EROMENOS: a novel of Antinous and Hadrian (5 page)

The stable master, Momius, a grizzled old freedman with sun-squinted eyes, the rinds of his heels caked as often as not with manure, acted gruff toward new hands, impatient at any sign of laziness or carelessness with the animals. Yet his curses soon enough sounded like prayers to me, his way of calling down blessings around the horses and dogs and grooms left in his charge.

Momius knew the measure of every horse in Rome, knew which horse had won every race held for the last twenty years and from which bloodlines it descended. It was he who told me about the October Horse of Rome, a custom retained from the earliest days of the city.

“Every October,” he said, “a race is held in the Forum during the festival of Jupiter Capitolinus. The winning horse is the sacrifice. Its head is cut off and displayed in a place of honor along the Sacred Way. The October horse protects the people of Rome for a year, until the next race, when its skull will be replaced by the head of its successor.”

I spent many of my happiest hours out at the stables, engrossed in riding and caring for those creatures and watching while the hunt master worked the horses and the dogs, training them so their nerve could be counted upon to hold steady during the hunt. I hoped someday to be one of those grooms allowed to accompany the emperor and his friends when they rode out after stag or boar, or even bear or lion.

A
T SCHOOL, ISSUES
arising out of class and wealth differences sometimes caused conflicts within our ranks. Certain personalities also clashed on occasion. But many friendships and romances grew up there as well. In some cases, boys cemented bonds of fraternity with one another likely to endure for their lifetimes. Older boys often looked out for favorite younger ones, and helped with their acclimation to court life.

Early on, some of the other boys gave me a hard time for being Greek, a circumstance which no doubt I helped provoke with a youthful arrogance regarding my ancestral culture’s superiority, despite the low social standing of my own family in comparison with many of theirs.

“If the Greeks were so advanced,” one boy, a Roman patrician named Gracchus Lucius Marcus, asked me one day while several of us sat around talking together in the library, “why did they condemn Socrates to death? And if he was so superior intellectually, why did he not write anything down?”

After a few such interrogations by Marcus and some others, I learned perhaps the most important lesson of all for surviving both in school and later at the court: Though the mind remains open, keep the mouth shut.

We new boys, shy at first, soon joined the others in discussions during our lessons and spent what free time we had in the school’s new library, reading or studying between classes. We also spent time in the common dining area, where we took our meals on those evenings when no official banquets were held—that is, most evenings, since the emperor traveled for much of the year.

In the atrium, I studied the images of Rome’s early heroes and heroines, and soon learned their stories. There were the founding twins, Romulus and Remus, suckled by a she-wolf, who reigned together until Romulus killed his brother and took over, as forecast by augurs. There was Lucretia, a virtuous woman spied upon and then raped by the son of Tarquin. Afterward, she killed herself in shame, spurring her Roman countrymen to defeat their Etruscan overlords and establish the Republic. (When I first met Empress Plotina, Hadrian’s adoptive mother and the widow of his predecessor, Trajan, I felt struck by the similarity of her features and demeanor to that image of the noble woman who represented Roman honor.)

I also learned of Cincinnatus, a citizen appointed dictator in a time of war during the era of the Republic, who upon achieving the Roman victory renounced his title at once and retired to his farm outside the city. I found myself as moved by his story as when I first heard of Pheidippides’ run from the plain of Marathon to relay the news of Athens’ victory to its citizens. Just as men today still hark back to the ideals of Greek democracy, so too, I believe, will future generations of Romans continue to look back to the old Republic, and perhaps even to the current empire, though not to the reigns of those emperors corrupted by absolute power.

In the school’s new library, some wag already had scratched bits of doggerel in one corner of the back wall, which I deciphered one morning for another new boy who couldn’t yet read Latin: “Virgil is still the frog boy,” “Pandora’s jar was sealed up tight—Epimetheus pried. . .” and so forth, no doubt the handiwork of older students since none of us new boys would have dared leave our mark on the empire that way.

In the housing annex, we bunked in a wing with a dozen rooms. My room was far larger and much fancier than any back home, painted in shades of red, yellow, blue and black. It was carpeted with thick wool rugs, and furnished with cupboards, shelves, my own chest, and a table beside the bed, which was spread with embroidered linens and a heavy wool coverlet. Incense kept the air fragrant, and the lamps, braziers, and candles offered a wealth of light.

Back home, by habit I rose with the sun and went to bed soon after it set, so the early mornings didn’t bother me at first. But there in the private quarters, one could stay up late into the night and read beneath those plentiful lights. So on many nights I chose books over sleep, until exhaustion caught up and I nodded off. The housemaid must have been the one who eased the book from my grasp, pulled the coverlet over me, and put out the light, for that was how I always woke. She also gave me a shy smile whenever we met in the hall.

A cook in the school’s kitchen also took me under her care after I wandered into her corner of the place one day, looking for something to eat. She offered me pears, told me to feel welcome any time. Whenever I dropped by after that, she petted me and gave me choice morsels, and sometimes even fed me tales recalled from her own childhood, which I soon enough recognized as corrupted versions of Aesop’s fables. I tried to show my gratitude in turn, bringing her flowers or spices from the market or collecting herbs for her from the imperial garden, but when she caught me washing out my own dirty cup and plate one afternoon after a snack during a free period, she looked bemused. No doubt she feared someone might see and think she’d set me to this menial task. She chided me, pretending an offense she perhaps did not feel.

“No, lad—I mean, sir,” she said. “This is work for servants and women. You are a page of the imperial court now. You mustn’t sully your hands with such tasks. Unless, of course, you go out hunting, or off to war.”

She ruffled my hair, a gesture of affection my boyishness still allowed her back then, and sent me off to more appropriate diversions.

I still think of her and that maid with fondness, although I understand now what I did not as a child—their need, for their own dignity’s sake, to observe the formalities proper to our separate stations in life. At home, servants always seemed part of the family to me. Circumstances were different at court.

E
MPEROR
H
ADRIAN HAD
selected the palace built by Domitian, a complex of enormous rooms and mirrored galleries which occupied the Palatine hill, to use as his personal residence whenever he held court in Rome. At this palace, one of my first assignments as a new imperial page called for pouring the watered wine during feasts held for the emperor and his guests.

The opulence of the imperial banquet hall impressed me on first viewing, with its mosaics and enormous carpets, wall paintings with scenes of gods and goddesses at the hunt or at play, elegant tablecloths, silk-cushioned divans, silver, gold and cut-glass table service gleaming in the lamplight, but soon enough I became accustomed to it, as one does with any surroundings after a while, however humble or luxuriant. My focus turned instead to the performance of my official duties.

A senior page, the handsome archer named Demetrius Korias, volunteered to teach me the correct technique for the pouring of the wine and water. This involved grasping the handle of the flagon in a particular manner, and arching the wrist and forearm to minimize splashing.

“You’ll notice,” Korias said, “that by holding it this way, the curve of one’s arm echoes the curve of the handle—a configuration considered graceful and pleasing to the eye, at least by the banquet steward.” He grinned at me, his eyes full of mirth.

I felt quite nervous the first evening I served, but the various guests seemed kind, and several smiled as if for encouragement, or in recognition of my desire to please, and to execute my task without flaw. Not a drop fell awry, and I collapsed into bed later that night exhausted but happy to have acquitted myself well in the service of the emperor, even though, on that first night, I was not permitted to serve at Hadrian’s own table. I noticed that Lucius Commodus, a young noble deemed worthy of consideration as the emperor’s successor, was present at the emperor’s table that evening, seated near Plotina, Hadrian’s adoptive mother and the widow of Emperor Trajan. Later I learned that Commodus also was rumored to be the emperor’s favorite among the court’s young men.

At many of those banquets in my earliest days at court, I succumbed to gluttony, sampling all the exotica offered up for empire by wealth and power at those official feasts of greed. At times, it shames me now to say, I overindulged to the point of having to go and vomit. Such an endless profusion of delicacies seemed like nectar and ambrosia for a boy not from that city.

I ate hummingbird, thrush tongues, caviar, crayfish, artichokes, eels, peaches, oysters, snails, dormice, wild game, exotic fruits, and vegetables seasoned with expensive spices from India and China. The food was accompanied by the finest wines, Falernian, Nomentan, Setian, Amineum, and various other golden vintages from Campagna, Hispanica and Greece, sometimes served chilled by snow, transported to Rome at great cost to some banquet sponsor just for that purpose. In those dishes I devoured, I discovered even more of the world that still lay beyond my own experience, all offered up for the pleasure of the imperial court.

Yet after a while I noticed Emperor Hadrian himself did not always partake in these extravagances, despite being urged by those around him. He often preferred simpler dishes: grilled fish, or a bit of lamb, bread and olives, water and wine. Perhaps he had been offered so many delicacies that his palate, numbed by surfeit, craved the plain fare of his army years. Or perhaps one must become great before one’s preferences are allowed to become so simple.

Hadrian, in his unique and unassailable position, felt no need for such exhibitions, I realize now, but tolerated them as a necessity for those beneath him, ceaseless in their efforts to impress and please him. And, too, perhaps we youths and beauties of the court, sleek partridges dressed in fine garments, were encouraged to desire the exotic, the rare, the savory, so that the great expense accrued and paid for such consumption, meant to promote various benefactors while they sought to curry favor with the emperor, might be justified. Power and wealth, I have learned, often exhibit themselves by such means.

A
S FOR MY
schooling, I enjoyed the opportunity to read for myself those philosophers of whom I had so often heard from my father and grandfather, and the chance to discuss their works and ask questions of teachers whose intellects and ethics I respected. Rhetoric, Latin grammar and mathematics I did not enjoy, but persisted in those disciplines nonetheless.

When I had been at the court school for perhaps six months, Emperor Hadrian came to sit in and listen to our classes one afternoon, during the Ides of March, I believe. No doubt Hadrian felt it an appropriate day for Caesar to spend among schoolboys.

Because of the mild sunny weather, we sat outdoors that afternoon. Our teacher welcomed our royal visitor with a courteous speech and asked him to be seated. We were reading about Odysseus in a new Latin translation (which of course renamed him Ulysses), and had just been discussing his return to Ithaka in the guise of a beggar, and the beggar’s odd request to participate in the archery contest for Penelope’s hand, a contest which would soon reveal his deadly glory to the ill-fated suitors.

“Why a bow?” our teacher asked. “Why did the poet choose the bow—and Ulysses’ own great bow, at that—as the weapon to be used in the contest for Penelope?”

“Because only he could string it,” Marcus said, eager to show off, wanting to prove he had read the text and knew the answer.

“Yes, of course,” said the teacher, with a bit of impatience, “we are told that in the text. But why a bow, rather than, let’s say, a spear, or a sword?”

I understood what he was asking—what that weapon might represent symbolically, beyond a means to kill those rivals—but hesitated to volunteer an answer. The teacher saw the hesitation in my face, and called upon me anyway.

“Antinous, you looked as if you might have an idea.”

“Sir,” I said, “he might have chosen the bow and arrow since, traditionally, they are the weapons of the god of love, and Ulysses is competing to win his wife back from false lovers. The arrow flying into the rings is fairly obvious in its implications—”

A snicker, at once suppressed, interrupted my thought. Then the teacher said, “Yes, go on.”

“And also—also.” I took a breath. “Might it be because of the tension?”

“What do you mean, Antinous?”

“That tension which accompanies the stringing of the bow, which must be bent to receive it, and the drawing back of the arrow, the holding and then, release, the letting go.