by Allan Massie
"There are times I sympathise with him."
"You are foolish. Indeed you are more than foolish. I am glad you have come in this serious mood — not that your mood is often anything else. I am told that you and Julia no longer speak to each other, that you communicate only by letter. Is this true?"
"So you have been spying on us, Mother?"
"So it is true. Do you want to destroy everything?"
I hesitated. It was tempting to answer in the affirmative.
"Julia and I have decided for the time being to go separate ways. That's all."
"All? Do you understand what you are saying? That's all? Your wife is galloping towards public disgrace and you don't realise that you will be stained by it yourself?"
"My wife," I said, "will do as she chooses. She always has. I am powerless."
I retired to the baths. I sweated out my irritation and idled the afternoon away watching young men wrestle in the gymnasium. I dined at home, then sat drinking wine while a slave read to me from Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian war.
"Foolishness," I said, and dismissed the man.
I drank wine and composed letters to Julia in my head which I knew I would never send. The dawn broke, cold, grey, unpromising. 1 staggered to my couch and slept badly.
Augustus summoned me.
He jumped up with an expression of pleasure on his face when I entered; it must have cost him an effort, but of course he always took pleasure in his performance.
"My dear boy," he said, "your mother has been talking to me. She is worried. She says you have withdrawn from her. 'I see only what flickers on the surface of the waters, nothing of the dark swirling currents below.' Her precise words, I assure you . . . She believes, she tells me, that you have never recovered from Drusus, your dear dear brother's death." He laid his hand on my sleeve. It hung there like a leech. "Ah which of us has, which indeed . . . ?"
Then his tone changed. It resumed that mastery which I have always respected as he outlined our strategical position. There was a new outbreak of unrest in Armenia — "a country you handled with such deft efficiency in your youth, dear boy". It was necessary to send a strong man to the East. He offered me the job . . . "With maius imperium of course - overriding authority ... I am offering you exactly what Agrippa had. And the job is even more urgent and demanding now . . ."
He gave that radiant and confiding smile which is so essential a part of his famous charm. Then a look of concern crossed his face.
"Are you quite well? You look flushed." "A touch of headache. No more."
"Good, because the job will demand everything from you." "No," I said. "No, I'm not going."
"What do you mean? What do you mean you aren't going?"
"Just as I say."
"But this is madness."
He threw his hands into the air, registering incredulity.
"Come, dear boy," he said, "you can't have understood what I am offering you. Agrippa's position. My . . ." he hesitated, swallowed, got the disagreeable medicine down . . . "my partner in the government of the Republic."
"For how long?"
"What do you mean 'for how long'? Listen, dear boy," he patted my arm, squeezed it, "maius imperium" — he dwelled on the words like a ham actor, then, in the same manner, smote his forehead with the palm of his hand. "I see what it is. You feel your place is still on the German frontier, you have unfinished business there. Well, dear boy, you were ever conscientious, and I admire you for it. And I am indeed loth, yes loth, to take you from that task. But it can't be helped, dear boy, this matter is too urgent. It is a task of the utmost importance, and one in which you will win great honour . . ."
"No," I said. "I've had enough. I want out."
"What do you mean? Do you understand what you are saying? It is treason."
"No," I said, "it isn't, by no interpretation of the word. And if you don't understand, then that is unfortunate, but my meaning is really as plain as my mind is fixed . . ."
I left him, his jaw hanging open. When, I wondered, had he last been defied in this manner?
To tell the truth I was surprised and puzzled myself. I had planned nothing of what I had said. I had had as little intention to refuse him as expectation that he was going to offer me such a position. My refusal was unpremeditated. It seemed to me all the more convincing for that reason; it had sprung from the deepest recesses of my being: that flat obdurate negative. All my life, I realised, I had wanted to utter that clanging "No". I walked back to my own house through the sunshine of a May morning, with the flower-girls crying their blooms, and the air singing with bird music, and it was as if chains had been lifted from my body.
But I knew I had fought no more than the first battle. Augustus could not compel me to command his army, but he could punish me for disobedience. Moreover, as a senator, I required his permission to quit Italy, and that was, it came to me, what I devoutly wished to do. And I knew where I wanted to go.
I had visited Rhodes on my way back from my early campaign in Armenia, and the memory of that magical island and city, lying like a natural auditorium above a crescent bay, had remained with me, working in my imagination, in, as it were, subterranean fashion, with the sweetness of a summer morning before the sun is high. The Sun is, of course, the patron-god of Rhodes; his huge statue carved by Chares of Lindus adorns the harbour, one of the three thousand statues with which the city is beautified so that even a street empty of people is animated by images of gods and heroes. But my chief memory was of a villa at the western extremity of the city, a villa whose gardens rich in trees — plums, cherries, ilex, oak - and flowers, with red, pink and yellow roses rambling over the stonework, hung over the sea, so that in evening, the scent of roses mingled with the salt tang of the water. There were fountains in garden groves and when the bustle of the city below was stilled, nightingales sang. I had dined there, my host a Greek merchant with a snowy beard, who had greeted my rhapsodic appreciation of his creation of rus in urbe with benign complacency. When he died ten years later, he left me the villa; there was a lawsuit in which his son was embroiled, and my advice and countenance were of service. Besides, that merchant had many villas. Thither my mind tended. My resolution to seek repose there was formed before I had attained my own house.
It would not be easy. I therefore wrote to Augustus as follows.
Augustus, esteemed stepfather and father-in-law,
The offer you have made me does me more honour than I am worthy of. It gives me at least the opportunity to express my gratitude for the confidence you have always shown in my abilities. Nevertheless I must decline. I have served Rome and the Republic which you restored for more than twenty years. It is my desire to retire to an island and study philosophy and science. The Republic will manage very well without me, for it is not desirable that one man monopolise honours and commands as you have been kind enough to let me do. Moreover, I think that Gaius and Lucius, my dear and brilliant stepsons, should be able to embark on their public careers, which promise to be glorious, without finding themselves at their commencement in the shadow of my achievement. I have fixed on Rhodes as my place of retirement. It is a place of no importance, other than commercial. I have always been fond of islands, as my revered mother will be able to assure you, and the climate is said to be pleasant. It will benefit the rheumatism I have contracted from the damps of the Danube and the Rhine.
I therefore formally request that permission to retire to Rhodes which I am confident your generous and understanding nature will not deny me.
"Your letter," Livia said, "was ill-judged. It made your father even angrier than he was before."
"And I thought it such a good letter. Civil and well expressed."
"Stop it, Tiberius, it is not in your nature to play games."
"What do you know of my nature, Mother? What does anyone know of my nature? What do I know myself? What indeed does anyone know of anyone's? Is there even such a thing as a person's nature?"
"There is suc
h a thing as stupidity, no doubt about that. Which you are displaying now. Besides, you don't believe what you are saying. Why in your letter you remarked on Augustus' generous and understanding nature!"
"A form of words. Conventional language, no more than that."
"What do you think is going to happen?" "Oh Gaius and Lucius will take over." "Don't be silly. Lucius is only eleven." "Ten, surely?" I said. "Eleven."
"Well, that makes Gaius fifteen."
She turned away, throwing her face into half-shadow. "You're breaking my heart," she said. "All my life I have worked and schemed, yes, and sometimes done wrong, on your behalf. I have had such ambitions for you, and now, when you are on the point of fulfilling them, you prefer to throw everything away. Tiberius, why? Why, why?"
She wept. Her tears were the tears of all mothers, of Niobe and Andromeda. My heart softened. Something of my old childish love for her revived. I knelt by her side and put my arms round her. I kissed her cheek, which was pale and a little wrinkled.
"I am sorry to pain you, Mother. Try to understand. I know you love your husband and I respect you for that, and there are moments when I respect him too and others when I even feel a strange and unexpected liking for him. But I do not like what he has done to Rome, and I fear and resent what he would do to me. He has made the whole world his slave, subservient to his terrible will. Men of noble family fawn on him for favours and nobody dares to speak his mind. Even when I wrote to him 1 flattered him, I was constrained to flatter him. It is contemptible. And as for me, Mother, you have been ambitious for me, as a mother should be for her son, and I am grateful. But what will my achievement signify? In a few years when Gaius and Lucius are of age, I shall be elbowed into the shadows. I shall have become . . . expendable. Well, let me choose my own moment to withdraw. I am tired of it, simply that. But there is another matter of which we have never been able to speak honestly: my marriage. Yes, my marriage to your husband's daughter. It has become torture to me. I do not blame Julia, for she herself is a victim of his destroying will. But I cannot live like this. I cannot divorce her, can I? I cannot punish her for adultery as a husband is enjoined by law to do. I am condemned by circumstance to live a cuckold and an object of mockery. Don't you see, Mother, I have had enough, enough of hypocrisy and deception, of the demeaning struggle for power, of being bought off with honied words, of . . . all this? I am sorry if I have failed you, but to continue I would fail myself. The world has been corrupted, and I want out . . ."
She stood up. The tears were dry on her face.
"All that," she said, "is very affecting. It reminds me of the sort of speeches your own father used to make. I had thought you a fighter. I should have remembered how you have always been subject to fits of ignoble dejection. I understand you, don't think I don't, better than you understand yourself. You have lost stomach for the struggle but, my son, because you are my son as well as your father's, your appetite will revive. So you have a strumpet for a wife. Well there were cuckolds before Agamemnon, and there will be countless others. What does that matter in the sum of things? You may choose to withdraw but my will, Tiberius, is indomitable. I shall continue to fight on your behalf, whether you would have me do so or not, and one day you will be grateful .. ."
My friends clustered round me, alarmed. I discounted a good part of their concern, for I knew that they had hoped to rise with me, and now feared the effect of my retirement on their future. I understood their disappointment but, since I had made no promises which I had not kept, felt neither guilt nor responsibility. Besides, a man's first duty is to his own peace of mind. As soon as I fully comprehended the depth of my desire to withdraw from public life, I felt as if a black cloud had been blown away. I no longer required wine to let me sleep. My breathing, which had been distressed, improved. My headaches disappeared. At night I dreamed of the wine-dark sea lapping on the rocks below and of the mountains of Asia rising majestic and purple against the evening sky. I could scarcely wait to be gone.
Augustus struggled still to hold me in the captivity of office. He deluged me with letters in which praise, reproof and appeals to my conscience were mixed, higgledy-piggledy. He abandoned dignity and went beyond decorum. When he forced another interview upon me, it ended with him cursing me like a fish-wife, "You are a sack of dung in a man's clothing," he shrieked.
"What a pity that so great a man should have such bad manners," I remarked, smiling, for I knew that I was winning, that his loss of control indicated that the battle was slipping from him.
I exploited my advantage. I knew that Livia's love held him from the violent course to which my obduracy excited him. So I gave out that I was going on hunger strike, till he granted me permission. Naturally, he was bound to yield; my mother saw to that. She made it plain to him that she feared the consequences if he did not grant me leave.
First, however, he took care to let me know what men were saying about me; how some senators saw my wish for retirement as a challenge to his authority; how others declared that I was weary of virtue.
You have been a hypocrite all your life — or so I am told - nursing secret vices which you are ashamed to practise publicly. Now you find such self-control beyond you, and intend to retire to this island to enable you to indulge your vile lusts unhindered by public opinion.
I replied as follows:
Augustus,
How could I wish to challenge an authority which I have served proudly and willingly to the best of my poor abilities these twenty years? I am well aware that your authority, which I respect, is founded in the decrees of the Conscript Fathers, which no good Roman could wish to challenge.
This was disingenuous; it was founded in his victory in the civil wars, and none now dared to challenge it openly.
The sincerity of my wish for retirement acquits me of the charge of ambition. It would be a stupid manoeuvre to put myself in this position if I were truly ambitious, for you have only to grant my wish for retirement to bring my public career to an end. Besides, if I understand you correctly, you yourself charge me with a lack of that ambition which is proper and laudable in a Roman noble.
The charge of vice is absurd . . .
I paused as I wrote that line. Can any man, I thought, truly rebut such an accusation?
I repeat that I wish to devote the rest of my life to study. My chosen companions in my retreat will be Thrasyllus the distinguished astronomer, and other mathematicians; sober men. They are scarcely the company I should select for an orgy.. .
Should I have added that I was in reality fleeing from orgies? Would it have saved future pain?
I repeat that I am worn out, disturbed, have never recovered from my brother's death, and now there is a new generation ready to serve Rome. My continued presence at the head of the armies would be likely to cause them embarrassment. . .
In reply he asked me:
What sort of example will your miserable and selfish abnegation of duty be to the new generation of whom you speak? I have worked longer for Rome than you, and every bit as hard, but I have never thought to indulge in the luxury of retirement. It would be a fine state of affairs if we could all slip off our responsibilities as you are feebly and selfishly proposing to do. Do you realise how you are hurting your mother and me?
I am afraid that, at the thought of Augustus surrendering power and calling it responsibility, a smile of knowing superiority crossed my face. When I read the letter a second time, I knew that he was beaten.
I embraced my mother before departure — Augustus had declined to say farewell to me. I thanked Livia for her efforts on my behalf and commended my son Drusus to her care. He had expressed a desire to accompany me to Rhodes, but this was of course impossible; it was necessary that he be trained for public life along with his peers.
Livia's cheek was cold.
She said, "I wish you well and happy, dear boy, but I think I shall never be able to forgive you."
"Mother," I said, "I go in search of a happiness I have never know
n."
"Happiness. An idea for middle-class poets."
As I was sailing past Campania news was brought that Augustus was ill. Naturally I suspected a trick, but it was impossible that I should not give the order to cast anchor. I sat up on deck all night under the stars gazing at the land, wondering if he would cheat me again, this time by dying. Then my friend Lucilius Longus sent me word that my delay was being misinterpreted: that men said I was hoping for my stepfather's death, and intended to seize power.
So little was I understood. Sighing, I gave orders that we should set sail, though the wind was clean contrary.
13
The four years that succeeded my arrival here at Rhodes were the happiest of my life. I had cast aside care, and though I lived in leisure, I abjured mere idleness. I studied for three hours every morning, and read for two every afternoon. I attended lectures and debates in the schools of philosophy and exercised in the gymnasium. I engaged in friendly conversation on terms of equality with the citizens, cultured and generally charming Greeks who showed themselves free of the vices with which those members of their nation who have settled in Rome are wont to disgrace themselves and disgust us. On the contrary, the citizens of Rhodes are distinguished by their learning, common sense and virtue; nobody could reside here without learning that virtue is not, as some suppose, the monopoly of well-born Romans, but a quality innate in all men, which only requires congenial surroundings for its cultivation. The demeanour of the citizens here is such that no wise man can forget that Greece is the cradle of both liberty and law. I was pleased to reflect that through the insensible influence of this enchanted island I was growing in both virtue and wisdom.