John Williams - Augustus

In some ways Augustus is a vivacious book, but the vivacity is subdued and, ultimately, drowned. You may think that it started light-heartedly enough, but if you reread Maecenas’ letters to Livy, you realize that they are statements of melancholy. In these letters old Maecenas reminisces about his youth, so his melancholy is the sort that only comes with age: not the melancholy of youthful affectation (we can easily imagine a young, somewhat effeminate Maecenas effusively protesting this verdict), nor the melancholy of the poet (think Ovid), nor the melancholy of a Roman in search of the lost Republic (think Cicero). It is a sadness that underlies every thought and word but is never pronounced. It is als0 hard not to feel pity when reading of what the successive deaths of Virgil, Maecenas, and Horace did to Octavius, who said to Nicolaus after Maecenas’ passing: “Maecenas wrote badly… I always told him that he wrote badly.” It is always the little things, the things we would consider banal, that reveal the depths of a relationship.

Williams imbues the book with a sense of utter futility: of power, glory, and glamour, of all the greatest and the best (or should I say, the worst) of human experience, but also of the futility of them all. Alongside power, Williams juxtaposes Salviedienus’s suicide. Alongside glory, Williams juxtaposes Cleopatra’s corpse in the procession of Octavius’ triumph. Alongside glamour, Williams juxtaposes Julia’s downfall. Alongside the greatest and the best, Williams juxtaposes an Octavius who had always been lucid enough to know since Caesar's death that there never was any meaning. But Octavius lived in that lie and said to his daughter: “We both must believe that it has [been worth it].” Of course Julia was unconvinced. He never convinced himself, just as Caesar left questions unanswered: “... I do not know where we are going, though I lead a nation to its destiny.”

The story's cynicism amounts almost to nihilism, but at the same time it is admirable because it is the energy to work and live when there is no answer to the “why”. This energy, subdued but persistent, reminded me of how energetically characters often work towards bittersweet endings without realizing it. But bittersweetness is not a good description of the sadness of Augustus. Bittersweetness implies hope, even just a little bit of it, whereas there is no hope by the end of this story. All the old friends die and Julia, who could have been a hope, became a fallen woman before dying a disillusioned and abandoned one. 

(Julia’s share of the blame for her downfall is complicated. We can argue that it was completely her responsibility, but we can also argue that many circumstances and people combined to make her the person she became. Characters repeatedly call her “the Emperor’s daughter”. Perhaps the older generation expected her to be a model woman, just as her father was expected to be the model citizen and leader. The difference is that Augustus is an unusually driven man with steady determination, but Julia was much more susceptible to influence. Also, Augustus could hold on to a distant ideal of perfection but Julia had nothing to hold on to but air.)

Octavius wrote that the old man sees life as a comedy. This is not hope. To Octavius, it is a grotesque comedy staged in heaven for the gods, where they laugh at the futility of human endeavor, in the midst of which the old man clearly sees that he is one amongst many fallible mortals. He has lost bits and pieces of himself over the years in pursuit of his goal, as those before him had and those after him inevitably will.

Maybe we can consider the ending hopeful, since Philipus of Athens writes: “let us pray to the gods that, under Nero, Rome will at last fulfill the dream of Octavius Caesar.” 

Hopeful? It is ironic. Strip away the semblances of hope and optimism and we are left with the knowledge that Nero was the worst ordeal Rome would have to go through yet. If Tiberius had been harsh, if Caligula had been cruel, if Claudius had been inept, then Nero was the culmination of all those sins. And yet Philipus says: “let us hope”.

Augustus’s own words are the best representation of the fate of Rome and the fate of mankind without hope yet striving, generation after generation, to obtain it:

“Rome is not eternal; it does not matter. Rome will fall; it does not matter. The barbarian will conquer; it does not matter. There was a moment of Rome, and it will not wholly die; the barbarian will become the Rome he conquers; the language will smooth his rough tongue; the vision of what he destroys will flow in his blood. And in time that is ceaseless as this salt sea upon which I am so frailly suspended, the cost is nothing, is less than nothing.”

Yet even these words of Octavius’s are the words of ashes. He had written them to Nicolaus, the last surviving of his friends - but Nicolaus had actually died a fortnight before the letter was written. Octavius, soon to become ash, had been writing to the ashes of his friend. 

Philipus explains: “I did not inform the Emperor of [Nicolaus’s death], for it seemed to me at the time that he was happy in the thought that his old friend would read his last words.” So Octavius died under this illusion, just as Williams let him live through many others. What is left of Augustus's 'marble' Rome except a few scarred pillars and temples? Should his legacy and success be judged by them, or by their intangible afterlife? Williams leaves the question open.