Life at the Palace I found extremely disorderly. I don't mean that I wasn't made very comfortable or that the servants were not well trained or that the ordinary formalities and courtesies were not observed towards visitors. But I never quite knew what tender relations existed between this person and that: Agrippinilla and Lesbia seemed to have exchanged husbands at one time, and at another Apelles seemed somehow intimately connected with Lesbia and the charioteer with Agrippinilla. As for Caligula and Ganymede--but I have said enough to show what I mean by 'disorderly'. I was the only one among them past middle-age, and did not understand the ways of the new generation at all. Gemellus also lived in the Palace: he was a frightened, delicate boy who bit his nails to the quick and was usually to be found sitting in a corner and drawing designs of nymphs and satyrs and that sort of thing for vases. I can't tell you much more about Gemellus than that I got into talk with him once or twice, feeling sorry for him because he was not really one of the party, any more than I was; but perhaps he thought that I was trying to draw him out and force him into saying something against Caligula, for he would only answer in monosyllables. On the day that he put on his manly-gown Caligula adopted him as his son and heir, and appointed him Leader of Cadets; but that wasn't the same thing by any means as sharing the monarchy with him.
Caligula fell ill and for a whole month his life was despaired of. The doctors called it brain-fever. The popular consternation at Rome was so great that a crowd of never less than ten thousand people stood day and [A.D. 38] night around the Palace, waiting for a favourable bulletin. They kept up a quiet muttering and whispering together; the noise, as it reached my window, was like that of a distant stream running over pebbles.
There were a number of most remarkable manifestations of anxiety. Some men even pasted up placards on their house-doors, to say that if Death held his hand and spared the Emperor, they vowed to give him their own lives in compensation. By universal consent all traffic noises and street cries and music ceased within half a mile or more of the Palace. That had never happened before, even during Augustus' illness, the one of which Musa was supposed to have cured him. The bulletins always read: 'No change.'
One evening Drusilla knocked at my door and said, 'Uncle Claudius! The Emperor wants to see you prgently.
Come at once. Don't stop tor anything.'
'What does he want me for?'
'I don't know. But for Heaven's sake humour him. He's got a sword there.
He'll kill you if you don't say what he wants you to say. He had the point at my throat this morning. He told me that I didn't love him. I had to swear and swear that I did love him. 'Kill me, if you like, my darling,' I said .O Uncle Claudius, why was I ever born?
He's mad. He always was. But he's worse than mad now.
He's
possessed.'
I went along to Caligula's bedroom, which was heavily curtained and thickly carpeted. One feeble oil-lamp was burning by the bedside. The air smelt stale. His querulous voice greeted me. 'Late again? I told you to hurry,' He didn't look ill, only unhealthy. Two powerful deaf-mutes with axes stood as guards, one on each side of his bed.
I said, saluting him, 'Oh, how I hurried! If I hadn't had a lame leg I'd have been here almost before I started. What joy to see you alive and to hear your voice again, Caesar! Can I dare to hope that you're better?'
'I have never really been ill. Only resting. And undergoing a metamorphosis. It's the most important religious event in history. No wonder the City keeps so quiet.'
I felt that he expected me to be sympathetic, nevertheless. [363] 'Has the metamorphosis been painful, Emperor? I trust not.'
'As painful as if I were my own mother. I had a very difficult delivery.
Mercifully, I have forgotten all about it.
Or nearly all. For I was a very precocious child and distinctly remember the midwives' faces of admiration as they washed me after my emergence into this world, and the taste of the wine they put between my lips to refresh me after my struggles.'
'An astounding memory. Emperor. But may I humbly enquire precisely what is the character of this glorious change that has come over you?'
'Isn't it immediately apparent?' he asked angrily.
Drusilla's word 'possessed' and the conversation I had had with my grandmother Livia as she lay dying gave me the clue. I fell on my face and adored him as a God.
After a minute or two I asked from the floor whether I was the first man privileged to worship him. He said that I was and I burst out into gratitude. He was thoughtfully prodding me with the point of his sword in the back of my neck. I thought I was done for.
He said: 'I admit I am still in mortal disguise, so it is not remarkable that you did not notice my Divinity at once.'
'I don't know how I could have been so blind. Your face shines in this dim light like a lamp.'
'Does it?' he asked with interest. 'Get up and give me that mirror.' I handed him a polished steel mirror and he agreed that it shone very brightly. In this fit of good humour he began to tell me a good deal about himself.
'I always knew that it would happen,' he said. “I never felt anything but Divine. Think of it. At two years old I put down a mutiny of my father's army and so saved Rome. That was prodigious, like the stories told about the God Mercury when a child, or about Hercules who strangled the snakes in his cradle.'
'And Mercury only stole a few oxen,' I said, 'and twanged a note or two on the lyre. That was nothing by comparison.'
'And what's more, by the age of eight I had killed my father. Jove himself never did that. He merely banished the old fellow.'
I took this as raving on the same level, but I asked in a matter-of-fact voice,
'Why did you do that?' '
'He stood in my way. He tried to discipline me--me, a young God, imagine it! So I frightened him to death. I smuggled dead things into our house at Antioch and hid them under loose tiles; and I scrawled charms, on the walls; and I got a cock in my bedroom to give him his marching orders. And I robbed him of his Hecate. Look, here she is: I always keep her under my pillow!' He held up the green jasper charm.
My heart went as cold as ice when I recognised it. I said in a horrified voice: 'You were the one then? And it was you who climbed into the bolted room by that tiny window and drew your devices there too?'
He nodded proudly and went rattling on: 'Not only did I kill my natural father but I killed my father by adoption too--Tiberius, you know. And whereas Jupiter only lay with one sister of his, Juno, I have lain with all three of mine.
Martina told me it was the right thing to do if I wanted to be like Jove.'
'You knew Martina well then?'
'Indeed I did. When my parents were in Egypt I used to visit her every night. She was a very wise woman, I'll tell you another thing, Drusilla's Divine too. I'm going to announce it at the same time as I make the announcement about myself. How I love Drusilla! Almost as much as she loves me.' 'May I ask what are your sacred intentions? This metamorphosis will surely affect Rome profoundly.'
'Certainly. First, I'm going to put the whole world hi awe of me. I won't allow myself to be governed by a lot of fussy old men any longer. I'm going to show... but you remember your old grandmother, Livia? That was a joke.
Somehow she had got the notion that it was she who was to be the everlasting God about whom everyone has been prophesying in the East for the last thousand years.
I think it was Thrasyllus who tricked her into believing that she was meant.
Thrasyllus never told lies but he loved misleading people. You see, Livia didn't know the precise [565] terms of the prophecy. The God is to be a man not a woman, and not born in Rome, though he is to reign at Rome [I was bom at Antium], and bom at a time of profound peace [as I was], but destined to be the cause of innumerable wars after his death. He is to die young and to be at first loved by his people and then hated, and finally to die miserably, forsaken of all.
'His servants shall drink his blood.' Then after his death he is to rule over all the other Gods of the world, in lands not yet known to us. That can only be myself.
Martina told me that many prodigies had been seen lately in the near East which proved conclusively that the
