Augustus Takes the Cure

In 23 B.C. the Roman emperor Augustus should have felt on top of the world. He had conquered most of western Europe, and the might of his Roman legions stretched deep into North Africa and the Near East. Culturally, he was presiding over a golden age, represented by some of the greatest poets who ever lived: Horace, Virgil and Ovid. The empire was largely at peace, too, with the emperor busily transforming Rome into a new Athens. And he was no longer to be called Octavian but Augustus, the revered one.

But Augustus wasn’t happy. Doubled over with pain so severe he thought he would die, he summoned his personal physician, Antonius Musa. The emperor believed 052he had an abscessed liver, and Musa had a precise plan for treatment. He insisted that Augustus abandon the traditional hot-water springs, such as the trendy spa at Baiae on the Bay of Naples, and instead visit such cold-water springs as the fontes clusini (springs of Chiusi), some 90 miles northwest of Rome, where he might pursue a special diet and take the waters.