I, Claudius (Claudius, #1)

by Robert Graves

“Men such as Antony, real men, prefer the strange to the wholesome,” Livia finished sententiously. “They find maggoty green cheese more tasty than freshly pressed curds.”

When the door was shut and we stood there facing them—myself nervous and fidgety, Urgulanilla massive and expressionless and clenching and unclenching her great fists—the solemnity of these two evil old grandmothers gave way, and they burst into uncontrolled laughter. I had never heard either of them laugh like that before and the effect was frightening. It was not decent healthy laughter but a hellish sobbing and screeching, like that of two old drunken prostitutes watching a torture or crucifixion. “Oh, you two beauties!” sobbed Livia at last, wiping her eyes, “What wouldn’t I give to see you in bed together on your wedding night! It would be the funniest scene since Deucalion’s Flood!”

“Camel and Elephant! That’s a fine one!” cackled Urgulania. “Look at Tiberius Claudius’s long neck and skinny body and long silly face. And my Urgulanilla’s great feet and great flapping ears, and little pig-eyes! Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha! And what was their offspring? Giraffe? Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha!”

Then up came the elephant with his mouth open as if he were laughing and, first enlarging the breach in the wooden barrier, began trampling on his fallen enemy’s skull, which he crushed in. He then nodded his head as if in time to music and presently walked quietly away.

Claudius is perfectly unfit to appear in public. We must be content to write him off as a loss, except perhaps for breeding purposes, for I hear he has now done his duty by Urgulanilla—but I won’t be sure of that until I see the child, which may well be a monster like him.

The tax-collector exercised his right of seizing good-looking children from the villages which could not pay and carrying them off to be sold as slaves.

Sejanus was a liar but so fine a general of lies that he knew how to marshal them into an alert and disciplined formation

Suspecting that Plancina was practising witchcraft against him, for she had the reputation of being a witch, he made a propitiatory sacrifice of nine black puppies to Hecate; which was the proper course to take when so victimized. The next day a slave reported with a face of terror that as he had been washing the floor in the hall he had noticed a loose tile and, lifting it up, had found underneath what appeared to be the naked and decaying corpse of a baby, the belly painted red and horns tied to the forehead. An immediate search was made in every room and a dozen equally gruesome finds were made under the tiles or in niches scooped in the walls behind hangings. They included the corpse of a cat with rudimentary wings growing from its back, and the head of a Negro with a child’s hand protruding from its mouth. With each of these dreadful relics was a lead tablet on which was Germanicus’s name. The house was ritually cleansed and Germanicus began to be more cheerful, though his stomach continued troublesome.

Instead of saying, as he had once said of his soldiers, “Let them fear me, so long as they obey me,” he now told Sejanus, “Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.”

Nerva was not so much help. He was a jurist and the greatest living authority on the laws of contracts, about which he had written several books: but in all other respects he was so absent-minded and unobservant as to be almost a simpleton.

Unfortunately Vipsania died soon afterwards and the effect on Tiberius was apparent at once. He no longer made any serious attempt to conceal his sexual depravity, the rumours of which everyone had shrunk from taking literally. For some of his perversities were so preposterous and horrible that nobody could seriously reconcile them with the dignity of an Emperor of Rome, Augustus’s chosen successor. No women or boys were safe in his presence now, even the wives and children of senators; and if they valued their own lives or those of their husbands and fathers they willingly did what he expected of them. But one woman, a Consul’s wife, committed suicide afterwards in the presence of her friends, telling them that she had been forced to save her young daughter from Tiberius’s lust by consenting to prostitute herself to him, which was shameful enough; but then the Old He-Goat had taken advantage of her complaisance by forcing her to such abominable acts of filthiness with him that she preferred to die rather than to live on with the memory of them.

As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.

“I had a sudden feeling of profoundest regret and despair, my dearest wife, when discussing State policy with Tiberius yesterday, that the people of Rome should be fated to be glared at by those protruding eyes of his and pounded by that bony fist of his and chewed by those dreadfully slow jaws of his and stamped on by those huge feet of his.

He used often to invite people to dine with him whom he particularly mistrusted and stare at them throughout the meal as if trying to read their secret thoughts: which shook the self-possession of all but very few. If they looked alarmed he read it as a proof of guilt. If they met his eye steadily he read it as an even stronger proof of guilt, with insolence added.

he can’t bear the idea of a successor who will be more popular than himself. But at the same time he does all he can to make himself hated and feared. So, when he feels that his time’s nearly up, he’ll search for someone just a little worse than himself to succeed him. And he’ll find Caligula.

Caligula said: “Is it safe for Uncle Claudius to be told things? Or are you going to poison him?”

Listen, Claudius. Your nephew Caligula is a phenomenon. He’s treacherous, cowardly, lustful, vain, deceitful, and he’ll play some very dirty tricks on you before he’s done: but remember one thing, he’ll never kill you.”

I never take vengeance unless I am forced to do so by an oath or in self-protection. I believe that evil is its own punishment.

The first thing that happened was that Helen became an invalid—we know now that there was nothing wrong with her, but Livilla had given her the choice of taking to her bed as if she were ill or of taking to her bed because she was ill.

The divine air you exhale is too strong for my mortal nostrils. I am nearly fainting.”

“Go in peace. I thought of killing you, but I won’t now. Tell the Scouts about my being a God and about my face shining, but don’t tell them any more. I impose holy silence on you for the rest.” I grovelled on the floor again and retired, backwards. Ganymede stopped me in the corridor and asked for the news. I said: “He’s just become a God and a very important one, he says. His face shines.” “That’s bad news for us mortals,”

Caligula laughed and said to Macro: “I think the best thing that this old lady can do now is to go home and borrow a pruning-knife from one of her vine-dressers and cut her vocal chords with it.” Macro said: “I always gave the same sort of advice to my grandmother, but the old witch refused to take it.”

Someone mentioned epilepsy and I said that Carthaginian records showed Hannibal to have been an epileptic, and that Alexander and Julius Cæsar were both subject to this mysterious disease, which seemed to be an almost inevitable accompaniment of superlative military genius. Caligula pricked up his ears at this, and a few days later he gave a very good imitation of an epileptic fit, falling on the floor in the Senate House and screaming at the top of his voice, his lips white with foam

When Leek Green won the first heat there was no applause and even a little hissing. Caligula leaped angrily from his seat: “I wish you had only a single neck. I’d hack it through!”

He was beginning to be unpopular. That the crowd always likes a holiday is a common saying, but when the whole year becomes one long holiday, and nobody has time for attending to his business, and pleasure becomes compulsory, then it is a different matter.

Caligula took private lessons in elocution and dancing from Apelles and Mnester and after a time frequently appeared on the stage in their parts. After delivering a speech in some tragedy, he used sometimes to turn and shout to Apelles in the wings: “That was perfect, wasn’t it? You couldn’t have done better yourself.” And after a graceful hop, skip and jump or two in the ballet he would stop the orchestra, hold up his hand for absolute silence and then go through the movement again unaccompanied.

“What is the use of putting men in prison for forgery and theft and breaches of the peace? They don’t enjoy themselves there and they are a great expense for me to feed and guard; yet if I were to let them go they would only start their career of crime again. I’ll visit the prisons to-day and look into the matter.” He did. He weeded out the men whom he considered the most hardened criminals, and had them executed. Their bodies were cut up and used as meat for the wild beasts waiting to be killed in the amphitheatre: which made it a double economy.

He was pleased with the little knives which gave him an opportunity of enlarging on the splendor of his disease;

“I was too gentle with them. I am determined now not to yield an inch. ‘Immovable rigour’ is the watchword from henceforward.” And to keep himself reminded of this decision, he used every morning now to practise frightful faces before a mirror in his bedroom and terrible shouts in his private bathroom, which had a fine echo.

I asked him: “Why don’t you publicly announce your Godhead? That would awe them as nothing else would!” He answered: “I have still a few acts to perform in my human disguise.”

At a banquet a few nights later he suddenly burst into a most extraordinary howl of laughter. Nobody knew what the joke was. The two Consuls, who sat next to him, asked whether they might be graciously permitted to share in it. At this Caligula laughed even louder, the tears starting from his eyes. “No,” he choked, “that’s just the point. It’s a joke that you wouldn’t think at all funny. I was laughing to think that with one nod of my head I could have both your throats cut on the spot.”

“Who’s the greater God—Jove or myself?” Apelles hesitated, thinking that Caligula was joking, and not wishing to blaspheme Jove in Jove’s own temple. Caligula whistled two Germans up and had Apelles stripped and whipped in sight of Jove’s statue. “Not so fast,” Caligula told the Germans. “Slowly, so that he feels it more.” They whipped him until he fainted, and then revived him with holy water and whipped him until he died. Caligula then sent letters to the Senate announcing his Divinity and ordered the immediate building of a great shrine next door to the temple of Jove, “in order that I may dwell with my brother Jove”. Here he set up an image of himself, three times the size of life, made of solid gold and dressed every day in new clothes.

“Cassius, old hero, you who acted as my war-horse when I was a child, my oldest and most faithful family-friend, did you ever see such a sad and degrading sight as this? My two sisters prostituting their bodies to senators in my very Palace, my uncle Claudius standing at the gate selling tickets of admission! Oh, what would my poor mother and father have said if they had lived to see this day!”

It was not the last orgy of this sort at the Palace and thereafter Caligula made the senators who had attended the show bring their wives and daughters to assist Agrippinilla and Lesbia.

“It’s a very difficult thing, you know, Claudius,” he said confidentially, “to be a God in human disguise. I’ve often thought I was going mad.

Cassius used to come to Caligula for the watchword every day at noon. It had always been “Rome” or “Augustus” or “Jove” or “Victory” or something of the sort; but now to annoy Cassius, Caligula would give him absurd words like “Stay-laces” or “Lots of Love” or “Curling-irons” or “Kiss me, Sergeant,” and Cassius had to take them back to his brother-officers and stand their chaff. He decided to kill Caligula.

He then suddenly remembered that he had been called a bald-headed madame—his hair was certainly very thin on top now—and shouted out, “How dare you go about with a great ugly bush of hair in my presence? It’s blasphemy.” He turned to his German guard, “Cut his head off!” Once more I thought I was done for. But I had the presence of mind to say sharply to the Guard who was running at me with his sword, “What are you doing, idiot? The God didn’t say ‘head’, he said ‘hair’! Run off and fetch the shears at once!” Caligula was taken aback and perhaps really thought that he had said “hair”. He allowed the German to fetch the shears. My crown was shorn clean. I asked permission to dedicate the clippings to his Deity and he graciously gave consent. So now he had everyone in the Palace shorn, except the Germans. When it came to Cassius’s turn Caligula said, “Oh, what a pity! Those darling little ringlets that the Sergeant loves so much!”