I, Claudius - Robert Graves [55]
"Yes."
"Then exaggerate your limp, stammer deliberately, sham sickness frequently, let your wits wander, jerk your head and twitch with your hands on all public or semi-public occasions. If you could see as much as I can see, you would know that this was your only hope of safety and eventual glory."
I said: "Livy's story of Brutus—the first Brutus, I mean—may be unhistorical, but it's apt. Brutus pretended to be a half-wit, too, to be better able to restore popular liberty."
"What's that? Popular liberty? You believe in that? I thought that phrase had died out among the younger generation."
"My father and grandfather both believed in it—"
"Yes," Pollio interrupted sharply, "that's why they died."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that's why they were poisoned."
"Poisoned! By whom?"
"Hm! Not so loud, boy. No. I'll not mention names.
But I'll give you a sure token that I'm not just repeating groundless scandal. You're writing a life of your father you say?"
"Yes."
"Well, you'll see that you won't be allowed to get beyond a certain point in it. And the person who stops you—"
Sulpicius came shuffling back at this point and nothing more was said of any interest except when I took my leave of Pollio and he drew me aside and muttered: "Little Claudius, good-bye! But don't be a fool about popular liberty. That cannot come yet. Things must be far worse before they can be better." Then he raised his voice: "And one thing more If, when I'm dead, you ever come across any important point in my histories that you find unhistorical I give you permission—I'll stipulate that you have the authority—to put the corrections in a supplement.
Keep them up to date. Books when they grow out of date only serve as wrappings for fish." I said that this would be an honourable duty.
Three days later Pollio died. He left me in his will a collection of early Latin histories, but they were withheld from me. My uncle Tiberius said that it was a mistake: that they were intended for him, our names being so similar. His stipulation about my having the authority to make corrections everyone treated as a joke; but I kept my promise to Pollio some twenty years later. I found that he had written very severely on the character of Cicero—a vain, vacillating, timorous fellow—and while not disagreeing with this verdict I felt it necessary to point out that he was not a traitor too, as Pollio had made him out. Pollio was relying on some correspondence of Cicero's which I was able to prove a forgery by Clodius Pulcher. Cicero had incurred Clodius' enmity by witnessing against him when he was accused of attending the sacrifice of the Good Goddess disguised as a woman-musician. This Clodius was another of the bad Claudians.
X
WHEN I CAME OF AGE, TIBERIUS HAD LATELY BEEN ordered by Augustus to adopt Germanicus as his son, though he already had Castor as an heir, thus bringing him over from the Claudian into the Julian family. I now found myself head of the senior branch of the Claudians and in indisputable possession of the money and estates inherited from my rather. I became my mother's guardian—for she had never married again—which she felt as a humiliation. She treated me with rather more severity than before, though all business documents had to come to me for signature and I was the family priest. My coming of age ceremony contrasted curiously with that of Germanicus. I put on my manly-gown at midnight and without any attendants or procession was carried into the Capitol in a sedan, where I sacrificed and was then carried back to bed. Germanicus and Postumus would have come, but in order to call as little attention to me as possible Livia had arranged a banquet that night at the Palace which they could not be excused from attending.
When I married Urgulanilla, the same sort of thing happened. Very few people were aware of our marriage until the day after it had been solemnised. There was nothing irregular about the ceremony. Urgulanilla's saffron-coloured shoes and flame-coloured veil, the taking of the auspices, the eating of holy cake, the two stools covered with sheepskin, the libation I poured, the anointing by her of the doorposts, the three coins, my present to her of fire and water