Thursday, November 22, 2012

Five years later

Five years later, on Julia's birthday, Augustus asked Livia suddenly: "How big is the island?"
"Which island?" asked Livia.
"The island… where an unlucky woman is living."
"Oh, a few minutes' walk from end to end, I believe," Livia said with affected carelessness.
"A few minutes’ walk! Are you joking?" He had thought of her as an exile on some big island, like Cyprus or Lesbos or Corfu. After a while he asked: "What is it called?"
"It's called Pandataria!"
"What? My God, that desolate place? O cruel Five years on Pandataria!"
Livia looked at him severely and said: "I suppose you want her back here at Rome?"
Augustus then went over to the map of Italy, engraved on a thin sheet of gold studded with small jewels to mark the cities, which hung on the wall of the room in which they were. He was unable to speak, but pointed to Reggio, a pleasant Greek town on the straits of Messina.
So Julia was sent to Reggio, where she was given somewhat greater liberty, and even allowed to see visitors-but a visitor had first to apply in person to Livia for permission. He had to explain what business he had with Julia, and fill in a detailed passport for Livia's signature, giving the colour of his hair and eyes and listing distinguishing marks and scars, so that only he himself could use it. Few cared to submit to these preliminaries. Julia's daughter Agrippina asked permission to go, but Livia refused out of consideration, she said, for Agrippina's morals. Julia was still kept under severe discipline and had no friend living with her, her mother having died of fever on the island.
Once or twice when Augustus was walking in the streets of Rome there were cries from the citizens: "Bring your daughter back! She's suffered enough! Bring your daughter back!" This was very painful to Augustus, One day he made his police-guard fetch from the crowd two men who were shouting this out most loudly, and told them gravely that Jove would surely punish their folly by letting them be deceived and disgraced by their own wives and daughters. These demonstrations expressed not so much pity for Julia as hostility to Livia, whom everyone justly blamed for the severity of Julia's exile and for so playing on Augustus's pride that he could not allow himself to relent.
As for Tiberius on his comfortably large island, it suited him very well for a year or two. The climate was excellent, the food good, and he had ample leisure for resuming his literary studies. His Greek prose style was not at all bad and he wrote several elegant silly elegiac Greek poems in imitation of such poets as Euphorion and Parthenius. I have a book of them somewhere. He spent much of his time in friendly disputation with the professors at the university. The study of Classical mythology amused him and he made an enormous genealogical chart, in circular form, with the stems raying out from our earliest ancestor Chaos, the father of Father Time, and spreading to a confused perimeter thickly strewn with nymphs and kings and heroes. He used to delight in puzzling the mythological experts, while building up the chart, with questions like:

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