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II. Born Among Eagles · Augusta: The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina

• II. Born Among Eagles Translator: Augusta. The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina. Episode two. Born Among Eagles. Part One. Daughter of the Rhine. AD 15 to 28. A beloved house learns that it is mortal. Chapter One. Born Among Eagles. Entry 1. Palatine Hill, Rome. The archive room of the house of Antonia Minor. AD 49, Julia, aged thirty-three. She is writing of 6 November AD 15, at the Oppidum Ubiorum. Germanicus, aged twenty-nine, Agrippina the Elder, aged twenty-eight, Sostrata, aged eight, Albruna, aged nine. Julia: AD 49 The roll is on the table between us and it is not clean. Sostrata has weighted the corners with a lamp, an inkpot and two of my rings, because the wax has gone brittle at the edges and wants to curl back on itself, and where it has worn thin the stain has come through to the other side. It is brown now. It has been brown for very nearly as long as I have been alive. I am Julia Agrippina, daughter of Germanicus Julius Caesar and of Vipsania Agrippina; great-granddaughter of the Divine Augustus; sister of the late Gaius Caesar; and, since the Kalends of January of this year, wife of Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, First Citizen. I am thirty-three years of age. Until this morning I had never once looked at the record of my own birth. That is Sostrata's doing, and I set it down here so that she may have the credit and I may have the last word. For a year my insolent yet beloved attendant has been at me to make a proper commentary, in order and in my own words, the way any man of rank leaves an account of his own campaigns rather than waiting upon the history men to invent one for him, and for a year I have told her that I have no leisure for it. What I have learned this year is that I have no leisure for anything else either, since a great many people are writing my life at speed and not one of them has thought to ask me. She is insolent. She is also, in this, correct. She has reminded me that I am to begin with my birth. I am not going to begin with my birth. Not yet. I shall begin with the men who are the reason I am writing at all. There are those who call the marriage a scandal, and I know how many of them there are and I know precisely what each of them wants. My husband is my father's own brother, which is a fact that has been overblown beyond any reasonable proportion by a handful of men in the Senate who are pursuing their own advancement and who have never in their lives objected to anything a man of their own faction wanted. I will note for the record, since nobody else intends to, that the Senate asked him to marry me. In public. Lucius Vitellius stood up and made the request in the House, the law was altered by vote and by proper procedure, and not one of the men who now mutter about it in the baths stood up on that day and said a word against it, and I shall not be lectured upon piety by men who were silent when the vote was called. Narcissus muttered. Narcissus wanted Aelia Paetina brought back into the bed, on the reasoning that a woman he has handled once may be handled twice, and he is put out that the House asked on my account and not on his, and that is the whole of his objection, dressed up in the language of the ancestors. And if I am to hear about oaths and about propriety I would remind the mutterers of Cassius Chaerea, tribune of the Praetorians, who swore to guard the person of the First Citizen and who instead cut my brother down in a corridor on his way to his luncheon, and who talked a very great deal about the Republic while he did it, and who has been dead these eight years, and good. But I digress already. Sostrata has reminded me again, and she has now moved the lamp. So. My birth. Four of the household are still at work in the next room and this is the third day of it, and I will say at the outset that my grandmother Antonia's archive is a great deal less than it was promised to be. The army returns were copied out by clerks and camp slaves in the field, sent south by whatever ship was leaving, and stacked here in the order they came off the boats, which is the only order they are in. Out of the whole of it Sostrata has brought me four things worth having. My mother's own diary of that winter. The household birth roll, with the stain on it. Two returns out of the Ubian camp. And Albruna, who was there. Albruna I shall come to. Sostrata first, since without her there is no account at all and she would not thank me for the omission. My grandmother Antonia Minor bought her, and her mother along with her, in the year before my parents went north, and made a present of the pair of them to my father and mother for the journey. Two Greek-speaking women, which was represented as a kindness, and which was a kindness. My grandmother is a generous woman. My grandmother is also the woman who told my father to his face that a legionary camp is no place for a wife and no place whatever for children, and who lost that argument as everyone lost every argument with my father, and it took me until nearly thirty to see what two attendants of her own choosing, in my mother's rooms, on the far side of the Alps, were also for. Sostrata was about five when she went north and about eight when I was born. That is old enough to fetch and carry, which she did, and precisely old enough to remember a thing badly and be certain of it forever, which she also does. Her mother is dead. I have never once caught Sostrata in a lie, which I find I do not altogether like. Then there is Albruna, who is a year or two older than Sostrata and who is free, and whom I shall have to explain, since the histories never will. Her father is a chief among the Ubii and he is alive and prospering to this day. The Ubii sit on our bank of the Rhine because Agrippa moved them there, and they stay quiet because staying quiet is paid for, and part of the payment was a daughter. She came into my mother's household as a fosterling, which is the word the treaty uses, and she has remained in it as a surety, which is the word everybody means. While she eats at a Roman table her father keeps his neighbours in order and his neighbours know exactly why. She was seven or eight when this was arranged for her and nobody consulted her about it. More on that later, because I am not finished being uncomfortable about it. She was also, on the night in question, in the building. She was born within a mile of the place where I was born. I was the visitor. My father, then. He was kind, and everyone in Rome loved him, which is a thing people say about the dead and which in his case happened to be true, and I have gone to some trouble to check it against people who had no reason to flatter me. The Golden Boy, they called him, in every street and at every station. He loved his family to a degree that his own mother thought unwise and could not bear to be parted from us for a single month, and so he insisted that my mother, with whom he was passionately and quite openly in love, accompany him on campaign, which was thought noble and properly Roman, if unusual, and not wholly outlandish, since it is said in this family that my grandfather Drusus was never willingly parted from my grandmother Antonia either. That last is not true and I shall correct it here, since nobody else is going to. Antonia never went north. She stayed in Rome and ran the house and wrote letters. And it is said among the women of my family, though it has never once been set down by the history men, that one of those letters gave my grandfather the plan that carried him to the Elbe, the first Roman to stand upon that bank. I cannot vouch for it. My mother repeated it often, and I know perfectly well why she repeated it, and I notice that by the time my mother had finished with the story the woman was in the tent. Now, the circumstances, because they are the reason a granddaughter of Agrippa was delivered in a timber fort and not in a house. The histories recount that upon the death of my great-grandfather Augustus the legions along the Rhine rose in revolt over pay, and men in the Forum will tell one, with great confidence, that the legions always mutiny when an emperor dies, as though it were a rite with a fixed season and a proper form. Augustus was the first emperor to die. There was no custom. There was a very large number of armed men discovering in the same hour that the man they had sworn to was gone and that nobody could tell them what their oath was now worth. The news came south to Rome by every ship and every dinner table: that the common soldiers of the Fifth Alaudae and the Twenty-First Rapax, in the summer camp under Aulus Caecina Severus, had worked themselves into a frenzy over pay, over the years they had been kept past their term, over centurions who had sold them exemptions from labour and beaten them when they could not pay for them, and that they had murdered those centurions and thrown the bodies into the Rhine. The First and the Twentieth went with them. My father had been sent north by Augustus two years before to hold Gaul and the armies of the Rhine, so he was already there, and he put the mutiny down himself, with his own voice, in his own camp, while the Senate was still deciding what it thought. Tiberius did not send him to do it and never thanked him for having done it. Every man in Rome understood what that meant. I believe Tiberius understood it best of all, and I believe that summer is where the long business begins that finished at Antioch four years later. So to the roll, which is the only part of this I would swear to in a court, and which gives me very little. I was born at the Oppidum Ubiorum, which is the Ubian town, and which is not the same thing as the Ara Ubiorum, which is the altar, and I intend to be exact about that because nobody else ever is. It is a crude place. Timber and mud, and a shrine to Juno Lucina that a mason from Puteoli would have been ashamed to put his name to. The day was the eighth before the Ides of November, in the consulship of Drusus Caesar and Gaius Norbanus. The labour began upon one day and ended upon the next, and I arrived in the morning. My mother, whom the history men call Agrippina the Elder as though she were a size of amphora, and whom my father called his beloved Vipsania, wrote in her diary that I was born on the bank of the Rhine under a full moon, red as a shield. Albruna says there was no moon at all. I read the line out to her twice, slowly. "There was cloud," she said. "All that night, cloud. I filled the lamps twice before you came and I filled them again after. I would not have filled them twice under a full moon." "My mother wrote it down." "Your mother was busy." Sostrata laid her hand flat on the table, which is what she does instead of speaking when she believes I am about to be foolish. "A sliver, then," I said. "You would allow a sliver." "I would allow that there may have been a moon," Albruna said. "I did not see it. I saw cloud, and I saw the lamps, and I remember the lamps because they were mine." I have put both of them on the roll. Consider what each of them was, though, before anyone decides which to believe. My mother was in the bed. She was eight and twenty, the far side of the Alps from her own house, in a fort full of men who had put their officers in the river the year before, and she was writing for a reader, as she was always writing for a reader. A blood moon over the Rhine and a child of the divine blood delivered beneath it is a better version of a true night. My mother had a gift for the better version, which I have inherited and, I flatter myself, improved upon. Albruna was nine years old, she was carrying oil, and she had nothing whatever to gain by the answer. The rest I have from the roll, and from Sostrata, who was old enough to be underfoot. My mother and father brought offerings to Juno Lucina at that shrine: cakes, baked by Albruna's mother, which Albruna remembers vaguely and remembers nothing else about, and which I take as evidence in her favour, since a liar would have remembered the cakes; and Campanian wine, the good wine, which had come the whole length of the Rhine road for the purpose and which cannot have been improved by the journey. My birth was then celebrated across the legions, and here I must correct the version that is going about, which has my father ordering the army's priests to perform the sacrifices. An army has no priests. An army has a commander, and my father was an augur besides, and he made the offerings himself, at the principia, in front of the standards, to Jupiter Optimus Maximus and to the Genius of the Roman People, with a victimarius to hold the beast and a haruspex to read what was inside it. The legions that had murdered their own centurions the previous autumn stood in their ranks and gave thanks for the birth of a girl. Then he made a second offering, to Apollo, who belongs at the games and the sickbed and has no business at a birth, and he offered no explanation for it and required none. Apollo was Augustus's god. Apollo's temple stands against the wall of the house my great-grandfather lived in. On a mud bank in Germania, in front of soldiers who had lately forgotten whose men they were, my father sacrificed to the god of the divine dead and let every one of them draw the line for himself, and if anybody supposes that my father was a simple soldier who happened to be popular, I would ask them to explain that sacrifice to me. On the eighth day I was purified and given my name, Julia Agrippina, and given my lunula, a thin crescent of silver, the smallest moon there is, to turn away the evil eye. There were no priests at that either, whatever anyone says: it is a household rite, the family and the hearth and the fire on it, and it is the rite that makes a child a person and gets her counted. My mother put the lunula about my neck with her own hands. Albruna was in the room. She has nothing to say about it. Sostrata has been writing all this while and she has left my mother's line exactly as my mother made it, full, and red as a shield. She has not asked me about it. She copied it out an hour ago and she has been waiting since, in the manner she waits, which involves no waiting of any visible kind. I could strike it. It is one word and there is a whole afternoon of light left. I am going to keep both of them on this roll, side by side, where I can see what I am doing, because the only value this exercise has is that I do not lie in it about the lying. Albruna's cloud is true and it is worth nothing to anybody. My mother's moon is better. It is better for my father, who has earned better, and it is better for me, and in fifty years there will be nobody living who filled those lamps. When it is copied out fair, the moon will be full. Translator: Entry 2. The same room. AD 49, Julia, aged thirty-three. She is writing of the autumn of AD 15 and the winter following, on the Rhine. Agrippina the Elder, aged twenty-eight, Germanicus, aged thirty, Gaius, aged three. Julia: AD 49 My mother kept her own accounts. Nobody in this house ever thought to tell me so. Sostrata found the books this morning at the bottom of a chest of my grandmother's correspondence, four of them, in a hand with a steward's discipline in it and none of a lady's ease, and I have had them open in front of me since the second hour and I have eaten nothing. There was a freedman of Vitellius's waiting in the outer room while I read, wanting something for his patron, and I had bread taken out to him and sent him away with a word to carry back, and I did not think about it again for the rest of the day. Before the books, the story, since everybody in this house has heard the story and nobody in this house has seen the books. My mother told the bridge perhaps three hundred times and I can still do it in her voice. She always began with the weather, because she knew that a story about a river wants the river in it before anything else. Late in the autumn, she would say, and the water high and the colour of iron. Caecina had taken four legions east across the Rhine and they had been a long time coming back, and then they began to come back in the wrong order, and in pieces, with men on foot who had gone out mounted. And a rumour got over the water ahead of them, which is what rumours do: that the column was broken, that the Germans were behind it, and that the whole German nation would be at the bridgehead by nightfall. There were men on our bank who went down to cut the bridge. She named them at this point. Not always the same names, I notice now that I am no longer six years old, but always names, and always delivered flatly, in the manner of a woman listing the contents of a room. And she said no. That is where she stopped, every time, in the same place, after those four words, and she let it sit there. If it was a good table somebody would eventually ask what happened then, and she would say, quite mildly, that the army came over the bridge, and that would be the end of it. Nobody ever asked a second question. There is no second question. Either one would have stood on that bridge or one would not have, and everyone at every table she ever told it at knew within a heartbeat which of the two they were, and that is precisely why she told it. Then she stood at the head of the bridge while eight legions came off it. She gave out clothing to the men who came off cold. She had the wounded seen to as they passed. And she thanked them, one at a time, in the mud, in the dark. I have heard that story repeated by men who were not born when it happened. A tribune told it to me at my own table four years ago, not knowing whose daughter he was performing it for, and he had my mother's pause in exactly the right place, three men removed from her and twenty years on, and I let him finish and I thanked him for it. Tiberius has never forgiven any of us for it. He said, or is reported to have said, that a woman had gone among the maniples, had approached the standards, had attempted largesse, and that when a general's wife did such things there was nothing left for the general to do. He said it as a complaint about propriety. I have read the thing a dozen times. It is a man saying, in the only words available to him, that he had watched a woman conduct government with her hands and could think of nothing to call it. Nor could anybody else. That is my whole family in a sentence and I am coming to it slowly because I have only understood it properly today. Now the books. Two hundred and eleven cloaks. Forty-one blankets. Vinegar, honey and linen, bought at camp prices from a sutler by the name of Petronius who has put his mark on the entry with the wrong end of the stylus. It is in her own hand, in a column, with the cost written beside each item and a running total at the foot of the page, and the total is charged not to the legions and not to the province but to our own household, which is to say to my father, which is to say to the Julian land in Italy. I have read that column perhaps twenty times today. Nobody has two hundred and eleven cloaks about their person. Nobody standing on a bridge in a panic at dusk has anything about their person at all. She sent to the stores. She had a man count them out. She had a second man write down what had been counted and what it cost and to whom it was to be charged, and she did that either before she went down to the bridgehead or while she was standing on it, and then she stood in the mud until eight legions were across and thanked every one of them. That is courage with a quartermaster attached, and the quartermaster is the part that made it work. And she never told it. Three hundred tellings, at three hundred tables, over twenty years, and not once did my mother mention that she had ordered stores counted. I know exactly why, because I have made the identical decision at least twice this month. A woman on a bridge saying no is a thing the gods send. A woman sending to the stores is a housekeeper. She kept the bridge and she buried the ledger, and I have spent this whole day reading the part she buried and I do not think one grain the less of her for it. I think she was right. I think I would have cut it as well, and the only difference between us is that she had to say her version out loud to people who could see her face, and I have the leisure to write mine down. After the bridge they came to her. That is what these four books are. Four years of people coming to her. Which brings me to Maesia, who is in the book twice. Her husband was Titus Aufidius, a centurion of the Fifth Alaudae. The Fifth went first in the mutiny, and their centurions were what the mutineers had instead of an argument, and Aufidius went into the Rhine with the others, a year and more before I was born, and his body was never taken out of it. A great many were not. He had money. Soldiers keep their savings with the standards, in the chest in the shrine, and the signifer of the century keeps the account, and money is safer there than anywhere else in the world. Aufidius had served twenty-two years and he had been careful. Maesia came to the principia with a witness and asked for it, and she did not get it, and she could not have got it, because the signifer had no proof the man was dead. No body, no burial. There is no clerk in the Roman army who will pay out a dead man's deposit on the word of the camp, since the entire value of that chest is that it cannot be opened on anybody's word. He was being a signifer, which on that afternoon looked exactly like cruelty and was something else. I have sat with the entry and I can see the whole shape of that afternoon in it, and there is nobody in it to blame, which is the worst sort of afternoon there is. So Maesia came up to the praetorium instead. The chest stayed shut. My mother paid Maesia three thousand two hundred sesterces out of the household instead, and had it entered in this book, and the word she had entered against it is gift. Aufidius's deposit is presumably sitting in that chest to this hour, waiting upon a proof that is at the bottom of the river. Thirty-five years. The second entry is eleven months later. A smaller sum, at the Saturnalia, to the same name, with nothing whatever written against it. I have been trying since I was old enough to think about it to find the seam in my parents, to get a knife into the place where what they felt stops and what they were doing begins, and it is not there. My mother pitied that woman. My mother also understood, better than any legate on that river, that a widow paid out of the household purse in front of the whole camp is worth more than a cohort, and that the second payment eleven months later is what makes the first one true in the eyes of every man watching. Both of those things were in the same woman at the same moment, in the same hand, on the same line of the same page, and I am nearly certain she did not experience them as two things. And into the middle of that afternoon, on the day of the first entry, my father came home. He had been out at the yards since before light. That was the winter they were building the ships, a thousand of them, for the summer's campaign down the rivers, and he went out to the yards most days and came back after dark, filthy and pleased with himself. Sostrata remembers the smell of him coming into the hall: horse, and lamp oil, and wet wool. She remembers that nobody stood back from it. I think that is the single most useful thing anybody has ever told me about my father, because I have now read four accounts of his life and in none of them does he smell of anything, and a man who does not smell of anything was not in the room. The cold was still on him. There was frost standing in the nap of the cloak in small grey stars and he had not taken it off. Maesia was still in the hall. He took her hands and said her husband's name, and he will have said it correctly, because Aufidius had been dead fifteen months and my father would still have had the name. Albruna told me this afternoon how that was done, and told it quite flatly, as a plain fact about the arrangement of a Roman household. "He had a man for the names," she said. "A Sicilian. He walked at your father's shoulder and put them into his ear half a step before he needed them." I said that nobody had ever told me this. "My father has never had such a man," she said. "He knows every man in his hall. There are ninety of them." "A commander of eight legions cannot know a hundred thousand names." "No," she said. "He cannot." I have thought about it all evening and I have got no further than this: the soldier whose name my father spoke knew nothing of the Sicilian, would have shrugged at him, and went and died for my father at the Long Bridges. The warmth was staffed. It was still warmth. Gaius was three that winter and he was in the camp in his little boots with the soldiers making a pet of him, and he came at my father's knees while the cloak was still on him, and got the edge of it to hold, and the frost went to water in his hands. I was in the next room. I was asleep, or feeding, or howling, which are the three things I was that year. And here is what I have of my father, entire, because I have been counting it all day and it does not take long. I have his hand on a birth roll. I have a Sicilian at his shoulder. I have Sostrata on the smell of him in a hall I cannot remember being in. I have four written accounts by men who wanted something out of his memory. And I have one afternoon at Tarracina, when I was four years old and he was already ashes in my mother's arms. That is the inventory. There is no morning in it. I have looked. One thing more and then I shall stop, because the lamps are low and Sostrata has begun sighing in the manner she believes I cannot hear. The freedman in the outer room this morning. He came about a piece of land that is not his, on behalf of a man who cannot approach me directly, and I had bread taken out to him because he had been standing there since before dawn, and I sent him away with a word to carry back, which cost me nothing, and which he will repeat as though it were an oath, and by tomorrow evening his patron will know that he has been noticed and will begin to behave accordingly. I did all of that before I had eaten. I did not plan it. I did not think of it once until I sat down tonight with my mother's column of cloaks in front of me. Two hundred and eleven cloaks, and one loaf of bread. We are not a family that learned to do this. Translator: Entry 3. The same room. AD 49, Julia, aged thirty-three. She is writing of 26 May AD 17, the triumph of Germanicus, Rome. Germanicus, aged thirty-one, Nero, aged eleven, Drusus, aged nine, Gaius, aged four, Julia, aged eighteen months, Drusilla, not yet one, Albruna, aged eleven. Julia: AD 49 There is far too much of this one, and I want that written down before anything else. For my birth I had one stained roll and two women who could not agree about the moon. For the bridge I had four books in my mother's hand that nobody had opened in thirty years. For my father's triumph I have sent to the tabularium twice, and I have had back more paper than will lie flat upon this table, and I have been reading since yesterday morning, and I have learned almost nothing about any person in it. I believe that is a rule, and it took me by surprise. The larger the event, the better Rome writes it down and the less the writing holds. There is somewhere in this house an exact account of how many painted boards were carried through the Porta Triumphalis on the seventh day before the Kalends of June in the year my father triumphed, and what was painted upon each of them, and there is not one line anywhere in this city about what became of the child who walked in front of them. I shall come to the child. The triumph was over the Cherusci, the Chatti, the Angrivarii and the other peoples as far as the Elbe. There were spoils, and prisoners, and boards painted with the mountains, the rivers and the battles. And Tiberius gave three hundred sesterces to every man of the city populace, in my father's name and out of his own hand, which is a species of generosity I have come to recognise on sight, having practised it myself. If one pays for a man's triumph then the triumph is partly one's own, and everybody who takes the money understands that without needing to be told. My father rode. Everyone knows that much. What I did not know until yesterday, because nobody thought to tell me and I never thought to ask, is that I was in the chariot with him. There were five of us in it. Nero and Drusus, who were eleven and nine and old enough to stand. Gaius, who was four. Drusilla, who was not yet one. And me, at eighteen months. The two of us at the bottom of that list were carried, and held up when the noise came, and put down again. I have turned this over for a day and a half and there is only one honest way to set it down. I was part of the exhibit at my father's triumph. Consider what the procession was actually saying, because it is a sentence and it was built by men who knew grammar. The boards said what he had taken: these mountains, these rivers, this battle and that one. The spoils said the same thing over again in metal, for the people at the back who could not read. The prisoners said whom he had taken it from, walking, in order of rank, so that the ranking was legible from a distance. And then, at the end of it, in the chariot, the five of us, to say that it would keep. It took me a day and a half to see it, because I was looking through that procession for myself and I was in it as something else. Now the prisoners, and the child. They are listed. Rome lists prisoners the way it lists boards and cattle, and the list is one of the very few honest documents in this pile, because a list has no opinion in it. Segimundus, who was a priest at the altar of the Ubii and who tore off his fillets and went over to Arminius and was handed back. Sesithacus. Rhamis, who was his wife. Deudorix. And Thusnelda, the wife of Arminius, with her son. The boy was about three. He was born in our keeping. His mother was taken pregnant and he was born a prisoner and he had never in his life been anything else, and he walked, or was carried, the list does not say which, in front of a chariot with me in it. And Thusnelda was given to us by her own father, which I read past twice before it registered. Segestes was a chief of the Cherusci and a friend of Rome for years, and Arminius took his daughter and married her against his will, and when Arminius came for him Segestes shut himself up and sent to my father, and my father brought him out, and Segestes handed over his daughter, who was carrying his grandson. He was given land and honours on our bank of the river and lived out his life upon them very comfortably indeed. So the woman walking in front of my father's chariot was put there by her own father in exchange for an estate, and the boy at her side was the price of the estate being kept. Albruna was in the stands. That was new to me as well. Thirty-three years, and she has been in every house I ever lived in, and it did not once occur to me until this afternoon to ask whether she had seen my father's triumph. She was eleven. She came south with the household and she watched it from the family's seats, in Roman clothes, with a Roman child on either side of her. "What do you remember of it?" "That I was frightened someone would put me in the line." She said nothing else for a good while and I had the sense not to fill it, which is not a thing I am naturally good at. "Did any of them look up?" "One did." I waited. She stopped there. I have spent three days getting things out of that woman by pressing, and I understood that this one was hers to keep. So I let it alone, and I am after the credit for having done it. Two chiefs, then, both friends of Rome. Segestes and Albruna's father. Each of them gave up a daughter. One daughter walked in chains through the Porta Triumphalis and the other sat in the stands and watched her go past, and the arrangement was identical in both cases, and the only thing that decided which was which was whose side the girl's husband happened to be on. Albruna has never once said this to me, and she said nothing this afternoon either. She was sitting eighteen inches from the list. About the boy. His name was Thumelicus and he was sent to Ravenna and reared there, and that is where the paper stops. I have written to Ravenna. To two men in Ravenna, in point of fact, one of whom owes me a favour and one of whom wants one, which between them is generally sufficient. What came back was four lines from the second, saying that the boy was known there, that he was brought up in the town, that there was some business about him and the arena, and that the man would enquire further if I wished it. Some business about him and the arena. Four lines. That is what survives, in this house, in Rome, of what the empire did with the son of Arminius. And at the other end of this table I have a document which records that the fourth board carried in the procession showed the river Weser, and that it was carried by four men. We wrote down the river. We did not write down the child. A triumph is a claim and a claim must be evidenced, and what becomes of the people in it afterwards is no part of the claim. Rome keeps immaculate records of what it takes and almost none of what it then does with what it has taken. I have never in my life met a Roman, the one dictating this included, who found that in the least peculiar until it was pointed out. So: my father's day, which the histories give me as the summit of his life and of this family's, and which I have now read from end to end. He was thirty-one. He was magnificent. Everybody says so and I believe it, and the crowd along the Sacred Way was not paid to feel what it felt, and the three hundred sesterces from Tiberius bought no part of it, which I imagine is precisely what Tiberius discovered on the day and never afterwards got over. And the arrangement that made him magnificent required a woman handed over by her father, a child born in custody and walked through a gate, and a priest of the Ubian altar who had changed sides and been sent back to be looked at. Every version of that day in which my father is glorious has those three people walking in it. The procession runs on them. That is what a triumph is: a sentence in which one family is the subject and another family is the object, and the grammar will not permit any other arrangement. I was eighteen months old and I was in the chariot and I understood none of it, and I have understood none of it for thirty-two years, and I understand it now, and I find that understanding it has not made the smallest difference to what I intend to do next. Which brings me to the last item, and then I shall stop. There is a petition at the far end of this table and it has been there a month. It asks that the Oppidum Ubiorum, which is the place I was born, be raised to the standing of a colony and settled with veterans of the Rhine armies, and it asks it in my name. It will be granted, because my husband grants what I put in front of him, and because the frontier wants a colony there, and because I want my name upon the ground I came out of, and I see no reason to pretend otherwise in my own commentary. Veterans are settled upon land. Land is a place where somebody already is. Albruna was in this room from the fourth hour until dark and she passed that petition twice. There was no moment in the whole afternoon at which mentioning it would have been awkward, and I have gone back through the afternoon looking for the point at which I decided not to mention it, and I cannot find one. Her father is alive. He has been loyal for thirty-five years. His loyalty was bought with her and it is still being paid for with her, and she is downstairs at this moment. I shall tell her before the surveyors go north. I have written that here so that I shall have to. Translator: Entry 4. The same room, and the greeting hall of the house of Livia, Palatine Hill. AD 49, Julia, aged thirty-three. She is writing of the autumn of AD 17, at the house of Livia. Livia, aged seventy-four, Julia, aged twenty-two months. Julia: AD 49 Sostrata put something on this table today that I did not send for. She did it in the middle of the afternoon, without announcement, in the flat manner she has for things she has already decided about, and then she went and stood by the window with her face to the light, which she does on purpose and always has. It is a bundle of household papers in a hand I did not know. Small, upright, very even, the writing of somebody who was taught late and taught properly and never afterwards allowed herself to be hurried. There are sixty-one sheets. They are folded in four, the folds are old, and the outer sheet has been rubbed soft at the corners the way paper goes when it has been carried on a person rather than kept in a box. The crease across the middle is deeper than sixty-one sheets will make. It is Antigone's hand. Antigone has been dead twenty years. Sostrata has had these papers for twenty years and has never once mentioned them, in this house or any other, through two marriages of mine and one exile and a very great deal of conversation. "When did you mean to tell me?" "She left an instruction with them." "What instruction?" "That I was to give them to you when you began writing your own history." I have been at this commentary for something under a month. I began it because Sostrata nagged me into it. I have believed for a month that this was my own project, undertaken at my own convenience, at a time of my own choosing, and this afternoon I was informed that a freedwoman who died when I was thirteen had foreseen the month I would start and had left standing orders about it with my own attendant. I said nothing for some while, and what I was doing with the silence was going back over the past month looking for the place where Sostrata had begun steering. I have been through it twice and the place is not there, which is the second time in a fortnight I have gone looking for the moment a decision was made and come back with nothing. "Did she say why?" "She said the dangerous hour with your family is not when you take a thing. It is when you sit down to explain it." So. Antigone. She was Livia's, and had been Livia's since before my mother was born. She came into that household as a girl and was freed and stayed on, with the road open in front of her, and she ran a part of that house which had no name and appeared on no list. Every great house has such a person. Ours has Sostrata, and I have known for a long time that I did not choose her for the office, and I have preferred not to follow that thought to the end of the corridor. Antigone taught Sostrata. Medicine, and accounts, and the cipher. I always took that for a kindness of Livia's, an old woman lending out a useful slave to a granddaughter she was obliged to be civil to. It occurs to me now that nobody lends out that particular sort of servant. What was placed in my mother's household in the year my father went east was placed there deliberately, and my grandmother Antonia had done precisely the same thing on the Rhine two years earlier with a Greek woman and her daughter, and I have therefore spent the whole of my life among women who were given to me. I shall come back to that. It wants a colder hour than this one. The papers themselves are household papers, mostly, and whoever gets hold of them after me will be disappointed. Lists. What was bought, what was owed, who was admitted, and what was said to be the matter with whoever did not come. That is exactly what makes them valuable, and Antigone knew it, because a household list has no ambition in it and will therefore still be true in thirty years when everything with ambition in it has been rewritten twice. And among them there is a running order for a reception at my great-grandmother's house, in the last months of the year my father triumphed. I know what that reception was for. My father was going east. It was settled by then, and the family were to go with him, and the arrangement was that Nero and Drusus and Drusilla and I would stay in Rome and Gaius alone would go. So the gathering at the house of Livia that autumn was the handing over, and it was never presented to any of us as anything else. My great-grandmother was being shown the children who were to be left in the city while their parents went to the other end of the world. She was seventy-four. She had been Julia Augusta for three years by then, and the name was still new enough in that house that Antigone's list uses it twice at the head of the page and then reverts to the old one for the rest of it, which I find more human than anything else in this bundle. Here is the order, as it is written. The two eldest first. Nero at eleven and Drusus at nine, in that sequence, and against each of their names Antigone has written down what was to be said about them, because it was to be said, and somebody had to be told what it was. Nero was to be praised for his likeness to his father. Drusus was to be praised for his likeness to his grandfather. Then Gaius, at five, and there is nothing written against Gaius, because Gaius was going east and did not need to be described to anybody, he needed only to be looked at. Then Drusilla, who was one. Then me. I am last on the list. I was the fourth child and the first girl, and a first girl in a house with three sons already standing in it is not a person anybody needs to describe. No praise was arranged for me. What is written against my name is where I was to be put. Set down at the back with the household. Not to be brought forward. It sits in the margin, in a smaller hand than the list, which means it was added afterwards and not planned, and in the same ink, which means it was added on the day. I held the sheet up against the window and I made Sostrata look at it. "Was that put in later?" "Same ink." "You would say that." "Have it looked at by a man who does not care about you. I will send for one in the morning." She waited a moment. "You do not want him." She was right and I did not send for him. I walked over this afternoon and stood in the room. The house is imperial property and I am the wife of the First Citizen and there is nobody in Rome who is going to ask me my business on the Palatine, so I went out of this room and down past the temple and I was standing in my great-grandmother's greeting hall inside a quarter of an hour, in the middle of the day, with two of her rooms in use for storing furniture. The back of that hall, where the household stands, is the wall on the garden side. There is a narrow door in it, behind where the hangings were, which is how the staff came and went so that they would not have to cross the floor in front of the guests. It stands open in plain sight and always has. It is a door the guests were meant to look past. Which is where Antigone was standing. It is the only place in the hall she could have been standing, since she was working, and it is eighteen inches from where I was set down. I stood in front of that door for some time, and then I did the thing I always do, and I have decided to set it down here because I have never once written it down and I am supposed to be writing everything down. I counted the ways out of the room. I have done it my whole life and I do not remember beginning and I have never on any occasion decided to do it. I counted the doors of Domitius's house on the first morning of my marriage, at thirteen years of age, and I made a list, and I have the list still, on the back of a laundry account, in a hand I can barely stand to look at. I counted them on Pontia, which took a very short time. I count them in this house every time the furniture is moved, and I could tell anybody who asked how many ways there are out of the room my husband sleeps in. And the number is never the number. There are the ways out, and then there are the ways out that a person of rank would think to use, and the second is always smaller, and the difference between the two is where everything in my life has actually happened. Nobody put a guard on that door. Nobody has ever put a guard on that door. It is how the oil went in and the plates came out and how a woman with a wax book came and went all evening, eighteen inches from a child who was not to be brought forward, and there were forty people in that hall and not one of them looked at it once. So the four of them were arranged in the middle of the floor in their order with their praises ready, and I was carried to the back wall and left against it with the woman who was writing everything down, at twenty-two months, by a household that had decided in advance where I belonged. It is on the page. Somebody thought about it beforehand and wrote it out. I told Sostrata what I had found when I came back and she heard the whole of it without putting down the pen. "At twenty-two months," she said, "a child is put where a child can be held. The women who hold children stand at the back." I said that Antigone had written it down. "Antigone wrote down the lamps." I have been sitting here since dark with that in front of me and she is wrong. I have the list. Nothing else on that page was left to the ordinary arrangement of a room. Nero's likeness to his father was decided in advance, and Drusus's likeness to his grandfather was decided in advance, and Gaius was to be looked at and not described, and every one of those was written out before anybody came through the door. A house that plans the sentences does not leave the placements to chance. She is wrong, and she has written down what she said anyway, which I notice she does whenever she believes she will be proved right later. Translator: Entry 5. The same room. AD 49, Julia, aged thirty-three. She is writing of the autumn of AD 17 and of an afternoon in AD 28, in the cabinet of Livia. Livia, aged eighty-five, Julia, aged twelve. Julia: AD 49 I have been writing around this one for a month and have been perfectly aware of doing it, so I shall admit it at the top of the page rather than be caught at it later. I began this commentary in order to get to this afternoon, and I have spent four weeks upon a birth roll, a column of cloaks, a parade order and a servant's note in a margin, all of which I have enjoyed enormously, and every one of which I chose because it was not this. The reason is simple. There is no document. I have looked. Sostrata has looked, which means it has been looked for properly. There is nothing in Antigone's bundle, and Antigone wrote down the number of lamps in a room. There is nothing in my mother's books. There is no household list, no note of a gift given or received, no letter, no line in any hand anywhere in this house or in the tabularium or in the papers of the Divine Augustus, which I have now had searched at some expense and at some risk of comment. Every other thing in this account came to me on paper written by somebody who was in the room. The single most important quarter of an hour of my life has no paper at all. What it has instead is Livia, who told me about it herself, eleven years afterwards, when I was twelve. That is the whole of the evidence. One account, given once, by a woman with a purpose, about a child who could not remember it, eleven years after the fact. If a case of that quality were brought against a senator in the Curia I would have the prosecutor laughed out of the chamber and then I would take some trouble to find out who was paying him. Set down the circumstances first, because they matter more than the story does. It was in the last year or two before she died and she was eighty-five, and she was teaching me. Not the household, not the girls, not Drusilla. Me, alone, in the afternoons, in her own cabinet, with the door shut and Antigone somewhere behind it. Nobody has ever explained to me why she chose me. My mother thought it was malice, because my mother thought most things about Livia were malice and had earned the right to think so. I have wondered since whether it was because I was the fourth child and the first girl and therefore nobody was going to be watching, which would make me the safest of us to put anything into. I have also wondered, since this afternoon, whether it was Antigone's doing, and whether a line in a margin about a child who had been set down at the back of a hall had been sitting in that house for ten years waiting for the girl to grow into it. I cannot know, and there is nobody left alive to ask, which is the condition of everything in this account and I have given up complaining about it. The history men who eventually get hold of me will want it to have been statecraft. It was a good deal closer to bookkeeping. Who owes what. Which favours expire and which do not. How a rumour travels through a house, and how long it takes, and which servant it will reach first. How to tell from the seating what a family has decided about its own succession before anybody has said a word aloud. It was the practical management of things which have no names, because to name them would make them illegal. And one afternoon she told me about the ring. I shall give it as she gave it, as near as I can, because I have carried the words a long time. She said that in the autumn my father went east, after the formal part of the reception was over and the children had been praised in their order, she had me brought through into her cabinet. Just me. She had a box on the table and she opened it and took out a ring and put it into my hand. Then she asked me what it could command. I said, at twelve, that I could not possibly have understood the question. She said no. And then she waited, in the manner she had, which was cold all the way through and left me in the silence to get out of on my own. And when she had let it run on long enough she said: you put your arm up. You held it over your head so that the room could see it. And everybody laughed, because you were an infant and it was charming. And I took your hand and closed your fingers over it and held them closed until you stopped, and you did not like it, and you were quite right not to like it. I asked her why she had closed my hand. She said: because an instrument that can be seen belongs to whoever can reach it. And then she said the rest of it, which I have never repeated to any living person and which I shall put down here because everyone it could injure is dead. She said: your great-grandfather governed for fifty-six years and was never once seen to give an order that a magistrate had not first asked him to give. Men call that modesty, and restraint, and I will not have you admire it as either. It is the entire method. Everything I have, I have because it cannot be pointed at. The day a thing of mine can be pointed at, it stops being mine. It is only in my keeping until somebody stronger comes for it, and no law will help me, because there is no law that says I may have it at all. That is what I was told at twelve years of age, in a shut room, by the most powerful woman who has ever lived, and I have run my life on it. Now the difficulty, which is that the story cannot be true as she told it. I was twenty-two months old that autumn. A child of twenty-two months cannot be asked what a thing can command. She cannot understand the question, cannot hold an object above her head in answer to it, and cannot be said to have raised it in order that the room might see it, because she has no notion that there is a room. I know this perfectly well. I have had a child. At twenty-two months a child will lift a thing over her head because lifting a thing over her head is a great deal of fun, and if forty adults laugh she will do it again for an hour and then cry when they stop. So there are three ways to repair it and no more. It happened and I was older, perhaps five, perhaps six, on some later afternoon in that house, of which there were many and not one of which anybody wrote down. Or it happened as described and the meaning was supplied afterwards, by her, out of an infant doing what infants do. Or it did not happen at all and she made it whole, for a girl of twelve who needed a lesson that would stay put. And I had better set down which of the three I want, since it bears upon everything that comes after. I want the first, or I want the second, and what I want in either of them is the same thing: that there was already something in me in that room, and that the woman dictating this was finished at twenty-two months, in front of Livia, before she could speak. Because if I was always this, then I did not become it. Then Pontia did not make me, and my mother's death on her island did not make me, and Domitius did not make me, and the eight months in which I could not discover whether my son was alive did not make me, and nothing I have done since is a thing that could have gone otherwise, and there is no ledger, and I am not standing in front of one. That is an extremely convenient prophecy, and I noticed how badly I wanted it. Three days upon that question, and it is the wrong question, and I am going to set down the right one. Livia set that story in the autumn my father triumphed and went east. She could have set it anywhere. She had me in that house for eleven years. She chose the one afternoon in my childhood that every person in Rome can place: the famous autumn, the year of the triumph, the departure for the East. She hung the lesson on it because a story pinned to a day that everybody remembers will keep, and a story about an ordinary Tuesday will not. My mother did exactly the same thing. She put a full moon over the Rhine because the night I was born was going to be told for fifty years, and a full moon travels better than cloud. And four weeks ago I read Albruna's version and my mother's version and I kept both of them on the working roll where I could see them, and then I gave the order that the fair copy should say the moon was full. There it is. That is the inheritance. Ambition is common as dirt in this city and half the men in the Senate carry more of it than I do. The editing is the rare thing. Three women across three generations, each handed a true and useless thing, each improving it in the same direction, for the same reason, with the same entirely clear conscience. The history men will write that Livia gave me her cunning. What she gave me was the word for it. She recognised the thing in a room, in an infant, and eleven years later she came back and named it, and a thing that has been named will grow. Sostrata put the pen down at that. I asked her what. She said nothing at all, and picked it up again, and wrote it as I gave it. The ring is real, though, and that is the one hard object in this whole account, and I have had it in my hand today. The seal of state is the head of Augustus cut by Dioscurides, and my husband has it, and it goes with the office and always has. What Livia had in her cabinet was the sphinx. My great-grandfather used three seals in his life: the sphinx first, then Alexander, then his own face. He gave up the sphinx because in the years he was away from Rome his letters went out under it, sealed by the men acting in his name, and the city made a joke of it. The sphinx sets riddles, they said, and everything that arrives under it is a burden nobody can read. He gave it up because it could be pointed at. So the object Livia used to teach me that an exposed instrument belongs to whoever can reach it was itself an instrument that had been given up for precisely that reason, and I have wondered all evening whether she chose it for that or whether it was simply the ring she happened to have, and I have decided that with her there was never any difference between those two things. I sent for it this morning. It came after the seventh hour, in a box, carried by a freedman of the household of the Divine Augustus, a careful elderly man who did not sit down and did not look at me and did not leave the room. It is smaller than I expected. They always are. Gold, worn very thin on the inner side where a thumb has gone round it for fifty years, the stone a dark sardonyx, the sphinx cut into it sitting, in profile, facing left. It is a fine piece of work and it would sit unremarked on the hand of a moderately prosperous man in Ostia. I held it about a quarter of an hour, in my palm, which is where she put it, and I looked at it, and I am obliged to report that I felt nothing whatever, and that I was disappointed by that, and that being disappointed by it was the most childish thing I have done in a decade. Then I closed my own fingers over it, which I had promised myself I would not do, because it is exactly the sort of gesture I would sneer at in a poem, and I did it anyway, and I sat there with my fist shut like a woman in a bad play, in front of a freedman who had the good manners to be looking at the wall. And here is what I thought, which is not what she intended, and I have checked it three times. Livia was right and Livia lost. She ran her method for over half a century without a single error that I have ever been able to find. Nothing of hers could be pointed at. She governed through her husband and then through her son and she was never once in fifty years holding anything in the open. And then she died, and within a month her son cut her honours, pared back her funeral, refused her the divinity that was hers by any reckoning, and stood up in front of the Senate and reduced the greatest political life of the age to a list of expenses he considered excessive. And they let him. Of course they let him. There was nothing to point at. She had spent fifty years making certain of it, and when the moment came there was no instrument anywhere in the record with her name upon it, and so there was nothing for anybody to defend. An instrument that is never displayed cannot be seized. It also cannot be inherited, and it cannot be proved, and the day after one dies a man in a bad temper can stand up and say one never held it, and every document in Rome will agree with him. So I am going to do the other thing. I have men working on the title. It will come next year, or the year after, and it will be Augusta, and I shall be the second woman ever to hold it and the first to hold it while her husband is alive. I want it on the coinage. I want my face and my son's face on the same die, the same size, and I want the wording so exact that no clerk in any future reign can demote it into an ordinary courtesy paid to an emperor's wife. I want to be pointed at. I want there to be so much to point at that removing it would take a year and leave a hole in the record in the shape of me. The freedman took the ring back a little before dark. He put it in the box and closed the box and then stood at this table and wrote in a small book that on this day the ring was viewed, and by whom, and for how long, and he asked me to confirm the hour, and I gave it to him, and he wrote that down too. My great-grandfather did the same with his letters. He put the hour on everything, night and day. It is the family disease and at least one of us has died of it. There is now a line in a book in this city which says that I held it. Livia would have had that line taken out. I am going to have it copied. Translator: That was episode two, Born Among Eagles. Next episode is three, The East Took My Father. Augusta is a translation of The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina.