‘Don’t know. He seemed perfectly respectable. I let him go, of course. He didn’t strike me as inferior.’
‘All the same, these Levantines …’
‘There seem to be so many of them,’ Crispus said. ‘Now this fellow Erasixenos, I wouldn’t have asked him two or three years ago. But now…’ He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Yes,’ said Balbus, ‘our Divine Nero admires their taste so much! And the rest of us have to ask them to dinner.’
Crispus looked round; two or three of the slaves were still there. ‘Boys, you may go,’ he said quickly, ‘all of you.’
‘Ah, thanks,’ said Balbus, ‘though I wasn’t going to say anything treasonable! Only that Tigellinus makes me sick. To see the way he looked at your daughter!’
‘We’re old-fashioned, I’m afraid. Perhaps he isn’t as bad as he seems. I can’t believe everything I hear about the Emperor.’
‘You’d better start practising, then,’ said Gallio, and laughed shortly.
But Crispus went rambling on with his regrets. The wine made him reminiscent and long winded. But there was no hurry. No hurry for any of them. Nothing left for three old men, all more or less retired from public life, to do or change. So they could go on talking. ‘It was so different those first five years, Gallio,’ he said, ‘when your brother Seneca was Nero’s tutor. We all thought he might be going to be the philosopher-king at last: the old dream. Yes, yes. But it was only because things had got so bad just before, with all the informers and murders and confiscations and scandals, and women and slaves in high places. But, you know, Balbus, it seemed like a fresh start with every Emperor, and then …’ He shook his head and emptied his wine-cup.
‘I was only a child when the Divine Augustus died,’ said Balbus, reminiscent too, ‘but I can remember the grief there was in all classes. And I remember, too, my father saying that we’d got a scholar and philosopher in Tiberius, a true Roman, hard-working, modest—well, there, we all know what came of it, and my poor father knew, too, to his cost, before the end.’
‘I was out of Rome those last five years of Tiberius,’ said Crispus, ‘a young man on my first job in the Provinces. It wasn’t till I came back that I realised how things were at home.’
‘It was the gloom, the blackness on everything—wasn’t it, Gallio?’ Balbus said. ‘You couldn’t enjoy yourself nor feel secure. There was that unhappy madman, betrayed by his wife and his friends, and at last by his own scholarship, glowering and pouncing between here and Capri. And then when he died and young Gaius took over—Caligula they called him, remember, Crispus?—it seemed like the good old days. Yes, the exiles came back, there were free elections and free speech again; we thought Rome could be Rome … But it was hardly a year before the prosecutions and the tyranny came back; Gaius was as mad as Tiberius. The things we had to put through in the Senate! Enough to make one ashamed to bear one’s grandfather’s name. And then Gaius was murdered and the Divine Claudius came shambling and stammering on; but still, he was no tyrant. No, Gallio, he kept the Provinces together and he might have done well for Rome, but for trusting his wives and his freedmen. It didn’t send him mad, being Caesar, but whether Nero is going the same way as Tiberius and Gaius—what do you think, Gallio?’
‘He’s not mad; he’s bad,’ Gallio answered. ‘It would take more than my poor brother and Burrus to hold a boy like that. He took after his mother. And she was a devil. But he only murdered her for a worse woman yet. Women and slaves!’
‘But, oh dear, why must the gods treat us like this?’ said Crispus.
‘Why? I’ll tell you. We’re to blame ourselves. Power’s a nasty, dangerous stuff, bad enough for a grown man. Poison to a boy. Even if Nero hadn’t had that mother. And we’ve been so afraid of civil war again—and the gods know we had reason to be afraid—that we let these Julio-Claudians have power. Tons of it. Enough to burst them, to send them mad. We gave it them with both hands—anything to keep us out of a civil war. We wouldn’t see that it was more than they could stand, any of them.’
‘Augustus stood it.’
‘He didn’t have it from childhood. And it wasn’t all in his hands, either. There was still a Senate and People of Rome with a will of its own that it could make known. And certain powers not given up. But now: think! We’ve given everything. Civil and military power. Judicial and executive. Haven’t we, Balbus?’
‘It’s not possible to run an empire efficiently unless there’s power at the centre; what we complain about is its misuse. It keeps on getting into the wrong hands—creatures like Pallas and Narcissus in the last reign—not even Italians!—and now men like Tigellinus and all those clever little snakes of freedmen, who can’t even get the whip marks off their backs, and women like Poppaea—the Divine Empress creeping from one bed to another—oh, it makes my blood boil!’
Gallio laughed. ‘Drink and cool down. It’s our doing. Not that we could have helped it. Being what we are. And the world as it is. The people who want power are the ones who get it, and it’s not a thing that decent people want. You wouldn’t like to be Emperor, would you, Crispus?’
‘The gods forbid!’
‘Nor I. We’ve some regard for our souls. It’s the ones without souls—women and half-men like these Imperial Ganymedes, and brutes without education like our dear Tigellinus. They’re the kind that want power. And take it.’
‘But the Emperors?’
‘Can an Emperor have a soul? Ask my brother: Seneca’ll tell you fast enough! Poor little silly Imperial soul, smothered to death with flattery and luxury and pride and anger uncontrolled. No, you can’t have it both ways. Not power and a soul.’
‘At any rate,’ said Crispus, ‘it isn’t so bad in the Provinces; they say that in Gaul, for instance, there is something nearer the old Roman life.’
‘Comes of being a week’s journey from the capital. Gaul can’t be gathered up into the same bundle of power as Rome. But suppose now—well, I’m no poet, this is more my nephew’s line!—but say one could get letters—and legions—to and fro to the Provinces in a matter of hours: flying horses! Well, then, they’d be under the same power too, and no different.’
‘In the same fear and shame as we are.’
‘Yes, but mark you, Crispus, the Empire’d be that much more efficient. The Imperial administration that much more unified. No rebellions possible. Can’t have it both ways. See, Crispus?’
Balbus, who had been calming down, swirling the wine round in his cup, broke in: ‘I’m not so sure, Gallio; is it all so damned efficient? What about the finances? Rome could live on what she made and took—well, in the usual way!—under the Republic. If you were a citizen that meant a decent security. But an Imperial Court with all the trimmings is a different matter; it’s upset the balance of things. It has to be fed and paid for, with imports all the time, and I’m not sure if that’s going so nicely. Here in Rome, half the citizens are on the dole. And I’d like to know just how the Exchequer are paying for these pageants and parades and cardboard imitations of the Olympic Games that are got up to keep their minds off reality!’
Crispus sighed. ‘We all need to have our minds taken off reality these days. It’s nice
