I, Claudius

  I said: "If you were a dishonest man you wouldn't ask that question. So let us have another drink together and off you go."

  To cut a long story short, he went away with the bundle and money and a few days later brought me back a verbal answer from Postumus, which was thanks for the money and clothes and that I was not to seek him out, but that the crocodile's mother would know where he was and that his name was now Pantherus and would I forward him his brother-in-law's answer as soon as possible. I paid the old soldier the ten pieces I had promised him and ten more for his faithfulness. I understood whom Postumus meant by the crocodile's mother. The Crocodile was an old freedman of Agrippa's whom we called that because of his torpidity and greed and his enormous jaws. He had a mother living at Perusia, where she kept an inn. I knew the place well. I sent off a letter to Germanicus at once to tell him the news; I sent it by Pallas to Rome telling him to send it off with the next post to Germany. In the letter I merely said that Postumus was alive and in hiding—I did not say where—and begged Germanicus to acknowledge the receipt of the letter at once. Then I waited and waited for an answer but none came. I wrote again, rather more fully; but still no answer. I sent a message to the Crocodile's mother by a country-carrier that no message had yet arrived for Pantherus from his brother-in-law.

  I did not hear again from Postumus. He did not wish to compromise me further, and now that he had money and was able to move about without being arrested on suspicion as a runaway slave he was not dependent on my help.

  Somebody at the inn recognised him and he had to move from there for safety's sake. Very soon the rumour that he was alive was all over Italy. Everyone was talking about it at Rome. A dozen people, including three senators, came out to me from the City to ask me privately if it were true.

  I told them that I had not seen him but that I had met someone who had, and that there was no doubt that it was Postumus. In return I asked them what they intended to do if he came to Rome and won the support of the populace. But the directness of my question embarrassed and hurt them, and I got no answer.

  Postumus was reported to have visited various country towns in the neighbourhood of Rome, but apparently he took the precaution of not entering them before nightfall and always going away, in disguise, before dawn. He was never seen publicly but would lodge at some inn and leave behind a message of thanks for the kindness shown him—signed with his real name. At last one day he landed at Ostia from a small coasting vessel. The port knew, a few hours beforehand, that he was coming, and he had a tremendous ovation at the quay as he stepped ashore. He chose to land at Ostia because it was the summer headquarters of the Fleet, of which his father Agrippa had been Admiral. His vessel flew a green pennant which Augustus had given Agrippa the right to fly whenever he was at sea [and his sons after him] in memory of his sea-victory off Actium. Agrippa's memory was honoured at Ostia almost beyond that of Augustus.

  Postumus was in great danger of his life, being still under sentence of banishment and therefore outlawed by his public reappearance in Italy. He made a short speech of thanks to the crowd for their welcome. He said that if Fortune was kind to him and if he won back the esteem of the Roman Senate and people which he had forfeited because of certain lying accusations brought against him by his enemies—accusations which his grandfather, the God Augustus, had realised too late were untrue—he would reward the loyalty of the men and women of Ostia in no niggardly fashion. A company of Guards was there with orders to arrest him, for Livia and Tiberius had got the news too, somehow. But the men would have had no chance against that crowd of sailors. The captain wisely made no attempt to carry out his commission; he ordered two men to change into sailors' slops and not lose sight of Postumus. But by the time they had changed he had disappeared and they could find no trace of him.

  The next day Rome was full of sailors who picketed the principal streets: whenever they met a knight or senator or public official they asked him the pass-word. The pass-word was "Neptune", and if he did not already know it he was given it and made to repeat it three times unless he wanted a beating. Nobody wanted a beating, and popular feeling now ran so strongly in sympathy with Postumus and against Tiberius and Livia that if a single favourable word had come from Germanicus the whole City, including the Guards and the City battalions, would have come over to him at once. But without Germanicus' support any rising in favour of Postumus would have meant civil war; and nobody had much confidence in Postumus' chances if it came to a struggle with Germanicus.

  In this crisis the same Crispus who had antagonised Tiberius two years before by sending Clement to his death on the island [but had been forgiven] came forward and offered to redeem his fault by this time making sure of Postumus. Tiberius gave him a free hand. He found out somehow where Postumus' headquarters were and, going to him with a large sum of money which he said was for the payment of his sailors, who had already lost two working-days by this picketing work, he undertook to bring over the German bodyguard to Postumus' side as soon as he gave the signal. He had, he said, already given them enormous bribes. Postumus believed him. They arranged a meeting for two hours after midnight at a certain street corner where Postumus' sailors were also to assemble in force. They would march to Tiberius' Palace. Crispus would order the bodyguard to admit Postumus. Tiberius, Castor and Livia would be arrested, and Crispus said Sejanus, while not active in the plot, had undertaken to bring the Guards over in support of the new regime as soon as the first blow had been successfully struck: on condition that he retained his command. The sailors were punctual at the rendezvous but Postumus did not arrive. At that hour no citizens were in the street; so when a combined force of Germans from the bodyguard and picked men of Sejanus' suddenly fell on the sailors—who were mostly drunk and not in any regular formation—the pass-word "Neptune" lost its power. Many of them were killed on the spot, many more as they broke and ran, and the rest never once slowed down, it is said, before they reached Ostia again. Crispus and two soldiers had waylaid Postumus in a narrow alley between his headquarters and the rendezvous, stunned him with a sandbag, gagged and bound him, put him into a covered sedan and carried him off to the Palace. The next day Tiberius made a statement to the Senate. A certain slave of Postumus Agrippa's called Clement, he said, had caused a deal of unnecessary alarm in the City by impersonating his dead former master. This bold fellow had run away from the provincial knight who had bought him when Postumus' estate was sold and had hidden in a wood on the coast of Tuscany until his beard grew long enough to hide his receding chin—the chief point of dissimilarity between himself and Postumus. Some rowdy sailors at Ostia had pretended to believe in him, but only as an excuse for marching to Rome and creating a disturbance there. They had assembled in the suburbs a little before dawn that morning under his leadership with the object of marching to the centre of the City and plundering shops and private houses. When challenged by a force of Watchmen they had dispersed and deserted their leader, who had since been put to death; so the House need have no further anxiety about the matter.

  I heard later that Tiberius pretended not to recognise Postumus when he was brought before him at the Palace and asked him, mockingly: "How did you happen to become one of the Caesars?" To which Postumus answered: "In the same way and on the same day as you did. Have you forgotten?" Tiberius told a slave to strike Postumus on the mouth for his insolence, and he was then put on the rack and asked to reveal his fellow-conspirators. But he would only tell scandalous anecdotes of the private life of Tiberius, which were so disgusting and so circumstantial that Tiberius lost his temper and battered his face in with his great bony fists. The soldiers finished the bloody work by beheading him and hacking him into pieces in the cellar of the Palace.

  What greater sorrow can there be than to mourn a beloved friend as murdered—at the close of a long and undeserved exile, too—and then, after the brief joy and astonishment of hearing that he has somehow cheated his executioners, to have to mourn him a second time—this time without ho
pe of error and without even seeing him in the interval—as treacherously recaptured and shamefully tortured and killed? My one consolation was that when Germanicus heard what had happened—and I would at once write him the whole story so far as I knew it—he would leave his campaigns in Germany and march back to Rome at the head of as many regiments as could be spared from the Rhine and avenge Postumus' death on Livia and Tiberius. I wrote, but he did not answer; I wrote again, and still no answer. But eventually a long affectionate letter came in which there was a wondering reference to the success which Clement had had in impersonating Postumus—how in the world had he managed to do it? From this sentence it was quite clear that none of my important letters had arrived: the only one to arrive had been sent off by the same post as the second. In this I had merely given him particulars of a business matter which he had asked me to look into for him: he now thanked me for the information, which he said was exactly what he wanted. I realized with a sudden feeling of dread that Livia or Tiberius must have intercepted all the rest.

  My digestion had always been bad and fear of poison in every dish did not improve it. My stammer returned and I had attacks of aphasia—sudden blanks in the mind which brought me into great ridicule: if they caught me in the middle of a sentence I would finish it anyhow. The most unfortunate result of this weakness was that I made a mess of my duties as priest of Augustus, which hitherto I had carried out without cause for complaint from anyone.

  There is an old custom at Rome that if any mistake is made in the ritual of a sacrifice or other service the whole thing has to be gone over again from the beginning. It now often happened when I was officiating that I would lose my way in a prayer and perhaps go on repeating the same sequence of sentences two or three times before I realised what I was doing, or that I would take up the flint knife for cutting the victim's throat before sprinkling its head with the ritual flour and salt—and this sort of thing meant going back to the beginning again. It was tedious to make three or four attempts at a service before I could get through it perfectly, and the congregation used to get very restless. At last I wrote to Tiberius as High Pontiff and asked to be relieved from all my religious duties for a year on the ground of ill-health. He granted the request without comment.

  XIX

  GERMANICUS' THIRD YEAR OF WAR AGAINST THE GERMANS was more successful even than the first two. He had worked out a new plan of campaign, by which he would take the Germans by surprise and save his men a lot of dangerous and weary marching. This was to build on the Rhine a fleet of nearly a thousand transports, embark with most of his forces and sail down the river and, by way of the canal that our father had once cut, through the Dutch lakes and by sea to the mouth of the Ems. Here he would anchor his transports on the near bank, except for a few which would serve for making a pontoon bridge. He would then attack the tribes across the Weser, a river, fordable in places, which runs parallel to the Ems about fifty miles beyond. The plan worked well in every detail.

  When the advance-guard reached the Weser they found Hermann and some allied chieftains waiting on the further bank. Hermann shouted across to ask whether Germanicus was in command. When they answered yes, he asked whether they would take him a message. The message was: "Hermann's courteous greetings to Germanicus, and might he be permitted speech with his brother?" This was a brother of Hermann's called, in German, something like Goldkopf, or at any rate a name so barbarous that it was impossible to transliterate it into Latin—as "Hermann" had been made into "Arminius", or as "Siegmyrgth" into "Segimerus"; so it was translated as Flavius, meaning the golden-headed. Flavius had been in the Roman Army for years, and being at Lyons at the time of the disaster of Varus had there made a declaration of his continued loyalty to Rome, repudiating all the family ties which bound him to his treacherous brother Hermann. In the next year's campaign of Tiberius and Germanicus he had fought bravely and lost an eye.

  Germanicus asked Flavius whether he wished to address his brother. Flavius said he didn't much want to but that it might be an offer to surrender. So the two brothers started shouting at each other across the river. Hermann began talking German, but Flavius said that unless he talked Latin the conversation was at an end. Hermann did not want to talk Latin, which the other chiefs did not understand, for fear of being thought a traitor, and Flavius did not want to be thought a traitor by the Romans, who did not understand German. On the other hand Hermann wanted to make an impression on the Romans, and Flavius on the Germans. Hermann tried to keep to German, and Flavius to Latin, but as they grew more and more heated they fell into such a dreadful mixture of both languages that, as Germanicus wrote to me, it was as good as a comedy to hear them. I quote from Genrmanicus' account ot the dialogue.

  HERMANN: Hullo, brother. What's happened to your face? That scar's an awful deformity. Lost an eye?

  FLAVIUS; Yes, brother. Did you happen to pick one up?

  I lost it that day you galloped away out of the wood with mud smeared on your shield so that Germanicus wouldn't recognise you.

  HERMANN: You're wrong, brother. That wasn't me. You must have been drinking again. You were always like that before a battle: a bit nervous unless you had drunk at least a gallon of beer, and had to be strapped to the saddle by the time the warhorns sounded.

  FLAVIUS: That's a lie, of course, but it reminds me what a barbarous gut-rotting drink your German beer is. I never drink it now even when there's a great consignment come into the camp from one of your captured villages. The men only drink it when they have to: they say that it's better than swamp water spoilt by German corpses.

  HERMANN: Yes, I like Roman wine myself. I have a few hundred jars left of what I captured from Varus. This summer I'll be getting in another good supply, if Germanicus doesn't look out. By the way, what reward did you get for losing your eye?

  FLAVIUS: [with great dignity]: The personal thanks of the Commander-in-Chief, and three decorations, including the Crown and the Chain.

  HERMANN: Ho, Ho! The Chain! Do you wear it round your ankles, you Roman slave?

  FLAVIUS: I'd rather any day be a slave to the Romans than a traitor to them. By the way, your dear Thrusnelda's very well and so's your boy. When are you coming to Rome to visit them?

  HERMANN: At the end of this campaign, brother. Ho, Ho!

  FLAVIUS: You mean when you walk behind Germanicus' car in the triumph and the crowd pelts you with rotten eggs? How I'll laugh!

  HERMANN: You had better do all your laughing in advance, because if you still have any throat left to laugh through in three days from now my name's not Hermann.

  But enough of this. I have a message to you from your mother.

  FLAVIUS [suddenly serious and fetching a deep sigh]: Ah, my dear, dear mother! What message does my mother send me? Have I her sacred blessing still, brother?

  HERMANN: Brother, you have wounded our wise and noble and prolific mother to the soul. She says that she will turn her blessing into a curse if you continue to be a traitor to your family and tribe and race, and do not instantly come over to us again and act as joint-General with me.

  FIAVIUS [in German, bursting into tears of rage]: Oh, she never said that, Hermann. She couldn't have said that. It's a lie you made up yourself just to make me unhappy. Confess it's a lie, Hermann!

  HERMANN: She gave you two days to make up your mind.

  FLAVIUS [to his groom}: Hi, you ugly-faced pig, give me my horse and arms! I'm going over the stream to fight my brother. Hermann, you foul thing, I'm coming to fight you!

  HERMANN: Come on then, you one-eyed bean-eating slave, you!

  Flavius jumped on his horse and was about to swim it across the river when a Roman colonel caught at his leg and pulled him off the saddle: he knew German and he knew the absurd veneration that Germans have for their wives and mothers. Suppose Flavius really meant to desert?

  So he told him not to bother about Hermann or believe his lies. But Flavius couldn't resist having the last word. He dried his eyes and shouted across: "I saw your father
-in-law last week. He'd got a nice place near Lyons. He told me that Thrusnelda came to him because she couldn't bear the disgrace of being married to a man who broke his solemn oath as an ally of Rome and betrayed a friend at whose table he had eaten. She said that the only way you can ever win back her esteem is by not using the arms which she gave you on your wedding-day against your sworn friends. She has not been unfaithful to you yet, but that won't last long if you don't instantly come to your senses."

  Then it was Hermann's turn to weep and storm and accuse Flavius of telling lies. Germanicus privately detailed a captain to watch Flavius very carefully during the next battle and at the least sign of treachery to run him through.

  Germanicus wrote seldom but when he did they were long letters and he put into them, he said, all the interesting and amusing things that did not seem quite suitable for his official dispatches to Tiberius: I lived for those letters.

  I was never anxious about Germanicus' safety when he was fighting the Germans: he had the same sort of confidence with them as an experienced bee-keeper has with bees, who can go boldly to a hive and remove the honey, and the bees somehow never sting him as they would you or me if we tried to do the same thing. Two days after fording the Weser he fought a decisive battle with Hermann. I have always been interested in speeches made before a battle: there is nothing that throws such light on the character of a general. Germanicus neither harangued his men in an oratorical way nor joked obscenely with them like Julius Caesar. He was always very serious, very precise and very practical. His speech on this occasion was about what he really thought of the Germans. He said that they were not soldiers. They had a certain bravado and fought well in a mob, as wild cattle fight, and they had a certain animal cunning too which made it unwise to neglect ordinary precautions in fighting them. But they soon tired after their first furious charge and they had no discipline in any true military sense, only a spirit of mutual rivalry. Their chiefs could never count on them to do what was wanted: either they did too much or not enough. "The Germans," he said, "are the most insolent and boastful nation in the world when things go well with them, but once they are defeated they are the most cowardly and abject. Never trust a German out of your sight, but never be afraid of him when you have him face to face. And that's all that need be said except this: most of the fighting tomorrow will be in among those woods, where from all accounts the enemy will be so tightly packed that they will have no room for manoeuvre. Go straight at them, never mind their assegais, and get to close quarters at once. Stab at their faces: that is what they hate most."