land… Twice I triumphed with an ovation, thrice I celebrated curule triumphs, and was saluted as Imperator twenty-one times. Yet, as others have suggested, perhaps with more tact than I deserved, I was an indifferent soldier. Whatever successes I have claimed came from those more skillful in the art of battle than I-Marcus Agrippa first, and then those who inherited the skills of which he was author. Contrary to the libels and rumors spread during the early days of my military life, I was not more cowardly than another, nor did I lack the will to endure the hardships of campaign. I believe that I was then even more nearly indifferent to the fact of my existence than I am now, and the endurance of the rigors of warfare afforded me a curious pleasure that I have found elsewhere neither before nor since. But it always seemed to me that there was a peculiar childishness about the fact of war, however necessary it might have been.
It is said that in the ancient days of our history, human rather than animal sacrifices were offered to the gods; today we are proud to believe that such practices have so receded into the past that they are recorded only in the uncertainty of myth and legend. We shake our heads in wonderment at that time so far removed (we say) from the enlightenment and humanity of the Roman spirit, and we marvel at the brutality upon which our civilization is founded. I, too, have felt a distant and abstract pity for that ancient slave or peasant who suffered beneath the sacrificial knife upon the altar of a savage god; and yet I have always felt myself to be a little foolish to do so.
For sometimes in my sleep there parade before me the tens of thousands of bodies that will not walk again upon the earth, men no less innocent than those ancient victims whose deaths propitiated an earlier god; and it seems to me then, in the obscurity or clarity of the dream, that I am that priest who has emerged from the dark past of our race to speak the rite that causes the knife to fall. We tell ourselves that we have become a civilized race, and with a pious horror we speak of those times when a god of the crops demanded the body of a human being for his obscure function. But is not the god that so many Romans have served, in our memory and even in our time, as dark and fearsome as that ancient one? Even if to destroy him, I have been his priest; and even if to weaken his power, I have done his bidding. Yet I have not destroyed him, or weakened his power. He sleeps restlessly in the hearts of men, waiting to rouse himself or to be aroused. Between the brutality that would sacrifice a single innocent life to a fear without a name, and the enlightenment that would sacrifice thousands of lives to a fear that we have named, I have found little to choose.
I determined early, however, that it was disruptive of order for men to give honor to those gods who spring from the darkness of instinct. Thus I encouraged the Senate to declare the divinity of Julius Caesar, and I erected a temple in his honor in Rome so that the presence of his genius might be felt by all the people. And I am sure that after my death, the Senate will in like manner see fit to declare my divinity also. As you know, I am already thought to be divine in many of the towns and provinces of Italy, though I have never allowed permission for this cult to be practiced in Rome. It is a foolishness, but it is no doubt necessary. Nevertheless, of all the roles that I have had to play in my lifetime, this one of being a mortal god has been the most uncomfortable. I am a man, and as foolish and weak as most men; if I have had an advantage over my fellows, it is that I have known this of myself, and have therefore known their weaknesses, and never presumed to find much more strength and wisdom in myself than I found in another. It was one of the sources of my power, that knowledge.
It is afternoon; the sun begins its slow descent to the west. A calm has come upon the sea, so that the purple sails above me hang slack against the pale sky; our boat sways gently upon the waves, yet does not move forward to any perceptible degree. The oarsmen, who all day have been taking their leisure, look at me with a bored apprehension, expecting me to rouse them from their ease and urge them to labor against the calm that has stilled us. I shall not do so. In half an hour, or an hour, or two hours, a breeze will rise; then we shall make for the coast and find safe harbor and drop anchor. Now I am content to drift where the sea will take me.
Of all the curses of age, this sleeplessness which increasingly I must endure is the most troublesome. As you know, I have always been subject to insomnias; but when I was younger, I was able to put that nocturnal restlessness of mind to purpose, and I almost enjoyed those moments when it seemed to me that all the world slept and I alone had leisure to observe its repose. Beyond the urgings of those who would advise my policy in the terms of their own vision of the world, which is to say in their visions of themselves, I had the freedom of contemplation and silence; many of my most important policies were determined as I lay awake on my bed in the early hours before dawn. But the sleeplessness that I have recently been undergoing is of a different kind. It is no longer that restiessness of a mind so intent upon its play that it is jealous of that slumber which would rob it of consciousness of itself; it is, rather, a sleeplessness of waiting, a long moment in which the soul prepares itself for a repose unlike any that mind or body has ever known before.
I have not slept this night. Near sunset, we harbored a hundred yards or so offshore in a little cove that protects the few fishing boats of some nameless village, the thatched huts of which are nestled on the slopes of a small hill perhaps half a mile inland. As evening came on, I watched the lamps and the fires glimmer against the dark, and watched until they flickered out. Now, once again, the world is asleep; a number of the crew have taken advantage of the night air, and chosen to sleep on deck; Philippus is below, next to the cabin in which he thinks I rest. Gently, invisibly, the little waves lap against the side of our ship; the night breeze whispers upon our furled sail; the lamp on my table glows fitfully, so that now and then I have to strain my eyes to see these words that I write to you.
During this long night, it has occurred to me that this letter does not serve the purpose for which it was intended. I wished at first, when I began writing to you, merely to thank you for the nicolai, to assure you of my friendship, and perhaps to give us both some comfort in our old age. But in the course ofthat friendly courtesy, I can see that it has become something else. It has become another journey, and one which I did not foresee. I go toward Capri for my holiday; but it seems to me now, in the quietness of this night, beneath the mysterious geometry of the stars, where nothing exists except this hand that forms the curious letters which by some other mysterious process you will understand, it seems to me that I go somewhere else, to a place as mysterious as any I have ever seen. I shall write further tomorrow. Perhaps we can discover that place toward which I travel.
August 10
There was a damp chill in the air when we embarked from Ostia yesterday, and rather foolishly I remained on deck so that I might see the Italian shore recede in the soft mist, and so that I could begin this letter to you-a letter which I intended at first simply to convey my thanks for the nicolai, and to assure you of my continuing affection, despite our long absence from each other. As you shall have understood by now, however, the letter has become more than that; and I beg the indulgence of an old friend to hear out what I shall discover to say. In any event, the chill brought on one of my colds, which has become a fever; and I became once again accustomed to an indisposition. I have not told Philippus of this new illness; I have, rather, reassured him of my well-being; for it appears that I am under some compulsion to complete the task of this letter, and I do not wish to be interrupted by Philippus's solicitudes.
The question of my health has always been less interesting to me than it has been to others. From my youth I have been frail, and subject to such a variety of maladies that more doctors than I like to imagine have been made wealthy. Their wealth has been largely unearned, I suspect; but I do not begrudge them what I have given them. So often has my body led me near death that, in my sixth consulship, when I was thirty-five years old, the Senate decreed that every four years the consuls and the priests of the orders undertake vows and make sacrifices for the state of my health. To fulfill these vows, games were held so that the people might be made to remember their prayers, and all citizens, both individually and by municipalities, were encouraged to perform continued sacrifices for my health at the temples of the gods. It was a foolishness, of course; but it did at least as much for my health as the various medications and treatments that my doctors subjected me to, and it let the people feel that they were participating in the fate of the Empire.
Six times during my life has this tomb of my soul led me to the brink ofthat eternal darkness into which all men sink at last, and six times it has stepped back, as if at the behest of a destiny it could not overmaster. And I have long outlived my friends, in whose lives I existed more fully than in my own. All are dead, those early friends. Julius Caesar died at fifty-eight, nearly twenty years younger than I am now; and I have always believed that his death came as much from that boredom which presages carelessness as from the assassins’ daggers. Salvidienus Rufus died at the age of twenty-three, in his pride and by his own hand, because he thought he had betrayed our friendship. Poor Salvidienus. Of all my early friends, he was most like me. I wonder if he ever knew that the betrayal was my own, that he was the innocent victim of an infection that he caught from me. Vergil died at fifty-one, and I was at his bedside; in his delirium, he thought he died a failure, and made me promise to destroy his great poem on the founding of Rome. And then Marcus Agrippa, at the age of fifty, who had never had a day of illness in his life, died suddenly, at the height of his powers, before I could reach him to bid him farewell. And a few years later-in my
