Page 53 of Agrippa

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.

As she led me through the villa, she asked me not to tire him by staying too long or to agitate him by relaying unwelcome news. She left me at the door to his room.

It was stiflingly close. The shutters were closed. The air was thick with the smell of herbal remedies. A brazier full of coals, tended by a slave, glowed red hot. The flames of scented candles rose motionless in the still air, emitting threads of black smoke. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I made out a lumpish shape, which I realised was Augustus. He was lying on a couch, swaddled like a baby in wet woollen blankets that had been soaked in hot olive oil and herbs.

As I moved towards him, he stirred and turned his head towards me. His hair was damp, his face glistening, his voice weak.

– Agrippa, is that you?

He apologised for the stuffiness of the room. He said he was being treated with hot compresses and poultices, which were supposed to draw out the poison from his body, but their only effect so far had been to make him feel worse.

– What is the point of controlling the world if you cannot control your own body?

He told the slave to leave us.

– Open the shutters, for pity’s sake, and get this stuff off me.

I did as he asked. Beneath the blankets he was naked apart from a loincloth. His limbs were thin, his belly distended.

– Did you ever see such an ugly sight? I look like a pregnant spider. Help me sit up.

He started to shiver in the draught from the window. I draped one of the blankets around his shoulders. He asked me to mix some wine with water, and drank it from a small bowl, which he held shakily, cupped in both hands. When he had finished, he gave me the empty bowl and leaned his back against the wall.

– Tell me what is happening in the city.

I started to describe the opening of the Senate, but he interrupted me.

– No, no, I’m not interested in any of that. I want to know about your buildings.

I did my best to paint a picture of it all in words – the bridge, the basilica, the baths, the Pantheon, the voting ground, the frescoes, the statues. He listened with his eyes closed, nodding, occasionally asking for more detail. At the end, he expressed his approval, and our exchanges continued roughly as follows:

– You have clearly done great things. I expected no less. And the wedding, how was that?

– It went off well. The people loved it. They turned out in their thousands to watch the couple arrive and waited outside to accompany them home.