successors have used as the token of their sovereignty.]
Livia wrote the recommendation for banishment in very strong terms. It was composed in Augustus' own literary style; which was easy to imitate because it always sacriEced elegance to clarity--for example, by a determined repetition of the same word, where it occurred often in a passage, instead of hunting about for a synonym or periphrasis [which is the common literary practice]. And he had a tendency to over-prepositionalize his verbs. She did not show the letter to Augustus but sent it direct to the Senate, who immediately voted a decree of perpetual banishment.
Livia had listed Julia's crimes in such detail and had credited [75] Augustus with such calm expressions of detestation for them that she made it impossible for him ever afterwards to change his mind and ask the Senate to cancel their decision. She did a good piece of business on the side, too, by singling out for special mention as Julia's partners in adultery three or four men whom it was to her interest to ruin. Among them was an uncle of mine, lulus, a son of Antony, to whom Augustus had shown great favour for Octavia's sake, raising him to the Consulship. Livia, in naming him in her letter to the Senate, strongly emphasized the ingratitude that he had shown his benefactor and hinted that he and Julia were conspiring together to seize the supreme power. lulus committed suicide. I believe that the charge of conspiracy was groundless, but as the only surviving son of Antony, by his wife Fulvia--Augustus had put Antyllus, the eldest, to death immediately after his father's suicide, and the other two, Ptolemy and Alexander, his sons by Cleopatra, had died young--and as an ex-Consul and the husband of Marcellus' sister, whom Agrippa had divorced, he seemed dangerous. Popular discontent with Augustus often expressed itself in a wish that it had been Antony who had won the Battle of Actium.
The other men whom Livia accused of adultery were banished.
A week later Augustus asked Livia whether 'a certain decree' had been duly passed--for he never mentioned Julia by name again and seldom even by a roundabout expression, though she plainly was much in his thoughts.
Livia told him that 'a certain person' had been sentenced to perpetual confinement on an island and was already on her way there. At this he seemed further downcast, that Julia had not done the one honourable thing left to her to do, namely to take her own life. Livia mentioned that Phcebe, who was Julia's lady-in-waiting and chief confidant, had hanged herself as soon as the decree of banishment had been published. Augustus said: 'I wish to God I had been Phoebe's father.' He delayed his public appearance for a further fortnight. I well remember that dreadful month. We children were all, by Livia's orders, made to wear mourning and not allowed to play or make a noise or even smile. When we saw Augustus again he looked ten w years older and it was months before he had the heart to visit the playground in the Boys' College or even to resume his daily morning exercise, which consisted of a brisk walk around the Palace grounds with a run at the end over a course of low hurdles.
Tiberius had the news about Julia sent him at once by Livia. At her prompting he wrote two or three letters to Augustus, begging him to forgive Julia, as he did himself, and saying that however badly she had behaved as a wife he wished her to keep all the property that he had at any time made over to her.
Augustus did not answer. He firmly believed that Tiberius' original coldness and cruelty to Julia, and the example of immorality he had given her, were responsible for her moral degeneration. So far from recalling him from banishment he refused even to renew his Protectorate when it came to an end the following year.
There is a soldiers' marching-ballad called The Three Griefs of Lord Augustus, composed in the rough tragicomic style of the camp, which was sung many years later by the regiments stationed in Germany. The theme is that Augustus grieved first for Marcellus, next for Julia, and the third time for the lost Eagles of Varus. Deeply for Marcellus' death, more deeply for Julia's disgrace, but most deeply of all for the Eagles, for with each Eagle had vanished a whole regiment of Rome's bravest men. The ballad laments in a number of verses the unhappy fate of the Nineteenth, Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Sixth Regiments which, when I was nineteen years old, were ambushed and massacred by the Germans in a remote marshy forest; and tells how, after the news of this unparalleled disaster reached him. Lord Augustus kept knocking his head against the wall: Lord Augustus each time bawling
As he fetched his head a crack,
'Varus, Varus, General Varus,
Give me my three Eagles back!'
Lord Augustus tore his bedclothes,
Blankets, sheet and counterpane.
'Varus, Varus, General Varus,
Give my Regiments back againi'
The next verses say that he never afterwards formed new regiments under the numbers of the three destroyed, but kept the gap in the Army List. He is made to swear that Marcellus' life and Julia's honour had been nothing to him by comparison with the life and honour of his soldiers, and that his spirit would have
'no more rest than a flea in an oven' until all three Eagles were recovered and safely laid in the Capitol. But though since then the Germans had been thrashed again and again in battle, nobody had been able to discover where the lost Eagles were 'roosting'--the cowards kept them so closely hidden. That was how the troops belittled Augustus' grief for Julia, but it is my opinion that for every hour he grieved for the Eagles he must have grieved a full month for her.
He did not wish to know where she had been sent, because this would have meant that his mind would be continually turning there and he would hardly be able to restrain himself from taking ship and visiting her. So it was easy for Livia to treat Julia with great revengefulness. She was not allowed wine, cosmetics, fine clothes or luxuries of any sort and her guard consisted of eunuchs and very old men. She was allowed no visitors and was even set to work on a daily spinning task as in her schoolgirl days. The island was off the Campanian coast. It was a very small one and Livia purposely increased her sufferings by keeping the same guards there year after year without relief; they naturally blamed her for their banishment in that confined and unhealthy spot. The one person who comes well out of this ugly story is Julia's mother, Scribonia, whom it will be recalled Augustus had divorced in order to be able to marry Livia. Now a very old woman, who had lived in retirement for a number of years, she boldly went to Augustus and asked permission to share her daughter's banishment. She told him in Livia's presence that her daughter had been stolen from her as soon as born but that she had always worshipped her from a distance and, now that the whole world was set against her darling, she wished to show what true mother's love was. And in her opinion the poor child was not to blame: things had been made very difficult for her. Livia laughed contemptuously but must have felt [78] pretty uncomfortable.
Augustus, mastering his emotion, iigned that the request was granted.
Five years later, on Julia's birthday, Augustus asked Livia suddenly: 'How big is the island?'
'Which island?' asked Livia.
'The island... where an unlucky woman is living.'
'Oh, a few minutes' walk from end to end, I believe,'
Livia said with affected carelessness.
'A few minutes walk! Are you joking?' He had thought of her as an exile on some big island, like Cyprus or Lesbos or Corfu. After a while he asked: 'What is it called?'
'It's
called
Pandatarial'
'What? My God, that desolate place? 0 cruel! Five years on Pandataria!'
Livia looked at him severely and said: 'I suppose you want her back here at Rome?'
Augustus then went over to the map of Italy, engraved on a thin sheet of gold studded with small jewels to mark the cities, which hung on the wall of the room in which they were. He was unable to speak, but pointed to Reggio, a pleasant Greek town on the straits of Messina.
So Julia was sent to Reggio, where she was given somewhat greater liberty, and even allowed to see visitors--but a visitor had first to apply in person to Livia for permission. He had to explain what business he had with Julia, and fill in a detailed passport for Livia's signature, giving the colour of his hair and eyes and listing distinguishing marks and scars, so that only he himself could use it. Few cared to submit to these preliminaries. Julia's daughter Agrippina asked permission to go, but Livia refused out of consideration, she said, for Agrippina's morals. Julia was still kept under severe discipline and had no friend living with her, her mother having died of fever
