Claudius the God

by Robert Graves

  ‘We have got to defend ourselves, and Suilius is the handiest weapon we have.’

  So Suilius was sent for, and a week later he made his report, which confirmed Messalina’s suspicions. The Petra brothers were certainly in the plot. The elder of them had privately circulated an account of a vision which had appeared to him one early morning between sleeping and waking and which the astrologers had interpreted in an alarming fashion. The vision was of my head severed at the neck and crowned with a wreath of white vine-leaves: the interpretation was that I should die violently at the close of the autumn. The younger brother had been acting as Asiaticus’s go-between with the Guards, of which he was a colonel. Apparently associated with Asiaticus and the Petra brothers were two old friends of mine, Pedo Pompey, who used often to play dice with me in the evenings, and Assario, maternal uncle of my son-in-law, young Pompey, who also had free access to the Palace. Suilius suggested that these would naturally have been given the task of murdering me over a friendly game of dice. Then there were Assario’s two nieces, the Tristonia sisters, who had an adulterous association with the Petra brothers.

  There was nothing for it, I decided, but to strike first. I sent my Guards Commander, Crispinus, with a company of Guards whose loyalty seemed beyond question, down to Assario’s house at Baiae; and there Asiaticus was arrested. He was handcuffed and fettered and brought before me at the Palace. I should, properly, have had him impeached before the Senate, but I could not be sure how far the plot extended. There might be a demonstration in his favour, and I did not wish to encourage that. I tried him in my own study, in the presence of Messalina, Vitellius, Crispinus, young Pompey, and my chief secretaries.

  Suilius acted as public prosecutor, and I thought, as Asiaticus faced him, that if ever guilt was written on a man’s features it was written there. But I must admit that Crispinus had not warned him what were the charges against him – I had not even told Crispinus – and there are few men who if suddenly arrested would be able to face their judges with absolute serenity of conscience. I know how badly I once felt myself when I was arrested by Caligula’s orders on the charge of witnessing a forged will. Suilius was indeed a terrible and pitiless accuser: he had a thin, frosty face, white hair, dark eyes, and a long forefinger which probed and darted like a sword. He began with a mild rain of compliments and banter which we all recognized as a prelude to a thunderstorm of rage and invective. First he asked Asiaticus in a mock-friendly conversational tone, exactly when he proposed visiting his French estates again – was it before the vintage? and what had he thought of agricultural conditions in the neighbourhood of Vienne and how had they compared with those of the Rhine valley? ‘But don’t trouble to answer my questions,’ he said. ‘I don’t really wish to know how high the barley grows in Vienne or how loud the cocks crow there, any more than you really wished to know yourself.’ Then about his presents to the Guards: how loyal Asiaticus had shown himself! but was there not perhaps a danger of the simple-witted military misunderstanding those gifts?

  Asiaticus was growing anxious, and breathing heavily. Suilius came a few steps nearer him, like a wild-beast hunter in the arena, some of whose arrows, fired from a distance, have gone home: he comes nearer, because the beast is wounded, and brandishes his hunting-spear. ‘To think that I ever called you friend, that I ever dined at your board, that I ever allowed myself to be deceived by your affable ways, your noble descent, the favour and confidence that you have falsely won from our gracious Emperor and all honest citizens. Beast that you are, filthy pathic, satyr of the stews! Bland corrupter of the loyal hearts and manly bodies of the very soldiers to whose trust the sacred person of our Caesar, the safety of the City, the welfare of the world is committed. Where were you on the night of the Emperor’s birthday that you could not attend the banquet to which you were invited? Sick, were you? Mighty sick, I have no doubt. I shall soon confront the court with a selection of your fellow invalids, young soldiers of the Guards, who caught their infection from you, you filth.’

  There was a great deal more of this. Asiaticus had turned dead white now, and great drops of sweat stood on his brow. The chain clanked as he wiped them away. He was forbidden by the rules of the court to answer a word until the time came for him to make his defence, but at last he burst out in a hoarse voice: ‘Ask your own sons, Suilius! They will admit that I am a man.’ He was called to order. Suilius went on to speak of Asiaticus’s adultery with Poppaea, but put little emphasis on this, as if it was the weakest point of his case, though really it was the strongest; and so tricked Asiaticus into making a general denial of all the charges against him. If Asiaticus had been wise he would have admitted the adultery and denied the other charges. But he denied everything, so his guilt seemed proved. Suilius called his witnesses, mostly soldiers. The chief witness, a young recruit from South Italy, was asked to identify Asiaticus. I suppose that he had been coached to recognize Asiaticus by his bald head, for he picked on Pallas as the man who had so unnaturally abused him. A great burst of laughter went up: Pallas was known to share with me a real hatred of this sort of vice, and, besides, everyone knew that he had acted as guest-master throughout my birthday banquet.

  I nearly dismissed the case then and there, but reflected that the witness might have a bad memory for faces – I have myself – and that the other charges were not disproved by his failure to identify Asiaticus. But it was in a milder voice that I asked Asiaticus to answer Suilius’s charges, point by point. He did so, but failed to account satisfactorily for his movements in France, and certainly perjured himself over the Poppaea business. The charge of corrupting the Guards I regarded as unproved. The soldiers testified in a formal, stilted way which suggested that they had learned the testimony off by heart beforehand, and when I questioned them merely repeated the same evidence. But then I have never heard a Guardsman testify in any other tones, they make a drill of everything.

  I ordered everyone out of the room but Vitellius, young Pompey, and Pallas – Messalina had burst into tears and hurried off some minutes before – and told them that I would not sentence Asiaticus without first securing their approval. Vitellius said that, frankly, there seemed no reasonable doubt of Asiaticus’s guilt, and that he was as shocked and grieved as I was: Asiaticus was a very old friend and had been a favourite of my mother Antonia’s, who had used her interest at court to advance them both. Then he had had a most distinguished career and had never hung back where patriotic duty called: he had been one of the volunteers who came to Britain with me, and though he had not arrived in time for the battle, that was the fault of the storm, not due to any cowardice on his part. So if he had now become mad and betrayed his own past it would not be showing too much clemency to allow him to be his own executioner: of course, strictly, he deserved to be hurled from the Tarpeian Rock, and to have his corpse dishonoured by being dragged off by a hook through the mouth and thrown into the Tiber. Vitellius told me, too, that Asiaticus had practically confessed his guilt by sending him a message, as soon as he was arrested, begging him for old friendship’s sake to secure his acquittal or, if it came to the worst, permission to commit suicide. Vitellius added: ‘He knew that you would give him a fair trial: you have never failed to give anyone a fair trial. So how could my intercession be expected to help him? If he was guilty, then he would be pronounced guilty; or if he was innocent, he would be acquitted.’ Young Pompey protested that no mercy should be shown Asiaticus; but perhaps he was thinking of his own safety. Assario and the Tristonia sisters, his relations, had been mentioned as Asiaticus’s accomplices, and he wished to prove his own loyalty.

  I sent a message to Asiaticus to inform him that I was adjourning the trial for twenty-four hours, and that, meanwhile, he was released from his fetters. He would surely understand that message. Meanwhile Messalina had hurried to Poppaea to tell her that Asiaticus was on the point of being condemned, and advised her to forestall her own trial and execution by immediate suicide. I knew nothing about this.

  As
iaticus died courageously enough. He spent his last day winding up his affairs, eating and drinking as usual, and taking a walk in the Gardens of Lucullus (as they were still called), giving instructions to the gardeners about the trees and flowers and fish-pools. When he found that they had built his funeral pyre close to a fine avenue of hornbeams he was most indignant and fined the freedman responsible for choosing the site a quarter’s pay. ‘Didn’t you realize, idiot, that the breeze would carry the flames into the foliage of those lovely old trees and spoil the whole appearance of the Gardens?’ His last words to his family before the surgeon severed an artery in his leg and let him bleed to death in a warm bath were, ‘Good-bye, my dear friends. It would have been less ignominious to have died by the dark artifices of Tiberius or the fury of Caligula, than now to fall a sacrifice to the im-becilic credulity of Claudius, betrayed by the woman I loved and by the friend I trusted.’ For he was now convinced that Poppaea and Vitellius had arranged for the prosecution.

  Two days later I asked Scipio to dine with me, and inquired after his wife’s health, as a tactful way of indicating that if he still loved Poppaea and was ready to forgive her, I would take no further action in the matter. ‘She’s dead, Caesar,’ he answered, and began sobbing with his head in his hands.

  Asiaticus’s family, the Valerians, to show that they did not wish to associate themselves with his treasonable words, were then obliged to present Messalina with the Gardens of Lucullus as a peace-offering; though naturally I never suspected it at the time, they were the real cause of Asiaticus’s death. I tried the Petra brothers and executed them, and the Tristonia sisters then committed suicide. As for Assario, it seems that I signed his death-warrant: but I have no recollection of this. When I told Pallas to warn him for trial I was told that he had already been executed, and was shown the warrant, which was certainly not forged. The only explanation that I can offer is that Messalina, or possibly Polybius, who was her tool, smuggled the death-warrant in among a number of other unimportant ones that I had to sign, and that I signed it without reading it. I know now that this sort of trick was constantly played on me: that they took advantage of the strain from which my eyes were again suffering (so much that I had to stop all reading by artificial light) to read out as official reports and letters for my signature improvisations that did not correspond at all with the written documents.

  About this time Vinicius died, of poison. I heard, some years later, that he had refused to sleep with Messalina and that the poison was administered by her; certainly he died on the day after he had dined at the Palace. The story is quite likely to be true. So now Vinicius, Vinicianus, and Asiaticus, the three men who had offered themselves as Emperor instead of me, were all dead, and their deaths seemed to lie at my door. Yet I had a clean conscience about them. Vinicianus and Asiaticus were clearly traitors, and Vinicius, I thought, had died as the result of an accident. But the Senate and People knew Messalina better than I did, and hated me because of her. That was the invisible barrier between them and me, and nobody had the courage to break it down.

  As the result of a strong speech that I made about Asiaticus, at a session in which Sosibius and Crispinus were voted cash presents for their services, the Senate voluntarily surrendered to me the power of granting its members permission to leave Italy on any pretext.

  Chapter 26

  MY daughter Antonia had been married for some years to young Pompey but they had no children yet. One evening I visited her at her house, in Pompey’s absence, and it occurred to me how disconsolate and bored she now always looked. Yes, she agreed, she was bored, and very bored and more than bored. So I suggested that she would feel much happier if she had a child and told her that I thought it was her duty as a healthy young woman with servants and plenty of money to have not only one child but several. With a family of young children she need never complain of boredom. She flared up and said: ‘Father, only a fool would expect a field of corn to spring up where no seed has been sown. Don’t blame the soil, blame the farmer. He sows salt, not seed.’ And to my astonishment she explained that the marriage had never been properly consummated; and not only that, but she had been used in the vilest possible way by my son-in-law. I asked her why she had not told me of this before, and she said that she didn’t think that I would believe her, because I had never really loved her, not as I loved her half-brother and half-sister; and that young Pompey had boasted to her that he stood so well with me now that he could make me do anything he wanted and believe anything that he told me. So what chance had she? Besides, there would be the shame of having to testify in court to the horrible things that he had done to her, and she could not face that.

  I grew angry, as any father would, and assured her that I loved her dearly, and that it was chiefly on her account that I treated Pompey with such respect and confidence. I swore on my honour that if only half of what she had told me was true I would take immediate vengeance on the scoundrel. And that her modesty would be spared: the matter would never go to court. What was the use of being an Emperor if I couldn’t use the privileges of my position to good private purpose occasionally, as a slight counterbalance to the responsibility and labour and pain that went with it? And at what hour was Pompey expected back?

  ‘He’ll be home at about midnight,’ said Antonia, miserably, ‘and by one o’clock he’ll be in his room. He’ll have a few drinks first. It’s nine chances in ten that he’ll take that disgusting Lycidas to bed with him: he bought him at the Asiaticus sale for twenty thousand gold pieces and he’s not had eyes for anyone else since. In a way it’s been a great relief to me. So you know how bad things must be when I say that I infinitely prefer him to sleep with Lycidas than with me. Yes, I was in love with Pompey once. Love’s a funny thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Very well, then, my poor, poor Antonia. When Pompey’s in his room and settled down for the night, light a pair of oil lamps and put them on the window-sill of this room for a signal. Then leave the rest to me.’

  She put the oil lamps on the window-sill an hour before dawn; then she came down and made the janitor open the front door. I was there. I brought Geta and a couple of Guards sergeants into the house with me and sent them upstairs while I waited in the hall below with Antonia. She had sent all the servants away except the janitor, who had been a slave-boy of mine. She was crying a little and we clasped hands as we anxiously listened for the sound of screams and scuffling from the bedroom. Not a sound was heard, but presently Geta came down with the sergeants and reported that my orders had been obeyed. Pompey and the slave Lycidas had been killed with a single javelin thrust.

  This was the first time that I had used my power as Emperor to avenge a private wrong; but if I had not been Emperor I should have felt just the same and done whatever lay in my power to destroy Pompey; and though the law dealing with unnatural offences has fallen into abeyance for many years now, because no jury seems willing to convict, Pompey legally deserved to die. My only fault was that I executed him summarily; but that was the cleanest way of dealing with him. When a gardener comes across a filthy insect eating the heart out of one of his best roses he does not bring it to court before a jury of the gardeners: he crushes it then and there between his finger-nails. A few months later I married Antonia to Faustus, a descendant of the dictator Sulla, a modest, capable, and hard-working fellow who has turned out an excellent son-in-law. Two years ago he was Consul. They had a child, a boy, but it was very weakly and died, and Antonia has not been able to have another, because of the injury done to her by a careless midwife at the time of her delivery.

  Shortly after this I executed Polybius, who was now my Minister of Arts, on Messalina’s giving me proof that he was selling citizenships for his own profit. It was a great shock when I found that Polybius had been playing me false. I had trained him up in my service from a child, and had trusted him implicitly. He had just helped me complete the official autobiography that the Senate had requested me to write for the national archives. I had treated him s
o familiarly, in fact, that one day when he and I were walking in the Palace grounds, discussing some antiquarian point or other, I did not dismiss him when the two Consuls came up to give me their customary morning greeting. This offended their dignity, but if I was not too proud to walk beside Polybius and listen to his opinions, why should they have been? I allowed him the greatest freedom, and I had never known him to abuse it, though once he was rather too free with his tongue in the Theatre. They were playing a comedy of Menander’s, and an actor had just delivered the line:

  A prosperous whipstock scarce can be endured.

  Someone in the wings laughed pointedly at this. It must have been Mnester. At any rate everyone turned and stared at Polybius, who as my Minister of Arts had the task of keeping the actors in order: if an actor showed too much independence Polybius saw to it for me that he was severely whipped.

  Polybius shouted back: ‘Yes, and Menander says in his Thessaly:

  Who once were goatherds now have royal power.’

  That was a hit at Mnester, who started life as a goatherd in Thessaly and was now known to be Messalina’s chief infatuation.

  I did not know it then, but Messalina had been having sexual relations with Polybius too and he was stupid enough to be jealous of Mnester. So she got rid of him, as I have told you. My other freedmen took Polybius’s death as an affront to themselves – they formed a very close guild, always shielded each other loyally and never competed for my favour or showed any jealousy among themselves. Polybius had said nothing in his own defence, not wishing, I suppose, to incriminate his guild-brothers, many of whom must have been implicated in the same discreditable traffic in citizenships.

  As for Mnester, it now happened on several occasions that when billed to dance he would fail to put in an appearance. It used to cause an uproar in the theatre. I must have been very stupid; though his absence always coincided with a sick headache of Messalina’s, which prevented her attendance too, it never occurred to me to draw the obvious conclusion. I had to apologize several times to the public and undertake that it would not occur again. On one occasion I said, in joke: ‘My Lords, you can’t accuse me of hiding him away at the Palace.’ This remark caused inordinate laughter. Everyone but myself knew where Mnester was. When I got back to the Palace Messalina used to send for me, and I would find her in bed in a darkened room with a damp cloth over her eyes. She would say in a faint voice: ‘What, my dear, do you mean to say Mnester didn’t dance again? Then I didn’t miss anything after all. I was lying here simply seething with envy. I got up once and started to dress, to come after all, but the pain was so frightful that I had to get back to bed. Was the play very dull without him?’