Tiberius (17 page)

I expressed my indignation to my mother. She was spinning wool, an affectation, as I had often told her, and one naturally encouraged by her husband. He thought it made for good "public relations" — a vile phrase he had learned from one of his Greek freedmen — to let it be known that his wife engaged in traditional domestic crafts like spinning and weaving.

"You don't really enjoy that, do you, Mother?"

"As a matter of fact I do. It's very soothing. Perhaps you should take it up yourself. You look strained."

"No wonder."

"But you are stupid to fight your father's love for those boys."

"Do I have to remind you that I stand in the same relation to them myself as he does to me? They are not bad boys, but he is in danger of ruining them."

"He is planning for the future, that's all. As we grow older, Tiberius, something strange happens to us. We find the horizon very short one day and stretching out illimitably the next. You can't blame Augustus for being concerned with what happens to the state when he has gone."

"And have I no part in that? Is there no room for me in his plans?"

"Of course there is, of course you have. How could it be otherwise considering your age, achievement and station? Moreover, you might remember that I am capable of making my own plans and carrying them out. For example I am arranging that Gaius should marry your brother's daughter, little Livia Julia."

"Very nice. That will maintain your influence, Mother."

"Don't take that tone with me. I dislike it. I always have. And I know what it means. You are about to sink into a fit of sulks."

"That's ridiculous. I'm concerned of course about my personal position."

"You will be the first man in the state — when your stepfather dies."

"He will live twenty years. And what will I be then? But I am not merely concerned with my own position. I disapprove fundamentally, Mother, of the direction in which things are tending. We are in danger of becoming like an eastern despotism, with a law of succession. It's not Roman."

"Yes, Tiberius, you are a conservative. It is that which makes you unhappy. Well, I share your sentiments but I have the intelligence to know that things have to change if we want them to remain the same. And I know that Augustus' creation is good because unlike you I can remember the civil wars. Don't become like your father, Tiberius, a man for whom all virtue resided only in the past, who viewed the new world as something made for his personal distress."

"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.
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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 such 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
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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 . . ."