Then I called Callistus and told him what I had decided. When he threw up his hands and turned up his eyes in a despairing gesture I told him to stop play-acting.
`But, Caesar, where's the money to come from?' he bleated like a sheep. .
`From the corn-factors,; fool,' 'I answered, `Give me the names - of principal members of the Corn Ring and I'll see that we get as much as we need.'
Within an hour I had the six richest corn-factors in the-City before me. I frightened them.
`My engineers report that you gentlemen have- been bribing them to send in an unfavourable report on the Ostia scheme. I take. a very serious view of the matter. It amounts to conspiracy against the lives of your fellow-citizens. You deserve to be thrown to the wild beasts.'
They denied the charge-with tears and oaths and begged me to let them know in what way they could prove their loyalty.
That was easy: wanted an immediate loan of 1,000,000 gold pieces for the Ostia scheme, which I would pay back as soon as the financial situation justified it.
They pretended that their combined fortunes did not amount to half that sum. I knew better. I gave there a month to, raise the money and I warned them that if they did not do so they would - all be banished to the Black Sea. Or farther. `And remember,' I said, `that when this harbour is built it will be my harbour if you want to use it you willhave to
come to me for permission. I advise you to keep on the right side of me.'
The money was paid over within five days, and the work at Ostia began at once with the erection of shelters for the workmen and the pegging out of tasks. On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word. But I had to be constantly reminding myself of the danger of exercising my Imperial prerogatives in such a way as to retard the eventual restoration of a Republic. I did my best to encourage free speech and public-spiritedness, and to avoid transforming personal caprices of my own, into laws which all Rome must obey.. It was very difficult. The joke was that free speech; public-spiritedness, and Republican idealism itself seemed to come under the heading of personal caprices of my own. And though at first I made a point of being accessible to everyone, in order to avoid-the appearance of monarchical haughtiness, and of speaking inn a friendly-familiar way with all my fellow-citizens, I soon had to behave more distantly. It was not so much that I had not the time to spare for continuous friendly chat with everyone who came calling at .the Palace: it was rather that my fellow-citizens, with few exceptions, shamefully abused my good feelings towards them. They did this either by answering my familiarity with an ironically polite haughtiness, as if to say, `You can't fool us into loyalty,' or by a giggling impudence as if to say, `Why don't you behave like a real Emperor?' or by thoroughly false good-comradeship, as if to say, `If it pleases your Majesty to unbend, and to expect us to unbend in conformity with your humour, then look how obligingly we do so! But if you please to frown, down we'll go on our faces at once.'
Speaking of the harbour, Vitellius said to me one day: `A republic can never hope to carry through public works on so grand a scale ass a monarchy. All the grandest constructions in the world are the work of Kings or Queens. The walls and hanging gardens of Babylon. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The Pyramids. You have never been to Egypt, have you? I was stationed there as a young soldier and, ye Gods, those Pyramids! It is impossible to convey in words the crushing sense of awe with which they overwhelm everyone who sees them. One first hears about, them at home, as a child, and asks: "What are the Pyramids?" and the answer is, "Huge stone tombs in Egypt, triangular in shape, without any ornaments on them: just faced with white stucco." That doesn't sound very interesting or impressive. The mind makes "huge" no linger than some very big building with which one happens to be familiar - say the Temple of Augustus yonder or the Julian Basilica. And then again, visiting Egypt, one sees them at a great distance across the desert, little white marks like tents, and says "Why, surely that's nothing to make a fuss about!’ But, Heavens, to stand beneath them a few hours later and look up! Caesar, I tell you, they are incredibly and impossibly huge. It makes one feel physically sick to think of them as having been built by-human hands. One's first sight of the Alps was nothing by comparison. So white, smooth, pitilessly immortal. Such a terrific monument of human aspiration '
`And stupidity and tyranny- and cruelty,' I broke in. 'King Cheops, who built the Great Pyramid, ruined his rich country, bled it white and left it gasping; and all to gratify his own absurd vanity and perhaps impress the Gods with his superhuman power. And what practical use did this Pyramid serve? Was it intended as a tomb to house Cheops's corpse for all eternity? Yet I have read that this absurdly impressive sepulchre has long been empty. The invading Shepherd Kings, discovered the secret entrance, rifled the inner chamber, and made a bonfire of proud Cheops's mummy.'
Vitellius smiled. `You haven't seen the Great Pyramid or you wouldn't talk like that. Its emptiness makes it all the more majestic. And as for use, why, it has a most important use. Its pinnacle serves as a mark of orientation for the Egyptian peasants when the yearly Nile flood subsides and they must mark out their fields again in the sea of fertile mud.'
'A tall pillar would have served just as well,' I said, `and two tall pillars, one on each bank of the Nile, would have been still better; and the cost would have been negligible. Cheops was mad, like Caligula; though apparently he had. a more settled madness than Caligula, who always did things by fits and starts. The great city that Caligula planned, to command the Great St Bernard Pass on the Alps, would never have got very far towards completion, though he had lived to be centenarian.'
Vitellius agreed. 'He was a jackdaw. The nearest he ever came to raising a Pyramid was when he built that outsize ship and stole the great red obelisk from Alexandria. A jackdaw and a monkey.'
`Yet I seem to remember that you once adored that jackdaw monkey as a God.'
'And I gratefully remember that the advice and example came from you.'
`_Heaven forgive us both,' I said. We were standing talking outside the Temple of Capitoline Jove, which we had just been ritually purifying, because of the recent appearance, on the roof, of a bird of evil omen. (It was an owl of the sort we call `incendiaries because they foretell the destruction by fire of any building on which they perch.) I pointed across the valley with my finger. `Do you see that? That's part of the greatest monument ever built, and though monarchs like Augustus and. Tiberius have added to it and kept it in repair, it was first built by a free people. And I have no doubt that it will last as long as the Pyramids, besides having proved of infinitely more service to mankind.'
'I don't see what- you mean. You seem to be pointing at the Palace.'
'I am pointing at the Appian Way,' I replied solemnly. 'It was begun in the Censorship of my great ancestor, Appius Claudius the Blind. The Roman Road is the greatest monument ever raised to human liberty by a noble and generous people. It runs across mountain, marsh, and river. It is built broad, straight, and firm. It joins city with city and nation with nation. It is tens of thousands of miles long, and always thronged with grateful travellers. And while the Great Pyramid, a few hundred feet high and wide, awes sightseers to silence - though it is only the rifled tomb of an ignoble corpse and a monument of oppression and misery, so that no doubt in viewing it you may still seem to hear the crack of the taskmaster's whip and the squeals and groans of the poor workmen struggling to set a huge block of stone into position 'But in this unpremeditated gush of eloquence I had forgotten the beginning of my sentence. I broke off, feeling foolish, and Vitellius had to come to the rescue. He threw up his hands, shut his eyes, and declaimed: `Words fail me, my Lords. Nothing that I might utter could possibly match the depth of my feelings in this matter.' We both laughed uproariously at this. Vitellius was one of the few friends I had who treated me with the right sort of familiarity. I never knew whether it was genuine, or artificial; but if artificial, it was so good an imitation of the real thing that I accepted it at its face value. I should never perhaps have called it in question if his former adoration of Caligula had not been so well acted, and if it had not been for the matter of Messalina's slipper. I shall tell you about this.