Augustus (22 page)

'Conditions?' I said.

'Conditions which your natural gratitude and dignity will be happy to satisfy.' He gave a quick forky lick of his lips. 'Caesar, I have served the Republic all my life. I have lived as honourably as a man can these last terrible two decades. I recognize what you have done to shore up the State, but I have done my bit myself even though we have sometimes found our judgements differ. No more of that though. I've attained some honour, I say

- do you know, in Mylyssa in Caria where I was proconsul there's a priest consecrated in my honour - awful, these Orientals, aren't they? But honour is one thing and a man can't live on it in his old age.'

'What,' I said, 'do you have to . .
.'I
hesitated before the word 'sell'; it hardly chimed with all this talk of honour . . . 'tell me? I am sure we shall be able to satisfy you.'

'Antony's made a will,' he said. 'I witnessed it and know its provisions
...
As for me, there's various honours and comforts

- a priesthood of Jupiter, an estate on the Bay of Naples - that I have my eye on
...
I would like a contract, Caesar . . . the provisions of the will are scandalous . . .'

'Would they be believed?' I said. 'My word . . .' he said.

'Words,' I said, 'are discounted these days. The currency of language has been debased. Look at the insults Antony has showered on me. They mean nothing, have no effect.'

Plancus smiled. This would be different. Let me tell you what is in the will. He asserts again that Ptolemy Caesar is Caesar's son and leaves huge legacies to him and Cleopatra's other brats. Nothing is left Octavia or her daughter Antonia. He orders that his body be buried in the royal mausoleum at Alexandria. I don't need to spell out the implications of this will, do I, Caesar?'

He did not; I felt my head swim with excitement. Plancus had handed me what I needed to convert a personal struggle (as some persisted in seeing it) into the cause of Rome and all Italy.

'But words,' I said.

'I can prove them . . . but first my contract. . .' I called for a slave, signed whatever he dictated. (It mattered little.)

'The will,' he said, 'is deposited in the Temple of Vesta.'

Livia was adamant: it could not, must not, be done. It was wrong in itself, sacrilege. Whatever lay in the Temple of Vesta was a sacred trust of the Goddess. No man might enter the shrine; no man might compel the Virgins to surrender what had been entrusted to their keeping. Her eyes flashed as she said this, and love, fear and anger were mingled in my heart. If no man . . . could she not herself? 'You have been blinded, Caesar,' she said. 'You are in danger of losing your sense of what is right and what is wrong. I beg you to have nothing to do with this, to forget and lay aside the evil temptation that that man Plancus has sown in your mind. I warn you too, that if you commit this sacrilege, our marriage
will be doomed to perpetual un
fruitfulness . . .'

How can a man respond to such a plea from his wife? There are no words. No argument can still a trembling heart such as Livia revealed. I took her in my arms, but she drew her head away, resisting my kiss. There was no answering embrace.

'You will kill,' she said, 'whatever is good and true in you and in us . . .'

A shadow crossed the face of the sun and the room was cold.

Maecenas, too, hesitated. The news shook him out of his affectations. His hand flew to the carved frog he wore on a chain round his neck. For some time he could not speak.

Then he went and looked out of the window to the hills . . .

Tm afraid,' he said, 'I would be afraid to do it myself, and I'm afraid for you, my dear. You can put me down as a dark and superstitious old Etruscan, but . . . Your star, yes, the Gods have looked kindly on you and on us. Will they do so after what you propose . . . this violation?'

'We shall fight Antony at sea perhaps. I do not think Neptune cares a rap for the Temple of Vesta.'

'The Gods punish impiety, whatever form it takes. My dear, if you do this, you will suffer, some time, I cannot tell when, but you will. . .'

I remembered what Virgil had said of the Temple of Diana, and knew Maecenas spoke truth.

It frightened me that Livia and Maecenas, who disliked each other, should proffer the same advice, the same warning.

It frightened me; yet I could not turn back. Plancus had handed me a set of loaded dice. When I cast them on the table, they would inevitably roll to my advantage. My hand holding the dice-box felt cold and bony; my mouth filled with nausea, as I hesitated. I turned back, once more, to Livia, and begged her to free me from the guilt. She, being a woman, could act as intermediary. She was permitted to enter the Temple, and wasn't the High Priestess her mother's sister?

Livia said, 'You are asking me to do what I know to be wrong; to ask my aunt to betray the trust vested in her order through all the centuries of Rome's history.'

I felt my face grow obstinate as a small boy's.

'You don't understand,' I said. 'We cannot avoid war, and you refuse me what alone can ensure my victory. Antony has all the riches of the East behind him. I must march against him, for I cannot endure war in Italy. But I dare not leave disaffection behind. That will cook Antony's goose,' I said. 'If you will not help me, I shall ask Octavia.'

'Do,' she said, 'do just that. See if she will commit sacrilege to help her beloved brother.'

And with these words, and a face as full of wifely love as Clytemnestra's, she swept from the room.

As it happened I dared not approach Octavia. I told myself I could not ask her to take this weight on herself. But that was not the true reason. I was afraid of her anger and contempt.

Even Agrippa shrank from the deed. When I talked of the will to him, he at once rattled off a string of military statistics, all claiming to prove that Antony was lost whatever happened in Rome and Italy. Only his refusal to meet my eye told me of his fear, told me he was lying. I couldn't recall that he had ever lied to me before.

So, in the end, I had to take full responsibility. Even Plancus slipped into the shadows, and I wrote to the High Priestess requesting an interview. She declined, politely. No doubt rumour of my intention had reached her; it was unlikely that Plancus had kept his mouth shut. Alternatively
...
but to dwell on the alternative could do nothing for my self-esteem.

Then, one of the tribunes, whose name I now forget, organized a pro-Antonian demonstration in the forum. There was something of a riot, a few houses were burnt, and Agrippa's police had to clear the streets. Men started to talk wildly - as men always will in times of civil unrest. This time word flew round that we would soon be back in the days of Clodius and Milo, those gangsters whose ruffians had made political life impossible for a time some twenty years previously. This talk alarmed Agrippa. Your father was a great man, a g
reat soldier and even finer adm
inistrator; at heart however he was a policeman. There was nothing he feared except disorder.

He came to me now like a bewildered bull, to tell me I had been right and he himself wrong. 'It's no longer a question of what to do,' he said, 'but how to do it.'

'I'm glad you see it that way. Have you any ideas?' I said. 'I may say,' I added, 'that we can't look for any co-operation from the Vestals.'

'In that case,' he said, 'it's a choice between force and fraud.' 'That's no choice,' I said. 'Can I leave it to you?'

He bungled it. We were dining late (which was ever Livia's taste, itself a surprise to those who cast her as a conventional Roman lady of the old school, and did not realize that, when Livia abode by conventions, she did so because they pleased her, while remaining always ready to disregard them if they happened to clash with her immediate preferences or inclinations). We were, as I say, dining late, when my stepfather bustled in, full of that simulated consternation with which he was wont to impart the latest news, and, having attracted general attention by his huffing and puffing and hopping from foot to foot, exclaimed, 'You'll never believe the atrocious news I have just heard. There's been an attempted robbery at the Temple of Vesta.'

'Attempted?'

'Robbery?'

Livia's head came up like a startled mare's.

'Who were the thieves? What were they after?'

Philippus, gratified by the attention he had won, seated himself on a couch and clapped his hands for the slave-boy. 'Give me wine,' he said, 'I'm all out of breath with the hurry of coming here. That precisely no one knows. They were slaves of course. Greeks, men say. Whose is not yet clear. Nor what they were after. But I'm told we can expect revelations. They'll be put to the question of course. You look pale, my boy,' he said to me. 'You're overdoing things, I've told you that. What do you make of my news? It's terrible, isn't it, to think of such a thing happening. I don't know what the world's coming to,' and he drank his wine, not, you will understand, as if that could tell him . . .

Livia denied herself to me. I knew she had so determined by the way she refused to look at me, and, when I came to bed, she had turned her face to the wall and was pretending to be asleep.

Before then, however, I had talked to Agrippa, whom I had sent a slave to fetch from wherever he was gambling. The shock having been sprung, I was quite calm.

'They're your men, I take it,' I said.

He nodded. All the colour had been drained away from his face, and his usual composure had vanished.

I said, They mustn't be permitted to speak. I don't suppose they can be trusted to keep silence. They're Greeks, aren't they?'

They're Greeks. Dammit all, they had to be. I couldn't use illiterates.'

That's all right,' I said, 'but their mouths must be stopped. You know that. You've taken an interest in the city's aqueducts. You know what happens if an aqueduct springs a leak. Exactly. Well, your plumbers have failed in their repair job. They're leaky themselves. They mustn't be allowed to talk. I've had the Praetorian Prefect take over responsibility. But the question is, is there one of them who might sing the right tune to save his skin? Find out will you, before he's killed trying to escape. And if he exists, this is what he should sing . . .'

I looked at Livia in the half-light. I knew she wasn't asleep. The air of our room was heavy and menacing with her resentment and reproach. When I laid my hand on her thigh I felt the muscles stiffen. 'It's going to be all right,' I said. Without shifting her body, she distanced herself from me. I was excluded from all that I most immediately desired, and I dared not move towards her.

The boy was brought before me in the morning. I had taken care to have a dozen senators assembled, at least three of whom I knew to have been friends of Antony. The Greek was very young, about sixteen I suppose, with oiled curls and a smooth oiled body. His mouth was swollen and a bruise was coming up on his cheekbone. He looked frightened, like a puppy expecting to be whipped. I was surprised that he was so young, but Agrippa explained that he had been the lookout boy. 'I suppose Democritus,' (an ex-gladiator who had been the leader of the gang) 'fancied him,' Agrippa said. 'You can see he's a bloody little catamite. Typical Greeks, you know.'

The boy fluttered his long eyelashes over his big doe eyes. I looked at him severely, rejecting the timid smile he was trying to muster. I said to Agrippa, 'What's his name and provenance?'

Timotheus. Slave-born. Has been a member of a dancing-troupe. Taken up by the gladiator Democritus.'

'Has he been put to the question?'

'Wasn't necessary. He babbled at the sight of the instruments.'

I turned to the group of consulars I had invited to be present at the examination.

'Would one of you like to question him?' I asked. 'You perhaps?' I offered the role to M. Cocceius Nerva, consul three or four years before, who had served under Antony, but who was also, like all his family, a close friend of Plancus. I made the choice carefully. Cocceius Nerva, a leading member of a rising family, was swithering on a tightrope of indecision; he danced in the air unable to decide which side would better promote his career. Now he looked for a moment as if he would rather decline my invitation, considered the consequences of that, and nodded his head in acceptance. He began to question the boy in a harsh guttural accent. The boy stuttered over his first responses (I thought to myself; he has a certain theatrical talent; well chosen, Agrippa). Seeing his fear, Nerva warmed to his work. His voice snarled out his questions, and the boy began to whimper obediently. Then at last, as if giving way to intolerable pressure, he told his story.

He had had no responsibility himself, yet he had to confess he had been in it from the beginning.

'I was drinking,' he said, 'with Democritus - that's my friend, my special friend, you understand, in a wineshop in the Suburra. We were short of money, business has been bad lately with so many patrons out of the city, and we were moaning about it. Democritus was always a moaner, I have to say that. Well, then, as we were drinking, a big hook-nosed fellow came up and sat at our table. I didn't like the look of him from the start. He spoke to Democritus as if he knew him, but it soon came out that he'd only been recommended to him. Then he looked at me doubtfully. "You can say anything before the boy," Democritus said. So the man nodded and said there was a job on. "What sort of a job?" says Democritus. "A big one," says the man. "Can you read?" he says. "Not so well," says Democritus.