I, Virgil, page 19
And jumped.
'Why not?' I said, my heart racing. 'Yes, all right. If you want me to, of course I'll come.'
I knew that chances were I would be dashed to pieces; but I suddenly felt the exhilaration of flight.
CAESAR'S POET (SEPTEMBER 40 – SEPTEMBER 19 BC)
45.
If I were asked to draw a line, and say, ‘This is the point at which I became Octavian's poet,’ I would choose that journey to Brindisi.
Maecenas persuaded me by discussing, not politics, but poetry. I discovered that I had been right not to underestimate him; not only did he have a thorough knowledge of literature, but also – the two do not necessarily go together – a sincere appreciation of it. I was surprised at first to find that when we were alone he talked naturally and seriously, without affectation. Once I was over my shyness, our discussions became enjoyably acrimonious, and I did not always have the best of them, by any means. Only on the subject of his own work was he less than serious, and that, too, impressed me: Maecenas wrote the most appalling drivel, but he knew it and could laugh at himself. He said it did not matter, and he was right.
We know each other better now – he was, until that last disastrous meeting only a few months ago, one of my closest friends for almost twenty years – but I still wonder which is the real Maecenas: Agrippa's 'chattering jay', my razor-brained critic, or Octavian's master of diplomacy and propaganda. All three, I suspect, and more besides. A senator once said, sarcastically, of Julius Caesar that he was 'all things to all men'. That is certainly true of Maecenas, although not in the way the senator meant it of Caesar. For me, it was enough that he was my friend, and it would have been wrong to probe too deeply. In the course of that journey he won my respect (he has it still, although he would not want it); and if both he and Gallus believed that Octavian was Rome's only hope, then despite my private reservations I owed him my support, too.
Perhaps at this point I should clear up a possible misunderstanding. In his Fifth Satire, Horace gives an account of a journey he, Maecenas and I made to Brindisi. This, I am sorry to say, since it is such a marvellous slice of low life, is completely imaginary, although written with Maecenas's full knowledge and approval: a beautiful bit of tongue-in-cheek nonsense, rather like my Gallus poem (I will tell you about that one, in its proper place), that made all of us laugh when he read it. Maecenas – and this is the point of the poem – would not be seen dead in an inn, let alone one with fleas. When he travels, his accommodation is arranged in advance either with some rich friend or with prominent local dignitaries; and even then he takes his own linen, for preference.
Our real journey to Brindisi was much more luxurious. We arrived on the last day of September; and there our paths immediately diverged since I was not, of course, involved in the negotiations themselves. Maecenas had arranged for me to stay with an acquaintance of his, a certain Appius Mucro, who was old, half-blind and completely deaf. After welcoming me to his house and giving his slaves strict instructions to look after me, he courteously left me alone, which suited both of us very well. I did not see much of Pollio either. As Antony's second, he had more important things on his mind than socialising. I understood, and kept my own company.
Brindisi, although it is the major port for the east, is quite a small town. With the peace conference it was bursting at the seams, and the mood was almost – paradoxically – one of holiday. I could see what Maecenas had meant about fraternisation: the wineshops were full of soldiers and sailors from both Octavian's and Antony's forces, but there was very little trouble. The officers, too, seemed to be making no attempt to keep the armies apart. It was obvious that no-one wanted war. From the soldiers' point of view there was little to gain: a fresh civil war would put money in nobody's pocket. In any case, the troops, too, had had their fill of fighting. Maecenas had been right. What Italy needed now was peace.
The day after my arrival, I set out to explore the town. I cannot remember exactly where I went, but I ended up, as you might expect, in the booksellers' quarter. I was examining a copy of Plato's Laws when I realised that I was being watched by a stooped, elderly man. As I looked up, he bowed: hand on heart, with a curious, bobbing motion.
'Forgive me for staring,' he said. 'I couldn't help noticing your interest in the philosophical works. Are you a philosopher yourself, by any chance?'
'I'm a student of philosophy,' I said. 'I wouldn't claim anything more.'
'But you are,' the old man indicated the book I held in my hands, 'a follower of Plato?'
'Of Epicurus,' I said.
He frowned.
'I have never understood,' he said, 'how any man can deny the existence of the soul.'
'Some find it comforting to believe that death is the end.'
He shook his head.
'Belief is one thing,' he said gently. 'Facts are another. The soul exists. Whether we choose to believe that or not is immaterial.'
I had not had a philosophical discussion for months; my time had been taken up with poetry and other things. With a warm glow of anticipation, I replaced the book and turned to the attack.
We agreed, in the end, to differ. My new friend introduced himself. His name was Matthias, and he was by origin an Alexandrian Jew now resident in Brindisi. He invited me to his house nearby for a cup of wine.
I spent a very pleasant day with Matthias and Sarah, his wife. Although he had studied Greek philosophy, his main interest lay in the Jewish writings. I cannot remember many details of our conversation, except for one thing: a discussion of the Jewish prophecies concerning the Messiah; that is, in Latin, the Anointed One.
The Messiah, Jews believe, is a man sent from God to rescue them from their enemies, including, of course, ourselves. They do not know when he will come; but his coming will signal the beginning of a new era of prosperity and justice. The Messiah will be called Wonderful, the Counsellor, the Prince of Peace. In his time, the lion will lie down with the lamb, and wars throughout the earth will cease forever.
As we sat in the autumn sunlight in Matthias's garden, and he read the prophecies to me, I could feel, even beneath his stumbling translation, the beat and fire of the language. Whoever he was, this Isaiah was a great poet – unless, as the Jews believe, he was what is greater, the mouthpiece of their god. When I left, after saying my farewells, his words left with me, and my ears still rang with them.
The next day, the peace treaty was signed. Under its terms, Octavian and Antony split the world between them, Antony taking the east, Octavian the west. Lepidus was to be left in possession of Africa, and the sentence of exile passed on Ahenobarbus revoked. Further, since Antony's wife Fulvia had died in exile at Athens, the pact was to be sealed by a dynastic marriage between Antony and Octavian's sister, Octavia.
They say that, when the news reached Rome, the celebrations surpassed any within living memory. Certainly Brindisi went mad that night. I have never seen anything like it, before or since, even including the thanksgiving after Actium. It was as though the whole town were one great wedding party, soldiers and civilians alike. There was no violence, no looting, hardly even any unpleasant drunkenness; and that was a miracle in itself. More, there was a strange, pervasive feeling in the very air of the place, a feeling that everything was going to be all right. I cannot put this any more clearly, nor can I explain what is inexplicable. It was simply a fact. If anything was needed to convince me that peace is the greatest gift the gods can give, that night was the proof, whatever happened after.
I retired early to my room; but not to sleep. I felt restless, as if a million tiny flies were crawling over my skin. I tried to read, but the letters would not stay still on the page or the words in my head. I got up, walked around, lay down again a dozen times; but always my eyes kept straying to the window. Finally I threw open the shutters and looked outside, over the city.
It was a magical evening, clear and alive with diamond-bright stars. Below me I could see the glittering of a thousand torches, moving and weaving through the narrow streets like fireflies, and hear the sussuration of voices like a beach full of pebbles stirred by the waves. I stood entranced for I do not know how long, letting the peace and contentment and pure joy of the night flood through me. I think I prayed, but I am not sure, nor do I know to which god. In any case, my cheeks as I turned away were wet with tears.
I cannot remember reaching for my pen and wax tablets, nor of writing what has become my Fourth Pastoral. I have never written another poem like it and never could again. It came unbidden, complete and perfect as a fine- cut gem. Part of it was the night, part my memories of those rolling Jewish prophecies, part the signing of the treaty and the marriage settlement; but still, that was not the whole. There was Something Else that stood behind my shoulder and guided my hand as I wrote, and to this day I cannot tell who or what it was. I can only be grateful.
The poem celebrates the birth of a child; no ordinary child, but one who will bring back the Golden Age, the Years of Saturn when there were no wars and no hunger and no fear anywhere in the world; when man and nature lived as one in perfect harmony and the gods walked quietly through smiling fields. It celebrates peace and plenty and an end forever to the bickering and the bloodshed and the million million sad, wasted tears of human history:
For you, Child,
The untilled earth will pour forth her gifts –
Small at first, the smallest of giftlings:
Trailing ivy; valerian the healer;
Lilies, and the smiling acanthus.
Goats will bring, with no man urging,
Their milk-swelled udders swaying homeward.
Lions
Will hold no terrors for the sheep.
Your very cradle, Child,
Will pour forth flowers in rich abundance
To welcome you...
As I say, I do not know where the poem came from. I did not write it, it wrote itself, and alone of my poems I altered not a single line. When it was done, I closed the tablets, laid them beside my bed, and went quietly to sleep.
46.
The joy of Brindisi was short-lived.
This time, the fault lay with neither Antony nor Octavian, but with Sextus Pompey. He had, quite understandably, considered himself snubbed: Octavian and Antony, when they thought he might be useful, had each proposed an alliance. After Brindisi Pompey found himself out in the cold, packed off back to Sicily like a faithful dog who is surplus to immediate requirements but who his master knows will come back, tail wagging, when he whistles.
In the latter months of the year, Pompey set out to make his presence felt. From his bases in Sicily and Sardinia he began to launch raids on the Italian coast, threatening Rome's vital grain supplies. The cost of provisions escalated, and matters were made worse by the fresh taxation levied to raise cash for the new sea war. Finally, in mid-November, the Roman mob rioted and troops were called in.
It was clear that Pompey had to be dealt with, one way or the other. Realising that they were not yet strong enough at sea to risk an all-out campaign, Antony and Octavian decided on a peaceful settlement. They persuaded Pompey to accept Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily (legitimately) and the Peloponnese as a governorial province, in exchange for a pledge of good conduct.
The east was in an even worse state. Parthia – the great empire to the west of the Roman boundaries – had invaded Syria, and Antony's ramshackle arrangements for the buffer-kingdoms at the western edge of Roman territory sagged and collapsed like a rotten tenement. Petty-king after petty-king went over to the invaders: Cappadocia, Commagene, Galatia...one after another. Worse, the Parthian commander was an experienced Roman general, Caesar's renegade lieutenant Labienus. By the autumn, the situation had become critical. Antony set out for the east to take over the conduct of the war; and Italy enjoyed a whole year of peace.
I spent the year after the Pact of Brindisi between Naples and Rome. Now that I had come to terms with Octavian and Antony's plans for the state, I had begun in earnest on the pastoral poems. It was as if a blockage had been removed. I no longer balked at the political content; in fact, like an ox who, once he has discovered the taste of salt, comes again and again to the lick, I began positively to enjoy the challenge. First of all, I discharged my debt by writing two poems on the confiscations. To these I added another, on Caesar's divinity (Antony had recently, at Octavian's request, become a Priest of the Divine Julius. The poem was thus a three-way compliment). These seemed to satisfy the craving, for the time being.
Here I should perhaps relate a story which is a warning to poets and critics alike: poets, because critics may read into a poem something they did not mean; critics, because they may, in their cleverness, credit the poet with an allusion which he never intended. Maecenas enjoyed the 'political' poems, but on reading one of the others (an uneasy blend of pastoral and Epicurean physics), he suddenly amazed me by dissolving into a fit of coughing.
'I'm not exactly sure, my dear boy,' he said, 'that I approve of the allusion here.'
I must have looked blank, for he added:
'The Silenus figure. Antony may be fond of his wine and women, but he's hardly likely to enjoy being portrayed as a hung-over demigod. Especially one whose interests seem to include the natural sciences.'
I was relieved. I explained that there was no allusion to Antony, that if Silenus represented anything it was the philosophical union between the instinctive and the rational sides of the human spirit. Maecenas, I could see, listened to none of this. I had the impression that he was not displeased, and had filed the comparison away for future use.
I do not know if Antony himself ever thought I was being disrespectful, but I doubt it. It has been my experience that although compliments tend to get themselves noticed, people do not readily recognise when they are being criticised symbolically. Others notice, of course, especially those like Maecenas, who think easily in symbols; and sometimes they are too clever for their own good.
I wrote another of the poems about this time, or perhaps slightly later, I cannot now remember: a fairly short, tongue-in-cheek piece addressed to Gallus. I mention it because, in retrospect, it was a chilling foretaste of what was to come. In the wake of one of their violent but never very long-lasting quarrels, Cytheris had gone off to Milan with a young cavalry officer, leaving Gallus not so much disconsolate as at a loose end (he did not remain so for long). In the poem, I pictured him, near suicidal and ready to die for love, haunting the sylvan glades and vowing every kind of desperate act, while Lycoris (the name he used for Cytheris in his own works) tramped the frozen north barefooted behind her soldier-lover. It was a pretty bit of Alexandrian nonsense, and both Gallus and Cytheris, when she finally returned, as I knew she would, had a good laugh over it. Yet the poem contained a kernel of truth – do poets, like prophets, have the power to see the future? – and I remembered it later, when the time came to lament my friend in earnest.
Antony was away from Italy, except for a brief but significant visit, for the next two years. After pushing the Parthians back across the border he set up his headquarters in Athens, where he lived with Octavia and their new-born daughter Antonia (no, there was no male Child, after all. In that I proved a false prophet).
Octavia is one of the few 'good' characters in my story. In her quiet way, she resembled Cleopatra.
I can see your eyebrows rise, but I mean exactly that. Not in looks – Octavia was far more beautiful – nor in character. Certainly not in her behaviour. Yet both women had an intense inner drive which united them. For Cleopatra, it was a love of her country, and of power; for Octavia, of her family and the old Roman virtues of constancy and fidelity. Both, in their different ways, loved Antony, and he responded to both in ways of his own. If anyone could have saved him from himself, that person was Octavia. During the two years they lived together, he was the model husband: sober, faithful, attentive. He even took to sitting in on philosophical lectures, which he hated - philosophy was very much one of Octavia's interests. However, the fault lay so deep in Antony's character that not even Octavia could dig it out. Like a man who, once he has tasted spiced wine, will no longer be content to drink plain water all his life, Antony was drawn away from her to Cleopatra; and she destroyed him. Even then, Octavia made no complaint. After his death she reared his children by the Egyptian queen as her own, until her brother had them murdered.
Meanwhile, Octavian himself had married, for the third and (hitherto) final time. His admirers say it was purely a love-match, but I am not so sure. Sex, for Octavian, was merely an extension of politics; and marriage with Livia gave him the entrée into respectable society which he badly needed, plus the added bonus of a wife with a talent for political analysis that almost surpassed his own.
To marry Livia, Octavian had to divorce his second wife Scribonia. He did so, the day she bore his daughter Julia, on the pretext that 'she nags me.'
I wish I had met Scribonia, who sounds interesting. I did meet Livia, and found her merely frightening.
While Antony was in Athens, and shortly before Octavian's marriage, trouble had broken out yet again with Sextus Pompey. This time the consequences were to be more serious.
47.
I do not propose to describe the war against Sextus Pompey in any detail, but I must spend some time on it since it highlights Antony's relationship with Octavian, and Octavian's abilities (or rather lack of them) as an admiral. You see, like a lawyer, I am preparing my case. Very soon now Antony will become the horned monster, the devourer of children, who leads the whole yapping crew of beast-headed eastern gods against poor trembling Italy. Against him will stand Italy's champion, Caesar-Apollo, calm, strong, serene in his perfect marble coolness: Caesar the Python-Killer, the Destroyer of Demons. I would not take you into that blinded by the Authorised Version. There were faults (and failings) on both sides. I would have you see them clearly.
