Allan Massie: Augustus

She said, 'I don't know how to tell you what I have to tell you.' 'Which of them is it?' 'No,' she said, 'it's not the boys.' It was as if a crab released its claws from my heart. 'It's worse, because it's not only sad but disgraceful too.'

From the farm across the lake a cock crew, loudly, several times while we sat frozen in the climbing sun.

At last she said: 'I had decided as I came down the garden just to let you read this. It's a police report. But now I find I can't – just lay it before you. I can't be so cowardly.'

And then she told me. Her words have died away, though the cock still crows its derisive challenge to the morning, and I cannot piece them together in my broken and disordered memory. She spoke as gently and, as it were, lovingly, as she knew how. I am sure of that.

The police report concerned my daughter Julia. Agents had watched her for a long time, for she had been suspected of contravention of the laws against immorality. At last her behaviour had become blatant – Livia pressed the document into my hands, and the fingers that touched mine were icy-cold – 'Subject, after a dinner-party, where much wine had been consumed, staggered with her companions into the forum, and there mounted the Rostra from which position she solicited the custom of chance passers-by, to the pleasure of her associates, who called out, "Roll up, roll up, for the best-born f… in Rome…"' 'Have you read this?' Livia nodded. I had to order a thorough investigation. In Sicily there is an expression: 'to swallow a toad'. It is employed when one has to accept an unacceptable fact. My own daughter was the monstrous and slimy toad I was compelled to swallow. The catalogue of her lovers and debauchery was long, detailed, and nauseating. As I read, I felt her loving and deceitful arms pressed round my neck, her soft lips proclaiming love against my cheek. But where else had those ruby lips been? What noisome work had that tongue done? The pictures in my mind… I forced the toad down.

The catalogue of lovers ranged from members of the old nobility to lusty slaves and freedmen.

'Augustus,' said my chief of police, 'we have evidence of worse than immorality. There is criminal conspiracy here too. Look at these names, Iullus Antonius, grandson of the triumvir, Sempronius Gracchus, Cornelius Scipio, Appius Claudius Pulcher, it's a roll-call of the disaffected old nobility. We have evidence which suggests that there was a plan to poison Tiberius so that Antonius might marry the widow and be in a position, in the event of your death, to supplant her sons the Princes. We have a letter too which suggests that the poison that would be employed on Tiberius should then be used on you. I am sorry to tell you this, but you have been kept ignorant too long. I urged your wife to tell you some months ago…' Maecenas had called Iullus Antonius 'a pretty boy'. 'We have evidence that the affair with Gracchus goes back even to the days of her marriage to Marcus Agrippa…' So Agrippa wore horns? 'We have evidence…' 'We have evidence…' 'We have evidence…' She asked to see me. I saw her eyes swimming with tears and her body slack with apprehension, and I heard soft lies, and declined. 'We have evidence…'

Screeds and screeds of eye-witness accounts, too horrid to brood on, depositions taken from slaves, some tortured to extract the truth, some spouting evidence like fountains to escape torture. (But tortured all the same, to test their story.)

'We have evidence…' crowing vice and defiance to the morning air.

'We have evidence…' secret meetings, plots laid, seditious talk, laughter and resentment, the mockery of soft men who had never ventured to the frontier camps, the anger of empty men who resented government… 'We have evidence…'

'Prepare a digest for Gaius and Lucius, the Princes of the Youth Movement'; but when the digest, which recorded their mother's vice in the barest terms, had been made, I could not bring myself to send it. How could I tell them what I had feared to know myself?

'We have evidence…' The cock crew, the documents piled up unfolding, in the May sunshine, the record of loveless coupling, debauchery and treason. Julia wrote again, a long epistle, now grovelling, now whining, now defiant, now abject in self-justification: my love had always been selfish and domineering; I had never asked her what she wanted; I had made her my instrument; I had forced her into loveless marriages; I had sought to steal the love of her first husband and I had stolen the love of her sons. She was repentant, she promised she would amend her life; her disgrace was my disgrace; any pain she suffered would be compensated by the pain she was inflicting on me, for I deserved it, I had brought it on myself by my callous manipulation of her life, and it was my fault. And in the next sentence she promised me enduring love and swore she would be dutiful.

'We have evidence…' Livia never once, by any flicker of a cold and satisfied eye, reminded me of her thirty years of warnings.

'We have evidence…' Julia's handmaiden, a Greek called Phoebe, alarmed by its weight piling against her own reputation, rose before dawn and hanged herself from the lintel of my daughter's house. 'I would I were Phoebe's father!' I cried out; but Julia, my agents reported, wept to hear of the girl's death. Were they lovers too? 'We have evidence that…'

Tiberius wrote to me from Rhodes. His letter was calm, dignified and laconic… My wife, suffering perhaps from a species of desperation that can, my doctors tell me, afflict women as they approach middle-life, has behaved in a manner that is worse than foolish. The peculiarly public nature of her conduct must touch the bounds of forgiveness, for, as princeps, you can hardly fail to interpret it as a public challenge to the admirable legislation you have caused to be passed. Yet I appeal to you, in your public and private capacity, to show clemency. Clemency would become you both as Father of our Country, and as father of your unfortunate daughter. I would beg you to consider that my own absence, the result of my intense weariness of spirit and body, and of my desire to allow Gaius and Lucius to flourish, may have contributed to my wife's aberrations. Clemency is good in itself. The harsh letter of justice will be like a knife you yourself drive into your own heart… When news of Tiberius' plea became known – as these things always do – there were many quick to say that he was anxious primarily to safeguard his own position as my son-in-law; but I am now convinced that his plea on his wife's behalf was an illustration of his true nobility of character.

At the time I felt differently. It seemed impertinent. Perhaps in my heart I agreed with the reproach he directed at himself. If he had done his duty as Julia's husband we would have been spared this. I would have been spared. I did not then comprehend the part played by Julia's conduct in his decision to withdraw to Rhodes. As it was, I immediately commanded a bill of divorce to be drawn up in his name. I wrote informing him of this. As if to reprove me, he allowed Julia to keep the presents which he had given her. This is not of course normal custom, and it could only be interpreted as a protest.

The evidence overwhelmed me. I wrote in guarded terms to the boys, merely telling them that their mother had disgraced herself, imperilled the whole family's future, willingly associated herself with a group of dissidents, and must suffer the appropriate penalties. They were horrified, but saw reason, welcome and reassuring proof of their civic virtue, which I had never doubted. But then, till the cock crew evidence to the open air, I had never doubted Julia's love for me.

I was left no choice. Had I been a private citizen, I would still have had to punish my daughter's crimes. Their nature and their full extent could not be hidden. I therefore forwarded the evidence to the Senate, asking them to take the appropriate action against her lovers, who had offended against both the laws of morality and the statutes of treason. Their sedition was manifest. The court had no hesitation in condemning Antonius, Gracchus, Appius Claudius Pulcher, Cornelius Scipio and the vile T. Quinctius Crispinus, whose presence in the list had made me choke and spew, to the death they merited. All five were consigned to the Mamertine prison, historic execution-chamber of Rome. The sentence relieved the public mind of the fear of Revolution; yet deepened my depression. It was forty-two years since Julius' murder, forty since Philippi, twenty-nine since Actium, and it was now revealed that numerous members of the old political class had not reconciled themselves to the New Order, but still craved the savage excitements of disorderly faction. After long study of the evidence, I recommended that only Iullus Antonius should be put to death, and that the others should be sent into perpetual exile. That fate would, I hoped, be sufficient warning to other dissidents. I could not bring myself however to ask for mercy to be extended to Iullus Antonius, for I regarded him as the engineer of my daughter's fate. This son of Antony and Fulvia inherited the beauty of both parents (though his was of a more effeminate stamp than either his mother's or his father's) and the selfish and vicious temperament of Fulvia; there was nothing in him of that generosity of spirit which shone among Antony's vices like a jewel in a dunghill; I shuddered to think how he would have disposed of Gaius and Lucius had he achieved his ambition of marrying Julia.