I, Claudius - Robert Graves [93]
Either I claim less than I have won, as if by mistake, or I pay more than I owe, and hardly anyone but yourself, I find, is honest enough to put me right." [I should have liked to quote a further passage in which there was a reference to Tiberius' bad sportsmanship, but of course I could not.]
In this book I began with a mock-serious enquiry into the antiquity of dice, quoting a number of non-existent authors, and describing various fanciful ways of shaking the dice-cup. But the main subject was, naturally, that of winning and losing and the title was How To Win At Dice.
Augustus had written in another letter that the more he tried to lose, the more he seemed to win, and even by cheating himself in the reckoning it was seldom that he rose from the table poorer than he sat down. I quoted an opposite statement attributed by Pollio to my grandfather Antony to the effect that the more he tried to win at diceplay the more he seemed to lose. Putting these statements together I deduced that the fundamental law of dice was that the Gods, unless they had a grudge against him on another score, always let the man win who cared least about winning. The only way to win at dice therefore was to cultivate a genuine desire to lose. Written in a heavy style, parodying that of my bugbear Cato, it was, I flatter myself, a very funny book, the argument being so perfectly paradoxical. I quoted the old proverb which promises a man a thousand gold pieces every time he meets a stranger riding on a piebald mule, but only on condition that he does not think of the mule's tan until he gets the money. I had hoped that this squib would please people who found my histories indigestible. It did not. It was not read as a humorous work at all. I should have realised that oldfashioned readers who had been brought up on the works of Cato were hardly the sort to enjoy a parody of their hero and that the younger generation, who had not been brought up on Cato, would not recognise it as a parody. The book was therefore dismissed as a fantastically dull and stupid production written in painful seriousness and proving my rumoured mental incapacity beyond further dispute.
But this has been a very ill-judged digression, leaving Germanicus, as it were, waiting anxiously for his money while I write a book about dice. Old Athenodorus would criticise me pretty severely, I think, if he were alive now.
XVI
GERMANICUS WAS MET AT BONN BY A DEPUTATION OF senators sent by Tiberius. They really came to see whether Germanicus had been either exaggerating or minimising the seriousness of the mutiny. They also brought a private letter from Tiberius approving the promises made to the men on his behalf with the exception of the doubled bequest, which would now have to be promised to the entire Army, not merely the regiments in Germany. Tiberius congratulated Germanicus on the apparent success of the ruse but deplored the necessity of forgery. He added that whether he fulfilled the promises depended on the behaviour of the men. [By this he did not mean, as Germanicus supposed, that if the men returned to obedience he would fulfil the promises, but exactly the reverse.] Germanicus wrote back at once apologising for the expense involved in the doubling of the bequest, but explained that the money was being paid from his own purse and the men would not know that it was not Tiberius who was their benefactor; and that in the forged letter he had made it plain that only the German regiments were to benefit, making the payment a reward for their recent successful campaign across the Rhine. As for the other specific promises, the veterans of twenty years' service had already been discharged and were only remaining with the Colours until the bounty-money arrived for them.
Germanicus could ill afford this heavy charge on his estate and wrote asking me not to press him for repayment of my fifty thousand for awhile. I answered that it had not been a loan but a gift, which I was proud to have been able to make. But to return to the order of events. Two of the regiments were in their winter quarters at Bonn when the deputation arrived. Their march back under their General had been a disgraceful display: the bags which had contained the money were tied to long poles and carried mouth-downwards, between the standards. The other two regiments had refused to leave the summer camp until the whole bequest was paid them. The Bonn regiments, the First and Twentieth, suspected that the deputation had been sent to cancel the concessions and began to riot again.