I was there when the republic died

I was there when the Republic died, ye Roman citizens of shortest memory, so I will remind you how it was with that.

I remember the day. And more than the day– the standard bearers with their flags penitent in the snapping winds of January, the gathering in the curia, the elite of Roman society in their finery– I remember the looks on the faces of the senators, because what happened was a sleight of hand that they did not see coming until the moment it struck them, like a slap. I remember their lips, that is what I remember. Strange to say, no? For my attention rarely dwells on the lips of men. Their collective grimace, the way their faces turned away from the deed in the moment it was done. How could they not have seen it coming?

They thought they were standing in the house of the Republic until that moment, and then it become clear: no.

"I built the Senate House... with the power of the state entirely in my hands by universal consent, I extinguished the flames of civil wars, and then relinquished my control, transferring the Republic back to the authority of the Senate and the Roman people. For this service I was named Augustus by a decree of the Senate."

So says Octavian, the first emperor of Rome.

But this is not what he means. I don’t know why I keep having to tell you that things are not what they seem. When the peddler sets up his stall in the Forum to show you tricks done with the hands, what has become popularly known as magic, and is rightly known as illusion, you must keep your attention fixed on the hand he is not looking at, for that is the hand that does the deed, not the one everyone is watching. To say, “I built the Senate House…and relinquished my control…” this is the hand everyone is watching, the hand Octavian would have you watch. Look away from that hand. What is the other hand doing?

The precedent for this moment had been laid a long time prior. The take-over was 15 years in the making, not less. Caesar was murdered in 44, and recognized as a god of the Roman state two years later in 42. We are before your Christ, the numbers are working backwards still. Octavian, returning to Rome after the murder of Caesar, discovered himself named in the will as Son of Caesar. These happenings were dynastic: a game of succession.

How can the state declare someone a god? I fail abjectly to understand this. In the Curia in January of 27, at the moment that Octavian relinquished control, which was in fact the total opposite of this, I found myself staring at the Winged Victory, the Altar of Victory, and I believe she began to smirk. This is the power of a god: to render the inanimate animate. Caesar a god? Laughable. But the moment was strange enough– she was stone after all, veneered in purest gold– that I turned my head away from her momentarily, as if to seek confirmation I was not seeing things– and that is when I beheld the senators agape. A moment suspended as if outside of time.

It is a freeze-frame in my memory; a still-life. Were I a better painter of portraits, I would have sought to memorialize the scene, because it contained the energies of everything that had gone awry in that moment– the seeds of their future destruction (how many of them would be murdered in the following years?) and perhaps our own. It was the moment of impact– eternal, inviolate, perversely sanctified– silent and yet with an enormous crushing sound, the violence of a great artificial machine whose gears will chew up the world itself, or the sound of a great dam breaking, giving way, the ocean rushing in to fill the void.

My attention was drawn immediately to their lips, though no sound came from them. These men- first citizens of Rome– men unaccustomed to bending a knee, unaccustomed to uttering a word of flattery, unaccustomed to swallowing down the seed of another man– it was their lips that gave them away, lips accustomed to mouthing orders, making declarations, giving speeches, now pulled back in revulsion, their faces turned away as though struck with an open palm. The moment is etched in my mind, I cannot unsee it. In two of them in particular I could see the blow land, hear the silence of it striking not merely their faces but their hearts.

As this blow struck, I was overcome by vertigo. The room began to wheel, with its vaulted ceiling ornately drawn and quartered, the burning afternoon light which streamed pale fire hanging through the windows of the upper chamber, as though the building itself was sitting on a pivot, spun by the hand of Octavian. The inverse of light consolidated about him: some gravitational darkness, some mode of weight and density. All eyes were on him and yet I wrenched my gaze away, I refused to look at him, it was a survival instinct I believe. This was how I saw the blow delivered.

There is no document of this moment outside of my own memory, would that there were– and yet this photo, utterly irrelevant, of a different era, a different moment entire, having no bearing on my story whatsoever–a mere footnote to the tale I am telling about ancient things, far removed from the here and now, will have to substitute, a poor imitation of what I am describing: