don't get my letters you'll know that they are being held back. Look carefully at the seventh page of any sewn-sheet book that reaches you from me. It will have a private message for you I'll write it in milk there. It's a trick that the Egyptians use. The writing is invisible until you warm it in front of a fire. Oh, listen to those doors banging. You must go now. They're at the end of the next corridor.'
Tears were in his eyes. He embraced me tenderly without another word and walked quickly to the balcony. He climbed over the edge, waved his hand in farewell and slid down the old vine up which he had climbed. I heard him running away through the garden and a moment later cries and shouts from the guard.
I have no recollection at all of anything that happened for the next month or more. I was ill again: so ill that they talked of me as already dead. By the time that I began to recover, Germanicus was already at the wars and Postumus had been disinherited and banished [A.D. 7 for life. The island chosen for him was Planasia.
It lay about twelve miles from Elba in the direction of Corsica and had not been inhabited within human memory.
But there were some prehistoric stone huts on it which were converted into living quarters for Postumus and a barracks for the guard. Planasia was roughly triangular in shape, the longest side being about five miles long. It was treeless and rocky and only visited by the Elba boatmen in the summer when they came to bait lobster-pots. By Augustus' orders this practice was discontinued, for fear Postumus might bribe someone and escape.
Tiberius was now Augustus' sole heir, with Germanicus and Castor to carry on the line after him--Livia's line.
XII
IF I WERE TO CONFINE MY ACCOUNT OF THE EVENTS OF THE next twenty-five years or more merely to my own performances it would not cost me much in paper and make very dull reading; but the later part of this autobiography, in which I figure more prominently, will only be intelligible if I continue here with the personal histories of Livia, Tiberius, Germanicus, Postumus, Castor, Livilla, and the rest, which are far from dull, I promise you.
Postumus was in exile, and Germanicus was at the wars, and only Athenodorus remained of my true friends. Soon he left me too, returning to his native Tarsus. I did not grudge his going because he went at the urgent appeal of two of his nephews there who begged him to help him free the city from the tyranny of its governor. They wrote that this governor had insinuated himself so cleverly into their God Augustus' good graces that it would need the testimony of a man like Athenodorus, in whose integrity their God Augustus had complete confidence, to persuade their God Augustus that the fellow's expulsion was justified. Athenodorus succeeded in ridding the city of this blood-sucker, but afterwards found it impossible to return to Rome as he ' had intended. He was needed by his nephews to help them rebuild the city administration on a firm foundation. Augustus, to whom he wrote a detailed report of his actions, showed his gratitude and confidence by granting Tarsus, as a personal favour to him, a five years' remission from the Imperial tribute. I corresponded regularly with the good old man until his death two years later at the age of eighty-two.
Tarsus honoured his memory with an annual festival and sacrifice; at which the leading citizens took turns to read his Short History of Tarsus through from beginning to end, starting at sunrise and finishing after sunset.
Germanicus wrote to me occasionally, but his letters were as brief as they were affectionate: a really good commander has no time for writing letters home to his family, his entire time between campaigns being spent in getting to know his men and officers, in studying their comfort, in increasing their military efficiency, and in gathering information about the disposition and plans of his enemy.
Germanicus was one of the most conscientious commanders who ever served in the Roman army--and more beloved even than our father. I was very proud when he wrote asking me to make for him, as quickly and thoroughly as I could, a digest of all reliable reports that I could find in the libraries on the domestic customs of the various Balkan tribes against whom he was fighting, the strength and geographical situation of their cities, and their traditional militajy tactics and ruses, particularly in guerrilla warfare. He said that he could not get enough reliable information locally: Tiberius had been most uncommunicative. With Sulpicius'
help and a small group of professional researchmen and copyists working night and day I managed to get together exactly what he wanted and sent off a copy to him within a month or his asking for it. I was prouder than ever when he wrote to me not long afterwards for an [M9], edition of twenty copies of the book for circulation among his senior officers, for it had already proved of the greatest service to him. He said that every paragraph was clear and relevant, the most useful sections being those giving particulars of the secret extra-tribal military brotherhood against which, rather than against the tribes themselves, the war was being fought; and of the various sacred trees and bushes---a different sort was reverenced by each tribe--under whose protective shade the tribesmen were accustomed to bury their stores of corn, money and weapons when they had to abandon their villages in a hurry. He promised to tell Tiberius and Augustus of my valuable services.
No public mention of this book was made, perhaps because if the enemy had heard of its existence they would have modified their tactics and dispositions.
As it was, they believed that they were being constantly betrayed by informers, Augustus rewarded me unofficially by appointing me to a vacancy in the Augurs'
College, but it was clear that he gave all the credit for the compilation to Sulpicius, though Sulpicius did not write a word--he merely found me some of the books.
One of my chief authorities was Pollio, whose Dalmatian campaign bad been a model of military thoroughness combined with brilliant intelligencework. Though his account of local customs and conditions seemed nearly fifty years out of date, Germanicus found my extracts from it more helpful than any more recent campaign- history. I wished Pollio had been alive to hear that. I told Livy instead, who said rather crossly that he had never denied Pollio credit for writing competent military textbooks; he had merely denied him the title of historian in the higher sense.
I must add to this that if I had been more tactful I am pretty sure that Augustus would have commended me in his speech to the Senate at the conclusion of the war. But my references to his own Balkan campaigns had been fewer than they might have been had he written a detailed account of it, as Pollio did of his; or, if the official historians had been less concerned with flattering their Emperor, and more with recording his successes and reverses in an unprejudiced, technical way. I could extract little or no useful matter from these eulogies and Augustus in reading my book must have felt himself slighted. He identified himself so closely with the success of the war that during the last two campaigning seasons he moved from Rome to a town on the North-East frontier of Italy, to be as near as he could to the fighting; and as Commander-in-Chief of the Roman Armies he was continually sending Tiberius not very helpful military advice.
I was now working on an account of my grandfather's part in the Civil Wars: but I had not gone very far before I was once more stopped by Livia. I only managed to complete two volumes. She told me that I was no more capable of writing a life of my grandfather than a life of my father and that I had behaved dishonestly in starting it behind her back. If I wanted a useful employment for my pen, I had better choose a subject that did not allow of so much misrepresentation.
She offered me one: the reorganisation of religion by Augustus since the Pacification. It was not an exciting subject, but had not been treated before in any detail and I was quite willing to undertake it. Augustus' religious reforms had been almost without exception excellent; he bad revived several ancient societies of priests, built and endowed eighty-two new temples in Rome and its environs, reedified numerous old ones that were falling into decay, introduced foreign cults for the benefit of visiting provincials and re-instituted a number of interesting old public festivals that had been allowed to lapse one after the other during the civil disturbances of the previous half- century. I went into the subject very closely and completed my survey within a few days of the death of Augustus six years later. It was in forty-one volumes, averaging five thousand words apiece, but a great deal of this consisted of transcripts of religious decrees, nominal lists of priests, catalogues of gifts made to temple treasuries and so on.
The most valuable volume was the introductory one dealing with primitive ritual at Rome. Here I found myself in difficulties, because Augustus' ritualistic reforms were based on the findings of a religious commission which had not done its work properly. There had apparently been no antiquarian expert among the commissioners, so that a number of gross misunderstandings of ancient religious formulas had been embodied in the new official liturgies.
Nobody who has not made a study of the Etruscan and Sabine languages is capable of correctly interpreting
