urgent and demanding now…' He gave that radiant and confiding smile which is so essential a part of his famous charm. Then a look of concern crossed his face. 'Are you quite well? You look flushed.' 'A touch of headache. No more.' 'Good, because the job will demand everything from you.' 'No,' I said. 'No, I'm not going.' 'What do you mean? What do you mean you aren't going?' 'Just as I say.' 'But this is madness.' He threw his hands into the air, registering incredulity.
'Come, dear boy,' he said, 'you can't have understood what I am offering you. Agrippa's position. My…' he hesitated, swallowed, got the disagreeable medicine down… 'my partner in the government of the Republic.' 'For how long?'
'What do you mean 'for how long'? Listen, dear boy,' he patted my arm, squeezed it, 'maius imperium' – he dwelled on the words like a ham actor, then, in the same manner, smote his forehead with the palm of his hand. 'I see what it is. You feel your place is still on the German frontier, you have unfinished business there. Well, dear boy, you were ever conscientious, and I admire you for it. And I am indeed loth, yes loth, to take you from that task. But it can't be helped, dear boy, this matter is too urgent. It is a task of the utmost importance, and one in which you will win great honour…' 'No,' I said. 'I've had enough. I want out.'
'What do you mean? Do you understand what you are saying? It is treason.'
'No,' I said, 'it isn't, by no interpretation of the word. And if you don't understand, then that is unfortunate, but my meaning is really as plain as my mind is fixed…'
I left him, his jaw hanging open. When, I wondered, had he last been defied in this manner? To tell the truth I was surprised and puzzled myself. I had planned nothing of what I had said. I had had as little intention to refuse him as expectation that he was going to offer me such a position. My refusal was unpremeditated. It seemed to me all the more convincing for that reason; it had sprung from the deepest recesses of my being: that flat obdurate negative. All my life, I realised, I had wanted to utter that clanging 'No'. I walked back to my own house through the sunshine of a May morning, with the flower-girls crying their blooms, and the air singing with bird music, and it was as if chains had been lifted from my body.
But I knew I had fought no more than the first battle. Augustus could not compel me to command his army, but he could punish me for disobedience. Moreover, as a senator, I required his permission to quit Italy, and that was, it came to me, what I devoutly wished to do. And I knew where I wanted to go.
I had visited Rhodes on my way back from my early campaign in Armenia, and the memory of that magical island and city, lying like a natural auditorium above a crescent bay, had remained with me, working in my imagination, in, as it were, subterranean fashion, with the sweetness of a summer morning before the sun is high. The Sun is, of course, the patron-god of Rhodes; his huge statue carved by Chares of Lindus adorns the harbour, one of the three thousand statues with which the city is beautified so that even a street empty of people is animated by images of gods and heroes. But my chief memory was of a villa at the western extremity of the city, a villa whose gardens rich in trees – plums, cherries, ilex, oak – and flowers, with red, pink and yellow roses rambling over the stonework, hung over the sea, so that in evening, the scent of roses mingled with the salt tang of the water. There were fountains in garden groves and when the bustle of the city below was stilled, nightingales sang. I had dined there, my host a Greek merchant with a snowy beard, who had greeted my rhapsodic appreciation of his creation of rus in urbe with benign complacency. When he died ten years later, he left me the villa; there was a lawsuit in which his son was embroiled, and my advice and countenance were of service. Besides, that merchant had many villas. Thither my mind tended. My resolution to seek repose there was formed before I had attained my own house. It would not be easy. I therefore wrote to Augustus as follows. Augustus, esteemed stepfather and father-in-law,
The offer you have made me does me more honour than I am worthy of. It gives me at least the opportunity to express my gratitude for the confidence you have always shown in my abilities. Nevertheless I must decline. I have served Rome and the Republic which you restored for more than twenty years. 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 monopolise honours and commands as you have been kind enough to let me do. Moreover, I think that Gaius and Lucius, my dear and brilliant stepsons, should be able to embark on their public careers, which promise to be glorious, without finding themselves at their commencement in the shadow of my achievement. I have fixed on Rhodes as my place of retirement. It is a place of no importance, other than commercial. I have always been fond of islands, as my revered mother will be able to assure you, and the climate is said to be pleasant. It will benefit the rheumatism I have contracted from the damps of the Danube and the Rhine.
I therefore formally request that permission to retire to Rhodes which I am confident your generous and understanding nature will not deny me. 'Your letter,' Livia said, 'was ill-judged. It made your father even angrier than he was before.' 'And I thought it such a good letter. Civil and well expressed.' 'Stop it, Tiberius, it is not in your nature to play games.'
'What do you know of my nature, Mother? What does anyone know of my nature? What do I know myself? What indeed does anyone know of anyone's? Is there even such a thing as a person's nature?'
'There is such a thing as stupidity, no doubt about that. Which you are displaying now. Besides, you don't believe what you are saying. Why in your letter you remarked on Augustus' generous and understanding nature!'
'A form of words. Conventional language, no more than that.' 'What do you think is going to happen?' 'Oh Gaius and Lucius will take over.' 'Don't be silly. Lucius is only eleven.' 'Ten, surely?' I said. 'Eleven.' 'Well, that makes Gaius fifteen.'
She turned away, throwing her face into half-shadow. 'You're breaking my heart,' she said. 'All my life I have worked and schemed, yes, and sometimes done wrong, on your behalf. I have had such ambitions for you, and now, when you are on the point of fulfilling them, you prefer to throw everything away. Tiberius, why? Why, why?'
She wept. Her tears were the tears of all mothers, of Niobe and Andromeda. My heart softened. Something of my old childish love for her revived. I knelt by her side and put my arms round her. I kissed her cheek, which was pale and a little wrinkled.
'I am sorry to pain you, Mother. Try to understand. I know you love your husband and I respect you for that, and there are moments when I respect him too and others when I even feel a strange and unexpected liking for him. But I do not like what he has done to Rome, and I fear and resent what he would do to me. He has made the whole world his slave, subservient to his terrible will. Men of noble family fawn on him for favours and nobody dares to speak his mind. Even when I wrote to him 1 flattered him, I was constrained to flatter him. It is contemptible. And as for me, Mother, you have been ambitious for me, as a mother should be for her son, and I am grateful. But what will my achievement signify? In a few years when Gaius and Lucius are of age, I shall be elbowed into the shadows. I shall have become… expendable. Well, let me choose my own moment to withdraw. I am tired of it, simply that. But there is another matter of which we have never been able to speak honestly: my marriage. Yes, my marriage to your husband's daughter. It has become torture to me. I do not blame Julia, for she herself is a victim of his destroying will. But I cannot live like this. I cannot divorce her, can I? I cannot punish her for adultery as a husband is enjoined by law to do. I am condemned by circumstance to live a cuckold and an object of mockery. Don't you see, Mother, I have had enough, enough of hypocrisy and deception, of the demeaning struggle for power, of being bought off with honied words, of… all this? I am sorry if I have failed you, but to continue I would fail myself. The world has been corrupted, and I want out…' She stood up. The tears were dry on her face. 'All that,' she said, 'is very affecting. It reminds me of the sort of speeches your own father used to make. I had thought you a fighter. I should have remembered how you have always been subject to fits of ignoble dejection. I understand you, don't think I don't, better than you understand yourself. You have lost stomach for the struggle but, my son, because you are my son as well as your father's, your appetite will revive. So you have a strumpet for a wife. Well there were cuckolds before Agamemnon, and there will be countless others. What does that matter in the sum of things? You may choose to withdraw but my will, Tiberius, is indomitable. I shall continue to fight on your behalf, whether you would have me do so or not, and one day you will be grateful…'
My friends clustered round me, alarmed. I discounted a good part of their concern, for I knew that they had hoped to rise with me, and now feared the effect of my retirement on their future. I understood their disappointment but, since I had made no promises which I had not kept, felt neither guilt nor responsibility. Besides, a man's first duty is to his own peace of mind. As soon as I fully comprehended the depth of my desire to withdraw from public life, I felt as if a black cloud had been blown away. I no longer required wine to let me sleep.
