"You're backing the wrong colour, my friend. The Scarlet charioteer hasn't the least idea of managing his reins. He tries to do it all with the whip. I'll bet you an even thousand that Leek Green wins. Young Nero here says he'll make it fifteen hundred; he's an enthusiastic Leek Greener." Sejanus looked significantly at Tiberius, who had heard the whole exchange and was astonished at Silius'
boldness. He took it as a good omen when the leader of the Leek Green chariot fell in rounding the mark on the last lap but one, and Scarlet came in an easy winner.
Ten days later Silius was impeached before the Senate.
The charge was high treason. He was accused of having connived in the French revolt during its earlier stages and having taken a third part of the plunder as payment for non-intervention, of making his victory the excuse for further plunder of loyal provincials, and of afterwards imposing excessive emergency taxes on the province for the expenses of the campaign. Sosia was accused of complicity in the same offences. Silius had been unpopular at the Palace ever since the French rebellion. Tiberius had come in for a good deal of criticism for not having taken the field against the rebels, and for having shown more interest in the treason trials that were going on at the time than in the campaign. He had excused himself to the Senate on the ground of age--and Castor had been engaged in important business--and explained that he had been keeping in touch with Silius'
headquarters all along, giving him valuable advice. Tiberius was very sensitive about the whole French revolt. When the French were beaten he had been made ridiculous by the motion of a waggish senator, an imitator of Gallus' tricks, that he should be awarded a triumph for being the man really responsible for victory. He was so displeased by this, taking the line that in any case the victory was not worth talking about, that nobody dared to vote Silius the triumphal ornaments which he thoroughly well deserved. Silius had been disappointed and what he had said about the Rhine mutiny had been said in resentment of Tiberius' ingratitude.
Silius disdained to reply to the charges of treason. He was not guilty of any understanding with the rebels and if the soldiers under his command had in some cases failed to distinguish between the property of rebels and the property of loyalists that was only to be expected: many pretended loyalists were secretly financing the rebellion. As for the taxation, the fact was that Tiberius had promised him a special grant from the Treasury to cover the expenses of the campaign and to indemnify Roman citizens for their loss of houses, crops and cattle. In anticipation of the payment [283] of this grant Silius had imposed a tax on certain Northern tribes, promising to refund the money when it was paid him by Tiberius: which it never was. Silius was a poorer man by twenty thousand gold pieces after the revolt than before it, because he had raised a troop of volunteer horse which he armed and paid at his own expense. His chief accuser, who was one of the Consuls of the year, pressed the charges of extortion with great malice.
He was a friend of Sejanus and was also the son of the military governor of the Lower Province who had wished to take supreme command of the Roman forces against the French and had been forced to stand aside in Silius' favour. Silius could not even produce evidence of Tiberius' promised grant, because the letter in which it was contained was sealed with the Sphinx. And the charges of extortion were in any case irrelevant, because the trial was for treason, not for extortion.
He finally burst out: "My Lords, I could say much in my defence but shall say nothing, because this trial is not being conducted in a constitutional manner and the verdict has been long ago decided. I understand that my real crime is having said that, but for my handling of them, the regiments in Upper Germany would have mutinied. I shall now put my culpability in this matter beyond question. I shall say that, but for Tiberius' previous handling of them, the troops in Lower Germany would not have mutinied.
My Lords, I am the victim of an avaricious, jealous, bloodthirsty, tyrannical..." The rest of his speech was drowned in a roar of horrified protest from the House.
Silius saluted Tiberius and walked out with his head high in the air. When he arrived at his house he embraced Sosia and his children, gave an affectionate message of farewell to Agrippina, Nero, Gallus, and his other friends, and going to his bedroom drove his sword into his throat.
His guilt was held to be proved by his insults to Tiberius.
His entire estate was confiscated, with a promise that the provincials should have the unjust tax repaid them out of it, and that his accusers should be given the fourth part of what remained, as the law required, and that the money which had been left him under Augustus' will as an earnest of his loyalty should return to the Treasury as paid him under a misapprehension. The provincials did not dare to press for the tax to be refunded, so Tiberius kept threequarters of the estate: for there was no longer any real distinction between the Military Treasury, the Public Treasury and the Privy Purse. This was the first time that he had benefited directly from the confiscation of an estate or that he had let a spoken insult to himself be construed as a proof of treason.
Sosia had property of her own and, to save her life and keep the children from becoming paupers, Gallus moved that she should be banished and that half of her effects should be forfeited to her accusers, half left to her children. But a cousin by marriage of Agrippina's, who was a confederate of Gallus, proposed that the accusers should only be paid one-fourth, which was the legal minimum, saying that Gallus was more loyal to the Emperor than just to Sosia; for Sosia was known, at least, to have reproved her husband, as he lay dying, for his treasonable and ungrateful utterances. So Sosia was only banished--she went to live in Marseilles; and since Silius as soon as he knew that he would be tried for his life had secretly given Gallus and certain other friends most of his money in cash to hold in trust for the children, the family came off quite well. His eldest son lived to cause me much distress.
From now onward Tiberius, who had hitherto made his accusations of treason hang on supposed blasphemies of Augustus, enforced more and more strongly the edict which had been passed in the first year of his monarchy, making it treason for anyone to assail his own honour and reputation in any way. He accused a senator, whom he suspected to be of Agrippina's party, of having recited a scurrilous epigram aimed against him. The fact was that the senator's wife one morning noticed a sheet of paper posted high up on the gate of the house. She asked her husband to read out what was on it--he was taller. He slowly spelt out:
"He is no drunkard now of wine As he was drunkard then: He warms him up with a richer cup--The blood of murdered men." She asked innocently what the verse meant and he said, "It's unsafe to explain in public, my dear." A professional informer was hanging about the gate on the chance that when the senator read the epigram, which was Livia's work, he would say something worth reporting. He went straight to Sejanus. Tiberius himself cross-examined the senator, asking what he meant by "unsafe", and to whom, in his opinion, the epigram referred. The senator shuffled and would not give direct answers. Tiberius then said that many libels had been current when he was a younger man, all accusing him of being a drunkard, and that in recent years he had been ordered by his doctors to abstain from wine because of a tendency to gout, and that several libels had lately been published accusing him of bloodthirstiness. He asked the accused whether he was not aware of these facts, and whether he thought that the epigram could refer to anyone but his Emperor. The wretched man agreed that he had heard the libels on Tiberius' drunkenness but knew them to have no foundation in truth and had not made any connection in his mind between them and the one on his gate. He was then asked why he had not reported the former libels to the Senate as it was his duty to do. He answered that when he had heard them it was not yet a punishable offence to utter or repeat any epigram, however scurrilous, written against anyone, however virtuous; nor treason to utter or repeat scurrilities directed even against Augustus so long as one did not publish them in writing.
Tiberius asked to what time he referred, for Augustus had la
te in life made an edict against scurrilities too. The senator answered: "It was during your third year at Rhodes."
Tiberius cried out, "My Lords, how can you permit this fellow to insult me so?" So the Senate actually condemned him to be thrown down the Tarpeian cliff, a punishment ordinarily reserved for the worst traitors--generals who sold battles to the enemy, and such-like.
Another man, a knight, was put to death for writing a tragedy about King Agamemnon in which Agamemnon's queen, who murdered him in his bath, cried as she swung the axe: "Know, bloody tyrant, 'tis no crime T'avenge my wrongs like this."
Tiberius said that he was intended by the character Agamemnon and that the line quoted was an incitement to assassinate him. So the tragedy, which everyone had laughed at because it was so lamely and wretchedly composed, won a sort of dignity by having all its copies called in and burned and its author executed.
This prosecution was followed two years later--but I put it down here because the Agamemnon story reminds me of it--by that of Cremutius Cordus, an old man who had come into collision with Sejanus some time [A.D. 25] before over a trifle. Sejanus entering the House one wet day had hung his cloak on the peg which had always been Cremutius', and Cremutius, when he came in, not knowing that it was Sejanus' cloak, had moved it to another peg to make room for his own. Sejanus' cloak had fallen down from this new peg and somebody with muddy sandals had trampled on it. Sejanus retaliated in a variety of malicious ways, and Cremutius came so to loathe the sight of his face and the sound of his name that when he heard that Sejanus' statue had been set up on the Theatre of Pompey he exclaimed: "That just about ruins the Theatre". So now he was named to Tiberius as one of Agrippina's principal adherents. But as he was a venerable, mild old man who had no enemy in the world but Sejanus and never spoke a word more than necessary, it was difficult to support any accusation against him with evidence that even a brow-beaten Senate could decently accept. In the end Cremutius was charged with having written in praise of Brutus and Cassius, the murderers of Julius Caesar. The evidence produced was an historical work which he had written thirty years before and which Augustus himself, Julius' adopted son, was known to have included in his private library and occasionally consulted.
Cremutius made a spirited defence against this absurd charge, saying that Brutus and Cassius had been dead so long and had been so frequently praised for their deed by subsequent historians that he could not believe that the trial was not a hoax--such a hoax as a young traveller recently suffered in the city of Larissa.
This young man was publicly accused of having murdered three men, though they were no more than wineskins, hanging outside a shop, [287] which he had slashed at in the dark, mistaking them for robbers. But this Larissan trial had taken place on the annual festival of Laughter, which gave some point to the proceedings, and the young man was a drunkard and much too ready with his sword and perhaps deserved a lesson.
But he, Cremutius Cordus, was too old and too sober to be made a fool of in this way, and this was no festival of Laughter but, on the contrary, the four hundred and seventy-sixth anniversary of the solemn promulgation of the Laws of the Twelve Tables, that glorious monument to the legislative genius and the moral rectitude of our forefathers. He went home and starved himself to death. All copies of his book were called in and burned except for two or three which his daughter hid away somewhere and republished many years later when Tiberius was dead. It was not very good writing; it got more fame than it really deserved.
I had been all this time saying to myself, "Claudius, you're a poor fellow and not much use in this world, and you have led a pretty miserable life with one thing and another, but at least your life is safe." So when old Cremutius whom I knew very well--we had often met and chatted in the Library--lost his life on a charge like this it was a great shock to me. I felt like a man living on the slopes of a volcano when it suddenly throws up a warning shower of ash and red hot stones.
I had written far more treasonable things in my time than Cremutius. My history of Augustus' religious reforms contained several phrases that could easily be made the subject of an accusation. And though my estate was so small that it would hardly be worth an accuser's while to impeach me for the sake of a fourth share, I realised well enough that all the recent victims of treason-trials were friends of Agrippina, whom I continued to visit whenever I went to Rome. I was not at all sure how far my being a brother-in-law of Sejanus would be sufficient protection to me.
Yes, I had lately become Sejanus' brother-in-law, and now I shall tell how it came about.
XXIII
ONE DAY SEJANUS HAD TOLD ME THAT I OUGHT TO MARRY again, as I did not seem to get on well with my wife. I said that Urgulanilla had been the choice of my grandmother Livia and that I could not divorce her without Livia's permission.
"Oh, no, of course not," he said. "I quite understand that, but it must be very unhappy for you without a wife."
"Thank you," I said, "I manage all right."
He pretended to find this a good joke and laughed loudly, calling me a very wise man, but afterwards said that if by any chance I found it possible to divorce my wife I was to come to him. He had just the woman for me in mind--well-born, young and intelligent. I thanked him but felt uncomfortable. As I was going away he said: "My friend Claudius, I have a word of advice to you. Back Scarlet tomorrow in every race and don't mind losing a bit of money at first; you'll not lose in the long run. And don't back Leek Green: it's an unlucky colour these days.
And don't tell anyone that I gave you the tip." I felt much relieved that Sejanus thought me still worth cultivating, but I couldn't make sense of what he told me.
However, at the chariot-race next day--it was the festival of Augustus--Tiberius saw me take my seat in the Circus and, being in an affable mood, sent for me and asked, "What are you doing these days, nephew?"
I stammered that I was writing a history of the ancient Etruscans, if it pleased him.
He said: "Oh, really? That does credit to your judgment. There's no ancient Etruscan left to protest and no modern Etruscan who cares: so you can write as you please. What else are you doing?"
"Wr-r-riting a history of the ancient C-C-C-C-C-Carthaginians, if you please."
"Splendid! And what else? Hurry up with that stammer.
'I'm a busy man."
"At the m-m-moment I'm b-b-b-b----"
"Beginning a history of C-C-C-Cloud C-C-C-Cuckoo Land?"
"N-no, sir, b-b-b-backing Scarlet."
He looked at me very shrewdly and said: "I see, nephew, that you are not altogether a fool. What makes you back Scarlet?"
I was in difficulties, because I couldn't say that Sejanus had given me the tip. So I said: "I dreamed that Leek Green was d-disqualified for using his whip on his c-c-ccompetitors and Scarlet c-c-came in first with Sea-b-b-blue and White nowhere."
He gave me a purse of money and muttered in my ear: "Tell nobody that I'm staking you, but put this on Scarlet and let's see what happens."
It proved to be Scarlet's day, and by betting with young Nero on every race I won close on two thousand gold pieces. That evening I thought it wise to visit Tiberius at the Palace and to say: "Here's the lucky purse, sir, with a family of little purses which it littered during the day."
"All mine?" he exclaimed. "Well, I am in luck. Scarlet’s the colour, eh?"
This was just like my uncle Tiberius. He hadn't made it clear who was to keep the winnings and I had supposed that I was. But if I had lost all the money he would have said something to make me feel in his debt to that amount.
He might at least have given me a commission.
The next time I came up to Rome I found my mother in such a distracted state that I did not dare at first to utter a word in her presence for fear of her flying into a temper and boxing my ears. I gathered that her trouble was connected with Caligula, then aged twelve, and Drusilla, then aged thirteen, who were staying with her. Drusilla was confined to her room without food and Caligula was at li
berty but looking thoroughly frightened. He visited me that evening and said:
"Uncle Claudius. Beg your mother not to tell the Emperor. We were doing no wrong, I swear.
It was just a game. You can't believe it of us. Say you can't."
When he explained what he did not want told to the Emperor, and swore by his father's honour that he and Drusilla were entirely innocent, I felt bound to do what I could for the children. I went to my mother and said: "Caligula swears you are mistaken. He swears by his father's honour, and if there is the least possible doubt in your mind about his guilt you ought to respect that oath. For my part, I can't believe that a boy of twelve----"
"Caligula's a monster and Drusilla's a she-monster, and you're a blockhead, and I believe my eyes more than their oaths or your nonsense. I shall go to Tiberius the first thing to-morrow."
"But, Mother, if you tell the Emperor, it will not be only those two who will suffer. For once let's talk frankly, and be damned to informers! I may be a blockhead, but you know as well as I do that Tiberius suspects Agrippina of having poisoned Castor to get her elder boys made heirs to the monarchy, and that he lives in terror of a sudden rising in their favour. If you, as their grandmother, accuse these children of incest, do you suppose that he won't find a way of involving the elder members of the family in the charge?"
I, Claudius c-1 Page 33