Augustus: A Private Life

13 AD, Rome

The room has been over-arranged. Tablets stacked, memoranda tied, a cup gone untouched beside the couch, and every man who enters looking first at my face and then at the papers as though the order of those things might soon reverse. My health goes in spells now. There are mornings when the body feels merely old and others when it betrays me outright, weakness in the legs, a tightness in the chest, a head that will not hold its line. Rome calls the present settlement peace, but peace is only secure while men believe the next hand will close over power without shaking. Tiberius waits because he must. The Senate waits because it has learned no better way to live. Families I made and families I spared have already begun remembering me in forms useful to themselves. Marble is being prepared while I still breathe. That is reason enough to distrust silence, and I do distrust it tonight.