Under Tiberius

by Nick Tosches

  “He—and his Sanhedrin and Pharisees—cannot by law do certain things. The benevolence of the Roman government is then called upon to accommodate him by acting on his behalf, often with the appearance of acting independently on its own behalf.”

  “You mean to say that Jesus was brought here so—”

  “Yes, precisely. So that I might, in the name of Rome, order his execution.”

  Jesus became faint. Pilate reached out and braced his shoulder, saying:

  “It is my sorrow to share the truth with you.”

  All the strangeness in the air of the past seasons, all the haunted howlings and descending ominous darkness. It had led here, to this tranquil palace, on this clear and sunny day.

  I heard myself speak numbly:

  “But you have said that you could find no crime in him.”

  “I was speaking for myself, not for Rome. And I spoke honestly. I believe this man to be guilty of nothing, except perhaps of innocence.”

  “You do not have to comply. You can disallow it.”

  Jesus had said nothing And he would say nothing now. For all I know, he said nothing ever after.

  “I can delay it. Nothing more. Of all people, my Gaius, you should understand this. You, who once abided the mad dictates of a mad princeps; you, if anyone, should understand. But for a man to be caged to have but a spell of dank breath and anguish before dying—this is not an act of mercy; it is an act of torture. Where is the life, the dignity, the good in that? Do you not agree that to postpone death in such a situation is to postpone deliverance?”

  “How long can you delay it?”

  “The prolonging of his suffering?”

  “Yes.”

  “A while. A few months perhaps.”

  “To whom in Rome do you answer?”

  “Why do you ask me this? You know that it is Sejanus. But he would grant no reprieve. I can only defer the inevitable, I cannot avoid it. There will be no reprieve.”

  “Ah, there you are wrong,” I said. “By the decree and seal of Tiberius, this man shall not die. The decree of the princeps of all Rome and its imperial provinces cannot be denied. He may be insane, but he is still the supreme commander and ruler of the Roman Empire.”

  Jesus turned to me. His eyes were red and watering. I had once reckoned that he was about ten years younger than I. Now he looked the same age, or older. Loiterer, savior, slave, captive, condemned. But soon to be freed. I swore that I would hear his laughter again.

  “You will bring him with you to Caesarea when you leave?” I asked.

  “That will be impossible. He must remain here, in Jerusalem. I can see to it that he is put in the Antonia. There are good Romans stationed there. The Jewish auxiliaries there might wish to see him suffer, but the Roman legionaries will see to it that they do not have their way, and that he is treated with kindness.”

  I asked Pilate to grant me two documents bearing his seal, and the use of a carpentum and steed-driver who could get me to Caesarea as fast as possible.

  “What kind of documents?”

  One was to be a letter instructing that I be given passage to Neapolis on the next trireme bound for Rome. The other, simply a note of good wishes to the princeps, was to be folded in such a way that it could not be opened without breaking the seal. Its brief message mattered very little.

  I embraced Jesus and told him neither to worry nor to count the days. I would return to free him.

  I had the palace livery-man remove the packsaddles from Faith, Hope, and Charity, telling him to put them in the carriage of the carpentum. I made a gift of the dear creatures to him, telling him to care well for them, or give or sell them to one who would. I should have told him to tend to them until my return. This would have insured their good care. But I was not thinking. My body stumbled and stammered. My mind raced.

  Though the lashings of his whip were few and seldom, the carpentarius who drove the carriage gave the stallions no slack of rein and little rest. Making fierce speed, we were in Caesarea the next day. From lack of sleep, my vision was all flash and eclipse.

  I delivered the packsaddles to our argentarius for deposit. I did not linger for the sorting, permutation, and computation of the wealth they held, but hastened to the harbor-master and presented him with my letter of instruction bearing the prefect’s seal. I also showed him, without words, the folded sealed parchment that was addressed, in the hand of the governor, to Tiberius.

  The navigator of the trireme had many years of experience on the Great Sea, in every weather of every season. The course he chose seemed unusual. Consulting no periplus-book, but looking only to shores and stars and the colors indicating sea-depths, he directed the ship straight toward Rhodes.

  I had to close one eye and squint through the other to see, even as a blur, the moon in the afternoon sky, or any other thing. My legs trembled, and I fell. The dry burning in my throat made it impossible for me to speak.

  When we were beyond sight of all land, I collapsed, and the frenzy of flash and eclipse that was my vision succumbed to blackness.

  34

  THE NAVIGATOR WAS A ROMAN. HIS CREW AND ITS ROWERS—two hundred of them, all but twenty of whom manned the oars at any given time, while twenty rested—were mostly Egyptians.

  When the island of Rhodes could be seen as a mote on the horizon, the navigator turned the ship west, passing between the northern shore of Crete and an island south of the Peloponnesus, and evading the strongest of the winds that blew against us. We made for the Sicilian Sea, to sail through the Strait of Sicilia, between Agrigentum and Cossyra, and thence to the Tyrrhenian, and directly northeast to Neapolis, where I was to board a light craft for the brief crossing to Capri. Then, having gotten what I wanted from Tiberius, I would come back to Caesarea as hastily as possible.

  The urgency of my mission was beneath my skin always. The return voyage, I told myself, would be a matter of days, not weeks. These same winds we now faced would then be leeward, filling our sail.

  Like the crew, I slept on the deck. As I had with me no food at the time of our setting forth from Caesarea, the harbor-master had seen to it that provisions for the sailing were brought to me aboard ship before the gangway was raised.

  On nights when sleep would not come, I watched the white froth of the sea at the ship’s prow and the breaking of distant waves in the unimaginable cold black depths, which were so forbidding and so enticing at once.

  My thoughts were on Jesus. I remembered all that we had done together, from our first encounter in Caesarea to the bad dream of our time in Jerusalem, where I never should have indulged his perverse desire to make known his presence. I dwelled on this perversity in him, and on the very nature of him. These things were as mysterious as the churning white sea-froth, the distant waves, the cold black depths. Who was this man? He was my friend. I knew him as a brother. But I really knew him not. Ultimately he was as unknowable as this sea and the winds that blew at times with us and, more often, against us. I had seen in his eyes a kind of magic that I associated with the powers of the elements. I recalled him describing, with artful cunning, the source of his words as the voice of another. A different voice, one that was not audible to others; a voice that spoke in elemental tones that were not words and yet were words. But, at sea, as much as I pondered the elements, and as much as I pondered him, there were no answers.

  Or, usually, when sleep would not come, I just lay and looked to the stars, which at sea were myriad, a lushness and luxuriance as one never sees from the firm earth of civilization.

  Have you ever seen a two-headed snake? I have not, though all my life I have heard that they are not uncommon. I saw the form of one now, in the stars of this voyage.

  Your grandmother once told me a little tale that had scared her so in her youth. In this tale, a girl lying naked by a pond one summer afternoon has drifted off to sleep, and while she sleeps, a water-snake, one of the little live-born ones, wanders newborn from his brood and enters her.

  I saw
one night the image of this little tale in the stars as well.

  Were there snakes in the skies? Yes, wisdom is a serpent. But I felt little wisdom.

  As many souls as there are stars. So Plato said. Each soul to its star, destined and allotted from the soul-brew of the universe by the making-force of the gods and all things. And mounting each soul on its star, as on a chariot, the making-force revealed and instilled deep in all of them the nature of the universe and the laws of destiny. And anyone, on his incarnation, who lived virtuously for his appointed time, mastering his passions and his fears, would return home to his native star and dwell in bliss forever. And anyone who failed would be changed into a woman on his second birth. And if that soul still did not refrain from wrong, its mortal shell, on its third incarnation, would be reduced to that of some creature that was suitable to its particular kind of wrongdoing.

  Maybe Plato was not such a fool. Maybe Plato was right. Maybe this is why there are more women than men, and more lower creatures than men and women together. All those cold and vacant stars, all those wandering homeless souls. Some stars did seem to glow more warmly than others, regardless of their distance, regardless of their size.

  And what of the cascades of shooting stars that fell from the dark heavens? Whose souls were these?

  Usually the movement of the sea, no matter how rough it might be, lulled me to sleep like a babe being cradled in his mother’s arms.

  The moon waned, then waxed, and then again was full, and still we sailed on.

  I wondered if the moon could be seen from his cell. In my mind, I tried to enter that cell, that I might also enter his heart. But this was impossible. I could muse and brood on winds, the cold black deep and its waves, the myriad stars, and the souls that pulsed in them, and I could peer into the imaginings inspired by my musings and broodings. But into him, there was no peering. No man can ever truly see into another. This was doubly true of him. Loiterer, pretender, wise man, fool. Which of these was he, this false savior who could now be saved only through the intercession of a madman, or should I say a fellow madman, or fellow madmen? Loiterer, pretender, wise man, fool. Was he all of these?

  In a way, I had made him; had cultivated him, as the vine-dresser his vine. From a petty thief, I had made a master thief; had taught him the honeysuckled oratory of deception; had from a dirty backstreet cutpurse groomed an immaculate illusion to whom men offered up their purses as eagerly as they offered up their souls.

  Yes, in a way I had made him. But in no way did I fully understand him. I had once believed I did, but I was wrong. For there was in him something that had taken flight, or been borne away by breezes, one petal at a time, to a distant, unknown place.

  35

  HE WAS SPUTTERING CURSES ON ALL FIG TREES, AND ON THE gods that had given them their season.

  “I am Tiberius, supreme ruler of all the Roman Empire. I could procure half the Negroes in Africa and have them brought to me in silver chains; but I am not to have a single ripe fig. It is absurd.”

  It was unpleasant to look upon him. He had been abhorrent enough to behold when I had last seen him, on the day he had dismissed me from his court at Rome. He then had been an old man trembling with madness, bent and emaciated, destitute of teeth, with sores and scabs on his withered bald head, and a face of red blotches that could not be hidden by the cosmetic plasters on them.

  His condition had worsened since then. One of his eyes could not open, but was like a sallow unhealing wound, a sunken slash-mark sealed and caked with crystalline yellow, and oozing foul matter. Under an ear, a white fungus grew profusely, with dark blood trickling from it. Slender tatters of dead skin hung here and there, revealing open pustules. I could not imagine the unseen parts of him.

  He moved stiffly, hunched over and contorted, with visible difficulty. The cosmetic plasters were gone, but there was around his neck a strip of muslin soaked with some kind of lotion and spotted with blood. He wore a wig that seemed to be made of a woman’s auburn hair, and it made him appear all the more grotesque. This display of fair locks on a death’s-head was the most incongruous and egregiously ridiculous indulgence of vanity I ever saw.

  He looked at me with some bewilderment, squinting at me through the one eye that was not sealed.

  “And what is it that you want?” he said.

  “I come to save the life of a man,” I said.

  From somewhere in the palace, far-off and faint, there were the desperate piercing cries and wails of children.

  Irritation came over him like a storm.

  “That bawling maddens me,” he said. Summoning one of his servants, he ordered him: “Silence those little squealers, and prepare them for the sty. Right now, this moment. Be done with it. Go.”

  He smiled easily.

  “If there is anything better than acorns and chestnuts for the diet of wild boars, it is the soft flesh and vitals of the little ones. A diet of these three things will produce the most succulent meat imaginable.”

  I told him that there was unrest in Judea. There were those who would rise against Rome. The man whose life I sought to save was a defender of Rome. For this, the other Jews had condemned him to death.

  “I care not about unrest in Judea. I care not about the affairs of Judea or any other province. I am now fully absorbed by my inquiries into the sciences. They alone command and occupy my time.”

  A man entered unannounced. He was dressed in finery more befitting an imperator than what the imperator himself wore.

  Seeing that Tiberius was engaged in conversation, he excused himself and turned to leave.

  I saw a ring of gold in the lobe of one of the man’s ears, and rings of gold on his fingers as well. He looked oddly familiar. It was him, the soothsayer, the dark Egyptian of Greek blood named Thracyllus.

  “Gaius,” he said to me, turning round again for a moment, “it is good to see you.”

  I could hear the falseness in his voice.

  “You know this man?” the imperator asked him.

  “Why, of course,” said the soothsayer, “I remember him well, from our court in Rome.”

  Tiberius looked at me.

  “At least someone knows who you are,” he said. He looked then to Thracyllus, and said to him:

  “Your memory of things past is, as always, as acute as your foresight of things to be. Go now.”

  The folded, sealed parchment that Pilate had given me, and which I had shown to the imperial guard who had led me from the harbor to the palace, now lay on the desk where Tiberius sat. He raised it in his hand, brought it very close to his one good eye, and studied the seal.

  Then he looked from Pilate’s seal to me.

  “And who is this man?” he asked.

  “He is your governor in Judea.”

  “Ah, yes, of course.”

  I dared not mention Sejanus. I knew not how the princeps felt toward him these days.

  “I believe he was an appointee of Sejanus,” he said lucidly. He seemed abstracted for a moment, then again spoke lucidly: “I know that Sejanus plans to kill me. What I do not know is why he waits so long to do it.”

  He was very still then, as if deep in thought, or as if he had expired.

  Perhaps Sejanus waited because he believed that death was already fast at work on this diseased and desiccated stick of birch loosed from the fasces. Perhaps it was simply because no princeps had ever been assassinated. That distinction would belong to the successor to Tiberius, his nephew and adopted son, Caligula.

  His head rose with a jerk.

  “Well, what is it that you want?” he said.

  He had already forgotten what I had told him; and so I told him again.

  “And it is ripe figs that I crave,” he said sharply. “It seems that neither of us is to have our satisfaction.”

  I recalled to him his custom of visiting the Tullianum, where he strode before the row of prisoners who were to be executed that day, and sometimes ordered that one or two of them be set free, saying tha
t their innocence had been revealed to him in dreams.

  “I dream no more,” he said.

  “You can save this good man with a stroke of your hand,” I said.

  “I can do many things with a stroke of my hand.”

  “He increases your fortune, and the fortunes of Rome. He tells all Jews to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. He says that, were it not for you, the greatness of Rome would be much diminished.”

  “If this is so, he is a fool.”

  “If it is folly to worship you, and respect and admire you, and to love Rome, then, yes, he is a fool, as am I.”

  He cackled with sickly laughter.

  “You are full of shit,” he said. “You always were.”

  “I beg of you.”

  “I remember you now.”

  “Then you know that I always had your best interests in my heart, as I do at this moment.”

  “I remember many things. My memory of things past is as acute as my foresight of things to be.”

  “I beseech you. Do us both this favor. Spare the life of this rare good man.”

  He waved the back of his hand to me, then showed interest in my words.

  “What are the preferred forms of public execution among the Jews of Judea?”

  “Stoning. Burning. Hanging. Slaying by sword. Immersion in mud. Strangling. They have also taken delight in crucifixion, brought to them by Rome.”

  “Imagine being so benighted and unimaginative as not to conceive of a manner of execution on one’s own. Imagine having to have it introduced.”

  “A most interesting reflection,” I said.

  “And what of the poena cullei, the punishment of the sack? Is it known to the Jews of that land?”

  “I believe not.”

  “Ah, surely that is the sublimest of inflicted deaths. And surely it is ours alone, as truly as is Virgil. Such are the things that make us great.” He looked away. “There is much poetry in pain.”

  He seemed startled to see me standing there. “Go now,” he said.

  “I shall not move until I have your written order for the life and liberty of this man under seal.”