by Allan Massie
Sejanus was not satisfied with this letter. He complained of my moderation, even timidity. He told me that I would destroy myself through my own benevolence.
I am not certain how my letter was received, for I have had conflicting reports. It seems that it puzzled the senators. They did not know what I wanted them to do, though I should have thought it was clear. One, Messalinus, leaped up to demand that Agrippina and Nero should be put to death, but omitted to say on what charge. Then Julius Rusticus, a man I had long revered and whom I had appointed to keep the minutes of senatorial proceedings, tried to calm the assembly by arguing - quite correctly as my account must have made clear — that the motion should not be put to the vote. It was inconceivable, he said, that I should wish to eliminate Germanicus' family. All that was required of the Senate was to note the arrival of the letter and its contents, in the hope that its measured and dignified language would serve as a public warning to the two errant members of the imperial family. That was all the emperor wished.
News of the letter alarmed the mob. They crowded round the Senate House, baying support for Nero and Agrippina. This unsettled the senators further. I doubt now whether the appearance of the mob was spontaneous. It was reported that some of them shouted that my letter was a forgery - Tiberius could not favour plots to destroy his family. If this report was true, it sounded to me as if someone's agents had implanted that idea in their minds.
But whose? I was already aware that my retirement to Capri had made it more difficult for me to know what was happening. I was more than ever at the mercy of the information I received.
My letter did not have the desired effect of persuading either Agrippina or Nero to mend their ways. Indeed, it may have had the contrary effect. Within a month of its appearance, Sejanus sent me word of new communications between the pair and the German legions.
He appeared on Capri without a prior announcement, something he had never done before.
"The situation," he said, "is critical."
It was a beautiful morning. I had bathed early, and was breakfasting with Sigmund and other members of my household when news was brought that a ship was approaching the island. Unannounced arrivals were always agitating, and Sigmund exerted himself to calm my suspicions. It was a relief when I learned that Sejanus was on board. Nevertheless I reproved him for having taken me by surprise.
"The situation is critical," he repeated. He spoke without geniality. He was insensible to the beauty of the scene and of the morning. "You don't understand," he said, "you refuse to understand the danger we are in. Conspiracies are afoot all around us. To speak frankly, I don't know that I can trust the security of your own household. If I let my movements be known in advance, then it becomes more difficult to protect you. Think what your position would be if I were assassinated. And there's nothing they would like better. Without me, you would be quite helpless here. You would actually be a prisoner. It wouldn't be necessary to kill you, or even arrest you, though of course they would get rid of you as soon as they felt it safe to do so. And that wouldn't be long."
He sat in the sun, sweating. He had dismissed all my attendants, and posted guards at the doorway which led to the terrace, and more guards in the anteroom by which the terrace was approached.
"I've taken a risk leaving Rome," he said.
I told him I didn't understand why he had come.
He sighed. He got to his feet and strode to the corner of the terrace looking down on the beautiful bay which I was quite sure he did not see. He stood with his back to me while the silence prolonged itself. Then he turned, frowning.
"Anything may happen while I'm away," he said. "I have left good men in charge, but even good men may be suborned. What's brewing is more than a plot, more than a revolt. It's a revolution. Agrippina dines half a dozen different senators every day. Letters fly to and fro between her and the legions in Germany. Here's an example."
The letter he passed was evidently seditious. It called on the commander of the legions there to hold himself in readiness for the day which would soon be upon them. "As soon as we act against the Bull, or are ready to act against him, I shall let you know. I understand of course that you do not dare to commit yourself till you are certain he has been eliminated."
Sejanus threw back his head in that defiant gesture I had once loved.
"I am the Bull," he said. "And this is genuine?" "Yes."
"You are certain?" "Yes."
Four weeks earlier, one of Agrippina's trusted freedmen had left her house disguised as an Egyptian dealer in precious stones. He had given Sejanus' agent the slip in Ostia, but the agent discovered that he had embarked on a ship bound for Marseille. Messages had been sent to the governor of the city to intercept the merchant, but they had been delayed, and Agrippina's man had escaped the city. A cavalry troop had set off in pursuit, and he had been apprehended at the Augustan gate of Lyon. The letter had been found on his person. It bore no direction, but the freedman had been put to the question and, under torture, had revealed the name of its intended recipient.
Sejanus said, "It is unlikely that Agrippina will act till she has had an acknowledgment but, if none comes, she may be minded to move for fear it has been discovered. She will not dare to move directly against you in such circumstances, but she will certainly act against me. As you can see, that does not depend on the assurance of help from the German legions. Here, however, is the second sheet of the letter."
It read:
As for the old man himself, it will be time enough when we are in control of the machinery of the state to determine his fate. I know you have tender feelings of residual loyalty, and these shall be respected. Therefore you yourself may conclude, in conversation with my son, who to some extent shares your sentiments, whether he shall be imprisoned where he is, or in some less salubrious island, such as that to which my mother was confined, or whether he shall be more conclusively disposed of. I am bound to say that, for our general security, I favour the last course, since who can tell the number of adherents he may still have, or how his survival might act as a focus for disaffection?
Sejanus smiled for the first time that morning. I lifted my eyes from the page, compelled by his smiling stare.
"I do not think this is her handwriting," I said.
"No. She has dictated it."
"Would she trust a slave or freedman with such matter?" "Evidently. Since she has done so. Who else could have composed it? I grant you it was imprudent. . ." "Strangely imprudent . . ."
"Imprudent, yes, but not strangely so. I have always known that you have never understood Agrippina. She thinks normal rules don't apply to her, and consequently she disdains precautions that any sensible person would take. Moreover she is so swollen with pride in her own popularity that she cannot imagine one of her own people capable of acting against her. Besides which, in this case, she has been justified. She wasn't betrayed . . ."
His impatience and assurance both disturbed me. Early in my military career I learned to be suspicious of any course of action which was vehemently advanced. Whenever a man shows unusual ardour in urging a policy, you may be certain that something is wrong somewhere. Sejanus had always been alert to my moods; he caught a whiff of my doubts.
"You hesitate," he said, "because you are unwilling to believe Agrippina could desire your death, though you have evidence enough that she has long wanted that more than anything in the world. You have never accepted that she really believes Piso murdered Germanicus, and that you instigated the crime. She has been mad for revenge ever since . . ."
I did not answer. I felt the power of his stare. I had made Sejanus by my own choice and now it seemed to me that he had escaped my influence, achieved an autonomous force. I felt my age, and the weakness and irresolution of age. I looked down at the sea. The sun sparkled on the water and there were children playing, with happy cries, in the shallows. Sejanus followed the direction of my gaze.
"I can see it is a temptation," he said, "to pretend in thi
s island paradise that you have escaped the world."
He sat on the terrace wall and crumbled fragments of rubble between his fingers. A cat brushed against my legs and I bent down to run my hand along the soft fur. Sejanus dropped pebbles over the wall, and seemed to listen for a sound that never came.
"I'm not out of the world," he said. "I am right in the centre of the horrible gory mess. You rescued that German boy from the arena but you left me to fight your battles there. Well, I've a confession to make. I'm afraid. There, you never thought to hear me admit to that. I'm as fearful as that German boy was when he lay on the sand while the world hurtled away from him and left him face to face with death. You may be indifferent to death, Tiberius, and I would be indifferent to death in battle, but this fear is different. It's the terror that stalks by night. Whenever any petitioner approaches me, I wonder if he is the murderer they have despatched. I try to reassure myself: 'He's been searched by my guards' I say. 'He can't possibly have a weapon'. And then I wonder if my guards have perhaps been suborned. It is to such imaginings unworthy of a man that my devotion to your person and your interests has condemned me."
"Very well," I said, "but I do not wish them put to death . . . I shall write in suitable terms to the Senate." "Now," he said.
I watched his boat shrink into invisibility. There were pink roses on my terrace, I called for wine. I waited.
The Senate, now certain of my intentions, was only too happy to order the arrest of Agrippina and Nero. A vote of thanks for my deliverance from vile conspiracy was passed. Some ardent spirits, hoping to please me, called for the death penalty. This time no mob swirled around the Senate House. Rome was quiet as the grave. Agrippina was sent to the island of Pandateria to be confined in the villa where her mother, my poor Julia, had been lodged. Nero was imprisoned on the island of Pontia, where several of Julia's lovers had dragged out existence. I thanked the Senate for their vigilance on my behalf, and commended Sejanus to them as "the partner of my labours". When he wrote renewing his request to be allowed to marry my daughter-in-law, Julia Livilla, I made no objection. Let him please himself, if it still pleased the lady. I asked him only to maintain his care for the children he had had by Apicata.
A few weeks after his mother's arrest, Drusus visited me on Capri. I had not invited him for I detested the thought that this young man, who had been so zealous in the destruction of his brother Nero, should be seen by so many as my ostensible heir. He demanded praise for his loyalty and eagerly begged a reward. It was time he was granted command of an army, he said. I replied that I entrusted military commands to experienced and trusted soldiers, not to ignorant boys. He flushed.
"Furthermore," I said, "I find your expressions of loyalty to me less striking than your indifference to your mother's fate. Where natural affections wither, it is hard to trust noble sentiments."
"You have made an enemy of that young man," Sejanus wrote. "He returned to Rome inspired by malice directed at your person."
I could not help that. I saw in Drusus the fierce and cunning servility which has been the bane of Rome. It is the Ides of March today, the anniversary of Caesar's murder. Of course the corruption of virtue long preceded that, which was indeed a vain attempt at its purification. Marcus Brutus at least, a man who won the admiration of almost all those opposed to his actions, certainly saw that murder as a necessary cleansing deed. I am told he looked down on Caesar's mangled corpse, and muttered, "Cruel imperative". There was one exception to the general approval of Brutus: my stepfather always described him as a prig, fool and ingrate; he called the conspiracy against Caesar "a mad dream of disappointed careerists given a spurious respectability by Brutus who lacked any understanding of how the Republic had changed since the Punic Wars".
Augustus was right. Yet I have often wondered whether I would not myself have been among the self-styled Liberators. I am sure at some moments that I would have been, for I would have found the rule of a single person — a rule then in its infancy — as repugnant as ... as I find it now when I am myself that person. And yet, if I have any consistent virtue, clarity of mind must be granted me. Would I not then have looked around the Senate as I do now and have found a generation fit for slavery, no longer capable of exercising the restraint of the passions on which the enjoyment of true liberty depends?
It is not only a question of morality, though ultimately all political questions must be seen as that. It is a question of consistent authority. Rome has been destroyed by its empire; the doom of the Republic was written in the conquest of Greece, Asia, Africa, Gaul and Spain. My whole life, animated by Republican sentiments, has yet been devoted to making the re-establishment of the Republic impossible. And it is thanks to Brutus and his friends that the inevitable principate had its origins in murder and civil war.
These thoughts have been with me a long time. I looked around and saw no man but Sejanus capable of governing the empire. Drusus was a scoundrel. I doubted the mental balance of his younger brother, Gaius Caligula. My own grandson Tiberius Gemellus was a sweet child, but nothing in his nature promised that he would be a man of character. Perhaps the best security for him was indeed that Sejanus should marry his mother and be entrusted with his care, as Augustus had entrusted me with the rearing of Gaius and Lucius. Surely, I thought, I could trust Sejanus? The nobility, jealous of his comparatively humble birth, would rebel if he was openly elevated to the position which Augustus had enjoyed, and I had endured; but he could be the power, as it were, behind the throne, my grandson's throne. I announced that as he had long been the partner of my labours, I would honour him by making him my partner in the consulship for the following year.
That announcement proved to Drusus that he had gained nothing by his betrayal of his mother and brother. He collected about him a group of giddy-minded, dissipated and discontented nobles. Their dinner-table talk was rank sedition. This was reported to me; I relayed it to the Senate, who ordered Drusus' arrest. Pending full investigation, he was held under house arrest. I ordered that he be strictly guarded, and forbidden company.
Agrippina, hearing the news, embarked on a hunger strike. Orders were given that she be forcibly fed. She resisted the attempt. Struggling with her guards, she received a blow which cost her the sight of her left eye.
9
Does chance govern all? I had a letter from Antonia, my brother's widow, Germanicus' mother, saying she hoped to visit me, perhaps for a few days while she was holidaying at her villa on the Bay of Naples. I was minded to refuse, though I have always liked and admired Antonia. I was afraid that she would plead for her grandsons Nero and Drusus; not for her daughter-in-law Agrippina, I was sure of that, for she had never cared for her. It would have been embarrassing to endure her intercession on their behalf. So I wrote a letter saying I was unwell and unable to receive visitors.
But I did not send it. I was distracted by another letter I had received. This was from Sejanus. He requested that I accord him the tribunician power, that Republican status which Augustus had employed as a device to enable him to initiate and veto legislation and to ensure that his person was sacrosanct, which I had, of course, been granted by him. In fact I had been considering whether this should not be accorded Sejanus; I had hesitated because I knew how much a grant would stimulate discontent and envy. Yet the matter was on my mind. Now, on the other hand, there was something in the tone of Sejanus' letter which was displeasing, a peremptory note, as if he had only to ask to be given what he demanded. There was an underlying suggestion that with this power he would be free of my authority. It was not stated. Perhaps Sejanus himself did not know that it was there, but I caught a whiff of arrogance and impatience and this disquieted me.
In my perturbation, nostalgia invaded me. When I thought of Antonia, I set aside my fears as to what she would request. I was able to forget the sink of political Rome, with its private bureaux
of espionage, its stench of conspiracy, its atmosphere infected by suspicion and fear; instead the memory came to
me of conversations under chestnut trees, conversations that stretched towards the setting sun, and covered in the most friendly and sincere manner the whole range of human experience. In talking with Antonia, I reflected, I would share again some species of communion with my long-dead brother. And I remembered that in those distant days Antonia and I had been bound together by the purest sort of affection, that between a man and a woman, into which is breathed only the lightest breeze of sexual desire -a desire which, for imperative reasons, will never be translated into action; an affection which floats like a raft on a lake in the sunshine of a summer afternoon that can never end.
