I, Claudius - Robert Graves [113]
Sejanus also said that he knew from a freedman of his who had once been a slave in Germanicus' household that Agrippina somehow believed Livia and Tiberius responsible for the death of her three brothers and the banishment of her sister and had sworn to be revenged. Sejanus also began discovering all kinds of plots against Tiberius and kept him in constant fear of assassination while assuring him that he need not have the least anxiety with himself on guard. He encouraged Tiberius to cross Livia in trifling ways, to show her that she overestimated the strength of her position. It was he who, a few years later, organised the Guards into a disciplined body. Hitherto the three battalions stationed at Rome had been billetted by sections in various parts of the City, in inns and such-like places, and were difficult to fetch out on parade in a hurry and slovenly in their dress and movements. He suggested to Tiberius that if he built a single permanent camp for them outside the City it would give them a strong corporate sense, prevent them from being influenced by the rumours and waves of political feeling which were always running through the City, and attach them more closely to his person as their Emperor. Tiberius improved on his advice by recalling the remaining six battalions from their stations in other parts of Italy and making the new camp big enough to house them all—nine thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry. Apart from the four City battalions, one of which he now sent to Lyons, and various colonies of discharged veterans, these were the only soldiers in Italy. The German bodyguard did not count as soldiers, being technically slaves. But they were picked men and more fanatically loyal to their Emperor than any true-born Roman There was not a man of them who really wanted to return to his cold rude barbarous land, though they were always singing sad choruses about it; they had too good a time here.
As for the criminal dossiers, to which Tiberius, because of his fear of plots against his life, was most anxious now to have access, Livia still pretended that the key to the cipher was lost. Tiberius, at Sejanus' suggestion, told her that since they were of no use to anyone he would burn them. She said that he could do so if he liked but surely it would be better to keep them, just in case the key turned up? Perhaps she might even suddenly remember the key.
"Very well, mother," he answered. "I'll take charge of them until you do; and meanwhile I'll spend my evenings trying to work the cipher out myself." So he took them off to his own room and locked them in a cupboard. He tried his hardest to find the key to that cipher but it beat him. The common cipher was simply writing Latin E for Greek Alpha, Latin F for Greek Beta, G for Gamma, H for Delta and so on. The key of the higher cipher was next to impossible to discover. It was provided by the first hundred lines on the first book of the Iliad, which had to be read concurrently with the writing of the cipher, each letter in the writing being represented by the number of letters of the alphabet intervening between it and the corresponding letter in Homer. Thus the first letter of the first word of the first line of the first book of the Iliad is Mu. Suppose the first letter of the first word of an entry in the dossier to be Upsilon. There are seven letters in the Greek alphabet intervening between Mu and Upsilon so Upsilon would be written as 7. In this plan the alphabet would be thought of as circular. Omega, the last letter, following Alpha, the first, so that the distance between Upsilon and Alpha would be 4, but the distance between Alpha and Upsilon would be 18. It was Augustus' invention and must have taken rather a long time to write and decode,