Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina

  ‘Then why are they sitting in such humble seats?’ the Germans persisted.

  (‘Hush, hush!’ ‘Quiet there, Barbarians, we can’t hear!’ and similar protests from the crowd.)

  ‘Out of compliment to Caesar,’ the ushers lied. ‘They swear that if Caesar’s deafness forces him to occupy such a lowly seat, they won’t presume to sit any higher.’

  ‘And do you expect us to be outdone in courtesy by a miserable parcel of blackamoors?’ the Germans shouted indignantly. ‘Come on, brothers, down we go!’ The play was held up for five minutes as they forced their way down through the packed seats and fetched up triumphantly among the Vestal Virgins. Well, they meant no harm, and I greeted them honourably as they deserved, and at dinner that night consented to let them have the king they wanted; I was, of course, very glad to be able to do so.

  I sent Italicus across the Rhine with an admonition that contrasted strangely with the one I had given Meherdates before I sent him across the Euphrates; for the Parthians and the Cheruscans are the two most dissimilar races, I suppose, that you could find anywhere in the world. My words to Italicus were these: ‘Italicus, remember that you have been called upon to rule over a free nation. You have been educated as a Roman and accustomed to Roman discipline. Be careful not to expect as much from your fellow tribesmen as a Roman magistrate or general would expect from his subordinates. Germans can be persuaded but not forced. If a Roman commander says to a military subordinate: “Colonel, take so many men to such-and-such a place and there raise an earthwork so-and-so many paces long, thick, and high,” he replies, “Very good, General”: off he goes without argument and the earthwork is raised within twenty-four hours. You can’t speak to a Cheruscan in that style. He’ll want to know precisely why you want the earthwork raised and against whom, and wouldn’t it be better to send someone else of less importance to perform this dishonourable task – earthworks are a sign of cowardice, he’ll argue – and what gifts will you bestow on him if he consents, of his own free will, to carry out your suggestion? The art of ruling your compatriots, my friend Italicus, is never to give them a downright order, but to express your wishes clearly, disguising them as mere advice of State policy. Let your thegns think that they are doing you a favour, and thus honouring themselves, by carrying out these wishes of their own free will. If there is an unpleasant or thankless task to be done, make it a matter of rivalry between your thegns who shall have the honour of undertaking it, and never fail to reward with gold bracelets and weapons services which at Rome would be regarded as routine duties. Above all, be patient and never lose your temper.’

  So he went off in high hopes, as Meherdates had gone off, and was welcomed by a majority of the thegns, the ones who knew that they had no chance of succeeding to the vacant throne themselves, but were jealous of all native-born claimants. Italicus did not know the ins-and-outs of Cheruscan domestic politics and could be counted on to behave with reasonable impartiality. But there was a minority of men who thought themselves worthy of the throne themselves and these temporarily sank their differences to unite against Italicus. They expected that Italicus would soon make a mess of the government from ignorance, but he disappointed them by ruling remarkably well. They therefore went secretly round to the chiefs of allied tribes raising feeling against him as a Roman interloper. ‘The ancient liberty of Germany has departed,’ they lamented, ‘and the power of Rome is triumphant. Is there no native Cheruscan worthy of the throne, that the son of Flavius, the spy and traitor, should be permitted to usurp it?’ They raised a large patriotic army by this appeal. Italicus’s supporters, however, declared that Italicus had not usurped the throne, but had been offered it with the consent of a majority of the tribe; and that he was the only royal prince left and though born in Italy had studiously acquainted himself with the German language, customs, and weapons, and was ruling very justly; and that his father Flavius, far from being a traitor, had on the contrary sworn an oath of friendship with the Romans approved by the whole nation, including his brother Hermann, and unlike Hermann had not violated it. As for the ancient liberty of the Germans, that was hypocritical talk: the men who used it would think nothing of destroying the nation by renewed civil wars.

  In a great battle fought between Italicus and his rivals, Italicus came off victorious, and his victory was so complete that he soon forgot my advice and grew impatient of humouring German independence and vanity: he began ordering his thegns about. They drove him out at once. Afterwards he was restored by the armed assistance of a neighbouring tribe, and then ousted again. I made no attempt to intervene: in the West as in the East the security of the Roman Empire rests largely on the civil dissensions of our neighbours. At the time of writing Italicus is king once more but much hated although he has just fought a successful war against the Chattians.

  There was trouble farther north about this time. The Governor of the Lower Rhine province died suddenly and the enemy began their cross-river raids again. They had a capable leader of the same type as the Numidian Tacfarinas who had given us so much trouble under Tiberius: like Tacfarinas he was a deserter from one of our auxiliary regiments and had picked up a considerable knowledge of tactics. Gannascus was his name, a Frisian, and he carried on his operations on an extensive scale. He captured a number of light river transports from us and turned pirate on the coasts of Flanders and Brabant. The new Governor I appointed was called Corbulo, a man for whom I had no great personal liking but whose talents I gratefully employed. Tiberius had once made Corbulo his Commissioner of Highways and he had soon sent in a severe report on the fraud of contractors and the negligence of provincial magistrates whose task it was to see that the roads were kept in good repair. Tiberius, acting on the report, had fined the accused men heavily; and out of all proportion to their culpability because the roads had been allowed to get into a bad condition by previous magistrates and these particular contractors had only been employed to patch up the worst places. When Caligula succeeded Tiberius and began to feel the need of money, amongst his other tricks and shifts he brought out the Corbulo report and fined all previous provincial magistrates and contractors on the same scale as the ones who had been fined by Tiberius; he gave Corbulo the task of collecting the money. When I succeeded Caligula I paid back these fines, only retaining as much as was needed to repair the roads – about one-fifth of the total amount. Caligula had not, of course, used any of the money for road-repairs, and neither had Tiberius, and the roads were in a worse condition than ever. I really did repair them and introduced special traffic-regulations limiting the use of heavy private coaches on country roads. These coaches did far more damage than country wagons bringing in merchandise to Rome, and I did not think it right that the provinces should pay for the luxury and pleasure of wealthy idlers. If rich Roman knights wished to visit their country estates, let them use sedan-chairs, or ride on horseback.

  But I was speaking of Corbulo. I knew him for a man of great severity and precision, and the garrison of the Lower Province needed a martinet to restore discipline there: the Governor who had died was much too easy-going. Corbulo’s arrival at his headquarters at Cologne recalled Galba’s at Mainz. (Galba was now my Governor of Africa.) He ordered a soldier to be flogged whom he found improperly dressed on sentry-duty at the camp gate. The man was unshaved, his hair had not been cut for at least a month, and his military cloak was a fancy yellow colour instead of the regulation brownish-red. Not long after this Corbulo executed two soldiers for ‘abandoning their arms in the face of the enemy’: they were digging a trench and had left their swords behind in their tents. This scared the troops into efficiency, and when Corbulo took the field against Gannascus and showed that he was a capable general as well as a strict disciplinarian they did all that he could have expected of them. Soldiers, or at least old soldiers, always prefer a reliable general, however severe, to an incompetent one, however humane.

  Corbulo fitted out war-vessels, chased and sank Gannascus’s pirate fleet, and then marche
d up the coast and compelled the Frisians to give hostages and swear allegiance to Rome. He wrote out a constitution for them on the Roman model and built and garrisoned a fortress in their territory. This was all very well, but instead of stopping here Corbulo pushed on into the land of the Greater Chaucians, who had taken no part in the raids. He heard that Gannascus had taken refuge in a Chaucian shrine and sent a troop of cavalry to hunt him down and kill him there. This was an insult to the Chaucian Gods, and after Gannascus’s assassination the same troop rode on to the Ems and there at Emsbuhren presented the Chaucian tribal council with Corbulo’s demands for their instant submission with payment of a heavy yearly tribute.

  Corbulo reported his actions to me and I was furiously angry with him; he had done well enough in getting rid of Gannascus, but to pick a quarrel with the Chaucians was another matter. We had not sufficient troops to spare for a war: if the Greater Chaucians called in the Lesser Chaucians to their assistance and the Frisians revolted again I would have to find strong reinforcements from somewhere, and they were not to be had, because of our commitments in Britain. I wrote ordering him to recross the Rhine at once.

  Corbulo received my orders before the Chaucians had had time to reply to his ultimatum. He was angry with me, thinking that I was jealous of any general who dared to rival my military feats. He reminded his staff that Geta had not been awarded proper honours for his fine conquest of Morocco and the capture of Salabus; and said that, though I had now made it legal for generals who were not members of the Imperial Family to celebrate a triumph, in practice, it seemed, no one but myself would be allowed to conduct a campaign for which a triumph could legally be awarded. My anti-despotic pretensions were mere affectation: I was just as much of a tyrant as Caligula, but I concealed it better. He said too that I was lowering Roman prestige by going back on the threats that he had made in my name; and that our allies would laugh at him, and so would his own troops. But this was only an angry talk to his staff. All that he told the troops when he sounded the signal for a general retirement was: ‘Men, Caesar Augustus orders us back across the Rhine. We do not yet know why he has reached this decision, and we cannot question it, though I confess that I, for one, am greatly disappointed. How fortunate were the Roman generals who led our armies in the days of old!’ However, he was awarded triumphal ornaments and I also wrote him a private letter exculpating myself from the angry charges which, I told him, I had heard that he had made against me. I wrote that if he had been angry, why, so had I, on hearing of his provocation of the Chaucians; and that though he should have thought better of me than to accuse me of jealous motives, I blamed myself for sending him so curt a dispatch instead of explaining at length my reasons for ordering him to withdraw. I then explained these reasons. He wrote back in handsome apology, withdrawing the charges of despotism and jealousy, and I think now that we understood each other. To keep his troops occupied and allow them no leisure for laughing at him, he put them to work on a canal twenty-three miles long between the Meuse and the Rhine, to carry off occasional inundations of the sea in this flat region.

  Since that time there have been no other events of importance to record in Germany except, four years ago, another raid by the Chattians. They crossed the Rhine in great force one night a few miles north of Mainz. The Commander of the Upper Province was Secundus, the Consul who had behaved with such indecision when I became Emperor. He was also supposed to be the best living Roman poet. Personally, I think very little of the moderns, or indeed of the Augustans: their poetry does not ring true to me. To my mind Catullus was the last of the true poets. It may be that poetry and liberty go together: that under a monarchy true poetry dies and the best that one can hope for then is gorgeous rhetoric and remarkable metrical artifice. For my part I would exchange all twelve books of Virgil’s Aeneid for a single book of Ennius’s Annals. Ennius, who lived in Rome’s grandest Republican days and counted the great Scipio as his personal friend, was what I would call a true poet: Virgil was merely a remarkable verse-craftsman. Compare the two of them when they are both writing about a battle: Ennius writes like the soldier he was (he rose from the ranks to a captaincy), Virgil like a cultured spectator from a distant hill. Virgil borrowed much from Ennius. Some say he overshadowed Ennius’s rude genius by his cultured felicity of phrase and rhythm. But that is nonsense. It is like Aesop’s fable of the wren and the eagle. The birds all competed as to which could fly the highest. The eagle won, but when he tired and could go no higher, the wren, who had been nestling on his back, mounted up a few score feet and claimed the prize. Virgil was a mere wren by comparison with Ennius the eagle. And even if you concentrate on single beauties, where in Virgil will you find a passage to equal in simple grandeur such lines of Ennius’s as these? –

  Fraxinu’ frangitur atque abies consternitur alta.

  Pinus prōcēras pervortunt: omne sonabat

  Arbustum fremitu silvaï frondosal.

  The ash was hewn, the high white fir laid low,

  Down toppled they the princely pines, and all

  That grove of countless leaves rang with the timber’s fall.

  But they are untranslatable, and in any case I am not writing a treatise on poetry. And though Secundus’s poetry was, in my opinion, as disingenuous and unpraiseworthy as his behaviour in the Senate House that day, he was at least capable of dealing decisively with the Chattians on their return in two divisions from the plunder of our French allies. Victory disorganizes the Germans, especially if their plunder includes wine, which they swill as if it were beer, disregarding its greater potency. Secundus’s forces surrounded and defeated both enemy divisions, killing 10,000 men and capturing as many prisoners. He was given triumphal ornaments, but the regulations controlling the award of triumphs did not permit me to grant him one.

  I had recently granted a similar honour to Secundus’s predecessor, one Curtius Rufus, who, though only the son of a sword-fighter, had risen under Tiberius to the dignity of first-rank magistrate. (Tiberius had won him this appointment, in spite of the competition of several men of birth and distinction, by remarking: ‘Yes, but Curtius Rufus is his own illustrious ancestor’.) Rufus had become ambitious for triumphal ornaments but was aware that I would not approve of his picking a quarrel with the enemy. He knew of a vein of silver that had been discovered a few miles across the river, in the reign of Augustus, just before Varus’s defeat, and sent a regiment across to work it. He got a good deal of silver out before the vein ran too far underground to be manageable – sufficient silver indeed to pay the whole Rhine army for two years. This was naturally worth triumphal ornaments. The troops found the mining very arduous and wrote me an amusing letter, in the name of the entire army:

  The loyal troops of Claudius Caesar send him their best wishes and sincerely hope that he and his family will continue to enjoy long life and perfect health. They also beg that, in future, he will award his generals triumphal ornaments before he sends them out to command armies, because then they will not feel obliged to earn them by making Caesar’s loyal troops sweat and drudge at silver-mining, canal-digging, and suchlike tasks which would be more suitably done by German prisoners. If Caesar would only permit his loyal troops to cross the Rhine and capture a few thousand Chattians, they would be very pleased to do so, to the best of their ability.

  Chapter 25

  THE year after Herod died I celebrated the first annual festival in honour of my British triumph; and, remembering the complaints that I had overheard that night on the steps of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, I made a distribution of money to A.D. 45 the needy populace – three gold pieces a head with half a gold piece extra for every child in the family who had not yet come of age. In one case I had to pay as much as twelve and a half gold pieces, but that was because there were several sets of twins to subsidize. Young Silanus and young Pompey assisted me in the distribution. When I record that I had now removed all Caligula’s extraordinary taxes and paid back the men he had robbed, and that work continued on t
he Ostia harbour scheme and the aqueducts and the Fucine Lake drainage scheme, and that, without defrauding anyone, I was able to pay out this bounty and still keep a substantial balance in the Public Treasury, you will admit, I think, that I had done extremely well in these four years.

  The astronomer Barbillus (to whom I referred in my letter to the Alexandrians) made some abstruse mathematical calculations and informed me that there was to be an eclipse of the sun on my birthday. This caused me some alarm, because an eclipse is one of the most unlucky omens that can happen at any time, and happening on my birthday, which was also a national festival in honour of Mars, it would greatly disturb people and give anyone who wished to assassinate me every confidence of success. But I thought that if I warned the people beforehand that the eclipse was to take place they would feel very differently about it: not despondent but actually pleased that they knew what was coming and understood the mechanics of the phenomenon.

  I published a proclamation:

  Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Caesar Augustus Germanicus Britannicus, Emperor, Father of the Country, High Pontiff, Protector of the People for the fifth year in succession, three times Consul, to the Senate, People, and Allies of Rome, greetings.

  My good friend Tiberius Claudius Barbillus of the city of Ephesus made certain astronomical calculations last year, since confirmed by a body of his fellow astronomers in the city of Alexandria, where that science flourishes, and found that an eclipse of the sun, total in some parts of Italy, partial in others, will take place on the first day of August next. Now, I do not wish you to feel any alarm on this account, though superstitious terrors have always in the past been awakened by this natural phenomenon. In the old days it was a sudden and inexplicable event and considered as a warning by the Gods themselves that happiness was to be blotted out on earth for a while, just as the sun’s life-giving rays were blotted out. But now we so well understand eclipses that we can actually prophesy, ‘On such and such a day an eclipse will take place.’ And I think everyone should feel both proud and relieved that the old terrors are laid at last by the force of intelligent human reasoning.