I, Tiberius: Robert Graves on Caligula

Robert Graves’s The Twelve Caesars. Photo by the author.

I’m going on my third entry on this site and this is going to be the second of the three where I mention Robert Graves. That’s because he’s an amazing poet and author and I’m enthralled so we might as well all just get used to it. This time it’s in reference to his translation of Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars.

My oldest son is now fifteen and terrorizing the neighborhood with his incunabular attempts at driving with a permit which will no doubt result in me replacing a few mailboxes as he learns that operating a car is not all brake/gas/brake/gas and putting his father in a cervical collar. There is progress being made for those that are concerned.

Way before he forced a car into one extreme or another, he was a baby and we would read to him.

For the most part it didn’t matter what we read. It was our calming voice that worked.

Real quick aside: Law & Order is always on and when you are bottle feeding a baby at three in the morning that means you watch Law & Order because Law & Order is always on. It’s not like you can hold a book with a screaming kid. I ran into S. Epatha Merkerson who played the lieutenant on the show and she was a wonderful lady. I liked her so much. I mentioned that her show got me through multiple late night and early morning bottle feeding and she told me that she’s heard that too many times to count.

I thought that was pretty cool.

But back to Graves. When we wanted to calm the suddenly fifteen-year-old back when he was an infant we calmed him by reading. It worked. Maybe it was cadence. He’s not cognizant of it, but he’s heard Hamlet. He’s heard Faulkner. He’s probably heard some really inappropriate but funny stuff that we needn’t get into because his English was not the best at the time, and we were not worried about the possible impression.

The funny thing was the Graves translation of Twelve Caesars.

He would always cry when we read it.

It became a parlor game.

Not kidding. I would have friends or family over to bear witness and would read all manner of books to the kid as an infant and he would be fine. I started Twelve Caesars and he would go nuts with crying. I switched books. Fine. Back to Suetonius, disaster. It was funny in a “I tortured my kid cruelly with a history text,” kind of way. There was no sense to it.

One of the lines from Suetonius, as translated by Graves and attributed to Tiberius, is this: “I am nursing a viper for the Roman people, and Phaethon for the whole world.” I had forgotten about the Phaethon part but it’s cracking me up because Phaethon took the sky chariot and did all manner of crazy stuff with the it and his dad Helios probably ended up paying for tons of mail boxes. Total wreck.

But the viper is what I’m after. Graves meant Caligula.

Caligula began as a success. He was a Germanicus and beloved. At some point he lost it. Lead poisoning is the most common theory but that makes so little sense to me because he drank the same water from the same pipes that didn’t make the rest of Roman society have sex with their sister. He snapped. I don’t think we’ll ever know why. The atmosphere in which he was raised is… interesting.

Tiberius hated those who felt they were better than him. He retreated to an Epstein island and cast sneering glances at the senatorial types. His reasons and his outcomes are disturbing.

I don’t like the society we are developing where people are told to obey, where dissent is vigorously punished, where not complimenting the emperor’s hemlines is a punishable offense. My kids are going to ask questions.

My oldest is analytical. He’s going to ask you all manner of things and gather as much information as he can. My youngest is a skeptic. He wants to see where you are wrong and smirk. God help you if they team up.

They will look you in the eye and inquire. I’m not happy with education as is put forth by so many school systems. I won’t accept a world as seen by rote. My kids will agree or disagree with me, but they will do so after considering and defending. I’m seeing too much indoctrination and sneering at those that notice inconsistencies in what has been deemed a piety.

The way Tiberius groomed Caligula was unconscionable. I’m not trying to recreate or even nearly approach what he did because his way created a monster, but he intended to raise the boy to be a thorn in the side of the Roman elite. That instinct, not the process, resonates with me. I’m doing my best to instill an independence. In the sense that I hope my children will be problematic to those that hold the reins of power, that they demand reasons, mock the indefensible in a way that would make Havel proud, and hold those that claim principle to what they espouse, I’m raising two vipers.