`So I'm a God, now, am I?' I repeated. `Herod Agrippa always said that I'd end as a God, and I told him that he was talking nonsense. I suppose that I can't cancel the mistake, can I, Narcissus, do you think?'
`It would create a very bad effect on the provincials, I should say,' Narcissus answered.
`Well, I don't care, the way I feel now,' I said. `I don't care about anything. Suppose that I have that miserable woman brought here for trial at once. I feel completely free from petty mortal passions. I might even forgive her.'
`She's dead,' Narcissus said in a low voice. `Dead, at your own orders.'
'Fill my glass,' I said. `I don't remember giving the order, but it's all the same to me now. I wonder what sort of God I am. Old Athenodorus used to explain to me the Stoic idea of God: God was a perfectly rounded whole, immune from accident or event. I always pictured God as an enormous pumpkin. Ha, ha, ha! If I eat any more of this goose and drink any more of this wine I'll become pumpkinified too. So Messalina's dead! A beautiful woman, my friends! But bad!'
`Beautiful but bad, Caesar.'
`Carry me up to bed, someone, and let me sleep the blessed sleep of the Gods. I'm a blessed God now, aren't I?'
So they took me up to bed. 'I stayed in bed until noon the next day, fast asleep all the time. The Senate met in my absence and passed a motion congratulating me on the suppression of the revolt, and another expunging Messalina's name from the archives and removing it from every public inscription, and destroying all her statues. I rose in the afternoon and resumed my ordinary Imperial work. Everyone whom I met was extremely subdued and polite, and when I visited the Law Courts nobody, for the first time for years, attempted to bustle or browbeat me. I got through my cases in no time.
The next day I began to talk grandly about the conquest of Germany; and Narcissus, realizing that Xenophon's medicine was having too violent an effect - disordering my wits instead of merely tiding me gently over the shock of Messalina's death, as had been intended - told him to give me no more of it. Gradually the Olympian mood faded and I felt pathetically mortal again. The first morning after I was free from the effects of the drug I went down to breakfast, and asked: `Where's my wife? Where's the Lady Messalina?' Messalina always breakfasted with me unless she had a `sick headache'.
`She's dead, Caesar,' Euodus answered. `She died some days ago, by your orders.'
`I didn't know,' I. said weakly. `I mean, I had forgotten.' Then the shame and grief and horror of the whole business came welling back to my mind, and I broke down. Soon' I was babbling foolishly of my dear, precious Messalina and reproaching myself as her murderer, and saying that it was all my fault, and making an almighty fool of myself. I eventually pulled myself together and called for my sedan. `The Gardens of Lucullus,' I ordered. They took me there.
Seated on a garden bench under a cedar, looking across a smooth green lawn and down a wide grassy avenue of hornbeams, with nobody about except my German guards posted out of sight in the shrubbery, and with a long strip of paper on my knee and a pen in my hand, I began solemnly working out just where and how I stood. I have this paper by me as I now write and will copy out what I put down exactly as I find it. My statements fell, for some reason or other, into related groups of three, like the `tercets' of the British Druids (their common metrical convention for verse of a moralistic or didactic sort)
I love liberty: I detest tyranny.
I have always been a patriotic Roman.
The Roman genius is Republican.
I am now, paradoxically, an Emperor.
As such I' exercise monarchical power.
The Republic hasbeen suspended for three generations.
The Republic was torn by Civil Wars.
Augustus instituted this monarchical power.
It was an emergency measure only.
Augustus found that he could not resign his power.
In my mind I condemned Augustus as hypocritical.
I remained a convinced Republican.
Tiberius became Emperor.
Against his inclination?
Afraid of some enemy seizing power?
Probably forced into it by his mother Livia.
In his reign I lived in retirement.
I considered him a blood-thirsty hypocrite.
I remained a convinced Republican.
Caligula suddenly appointed me Consul.
I only desired to be back at my books.
Caligula tried to rule like an Oriental monarch.
I was a patriotic Roman.
I should have attempted to kill Caligula.
Instead I saved my skin by playing the imbecile.
Cassius Chaerea was perhaps a patriotic Roman.
He broke his oath, he assassinated Caligula.
He attempted, at least, to restore the Republic.
The Republic was not then restored.
Instead there was a new Emperor appointed.
That Emperor was myself, Tiberius Claudius.
If I had refused I should have been killed.
If I had refused there would have been Civil War.
It was an emergency measure only.
I put Cassius Chaerea to death.
I found that I could not yet resign my power.
I became a second Augustus.
I worked hard and long, like Augustus,
I enlarged and strengthened the Empire, like Augustus,
I was an absolute monarch, like Augustus.
I am not a conscious hypocrite.
I flattered myself that I was acting for the best.
I planned to restore the Republic this very year.
Julia's disgrace was Augustus's punishment.
Would I had never wed, and childless died.
I feel just the same about Messalina.
I should have killed myself rather than rule:
I should never have allowed Herod Agrippa to persuade me.
With the best of intentions I have become a tyrant.
I was blind to. Messalina's follies and villainies.
In my name she shed the blood of innocent men and women.
Ignorance is no justification for crime.
But am I the only guilty person?
Has not the whole nation equally sinned?
They made me Emperor and courted my favour.
And if I now carry out my honest intentions?
If I restore the Republic, what then?
Do I really suppose that Rome will be grateful? -
`You know how it is when one talks of liberty.
Everything seems beautifully simple.
One expects every gate to open and every wall to fall flat.'
The world is, perfectly content with me as Emperor,
All but the people who want to be Emperor themselves.
Nobody really wants the Republic back.
Asinius Pollio was right:
'It will have to be much worse before it can be any better.
Decided: I shall not, after all, carry out my plan.
The frog-pool wanted a king.
Jove sent them Old King Log.
I have been as deaf and blind and wooden as a log.
The frog-pool wanted a king.
Let Jove now send them Young King Stork.
Caligula's chief fault: his stork-reign was too brief.'
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.
Rome is fated to bow to another Caesar.
Let him be mad, bloody, capricious, wasteful, lustful.
King Stork shall prove again the nature of kings.