To me the proudest moment of the whole festival was on the afternoon of the third day, when the Troy Game was performed on Mars Field and my little Britannicus, then only just six years old, took part in the skirmish with boys twice his age and managed his pony and his weapons like a Hector or Caractacus. The people reserved their loudest cheers for him. They commented on his extraordinary likeness to my brother Germanicus, and prophesied splendid triumphs for him as soon as he was old enough to go to the wars. A grand-nephew of mine also took part in the Games, boy of eleven, the son of my niece Agrippinilla. His name was Lucius Domitius,* and I have mentioned him before, but only in passing. The time has now come for a fuller account of him.
*later the Emperor Nero
He was the son of that Domitius Ahenobarbus (or Brassbeard), my maternal cousin, who had the reputation of being the bloodiest-minded man in Rome. Bloody-mindedness ran in the family, like the red beard, and it was said that it was no wonder they had brass beards, to match their iron faces and leaden hearts. When a young man Domitius Ahenobarbus had served on Gaius Caesar's staff in the East and had killed one of his own freedmen by locking him up in a room with no water to drink and nothing but salt fish and dry bread to eat, because he had refused to get properly drunk at his birthday banquet. When Gaius heard of this he told Domitius that his services were no longer needed and that he no longer counted him among his friends. Domitius returned to Rome, and on the way back, in a freak of petulance, suddenly spurred his horse along a village street on the Appian Way and deliberately ran down a child who was playing in the road with its doll. Again, once in the open Market Place, he picked a quarrel with a knight to whom he owed money, and gouged out one of his eyes with his thumb. My uncle Tiberius made a friend of Domitius in the latter years of his reign: for he deliberately cultivated the society of the cruel and base, with the object, it: is supposed, of feeling somewhat virtuous by comparison. He married Domitius to his adoptive granddaughter, my niece Agrippinilla, and there was one child of the marriage, this Lucius. Congratulated by his friend on the birth of an heir, Domitius scowled: `Spare your congratulations, blockheads. If you had any real patriotism you'd go to the cradle and strangle the child at once. Don't you realize that Agrippinilla and I between us command all the known vices, human and inhuman, and that he's destined to grow up the most detestable imp that ever plagued our unfortunate country? That's not guesswork, either: have any of you seen his horoscope? It's enough to make you shudder.' Domitius was arrested on the double charge of treason and.incest with his sister Domitia - of course, that meant nothing in Tiberius's time, it was a mere formality. Tiberius died opportunely and he was liberated by Caligula. Not long afterwards Domitius himself died, of the dropsy. He had named Caligula in his will as young Lucius's co-heir, leaving him two-thirds of the estate. When Agrippinilla was banished to her island, Caligula seized the rest of the estate too, so Lucius was now practically an orphan and quite unprovided for. However, his aunt Domitia took care of him. (She must not be confused with her sister, Domitia Lepida, Messalina's mother.) She was a woman who gave herself wholly to pleasure and only bothered about young Lucius because of a prophecy that he would one day become Emperor: she wanted to stand in well with him. It is a comment on Domitia's character that the three tutors to whom she entrusted his education were a Syrian ex-ballet-dancer, who shared Domitia's favours with a Tyrolese ex-swordfighter, this same ex-sword-fighter, and her Greek hairdresser. They gave him a fine popular education.
When two years later Agrippinilla returned she felt so little maternal feeling for her son that she told Domitia that he might as well stay with her for another few years; she would pay well to have the responsibility taken off her hands. I intervened and made Agrippinilla take him home; she took the tutors too, because Lucius was unwilling to come without them, and Domitia had other lovers. Agrippinilla also took Domitia's husband, an ex-Consul, and married him, but they soon quarrelled and separated. The next event in Lucius's life was an attempt to assassinate him while he was taking his afternoon siesta: two men walked in at the front door unchallenged by the porter, who was also taking his siesta, went upstairs, found nobody about in the corridors, wandered along until they saw a slave sleeping in front of a bedroom door which they decided must be the one that they were looking for, went in, found Lucius asleep in his bed, drew their daggers, and tiptoed close. A moment later they came rushing out again screaming: `The snake, the snake!' Though the household was alarmed by the noise no effort was made to stop them, and they escaped. What had frightened them, was the sight of a cobra's skin on Lucius's pillow. He had been wearing it wound around his leg as a cure for scrofula, from which he suffered greatly, as a child, and I suppose had been playing with it before he went to sleep: `In the darkened room it looked like a live cobra. I have since supposed that the assassins were sent by Messalina, who hated Agrippinilla but did not, for some reason or other, dare to bring any charge against her. At any rate, the story went round- that two cobras stood on guard at Lucius's bed, and Agrippinilla encouraged it. She enclosed the snakeskin in a gold snake-shaped brace Set for him to wear and told her friends that it had indeed been found on the pillow and must have been sloughed there by a cobra. Lucius told his friends that he certainly had a cobra guard, but that it was probably an exaggeration to say that it was a double-guard: he had never seen more than a single cobra. It used to drink from his water-jug. No more attempts were made to assassinate him.
Lucius, as well as Britannicus, resembled my dear brother Germanicus, who was his grandfather, but in this case it was a hateful resemblance. The features were almost identical, but the frank, noble, generous, modest character that beamed from Germanicus's face was supplanted here by slyness, baseness, meanness, vanity. And yet most people were blinded to this by the degenerate refinement he had: made of his grandfather's handsome looks: he had an effeminate beauty that made men warm to him as they would to a woman; and he knew the power of his beauty only too well, and took as long every morning over his toilet, especially over his hair, which he wore quite long, as his mother or his aunt. His hairdresser tutor tended his beauty as jealously as the head gardener in the Gardens of Lucullus tended the fruit on the famous peach wall or the unique white-fleshed cherry-tree which Lucullus had brought from the Black Sea.. It was strange to watch Lucius on Mars Field doing military exercises with sword, shield, and spear: he handled them correctly enough, as his Tyrolese sword-fighter tutor had taught him, yet it was less a drill than a ballet-dance. When, at the same age,- Germanicus was doing his exercises, one could always in imagination hear the clash of battle, trumpets, groans, and shouts, and see the gush of German blood; with Lucius one only heard the rippling applause of a theatre audience and saw roses and gold coins showered on the stage.
But enough of Lucius for the moment. A more pleasant topic is my improvement of the Roman alphabet. In my previous book I explained about the three new letters that I had suggested as necessary for modern usage: consonantal u; the vowel between i and u corresponding with Greek upsilon and the consonant which we have hitherto expressed by bs or ps. I had intended to introduce these after my triumph, but then postponed the matter until the new cycle should start. I announced my project in the Senate on the day following the Saecular Games, and it was favourably received. But I said that this was an innovation which personally affected everyone in the Empire and that I did not wish to force my own ideas on the Roman people against their will or in a hurry, so I proposed to put the matter to a plebiscite in a year's time.
Meanwhile I published a circular letter explaining and justifying my scheme. I pointed out that though one was brought up to regard the alphabet as a series no less sacred and unalterable than the year of months, or the order of the numerals, or the signs of the Zodiac, this was not really so: everything in this world was subject to change and improvement. Julius Caesar had reformed the Calendar: the convention for writing numerals had been altered and extended; the names of constellations had been changed:
even the stars that composed them were not immortal - since the time of Homer, for example, the seven Pleiades had become six through the disappearance of the star Sterope, or, as she was sometimes called, Electra. So with the Latin alphabet. Not only had the linear forms of the letters changed, but so also had the significance of the letters as denoting certain spoken sounds. The Latin alphabet was borrowed from the Dorian Greeks in the time of the learned King Evander, and the Greeks had originally had it from Cadmus who brought it with him when he arrived with the Phoenician fleet, and the Phoenicians had it from the Egyptians. It was the same alphabet, but only in name. The fact was that Egyptian writing began in the form of pictures of animals and other natural objects, and that these gradually became formalized into hieroglyphic letters, and that the Phoenicians borrowed and altered them, and that the Greeks borrowed and altered these alterations, and finally the Latins borrowed and altered these alterations of alterations. The primitive Greek alphabet contained only sixteen letters, but it was added to until it numbered twenty-four and in some cities twenty-seven. The first Latin alphabet contained only twenty letters, because three Greek, aspirated consonants and the letter Z were found unnecessary. However, about 500 years from the foundation of Rome, G was introduced to supplement C, and more recently still the Z had returned. And still in my opinion the alphabet was not perfect. It would perhaps be a little awkward, at first, if the country voted in favour of the change, to remember to use these convenient new forms instead of the old ones, but the awkwardness would soon wear off and a new generation of boys taught to read and write in the new style would not feel it at all. The awkwardness and inconvenience of the change that was made in the Calendar, not quite 100 years ago, when one year had to be extended to fifteen months, and thereafter the number of days in each month altered, and the name of one of the months changed too - now, that really was something to complain about, but had it not passed off all right? Surely nobody would wish to go back to the old style?
Well, everyone discussed the matter learnedly, but perhaps nobody cared very much about it, one way or the other, at any rate not so much as I did. When eventually the vote was taken it was overwhelmingly in favour of the new letters; but rather as a personal compliment to me, I think, than from any real understanding of the issue. So the Senate voted for their immediate introduction and they appear now in all official documents and in every sort of literature from poems, scientific treatises, and legal commentaries, to advertisements of auctions, duns, love-letters, and pornographic scrawls in chalk on the walls of buildings.
And now I shall give a brief account of various public works, reforms, laws, and decrees of mine dating from the latter part of my monarchy; I shall thus, so to speak, have the table cleared for writing the painful last chapters of my life. For I have now reached a turning-point in my story, `the discovery' as tragedians call it, after which, though I continued to carry out my duties as Emperor, it was in a very different spirit from hitherto.
I finished building the aqueducts. I also built many hundreds of miles of new roads and put broken ones into good repair. I prohibited money-lenders from making loans to needy young men in expectation of their fathers' deaths: it was a disgusting traffic the interest was always extortionate and it happened more often than was natural that the father died soon afterwards. This measure was in protection of honest fathers against prodigal sons, but I also provided for honest sons with prodigal fathers: I exempted a son's lawful inheritance from the sequestration of a father's property on account of debt or felony. I also legislated on behalf of women, freeing them from the vexatious tutelage of their paternal and had then been betrayed by him in this way. He went to Suilius and asked for a return of his 4,000 gold pieces. Suilius said that he had done his best and regretted he could not pay back the money that would be a dangerous precedent. The knight committed suicide on Suilius's doorstep.
By thus reducing the barristers' fees, which in Republican Rome had been pronounced illegal, I damaged their prestige with the juries, who were thereafter more inclined to give verdicts corresponding with the facts of the case. I waged a sort of war with the barristers. Often when I was about to judge a case I used to warn the court with a smile: `I am an old man,, and my patience is easily., tried. My verdict will probably go to the side that presents its evidence in the briefest, frankest, and most lucid manner, even if it is somewhat incriminating, rather than to the side that spoils a good case by putting up an inappropriately brilliant performance.' And I would quote Homer:
Yea, when men speak, that man I most detest Who locks the verity within his breast.
I encouraged the appearance of a new sort of advocate, men without either eloquence or great legal expertness, but with common sense, clear voices, and a talent for reducing cases to their simplest elements. The best of these was called Agatho. I always gave him the benefit of the doubt when he pleaded a case before me in his pleasant, quick, precise way; in order to encourage others to emulate him.
The Forensic and Legal Institute of Telegonius, `that most learned and eloquent orator and jurist', was closed down about three years ago. It happened as follows. Telegonius, fat, bustling, and crop-haired, appeared one day in the Court of Appeal where I was presiding, and conducted a case of his own. He had been ordered by a magistrate to pay a heavy fine, on the ground that he had incited one of his slaves to kill a valuable slave of Vitellius's in a dispute. It appears that Telegonius's slave, in a barber's shop, had put on insufferable airs as a lawyer and orator. A dispute started between this fellow and Vitellius's slave, who was waiting his turn to be shaved and was known as the best cook (except mine) in all Rome, and worth at the very least 10,000 gold pieces. Telegonius's slave, with offensive eloquence, contrasted the artistic importance of oratory and cookery. Vitellius's cook was not quarrelsome but made a few dispassionate statements of fact, such as that no proper comparison could be drawn between domestic practitioners of splendid arts and splendid practitioners of domestic arts; that he expected, if not deference, at least politeness from slaves of less importance than himself; and that he was worth at least a hundred times more than his opponent. The orator, enraged by the sympathy the cook got from the other customers, snatched the razor from the barber's hand and cut the cook'sthroat with it, crying: `I'll teach you to argue with one of Telegonius's men. Telegonius had therefore been fined the full value of the murdered cook, on the ground that his slave's violence was due to an obsession of argumental infallibility inculcated by the Institute in all its employees. Telegonius now appealed on the ground that the slave had not been incited, to murder by violence, for the very motto of the Institute was: `The tongue is mightier than the blade', which constituted a direct injunction to keep to that weapon in any dispute. He also pleaded that it had been a very hot day, that the slave had been subjected to a gross insult by the suggestion that he was not worth more than a miserable 100 gold pieces - the lowest value that could be put upon his services as a trained clerk would be fifty gold pieces annually - and that therefore the only fair view could be that the cook had invited death by provocative behaviour.
Vitellius appeared as a witness. `Caesar,' he said, `I see it this way. This Telegonius's slave has killed my head-cook, a gentle, dignified person, and a perfect artist in his way, as you will yourself agree, having often highly praised his sauces and cakes. It will cost me at least ten thousand gold pieces to replace him, and even then, you may be sure, I'll never get anyone half so good. His murderer used phrases, in praise of oratory and in dispraise of cookery, that have been proved to occur, word for word, in Telegonius's own handbooks and it has been further proved that in the same handbooks, in the sections devoted to "Liberty". many violent passages occur which seek to justify a person in resorting to armed force when arguments and reason fail.'
Telegonius cross-examined Vitellius, and I must admit that he was scoring heavily when a chance visitor to the court sprang a surprise. It was Alexander the Alabarch, who happened to be in Rome and had strolled into
court for amusement. He passed me up a note:
The person who calls himself Telegonius of Athens and Rome is a runaway slave of mine named Joannes, born at Alexandria in my own household, of a Syrian mother. I lost him twenty-five years ago. You will find the letter A, within a circle, pricked on his left hip, which is my household brand.
Signed: ALEXANDER, ALABARCH
I stopped the case while Telegonius was taken outside by my yeomen and identified as indeed the Alabarch's property. Imagine he had been masquerading as a Roman citizen for nearly twenty years. His entire property should have gone to the State, except for the 10,000 gold pieces which had been awarded to Vitellius, but I let the Alabarch keep half of it. In return the Alabarch made me a present of Telegonius, whom I handed over to Narcissus for disposal: Narcissus set him to work at the useful, if humble, task of keeping court records.
This, then, was the sort of way I governed. And I widely extended the Roman citizenship, intending that no province whose inhabitants were loyal, orderly, and prosperous should long remain inferior in civic status to Rome and the rest of Italy. The first city of Northern France for which I secured the citizenship was Autun.
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