by Allan Massie
(I thought of the blond model, and dissented tacitly.)
"And yet," he said, fingering a fat purple fig, letting its juice trickle over his fingers which he then licked before dipping them in water and wiping them with a linen cloth, "you are the second supper guest I have had this week. Remarkable. The first was your stepfather
…"
"Your messenger hinted," I said, "that you had something to say concerning my wife. That is why I came."
"Tiberius, I pray you to allow a sick old man to approach the matter gradually. Display to me, dear boy, the patience with which you are so splendidly equipped, which you practise with such admirable skill in war. It is my affliction that what was once affectation has become so much a part of my nature that I cannot now approach a subject except circuitously. What I have to say would endanger me if I spoke to any man other than yourself. That I choose to ignore the danger is the measure of the respect in which I hold you. Remember that. I have watched you, and watched over you, all your life, and believe me, dear boy, I have your best interests at heart. Yet you despise me, don't you?"
I made no reply. He smiled.
"All my life," he said, "I have made it my business to know men. It is in that knowledge that all my skill lies, and I possess it because I have never neglected the gods' advice: 'Know thyself. You will know, for all Rome knows it, that I am helpless before the actor Bathyllus. My passion for him has made me an object of mockery. I cannot appear in the street now without enduring insult. What was once pleasant self-indulgence has become addiction. I need Bathyllus and his like — yes, and more, boys like that child you saw here tonight — as a drunkard needs wine. It is what my life has become. Once, I loved my wife, in a manner of speaking. But…" he extended his hands, the rings flashed in the light of the lamps, and he laughed, "… but they have all been substitutes. There is only one person I have truly loved, and
I made it my business to secure him what he most ardently desired: which was Rome. His accession to power, aided by my advice on innumerable occasions, has saved the state, and perhaps the world. I helped to make him a great man for the benefit of all and, in doing so, collaborated with time and the world in the destruction of the boy I loved. I adored Octavius and I still love the boy who survives behind the mask of Augustus. Yet in giving him the world, I lost him. In saving Rome, I taught him to place reasons of state above the claims of ordinary human love. I am proud of what I accomplished, and disgusted by its consequences. My disgust expresses itself in my own enslavement to lust, and it is for me small consolation that the enjoyment of embraces is less damaging to the psyche and the character than the enjoyment of power…
"Are you still listening, Tiberius?"
"Yes," I said, "I am listening to your words and to the sound of the gathering night."
"I believe you love Vipsania?" "I do."
"And she loves you?" "I believe so."
"And you are happy together."
"We have grown in love, and that love is at least a shield against the realities of the world."
"An insubstantial shield, I fear. Can love armour you against destiny?"
"As to destiny, I have moments of scepticism."
"All wise men are sceptics. I myself am even sceptical of scepticism…"
He sighed, and leant back on his cushions.
"Pass me that phial, dear boy. My medicine. And have patience. We approach the point. Forgive my procrastination. I had to be sure things were as I had thought them to be."
He was silent a long time. The sand slipped down the hourglass and moths fluttered round the lamps. A little dog crawled out from under the couch where it had been sleeping and jumped on to his lap. He fondled its ears.
"When Augustus was here the other night, I said to him: if you really loved your daughter, you would let her marry a pretty playboy like Iullus Antonius, and be happy. He replied that he could not let her marry a man who would diminish her. Do you believe he was honest?"
"I believe he would never let her marry Antonius, if not for that exact reason."
"No, you are quite right. He would not trust him as the guardian of Gaius and Lucius. That will be his first concern. But you see, dear boy, for Augustus, people have become objects to be shifted for his advantage which he equates with the advantage of the state. And the terrible thing is he is right to do so. I said to him the other night: everyone has to yield to your monstrous will. It has come to dominate Rome, all of us; it dominates you yourself, it has killed your capacity for imagination and for ordinary human warmth. You, I said, are as much prisoner of your vice as I am of mine. And then, Tiberius, I told him what would happen. This is by way of being a confession. We need more wine."
He picked up a little bell and tinkled it twice. A painted slave in a short tunic brought in a jug of wine and poured a cup for both of us. I drank mine in a gulp and he filled it again. Maecenas held the rim of his own cup to his lips and watched the boy leave us alone.
"I said to him: we end as prisoners of our own character. Shall I tell you what you'll do? You will compel Tiberius to divorce Vipsania
…"
When he spoke these words it was as if a fear which I had been denying stood erect before me with drawn sword.
"Yes, dear boy… after all, I said, Vipsania is no longer of any value since her father is dead. It doesn't matter that she and Tiberius have been happy together, for that happiness has become only an obstacle to your greater intent. You will throw it aside, and force him to marry Julia. He's a strong man, I said, and a man of honour — I do not say this to flatter you now, dear boy, but because I have always found it necessary to explain to Augustus how he makes his will appear reasonable. He will do the right thing by your grandsons, I said… As I spoke I could see the clouds slip away from him. He gave me the loving smile I remember from our youth, which he would accord me whenever I resolved a difficulty. For a moment it was as if our old intimacy had been rekindled. I was happy. But later, when he had gone, I was sad to think that this revival of intimacy had been made possible only by my ability to show him what he wanted to do, though he had not yet brought himself to the point of admitting it…"
"You know my stepfather very well," I said.
"I think I know him even better than Livia does. You see, unlike her, I remember the boy with whom I laughed and loved before the proscriptions, before he combined with Mark Antony and that imbecile Lepidus to mark down the names of those who must be killed because they had become inconvenient. When once a man has done that, Tiberius, he can excuse himself anything."
"Why do you tell me this? Is it to warn me, so that I can resist?"
"Tiberius, Tiberius, I had thought better of you." He closed his eyes, and, when he spoke again, his voice seemed to me to come from a great distance, across windy deserts of experience. "I had thought better of you. Surely you understand the world Augustus has made, with my help and Agrippa's? The time for effective resistance is over. An act of resistance now is no more than a piece of petulance, like telling the wind to cease blowing."
"I could kill myself rather than submit…"
"Tiberius, remember: 'Know thyself is the command of the gods. Your nature is to serve. You will obey. And you will praise yourself for your obedience."
"Never…"
"Then let us say you will console yourself with the thought that you obey in the public interest. And let me add something else: when Augustus unfolds his plan to you, he will assure you that he has consulted me, and that my advice has ever proved to be for the public good. Your submission will then become an act of virtue, just as defiance would be understood as the expression of your selfish and individual will. How, Tiberius, can you put your little marriage above the majesty of the interest of Rome? Together," he sniffed his wine, "we restored the Republic and created a despotism, a world fit for power, ruled by power, a world in which gentle values have become obsolete, a world where one commands and all others serve, a vision of the future in which a hard frost grips me
n's hearts, and generous sentiments are annulled by the habit of fearful subjection…"
I left him and entered into black night, choking with smoke, from which, it sometimes seems, I have never emerged. As I descended the slippery steps of his palace, I was accosted by a whore. I took her, in anger, like a goat, against a wall. I paid her ten times the fee she demanded.
"You must raise your price," I said to her, "for, since all value is destroyed, no measure of worth can survive and you may ask what you choose."
"Oh thank you, sir, I wish all my clients were gentlemen like yourself."
I did not leave my chamber for two days, but lay in sullen torpor, drowning myself in wine. When I received a message summoning me to the Princeps, I sent word that I was sick, and turned my face to the wall.
On the third day a letter came from my wife. I have it here now. It has never been parted from me, all these years…
Husband,
It is with a heavy heart that I write that word for the last time. Henceforth it must remain locked up in my grieving heart. I do not blame you, for I understand that you too are a victim, and that you too will suffer. I believe this because I am confident of the virtue of your love for me. And I do not even reproach you, my dear Tiberius, for having lacked the courage to break the news to me yourself. Why, I can imagine you protesting, should I be compelled to do the deed when it is not of my desiring? It is the certainty that you do not desire it which makes it possible for me to bear my sorrow.
My own life is, I now feel, well nigh ended, and I exist only for our son. Yet I cannot quite convince myself that even this is true, for it has been hinted that — of course — I shall be compensated with a new and respectable marriage. I do not want it, but since I do not want what is about to befall me either, what has indeed befallen me, I have no doubt I shall submit. I was brought up to do my duty, and this new departure will be presented to me as duty.
I hesitate to write more, lest my feelings betray me.
I would wish also to warn you. I shall not do so, because my judgment may be mistaken, because I am certain you will share my doubts, and because it would be both improper and unwise to say what I think. I will merely add that my father once remarked that to make Julia happy was work for a god, not a man.
You will, I know, continue to care lovingly for our son, though you will naturally be aware also of the new, and very great, responsibilities you have assumed…
Believe me, my dear Tiberius, ever your loving and devoted — but I no longer know how to sign myself…
I do not know why I have kept this letter, for I knew it by heart almost from the first. I turn it over in my mind, in self-laceration and for reassurance. It is both a dagger and a talisman.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this unholy episode was that I never discussed it with Augustus. He behaved to me in the weeks that followed with benevolence, respect and that evasiveness of which he was the supreme master. There were countless moments when it seemed as if he was about to broach the subject, others when it appeared that I had been granted an opening which would allow me to do so myself; yet nothing was said between us, till the eve of my wedding to Julia when he embraced me — almost without the involuntary shrinking which I had always sensed when he took me in his arms — and assured me of his love and confidence, assurance sweetened by his gift of a villa and estate at Ravello.
"At last," he said, "I can face the future without Agrippa."
But I had raged to my mother, stormed and pleaded. I had howled at the malignity of fortune which deprived me of what I chiefly valued. I had protested that if deprived of Vipsania I would be rendered unfit to prosecute my career. I swore that Livia's connivance in this brutality would destroy my love and respect for her herself. And, in the privacy of my mother's chamber, I cursed my stepfather who had made the world in which I was compelled to live.
She accused me of behaving like a spoiled child; and I was indeed spoiled, I was damaged.
She, my mother, had damaged me. I saw her at that moment, a lean woman with fading hair and a face that grew more chiselled every year, as if preparing itself to be preserved only in stone, and I saw her as one who had failed me, her son, by her subservience to her husband, by the subordination of her duty to me to his devouring ambition, and her ambition for him. Resentment filled me, tasting of bile. Even as I let bitterness fill my mouth, I knew my reaction was absurd. I knew that every man carries his own destiny with him, and that to blame my mother for my present predicament was as ridiculous as to blame winter for bringing snow to the mountains. I knew too that for a man of my age, for one who had achieved what I had, who had commanded armies and consigned men to death, to experience such resentment was contemptible. Indeed my resentment was as contemptible as my submission; yet I could not resist it.
I soon learned also not to despise myself for submitting. What else could I have done? I had already seen lives wither when men set themselves against Augustus. I have since seen how no considerations of affection, loyalty or decency can deflect him from a course which he has judged expedient or necessary. All men, yes, and all women too, exist for him ultimately as malleable objects: creatures whose lives may be deformed or cut off at his command. I told myself that if I had resisted, if I had opposed my will to his, it would have profited me nothing: I would have been cast into exile, Vipsania would still have been denied me, and my son Drusus' future would have been darkened. My acquiescence was my only means of protecting him.
I told myself this, and knew it to be true; yet still despised my weakness. To appease my troubled mind I transferred my self-contempt to a pervasive scorn for the degeneracy of our times, when, with the loss of our antique Republican virtue, even the nobility of Rome have become the despot's playthings. "O generation fit for slavery," I growled; and those who heard me, and shrank from my harsh speech, did not understand that I included myself among the slaves.
9
So we were married. The night before the wedding I sat late over the wine with my friend Gnaeus Piso, a man who has ever been ready to match me bottle for bottle. Piso, as a member of a family almost as distinguished as my own, would later be my colleague in the consulship. We shared more than a taste for good liquor, for, like me, he was a stern critic of the vices of our age, and yearned for the virtue of the free state. A realist however, he recognised that the great days were departed. He had — and indeed, I trust, still has — a talent for making the tart and pertinent observation which had pleased me from the first days of our acquaintance.
"Well, Tiberius," he said that night, "Heracles himself might shrink from the task thrust upon you."
"Heracles' own matrimonial history was unhappy."
"Most people would call you a lucky man, of course. She's not only the Princeps' daughter, but also the most beautiful and seductive woman in Rome."
"She was faithful, I think, to Agrippa."
Piso laughed.
"There's faithfulness and then there's fidelity," he said.
"What do you mean? It's unlike you to play with words."
"When you are faced with women like Julia, what else is there to do with them?"
"I don't understand you, and I think I am happy not to."
"Tiberius, we both know Julia. We have both known Julia. Don't forget that I was once on Marcellus' staff… and, old friend, when that pretty boy was alive, what were you to Julia? Can you control her now?"
I pushed the wine-flask in his direction.
"What would you advise?"
"I would advise you not to be in your present position. Seeing as you are, and there's no help for it, then there are only two things to be done. First, you must insist that she accompanies you to the armies, so that she is at least under your eye. Second, keep her in pig. A flighty woman can be anchored only in that way."
I swallowed my wine, and made a face.
"You're forgetting," I said, "that my mother was in just that condition when the Princeps seduced her."
"The situations," I continued, after a pause during which silence and uncertainty filled the room, "are not, of course, analogous. If my stepfather was not yet Princeps and Augustus, he was nevertheless triumvir. There is no one today with that glamour of power…"
"Yes, and Livia was already a woman celebrated for her virtue. As you say, the situations are not analogous…"
I had not seen Julia for more than two years, and we had held no communication concerning the decision made for our future. I had therefore no idea whether she approved the marriage. In recent years she had shown no sign of the desire she had felt for me when we were young, and I could not believe that I would have been her choice. Iullus Antonius was, of course, a liar, but the confidence with which he had spoken of Julia's feeling for him had been convincing. On the other hand, Julia had always disliked Vipsania and would be pleased to have triumphed over her. These reflections made me nervous, and my evening with Piso had left me ill at ease. I steadied myself with a jug of wine before the ceremony, and then, to ward off criticism from Livia, and perhaps Julia herself — though hers would rather take the form of mockery — I sweetened my breath with a handful of violet pastilles.
My mother summoned me to her apartments. I found her alone, which pleased me, for I had feared that my stepfather would be there too. Then I realised that he would be unwilling to confront me till the marriage had been celebrated: in case I dug my heels in. (He has often remarked on my resemblance to a mule: a poor joke in present circumstances, I thought.)
Livia kissed me on the forehead.
"This is a solemn moment for you, my son," she said.
"Mother, there's no need for dissimulation when we are alone. I take it we are alone — no spies concealed in waiting, no informers behind the screens?"
She snapped her fingers.
"There's no need to take that tone, Tiberius. I can see you are still displeased. Well, sulk if you must but I'm glad that you have the sense to go through with it. I was going to commend you on your sense of duty. Here, come and sit beside me and listen to what I have to say. What have you been eating? There's a nasty smell on your breath."
