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VII. Livia's Last Tablet · Augusta: The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina

• VII. Livia's Last Tablet Translator: Augusta. The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina. Episode seven. Livia's Last Tablet. Chapter Seven. Livia's Last Tablet. Entry one. The house of the Domitii, Julia's married home now, in the winter of AD 28 to 29. Julia is thirteen. Across the hill, Livia is dying, and all Rome knows it. In the same house, some weeks before her, Antigone dies in the night, at about sixty, and nobody outside that household will hear of it. Sostrata, twenty-two, who was trained by her for eighteen years, goes over in the morning. Written in Julia's own hand, the same day. Julia: AD 29 Antigone died in the night some time before the eighth hour and they told me at noon, and my great-grandmother is dying in the next part of the house and nobody outside that household is going to hear about the first of those two things at all. She had been ill about nine days. It was her chest and it was quick at the end and she was about sixty and she had been in that house since before my mother was born. I was not there. Nobody sent for me and there was no reason to send for me. I have been trying since noon to write down what she was and I keep getting a list of jobs. She had the correspondence when Livia's correspondence was the thing it was. She had the admissions and she kept the lists, and I have four of those lists in this room and I have got more out of them in the last two years than out of everything anybody has told me. She had the linen and the stores. She trained people. She trained Sostrata, in medicine and accounts and the cipher, for eighteen years, and I have only understood in the last year that this was not a kindness and was an appointment. She was freed a very long time ago and never left. Here is what I actually have of her, and it is four things. She told me who had sat in nine chairs, in a room with the covers going on, when I was seven, and she said my father's name in the same voice as the other four. She told me, at seven, that every one of those nine had been the next thing and that she had put a cover over the certain future six times. She told me last autumn that the truth is what the first surviving account decides, standing in a passage, on her way somewhere else. And she showed a slave girl of eleven a gap behind a shelf where the plaster had come away, twelve years ago, in a house I have never lived in, and neither of them told me about it until this year. That is all of it. Four things in eleven years and not one of them was a lesson and every one of them was delivered while she was carrying something. Sostrata has not said anything. She went over there this morning before we knew and came back at the ninth hour and told me and then went and did the accounts, and she has done the whole evening's work and has spoken about four times, and I did not ask her anything and I am not going to tonight. There is one thing I want down. Last autumn, in that passage, I did not ask her what would happen to her when the household was broken up. It did not occur to me. She was standing in front of me and I was thirteen and I had my hands full of a packet of my own business, and there was a woman of sixty in front of me whose entire life was about to be dispersed at auction along with the furniture, and I did not think of it. She would not have answered. I know that. She would have said something about it not being her concern or she would have said nothing at all. I did not think of it. Livia is expected to die within the fortnight and when she does there will be a funeral that half Rome comes to, and Antigone went in the night and was burned this afternoon and there were nine people there and I was not one of them, because nobody thought to send and because I would have had to ask my husband. Translator: Entry two. Livia's bedroom on the Palatine, AD 29. She is eighty-six and dying, and Julia, thirteen, is let in for about the length of a hundred count. There are nine people in the room, among them Claudius, thirty-nine, standing near the door and being no trouble to anybody, and a freedman with a pen whom Julia does not know. There is nobody left in that house to ask who he is. Written in Julia's own hand, within days, in cipher. Julia: AD 29 I was let in to see my great-grandmother for about the length of a hundred count and I am putting down what I saw in the room and not what I felt, because I have tried the other way twice this evening and it comes out wrong. She is eighty-six and she is dying and everybody knows it and the house is full. There were nine people in that bedroom. Two of them were physicians. Two were priests, and one of those was there about a vow and the other one I could not place. There was a man from the treasury with a case. There were two women of her household. There was my uncle Claudius, standing near the door and being no trouble to anybody, which is what he does. And there was a freedman I did not know who was writing. She could not get any of them out. That is the thing and it is the whole of the entry. She said, twice while I was there, that she wanted the room cleared, and she said it in the voice, and nothing happened. The physicians went on. The man from the treasury opened his case. One of the women said something soothing and stayed exactly where she was. Nobody was rude. That is what makes it worth writing down. There was no moment where anybody refused her. They simply did not go, and they did not go in a way that had clearly been going on for some while before I got there. I watched the freedman who was writing, because I wanted to know whose he was. He is not hers. There is nobody left in that house to ask, which I had not understood until I stood in the doorway and went through the people I would have asked and found that the one I would have asked was burned three weeks ago. So I did it the other way. I asked one of the litter men on the way home which of the household had been taken on this year, and he gave me two names and one of them is the man with the pen, and he came in about the Kalends of last month out of the emperor's own people. The instructions the servants are taking now come through him. So it changed hands before she died. I want that down plainly because I do not think anybody arranged a day for it. There was no morning on which somebody said that Julia Augusta's orders were finished. What happened is that men who wanted to be somewhere and knew she would be dead in a fortnight found that they could stay in the room, and then found it again the next day, and inside a week the household had worked out which way it went and had adjusted. She noticed. She looked at me while she was saying it the second time and she knew I had seen it. Then she asked me what I was reading and I told her, and she said something about the writer that I did not understand and have not been able to get anybody to explain since, and she was perfectly herself for that part. And then she said the last thing she has said to me, which is that I should keep on with the wax. Not the reading. The wax. She had not asked me about the tablets for two years and she asked me about them at the end with nine people in the room, and I do not know whether that is because it was the only private thing we had or because she wanted the freedman to hear it. One of the women took me out. I have written all of the above in the cipher because I do not want it in plain wax in this house. Translator: Entry three. The Rostra, the speakers' platform in the Forum, and the service passage behind it. Livia is dead at eighty-six, and the funeral is smaller than it should be, because Tiberius, seventy, stays on Capri and sends no letter. Antonia, sixty-four, has got it up with the household. Julia's brother Gaius, sixteen, back from four years on Capri with the emperor, delivers the eulogy. Julia is thirteen, at the back, where the household stands. Afterwards, in the corridor, Sostrata, twenty-two, hands her twelve of Livia's unused tablets, and with them a sentence of Antigone's that she has been holding for eight years. Written in Julia's own hand, within days. Julia: AD 29 She was buried and my brother Gaius spoke, and Sostrata gave me a packet of tablets in a corridor afterwards, and I am going to do those in that order. Tiberius did not come. He is on Capri and he sent word that public business detained him, and he sent no letter to be read, and the funeral was got up by the household and by my grandmother Antonia and it was smaller than it should have been and everybody in Rome could count. Gaius delivered the eulogy from the Rostra. He is sixteen. He was good. I want to be exact about how good, because he is my brother and because I have heard him talked about since as though the speech were a curiosity, a boy put up to it because there was nobody else. He was not put up to it. He asked. My grandmother told me this afterwards and was pleased about it. He did the whole of it from memory and he did not hurry and he had one joke in it, near the beginning, about her age and about the number of consuls she had outlasted, and it was funny and the crowd went with it and then he took them somewhere else inside about four sentences. I could not give the argument of it. I have tried to reconstruct it this evening and I cannot, and I heard the whole thing. Afterwards he came and found me at the back where the household was standing and said that he had been terrified and had been sick twice in the morning, and that he had got the joke out of a man who sells fish, and he was pleased with himself and wanted somebody to be pleased with him, and I was pleased with him and told him so. Then he said that the crowd had been easy and that a crowd is always easy when the person is old and nobody is angry, and that it would be different when it was somebody people had feelings about, and he said it in the way he says things, which is quick and half to himself. Afterwards he asked me how I was getting on in the red-bearded house, which is what he calls it, and I said that I had the accounts and he said that was the whole of it and that our mother had never had the accounts of anything in her life. I said that was not fair. He said it was not fair and that it was also true, and then he did our grandmother Antonia asking after somebody's health, which is a thing he has done since he was nine and which is cruel and exact, and I laughed in the street on the day of a funeral and had to stop. He was on Capri for four years with Tiberius before this and nobody in the family will say anything about those four years except that he was well treated. He does not talk about them either. He has come back very good at people and he was not particularly good at people when he went. He is my brother. He is the only one of us out of that house at present who has anything at all in front of him, and I like him, and I am putting that down because it is true today. Now the corridor. There is a service passage behind the Rostra that comes out by the steps and Sostrata brought me through it because the front was full, and she stopped in it and gave me a packet. Blank tablets. Twelve of them, in a linen wrap. They are Livia's and they are the ones she never used, good wood, the wax fresh and unmarked. I asked where she had got them. She said they were in the room and that nobody had listed them, and that she had been over there twice this month on Antigone's business and had been let go where she liked because everybody in that house has stopped asking anybody anything. Then she said the other thing, and she said it in a voice that was not her voice. She said that when two people disagree about what was necessary, the one who wrote it down first is the one who was right. I said that did not sound like her. She said it was not hers. She said Antigone said it to her when she was fourteen, in the linen store, and had said it twice more since, and that she had been waiting for the right day to give it to me and had decided this was probably it. I asked whether it was true. She said that truth is what the first surviving account decides, and that the word surviving is doing more work in that sentence than the word first, and that I should think about which of the two I could actually control. Then she said we had better go out the other way. She is twenty-two. She had that in her since she was fourteen and did not give me it for eight years, and I have been thinking this evening about what else she is holding and about the fact that this is the first time it has ever occurred to me that she might be holding anything. She said we should use the plain tablets for the house and the good ones for the other thing, and that is what we are doing. Translator: Entry four. The gallery of the Curia, the Senate house, behind the screen where women may listen. AD 29. The Senate spends an afternoon on Livia's memorial honours, and a letter from Tiberius on Capri decides them. Julia, thirteen, is behind the screen with two other women, and makes a list of who speaks. Written in her own hand, within days, in cipher. Julia: AD 29 The Senate spent an afternoon on my great-grandmother's memorial and I was behind the screen in the gallery with two other women and I made a list. The proposals first, because they were large. An arch, which had never been voted to a woman. The title Mother of her Country. That she be entered among the gods. A year of public mourning by the women. Her name into the vows of the magistrates. There were more and those were the ones that mattered. Tiberius wrote from Capri. He allowed the funeral and the ordinary honours. He refused the arch, saying that she had not wished it. He refused the deification, saying that she had not wished it. He refused the year and gave a shorter term, and he said that excessive honours to women were a departure from custom, and that she herself had cared nothing for such things, and that he would honour her memory by moderation as she would have wished. Every clause of that is defensible. Not one of them can be argued with, because the person who could have contradicted it is the person it is about. Then the House agreed with him. That is the part I made the list for. I wrote down the men who spoke. Then, when I got home, I went through my grandmother's registers for the last four years and found which of them had been in that house asking for something and how many times. Eleven of the men who spoke this afternoon in favour of moderation had called at my great-grandmother's door in the last four years. Four of them had called more than three times. Two of those four had got what they came for and I can name the thing in both cases. They did not lie. Nobody said anything untrue. What they said was that restraint was the Roman way and that Livia would have wanted it, and that the Republic did not heap arches on women, and one of them said the word ancestors eleven times, and I counted because I had nothing else to do behind a screen. And here is the thing that I cannot get round and that I am going to put in this tablet in the cipher. There was nothing to point at. She ran that household and half the men in that chamber for fifty-six years and there is no decree with her name on it, no office, no command, no law that says what she was, and this afternoon a man on Capri wrote four hundred words and took it all off her in about two hours, and the House agreed, and there was nothing anywhere in the record for anybody to hold up. She spent her whole life making certain nothing could be taken away from her by making certain nothing was ever in her hands where it could be seen. It could not be taken away. It also could not be defended, and it could not be left to anybody, and the day after she died a man in a bad temper could stand up and say she never had it, and every document in Rome agreed with him. I do not know what the other way would look like. I have thought about it since the fourth hour and I cannot see it. But I know that the thing she taught me is not sufficient, and I am thirteen and I have nobody to say that to. Translator: Entry five, the roll. The street gate of Antonia's house, before dawn, AD 29. A letter from Tiberius has been read in the Senate, and Agrippina, forty-two, is condemned to the island of Pandateria, and Nero Caesar, about twenty-three, to the island of Pontia. They are taken before it is light. Julia is thirteen and at the gate. She wrote this version within days, in plain wax, in her husband's house, where anybody might read it: the version this edition calls the roll. Julia: AD 29 The letter from Capri was read in the Senate and my mother and my brother Nero Caesar have been condemned. It was written some while ago. It was in the emperor's own hand and it had been in Rome for some days before it was read out, and it charged my mother with arrogance of speech and a defiant spirit, and my brother with vices I am not going to copy into wax. It did not ask for a penalty. That was noticed. The House did not know what was wanted and sat for a while and then adjourned it, and the people came out into the street with images of my mother and my brother and stood round the Curia and called out that the letter was a forgery and that the emperor did not know. Tiberius wrote again and was displeased and the second letter was not adjourned. My mother is to Pandateria. My brother Nero Caesar is to Pontia and is a public enemy. They came for them before dawn. I was at my grandmother's house because I had been permitted to stay two nights and I heard the horses and I went down to the street gate with Sostrata and we stood there while it was done. It was orderly. There was an officer and there were about twenty men and nobody was struck and nothing was broken. My mother came out and got into the litter and did not look at the house. I did not speak to her. There were perhaps thirty people in that street by the end of it, which is a good many for that hour, and they came out because of the horses and they stood and watched and went in again. I am going back to my husband's house in the morning. Translator: Entry five, Sostrata's copy. The same night, on the other tablet. From here on the commentary sometimes exists in two versions, the plain one for the house and the one Sostrata keeps, and this is the first place where the two do not say the same thing. Julia wrote both, within days. Sostrata, twenty-two, kept this one. Julia: AD 29 Everything in the other tablet about last night is true and I left three things out of it. The first is that I had written to my mother and had it on me. Four lines. I had done it the evening before, when the second letter was read out and everybody knew what was coming, and I had it inside my dress at the gate and I meant to put it into her hand when she passed and I had worked out where to stand. She passed within two feet of me. She was looking at the litter. The second is Gaius Petilius Rufus, who was in that street. He is of praetorian rank and he was my father's friend and he has been at my grandmother's table perhaps forty times in my life, and he was standing at the corner of the street in a cloak at that hour, which is not an hour a man of his rank is in a street by accident. I went to him. I had the four lines in my hand by then because my mother was already in the litter and I had missed her, and I went to him because he was the only person in that street I knew, and I asked him to take it to her. He turned his face away. He said nothing at all and he did not step back. He turned his head about a quarter and looked up the street at nothing, and he held it there, and he waited for me to go away. I went away. The third thing is that I know his name from somewhere else. I have the list from the fitting room last year, in the wax, in the other box, and I got it out this evening and it is the fourth name. Latinius Latiaris. Porcius Cato. Marcus Opsius. Gaius Petilius Rufus. Three of them lay in a roof for an afternoon to hear a man say something against Sejanus, and the fourth was the one Titius Sabinus liked, and the one who stood at the corner of the street last night is one of the three in the roof. He is not going to be prosecuted. He is not going to be anything. He wanted the consulship and I do not know whether he will get it and I have written his name down and put it in the second column, which is what men do, and I am leaving the third column empty as usual. I burned the four lines in the kitchen fire when I got in. Sostrata has this tablet and the house has the other one. She asked me which one was true and I said both of them. She said that was not an answer and I said I knew, and we left it. Translator: Entry six. The house of the Domitii, eleven days after the arrests, AD 29. Domitius, forty-five, says one sentence to his wife about her mother in those eleven days, and Julia, thirteen, sets down what he did instead. Anicius, the steward, brings her the dining lists. Written in her own hand. None of it went into the plain wax. Julia: AD 29 My husband has said one sentence to me about my mother in eleven days and I am going to put down what he did instead. He did nothing for four days. He was ordinary. He ate at the usual hour and went out and came back and asked me about the stable accounts, which he has never asked me about before or since, and I answered him and he was not listening. On the fifth day the dining lists changed. Anicius brought them to me because they come to me now, and there were four names off them, and none of the four had been struck through, they had simply not been written. I asked him whose instruction and he said the master's, and I asked when and he said the master had spoken to him about it in the morning, and Anicius was uncomfortable, which is worth noting because he is not a man who is easily made uncomfortable by anything. The four are men who were at my grandmother's table this year. One of them is a cousin of my mother's on the Vipsanian side. They are not enemies of anybody. They have not been charged and they are not going to be charged and I do not believe any of them is in the smallest danger. What they are is people who would be seen coming into this house. Then the letters. There were eleven sealed letters on the second shelf of the book presses on the twelfth of last November and I counted them and wrote it down, and two of them were in a hand I knew and would not write down. There are three now. I went and looked on the sixth day and there are three, and the two I knew are gone, and I have been through the braziers in that part of the house and there is nothing to find because it has been eleven days. The hand was my mother's. I am putting that in this tablet now because there is no longer any point in not putting it. He had letters from my mother. I do not know how many or how old or what was in them and I never shall, and they were almost certainly about me, because a woman writes to the man her daughter is to be married to and there is nothing whatever in that. He burned them in the week she was arrested. Now the sentence. He came into the small room on the eleventh day, in the evening, when I was at the wax, and he stood in the doorway and did not come in, and he said that he was sorry about my mother and that it was a bad business. Then he said the rest of it. He said that I was to understand that he could not help her and that nobody could help her, and that a man who tried would be helping nobody and would take his household down with him, and that he had a sister and a mother and people who depended on him and that I was one of them now. And then he said: I am not a brave man. You should know that about me and now you do. And he went. I have been three hours on that. I think he meant it kindly. I have gone at it every way and I think a man of forty-five stood in a doorway and told a girl of thirteen the truest thing about himself that he knows, on purpose, so that she would not build anything on him and then find it was not there. It is the only honest thing anybody has said to me since the horses. And it is also, at the same time and in the same words, a man telling his wife that if it comes to it he will not do anything, and telling her early, so that when the day arrives he can say he told her. Both of those are true and I cannot get a knife between them, and I have been looking for the seam in people my whole life and I did not expect to find the first one in this house. I have written none of this in the plain wax. I have written, in the plain wax, that my husband was kind to me about my mother. Translator: Entry seven. The last entry of Part One. The rooms of Agrippina the Elder in Antonia's house, being cleared. AD 29, and Julia is thirteen, turning fourteen. She burns one thing in that room and writes another, on one of Livia's twelve tablets, and Sostrata copies it before the wax has cooled. Julia: AD 29 I went into my mother's rooms today because they are being cleared and my grandmother let me, and I burned something of my own, and then I wrote a thing on one of Livia's tablets and Sostrata copied it while I was still sitting there. The rooms are not stripped. That is what I was not ready for. Somebody has been through them and taken out what the treasury wanted and what my grandmother wanted kept, and the rest of it is exactly where she left it, and there is a comb on a table and a shoe under the bed and a bowl with something in it that has gone hard. The household books are gone. I asked and they have gone to my grandmother's press and I shall have them one day and I am not going to ask for them now. Now the thing I burned. Two years ago, when I was eleven, I wrote an appeal to the Roman people. I have not looked at it since I wrote it and I found it today in the second press where I had put it, and it is four sheets. It says that my father was murdered and that his children are being destroyed one at a time and that the Roman people loved him and should not permit it. It says it well enough for eleven. There is a part in the middle about the funeral procession, out of what Sostrata told me, and it is the best part of it. It is addressed to nobody. There was no plan for how it would reach anybody. I wrote four sheets to the Roman people and put them in a press. I burned it in the brazier in that room and it took some while because four sheets do not burn quickly and I had to keep pushing them down. Then I wrote the other thing. I used one of the twelve. I want that in the record because I have been saving them for something and I did not know what and now I do. Here is what I wrote, and it is short and I got it in one go, which has not happened before. My father had the blood. My mother had the virtue. Both of them had the fame, and my father had more of it than any man alive. None of the three protected anybody. My brother Nero Caesar has all three of them today and he is on Pontia. Blood, virtue and fame are things that can be given. Protection is not among them and has to be something else, and I do not yet know what it is, and I am going to find out, and when I have found it I am not going to be told that a woman may not hold it. I read it back and it is not finished. The last part is a child's part and I know it while I am writing this. The first part is not. Sostrata was in the room. She had come in with me because I had asked her to and she had said nothing the whole time, including about the burning. When I put the stylus down she came over and read it and then went and got her own wax and copied it out, standing at the table, while I was still sitting there, and the wax was still soft enough that she was pressing carefully to keep from taking my letters up with hers. I asked her why she was doing it now. She said because the wax was still warm and it comes off cleanest then. That is not the reason and we both know it is not the reason, and I did not say so. There are two of it now. Translator: That was episode seven, Livia's Last Tablet. Next episode is eight, The House of Ahenobarbus. Augusta is a translation of The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina.