Tiberius i-2

by Allan Massie

  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 h ave 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 carried 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.

  "That's no way for a little girl to talk. Do you want your mouth washed out with soap?"

  "It'th what I heard Uncle Marcuth Agrippa thay."

  She gave a little pout, holding strawberry-pink lips open and thrust forward. I was twelve then, so Julia must have been ten. But she already knew — had always known as if by nature — how to act, tease and provoke. Augustus at that stage liked the three of us to behave as if we were indeed brothers and sister — Julia is of course the child of his second marriage to the appalling Scribonia, one of the few women I have ever met who is as disagreeable and generally awful as the reputation which precedes her. Livia was always less certain that we should be encouraged to think of ourselves as siblings.

  "What does sedutheth mean?" Drusus asked.

  "It's seduces," I said. "Julia only says sedutheth because she's lost a front tooth. Anyway, Julia, Marcus Agrippa isn't really our uncle, you know. He can't be because he's a plebeian."

  "Quite so," Livia said, and changed the subject.

  Augustus liked us, however, to speak of Agrippa as our uncle; he was always eager that his supporters should feel they were a family; later, when Livia wasn't about, he upbraided me for the way I had spoken of his friend.

  "If you grow up to be half the man Agrippa is," he said, "you'll be twice the man your own father was. And don't speak of plebeians in that silly way. If it weren't for plebeian blood, Rome wouldn't have an empire…"

  He was right of course, and I came to appreciate Agrippa later, but then I could only think that my stepfather himself was essentially plebeian. I took his irritation as further evidence of his inferiority to the Claudians and of his lack of true nobility.

  He had his revenge in the arrangements of his triumph. His nephew Marcellus was granted the honour of riding on the leading trace-horse, while I was relegated to an inferior position.

  Cleopatra did not of course walk in chains, as she deserved to do. She had escaped him, by means of the now famous asp.

  Two years later Augustus declared that he had restored the Republic. (I shall treat of this more fully, and philosophically, at a more appropriate stage of my history.) Marcellus was ecstatic.

  "There never
was such a thing," he said, again and again. "Such a surrender of power."

  "I don't understand why Daddy should choose to give up power," Julia said. "It seems strange to me, after fighting so long to win it." She had quite lost her lisp, you observe.

  "Yes," I said, "very strange."

  I look up from the terrace on which I am writing this, and gaze over the evening sea and it is as if I can see reflected there our childish faces, as we strove with the dawning of our political understanding. I see Marcellus, six months older than I — and how much younger? — candid, beautiful, insipid. He reclines on a couch, in languid attitude that cannot disguise his animal energy, and yet looks, as always, as if he has fallen into a pose to delight a sculptor. I see Julia, the childish gold of her hair already darkening to that colour for which I have never found the right epithet, her blue eyes set rather far apart and moist at the edges, her lips always a little open. (Livia used to say she had breathing difficulties but I have always thought that the habit indicated her greed for experience.) And myself? When I try to envisage myself a shadow falls, and my face withdraws into the dark.

  So we argued the matter and I have forgotten what we said, but the impression of that evening remains warm. We could hear the din and bustle rise from the forum below. Julia was eating a peach, and the juice trickled down her chin, to be retrieved by that quick, pointed tongue. Marcellus strove to convince us of Augustus' nobility and generosity in handing the Republic back to the Roman people, and Julia laughed and said,

  "Daddy's not noble, he's clever, he's much too clever to do that. I'm only a girl and my interest in these political affairs is strictly limited, but I know perfectly well that you don't fight civil wars for fifteen years in order to give the dice back to your enemies and tell them to play the game again in their own way. If you take things at face value, Marcellus, you're a fool. Of course, you are a fool. I'd forgotten that."

  She was quite right. Marcellus was a fool, a beautiful fool certainly, but all the more fool for that, because he was eaten up with self-love. "He's just like Narcissus, or Hyacinthus, isn't he?" Julia once said to me. "One of these silly Greek boys who fell in love with their own beauty." So from that day we called him The Hyacinth.

  "You're different," she said to me, and put her arms round my neck. "You sit there like a wise man and say nothing. Nobody knows what you think, do they, Tiberius? I think that's clever."

  And she kissed me. It wasn't a child's kiss. Or a sister's. It lingered on my lips.

  But Augustus did not think Marcellus a fool. He thought him a golden youth and adored him. I believe Livia tried to warn him that he was in danger of making an ass of himself, but he was infatuated with the boy. Of course Marcellus was the son of his sister Octavia, whom he had always thought perfect and who now aroused feelings of guilt in him because he had compelled her to marry Mark Antony for political reasons; and the boy's father, C. Claudius Marcellus, had been one of his earliest supporters. (The Claudii Marcelli were, of course, cousins of mine.) But this wasn't the real reason for the enthralment in which Augustus was held by his nephew; and, despite the sneers of Roman gossip, it wasn't a vicious attachment either. The truth is that in Marcellus Augustus saw what he longed to be, and knew, of course, that he couldn't: a natural aristocrat, spontaneous, generous, idealistic; impulsive, a being born to be adored. His stupid love for Marcellus represented his surrender to a suppressed part of his character; it represented the wish that life is not what it is but an idyll.

  He took us on campaign in Gaul when we were both very young. By this time — though I wasn't yet aware of it — he had already decided that Marcellus and Julia should marry. In that way he would, he fondly thought, continue to possess the two people the immature side of his nature most adored. (It was a different, and more worthy, side that loved Livia.) He was asking for the impossible of course, forgetting that neither could remain eighteen.

  He loved to question us in the evening, to extract our views on life, and then try to correct them; he has always been a natural teacher. He told us that the business of government was service. "The only satisfaction," he said, "is the work itself. The only reward, the ability to continue the work. It is our task to bring law and civilisation to the barbarians. The true heroes of our empire are the countless administrators whom history will never know…"

  I was fascinated. This was a different Augustus I was seeing. I realised for the first time how my mother diminished him; in her presence he would never have dared speak as if he had authority. Men, I said to myself, become fully themselves when they are away from women: in the camp, at their office, feeling responsible for action, for decisions which determine life and death. But Marcellus was bored. He interrupted:

  "Caesar invaded the island of Britain, didn't he?"

  If I had interrupted in such a manner which showed that I had p aid no attention to what he had been saying, he would have r eproved me. But he beamed at Marcellus and laughed:

  "You know he did. You've read his memoirs, haven't you..? "

  Marcellus groaned.

  "Not much of them. He's awfully dull, you know."

  "I can see how you might think so," he stretched over and umpled my cousin's hair. "Is that your opinion too?" he asked.

  "He's admirably lucid," I said, "and I've no experience of zourse, but I find his descriptions of battles very convincing, except for one thing. He's always the hero. Was he really like that, sir?"

  He smiled at us, as if thinking. I nibbled a radish. Marcellus t ook a swig of wine. Then, before Augustus could speak, he said:

  "I do like the sound of Britain, there are pearls there and the warriors paint themselves blue. They must look funny, but despite that, it seems they can f ight a bit. Why don't we carry o n Caesar's work and conquer the island?"

  "What do you think, Tiberius…?"

  I hesitated, to show that my op inion was well considered. But I had no doubt:

  "It seems to me that we have enough trouble with the empire as it is. I think it may be big enough. Wouldn't we be best to consolidate before we bite off any more…?"

  And what was Marcellus' reaction to this good sense?

  He called me an old woman. If we'd been alone I might have said that it was better to talk like an old woman than a silly girl, but in the circumstances I only smiled.

  To my surprise, Augustus agreed with me.

  "Caesar was an adventurer," he said. "I'm not. The conquest of Britain would be worthless, for the island is covered in fog and there's little evidence that the pearl fisheries are of much value.. "

  Marcellus sighed. "It would be such an adventure," and Augustus laughed and rumpled his hair again.

  2

  Augustus was from the first, by nature, a dynast. The word is Greek and means a man of power. It was on account of his single-minded pursuit of power that he triumphed in the civil wars; it was that pursuit which forced the war against Antony and Cleopatra on the Roman people. Yet he was never even a competent soldier. He owed his victories to Marcus Agrippa, and to the goddess Fortune.

  I didn't appreciate Agrippa till he became my father-in-law. I can't reproach myself for failing to do so. It would have been more remarkable if I had understood his genius, for he was everything I distrusted by nature: rough, uncouth, with a strong provincial accent, and given to laughing loudly at his own (poor) jokes. He had that taste for bawdy stories which is such a useful means of creating good-feeling between men; it is my ill-fortune that I am fastidious and detest such ribaldry.

  Augustus relied on him utterly. They were complementary. Neither would have been capable of the other's achievement. Nevertheless, as children, we used to mock him, Julia especially. I didn't realise then that Augustus had already arranged that I should marry Agrippa's daughter, Vipsania. I would have been extremely offended, for I found her insipid.

  Certain scenes of youth stand out with the clarity of wall-paintings. A summer evening in the gardens of a villa overlooking the sea, Naples some twenty
miles distant. I am reading Homer and listening to a nightingale, for it is almost too dark to read the words. A hand is slipped across my eyes from the rear. I have heard no one approaching. The hand is cool and dry.

  "Julia," I say, without moving, and feel the fingers move down to stroke my cheek.

  "I wish you weren't always reading. I don't know what you see in books."

  "They tell us," I say, "how life…"

  "Now, darling," she says, "don't be pompous…"

  Even at that age — what, thirteen? — when most of us are shy and awkwardly aware of ourselves, Julia could employ the word "darling" as naturally as a child or a lover.

  But she was perturbed that summer, that evening.

  "Put your book away," she said. "I want to speak to you."

  "Well, it's too dark to read…"

  "Please be serious."

  "What is this? You ask me to be serious?" "I've got some news. Daddy says he wants me to marry The Hyacinth." "Congratulations." "Don't be silly."

  "I'm serious. Marcellus is going to win great glory. Your father will see to that…"

  "That's what I mean. I should prefer my husband to be a man who will win glory for himself. Or perhaps not? What is glory after all?"

  "But Marcellus is charming also," I said. "Everyone agrees on that."

  "Oh yes," she said, "but I don't want him…" She leaned forward, kissed me on the lips, and ran away, laughing.

  She would laugh — at intervals — all through her marriage to Marcellus, and he took it as a tribute to his charms. But laughter in Julia was not necessarily a sign of happiness.

  As it happened, my mother also was opposed to the marriage. She made her view clear, but this was one of the few battles with Augustus which she lost.