I was always most attentive to the City food-supply. I instructed the steward of my Italian estates to devote as much land as possible in the neighbourhood of the City to the growing of vegetables for the City Market, especially cabbage, onion, lettuce, endive, leek, skirret, and other winter vegetables. My physician Xenophon told me that the frequent outbreaks of disease in the poorer' quarters of Rome in the winter months were largely due to the scarcity of green vegetables. I wanted an abundant supply raised, brought in -every day before: dawn and sold at the lowest possible prices: I also encouraged pig, poultry, and cattle-breeding; and a year or two later won special privileges from the Senate for City butchers and wine-sellers. There was some opposition in the Senate to these grants. The Senators themselves were supplied from their own country estates and were not interested in the people's food. Asiaticus said: `Cold water, bread, beans, pulse porridge, and cabbage are good enough for working-men. Why pamper them with wine and butchers' meat?' I protested against Asiaticus's inhumanity and asked him whether he preferred cold water to Chian wine, or cabbage to roast venison. He answered that he had been brought up on a rich diet and would find it quite impossible to change to the simpler sort, but that no doubt he would be a hardier man if he could, and that it was wrong to encourage poor men to a diet above their station.
`Iappeal to
you, my Lords,' I protested, trembling with vexation, `what man is able to live a self-respecting life without a little bit of meat now and then?' The House seemed to think this funny. I didn't. And the same thing happened at the end of the same debate when I was on the subject of the wine-sellers. `They want encouragement,' I said. `There has been a great falling off in the number of wine-shops even in the last five years : I mean honest jug-and-bottle houses, not those dirty places that I have had shut up now where they sold cooked meat as well as wine and what wine too! Awful stuff, for the most part, doctored with salts of lead - and a brothel full of diseased women attached, with pornographic pictures smudged on the wall. Why, five years ago, within a quarter of a mile of my house on the Palatine, there were at least fifteen - no, what am I saying? at least twenty-five jug-and-bottle houses, and now there aren't more than three or four. And they served good wine too. There was "The Flask", and "The Bacchus", and "The Veteran", and "The Two Brothers", and "The Glory of Agrippa", and "The Swan" (" The Swan's" still in business, but the others are gone - the best wine came from "The Two Brothers"), and the "Baucis and Philemon" - that's disappeared too, a very pleasant place. And so has "The Yew Tree" - I liked the old "Yew Tree".
How they laughed at me! They were all men who kept their own cellars and had probably never been into a wine-shop to buy drink in their life. I silenced them with an angry look. I said: `You may recall that five years ago, owing to the, caprices of my nephew, the late Emperor, I went bankrupt and was forced to live on the charity of my friends - not a man of you among them, by the way - real friends, such as a few, grateful freedmen, a girl prostitute, and an old slave or two: I visited those taverns to buy wine because my cellar was up for public auction along with my house, of which I could only afford to occupy a few rooms. So I know what I'm talking about: And I hope that if any of you happen to fall a victim to the caprices of an Emperor and find yourself in poverty you will remember this debate, and regret that, you have not voted for the maintenance of a proper supply of butcher's meat in the City and for the preservation of such honest wineshops as the old " Swan", ,"The Coronet' and "The Black Dog", which are still in business but won't survive long if you don't do something for them. To Hell with cold water and pulse-porridge! And if I see so much as a smile cross your faces, my Lords, before I have finished this speech - or after - I shall take it as a personal affront.'
I was really angry, shaking with anger, and I saw the fear of death gradually stealing over them. They passed my motion without a single contrary vote.
My success gave me momentary pleasure, but afterwards I felt deeply ashamed and made things worse by apologizing to them for my ill-temper. They thought that I was showing weakness and timidity by doing so. Now, I wish to make it clear that I had not been using my Imperial power, contrary to all my most cherished principles of equality and justice and human self-respect, to bully and browbeat the Senate. I had just felt outraged by Asiaticus and the rest of those rich heartless men who treated their fellow-citizens like dirt. I was not threatening, I was merely expostulating. But those words of mine were used against me afterwards by my enemies, in spite of my apology for them and in spite of the following letter that I composed and circulated in the City:
Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Emperor, High Pontiff Protector of the People, Consul for the third time, to the Senate and People of Rome, greetings.
I am aware of a certain failing in myself, which distresses me perhaps more than it distresses you, because one grieves more for a trouble of one's, own making than for trouble that comes upon one from another source, particularly from some powerful source over which one has little or no control, such as lightning, disease, hail, or the severity of a judge: I refer to the sudden bursts of anger to which I have been increasingly subject since I first assumed the burden of government that, against my inclinations, you laid on me. For example, the other day I sent word to the citizens of Ostia that I was coming to view the progress of the excavations at their new port, sailing down the Tiber, and that they might expect me about noon, and that if they had any complaints to make about the behaviour of my army of workmen there or any petitions to offer I should be pleased to attend to them; but when I reached Ostia no boat put out to meet me and no group of city officials was waiting at the quay. I was incensed and sent for the leading men of the city, including the chief magistrate and the harbour-master, and addressed them in the most violent terms, asking why it was that I had become so contemptible and worthless in their eyes that there was not even a sailor there ready to tie my yacht up to the quay when I landed, and I supposed that they would charge me a fee for entering their port at all, and what sort of ingrates were the men of Ostia to growl and snap at the hand that fed them, or at the best, to turn away from it with indifference? However, a simple explanation was offered: my message had never reached them. They apologized, and I apologized, and we became the best of friends again, no ill-will remaining on either side. But I suffered more from my anger than they did, because they were not conscious of any wrong-doings when I shouted at them, whereas I was most ashamed, afterwards, to have insulted them.