Ovid (Marcus Corvinus Book 1)

by David Wishart

  Suillius Rufus gets a very bad press in the historians. He was banished under Tiberius, recalled by Caligula and became a notorious informer for Claudius's wife Messalina. On the other hand, he and Perilla (so far as I know) were happily married with children. Rufus could not possibly have been, as I imply, the 'false friend' who attempted to deprive Ovid's wife of his estate and whom he calls Ibis in his poems.

  Nonius Asprenas I have not libelled, in character at least. The charge against him of appropriating 'legacies' after the Varian Disaster is made by the historian Paterculus, who served in Germany shortly afterwards and would have talked to men who knew him. Paterculus also mentions, when describing the massacre, the 'base behaviour of the camp commander Ceionius, who advised giving up and preferred a criminal's death by execution to that of a soldier in battle', and contrasts it with the conduct of the noble Eggius.

  Lastly, I feel slightly guilty about the picture I have given of the palace bureaucracy. This certainly reflects the reign of Claudius (AD41-54) far more than that of Tiberius.