As a young man, a terrorist barely out of his teens, the future Augustus had spared no one, shown no compunction, in securing his goal of absolute predominance. Decades had since passed, softening the memory of his youthful cruelty: ‘He well deserves the name of father.’48 Julia herself, as wilful as she was bold, had dared to imagine as Tiberius had done, that the Princeps might safely be crossed. A fatal mistake. Those with clearer insight into Augustus’s nature knew better than to imagine that a leopard could ever entirely change its spots: ‘I would certainly not describe as mercy what was actually the exhaustion of cruelty.’49 Augustus’s powers, as a father, were those of death as well as life. In the humiliation inflicted upon him by his daughter he found, as he had so often done before when confronted by setbacks, only an opportunity to entrench his greatness yet further. No one, after he had dealt with Julia and her lovers, was to be left in any doubt that the Father of his Country reserved the right to destroy as well as cherish those in his power. Rather than draw a veil over the scandal, he opted to expose the whole sordid business to the Senate. His voice raw with shock and horror, Augustus braved the hidden smirks of the listening nobility. A mortifying indignity, certainly – but all for long-term advantage. Senators were being exposed to a fact of political life long veiled behind the Princeps’s show of patience and forbearance: that he could, if he so wished, annihilate anyone he pleased.
It was Iullus Antonius who paid the ultimate price. Whether his affair with Julia had been as scandalous as the gossip had it, let alone as sinister in its implications as Augustus seems to have suspected, no one could know for sure. The truth of his ambitions was as veiled in shadow as his midnight revels had been. The baseness of his ingratitude, though, was beyond doubt. His suicide echoed the end of his father. Julia’s fate was, if anything, even more cruel. Branded an adulteress, she paid the price laid down by her own father’s law: exile to an island. Pandateria, the remote and windswept destination chosen to serve as her prison, was furnished with an agreeable enough villa, yet this hardly served to make up for its downside: that it was dull beyond words. Only Scribonia, her aged mother, was permitted to accompany her there. Otherwise, all company was banned, and even slaves had to be thoroughly vetted before they were permitted to make the crossing to the island. Wine too was forbidden, and all but the plainest food. Julia, whose scorn for the bogus economies of her father’s household had always so amused her admirers, found herself condemned to a living nightmare of austerity and tedium.
Meanwhile, back in Rome, the fast set of whom she had been the undoubted queen reeled in stunned horror. A wave of copycat prosecutions threatened a witch-hunt. Even though the Princeps dismissed many of the accusations, a mood of dread settled over the city’s salons. ‘Who can deceive the sun?’50 Ovid, casting its golden blaze as an all-seeing spy, imagined its gaze as capable of penetrating even the darkest bedroom, of fathoming the secrets of even the most careful adulterers. Yet even as he confessed to his nervousness, he refused to surrender to it. ‘My sexual tastes are deviant,’ he cheerily admitted, ‘nor is it the first time they have got me into trouble.’51 Nor, perhaps, the last. Julia might have been banished to a grim existence redolent of antiquity at its most brutally primitive, all weaving at the loom and turnips, but Ovid was not intimidated. He refused to abandon those values of urbanity and sophistication that he saw as embodying the true spirit of the age. In the months after Julia’s exile, when the mood in elite circles was all paranoia, Ovid busied himself with a project that could hardly have been more provocative: a guide to the arts of love. Naturally, he made sure to hedge it about with the odd caveat. ‘I reiterate – there’s nothing illegal about my fun and games. No woman is caught up in them who shouldn’t be.’52 He protested too much, of course. In the wake of Rome’s most notorious sex scandal, it took a peculiar degree of courage – or insouciance – to enthuse as Ovid did about the thrills and pleasures of seduction. Even more to give tips to a woman on how best to slip a guard, write messages in secret ink, and conduct an affair behind the back of an over-protective father. Advice such as this, in the wake of Julia’s downfall, was as close as anyone among her circle dared come to open dissidence.
Out in the streets, it was different. Julia, witty and blessed with the popular touch, was the people’s princess. The great events staged that year by Augustus, and which the entire city had been invited to celebrate, had only fed the public fascination with her. She was loved not just as Caesar’s daughter but as the mother of two dashing boys. Both had played a key role in the dedication of the temple of Mars, and preparations for Gaius’s departure on his mission to the East could hardly help but stir thoughts in people’s minds of the wretched Julia, bereft now of her young princes. Beyond the splendour of Augustus’s new forum, in the shadow of its massive screening wall, narrow streets slippery with filth teemed with people who saw in Caesar’s daughter, in her sufferings and her sorrows, a glamorous proxy for their own misery. In squalid, crowded courtyards, in teetering tenement blocks, in slums far and wide across the city, the poor mourned the downfall of their favourite. Only months after the people had joined as one with the Senate to hail Augustus as Father of his Country, the unity that he had laboured so hard to foster was fraying. Demonstrations and demands for Julia’s return, chanted publicly in the streets, contributed to the sense of a darkening mood. The newly dedicated temple of Mars, seen from the warren of alleys that stretched beyond it, began to seem less a monument to the greatness of a united people, more an embattled island amid a hostile sea.
Augustus himself, having just bared his teeth at the aristocracy, was hardly likely to yield to the mob. Nevertheless, as befitted a man endowed with the tribunicia potestas, he was sensitive to its hissing. He had long since learned to keep a beady eye on what happened in the slums. No regime could prosper that was content to leave them unregulated. This was not the least among the many insights that Augustus had brought to the art of government. ‘The poor are like the paltry, obscure places into which shit and other refuse are dumped.’53 While sufficiently a man of his class to take this commonplace for granted, Augustus had nevertheless come to appreciate how vital it was to plumb their depths. His agents, over the course of the decades, had duly fathomed the city’s bowels. Registers of everything from prostitutes to snack bars had been assiduously compiled. Loose roof-tiles, dangerous paving-stones, leaking water-pipes: all had attracted the attention of ever more officious aediles. Plans of properties and lists of householders were drawn up in exacting detail. The image that haunted Ovid, of Augustus as the sun, his eye forever probing shadows, was one that the agents appointed to map the city, his many surveyors and officials, would doubtless have recognised. No matter that Rome’s snarl, away from the gold and marble of the Princeps’s grands projets, remained as much a warren as ever, the gaze of Caesar had come to penetrate even its darkest, most insalubrious corners. The great labyrinth of the vastest city on the planet, one that no one previously had ever before thought to trace, held few secrets from Augustus.