concerning his children. Nero pleased me by his wit and intelligence; also by an innate melancholy, which suggested to me that he had no exaggerated hopes of his fellow men.
'My father was everything that I am not,' he said to me, 'and I have always been unhappily conscious that men consider him a hero.' 'Why unhappily?'
'Because…' he pushed back a curl that had fallen damply over his face, '… I don't really know why. I only know that this knowledge makes me feel ill at ease.'
I understood that. If at that moment I had asked him, 'Why do you go with men?' perhaps everything would have been different. Perhaps a rare moment of honesty would have diverted us into another path. But I dared not ask that question, in case the answer destroyed such intimacy as we enjoyed. There is a limit, I told myself, to the frankness proper between an old man and a youth. Instead, I shied away and talked instead of the duties and burdens of power. 'Burdens,' I said, 'which I hope you will yourself assume.'
'You can't think me suitable…?' He blushed. 'For one thing I am no soldier and could never be one.'
'I believe you to be honest,' I said, 'and, in the fashion of your generation, honourable.' He squirmed, perhaps with embarrassment. 'It pains me,' I said, 'that your mother so distrusts me.'
He blushed again. It was clear that he would wish to defend Agrippina but, aware of the injustice of her attitude towards me, could summon up no argument.
'To demonstrate to her and to the world that I have confidence in you,' I said, 'I am proposing that you should marry my grand-daughter Livia Julia, the only sister of Tiberius Gemellus. I believe that you are the only person I can trust to do right by the boy, and I believe that marriage to his sister is not only the best way of displaying my regard for you, but will itself be of benefit to you.' He was taken aback, protested that he was unfit for such an honour. For a moment I savoured his terror, then hastened to reassure him. He had been the victim, I said, of evil rumours; it was time to silence them. My grand-daughter was a sweet girl, whom I was sure he would come to love. I watched his mouth tremble; then, with an effort, he smiled. He looked like my Julia caught out in a lie. I kissed him. 'We understand each other,' I said. The proposal of this marriage took Agrippina aback. She could not oppose it; yet she feared that it represented in some way which she could not fathom a plot aimed at her. She was correct. It was my intention to lure Nero from her malign influence. In the same week that the marriage between Nero and Livia Julia was celebrated, my mother fell ill, and Sejanus requested my permission to divorce his wife Apicata. 'We no longer find each other agreeable,' was all he said. 'That is sufficient explanation.'
I called to see my mother. She looked at me as if she did not know me, and refused to speak. I besought her not to die in a rage, and performed a sacrifice in her bedchamber in order that the gods might restore her health and reason. But even as I moved my hands over the altar I knew that I wished her dead. I had in fact wished that for years though it was only now when death was imminent that I found myself able to confess it even to my own heart.
It was raining as I left her house for the last time, and stood looking down into the bustle of the Forum. It rained as I had wept in childhood whenever she seemed to withdraw her love from me. Nothing lasts, except memory with its shadowy and ghostly truths. Agrippina raged. She accused me of stealing her son, of thwarting her in every endeavour. The tip of her long nose trembled. That nose, which destroyed her pretensions to beauty, and which was not even imperious, invaded my imagination. I saw it quivering over my every act. 'Is it my fault,' I answered her, 'that you are not queen?'
'Queen?' she replied, failing to understand that I was quoting Sophocles. 'We have no queens in Rome.' 'Except my dear brother Nero,' said Drusus.
'That's no way to speak. He will outgrow his affectations. There is much good in the boy. Come, Agrippina, we have both suffered much. There's no cause for us to be enemies. Let us at least have a truce. Come to dinner with me tomorrow.'
She consented; but at the table, when I passed her an apple, she held it in her hand a moment, squinting at it, then passed it back to me.
'You eat it,' she said. 'I would like to see you eat it. You chose it so carefully.'
'I selected it as the best apple,' I replied, and bit into the fruit. 'Did you understand the significance?' I asked Sejanus.
'Of course I did. She as good as accused you of attempting to poison her. What's more, when she tells the story, I'll bet she doesn't mention that you actually ate the apple. I've told you before, I'll tell you again: that woman spares no effort to slander you. Of course nobody really believes the specific accusations, but, as the proverb has it, 'Much water weareth away stone…' The sum of her accusations has an effect.'
I turned away in misery, back to my desk and the never-ending series of decisions to be made, reports to be considered, questions to be debated, problems to be confronted.
'Work,' I found myself muttering too often, 'is the surest anodyne.'
But when I retired to bed, and sleep did not come, as so many nights it denied itself to me, my thoughts turned back to my villa and gardens in Rhodes. It seemed to me, or so I persuaded myself, that I had come closer to content, and to an understanding of the purpose of life, in my retirement there, than at any time since I had been thrust back into the maelstrom of action. I could not of course retire again; if Drusus had not died, it might have been possible, as I had intended, to associate him with myself in the government of the empire, as Augustus had done with me in his last years; and then, I promised myself, I would be able to lean on my son, depart from Rome confident of his virtue, and, in retirement, exercise no more than a general power of supervision. That dream had been as seductive as a ripe peach. Now it had withered.
I turned to wine; to no avail. It brought neither joy nor comfort.
And yet I heard the sea lapping against the rocks, smelled its tangy odour mingled with the scent of roses, myrtle and honeysuckle. And I remembered a story which a Greek scholar had once told me.
He was a freedman called Philip, in Julia's household, and he had married, with his mistress's blessing, a free-born Greek girl from the island of Capri, where Augustus had had a villa. He told me of his wife's uncle, an unmarried man against whom, nevertheless, no accusation of vice had ever been brought. He was revered in the family for his wisdom and calm philosophy, though my informant was for long ignorant of any justification for the high regard in which the old man was held.
'Indeed it seemed strange to me,' he said, 'for Xenophon, as he was called, seemed in human relations the most cantankerous of fellows. He rarely spoke at family gatherings, and when he did it was generally to express his disapproval of the younger generation. I can't now recall what incident encouraged him to take an interest in me. Perhaps there was no incident. Perhaps he merely detected in me some communion of feeling. I can't say. At any rate it so happened that I developed the habit of sitting with the old man in the afternoons which he spent on a terrace under a vine-wreathed arbour while the rest of the household took its siesta. We would drink the yellow wine from the family's own vineyard, sharp acidulous stuff, nevertheless with a piquant and memorable flavour to which I had become happily accustomed. Forgive me these details, which I offer you because they bring back to me so vividly the memory of these afternoons when I was aware of an utter stillness, as of death; yet simultaneously of the sound of the waves below and of lizards scurrying over the ancient wall that surrounded the terrace. Xenophon would eat sea-urchins, which he put whole into his mouth and chewed noisily with much spitting. He was generally silent and would spend hours on end gazing out to sea. I noticed at last that his eyes were fixed on some rocks which thrust themselves out of the water a little further from land than a man could swim with comfort.
''Is there something about these rocks?' I asked one afternoon, when his gaze had been more than usually fixed. ''Do these fools in there ever speculate before you on the reasons why I have never married?' he replied. 'I hesitated.
''You're a sensible fellow,' he said. 'Doesn't it disgust you to copulate with human beings?'
'I adored my wife, and if she had not disliked sex in the afternoon would happily have been in her bed.
''But then, why should you? You're like the rest. You don't know anything better.'
'And he popped another sea-urchin into his mouth, and spat vigorously. ''You do then?' I said.
'He paid no attention to the impudence in my tone, but smiled. I have never seen such a smile. It had such an assurance of bliss.
''When I was a young man – oh younger than you,' he said, 'I learned better. I was vouchsafed an experience which I can only call miraculous, and which altered my whole life. You ask me why I gaze at these rocks. It is for the same reason that I keep a rowing-boat tied up in the cove below. I was betrothed then to a cousin. One afternoon as I sat in this same place the air was filled with music such as I had never heard. It was a music both
