Claudius the God (31 page)

I was aware, I own, that many of my secretaries received money-presents from suitors. I discussed this point with them one day. I said: ‘I permit you to take presents: but I forbid you to solicit them. I shall not wrong you by suggesting that you could be bribed to commit any falsification, or other irregularity, and I don’t see why you should not be rewarded for doing favours for people which take your time and energy, and for, ceteris paribus, giving priority to their business. If a hundred applications for the same favour are sent in simultaneously and there is nothing to choose between the candidates, yet only ten can have their applications granted - well, I should think you foolish not to choose the ten who are capable of showing the most gratitude. My loyal friend and ally, King Herod Agrippa, is fond of quoting a Jewish proverb or rather a Jewish law which has won proverbial force - “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn”. That is appropriate and just. But I don’t want any indecent haggling or auctioning of favours and priorities; and if I find that any of my oxen devote more of their attention to snatching mouthfuls of corn than to treading it out, I shall take them straight from the threshing-floor to the slaughter-house.’

My new Commander of the Guards was called Justus; I had called up the other Guards colonels to suggest one of their number for the appointment, and though I would have preferred someone other than Justus I accepted their choice. Justus took too meddling an interest in politics for a mere soldier: for instance, he came to me, one day and informed me that some of the new citizens I had created were not adopting my name, as they should do in loyalty, or altering their wills in my favour, as they should do in gratitude. He had a list already prepared of these ungrateful and disloyal men and asked whether I wished to have charges framed against them; I silenced him by asking him whether his recruits made a practice of adopting his name and altering their wills in his favour. Justus took the trouble to tell me this, but neither he nor anyone else let me know that not only was Messalina selling the citizenship and encouraging others to sell it; but, more shameful still, was being paid huge sums of money in return for her influence with me in the choice of magistrates, governors, and military commanders. In some cases she not only exacted the money but I might as well tell you at once insisted on the man sleeping with her as a seal to the bargain. The most shameful thing of all was that she brought me into it without my knowledge: telling them that I had cast her off in scorn of her beauty, but allowed her to choose what bed-fellows she liked on condition that she persuaded them to pay a good price for the appointments which I gave her to sell on my behalf! However, I knew nothing about any of this at the time, and flattered myself that I was doing well enough and acting in an upright way that should command the affection and gratitude of the whole nation.

In my self-confident ignorance I did one particularly stupid thing: I listened to Messalina’s advice on the subject of monopolies. You must remember how clever she was and how slow-witted I was, and how much I relied on her: she could persuade me to almost anything. She said to me one day: ‘Claudius, I have been thinking about something; and that is, that the nation would be much more prosperous if competition between rival merchants were to be suppressed by law.’

‘What do you mean, my dear?’ I asked.

‘Let me explain by analogy. Suppose that in our governmental system we had no departments. Suppose that every secretary in this place were free to move from job to job just as he thought fit. Suppose that Callistus were to come rushing into your study one morning and say: “I got here first and I want to do Narcissus’s secretarial work this morning,” and then Narcissus, arriving a moment later and finding his stool occupied by Callistus, were to dash into Felix’s room, just in time to anticipate Felix, and begin work on some foreign-affairs document that Felix had not quite finished drawing up the night before. That would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?’

‘Very ridiculous. But I don’t see what this has to do with merchants.’

‘I’ll show you. The trouble with merchants is that they won’t stick to a single task or let their rivals stick to one. None of them is interested in serving the community, but merely in finding the easiest way of making money. A merchant may start with an inherited business as a wine-importer, and manage that soberly for a while, and then suddenly break into the oil-business, underselling some oldestablished firm in his neighbourhood; perhaps he will force this firm out of business or buy it up, and then perhaps dabble in the fig-trade or slave-trade and either crush competitors or get crushed himself. Trade is constant fighting, and the mass of the population suffers from it, just like non-combatants in a war.’

‘Do you really think so? Often they get things surprisingly cheap when one merchant is underselling another merchant or when he goes bankrupt.’

‘You might as well say that sometimes non-combatants can get quite good pickings from a battlefield scrap-metal, the hides and shoes of dead horses, enough sound parts of broken chariots to build one good one with. Those windfalls aren’t to be reckoned against the burning of their farms and the trampling down of their crops.’

‘Are merchants as bad as all that? They never struck me as being anything but useful servants of the State.’

‘They could be and ought to be useful. But they do great harm j by their lack of co-operation and their insane jealous competition. The word goes round, for example, that there’s to be a demand for coloured marble from Phrygia, or Syrian silk, or ivory from Africa, or Indian pepper; and for fear of missing a chance they scramble for the market like mad dogs. Instead of persisting with their ordinary lines of commerce, they rush their ships to the new centre of excitement, with orders to their captains to bring as much marble, pepper, silk, or ivory as possible at whatever cost; and then of course the foreigners raise the prices.’ Two hundred shiploads of pepper or silk are brought home at great expense when there is really only a demand for twenty, and the hundred and eighty ships could have been far better employed in importing other things for which there would have been a; demand and for which a fair price could have been got. Obviously trade ought to be centrally controlled in the same way as armies and lawcourts and religion and everything else is controlled.’

I asked her how she would control trade if I gave her the chance.

‘Why, that’s simple enough,’ she answered. ‘I should grant monopolies:’

‘Caligula granted monopolies,’ I said, ‘and sent prices up with a rush.’

‘He sold monopolies to the highest bidder, and of course prices went up. I shouldn’t do that. And my monopolies wouldn’t be so huge as Caligula’s. He sold one man the world’s trading-rights in figs! I’d simply calculate a normal year’s demand: for any given commodity and then freely allocate that trade for the next two years to one firm or more of traders. I should, for instance, grant the sole right to import and sell Cyprian wines to such-and-such a firm, and the sole right to import and sell Egyptian glass to such-and-such a firm; and Baltic amber and Tyrian purple and British enamel would go to other firms. Control trade like this and there is no competition, so the foreign manufacturer or dealer in raw materials can’t put up the price; “take, it or leave it”, says the trader, as he fixes the price himself. The traders who have not sufficient standing to be granted monopolies must either come to terms with monopoly-holders, if the latter think that they have more trade than they can manage themselves,, or must discover new industries or trades. If h had my way everything would be thoroughly orderly and we should be well supplied, and the State would get bigger harbour-dues than ever.’

I agreed that it sounded a very sensible plan; and one good effect would be to release a large number of ships and merchants for the corn trade. I immediately empowered her to grant a large number of monopolies, never suspecting that the clever woman had talked me over to her scheme merely with an eye to enormous bribes that she would get from the merchants. Six months later the removal of competition in the monopoly trades, which included necessaries as well as luxuries, had sent prices up to a most ridiculous height the merchants were recovering from the consumers what they had paid in bribes to Messalina - and the City became more restless than at any time since the famine-winter. I was continually shouted at in the streets by the crowd, and there was nothing for me to do but to set up a-big platform on Mars Field, from which, with the help of a big-voiced Guards captain, I fixed the prices, for the ensuing twelve months, of the commodities affected. I based the prices on those of the previous twelve months, as far as I was able to get accurate figures and then of course all the monopolists came to the Palace afterwards to beg me to modify my decision in their own particular cases, because they were poor men and beggary was facing their starving families, and nonsense of that sort. I told them that if they could not make their monopolies pay at the prices now fixed they could retire in favour of other traders with better business methods; and then warned them to go away at once before I charged them with ‘waging war against the State’ and threw them from the Capitoline cliff. They made no further protests but tried to beat me by withdrawing their goods from the market altogether. However, as soon as any complaints reached me that a certain class of goods, say pickled fish from Macedonia or medicinal drugs from Crete - was not reaching the City in sufficient quantities I added another firm to those already sharing the monopoly.

I was always most attentive to the City food-supply. I instructed the steward of my Italian estates to devote as much land as possible in the neighbourhood of the City to the growing of vegetables for the City Market, especially cabbage, onion, lettuce, endive, leek, skirret, and other winter vegetables. My physician Xenophon told me that the frequent outbreaks of disease in the poorer’ quarters of Rome in the winter months were largely due to the scarcity of green vegetables. I wanted an abundant supply raised, brought in -every day before: dawn and sold at the lowest possible prices: I also encouraged pig, poultry, and cattle-breeding; and a year or two later won special privileges from the Senate for City butchers and wine-sellers. There was some opposition in the Senate to these grants. The Senators themselves were supplied from their own country estates and were not interested in the people’s food. Asiaticus said: ‘Cold water, bread, beans, pulse porridge, and cabbage are good enough for working-men. Why pamper them with wine and butchers’ meat?’ I protested against Asiaticus’s inhumanity and asked him whether he preferred cold water to Chian wine, or cabbage to roast venison. He answered that he had been brought up on a rich diet and would find it quite impossible to change to the simpler sort, but that no doubt he would be a hardier man if he could, and that it was wrong to encourage poor men to a diet above their station.

‘I appeal to you, my Lords,’ I protested, trembling with vexation, ‘what man is able to live a self-respecting life without a little bit of meat now and then?’ The House seemed to think this funny. I didn’t. And the same thing happened at the end of the same debate when I was on the subject of the wine-sellers. ‘They want encouragement,’ I said. ‘There has been a great falling off in the number of wineshops even in the last five years: I mean honest jug-and-bottle houses, not those dirty places that I have had shut up now where they sold cooked meat as well as wine and what wine too! Awful stuff, for the most part, doctored with salts of lead - and a brothel full of diseased women attached, with pornographic pictures smudged on the wall. Why, five years ago, within a quarter of a mile of my house on the Palatine, there were at least fifteen - no, what am I saying? at least twenty-five jug-and-bottle houses, and now there aren’t more than three or four. And they served good wine too. There was “The Flask”, and “The Bacchus”, and “The Veteran”, and “The Two Brothers”, and “The Glory of Agrippa”, and “The Swan” (” The Swan’s” still in business, but the others are gone - the best wine came from “The Two Brothers”), and the “Baucis and Philemon” - that’s disappeared too, a very pleasant place. And so has “The Yew Tree” - I liked the old “Yew Tree”.

How they laughed at me! They were all men who kept their own cellars and had probably never been into a wineshop to buy drink in their life. I silenced them with an angry look. I said: ‘You may recall that five years ago, owing to the, caprices of my nephew, the late Emperor, I went bankrupt and was forced to live on the charity of my friends - not a man of you among them, by the way - real friends, such as a few, grateful freedmen, a girl prostitute, and an old slave or two: I visited those taverns to buy wine because my cellar was up for public auction along with my house, of which I could only afford to occupy a few rooms. So I know what I’m talking about: And I hope that if any of you happen to fall a victim to the caprices of an Emperor and find yourself in poverty you will remember this debate, and regret that, you have not voted for the maintenance of a proper supply of butcher’s meat in the City and for the preservation of such honest wineshops as the old ” Swan”,,”The Coronet’ and “The Black Dog”, which are still in business but won’t survive long if you don’t do something for them. To Hell with cold water and pulse-porridge! And if I see so much as a smile cross your faces, my Lords, before I have finished this speech - or after - I shall take it as a personal affront.’

I was really angry, shaking with anger, and I saw the fear of death gradually stealing over them. They passed my motion without a single contrary vote.

My success gave me momentary pleasure, but afterwards I felt deeply ashamed and made things worse by apologizing to them for my ill-temper. They thought that I was showing weakness and timidity by doing so. Now, I wish to make it clear that I had not been using my Imperial power, contrary to all my most cherished principles of equality and justice and human self-respect, to bully and browbeat the Senate. I had just felt outraged by Asiaticus and the rest of those rich heartless men who treated their fellow-citizens like dirt. I was not threatening, I was merely expostulating. But those words of mine were used against me afterwards by my enemies, in spite of my apology for them and in spite of the following letter that I composed and circulated in the City: Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Emperor, High Pontiff Protector of the People, Consul for the third time, to the Senate and People of Rome, greetings.