respect for sovereignty as coins: the gold and silver currency, had my head on it, because after all I was the Emperor and the man actually responsible for the greater part of the government; but the Senate's familiar ' S.C.' appeared again, on the copper, and copper is at once the most ancient, the most useful, and quantitatively the most important coinage.
The immediate cause of my decision to purge the Senate was the alarming case of Asiaticus. One day Messalina came to me and said: 'Do you remember wondering last year whether there wasn't something else at the bottom of Asiaticus's resignation of the Consulship besides the reason he gave - that people were jealous and suspicious of him, because it was his second time as Consul?'
'Yes, it didn't look like the whole reason.' -
'Well, I'll tell you something which I should have told you about long ago. Asiaticus has been violently in love for some time with Cornelius Scipio's wife; what do you think of that?'
'Oh, yes, Poppaea - very good-looking girl, with a straight nose and a bold way of staring at men? And what does she think of it? Asiaticus isn't a good-looking young fellow like Scipio: he's bald and rather fat, but of course the richest man in Rome, and what marvellous gardens he has too!'
' Poppaea, I'm afraid, has thoroughly compromised herself with Asiaticus. Well, I'll tell you. It's best to be frank. Poppaea came to me some time ago - you know what good friends we are, or, rather, we used to be and said, 'Messalina, dearest, I want to ask you a great favour. You promise not, to tell anyone that I've asked you?' Naturally I promised. She said: 'I’m in love with Valerius Asiaticus and I don't know what to do about it. My husband is fearfully jealous and if he knew I think he'd kill me. And the nuisance is that I'm married to him in the strict form and you know how difficult it is to get a divorce-from a strict form of marriage if the husband chooses to be nasty. It means you lose your children, for a start. Do you think that you could possibly do something to, help me? Could you ask the Emperor to speak to my husband and arrange a divorce, so that Asiaticus and I can marry?'
' I hope you didn't say that there was any chance of my consenting. Really, these women...'
'Oh, no, dearest, on the contrary. I said that if she never mentioned the subject to me again I would try, for friendship's sake, to forget what I'd heard, but that if so much as a whisper came to me of anything improper still going on between her and Asiaticus I'd come straight to you.'
`Good. I'm glad `you said that.'
`It was soon afterwards that Asiaticus resigned, and do you remember, then, that he asked the Senate's permission to visit his estates in France?'
'Yes, and he was away a long time. Trying to forget Poppaea, I suppose. There are a lot of pretty women in the South of France.'
`Don't you believe it. I have been finding out things about Asiaticus. The first thing is that lately he's been giving large money presents to the Guards captains and sergeants and standard-bearers. He does it, he says, `because of his gratitude to them for their loyalty to you. Does that sound right?'
'Well, he has more money than he knows what to do with,’
'Don't be ridiculous. Nobody has more money than they know what to do with. Then the second thing is that he and Poppaea still meet regularly; whenever poor Scipio's out of town, and spend the night together.'
'Where do they meet?'
`At the house of the- Petra brothers. They're cousins of hers.
The third thing is that Sosibius told me the other day, quite on his own, that he thought it most unwise of you to have allowed Asiaticus to pay so long a visit to his estates in France; When I asked him what he meant, he showed me a letter from a friend of his in Vienne: the friend wrote that Asiaticus had actually spent very little time on his estates. He had gone round visiting the most influential people in the province and had even been for a tour along the Rhine, where he showed great generosity to the officers of the garrison. Then, of course, you must remember that Asiaticus was born at Vienne; and Sosibius says - -'
'Call Sosibius at once, 'Sosibius was the, man I had chosen as Britannicus's tutor, so you can imagine that I had the greatest confidence in his, judgement. He was an Alexandrian Greek, but had long interested himself in the, study of early Latin authors and was the leading authority on the texts of Ennius: he was so much at home in the Republican period, which he knew far better than any Roman historian, including myself, that I considered that he would be a constant inspiration to my little boy. Sosibius came, and when I questioned him answered very frankly. Yes, he believed Asiaticus to be ambitious and capable of planning a revolution. Hadn't he once offered himself as a candidate for the monarchy in opposition to me?
`You forget, Sosibius,' I said, 'that those two days have been wiped off the City records by an amnesty.'
'But Asiaticus was in the plot against your nephew, the late Emperor, and even boasted about it in the Market Place. When a man like that resigns his Consulship for no valid reason and goes off to France, where he already has great influence, and there tries to enlarge that influence by scattering money about, and no doubt saying that he was forced to resign his Consulship because of your jealousy, or because he stood up against you for the-rights of his fellow Frenchmen. ...
Messalina said: 'It's perfectly plain. He has promised Poppaea to marry her, and the only way that he can do that is by, getting rid of you and me. He'll get leave to go, to France again, and start his revolt there with the native regiments, and then bring the Rhine regiments into it too. And the Guards will be as ready to acclaim him Emperor as they were ready, to acclaim you: it will mean another two hundred gold pieces a man for them.'
'Who else do you think is in the plot?'
`Let's find out all about the Petra brothers. That lawyer Suilius has just been asked to undertake a case for them: and he is one of my best secret agents. If there's anything against them besides their having- accommodated Poppaea and Asiaticus with a bedroom, Suilius will find it out, you can rely: on that'
'I don't like spying. I don't like Suilius, either.'
`We have got to defend ourselves, and Suilius is the handiest weapon we have.'
So Suilius was sent for, and a week. later he made his report, which confirmed Messalina's suspicions. The Petra brothers were certainly in the plot. The elder of them had privately circulated an account of a vision which had appeared to him one early morning between sleeping and waking and which the astrologers had interpreted in an alarming fashion. The vision was of my head severed at the neck and crowned with a wreath of white vine-leaves: the interpretation was that I should die violently at the close of the autumn. The younger brother had been acting as Asiaticus's go between with the Guards, of which he was a colonel. Apparently associated with Asiaticus and the Petra brothers were two old friends of mine, Pedo Pompey, who used often to play dice with me in the evenings, and Assario, maternal uncle of my son-in-law, young Pompey, who also had free access to the Palace. Suilius suggested that these would naturally have been given the task of murdering me over a friendly game of dice. Then there were Assario's two nieces, the Tristonia sisters, who had an adulterous association with the Petra brothers.
There was nothing for it, I decided, but to strike first. I sent my Guards Commander, Crispinus, with a company of Guards whose loyalty seemed beyond question, down to Assario's house at Baiae and there Asiaticus was arrested. He was handcuffed and fettered and brought before me at the Palace. I should, properly, have had him impeached before the Senate, but I could not be sure how far the plot extended. There might be a demonstration in his favour, and I did not wish to encourage that. I tried him in my own study, in the presence of Messalina, Vitellius, Crispinus, young Pompey, and my chief secretaries.
Suilius acted as public prosecutor, and I thought, as Asiaticus faced him, that if ever guilt was written on a man's features it was written there. But I must admit that Crispinus had not warned him what were the charges against him - I had not even told Crispinus - and there are few men who if suddenly arrested would be able to face their judges with absolute serenity of conscience. I know how badly I once felt myself when I was arrested by Caligula's orders on the charge of witnessing a forged will. Suilius was indeed a terrible and pitiless accuser: he had a thin, frosty face, white hair, dark eyes, and a long forefinger which probed and darted like a sword. He began with a mild rain of compliments and banter which we all recognized as a prelude to a thunderstorm of rage and invective. First he asked Asiaticus in a mockfriendly conversational tone, exactly when he proposed visiting his 'French estates again - was it before the vintage? and what had he thought of agricultural conditions in the neighbourhood of Vienne and how had they compared with those of the Rhine valley? `But don't trouble to answer my questions,' he said. `I don't really wish to know how high the barley grows in Vienne or how loud the cocks crow there, any more than you really wished to know yourself.' Then about his presents to the Guards: how loyal Asiaticus had shown himself! but was there not perhaps a danger of the simple-witted military misunderstanding those gifts?
Asiaticus was growing anxious, and breathing heavily; Suilius came a few steps nearer him,' like a wild-beast
