Chapter XX
XX
She was seventeen. I was forty-one.
Such a gulf in age is not, of course, uncommon, especially in marriages in which matters of state are involved. There, it is often the case that the bride and groom are complete strangers to one another.
But I had known Julia since she was a baby. I had watched her father tossing her in the air and catching her. She was the same age as my daughter Agrippina. They were friends and often together. I had seen her grow into a young woman. I had even given her away at her first wedding to Marcellus.
That made the prospect of marrying her, for me at least, much more, not less awkward than if I had never met her.
She arrived with her maids in answer to her father’s summons – a tall, slim, demure figure, with a delicate oval face, her fair hair gathered up and tied at the back to reveal her long, pale neck.
She looked the image of youth and innocence.
I felt certain she would find the idea of marrying me repugnant.
However, after Augustus had explained his wishes to her and left us alone to discuss our future, her manner changed entirely, as it generally did when he was no longer in the same room. She let out her breath and raised her eyes to the ceiling in relief.
– Well, that could have been worse! I thought he was going to suggest someone awful.
– You don’t object to marrying me?
– No. Why should I? I have always liked you.
When I pointed out I was the same age as her father, she laughed and said I was in better physical condition than most men ten years my junior – which was true: I had never suffered a day’s illness in my life – and that she, already a widow, had always been much more mature than her years.
– I believe our marriage can be a success if we allow one another a certain degree of freedom. In any case, I can’t refuse to do what my father wishes – and let’s face it, Agrippa, neither can you, so we had better make the best of it. And now you may kiss me if you wish.
I was captivated by her at that moment and have gone on being captivated by her ever since.
She was – still is – vivacious, teasing, clever, ruthless, unsentimental, often outrageous, not at all dutiful, and certainly never boring.
In retrospect, I should have paid more attention to her remark about giving one another freedom, but at the time I thought little of it.
Her honesty is one of the few qualities she does not share with her father.
Otherwise, she was as formidable at seventeen as he was.
I divorced Claudia the following year. Each of us was mightily relieved to be free of the other.
I gave her the house on the Vatican Hill and built a new villa for myself and Julia on the west bank of the Tiber, looking out over the bridge I had constructed to the Field of Mars and all the great buildings I had erected.
We married quietly on her eighteenth birthday, in the presence of my daughters, her mother and her half-brother and half-sister.
Augustus was not in Rome. He had left on a two-year tour of the eastern provinces, taking Livia with him.
Her absence from Rome was a relief. She had bitterly opposed our marriage.
She saw in it the possibility that we might produce a son who would be a threat to the position of Tiberius.
She even tried to persuade Augustus to give Julia’s hand to Tiberius instead, but he would not hear of it – that would have made him unquestionably his heir.
Besides, Tiberius was still engaged to my Agrippina, with whom, to my secret astonishment – for I had not believed him capable of any emotion except anger – he appeared very much in love.
If I had to nominate the period of my life when I was happiest, I would say it was those first two years with Julia.
I was in complete control of Rome. I cleared the streets of thieves and troublemakers.
I indulged my love of geography and commissioned the first great map of the world.
I completed the Aqua Virgo and extended it across the river to bring water to the west of the city.
On the Field of Mars, I laid out a park with gravel paths and a huge artificial lake for swimming and boating.
And above all, I fathered a son.
Julia became pregnant at the beginning of the second year of our marriage.
She carried the child without mishap throughout the spring, and at the start of the summer moved out to her father’s villa in the Alban Hills for the final stages of her confinement.
As soon as the annual elections were over, I went out to join her, and I was there when she went into labour on the first day of September.
The moment when the doctor appeared on the threshold to announce she had given birth to a healthy boy is as vivid in my mind as I lie here now as it was on the day it happened.
When I held him for the first time, I felt I had broken a curse, and that here was an achievement of which even Julius Caesar could not boast.
At his lustration ceremony nine days later, we named him Gaius, in honour ostensibly of his grandfather, Augustus, but also – although this of course was my secret alone – his other grandfather, Caesar.
I announced his birth in the Senate to rapturous applause, and a decree was issued stating that a sacrifice and prayers were to be celebrated annually on his birthday.
I wrote at once to Augustus, who was then in Syria, to give him the news, and he replied by special courier.
This is a fourfold joy to me. I offer thanks to the gods for the sake of my daughter, for my friend, for myself and for Rome. May he grow up to embody the virtues of his father and grandfather. And now I must go and break the news to Livia …
As soon as Julia was well enough to travel, we went down to the Bay of Naples, where I had begun to build this villa, just outside Pompeii, on the southern slopes of Vesuvius.
If the gods would only grant us the power to freeze our lives at one particular instant and live in it for ever, what a blessing it would be!
I know which I would choose – sitting in the shade of an olive grove one afternoon in the gentle late summer of Campania with my young wife and baby son on a blanket beside me, the calm blue sea behind us, the green mountain ahead, watching the house we had designed together take shape before our eyes, in a world for once at peace – the co-ruler of the Roman empire: healthy, honoured and complete.
But time and fate herd us onward like sheep, through the months and years, hustling us out of the sunshine and into the shadows.
Unknown to me in my Campanian idyll, the tribes of Germania had once again crossed the Rhine and were spreading havoc in eastern Gaul, and soon after we returned to Rome, for the first time in twelve years I was obliged to put on my armour and set off to war again.
Caesar’s Gallic Wars is excellent military history.
But unlike Caesar, I have no team of secretaries to compose my memoirs for me, and I do not have the time remaining that is required to undertake it.
Nor, if I am honest, do I possess the appetite to glorify every siege and skirmish of those campaigns – not in my present state, sitting here propped up in bed, drinking undiluted wine to try to dull the pain.
My motto after years of service to the state is unheroic.
You might even call it boring. My staff certainly grew tired of hearing it.
It was the advice given a hundred years ago by Micipsa, the King of Numidia, to his sons, and I offer it here, on the unlikely chance that some statesman might one day chance across these pages in search of guidance: ‘Harmony makes even small things grow; discord makes even the greatest decay.’
That was the policy I pursued in Gaul.
You may recall that I had fought many years before against the Germanic tribe called the Ubii, whose lands lay on the eastern side of the Rhine.
They were now under attack in their rear from the warlike Suebi, who were also making repeated incursions across the river into Roman Gaul.
I drove them off easily enough, and rather than station an army on the Rhine to prevent further invasions, I invited the Ubii to move their population across to our side of the river, where they could act as a buffer colony between us and the Suebi.
I laid the foundations of a town, with an altar at its centre where they could worship their gods.
I built roads and surveyed the line of an aqueduct to bring water from the hills to the west. I did this on my own authority, without consulting Augustus or the Senate, and I am glad to say the policy has brought lasting peace.
I had similar success in the region to the south around Lugdunum, where I put down local rebellions and began another programme of building works.
I commissioned three great roads – westwards to the Atlantic, southwards to the Mediterranean and eastwards to the Rhine – to open Gaul to trade.
I also initiated the construction of a thirty-mile aqueduct to bring water to the colony at Nemausus.
If Rome is to prevail, it will not be by force of arms alone, but by the superiority of our engineering, which will spread across the world and carry our civilisation in its wake.
Harmony makes even small things grow …
Three months after I arrived in Gaul, I received a letter from Julia to say that she had just discovered she was pregnant with our second child.
I believe it must have happened that time the day before you left – do you remember it?
I haven’t told anyone about the baby yet except you.
Do you think of me at night in your tent when I was still slim and beautiful?
Now it won’t be long before I’m fat and hideous again.
At least you won’t have to worry about my taking a young lover. No man will even look at me.