Page 75 of Agrippa

– This is fascinating, Agrippa. I never thought of you as a literary man. I congratulate you.

I struggled to prop myself up on my elbows. I saw that the chest in which I had locked my memoir was open. I ran my tongue around my dry, cracked lips.

– I gave orders that no one was to be admitted.

– Yes, but that hardly applies to me! Don’t distress yourself. Go back to sleep.

I lay down again and closed my eyes. I was weak and bewildered. I must have slept. When I opened them again, there was a breeze on my face. The door to the terrace was open and she was standing just outside. She turned to look at me. Her arms were folded. She was empty-handed.

– I needed some fresh air. Your room stinks.

– Where is my memoir?

– I put it back.

She tossed the key onto my bed.

I asked what would happen to it after I was gone.

– That will be for Augustus to decide. It will certainly come as a great shock to him.

– That I was Caesar’s son?

– Oh no, not that. He always knew that.

– How did he know it?

– Caesar told him before you both went to Apollonia. No, the shock will be learning what you really thought of him.

Did I dream it, this encounter? I must admit the possibility. My mind is a whirl of strange imaginings. I have tried to write down our conversation as best I can recall it. There was more she said before she left, but most of it is hazy. One last remark, though, lingers in my memory.

She was musing on whether I would have made the better ruler if Caesar in his will had adopted me as his son rather than Octavius and left me his estate. It must have crossed his mind, she said. It would have caused a sensation – but since when had Caesar bothered about what anyone thought? He believed himself to be a god.

In the end, she was sure he had made the right decision.

– It was a choice between the bear and the fox. And in politics there is no choice. It has to be the fox.

Post-Mortem

Marcus Agrippa died in his villa near Vesuvius in March 12 BC. Augustus returned to Rome in time to preside at his funeral. His ashes were interred in the Tomb of Augustus.

Julia married Tiberius the following year. Her affairs continued. The marriage lasted nine increasingly bitter years. In 2 BC, she was charged with treason and adultery. Tiberius divorced her, and she was banished by Augustus in accordance with his morality laws to the island of Pandataria (modern-day Ventotene), an extinct volcano off the Bay of Naples, roughly two miles long and half a mile wide. Her mother, Scribonia, Augustus’s second wife, accompanied her into exile. Julia was forbidden to drink wine, or to receive male visitors without her father’s permission. She died of starvation in Rhegium at the age of forty-six.

The fates of all five of Agrippa’s children by Julia were similarly unhappy.

Lucius Caesar died of illness while with the army in Gaul, aged eighteen.

A year and a half later, his elder brother, Gaius Caesar, also died, of wounds sustained while fighting in Anatolia, aged twenty-three.

Four years after Gaius’s death, Agrippa’s daughter Julia was arrested for adultery, and banished like her mother to a remote island, in her case Trimerus, in the Adriatic, where she died aged forty-seven.

Agrippa’s remaining son by Julia – the child with whom she was pregnant at the end of this novel – was born about three months after his father’s death. Known in consequence as Agrippa Postumus, he seems to have suffered from some kind of mental illness. At any rate, he was kept secluded from public view during Augustus’s lifetime and lived under close guard in the same villa in which Agrippa died. He was eventually murdered there by one of his guards, aged twenty-four or twenty-five, shortly after Augustus died and was succeeded by Tiberius: which of the two issued the order for the killing is uncertain.

Agrippa’s other daughter by Julia, known as Agrippina the Elder, was a victim of political intrigue during the reign of Tiberius. She was also exiled to her mother’s old island prison of Pandataria, and died there, allegedly of starvation, at the age of forty-six. She left behind several surviving children, including a son, Gaius – Agrippa’s grandson – who in time inherited control of the Roman empire from Tiberius. He is better known today as the emperor Caligula.

So much for Augustus’s succession planning.

Augustus proved to be the embodiment of the old English proverb that a creaking gate lasts longest. Against all expectations, he survived to the age of seventy-five, outliving Agrippa by a quarter of a century. His last words were said to be: Acta est fabula, plaudite. ‘The show is over – applaud.’