Read Online Tiberius by Allan Massie - Free Book Online Page A

will have heard the news about my father and Julia. It is very strange, but may work out well. Of course I am sorry for my mother who has had to be divorced. But she is well compensated, and, to tell the truth, has seen so little of my father in recent years that I think it likely she will feel the dishonour, but not the desertion. And, as you know, she is a devoted gardener, and the creation of her gardens on the Bay has been her chief interest. "Nobody," she once said to me, "can be unhappy planting flowers . . ."
    Julia was furious when the match was first proposed. You can guess why. But she is now reconciled to it. She realises that my father is a great man.
    "I am not going to ask you about Julia," Agrippa said to me, "because I don't think I would like the answer. But she'll behave herself now, you'll see. What she needs is authority . . ."
    I didn't see her for two years
    7
    I t is not my intention in this brief memoir to dilate at length on my military exploits. I have observed that there is a sameness in accounts of campaigns and that it is almost impossible to differentiate between one year's service and the next. Indeed they blur in my mind. Yet in as much as the greater part of my adult life, till I retreated into philosophic retirement, has been passed in camps, completely to ignore my memories of soldiering would give a misleading picture of my life.
    Yet I write this in no expectation of being read. Indeed in the hope that I will not. I write for my own satisfaction, in pursuit of my personal enquiry into the nature of truth; in an attempt to answer the two perplexing questions: what manner of man am I? What have I done with my life?
    When my mind drifts back now, it is images rather than a coherent narrative which present themselves to me: mist rising from horse lines in the thin keen wind of a morning by the Danube; long marches, the men ankle-deep in mud behind creaking waggons, as the beech and ash woods of Germany enfold us; a hill-top in Northern Spain, when snow fell below us in the valleys but we lay on dry, iron-hard ground under the stars; grizzled centurions lashing at the transport horses, yelling at the legionaries to put their shoulder to a wheel that was spinning as if in mockery of their efforts; a boy with blood oozing from his mouth as I rested his dying head on my arm and watched his leg kick; my horse flinching from a bush which parted to reveal a painted warrior, himself gibbering with terror; the sigh of the wind coming off a silent sea; the tinkle of the camel bell across desert sands. Army life is a mere collection of moments.
    My first independent command was, however, glorious. I use the word in full awareness that it can rarely be employed without irony, even if the understanding of the irony is reserved to the gods.
    Everyone knows that the greatest power in the world after Rome is Parthia. This vast empire extending to the boundaries of India, and influential beyond them, is fortunately divided from us by a wide and inhospitable desert. It was in that desert that the millionaire triumvir, Marcus Crassus, seeking to emulate the glory of his colleagues Caesar and Pompey, suffered, thanks to his vanity and ineptitude, the greatest disaster ever to befall Roman arms. His troops were cut to pieces at Carrhae, all killed except those taken prisoner, his standards captured, and he himself slain. (His head was thrown on to the stage of the theatre in which the Parthian Emperor was watching a performance of The Bacchae.) Later Mark Antony led another expedition against Parthia, meeting with almost equal disaster.
    The desert divides the two empires, but in the north the kingdom of Armenia serves as a buffer between them. In race and culture the Armenians are closely allied to the Parthians, a similarity which deepens the hatred they feel for them. But Armenia is of great strategic importance, for it thrusts itself like a dagger into each of the two empires. It is in Rome's interest to