John Williams' Augustus

To give some idea of how backlogged I am on book recommendations, I'm reading this at the suggestion made by a professor of mine twelve years ago. Saw it at Powell's and grabbed it while the grabbing was good. It won the National Book Award in 1973, and it seems to me very deserving. It concerns, obviously enough, Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, and is composed as a kind of chronological collage with letters, diaries, memoirs, field notes and the like - even Cicero's letters are fictional, though we have a substantial portion of his prodigious output. Williams does a fine job of affecting the tone of his various scribblers and presents us with an age that gives the graphomania of our own time a run for its money. Here is a letter from Marcus Antonius to a military commander, in which his first impressions of Octavian (later Augustus) are described:

I shall never understand how the "great" Caesar could have made this boy the inheritor of his name, his power, and his fortune. i swear to the gods, if the will hadn't first been received and recorded in the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, I would have taken a chance on altering it myself.

I don't think I wold have been so annoyed if he had left his airs in the reception room and had come into my office like anybody else. But he didn't. he came in flanked by his three friends, whom he presented to me as if I gave a damn about any of them. he addressed with the proper amount o fcivility, and then waited for me to say something. I looked at him for a long time and didn't speak. I'll say this for hime: he's a cool one. He didn't break and didn't say anything, and I couldn't even tell whether or not he was angry at having been made to wait. So finally I said:

"Well? What do you want?"

And even then he didn't blink. He said: "I have come to pay my respects to you, who were my father's friend, and to inquire about the steps that may be taken to settle his will. "Your uncle," I said. "I would also advise you not to use his name quite so freely, as if it were your own. It's not your own, as you well know, and it won't be until the adoption is confirmed by the Senate."

He nodded. "I am grateful fo rthe advice. I use the name as a sign of my reverence, not my ambition. But leaving the question of my name aside, and even my share of the inheritence, there is the matter of the bequest that Caesar made to the citizens. I judge that their temper is such that-"

I laughed at him. "Boy," I said, "this is the last bit of advice I'll give you this morning. Why don't you go back to Apollonia and read your books? It's much safer there. I'll take care of your uncle's affairs in my own way and in my own time."

You can't insult the fellow. He smiled that cold little smile at me and said, "I am pleased to know that my uncle's affairs are in such hands."

I got up from my table and patted him on the shoulder. "That's the boy," I said. "Now you fellows had better get running. Ihave a busy afternoon ahead of me." (36)

Perhaps it's even a tad overdone, but Antony's swaggering overconfidence is mixed with enough surprise to give us a colorful version of what must indeed have been a rise to power as unforseen as it was astonishing. The portrait of the young Octavian throughout strikes me as a pretty good guess at how the young leader could inspire such confidence and devotion, despite (maybe because of) his single-minded ruthlessness.