stolid, insolent child, and my mother scolded me so often in his presence that he learned to have no respect for me.
I don't know how Urgulanilla got through her days. But she never seemed bored and ate enormously and, so far as I know, entertained no secret lovers. This strange creature had one passion, though--Numantina, the wife of my brother-in-law Silvanus, a little fair-haired elf-like creature who had once done or said something [I don't know what] which had penetrated through that thick hide and muscular bulging body and touched what served Urgulanilla for a heart.
Urgulanilla had a life-size portrait of Numantina in her boudoir: she used, I believe, to sit gazing at it for hours whenever there was no opportunity for gazing at Numantina herself. When I moved to Capua, Urgulanilla stayed at Rome with my mother and Drusillus.
The only inconvenience of Capua as a home for me was the absence of a good library. However, I began a book for which a library was not needed--a history of Etruria. I had by now made some progress in Etruscan, and Aruns, with whom I spent a few hours every day, was most helpful in giving me access to the archives of his half- ruined temple.
He told me that he had been born on the day that the comet appeared which had announced the beginning of the tenth and last cycle of the Etruscan race. A cycle is a period reckoned by the longest life: that is to say, a cycle does not close until the death of everyone who was alive at the festival [217] celebrating the close of the previous cycle. A cycle averages a little over one hundred years. Well, this was the last cycle and it would end with the total disappearance of Etruscan as a spoken language. The prophecy was already as good as fulfilled because he had no successors in his priestly office, and the country-people now talked Latin even in the home; so he was glad to help me to write my history, he said, as a mausoleum for the traditions of a once great race. I started it in the second year of Tiberius'
reign and I finished it twenty-one years later. I consider it my best work: certainly I worked hardest at it. So far as I know, there is no other book on the subject of the Etruscans at all and. they were a very interesting race indeed; so I think that historians of the future will be grateful to me.
I had Gallon and Pallas with me and lived a quiet orderly life. I took an interest in the farm attached to my villa and enjoyed occasional visits from friends in Rome who came out for a holiday. There was a woman permanently living with me, called Acre, a professional prostitute and a very decent woman, I never had any trouble with her in the fifteen years she was with me. Our relationship was a purely business one. She had deliberately chosen prostitution as her profession; I paid her well; there was no nonsense about her. We were quite fond of each other in a way. At last she told me that she wanted to retire on her earnings.
She would marry a decent man, an old soldier for choice, and settle down in one of the colonies and have children before it was too late. She had always wanted to have a houseful of children. So I kissed her and said good-bye and gave her enough dowry-money to make things very easy for her. She did not go away, though, until she had found me a successor whom she could trust to treat me properly. She found me Calpurnia, who was so like her that I have often thought she must have been her daughter. Acte did once mention having had a daughter whom she had to put out to nurse because one couldn't be a prostitute and a mother at the same time. Well, so Acte married an ex-Guardsman who treated her quite well and had five children by her.
I have always kept an eye on that family. I mention her only because my readers will wonder what sort of sexual life I led when living apart from Urgulanilla. I do not think that it is natural for an ordinary man to live long without a woman, and since Urgulanilla was impossible as a wife I do not think that I can be blamed for living with Acte.
Acte and I had an understanding that while we were together we would neither of us have to do with anyone else.
This was not sentiment but a medical precaution: there was so much venereal disease now in Rome--another fatal legacy, by the way, of the Punic War.
Here I wish to put it on record that I have never at any time of my life practised homosexuality. I do not use Augustus' argument against it, that it prevents men having children to support the State, but I have always thought it at once pitiful and disgusting to see a full-grown man, a magistrate, perhaps, with a family of his own, slobbering uxoriously over a plump little boy with a painted face and bangles; or an ancient senator playing Queen Venus to some tall young Adonis of the Guards cavalry who tolerates the old fool only because he has money.
When I had to go up to Rome I stayed there for as short a time as possible. I felt something uncomfortable in the atmosphere on the Palatine Hill, which may well have been the growing tension between Tiberius and Livia. He had begun building a huge palace for himself on the NorthWest of the hill, and now moved into the lower rooms, before the upper ones were finished, leaving her in sole possession of Augustus' palace. Livia, as if to show that Tiberius' new building, though three times the size, would never have the prestige of the old one, put a magnificent gold statue of Augustus in her hall and proposed, as High Priestess of his cult, to invite all the senators and their wives to the dedicatory banquet. But Tiberius pointed out that he must first ask the Senate to vote on the matter: it was a State occasion, not a private entertainment. He so managed the debate that the banquet was held in two parts simultaneously: the senators in the hall with himself as host, and their wives in a big room leading off it with Livia as hostess. She swallowed the insult by not treating it as such, only as a sensible arrangement more in keeping with what Augustus would have wished himself; but gave orders to the Palace cooks that the women were to be served first [»9] with the best joints and sweetmeats and wine. She also appropriated the most costly dishes and drinking-vessels for her feast. She got the better of him on that occasion and the senators' wives all had a good laugh at the expense of Tiberius and their husbands.
Another uncomfortable thing about coming to Rome was that I never seemed to be able to avoid meeting Sejanus.
I disliked having anything to do with him, though he was always studiously polite to me and never did me any direct injury. I was astonished that a man with a face and manner like his and not well-born or a famous fighter, or even particularly rich, could have made such a huge success in the City: he was now the next most important man after Tiberius, and extremely popular with the Guards. It was a completely untrustworthy face--sly, cruel and irregular featured--and the one thing that held it together was a certain animal hardiness and resolution. What was stranger still to me, several women of good family were said to be rivals in love for him. He and Castor got on badly together, which was only natural, for there were rumours that Livilla and Sejanus had some sort of understanding. But Tiberius seemed to have complete confidence in him.
I have mentioned Briseis, my mother's old freedwoman.
When I told her that I was leaving Rome and settling at Capua she said how much she would miss me, but that I was wise to go. 'I had a funny dream about you last night, Master Claudius, if you'll forgive me. You were a little lame boy, and thieves broke into his father's house and murdered his father and a whole lot of relations and friends; but he squeezed through a pantry-window and went hobbling into the neighbouring wood. He climbed up a tree and waited. The thieves came out of the house and sat down under the tree where he was hiding, to divide the plunder. Soon they began to quarrel about who should have what, and one of the thieves got killed, and then two more, and then the rest began drinking wine and pretending to be great friends; but the wine had been poisoned by one of the murdered thieves, so they all died in agony. The lame boy climbed down the tree and collected the valuables and found a lot of gold and jewels among them that had been I, CLAUDlUt [220] stolen from other families: but he took it all home with him and became quite rich.'
I smiled. 'That's a funny dream, Briseis. But he was still as lame as ever and all that wealth could not buy his father and family back to life again, could it?'
'No, my dear, but perhaps he married and had a family of his own. So choose a good tree. Master Claudius, and don't come down till the last of the thieves are dead. That's what my dream said.'
'I'll not come down even then, if I can help it, Briseis.
I don't want to be a receiver of stolen goods.'
'You can always give them back. Master Claudius.'
This was all very remarkable in the light of what happened later. I have no great faith in dreams. Athenodorus once dreamed that there was treasure in a badger's den in a wood near Rome. He found his way to the exact spot, which he had never visited before, and there in a bank was the hole leading to the den. He fetched a couple of countrymen to dig away the bank until they came to the den at the end of the hole--where they found a rotten old purse containing six mouldy coppers and a bad shilling, which was not enough to pay the countrymen for their work. And one of my tenants, a shopkeeper, dreamed once that a flight of eagles wheeled round his head and
