AGRIPPA: Great Caesar and dear friend, you have heeded my counsel before; I beseech you to do so again. Be persuaded by Nicolaus's eloquent request, and forsake your modesty in the interest of that which you must love more than your own person-that Rome, and the order which you have bequeathed her. The admiration which men in distant lands will give to you, will become love for the Rome that you have built.
LIVY: I shall make bold to add my voice to the persuasions you have heard. I know the reputation of this Nicolaus who stands before us now, and you could not put your fame in more trustworthy hands. Let mankind repay in some small measure that which you have given in such abundance.
OCTAVIUS CAESAR: I am at last persuaded. Nicolaus, you have the freedom of my house and you have my friendship. But I would beg you to confine your labors to those matters which have to do only with my acts in regard to Rome, and do not trouble your readers with those unimportant things that might have to do with my person.
NICOLAUS: I accede to your wishes, great Caesar, and shall endeavor by my poor efforts to do justice to your leadership of the Roman world.
… And thus, my dear Strabo, was the matter accomplished; Herod will be pleased, and I flatter myself by imagining that Octavius (he insists that I use the familiar address to him, in the intimacy of his house) has full confidence in my abilities to perform this work. You understand, of course, that the foregoing account has been submitted to the formal necessities of the dialogue in which I have cast it; the actual conversation was a good deal more informal and more lengthy; there was much bantering, all quite good-natured; Horace made jokes about Greeks who bore gifts, and asked if I intended to compose my work in prose or in verses; the vivacious Julia, who teases her father constantly, informed me that I could write anything I wanted, since her father's Greek was such that he could easily take an insult as a compliment. But I have, I believe, captured in my account the essence of the matter; for however these people make jokes with each other, there is a kind of seriousness going on-or at least, so it seems to me.
Besides, in order to take further advantage of my stay here (which promises to be a lengthy one), I have projected a new work beyond the Life of Octavius Caesar, which Herod has commissioned. It shall be called 'Conversations with Notable Romans,' and I expect that what you have read will be a part of it. Does it strike you as a feasible idea? Do you think that the dialogue is a suitable form in which to cast it? I shall await your advice, which I treasure as much as always.
VI. Letter: Terentia to Octavius Caesar, in Asia (20 B. c.)
Tavius, dear Tavius-I say our name for you, but you do not appear. Can you know how cruel your absence is? I rail against your greatness, which calls you away and keeps you in a country that is strange and detestable to me, because it holds you as I cannot. I know that you have told me that rage against necessity is the rage of a child; but your wisdom has fled from me with your body, and I am a restless child until you return.
How could I have been persuaded to let you go from me, who could not be happy for even a day outside your presence, once you had loved me? The scandal, you said, if I followed you-but there can be no scandal where there is common knowledge. Your enemies whisper; your friends are silent; and both know you are above the customs that others find necessary to lead orderly lives. Nor would there have been harm to anyone. My husband, who is my friend as well as yours, does not have that pride of possession that a lesser man might have; from the beginning it was known between us that I would have lovers, and that Maecenas would go where his tastes led him. He was not a hypocrite then, nor is he now. And Livia seems content with things as they are; I see her at readings, and she speaks to me civilly; we are not friends, but we are pleasant to each other. On my part, I am almost fond of her; for she chose to relinquish you, and thus you became mine.
Are you mine? I know that you are when you are with me, but when you are so far away-where is your touch, that tells me more than I have known before? Does my unhappiness please you? I hope it does. Lovers are cruel; I would almost be happy, if I could know that you are as unhappy as I am. Tell me that you are unhappy, so that I may have some comfort.
For I find no comfort in Rome; all things seem trivial to me now. I attend those festivals required of me by my position, the rituals seem empty; I go to the Circus, I cannot care who wins the races; I go to readings, my mind wanders from the poems read-even those of our friend Horace. And I have been faithful to you, all these weeks-I would tell you so, even if it were not true. But it is true; I have been. Does that matter to you?
Your daughter is well and is pleased with her new life. I visit with her and Marcus Agrippa once or twice a week. Julia seems pleased to see me; we have become friends, I believe. She is very heavy with child now, and seems proud of her impending motherhood. Would I want a child by you? I do not know. What would Maecenas say? It would be another scandal, but such an amusing one!… You see how I chatter on to your memory, as I used to do to your presence.
There is no gossip amusing enough to pass on to you. The marriages that you encouraged before you left Rome have at last taken place. Tiberius, it seems, has given up his ambitions, and is wed to Vipsania; and Julius Antonius is wed to Marcella. Julius seems happy that he is now officially your nephew and a member of the Octavian family, and even Tiberius seems grumpily content-even though he knows that Julius's union with your niece is more advantageous than his own marriage to one of Agrippa's daughters.
Will you return to me this autumn, before the winter storms make your voyage impossible? Or will you wait until spring? It seems to me that I shall not be able to endure your absence for so long. You must tell me how I may endure.
VII Letter: Quintus Horatius Flaccus to Gains Cilnius Maecenas, at Arezzo (19 B.C.)
Our Vergil is dead.
I have just received the news, and I write you of it before grief overwhelms the numbness that I feel now, a numbness that must be a foretaste of that inexorable fate that has overtaken our friend, and which pursues us all. His remains are in Brindisi, attended by Octavius. The details are sketchy; I shall pass on to you what I have learned, for I have no doubt that Octavius's grief will delay his writing to you for some time.
Apparently the work of revision upon his poem, for the sake of which he had absented himself from Italy, had been going badly. Thus when Octavius, returning to Rome from Asia, stopped off at Athens, he had little difficulty persuading Vergil to accompany him back to Italy, for which he was already homesick, though he had been away for less than six months. Or perhaps he had some intimation of his death, and did not want his body to waste in a foreign soil. In any event, before setting out on the final journey, he persuaded Octavius to visit Megara with him; perhaps he wished to see that valley of rocks where the young Theseus is said to have slain the murderer Sciron. Whatever the reason, Vergil remained too long in the sun, and became ill. However, he insisted upon continuing the voyage; aboard ship, his condition worsened, and an old malaria returned upon him. Three days after landing at Brindisi, he died. Octavius was at his bedside, and accompanied him as far as any can on that journey from which there is no return.
I understand that he was delirious much of the time during his last days-though I have no doubt that Vergil delirious was more reasonable than most men lucid. At the end he spoke your name, and mine, and that of Varius. And he elicited from Octavius the promise that the unperfected manuscript of his Aeneid be destroyed. I trust that the promise will not be kept.
I wrote once that Vergil was half my soul. I feel now that I understated what I thought then was an exaggeration. For at Brindisi lies half the soul of Rome; we are diminished more than we know. -And yet my mind returns to smaller things, to things that only you and I, perhaps, can ever understand. At Brindisi, he lies. When was it that the three of us traveled so happily across Italy, from Rome to Brindisi? Twenty years… It seems yesterday. I can still feel my eyes smart from the smoke of the green wood that the innkeepers burned in their fireplaces, and hear our laughter like that of boys released from school. And the farm girl we picked up at Trivicus, who promised to come to my room, and did not; I hear Vergil mocking me, and remember the horseplay. And the quiet talk. And the luxuriant comfort of Brindisi, after the countryside.
I shall not return to Brindisi again. Grief comes upon me now, and I cannot write more.
VIII. The Journal of Julia, Pandateria (A.D. 4)
In my youth, when I first knew her, I thought Terentia to be a trivial, foolish, and amusing woman, and I could not understand my father's fondness for her. She chattered like a magpie, flirted outrageously with everyone, and it seemed to me that her mind had never been violated by a serious thought. Though he was my father's friend, I did not like her husband, Gaius Maecenas; and I was never able to understand Terentia's agreement to that union with him. Looking back upon it, I can see that my marriage to Marcus Agrippa was nearly as strange; but then I was young and ignorant, and so filled with myself that I could see nothing.
