When Messalina appeared on the threshold of the temple, Lepida ran toward her and covered her shoulders with the flap of her stola. Then they descended the little path swiftly, for the slave was waving his torch in the distance.
A man followed them on all fours, imitating the leaps of a hare and the grunts of a goat, and pretending to deliver thrusts of imaginary horns with his head. When they arrived at the bottom of the path, it was necessary for the slave to drive him away, threatening him with his staff. Then, still on all fours, he started imitating the braying of a donkey, interminably.
Next to Lepida and Messalina walked the two dancing girls and cithern-players. They were glad to take advantage of the protection of the slave, for the streets were unsafe. They chatted together, and Lepida sometimes addressed a benevolent word to them.
Messalina felt an immense pride in having become a woman. She lifted up her veils. She would have liked the dancers to see the blood she had on her knees. But by the latter’s conversation, she understood that they were chaste. They had come to Rome with a dance-teacher from Alexandria and were hired out cheaply. They had not participated in any way in the festival of Priapus. They had only seen it as an opportunity to earn the few sesterces promised by Chilon
Messalina was seized by scorn for them, and then anger. If she had dared, she would have ordered the slave to strike them.
In the distance, on the Tiber someone was singing an old Etruscan song. Rome was in repose. But as they passed over the Palatine bridge again, it seemed to Messalina that it was a new city that she had before her eyes. The colonnades of the temples were rows of phallic emblems. The Carmental Gate opened before her like a stone vagina. The statue of the bronze bull in the Forum Boarium reminded her of the animal sexual potency that she had just worshiped and to which she had offered her virginity. The obelisks standing outside certain patrician houses seemed to become animate and to extend toward the cupolas of monuments. She seemed to perceive, in the great display of stones, in the superimposition of porphyry, syenite and orichalcum that was the sleeping city, the voluptuous quivering of the mineral. The frozen splendor of the city was only apparent; the triumphal arches, the porticos, the sacred altars, the temples of the gods and the innumerable dwellings of humans were animated by the same life that warmed her adolescent blood.
And with the same spontaneous gesture, when they passed before the temple of patricienne Pudicitia, they veiled their faces while turning their heads, and extended their left hands with three closed fingers in a sign of aversion.
III. The Emperor Claudius
Claudius was one of those men who can find a precise median between an extreme dementia and an extreme sagacity, an extreme generosity and a boundless cruelty, a superior virtue and a sincere love of evil.
Since his childhood, all his relatives had judged him somewhat feeble-minded. His mother Antonia said that she had only brought into the world a sketch. His sister Livilla, when she heard it said that he might reign one day, deplored the destiny of the Romans, Augustus recommended that he was not to watch the circus games in the imperial box, because he would not have failed to attract attention by his ridiculous postures. He had been struck by all sorts of maladies, which had left him with many defects. His excessively frail legs could not carry his stout body, and he always gave the impression of tottering. His feet were abnormally long, to the extent that when he rendered justice and descended from his tribunal, it was his feet that certain advocates seized in order to retain him. He was precociously bald. His face sweated incessantly. He had large eyes and thick lips—at least, that is what can be distinguished on one of the rare busts of him that we have, which served for a long time as a counterweight in the clock of the church of the Escorial.
His notorious imbecility protected him from the fury of his nephew Caligula, but the latter spared him no insult. He threatened to deprive him of nourishment if he arrived late for supper, and forced him, by way of penance, to run around the triclinium. He was accustomed to fall asleep after meals, when people threw olives and dates at him, and as, when he was woken up, he rubbed his eyes, which were gummed up, people attached worn sandals to his hands in order that he would bear them to his face.6
He grew old in the midst of the disdain of his relatives, in the perpetual fear of being assassinated, struggling amid the greatest financial difficulties. But destiny had admirable adversities. In addition to Messalina, Claudius was to have for his wives and mistresses the most beautiful women in the Empire, and when he reached his fiftieth year he was, to his own great surprise and everyone else’s, proclaimed emperor.
It was the ninth day before the kalends of February, toward the seventh hour. Caligula, with his friends and freedmen, were going to the theater. He had a stomach ache and he was walking with a slight stoop, which was a bad sign. He stopped in a gallery of the palace where the children of noble Asiatic families were practicing mimes for the theater. He addressed a few familiar words to them; but, the leader of the troupe having said to him, doubtless for the sake of saying something, that it was cold, he felt cold and wanted to go back. As he turned round, the tribune Choerea, who had drawn a concealed sword from his garments, struck him a rather maladroit blow, which only cleaved his jaw. He fell to the ground. Cornelius Sabinus had everyone driven away and dispersed by a few centurions, accomplices of the murder. He came back to Caligula, who was screaming without getting up, and pierced his heart. Then other conspirators, in order to be more certain of his death, approached and struck him thirty times.
There was great disorder in the palace. The Germans of the Caligula’s guard came running and started striking at random those whom they supposed to be his murderers. The conspirators ran hither and yon, announcing the Emperor’s death and pursuing his partisans. A tribune of soldiers, Julius Lupus, had run to kill the Empress Caesonia. Grabbing her four-year-old daughter by one leg, he smashed her head against the wall.
Claudius was among those accompanying Caligula. He fled, but running was difficult for him. He traversed a garden, perceived a little belvedere, and hid therein. His natural pusillanimity must have got the upper hand. Either he was not thinking or, like an ostrich, he was only concerned with shutting his eyes. His body was hidden under the belvedere, but his immense feet stuck out into the garden, under the floating curtain that served as a door. A soldier named Gratus, who was passing by, perceived them, marveled, and pulled them out of curiosity. He recognized Claudius. The latter fell to his knees and begged him to spare his life, but the soldier, who was involved in the plot against Caligula, and had often heard Claudius mentioned with regard to the Emperor’s eventual succession, ignorant of what had been decided on that subject and finding himself unexpectedly in Claudius’ presence, also fell to his knees, with the result that they found themselves kneeling face to face, both in an imploring attitude.
The soldiers placed Claudius in a litter and transported him to the camp, where he spent the night in dread. But that dread developed the qualities of peasant cunning that he had. Summoned by the Senate, he refused to emerge from the enclosure of the entrenchments, where he found a certain security. He thought that his life was worth more than the treasures of the Empire and he promised fifty thousand sesterces to each of the assembled soldiers, for it is sometimes necessary to engage the future without hesitation in order to save the present. He was proclaimed Emperor and carried in triumph to the Capitol.
Then, at the moment when he had supreme power, he caused his modesty to burst forth as an ordinary man expands his pride. He refused the forename of Imperator. He affected not to decide anything without the advice of the Senate. He witnessed its procedures as a simple assessor. He stood up during spectacles when the magistrates arrived. He celebrated the betrothal of his daughter privately, without any fuss, in order that there should be no talk about him. But the display of a quality as unexpected as modesty rendered him extraordinarily popular.
In any case, modesty is easy in a man of fifty who is dominated
by other passions than pride and who has every facility to satisfy them. He had a passion for eating and drinking, and he did so without restraint, at all hours of the day, in accordance with the capacity of his forceful nature. He had a special service of boats that brought him rock lobsters from the costs of Africa, which he preferred to those of Minturno. Sea bass had to be fished in the Tiber and not in the open sea, because going upriver those fish gave their flesh a delicacy of which he was very fond. It was necessary that pheasants came from the frontiers of Phaeacia, goat-kids from Ambracia, tuna from Chalcedonia, moray eels from Tartissus, sturgeons from Rhodes, sausages from Gaul, salted pork from Sequania, and walnuts from the isle of Thassos. He often had salmis of nightingales prepared, but that was out of superstition, because he thought that the flesh of those birds developed the spirit of vigilance necessary to someone who renders justice. He lay down on his back after meals, blowing hard, and a slave had the mission of caressing his throat with a feather to relieve him.
He had, to an astonishing degree, a physical passion for women. He was married four times to wives renowned for a love of pleasure similar to his own. The sagacity of Messalina caused her to offer him new mistresses incessantly. She ordinarily chose beautiful but stupid ones. She preferred them to be slaves recently arrived from Alexandria, Tyre or Antioch, who only knew their native language. Claudius said himself that he did not want to talk to them, but only to touch them. Thus, Messalina kept away any foreign influence.
He loved brothels and often visited them. Although he did not conserve the one that Caligula had installed inside the imperial palace, it was only because of the insistence of his freedmen. He claimed to be certain that women had no soul, as men did, and added that that was what made their bodies so desirable. Having once gone to see a brothel-keeper of his acquaintance in order to see a woman from Armenia whom he visited sometimes, he did not find her in her cell. He sat down on a stool and waited all day and part of the night without showing any sign of impatience.
He had an excessive fear of everything. After a riot, Camillus having written him a threatening and insulting letter in which he exhorted him to renounce the Empire, he immediately summoned an assembly of citizens in order to deliberate as to whether he ought to obey. As soon as he learned about a plot he talked about abdicating. He considered dreams as presages. While he was exercising the functions of judge, a plaintiff came to take him to one side and explained to him that he had seen him in a dream struck by an assassin. Shortly thereafter he designated his adversary in the case as the assassin in the dream, and Claudius immediately condemned that adversary to death for having wanted him dead. He had all those who came to visit him searched rigorously, even the young women, in fear of a weapon hidden under their garments. Once, he ordered that a slave he had in his bed be whipped because she had squeezed his neck slightly during a caress, and he had had the idea momentarily that she wanted to strangle him.
He was very distracted. Several times, he invited to supper men he had recently condemned to death, and, not seeing them arrive at the appointed hour, sent messengers to them to discover the cause of their absence. As he was taking part in a serious debate in the Senate, he suddenly cried out loudly, following a thought of a gastronomic order: “I ask you, can one live without eating eels?”
He was literate. He cited poets and he wanted three letters added to the alphabet, but their utility was only realized during his reign. He judged his life and all things with a certain philosophy, and said that it was in his destiny to have immodest wives.
He loved Messalina for her immodesty and her beauty, and because she was able to subjugate him entirely to her will and thus render him to his veritable destiny, which was to be a slave rather than an Emperor.
IV. The Tiber Boatman and the River Monster
When Messalina was seventeen years old, she acquired a violent taste for the marvelous—for the world was full of prodigies. There was no power or death of an emperor that was not announced by signs. It was asserted that the tower of the lighthouse of Capri collapsed of its own accord in order to inform people that Tiberius would soon perish. That Emperor had had another confirmation of his death in gazing at his fireplace, where extinct and cold ashes had shone all night long, as if they were ablaze.
The story was still told in Rome of the ship’s captain Thamus, whose ship had been immobilized one night by the absence of wind not far from Sicily, some distance from an island he did not know. He was eating and drinking on the deck with a few passengers and is crew when he heard a voice calling him by his name: “Thamus, are you there?” He replied that he was, indeed, there. Then the voice said: “Announce this news to men: Pan, the great Pan, is dead!” And a noise of sobs and laments resounded. There was a gravity and a despair, and such a great mystery, in that voice that Thamus and his companions were struck by terror. A breeze having risen, in the morning they interrogated the wretched fishermen who lived on the island. They did not know the name of Thamus. Furthermore, the distance of the ship from the island had been too great for a human voice to cross it.
Thamus concluded that he had been summoned by a god. The story he told of the event flew from mouth to mouth and soon became the object of all conversations. The Emperor Tiberius was very impressed by it. He ordered an investigation in order to establish the veracity of the event. Two senators retraced Thamus’ voyage and scholars were consulted as to the meaning of the prodigy. They simply concluded that Pan, the son of Mercury and the nymph Penelope, was dead, and had wanted to communicate that death to the mariner Thamus in order for him to spread it throughout the world. The latter had done that, so all was well.
Those who did not believe in the personal existence of nymphs and gods smiled. There was an Egyptian miracle-worker who recommended navigators to pay the most extreme attention when the winds dropped and the stars appeared, because at the same hour, in the evenings to come, many other gods were about to die.
But it was around her, above all, that Messalina heard talk of supernatural events. Her mother Lepida was the most superstitious and the most credulous of women. When she went out into the garden in the morning and looked to the right and left, it was as if she were reading an open book. A broken branch, the slime that a snail had left on the sand of a pathway, everything she saw, had a meaning. In the company of Tryphene, an old Thessalian woman who had been her nurse and Messalina’s, she devoted herself to magical operations. All of them were performed with the objective of obtaining happiness, and above all wealth, for Messalla Barbatus was almost ruined.
The operation that she pursued with the greatest ardor was the birth of the mandrake. For that she took the egg of a black hen, which she pierced, and from which she let out a quantity of albumin equal in volume to a broad bean. She replaced that albumin with sperm and blocked the hole in the egg by allying a piece of virgin parchment to it. Then she buried the egg in a cemetery and covered the soil with the dust of human bones. It was necessary that that be done on the first day of the moon of March and, in the thirty days that followed, she came every day to pour the milk of a she-donkey and vinegar over it.
On the thirtieth day a little monster ought to have emerged from the egg, with a vaguely human appearance, which had to be nourished on lavender seeds, and the possession of which would assure the realization of all desires. Tryphene affirmed that in her youth, in Thessaly, she had succeeded in achieving the birth of many mandrakes; but Lepida, either because the egg was poorly sealed or because the bone dust came from people who had died too recently or too long ago, never succeeded in making a little monster emerge from the soil on the thirtieth day. Her imagination being vivid, she believed in it as much as if she had seen it, and Messalina shared her faith.
In any case, the stars, interrogated incessantly, announced a brilliant destiny. One day, when she went into the temple of Fortuna, Lepida had seen very clearly, in the half-light that reigned there, a statue of Apollo bend a knee before her, which was not a gesture habitual to gods,
and had to presage great things. One morning, when she picked up her mirror in order to do her hair, it sent back to her, instead of her own image, that of heaps of gold coins and jewels. She had summoned Messalina immediately so that she could observe the prodigy, but when she came running, the mirror had become normal again and she only saw her young daughter’s teeth, avid for pleasure, shining within it.
Even her father, Messalla Barbatus, a limited and precociously aged man, had the apparition of a familiar genius, which he claimed to be similar to that of Socrates. The familiar spirit only came to converse with him when he was alone and drunk on wine. Because of that he drank a great deal, and, for want of any other protection, he was at least able to see the cessation of his wife’s recriminations because of his intemperance.
Only Messalina was not visited by any genius. When she passed by, statues remained inanimate, and no supernatural voice called out her name when she was writhing in her bed. Prey to the initial fevers of desire. She even slept the heavy slumber that youth and health procure, and that slumber was never traversed by any prophetic dream. She suffered from that incapacity to perceive invisible things, which was perhaps nothing but a lack of imagination. She sensed aspirations of an elevated order. She thought about entering the college of Vestals, and in order to make her renounce that project it was necessary to remind her that she was not a virgin and that young women who were found to have deceived the pontiffs in that matter were condemned to be buried alive.
Sometimes she went, crowned with verbena, into the Temple of Venus Libitina, which was near the city wall in the quarter of monumental masons, near the place where people went to register deaths. She sometimes stayed there for an entire day, formulating vague prayers, in a disturbance that had no cause.
The Angel of Lust Page 3