Chapter XXI
XXI
Julia had never left Italy before. Indeed, she had barely left Rome, except for spring vacations on the Bay of Naples. She wanted to see more of the world, and I wanted to show her the places that meant most to me, where I had spent so many years and fought so many battles.
After saying goodbye to our families, we set out for Brundisium in good spirits, along that familiar endless road – Julia and me and our three children, their domestic slaves and ours, my staff officers and secretaries, two cooks, three doctors, twelve lictors carrying the symbols of my proconsular imperium, a thousand legionaries acting as our bodyguard, a cavalry escort, and a baggage train consisting mostly of Julia’s belongings.
She had never been to sea before either.
Fortunately, the spring weather was fine.
We made an easy passage across the Adriatic to Apollonia, accompanied in the middle part of the voyage by dolphins, to her delight and that of the elder children.
We stayed in the Citadel, and I showed her the room where her father and I had been dining when we learned the news of Caesar’s assassination.
In that curious way of memories, it seemed both long ago and yet close enough to be yesterday.
From Apollonia we sailed down the coast to Corfu, to the spot where Augustus and I had rendezvoused – he with the legions, I with the navy – months before the decisive engagement with Antony and Cleopatra.
I fear I must have talked too much of my old adventures.
As our voyage continued towards Actium, I gave Julia over the course of several days a full description of the battle, using pieces of her jewellery to represent the position of the warships, and for the first time I thought I saw a tremor of boredom flicker across her face.
We anchored at the scene of the battle and were rowed ashore towards Nicopolis, the city Augustus had founded to commemorate our victory. I remember a wind was blowing off the sea, and I turned my face to it and inhaled the strong, cool breeze of my old ally the Iapyx.
Memories flooded back.
A delegation of the town’s councillors was waiting at the quayside.
They gave us a tour and proudly showed off their fine new buildings, including the stadium where Augustus had decreed that games should be held every five years on the anniversary of the battle.
The climax of the visit was a walk up to the headland, accompanied by my lictors, to see the Temple of Apollo Aktios, close to the site of our old camp.
Here a monument had been built with a platform facing out to sea from which visitors could view the stretch of water on which the fate of the world had been decided.
Behind it was a long wall into which were set the captured beaks of thirty-five of Antony’s warships.
Above these, running from one end to the other, was an inscription.
IMPERATOR CAESAR, SON OF THE DIVINE JULIUS, FOLLOWING THE VICTORY IN THE WAR WHICH HE WAGED ON BEHALF OF THE REPUBLIC IN THIS REGION, WHEN HE WAS CONSUL FOR THE FIFTH TIME AND IMPERATOR FOR THE SEVENTH TIME, AFTER PEACE HAD BEEN SECURED ON LAND AND SEA, CONSECRATED TO NEPTUNE AND MARS THE CAMP FROM WHICH HE SET FORTH TO ATTACK THE ENEMY, NOW ORNAMENTED WITH NAVAL SPOILS
Julia and I studied it for a while. Finally she turned to me with a smile and an expression of mock puzzlement.
– How very odd! He doesn’t even mention you. And yet from what you said, I thought it was you who won the battle here?
I should have smiled with her. Augustus was already being hailed as a god, especially in the east, and gods don’t share the credit for their wonders with us mere mortals. And in defence of Julia’s teasing, she was young and had no idea of the ghosts that haunted me on that windswept clifftop.
But to see history carved in stone and my name obliterated was hard to stomach.
I turned on my heel and walked away without another word.
I say I walked, although limped would be a better word. My leg was now causing me serious pain, and it is from this incident that I date the beginning of the troubles in our marriage.
I mostly blame myself. I was too immersed in the past. My illness was making me short-tempered and withdrawn, and Julia was no longer excited by the novelty of long days at sea.
She was bored, without suitable company of her own age, and began to spend more time with some of the young officers on my staff.
I decided not to object. It was a relief to see her happy.
I knew I could trust them not to let any flirtation go too far.
They were too frightened of me for that.
In search of a cure for my affliction, we interrupted our voyage eastwards to stop off at Epidaurus on the eastern coast of the Peloponnese.
This has long been renowned as the birthplace of Apollo’s son Asclepius, the god of healing, a shrine to which invalids flock from all over the world in the hope of finding a cure.
My soldiers made a camp nearby, Julia and I took a villa with the children, and I submitted myself to the local Greek doctors.
I prefer to forget all the tortures they inflicted, which they were pleased to call treatments.
The worst was a bath of hot vinegar into which I had to plunge my leg three times a day.
It gave me a new respect for Augustus. How much he had endured over the years, and what willpower he had shown to overcome his physical weakness and reach the summit.
I realised too, even more clearly, how essential I had been to his ambitions – a friend at his side whom he trusted, who could act, as it were, as his muscle.
He had supplied the cunning. I had supplied the body – even to the extent of fathering his sons.
Neither of us would have got so far on his own. But together we had proved impossible to stop.
Despite my scepticism, the soakings in vinegar, although they did not cure me, did at least provide some temporary relief. Henceforth, the pain and swelling would come and go without warning. I donated money to set up a monument to Asclepius, and at the end of the month we resumed our journey.
This remembrance of my illness has made me feel worse.
As you can see by the number of pages that remain, I am coming to the end of my story, and as reading about other people’s travels is even more boring than the recital of an old soldier’s past campaigns, I shall list only the main events of our time in the east.
From Epidaurus we went to Athens, where I laid the foundations of a theatre with a capacity of twelve hundred spectators.
From there we toured the islands.
Everywhere we went, people turned out in their thousands to see us – or rather, to see Julia, the only child of Augustus, the descendant of Caesar, who was treated as if she were Diana, a goddess come to earth. Women clutched at her clothes. Men fell to their knees. She revelled in the attention.
We wintered in Sestos, in an ancient seaside villa that was said to have belonged to the priestess Hero, who lit a lamp in its tower every night so that her lover Leander could swim across the Hellespont to join her.
Alas, our stay was not so romantic. I stayed for hours in my study, often with my bandaged leg propped up on a stool, working on official papers and receiving emissaries from the region, while Julia was left to the children and the company of her maids.
With no crowds to cheer her, she complained constantly about the tediousness of provincial life.
The following year, as soon as the weather improved, we crossed the straits to Asia, and life became more interesting.
We both spent freely in the prosperous merchant towns, full of precious goods, silks and spices and artworks.
I bought the famous sculpture Fallen Lion by Lysippos and paid the citizens of Kyzikos more than a million sesterces for two paintings, of Ajax and of Venus, which I had shipped back to Rome for public display in my colonnade on the Field of Mars.
We sailed around the coast, stopping off in Cyprus, and in the middle of the summer we finally reached our destination, Syria. In Antioch, we moved into the palace of the Roman governor, situated on an island in the middle of the Orontes river.
I left Julia in the residence and travelled by sea to the beautiful seaside town of Beirut, where I arranged the settlement of veterans from the Fifth Legion (Macedonia) and the Eighth (Augusta) on the surrounding land.
I had just completed this task when news reached me of an earthquake in Antioch.
I hurried back to find Julia and the children unharmed, but parts of the city reduced to rubble. I took charge of the rebuilding and paid for the repairs.
Around this time, I received an invitation from King Herod of Judaea, a client ruler of ours, to visit him in Jerusalem.
I refused at first, but when he wrote again to tell me of the enormous construction works he had undertaken and which he wished to show me, I was unable to resist. I persuaded Julia to accompany me, and our entire entourage set off in our flotilla, sailing from Seleucia three hundred miles along the coast to Herod’s great new harbour at Caesarea, where he had assembled a large party to welcome us.
He was an old man of nearly sixty, notorious for his ruthless cruelty.
He had drowned one brother-in-law, executed another, killed his second wife, and was said to have murdered a couple of his sons.
But he was loyal to Rome, which was all that counted in our eyes, and he was also a tremendous builder, which commended him to me.