Authors: Robert Graves
Claudius hid behind a curtain,
Gratus twitched the thing away.
‘Be our Leader,’ said bold Gratus.
‘All your orders we’ll obey.’
‘Be our Leader,’ said bold Gratus,
‘Learned Claudius, courage take!
There’s an Eagle to be rescued
For the God Augustus’ sake.’
Learned Claudius, feeling thirsty,
Drank a mighty pot of ink.
‘Owl was it you said, or Eagle? ‘
I could rescue both, I think.’
Early in August, twenty days after I had been voted the title of Emperor,. Messalina bore me her child. It was a boy, ands for the first time I experienced all the pride of fatherhood. For my son. Drusillus, whom I had lost some twenty years before at the age of eleven, I had felt no warm paternal feelings at all, and very few for my daughter Antonia, though she was a good-hearted child. This was because my marriages with Urgulanilla, Drusillus’s mother, and with Aelia, Antonia’s mother (both of whom I divorced as soon as the political situation enabled, me to do so), had been forced on me: I had no love for either of these women. Whereas I was passionately in love with Messalina and seldom, I suppose, had our Roman. Goddess Lucina, who presides over childbirth, been so persistently courted with prayers and sacrifices as she was by me in the last two months of Messalina’s pregnancy. He was a fine healthy baby, and being my only son he took all my names, as the custom was. But I gave it out that he was to be known as Drusus Germanicus: I knew that this would have a good effect on the Germans. The first Drusus Germanicus to make that name terrible across the Rhine - more than fifty years before this - had been my father, and the next had been my brother, twenty-five years later; and I was also a Drusus Germanicus, and had I not just won back the last of the captured Eagles? In another quarter of a century, no doubt, my little Germanicus would repeat history and slaughter a few score thousands more of them. Germans are like briars on the edge of a field: they grow quickly and have to be constantly checked with steel and fire to prevent them from encroachment. As soon as my boy was a few months old and I could pick him up without risk of injuring him, I used to carry him about with me in my arms in the Palace grounds and show him to the soldiers; they all loved him almost as much as I did. I reminded them that he was the first of the Caesars since the great Julius who had been born a Caesar, not merely adopted into the family, as Augustus, Marcellus, Gaius, Lucius, Postumus, Tiberius, Castor,. Nero, Drusus, Caligula had each in turn been. But here, as a matter of fact, my pride tempted me into inaccuracy. Caligula, unlike his brothers Nero and Drusus, was born two or three years after his father, my brother Germanicus, had been adopted by Augustus (a Caesar in virtue of his adoption by Julius) as his son; so he was really born a Caesar. What misled me was the fact that Caligula was not adopted by Tiberius (a Caesar in virtue of his adoption by Augustus) as his son until he was about twenty-three years old.
Messalina did not keep our little Germanicus at her own breast, as I wished her to do, but found him a foster-mother. She was too busy to nurse a child, she said. But nursing a child is an almost certain insurance against renewed pregnancy, and pregnancy interferes with a woman’s health and freedom of action; even more than nursing does. So it was bad luck for Messalina when she became pregnant again, so soon afterwards that only eleven months elapsed between Germanicus’s birth and that of our daughter Octavia.
There was a poor harvest that summer and so meagre a supply of corn in the public granaries that I grew alarmed and cut down the free ration of corn, which the poor citizens had come to regard as their right, to a very small daily measure. I only maintained it even at that measure by commandeering or buying corn from every, possible source. The heart of the populace lies in its belly. In the middle of winter, before supplies began to come through from Egypt and Africa (where, fortunately, the new harvest was a particularly good one), there were frequent disorders in the poorest quarters of the City and much loose revolutionary talk.
B Y this time my engineers had finished the report which I had told them to make on the possibility of converting Ostia into a safe winter harbour. The report was at first sight a most discouraging one. Ten years and 10,000,000 gold pieces seemed to be needed. But I reminded myself that the work once carried out would last for ever and that the danger of a icon mime would never arise again, or at least not so long as we held Egypt and Africa. It seemed to me an undertaking worthy of the dignity and greatness of Rome. In the first place, a considerable tract of land would have to be excavated and strong retaining-walls of concrete built on every side of the excavation, before the sea could be let into it to form the inner harbour. This harbour in turn must be protected by two huge moles built out into
deep water, on either side of the harbour entrance, with an island between their extremities to act as a breakwater when the wind blew from the west and big seas came rushing up the mouth of the Tiber. On this island it was proposed to build a lighthouse like the famous.one at Alexandria, to guide shipping safely in, however dark and stormy the night. The island and the moles would form the outer harbour.
When the engineers brought me their plans they said: ‘We have done as you told us, Caesar, but of course the cost will be prohibitive.’: l answered rather sharply. ‘I asked for a plan and an estimate and you have been good enough to provide both, for which many thanks; but I do not employ you as my financial advisers and I shall thank you not to take that upon yourselves.’
‘But Callistus, your Treasurer - ‘one of them began.’
I cut him short: ‘Yes, of course, Callistus has been speaking to you. He is very careful with public money, and it is right that he should be. But economy can be carried too far. This is a matter of the utmost importance. Besides, I should not be surprised to learn that it is the corn-factors who have persuaded you to send in this discouraging report. The scarcer corn becomes, the richer they grow. They pray for bad weather and thrive on the miseries of the poor.’
‘Oh, Caesar,’ they chorused virtuously, ‘can you believe that we would take bribes from corn factors?’
But I could see that my shot had gone home. ‘Persuaded, not bribed, was my word. Don’t accuse yourselves unnecessarily. Now listen to me. I am determined to carry this plan out whatever it is going to cost: get that into your heads. And I’ll tell you another thing: it is not going to take nearly so long a time or cost nearly so much, money as you seem to think. Three days from now you and I are going to go into the question thoroughly.’
On a hint; given me by my secretary Polybius I consulted the Palace-archives, and there, sure enough, I found a detailed scheme that had been prepared by Julius Caesar’s engineers some ninety years before for the very same work. The scheme was almost identical with the one that had just been made, but the estimated time and cost were, I was delighted to find, only four years and 4,000,000 of gold. Allowing for a slight increase in the cost of materials and labour it should be possible to carry the task out for only half what my own engineers had estimated, and in four years instead of ten. In certain respects the old plan (abandoned as too costly!) was an improvement on the new, though it left out the island; I studied both plans closely; comparing their points of difference; and then visited Ostia myself, in company with Vitellius, who knew a great deal about engineering, to make sure that no important physical changes had occurred on the site of the proposed harbour since Julius’s day. When the, conference met I was so primed with information that the engineers found it impossible to deceive me - by underestimating, for instance, the amount of earth that 100 men could shift from this point to that in a single day, or, by suggesting that the excavations would entail the, cutting away of many thousands of square feet of living rock. I now knew almost as much about the business as they did. I did not tell them how I came to know: I let it appear that I had taught myself engineering in the course of my historical studies, and that a couple of visits to Ostia had sufficed me for mastering the whole problem and drawing my own conclusions. I profited from the great impression that I thus made on them by saying that if there was any attempt to slow down the work once it started, or any lack of enthusiasm, l would send them all down to the Underworld to build Charon a, new jetty on the River Styx. Work on the harbour must begin at once. They should have as many workmen as they needed, up to the-number of 30,000, and 1,000 military foremen, with the necessary materials, tools, and transport; but begin they must.
Then I called Callistus and told him what I had decided. When he threw up his hands and turned up his eyes in a despairing gesture I told him to stop play-acting.
‘But, Caesar, where’s the money to come from?’ he bleated like a sheep..
‘From the corn-factors,; fool,’
‘I answered, ‘Give me the names - of principal members of the Corn Ring and I’ll see that we get as much as we need.’
Within an hour I had the six richest corn-factors in theCity before me. I frightened them.
‘My engineers report that you gentlemen have-been bribing them to send in an unfavourable report on the Ostia scheme. I take. a very serious view of the matter. It amounts to conspiracy against the lives of your fellow-citizens. You deserve to be thrown to the wild beasts.’
They denied the charge - with tears and oaths and begged me to let them know in what way they could prove their loyalty.
That was easy: wanted an immediate loan of 1,000,000 gold pieces for the Ostia scheme, which I would pay back as soon as the financial situation justified it.
They pretended that their combined fortunes did not amount to half that sum. I knew better. I gave there a month to, raise the money and I warned them that if they did not do so they would - all be banished to the Black Sea. Or farther. ‘And remember,’ I said, ‘that when this harbour is built it will be my harbour if you want to use it you will have to come to me for permission. I advise you to keep on the right side of me.’
The money was paid over within five days, and the work at Ostia began at once with the erection of shelters for the workmen and the pegging out of tasks. On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word. But I had to be constantly reminding myself of the danger of exercising my Imperial prerogatives in such a way as to retard the eventual restoration of a Republic. I did my best to encourage free speech and public-spiritedness, and to avoid transforming personal caprices of my own, into laws which all Rome must obey.. It was very difficult. The joke was that free speech; public-spiritedness, and Republican idealism itself seemed to come under the heading of personal caprices of my own. And though at first I made a point of being accessible to everyone, in order to avoid-the appearance of monarchical haughtiness, and of speaking inn a friendly-familiar way with all my fellow-citizens, I soon had to behave more distantly. It was not so much that I had not the time to spare for continuous friendly chat with everyone who came calling at. the Palace: it was rather that my fellow-citizens, with few exceptions, shamefully abused my good feelings towards them. They did this either by answering my familiarity with an ironically polite haughtiness, as if to say, ‘You can’t fool us into loyalty,’ or by a giggling impudence as if to say, ‘Why don’t you behave like a real Emperor?’ or by thoroughly false good-comradeship, as if to say, ‘If it pleases your Majesty to unbend, and to expect us to unbend in conformity with your humour, then look how obligingly we do so! But if you please to frown, down we’ll go on our faces at once.’
Speaking of the harbour, Vitellius said to me one day: ‘A republic can never hope to carry through public works on so grand a scale ass a monarchy. All the grandest constructions in the world are the work of Kings or Queens. The walls and hanging gardens of Babylon. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The Pyramids. You have never been to Egypt, have you? I was stationed there as a young soldier and, ye Gods, those Pyramids! It is impossible to convey in words the crushing sense of awe with which they overwhelm everyone who sees them. One first hears about, them at home, as a child, and asks: “What are the Pyramids?” and the answer is, “Huge stone tombs in Egypt, triangular in shape, without any ornaments on them: just faced with white stucco.” That doesn’t sound very interesting or impressive. The mind makes “huge” no linger than some very big building with which one happens to be familiar - say the Temple of Augustus yonder or the Julian Basilica. And then again, visiting Egypt, one sees them at a great distance across the desert, little white marks like tents, and says “Why, surely that’s nothing to make a fuss about!’ But, Heavens, to stand beneath them a few hours later and look up! Caesar, I tell you, they are incredibly and impossibly huge. It makes one feel physically sick to think of them as having been built by-human hands. One’s first sight of the Alps was nothing by comparison. So white, smooth, pitilessly immortal. Such a terrific monument of human aspiration ‘
‘And stupidity and tyranny-and cruelty,’ I broke in. ‘King Cheops, who built the Great Pyramid, ruined his rich country, bled it white and left it gasping; and all to gratify his own absurd vanity and perhaps impress the Gods with his superhuman power. And what practical use did this Pyramid serve? Was it intended as a tomb to house Cheops’s corpse for all eternity? Yet I have read that this absurdly impressive sepulchre has long been empty. The invading Shepherd Kings, discovered the secret entrance, rifled the inner chamber, and made a bonfire of proud Cheops’s mummy.’
Vitellius smiled. ‘You haven’t seen the Great Pyramid or you wouldn’t talk like that. Its emptiness makes it all the more majestic. And as for use, why, it has a most important use. Its pinnacle serves as a mark of orientation for the Egyptian peasants when the yearly Nile flood subsides and they must mark out their fields again in the sea of fertile mud.’