Letter: Octavius Caesar to Nicolaus of Damascus (A.D. 14)
August 9
My dear Nicolaus, I send you affectionate greetings and my thanks for the recent shipment of those dates of which I am so fond, and which you have been kind enough to furnish me over the years. They have become one of the most important of the Palestinian imports, and they are known throughout Rome and the Italian provinces by your name, which I have given them. The nicolai, I call them; and the designation has persisted among those who can afford their cost. I hope it amuses you to learn that your name is known better to the world through this affectionate eponym than through your many books. We both must have reached the age when we can take some ironic pleasure in the knowledge of the triviality into which our lives have finally descended.
I write you from aboard my yacht, the one upon which so many years ago you and I used to float leisurely among the little islands that dot our western coastline. I sit where we used to sit-slightly forward of midship upon that canopied platform which is raised so that the constant and slow movement of the sea might be observed without hindrance. We set sail from Ostia this morning, in an unseasonably chill hour before dawn; and now we are drifting southward toward the Campanian coast. I have determined that this shall be a leisurely journey. We shall depend upon the wind to carry us; and if the wind refuses, we shall wait upon it, suspended by the vast buoyancy of the sea.
Our destination is Capri. Some months ago one of my Greek neighbors there asked me to be guest of honor at the yearly gymnastic competitions of the island youths; I demurred at the time, pleading the burden of my duties. But a short while ago, it became necessary for me to travel southward upon another mission, and I determined to give myself the pleasure of this holiday.
Last week my wife approached me with that rather stiff formality she has never lost, and requested that I accompany her and her son on a journey to Benevento, where Tiberius had to go on some business connected with his new authority. Livia explained to me what I already knew-that the people are not persuaded that I am fond of my adopted son, and that any display of affection or concern I might show will make more secure Tiberius's eventual succession to my power.
Livia did not put the matter so directly as she might have; despite her strength of character, she has always been a diplomatic woman. Like one of those Asian diplomats with whom I have dealt for much of my life, she wished to suggest to me without brutally stating the case that the days of my life are limited in number, and that I must prepare the world for that moment of chaos which will inevitably follow my death.
Of course Livia was in this matter, as she has been in most, quite reasonable and correct. I am in my seventy-sixth year; I have lived longer than I have wished to do, and such mortal boredom does not augment longevity. My teeth are nearly gone; my hand shakes with an occasional palsy that always surprises me; and the lassitude of age pulls at my limbs. When I walk I sometimes have the odd sensation that the earth is shifting under my feet, that the stone or brick or patch of earth upon which I step may suddenly move beneath me, and that I shall fall free of the earth to wherever one goes when time has done with one.
And so I acceded to her request, upon the condition that my accompaniment be a ceremonial one. I suggested that since sea travel makes Tiberius ill, he and his mother take the land route to Benevento, while I traveled in the same direction by sea; and that if either of them wished to make public the news that the husband or adoptive father traveled with them, I would not dispute it. It is a satisfactory arrangement, and I imagine that we all are more pleased by this subterfuge than we would have been by public honesty.
Yes, my wife is a remarkable woman; I suppose I have been more fortunate than most husbands. She was quite beautiful when she was a young woman, and she has remained handsome in her age. We loved each other for only a few years after our marriage, but we remained civil; and I believe that at last we have become something like friends. We understand each other. I know that deep within her Republican heart she has always felt that she married beneath her station, that she traded the dignity of an ancient title for the brute power of one whose authority was undeserved by his more humble name. I have come to believe that she did so for the sake of her first-born son, Tiberius, of whom she has always been inexplicably fond and for whom she has had the most tenacious ambition. It was this ambition that caused the first estrangement between us, an estrangement that grew so deep that at one period of our lives I spoke to my wife only of topics upon which I had made careful notes, so that we might not have to undergo the additional burden of misunderstanding, real or imagined.
And yet in the long run, despite the difficulties it caused between Livia and me, that ambition has worked for the benefit of my authority and Rome. Livia was always intelligent enough to know that her son's succession depended upon my undisputed retention of power, and that he would be crushed if he were not bequeathed a stable Empire. And if Livia is capable of contemplating my death with equanimity, I am sure that she will contemplate her own in a like manner; her real concern is for that order of which we both are mere instruments.
So in deference to that concern for order which I share, and in preparation for this voyage, three days ago I deposited at the Temple of the Vestal Virgins four documents, which are to be opened and read to the Senate only upon the occasion of my death.
The first of these was my will, which bequeaths to Tiberius two-thirds of my personal property and wealth. Though Tiberius does not need it, such a bequest is a necessary gesture to an adequate succession. The remaining portion-except for minor provisions for the citizens and various relatives and friends-goes to Livia, who will also by this document be adopted into the Julian family and be allowed to assume my tides. The name will not please her, but the tides will; for she will understand that her son will gain stature by her possession of the titles, and that her ambition will be that much more easily fulfilled.
The second was a set of directions for my funeral. Those who must put themselves in charge of that matter will no doubt exceed my instructions, which are lavish and vulgar enough to begin with; but such excesses invariably please the people, and thus are necessary. I comfort myself with the knowledge that I shall not have to be witness to this last display.
The third document was an account of the state of the Empire; the number of soldiers on active duty, the amount of money that is (or should be) in the treasury, the financial obligations of the government to provincial leaders and private citizens, the names of those administrators who are fiscally and otherwise responsible-all such matters that must be made public for the safety of order and the prevention of corruption. In addition, I appended to this account some rather strong suggestions to my successor. I advised against extending Roman citizenship so capriciously or widely as to weaken the center of the Empire; I advised that all men in high administrative positions be employed by the government at a fixed salary, so that temptation to undue power and corruption might be lessened; and at last I charged that under no circumstances should the frontiers of the Empire be extended, but that the military be employed solely to defend the established borders, especially against the German barbarians, who seem never to tire of their senseless adventures. I do not doubt that this advice will in the long run be ignored; but it will not be ignored for a few years, and I shall at least have left my country that poor legacy.
And finally I gave into the keeping of those estimable ladies in their temple a statement setting forth an account of all my acts and services to Rome and its Empire, with directions that this statement be engraved upon bronze tablets and attached to the columns that so ostentatiously rear themselves outside that even more ostentatious mausoleum that I have decreed will hold my ashes.
I have a copy of this document before me now, and from time to time I glance at it, as if it were written by someone else. During its composition, I found it necessary upon occasion to refer to a number of other works, so distant in time were some of the events that I had to record. It is remarkable to have grown so old that one must depend upon the work of others to search into one's own life.
Among the books that I consulted were that Life of me which you wrote when you first came to Rome, those portions of our friend Livy's history of the Founding of the City which concerns itself with my early activities, and my own Notes for an Autobiography-which, after all these years, seems also to be the work of someone other than myself.
If you will forgive me for saying so, my dear Nicolaus, all these works seem to me now to have one thing in common: they are lies. I trust that you will not too literally apply this remark to your own work; I believe you know what I mean. There are no untruths in any of them, and there are few errors of fact; but they are lies. I wonder if during your recent years of study and contemplation in the quiet of your far Damascus you have come to understand this also.
For it seems to me now that when I read those books and wrote my words, I read and wrote of a man who bore my name but a man whom I hardly know. Strain as I might, I can hardly see him now; and when I glimpse him, he recedes as in a mist, eluding my most searching gaze. I wonder, if he saw me, would he recognize what he has become? Would he recognize the caricature that all men become of themselves? I do not believe that he would.
In any event, my dear Nicolaus, the completion of these four documents and their deposition in the Temple of the Vestal Virgins may be the last officiai acts that I shall have to perform; I have in effect relinquished my power and my world, as I drift now southward toward Capri, and drift more slowly toward that place where so many of my friends have gone before me; and at last I may have a holiday that will not be disturbed by a sense of anything left undone. For the next few days at least, no messenger will rush to me with news of a new crisis or a new conspiracy; no senator will importune my support for a foolish and self-serving law; no lawyers will plead before me the cases of equally corrupt clients. My only duties are to this letter that I write, to the great sea that so effortlessly supports our frail craft, and to the blue Italian sky.
For I travel nearly alone. Only a few oarsmen are aboard, and I have given orders that they shall not work at their stations except in the event of a sudden squall; a few servants lounge at the stern of our craft and laugh lazily; and near the prow, always observing me carefully, is a new young physician that I have employed, one Philippus of Athens.
I have outlived all my physicians; it is some comfort to me to know that I shall not outlive Philippus. Moreover, I trust the boy. He seems to know very little; and he has not yet been a doctor long enough to have learned the easy hypocrisy that deludes his patients and at the same time fills his own purse. He offers no remedy for my disease of age, and does not subject me to those tortures for which so many so eagerly pay. He is a little nervous, I think, knowing himself to be in the presence of one whom he too solemnly considers the Emperor of the world; yet he is not obsequious, and he looks after my comfort rather than what another might think of as my health.
I tire, my dear Nicolaus. It is my age. The vision in my left eye is nearly gone; yet if I close it, I can see, to the east, the soft rise of the Italian coast that I have loved so well; and I can discern, even in the distance, the shapes of particular cottages and even make out the movement of figures upon the land. In my leisure I wonder at the mysterious lives that these simple folk must lead. All lives are mysterious, I suppose, even my own.
Philippus is stirring and looking at me apprehensively; it is clear that he wants me to cease what he takes to be work rather than pleasure. I shall forestall his ministrations, desist for a while, and pretend to rest.
At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty to the Republic, which had been oppressed by the tyranny of faction. For this service the Senate, with complimentary resolutions, enrolled me in its order, in the consulship of Gaius Pansa and Aulus Hirtius, and gave me at the same time consular precedence in voting and the authority to command soldiers. As propraetor it ordered me, along with the consuls, ^ cc to see that the Republic suffered no harm. " In the same year, moreover, as both consuls had fallen in war, the people elected me consul and a triumvir for settling the constitution.
Those who slew my father I drove into exile, punishing their deed by due process of law; and afterward when they waged war upon the Republic I twice defeated them in battle…
Thus begins that account of my acts and services to Rome of which I wrote you earlier this morning. During the hour or so that I lay on my couch and pretended to doze, thus affording Philippus some respite from his concern, I thought again of this account, and of the circumstances under which it was composed. It shall be engraved upon bronze tablets and attached to those columns that mark the entrance to my mausoleum. Upon those columns there will be sufficient space for six of these tablets, and each of the tablets may contain fifty lines of about sixty characters each. Thus the statement of my acts must be limited to about eighteen thousand characters.
It seems to me wholly appropriate that I should have been forced to write of myself under these conditions, arbitrary as they might be; for just as my words must be accommodated to such a public necessity, so has my life been. And just as the acts of my life have done, so these words must conceal at least as much truth as they display; the truth will lie somewhere beneath these graven words, in the dense stone which they will encircle. And this too is appropriate; for much of my life has been lived in such secrecy. It has never been politic for me to let another know my heart.
It is fortunate that youth never recognizes its ignorance, for if it did it would not find the courage to get the habit of endurance. It is perhaps an instinct of the blood and flesh which prevents this knowledge and allows the boy to become the man who will live to see the folly of his existence.
Certainly I was ignorant that spring when I was eighteen years of age, a student at ApoUonia, and got the news of Julius Caesar's death… Much has been made of my loyalty to Julius Caesar; but Nicolaus, I swear to you, I do not know whether I loved the man or not. The year before he was killed, I had been with him on his Spanish campaign; he was my uncle, and the most important man I had ever known; I was flattered at his trust in me; and I knew that he planned to adopt me and make me his heir.
Though it was nearly sixty years ago, I remember that afternoon on the training field when I got the news of my Uncle Julius's death. Maecenas was there, and Agrippa, and Salvidienus. One of my mother's servants brought me the message, and I remember that I cried out as if in pain after I read it.
But at that first moment, Nicolaus, I felt nothing; it was as if the cry of pain issued from another throat. Then a coldness came over me, and I walked away from my friends so that they could not see what I felt, and what I did not feel. And as I walked on that field alone, trying to rouse in myself the appropriate sense of grief and loss, I was suddenly elated, as one might be when riding a horse he feels the horse tense and bolt beneath him, knowing that he has the skill to control the poor spirited beast who in an excess of energy wishes to test his master. When I returned to my friends, I knew that I had changed, that I was someone other than I had been; I knew my destiny, and I could not speak to them of it. And yet they were my friends.
Though I probably could not have articulated it then, I knew that my destiny was simply this: to change the world. Julius Caesar had come to power in a world that was corrupt beyond your understanding. No more than six families ruled the world; towns, regions, and provinces under Roman authority were the currencies of bribery and reward; in the name of the Republic and in the guise of tradition, murder and civil war and merciless repression were the means toward the accepted ends of power, wealth, and glory. Any man who had sufficient money could raise an army, and thus augment that wealth, thereby gaining more power, and hence glory So Roman killed Roman, and authority became simply the force of arms and riches. And in this strife and faction the ordinary citizen writhed as helplessly as the hare in the trap of the hunter.
Do not mistake me. I have never had that sentimental and rhetorical love for the common people that was in my youth (and is even now) so fashionable. Mankind in the aggregate I have found to be brutish, ignorant, and unkind, whether those qualities were covered by the coarse tunic of the peasant or the white and purple toga of a senator. And yet in the weakest of men, in moments when they are alone and themselves, I have found veins of strength like gold in decaying rock; in the crudest of men flashes of tenderness and compassion; and in the vainest of men moments of simplicity and grace. I remember Marcus Aemilius Lepidus at Messina, an old man stripped of his titles, whom I made publicly to ask forgiveness for his crimes and beg for his life; after he had done so in front of the troops that he had once commanded, he looked at me for a long moment without shame or regret or fear, and smiled, and turned from me and strode erectly toward his obscurity. And at Actium, I remember Marcus Antonius at the prow of his ship looking at Cleopatra as her own fleet departed leaving him to certain defeat, knowing at that moment that she had never loved him; and yet upon his face was an expression almost womanly in its wise affection and forgiveness. And I remember Cicero, when at last he knew that his foolish intrigues had failed, and when in secret I informed him that his life was in danger. He smiled as if there had been no strife between us and said, "Do not trouble yourself. I am an old man. Whatever mistakes I have made, I have loved my country." I am told that he offered his neck to his executioner with that same grace.
Thus I did not determine to change the world out of an easy idealism and selfish righteousness that are invariably the harbingers of failure, nor did I determine to change the world so that my wealth and power might be enhanced; wealth beyond one's comfort has always seemed to me the most boring of possessions, and power beyond its usefulness has seemed the most contemptible. It was destiny that seized me that afternoon at Apollonia nearly sixty years ago, and I chose not to avoid its embrace.
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.
And yet they were my friends, and dearest to me at the precise moment when in my heart I gave them up. How contrary an animal is man, who most treasures what he refuses or abandons! The soldier who has chosen war for his profession in the midst of battle longs for peace, and in the security of peace hungers for the clash of sword and the chaos of the bloody field; the slave who sets himself against his unchosen servitude and by his industry purchases his freedom, then binds himself to a patron more cruel and demanding than his master was; the lover who abandons his mistress lives thereafter in his dream of her imagined perfection.
Nor do I exempt myself from this contrariness. When I was young, I would have said that loneliness and secrecy were forced upon me. I would have been in error. As most men do, I chose my life then; I chose to enclose myself in the half-formed dream of a destiny no one could share, and thus abandoned the possibility of that kind of human friendship which is so ordinary that it is never spoken of, and thus is seldom cherished.
One does not deceive oneself about the consequences of one's acts; one deceives oneself about the ease with which one can live with those consequences. I knew the consequences of my decision to live within myself, but I could not have foreseen the heaviness ofthat loss. For my need of friendship increased to the degree that I refused it. And I believe that my friends- Maecenas, Agrippa, Salvidienus-never could fully understand that need.
Salvidienus Rufus, of course, died before he could have understood it; like myself, he was driven by energies of youth so remorseless that consequence itself became nothing, and the expense of energy became its own end.
The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality. The man of middle years, who has lived the future that he once dreamed, sees life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power, however great, will not prevail against those forces of accident and nature to which he gives the names of gods, and has learned that he is mortal. But the man of age, if he plays his assigned role properly, must see life as a comedy. For his triumphs and his failures merge, and one is no more the occasion for pride or shame than the other; and he is neither the hero who proves himself against those forces, nor the protagonist who is destroyed by them. Like any poor, pitiable shell of an actor, he comes to see that he has played so many parts that there no longer is himself.
I have played these roles in my life; and if now, when I come to the final one, I believe that I have escaped that awkward comedy by which I have been defined, it may be only the last illusion, the ironic device by which the play is ended.
When I was young, I played the role of scholar-which is to say, one who examines matters of which he has no knowledge. With Plato and the Pythagoreans, I floated through the mists where souls are supposed to wander in search of new bodies; and for a while, convinced of the brotherhood of man and beast, I refused to eat any flesh, and felt for my horse a kinship that I had not dreamed possible. At the same time, and without discomfort, I as fully adopted the opposing doctrines of Parmenides and Zeno, and felt at home in a world that was absolutely solid and motionless, without meaning beyond itself, and hence infinitely manipulatable, at least to the contemplative mind.
Nor when the course of events around me altered did it seem inappropriate that I assume the mask of a soldier and play out that appointed role. Wars, both civil and foreign, I undertook throughout the world, on sea and land… Twice I triumphed with an ovation, thrice I celebrated curule triumphs, and was saluted as Imperator twenty-one times. Yet, as others have suggested, perhaps with more tact than I deserved, I was an indifferent soldier. Whatever successes I have claimed came from those more skillful in the art of battle than I-Marcus Agrippa first, and then those who inherited the skills of which he was author. Contrary to the libels and rumors spread during the early days of my military life, I was not more cowardly than another, nor did I lack the will to endure the hardships of campaign. I believe that I was then even more nearly indifferent to the fact of my existence than I am now, and the endurance of the rigors of warfare afforded me a curious pleasure that I have found elsewhere neither before nor since. But it always seemed to me that there was a peculiar childishness about the fact of war, however necessary it might have been.
It is said that in the ancient days of our history, human rather than animal sacrifices were offered to the gods; today we are proud to believe that such practices have so receded into the past that they are recorded only in the uncertainty of myth and legend. We shake our heads in wonderment at that time so far removed (we say) from the enlightenment and humanity of the Roman spirit, and we marvel at the brutality upon which our civilization is founded. I, too, have felt a distant and abstract pity for that ancient slave or peasant who suffered beneath the sacrificial knife upon the altar of a savage god; and yet I have always felt myself to be a little foolish to do so.
For sometimes in my sleep there parade before me the tens of thousands of bodies that will not walk again upon the earth, men no less innocent than those ancient victims whose deaths propitiated an earlier god; and it seems to me then, in the obscurity or clarity of the dream, that I am that priest who has emerged from the dark past of our race to speak the rite that causes the knife to fall. We tell ourselves that we have become a civilized race, and with a pious horror we speak of those times when a god of the crops demanded the body of a human being for his obscure function. But is not the god that so many Romans have served, in our memory and even in our time, as dark and fearsome as that ancient one? Even if to destroy him, I have been his priest; and even if to weaken his power, I have done his bidding. Yet I have not destroyed him, or weakened his power. He sleeps restlessly in the hearts of men, waiting to rouse himself or to be aroused. Between the brutality that would sacrifice a single innocent life to a fear without a name, and the enlightenment that would sacrifice thousands of lives to a fear that we have named, I have found little to choose.
I determined early, however, that it was disruptive of order for men to give honor to those gods who spring from the darkness of instinct. Thus I encouraged the Senate to declare the divinity of Julius Caesar, and I erected a temple in his honor in Rome so that the presence of his genius might be felt by all the people. And I am sure that after my death, the Senate will in like manner see fit to declare my divinity also. As you know, I am already thought to be divine in many of the towns and provinces of Italy, though I have never allowed permission for this cult to be practiced in Rome. It is a foolishness, but it is no doubt necessary. Nevertheless, of all the roles that I have had to play in my lifetime, this one of being a mortal god has been the most uncomfortable. I am a man, and as foolish and weak as most men; if I have had an advantage over my fellows, it is that I have known this of myself, and have therefore known their weaknesses, and never presumed to find much more strength and wisdom in myself than I found in another. It was one of the sources of my power, that knowledge.
It is afternoon; the sun begins its slow descent to the west. A calm has come upon the sea, so that the purple sails above me hang slack against the pale sky; our boat sways gently upon the waves, yet does not move forward to any perceptible degree. The oarsmen, who all day have been taking their leisure, look at me with a bored apprehension, expecting me to rouse them from their ease and urge them to labor against the calm that has stilled us. I shall not do so. In half an hour, or an hour, or two hours, a breeze will rise; then we shall make for the coast and find safe harbor and drop anchor. Now I am content to drift where the sea will take me.
Of all the curses of age, this sleeplessness which increasingly I must endure is the most troublesome. As you know, I have always been subject to insomnias; but when I was younger, I was able to put that nocturnal restlessness of mind to purpose, and I almost enjoyed those moments when it seemed to me that all the world slept and I alone had leisure to observe its repose. Beyond the urgings of those who would advise my policy in the terms of their own vision of the world, which is to say in their visions of themselves, I had the freedom of contemplation and silence; many of my most important policies were determined as I lay awake on my bed in the early hours before dawn. But the sleeplessness that I have recently been undergoing is of a different kind. It is no longer that restiessness of a mind so intent upon its play that it is jealous of that slumber which would rob it of consciousness of itself; it is, rather, a sleeplessness of waiting, a long moment in which the soul prepares itself for a repose unlike any that mind or body has ever known before.
I have not slept this night. Near sunset, we harbored a hundred yards or so offshore in a little cove that protects the few fishing boats of some nameless village, the thatched huts of which are nestled on the slopes of a small hill perhaps half a mile inland. As evening came on, I watched the lamps and the fires glimmer against the dark, and watched until they flickered out. Now, once again, the world is asleep; a number of the crew have taken advantage of the night air, and chosen to sleep on deck; Philippus is below, next to the cabin in which he thinks I rest. Gently, invisibly, the little waves lap against the side of our ship; the night breeze whispers upon our furled sail; the lamp on my table glows fitfully, so that now and then I have to strain my eyes to see these words that I write to you.
During this long night, it has occurred to me that this letter does not serve the purpose for which it was intended. I wished at first, when I began writing to you, merely to thank you for the nicolai, to assure you of my friendship, and perhaps to give us both some comfort in our old age. But in the course ofthat friendly courtesy, I can see that it has become something else. It has become another journey, and one which I did not foresee. I go toward Capri for my holiday; but it seems to me now, in the quietness of this night, beneath the mysterious geometry of the stars, where nothing exists except this hand that forms the curious letters which by some other mysterious process you will understand, it seems to me that I go somewhere else, to a place as mysterious as any I have ever seen. I shall write further tomorrow. Perhaps we can discover that place toward which I travel.
August 10
There was a damp chill in the air when we embarked from Ostia yesterday, and rather foolishly I remained on deck so that I might see the Italian shore recede in the soft mist, and so that I could begin this letter to you-a letter which I intended at first simply to convey my thanks for the nicolai, and to assure you of my continuing affection, despite our long absence from each other. As you shall have understood by now, however, the letter has become more than that; and I beg the indulgence of an old friend to hear out what I shall discover to say. In any event, the chill brought on one of my colds, which has become a fever; and I became once again accustomed to an indisposition. I have not told Philippus of this new illness; I have, rather, reassured him of my well-being; for it appears that I am under some compulsion to complete the task of this letter, and I do not wish to be interrupted by Philippus's solicitudes.
The question of my health has always been less interesting to me than it has been to others. From my youth I have been frail, and subject to such a variety of maladies that more doctors than I like to imagine have been made wealthy. Their wealth has been largely unearned, I suspect; but I do not begrudge them what I have given them. So often has my body led me near death that, in my sixth consulship, when I was thirty-five years old, the Senate decreed that every four years the consuls and the priests of the orders undertake vows and make sacrifices for the state of my health. To fulfill these vows, games were held so that the people might be made to remember their prayers, and all citizens, both individually and by municipalities, were encouraged to perform continued sacrifices for my health at the temples of the gods. It was a foolishness, of course; but it did at least as much for my health as the various medications and treatments that my doctors subjected me to, and it let the people feel that they were participating in the fate of the Empire.
Six times during my life has this tomb of my soul led me to the brink ofthat eternal darkness into which all men sink at last, and six times it has stepped back, as if at the behest of a destiny it could not overmaster. And I have long outlived my friends, in whose lives I existed more fully than in my own. All are dead, those early friends. Julius Caesar died at fifty-eight, nearly twenty years younger than I am now; and I have always believed that his death came as much from that boredom which presages carelessness as from the assassins’ daggers. Salvidienus Rufus died at the age of twenty-three, in his pride and by his own hand, because he thought he had betrayed our friendship. Poor Salvidienus. Of all my early friends, he was most like me. I wonder if he ever knew that the betrayal was my own, that he was the innocent victim of an infection that he caught from me. Vergil died at fifty-one, and I was at his bedside; in his delirium, he thought he died a failure, and made me promise to destroy his great poem on the founding of Rome. And then Marcus Agrippa, at the age of fifty, who had never had a day of illness in his life, died suddenly, at the height of his powers, before I could reach him to bid him farewell. And a few years later-in my memory, the years dissolve into one another, like the notes of tambour and lute and trumpet, to make a single sound-within a month of each other, Maecenas and Horace were dead. Except for you, my dear Nicolaus, they were the last of my old friends.
It seems to me now, as my own life is slowly trickling away, that there was a kind of symmetry in their lives that my own has not had. My friends died at the height of their powers, when they had accomplished their work and yet had further triumphs to look forward to; nor were they so unfortunate to come to believe that their lives had been lived for nothing. For nearly twenty years, it seems to me now, my life has been lived for nothing. Alexander was fortunate to have died so young, else he would have come to know that if to conquer a world is a small thing, to rule it is even less.
As you know, both my admirers and detractors have likened me to that ambitious young Macedonian; it is true that the Roman Empire is now constituted of many of the lands that Alexander first conquered, it is true that like him I came to my power as a young man, and it is true that I have traveled in many of the lands that he first subjugated to his rather barbaric will. But I have never wished to conquer the world, and I have been more nearly ruled than ruler.
The lands that I have added to our Empire, I have added to insure the safety of our frontiers; had Italy been safe without those additions, I should have been content to remain within our ancient borders. As it turned out, I have had to spend more of my life than I would have liked in foreign lands. From the mouth where the Bosporus spills into the Black Sea to the farthest shores of Spain I have traveled, and from the cold wastes of Pannonia where the German barbarians are contained to the burning deserts of Africa. Yet more often than not I did not go as conqueror, but as emissary, in peaceful negotiation with rulers that were more likely to resemble tribal chieftains than heads of state, and who often had neither Latin nor Greek. Unlike my uncle Julius Caesar, who found some odd renewal in such extended travels, I never felt at home in those distant lands, and always longed for the Italian countryside, and even Rome.
And yet I came to have respect and even some affection for these strange people, so unlike Romans, with whom I had to deal. The northern tribesman, his half-naked body swathed in the skins of animals he had killed with his own hands, staring at me through the smoke of a campfire, was not unlike the swarthy African who entertained me in a villa the opulence of which would dim that of many a Roman mansion; nor was the tur-baned Persian chieftain with his carefully curled beard and his curious trousers and cloak embroidered with gold and silver thread, his eyes as watchful as those of a serpent, unlike the Numidian savage chieftain who stood before me with his javelin and his shield of elephant hide, his ebon body wrapped loosely with the skin of a leopard. At one time or another I have given power to such men; I have made them kings in their lands and given them the protection of Rome. I have even made them citizens, so that the stability of their kingdoms might have the name of Rome behind them. They were barbarians; I could not trust them; and yet more often than not I found as much to admire in them as I did to detest. And knowing them made me more fully understand my own countrymen, who have often seemed to me as strange as any people who inhabit the world.
Beneath the perfume and under the coiffure of the Roman dandy who minces about his carefully tended garden in his toga of forbidden silk, there is the rude peasant who walks behind his plough and is anointed by the dust of his labor; hidden by the marble facade of the most opulent Roman mansion there is the straw-thatched hut of the farmer; and within the priest who by solemn ritual dispatches the white heifer there is the laboring father who would provide meat for his family's table and clothing against the winter's chill.
At one time, when it was necessary for me to secure the favor and gratitude of the people, I was in the habit of arranging gladiatorial games. At that time, most of the contestants were criminals whose offenses would otherwise have been punishable by death or deportation. I gave them the choice of the arena or the legal consequences of their acts, and further stipulated that the defeated fighter might plead for mercy, and that he who survived three years, no matter what his offense might have been, would be set free. I had no surprise that the criminal condemned to death or relegated to the mines might choose the arena; but it always surprised me that a criminal who had been exiled from Rome more quickly chose the arena than the relatively safe hazards of a strange country. I never enjoyed these contests, yet I forced myself to attend them, so that the people might feel that I shared in their pleasure; and their pleasure in this carnage was extraordinary to behold. It was as if they took some strange sustenance into their lives by observing another less fortunate than they relinquish his own. More than once I have had to calm the lust of the mob by sparing the life of some poor wretch who had fought bravely; and I have observed, as if upon a single face, the sullen disappointment of unconsum-mated lust. At one time I suspended those games in which one or another of the contestants was intended to lose his life, and substituted boxing matches, in which Italian was pitted against barbarian; but this did not please the mob, and others who wished to buy the admiration of the people produced spectacles of such carnage and abandon that I was forced to give up my substitution and once again be guided by the desires of my countrymen, so that I might control them.
I have seen gladiators return to their quarters from the arena, covered with sweat and dust and blood, and weep like women over some small thing-the death of a pet falcon, an unkind note from a lover, the loss of a favorite cloak. And in the stands I have seen the most respectable of matrons, her face distorted as she shouted for the blood of a hapless fighter, later in the quietness of her home care for her children and her servants with the utmost gentleness and affection.
Thus if there runs in the blood of the most worldly Roman the rustic blood of his peasant ancestor, there runs also the wild blood of the most untamed northern barbarian; and both are ill-concealed behind the facade he has erected not so much to disguise himself from another as to mask himself against his own recognition.
It occurs to me, as we drift slowly southward, that without my having to tell them to do so, the crew, since they are under no compulsion to make haste, have instinctively kept always in sight of land, though as the wind has changed we have had to go to some trouble to make corrections to follow the irregular line of the coast. There is something deep within the Italian heart that does not like the sea, a dislike that has seemed to some so intense as to be nearly abnormal. It is more than fear, and it is more than the natural propensity of the peasant to husband his land, and to avoid that which is so unlike it. Thus the eagerness of your friend Strabo to sail blithely upon unknown seas, in search of strangeness, would bewilder the ordinary Roman, who ventures beyond the sight of land only upon the occasion of such a necessity as war. And yet under Marcus Agrippa the Roman navy has become the most powerful in the history of the world, and the battles that saved Rome from its enemies were fought upon the sea. Nevertheless, the dislike remains. It is a part of the Italian character.
It is a dislike of which the poets have been aware. You know that little poem of Horace's addressed to the ship that was bearing his friend Vergil to Athens? He advanced the conceit that the gods had separated land from land by the unimaginable depths of ocean so that the peoples in those lands might be distinct, and man in his foolhardiness launches his frail bark upon an element that ought not to be touched. And Vergil himself, in his great poem upon the founding of Rome, never speaks of the sea except in the most ominous of terms: Aeolus sends his thunder and winds upon the deep, waves are lifted so high that they obscure the stars, timbers are broken, and men see nothing. And even now, after so many years and so many readings of the poem, I am still moved nearly to tears by the thought of Palinurus, the helmsman, betrayed by the god of sleep into the depths of the ocean, where he drowns, and for whom Aeneas mourns, thinking of him as too trustful in the calm of sea and sky, lying naked on an unknown shore.
Of the many services that Maecenas performed for me, the most important seems to me now to be this: He allowed me to know the poets to whom he gave his friendship. They were among the most remarkable men I have ever known; and if the Roman, as he often did, treated them with as much disdain as he dared, it was a disdain that masked a fear perhaps not wholly unlike that feeling he had about the sea. A few years ago it became necessary for me to banish the poet Ovid from Rome because of his involvement in an intrigue that threatened to disturb the order of the state; since his part in the intrigue was more nearly mischievous and social than malevolent and political, I made the banishment as light as possible; I shall lift the banishment soon, and allow him to return from the cold north to the more temperate and pleasing climate of Rome. Yet even in his place of banishment, that half-barbaric little town of Tomis that huddles near the mouth of the Danube, he continues to write his poems. We correspond occasionally, and are on friendly enough terms; and though he misses the pleasures of Rome, he does not despair of his condition. But of the several poets that I have known, Ovid is the only one whom I could not fully trust. And yet I was fond of him, and remain so.
I could trust the poets because I was unable to give them what they wanted. An Emperor may give to an ordinary man the means to a wealth that would confound the most extraordinary taste for luxury; he may bequeath such power that few men dare to oppose it; he may confer such honor and glory upon a freedman that even a consul might feel constrained to behave toward him with some deference. Once I offered to Horace the position of my private secretary; it would have made him one of the most influential men in Rome, and, had he been even discreetly corrupt, one of the richest. He replied that, alas, the state of his health precluded his acceptance of a post fraught with such responsibilities. We both knew that the post was more nearly ceremonial than laborious, and that his health was excellent. I could not be offended; he had the little farm that Maecenas had given him, a few servants, his grape arbors, and enough income to import an excellent wine.
I suspect that I have admired the poets because they seemed to me the freest and therefore the most affectionate of men, and I have felt a closeness to them because I have seen in the tasks that they set for themselves a certain similarity to the task that long ago I set for myself.
The poet contemplates the chaos of experience, the confusion of accident, and the incomprehensible realms of possibility -which is to say the world in which we all so intimately live that few of us take the trouble to examine it. The fruits ofthat contemplation are the discovery, or the invention, of some small principle of harmony and order that may be isolated from that disorder which obscures it, and the subjection ofthat discovery to those poetic laws which at last make it possible. No general ever more carefully exercises his troops in their intricate formations than does the poet dispose his words to the rigorous necessity of meter; no consul more shrewdly aligns this faction against that in order to achieve his end than the poet who balances one line with another in order to display his truth; and no Emperor ever so carefully organizes the disparate parts of the world that he rules so that they will constitute a whole than does the poet dispose the details of his poem so that another world, perhaps more real than the one that we so precariously inhabit, will spin in the universe of men's minds.
It was my destiny to change the world, I said earlier. Perhaps I should have said that the world was my poem, that I undertook the task of ordering its parts into a whole, subordinating this faction to that, and adorning it with those graces appropriate to its worth. And yet if it is a poem that I have fashioned, it is one that will not for very long outlive its time. When Vergil died, he earnestly beseeched me to destroy his great poem; it was not complete, he said, and imperfect. Like a general who sees a legion destroyed and does not know that two others have triumphed, he thought himself to be a failure; and yet his poem upon the founding of Rome will no doubt outlast Rome itself, and certainly it will outlast the poor thing that I have put together. I did not destroy the poem; I do not believe that Vergil thought I would. Time will destroy Rome.
My fever has not abated. An hour ago, I had a sudden attack of dizziness and a sharp pain in my left side, followed by a numbness. I discover that my left leg, always a little weak, is now hardly capable of movement. It will still support my weight, but it drags beneath me uselessly; and when I prick it with my stylus there is the merest ghost of a pain.
I still have not informed Philippus of my condition; there is nothing that he can do to relieve my condition, and I should prefer not to humiliate him by forcing him to perform vain solicitudes upon a body whose deterioration is far beyond the reach of any ministrations he might attempt. After all these years, I cannot be angry at a body that fails; despite its weakness, it has served me well; and it is perhaps appropriate that I should attend its demise, as I might attend the death of an old friend, remembering as the soul slips away into whatever immortality it might find, the mortal soul which could not in life separate itself from the animal that was its guest. I am able now, and have been for some months, almost to detach myself from the body that contains me and observe this semblance of myself. It is not an ability altogether new, and yet it seems to me now that it is more natural than it has been before.
And so, detached from a failing body, almost oblivious to the pain that now is its habitation, I float above the unimaginable sea southward toward Capri. The high sun glints upon the water that parts before our prow, the white foam hisses as it spreads and disperses upon the waves. I shall rest from my task, and perhaps some of my strength will return. This evening we harbor at Puteoli. And tomorrow we shall land at Capri, where I shall perform what might be the last of my public functions.
We are at harbor. It is early afternoon, and the mists have not yet blurred the coastal lands from the sight of the sea voyager. I remain at my table, and occupy my leisure with this letter. I believe that Philippus, who continues to watch me from his station at the prow of our ship, has begun to suspect that the condition of my health has sharply worsened. A look of doubt has settled upon his fine young face, and his hazel eyes beneath the brows that are straight and delicate as a woman's glance at me from time to time. I do not know how much longer I shall be able to conceal my condition from him.
We have dropped anchor at a little cove just north of Puteoli; and farther north is Naples, where some years ago Marcus Agrippa constructed a causeway between the sea and the Lucrine Lake, so that the Roman fleet might conduct its maneuvers safe from the vicissitudes of weather and the pirate fleets of Sextus Pompeius. At one time, as many as two hundred war ships trained upon that inland harbor, and thus became capable of defeating Sextus Pompeius and saving Rome. But during these years of peace, silt has been allowed to clog the entrance to this training ground; and now I understand that it has been turned into an oyster bed so that the Roman rich might have the pleasures of their new existences enhanced. From where we are anchored, I cannot see this harbor, and I am just as pleased that I cannot.
In recent years the possibility has occurred to me that the proper condition of man, which is to say that condition in which he is most admirable, may not be that prosperity, peace, and harmony which I labored to give to Rome. In the early years of my authority, I found much to admire in my countryman; in the midst of privation he was uncomplaining and sometimes almost gay, in the midst of war he had more care for the life of a comrade than he did for his own, and in the midst of disorder he was resolute and loyal to the authority of Rome, wherever he thought that authority might lie. For more than forty years we have lived the Roman peace. No Roman has fought Roman, no barbarian foot has trod in unchallenged enmity upon Italian soil, no soldier has been forced to bear arms against his will. We have lived the Roman prosperity. No person in Rome, however lowly, has gone without his daily ration of grain; the provincial citizen is no longer at the mercy of famine or natural disaster, but may be sure of aid in any extremity; and any citizen, whatever his birth, may become as rich as his endeavor and the accidents of the world allow him. And we have lived the Roman harmony I organized the courts of Rome so that each man might go before a magistrate with some assurance of receiving at least a modicum of justice; I codified the laws of the Empire, so that even the provincial might live in some security from the tyranny of power or the corruption of greed; and I made the state secure against the brutal force of ambitious power by instituting and enforcing those laws against treason that Julius Caesar had promulgated before his death.
And yet there is now upon the Roman face a look which I fear augurs badly for his future. Dissatisfied with honest comfort, he strains back toward the old corruption which nearly robbed the state of its existence. Though I gave the people freedom from tyranny and power and family, and freedom to speak without fear of punishment, nevertheless the dictatorship of Rome was offered to me by both the people and the Roman Senate, first when I was absent in the East, following the defeat of Marcus Antonius at Actium, and later during the consulship of Marcus Marcellus and Lucius Arruntius, after I had saved Italy, at my own expense, from that famine which destroyed the grain supply of Italy. Upon neither occasion did I accept, though I incurred the displeasure of the people. And now the sons of senators, who might be expected to serve their fellow men or even themselves with some honor, clamor to hazard their lives in the arena, pitting themselves against common gladiators, for what they imagine to be the sport of danger. So has Roman bravery descended into the common dust.
Marcus Agrippa's harbor now furnishes oysters for the Sybarite of Rome, the bodies of honest Roman soldiers fertilize his luxuriant garden of clipped box and cypress, and the tears of their widows make his artificial streams flow merrily in the Italian sunlight. And in the north the barbarian waits.
The barbarian waits. Five years ago, on that part of the German frontier that is marked by the Upper Rhine, a disaster befell Rome from which she has not yet recovered; it is perhaps a portent of her fate.
From the northern shore of the Black Sea to the lower coast of the German Ocean, from Moesia to Belgium, a distance of more than a thousand miles, Italy lies unprotected by any natural barrier from the Germanic tribes. They cannot be defeated, and they cannot be persuaded from their habits of pillage and murder. My uncle was not able to do so, nor could I during the years of my authority. Therefore it was necessary to fortify that frontier, to protect at once the northern provinces of Rome and at last to protect Rome itself. The most difficult part of that frontier, since it protected land that was particularly rich and fertile, was the area in the northwest, below the Rhine. Thus, of the twenty-five legions of some one hundred and fifty thousand soldiers that protected the Empire of Rome, five legions of the most experienced veterans I had assigned to that small region. They were under the command of Publius Quintilius Varus, who had successfully served as proconsul of Africa and governor of Syria.
I suppose that I must hold myself responsible for that disaster, for I allowed myself to be persuaded to give the German command to Varus. He was a distant relative of my wife, and he had been of some service to Tiberius in the past. It was one of the most serious mistakes I ever made, and the only time in my memory that I placed a man of whom I knew so little in such a high position.
For on the rude and primitive border of that northern province, Varus imagined that he might still live in the luxury and ease of Syria; he remained aloof from his own soldiers, and began to trust those German provincials who were adept at flattery and able to offer him some semblance of the sensual life to which he had become accustomed in Syria. Chief among these sycophants was one Arminius of the Cherusci, who had once served in the Roman army and had been rewarded by the gift of citizenship. Arminius, who spoke fluent Latin despite his barbaric origin, gained the confidence of Varus, so that he might further his own ambitions of power over the scattered German tribes; and when he was sufficiently sure of Varus's credulity and vanity, he falsely informed him that the distant tribes of the Chauci and the Bructeri were in revolt and sweeping southward to threaten the security of the provincial border. Varus, in his arrogance and recklessness, would not listen to the counsel of others; and he withdrew three legions from the summer camp on the Weser and marched northward. Arminius had laid his plans well; for as Varus led his legions through the forest and marshland toward Lemgo, the barbarian tribes that had been forewarned and prepared by Arminius, fell upon the laboring legions. Confused by the suddenness of the attack, unable to maintain an orderly resistance, bewildered by the thick forest and rain and marshy ground, they were annihilated. Within three days, fifteen thousand soldiers were slain or captured; some of the captured were buried alive by the barbarians, some were crucified, and some were offered to the northern gods by the barbaric priests, who decapitated them and secured the heads to trees in the sacred groves. Fewer than a hundred soldiers managed to escape the ambush, and they reported the disaster. Varus was either slain or took his own life; no one could be sure which. In any event, his severed head was returned to me in Rome by a tribal chieftain named Maroboduus, whether out of an anxious piety or an exultant mockery I do not know. I gave the poor remnant of Varus a decent burial, not so much for the sake of his soul as for the sake of the soldiers who had been led to disaster by his authority. And still in the north the barbarian waits.
After his victory on the Rhine, Arminius did not have the wit to pursue his advantage; the north lay open to him-from the mouth of the Rhine nearly to its confluence with the Elbe- and yet he was content merely to plunder his neighbors. The following year, I put the German armies under the command of Tiberius, since it was he who had persuaded me to appoint Varus. He recognized his own part in the disaster, and knew that his future depended upon his success in subduing the Germans and restoring order in those troubled northern provinces. In this endeavor he was successful, largely because he relied upon the experience of the veteran centurions and tribunes of the legions rather than upon his own initiative. And so now there is an uneasy peace in the north, though Arminius remains free, somewhere in that wilderness beyond the border he disturbed.
Far to the east, beyond even India, in a part ofthat unknown world where no Roman has been known to set foot, there is said to be a land whose kings, over unnumbered successive reigns, have erected a great fortress wall that extends hundreds of miles across the entirety of their northern frontier, so that their kingdom might be protected against the encroachments of their barbaric neighbors. It may be that this tale is a fantasy of an adventurer; it may even be that there is no such land as this. Nevertheless, I will confess that the possibility of such a project has occurred to me when I have had to think of our northern neighbors who will be neither conquered nor appeased. And yet I know that it is useless. The winds and rains of time will at last crumble the most solid stone, and there is no wall that can be built to protect the human heart from its own weakness.
For it was not Arminius and his horde; it was Varus in his weakness who slaughtered fifteen thousand Roman soldiers, as it is the Roman Sybarite in his life of shade who invites the slaughter of thousands more. The barbarian waits, and we grow weaker in the security of our ease and pleasure .
Again it is night, the second night of this voyage which, it becomes clearer and clearer to me, may be my last. I do not believe that my mind fails with my body, but I must confess that the darkness came over me before I even noticed its encroachment; and I found myself staring sightlessly to the west. It was then that Philippus could no longer avoid his anxiety and approached me with that slightly rude manner of his that so transparently reveals his shyness and uncertainty. I allowed him to place his hand upon my forehead so that he could judge the extent of my fever, and I answered a few of his questions- untruthfully, I might add. But when he tried to insist that I retire to my room below deck, so that I might be protected from the night air, I assumed the role of the willful and crotchety old man and pretended to lose my temper. I did so with such energy that Philippus was convinced of my strength, and was content to send below for some blankets with which I promised to wrap myself. Philippus elected to stay on deck, so that he could keep an eye on me; but soon he nodded, and now, curled on the bare deck, his head cradled in his folded arms, with that touching faith and completeness of the young, he sleeps, certain that he will awake in the morning.
I cannot see it now, but earlier, before the late afternoon mists rose from the sea to shroud the western horizon, I thought I could make out its contours, a dark smudge against the vast circle of the sea. I believe that I saw the Island of Pandateria, where for so many years my daughter suffered to live in her exile. She is no longer on Pandateria. Ten years ago, I judged that it was possible to allow her to return in safety to the mainland of Italy; now she abides in the Calabrian village of Reggio, at the very toe of the Italian boot. For more than fifteen years, I have not seen her, or spoken her name, or allowed the fact of her existence to be mentioned in my presence. It was too painful for me. And that silence merely defined another of the many roles that contained me in my life.
My enemies have found an understandable pleasure in contemplating the ironic use to which I finally had to put those marriage laws that I promulgated and had enacted by the Senate some thirty years ago; and even my friends have found occasion to be displeased by their existence. Horace once told me that laws were powerless against the private passions of the human heart, and only he who has no power over it, such as the poet or the philosopher, may persuade the human spirit to virtue. Perhaps in this instance both my friends and enemies were right; the laws did not move the people toward virtue, and the political advantage I achieved by pleasing the older and more staid segments of the aristocracy was momentary.
I was never so foolish as to believe that my laws of marriage and adultery would be obeyed; I did not obey them, nor did my friends. Vergil, when he invoked the Muse to assist him in the writing of The Aeneid, did not in any substantial way believe in her w ^ r hom he invoked; it was a way that he had learned to begin the poem, a way to announce his intention. Thus those laws which I initiated were not intended so much to be obeyed as to be followed; I believed that there was no possibility of virtue without the idea of virtue, and no effective idea of virtue that was not encoded in the law itself.
I was mistaken, of course; the world is not poem; and the laws did not accomplish the purpose for which they were intended. But in the end they were of use to me, though I could not have foreseen that use; and I have not been able to regret since then that I allowed them. For they saved the life of my daughter.
As one grows older, and as the world becomes less and less to him, one wonders increasingly about those forces that propelled him through time. Certainly the gods are indifferent to the poor creature who struggles toward his fate; and they speak to him so obliquely that at last he must determine for himself the meanings they portend. Thus in my role of priest, I have examined the entrails and livers of a hundred beasts, and with the aid of the augurs have discovered or invented whatever portents seemed to me appropriate to my intention; and concluded that the gods, if they do exist, do not matter. And if I encouraged the people to follow these ancient Roman gods, I did so out of necessity rather than any religious conviction that those forces rest very securely in their supposed persons… Perhaps you were right after all, my dear Nicolaus; perhaps there is but one god. But if that is true, you have misnamed him. He is Accident, and his priest is man, and that priest's only victim must be at last himself, his poor divided self.
As they have known so many things, the poets have known this better than most, though they have put the knowledge in terms that may seem trivial to some. I agreed with you in the past that they spoke too much of love, and gave too much value to what at best was a pleasant pastime; but I am no longer sure that that agreement was well advised. I hate and I love, Catullus said, speaking of that Clodia Pulcher whose family caused so much difficulty in Rome, even in our time and long after her death. It is not enough; but what better way might we begin to discover that self which is never wholly pleased or displeased with what the world offers?
You must forgive me, Nicolaus; I know that you will disagree, and that you have no way to voice your disagreement; but I have in late years sometimes thought that it might be possible to construct a system of theology or even a religion around the idea of love, if that idea were extended somewhat beyond its usual application, and approached in a certain way. Now that I am no longer capable of it, I have been examining that mysterious power that in its many varieties existed within me for so many years. Perhaps the name that we give to the power is inadequate; but if it is, so are the names, spoken and unspoken, that we give to all the simpler gods.
I have come to believe that in the life of every man, late or soon, there is a moment when he knows beyond whatever else he might understand, and whether he can articulate the knowledge or not, the terrifying fact that he is alone, and separate, and that he can be no other than the poor thing that is himself. I look now at my thin shanks, the withered skin upon my hand, the sagging flesh that is blotched with age; and it 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. I have loved many men, but never as I have loved women; the love of a man for a boy is a fashion in Rome that you have observed with some wonder and I believe repulsion, and you have been puzzled by my tolerance of such practices, and more puzzled perhaps because despite my tolerance I have not engaged in them myself. But that kind of love which is friendship has seemed to me best disengaged from the pleasures of the flesh; for to caress that body which is of one's own sex is to caress one's self, and thus is not an escape of the self but an imprisonment within it. For if one loves a friend, he does not become that other; he remains himself, and contemplates the mystery of one that he can never be, of selves that he has never been. To love a child may be the purest form of this mystery; for within the child are potentialities that he can hardly imagine, that self which is at the furthest remove from the observer. My love for my adopted children and for my grandchildren has been the object of some amusement among those who have known me, and has been seen as an indulgence of an otherwise rational man, as a sentimentality of an otherwise responsible father. I have not seen it so.
One morning some years ago, as I walked down the Via Sacra toward the Senate House, where I was to give that address which would condemn my daughter to a life of exile, I met one whom I had known when I was a child. It was Hirtia, the daughter of my old nurse. Hirtia had cared for me as if I were her own child, and had been given her freedom for her faithful service. I had not seen her for fifty years, and would not have known her had not a name I once was known by slipped from her lips. We spoke of the times of our childhoods, and for a moment the years slipped away from me; and in my grief I almost told Hirtia of what I had to do. But as she spoke of her own children, and her life, and as I saw the serenity with which she had returned to the place of her birth so that she might meet her death in the pleasant memory of that lost youth, I could not speak. For the sake of Rome and my authority, I was to condemn my own daughter; and it occurred to me that had Hirtia had the power to make the choice, Rome would have fallen and the child would have survived. I could not speak, for I knew that Hirtia would not understand my necessity, and would be troubled for the little time that remained in her life. For a moment, I was a child again, and mute before what I took to be a wisdom that I could not fathom.
It has occurred to me since that meeting with Hirtia that there is a variety of love more powerful and lasting than that union with the other which beguiles us with its sensual pleasure, and more powerful and lasting than that platonic variety in which we contemplate the mystery of the other and thus become ourselves; mistresses grow old or pass beyond us; the flesh weakens; friends die; and children fulfill, and thus betray, that potentiality in which we first beheld them. It is a variety of love in which you, my dear Nicolaus, have found yourself for much of your life, and it is one in which our poets were happiest; it is the love of the scholar for his text, the philosopher for his idea, the poet for his word. Thus Ovid is not alone in his northern exile at Tomis, nor are you alone in your far Damascus, where you have chosen to devote your remaining years to your books. No living object is necessary for such pure love; and thus it is universally agreed that this is the highest form of love, since it is for an object that approaches the absolute.
And yet in some ways it may be the basest form of love. For if we strip away the high rhetoric that so often surrounds this notion, it is revealed simply as a love of power. (Forgive me, my dear Nicolaus; let us pretend that once again we are engaging in one of those quibbles with which we used to amuse ourselves.) It is the power that the philosopher has over the disembodied mind of his reader, the power that the poet has over the living mind and heart of his listener. And if the minds and hearts and spirits of those who come under the spell of that appointed power are lifted, that is an accident which is not essential to the love, or even its purpose.
I have begun to see that it is this kind of love that has impelled me through the years, though it has been necessary for me to conceal the fact from myself as well as from others. Forty years ago, when I was in my thirty-sixth year, the Senate and people of Rome accorded me the title of Augustus; twenty-five years later, when I was in my sixty-first year, and in the same year that I exiled my daughter from Rome, the Senate and people gave me the title of Father of my Country. It was quite simple and appropriate; I exchanged one daughter for another, and the adoptive daughter acknowledged that exchange.
To the west, in the darkness, lies the Island of Pandateria. The little villa where Julia lived for five years is uninhabited now and by my orders uncared for. It is open to the weather and the slow erosion of time; in a few years it will begin to crumble, and time will take it, as it takes all things. I hope that Julia has forgiven me my sparing her life, as I have forgiven her for having thought to take mine.
For the rumors that you must have heard are true. My daughter was a member of the conspiracy that had as its end the assassination of her husband, and the murder of myself. And I invoked those marriage laws that had so long lain unused and condemned her to a life of exile, so that she might not be condemned to death by the secret effort of her husband, Tiberius, who would have made her endure a trial for treason.
I have often wondered whether my daughter has ever admitted to herself the extent of her own guilt. I know that the last time I saw her, in her confusion and grief at the death of Julius Antonius, she was not able to do so. I hope that she will never be able to do so, but will live out her life in the belief that she was the victim of a passion which led to her disgrace, rather than a participant in a conspiracy that would certainly have led to her father's death, and almost certainly would have destroyed Rome. The first I might have allowed; the second I could not.
I have relinquished whatever rancor I might have had against my daughter, for I have come to understand that despite her part in the conspiracy there was always a part of Julia that remained the child who loved the father who was perhaps too doting; a part of her that must have recoiled in horror from what she felt she was at last driven to do; a part of her that still, in the loneliness of Reggio, remembers the daughter that once she was. I have come to understand that one can wish for the death of another and yet love that victim without appreciable diminution. At one time I was in the habit of calling her my Little Rome, an appellation that has been widely misunderstood; it was that I wished my Rome to become the potentiality that I saw in her. In the end, they both betrayed me; but I cannot love them the less for that.
To the south of our anchorage, the Lucrine Lake, dredged once by honest Italian hands so that the Roman fleet might protect the people, furnishes oysters for the tables of the Roman rich; Julia languishes on the barren Calabrian coast at Reggio; and Tiberius will rule the world.
I have lived too long. All those who might have succeeded me and striven for the survival of Rome are dead. Marcellus, to whom I first betrothed my daughter, died at the age of nineteen; Marcus Agrippa died; and my grandsons, the sons of Agrippa and Julia, Gaius and Lucius, died in the service of Rome; and Tiberius's brother, Drusus, who was both more able and equable than his brother, and whom I raised as my own son, died in Germany. Now only Tiberius remains.
I have no doubt that more than any other Tiberius was responsible for the fate of my daughter. He would not have hesitated to implicate her in the conspiracy against his life and my own, and he would have been pleased to see the Senate pass the sentence of death upon her, while he assumed the demeanor of sorrow and regret. I cannot bring myself to do other than despise Tiberius. At the center of his soul there is a bitterness that no one has fathomed, and in his person there is an essential cruelty that has no particular object. Nevertheless he is not a weak man, and he is not a fool; and cruelty in an Emperor is a lesser fault than weakness or foolishness. Therefore I have relinquished Rome to the mercies of Tiberius and to the accidents of time. I could do no other.
August 11
During the night, I did not move from my couch but kept a vigil on the stars that move slowly in their eternal voyage across the great dome of the sky. Toward dawn, for the first time in days, I dozed a little; and I had a dream. I was in that curious state where one dreams and knows that one dreams, yet finds there a reality which mocks that of one's waking life; I wished to remember the contours ofthat other world; but when I was awakened, the memory of the dream fled into the brightness of the morning.
I was awakened by the stirring of the crew, and by the sound of a distant singing; for a moment, in my confusion, I thought of those Sirens of whom Homer wrote so beautifully, and imagined myself to be bound to the mast of my ship, helpless against the call of an unimaginable beauty. But it was not the Sirens; it was a grain-ship from Alexandria that sailed slowly toward us from the south, and the Egyptian crew, dressed in white robes with garlands on their heads, stood on deck singing in their native tongue as they approached us; and the musky odor of burning incense was borne to us on the morning breeze.
We watched their approach with some puzzlement, until at last the huge ship which dwarfed our own came so close that we could make out the smiling swarthy faces of the men; and then the captain stepped forward and hailed me by name.
With some difficulty, which I trust I concealed even from Philippus, I rose from my couch and went to the deck rail, upon which I leaned while I returned the greeting of this captain. It appeared that the ship had unloaded a cargo of goods at the harbor between Puteoli and Naples, and had been informed of my presence nearby; and the crew had wished, before they made their way back to their far Egyptian homeland, to greet me and to give me thanks. The ship was so close that I did not have to shout, and I could see clearly the dark face of the captain. I inquired his name; it was Pothelios. And as the crew continued its low singing, Pothelios said to me:
"You have given us the liberty to sail the seas and thus furnish Rome with the bountiful goods of Egypt; you have rid the seas of those pirates and brigands that in the past would have made that liberty empty. Thus the Egyptian Roman may prosper, and may return to his homeland secure in the knowledge that only the accidents of wind and wave threaten his safety. For all this we give thanks to you, and pray that the gods will allow you good fortune for the rest of your days."
For a moment I could not speak. Pothelios had addressed me in a stiff but passable Latin; and it occurred to me that thirty years ago he would have spoken in that demotic Egyptian Greek and that I would have been hard put to understand him. I returned the captain's thanks and said a few words to the crew, and directed Philippus to see that each member ofthat crew be given some coins of gold. Then I returned to my couch, from where I watched the huge freighter turn slowly away from us and move southward, its sails bulging in the wind, its crew waving and laughing, happy in their safety and homeward voyage.
And so now we too move southward, and our less bulky ship dances upon the waves. The sunlight catches the flecks of white foam that top the little waves, the waves slap gently and whisper against the sides of our ship, the blue-green depth of the sea seems almost playful; and I can persuade myself now that after all there has been some symmetry to my life, some point; and that my existence has been of more benefit than harm to this world that I am content to leave.
Now throughout this world the Roman order prevails. The German barbarian may wait in the North, the Parthian in the East, and others beyond frontiers that we have not yet conceived; and if Rome does not fall to them, it will at last fall to that barbarian from which none escape-Time. Yet now, for a few years, the Roman order prevails. It prevails in every Italian town of consequence, in every colony, in every province-from the Rhine and the Danube to the border of Ethiopia; from the Atlantic shores of Spain and Gaul to the Arabian sands, and the Black Sea. Throughout the world I have established schools so that the Latin tongue and the Roman way may be known, and have seen to it that those schools will prosper; Roman law tempers the disordered cruelty of provincial custom, just as provincial custom modifies Roman law; and the world looks in awe upon that Rome that I found built of crumbling clay and that now is made of marble.
The despair that I have voiced seems to me now unworthy of what I have done. Rome is not eternal; it does not matter. Rome will fall; it does not matter. The barbarian will conquer; it does not matter. There was a moment of Rome, and it will not wholly die; the barbarian will become the Rome he conquers; the language will smooth his rough tongue; the vision of what he destroys will flow in his blood. And in time that is ceaseless as this salt sea upon which I am so frailly suspended, the cost is nothing, is less than nothing.
We approach the Island of Capri. It shines like a jewel in the morning sun, a dark emerald rising out of the blue sea. The wind has almost died, and we float as if upon the air toward that quiet and leisurely place where I have spent so many happy hours. Already the island inhabitants, who are my neighbors and my friends, have begun to gather at the harbor; they wave, and I can hear their voices calling. Gaily, gaily they call to me. In a moment I shall rise and answer them.
The dream, Nicolaus; I remember the dream I had last night. I dreamed I was again at Perusia, during the time of Lucius Antonius's uprising against the authority of Rome. All winter we had blockaded the town, hoping to effect Lucius's surrender and thus avoid the shedding of Roman blood. My men were weary and disheartened by the long waiting, and threatened revolt. To give them hope, I ordered that an altar be constructed outside the city walls and that sacrifice be offered to Jupiter. And this is the dream:
A white ox, never yoked to the plough, was led to the altar by the attendants; its horns were gilded, and its head was garlanded by a wreath of laurel. The rope was slack; the ox came forward willingly, its head raised. Its eyes were blue, and they seemed to be looking at me, as if the beast recognized who was to be its executioner. The attendant crumbled the salt cake on its head; it did not move; the attendant tasted the wine, and then poured the libation between its horns. Still the ox did not move. The attendant said: "Shall it be done?"
I raised my ax; the blue eyes were upon me; they did not waver. I struck, and said: "It is done." The ox quivered and sank slowly to its knees; still its head was upraised, and its eyes were upon me. The attendant drew his dagger and slit the throat, catching the blood in his goblet. And even as the blood flowed the blue eyes seemed to look into mine, until at last they glazed and the body toppled to one side.
That was more than fifty years ago; I was in my twenty-third year. It is curious that I should dream of that after so long a time.