The Bacchantes, still wearing nothing but their leopard skins, I ordered to be hanged, quoting Ulysses’s speech in the Odyssey, when he took vengeance on Penelope’s wicked maidservants:
Then thus the prince: ‘To these shall we afford
A fate so pure as by the martial sword?
To these, the nightly prostitutes to shame
And base revilers of our house and name?’
I strung them all up in Homeric fashion, twelve in a row, on a huge ship’s cable tautened between two trees with a winch. Their feet were just off the ground and as they died I quoted once more:
They twitched their feet awhile, but not for long.
And Silius? And Messalina? Silius attempted no defence: but when I questioned him he made a plain statement of fact giving an account of his seduction by Messalina. I pressed him: ‘But why, I want to know why? Were you really in love with her? Did you really think me a tyrant? Did you really intend to restore the Republic, or just to become Emperor in my place?’ He answered: ‘I can’t explain, Caesar. Perhaps I was bewitched. She made me see you as a tyrant. My plans were vague. I talked liberty to many of my friends and, you know how it is, when one talks liberty everything seems beautifully simple. One expects all gates to open and all walls to fall flat and all voices to shout for joy.’
‘Do you wish your life to be spared? Shall I put you into the custody of your family as an irresponsible imbecile?’
‘I wish to die’.
Messalina had written me a letter from the Gardens. In it she told me that she loved me as much as ever and that she hoped I wouldn’t take her prank seriously; she had just been leading Silius on, as she and I had arranged, and if she had rather overdone the joke by getting beastly drunk, I mustn’t be stupid and feel cross or jealous. ‘There is nothing that makes a man so hateful and ugly in a woman’s eyes as jealousy.’ The letter was handed to me on the tribunal, but Narcissus would not let me answer it until the trials were over, except by a formal ‘Your communication has been received, and will be granted my Imperial attention in due course.’ He said that until I was satisfied as to the extent of her guilt it was better not to compromise myself in writing: I must not hold out any hope that she would escape death and merely be exiled to some small prison island.
Messalina’s reply to my formal acknowledgement of her letter was a long screed, blotted with tears, reproaching me for my cold answer to her loving words. She now made a full confession, as she called it, of her many indiscretions, but did not admit to actual adultery in a single instance; she begged me for the sake of the children to forgive her and grant her a chance of starting again as a faithful and dutiful wife; and she promised to set a perfect example of matronly deportment to Roman noble-women for all ages to come. She signed herself by her pet name. It reached me during Silius’s trial.
Narcissus saw tears in my eyes and said: ‘Caesar, don’t give way. A born whore can never reform. She’s not honest with you even in this letter.’
I said: ‘No, I won’t give way. A man can’t die twice of the same disease.’
I wrote again: ‘Your communication has been received and will be granted my attention in due course.’
Messalina’s third letter arrived just as the last heads had fallen. It was angry and threatening. She wrote that she had now given me every chance to treat her fairly and decently, and that if I did not immediately beg her pardon for the insolent, heartless, and ungrateful behaviour I had shown her, I must take the consequences; for her patience was wearing out. She secretly commanded the loyalty of all my Guards officers, and of all my freedmen with the exception of Narcissus, and of most of the Senate; she had only to speak the word and I would immediately be arrested and surrendered to her vengeance. Narcissus threw back his head and laughed. ‘Well, at least she acknowledges my loyalty to you, Caesar. Now, let’s go to the Palace. You must be nearly fainting with hunger. You have had nothing since breakfast, have you?’
‘But what shall I answer?’
‘It deserves no answer.’
We returned to the Palace and there was a fine meal waiting for us. Vermouth (recommended by Xenophon as a sedative) and oysters, and roast goose with my favourite mushroom and onion sauce – made according to a recipe given my mother by Berenice, Herod’s mother – and stewed veal with horse-radish, and a mixed dish of vegetables, and apple-pie flavoured with honey and cloves, and water-melon from Africa. I ate ravenously and when I had done I began to feel very sleepy. I said to Narcissus: ‘My mind won’t work any more to-night. I’m tired out. I put you in charge of affairs until to-morrow morning. I suppose that I ought to warn that miserable woman to attend here to-morrow morning and defend herself against those charges. I promised Vibidia that I’d give her a fair trial.’ Narcissus said nothing. I went to sleep on my couch.
Narcissus beckoned to the Colonel of the Guard. ‘The Emperor’s orders. You are to proceed with six men to the pleasure-house in the Gardens of Lucullus and there execute the Lady Valeria Messalina, the Emperor’s divorced wife.’ Then he told Euodus to run ahead of the Guards and warn Messalina that they were coming, thus giving her an opportunity of committing suicide. If she took it, as she could hardly fail to do, I would not need to hear of the unauthorized order for her execution. Euodus found her lying on her face on the floor of the pleasure-house, sobbing. Her mother knelt beside her. Messalina said, without looking up: ‘O beloved Claudius, I’m so miserable and ashamed.’
Euodus laughed: ‘You’re mistaken, Madam. The Emperor is asleep, at the Palace, with orders not to be disturbed. Before he went off he told the Colonel of the Guard to come here and cut off your pretty head. His very words, Madam. “Cut off her pretty head and stick it on the end of a spear.” I ran ahead to let you know. If you’ve as much courage as you have beauty, Madam, my advice is to get it over before they come. I brought this dagger along in case you hadn’t one handy.’
Domitia Lepida said: ‘There’s no hope, my poor child; you can’t escape now. The only honourable thing left for you to do is to take his dagger and kill yourself.’
‘It’s not true,’ Messalina wept. ‘Claudius would never dare to get rid of me like this. It’s an invention of Narcissus’s. I ought to have killed Narcissus long ago. Vile, hateful Narcissus!’
The tramp of heavy feet was heard on the pavement outside. ‘Guard, halt! Order arms!’ The door flew open and the Colonel stood with folded arms in the entrance, outlined against the night sky. He did not say a word.
Messalina screamed at the sight of him and snatched the dagger from Euodus. She felt the edge and point timorously. Euodus sneered: ‘Do you want the Guards to wait there while I fetch a grindstone and sharpen it up for you?’
Domitia Lepida said: ‘Be brave, child. It won’t hurt if you drive it home quick.’
The Colonel slowly unfolded his arms: his right hand reached for the pommel of his sword. Messalina put the point of the dagger first to her throat and then to her breast. ‘Oh, I can’t, Mother! I’m afraid!’
The Colonel’s sword was out of its sheath. He took three long steps forward and ran her through.
Chapter 30
XENOPHON had given me another dose of the ‘Olympian mixture’ just before I went to sleep, and the exalted feeling, which had been wearing off slightly during supper, revived in me. I woke up with a start – a careless slave had dropped a pile of dishes – yawned loudly and apologized to the company for my bad table-manners. ‘Granted, Caesar,’ they all cried. I thought how frightened they looked. Bad lives and bad consciences.
‘Has anyone been poisoning my drink while I was asleep?’ I bantered.
‘God forbid, Caesar,’ they protested.
‘Narcissus, what was the sense of that Colchester joke of Vettius this Valens’s? Something about the Britons worshipping me as a God.’
Narcissus said: ‘It was not altogether a joke, Caesar. In fact, you may as well know that a temple at Colchester had been dedicated to the God Claudius Augustus. They
have been worshipping you there since the early summer. But I’ve only just heard about it.’
‘So that’s why I feel so queer. I’ve been turning into a God! But how did it happen? I wrote to Ostorius, I remember, sanctioning the erection and dedication of a temple at Colchester to the God Augustus, in gratitude for the victory he had given Roman arms in the island of Britain.’
‘Then I suppose, Caesar, that Ostorius made the natural mistake of understanding “Augustus” as meaning yourself, particularly as you specified a victory given by Augustus to Roman arms in Britain. The God Augustus fixed the frontier at the Channel and his name means nothing to the British, in comparison with your own. The natives speak of you there, I am informed, with the deepest religious awe. There are poems composed about your thunder and lightning and your magic mists and your black spirits and your humped monsters and your monsters with snakes for noses. Politically speaking, Ostorius was perfectly correct in dedicating the temple to you. But I must regret that it was done without your consent, and, I suppose, against your wishes.’
‘So I’m a God, now, am I?’ I repeated. ‘Herod Agrippa always said that I’d end as a God, and I told him that he was talking nonsense. I suppose that I can’t cancel the mistake, can I, Narcissus, do you think?’
‘It would create a very bad effect on the provincials, I should say,’ Narcissus answered.
‘Well, I don’t care, the way I feel now,’ I said. ‘I don’t care about anything. Suppose that I have that miserable woman brought here for trial at once. I feel completely free from petty mortal passions. I might even forgive her.’
‘She’s dead,’ Narcissus said in a low voice. ‘Dead, at your own orders.’
‘Fill my glass,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember giving the order, but it’s all the same to me now. I wonder what sort of God I am. Old Athenodorus used to explain to me the Stoic idea of God: God was a perfectly rounded whole, immune from accident or event. I always pictured God as an enormous pumpkin. Ha, ha, ha! If I eat any more of this goose and drink any more of this wine I’ll become pumpkinified too. So Messalina’s dead! A beautiful woman, my friends! But bad!’
‘Beautiful but bad, Caesar.’
‘Carry me up to bed, someone, and let me sleep the blessed sleep of the Gods. I’m a blessed God now, aren’t I?’
So they took me up to bed. I stayed in bed until noon the next day, fast asleep all the time. The Senate met in my absence and passed a motion congratulating me on the suppression of the revolt, and another expunging Messalina’s name from the archives and removing it from every public inscription, and destroying all her statues. I rose in the afternoon and resumed my ordinary Imperial work. Everyone whom I met was extremely subdued and polite, and when I visited the Law Courts nobody, for the first time for years, attempted to bustle or browbeat me. I got through my cases in no time.
The next day I began to talk grandly about the conquest of Germany; and Narcissus, realizing that Xenophon’s medicine was having too violent an effect – disordering my wits instead of merely tiding me gently over the shock of Messalina’s death, as had been intended – told him to give me no more of it. Gradually the Olympian mood faded and I felt pathetically mortal again. The first morning after I was free from the effects of the drug I went down to breakfast, and asked: ‘Where’s my wife? Where’s the Lady Messalina?’ Messalina always breakfasted with me unless she had a ‘sick headache’.
‘She’s dead, Caesar,’ Euodus answered. ‘She died some days ago, by your orders.’
‘I didn’t know,’ I said weakly. ‘I mean, I had forgotten.’ Then the shame and grief and horror of the whole business came welling back to my mind, and I broke down. Soon I was babbling foolishly of my dear, precious Messalina and reproaching myself as her murderer, and saying that it was all my fault, and making an almighty fool of myself. I eventually pulled myself together and called for my sedan. ‘The Gardens of Lucullus,’ I ordered. They took me there.
Seated on a garden bench under a cedar, looking across a smooth green lawn and down a wide grassy avenue of hornbeams, with nobody about except my German guards posted out of sight in the shrubbery, and with a long strip of paper on my knee and a pen in my hand, I began solemnly working out just where and how I stood. I have this paper by me as I now write and will copy out what I put down exactly as I find it. My statements fell, for some reason or other, into related groups of three, like the ‘tercets’ of the British Druids (their common metrical convention for verse of a moralistic or didactic sort):
I love liberty: I detest tyranny.
I have always been a patriotic Roman.
The Roman genius is Republican.
I am now, paradoxically, an Emperor.
As such I exercise monarchical power.
The Republic has been suspended for three generations.
The Republic was torn by Civil Wars.
Augustus instituted this monarchical power.
It was an emergency measure only.
Augustus found that he could not resign his power.
In my mind I condemned Augustus as hypocritical.
I remained a convinced Republican.
Tiberius became Emperor. Against his inclination?
Afraid of some enemy seizing power?
Probably forced into it by his mother Livia.
In his reign I lived in retirement.
I considered him a blood-thirsty hypocrite.
I remained a convinced Republican.
Caligula suddenly appointed me Consul.
I only desired to be back at my books.
Caligula tried to rule like an Oriental monarch.
I was a patriotic Roman.
I should have attempted to kill Caligula.
Instead I saved my skin by playing the imbecile.
Cassius Chaerea was perhaps a patriotic Roman.
He broke his oath, he assassinated Caligula.
He attempted, at least, to restore the Republic.
The Republic was not then restored.
Instead there was a new Emperor appointed.
That Emperor was myself, Tiberius Claudius.
If I had refused I should have been killed.
If I had refused there would have been Civil War.
It was an emergency measure only.
I put Cassius Chaerea to death.
I found that I could not yet resign my power.
I became a second Augustus
I worked hard and long, like Augustus,
I enlarged and strengthened the Empire, like Augustus,
I was an absolute monarch, like Augustus.
I am not a conscious hypocrite.
I flattered myself that I was acting for the best.
I planned to restore the Republic this very year.
Julia’s disgrace was Augustus’s punishment.
‘Would I had never wed, and childless died.’
I feel just the same about Messalina.
I should have killed myself rather than rule:
I should never have allowed Herod Agrippa to persuade me.
With the best of intentions I have become a tyrant.
I was blind to Messalina’s follies and villainies.
In my name she shed the blood of innocent men and women.
Ignorance is no justification for crime.
But am I the only guilty person?
Has not the whole nation equally sinned?
They made me Emperor and courted my favour.
And if I now carry out my honest intentions?
If I restore the Republic, what then?
Do I really suppose that Rome will be grateful?
‘You know how it is when one talks of liberty.
Everything seems beautifully simple.
One expects every gate to open and every wall to fall flat.’
The world is perfectly content with me as Emperor,
All but the people who want to be Emperor themselves.
Nobody really wants the Republic back.
Asinius Pollio was right:
‘It will have to be much worse before it can be any better.’
Decided: I shall not, after all, carry out my plan.
The frog-pool wanted a king.
Jove sent them Old King Log.
I have been as deaf and blind and wooden as a log.
The frog-pool wanted a king.
Let Jove now send them Young King Stork.
Caligula’s chief fault: his stork-reign was too brief.
My chief fault: I have been far too benevolent.
I repaired the ruin my predecessors spread.
I reconciled Rome and the world to monarchy again.
Rome is fated to bow to another Caesar.
Let him be mad, bloody, capricious, wasteful, lustful.
King Stork shall prove again the nature of kings.
By dulling the blade of tyranny I fell into great error.
Claudius the God Page 51
