Flowers and Tiberius on Capri

I was incredibly lucky, many years ago now, to go a wedding on Capri - my first visit to Italy. It was a magical, week-long event, one afternoon of which was spent in splendid solitude pottering around the Villa Iovis. Robin Lane Fox's piece on anemones on Capri in today's FT brought it all home to me:

For 10 years, between AD27 and AD37, the elderly Tiberius withdrew to the most remote of his 12 properties on the island and continued to rule the empire from its rocky peak without going anywhere near Rome. I wanted to see for myself where he resided. His years of retreat became the subject of gossip so salacious that it was never translated from its original Latin in texts for general readers and schoolchildren. Only recently have editions of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars and Tacitus’s Annals made the allegations available. They are still strong stuff, of which compulsory sex with babies is only one of the more disagreeable items.

I was trying to forget the Latin words for swinging threesomes as I took the long uphill track to Tiberius’s ultimate refuge, the so-called Villa Jovis, or Villa of Jupiter, on the far western tip of the island. Actually it is a palace in plan, not a villa, at a time when the emperors did not yet have a proper palace in the heart of Rome. I was not thinking of orgies, not even when a trio of goats appeared on cue at the path to what the text of the best ancient manuscript of Suetonius calls “villa Ionis”. Contemporaries called its grounds the “old goat’s garden”, referring to Tiberius’s goat-like behaviour with boys and girls in its bushes. I did not follow the goats into the undergrowth.

My thoughts, rather, were historical. How ever did the Roman empire continue to function while the managing director was away for 10 years on an island with the most spectacular view in the Mediterranean and nothing so elementary as a phone? Tacitus artfully tells us that some people said the emperor had retired in his 60s because he looked so repulsive; his face was pockmarked and covered in bits of healing plaster. It is as if the British prime minister were to decide to withdraw to Lundy island, off the coast of Devon in England, for the rest of his term in office. It is an interesting question: which modern states would function no worse if their leaders simply pulled out and kept quiet?

Full story here.

Comments

[Lance Knobel]

Wedding on Capri? Sounds nice.