Tiberius by Allan Massie

affection, loyalty or decency can deflect him from a course which he has judged expedient or necessary. All men, yes, and all women too, exist for him ultimately as malleable objects: creatures whose lives may be deformed or cut off at his command. I told myself that if I had resisted, if I had opposed my will to his, it would have profited me nothing: I would have been cast into exile, Vipsania would still have been denied me, and my son Drusus' future would have been darkened. My acquiescence was my only means of protecting him.
    I told myself this, and knew it to be true; yet still despised my weakness. To appease my troubled mind I transferred my self-contempt to a pervasive scorn for the degeneracy of our times, when, with the loss of our antique Republican virtue, even the nobility of Rome have become the despot's playthings. "O generation fit for slavery," I growled; and those who heard me, and shrank from my harsh speech, did not understand that I included myself among the slaves.
    9
    S o we were married. The night before the wedding I sat late over the wine with my friend Gnaeus Piso, a man who has ever been ready to match me bottle for bottle. Piso, as a member of a family almost as distinguished as my own, would later be my colleague in the consulship. We shared more than a taste for good liquor, for, like me, he was a stern critic of the vices of our age, and yearned for the virtue of the free state. A realist however, he recognised that the great days were departed. He had - and indeed, I trust, still has — a talent for making the tart and pertinent observation which had pleased me from the first days of our acquaintance.
    "Well, Tiberius," he said that night, "Heracles himself might shrink from the task thrust upon you."
    "Heracles' own matrimonial history was unhappy."
    "Most people would call you a lucky man, of course. She's not only the Princeps' daughter, but also the most beautiful and seductive woman in Rome."
    "She was faithful, I think, to Agrippa."
    Piso laughed.
    "There's faithfulness and then there's fidelity," he said.
    "What do you mean? It's unlike you to play with words."
    "When you are faced with women like Julia, what else is there to do with them?"
    "I don't understand you, and I think I am happy not to."
    "Tiberius, we both know Julia. We have both known Julia. Don't forget that I was once on Marcellus' staff . . . and, old friend, when that pretty boy was alive, what were you to Julia? Can you control her now?"
    I pushed the wine-flask in his direction.
    "What would you advise?"
    "I would advise you not to be in your present position. Seeing as you are, and there's no help for it, then there are only two things to be done. First, you must insist that she accompanies you to the armies, so that she is at least under your eye. Second, keep her in pig. A flighty woman can be anchored only in that way."
    I swallowed my wine, and made a face.
    "You're forgetting," I said, "that my mother was in just that condition when the Princeps seduced her."
    "The situations," I continued, after a pause during which silence and uncertainty filled the room, "are not, of course, analogous. If my stepfather was not yet Princeps and Augustus, he was nevertheless triumvir. There is no one today with that glamour of power . . ."
    "Yes, and Livia was already a woman celebrated for her virtue. As you say, the situations are not analogous . . ."
    I had not seen Julia for more than two years, and we had held no communication concerning the decision made for our future. I had therefore no idea whether she approved the marriage. In recent years she had shown no sign of the desire she had felt for me when we were young, and I could not believe that I would have been her choice. Iullus Antonius was, of course, a liar, but the confidence with which he had spoken of Julia's feeling for him had been convincing. On the other hand, Julia had always disliked Vipsania and would be pleased to have triumphed over her. These