Claudius the God

by Robert Graves

  I told her that I respected and loved her all the more for her frankness, and of course she must have her way. But that naturally I should be impatient for the time when she felt again for me as she once had done.

  ‘Oh, please don’t be impatient,’ she cried. ‘It makes it so difficult for me. If you were impatient I should feel that I was being unkind to you, and should probably pretend feelings that I didn’t have. I may be an exception, but somehow sex doesn’t mean much to me. I suspect, though, that many women get bored with it – without ceasing to love their husbands or to want their husbands to love them. But I’ll always continue to be suspicious of other women. If you were to have affairs with other women I think I should go mad with jealousy. It isn’t that I mind the thought of your sleeping with someone other than me; it’s the fear that you might come to love her better than me, not merely regarding her as a pleasant sexual convenience, and then want to divorce me. I mean, if you were to sleep with a pretty housemaid occasionally, or some nice clean woman too low in rank for me to be jealous of, I should be very glad, really delighted, to think that you were having a nice time with her; and if you and I ever slept together after wards we wouldn’t consider it as anything that had come between us. We’d merely think of it as a measure that you had taken for the sake of your health – like a purge or an emetic. I shouldn’t expect you even to tell me the woman’s name, in fact I’d prefer you not to, so long as you first promised not to have doings with anyone about whom I would have a right to feel jealous. Wasn’t that how Livia is said to have felt about Augustus?’

  ‘Yes, in a way. But she never really loved him. She told me so. That made it easier for her to be attentive to him. She used to pick out young women from the slave-market and bring them secretly into his bedroom at night. Syrians, mostly, I believe.’

  ‘Well, you’re not asking me to do that, are you? I’m human, after all.’

  This was how Messalina played, very cleverly and very cruelly, on my blind love for her. She moved over to the New Palace that very evening. And for a long time I said nothing further, hoping that she would come back to me. But she said nothing, only indicating by her tender behaviour that a very fine understanding existed between us. As a great concession she did sometimes consent to sleep with me. It was seven years before I heard so much as a whisper of what went on in her suite at the New Palace, when the old cuckold-husband was away at his work or safely snoring in his bed at the Old Palace.

  And this brings me to the story of the fate of Appius Silanus, an ex-Consul who had been Governor of Spain since Caligula’s reign. It may be recalled that it was marriage with this Silanus that Livia had made the bribe for Aemilia’s betrayal of Postumus: Aemilia was Augustus’s great-granddaughter, whom as a boy I had nearly married. Through Aemilia, Silanus had become the father of three boys and two girls, now all grown up. Except for Agrippinilla and her little son, they were the only surviving descendants of Augustus. Tiberius had regarded Silanus as a danger because of his illustrious connexions and had arranged to have him accused of treason in company with several other senators, including Vinicianus. However, the evidence against them broke down and they escaped with nothing worse than a bad fright. At the age of sixteen Silanus had been the handsomest youth in Rome; at the age of fifty-six he was still remarkably fine-looking, his hair only slightly grizzled, his eyes bright, and his step and carriage like those of a man in the prime of life. He was now a widower, Aemilia having died of a cancer. One of his daughters, Calvina, had married a son of Vitellius’s.

  One day, shortly before little Octavia’s birth, Messalina had said to me: ‘The man whom we really need at Rome is Appius Silanus. I wish you could recall him and keep him permanently at the Palace as an adviser. He’s remarkably intelligent and quite wasted in Spain.’

  I said: ‘Yes, that isn’t a bad plan: I admire Silanus, and he’s a man of great influence in the Senate. But how can we persuade him to come and live with us? We can’t very well plant him in the Palace as we might plant a new secretary or accountant. There must be some sort of honourable pretext for his presence.’

  ‘I’ve thought of that, and I’ve got a brilliant idea. Why not connect him with the family by marrying him to my mother? She’d like to marry again: she’s only thirty-three. And she’s your mother-in-law, so it would be a great honour for Silanus. Do say that you think it a good idea.’

  ‘Well, if you can make it right with your mother.…’

  ‘I have already asked her about it. She says that she’d be charmed.’

  So Silanus came to Rome and I married him to Domitia Lepida, Messalina’s mother, and assigned them a suite in the New Palace, next to Messalina’s. I soon noticed that Silanus was very ill at ease with me. He readily did any services that I asked him to do, such as paying surprise visits to the lower courts on my behalf to see that justice was being properly done, or inspecting and reporting upon housing conditions in the poorer quarters of the City, or attending the public auction of property confiscated by the State, to see that the auctioneers did not play any tricks; but he seemed unable to look me in the face and always avoided any intimacy with me. I was rather offended. But after all I could not have been expected to guess the truth: which was that Messalina had only asked me to send for Silanus from Spain because she had been in love with him as a girl, and that she had married him to her mother merely as a means of having easy access to him, and that ever since his arrival she had been pressing him to sleep with her. To think of it! Her own step-father and a man five years my senior, with a granddaughter not much younger than Messalina herself! Naturally, his manner to me was queer, since Messalina had told him that she had moved over to the New Palace at my orders, and that I had myself suggested that she should become his mistress! She explained that I wanted to keep her amused while I had a silly affair with that Julia, once the wife of my nephew Nero, whom we used to call Helen, to distinguish her from the other Julias, but now called Heluo because she was such a glutton. Apparently Silanus believed this story, but he firmly refused to sleep with his daughter-in-law, in spite of her beauty, even at the Emperor’s suggestion: he said that he was of an amorous but not an impious nature.

  ‘I’ll give you ten days to make up your mind about it,’ Messalina threatened. ‘If you refuse me at the end of that time I shall tell Claudius. You know how vain he has become since they made him Emperor. He wouldn’t like to hear that you’d scorned his wife. He’d certainly kill you, wouldn’t he, Mother?’

  Domitia Lepida was entirely under Messalina’s thumb, and bore her out. Silanus believed them. His experiences under Tiberius and Caligula had made him a secret anti-monarchist, though he was not a man who mixed much in politics. He fully believed that nobody could now find himself at the head of the State without giving way very soon to tyranny, cruelty, and lust. By the ninth day he had not yet yielded to Messalina, but had worked himself up into such a state of nervous desperation that he had, it appears, fully resolved to kill me.

  My secretary Narcissus was a witness of Silanus’s distracted state that evening; he overtook him in a corridor of the Palace muttering unintelligibly to himself, ‘Cassius Chaerea – Old Cassius. Do so – but not alone.’ Narcissus was busy at the moment working out something in his head, and heard the words but did not consider them fully. They stuck in his mind and, as often happens in cases of this sort, when he went to bed that night without having thought about them again, they came into his dream and enlarged themselves into a terrifying picture of Cassius Chaerea handing Silanus his bloody sword and shouting ‘Do so! Strike! Strike again. Old Cassius is with you! Death to the tyrant! ‘and of Silanus then rushing at me and hacking me to pieces. The dream was so vivid and so violent that Narcissus leaped out of bed and came hurrying to my bedroom to tell me about it.

  The shock of being suddenly awakened just before dawn and told in a terrified voice about this nightmare – I was sleeping alone and not sleeping very well either – put me into a cold sweat of horror. I ca
lled for lights – hundreds of lights – and sent at once for Messalina. She was terrified too at this hasty summons; afraid that I had found her out, I suppose. It must have been a great relief to her when I merely told her of Narcissus’s dream. She shuddered. ‘No! Did he really dream that? O Heavens! That’s the same terrible nightmare that I’ve been trying to remember every morning for the last seven days! I always wake up screaming, but I can’t ever remember what I was screaming about. It must be true. Of course it must. It’s a divine warning. Send for Silanus at once and make him confess.’

  She ran from the room to give the message to one of her freedmen. I know now that she told him to say: ‘The ten days are over. The Emperor now orders you to his presence immediately and asks for an explanation.’ The freedman did not understand what ten days were meant, but delivered the message, arousing Silanus from his sleep. Silanus cried: ‘Come? Indeed I will!’ He dressed hurriedly, thrusting something into the fold of his robe and rushed stumbling and wild-eyed ahead of the messenger to my rooms. The freedman was alert. He stopped a slave-boy. ‘Run like lightning to the Council Chamber and tell the guards there to search Appius Silanus when he arrives.’ The Guards found the hidden dagger and arrested him. I tried him then and there. It was, of course, impossible for him to explain the dagger, but I asked him whether he had anything to say in his defence. His only defence was to rage and splutter inarticulately, cursing me for a monster and Messalina for a she-wolf. When I asked him why he had wished to kill me he would only answer: ‘Give me back my dagger, tyrant. Let me use it on my own breast!’ I sentenced him to execution. He died, poor fellow, because he did not have the sense to speak out.

  Chapter 14

  IT was the execution of Silanus that encouraged Vinicianus to make his insurrection. When I reported in the Senate, the same day, that Silanus had intended to kill me but that my guards had frustrated his designs and that I had already executed him, a groan of astonishment rose, followed by a dismayed whisper, instantly smothered. This was the first execution of a senator since I had assumed the monarchy, and nobody believed Silanus capable of trying to murder me. It was felt that at last I was showing myself in my true colours and that a new reign of terror was about to start. I had recalled Silanus from Spain under the pretext of doing him a great honour but had really intended all the time to murder him. Just like Caligula! Naturally, I was quite unaware of all this feeling and even ventured on a little joke, saying how grateful I was to Narcissus for being so vigilant for my safety even in his sleep. ‘But for that dream I should not have sent for Silanus and consequently he would not have been frightened into giving himself away: he would have made his attempt on my life in a more considered manner. He had many opportunities for assassinating me, having lately been taken so deeply into my confidence that I spared him the indignity of being searched for weapons.’ The applause was hollow.

  Vinicianus told his friends afterwards: ‘So the noble Appius Silanus is executed just because the Emperor’s Greek freedman has a bad dream. Are we to allow a creature as weak-minded as this pumpkin-headed Clau-Clau-Claudius to rule over us? What do you say?’

  They agreed that a strong, experienced Emperor was needed, not a makeshift like myself, who knew nothing, learned nothing, and acted in a perfectly crazy way half the time. They began reminding each other of my most remarkable errors or eccentricities. Apart from those that I have already mentioned, they brought up, for instance, a decision that I had made a few days before when reviewing the jury-lists. It must here be explained that there were about 4,000 qualified jurymen at Rome and that these were obliged to attend trials when called upon, under penalty of a heavy fine: jury-service was extremely laborious and extremely unpopular. The jury-lists were first prepared by a first-rank magistrate, and this year more than half the men named in them came forward as usual to excuse themselves on one account or another; but in nineteen cases out of twenty their appeals were dismissed. The magistrate handed me the final lists for my scrutiny with a mark against the names of those whose appeal for exemption had been dismissed. I happened to notice that among the men who had willingly presented themselves for jury-service was one whom I knew to be the father of seven children. Under a law of Augustus’s he was exempt for the rest of his life; yet he had not pleaded for exemption or mentioned the size of his family. I told the magistrate: ‘Strike this man’s name off. He’s a father of seven.’ He protested: ‘But, Caesar, he has made no attempt to excuse himself.’ ‘Exactly,’ I said, ‘he wants to be a juryman. Strike him off.’ I meant, of course, that the fellow was concealing his immunity from what every honest man considered a very thankless and disagreeable duty and that he therefore was almost certain to have crooked intentions. Crooked jurymen could pick up a lot of money by bribes, for it was a commonplace that one interested juryman could sway the opinions of a whole bunch of uninterested ones; and the majority verdict decided a case. But the magistrate was a fool and simply reported my words, ‘He wants to be a juryman; strike him off,’ as a characteristic example of my fatuity.

  Vinicianus and the other malcontents spoke, too, of my extraordinary decision in insisting that every man who appeared before me in court should give the usual preliminary account of his parentage, connexions, marriage, career, financial condition, present occupation, and so on – with his own mouth, as best he could, instead of calling upon some patron or lawyer to do it for him. My reasons for this decision should have been obvious: one learns more about a man from ten words which he speaks himself on his own behalf than from a ten-hour eulogy by a friend. It does not matter so much what he says in those ten words: what really counts is the way in which he says them. I had found that to have some knowledge before a case starts as to whether a man is slow-witted or glib, boastful or modest, self-possessed or timorous, capable or muddle-headed, is a great help to my understanding of what follows. But to Vinicianus and his friends I seemed to be doing the accused a great injustice by robbing him of the patronage or eloquence on which he counted.

  Strangely enough, what shocked them most of all my Imperial misdemeanours was my action in the case of the silver chariot. This is the story. As I happened to pass through the Goldsmiths’ Street one day I saw about 500 citizens gathered around a shop. I wondered what the attraction could be and told my yeomen to move the crowd on, because it was blocking the traffic. They did so, and I found that the shop was exhibiting a chariot entirely plated with silver, except for the rim of the body, which was gold. The axle was silver-plated too, ending in golden dog-heads with amethyst eyes; the spokes were ebony carved in the form of negroes with silver girdles, and even the lynchpins were of gold. The silver sides of the body were embossed with scenes illustrating a chariot-race in the Circus and the felloes of the wheels were decorated with a golden inlay of vine-leaves. The extremities of the yoke and pole – silver-plated too – were golden cupids’ faces with turquoise eyes. This wonderful vehicle was for sale at 100,000 gold pieces. Someone whispered to me that it had been commissioned by a rich senator and already paid for, but that he had asked the goldsmiths to expose it for sale for a few days (at a far higher price than he had actually paid) because he wished publicly to advertise its costliness before taking possession of it. This seemed likely: the goldsmiths themselves would not have built so expensive a thing on the mere chance of its finding a millionaire buyer. In my capacity as Director of Public Morals I had a perfect right to do what I then did. I made the goldsmiths, in my presence, strip off the gold and silver with a hammer and chisel and sell it by weight to the competent Treasury official, whom I sent for, to be melted down into coin. There were loud cries of protest, but I silenced them by saying: ‘A car of this weight will damage the public pavements: we must lighten it a bit.’ I had a pretty shrewd notion who the owner was: it was Asiaticus, who now felt it safe to make no secret of his immense riches, though he had successfully concealed them from Caligula’s greedy eyes by parcelling them out into hundreds of small deposits which he left with scores of di
fferent bankers in the names of his freedmen or friends. His present ostentation was a direct incitement to popular disorder. The extraordinary additions he had made to the Gardens of Lucullus, which he had now bought! They had been considered only second in beauty to the Gardens of Sallust; but Asiaticus boasted, ‘When I have finished with the Gardens of Lucullus, the Gardens of Sallust will seem by contrast to be little better than a few acres of waste land.’ He put in such fruits, flowers, fountains, and fish-pools as Rome had never seen before. It occurred to me that when food was scarce in the City nobody would like to see a jolly senator with a big belly driving about in a silver car with golden axle-ends and lynchpins. A man wouldn’t be human if he didn’t at least feel a desire to pull out the lynchpins. I still think that I did right in this instance. But the destruction by me of a work of art – the goldsmith was a famous craftsman, the same who had been entrusted by Caligula with the modelling and casting of his golden statue – was regarded as a wanton act of barbarism and caused far more resentment among these friends of Vinicianus than if I had hauled a dozen common citizens out of the crowd and had them knocked to pieces with hammer and chisel and sold as meat to the butchers. Asiaticus himself did not express any irritation, and was indeed careful not to acknowledge ownership of the chariot, but Vinicianus made the most of my crime. He said: ‘He’ll be pulling our gowns off our backs next and unravelling the wool to sell to the weavers again. The man’s insane. We must get rid of him.’