ignorant of the plot, some lacked courage, some opportunity. None lacked the will.' Those were his very words, they are engraved in my memory. Some ornament, some culture. These words alone should be enough to condemn this most insidious of our enemies. We have the opportunity; surely we do not lack the will?'
Antony's hands trembled on the table. I thought of the old man flattering me, digging his teeth into a fig, interrupting his declamation of his speech against Catiline to heed a call of nature and then resuming it at the exact point at which he had broken off; I felt his old crooked arthritic hands press against my shoulder. I said, 'As you wish it, Antony.'
He turned a face, moonlike with wonder, on me. Lepidus emitted a little hiss of excitement. I repeated:
'As you wish it, Antony. 'The boy,' I quoted, 'must be flattered, decorated, and got rid of.' Cicero has had flattery enough for a lifetime; he will receive honour from generations that have forgotten us. Let that be sufficient epitaph. Let him depart.'
I do not propose to defend my decision now in other words than I employed then. That evening Marcellus urged me to send a messenger to warn the old man of the fate decreed. I replied that the publication of the proscription lists would give him ample warning. As all the world knows, he delayed to act, moved either by vanity or indecision. The manner of his death, which did credit to his virtue, is too well known to repeat here.
FOUR
Cassius died at Philippi, in the first battle, falling on his sword in imitation of Cato. Brutus, three days later, fled to the mountains; he hesitated to kill himself and besought the freedman who was his last companion to perform the work. These battles were Antony's triumph, not mine. My health was poor throughout the campaign, but that was not the only reason. Civil war is a horrible business; I could never forget that the legions which opposed us were themselves made up of our countrymen. Yet, after the battle, when the defeated were led before us, they hailed Antony as 'imperator'; they reviled me. I stood on the dais, sick at heart and in my belly, while they cursed. The body of Brutus had been brought down from the high mountains to the forum; in an actor's gesture Antony covered it with his own purple cloak. Stony-faced, I accepted the verdict of the defeated; it recognized that it had been my determination to avenge my father which had created the army that destroyed them.
That night Antony grew maudlin. He spoke lovingly of Brutus, of their friendship in youth. 'He was the noblest of us,' he said over and over again. 'The others envied Caesar. He alone acted out of true public spirit, honest and true to his conception of the Republic. He had principles; he died for them. Whatever else you say of him, he was a Man.'
I kept my argument to myself, and spoke soothingly. Antony was sunk in the guilt of victory. I did not then recognize it as such. It took his own death more than ten years later to let me feel it; a battle won in a civil war can be crueller and more bitter than a battle lost. Right can never be concentrated altogether on one side. The dead bodies of citizens reproach the living. Pray, my sons, you never have such experiences.
I am glad I soothed him. Yet my true feelings were quite other. I had no tender memories of Brutus. For me he was a dishonest rhetorician. I saw the man Caesar had spared and honoured with his love, who had then drawn the dagger against him. Is there anything in literature or history more terrible than that moment in my father's agony when he looked on the face of Brutus among his assassins, and clearly said: 'You too, my son?'; then covered his face and abandoned all resistance? Only a man of the most abnormal self-conceit could live with such a memory; Brutus managed to do so. He was inflated, like the frog in Aesop, with self-importance; carried through treachery, dishonesty and crime by his consciousness of his own virtue. I am glad I had his head sent back to Rome to be thrown at the feet of Caesar's statue.
Brutus' self-righteousness was shared by his colleagues: one of the other murderers, Quintus Ligarius, had the insolence to look me in the eye, and demand that he be given honourable burial. 'That is a matter for the carrion- crows and vultures,' I replied. My flash of temper was unworthy; I hope you do not think it uncalled for. On the other hand the story that I told a father and son who pleaded that one at least should be spared, that they should themselves decide which by casting lots or throwing dice, is a calumny. (You will note that when this story is related, no names are mentioned; always distrust the anecdote with anonymous subjects.) It was this rumour however which caused Marcus Pavenius to abuse me with filthy epithets which I recall with horror even now. To receive such insults from a man who is about to die is like the touch of an icy finger; what reports will he carry to the Immortals?
Antony and I had come close together after our meeting on the island. It was like our first days in Spain again, before shadows fell between us. I warmed to his Sun, to his spontaneous affection. Antony had a great need to be loved; this made him lovable wherever he let his radiance light. So I had been happy to seal our bond by agreeing to marry his stepdaughter Claudia; the pleasure this gave Antony and the legions over-rode my natural distaste for any connection with the girl's mother Fulvia. But now, after Philippi, I sensed that Antony, ever a ready victim of rumour (as gossips generally are) was drawing away from me. My inability fully to share his boozy sentimentality about Brutus distressed him; he was perturbed by what he saw as my coldness of heart. Almost overnight he stopped calling me 'kid', and it was only once or twice in later years that he resumed the habit. He was still able for a long time to be affectionate at a distance, his letters to me were lively and loving, but my presence froze him; it was as if the carrion-crows and vultures settled on the table between us.
I sailed back to Italy, sea-sick as usual, to arrange for the demobilization of 100,000 men. Antony meanwhile turned to the rising sun to undertake my father's long-meditated war against the Parthian Empire. Agrippa grumbled all the way back across the Adriatic that Antony had pinched the glory and left us the dross; but then, Agrippa, unlike me, was a soldier at heart, even though I knew that his true genius lay in administration. (But that, let me remind you, dear boys, is the necessary foundation of all military success; that general triumphs best who best organizes supply. Look at the history of Alexander's campaigns for proof of this adage.)
'Besides,' I told Agrippa, 'Antony is moving to the frontier, where anything can happen. Think of Crassus.' (The fat booby Marcus Crassus allowed his army to be surrounded in the desert sands. That was the end of Crassus. They threw his head before the Parthian king as he sat watching some Greek tragedy. According to some versions of the story, it was actually carried on to the stage.)
'We, on the other hand,' I said, 'are given the chance of establishing ourselves at the seat of power.'
'Oh sure,' Agrippa said, 'you mean we're going to get our throats cut, left and right. We'll never get enough land, or good enough land, to satisfy the veterans; yet every municipality and every landowner we dispossess will be an enemy for life.' 'We shall pay whenever possible.'
'Sure again. The campaign's emptied the Treasury. And don't think we'll get any help from Fulvia or Antony's brother Lucius, who is – let me remind you – booked in as next year's consul.'
I needed no such reminder, for I saw trouble there. Nevertheless I persevered in my appointed task. Most of the business of government is a matter of long hours and assiduous attention to detail; its only satisfaction is the consciousness of work well done. That has been the main part of my life. There is hardly any story in it; yet, without such work, without such scrupulous devotion to the minutiae of administration and justice, this great Empire of Rome would crumble. I am not sure that you realize this; your mother's husband, my stepson Tiberius, for all his faults of character and ungracious demeanour, appreciates it as I do, and as your natural father Agrippa did. You could do worse than look to Tiberius as a model.
Very occasionally the drudgery of administration is lightened by the chance to perform some conspicuous benevolence. One such opportunity was given me this arduous year. Maecenas called one morning with a petition. There was – to cut through what I used to call his 'myrrh-distilling ringlets of speech' – a young protege of his, a poet called Virgil, of whom I certainly would not have heard, whose family farm, near Mantua, was on the list of those to be confiscated. Wouldn't I, to oblige Maecenas, stretch a point and reprieve the farm to which the young poet was devoted? Now such agricultural enthusiasm was not typical of Maecenas' proteges, and my curiosity was aroused. 'Is he a good poet?' I asked. 'I doubt if there is a more promising one in Italy,' Maecenas said, surprising me with the unaffected simplicity of his language. 'Very well,' I said, 'a reprieve will be granted, providing you promise to introduce the poet to me.'
