Such learning, of course, could be dangerous in the wrong hands. Back in 12 BC, Augustus had confiscated and burned more than two thousand books which claimed to reveal the future; two years into Tiberius’s reign, the Senate had ordered all astrologers out of Italy. Particularly prominent ones risked being thrown off a cliff. Knowledge of where the world was heading had become far too sensitive to be permitted the average citizen. A Princeps, by contrast, needed all the guidance he could get. Tiberius’s own instructor in occult studies was an astrologer by the name of Thrasyllus, whose talents had first impressed him during his exile on Rhodes, and who had since become a bosom companion.*1 The presence by his side of such a seasoned observer of the constellations was a great reassurance to the Princeps. The pulse of things still needed to be kept. Quarantined as he was from the sordid mass of humanity, Tiberius aimed to fix his gaze instead on higher things, upon wonders untouched by equivocating senators, fractious mobs and ambitious widows.
Even Augustus had found Capri a fitting home for marvels. His villa had been liberally adorned with them: the bones of giants, the skeletons of sea monsters. Tiberius too had a fascination with such treasures – so much so that his curiosity about them was celebrated across the world. Brought the tooth of a colossal hero whose remains had been exposed by an earthquake in Asia Minor, he had reverently measured it, then commissioned a full-scale model of the dead man’s head.*2 Such attention to the details of the fantastical was typical of Tiberius. When a merman was spotted playing a conch shell in a Spanish cave, or a mysterious voice was heard crying out from a Greek island that Pan, a god with the legs and huge genitals of a goat, was dead, the Princeps demanded a full report. Witnesses were grilled, official inquiries set up. Nowhere, though, did the Princeps’s obsession with squaring the rival dimensions of the earthly and the heavenly, the mortal and the supernatural, express itself to more spectacular effect than on his island retreat. Twelve separate villas, some converted by the Princeps and some built from scratch, dotted the island in transparent homage to Mount Olympus, home of the twelve most powerful gods of Greece. Some of these complexes stood perched on cliffs, louring over sea-lanes once navigated by Ulysses and Aeneas; others led down to caves, where, set amid the lapping of blue waters, statues of mermen and sea-nymphs adorned the flame-lit depths. Everywhere, grottoes, gardens and porticoes, graced by the Princeps with learned, teasing names and fashioned in obedience to his immaculate taste, provided the perfect setting for young actors to pose as Pans and nymphs. As at Spelunca, so on Capri: Tiberius dwelt amid a mythological theme park.
And by 37, eleven years after his departure for Campania, he was coming to seem almost a figure of myth himself. It was inevitable, in a city as addicted to scandal as Rome, that the Princeps’s lengthy absence on a private island should have fuelled the rumours told of him. His brooding shadow still lay heavy over the capital. The plebs had neither forgotten nor forgiven his haughty contempt for them, nor the Senate his brutal purging of the supporters of Agrippina and Sejanus. The smears of blood on the Gemonian Steps were not easily washed away. Tiberius had come to seem, in his old age, a ghoulish figure of dread: embittered, paranoid and murderous. Of what hellish cruelties he might be capable away from the public gaze, amid the seclusion of Capri, was a question fit to send shivers up the spines of eager Roman gossips. Many stories were bandied about. It was claimed, for instance, that a few days after the Princeps’s first arrival on the island, while he was standing on a cliff, a fisherman had clambered up the rocks, bringing with him a huge mullet as a gift for Caesar; and that Tiberius, the man whose fearlessness in the service of Rome even his bitterest enemies acknowledged, had been terrified by the intruder. So terrified, in fact, that he had ordered his guards to seize the wretched trespasser and scrub his face with the mullet. The man, screaming, was said to have cried out in the midst of this torture, ‘I only thank the stars I did not give him the huge crab I also caught!’91 And so Tiberius ordered him scrubbed with the crab as well. Rome too, so many had come to believe, had been similarly treated by the Princeps. She had become, under his rule, a face shredded and bloodied to the bone.
That Tiberius was capable of being vengeful hardly came as news. More unsettling, perhaps, were the vices that he had previously kept concealed. To the Roman people, privacy was something inherently unnatural. It permitted aberrant and sinister instincts free rein. Only those with sexual tastes they wished to keep veiled from their fellow citizens could have any reason to crave it. Hostius Quadra had indulged his unspeakable perversities in the isolation of a mirrored bedroom – but Tiberius, for eleven years, had enjoyed the run of an entire island. People in Rome were not fooled by his high-flown pretensions to scholarship. They suspected that his claims to an interest in the arcane details of mythology were merely an excuse to indulge in pornographic floor-shows. Decades before, when the future Augustus had celebrated his marriage to Livia, crowds in the streets below had rioted when news broke that the wedding guests were dressed up as gods. Now, though, in the playground that Tiberius had made of Capri, there were no censorious mobs to keep the Princeps’s fantasies in check. The nymphs and Pans with which he peopled his grottoes were not there merely to pose. Rapes and fantastical copulations were rife in the tales told of the gods. What greater pleasure, then, for an old man fascinated by their doings than to watch their couplings being graphically restaged?
The frisson derived not just from the performances but from the cast. All his life, Tiberius had been pledged to certain fundamentals: the dignity of the Senate, the ideals of the aristocracy, the virtues of his city’s past. Yet as Ovid, left to die by the Princeps at the ends of the world, had always understood, ‘desire is fuelled by prohibitions.’92 Tiberius’s choice of performers could hardly have been more transgressive. Young and attractive, many were not merely paragons of modesty but children of the Princeps’s own class. ‘Beauty and good bodies; uncorrupted innocence and distinguished ancestry: these were what turned him on.’93 Obliged to pose as prostitutes, to hawk for business like the lowest class of sex worker, to perform sometimes three or four at a time, the offspring of the nobility summoned to Capri could hardly have been more humiliated. The spectacle of their degradation was a hideous desecration of everything that the man watching it had always held most dear. But that, of course, for the Princeps, was precisely what made it so exciting.
Naturally, he despised himself for it. Tiberius, heir to the Claudian name, the greatest general of his generation, a man who by virtue of his many services to the Republic would have deserved to rank as Princeps even had his divine father not adopted him, knew the standards by which he would be judged – for he shared them. But he was weary. Twenty long years he had been holding the Roman wolf by its ears. Almost into his ninth decade, he felt himself a man out of time. His best hopes for his city had turned to dust. The Senate had failed him. Indeed, it was the measure of his peers’ depravity that so many had become complicit in his own. Men whose record of service to Rome reached back to the days of the kings, when gods had still walked the earth, now competed to pimp their children to him. Faced by the evidence of such degeneracy, Tiberius no longer felt any great concern to secure the future of his fellow citizens.