The problem was obvious. All the arrangements were in place for the princeps’ death, but the princeps was recovering from his final illness. The timetable was at risk. The recently sent dispatches would soon be received. The longer Augustus lived, the more opportunity there would be for rumors to fly around Rome and the empire, fomenting disunity and trouble, imperiling the smooth transfer of power.
That afternoon, while Augustus was taking a siesta and the house was quiet in the summer heat, Livia went to the peristyle, a large cloister around an open-air garden. In the middle stood a fig tree, heavy with ripe fruit, which Livia had planted years ago. Augustus liked to pick a fig or two in the evening. Livia coated some of them with a poisonous ointment, leaving a few untouched.
Later, the aged couple walked out into the garden and Augustus picked two of the poisoned fruit and ate them. He noticed nothing. Livia ate a fig she had left alone. There was no reason for her husband to know exactly how he was going to die, she thought; indeed, if she was lucky, he might not guess that she had had to carry out what they had unspokenly agreed. Much more pleasant for him.
Augustus slept badly. He suffered from stomach cramps and renewed diarrhea, and developed a high fever. Guessing what had happened, he silently thanked his wife. In the morning, he called for a mirror. He looked terrible. He had his hair combed and his lower jaw, which had fallen from weakness, was propped up. He gave some orders to a military officer, who immediately set sail for the island of Planasia with a troop of soldiers. Hail and farewell, Agrippa!
A small group of notables, including Livia and Tiberius, recalled as prearranged, gathered round the bedside. The princeps uttered some suitable, obviously unspontaneous last words.
“I found Rome built of clay: I leave it to you in marble.”
He was referring not simply to his redevelopment of the city, but also to the strength of the empire.
Augustus could not resist adding a bleak joke. He had always seen life as a pretense, something not to be taken too seriously, and at his house on the Palatine Hill at Rome, he had had his bedroom walls painted with frescoes of the tragic and comic masks that actors wore. Their image came into his mind, and he asked:
“Have I played my part in the farce of life well enough?”
After a short pause, he quoted a well-known theatrical tag.
“If I have pleased you, kindly signify
Appreciation with a warm goodbye.”
I
SCENES FROM A PROVINCIAL CHILDHOOD
63–48 B.C.
Little remains of ancient Velitrae, but signs of the Renaissance are to be found everywhere. In the main square stands an old fountain with battered lions spouting water. The streets leading off the piazza are roughly parallel and are gridded, echoing the original pattern of the old Roman vici. At the town’s highest point, where the citadel must have been, a sixteenth-century palazzo communale, which combines the functions of town hall and museum, was built on the foundations of a Roman building.
Here, on a stone platform, the modern life-size statue in bronze of a man in his late teens gazes blankly from empty eye sockets into the far distance, contemplating the life that has yet to unfold. This is Gaius Octavius, Rome’s future ruler Augustus: for Velitrae was his hometown and Velletri is proud to celebrate his memory.
Gaius would recognize the lay of the land, the rise and fall of streets and alleys, perhaps the layout, certainly the views. Now as then, this is a provincial place, which seems farther from the capital city than it really is. Change has always come slowly. The community leaves a powerful impression of being self-contained and a little isolated. Even today, elderly locals squint blackly at strangers.
A certain dour feeling for tradition, a suspicion of newfangled ways, a belief in propriety, have always been typical of provincial life in towns such as Velitrae, and it would be hard to imagine a more conventional family than that into which Gaius Octavius was born in 63 B.C.
Every Roman boy received a praenomen, or forename, such as Marcus, Lucius, Sextus—or Gaius. Then came his clan name, or nomen, such as Octavius. Some but not all Romans also had a cognomen, which signified a family subset of a clan. Successful generals were sometimes awarded a hereditary agnomen; for example, Publius Cornelius Scipio added Africanus to his existing names, in honor of his victory over Hannibal in north Africa. By contrast, girls were only known, inconveniently, by the feminine version of their nomen; so Gaius’ two sisters were both known as Octavia.
An important feature of the infant Gaius’ inheritance was that, although like most Italians the Octavii held Roman citizenship, they were not of “Roman” stock. Velitrae was an outpost on the borders of Latium, home of the Latin tribes that, centuries before, had been among the first conquests of the aggressive little settlement beside a ford on the river Tiber.
Two hundred years before Gaius’ birth, Rome finally united the tribes and communities of central and southern Italy through a network of imposed treaties. The men of these lands provided the backbone of the legions and were eventually, as late as the eighties B.C., incorporated into the Republic as full citizens. The little boy grew up with a clear impression of the contribution that Rome’s onetime opponents were making to its imperial greatness, a contribution not always fully recognized by the chauvinists in the capital. In a real sense, the Roman empire would be better called the Italian empire.
The Octavii were a well-respected local family of considerable means. A Vicus Octavius, or Octavius Street, ran through Velitrae’s center (just as a Via Ottavia does today), past an altar consecrated by a long-ago ancestor.
The family seems to have been in trade, a sure sign that it was not of aristocratic status. Gaius’ paternal great-grandfather fought in Sicily as a military tribune (a senior officer in a legion, or regiment) during the second war against the great merchant state of Carthage in northern Africa (218 to 201 B.C.). Carthage’s comprehensive defeat was the first indication to the Mediterranean world that a new military power had arrived on the scene. Gaius’ grandfather, who lived to an advanced age, was well-off, but had no ambitions for a career in national politics, being apparently content to hold local political office.
Later hostile gossip claimed that the great-grandfather was an ex-slave who, having won his freedom, made a living as a rope maker in the neighborhood of Thurii, a town in Italy’s deep south. It was also rumored that the grandfather was a money changer, with “coin-stained hands.” Friendly propagandists took a different tack and invented a fictitious link with a blue-blooded Roman clan of the same name.
When he came to write his memoirs many years afterward, Gaius merely noted that he “came from a rich old equestrian family.” The equites, or knights, were the affluent middle class, occupying a political level below that of the nobility and members of the ruling Senate, but often overlapping with them socially. To qualify for equestrian status, they needed to own property worth more than 400,000 sesterces, and were not actively engaged in government. They were usually wealthy businessmen or landed gentry who preferred to avoid the expense and dangers of a political career. Many were contracted by the state to collect taxes on its behalf from the provinces. By the time of the boy’s father, also named Gaius Octavius, the family had become seriously rich, and probably far exceeded the equestrian minimum.