Authors: Robert Graves
Narcissus said: ‘Yes, indeed. The danger is that the High Pontiff may show his former wife an undeserved clemency. It is very difficult indeed for him to judge the case as impartially as it will be his official duty’ to do. I must therefore ask you on his behalf not to make things more painful for him than they already are. May I courteously suggest that you retire, my Lady Vibidia, and attend to the solemnities of the Goddess Vesta, which you understand so well?’
So she retired, and we drove on. As we came into the City, Messalina made another attempt to see me, I am told, but was restrained by the sergeants. She then tried to send Britannicus and little Octavia to plead with, me for her, but Narcissus saw there running towards us and waved them back. I was sitting silent, brooding over the list of Messalina’s lovers. Narcissus had headed it: ‘Provisional and incomplete account of Valeria Messalina notorious adulteries, from the first year of her marriage to Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus Britannicus, Father; of the Country, High Pontiff, etc., until the present day.’ It contained forty-four names, later extended to 156.
Narcissus sent a message ordering the cart back to the Gardens: the traffic regulations forbade it to be in the streets at this hour. Messalina saw that she was beaten, so allowed herself to be carried back to the Gardens. The children had been sent to the Palace but her mother Domitia Lepida, though lately there had been a coolness between the two, bravely joined her in the cart; otherwise Messalina would have been quite alone but for the carter. Narcissus then told our coachman to drive on to Silius’s house. When we reached it I said: ‘This isn’t the place, is it? Surely this is the family mansion of the Asinians?’
Narcissus explained: ‘Messalina bought it privately when Asinius Gallus was banished, and gave it to Silius as a wedding present. Come inside and see for yourself what, has been going on.’
I went in and saw the litter of the wedding - the vine-leaf decorations, the wine-vats and presses, tables covered with food and dirty plates, trampled rose-leaves and garlands on the floor, discarded leopardskins, and wine spilt everywhere. The house was deserted except for an old porter and two dead-drunk lovers lying in each other’s arms on, the bed in the nuptial-chamber. I had them arrested. One was a staff-lieutenant called Montanus, the other was Narcissus’s own niece, a young married woman with two children. What shocked and distressed me most was to find the whole house full of Palace furniture, not merely things that Messalina had brought me as part of her dowry when we were married, but ancient heirlooms of the Claudian and Julian families, including the very statues of my ancestors and the family masks, cupboard and all! There could be no plainer proof of her intentions than that. So we climbed into the carriage again and drove on to the Guards Camp. Narcissus was gloomy and subdued now, because he had been very fond of his niece; but Vitellius and Caecina, had made up their minds that it would be safer for them to believe the evidence of their eyes, and simultaneously began urging me to vengeance. We reached the Camp, where I found the whole Division on parade, by Narcissus’s orders, in front of the tribunal. It was dark now and the tribunal was lit by flaring torches. I climbed up on the platform and made a short speech. My voice was clear, but sounded very far away: ‘Guards, my friend the late King Herod Agrippa, who first recommended me to you as your Emperor and then persuaded the Senate to accept your choice, told me on the last occasion that I saw him alive, and also wrote to-me in the last letter that I ever had from him, never to trust anyone, for nobody about me was worthy of my trust. I did not take his words literally. I continued to repose the fullest confidence in my wife, Valeria Messalina, whom I now know to have been a whore, a liar, a thief, a murderess, and a traitor to Rome. I don’t mean, Guards, that I don’t trust you. You’re the only people I do trust, you know. You’re soldiers and do your duty without question. I expect you to stand by me now and crush the plot which my former wife Messalina and her adulterer, the Consul-Elect Gaius Silius, have formed against my life under a pretence of restoring popular liberty to the City again. The Senate is rotten with conspiracy, as rotten as the entrails of the ram that I sacrificed this afternoon to the God Augustus; you never saw such an unholy sight. I am ashamed to talk as I do, but that’s right, isn’t it? Help me bring my enemies our enemies to book and, once Messalina’s dead, if I ever marry again I give you free and full leave to chop me to pieces with your swords, and use my head as a football at the Baths, like Sejanus’s. Three times married, and three times unlucky. Well, what about it, lads? Tell me what you think. I can’t get a straight answer from my other friends.’
‘Kill them, Caesar!’ - ‘No mercy!’
‘Strangle the bitch!’ -. ‘Death to them all!’
‘We’ll stand by you!’ - ‘You’ve been too damned generous.’ -‘Wipe them out, Caesar!’ There was no doubt what the Guards thought of the matter.
So I had the arrested men and women brought up beore me there and then, and ordered-the arrest of 110 more men now named in the charge-sheet as Messalina’s adulterers, and four women of rank who had prostituted themselves, at Messalina’s suggestion, in the course of that notorious Palace orgy. I finished the trial in three hours. But this was because all but thirty-four of the 360 persons who answered their names pleaded guilty to the charges brought against them. Those whose only, crime was their attendance at the wedding I banished. Twenty knights, six senators, and a Guards colonel, who all pleaded guilty to adultery or attempted revolution, or both, demanded to be executed at once. I granted them this favour: Vettius Valens tried to buy his life by offering to reveal the names of the ringleaders of the plot. I told him that I could find them out without his, assistance and he was led off to execution. Montanus was mentioned in Narcissus’s list, but pleaded that Messalina had forced him to spend the night with her by showing him an order to do so signed and sealed by me: and that after that single night she had tired of him. Messalina must have got my signature to the document by reading it out to me - ‘just to save your precious eyes, my darling’ as something quite different. However, I pointed out that he had no order from me to attend the wedding or to commit adultery with my friend Narcissus’s‘ niece; so he was executed too. There were also fifteen suicides in the City that night by persons who had not been arrested but expected to be. Three intimate friends of mine, all knights, Trogus, Cotta, and Fabius, were among these. I suspect that Narcissus knew of their guilt but left them out of the charge-sheet for friendship’s sake, contenting himself with sending them a warning.
Mnester would not plead guilty: he reminded me that he was under orders from me to obey my wife in everything, and said that he had obeyed her much against his will. He pulled off his clothes and showed the marks of a lash on his back. ‘She gave me that because my natural modesty prevented me from carrying out your orders as energetically as she wished, Caesar.’ I was sorry for Mnester. He had once saved that theatre-audience from massacre by the Germans. And what can you expect from an actor? But Narcissus said: ‘Don’t spare him, Caesar. Look carefully at the bruises. The flesh isn’t cut open at all. It’s clear to anyone with eyes in his head that the lash wasn’t meant to hurt; it was just part of their vicious practices.’ So Mnester made a very graceful bow to the parade, his last bow, and spoke his usual little speech: ‘If I have ever pleased you, that is my reward. If I have offended you, I ask your forgiveness.’ They received it in silence, and he was led off to his death, The only two people whom I spared except the obviously innocent were one Lateranus, who was accused of conspiracy but pleaded not guilty, and Caesoninus. The evidence against Lateranus was conflicting, and he was a nephew of Aulus Plautius, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt: Caesoninus I spared because he was so foul a wretch, though of good family, that I did not wish to insult his fellow-adulterers by executing him alongside of them: in Caligula’s reign he had prostituted himself as a woman. I don’t know what happened to him: he never reappeared in Rome. I also dismissed the charge against Narcissus’s niece: I owed him that.
The Bacchantes, still wearing nothing but their leopard skins, I ordered to be hanged, quoting Ulysses’s speech in the Odyssey, when he took vengeance on Penelope’s wicked maidservants: Then thus the prince ‘To these shall we afford A fate so pure as by the martial sword?
To these, the nightly prostitutes to shame And base revilers of our house and name?’
I strung them all up in Homeric fashion, twelve in a row, on a huge ship’s cable tautened between two trees with a winch. Their feet were just off the ground and as they died I quoted once more: They twitched their feet awhile, but not for long.
And Silius? And Messalina? Silius attempted no defence: but when I questioned him he made a plain statement of fact giving an account of his seduction by Messalina. I pressed him: ‘But why, I want to know why? Were you really in love with her? Did you really think me a tyrant? Did you really intend to restore the Republic, or just to become Emperor in my place?’ He answered: ‘I can’t explain, Caesar. Perhaps I was bewitched. She made me see you as a tyrant. My plans were vague. I talked liberty to many of my friends and, you know how it is, when one talks liberty everything seems beautifully simple. One expects all gates to open and all walls to fall flat and all voices to shout for joy.’
‘Do you wish your life to be spared? Shall I put you into the custody of your family as an irresponsible imbecile?’
‘I wish to die.’
Messalina had written me a letter from the Gardens. In it she told me that she loved me as much as ever and that she hoped I wouldn’t take her prank seriously; she had just been leading Silius on, as she and I had arranged, and if she had rather overdone the joke by getting beastly drunk, I mustn’t be stupid and feel cross or jealous. ‘There is nothing that makes a man so hateful and ugly in a woman’s eyes as jealousy.’ The letter was handed to me on the tribunal, but Narcissus would not let me answer it until the trials were over, except by a formal ‘Your communication has been received, and will be granted my Imperial attention in due course.’ He said that until I was satisfied as to the extent of her guilt it was better not to compromise myself in writing: I must not hold out any hope that she would escape death and merely be exiled to some small prison-island.
Messalina’s reply to my formal acknowledgement of her letter was a long screed, blotted with tears, reproaching me for my cold answer to her loving words. She now made a full confession, as she called it, of her many indiscretions, but did not admit to actual adultery in a single instance; she begged me for the sake of the children to forgive her and grant her a chance of starting again as a faithful and dutiful wife; and she promised to set a perfect example of matronly deportment to Roman noblewomen for all ages to come. ‘She signed herself by her pet name. It reached me during Silius’s trial.
Narcissus saw tears in my eyes and said: ‘Caesar, don’t give way. A born whore can never reform. She’s not honest with you even in this letter.
I said: ‘No, I won’t give way. A man can’t die twice of the same disease.’
I wrote again: ‘Your communication has been received and will be granted my attention in due course.’
Messalina’s third letter arrived just as the last heads had fallen. It was angry and threatening. She wrote that she had now given me every chance to treat her fairly and decently, and that if I did not immediately beg her pardon for the insolent, heartless, and ungrateful behaviour I had shown her, I must take the consequences; for her patience was wearing out. She secretly commanded the loyalty of all my Guards officers, and of all my freedmen with the exception of Narcissus, and of most of the Senate; she had only to speak the word and I would immediately be arrested and surrendered to her vengeance. Narcissus threw back his head and laughed. ‘Well, at least she acknowledges my loyalty to you, Caesar. Now, let’s go to the Palace. You must be nearly fainting with hunger. You have had nothing since breakfast, have you?’
‘But what shall I answer?’
‘It deserves no answer.’
We returned to the Palace and there was a fine meal waiting for us. Vermouth (recommended by Xenophon as a sedative) and oysters, and roast goose with my favourite mushroom and onion sauce - made according to a recipe given my mother by Berenice, Herod’s mother - and stewed veal with horse-radish, and a mixed dish of vegetables, and apple-pie flavoured with honey and cloves, and water-melon from Africa. I ate ravenously and when I had done I began to feel very sleepy. I said, to Narcissus: ‘My mind won’t work anymore to-night. I’m tired out. I put you in charge of affairs until tomorrow morning. I suppose that I ought to warn that miserable woman to attend here tomorrow morning and defend herself against those charges. I promised Vibidia that I’d give her a fair trial.’ Narcissus said nothing: I went to sleep on, my couch.
Narcissus beckoned to the Colonel of the Guard. ‘The Emperor’s orders. You are to proceed with six men to the pleasure-house in the Gardens of Lucullus and there execute the Lady Valeria Messalina, the Emperor’s divorced wife.’ Then he told Euodus to run ahead of the Guards and warn Messalina that they were coming, thus giving her an opportunity of committing suicide. If she took it, as she could hardly fail to do, I would not need to hear of the unauthorized order for her execution. Euodus found her lying on her face on the floor of the pleasure-house, sobbing. Her mother knelt beside her. Messalina said, without looking up ‘0 beloved Claudius, I’m so miserable and ashamed.’
Euodus laughed: ‘You’re mistaken, Madam. The Emperor is asleep, at the Palace, with orders not to be disturbed. Before he went off he told the Colonel of the Guard to come here and cut off your pretty head. His very words, Madam. “Cut off her pretty head and stick it on the end of a spear. I ran ahead to let you know. If you’ve as much courage as you have beauty, Madam, my advice is to get it over before they come. I brought this dagger along in case you hadn’t one handy.’