Chapter XII
XII
Memories breed memories. They multiply like vermin.
As soon as I catch one, another emerges – some incident or conversation I had forgotten about entirely.
My pen cannot keep pace with them all.
Last night, I counted how many closely written sheets I have filled so far. It comes to over fifty. This morning I had to send a slave to fetch me more sheets, and a fresh supply of ink.
When I started to write, it was only for myself. But now I wonder what the point is of a book without a reader. If a man started telling stories aloud to himself in an empty room, people would say he was mad. An audience is necessary to complete the transaction.
So I find myself trying to picture a reader – you, I suppose, whoever you are, sitting in your library in Rome or some well-appointed villa in the country.
I try to imagine what an educated person might make of my life.
Of course I know this is a fantasy. There never will be any readers.
I have put down episodes far too damaging to be published. Augustus would never permit it.
Wait, though. Now I come to think of it, perhaps you are my reader, Octavius – if I may call you that one last time?
After all, under the terms of my will, my estate passes entirely to you – that was always our agreement.
Perhaps my memoir will be discovered after my death in the locked chest in which I now keep it, and it will be conveyed to you among my other effects.
In which case – greetings, my old friend! I wonder how you are managing without me.
Not well, I suspect.
You will doubtless remember all this differently. But I am trying to be honest.
A dishonest memoir is as pointless as a book without a reader.
Following the death of Salvidienus, I climbed another two rungs of the ladder. I became one of the sixteen members of the College of Priests. More importantly, Caesar appointed me to govern Gaul.
I asked his permission to take Caecilia with me.
At first, he demurred. I would be a commander on active service.
Wives were forbidden to accompany their husbands on military missions.
But I pointed out that there would be much civilian administration as well, and I would not always be campaigning.
Finally he relented, and Caecilia and I left Rome together.
As it turned out, I was mostly away with the army.
But I made sure she was always safe close by in the nearest fortified town.
As a result, we were able to enjoy some measure of normal married life, and while I was in Aquitania, she gave birth to our first child.
My joy was as much that Caecilia had survived the labour as that the baby was born healthy.
We named her Agrippina. I was able to spend a week with them both before duty called me back to war.
Gaul was riven with violent conflict. It took me two years to bring it under control.
First I fought in the west, against the fourteen insurgent tribes of Aquitania.
Then, after crushing them entirely, I fought in the north, along the banks of the Rhine, where the Germans had begun to encroach upon our territory.
I was constantly on the move, in all weathers, on horseback and marching with the men, building camps and striking them a day or two later, besieging towns, avoiding ambushes, encircling pockets of the enemy and destroying them.
Let me record merely that I was the first Roman general since the elder Caesar to cross the Rhine with an army, expelling the tribe called the Ubii and resettling them in Germania, and that for my victories in Aquitania, the Senate voted to award me a triumph.
In the autumn of Rome’s 716th year, I was eight hundred miles from the city, on the far side of the Rhine – preoccupied with administration, happily absorbed in my duties and thankfully cut off from all political intrigue – when I received an urgent summons from Caesar.
He was guarded in what he said, but it was clear from the tone of his message that he was facing some kind of crisis.
He ordered me to return at once to Rome, where he had arranged my election as consul for the coming year.
I left my family behind so that I could travel unencumbered and join him as soon as possible.
After three weeks’ hard riding with a few staff officers, I reached the gates of Rome. I could not enter the city. To do so would have meant surrendering my imperium, and with it my right to a triumph – a glorious honour granted to few victorious generals, let alone one aged just twenty-five.
I sent word to Caesar that I had arrived and was at his disposal in the state guest house on the Field of Mars.
By now it was December, an early evening.
I remember standing in the garden of the empty villa with my officers and gazing at the massive walls and temples of the city silhouetted against the last faint streaks of the winter sunset.
I imagined entering it in triumph. The red warpaint.
The four-horse chariot. The gold-embroidered toga.
The applause of thousands. The pinnacle of my career.
Presently the gates swung open and a small group of riders appeared. I readied myself to greet Caesar.
But it was not Caesar who rode out to meet me. It was Maecenas.
He had brought some fine wine. We sat alone beside a fire in the chilly tablinum and talked together.
He started by offering Caesar’s apologies for not coming out to welcome me in person, but he was feeling unwell. He said that much had changed in Caesar’s circumstances, both personal and political.
Then he poured some wine and began to tell his tale, in his usual confiding and gossipy style.
– A year ago, Caesar fell passionately in love – if you can imagine such a thing of our ice-cold friend – with Livia, the wife of Tiberius Claudius Nero.
I don’t think you’ve ever met her, have you?
She has only recently returned to Rome. She is clever and beautiful and still only twenty-one – even a confirmed bachelor such as I can understand what he sees in her.
Unfortunately, when he first met her, she was pregnant.
And so, for that matter, was his own wife, Scribonia.
Of course, this did not deter him – you know what he’s like when he wants something.
As soon as Scribonia had given birth – to a girl, unfortunately – he divorced her, in fact on that very same day.
And when Livia produced her child – a boy – he insisted she should divorce her husband a mere three days later.
Well, my dear Agrippa, this did not go down well, as you can imagine!
And he made the scandal worse by having a grand wedding feast when Rome was in the grip of a famine.
I held up my hand to stop him.
– I have travelled eight hundred miles for this?
– No. Let me finish. The reason there is a shortage of food is that Sextus’s pirates have renewed their blockade of the southern ports.
Caesar’s divorce from Scribonia breaks the Treaty of Misenum.
In the summer, against my advice, he took it into his head to lead an expedition against Sextus to try to end the famine.
But I am afraid – how can I put this delicately?
– the sea is not the element in which he is shown to his best advantage.
The result was a disaster. Half our ships were lost, and he himself only narrowly avoided capture.
Hence our decision to summon you back immediately from Gaul.
His fortunes are at a low ebb, Agrippa. People are hungry, and they see him as an adulterous military incompetent. He needs you badly.
I replied that of course I stood ready to serve him, and that as soon as my triumph was arranged and I could enter Rome, I would be at his command as always.
Maecenas winced and fiddled with his bejewelled rings.
– If I could offer you some advice, I’m not sure now is the right time to celebrate a triumph. It will delay your arrival in the city, and some might see it as disloyal to Caesar, provocative even, to flaunt your success when he has suffered a setback.
– Is that what Caesar has sent you to tell me?
– No, no, not at all! Banish that thought from your mind!
Caesar has no idea I am even raising the matter.
He would strongly disapprove if he knew.
I merely want to avoid any appearance of discord between my two greatest friends.
Because sadly, in politics, it is often the look of a thing, rather than the thing itself, that causes the trouble.
I did not believe him for an instant. I knew Caesar too well.
On the one hand, he did not want me to triumph.
On the other hand, he did not want to diminish his authority by the humiliation of asking me not to triumph.
Sending Maecenas to do it for him, and disclaiming all responsibility, was typical of his methods.
I asked to be excused for a moment and went back out into the garden to think it over.
By now it was night, and the first stars had begun to appear.
I weighed two different futures in the balance.
A triumphing general, a consul, a man of power in my own right.
Or Caesar’s loyal friend, a perpetual second in command who could always be relied upon to put the interests of his chief ahead of his own ambition.
I could not be both.
I am not a coward, but I am not a fool either.
Friends though we were, I knew that sooner or later, if Caesar perceived me as a threat, he would find a way to destroy me.
Then I would be the man in the cellar with a sword tip pressed to his throat.
And I knew something else as well – that all I had achieved in life I owed to him, and that despite his faults, I loved him like a brother.
I went back to give Maecenas my decision. We finished the wine, and after he left, I passed a sleepless night, trying to think of a strategy by which we might defeat Sextus once and for all.
The following day, I quietly entered Rome.