Tiberius

does, and he will be awfully jealous when he sees how 1 dote on little Tiberius. He doesn't understand: it's because that man was their father, and I can't look at them without hearing his voice droning on and on… Maybe I love you because you're so silent, old bear… All I have wanted was to have fun, and all my life my father has tried to squeeze that desire out of me.'

She would talk like this, lying naked on our bed, and then she would stretch out her long leg and, with a suppleness that I found enchanting, paint her toenails shell-pink with a delicate brush. Or she would rest, warm and damp and relaxed and happy, in my arms, while her hair tickled my lips and my cheek, and she sank into sleep. Can life, I wondered, have more to offer than to lie thus, with the trusting and satisfied proof of manhood held in sleeping embrace? Can anything equal that drift into oblivion with your girl in your arms?

As I write these words I feel the renewal of desire, then regret and misery invade the defences I have so laboriously constructed.

10

In the autumn of that year when we found ourselves in love, my brother Drusus died. We had been engaged in a two-pronged campaign on the northern frontiers of the empire. While I subdued Pannonia, advancing to the banks of the mighty River Danube, Drusus, with a mixture of prudence and audacity which was wonderful, penetrated deep into the mysterious forests of Germany through the territory of the Cherusci and the Marco-manni to the River Elbe, where he erected a trophy to mark the new limit of Roman control. This was no mere raid, for he built a chain of fortresses on the line of his march to secure his rear, while at the same time the Rhine was defended by new, well-garrisoned fortifications. No man of Rome ever deserved better, or did more for our city, than my dear brother in his German campaigns. Then, crossing a river swollen by the October rains, his horse slipped. He struck his head against a jagged rock, and was dragged insensible from the water. Word of his condition was brought to me and pausing only to make necessary arrangements for my own troops, I hastened to his bedside. I covered four hundred miles in less than sixty hours, and arrived to find his doctors ashen-faced and nervous. They were relieved to see me, however, for they knew that I would be able to testify that they had done everything that was possible. Drusus was only intermittently conscious. I sat by his camp-bed, and prayed useless prayers to the indifferent gods, while he, poor boy, babbled words that I could not understand, and threw himself about in a restless fever.

'He is so weak,' the doctors said, 'that we do not dare to bleed him further.'

Instead they applied compresses of ice to his temples, and sponged his body with water drawn from a deep well.

The sweat dried on his forehead. He opened his eyes, saw me, recognised me, and spoke in a voice which was calm but already sounded as if it came from another world.

'I knew you would come, brother. I have been waiting till you were here… Tell our father' – even then I noticed how easily Drusus used that term of Augustus – 'that I have done my duty. But I do not believe that we can ever…' he broke off. I pressed his hand. Again his eyes opened. 'Look after my children, brother, and my dear Antonia. She has always liked you, and…' His voice faded and he choked. I held a mug of watered wine to his lips. 'I feel like a deserter,' he sighed, and closed his eyes, and in a little was no more.

I sat by his bedside as night chilled my bones. I remembered his candour and ease of manner, his probity, his easy affection. Once, he came to me and suggested we should approach Augustus and recommend that the Republic be restored in its antique form. 'We both know, brother,' he said, 'that the restoration our father made was false, and that only a true resuscitation of our ancient institutions can enable Rome to regain its moral health, its old virtue.' I placed my hand on his shoulder in agreement, and shook my head, 'You are demanding what cannot be,' I said. But now, as I heard an owl screech through the long night, I knew that it was Drusus' willingness to attempt the impossible, his refusal to be constrained by the appearance of necessity, which had made me love him.

In the morning his body was disembowelled and embalmed. The next day the funeral cortege began its long journey home. I marched on foot by the wheel of the waggon that carried his coffin. In every village people bared their heads as we passed, for his fame had gone before him. At night I slept on a mattress spread in the waggon beside his coffin. So we crossed the Alps, out of the rains, and marched down through Italy where the peasants were harvesting the vines, and the olive trees groaned under a weight of fruit. We reached Rome, and my brother was laid to rest in the mausoleum which Augustus had constructed for the family; I would have preferred him to lie in a Claudian tomb, but my wishes were not consulted. Meanwhile Julia had remained at Aquileia in Cisalpine Gaul at the north end of the Adriatic Sea. She was expecting another child and her doctor had forbidden her to travel. At a dinner-party Augustus spoke of Drusus. He was sincere, and embarrassing. Whenever honey enters his voice, I am aware of what has been cut off. I am made uneasy by my sense of discrepancy: my knowledge that this warm and beautiful voice has spat out orders to kill people and destroy lives. 1 find myself making excuses for him, saying to myself that it is not his fault he has been put into a position in which he has to make intolerable decisions. And then I remember that he is there because he wanted power.

Now he spoke of all those who had left him: of Agrippa, of the poet Vergil, of Maecenas who was dying, and of Drusus himself. He praised my… fidelity, a word you might use of a dog. And then he turned towards his grandsons, my stepsons, who are also – these things become confusing – his adopted sons: Gaius and Lucius. He told them they were the light of his old age, the fire that warmed his heart, and the hope of Rome. Lucius, who is the nicer of the two, and in reality a good and affectionate boy, had the grace to blush.

But the next morning the Princeps was back in charge of Augustus, the sentimentalist who embarrasses me relegated.

'You will have to go to Germany,' he said, 'to take over from Drusus.' I pointed out that the situation in Pannonia was still unstable.

'You have done wonderfully well there,' he said, 'and Gnaeus Piso will be competent to consolidate your work. But Germany is another matter. Drusus has made the breach, but all his work will be wasted if we do not follow it up. Don't you see? Germany must be subjugated, the tribes brought within our orbit, or the whole of Drusus' achievement will go for nothing. It will be as if he had never been. And you, Tiberius, are the only man able to achieve the total victory which will be the true memorial to your dear brother, my beloved son…'

The note of embarrassing sincerity returned to his voice in this last sentence. It was the sincerity of the actor.

Then he said, 'I think you have doubts about the German campaign.' He fidgeted while I remained silent. 'Come on.'

'Forgive me, I was gathering my thoughts. Drusus had no doubts…'

'Which was why I originally sent him to Germany and you, Tiberius, to Pannonia.'

'Yes,' I said, 'the situation on the two fronts appears to me to be quite different. We have only to look at the map. Pannonia – the Danube frontier – is within a short march of Cisalpine Gaul, and though we still use the term, it seems to me that the province now differs but little from Italy itself…'

'So Vergil, who was, you will remember, from Mantua in the north of that province, used to say. And you are both right. So?'

'So we must hold Pannonia and the line of the Danube. But Germany is different. The tribes there do not appear to me to be susceptible to civilisation, while Gaul itself may be adequately protected by the barrier of the Rhine. Therefore I doubt the value of Germany, certainly in relation to the cost of subjugation. I fear some terrible disaster will one day overtake Roman arms in those savage forests. Germany is a wooded desert.'

'Nevertheless,' he said; and I knew when he pronounced that word that my arguments were vain, that his mind was settled. When he utters that word, it signifies that he accepts the validity of your argument, but will still have his way.

'An empire like Rome's cannot rest. The day it ceases to grow is the day we renege on our duty. The gods promised Aeneas and his descendants an empire without limits. We cannot take on ourselves the responsibility of deciding that we have gone far enough. Of course, for tactical reasons such a decision may be made – for the moment. But no more than that. Besides, it is only our expanding empire which reconciles the Roman nobility to the loss of liberty. Never forget that.' 'Which was lost precisely in the cause of empire.' 'An undeniable truth, and