'I mean that your stepson Gaius will receive the honour in five years' time – at the age of twenty. That should show you how the wind is blowing.' 'How do you know this?'
'It's sufficient that I do. Things like that can't be kept secret…'
I said, 'I was twenty-nine, excused five years, when I was consul for the first time.'
'Precisely, and the rest of us are ineligible till we are thirty-three. I'm speaking as a friend, Tiberius, and one whose family has a long association with yours. Our fathers fought side by side at Perugia and both followed Sextus Pompeius to Sicily. You are on the point of being edged out. That's what I have to tell you. And what are you going to do about it?' The question was, as he knew, unanswerable. I pondered it all the same as I walked home through the seething city. The night was hot and stuffy. I descended the Quirinale and crossed into the Suburra. Julius Caesar had had a house there, a ploy in his campaign to capture the hearts of the plebeians, for it has always been a popular quarter. It came to me, as I walked, that Rome was no longer a Roman, or even an Italian city. The babble of innumerable tongues assailed my ears. In the space of two hundred yards I heard more than one variety of Greek, the Celtic tongue of Gaul, the harsh language of the Illyrian Highlands, the smooth accents of Syria and Egypt, mellifluous and deceiving, and the incomprehensible murmuring Aramaic of the Jews. A group of them were standing outside a tavern rattling their money-tallies; a man emerged, approached them, conducted a transaction and returned within to resume his pleasure; the Jews gabbled among themselves. A little further on a pork butcher was howling his wares, urging them on the Jews who for some reason think it wrong to eat pig. Nobody understands the laws of their curious religion, with its many prohibitions and requirements but I smiled to think that the pork butcher knew very well that they would take his invitation as an insult. Every second house was a tavern or brothel: through the open window I saw a tawny girl dancing on a table. The sweat glistened on her gyrating thighs and her eyes were blank as if she had swallowed some potion which numbed her consciousness while exciting her animal allure. She paused in her dance, drew her knees together and caressed her thighs with long fingers; a moan of anticipatory and yet ever-to-be-denied pleasure escaped the watching crowd. Then a man wearing a boar's head and a huge false phallus made of leather dyed scarlet mounted the table beside her, threw her over the windowledge so that her long black hair floated round the faces of the panting spectators and began to work his phallus while the girl moaned and bit her lips till a trickle of blood emerged at the corner of her mouth. Meanwhile, standing at the back of the crowd, I observed a brace of pickpockets moving among them, relieving the poor enthralled fools of their purses. 'There ought to be a law,' a pinch-faced man by my shoulder muttered, 'against this filth.' 'There is,' I assured him, and moved on. There is indeed such a law, but it is not enforced. It cannot be enforced, for it is beyond the power of government to make people behave well. When respect for the gods has withered, when families are in disarray, licentiousness prevails; the secret impulses, which men subdue in a decent and well-ordered society, are openly acknowledged.
I paused at the next booth where a little play was being enacted on an open stage. A curly-headed boy reclined on a pile of cushions with a bowl of cherries by his side. He popped one in his mouth and rolled saucy eyes at his audience. Then he uncurled himself, rose to his feet and slipped off his tunic. He did it in the most natural fashion, like a boy preparing to take a bath. The absence of any sense of lasciviousness excited the crowd. He strutted round the stage, then, as if the idea had just occurred to him, began to stroke his cock. He held it out stiff for approval, and then, with supple grace, crouched down and began to suck it. The man beside me – a stout greasy fellow who might have been a pastry cook – hissed, 'A proper little contortionist, that bumboy.' Then a big strapping woman wearing a red wig bounded on to the stage, a whip in her hand. She swished it around the boy's legs, howling abuse. He skipped and danced and yelped, as if in pain, though it was clear that she manipulated the whip in such a manner that it did not touch him. Then he fell to his knees before her and embraced her thighs, pressing his face against them. She seized his curls with her left hand and pulled his head back. She slipped her right hand down the front of her skirt, grimaced as if she could not find what she was searching for, then, with a cry of triumph, produced a carrot which she thrust into the boy's open mouth. The crowd rocked with laughter. She held the boy there, forcing him to eat the carrot and then lick her fingers like a dog. She pulled him to his feet, and, grabbing his member, led him off the stage. She turned, winked to the audience, and the pair disappeared into the darkness. The crowd howled approval of the obscene buffoonery.
A hand plucked my sleeve. I turned to see a fat shining bald-pated fellow.
'You like boys?' he said. His voice was hoarse and he smelled of onions. 'You want a boy? A nice Greek boy?'
He indicated a painted, ringleted wretch who fluttered his eyelashes at me, and wriggled his backside. The image of the young Segestes, brave, upright, clean-limbed, biting his lip to restrain tears when hurt, flashed across my mind. 'Pretty, eh?' wheezed the pimp.
Bile filled my mouth. I thrust the wretch out of the way, and hurried from the noxious place. Yet I returned other nights, to gaze on the shows, to expose myself to a full understanding of the degradation that opened before my eyes, inviting me, in subtle and horrible fashion, to participate. I returned again and again, because I could not do otherwise, and because… because… Why do I torture myself with these memories? Why does my mind play upon temptations with fascinated disgust? Why do gross and terrible images invade my mind when I lie down to sleep, in the afternoon and at night? This morning I attended a debate in the school of philosophy here. Two sophists argued the question whether morality was natural to man. One of the Platonic school asserted that since we possessed ideas of truth and justice, absolute truth and absolute justice, though we had never encountered these absolutes in human behaviour, it followed that the idea of truth and justice was innate in us. His opponent, a Cynic, scoffed at this: morality, he said, was a device created by cowards to awe the strong. Ideas meant nothing, it was behaviour that counted, and the superior man disregarded concepts formed by cowards, and acted as he pleased. It was in this exercise of freedom that he proved his superiority. 'Then your superior man may be very wicked,' said the first sophist.
'Wickedness is a word you have invented,' was the reply, 'as you have invented truth and justice…'
At this point I felt moved to intervene. 'It seems to me,' I said, 'that you two cannot agree because you are talking of absolutes, which we rarely meet. Yet Socrates himself asked his friends, as we are told in the Phaedo, whether they had never realised that 'Extreme instances are few and rare, while intermediate ones are many and plentiful', so that if there were to be a competition in wickedness, very few would distinguish themselves even there…'
'You have missed the point,' cried the Cynic, and at that moment an impudent member of the audience leaped up and abused me for joining in the argument and seeming to support the Platonist.
'It's a fine thing,' he cried, 'when a Roman prince can't let an intellectual argument flourish without throwing his weight on one side.'
I could have said that if he was, as I supposed, a supporter of the Cynic, he could hardly reprove me for my intervention, for I was merely putting his philosopher's principles into suitably unprincipled action. That would have won me a round of applause, and turned the situation off with a laugh. But I was furious at his impertinent presumption, and withdrew with such state as I could muster. I retired to my house, only to reappear with a group of lictors, whom I ordered to arrest the insolent wretch and carry him off to gaol.
My behaviour amazed, and, I think, alarmed the people. It took me by surprise itself, and I am not proud of it. Some nerve was touched I suppose. When I returned that first evening from the Suburra, Julia was absent. I found a note pinned to my pillow. It was unsigned, and read: WHAT DOES YOUR WIFE GET UP TO IN THE NIGHT? ARE YOU AFRAID TO ASK HER WHERE SHE HAS BEEN? I questioned the slaves. All denied any knowledge of the message. It is impossible of course to get the truth from slaves when they are frightened unless you threaten them with torture. I am afraid of doing that, lest I take pleasure in it. Besides, men will say anything under torture and you may be no nearer any truth except what they think you want to hear. Which is rarely the truth. I had tried to speak to Julia many times since my return. I didn't know how to. It was clear that any love she had felt for me had died with our little son. We made love twice. Then she denied me my bed, and it was not in my nature to compel her to fulfil her marital duties. 'I'm bored,' she said, 'you disgust me, you smell of Germans.' I remember I turned away because I felt myself blushing. 'I would rather make love to a corpse,' she said, 'you stink of so many deaths.' 'What do you expect of a soldier?'
'War, brutality, delight in slaughter, greed for power, they all disgust me.'
'Julia, you know, you must know, that I have never taken pleasure in slaughter, I have only tried to do my duty…'
'Oh what a bore you are, what a dismal bore,' and there was no laughter in her voice, as there would formerly have been when she uttered that reproach, but she turned instead a gaze on me that was as beautiful
