by Jamie James
Juliette and Clairwil’s visit to Capri is a relatively subdued idyll, coming immediately after an orgy with Ferdinand, king of Naples, and his queen, Marie-Caroline, Marie Antoinette’s sister. The latter has intercourse with a group of men as she watches the decapitation of a twelve-year-old girl she has just raped, an obscene burlesque of her sister’s recent execution. As it did Tacitus, Capri inspired the Marquis de Sade to undertake an unwonted exercise in descriptive geography, a concise profile of the island’s topography that appears to have been based upon his notes from a series of visits to Italy in the 1770s, after he was convicted in France and sentenced to death in absentia for poisoning prostitutes, sodomy, and other crimes.
Sade’s description of the Villa Jovis has the ring of an eyewitness observation, even as it refers to a familiar passage in Suetonius: “The palace is perched on the tip of a rock rising so far above the water that the eye can barely discern the fishermen’s boats moored below. That particular palace served as the theater for his most piquant lewd revels,” in particular ordering children of both sexes to be flung to their deaths from the cliff “once they were of no further use to his lust.” Clairwil rhapsodizes on the orgasms the emperor must have experienced as he watched his victims plummet to their deaths and makes a proposal. “Oh, dear angel,” says Clairwil, hugging Juliette, “he was a voluptuous rascal, that Tiberius. What if we were to look for something to throw off this precipice as the Emperor used to do?”
As always, a perfect victim is close at hand, an innocent young goatherd who tells them that she is the sole support of her invalid mother. Clairwil is all for tossing the girl from the Salto di Tiberio straightaway, but Juliette restrains her, saying, “I am dreadfully curious to know how this child is made: health, freshness, innocence glow in her young charms: it would be ridiculous not to divert ourselves with them.” Their diversion consists of collecting the girl’s hymen with a pointed rock, flaying her with brambles, and finally tying her to the goat and throwing them off the precipice into the sea. Their pleasure is enhanced by the knowledge that the loss of the goat ensures that the sickly mother will soon die of starvation. “That is how I like my horrors,” Juliette declares, “either make them thorough and extensive, or refrain from undertaking them at all.”
Then the fiendish pair stroll down to the village and present the governor of the island with a letter from King Ferdinand commanding him to provide them with virgins to defile. The governor regretfully informs the women that they must pay: he himself enjoys an orgy from time to time, he says, but finds little opportunity for it, because Capri is ill-supplied with prostitutes “and precious few idlers or valets.” So the women give him a sack of gold to procure three girls and three healthy lads, and after an all-night orgy they embark on a sightseeing cruise before their return to Naples. They stop at Herculaneum and observe the ongoing excavation of the ruins, which had begun thirty years before Sade’s visit.
Doubts about the authority of Tacitus began, as many doubts did, with Voltaire, who described him as “a fanatic sparkling with wit,” adept at withering abuse but deficient in facts. With the rise of skepticism about the Roman historian, Tiberius’s reputation too began to rise. Some of the emperor’s early advocates were scarcely more credible than boosters such as Gilles de Rais and the Marquis de Sade. In 1813, John Rendle, a mathematics don at Cambridge, published a spirited if demented defense entitled The History of That Inimitable Monarch Tiberius. He makes some strong arguments, starting with a detailed compendium of quotations from authors contemporary with Tiberius’s reign or immediately after it, who praise him as a wise, just monarch and do not mention the Orgy in Capri. After the collapse of the amphitheater at Fidenae, in A.D. 27, the deadliest stadium disaster in ancient history, in which fifty thousand spectators died (according to Tacitus), Tiberius rushed to the scene and personally assisted in the rescue effort. At this point Rendle goes off the rails and asserts that by the time of this disaster Tiberius had converted to Christianity. He offers no proof of this ridiculous claim and concludes that the principal lessons to be learned from the life of Tiberius are “that the first Pope was an arch-impostor” and that Catholics are “dangerous heretics.”
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TIBERIUS NEVER HAD a more zealous advocate than Thomas Spencer Jerome, a lawyer from Detroit who bought a villa in Capri on his first visit to the island, in 1899. He lived in it until his death in 1914, laboring on a treatise that would exonerate Tiberius of the crimes ascribed to him by the imperial historians. In Vestal Fire, a satirical roman à clef about the expatriate colony in Capri (called Sirene in the novel), Compton Mackenzie paints an affectionately mocking portrait of the eccentric American, in the character of John Scudamore. For years, Mackenzie wrote, “foreigners had been coming to Sirene and there been seized with a passion to prove that Suetonius and Tacitus had monstrously slandered Tiberius. They had remained on the island for years, some of them, working away with fanatical industry at his whitewashing. When Scudamore arrived the time was ripe for another coat.”
Jerome’s plea for the emperor was passionate but based upon a wide reading of classical literature and existing critiques by skeptical German classicists and sharpened by his legal training. He directs most of his analysis against Tacitus, the revered master, and scarcely mentions Suetonius, who wrote, at least in part, to titillate his readers. Like Rendle, Jerome offers a compendious résumé of admiring reports by Tiberius’s near contemporaries, such as Plutarch, who, though “possessed of much fondness for castigating vice,” wrote that the monarch “passed the last seven years [sic] of his life on the island of Capri, and that sacred governing spirit which sways the whole universe and was inclosed as it were in his breast, never in that time changed its residence.” Even Juvenal, “avid of scandal and exuberant in biting phrase,” Jerome wrote, “attributes to him no worse companions than astrologers, and with tame and unaccustomed blandiloquence characterizes his later years as a ‘tranquil old age.’”
Jerome’s most powerful argument is the disparity, apparent to every reader of the Annals, between the historian’s assertions of Tiberius’s vicious behavior in private and the appearance of virtue in his public actions, bolstered by the uniformly admiring testimony of witnesses. Jerome’s damning case in point is Tacitus’s claim that Tiberius was savage and cruel in his exercise of the emperor’s privilege to order the execution of his enemies, which resembled “a wave of blood through the houses of Rome, or the hand of a butcher.” Yet, in Jerome’s reading, “the cases on which these charges are based, and Tacitus claims to report them fully,” amount to “about one execution per annum on all sorts of charges,” which included the atrocious retribution against Sejanus—who was, after all, plotting a violent coup d’état and perhaps even the assassination of the emperor.
At a scholarly conference in London, in 1913, Jerome read a paper entitled “The Orgy of Tiberius on Capri,” which opens with a passage from a speech that the emperor delivered to the Senate a year before his move to Capri, in reply to an embassy from Spain that sought to erect a temple in honor of himself and his mother deified. It is one of the longest extracts of Tiberius’s own expression extant and suggests that if his memoirs had survived, posterity might have had a quite different impression of him. The emperor concludes,
I declare unto you that I am no more than mortal and do but discharge the duties of a man; that it suffices me if I fill worthily the principal place among you—this I would have remembered by those who live after me. Enough, and more than enough, will they render to my memory, if they judge me to have been worthy of my ancestors, watchful of their interests, unflinching in danger, and fearless of enmities in defense of the public weal. These are the temples I would erect in your hearts, these are the fairest images and such as will best endure.
Tiberius’s successors would have been incapable of such plainspoken humility, even in the service of duplicity. Like a skilled lawyer addressing the jury, Jerome uses the passage to great effect, comparing
Tiberius’s modest aspirations for his reputation with the posthumous infamy brought upon him by Tacitus.
Some of Jerome’s arguments are not as convincing as he hopes. For example, he asserts that Tiberius’s sexual adventures in Capri, as represented by Tacitus, are “a highly improbable performance for a septuagenarian to keep up for eleven years.” However, the detailed descriptions of deviant sex are the work of Suetonius, not Tacitus, and none of the strenuous activities are ascribed to the emperor himself; he is a voyeur. Jerome’s Latin is fallible: he offers a scornful criticism of the infamous passage from Suetonius quoted above, about the obscene weaning of babies and the bathing pool with children nibbling the imperial thighs, on account of the impossibility of “the natatory exploits of suckling infants, whose relatively large skulls however would preclude their swimming.” The size of the infantile skull is just one of many reasons that babies do not swim, but in any case Suetonius clearly presents the two charges as separate, and Jerome has confused them. The “little fishes” who frolicked in the pool with the emperor, according to Suetonius, are pueri, children up to the age of adolescence, not babies.
What really went on at Villa Jovis? Despite his occasional lapses in scholarship and habitual excess of enthusiasm, Thomas Jerome makes a persuasive case that Tacitus’s lurid tales of the paranoid, bloodthirsty monarch, driven by perverted lust, are insubstantial. Jerome’s conclusions have been supported by most (though not all) modern historians, yet the legend of the orgy endures: the stories are just too sensational to die. Jerome notes with majestic, polysyllabic scorn, “As long as hypocritical pruriency demands an opportunity to glut its appetite for the lascivious under the guise of an interest in history, it needs the old story of Tiberius’ Orgy, consecrated by the affection of ancestral concupiscence and fortified by the approval of contemporaneous lubricity.”
The enduring image of Tiberius for contemporary English speakers is the portrait of him in Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius, which draws heavily on Suetonius, and the BBC adaptation of the book, with George Baker’s memorable portrayal of the emperor as a weakling with putrid skin and scanty hair, always exasperated by his monstrous mother, the story’s villainess. Both Graves and the BBC script, by Jack Pulman, omit the emperor’s riotous years in Capri, presumably because British readers in 1934 and television viewers in 1976 were not as receptive to scenes of raunchy sex as were the readers of imperial annals in the second century.
Yet the question persists: Was Tiberius an upright moralist, as Jerome believed, or the wicked sensualist of the imperial histories? The correct answer is the unsatisfying one that applies to most controversies of antiquity: we shall never know. Even if a bombshell scroll were to turn up, it could only complicate the mystery. The admiring portraits of Tiberius are just as likely to be faulty as the salacious slanders. If the emperor in his old age, weary of the responsibilities of supreme power, and released from the need to set a moral example in his retirement in Capri, took his pleasure by watching adolescents perform sexual acrobatics, it does not strain credulity.
Thomas Jerome’s life began as the pattern of elite midwestern dullness in the Gilded Age. Born into the high society of Saginaw, Michigan, he was a sickly, bookish boy. When he was an undergraduate at the university in Ann Arbor, his father was elected governor of the state. After he received his bachelor’s degree, Jerome attended the university’s law school and went on to earn an M.A. at Harvard. At the age of twenty-three, he set up a law practice in Detroit that did not distract him from his principal profession as a cultured bachelor, with the prospect of a leisurely lifetime of feeding and drinking at private clubs and indulging his passion for Roman history.
Then he met Charles Lang Freer, from Kingston, New York, who had made a fortune in Detroit building railway cars, which enabled him to pursue his vocation of collecting art. Freer’s interests were divided between contemporary American painting, particularly the work of James McNeill Whistler, who would become a friend and confidant, and Asian art, which was almost unknown in America at that time. In his mid-forties, healthy and wealthy, Freer retired from the active management of his business affairs. The two intellectual bachelors became fast friends, and at century’s end they went on a European tour together, a pair of idle-rich American aesthetes in the Old World straight out of a novel by Henry James.
When they arrived in Capri, they joined a community of effete bachelors. The preposterously bearded painter Charles Caryl Coleman, a Civil War veteran from Buffalo, was the dean of the island’s expatriates. He arrived in Capri in 1870 and lived there until his death in 1928, in an extravagant mansion near the Piazzetta. Villa Narcissus united the enthusiasms of Jerome and Freer: a former convent Coleman had converted to a Moorish palace, it was cluttered with Roman marbles and mosaics, many of them dug up in the meadows of Capri, and a miscellany of Orientalia, including Chinese porcelain, Islamic textiles, and Japanese painted fans and scrolls. Coleman’s paintings exploited every cliché of the Aesthetic style, conversation pieces with generic Renaissance or classical settings and decorative still lifes that imitated Japanese woodcuts, but his specialty was views of Vesuvius. He produced hundreds of pastels of the volcano, which was perfectly framed in the window of his studio. E. F. Benson, the author of the satirical Mapp and Lucia novels, a seasonal resident of the island, offered this withering assessment of Coleman in his memoir: “His pictures—picturesque corners and rugged old fishermen—had (for me) the curious quality of looking like bad copies of first-rate work, and he himself, white-bearded and rather majestic in manner, looked like a bad copy of [Frederic] Lord Leighton,” the eminent society painter of classical scenes and president of the Royal Academy.
His neighbor just up the hill was a peripatetic alienist, Allan McLane Hamilton, a grandson and biographer of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton was preparing to move to London, so his estate, Villa Castello, one of the most prestigious residences on the island, was for sale. Jerome and Freer decided to buy the house and settle down there. Inevitably, the nature of a friendship between two unmarried gentlemen, aged thirty-five (Jerome) and forty-five (Freer), who set up housekeeping together invites speculation, but their private lives are almost as elusive as that of Tiberius. Four years before they arrived in Capri, Oscar Wilde had been convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labor. As a result, homosexual relationships in this period were kept strictly private: the memory of Wilde’s love letters to “Bosie,” Lord Alfred Douglas, his “gilt and graceful boy,” being read into the court record was still vivid and terrifying. We may be curious whether Jerome and Freer’s relationship was a romantic friendship or a sexual affair; a recent Italian biographer has argued it was the latter, but because the issue cannot be settled, it need not detain us.
Whatever the exact nature of their relationship, Villa Castello was a romantic setting for it, set atop a hillside rising to the Malerplatte (now the Belvedere Cannone), the Painters’ Plaza, so called because it was thronged by German amateur artists who went there to paint the spectacular panoramas. Hamilton wrote in his memoirs that the house, at least eight hundred years old, was built on a foundation of Cyclopean blocks of pink granite that predated the Roman era in Capri. “The rooms were lofty, and always full of fresh air, while in front was a large terrace that overlooked the entire Bay of Naples and the villages at the base of Vesuvius.” The previous resident, a mediocre British painter of classical scenes named Walter Anderson, had paved the floors with antique marble from Tiberius’s palaces. The garden was a pocket Eden, two acres of orange, lemon, mulberry, and fig trees and a grape arbor, shaded by feathery bamboo and parasol pines. “After I left,” wrote Hamilton, “an entire Roman room with frescoes in a perfect state was opened up by Mr. Thomas Jerome, the new tenant, and I myself often picked up fragments of Greek glass, once finding a terracotta mask of Medusa.”
Jerome and Freer decided to buy the estate and then went their separate ways, pledging to meet in Capri the following year. Coleman conclu
ded the deal with Hamilton on their behalf. At home in Michigan, Jerome gave a farewell party at which he shocked his family and friends by announcing his intention to retire from the practice of law and move to Capri to write a history of Rome. He secured an appointment as the American consul at Sorrento, a post he managed to have transferred to Capri the following year. W. Somerset Maugham, who shared a fine house in the village called Villa Cercola with E. F. Benson and a ne’er-do-well dilettante named John Ellingham Brooks, wrote a fanciful short story about Jerome’s magnificent midlife crisis. The story, entitled “Mayhew,” also the name of the character based on Jerome, begins in Detroit:
One evening he was sitting in his club with a group of friends and they were perhaps a little worse (or the better) for liquor. One of them had recently come from Italy and he told them of a house he had seen at Capri, a house on the hill, overlooking the Bay of Naples, with a large and shady garden. He described to them the beauty of the most beautiful island in the Mediterranean.
“It sounds fine,” said Mayhew. “Is that house for sale?”
“Everything is for sale in Italy.”
“Let’s send ’em a cable and make an offer for it.”
“What in heaven’s name would you do with a house in Capri?”
