****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
“For I heard in later years that there were many portents at his birth.”- Hirtia (Slave to Atia, stepmother of Augusts) in a letter to her son Quintus – 2 B.C.For readers of historical fiction, there are few periods so rich with fascination and mystery than ancient Rome, and the greatest appeal of this period is most surely the Romans themselves. As men and women of history, they were more influential and perhaps just as powerful as the Roman gods they worshipped, and they outlived their deities in the heart and memory of western culture. When fact and imagination are placed into the right hands, these larger-than-life personages can live again, as vividly as characters standing before us. “Augustus” is one such work.Those of us who were thoroughly swept away by Colleen McCullough’s “Masters of Rome” series have long been waiting for a sequel as rich in the details of private life and as exciting in its recounting of the very real, historical events surrounding the characters. (You can view the first book of McCullough's series here: https://www.amazon.com/First-Man-Rome-Masters/dp/0061582417/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1524174835&sr=8-1&keywords=First+man+in+rome ) Williams’s book requites that long-forgotten desire, and then some. For that’s where the similarity with McCullough pretty much ends.Williams chooses to recount his history in epistolary, using fictitious letters excerpted from equally fictitious documents purportedly written by the very real people of the time. These documents include the journals of Marcus Agrippa and Julia, Octavius’ daughter, a modern, intelligent woman living in a time when being such, for a woman, was unpardonable; letters between the poets Vergil, Maecenas, and Horace; and exchanges of correspondence both with Octavius and about him. Indeed, it is from these latter correspondences that we learn most of what we come to know of Augustus. Williams builds the aura of mystery around Octavius – an aura that apparently surrounded him in life as well – so that the reader is aching to know him better by the time we get to the third subsection of the novel, which is written almost entirely by Augusts himself.Perhaps the greatest of the mysteries about Octavius Caesar is how a man who was capable of such good and wise and magnanimous gestures could likewise be indifferent to ordering acts of abject cruelty, wanton destruction, and bloodless calculation for the sake of personal gain (though it was always “for the empire”). Octavius himself never quite finds the answer to this mystery as he observes it in others. He contemplates this in the hours before his death:“Mankind is an aggregate I have found to be brutish, ignorant, and unkind, whether those qualities were covered by the coarse tunic of the peasant or the white and purple toga of a senator. And yet in the weakest of men, in moments when they are alone and themselves, I have found veins of strength like gold in decaying rock; in the cruelest of men flashes of tenderness and compassion; and in the vainest of men moments of simplicity and grace.” (p. 273)Augusts, of all people, is mystified by what he sees as the “unconsummated lust” in the eyes of the arena crowd on those occasions when he has spared the life of a contestant. “It was as if they took some strange sustenance into their lives by observing another less fortunate than they relinquish his own.” He goes on:“We tell ourselves that we have become a civilized race, and with a pious horror we speak of those times when a god of the crops demanded the body of a human being for his obscure function. But is not the god that so many Romans have served, in our memory and even in our time, as dark and fearsome as that ancient one? … Yet I have not destroyed him, or weakened his power. He sleeps restlessly in the hearts of men, waiting to rouse himself or to be aroused. Between the brutality that would sacrifice a single innocent life to a fear without a name, and the enlightenment that would sacrifice thousands of lives toa fear that we have named, I have found little to choose.” (p. 276)As Williams portrays him, the dying Augustus is a man whose indifference to the world hides a perspicacious and shrewd observer of humankind and human folly. In the book’s third division, Octavius delivers from his deathbed the fruits of this life, a life spent being both a prime mover and an acute observer of the events of his time, and to delve into a full sampling would take this review too far afield, as worthwhile a journey as it might be. The best advice I can give you is to make the journey yourself by reading this book and savoring the quiet, final moments you will share with one of history’s most influential men.In Book Two, the second subdivision of the book, the reader also encounters Julia, the very beloved daughter of Augustus. Hers is a tale that, sadly, repeats itself throughout the history of women, but with a particular poignancy. For Julia was guilty of being nothing more or less than the woman her father insisted she become: intelligent, educated, purposeful, and devoted, and sharing her father’s passionate fondness for the poetry and the arts. Julia was her father’s dearest companion, and her eventual banishment to the island of Pandateria is perhaps the only act of cruelty that Augustus could bring himself to regret, albeit that it was to save her from a trial for treason and almost certain execution. It was a severe mercy for them both.Readers must judge for themselves whether Julia was a woman cheated out of life just when she had discovered the true powers of her womanhood, or whether she was a spoiled, privileged woman who let it all go to her head and went too far. Whichever you choose, the notes of gender oppression and unfulfilled ambition and potential in Julia’s story resonate to the stories of woman today. I think that’s probably one of the saddest observations I’ve ever had to share, but there it is. That’s how far we have *not* come with the issue of a woman’s right to be all the wonderful things she can be, and even a few of the un-wonderful things, if it comes to that. In recognizing for himself Julia’s plight – one of his own creating – Augustus manages to transcend both his gender and his time in his understanding.This book joins the McCullough series as one of my most treasured reading memories. Highly recommended. Lectio Felix! (Happy Reading.)
