An old Frenchman agreed: `For my part, Captain, I shouldn't care how a battle was won, so long as it was well won. I heard two other officers like yourself discussing the battle to-night. And one of them said: 'Yes, a clever bit of strategy, but too clever: smells of the lamp.' What I say is, did the Emperor win a splendid victory or did he not? He did. Then long live the Emperor.'
But the Captain said: `Smells of the lamp, they said, did they? That was very well put. A strategical victory, but it smelled of the lamp. The Emperor's altogether too clever to rank as a good soldier. For my part, I thank the Gods that I never read a book in my life.'
I said shyly to Narcissus as we went home: `You didn't agree with that captain, did you, Narcissus?'
`No, Caesar,' said Narcissus, `did you? But I thought he spoke like a brave and honest man and as he's only a captain, perhaps you ought to be rather pleased than otherwise. You don't want captains in the army who know too much or think too much. And he certainly gave you full credit for the victory, didn't he?'
But I grumbled: `Either I'm an utter imbecile or I'm altogether too clever.'
The triumph lasted for three days. On the second day we had spectacles in the Circus and in the amphitheatre simultaneously. At the first we had chariot-races, ten in all, and athletic contests, and fights between British captives and bears; and boys from Asia Minor performed the national sword-dance. At the other a pageant of the storming and sacking of Colchester and the yielding of the enemy chiefs was re-enacted, arid we had a battle between 300 Catuvellaunians and 300 Trinovants, chariots as well as infantry. The Catuvellaunians won. On the morning of the third day we had more horse-racing and a battle between Catuvellaunian broad-swordsmen and a company of Numidian spearmen, captured by Geta the year before. The Catuvellaunians won easily. The last performance took place in the Theatre - plays, interludes, and acrobatic dancing. Mnester was splendid that day; and the audience made him perform his dance of triumph in Orestes and Pylades he was Pylades three times over. He refused to take a fourth call. He put his head around the curtain and called archly `I can't come, my Lords. Orestes and I are in bed together.'
Messalina said to me afterwards: `I want you to, talk to Mnester very sternly, my dearest husband. He's much too independent for a man; of his profession and origin, though he is a marvellous actor. During your absence he was most rude tome on two or three occasions. When I asked him to make his company rehearse a favourite ballet of mine for a festival you know that I have been supervising all the Games and Shows because Vitellius found it too much for him, and then I found that Harpocras, the secretary, had been behaving dishonestly, and we had to have him executed, and Pheronactus whom I chose in his place has been rather slow in, learning his business - well, anyhow, it was all very difficult for me, and Mnester instead of making things easier was most dreadfully obstinate. Oh, no, he said, he couldn't put on Ulysses and Circe because he hadn't anyone capable of playing Circe to his Ulysses, and when I suggested The Minotaur he said that Theseus was a part he greatly disliked playing- but that on the other hand it would be below his dignity to dance in the less important part of King Minos. That's the sort of obstruction he made all the time. He simply refused to grasp that I was your representative and that he simply must do what I told him: but I didn't punish him because I thought you might not wish it. I waited until now
I called Mnester. `Listen, little Greek,' I said. `This is my wife, the Lady Valeria Messalina. The Senate of Rome thinks as highly of her as I do: they have paid her exalted honours. In my absence she has been taking over some of my duties for me and performing them to my entire satisfaction. She now complains that you have been both un-co-operative and insolent. Understand this: if the Lady Messalina tells you to do anything, however much obedience in the matter may happen to hurt your professional vanity, you must obey her. Anything, mark you, little Greek, and no arguments either. Anything and everything.'
`I obey, Caesar,' Mnester answered, sinking to the floor with exaggerated docility, `and I beg forgiveness for my stupidity. I did not understand that I was to obey the Lady Messalina in everything, only in certain things.'
`Well, you understand now.'
So that was the end of my triumph. The troops returned to duty in Britain, and I returned to civil dress and duty at Rome. It is probable that it will never happen to anyone again in this world, as it is certain that it had- never happened to anyone before, to fight his first battle at the age of, fifty-three, never having performed military service of any sort in his youth, win a crushing victory, and never take the field again for the rest of his life.
Chapter 23
I CONTINUED my reforms at Rome, especially doing all I could to create a sense of public responsibility in my subordinates. I appointed the Treasury officials whom I had been training and made their appointments run for three years. I dismissed from the Senatorial Order the Governor of Southern Spain because he could not clear himself of the charges brought against him by the troops serving in Morocco that he had cheated them of half their corn-rations. Other charges of fraud were brought against him too, and he had to pay 100,000 gold-pieces. He went round to his friends trying to gain their sympathy by telling them that the charges were framed by Posides and Pallas whom he had offended by remembering their slavish birth. But he got little sympathy. One early morning this governor brought all his house-furniture, which made about 300 wagon-loads of exceptionally valuable pieces, to the public auction-place. This cause a lot of excitement because he had an unrivalled collection of Corinthian vessels. All the dealers and connoisseurs came crowding up, licking their lips and searching round for' bargains. `Poor Umbonius is finished,' they said. 'Now's our chance to pick up cheap the stuff which he refused to part with when we made him really-handsome offers for it.' But they were disappointed. When the spear was stuck upright in the ground, to show that a public auction was in progress, all that Umbonius sold was his senator's gown. Then he had the spear pulled out again to show that the auction was over, and that night at midnight, when wagons were allowed in the streets again, he took all his stuff -back home. He was merely showing everyone that he had plenty of money still and could live very comfortably as a private citizen. However, I was not going to let the insult pass. I put a heavy tax on Corinthian vessels that year, which he could not evade- because he had publicly displayed his collection and even listed them on the auction board.
This Was the time that I began going closely into the question of new religions and cults. Some new foreign god came to Rome every year to serve the needs of immigrants and in general I had no objection to this.. For example; a colony of 400 Arabian merchants and their families from Yemen, which had settled at Ostia, built a temple there to their tribal gods: it was orderly worship, involving no human sacrifices or other scandals. But what I objected to was disorderly competition between religious cults, their priests and missioners going from house to house in search of converts and modelling their persuasive vocabulary on that of the auctioneer or the brothel-pimp or the vagabond Greek astrologer. The discovery that religion, is a marketable commodity like oil, figs, or slaves was first made at Rome in late Republican times and steps had been taken to check such marketing, but without great success. There had been a notable breakdown in religious belief after our conquest of Greece, when Greek philosophy spread to Rome: The philosophers, while not denying the divine, made such a remote abstraction of it that a practical people like the Romans began to argue: `Very well, the Gods are infinitely powerful and wise but also infinitely remote. They deserve, our respect and we will honour them most devotedly with temples and sacrifices, but it is clear that we were mistaken in thinking that they were immediate presences and that they would bother to strike individual sinners dead or punish the whole city for one man's crime, or appear in mortal disguise. We have been mistaking poetical fiction for prose reality. We must revise our views.'
This decision made an uncomfortable void, for the ordinary common citizen, between himself and those remote ideals. of (for example) Power, Intelligence, Beauty, and Chastity into which the philosophers had converted Jove, Mercury, Venus, and Diana. Some intermediary beings were needed. Into the void came crowding new divine or semi-divine characters. These were mostly foreign gods with very definite personalities, who could not easily be philosophized about. They could be summoned by incantation and take on visible human shape. They could appear in the middle of a circle of devotees and talk familiarly to each member of the cult. Occasionally they even had sexual intercourse with women worshippers. There was one famous scandal in the reign of my uncle Tiberius. A rich knight was in, love with a respectable married noblewoman. He tried to bribe her to, sleep with him: and offered her as much as 2,500 gold pieces for a single tryst. She refused, indignantly, and thereafter would not even acknowledge his greetings when they met in the street. He knew that she was a devotee of Isis, who had a temple at Rome, and bribed the priests of the Goddess, for 500 gold pieces, to tell her that the God Anubis was in love with her and wished her to visit him. She was greatly flattered by the message and went to the Temple on the night ordained by Anubis, and there in the holiest part, on the very couch of the God, the knight, disguised as the God, enjoyed her until morning. The silly woman could not contain herself for felicity. She told her husband and friends of the signal honour that she had been shown. Most of them believed her. Three days later she met the knight in the street and as usual tried to pass by without answering his greeting. He barred her way and taking her familiarly by
