I have returned to Naples; tomorrow I shall resume my labors. But I am troubled by what I have done, and I cannot but fear for the future happiness ofthat great lady who has given so much to her country.
X. Letter: Octavia to Octavius Caesar, from Velletri (22 B. c.)
My dear brother, I arrived, safe but weary, in Velletri yesterday afternoon, and have been resting since. Below my window is the garden where we used to play as children. It is somewhat overgrown now, or at least it seems so to me; most of the shrubs have succumbed to the winter weather, the beeches need pruning, and one of the old chestnut trees has died. Nevertheless, it is pleasant to gaze upon this spot and recall those days when we were free from the cares and sorrows of the world, so many years ago.
I write you upon two matters: first, to extend my long overdue apologies for my behavior on that awful night when our friend Vergil read to us of my late son; and second, to make a request.
When next you have occasion to write or speak to Vergil, will you explicitly ask his forgiveness for me? I did not intend my action, and I would be regretful if he took it as an unkindness. He is a good and gentle man, and I would not have him believe that I thought otherwise.
But it is the request that I make to you with which I am more concerned.
I wish to have your permission to retire from that world of affairs in which I have lived for as long as I can remember, so that I may spend the years that remain to me in the quiet and solitude of the country.
All my life I have done the duty required of me by my family and my country. I have performed this duty willingly, even when it went against the inclinations of my person.
In my childhood and early youth, under the tutelage of our mother, I performed the duties of the household with willing pleasure; and after her death, I more fully performed them for you. When it became necessary to our cause to conciliate the enemies of Julius Caesar, I gave myself in marriage to Gaius Claudius Marcellus, and upon his death I became wife to Marcus Antonius. To the best of my abilities, I was a good wife to Marcus, while remaining your sister and dutiful to our family. After Marcus Antonius divorced me and cast his fortunes in the East, I raised the children of his other marriages as if they were my own, indeed, even that Julius Antonius of whom you now are so fond; after his death, I took under my protection those children of his by Cleopatra that survived the war.
Both of your wives I have treated as my sisters, though the first was too ill-tempered to receive my kindness and the second too ambitious for herself to trust my duty to our common cause. And from my own body I have given five children to our family and to the future of Rome.
Now my first-born and only son, my Marcellus, is dead in your service; and the happiness of his sister, Marcella, my beloved second-born, is threatened by the necessity of your policy. Fifteen years ago-perhaps even ten years ago-I should have been proud that you had chosen one of my children to shape in the succession of your destiny. But now I believe that my pride is vain, and I do not persuade myself that the possession of fame and power is worth the price of it. My daughter is happy in her marriage to Marcus Agrippa; I believe she loves him; I trust that he is fond of her. The divorce that you propose between them will not make her unhappy because she shall have lost the power and prestige that have accreted to her by the marriage; she shall be unhappy because she shall have lost a man for whom she feels respect and affection.
You must understand me, my dear brother; I do not quarrel with your decision; you are right. It is both fitting and necessary that your successor be one with your daughter, either through marriage or parentage. And Marcus Agrippa is the most able man of all your friends and associates. He is my friend, as well as my son-in-law; despite whatever may happen I trust that he shall remain the former.
And thus without resentment let me ask that the permission that I must give for this divorce be the last public act that I shall have to commit. I grant the permission. Now I wish to remove myself from the household in Rome, and remain with my books here in Velletri for as long as I may. I do not renounce your love; I do not renounce my children; I do not renounce my friends.
But the feeling that I had that awful evening, when Vergil read to us of Marcellus, remains with me, and shall remain for as long as I live; it was as if suddenly, and for the first time, I truly saw that world in which you must live, and saw the world in which I had lived without seeing for so long. There are other ways and other worlds in which one might live, humbler and more obscure, perhaps-though what is that in the eyes of the indifferent gods?
I have not done so yet, but within a few years I shall have reached the age when it will no longer be seemly for me to marry again. Give me these few years; for I do not wish to marry, and I shall not regret not having done so, even when I am old. That which we call our world of marriage is, as you know, a world of necessary bondage; and I sometimes think that the meanest slave has had more freedom than we women have known. I wish to spend the remainder of my life here; I shall welcome my children and grandchildren to visit me. There may be a kind of wisdom somewhere in myself, or in my books, that I shall find in the quiet years that lie ahead.
CHAPTER THREE
I. The Journal of Julia, Pandateria (A.D. 4)
Of all the women I have known, I have admired Livia the most. I was never fond of her, nor she of me; yet she behaved toward me always with honesty and civility; we got along well, despite the fact that my mere existence thwarted her ambitions, and despite the fact that she made no secret of her impersonal animosity toward me. Livia knew herself thoroughly, and had no illusions about her own nature; she was beautiful, and used her beauty without vanity; she was cold, and thus could feign warmth with utter success; she was ambitious, and employed her considerable intelligence exclusively to further her ambition's end. Had she been a man, I do not doubt that she would have been more ruthless than my father, and would have been troubled by fewer compunctions. Within her nature she was an altogether admirable woman.
Though I was only fourteen years of age at the time and could not understand the reason for it, I knew that Livia opposed my marriage to Marcellus, seeing it as a nearly absolute impediment to her son Tiberius's succession to power. And when Marcellus died so quickly after our marriage, she must have felt the possibility of her ambition urgently renewed. For even before the obligatory months of mourning had elapsed, Livia approached me. My father, having been offered the dictatorship of Italy in the wake of a famine, and having refused, had some weeks before prudently removed himself from Rome upon the pretext of business in Syria, so that he might not have further to exacerbate the frustrations of the Senate and the people by the presence of his refusal. It was a tactic that he employed often in his life.
As was her habit, Livia came at once to the point.
"Your time of mourning will be ended soon," she said.
"Yes," I replied.
"And you will be free to marry again."
"Yes."
"It is not appropriate that a young widow should remain long unmarried," she said. "It is not the custom."
I believe I did not reply. I must have thought even then that my widowhood was as much a matter of form as my marriage had been.
Livia continued. "Is your grief such that the prospect of marriage offends you?"
I remembered that I was my father's daughter. "I shall do my duty," I said.
Livia nodded as if she had expected the answer. "Of course," she said. "It is the way… Did your father speak to you of this matter? Or has he written?"
"No," I said.
"I am sure that he has been considering it." She paused. "You must understand that I speak now for myself, not your father. But were he here, I would have his permission."