Augustus. Buchan John

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      CHAPTER I

      WINTER AT APOLLONIA

      (B.C. 45-44)

      The homespun cloak that muffled half his cheek Dropped somewhat, and I had a glimpse—just one! One was enough, whose—whose might be the face? That unkempt careless hair—brown, yellowish—Those sparkling eyes beneath their eyebrows’ ridge (Each meets each, and the hawk-nose rules between)—That was enough, no glimpse was needed more!

      BROWNING, “Imperante Augusto”—

      I

      THE town of Apollonia on the Illyrian shore, an old colony of Corinth, was in the spring of the year 44 B.C. the centre of a varied life. It was a busy port, for it was one of the debouchments on the Adriatic of the great Via Egnatia, the highroad from Rome to the East; it was a military station; and for some years its bland air and its position as a half-way house between East and West had drawn to it scholars whose fame brought them many pupils. As seaport, garrison and university town, it was a pleasant dwelling-place for youth.

      Among those who walked its streets in the mild March weather there was one on whom many turned to look a second time, for he was the great-nephew of him who was now master of the world. But he was a young man who on his own account would anywhere have attracted notice. His name was Gaius Octavius Thurinus,¹ and he had come to Apollonia in the previous autumn to complete an education which had been interrupted by the wars in Spain. He was now half-way through his nineteenth year, having been born on the 23rd of September, 63, in the consulship of Cicero. In build he was small and slight, not quite five feet seven, but he was well-proportioned, and his short stature did not catch the eye. His features were so delicately modelled as to be almost girlish, for the Julian strain had a notable fineness, but the impression left on the spectator was not one of effeminacy. The firm mouth and the high-bridged nose forbade that, but above all the steady, luminous grey eyes. Wonderful eyes they were, so penetrating, so intense in their regard, that those on whom he bent them had to avert their gaze.¹ His complexion was pale, for he had always been a delicate boy, but now and then he would flush delightfully. His voice was quiet and pleasant, and his whole air was of calm and self-control, with just a hint of suffering. For his years he seemed preposterously mature, and he had few youthful irregularities; he drank little wine, and ate no more than a bird, having a miserable digestion. But, though nothing of a boon companion, there was a grace about him which charmed, and a hint of latent power which impressed.

      He looked the scholar which he had been since his childhood. He had declaimed orations when scarcely out of his cradle, and during his teens he had been a serious student of what went in Rome by the name of philosophy. Like all the Roman youth he had given much time to rhetoric, the science which taught literary style and the arts of persuasion; but he had not been one of the younger set that Cicero despised, whose craze was for extravagant tropes and novel idioms. Like his great-uncle he had a dry taste in letters, preferring the Attic to the Corinthian manner. This same austerity appeared in his philosophical interests. An indifferent Greek scholar, he was not a devotee of any Hellenic master, but after the Roman fashion was something of a free-lance and an eclectic. Like his great-uncle again, he had fallen under the spell of Posidonius,¹ a Stoic who borrowed from many schools, and who tried to marry the thought of Greece and the East with Roman tradition, seeking what might be a universal creed for a universal empire. Unlike many of his young contemporaries, Octavius had no contempt for ancient Roman ways or any undue love of the exotic.

      This discreet young man had brought with him a tutor, one Apollodorus, an ancient savant from Pergamum, whose chief task was to improve his halting Greek. But his friends were not limited to his fellow-students at the Academy. Six legions were quartered in Illyria and Macedonia, and, as befitted one who had been appointed to Julius’s staff, he lived a good deal in military society. СКАЧАТЬ