Tiberius Read Free Page A

miles, ankle-deep, through mud, and slept in tents soaked through by morning. Yet my relish for what is dry is of another nature: I detest sentiment or displays of feeling; I detest acting. I detest self-indulgence, and that emotion in which one eye does not weep but observes the effect of tears on those who watch. I take pleasure in language which is precise, hard and cruel. This has made me a difficult and uncomfortable person. My presence makes my stepfather, the Princeps, uneasy. I have known this since I was a youth. For years I regretted it, for I sought his approval, even perhaps his love. Then I realised I could never have either of these: he responded to the false spontaneous charm of Marcellus, as he does now to that of his grandsons, Gaius and Lucius, who are also my stepsons.
    Nothing has been easy for me, and it would not be surprising if I were to relapse into self-pity. It is a temptation, because my merits have ever been unjustly disregarded on account of my lack of charm. I have never been able to dispel clouds with a smile and a jest, and it is natural if I have experienced twinges of envy when I see my inferiors able to do so. Yet I am kept from self-pity by my pride. This is inherited. It is Claudian pride.
    Augustus has always been rendered uneasy on account of the indignity of his birth. It is only by the accident of marriage that he has had a career; the accident of two marriages, I should say, for there can be no question that his own marriage to my mother smoothed his path to power.
    It was, however, the marriage of his grandfather, M. Atius Balbus, to Julia, the sister of Gaius Julius Caesar, the future dictator, which raised his family from an obscure provincial station. The Princeps' own father was the first member of the family to enter the Senate. Contrast that with my heredity.
    I shall not boast of the Claudian gens: our achievements glitter on every page of the Republic's history.
    Mark Antony - a liar of course - used to delight in mocking my stepfather's antecedents. He would claim that the great - grandfather of his colleague in the triumvirate had been a freed-man and rope-maker, and his grandfather a dishonest money-changer. It is not necessary to believe such charges to understand why Augustus' attitude to the old aristocracy of Rome has been ambiguous: he is both resentful and dazzled.
    I, being a Claudian, judge these things better. I know the worthlessness of my fellow nobles. I recognise that their decadence has made them unfit to govern, and so destroyed Liberty in Rome. Though the Roman Empire now extends over the whole civilised world to the limits of the Parthian Empire in the East, our great days are behind us; we have been compelled to acquiesce in the suppression of Liberty.
    I write this in retreat in Rhodes, in the tranquillity of my villa overlooking the sea. My life is now devoted to the study of philosophy and mathematics, and to pondering the nature of experience. Accordingly it is not surprising that I should think to write my autobiography. There is good precedent for this, and any man of enquiring intelligence must frequently stand amazed before the spectacle of his own life and wish to make sense of it.
    I am forty-two years old. My public life is ended through circumstances and my own desire. I have been humiliated in my private life. I am disgraced through no fault of my own, rather on account of the schemes of others and my own indifference. I may, if the Gods will it, have as long to live again, though nightly I pray otherwise. Even from this distance I cannot contemplate the shipwreck of old age with equanimity.
    My father was Tiberius Claudius Nero, dead now for more than thirty years. (I was nine when he died. They made me deliver his funeral oration. More of that later, if I can bring myself to write it.) My mother, who still lives, is Livia Drusilla. She was seduced by the triumvir, Caesar Octavianus, who is now styled Augustus. He was not deterred by the