`What's that?' I cried.
He caught me by the arm without ceremony and fairly dragged me up the hill. `Hurry!' he screamed. `Faster, faster!' I looked to see what was the matter, and a huge brown-and-white wall- of water, I wouldn't like to say, how many feet high, on the model of the one that runs yearly up the Severn River in Britain, was roaring up the channel. Up the channel, mark you! It was some time before I realized what had happened. The sudden rush of water had overflowed the channel a few hundred yards down, forming a large lake in a fold of the hills. Into this lake, its foundations sapped by the water, slid a whole hillside, hundreds of thousands of tons of rock, completely filling it and expelling the water with awful force.
All but a few, of us managed to scramble to safety, though with wet legs - only twenty persons were, drowned. But the dining chamber was torn to pieces and tables and couches and food and garlands carried far out into the lake. Oh, how vexed Agrippinilla was! She blazed up at Narcissus, telling him that he had arranged the whole thing on purpose to conceal the fact that the channel was still not dug deep enough, and accused him of putting millions of public money into his own pocket, and Heaven only knows what else besides.
Narcissus, whose nerves were thoroughly upset now, lost his temper too and asked Agrippinilla who she thought she was -Queen Semiramis? or the Goddess Juno? or the Commander-inChief of the Roman Armies? `Keep your paws out of this pie,' he screamed at her.
I thought it all a great joke. `Quarrelling won't give us back our dinners,' I said.
I was more amused than ever when the engineers reported that it would take two more years to cut a new passage through the obstruction. `I'm afraid that I'll not be spared to exhibit another fight on these waters, my friends,' I said gravely. Somehow, the whole business seemed beautifully symbolic. Labour in vain, like all the industrious work that I had done in my early Years of monarchy as a gift to an undeserving Senate and People. The violence of that wave gave me a feeling of the deepest satisfaction. I liked it better than all the sea-fighting and bridge-fighting.
Agrippinilla was complaining that a precious set of gold dishes from the Palace had been. carried away by the wave and only a few pieces recovered: the others were at the lake-bottom. `Why, that's nothing to worry about,' I teased. `Listen! You take off those beautiful shining clothes of yours - I'll see that Narcissus doesn't steal them - and I'll make the Guards keep the crowd back and you can give a special diving display, from the sluice-gate. Everyone will enjoy that tremendously: they like nothing so much as the discovery that their rulers are human after all. But, my, dear, why not? Why shouldn't you? Now, don't lose your temper. If you can dive for sponges, you can dive for gold dishes, surely? Look that must be one of your treasures over there, shining through the water, quite easy to get. There, where I'm throwing this pebble!'
To console Agrippinilla for her losses, I gave her, some days later, a very valuable present a snow-white nightingale, the first ever reported of that colour. Narcissus, as an apology for his rudeness, gave her a talking blackbird. The blackbird talked- almost as well as a parrot, and the white nightingale sang quite as well as the ordinary brown sort. Agrippinilla could not easily conceal her delight .in these birds. My family, by the way, has always shown a weakness for pet animals. There was Augustus with his watchdog, Typhon; Tiberius with his wingless dragon; Caligula with the horse Incitatus. My: sister Livilla kept a thievish, mischievous marmoset; my brother Germanicus a black squirrel, and my mother Antonia a large pet carp, This fish would answer to its name, which was `Leviathan', swimming up from its lair among the water-lilies in its pool and allowing my mother to feed and tickle it. It was a present from Herod Agrippa, who had fixed a little pair of jewelled ear-rings in its gills. She used to claim that when it opened and shut its mouth it was addressing her, and that she understood it. I never had a pet myself. I have always felt that in these cases one gives more than one gets, and there is a temptation to believe the creature both more affectionate and more sagacious than it really is.
Chapter 32
IT is now September in the fourteenth year of my reign. Barbillus has lately read my horoscope and fears that I am destined to die about the middle of next month. Thrasyllus once told me exactly the same thing for he allowed me' a life of sixty-three years, sixty-three days, sixty-three watches, and sixty three hours. That works out to the thirteenth of next month. Thrasyllus was more explicit about it than Barbillus: I remember that he congratulated me on this combination of multiplied seven and nines: it was a very remarkable one, he said. Well, I am prepared to die. In court this morning I begged the lawyers to behave with a little more consideration for an old man; I said that next year I shouldn't be among them, and they could treat my successor as they pleased. I also told the court, in the case of a noblewoman charged with adultery, that I had now been married several times, and that each of my wives in turn had proved bad, and that I had showed them indulgence for, a while, but not for long: so far I had divorced three. Agrippinilla will get to hear of Nero is seventeen. He goes about with the affected modesty of a high-class harlot, shaking his scented hair out of his eyes; every now and then; or with the affected modesty of a high-class philosopher, pausing to ponder privately, every now and then, in the middle of a, group of admiring, noblemen - right foot thrown out, head sunk on breast, left arm akimbo, right hand raised, with the finger tips pressing lightly on his forehead as if in the throes of thought. Soon he comes out with a brilliant epigram or a happy couplet or a profound piece of sententious wisdom; not however his own Seneca is earning his porridge, as the saying is. I wish Nero's friends joy of him. I wish Rome joy of him; I wish Agrippinilla joy of him, and Seneca too. I heard privately, by way of Seneca's sister (a secret friend of Narcissus's who gives us a lot of useful, information about the nation's latest darling), that the night before Seneca received my order for his recall from. Corsica he dreamed that he was acting as, schoolmaster to Caligula. I take that as a sign.
On New Year's Day this year I called Xenophon to me and thanked him for keeping me alive so long. I then fulfilled my, promise to him, though the agreed fifteen years term is not yet over, and won from the Senate a perpetual exemption from taxes and military service of his native island of Cos. In my speech I gave the House a full account of the lives and deeds of the many famous physicians of Cos, who all, claim direct descent from the God Aesculapius, and learnedly discussed their various therapeutic practices; I ended up with Xenophon's father, who was my father's field-surgeon in his German wars, and with Xenophon himself, whom I praised above them all. Some days later Xenophon asked permission to remain with me a few years longer. He did not put his request in terms of loyalty or gratitude or affection, though I have done much for him - what a curiously unemotional man he is! but on the grounds of the convenience of the Palace as a place for medical research! The fact was that when I paid Xenophon this honour I was
counting on him to help me carry out a plan that called for the utmost secrecy and discretion. It was a debt that I owed to myself and to my ancestors: it was nothing less than the rescue of my Britannicus. Let me now clearly show why I deliberately preferred Nero to him, why I gave him so old-fashioned an education, why I guarded him so carefully from the infection of, the court, from contact with vice and flattery. To begin with, I knew that Nero is fated to rule as my successor, carrying on the cursed business of monarchy, fated to plague Rome and earn everlasting hatred, to be the last of the mad Caesars. Yes, we are all mad, we Emperors. We begin sanely, like Augustus and Tiberius and even Caligula (though he was an evil character, he was sane; at first) and monarchy turns our wits. `After Nero's death surely the Republic will be restored,' I argued; and it was my intention that Britannicus should be the one to restore it. But how was Britannicus to live through the reign of Nero? Nero would surely put him to death if he remained at Rome, as Caligula had put Gemellus to death. Britannicus must be removed, I decided, to some safe place where he could grow up virtuously and nobly like a Claudian of ancient times, and keep alight in his heart the fire of true-liberty.
`But the world is now wholly Roman, with the exception of Germany, the East, the Scythian deserts' north of the Black Sea, unexplored Africa, and the farther parts of Britain: so where can my Britannicus be safe from Nero's power?' I asked myself. `Not in Parthia or Arabia: there could be no worse choice. Not in Germany: I have never loved the Germans. For all their barbaric virtues they are our natural enemies. Of Africa and Scythia I know little. There is only one place for a Britannicus, and that is Britain, The northern Britons are racially akin to us. Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantians is my ally. She is a noble and wise ruler and at peace with my province of South Britain. Her chieftains are brave and courteous warriors. Her young stepson, who is her heir, is coming here in May, accompanied by a band of young nobles and noblewomen, as my guests at the Palace. I shall make Britannicus his host and secretly bind the two together in blood-brotherhood, according to the British rite. These Brigantians will remain here for the entire summer. When they sail back (and I shall send them back by long sea, from Ostia direct to their port in the Humber) Britannicus will go with them in disguise. He will, have his face and body stained blue, and will be dressed in the red smock and tartan trousers of a young Brigantian nobleman, with gold chains around his neck. Nobody will recognize him. I shall load the Brigantian prince with gifts and bind him with the holiest possible oaths to keep Britannicus safe, and to hide his identity from everyone but the Queen. He will bind his
