Page 67 of Agrippa

If I had to nominate the period of my life when I was happiest, I would say it was those first two years with Julia.

I was in complete control of Rome. I cleared the streets of thieves and troublemakers. I indulged my love of geography and commissioned the first great map of the world. I completed the Aqua Virgo and extended it across the river to bring water to the west of the city. On the Field of Mars, I laid out a park with gravel paths and a huge artificial lake for swimming and boating.

And above all, I fathered a son.

Julia became pregnant at the beginning of the second year of our marriage. She carried the child without mishap throughout the spring, and at the start of the summer moved out to her father’s villa in the Alban Hills for the final stages of her confinement. As soon as the annual elections were over, I went out to join her, and I was there when she went into labour on the first day of September. The moment when the doctor appeared on the threshold to announce she had given birth to a healthy boy is as vivid in my mind as I lie here now as it was on the day it happened. When I held him for the first time, I felt I had broken a curse, and that here was an achievement of which even Julius Caesar could not boast.

At his lustration ceremony nine days later, we named him Gaius, in honour ostensibly of his grandfather, Augustus, but also – although this of course was my secret alone – his other grandfather, Caesar. I announced his birth in the Senate to rapturous applause, and a decree was issued stating that a sacrifice and prayers were to be celebrated annually on his birthday.

I wrote at once to Augustus, who was then in Syria, to give him the news, and he replied by special courier.

This is a fourfold joy to me. I offer thanks to the gods for the sake of my daughter, for my friend, for myself and for Rome. May he grow up to embody the virtues of his father and grandfather. And now I must go and break the news to Livia …

As soon as Julia was well enough to travel, we went down to the Bay of Naples, where I had begun to build this villa, just outside Pompeii, on the southern slopes of Vesuvius.

If the gods would only grant us the power to freeze our lives at one particular instant and live in it for ever, what a blessing it would be! I know which I would choose – sitting in the shade of an olive grove one afternoon in the gentle late summer of Campania with my young wife and baby son on a blanket beside me, the calm blue sea behind us, the green mountain ahead, watching the house we had designed together take shape before our eyes, in a world for once at peace – the co-ruler of the Roman empire: healthy, honoured and complete.

But time and fate herd us onward like sheep, through the months and years, hustling us out of the sunshine and into the shadows.

Unknown to me in my Campanian idyll, the tribes of Germania had once again crossed the Rhine and were spreading havoc in eastern Gaul, and soon after we returned to Rome, for the first time in twelve years I was obliged to put on my armour and set off to war again.

Caesar’s Gallic Wars is excellent military history. But unlike Caesar, I have no team of secretaries to compose my memoirs for me, and I do not have the time remaining that is required to undertake it. Nor, if I am honest, do I possess the appetite to glorify every siege and skirmish of those campaigns – not in my present state, sitting here propped up in bed, drinking undiluted wine to try to dull the pain.

My motto after years of service to the state is unheroic. You might even call it boring. My staff certainly grew tired of hearing it. It was the advice given a hundred years ago by Micipsa, the King of Numidia, to his sons, and I offer it here, on the unlikely chance that some statesman might one day chance across these pages in search of guidance: ‘Harmony makes even small things grow; discord makes even the greatest decay.’

That was the policy I pursued in Gaul.

You may recall that I had fought many years before against the Germanic tribe called the Ubii, whose lands lay on the eastern side of the Rhine. They were now under attack in their rear from the warlike Suebi, who were also making repeated incursions across the river into Roman Gaul. I drove them off easily enough, and rather than station an army on the Rhine to prevent further invasions, I invited the Ubii to move their population across to our side of the river, where they could act as a buffer colony between us and the Suebi. I laid the foundations of a town, with an altar at its centre where they could worship their gods. I built roads and surveyed the line of an aqueduct to bring water from the hills to the west. I did this on my own authority, without consulting Augustus or the Senate, and I am glad to say the policy has brought lasting peace.

I had similar success in the region to the south around Lugdunum, where I put down local rebellions and began another programme of building works. I commissioned three great roads – westwards to the Atlantic, southwards to the Mediterranean and eastwards to the Rhine – to open Gaul to trade. I also initiated the construction of a thirty-mile aqueduct to bring water to the colony at Nemausus.

If Rome is to prevail, it will not be by force of arms alone, but by the superiority of our engineering, which will spread across the world and carry our civilisation in its wake.

Harmony makes even small things grow …

Three months after I arrived in Gaul, I received a letter from Julia to say that she had just discovered she was pregnant with our second child.

I believe it must have happened that time the day before you left – do you remember it? I haven’t told anyone about the baby yet except you. Do you think of me at night in your tent when I was still slim and beautiful? Now it won’t be long before I’m fat and hideous again. At least you won’t have to worry about my taking a young lover. No man will even look at me.

Gaius has learned how to sit up and is trying to say his first words. I know what he wants to say, because I want to say it too – come home, Agrippa, we miss you.

I was determined to try to return to Rome in time for the birth. But just as I was preparing to leave Nemausus, I received a message from Augustus alerting me to fresh trouble, this time in his province of northern Spain. He implored me to leave Gaul immediately and take control of the crisis.

This was doubly infuriating. Not only would it take me a month of arduous travel merely to reach the scene of the uprising, but the rebellious tribe was the same Cantabri whose menfolk had been sold into slavery by Augustus after his supposed victory six years earlier. They had risen up and slaughtered every single one of their masters, then returned home and organised a general revolt that was now threatening the Roman garrisons.

I sent a message to Julia explaining the situation. I apologised for my absence, and begged her above all else to look after her health, and to send me news of the baby as soon as it was delivered.

Then I set off for the coast of Aquitania, where I took ship for northern Spain.

Augustus had left behind a powerful army of eight legions in Spain, under the command of Gaius Furnius. With the addition of cavalry, our force numbered more than fifty thousand. But it was clear from the moment I met Furnius and his commanders at Castra Legionis, their permanent headquarters about fifty miles inland, that they were gripped by defeatism.

The warriors of the Cantabri, and their allies the Astures, were tough fighters, hewn from the same rugged landscape that had bred them. It is a region of mountains, mostly forested on their lower slopes, with narrow winding paths clinging to the sides of steep ravines, and fast streams that can swell overnight into mighty rivers thanks to the torrential downpours to which the area is subject. Their fighters, usually armed with daggers and double-headed axes, would sweep down from the higher ground, ambush our patrols, and disappear into the woods before our reinforcements could be summoned.

It is the kind of warfare a regular army dreads, and it had been going on for more than a year. Our casualties were high. Morale was low.

My first task was to tour the legions and raise their fighting spirit, using a combination of exhortations and threats. I decided to make an example of Legion I Augustus, which had disgraced itself in a recent engagement. I stripped it of its honorific title as a punishment for its cowardice. The legion was mortified at this public shaming. The other seven took notice.

Once I had done what I could to restore the army’s backbone, I turned my attention to the enemy.