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VIII. The House of Ahenobarbus · Augusta: The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina

• VIII. The House of Ahenobarbus Translator: Augusta. The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina. Episode eight. The House of Ahenobarbus. Part Two. Bride of the Doomed. AD 30 to 37. Survival becomes a private religion. Chapter Eight. The House of Ahenobarbus. Entry one. Part Two opens in the service wing of the house of the Domitii, in Rome, in AD 30. Julia is fourteen, a year and a half married, and this is the first entry in which she runs the house rather than learns it. Domitius, forty-six, strikes the doorkeeper, Anthus, in the hall, and says something to his wife in front of the staff. Anicius, the steward, is away at the family's estate at Pyrgi. Glaucus has the wine; Philotas has the bath. Written in Julia's own hand, the same night. Julia: AD 30 My husband struck Anthus in the hall this morning and said something to me and I did not answer him, and by the ninth hour I had the day arranged so that he could not do it again, and it took about ninety seconds to set up. The striking first. Anthus is the doorkeeper. He has been the doorkeeper eleven years. A man came at the second hour with a petition and Anthus admitted him, and the man was somebody Domitius did not want to see and had said so a fortnight ago, and Anthus had not been told because the person who was supposed to tell him is Anicius and Anicius had been at Pyrgi for four days. Domitius came through, saw the man in his hall, and hit Anthus across the face with the back of his hand, once, and went on out. Then he came back and said to me that if I was going to run the house I could run the door, and that he was tired of finding people in his own hall, and he said it in front of Anthus and two of the kitchen and the man with the petition. I said nothing. I have found that this works better than anything I can think of to say, and I have been doing it since the winter, and he has never once remarked on it. Now what I did. I did not go near the door and I did not go near Anicius when he came back. I went to three people. Glaucus, who has the wine. I told him that the master had been complaining of his head in the mornings and that from now on the good Falernian was to be brought out at the eighth hour and not the sixth, and that before the eighth he was to be given the Alban, which he does not like and drinks slowly. Philotas, who has the bath. I told him that the master's bath was to be got ready for the seventh hour and to be ready properly, hot, and that he was to send in and say so, and to keep sending in. And Anthus, whose face was up on one side. I told him that the petitioners were to be brought in from the sixth hour and not the second, and that anybody arriving before the sixth was to be given somewhere to sit and something to drink and left there. That is the whole of it. Here is what happened. He was up at the second hour and there was nobody to see and nothing to drink that he wanted, so he did the accounts with me, badly, and went out to the yard. The petitioners started at the sixth and there were nine of them because they had been accumulating, and he got through four of them and was in a temper about it, and at the seventh Philotas came and said the bath was hot, and he went, because it was hot and he had been dealing with people. He came out at the eighth and the Falernian was there and he was pleased. He ate at the ninth and was in the best humour I have seen him in since the spring, and he told a long story about a horse. Nobody came into his hall who had not been let in. He said at the table that the house was running better. I said it was Anicius. I want to put down what this actually is, because I have done pieces of it before and this is the first time I have done the whole thing and had it work. I did not stop him doing anything. There was no argument and there was no request and he has not been refused anything at any point in the day, and if he were asked this evening whether his wife had crossed him he would say no and would be telling the truth. What I did was decide the order. I have four more things I want to move and I am going to do one a fortnight. Anthus has a mark on his face and I have said nothing to him about it and he has said nothing to me, and I gave him the instruction about the petitioners in the ordinary voice as though nothing had happened this morning, and he took it in the ordinary way, and that is how it is going to be in this house. Translator: Entry two. Two afternoons in AD 30. One at the house of Domitia, Domitius's elder sister, about thirty-seven, who runs four blocks of city tenements out of a book. One in the service courtyard of the Domitii with Domitia Lepida, the younger sister, about thirty-nine, who has no book at all. Julia is fifteen and learns two different trades in two days. Sostrata, twenty-three, has a view about one of them. Written in Julia's own hand, the same night. Julia: AD 30 I spent yesterday afternoon with Domitia and today with Lepida and I have learned two different trades in two days. Domitia first. She does the rents. Not the estates, which are Anicius, but the tenements in the city, four blocks of them, and she has done them since her father died and she does them herself out of a book she keeps in her own room and lets nobody touch. We went through it for three hours and she showed me everything, which I did not expect. She has a hundred and forty tenancies. She knows what every one of them pays and what it paid four years ago and which of them are behind. She has the trades of the men and the number in the family and she has, against about thirty of them, a note about something that has gone wrong in the household, a death or an illness or a son gone into the army. I asked what the notes were for. She said that a man who has just buried somebody will pay late and can be given a fortnight and will remember it, and that a man who has a son in the army has money coming in that he has not told anybody about. She said both of those in the same voice. She raises the rent on the second one. She gives the fortnight to the first, and she said that the fortnight costs her about nine sesterces and buys her a tenant who does not go elsewhere and who talks about her in the street, and that the talk is worth more than the nine sesterces. I asked whether she liked any of them. She said she had never met one. She is thirty-seven and she has run four blocks of the city for eleven years out of a book, and she has not been in any of them. Now Lepida. Lepida has no book. Lepida does not do the accounts of anything and I do not believe she could and she would say so herself and laugh about it. She came this morning and was in this house for six hours and in that time she went into the kitchen twice, sat down in the service courtyard for about half an hour, gave a woman a comb, gave a boy a coin for no reason at all that I could see, asked Philotas about his knee, and heard the whole of a thing about Glaucus and Glaucus's brother that I did not know and that I have been in this house eighteen months. She had a piece of bread standing up in the kitchen, out of the basket, with her fingers. By the middle of the afternoon there were four people in that courtyard who had come in from other parts of the house to be near her. I asked her afterwards how she did it. She said she did not do anything, and that she likes people, and that it is a great advantage to actually like them because it cannot be got any other way and everybody can tell. I do not think that is entirely true. I watched her for six hours and there were three moments where she was working and knew she was working, and the coin was one of them. But it is mostly true, and that is the difficulty, and I sat with it for some time this evening. I told Sostrata what I want out of the two of them. I want Domitia's book and I want Lepida's afternoon. Sostrata asked which one I could actually get. I said the book. She said yes, and then said that I should be careful about the other one, because a person who is trying to be liked is doing a different thing from a person who is liked, and that everybody can tell, and that the ones who cannot tell are the ones who are being paid to say they cannot. She was hard about it. I asked her why she was being hard about it and she said she was not being hard, she was being quick, because she had a good deal to get through this evening. I do not think that was the reason. Translator: Entry three. AD 31. Julia's brother Drusus Caesar, about twenty-two, is not on an island. He is in a cellar under the Palatine, in the store rooms beneath the imperial buildings, and has been since the spring of the previous year. Julia, fifteen, tries to get food to him through three men in eleven days: Tiro, a freedman of the house who does the marketing; Marcus Volusius, a knight who owes the family money and her a favour; and Chrysippus, about sixty, a corn factor with an office by the Aemiliana, the warehouse quarter by the river, and the least frightened man she has ever dealt with. Written in her own hand, the same night. Julia: AD 31 My brother Drusus Caesar is in a cellar under the Palatine and I have tried three men in eleven days and all three have refused, and I am going to put down all three because I want the names. He was taken last year and he is not on an island. He is in the building. He is under the part of the Palatine that goes down toward the Forum and there are rooms under there that were built for stores, and he is in one of them and has been since the spring of last year. The scrap came through a guard. I paid for it and I paid too much and I paid it in a way that can be traced, which I did not think about until afterwards and which I am not going to do again. Four words. It says that he is not being fed properly. Not that he is not being fed. That is what I have been three days on. A man who is not being fed at all dies in a month and there is no reason to write four words about it to anybody. Not properly means a quantity, and a quantity means somebody has decided what the quantity is, and it means this is going to go on. So I tried to send food in. Tiro first. He is a freedman of this house, he has been free eleven years, he does the marketing for the kitchen and he goes into that quarter four times a market cycle and nobody would look at him twice. I asked him on the fourth day. He said he would think about it. He came back the next morning and said no, and he was straightforward about it and did not make excuses, and he said that he had a wife and that she is not free. Then Marcus Volusius. He is a knight. He owes this house money out of a thing of Domitius's father's and he owes me a favour of my own because of a matter with his brother's estate that I sorted out in the winter, and he is exactly the sort of man who can go anywhere and be asked nothing. He said yes. Then on the third day after that he sent a man round with a message that his health would not permit him to be of service at present, which is a form of words, and I sent back asking him to come and he did not come. I have found out since that two men called on him in the interval. Nobody knows who they were and nobody wrote anything down and no charge has been laid against Marcus Volusius and none is going to be. Then Chrysippus. He is a corn factor and he has an office by the Aemiliana and he supplies four great houses and he is the least frightened man I have ever dealt with about anything. He has been rude to my husband to his face. He sat in this house last year and told Domitius the price was the price. I went to him myself. I took Sostrata and I went in the morning and I asked him. He was standing when I came in and he did not sit down while I was there and he did not offer me anything. He said no before I had finished. I said he had not heard the whole of it. He said he had heard enough of it and that he was sorry, and he said that twice, and then he said the thing I am putting in this tablet, which is that two men had been to see him on the twelfth about a matter of accounts and had asked him whether he knew the household of Marcus Volusius. That is all they asked him. They asked him whether he knew a man he does know, whose name is in his books, and they asked it in an office, about accounts, and they went away. He was shaking. That is the part. A man of sixty who has told a consular to his face what corn costs stood up in his own office in front of a girl of fifteen and shook, and he was not shaking at me. I said I understood. He said that he did not think I did, and then he apologised for saying it, and then he said it again. Nobody has been arrested. There is no case. Three men have been asked one question each, in the right order, and my brother is not going to get any food. I have written the three names down and I am not going to do anything with them. Translator: Entry four. The house of the Domitii, AD 31, on the day the news comes. Julia's eldest brother, Nero Caesar, is dead on Pontia at about twenty-five, and the family is told eleven days after the fact. Julia is fifteen. Domitius, forty-seven, tells her himself. Gaius, eighteen, is on Capri with Tiberius and writes to nobody. Sostrata, twenty-three, comes in at the eighth hour and finds her at the accounts. Written in Julia's own hand, the same day. Julia: AD 31 My brother Nero Caesar is dead on Pontia and we were told eleven days after and I am writing this on the day we were told. He was twenty-five. The account is that he was informed that the executioner was coming, and that he killed himself, and that the man who informed him was sent for that purpose. That is the official form. It is the same form as the letter to my mother's people about the food ration and it is the same form as the notice about Titius Sabinus, and I have three of these now and they use the same phrases, and I would know the hand that drafts them if I saw it and I have never seen it. He was the eldest. He was my father's heir in the plain sense and every man in Rome knew it and he was twenty-five and he was on an island with nobody, and I have not seen him for two years and the last time I saw him he was going out of my grandmother's hall and did not know I was in the doorway. Domitius told me. He came and found me and told me straight away and did not send anybody, and he stood there afterwards for a bit, and I do not think he knew what to do. I said thank you. Then I went and did the household accounts because it was the day for them. I am putting that down because Sostrata came in at the eighth hour and found me at the eighth column and stopped in the doorway, and I saw her stop, and she came in and sat down and did the other side of the page with me and we did the whole thing and neither of us said anything about it. Here is what I have been able to establish today, and I have established it in the same day as I heard, and I know what that is. Nero Caesar was condemned in the year my great-grandmother died. He was on Pontia twenty-two months. In that time nobody in Rome moved for him. Not the Senate, not the people who came out into the street with his image the day the letter was read, not one of the ninety-one men who called at his door in the year I followed the clerk. The people who came out into the street did it once. It cost them an afternoon and they went home and it never happened again, and I have thought about that all evening. He had the blood and the name and the crowd, and he had them completely, more than anybody living has them now, and he starved on an island at twenty-five and the crowd did nothing. I wrote that down in my mother's rooms two years ago and I did not know what I meant by it. There is one brother left in the cellars and one on Capri. Gaius is eighteen and he is on Capri with Tiberius and has been for four years and he writes to nobody. I do not blame him for it. I have worked out this evening that the reason Gaius is alive is that he is in the same house as the man and can be looked at, and that Nero Caesar and Drusus Caesar were sent away and could not, and that being visible has kept my brother alive. I am going to remember that. Sostrata asked whether I wanted to write anything to my mother. I said not yet. Translator: Entry five. The house of the Domitii, and the house of Antonia Major, Domitius's mother, AD 31. Publius Suillius Rufus, about thirty-two, once Germanicus's quaestor, back from exile for taking bribes and looking for a way in, wants access to Domitius, forty-seven. He has something Julia, fifteen, wants more, and she makes a trade. Four days later, at Antonia Major's table, with Domitia Lepida, about thirty-nine, watching, she says something she had no business saying. Written in her own hand, the same night, and copied by Sostrata without a word. Julia: AD 31 I sold something this week and I am going to write down what it was and what I got and then I am going to write down the other thing, which is that I said a thing at a table four days later that I had no business saying. Publius Suillius Rufus wanted access to my husband. He is about thirty-two. He was quaestor to Germanicus, which he mentions, and he was exiled under the last consuls for taking money to give judgment and he came back this year and he is looking for a way in and there are not many houses that will have him. He has people in the offices under the Palatine. That is what he has and that is what he is worth. He has a cousin who is a clerk in the works and he has two more he did not name, and he can tell me who is being fed in that quarter and how often and what the order says. I gave him Domitius. Twice a month, in the mornings, before the petitioners, with me putting his name into the list myself, which is a thing that cannot be got in this house any other way and which men have offered Anicius money for. And I let my husband think it was something else. That is the part I am going to be exact about. Domitius asked me why I was pushing the man and I did not answer him, and I did not answer him in a particular way, and he arrived at his own conclusion inside about four seconds, which is that Suillius wants something from me and I am arranging it, and that his wife has an admirer and is managing him, and he was pleased about it. He has been pleased about it for a week. He made a remark at dinner. Nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and Suillius has never so much as looked at me and would not dare. It cost me nothing and it bought me the ration list, and I have had one report already and my brother is being given bread at intervals that I now know and I am not going to write here. Sostrata said it plainly when I told her. She said that I had sold my husband's mornings for prison news and had paid for it with my own reputation and had not been asked to. I said that was correct. She asked whether I minded. I said that a reputation is a thing other people keep and that I would rather have the list. Now the other thing. Four days later I was at my mother-in-law's and there were six women and somebody brought up Vistilia's daughter, who has an arrangement with a man in the treasury and everybody knows it, and the arrangement is that he sees her husband and she is talked about. And I said something. I said that a woman who trades on being suspected has nothing left to trade with afterwards, and that it was contemptible, and I said it with some warmth, and two of them agreed with me, and Lepida looked at me across the room for about as long as it takes to draw a breath and then looked at the fruit. I knew what I was doing while I was saying it. That is the part. I did not discover it afterwards and I did not think of it in the litter. I was four days into an identical arrangement and I heard my own sentence coming and I said the whole of it anyway, at volume, in a room, about somebody I have met twice. Sostrata was standing at the wall. She did not say anything on the way home and she has not said anything since, and she has copied this entry out without a word, and I have watched her do it, and I would rather she had said something. I have not decided whether I am going to stop doing either of the two things. Translator: Entry six. The small room of the house of the Domitii, AD 31, the year Sejanus holds the consulship alongside the emperor himself and is to be married into the imperial family. Julia is fifteen; Sostrata is twenty-three. Julia has been keeping eleven documents she should not have, and she sentences them to the brazier. From here on, the copy Sostrata keeps is the one that holds what Julia cut, and this edition calls it the uncensored copy. Written in Julia's own hand, the same night. Julia: AD 31 Sejanus is consul with the emperor this year and there is to be a marriage into the house, and I have burned everything in this room that could hurt anybody, and I want the burning written down while I can still remember what was in it. The year first, because it is the reason. He has the consulship. He holds it with Tiberius, which is the arrangement Tiberius made for Drusus and for his own sons, and everybody in Rome understands what it is. He has been given a proconsular authority. And there is to be a betrothal into the house, to a daughter of it, and the girl is a child and it does not matter which of them she is, and by the time she is of age the thing will be settled either way. He is a knight from Volsinii and he is going to be co-heir of the Roman empire by the spring after next unless somebody stops it, and I cannot see who is left to stop it. Now the burning. I have been keeping eleven things I should not have. Two are letters to me from my mother, from before, when she could still write. One is a note in my brother Drusus Caesar's hand about a horse, which is nothing at all, and which has his hand on it. Four are the reports out of Suillius's cousins about the rations, in a clerk's hand, with dates on them. Three are sheets out of my grandmother's registers that I took and did not ask for, showing who called on my brothers in the year I followed the clerk. And one is the guard's scrap with the four words. Any one of them is enough. The reports are enough to finish Suillius and both of his cousins and the man who carried them and me. The register sheets are enough to finish about forty people who have done nothing except knock on a door. I have sat here for two evenings and got the whole of it into my head. The dates, the sums, the names, the order. I can give the ration intervals for the last four months without the sheet. I made Sostrata test me on it last night and I got one date wrong out of thirty-one and I did it again this evening and got them all. Then I told her to burn them. I said all of it, and I said it twice, and I said I did not want to know when it had been done. She was at the brazier for a good while afterwards. I could hear her from the other room and I did not go in, and when she came back she said it was done and I said thank you. That is the entry. There is one more thing and I am putting it in because it is the sort of thing I have started putting in. She was up very late afterwards. I woke somewhere in the middle of the night and there was a lamp still going in the small room and I could hear her at something and I thought she was writing. She was sewing. I asked in the morning what she had been doing and she said the mattress in the small room had gone at the seam and she had done it before it got worse. I said I had not noticed it. She said no, and that she had. Translator: Chapter Nine. Sejanus Falls. Entry one. The tablinum of the house of the Domitii, and the streets leading up to the temple of Apollo on the Palatine, where the Senate is next to sit. Mid-October, AD 31. Naevius Sutorius Macro, about forty, prefect of the city's fire watch, a knight who has been nobody in particular for years, calls on Domitius, forty-seven, about a horse. Julia, fifteen, is in the room with her wax, as she always is. That night she goes out with Sostrata, twenty-three, on an errand she invents. She writes it up the same evening, four days before what she thinks is coming. Julia: AD 31 Naevius Sutorius Macro came to this house four days ago on a social pretext and I have worked out this evening what he was doing, and there are new men on the approaches to the temple of Apollo tonight. He came about a horse. That is the pretext and it is a good one because Domitius will talk about horses for two hours with anybody and be pleased about it afterwards. Macro is about forty and he is prefect of the watch and he is a Roman knight from Alba Fucens and he has been nobody in particular for years. They talked about the horse for a quarter of an hour. Then he talked about other things and I was in the room with the wax because I am always in the room with the wax and nobody has ever remarked on it in this house. He asked Domitius, in the course of an hour, and in among a great deal of other conversation, the following. Whether his people at Pyrgi were settled and who held them. Whether he had any connection with the cohorts, which he has not and said so. What he thought of Lucius Arruntius, and then what he thought of two other men whose names I have written elsewhere. Whether he was in the city in the coming month or going out to the coast. And, at the very end, standing up, whether the household would be at the games. He asked all of that pleasantly and he asked nothing twice. Domitius told him the truth about every one of it and thought he had been having a conversation. I have written the questions out in order and I have looked at them for two evenings and here is what they are. They are not about my husband. Every one of them establishes the same thing, which is whether this house has men, whether it has soldiers, whether it is tied to anybody, and where it will physically be on a given day. He is counting houses. And tonight I went out with Sostrata on an errand I invented and we went along past the temple of Apollo, which is up on the Palatine and which is where the Senate is called to sit next, and there are men posted on the approaches to it who are not praetorians. They are the watch. I know the watch. They are the fire men and they are freedmen mostly and they are on the streets all night in the ordinary way and nobody looks at them. They were on the approaches. Not at the temple. On the ways up to it. So whatever is going to be read out in that building has been arranged for some days by a man who has been round the houses asking who has soldiers, and the men who will be standing outside the doors when it is read are not the men who guard the man it is about. I do not know what is in the letter. Nobody in this city knows what is in the letter. I know that it has already happened. I am fifteen and I could be entirely wrong and I am putting it down tonight, before, so that I can look at it afterwards and find out whether I can do this. Translator: Entry two. The eighteenth of October, AD 31: the day Sejanus falls. Julia, fifteen, was not in the chamber, and neither was anyone she talked to. She reconstructs the day from six sources, as a schedule of hours, the same night. The people in it are Sejanus, about fifty, the most powerful man in the empire at the first hour; Macro, about forty; Memmius Regulus, the consul, who reads the letter from Capri; and Graecinus Laco, who commands the watch. Julia: AD 31 Sejanus was destroyed today between about the first hour and the eleventh and I have spent this evening getting the hours in order from six people and I am going to set it down as a schedule because that is what it was. I was not there. Nobody I have talked to was in the chamber. What I have is the men on the steps outside, and Suillius's cousin, and a clerk of the consul's who talked to Sostrata, and the street. Before dawn. Macro comes to the house of the consul Memmius Regulus with a letter from Capri. He also sees Graecinus Laco, who has the watch under him. Two men are told the whole of it before the sun is up and neither of them is a praetorian. First hour. The Senate is called to the temple of Apollo on the Palatine. Sejanus is outside it. He has been told, or has told himself, that the letter gives him the tribunician power, which is the thing that has been coming to him all year and which everybody has been expecting since the consulship. First hour, at the door. Macro meets him on the steps and tells him quietly that this is what the letter contains, and congratulates him. Sejanus goes in. He goes in pleased. Second hour. Macro, outside, shows the praetorian cohort on duty at the temple his own commission as prefect. He tells them the emperor has appointed him and that there is a donative, and he sends them back to the camp. He puts Laco's watchmen on the doors in their place. That is the whole of the operation. It took him about a quarter of an hour and he did it after Sejanus was inside the building. Third hour to the seventh. The letter is read. It is long. Everybody I have spoken to says the same thing about it and none of them can tell me what most of it was about. It goes on about small matters. It complains. It praises two men. It rebukes two of Sejanus's friends and says nothing about Sejanus. It goes back to small matters. It goes on for hours and the House sits there and nobody can tell where it is going, and Sejanus is in his seat. Then, at the end of it, it orders his arrest. Seventh hour. Regulus says his name. Sejanus does not stand. Regulus says it again. The clerk says he said it three times and that the third time he said it loudly and that the whole House was silent, and that Sejanus said, Me? Seventh hour, at the doors. He is taken out. The men who take him out are watchmen. He goes down through the crowd on the Palatine and they follow him and he is taken to the prison. Between the seventh and the tenth. The statues come down. There are a great many of them in this city and by the middle of the afternoon they were being pulled down in four places at once and dragged, and the crowd was doing it and nobody was stopping them. Tenth hour. The Senate reconvenes in the temple of Concord, which is down by the prison, and votes his death. Eleventh hour. He is executed and the body is put out on the Gemonian steps. That is the day. Here is the part that I have written last because I have been trying to get it right. At the second hour a man of forty who has been nobody in particular sent one cohort back to barracks with the promise of money and put fire watchmen in their place, on a set of steps, and that was the whole of it. There was no fighting. There was no moment. Nine cohorts of praetorians were in a camp on the Viminal, which is a quarter of an hour away at a walk, and their prefect was inside a building on the Palatine, and between the two of them Macro put forty men with buckets, and it held, because nobody tried it. He was the most powerful man in the empire at the first hour. He was in the ground by the twelfth. And the thing that did it was a piece of paper about a command, shown to the right men in the right order, before the letter was read. Translator: Entry three. The Gemonian steps, where the bodies of the condemned are put out, and the streets between there and home, on the afternoon of the eighteenth of October, AD 31. Julia, fifteen, goes out into the city expecting something. Sextus Vettius, about fifty, who has the house on the other side of the wall and works in the treasury, finds her in the street. Written in her own hand, the same evening. Julia: AD 31 I went out into the city this afternoon expecting something and I want to write down what I expected before I write down what happened, because I shall lie about it later otherwise. I expected the case against my mother to be finished. Not undone. I am not a fool and she is on an island and the emperor put her there. I expected the thing to loosen. I expected that the man who did it being dead in a street would mean that the men who did it for him would stop, and that somebody in that city, one man, would say aloud that this had gone too far and that Germanicus's widow had been on Pandateria for two years. I got as far as the Gemonian steps. The body was there. There was a crowd round it and they were at it with their hands and with whatever they had and they had been at it for some hours, and I am not going to write what it looked like, and I stood at the top of the steps for about as long as it takes to draw a breath and then I went back up the street. Then Sextus Vettius found me. He has the house on the other side of the wall from ours and I have known him since I was married and he has eaten in our hall perhaps fifteen times. He is fifty-something and he does something in the treasury and he has a wife I like. He came up the street and took my arm and walked me along it and he was talking before he had my arm. He wanted a letter destroyed. He had written to my husband four years ago about a matter in which Sejanus's name appears twice, and it was nothing, and he told me it was nothing eleven times in four hundred yards, and he wanted to know whether the letter was still in this house and whether I would find it and burn it, and he asked me as though he were asking for a cup of water. I said I would look. Then Salvidienus, who I know slightly, at the corner of the Vicus Tuscus, about a dinner he had attended. Then a man whose name I did not get, who wanted to tell me that he had been in the House this morning and had voted for the death and had voted quickly, and who wanted me to know that he had, and who had no reason on earth to tell me and told me anyway. Then two more, and one of them was a woman, and by the ninth hour I had been stopped five times in about an hour and a half and every one of them was about the same thing. Not one of them mentioned my mother. I came out of that house this afternoon to see the sky change and I spent the afternoon being asked to lie for people, and I am fifteen and I am nobody and I am the wife of a man of no importance whatever, and I was asked five times, and the reason I was asked is that I am my father's daughter and that means something again this afternoon in a way it has not meant anything for two years, and every one of them worked that out inside a day. I have looked for Vettius's letter this evening and it is not in the presses and I do not believe it ever existed. I think he wanted to be seen speaking to me in the street. Translator: Entry four. The upper corridor of the house of Antonia Minor, late AD 31. Apicata, the wife Sejanus put away, has written to Capri and killed herself, and her letter says that Drusus, the emperor's son, did not die of an illness eight years ago. Livilla, forty-three, his widow and Antonia's daughter, is shut in a room in her mother's house. Eudemus, her physician, has been questioned. Antonia is sixty-six. Julia, fifteen, goes to the box that night and takes out a tablet in Sostrata's hand from AD 23, the four sentences she said when she was seven, and adds nothing to it. Written in her own hand, the same evening. Julia: AD 31 Apicata has written to Capri and killed herself and my aunt Livilla is shut in a room in my grandmother's house, and I have been to the box tonight and got out a tablet I wrote when I was seven. Apicata was Sejanus's wife until he put her away three years ago. Her children were killed after him. All three, and the girl was a child, and there is a thing about the manner of it which is in the city this week and which I am not going to write down. Then she wrote to the emperor. She wrote that Drusus, the son of Tiberius, did not die of an illness. She wrote that Livilla, who was his wife, and the physician Eudemus, who was Livilla's, poisoned him over some weeks eight years ago, and that Sejanus knew. Then she killed herself, which she had presumably arranged before she sent it. Eudemus has been taken and questioned and has said the same, and so has a man of Livilla's household whose name I do not have. Now my grandmother. There was a council in that house two days ago and there were four people in it and I was not one of them and my grandmother had Livilla brought in. I have this from Sostrata, who had it from a woman of that household who was outside the door with wine that nobody drank. There was no shouting. My grandmother went through the evidence, which she had, in order, and asked her daughter three questions, and Livilla answered two of them and did not answer the third. Then my grandmother said that she would not be defended. That is the sentence. She did not say that Livilla was guilty and she did not say she was innocent and she has never said either of those things to anybody since. She said that no defence would be mounted, and that the house would not go into the Senate about it, and that Livilla was to be given a room. And she has been given a room, in that house, and the door is shut, and there is nobody in the room with her. I was in that house yesterday about something else and I came along the upper corridor and my grandmother was outside that door. She was not going in. She was standing about four feet from it with her hand on the wall and she was crying, and she is sixty-six and I have never seen her do it in my life, and she did not know I was at the end of the corridor and I went back the way I came. She shut that door herself. She had the evidence brought to her and she read it and she made the decision in a room with four people, and the decision is right, because the alternative is the house of Antonia standing up in the Senate to say that Germanicus's sister did not poison the emperor's son, and losing. She chose the house. I have written that down and I have looked at it and I am going to leave it there, and I have nothing else to say about my grandmother tonight. The tablet. I was seven. It is the third tablet of that year and it is in Sostrata's hand because I could not write yet, and it is four sentences about the death of Drusus the son of Tiberius, and I have read it three times tonight. The fourth sentence is about a cup. I have not written anything under it and I am not going to. Translator: Entry five. The garden of the house of the Domitii, November AD 31. Marcus Veturius Varro, the boy from the courtyard, is twenty-one now and a soldier of the third praetorian cohort. He brings Julia, sixteen, four entries copied out of the prefect's own dockets, which could finish him, and the two of them have their first real quarrel. The four copies are pasted into the roll and are still in it. Written in her own hand, the same evening. Julia: AD 31 Marcus Veturius Varro came to this house today with copies out of the dockets and we had the first real quarrel we have ever had, and he was right, and I am putting it all down because I said something to him that I want on the record. He is twenty-one. His father is dead these two years and he is in the guard himself now, in the third cohort, and he comes here about twice a year and always about nothing. Today he came about something. He had four docket entries copied out in his own hand from the office of the prefect, which he should not have and which would finish him, and they are pasted into this roll and I am not going to take them out. They show that the cases are open. The case against my mother is open. The case against Nero Caesar, who is dead, is open, because the confiscations arising out of it are still being worked through and there are four estates in it and two of them have not been settled. The case against Drusus Caesar, who is in a cellar under the building where those dockets are kept, is open and there is an entry against it dated eleven days after Sejanus was executed. Eleven days after. So I said the thing I had been thinking since the eighteenth, which is that the veterans of the Rhine armies are in Italy in their thousands and that they were my father's and that a man in the guard could reach them, and I said it plainly, and I asked him to do it. He said no, and then he explained, and the explaining is what we quarrelled about. A dead prefect's paperwork, he said, has living beneficiaries. That the four estates out of my brother's case are in the hands of men who bought them, and those men are not Sejanus's friends and were never Sejanus's friends, and they are simply men who now own farms, and every one of them will fight to the last document to keep the case open because if the case falls the purchase falls. That there are clerks whose whole employment is those cases. That there are informers who have been paid a quarter and are owed three quarters. The machine does not stop when the man stops, he said, because the man was never the machine, and that if I thought otherwise I had watched the wrong thing on the eighteenth. I said that my father's veterans loved him. He said yes. He said that they love him, and that they will say so, and that they will weep in the street about him at their own gatherings and get up in the morning and go about their business, and that affection is not a thing that can be mustered, and that his own father served under Germanicus for eleven years and would have done anything for him alive and did nothing whatever for any of us after, and that he had been fond of him. I told him that his father had done nothing because he was a centurion who wanted his pension. That is what I said. It is exactly what I said and I have not softened it and I said it to a man of twenty-one about his own father, who is dead, and who was fond of mine. He did not answer it. He waited a bit and then he said that he would go on bringing what he could get. Then he went. He is right about all of it. I knew he was right while he was saying it, which is a thing I have noticed about myself twice now. I am not going to apologise, and I am putting that down too. Translator: Entry six. The dining room of the house of the Domitii, November AD 31. Nine at table, fourteen of the household standing behind them. Domitius, forty-seven, says that the fall of Sejanus is the restoration of the republic, and the table agrees with him. Julia, sixteen, counts the room instead. Written in her own hand the same evening, with a shorter form of it in the plain wax. Julia: AD 31 My husband said at dinner tonight that the fall of Sejanus was the restoration of the republic, and eleven people agreed with him, and I counted the room instead. He said it well enough. He said that the constitution had been overthrown by a knight from Volsinii and had righted itself, and that the Senate had done it, and that this proved the old forms were sound. Two men said hear him. A third said something about the ancestors, which is the eleventh time I have heard the ancestors this month. I have the room. There were nine at table. Behind them, standing, there were fourteen of this household. In the hall there were two men waiting who had come at the sixth hour and were still there at the tenth because Domitius had forgotten them and I had decided not to remind him. At the street door there were Anthus and a boy. And of the fourteen standing, I know of three who are carrying what is said in this room to somewhere else, and I know of two more since the eighteenth, and I do not know the rest of them. That is twenty-seven people in a house, of whom perhaps five are reporting, and every one of the nine at that table would have called the room private. Here is the thing I have been working towards for about a month and I have got it tonight. Rome is not a state with a household in it. Rome is a household with more rooms. The emperor is on an island and he governs by letters to his freedmen. The men who took Sejanus were his own household officers. The praetorians are his guard, which is to say his door slaves with weapons, and they live in a camp he built for them and they are paid a donative when a new master takes over, exactly as a house is given a payment at a funeral. The provinces are estates. The treasury is a strong room. The Senate is the hall where the clients wait, and the master comes out to it when it suits him, and the clients have a great many rights and are extremely proud of them and go home when he goes in. Everything I have watched in fifteen years works if it is read that way and nothing works if it is read the other way. My husband thinks he lives in a republic that had an interruption. He lives in a house. He is one of the clients in the hall, and he is a good one, of old family, and he will be given wine and be told he is valued, and nobody will ever explain to him that the arrangement he is proud of is a domestic one, because it would be discourteous and because he would not believe it. I am going to write this in the plain wax as well, in a shorter form, because it is not dangerous. It is only true. A household is a thing I know how to run. Translator: Chapter Ten. Death by Inches. Entry one. The house of the Domitii, January AD 32, the year Domitius, forty-eight, is consul, the highest office in Rome and one his family has held for generations. Julia is sixteen. Anicius is the steward. Marcus Aurelius Cotta is a difficult senator who calls on the first morning. This entry is on the page twice, from the same day. The first version was dictated to Sostrata, twenty-five, at the sixth hour, with the household coming and going. The second is in Julia's own hand, that evening, with the door shut. She kept both. Julia: AD 32 I am going to put the whole of today down twice, in two places on this page, and I am going to keep both, and I want it understood that this was thought about and is not being done out of temper. My husband is consul this year. Here is the first account, which is the one I dictated to Sostrata at the sixth hour with the household coming in and out, and which is true. Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, consul, received in the house at the second hour. Eighty-one callers were admitted between the second hour and the sixth. He heard four petitions in person, of which he granted two and referred one and declined one, and he declined it courteously and gave his reason. He spoke to the delegation from Pyrgi about the aqueduct and knew the figures and did not need to be prompted. Marcus Aurelius Cotta, who is difficult, said afterwards that he had been received better in this house than in any house he had been in this month. The consul's wife was present from the fourth hour. Every word of that is accurate. He was good. He is better at that than at anything else he does and he was better at it today than I have seen him, and I stood at the side of that room for two hours and was proud of him, which I have not written down before and which I am writing down now. Here is the second account. Sostrata: At about the tenth hour, after the callers had gone, the master came into the small room where I was at the accounts and asked me about a sum of four hundred and twenty sesterces entered against the kitchen in the second week of the month. He had been through the household copy himself, which he has never done. I told him it was the fish for the reception, which it was, and that the price was the price because the reception was on a market day and everybody in the city was buying fish. He said that he was not a fool. He said it four times over about a quarter of an hour, and the third time he said it he took the tablet out of my hands, and the fourth time he put it down on the table hard enough that the wax took the mark of his thumb. He said that I made him look a fool in his own house and that everybody knew who ran it. Then he said that he was the consul of the Roman people and that this was his house. He was not drunk. He went out and sent Anicius in an hour later to say that the fish had been correct. Julia: That is also true and both of those things happened today, in the same building, about four hours apart, to the same man. Now the part I want on the page. I dictated the first one in the ordinary way with people coming through and Sostrata wrote it and it is on the roll in her hand. I wrote the second one myself, this evening, with the door shut, and it is on the roll in mine, on the same page, directly under it. I could have burned the first. It would have taken a moment and there would be no record of the reception at all, and this account would then say that my husband is a man who shouts at his wife about fish, and that would be a lie by omission and would be a good lie because it is the sort a person tells about a man they are tired of. I could have burned the second, which is what everybody does. The history men will get the first one, if they get anything. They will get eighty-one callers and Cotta's remark, because that is what survives, because that is what people write down and keep. I am keeping both because I want to know, when I am old, which of the two I actually married. The thumb mark is still in the wax on the household tablet. I have not smoothed it and I am not going to, and I have put the tablet at the back of the second press where nobody looks. Translator: Entry two. The hall of the house of the Domitii, AD 33. Julia is seventeen, and this is the third time in eighteen months a man has come to the door to tell her that somebody is dead. Her brother Drusus Caesar has died in the cellar under the Palatine, at about twenty-five, after three years there. The man is Eucaerus, about thirty, a freedman of Antonia's, doing this for the second time, and this time he has brought notes. The nine questions in the entry are Julia's, and she asks them in this order. Written in her own hand, within days. Julia: AD 33 Three men have come to this door in eighteen months to tell me that somebody is dead, and the third one brought notes, and I am going to write down the questions rather than the answers because the questions are the only part of this that is mine. The first came about Nero Caesar, two years ago. That entry is written and I am not going back to it. The second came in October about my mother. The third came about Drusus Caesar, and it is Eucaerus both times, and he is a freedman of my grandmother's and he is about thirty and he has now done this twice and he knew what was coming and had written things down beforehand. He said so at the door. He said, before I had asked him anything, that he had the answers to what I would want and that he had got them written because last time he had got two of them wrong and had had to come back. I asked him to sit down and he would not. Here are the questions. I have asked all nine of these three times now and I ask them in this order. Where. Not the island or the building. The room. Who was in the room at the time. Who was in the room in the hour before. Who found the body. How long between the death and the report going out, and who wrote the report. What was done with the body. Burned, buried, taken anywhere, and by whom. Whether anybody was paid anything afterwards, and who. What the household of the place did the next day. And the ninth, which I added after the second time: what has happened to the men who were on that duty since. Drusus Caesar died in a cellar under the Palatine some time before the middle of the year. He had been down there three years. The answer to the eighth question is that the household went on as before, because it was not a household, it was a building where records are kept and there are clerks in it all day and there have been all three years, and they came in the next morning and worked. The answer to the sixth is that he was taken out at night and burned and that Eucaerus does not know where and has asked three people. The answer to the fourth is a guard whose name he could not get. He was twenty-five, or near it. He was in a room under a building I have been into four times in the last two years about other business, and there were men over his head doing accounts, and it went on for three years, and he was my brother. Nobody in this city is going to be able to tell me what any of them looked like at the end, and I have decided that I do not want to know that and I am not going to ask it, and I have thought about whether that is cowardice and I do not think it is. What I want is where, and who, and when the report went out. Those can be checked. The other thing is only pain and it cannot be checked and it would be told to me by a man who was paid to be there. Eucaerus said one thing that was not an answer to a question. He said that when they took the body out there was a good deal of the mattress on the floor and that it had been pulled apart, and he stopped, and then he said that the man who told him had not understood what he was looking at until somebody else explained it. I said thank you and asked whether he wanted anything and he said no, and he stood in the hall for a bit longer and then went. The nine questions are written out fair at the top of a new tablet. There is nobody left to ask them about. Translator: Entry three. Worked over several weeks, in late AD 33. Agrippina the Elder has died on Pandateria on the eighteenth of October, aged forty-six, after four years on the island. Julia, seventeen, gathers four accounts of how. From Marcus Herennius, a centurion who was there the whole four years and is now with the fleet at Misenum. From a soldier called Rufus. From a washerwoman of the island. And from Julius Gracilis, a clerk in the office that handled the reports. She rules them into four columns, side by side, and never collapses them into one. Julia: AD 33 I have four accounts of how my mother died and I have ruled them into columns and they do not agree, and I am going to leave them in columns because collapsing them into one account is exactly what the people who gave them to me would like. The four are these. Marcus Herennius, a centurion, who was on Pandateria for the whole of the four years and is now at Misenum and is drawing his pay. A soldier called Rufus, who was there for the last two years, and who came to this house for money and got it. A woman of the island whose name I have and am not writing, who did the washing for that establishment and who has never been off Pandateria in her life and who was talked to by a man I sent. And Julius Gracilis, a clerk in the office that handled the reports, who never went near the place and has the paper. I asked all four the same nine questions and I asked them in the same order and I asked three of them through other people because I cannot go to Misenum. Here is where they agree. She stopped eating. All four. The date is within a fortnight in all four. She was fed by force. All four, and Gracilis has it in the report in the form of words that was used, which is that measures were taken for her preservation. It went on some time. Herennius says weeks and Rufus says he does not know and the washerwoman says a long while and Gracilis has no date for the beginning of it. She died on the eighteenth day of October. Here is where they do not agree. The eye. Herennius says that a centurion struck her on an occasion when she was resisting and that she lost the sight of one eye afterwards, and that the man was reprimanded, and he gives the name of the man and it is not himself. Rufus says that he heard about it and was not there. The washerwoman says that she saw her twice at a distance in the last year and that there was something wrong with the left side of her face, and that she could not say what. Gracilis says there is nothing whatever in the file about an injury and that if a centurion had struck her there would be, because that is the sort of thing the office requires to be entered, and he said that in the tone of a man defending his office and not defending anybody in it. So: three men and a woman, and one of them says a blow, one says he heard of a blow, one says something about a face at a distance, and one says the paper is silent. Four days on that, and here is the only thing I am prepared to write. The thing they all agree about is the force-feeding. That is the one that took more than one man. A blow is one man in a moment and can be denied by everybody who was not standing there. Holding a woman of forty-six down and opening her mouth is three or four men, repeatedly, over weeks, on a schedule, and it goes in the report because it has to be authorised, and it is in the report, in a form of words, and the form of words is preservation. So the state's own paper says they did it, in language chosen to say they did it, and the same paper is silent on the eye, and I am asked to believe the paper about the second thing. I am not going to decide about the eye. I am going to keep the four columns and I am going to keep the names, and I have put Herennius's name in the second column of the other list and I have written against it that he was there for four years and told me about a blow he says he did not strike. He is at Misenum. He is a centurion of the fleet and he is about fifty and he will be alive in ten years and so shall I. Translator: Entry four. The Senate house by report, and the public calendar board, in daylight, late AD 33. A letter from Capri has gone through the charges against Agrippina again, after her death, and added a new one, linking her to Asinius Gallus, who has starved under guard this same year. The Senate votes what it votes, and a clerk alters the calendar. Julia, seventeen, goes down with Sostrata, twenty-six, to look at it. Written in her own hand, within days. Julia: AD 33 A clerk altered the calendar and I went and looked at it. The letter came from Capri after she was dead. It went through the charges again, which are that she had been arrogant in speech and defiant in spirit, and it added that she had been the mistress of Asinius Gallus and that his death had made her want to die. Asinius Gallus has been under guard for three years and he starved this year as well, and the two of them are put together in that letter for the first time in anybody's hearing, and the reason they are put together is that a woman who starved herself for grief over a lover is a woman who was not starved by anybody. The Senate thanked the emperor for his clemency in not having her strangled and thrown down the steps, which was said in the House, in those words, as a compliment. Then it voted a yearly thanksgiving to Jupiter on the eighteenth of October. And then it entered the day of her birth among the days on which no public business may be done. That is the part I went to look at. I went down two days later, in the middle of the morning, with Sostrata, in an ordinary litter, and we went to where the calendar is displayed and I stood in front of it in daylight with people going past behind me. It is a board. It has been corrected before and there are places where the paint has gone on twice. Against her birthday there is now a mark, and the mark means a day of ill omen, on which the courts do not sit and the assemblies do not meet and no magistrate does anything, and a man reading it in twenty years will see the mark and will not know why it is there and will not ask, because there are a good many such days and they all have reasons and nobody remembers any of them. Somebody was paid to do that. A man came with a brush and a pot and he was told which line and he did it, and it took him a few minutes, and I would like to know his name and I am not going to get it. They did not erase her. That is what I want down and I have taken two days to get it right. Erasing leaves a mark. A scraped place on a board is a thing people look at. What they did is add. They put one small mark against one day, and the day is now a day about ill omen, and in twenty years the day will simply be a day the courts do not sit, and her name is not on the board at all and never was, and there is nothing anywhere for anybody to point at. I have been trying to think of the thing that would undo it and there is not one. A woman cannot go to that board with a brush. I stood there long enough that Sostrata came up beside me, which she does not do in the street. I said that I wanted to remember the board. She said that I would. Then we went home and I did the accounts, because it was the day for them, and this is the eleventh hour and I am going to say the rest of it now. My mother was born on a day. That day is in the year, every year, and it comes round whatever anybody does, and it will come round next year and I shall be in a room somewhere and so will everybody else in this city, and the only difference the Senate has made is that on that day the courts will not sit. They have not taken the day. They have taken what anybody is allowed to do in it. I have understood something this evening about what is actually being defended in this city and I am too tired to write it properly and I am going to try again tomorrow. Translator: Entry five. The house of the Domitii, nine weeks after Pandateria, AD 33. A letter comes from Gaius, twenty-one, on Capri, and it is about the games, and the fish, and a boat. Julia is seventeen. Her sisters have both been married this year, Drusilla to Cassius Longinus and Julia Livilla to Marcus Vinicius, and both matches were arranged from Capri. Sostrata, twenty-six, reads the letter after her. Written in Julia's own hand, within days. Julia: AD 33 A letter came from my brother Gaius on Capri and I read it three times and decided he was a coward, and Sostrata found the thing in it that I had gone straight past. It is one sheet. It is about the games. It is about a man there who has an arrangement of mirrors and about the emperor's health, which is good, and about the fish they get there and about a boat, and there is a sentence at the end about the weather and one about hoping I am well. There is nothing in it about our mother, who has been dead nine weeks. There is nothing about Nero Caesar or about Drusus Caesar. There is nothing about our sisters, who have both been married this year, Drusilla to Cassius Longinus and Livilla to Vinicius, and both matches were arranged from Capri and he was in the building when it was done. I said several things about it that I am not going to write down and one of them was about our father. Sostrata took the sheet and read it and asked me about the boat. There is a sentence about a boat. It says that they went out in a boat on a day when the water was flat and that they got as far as the point and had to come back because the wind changed, and that he had not been out in a boat since he was a boy with our father on the Rhine and that he had forgotten how it was done. Our father never took him out in a boat on the Rhine. He took him out on the Rhine four times that anybody has ever mentioned and it was on the bridge or on the road, and Gaius was three and four years old, and there is nothing about a boat in any account of those years and Sostrata was there. But we had a thing when we were children which was that when we wanted to say a thing in front of adults we said it as a memory of something on the Rhine that had not happened, and the false part was the message, and there were about six of them and boat was one and I have not thought about it in eleven years. Boat means I cannot write to you. Not that he is watched, which he would expect me to assume. That he cannot write. That there is no sheet that leaves that island which is not read before it goes and after it arrives, and that everything in that letter is in it because it can be in it. So the letter is not about the games. The letter says: I have read the reports, I know what has been done to our mother and our brothers, I cannot say one word about any of it, and I am telling you that I cannot in the only way left to me, and I have buried it in a sentence about a boat and I am trusting you to find it. I did not find it. I read it three times and called him a coward in this room out loud and a woman of twenty-six who was fifteen when we invented the thing found it in about a minute. I am going to write back about the mirrors. And I am not going to forgive him for it, and I want that on the page, because he is twenty-one and on an island with the man who did all of this and he had one sentence available to him and he used it, and I have spent this evening being angry with him for making me work for it, and I know exactly how unjust that is and I am angry anyway. Translator: Entry six. An office in the works quarter of the city, AD 33, in the year of the credit shortage, when loans are being called in all over Rome and Tiberius has put a hundred million sesterces of his own money into the banks to stop it. Julia, seventeen, goes herself, about the plaque for her mother's niche in the Mausoleum of Augustus, a place Antonia, sixty-eight, has secured without telling anybody. The clerk she is put in front of is Priscus, about twenty-eight, junior in the room. Written in her own hand, within days. Julia: AD 33 I went to an office about a plaque and I got three words more than I was offered, and it took two hours and it is the only thing I have won all year. The tomb first. She is to go into the Mausoleum. That was not certain and I want that understood: there was a fortnight in which it was not certain, and it was settled by my grandmother, who did it without telling anybody she was doing it and has never referred to it since. But the terms are set by the office that has charge of the building, and the terms as they came to me were these. No inscription beyond the name. No public rite. Not more than eleven mourners, which is a number somebody arrived at and I would like to know how. And the niche is not to be one of the ones on the front. I went myself. I did not send. The office is a room in the works quarter with four clerks in it and it was busy because of the money. There is a shortage of coin in the city this year. The old law about how much of a fortune must be in Italian land has been called in and everybody is calling in loans at once to buy land to comply with it, and the loans cannot be paid, and men who were rich in the spring are selling at a quarter. Tiberius has put a hundred million into the banks out of his own money, to be lent for three years without interest against land at double value, which has stopped the worst of it and has made him popular for the first time in fifteen years. So every clerk in that quarter is doing land valuations and has been since the summer, and the man I was put in front of had been at it since dawn and was tired and had four other people waiting. His name is Priscus and he is about twenty-eight and he is junior in that room. I did not tell him who I was. He knew. Everybody in that room knew inside a minute and one of the others got up and went out. I asked for six things and expected to get one. He said no to the rite, and no to the number of mourners, and no to the front, and he said all three of those quickly because they had been decided above him and he had no room in them. Then we came to the inscription. The offer was the name. Julia Agrippina, and the two dates. I asked for her father. He said that daughter of Marcus Agrippa was a matter of fact and not an honour and he could see no objection, and then he sat there for a bit and said that he would have to put it up and that he thought it would come back agreed and that if I would leave it with him for eight days he would try it. It came back agreed. So the plaque says her name and her dates and three words, and the three words are the name of a man who has been dead forty-one years and who cannot be objected to by anybody, and I got them out of a tired clerk in a room where everybody was doing land valuations, in the eighth week after the Senate marked her birthday on a board. I gave Priscus nothing. He did not ask for anything and he would not have taken it, and I have written his name down in the first column and against it I have written that he did a thing he did not have to do on a busy afternoon, and there are four names in that column and this is the third one I have added in eleven years. I am aware of the size of it. Three words, and I have been pleased about it for two days, and I am going to write that down rather than pretend I have not. Translator: Entry seven. The Mausoleum of Augustus, at the sealing of Agrippina's niche, late AD 33. Eleven mourners are permitted, among them Antonia, sixty-eight, and Claudius, forty-three. Julia is eighteen now. Everybody goes, and she stays, and Sostrata, twenty-six, stays eight feet behind her. This one is not in wax. It is written the same night in permanent ink, on a sheet, and Julia says why. Sostrata did not copy it. Julia: AD 33 This is in ink, on a sheet, and not in wax, and that is the whole of what I have to say about tonight, and I am going to explain it and then set it down. The niche was sealed this afternoon. There were eleven of us. My grandmother, my uncle Claudius, my sisters and their husbands, myself and my husband, and three of the household who have been with her since before I was born and who were permitted because I asked for three and was given three. It took about a quarter of an hour. The plasterer was very careful and did it well and I watched his hands the whole time. Then everybody went and I stayed, and Sostrata stayed because Sostrata stays. I talked to my father. I have not done that since I was about nine and I did not decide to do it and I am not going to write down most of it. What I said at the end of it was that I would have a child that no clerk could put a mark against, and that when they came to that child's name with the brush there would be so much of it on so many boards in so many provinces that a man with a pot of paint would not know where to start, and that I would do it whatever it took and out of whatever I could get, and that I was sorry about the whatever. Sostrata was about eight feet behind me and heard the whole thing. On the way out she asked me a question and she asked it in the flat voice. She asked whether what I wanted was justice for my mother or command. I said that I did not accept that those were two things. She said that they are two things, and that everybody who has ever done what I am proposing to do has said what I have just said, and that she was not arguing with me, she was asking me to notice the date. I said I had noticed the date. Then she said the other thing, which is that a child is a person. I have thought about that for four hours and I am not able to answer it and I am putting the vow down anyway, and I have chosen the ink deliberately and I want the reason on the page. Everything I have written since I was seven is in wax. Wax is warmed and smoothed and written over and that is the whole virtue of it, and I have smoothed a great deal in eleven years and I shall smooth a great deal more, and there is nothing in this house I could not take out in an evening with a lamp and a flat blade. Ink on a sheet cannot be taken out. It can be burned, which is a different thing, because burning is an act and leaves an absence and somebody has to decide to do it. So. I shall have a son, and he shall be Caesar, and I shall put him there myself, and I shall not be told at any point in it that a woman may not. My mother was right and my mother is in a wall. My father was loved and my father is in an urn. My brothers had everything and two of them are dead and the third cannot write to me about a boat. What was wanting in all four of them was command, and command is not given to anybody in this family, it is taken, and I am eighteen years old and I am writing this in ink so that I cannot come back and soften it when I find out what it costs. That is on a sheet, in ink, in my own hand, and it is in the second press under the household copies where nobody looks. Sostrata has not copied it. I asked her whether she was going to and she said that there was no need, because she was standing eight feet behind me when I said it and she is not going to forget it, and then she went to bed. Translator: That was episode eight, The House of Ahenobarbus. Next episode is nine, The Sun Before the Ground. Augusta is a translation of The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina.