Claudius the God (Claudius, #2)

by Robert Graves

Herod’s Evil

A cousin of mine was once riding on business from Jerusalem to Jericho. He came upon a poor Jew lying wounded and naked in the hot sun by the roadside. He had been set on by bandits. My cousin cleansed his wounds and bound them up as best he could and then took him on his beast to the nearest inn, where he paid in advance for his room and his food for a few days – the inn-keeper insisted on payment in advance – and then visited him on his way back from Jericho and helped him to get home. Well, that was nothing: we Samaritans are made that way. It was all in a day’s work for my cousin. But the joke was that three or four well-to-do Jews – a priest among them – whom my cousin had met riding towards him just before he came on the wounded man, must have actually seen him lying by the roadside; but because he was no relation of theirs they had left him there to die and ridden on, though he was groaning and calling out for help most pitifully.

Make it a rule never to rise from the table without an unsatisfied longing for just one little thing more.

But I knew just what I was doing. I was, in fact, being rather clever. I had in the first place spoken extremely frankly, and unexpected frankness about oneself is never unacceptable. I was reminding the Senate what sort of a man I was – honest and devoted; not clever, but not self-seeking – and what sort of men they themselves were – clever but self-seeking, and neither honest nor devoted nor even courageous.

A verse of Homer’s stuck in my head and I kept repeating it to everyone I met: Do thou resist that man with all thy might Who, unprovoked, provokes thee to a fight.

No, I could not give up yet. I was thoroughly ashamed of myself, in theory, as having been forced to put to death the leaders of an abortive anti-monarchical revolt; but in practice what else could I have done?

Persons who could find no sponsor applied to me indirectly through my secretaries, and Messalina then inquired into their antecedents. Those whom she recommended I put on the list without further question. I did not realize at the time that she was charging applicants a heavy fee for her interest with me and that the freedmen, notably Amphaeus, and Polybius whom I had temporarily transferred to this duty, were making enormous sums of money too. Many senators who sponsored candidates for citizenship got wind of this and began to take money under the table (as the saying is) and some even advertised in a cautious way through their agents that they made a more reasonable charge for their patronage than any other senator in the business. I knew nothing about this at the time, though. I suppose that they thought I was getting money from the business myself, using Messalina as my agent, and so would wink at their own practices.

Philo the mathematician who worked out the proportion of the circumference of a circle to its diameter as far as the ten-thousandth decimal place.

The Roman Empire of this time knew nothing about decimals.

Among the converts is an ex-Governor of Cyprus, one Sergius Paullus;

But godhead is, after all, a matter of fact, not a matter of opinion: if a man is generally worshipped as a god then he is a god.

I know no sound so laughable, so laughable and sad, As an old man weeping for his wife, a girl gone to the bad.

I was sitting silent, brooding over the list of Messalina’s lovers. Narcissus had headed it: ‘Provisional and incomplete account of Valeria Messalina’s notorious adulteries, from the first year of her marriage to Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus Britannicus, Father of the Country, High Pontiff, etc., until the present day.’ It contained forty-four names, later extended to 156.

My chief fault: I have been far too benevolent. I repaired the ruin my predecessors spread. I reconciled Rome and the world to monarchy again.

I adopted Lucius. He is now called Nero.