Calpurnia greeted me with a look of such anxious sorrow that I knew at once that something very serious had happened. `Tell me at once 1' I said. 'What's the matter?'
She began to cry. I had never seen Calpurnia cry before, except once on the famous occasion when I was sent for at midnight to the Palace by Caligula's orders and she thought that I was going to my execution. She was a self-possessed girl with none of the tricks and manners of the ordinary prostitute and ‘as true as a Roman sword', as the saying is. 'You promise to listen? But you'll not want to believe me. You'll want to have me tortured and flogged don't want to tell you, either. But nobody else dares tell you, so I must. I promised Narcissus and Pallas that I would. They were good friends to me in the old days when we were all poor together. They said that you'd not believe them, or anyone, but I said that I thought you'd believe me, because once I showed myself your true friend when you were in trouble. I gave you all my savings, didn't I? I was never greedy or jealous or dishonest, was I?'
'Calpurnia, in my life I have known only three really good women, and I'll tell you their names. One was Cypros, a Jewish princess; one was old Briseis, my mother's wardrobe-maid; and the third is you. Now tell me what you have to say.'
'You've left out Messalina.'
`Messalina goes without saying. Very well, then, four really good women. And I don't consider that I'm insulting Messalina by linking her with an Oriental princess, a Greek freedwoman, and a prostitute from Padua. The sort of goodness I mean isn't the prerogative - '
'If you put Messalina in the list, leave me out,' she said, gasping.
'Modest, Calpurnia? You needn't be. I mean what I say.''No. Not modest.'
'Then I don't understand.'
Calpurnia said, very slowly and painfully: 'I hate to hurt you, Claudius. But I mean this. I mean that if Cypros had been a typical princess of the Herod family if she had been blood-thirsty and ambitious and unscrupulous and without any moral restraint; and if Briseis had been a typical wardrobe-maid - If she had been thieving and base-minded and lazy and clever at covering up her tracks; and if your Calpurnia had been a typical prostitute - if I had been vain, lustful, promiscuous, and greedy, and used my beauty as a means for dominating and ruining men - and if you were now listing the three worst types of women you knew and happened to pick on us as convenient examples -'
` Then what? What are you getting at? You talk so slowly.'
`- Then, Claudius, you'd be right to add Messalina to us and to tell me, "Messalina goes without saying".
'Am I mad, or are you?'
'Not I'
'Then what do you mean? What's my poor Messalina done to be suddenly attacked in this violent and extraordinary way? I don't think that you and I are going to remain friends much longer, Calpurnia.'
'You left town at seven o'clock this morning.'
`Yes. And what of it?'
'I left at ten. I had been up there with Cleopatra. doing some shopping. I looked in at the wedding. A curious hour of the day for a wedding, wasn't it? They were having a grand time. Everyone drunk. Marvellous show. The whole house decorated with vine-leaves and ivy and enormous bunches of grapes, and wine-vats, and wine-presses. The vintage festival, that was what it was supposed to represent.'
`What wedding? Talk sense.'
`Messalina's wedding to Silius. Weren't you invited? She was there dancing and waving a thyrsus in the biggest wine-vat she could find, dressed in a short wine-stained white tunic with one breast exposed and her hair flying loose. She was almost decent, though, compared with the other women. They only wore leopardskins, because they were Bacchantes. Silius was Bacchus. He was crowned with ivy and wore buskins. He was even drunker than Messalina. He kept tossing his head about in time to the music and grinning like Baba.'
'But ... but ..,' I said stupidly. `The wedding isn't until the tenth. I'm to officiate.'
'They're managing nicely without you. So I went to Narcissus at the Palace, and when he saw me, he said: "Thank God you're here, Calpurnia. You're the only one he'll believe." And Pallas `I don't believe. I refuse to believe.'
Calpurnia clapped her' hands. 'Cleopatra, Narcissus!' They came in and fell at my feet. `It's true about the wedding, isn't it-?
They agreed that it was true.
`But I know all about it,' I said feebly. `It's not a real wedding my friends. It's a sort of joke that Messalina: and I planned. She's not going to bed with him at the end of the ceremony. It's all quite innocent.'
Narcissus said: 'Silius caught at her and pulled up her tunic and began kissing her body in full view of the company, and she screamed and laughed and then he carried her off to the nuptial-chamber, and they stayed there nearly an hour before coming out again to do a little more drinking and dancing. That's not innocent, Caesar, surely?'
Calpurnia said: `And unless you act at once, Silius will be master of Rome. Everyone I met told me that Messalina and Silius have sworn by their own heads to restore the Republic, and that they have the whole Senate behind them and most of the Guards.'
`I must hear more,' I said. `I don't, know whether to laugh or cry. I don't know whether to pour gold in your, laps or flog you until the bones show.'
They told me more, but Narcissus would only speak on condition that I forgave him for hiding Messalina's crimes from me so long. He said that when he was first aware of them and I seemed happy in my innocence, he had resolved to spare me the pain of disillusionment so long as Messalina did nothing which endangered my life or the safety of the country. He had hoped that she might mend her ways or else that I would find out about her for, myself. But as time went on and her behaviour grew more and more shameless, it became more and more difficult to tell me. In fact, he could not believe that I did not know by now what all Rome, and all the provinces for that matter, and our enemies over the frontier, knew. In the course of nine years it seemed impossible that I should not have heard of her debaucheries, which were astounding in their impudence.
Cleopatra told me the most horrible and ludicrous story. During my absence in Britain Messalina had issued a challenge to the Prostitutes' Guild asking them to provide a champion to contend with her at the Palace, and see which of the two would wear out most gallants: in, the course of a night. The Guild had sent a famous Sicilian named Scylla, after the whirlpool in the Straits of Messina. When dawn came Scylla had been forced to confess herself beaten at the twenty-fifth gallant but Messalina had continued, out of bravado, until the sun was quite high in the sky. And, what was worse, most of the nobility at Rome had been invited to attend the contest, and many of the men had taken part in it; and three or four of the women had been persuaded by Messalina to compete too.
I sat weeping with my head in my hands, just as Augustus had done some fifty years before, when his grandsons Gaius and Lucius told him the same sort of story about their mother Julia and in Augustus's very words I said that I had never heard the slightest whisper or entertained the faintest suspicion that Messalina was not the chastest woman in Rome. And like Augustus I had the impulse to shut myself away in a room and see nobody for days. But they would not let me. Two lines out of a musical comedy that Mnester's company had played a few days before - I forget the name - kept hammering absurdly in my brain
I know no sound so laughable, so laughable and sad,