I, Britannicus (With Apologies to Robert Graves)

Tom Colton

Tom Colton

"Britannicus was now of age — Britannicus, the genuine and deserving stock to succeed to his father's power, which an interloping heir by adoption now exercised in virtue of the iniquities of his mother..."
Annals, Book XIII by Tacitus

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(with further apologies to Vidal, Brass and Guccione...well, they should apologise first to be honest...)

COMING TO A FORUM NEAR YOU
KALENDARUM AUGUSTAE, 2769 AB URBE CONDITA
(That's early August 2016 to us barbarians)

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OH NO, NOT AGAIN.
Now what's that supposed to mean?

HOW'S THE SIXTH GOOD EMPEROR DOING?
As dead as he himself was after that Tongrian cavalryman was done with him.

AND WHEN IS GERMANIA WEBERAE UPDATING?
This weekend.

REALLY?
Yes! :oops:

IF YOU SAY SO.
Well, I do! :mad: Can we talk about this now?

BEEN WATCHING "EGO, CLAUDIUS", EH?
Indeed I have, and I'm cracking on with the books (ergo, and Divus Claudius) now, recently gotten from the Interrete; that service known as "Amazonia", to be specific.

I PRESUME TI. CLAUDIUS BRITANNICUS CAESAR SURVIVES AND GETS HIS TOGA VIRILIS?
Yes indeed, and lives on for quite a while, although it's not always a smooth ride - then again, it never is with those Caesares, is it?

...IS THAT MONS VESUVIUS IN THE BACKGROUND?
Quite so. ;)

ARE YOU FOLLOWING THE CANON OF THE STORIES OR OF HISTORY AS TOLD BY SUETONIUS, PLINIUS (MAJOR AND MINOR) AND TACITUS, AMONGST OTHERS?
Whichever is convenient for the plot. So let us accept that Britannicus rebuffs his father's proposal to restore the Republic, but in the time after Claudius's death and before Britannicus's fourteenth birthday Nero begins to fall out with Agrippinilla, and mother begins to plot against son, with Britannicus as her key pawn...

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As suggested more than once before, welcome to (hopefully) my first narrative TL! It's an unlicensed and unauthorised sequel to I, Claudius, purporting a different fate for Britannicus where he lives to see his fourteenth birthday (and many more thereafter), and treads a thin line between fan fiction and alternate history. Hopefully the idea isn't too offensive. :oops:

The first part, Bottoms Up, Titus, will begin in August...or so I hope. o_O
 

DaveB

Always good value, our Tom. Pity I'll have to re-read all of Weber to remember where we've got to [not], but hey...
 
Donald Reaver

Donald Reaver

Donor
Great books, I read them long before I Claudis was put on tv, worth reading. Of course that for me was back in the sixties and seventies for that series for the first time. Probably one of those first things that made me realize the concept of alternate worlds
 
Tom Colton

Tom Colton

Thanks for the enthusiasm, guys! :biggrin:

I'm happy to say that I've felt particularly inspired this week, and that the first update will go up the day after Germania Weberae finally updates, on Monday, 1st August, and will update either once a month or once every two months (hopefully) thereafter.

I should state outright that this will be a self-contained, low-butterflies timeline, so don't expect too much detail on how the Roman world works (beyond what's necessary for the story) or long-term effects of the changes at the top, but there will be your usual alt-historical ironies and exploration of short-term changes, wrapped up in the (hopefully) rich human drama of Britannicus being the man about whom everything and nothing is expected all at once.
 

Lindseyman

I hope that Britannicus takes after his Uncle Germanicus and grandfather Drusus rather than Caligula or Nero. However he's sure to have a big dose of paranoia!
 
Tom Colton

Tom Colton

Lindseyman said:
I hope that Britannicus takes after his Uncle Germanicus and grandfather Drusus rather than Caligula or Nero. However he's sure to have a big dose of paranoia!
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The lingering legacies of these figures will weigh heavily on Britannicus (especially Germanicus, given that people said the two looked almost identical), although it's fair to say that Nero is the one guy upon whom he'd never model himself, given their historically recorded animosity.

He will benefit from a magnanimous protector in his youth, but more on this later...

TheYoungPretender said:
For all their historiographical flaws, I do like the Graves books.
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They are a good romp! I couldn't get into them at first because of how differently structured they were from the TV series, but I've come around since.

I'll be taking a rather fluid view of history given that none of our sources for this period of time (except Pliny and Josephus) are contemporary nor are any of them particularly sans agendas.
 
Tom Colton

Tom Colton

Sing to me, O Muse, and tell me the story
Of the noble Britannicus and the vile Ahenobarbus...

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I, BRITANNICUS


The Final Epistle of
Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Britannicus

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First Man of the Senate, Endowed with Tribunician Power, Supreme Pontiff
Holder of Consular and Proconsular Authority

Emperor of Rome

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PART 1: BOTTOMS UP, TITUS​


My father killed my mother when I was seven years old.

I apologise, for this is no way to begin a biography, for that is what this is, considering that I have spent my preceding breaths dictating the final amendments to my will. It reeks of the sensationalism of the worst dramas – but there is indeed much drama yet to unfold on the pages of these final ruminations of mine, so dutifully recorded by my freedman Telemachus.

I waste the strength of my beleaguered lungs at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, which in a single terrifying instant transformed from a mountain of stone to the very likeness of Vulcanus, with various signs and portents emitting therein failing to warn the hapless inhabitants of the nearby towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum of their horrendous fate, buried under viscous tides of earth and water and their lungs filled with toxic ash spewed in clouds; a fate to which I understand my dear friend, the admiral Plinius Secundus, has already succumbed. I shall follow him into the afterlife soon, as my breathing grows more laborious with every word. [1]

I must apologise once again, for I have, in the manner of the Greek poets, skipped to and fro through various points of my narrative and worse yet, rushed through the entire story and gone directly to the end, when there is so much more of it to tell. I can sense that Telemachus has grown frustrated with my various interjections and corrections, so much so that it would perhaps be best to begin all over again. Let that be so.

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I, Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Britannicus, and many other appellations besides, son of the divine Claudius, known in his time as “Claudius the Fool”, “That Claudius”, “Uncle Clau-Clau-Claudius”, “Claudius the Stammerer”, and many other cruel nicknames besides, but also the Emperor Claudius, and Claudius the God, [2] am about to begin my final epistle concerning my own life, for already I have begun to see the effects of slander, not only on my own person, but especially that lain against my own father, where he was smeared as simultaneously slavishly uxorious and an inveterate womaniser, lustful of the bloodshed at gladiatorial games (as though the average Roman was not!), eager to meddle in legal affairs of which he had no knowledge, frighteningly quick to anger (a fault, I must add, for which he apologised numerous times in his own life), and the tool of his freedmen and his wives.

All of these, truth or lies, were perpetuated mostly to fulfil specific agendas and the worst amongst these were not lain against my father, who was merely presented as a foolish dupe, but against my mother, the lady Valeria Messalina, who was said to be worse than the most degenerate she-wolf in Rome, having competed with the leader of the guild of whores to see who could tire out more men in a single night and won, and thereafter plotted with the suffect consul Gaius Silius, the handsomest man in Rome and object of her passions, to overthrow my father and rule with him as regents in my stead, for which they were executed on the orders of my father, which he was duped into signing [3] – but enough of back-alley rumour and haughty slander. As though the chief perpetrators of these disgusting stories were any nobler!

I speak, of course, of the deceased Agrippinilla, niece and final wife of my father, and her son, born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus but thereafter known as “Nero” – and mark my words, this shall be the final time I shall ever refer to that vile cousin of mine by that name, for the name Nero is undeserving of being dragged through the sewers by that character. [4]

My grandfather, the brother of the emperor Tiberius and the last noble Roman of his generation, was called Nero Claudius Drusus, and his son was also named Nero before he adopted the name Germanicus Julius Caesar, and the first son of Germanicus (the madman Gaius Caligula being the third), who was murdered in the purges of the condemned Sejanus, was also called Nero. All three men were unjustly killed in the struggles of the past, and to associate them with my degenerate cousin would be to disgrace three generations of Romans at once. And I shall hence follow in the practice of my own youth, where I brimmed with juvenile resentment at that portly libertine being adopted into my family, and deny him this name, and instead call him Ahenobarbus – and in so doing I am in no danger of the same slanders of which his family was guilty, for the finding the last noble Domitius Ahenobarbus is as fruitless a task as finding the last Aemilius Lepidus that did not meet some ignoble fate. [5]

And in truth I would have joined them in the slanders of my father if not my mother, whom I only remember as the tearful matron who, on the night she was condemned to death, thrust a letter addressed to my father into my hands and sent me and my sister born by her, Claudia Octavia, from her house in which she was held captive, to the palace in which my father was equally held prisoner by his freedmen and his guards, for they feared that she would convince him of her innocence should they be allowed to meet face-to-face. [6] And such an impious confession that is! But I must be honest, for to be self-serving on one’s deathbed is useless.

Why was I so hateful of my own father, beyond the simple fact that it was he who had signed the death-warrant of my mother and over the course of a single night gone from loving, propping me up on his shoulder and declaring to the world that Rome was at last free of its murderous family struggles, to cold and distant, unfeeling as the “Old King Log” which he repeatedly cited in his quotations of the fables of Aesop? One would think that these reasons would be enough; but then he added one final indignity. He incestuously married his own niece Agrippinilla, sister of the madman Caligula and the Nero murdered by Sejanus, and daughter of his brother Germanicus, and then adopted her son Ahenobarbus as his heir before me, for he was three years my senior.

Already from my days as a boy I hated him for depriving me and my sister of our mother, who all Rome castigated at the urgings of his new wife, but this – this was unforgivable. How was I to reconcile his admiration and his hopes in me with this insult? Unable to find any answer, I committed myself to a single impulse – that of utter loathing. There would be no occasion upon which where I would not take the opportunity to declare my antipathy at the lot of them, which I even unfairly laid upon my own sister Octavia when she was betrothed to Ahenobarbus. What else could I do? There was no future for me – to quote the divine Augustus following his triumph over my ancestor the unfortunate Mark Antony, two Caesars were too many, and so long as Ahenobarbus was ahead of me, the decoration of his head with the imperial crown would mean the loss of mine.

I had already sworn to this self-destructive path when my father’s freedman Narcissus, architect of my mother’s downfall, brought me to his room, where he revealed all. He confessed that he had done me a great injustice over these past years in his disinterest, but claimed that he had done so in order to keep me safe. For in the same way that it was only his disabilities which had kept him out of the public eye and thus protected him from the strife which had claimed these three men named Nero amongst many other noble Romans, his denigrations would do the same for me. Indeed, I had inherited all of my father’s character but none of his inadequacies, and this had also made him question if I was truly his son and not that of the lunatic Caligula. [7]

What a confession to make, and what material for an impious usurper to use! Regardless, one way or the other, that still makes me a descendant of the divine Augustus; and besides, one’s dying moments are hardly a suitable time and place to begin doubting one’s parentage. But anyway, I was considerably grown for my age, and they said that my face was the spitting image of my uncle Germanicus – another reason why they suspect Caligula was my true father. Perhaps my father Claudius’s infirmities were those which required the mixing of both the father’s and the mother’s blood to take effect.

While I may have been flippant about my parentage, in truth the madness of my relative was for a long time one of my obsessions. In many quarters critical of my policies and my behaviour, it would be commonly said that while I had the face of Germanicus, I had the brains of Claudius and the heart of Caligula – that is to say, none at all. Although it was true that I was first cousin to Caligula, for Caligula was the nephew of Claudius and I was his son, there was no point in history at which we were both alive, for he was slain by the tyrannicide Cassius Chaerea mere weeks before the date of my birth. But still his spectre and the horrors of his excesses haunted me, not least because of those comparisons already mentioned.

This further confession of my father’s merely added to these doubts and self-recriminations, and for a long time I despised attending the races at the Circus Maximus, for it was said that it was the sound of galloping horses which had driven Caligula into the depths of insanity and to those monstrous acts – so horrible they are that I must act as censor and excise them from my account – which led to the death of his sister Drusilla, whom he had incestuously impregnated during the period in which he thought himself a god. [7] I exaggerated when I said I had inherited none of my father’s infirmities, for I had infrequent attacks of the falling sickness, a weakness which acted as a cover for one of many attempts by Ahenobarbus to do me in, and it was during these that I was most terrified of succumbing to the same insanity which had once gripped Caligula and all of Rome.

I am tempted to further amend my will to say that it would be best to smother me with my own pillow, as Caligula himself had done unto Tiberius in his final days on Capri, and save Rome from another mad monarch should I recover from my malady and think myself resurrected as a deity, but I am reassured by my physician that there is no recourse from the ash choked up in my throat and my lungs.

[1] Letter from Pliny the Younger to Tacitus; I'm taking the eruption as having occurred in October given the archaeological evidence.
[2] Graves, R. 1934 I, Claudius, Chapter 1
[3] I, Claudius, Episode 11, "A God in Colchester"
[4] I, Claudius, Episode 12, "Old King Log"; Suetonius and Tacitus both record Britannicus as deliberately mocking Nero with his pre-adoption name, which has become a full-blown damnatio memoriae here.
[5] There is never not a time to make fun of Lepidus. He's like the Franz von Papen of Republican Rome.
[6] I, Claudius, Episode 11
[7] I, Claudius, Episode 8, "Zeus, by Jove!"; the gruesome ending of the episode telling a fictionalised version of Drusilla's death by botched Caesarean was infamously cut and is now lost forever.

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The second half of this chapter, including the actual PoD, will be here in a couple of weeks.

Comments and feedback are very much welcome! :biggrin:
 
Tom Colton

Tom Colton

OrsonWelles said:
Wow, that's great! Massive props!
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desmirelle said:
Looking good.....
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Thanks, guys! Any ideas where I can get good sources on the Boudican uprising, Corbulo's Parthian War, and the Jewish-Roman War, given that these will all be relevant to the story down the line?

TheYoungPretender said:
"There is never not a time to make fun of Lepidus. He's like the Franz von Papen of Republican Rome."

And coffee went up my nose...
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If you thought the man himself was bad, his family history reads like a Greek tragedy. o_O
 

Llamastrangler

I loved both of Robert Graves' novels- you capture the style very well- and of course I, Clavdivs on the telly, which superbly depicted, with superlative acting, all the bits of the novel which didn't require location filming.

Subscribed, naturally. This is excellent so far.
 
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