Master and God (18 page)

‘Exactly.’

‘Does he suffer hallucinations?’

‘Not that we know.’

‘Is he hearing voices?’

‘Seems not. Is that good?’ queried Vinius.

‘Better than nothing.’

‘Can you do anything?’ asked Gracilis.

‘Even if I could, such patients are not amenable to being treated. Their suspicion that people are plotting against them leads them to resist any suggestion they are ill; they see this as part of the sinister plan, the plan they must try to outwit. Even if they do seek help, they tend to disrupt any prescribed regime, toss away medicine, obstinately take against their doctors—’

‘It’s a waste of time trying?’

‘There is no cure.’

‘He will never get better?’

‘The condition is chronic. He may perhaps get worse.’

‘That could be unfortunate! So what do you advise?’

‘It is important to resist his crazy ideas. Stand firm. Do not undermine the poor fellow, but tell him firmly you assume he has his reasons for thinking that way, but you cannot agree with him. This condition is very hard on friends and family, because of the unremitting need to deal with someone who denies he is afflicted and resents help. Such patients are wearing to live with and, as you probably appreciate, to be constantly under suspicion while innocent may exasperate his associates until they do turn against him. Those who love him will feel rejected.’

‘Those who love him may
be
rejected.’

‘Exactly.’

‘This is bleak.’

‘Not entirely. Such patients can have great creative talent – and can be capable of immense kindness to others – but even those who admire him may not dare to reassure him, in case the slightest phrase is misinterpreted.’

Themison paused. The Praetorians were too despondent to react.

‘Well, at least from your friend’s point of view, although he suffers terribly – and believe me, his delusions do make him truly miserable – even so, his affliction is not fatal . . . Though we must all die,’ said the doctor lugubriously.

‘That’s what you think!’ snapped Decius Gracilis dryly. ‘He’s almost a god. Half the buggers sitting up among the constellations nowadays are his dead relatives.’

This plain speaking went too far for Themison. With the patient’s identity brought into the open so dangerously, he broke down under the pressure.

He jumped from his chair and fell on his knees. ‘Is this a test? Has some patient complained? Is a rival playing tricks on me?
Pharoun of Naxos?
What can I have done to displease the Emperor? Are you going to send troops to arrest me?’ He sounded quite delusional.

They would achieve nothing more from the interview. The Praetorians went to the panicking doctor, lifted him considerately from his cracking knees like a sack of hay, and replaced him in his consulting chair. Vinius fetched his lunch tray and laid it in the doctor’s lap, then wiped Themison’s brow with his linen napkin and waved a fly away. After these gentle courtesies, the two soldiers left.

Outside in the street, Gracilis and Vinius breathed deeply as if they had been stifled in the consulting room; heads back, they gazed for a moment at the mild autumnal sky.

‘Well, we tried our best. There’s nothing we can do for him. “We all carry the seeds of it within us” – how good to know!’

‘And what hope is there for anyone, when even the doctor is paranoid?’

L
ife went on.

For nearly two years the Emperor was absorbed in running Rome. To demonstrate stability, he reorganised the Mint and upgraded the currency’s metal content to the high quality it had contained in the reign of Augustus. This standard was hard to maintain. But Domitian boosted the Treasury by confiscating property; it was said he relied on trumped-up charges laid by informers. At the start of his reign he had expressed abhorrence for informers; now he was less fastidious. On the other hand, his management of the courts was scrupulous; he purged juries of undesirables and, when he was involved personally, gave high-quality judgements.

The most visible result of his rule was the city revamp. Almost all the buildings destroyed in the fire were reconstructed within a few years. The Campus Martius was completely redeveloped, with even the gnomon on the Horologium straightened up to tell the time correctly; the Pantheon and Saepta were restored, with an enhanced Temple of Isis to celebrate Domitian’s dramatic escape in the Year of the Four Emperors. How much his youthful experience affected him was displayed in his new treatment of the caretaker’s hut where he had been hidden overnight; the original shrine he constructed during his father’s reign, with its altar picturing his exploits, was replaced by a large Temple of Jupiter the Guardian.

The main temple to Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitol was lavishly restored. Using its original footprint, the massive Etruscan base, Domitian created a dramatic new building with a hexastyle Corinthian portico in white Pentelic marble, which had never been used in Rome before. The doors were plated with gold and the bronze roof-tiles gilded. The new chief cult statue of gold and ivory rivalled the masterpiece of Phidias, the statue of Zeus at Olympia.

Carpers might accuse Domitian of ignoring his father and brother, yet he willingly completed the Temple of the Deified Vespasian in the Forum, plus a Flavian Tribunal on the Capitol where discharged soldiers were listed under the aegis of all three Flavian emperors; he commissioned the Arch of Titus, a superb and enduring monument that celebrated his brother’s Judaean victory. Close by, Domitian created new underground systems in the Flavian Amphitheatre, where gladiators and animals were assembled before fights, and crowned the building with a fourth storey, decorated with bronze shields just below its cornice and supporting famous canvas coverings that were operated by sailors from the Misenum Fleet, to shade the audience. He installed the curious Sweating Fountain and built four training schools for gladiators, one directly linked to the amphitheatre. In Vespasian’s forum, he completed the Temple of Peace, adding his own Forum Transitorium, which ingeniously utilised a narrow space to provide a linking walkway, at the heart of which was a Temple of Minerva, Domitian’s favourite deity.

His works included every kind of amenity and monument: warehouses, gates, arches, baths. He renovated the public libraries, and spared no efforts to stock them, sending scribes to Alexandria to copy all existing literature. To persuade the gods to ward off future conflagrations, in every region of Rome he paid for the substantial altars that had been promised since Nero’s Great Fire, yet never before provided.

There were many more projects in planning, not least a dramatic new palace on the Palatine Hill. Although credit for much of this massive building programme would be claimed by his successors, Nerva and Trajan, it was Domitian who instigated many buildings that would become the famous face of imperial Rome.

This great statement Flavian city did have an unsettling effect on people who felt unsafe with the unfamiliar. Altering the time-honoured centre of an ancient urban scene is not immediately popular. But generations would soon grow up who had only known the new. For them, Rome was now more magnificent and impressive than it had been before, both a source of pride for its own citizens and a magnet to awe-struck visitors.

In Plum Street, by contrast, the Insula of the Muses looked much the same. Agents for the Crettici kept the building secure and watertight, though they tended to leave shutters and doors with a sun-bleached, shabby look. The porticos were swept most days by a group of slaves who worked slowly and liked leaning on their besoms, but who did deter vagrants. Many tenants supplied balcony troughs or flowerpots on steps; some even put out lamps in the evening, though these were regularly stolen by burglars or mischief-making revellers.

The ailing tassel business finally went under, which made Lucilla assess her own plans. She would have liked to rent the vacant shop, starting a local beauty parlour, but so far her ambitions were grander than her cashbox allowed. After a sad discussion with Melissus, she saw the new lease given to a couple of pumice-and-sponge sellers. Like the soft-furniture people before them, they had silly taste and little business sense, so Lucilla was biding her time.

Gaius Vinius somehow acquired a disassembled couch from the tassel shop. Typically, the desultory designer had always intended to use this to show off his stock, yet he never created the display. Lucilla one day heard a strange croaking sound and found Vinius in his second room, assembling the couch, whilst apparently singing. He claimed to be musical. Unmoved, Lucilla watched for a while, as he sorted a big bag of bronze fitments and systematically laid out parts in rows on the floor. ‘I snapped this up from Droopy-Tunic. He reckoned it could be bolted together by a semi-nude fan-dancer in half an afternoon . . . Total tit, no wonder he’s bust. Here, hold up the frame for me. Keep it level.’

Lucilla could follow instructions. She could also spot when Vinius had missed out a necessary joint, though he ignored her warning, which delayed the finished product by an hour or so. Brought up and working among women, she had learned enough about men and their foibles to bite her tongue.

Vinius decided to run down and buy a multi-bladed tool to help as he fixed webbing; he got talking to the knife-seller, leaving Lucilla standing with the couch. When he reappeared, Lucilla had gone back to what she herself had been doing. She noticed that Vinius made no complaint. He resumed work alone. She waited long enough to make her point, then took him a pistachio biscuit and continued helping again.

Their relationship was neither warm nor cold. In eighteen months, they met at Plum Street on maybe a score of occasions. Since Vinius sometimes had had a quarrel with his wife, on those occasions he was uncommunicative. He shut himself in his bedroom, lay on his mattress and waited to calm down. Lucilla deduced what had probably upset him; he never said anything.

Other times, he brought knick-knacks or collected clothes. A stringed instrument appeared, which Lucilla heard him tuning and strumming. Once, with unusual diffidence, he asked Lucilla about the pot of ointment the doctor Themison had given him. She sniffed it, identified herbal ingredients and urged him to use it. Vinius told her, grinning cheekily, that Themison had said a woman’s touch was best, but she made him rub it in himself.

He and Lucilla would nod to one another if she had a client, or otherwise exchange the time of day blandly. They had, however, adopted their catchphrase:

‘It’s me –’

‘– Vinius!’

If Flavia Lucilla had shown any encouragement, an entanglement might have ensued. But the last thing she wanted was to complicate her life with a married man. She liked the look of the Praetorian, she could not help it; she welcomed his steady tread and did not object to him singing when he was happy (though she never joined in). But she was self-protective. Even if she had wanted to flirt, there were other men on the periphery of her life. Some were handsomer and even seemed more pleasant, although any belief in their good nature was probably rash. Many had two eyes not one, but most clearly lacked brains.

Gaius Vinius was bright, she thought. From their first meeting she had seen him as almost dangerously clever, though she had heard enough about him to know he was hopeless with women. Who wanted that?

Generally, Lucilla understood that any affair, or even marriage, would mean she lost control of her career. Men took up your time. They resented you having other interests. They made demands, even if you could avoid bearing their children. So although her women clients regularly asked when she was going to get a love-life, Lucilla murmured obliquely that she was still looking.

The avoidance of pregnancy was a subject on which she and Lara were seen as professional consultants, an offshoot of their trade. They gave discreet advice – not that Lara ever seemed to follow it. Along with handing out pots of face cream and other cosmetics, they would dispense discreet recommendations: how honey, gum or olive oil might make men’s seeds sluggish; the usefulness of ground acacia, cedar or white lead in creams or vaginal tampons; and even the possibilities of goatskin sheaths, though these were generally seen as mythical and nobody knew how to obtain them. In disasters, they would whisper an address for the Sixth Region’s abortionist, although she operated discreetly because while it was permissible to prevent conception, killing a foetus was illegal. It denied a father his rights.

Getting pregnant could be problematical, even for women who wanted it. Others were relentlessly fertile – their main client, Flavia Domitilla, was one of those, either carrying or breastfeeding most of the time they knew her. Equally fertile was Lara herself. As the two suffered in the summer heat or risked pain and death at every birth, Lucilla saw enough to be wary of motherhood.

Lara, her closest friend and confidante, had married young but somehow avoided pregnancy for several years. Perhaps then Junius found out what she was doing and forbade such measures. He took little interest in their children but their existence proved his manhood; Lucilla thought privately, it also kept control of Lara. Her sister’s eldest son was fourteen, about seven years younger than Lucilla. Lara had borne several more children who died at birth or very young; in all there were six survivors – three boys around their teens, two little girls, a sickly baby – and that year Lara was pregnant again.

While Flavia Domitilla could take her ease at such times, looked after in every way by batteries of slaves, Lara had no such luxury. If she had not had a mother-in-law who took in her children by day, Lara would have been stuck. She worked right up until she felt her birth pangs, from necessity. She and Junius paid their rent and had food on the table; their children possessed an outfit and sandals each; Junius could drink in bars often enough. Mostly, they managed to avoid moneylenders. But Lara’s income was as important to their budget as her husband’s. She needed Domitilla, she needed all the sisters’ private clients and weddings. Any loss would have a serious financial effect. This never perturbed her, as far as Lucilla could see. Lara was an easygoing character who kept afloat by never worrying. She remained true to her personality, but her life was hard.