Page 35 of Agrippa

– I was thinking last night of the area close to Misenum. It would cut the distance by almost half.

– Misenum? That tiny place? Its harbour is too small for anything larger than fishing boats!

– There are lakes close by, only a few hundred paces from the sea. Do you remember I searched the area to find a place where you and Antony could negotiate the treaty with Sextus? I would need to return with engineers and make a proper survey, but if we could dig a channel from the lakes through to the Mediterranean, we would create a natural harbour, well protected from any storms.

Caesar was sceptical. Even if the scheme was feasible, it would take years to finish, and then we would still need to build the warships to fill it. And the cost! Where was he to find the money? And the manpower? Yet the more objections he raised, the less certain he sounded. Finally he turned to Livia and asked her what she thought.

– I think it is a conception on a massive scale, Caesar – worthy of the pharaohs, worthy of you.

And when it was put to him in those terms, and put by her, I knew he would agree.

As senior consul, I was required on the first of January to preside at the opening of the Senate. As soon as the ceremony in the Temple of Jupiter was over, I took immediate leave of absence. My duties devolved onto my consular colleague, a distant cousin of Antony’s. He was a placeman, a nobody, a figurehead. The important decisions would all be taken by Caesar.

I left for Misenum that same afternoon. I took with me L. Cocceius Auctus, my chief engineer from my time in Gaul, who had impressed me by the speed with which he had erected a temporary bridge across the Rhine.

History records many soldiers and statesmen but seldom mentions engineers. Yet these are the men who really made Rome great. They built the roads and the aqueducts that enabled the empire to spread. Their incredible constructions brought undreamed-of wealth and comfort to the people. Auctus was typical of their type – the sort of fellow to whom one gives an impossible task, who sucks his teeth and shakes his head and asks for an hour to think it over, and then returns with a solution.

When we arrived in Campania, I found my memory had been correct. The coastal road from Neapolis to Misenum ran across a spit of land no more than fifty paces wide, separating the sea from the Lucrine Lake. That lake itself might easily become a harbour. But it was the much larger Lake Avernus, which lay a quarter of a mile further inland, that I coveted most. That could form a perfect natural inner port, protected from both the elements and enemy raiders.

Auctus and I, together with his surveyors, walked back and forth across the marshy land between the two lakes. It would be a Herculean task, he said, to dig a canal from one to the other, as the channel would have to be wide enough and deep enough to allow the passage of large warships. But eventually he conceded it could be done.

If I had to choose the single accomplishment of my life of which I am most proud, it would be what I did here.

I approached it as I would a military campaign. I drew the workforce from slaves and the thousands of veterans who had been resettled nearby. I created a tented army camp on site to house them. Soon the area swarmed with a myriad of activity and looked, as Livia had observed, as the Valley of the Kings must have done when the pyramids were created.

I based myself in Caesar’s parents’ old villa in nearby Puteoli, and arranged for Caecilia and Agrippina to join me. They were happy as well as productive days.

Sextus’s ships often patrolled the Bay of Naples. If he had got wind of what we were doing, he would surely have sent a task force to attack us. Secrecy was therefore vital. The entrance to our site I kept invisible from the sea with a screen of trees, while Auctus dug a tunnel north from the Avernus to Cumae to bring in labour and supplies.

The gods have blessed that part of Italy close to Vesuvius with a reddish soil of remarkable properties. When mixed with lime, sand and a little water, and pounded hard, it forms a hydraulic concrete called puteolanum that sets underwater as hard as rock. We had no need for time-consuming bricklaying. Using concrete poured into wooden shuttering, we were able to build harbour walls, quays, moles, piers, bridges, locks and jetties at great speed, all conjured out of the soil we walked on.

It was a great day later that first summer when we opened the locks and allowed seawater to surge between the concrete walls of our freshly dug canal. With Caesar’s permission, I named the new harbour Portus Julius in his honour. Its northern shore we set aside for shipyards. We built slipways and dry docks and began to bring in timber felled from the surrounding pine forests to lay the keels of our new fleet.

I had consulted experts and given much thought to the type of ships we ought to build. Sextus relied upon small, fast, manoeuvrable sixty-oared liburnians, ideal for raiding. I decided to create instead a fleet consisting mainly of triremes – one third larger, heavier – which would require twice as many rowers but could carry twice as many soldiers. If we managed to bring Sextus’s warships within boarding range, we could overwhelm them by force of numbers. To do this, I made certain modifications to the traditional trireme design, adding a movable gangplank that could be lowered over either side with a metal point that could jam into the enemy’s hull, and a collapsible tower that could be erected once we were within range. Upon this would be fixed a catapult that fired an iron claw called a harpax, attached by a chain to a windlass. Using this device, we could grab the enemy’s vessels and haul them alongside, allowing our soldiers to swarm aboard them across the gangplank.

I now needed sailors and oarsmen, and soldiers who could serve as marines. As the harbour complex neared completion, I began to transfer hundreds of workers each week to train for these new occupations. Ten thousand veterans eventually signed on to become marines and sailors, and in return for their freedom, some twenty thousand slaves agreed to man the oars. I set up tiers of practice benches on land for them to learn the techniques of rowing and to strengthen their muscles.

Eighteen months after work began, I was able to inform Caesar that he had a new naval base and a whole new navy.

Caesar sailed down the coast from Ostia at the end of June, in command of the remnants of the old fleet, which was still a sizeable force of more than fifty warships. He anchored off the entrance to the Portus Julius, and I was rowed out to meet him.

During construction, I had gone back several times to Rome to brief him on progress and discuss the plan to invade Sicily. It was to be a joint operation by the three triumvirs. Lepidus would cross from Africa with twelve legions and land on the westernmost tip of the island. Antony would not take part in person – he had his hands full with his duties in Greece – but he had sent a force of two legions aboard one hundred ships under the command of Statilius Taurus, which would attack Sicily from the east. Caesar and I would sail from the Bay of Naples and engage Sextus’s main fleet north of the island as soon as it put to sea.

All three expeditions were to begin moving into position on the first day of July.

I spent the eve of our departure with Caesar aboard his flagship. He was tense, as so often before a battle, constantly searching the night sky for meteor showers and other omens and consulting the fortune-tellers who travelled with him.

At dawn the next morning, we sailed into the harbour, past the great ochre-coloured moles and pillars, and into the basin for the ceremony of purification. It was an unforgettable sight – the sacrificial fires burning brightly all around the quays in the day’s early light, the priests in their robes standing at the water’s edge, the crews silently lining the decks of the warships. After the animals had been sacrificed and their entrails inspected, half the offerings were burned with incense on the altars and the remainder were rowed three times around the fleet, in a procession led by Caesar, before being solemnly tipped into the sea with libations of wine and prayers to gentle winds, Saviour Neptune and a calm sea.

An hour later, the oars dipped, and the first triremes began to move out into the Bay of Naples.

The gods do as they please. They heard our prayers and did the opposite. Such is their perversity.

We had made good progress and were within sixty miles of Sicily when on the third day of our voyage, the sky darkened and a gale began to blow. Caesar quickly succumbed to his usual seasickness and retired to his cabin. The fleet moved closer to the shore in hope of finding shelter and dropped anchor. But the currents were too strong. The anchors dragged on the seabed, and despite the frantic efforts of our oarsmen to hold their positions, as the storm worsened our ships collided with one another and smashed against the rocks.

Darkness fell and we passed a wretched night, drenched with rain and thrown about by the waves. It was the worst summer storm anyone could remember. At first light, I went up on deck, to be met by an awful vision. Seventy of our ships, including some of our newest, had been sunk. Many others were damaged and lying low in the heaving grey sea as their crews struggled to save them.

Never can a man have been more eager to set foot on dry land than Gaius Caesar! As soon as the storm abated, he announced his intention of going to Vibo, the nearest town, to demonstrate to the citizens that he was still alive. I went with him, and while he held meetings with the elders and wrote dispatches to Lepidus and Antony reporting the disaster, I arranged for supplies of local timber to be brought to the shore to repair our damaged ships.