'I hate guessing when I'm half-asleep.'
`But I hate telling you directly, it's so frightening. He said: "Lady Messalina, your husband will die a violent death".'
`He really said that?'
She nodded solemnly.
I sat up, my heart pounding. Yes, Barbillus was always right in his forecasts. And that meant that I would not survive my attempted introduction of the new constitution by more than a few days. I had planned my speech for the seventh of September, the anniversary of my victory at Brentwood but I had kept the whole business a complete secret from everyone, even Messalina, from whom otherwise I had no secrets. I said: `Is there nothing to be done? Can't we cheat the prophecy somehow?'
`I can't think of anything. You're my husband, aren't you? Unless ... unless ... listen, I have an idea! Suppose that just for this next month you aren't my husband.'
`But I am. You can't pretend I'm not.'
`You can divorce me, can't you, just for a month? And marry me again when Barbillus reports that Saturn has moved away to a safe distance.'
`No, that's not possible. If I divorce you we can't legally remarry unless there has been a marriage in between.'
`I didn't think of that. But don't let us be beaten by a mere technicality. Suppose, then, that I do marry someone - anyone just as a matter of form. A cook or a porter or one of the Palace Guards. Only the ceremonial part of the marriage, of course. We'd go into the nuptial-chamber by one door and then come right out again by another. That's not a bad idea, is it?
I thought that there was something in it; but obviously she must marry someone of rank and importance, or it would create a bad impression. First I suggested Vitellius, and she said smiling that Vitellius already felt so sentimentally about her that it would be cruel to marry him and not allow him to spend the night with her. Besides, what about the prophecy? I didn't want to doom Vitellius to a violent death, did I?
So we discussed various husbands for her. The only one that we could agree on was Silius, the Consul-Elect, a son of that Silius, my brother Germanicus's general, whom Tiberius had accused of high treason and forced to suicide. I disliked him because he had led the opposition in the Senate to my measure for the extension of the franchise and had been very insolent to me. After my speech about the franchise, he had been asked to give his opinion. He said that he thought it strange that our ancient allies, the noble and illustrious Greek cities of Lycia, should remain deprived of their freedom (I had annexed Lycia five years previously, because of continued political unrest there, and also the neighbouring island of Rhodes, where they had impaled some Roman citizens) while the, Celtic barbarians of the north should be admitted to the fullest rights of Roman citizenship. When I came to answer this abjection, which was almost the only one raised, I did so in the pleasantest possible way. I began, `It is indeed a long way from famous Lycia, from
Xanthus' lucid stream,
where, in the poet Horace's words that we heard sung last year at the Saecular Games,
Apollo most delights to bathe his hair,
to France and the huge dark River Rhone, the huge dark River Rhone ... of which no mention whatsoever appears in Classical legend, apart from a doubtful visit by Hercules, in the course of his Tenth Labour, on his way to win the oxen of Geryones. But I do not think,...' I was interrupted by a tittering that soon swelled into a roar of laughter. It, appears that when I repeated `the huge dark River Rhone' and hesitated for a moment, in search of a phrase, Silius had remarked in an audible voice - but he was sitting on my deaf side, so I had not heard the interruption - `Yes, the huge dark River Rhone,, where, if historians do not lie,
Claudius most delights to bathe his hair.'
A reference to the occasion when I was flung over a bridge into that river at Caligula's orders and nearly drowned. You can imagine how angry I was when Narcissus explained what the laughter was about. It is all very well to make little personal jokes at a private supper table or at the baths, or more boisterous ones during Saturn's All Fools' Festival (to which, by the way, I had restored the fifth day removed by Caligula), but for my own part it would never occur to me to make any sort of personal joke in the Senate which could raise an unkind laugh against a fellow member; and that a Consul-Elect had done so at my expense, and in the presence too of a group of prominent Frenchmen whom I had brought into the House, I took very ill. I shouted out: 'My Lords, I invited you to give your opinions on my motion, but from the noise that you are making anyone would, mistake this for the cheapest sort of knocking-shop. Please observe the rules of the House. Whatever will these French gentlemen think of us?' The noise stopped instantly. It always did when they saw I was angry.
Messalina said that she would like very much to marry Silius, not only because of his rudeness to me, which certainly merited astral vengeance, but because by the way he looked at her she felt sure that his rudeness was based on jealousy and that he was passionately in love with her. It would be a neat punishment for his presumption if she told him that she was being divorced and would marry him, and then only at the very last minute let him discover that it was to be a marriage in form only.
So we chose Silius, and that very day I signed a document repudiating Messalina as my wife and permitting her to return to her paternal roof. There were a lot of jokes about itbetween. us
. Messalina pretended to plead for permission to stay, falling on 'her knees before me and asking pardon for her errors. She also weepingly embraced the children, who did not know what to make of the business: `Must these poor darlings suffer for a mother's faults, cruel man?'
I replied that her faults were unpardonable: she was too clever, too beautiful and too industrious to stay with me an hour longer. She set an impossible standard for other wives to live up to, and made me the object of-universal jealousy.
She whispered in my ear `If I come into the Palace some night next week and commit adultery with you, will you banish me? I might be tempted, you know.'
`Yes, I'll banish you, all right. I'll banish myself too. Where shall we go? I'd like to visit Alexandria. They say it's an ideal place for banishment.'
'And take the children too? They'd love it.'
'I don't think the climate would suit them. They'd have to stay here with your mother, I'm afraid.'
`Mother knows nothing about the proper bringing-up of children: look at the way she brought me up! If you won't bring the children too, I won't come and commit adultery with you.'
`Then I'll marry Lollia Paulina, just to spite you.'
'Then I'll murder Lollia Paulina. I'll send her poisoned cakes; like the ones Caligula used to send people who had made him their heir.'
'Well, here's your divorce document all signed and sealed, you slut. Now you're restored to all the rights and privileges of an unmarried woman.' -
'Let us kiss, Claudius, before we part.'
'It reminds me of the famous farewell between Hector and Andromache in the Sixth Book of the Iliad:
His princess parts with a prophetic sigh,' Unwilling parts, and oft reverts her eye
That streamed at every look; then, moving slow, Sought her own palace and indulged her woe:’
Here, don't be in such a hurry to run off stage with your divorce. You ought to take a few private lessons in acting from Mnester.'
'I'm my, own mistress now. If you're not careful I'll marry Mnester.'
Silius was supposed to be the best-looking nobleman in Rome and Messalina had long been fascinated by him. But he was not by any means an easy victim of her passion. In the first place he was a virtuous man, or at least prided himself on his virtue, and then he was married to a noblewoman of the Silanus family, a sister of Caligula's first wife, and finally, though Messalina attracted him physically in the highest degree, he knew of the indiscriminate generosity with which she had been conferring her favours on nobleman, commoner, sword-fighter, actor, guardsman, even on one of the Parthian ambassadors, and did not consider himself particularly honoured by being asked to join their company. So she had to hook and play her fish with great cunning. The first difficulty lay in persuading him to visit her privately. She invited him several times, but he excused himself. She managed it in the end only by an arrangement with the Commander of the Watchmen, a former lover of hers, who invited Silius to supper and then had him shown into a room where she was waiting for him with supper laid for two. Once he was there he could not easily escape, and she was very clever: she did not talk love at all at first, she talked revolutionary politics! She reminded him of his murdered father and asked him whether he could bear to see the murderer's nephew, a bloodier tyrant still, clamping the yoke of slavery tighter and tighter on the neck of a once free people. (This was myself, in case you do not recognize me.) Then she told him that she was in danger of her life because she had been constantly reproaching me for not restoring the Republic and for my cruel murders of innocent men and women. She said, too, that I had despised her beauty and preferred housemaids and common prostitutes and that it was only in revenge for my disregard that she had ever been unfaithful to me; her promiscuity had been the result of extreme despair and loneliness. He, Silius, was the only man she knew who was virtuous and bold enough to help her in the task to which she had now dedicated her life - the restoration of the Republic. Would he forgive the innocent trick that she had played in decoying him there?