Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina

  The following, then, is the explanation that my learned friends give. The Moon, which revolves in its orbit below the Sun, either immediately below it or perhaps with the planets Mercury and Venus intervening – this is a disputed point and does not affect the present argument – has a longitudinal motion, like the Sun, and a vertical motion, as the Sun probably has too; but it has also a latitudinal motion which the Sun never has in any circumstances. So when, because of this latitudinal motion, the Moon gets in a direct line with the Sun over our heads and passes invisibly under its blazing disk – invisibly, because the Sun is so bright that by day, as you know, the Moon becomes a mere nothing – then the rays which normally dart from the Sun to the earth are obscured by the Moon’s intervention. For some of the earth’s inhabitants this obscuration lasts for a longer time than for others, according to their geographical position, and some are not affected by it at all. The fact is that the Sun never really loses its light, as the ignorant suppose, and consequently it appears in its full splendour to all people between itself and whom the Moon does not pass.

  This is the simple explanation, then, of an eclipse of the Sun – as simple a matter as if anyone of you were to shade the flame of an oil-lamp or candle with your hand and plunge a whole room into temporary darkness. (An eclipse of the Moon, by the way, is caused by the Moon running into the cone-shaped shadow thrown by the Earth when the Sun is underneath it; it only happens when the Moon passes through the mean point in its latitudinal motion.) But in the districts most affected by the eclipse, which are indicated on the adjoining map, I desire all magistrates and other responsible authorities to take every precaution against popular panic, or robbery under cover of darkness, and to discourage people from staring at the sun during its eclipse, unless through pieces of horn or glass darkened with candle smoke, because for those with weak eyes there is a danger of blindness.

  I think that I must have been the first ruler since the Creation of the World to issue a proclamation of this sort; and it had a very good effect, though of course the country people did not understand words like ‘longitudinal’ and ‘latitudinal’. The eclipse occurred exactly as foretold and the festival took place as usual, though special sacrifices were offered to Diana as Goddess of the Moon, and Apollo as God of the Sun.

  I enjoyed perfect health throughout the following year, and nobody tried to assassinate me, and the one revolution that was attempted ended in a most ignominious way for its prime mover. This was Asinius Gallus, grandson of Asinius Pollio and son of Tiberius’s first wife, Vipsania, by Gallus whom she afterwards married and whom Tiberius hated so and finally killed by slow starvation. It is curious how appropriate some people’s names are. Gallus means cock, and Asinus means donkey, and Asinius Gallus was the most utter little donkey-cock for his boastfulness and stupidity that one could find in a month’s tour of Italy. Imagine, he had not got any troops ready or collected any funds for his revolution, but believed that the strength of his personality supported by the nobility of his birth would win him immediate adherents!

  He appeared one day on the Oration Platform in the Market Place and began to hold forth to a crowd which soon assembled, on the evils of tyranny, dwelling on my uncle Tiberius’s murder of his father, and saying how necessary it was to root out the Caesar family from Rome and give the monarchy to someone really worthy of it. From his mysterious hints the crowd gathered that he meant himself and began to laugh and cheer. He was a wretched orator and the ugliest man in the Senate, not more than four foot six in height, with bottle-shoulders, a great long face, reddish hair, and a tiny little bright red nose (he suffered from indigestion); yet he thought himself Hercules and Adonis rolled into one. There was not, I believe, a single person in the Market Place who took him seriously, and all sorts of jokes went flying about such as: ‘A sinus in tegulis’ and ‘A sinus adlyram’ and ‘Ex Gallo lac et ova.’ (A donkey on the roof-tiles is a proverbial expression for any sudden grotesque apparition, and a donkey playing on a lyre stands for any absurdly incompetent performance, and cock’s milk and cock’s eggs stand for nonsensical hopes.) However, they went on cheering every sentence to see what absurdity would come next: and sure enough, when his speech ended he tried to lead the whole mob up to the Palace to depose me. They followed him in a long column, eight abreast, up to about twenty paces from the outer Palace Gate and then suddenly halted and let him go on by himself, which he did. The sentries at the gate let him through without question, because he was a senator, and he went marching on into the Palace grounds for some distance, shouting threats against me, before he realized that he was alone. (Crowds can be very witty and very cruel sometimes, as well as very stupid and very cowardly.) He was soon arrested, and although the whole affair was so ridiculous I could hardly overlook it: I banished him, but no farther than Sicily, where he had family estates. ‘Go away and crow on your own dung-hill or bray in your own thistle-field, whichever you prefer, but don’t let me hear you,’ I told the ugly, excitable little man.

  The harbour at Ostia was not nearly completed yet and had already cost 6,000,000 gold pieces. The greatest technical difficulty now lay in forming the island between the extremities of the two great moles; and you may not credit it, but I solved it myself. You remember Caligula’s great obelisk-ship which had taken the elephants and camels to Britain, and brought them safely back too? She was at Ostia again and had been used twice since for voyages to Egypt to fetch coloured marble for Venus’s temple in Sicily. But the captain told me that she was becoming unseaworthy and he would not care to risk another voyage in her. So one night, as I lay awake, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to fill her with stones and sink her as a foundation for the island. But I rejected that, because we would only be able to fill her about a quarter full of stones before the water rose over the gunwale, and when she rotted they would just fall out in a loose heap. So I thought, ‘If we only had a Gorgon’s head handy to turn her into a big solid rock!’ And that foolish fancy, the sort that often flies into my mind when I am over-tired, gave birth to a really brilliant idea: why not fill her as full as possible with cement powder, which is comparatively light, and then batten down her hatches, sink her, and let the cement set under the water?

  It was about two o’clock in the morning when this idea came to me and I clapped my hands for a freedman and sent him off at once to bring my chief engineer to me. About an hour later the engineer turned up from the other side of the City in a great hurry and trembling violently; expecting to be executed, perhaps, for some negligence of other. I asked him excitedly whether my idea was practicable, and was greatly disappointed to hear that cement would not set satisfactorily in sea-water. However, I gave him ten days to find some means of making it set. ‘Ten days,’ I repeated solemnly, ‘or else…’

  He thought that ‘or else’ was a threat, but if he had failed I should have explained my little joke, which was simply ‘or else we shall have to abandon the idea’. Fear improved his wits, and after eight days’ frantic experimenting he invented a cement powder that set like a rock when it came into contact with sea-water. It was a mixture of ordinary cement powder from the cement works at Cumae with a peculiar sort of dust from the hills in the neighbourhood of Puteoli, and the shape of that obelisk-ship is now eternized in the hardest stone imaginable at the mouth of Ostia harbour. We have built an island over it, using large stones and more of the same cement; and there is a tall lighthouse on the island, with a beacon fire fed with turpentine shining every night from its summit. There are polished steel reflectors in the beacon chamber which double the light of the fire and send it out in a steady stream down the estuary. The harbour took ten years to complete and cost 12,000,000 in gold; and there are still men at work improving the channel. But it is a great gift to the City, and so long as we command the seas we can never starve.

  Everything seemed to be going very well for me and Rome. The country was contented and prosperous and our armies were victorious everywhere – Aulus was consolida
ting my conquest of Britain by a series of brilliant victories over the yet unsubdued Belgic tribes of the south and south-west; religious observances were being regularly and punctually performed; there was no distress even in the poorest quarters of the City. I had managed to get even with my law-court business and find means of keeping down the number of cases. My health was good. Messalina was lovelier in my eyes than ever. My children were growing up strong and healthy, and little Britannicus was showing the extraordinary precocity which (though, I own, it missed me out) has always run in the Claudian family The only thing that grieved me now was an invisible barrier between myself and the Senate that I could not break down. All that I could do in the way of paying respect to the Senatorial Order, especially to the Consuls in office and to the first-class magistrates, I did, but I was always met with a mixture of obsequiousness and suspicion that I found it difficult to account for and impossible to deal with. I decided to revive the ancient office of Censor which had been swallowed up in the Imperial Directorship of Morals, and in that popular capacity reform the Senate once more and get rid of all useless and obstruction-making members. I posted a notice in the House requesting every member to consider his own circumstances and decide whether he was still qualified to serve Rome well as a senator: if he decided he was not so qualified, either because he could not afford it, or because he felt himself not sufficiently gifted, he should resign. I hinted that those who failed to resign would be dishonourably expelled. And I hurried things along by sending round private notifications to those whom I proposed to expel if they didn’t resign. I thus lightened the Order of about a hundred names, and those who remained I then rewarded by conferring patrician rank on their families. This enlargement of the patrician circle had the advantage of providing more candidates for the higher orders of priesthood and of giving a wider choice of brides and bridegrooms to members of the surviving patrician families; for the four successive patrician creations of Romulus, Lucius Brutus, Julius Caesar, and Augustus had each in turn become practically extinct. One would have thought that the richer and more powerful the family, the more rapidly and vigorously it would breed, but this has never been the case at Rome.

  However, even this cleansing of the Senate did not have any appreciable effect. Debates were a mere farce. Once, during my fourth Consulship, when I was introducing a measure about certain judicial reforms, the House was so listless that I was obliged to speak very plainly:

  ‘If you honestly approve of these proposals, my Lords, do me the kindness of saying so at once and quite simply. Or, if you do not approve of them, then suggest amendments, but do so here and now. Or if you need time to think the matter over, take time, but don’t forget that you must have your opinions ready to be delivered on the day fixed for the debate. It is not at all proper to the dignity of the Senate that the Consul-Elect should repeat the exact phrases of the Consuls as his own opinion, and that everyone else when his turn comes to speak should merely say, “I agree to that” and nothing else, and that then, when the House has adjourned, the minutes should read “A debate took place…” ’

  Among other marks of respect to the Senate, I restored Greece and Macedonia to the list of Senatorial provinces: my uncle Tiberius had made Imperial provinces of them. And I gave the Senate back the right of minting copper coinage for circulation in the provinces, as in the time of Augustus. There is nothing that commands such respect for sovereignty as coins: the gold and silver currency had my head on it, because after all I was the Emperor and the man actually responsible for the greater part of the government; but the Senate’s familiar ‘S.C.’ appeared again on the copper, and copper is at once the most ancient, the most useful, and quantitatively the most important coinage.

  The immediate cause of my decision to purge the Senate was the alarming case of Asiaticus. One day Messalina came to me and said: ‘Do you remember wondering last year whether A.D. 46 there wasn’t something else at the bottom of Asiaticus’s resignation of the Consulship besides the reason he gave – that people were jealous and suspicious of him, because it was his second time as Consul?’

  ‘Yes, it didn’t look like the whole reason.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you something which I should have told you about long ago. Asiaticus has been violently in love for some time with Cornelius Scipio’s wife; what do you think of that?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Poppaea – very good-looking girl, with a straight nose and a bold way of staring at men? And what does she think of it? Asiaticus isn’t a good-looking young fellow like Scipio: he’s bald and rather fat, but of course the richest man in Rome, and what marvellous gardens he has too!’

  ‘Poppaea, I’m afraid, has thoroughly compromised herself with Asiaticus. Well, I’ll tell you. It’s best to be frank. Poppaea came to me some time ago – you know what good friends we are, or, rather, we used to be – and said, “Messalina, dearest, I want to ask you a great favour. You promise not to tell anyone that I’ve asked you?” Naturally I promised. She said: “I’m in love with Valerius Asiaticus and I don’t know what to do about it. My husband is fearfully jealous and if he knew I think he’d kill me. And the nuisance is that I’m married to him in the strict form and you know how difficult it is to get a divorce from a strict form of marriage if the husband chooses to be nasty. It means you lose your children, for a start. Do you think that you could possibly do something to help me? Could you ask the Emperor to speak to my husband and arrange a divorce, so that Asiaticus and I can marry?” ’

  ‘I hope you didn’t say that there was any chance of my consenting. Really, these women…’

  ‘Oh, no, dearest, on the contrary. I said that if she never mentioned the subject to me again I would try, for friendship’s sake, to forget what I’d heard, but that if so much as a whisper came to me of anything improper still going on between her and Asiaticus I’d come straight to you.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad you said that.’

  ‘It was soon afterwards that Asiaticus resigned, and do you remember, then, that he asked the Senate’s permission to visit his estates in France?’

  ‘Yes, and he was away a long time. Trying to forget Poppaea, I suppose. There are a lot of pretty women in the South of France.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. I have been finding out things about Asiaticus. The first thing is that lately he’s been giving large money presents to the Guards captains and sergeants and standard-bearers. He does it, he says, because of his gratitude to them for their loyalty to you. Does that sound right?’

  ‘Well, he has more money than he knows what to do with.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody has more money than they know what to do with. Then the second thing is that he and Poppaea still meet regularly, whenever poor Scipio’s out of town, and spend the night together.’

  ‘Where do they meet?’

  ‘At the house of the Petra brothers. They’re cousins of hers. The third thing is that Sosibius told me the other day, quite on his own, that he thought it most unwise of you to have allowed Asiaticus to pay so long a visit to his estates in France. When I asked him what he meant, he showed me a letter from a friend of his in Vienne: the friend wrote that Asiaticus had actually spent very little time on his estates. He had gone round visiting the most influential people in the province and had even been for a tour along the Rhine, where he showed great generosity to the officers of the garrison. Then, of course, you must remember that Asiaticus was born at Vienne; and Sosibius says – –’

  ‘Call Sosibius at once.’ Sosibius was the man I had chosen as Britannicus’s tutor, so you can imagine that I had the greatest confidence in his judgement. He was an Alexandrian Greek, but had long interested himself in the study of early Latin authors and was the leading authority on the texts of Ennius: he was so much at home in the Republican period, which he knew far better than any Roman historian, including myself, that I considered that he would be a constant inspiration to my little boy. Sosibius came, and when I questioned him answered very frankly. Yes, he bel
ieved Asiaticus to be ambitious and capable of planning a revolution. Hadn’t he once offered himself as a candidate for the monarchy in opposition to me?

  ‘You forget, Sosibius,’ I said, ‘that those two days have been wiped off the City records by an amnesty.’

  ‘But Asiaticus was in the plot against your nephew, the late Emperor, and even boasted about it in the Market Place. When a man like that resigns his Consulship for no valid reason and goes off to France, where he already has great influence, and there tries to enlarge that influence by scattering money about, and no doubt saying that he was forced to resign his Consulship because of your jealousy, or because he stood up against you for the rights of his fellow Frenchmen.…’

  Messalina said: ‘It’s perfectly plain. He has promised Poppaea to marry her, and the only way that he can do that is by getting rid of you and me. He’ll get leave to go to France again, and start his revolt there with the native regiments, and then bring the Rhine regiments into it too. And the Guards will be as ready to acclaim him Emperor as they were ready to acclaim you: it will mean another two hundred gold pieces a man for them.’

  ‘Who else do you think is in the plot?’

  ‘Let’s find out all about the Petra brothers. That lawyer Suilius has just been asked to undertake a case for them: and he is one of my best secret agents. If there’s anything against them besides their having accommodated Poppaea and Asiaticus with a bedroom, Suilius will find it out, you can rely on that.’