Messalina's third letter arrived just as the last heads had fallen. It was angry and threatening. She wrote that she had now given me every chance to treat her fairly and decently, and that if I did not immediately beg her pardon for the insolent, heartless, and ungrateful behaviour I had shown her, I must take the consequences; for her patience was wearing out. She secretly commanded the loyalty of all my Guards officers, and of all my freedmen with the exception of Narcissus, and of most of the Senate; she had only to speak the word and I would immediately be arrested and surrendered to her vengeance. Narcissus threw back his head and laughed. `Well, at least she acknowledges my loyalty to you, Caesar. Now, let's go to the Palace. You must be nearly fainting with hunger. You have had nothing since breakfast, have you?'
'But what shall I answer?'
`It deserves no answer.'
We returned to the Palace and there was a fine meal waiting for us. Vermouth (recommended by Xenophon as a sedative) and
oysters, and roast goose with my favourite mushroom and onion sauce - made according to a recipe given my mother by Berenice, Herod's mother - and stewed veal with horse-radish, and a mixed dish of vegetables, and apple-pie flavoured with honey and cloves, and water-melon from Africa. I ate ravenously and when I had done I began to feel very sleepy. I said, to Narcissus : 'My mind won't work anymore to-night. I'm tired out. I put you in charge of affairs until tomorrow morning. I suppose that I ought to warn that miserable woman to attend here to- morrow morning and defend herself against those charges. I promised Vibidia that I'd give her a fair trial.' Narcissus said nothing: I went to sleep on, my couch.
Narcissus beckoned to the Colonel of the Guard. `The Emperor's orders. You are to proceed with six men to the pleasure-house in the Gardens of Lucullus and there execute the Lady Valeria Messalina, the Emperor's divorced wife.' Then he told Euodus to run ahead of the Guards and warn Messalina that they were coming, thus giving her an opportunity of committing suicide. If she took it, as she could hardly fail to do, I would not need to hear of the unauthorized order for her execution. Euodus found her lying on her face on the floor of the pleasure-house, sobbing. Her mother knelt beside her. Messalina said, without looking up '0 beloved Claudius, I'm so miserable and ashamed.'
Euodus laughed: `You're mistaken, Madam. The Emperor is asleep, at the Palace, with orders not to be disturbed. Before he went off he told the Colonel of the Guard to come here and cut off your pretty head. His very words, Madam. 'Cut off her pretty head and stick it on the end of a spear. I ran ahead to let you know. If you've as much courage as you have beauty, Madam, my advice is to get it over before they come. I brought this dagger along in case you hadn't one handy.'
Domitia Lepida said: `There's no hope, my poor child; you can't escape now. The only honourable thing left for you to do is to take his dagger and kill yourself.'
`It's not true,' Messalina wept. `Claudius would never dare to get rid of me like this. It's an invention of Narcissus's. I ought to have killed Narcissus long ago. Vile, hateful Narcissus!'
The tramp of heavy feet was heard on the pavement outside. `Guard, halt! Order arms!' The door flew open and the Colonel stood with folded arms in the entrance, outlined against the night sky. He did not say a word.
Messalina screamed at the sight of him and snatched the dagger from Euodus. She felt the edge and point timorously. Euodus sneered: `Do you want the Guards to wait there while I fetch. a grindstone and sharpen it up for you?'
Domitia Lepida said `Be brave, child. It won't hurt if you drive it home quick.'
The Colonel slowly unfolded his arms: his right hand reached for the pommel of his sword. Messalina put the point of the dagger first to her throat and then to her breast. `Oh, I can't, Mother! I'm afraid!'
The Colonel's sword was out of its sheath. He took three long steps forward and ran her through.
Chapter 30
XENOPHON had given me another dose of the `Olympian mixture' just before I went to sleep, and the exalted feeling, which had been wearing off slightly during supper, revived in me. I woke up with a start - a careless slave had dropped a pile of dishes yawned loudly and apologized to the company for my bad tablemanners. `Granted, Caesar,' they all cried. I thought how frightened they looked. Bad lives and bad consciences.
`Has anyone been poisoning my drink while I was asleep?' I bantered.
`God forbid, Caesar,' they protested.
`Narcissus, what was the sense of that Colchester joke of Vettius Vileness'? Something about the Britons worshipping me as a God.'
Narcissus said: `It was not altogether a joke, Caesar. In fact, you may as well know that a temple at Colchester had been dedicated to the God Claudius Augustus. They have been worshipping you there since the early summer. But I've only just heard about it.'
`So that's why I feel so queer. I've been turning into a God! But how did it happen? I wrote to Ostorius, I remember, sanctioning the erection and dedication of a temple at Colchester to the God Augustus, in gratitude for the victory he had given Roman arms in the island of Britain.'
`Then I suppose, Caesar, that Ostorius made the natural mistake of understanding 'Augustus' as meaning yourself, particularly as you specified a victory given by Augustus to Roman arms in Britain. The God' Augustus fixed the frontier at the Channel - and his name means nothing to the British, in comparison with your own. The natives speak of you there, I am informed, with the deepest religious awe. There are poems composed about your thunder and lightning and your magic mists and your black spirits and your humped monsters and your monsters with snakes, for noses. Politically speaking, Ostorius was-perfectly correct in dedicating the temple to you. But I must regret that it was done without your consent, and, I suppose, against your wishes.'
`So I'm a God, now, am I?' I repeated. `Herod Agrippa always said that I'd end as a God, and I told him that he was talking nonsense. I suppose that I can't cancel the mistake, can I, Narcissus, do you think?'
`It would create a very bad effect on the provincials, I should say,' Narcissus answered.
`Well, I don't care, the way I feel now,' I said. `I don't care about anything. Suppose that I have that miserable woman brought here for trial at once. I feel completely free from petty mortal passions. I might even forgive her.'
`She's dead,' Narcissus said in a low voice. `Dead, at your own orders.'
'Fill my glass,' I said. `I don't remember giving the order, but it's all the same to me now. I wonder what sort of God I am. Old Athenodorus used to explain to me the Stoic idea of God: God was a perfectly rounded whole, immune from accident or event. I always pictured God as an enormous pumpkin. Ha, ha, ha! If I eat any more of this goose and drink any more of this wine I'll become pumpkinified too. So Messalina's dead! A beautiful woman, my friends! But bad!'
`Beautiful but bad, Caesar.'
`Carry me up to bed, someone, and let me sleep the blessed sleep of the Gods. I'm a blessed God now, aren't I?'
So they took me up to bed. 'I stayed in bed until noon the next day, fast asleep all the time. The Senate met in my absence and passed a motion congratulating me on the suppression of the revolt, and another expunging Messalina's name from the archives and removing it from every public inscription, and destroying all her statues. I rose in the afternoon and resumed my ordinary Imperial work. Everyone whom I met was extremely subdued and polite, and when I visited the Law Courts nobody, for the first time for years, attempted to bustle or browbeat me. I got through my cases in no time.
The next day I began to talk grandly about the conquest of Germany; and Narcissus, realizing that Xenophon's medicine was having too violent an effect - disordering my wits instead of merely tiding me gently over the shock of Messalina's death, as had been intended - told him to give me no more of it. Gradually the Olympian mood faded and I felt pathetically mortal again. The first morning after I was free from the effects of the drug I went down to breakfast, and asked: `Where's my wife? Where's the Lady Messalina?' Messalina always breakfasted with me unless she had a `sick headache'.
`She's dead, Caesar,' Euodus answered. `She died some days ago, by your orders.'
`I didn't know,' I. said weakly. `I mean, I had forgotten.' Then the shame and grief and horror of the whole business came welling back to my mind, and I broke down. Soon' I was babbling foolishly of my dear, precious Messalina and reproaching myself as her murderer, and saying that it was all my fault, and making an almighty fool of myself. I eventually pulled myself together and called for my sedan. `The Gardens of Lucullus,' I ordered. They took me there.
