Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina

by Robert Graves

  ‘Even to say as much as that would be a violation of my oath, Caesar.’

  But I used an old trick on him that I had read about in my historical studies: once, when a certain Phoenician judge visiting a village on his assizes wished to find out where a man had hidden a gold cup that he had stolen, he told the man that he did not believe him capable of theft and would discharge him. ‘Come, sir, let us go for a friendly walk instead and you will perhaps show me your interesting village.’ The man guided him down every street but one. The judge found by inquiry that one of the houses in this street was occupied by the man’s sweetheart; and the cup was discovered hidden in the thatch of her roof. So in the same way I said: ‘Very well, I shall not press you further.’ I then turned to another member of the tribe who also seemed, by his sullen, uncomfortable looks, to be in the secret, and asked conversationally: ‘Tell me: in what towns or villages in your territory are these temples raised to your German Hercules?’ It was probable that the Eagles had been dedicated to this God. He gave me a list of seven names, which I noted down. ‘Is that all?’ I asked.

  ‘I cannot recall any more,’ he answered.

  I appealed to the Great Chaucians. ‘Surely there must be more than seven temples in so important a territory as Lesser Chaucia – between the great rivers of Weser and Elbe?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Caesar,’ they replied. ‘He has not mentioned the famous temple at Bremen on the eastern bank of the Weser.’

  That is how I was able to write to Gabinius: ‘You will, I think, find the Eagle somewhere hidden in the temple of the German Hercules at Bremen on the eastern bank of the Weser. Don’t spend too much time at first in punishing the Istaevonians: march in close formation straight through their territory and that of the Ansibarians, rescue the Eagle and do the burning, killing, and pillaging on your return.’

  Before I forget it, there is another story that I want to tell about a stolen gold cup, and it may as well go in here as anywhere. Once I invited a number of provincial knights to supper – and would you believe it, one of the rogues, a Marseilles man, went off with the gold wine-cup that had been put before him. I didn’t say a word to him, but invited him to supper again the next day, and this time gave him only a stone cup. This apparently frightened him, for the next morning the gold cup was returned with a fulsomely apologetic note explaining that he had taken the liberty of borrowing the cup for two days in order to get the engravings on it, which he much admired, copied by a goldsmith: he wished to perpetuate the memory of the enormous honour that I had done him, by drinking from a similarly chased gold cup every day for the rest of his life. In answer I sent him the stone cup, asking, in exchange, for the reproduction of the gold one as a memento of the charming incident.

  I arranged a date in May for both Galba’s and Gabinius’s expeditions to start, increased their forces by levies in France and Italy to six regiments apiece – leaving two regiments to hold the Upper Rhine, and two to hold the Lower – allowed them each a maximum of 2,000 casualties, and gave them until July the First to conclude their operations and be on the way home. Galba’s objective was a line of three Chattian towns originally built when the country was under Roman rule – Nuaesium, Gravionarium, and Melocavus – which lie parallel with the Rhine about 100 miles inland from Mainz.

  I shall content myself by recording that both campaigns were a complete success. Galba burned 150 stockaded villages, destroyed thousands of acres of crops, killed great numbers of Germans, armed and unarmed, and had sacked the three towns indicated by the middle of June. He took about 2,000 prisoners of both sexes, including men and women of rank to hold as hostages for the Chattians’ good behaviour. He lost 1,200 men, killed or disabled, of whom 400 were Romans. Gabinius had the harder task and accomplished it with the loss of only 800 men. He took a last-minute suggestion of mine, which was not to make straight for Bremen but to invade the territory of the Angrivarians, who live to the south of the Lesser Chaucians; and from there to send a flying column of cavalry against Bremen, in the hope of capturing the town before the Chaucians thought it worth while to remove the Eagle to some safer repository. It all worked out exactly to plan. Gabinius’s cavalry, which he commanded personally, found the Eagle just where I had expected, and he was so pleased with himself that he called up the rest of his force and drove right through Lesser Chaucia from end to end, burning the timber shrines of the German Hercules one after the other, until none was left standing. His destruction of crops and villages was not so methodical as Galba’s, but on the way back he gave the Istaevonians plenty to remember him by. He took 2,000 prisoners.

  The news of the rescue of the Eagle came to Rome simultaneously with that of Galba’s successful sacking of the Chattian towns, and the Senate immediately voted me the title of Emperor, which this time I did not refuse. I considered that I had earned it by my location of the Eagle and by suggesting the long-distance cavalry raid, and by the care that I had taken to make both campaigns a surprise. Nobody knew anything about them until I signed the order instructing the French and Italian levies to be under arms and on their way to the Rhine within three days.

  Galba and Gabinius were given triumphal ornaments. I should have had them granted triumphs if the campaigns had been more than mere punitive expeditions. But I persuaded the Senate to honour Gabinius with the hereditary surname ‘Chaucias’ in commemoration of his feat. The Eagle was carried in solemn procession to the Temple of Augustus, where I sacrificed and gave thanks for his divine aid: and dedicated to him the wooden gates of the temple where the Eagle had been found – Gabinius had sent them to me as a gift. I could not dedicate the Eagle itself to Augustus, because there was a socket long ago prepared for its reception in the temple of Avenging Mars, alongside the other two rescued Eagles. I took it there later and dedicated it, my heart swelling with pride.

  The soldiers composed ballad verses about the rescue of the Eagle. But this time, instead of building them on to their original ballad, ‘The Three Griefs of Lord Augustus’, they made them into a new one called ‘Claudius and the Eagle’. It was by no means flattering to me, but I enjoyed some of the verses. The theme was that I was an absolute fool in some respects and did the most ridiculous things – I stirred my porridge with my foot, and shaved myself with a comb, and when I went to the Baths used to drink the oil handed me to rub myself with and rub myself with the wine handed me to drink. Yet I had amazing learning, for all that: I knew the names of every one of the stars in Heaven and could recite all the poems that had ever been written, and had read all the books in all the libraries of the world. And the fruit of this wisdom was that I alone was able to tell the Romans where the Eagle was that had been lost so many years and had resisted all efforts to recapture it. The first part of the ballad contained a dramatic account of my acclamation as Emperor by the Palace Guard; and I shall quote three verses to show the sort of ballad it was:

  Claudius hid behind a curtain,

  Gratus twitched the thing away.

  ‘Be our Leader,’ said bold Gratus.

  ‘All your orders we’ll obey.’

  ‘Be our Leader,’ said bold Gratus,

  ‘Learned Claudius, courage take!

  There’s an Eagle to be rescued

  For the God Augustus’ sake.’

  Learned Claudius, feeling thirsty,

  Drank a mighty pot of ink.

  ‘Owl was it you said, or Eagle?

  I could rescue both, I think.’

  Early in August, twenty days after I had been voted the title of Emperor, Messalina bore me her child. It was a boy, and for the first time I experienced all the pride of fatherhood. For my son Drusillus, whom I had lost some twenty years before at the age of eleven, I had felt no warm paternal feelings at all, and very few for my daughter Antonia, though she was a good-hearted child. This was because my marriages with Urgulanilla, Drusillus’s mother, and with Aelia, Antonia’s mother (both of whom I divorced as soon as the political situation enabled me to do so), had been forced on
me: I had no love for either of these women. Whereas I was passionately in love with Messalina; and seldom, I suppose, had our Roman Goddess Lucina, who presides over childbirth, been so persistently courted with prayers and sacrifices as she was by me in the last two months of Messalina’s pregnancy. He was a fine healthy baby, and being my only son he took all my names, as the custom was. But I gave it out that he was to be known as Drusus Germanicus. I knew that this would have a good effect on the Germans. The first Drusus Germanicus to make that name terrible across the Rhine – more than fifty years before this – had been my father, and the next had been my brother, twenty-five years later; and I was also a Drusus Germanicus, and had I not just won back the last of the captured Eagles? In another quarter of a century, no doubt, my little Germanicus would repeat history and slaughter a few score thousands more of them. Germans are like briars on the edge of a field: they grow quickly and have to be constantly checked with steel and fire to prevent them from encroachment. As soon as my boy was a few months old and I could pick him up without risk of injuring him, I used to carry him about with me in my arms in the Palace grounds and show him to the soldiers; they all loved him almost as much as I did. I reminded them that he was the first of the Caesars since the great Julius who had been born a Caesar, not merely adopted into the family, as Augustus, Marceilus, Gaius, Lucius, Postumus, Tiberius, Castor, Nero, Drusus, Caligula had each in turn been. But here, as a matter of fact, my pride tempted me into inaccuracy. Caligula, unlike his brothers Nero and Drusus, was born two or three years after his father, my brother Germanicus, had been adopted by Augustus (a Caesar in virtue of his adoption by Julius) as his son; so he was really born a Caesar. What misled me was the fact that Caligula was not adopted by Tiberius (a Caesar in virtue of his adoption by Augustus) as his son until he was about twenty-three years old.

  Messalina did not keep our little Germanicus at her own breast, as I wished her to do, but found him a foster-mother. She was too busy to nurse a child, she said. But nursing a child is an almost certain insurance against renewed pregnancy, and pregnancy interferes with a woman’s health and freedom of action even more than nursing does. So it was bad luck for Messalina when she became pregnant again, so soon afterwards that only eleven months elapsed between Germanicus’s birth and that of our daughter Octavia.

  There was a poor harvest that summer and so meagre a supply of corn in the public granaries that I grew alarmed and cut down the free ration of corn, which the poor citizens had come to regard as their right, to a very small daily measure. I only maintained it even at that measure by commandeering or buying corn from every possible source. The heart of the populace lies in its belly. In the middle of winter, before supplies began to come through from Egypt and Africa (where, fortunately, the new harvest was a particularly good one), there were frequent disorders in the poorest quarters of the City, and much loose revolutionary talk.

  Chapter 11

  BY this time my engineers had finished the report which I had told them to make on the possibility of converting Ostia into a safe winter harbour. The report was at first sight a most discouraging one. Ten years and 10,000,000 gold pieces seemed to be needed. But I reminded myself that the work once carried out would last for ever and that the danger of a corn famine would never arise again, or at least not so long as we held Egypt and Africa. It seemed to me an undertaking worthy of the dignity and greatness of Rome. In the first place, a considerable tract of land would have to be excavated and strong retaining walls of concrete built on every side of the excavation, before the sea could be let into it to form the inner harbour. This harbour in turn must be protected by two huge moles built out into deep water, on either side of the harbour entrance, with an island between their extremities to act as a breakwater when the wind blew from the west and big seas came rushing up the mouth of the Tiber. On this island it was proposed to build a lighthouse like the famous one at Alexandria, to guide shipping safely in, however dark and stormy the night. The island and the moles would form the outer harbour.

  When the engineers brought me their plans they said: ‘We have done as you told us, Caesar, but of course the cost will be prohibitive.’

  I answered rather sharply: ‘I asked for a plan and an estimate and you have been good enough to provide both, for which many thanks; but I do not employ you as my financial advisers and I shall thank you not to take that upon yourselves.’

  ‘But Callistus, your Public Treasurer – –’ one of them began.

  I cut him short: ‘Yes, of course, Callistus has been speaking to you. He is very careful with public money, and it is right that he should be. But economy can be carried too far. This is a matter of the utmost importance. Besides, I should not be surprised to learn that it is the corn-factors who have persuaded you to send in this discouraging report. The scarcer corn becomes, the richer they grow. They pray for bad weather and thrive on the miseries of the poor.’

  ‘Oh, Caesar,’ they chorused virtuously, ‘can you believe that we would take bribes from corn-factors?’

  But I could see that my shot had gone home. ‘Persuaded, not bribed, was my word. Don’t accuse yourselves unnecessarily. Now listen to me. I am determined to carry this plan out whatever it is going to cost: get that into your heads. And I’ll tell you another thing: it is not going to take nearly so long a time or cost nearly so much money as you seem to think. Three days from now you and I are going to go into the question thoroughly.’

  On a hint given me by my secretary Polybius I consulted the Palace archives, and there, sure enough, I found a detailed scheme that had been prepared by Julius Caesar’s engineers some ninety years before for the very same work. The scheme was almost identical with the one that had just been made, but the estimated time and cost were, I was delighted to find, only four years and 4,000,000 of gold. Allowing for a slight increase in the cost of materials and labour it should be possible to carry the task out for only half what my own engineers had estimated, and in four years instead of ten. In certain respects the old plan (abandoned as too costly!) was an improvement on the new, though it left out the island. I studied both plans closely, comparing their points of difference; and then visited Ostia myself, in company with Vitellius, who knew a great deal about engineering, to make sure that no important physical changes had occurred on the site of the proposed harbour since Julius’s day. When the conference met I was so primed with information that the engineers found it impossible to deceive me – by under-estimating, for instance, the amount of earth that 100 men could shift from this point to that in a single day, or by suggesting that the excavations would entail the cutting away of many thousands of square feet of living rock. I now knew almost as much about the business as they did. I did not tell them how I came to know: I let it appear that I had taught myself engineering in the course of my historical studies, and that a couple of visits to Ostia had sufficed me for mastering the whole problem and drawing my own conclusions. I profited from the great impression that I thus made on them by saying that if there was any attempt to slow down the work once it started, or any lack of enthusiasm, I would send them all down to the Underworld to build Charon a new jetty on the River Styx. Work on the harbour must begin at once. They should have as many workmen as they needed, up to the number of 30,000, and 1,000 military foremen, with the necessary materials, tools, and transport; but begin they must.

  Then I called Callistus and told him what I had decided. When he threw up his hands and turned up his eyes in a despairing gesture I told him to stop play-acting.

  ‘But, Caesar, where’s the money to come from?’ he bleated like a sheep.

  ‘From the corn-factors, fool,’ I answered. ‘Give me the names of principal members of the Corn Ring and I’ll see that we get as much as we need.’

  Within an hour I had the six richest corn-factors in the City before me. I frightened them.

  ‘My engineers report that you gentlemen have been bribing them to send in an unfavourable report on the Ostia scheme. I t
ake a very serious view of the matter. It amounts to conspiracy against the lives of your fellow-citizens. You deserve to be thrown to the wild beasts.’

  They denied the charge with tears and oaths and begged me to let them know in what way they could prove their loyalty.

  That was easy: I wanted an immediate loan of 1,000,000 gold pieces for the Ostia scheme, which I would pay back as soon as the financial situation justified it.

  They pretended that their combined fortunes did not amount to half that sum. I knew better. I gave them a month to raise the money and I warned them that if they did not do so they would all be banished to the Black Sea. Or farther. ‘And remember,’ I said, ‘that when this harbour is built it will be my harbour – if you want to use it you will have to come to me for permission. I advise you to keep on the right side of me.’

  The money was paid over within five days, and the work at Ostia began at once with the erection of shelters for the workmen and the pegging out of tasks. On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word. But I had to be constantly reminding myself of the danger of exercising my Imperial prerogatives in such a way as to retard the eventual restoration of a Republic. I did my best to encourage free speech and public-spiritedness, and to avoid transforming personal caprices of my own into laws which all Rome must obey. It was very difficult. The joke was that free speech, public-spiritedness, and Republican idealism itself seemed to come under the heading of personal caprices of my own. And though at first I made a point of being accessible to everyone, in order to avoid the appearance of monarchical haughtiness, and of speaking in a friendly familiar way with all my fellow-citizens, I soon had to behave more distantly. It was not so much that I had not the time to spare for continuous friendly chat with everyone who came calling at the Palace: it was rather that my fellow-citizens, with few exceptions, shamefully abused my good feelings towards them. They did this either by answering my familiarity with an ironically polite haughtiness, as if to say, ‘You can’t fool us into loyalty,’ or by a giggling impudence as if to say, ‘Why don’t you behave like a real Emperor?’ or by thoroughly false good-comradeship, as if to say, ‘If it pleases your Majesty to unbend, and to expect us to unbend in conformity with your humour, then look how obligingly we do so! But if you please to frown, down we’ll go on our faces at once.’