Chapter XVII #2
The next day, I did as he asked and went to see Octavia, relaying what he had told me.
She wept at the news. She had no objection to her son marrying Julia.
But to her, the mighty Augustus was still her little brother, and she dreaded the thought that he might die.
I did my best to comfort her. I reminded her that we had both witnessed him on his sickbed many times.
He had always recovered. There was no reason to believe he would not do so again.
The response of Scribonia, whom I visited next, was entirely different.
She could not hide her pleasure at the prospect of becoming the mother-in-law of Rome’s next ruler.
She asked her daughter to join us and informed her of the marriage.
Julia was then just fourteen, but seemed older, not just in her looks but in her cool and confident manner, which reminded me a little of her father at that age.
She was sorry he was ill, though pleased that I would be giving her away.
Readers who have followed my life thus far will not be surprised that I, a man who was most at ease on a battlefield or a building site, was not entirely comfortable in the sphere of Cupid. However, I was resolved to do my best, and offered to host the wedding ceremony in my house.
As soon as Marcellus returned to the city, early in November, I invited him to a meeting.
Claudia was present – the first time they had met since he came home from Spain – and he all but ignored me as they fell into one another’s arms. He was now seventeen.
In the years he had been away serving in the army, he had grown from a boy into a man.
I could see why Augustus would favour him – a young patrician, born to rule, with the easy confidence of his ancestors.
Unfortunately, time had done nothing to diminish his resentment of my marriage into his family.
To him, I plainly remained a rough-mannered plebeian, unworthy of his beloved sister – a competent soldier, nothing more, who had somehow been over-promoted.
When I explained that the wedding would be in our house, he grimaced, and only relented when Claudia promised that she would take charge of all the arrangements.
– Well, that is reassuring. You at least know how these things should be done.
I longed to box his well-bred ears and inform him that while he might be Julius Caesar’s great-great-nephew, I was in fact Caesar’s natural son, and that if anyone could claim to have inherited his military genius, it was most likely to be me!
As ever, I restrained myself from revealing a fact that would have put a noose around my neck.
But from that day on, I made it plain that I reciprocated his distaste, and treated him with the minimum of cold politeness.
Once news of the wedding got out, the interest in the city was enormous.
On the day of the ceremony, the streets around the house were jammed with crowds.
A rumour spread that Augustus himself would attend, even though he was still in Spain.
His failure to appear did nothing to diminish the excitement.
The groom was handsome. The bride was beautiful.
Both were young. There was a sense of hope in the air.
Our rooms were filled with gifts and flowers.
Waiting inside, I heard the applause as Marcellus arrived, accompanied by Octavia and Maecenas, who with his usual skill had wormed his way into the young man’s affections since his return.
When Julia appeared, the cheers were even louder.
As I brought her into the room where the vows were to be exchanged, she took my arm, and to my surprise I found tears welling in my eyes.
I had known her since she was a baby. Beneath the hard carapace of power and ambition that had surrounded her since her cradle, a fragile infant had grown to the brink of womanhood.
The contrast between her innocence and the machinations of state politics that had brought her to this point I found moving in a way I still find hard to express.
I hoped she would find happiness with Marcellus.
My wedding gift was Pompey’s and Antony’s old house, which even Marcellus could find no snobbish reason to refuse.
After the ceremony and the feasting, I joined the long procession through the city and watched him carry her over the threshold.
It brought back memories of my own happy wedding day to Caecilia, when the world seemed fresh with promise, and after the door had closed and the well-wishers began to disperse, I walked back home in a sombre mood.
Augustus had recovered sufficiently to return to Italy at the beginning of December.
I was about to set out to meet him off his ship in Ostia when I received a message from Livia asking me not to come.
There was pestilence in the city, and his doctors, she said, had advised him to keep clear of Rome and go straight to his house in the Alban Hills, where the air was healthier.
He therefore missed the opening of the Senate on the first of January, even though he had been elected consul in his absence for the tenth time. His colleague, a hand-picked creature named Flaccus, whose father had been a friend of Augustus, presided in his place, and read out his inaugural speech.
In the days that followed, Augustus continued to make his presence felt by issuing a constant stream of edicts and written instructions.
But no one was allowed to visit him, not even Julia.
It was only at the end of the month that I received a letter from Livia summoning me to his presence. She asked me to come alone.
It took me less than an hour on horseback to reach his villa.
The closer I approached, the more of his Praetorian Guard I encountered.
They were stationed at the crossroads and in the nearby fields.
A camp had been established in the villa’s grounds.
I was challenged several times, until an officer recognised me and offered to act as my escort.
Inside, I was taken to a room where Livia was working with her husband’s secretaries.
She received me politely and asked if I would be good enough to wait a moment, as she wished to have a word with me before I saw Augustus.
I sat in a corner and watched as she dispatched official business – dictating a letter to one man, receiving documents from another, issuing instructions to a third.
She appeared to have the use of Augustus’s signet ring, pressing it into various wax seals, and it occurred to me that since his return she must have been ruling in his name.
When the last of the secretaries had been sent away, she said she wanted me to know the background to his present illness.
He had been fit and well during the campaign in Spain, but by the time he reached Tarraco to embark for home, he had become exhausted and was running a fever.
The fever had worsened, his stomach had swollen, he had refused to eat.
The voyage back to Italy at the beginning of winter had been a mistake, but he had insisted on undertaking it.
His seasickness was terrible. When they arrived at Ostia, she had used the pestilence in Rome as an excuse for not coming into the city.
The real reason was that she feared what his opponents in the Senate might do if they saw him in such a weakened state.