I. Book Four, Chapter Fifty-Three

Show Notes

There is a sentence in Tacitus that nobody reads, because of the scene that comes before it. Mills starts there, and ends in a museum in Rome in front of a statue whose head was borrowed.

A work of fiction. The manuscript and the people who found it are invented.

What is The Borrowed Head?

The making of Augustus: The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina — daughter of Germanicus, sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius, mother of Nero — which Tacitus read, cited once, and which vanished for nineteen centuries. Discover more at pbmills.com.

I. Book Four, Chapter Fifty-Three

Host: There is a sentence in Tacitus that nobody reads.

I do not mean it is obscure. It sits in the middle of one of the most famous passages in Latin literature, in a book that has been in print for five hundred years, in an edition you can buy for nine dollars. Every classicist alive has read it. It is on the syllabus.

What I mean is that people read past it, because of where it sits. It comes directly after a scene so good that by the time you reach the sentence you are still thinking about the scene.

Here is the scene. The emperor Tiberius is old and frightened. A woman comes to him and asks him for a husband, because a widow of her rank who has no husband has no protection, and she knows it, and so does he. He refuses her. He does it in Greek, which is the cruellest available way to do it, because Greek is the language you use when you want the moment to be elegant and not personal.

That woman is Agrippina the Elder. She will be exiled to an island and she will starve to death there.

It is a private conversation. Two people in a room.

So the question, if you stop and ask it, is how Tacitus knows.

And for once, he tells you.

Here is the sentence. The Latin first, then mine.

Agrippina: Id ego, a scriptoribus annalium non traditum, repperi in commentariis Agrippinae filiae, quae Neronis principis mater vitam suam et casus suorum posteris memoravit.

Host: This, not handed down by the writers of the annals, I found in the memoirs of her daughter Agrippina, who, as mother of the emperor Nero, recorded for posterity her life and the disasters of her family.

She wrote a book.

The daughter of Germanicus. The sister of Caligula. The wife of Claudius. The mother of Nero. Born in an army camp on the Rhine, killed on a shore near Naples by sailors with a club and a sword, and in between, according to the greatest historian Rome produced, she sat down and wrote an account of her own life.

And Tacitus read it.

I am P.B. Mills. I am not a classicist. I run companies.

This is the story of what happened when I went looking for that book.

You do not go to see Agrippina in Rome. You go to see what is left of her, and what is left of her is in a power station.

The Centrale Montemartini is on the Via Ostiense, south of the old walls. It was built in 1912 to give Rome electricity and it did that job until it stopped doing it, and then the city found itself with a decommissioned generating hall and several hundred pieces of ancient marble in storage, and made the only decision anyone could love it for.

The gods are in there with the machines.

Diesel engines the size of railcars, painted deep red. And along the wall behind them, in a row, lit like an operating theatre, the Republic and the Empire.

She is standing among them and she is the wrong colour. That is what takes you first. Every other figure in that hall is pale. She is basanite, a hard dark stone the Egyptians favoured, nearly black in that light and green when you get close, and the effect at forty feet is of a woman in mourning at a wedding.

Inventory number S 1882. First century. She came out of the ground on the Caelian hill in 1885, when they were digging foundations for a military hospital. She is thought to have stood in the Temple of the Divine Claudius, which is to say the temple of the husband she is generally supposed to have poisoned.

She is posed in prayer. Her arms are up. The body is quiet and beautifully done and it is unmistakably a body somebody paid a great deal of money for.

The head is a plaster cast.

It is a cast of a different portrait, the one in Copenhagen, screwed onto the ancient shoulders by a curator at some point in the last hundred and forty years so that the statue would have a face.

Nobody is hiding this. It is on the label. I stood there and read the label three times.

I had come four thousand miles to look at the most complete surviving image of Julia Agrippina, and what I was looking at was a real woman's body with a copy of somebody else's head on it.

I know how that sounds. A man who flies to Rome about a sentence is going to find meaning in a museum label. I would ask you to hold the scepticism for a moment and consider what we actually have of this woman.

I put that question to Helen Voss. Dr Voss is a palaeographer. She has spent her working life reading the handwriting of people who have been dead for a thousand years, and she is, by some distance, the person in this story least willing to say anything she cannot show you. I asked her how many accounts of Agrippina we actually have.

Voss: Three. Well. Three that are worth the name, and you will get people arguing with me about that, and they can.

Host: Give me the three.

Voss: Tacitus, who was a small boy when she died. Suetonius, born after. Cassius Dio, writing a hundred and fifty years later, in Greek, working from people who were working from people.

Host: None of whom were in the room.

Voss: None of whom were in the building. And all three of them are writing inside a tradition that had already decided what an ambitious woman was for. You have to understand that the genre is older than the woman. The template existed. She was fitted to it.

Host: Is that a fringe position?

Voss: No. That is a seminar in week two. What is a fringe position is thinking you can do anything about it.

Host: There is a better likeness of her upstairs at the Markets of Trajan. A portrait head from the Forum of Trajan, with nothing borrowed in it.

The hair is the hair she made famous. Two rows of tight curls over the brow, corkscrewed, absolutely rigid. A style that took a slave two hours a day, and that told every woman in the empire who set it.

It is not a soft face. It is not a hard one either, which is the thing the histories never allow her.

It is the face of somebody listening to a number she does not like.

That autumn I drove a hundred and fifty miles, from Vienne to Nîmes, which is the whole argument about what survives, laid out on a road.

At Vienne there is a complete Roman temple standing in a square with a brasserie on one side. Six Corinthian columns across the front. Early first century. It was raised to Augustus and to his wife Livia, who was Julia Agrippina's great-grandmother and, by every account we have, the woman whose career she studied.

The thing you cannot get over is that it is there. Not a footprint. Not three columns and a diagram. The building, with its walls, with a bus stop near it.

And the reason it is there is that somebody made it into a church.

It kept its roof for eleven hundred years because a congregation needed somewhere dry to stand on Sundays. After the Revolution it was a Temple of Reason. Then the commercial court. Then a museum. Then the town library, which it stayed until 1852.

A hundred and fifty miles south there is the Maison Carrée, the best preserved Roman temple in the world, and it is not a temple to a god at all. It was raised to two boys. Gaius and Lucius Caesar, the grandsons Augustus adopted and groomed and buried, whose deaths handed the succession to Tiberius and, by that accident, produced every single thing that happens in this story.

Princes of Youth, the dedication called them.

Except that by the time anybody modern looked at it, there was no dedication.

The letters had been bronze, pegged into the stone of the frieze. Bronze is worth money. At some point in the long centuries when that building was a house and a stable and a church and a granary and the town archive, somebody prised every letter off the front and sold them for the metal.

What was left was holes.

In 1758 a man from Nîmes called Jean-François Séguier stood in that square and read the holes.

He was a botanist by preference and an epigrapher by obsession. He measured them. He worked out which spacings belonged to which letters. How many pegs an M takes, and how many an I. And he reconstructed the entire lost inscription from the pattern of the wounds the missing text had left in the stone.

To Gaius Caesar, son of Augustus, consul. To Lucius Caesar, son of Augustus, consul designate. To the Princes of Youth.

It is carved into that frieze today, and it is his.

He read a text that was not there by studying the shape of its absence.

Two buildings, and between them the whole of the discipline.

Everything Roman still standing in Europe is standing because somebody, at some point, decided to keep it. That is not a slander and it is not a conspiracy. It is a fact about who owned the roofs and the walls and the ink and the parchment and the labour between the sixth century and the fifteenth.

The monasteries are the reason we have Virgil. They are the reason we have Tacitus at all, and we have him by a thread.

I asked Voss about the thread.

Voss: The first six books of the Annals come to us in one manuscript. One. Out of the entire Middle Ages. It sat at Corvey in Germany until the sixteenth century.

Host: And if it had burned.

Voss: Then we would not have her mother's name in any detail, we would not have the trial of Piso, and we would not have the sentence you are so excited about. You would not be here. I would be having a quieter morning.

Host: Everything we possess is what somebody chose to keep.

Which means that everything we do not possess is, at least sometimes, what somebody chose not to.

This is the exact point at which this kind of story usually goes wrong.

There is a version of what I am telling you in which somebody suppressed this book. It is a good version. I believed it for a while, and I will tell you honestly that I wanted to, because a suppressed book has a villain in it, and a villain is easier to talk about at dinner than damp.

It is almost certainly wrong.

Books die all the time. Most of them do. They die of mice and mould and of nobody caring enough to recopy them when the roll wears out. That is the ordinary, unremarkable, entirely sufficient explanation, and any classicist will hand it to you in about nine seconds.

Voss: Nine seconds is generous. Four.

Host: So. Her memoirs are quoted by Tacitus. They are quoted, separately, a generation apart, by Pliny the Elder, who tells us on her authority that Nero was born feet first. Pliny died at Vesuvius in the year 79. She had been dead twenty years and the book was on shelves and men were taking notes from it.

And then it stops. No third citation. No summary, no epitome, no scrap of papyrus, not one line quoted by a grammarian to illustrate an unusual ablative, which is how half of Latin literature actually survives.

The most quotable woman in Roman history wrote a book about herself, two of the most careful authors in the language used it, and after that it leaves no trace of any kind.

I accepted that for about a month.

Parchment is skin, and skin is expensive.

That is the whole of what I am about to tell you and everything else follows from it.

Tobias Amadi is an imaging scientist. Dr Amadi photographs manuscripts in wavelengths the eye cannot see, and he is enthusiastic about equipment and cautious about everything else. He is the person who explained parchment to me.

Amadi: People hear the word manuscript and they think of the writing. The writing is the cheap part. The writing is a man and some ink and a few days. The expensive part is the animal.

Host: How expensive?

Amadi: A decent sized book is a herd. That is not a figure of speech, that is arithmetic. So when a house needs a book and has no skin to spare, they do not go and buy skin. They go to the shelf.

Host: A monk takes a volume nobody in that house wants any more. He scrapes it. He washes it. He pumices it. And he writes the new book across the old one, very often turning the leaves ninety degrees, so that the two texts run at right angles through each other.

Amadi: And the old text does not go.

Host: Why not.

Amadi: Because the ink has iron in it, and the iron bites. You can take the pigment off the surface. You cannot take the bite out of the skin. It is a wound, and the skin remembers it. Put it under the right light, in the right part of the spectrum, and it comes back up out of the page.

Host: Like a bruise.

Amadi: Like a bruise. Yes. Exactly like a bruise.

Host: This is not speculative and it is not rare.

It is how we have most of Cicero's Republic, scraped clean in the seventh century, covered over with Augustine on the Psalms, and read again in 1819 by a Vatican librarian with very sharp eyes.

It is how we have the Archimedes Palimpsest, which sold at Christie's in 1998 in appalling condition with forged gold pictures painted over the top of it, and which was imaged over twelve years at three synchrotrons and a museum in Baltimore, and which turned out to contain two treatises that no living person had read since the Middle Ages, including the one in which Archimedes does calculus eighteen hundred years early.

So here is the duller and worse thing I finally understood, at a kitchen table in Nashville with a legal pad, and it is the thing I would ask anybody who doubts this to sit with.

Nobody has to burn a book in a world where parchment costs more than labour.

Burning is loud. Burning makes martyrs and rumours and lists. You do not need any of it. You take the volume off the shelf, and you give it to a house that needs a psalter, and in eleven months it is a psalter. No order has to be given. Nobody has to have an opinion about the contents.

It was old. Nobody in the house could read it. And they needed the skin.

Which brings me to the only genuinely useful thing I have ever done with money.

Claire Bonnet is one of two curators at the collection where the codex had been sitting since 1874. What I paid for was a survey of her shelves. She will tell you why one was needed.

Bonnet: Our catalogue was made in 1874.

Host: Which is old for a catalogue.

Bonnet: No, that is not the point. Old is fine. Plenty of good catalogues are old. The point is what a catalogue was in 1874, which is a man walking along the shelves with a notebook writing down what he thinks each volume is, by looking at the outside and the first page, and then going home.

Host: And it has never been revised.

Bonnet: It has never been revised. There has never been any money to revise it. I have asked for a survey nine times in nine years. I was told no nine times, always politely, always by people who were correct, because there is no money.

Host: There are somewhere north of eleven thousand manuscripts in French ecclesiastical and former ecclesiastical collections that have never been examined with any instrument more sophisticated than a good lamp. The figure for Europe as a whole is a great deal worse. And nobody treats this as a scandal, because there has never been any money, and there is not going to be.

In the second year I stopped writing letters to people who study this, and started paying for imaging.

Amadi: Two hundred and sixty volumes. That is a real survey. That is months.

Host: And what do you expect to find, in two hundred and sixty?

Amadi: Nothing. That is the honest answer. Most surveys find nothing. If you find one palimpsest you have had a good year and you write it up.

Host: We found four.

Amadi: Four is a haul. Four is a very good haul.

Host: The four matter separately, because three of them are the reason you should believe me about the fourth.

One is a fragment of a legal compilation. One is thirty leaves of a grammar. One is a set of estate accounts, which is going to make exactly one specialist in the world extremely happy and will not make the news.

They are dull. They are completely and gloriously dull. They are what a survey finds.

The fourth is a codex of two hundred and forty-one parchment leaves.

The upper text is a passionary. A collection of the lives and the deaths of virgin martyrs, written in a good clear hand in the second half of the thirteenth century.

Women who chose to die rather than yield.

It is written over a woman who chose neither.

I have wanted very badly, at times, for that to have been a joke. A joke would mean a mind in there with me. It was not a joke. It was on the shelf, it was old, nobody could read it, and the house needed a passionary.

The imaging took a great deal longer than anybody told me it would, and it cost roughly what I had been told a book like this would earn, which is a joke I am not tired of yet.

Amadi: Sixteen wavelengths. Ultraviolet fluorescence. Raking light, which is just a lamp at a very low angle and is sometimes the thing that works. And then X-ray fluorescence for the iron, in the passages where the ink is too far gone for any of the rest of it.

Host: And then it is done.

Amadi: And then it is not done at all, and that is the part nobody tells you about. Then it is processing. And then it is argument, for a very long time, because two people can look at the same recovered stroke and see two different letters.

Host: What do you do when that happens?

Amadi: Both readings go in the file. Both of them. Forever.

Host: Hold on to that, because it is going to matter more than anything else I tell you in this series.

The undertext is in a Latin that made two specialists sit down.

It is not thirteenth century and it is not tenth. The consensus of the people who have examined it, none of whom will yet put their names to it, and all of whom I understand completely, is that we are looking at a late antique book. Uncial. Sixth century or a little before. Copied from something considerably older, at close to the last moment in European history when such a thing could still have been copied at all.

Will you put your name to it?

Voss: No.

Host: Will you tell me why not?

Voss: Because I have been doing this for thirty-one years and I have watched four people I respect put their names to a thing early and spend the rest of their working lives being the person who said that. Ask me again in six years.

Host: Is there anything you will say?

Voss: I will say that I did not expect to be shown what I was shown, and that I went home early that day, and that I have not told my colleagues why.

Host: The first recovered leaf is damaged at the head. The first two lines are gone, and they are going to stay gone, and that is the ordinary condition of everything in this.

The third line is not gone.

Agrippina: Ego sum Iulia Agrippina, Germanici filia.

Host: I am Julia Agrippina, daughter of Germanicus.

I want to leave you with a problem, because it is the problem the rest of this series is about, and because I cannot solve it.

What is under the passionary is not the book Tacitus read.

Tacitus read the fair copy. The finished thing. The version she was willing to have read.

What is under the passionary is the draft. The working roll, with the corrections still standing in it. Cancelled sentences that somebody has crossed out and somebody else has faithfully copied anyway. Passages that she plainly meant to remove. Two versions of the same event sitting side by side on the page, with a note about which one she means to keep.

A working roll is the copy a household destroys. It is superseded by definition. It is the one nobody is meant to have, and its ordinary fate is the brazier, within a year of the fair copy being made.

Somebody kept this one.

Somebody kept it in exactly the state it was in, with the crossings-out legible and a second person's handwriting carefully marked off from the first. And then, four or five hundred years later, somebody else sat down and copied every bit of that across rather than tidying it up into a book, and left a note at the bottom of the last page explaining that he had done so on purpose.

I have that note. It is four lines long. We will start there next time.

I do not know who either of them was. I do not think I am ever going to know.

But one of them is the reason there is anything at all, and I would like, before the end of this, to be able to say something about her.

The Borrowed Head is produced by me, and I am not going to pretend that is a virtue.

Next time: a scribe in the sixth century who was handed something strange, and who decided that the strange part was the point.

The full translation, Augusta: The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina, is at pbmills.com, with the companion guide, the map and the family tree.