Under Tiberius

by Nick Tosches

  He could barely write his name, or that of the vicious god whose mark the particular branch of his foul race bore. In truth, he knew less of that false god than I did. As he was without learning, so he was without trade. He knew only to loiter, to connive, and to pilfer.

  His eyes alone distinguished him from the other young wastrels who scurried through the streets like unweaned rats. The lie of sweet innocence in those soft, pale-brown eyes struck me the moment I chanced to look into them. They were eyes destined for greater games, greater gains.

  It was I who envisioned and devised the means of those gains.

  3

  I HAVE TOLD YOU OF HOW THE WELL-CULTIVATED SEEDS OF MY dedication to the art of oratory came to distinguish me among the peerage for my success in representing accusers and the accused, the innocent and the guilty alike in legal cases brought before the Senate. I have told you of how this success was brought to the attention of the emperor by his consuls, of how I entered the emperor’s court in a curule position, of restoring the fallen dignity of our family’s equestrian rank, and of being raised above it.

  My writing of speeches for the emperor differed from my work as an advocate in two significant ways. I was now writing orations to be delivered by another, as if he himself had composed them; and I was now no longer representing the innocent and the guilty alike, but only the guilty, the same single guilty man every day.

  The lies that I placed in the mouth of the emperor grew from eloquence to grandiloquence. But for occasional moments of benevolent grandeur, which satisfied his vanity well, every measure he enacted and every devious path he pursued was for his own gain at the expense of the populace and often of the aristocracy as well. It pleased him that the words I wrote for him were claimed to be his own. This pleased me also. To be the concealer of his perfidies was a perfidy from which I wished to be concealed.

  To be sure, the speeches I wrote were more than duplicity, more than malfeasance. They were the recasting of horrible truth into beauteous falsehoods. His betrayals were turned into acts of beneficence, his thefts into acts of charity, his evil into good.

  All words are mercenary. The same words that served Virgil serve the most wicked among us. The poet and the bringer of ruin are one. Oratory is the craft of convincing through words of forceful elegance. Morality is not elemental to it.

  To veil the source of the words to which an emperor gives voice, a speech-writer is referred to as an advisor to the emperor. When we are moved by words at the theatre, it is against all reason that it is to the actor who has uttered them that we immediately respond, rather than to the unseen author of the words. So much more so if the Senate is the stage and the emperor, in all the imposing gravitas of his presence, is the actor. No one has ever asked his neighbor if he heard tell of what the emperor’s speech-writer said on this occasion or that. He asks if he heard tell of what the emperor said. It is the puppet that gains the attention of the crowd, not the hidden puppeteer.

  It is curious that in discussions with the princeps as to the illusions or effects he wished to bring about through his speeches I came in time to be closer to him than his actual appointed advisors. Slowly he drew me into the shadows of the secret truths that my words must hide with compelling splendor. This complicity was necessary to better achieve what he sought. He lavished gold on me at times. He promised me a praetorship at times. I knew that the lavishments, to insure my fidelity, were grudging and loath, and the promises, toward the same end, were hollow.

  We were of a kind in a way, Tiberius and I—he reaching and grasping from on high, I from far below.

  I had come to his court in the fourth year of his reign. It was in the ninth year of his reign that I saw madness overtake him. His carnal appetites, which had been always depraved, became ever more grotesque. He all but forsook appearing in public, and thus my oration-writing all but ceased and my role became that of a confidant who sometimes was called on to compose and impose what sense I could on lunatic proclamations or proposals of deranged laws. A confidant in the confidence of a madman.

  He developed a custom of being carried on many mornings to the Tullianum, where those awaiting execution were brought out to kneel before him in a row. Strolling down the row of them, he looked at their faces and, knowing nothing of the crimes for which they had been condemned to die that day, often ordered that one or two of them be set free.

  I asked him how he chose among them, and he said he encountered the faces of the innocent in his dreams. I asked him how he knew that he was not encountering the faces of the guilty in his dreams. He told me that he no longer merely enjoyed the honors due a god, and that he was no longer merely god-like. He told me that he had in fact become a god, and that nothing that was not good could enter the dreams of a god.

  It seemed to me that he was very sincere in telling me this. It also seemed that the visible pleasure he derived from looking into the faces of those about to die was equally sincere. He told me that he could sense the rapidity with which their mortal hearts beat.

  He could not see that all of Rome, from the streets to the Senate, had turned against him. He had abandoned them, they felt. He cared nothing for their welfare, they felt, or for that of Rome itself.

  They were right. He had once been hailed as a great warrior and conqueror. Now he was looked on as a threat, a liability, a creature to be more despised than pitied.

  He had his long periods of lucidity, but they grew fewer and briefer. All the while, there was within me a rising blight of agitation and confusion. I knew what I was not meant to know, and I did not know what to do with what I knew.

  The princeps had but one surviving son and successor, Drusus, from his first marriage, to Vipsania Agrippina, whom her father, Agrippa, had betrothed to Tiberius when she was an infant in swaddling.

  Lest your tutors have painted pretty pictures in a palimpsest of the truth, you know the politics of the late Republic, the first imperium, and the Julian and Claudian clans. They speak for all politics. One need not lay waste to time by learning the political history of our world. It is all the same, ever repeating. Different names, different faces. But all and always the same save for the extraneous detail of the embroidery. One need learn but a span, and learn it well, to understand eternity. For eternal is the nature of man’s treachery, greed, and bestial hunger for power, which, well-groomed, is the essence and sum of politics.

  Trust no man. Above all, trust no man of wealth who speaks of his concern for the welfare of the people or the common good.

  Just as our first princeps, Augustus, had compelled the divorce between Livia, the mother of Tiberius, and her cousin Tiberius Claudius Nero, the father of Tiberius and a conspirator with the sicarians of Julius Caesar against Octavian before he had been raised to the title of Augustus, so it was Augustus who, on the death of his general Agrippa, compelled Tiberius to divorce Vipsania and marry her mother, Agrippa’s widow, Julia, the daughter and only natural child of Augustus.

  This was before Augustus, seeing those with claim to the succession perish—his grandsons by Julia and Agrippa, and his nephew by his sister, Octavia—and foreseeing Tiberius as his successor, adopted him, rendering him then the stepbrother as well as the third husband of his daughter, Julia.

  As happy as was the fifty-year marriage of Augustus and Livia, the mother of Tiberius, just as unhappy was the marriage of Livia’s son Tiberius and the daughter of Augustus, a termagant in whom the ways of a whore and the overbearing airs of an arrogant aristocratic bitch resided in full, equal, and abominable measure. After a while of wretched discord, Tiberius and Julia lived apart.

  Augustus himself showed little liking for the man Tiberius had become. As a boy-soldier, Tiberius had accompanied Augustus, riding at his left side, on his triumphal entry into Rome after forcing the suicide of Marc Antony in Egypt. That noble boy-soldier, now in command of Rome’s armies, had grown into a character so dissolute and wanton in his ways that his idlest degeneracies extended far beyond all conjecture
and rumor. As much as Augustus had come to loathe Tiberius, he made a show of praising and supporting him, all for the sake of keeping power in the family hold.

  A man orders another man to divorce his wife and marry her mother. He then adopts the man, whom he increasingly dislikes. The adopted son knows nothing but misery in his marriage to his former wife’s mother. The enmity between the two men increases. But the one has ensured that his power will be passed to a man who has been configured into a shared lineage, even as he considers that man to be unworthy and undeserving. And he who has allowed himself to be configured and brought to misery has done so to ensure that power will be bequeathed to him.

  What sane man cares so for the course the world’s power will take after he is dead to it? A decomposing corpse, or a handful of tossed ashes, can feel nothing, know nothing. What satisfaction could Augustus have hoped to derive after he was but ashes in his pompous mausoleum on the Campus Martius? Were all his arrangements only to inflict a final revenge on the world? Were they a final raging against mortality? The man to whom power was passed descends slowly from misery to madness. Are such incomprehensibilities, manifest in the ways of these men, inherent in the malady of power?

  When he succeeded Augustus as princeps, Tiberius made a great show of his own, affecting both humility and reluctance.

  This show of humility was not long-lived. When addressed by senators as “master,” he took offense, declaring this title to be an insult to his stature and power. He was, he said, master only to his slaves. To his armies, he was imperator. He was princeps to all, and of all. The title he dictated to be used on his coinage was Tiberius Caesar Augustus, Son of the Deified Augustus. While affectedly demurring in Rome to be regarded as a divinity, he allowed elsewhere, in Italy and farther lands, priests to be ordained in cults that worshipped him, temples and statues to be dedicated to him, and sacrifices to be made in his name.

  His first act upon his accession had been to put to death Postumus Agrippa, son of his wife Julia by a previous marriage, grandson of Augustus, and a former potential heir to the throne. He had proclaimed this execution to be the fulfilling of a deathbed desire with which Augustus had entrusted him. That Augustus had years ago disowned his grandson lent a note of credibility to this claim. Few dared ask why, if he wished his grandson’s execution, he had not seen to it himself rather than merely exiled him.

  This world is a world of lies. If we seek truth, we must look to where no man speaks.

  Tiberius looked often for guidance and counsel to an Egyptian of Greek blood named Thracyllus. This man was an astrologer, a soothsayer, a magician. It was he who had assured Tiberius that it was written in the occult signs of the stars that he would become emperor, thus insuring his lucrative employment until the day of his death, which came mere months, unforetold, before Tiberius’s own. The emperor consulted Thracyllus almost daily. He bestowed Roman citizenship on him under the name Tiberius Claudius Thracyllus. Whatever of deception I did not learn through oratory and politics, I learned from Thracyllus the seer.

  You have heard the story, be it true or not, of how Julius Caesar, while a quaestor in Farther Spain, dreamt one night of raping his mother, and, ordering that his soothsayer be brought to him, was told that it was a great and wondrous dream, for it augured that Caesar would one day ravish and conquer the world. It was among the oldest and slyest of ploys, to see the finest of fates in the future of a master of rank. If by chance the prophet were to be right, his gain would be considerable. If he were to be wrong, nothing would be lost.

  At the same time, with Thracyllus installed in the luxury of the palace on the Palatine Hill, Tiberius banished all astrologers from Rome save those who begged his forgiveness and swore to abandon their black art.

  He established the Delatores, a virulent and feared group of men whose duty it was to arrest and bring to his judgment all who were suspected of speaking, even privately in their own homes, against him or his rule.

  He had studied rhetoric under Theodorus of Gadara. He could write and speak well. But not well enough to weave spells of lovely lies around his public doings. At the same time, he was much concerned that the rhetorical flourishings I wrote for him be taken as his own. Thus I was assigned also to compose several brief circumlocutions that he could memorize for seemingly extempore occasions. I was even to compose a series of Greek epigrams and a long lyric lament on the death of Lucius Caesar, all of which were recited and peddled as his own. The lament was especially sardonic, as Lucius Caesar was the second son of his wife Julia through her marriage to Agrippa, and detested by Tiberius on principle. The entire matter of writing verse to which he might put his name was in fact sardonic, as he took little pleasure from poetry. His only true pleasure lay in watching others suffer. That was his poetry. He devoted his leisure not to meter or rhyme but to devising implements and methods of torture. It is my consolation that I was never much of a poet, and thus the poetry with which he is credited is quite lackluster.

  He spoke often of the love and happiness he had known with his first wife, Vipsania. It was difficult to accept him as capable of love or happiness. Perverse pleasures from perverse lusts, yes. What we call love, happiness: no. It may be that these are things that none of us knows. It may be that they are chimeras dreamt by us that we sometimes deceive ourselves into glimpsing during our waking moments. We long most for what we have never had and will never have. But it seemed that Tiberius never even dreamt these things, much less pursued them. If he did, if only for one errant, forgotten breath with Vipsania, it remained, like light caught in amber, in the eyes of their living son, Drusus. There were times when the emperor would halt Drusus, hold him by the jaw or the back of the neck, and look into those eyes. It was said by all that they were the eyes of his mother. And what does our name for amber mean? “Tears of the daughters of the god of the sun.” The amber of the eye holds many things.

  I had come to know much of the amatory appetites of the emperor. I knew he much preferred to irrumate than to be fellated, and he preferred to irrumate than to fuck. He favored young girls, those whose breasts were just budding. Young boys held almost no interest for him. But he enjoyed the Siphnian fingerings of children, boys and girls together, who were trained to minister in this manner, their little fingers lubricous with oil of rosemary.

  He was a loquacious expounder and critic of the imperfections of the cunt, as well as of the imperfections of woman in general; and for him cunnilingus and anilingus were the only unnatural acts, the latter being acceptable if performed on, not by, him.

  He was at times a paedicator of young men, many of his soldiers among them, but never paedicatus to them.

  He bragged, with some exaggeration I am sure, that he never had sex with a woman who was unbound, either by rope or thong or shackle. This, he said, not only held them subject to his will but also rendered all the more lascivious the especial undulations of their haunches that we call crisandum.

  The older he became, the younger the girls with whom he consorted. Their breasts far from budding, they were often little more than babes. They were brought to him by willing, even eager, parents. It is remarkable what a mother or a father of little means will do for a single coin of brass.

  There were rumors that some of these children were not seen again. I believed these rumors to be untrue. I know, however, of a lute-player whose name was Aquilina. The emperor retained several girls to provide him with music when and as his whims and moods desired. Aquilina was by far the most beautiful of these girls. She did not live beyond her fifteenth year, and when death stilled her, the emperor ordered her body cleansed, anointed with perfumed unguents, and brought to him that he might bestow on her remains his blessings.

  There was an image of which I could not rid myself. I saw Vipsania—a vague, shifting face and form that I never knew—bound and captive at the moment that Drusus was conceived.

  I was close to Drusus and believed him to be a good man and a good son, who knew his father to be a mons
ter yet felt the blood that tied them. He was prone to drunkenness and to sudden outbursts. I prefer such visible flaws in men to those that lie hidden. These outbursts sometimes seemed to well up from a need to break free and be unbound from an unknown inner bondage of his own.

  But this is phantom-talk such as fool physicians make. Let us just say that Drusus was a violent-tempered drunkard, and I liked him. We were about the same in years. We watched the downfall of his father together, though through quite different eyes, quite different amber.

  Would Drusus retain me in his own imperial court? Should I tell him what I knew, or did he already know what I knew? Should I tell the princeps himself in one of his lucid moments, without knowing what his reaction might be, in lucidity or derangement? Drusus, as I had witnessed often and as I have said, was a man of unpredictable violent tempers. His father more so by the day. Should I keep my silence, leave the court with my gold and finery, go my way, and let the dice roll and come to rest as they might? Or might such a flight later be seen as a sign of involvement on my part, with retribution due?

  I grappled with these questions. Perhaps because what I knew seemed to be madness, and he was mad, I decided at last to reveal my knowledge to the emperor. I really do not recall what the line of my thoughts at that time was. It very well may have been that, as it was Tiberius and not his son and heir, Drusus, who held the riches, I should likely be rewarded handsomely for my life-saving loyalty.

  I grow impatient and short with myself at how I say what I say to you. It is as if I am living through those days again. This is no time to live my past again. There is no time to live the past again. I want only to tell it, and that is all.

  There are occasions, too, when I pause to craft flourishes of oratory in this narrative. As it is said, the habits of youth accompany us in age. But I have not here set out to compose a literary work of ornate inflections, subtle sonorities, and poetic filigree for the eyes of posterity. I have set out to write a plain and simple narrative of my life for you alone, and I must stay that plain and simple course. The time to deliberate upon eloquence is gone. Cicero long ago said that no man is so old as to think he cannot live another year. In the infirmities of my age, I am that man who disproves his wit.