Augustus

  JOHN WILLIAMS (1922–1994) was born and raised in northeast Texas. Despite a talent for writing and acting, Williams flunked out of a local junior college after his first year. He reluctantly joined the war effort, enlisting in the Army Air Corps, and managed to write a draft of his first novel while there. Once home, Williams found a small publisher for the novel and enrolled at the University of Denver, where he was eventually to receive both his B.A. and M.A., and where he was to return as an instructor in 1954. He remained on the staff of the creative writing program at the University of Denver until his retirement in 1985. During these years, he was an active guest lecturer and writer, editing an anthology of English Renaissance poetry and publishing two volumes of his own poems, as well as three novels, Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner, and the National Book Award—winning Augustus (all published as NYRB Classics).

  DANIEL MENDELSOHN was born in 1960 and studied classics at the University of Virginia and at Princeton, where he received his doctorate. His essays and reviews appear regularly in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. His books include The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace; and the collection Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture, published by New York Review Books. He teaches at Bard College.

  AUGUSTUS

  JOHN WILLIAMS

  Introduction by

  DANIEL MENDELSOHN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1971 by John Williams

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by Daniel Mendelsohn

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Augustus as pontifex maximus in a detail from the frieze of the Ara Pacis Augustae, Museum of the Ara Pacis, Rome; Album / Art Resource, NY

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Williams, John Edward, 1922–

  Augustus/John Williams ; introduction by Daniel Mendelsohn.

  pages ; cm. — (New York Review Books Classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-821-8 (paperback)

  1. Augustus, Emperor of Rome, 63 B.C.—14 A.D.—Fiction. 2. Rome— History—Empire, 30 B.C.—284 A.D.—Fiction. 3. Emperors—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3545.I5286A94 2014

  813'.54—dc23

  2014013233

  ISBN 978-1-59017-822-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  AUGUSTUS

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  BOOK ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  BOOK TWO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  BOOK THREE

  Epilogue

  INTRODUCTION

  Compared to John Williams’s earlier novels, Augustus—the last work to be published by the author, poet, and professor, whose once-neglected Stoner has become an international literary sensation in recent years— can seem like an oddity. For one thing, it was the only one of his four novels to win significant acclaim during his lifetime: Published in 1972, Augustus won the National Book Award for fiction in the following year. (Williams was born in Texas in 1922 and died in Arkansas in 1994, after a thirty-year career teaching English and creative writing at the University of Denver.) More important, the novel’s subject—the eventful life and history-changing career of the first emperor of Rome—seems impossibly remote from the distinctly American preoccupations of the author’s other mature works, with their modest protagonists and pared-down narratives. Butcher’s Crossing (1960) is the story of a young Bostonian who, besotted with Emersonian transcendentalism, goes west in 1876 to explore the “wilderness” where, he believes, “the central meaning he could find in all his life” lies; there he participates in a savage buffalo hunt that suggests the costs of the American dream. Stoner (1965) traces the obscure and, to all appearances, unsuccessful life of an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri in the early and middle years of the last century— a man of desperately humble origins who sees the Academy as an “asylum,” a place where he finds at last “the kind of security and warmth that he should have been able to feel as a child in his home.” (Williams later repudiated his first novel, Nothing But the Night, published in 1948, about a dandy with psychological problems.)

  It would be difficult to find a figure ostensibly less like these idealistic and, ultimately, disillusioned minor figures than the real-life world leader known to history as Augustus—a man whose many and elaborate names, given and taken, augmented and elaborated, acquired and discarded over the eight decades of his tumultuous and grandiose life stand in almost comic contrast to the simple disyllables Williams gave those two other protagonists. Both, as readers will notice, share their creator’s name—William Andrews, William Stoner: a coincidence that makes it almost impossible not to seek some element of autobiography in the early novels.

  No such temptation exists in the case of Augustus. The emperor who gave his lofty name to a political and literary era was born Gaius Octavius Thurinus in 63 BC, the year in which the statesman Cicero foiled an aristocrat’s attempt to overthrow the Roman Republic (a system of government to which Augustus himself would administer the coup de grâce three decades later). The offspring of one Gaius Octavius, a well-to-do knight of plebeian family origins, he was raised in the provinces about twenty-five miles from Rome. While still a teenager, the sickly but clever and ambitious youth sufficiently impressed his maternal great-uncle Julius Caesar to be adopted by him; he was thereafter known as Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (“Octavian”).

  In 44 BC, following Caesar’s assassination and his subsequent deification by decree of the Senate, the canny nineteen-year-old, eager to capitalize on his dead relative’s prestige and thereby enhance his standing with Caesar’s veterans, referred to himself as Gaius Julius Caesar Divi Filius (“Son of the Divine”). By the time he was twenty-five, having avenged Caesar’s murder by vanquishing Brutus and Cassius at Philippi, the new Gaius Julius Caesar had shrewdly maneuvered himself to the center of power in the Roman world as one of three military dictators, or “triumvirs.” (Another was Marc Antony, with whom he would eventually quarrel.) At this point the “Gaius” and “Julius” disappeared, to be replaced by “Imperator”: a military title used by troops to acclaim successful leaders, and the root of the English word “emperor.”

  Within another decade this Imperator Caesar Divi Filius had successfully wrested absolute control of the vast Roman dominions from his one remaining rival, Antony, whom he defeated at Actium in 31 BC and who committed suicide a year later, along with his paramour, Cleopatra. (As the imperator gave the order to murder Cleopatra’s teenaged son Caesarion—a potential rival, since the youth’s father had been Julius Caesar himself—he remarked that “too many Caesars is no good thing.”) Master of the world at thirty-three, he then set about consolidating his power, craftily legitimating his autocratic rule under the forms of traditional republican law, and establishing the legal, political, and cultural foundations for empire that would persist, in one form or another, for the next fifteen centuries. And, indeed, beyond: The current structure of the Roman Catholic Church derive
s directly from Augustus’s political creation.

  One title that this astonishingly adept figure never used was rex, “king”—a word much loathed by the Romans, some of whom killed his great-uncle partly out of fear that he wanted to be one; shrewdly, the master of the world referred to himself as princeps, “first citizen.” In 27 BC, ostensibly in gratitude to the new Caesar for ending a century of civil bloodshed and establishing political stability at home and abroad, the Roman Senate voted him an unprecedented additional title that had suggestive religious associations: augustus, “the one who is to be venerated.” It is the name by which he has come to be known by history—one that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the one he was born with.

  No resemblance to his former self: It is here that the hidden kinship between Augustus and its two predecessors lies. A strong theme in Williams’s work is the way that, over time, our sense of who we are can be irrevocably altered by circumstance and accident. In his Augustus novel, Williams took great pains to see past the glittering historical pageant and focus on the elusive man himself, one who, more than most, had to evolve new selves in order to prevail. The surprise of his final novel is that its famous protagonist turns out to be no different in the end from this author’s other disappointed heroes—which is to say, neither better nor worse than most of us. The concerns of this spectacular historical saga are intimate and deeply humane.

  The life of the first emperor is an ideal vehicle for a historical novel, a genre that is most successful when scholarly adherence to the known facts is balanced by imaginative insights into character and motivation. Augustus is a figure about whom we know at once a great deal and very little, and who therefore invites both description and invention.

  The biographies and gossip, recording and conjecturing began in the emperor’s own lifetime. One work, the ancient equivalent of an authorized biography, was composed by a contemporary of Augustus’s who appears as a character in Williams’s novel: the philosopher and historian Nicolaus of Damascus, whose CV included a stint as tutor to the children of Antony and Cleopatra. The emperor himself composed an official autobiography, the Res Gestae Divi Augusti (“Deeds Accomplished by the Divine Augustus”), clearly intended as a form of political propaganda: Inscribed on bronze tablets affixed to the portals of his mausoleum, it was reproduced in inscriptions throughout the empire.

  If we are to believe Tacitus, writing a century after Augustus’s reign, the obscurity of the emperor’s nature and motives was already a subject of discussion among his contemporaries. In his Annals, that historian paraphrases a debate that took place at the time of the emperor’s death, at the age of seventy-six, in 14 AD:

  Some said “that he was forced into to civil war—which one can neither plan nor execute on upstanding moral principles—by the duty owed to a father [i.e., Julius Caesar], and by the necessities imposed by the state, in which at the time the rule of law had no place . . . and that there was no other remedy for a country at war with itself than to be ruled by one man. The state he founded went by the name of neither a kingdom nor a dictatorship, but of a principate [a state presided over by a ‘first citizen’] . . . there was law for the citizens and due respect shown to the allies; the capital was made magnificent by his embellishments; only in rare instances did he use force, and then only to effect a larger stability.”

  And yet:

  It was said, on the other hand, “that duty toward a father and the exigencies of state were merely put on as a mask: it was in fact from a lust for domination that he had stirred up the veterans by bribery, had, while still a very young man, raised a private army, tampered with the Consul’s legions . . . he wrested the consulate from a reluctant Senate and turned the arms that had been entrusted to him for a war with Antony against the republic itself. Citizens were proscribed and lands divided . . . Undoubtedly there was peace after all this, but it was a peace that dripped blood.”

  The emperor may, indeed, have cultivated a certain opacity as a means of maintaining control: if his nature and motives were hard to guess, so too would his actions be. Small wonder that his official seal was the enigmatic, riddling Sphinx.

  How to write about such a figure? In Augustus, the question is slyly put in the mouth of that Nicolaus who was commissioned to write the First Citizen’s biography. “Do you see what I mean,” the confounded scholar writes after a meeting with Augustus, whose notorious prudence he cannot reconcile with an equally notorious penchant for gambling. “There is so much that is not said. I almost believe that the form has not been devised that will let me say what I need to say.” This is an in-joke on Williams’s part: The form Nicolaus dreams of—which is of course the one Williams ended up using—is the epistolary novel, a genre that wasn’t invented until fifteen centuries after Augustus, when Diego de San Pedro wrote Prison of Love (1485), generally regarded as the first example of the genre. And yet its roots go right back to Augustus’s reign: The Roman poet Ovid—also a character in Augustus, providing gossipy updates on the doings of the imperial court— composed a work called Heroides (“Heroines”), a sequence of verse epistles by mythical women to their lovers. (The worldly litterateur’s taste for gossip ultimately doomed him: It’s likely that his involvement in a scandal involving the emperor’s family was the cause of his exile to a bleak settlement on the Black Sea.)

  The epistolary form, so long associated with romantic subjects, is in fact ideally suited to Williams’s project. The portrait his novel creates, refracted through not only (invented) letters but also journal entries, senatorial decrees, military orders, private notes, and unfinished histories, is at once satisfyingly complex and appropriately impressionistic, subjective. (In his choice of genre Williams was undoubtedly influenced by Thornton Wilder’s 1948 novel The Ides of March: In it, the events leading up to the assassination of Julius Caesar are presented through fictional letters and documents that are intermixed with citations of actual works by real-life figures, such as the poet Catullus, a contemporary and acquaintance of Caesar, and the first-century AD historian Suetonius.) In Augustus, the authors of the invented epistles and documents are, with very few exceptions, real-life characters, and Williams, who was impatient with historical fiction that merely “updated” the past, clearly relished the opportunity to impersonate some well-known figures. He was determined, he wrote in a note while working on Augustus, “not [to] have Henry Kissinger in a toga.”

  Here, then, is the wit and also the preening of Cicero, the orator who, despite his opposition to Julius Caesar, was allied at one point with the young Octavian, whom at first he dangerously underestimates. (“The boy is nothing, and we need have no fear . . . I have been kind to him in the past, and I believe that he admires me . . . I am too much the idealist, I know—even my dearest friends do not deny that.”) Here too is the worldly Ovid, his report to his friend Propertius on a day at the races in the emperor’s box nicely filigreed with self-conscious poeticisms. “The sun was beginning to struggle up from the east through the forest of buildings that is Rome . . .”

  Even those figures who left few traces of their writing style appear fully fleshed and, as far as the historical record permits us to know, true to life. Maecenas, the canny, well-born patron of the arts and intimate of Horace, Vergil, and Augustus—who ridiculed his friend’s effete writing style—is presented as an aesthete whose fussing (“much has been said about those eyes, more often than not in bad meter and worse prose”) conceals a nice hint of steel; it is hard to imagine the emperor suffering lightweights gladly. Augustus’s ambitious third wife, Livia, mother of his eventual successor, Tiberius, comes across as coolly pragmatic and no more excessively conniving than most of the people around her: a far more persuasive character than the Grand Guignol poisoner of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius. (“Our futures are more important than ourselves,” Williams’s Livia matter-of-factly writes her son, demanding that he divorce his beloved wife in order to enter into a dynastic match with Augustus’s daughter, Julia, whom he loathes.) And
Williams invents excerpts from a now-lost memoir by Marcus Agrippa—Augustus’s great friend from youth, the author of his military victories, his eventual son-in-law, and the father to his heirs—to give the tersely prosaic, “official” version of events: “And after the triumvirate was formed and the Roman enemies of Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus were put down, there yet remained in the West the forces of the pirate Sextus Pompeius, and in the East the exiled murderers of the divine Julius . . .” (Williams knows how to deploy the persuasive stylistic tic: to Agrippa he gives the habit of beginning his sentences with “and.”) A possible criticism of the earlier novels is that the author occasionally works so hard to make the writing “beautiful” that it sometimes works against believability; in particular, Andrews in Butcher’s Crossing often expresses himself in a high style at odds with his callow youth. The ventriloquism imposed by Augustus’s epistolary form saves Williams from this vice. It is his most rigorous work.

  One particularly shrewd choice he made in writing Augustus was the decision to withhold the emperor’s own voice until the end, where we get to hear it at last in a long (again: fictional) letter from Augustus to Nicolaus of Damascus, which constitutes the novel’s third and final section. Not surprisingly, the emperor’s account of his past doesn’t square with many of the suppositions and speculations that have preceded it. For instance, it now emerges that what a friend had understood to be the young Octavian’s cry of grief and confusion on hearing the news of Caesar’s assassination was—at least as the aged emperor would now have his correspondent believe—an expression of “nothing . . . coldness,” followed by a feeling of triumph: “I was suddenly elated . . . I knew my destiny.” As if to underscore the unbridgeable distance between what is perceived and what is true, between the official and unofficial, public and private narratives of our own lives, Williams intersperses this climactic fictional mini-autobiography with italicized excerpts of the Res Gestae Divi Augusti. Where does the truth of a life lie? For Williams, whose interest not merely in history but in historiography—the study of how history gets written—distinguishes this novel, the question is rich with irony. After reading Nicolaus’s authorized biography (and reflecting on his own official autobiography), Williams’s Augustus wryly comments that “when I read those books and wrote my words, I read and wrote of a man who bore my name but a man whom I hardly know.”