I, Claudius - Robert Graves [64]
"Antonia has to-day abstracted from his study what appears to be a notebook of historical material which he has been collecting for a life of his father; with it she found a painfully composed introduction to the projected work, which I send you herewith. You will observe that Claudius has singled out for praise his dear father's one intellectual foible—that wilful blindness of his to the march of time, the absurd delusion that the political forms that suited Rome when Rome was a small town at war with neighbouring small towns could be reestablished after Rome had become the greatest kingdom known since the days of Alexander, Look what happened when Alexander died and nobody could be found strong enough to succeed him as supreme monarch—why, the Empire simply fell to pieces.
But I should not waste my timeand yours in making historical platitudes. Athenodorus and Sulpicius, with whom I have just had a conference, say that they had not seen this introduction until I showed it them and agree on its extreme inadvisability. They swear that they have never put any subversive ideas into his head, and suggest that he must have got them from old books. Personally I think that he inherited them—his grandfather had the same curious infirmity, you remember—and it is just like Claudius to have chosen that one weakness to inherit and to have refused any legacy of physical or moral soundness! Thank God for Tiberius and Germanicus! There's no republican nonsense about them, so far as I know.
"Naturally I am instructing Claudius that he must desist from his biographical labours, saying that if he disgraces his father's memory by fainting at the solemn Games given in his honour, he is obviously unfit to write his life: let him find some other employment for his pen.
"LIVIA."
Ever since Pollio had told me about the poisoning of my father and grandfather I had been greatly perplexed. I could not make up my mind whether the old man had been talking senile nonsense, or joking, or whether he really knew something. Who but Augustus himself was sufficiently interested in the monarchy to have poisoned a nobleman merely because he believed in republican government? Yet I could not believe Augustus the murderer: poison was a mean way of killing, a slave's way, and Augustus would never have stooped to it. Besides, he was not a hypocrite and when he talked about my father it was always with admiration and affection. I consulted two or three recent histories, but they told me nothing that I had not already hdard from Germanicus of the circumstances of my father's death.
It was only a couple of days before the Games that I happened to be talking to our porter, who had been my father's orderly throughout his campaigns, The honest fellow had been drinking rather too much, because my father's name was on everyone's lips at the time and his veterans had come in for a good deal of reflected glory.
"Tell me what you know of my father's death," I said boldly. "Were there any stories current in the camp that he met his death other than by accident?" He replied: "I wouldn't say it to anybody, sir, but yourself, but I can trust you, sir. You're the son of your father and I never knew a man who didn't trust him. Yes, sir, there was a rumour going about and there was more in it than in most camp rumours. Your brave and noble father, sir, was poisoned, it's my sure belief. A certain Person, whose name I won't mention because you'll know it without my saying, was jealous of your father's victories and sent him an order of recall. That's not a story, or rumour, that's history. The order came when your father had broken his leg; not much of a damage either, and it was coming along well enough until that doctor fellow arrived from Rome, at the same time as the message, with his little bag of poisons in his hand. Who sent that doctor fellow? The same person who sent the message. Two and two's four, isn't it, sir? We orderlies wanted to kill that doctor fellow but he got back safe to Rome under special escort."