own solution to the problem that the form of this projected oration raised, I made some notes about those early days, which I now draw upon in an effort to aid you in the completion of your history of our world.

Picture, if you can, four youths (they are strangers to me now), ignorant of their future and of themselves, ignorant indeed of that very world in which they are beginning to live. One (that is Marcus Agrippa) is tall and heavy-muscled, with the face almost of a peasant—strong nose, big bones, and a skin like new leather; dry, brownish hair, and a coarse red stubble of beard; he is nineteen. He walks heavily, like a bullock, but there is an odd grace about him. He speaks plainly, slowly, and calmly, and does not show what he feels. Except for his beard, one would not know that he is so young.

Another (this is Salvidienus Rufus) is as thin and agile as Agrippa is heavy and stalwart, as quick and volatile as Agrippa is slow and reserved. His face is lean, his skin fair, his eyes dark; he laughs readily, and lightens the gravity which the rest of us affect. He is older than any of us, but we love him as if he were our younger brother.

And a third (is it myself?) whom I see even more dimly than the others. No man may know himself, nor how he must appear even to his friends; but I imagine they must have thought me a bit of a fool, that day, and even for some time afterward. I was a bit luxuriant then, and fancied that a poet must play the part. I dressed richly, my manner was affected, and I had brought along with me from Arezzo a servant whose sole duty it was to care for my hair—until my friends derided me so mercilessly that I had him returned to Italy.

And at last he who was then Gaius Octavius. How may I tell you of him? I do not know the truth; only my memories. I can say again that he seemed to me a boy, though I was a scant two years older. You know his appearance now; it has not changed much. But now he is Emperor of the world, and I must look beyond that to see him as he was then; and I swear to you that I, whose service to him has been my knowledge of the hearts of both his friends and enemies, could not have foreseen what he was to become. I thought him a pleasant stripling, no more, with a face too delicate to receive the blows of fate, with a manner too diffident to achieve purpose, and with a voice too gentle to utter the ruthless words that a leader of men must utter. I thought that he might become a scholar of leisure, or a man of letters; I did not think that he had the energy to become even a senator, to which his name and wealth entitled him.

And these were those who came to land that day in early autumn, in the year of the fifth consulship of Julius Caesar, at Apollonia on the Adriatic coast of Macedonia. Fishing boats bobbed in the harbor, and the people waved; nets were stretched upon rocks to dry; and wooden shacks lined the road up to the city, which was set upon high ground before a plain that stretched and abruptly rose to the mountains.

Our mornings were spent in study. We rose before dawn, and heard our first lecture by lamplight; we breakfasted on coarse food when the sun shone above the eastern mountains; we discoursed in Greek on all things (a practice which, I fear, is dying now), and spoke aloud those passages from Homer we had learned the night before, accounted for them, and finally offered brief declamations that we had prepared according to the stipulations of Apollodorus (who was ancient even then, but of even temper and great wisdom).

In the afternoons, we were driven a little beyond the city to the camp where Julius Caesar’s legions were training; and there, for a good part of the rest of the day, we shared their exercises. I must say that it was during this time that I first began to suspect that I might have been wrong about Octavius’s abilities. As you know, his health has always been poor, though his frailness has been more apparent than mine, whose fate it is, dear Livy, to appear the model of health even in my most extreme illness. I, myself, then, took little part in the actual drills and maneuvers; but Octavius always did, preferring, like his uncle, to spend his time with the centurions, rather than with the more nominal officers of the legion. Once, I remember, in a mock battle his horse stumbled and he was thrown heavily to the ground. Agrippa and Salvidienus were standing nearby, and Salvidienus started at once to run to his aid; but Agrippa held him by the arm and would not let him move. After a few moments Octavius arose, stood stiffly upright, and called for another horse. One was brought him, and he mounted and rode the rest of the afternoon, completing his part in the exercise. That evening in our tent, we heard him breathing heavily, and we called the doctor of the legion to look at him. Two of his ribs were broken. He had the doctor bind his chest tightly, and the next morning he attended classes with us and took an equally active part in a quick-march that afternoon.

Thus it was during those first days and weeks that I came to know the Augustus who now rules the Roman world. Perhaps you will transform this into a few sentences of that marvelous history which I have been privileged to admire. But there is much that cannot go into books, and that is the loss with which I become increasingly concerned.

III. Letter: Julius Caesar to Gaius Octavius at Apollonia, from Rome (44 B.C)

I was remembering this morning, my dear Octavius, the day last winter in Spain when you found me at Munda in the midst of our siege of that fortress where Gnaeus Pompeius had fled with his legions. We were disheartened and fatigued with battle; our food was gone; and we were besieging an enemy who could rest and eat while we pretended to starve them out. In my anger at what seemed certain defeat, I ordered you to return to Rome, whence you had traveled in what seemed to me then such ease and comfort; and said that I could not bother with a boy who wanted to play at war and death. I was angry only at myself, as I am sure you knew even then; for you did not speak, but looked at me out of a great calm. Then I quieted a little, and spoke to you from my heart (as I have spoken to you since), and told you that this Spanish campaign against Pompeius was to settle at last and forever the civil strife and faction that had oppressed our Republic, in one way or another, ever since my youth; and that what I had thought to be victory was now almost certain defeat.

“Then,” you said, “we are not fighting for victory; we are fighting for our lives.”

And it seemed to me that a great burden was lifted from my shoulders, and I felt myself to be almost young again; for I remembered having said the same thing to myself more than thirty years before when six of Sulla’s troops surprised me alone in the mountains, and I fought my way through them to their commander, whom I bribed to take me alive back to Rome. It was then that I knew that I might be what I have become.

Remembering that old time and seeing you before me, I saw myself when I was young; and I took some of your youth into myself and gave you some of my age, and so we had together that odd exhilaration of power against whatever might happen; and we piled the bodies of our fallen comrades and advanced behind them so that our shields would not be weighted with the enemy’s hurled javelins, and we advanced upon the walls and took the fortress of Cordova, there on the Mundian plain.

And I remembered too, this morning, our pursuit of Gnaeus Pompeius across Spain, our bellies full and our muscles tired and the campfires at night and the talk that soldiers make when victory is certain. How all the pain and anguish and joy merge together, and even the ugly dead seem beautiful, and even the fear of death and defeat are like the steps of a game! Here in Rome, I long for summer to come, when we will march against the Parthians and the Germans to secure the last of our important borders. . . . You will understand better my nostalgia for past campaigns and my anticipation of campaigns to come if I let you know a little about the morning that occasioned those memories.

At seven o’clock this morning, the Fool (that is, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus—whom, you will be amused to know, I have had to make your nominal coequal in power under my command) was waiting at my door with a complaint about Marcus Antonius. It seems that one of Antonius’s treasurers was collecting taxes from those who, according to an ancient law cited at tedious length by Lepidus, ought to have their taxes collected by Lepidus’s own treasurer. Then for another hour, apparently thinking that allusive loquacity is subtlety, he suggested that Antonius was ambitious—an observation that surprised me as much as if I had been informed that the Vestal Virgins were chaste. I thanked him, and we exchanged platitudes upon the nature of loyalty, and he left me (I am sure) to report to Antonius that he perceived in me some excessive suspicion of even my closest friends. At eight o’clock, three senators came in, one after another, each accusing the other of accepting an identical bribe; I understood at once that all were guilty, that they had been unable to perform the service for which they were bribed, and that the briber was ready to make a public issue of the matter, which would necessitate a trial before the assembly—a trial that they wished to avoid, since it might conceivably lead to exile if they were unable to bribe enough of the jury to insure their safety. I judged that they would be successful in their effort to buy off justice, and so I trebled the reported amount of the bribe and fined each of them that amount, and resolved that I would deal similarly with the briber. They were well-pleased, and I have no fear of them; I know that they are corrupt, and they think that I am. . . . And so the morning went.

How long have we been living the Roman lie? Ever since I can remember, certainly; perhaps for many years before. And from what source does that lie suck its energy, so that it grows stronger than the truth? We have seen murder, theft, and pillage in the name of the Republic—and call it the necessary price we pay for freedom. Cicero deplores the depraved Roman morality that worships wealth—and, himself a millionaire many times over, travels with a hundred slaves from one of his villas to another. A consul speaks of peace and tranquillity—and raises armies that will murder the colleague whose power threatens his self-interest. The Senate speaks of freedom—and thrusts upon me powers that I do not want but must accept and use if Rome is to endure. Is there no answer to the lie?

I have conquered the world, and none of it is secure; I have shown liberty to the people, and they flee it as if it were a disease; I despise those whom I can trust, and love those best who would most quickly betray me. And I do not know where we are going, though I lead a nation to its destiny.

Such, my dear nephew, whom I would call my son, are the doubts that beset the man whom they would make a king. I envy you your winter in Apollonia; I am pleased with the reports of your studies; and I am happy that you get along so well with the officers of my legions there. But I do miss our talks in the evenings. I comfort myself with the thought that we shall resume them this summer on our Eastern campaign. We shall march across the country, feed upon the land, and kill whom we must kill. It is the only life for a man. And things shall be as they will be.

IV. Quintus Salvidienus Rufus: Notes for a Journal, at Apollonia (March, 44 B.C.)

Afternoon. The sun is bright, hot; ten or twelve officers and ourselves on a hill, looking down at the maneuvers of the cavalry on the field. Dust rises in billows as the horses gallop and turn; shouts, laughter, curses come up to us from the distance, through the thud of hoofbeats. All of us, except Maecenas, have come up from the field and are resting. I have removed my armor and am lying with my head on it; Maecenas, his tunic unspotted and his hair unruffled, sits with his back against the trunk of a small tree; Agrippa stands beside me, sweat drenching his body, his legs like stone pillars; Octavius beside him, his slender body trembling from its recent exertion—one never realizes how slight he is until he stands near someone like Agrippa—his face pale, hair lank and darkened by sweat, plastered to his forehead; Octavius smiling, pointing to something below us; Agrippa nodding. We all have a sense of well-being; it has not rained for a week, the weather has warmed, we are pleased with our skills and with the skills of the soldiers.

I write these words quickly, not knowing what I shall have occasion to use in my leisure. I must get everything down.

The horsemen below us rest; their horses mill around; Octavius sits beside me, pushes my head playfully off the armor; we laugh at nothing in our feeling for the moment. Agrippa smiles at us and stretches his great arms; the leather of his cuirass creaks in the stillness.

From behind us comes Maecenas’s voice—high, thin, a little affected, almost effeminate. “Boys who play at being soldier,” he says. “How unutterably boring.”

Agrippa—his voice deep, slow, deliberate, with that gravity that conceals so much: “If you had it in your power to remove that ample posterior from whatever convenient resting place it might encounter, you would discover that there are pleasures beyond the luxuries you affect.”

Octavius: “Perhaps we could persuade the Parthians to accept him as their general. That would make our task easier this summer.”

Maecenas sighs heavily, gets up, and walks over to where we are lying. For one so heavy, he is very light on his feet. He says: “While you have been indulging yourselves in your vulgar displays, I have been projecting a poem that examines the active versus the contemplative life. The wisdom of the one I know; I have been observing the foolishness of the other.”

Octavius, gravely: “My uncle once told me to read the poets, to love them, and to use them—but never to trust them.”

More banter. We grow quiet. The field below us is almost empty; the horses have been led away to the stables at the edge of the field. Below the field, from the direction of the city, a horseman, galloping at full speed. We watch him idly. He comes to the field, does not pause there, but crosses it wildly, careening in his saddle. I start to say something, but Octavius has stiffened. There is something in his face. We can see the foam flying from the horse’s mouth. Octavius says: “I know that man. He is from my mother’s household.”

He is almost upon us now; the horse slows; he slides from his saddle, stumbles, staggers toward us with something in his hand. Some of the soldiers around us have noticed; they run toward us with their swords half-drawn, but they see that the man is helpless with exhaustion and moves only by his will. He thrusts something toward Octavius and croaks, “This—this—” It is a letter. Octavius takes it and holds it and does not move for several moments. The messenger collapses, then sits and puts his head between his knees. All we can hear is the hoarse rasp of his breathing. I look at the horse and think absently that it is so broken in its wind that it will die before morning. Octavius has not moved. Everyone is still. Slowly he unrolls the letter; he reads; there is no expression on his face. Still he does not speak. After a long while he raises his head and turns to us. His face is like white marble. He puts the letter in my hand; I do not look at it. He says in a dull, flat voice: “My uncle is dead.”

We cannot take in his words; we look at him stupidly. His expression does not change, but he speaks again, and the voice that comes out of him is grating and loud and filled with uncomprehending pain, like the bellow of a bullock whose throat has been cut at a sacrifice: “Julius Caesar is dead.”

My hand is shaking so that I cannot read what is written. I steady myself. My voice is strange to me. I read aloud: “On this Ides of March Julius Caesar is murdered by his enemies in the Senate House. There are no details. The people run wildly through the streets. No one can know what will happen next. You may be in great danger. I can write no more. Your mother beseeches you to care for your person.” The letter has been written in great haste; there are blots of ink, and the letters are ill-formed.

I look around me, not knowing what I feel. An emptiness? The officers stand around us in a ring; I look into the eyes of one; his face crumples, I hear a sob: and I remember that this is one of Caesar’s prime legions, and that the veterans look upon him as a father.

After a long time Octavius moves; he walks to the messenger who remains seated on the ground, his face slack with exhaustion. Octavius kneels beside him; his voice is gentle. “Do you know anything that is not in this letter?”

The messenger says, “No, sir,” and starts to get up but Octavius puts his hand on his shoulder and says, “Rest”; and he rises and speaks to one of the officers. “See that this man is cared for and given comfortable quarters.” Then he turns to the three of us, who have moved closer together. “We will talk later. Now I must think of what this will mean.” He reaches his hand out toward me, and I understand that he wants the letter. I hand it to him, and he turns away from us. The ring of officers breaks for him, and he walks down the hill. For a long time we watch him, a slight boyish figure walking on the deserted field, moving slowly, this way and that, as if trying to discover a way to go.

Later. Great consternation in camp as word of Caesar’s death spreads. Rumors so wild that one can believe none of them. Arguments arise, subside; a few fist fights, quickly broken up. Some of the old professionals, whose lives have been spent in fighting from legion to legion, sometimes against the men who are now their comrades, look with contempt upon the fuss, and go about their business. Still Octavius has not returned from his lonely watch upon the field. The day darkens.

Night. A guard has been placed around our tents by Lugdunius himself, commander of the legion; for no one knows what enemies we have, or what may ensue. The four of us together in Octavius’s tent; we sit or recline on pallets around the lanterns flickering in the center of the floor. Sometimes Octavius rises and sits on a campstool, away from the light, so that his face is in shadow. Many have come in from Apollonia, asking for more news, giving advice, offering aid; Lugdunius has put the legion at our disposal, should we want it. Now Octavius has asked that we not be disturbed, and speaks of those who have come to him.

“They know even less than we, and they speak only to their own fortunes. Yesterday—” he pauses and looks at something in the darkness—“yesterday, it seemed they were my friends. Now I may not trust them.” He pauses again, comes close to us, and puts his hand on my shoulder. “I shall speak of these matters only with you three, who are truly my friends.”

Maecenas speaks; his voice has deepened, and no longer shrills with the effeminacy that he sometimes affects: “Do not trust even us, who love you. From this moment on, put only that faith in us that you have to.”

Octavius turns abruptly away from us, his back to the light, and says in a strangled voice: “I know. I know even that.”

Agrippa says that we must do nothing, since we know nothing upon which we can reasonably act. In the unsteady light of the lanterns, he might be an old man, with his voice and his gravity. “We are safe here, at least for the time being; this legion will be loyal to us—Lugdunius has given his word. For all we know, this may be a general rebellion, and armies may already have been dispatched for our capture, as Sulla sent troops for the descendants of Marius—among whom was Julius Caesar himself. We may not be as lucky now as he was then. We have behind us the mountains of Macedonia, where they will not follow against this legion. In any event, we shall have time to receive more news; and we shall have made no move to compromise our position, one way or the other. We must wait in the safety of the moment.”

Octavius, softly: “My uncle once told me that too much caution may lead to death as certainly as too much rashness.”

I suddenly find myself on my feet; a power has come upon me; I speak in a voice that seems not my own: “I call you Caesar, for I know that he would have had you as his son.”

Octavius looks at me; the thought had not occurred to him, I believe. “It is too early for that,” he says slowly, “but I will remember that it was Salvidienus who first called me by that name.”

I say: “And if he would have you as his son, he would have you act as he would have done. Agrippa has said that we have the loyalty of one legion here; the other five in Macedonia will respond as Lugdunius has, if we do not delay in asking their allegiance. For if we know nothing of what will ensue, they know even less. I say that we march on Rome with the legions we have and assume the power that lies there.”

Octavius: “And then? We do not know what that power is; we do not know who will oppose us. We do not even know who murdered him.”

Myself: “The power shall become what we make it to be. As for who will oppose us, we cannot know. But if Antonius’s legions will join with ours, then—”

Octavius, slowly: “We do not even know who murdered him. We do not know his enemies, thus we cannot know our own.”

Maecenas sighs, rises, shakes his head. “We have spoken of action, of what we shall do; but we have not spoken of the end to which that action is aimed.” He gazes at Octavius. “My friend, what is it that you wish to accomplish, by whatever action we take?”

Augustus

John Williams

About the Book

About the Author

AUTHOR’S NOTE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE