Page 2 of Agrippa

According to our spies, the Germanic forces were hidden in the forest that lay across open country about three miles to the north. The best estimate of their strength was a hundred and ten thousand, roughly three times our number. We could either stay inside our stockade and wait for them to show themselves – we had plentiful supplies of food and water – or take the offensive.

What would Caesar have done?

I gave the order that we should prepare to attack the following day.

– And tell the men to make as much noise about it as they can.

That night it snowed. At dawn I was roused by the sentries with the news that a party of six barbarian horsemen was advancing towards our camp under a flag of truce. I gave the order to open the gate.

I received them in my tent, seated in my curule chair beneath my standard, my senior officers arrayed behind me.

They were clothed in animal skins. Their straggling hair and beards were matted into pelts. Their faces were heavily tattooed. They looked barely human. Their leader asked through a translator in their guttural language if it was true that I was the Roman general Agrippa. I said that I was. He replied that out of respect for the way I had fought them twenty years previously, they were prepared to disperse their forces and try to settle their grievances by negotiation. They agreed to deliver hostages as a guarantee of their sincerity. It was all arranged very swiftly.

I ordered the army to stand down.

I stayed in the camp for a few more days, resting my leg, waiting for reports from our scouts that the enemy had indeed returned to their villages. It seemed they had. Vinicius asked if I believed they would keep their promise. I replied that they probably would – for now. But in the spring, they would be back, by which time we would have been able to bring in reinforcements. In the meantime, I proposed to return secretly to Rome, leaving my standard flying over my tent to maintain the pretence that I was still with the army. I told him to inform no one of my departure.

I left that night with my escort under cover of darkness.

We had to make haste to get back across the mountains before the snow closed the passes. We succeeded, and reached Italy four days later. It was important no one knew of my arrival. The German tribes had to be convinced I was still in Illyricum. My plan was to stop briefly in Rome, collect Julia and slip away unnoticed to our villa on the Bay of Naples, where the weather would be warmer, I could recover my health and she could have our baby.

The journey to Rome took another week. We reached the city at nightfall. I went at once to my house overlooking the Tiber. My slaves were startled to see me. Worse than startled, I realised. Terrified. As I limped towards Julia’s apartments, they scattered out of my path like pigeons and fluttered away down the shadowy passages.

I stopped outside her bedroom. I could hear voices. I opened the door a fraction and in the flickering lamplight and the glow of the fire saw all that I needed to see.

If it had been any other man, I would have drawn my sword, strode to the bed and finished him on the spot. But he was Tiberius Claudius Nero, the adopted son of Augustus, married to my daughter Agrippina, and the father of my grandson.

They were so engrossed, I closed the door without them noticing and left the house.

It is unseasonably cold on the Bay of Naples – incessant rain since the moment I arrived, the sky grey, the sea beyond my terrace dark. I am here alone. I have told the household staff to keep my presence secret. No one is to be admitted to my room, except my doctor. I take no food. I lie propped on my couch. My cloak serves as my blanket, my shield my desk. I cannot sleep. I think. I write. I remember.

Part One

OCTAVIUS

II

The most significant event of my life, from which all the others were to flow, occurred shortly before my fourteenth birthday, when I was plucked from the rough and tumble of my grammar school and sent to an academy on the Palatine to further my studies in Greek, astronomy and mathematics.

How my father could afford the fees was a mystery. He was a fanatical Stoic, a follower of Cato. He disdained worldly matters and subsisted on a small income from a few shops and apartments he had inherited. I was the only pupil of plebeian rank. The others were all the sons of equestrian or senatorial families, with grand houses in Rome and estates in the country. They never asked me back to their homes after classes ended, and certainly I never thought of inviting them to our modest dwelling in the valley amid the tenements of Subura.

The only boy who was as unpopular as myself was a young lad half a year my junior, called Gaius Octavius Thurinus.

His name meant nothing to me. He was puny and round-shouldered, often absent through illness, and when he did attend, he kept himself aloof. He never spoke to me. I paid him no attention. But one day when I arrived for the first lesson of the morning, I found him being set upon in the street by two much bigger boys.

I had been longing for a chance to fight ever since I arrived. I dragged them off him, knocked them both into the gutter and kicked them down the road. When I returned, expecting a word of thanks from their victim, he had gone.

Later that day, I asked another boy if he knew the reason why Octavius had been picked on. He looked at me as if I was a simpleton.

– Haven’t you heard? His uncle has just invaded Italy!

– Who is his uncle?

– Julius Caesar!

I was dumbfounded. It was impossible to connect so feeble a figure as Octavius with the mighty conqueror of Gaul. When I got home that evening, I asked my father if it was true that Caesar had launched an invasion. He replied bitterly that it was, that Caesar was a treacherous, immoral gambler who had broken the most sacred laws and brought his army across the Rubicon to destroy the Republic and make himself dictator.

I did not mention that I had met his nephew – in fact, I discovered afterwards, Octavius was only his great-nephew – and I certainly did not mention the fight.