MESSALINA HER FALL

A Tragedy in Five Acts

Last updated: June 4, 2026

THE ARGUMENT

VALERIA MESSALINA, daughter of the house of Messalla Barbatus and great-niece to Augustus, wife to Claudius, fourth emperor of Rome, having long governed the private machinery of the principate through beauty, intelligence, and the studied arts of indirection, finds herself, in the twelfth year of her husband’s reign, grown weary of that concealment which power imposes upon those it will not publicly acknowledge. About her are ranged, on one side, suitors without number — Titus Petronius, a young nobleman who mistakes his own affliction for devotion; Appius Silanus, a soldier who hides fear behind the vocabulary of virtue; Marcus Pollio, a wit who believes that laughter, elegantly phrased, stands above the reach of consequence — each of whom she reads with precision, and dismisseth with contempt or ruin as occasion warrants; and on the other, the instruments of her will, chief among them Suillius Rufus, whose talent for legal destruction she employeth against those who speak one way to her face and another at another man’s table. Into this court, already thick with appetite, envy, and calculation — for she hath long made jealousy her minister of state, moving men by their grievances as a smith moves bellows — entereth Gaius Silius, consul, the first man in all Rome to speak to her as a statesman to a statesman, to dispute with her openly, and to name aloud what she hath known in silence: that a mind fitted for the governance of states hath been reduced to governing by corridors and beds. This recognition emboldening what was already half-resolved, she taketh him for her lover; and he, being of like daring, proposeth a public marriage during Claudius’s absence at Ostia; the which they celebrate openly, with priests, witnesses, and all the ceremony of Rome, thereby converting private desire into public treason. Narcissus, freedman and chief secretary, having long observed this design, and perceived that Messalina’s greatest engine — jealousy, wherewith she hath moved men against one another for years — may now be turned upon herself, by making Claudius jealous not of a body given to another, but of the dignity and succession she hath put at hazard, bringeth the matter to the emperor at Ostia; who, being persuaded, signeth the death-warrant before Messalina can reach him; Silius is taken and dieth bravely; and she, abandoned by all the court that once moved at her motion, is left in the gardens of Lucullus with only her women and the instrument of her own death; which she cannot use of herself, so that the tribune Sulpicius must do for her what she could not do. Thus falleth she: not by weakness of will, but by the excess of her own nature in a world too narrowly framed to contain it.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

CLAUDIUS    Fourth emperor of Rome, learned in laws, histories, and dead alphabets.
   A man shaped more fitly for books than sceptres or alarms.
   He loves Messalina truly, and therefore sees her least.

MESSALINA    Empress of Rome, daughter of the house of Messalla.
   The most beautiful woman of her age, and one of the keenest minds.
   Forced to rule by curtains and side-doors, she grows weary of concealment.

GAIUS SILIUS    Consul of Rome, magnificent in person and direct in judgment.
   Handsome without vanity, ambitious without disguise, and easy in danger.
   The first man to meet Messalina at the level of her full intelligence.

TITUS PETRONIUS    A young nobleman, fair as a newly-struck coin and much observed.
   He mistakes intensity for knowledge, and suffering for devotion.
   In loving Messalina he chiefly adores the image of himself inflamed.

GAIUS FABIANUS    A veteran senator and provincial governor, grave in speech and rich in gifts.
   He courts as generals besiege, with honour on the lip and possession beneath.
   Rome mistakes his expensive moderation for wisdom.

MARCUS POLLIO    An advocate of wit, address, and social quickness.
   He trusts too much in laughter elegantly phrased and widely repeated.
   His ruin proves that power remembers what company calls a jest.

NARCISSUS    Freedman, chief secretary to Claudius, subtle and patient.
   He has long observed the empress with fear, admiration, and care.
   When scandal becomes public theatre, necessity hardens him into action.

PALLAS Freedman and treasurer, cautious in counsel and jealous of survival.
He serves the state, the emperor, and his own continuance with equal diligence.

CALLISTUS Freedman and keeper of records, practised in silence.
He reads the shifting weather of the court and survives by exact reserve.

VITELLIUS Senator, courtier, and senior lieutenant to Claudius.
He bends with power as reeds with wind, and calls the motion prudence.

MARCUS SCRIBONIUS A senator of observation and grave speech.
He serves in the play as witness, commentator, and moral historian.

FLAVIUS TERTIUS Companion to Marcus, less severe and quicker to fear.
In his questions the audience hears Rome’s troubled conscience.

MNESTER    A celebrated actor, formerly commanded into Messalina’s service.
   His body may be summoned, but his inward measure remains his own.
   In resisting falsity without open rebellion, he teaches her a harder truth.

SUILLIUS RUFUS Senator, prosecutor, and workman in legal destruction.
He serves Messalina efficiently and hates her with professional clarity.

APPIUS SILANUS    Soldier and senator of established reputation.
   Grave, reputed upright, and thought by many a pattern of Roman virtue.
   When tested in private, he mistakes fear for principle and pays for it.

SULPICIUS Tribune of the Praetorian Guard, employed in the final business.
A soldier capable of pity, though not of disobedience.

LUCIUS GETA Tribune of the Guard, present among the instruments of state.
He obeys the signatures of empire and asks no larger question.

EUNICA A freedwoman used by Narcissus for the carrying of truth.
Quick, frightened, and exact in testimony when it is safest to be exact.

VINIA    Lady of the Bedchamber to Messalina.
   She attends her mistress with affection, fear, and observant loyalty.
   ECLOGÉ
   Another lady of the Bedchamber, sharper in judgment than she appears.
   She sees beauty as danger sooner than most and names it lower.
   SCRIBE, MESSENGER, SERVANT, SENATORS, PRAETORIAN GUARDS, LICTORS,
   CITIZENS, MUSICIANS, AND ATTENDANTS.
   The city of Rome in all its obedient, curious, frightened degrees.
   SCENE.—ROME: the Palatine Palace; the Theatre of Pompey; the Senate House;
   the Gardens of Lucullus; and the Harbour at Ostia.

ACT I

SCENE I.—A Portico of the Palatine Palace.

Enter MARCUS SCRIBONIUS and FLAVIUS TERTIUS.

MARCUS.

‘Tis well, Flavius, that the morning air
Blows cool enough to clear a Roman head;
For what I saw within those gilded halls
Last evening at the emperor’s reception
Would stuff a Syrian merchant’s dreams with wonder
And fill a free man’s stomach full of shame.

FLAVIUS.

You speak of court.

MARCUS.

What else? The court. The court.
That place which is no longer Claudius’s—
If ever it were his—but hers: that force,
That constellation of dark arts which men
Call beauty, which the gods alone call power,
And which we—poor reasoning creatures of
The afternoon of Rome—call Messalina.

FLAVIUS.

Softly. These porticoes have ears as fine
As any in the Senate.

MARCUS.

I know it well.
And yet I speak no malice of her—mark:
No malice, for malice is a thing
That fastens on the worthy and the base
With equal indiscrimination. I
Speak observation; which is something else.
I’ve seen her at the games, when forty thousand
Romans turned their eyes from blood and lions
To watch her pass beneath the awning where
The empress sits; and every senator,
Hard-bitten in his service, soft in nothing,
Forgot the dignity of his stripe and stood
A moment open-mouthed; and every wife
Beside him felt the cold of being merely
Mortal, merely human, merely fair—
For she is beautiful beyond what beauty
Signifies in others. Hers is not
A gift but an authority; not a face
But a command; not ornament but engine,
Such as the gods devise when they intend
To make the world prove interesting. And some,
Who pity Claudius for his scholar’s soul,
Envy him too the blindness of a man
Who may possess such weather as a wife
And call it marriage. So the sickness spreads;
For envy dogs beauty enthroned in power
As flies attend a wound they cannot heal.

FLAVIUS.

Old Titus Gallus—whom no face hath moved
To softer thought these forty years—I’m told
He saw her once upon the temple steps
Of Juno, dropped his schedule of the grain,
And stood as mute as any temple sheep.
Thus Rome may starve, yet call the omens good,
If beauty but preside above the famine.

MARCUS.

His silence was his only eloquence.
But Flavius, hear me: beauty of that kind—
That force, that engine—is not merely beautiful.
On her it falls as lightning falls on gold:
It makes the gold more terrible to touch.
For she is not a woman merely fair
Who takes her praise and lets the world flow by.
She thinks. She reads a man the way a hawk
Reads meadow from the air—each twitch of pride,
Each hidden appetite, each secret fear;
The cowardice inside the soldier’s chest;
The avarice behind the pious face.
And having read them so, she moves them then
As patient players move upon a board,
And Rome itself—the Senate, palace, camp,
The appointments and the prosecutions—all
Is hers, though none may say so, and none does.
Men think desire a private fever. No.
I have seen votes miscarry at her sleeve,
Old patrons left, the innocent accused,
Because some lean aspirer hoped one glance
Would mend the cracked opinion of himself.
Thus appetite, once harnessed to preferment,
Draws harder than the law. Livia held
Augustus by long patience; Egypt’s queen
By theatre led Antony. But she
Has found a subtler Roman art than both:
Not Nile nor banquet, but each Roman breast
Turn’d clerk to copy warrants on itself.
Lust is ambition entering by the blood.

FLAVIUS.

I would not say so—not where any wall
May turn informer first.

Enter VITELLIUS.

VITELLIUS.

Good day to you, gentlemen. [Aside.] These two
Know more than those who wish long lives should know.
You talk of—?

MARCUS.

Rome, my lord Vitellius.
A subject wide enough to fill the time
And still leave room for more.

VITELLIUS.

Rome. Yes.
She is capacious. I must go within.

FLAVIUS.

There goes a man who serves whoever holds
The largest cup. If Romulus came back,
He’d call him founder, did the wolf keep place.

MARCUS.

And will serve many years.

Exeunt.

SCENE II.—Claudius’s Private Study.

Enter CLAUDIUS and a SCRIBE.

Enter MESSALINA.

Exit SCRIBE.

CLAUDIUS.

You came before the household had begun.
I thought to steal an hour with dead men’s words
Before the city broke upon my door;
But you are better than recovered kingdoms.

MESSALINA.

My lord grows lavish over mouldering kings.

CLAUDIUS.

Not lavish. Only glad. Sit near me, wife.
When you are absent, rooms collect too much
Of paper and of me.

MESSALINA.

[Sits.]
Then I preserve
The state from two most learned encumbrances.

CLAUDIUS.

You mock me kindly. That is one great cause
I bear the world as well as I contrive.
I had a letter come from Ostia at dawn.
The northern arm subsides again. I must
Go down and see the harbour works myself.

MESSALINA.

Then Ostia shall grow suddenly more wise.

CLAUDIUS.

And I less comfortable. When I am gone,
Take not too much upon you. You will tire
Yourself with hearings, letters, and the rest.
You are too diligent where I love ease.

MESSALINA.

I do no more than keeps your house in tune.

CLAUDIUS.

My house, my heart, my children’s peace, my name—
You keep them all. Britannicus last night
Would not be laid to sleep till you had come.
Octavia asks each day if you will dine.
You think these little things are little things.
They are the cords by which a life holds fast.

MESSALINA.

You praise a wife for doing what is hers.

CLAUDIUS.

No. I praise you
For making duty seem a kind of grace.
And more than that—come, read this note from Spain.
Vitellius doubts between two men for post:
One has old family, one actual use.
Which would you choose?

MESSALINA.

The useful one, my lord.
Old family spends itself remembering.
Use answers when the hour requires a hand.

CLAUDIUS.

There—see? You loose a knot at once. In women
There is sometimes a household kind of wit
That sees more swiftly than our public methods.

MESSALINA.

I am content it serves you.

CLAUDIUS.

Serves me? Dear heart,
You speak as if I kept you for a seal
Or lamp beside my chair. I love you. Mark me.
Not for the court’s report, nor for the noise
Men make when beauty enters—though I hear
Enough of that—but for your presence near,
Which stills in me a thousand foolish starts
And makes the business of the day seem human.

MESSALINA.

You are too good to what is only yours.

CLAUDIUS.

Only? Nay, all.
If Rome took every laurel from my brow
And left me still your kindness at the end
Of supper, I could bear the loss of Rome.
When I am older still, and all these papers
Have beaten my poor eyes to weaker service,
I think to have no greater happiness
Than books, our children, and your hand in mine.

MESSALINA.

Then keep it so.

CLAUDIUS.

I shall.
You’ll walk with me before I leave for Ostia?

MESSALINA.

If you command it.

CLAUDIUS.

No. If you are willing.
I would not have obedience where I want
Affection.

MESSALINA.

I am willing, sir.

CLAUDIUS.

That word from you can make a rough day mild.
Come at the sixth hour. Till then I will pretend
To govern Rome and not my footnotes only.

MESSALINA.

And I will help the empire by consenting.

CLAUDIUS.

There spoke my dearest enemy in jest.
Till noon, my love.

MESSALINA.

He loves me truly. There is pain in that.
Had he been gross, or cruel in the common kind,
The heart might arm itself and call it justice.
But kindness makes the wound exact. He sees
My care, my face, the comfort of my hand,
And thinks the whole of me is gathered there.
I answer with a tenderness half true,
And pay for every syllable in silence.
He loves me as men love a blessed room
They enter weary and are healed within.
I am the room—and more than room—and he
Will never know how much stands unreceived.

SCENE III.—A Chamber of Audience in the Palace.

Enter MESSALINA, VINIA, ECLOGÉ, and Petitioners.

Petitioners kneel.

VINIA.

Mark how the morning light finds her here—
Purposefully, as though it learned her angles
Before the day began, and laid itself
Across the room to greet her. When I stand
Beside her at the mirror, I could think
The gods have spent upon one woman’s face
Enough to leave the rest of us in debt.
I know the thought is shameful. It is true.
ECLOGÉ.
And human.
To serve so bright a mistress is to learn
How ordinary one’s own life may look
When set against a candle held too near.
She did not ask the gift; yet all who live
About her pay some private part of it.
And mark how
She takes it—not as gift, but as a thing
Long owed and now delivered. There is none
In this whole train that sees a woman enter.
They see an interval within themselves
Open, and lose command of it.

MESSALINA.

Rise. You will be heard presently. Not now.
Who are this morning’s suppliants?

VINIA.

First,
The grain factor from Puteoli who seeks
A licence for the Alexandrian trade;
Then one Sextus Labienus—

MESSALINA.

No. Not he.
I told you last week that Labienus is
A man who smiles with all his mouth and none
His eyes. I have no commerce with such smiles.
What else?

VINIA.

A letter from the Senate, touching
The eastern garrison—

MESSALINA.

Let Narcissus read it.
He reads so happily when given the chance
To feel himself of consequence. And next?

VINIA.

There is one Felix—

MESSALINA.

Send him to Crispinus.
Is there some further matter? Private?

VINIA.

Madam—
Yes. He is here.

MESSALINA.

[Turns.]
Let the petitioners attend us in the antechamber.

MESSALINA.

You may go too. Send him.

MESSALINA.

Look at it. All that—the tiles, the markets,
The tens of thousands living their ten-thousand
Varieties of ordinary day.
They call me empress of it all. And mean
The man who sleeps beside me; who by day
Pores over Etruscan manuscripts
And writes to his antiquarian friends
In Alexandria of ancient alphabets
And calls it governance. They mean his title
When they bend the knee. I am the ornament
Upon the chest. The jewel in the setting.
The beauty on the arm of empire’s lord.
They praise the whiteness of the skin, the dark
Weight of the lashes, and the brow that makes
Men think of pride before the mouth corrects
Them with a softer promise. Thus they praise.
And having praised, believe they understand.
Yet what they call my beauty is but surface,
Though useful surface. Rome conducts half Rome
By costume, witness, formula, and pose.
Why should not beauty serve as other forms
Do serve, and make men pause inside themselves?
That pause is power. In that thin interval
They are not wholly governed by their names,
Their offices, their wives, their prudent selves.
I take the payment there. Yet I have marked
A further thing more curious: how desire
Puts on the mask of vision. See them stare.
They think intensity is knowledge. No.
The eye inflamed sees less. That heat is blind.
The man most taken does not look on me,
But on a species minted for his want:
One dreams possession will enlarge his name;
Another finds promotion in my bed;
A third, being weak, would wear my glance as proof
He too was made for empire. Thus the blood
Usurps the office of the mind, and struts
In borrowed purple. Appetite hath kinds:
Some grows adventurous; some crouches and serves;
Some, cross’d, turns evidence and prosecutes.
But every sort is easier ruled than reason.
The easiest man to govern in a room
Is he who thinks himself most seized within it.
To be read always from the skin inward,
And never from the mind outward—that breeds
A certain weariness no jewels cure.
Yes. Let them think so.

Enter GAIUS SILIUS.

SILIUS.

You sent for me, or had them say I might
Attend. The wording matters between equals.

MESSALINA.

Between equals. Sit, Gaius.

SILIUS.

[Sits.]
You are not at ease this morning.

MESSALINA.

On the contrary.
I am at ease entirely. I merely think,
Which some mistake for unease.

SILIUS.

Most men do.

MESSALINA.

I have been looking at the city—at that—
And asking, as I sometimes ask, where falls
The boundary between the possible
And what is merely suffered to be permitted.

SILIUS.

There you have touched the nerve precisely. Those
Are different territories.

MESSALINA.

Tell me how.

SILIUS.

Possible is real: the range that will
And wit and beauty—rightly used together—
Can reach, when they extend without the crooked
Staff of other men’s approval. Permitted
Is what dull power grants more vivid power
In hopes to look magnanimous. Claudius
Permits. That word already tells you how
The world is ordered, and who orders it.
Rome is full now of names without the force
To answer to them. Offices are worn
As boys wear swords at festivals; one sees
The metal, and the hand that shakes beneath.

MESSALINA.

You speak of Rome as statesmen spoke before
The emperors grew old in middle age.
Say on. I would know which men trouble you.

SILIUS.

Since you command it: Felix. Let him fall.

MESSALINA.

I had rather use him. He is quick enough.

SILIUS.

Too quick to be of use. He loves the sound
Of his own usefulness more than the thing.
A man who needs admiring every hour
Will sell tomorrow what he served today.
You read his wit, and read it rightly too;
You do not weight enough his need of praise.

MESSALINA.

You contradict me early.

SILIUS.

Better early
Than later with a corpse behind the doubt.

MESSALINA.

And who for Syria, then? The letter asks
Whom I prefer to hold the eastern watch.
I favour Aulus Celsus, for he is
Not brilliant, and the eastern sun makes fools
Of brilliant men.

SILIUS.

Then send Corvinus there.

MESSALINA.

Corvinus? He is all edge and appetite.

SILIUS.

He is. Yet appetite in a command
That borders Parthia may prove safer far
Than caution dressed as judgment. Celsus waits
For every sign to ripen into proof.
By then the proof has eaten half a province.
Corvinus sees first, strikes first, and if
He errs, he errs in motion. Rome is served
More often by a dangerous competence
Than by a prudent sleep.

MESSALINA.

Twice in one hour.
I have not heard a man disagree with me
So purely since—indeed, I have not heard it.
Most men who cross me either want my fear
Or want my favour by appearing brave.
You seem to want the argument itself.

SILIUS.

I want the truth of it.
Would you have lies because your face is fair?
I had thought better of your appetite.

MESSALINA.

You answer as if in the Senate house.
Men use that register among themselves,
But lower it for women, as if thought
Must curtsey before entering a gown.

SILIUS.

I speak to what is first in you, and plain:
Your intelligence. The rest Rome knows already.
The beauty is a weather over Rome.
It enters rooms before your footfall does.
Men lose their order in it; women feel
Their own arranging look contrived and cold.
I know all that. Yet if I spoke to that
First and not further, I should speak like boys
Who stand before a statue and call it love.

MESSALINA.

And you do not?

SILIUS.

No.
I speak to the mind that sees the grain supply,
The weaknesses of governors, the long
Corruption of appointments, and the cost
Of every smiling fool advanced for blood.
That is the fact I answer to. Desire
Is present; I should insult us both to hide it.
But it is not the point.

MESSALINA.

No. Not the point.
Go on.

SILIUS.

You are being wasted.

MESSALINA.

That is a phrase which has not been aloud
In any room of mine.

SILIUS.

Then let it stand.
What you do now—through corridors, through beds,
Through signatures conveyed by softer hands,
Through freedmen, bedchambers, and legal snares—
Is done with great ability. I grant it.
But the arrangement is an insult still.
Rome spends a mind made for the frame of states
In moving cushions for a scholar-emperor.
That waste would anger any man who saw.

MESSALINA.

You call it waste and sit there without fear.
Do you know what men usually do in here?
They watch my face after each sentence, like
Players who wait to learn if they have missed
Their cue. They labour at their ease. Their calm
Is a performed thing, stitched and fitted close.
You are at ease as if ease were your skin.

SILIUS.

I am at ease because the matter asked
Is grave enough already. I have no wish
To add myself, theatrically, to it.

MESSALINA.

What is it you would have?

SILIUS.

What every man
Who stands before you wants and none admits:
To matter. To be real inside the room
That matters. With a woman who is more
Than any room that’s ever held her yet.

MESSALINA.

Come again at the fourth hour.

MESSALINA.

The handsomest man in Rome, they say.
I say the only man in Rome.

SCENE IV.—A Shaded Peristyle in the Palace.

Enter MESSALINA and VINIA.

VINIA.

He waits beyond the cypress screen, my lady.
He has not eaten, I think.

MESSALINA.

No. Of course.
Hunger is the first ornament of love
In men who wish their feeling to look grand.
Has he rehearsed?

VINIA.

By all his motions, yes.
He came twice to the threshold, turned, returned,
Spoke lines beneath his breath, forgot them, blushed,
And then remembered them more earnestly.

MESSALINA.

That makes him legible. Admit him.

PETRONIUS.

Madam—if boldness now offend, despair
Will answer for me better than my skill.
I could not hold my silence any more.
Your image has become so absolute
Within my thought that sleep itself is filled
With the disturbance of it. I have walked
At dawn because the streets were emptier then
And seemed less likely to repeat your name.
I have avoided places where you pass,
And therefore found you everywhere at once.
The air of Rome, the marble of the baths,
The banners at the games, the sudden gleam
On silver in a banquet hall—all these
Have turned conspirators to your idea.
I know the peril. I despise it. Still
I am compelled to stand before your judgment
And speak.

MESSALINA.

You speak already.

PETRONIUS.

Then I will say
The thing itself. I love you. If the word
Be poor, the body’s witness makes it rich.
Since first I saw the dark weight of your hair
Lift from that ivory brow, and saw your mouth
Part as if Rome took breath there, I have borne
A civil tumult in my flesh. My blood
Remembers you before my mind can speak.
Sleep starts at your imagined step. My hand
Would learn the measure of that living shape
Whose mere report disorders all my frame.
I envy garments once they have touch’d you.
I hate the air because it goes between
My lips and what they worship. Any room
That holds you seems made sovereign by that fact,
And I could bar the world out from the door
To know one hour in which that sovereign form
Were mine alone. I know the peril. Still
I am compelled to stand before your judgment
And speak.

MESSALINA.

You have not lied. That is almost refreshing.
Sit, Titus.

PETRONIUS.

[Sits.]
If there is hope—

MESSALINA.

Do not injure hope
By naming it too early. Let me ask.
When did this love begin?

PETRONIUS.

I think it began
The day I saw you on the temple steps,
Your hair bound up with eastern pearls, your robe
Not bright, but made more bright by being yours.
The whole street altered. Men forgot themselves.
A priest dropped incense. I was lost at once.
Since then each glimpse has deepened what was fixed.
I have admired your judgment in the court,
Your mercy where you chose it, and the force
By which you hold this palace all in tune.
Yet even had you none of these, I think
I must have loved you still.

MESSALINA.

That last clause undoes
The former part of all you have declared.
Had I none of these? Then what remains of me
In this great love?

PETRONIUS.

Your beauty. Which is more
Than all such things—more moving because it seems
The sign and vessel of a rarer soul.

MESSALINA.

A sign and vessel. You convict yourself.
No, Titus. Hear the anatomy of this.
You do not seek my judgment, but the shock
My presence gives your senses. What you praise
Is colour, motion, nearness, interruption,
The body as it enters and disorders
The settled business of another man.
You bring me sleeplessness, mutiny of blood,
Envy of garments, hatred of the air
That goes between, ambition to enclose,
And call the enclosing worship. This is want
Grown eloquent, and therefore vain of speech.
It would possess, and name possession faith.
Love begins lower than the pulse, yet climbs
By curiosity, patience, equal truth,
The difficult consent to let another
Remain more large than one’s desire of them.
You would have me reduced to an effect
You suffer nobly. That is not regard.
It is a fever proud of its own heat.
I do not scorn it; youth must spend itself.
But do not crown it with my proper name.
Because I am not cruel, I will make
One sentence true before I send you hence:
You have honoured me with candour. Keep that habit.
It may yet save you from the common kind
Of Roman polish, which is merely rot
Well-burnished. You are young enough to live
Beyond what now appears unendurable.
Never mistake strong feeling for clear knowledge.
The beloved is a country past the reach
Of one’s own weather. Curiosity,
Humility, endurance—these must go
Before possession even thinks to speak.
You have not brought them.

PETRONIUS.

Then I am dismissed.

MESSALINA.

With kindness sharpened to finality.

PETRONIUS.

I understand.
Madam, I pray you think not utterly
In contempt of me.

MESSALINA.

I do not. Go.
Marry a woman with good land and health,
And find that ordinary life is large
Enough for ordinary happiness.
There are worse fates.

PETRONIUS.

You have measured me.

MESSALINA.

Yes. And spared you by it.

VINIA.

My lady, the consul Silius
Awaits without. He asked no second time,
Yet has the look of one who could command
The hour by merely standing in it.

MESSALINA.

Let him come in.
No—let him wait one moment. I would have
My face entirely mine before he sees it.
And speak his name aloud when you return.
Not “the consul”—Silius. Let it fall
Where Titus, passing, cannot choose but hear.
The little wound instructs him more than balm.
And that small signet which he sent at noon—
Leave it upon the bench beside the light.
Men understand what shines in others’ hands.
Gently, Vinia. I would not have him think
I meant him any unconsidered hurt.

VINIA.

Madam, he will see all.

MESSALINA.

That is the point.
Kindness is sometimes clearest when it cures
The whole disease at once. Go. Bring in Silius.

PETRONIUS.

Silius.
She said it so another name might hear.
Even the mercy had deliberation.
There on the bench his signet takes the light
As if her hand had warm’d it. I begin
To know what schoolboys enter when they learn
That grace may cut more cleanly than contempt.
I poured my whole soul out and was tutor’d back
As if rejected pain were vanity.
Yet what else have I now but to ennoble
The bruise and call it fate? Rejected pride
Will wrap itself in tragic phrases first,
Then sit to pity its own Roman worth.
I am not singular in this. Rome breeds
Whole families of noble-sounding wounds.
And he, no more a man than I, walks in
By being named. What has he more than this—
A steadier hand? A brow less quick to flame?
Rome calls such colder blood deserving blood.
I know the breed: they wear contempt for plume,
And take the prize as if it came by right.
Yet if she loves him, then the gods have judged
Not merit, but their pleasure. Let them smile.
I shall learn how contempt and envy sound
When spoken with one tongue.

VINIA.

Well?

MESSALINA.

He will recover.
That is the good thing youth can do more fast
Than age imagines.

VINIA.

He seemed half undone.

MESSALINA.

No. He seemed half composed,
The other half performing the undoing.
There is a difference. Note it. It will serve.

SCENE V.—A Colonnade without the Theatre of Pompey.

Music within.

Enter MESSALINA, VINIA, and ECLOGÉ.

VINIA.

The play begins within. Yet half the house
Has turned already to the colonnade.
ECLOGÉ.
Men come to tragedies and lose the plot
When beauty passes nearer than the verse.

MESSALINA.

Let them be cheated, then. I did not ask
For an audience but have learned to carry one.
Where is Suillius?

VINIA.

He waits within the arch
That joins the basilica to the stage.
He said the Macedonian file would break
This day or not at all.

MESSALINA.

Then we shall hear
Whether wit answers witnesses as fast
As it answers wine.

SUILLIUS.

Madam, the matter moves.
The freedman yielded sooner than I hoped.
The jurors’ steward named the sums. The chain
Lies whole now from the packet to the hand.
Pollio argued well.

MESSALINA.

Of course he did.
A clever man will flourish on the brink
As if the fall were merely one more room
In which to show his breeding. Is he here?

SUILLIUS.

He comes.

POLLIO.

Ah, madam. If I had known the theatre
Extended this far outward from the stage,
I would have trimmed my speeches for more ears.

MESSALINA.

You have had many ears already, Pollio.
Some kept your words in better memory
Than you desired.

POLLIO.

Then memory is the crime?
I shall appeal from Rome to Lethe next.
Suillius, you have built with such neat care
A house of accusations out of breath,
Suspicion, old resentment, and the need
Of frightened men to prove themselves useful.
If this stands law, then laughter must be taxed,
For every jest may hatch a prosecution.

SUILLIUS.

[Opens a tablet.]
You jest still. Read him the names.

LICTOR.

The juror Quintus Varo.
The steward of Metellus. Herma the freedman.
Two agents of the Macedonian suit.

SUILLIUS.

And the sums?

LICTOR.

Here entered, month by month.

POLLIO.

Numbers are obedient things. They can be taught
To march in any order. Witnesses,
When shown the racks of fear, remember all
That prudence asks of them.

MESSALINA.

Yet you forget
Your own good caution. Four months since, at supper,
You found it witty to declare aloud
That Caesar had resolved the art of rule
By giving Rome to his more capable house.
Sixty men laughed. Laughter is not air,
Pollio. It chooses sides. It leaves a dust.
Power breathes it in, and later coughs.

POLLIO.

So. We arrive at last where business lay.
I am condemned for hearing company
Confirm what all men know and some men fear.
Were I less quick of phrase, I had less trouble.

MESSALINA.

Were you less pleased with quickness, you had more
Of judgment.

POLLIO.

Judgment? Madam, there are those
Who value in a man the thing that sparks,
The small electric life of mind made speech.
Must all Rome now grow solemn for your peace?

MESSALINA.

No. Only accurate.

SUILLIUS.

Accuracy speaks.
Marcus Pollio, by the evidence
Of purchased jurors, corrupted servants, sums
Conveyed to influence a Macedonian cause,
And by the Senate’s earlier reserved note,
You stand condemned for tampering with the law.
The sentence is exile.

POLLIO.

Exile.
A witty word. The city keeps the room
Where I was loudest, and turns out the man.
To lose one’s country is a common grief;
To lose one’s audience is a colder one.
The tongue goes out with me; the echo stays,
And will applaud some duller mouth tomorrow.
That is the bitter grammar of exile.

SUILLIUS.

Remove him.

POLLIO.

Was there no other way?

MESSALINA.

There was the old:
To know the weight of rooms before you throw
Your lightness through them. Had you kept that art,
You might have grown old honoured for your style.

POLLIO.

I thought you loved a dangerous mind.
Silius has said braver things at table
Than ever I put wing to; Silius too
Has struck at Caesar’s shadow with his tongue.
Yet Silius is admitted, praised, desired,
And I for one lean jest am cast from Rome.
There is an equity in power like this
That makes wit taste of ashes.

MESSALINA.

I do.
But not the mind that turns itself to show.
Your wit was never dangerous for its truth,
But for its theatre. You did not strike
A fact more clear; you struck a posture first,
And made intelligence a spectacle
For other men’s approval. Jests with you
Were mirrors carried through the supper-room,
That all might see Marcus Pollio shine.
Remove the eyes, and what remains? A mind
Still bowing to imagined benches. That,
Not wit, condemns you. A sharp brain spent out
To hear itself applauded is mere waste.

VINIA.

They clap inside.

MESSALINA.

Let them.
The scene here ended better.

SUILLIUS.

Shall I attend you in?

MESSALINA.

No. Finish the papers.
Let law conclude the thing while flutes begin.
I like the form of that.
ECLOGÉ.
The players within are robbed.

MESSALINA.

Poor souls. They work
For glances I inherit by a step.
Come.

SCENE VI.—The Freedmen’s Offices in the Palace.

Enter NARCISSUS, PALLAS, and CALLISTUS, with writing tablets.

NARCISSUS.

You’ve seen the records for the last three months?

PALLAS.

Which records do you mean? The emperor has so many.

NARCISSUS.

The private ones. The appointments not made
Through regular channels. The reversions granted
Without petition. The prosecutions—
Asiaticus last winter; before him,
Pollio the advocate—never tried,
Always condemned; always by the same
Set of accusers; always to the benefit
Of the same party.

CALLISTUS.

You are saying what
We’ve all three known since—

NARCISSUS.

Say it plainly.

CALLISTUS.

Since she consolidated what she had
Of influence into what she has of power.
Since the one thing became the other. Yes,
We all three know it.

PALLAS.

And yet we have not acted.

NARCISSUS.

No. Because the day is not yet come
When acting is less dangerous than watching.
But I will tell you this: the thing she does
With Silius—the consul—is no longer
The kind of thing a man of any sense
Looks quietly away from. Three weeks past,
He gave up his own household to her keeping—
Moved his own servants, his own plate, his own
Records and furniture into her apartments.
He lives there, Pallas. In the palace. Openly.
As though the word ‘discretion’ were a term
Too small for their ambition to make use of.
And what most galls the court is not the power
Alone. Power has its prices; we know that.
But he is loved in daylight. Mark me there.
No bargain in the doorway, no bought smile,
No measured gratitude for services—
He walks into an open human warmth
Men of our kind must earn by usefulness.

PALLAS.

The emperor knows nothing of it?

NARCISSUS.

He knows
Nothing of anything that does not wear
The face of scholarship. He is a man
Whom nature made for better days than these—
For peaceful study, and for honest friendship,
And for a wife of somewhat lesser…fire.
Yet fire has one defect. She has so long
Made jealousy her minister of state
She thinks it serves whoever lights it first.
That is her blindness. She can read at once
What man will pale to see another praised,
Another advanced, another taken near,
And by that grievance move him like a door.
She will not know the same device in turn.
We need not make Claudius jealous merely
Of Silius in her bed. Old men forgive
More flesh than majesty. We make him feel
His dignity supplanted, Caesar’s name
Worn by another, his posterity
Made laughable. Touch that, and what is weak
In husband hardens in the emperor.

CALLISTUS.

[Aside.]
And for a set of freedmen somewhat less
Precariously balanced on his favour.
He means to undo her with her own best art.

NARCISSUS.

What we must watch for is the moment when
Their boldness passes past the point of merely
Private scandal into public theatre.
When that day comes, we shall need to move—
And quickly.

PALLAS.

And if we do not?

NARCISSUS.

Then whatever
They make of Rome will be a thing we’ve made
By our own silence. Come: we have our work.

Exeunt.

SCENE VII.—A Private Room in the Palace.

Enter MESSALINA and SUILLIUS RUFUS.

SUILLIUS.

You summoned me, madam. I am at your service.

MESSALINA.

Suillius. Sit.

MESSALINA.

One Quintus Labeo. You know him?

SUILLIUS.

A senator
Of middling rank and fortune. His record
In the smaller courts considered sound—
Or nearly so.

MESSALINA.

What would it take to make it
Less than sound?

SUILLIUS.

Very little. With a middling
Fortune there is always something—some
Arrangement with a contractor; some favoured
Appointment unexplained; some correspondence
That, read carefully, might be read
As something rather more than courtesy.

MESSALINA.

Good.
I want it read. Aloud, before the Senate,
In your voice—which is, I am told, the finest
Instrument of law in all of Rome.
Yet I would have the chamber softened first.
For two days let it seem that Labeo has
Stood nearer to my favour than he has.
My litter at his door. A page with notes.
His name, by accident, preferred at supper.
Nothing too plain. Gross lies unite a room.
A measured lie divides it into envies.
I want his friends suspicious of his rise,
His rivals sure he has supplanted them.
Then when you strike, no senator will stand.
Each will believe he suffers for a grace
Secretly given him and kept from all.

SUILLIUS.

You mean to prosecute him first by air,
By rumour and men’s private grievance, then
By tablets. Excellent. The law arrives
Best where jealousy has cleared the benches.

SUILLIUS.

May I ask what has brought Labeo to your notice?

MESSALINA.

He was at Vitellius’s table four nights past.
He told the company that a woman who
Governed by desire governed badly; that
The empress’s beauty was the empire’s chiefest
Extravagance; that men who served her orbit
Served their own appetites and not their Rome.

SUILLIUS.

And at the reception that preceded dinner?

MESSALINA.

He called me radiant. He said that Rome
Had not beheld such grace since Venus stepped
From water to resolve some war of gods.
He said it with his eyes fixed on my face
And his mouth shaped to what he meant for wonder.

SUILLIUS.

Ah.

MESSALINA.

You understand me now.

SUILLIUS.

Entirely, madam.
The charge can be prepared within the week.

MESSALINA.

[Moves to the window.]
I want you to understand what I find
Intolerable—not only that you serve me
Better, though you will, but because I think
You are a man who can distinguish kinds.
An enemy who hates me and says so
To my face gives me something I can use:
His honest ground; his terms; a known perimeter.
I know where that man stands. But Labeo—
Who praises me in company and mocks me
In plain talk at another man’s table—
He is not my enemy. He is a fault
In the architecture of the world: a crack
Through which nothing solid passes; a face
That says two different things and knows it,
And does not find that troubling.

SUILLIUS.

Such faults
Are common in the Senate, madam.

MESSALINA.

I know it. I have made some study of the Senate.
Most of them bow to me and think the bow
So well performed that I cannot detect
The thought behind it. They are wrong about
My sight. But Labeo was careless—too
Pleased with his own wit at dinner—
And forgot that walls have porters, porters ears,
And ears have owners; and that I am one.
[Turns.]
Make it thorough. And do not be merciful
In the presentation—not from any desire
For cruelty, which is waste, but because
The lesson must be legible to all
The other men who smile in silk and say
The opposite in plain wool. They should know
The cost of calculation.

SUILLIUS.

It shall be done.

MESSALINA.

By you, Suillius. Not by Sabinus.
I hear he grows industrious of late.

SUILLIUS.

Has he?
Then he may study diligence from far.
You keep your servants exact by such small hints.
A man pleads better when another man’s
Promotion is allowed to breathe nearby.

MESSALINA.

Then plead the better.

SUILLIUS.

I shall, madam.
[Aside.]
She lets each servant glimpse another hand
Upon the leash, and so we pull the more.
I know the art, and honour it by fear.
And if I search beneath that colder word,
There burns some older tribute of the blood.
I too desire her; but in me desire
Has learn’d the toga of my trade, and serves.
It asks no private grace, no stolen hour.
It takes its pleasure in efficients, seals,
In men broken neatly for her purposes.
Thus appetite, once school’d, becomes a clerk,
And writes her will in legal characters.

MESSALINA.

He serves me well—Suillius—and hates me
Precisely as much as his position needs.
His eyes have never once attempted to
Deceive me: they want what I can give;
They measure what I cost; they weigh return
Against the risk with the precision of
A usurer. That is a kind of honesty—
Ugly, but honest; workmanlike and cold.
I can depend on that. What I cannot
Depend on—what undoes me at the joint
Of any trust—is the man who believes
His careful simulation of esteem
Is indistinguishable from the genuine;
Who has forgotten what the genuine feels like
Because he has so long performed its surface.
Give me Suillius’s clear contempt before
A flatterer’s warm approximation of regard.
Mnester has not come.
He was to be here at the third hour. It
Is past the fourth. He delays by inches—
Small rebellions of the clock, since
The larger ones are not available to him.
There is a man whose face still tells the truth—
Even under compulsion. Especially then.
I find that harder to set aside than I
Expected that I would.

ACT II

SCENE I.—Messalina’s Private Apartments.

MESSALINA reclines, attended by VINIA and ECLOGÉ.
MNESTER, the actor, sits nearby, tuning his instrument.
Lamps burn low. The room is luxurious, but the air about
him keeps a smaller, severer order than the cushions do.
ECLOGÉ.
Will madam take more wine?

MESSALINA.

Eclogé, the word
Is never ‘more.’ The word is ‘wine.’ There is
No ‘more’ in asking for the first thing.
ECLOGÉ.
Madam.

MESSALINA.

What was that air you played before, Mnester?

MNESTER.

A Lydian mode, madam. From the old
Greek, brought to Rome a hundred years ago
And half-forgotten since. It has a quality
Of—of—

MESSALINA.

Longing.

MNESTER.

Yes. Precisely that.

MESSALINA.

You understand it well. Most who commission
Music want it named for them—simplified,
Delivered neat upon the surface. You
Name it without prompting.

MNESTER.

I tell you what I hear in it, madam.

MESSALINA.

And what you feel.

MNESTER.

I try not to.
It interferes with playing.

MESSALINA.

You were not bred for courts.

MNESTER.

Nor courts for truth.
We differ there but not enough to heal
The meeting.

MESSALINA.

You do not want to be here, Mnester.

MNESTER.

I am here at the emperor’s direction—
Which is at yours. The terms were made quite clear.

MESSALINA.

I know the terms. I set them. That was not
What I asked.

MNESTER.

No. I do not want to be here.
I had a life before—the stage, the work
Of making something true that stands apart
From every patron’s need of it. I had
A name that was my own and not appointment,
Applause that rose because a thing was done,
Not because rank required its little noise.

MESSALINA.

Claudius once laughed and said that you
Were mine to summon wholly. He believed
Himself indulgent in the saying.

MNESTER.

Yes.
Empires make light of violence by a jest.
A man becomes an instrument because
The powerful smile. The smile does not change steel.

VINIA.

[Aside.]
He speaks too far.
ECLOGÉ.
[Aside.]
No further than the truth.
The dangerous distance is the shortest one.

MESSALINA.

And yet you come, and play, and speak with measure,
Not hatred.

MNESTER.

Hatred would make simpler shapes
Than truth permits. You are not one thing only.
Nor am I. That complicates obedience.

MESSALINA.

And yet you play as though it costs you nothing.

MNESTER.

Playing cannot be purchased, arranged, or compelled.
The rest they took. The playing is still mine.
When I am in the phrase, no patron stands
Between the note and me. No emperor,
No favourite, no laughing grant of power,
No bed, no order, no remembered fear.
There is a law inside the art itself
Which does not ask permission.

MESSALINA.

[Leans forward.]
You say this to me
As if you offered water.

MNESTER.

Plain things should be
Offered plainly. To adorn them is to lie.

MESSALINA.

And what am I, then, in this plain account?
The taker of plain things from other hands?

MNESTER.

You are a woman to whom many rooms
Have answered yes so long that every no
Sounds like an injury, though some are truths.

VINIA.

By all the gods.

MESSALINA.

Let him speak.

MNESTER.

You have a great deal, madam. I do not know
If it has been worth the texture of the world
It made around you.

MESSALINA.

Texture.

MNESTER.

Yes.
The air that men grow false in when you pass.
The women growing cold beside themselves.
The servants learning to anticipate
Not wishes only, but the forms of wishes.
The endless effort spent to stand near fire
And not confess the wish to warm by it.
I think such weather costly.

MESSALINA.

Costly to whom?

MNESTER.

To all who breathe it. Most of all, perhaps,
To one who has forgotten other air.

MESSALINA.

You think I have forgotten.

MNESTER.

I think you know
The price of things and therefore know the price
Of this. Whether you count it worth the charge,
I cannot judge.

MESSALINA.

And what of you? When you
Stand on the stage and fifty thousand mouths
Hang open on the shape you make of grief,
Is that not power? Do you not breathe then too
A weather of your own?

MNESTER.

A little one.
And mortal. When the scene is done, it breaks.
That is why I prefer it. It does not lie.
No actor thinks applause a constitution,
Or garlands law. We borrow feeling there,
Yet only for the hour. Courts borrow souls
And mean to keep them.

MESSALINA.

Courts borrow souls and mean to keep them.

MNESTER.

Madam—

MESSALINA.

No. Finish what you began. Play.
Play it again.

VINIA.

[Aside.]
She thinks of him.
ECLOGÉ.
[Aside.]
She thinks of something.
She is always thinking. Even when she seems
To only feel, she thinks behind the feeling.

VINIA.

[Aside.]
Of all the things that make her dangerous,
That may be chief.

MESSALINA.

What did the stage give you that palaces do not?

MNESTER.

A boundary.
The audience wanted much, but knew the price
Of wanting was to sit and let the truth
Stand at a distance. They could not step through.
Here all distance is interpreted
As insult. Here desire has household keys.

MESSALINA.

Leave me. Both of you. Mnester, you too.
I’ll have the lamps tonight myself.

MESSALINA.

Rome thinks a woman loves as children play,
By appetite, by novelty, by change.
It judges from the brothel and the bath,
Then writes that judgment in the style of law.
They err. I chose men as the censors note
A tribe, a class, a revenue, a use.
One served for access; one to shake a vote;
One to convey a whisper through the court;
One by resentment; one by hope of rise.
Thus states are govern’d, where the lawful chair
Is fill’d by sloth, and action stands without.
A woman in such state must coin her means.
What men call looseness oft is policy
Denied the proper fasces of its name.
Petronius loved, but as a client loves
The image of a patron in his want:
He brought not amicitia, but suit,
Not equal counsel, but a pleading wound.
Fabianus came arm’d with old renown,
And named possession honour, siege consent.
Pollio had wit, that quick libertine coin,
Which rings at table and is clipped in court.
Such men are uses, not societies;
They touch the skirts of power, and call it love.
Then Mnester: there the account alters. He,
Compell’d, kept yet a frontier in himself,
A little freehold held against command.
That province drew me. Liberty, once seen,
Is like the Capitol against the dawn;
The eye returns to’t. Yet even there I found
Not love, but witness to a harder law:
That no dominion is complete on earth,
That art keeps sanctuary from the court,
And a true phrase hath rights no prince can seize.
I honour’d that. I was not mastered by’t.
But jealousy—here lies the instrument
By which the hidden politics of Rome
Are moved more surely than by edicts are.
Catiline envied every curule chair,
And made the commonwealth a theatre
For his own hunger. Sejanus could not bear
The house of great Germanicus should stand
Between his wish and empire; therefore all
Their innocence became to him offence.
The Senate daily frets because one man
Is nearer to a smile, an ear, a place;
And every private gall would fain be law.
Love asks what thing is lovable in truth.
Jealousy asks, Who hath what should be mine?
Love keeps a forum in the inward state,
Hears both sides, cites remembrance, and adjourns.
Jealousy enters by a postern gate,
Proclaims itself dictator, and strikes first.
Love may make peace. Jealousy makes parties.
Love would possess the person. Jealousy
Would dispossess the rival. Mark that well.
And here the difference of the sexes stands.
A man, being jealous, hath the open ways:
The sword, the charge, the Senate, and the camp.
His envy may put armour on itself,
And pass for zeal to Caesar or the state.
A woman, fenced from office, must employ
The oblique arts left naked power denied:
Delay, admission, glance, precedence,
Whose name was first, whose litter stopt the door,
What ring was worn, who sat, who was call’d in.
Thus jealousy becomes her lictor, where
The law allows her neither bench nor rod.
I learnt that art too well. I confess so much.
I set men on with injuries of air,
Made courtly trifles into mortal proofs,
And found how readily the proud will serve,
If once persuaded another stands preferr’d.
Grievance will run where reason will not stir.
That is the black economy of courts.
Yet Silius breaks it. He doth not compete
For what another wears; nor does he pine,
Like a poor freedman, under noble ease.
He stands as old Camillus might have stood,
Recall’d from exile less by favour than
By his own competence; or like Agrippa,
Who made his greatness service to the state,
Not state to greatness. He can love, and not
Sue as a client; counsel, and not crawl;
Desire, and not grow servile in desire.
Therefore my policy grows blunt in him.
The net takes all Rome else and misses there.
And that is why the wound goes deep at last:
I know the difference between employ’d men
And one acknowledged true.

SCENE II.—A Gallery of Mirrors in the Palace.

Enter MESSALINA.

Enter VINIA.

VINIA.

Madam, the household asks if you will dine
With Caesar at the sixth hour.

MESSALINA.

Say I may.
No—say I shall. Let habit have its meat.

VINIA.

You have not rested.

MESSALINA.

I have rested in
One sentence only, and it will not rest.

VINIA.

Mnester’s?

MESSALINA.

Yes.
Playing cannot be purchased, arranged, or compelled.
I have heard it in the bath, the court, the bed,
At dawn between the shutters and at noon
Above the petitions. Three whole days it moves,
And with it all the limits of command.
Strange that one actor, by protecting one
Interior province, should enlarge the map
Of empire in my head.

VINIA.

Why should that pain you?

MESSALINA.

Because it does not pain me only. It
Corrects me. I do not love to be corrected.
There was one man before this consul came
Who touched me nearly—not as now, not thus,
Yet nearly. Long before these palace years,
Before I understood the full machine
Of appetite and office, there was one
Young rider in my uncle’s train who loved
Me plainly, and I him for one brief month.
He had no great imagination, none.
He wanted me as summer wants the fruit:
Directly, gladly, with no rhetoric.
I think on him sometimes because he proves
A simple thing was once within my reach.
Yet had I gone with him, I had been less
Than I already was. He loved my nearness,
My body in the sun, my laughing mouth;
But never once stood still before the scale
Of mind within me. He could kiss; not read.
He made me warm, not known.
And I was never proud of being warm.
Beauty is fortune, not achievement, Vinia.
The face is Nature’s coin, stamp’d without counsel.
If Rome bows there, it bows to what I did not make.
My pride, where it is just, stands elsewhere: in
The faculty that reads men to the root,
Distinguishes the useful from the brave,
The solid from the merely resonant,
And governs by that knowledge. This, if named,
Is dignitas. The world miscalls it pride
Because it wears a woman’s body first,
And will not grant that form such inward rank.

VINIA.

And Silius?

MESSALINA.

Silius is the first
Before whom I need not translate myself
Downward. There lies the difference. Other men,
However genuine in part, have loved
Some manageable province of my being.
This face. This force. This danger. This delight.
He looks as if the whole were but one fact,
And speaks to it. That is another world.

VINIA.

Then you are glad.

MESSALINA.

Gladness is too small a word.
I feel a gate within me standing wide,
And all the old arranged life blowing through.
Yet even now Mnester’s hard sentence stays.
It may be that I love Silius best
Because with him no part of me seems bought,
Or placed, or coaxed, or ordered into shape.
Even desire arrives less as a chain
Than as a second liberty.

VINIA.

He comes tonight?

MESSALINA.

He comes. Leave me awhile.
The room is full enough already.

MESSALINA.

Information. That is all the glass
Can ever give. The rest another soul
Must answer. Vanity is court disease.
The vain man praises beauty to commend
His own election; by applauding me
He crowns his taste and thinks the wreath is mine.
The vain man vows devotion to be seen
Vowing it; audience is the secret bed
Where most court passions couple with themselves.
Take off the witnesses, their fervour cools.
Remove the benches, and the lover melts
Like wax without a seal. Such men I know.
Our senate breeds them under every robe:
Lean Catos of the supper-table, grave
For exercise, and chaste for observation.
Pollio had the scholar’s version of’t;
Fabianus the camp’s. He would have loved
To storm a woman as men storm a town,
For chronicle, triumph, and the after-supper tale,
Not for the woman. Vanity wears steel
As readily as scent. Silius hath none.
Therefore he stands without reflection’s crutch,
And is more real than all these shining rooms.
If he answers as he began, Rome may
At last behold what Rome deserves and cannot bear.

SCENE III.—A Garden of the Palatine.

Enter SILIUS.

Enter MESSALINA.

SILIUS.

[Turns.]
You came.

MESSALINA.

I said I would.

SILIUS.

You said many things
This afternoon. I have been thinking which
Of them you meant.

MESSALINA.

I meant all of them.
Which troubles you?

SILIUS.

This: that a woman of—
Of everything you are—should be content
To exercise her mind within a space
As small as this. As these apartments. Rome
Is larger than a palace, Messalina.

MESSALINA.

And you would have me larger than a palace?

SILIUS.

I would have you commensurate with yourself.
And you are not, as things stand now.

MESSALINA.

And you?
Are you commensurate with yourself, Silius,
In your consulship, your handsome offices,
Your careful smile at Claudius’s table?

SILIUS.

No. Which is why I am here and not there.

MESSALINA.

What would you do—if you could do it—with
The thing that Rome is now?

SILIUS.

I would begin
By making it itself again. A place
Where those who have the fire of governance
Govern, and those who have the gift of letters
Spend their long lives contentedly with letters,
And no one makes of private appetite
A public virtue or a public law.
I would recall the provinces from men
Advanced for ancestry, restore the camp
To soldiers and the courts to those who fear
A judgment more than dinners. I would make
The Senate dangerous again by truth,
Not merely safe by ceremony.

MESSALINA.

Bold.

SILIUS.

True.
Or else what use in speaking after dark?

MESSALINA.

And what would you do with an empress who
Has more intelligence than her emperor
And has been made to ornament his title
These twelve years past?

SILIUS.

I would make her visible.

MESSALINA.

Visible?

SILIUS.

Publicly herself.
That is the phrase. Forgive the bareness of it.
You have been hidden in the busiest place
In the world. All Rome feels your weather, yet
Must speak of it as accident or charm.
This is a lie too costly to continue.
You deserve to be yourself in public,
Fully, without Claudius’s name above
The door by which you enter your own power.
And I—I will not counterfeit a meek
Contentment at the edge of lesser men.
I was not born to watch dull natures wear
The honours that should answer fire with fire.
If I would raise you to the light, I know
I mean to stand there with you.

MESSALINA.

There spoke the consul in the lover’s breath.

SILIUS.

Should I dissemble? No. Ambition, if
It moves in me, moves toward a world made fit
For what we are, not one more flattering name.

MESSALINA.

[Aside.]
Ambition has a handsome countenance
In him. I see it, and because it bears
My own high wound, I call it courage first.
Say that again.

SILIUS.

You deserve that Rome should see
The whole of you where it has seen a part,
And know whose mind has governed it these years.

MESSALINA.

Men offer schemes when they approach this edge.
They spread contingencies like nets and call
The intricate design intelligence.
You have brought none.

SILIUS.

No. I bring no scheme.
I bring a truth too long delayed for fear.
And what if fear be wrong?

MESSALINA.

Fear is not wrong. It is expensive.

SILIUS.

Pay it then,
But pay for something worthy. There are lives
Preserved by becoming smaller every year,
Safer, dimmer, more acceptable
To frightened arrangements. There are others lived
Only by stepping once into the shape
One has been moving toward in secret. Choose.

MESSALINA.

You think I have not chosen long ago?
I have been counting cost these months and more.
I knew Claudius would go to Ostia.
I knew what harbour stones would buy me time.
I knew the names of priests who could be brought,
The houses that would witness, who would come
For envy, terror, appetite, or awe.
I waited only for one thing.

SILIUS.

For what?

MESSALINA.

To hear you say it first.

SILIUS.

Then hear it now.
While Claudius attends his harbour works
At Ostia—which he will; the tides demand him
In little more than a fortnight—we shall make
It public. Not a whisper in a garden.
A feast. A wedding. Priests and witnesses
And all of Rome that matters looking on.

MESSALINA.

Yes.

SILIUS.

It will require—

MESSALINA.

I know what it requires.
Blood, tears, decrees, the old man’s broken trust,
The sharpened labour of a frightened court,
Perhaps the end of us. I know it all.
Yet what I know more certainly than these
Is this: that to return from you to that
Half-life would be the only cowardice
I could not pardon in myself.

SILIUS.

[Takes her hand.]
Then let
The outward act at last resemble truth.

MESSALINA.

Kiss me.
Not as men kiss the image of a throne,
But as one equal answers another’s choice.

SCENE IV.—A Terrace above the Garden.

Enter MESSALINA.

MESSALINA.

Why do I love him? Let me plead the cause
As if before the fathers, article
By article, and cite the proof entire.
For love, if it be worthy a Roman mind,
Must stand not on the pulse alone, but bear
Examination, answer, and decree.
First, he knew me not by show. He saw the face,
As all Rome must, for that walks in before me;
But he did not there arrest the whole estate,
As bankrupt suitors seize the outward goods.
Most men stop at the portico, and praise
The marble front. He enter’d to the seat
Of counsel first. Beauty is credit, not
Account. He knew the difference. There began
My bond with him.
Next, he dealt not in client forms of love,
That rotten clientela of the court,
Where free men echo and petition smiles.
No studied awe, no watch upon my brow,
No humble boldness practised for effect,
No pageant of obedience neatly worn.
His ease was not display, but inward proof
That liberty still lived in Rome somewhere.
Ease in a great room is a rarer thing
Than valour in the field. He sat with me
As Scipio might with Laelius in debate,
Not asking how to please, but what was true.
That kind of amicitia Rome once knew;
Now it is flatter’d under seals and fees.
He brought the coin unworn.
Then he spoke public things before he spoke
Of me. Grain, provinces, the eastern watch,
Advancements made for ancestry, not worth,
The long divorce of office from desert,
He argued all in their full Roman frame,
Not broken into morsels for my sex.
Men think with men in one severe whole key;
To women they descend, gloss, sweeten, maim.
He did not once descend. He thought with me.
Recognition is dearer than delight.
A whole self, maim’d by use, received from him
Its members back, and knew itself entire.
Then he opposed. This seems a little thing
To those ne’er famish’d of plain truth; to me
It was a largess. He contradicted,
Not to extort applause for dangerous candour,
Nor prove a masculine hardihood in rooms,
But because another judgment stood in him,
And he thought justice due to what he saw.
Contradiction, where respect holds firm beneath,
Is honour in the dress of argument.
The flatterer lessens what he would enjoy.
He dares not meet the whole, and therefore trims it.
Silius met the whole.
Then there is desire. In him it keeps
Senate with judgment; it doth not grow drunk,
Nor turn informer on the mind that breeds it.
Lust I have govern’d in a hundred men,
As captains know the bog, ford, ditch, and rise
Of ground that may be used. One man’s hot blood
Makes him rash; another’s servile; one,
Cross’d, turns accuser; one would kneel and lick
The hand that hurts him. I have mark’d each kind.
But in him moves another sort of fire,
Not that manageable fever of the flesh
Which blinds, petitions, boasts, or would possess.
His appetite and judgment sit at rein
Like Castor and like Pollux, each awake,
Neither debasing either. Thus his touch
Does not divide my person from my thought,
Nor make an instrument of what I feel.
It takes the whole state in, and alters mine.
Then he named my injury. Others took
What I do by curtains, notes, beds, freedmen,
Prosecutions, delays, and private means,
For triumph. He saw under it the wrong:
That Rome employed a governing mind through stealth,
Where it should sit in open magistracy.
He call’d that waste, and in that word restored
My case to law. A thought alone is mist;
Return’d by an equal, it becomes record.
He is beautiful, yes; I do not feign
Contempt of what the gods made evident.
But his is not that silver’d senator’s grace,
Nor the self-wooing splendour of a camp
Made too conscious of its scars. His outward form
Keeps covenant with the inward. One might think
On young Germanicus, had fate allow’d
His virtue longer use; or old Agrippa,
When service made ambition honourable.
His body testifies.
And chiefly this: he asks me not grow less.
Claudius, being kindly fashion’d, loves in me
Household peace, warmth, and grace. The Senate would
Endure me as an ornament of rule.
My former lovers each demanded part:
This body, that advancement, this reflected fire.
Even praise from them was partition. He alone
Requires no diminution for his ease.
He asks not that I house my spirit small,
Nor fold my thought into the private style,
But would enlarge the commonwealth itself,
Or perish, till the public shape took in
The measure that he sees.
Last, he proposed marriage as a truth,
Not as a stratagem dress’d out with clauses.
He spread no nets of admirable fear,
But said the central thing: that I deserve
To be myself in public. There the words
Went through me like the lictor’s axe through rods.
Some truths lie dumb till another mouth
Pronounce them in our proper case. Then mind,
Long in suspense between presumption, hope,
And solitary rage, concludes at last.
Against all this what counter may be urged?
That he is ambitious. So he is.
But base ambition covets rise alone;
A great one asks fit work. Shall Silius know
His measure, and yet smile at duller men,
Commend his chain, and call the servitude
Contentment? No. His ambition and my wrong
Agree in one. If that conjunction ruin,
The time, not only we, stands criminous.
Before him there were others, yes: the boy,
The wit, the soldier, and the actor too.
Each touch’d some border. None came to the seat
Where I am one. Silius enter’d there.
Therefore I love him more than any man.
Therefore, if Rome proceed by writ and sword,
Let Rome proceed. A life once recognised
Cannot go back to client terms and live.

SCENE V.—The Portico.

Enter MARCUS, FLAVIUS, and VITELLIUS.

MARCUS.

My lord Vitellius—a word?

VITELLIUS.

One word; I’m pressed.

MARCUS.

We hear the consul Silius—

VITELLIUS.

Hear nothing.
Nothing from me, at any rate. Good day.

FLAVIUS.

He heard it too.

MARCUS.

He hears everything.
And acts on nothing he cannot turn to profit.

FLAVIUS.

What have you heard of Silius? Men say now
The consul keeps his wedding in his sleeve,
And wears the republic like a marriage-gift.

MARCUS.

That his house—
His goods, his servants, the appointments of
His steward—all have moved this fortnight past
Into the palace; that he sits at table
Where the emperor’s seat stands vacant; that
He speaks of future matters openly
In the hearing of her women; that he loves
Her truly, yet too well the larger sound
Of his own name pronounced beside her name;
And that she—

FLAVIUS.

She—?

MARCUS.

She receives it. Welcomes it. Encourages it.
She wears on her right hand the seal of his
Consulship, as though it were a marriage ring.
The court is thick with envy of them both:
Senators envy him his daily place
Beside the empress; women envy her
The beauty and the power joined in one;
And there are men who envy Claudius
The wife they pity him for not perceiving.
Men vote against old friends to earn one nod,
Prosecute innocence for leave to hope,
Break faith, break sequence, break their proper minds,
Because her favour glitters through the wish.
Thus appetite grows structural at court.
Livia by patience held Augustus’ ear;
Cleopatra by theatre led Antony;
But this is stricter Rome, and therefore worse:
No barge on Cydnus, no extravagant East,
Only each man’s own longing made a clerk
To enter policy in crooked books.
Lust is the tax Rome pays to look on power.

FLAVIUS.

The gods protect us.

MARCUS.

The gods observe, Flavius.
I have not noticed that they always interpose
Between us and the consequences of
Our own arrangements. We protect ourselves,
Or we are not protected.

FLAVIUS.

What would you have us do?

MARCUS.

Watch. Wait. Speak to no one. And be ready.

Exeunt.

SCENE VI.—A Receiving Room in the Palace.

Enter MESSALINA, APPIUS SILANUS, and a GUARD.

He enters with the bearing of a man expecting preferment—
composed, dignified, a soldier’s straightness carried into age.

APPIUS.

[Bows.]
The empress does me honour. I am, as ever,
At her service—and the emperor’s—in all
Things consonant with duty.

MESSALINA.

Sit, Appius.

MESSALINA.

Three years in Rome since your return from Spain.
In those three years you have not called upon me.

APPIUS.

The demands of Senate business and the courts
Have kept me much engaged. I had not thought—

MESSALINA.

You had not thought I wished to see you.
Were you wrong?

APPIUS.

I confess—the question—

MESSALINA.

You commanded armies, Appius. You have
Governed provinces and judged the lives of men.
Does a direct question from a woman trouble you?

APPIUS.

I am not troubled. I find the question—
Somewhat irregular in its—

MESSALINA.

I asked only if you were wrong to stay away.

APPIUS.

I think—perhaps—I may have been.

MESSALINA.

There. That was not so difficult.
You have something rare in this palace, Appius—
I have been observing it all morning.
Your face does not lie. Most men who walk
These corridors have spent so many years
Performing the correct expression for
Each moment that the face has long become
A second mode of dress—worn for occasion;
Entirely exterior. Yours still shows
What you think. I saw confusion cross it
Just now—real confusion—and below it
Something else.
I find that—interesting.

APPIUS.

[Rises.]
Madam—I think I understand the way
This tends—and I must say, with all the respect
I owe your station—with all honour due
The emperor your husband—I cannot—
There are obligations—to honour—to
The memory of my late wife, a woman
Of great virtue—to the principle of—

MESSALINA.

Stop.

MESSALINA.

The memory of your wife.
The principle.
Do you know what you just did, Appius?
You reached for every wall available—
Honour; obligation; a dead woman’s name;
The abstract noun of principle—and built
A structure out of borrowed architecture
And called it virtue. But I was watching.
And what I saw behind the structure was
A man afraid. Not afraid of me—
I could respect that, honestly stated.
Afraid of a room without a precedent;
A context where the manual of Roman
Manhood offers no instruction; where
The only map available is what
You are—and you, without the map,
Look for walls.
You have been brave in every situation
Where bravery has a proper name, a trumpet,
And the clear approval of tradition.
Here there is no tradition. Only you—
Unscripted—and the thing that you might be
If you had less regard for your own
Reputation with yourself.

APPIUS.

I—the emperor—I must—

MESSALINA.

You may go.

APPIUS.

I—yes—I thank you, madam—

MESSALINA.

Go.

SERVANT.

My lord?

APPIUS.

Nothing. Go on.
No—stay. If servants hear what senators
Pretend not to have heard, then answer me:
Has Silius a surer heart than mine?

SERVANT.

My lord, I dare not judge great men.

APPIUS.

Then judge
A lesser one. He would not have drawn up
The names of honour like a shield. I’d have
Been measured, and found wanting. There’s the wound.
Not that she tempted me; but that my worth,
Which I had wearied years to think solid,
Proved in that room a brittle piece of show.
So I run back to principle, because
Principle stands still and cannot look
A man in the face and ask if he is enough.
I call recoil by virtue’s Roman names,
Else must confess insufficiency.
He chose the dangerous courage I called rash,
And now is favoured for the very leap
I praised in story and refused in life.
Go. I am well enough to hate my own
Discretion, and the armour of it too.

MESSALINA.

He will go home and tell himself he showed
The ancient virtue—severitas, gravitas,
The long roll of the Roman attributes
That men invoke most fervently precisely when
They feel them slipping. He will believe it.
He will sleep well, wrapped in that belief—
Warm, virtuous, entirely unaware
Of what he chose against.
That is the kind I cannot pardon—not
From wrath, but from a kind of—weariness.
An enemy is useful. The indifferent
May be ignored. But the man who stood
Inside the room where something real was offered—
And chose instead the comfort of his own
Good opinion of himself—
That man is a falsification in
The record of the world. He cannot stay.
Send for Suillius.

SCENE VII.—The Portico.

Enter MARCUS and FLAVIUS.

FLAVIUS.

You have heard of Appius Silanus? Rome,
That once had twelve tables, now keeps one bed,
And draws indictments from a sleeper’s pulse.

MARCUS.

Arrested before dawn. Condemned before
The Senate had quite settled in its seats.
Narcissus brought the charge.

FLAVIUS.

On what ground?

MARCUS.

A dream.
No—truly. He told the emperor he’d dreamed
That Appius planned to murder him; and then
The empress said she too had dreamed it—
The same dream, the same night, two careful witnesses.
Claudius—who does not trust his own dreams
In smaller matters—was content to find
Such independent confirmation, and
Signed before the morning meal was done.

FLAVIUS.

And what had Appius done? In truth?

MARCUS.

What men
Suggest—in whispers, at a distance—is
That he was summoned; that he went; that something
Was required of him; and that he refused.

FLAVIUS.

He refused her. And paid with his life for it.

MARCUS.

He paid. Though I do not think she destroyed him
Merely for the refusal—she is past
Mere pique. What she cannot endure, Flavius,
Is the particular manner of refusal:
The man who, faced with something real, retreats
Behind a wall of borrowed names—
Duty, honour, principle, the long
Recital of the Roman virtues—using them
Not as virtues but as furniture
To put between himself and being present
In a room that asks him to be wholly there.
She can forgive an enemy—a man
Who hates her plainly, holds his ground, and fights
Her on the open field. Clear terms; known stakes;
She knows that country and can navigate it.
What she finds intolerable is the man
Who comes before her, is offered something genuine,
And chooses the familiar safety
Of his own good character.
That man she finds—not wicked, Flavius;
Worse than wicked—false. A lie dressed up
In the clothes of the antique virtues,
Too frightened to admit it is afraid.

FLAVIUS.

And does she know the difference between
That man and the merely honourable one
Who will not be compelled?

MARCUS.

That is the question
Which I think she also asks. And cannot
Always answer. Which may be the most
Dangerous thing about her—not the fire,
Not the ambition, not the mind—but that:
The place where justice and desire
Share a boundary, and she alone
Must walk the line between them in the dark.

Exeunt.

ACT III

SCENE I.—A Library in the Palace.

Enter CLAUDIUS, a SCRIBE, and NARCISSUS.

CLAUDIUS.

Narcissus, come here. This passage in Livy—
The twenty-second book—where he describes
The Etruscan alphabet employed by—

NARCISSUS.

My lord,
I wonder if I might—

CLAUDIUS.

—by the Veientes in
The time of the republic; does he mean
The northern variant, which I believe—

NARCISSUS.

My lord, the harbour master has arrived
From Ostia with the engineering plans
For the new mole, which your attention—

CLAUDIUS.

Yes,
Yes, yes. I’ll see them. Give me half an hour.
Where was I? The Veientes. Yes. They used
A variation of the northern script
That scholars have too long confused with—

NARCISSUS.

[Aside.]
And while he conjugates his dead men’s verbs
She is conjugating very living ones.

SCRIBE.

[Aside.]
Heaven spare us.

CLAUDIUS.

There—read me that.

NARCISSUS.

[Reads.]
“To the most learned and excellent Emperor: the harbour
works proceed according to the schedule Your
Divinity approved in March; the northern arm
requires inspection before the autumn storms—”

CLAUDIUS.

I shall go to Ostia. It cannot wait.
The tidal surveys need—they need my eye.
No, I will go. Arrange it for—when? Friday.
Friday is—Friday is auspicious; let
The priests confirm it.

NARCISSUS.

Yes, my lord.

CLAUDIUS.

Good, good.
Now—the Veientes.

NARCISSUS.

He goes to Ostia. She has known it long
Before he knew it; all her preparations
Have been arranged to this occasion’s clock.
I have held my tongue till now from prudence—
Pure, cold, calculated prudence—for
To act too soon is to act foolishly,
And foolishness in courts is quick mortality.
Yet there is more than prudence in my watch.
I was not born to be one of the tools
Great houses use, then think insensible.
A slave-child learns how masters look through hands
That hold their world together, as though those
Hands had no pulse, no pride, no inward Rome.
She, being subtle, should have known that best.
To govern men as if they were pure means
Breeds in the govern’d an accounting soul.
Her fall will partly be that hidden sum:
The pride of those employ’d, then overlook’d,
Returning thought for thought, and fire for fire.
But there is a point past which the wise man’s silence
Becomes a different kind of foolishness.
I think that point is near.

SCENE II.—The Halls of Silius’s House.

It is dressed for a great occasion: garlands, lamps, wine.
Flowers mass from pillar to pillar in disciplined profusion;
bronze and silver sharpen torchlight; music threads the room
so continuously that even laughter seems composed beforehand.

Enter MESSALINA, VINIA, ECLOGÉ, SILIUS, and Guests.

Music within.
ECLOGÉ.
[Aside.]
Look at her. Have you ever seen her so?

VINIA.

[Aside.]
Never in twelve years. She’s—
ECLOGÉ.
She’s herself, Vinia.
For the first time—wholly, dangerously herself.
With nothing held in reserve. With nothing
Shaped for another’s eye. The torches strike
Her as if flame had always known her shape.

VINIA.

[Aside.]
And therefore more to fear.

GUESTS.

To Rome! To Rome! To Silius and the bride!

SILIUS.

[Raises a cup.]
To Rome, and to its future—and to us,
Who have at last stepped openly toward it!

GUESTS.

To Rome! To Rome!

SILIUS.

How do you feel?

MESSALINA.

Like myself.
For the first time.
Not triumph—there is too much knowledge here
For that poor word—not folly, for I know
The price sent riding outward through the dark.
But correspondence. Outward act and inward
Fact at last are equal.

SILIUS.

And seen.
That too has sweetness. I would lie to you
Were I to say the room’s acclaim means nothing.
Greatness tastes sharper when the light is public.

MESSALINA.

I know. The hour enlarges what it crowns.
There is in you tonight a touch too much
Of joy in being witnessed.

SILIUS.

Is that blame?

MESSALINA.

No. Only knowledge.
We stand too near the summit now for lies.

SILIUS.

Like an empress.

MESSALINA.

Like a woman
Who has chosen her own life. Which may be more.
There are the horrified, who shelter under
Morality because it masks their envy.
There are the delighted, who love scandal best
When someone else has paid the charge of it.
The frightened, who already step inwardly
Away from what their bodies still attend.
The curious. The opportunists. Perhaps
One loyal soul. Rome gathered under flowers.
Let it all watch.

SILIUS.

It watches you as storms
Are watched at sea—half fear, half appetite.

MESSALINA.

I have been watched all life. Tonight at least
I give the watchers something true to fail
In understanding.

VINIA.

[Aside.]
Hear them talk and one
Would think the sword a rumour.
ECLOGÉ.
[Aside.]
They know it.
That is the splendour and the terror both.

SILIUS.

Whatever comes of this, I would not call
The choice mistaken.

MESSALINA.

Nor would I.
I thought, a moment since, of all the men
Who came and touched some border of my life:
Petronius with his dazzled inward play,
Fabianus laying siege in silk and bronze,
Pollio trusting wit to carry him,
Mnester with that inward room still sealed.
Each asked me, by his action or omission,
To occupy a smaller truth. You did not.
That is why loving you feels less like fall
Than recognition.

SILIUS.

Then stand with me in it.

MESSALINA.

Whatever comes of this, Gaius—whatever
The price of it—I would not take it back.

SILIUS.

Nor would I. Come: they call for us.

SCENE III.—Narcissus’s Office in the Palace.

Enter NARCISSUS.

A MESSENGER arrives.

MESSENGER.

My lord Narcissus—

NARCISSUS.

Speak.

MESSENGER.

It is confirmed.
The wedding was performed this evening at
The house of Silius—public, attended by
Some forty guests of rank—priests, witnesses—
The full ceremony. She wore white, my lord.
She wore the bridal veil.

NARCISSUS.

She wore the bridal veil.
He sets down the lamp. He rises.

NARCISSUS.

Then the time has come.
I have been a patient man—too patient, perhaps,
In the accounting that history will make
Of this night’s choices. But I will not be
The man who sat and watched an empire lost
For want of a decision. Who rides with me
To Ostia?

MESSENGER.

Whomever you command, my lord.

NARCISSUS.

Send for Eunica. And saddle horses.
We ride before the hour.

NARCISSUS.

She is magnificent. I’ll grant her that.
There is no other word for what she is.
The beauty is a fact, the mind is fact,
The courage—yes, the courage too—is fact.
And he is openly beloved. There lies
A bitterness no policy explains.
Men such as I are necessary things,
Weighed, paid, advanced, distrusted, used again;
We purchase every token of regard
With service. He walked loved into the light
As if the world still held such prodigal gifts
For men of noble face and easier blood.
I envy that—and therefore trust myself
The more to act against it. Necessity
Is cleanest when it strips the heart bare too.
I feel no malice toward her. Toward him—
No malice neither; only that old wound
By which the useful measure what is loved.
She schooled the court to move by injuries
Imagined from another’s nearer place.
Tonight I turn that lesson on its source:
Not Silius in her bed—that wounds a man;
But Silius in his story, in his name,
Before his children. That wounds Caesar.
The emperor must be told. The emperor
Will weep. And then the emperor will sign.
That is the order of the thing. Let’s ride.

ACT IV

SCENE I.—An Office near the Quay at Ostia.

CLAUDIUS sits with engineers and their plans.

Enter NARCISSUS.

CLAUDIUS.

Narcissus! You’ve ridden through the night?

NARCISSUS.

[Kneels.]
My lord—I ask your patience for what I
Must now set before you. What I carry
Is not a pleasant burden; but the duty
Of a faithful servant is to bear
The truth that love would leave unspoken.

CLAUDIUS.

Rise.
What is it? Speak.

NARCISSUS.

I hardly know the words
For what has happened in the city since
Your Divinity departed for the harbour.
There has been a— There has been a marriage.

CLAUDIUS.

A marriage?

NARCISSUS.

A public one. Performed with priests
And witnesses and ceremony and garlands.

CLAUDIUS.

Whose marriage?

NARCISSUS.

I have brought Eunica,
Who was present; who will tell it in
Her own words, which are—plainer than my own.

EUNICA.

Most excellent Emperor, your servant saw
With her own eyes the ceremony performed—
The altar dressed, the vows exchanged in form,
The cups joined and the witnesses in place—
Between the lady Messalina and
The consul Gaius Silius; this at his house
Which holds her furniture, her servants, all
Her moveable estate; and afterward
A feast of forty persons; and the lady
Wore the bridal veil; and called him husband.

CLAUDIUS.

She—

NARCISSUS.

My lord.

CLAUDIUS.

My wife.

NARCISSUS.

My lord.

CLAUDIUS.

[Sits.]
She—wore the—

NARCISSUS.

My lord, we have little time. The guards—
The Praetorian tribunes—must be given
Your authority to act before the morning
Finds this matter common knowledge in the streets
And your position—

CLAUDIUS.

[Turns.]
Give me the paper.

CLAUDIUS.

Was she—was she—happy?

NARCISSUS.

She was, my lord. I think she was.

CLAUDIUS.

The northern arm of the mole requires—requires—
Send for the priests. I would have the auguries—
The auguries for the harbour work—confirmed.

SCENE II.—The Senate House.

Senators assembled. SILIUS stands in the open centre,
attended by the tribunes. SUILLIUS stands as accuser.
MARCUS and FLAVIUS observe from the upper benches.

SUILLIUS.

Before this body and before the laws
Of Rome—those laws which have endured because
They are the frame within which Roman life
Is possible—I lay the following charge…

FLAVIUS.

[Aside.]
He looks well. A man would think the axe
Came but to ask his vote.

MARCUS.

[Aside.]
He does. Consider that: to stand
In that place, knowing, and to look that well.
That is a kind of greatness, even now.

FLAVIUS.

[Aside.]
Or a kind of recklessness that looks the same.

SUILLIUS.

—did take, with full conspiracy and purpose,
The empress Valeria Messalina
To wife in formal ceremony, while
The emperor lived and breathed; did so with priests
And witnesses, as though the throne were his—

SILIUS.

I do not deny it.

SILIUS.

What you accuse me of, I did. I did it
With open eyes and in the full possession
Of my understanding. If the Senate
Requires a performance of remorse or terror,
I will disappoint it. I have been
The consul of Rome; I have served Rome’s interests
As I understood them; and I loved a woman
Who was more than what the world permitted her
To be. That is my case. Proceed.

MARCUS.

[Aside.]
There. That is what she chose. You see it now—
The mirror of herself; the selfsame fire.
Two flames. As she has always said.

FLAVIUS.

[Aside.]
And both
Now burning down.

SUILLIUS.

The Senate’s judgment—

SILIUS.

As I expected. He looks up. It was worth it.

MARCUS.

Rome, in its great days, made men like that.
Then lost the habit of it; and condemned
The few it still produced for being what
The rest had ceased to be. This is the city.
This is the morning’s work.

Exit MARCUS.

ACT V

SCENE I.—Messalina’s Apartments.

Enter MESSALINA, VINIA, ECLOGÉ, and a SERVANT.

MESSALINA.

Say that again.

SERVANT.

The tribune Sulpicius
Has taken the consul Silius from
The Senate House; the charge is—

MESSALINA.

I heard the charge.
Who gave the order?

SERVANT.

Narcissus, in the emperor’s name.

MESSALINA.

I see. Go.

MESSALINA.

Help me dress.

VINIA.

Madam—where will you go?

MESSALINA.

To Claudius. Where else? He is my husband.
We have children between us—have you forgotten?
Britannicus is six years old; Octavia
Will need her mother. He is—he has always—
He has always loved me. That is the fact
That outlasts everything. I will go to him.
I will speak to him myself. I will not send
A freedman’s letter or an intermediary.
He will see me, and he will hear me, and
Whatever he has signed at Ostia in
The midnight pressure of a frightened man
Will be reconsidered in the daylight, with
My face before him. Help me dress.

MESSALINA.

Don’t do that. It doesn’t help.
She puts on her jewels.

SCENE II.—A Road from the City.

She is walking toward Claudius’s returning litter.

Enter NARCISSUS.

NARCISSUS.

The emperor is not well. He will not
Receive her now. No—do not let her near.
NARCISSUS passes her.

MESSALINA.

He wouldn’t even look at me.

VINIA.

Madam—

MESSALINA.

Twelve years.
Twelve years I have managed that man’s house—
His children, his appointments, his safety, all
Of it—and Narcissus will not turn his head.

MESSALINA.

He did not look out.

VINIA.

Madam.

MESSALINA.

No. He did not.

MESSALINA.

Take me to Lucullus’s gardens.

Exeunt.

SCENE III.—The Gardens of Lucullus.

Enter MESSALINA, VINIA, and ECLOGÉ.

MESSALINA sits with a knife.

MESSALINA.

Let me proceed as Romans should proceed,
And argue with myself before I die.
Death is no new invention. Cato found it
No paradox, but freedom’s last appeal.
Arria gave counsel with the wound itself.
Cornelia, having borne the Gracchi dead,
Still kept her grief in form, and named them jewels.
The schools say, what the mind cannot command,
It should at least contemn. I taught as much
By life to others. Now the text is mine.
What is the state? Silius is gone before.
Claudius hath sign’d. The court is closed. The names
That waited on my smile already learn
New postures for Narcissus. If I live,
I live as spectacle to lesser souls,
An argument for every prudent coward
Who ever call’d his littleness a virtue.
If I die well, I only pay at last
The debt great natures owe to their own acts.
The case is ripe. The instrument is here.
Reason concludes it. Honour enters judgment.
Yet note the irony. I, who could send men
By one word downward, marshal rumour, law,
Desire, inheritance, and fear of place,
Stand now arraign’d by one small knife alone,
And find rebellion in the private hand.
The body is a poor plebeian thing;
It loves the sun, the pulse, the common air,
And though the mind pronounce the decree just,
Puts in appeal to nature. There is shame
In that; and yet some truth. We do not die
By argument so easily as we live.
The Stoic writes with cleaner blood than this.
I know the act. One thrust beneath the breast,
And all Rome’s process ends. Why then this pause?
Not fear of Tartarus. I have seen enough
On earth to spare hell any novelty.
Not hope. That litter pass’d and took no note.
Not for my children neither, though that name
Strikes through me once. The cause is harder far:
I can command men’s deaths more well than mine.
My courage lived in action upon worlds;
Turn’d inward, it grows strange. So let truth stand:
I am no statue, no Roman brass all pose.
I was fire; and fire, compress’d to one last point,
May flare, divide, recoil.
She lets the knife fall. She takes it up again.

Enter SULPICIUS and two Guards.

SULPICIUS.

Madam.

MESSALINA.

I cannot.

SULPICIUS.

I know, madam.
SULPICIUS strikes her.
MESSALINA falls.

Exeunt SULPICIUS and Guards.

Exeunt VINIA and ECLOGÉ.

SCENE IV.—The Portico of the Palace.

Enter MARCUS and FLAVIUS.

FLAVIUS.

Is it finished?

MARCUS.

It is finished.

FLAVIUS.

And the city?

MARCUS.

The city is already speaking of other things.
The grain price; the harbour works; the weather.
As cities do. As cities have always done.
The remarkable thing about the unremarkable
Is how quickly it reasserts itself.

FLAVIUS.

And Claudius?

MARCUS.

Claudius, I’m told, sat down to dinner
And ate his meal and slept. He has, they say,
Been spared the details by the kind attention
Of Narcissus, who arranged for him
To learn of her death only what a man
Who still has functions can afford to know.

FLAVIUS.

And Silius?

MARCUS.

Dead. As bravely as he lived.
Without performance; without the luxury
Of a man begging for what will not come.
He was, in the end, precisely what
She chose him for: the equal of the moment
That she made of him. Give him that.

FLAVIUS.

Give them both that.

MARCUS.

Yes. Give them both that. Yet give Rome this too:
She was not only splendour, but excess;
Not only flame, but a consuming fire
That made clean metal melt with common dross.
She had a greatness in her; who denies it
Denies what every corridor confess’d.
Beauty there was, and wit, and that hard nerve
By which some spirits seem designed to rule.
But she made lust a civil instrument,
Set private envies to do public work,
And taught mean natures, vain of her least glance,
To think themselves important by another’s fall.
So appetite and vanity, once arm’d,
Did office for her. Thus innocent men died
Among the guilty; thus Appius, Pollio,
And I know not whom paid tax to that dark use.
Nor loved she Silius harmlessly. In him
The instrument broke in the user’s hand.
She who had govern’d appetite in men
By studying each species—rash, servile,
Vindictive, vain—met something past that art:
Not merely blood, which she could reckon with,
But pride at last acknowledged, mind with mind.
She loved his image of herself, ’tis true,
His answering fire; yet more, the liberty
He made imaginable. In that conjunction
She drew him on to wear her danger still
As wedding-robe. He went with open eyes;
Yet truth stands double. She admired, consumed,
And was consumed. Greatness, lacking bound,
Turns even affection into instrument.
Yet let no clerk conclude from hence alone
She was mere wanton, or a common plague.
She sinn’d in the Roman manner, hugely still;
By appetite made political, by mind
Too sharp to be content with lesser forms.
Her fall is not a ballad for soft tears,
But civic mourning. In her Rome beheld
What force may rise where law and nature part,
And how the gifts that should have served the state,
Being pent in secret, poison it instead.
So write her down: admired, fear’d, ruinous,
And ruin’d; fit to be remember’d long,
Not for absolution, but for scale.

FLAVIUS.

And Narcissus?

MARCUS.

Narcissus is already at his desk.
He has letters to write; appointments to arrange;
The harbour works require his consideration;
The eastern garrison awaits a secretary’s
Correspondence. He is a useful man.

FLAVIUS.

And we?
We keep the tally after greater thieves,
And call the reckoning virtue.

MARCUS.

We are Romans, Flavius. We watch.
We speak when speaking costs us nothing vital.
We are the record of the thing—not quite
The thing itself, but its remembrance. Come.

EPILOGUE — Spoken by the Author’s Voice

Here ends her style. Set neither star nor tear.
She was great matter, and ill-govern’d too:
A mind for empire in a private room,
A beauty that made policy of desire,
A hand that raised herself by others’ falls,
And in the end pull’d down what most she loved.
Learn hence no easy pardon, nor disdain.
Rome breeds such fires, then shudders at their heat.
Write on her stone this balance, hard and just:
She ruled, she wasted, she was seen, she fell.

FINIS