Chapter XV
XV
I left Actium a few days later, at the head of a twenty-mile column consisting of three legions, including artillery, cavalry, baggage train and slaves.
We marched along the coastal road towards Corfu, where a fleet of transports awaited us.
In the middle of October, I sailed for Italy with the first ten thousand of Antony’s men.
After the three great naval battles of Mylae, Naulochus and Actium, the seas now belonged to Rome. It was no longer necessary to scan the horizon endlessly for pirates or hostile warships. But peace had brought its own problems, and the voyage gave me a couple of days to try to think of a solution.
What faced me was the perennial problem of the Republic in those days.
Our state was over-militarised. The endless civil wars had left us with too many men under arms. One adult male in every four was a legionary.
There was no easy means of returning them to civilian life.
How was I to maintain discipline over thousands of disaffected soldiers who might easily degenerate into a marauding rebel horde after we landed?
How could I keep them occupied? How would I pay them? Where would they live?
I chose to travel on an ordinary troop transport rather than my flagship to better get a sense of their mood.
I sat talking with them for hours. Some had served for twenty-five years under one general or another.
A few had even fought with Julius Caesar when he invaded Britain.
They were respectful to me, and I had respect for them.
They wanted what veterans always want. Money.
A wife. A slave or two. A house. Some land.
During their time in the army, they had dug trenches, built walls, repaired siege engines and carts, sewn leather, tempered steel, hunted and cooked, shod horses, slept rough.
They could turn their hands to most things.
As we talked, an idea began to form in my mind.
When we landed in Italy, I worked with my officers to establish a camp for the veterans outside Brundisium. I gave orders for them to use the harshest punishment against any potential troublemakers. Then I set off with a small escort for the snakepit that was Rome.
I like soldiers.
I don’t like politicians.
They leave their wounded behind.
Nevertheless, I had Caesar’s seal, and the Senate had been informed that I was to act with his authority, so I was now a politician whether I wanted to be or not.
I entered the city without ceremony early in the morning through the Capena Gate, unnoticed by the crowds, and went directly to my house, where Caecilia and my daughters were waiting.
It was a year since I had left home to begin the campaign against Antony.
Agrippina was now eight, Attica six. They hung back, clinging to their mother’s dress, shy in the presence of this enormous stranger, until I swept them up, one on either arm, then set them down shrieking with laughter and embraced my wife.
It is a difficult business, to come home from a war and pick up the threads of domestic life.
I felt heavy and stiff standing there in that female household, wearing my chainmail and helmet, like some ancient bronze statue fished out of the sea, barnacled and corroded, that has retained its shape but lost its features.
I handed out some gifts I had brought back from Greece, and then excused myself, saying I had urgent business to attend to in the city.
I went straight to the headquarters of the Cura Aquarum, in the Porticus Minucia on the Field of Mars, which I had established when I was aedile. I had already sent a message ahead to Auctus, my chief engineer, to warn him I would be coming.
Our renovation of the three main aqueducts and the building of a fourth had transformed the curatorship into a busy department. Auctus showed me around the yard with pride. When we returned to his office, I asked him to fetch the plans of the Portus Julius. He looked puzzled but complied.
During the building of the harbour, we had conceived a scheme to bring in a reliable supply of fresh water to satisfy the demands of such a large military base.
After an extensive search, our surveyors had concluded that the only feasible springs of sufficient pressure and reliability emerged high up in the hills on the far side of Vesuvius, near the town of Abellinum.
To maintain the necessary gradual flow of an aqueduct – so slight as to be almost invisible – a fall of no more than six inches per one hundred feet is essential, otherwise the channel soon wears away.
To achieve this, the engineers had mapped out a sinuous descent following the contours of the land, running for sixty miles from Abellinum to Misenum.
That would have made it the longest aqueduct ever built.
We had neither the time nor the resources to undertake such an enormous task and abandoned the project immediately.
Now I told Auctus I wanted to revive it.
He folded his arms and frowned, rocking his head from side to side in that irritating way I remembered, then began raising objections.
– The manpower required for such an undertaking would be enormous.
– I can provide the manpower. I will soon have forty thousand demobbed veterans on my hands.
– Even so, the cost! Three million per mile for labour and materials – you’re looking at a hundred and eighty million sesterces, minimum.
– I can find you the money.
I pointed out on the plans that if we ran spurs from the aqueduct, as well as supplying the naval base we could provide eight other towns with running water – Pompeii, Nola, Acerrae, Atella, Naples, Baiae, Cumae and Puteoli.
I would insist the councils of each made a financial contribution.
The rest of the money I would put in myself.
All of us wish to leave some mark upon the world, engineers more than most. Here, I told him, was an opportunity to tame Mother Nature and harness her most precious resource for the benefit of a quarter of a million of our fellow Romans in Campania.
The aqueduct would still be running a thousand years after he and I were dead.
I knew he would be unable to resist. After his usual humming and hawing, he started to show some interest, despite himself.
– When would you want to start?
– At once.
Together we bent over the map.
We agreed to divide the sixty-mile line into twenty sections of three miles.
Each section would have a workforce of two thousand men, housed in camps on site.
Of course, the logistics were daunting. But this was a Roman army, I said, with all its equipment and expertise – wagons, tents, tools, carpenters, engineers – disciplined and used to living in the open.
We would simply make war upon a different kind of enemy.
Auctus undertook to send down every expert he could spare from the aqueduct department to oversee construction. Bricks, timber and lead we would source locally. The ingredients of hydraulic concrete would lie everywhere around us.
By the end of the morning, the matter was settled, and after a glass of wine to toast the future, I went off to visit the person I suspected was the true source of power in the city.
Livia.
I took her some letters that Caesar had entrusted to me to deliver to her personally.
They included his will, which he wanted her to deposit with the Vestal Virgins.
I could have broken the seal and read the contents, then resealed it with his ring.
No one would have been any the wiser. But he trusted me, so I did not.
She professed herself delighted to see me, and called in her elder son, Tiberius, to present him to me.
He was still betrothed to my daughter, Agrippina.
Livia was proud of him, and determined that one day he would be a great soldier, worthy of his station.
She asked me to tell him the story of the Battle of Actium.
He was a few days short of his eleventh birthday, big for his age, broad-shouldered, somewhat gloomy and surly, even at that age – a typical Claudian.
I did not relish the thought of him as my son-in-law.
I described the fighting as vividly as I could, conjuring heroism out of slaughter and being careful to give most of the credit to his stepfather.
But Livia was not fooled. After he had gone back to his lessons, she congratulated me on what she said everyone knew was entirely my victory.
– Unfortunately, that made it imperative that Caesar should be seen to go to Egypt and deal with Antony on his own. Too many people think he can only win a war when you do the fighting.
I realised then that my suspicion was correct.
– You advised him not to take me?
– When he is away from Rome, he relies on me to be his eyes and ears. I warned him what was being said behind his back. I gave him my opinion. Also, someone had to bring Antony’s army back to Italy and demob his legions. There was no one else we could trust.
I found it hard to suppress my irritation that a woman hundreds of miles away from the fighting was meddling in the high command.
I observed in a cold voice that while I understood the logic behind the decision, it was a pity that he should be doing what I did best, while I had to do what he was most brilliant at – politics.
– Oh, if it’s politics you’re worrying about, don’t be concerned. I can tell you exactly how to arrange things in Rome. The more urgent question is what should be done with Antony’s legions.
I explained my plan to set them to work building a great aqueduct in Campania.
They would be paid for their work. They would live in tents, so there would be no immediate need to find them land.
Construction would take at least a year.
During that time, we could try to locate areas in the south where they could settle permanently.