Tiberius

by Allan Massie

  The attack came in at an angle on our rear through a beech wood. The steep slope and our unreadiness gave the barbarians an advantage. My first thought was one of shame, not fear, shame and anger. I have always prided myself on my use of intelligence, and it was our intelligence which had let us down, its failure which had exposed us to this risk. I shouted such instructions as I could, but this was not so much a battle as a countless number of individual fights going on at the same time. Only historians, secure in their studies, can make sense of such warfare. For those involved in it there is no comprehensive structure, merely a succession of encounters, one man against one, two against three and so on. It is a story of stabbing spears, swinging or jabbing swords, the clang of metal on armour, cries of anger and howls of pain. There is no possible coherence, no narrative even which can render the whole. Our men first gave way as they were pushed towards the cliff, then, here and there, the surge was checked. All at once I found empty space before me and ran forward to occupy it, shouting commands that no one heard. I thrust at a huge yellow-bearded figure and then almost fell over as I stumbled against his falling body and struggled to extract my sword. A blow on my shoulder sent me sprawling on top of him and I rolled over to see a figure swing an axe above his head and there was a smile of glee on the axeman's face. I struggled to get out of line, and heard a yell and then a shape thrust itself between me and the axe, and axeman and his assailant fell to the ground and rolled over and over. Axeman came uppermost, heaved himself to his knees, his arms rigid as he began to choke the life out of his attacker. I stabbed him in the neck. He toppled forward with a groan. His grip loosened. I put my boot against him and thrust him over, and the boy Segestes struggled out from under him. I held out my hand and raised him to his feet. There was, for a moment, a space around us, and then we were behind our legionaries who were now pursuing the suddenly fleeing enemy towards the wood. I saw worse disaster beckon, grabbed a nearby trumpeter and ordered him to sound the retreat. Legionaries hesitated at the trumpet's note, drew themselves up, drew together and, in almost orderly fashion, still facing the fleeing enemy, halted. Centurions held them in line till order was restored and we could resume the march.

  "It seems," I said, to young Segestes, "that there is a new bond between us . . ."

  I have been in so many battles, and yet in my solitude it is that little skirmish - and it was no more — that comes to mind. I cannot forget it. When the youth leapt like a wild-cat at my attacker, it was in one sense no more than the sort of selfless action, performed without any reflection, which soldiers commit in every battle. And yet for me it was more than that. Other men have saved my life in other battles, and I have forgotten them. There is an anonymity in the comradeship of war. But this was different. The boy could have been honoured among his own race if he had stood by and cheered, if he had helped kill me and then run with his fellow barbarians. I could not have blamed him. He understood the ruthlessness with which I had been ready to use him, to compel his father's fidelity.

  He wept that night and trembled, as I have known others do, when it comes to them that they have felt death's icy fingers. He shook with delayed terror and relief, and his legs and feet were as cold as the river below us. Then we reaffirmed life and he laughed with pleasure, as full of vigour as a young colt or pony. He slept and I stroked his dirty hair and drew sunshine back into my life.

  It was tempting to keep him with me, to let myself be sustained and enlivened by his youth and strength and his ready acceptance of things as they are. But that simplicity - the simplicity of the Homeric world - has been corrupted. I could not let him grow to realise that he would become an object of scorn. He saw nothing wrong in it himself of course. Many of the German warriors have their boy-lovers and are said to fight the more bravely by their side. The Gauls too were accustomed to choose their charioteers for their beauty and courage. But, though we tolerate the love of boys, men who indulge in it are despised by others and come properly to despise themselves. Consequently the boys develop effeminate manners and become contemptible. Yet I looked at young Segestes sleeping in the crook of my arm with a smile on his face and thought that life would be better and simpler if we were indeed Achilles and Patroclus, and knew my thought to be absurd. This is not how it is now in our world.

  He could not return to his own people, and I did not care to entrust him to his father who might, it occurred to me, have learned to find a use for him of which I would not approve. I told the elder Segestes of the debt of gratitude I owed his son, and of my intention to repay it by advancing the boy to a career within the auxiliary forces of our empire. He was, I said, to regard me henceforth as his patron, and in that role it seemed expedient to me that the boy should go to Rome to study Latin and then Roman Law, which would together fit him for a career either in the army or the civil service. The father was properly appreciative of my intentions and so it was arranged.

  Young Segestes was loth to leave me, but I insisted. He told me, to my considerable embarrassment, that he had "fallen in love with his master as a German boy should". I made the break as tenderly as I could, supported by my knowledge that I was acting for his own good. He wept when he took leave of me, and my own eyes were not altogether dry. Unfortunately things did not work out quite as I hoped. Though he studied well, he soon fell into the habit of deep drinking to which Germans are all addicted. Soon after my arrival here, 1 heard that he had been knifed to death in a tavern brawl. It was sad; he was a boy of promise and virtue. But it would not have done for me to have acted otherwise. I still think of him with pleasure and regret.

  11

  My last campaign in Germany met with unprecedented success. I took 40,000 prisoners, whom I carried across the Rhine and established in colonies in Gaul. The German tribes were themselves thoroughly demoralised and, for the moment at least, subdued. When I returned to Rome, which I had hardly visited for six years, I was greeted as a hero. I was accorded a triumph and granted triumphal regalia. My mother, whose hair had turned white during my years of absence, called me "worthy of my most illustrious ancestors". Augustus embraced me without shrinking and assured me that no man had done more for Rome than I. Clients flocked to my house every morning to do me honour and seek preferment at my hand. Even the common people with whom I had never been popular, since I scorned to court their favour, hailed me with cheers when I appeared in public. I should have been the happiest man in Rome, justified and recognised at last.

  I should have been, but things are rarely as they should be, and never for long. I found much to perturb me, in both public and private affairs. When I visited the Senate, I was disgusted to see how the habit of servility had developed in my few years of absence. The assembly of free notables now fawned upon Augustus. Few dared to express an opinion on any matter of importance till they knew his. Complaints reached me, indirectly, in mutterings and whisperings, of how the descendants of great Republican houses were being squeezed from all positions of honour and influence to be replaced by members of the Princeps' family and by those referred to as his "creatures". As a member of his family I might have been satisfied to benefit myself, but I had had no need of Augustus to rise. My position as the head of

  the Claudian gens would have assured me of superiority at any time in Rome's history. I had therefore some sympathy with those who grumbled at the turn things had taken. "For the senator," they murmured, "no hope of glory remains, no hope of a monument to a fame he is no longer permitted to win. No roads or provincial cities may now bear the names of noble families." They complained that no senator might depart from Italy and visit a province without obtaining leave from the Princeps. "We experience a monopoly of power, a concentration of honour and opportunity," men said.

  I was aware of these mutterings. Old friends saw to that. They were quick too to point to the honours being showered upon my stepsons Gaius and Lucius.

  Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso had been nominated as my colleague in the consulship. He is a man of the utmost integrity
and nobility of soul, whom I have long loved dearly. Soon after my return he invited me to supper.

  "A serious meal," he said, "not like those dinners given by that old lecher Cestius Gallus - whom, by the way, Augustus has had removed from the Senate - you know the sort of dinners he gives, don't you, served by naked waitresses? They say there's one black girl from the south of Egypt, but never mind. That's not the sort of occasion to which I am inviting you. I want a chance to talk."

  He dismissed the slaves when we had eaten and pushed the wine-flask towards me.

  "My own wine," he said, "from the hills above Siena where I have a little estate. It is the best wine in Italy, you won't find anything finer."

  Everything of Piso's is always "the best".

  He plucked at the hairs which grew from a wart on his chin.

  "So we are consuls. Very nice, if it meant anything. Of course you have held the office before, so you know how meaningless it has become."

  "It carries respect still, and bestows authority on the man who attains it, at least subsequently."

  "Precisely. So how would you feel if I told you it was about to be rigged even more shamefully than we have grown accustomed to its being done?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that your stepson Gaius will receive the honour in five years' time - at the age of twenty. That should show you how the wind is blowing."

  "How do you know this?"

  "It's sufficient that I do. Things like that can't be kept secret . . ."

  I said, "I was twenty-nine, excused five years, when I was consul for the first time."

  "Precisely, and the rest of us are ineligible till we are thirty-three. I'm speaking as a friend, Tiberius, and one whose family has a long association with yours. Our fathers fought side by side at Perugia and both followed Sextus Pompeius to Sicily. You are on the point of being edged out. That's what I have to tell you. And what are you going to do about it?"

  The question was, as he knew, unanswerable.

  I pondered it all the same as I walked home through the seething city. The night was hot and stuffy. I descended the Quirinale and crossed into the Suburra. Julius Caesar had had a house there, a ploy in his campaign to capture the hearts of the plebeians, for it has always been a popular quarter. It came to me, as I walked, that Rome was no longer a Roman, or even an Italian city. The babble of innumerable tongues assailed my ears. In the space of two hundred yards I heard more than one variety of Greek, the Celtic tongue of Gaul, the harsh language of the Illyrian Highlands, the smooth accents of Syria and Egypt, mellifluous and deceiving, and the incomprehensible murmuring Aramaic of the Jews. A group of them were standing outside a tavern rattling their money-tallies; a man emerged, approached them, conducted a transaction and returned within to resume his pleasure; the Jews gabbled among themselves. A little further on a pork butcher was howling his wares, urging them on the Jews who for some reason think it wrong to eat pig. Nobody understands the laws of their curious religion, with its many prohibitions and requirements but I smiled to think that the pork butcher knew very well that they would take his invitation as an insult. Every second house was a tavern or brothel: through the open window I saw a tawny girl dancing on a table. The sweat glistened on her gyrating thighs and her eyes were blank as if she had swallowed some potion which numbed her consciousness while exciting her animal allure. She paused in her dance, drew her knees together and caressed her thighs with long fingers; a moan of anticipatory and yet ever-to-be-denied pleasure escaped the watching crowd. Then a man wearing a boar's head and a huge false phallus made of leather dyed scarlet mounted the table beside her, threw her over the windowledge so that her long black hair floated round the faces of the panting spectators and began to work his phallus while the girl moaned and bit her lips till a trickle of blood emerged at the corner of her mouth. Meanwhile, standing at the back of the crowd, I observed a brace of pickpockets moving among them, relieving the poor enthralled fools of their purses. "There ought to be a law," a pinch-faced man by my shoulder muttered, "against this filth." "There is," I assured him, and moved on. There is indeed such a law, but it is not enforced. It cannot be enforced, for it is beyond the power of government to make people behave well. When respect for the gods has withered, when families are in disarray, licentiousness prevails; the secret impulses, which men subdue in a decent and well-ordered society, are openly acknowledged.

  I paused at the next booth where a little play was being enacted on an open stage. A curly-headed boy reclined on a pile of cushions with a bowl of cherries by his side. He popped one in his mouth and rolled saucy eyes at his audience. Then he uncurled himself, rose to his feet and slipped off his tunic. He did it in the most natural fashion, like a boy preparing to take a bath. The absence of any sense of lasciviousness excited the crowd. He strutted round the stage, then, as if the idea had just occurred to him, began to stroke his cock. He held it out stiff for approval, and then, with supple grace, crouched down and began to suck it. The man beside me - a stout greasy fellow who might have been a pastry cook - hissed, "A proper little contortionist, that bumboy." Then a big strapping woman wearing a red wig bounded on to the stage, a whip in her hand. She swished it around the boy's legs, howling abuse. He skipped and danced and yelped, as if in pain, though it was clear that she manipulated the whip in such a manner that it did not touch him. Then he fell to his knees before her and embraced her thighs, pressing his face against them. She seized his curls with her left hand and pulled his head back. She slipped her right hand down the front of her skirt, grimaced as if she could not find what she was searching for, then, with a cry of triumph, produced a carrot which she thrust into the boy's open mouth. The crowd rocked with laughter. She held the boy there, forcing him to eat the carrot and then lick her fingers like a dog. She pulled him to his feet, and, grabbing his member, led him off the stage. She turned, winked to the audience, and the pair disappeared into the darkness. The crowd howled approval of the obscene buffoonery.

  A hand plucked my sleeve. I turned to see a fat shining bald-pated fellow.

  "You like boys?" he said. His voice was hoarse and he smelled of onions. "You want a boy? A nice Greek boy?"

  He indicated a painted, ringleted wretch who fluttered his eyelashes at me, and wriggled his backside. The image of the young Segestes, brave, upright, clean-limbed, biting his lip to restrain tears when hurt, flashed across my mind.

  "Pretty, eh?" wheezed the pimp.

  Bile filled my mouth. I thrust the wretch out of the way, and hurried from the noxious place. Yet I returned other nights, to gaze on the shows, to expose myself to a full understanding of the degradation that opened before my eyes, inviting me, in subtle and horrible fashion, to participate. I returned again and again, because I could not do otherwise, and because . . . because . . .

  Why do I torture myself with these memories? Why does my mind play upon temptations with fascinated disgust? Why do gross and terrible images invade my mind when I lie down to sleep, in the afternoon and at night? This morning I attended a debate in the school of philosophy here. Two sophists argued the question whether morality was natural to man. One of the Platonic school asserted that since we possessed ideas of truth and justice, absolute truth and absolute justice, though we had never encountered these absolutes in human behaviour, it followed that the idea of truth and justice was innate in us. His opponent, a Cynic, scoffed at this: morality, he said, was a device created by cowards to awe the strong. Ideas meant nothing, it was behaviour that counted, and the superior man disregarded concepts formed by cowards, and acted as he pleased. It was in this exercise of freedom that he proved his superiority. "Then your superior man may be very wicked," said the first sophist.

  "Wickedness is a word you have invented," was the reply, "as you have invented truth and justice ..."

  At this point I felt moved to intervene. "It seems to me," I said, "that you two cannot agree because you are talking of absolutes, which we rarely meet. Yet Socrates himsel
f asked his friends, as we are told in the Phaedo, whether they had never realised that 'Extreme instances are few and rare, while intermediate ones are many and plentiful', so that if there were to be a competition in wickedness, very few would distinguish themselves even there . . ."

  "You have missed the point," cried the Cynic, and at that moment an impudent member of the audience leaped up and abused me for joining in the argument and seeming to support the Platonist.

  "It's a fine thing," he cried, "when a Roman prince can't let an intellectual argument flourish without throwing his weight on one side."

  I could have said that if he was, as I supposed, a supporter of the Cynic, he could hardly reprove me for my intervention, for I was merely putting his philosopher's principles into suitably unprincipled action. That would have won me a round of applause, and turned the situation off with a laugh. But I was furious at his impertinent presumption, and withdrew with such state as I could muster. I retired to my house, only to reappear with a group of lictors, whom I ordered to arrest the insolent wretch and carry him off to gaol.

  My behaviour amazed, and, I think, alarmed the people. It took me by surprise itself, and I am not proud of it. Some nerve was touched I suppose.

  When I returned that first evening from the Suburra, Julia was absent. I found a note pinned to my pillow. It was unsigned, and read: