Domina

Chapter 8

Despite my forebodings, Agrippina seemed more relaxed. She moved back with her husband Domitius to his mansion on the Via Sacra. He soon began to display the symptoms of dropsy, but Agrippina didn’t seem to care. When I questioned her, she pulled a sorrowful face.

‘Domitius has brought his own death upon him,’ she murmured. ‘I did not ask him to be my husband or to be a drunken lecher, and boorish both in bed and at table. Like a lot of people, Parmenon, he should be careful what he eats and drinks and whose bed he shares.’ She tapped her belly. ‘I have my son: Domitius is no longer needed.’ She changed the subject and refused to discuss the matter any further.

Pregnancy suited Agrippina. She positively bloomed and, as her belly grew bigger with the monster within, she fought to control the monster without. Despite a few mistakes, Caligula maintained his mask and behaved himself. He liked to process in triumph through the city showing himself to be magnanimous and merciful. On one occasion, at a banquet, he stared into a lucent pool of water as if he was concentrating on a mirror.

‘I forgive you,’ he murmured, lifting his hand, talking to his own reflection. ‘I, the Emperor, pardon you!’

He raised his head, eyes half closed, and pretended to be a second Augustus listening attentively to speeches or poetry. The mob loved his grandiose gestures, especially when he staged games in the amphitheatre near the Campus Martius which resulted in the killing of four hundred Libyan lions and an equal number of bears. Agrippina fought to keep him in line. Her two sisters, Julia and Drusilla, were married off: the favourite to Lepidus, a man whom Caligula had also slept with. Caligula’s first wife had died when he was on Capri. He married again but soon divorced his next wife. He only had eyes and heart for Drusilla. Lepidus, I suppose, was to act as panderer to the bedroom and head off any scurrilous gossip about the Emperor and his sister. When he wasn’t closeted with Drusilla, Caligula pawed and kissed two actors, Mnester and Pallas.

Agrippina watched her brother closely. She made sure he did not drink too much at banquets or leap up to join in the singing and dancing. She relied for help in controlling him on two other people: Caligula’s aged aunt, Antonia, and her son, Claudius. I’ve never really been able to decide whether Claudius was a great fool or a very wise man. Slack-jawed and vacuous-eyed when he talked, Claudius sounded as if he suffered from a stroke. He spat and stuttered as if his tongue was too big for his mouth and, when he walked, dragged his foot behind him. Clumsy in all his movements, Claudius’s table manners were no better. He’d gobble his food and slurp his wine. He became known as Claudius the Windbreaker or Claudius the Farter because of his offensive personal habits. Nevertheless, he was a great scholar of the history of the Julio-Claudian House and Caligula would humour him by listening to his droning speeches. Claudius appeared more and more in public, and Caligula even made him Co-Consul, an act of magnamity and clemency which endeared him to the Senate and the powerful ones of Rome.

Claudius’s mother, Antonia, was a different dish of onions: sharp and shrewd, upright in her life, she knew the true Caligula. One evening though she berated him too openly at a banquet, and Caligula lost his temper. He cleared the room and leant over his aged aunt, his face a mask of hatred. ‘I can do what I like!’ he hissed. ‘I’m the Emperor!’

Agrippina intervened, pulling her brother away. A short while later Antonia died, some say from poison. Caligula didn’t attend the funeral rites. Instead he feasted and banqueted and watched the pyre burn, all the time murmuring, ‘I can do whatever I like! I can do whatever I like!’

Indeed, he did do what he liked. Some of his gestures were noble. A slave woman, who had been racked and tortured by Sejanus but refused to betray her master was given her freedom and the huge sum of 800,000 sesterces. On another occasion I was with Caligula when he visited the public baths — he’d taken a liking to me since Tiberius’s death — accompanied by a small retinue of slaves, one of whom carried his linen towels, flask of oil, perfume jar and strigoil. On entering the baths Caligula saw an old man, an ex-soldier, rubbing his back up against the wall, and told me to call the old soldier over.

‘I can’t afford a slave to clean my back,’ the old man explained. ‘So, rubbing it against the wall is the best I can do.’

Caligula immediately gave him two of his own slaves as a present. The next time he returned to the baths, at least three dozen veterans were rubbing their backs up against the wall. Caligula roared with laughter and told them to clean each other’s back: the Emperor’s wit became the toast of Rome. All seemed well. Agrippina now withdrew to her own house. She hired every physician in the city to advise her on what to eat and what to drink, how best to protect the child growing within her. When she wasn’t talking to them, she was closeted with me. She’d question me closely about Caligula’s moods, advise me what to say, what to do, and warned me to watch for certain symptoms.

‘What do you fear will happen?’ I asked.

‘The same as if a hungry panther burst into a chamber,’ she replied.

The panther sprang in the September following Tiberius’s death. Caligula was now obsessed with the games and staged a massive spectacle for the citizens of Rome. I rose early, in the still time just after cock crow. I had a light meal of bread soaked in watered wine and prepared Domina’s litter and retinue, to take us to the games. Every merchant and food-seller in Rome had flocked to swarm round the gates selling honeyed cakes, spiced sausage, lizard fish and boiled eggs, and the air was sweet with spices and perfumes. I joined Domina in the imperial box overlooking the amphitheatre. Caligula was there with his new plaything, whose name I forget, though as usual the place of honour was reserved for Drusilla, accompanied by her weak-jawed husband Lepidus. We sat behind them, but Agrippina moved so she could watch her brother’s face. Caligula was highly excited.

The games started with a mime featuring a dog. The animal was given food which, the audience was informed, was laced with poison. The dog ate it, exhibited hideous convulsions and fell down, to all appearances dead. He was picked up by his master, carried around and laid down on a mock funeral pyre. The man clapped his hands and the dog sprang to his feet. Caligula was beside himself with laughter. He grabbed a purse from Agrippina and threw it into the amphitheatre. He turned round, his face only a few inches from his sister, flushed, his eyes bright and starting.

‘Find the name of that poison, Agrippina,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘And I’ll never use it again!’ He jumped up and down clapping his hands.

‘The time of the panther,’ Agrippina whispered. ‘But we’ve done what we can.’

Caligula loudly applauded the tightrope-walking elephants and those other animals which had been dressed up in male and female costume, but then his mood changed abruptly.

‘Iugula! Iugula!’ he screamed. ‘Cut his throat! Cut his throat!’ The cry of the mob when the gladiator was down.

The games manager recognised his cue for the carnage to begin. Gladiators poured into the arena to a fanfare of music. The combatants whipped themselves up into a fury by shouting abuse at one another. The music grew more raucous; trumpets, horns, flutes brayed and shrieked and the real bloodshed began. Caligula was beside himself, screaming abuse. As the sun grew hotter, the crowd began to demand a break for their usual refreshments. Caligula, getting to his feet, bawled at them to shut up. He had the awnings removed so the mob would learn its lesson and suffer the full brunt of the burning sun. Agrippina hastily called a servant and poured a goblet of wine — only I saw her add the powder — which she thrust into her brother’s hand. Meanwhile, in the arena below, the red-gold sand was littered with corpses. The gladiators, who had fought for hours, were now looking askance at the imperial box, where Caligula had dozed off. Agrippina whispered to the games manager. She ordered the awnings replaced and water and cakes to be distributed to the crowd.

Caligula slept for an hour. When he woke, he was paler, and more composed, taking more interest in Drusilla than in the tally of mounting corpses for the rest of the afternoon. The games finished and he returned to the imperial house on the Palatine, where he had ordered a banquet that was to cost the treasury millions of sesterces. Caligula demanded that Drusilla share his couch, where he lolled, drinking incessantly, whilst every possible dish was served: young kid, pheasant and goose, lamprey and turbot, sow’s udders. All the best chefs in Rome had been hired for the occasion, and Caligula led many of the guests on a tour of the kitchens, where they flocked like starving, screeching peacocks, standing on tiptoe, biting their fingernails as they watched each chef prepare a dish. The Emperor had insisted on inviting the ‘Victor Ludorum’ from the amphitheatre, a burly Thracian with the nickname of ‘Lord of the Dolls’ because of his sexual prowess amongst the women of Rome.

Caligula was beside himself with pleasure at the consequent revelry and chaos. Musicians and jugglers noisily thronged about and, despite Agrippina’s efforts, Caligula joined them. He insisted that the jugglers explain how objects thrown into the air seemed to fly back into their hands. Agrippina ate and drank nothing. She tried to distract her brother with comedians and actors who performed a bedroom farce, ‘Love Locked Out’, which Caligula watched intently. After the first act, he kissed Drusilla full on the lips and staggered to his feet, before stopping convulsively as if poisoned, staring at an actor wearing a bright red mask. Caligula thrust a hand out towards him.

‘So, you are back!’ he bellowed. ‘Has Tiberius sent you up from Hell? Who invited you here?’

Agrippina half rose from her couch. The Emperor’s screams stilled all the clamour.

‘What are you doing here?’ Caligula demanded.

The actor wearing the mask stood rooted to the spot. Caligula’s hand flew up in the air, he gave a loud scream and collapsed to the floor. Agrippina and Macro immediately took charge: the banqueting hall was cleared and the Emperor was hastily carried to his bedchamber, to which physicians, including Charicles, were summoned. As Agrippina supervised their ministrations, I heard her whisper, ‘He can’t die, not yet!’

Caligula was as white as a sheet, his breath coming in short dying gasps. Indeed, at one point Agrippina had to hold a mirror to his mouth to see if he was still breathing. Charicles examined his mouth and eyes and took his pulse before coming in to the antechamber, where Agrippina, Macro and I had gathered, together with that sly-eyed Greek, Progeones. The inclusion of Progeones was Agrippina’s idea. He was one of those hybrid creatures, who seemed neither truly male nor female. Oh, he had a man’s face and testicles, but the way he talked and moved, especially the flutter of his eyelids, the turn of his mouth and his high-pitched tone, were more suggestive of a woman. He walked with a better wiggle than some of the best courtesans in Rome. Agrippina had hired him to keep an eye on Caligula when he went visiting in the pleasure houses and brothels of Rome. She trusted him completely, claiming to have enough proof of that creature’s execrable habits to have him crucified or strangled a hundred times. I hated him, with his curling eyelashes, dewy glances and affected lisp. I should have killed him that night.

Agrippina led the meeting, as Macro’s men guarded the door.

‘Well,’ she demanded of Charicles. ‘Is he dying?’

‘I don’t believe so, Domina, it’s just a fit.’ Charicles tapped his forehead. ‘More of the mind than the body.’

‘Has he been poisoned?’ Progeones lisped.

Charicles stared at Agrippina. The valerian was a secret: I begged Agrippina with my eyes not to mention it.

‘He’s not been poisoned,’ Charicles confirmed, ‘but he’s in a deep sleep. He may die or. .’ He shrugged.

‘What can we do?’ Agrippina asked.

‘If he dies,’ Macro broke in, ‘Gemellus still lies under house arrest, a possible heir to the throne.’

Agrippina clutched her belly. During those few tense moments I discovered the full extent of Agrippina’s secret ambition: she would have a son, who would ascend to the purple, and when he was Emperor, she would be the one to control him. Anyone else — whoever they were — would simply wear the purple until she and her son were ready.

‘No!’ She shook her head. ‘Macro, send messages to the legion commanders!’

‘Oh, they’ll be loyal enough,’ Macro laughed. ‘And the Praetorian Guard take their orders from me.’

Agrippina sat, sucking on her lips.

‘Let it be. Let it be,’ she murmured.

Agrippina stayed on in the palace where she and Macro managed everything. The news of Caligula’s illness spread through Rome, and people grew hysterical, or pretended to, with grief. The Palatine was besieged by mobs eager for news. Five days after that infamous banquet, Caligula awoke. He pulled himself up in bed and stared around, smacking his lips. His eyes were clear with a mischievous, malicious look, as if it had all been a game. As Agrippina carefully explained his illness. Caligula heard her out, nodding wisely, before demanding to be washed and fed and have Drusilla sent to him.

Caligula kept glancing at Agrippina out of the corner of his eyes, and now and again he would wink at me as if we were sharing a joke. I’ll be honest, the look on that man’s face made me shiver. Whatever soul Caligula possessed before, had died during those five absent days, and thereafter the king of demons controlled his mind.

‘So, he said he’d sacrifice himself, did he?’ he declared, tapping his chin and referring to a Roman citizen Afraneus. ‘Promised to commit suicide if I recovered? Well I have, haven’t I, Parmenon?’ He grinned and winked, clapping his hands. ‘The Gods have blessed me. So, Afraneus must fulfil the vow!’

It was the beginning of the terror.

The following day Afraneus was arrested. Naked, except for a loin cloth, he was paraded through Rome and tossed off the Tarpeian rock. Another official had reputedly offered to fight as a gladiator if Caligula recovered. The Emperor kept him to his promise and made the unfortunate man battle it out in the amphitheatre. Drusilla and Agrippina were in no danger, but the atmosphere at court became tense and watchful. Caligula showed little overt hostility to anyone in particular until one night, at a banquet, he abruptly turned on Macro who had been offering advice on some petty matter.

‘How dare you lecture me?’ Caligula roared. ‘How dare you set yourself up as my superior?’

‘That is not true,’ Agrippina intervened.

‘Isn’t it?’ Caligula yelled.

The Praetorian Prefect leapt to his feet and made ready to leave.

‘You won’t get far!’ Caligula shouted.

Two German auxiliaries, favourites of the Emperor, appeared in the doorway. Tall and blond-haired, they looked like twins and were nicknamed Castor and Pollux. Macro spun round, and glanced beseechingly at Agrippina. She could only stare sorrowfully back. We’d been invited to these banquets for days following the Emperor’s recovery and until now nothing had happened. Caligula had lulled our suspicions until springing like a hunting panther.

‘We should kill him now,’ Agrippina whispered to me.

She moved further up the couch to elicit support from Drusilla but that empty-head was drunk and half asleep, her face pressed against the headrest.

Macro tried reasoning with Caligula. ‘I have only ever wanted to help. .’

‘Assassin!’ Caligula screamed. ‘You are under arrest! The charge is treason!’

The mercenaries seized Macro and dragged him from the room. I never saw him again: he was dead by the following morning. Macro’s fall was the sign for a new bloodbath. Silenus, Caligula’s former father-in-law, was arrested and openly accused in the Senate: his response was to cut his throat in front of all his colleagues. Gemellus, Tiberius’s grandson, was released from house arrest, but then his fate followed the same pattern as Macro’s. He was invited to a banquet, where Caligula shared his couch, and sniffed the young man’s breath.

‘What are you doing?’ Caligula screamed. ‘Taking antidotes for poison? Are you accusing me of trying to poison you? You, who prayed for my death!’

‘I have not prayed for your death,’ Gemellus replied. ‘I take no antidote, it’s cough medicine!’

Caligula refused to accept this. ‘It’s an antidote!’ he insisted.

Gemellus, give him his due, realised his time had come. ‘There is no antidote against Caesar,’ he bravely retorted.

He was allowed to leave the banquet, but the following day Praetorians were sent to his house and forced him to open his veins.

Caligula’s conduct became wilder and more outrageous. He attended the marriage of a noblewoman Orestilla, where he sat next to the bride and sent a note to the bridegroom, inscribed ‘Don’t make love to my wife!’

He ordered Orestilla to be taken to his own quarters and married her himself. A few months later he divorced the woman but ordered her never to make love to any man for as long as the Emperor lived. Sometimes his conduct was simply malicious. He made his uncle, Claudius, the constant butt of his jokes. Caligula would throw olive, fig and date stones at him and put slippers on his hands as he dozed in a wine-drenched sleep. Caligula would roar with laughter when the old man woke and tried to rub his face with his hands.

Agrippina ignored all this. She withdrew from court, more concerned that nothing would occur to upset the impending birth of her child. The boy was born in December, after a difficult delivery. The portents were good, though Agrippina kept them quiet. ‘Now is not the time,’ she whispered to me, ‘to remind my mad brother that there’s another Caesar in Rome.’

‘What shall we do?’ I urged.

‘We must wait,’ she replied. ‘The same as we had to do with Tiberius on Capri. .’

At first I admired my mistress’s cunning and coolness, until two events abruptly changed this. In June the following year Drusilla suddenly died, and Caligula’s grief was ostentatious, bloody and dangerous. She was granted a public funeral, and during the time of official mourning, it became a capital offence to laugh, bathe, or even dine with one’s family. Caligula tried to console himself for the loss of his sister. He married a disreputable noblewoman, Lollia Paulina, who insisted on turning up at dinner parties drenched in jewels and pearls worth millions of sesterces. She actually made her slave carry the receipts around to show would-be admirers how much she was worth. Caligula soon tired of her and dear Lollia went the way of all the rest. Next he married Caesonia, a woman of high birth and low morals, who already had a number of children by other husbands. When I informed Agrippina of this, her rage was as surprising as it was fierce. She leapt off the couch, dropping all the accustomed poise of a noblewoman in retirement. She paced up and down her bedchamber, beating her fists against her thighs.

‘He is mad but he can still beget!’ she exclaimed. ‘And never forget that Caligula is the son of Germanicus. Or might be,’ she added in a half-whisper.

‘I beg your pardon, Domina? What did you say?’

Agrippina looked over her shoulder at me, with that lopsided smile on her face. She went over and kicked the door shut.

‘Have you ever really studied Caligula, Parmenon? Does he look like me? Or Drusilla? Or Julia? My mother bore him but that does not mean he is Germanicus’s son.’

‘You could lose your head for that,’ I whispered back. ‘And your son would disappear into a pit.’

I placed my hand on her shoulder — when we were in private she allowed such liberties.

‘Are you going to kiss me, Parmenon? Make love to me?’ she teased.

I never knew what would have happened if I’d tried. Perhaps it was her coldness which always stopped me. Agrippina regarded sex as a gladiator did a sword or shield, a weapon to be used.

‘Or are you going to force me?’ she grinned. ‘Like Metellus did?’

‘I am going to warn you,’ I advised. ‘Progeones is in this house: he would betray you at any time.’

‘Nonsense! He’s mine and always will be.’

‘If he heard what you’ve just said,’ I went on, ‘he would sell the information to any of your enemies who would not hesitate to use it. The slightest hint that the Emperor is a bastard would bring about the cruellest punishments.’

Agrippina swallowed hard and broke free from my grip. She went over into a corner, crossing her arms like a young girl being scolded by her father.

‘I’ve heard rumours,’ she said. ‘Even my mother once hinted at it. That could be why Caligula and poor Drusilla became lovers, since the blood-tie was not so strong.’ She sighed. ‘Now she’s gone. I thought we could keep Caligula distracted with one woman or another but Caesonia is different: she’s as fertile as a brood mare. Caligula is still a young man. In five or ten years Rome could have a nursery full of “Little Boots”.’ She rubbed her hands together. ‘I am sure Caesonia will become pregnant, but Parmenon, we cannot allow her, her husband or any offspring to live.’

‘If Caligula dies?’ I asked. ‘Do you think the Senate will accept your baby son as Emperor?’

Agrippina shook her head. ‘He’s of Germanicus’s line but he’s still too young. No, Uncle Claudius will do nicely for the moment.’

‘Him!’ I exclaimed. ‘That doddering idiot!’

‘He has the imperial blood, Parmenon. If the Senate accepted a madman like Caligula, they’d take a baboon from Africa.’

That was Agrippina’s one great weakness. She would not listen and, once she decided to act, did so impetuously.

A stream of visitors began to call secretly at her house. Agrippina was sifting which ones would listen to her, who was sympathetic? Whom could she trust? Slowly her plan began to develop: Caligula’s speedy assassination in Rome would be followed by letters to the legions on the frontiers. I watched helplessly. She would not be advised or warned. There were three main plotters: Agrippina, her sister Julia and Drusilla’s former husband Lepidus. Julia was involved because she was terrified of her brother. Lepidus, after Drusilla’s death, had fallen from favour. Progeones and I became unwilling bystanders and spectators. I was used as a messenger. Often at night I’d slip along dark streets carrying cryptic messages to various houses. I would deliver these faithfully word for word, before taking an answer back to Agrippina.

It was a dangerous time! Caligula’s madness worsened by the week. He turned up at the Senate and terrified everyone by saying how marvellous Tiberius had been, how wrong they all were to criticise him. This speech marked a renewed persecution. The prisons filled. Caligula liked to visit the torture chambers, eating and drinking whilst his victims experienced a slow, agonising death. Caligula would advise the executioners to go about their work slowly so that the victim would know he was dying. Agrippina, despite her plotting, still tried to restrain him. She sent begging letters but Caligula’s only reply was:

‘Let the people hate me as long as they fear me!’

Justice was sharp and cruel. Parents had to attend the execution of their own children. One father was forced to watch his son die and then invited to dinner immediately afterwards. Caligula joked and jested throughout the meal. The owner of a school of gladiators who had displeased him was beaten to death with chains. Caligula would only allow the corpse to be removed when the stench from the putrefied body became too great. Writers were burnt alive in the arena. A Roman knight was tossed to the beasts in the amphitheatre. He ran across the sand and begged Caligula for a pardon, claiming his innocence. Furious, Caligula ordered that his tongue should be removed before he was thrown back to the waiting lions. Other more hideous punishments were perpetrated. At one infamous banquet he had the hacked limbs and bowels of a senatorial victim stacked in a steamy heap on a table so all the guests could see. Caligula broke the brooding silence with a mad fit of laughter.

‘Don’t you realise?’ he shrieked. ‘I could have all your heads with one cut!’

No one was spared. He had Caesonia, his new wife, paraded naked before guests, accusing them of treason if they looked, and demanding whether his wife disgusted them if they turned away.

By the time the summer heat reached Rome, Caligula was tired of the city. He’d grown particularly concerned by a prophecy given to Tiberius that Caligula had no more chance of becoming Emperor than of riding over the Gulf of Naples on horseback. Caligula was determined to prove this wrong. He marched his troops down to the bay and ordered his engineers to build a bridge more than three miles long from Puteoli to Baiae. Merchant ships were anchored together in a double line and a road, modelled on the Appian Way, built across them. So many ships were commandeered that the corn imports from Egypt suffered. Caligula didn’t care. He arranged for wayside taverns to be built on this makeshift road, together with resting places, even running water was supplied.

Caligula proudly proclaimed that even the God Neptune was frightened of him. The bridge was finished and Caligula had decided it was time to prove the prophecy wrong.

‘You are coming with me, sister!’ he yelled at the banquet held the night before. ‘And you, Parmenon. You’re my lucky mascot, Parmenon. Do you know that?’ His cadaverous face broke into a wolfish grin. ‘I have met him, you know,’ he whispered to me, filling my cup to the brim so the wine splashed out over my hands.

‘Who, Excellency?’ I replied.

‘Tiberius,’ he whispered. ‘He comes to my bedchamber, drenched in blood. What a hideous sight!’

‘Your Excellency, he didn’t die of wounds.’

Caligula grinned, winked and tapped the side of his nose. ‘You didn’t see what I did to his corpse afterwards,’ he replied. ‘I did enjoy myself.’

And then he turned away to bestow slobbering kisses on Caesonia. Agrippina, on the couch before me, watched this red-haired, florid-faced woman intently. My mistress reminded me of a cobra about to strike. Once we were away from the banquet she turned to me.

‘The bitch is pregnant!’ she murmured. ‘It’s time we acted!’

The following day Agrippina and I joined Caligula in a splendid chariot. The Emperor wore the breast-plate of Alexander the Great, ransacked from the Conqueror’s tomb in Alexandria. He also insisted on wearing full armour, a purple cloak trimmed with gold and adorned with jewels from India, as well as a crown of oak leaves. He then made sacrifice to Neptune and rode across his makeshift road. Backwards and forwards we went, both that day and the next, until I thought I would drop. Caligula rewarded his soldiers and invited all the onlookers onto the bridge.

The celebrations became frenetic. Many became so drunk and incapable, they fell off: corpses were washed up on the sands for weeks afterwards. Agrippina was furious, not so much with her brother’s madness, more that he might have a possible heir.

When we returned to Rome, she made a decision.

‘Caligula is to go to Germany. We must make sure he never arrives there.’ She took a bracelet off her wrist. ‘Give that to Lepidus. Tell him the die is cast!’