IV. The Woman With the Urn

Show Notes

Her mother carries the ashes up the Appian Way, and the crowd learns what a widow can be. Julia is four.

Source: chapter 3.

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.

IV. The Woman With the Urn

Translator: Augusta. The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina. Episode four. The Woman With the Urn.

Chapter Three. The Woman With the Urn.

Entry one. The commentary leaves the house for the first time. It is January, AD 20, a month after the notice of Germanicus's death reached Rome, and his widow has landed at Brundisium, on the heel of Italy, carrying his ashes in an urn in her own arms. She is walking them up the coast to the city. This entry is the harbour road at Tarracina, sixty miles short of Rome, where the rest of the family is waiting for her, and then the Appian Way north.

Agrippina the Elder is thirty-three. Waiting at Tarracina are Drusus the Younger, the emperor's own son, also thirty-three, sent by his father; Claudius, Germanicus's younger brother, twenty-eight, the relation the family kept out of sight, and, thirty years on, Julia's husband; and the four children who stayed behind: Nero, fourteen, Drusus, twelve, Drusilla, four, and Julia, four. Back among the household, walking, are Sostrata, thirteen, and Albruna, fourteen, and most of what follows is theirs.

Sostrata writes it down that year, at thirteen, on the second of her tablets. Julia recasts it in AD 49, at thirty-three.

Julia: AD 20

They brought my father up the coast in January and the road came out to meet him the whole way.

My mother had landed at Brundisium with the urn in her own arms. Tiberius sent two praetorian cohorts down to receive it. The courtesy was noted, and so was the sight of the emperor's own guard drawn up round my father's ashes on a public quay, and every man there read that the second way. The tribunes and centurions carried the urn with the standards bare and the fasces reversed, and the magistrates of Calabria and Apulia and Campania came out at every stage of the road. She had Gaius with her, who was seven, and my sister Livilla, who was one and had been born on Lesbos and had never seen Italy.

At Tarracina the rest of us were waiting.

Drusus, the emperor's son, was there. My uncle Claudius was there, who was twenty-eight and whom the family had by then arranged never to send anywhere and who was sent to this. Nero, who was fourteen. Drusus, my brother, who was twelve. Drusilla, who was four. And me, who was four also.

That night at Tarracina the household was put in a rented house above the harbour and there were people outside it until well after dark, standing in the road, not doing anything.

My grandmother stayed in Rome. Her name is in no record of the mourning and it is nowhere on that road, and I have been through both. I was on the road. I was four years old.

I am going to stop on my uncle for a moment, because I am married to him now and because nobody has ever thought him worth a sentence in any account of that January.

He was twenty-eight. He had a limp and a stammer and a head that went sideways when he was tired, and the family's arrangement with him was that he was fed, housed, left his books, and never given anything to do in public where a Roman could see him. My grandmother called him a thing nature had begun and left off. That is her phrase, in her own hand, in a letter I have on this table.

They sent him to Tarracina.

They sent him because Antonia would not go and Livia would not go and Tiberius would not go, and because somebody of the house had to stand on that road beside the emperor's son, and he was what was left. So the man the family kept out of sight for thirty years was put at the front of the largest public occasion of the reign, because everybody who could have done it more elegantly had a reason to be elsewhere.

Sostrata says he wept openly, in front of the road, and that it was noticed. Albruna says the same and adds that of every adult of our house on that road he was the one who did. I have never asked him about it. In eleven months of marriage I have not once asked my husband what it was like to carry his brother's ashes up the Appian Way, and I have had a great deal of time and a great many quiet evenings in which to ask him.

Drusus the emperor's son was thirty-three and had been sent by his father on a hard errand, which he discharged properly, and I will say that for him here because I shall not have many other occasions to say anything for him.

Sostrata was thirteen and Albruna was fourteen, and both of them walked, back among the household, thirty feet behind us and to the side, with a view of the whole family at once. Most of what follows is theirs.

The road itself I have from the public record and from both of them.

Every town on the route came out, unsent and unarranged, and in several places their own magistrates spent the day scrambling to feed some thousands of people who had walked in from the country and meant to stay until we had passed. They burned offerings along the way. Men stood in the road in black and knights in their tunics without the stripe. In the villages there were altars put up in a hurry out of whatever was to hand, and Albruna says that at one of them, and she cannot say which, somebody had set out a cavalry standard, an old one, worn through, which had no business being in a farmyard and which somebody's grandfather must have taken home from a war forty years earlier.

The last of it into Rome was done at night with torches, so that the whole road from the Alban Hills was lit, and the consuls and the Senate and the people were in the Campus, and the tribunes and centurions carried it in.

Here is what happened at Tarracina, and it takes about a minute, and it has been told to me perhaps forty times in my life by people who were nowhere near it.

My mother came up off the road with the urn. The crowd made the noise a crowd makes, which Sostrata says was low and came from everywhere at once, like a house settling on its beams. Then she stopped in front of us and she gave the urn to a tribune to hold, and she went to Nero and took his head in her hands, and then to Drusus and did the same, and she held each of them for what Albruna gives as a long time and Sostrata gives as not very long at all.

Then she took the urn back and went on.

Sostrata says the tribune who had been holding it did not know what to do with his hands afterwards and stood there with them out for a moment before he put them down.

Albruna, who was fourteen and had been in this family six years by then and had watched all of us at close quarters the whole time, says something else about that minute. She says my mother had her hands on the boys' heads and her eyes on the crowd.

She went past Drusilla and she went past me and she carried the urn on up the road, in the part of the day that several thousand people were going to be able to describe afterwards.

I have had thirty years of people telling me this story as though it were an injury, and I have used it as one, and I am going to stop, because I have finally understood what I was looking at and it is not an injury.

She had two sons of her husband's blood, aged fourteen and twelve, standing on a public road in front of several thousand people and two praetorian cohorts, in the month her husband came home in a pot. Everything the family had was in those two boys. The whole of it. And she took their heads in her hands, in the open, at the front, where every man in that crowd could see her do it, and the message was legible from the back row and did not require a single word: these are his, they are here, they are mine, and I am standing with them.

That is grief doing a second job at the same time, and I have stopped trying to work out the proportions, because I have watched myself do the identical thing inside the last twelve months and I could not have given the proportions in my own case either.

Two girls of four were no part of that sentence. We could not be. Nobody looks at a four-year-old girl on a road and thinks about the succession, and my mother had about ninety seconds of the most valuable public attention any woman in Rome had ever been handed, and she spent all of it on the two people it could be spent on.

She came to us later, off the road, at the house we were put in that night at Tarracina, and Sostrata says she was there some while and that the two of them were apart from everybody else.

And now the part I cannot prove.

I have a sentence. I have had it a very long time and I do not know where I got it. It is that grief has to be made visible before it can be made useful.

Here is everything it rests on. A sentence in my head in my mother's voice. A woman of thirteen who puts the two of us apart from the others for some while at Tarracina. And my mother saying things very like it out loud, at tables, for the next nine years, to anybody who would sit still. I could have assembled the whole of it out of that at nine years old and believed it ever since.

So I am putting it here as what it is, which is a sentence I have carried for twenty-nine years and cannot source.

She said it to me at Tarracina. That is what I believe. It is not what I know.

What I do know about that night is smaller and is on record, because Sostrata wrote it down four days later on the second tablet, in the same upright hand, under a heading of her own devising which reads The road from Tarracina, and which I did not know existed until the eleventh day of this month.

She has written that my mother asked me and Drusilla, one after the other, whether we knew who was in the pot.

Drusilla said yes.

I said no.

Sostrata has written under that, in her own words and unprompted by anybody, that both of us were lying and that the elder one was lying better.

I was nine months the elder.

There is a second entry on that tablet from the same four days which I nearly left out and have decided not to. Sostrata has written that at some point that night my uncle Claudius sat down on the floor of that rented house with Drusilla and me and told us about a bird, at length, and that he had the whole thing wrong about the bird, and that neither of us cared and that he went on for some time.

Nobody has ever written that down anywhere else. There is no account of that January in any hand in Rome that contains a single line about what my uncle did, because nobody in Rome was recording him, and the only reason it survives is that a thirteen-year-old slave girl who had started keeping tablets four months earlier had not yet learned what was worth putting in them.

I have looked at that line for two days now. It is the earliest thing written about my character by any person living or dead. It was written by a girl of thirteen who was standing at the wall of a rented room at Tarracina, and it is one sentence long, and she never showed it to me, and she has been correcting my accounts for twenty-nine years without once mentioning that she started when I was four.

Translator: Entry two. Still on the Appian Way, somewhere between Tarracina and Aricia, on one of the four days the household walked it. Julia is four and on her feet, and Sostrata, thirteen, is behind her. A woman comes out of the crowd, and Julia asks her a question.

Sostrata recorded it that year. Julia recasts it in AD 49, and while she is writing it, a reply comes up from Baiae, to the letter she sent at the end of the last chapter. She enters it the same week.

Julia: AD 20

There was a woman on the road somewhere between Tarracina and Aricia and I have spent more time on her this month than on the entire trial.

The column made about eight miles a day. The road was full of people standing in it, and the household walked most of the way, and a household walking includes the children, so I was on that road on my feet for parts of four days at four years old, with Pyrrha holding my hand and Sostrata behind us.

The people came to the edge of the road and stood there while we went past. Some of them had walked two days to do it and had brought something to burn.

At one of the halts a woman came near enough to us to be spoken to.

Sostrata cannot tell me her name and cannot tell me where it was, and has been apologising for that all week, which is unlike her and which I have told her to stop. She gives the woman as somewhere near forty, in black, not a poor woman and not a grand one, on her own, which she says she noticed at the time because everybody else was in families.

I asked her why nobody had helped him.

Sostrata is certain of the sense of it and not of the words. It was the question of a small girl who had been walking two days past thousands of people plainly upset about her father, and who had put those two things together the way a child does, which is that if this many people minded, somebody ought to have done something.

The woman did not answer.

Sostrata says she opened her mouth and stopped, and then tried again, and got out something about the gods, and stopped again. Then she put her hand out and touched my head and went back into the crowd.

I have written that encounter three times this week and thrown two of them away, because I kept putting words into her mouth.

She had no answer. There was no answer to give. Every one of those people on that road would have died for my father in the abstract and not one of them had been in a position to do a single thing for him at any point, because they were forty days away and had no standing and no arms and no name, and what they had instead was affection, and affection cannot be sent anywhere.

I have thought about that road for thirty years without ever once looking at it properly, and I looked at it this month, and here is what I take from it.

The whole of Rome loved my father, in every street and at every station, and every ounce of it was freely given. And when it came to the point, all of it, from the Alban Hills to Brundisium, could not put one man in one room in Antioch on one afternoon.

Nine praetorian cohorts could have. They were four miles from where I am sitting, they were paid three times what a legionary was paid, and two of those cohorts had walked down to Brundisium and carried the urn. They carried it, and then they went back to camp. My mother spent her whole life being loved by people who had nothing to give her, and in forty-seven years she never once bought a man who had something.

And the state's answer to all that love, voted in the Senate and inscribed and paid for out of the treasury, was furniture.

I have the list of honours. Arches, at Rome and on the Rhine bank and in Syria. His name put into the hymn of the Salii. Curule chairs with oak crowns set among the seats of the Augustales. His image in ivory to go before the procession at the games in the Circus. His name cut into stone in a dozen provinces where nobody had ever laid eyes on him.

Every one of those is real and several of them stand within a quarter of an hour's walk of this table. My brother Nero got an ivory image at the Circus and starved on Pontia nine years afterwards. My mother got an arch.

I have never once in my life courted a crowd, and I have let it be said that this is coldness. I was on that road. I have read the list of honours. I know to the sesterce what the affection of the Roman people is worth in the hour it is wanted, because it has been tested on this family five times and it has never once arrived.

I shall now put down the other thing that happened this week, since it happened while I was writing the paragraphs above and I am not going to pretend it did not.

The reply came back from Baiae on the ninth day and it is not from Statia.

It is from her son. It is from Eutyches, who clerks in the grain office at Puteoli and who I had not intended to have any part in this, and it came up by a private courier at a speed that would have cost him a month of what he earns, and I am able to say that with some confidence because I have had the man who carried it asked what he was paid.

The letter is very careful. It has been written out at least twice, because the hand holds level from the first word to the last, and a man drafts twice before he writes to the wife of the emperor. It thanks me for the honour done to his mother's house. It says that his mother is well and is in her fifty-ninth year, which is a lie of ten years and is the only clumsy thing in it and is the part that tells me most. And then it asks, in the politest construction available in the language, what his mother is wanted for.

He has spent a month's earnings to ask me a question he has no standing to ask, in a letter he had to draft twice, because a courier came to that villa and her name was in it.

I showed it to Sostrata.

She read it and put it down and went back to what she was doing and has not said one word about it in two days, which is the loudest she has ever been.

Translator: Entry three. Back in the correspondence office of Antonia's house, in the spring of AD 20, and half a mile away, in the Senate house, the trial of Gnaeus Piso for what he did in Syria and for the death of Germanicus. Piso is about sixty-three. His wife Plancina, about forty-five, is tried alongside him. Tiberius, sixty, presides. Livia, seventy-seven, is not in the chamber and is in the case anyway. Prosecuting are Lucius Fulcinius Trio, an informer with a career to make, and Germanicus's own friends, Publius Vitellius, Quintus Veranius and Quintus Servaeus, who were in the house at Antioch when he died.

Julia is four and on the floor of the office, and what she has of the trial is what came through the door: three of the household's men bringing word back from the Forum, and none of them agreeing. Sostrata, thirteen, writes all of it down on her third tablet. Julia recasts it in AD 49 against the one document nobody disputes, the Senate's verdict, cut in bronze and sent to every legion in the empire, a copy of which is on her table.

Julia: AD 20

The trial of Gnaeus Piso ran for three days in the Senate in the spring and I was four years old and in a house half a mile away, and what I have of it is what came through the door.

Before any of it, the arrival, which people born since refuse to believe when I tell them.

He came up the Tiber by boat in the middle of the day and tied up at the steps by the Mausoleum of Augustus, which is where my father's ashes had been put four months earlier, on an afternoon when the wharf was crowded. He came off with his wife and a large following and walked up to his house on the Palatine, which stands over the Forum, and had the doors opened and gave a dinner.

Rome nearly came apart that evening. They took his statues down and were dragging them towards the Gemonian steps to throw them, and Tiberius sent men to take them back and set them up again, which he did because a mob deciding a case in the street is worse for an emperor than a guilty consular, and which the whole city read as protection, and I am not certain to this day that the whole city was wrong.

I want to set down the charges first, out of the bronze, because they are not what anybody in Rome remembers and they are not what anybody in this house believed at the time.

The record was cut in bronze by order of the Senate and set up in the provinces and in the winter quarters of every legion, which was done so that it could not afterwards be argued about, and I have had a copy of it on this table for eleven days. It is a long document and a very careful one and I have read the whole thing twice.

Piso was condemned for making war on a province of the Roman people. He took Syria back by force after he had been dismissed from it, he armed slaves, he bought soldiers, he divided the legions, and men died at Celenderis who had no business dying anywhere. He was condemned for the state of his province and for his conduct towards my father, for insolence, for celebrating my father's death with sacrifices and feasts, for corrupting the discipline of the army.

He was not condemned for poisoning my father.

And the man who did most to make the city believe otherwise was not permitted to say a word about it.

Lucius Fulcinius Trio put in to prosecute before anybody else and Vitellius and Veranius objected, on the ground that they had been my father's friends and had been in the room and that the charge was theirs. Tiberius settled it by giving Trio the earlier life and keeping him off the death. So Trio was allowed to lay out everything Piso had ever done before Syria, and nothing at all about Syria, and he took that restriction and made it into the best three hours of his career.

Barred from the death, Trio prosecuted the life, which was all he wanted. He gave the Senate a man: what he had said in Spain, how he had held Africa, the way he spoke to men above him and the way he spoke to men below him, a joke he had made twenty years earlier, his father's reputation, his wife's connections. He put it in order. He put it in an order.

And by the end of it every man in that House had a person in his head, and the poison did not have to be proved against a person like that, it only had to be mentioned near him.

Trio was made praetor within the year. He was a notorious man among the informers and made no secret of wanting to be one, and I have read what survives of that speech twice and it is the best-built thing in the whole record and there is not one provable falsehood in it anywhere.

The charge was brought. Publius Vitellius and Quintus Veranius and Quintus Servaeus brought it, and they had been in that house at Antioch and had seen what they had seen, and they could not make it stand. Nobody could. The bronze goes round it. It records what my father believed and what my father said, which is a different kind of fact and everybody who cut that plate knew it was a different kind of fact.

The whole city has believed for thirty years that Piso was condemned for the poison. The document that exists says he was condemned for taking a province back by force, and the document has been standing in bronze in a hundred camps the entire time, and not one person in ten thousand has ever read it, and the ones who have read it have not troubled anybody with what it says.

That is the first thing I learned this month that I did not know at the start of it, and I have not stopped turning it over.

The defence was Marcus Lepidus, Piso's brother Lucius, and Livineius Regulus, which is as good as could be had in Rome that year, and on the province and the legions they had nothing and knew it and barely tried.

On the poison they took it apart in a morning.

The occasion alleged was a dinner. Piso reclined above my father at a table with my father's own people round it and the servers going in and out and the room full, and Lepidus stood up and asked the House how a man does that, in that room, in front of those people, and the prosecution had nothing to say to it. My father's own household had been through the house at Antioch and turned up the things people leave in walls, the bones and the lead sheets and the name scratched on them, and that is what a man reaches for when the food is out of his reach.

I have read the defence twice and I would have made the same argument and I could not break it in an afternoon.

Now what came through the door, which is the part I was actually present for.

The house had three sources and they arrived all day for three days. Dorus went down himself twice. Hilarus, who was a young clerk then and is an old one now, was sent to the Forum in the mornings and came back at noon. And a freedman of my grandmother's called Chresimus, who did nothing else that spring, stood in the crowd outside the Curia from before dawn.

They did not agree about anything.

I was in the correspondence office for most of it, on the floor, because I was in the correspondence office for most of everything in those years and it did not occur to anybody to move me, and Sostrata was thirteen and had a tablet, and Sostrata wrote it all down.

I have that tablet. It is the third one and it is nearly full and the heading is What was said at the door.

On the second day Piso was found dead in his room with his throat cut and a sword on the floor beside him.

Three reports of it came into this house inside an hour and a half. Sostrata has the hour against each of them.

Chresimus had it first, from the crowd, and the crowd had it that Piso had killed himself because the defence had collapsed and he knew what was coming.

Hilarus had it forty minutes later, from a clerk of the Senate, and that version was that Piso had been given the opportunity and had taken it, which is a different sentence entirely, and Hilarus was seventeen and repeated it without understanding that he was repeating a different sentence.

Dorus came in last, near the tenth hour, and Dorus said that a letter had been found in the room, addressed to the emperor, and that Piso's slaves had been taken away.

Sostrata wrote all three. She wrote them one under the other with the hour against each. And then she wrote, under the third one, four words of her own.

Nobody argued with Dorus.

That is my contribution to the entire spring. I told her nobody argued with Dorus. I was four. I could not have told anybody what a letter to the emperor meant, or what it meant that a man's slaves had been taken away before anybody had asked them anything. What I could do was sit on a floor and watch three grown men come in with three different stories and notice that after the third one the room stopped talking.

Then Martina.

She was the poisoner. She was known through the whole of Syria for it and she was a friend of Plancina's, and Gnaeus Sentius put her on a ship for Rome to give evidence, and she died at Brundisium before she got any further.

Poison was found knotted into her hair. There was nothing on her body.

Three reports of that one as well, and they came in over two days rather than an hour and a half, and I have them in the same hand on the same tablet.

That she killed herself rather than be made to testify.

That Plancina's people reached her at Brundisium.

That somebody reached her at Brundisium who was not Plancina's.

The third is Dorus again. I notice that now, thirty years later, sitting with the tablet in front of me, and I did not notice it as a child and Sostrata did not notice it at thirteen, and I have spent an evening trying to work out who Dorus was talking to that spring and I cannot, because Dorus is seventy and has been in this house since before I was born and is downstairs at this moment and I am not going to ask him.

And Plancina was spared.

That is the part of the whole business that I have never been able to get past and I do not intend to try. She went out to Syria with him, she was in every room he was in, she was named in my grandmother's cut draft two years before any of it, she gave feasts on the day my father died, and she was tried alongside her husband and she was acquitted, and she was acquitted because Livia asked Tiberius to acquit her.

It is in the bronze, in the flat formal language of a decree, with the reasons entered. The Senate recorded that the emperor made the request on behalf of his mother, that the request was granted, and that the reasons given were that Julia Augusta had deserved well of the state and that Plancina had been a friend of hers.

I said in the earlier account that Livia's method was that nothing of hers could be pointed at. Here is the one time in fifty years that something could, and it is cut in bronze in a hundred camps, and it says that the most powerful woman in the world reached into a murder trial and took a defendant out of it, and gave as her reason that the woman was a friend.

She got away with it. Of course she got away with it. Plancina lived another thirteen years and was prosecuted again after Livia was dead and killed herself then, which is the whole of the arithmetic and it took thirteen years to come out.

One more thing out of the bronze, and then the question.

The Senate condemned him and then went on past the condemning. It ordered his name struck out, mourning for him forbidden to his own house, his images taken down wherever they stood, the praenomen Gnaeus withheld from every man of his family thereafter, and a part of his house on the Palatine pulled down. His son was spared, kept a share of the property, and changed his name.

So the Senate voted a budget to have a man taken out of the record, and then had the fact of his removal cut into metal and sent to the winter quarters of every legion on the frontier, so that it could not afterwards be argued about.

So: was he a murderer.

I have the verdict, which is silent on it. I have my father's own words as they are recorded, which say it outright. I have a poisoner dead at Brundisium with the stuff knotted in her hair before she could open her mouth. I have a man dead in a locked room with a letter beside him and his slaves gone. I have a wife lifted out of the case by the emperor's mother for reasons entered in the record.

Not one of those five things is proof of anything. I know that. I could take any one of them apart in an afternoon and I have taken three of them apart this week for the exercise.

And I believe it anyway, and I have believed it since I was old enough to hold the pieces in my head at the same time, and I am aware that what I am doing is not reading evidence.

Here is what I am actually doing, since this account is worth nothing if I lie in it about that.

The verdict is a manufactured object. It was made in three days by men with reputations to build and a province to settle, and it says what it was necessary for it to say, and the things it does not say were left out on purpose by people who knew exactly what they were leaving out.

I trust the shape of the thing and not the document.

I am probably wrong about several of the details. The letter in Piso's room I would put no weight on now. Dorus's third version of Brundisium may well have come out of a wine shop on the Vicus Tuscus.

I am not wrong about the shape.

Translator: Entry four. The second courtyard of Antonia's house, where the household's orders are given, and the schoolroom off it, in the summer and autumn of AD 20. Antonia, fifty-five, gives the household one instruction, and she gives it once. On the face of it, it is aimed at Nero, fourteen, and Drusus, twelve.

Julia is four and cannot write. Sostrata, thirteen, can. What the two of them did with that one afternoon survives as an object: a ruined tablet, which Julia found this month in the gap behind the shelf, and which is now on the table beside the bronze.

Julia: AD 20

My grandmother gave an instruction to the household in the summer and it was the only one of its kind she ever gave in my hearing.

Nobody in that house was to say that the emperor had killed my father. Not the children, not the staff, not in the house and not outside it, and not as a question and not as somebody else's opinion repeated. She gave it standing up in the second courtyard, in the same place and at the same hour of the morning that she gave the instructions about the mourning cloth, and she gave it in about eleven words and did not explain it, and then she went in to her correspondence.

It is worth saying what the house had been like before it, because the instruction did not come out of nothing.

Everybody had been saying it. Not carefully and not in corners. The kitchen said it, the door staff said it, Zenodotus said it in a Greek that the boys were meant to find witty, and the whole of Rome outside had been saying it since December and had put it on walls. My brother Nero was fourteen and said it at meals. My brother Drusus was twelve and said whatever Nero said, an hour later, louder.

And my mother said it everywhere, to everybody, at any hour, in the open, and did not care in the slightest who carried it.

She was right to think it and I have never once doubted that. What she never got round to, in the nine years she had left, was working out what saying it was for. She said it in her own atrium to men who agreed with her, which changed nothing. She said it in front of staff who could be questioned, which cost her nine of them inside two years and I shall come to that. She said it once at a table where Sejanus had a man, and she said it four or five times in the hearing of people who reported to Drusus the emperor's son, and Drusus was on our side that year and was the only person of that house who was, and she made it impossible for him to go on being useful to her because a man cannot be useful to somebody who says that sort of thing where he can hear it.

She had the best case in Rome and she took it to the wrong people for nine years, and at the end of it she was on Pandateria and the case was still the best in Rome and had never once been put to anybody who could act on it.

So the instruction was for the boys, on the face of it, and it was really about my mother, and it was given to the staff because the staff were the ones who would be asked. My grandmother could not tell her daughter-in-law to be quiet and had probably tried. What she could do was make certain that nobody who lived in her house could ever be produced as a witness to any of it.

Sostrata says that what she actually said was that there was no proof, and that until there was, nobody in her house would say it.

That is the whole of the instruction. It rests entirely on the evidence and it says a great deal about loyalty, and every person in that courtyard heard both halves.

I have thought about that a great deal this month and I am now fairly sure it was housekeeping of a particular kind. My grandmother had spent forty years arranging her affairs so that nothing of hers could ever be produced. What she did in that courtyard was the same operation she had performed on her own letter two years earlier: she took out the sentence that could be carried. She was clearing her house of the one object anybody could pick up and use, and Tiberius came into it only as the man it would have been used against.

I was four and I understood none of that. What I understood was that there was a thing everybody had been saying and now nobody was saying it, which is a change a small child notices in a house the way a small child notices a moved table.

So in the autumn I made Sostrata write it.

I have gone at my own reasons for a fortnight and I have not got anywhere I trust. There is a version in which a child who has been told a thing may not be said wants to see it exist. There is a version in which I was four and bored on a wet afternoon. Sostrata, who was there, says she has no idea and has never had one.

What I can put down is the sequence, because she wrote it out for me on the second day I asked her, and she has not varied it.

The schoolroom then was the room off the second courtyard where Zenodotus had the boys in the mornings and where nobody was in the afternoons. Drusilla and I were in there most afternoons with Pyrrha, who slept, and Sostrata, who was thirteen and had the run of the house and came and went.

I could not write. I did not know one letter from another. I was four years old and Sostrata was thirteen and had been taught by Antigone and could write a fair hand, and what I had was her.

I asked her to write the emperor's name.

She says she wrote it without thinking about it, because writing a name is nothing, and there is no household in Rome where a child cannot ask for a name to be written out.

Then I asked her to write the other word.

She has given me the exchange twice and it does not vary.

She said, no.

I said it again.

She said, your grandmother said not to say it.

I said that I was not saying it.

She has told me that she has thought about that answer for twenty-nine years and that she does not believe I meant anything by it, and that a child of four who has been told a thing may not be said will produce that sentence the way a child produces any sentence that gets it what it wants, and that there is no reason on earth to read anything into it.

And she says it is the reason she wrote the word.

She has not been able to tell me which word I used and she is not evading it, she genuinely cannot remember whether I said poisoner or whether I said the word for the man who does it for money, and she has offered me both and told me to pick, and I have declined to pick.

She wrote it.

She was thirteen. She had been carrying a stolen sheet of my grandmother's handwriting behind a shelf for two years, and she had three tablets going of things people had said at doors, and she had been in that courtyard in the summer and had heard the instruction herself, and a four-year-old asked her for a word and she put the stylus in the wax and made it.

I have asked her why. Twice, this week. She has told me both times that she does not know, in the identical words she used about the sheet in the brazier, and I believe her about as much as I believed her the first time.

Then we sat and looked at it.

Sostrata says that I looked at it for some while. She says she has never been able to describe what I was doing and that if she had to put a word to it she would say I was reading it, which I could not do, and that she has never afterwards seen anybody look at a piece of writing in quite that way except me.

Then there were steps in the courtyard.

I do not know whose they were and neither does she. They were probably Dorus's. Dorus crossed that courtyard forty times a day and had no interest in the schoolroom whatever.

I took the tablet and I put my hand flat on the words and I dragged.

Not the stylus. The stylus has a flat end for exactly this and any adult would have reached for it. I used my fingers, and when my fingers gave out I turned the stylus round and used the point, and I went at it until the wax came away from the wood in the middle and the surface would no longer close over.

Sostrata says it took some time and that she did not stop me.

I have asked her about that as well. She says the steps went past and kept going, and that by then she could have taken the tablet off me and smoothed it in ten seconds and had it back in the box, and that she stood at the wall instead and let a four-year-old take a piece of household property apart with her fingers.

She says she wanted to see what I would do.

That is the first straight answer she has given me about anything she did in those years, and she gave it without being pressed, and I have decided that it is also the least believable.

The tablet cannot be smoothed. I have had it looked at by a man who does nothing but wax and he says the wood is scored underneath along the whole length of both words and that a new bed of wax laid over it will sit unevenly forever and will show. He asked me whether I wanted him to try. I said no.

And here is the object.

The words are gone. Nobody can read them and nobody ever will. What is there instead is a channel gouged through the wax and into the wood in the shape of two things somebody wanted removed, done by a hand too small to have done it neatly, and anybody who picks that tablet up knows within a heartbeat that something was on it and that somebody was frightened.

I have kept it for twenty-nine years and I did not know I had it. It was in the linen store with the sheet and the three tablets, eighteen inches behind the second shelf, in Antigone's gap.

It has been on this table since the eleventh day of this month, at the end, next to the bronze.

Translator: Entry five. Three places: the atrium of Antonia's house, the Mausoleum of Augustus where Germanicus's ashes were laid, and the correspondence office. The time is August to the tenth of October, AD 20, the first anniversary of his death. Agrippina, thirty-three, is back in the account, and back in it angry. She intends the anniversary to be public, and the emperor's house has let her know it would prefer otherwise. The man they send to tell her so is Claudius, twenty-eight.

Julia is four, nearly five, and is called out of the schoolroom to settle something her mother cannot. Sostrata, thirteen, is at the door with her fourth tablet. Albruna, fourteen, is in the atrium. Julia recasts it in AD 49.

Julia: AD 20

My mother came back into this account in the autumn and she came back angry.

She had been in Rome since January and she had spent the spring at the trial or as near to it as a woman could get, and she had watched Piso die in a locked room and Plancina walk out of the case on the arm of an old woman's friendship, and by the autumn she had arrived at a position she never afterwards left, which was that the verdict was a fraud, that the men who had run it were complicit in it, and that anybody who advised her to be careful was one of them.

The first anniversary of my father's death was the sixth before the Ides of October and she began preparing for it in August.

I have her orders. My grandmother's household kept them because they were addressed to my grandmother's household, and they are three sheets and they are not in a secretary's hand.

She wanted the rites done at the Mausoleum and at the family shrine, on the day, in the morning, publicly. She wanted the images carried. She wanted a specified number of people present and she named them. She wanted the boys in front. She specified what was to be worn, by whom, down to the staff. And she wanted it done every year for the rest of her life, and she said so in writing, in a letter to her mother-in-law, which put it on a shelf where anybody could find it.

Drusus the emperor's son had by then let it be known, through two intermediaries in a fortnight, that a quieter observance would be better received.

She read that as an instruction to forget her husband, and she said so, and she said so to the second intermediary's face, and the second intermediary was my uncle Claudius.

Sostrata was in the room for that as well, at the wall, at thirteen, with the tablet, which by then she had more or less permanently about her.

He got out that it was thought a smaller ceremony might be better received.

She asked him by whom.

He said that he had been asked to say it.

She asked him again by whom, and he did not answer, and she asked him a third time whether he had come to her from Drusus or from Drusus's father, and he stood there.

Then she said the thing that is in Sostrata's hand and that I have read four times this week and cannot get out of my head, which is that she had four children in Rome and a husband in a pot and that the family had sent her its idiot.

He did not answer that either. He waited what Sostrata gives as some while, and then he said that he would carry back whatever she wished him to carry back, and he asked her what it was.

She said, nothing.

He said, then I shall say that.

And he went, and he came back four days later on some ordinary errand about the boys and behaved as though none of it had occurred, and he has behaved as though none of it occurred for twenty-nine years, and I did not know it had occurred until the fourteenth day of this month.

I have been married to him since January.

My grandmother wrote to her twice in September. I have both letters in the book. The first is four lines and is about the arrangements. The second is nineteen lines and does not mention the arrangements at all, and is the only letter in that entire book in which my grandmother argues with anybody, and it ends by asking her to consider what she is teaching the children to say out loud.

The reply is not in the book because my grandmother did not keep it.

The day itself I have from three people and there is no disagreement in any of it, which there never is about ceremonies, because a ceremony is a thing designed to be described the same way by everybody who sees it.

They went to the Mausoleum first, in the morning, and the boys went in front, and my mother carried nothing and walked behind them, which she had specified. There were offerings and there was wine and there was the proper form of words, and then the household went back and the rites at the shrine were done in the house with the doors open and the atrium full.

She had asked for a specified number and she got a great deal more, because half the Palatine came and stood in the street outside, and the street came unasked, and it is the only part of that day anybody in Rome talked about afterwards.

So the rites were done my mother's way, in the morning, publicly, with everything she asked for. And Tiberius did not come and Livia did not come and Antonia did not come, and every person in Rome counted the three of them, and my mother had achieved exactly what she intended and had also handed them the thing they needed, which was a woman who could be described as making a display.

Now the images, because this is the part I was in.

She had the wax portraits of my father brought out and set up in the atrium four days before. There were eleven, made at different times and by different hands, some from life and some after, and no two of them agreed about his face.

She could not choose. She was in that atrium a long time on two separate afternoons and she could not choose, and the household went round her and let her alone.

Then she sent for me.

Not the boys. Not Drusilla. She sent Pyrrha to fetch me out of the schoolroom, and she stood me in front of the eleven of them.

Sostrata was at the door and has the whole of it.

My mother said: which one is him.

She said it flat, standing, from her own height, which is exactly what her mother-in-law had done to me in a colonnade two and a half years earlier. The two women who disliked each other most in Rome had precisely the same manner with children, and either of them would have been furious to hear it said.

I was four years and eleven months old. I had last seen my father alive at twenty-two months old, on the day the carts went east, and after that at Tarracina in a jar.

I pointed at one.

She took the other ten away and used the one I pointed at, and it was carried at the Mausoleum in the morning, and it was the image of my father that stood in this family's atrium for the next nine years until the house was broken up, and it is the face I have in my head at this moment as I dictate this, and it is the face I will die with.

I have no way of knowing whether it looked like him.

Why she did it I can get to three or four answers for, and none of them is cruelty. The likeliest is the plainest: she had spent two afternoons unable to do it and she wanted it taken out of her hands, and the only person in that house who could take it out of her hands without it meaning anything was a child who had no memory to offend.

There is another answer and Albruna gave it to me this week without being asked for it, which she does about twice a year. She says my mother wanted the one that would carry, at the Mausoleum, in October, at forty feet, in front of the whole Palatine, and that she stood in that atrium for two afternoons because she knew exactly what she was choosing, and that a child pointing at a wax face settled a question that had very little to do with the face.

I do not know which of those it is. Albruna was fourteen and in the atrium and has been in this family since before I was born, and I have never known her to say a generous thing about my mother or an untrue one.

I would have done the same. I have handed decisions to people who could not carry them for exactly that reason, and I have done it inside the last month.

Now the last thing, and it is the reason this account exists at all.

That evening, after the images, I was on the floor of the correspondence office and Sostrata was there with the tablet, and I began naming people.

Not because anybody asked. She is definite that it started on its own, and she has said so three times this week, because she can see I would prefer a version in which somebody asked me.

I named Aglaus, who had been in my mother's rooms. Thallus, who was one of the door staff. Menecrates, who had done the accounts under Philargyrus for a while and had gone. Parmeno. Tertulla, who was Drusilla's before Pyrrha. Hermeros. Callisto. Rufa, from the kitchens. And Secunda, who I could not name properly and gave as the one with the ear, because she had something wrong with an ear.

Nine.

Every one of them had been turned out of my mother's household in the ten months since she came back to Italy. Some were sold on and some were sent to the estates and two were sold out of the family altogether, and the reasons in every case were the same reason, which was that my mother had come to believe they were carrying what she said out of the house.

Two of the nine I have since found. Menecrates went to the estate at Antium and was still there eleven years later, and Tertulla was sold to a house in Ostia and died in the year Tiberius died. The other seven I have not traced and Sostrata has been at it for a fortnight and has got nowhere, and there is nowhere further to get, because a slave sold out of a family in the year AD 20 is not a person the record follows.

She was right about at least two of them. I have established that this month and I am not going to put down which two.

I did not know any of that. I could not have. I was naming people who were not there any more, on a floor, in the evening, after a long day, in the manner of a child listing things.

Sostrata wrote the nine names down, one under the other, on the fourth tablet, and she did not head it, and she has told me this week that she did not head it because she did not know what it was and did not want to write something she would have to explain.

So there are two lists out of that autumn and they are both on this table.

My mother's, which is three sheets in her own hand, which specifies eleven images and names the people who were to attend and says what they were to wear.

And nine names in a girl's hand, with no heading, on the back half of a tablet that has door reports on the front.

My mother's list did what it was for. The rites were held, the count was noticed, and the three who stayed away were noticed more.

The other one was not for anything. Nobody commissioned it, nobody read it, and it has been behind a shelf for twenty-nine years.

Since dark I have been working out which of the two of them I would rather have, and I am not going to write the answer down, because I have already acted on it. I sent for Statia eleven days ago and the letter that came back was from her son.

I have told Sostrata to write to Baiae again. Not to Statia. To Eutyches, in my own name, telling him what his mother is wanted for.

She has asked me whether I intend to tell him the truth.

Translator: That was episode four, The Woman With the Urn. Next episode is five, The Empty Chairs. Augusta is a translation of The Lost Commentaries of Julia Agrippina.