Claudius the God (60 page)

Domitia Lepida said: ‘There’s no hope, my poor child; you can’t escape now. The only honourable thing left for you to do is to take his dagger and kill yourself.’

‘It’s not true,’ Messalina wept. ‘Claudius would never dare to get rid of me like this. It’s an invention of Narcissus’s. I ought to have killed Narcissus long ago. Vile, hateful Narcissus!’

The tramp of heavy feet was heard on the pavement outside. ‘Guard, halt! Order arms!’ The door flew open and the Colonel stood with folded arms in the entrance, outlined against the night sky. He did not say a word.

Messalina screamed at the sight of him and snatched the dagger from Euodus. She felt the edge and point timorously. Euodus sneered: ‘Do you want the Guards to wait there while I fetch. a grindstone and sharpen it up for you?’

Domitia Lepida said ‘Be brave, child. It won’t hurt if you drive it home quick.’

The Colonel slowly unfolded his arms: his right hand reached for the pommel of his sword. Messalina put the point of the dagger first to her throat and then to her breast. ‘Oh, I can’t, Mother! I’m afraid!’

The Colonel’s sword was out of its sheath. He took three long steps forward and ran her through.

XENOPHON had given me another dose of the ‘Olympian mixture’ just before I went to sleep, and the exalted feeling, which had been wearing off slightly during supper, revived in me. I woke up with a start - a careless slave had dropped a pile of dishes yawned loudly and apologized to the company for my bad tablemanners. ‘Granted, Caesar,’ they all cried. I thought how frightened they looked. Bad lives and bad consciences.

‘Has anyone been poisoning my drink while I was asleep?’ I bantered.

‘God forbid, Caesar,’ they protested.

‘Narcissus, what was the sense of that Colchester joke of Vettius Vileness’? Something about the Britons worshipping me as a God.’

Narcissus said: ‘It was not altogether a joke, Caesar. In fact, you may as well know that a temple at Colchester had been dedicated to the God Claudius Augustus. They have been worshipping you there since the early summer. But I’ve only just heard about it.’

‘So that’s why I feel so queer. I’ve been turning into a God! But how did it happen? I wrote to Ostorius, I remember, sanctioning the erection and dedication of a temple at Colchester to the God Augustus, in gratitude for the victory he had given Roman arms in the island of Britain.’

‘Then I suppose, Caesar, that Ostorius made the natural mistake of understanding “Augustus” as meaning yourself, particularly as you specified a victory given by Augustus to Roman arms in Britain. The God’ Augustus fixed the frontier at the Channel - and his name means nothing to the British, in comparison with your own. The natives speak of you there, I am informed, with the deepest religious awe. There are poems composed about your thunder and lightning and your magic mists and your black spirits and your humped monsters and your monsters with snakes, for noses. Politically speaking, Ostorius was-perfectly correct in dedicating the temple to you. But I must regret that it was done without your consent, and, I suppose, against your wishes.’

‘So I’m a God, now, am I?’ I repeated. ‘Herod Agrippa always said that I’d end as a God, and I told him that he was talking nonsense. I suppose that I can’t cancel the mistake, can I, Narcissus, do you think?’

‘It would create a very bad effect on the provincials, I should say,’ Narcissus answered.

‘Well, I don’t care, the way I feel now,’ I said. ‘I don’t care about anything. Suppose that I have that miserable woman brought here for trial at once. I feel completely free from petty mortal passions. I might even forgive her.’

‘She’s dead,’ Narcissus said in a low voice. ‘Dead, at your own orders.’

‘Fill my glass,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember giving the order, but it’s all the same to me now. I wonder what sort of God I am. Old Athenodorus used to explain to me the Stoic idea of God: God was a perfectly rounded whole, immune from accident or event. I always pictured God as an enormous pumpkin. Ha, ha, ha! If I eat any more of this goose and drink any more of this wine I’ll become pumpkinified too. So Messalina’s dead! A beautiful woman, my friends! But bad!’

‘Beautiful but bad, Caesar.’

‘Carry me up to bed, someone, and let me sleep the blessed sleep of the Gods. I’m a blessed God now, aren’t I?’

So they took me up to bed. ‘I stayed in bed until noon the next day, fast asleep all the time. The Senate met in my absence and passed a motion congratulating me on the suppression of the revolt, and another expunging Messalina’s name from the archives and removing it from every public inscription, and destroying all her statues. I rose in the afternoon and resumed my ordinary Imperial work. Everyone whom I met was extremely subdued and polite, and when I visited the Law Courts nobody, for the first time for years, attempted to bustle or browbeat me. I got through my cases in no time.

The next day I began to talk grandly about the conquest of Germany; and Narcissus, realizing that Xenophon’s medicine was having too violent an effect - disordering my wits instead of merely tiding me gently over the shock of Messalina’s death, as had been intended - told him to give me no more of it. Gradually the Olympian mood faded and I felt pathetically mortal again. The first morning after I was free from the effects of the drug I went down to breakfast, and asked: ‘Where’s my wife? Where’s the Lady Messalina?’ Messalina always breakfasted with me unless she had a ‘sick headache’.

‘She’s dead, Caesar,’ Euodus answered. ‘She died some days ago, by your orders.’

‘I didn’t know,’ I. said weakly. ‘I mean, I had forgotten.’ Then the shame and grief and horror of the whole business came welling back to my mind, and I broke down. Soon’ I was babbling foolishly of my dear, precious Messalina and reproaching myself as her murderer, and saying that it was all my fault, and making an almighty fool of myself. I eventually pulled myself together and called for my sedan. ‘The Gardens of Lucullus,’ I ordered. They took me there.

Seated on a garden bench under a cedar, looking across a smooth green lawn and down a wide grassy avenue of hornbeams, with nobody about except my German guards posted out of sight in the shrubbery, and with a long strip of paper on my knee and a pen in my hand, I began solemnly working out just where and how I stood. I have this paper by me as I now write and will copy out what I put down exactly as I find it. My statements fell, for some reason or other, into related groups of three, like the ‘tercets’ of the British Druids (their common metrical convention for verse of a moralistic or didactic sort)

I love liberty: I detest tyranny.
I have always been a patriotic Roman.
The Roman genius is Republican.

I am now, paradoxically, an Emperor.
As such I’ exercise monarchical power.
The Republic hasbeen suspended for three generations.

The Republic was torn by Civil Wars.
Augustus instituted this monarchical power.
It was an emergency measure only.

Augustus found that he could not resign his power.
In my mind I condemned Augustus as hypocritical.
I remained a convinced Republican.

Tiberius became Emperor. Against his inclination?
Afraid of some enemy seizing power?
Probably forced into it by his mother Livia.

In his reign I lived in retirement.
I considered him a bloodthirsty hypocrite.
I remained a convinced Republican.

Caligula suddenly appointed me Consul.
I only desired to be back at my books.
Caligula tried to rule like an Oriental monarch.

I was a patriotic Roman.
I should have attempted to kill Caligula.
Instead I saved my skin by playing the imbecile.

Cassius Chaerea was perhaps a patriotic Roman.
He broke his oath, he assassinated Caligula.
He attempted, at least, to restore the Republic.

The Republic was not then restored.
Instead there was a new Emperor appointed.
That Emperor was myself, Tiberius Claudius.

If I had refused I should have been killed.
If I had refused there would have been Civil War.
It was an emergency measure only.

I put Cassius Chaerea to death.
I found that I could not yet resign my power.
I became a second Augustus.

I worked hard and long, like Augustus,
I enlarged and strengthened the Empire, like Augustus,
I was an absolute monarch, like Augustus.

I am not a conscious hypocrite.
I flattered myself that I was acting for the best.
I planned to restore the Republic this very year.

Julia’s disgrace was Augustus’s punishment.
Would I had never wed, and childless died.
I feel just the same about Messalina.

I should have killed myself rather than rule:
I should never have allowed Herod Agrippa to persuade me.
With the best of intentions I have become a tyrant.

I was blind to. Messalina’s follies and villainies.
In my name she shed the blood of innocent men and women.
Ignorance is no justification for crime.

But am I the only guilty person?
Has not the whole nation equally sinned?
They made me Emperor and courted my favour.

And if I now carry out my honest intentions?
If I restore the Republic, what then?
Do I really suppose that Rome will be grateful?

‘You know how it is when one talks of liberty.
Everything seems beautifully simple.
One expects every gate to open and every wall to fall flat.’

The world is, perfectly content with me as Emperor,
All but the people who want to be Emperor themselves.
Nobody really wants the Republic back.

Asinius Pollio was right:
‘It will have to be much worse before it can be any better.
Decided: I shall not, after all, carry out my plan.

The frog-pool wanted a king.
Jove sent them Old King Log.
I have been as deaf and blind and wooden as a log.

The frog-pool wanted a king.
Let Jove now send them Young King Stork.
Caligula’s chief fault: his stork-reign was too brief.’

My chief fault: I have been far too benevolent.
I repaired the ruin my predecessors spread
I reconciled Rome and the world to monarchy again.

Rome is fated to bow to another Caesar.
Let him be mad, bloody, capricious, wasteful, lustful.
King Stork shall prove again the nature of kings.

By dulling the blade of tyranny fell into great error.
By whetting the same blade I might redeem that error.
Violent disorders call for violent remedies.

Yet I am, I must remember, Old King Log.
I shall float inertly in the stagnant pool.
Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.

I kept my resolution. I have kept it strictly ever since. I have allowed nothing to come between me and it. It was very painful at first. I had told Narcissus that I felt like the Spanish swordfighter whose shield-arm was suddenly lopped off in the arena; but the difference was that the Spaniard died of his wound, and I continue to live. You have perhaps heard maimed men complain, in damp, cold weather, of sensations of pain in the leg or arm they have lost? It can be a most precise pain too, described as a sharp pain running up the wrist from the thumb, or as a settled pain in the knee. I felt like this often. I used to worry what Messalina would think of some decision I had taken, or about what effect a long boring play in the theatre was having on her; if it thundered I would remember how frightened she was of thunder.

As you may have guessed, the most painful consideration of all was that my little Britannicus and Octavia were perhaps, after all, not my children. Octavia, I was convinced, was not my child. She did not resemble the Claudian side of the family in the slightest. I looked at her a hundred times before I suddenly realized who her father must have been the Commander of the Germans under Caligula. I remembered now that when, a year after the amnesty, he had disgraced himself and lost his position and finally sunk so low that he became a swordfighter, Messalina had pleaded for his life in the arena (he was disarmed and a net-man was standing over him with his trident raised) - pleaded for the wretch’s life against the protests of the entire audience, who were yelling and booing and turning their thumbs down. I let him off, because she said that it would be bad for her health if I refused: this was just before Octavia’s birth. However, a few months later he fought the same net-man and was killed at once.

Britannicus was a true Claudian and a noble little fellow, but the horrible thought came into my mind that he resembled my brother Germanicus far too closely. Could it be that Caligula was really his father? He had nothing of Caligula’s nature, but heredity often skips a generation. The notion haunted me.. I could not rid myself of it for a long time. I kept him out of my sight as much as possible without seeming to disown him. He and Octavia must have suffered much at this time. They had been greatly attached to their mother, so I had given instructions that they should not be told in detail about her crimes; they were merely to know that their mother was dead. But they soon found out that she had been executed by my orders, and naturally they felt a childish resentment of me. But I could not yet bring myself to talk to them about it.

I have explained that my freedmen formed a very close guild and that a man who offended one of them offended all, and that a man who was taken under the protection of one enjoyed the favour of all. In this they set a good example to the Senate, but the Senate did not follow it, being always torn into factions and only united in their common servility to me. And though now, three months after Messalina’s death, a rivalry started between my three chief ministers, Narcissus, Pallas, and Callistus, it had been agreed beforehand that the successful one would not use the strong position that he would win by pleasing me as a means of humiliating the other two. You would never guess what the rivalry was about. It was about choosing a fourth wife for me! ‘But,’ you will exclaim, ‘I thought you gave the Guards full permission to chop you in pieces with their swords if you ever married again?’ I did. But that was before I took my fateful decision, sitting there under the cedar in the Gardens of Lucullus. For now I had made up my mind, and once I do that, the thing is fixed with a nail. I set my freedmen a sort of guessing-game as to what my marital intentions were. It was a joke, for I had already chosen the lucky woman. I started them off one night-by remarking casually at supper: ‘I ought to do something better for little Octavia than put her in charge of freedwomen. I hanged all the maids who understood her ways, poor child. And I can’t expect my daughter Antonia to look after her: Antonia’s been very poorly ever since her own baby died.’