Richard Epstein

Tiberius Caesar

On his warm island he amused himself,
What with his little boys and little fish.
He grew quite mad. “Succeeding a new god
Whom you knew well is man’s work,” he told young
Specialists ferried in from Syria.
“I touched Augustus when he was a man.”
They brought with them their step-by-step instructions
And whiled away some minutes each, but more
Time was absorbed — who’d have believed it? — watching
Cooks cook. Vigilance was the price of lunch.
He grew quite mad. His tarts were not enough
To soothe divinity, not even strangled.
He grew quite mad. He grew quite mad. Did gods
Attend their mothers’ fetes and pillow talk?
And when he had his godhead fitted on,
Would he have to be dead, and would he notice?

Companion Piece — He Sleeps with the Fishes

Fucking Suetonius. I mean, who knows what about me? Little fishes. “Tiberius and the Little Fishes” — that’s what they’d call a new biography. If Loeb had wanted you to know, he wouldn’t have left ’em in Latin. Hello? Empire being run here.

I’ll bet there’s a name for someone with a morbidly prurient interest in little fishes. “Yeah, ‘Tiberius’”? “Dark, unrelenting,” said that fat fellow with the hydrocele. What do you mean, what did he mean? Down the Steps and into the Tiber. Find me a sack, somebody.

He had the old arrogance inbred in the Claudian family, and many symptoms of a cruel temper, though they were repressed, now and then broke out. He had also from earliest infancy been reared in an imperial house; consulships and triumphs had been heaped on him in his younger days; even in the years which, on the pretext of seclusion he spent in exile at Rhodes, he had had no thoughts but of wrath, hypocrisy, and secret sensuality.

Giggles. Like that’s a bad thing. Waft me away to the villas of Capreae. A casino? What the fuck, “a casino”? The Isle of Capri in Blackhawk. Indoor tropical pools, towering palms, and — no, let me guess. Little fishes. Jupiter Fucking Imperator.