‘Wild mmmmmm—’
They were already on the table when Claudius came in. His daughter was absent with a migraine, a physical endowment from her father. She had none of his mental endowments. Britannicus, his sturdy son, stood at attention. Agrippina, all smiles, helped her husband on to his couch. The three were reclined when Claudius took in the empty place. ‘Late again. Not on the hour but five minutes bbbbefore the hour. Isn’t that military ppppunctuality, my son?’
‘A family dinner isn’t a parade, father.’
‘No. Well, at least ccccommon ppppoliteness. An empire ought to be run like the ffffusion of a ffffamily and an army. If that’s ppppossible.’
The mushrooms in their thick brown sauce steamed less urgently. ‘Eat, Claudius dear. We won’t wait for Domitius.’
‘I’ve little appppetite, my dear. Still, the odour is – seductive.’ Agrippina’s son now rushed in, unclasping his cloak, crying:
‘My profoundest apologies. An appointment in Suburra. One of the litter-carrying slaves broke his ankle. I do most sincerely regret my unpunctuality, dear father. I beat the fool, of course, and borrowed a slave from somebody, I forget whom – Ah, mushrooms, delicious—’
He was ready to put his fingers unceremoniously in the dish, but Claudius proffered his own full plate. ‘Take these. I can’t eat.’
Agrippina coughed violently. She then, preoccupied with the feigned paroxysm, overturned her goblet blindly and let wine cascade on to her dress. Her son took Britannicus’s napkin and wiped her down. Claudius said:
‘Well, since you ordered them, my dear—’
He fingered in three of the fungi whole. Agrippina exhaled in relief and cried: ‘Oh, I’m so pleased. Let’s drink to the Emperor’s restored health and appetite. May the Emperor Claudius live for ever.’
‘Not even you, my dear, can prevent me from turning into a gggg—’ He turned pale. He sweated. ‘Greed. Always one of my failings. The virtues of ttttemperance. Seneca is very good on that subj—Oh, no.’ His round face under the snow thatch passed from colour to colour like a chameleon. He gaped and tried to drink in all the air of the world. He clutched his big belly with both hands. Quick to act. That witch in the Suburba knew her craft. Nor, it was hoped, had suspected who her veiled client might be. But, to be on the safe side, have her put, operative word, to silence. Agrippina clapped her hands, her eating son thought, for a moment, in applause, but it was that servants might come. Claudius, moaning, was helped out. One servant performed a more important act – the removal of the mushrooms and their consignment to silence. Domitius tore white meat from a bone. Britannicus stood to attention, waiting for orders that did not arrive.
Pallas and Agrippina stood in the imperial bedchamber and watched Claudius turn painfully into a god. He had vomited, but she had been ready with what she alleged to be a healing aperient well watered. She openly embraced Pallas when Claudius opened his eyes wide for a last gulp of the world. Gaping to the limit to take it all in to take below to the bloodless land of the shades. She made a rutting motion in Pallas’s arms as the rattle began. ‘Goodbye, uncle Ccccclaudius,’ she jeered. Then, affronted by the audible collapse of nether muscles, she strode to the one lamp and blew it out.
When the Roman dawn was gorgeous over the pines beyond the terrace, Narcissus paced, waiting for the commander of the Praetorian Guard to appear. He at length strode in, Afranius Burrus, a decent moral man, though chosen for the office by Agrippina. ‘The news?’ he asked.
‘All over. It was a failure of the heart. To be expected at his age after unwonted gorging.’
‘What had he eaten?’
‘Mushrooms.’
‘Mushrooms can always be dangerous. He proclaimed the succession?’
‘Pallas and the Empress report that he proclaimed it.’
‘Be so good,’ Burrus said weightily, ‘as to assure the Emperor designate that the Praetorian Guard is ready to serve him with all the devotion it accorded his father.’
‘Adoptive father I take it you mean. The Emperor designate is not Britannicus.’
‘Not Britannicus?’ Burrus seemed to take all of ninety seconds to perform an act of simple subtraction. Then he heard the voice of a mere boy, though a precocious one, up early to practise his music, moaning a song to the accompaniment of a cithern:
‘Troy is destroyed,
But a greater Troy
Will rise in the void
None shall destroy.’
If I have neglected for many pages the minor personages of this chronicle, it is because they have done little worthy of your attention. Who can compare a mother’s wiping of her child’s nose with the spreading of the word? If you reply that the word will not last but noses will always drip you are doubtless speaking a profound truth, but chronicles are not compiled that the obvious may be eternised. When the great men are gone it will be time to give ear and eye to the little ones. However, let us go briefly to a gymnasium in Rome where Caleb alias Metellus no longer trains himself to perform skilled acts of aggression and defence in the circus but instead trains others. He has lost his youth but is in robust maturity, health glowing from him like oil, or it may be oil. ‘Break now,’ he says to two Greek wrestlers. ‘Rub down. Then to the baths. Ah, Julius.’
For Marcus Julius Tranquillus the senior centurion has trodden sand and made a circuitous way past sweating gougers and punchers to say a word of farewell to his brother-in-law. During the past years he has done nothing notable. His leg was long in healing, he put on some weight and lost some hair and is clearly no longer a young officer of whom much may be expected. His sole triumph was the confirmation of Messalina’s villainy, but he took no pleasure in witnessing her execution, seeing that glorious body rendered into proleptically putrescent morphology or worm’s food. The Emperor Claudius was not as grateful as he might have been: he probably associated Julius with a phase of pain and humiliation, and Narcissus, in his concentration on amassing wealth before his retirement, forgot the humble soldier who had lent the weight of a witness to a most dangerous accusation. He served briefly in Syria but was stricken with fever and sent home. He grew weary with duties in barracks. But now, with a new Emperor, and with a new procurator in Palestine, he is to be given a chance to serve Rome with his Aramaic, not that he has much of it. Caleb says:
‘How does Sara feel about it?’
‘She won’t come. She never wants to see Palestine again. She’s happy in Rome, she says.’
‘You’re going with the new procurator?’
‘Yes. Poncius Festus. But I retire in a year. I’m given this short tour as they call it, and then – a pension, a garden, boring reminiscences to make Sara yawn. Sara thinks she can bear a year’s separation.’
‘Can you?’
‘She has Ruth. Do you think of going back?’
Caleb rubbed his chin as if to remind himself that there was no beard there, he was no longer a real Jew. ‘To start insurrections? Kill Poncius Festus and you in the name of a free Israel? I’m a married man now, with a child on the way. First things first. I’m seduced. I’ve succumbed.’
‘Grown up.’
‘Oh, I still believe. But I think Israel will get her independence through negotiation. Break the link through a new client monarch. I have a feeling that Rome will want to be rid of Palestine. Costs too much in taxes. Too poor to pay taxes. I don’t know. But Hannah comes first now. And the child on his way.’
‘You’re sure it’s going to be a son?’
‘I take what God sends. When do you sail?’
‘The day after tomorrow if the wind’s good. From Puteoli. And if the Emperor’s performance at Neapolis ends on time.’
‘What performance is that?’
‘Shameful, really. He sings and dances before an invited audience. Conscripted, I mean. I’m one of the conscribed. Bad luck. We lodge the night with the garrison at Puteoli and the entire garrison has to attend.’
‘God help you.’
This was
the well-remembered occasion on which the gods or the chthonian demons responded with displeasure to a Roman emperor’s making a fool of himself in public. It was in an indoor theatre outside Neapolis. The entire Puteoli garrison, a number of patricians, knights, consuls and their wives sat dismally on stone benches while a certain Gaius Petronius, a simpering aesthete in a violet robe carrying a bunch of hyacinths, danced on to the stage and announced: ‘Honoured guests. Imperial entertainment. His Grace the Emperor Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar.’ He tucked his hyacinths under his arms and led the applause. There were dutiful shouts of ‘ave!’ The Emperor, looking like the silly though precocious boy he was, came on smirking. He was in frilled purple and florally crowned. With him were a number of shamefaced lute and flute players who had nothing to do but hold him to the simple tune he had composed to bear words he had composed. The tune was this:
The players preluded with it while the Emperor announced: ‘The Siege of Troy.’ Under the loyal or sycophantic applause there were deeper rumblings from below ground. Some of the ladies showed reasonable fear, but the lynx eyes of the Emperor were on everybody, and the husbands quietened their spouses. The Emperor began:
‘Richly enrobed with the flames of her funeral, Ilium yielded her limbs to the fingers of fire,
Lovingly, lustingly, cooing like columbines,
Roaring like lions and howling like wolves of the wood.
See how the citizens, screaming and scurrying,
Scamper like woodlice from logs freshly thrown on the fire …
One of the audience inadvertently yawned, a young soldier unused to high art and happier with the dirty songs of the taverns. The Emperor cried: ‘I demand not only attention. I demand appreciation. Take that man away.’ The wretched fellow was dragged off by two of his comrades, a little too eagerly thought Marcus Julius Tranquillus, who sat next to Poncius Festus. The Emperor resumed:
‘Ancient Anchises, caught sleeping, awakening
Now to the flames that devour his ancestral abode,
Calls to his son, young Aeneas, to rescue him,
Pious Aeneas, our father, the builder of Rome …’
The underground rumblings grew and the pillars of the theatron visibly shook. Women now screamed. The Emperor cried:
‘Stay! Stay! Nobody is to leave! The Emperor’s orders!’ The nervous musicians resumed fluting and thrumming, though not all at the same time. The Emperor sang loudly but not loudly enough to drown the treasonous noise of something crashing outside:
‘Pious Aeneas, our father, the builder of Rome,
Bore on his shoulders, so handsome and muscular,
Anchises, the father of all of the fathers of Rome …’
He gave up. There was no applause. The shaking earth seemed to be applauding enough. Brave or stupid, the Emperor watched part of the roof giving way. Gaius Petronius came on and led him gawping off. Julius to Poncius Festus said:
‘Well, that’s one way to stop him singing.’
There was no smile in response. The procurator designate was pushing his way through the frantic pushing audience. The earthquake continued its performance.
CHAPTER FOUR
The month of the ox-eyed goddess and, round about its ides, the weather has improved sufficiently for me to move my chair out of doors and admire the fat thrushes or enjoy the wink of the sun in the leaves of the planetrees. I have been reading in a rather rare book which appeared during the imperiate of Galba, brief and perhaps apocryphal, its title A Dialogue Between the Emperor Nero and His Friend Gaius Petronius. Petronius you will know from his scurrilous but witty Satyricon, which I sometimes think to be a mockery of Luke’s ‘Pauliad’, but this dialogue, more of a monologue, for Nero interjects only phrases of wonder or agreement, has been recognised as a dangerous work and copies have probably been privily burnt by censorial decree. It presents a philosophy which I have already made the young Nero adumbrate in a discussion with Seneca. This philosophy is said to have been derived from Gaius Petronius’s youthful indoctrinations by a poet exiled for blatant sodomy in the unequivocally heterosexual Claudius’s reign, his real name unknown but his sobriquet Selvaticus. Briefly, the philosophy states that everything must bow down to beauty, and that the artist is above the regular moral concerns of ordinary humanity. As the laws of the state are hardly likely to concede such a transcendence, it follows that only the individual whom rank has raised above the law is free to pursue beauty to the limit. Beauty in nature is admirable but too sensuous to satisfy the totality of man’s aesthetic nature. The beauty of art is far higher, and art is permitted to rearrange the forms of nature into new and often intricate patterns, entailing – and this is the point where moral freedom enters – a curtailment or a perversion of what may be thought of as natural rights. The basic natural right of all living things is to subsist and to fulfil what is sometimes termed their vital cycle. In Petronius’s aesthetic, which became Nero’s, this right was denied, and human life was to be regarded by the imperial artist as living wood is regarded by the carpenter – namely, fissile and susceptible of new shapes. It was necessary, in cultivating this aesthetic philosophy, to nullify such natural sympathetic responses as make the ordinary anaesthetic man wish to avoid giving pain to others, especially those close to him, and to regard what ordinary humanity calls cruelty as a morally neutral means of procuring new aesthetic transports. To understand this philosophy of beauty is partly to understand the enormities of Nero’s imperiate, which, by Petronian standards, were not enormities at all but wholly legitimate devices for flushing the imagination with a hint of a higher reality. As Petronius’s own skill as a verbal artist lay in the creation of imaginary personages who could be manipulated freely and freely annihilated, so Nero’s special artistic achievements lay in acts of manipulation which operated in the realm of actuality, not imagination. In one sense he was the finest artist of his time, in another, and this was partly due to the enforced absence of salutary criticism, he was not the worst but merely one of many mediocrities. His verse was bad, his music tuneless, his singing deplorable, his dancing ridiculous, his acting painful. Petronius, who could have been a useful critic, was so enthralled by the Emperor’s total moral freedom, one of the Petronian requisites for high art, that he tended to ignore the wretched results of this freedom in the creative realm.
I mentioned above a certain higher reality invoked by art. Petronius, following the tradition of Plato and indeed of Aristotle, accepted the notion of a supreme being, though one remote from the Hebraic and Christian concepts. This being was amoral, and hence he did not acquaint mankind with his essence through acts of justice or the inspirations of the natural philosophers. A whisper of his quality was heard in manmade works of beauty. The more cultivated Romans of the time accepted with good humour, and even sometimes with vindictive persecution of their rejectors, the gods of the state as useful and perhaps diverting personifications of social virtues and natural processes. But, like the Athenians whom Paul failed to convince, they took a mystical pleasure in brooding on an unknown god whose greatness lay in his capability of definition through negative means. Beauty, said Petronius, was his one sure attribute, and the pursuit of beauty was the highest of human activities. Nero believed this too, since Petronius had taught him when his young mind was blank and open to eloquent influences. Seneca, who taught only moral obligations, found him either contentious or deaf.
Being young and concupiscent, Nero naturally found the orthodox outlets of sexuality quite as important as art during the first five years of his reign. Indeed, having read Ovid, he accepted that there was an art of love and assiduously cultivated it. A young and eager ruler without frustrations, he arose from his multiple orgasms to acquiesce in the just running of the state and the efficient administration of the provinces. His mother, who was primarily concerned with ridding herself of her enemies, actual, potential or purely imaginary, did not at first greatly interfere with either his duties or his pleasures. Soon, though, she had leisure to consi
der how best to assume the control of the Empire herself behind the mask of her son. Her son, whom she had considered wholly controllable, she discovered to have a will of his own.
One sunny afternoon Nero disported himself in the imperial bedchamber with his latest love, a freed slave named Acte. She was vulgar but her limbs were supple and her skin gave off a maddening odour. Nero, naked, still sadly pustular, breathed like a runner at the finishing tape as he relaxed in the convalescence of achieved orgasm. Acte admired the furnishings, which were all Greek, the hangings, the Pompeian pictures of human and bestial dalliance, and said:
‘Well. Just think. I’m here.’
‘And why not? Isn’t the Emperor’s bed the only place for the most beautiful woman in Rome?’
‘I’m not that beautiful,’ she said conventionally. ‘But I know things, don’t I? Don’t I know things?’
‘You’re a mine of wisdom. There’s more wisdom in your left buttock than in the entire gloomy library of Seneca.’
‘Who’s Seneca?’
‘An old man who thinks he knows everything. He used to teach me. Virtue, self-control, what they call the stoic qualities. What he didn’t tell me is that true wisdom lies in the nerves and in the arousing of the imagination.’
‘Did I teach you that?’
‘You give me practical demonstrations. And now I have to go to the Senate.’
‘Have to go? You?’
‘Courtesy. Discretion. Pretend you’re letting them have their own way. Lower taxes. Make yourself popular. Tricks, really.’
There was then a knock at the great double door. Acte covered her delicious breasts with the coverlet and said: ‘Would that be your wife? The Empress, I mean.’