Conspiracies of Rome (10 page)

    Now to our lodgings. Back in Canterbury, Maximin had been given an introduction to some monastery nearby the old Praetorian Camp. This would give us a floor to sleep on and our bare fill. But we had gone somewhat up in the world in the past few days, and Maximin saw no sinful indulgence in revising our arrangements.

    ‘Let us give our places to some other poor souls who cannot afford what God has placed within our reach,’ he’d explained in Tarquini, as he sent ahead. ‘So long as we do not enjoy it to the exclusion of our spiritual needs,’ he’d added with a monitory wave of his finger, ‘it is our duty to take what luxury God has made possible.’

    ‘Indeed,’ I said, with an attempt at meekness. I was wondering where the brothels might be, and what excuses I’d be able to make to get away from Maximin.

    Luxury for him was the house of Marcella on the Caelian Hill, with a fair view from its roof down to the southeastern wall and the country beyond. Looking away from this, one could see the still noble shell of the Imperial Palace on the Palatine.

    Usefully close to the Lateran, the house was a sizeable place, in a district still populated and reasonably wealthy and therefore unruined. Two storeys high, it was built around a central garden. The external walls were as blank and windowless as a fortress’s. There was a double gate in, which showed that Rome had never been a very peaceful city. Other similar houses lined the street on both sides. The paving stones were unbroken, and were kept clear of weeds and rubbish.

    All within was delightful. The rooms were light and airy. There was fresh plaster on many of the walls. The furniture was ill-matched, having been picked up in various auctions. But, unformed as my taste then was in such matters, I could see that many pieces were of remarkable workmanship. I was most struck by a table in the entrance hall – ebony legs in the shape of caryatids, the top a single sheet of blue glass two inches thick. Rather big even for that big hall, it supported a crystal vase filled every day with freshly cut flowers.

    In Richborough, we’d all lived in one big room. In Canterbury, I’d slept in a dormitory with the other monks, and it had needed great care not to wake the others as I went out for my nightly exercise with Edwina. Otherwise, I’d slept in common rooms in taverns, in monasteries, or by the side of the road with Maximin. Now, I had my own suite of rooms on the upper floor. I entered through a door with a lock that led off a corridor. Within, I had a fine living chamber, where I could eat and work if I felt disinclined to share my company. Through a connecting doorway was a bedroom – with a bed, with a mattress, with linen coverings, with a lead chamber pot underneath.

    ‘Piss only in there, if you please,’ Marcella had said when I drew it out. ‘We use it for bleaching the clothes.’

    Through another door was my own bathroom. At the time, the Claudian Aqueduct was back in a semblance of working order, and the house drew water from it. There was no longer any furnace to heat the water in the main bathhouse downstairs, but I could have a bath whenever I pleased to have the slaves bring up cold water. In his own suite, across the corridor, Maximin sniffed at the idea of a cold bath. But a childhood spent swimming in the sea off Richborough had prepared me for the very gentle chill of the Roman water supply.

    But I haven’t described the toilets! These were in a low building in a corner of the garden. There was a bank of five stone seats, each one in the shape of an omega. You sat yourself down. You shat. You reached through the opening between your legs and cleaned yourself with a vinegary sponge on a stick. I could see there used to be a time when the shit and piss fell into a little channel and was washed away into sewers that led down to the Tiber. Nowadays, though, the water hadn’t the pressure to reach here, and so buckets were placed under the seats and emptied before they could overflow.

    It was delightful! I’d never imagined such delicacy of living. The poets and sermonisers I’d read had declaimed against warm baths and silken sheets. But none had thought to mention this. It must have been to them an accepted fact of civilisation. Never was cleanliness made easier or more elegant.

    ‘Right, my lad,’ said I as I sat sponging myself for the first time, ‘it’ll need more than for Ethelbert to change his mind before you set foot in boring, dumpy old England again.’

I have no idea how old Marcella was. With her scrawny arms and black wig and hard, painted face, she could have been anywhere between fifty and eighty. She tyrannised her slaves and as many of her guests as she could terrify into line.

    ‘This is a respectable house for respectable guests,’ she’d said as she’d showed us round. ‘I’ll have no excessive drinking in the rooms, nor any gambling, nor male or female callers after dark.

    ‘And you can keep your hands off my slaves!’

    This last was thrown in my direction. I took my eyes off one of the maids who was scrubbing the steps down to the garden, her tits bobbling most provocatively, and tried to look demure. But my amorous propensities were well and truly excited, and I marked that girl down for a delivery of bread and cheese or whatever to my room as soon as the Pleiades had set around the midnight hour. I’d not lie alone that night, I was sure.

    Before dying in one of the plagues, Marcella’s husband had been a middling imperial official. She’d then had the house adapted for paying guests, and had managed very well ever since. Her guests were a mixed lot – merchants from the East, the poorer sorts of diplomat, officials on business from Constantinople who didn’t fancy being put up in what was left of the Imperial Palace. With her rates, and assuming a three-quarter occupancy, she must have taken about three pounds of gold a year, of which two-thirds could have been profit. In a city like Constantinople or Alexandria, this would have bought solid comfort. In Rome, where coin was short outside the Church, it let her put on all manner of airs and graces, and think herself the equal of the ancient senators.

    ‘Of course, we fair dote on learning in my house,’ she’d said, throwing open the door to her library.

    Also on the upper floor, the library was across the garden, just opposite my rooms. About fifty volumes, with scorched covers and water-stained pages, her collection was an incongruous mass. I don’t doubt she’d got that too at auction – a job lot of stuff collected from ruined houses after one of the sieges or internal riots. Much of it, not surprisingly, was religious. Some of it, though, was of interest for me. I took down some volumes translated from Greek on mathematical theory, together with a brief work on the construction of drains. Marcella saw me and pulled out a papyrus notebook.

    ‘Your name and the title, if you please,’ she said briskly. ‘I find this avoids much unpleasantness.’

    She looked at my name and pulled a face sour even by her standards. ‘Where are you from?’ she asked. ‘You’re not a barbarian, surely?’

    ‘He is a good Christian boy from the old province of Britain,’ Maximin hastily explained. ‘He is my secretary, and will assist in the collection of more books for the missionary libraries there.’

    She sniffed and launched into a long boast about some remote ancestor of one of her late husband’s cousins – a senator, she claimed, who’d run a chain of wine shops in London. I forget the details of all this. Its burden, though, was that she distrusted barbarians and refused to have them as guests.

    Though it still exists in the Empire, this distinction between barbarian and citizen has broken down in Italy. When I was first there, though, it was still sharply drawn. You can imagine I was somewhat put out by having it drawn against me. I only felt happier with Marcella when, shortly after, she took in a whole party of Franks, accepting their silver with what passed with her for a happy smile.

    While I recovered my composure, she prosed on about a London she seemed to have confused with somewhere in Africa. She was cut short by one of the household slaves. There was a man at the door, asking for Maximin. A slave, he was shown into one of the common rooms on the ground floor. The urban prefect awaited us at our earliest convenience.

    ‘I wonder what took him so long?’ Maximin grunted.

11

In olden times, the city had been governed from the Basilica built by Constantine. In those days, the urban prefect had enjoyed dominion in the emperor’s name over Rome and its external suburbs. The prefect sat there still – though his correct title even then, I think, had changed to duke of Rome – and we hurried to be in his presence.

    We repassed the Colosseum after coming down from the Caelian. It made anyone beside it look like an ant. It dwarfed even the huge buildings that surrounded it. I wanted to stop and look at it, but Maximin said we were in a hurry.

    ‘We can have a little tour once our business is finished,’ he said soothingly, as I looked about within this massive landscape of stone and brick. I wanted to run about, looking at everything. I wanted to see what shops there might be, and what was in them for sale. To look properly about this great city would take months, and then there would still be much to see. I wanted to make a start. Seeing some imperial official, to say who we were and get his formal consent to our remaining in the place, struck me as a dry and almost useless proceeding.

    But Maximin had fussed about in his room with documents, and insisted I shouldn’t put on my fine suit. Then we’d come straight out. Now we were hurrying past things of endless interest.

    The Basilica was a block further down on our left, just before the main Forum. It was interesting in itself. Being the main government building, it had suffered in the general sacks by the Goths and Vandals, but had escaped the more continuous predations of the Roman people. Therefore, it retained all its marble facing and most of the bronze tiles on its roof. The Basilica was adorned in the manner usual for ancient buildings – marble portico, colonnades, niches for statues, and so forth. But the dominant feature was its immense size. It sat on a sheet of concrete three hundred feet long and two hundred wide. Raised on each side of the width were a line of barrel vaults extending down the length. Connecting these was a great central vaulted nave, two hundred and fifty feet long, eighty wide, and a hundred and twenty high. Still smaller than the Colosseum, the building towered over us as we approached. Two giants walking abreast could have entered through the main bronze door.

    The great hall inside was a shimmering mass of many-coloured marbles, lit from windows high up in the vaults. At the far end sat a colossal statue of Constantine. There were still traces of gold leaf on the upper parts. But even bare and white, it was an impressive sight. The head alone was bigger than most houses. To the right and left of the hall, staircases led to warrens of offices and smaller public rooms. On each side, about fifty feet up, were long galleries giving an overall view of the hall.

    As we entered, the prefect sat before the statue of Constantine. A small man with a dark beard and a white robe fringed with purple, he was hearing a law case. Beside him on stands were icons of the emperor and empress. Slightly away from these, though at the same height, was an icon of the pope. In front of him, their clients in cowed silence, two lawyers were arguing at interminable length about some defective building works.

    As we sat unobtrusively by one of the smaller statues, I gathered that the plaintiff had engaged the defendants to repair a drain. But as nobody in Rome nowadays knew anything about the correct gradient for water, there had been a flood and the plaintiff’s house had been undermined. Now the lawyers were making the most of the work put their way. Listening to their slow, turgid delivery, I was unable to work out if they were being paid by the word uttered or by the time needed to utter their words.

    Otherwise, the hall was empty. It had plainly been built with crowds in mind. The prefect would once have sat among a vast concourse of litigants and petitioners, all jostling and shouting for his attention. Now he sat almost alone. There hadn’t even been beggars outside. The sunbeams moved slowly across the dusty, tiled floor, and the lawyers droned on.

    I coughed. The sound echoed round the empty hall. The prefect looked up from his doze, saw us and stood.

    ‘This is a case of gross negligence,’ he said in the very correct Latin of someone who has learnt it as a foreign language. The exarch had recently taken to appointing Greek officials to the post, there being so few Romans willing or competent to discharge the remaining duties.

    ‘I give judgement for the plaintiff. I will settle the damages in my written judgement, which you will receive on the Ides of next month. You can pay the appropriate clerking fee as you leave. You are all dismissed.’

    With that, he was walking quickly over to us, his legal business forgotten. One of the litigants cried out in a thick German accent that he hadn’t received justice. He had used the best engineers available, and could show the receipts. He would be taking his case to the Lateran, where justice went on the merits of the case, not the size of the bribe. The prefect ignored this.