Empire (90 page)

“Thank you.” Marcus was irritated by the man’s flippancy but managed a gracious nod.

“Almost as bright, if I may say so, as that curious bauble at your breast. How the gold catches the sunlight!”

Marcus reached up to touch the fascinum, which on this day he was wearing outside his toga, for all to see, since this was the last occasion on which he would ever wear it.

“You’ll excuse me now,” he said. “I need to go to my son.”

Hadrian was already conducting the two young men to a private chamber just off the Auguratorium. For the ceremony that was to follow, Marcus had requested that no witnesses be present except the emperor and young Verus.

The small, quiet room was sparsely decorated. Dominating one wall was a bust of Antinous set in a niche. This, too, had been Marcus’s request, that the only image present should that of the Divine Youth.

While the emperor and Verus stood to one side, Marcus approached his son. Now that the public ceremony was over, Lucius looked quite relaxed. He smiled as Marcus lifted the chain over his neck and held the fascinum aloft.

“My son, you’ve seen this amulet many times, hanging from my neck. Before me, my father wore it, and before him, his father. The fascinum has been in our family for many generations, even before the founding of the city. It has protected us, guided us, given us strength in times of trouble. You are a man now, with all the uncertainties of life ahead of you. On this day, I wish to pass the fascinum to you, so that you may never face those uncertainties alone. As it has guided me, so let it now guide you. And just as it was given to me in the presence of the emperor—the Divine Trajan—so I wish to give it to you, here before Caesar.”

Marcus placed the chain over his son’s head. It was strange to see the gold talisman glimmering upon another breast, and for a moment Marcus felt a pang of regret. Had his father felt the same regret when he gave up the fascinum? If so, he had never spoken of it, and neither would Marcus.

For a hour or so, before the banquet was to begin, the young men were left to themselves.

“I don’t know about you,” said Verus, “but I’m taking off this toga and changing into something less cumbersome.”

“You shall just have to put it on again for the banquet,” said Lucius. “Besides, I have nothing to change into.”

“You can wear one of my tunics, though it may be a bit short for you.
No matter, we’re men now, and allowed to show our legs. Let’s go to my rooms.”

A statue of Minerva met them as they entered Verus’s apartments. Around a corner, a bust of Socrates had pride of place upon a pedestal. On the ceilings and walls there were no paintings of warfare or scenes of seduction, or of maidens dancing or gladiators fighting; indeed, there were no paintings at all. The walls had been colored a placid sky blue, a color that was conducive to study and philosophical discussion, according to Verus.

As they discarded their togas and put on tunics, Verus’s attention was drawn to the fascinum at his friend’s breast. He asked to touch it.

“Can it really be as old as your father says?”

“So the Divine Claudius believed.”

Verus nodded gravely. “Few men were more knowledgeable about the distant past than the Divine Claudius. How remarkable, that this object must have been in existence in the days of King Numa, and even before, in the age when demigods like Hercules walked the earth. What a wondrous thing, that you have this link to your ancestors. One of them must have worn it when Hannibal and his elephants crossed the Alps, and another when the Divine Julius was slain by assassins. Where will you keep it when you’re not wearing it?”

“You’ve seen the shrine in the vestibule of our house. Among the niches that display the wax masks of the ancestors, there’s one niche where we keep a small capsa that contains all the letters my grandfather received from Apollonius of Tyana, and the manacle that Apollonius cast off, and a small bust of Antinous made by my father. That’s where the fascinum is kept.”

Verus nodded. He had asked and been allowed to read the letters from Apollonius, but had been rather disappointed by them. A great teacher Apollonius must have been; a great writer he was not. The letters were nothing more than brief messages of encouragement, enthusiastic but without any philosophical content, and frequently ungrammatical. The manacle had impressed Verus even less; it looked like any rusty piece of iron, and he secretly wondered if it was genuine. As for Antinous, Verus did not share Hadrian’s fascination for beautiful young males, and, though he was too
circumspect to say so, he had little enthusiasm for the cult of the Divine Youth.

But the fascinum was another matter. To Verus it seemed a truly wondrous object, a repository of all the mysteries of the past, all the more intriguing because time had worn away its features yet was powerless to diminish its golden luster.

Lucius had shown him the fascinum. It seemed to Verus that he should show his friend something equally marvelous. “Follow me,” he said.

They made their way to a part of the imperial palace that Lucius had never seen before. It soon became evident that they had entered a forbidden area; in a whisper, Verus told him to be silent, and whenever anyone passed, Verus pulled him out of sight.

They came to a locked door. To Lucius’s amazement, Verus produced a small metal device and proceeded to pick the lock.

They proceeded down a long hallway and came to another locked door, which Verus picked with equal ease.

Once inside, Verus quietly closed the door behind them. They were in a stone vault. Narrow slits set high in the walls admitted bright beams of sunlight. Even before his eyes adjusted to the dimness that swallowed most of the room, Lucius saw that it was lined to the height of his waist with wooden cabinets, and atop the cabinets were objects that shone with bright points of colored light.

“This is the jewel room,” Verus whispered.

Surrounding them was a vast collection of gemstones. Most were stored inside the cabinets, but some of the more spectacular examples were displayed on stands or hung on the wall or simply lay atop the cabinets, left there by Hadrian or Sabina or whatever courtier was allowed to handle such precious objects. Some were cut into cameos. Some were faceted and set as jewels into necklaces or bracelets of silver and gold. Some were in their natural state. There were rubies and sapphires, emeralds and lapis lazuli, amethyst and jasper, carnelian and agate, tiger’s-eye and amber.

“Hadrian didn’t acquire all these in his travels, did he?” whispered Lucius.

“Oh, no. These have been collected by generations of emperors. Nero ended up in such dire straits that he sold off most of the gems he inherited,
but Vespasian and his successors managed to recover many of them. Do you see that carnelian necklace? Queen Cleopatra was wearing it the day she died. Augustus was furious that she killed herself, and took it off her with his own hands, as a trophy.”

“I never imagined such a collection existed.” Lucius was astounded by the treasure. He had seen the emperor’s sprawling villa go up at Tibur. He had stood beside his father at the dedications of the Temple of Venus and Roma and of the Pantheon, the largest and grandest buildings ever constructed. That the wealth of Hadrian was immense he had always known, but now, gazing at the splendors that surrounded him, he realized that the emperor’s fortune surpassed all reckoning.

“Very few people have ever seen this room,” said Verus. “Even fewer have seen this.” He opened a cabinet and pulled out a stone that he held between two fingers, thrusting it into the nearest beam of sunlight.

To Lucius, it seemed that the stone must have come from a world of dreams. It was octahedral and as large as a walnut. The stone was transparent yet captured the light and cast it back again in a dazzling array of colors. Lucius had never seen anything like it.

“It’s called a diamond,” said Verus. “This is by far the largest and most perfect specimen ever found. It’s not only beautiful but indestructible. Fire will not burn it. No blade can cut it.”

“Where did it come from?”

“We think Domitian acquired it. He had such a penchant for secrecy that no one knows its history, but it must have come from India, which is the source of all true diamonds. Nerva presented it to Trajan as a sign of his favor. Trajan presented it to Hadrian as a reward for leading the First Legion Minerva. It’s the rarest jewel in all the collection, which means in all the world.”

“It’s amazing,” said Lucius.

“I myself have little interest in gemstones,” said Verus, “or in any of the other trappings of wealth. Material objects possess no intrinsic value, only that which men assign to them. And yet, when I gaze upon a thing as beautiful and perfect as this, I think it must in some way be a manifestation of that which Apollonius called the Divine Singularity.”

“I could stare at it for hours,” said Lucius. “Thank you for showing it to me.”

Verus smiled. “And yet, the most precious thing in this room is not this diamond, but that object you wear upon your breast.”

“Do you really think so?” Lucius looked down at the fascinum, which seemed to him a fragile, crudely fashioned thing compared to the adamantine perfection of the diamond. He could scarcely believe that Verus was serious, but it was not like his friend to joke about such a thing.

“I truly think so. I speak not just as Marcus Verus, your friend, but as Verissimus, who loves Truth above all else.”

The month of Junius had been uncommonly hot. The month of Julius promised to be even hotter. Wearing his toga and wiping sweat from his brow, Marcus Pinarius made his way to the imperial palace in answer to the emperor’s summons.

He was sweating because the day was hot, he told himself; a man in his fifties should be carried in a sedan on such a day rather than travel on foot. But in fact, Marcus was also quite nervous. He had not seen the emperor for months, and these days, a summons to the palace was a cause not for celebration but for grave misgivings. Hadrian was now sixty-two. His health was rapidly declining, and his illness had brought out a dangerous, even murderous side of his personality. The vow he had made more than twenty years ago to kill no senators had fallen by the wayside. An atmosphere of gloom and fear had settled over everyone who had dealings with the emperor.

Marcus was conducted not to a reception hall but to the emperor’s private quarters. The courtier left him in a room with a balcony perched above a garden. The bright sunlight from the balcony at first blinded Marcus to the contents of the room; only gradually did he perceive the sumptuous furnishings, the elegant statues, the paintings on the walls—and the fact that he was not alone. A figure in silhouette was seated on a couch with his back to the sunlight. For a moment, Marcus mistook the man for Hadrian—his hair and beard were much the same—but the man’s posture was that of a younger man. Marcus gasped, thinking for just an instant that he was seeing Ceionius, who had died on the Kalends of Januarius. It
was rumored that the man’s lemur still lingered in the palace, held back by the anguish of Hadrian’s mourning.

But this man was older than Ceionius had been, and younger than Hadrian—perhaps in his forties—and he appeared to be in the best of health, despite the strained look on his face. “You must be Marcus Pinarius,” he said quietly. “I’m Titus Aurelius Antoninus. I don’t think we’ve met, but I believe you’re acquainted with my nephew, young Marcus Verus. Or rather, my son, as I suppose I should call him now.”

So this was the man whom Hadrian, bitterly disappointed at the death of Ceionius and pressed by the imminence of his own death, had named to be his successor. Determined to control the succession even after his own death, Hadrian had required Antoninus to adopt as heirs the son of the late Ceionius and also young Marcus Verus. Verus had taken his new father’s name and so was now Marcus Aurelius, third in the line of succession.

The forced adoptions had not been Hadrian’s only gambit in his bid to control the future. He seemed determined to move or remove numerous people around him, like tokens on a game board. In his depressed, bedridden state, obsessed with protecting the succession, he had resorted to executing or forcing suicide on a number of men he considered too ambitious.

The latest and most scandalous of these deaths had been the forced suicide of his ninety-year-old brother-in-law, Servianus, whom Hadrian suspected of seeking to advance his grandson. The death of the empress Sabina had also sparked a scandal: some of her relatives dared to whisper that Hadrian had poisoned her.

“I was told that Caesar asked for me,” said Marcus.

Antoninus nodded. “It was the first thing he requested when he woke this morning.”

“I pray that I may find Caesar in better health than when I last saw him,” said Marcus.

“I presume that’s your tactful way of inquiring about his condition. You’ll see for yourself soon enough. Try not to be shocked at his appearance. His entire body is swollen with fluid. His face is so bloated you may hardly recognize him. They say something similar happed to Trajan, near the end.”

“May I inquire about Caesar’s state of mind?”