by Allan Massie
A week after Caltagirone pressed the manuscript upon me, his death was announced on the front page of Il Mattino, the principal Neapolitan daily. He was described in the frank manner of the Italian press as "a notorious swindler".
So I was left with the manuscript, and, intrigued, set to work on it.
Further discrepancies appeared, and it was soon clear to me that, whatever its provenance, whatever its element of authenticity, the memoirs had been the work of more than one hand, and at different periods. I became convinced that even the eighteenth-century paper was a blind or false trail or red herring. It seemed strange, for instance, that on page 187 of the manuscript Tiberius should be quoting Nietzsche. This, together with the tone of some passages, made me wonder whether a gloss had been put on the original (if it existed) by some resident of Capri in, perhaps, the first decade of this century. And this suspicion was intensified when my all-seeing agent, Giles Gordon, remarked that one incident seemed to be drawn from The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe.
As against this, the coincidence is explicable if one remembers that the figure who appears to Munthe also claims to have appeared centuries previously to none other than Tiberius. It has always been assumed that Munthe invented this genius loci; but what, it occurred to me, if he had not? Might not such a supposition confirm the authenticity of the memoirs?
Then there is another story — about Sirens — which recalls one by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. That would place the concoction of the memoirs unacceptably late, I thought; besides, the Mediterranean lands are rich in Siren stories, and it is known that Tiberius took a particular interest in the myth. And then there is the postscript, which is decidedly rum, though it purports to account for the survival of the original memoirs in manuscript.
Ultimately I remain undecided. I do not assert that these are the memoirs of Tiberius, or not unequivocally so. I think the bare bones of the narrative may be authentic, but that subsequent versions have refined, expanded and glossed them.
And I find myself asking whether it matters. What we have here, persuasively and movingly in my opinion — else I should not have put myself to the labour of translating the work — is a remarkable portrait of one of the greatest, and certainly the unhappiest, of Roman emperors. In the end, I say to myself, fiction - if this is fiction - may offer truths to which neither biography nor even autobiography can aspire. Who knows himself or another man as thoroughly as the artist may imagine a life? Whose identity is fixed? A great and malignant artist, Tacitus, pinned a terrible portrait of Tiberius on the wall of history. If another hand has been moved to amend that picture, so be it. It was Napoleon, with his uncanny penetration of men's motives, who dismissed the great historian as le poete; yet Tacitus' lying truth held sway for centuries. The author of this autobiography, whoever he may be, is, I would claim, a poet himself at moments, and I trust that his version of the story, a version which is certainly the case for the defence, will work its influence also. Tiberius has waited long for justice; perhaps it is time that the deceptive bargain offered him by the divine boy in the garden, who promised the aged emperor peace of mind in exchange for the sacrifice of his reputation, should be expunged.
So I do not care whether these memoirs are authentic or not. They convince me that they contain important verities. Basta!
I had written this and left it to rest a week or two, to see if there was anything I wished to add.
No sooner had I concluded that I was satisfied, than I received a telephone call.
I recognised the voice at once. It was the Count. He reminded me of a bargain we had not made: that he should receive seventy-five per cent of translation rights, and twenty per cent of my English royalties. When I told him I had no memory of this, and had anyway thought him dead, he laughed.
"I have given Tiberius to drink of my elixir," he said. "Why should you suppose that either he or I can die?"
I had no answer to that. He promises to appear at the publication party. We shall see.
Book One
Chapter One
T
hat I relish dryness is not strange: I have campaigned too many years in the rains of the Rhine and Danube valleys. I have marched miles, ankle-deep, through mud, and slept in tents soaked through by morning. Yet my relish for what is dry is of another nature: I detest sentiment or displays of feeling; I detest acting. I detest self-indulgence, and that emotion in which one eye does not weep but observes the effect of tears on those who watch. I take pleasure in language which is precise, hard and cruel. This has made me a difficult and uncomfortable person. My presence makes my stepfather, the Princeps, uneasy. I have known this since I was a youth. For years I regretted it, for I sought his approval, even perhaps his love. Then I realised I could never have either of these: he responded to the false spontaneous charm of Marcellus, as he does now to that of his grandsons, Gaius and Lucius, who are also my stepsons.
Nothing has been easy for me, and it would not be surprising if I were to relapse into self-pity. It is a temptation, because my merits have ever been unjustly disregarded on account of my lack of charm. I have never been able to dispel clouds with a smile and a jest, and it is natural if I have experienced twinges of envy when I see my inferiors able to do so. Yet I am kept from self-pity by my pride. This is inherited. It is Claudian pride.
Augustus has always been rendered uneasy on account of the indignity of his birth. It is only by the accident of marriage that he has had a career; the accident of two marriages, I should say, for there can be no question that his own marriage to my mother smoothed his path to power.
It was, however, the marriage of his grandfather, M. Atius Balbus, to Julia, the sister of Gaius Julius Caesar, the future dictator, which raised his family from an obscure provincial station. The Princeps' own father was the first member of the family to enter the Senate. Contrast that with my heredity.
I shall not boast of the Claudian gens: our achievements glitter on every page of the Republic's history.
Mark Antony - a liar of course - used to delight in mocking my stepfather's antecedents. He would claim that the great-grandfather of his colleague in the triumvirate had been a freed-man and rope-maker, and his grandfather a dishonest money-changer. It is not necessary to believe such charges to understand why Augustus' attitude to the old aristocracy of Rome has been ambiguous: he is both resentful and dazzled.
I, being a Claudian, judge these things better. I know the worthlessness of my fellow nobles. I recognise that their decadence has made them unfit to govern, and so destroyed Liberty in Rome. Though the Roman Empire now extends over the whole civilised world to the limits of the Parthian Empire in the East, our great days are behind us; we have been compelled to acquiesce in the suppression of Liberty.
I write this in retreat in Rhodes, in the tranquillity of my villa overlooking the sea. My life is now devoted to the study of philosophy and mathematics, and to pondering the nature of experience. Accordingly it is not surprising that I should think to write my autobiography. There is good precedent for this, and any man of enquiring intelligence must frequently stand amazed before the spectacle of his own life and wish to make sense of it.
I am forty-two years old. My public life is ended through circumstances and my own desire. I have been humiliated in my private life. I am disgraced through no fault of my own, rather on account of the schemes of others and my own indifference. I may, if the Gods will it, have as long to live again, though nightly I pray otherwise. Even from this distance I cannot contemplate the shipwreck of old age with equanimity.
My father was Tiberius Claudius Nero, dead now for more than thirty years. (I was nine when he died. They made me deliver his funeral oration. More of that later, if I can bring myself to write it.) My mother, who still lives, is Livia Drusilla. She was seduced by the triumvir, Caesar Octavianus, who is now styled Augustus. He was not deterred by the fact that she was pregnant. My brother, Drusus, was born three days after their marriage. He knew no father but Augustus,
and our real father refused to receive him: he liked to pretend that Drusus was not his son. This was nonsense. Perhaps it salved his pride.
I used to go to stay with him on the estate in the Sabine Hills to which he had retired. I wish I could claim vivid memories. But I have few, except of meals. He comforted himself with gluttony; his dinner lasted the whole afternoon. He liked me, even when I was only six or seven, to drink wine with him.
"Don't water it," he said, "it delays the effect. . ."
As the sun set he would embark on long monologues, to which I scarcely listened and which I could not anyhow have understood.
He was an unlucky man, of poor judgment and some sense of honour. Fortune having dishonoured him, he sought refuge from the regrets which assailed him in eating and drinking. As the years have slipped away, I have come to understand him; and to sympathise.
"Why prolong life save to prolong pleasure?" he would sigh, raising a cup of wine; and a tear would trickle down his fat cheek.
A few years ago my father started to appear in my dreams. I would see him standing on a promontory looking out to sea. He was watching for a sail. I gazed at the blue water too, but did not dare to approach him. Then the sun was darkened, as if in an eclipse, and when light returned my father had vanished; in his place stood a white cockerel bleeding from the neck. This dream came to me, in identical form, perhaps seven times. At last I consulted Thrasyllus but even he, the most acute interpreter of dreams, was unable to supply an explanation.
Or perhaps dared not. In my position few, even among trusted friends, have the courage to speak their minds.
Drusus, as I say, was never allowed to visit our father. Indeed I do not think he ever thought of him, except when I compelled the subject. But then he had no memories, and Drusus was never introspective. I, on the other hand, can recall my father on his knees clutching my mother's ankles and sobbing out his love for her. She disengaged her legs: he fell prostrate on marble; and I began to howl. I was three at the time.
I adored my mother for her beauty, and for being herself. She would sing me to sleep with honied voice; the touch of her fingers on my eyelids fell like rose petals. She would tell me stories of my ancestors and of the gods, of Troy and of Orpheus, and the wanderings of my forefather Aeneas. At the age of five I wept for Dido, Queen of Carthage, and she said:
"You are wrong to weep. Aeneas was fulfilling his destiny." "Is destiny so grim, Mama?" "Go to sleep, child."
Drusus would clamber all over our stepfather who would kiss him and throw him in the air and laugh at his whoops. But I kept my distance. My love was for Mama, whose favourite I knew myself to be. That was important to me, and it confirmed me in what may have been an instinctive conviction that the world is ignorant of justice: for I knew Drusus to have a charm that I lacked, and, moreover, I recognised in him a sunny virtue which was absent from my character. His temper was benign. Nothing alarmed him. He was always truthful and generous. Even as a baby he would surrender a cherished toy with a happy smile. But I was greedy, and untruthful, and afraid of the dark places and of night. (Yet I also welcomed the night, and never went reluctant to bed, because I knew that bedtime promised me my mother's undivided attention, promised me stories, and the cool touch of her sweet-smelling hand; I would lie waiting for sleep in a world from which all but the two of us were banished . . .)
Because I was her favourite she chastised me. She whipped me for my transgressions till I was within a few years of assuming the toga virilis. I recognised in her lashes, which bit with stinging joy into my flesh, the strange expression of her love: each blow sang out that I should be her creature, hers alone. We were joined together in a savage rite: Claudian pride flayed Claudian pride, and called for a cry of mercy, which never came. And then, afterwards, how sweet and honied the reconciliation!
We were joined in passion, all the more intense because we are both shy of speech. In public she sometimes liked to mock me; as I grew older she would upbraid me for a great clumsy oaf. We never referred to such outbursts when we were alone. I knew them to be provoked by the intensity of her love, which she resented. It annoyed her, no, infuriated her, to know how much she cared.
When I was a child she mocked and whipped me out of my stammer. "It makes you seem a dolt," she said. "Do you want the world to take you for a fool?" So, by willpower, I overcame my infirmity.
Her moods were as quick-changing as mountain weather. Her inconsistency was wild enchantment. When she smiled the world was spring sunshine; but her frowns darkened any company. Consequently we were engaged in endless warfare. I found her entrancing, but I declined to submit to her black moods. Yet it was in my reaction to Livia that I came to sense my superiority to my stepfather: he was afraid of her; I was not.
Of course he loved her, depended on her, could not - as he often exclaimed - imagine life without her. Very good, I don't dispute it. Yet he was always less in her presence, more timid, more circumspect, dreading that she should turn cold and refuse to speak to him. That was all Livia has ever had to do to bring Augustus to heel: refuse to speak to him. I, on the other hand, know myself her equal; and, in fact, since I grew up, Livia has been a little in awe of me.
I have run ahead of myself, ahead of my story. Yet it is hard to see how autobiography can avoid being discursive. Everything one recalls promotes reflection. I am writing of people without whom my life is unimaginable.
Perhaps it will be easier to keep to the point when I get beyond childhood. For, looking back on childhood, I see one thing clearly: there is no narrative there. Childhood is a state, not a story. Let me try to reveal my childhood in four distinct episodes therefore.
* * *
I was, as I said, nine when my father died. Naturally I did not weep.
"You are head of the family now," Livia said. "What do I have to do, mama?"
"First, it will be your duty to pronounce your father's funeral oration . . ."
I don't know who wrote it, but I daresay its author made the best he could of it. These people have a certain professional pride after all. But there was not much to say about the poor man, and it was raining, a November day of thick cloud that obscured the houses on the Palatine Hill. I rehearsed the speech so well that I can remember parts of it to this day.
My father was a victim. I see that now, though in my adolescence I came to think harshly of him as a weakling and failure. His public history was undistinguished. He fought with Julius Caesar in the war against Pompey and commanded the dictator's fleet at Alexandria. But this association disgusted him, for he saw that Julius was an enemy of the traditional liberties of the Roman people. Too tender-hearted to join the conspiracy of the Ides of March and perhaps inhibited by his consciousness of what he had himself received from the dictator, he nevertheless rejoiced at its success. In the Senate he proposed that the Liberators be publicly rewarded. That suggestion was enough for him to earn my stepfather's undying hatred; not, you understand, that Augustus (as it is convenient to call him, though he had not yet been accorded that honorific title) had any affection for Julius himself; but because he knew it was expedient that he should pay public honour to his name. Otherwise, why should Caesar's old soldiers fight for him?
Reluctant to leave Italy, where he feared the confiscation of his estates, convinced anyway that the Liberators could never withstand the Caesarean forces, my father naturally adhered to Antony rather than to Augustus. Besides, he was an old friend — and personal loyalty meant much to him - of the younger Antony, Lucius, who had inveigled him into the campaign that was to end in the terrible siege of Perugia. He never forgot the rigours of that siege, and even the mention of Mark Antony's wife, the loathsome Fulvia, would make him shudder, right up to his death. Desperate now, he blundered again, joining himself with Sextus Pompeius, the unprincipled son of a dubiously great father. He was soon disillusioned, and rejoined Antony. Then came the Peace of Misenum. During the negotiations that led up to it, Augustus encountered Livia, fell in love with her, and ca
rried her off.
How could such a life be eulogised? Only in empty, high-sounding phrases, obviously, with much talk of private virtues (which indeed the poor man did not lack) and with noble, not unveracious, platitudes about the malignity of fortune. These platitudes had nevertheless to be modified, since they should not in any wise reflect upon the victor and favourite of fortune, Augustus, his successor as Livia's husband, who would be standing on the speaker's right hand.
Accordingly, my introduction to the art of public oratory was to spout disingenuous rhetoric.
Cant.
I have distrusted rhetoric ever since, even while acknowledging that its mastery is a necessary part of education.
Four years later, after Actium, my stepfather Augustus prepared to celebrate the triumph granted him by the Senate and the Roman people in honour of his achievements in the war against Egypt. There was cant here too, for no one was allowed to remind us that Roman citizens had been the chief victims of his wars. Instead all attention was concentrated on Egypt.
"Will Cleopatra walk in chains, mama?" "What do you children know of Cleopatra?" "That she'th a bad woman who sedutheth Romans," Julia said.