by Nick Tosches
We sat together in the garden, Tiberius and I. We drank good wine of smoked Alban grapes and watched the flight of birds in the vernal blue sky. I remember it was the ides of Maia, the day of the full moon of the goddess of spring, daughter of the god of the sun, in the ninth year of his principate.
“Would you say that the man closest to you is the prefect of your Praetorian Guard?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I would say that I trust young Sejanus more than I trust any other.”
“And are you fond of Livilla?”
“I care only that she be a good wife to Drusus.”
“And you know that Sejanus and Livilla have been quite involved behind your son’s back?”
His eyes did not turn from the sky.
“I’ve had her as well,” he said. “I’m surprised you haven’t.”
I had, but I said nothing of it.
“Her cunt is a sewer,” he said. “Her mouth is a sewer. Her asshole is a sewer.”
“And you know that as they copulate they conspire to kill both you and your son so that Sejanus might rule?”
His wrath was upon me like a sudden storm. I was jealous of Sejanus, he inveighed. I was an invidious ingrate. I was seeking gain through vicious betrayal.
Looking back, I think that what truly enraged and offended him was that I had the temerity to know what he, as a god, did not know. I had impugned his sagacity, or his all-knowing divinity.
Then he fell silent. His eyes were on me as on a dog who had misbehaved. Then his eyes were not on me, and nothing more of the matter was said.
The summer was a beautiful one, and the warm night winds through the gardens brought an air of fable to the moonlit frolickings and cavortings of the mad Tiberius, who danced, declaimed, and deified from tree to tree, bush to bush.
As the night winds grew cooler and summer neared its end, young Drusus was murdered by his stepmother and Sejanus in concert. The response of Tiberius to the death of his son was to embrace Sejanus all the more tenderly, proclaiming him “the partner of my labors” and commanding statues of him to be raised throughout the precincts of Rome.
I took a few dictations from Tiberius for a treatise he fancied himself to be compiling on the occult communications of butterflies, but during the three years afterward I wrote no more speeches for him, because he made no more speeches. For that matter, he became all but unseen by the public. Sejanus employed his own speech-writer, and I was pleased with that. I did my best to avoid the prefect. I idled and drew my pay, which was handsome.
One quiet afternoon, I woke in open sunlight in the gardens and undertook removing myself to the shade nearby where cornel trees blossomed. My thoughts wove through the softening golden light and lengthening shadows in the bright of the sun that could no longer be seen. I did not hear the approach of Tiberius as he came stalking to me.
He stood before me. He beheld me as if I were a stranger, an intruder. He dismissed me with imprecations.
“Go now,” he commanded.
It struck me full as I beheld him that there was little trace of the Tiberius I had known twelve years ago and more. He had been an august and imposing figure then. The sixty-seven-year-old man who stood before me now, trembling with madness, was stooped and emaciated, toothless, with sores and scabs on his withered bald head, and a face of red blotches that could not be hidden by the cosmetic plasters on them.
I went to my chamber to fetch my robes, my writing tools, and my gold. The gold was gone. Not one aureus remained in the leather pouch that had grown full through the years.
Thus was I banished to the Judean provinces, to a clerical post in the capital city of Caesarea Maritima, on the farther shore of the Great Sea.
“I am too merciful.”
These were, or so I thought, the last words I would ever hear from him. Unlike his Thracyllus, I made no pretense of reading the future in the stars.
4
MY WIFE, YOUR GRANDMOTHER AELINA, AND I HAD GROWN apart through the years. No man who serves an emperor can be a good husband. I saw to it that she and our young son, your father, were well provided for in every way. Duties, and idleness, at the palace had kept me from home for long periods, but she and your father were very dear to me. On the quay at Ostia, when I bade them good-bye before boarding for Judea, I shared with them my sincere belief and hope that I would be with them again soon. My duties in Caesarea Maritima would not be so consuming as they had been here, and I would be able to return to visit them in a matter of months. It was truly my desire to renew my family life, and I declared this to Aelina while holding her close in my arms. From the ship I saw that she wept, and your father consoled her. I was never to see her again.
It was not long after I left that Tiberius withdrew to Capri to rule in absentia, leaving Rome to Sejanus in his stead.
Was it fear that drove the princeps Tiberius from Rome, or was it, following the death of his son, a complete loss of concern for the world? Or was it both?
The conspirator and the emperor now shared the consulship, the one as a dictator in Rome, the other as a man who now pursued little but the gratification of his senses, and who dwelled on an island that was many miles and far away.
The diviners said that Tiberius would never be seen again in Rome. He had a great palace built for him on remote Capri. He called this palace but a villa, and he dedicated it in name to Jupiter, the foremost of the gods, the god of sky and storm and thunder.
In the same year that Tiberius left Rome for Capri, an equestrian of the Pontii family, Pontius Pilate by name, succeeded Valerius Gratus as prefect of Roman Judea. He lived in a palace built by Herod, the murderous client king of Judea. As king of the Jews, Herod had hated his kind as they had hated him. He had a succession of ten wives, and sons by most of them. He killed two of these sons with the same nonchalance with which he killed many rabbis. After his death, other sons of his reigned as client kings throughout Judea.
Valerius had been Tiberius’s man, and had served more than ten years under him. Pontius Pilate, appointed in the eleventh year of the reign of Tiberius, also formally served the emperor, who was now in self-imposed exile. But he was Sejanus’s man.
It was he, Pilate, born like me to the equites order, whom I was condemned to serve in a god-forsaken land. But before ever I came before him, I felt myself drawn to him. It was not my will, nor my desire. It was merely something that I felt, a vagueness, a feeling beyond which I could not see.
My voyage, by light, fast-sailing liburna rather than by heavier galley, was good. The moon and fine summer winds were with us, filling our sail for long spells. The oarsmen were strong, and preferred the pain of hard rowing to the pain of the lash. There were days, a good many of them, when we must have made a hundred and twenty sea-miles or more.
To a Jew banker not far from the harbor I sold a brooch of emerald set in gold, my golden serpent bracelet with eyes of black onyx, and one of two rings, each of gold and with a ruby flanked by a pair of six-pointed Indian diamonds. The rings were identical. They had been given to me by Tiberius, in the ninth year of his principate, at about the time I first sensed madness overtaking him. They were, these rings, an astoundingly generous and sumptuous presentation that indicated both my rank in the equestrian order and my place of high distinction in his court. The inner bands of both rings were inscribed with my name, his, and the year.
The ring that remained is mine still, and is destined to be yours.
Also in my possession, sewn into my cloak, were three magnificent pearls, the most precious and valuable of all jewels, and these, from the Indian ocean, were the most precious and valuable of all pearls. These, as always, I kept in secret, never mentioning them, and never losing sight of my cloak.
After all his tedious wheedling, weaseling, lying, and arch imposturing, it was only by forming a sort of consortium with two of his neighboring hagglers-in-avarice that the Jew banker could summon sufficient money to satisfy my desire and demand to be only modestly swindled.
I wandered slowly in the general direction of the palace, which I could see atop a promontory that jutted out into the sea. The well-guarded residential palace of the proconsul and those under him was called the Palace of Herod, after he who had built it.
In a dark by-way, I came upon my loiterer. The marble of the palace, which glowed pale blue in the distance, was immediately overtaken by something that glowed pale brown, like amber, in his eyes.
If there was thought in my mind, it left me in that moment. He saw my gaze and smiled. It was a smile of faint, aloof malevolence, a curse of a smile.
As I had wandered vaguely toward the palace, so thought, vague and wandering, returned to me.
The shabbier streets of this place and time were filled with ranting or mumbling messiahs, with howling or gesticulating claimants to prophecy, some of them alone and ignored, some of them drawing a sparse group of passing listeners, some of them gathering crowds. I thought of gods and men.
This sort of thing was not unknown in Rome, though it was much less noticeable. Among my earliest orations for Tiberius was one on the occasion of his decree abolishing the cults of the Egyptians and the Jews. The oration justified this on the grounds that the increasing proselytizing of these cults posed a dangerous threat to the established, time-honored nature of Roman worship and thus to the integrity of the traditional fabric of Roman society itself. Public displays aside, he himself believed in no god or gods, except perhaps, later, himself. His true concern was that the growing number of Roman converts to the Egyptian and Jewish cults was a peril to the foundations of his own power, which rested on the authority of the autochthonic gods.
The Jews claimed that they sought no converts. But their forced conversion and forced circumcision of the multitudes of Idumaea, conquered by them under Hyrcanus II, the high priest and king of Judea, spoke otherwise. Herod was of the Phoenician-Syrian stock of Idumaea, where he was born. His grandfather was among the conquered.
All who embraced the Egyptian and Jewish cults were ordered to burn their cultic vestments and destroy the idols and other accessories of their worship. Priests of Isis were crucified, the statue of Isis in the great Iseum, in the ninth administrative region of the city, was demolished, and the Iseum itself was shut. As for the Jews, who were a more numerous and significant presence in Rome, the actions taken against them were less severe. Some Jews of military age were drafted and removed to the most unhealthy marshes, there to die more than to serve. Some Jews of elderly years who did not worship the gods of Rome were simply expelled from the city under the threat of being reduced to slavery if they remained or revisited.
But Isis returned to Rome, as did the principal god of the Jews, who in their Book and rites had a confusion of many names, some of them denoting plurality and some singularity, one of which, rarely uttered, was an incomprehensible guttural muddlement, like the attempt to speak of a man whose tongue has been torn from him.
And new converts they did make, for unfulfilled by one thing, man will seek fulfillment in another. An old toga will be put away for a new one, though there be little or no difference between the two. As from one wife to another, so from one god to another.
But of late in Rome, and all the more intensely here, one could sense among the Jews a growing search for a portent, a promise, a coming of the new. A new day, a new life, a new age? Were they waxing weary of their weary old god himself, or gods themselves? Old gods do die, and new gods do appear.
Anxious anticipation was rife in the air. For a thousand years, their Book had promised them a final, consummating savior. His time, many felt, had now come. Unbeknownst to them, endless expectation may have been their truest and most enduring captivity. Enough of this ancient promise, this eternity of waiting, complaint, and moaning. They wanted fulfillment of a thousand years’ prophecy. They wanted it now.
There was among them a history of redeemers and deliverers. The demigods of their Book were such. All histories are lies. We have our she-wolf, our Romulus and Remus. The Jews favored a history of oppressions and slavery. Their Book tells of captivities in Egypt, in Babylon. Captivities that never were. Deliverances from them that never were. Yes, histories are lies, but the nature of the lies that are embraced tells us something of the nature of those who embrace them.
Perhaps they had come to see themselves as captives under Roman dominion. Only rarely were they slaves. The slaves of Rome were then as now brought in their greatest numbers from Asia and Africa, with lesser numbers from Spain and from among the Gallic, Germanic, and later the Britannic tribesmen. And there have been many natives to our own soil to be enslaved for theft or debt. Jews were free in their own land to work and worship as they would. Julius Caesar himself had bestowed legitimacy on their cult. Far more Jews owned slaves than were slaves themselves.
Whatever it was they sought, the long-overdue fulfillment of prophecy—their final, consummating savior—was central to it. This was evinced by the mangy messiahs thick as flies in the offal and shit of the streets.
In the breadth of an instant, an ocean of thought seemed to be mine. Or was it but the single crashing down of one immense wild wave of envisioning?
I saw the high priests of the cults of Rome—the riches of Mithras, the riches of Cybele, the riches of the pontiffs of the temples of the Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. I saw the riches of the high priests and the rulers of the synagogues of the cults of the Jews in Judea, compounded by riches gotten through those with whom they were in league, the usurers and money-merchants in the yards of their temples.
I saw wealth beyond imagining. I saw the principate of the other world, and the vast treasures of the real world that derive therefrom.
I saw that every prayer was a profession of the ignorance and benighted folly of he who knelt, that he who prayed avowed himself a fool for the taking. I saw lambs to the slaughter. I saw fortunes falling from the hands of believers into the coffer of the believed.
I saw many things in that lightning bolt of an instant, that fulmination of a breath between a lowering and rising of the lashes of my loiterer’s eyes.
I had given Tiberius dignity, had given him counsel and fine words of commanding and enchanting powers. I had created the lie of him and the illusion of him. What I had done, I could do in the dream-world. Different words, different calculations, but the same game.
What I had done, I could do again. I had cultivated a god in whom no one but himself believed. I could mold and fashion of other clay a new prophet, to whom those seeking a new prophet, and then the masses beyond them, would flock. With no master to serve, no master to restrict or command me, my craft would be free to flourish to the fullest.
It was strange, but there was no uncertainty in me as to this unsavory loiterer with his eyes that seemed, like obsidian, to hold in them the magic of the most powerful of the elements—earth, air, water, fire—commingled. He was my man, this loiterer. There was something eerie in my sureness. There was something eerie in it all: this place, this moment, the sinister otherworldliness in the late afternoon air, the weave of light and gloom. A sense of presentiment moved through me, then was gone.
I returned his look with one in kind, and I strode casually to him. As I approached, he regarded me with a slightly different but no less malevolent smile, one that implied I was soon to be a victim, perhaps not of him directly, but of something of which I knew nothing.
We were face to face. He no longer smiled in any way, nor did I. Without words I told him that he was nothing, no one, a lowly Jew peasant in thrall to almighty conquering Rome, and that he stood before a Roman citizen of rank.
He absorbed this wordless meaning written in my stern face and stance, and suspicion came over his demeanor.
And so we faced each the other. I introduced myself to him.
“I am Gaius Fulvius Falconius, son of Marcus, grandson of Lucius.”
He did not speak. I looked into those lambent eyes, the likes of which I had never before seen.
He was toying aimlessly with a plane-twig, holding it in both hands, or moving it occasionally from one hand to another. Now in the unpaved street, he used it to write six Greek characters.
“I am he.”
I read aloud the name in the dirt: Iesous. It was the common name that we would render as Iesus in Latin. He corrected me, saying it rather as something like Iesua. I took this to be Hebrew, but I was right only in ignorance. I was later to learn that a dialect called Aramaic had much displaced Hebrew as the written tongue of the Jews, and that much of their Book was written in this related language.
Hebrew, however, was the spoken tongue among them, along with Greek and often Latin. I also was to learn that the common name of Iesous, or Iesus, or Iesua, was but a form of the commoner Ieosua, or, as we have it, Iosua.
I can only trust that you have heard, or will hear, these names, Iesua and Ieosua, pronounced by a Jew in the Hebrew tongue, as their true sounds are not represented by any combination of characters in Greek and Latin, and our spelling Iesus gives rise to nothing that sounds of his name, unless perhaps in the case of a grave speech impediment. It involves a rising of the tongue toward the palate that I have encountered elsewhere only among a few unlettered Germanic and lately Britannic tribals.
Yes, it would be good for you to have his rightful name, as he and I here begin to travel forward in this account.
That you could hear the sound of my own voice is a dream that can never be.
My loiterer raised his head from the name he had written in the street, but did not look directly to me.
