I, Claudius

by Robert Graves

  The Consul asked the question, whether the Emperor's advice should be followed. "Ay, ay!" the whole House shouted. The Commander of the Watchmen was summoned, and when Sejanus saw that his own Guards had disappeared and that Watchmen had taken their places, he knew that he was beaten. He was marched off to prison and the populace, who had got wind of what was happening, crowded round him and shouted and groaned and pelted him with filth. He muffled his face with his gown but they threatened to kill him if he did not show it; and when he obeyed they pelted him all the harder. The same afternoon the Senate, seeing that no Guards were about and that the crowd was threatening to break into the gaol to lynch Sejanus, decided to keep the credit for themselves and condemned him to death.

  Caligula sent Tiberius the news at once by beacon signal.

  Tiberius had a fleet standing by prepared to take him to Egypt if his plans went astray. Sejanus was executed and his body thrown down the Weeping Stairs, where the rabble abused it for three whole days. When the time came for it to be dragged to the Tiber with a hook through the throat, the skull had been carried off to the Public Baths and used as a ball, and there was only half the trunk left. The streets of Rome were littered, too, with the broken limbs of his innumerable statues.

  His children by Apicata were put to death by decree.

  There was a boy who had come of age, and a boy under age, and the girl who had been betrothed to my son Drusillus—she was now fourteen years old. The boy under age could not legally be executed, so, following a Civil War precedent, they made him put on his manly-gown for the occasion. The girl being a virgin was still more strongly protected by law. There was no precedent for executing a virgin whose only crime was being her father's daughter.

  When she was carried off to prison she did not understand what was happening and called out: "Don't take me to prison! Whip me if you like and I won't do it again!" She apparently had some girlish naughtiness on her conscience, Macro gave orders that, to avoid the ill-luck that would befall the City if they executed her while still a virgin, the public executioner should outrage her. As soon as I heard of this, I said to myself: "Rome, you are ruined; there can be no expiation for a crime so horrible," and I called the Gods to witness that though a relative of the Emperor I had taken no part in the government of my country and that I detested the crime as much as they did, though powerless to avenge it.

  When Apicata was told what had happened to her children and saw the crowd insulting their bodies on the Stairs she killed herself. But first she wrote a letter to Tiberius telling him that Castor had been poisoned by Livilla and that Livilla and Sejanus had intended to usurp the monarchy. She blamed Livilla for everything. My mother had not known about the murder of Castor. Tiberius now called my mother to Capri, thanked her for her great services, and showed her Apicata's letter. He told her that any reward within reason was hers for the asking. My mother said that the only reward that she would ask was that the family name should not be disgraced: that her daughter should not be executed and her body thrown down the Stairs.

  "How is she to be punished then?" Tiberius asked sharply.

  "Give her to me," said my mother. "I will punish her."

  So Livilla was not publicly proceeded against. My mother locked her up in the room next to her own and starved her to death. She could hear her despairing cries and curses, day after day, night after night, gradually weakening; but she kept her there, instead of in some cellar out of earshot, until she died. She did this not from a delight in torture, for it was inexpressibly painful to her, but as a punishment to herself for having brought up so abominable a daughter. A whole crop of executions followed as a result of Sejanus' death—all his friends who had not been quick in making the change-over, and a great many of those who had. The ones who did not anticipate death by suicide were hurled from the Tarpeian cliff of the Capitoline Hill.

  Their estates were confiscated, Tiberius paid the accusers very little; he was becoming economical. On Caligula's advice he framed charges against those accusers who were entitled to benefit most heavily and so was able to confiscate their estates too. About sixty senators, two hundred knights and a thousand or more of the commons died at this time. My alliance by marriage with Sejanus' family might easily have cost me my life, had I not been my mother's son. I was now allowed to divorce Elia and to retain an eighth part of her dowry. As a matter of fact I returned it all to her. She must have thought me a fool.

  But I did this as some compensation for taking our little child Antonia away from her as soon as she was born. For Elia had allowed herself to become pregnant by me as soon as she felt that Sejanus' position was becoming insecure.

  She thought that this would be some protection to her if he fell from power: Tiberius could hardly have her executed while she was with child of his nephew. I welcomed my divorce from Elia, but would not have robbed her of the child if my mother had not insisted on it: my mother wanted Antonia for herself as something to mother of her very own—grandmother-hunger, as it is called.

  The only member of Sejanus' family who escaped was his brother, and he escaped for the strange reason that he had publicly made fun of Tiberius' baldness. At the last annual festival in honour of Flora, at which he happened to be presiding, he employed only bald-headed men to perform the ceremonies, which were prolonged to the evening, and the spectators were lighted out of the theatre by five thousand children with torches in their hands and their heads shaved. Tiberius was informed of this in Nerva's presence by a visiting senator and just to create a good impression on Nerva he said, "I forgive the fellow. If Julius Caesar did not resent jokes about his baldness, how much less should I?" I suppose that when Sejanus fell Tiberius decided, by the same kind of whim, to renew his magnanimity.

  But Helen was punished, merely for having pretended to be ill, by being married to Blandus, a very vulgar fellow whose grandfather, a provincial knight, had come to Rome as a teacher of rhetoric. This was considered very base behaviour on Tiberius' part, because Helen was his granddaughter and he was dishonouring his own house by this alliance. It was said that one had not to go far back in the Blandus line before one came to slaves.

  Tiberius realised now that the Guards, to whom he paid a bounty of fifty gold pieces each, not thirty as Macro had promised, were his one certain defence against the people and the Senate. He told Caligula: "There's not a man in Rome who would not gladly eat my flesh." The Guards, to show their loyalty to Tiberius, complained that they had been wronged by having the Watchmen preferred to them as Sejanus' prison escort, and as a protest marched out of Camp to plunder the suburbs. Macro let them have a good night out, but when the Assembly-call was blown at dawn the next day, the men who were not back within two hours he flogged nearly to death.

  After a time Tiberius declared an amnesty. Nobody could now be tried for having been politically connected with Sejanus, and if anyone cared to go into mourning for him, remembering his noble deeds now that his evil ones had been fully punished, there would be no objection to this. A good many men did so, guessing that this was what Tiberius wanted, but they guessed wrong. They were soon on trial for their lives, faced with perfectly groundless charges, the commonest being incest. They were all executed. It may be wondered how it happened that there were any senators or knights left after all this slaughter: but the answer is that Tiberius kept the Orders up to strength by constant promotion.

  Free birth, a clean record, and so many thousands of gold pieces, were the only qualifications for admission into the Noble Order of Knights, and there were always plenty of candidates, though the initiation fee was heavy. Tiberius was becoming more grasping than ever: he expected rich men to leave him at least half their estates in their wills, and if they were found not to have done so he declared the wills technically invalid because of some legal flaw or other, and took charge of the entire estate himself; the heirs getting nothing. He spent practically no money on public works, not even completing the Temple of Augustus, and stinted the corn-dole and the a
llowance for public entertainments. He paid the armies regularly, that was all. As for the provinces, he did nothing at all about them any more, so long as the taxes and tribute came in regularly; he did not even trouble to appoint new governors when the old ones died. A deputation of Spaniards once came to complain to him that they had been four years now without a governor and that the staff of the last one were pillaging the province shamefully. Tiberius said: "You aren't asking for a new governor, are you? But a new governor would only bring a new staff, and then you'd be worse off than before. I'll tell you a story. There was once a badly wounded man lying on the battle-field waiting for the surgeon to dress his wound, which was covered with flies.

  A lightly wounded comrade saw the flies and was going to drive them away, 'Oh, no,' cried the wounded man, 'don't do that! These flies are almost gorged with my blood now and aren't hurting me nearly so much as they did at first: if you drive them away their place will be taken at once by hungrier ones, and that will be the end of me.''

  He allowed the Parthians to overrun Armenia, and the trans-Danube tribes to invade the Balkans, and the Germans to make raids across the Rhine into France. He confiscated the estates of a number of allied chiefs and petty kings in France, Spain, Syria and Greece, using the most flimsy pretexts. He relieved Vonones of his treasure—you will recall that Vonones was the former king of Armenia, about whom my brother Germanicus had quarrelled with Gnaeus Piso—by sending agents to help him escape from the city in Cilicia where Germanicus had put him under guard and then having him pursued and killed.

  The informers about this time began to accuse wealthy men of charging more than the legal interest on loans—one and a half per cent was all that they were allowed to charge. The statute about it had long fallen in abeyance and hardly a single senator was innocent of infringing it. But Tiberius upheld its validity. A deputation went to him and pleaded that everyone should be allowed a year and a half to adjust his private finances to conform with the letter of the law, and Tiberius as a great favour granted the request. The result was that all debts were at once called in, and this caused a great shortage of current coin. Tiberius' great idle hoards of gold and silver in the Treasury had been responsible for forcing up the rate of interest in the first place, and now there was a financial panic and land-values fell to nothing. Tiberius was eventually forced to relieve the situation by lending the bankers a million gold pieces of public money, without interest, to pay out to borrowers in exchange for securities in land. He would not even have done this much but for Cocceius Nerva's advice. He still used occasionally to consult Nerva who, living at Capri, where he was kept carefully away from the scene of Tiberius' debauches and allowed little news from Rome, was perhaps the only man in the world who still believed in Tiberius' goodness. To Nerva [Caligula told me some years later] Tiberius explained his painted favourites as poor orphans on whom he had taken pity, most of them a little queer in the head, which accounted for the funny way they dressed and behaved. But could Nerva really have been so simple as to have believed this, and so shortsighted?

  XXVIII

  OF THE LAST FIVE YEARS OF TIBERIUS' REIGN the less told the better. I cannot bear to write in detail of Nero, slowly starved to death; or of Agrippina, who was cheered by news of Sejanus' fall, but when she saw that it made matters no better for her refused to eat, and was forcibly fed for awhile, and then at last left to die as she wished; or of Gallus, who died of a consumption; or of Drusus who, removed some time before from his attic in the Palace to a dark cellar, was found dead with his mouth full of the flock from his mattress, which he had been gnawing in his starvation. But I must record at least that Tiberius wrote letters to the Senate rejoicing in the death of Agrippina and Nero—he accused her now of treason and of adultery with Gallus—and regretting, in the case of Gallus, that "the press of public business had constantly postponed his trial so that he had died before his guilt could be proved".

  As for Drusus, he wrote that this young man was the lewdest and most treacherous rascal he had ever encountered. He ordered a record to be publicly read, by the Guards captain who had been in charge of him, of the treasonable remarks which Drusus had uttered while in prison. Never had such a painful document been read in the House before. It was clear from Drusus' remarks that he had been beaten and tortured and insulted by the captain himself, by common soldiers and even by slaves, and that he had very cruelly been given every day less and less food and drink, crumb by crumb, and drop by drop. Tiberius even ordered the captain to read Drusus' dying curse.

  It was a wild but well-composed imprecation, accusing Tiberius of miserliness, treachery, obscene filthmess and delight in torture, of murdering Germanicus and Postumus, and of a whole series of other crimes [most of which he had committed but none of which had ever been publicly mentioned before]; he prayed the Gods that all the immeasurable suffering and distress that Tiberius had caused others should weigh upon him with increasing strength, waking or sleeping, night and day, for as long as he lived, should overwhelm him in the hour of his death, and should commit him to everlasting torture in the day of infernal Judgment.

  The senators interrupted the reading with exclamations of pretended horror at Drusus' treason, but these oh, oh's and groans covered their amazement that Tiberius should voluntarily provide such a revelation of his own wickedness.

  Tiberius was very sorry for himself at the time [I heard afterwards from Caligula], tormented by insomnia and superstitious fears; and actually counted on the Senate's sympathy. He told Caligula with tears in his eyes that the killing of his relatives had been forced on him by their own ambition and by the policy that he had inherited from Augustus [he said Augustus, not Livia] of putting the tranquillity of the realm before private sentiment. Caligula, who had never shown the slightest signs of grief or anger at Tiberius' treatment of his mother or brothers, condoled with the old man; and then quickly began telling him of a new sort of vice that he had heard about recently from some Syrians. Such talk was the only way to cheer Tiberius up when he had attacks of remorse. Lepida, who had betrayed Drusus, did not long survive him. She was accused of adultery with a slave and not being able to deny the charge [for she was found in bed with him] took her own life.

  Caligula spent most of his time at Capri but occasionally went to Rome on Tiberius' behalf to keep an eye on Macro. Macro did all Sejanus' work now, and very efficiently, but was sensible enough to let the Senate know that he wanted no honours voted to him and that any senator who proposed any such would soon find himself on trial for his life on some charge of treason, incest or forgery. Tiberius had indicated Caligula as his successor for several reasons. The first was that Caligula's popularity as Germanicus' son kept the people on their best behaviour for fear that any disturbance on their part would be punished by his death. The next was that Caligula was an excellent servant and one of the few people wicked enough to make Tiberius feel, by comparison, a virtuous man. The third was that he did not believe that Caligula would, as a matter of fact, ever become Emperor. For Thrasyllus, whom he still trusted absolutely [since no event had ever happened contrary to his predictions], had told him, "Caligula can no more become Emperor than he could gallop on horseback across yonder bay from Baias to Puteoli". Thrasyllus also said, "Ten years from now Tiberius Caesar will still be Emperor." This was true, as it turned out, but it was another Tiberius Caesar.

  Tiberius knew a great deal, but some things Thrasyllus kept from him. He knew, for instance, the fate of his grandson Gemellus, who was not really his grandson because Castor was not the father, but Sejanus. He said to Caligula one day: "I am making you my principal heir.

  I am making Gemellus my second heir in case you die before him, but this is only a formality. I know that you'll kill Gemellus; but then, others will kill you." He said this expecting to outlive them both. Then he added, quoting from some Greek tragedian or other: "When I am dead, let Fire the Earth confound."

  But Tiberius was not dead yet. The informers were still busy and ev
ery year more and more people were executed.

  There was hardly a senator left who had kept his seat since the days of Augustus. Macro had a far greater appetite for blood and far less compunction in shedding it than Sejanus. Sejanus was at any rate the son of a knight; Macro's father had been born a slave. Among the new victims was Plancina who, now that Livia had died, had nobody to protect her. She was accused once more of poisoning Germanicus; for she was quite wealthy. Tiberius had not allowed her to be prosecuted until Agrippina was dead, because if Agrippina had heard the news it would have pleased her greatly.

  I was not sorry when I heard that Plancina's body had been thrown on the Stairs, though she had anticipated execution by suicide.

  One day at dinner with Tiberius, Nerva asked Tiberius' pardon, explaining that he was not feeling hungry and wanted no food. Nerva had been in perfect health and spirits all this time and apparently quite contented with his sheltered life at Capri. Tiberius thought at first that Nerva had taken a purge the night before and was resting his stomach; but when he carried his fast through into the second and third day, Tiberius began to fear that he had decided to commit suicide by starvation. He sat down at Nerva's side and begged him to tell him why he was not eating. But all Nerva would do was to apologise again and say that he was not hungry. Tiberius thought that perhaps Nerva was annoyed with him for not having taken his advice sooner about averting the financial crisis. He asked, "Would you eat with a better appetite if I repealed all laws limiting the interest on loans to a figure which you consider too low?"

  Nerva said: "No, it isn't that. I'm just not hungry."

  The next day Tiberius said to Nerva; "I have written to the Senate. Someone has told me that two or three men actually make a living by acting as professional informers against wrongdoers. It never occurred to me that by rewarding loyalty to the State I should encourage men to tempt their friends into crime and then betray them, but this seems to have happened on more than one instance.