for the workmen and the pegging out of tasks. On occasions of this sort it was, I must admit, very pleasurable to be a monarch: to be able to get important things done by smothering stupid opposition with a single authoritative word. But I had to be constantly reminding myself of the danger of exercising my Imperial prerogatives in such a way as to retard the eventual restoration of a Republic. I did my best to encourage free speech and public- spiritedness, and to avoid transforming personal caprices of my own, into laws which all Rome must obey.. It was very difficult. The joke was that free speech; public-spiritedness, and Republican idealism itself seemed to come under the heading of personal caprices of my own. And though at first I made a point of being accessible to everyone, in order to avoid-the appearance of monarchical haughtiness, and of speaking inn a friendly-familiar way with all my fellow-citizens, I soon had to behave more distantly. It was not so much that I had not the time to spare for continuous friendly chat with everyone who came calling at .the Palace: it was rather that my fellow-citizens, with few exceptions, shamefully abused my good feelings towards them. They did this either by answering my familiarity with an ironically polite haughtiness, as if to say, `You can't fool us into loyalty,' or by a giggling impudence as if to say, `Why don't you behave like a real Emperor?' or by thoroughly false good-comradeship, as if to say, `If it pleases your Majesty to unbend, and to expect us to unbend in conformity with your humour, then look how obligingly we do so! But if you please to frown, down we'll go on our faces at once.'
Speaking of the harbour, Vitellius said to me one day: `A republic can never hope to carry through public works on so grand a scale ass a monarchy. All the grandest constructions in the world are the work of Kings or Queens. The walls and hanging gardens of Babylon. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The Pyramids. You have never been to Egypt, have you? I was stationed there as a young soldier and, ye Gods, those Pyramids! It is impossible to convey in words the crushing sense of awe with which they overwhelm everyone who sees them. One first hears about, them at home, as a child, and asks: 'What are the Pyramids?' and the answer is, 'Huge stone tombs in Egypt, triangular in shape, without any ornaments on them: just faced with white stucco.' That doesn't sound very interesting or impressive. The mind makes 'huge' no linger than some very big building with which one happens to be familiar - say the Temple of Augustus yonder or the Julian Basilica. And then again, visiting Egypt, one sees them at a great distance across the desert, little white marks like tents, and says 'Why, surely that's nothing to make a fuss about!’ But, Heavens, to stand beneath them a few hours later and look up! Caesar, I tell you, they are incredibly and impossibly huge. It makes one feel physically sick to think of them as having been built by-human hands. One's first sight of the Alps was nothing by comparison. So white, smooth, pitilessly immortal. Such a terrific monument of human aspiration '
`And stupidity and tyranny- and cruelty,' I broke in. 'King Cheops, who built the Great Pyramid, ruined his rich country, bled it white and left it gasping; and all to gratify his own absurd vanity and perhaps impress the Gods with his superhuman power. And what practical use did this Pyramid serve? Was it intended as a tomb to house Cheops's corpse for all eternity? Yet I have read that this absurdly impressive sepulchre has long been empty. The invading Shepherd Kings, discovered the secret entrance, rifled the inner chamber, and made a bonfire of proud Cheops's mummy.'
Vitellius smiled. `You haven't seen the Great Pyramid or you wouldn't talk like that. Its emptiness makes it all the more majestic. And as for use, why, it has a most important use. Its pinnacle serves as a mark of orientation for the Egyptian peasants when the yearly Nile flood subsides and they must mark out their fields again in the sea of fertile mud.'
'A tall pillar would have served just as well,' I said, `and two tall pillars, one on each bank of the Nile, would have been still better; and the cost would have been negligible. Cheops was mad, like Caligula; though apparently he had. a more settled madness than Caligula, who always did things by fits and starts. The great city that Caligula planned, to command the Great St Bernard Pass on the Alps, would never have got very far towards completion, though he had lived to be centenarian.'
Vitellius agreed. 'He was a jackdaw. The nearest he ever came to raising a Pyramid was when he built that outsize ship and stole the great red obelisk from Alexandria. A jackdaw and a monkey.'
`Yet I seem to remember that you once adored that jackdaw monkey as a God.'
'And I gratefully remember that the advice and example came from you.'
`_Heaven forgive us both,' I said. We were standing talking outside the Temple of Capitoline Jove, which we had just been ritually purifying, because of the recent appearance, on the roof, of a bird of evil omen. (It was an owl of the sort we call `incendiaries because they foretell the destruction by fire of any building on which they perch.) I pointed across the valley with my finger. `Do you see that? That's part of the greatest monument ever built, and though monarchs like Augustus and. Tiberius have added to it and kept it in repair, it was first built by a free people. And I have no doubt that it will last as long as the Pyramids, besides having proved of infinitely more service to mankind.'
'I don't see what- you mean. You seem to be pointing at the Palace.'
'I am pointing at the Appian Way,' I replied solemnly. 'It was begun in the Censorship of my great ancestor, Appius Claudius the Blind. The Roman Road is the greatest monument ever raised to human liberty by a noble and generous people. It runs across mountain, marsh, and river. It is built broad, straight, and firm. It joins city with city and nation with nation. It is tens of thousands of miles long, and always thronged with grateful travellers. And while the Great Pyramid, a few hundred feet high and wide, awes sightseers to silence - though it is only the rifled tomb of an ignoble corpse and a monument of oppression and misery, so that no doubt in viewing it you may still seem to hear the crack of the taskmaster's whip and the squeals and groans of the poor workmen struggling to set a huge block of stone into position 'But in this unpremeditated gush of eloquence I had forgotten the beginning of my sentence. I broke off, feeling foolish, and Vitellius had to come to the rescue. He threw up his hands, shut his eyes, and declaimed: `Words fail me, my Lords. Nothing that I might utter could possibly match the depth of my feelings in this matter.' We both laughed uproariously at this. Vitellius was one of the few friends I had who treated me with the right sort of familiarity. I never knew whether it was genuine, or artificial; but if artificial, it was so good an imitation of the real thing that I accepted it at its face value. I should never perhaps have called it in question if his former adoration of Caligula had not been so well acted, and if it had not been for the matter of Messalina's slipper. I shall tell you about this.
Vitellius was going up a staircase at the Palace, one day in summer, in company with Messalina and myself, when Messalina said: `Stop a moment, please: I've, lost my slipper.' Vitellius quickly turned and retrieved it for her, handing it back with a deep obeisance. Messalina was charmed. She said, smiling: `Claudius, you won't be jealous, will you, if I confer the Order of the Jewelled Slipper on this brave soldier, our, dear friend Vitellius? He really is most gallant and obliging.'
`But don't you need the slipper, my dear?'
`No, it's cooler to go barefoot on a day like this. And I have scores of other pretty pairs.'
So Vitellius took the slipper and kissed it and put it in the pocket-fold of his robe, where he kept it continually; bringing it out to kiss once more when enlarging, in sentimental private talk with me, on Messalina's beauty, brains, bounty, and on my extra ordinarily good fortune in being her husband. It always brought a great sense of warmth to my heart and sometimes even tears to my eyes to hear Messalina praised. It was a constant wonder to me that she could care as much for a lame, pedantic, stuttering old fellow like myself as she swore she did; yet nobody, I argued, could pretend that she had married me for mercenary reasons. I was a bankrupt at the time, and as for, the possibility of my ever becoming Emperor, it could surely never have occurred to her.
The harbour at Ostia was by no means my only great public work. The verse that the Sibyl of Cumae recited when I visited her once, in disguise, ten years before I became Emperor, prophesied that I should `give Rome water and winter bread'. The winter bread was a reference to Ostia, but the water meant the two great aqueducts I built. It is very curious about prophecies. A prophecy is made, perhaps, when one is a boy, and one pays great attention to it at the time, but then a mist descends: one forgets about it altogether until suddenly the mist clears and the prophecy is fulfilled. It was not until my aqueducts were completed and consecrated, and the harbour completed too, that I recalled the Sibyl's verse. Yet I suppose that it had been at the back of my mind all the time, as it were the God's whisper to me to undertake these great projects:
My aqueducts were most necessary the existing water supply was by no means sufficient for the City's needs, though greater than that of any other city in the world. We Romans love fresh water. Rome is a town of baths and fish-pools and fountains. The fact was that, though Rome was now served by no less than seven aqueducts, the rich men had managed to draw away most of the public water for their own use, getting permission to connect private reservoirs with the mains - their swimming-baths had to have fresh water every day, and their great gardens had to be watered so that many of the poorer citizens were reduced in the summer to drinking and
