I, Claudius - Robert Graves [37]
Augustus then went over to the map of Italy, engraved on a thin sheet of gold studded with small jewels to mark the cities, which hung on the wall of the room in which they were. He was unable to speak, but pointed to Reggio, a pleasant Greek town on the straits of Messina.
So Julia was sent to Reggio, where she was given somewhat greater liberty, and even allowed to see visitors—but a visitor had first to apply in person to Livia for permission. He had to explain what business he had with Julia, and fill in a detailed passport for Livia's signature, giving the colour of his hair and eyes and listing distinguishing marks and scars, so that only he himself could use it. Few cared to submit to these preliminaries. Julia's daughter Agrippina asked permission to go, but Livia refused out of consideration, she said, for Agrippina's morals. Julia was still kept under severe discipline and had no friend living with her, her mother having died of fever on the island.
Once or twice when Augustus was walking in the streets of Rome there were cries from the citizens: "Bring your daughter backl She's suffered enough! Bring your daughter backl" This was very painful to Augustus, One day he made his police-guard fetch from the crowd two men who were shouting this out most loudly, and told them gravely that Jove would surely punish their folly by letting them be deceived and disgraced by their own wives and daughters. These demonstrations expressed not so much pity for Julia as hostility to Livia, whom everyone justly blamed for the severity of Julia's exile and for so playing on Augustus' pride that he could not allow himself to relent.
As for Tiberius on his comfortably large island, it suited him very well for a year or two. The climate was excellent, the food good, and he had ample leisure tor resuming his literary studies. His Greek prose style was not at all bad and he wrote several elegant silly elegiac Greek poems in imitation of such poets as Euphorion and Parthenius. I have a book of them somewhere. He spent much of his time in friendly disputation with the professors at the university.
The study of Classical mythology amused him and he made an enormous genealogical chart, in circular form, with the stems raying out from our earliest ancestor Chaos, the father of Father Time, and spreading to a confused perimeter thickly strewn with nymphs and kings and heroes. He used to delight in puzzling the mythological experts, while building up the chart, with questions like: "What was the name of Hector's maternal grandmother?" and "Had the Chimasra any male issue?" and then challenging them to quote the relevant verse from the ancient poets in support of their answer. It was, by the way, from a recollection of this table, now in my possession, that many years afterwards my nephew Caligula made his famous joke against Augustus: "Oh, yes, he was my greatuncle. He stood in precisely the same relationship to me as the Dog Cerberus did to Apollo." As a matter of fact, now that I consider the matter, Caligula made a mistake here, did he not? Apollo's great-uncle was surely the monster Typhoeus who according to some authorities was the father, and according to others the grandfather of Cerberus.
But the early genealogical tree of the Gods is so confused with incestuous alliances—son with mother, brother with sister—that it may be that Caligula could have proved his case.
As a Protector of the People Tiberius was held in great awe by the Rhodians; and provincial officials sailing out to take up their posts in the East, or returning from there, always made a point of turning aside in their course and paying him their respects. But he insisted that he was merely a private citizen and deprecated any public honours paid to him. He usually dispensed with his official escort of yeomen. Only once did he exercise the judicial powers that his Protectorship carried with it: he arrested and summarily condemned to a month in gaol a young Greek who, in a grammatical debate where he was acting as chairman, tried to defy his authority as such. He kept himself in good condition by riding and taking part in the sports at the gymnasium, and was in close touch with affairs at Rome