he would surrender a cherished toy with a happy smile. But I was greedy, and untruthful, and afraid of the dark places and of night. (Yet I also welcomed the night, and never went reluctant to bed, because I knew that bedtime promised me my mother's undivided attention, promised me stories, and the cool touch of her sweet-smelling hand; I would lie waiting for sleep in a world from which all but the two of us were banished…)
Because I was her favourite she chastised me. She whipped me for my transgressions till I was within a few years of assuming the toga virilis. I recognised in her lashes, which bit with stinging joy into my flesh, the strange expression of her love: each blow sang out that I should be her creature, hers alone. We were joined together in a savage rite: Claudian pride flayed Claudian pride, and called for a cry of mercy, which never came. And then, afterwards, how sweet and honied the reconciliation! We were joined in passion, all the more intense because we are both shy of speech. In public she sometimes liked to mock me; as I grew older she would upbraid me for a great clumsy oaf. We never referred to such outbursts when we were alone. I knew them to be provoked by the intensity of her love, which she resented. It annoyed her, no, infuriated her, to know how much she cared.
When I was a child she mocked and whipped me out of my stammer. 'It makes you seem a dolt,' she said. 'Do you want the world to take you for a fool?' So, by willpower, I overcame my infirmity.
Her moods were as quick-changing as mountain weather. Her inconsistency was wild enchantment. When she smiled the world was spring sunshine; but her frowns darkened any company. Consequently we were engaged in endless warfare. I found her entrancing, but I declined to submit to her black moods. Yet it was in my reaction to Livia that I came to sense my superiority to my stepfather: he was afraid of her; I was not.
Of course he loved her, depended on her, could not – as he often exclaimed – imagine life without her. Very good, I don't dispute it. Yet he was always less in her presence, more timid, more circumspect, dreading that she should turn cold and refuse to speak to him. That was all Livia has ever had to do to bring Augustus to heel: refuse to speak to him. I, on the other hand, know myself her equal; and, in fact, since I grew up, Livia has been a little in awe of me. I have run ahead of myself, ahead of my story. Yet it is hard to see how autobiography can avoid being discursive. Everything one recalls promotes reflection. I am writing of people without whom my life is unimaginable.
Perhaps it will be easier to keep to the point when I get beyond childhood. For, looking back on childhood, I see one thing clearly: there is no narrative there. Childhood is a state, not a story. Let me try to reveal my childhood in four distinct episodes therefore.
I was, as I said, nine when my father died. Naturally I did not weep. 'You are head of the family now,' Livia said. 'What do I have to do, mama?'
'First, it will be your duty to pronounce your father's funeral oration…'
I don't know who wrote it, but I daresay its author made the best he could of it. These people have a certain professional pride after all. But there was not much to say about the poor man, and it was raining, a November day of thick cloud that obscured the houses on the Palatine Hill. I rehearsed the speech so well that I can remember parts of it to this day.
My father was a victim. I see that now, though in my adolescence I came to think harshly of him as a weakling and failure. His public history was undistinguished. He fought with Julius Caesar in the war against Pompey and commanded the dictator's fleet at Alexandria. But this association disgusted him, for he saw that Julius was an enemy of the traditional liberties of the Roman people. Too tender-hearted to join the conspiracy of the Ides of March and perhaps inhibited by his consciousness of what he had himself received from the dictator, he nevertheless rejoiced at its success. In the Senate he proposed that the Liberators be publicly rewarded. That suggestion was enough for him to earn my stepfather's undying hatred; not, you understand, that Augustus (as it is convenient to call him, though he had not yet been accorded that honorific title) had any affection for Julius himself; but because he knew it was expedient that he should pay public honour to his name. Otherwise, why should Caesar's old soldiers fight for him?
Reluctant to leave Italy, where he feared the confiscation of his estates, convinced anyway that the Liberators could never withstand the Caesarean forces, my father naturally adhered to Antony rather than to Augustus. Besides, he was an old friend – and personal loyalty meant much to him – of the younger Antony, Lucius, who had inveigled him into the campaign that was to end in the terrible siege of Perugia. He never forgot the rigours of that siege, and even the mention of Mark Antony's wife, the loathsome Fulvia, would make him shudder, right up to his death. Desperate now, he blundered again, joining himself with Sextus Pompeius, the unprincipled son of a dubiously great father. He was soon disillusioned, and rejoined Antony. Then came the Peace of Misenum. During the negotiations that led up to it, Augustus encountered Livia, fell in love with her, and carried her off.
How could such a life be eulogised? Only in empty, high-sounding phrases, obviously, with much talk of private virtues (which indeed the poor man did not lack) and with noble, not unveracious, platitudes about the malignity of fortune. These platitudes had nevertheless to be modified, since they should not in any wise reflect upon the victor and favourite of fortune, Augustus, his successor as Livia's husband, who would be standing on the speaker's right hand.
Accordingly, my introduction to the art of public oratory was to spout disingenuous rhetoric. Cant.
I have distrusted rhetoric ever since, even while acknowledging that its mastery is a necessary part of education. Four years later, after Actium, my stepfather Augustus prepared to celebrate the triumph granted him by the Senate and the Roman people in honour of his achievements in the war against Egypt. There was cant here too, for no one was allowed to remind us that Roman citizens had been the chief victims of his wars. Instead all attention was concentrated on Egypt. 'Will Cleopatra walk in chains, mama?' 'What do you children know of Cleopatra?' 'That she'th a bad woman who sedutheth Romans,' Julia said.
'That's no way for a little girl to talk. Do you want your mouth washed out with soap?' 'It'th what I heard Uncle Marcuth Agrippa thay.'
She gave a little pout, holding strawberry-pink lips open and thrust forward. I was twelve then, so Julia must have been ten. But she already knew – had always known as if by nature – how to act, tease and provoke. Augustus at that stage liked the three of us to behave as if we were indeed brothers and sister – Julia is of course the child of his second marriage to the appalling Scribonia, one of the few women I have ever met who is as disagreeable and generally awful as the reputation which precedes her. Livia was always less certain that we should be encouraged to think of ourselves as siblings. 'What does sedutheth mean?' Drusus asked.
'It's seduces,' I said. 'Julia only says sedutheth because she's lost a front tooth. Anyway, Julia, Marcus Agrippa isn't really our uncle, you know. He can't be because he's a plebeian.' 'Quite so,' Livia said, and changed the subject.
Augustus liked us, however, to speak of Agrippa as our uncle; he was always eager that his supporters should feel they were a family; later, when Livia wasn't about, he upbraided me for the way I had spoken of his friend.
'If you grow up to be half the man Agrippa is,' he said, 'you'll be twice the man your own father was. And don't speak of plebeians in that silly way. If it weren't for plebeian blood, Rome wouldn't have an empire…'
He was right of course, and I came to appreciate Agrippa later, but then I could only think that my stepfather himself was essentially plebeian. I took his irritation as further evidence of his inferiority to the Claudians and of his lack of true nobility.
He had his revenge in the arrangements of his triumph. His nephew Marcellus was granted the honour of riding on the leading trace-horse, while I was relegated to an inferior position.
Cleopatra did not of course walk in chains, as she deserved to do. She had escaped him, by means of the now famous asp. Two years later Augustus declared that he had restored the Republic. (I shall treat of this more fully, and philosophically, at a more appropriate stage of my history.) Marcellus was ecstatic.
'There never was such a thing,' he said, again and again. 'Such a surrender of power.'
'I don't understand why Daddy should choose to give up power,' Julia said. 'It seems strange to me, after fighting so long to win it.' She had quite lost her lisp, you observe. 'Yes,' I said, 'very strange.' I look up from the terrace on which I am writing this, and gaze over the evening sea and it is as if I can see reflected there our childish faces, as we strove with the dawning of our political understanding. I see Marcellus, six months older than I – and how much younger? – candid, beautiful, insipid. He reclines on a couch, in languid attitude that cannot disguise his animal energy, and yet looks, as always, as if he has fallen into a pose to delight a sculptor. I see
