by Allan Massie
Perplexed, dismayed, deceived, my mind in the months after Drusus' death entered into turmoil. His loss hit me harder than I could have imagined; indeed, I had never imagined it. I descended into a narrow cleft in the rocks, and, no matter where I turned my gaze, found nothing to comfort, only the dark-grey and slimy rock. In those nights I came to know the grief of Hecuba, carried as a slave to Greece, who saw her son dead and her daughter a sacrifice, and then, driven out of her senses, barked like a dog on the deserted beach, as the winds howled. The same winds howled around me.
I had never had much faith in humanity. Now I lost those shreds which remained. There was a case came before the Senate, in which a certain Vibius Serenus charged his father of the same name with treason. The elder Serenus had been exiled some eight years previously, on what charge I now forget. Now he was brought back and stood before the Senate, in chains, shabby and exhausted by illness, fear or neglect. His son, a brisk and elegant young man, accused him of plots against my life. Subversive agents, he explained, had been sent to foment a rebellion in Gaul; they had been financed by the ex-praetor Marcus Caecilius Cornutus. Substance was given to the charge by the suicide of Cornutus, but the elder Serenus denied everything. He shook his manacles in his son's face, and challenged him to produce his accomplices. "Surely," he said, "an old man like myself cannot be thought to have plotted the emperor's murder with the help of a single confederate, and him a man so weak-spirited as to kill himself because of a lying charge?" His son smiled, and named Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus and Lucius Seius Tubero, friends of mine, whose loyalty I had always considered certain. I said that the accusation was absurd. The elder Serenus' slaves were then tortured, and revealed nothing. Sejanus supervised their examination, and assured me there was no case to answer. Serenus the younger then panicked; he feared the Tarpeian Rock, the reward of attempted parricide, and fled from Rome. I had him fetched back from Ravenna. "Continue your prosecution," I said, intending that his ignominy should be exposed to all. Certain senators, however, misinterpreted my intention; they thought I was certain of the father's guilt, and, to oblige me — yes, such was their notion of what would oblige me! — demanded that the father should suffer the ancient punishment for treason, and be flogged to death. I declined to allow this motion to be put to the vote, and was ready to dismiss the charge and punish the son. At this point Sejanus came to me and said that though the slaves had revealed nothing to prove their master guilty of this treason, nevertheless there was cause to believe that the accusation was not altogether unfounded. I was perplexed, divided between suspicion of the father and loathing for the son's impious zeal. Both were consigned to exile.
Scarcely a week passed without some charge being brought against some man, and though I struggled to preserve my indifference, my disgust intensified. The spectacle of greed, fear, resentment and vindictiveness, that was offered again and again to my eyes, was altogether repellent.
Nor was I appeased by the arrival of a delegation from Further Spain requesting to be permitted to build a shrine to me and to my mother. I refused angrily, dismayed by this new evidence of servility: "Let me assure you," I said, "that I am human and mortal, performing merely human tasks and content to occupy the first place among men to which the Senate has chosen to appoint me. Future generations will do me justice if they judge me worthy of my ancestors, careful of your interests, steadfast in danger, and fearless of animosities incurred in the public service…"
Sejanus reported, "You shouldn't have spoken like that. It doesn't have the effect you hope for. When you reject veneration, people assume that you are either insincere or genuinely unworthy of it."
I considered carefully the character of Agrippina's sons. Despite his effeminacy, there was more true virtue, I thought, in Nero than in his brothers, both of whom showed a relish for cruelty that disgusted and frightened me. I resolved therefore to cultivate him. I was now in my middle sixties and, though my health was good, apart from painful rheumatism, knew that I could not count on many years. My own grandson Tiberius Gemellus was still a child, and I was anyway conscious of the promise I had made first to Augustus concerning Germanicus, then to the Senate concerning his children. Nero pleased me by his wit and intelligence; also by an innate melancholy, which suggested to me that he had no exaggerated hopes of his fellow men.
"My father was everything that I am not," he said to me, "and I have always been unhappily conscious that men consider him a hero."
"Why unhappily?"
"Because…" he pushed back a curl that had fallen damply over his face, "… I don't really know why. I only know that this knowledge makes me feel ill at ease."
I understood that. If at that moment I had asked him, "Why do you go with men?" perhaps everything would have been different. Perhaps a rare moment of honesty would have diverted us into another path. But I dared not ask that question, in case the answer destroyed such intimacy as we enjoyed. There is a limit, I told myself, to the frankness proper between an old man and a youth. Instead, I shied away and talked instead of the duties and burdens of power.
"Burdens," I said, "which I hope you will yourself assume."
"You can't think me suitable…?" He blushed. "For one thing I am no soldier and could never be one."
"I believe you to be honest," I said, "and, in the fashion of your generation, honourable."
He squirmed, perhaps with embarrassment.
"It pains me," I said, "that your mother so distrusts me."
He blushed again. It was clear that he would wish to defend Agrippina but, aware of the injustice of her attitude towards me, could summon up no argument.
"To demonstrate to her and to the world that I have confidence in you," I said, "I am proposing that you should marry my grand-daughter Livia Julia, the only sister of Tiberius Gemellus. I believe that you are the only person I can trust to do right by the boy, and I believe that marriage to his sister is not only the best way of displaying my regard for you, but will itself be of benefit to you."
He was taken aback, protested that he was unfit for such an honour. For a moment I savoured his terror, then hastened to reassure him. He had been the victim, I said, of evil rumours; it was time to silence them. My grand-daughter was a sweet girl, whom I was sure he would come to love. I watched his mouth tremble; then, with an effort, he smiled. He looked like my Julia caught out in a lie. I kissed him. "We understand each other," I said.
The proposal of this marriage took Agrippina aback. She could not oppose it; yet she feared that it represented in some way which she could not fathom a plot aimed at her. She was correct. It was my intention to lure Nero from her malign influence.
In the same week that the marriage between Nero and Livia Julia was celebrated, my mother fell ill, and Sejanus requested my permission to divorce his wife Apicata. "We no longer find each other agreeable," was all he said. "That is sufficient explanation."
I called to see my mother. She looked at me as if she did not know me, and refused to speak. I besought her not to die in a rage, and performed a sacrifice in her bedchamber in order that the gods might restore her health and reason. But even as I moved my hands over the altar I knew that I wished her dead. I had in fact wished that for years though it was only now when death was imminent that I found myself able to confess it even to my own heart.
It was raining as I left her house for the last time, and stood looking down into the bustle of the Forum. It rained as I had wept in childhood whenever she seemed to withdraw her love from me. Nothing lasts, except memory with its shadowy and ghostly truths.
Agrippina raged. She accused me of stealing her son, of thwarting her in every endeavour. The tip of her long nose trembled. That nose, which destroyed her pretensions to beauty, and which was not even imperious, invaded my imagination. I saw it quivering over my every act.
"Is it my fault," I answered her, "that you are not queen?"
"Queen?" she replied, failing to understand that I was quoting Sophocles. "We have no queens
in Rome."
"Except my dear brother Nero," said Drusus.
"That's no way to speak. He will outgrow his affectations. There is much good in the boy. Come, Agrippina, we have both suffered much. There's no cause for us to be enemies. Let us at least have a truce. Come to dinner with me tomorrow."
She consented; but at the table, when I passed her an apple, she held it in her hand a moment, squinting at it, then passed it back to me.
"You eat it," she said. "I would like to see you eat it. You chose it so carefully."
"I selected it as the best apple," I replied, and bit into the fruit.
"Did you understand the significance?" I asked Sejanus.
"Of course I did. She as good as accused you of attempting to poison her. What's more, when she tells the story, I'll bet she doesn't mention that you actually ate the apple. I've told you before, I'll tell you again: that woman spares no effort to slander you. Of course nobody really believes the specific accusations, but, as the proverb has it, 'Much water weareth away stone…' The sum of her accusations has an effect."
I turned away in misery, back to my desk and the never-ending series of decisions to be made, reports to be considered, questions to be debated, problems to be confronted.
"Work," I found myself muttering too often, "is the surest anodyne."
But when I retired to bed, and sleep did not come, as so many nights it denied itself to me, my thoughts turned back to my villa and gardens in Rhodes. It seemed to me, or so I persuaded myself, that I had come closer to content, and to an understanding of the purpose of life, in my retirement there, than at any time since I had been thrust back into the maelstrom of action. I could not of course retire again; if Drusus had not died, it might have been possible, as I had intended, to associate him with myself in the government of the empire, as Augustus had done with me in his last years; and then, I promised myself, I would be able to lean on my son, depart from Rome confident of his virtue, and, in retirement, exercise no more than a general power of supervision. That dream had been as seductive as a ripe peach. Now it had withered.
I turned to wine; to no avail. It brought neither joy nor comfort.
And yet I heard the sea lapping against the rocks, smelled its tangy odour mingled with the scent of roses, myrtle and honeysuckle. And I remembered a story which a Greek scholar had once told me.
He was a freedman called Philip, in Julia's household, and he had married, with his mistress's blessing, a free-born Greek girl from the island of Capri, where Augustus had had a villa. He told me of his wife's uncle, an unmarried man against whom, nevertheless, no accusation of vice had ever been brought. He was revered in the family for his wisdom and calm philosophy, though my informant was for long ignorant of any justification for the high regard in which the old man was held.
"Indeed it seemed strange to me," he said, "for Xenophon, as he was called, seemed in human relations the most cantankerous of fellows. He rarely spoke at family gatherings, and when he did it was generally to express his disapproval of the younger generation. I can't now recall what incident encouraged him to take an interest in me. Perhaps there was no incident. Perhaps he merely detected in me some communion of feeling. I can't say. At any rate it so happened that I developed the habit of sitting with the old man in the afternoons which he spent on a terrace under a vine-wreathed arbour while the rest of the household took its siesta. We would drink the yellow wine from the family's own vineyard, sharp acidulous stuff, nevertheless with a piquant and memorable flavour to which I had become happily accustomed. Forgive me these details, which I offer you because they bring back to me so vividly the memory of these afternoons when I was aware of an utter stillness, as of death; yet simultaneously of the sound of the waves below and of lizards scurrying over the ancient wall that surrounded the terrace. Xenophon would eat sea-urchins, which he put whole into his mouth and chewed noisily with much spitting. He was generally silent and would spend hours on end gazing out to sea. I noticed at last that his eyes were fixed on some rocks which thrust themselves out of the water a little further from land than a man could swim with comfort.
'"Is there something about these rocks?' I asked one afternoon, when his gaze had been more than usually fixed.
"'Do these fools in there ever speculate before you on the reasons why I have never married?' he replied. "I hesitated.
"'You're a sensible fellow,' he said. 'Doesn't it disgust you to copulate with human beings?'
"I adored my wife, and if she had not disliked sex in the afternoon would happily have been in her bed.
"'But then, why should you? You're like the rest. You don't know anything better.'
"And he popped another sea-urchin into his mouth, and spat vigorously.
'"You do then?' I said.
"He paid no attention to the impudence in my tone, but smiled. I have never seen such a smile. It had such an assurance of bliss.
"'When I was a young man — oh younger than you,' he said, 'I learned better. I was vouchsafed an experience which I can only call miraculous, and which altered my whole life. You ask me why I gaze at these rocks. It is for the same reason that I keep a rowing-boat tied up in the cove below. I was betrothed then to a cousin. One afternoon as I sat in this same place the air was filled with music such as I had never heard. It was a music both melancholy and uncanny, yet with an undercurrent of joy, like the movement of deep water. I left the terrace and made for my boat and steered towards the sound. And so I came to these rocks where the music seemed close, yet no louder than it had been at a distance. Like one in a trance, I mounted the rock to the girl who reclined there making the music though she had no instrument and her lips were still. It seemed to me that she was the music. She took me in her arms and the music hummed around us, and I knew delight beyond the limits of imagination. I became one with her, achieving an ethereal perfection of unity compared to which any human coupling is an obscene shadowy representation of reality. I say girl, but of course she was no human thing, but a spirit, a nymph, the plenitude of what may be desired. We made love while the sun sank in the west, and through the darkness and till it rose in a pink-dappled sky behind the mountains of Campania. And the music never left us. Then she closed my eyes with a kiss, and murmured to me that she was of my life forever, and that we would come together again. And I woke, with the sun beating on the rock, and no sound but the sea, and found myself alone. These sea-urchins have the taste of her, for she belonged to the sea, and returned to it, and will one day call me thence. So do you wonder, young man, that I look on your couplings with the same scorn you might feel for cocks mounting fowls in the yard?'" Philip paused.
"It was a Siren he had met and loved. There is no other conclusion possible."
"You believed him?" I asked.
"For a long time I didn't. But I have never forgotten his words."
"What song did the Siren sing him?" "A song that is beyond imitation. Evidently." "For a long time you didn't believe him?" "That is right."
"And then? What is the end of the story?"
"Oh, it has no end. Don't you know that, Emperor? No story ever has an end. All narratives are circular. They couldn't be otherwise. But I can tell you another stage in the journey. One day old Xenophon was sitting on the terrace as usual, while the other members of the family slept in the afternoon. There had been a week of scirocco, but the skies had cleared and the air was gentle. They left him with his flask of wine and a basket of sea-urchins. Nobody ever saw him again. When they woke, he had vanished."
"And his boat? That had vanished too?"
"Of course. There was consternation. It was assumed that for some reason nobody could fathom he had descended the cliff, embarked in his little boat, and sailed into… what? The void, perhaps?"
"But you don't believe that?"
Philip smiled. "I wasn't there at the time. I have never spoken to anyone except you, Emperor, about these matters. This is the first time I have repeated Xenophon's story…"
"So t
here are Sirens… the calm under the winds…"
"It may have been a delusion, Emperor. He was a very old man, and perhaps not right in his wits."
7
Some three weeks after this conversation I occupied the imperial box at the Games. I had gone reluctantly, as usual. I believe no man of taste and sensibility can take pleasure in gladiatorial contests. Moreover, thirty years' experience of warfare has schooled me to view this contrived carnage with disgust. I have seen too much courage and suffering and terror to take any pleasure in their compulsory exhibition by wretches condemned to fight for the amusement of the mob. It is even more disgusting to see educated men of good birth — and even women — salivating gleefully at these shows. Few things fortified my respect for Sejanus more than the contempt he felt for those who delighted in these contests.
Duty, however, compelled me on occasions to attend. And on this day almost the whole family was present, from the unfortunate slobbering Claudius, my poor brother Drusus' younger son, whose wayward wits and physical disabilities might excuse the morbid pleasure he took in the battles in the arena, to Agrippina and her brood. As usual Agrippina maintained a quasi-regal air of superiority; she scarcely deigned to acknowledge the cheers with which she was greeted; yet by the merest twitch of her lips and inclination of her head conveyed the sense of her immeasurable pride. Instead of offending the populace, her hauteur encouraged their enthusiasm. It was strange. I have always known that the mob resented what they took to be my own awareness of my superiority; yet their adoration of Agrippina swelled in proportion to the distance she set between herself and them.
