I, Claudius - Robert Graves [170]
In the summer of this year there was an accidental meeting between Livia in a sedan-chair and Tiberius on a cob in the main street of Naples, Tiberius had just landed from Capri and Livia was returning from a visit to Herculaneum.
Tiberius wanted to ride past without a greeting but force of habit made him rein up and salute her with formal enquiries after her health. She said: "I'm all the better for your kind enquiries, my boy. And as a mother my advice to you is: be very careful of the barbel you eat on your island.
Some of the ones they catch there are highly poisonous."
"Thank you. Mother," he said. "As the warning comes from you I shall in future stick religiously to tunny and mullet."
Livia snorted and turning to Caligula, who was with her, said in a loud voice: "Well, as I was saying, my husband [your great-grandfather, my dear] and I came hurrying along this street one dark night sixty-five years ago, wasn't it, on our way to the docks where our ship was secretly waiting. We were expecting any moment to be arrested and killed by Augustus' men—how strange it seemsl My elder boy—we had had only one child so far—was riding on his father's back. Then what should that little beast do but set up a terriffic yowl: ‘0h, father, I want to go back to Peru-u-u-sia.' That gave the show away. Two soldiers came out of a tavern and called after us. We dodged into a dark doorway to let them pass. But Tiberius went on yowling, ‘I want to go back to Peru-u-u-sia.' I said, 'Kill him! Kill the brat! It's our only hope.' But my husband was a tender-hearted fool and refused. It was only by the merest chance we escaped."
Tiberius, who had stopped to hear the end of the story, dug his spurs into his cob and clattered off in a fury. They never saw each other again.
Livia's warning about fish was only intended to make him uncomfortable, to make him think that she had his fishermen or his cooks in her pay. She knew Tiberius' fondness for barbel, and that he would now have a constant conflict between his appetite and his fear of assassination. There was a painful sequel. One day Tiberius was sitting under a tree on a western slope of the island, enjoying the breeze and planning a verse-dialogue in Greek between the hare and the pheasant, in which each in turn claimed gastronomic pre-eminence. It was not an original idea: he had recently rewarded one of his court-poets with two thousand gold pieces for a similar poem, in which the rivals were a mushroom, a titlark, an oyster and a thrush.
In his introduction to the present piece he brushed all these claims aside as trifling, saying that the hare and pheasant alone had the right to dispute the parsley-crown—their flesh alone had dignity without heaviness, delicacy without paltriness, He was just searching for a discourteous adjective with which to qualify the oyster when he heard a sudden rustling from the thom-bushes below him and a tousleheaded wild-looking man appeared. His clothes were wet and torn to rags, his face bleeding and an open knife was in his hand. He burst through the thicket shouting: "Here you are, Caesar, isn't it a beauty?'' From the sack he was carrying over his shoulder he pulled out a monstrous barbel and threw it, still kicking, on the turf at Tiberius' feet.
He was only a simple fisherman who had just made this remarkable catch and, seeing Tiberius at the cliff top, had decided to present it to him. He had moored his boat to a rock, swum to the cliff, struggled up a precipice path to the belt of thorn-bushes, and hacked himself a path through them with his clasp-knife.
But Tiberius