Augustus

by John Williams

This is a man who shaped himself in order to shape the world, who put as much faith in superstition as in his intelligence, who loved to gamble on the races and in private to play at dice, preferring the rigours of the battlefield and the solitude of the study to the luxury and pomp of office.

Stoner followed, the finest novel I know of university life, and it is the single work that most closely shadows Williams’s own life and career, though it is set a generation back, in the first half of the twentieth-century.

Discovering that Julia had been effectively written out of the histories, the more he read the more he was engaged by what he describes as ‘the ambivalence between the public necessity and the private want or need’ which is at the novel’s core.

I don't think Julia IS written out of the story now. She might have been by Ancient writers.

Judgement is easy. Knowledge, since it involves an act of the imagination on behalf of others and their situations in the exigencies of the world, is difficult.

But if there are truths in this work, they are the truths of fiction rather than of history.

No man may know himself, nor how he must appear even to his friends; but I imagine they must have thought me a bit of a fool, that day, and even for some time afterward.

Octavius, gravely: “My uncle once told me to read the poets, to love them, and to use them—but never to trust them.” “Your uncle,” says Maecenas, “is a wise man.”

I begin to understand this Roman disdain for philosophy. Their world is an immediate one—of cause and consequence, of rumor and fact, of advantage and deprivation. Even I, who have devoted my life to the pursuit of knowledge and truth, can have some sympathy for the state of the world which has occasioned this disdain. They look at learning as if it were a means to an end; at truth as if it were only a thing to be used. Even their gods serve the state, rather than the other way around.

It was, I believe, because in my studies I had forgotten the world, and had begun almost to believe that philosophy was true. Liberty. I joined the cause of Brutus for a word; and I do not know what the word means. A man may live like a fool for a year, and become wise in a day.

And it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world.

But no grief came; and I began to look upon my life, and to remember the moments that had spaced it out, as if I were not concerned. And I knew that it was over. To care not for one’s self is of little moment, but to care not for those whom one has loved is another matter.

But it was not the strangeness of that knowledge that caused my heart to come up in my throat. Though I did not have the words to say it then, I believe it occurred to me for the first time that even a woman might be caught up in the world of events, and be destroyed by that world.

The indulgence of my library was one of the few allowed me; yet of all that might have been, it is the one that has made this exile the most nearly endurable. For I have returned to that learning which I abandoned many years ago, and it is likely that I should not have done so had not I been condemned to this loneliness; I sometimes can almost believe that the world in seeking to punish me has done me a service it cannot imagine.

Athenodorus and I used to talk about the Roman distaste for any learning that did not lead to a practical end; and he told me that once, more than a hundred years before my birth, all teachers of literature and philosophy were, by a decree of the Senate, expelled from Rome, though it was a decree that could not be enforced.

To write an indifferent poem upon a dangerous topic is to choose to behave foolishly.

The poets say that youth is the day of the fevered blood, the hour of love, the moment of passion; and that with age come the cooling baths of wisdom, whereby the fever is cured. The poets are wrong. I did not know love until late in my life, when I could no longer grasp it. Youth is ignorant, and its passion is abstract.

You know the poem and its place in my book; I shall not repeat it.

It is at the end of Book VI of the Aeneid, after lines 855. There is a reference to another Marcellus, which melds into this Marcellus.

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 did not find Tiberius to my liking, and I never had; I did not know why. Later I came to understand that it was because he discovered in all others those vices he would not recognize in himself.

Even as I once was. . . . Was Terentia content to be a woman, as I was not? When I lived in the world, I believed that she was content, and had a secret contempt for her. Now I do not know. I do not know the human heart of another; I do not even know my own.

For no law may adequately determine a spirit, nor fulfill a desire for virtue.

It is empty, the philosophers say; but they have not known power, as a eunuch has not known a woman, and thus can look upon her unmoved.

I was the Emperor’s daughter. I was wife to Marcus Agrippa, who was my father’s friend; but before and after that, I was the Emperor’s daughter. It was accepted by all that my duty was to Rome. Yet there was a part of me which, as year followed year, I came to know with increasing intimacy; it was a part that refused that duty, knowing it was a duty without reward. . . .

A moment ago I wrote of power, and of the joy of power. I think now of the devious ways in which a woman must discover power, exert it, and enjoy it. Unlike a man, she cannot seize it by force of strength or mind or desire; nor can she glory in it with a man’s open pride, which is the reward and sustenance of power. She must contain within her such personages that will disguise her seizure and her glory.

“Father,” I asked, “has it been worth it? Your authority, this Rome that you have saved, this Rome that you have built? Has it been worth all that you have had to do?” My father looked at me for a long time, and then he looked away. “I must believe that it has,” he said. “We both must believe that it has.”

I shall not subject you, my dear Sextus, to one of my disquisitions; but it seems to me more nearly true, as the years pass, that those old “virtues,” of which the Roman professes himself to be so proud, and upon which, he insists, the greatness of the Empire is founded—it seems to me more and more that those “virtues” of rank, prestige, honor, duty, and piety have simply denuded man of his humanity. Through the labors of the great Octavius Caesar, Rome is now the most beautiful city in the world. May not its citizens now have the leisure to indulge their souls, and thus lead themselves, like the city in which they live, toward a kind of beauty and grace they have not known before?

“Few people knew him well,” he said. “Not many liked him. But there was a time when we were young—Marcus Agrippa was young, too—there was a time when we were friends, and knew that we would be friends for as long as we lived. Agrippa; Maecenas; myself; Salvidienus Rufus. Salvidienus is dead too, but he died long ago. Perhaps we all died then, when we were young.”

We talked about the old times together. He asked me to look out for Horace’s welfare; he said that poets had more important things to do than to care for themselves.

The only one alive now whom he loves is his daughter. And I fear for that love; I fear most desperately. For his daughter seems to grow more careless of her position month by month; her husband will not live with her, but remains abroad, though he is consul for the year.

It began its service late, for it was told that it had no rights, and must by the nature of things be subservient to dictates other than its own. When I learned that the body had its rights, I had been twice married, and was the mother of three children. . . .

And yet the woman in such a game is always the victor; and I believe she must have a little contempt for her antagonist; for he is conquered and used, as he believes that he is conqueror and user.

I cannot remember my emotions at being so refused; it had not happened to me before. I must have been angry; and yet I believe that there must have been a part of me that was relieved, and grateful. I had, I suppose, begun to be bored.

If history remembers me at all, history will remember me so. But history will not know the truth, if history ever can.

If you will forgive me for saying so, my dear Nicolaus, all these works seem to me now to have one thing in common: they are lies.

It is fortunate that youth never recognizes its ignorance, for if it did it would not find the courage to get the habit of endurance. It is perhaps an instinct of the blood and flesh which prevents this knowledge and allows the boy to become the man who will live to see the folly of his existence.

Mankind in the aggregate I have found to be brutish, ignorant, and unkind, whether those qualities were covered by the coarse tunic of the peasant or the white and purple toga of a senator. And yet in the weakest of men, in moments when they are alone and themselves, I have found veins of strength like gold in decaying rock; in the cruelest of men flashes of tenderness and compassion; and in the vainest of men moments of simplicity and grace.

wealth beyond one’s comfort has always seemed to me the most boring of possessions, and power beyond its usefulness has seemed the most contemptible.

It was more nearly an instinct than knowledge, however, that made me understand that if it is one’s destiny to change the world, it is his necessity first to change himself. If he is to obey his destiny, he must find or invent within himself some hard and secret part that is indifferent to himself, to others, and even to the world that he is destined to remake, not to his own desire, but to a nature that he will discover in the process of remaking.

One does not deceive oneself about the consequences of one’s acts; one deceives oneself about the ease with which one can live with those consequences.

The young man, who does not know the future, sees life as a kind of epic adventure, an Odyssey through strange seas and unknown islands, where he will test and prove his powers, and thereby discover his immortality. The man of middle years, who has lived the future that he once dreamed, sees life as a tragedy; for he has learned that his power, however great, will not prevail against those forces of accident and nature to which he gives the names of gods, and has learned that he is mortal. But the man of age, if he plays his assigned role properly, must see life as a comedy.

Between the brutality that would sacrifice a single innocent life to a fear without a name, and the enlightenment that would sacrifice thousands of lives to a fear that we have named, I have found little to choose.

Alexander was fortunate to have died so young, else he would have come to know that if to conquer a world is a small thing, to rule it is even less.

Of the many services that Maecenas performed for me, the most important seems to me now to be this: He allowed me to know the poets to whom he gave his friendship. They were among the most remarkable men I have ever known; and if the Roman, as he often did, treated them with as much disdain as he dared, it was a disdain that masked a fear perhaps not wholly unlike that feeling he had about the sea.

I could trust the poets because I was unable to give them what they wanted.

The poet contemplates the chaos of experience, the confusion of accident, and the incomprehensible realms of possibility—which is to say the world in which we all so intimately live that few of us take the trouble to examine it. The fruits of that contemplation are the discovery, or the invention, of some small principle of harmony and order that may be isolated from that disorder which obscures it, and the subjection of that discovery to those poetic laws which at last make it possible.

The winds and rains of time will at last crumble the most solid stone, and there is no wall that can be built to protect the human heart from its own weakness.

Thus those laws which I initiated were not intended so much to be obeyed as to be followed; I believed that there was no possibility of virtue without the idea of virtue, and no effective idea of virtue that was not encoded in the law itself.

Perhaps you were right after all, my dear Nicolaus; perhaps there is but one god. But if that is true, you have misnamed him. He is Accident, and his priest is man, and that priest’s only victim must be at last himself, his poor divided self.

I have come to believe that in the life of every man, late or soon, there is a moment when he knows beyond whatever else he might understand, and whether he can articulate the knowledge or not, the terrifying fact that he is alone, and separate, and that he can be no other than the poor thing that is himself. I look now at my thin shanks, the withered skin upon my hand, the sagging flesh that is blotched with age; and it is difficult for me to realize that once this body sought release from itself in that of another; and that another sought the same from it.

For contrary to what we may believe, erotic love is the most unselfish of all the varieties; it seeks to become one with another, and hence to escape the self.