EROMENOS: a novel of Antinous and Hadrian (2 page)

My family grazed its herds on a hillside just south of the great evergreen forest that supplied timber for the shipbuilders of the province. Once when I was no older than five, on an outing with my father to this place, he directed my attention down valley to the long outline of the aqueduct, the arched stone flanks marching off to span the next hillside and carry on into the blue distance. The sun sat low in the sky, a tarnished disc of copper.

“Look, son,” he said. “All of the water at our house comes from right there. Because of that aqueduct, no one has to carry heavy buckets of water just to be able to drink and bathe and wash any more, like people used to a long time ago.”

He spoke that day of the precision of the grades implemented in the construction of those duct systems, a precision that assures the water always flows, uphill and down, from one town to the next. Like water through the aqueduct, his amazement conveyed itself to me.

“I promise you, Antinous, that aqueduct will outlast its builders until the next ten generations of Romans have passed, at least.”

Standing at his side there on the hill, my childish mind conjured an image of this line of succession of which he spoke—a legion of men whose sons, grandsons and further descendants all stood stacked atop each other’s shoulders, forming a human ladder like the tumblers in the market square might make. The ladder in my mind stretched up toward the sun, its topmost forms invisible against the zenith’s brightness.

Despite illustrious ancestry and potential posterity, I grew up a small town boy, provincial and ignorant in manners and outlook. I spent much of my early childhood outdoors, herding, hunting, and observing nature, whose lessons, sensuous and cruel, she offers to any who wish to sit at her feet. I hugged those lessons to myself and pondered them in solitude, long before the years of my formal education began.

When I was six, wandering about in the cook’s garden behind our villa, I discovered a field mouse dead in a thicket of berry brambles as high as my waist. Gazing at those translucent claws, his fur the color of bark and stone, I wondered how he came to be suspended there between earth and sky, like a tiny Antaeus. Maybe he had climbed up to escape one of our cats or wriggled loose from the talons of a hawk or owl only to drop down and become entangled in those thorns he mistook for his salvation. Perhaps he had been summoned there by Apollo Smynthius, Lord of field mice and the plague, my favorite god in the story of the Greek war against the Trojans.

Studying the creature’s unnatural position, my wonder turned to pity, for death had left him in a state of indignity. Heedless of the bramble spines that scored my forearms, I reached into the thicket to dislodge him, an effort frustrated by the clumsiness of my childish fingers. I carried him away and deposited him on solid ground at last beneath a rosebush, where his tiny stink bothered no one as he returned to the soil.

I wondered if mice went to Hades, and imagined their tiny shades scrabbling about among the tall ones of famous men.

Then I went into the kitchen and washed my hands of him like a good boy.

The cook rewarded my compassion with a spoonful of honey to pour out as the mouse’s libation. She had myriad ways of skimming from the larder: a spoon of honey here, there a bladeful of expensive spice that disappeared into the folds of her robes. She must have known I was not one to tell. I thought it only fair that the one who prepared all the food for our household also sample it herself.

Another time, at the age of nine, I set off alone to tend a herd of my grandfather’s goats. Their self-congratulatory rubbing against trees and hedgerows left clots of greasy wool behind to stir in the breeze. I thought about how the cook converted their milk into a delicious crumbly white cheese. Rambling after them over the hillside, I heard a keening, and followed it into a copse, where I discovered a fox caught by its forelegs in a snare. Two crows had come to peck at its eyes.

I pulled my slingshot from my belt and grabbed a stone to fire at the birds. They retreated to a nearby tree, cawing at my intrusion.

The blinded fox’s cries softened to a whimper after its tormentors had gone. When it heard my soft approach on foot it scrabbled with its hind paws, trying in vain to get a purchase on the leafy ground and yank itself free to escape this new threat.

Up close, I smelled the metal tang of blood overlying the creature’s own musky odor. I knocked it in the head with a large stick. Then, to be sure, wrapped my slingshot around its muzzle, pulled aside the white ruff, and slit its throat with my knife.

I sliced through the rope and freed its forelegs, which it had begun to gnaw in its bid for freedom, and laid the fox on the ground below the trap. I thought of taking the pelt, or perhaps just the tail, that gaudy flame, but couldn’t bear to mutilate the corpse further. The unknown hunter could have it to pay for his ruined rope.

The crows, with the prudence of their species, had flown away by then, or I would have killed them as well.

That day I made a vow to myself, never to betray any weakness of my own to an enemy if it lay at all within my power to conceal it. Long before I began to study philosophy, such encounters with natural cruelty had already encouraged in me a certain tendency toward secrecy and stoicism.

Soon after that incident, my father died. I came in one evening after bringing our small herd of goats back down to the paddock for milking to find my grandparents seated together on a couch in our villa, silent. My grandmother’s face bore traces of tears. They told me my father’s body had been carried home from the site of a new road project for the province. That was where he had suddenly slumped over the groma he was using to mark a sight line. His contorted face at first went pale and clammy, then flooded with color before his breath stopped.

The engineer who brought home his body returned later that evening with his equipment. My father’s sundial they placed in the atrium. His groma disappeared into a chest for safekeeping. Perhaps my grandmother thought I might use it someday if I chose to follow his path and become a surveyor myself. He and I had, after all, shared a fascination with aqueducts and arches, bridges and tunnels, though his interest was based on professional knowledge of their construction, mine on imagination and wonder.

His bust soon joined my mother’s in the foyer of the atrium, where our lares were worshipped. My grandparents let me take charge of making the household offerings at that time. I grieved for him, or rather for my own loss of him, but found solace in the woods and on the hillsides. The solitude of those places felt as familiar as our own hearth.

In the years following, I learned to hunt and to fish and to set snares for small game, although I preferred tracking animals to killing them. I found and tamed so many tortoises, hares, baby birds, squirrels and hedgehogs that my grandmother eventually forbade me to bring another living creature home from the woods.

I spent a great deal of time studying animals, creeping as close to them as possible for my observations. I cultivated an ability to find a spot, remain still and quiet, and disappear into the surroundings, so that the creatures of the wood carried on their routines, ignoring my presence. I felt blessed by Artemis when a doe nudged her twin fawns onto their feet and led them right past me to another section of the wood where the acorns lay thicker on the ground. They passed so close, I could have stroked those spotted hides had I reached forth a hand. On another occasion, I saw a bird dragging its wing along the ground just in front of me, as if to lure me toward herself; she had hatchlings in a nest nearby, and meant to offer herself as a sacrifice, if necessary, to protect them.

During the first decade of my life, my child-mind absorbed knowledge with the greed of a beggar who gobbles a banquet, and disgorged that knowledge just as readily. Would that I had learned the rudiments of mathematics with such an eager mind. (Much later, I set myself to study it, and expended great effort to grasp its tenets, with little success.)

A
N EARTHQUAKE STRUCK
Bithynia in my eleventh year. I remember the ground rippled like the skin over a dog’s haunch when he feels aggravated by fleas. Although the tremors devastated Nikomedia on the coast, and other parts of the province, our own town withstood the earth’s shudders. A few cracks appeared in the columns of the temple of Mercury, where doctors and thieves all sacrifice. One eyewitness reported seeing the serpents entwined on the caduceus of the god’s statue writhe and tremble of their own accord. That seemed to be the worst of it. Our greatest damage at home occurred when my grandmother’s favorite bowl leaped from its shelf and crashed into a thousand shards on the tile floor.

My grandfather made a visit to Nikomedia soon afterward to check on several friends and to assess the damage there for himself. He found his friends, and indeed most of the residents, to be in good spirits, but unsure how long it might take for the city to reconstruct itself. Nikomedia, as Pliny the Younger once observed, was known for excessive squabbling in local politics and a lack of coherent planning and building programs. That city’s difficulties in rebuilding after the quake seemed to bear out the truth of his allegations.

A
S
I C
ONTINUED
into the second decade of life, the earthquake that is adolescence caused my body to change in various ways. I grew taller and slimmer, the pudginess of childhood melting from my fingers, knees and middle. New sensations that came on in the night perplexed me. The planes of my face were changing, though I didn’t realize or care; it never occurred to me to study my own features in the mirror. (Such vanity, like primping, seemed the prerogative of girls.) Instead, I took pride in the strength of new muscle and sinew in my legs and arms. My grandfather laughed whenever I flexed my biceps, showing off, and my grandmother fussed over my clothing, complaining that I outgrew my tunics faster than she could sew them.

Certain people of my acquaintance looked upon me with new interest. When I accompanied my grandfather to the baths, men who never acknowledged my presence now spoke to me, asking how school or music lessons were going, or complimented my grandfather on his “fine boy” right in front of me. My family and our servants, however, still treated me in much the same manner as they always had. Since they made no fuss about my changing looks, I took no great interest in them myself. I am ashamed to say that later on at court I sometimes succumbed to the temptations of vanity, due to the attention I received. As I aged, I grew wiser about appearances, and warier of flattery. Beauty, a gift from the gods, soon enough becomes its own curse.

T
HE YEAR
I turned twelve, my grandfather announced I would be sent to stay with a friend of the family in Nikomedia in order to continue my studies. I felt sad to leave the countryside I loved, but looked forward to the trip to the coast, and obeyed him without complaint. I didn’t know the particulars of the arrangement between my grandfather and his friend Deucalion, a ship builder and horse breeder, but understood my prospects could only improve with the opportunity for further education, in a coastal town with more resources than our village offered.

On the day I left home, I bundled my tunics, my school books, my slingshot, knife, bow and quiver full of arrows into my trunk and dragged it to the atrium, where my grandfather waited to help me load it onto the oxcart and my grandmother waited to kiss me goodbye.

As we traveled west over the ridge road, a sudden tang of salt became noticeable in the breeze that stirred the hairs on the oxen’s ears and lifted the edges of our tunics. When I mentioned this smell to my grandfather, he said, “That, Antinous, is the smell of the sea.”

We arrived in Nikomedia and found our way to the ship builder’s villa through a maze of streets bustling with commerce, raucous with the ring and clatter of axes and hammers and shriek of seagulls.

Deucalion, a stocky man of swarthy complexion, greeted my grandfather with affection and then turned his attention to me, where I stood waiting beside my trunk of belongings. Studying my features in a manner that seemed brusque, yet not unkind, he said to my grandfather, “Ah, yes. This one can’t stay buried forever.”

He offered us a simple but delicious meal of fish, bread, and figs. Afterward one of his servants helped me unpack and settle in while he and my grandfather visited and caught up on local news and gossip. I overheard Deucalion say in jest of a mutual friend, known to be fond of his wine, “His liver has suffered more torments than Prometheus’s.” My grandfather laughed, but made no reply I could catch.

When the time came for my grandfather to take his leave, I knew by the tilt of his chin that I had made a good impression on my host, and that my welcome there in Deucalion’s house was genuine.

My room, while larger than my old room at home, was just as spare in its accoutrements, which suited me, lacking in possessions as I was in those days. My host’s family, with whom I soon became acquainted, included his blonde wife, Melita, and his brown-haired daughter, Penelope, whose husband, an engineer, had been called up to the northern frontier of Britannia to help construct a wall ordered by Emperor Hadrian for protection against barbarian tribes. He was expected to be gone for another couple of years at least. Mother and daughter spent much of their time together, running the household with the servants, baking their renowned honey-sesame seed cakes for sacrificial offerings, and visiting with the neighbor women, one of whom Deucalion declared a peerless spy and gossip.