Herod grinned. ‘This is the first time in my life that I have heard you agree with old Cato. I remember that Commentary on Medicine which he wrote for his son, forbidding him ever to consult a Greek doctor. Instead he recommended prayers, common sense, and cabbage leaves. They were good enough for every common physical ailment, he said. Well, there are enough prayers going up for your health in Rome to-day to make you a positive athlete, if prayers were enough. And common sense is the birthright of every Roman. Perhaps, Caesar, you have forgotten the cabbage leaves?’
I stirred irritably on my couch. ‘Well, what doctor do you recommend? I’ll see just one, to please you, but no more. What about Largus? He’s the Palace Physician now. Messalina says that he’s quite clever.’
‘If Largus had known of a cure for your ailments he would have volunteered it quick enough. No use going to him. If you will only consent to consult a single one, consult Xenophon of Cos.’
‘What, my father’s old field-surgeon?’
‘No, his son. He was with your brother Germanicus on his last campaign, you may remember; then he went to practise at Antioch. He was extraordinary successful there and recently he’s come to Rome. He uses the motto of the great Asclepiades, Cure quickly, safely, pleasantly. No violent purges and emetics. Diet, exercise, massage, and a few simple botanical remedies. He cured me of a violent fever with a distillation of the leaves of a purple flowered weed called monk’s-hood and then set me right generally with advice about diet, and so forth: told me not to drink so much, and what spices to avoid. A marvellous surgeon too, when it comes to that. He knows exactly where every nerve, bone, muscle, and sinew in the body lies. He told me that he learned his anatomy from your brother.’
‘Germanicus wasn’t an anatomist.’
‘No, but he was a German-killer. Xenophon picked up his knowledge on the battle-field: Germanicus provided the subjects. No surgeon can learn anatomy in Italy or Greece. He has either to go to Alexandria, where they don’t mind cutting up corpses, or follow in the wake of a conquering army.’
‘I suppose he’ll come if I send for him?’
‘What doctor wouldn’t? Do you forget who you are? But of course, if he cures you you’ll have to pay him handsomely. He likes money. What Greek doesn’t?’
‘If he cures me.’
I sent for Xenophon. I took an immediate liking to him because his professional interest in me as a case made him forget that I was Emperor and had the power of life and death over him. He was a man of about fifty. After his first formal obeisances and compliments he talked curtly and dryly and kept strictly to the point.
‘Your pulse. Thanks. Your tongue. Thanks. Excuse me’ (he turned up my eyelids). ‘Eyes somewhat inflamed. Can cure that. I’ll give you a lotion to bathe them with. Slight retraction of eyelids. Stand up, please. Yes, infantile paralysis. Can’t cure that, naturally. Too late. Could have done so before you stopped growing.’
‘You were only a child yourself at the time, Xenophon,’ I smiled.
He appeared not to hear me. ‘Were you a premature birth? Yes? I suspected it. Malaria too?’
‘Malaria, measles, colitis, scrofula, erysipelas. The whole battalion answers “present”, Xenophon, except epilepsy, venereal disease, and megalomania.’
He consented to smile briefly. ‘Strip!’ he said. I stripped. ‘You eat too much and drink too much. You must stop that. Make it a rule never to rise from the table without an unsatisfied longing for just one little thing more. Yes, left leg much shrunk. No good prescribing exercise. Massage will have to do instead. You may dress again.’ He asked me a few more intimate questions, and always in a way that showed he knew the answer and was merely confirming it from my mouth as a matter of routine. ‘You dribble on your pillow at night, of course?’ I owned with shame that this was so. ‘Fits of sudden anger? Involuntary twitching of the facial muscles? Stuttering when in a state of embarrassment? Occasional weakness of bladder? Fits of aphasia? Rigidity of muscles, so that you often wake up cold and stiff even on warm nights?’ He even told me the sort of things I dreamed about.
I asked, astonished: ‘Can you interpret them, too, Xenophon? That ought to be easy.’
‘Yes,’ he answered in a matter-of-fact way, ‘but there’s a law against it. Now, Caesar, I’ll tell you about yourself. You have a good many more years to live if you care to live them. You work too hard, but I cannot prevent you from doing that, I suppose. I recommend reading as little as possible. The fatigue of which you complain is largely due to eye-strain. Make your secretaries read everything possible out to you. Do as little writing as you can. Rest for an hour after your principal meal: don’t rush off to the law-courts as soon as you have gobbled your dessert. You must find time for twenty minutes’ massage twice a day. You will need a properly trained masseur. The only properly trained masseurs in Rome are slaves of mine. The best is Charmes: I shall give him special instructions in your case. If you break my rules you must not expect a complete cure, though the medicine that I shall prescribe will do you appreciable good. For instance, the violent cramp in the stomach of which you complain, the cardiac passion as we call it: if you neglect your massage and eat a heavy meal in a hurry, when in a state of nervous excitement about something or other, that cramp will come on you again, as sure as fate, in spite of my medicine. But follow my directions and you’ll be a sound man.’
‘What’s the medicine? Is it difficult to come by? Will I have to send to Egypt or India for it?’
Xenophon permitted himself a little creaking laugh. ‘No, nor any farther than the nearest bit of waste land. I belong to the Cos school of medicine: I am a native of Cos, in fact, a descendant of Aesculapius himself. At Cos we classify diseases by their remedies, which are for the most part the herbs that if eaten in great quantities produce the very symptoms that when eaten in moderate quantities they cure. Thus if a child wets his bed after the age of three or four and shows certain other cretinous symptoms associated with bed-wetting we say: “That child has the Dandelion disease.” Dandelion eaten in large quantities produces these symptoms, and a decoction of dandelion cures them. When I first came into the room and noticed the twitch of your head and the tremor of your hand and the slight stutter of your greeting, together with the rather harsh quality of your voice, I summed you up at once. “A typical bryony case,” I said to myself. “Bryony, massage, diet.”’
‘What, Common Bryony?’
‘The same. I’ll write out a prescription for its preparation.’
‘And the prayers?’
‘What prayers?’
‘Don’t you prescribe special prayers to be used when taking the medicine? All the other doctors who have tried to cure me have always given me special prayers to repeat while mixing and taking the medicine.’
He answered, rather stiffly: ‘I suggest, Caesar, that as High Pontiff and the author of a history of religious origins at Rome, you are better equipped than myself for undertaking the theurgical side of the cure.’
I could see that he was an unbeliever, like so many Greeks, so I did not press the matter, and that ended the interview: he begged to be excused because he had patients waiting in his consulting-room.
Well, bryony cured me. For the first time in my life I knew what it was to be perfectly well. I followed Xenophon’s advice to the letter and have hardly had a day’s illness since. Of course, I remain lame and occasionally I stammer and twitch my head from old habit if I get excited. But my aphasia has disappeared, my hand hardly trembles at all, and I can still at the age of sixty-four do a good fourteen hours’ work a day, if necessary, and not feel utterly exhausted at the end of it. The cardiac passion has recurred occasionally, but only in the circumstances against which Xenophon warned me.
You may be sure that I paid Xenophon well for my bryony. I persuaded him to come and live at the Palace as Largus’s colleague: Largus was a good physician in his way and had written several books on medical subjects. Xenophon would not come at first. He had built up a lar
ge private practice during the few months he had been at Rome: he assessed it as now worth 3,000 gold pieces a year. I offered him 6,000 – Largus’s salary was only 3,000 – and when he hesitated even then I said: ‘Xenophon, you must come: I insist. And when you have kept me alive and well for fifteen years, the Governors of Cos will be sent an official letter informing them that the island where you learned medicine will henceforth be excused from furnishing its military contingent and from paying tribute to the Imperial Government.’
So he consented. If you wish to know to whom my freedman addressed prayers when mixing my medicine and to whom I addressed mine when taking it, it was the Goddess Carna, an old Sabine Goddess whom we Claudians have always cultivated since the time of Appius Claudius, of Regillus. Medicine mixed and taken without prayers would have seemed to me as unlucky and useless as a wedding celebrated without guests, sacrifice, or music.
Before I forget it, I must record two valuable health hints that I learned from Xenophon. He used to say: ‘The man is a fool who puts good manners before health. If you are troubled with wind, never hold it in. It does great injury to the stomach. I knew a man who once nearly killed himself by holding in his wind. If for some reason or other you cannot conveniently leave the room – say, you are sacrificing or addressing the Senate – don’t be afraid to belch or break wind downwards where you stand. Better that the company should suffer some slight inconvenience than that you should permanently injure yourself. And again, when you suffer from a cold, don’t constantly blow your nose. That only increases the flow of rheum and inflames the delicate membranes of your nose. Let it run. Wipe, don’t blow.’ I have always taken Xenophon’s advice, at least about nose-blowing: my colds don’t last nearly so long now as they did. Of course, caricaturists and satirists soon made fun of me as having a permanently dripping nose, but what did I care for that? Messalina told me that she thought I was extremely sensible to take such care of myself: if I were suddenly to die or fall seriously ill, what would become of the City and Empire, not to mention herself and our little boy?
Messalina said to me one day: ‘I am beginning to repent of my kind heart.’
‘Do you mean that my niece Lesbia should after all have been left in exile?’
She nodded. ‘How did you guess that I meant that? Now tell me, my dear, why does Lesbia go to your rooms in the Palace so often when I’m not about? What does she talk of? And why don’t you let me know when she comes? You see, it’s no good trying to keep secrets from me.’
I smiled reassuringly but felt a little awkward. ‘There’s nothing secret about it, nothing at all. You remember that about a month ago I gave her back the remainder of the estates which Caligula had taken from her? The Calabrian ones that you and I decided not to give back until we saw how she and Vinicius would behave? Well, as I told you, when I gave them back she burst into tears and said how ungrateful she had been and swore that she was now going to change her way of living altogether and conquer her stupid pride.’
‘Very touching, I am sure. But this is the first word I have heard of any such dramatic scene.’
‘But I distinctly remember telling you the whole story, one morning at breakfast.’
‘You must have dreamed it. Well, what was the whole story? Better late than never. When you gave her back the estates I certainly thought it rather queer that you should reward her insolence to me. But I said nothing. It was your business, not mine.’
‘I cannot understand this. I could have sworn I told you. My memory has the most extraordinary lapses sometimes. I am very sorry indeed, my dearest. Well, I gave her back the estates, simply because she said that she had just gone to you and made a wholehearted apology and that you had said: “I forgive you freely, Lesbia. Go and tell Claudius that I forgive you.”’
‘Oh, what a bare-faced lie! She never came to me at all. Are you sure she said that? Or is your memory at fault again?’
‘No, I’m positive about it. Otherwise I should never have given her back the estates.’
‘You know the legal formula about evidence? “False in one thing, false in all.” That fits Lesbia. But you haven’t yet told me why she visits you. What is she trying to get out of you?’
‘Nothing, so far as I know. She just comes occasionally for a friendly visit to repeat how grateful she is and to ask whether she can be of any use to me. She never stays long enough to be a nuisance and always asks how you are. When I say that you’re working she says that she wouldn’t dream of disturbing you and apologizes for disturbing me. Yesterday she said that she thought you were still a little suspicious of her. I said that I thought not. She chatters a little about things in general for a few minutes, kisses me like a good niece, and off she goes. I quite enjoy her visits. But I was convinced that I’d mentioned them to you.’
‘Never. That woman’s a snake. I think I know her plan. She’ll worm her way into your confidence – like a good niece, of course – and then begin slandering me. In a quiet, hinting sort of way at first and then more directly as she gets bolder. She’ll probably make up a wonderful story about the double life I lead. She’ll say that behind your back I live a regular life of debauchery – sword-fighters and actors and young gallants and the rest. And you’ll believe her, of course, like a good uncle. O God, what cats women are! I believe she’s begun already. Has she?’
‘Certainly not. I wouldn’t let her. I wouldn’t believe anyone who told me that you were unfaithful to me in deed or word. I wouldn’t believe it even if you told me so yourself with your own lips. There, does that satisfy you?’
‘Forgive me, dear, for being so jealous. It’s my nature. I hate you to have friendships with other women behind my back, even relations. I don’t trust any woman alone with you. You’re so simple-minded. And I’m going to make it my business to find what poisonous trick Lesbia has at the back of her mind. But I don’t want her to know that I suspect her. Promise me that you won’t let her know that you have caught her out in a falsehood, until I have some more serious charge against her.’
I promised. I told Messalina that I didn’t believe in Lesbia’s change of heart now and that I would report all conversational remarks that she made to me. This satisfied Messalina, who said that now she could continue her work with an easier mind.
I faithfully repeated to Messalina all Lesbia’s remarks. They seemed to me of little importance, but Messalina found significance in many of them and caught especially at one – to me – perfectly inoffensive remark that Lesbia had made about a senator called Seneca. Seneca was a magistrate of the second rank, and had once incurred the jealous dislike of Caligula by the eloquence with which he had conducted a case in the Senate. He would certainly have lost his head then but for me. I had done him the service of depreciating his oratorical abilities, saying to Caligula: ‘Eloquent? Seneca’s not eloquent. He’s just very well educated and has a prodigious memory. His father compiled those Controversies and Persuasories, school-exercises in oratory on imaginary cases. Childish stuff. He wrote a lot more which have remained unpublished. Seneca seems to have got the whole lot off by heart. He has a rhetorical key now to fit any lock. It’s not eloquence. There’s nothing behind it, not even strong personal character. I’ll tell you what it is – it’s like sand without lime. You can’t build up a reputation for true eloquence out of that.’ Caligula repeated my own words as his own judgement on Seneca. ‘School-exercises only. Puerile declamations, borrowings from his father’s unpublished papers. Sand without lime.’ So Seneca was permitted to live.
Now Messalina asked me: ‘You are sure that she went out of her way to commend Seneca as an honest and unambitious man? You didn’t bring up his name yourself first?’
‘No.’
‘Then you may depend on it, Seneca’s her lover. I have known for some time that she was keeping a secret lover, but she hides her tracks so well that I couldn’t be sure whether it was Seneca or her husband’s cousin Vinicianus, or that fellow Asinius Gallus, Pollio’s grandson. They all li
ve in the same street.’
Ten days later she told me that she now had complete proof of adultery between Lesbia and Seneca during the recent absence from Rome of Vinicius, Lesbia’s husband. She brought witnesses who swore that they had seen Seneca leave his house late at night, in disguise; had followed him to Lesbia’s house, which he had entered by a side door; had seen a light suddenly appear at Lesbia’s bedroom window and presently go out again; and three or four hours later had seen Seneca emerge and return home, still in disguise.
It was clear that Lesbia could not be allowed to stay at Rome any longer. She was my niece, and therefore an important public figure. She had already been banished once on a charge of adultery and recalled by me only on an understanding that she would behave more discreetly in future. I expected all members of my family to set a high moral standard for the City. Seneca would have to be banished too. He was a married man and a senator, and though Lesbia was a beautiful woman I suspected that with a man of Seneca’s character ambition was a stronger motive for the adultery than sexual passion. She was a direct descendant of Augustus, of Livia, and of Mark Antony, a daughter of Germanicus, a sister of the late Emperor, a niece of the present one: while he was merely the son of a well-to-do provincial grammarian and had been born in Spain.
Somehow I did not wish to interview Lesbia myself, so I asked Messalina to do so. I felt that Messalina had more cause for resentment in the matter than I had, and wished to stand well with her again and show how sorry I was that I had given her occasion for the slightest twinge of jealousy. She gladly undertook the task of lecturing Lesbia for her ingratitude and acquainting her with her sentence; which was banishment to Reggio in the South of Italy, the town where her grandmother Julia had died in banishment for the same offence. Messalina afterwards reported that Lesbia had spoken most insolently, but had finally admitted adultery with Seneca, saying that her body was her own to do with as she liked. On being informed that she would be banished, she had flown into a passion and threatened us both: she said: ‘One morning the Palace servants will enter the Imperial bed-chamber and find you both lying with your throats cut,’ and ‘How do you think my husband and his family will take this insult?’
Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina Page 21