Tiberius

by Allan Massie

  There was to be a happy day before she arrived. Sigmund had fallen in love with a local girl, a Greek called Euphrosyne, whose father practised as a doctor in Naples, but owned a little villa on Capri, given to him by Augustus in return for some service he had rendered. It would have been a quite unsuitable marriage but for my patronage. Miltiades (the father) would never have consented that his adored daughter should marry anyone so unsuitable as a German freedman, who had, moreover, been a gladiator, if that freedman had not also been my favourite. For my part I was delighted by the match. Euphrosyne was an enchanting girl, with black eyes and a mass of dark curls, a creature made for pleasure, yet tender-hearted and witty. To see them together was a justification of empire, for what but Rome could have brought these two perfect, but contrasting, physical types together? Their happiness and the delight they took in each other enfolded us all. I blessed the marriage, asking only that both remained in my household.

  Antonia arrived early, while we were still celebrating. Her hair was white but she retained that serene beauty which she had inherited from her mother, Octavia.

  "You must forgive me," she said, "I never keep to my plans exactly, for reasons I shall later explain. Meanwhile, Tiberius, how delightful it is to see you again, looking so well and happy."

  "You have come in the middle of a happy occasion," I said, "and your arrival, Antonia, adds to the pleasure."

  "Ah," she said, "if Rome could see you now, so innocently engaged as a sort of godfather, people would be ashamed of the scurrilous stories they are so fond of retailing."

  "You risk spoiling my pleasure by mentioning that place."

  "That's the last thing I want to do," she replied, but her face clouded.

  "It's strange," she said, "how we have remained friends."

  "We have our dear Drusus and many memories in common."

  "And yet I cannot turn anywhere without being told that you are the enemy of my family."

  "We could never be enemies, Antonia. I remember with the greatest gratitude how you refused to heed the vile rumours about Germanicus' death."

  "I knew they were all lies. I knew you could never have a hand in the death of your brother's son. Now two of his grandsons have been imprisoned by your command."

  "By order of the Senate."

  "At your request. . ."

  "If you had seen the evidence . . ."

  She looked away, her grey eyes filled with tears. A little wind blew whispers of the ocean towards us. The blue-veined marble of the terrace shone like a dull shield in the noon sun. We sat in the shade under an arbour of trailing roses.

  "I came a day early," she said, "because I no longer choose to advertise my movements exactly. More than that, I do not dare. And I brought Gaius Caligula with me because . . ." she paused, and looked me in the eyes with a candid gaze which I was reluctant to meet but from which I could not turn away, "because I am afraid of what may happen to him if he is not with you."

  She then spoke of Gaius. He was an unsatisfactory youth, moody, disorganised, given to apparently unprovoked outbursts of cackling laughter and fits of temper. He had, she was afraid, a streak of cruelty. (I pictured the boy, his tow-coloured hair wild as a slum-child's, leaping from his seat in the theatre and shrieking, "Kill him, kill him!" as Sigmund lay helpless and terrified on the sand.) Nevertheless, and perhaps precisely because he was difficult, awkward, and given to nervous terrors at night, Antonia loved him; Agrippina, who, having once spoiled him, had come to detest him, had long ago consigned his upbringing to her care, and she felt the special responsibility for him that good women so often feel for their most unsatisfactory child. Now she was afraid on his account.

  He had friends, a year or two older than himself for the most part, of good family, but given to dissipation and wild talk. She disapproved of their influence, but her alarm ran deeper.

  "I don't know how to say this," she said, "without angering you."

  "Antonia, you won't anger me, because I appreciate that you speak out of friendship."

  She laid her hand on mine. The bones of old age met in mutual reassurance.

  She was suspicious of these friends, some of whom had appeared suddenly, and all the more because she had come to know that much wild talk was exchanged at their drunken suppers. So she had taken steps to enquire about them, and had been alarmed to discover - she hesitated on the word "alarmed" - that two of them had also been intimates of Sejanus. "They were described to me as his proteges. Or else as his creatures." And they maintained relations with him. She had had one of them followed on several mornings after he had attended supper-parties with Gaius, either at her house, or at the home of another member of the group, or at a tavern. On each occasion, he had gone straight to Sejanus' house on the Esquiline, and remained there a long time. "I could only conclude that he had gone there to make a report. . ."

  "Tiberius," she said, "my boy is wild and uncontrolled in his language. He is easily led, because he has no confidence in himself and so is open to flattery. It wouldn't be difficult to lure him into saying stupid things, even engaging in stupid . . . conspiracies. I am afraid for him, because I believe that one day soon, Sejanus will come to you with evidence, and witnesses to support it, all showing that he has engaged in sedition. That's why I want you to take him into your own household. Permanently."

  When I didn't answer, she said:

  "Tiberius, did all the evidence against his brothers, Nero and Drusus, come to you by way of Sejanus . . . ?" "I trust Sejanus . . ."

  "Where there is the most trust, there is also the greatest treachery."

  She cleared her throat, a polite preparatory noise. She folded her hands in her lap and sat very straight.

  "Nobody else," she said, "will dare to tell you what I am going to say. In giving such entire confidence to that man, you have isolated yourself. He has made of you a mystery at Rome, and mysteries are always feared. You made him what he is, but are you sure he has not escaped your control? When he claims to act in your interests, are you always certain that he is not in reality preferring his own? Agrippina has been your enemy -certainly — she is a foolish and bitter woman — but are you so sure that her sons were not made to appear your enemies, by the contrivance, indeed by the order, of that man? What reason do you have to believe the evidence he offers, when I can show you how that evidence has been concocted?"

  "He has never told me a lie."

  "He has never told you a lie which you have discovered. My poor Tiberius," again she placed her hand on mine, "this is not the first time you have been betrayed by affection, and trusted beyond the moment when reason for trust had vanished. You don't like to hear what I am saying, but if these same thoughts have not come to you in dark moments and been then thrust aside because you find them intolerable, then, mindless of our old, long-enduring friendship, you will act against me. I too will follow the other women of our family to an island prison, and Sejanus will be left master of the field and of your mind. But if I speak to you doubts which you have already entertained in your secret heart, then you will know that they are not vain and unworthy imaginings since they are shared by another. You will know that you are as much his victim as Nero and Drusus or as my poor chick Gaius Caligula may be. If you are not convinced, ask him for a report about the boy. I will wager that he will, with expressions of sorrow, present you with all the evidence he thinks necessary to destroy him. Has it not occurred to you that the chief beneficiary of my grandsons' pretended plots has been that man: Lucius Aelius Sejanus, and none other?"

  Night closed in about me like a blanket of wet mist. Sleep was denied me; through the dead hours questions, fear and hesitations afflicted me, like nails hammered into my brain. At dawn the chorus of sea-birds circling the cliffs mocked my red-eyed restlessness. Before we separated, Antonia had said: "In Rome men now talk of you as a monster, given over to nameless vices which everyone is yet ready to name. These stories are spread and believed. At a dinner-party the other day, someone remarked
that one day, when sacrificing, you took a fancy to the acolyte who carried the casket with the incense, and could hardly wait for the ceremony to end before you hurried the lad out of the temple and assaulted him; then you did the same for his brother, the sacred trumpeter . . . Who spreads such stories?"

  "The Roman people," I said, turning away to hide my feelings, "have ever been scurrilous."

  "I grant you that."

  "They are the kind of stories people invent about men in positions of authority, and which others love to spread. They told like tales of Augustus himself, though nobody who knew him believed them."

  "But people choose to believe them of you. Why is that?"

  For a moment I was tempted to tell her of the vision I had had on the mountainside, and of the promise which the divine boy had made to me. But that promise seemed already a cheat; I was no nearer the peace of mind he had offered me in exchange for my reputation. Besides, Antonia might think I was suffering from the delusions of old age, such as had afflicted Livia.

  "Perhaps simply because I have withdrawn here," I said.

  "That certainly is one cause for credulity. But there is another. When I first heard that story told, I made it my business to track it down. It was said to have come from Quintus Junius Blaesus, who is, as you know, Sejanus' uncle. Do you think such a man - for he is of very little merit and a known coward - would dare to invent such a story, or if he did, would he not be certain that his nephew would support him?"

  "But I cannot see that it is in Sejanus' interest to imperil my authority in this manner."

  Antonia sighed. "Tiberius," she said. "You are too reasonable. That has always been your fault. You have acquired a reputation for duplicity simply by telling the truth. Don't you see that you consider Sejanus truthful because he has consistently lied to you? As to your question: it is in his interest to have you thought unstable, capricious and cruel, near to madness. In this way anything vicious or unpopular can be laid at your door, while Sejanus acquires the reputation of being the only man capable of restraining your savagery.

  "There," she said, "I have proved my own confidence in your continuing virtue, for if I had spoken in this manner to a man who was really as they describe, I fear I should not see tomorrow."

  "If you have spoken truth, Antonia," I said, "I would wish that I might not."

  I yielded nothing to her suspicions in our conversation, and struggled to yield nothing in my sleepless hours. If Sejanus were false then the rock on which I had built my life — not the certainty of his loyalty, but rather my own faith in my knowledge of men — would crumble. For two days I could not bring myself to do anything either to confirm or disprove Antonia's allegations. I pretended that she was here simply on a friendly visit, but I also took the opportunity to watch Gaius Caligula closely. My scrutiny failed to reassure me. Apart from anything else, the boy was obviously unreliable; he would argue a point vehemently, and a few hours later - at the next meal for instance — assert the contrary, without seeming to be aware of any contradiction. So at lunch he quoted Homer, and remarked that there was "Nothing on earth finer than Homeric verse or a Homeric hero", and at dinner remarked that the best thing he knew about Plato was his decision to exclude Homer from The Republic because, as the boy put it, "Poets are liars who tell us life is noble".

  Perhaps it isn't, but it is better that young men should think it so, and Gaius was very young, only nineteen.

  Then he said that no one should enter marriage a virgin, only to state with quite unnecessary ardour a few hours later that if he discovered that his bride was not a virgin, he would smother her with the pillow of the marriage bed.

  I could not ignore Antonia's words, simply because the young man had an unpleasant character. (Another displeasing aspect of this was that, as a result of being educated at Rome with a number of Thracian princes, he had imbibed all sorts of notions about a royal state, and what was due to royalty, that I found offensive.) Accordingly, I wrote to Sejanus in guarded terms. Antonia had brought Gaius here on a visit, I said, and I would be grateful if Sejanus would send me, under seal, a copy of the lad's dossier. There were things about him which I found disturbing, I said.

  The courier returned directly. Sejanus wrote that he was alarmed to hear of Gaius' visit. I would see that he was not to be trusted. He was ill-disposed towards me and had often talked of his longing for my death. I should be on my guard against assassination.

  He named his witnesses. They were those young noblemen whom, according to Antonia, he had employed to spy on Gaius and, as she insisted, to provoke him to treasonable utterances. "These young men," Sejanus wrote, "were so shocked by the language of the young prince (as he chooses to style himself) that without any prompting on my part, they came voluntarily forward to denounce him."

  Once, campaigning in Illyria, I came on a village which had just suffered a small earthquake. Not many people had been killed, but the physical damage was still astonishing. I remember one old woman gazing in wonder at a crevasse which had appeared in the floor of her cottage. The walls still stood, the roof had remained in place, but there was this chasm, but two feet wide, and more than a spear-length deep; her hens and a cockerel had been swallowed up. Some of them had perhaps been smothered; others clucked and squawked in indignant puzzlement, which reproduced, as it were, exactly the expression on the old woman's face. I now shared the sensations of the old woman and her cockerel; life had lost its foundation.

  It came to me that I was isolated as never before. I was myself a prisoner, for I had put myself in Sejanus' power. There was not an officer on my staff whom he had not appointed. I could not be certain that my correspondence with provincial governors and military commanders was not subject to scrutiny by Sejanus' agents. Nor indeed could I have any confidence that I received all the letters addressed to me; it was possible that any which Sejanus deemed unsuitable for one reason or another were intercepted and destroyed. Almost everything I knew was what he had allowed me to know, and my knowledge of the world was his.

  He had nurtured my every suspicion and now I found myself, as a result of the revelation Antonia had forced upon me, redoubling suspicions. I realised I could be certain of nothing. A few months previously, for example, I had invited an old friend, Pomponius Flaccus, whom I had formerly made Governor of Syria, to spend a few weeks of his retirement as my guest. The invitation was declined: Flaccus was too ill to travel. Now I found myself wondering whether the invitation had been received, or the reply concocted. My suspicions might be unjust in this case; that made no difference to the fact that they were there.

  He had taught me to fear others. We had hardly had a single conversation in recent years in which he had not raised the problem of my security or offered me the names of those who were plotting my assassination. Now I learned to fear him in his turn.

  I had only one advantage. Sejanus had to believe that 1 still trusted him absolutely. It was necessary to confirm him in his confidence. I therefore wrote thanking him for warning me against Gaius and his friends, and for his continued efforts on my behalf. "The only thing," I said, "which enables me to bear the ingratitude and unreliability of men is the trust which I repose in you — the one man who has never let me down." In the same letter I confirmed that he would be my partner in the consulship the following year, and reminded him that I had been sparing in my assumption of that dignity: sharing consulships only with Germanicus and my son Drusus. The implication was, I hoped, clear; they had been my chosen, indeed designated, successors. I had no need to spell out the import of this honour to Sejanus. I held out hints of the tribunician power — "when the time is ripe". I was tempted to satisfy his desire to be granted this, in the hope that such a gift would swathe him in grateful security; but I hesitated, held back by a new fear. Sejanus had schemed to isolate and control me; might he not decide, if protected by this power and assured of this authority, that I had become redundant, and could be safely eliminated? So I promised more than I performed; let him still,
I said to myself, have something to hope for from my hand.

  It was necessary to reanimate support for my person among the senators. I therefore ordered that the trial of Lucius Arruntius, accused by Sejanus' agents of treason, should be abandoned. There was not, I wrote, sufficient evidence. Taking a risk, I had this letter conveyed to Rome by Sigmund and handed to the consul Memmius in person. Since Memmius was a cousin by marriage of Arruntius I trusted he would obey my instructions without consulting Sejanus. But I had days of alarm till I learned that he had done so, and even more till Sigmund returned safe to Capri.

  Let me confess too that I had hesitated before trusting even Sigmund with this message. I felt a warm and tender love for the young man, in the happiness of whose marriage I delighted, and of course I was sure that my confidence in his virtue was well founded. And yet at the same time, I could not be sure. I tormented myself by elaborating methods, cajolements and threats which Sejanus might have employed to suborn the boy. When Sigmund returned, I called him before me in private and heard his report, and embraced him with a warmth that sprang from relief as much as from affection.