Free Augustus by Allan Massie

that we alone could restore peace and fruitfulness to the land. The moral effect of the reports of our reception which the Senate will receive compensates for any delay; besides,' I said, 'it boosts the morale of our troops. Soldiers, good ones anyway, like to be loved; it's only the degenerates who are pleased to inspire fear.'
    Then I sent Agrippa on ahead. 'There are three legions,' I said, 'two from Africa blocking the Flaminian Way. We do not want a battle. To fight within earshot of the walls of Rome would change everything. I would arrive as a conqueror to a scene of terror.'
    Agrippa galloped into the dawn. Two days later a messenger returned. Agrippa would meet me at the cross-roads ten miles north of Tivoli. I was to bring only a handful as escort. Philippus, twittering into my tent with another letter in his hand, picked up Agrippa's. I suppose he turned pale. At any rate when he spoke he twittered worse. I was being tricked, he said; Agrippa had defected; he had been bribed; how could I have thought it safe to trust a man of neither birth nor breeding; I was going to walk into a trap; much more in the same womanish vein. (No, that is unjust, my sons; one should not talk so of women; Livia has never given me weak advice in our many years of marriage.)
    I said to Philippus: 'Stepfather, I understand of course that you are afraid of my mother, and that you have promised her to see that no harm will come to me, and I realize also that as an old Pompeian you are a snob who doesn't understand democratic politics; but have you no nose that functions? Can't you feel the direction of the wind? I don't ask you to share my opinion of Agrippa, which is (by the way) that he is the most trustworthy man I know, but I do ask you to realize that he is a chap of some intelligence, even if his vowel-sounds are long and provincial. So, even if I agreed with you concerning his character, I would still tell you your fears were groundless. I mean, have you ever heard of a rat leaving a ship in full sail? What's that you have in your hand now?'
    'This? Oh this is another worry, which may destroy that complacency you now show. Listen to what my correspondent tells me. Cicero has been in touch with Lepidus. He has offered him the dictatorship. What do you say to that?'
    'How generous of him to offer what he has no means of delivering.'
    * * *
    I took Maco and half a dozen men and we rode into the sun. We rode some two hours and saw no soldiers, nothing but quiet villages and farmers working in their fields. Then Maco touched my sleeve: 'There's a glint of metal in that oak grove there. Shall I ride on to check?'
    'No,' I said, 'it will be Agrippa.'
    'Can't be sure.'
    'It will be Agrippa. Have no fear, Maco. I'm not being rash, you know. There's no chance in the business to-day. The dice have fallen. All we have to do is pick up our winnings.'
    (How much of this, you ask, was acting? How much conviction? Such a question would have been almost meaningless even then. I had to behave as I did. My men must know that I never questioned my destiny; nor, on this occasion, did I. I don't say that it was always so, for I have known nights of doubt when the blankets seem to shroud me, as I am denied restoring sleep; nights when I felt that the Gods had abandoned me and when I walked in empty wind-swept passages. But on this occasion I had all the certainty of the great artist who finds a long-projected and much brooded-on work slowly assuming the perfect, hardly-understood, shape before his eyes; a moment of magic, as Virgil once described it to me, 'When everything you have ever known or dreamed assumes an unknown and undreamed-of reality and lightness.' So it was with me in those August days.)
    Agrippa was drinking wine and eating pecorino cheese and apples in the midst of some dozen men. They had tied their horses under the oak trees, in the shade. 'You see,' I had said to Maco as we drew near, 'no sentries even. That's a measure of our victory,