Still, there were times when meaningful sentences were uttered, and at these moments Uri could scarcely dignify what he was hearing from these senators, the sons of old families of high repute. Among the words he had to interpret into Greek were their opinions about the deeds of the emperors Tiberius and Caligula, including some especially peculiar assertions. He was occasionally tempted to water down his renderings of certain particularly gross Latin words, but he was worried that quizzical senators might in fact know Greek after all and would correct him.
The senators gossiped about the capital crimes that Tiberius was supposed to have committed.
Over the last two decades of his life Tiberius was known as Caprineus, or he-goat, after Capriae, the ancient name of the island. He would have groups of young girls and catamites make love before him to stimulate his jaded male lust, executing the positions he would point to, one after the other, in the books of Elephantis with their lascivious illustrations. Among the performers could be found the sons and daughters of highly positioned Roman officials — for example, Aulus Vitellius, the eldest son of the dismissed Syrian legate. The youths would cavort in the woods and groves near the emperor’s house, disguised as little Pans and scantily clad Nymphs out to lure an innocent passerby — and who would that be except the emperor himself, who was permanently drunk, and known on that account as Biberius.
It was also reported that during a service in a temple Tiberius became so captivated with the form of a young boy of about ten who held a censer that he molested him, along with the boy’s brother who had been playing the flute. After the boys related this to their parents, Tiberius had both of their legs broken, and looked on in lascivious delight at their suffering.
In Tiberius’s bedchamber there was a famous picture, painted by Parrasius (it hangs there still, as Caligula did not have it removed), in which Atalanta is pictured in the act of satisfying Meleager’s lust orally. In his old age, they said, he had unweaned babies brought to him and placed his prick in their mouths to be sucked.
Few friends had traveled with Tiberius to the island of Capri. His favorites, the Greek philosophers, had all committed suicide while the emperor was alive, for reasons they knew best. Nerva starved himself to death because of the emperor’s refusal to implement his economic reforms. All the while, Tiberius begged him in vain to eat, but after he had died, he instituted his reforms after all, these forming the foundation of the bank loan scheme that had been the topic of such heated discussion in Alexandria.
Those he had summoned to the island of Capri had been tortured and flung from a cliff overhanging the sea; soldiers were posted at the bottom to check that the unfortunate men had perished, and if not they beat him with oars and wrung his neck.
Thrasyllus, the emperor’s favorite astrologer, with whom he had become acquainted in exile and dragged along thereafter, barely survived with his skin. While they were walking together in Rhodes, Tiberius had been at the point of throwing him from a cliff into the sea when Thrasyllus spoke to say that he felt death was near at hand. That made Tiberius shudder; he embraced Thrasyllus and let him live. And, by the way, such is fate: Caligula later had Thrasyllus’s granddaughter, Ennia, murdered along with her husband, Macro. Or to be more precise, the couple killed themselves watched by soldiers; all quite lawful, as they had they been planning to murder the emperor.
When Tiberius came to power, it was said, he had his young brother Agrippa dispatched, then the latter’s son, Germanicus, and later Germanicus’s widow, his daughter-in-law Agrippina, mother of the present emperor. He’d had one of her eyes plucked out, then when she went on a hunger strike he ordered that meat be crammed down her throat until she choked to death. He had anyone more popular than he put to death. The bloodbath staged after Sejanus’s plot was discovered was horrible, with hundreds of innocents being killed or driven to take their own lives, with the emperor snatching their estates afterward. Shamefully, the corpses were dragged by meathook down the Steps of Mourning, before being flung into the river Tiber, and on top of that he even had those who dared mourn their relatives themselves killed.
He had no love for anyone: even his very own son, Drusus — whom Livia Drusilla, Augustus’s daughter, bore for him — perished in the excesses, poisoned by her and Sejanus. That was when he set about the torturing in earnest: he had Sejanus’s two innocent sons starved to death. Nero met his end on the island of Pontia, and Drusus in the deepest dungeon of Augustus’s palace on Palatine Hill, where, in his hunger pangs, he ate his pillow. Perhaps out of a twinge of conscience, he left alive Gaius, our own gracious Emperor Caligula. Anyone whom he became suspicious of on the island of Capri he would have his member bound and then force wine down him until he burst.
Tiberius was a coward: for nine months after Sejanus was murdered he did not dare set foot outside the villa of Jupiter on Capri, which he had rebuilt as a fortress, even though a fleet of warships were stationed in the island’s sole tiny harbor. He was terrified by thunder, and would hide whenever a thunderstorm raged; even after the tempest had passed his men had a hard time coaxing him out. Oh, and he confiscated the fortunes of the notabilities of Gaul, Syria, Hispania, and Greece on the most transparent pretexts. And from his youngest days wine was all he quaffed in the camps, and he would go into battle blind drunk, winning only by pure luck.
And you all know the case of Mallonia: a highborn lady who was seduced by Tiberius, but after the first time she never wanted to lie down with him again. He had her called before a court of law, and there he asked her if she had repented. On leaving the court, Mallonia went home, and with a cry of “You brute! Vile old lecher!” she stabbed herself in the heart.
The senators spoke not from memory, but related these sordid tales from scrolls they’d dug up: Caligula, since coming to power, had supposedly unearthed these documents and had them copied in substantial numbers, so that the truth about the misdeeds of Tiberius should be brought to light. “About time,” the senators would sigh. “May such things be seen no more! Never again! This must stand as a lesson to us for evermore.”
The alabarch said nothing in response to any of these accusations, but summarized them later for Philo, who responded with a sage remark:
“What Tiberius actually committed was more than enough by itself. What’s the point of spreading stupid legends on top of it?”
Marcus took the view that the crimes ascribed to the dead emperor were merely the offenses that these bullshitters themselves wished they could commit.
The alabarch was thankful that the one person whose name had not crossed anybody’s lips was that of the late, lamented Antonia, Tiberius’s sister-in-law — possibly because they were well aware that the alabarch had handled Antonia’s properties in Egypt, which had since then reverted to the emperor.
There was no end to the praises sung by the same senators for Caligula.
It was a good thing, they said, that the new emperor had managed to get rid of Macro and his father-in-law, Silanus, in time; they had become too big for their britches. They did not go into in any detail regarding the murder of Gemellus, the general opinion being that it had been worth it as the price of peace between Rome and the world at large. They did mention how Gemellus had attempted to take his own life. Since he had just attained the toga of adulthood, and had never fought in a battle, he did not know where to stick the dagger into himself; a centurion had given him some advice, but even so he could not do it — so in the end he was set upon and butchered.