Tiberius (29 page)

Drusus died. When I entered the Senate the next day, the consuls sat on the ordinary benches as a sign of mourning. I thanked them, but reminded them of their dignity and rank, and requested that they resumed their proper station. Many senators wept, some with the aid of onions applied surreptitiously to their eyes. I raised my hand in a gesture to silence the display of grief.

"I know," I said, "that some will criticise me for appearing here while my son's body awaits burial, and my affliction is fresh. Many mourners can scarcely endure even the condolence of their families, and prefer to shut themselves away from the light of day. I understand such conduct and would never censure it. For me however seclusion is the worst temptation, and so I resist it, seeking a sterner solace. The arms in which I have taken refuge are those of the state."

I paused and then spoke of my family.

"My son's death is but the latest affliction in my mother's long and glorious life," I said. "Drusus was her grandson, and married to her grand-daughter, my brother's child Julia Livilla. Judge therefore how the Augusta grieves. Her only surviving male descendant apart from myself is my little grandson Tiberius Gemellus. After sixty years and more in the service of the Republic my mother, the Augusta, sees only this child as the heir of her labours, though I must not forget that he has, of course, an elder sister Livia Julia.

"As for me, my son's death, following so soon on that of his adopted brother, our dear Germanicus, is a blow from which I do not now feel I shall ever recover. At such moments it is of little comfort to recall the nobility and virtue of the dead, for, to tell you the truth, Conscript Fathers, such reflections only sharpen the pain, by reminding us of what we have been deprived. So now, I must tell you, that apart from little Tiberius Gemellus, only the sons of Germanicus remain to comfort my declining years . . ."

Then I had them called before the Senate, and the three stood there: Nero shy, ill at ease, but with a dignity which I had never previously known him to assume; Drusus proud, even arrogant, yet sullen, as if he suspected my intentions and would charge me with insincerity; and Gaius Caligula squinting horribly and unable to stop fidgeting . . .

"When these boys lost their father," I said, "I entrusted them to their uncle Drusus, begging him - though he had children of his own - to treat them as though they were his own seed, and, for posterity's sake, to fashion them in his image. Now Drusus has gone. So my plea is directed to you. The gods and our country are my witnesses.

"Senators, on my behalf as well as your own, adopt and guide these youths, whose birth is so glorious - these great-grandsons of Augustus. Nero, Drusus and Gaius" — I continued, taking each in turn by the hand, and then embracing each — "these senators will take the place of your parents. For in the station to which you are born, the good and bad in you is of national concern . . ."

I quote this speech in full, because, in the light of what later happened, I would wish that posterity should fully understand the sincerity of my benevolence towards the sons of Germanicus. If things turned out otherwise subsequently, it was the gods that willed it, not I.

My mother grew ever more insupportable in her old age. No sooner had I finished addressing the Senate than I received a summons from her. I found her dressed in mourning, but with the light of battle in her eye. She at once reproached me for the speech which had been fully reported to her.

"It was not enough," she said, "for you to allow that woman" — she meant Agrippina — "to destroy your loyal confederate Piso and attempt to destroy my dearest friend Plancina, by her lies and malice; but now you have to elevate her children in this rash manner. How do you know that Agrippina didn't poison Drusus? Have you thought of that possibility? Certainly his symptoms resemble those of certain poisons, and who had a better motive?"

"Mother," I said, "this is truly nonsense. There is no reason to suppose that Drusus was murdered. Do you think the suspicion has not crossed my mind, and been rejected? Besides, Agrippina and Drusus were never enemies. If she was going to poison anyone, don't you think she would have started with me?"

"And now," she continued, pay
ing no attention at all to what
I said, "you choose to make yourself ridiculous by speaking in this manner about the woman's children? Do you think that will appease her?"

"They are members of the family," I said, "and the great-grandsons of your husband. Don't you think I have a duty to them?"

"I have no patience with your folly. But you were always as obstinate as a pig. When I think how Augustus used to complain of you! And of how I would defend you! Here, listen to what he said," and, saying this, she drew a letter from her bosom, and began to read: "I can never be easy with Tiberius, because
1
never know what he is thinking and therefore find it difficult to trust him. Moreover, besides his obstinacy — and I agree with you there — he is a bad judge of character. Like you, I have noted with distress his susceptibility . . ."

But I cannot bring myself, even in the privacy of my chamber, to quote further, or to allow myself to dwell on the charges my stepfather brought against me, charges which, I can only say, derived from a more profound misunderstanding of my nature than I believed him capable . . .

"If you bring forward that disgusting little creature, Nero, who is in my opinion no better than a catamite, you will make yourself an object of public mockery and contempt," my mother said.

"Nero,"
1
said, "has obvious faults, but I believe he is capable of outgrowing them. There is a fundamental goodness in his character. Believe me, I have seen evidence of it. . ."

But Livia had reached a stage in life when her attention wandered. She could no longer sustain an argument. Instead she now began to reprove me for offences, many of them imaginary, which lay in the distant past. She accused me of neglecting her. She accused me of having conspired with Julia — yes, Julia — against her. In the next breath she told me she had "adored" Julia, "the best of daughters", and never been able to forgive me for the failure of our marriage, "directly caused by your vices. Julia was distressed by what she heard of your infatuation for that German boy, and everything that went wrong stemmed from that
..."

Since I knew that Livia's dislike of Julia had been fixed from the start, and since I could remember how she had time and again warned me against her, I could only wonder at the tricks which old age can play with memory. I was pained to be compelled to observe the decay of my mother's faculties. Every meeting in the months that followed gave rise to new reproaches, new fantasies, new tirades. The confusion of her mind was betrayed in the intemperance of her language and in her willingness to give me pain, a willingness that might better be described as a compulsion.

Livia's confusion exasperated me. I could no longer tolerate her society. Yet I have to confess that it was no wonder she had grown confused: it would have been no wonder even if she had lacked the excuse of great age. Her confusion was a proper response to the corruption of the times. If I put the most generous interpretation on what she and Augustus thought they had achieved, then I would say, that in bringing to an end the civil wars that had gnawed at Rome's body politic, they believed that they created an opportunity for the revival of virtue. Of course, Augustus, being a man of the world, was aware, from time to time at least, that he deceived himself in nursing such a hope; nevertheless the hope was there, and not ignoble. But it was cheated. Augustus greatly admired the poet Vergil, who celebrated the perfect order of Italy in his
Georgics
and promised a resumption of the Golden Age in his sixth
Eclogue,
and throughout his
Aeneid.
When Augustus spoke of Vergil, a wholly unaccustomed tone — a mixture of warmth and reverence — invaded his voice. There were moments when he really believed it was his destiny to make the Vergilian vision real. I don't say that Livia felt in exactly the same way; hers was never a poetic nature, but she still responded to the underlying impulse, and at certain moments both thought it came within the scope of the possible. There was thus, for all his personal ruthlessness and duplicity, something altogether admirable about my stepfather's ambition. Without his capacity for self-deception, I could throb to the same music. All my life I have been entranced by a vision of virtue, and always it has receded into the obscurity of reality. Plato teaches that this life is at best a dusty reflection of what is ideal. Our experience is a nickering of figments, shadows dancing on the wall of the cave in which we are imprisoned. Yes, indeed; but these are figments that torment, shadows that lie and steal and stab and betray. We envision an ideal Republic; we expound principles of civic virtue; we extol law. Experience matches none of this. Augustus, with a sunnier nature than mine, contrived till near the end to give himself the illusion of faith. I have had to cling to it by my fingernails, like a man scrabbling to save himself from tumbling from a cliff-face into the void.

Perplexed, dismayed, deceived, my mind in the months after Drusus' death entered into turmoil. His loss hit me harder than I could have imagined; indeed, I had never imagined it. I descended into a narrow cleft in the rocks, and, no matter where I turned my gaze, found nothing to comfort, only the dark-grey and slimy rock. In those nights I came to know the grief of Hecuba, carried as a slave to Greece, who saw her son dead and her daughter a sacrifice, and then, driven out of her senses, barked like a dog on the deserted beach, as the winds howled. The same winds howled around me.

I had never had much faith in humanity. Now I lost those shreds which remained. There was a case came before the Senate, in which a certain Vibius Serenus charged his father of the same name with treason. The elder Serenus had been exiled some eight years previously, on what charge I now forget. Now he was brought back and stood before the Senate, in chains, shabby and exhausted by illness, fear or neglect. His son, a brisk and elegant young man, accused him of plots against my life. Subversive agents, he explained, had been sent to foment a rebellion in Gaul; they had been financed by the ex-praetor Marcus Caecilius Cornutus. Substance was given to the charge by the suicide of Cornutus, but the elder Serenus denied everything. He shook his manacles in his son's face, and challenged him to produce his accomplices. "Surely," he said, "an old man like myself cannot be thought to have plotted the emperor's murder with the help of a single confederate, and him a man so weak-spirited as to kill himself because of a lying charge?" His son smiled, and named Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus and Lucius Seius Tubero, friends of mine, whose loyalty I had always considered certain. I said that the accusation was absurd. The elder Serenus' slaves were then tortured, and revealed nothing. Sejanus supervised their examination, and assured me there was no case to answer. Serenus the younger then panicked; he feared the Tarpeian Rock, the reward of attempted parricide, and fled from Rome. I had him fetched back from Ravenna. "Continue your prosecution," I said, intending that his ignominy should be exposed to all. Certain senators, however, misinterpreted my intention; they thought I was certain of the father's guilt, and, to oblige me -yes, such was their notion of what would oblige me! — demanded that the father should suffer the ancient punishment for treason, and be flogged to death. I declined to allow this motion to be put to the vote, and was ready to dismiss the charge and punish the son. At this point Sejanus came to me and said that though the slaves had revealed nothing to prove their master guilty of this treason, nevertheless there was cause to believe that the accusation was not altogether unfounded. I was perplexed, divided between suspicion of the father and loathing for the son's impious zeal. Both were consigned to exile.

Scarcely a week passed without some charge being brought against some man, and though I struggled to preserve my indifference, my disgust intensified. The spectacle of greed, fear, resentment and vindictiveness, that was offered again and again to my eyes, was altogether repellent.

Nor was I appeased by the arrival of a delegation from Further Spain requesting to be permitted to build a shrine to me and to my mother. I refused angrily, dismayed by this new evidence of servility: "Let me assure you," I said, "that I am human and mortal, performing merely human tasks and content to occupy the first place among men to which the Senate has chosen to appoint me. Future generations will do me justice if they judge me worthy of my ancestors, careful of your interests, steadfast in danger, and fearless of animosities incurred in the public service . . ."

Sejanus reported, "You shouldn't have spoken like that. It doesn't have the effect you hope for. When you reject veneration, people assume that you are either insincere or genuinely unworthy of it."

I considered carefully the character of Agrippina's sons. Despite his effeminacy, there was more true virtue, I thought, in Nero than in his brothers, both of whom showed a relish for cruelty that disgusted and frightened me. I resolved therefore to cultivate him. I was now in my middle sixties and, though my health was good, apart from painful rheumatism, knew that I could not count on many years. My own grandson Tiberius Gemellus was still a child, and I was anyway conscious of the promise I had made first to Augustus concerning Germanicus, then to the Senate concerning his children. Nero pleased me by his wit and intelligence; also by an innate melancholy, which suggested to me that he had no exaggerated hopes of his fellow men.