Silas was too astonished to say a word and was led away like a lamb to the, slaughter. The joke was that if he hadn't been, so obstinate at Rome about refusing the citizenship that I had offered to get for him, I should never have been able to play that trick on him. He would have appealed to you and you would no doubt have pardoned him, you softhearted fellow. Well, I had to do it, or the Sidonians would never have respected me, again.. As it was, they seemed gratifyingly, impressed and the rest of the banquet proved a great success. That was some months ago, and I kept him there in gaol - unpleaded for by Cypros - to learn his lesson; intending, however, to release him in time to attend my birthday feast, which took place yesterday. I sent Thaumastus to Tiberias to to visit Silas in his cell. He was to say: `I was once a messenger of hope and comfort to our Lord and Master King Herod Agrippa when he was entering the, prison gates, at Misenum: I am now here, Silas, as a messenger of hope and comfort to you. This pitcher of wine is the token.
Our gracious sovereign invites you to banquet with him at Jerusalem in three days time and will allow you to present yourself, if you prefer it, without the insignia of the Order that he has conferred on you. Here, take this and drink it. And my own advice to you, my friend Silas, is never remind people of services that you have done them in times past. If they are grateful and honourable men they will not need any reminder and if they are ungrateful and dishonourable, the reminder will be wasted on them.'
Silas had been brooding over his wrongs all these months and was bursting to tell someone about them - besides his warder.' He said to Thaumastus: `So that is king Herod's message, is it? And I am supposed to be grateful, am I? What new honour does he intend to confer on me? The Order of the Whip perhaps? When was an honest man ever so badly treated at a friend's hands as I have been at King Herod's? Does he expect that the awful miseries I have suffered here in solitary confinement will have taught me to hold my. tongue when I feel impelled to speak the truth and shame his lying counsellors and flattering courtiers? Tell the King that he has not broken my spirit and that if, he releases me I shall celebrate the occasion by franker and blunter speech than ever: I shall tell the whole nation through how many dangers and misfortunes he and I passed together and how I always saved the situation in the end after he had nearly ruined us both by his refusal to listen to my warnings in time, and how generously he rewarded me for all this with a heavy chain and a dark dungeon. No, I shall never forget this treatment. My very soul when I die will remember it, and remember too all the glorious deeds I did for his sake." Drink,' said Thaumastus. But Silas would not drink. Thaumastus tried to reason with the madman, but he insisted on sending the message and refusing the wine. So Silas is still in gaol and it is quite impossible for me to release him; as Cypros agrees. I was amused by that affair at Doris. You remember what I said to you at that farewell banquet when we were both so drunk and so Samaritanly frank: you'll be a 'God, my Marmoset, in spite of everything you do to prevent it. You can't stop that sort of thing. And as for what I said then about sucking-pigs stuffed with truffles and chesnuts I think I know what I must have meant.. I am such a good Jew now that I never, never on any occasion let a morsel of unclean food pass my lips - or at least if I do, nobody but I and my Arabian cook and the watching Moon knows about it. I abstain even when I visit my Phoenician neighbours or dine with my Greek subjects. When you write give me news of canning old Vitellius and those scheming scoundrels Asiaticus, Vinicius, and Vinicianus I have sent my highflown compliments to your lovely Messalina in my official letter. So good-bye for the present and continue to think well (better than he deserves) of your knavish old playmate,
THE BRIGAND
I shall explain about the 'Doris affair'. In spite of my edict some young Greeks at a place in Syria called Doris had got hold of a statue of mine and broken into a Jewish synagogue, where they set it up at the south end, as if for worship. The Jews of Doris at once appealed to Herod, as their natural protector, and Herod went in person to Petronius at Antioch to make a protest. Petronius wrote the magistrates of Doris a very severe letter, ordering them to arrest the guilty persons and send them to him for punishment without delay. Petronius wrote that the offence was a double one - not only to the Jews whose desecrated synagogue could no longer be used for worship, but to myself whose edict on the subject of religious toleration had been shamelessly violated. There was one curious remark in his letter: that the proper, place for my statue was not in a Jewish synagogue but in one of my own temples. He thought, I suppose, that by now I must surely have given in to the Senate's entreaties, and that therefore it would be politic to anticipate my deification. But I was most firm about refusing to become a God.
You can imagine that the Alexandrian Greeks did their utmost to win my favour now. They sent a deputation to congratulate me on my accession and to offer to build and dedicate a splendid temple to me, at the City's expense; or, if I refused this, at least to build and stock a Library of Italian Studies, and dedicate this to me as the most distinguished living historian. They also asked permission to give special public readings of my History of Carthage and my History of Etruria every year on my birthday. Each work was to be read out from end to end-by relays of highly trained elocutionists, the former in the old library, the latter in the new. They knew that this could not fail to flatter me. In accepting the honour. I felt very much as the parents of still-born twins might be expected to feel if, some time after the delivery, the little cold corpses awaiting their funeral in a basket set somewhere in a corner were suddenly to glow with unexpected warmth and sneeze and cry in unison. After all, I had spent more than twenty of the best years of my life on these books and taken infinite trouble to learn the various languages necessary for collecting and checking my facts and not a single person hitherto had to my knowledge been to the trouble of reading them. When I say `not a single person' I must make two exceptions. Herod had read the History of Carthage - he was not interested in the subject of Etruria -and said that he had, learned a lot from it about the Phoenician character; but that he did not think that many people would have the same interest in it as he had; `There's too much meat in that sausage,' he said, `and not enough spices and garlic.'' He meant that there was too much information in it and not enough elegant writing. He told me this while I was still a private citizen, so there could be no question of flattery. The only person except my secretaries and research assistants who had, read both books was Calpurnia. She preferred a good book to a dad play, she said, my histories to many quite good plays she had seen, and the Etruscan book to the Carthaginian one because it was about places that she knew. When I became Emperor, I should record here, I bought Calpurnia a charming villa near Ostia and gave her a comfortable annual income and a staff of well-trained slaves. But she never came to visit me at the Palace and I never visited her, for fear of making Messalina jealous. She lived with a close friend, Cleopatra, an Alexandrian, who had also been a prostitute; but now that Caipurnia had enough money, and to spare, neither of them continued in the profession. They were quiet girls.
But, as I was saying, I was very proud indeed of the Alexandrian offer, for after all Alexandria is the cultural capital of the world and had I not been addressed by its leading citizens as the most distinguished living historian? I regretted that I could not spare the time for a visit to Alexandria to be present at one of the readings. The day that the embassy came -I sent for a professional reader and asked him to read over to me in private a few passages from each of the histories. He did so with so much expression and such beautiful articulation that, forgetting for the moment that I was the author, I began clapping loudly.