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III. The East Took My Father · Augusta: The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina

• III. The East Took My Father Translator: Augusta. The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina. Episode three. The East Took My Father. Chapter Two. The East Took My Father. Entry 1. The house of Antonia Minor, Palatine Hill, Rome. Event Spring AD 17 to spring AD 18. The Senate grants Germanicus an authority above the governors, Tiberius gives Syria to Piso, the household divides. Julia, aged two, Antonia Minor, aged fifty-three, Germanicus, aged thirty-two, Agrippina the Elder, aged thirty-two, Gaius, aged five, Nero Caesar, aged twelve, Drusus Caesar, aged ten, Drusilla, aged one, Sostrata, aged eleven. Recorded Sostrata's hand AD 19, Sostrata, aged twelve. Recast by Julia AD 49, Julia, aged thirty-three, from the decree, the appointment and the loading account. Julia: AD 18 I remember none of what follows. I was two years old and then three and then four, and everything in this account comes to me from my grandmother's letter-book, from the courier schedule, from the register of who called at the house, and from Sostrata, who was eleven and then twelve and who was in every room. I shall say that once and then get out of the way. The Senate gave him the East in the spring and I have the decree. It is short. It grants him the provinces beyond the sea, and it grants him, in those provinces, an authority greater than that of any man holding them, whether the man holds by lot or by the emperor's appointment. That is the operative clause and it runs to nine words in the Latin. It puts one man above every governor from Macedonia to the Euphrates. Nobody had held anything like it since Agrippa, and Agrippa was the emperor's son-in-law and his right hand and had earned it in a sea fight. My father was thirty-one. He was given it four days after riding a triumph through the Porta Triumphalis with five of his children in the chariot. And in the same season, out of the same house, Tiberius took Syria from Creticus Silanus and gave it to Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso. I have the grant and the appointment on this table and they are two months apart. The reason given for moving Silanus is stated in the record and is perfectly sound. His daughter was betrothed to my brother Nero, and a governor of Syria who is about to become family is a governor of Syria who can be relied upon for nothing else. Every man in Rome could repeat that reason and every man in Rome did. It also happens to have taken the one governor in the East who was tied to us and put in his place a man of sixty-one who had been consul alongside Tiberius, whose family had been great when ours was nothing at all, and who took the appointment as a commission rather than a posting. Plancina went with him. I am going to leave those facts side by side and stop there, because joining them up is what everybody in Rome has done for thirty years and it is the one thing that cannot be proved. They went east in the autumn, some weeks after the reception at Livia's, and the household spent four days loading. The arrangement was that my mother would go with him, as my mother always went with him, and that Gaius alone of the children would go too. My mother was carrying my sister Livilla at the time and was delivered of her the following year on Lesbos, which is a thing that happened to my family and which no other family in Rome would have permitted to happen to it. What goes east with a proconsul is a small town taken apart and put on wheels, and I have the loading account because Dorus kept it and my grandmother paid a third of it. Fourteen carts to Ostia over the four days. The plate, which went in straw in locked chests with two of the door staff sitting on them. The bedding. My mother's own physician, a Coan named Xenon. A cook, and the cook's boy, and a man whose entire office was the drinking water. Sixty rolls out of my father's library, listed by title, and I have read the list twice for the pleasure of it, and there is a great deal of Greek in it and one thing about horses. Winter clothing for a household going to Syria, which tells its own story: they expected to be there some years and were not pretending otherwise to themselves whatever they were saying to us. And thirty-one people, named, in Dorus's hand, in the order they were to travel. Gaius was five and he had his kit. The soldiers on the Rhine had made it for him when he was a baby in their camp, a little mail shirt and a little sword-belt and the boots, and it was the boots that gave him the name he carried the rest of his life and detested every day of it, and he wore the whole of it up and down the colonnade for four days while the carts were loaded, and everybody in the house told him he was magnificent, and he was. My mother spent the parting on the carts. Sostrata is definite about this and has never varied it. She went round the loading twice with Dorus, checking it against the list, found two errors and had them fixed, and got in and went. In thirty-one years nobody has been able to repeat to me one word she said to us that morning. I have heard that held against her, by women mostly, and by one man at my own table who did not enjoy the rest of his evening. I think it is the single most useful thing I know about her. She was going to be at sea in the sailing season with a five-year-old and a pregnancy, into a province where the governor had been given instructions about her by somebody in Rome, and she had four children standing in a courtyard who were going to be there for years and who were going to remember whatever she did in the next quarter of an hour for the rest of their lives. So she checked the loading. There is nothing to remember, which was the arrangement. The four of us who were staying were Nero, who was twelve, Drusus, who was ten, Drusilla, who was one, and me. We were taken across to my grandmother Antonia's house on the Palatine, which is the house I am sitting in as I dictate this, and which was at that time the largest and best-run private establishment in Rome and had been for twenty years. Nobody told us it was for three years. I am confident about this because nobody told anybody, my grandmother included. My father's command was for as long as the East required, and the East is a place a Roman goes to and does not put a date on, and the whole household understood the arrangement as a long visit of unspecified length, which is not the same as understanding it as an absence, and my grandmother did not correct that understanding because she did not yet have anything to correct it with. So we passed the winter in her house as guests, and it was a good winter, and I have that from all three of the people who were in it with me. My grandmother's establishment ran on a scale nobody keeps up any more. There were something over two hundred in that household at the time, and a Greek library, and two Thracian boys whose whole employment was the fish pond, and an old woman called Doris who had been my great-grandfather Antony's and was kept on in comfort and produced at dinner parties. My brothers were let alone. Nero had the run of the place and Drusus went where Nero went and neither of them had a tutor set over them yet, and Sostrata says the two of them were on the roof of the store range so often that a man was eventually put on the ladder. I am setting all that down at length because I would rather write it than write the next part, and because nothing was wrong. There was no cruelty and no neglect and no cold grand old woman in a corridor. There was an extremely well-run house full of people being kind to four children whose parents were away, and it went on for four months, and everybody in it including my grandmother believed that this was a thing that was happening for a while. Then in the spring Dorus, who was my grandmother's steward and who is still on the staff and is now nearly seventy, posted the allocation on the wall of the small colonnade where the household orders went, in the ordinary way, at the ordinary hour, between a note about the bath furnace and a note about a delivery of oil. I have the allocation. It is four lines of household business. Nero Caesar and Drusus Caesar were given the two rooms on the garden side and were assigned to Zenodotus, a grammarian my grandmother had off Asinius Gallus and did not much like. Drusilla and I were given the room off my grandmother's own and were assigned to Pyrrha, who had been nurse to my aunt Livilla and was by then about fifty. The rooms were to be fitted at the household's charge. The arrangement was written for a term of three years. That is the whole document. There is no cruelty in it anywhere. It is a competent woman doing what a competent woman does with four children who have been left in her house, which is to stop treating them as guests and start treating them as residents, and any other course would have been sentimentality and my grandmother had none. But it was posted on a wall in a public part of the house, in Dorus's hand, where the kitchen staff and the door staff and the two boys could read it, and Nero read it aloud, because he was twelve and reading things aloud was what he did that year. Three years. Sostrata says the house went quiet in a way she had not heard before and did not hear again until the December of the following year. And this is where I come into it, and I want to set down first what I have believed about it for thirty-one years, because I have told the story a great many times and I have told it wrong every time. The story as I have always given it is this. That when I understood we were staying, I asked to go, and that my mother refused me, flat, and left the refusal where it fell and never afterwards explained it. I have used that story. I have used it at table and I have used it in arguments and I used it once, at eleven, two years before they took her, in a very ugly quarter of an hour with my mother herself, and she did not contradict me, and I took her silence for the admission it was not. My mother was in Syria. She had been out of Italy since the previous autumn. She was on Lesbos or on the way to it, six weeks of sea from anybody in this house, and she did not know the allocation had been posted and could not have known for another two months. The woman I asked was my grandmother. Sostrata was in the room and gives it as follows. I came to my grandmother in the small colonnade, at the wall, where she had gone to look at the thing Dorus had posted, and I asked to be taken to my mother. I was two years and four months old and I will not pretend to any eloquence. Sostrata says I said it perhaps six times and that the sixth was the one that got an answer. My grandmother said no. She did not soften it, she did not crouch, and she did not explain, and Sostrata is very clear that she did not explain, because Sostrata was eleven and standing near enough to hear an explanation if one had been given and has thought about the absence of it on and off for thirty-one years. Then my grandmother went in to her correspondence and worked until the lamps. I find it easy enough to be fair to her, because she had no answer to give. Tiberius settled the composition of my father's household on that journey, as he settled everything about that journey, and his settlement was that one son went and the rest stayed, and the reason the rest stayed is that four of my father's children in Italy are four hostages in Italy. Every adult in that colonnade knew it. Every one of them had reasons of their own for keeping it behind their teeth in a house full of staff, and my grandmother had the best reason of all, since she was the one who had agreed to hold us. So she said no to a child of two and left it there, because the explanation was that the child was surety, which is a thing you can say to nobody in a colonnade, least of all with an eleven-year-old slave girl standing four feet away. I have spent thirty-one years being angry at my mother for a sentence my grandmother said. I gave the allocation to Sostrata this evening and told her what I had worked out and she heard it without any change of expression at all. "I know," she said. "You know." "You were two. Your mother was in Mytilene. I have known since it happened." I asked her, and I did not ask it gently, why in thirty-one years, in every house I have lived in, at every table where I have told that story with my mother in the wrong, she had never once said a word. She put the stylus down, which she does not do. "Because you would have gone to your grandmother about it," she said. "And your grandmother would have asked how you knew. And I was the person who was standing at the wall." She picked the stylus up again. "I was eleven," she said. "And then I was fifteen, and by then you had told it four or five times and it had set. There is no good hour to tell somebody that they have been angry at the wrong person for four years. There is a worse hour every year after." I have thought about that for the rest of the evening and I do not believe the second part of it. I believe the first part entirely. She was protecting herself. She has said so, plainly, in her own words, which is more than I would have got out of anybody else in this house, and she said it without the slightest suggestion that she was ashamed of it, and I find I am not able to tell her she was wrong, since she was not. But the second part, about there being no good hour, is a thing people say afterwards about a silence they kept for a different reason, and I have said it myself, and I know the shape of it from the inside. I have not put this to her. Translator: Entry 2. The dining room and the correspondence office. Event AD 18. Athens, Ilium, Colophon, and the crowning of Zeno as Artaxias III at Artaxata. Julia, aged two to 3, Sostrata, aged eleven, Nero Caesar, aged twelve, Drusus Caesar, aged ten, Gaius, aged five. Recorded Sostrata's hand, copied into the letter-book at the time. Recast by Julia AD 49, Julia, aged thirty-three, against the Caesarea coinage. Julia: AD 18 The letters came in from the East all that first year and my grandmother read them aloud at dinner. That was affection, and it was also business. A letter from the man holding the eastern command was a public document in every sense that mattered, and my grandmother knew that half the people at her table would repeat by the next evening whatever she let them hear, and she therefore read out the parts she wished repeated and the household understood that it was being handed something to carry. Athens first, where he went in with a single lictor and in Greek clothes, out of respect for a city that had been famous when Rome was farmland, and where the Athenians received him with everything they had. Ilium after that, and the tombs, and a long passage about the plain and where the ships must have been drawn up, which my grandmother read out entire and which put four people at that table to sleep. Then Colophon, and the oracle of Apollo at Clarus, which he asked and which answered him, and which was received in this house as a curiosity and repeated for a week as a joke about priests, and which nobody in Rome thought about again until the following autumn, when the whole city remembered it at once. I have the Colophon letter. There is nothing in it. It says the priest drank from the spring and gave the answer in verses and that the verses were obscure, and my father sets that down in the manner of a man describing a local custom, and then he writes four lines about the harbour. Whatever the priest actually said is not in the letter and was not in the letter when Sostrata copied it, and every version now going round the dinner tables of this city was manufactured after he was dead by people who wanted to have been told. Then Armenia, and this one I am going to give at length, because it is the letter that matters and because nobody has ever asked me about it. Armenia had thrown out its king. It had been throwing out its kings for thirty years, which is what Armenia does, and the country sits between us and Parthia and belongs to whoever last put a man on the throne there, and it had been Augustus's settled policy for forty years that the man should be ours. So the East had been given to my father with an authority above every governor in it, and the first thing that authority was for was this. He went up to Artaxata in the summer and he crowned a king. The man was Zeno, son of Polemon of Pontus, and he had been brought up in the Armenian manner, hunting and feasting and dressing as they dressed, so that the nobles took him for one of their own. He took the throne name Artaxias, which is the name their kings have. And my father, in front of the Armenian nobility and a Roman army, put the diadem on his head with his own hands. The letter is four sheets and it is the happiest thing he ever wrote. He describes the crowd. He describes the noise the crowd made, which he says he had heard in Rome and had not expected to hear on a hill in Armenia. He describes the diadem, which he says was heavier than it looked and which he had to set twice. He is pleased with the man, he is pleased with the day, and he says at the end that the boys would have liked it and that he is sorry Gaius slept through the greater part of the afternoon. Gaius was five and had been carried up a mountain in the heat and had slept through the crowning of a king. That is my brother entire, and it is the only thing in this account that has ever made me laugh out loud. He put Cappadocia into commission as a province the same season, under Quintus Veranius, and Commagene under Quintus Servaeus. Those two names are on the letter. They are also on the charge sheet at Piso's trial two years later, where they appear as the prosecutors, and they are in Hilarus's register in the spring of the year after that, calling at this door. I have set the three documents out in that order twice this week and I have taken them apart again both times. The house had it read out twice. My grandmother read it at the family table on the evening it came, and then had it read again three days later at a dinner of eleven, which was a thing she did perhaps four times a year and never without a reason. Sostrata was carrying that night and says the room went quiet at the diadem and stayed quiet to the end of the sheet, and that afterwards two of the men stayed on past the others and were with my grandmother in the small room until late. My brothers played at it for a fortnight. Nero was twelve and Drusus was ten and they crowned each other in the second courtyard with a wreath off the store-room door, over and over, taking turns to be Zeno, until Dorus took the wreath away and the game moved to the roof of the store range and had to be broken up by a man on a ladder. I want that on the page beside the coin, because both of them are the same fact. A boy of twelve in a courtyard and a mint in Cappadocia looked at the same letter and made the same picture out of it, which is a Roman handing out a kingdom, and the only difference between them is how many people saw the result. Now the copying, because the letter survives for a reason. My grandmother's letters from my father went into the letter-book, and the letter-book was Philargyrus's work, and Philargyrus that summer had the gout and could not sit. So the Armenian letter was given to the youngest literate person in the house to copy out, which is how a girl of eleven came to spend two afternoons writing out, in her careful upright hand, an account of a coronation in a country she could not have found on a map. She has told me this week that she remembers two things about it. She remembers that the word for diadem was new to her and that she had to be shown it. And she remembers that when she had finished the second sheet my grandmother came in, read the whole of it standing up, said nothing at all, and went out again. I have asked her what she made of that at eleven, and she says she made nothing of it whatever and assumed the copy was bad. The coin came the following year and I have one on this table. They struck it at Caesarea in Cappadocia: my father standing, in the act of setting the diadem on a seated man, and round the edge the words that say what is happening, GERMANICVS ARTAXIAS. There is nothing subtle about it. It is a picture of a Roman making a king, issued in quantity, in silver, and spent across half the East for years. Everybody in Rome saw one. Tiberius will have had one in his hand inside three months. Sostrata remembers the coins coming into this house because they came in a bag and were counted at the table like ordinary money, which is what they were. My grandmother had eleven of them put by and gave one to each of the boys and kept the rest, and I have hers, and the one on this table is my brother Nero's, which came back to this house in AD 31 with the rest of what he had on him. And here is where I stop, because I know what I am about to write and I have written it twice already this month and struck it out both times. A man who can put a crown on a head has demonstrated that he can put a crown on a head. It stays an observation however many times I write it down. What I will set down is this. My father was given an authority in the spring, he used it in the summer to make a king, the act was struck on coin and circulated, and within two years he was dead, and every one of those four things is a fact and I can produce the document for each. The joining of them is not a document. It is a shape I can see, and I have been able to see it since I was old enough to hold the pieces in my head at the same time, and I am aware that seeing a shape and proving a case are different occupations and that I have only ever been any good at the first. Sostrata has copied out the paragraph above without comment, which she does when she thinks I have gone as far as the evidence will carry me and no further. Translator: Entry 3. The correspondence office. Event Winter AD 18 to summer AD 19. Egypt, the granaries, Tiberius' remark in the Senate, and the draft Antonia cut. Julia, aged three, Antonia Minor, aged fifty-four, Sostrata, aged eleven to 12, Antigone. Recorded Sostrata's hand AD 19. The cut draft kept thirty-one years. Recast by Julia AD 49, Julia, aged thirty-three. Julia: AD 19 The Egyptian letters came in over the winter and my grandmother read almost none of them out. Everybody at that table knew what the trouble was before she had finished the first one. My father had gone down into Egypt to look at the antiquities and had opened the granaries against a shortage, and the people there came out to him in the streets, and he went about in Greek dress and without his lictors, which delighted the Alexandrians and was reported to Rome by the next ship. Egypt is the one province a senator must have leave to enter. Augustus made that rule and made it for a reason and everybody had kept it for forty years, and my father either forgot it or weighed it and went anyway, and I have never been able to determine which and neither has anybody else. Tiberius said so in the Senate. A remark, no more, entered in the record: that his nephew had been in Egypt and had worn Greek clothes. It was mildly put and it went round Rome in a day and a half. I have read that remark more times than is good for me and I want to put down what I think is actually in it, since the Greek clothes are what everybody quotes and the Greek clothes are the smallest part. He opened the granaries. The price of bread in Alexandria came down inside a week and the whole province knew whose hand had done it. Egypt is where the corn comes from, and a man who can lower the price of bread in Egypt has shown that he could raise it, and Rome eats out of that province at the sufferance of whoever is standing in it. My great-grandfather made his rule about Egypt because he had worked that out before anybody else did. My father broke the rule and then did precisely the thing the rule exists to prevent, and did it out of kindness, in front of a cheering city, in Greek clothes, and wrote home about the antiquities. The clothes went round Rome in a day and a half. The granaries have never been mentioned in my hearing by any person in this city in thirty years. So the Egyptian letters were read out in that dining room with the granaries in and the crowds in and the Greek clothes not in, and the antiquities in at some length, and a man at that table who had heard the Senate remark could sit there and listen to my grandmother going round the edge of it for an hour. About nine people at that table had heard the Senate remark. Then in the summer she began to skip. Sostrata, who was twelve by then and two years in Antigone's hands, says it was audible from the far end of the table. My grandmother would take the roll further from the lamp, and there would be a half-breath in the wrong place, and then she would go on in the same voice from a sentence that did not follow the last one. She did it four or five times before anybody at that table so much as looked up, and then she did it once too often, and Nero, who was thirteen and had no discretion whatsoever, asked her what the part was that she had left out. She told him it was about his father's health and would keep. That was the first time anybody in that house heard the word health in connection with my father. My grandmother produced it as a way of not saying something else, and I do not think she ever knew what she had put into the room. He was dead by the middle of October and we did not know until December. And I should say, since it bears on everything that follows, what my grandmother's position actually was, because the history men give it as grief and dignity and it was neither of those. She was the daughter of Antony and the niece of Augustus. Her husband Drusus died on campaign when she was twenty-seven and she never married again. She had one son in the East holding the largest command in the empire, and one son at home who was Claudius, whom the family kept out of sight, and whom she wrote to and kept at a distance. She had four of the eastern son's children in her house as a fact of state. And she was Livia's daughter-in-law and had been for forty years and had never once had a public disagreement with her about anything at all. That is a woman standing at the exact centre of every wire in Rome, keeping all of them slack. Now the office, because everything I have of that year comes out of it. My grandmother's correspondence was run out of a small room off the second courtyard by Philargyrus, who was her secretary and had been since before my father was born, and who was the only person in that house permitted to touch her seal. She dictated to him in the mornings. She wrote to my father herself, in her own hand, which she did for nobody else, and Philargyrus made the fair copies for the courier and the letter-book copies for the shelf, and the drafts she had abandoned went into a basket, and the basket went to the brazier at the end of the week. Sostrata carried the basket. That was the job of the youngest literate person in the house, and it was given to her precisely because she could read, since a girl who cannot read might show a sheet to somebody who can. I was in that room most mornings of that year. I was two and then three. I sat on the floor by the shelves, or under the table if it was cold, and I was given a box of counting stones and left there, and nobody sent me out and nobody lowered their voice, because there is no reason on earth to lower one's voice in front of a child who cannot yet tell one month from another. Philargyrus took dictation over my head. Dorus came in and out with the day's accounts over my head. My grandmother said things to Philargyrus in that room in AD 18 which she would not have said in her own dining room, and she said them with her granddaughter three feet away playing with stones, and this went on for the better part of two years. I understood none of it, whatever has since been said, and I was three. But I have thought a great deal this month about what was actually being taught in that room, and it was the room itself. I could be in it. Everybody in that house had a place they were sent out of, and I was small enough that nobody had bothered to work out where mine was, and by the time somebody might have bothered it had stopped occurring to any of them, and I have been going into rooms on the strength of it ever since. Now the sheet. In the summer of the first year, before any of the skipping and more than a year before he was ill, on a morning Sostrata cannot date and I have not been able to date for her, she carried the basket down to the brazier in the service court and burned the week's drafts one at a time as she had been told to, and one of them she did not burn. It is in front of me. It is my grandmother's own hand, which is small and fast and quite hard to read, and it is a draft of a letter to my father, and it breaks off in the middle of the fourth line because she stopped and started again. What it says is that Gnaeus Piso had been given Syria and Plancina had gone with him, and that Plancina was spoken to before she went, in Rome, by somebody who had no business speaking to a governor's wife about a governor's business, and that my father should be careful how he received her and more careful how he wrote about her, and that he should keep his household staff and not take on any of Piso's. What went east that week I have on this table beside the draft, in the letter-book. Four hundred words about the boys' progress with Zenodotus, a note about the price of grain, and one line saying that she trusted he found Piso serviceable. She wrote the warning and she cut it and she sent the fair copy the same day. I have put the two side by side a dozen times this month. The draft is fast and the letters run together and there are two words struck through in the second line, which is a woman writing at speed and thinking as she goes. The fair copy in the letter-book is immaculate, because Philargyrus made it and Philargyrus never made a bad copy of anything in fifty years, and the line about trusting that Piso proved serviceable sits in the middle of the third paragraph between the grain and a remark about Drusus's handwriting. It is the only mention of Piso in any letter my grandmother sent east in two years. The reason is a guess and I shall give it as one. A letter to the East went by imperial courier or it stayed in Rome. It was carried by men in the emperor's service, through posts kept by men in the emperor's service, and it could be opened at any point along that road by anybody with the standing to open it, and everybody who wrote such a letter knew it. She was writing to her son through a system belonging to a man who had a strong interest in what she thought of Piso, and she got four lines in before she saw where she was. So she took it out. And she could not send it another way, or she believed she could not, and I have gone round that several times and I do not know which of those it is, and Sostrata does not either, and my grandmother has been dead twelve years. It is six weeks from Ostia to Seleucia in the sailing season and I have counted it twice against the courier schedule for that year. A sheet put on a ship in the summer of that year reaches my father in Syria before the autumn. He fell ill fourteen months later. Whatever else is true, it was not a question of time. One more thing about the sheet, since it is going about that the draft names the poisoner. It names two people, and Martina is neither of them. Rome first heard that woman's name after my father was dead, when Sentius put her on a ship to testify and she died at Brundisium before she could. The names on my grandmother's draft are Piso and Plancina and one other who is not named at all, and the fact that the third one is not named is the reason the sheet was worth keeping. I have asked Sostrata twice why an eleven-year-old took a sheet out of a burning basket. She has told me twice that she does not know, and I believe her, and I would leave it there except that Antigone was in the service court that morning and saw her do it. Sostrata says Antigone came over and looked at the sheet in her hand for what she remembers as a long time, and then told her that a thing worth keeping is worth keeping somewhere, and that the place is a wall, and took her upstairs and showed her a gap behind the second shelf in the linen store where the plaster had come away from the lath. That gap held it for thirty-one years. An eleven-year-old slave stole a document out of her mistress's brazier, and Antigone showed her where to put it, and then taught her medicine and accounts and the cipher for another eighteen years, and then died, and left instructions with her about me. I have written that down flatly and I am going to leave it flat. Translator: Entry 4. Syria by report, and the house of Livia, Palatine Hill. Event Summer to autumn AD 19. Piso countermands, the Nabataean banquet, the renunciation of friendship, and the report of the illness. Julia, aged three, Livia, aged seventy-six, Tiberius, aged fifty-nine, Piso, aged about sixty-one, Plancina, aged about forty-five, Antonia Minor, aged fifty-four, Drusilla, aged three. Recorded Julia AD 49, Julia, aged thirty-three, from the trial record, the letter-book, Antigone's list of admissions and Livia's own account given AD 28. Julia: AD 19 Piso had been in Syria a year and a half by the summer and my father had been trying to govern over the top of him for most of it. I have the shape of that from three places. The trial record, which is a hostile document and says so. My grandmother's letter-book, which is a careful document and leaves things out. And Sostrata, who was eleven and twelve and standing at the wall of a correspondence office while men came in and out of it, and who has no interest in the case at all. What Piso did was simple and it was done in the open. My father would issue an order and Piso would issue another. My father would set a commander over a legion and Piso would move him. Discipline was let go. Men were released from duties. Punishments were remitted, and remitted publicly, so that everybody in the camp knew who had remitted them, and inside a year the legions of Syria had a name for him and the name was father of the legions. Plancina went to the cavalry exercises. She sat and watched them wheel, which is a thing a governor's wife had never done in the history of the province, and she said things about my mother while she watched. That is what a household in Rome heard, and it heard it in fragments, months late, out of order, from men who had come off ships. Sostrata says my grandmother stopped asking after a while. She says that in the spring of that year my grandmother would send for whoever had come up from the port and question him herself for a quarter of an hour, and that by the summer she had left off doing it, and that the men still came and were still fed and were shown out without being taken in. Then the banquet. The king of the Nabataeans gave a dinner for the two of them and made presents of gold crowns, which is what a client king does. He gave heavy ones to my father and my mother and lighter ones to Piso and the rest, which is also what a client king does, since the weight is the message and everybody at that table could weigh a crown by eye. Piso put his down on the table and said something about the dinner being given to the son of a Roman and not to the son of a Parthian, and got up and left. I have that in three forms and the words move about in all three, and I would not put any of them in a court. What survives identically in all three is the gesture, which is a man setting down a gift in front of the king who gave it, and going. After the banquet my father stopped trying to govern over the top of him and did the other thing. He renounced the friendship. I want to be exact about what that is, because it is nine parts law and one part temper, and it is generally reported as though it were the reverse. Amicitia between men of that rank is a standing arrangement with obligations on both sides, entered into by form and ended by form, in writing, and announced. When a Roman renounces a friendship he is filing. He is saying, in a document, to a man of consular rank, that the arrangement between us is at an end from this hour, that I owe you nothing and expect nothing, and that whatever you do after this hour you do as a man with no claim on me. It is the formal step a man takes before he moves against somebody, and every senator in Rome understands that the moment he hears it, and Piso understood it, and left the province. So my father, ill by then, dictated a legal instrument, had it copied, had it delivered, and had it recorded. That is the act of a man building a case he expects to stand up and argue, dictated by a man who by then could barely hold his food down. He was dead within two months and Piso was on a ship, and what my father had been building was left standing with nobody to argue it, and it was picked up in the spring by Publius Vitellius and Quintus Veranius and Quintus Servaeus and used, and it is largely why Piso is dead and largely why the poison was never proved, since a case built to argue misgovernment is a poor instrument for arguing murder and they had no other. The renunciation reached this house in the ordinary way, three weeks behind the illness, and by then nobody in the second courtyard was talking about anything else. The report that my father was ill came up from Brundisium in the late summer and was read out at my great-grandmother's house in front of perhaps twenty people. I have the day. It is in Antigone's list of who was admitted, which gives the hour as well, and there were more people in that house that afternoon than on any other day of that year, which tells its own story about how fast the thing had gone round the city before the paper got there. Tiberius was in the room. I have this from three people who were in it and they agree, which they do not always. The report was read. It said that the commander of the eastern provinces had been ill and was recovering, and it said a little more than that in the part about how the illness had come on, and it said nothing at all about Piso, which everybody present noticed, because by then everybody present had heard about Piso from somewhere else. And the entire room, every one of the twenty, stopped listening to the reader and looked at Tiberius. That is what an audience is for. Nobody in that house needed a courier to tell them what was in the report, since half of them had it by dinner the previous night from their own people at the port. What they had come for was his face, and they had come a long way for it, and some of them had been waiting in the outer rooms since the second hour. They got nothing, and I have been told about it by three separate people at three separate times in my life, and all three of them told me about it unprompted, which is how I know what that hour and a half was worth to the men who sat through it. It is worth setting down what the room was actually asking, since it has been misdescribed. What they wanted was small and very useful. They wanted to know whether the emperor had already decided how this was going to be handled, because a man who has decided sits differently from a man who is still waiting for more, and half the senior men in Rome had positions to take up and did not want to take them up on the wrong side of a decision that had already been made in private. He gave them nothing to work with, and they went home and had to guess, and a good many of them guessed wrong over the following year and are dead. He heard it out with his chin down and his hands where they had been, and when it was finished he said that he was glad of the recovery and asked whether there was anything from the Cappadocian settlement, and there was, and it was read, and he attended to it in exactly the manner he had attended to the first, and then the audience went on for another hour and a half and he did not refer to his nephew again. My grandmother Antonia was there and Antigone's list puts her in the second group admitted. Of our house, I was the only one in the room. Sostrata had the whole of it from me afterwards, at second hand, which she has told me twice this week. I was three years and nine months old and I had been brought over because Livia had sent for me, which she had begun doing that summer and did eleven times in seven weeks. The list gives all eleven. It gives the date and the hour and the word admitted and nothing else whatever, and I have looked at those eleven lines a great many times this month hoping that Antigone had written something in the margin, and she has not, and it is the only page in the whole bundle where I have wanted her to be less disciplined than she was. Livia sent for me eleven times in seven weeks and for Drusilla once in her life, at the reception, with the others. We were both three. We were kept in the same room and dressed out of the same chest and were, to most of that household, a single item with two heads. Antigone's list has eleven lines and my name is on all eleven. I learned that this month and I have not yet decided what to do with it. My grandmother could not have refused the summonses, and the reason has nothing to do with fear. Antonia had stopped being frightened of her mother-in-law twenty years earlier. What the two of them had was an arrangement of long standing, which consisted of never once putting either of them in a position where a refusal would have to be made. Livia asked for the child on a Tuesday and the child went on the Tuesday, and if my grandmother had ever said no, then the question of whether she could say no would have been in the open, and both of them would have had to find out the answer, and neither of them wanted to know it. So the litter went across eleven times and came back eleven times and nobody in either house recorded a single thing about any of it except a freedwoman with a list of who was admitted. What happened afterwards I have from Livia, who told me about it once, years later, and from my own body. She had me brought through to her cabinet when the house was clearing. She sat me on the table. Then she made a face at me and asked me to make it back. The game had two moves in it and no decoration whatever. She did the face and I did the face. When I did it wrong she did it again and waited. When I did it right she said good and gave me a piece of dried fig, and then she did it again, and I did it again, and got another one. She kept a dish of them at her elbow for the purpose. Sostrata says I came home that first afternoon extremely pleased with myself and smelling of figs and that nobody in our house thought anything of it at all, because a very old woman had spent an hour playing with a small child, and there is nothing in the world less remarkable than that. The face was Tiberius's. I have seen children do the emperor for a laugh, mouth pulled down, shoulders up round the ears. This was made out of much smaller parts. The chin a little down. The shoulders still. The eyes going to the person speaking and staying there half a beat past comfortable, and then nothing. No movement at the mouth. No movement anywhere. The particular thing about it, which took me until this month to work out, is that it is a busy face. A blank face is a face that has stopped, and everybody can see that it has stopped, and a room reads a stopped face as fear or as insolence and either way it reads it. His face went on working the whole time, at something a room could get no name and no purchase on, and after a while a room gives up and starts talking to fill the space, which is the entire object. Eleven afternoons. Seven weeks. Figs. Sostrata asked me this week what I did on the twelfth. There was no twelfth. The eleventh is four days before the Ides of October and then the list goes on with other people's names and mine is not in it again that year, and there is nothing on the days either side of it that would account for a stop. No illness in the house. No festival. Nothing in the day-book. I do not know why she stopped. There is nothing in Tiberius that can be explained to a three-year-old, and Livia had no interest whatever in wasting an afternoon. My reading is that she was putting it into a body that had not finished being made, at the age when a child learns to walk the way its mother walks and to hold a cup the way its nurse holds a cup, and that she was doing it by repetition and reward, because that is how a body is taught anything. There is another reading. A woman of seventy-six who had outlived nearly everybody she began with had a small great-granddaughter brought over eleven times in an autumn because she liked her, and played a game with her, because that is what is done with small children. I asked her about it once, at twelve, in that same room, and she said that everybody in Rome had spent thirty years trying to learn that face and that not one of them had managed it because they had all started too late. I had always taken that afternoon at twelve for the beginning of something. She had me in that house for eleven years and she began teaching me in the last two of them, and I have told myself for twenty years that she looked at a girl of twelve and saw what was there and decided to do something about it, and that is a version I have been comfortable with and have repeated. The eleven lines are nine years earlier. She was drilling a face into me before I could count to four. Then she said that she had started too late herself, and that hers was very good and was not the real thing, and that mine would be the real thing, and that I would never know the difference and neither would anybody else, which was the point. She was seventy-six that summer. She had ten years left and I was in and out of that house for nine of them. I can do it. I did it at the end of last month, in this house, in front of a man who had come to find out whether I knew something, and I held it for as long as it took him to fill the silence, and he filled it, and he told me the thing he had come to find out whether I knew. It arrived on its own, the way a limp arrives in a leg that was broken as a child. I have had it since before I could put a sentence together, and every part of me is younger than it is. Translator: Entry 5. The house of Antonia Minor. Event Germanicus dies at Epidaphna 10 October AD 19, aged 33. The notice reaches Rome in December. Julia turns 4 on 6 November. Antonia Minor, aged fifty-four, Sostrata, aged twelve, Asinius Gallus, aged about sixty, Hilarus, Dorus. Recorded Julia AD 49, Julia, aged thirty-three, from the day-book and the client register. Julia: AD 19 My father died at Epidaphna outside Antioch on the sixth day before the Ides of October and this house did not know it for nine weeks. I have gone at that gap harder than at anything else in this account, because it is the only part of the year I can hold in my hand. The rest is what people say. The nine weeks are arithmetic. He died in October. The notice reached my grandmother's door in December. In between there is a stretch of ordinary time in which every person in this house was going about their business under a mistake, and I have the household's own record of what that business was, day by day, because Dorus kept the day-book and the day-book survives. On the eighth before the Ides of November I was four years old. It is in the book. Cakes were had in from a man on the Vicus Tuscus at a cost I could recite, and my brothers were present, and Pyrrha was given the afternoon. There was a lunula on me that my mother had put there in a fort on the Rhine and there was a father in Syria who had been dead four weeks. Then in the middle of that month the report came up that he had recovered. It was true and it was old. He had been ill in the summer and had rallied and it was the rally that got on a ship, and Rome received it as news, and Rome went out of its mind. They went up to the Capitol in the dark with torches and led victims and there were so many of them at the doors of the imperial house that the doors had to be opened, and men were singing in the street about the safety of Rome. Sostrata was twelve and she went up into the roof space over the store rooms with two of the kitchen girls to watch the torches going along under the Palatine, and she says the whole line of them could be followed from the Forum up, and that it went on most of the night. He had been dead five weeks and the city was singing about him. I do not know what to do with that and I have stopped trying to do anything with it. I have had it put down here in the order it happened. The notice came in December, in the afternoon, and it went to Philargyrus at the door and Philargyrus took it in to my grandmother in the correspondence office and did not open it, because he never opened anything. I was in that room. I have said already that I was in that room most mornings of that year and I was in it that afternoon, on the floor, by the shelves, with the counting stones. What I was able to tell Sostrata afterwards, and what she wrote down, is who was standing where. That is all I had and it turned out to be the only thing in this house that nobody else had, and I shall come to the tablet. Philargyrus took the thing in and my grandmother read it standing, and Statia had come in with the water a moment before and was still holding the tray, and Celadus was by the shelves with the mud on him, and I was on the floor. Then the mourning, which I am told about and cannot remember and which everybody who was in Rome that winter has described to me at some point in my life without my ever having asked. The city shut itself. The Forum emptied and the shops came down and the courts stopped sitting for days before anybody in authority had said a word about any of it, and when the authorities did at last issue their instructions on mourning the city had been at it a week already and went on well past the date the instructions closed it. I have read those edicts. They are running behind a thing they cannot catch. Tiberius did not appear. Livia did not appear. That has been chewed over for thirty years and I have nothing to add to it that a hundred men have not said better and worse. But my grandmother's name is not in any record of that mourning either, anywhere, and I have looked, and men have written that she was ill, and men have written that she was kept indoors by Tiberius and Livia so that their own absence would look less pointed, and men have written that she was so overcome she could not be seen. She was in this house. She was in it the entire time and I was in it with her. She was perfectly well. She ran the household through every day of it. The day-book has her ordering the mourning cloth on the day the notice came, and settling with the man who supplied it, and disputing his price, and getting it down. She had the boys' tutor stood down and then, four days later, put back on. She wrote sixty letters that month and Philargyrus copied every one of them into the book. What she did not do was go out. I have the letter-book and I have the day-book and I have Sostrata, and I do not know whether she was told not to go out or decided not to go out, and I have found nothing in either book that settles it, and I have gone through both twice. I have my own opinion. I am not going to set it down as anything else. Now the register, which is the ugly part. Every house of any standing keeps a list of who called and at what hour, so that the return calls can be made and the obligations kept straight, and my grandmother's was kept by a clerk whose name in that year was Hilarus, and Hilarus was thorough, and Hilarus is still on the staff and copies out client names to this day. In the eleven days after the notice reached this door, ninety-four men called. Condolence is a name and an hour and it happens once. There are men on that list four and five times inside a fortnight, and men who had never called on my grandmother in their lives, and men who would have been turned at the door in November and were shown upstairs in December, because a house in mourning must receive everybody, and every one of them knew it. I have had Hilarus go through his own register with me, which he has enjoyed more than anything that has happened to him in years, and we have sorted the ninety-four into what they actually were. Eleven were my grandmother's own connections and came once, properly, and left. Nine were my father's men from the Rhine years, and they came and stood in the atrium and mostly did not speak, and four of them came back on the day of the funeral rites and stood in the atrium again. Twenty-two were creditors, factors and men of business, and I want that understood as the ordinary thing it is: a great house in mourning is a great house whose accounts are about to be looked at by somebody new, and every one of those twenty-two was there to establish where he stood before anybody started counting. That leaves fifty-two, and the fifty-two are why I am writing this scene. They wanted the same thing and they came at it openly. They wanted words. Anything my father had said, at any time, in any room, about the emperor. A letter, a remark repeated by a slave, a phrase from a dinner. A half sentence twelve years old would have served. A dead man who is loved by the whole city and who said something sour about the man who now rules is worth more than an estate, and everybody in Rome had worked that out inside a day. The one who came four times in eleven days was Gaius Asinius Gallus. He was a considerable man. Consul more than twenty years earlier, the best speaker of his generation after the old ones died, and married to the woman Tiberius had been made to divorce and had never got over, which Gallus mentioned rather more often than was wise. He hated Tiberius and Tiberius hated him and the whole city had been watching the two of them go at each other for years. He came in on the third day and my grandmother received him, and he was properly and correctly grieved, and then he asked whether the children might be brought in. They were brought in. Sostrata was in the room for all four of the visits, standing at the wall, because a girl of twelve is furniture in the same way a child of four is furniture and neither of them had yet found that out about the other. I want to be exact about the manner of it, because the word questioning calls up an interrogation, and the difference is the entire point. He was gentle. She is emphatic about that and she has repeated it three times this week. He kept his voice low and he went down on his heels so that his face was level with mine, and he asked me what my father used to say. Not about anything in particular, the first time. Just what he used to say. I do not know what I answered and Sostrata does not either. The second visit he asked me whether my father talked about the emperor. The third visit he asked me whether my father was ever cross about the emperor, and he made a face when he said cross, to show me what cross was, and there was a man with him on the third visit who had a tablet out and open. I have not been able to find out who that man was. He is not on Hilarus's register, because clerks and attendants were not entered, and I have asked Sostrata for a description and she has given me one and it is a description of half the men in Rome. The fourth visit I said nothing at all. Sostrata says I said nothing at all on the fourth visit, and she says I should take it for what it was, which is a four-year-old going quiet, and she is right, and I was tempted the other way and am putting her caution on the page for that reason. Any nurse in Rome will tell the same. A small girl was asked the same question by a strange old man four times in eleven days, and on the fourth she shut her mouth. What she is certain about is what happened next, because it was the only interesting thing that happened in the whole eleven days. He was disappointed and he let it show. None of it landed on me. He straightened up and looked over my head at my grandmother and made a small sound and a small movement of the hands, the sort a man makes at a bad auction, and the man with the tablet closed the tablet, and Gallus said something civil about the boys and went, and that was the last of him. The register has no Publius Vitellius in it, and no Quintus Veranius, and no Quintus Servaeus. All three of them were still in Syria in December, gathering what they could out of the household there, and none of them reached Italy until the spring, and by the time the three men whose names are attached to this business forever had set foot in Rome, ninety-four others had already been through this house and had it out of us or failed to. Gallus went on for another eleven years. Then Tiberius had him taken, and kept him alive in custody for three of those years on rations calculated to sustain him, and would not let him die and would not let him be tried, and he starved in the end in AD 33, and I was seventeen and I remember the talk about it perfectly well. I have had that in front of me all evening next to Hilarus's register and I have not decided what I think, and I notice that I keep putting the two documents on top of one another and then taking them apart again. Translator: Entry 6. The correspondence office and the kitchen corridor. Event The night the notice arrived, December AD 19. Julia, aged four, Sostrata, aged twelve, Philargyrus, aged sixty, Eros, Celadus, Statia, aged nineteen. Recorded Sostrata's hand December AD 19, Sostrata, aged twelve. The tablet recovered and continued by Julia AD 49, Julia, aged thirty-three. Julia: AD 19 The house was loud for about an hour after the notice, and then it went quiet and stayed quiet. That is the shape of it as everybody who was there gives it. There was a great deal of noise at first, from the staff mostly, because the staff heard it before the family did, since Philargyrus went in and the door was open and the corridor was full. Then my grandmother came out and said what had to be said to the household in the proper form, standing at the top of the steps into the second courtyard, and gave the instructions for the mourning, and named the man who would deal with the cloth, and went back in. After that it went quiet, and it stayed quiet, and Sostrata says that the quiet was worse than the hour before it, because in the hour before it people had at least been doing something. I was put to bed and I got out of it, which everybody agrees on and nobody finds surprising, since I was four and the house was awake. Sostrata found me on the floor of the passage outside the correspondence office at what she thinks was the third hour of the night, and she sat down on the floor with me because she was twelve and it did not occur to her to do anything else, and I talked to her. Here is what I said, as near as she can give it after thirty years. I said that Philargyrus stood in the door and did not come in. I said that grandmother stood up. I said that Dorus was behind Philargyrus and then was not there. I said that the water lady came and grandmother did not take the water. I said that the man with the mud came in and stood by the shelves near me, and that he had mud on him up to here, and Sostrata says I put my hand on my own thigh to show her where. That is it. Five things, and one of them about mud. The water lady was Statia. She was nineteen, she had been in the house eight months, and she had come in with the tray a moment before the courier did and was still holding it out when my grandmother read the thing and left the cup standing on it. That is the only account anywhere of what my grandmother did in that minute. A cup left on a tray, reported by a four-year-old. But the last one mattered, and Sostrata understood inside a heartbeat that it mattered, and she has never been able to tell me how she understood it, and I have decided to stop asking. The man with the mud was the courier. His name was Celadus and he had ridden up from Brundisium. A courier hands the dispatch at the door and is taken away and given food. That is the invariable practice in every great house in Rome, and the reason for it is that a courier who gets into the room has seen the thing opened. Nobody else in that house was going to say he was in the room. My grandmother was above being asked. Philargyrus stood in the doorway with his back to it. Dorus had gone. Statia was in the room with the tray and would have volunteered the hour of the day to nobody. Every adult in that building was looking at my grandmother's face, which is what adults look at, and the only person watching the door was a child on the floor with a box of stones who noticed that a man had mud on his legs. So Sostrata got up off that floor and went out into the house and started asking. She was twelve years old. She had no standing, no authority, and no business doing it, and if she had been caught at it she would have been beaten and quite properly. She had had a stolen sheet of my grandmother's handwriting behind a shelf in the linen store for eighteen months by then, and a woman who had watched her put it there and had said nothing. She went to Philargyrus first, which was brave and stupid in about equal measure. He was sixty and he had been in that house since before my father was born, and a twelve-year-old kitchen-side girl had no business speaking to him at all. She went in on an errand about lamp oil, which was not her errand. He said, what is it. She said the oil, and then she said nothing, because she had not thought past the oil. He looked at her, she says, for long enough that she understood she had made a mistake and was not going to be able to unmake it, and then he told her that the notice came to the door at the eleventh hour. She had not asked him. That is the part she still cannot account for. She stood there having said the word oil and he gave her the hour, and then, because he had been standing in a corridor for four hours with nobody to say anything to, he told her that there had been a second sealed thing in the satchel, and that he had not seen it opened, and that he did not know what became of it. Then he said, go on then. She went. She was outside the door before it occurred to her that she had been given something, and by then she could not go back in. What she has been annoyed about for thirty years is the second sealed thing, which she was handed and let go by. She was twelve. She had the presence of mind to keep her face still while a man five times her age told her something he should not have told her, and she did not have the presence of mind to ask one more question, and she has said to me twice this week that she would give a good deal to have that half a minute back. She went to Eros, who belonged to the physician my grandmother kept, and who had been sent for that evening and had waited in the corridor two hours because my grandmother would not see him. Eros gave her the corridor. Who went in, who came out, in what order, over two hours, which is exactly what a bored slave standing in a corridor for two hours has and nobody ever asks him for. The eleven lines are the best thing on the tablet and nobody will ever care about them but me. They give the order in which the household found out, which runs downward through the house and then sideways. Dorus knew before my brothers did. The kitchen knew before Pyrrha did, and Pyrrha had the two of us. The boys were told last of all the people in that house who could understand what they were being told, and they were told by my grandmother herself, and it took her forty minutes to get to them, and Eros was in the corridor for all forty of them and could say exactly where she went in between. She went down to the kitchens where they had put Celadus, and he was eating, and he was too tired to be careful with a child, and she got the road out of him. Where he had changed horses. What the weather had done to him at Beneventum. And that another rider had gone up out of Brundisium the same morning he did, an hour or two ahead, on the imperial post, and that he did not know whose business that man was carrying and had not asked, because it is not a courier's affair and asking is how a courier stops being a courier. An hour or two ahead. On the same road. In front of the family's own man. I have had that in front of me for three days. The courier schedule gives stages and hours and never gave riders or recipients, so I can establish neither who that man carried for nor where he stopped. There is a version of this in which I leave the schedule out and say the rest of it plainly. It is a very good version and I could have it written out by tomorrow evening. That is three. And now the tablet. It is a plain wax double, the cheap kind, the sort a household keeps by the hundred for lists and reckonings, and it is in front of me, and the wax has been kept out of the heat because it went into the gap behind the second shelf in the linen store with the other thing. At the top, in a hand I did not know until this month was hers, in the careful upright letters of somebody who had been taught to write two years earlier and was still proud of it, it says: Those who were in the room. Then four names, one under the other, with a space left under each. Philargyrus. Under his name, the hour, and the second sealed thing. Eros. Under his name, eleven lines, which is the corridor, in order, with times. Celadus. Under his name, the road, and Beneventum, and the rider who went an hour ahead. Statia. Under her name, nothing at all. I asked Sostrata this evening what Statia said. "I never asked her." I said that Statia's name was on the tablet. "Because you put her in the room. You said she brought the water in. So I wrote her down." I asked why she never went to her. She did not answer for long enough that I asked again, and then she said that a girl holding a tray three feet from my grandmother had been looking straight at her while she read it, and that whatever Statia saw in that face was the one piece of testimony on the whole tablet that could not be written down anywhere without ending the girl who gave it. "So I left it empty," she said. "And then I kept the tablet, which was the more dangerous of the two things, and I have never been able to explain to myself why I did the one and not the other." Statia is alive and she is forty-nine. She was freed under my grandmother's will and she has been twelve years at my husband's villa at Baiae, where she has the linen and the still-room and something over forty people under her, and she has a son called Sabinus who was freed with her under the same will and who is a clerk in the grain office at Puteoli. I established the whole of that this afternoon in rather less time than it takes to eat. So here is where this month arrives, and I shall put it down plainly. For a month I have been telling anyone who asked, and telling myself rather more often than that, that I have begun a commentary. I began it in the spring, at Sostrata's nagging, in my grandmother's archive room, and I have been quite pleased with myself about it. The first page of the record of my life was written in December of the year my father died, by a girl of twelve, out of four things a four-year-old said on the floor of a passage, one of which was about mud. It is in somebody else's hand. Somebody else commissioned it, somebody else kept it, and it has sat eighteen inches behind a shelf for thirty years in a house I have lived in for most of my life. I have had it brought and I am keeping it on this table. I told Sostrata to send to Baiae for Statia. She said that she would rather I did not. I said that my grandmother had been dead twelve years and that there was nobody left alive to be injured by anything Statia saw in her face on a December evening thirty years ago. "It is not the face," she said. "It is the letter." Then she said it out plainly, which she does when she has decided that being careful is no longer worth the trouble. The moment I send, there is a written instruction in a courier's satchel, and a name entered in the register at that villa, and a woman taken off her work for a day and put back on it, and every person in that household knows inside the hour that the wife of the emperor has sent to Campania for a freedwoman about the death of Germanicus. A thing like that is over the wall by evening. Publius Suillius Rufus has people in three households at Baiae that she knows of and very likely in others she has yet to hear about, and Suillius is in my employment at present and will not always be, and a woman who has once been a witness in a Germanicus matter is a woman somebody can use. And the second man who comes for her will not be as civil as I intend to be. And Statia will not refuse him, because she has a still-room and forty people under her and a son in the grain office at Puteoli, and a woman with those three things says whatever she is asked to say. Then she said the only sharp thing she has said to me in a month. "You are not sending for what she saw. You decided what she saw a fortnight ago. You are sending so that there is a document." That is not true. I am going to send anyway. She has written the instruction out and she has written her objection under it, in her own hand, unasked, on the same sheet, which she has never done before in her life. Translator: That was episode three, The East Took My Father. Next episode is four, The Woman With the Urn. Augusta is a translation of The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina.