Page 39 of Agrippa

If my health was strong enough, I would now describe the fighting in Illyricum. But I fear my time is short, and in any case the battles and the marches and the ambushes all run together in my memory. Let me record merely that Caesar made sure to expose himself to danger, which put paid to any lingering rumour that he was a physical coward. He also showed himself a harsh disciplinarian. On one occasion a cohort panicked and ran after a night-time attack, and he ordered its decimation. Fifty men were beaten to death in front of their comrades. There was no desertion after that.

At the end of two campaigning seasons, Caesar was finally able to inform the Senate that he had won an overwhelming victory, and was awarded a triumph.

In fact, we had stirred up an enduring enmity among the tribes in the region that meant they would never be peaceful again – hence the reason I had to go back again this year.

War always breeds more war.

It was while we were fighting in Illyricum that poor Octavia was sent on her journey to confront Antony. Caesar and Maecenas made sure her departure was as public as possible. She travelled with two cohorts of cavalry, two thousand Praetorian Guards, and a wagon train of supplies and pack animals for Antony’s Parthian campaign. But when she reached Athens, she found a letter from her husband forbidding her to proceed any further. After a few miserable weeks in Greece hoping he might relent, she returned to Rome in a worse state than when she had left, for now her humiliation was known to all.

This suited Caesar very well. Octavia was a popular figure with the citizens of Rome. The spectacle of her reappearance in the city with eight children, three of them not even hers, attracted widespread sympathy. There was much resentment against Antony and his Egyptian mistress, which Caesar and Maecenas were diligent in spreading.

Caesar had now taken the consulship for the second time, and asked me what office I would like to hold in the coming year.

I wanted a break from the army and told him I would like to be appointed aedile, responsible for the upkeep and amenities of the city – generally considered a thankless and expensive task, usually undertaken by a man at the start of his career. As I had already held the two most senior magistracies of urban praetor and consul, he was puzzled why I should request what would seem a demotion.

I answered truthfully that after the construction of the Portus Julius I had acquired a taste for building rather than destruction, and that now, thanks to him, I had the money to afford it. He saw the political benefits and approved my request.

It was now sixteen years since his great-uncle had crossed the Rubicon and started the first of our endless civil wars. Hundreds of thousands had died. The damage and misery that had been inflicted were visible everywhere in the capital city. The streets were potholed, the buildings dilapidated, the place was filthy. It was my dream not simply to restore but to improve it.

I had already consulted Auctus, my old chief engineer, and together we began a great programme of public works. First we repaired the cloaca maxima, the ancient sewer and storm drain that runs for a mile beneath the city centre and discharges into the River Tiber. Parts of it were five hundred years old and falling down. We cleared the blockages and fixed the walls and roof. When the work was done, I had myself rowed along its entire length in a barge lined with flaming torches so that I could inspect the brickwork and manholes.

Once I was satisfied that the cloaca could cope with the additional flow, I turned my attention to the supply of fresh water. I renovated the three main aqueducts – the Marcia, the Appia and the Vetus – and built an entirely new one, diverting several springs in the hills near Tusculum. It ran for twelve miles, mostly underground, entered the city along the Servian Wall, crossed an arched span over the Via Tiburtina and finally disgorged into a reservoir near the Colline Gate.

I named it the Aqua Julia in honour of Caesar, and he presided over the sacrifices at the opening ceremony.

In the space of a year, I dug seven hundred wells and one hundred and thirty reservoirs, built half a dozen bathhouses – for both men and women, and free of charge at least one day per week – installed five hundred drinking fountains, and beautified it all with three hundred bronze and marble statues and four hundred marble columns.

Finally I laid on fifty-nine days of chariot races, theatrical performances and games in the Circus Maximus.

The citizens of Rome were happy and at peace. Sometimes in the winter afternoons I strolled through the city with Caecilia and watched the people drinking and talking at the fountains, and laughing as they came out of the bathhouses. I felt more satisfaction at those moments than I had after any battle. The only thing that took the edge off my pleasure was the knowledge that this peace was about to end, and that within a few months we would be at war again.

Antony was a proud and wilful man. He could not abide to be challenged. Livia knew this, and he duly walked straight into the trap she had set for him.

Enraged with Octavia for publicly exposing his adultery, he divorced her. And he did so in the cruellest fashion. He sent her a one-line message – Take your possessions and go – and ordered his agents to evict her and the children from his house. She left the next day, watched by a gawping crowd, and moved in with Caesar.

Nor did Antony’s retaliation stop with her. He sent Caesar a defiant open letter, posted in the Forum, written in the crudest language, admitting he was screwing the queen – so what? Is it only Livia you fuck? Congratulations when you read this letter if you haven’t been inside – and he then named four married women with whom Caesar was supposedly having affairs. Does it really matter where or in whom you stick your cock?

The letter was the talk of Rome. Livia, who was as ruthless about her marriage as she was about politics, knew what her husband was like and refused to read it. Caesar pretended to dismiss it with amused contempt.

– The work of a drunkard. You can practically smell the wine coming off the page.

But privately he was furious at being accused of hypocrisy, not least because it was true.

It had become a question of personal honour, and from that moment on, war was certain. Men now began scrambling to join their chosen side. The two new consuls, Sosius and Ahenobarbus, were both Antony’s supporters. They left Italy to join him in the east, taking with them more than a hundred senators sympathetic to his cause. The exodus was not all one way. At the same time, some of Antony’s lieutenants deserted him and returned to Rome.

Chief among these was L. Munatius Plancus – even in those treacherous days one of the slipperiest characters I ever met. He had supported the dictator when he was alive, and then his assassins after he was dead, and then Lepidus, and then Antony, and now he had finally come home to Caesar. He brought with him lurid tales of Antony’s decadence and extravagance, and as clinching proof of his sincerity, a vital piece of intelligence.

He reported that Antony had deposited his will with the Vestal Virgins. He knew the contents because he had witnessed the document. He assured Caesar they would be deeply damaging to Antony if ever they became public.

The will was supposed to be kept secret until his death. To this day, I have no idea how Caesar managed to get hold of it. My suspicion is that Livia, who knew several of the Vestals, either persuaded or coerced one of them into handing it over. Whatever the truth, in March Caesar summoned a public assembly in the Forum and read the most incriminating extracts to a vast crowd.

These were: first, the huge legacies Antony left to his children by Cleopatra; second, his instruction that he was to be buried in Alexandria next to the queen, even if his death had occurred in Italy; and third, and most astonishing, his official recognition of Cleopatra’s fourteen-year-old son Caesarion, the so-called ‘King of Kings’, as the child of Julius Caesar.

Of all his many follies, this was Antony’s greatest. The crowd roared their anger. It showed he placed Egypt higher in his heart than Italy, a foreign queen above an honest Roman matron, and in his acknowledgement of Caesarion, he openly endorsed a rival claimant to the title of the true heir of the dictator.

I spoke to Caesar as soon as he came down from the rostrum. He was as coldly determined as I had ever seen him. The reaction of the people was exactly what he had hoped for. There would be no more peace treaties, he said, jabbing his finger to emphasise his determination, no more equal division of the spoils. This time it would be a fight to the finish, winner take all, and Antony and Caesarion were both marked for death.

Throughout this period, I was having to contend with a family tragedy.