moments the Emperor and Julia talked together, their heads close; the Emperor glanced at me, and said something to Julia, who smiled, nodded, and then beckoned me to join them.
I approached, and Julia presented me to her father.
'I am pleased to meet you,' the Emperor said; his face was lined and weary, his light hair shot with white- but his eyes were bright and piercing and alert. 'My friend Horace has spoken of your work.'
'I hope kindly,' I said, 'but I cannot pretend to compete with him. My Muse is smaller and more trivial, I fear.'
He nodded. 'We all obey whatever Muse chooses us… Do you have any favorites today?'
'What?' I said blankly.
'The races,' he said. 'Do you have any favorite drivers?'
'Sir,' I said, 'I must confess that I come to the races more nearly for the society than for the horses. I really know very little about them.'
'Then you don't wager,' he said. He seemed a little disappointed.
'On everything but the races,' I said. He nodded and smiled a little, and turned to someone behind him.
'Which do you pick in the first?'
But whoever it was to whom he spoke did not have time to answer. At the far end of the race course, gates opened, trumpets sounded, and the procession entered. It was led by Julius Antonius, the praetor who had financed the games; he was dressed in a scarlet tunic, over which he wore the purple-bordered toga, and carried in his right hand the golden eagle, which seemed almost ready to take flight from the ivory rod which supported it; and upon his head was the golden wreath of laurel. In his chariot drawn by his magnificent white horse, I must say he was an impressive figure, even at the distance from which I saw him.
Slowly the procession went round the track. Behind Julius Antonius walked the priests of the rites, who attended the statues, thought by the ignorant to be the literal embodiments of the gods; then came the drivers who were to race, resplendent in their whites and reds, and greens and blues; and at last a crew of dancers and mimes and clowns, who cavorted and tumbled upon the track while the priests relinquished their effigies to the platform around which the racers would drive their chariots.
And then the procession made its way to the Emperor's box. Julius Antonius halted, saluted the Emperor, and gave him the games in dedication of his birthday. I must say, I looked at Julius with some curiosity. He is an extraordinarily handsome man- his muscular arms brown from the sun, his face dark and slightly heavy, with very white teeth and curling black hair. It is said that he closely resembles his father, though he is less inclined to fat.
The dedication over, Julius Antonius came closer to the box and called up to the Emperor:
'I'll join you later, when I get them started.'
The Emperor nodded; he seemed pleased. He turned to me. 'Antonius knows the horses, and the riders. Listen to him. You'll learn a bit about racing.'
I must confess, Sextus, that the ways of the great are beyond me. The Emperor Octavius Caesar, master of the world, seemed concerned only with the impending races; to the son of a father whom he had defeated in battle and whom he forced to commit suicide, he was warm and friendly and natural; and he spoke to me as if we both were the most common of citizens. I remember that I thought briefly of the possibility of a poem upon the subject; but just as quickly I rejected the idea. I am sure that Horace could have done one, but that is not my (or our) sort ofthing.
Julius Antonius disappeared into a gate at the far end of the course, and a few moments later reappeared in his enclosure above the starting gate. A roar went up from the crowd; Julius Antonius waved, and looked down at the racers lined up beneath him. Then he threw down the white flag, the barriers dropped, and in a cloud of dust the chariots set off.
I stole a glance at the Emperor, and was surprised to see that he seemed hardly interested in the race, now that it had begun. He discerned my glance, and said to me: 'One does not bet on the first race, if one is wise. The horses are made so nervous by the procession that they seldom run according to their natures.'
I nodded, as if what he said made sense to me.
Before the chariots had completed four of their seven laps, Julius Antonius joined us. He seemed to know most of the people in the box, for he nodded to them in a friendly manner, and spoke a few of their names. He sat between the Emperor and Julia, and soon the three of them were exchanging wagers and laughing among themselves.
And so the afternoon went. Servants came with more food and wine, and with damp towels so that we could wipe the dust of the track from our faces. The Emperor wagered on every race, sometimes betting with several persons at once; he lost carelessly, and won with great glee. Just before the beginning of the last race, Julius Antonius rose to leave, saying that he had some last duties at the starting gate. He bade me good-by, and expressed the hope that we might meet again; he bade good-by to the Emperor; and then bowed with what I took to be an elaborate and private irony to Julia, who threw back her head and laughed.
The Emperor frowned, but said nothing. Shortly thereafter, when the crowd had streamed out of the Circus, we took our leave. A few of us gathered at Sempronius Gracchus's home for a while in the evening; and I learned what may have been the source of the little byplay between Julius Antonius and the Emperor's daughter. It was Julia herself who told me.
Julia's husband, Marcus Agrippa, had once been married to the younger Marcella, daughter of the Emperor's sister, Octavia; early in Julia's widowhood, he had been persuaded by the Emperor to divorce Marcella and marry Julia. And only recently had Julius Antonius married that Marcella who had been Agrippa's wife.
'It's rather confusing,' I said lamely.
'Not really,' said Julia. And then she laughed. 'My father has it all written down, so that one might always know to whom one is married.'
And that, my dear Sextus, was my afternoon and evening. I saw the new, and I saw the old; and Rome is again becoming a place where one can live.
IV. The Journal of Julia, Pandateria (A.D. 4)
I am allowed no wine, and my food is the coarse fare of the peasant-black bread, dried vegetables, and pickled fish. I have even taken on the habits of the poor; at the end of my day, I bathe and take a frugal meal. Sometimes I take this meal with my mother, but I prefer to dine alone at the table before my window, where I can watch the sea roll in on the evening tide.
I have learned to savor the simple taste of this coarse bread, indifferently baked by my mute servant. There is a grainy taste of earth to it, enhanced by the cold spring water that serves as my wine. Eating it, I think of the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of the poor and the enslaved who have lived before me-did they learn to savor their simple fare, as I have? Or was the taste of their food spoiled in their mouths by their dreams of the foods they might have eaten? Perhaps one must come to taste as I have done-from the richest and most exotic viands to those of the utmost simplicity. Yesterday evening, sitting at this table where I now write these words, I tried to recall the taste and texture of those foods, and I could not. And in that general effort to recall what I shall never experience again, I remembered an evening at the villa of Sempronius Gracchus.
I do not know why I remembered that particular evening; but suddenly, in this Pandaterian twilight, the scene sprang before me, as if it were being re-enacted upon the stage of a theater, and the remembering caught me before I could fend it off.
Marcus Agrippa had returned from the East and joined me in Rome, where he stayed for three months; and I became pregnant with my fourth child. Shortly thereafter, at the beginning of the year, my father sent Agrippa north to Pannonia, where the barbarian tribes were again threatening the Danube frontier. And Sempronius Gracchus, to celebrate my freedom and to herald the arrival of spring, gave a party, the like of which (he promised everyone) Rome had not seen before; all of my friends, from whom I had been separated while my husband was in Rome, would be there.
Despite the libels that were circulated later, Sempronius Gracchus was not my lover then. He was a libertine, and he treated me (as he treated many women) with an easy familiarity that might give rise to rumors, however false. At that time I was still conscious of the position which my father imagined I ought to occupy; and the time that I had been a goddess at Ilium was like a dream that waited to be fulfilled. I had, for a while, become someone other than myself.
Early in March, my father assumed the office of pontifex maximus, which had been vacated by the death of
