I

In March of the year a.d. 37, old, ill, and alarmed by a portent, Tiberius Caesar moved south from Rome to the Bay of Naples. Eager though he was to return to his refuge on Capri, declining health and foul weather detained him at his villa at Misenum. ‘A few days before he died’, says Suetonius, ‘the tower of the Pharus collapsed in an earthquake on Capri’.Footnote ¹ From his bedroom at Misenum the dying Princeps could surely see the great lighthouse far across the bay, on the eastern heights of the island. Was he aware that its flame had been extinguished? That may have signalled the end of a story which he had begun to write forty-five years before, at the death of his beloved brother.

The story was inspired by two men who became gods, Castor and Pollux. Originally Kastor and Polydeukes, the immensely popular twins of Greek myth were also commonly known as the Dioskouroi, Zeus' boys, or the Tyndaridai, the sons of their earthly father Tyndaros. The reports of their parentage and birth are complex and contradictory.Footnote ² In some strands, they and their sister, Helen of Troy, were all three the children of Leda and Tyndaros, the King of Sparta; in others, they were the offspring of Leda and Zeus, who had visited the queen in the form of a swan, and they may or may not have been hatched from an egg or eggs. But, most importantly, at some point it became established that Polydeukes was, or was potentially, immortal, while Kastor was born to die: possibly because they had different fathers, Zeus and Tyndaros. Each brother had a special talent recognized as early as Homer, for in the Iliad their sister Helen calls them ‘Kastor, breaker of horses, and the strong boxer, Polydeukes’.Footnote ³ The twins were renowned as heroes in two great expeditions, the Calydonian boar hunt and the voyage of the Argo, as well as in a few adventures of their own, but they are best remembered for what happened after their death. Kastor was cut down in a brawl. As he lay dying, Polydeukes prayed to Zeus that he be allowed to die with his brother. Zeus offered him a choice: either to live forever himself with the gods on Olympus, or to share Kastor's fate, alternating with him one day under the earth and one day on Olympus. Polydeukes chose the latter. How this alternation was effected is a matter of ancient debate, essentially over whether the brothers were together in each place for a day or actually exchanged places with each other. But invariably, in literature and in history, they appear after death as divinities together, and they represent the very incarnation of brotherly love.

Polydeukes' choice was decisive. Early on the brothers became the saviour gods, soteres, the averters of evil, alexikakoi. Like Herakles, these divinized mortals were great helpers of their fellow man, with two areas of special concern. They were famed as the protectors of sailors especially, and of all travellers by sea: in one version of their story, Zeus placed them among the stars as the Gemini, the heavenly twins, and Poseidon rewarded their brotherly love with command of the winds, whereby they became the saviours of shipwrecked mariners. They also developed an inclination to appear and bring or announce victory in battle, the most famous instance in Greek history being the Spartan defeat of Athens at the sea battle of Aegospotami in 405 b.c. On that occasion they materialized as two stars, but normally by land you could recognize them by a handful of particular human attributes: they turned up at critical moments as a pair of beautiful young men mounted on white horses, bearing spears in their hands and wearing on their heads the distinctive pilleus, the half-egg-shaped hat or helmet, often crowned by a star.

Their cult spread from Sparta throughout Greece, and eventually to Sicily and Southern Italy in the West, from where it early established itself in Latium around Rome. Some fifty years ago a bronze tablet was excavated at a temple in the territory of Lavinium which bore the dedication in archaic Latin: ‘Castorei Podlouqueique qurois’, ‘to Castor and Pollux, the kuroi’.Footnote ⁴ The dating of the tablet to the late sixth century b.c. accords marvellously with the dramatic entrance of the Dioscuri into Roman history, at the Battle of Lake Regillus, traditionally assigned to 499 or 496 b.c. According to the common version of this story, at the height of a battle between the Romans and their Latin neighbours, the dictator Aulus Postumius vowed a temple to Castor and Pollux if they would come to his aid. They did, and the Romans won. Later that same day two tall and handsome young men, battle-weary and in military gear, appeared at Rome, to wash and water their horses in Lacus Iuturnae, the Pool of Juturna, at the eastern end of the Forum, near the Temple of Vesta. They announced the victory to passers-by before disappearing, and the next day news arrived from the dictator, reporting the details and the divine intervention.Footnote ⁵ Their temple, usually called the Temple of Castor, was erected in the south-eastern corner of the Forum, next to the Pool of Juturna, and it was dedicated by the dictator's son in 484 b.c. So went the standard (but not necessarily correct) version of the arrival of the heavenly twins in Rome.

Castor and Pollux reappeared in the Forum to announce victories at other crucial moments in Roman history — after the great battles of Pydna (168 b.c.), Vercellae (101 b.c.), and Pharsalus (48 b.c.) — and their temple became one of the focal points of the community by the time of the Late Republic, a meeting-place for the Senate within, a speakers' platform and voting area without, a centre for debate and riot. Above all, as warriors on horseback the brothers became patrons of the Roman knights who, every year on 15 July, the anniversary of the battle, celebrated a great equestrian parade, the transvectio equitum. Up to 5,000 of them, wearing olive crowns and dressed in purple robes with scarlet stripes, attended the annual sacrifice at the Temple of Mars out on the Via Appia and then rode in procession through the city and the Forum to pass by the Temple of Castor on their way to the Capitol. The temple was also a hub of activity in daily life, a sort of bank and repository of weights and measures, surrounded by various enterprises: cobblers, moneylenders, a cloakmaker, and slave-dealers are attested, and there were certainly taverns nearby.Footnote ⁶ Some twenty-nine shops were actually built into the podium beneath the temple, one of which was a combination barbershop-beauty salon-gaming parlour-pharmacy and dentist's office, where dozens of extracted teeth were excavated in the 1980s, along with what may be tongue depressors and probes, not to mention coins, gaming-pieces, jars for unguents, drinking glasses, and cups.Footnote ⁷ If the scores of oaths in Roman comedy are any guide to life in the streets — ‘Ecastor!’ or ‘Mecastor!’, and even more ‘Edepol!’: By Castor! By Pollux! — the twin gods who presided over this bustle were casually called upon by everyone everywhere. In sum: Castor and Pollux were deeply embedded in the Roman consciousness; they conjured up specific vivid images; and they were very popular indeed.

According to tradition, their ancient temple was dedicated on 27 January 484 b.c. It was restored sometime in the second century; reconstructed in 117 b.c. by the triumphing general L. Caecilius Metellus Delmaticus; repaired to some extent in 74 b.c. by the notorious praetor Gaius Verres; and then rebuilt by Tiberius Caesar and dedicated by him on 27 January a.d. 6, in his own name and that of his brother Drusus, who had died in the autumn of 9 b.c.Footnote ⁸ Tiberius in fact completely replaced the five-hundred-year-old Temple of Castor in the heart of Rome with a new building dedicated to the immortal twins by two brothers, one by now the co-ruler with, and son and heir apparent of, the Princeps Augustus, the other dead now thirteen years and more. This association of Tiberius and Drusus with Castor and Pollux at the heart of Rome was a brilliant political statement, emotive, even provocative.Footnote ⁹

II

The story begins with the death of Castor, breaker of horses. From 12 to 9 b.c. the two young brothers had conducted brutal campaigns of conquest in the North, Tiberius in the Balkans, Drusus in Germany. Drusus penetrated with fire and sword as far the Elbe, but he withdrew, discouraged it was later said by a woman of superhuman stature who predicted his imminent end. He died at the age of thirty, sometime late in 9 b.c. Among the grim omens — wolves howling in the camp, the wailing of unseen women, shooting stars — one stands out: two young men were seen riding through the middle of the entrenchments. The uncanny appearance of two horsemen in a military camp could suggest only one thing to Romans: a visitation by the heavenly twins. Yet here, for the first time in history, they did not anticipate or report a victory, they warned of disaster.

The true magnitude of the ensuing calamity might not at first glance be obvious. Later authors are unanimous in reporting simply that Drusus died in camp of ‘some illness’, morbus, nosos,Footnote ¹⁰ but a markedly different account was offered by Drusus' contemporary, Livy, who was actually composing his history of Rome when the young general died. His version survives only in a brief and contorted summary of Book 142, five sentences long: Drusus carried the war against the German tribes across the Rhine, but ‘he died of a broken leg, caused by his horse falling upon it, on the thirtieth day after it happened’. Perhaps we can reconcile death from a broken leg with death from ‘some disease’ — gangrene following on a fracture, say — but the unique detail of the broken leg is striking. Livy in fact chose to conclude his enormous history with the death and funeral of Drusus in 9 b.c., followed, apparently, by brief mention of the legendary destruction of the entire army of Quinctilius Varus in Germany in a.d. 9, some seventeen years later. His point was surely that the death of Drusus was disastrous indeed for Roman history: the young prince would have conquered Germany, as contemporaries lamented, and the tremendous Varian disaster, clades Variana, with its loss of three legionary eagles and 15 to 20,000 men, would never have happened.Footnote ¹¹ It was that important for the history of Rome.

Some three or four decades later, when Tiberius was long established as Princeps, Valerius Maximus offered a dramatic narrative of his brother's death:

Tiberius' frantic dash to his brother's bedside, from north-west Italy to Germany across the Rhine, became the stuff of legend. The drama has two acts. First, the headlong race north, recounted by Livy (now lost) and retold by others, the dying Drusus' struggle to show his brother the honours befitting a victorious general, the last fraternal kiss and embrace, the ritual closing of the eyes.Footnote ¹³ Then, Act 2, funereal deliberation. The German tribes cease fighting, as a sign of respect. Tiberius brings the corpse to Rome, walking ahead of it all the way. For the first stage, in enemy territory, from the summer camp to their winter quarters, probably at Mainz, the body was borne by the young general's centurions and tribunes; thence it was carried by the leading men of each town and city passed by the cortège. Augustus and Livia joined it at Ticinum, and from there they proceeded to Rome, where Drusus was eulogized extravagantly, buried with elaborate ceremony in the vast new family tomb of Augustus, and showered with honours. Among the latter was the award of the name ‘Germanicus’, signifying the conqueror of Germany, which was also to be borne by his two small sons.Footnote ¹⁴

Drusus' posthumous fame as Drusus Germanicus was enormous and enduring, his family the keepers of the flame. His young widow was routinely identified for decades, in literature, inscriptions, and papyri, as ‘Antonia Drusi’, Antonia the wife of Drusus: she survived him by almost forty-five years and never remarried. Their elder son (born in 15 b.c.) was known, after his adoption by his uncle Tiberius in a.d. 4, as Germanicus Julius Caesar, and became the darling of the Roman people. His younger brother, the future Princeps Claudius (born in 10 b.c.), is regularly named on inscriptions as Tiberius Claudius Nero Germanicus, son of Drusus Germanicus. Claudius' predecessor and successor as Princeps, Gaius and Nero, were routinely identified as the grandson and great-grandson of Drusus. But the architect of his memory seems to have been their matriarch, Livia, later Julia Augusta, who is named on inscriptions as mother of Drusus Germanicus decades after his death.Footnote ¹⁵ Seneca, writing not too long after her demise in a.d. 29, assures us that, ‘She never ceased from proclaiming the name of her dear Drusus. She had him pictured everywhere, in private and in public places, and it was her greatest pleasure to talk about him and listen to the talk of others — she lived with his memory.’Footnote ¹⁶

Memory is never neutral, and Drusus was important to the dynasty, as Claudians supplanted Julians: contemporary writers competed in elaborate posthumous praise of his virtues. For Valerius Maximus, Drusus Germanicus was ‘the particular glory of the Claudian family, his country's rare ornament, and, best of all, one who by the grandeur of his achievements, in the perspective of his years, marvellously matched the Augusti, his stepfather and his brother, the two divine eyes of the commonwealth’. For Velleius Paterculus, Drusus Claudius the brother of (Tiberius) Nero was ‘a young man endowed with as many great qualities as man's nature is capable of receiving or application developing. It would be hard to say whether his talents were the better adapted to a military career or the duties of civil life; at any rate, the charm and the sweetness of his character are said to have been inimitable, and also his modest attitude of equality towards his friends. As for his personal beauty, it was second only to that of his brother.’ For Seneca (who imagines Claudius referring to his father as Drusus Germanicus), he ‘would have made a great Princeps, and had already shown himself a great leader. For he had penetrated far into Germany, and had planted the Roman standards in a region where it was scarcely known that any Romans existed.’Footnote ¹⁷

Others explicitly invoked Drusus as their muse. A now anonymous poet addressed his ponderous Consolation to Livia on the loss of her son, praising in 474 lines not only these two but every member of the dynasty whom he could recall. And sometime in the late 40s, while serving in Germany, Pliny the Elder was inspired in a dream by an image of Drusus, Drusi Neronis effigies, ‘who had conquered widely in Germany and died there’ to write a history of all of Rome's German Wars. The image commended his memory to Pliny and begged the writer to save him from the injustice of oblivion. Oblivion was not a likely prospect under the rule of Drusus' son, Claudius, but the posthumous injunction was a neat way for a scholarly officer to win the attention of his Princeps.Footnote ¹⁸

‘Drusus Germanicus’ accordingly figured prominently on public monuments and their inscriptions, most memorably in the record of elaborate posthumous honours decreed by the Senate in a.d. 20 to his elder son Germanicus, himself untimely dead in a.d. 19. These included a triumphal arch in the Circus Flaminius, surmounted by a statue of Germanicus Caesar standing in a chariot and flanked by statues of family members, of which the first named was ‘Drusus Germanicus, his natural father and brother of Tiberius Caesar’; another arch near Drusus' cenotaph on the Rhine; and, set up in the portico of the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine, among the portraits of other distinguished men, two busts ‘of Germanicus Caesar and of Drusus Germanicus, his natural father and the brother of Ti. Caesar Augustus’.Footnote ¹⁹ In so emphatically displaying the long-gone Drusus, not only did the Senate have its eye on the dynasty, both Senate and dynasty had their eyes on the public. ‘Drusi magna apud populum Romanum memoria’, ‘the memory of Drusus among the Roman people was considerable’, as Tacitus wrote about events that unfolded in a.d. 14, over two decades after the man's death, and Dio confirms that a few years earlier, in a.d. 6, during a time of urban disorder, the people had been comforted by a mark of honour to the memory of Drusus. The dead prince was a popular figure.Footnote ²⁰

Not only is memory never neutral but, another truism, it is contentious. Discord had arisen immediately. The soldiers wanted to burn Drusus' corpse in his armour, but ‘his brother against their will snatched away the sacred body’, according to the Consolation to Livia, while Seneca has Claudius praise Tiberius for maintaining discipline and restoring the old-fashioned way of mourning at a time when the army ‘was not only disconsolate but distraught, and claimed the body of the loved Drusus for itself’. In fact a compromise was reached, as his troops were allowed spontaneously to erect a cenotaph on the banks of the Rhine, around which soldiers would run on an anniversary day each year. The soldiers' love for Drusus surely contributed to their idolatry of his elder son, Germanicus Caesar, and it even transferred to his younger son. After the murder of Caligula, the praetorian who discovered Claudius hiding in the palace called out to his companions, ‘Here's a Germanicus: let's carry him off and make him emperor!’Footnote ²¹

Drusus' ‘great memory’ among the people of the city of Rome was an even more serious matter, for as Tacitus goes on to explain, ‘it was believed that, if he had been in charge of affairs, he would have given them back their freedom’. Suetonius agrees: Drusus did not hide his intention to restore the old republic whenever he should be able to, and he even wrote a letter to his brother in which he talked about forcing Augustus to restore liberty.Footnote ²² The reality of these plans of Drusus is dubious and not too important — they do have the ring of propaganda manufactured in factional struggles over the following decades. The significant element is their rôle in his posthumous popularity. Suetonius is indignant at another use to which they were put: some authors had dared to assert that Augustus was suspicious of Drusus, that he recalled him from his province, and that, when Drusus was slow to respond, Augustus had him removed by poison. Impossible, says Suetonius, offering four proofs of the Princeps' great affection for his stepson: he always named the young man co-heir with his own sons, as he once announced in the Senate; in his funeral laudation before the people, he solemnly called upon the gods to make his Caesars (that is, his sons Gaius and Lucius) like Drusus, and to give himself as honourable a death as they had given Drusus; he wrote a verse eulogy for him and had it inscribed on the tomb; and he composed a memorial of his life in prose. But what do these actions prove? Three of the four displays of affection were certainly posthumous; the fourth, the assertion about his will in the Senate, might well be too; and a fifth, omitted by Suetonius, certainly was, that is, the composition of the inscription for the statue of Drusus which the Princeps added to the galleries of Roman heroes that lined his new Augustan Forum.Footnote ²³ Whatever affection he may have felt for his stepson in life, he made a great public show of that love when the man was dead.

Augustus' expropriation of the popular memory of his stepson was outrageous. Orchestrating the posthumous memorials, he delivered a lachrymose eulogy in the Circus Flaminius which quite overshadowed the words of Drusus' brother Tiberius, spoken earlier in the Forum. This was part of a creative outburst by the stricken Princeps, along with the verse epitaph, the prose memorial, the honorific inscription on the statue base.Footnote ²⁴ But he went much farther than mere association: he essentially adopted the dead Drusus into his family. At the funeral the corpse was surrounded by the busts not only of his Claudian ancestors but of the Julii, to whom Drusus was not related. He was buried not in the family tomb of the Nerones, but in Augustus' great Mausoleum, the tomb of the Julii, tumulus Iuliorum: as the anonymous poet put it, somewhat obtusely, Drusus would not join in burial his forefathers of old. And among the statues of Roman heroes which lined the Forum Augusti, that of Drusus stood not with the great men on one side of the square but with the Julian family on the other. For Ovid, the brothers were from the clan of the gods (that is, Julians, not Claudians), while Valerius Maximus called them the fraternal pair, formerly the glory of the Claudian clan, now also that of the Julian.Footnote ²⁵

Drusus' funeral, his burial, his memorial: all Julian. What did the man's brother, Tiberius Claudius Nero — later Tiberius Julius Caesar — make of all this? His reaction, when it came, was Tiberian in its subtlety and deliberation.

III

To reconstruct it, we must first consider three brief notices offered by Cassius Dio in what is our only narrative account of the reign of Augustus. After the funeral, Tiberius was dispatched back to Germany to renew the campaign. His success there was rewarded with the acclamation as Imperator for a second time and the promise of a triumph when he returned to take up his second consulship in January of 7 b.c.

Thus the year began with a strong display of family unity. In the past, Tiberius' real military accomplishments had not earned him a triumph. By contrast, in 8 b.c. he had been occupied with the grimly inglorious task of pacifying the frontier in the wake of his brother's death, and he had won no notable victory. Yet now he was awarded his triumph. He had also been consul a mere seven years earlier: triumph and second consulship in 7 b.c. thus recognized him as the bulwark of the regime. Since he could not cross the sacred boundary of the city before the celebration, he summoned the Senate to meet him not in the Senate House but a few hundred metres away, outside the pomerium, in the Porticus Octaviae, next to the Theatre of Marcellus in the Campus Martius. Augustus had built this large and lavish portico, which enclosed several public buildings, from the spoils of his campaigns in Dalmatia in the 30s, and he had dedicated it in the name of his sister, Octavia. Tiberius' choice of setting for the Senate was thus a gracious bow to the Princeps and the Dalmatian triumph which he had celebrated in 29 b.c., and the gesture was neatly balanced by his subsequent dedication, immediately after his own triumph, of the equally lavish Porticus Liviae over on the Esquiline Hill, together with his mother, Livia, the wife of the Princeps.

Fitting nicely within this display of dynastic concord came the announcement that he would restore the great temple dedicated to Concordia at the north-western end of the Forum. But Dio's account prompts questions. Why choose a structure freighted with uncomfortably Republican associations, one that commemorated the bloody conclusion of a period of violent discord, the suppression of Gaius Gracchus and his followers in 121 b.c.? What ‘restoration’ did the temple need, and why did Tiberius in fact then completely rebuild it? Most curiously, what does Dio mean when he gives as Tiberius' motive for repairing the Temple of Concord the arresting ‘so that he might inscribe upon it his own name and that of Drusus’?

The following year his rôle as champion, if not heir, of the regime was confirmed by the grant of the tribunician power, but that was soon followed by his retirement to Rhodes. En route, Dio tells us in an aside, Tiberius forced the people of the island of Paros to sell him the statue of their beloved goddess Hestia, the Roman Vesta, ‘so that it might be set up in the temple of Concord’.Footnote ²⁷ In time, he came back to Rome as a private citizen, in a.d. 2, but then, after the deaths of Lucius and Gaius Caesar in a.d. 2 and 4 respectively, he returned to centre stage as the second man of the Empire: he was adopted by Augustus, he received the tribunician power again, and he was dispatched for more hard fighting in Germany, returning to Rome each winter. There, on 27 January a.d. 6, he at last dedicated the great temple in the Forum in his own name and that of Drusus — but, to our confusion, it is the wrong temple.

In a.d. 6, as Dio briefly records, Tiberius dedicated ‘the Temple of the Dioscuri, upon which he inscribed not only his own name — calling himself Claudianus instead of Claudius, because of his adoption into the family of Augustus — but also that of Drusus’. Not Concord: Castor and Pollux. It was to be another four years before the Temple of Concord was finally dedicated, on 16 January a.d. 10, the anniversary of the day on which Augustus had received the name ‘Augustus’. Thus Dio, again very briefly: ‘The Temple of Concord was dedicated by Tiberius, and both his name and that of Drusus, his dead brother, were inscribed upon it.’Footnote ²⁸ The Forum now shone with not one but two gleaming and very new versions of its largest temples, overflowing with carefully selected old master paintings and sculptures, all allegedly paid for by the triumphal spoils of two brothers, one of whom had returned from virtual exile less than eight years before, while the other had been dead for seventeen years.Footnote ²⁹ In short, Tiberius Caesar took immense care to erect two enormous public shrines in the heart of Rome, marble clad, bursting with artworks, that explicitly, in their dedicatory inscriptions, and implicitly, in the deities whom they honoured, immortalized his relationship with his brother.

The gaps and curiosities in this extraordinary sequence raise questions that cannot be answered. We do not know when Tiberius vowed to rebuild the Temple of Castor. We may deduce from the sequence of the two dedications, Castor in a.d. 6 and Concord in a.d. 10, that he promised the former some time before he promised the latter in January of 7 b.c.; or we might at least assume that he vowed Castor before sailing into retirement in the latter half of 6 b.c.; but we do not know.Footnote ³⁰ More importantly, we do not know why these two temples needed repair. The standard repertory of Roman topography suggests that Concord ‘was destroyed either by a fire or by the lightning that struck the Capitoline and other areas in Rome in 9 b.c.’, whilst Castor ‘was probably devastated in the fire of 14 or 9 b.c.’, but there is no evidence whatsoever, literary or archaeological, for either assumption. Moreover, the argument from silence is strongly against them: the damage to other monuments is recorded; how could two of the greatest temples in Rome possibly be ignored?Footnote ³¹ Whatever their state of disrepair — each was little more than a century old, and both had been worked on in the intervening years — the essential point is that Tiberius did not repair or restore them: he replaced them, on a larger scale. And the only motive we are given, in the case of Concord and again from Dio, is that he wanted to inscribe his own and Drusus' names on it.

The place to start is with what mattered so much to Tiberius: the dedicatory inscriptions naming the two brothers on the architrave of each temple. Concord's dedication is completely lost, but exiguous fragments of that on the Temple of Castor have survived and they have recently been the subject of meticulous analysis and hypothetical restoration by Géza Alföldy, first published in 1992 and enshrined now in his monumental 1996 edition of the inscriptions of the emperors and their families from the city of Rome. His reconstruction of the text reads as follows:

On the left side of the frieze:

On the right side:

And beneath these, in larger letters, running the entire length of the architrave:

That is, Alföldy suggests that the names and titles of the two dedicators will have appeared in shallow twin columns, side by side: ‘Tiberius Caesar, son of Augustus, grandson of the god (Julius), Claudianus, consul twice, imperator three times, in the seventh year of his tribunician power, pontifex’, and ‘Nero Claudius, son of Tiberius, Drusus Germanicus, stepson of Augustus, consul, imperator twice, augur’. And along the bottom, in a third line, the dedication concludes ‘rebuilt with their spoils the Temple of Pollux and Castor when it had been destroyed by fire’.

Alföldy's reconstruction is brilliant, based on encyclopedic knowledge of Roman, and especially Augustan, epigraphic language and conventions, and on minute attention to the size, shape, and position of both the surviving letters and the fragmentary stones on which they are inscribed. Most of what he suggests looks right, in the light of convention and close parallels, and it is argued with clarity and in great detail.Footnote ³³ But it is also bold, almost preposterous, since the original dedication is all but non-existent: the proposed reconstruction of its text runs to some 180 letters, of which a mere thirteen actually survive in whole or in part, on six scattered fragments. Moreover, serious doubts have recently been expressed, carefully but briefly, by Siri Sande, one of the excavators and principal publishers of the temple and its finds.Footnote ³⁴ Not least of these doubts are her agnosticism about the relationship of four of the six fragments to the temple, two of which may be too shallow for a structure of its size, and her belief that one of the two undoubted fragments has been wrongly located in Alföldy's reconstruction. But equally serious doubts can be raised in turn about Sande's objections, not least that her proposed single line text for the dedicatory inscription is impossible.Footnote ³⁵ Epigrapher and archaeologist look at the world with very different eyes, and the amateur stands at an impasse.

Much of Alföldy's proposed text must be right, that is, a major monument of Augustan Rome is inconceivable without the details of the nomenclature and titles of the dedicators in some form as he presents them, whatever the physical layout of the texts may have been. On the other hand, anything suggested by an epigrapher within brackets must be taken exempli gratia. Within this beckoning void an elastic variety of standard contractions may be called upon to fit the space available, precise numbers may give a false sense of security, and the longer the connected prose the less accurate the proposal is likely to be — thus here, for reasons presented earlier, the words incendio consumptam seem more than hazardous. Rather than accept the text of CIL VI.40339 as right or wrong, however, let us proceed on the assumption that it is good to think with. This is above all because of Alföldy's sharp-eyed observation and incorporation of known details the significance of which has gone unremarked. It must then be understood that nothing that follows here — nothing — depends on his reconstruction of the dedicatory inscription on Tiberius' temple: rather, his reconstruction reflects otherwise attested fact for three remarkable novelties. In its pristine condition, this was one of the largest known dedicatory inscriptions in the Roman world. It ran to over 27 metres and the letters in the bottom row were over half a metre high. Emblazoned across the façade of a major and popular temple at the very heart of the capital, it was meant to be seen.

First, on it Tiberius named himself Claudianus, so Dio tells us. We must believe him on this, for he took pointed care to note both the name and the reason for it. And of course the inscription was there for all to read in his day, any doubter could stroll down to the Forum to check it in person. It must have read Claudianus.

For the first forty-four years of his life Tiberius had been known as Tiberius Claudius Nero, the son of Tiberius. After his formal adoption by the Princeps on 26 June a.d. 4, his legal name for the rest of his days was Tiberius Julius Caesar, the son of Augustus. Invariably in literature and normally on inscriptions the family name Julius was omitted, and he was known by the austere and imposing abbreviation, Tiberius Caesar. After the death of his adoptive father in a.d. 14 he might even be known as Tiberius (or, sometimes, Tiberius Julius) Caesar Augustus. When adopted at Rome under the Republic, an adoptee took on the full name of his new father, but it was a common custom to retain a form of the original family name as an extra surname (cognomen or agnomen): thus, a Lucius Aemilius Paullus adopted by a Publius Cornelius Scipio became Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, known to all as Scipio Aemilianus; indeed, Tiberius' own grandfather, Livia's father, was a Claudius Pulcher adopted by a Livius Drusus, hence Marcus Livius Drusus Claudianus. But never, anywhere, in hundreds of Latin and Greek texts, literary, epigraphical, and papyrological, by himself or by anyone else, is Tiberius Caesar ever called Claudianus: only here.

The Roman Forum was the very centre of Roman history, and what Augustus had done with it over his decades in power well represents the heart of his programme, that is, he preserved and restored it as a living museum of Rome's glorious past while inserting himself everywhere as the culmination of that glory.Footnote ³⁶ He restored various emotive antiques, the Pool of Juturna itself, next to Castor and Pollux, the Black Stone outside the Senate House, the little shrine to Venus of the Sewers, all reminiscent of Rome's earliest days. But pious restoration was always put to use. The obscure Temple of Janus near the Senate House was transformed into the locus of a major ceremony, the forgotten ritual of closing its bronze doors when the Roman world was at peace: Augustus, the prince of peace, closed them three times, once more than in all previous history. On a huge triumphal arch at the eastern end of the Forum he listed all of the winners of triumphs and all of the consuls in Rome's glorious history: the arch was topped with a statue of Augustus, the winner of more triumphs and holder of more consulships than any previous Roman.

Indeed he converted the old political centre of Rome into a monument to himself and his family, for wherever you turned the prospect was dominated by Augustus. The Forum was, so to speak, Julianized. At the south-eastern end, facing the Capitol, stood the new temple to the Divine Julius, flanked by the triumphal arch of Augustus and a triumphal arch dedicated posthumously to his adopted son Gaius Caesar. Along the two sides of the Forum stood Rome's two largest administrative buildings, Julius Caesar's Basilica Julia, completely rebuilt after a fire and renamed for Augustus' sons, Gaius and Lucius Caesar, and the Basilica Paulli, now masked by a new portico likewise named after the two young Caesars. At the north-western end of the Forum stood the Rostra, adorned with the prows of ships captured over the centuries, which now acquired a golden statue of Augustus on horseback and the prows of ships captured at his victory at Actium. The Curia, the regular meeting place of the Senate, burned down after Caesar's death, was now the Julian Curia, with Augustus' name prominent on the façade. Inside was a statue of Victory, commemorating his victories in the civil wars and the golden shield listing his four cardinal virtues. The Forum as reconceived by Augustus was not a crude monument to his own achievements, it intertwined his own glory with the glories of the Roman past.

The reconstruction and dedication of the Temple of Castor marks a new stage. It too was a shrewd blend of the old and the new for, again, a completely new building replaced and yet continued a Republican structure. More precisely, it heralded the arrival of its builder in a suitably ambivalent way. At first glance, it fits the standard Augustan practice: a new Caesar, Tiberius, emerges for the first time on the monuments of the city, and the name of Augustus surely appeared on his inscription as father and stepfather of the dedicators.Footnote ³⁷ Yet the simple word ‘Claudianus’ shifts the balance forever, breaching the Julian monopoly of the Forum. It undercuts the adoption of Tiberius to emphasize his old natural family, an emphasis implicit in the whole structure, dedicated by two loving Claudian brothers to two loving brother gods.Footnote ³⁸

Before Tiberius, Augustus had adopted his two grandsons. Yet in no surviving text, literary or documentary, is there any hint of the names with which Gaius and Lucius Caesar were born, the sons of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa; that is, nowhere is either called Vipsanianus, or (since Agrippa had dropped the ‘Vipsanius’) Agrippa or Agrippianus. Augustus himself had been born Gaius Octavius and had taken, at the age of eighteen, the name of his great-uncle, through a dubious ‘testamentary adoption’, to become Gaius Julius Caesar and, although known briefly as Octavian — Cicero seems to be the only contemporary to call him by that name — on no public document does he ever bear the adoptive cognomen Octavianus. That is, Augustus systematically suppressed the memory of former family ties within the pseudo-Julian family he had created and imposed on the Forum. However by January of a.d. 6 he was sixty-eight years old and slowing down. Tiberius' unique addition of the adoptive Claudianus to his own name on one of Rome's central monuments in a.d. 6 emphatically marks the shift in power which had begun in a.d. 4. In fact it was not unique. Although the cognomen appears only here in our sources, it surely recurred once, in a.d. 10, when the same two loving brothers erected, at the other end of the Forum and dominating it, a similarly new-old temple from the same spoils and dedicated to a similarly fraternal ideal, Concord. The Claudians had arrived.Footnote ³⁹

There is a second anomaly in the dedicatory inscription from the Temple of Castor, one which verges on the bizarre — indeed we might take it for a joke, if a joke is conceivable set out in gilt letters half a metre high, towering over the façade of a grand public monument.

Suetonius tells us that from his German spoils Tiberius ‘also dedicated the Temple of Concord as well as that of Pollux and Castor in his own and his brother's name’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Pollux and Castor: not Castor and Pollux. Again, as with Dio above, we cannot doubt Suetonius: his manuscripts betray no sign of trouble, and again, any contemporary reader in Rome who had forgotten the monumental text could revisit it in the Forum.Footnote ⁴¹

The history of the temple's name is complex, not to say confusing. Under the Republic and Augustus, in Latin authors and inscriptions it was invariably called aedes or templum Castoris, the Temple of Castor, not the Temple of Castor and Pollux. Even the Romans thought this noteworthy. In 65 b.c., so the well-known anecdote ran, the curule aediles Julius Caesar and Marcus Bibulus produced games with public funds, but Caesar alone won all the popular goodwill. Bibulus then ruefully remarked that what had happened to Pollux happened to him, for just as the temple set up in the Forum to the twin brothers was called Castor's alone, so his own and Caesar's munificence was said to be Caesar's alone.Footnote ⁴² This anomaly can be explained by the assumption that the original fifth-century temple was dedicated to Castor alone — despite the much later legend of the Battle of Lake Regillus, and despite his being joined at a later date by Pollux in the temple (probably at its reconstruction in 117 b.c.), and for reasons unknown.Footnote ⁴³ The phenomenon of separate cults to one or other of the brothers is adequately attested in the Greek world, so the original anomaly is eminently plausible in the early fifth century b.c., but designation as the Temple of Castor alone, even after he had been joined there at some stage by his brother, and peculiar apparently to Rome, continues well into the Principate, again in both literature and epigraphy. Under the Principate it was also sometimes called the Temple of Castor and Pollux. But even then Castor might still subsume Pollux, as their shrine was occasionally called the Temple of the Castors, aedes Castorum, an arresting term, again peculiar to the cult at Rome, that the Romans never explained.Footnote ⁴⁴

This subordination of Pollux to Castor seems to reflect the way that people thought of the heavenly twins. Overwhelmingly, to the Romans as to us, they are ‘Castor-and-Pollux’: scores of literary references attest to this order, with the conjunctions ‘et’ or ‘ac’, or in lists of gods without conjunction. ‘Pollux-and-Castor’ are exceedingly rare. Before Tiberius they had appeared thus only twice, in Propertius and Ovid, and after him that order soon disappears.Footnote ⁴⁵ In short, whatever rare exceptions there might be, to the Romans of the Republic and early Principate the twins were Castor and Pollux and their temple was inevitably, for centuries, the Temple of Castor: whatever poetic variations there might be, to solemnly proclaim the popular Temple of Castor as the Temple of Pollux and Castor was contrary to a degree. The only plausible explanation of this contrarian order is that the comparison was not general, of pair with pair, but specific: Tiberius was proclaiming himself as Pollux the immortal and Drusus as Castor, the dead twin — a comparison rendered all the more pathetic, or ironic, in that it equated Castor, the mortal tamer of horses, with Drusus, who in one version of his end died because of a fall from his horse. The Temple of Pollux and Castor cries out for attention.

This leads to the third and strangest anomaly of all in its dedicatory inscription, one so obvious that it is invariably overlooked. As reconstructed, the text probably informed the world that, ‘They rebuilt with their spoils the Temple of Pollux and Castor’. As everyone agrees, EF were the last two letters of the text, since the fragment on which they are preserved fits into the right-hand end of the architrave, diminishing before the end, and they must represent the verb [r]ef(ecerunt), ‘they [that is, the two dedicators just named] rebuilt’. A good parallel lies in the dedicatory inscription repeated over each gate of the southern Italian town of Saepinum: ‘Ti. Claudius Ti. f. Nero pont. cos. II, [imp. I]I trib. potest. V / Nero Claudius Ti. f. Drusus Germ[anicus] augur cos. imp. II / murum portas turris d. s. p. f. c.’; or, with standard abbreviations expanded, ‘Tiberius Claudius, son of Tiberius, Nero, pontifex, twice consul, twice imperator, in the fifth year of his tribunician power, (and) Nero Claudius, son of Tiberius, Drusus Germanicus, augur, consul, imperator twice, took care that the wall, gates, and towers be built with their own money’. This unique text is dated by the iteration of Tiberius' tribunician power precisely to the year between late June 2 b.c. and late June 1 b.c., roughly six or seven years before the dedication of Pollux and Castor in Rome, and roughly six or seven years after Drusus' death.Footnote ⁴⁶ The final ‘c’, for curaverunt, confirms the refecerunt at Rome. That is, the Saepinum inscription and the enormous inscription at Rome both boldly proclaimed a grand fantasy, something that everyone knew to be untrue. Drusus did not pay for anything ‘from his own purse’, as proclaimed at Saepinum, or ‘out of the proceeds from his military spoils’: Drusus was dead. There is nothing like it in Roman history. Occasionally a dedication might be made posthumously, by relatives or friends of the dedicator, but never is his death, like that of Drusus, simply ignored.Footnote ⁴⁷

The rededication of the Temple of Castor to Pollux and Castor shows two complementary sides of Tiberius the notorious mythologist: the erudite and the practical. As an ardent lover of myth he knew the story of the Dioscuri, their joint life of constant warfare (beyond the violent adventures of the Calydonian boar hunt and the quest for the Golden Fleece, the brothers were invariably at war, raiding, harrying, liberating, laying waste). He knew of their immortal love for each other, the violent death of one, the grand sacrifice of the other to resurrect him. He also knew that amid the wildly varying accounts of the brothers' paternity and maternity, and that of their sister Helen, the one constant was that Pollux/Polydeukes was the son of the god Jupiter/Zeus (perhaps just as Tiberius was now the son of Augustus). And as an ardent lover of the obscure detail, he knew that Pollux was the elder brother.Footnote ⁴⁸ With his new temple he did precisely what Pollux had done for Castor: he made his dead younger brother immortal.

At the same time Tiberius knew as well as anyone the practical value of the myths of the heavenly twins to a Roman statesman, the saviour gods, benefactors of mankind, talismans of victory, beloved at Rome for five centuries, patrons of the knights, casually invoked by the people every day. The death of Drusus was a stroke of luck, his resurrection a stroke of genius. Whether he was so popular during his lifetime, whether he and his brother were so close, cannot be known. What is well attested is Augustus' much-vaunted love for his younger stepson, however posthumous, and his elaborate commemoration of his virtues. These played straight into Tiberius' hand, since the Princeps could hardly object to the public exhibition of fraternal piety by his own loyal son. How he played that hand — the jolting intrusion of the name ‘Claudianus’, the arresting inversion of Pollux and Castor, the reminder of the lost conquest of Germany in the spoils of Drusus ‘Germanicus’, the insistence that Drusus was not really dead, in short the whole great display of the heavenly twins — presents Tiberius the myth-maker as he crafts an original symbolic complex, a Claudian complex, from a popular ancient monument and a wildly popular dead hero. His notorious addiction to mythology mattered: he mastered Augustus at his own game.

IV

The gaps in Cassius Dio's account leave the chronological sequence unclear. When did Tiberius first conceive of the Claudians as Castor and Pollux? And more importantly, what happened to that conception after the erection of the two temples?

As to the first, there seems to be a piece of relevant evidence, a brief inscription from the theatre of Caesarea, the capital of the province of Judaea, discovered almost fifty years ago. As recently restored, again by Géza Alföldy, it can be read as follows:

How to understand this? As might be imagined, the epigraphic appearance of Pontius Pilate, the prefect of Judaea from a.d. 26 to 36, has stimulated an enormous bibliography.Footnote ⁴⁹ Controversy has engulfed the first line: what was the lost first word represented by the surviving ‘s’; and what was the ‘Tiberieum’ restored by Pilate?

Alföldy drew attention to two passages in Josephus, in which the historian wrote of King Herod's construction of his shining new city of Caesarea, built and named to honour Caesar Augustus. Its crowning glory was the great harbour (hence Maritima) which Josephus describes twice at admiring length. Part of this harbour's enormous breakwater was surmounted by a stone wall: ‘From this wall arose, at intervals, massive towers, the loftiest and most magnificent of which was called Drusion after the step-son of Caesar’, to which is added, in his other version of the same account, ‘he died young’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The loftiest tower should correspond, as the archaeologists have recognized, to a structure the remains of which lie at the end of the southern breakwater of the harbour (now under water), and which presumably served as a lighthouse. Alföldy argued forcefully that this Drous(e)ion, in Latin ‘Druseum’, must have had a pendant, on the northern breakwater, the ‘Tiberieum’ of the Pilate inscription. He then drew attention to Josephus' remark that Herod dedicated this safe haven to the sailors there, tois ploizomenois, and that gives us the correct restoration of the word lost at the beginning of the Pilate inscription: [nauti]s, the Latin equivalent, which neatly fills the space available. Hence the inscription is to be read: ‘Pontius Pilatus, prefect of Judaea, restored the Tiberieum for the sailors.’ Not only is this elegant, it is must be correct.Footnote ⁵¹

More speculative is the corollary, again drawn by Alföldy, that Drusus and Tiberius were being compared by King Herod, as the author of the Consolation to Livia would compare them, with the ‘harmonious stars’, the brothers Castor and Pollux, in their rôle as the protectors of sailors at sea: the lighthouses, named after the two Claudian brothers, beckoned mariners with their starry light into their safe haven. Werner Eck subsequently pointed out that the great lighthouse at Alexandria is said to have been dedicated ‘to the Saviour Gods on behalf of the sailors’. That is to say, in his ambitious new harbour works at Caesarea Herod consciously recalled the dedication of the Pharos, the lighthouse par excellence of antiquity, to Kastor and Polydeuces, the savers of sailors in distress.Footnote ⁵²

The association of Tiberius and Drusus with the heavenly twins is attractive indeed and would lead to a reasonable date. There is no hint that Tiberius and Drusus were in any way compared with Pollux and Castor before the death of Drusus — indeed the death of a brother ought to be the precipitating event. Drusus died in 9 b.c., King Herod in 4 b.c.: these would give us the terminal dates for the conception.Footnote ⁵³ As Dio tells us, Tiberius announced his intention to build the Temple of Concord on 1 January 7 b.c., in his own and his brother's name. Again, Dio does not inform us when the Temple of the ‘Dioscuri’ was vowed, but it too was dedicated in the name of the Claudian brothers, while Suetonius likewise links the temples as dedicated in the brothers' names and as paid for by their manubiae. And we can see that both temples proclaim aspects of concord. There is no proof then, and the silence of Dio is problematic, but it seems most likely that the Temples of Concordia and Pollux et Castor were conceived as a pair, and the glorious idea of comparing himself and his brother to the twin gods came to Tiberius in the year 8 b.c., very soon after Drusus died.Footnote ⁵⁴ Among the grim portents of his death was the appearance of the two superhuman youths riding through his camp in Germany: Castor and Pollux, come not to announce victory but, horrifyingly, to take the young prince away. Did Tiberius the mythographer exploit, perhaps even invent, this tale?

The notion is speculative, dependent on the dedication of the Pharos of Alexandria to the Dioskouroi, but the evidence for that is uncertain, and then on the hypothetical Tiberian and Drusian lighthouses at Caesarea Maritima.Footnote ⁵⁵ The later development and significance of Tiberius' heavenly twins is much clearer. What came of it all, what was the power of their myth at Rome?

As we might expect, loyal contemporaries celebrated the connection of Castor and Pollux with the Claudian brothers. In his Fasti, under 27 January, Ovid wrote of the new shrine: ‘The sixth day before the next Kalends a temple was dedicated to Ledaean gods. Brothers from a family of gods founded it for the brother gods near Juturna's pool.’ Similarly, the author of the Consolation to Livia: ‘Add too the Ledaean brethren, concordant stars, and the temples conspicuous in the Roman Forum. … Yet — woe is me! — Drusus will never see his bounty nor read his name upon the temple's front. Often will Nero weeping humbly say: “Why brotherless, alas!, do I approach the brother gods?”’ The two poets were writing within a decade or so of the dedication of the temple, while not much later Valerius Maximus would make the comparison with Castor and Pollux explicit in prose.Footnote ⁵⁶ But there is much more here than the flattery of courtiers and literary men. With Castor and Pollux Tiberius, the reserved and sardonic patrician who detested crowds, continues to reveal the shrewd politician, associating himself and his family with the popular heavenly twins through his equally popular dead brother.Footnote ⁵⁷

The connection had an impact on the turbulent political situation at Rome in a.d. 6. In that year Augustus faced great public upheaval, touched off by an unpopular tax he had imposed to fund his new military treasury, and exacerbated by a severe grain shortage and widespread fires. ‘This lasted’, Dio tells us,

The gladiatorial games are juxtaposed by Dio with the dedication of the temple, and we should assume that the two were part of one celebration: why else hold memorial games thirteen years after the death of the man honoured? Not only did they serve to remind the people of their lost hero, they presented his sons and heirs, both called Germanicus in his honour, and they underscored the closeness of Tiberius and Drusus, for Tiberius had adopted his elder nephew, Germanicus, now nineteen and quaestor designate, on the same day that he himself had been adopted by Augustus. In the midst of turmoil, the people were comforted.

When Tiberius was adopted by Augustus in a.d. 4, he brought with him two sons, the adopted Germanicus and his own Drusus: almost the same age, from then on the two new brothers were known as Germanicus Caesar and Drusus Caesar. Ovid took the hint. The poet who had linked Tiberius and Drusus with the refounding of the temple of the twin gods in the Forum, shifted the association to the next generation. Writing from exile in far off Tomis during Augustus' final years, he referred to Germanicus and Drusus as ‘your grandsons, the young stars’. Later, he was more explicit in his imagined recreation of Tiberius' triumph over the Pannonians and Dalmatians, which was celebrated on 23 October a.d. 12: as Tiberius proceeded, ‘his dutiful offspring [Germanicus and Drusus Caesar], along with you [the poet's friends, Messalla and Cotta Messallinus], accompanied him, worthy of their parent and of the names given to them, similar to those brothers, occupants of the nearby temple [that is, Pollux and Castor] whom the Divine Julius observes from his lofty shrine.’Footnote ⁵⁹

Germanicus died in a.d. 19, but in 20 by a happy chance twin sons were born to Drusus Caesar and his wife Livilla, the sister of Germanicus: Tiberius Julius Caesar and Germanicus Julius Caesar. The normally taciturn Tiberius was so overcome with joy that he could not restrain himself from boasting to the Senate that never before had any Roman of such rank been blessed with twin sons. In a.d. 23 the mint at Rome issued some remarkable coins, depicting the heads of two little boys facing each other set atop crossed cornucopias, with a caduceus in between, both symbols of good luck.Footnote ⁶⁰ The hint was taken up in the Greek-speaking provinces. Coins at Cyrene and Corinth portray the brothers, the latter as ‘the twin Caesars’. An alert citizen at Salamis, in Cyprus, proclaimed himself ‘priest of Tiberius for life and of the twin sons of Drusus Caesar, Tiberius and Germanicus Caesar’. Best of all, a private cult was likewise established in Ephesus, dedicated to ‘the new Dioscuri, the sons of Drusus Caesar’.Footnote ⁶¹ Hopes were dashed all too soon when, to his grandfather's grief, the younger twin died some time in a.d. 23, the same year as his father Drusus. Curiously, his surviving brother came to be known informally as Tiberius Gemellus, Tiberius the Twin, a reminder of what might have been.Footnote ⁶²

The evidence for the association of the heavenly twins with the emerging Claudian dynasty is sparse but clear, and there is one overlooked tale that brilliantly illustrates just how deeply meaningful it was for the people of Rome.

In his Natural History, Pliny tells a marvellous story. Talking birds are the subject, and he comes to the raven:

The emotional intensity of the People is astonishing. As the tale would have it, the killer is ostracized and indeed murdered. A bird is honoured with elaborate obsequies, complete with flutist, flowers, appropriately dark pallbearers, procession, and cremation — all this in an age when many of the mourners might expect no funeral for themselves. Much more is at stake than the loss of a favourite popular performer, which would soon have died in the course of nature. The physical setting in the heart of Rome is key. The bird is accepted as a guest by the cobbler out of piety, religione commendatus, before ever it begins to speak: it has come, after all, from Castor and Pollux. And, when it does quickly learn to talk, it does not perform in the shop. It flies rather to the other end of the Forum to address the world from, of all places, the Speakers' Platform — sensation! — and there, directly in front of the Temple of Concord, the messenger from the gods loyally salutes the dynasty.

But the uncanny aspect of the incident is this. After deploring the whole affair, Pliny gives us a precise date for it: ‘hoc gestum M. Servilio C. Cestio cos. a.d. kal. V Apriles’, the raven's funeral took place on 28 March a.d. 35. Now Germanicus Caesar had departed from Rome as long ago as a.d. 17, and he had died in Antioch on 10 October a.d. 19. Drusus Caesar died at Rome on 14 September a.d. 23. Tiberius himself left the capital in a.d. 26 and never set foot within the pomerium again. That is, for several years, plures annos, the raven saluted two long dead princes and a long absent Princeps. In a.d. 6, the people had been consoled in their affliction by the games and the temple that honoured Drusus, their fallen hero. Now, three decades later, they honoured the talisman of his departed family and his gods, and (whether true or not) they drove out and murdered its destroyer. Their devotion in life and death is amazing: with it we catch a glimpse into a world we have lost, but one that Tiberius understood.Footnote ⁶⁴

V

Suetonius records three omens predicting Tiberius' death two years later. The first was a straightforward prophetic dream on his last birthday, 16 November a.d. 36: he had brought a famed statue of Apollo from Syracuse to set up in the library of a new temple of the divine Augustus, and the statue had warned him in the dream that it would not be dedicated by him. The second was the collapse of the lighthouse on Capri in an earthquake a few days before he died, 16 March a.d. 37. And the third was the curious behaviour of a brazier at Misenum, with no date specified but surely in his last days there. ‘At Misenum the ashes from the glowing coals and embers which had been brought in to warm his dining-room, after they had died out and been for a long time cold, suddenly blazed up in the early evening and glowed without cessation until late at night.’Footnote ⁶⁵

As to the second of these portents, Suetonius' Latin reads turris phari, with ‘pharus’ being taken to mean lighthouse, referring to the lighthouse, the famous Pharos at Alexandria.Footnote ⁶⁶ In his recent exhaustive study of the ruins of the ‘Villa Jovis’ on Capri, Clemens Krause has argued that it was indeed modelled on the famous lighthouse of Alexandria, but there is a surprise. The Pharus of Tiberius is not to be identified, as it commonly is, with the remains of the rather small, so-called ‘Torre del Faro’ near the modern entrance to the site, if only because the massive villa itself, lying directly to the north, would have blocked a large segment of its light from the Bay of Naples. (This conclusion seems to be right and has been accepted by reviewers.) Rather the Pharus should be seen as a much, much larger structure which dominated the far end of the great ambulatio to the north-west of the villa. Its ruins are meagre, but calculating from the impressive dimensions of the rectangular base of this so-called ‘Loggia della Marina’ — assuming a length of 49 m for the outer walls, which appear to have been over 4 m thick — Krause offers the striking deduction that the multi-storied structure, far from being a mere model or small-scale replica, rivalled in height and dimensions the great Pharos of Alexandria itself. That is, it would have towered some 300 feet above the cliff top, which itself loomed just over 1,000 feet above the sea. To judge from the extent of its platform and the thickness of its foundation walls, the structure must have been enormous, dwarfing even the massive villa. If not the Pharus of Tiberius, it is very difficult indeed to imagine just what else it might have been.Footnote ⁶⁷

Like their great model at Alexandria, ancient lighthouses signalled harbours, havens for sailors, more often than dangerous coastlines. Tiberius' Pharus, perched high on a sheer and soaring cliff really did neither: rather it drew attention to itself and the fabulous, many-storied palace of the supposed recluse who lived in its shadow. An enormous lighthouse of little practical importance, perhaps 300 feet high and visible from afar, erected on his private estate by a princeps who shunned extravagance, should be something more than a general symbol of imperial benevolence. Like the dedicatory inscription on his temples at Rome, it demanded attention. If it did bear a special meaning to him and the world, how better to remember the Saviour Gods whose kindly symbol the Pharos was, the heavenly models for the brothers Claudius?

The evidence for that symbol is, admittedly, slim. There is no doubt of the rôle of the Dioskouroi as the great saviours of sailors in peril at sea. And, intimately connected with this, there is also no doubt of the twins' close identification with what is now known as St Elmo's Fire: that is in the midst of storms at sea they appeared with their twin stars (which are repeatedly described as flames) to play harmlessly and reassuringly about the masts of ships in danger and to calm the threatening seas.Footnote ⁶⁸ Was the security of their heavenly fire around the masts at sea extended to that offered to mariners by the flame on high in a lighthouse? That seems plausible but, against all the references to St Elmo's Fire reassuring seafarers in storms at sea, there is only one to a lighthouse beckoning them to a safe haven. That is precisely Lucian's version of the dedicatory inscription on the Pharos of Alexandria: ‘Sostratos, the son of Dexiphanes, the Cnidian, dedicated this to the Saviour Gods on behalf of those who sail the seas.’ Doubts have been expressed about its reliability: Lucian lived half a millennium after the Pharos was dedicated; Strabo appears to give a different version of the text; other ‘saviour gods’ have been proposed, perhaps all of the sea gods, perhaps the reigning Ptolemies. But against this it can be urged that Lucian saw what he saw, indeed reported it in a work on how to write history; Strabo's version does not contradict his; and there is overwhelming evidence that ‘Theoi Soteres’ without further definition would evoke the divine twins before any other divinities.Footnote ⁶⁹

Lucian's text is offered in support of his contention that history ought to be written not for the present generation but for eternity, and as such it concludes the tale of the inscription on the Pharos, which recorded the name of the king in plaster which was intended to fall off over time to reveal that of Sostratus in stone beneath. The fable is unlikely, but what of the text? Hundreds of Lucian's readers had seen the inscription, including some of the most learned men in the world, and it was there for all to observe: how or why would he get it wrong? Indeed, he draws our attention to the physical text visible in his own day, in commenting on Sostratus' aim: ‘In this way not even he was looking to the immediate present or his own brief lifetime, but forward to our time and to eternity, as long as the tower stands and his skill survives.’Footnote ⁷⁰

If we are then justified in accepting that Lucian's text of the inscription on the great Pharos in his day is accurate, and that the Saviour Gods are who they should be, Kastor and Polydeukes, it maps neatly on to the only known near-life-size replica of the lighthouse, the enormous Pharus on Capri almost two centuries later, the construction of a Princeps known for his close personal identification with Castor and Pollux.Footnote ⁷¹ The collapse of the latter structure would then indeed be an especially fitting portent of the imminent end of the surviving brother.

Its personal significance to Tiberius is signalled by the flaring up of the ashes over at Misenum. The tale of that phenomenon must have been inspired by a Claudian family tradition, as recorded by Suetonius of the Princeps:

The two portents are clearly opposites: if the lamp dying out without human intervention is an omen of success for a Claudian, the brazier reviving without human intervention should foretell disaster.Footnote ⁷³ This small flame at Misenum is then intimately connected with the history of the second Princeps. So too, we may now suspect, was the great flame of his lighthouse on Capri. When both were extinguished, the surviving brother departed and brought to an end his new tale of the heavenly twins.