Postumus ['S] did not arrive. At that hour no citizens were in the street; so when a combined force of Germans from the bodyguard and picked men of Sejanus' suddenly fell on the sailors--who were mostly drunk and not in any regular formation--the pass-word 'Neptune' lost its power. Many of them were killed on the spot, many more as they broke and ran, and the rest never once slowed down, it is said, before they reached Ostia again.
Crispus and two soldiers had waylaid Postumus in a narrow alley between his headquarters and the rendezvous, stunned him with a sandbag, gagged and bound him, put him into a covered sedan and carried him off to the Palace. The next day Tiberius made a statement to the Senate. A certain slave of Postumus Agrippa's called Clement, he said, had caused a deal of unnecessary alarm in the City by impersonating his dead former master. This bold fellow had run away from the provincial knight who had bought him when Postumus' estate was sold and had hidden in a wood on the coast of Tuscany until his beard grew long enough to hide his receding chin--the chief point of dissimilarity between himself and Postumus.
Some rowdy sailors at Ostia had pretended to believe in him, but only as an excuse for marching to Rome and creating a disturbance there. They had assembled in the suburbs a little before dawn that morning under his leadership with the object of marching to the centre of the City and plundering shops and private houses. When challenged by a force of Watchmen they had dispersed and deserted their leader, who had since been put to death; so the House need have no further anxiety about the matter.
I heard later that Tiberius pretended not to recognise Postumus when he was brought before him at the Palace and asked him, mockingly: 'How did you happen to become one of the Caesars?' To which Postumus answered: 'In the same way and on the same day as you did. Have you forgotten?' Tiberius told a slave to strike Postumus on the mouth for his insolence, and he was then put on the rack and asked to reveal his fellow- conspirators. But he would only tell scandalous anecdotes of the private life of Tiberius, which were so disgusting and so circumstantial that Tiberius lost his temper and battered his face in with his great bony fists. The soldiers finished the bloody work by beheading him and hacking him into pieces in the cellar of the Palace.
What greater sorrow can there be than to mourn a beloved friend as murdered--at the close of a long and undeserved exile, too--and then, after the brief joy and astonishment of hearing that he has somehow cheated his executioners, to have to mourn him a second time--this time without hope of error and without even seeing him in the interval--as treacherously recaptured and shamefully tortured and killed? My one consolation was that when Germanicus heard what had happened--and I would at once write him the whole story so far as I knew it--he would leave his campaigns in Germany and march back to Rome at the head of as many regiments as could be spared from the Rhine and avenge Postumus' death on Livia and Tiberius. I wrote, but he did not answer; I wrote again, and still no answer. But eventually a long affectionate letter came in which there was a wondering reference to the success which Clement had had in impersonating Postumus--how in the world had he managed to do it? From this sentence it was quite clear that none of my important letters had arrived: the only one to arrive had been sent off by the same post as the second. In this I had merely given him particulars of a business matter which he had asked me to look into for him: he now thanked me for the information, which he said was exactly what he wanted. I realized with a sudden feeling of dread that Livia or Tiberius must have intercepted all the rest.
My digestion had always been bad and fear of poison in every dish did not improve it. My stammer returned and I had attacks of aphasia--sudden blanks in the mind which brought me into great ridicule: if they caught me in the middle of a sentence I would finish it anyhow. The most unfortunate result of this weakness was that I made a mess of my duties as priest of Augustus, which hitherto I had carried out without cause for complaint from anyone.
There is an old custom at Rome that if any mistake is made in the ritual of a sacrifice or other service the whole thing has to be gone over again from the beginning. It now often happened when I was officiating that I would ['7] lose my way in a prayer and perhaps go on repeating the same sequence of sentences two or three times before I realised what I was doing, or that I would take up the flint knife for cutting the victim's throat before sprinkling its head with the ritual flour and salt--and this sort of thing meant going back to the beginning again. It was tedious to make three or four attempts at a service before I could get through it perfectly, and the congregation used to get very restless. At last I wrote to Tiberius as High Pontiff and asked to be relieved from all my religious duties for a year on the ground of ill-health. He granted the request without comment.
XIX
GERMANICUS' THIRD YEAR OF WAR AGAINST THE GERMANS was
more successful even than the first two. He had worked out a new plan of campaign, by which he would take the Germans by surprise and save his men a lot of dangerous and weary marching. This was to build on the Rhine a fleet of nearly a thousand transports, [A.D. 16] embark with most of his forces and sail down the river and, by way of the canal that our father had once cut, through the Dutch lakes and by sea to the mouth of the Ems. Here he would anchor his transports on the near bank, except for a few which would serve for making a pontoon bridge. He would then attack the tribes across the Weser, a river, fordable in places, which runs parallel to the Ems about fifty miles beyond. The plan worked well in every detail.
When the advance-guard reached the Weser they found Hermann and some allied chieftains waiting on the further bank. Hermann shouted across to ask whether Germanicus was in command. When they answered yes, he asked whether they would take him a message. The message was: 'Hermann's courteous greetings to Germanicus, and might he be permitted speech with his brother?' This was a brother of Hermann's called, in German, something like Goldkopf, or at any rate a name so barbarous that it was impossible to transliterate it into Latin--as
'Hermann' had been made into 'Arminius', or as 'Siegmyrgth' into 'Segimerus'; so it was translated as Flavius, meaning the golden-headed. Flavius had been in the Roman Army for years, and being at Lyons at the time of the disaster of Varus had there made a declaration of his continued loyalty to Rome, repudiating all the family ties which bound him to his treacherous brother Hermann. In the next year's campaign of Tiberius and Germanicus he had fought bravely and lost an eye.
Germanicus asked Flavius whether he wished to address his brother.
Flavius said he didn't much want to but that it might be an offer to surrender. So the two brothers started shouting at each other across the river. Hermann began talking German, but Flavius said that unless he talked Latin the conversation was at an end. Hermann did not want to talk Latin, which the other chiefs did not understand, for fear of being thought a traitor, and Flavius did not want to be thought a traitor by the Romans, who did not understand German. On the other hand Hermann wanted to make an impression on the Romans, and Flavius on the Germans. Hermann tried to keep to German, and Flavius to Latin, but as they grew more and more heated they fell into such a dreadful mixture of both languages that, as Germanicus wrote to me, it was as good as a comedy to hear them. I quote from Genrmanicus' account ot the dialogue.
HERMANN: Hullo, brother. What's happened to your face? That scar's an awful deformity. Lost an eye?
FLAVIUS; Yes, brother. Did you happen to pick one up?
I lost it that day you galloped away out of the wood with mud smeared on your shield so that Germanicus wouldn't recognise you.
HERMANN:
You're
wrong, brother. That wasn't me. You must have been
drinking again. You were always like that before a battle: a bit nervous unless you had drunk at least ['9] a gallon of beer, and had to be strapped to the saddle by the time the warhorns sounded.
FLAVIUS: That's a lie, of course, but it reminds me what a barbarous gut-rotting drink your German beer is. I never drink it now even when there's a great consignment come into the camp from one of your captured villages. The men only drink it when they have to: they say that it's better than swamp water spoilt by German corpses.
HERMANN: Yes, I like Roman wine myself. I have a few hundred jars left of what I captured from Varus. This summer I'll be getting in another good supply, if Germanicus doesn't look out. By the way, what reward did you get for losing your eye?
FLAVIUS: [with great dignity]: The personal thanks of the Commander-in-Chief, and three decorations, including the Crown and the Chain.
HERMANN: Ho, Ho! The Chain! Do you wear it round your ankles, you Roman slave?
FLAVIUS: I'd rather any day be a slave to the Romans than a traitor to them. By the way, your dear Thrusnelda's very well and so's your boy. When are you coming to Rome to visit them?
