Allan Massie: Tiberius

"I came a day early," she said, "because I no longer choose to advertise my movements exactly. More than that, I do not dare. And I brought Gaius Caligula with me because…" she paused, and looked me in the eyes with a candid gaze which I was reluctant to meet but from which I could not turn away, "because I am afraid of what may happen to him if he is not with you."

She then spoke of Gaius. He was an unsatisfactory youth, moody, disorganised, given to apparently unprovoked outbursts of cackling laughter and fits of temper. He had, she was afraid, a streak of cruelty. (I pictured the boy, his tow-coloured hair wild as a slum-child's, leaping from his seat in the theatre and shrieking, "Kill him, kill him!" as Sigmund lay helpless and terrified on the sand.) Nevertheless, and perhaps precisely because he was difficult, awkward, and given to nervous terrors at night, Antonia loved him; Agrippina, who, having once spoiled him, had come to detest him, had long ago consigned his upbringing to her care, and she felt the special responsibility for him that good women so often feel for their most unsatisfactory child. Now she was afraid on his account.

He had friends, a year or two older than himself for the most part, of good family, but given to dissipation and wild talk. She disapproved of their influence, but her alarm ran deeper.

"I don't know how to say this," she said, "without angering you."

"Antonia, you won't anger me, because I appreciate that you speak out of friendship."

She laid her hand on mine. The bones of old age met in mutual reassurance.

She was suspicious of these friends, some of whom had appeared suddenly, and all the more because she had come to know that much wild talk was exchanged at their drunken suppers. So she had taken steps to enquire about them, and had been alarmed to discover — she hesitated on the word "alarmed" — that two of them had also been intimates of Sejanus. "They were described to me as his proteges. Or else as his creatures." And they maintained relations with him. She had had one of them followed on several mornings after he had attended supper-parties with Gaius, either at her house, or at the home of another member of the group, or at a tavern. On each occasion, he had gone straight to Sejanus' house on the Esquiline, and remained there a long time. "I could only conclude that he had gone there to make a report…"

"Tiberius," she said, "my boy is wild and uncontrolled in his language. He is easily led, because he has no confidence in himself and so is open to flattery. It wouldn't be difficult to lure him into saying stupid things, even engaging in stupid… conspiracies. I am afraid for him, because I believe that one day soon, Sejanus will come to you with evidence, and witnesses to support it, all showing that he has engaged in sedition. That's why I want you to take him into your own household. Permanently."

When I didn't answer, she said:

"Tiberius, did all the evidence against his brothers, Nero and Drusus, come to you by way of Sejanus…?" "I trust Sejanus…"

"Where there is the most trust, there is also the greatest treachery."

She cleared her throat, a polite preparatory noise. She folded her hands in her lap and sat very straight.

"Nobody else," she said, "will dare to tell you what I am going to say. In giving such entire confidence to that man, you have isolated yourself. He has made of you a mystery at Rome, and mysteries are always feared. You made him what he is, but are you sure he has not escaped your control? When he claims to act in your interests, are you always certain that he is not in reality preferring his own? Agrippina has been your enemy — certainly — she is a foolish and bitter woman — but are you so sure that her sons were not made to appear your enemies, by the contrivance, indeed by the order, of that man? What reason do you have to believe the evidence he offers, when I can show you how that evidence has been concocted?"

"He has never told me a lie."

"He has never told you a lie which you have discovered. My poor Tiberius," again she placed her hand on mine, "this is not the first time you have been betrayed by affection, and trusted beyond the moment when reason for trust had vanished. You don't like to hear what I am saying, but if these same thoughts have not come to you in dark moments and been then thrust aside because you find them intolerable, then, mindless of our old, long-enduring friendship, you will act against me. I too will follow the other women of our family to an island prison, and Sejanus will be left master of the field and of your mind. But if I speak to you doubts which you have already entertained in your secret heart, then you will know that they are not vain and unworthy imaginings since they are shared by another. You will know that you are as much his victim as Nero and Drusus or as my poor chick Gaius Caligula may be. If you are not convinced, ask him for a report about the boy. I will wager that he will, with expressions of sorrow, present you with all the evidence he thinks necessary to destroy him. Has it not occurred to you that the chief beneficiary of my grandsons' pretended plots has been that man: Lucius Aelius Sejanus, and none other?"

Night closed in about me like a blanket of wet mist. Sleep was denied me; through the dead hours questions, fear and hesitations afflicted me, like nails hammered into my brain. At dawn the chorus of sea-birds circling the cliffs mocked my red-eyed restlessness. Before we separated, Antonia had said: "In Rome men now talk of you as a monster, given over to nameless vices which everyone is yet ready to name. These stories are spread and believed. At a dinner-party the other day, someone remarked that one day, when sacrificing, you took a fancy to the acolyte who carried the casket with the incense, and could hardly wait for the ceremony to end before you hurried the lad out of the temple and assaulted him; then you did the same for his brother, the sacred trumpeter… Who spreads such stories?"

"The Roman people," I said, turning away to hide my feelings, "have ever been scurrilous."

"I grant you that."

"They are the kind of stories people invent about men in positions of authority, and which others love to spread. They told like tales of Augustus himself, though nobody who knew him believed them."

"But people choose to believe them of you. Why is that?"

For a moment I was tempted to tell her of the vision I had had on the mountainside, and of the promise which the divine boy had made to me. But that promise seemed already a cheat; I was no nearer the peace of mind he had offered me in exchange for my reputation. Besides, Antonia might think I was suffering from the delusions of old age, such as had afflicted Livia.

"Perhaps simply because I have withdrawn here," I said.

"That certainly is one cause for credulity. But there is another. When I first heard that story told, I made it my business to track it down. It was said to have come from Quintus Junius Blaesus, who is, as you know, Sejanus' uncle. Do you think such a man — for he is of very little merit and a known coward — would dare to invent such a story, or if he did, would he not be certain that his nephew would support him?"

"But I cannot see that it is in Sejanus' interest to imperil my authority in this manner."

Antonia sighed. "Tiberius," she said. "You are too reasonable. That has always been your fault. You have acquired a reputation for duplicity simply by telling the truth. Don't you see that you consider Sejanus truthful because he has consistently lied to you? As to your question: it is in his interest to have you thought unstable, capricious and cruel, near to madness. In this way anything vicious or unpopular can be laid at your door, while Sejanus acquires the reputation of being the only man capable of restraining your savagery.