Augustus

care.'

Quintus looked at him again, and took my arm, and we went closer to the street so that we could watch his passing. Other citizens had noticed his approach, and we crowded among them.

I did not intend to speak; but as he passed, those memories of my childhood came up within me, and the word was spoken.

'Tavius,' I said.

The word was hardly more than a whisper, but it was said as he passed me; and the one whom I had not intended to address paused and looked at me as if he were puzzled. Then he gestured to the men around him to remain where they were, and he came up to me.

'Did you speak, old mother?' he asked.

'Yes, Master,' I said. 'Forgive me.'

'You said a name by which I was known as a child.'

'I am Hirtia,' I said. 'My mother was your foster nurse when you were a child in Velletri. Perhaps you do not remember.'

'Hirtia,' he said, and he smiled. He came a step nearer, and looked at me; his face was lined and his cheeks sunken, but I could see that boy I had known. 'Hirtia,' he said again, and touched my hand. 'I remember. How many years…'

'More than fifty,' I said.

Some of his friends approached him; he waved them away.

'Fifty,' he said. 'Have they been kind to you?'

'I have raised five children, of whom three live and prosper. My husband was a good man, and we lived in comfort. The gods have taken my husband, and now I am content that my own life draws to an end.'

He looked at me. 'Among your children,' he said, 'were there daughters?'

I thought it a strange question. I said: 'I was blessed only with sons.'

'And they have honored you?'

'They have honored me,' I said.

'Then your life has been a good one,' he said. 'Perhaps it has been better than you know.'

'I am content to go when the gods call me,' I said.

He nodded, and a somberness came upon his face. He said with a bitterness I could not understand: 'Then you are more fortunate than I, my sister.'

'But you-' I said, '-you are not like other men. In the countryside your image protects the hearth. And at the crossroads, and in the temples. Are you not happy in the honor of the world?'

He looked at me for a moment, and did not answer. Then he turned to Quintus, who stood beside me. 'This is your son,' he said. 'He has your features.'

'It is Quintus,' I said. 'He is manager of all the estates of Atius Sabinus at Velletri. Since I was widowed, I have been living with Quintus and his family there. They are good people.'

He looked at Quintus for a long time without speaking. 'I did not have a son,' he said. 'I had only a daughter, and Rome.'

I said, 'All the people are your children.'

He smiled. 'I think now I would have preferred to have had three sons, and to have lived in their honor.'

I did not know what to say; I did not speak.

'Sir,' my son said; his voice was unsteady. 'We are humble people. Our lives are what they have been. I have heard that today you speak to the Senate, and thus give to the world your wisdom and your counsel. Beside yours, our fortune is nothing.'

'Is it Quintus?' he said. My son nodded. He said: 'Quintus, today in my wisdom, I must counsel-I must order the Senate to take from me that which I have loved most in this life.' For a moment his eyes blazed, and then his face softened, and he said: 'I have given to Rome a freedom that only I cannot enjoy.'

'You have not found happiness,' I said, 'though you have given it.'

'It is the way my life has been,' he said.

'I hope that you become happy,' I said.

'I thank you, my sister,' he said. 'There is nothing that I can do for you? '

'I am content,' I said. 'My sons are content.'

He nodded. 'I must perform this duty now,' he said; but for a long while he was silent, and did not turn away. 'We did see each other again, as we promised long ago.'

'Yes, Master,' I said.

He smiled. 'Once you called me Tavius.'

'Tavius,' I said.

'Good-by, Hirtia,' he said. 'This time, perhaps we shall-'

'We shall not meet again,' I said. 'I go to Velletri, and I shall not return to Rome.'

He nodded, and he put his lips to my cheek, and he turned away. He walked slowly down the Via Sacra to join those who waited for him.

These words I have spoken to my son, Quintus, on the third day before the Ides of September. I have spoken them for my sons and for their children, now and to come, so that for as long as this family endures it might know something of its place in the world that was Rome, in the days that are gone.

II. The Journal of Julia, Pandateria (A.D. 4)

Outside my window, the rocks, gray and somber in the brilliance of the afternoon sun, descend in a huge profusion toward the sea. This rock, like all the rock on this island of Pandateria, is volcanic in origin, rather porous and light in weight, upon which one must walk with some caution, lest one's feet be slashed by hidden sharpnesses. There are others on this island, but I am not allowed to see them. Unaccompanied and unwatched, I am permitted to walk a distance of one hundred yards to the sea, as far as the thin strip of black-sand beach; and to walk a like distance in any direction from this small stone hut that has been my abode for five years. I know the body of this barren earth more intimately than I have known the contours of any other, even that of my native Rome, upon which I lavished an intimacy of almost forty years. It is likely that I shall never know another place.

On clear days, when the sun or the wind has dispersed the mists that often rise from the sea, I look to the east; and I think that I can sometimes see the mainland of Italy, perhaps even the city of Naples that nestles in the safety of her gentle bay; but I cannot be sure. It may be only a dark cloud that upon occasion smudges the horizon. It does not matter. Cloud or land, I shall not approach closer to it than I am now.

Below me, in the kitchen, my mother shouts at the one servant we are allowed. I hear the banging of pots and pans, and the shouting again; it is a futile repetition of every afternoon of these years. Our servant is mute; and though not deaf, it is unlikely that she even understands our Latin tongue. Yet inde-fatigably my mother shouts at her, in the unflagging optimism that her displeasure will be felt and will somehow matter. My mother, Scribonia, is a remarkable woman; she is nearly seventy-five, yet she has the energy and the will of a young woman, as she goes about setting in some peculiar order a world that has never pleased her, and berating it for not arranging itself according to some principle that has evaded them both. She came with me here to Pandateria, not, I am sure, out of any maternal regard, but out of a desperate pursuit of a condition that would confirm once again her displeasure with existence. And I allowed her to accompany me out of what I believe was an appropriate indifference.

I scarcely know my mother. I saw her upon few occasions when I was a child, even less frequentiy when I was a girl, and we met only at more or less formal social gatherings when I was a woman. I was never fond of her; and it gives me now some assurance to know, after these five years of enforced intimacy, that my feeling for her has not changed.

I am Julia, daughter of Octavius Caesar, the August; and I write these words in the forty-third year of my life. I write them for a purpose of which the friend of my father and my old tutor, Athenodorus, would never have approved; I write them for myself and my own perusal. Even if I wished it otherwise, it is unlikely that any eyes save my own shall see them. But I do not wish it otherwise. I would not explain myself to the world, and I would not have the world understand me; I have become indifferent to us both. For however long I may live in this body, which I have served with much care and art for so many years, that part of my life which matters is over; thus I may view it with the detached interest of the scholar that Athenodorus once said I might have become, had I been born a man and not the daughter of an Emperor and god.

– Yet how strong is the force of old habit! For even now, as I write these first words in this journal, and as I