VI. A Woman Injured

Show Notes

Her mother is taken. Julia is thirteen, and there is a red-bearded bridegroom waiting.

Source: chapters 5–6.

Free companion guide — a map of the novel, the family tree, a chronology and a pronunciation guide: pbmills.com

A work of fiction. Julia Agrippina left no memoir and there is no manuscript.

What is Augusta: The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina?

AUGUSTA is a novel by P.B. Mills, read in full. It is presented as the recovered private commentaries of Julia Agrippina — daughter of Germanicus, sister of Caligula, wife of Claudius and mother of Nero. The manuscript does not exist. Tacitus really did read her memoirs, and really did cite them once, and they really are lost. Everything else here is invention.Twenty-seven episodes. A new one each week. Series guide, maps, and family tree available for free download at pbmills.com.

VI. A Woman Injured

Translator: Augusta. The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina. Episode six. A Woman Injured.

Chapter Five. A Woman Injured.

Entry one. The study in the palace, AD 50, with Julia thirty-four and three years of the middle twenties on the table: AD 24 to 26. Julia is eight to ten across them. Her mother, Agrippina the Elder, is thirty-seven to forty, and this is the entry in which her household is taken apart, not by any charge against her, but around her.

The names, in order. Gaius Silius, who commanded on the Rhine, and his wife Sosia Galla, Agrippina's friend, destroyed in AD 24. The historian Cremutius Cordus, in AD 25. Claudia Pulchra, Agrippina's cousin, condemned in AD 26 on the prosecution of an unknown called Gnaeus Domitius Afer, with Varius Ligur beside him. Behind all of it, Sejanus, about forty-five, who this year asks for the hand of Livilla, thirty-seven, the widow of the emperor's son. Sostrata is seventeen to nineteen.

Julia made her own notes in AD 26. In AD 50 she recasts them from two household registers, her grandmother's and her mother's, read not for who came to the door, but for who stopped coming.

Julia: AD 24

A household can be taken apart without a single prosecution inside it, and the way to see it done is to read a register for the names that stop.

My grandmother's clerks kept the callers by the week for thirty years and my mother's people kept hers less well but they kept them, and both sets are on this table, and I have spent four days going down the columns of the middle twenties looking for absences instead of presences, which is a thing I had never done before and which took me about an hour to learn how to do properly. A man who is prosecuted leaves a mark. A man who simply stops coming leaves a gap in a column, and a gap in a column looks like nothing at all until four years of them are set side by side and turn out to be in an order.

They are in an order. It runs from the men who could do something to the men who could only be seen with her.

Gaius Silius went first, in the year Servius Cornelius and Lucius Visellius were consuls, and he had commanded the upper army on the Rhine for seven years and he was the man who took the legions across and finished Sacrovir in a summer, and he had a triumphal decoration for it. He was charged with extortion in Gaul and with having been complicit in Sacrovir's rising before he put it down, which are two charges that cannot both be pressed at once by an honest man, and they were pressed at once. He killed himself before the vote. His property went to the treasury and the part of it that had come to him as the emperor's gift was called back, which was noted at the time as an innovation.

Sosia Galla was his wife and she was my mother's friend, and she was exiled in the same proceeding, and half her estate was voted to the informers and the other half to her children on Asinius Gallus's motion, which everybody thought generous of him.

And the charge against Sosia, in the record, in the words the record uses, is friendship with Agrippina.

I have read that four times and I keep coming back to it because it is the only place in the whole of this business where anybody wrote it down plainly. They put it in the accusation. It was not a slip and nobody objected to it in the House, because in the year in question it was not yet the sort of thing anybody objected to.

Sosia went to my mother before the trial. She was not asking for help and she did not expect help. Sostrata was seventeen and carried the water in and has it, and what Sosia said was that my mother had misunderstood the shape of it, and that nobody was attacking her friends, and that what was being taken away from her was the people who carried her words about the city, and that when they were gone she would still be able to say anything she liked and there would be nobody to hear it but the person she said it to.

My mother thanked her and said that she would not abandon her friends and would say so publicly.

Sosia said that was the difficulty and went home and was exiled inside the month.

Two years later my mother had eleven callers a week where she had once had forty and she was still saying anything she liked, in rooms, to whoever was in them, and there was nobody left to carry it, and I do not think she noticed the difference between those two conditions until she was on the island.

Then Cremutius Cordus, in the year after, and this one I want down carefully because of what happened to the books.

He had written a history. He had praised Brutus in it and had called Cassius the last of the Romans, and both of those men had been dead seventy years, and he was sixty-something and had written the thing under Augustus, who had read it and done nothing. Satrius Secundus laid the charge. Cremutius came into the House and made a speech about it which is the best thing anybody said in Rome in that decade and which I have had copied out, and then he went home and starved himself to death over some days rather than wait.

The Senate ordered his books burned by the aediles.

They were burned. That is in the record and it was done in the Forum and in the provinces and it was thorough.

And they came back. His daughter Marcia had copies of them put away and brought them out when it was safe, and they are in this city now and any man can read them, and the thing the Senate voted a fire for is on a shelf.

Sostrata was eighteen when that happened and she has told me this week that she remembers the burning being talked about in the kitchen and that she does not remember anybody in that household mentioning Marcia at all, at the time or since, and she said it in a flat way and went on writing.

One more thing out of those two years and then Pulchra.

Sejanus asked for my aunt Livilla in marriage and was refused.

He put it in writing, to Tiberius, and the letter was careful and it argued from his services and from the enmity of Agrippina, which he named, and Tiberius answered it and the answer was careful too and said no in about four hundred words. Livilla was two years widowed. She had two children by Drusus, one of whom was Gemellus, and she was a Claudian and the emperor's niece and daughter-in-law both, and Sejanus was a knight from Volsinii, and everybody in Rome who heard about it, and a good many did, said that this was the whole objection and that Tiberius had put it kindly.

I do not think that was the objection at all, and I have the letter, or the parts of it the record kept.

He told Sejanus that such a marriage would divide the state into two parties. Not that it was beneath her. That it would make a faction with a name and a household, and that the men who had been going quietly to one man's door for six years would then be going to a house, and a house can be pointed at.

He refused him the thing that would have made him visible, and gave him everything else for another six years.

Sostrata says the household talked about that refusal for a fortnight and that the whole of what they said was that the emperor had put the man in his place, and that my aunt Livilla was seen to be perfectly cheerful about it, which she was, and which I did not think about again until I was thirty.

Now Claudia Pulchra, which is the one that was aimed at my mother through somebody else and which everybody understood as such on the day.

Pulchra was my mother's cousin and her friend and the two of them were in each other's houses constantly. She was charged in the year Gnaeus Lentulus and Gaius Calvisius were consuls with unchastity, with adultery with a man named Furnius, and with poisons and spells against the emperor. The prosecutor was Gnaeus Domitius Afer, who was praetorian and unknown and in debt and who wanted to be known, and he had Varius Ligur beside him, who was the injured party in the adultery and had been persuaded to be.

I was ten and I was outside the Basilica Julia in a litter with the curtain up because Sostrata had brought me down on an errand and the errand had taken longer than she expected, and the doors of the court were open because it was June.

I could hear him.

I could not follow it and I did not try. What I have is the sound, which was pleasant, and unhurried, and had a shape to it: he would go along steadily for a while and then stop, and there would be a noise from the room, and then he would start again from a little further back. I asked Sostrata what he was doing and she said he was telling them things they had already heard.

She was right and it took me about fifteen years to understand how right. There was no evidence in that prosecution that anybody would have accepted about a stranger. What there was, was every piece of gossip about Claudia Pulchra that had been in Rome for nine years, laid end to end by a man with a good voice in the correct order, so that the whole came out looking like a sequence with a purpose in it, and Afer's gift, and it is a real gift and I have hired it twice, was for the order.

He was made known. He had the consulship inside twelve years and he is alive and prosperous at this hour, and I could name three men in the Senate this month who are doing to somebody what he did to Claudia Pulchra, and one of them is doing it for me.

My mother went to Tiberius about it directly, which is the next entry and which is the worst quarter of an hour in her life.

Pulchra was condemned.

And I want to set down the small thing rather than the large one, since the large one is in the record and anybody can have it. The register for my mother's house shows Claudia Pulchra calling on the eleventh, the fourteenth and the nineteenth of that May, three times in nine days, which is more than she had come in the whole of the previous winter, and then nothing.

She knew. She came three times in nine days and said nothing about it to my mother, or said something and my mother did not hear it, and then she stopped coming because she had been charged.

I asked Sostrata whether anybody had noticed the three visits at the time.

She said everybody noticed. She said the whole household was talking about how often Pulchra was in the house that spring, and that what they were saying was that the two of them had quarrelled and made it up.

Translator: Entry two. The same study, with a letter to Puteoli going out: Julia's answer to the clerk who asked her to summon his mother. Then AD 26, and the precinct of the temple of the Divine Augustus, where Tiberius, sixty-seven, is sacrificing to his adoptive father, and Agrippina, forty, walks up to him in front of the priests and says the thing she has been saying in private for years.

Julia is ten. She is not there, but she is in the litter afterwards. Livia, eighty-three, told her the scene two years later, with relish; Julia counts her an interested source and says so.

Julia: AD 26

Eutyches has his answer and I did not give him what he asked for, and I want the whole of what I did on this page, since I made a point in the last part of this account of recording the refusal and I am not going to be less exact about the thing I did instead.

I withdrew the summons. Statia is not wanted and will not be sent for, and the letter saying so went down on the ordinary post and not by anybody's private courier, in Sostrata's hand and over her name and not mine, which is the whole of the protection I had available and is worth less than Eutyches would like.

Then I had the man moved.

There was a vacancy in the corn accounts at Ostia and I did not create it and I want that understood, because I have created vacancies and this was not one of them. A clerk there died in the spring and the place had been standing open since. Eutyches is at Puteoli, forty and competent and stuck, and Ostia is a better office in every way that matters to a man who does that work, and it is nine miles from this room.

He will be told that his name was put forward by the office and he will believe it, because that is how such places are filled, and it will be true in every particular except the part that matters.

So his mother is safe on the coast and he is out of Suillius's country and in mine, and he owes his advancement to an office and not to me, and I could send for him tomorrow and he would come and would have no idea in the world why he was coming.

I did not set out to do that. I sat down to write a letter withdrawing a request and I got up having acquired a household, and the space between those two facts is about four hours and I cannot account for what happened in it.

Sostrata has copied the letter and made no remark of any kind.

Now the altar, which is the other thing on this table and which I have been reading against Livia's account of it for two days.

My mother went to Tiberius at the sacrifice, in the precinct of the temple of the Divine Augustus, in the year Claudia Pulchra was condemned, and there is a version of this in circulation which has her weeping and there is a version which has her raving, and both of them are wrong and both of them were put about on purpose.

Here is what she did.

She waited until he was sacrificing to my father's grandfather. She let him finish. And then she came up to him in front of the priests and the attendants and said that it was absurd to sacrifice to the Divine Augustus and persecute his descendants at the same time, and that the god had not passed into images, and that she was his true likeness, sprung from his blood, and that she understood what was being done to her, and that Pulchra had been destroyed for no reason except friendship with her, and she asked for a husband.

She asked for a husband. That is the part everybody leaves out and it is the whole point of the exercise. She was forty and a widow of seven years with six living children and she was asking the emperor to let her remarry, which would have given her a man's name to stand behind and a household that was not a widow's household, and she asked for it in public because in private she had asked for it twice and had been given nothing at all.

And Tiberius took her hand and said one line in Greek, which is that she was hurt because she did not rule.

He said it quietly and he said it in Greek in front of Roman priests, which is a way of saying a thing to one person in a room full of people, and there is no answer to it, and my mother did not make one, and the sacrifice went on.

I was ten and I was not there and everything above is out of the record, out of Sostrata, and out of Livia, who told it to me two years later with a good deal of relish and who is an interested party and I shall say that once and leave it standing.

What I have of my own is the litter afterwards.

She was calm. That is the thing nobody believes and it is what I have. She was not weeping and she was not shaking and she had the look she had after she had done something she had decided to do, and she talked to me the whole way up the hill about the priests, who had heard it, and about the attendants, who had heard it, and about how many of them there had been, and she was pleased with the number.

She said that a true thing said in front of enough people cannot afterwards be taken back.

I was ten and I believed her entirely.

I believed her for eleven years. I stopped in the spring of the year I was twenty-one, in a room on the Palatine, when I understood that a true thing said in front of enough people can be taken back with perfect ease provided nobody who heard it is willing to repeat it, and that the arithmetic my mother was doing in that litter was the right arithmetic applied to the wrong quantity. She was counting the men who heard. The number that mattered was the number who would say afterwards that they had heard, and that number, on the day, in that precinct, was nought.

There is a smaller thing about that afternoon which has no bearing on anything and which I have kept for twenty-four years for no reason I can give.

The litter smelled of somebody's oil. One of the bearers or somebody who had used it before us, and it was cheap and it was strong and it was the sort of thing men buy in the Subura, and my mother was making the finest speech of her life about the Divine Augustus and I was ten and I could think about nothing else and I did not say so, because she was in earnest and I could tell.

Translator: Entry three. A dinner in the house of Tiberius, some weeks after the sacrifice, AD 26. Twelve or thirteen at table. Agrippina, forty, has been warned that morning that she will be poisoned there. Tiberius, sixty-seven, reclines above her. Julia, ten, is at the far end with the children, Drusilla, nine, and Gemellus, five, and her brothers Nero, about twenty, and Drusus, about eighteen, are on the couches. Sostrata, nineteen, is at home when Julia comes back.

Julia's notes are from AD 26. She recasts them in AD 50 from four accounts that agree about everything except the fruit.

Julia: AD 26

There was a dinner some weeks after the altar at which my mother would not eat, and I have four accounts of it and they agree about everything except what I am going to have to decide.

The house was Tiberius's and the party was small, twelve or thirteen, and my mother had been warned that morning that she would be poisoned there. The warning came in through a woman of her household whose name is on none of the lists and whom nobody afterwards could produce, and I shall come back to her because she is the whole of the next part of this account.

My mother went to the dinner. That was correct and I would have done the same, since a woman who declines an imperial invitation on the day has announced something she cannot then unannounce.

And she ate nothing.

She did it without a word and without a gesture, which is the part people get wrong when they tell it: there was no pushing of dishes and no ostentation. She simply did not eat, over about two hours, while everything went round her. Anybody watching would have seen it inside a quarter of an hour, and Tiberius was reclining above her, and Tiberius watched everything.

He took a piece of fruit off the dish in front of him and held it out to her with his own hand and praised it.

I have had the fruit itself given to me three ways over the years. Apples in two of them and pears in the third and it does not matter, and I mention the disagreement so that nobody supposes I have a better source on that evening than I do.

She took it and did not eat it and gave it to a slave.

Now the room, which is my contribution and which is what I actually have, because I was ten years old and I was at that dinner and I was put at the far end with the children and given something to occupy me, and children see the room because nobody is talking to them.

There were four of us at that end. Drusilla, who was nine and had been told to keep me quiet. Me. A boy belonging to somebody I have never been able to identify. And Gemellus, who was five and who was being fed by a woman and who dropped things on purpose to watch them go.

I was watching my mother, at first, because everybody was watching my mother.

Then I noticed that everybody was watching my mother.

That is my whole contribution at ten years old and I have thought about it a great deal since. There were perhaps thirty people in that room counting the service and every one of them had found something to do that let them keep her in view. The men on the couches had turned a little more than the conversation required. Plancina's woman had a jug she did not fill anything from for a long time. Two of the servers had stopped in places where servers do not stop. My brother Drusus was watching her and my brother Nero was watching Tiberius, and I remember being surprised by that and I have never been able to decide whether I remember it or have constructed it, and it is the only thing in this entry I would not swear to.

Nobody was watching the fruit.

I have gone at that from every direction. If a room is arranged so that a woman is poisoned at a dinner, then somebody in that room has to know where the poison is, and the person who knows is the person who does not look at it, and I could name the person who did not look at it if the answer were not that nobody looked at it. Thirty people watched a woman refuse food for two hours and not one of them, in any account I have, glanced at the dish.

There are two ways to read that. Either the warning was false and there was nothing on the table, or the thing on the table was so ordinary that the person handling it did not know what it was.

I cannot get past that and I have stopped trying.

What the evening did was settle the matter, and it settled it against her, and it did so without anything happening at all. Before that dinner my mother was a woman with grievances who was being badly used. After it she was a woman who believed the emperor meant to kill her and who had said so, in a room, with her body, in front of thirty people who all went home and told somebody.

He did not have to say a word. He handed her a piece of fruit and she handed it to a slave and the whole city had it inside three days, and every version of it that went round had her refusing the emperor's own hand.

She had made a claim she could not prove and could not withdraw and had made it without opening her mouth, which is a thing I did not know was possible until I watched it done.

Tiberius left Rome that year and did not come back. He went into Campania and then across to Capri, and the histories give it as Sejanus's doing and Sejanus certainly encouraged it, and I have never believed that is sufficient. A man of sixty-seven who has been in the same city as that dinner does not need to be persuaded to leave it.

I asked Sostrata this week what she remembered of the fruit and she said she was not at the dinner, being nineteen and not the sort of person who went to those, and that she remembered me coming home.

I asked what I had said.

She said I had said the room was very hot and had asked whether we could have the same little cakes at our house.

Translator: Entry four. The room the two of them shared in Antonia's house, later that same night in AD 26. Julia is ten, Sostrata is nineteen, and this is the worst quarrel of their lives. Julia wrote it in cipher before morning. It is also the night a woman with no name goes onto the list Julia keeps under the loom weight, and the column that says who she did it for is left blank. It is still blank.

Julia: AD 26

Sostrata and I had the worst quarrel of our lives on the night of the fruit and I lost it, and I did not understand that I had lost it for about nine years, and I am going to put it down as it went.

We shared a room until I was married. She was nineteen and I was ten and there were two beds and a lamp and a box, and this had been the arrangement since I was four, and neither of us thought about it any more than a person thinks about a wall.

I came in from the dinner full of it. I gave her the whole evening at speed, the way I gave her everything, and I was pleased with myself about the room and the watching, and she took it all down, and then she asked me a question.

"Who told your mother she would be poisoned?"

I said a woman of the household.

"Which woman?"

I did not know. Nobody knew. I said so.

She put the stylus down and asked me the next one, and she asked it in the ordinary voice she used for asking me what I had eaten.

"If your mother had eaten, what would have happened?"

I said she would have died.

"And if there was nothing in it?"

I said then nothing would have happened.

"Something happened," she said. "Thirty people watched her refuse the emperor's hand. That happened whether there was anything in the dish or not, and it cost whoever arranged it one woman and one morning, and it cost them nothing at all if it failed, because a warning that comes to nothing is a warning that came to nothing."

I said that the woman had saved my mother's life.

"She may have. Do you know her name?"

I said that a person who does a thing like that would not give a name.

"Then nobody can thank her," Sostrata said, "and nobody can ask her anything, and nobody can find her tomorrow, and she has done the greatest service one person can do another and has arranged never to be paid for it. I have been in service my whole life and I have never met anybody like that and neither have you."

I want to be exact about what I did next, because I have been telling myself a version of it for twenty-four years in which I argued.

I did not argue. I told her she was a slave and that she had not been in the room and that she did not know my mother and that she had no business saying such things about my mother's household, and I said it at some volume and I said the word slave, which I had never said to her in my life and have not said since.

She waited until I had finished.

Then she said that she was nineteen years old, and that she had come into this house at eight with my mother's people, and that if my mother's household went down she did not know whose she would be in a year, and that she had been thinking about that every night since Sosia Galla, and that she was asking me the question because I was the only person in that house who would answer her honestly and she needed the answer for herself and not for me.

I had not thought about that once. Not once, in two years of watching people stop coming to my mother's door. It had not occurred to me at any point that the arithmetic which was going to decide whether my brothers lived was also going to decide who owned the person asleep four feet away from me.

I did not apologise. I said something about it being late.

And then I lay awake and did what she had asked me to do, which is the part I am not proud of, and I did it properly.

A warning of poison, delivered on the morning, by a woman who cannot afterwards be produced. If the dinner is honest the warning costs the giver nothing. If the dinner is not honest, the warning saves my mother's life and the giver has done her the greatest service anybody could do her, and my mother will never know who to thank. There is no arrangement of those facts in which the warning is a bad investment for whoever paid for it, and there is exactly one arrangement in which it is a bad investment for my mother, and that is the arrangement in which she believes it.

She believed it. She was still believing it eight years later on Pandateria.

I got up in the dark and put the woman on the list.

I had a list by then. I had started it in the year I learned my letters and it was three columns and it lived under the loom weight with everything else, and it was people, and what they had done, and who they had done it for. The third column was mostly empty. That night I put down a woman with no name and no description in the first column, and warned mother of poison in the second, and I sat there for some while with the stylus and then wrote nothing in the third.

It is still blank. I have had twenty-four years and the papers of two imperial houses and I have never filled it in.

Sostrata was asleep, or was giving a very good account of being asleep, which she has done to me on perhaps eleven occasions in forty years and which I can now tell at a distance and could not tell then.

The pattern of that argument has repeated four times since and I have lost it four times, and on each occasion she has been right at the start and I have been unable to hear it until the thing she was right about had already happened. I know that about myself. Knowing it has not once altered the outcome, which is a discovery about the usefulness of self-knowledge that I would recommend to anybody.

We were perfectly ordinary with each other in the morning. Neither of us has ever mentioned the word I used.

Translator: Entry five. Two places on the same days, in the spring of AD 27. The second courtyard of Antonia's house, where eleven of the injured from Fidenae are laid on straw, after a cheaply built wooden amphitheatre five miles outside Rome collapsed with tens of thousands inside it; Atilius, the freedman who put it up, is exiled. And Livia's cabinet, three afternoons a week, where Livia, eighty-four, with two years to live, makes Julia, eleven, go back over her mother's spring and look at it the way Sejanus, about forty-six, would have looked at it. Antigone is in both places.

Julia's notes are from AD 27, in cipher, under the loom weight. She recasts them in AD 50, partly from Livia's own telling.

Julia: AD 27

The amphitheatre at Fidenae came down in the spring of the year I turned twelve and my grandmother's house took in eleven of them, and Livia had me across the hill three afternoons a week that same month teaching me how my mother had been beaten.

Both of those things were happening and I am going to put them on the same page because they were on the same days.

Fidenae first, since it is the one anybody remembers.

A freedman named Atilius put up a wooden amphitheatre there for a show. He had neither the money to lay the foundations properly nor the honesty to say so, and he was doing it as speculation because the shows had been thin in the city for some years and there was an appetite. It was five miles out. Half of Rome walked up. The structure went at the top and then folded inward and then outward, and the count that went about was fifty thousand killed or maimed, and the count in the record is twenty thousand dead, and the truth is that nobody counted and both numbers were used by people who wanted different things from them.

The leading houses opened their doors, which was ordered and was also what would have happened without the order. Physicians went out. Bodies came back down the road for days and the difficulty by the third day was that the injured and the dead were arriving mixed together and the families could not find their people.

We had eleven in the second courtyard. My grandmother had the store rooms cleared and put straw down and Antigone ran it, and I was eleven and was given a jug and told to be useful, which is the first work I ever did in my life.

I remember two things.

The first is that a man in that courtyard asked me, twice, whether the games had finished. He had been under it for some hours and he was clear enough to ask a question and he asked that one, and I did not know the answer, and I said I would find out, and I did not find out, and he was gone from the courtyard on the third day and I never asked where.

The second is that they were mostly poor. Antigone had the names taken as they came in, because that is what Antigone did with anything, and I looked at that list twenty-four years later this month, and there are eleven names on it and against nine of them there is a trade. A fuller. A man who made cord. Two who worked at the brickyards on the far side of the river and had walked out to Fidenae together and came back in the same cart.

My grandmother's house is on the Palatine and eleven people from a wooden amphitheatre at Fidenae, on straw, in her second courtyard, were the only members of the Roman people I had been in a room with in eleven years who did not work for us.

Atilius was exiled. The Senate passed a decree afterwards requiring that no man put on a show with a fortune under four hundred thousand sesterces and that amphitheatres be built on ground of tested solidity, which is a sensible decree and came a month late, and which I mention because I have signed things very like it and they always come a month late.

Now Livia, and the three afternoons a week.

She was eighty-four and she had two years to live and she was teaching me, and I have written already about what those afternoons were and I am not going to describe the arrangement again. What I have not put down is what she did in the spring after the fruit, which was different from the rest of it and which she did once and did thoroughly.

She made me tell her the sacrifice and the dinner.

Not as they happened. She made me tell them as Sejanus would have had them told to him, which meant from a man who had been in the precinct and a man who had been at the table and neither of whom cared, and she made me do it four or five times, and when I put anything in that a man who did not care would not have bothered to say, she stopped me and made me go back.

It took two afternoons and it was the hardest work of my childhood and I was better at it by the end than I have any business having been at eleven.

Then she asked me what he had been given.

Here is the list I made, and it is the list I gave her, and I have the tablet.

That my mother had approached the emperor in a precinct with priests present, so that a refusal would be public and a grant would be a precedent. That she had claimed descent from the Divine Augustus in front of his own altar, in the hearing of men whose office is to know who may claim what. That she had named Pulchra's destruction as an attack on herself, which put the two of them in one bundle for anybody who wanted them bundled. That she had asked for a husband, which told every man in the empire with a name and an ambition that there was a woman of Augustus's blood who wanted one and could not have one. And that at the dinner she had declined food from the emperor's hand in front of thirty people, which is an accusation of murder made in a form that cannot be prosecuted, retracted, or proved.

Five things in nine weeks, and every one of them true, and not one of them a lie or a weakness or a mistake of fact.

Livia looked at the tablet for a while and then said that my mother was an honest woman, and that she had said nothing in those nine weeks that was untrue, and that she had handed a man five instruments and that he had used four of them, and that the fifth he had not needed.

I asked which one he had not needed.

She said the husband.

I asked her why, and she did not answer, and I have known the answer for about twenty years, which is that a woman who is asking is a woman who has already been refused, and a man building a case does not have to use the parts of it that are doing the work by themselves.

And then I made the decision, which I want set down plainly and without any grandeur, because it was not made grandly. I was eleven and I was tired and I had spent the morning carrying water to people off a road.

My mother was right and she lost. Livia was patient and she won, and my great-grandmother had by then been winning for fifty-six years and had never once been seen to hold anything. Everybody who has ever explained this family to me has offered those two as a choice, and my mother chose the first and thought Livia contemptible for the second, and Livia chose the second and thought my mother a fool.

I decided not to choose.

That is the whole of it. I decided that I would be as right as my mother and as patient as Livia and that I would have both, and I wrote it in the cipher and put it under the weight, and I was eleven years old and I did not tell anybody, including Sostrata.

I read that entry again this week for the first time since I made it.

I do not think it was a foolish thing to have decided. I have looked at it for four days and I still do not, and I am aware that a woman of thirty-four sitting in the palace at the top of the empire is exactly the person who would find nothing wrong with it.

Translator: Chapter Six. The Red-Bearded Bridegroom.

Entry one. The tablinum, the formal reception room, of Antonia's house, in the spring of AD 28. A letter comes from Tiberius, sixty-nine and living on Capri now, and it is about Julia's marriage. She is twelve. The man is Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, forty-four, of a family as old as any in Rome, and he calls at the house that afternoon. Antonia is sixty-three. Agrippina, forty-two, is in the room and says nothing. Sostrata is twenty-one.

Something changes here in how the commentary was made. Everything up to now was written, or rewritten, from twenty and thirty years' distance. From this entry on, Julia writes as she goes, within days, in her own hand, on tablets that Livia's household supplied. This edition calls it the second layer. A girl of twelve is keeping the record now, and the woman of thirty-four only occasionally looks over her shoulder.

Julia: AD 28

The letter came at the fourth hour and my grandmother had it read out in the tablinum with eleven of us standing.

It is from Tiberius on Capri and it is four lines. It says that Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus is of the best blood in Rome, that he is connected to the divine house on both sides, and that the emperor has considered the matter of my marriage and finds him suitable. It does not ask anything.

My mother was there. She said nothing at all. She has said something about everything for nine years and she said nothing about this, and I looked at her while the clerk was reading and her face did not move.

Domitius came in the afternoon.

He is forty-four. He is heavy in the shoulders and he has red in his beard where it is going grey and he came in his own good clothes and was pleasant to everybody, and my grandmother gave him wine and they talked about a piece of land near Pyrgi for a quarter of an hour.

He was easy in the room. That is the thing I noticed first and I want it in the tablet. He put himself on the couch the way a man does in a house he has been in before, and he asked after two people by name, and one of them was a doorkeeper.

He is also, they say, the same man who ran a boy down on the Appian Way with a team and did not stop, and who took an eye out of a knight in the Forum over an argument, and I got both of those from the kitchen within an hour of his leaving and I have no way of testing either.

I was brought in and stood where I was put.

I asked him one question. I had it ready and I had asked Sostrata whether it was the right one and she had said it was.

I asked him how many men were in his household at Rome and how many at Pyrgi.

He laughed. He looked at my grandmother first, to see whether she was going to be embarrassed, and she was not, and then he laughed and said that I should find out soon enough and that it was a great many, and that his people would be told to look after me.

That is all he said. He was not unkind and there was nothing in his voice that was meant to put me down.

Here is what I know now that I did not know at the fourth hour.

A man who will not answer a question about the size of his household is a man who does not know the answer. If he knew it he would have said it, because it is a good number and it would have been a pleasant thing to say in front of my grandmother. He does not know how many people work for him. He has never counted them and there is nobody in that house whose business it is to tell him.

A negotiation would have told me less. In a negotiation he would have been careful.

I have written that down and I have read it back and I am going to leave it.

Sostrata says I should not put that sort of thing in this tablet.

I said that this tablet is mine.

She said that a tablet is not anybody's after the person who wrote it is out of the room, and that Antigone told her that when she was eleven, and that she is telling me now because I am twelve and I am going into a house where I do not know who anybody is.

So I am going to keep two. This one, which says what I think, and one for the wax that lies about in a room, which will have the household in it and the weather.

I asked her which one she would rather have if she were somebody else.

She said the household and the weather, without stopping to think about it, and that is the answer I would have given as well, and I am putting the reason down here so that I have it: because the first one can be argued with and the second one cannot.

The wedding is fixed for after my birthday. I shall be thirteen for about a fortnight and then I shall be married.

There is a bird that has got in somewhere above the tablinum ceiling and has been there four days and nobody can reach it, and everybody stops talking when it moves. It was moving while the letter was being read.

My mother has still not said anything.

Translator: Entry two. A fitting room in Antonia's house, in the autumn of AD 28, where Julia, twelve, stands on a stool for two hours with her arms out while the women fitting her wedding clothes talk. What she hears is the story of Titius Sabinus, a knight and her father's friend, killed on the first of January that year, and of the four men who arranged it: Latinius Latiaris, who did the talking, and Porcius Cato, Marcus Opsius and Gaius Petilius Rufus, who were in the roof. Nobody in the house has told her a word of it. Written in her own hand, within days.

Julia: AD 28

I have found out about Titius Sabinus and I am putting it here because nobody will tell me anything and I got it by standing still.

I was being fitted. There is a woman who comes with the cloth and there were four of them in that room and I was on a stool with my arms out for the better part of two hours, and after the first quarter of an hour they stopped seeing me.

That is a thing I have noticed and I am writing it down. A girl of twelve who holds still is finished being seen at about a quarter of an hour, and after that they say everything.

Sabinus was a knight and he was my father's friend. He stayed my mother's friend after, which is the part that mattered, and he went on going to her door for eight years after everybody else had worked out not to.

Four men arranged it. Latinius Latiaris, who knew him. Porcius Cato. Marcus Opsius. Gaius Petilius Rufus. All four were of praetorian rank and none of them had got any further and all four wanted the consulship.

Latiaris did the talking because Latiaris was the one Sabinus liked.

He met him in the street and walked with him and was sympathetic. He said the sort of thing a friend says: that it was a hard time, that men of decency were being driven out, that Sejanus was what he was. He said it first, several times, over some weeks, and he said it in the open where nothing could come of it, and Sabinus agreed with him, because it was true and because a man agrees with a friend in a street.

Then he asked him to the house.

And the other three were in the roof.

They were up in the space between the ceiling and the tiles and they had got up there before Sabinus came, and they lay with their ears at the gaps and the chinks in the boards. Men of praetorian rank, in the dust, in the dark, for however long it took.

Latiaris took him into that room and started him again on Sejanus and let him go on, and this time he wept, which is what everybody who tells it says, and I do not know whether that is true or whether it is the sort of thing people put in.

They wrote to Tiberius and sent the letter to Capri.

They took Sabinus on the first day of January. He was going about the streets on the day of the vows with everybody else and they put a cloak over his head and a rope round his neck and dragged him, and he called out, going along, that this was how the year was being opened and that these were the victims being offered to Sejanus. Then they killed him and put the body on the steps.

And his dog would not leave it.

That is what I have kept out of the whole of it. The dog stayed by him on the steps for a day and would not be driven off, and people brought it food and it would not eat, and when they threw the body in the river the dog went into the water after it and tried to hold it up.

I have asked three people about the dog and all three of them knew about the dog.

Nobody in this house has said one word to me about Titius Sabinus. Not my grandmother and not my mother and not the tutors. What I have is two hours on a stool with my arms out.

They were not being careful. That is the thing. They were not lowering their voices and they were not looking at the door, because there was nobody in that room but four women, a woman with cloth, and a girl who was being measured.

I am going to be married in November into a house where I do not know anybody.

I have written to Sostrata's list from that room the names of the four men and what each of them was, and I have put Latiaris first because Latiaris was the one he liked, and if I ever learn one thing from this it is that.

Translator: Entry three. Livia's cabinet, the same autumn. She is eighty-five, with a year to live, and is carried to the garden now, and this is the last real lesson she gives Julia, who is twelve. It is done with a box of eleven petitions out of her own house, and Antigone standing eight feet away. Written in Julia's own hand, within days.

Julia: AD 28

Livia sent for me twice this autumn and the second time she gave me petitions.

She is eighty-five. She does not come out of her rooms now except to the garden and she is carried to the garden, and her hands have gone bad and Antigone reads to her in the afternoons, and none of that has made any difference to her at all as far as I can tell.

The petitions were real. They were her own, out of her own house, eleven of them, and she had Antigone bring the box and put it on the table between us and then she made me sort them.

Not judge them. Sort them.

She said there were three heaps and I was to find out what they were.

It took me most of the afternoon and I got it wrong twice. I put them by what they asked for first, which was money, land, or a place, and she let me finish and then said that was a clerk's sorting and asked me who I thought read them in a great house.

I said a clerk.

She said yes, and asked what the clerk was for.

The three heaps are these.

The first is the ones that go to the dining couch. Not because they are important. Because they can be said in one sentence in front of guests and make the man look well.

The second is the ones that go in writing to the man himself when he is alone, because they are difficult and he will be embarrassed to be asked in front of anybody, and a man who is embarrassed says no.

And the third is the ones nobody shows him.

I asked what happens to the third heap.

She said they wait. She said that of the eleven on that table, four had been waiting since the spring, and that two of the four would be granted in the end and two would not, and that not one of the six men concerned had been refused anything, and that if any of them were asked this evening whether Julia Augusta had denied them they would all say no, and would mean it.

Then she said the thing I have been turning over for four days.

She said that there is no office in Rome for what she has just described, and no law that says who may do it, and that this is the reason it has never once been taken away from anybody. A consulship can be given to somebody else. A command can be recalled. What she does has no name and therefore no successor and therefore nothing to hand over, and she said that last part in a flat voice as though it were an item on a list.

I asked her whether that was a good thing.

She looked at me for a while and said that I would find out.

Then she made me do the sorting again with the same eleven and I got nine of them right, and the two I got wrong were both from men she has known forty years, and she said that those are always the difficult ones because the request is never what is written on the sheet.

She had almonds. She has them every afternoon and she gave me some and told me not to tell Antigone, who has views about it, and Antigone was standing eight feet away and heard the whole thing and said nothing.

I have thought about the third heap since and here is what I think, and I am writing it in this tablet and not the other one.

The clerk does not decide anything. The clerk decides which decisions are made.

I am going into a house in November where somebody is already doing this and I do not know who it is.

Antigone took me out and down the passage afterwards and said one thing on the way, which was that the old lady is tired now and that I should not press her about the past because she does not enjoy it any more, and that she used to.

I said I had not asked her about the past.

Antigone said no, and that she had noticed that, and that it was the first time.

Translator: Entry four. The dressing rooms of the Domitii, Julia's new family, in November AD 28, days before the wedding. Julia is thirteen now, and three women discuss her for two hours as though she had left the room: Antonia Major, sixty-seven, Domitius's mother and the elder sister of Julia's grandmother; Domitia, his elder sister, about thirty-five; and Domitia Lepida, the younger, about thirty-seven. Anicius, the family's steward, comes up too. News of a revolt in Frisia, on the North Sea coast, and a Roman defeat at the wood of Baduhenna, reaches the room somewhere between the dowry and the question of children. Written in Julia's own hand, within days.

Julia: AD 28

I was in the dressing rooms of my husband's family for three hours today and they discussed me for two of them as though I had gone out.

There were three of them. Antonia Major, who is my grandmother's sister and Domitius's mother and is sixty-seven. Domitia, who is his elder sister. And Domitia Lepida, who is the younger and who is about thirty-seven.

They went through it in order.

The dowry first, and they had the figure, and Domitia said it was less than had been talked about in the spring and Antonia Major said that what came with it was not the money.

Then whether I would carry. They looked at me for that. Antonia Major said my mother had produced nine and Domitia said that six had lived and that the two things are not the same, and then they discussed my mother's health for some minutes in a way I am not going to write down here.

Then what I was for. Domitia said the blood, which is the answer everybody gives. Antonia Major said the blood and the name, and that the name would be worth more in five years than it is now if the boys go on as they are, and worth nothing at all if they do not, and that her son had been given a thing that would either be very valuable or would kill him and that nobody could tell which and that this was the emperor's habit.

That is the most useful sentence anybody has said in front of me this year and she said it while a woman was pinning something.

Then Domitia Lepida said, and she was amused and she was looking at me while she said it, that in her opinion I had been listening to every word for two hours and that they should perhaps ask me.

So I said the thing I had been holding.

I said that their steward Anicius has been carrying a debt on the Pyrgi accounts since the spring of last year, that it is against the timber for the roof of the granary, that it has been moved four times between the household column and the estate column, and that in the last two returns it has been in neither.

I had it from the returns. My grandmother has copies of the Domitian accounts because there is property that touches hers at Pyrgi, and they have been in the second press in the correspondence office since the spring and nobody had told me not to read them, and I read them over eleven days and I found it on the eighth.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Antonia Major asked me how much.

I said forty-one thousand and some hundreds and that I could not give her the hundreds because the last return rounds.

She said that she would look into it.

Domitia has not spoken to me since. She said one thing at the end of the afternoon about the fastening on my sleeve and she said it in a voice I have heard before, from my mother, about people my mother had decided about, and I do not think she will change her mind now.

Lepida laughed. She laughed out loud and put her hand on my shoulder and said that I was going to be a great deal of trouble, and she said it as though it were a good thing, and I do not know what to do with that at all.

I have written down what everybody in that room is worth to me and I have put Lepida in the middle column because I cannot place her.

The other thing about today.

There is trouble in Germany. The Frisii have killed the tax collectors, over ox hides, because the man collecting decided the hides were to be measured against the aurochs, and there is no aurochs in Frisia any more and the hides they have are cattle hides and are smaller. So the price went up without anybody raising it. They took the soldiers who came for it and hanged them, and Lucius Apronius has gone up from the lower army and it went badly at a place called the wood of Baduhenna and five hundred were lost in a village afterwards.

It came into the room as a thing men were annoyed about, between the dowry and whether I would carry.

My father held those armies. Nobody in that room mentioned it and I do not think anybody in that room thought of it, and I am putting it down because I want to know whether I would have thought of it if it had been somebody else's father.

Translator: Entry five. Antonia's house, the night before the wedding, November AD 28. Agrippina, forty-two, who has not been to the house since the spring, comes after dark, stays an hour, and gives her daughter four things. Julia is thirteen. Sostrata, twenty-one, comes in afterwards. Written in Julia's own hand, the same night.

Julia: AD 28

My mother came to my grandmother's house the night before and stayed about an hour and I am putting down everything she said.

She had not been to that house since the spring. She came after dark and she came with two people and she did not send ahead, and my grandmother received her and then went away and left us, which my grandmother has never done.

She looked well. I want that in the tablet because people say she does not, and she looked well, and she has good colour and she is forty-two and she carries herself the way she has always carried herself.

She sat down and she said that she had been thinking about what to tell me and had decided.

Then she gave me four things.

The first is that I am to remember whose daughter I am, every day, and in that house particularly, because that house will want me to forget it and will be pleasant about it.

The second is that I am not to be liked. She said it in those words. She said that a woman who is liked in her husband's house is a woman who has agreed to things, and that being liked is what they will offer me instead of being listened to, and that I should refuse it early because it is very hard to refuse later.

The third is that if Domitius asks me anything about my brothers I am to say I know nothing and to say it every time and to say it the same way.

The fourth is that I am to write to her.

Then she stopped and looked at the room for a bit.

I am thirteen. I have been in her house perhaps twenty times in nine years and I have been in this one every day of it, and she has never given me four things before, and I could see that she had them in an order and had had them in an order for some while.

I said I would do all of it.

I am going to do the third one and the fourth one.

I am not going to do the second one, and I decided that while she was still saying it, and I did not tell her. Being liked in that house is the entire method. It costs nothing, it can be taken off at any time, and a woman nobody likes is a woman who is told nothing, and my mother has not been told anything by anybody for four years and does not appear to have noticed.

I am putting that down and I am aware that it is a hard thing to write about my mother on the night before my wedding, and I am leaving it, because this tablet is worth nothing if I am careful in it.

Then at the door she said the other thing.

She said that she was sorry about the age. She said it quickly and without any arrangement to it, and it was the only sentence in the hour that she had not thought about beforehand, and I know that because it was the only one that came out badly.

Then she said that she had been eighteen and that eighteen had been difficult enough, and she went.

I have sat with that for two hours and I do not know what to do with it, and I have decided to write it down exactly and leave it alone, because if I explain it I shall get it wrong.

Sostrata came in afterwards and asked whether I wanted the lamp out.

I said not yet.

Translator: Entry six. The service courtyard of the house of the Domitii, the morning after the wedding, and again eleven days later. Julia, thirteen, is now the mistress of a house she does not know, and she begins with the stewards. Domitius, forty-four, walks through at the fourth hour and makes a joke of it. Anicius, the steward, gets the credit for something. Sostrata, twenty-one, has come with her. Written in Julia's own hand, within days.

Julia: AD 28

I took the household this morning between the first hour and the fifth and I do not think anybody in it noticed.

Here is what I did and I am putting it down in order because I want to be able to do it again.

I had the stewards come to me one at a time instead of together. They had been coming together, all four, after the master had eaten, and reporting in whatever order they arranged among themselves, which meant they arranged it, and the one with the worst thing to say went last when everybody was tired.

Now they come at the first hour, singly, and I set the order, and it is the kitchen, then the stable, then the correspondence office, then the estates.

I put the kitchen first on purpose. The kitchen knows who ate in this house yesterday and who did not and who sent word and who simply did not come, and that is the whole of the household's politics before anybody has said anything political.

Then I asked all four of them for their accounts in duplicate.

That is the piece that matters and it took the longest to explain. One copy stays with them as before. The second comes to me at the end of every eighth day, in their own hand, not a clerk's. They did not like it and the correspondence office liked it least, and I said it was for my own learning because I am thirteen and new and know nothing about the house, which is a sentence that has been useful to me twice already and which I am going to have to stop using in a year or two.

The reason is not learning.

Two sets of the same accounts in two hands will agree for about five months. Then one of them will start to be tidier than the other, and the tidier one is the lie.

Domitius came through the service courtyard at about the fourth hour and found me with the stable steward and the wax and asked what I was doing.

I said I was learning the house.

He said something to the steward about how they had sent him a clerk and not a wife, and the steward laughed because he was expected to laugh, and Domitius went off perfectly good-tempered and told the story at dinner and everybody laughed there as well.

I laughed too. It is a good enough joke and it cost me nothing and it has bought me a year of nobody wondering why I want the numbers.

I want to be clear in this tablet, because there is nobody else to be clear to, that he was not being cruel. He is not cruel. He is not much of anything. He is a man of forty-four who has never had to find out what he is like and there has been nobody in his life with any reason to tell him.

The thing about the creditor happened eleven days later and I am putting it in this same entry because it belongs with the rest.

A man came about a debt Domitius did not know he had, out of an arrangement his father made, and the sum was large and the man had the documents and Domitius was going to pay it, because he had nothing to set against it and because he does not like a scene in his own hall.

I had the duplicate accounts by then. Two returns of them. And the arrangement had been discharged in the year Marcus Silanus was consul, out of the Pyrgi estate, and it is in the estate copy and it is not in the household copy, and the reason it is not in the household copy is that the household copy for that year was made up afterwards by a clerk who is now dead.

I did not tell Domitius. I told Anicius, who is the steward, and let Anicius tell him, in front of the creditor, and it took about four minutes and the man went away.

Domitius was pleased with Anicius for a week.

He has not mentioned the duplicate accounts since and he has not stopped them, and I do not believe he has connected the two things at all, and I have decided that I would rather he did not.

Sostrata says I should have taken the credit.

I said that credit is a thing you spend once.

She said that I had just said something my great-grandmother would have said and asked whether I knew that.

I said I did.

Translator: Entry seven. The house of the Domitii, and a gap. Julia has kept her record without a missed day since she was seven, and there is nothing for the ninth, tenth and eleventh of November, AD 28, the three days after her wedding. On the twelfth she dictates this to Sostrata to stand in for them. She is thirteen. The entry carries one note in the margin, added about twenty-two years later, in her own hand.

Julia: AD 28

There is nothing in this tablet for the ninth, the tenth or the eleventh.

I am writing on the twelfth and I am going to fill them in now because I have kept this without a gap since I was seven and I am not going to start.

The keys.

He carries four on his person and does not put them off. One is the strong room under the stair on the garden side. One is a press in his own bedroom, which is a lacquered thing with a bad hinge that he has had since his father died. One is the wine, which he keeps himself and which the steward has asked for twice and been refused. The fourth I have not identified and it is smaller than the other three and older, and it has been carried enough to be worn smooth on one face.

Anicius has the rest of the house.

The letters.

He does not keep them in the press. The press has money in it and the deeds of the Pyrgi land and a box of his mother's. The sealed letters go into the second shelf of the book presses in the small room off the tablinum, laid flat under the rolls, and there were nine of them on the tenth and there were eleven this morning, and he does not lock that room and there is no reason he should because nobody in his household reads.

Two of the nine are in a hand I know and I am not going to write whose here.

The name.

He is easy about most things. He was easy about his sister and about the wine and about a man called Sextus who cheated him over horses, and he tells that one as a story against himself.

The name is Sejanus.

Somebody said it at the table on the tenth in an ordinary way, about an appointment, and the room went on talking and he did not, and he was another colour for about the length of a sentence and then he came back and was pleasant. Nobody else in that room saw it. I was watching him because I have been watching him since the ninth.

He is frightened of him. Not offended by him and not in his debt as far as I can find. Frightened, in the plain way, the way a man is frightened of a dog he has been bitten by.

I do not know why yet. I have his accounts and his household and I do not have that, and it is the first thing about my husband that I want and cannot get, and I have put it in the third column with the woman who warned my mother.

Those are the three things.

Sostrata sat with me from about the eighth hour and wrote it all down and did not ask me anything.

At the end she asked whether I wanted anything else in it.

I said no.

She said she would leave the three days blank rather than write in them, and I said that would look like something, and she said that so would filling them, and we left them blank.

I am thirteen years and six days old and I am the mistress of a house with a hundred and nine people in it, which is the number, and I got it out of the kitchen steward on the second morning because he was the only one who knew.

Sostrata: In the margin of this entry, in a later hand.

Julia: I have read this eleven times in twenty-two years and I have never once been able to decide whether the child who wrote it was managing very well or had gone somewhere else for three days and come back. She is not available to be asked. I am going to leave the entry as it stands, and the blank days as they stand, and Sostrata was right about both.

Translator: That was episode six, A Woman Injured. Next episode is seven, Livia's Last Tablet. Augusta is a translation of The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina.