seemed to sway, and it occurred to me that he might even be still a little drunk. When he spoke I was sure he was. 'No,' he said. Nothing else; just the blank negative. I was taken aback.
'You can't have understood me,' I said. 'What I am offering you confirms your position as my partner in the Government of the Republic. Is that nothing? Oh, you may feel that your place is still on the German Frontier and I am indeed loth to take you away from there, but this matter is really urgent. It is a task of the utmost importance and one in which you will win great honour.' 'No,' he said again. 'I've had enough. I want out.' 'What do you mean?'
What sort of trick was this, I wondered. He fixed his gaze on a fly buzzing round the rim of a wine-jar, and stood there, like a great bull in sullen silence. 'I don't understand you,' I said again. * 'Drinker of hot wine without water'
'That's too bad, but it's plain enough,' he muttered, turned on his heel and shambled out. I was mystified, then I was furious.
'What,' I cried to his mother, 'does your son think he is doing? How dare he refuse to serve the Republic? How dare he throw my offer back in my face? Is he mad? Was he drunk?'
'Listen,' she said, 'and stop shouting at me. I have told you of my concern for Tiberius. I told you I was worried about him. This is precisely what I feared. Something in him has been rotted by the gnawing worm of resentment.'
I threw my hands up: 'He has cause to feel resentment! What about me?'
'I shall discuss the matter with him, and see if I can persuade him to see sense.' Her discussion bore no fruit. Instead I received a letter from Tiberius: Augustus: I esteem the offer you have made me and express my gratitude for the confidence you have always shown in my abilities. Nevertheless I must decline. I have served Rome now for more than twenty years… (On reading that line, I crumpled the letter up and hurled it into the corner of the room; what right had he to boast of his mere twenty years? While I… then I told a slave to retrieve the document and read on…) It is my desire to retire to an island and study philosophy and science. The Republic will manage very well without me, for it is not desirable that one man monopolize honours and commands as you have been kind enough to permit me to do. Moreover, I feel that Gaius and Lucius, my stepsons, should be able to embark on their careers without being in the shadow of my achievement… I have fixed on Rhodes as my place of retirement. I have always been fond of islands, and the climate is said to be pleasant. I have never read a more insolent letter. Livia said, 'I can get no other sense from him. He gives me a half-smile and shakes his head, and says it is time for the boys to take up the torch.'
'Lucius is eleven. Eleven. Does your dolt of a son expect him to command the army of Armenia?'
'I know, I know. And then he talks in a faraway voice about the pleasures of astronomical studies.' 'It doesn't make sense.' 'Something broke in him when Drusus died.' 'Haven't we all suffered losses?' Reluctantly, at Livia's insistence, I consulted Julia.
'You would have me marry him,' she pouted. 'But I can do nothing with him. If he's barely civil to you, he's as rude as an angry bear to me. I think he's a bit mad, if you must know. And of course he's as jealous of the boys as a bear with a pot of honey.' 'But they're still children.'
'The Senate proposed Gaius should share your next consulship.' Tiberius retired to a villa he owned in the hills, and gave out that he had embarked on a hunger strike. Naturally the news aroused great excitement among the gossips of the Senate where Tiberius, because of his long and frequent absences on campaign, was largely an unknown quantity and an enigmatic figure.
My agents reported that some senators saw his expressed wish for retirement as being in some way a challenge to my authority; it was said that he was warning me not to advance the careers of my grandsons. Tiberius knew he was indispensable and was using his threat of retirement merely for bargaining purposes; he wanted his open elevation to a position of equality with me. Those who viewed my restored Republic as a disguised monarchy said he was making a bid for the succession.
Others however accepted his wish as genuine. Tiberius was weary of virtue, they said. All his life he had been a hypocrite, nursing secret vices which he was ashamed to practise publicly. Desire had however now overcome him, and the purpose of his retreat was to enable him to indulge his lusts.
Nobody dared bring me the one rumour that had any base of truth, and so I continued to think harshly of Tiberius.
I took care that he should be made acquaint with what was being said. I hoped that he would be either alarmed or shamed into changing his mind. He replied in quite unequivocal terms: Augustus, how could I wish to challenge an authority which I have served willingly to the best of my poor abilities these twenty years? I am well aware that your authority which I respect is founded in the decrees of the Conscript Fathers, which no good Roman could wish to challenge.
The sincerity of my wish for retirement acquits me of the charge of ambition. It would be a stupid manoeuvre to put myself in this position if I was truly ambitious, for you have only to grant my wish for retirement, to bring my public career to an end.
The charge of vice is absurd. I repeat that I wish to devote the rest of my life to study. My chosen companions in my retreat will be Thrasyllus the astronomer, and other mathematicians. They are hardly the company I should select for an orgy.
I am worn out, disturbed, have never recovered from my brother's death, and there is now a new generation ready to serve Rome. My continued presence at the head of the armies would be likely to cause them embarrassment. I am ashamed now to say that this letter, which was so dignified, truthful and yet reticent, in no way calmed my anger. I was indeed furious with him, and remained so a long time. I replied asking him what sort of example he thought this selfish abnegation of duty would be for the new generation of which he spoke. 'I have worked longer than you for Rome, and every bit as hard,' I said, 'but I have never thought to indulge in the luxury of retirement. It would be a fine state of affairs if we could all slip off our responsibilities as you are doing. Do you realize how you are hurting your mother and me?'
He did not reply to this letter and I asked Livia to go to plead with him. She returned in tears:
'I humbled myself,' she said, 'I went on my knees to him, and begged him not to forsake his duty. He is very weak from hunger, and could scarcely reply, but he shook his head. Husband, we must give way. I think he is demented, I have already told you that; it wounds my pride now to beg you to let my son desert his post, for I think as badly of his behaviour as you do. But he is my only surviving son, and I can't consent to his death. And he will die. His Claudian pride will not permit him to give way, and then he will for ever be lost to Rome and to me. But if we give way, he may recover. Surely astronomical studies on a little island will not content him long? Perhaps we should think of this as an illness from which he will recover.' I put my arm round her and kissed her.
'Livia,' I said, 'you know in your heart that I can't pursue a course which will give you such pain as you will suffer if Tiberius dies. Therefore, I have to give way. Let him go to Rhodes. But -and I shall make this clear to him – if he goes there, he can stay. He can stay and rot there, for I shall never forgive him, nor trust him again. Let him go and study the stars with his Thrasyilus. He will read a bleak destiny for himself written there.'
And still not even Livia would tell me why Tiberius ran away from Rome. His departure left me curiously isolated. I missed him, for his achievement had been such that I had come to think of him as my partner in government, an awkward partner certainly, one whom I could never talk to with the frankness and ease that I had always experienced with Agrippa and Maecenas, but a true one nonetheless. Now I felt deprived of an equal. It was a new position and I did not like it. I became, for perhaps the first time in my life, introspective, and began to keep an intermittent journal. Some entries reveal more than I can recall, more perhaps than I care to remember: 'What a strange life mine has been and what a strange character I find I have. Now that I can see Death glowering at me, though he has left me so long after he has taken so many of my friends and loved ones, I ask myself whether any man has achieved so much with so few talents. Consider: my education was broken by civil war and, for all the generosity with which Virgil and Horace treated me, I have never been able to regard myself as being more than half-educated. I am only a poor orator and have never been able to rely on my powers to sway an assembly, and indeed many of my speeches have been disastrous failures. I am at best an indifferent general. Inasmuch as military ability can be separated from the quality of an army, I would have to place myself in the second rank. Agrippa, Antony, Sextus Pompey, even Cassius, Tiberius and Drusus have all had talents superior to mine – to say nothing of Julius Caesar. It may be that as a general I am no more distinguished than the wretched Lepidus. And yet consider my achievement. I have brought the Civil War to an end, which was something denied
