John Williams - Augustus

Brutus escaped with what remained of his legions, and made his way to the wilderness beyond the entrenchments at Philippi, which we had invested. He would have attacked again with what remained of his army, but his officers refused to risk themselves; and in the early dawn, the day after the Ides of November, on a lonely hillock overlooking the carnage of his will and resolve, with a few of his faithful officers, he fell upon his sword; and the army of the Republic was no more.

Thus was the murder of Julius Caesar avenged, and thus did the chaos of treason and faction give way to the years of order and peace, under the Emperor of our state, Gaius Octavius Caesar, now the August.

VI. Letter: Gains Cilnius Maecenas to Titus Livius (13 B. c.)

After Philippi, slowly, with many stops along the way, more dead than alive, he came back to Rome; he had saved Italy from its enemies abroad, and it remained for him to heal the nation that was shattered within.

My dear Livy, I cannot tell you the shock I had upon seeing him for the first time after those many months, when they carried him in secret to his house on the Palatine. I, of course, had remained in Rome during the fighting, according to Octavius's orders, so that I could keep an eye on things and do what I could to prevent Lepidus, either out of conspiracy or incompetence, from wholly disrupting the internal government of Italy.

He was not quite twenty-two years old that winter when he returned from the fighting, but I swear to you he looked double -treble-that age. His face was waxen, and, slight though he always was, he had lost so much weight that his skin sagged upon his bones. He had the strength to speak only in a hoarse whisper. I looked at him, and I despaired of his life.

"Do not let them know," he said, and paused a long time, as if the uttering of that phrase had exhausted him. "Do not let them know of my illness. Neither the people nor Lepidus."

"I will not, my friend," I told him.

The illness had, in fact, begun the year before, during the time of the proscriptions, and had grown steadily worse; and though the physicians who attended him had been paid handsomely and threatened with their livelihood, if not their lives, for any breach of secrecy, rumors of the illness had crept out. The doctors (a dreadful lot, then as now) might as well not have been called in; they were able to do nothing except prescribe noxious herbs and treatments of heat and cold. He was able to eat almost nothing, and upon more than one occasion he had vomited blood. Yet as his body had weakened, it seemed that his will had hardened, so that he drove himself even more fiercely in his illness than he had in his health.

"Antonius," he said in that terrible voice, "will not return yet to Rome. He has gone into the East to gather booty and to strengthen his position. I agreed to it-I would prefer to have him steal from the Asians and the Egyptians than from the Romans:… I believe he expects me to die; and though he hopes for it, I suspect he doesn't want to be in Italy when it happens."

He lay back on his bed, breathing shallowly, his eyes closed. At length he regained his strength, and said:

"Give me the news of the city."

"Rest," I said. "We shall have time when you are stronger."

"The news," he said. "Though my body cannot move, my mind can."

There were bitter things I had to tell him, but I knew that he would not have forgiven me had I sweetened them. I said:

"Lepidus negotiates secretly with the pirate, Sextus Pompeius; he has some notion, I believe, of allying himself with Pompeius against either you or Antonius, whichever proves weaker. I have the evidence; but if we confront him with it, he will swear that he negotiates only to bring peace to Rome… Out of Philippi, Antonius is the hero and you are the coward. Antonius's pig of a wife and his vulture of a brother have spread the stories- while you cowered and quaked in fear in the salt marsh, Antonius bravely punished the enemies of Caesar. Fulvia makes speeches to the soldiers, warning that you will not pay them the bounties that Antonius promised; while Lucius goes about the countryside stirring up the landowner and the farmer with rumors that you will confiscate their properties to settle the veterans. Do you want to hear more?"

He even smiled a little. "If I must," he said.

"The state is very near to being bankrupt. Of the few taxes that Lepidus can collect, a trickle goes into the treasury; the rest goes to Lepidus himself and, it is said, to Fulvia, who, it is also said, is preparing to raise independent legions, in addition to those that rightfully belong to Antonius. I have no proof of this, but I imagine it is true… So it would seem that you got the lesser bargain in Rome."

"I would prefer the weakness of Rome to all the power of the East," he said, "though I am sure this is not what Antonius had in mind. He expects that if I do not die, I will go under with the problems here. But I will not die, and we will not go under." He raised himself a little. "We have much to do."

And the next day, in his weakness, he arose from his bed, and put his illness aside as if it were of no moment and no account.

We had much to do, he said… My dear Livy, that admirable history of yours-how might it evoke the bustles and delays, the triumphs and defeats, the joys and despairs of the years following Philippi? It cannot do so, and no doubt it should not. But I must not digress, even to praise you; for you will scold me again.

You have asked me to be more particular about the duties I performed for our Emperor, as if I were worthy of a place in your history. You honor me beyond my merits. Yet I am pleased that I am remembered, even in my retirement from public affairs.

The duties that I performed for our Emperor… I must confess that some of them seem to me now ludicrous, though of course they did not seem so then. The marriages, for example. Through the influence and by the edicts of our Emperor, it is now possible for a man of substance and ambition to contract a marriage on grounds that are rational-if "rational" is not too contradictory a word to describe such an odd and (I sometimes think) unnatural relationship. Such was not possible in the days of which I speak-in Rome, at least, and to those of public involvement. One married for advantage and political necessity- as, indeed, I myself did, though my Terentia was on occasion an amusing companion.

I must say, I was rather good at such arrangements-and I must also confess that as it turned out none were advantageous or even necessary. I have always suspected that it was that knowledge which led Octavius, some years later, to institute those not altogether successful marriage laws, rather than the kind of "morality" imputed to them. He has often chided me about my advice in those early days. For it was invariably wrong.

For example: The first marriage I contracted for him was in the very early days, before the formation of the triumvirate. The girl was Servilia, the daughter ofthat P. Servilius Isauricus who, when Cicero opposed Octavius after Mutina, agreed to stand for senior consul with Octavius against Cicero-and the marriage to his daughter was to be our surety that he would be supported by the power of our arms, if that became necessary. As it turned out, Servilius was impotent in his dealings with Cicero and was of no help to us; the marriage never took place.

The second was even more ludicrous than the first. It was to Clodia, daughter of Fulvia and stepdaughter to Marcus Antonius, and it was a part of the compact that formed the triumvirate; the soldiers wanted it, and we saw no reason to deny them their whim, however meaningless it was. The girl was thirteen years old, and as ugly as her mother. Octavius saw her twice, I believe, and she never set foot in his house. As you know, the marriage did nothing to quiet Fulvia or Antonius; they continued their plotting and their treason, so that after Philippi, when Antonius was in the East and Fulvia was openly threatening another civil war against Octavius, we had to make our position clear by effecting a divorce.