Roman Games (23 page)

Chapter Thirty-one

That evening.

The tumult outside penetrated even to the innermost rooms of the house. Romans marching, dancing and singing in the streets—still celebrating the overthrow of the tyrant. On every corner, his gilded statues were being pulled down with ropes amid the cheers of the populace and the shrilling of flutes.

Pliny sat by his wife’s bed, holding her bone-white hand while she slept, watching the slight rise and fall of her breast. The floor was still littered with bloody cloths.

“I’ll be going then,” the midwife said. “Have your people change the poultice every hour regular and feed her only a little broth. Make a vow to Aesculapius. I can’t do more. Goodbye, sir. And I’m truly sorry.”

He barely nodded as the woman left.

Zosimus tapped on the door and came in. “You must come away and sleep, Patrone. I’ll keep watch. And…Patrone, I want to beg your forgiveness.”

Pliny looked up in surprise. “What on earth for?”

“For being useless, scared out of my wits. I failed in my duty.”

“Nonsense, what could you or anyone have done? We owe our lives to the Purissima.”

“You still call her that, even though—”

“Of course I do. What else?”

At that moment, Calpurnia sighed, and her eyelids fluttered open; she moved her lips. “Gaius? How…?

“Hush.” He lifted her to him, kissing her forehead, murmuring thanks to every deity he could name.

“Have I been sick?”

“The gods have given you back to me, that’s all that matters. We…we despaired. So much blood. Hush now.”

“No, but tell me what has happened. What are they shouting outside?” She gripped his hand and tried to struggle up on an elbow. He felt her trembling.

“Yes, yes, all right. The emperor has been assassinated. Before that, the Praetorian commandant and his men came here to take Amatia away and to, well, to deal with me.” She needn’t know every detail. “Then you went into labor and Amatia took command. I confess I’ve never seen anyone so magnificent. She refused to leave us. She sent a slave running for the midwife. And she convinced Petronius that I had joined their conspiracy to overthrow the emperor. Yes, that’s what it was all about. I don’t know if he believed her, but such force leapt from that woman’s eyes…Short and stout she may be, but at that moment, she seemed to tower over him like the great statue of Minerva come to life. Anyway he backed down.”

“And had you? Joined them?”

Pliny shook his head wearily. “At that moment I honestly don’t know.”

For a while they were both silent. Then Calpurnia whispered, “And now, husband, I want to see my baby.”

He covered his eyes with his hand.

Chapter Thirty-two

A week later.

Domitian’s corpse had been carted away on a common litter by the public undertakers, as they did with paupers. His old nurse saw to his burial in an inconspicuous spot. The elderly Nerva, looking shrunken inside the voluminous folds of Domitian’s triumphal toga, had presided as emperor over the final day of the Roman Games. In the city, people waited nervously for the tramp of approaching legions, but, as it became clear that there would be no civil war, rejoicing broke out anew and continued for days.

A communiqué had been promptly released from the palace announcing that the tyrant had been killed. No names were named but the text underlined that his death had occurred at the fifth hour on the fourteenth day before the Kalends, the precise day and hour that had been widely prophesied. Plainly, Fate, or the stars, or call it what you will, had spoken. There was no gainsaying it. And Parthenius had even found the time, during those last hectic days, to throw together an imperial horoscope for Nerva. So that clinched the matter.

The dead emperor’s memory was formally damned by the Senate. In an orgy of hate, his arches and monuments were demolished, his name obliterated from inscriptions. The months Germanicus and Domitianus reverted to their old names, September and October.

The Deified Julius and Augustus had named the months Quinctilis and Sextilis respectively after themselves, but they had died with honors and the changes seemed likely to last; not so Domitian. It would be as if he had never existed. The following day Aurelius Fulvus, the city prefect, who had been a regime stalwart to the end, was removed from office, and Pliny was politely relieved of his post as vice-prefect, although with a commendation from Nerva for good work and a hint that, having shown such a talent for detection, there might be further assignments of a confidential nature. Pliny devoutly hoped there would not be. He had sunk into a deep funk, crushed by the double loss of his stillborn son and Verpa’s slaves. Apart from unavoidable duties, he hadn’t left the house in a week.

All that drew him out today was a desperate message from Hispulla. Corellius Rufus, her husband, had resolved to starve himself to death; she begged Pliny to come and reason with him. He approached this meeting with a heavy heart.

When he arrived he was dismayed to find Amatia there too. How should he feel about this woman who had saved his and Calpurnia’s lives while coolly condemning forty innocent human beings to death? Now, unexpectedly he was face to face with her one last time. Though he scarcely recognized her. She lay stretched on a couch beside the old man, looking nearly as ill as he did. Her hair hung limp around her drawn face. She too had decided to end her life.

Pliny went swiftly to his mentor, knelt beside the couch and took his hand. “Sir, I have lost much, am I now to lose you?”

The old man dismissed this with a stern look. “I told you once, my boy, that I only wanted to outlive that monster by a day, and I have done so, thanks to the bravery of Amatia and Iatrides and, though I hate to say it, the odious Parthenius—perhaps him most of all. Domitian could kill any number of us senators with impunity. His great mistake was in frightening the creature who put him to bed every night.”

“Sir, I know your part in all this. Why couldn’t you have confided in me?”

“And forced a role on you that you mightn’t have chosen for yourself? And a reputation for conspiracy that could follow you the rest of your days? No. It was better this way. You will be a valued senator and a trusted adviser. You have a distinguished career before you. Accept it and put this past unpleasantness out of your mind; that is what a philosopher would do. It’s all over and done with.” He smiled benignly and patted him on the shoulder. And as for that meeting where he himself had voted for his protégé’s death? Well, what good would it do to confess that now?

All over and done with
, Pliny thought ruefully. For the slaves certainly. He had forced himself to go to the Colosseum to view their charred remains, still smoking on the embers of the pyre where they had been burned alive. He regarded it as his punishment.

There had been no trial in the Senate; Nerva Caesar heard the case in private. Pliny laid out the facts and pleaded for the slaves—he had spent all night preparing his oration. But the emperor stopped him in mid-flight with a peremptory wave of his arm. The transformation of man into monarch, Pliny noted, had taken place with remarkable swiftness.

“Enough! I will not inaugurate my reign by involving a Vestal Virgin in scandal as Domitian would have done. You tell me the slave Ganymede attacked his master with a dagger. The fact that the man was already dead is a detail. No one wants to know that the Vestalis Maxima has committed a sordid murder. They want to hear that slaves are guilty and will get the punishment they deserve. If I let them off, not a senator in Rome will feel safe in his bed at night and it is crucial that I keep the Senate on my side in these early days.”

“But in the name of justice, sir…”

“Senator, justice and the law are rather different things—a lesson you should have learned by now. I will be as just as I can afford to be, no more and no less.”

Amatia interrupted his reverie. Raising herself on an elbow, she ventured a smile at him. “You were wrong, you know, Gaius Plinius. There is no civil war, no blood in the streets.”

Pliny inclined his head. “We have been luckier than we deserved. Perhaps the gods have pitied us.”

“Don’t thank the gods,” Corellius broke in, “thank Trajan, the governor of Upper Germany. He is content to hold his legions in check and wait for Nerva to die a natural death. He knows it won’t be long. I had his word on it.”

Pliny sighed. How much else was there that he hadn’t known?

For a long moment a silence hung between the three of them. Then Amatia spoke. “You may ask yourself, Gaius Plinius, why I didn’t destroy the letter and horoscope once I possessed them.”

He raised an eyebrow. He had wondered.

“I had a reason. I vowed to burn them at the underground chamber where my darling Cornelia lies buried, as an offering to her shade, so that she would know how I took vengeance for her. And a few nights ago, in secret, that is what I did. And the next day I petitioned Nerva to release me from my service to the goddess—which he has done. I am no longer the Purissima, but only a woman, alone. Nothing remains for me now but to die and, if the poets speak truly, my shade and Cornelia’s will soon be together again.”

“Hades, they say, is a gloomy place.”

“It won’t matter.”

“Even if you encounter the mournful shades of forty slaves there?”

She stiffened at that. “For what it’s worth, I regret their deaths. Don’t think unkindly of me, my friend. We’re all a mixture of elements, aren’t we?”

As she spoke, a light burned in her eyes like the last flare of a dying flame. Then she sank back again on the cushions.

“Madam—Amatia—if I may, I have one question to ask you and then I will leave you in peace.
Why
did you stop Petronius from cutting off my head?”

“Ah.” She made a little smile. “Because Rome needs principled, decent men like you. The things I said to you that day—I spoke in anger. You aren’t a bad man. You deserved a better master. And there was another reason too. Childless as I am, I seem to have the soul of a mother. Calpurnia is dear to me, I could not abandon her. What do the doctors say?”

“She is still very weak.”

“But she has the resilience of youth. She will live to bear you more sons. And now I have a favor to ask of you. I’m told you are something of a writer, that you record your thoughts and observations of life in the form of letters, which, from time to time, you publish. You will oblige me by omitting me from your reminiscences and leave me to a welcome oblivion. I ask it not for my sake but for the Order.”

“I assure you both,” Pliny replied with feeling, “that I have no wish to revisit these past two weeks. They have left a bitter taste on my tongue. The world will not learn of it from me.”

No, the world would not learn of it, but what had
he
learned? He felt he had grown older, as if those fifteen days had been as many years. Most Romans drank in cynicism with their mother’s milk. He somehow never had. But now he no longer felt the comfort of his old certainties. At the crucial moment, they had turned to water and trickled through his fingers. Would he ever again find firm ground to stand on? He suspected he would be a long time looking.

Epilogue

One year later.

Seagulls swooped and cried in the salt-sharp morning air. Martial leaned on the railing of the
Amphitryon
and watched the dockhands as they trundled the last of the cargo up the gangplank. The harbor of Ostia rang with seamen’s shouts and the creak of ropes as yardarms were hoisted up masts. The morning tide would soon be running, and a score of ships would depart from the busy port of Rome to every corner of the Empire. This one would take him home to Spain. Forever.

He was past fifty and felt his years heavy on him. He had spent half his life in Rome without ever achieving the success he dreamed of. He could no longer afford the expense of living in the city and, truthfully, he had begun to miss the hills and woods and rivers of his youth.

Domitian’s victims were heroes now. In his inaugural address, Nerva had promised to repress the informers and respect the freedom of the Senate. Of course, Domitian had said the identical words when he came to the throne. So had Caligula, so had Nero. Hearing this, Pliny and his ilk wept tears of joy and rushed to heap flatteries upon their new master. Some months afterwards, though, the Praetorians, instigated by their new commandant, Aelianus, rioted and besieged the palace, demanding that Nerva execute the murderers of Domitian.

The frightened emperor reluctantly handed over Petronius, whom he had already removed from his post as Praetorian commandant, and Parthenius. The former was dispatched mercifully with a single stroke of the sword, but the grand chamberlain had his private parts cut off and stuffed into his mouth before being strangled. Domitian’s empress withdrew to her country estate to lead a quiet life of retirement.

Pliny had come out of it very well, Martial reflected. He had joined the ranks of the new majority, applauded Nerva, and was now fulsome in his praise of those senatorial martyrs who had died for their republican ideals under Domitian. If he felt any lingering bitterness over the fate of the slaves, he was careful not to let it show.

But no, this was too harsh. Pliny wasn’t as cynical or as opportunistic as many others. He was a trimmer, but which of us, Martial told himself, is innocent of the charge of flattery and trimming—certainly not I. The age we live in has shriveled our spirits.

Some things that seemed important at the time now seemed trivial in retrospect. No more had been heard of the Christians, for one thing. As is generally the case with these hole-in-the-corner fanatics, they had dissolved back into the general muck, leaving the field to some other gang of lunatics.

As for Verpa’s charming family, the old man’s will was never challenged since the complainant, Lucius, had absconded. Left unguarded by Valens and his troopers, and with the city in turmoil, he had simply disappeared, taking with him whatever loose money was in the house. By now he could be in Egypt or Britain or anywhere in between. Regulus, Verpa’s lawyer, acted as executor of the estate and, in due course, the legacy to the Temple of Isis was paid. Soon after that Turpia Scortilla disappeared. One night, she attended a nocturnal ceremony at the temple. She was seen entering the private chapel with the priest of Anubis. She was never seen leaving it. Odd. But no one cared to pursue the matter.

Without much delay, Alexandrinus too left town to pursue his priestly vocation in other climes. How much money he took with him no one knew. The Isiac clergy were grimly silent on the subject.

Verpa’s mansion was soon sold off to some businessman who converted part of it into a fuller’s works. The odor of piss now made the whole street quite unlivable.

Martial scanned the waterfront. Pliny had promised to come down from Rome to see him off. Since the day of Domitian’s death they had never discussed the Verpa case and, in fact, the two men had rather avoided each other; there was no open breach, but a coolness grew up between them. Martial felt ashamed of his part in the affair. How much of that Pliny suspected, he preferred not to know. On the other hand, his erstwhile patron had never succeeded in gaining for him his heart’s desire, the position of court poet and, when Martial had, at last, asked him for a gift of money to pay his way home, Pliny had seemed to leap at the chance—though with many expressions of regret—to perform this small service.

And here he came now, bustling among the bales heaped at the water’s edge and up the gangplank. All smiles.

The farewell was brief and awkward enough. Martial recited a poem he had written in his honor; Pliny had the good manners to praise it. He overflowed with best wishes and lamented that life in Rome kept him too busy to travel. He promised to write. Of course, he wouldn’t. They bade each other farewell with a feeling of mutual relief.

And then the
Amphitryon
cast off and set sail. Toward evening they dropped anchor in the Bay of Naples to take on a consignment of wine before standing across to Sicily. A blood-red sun was setting behind the barren speck of Pandateria. Martial leaned out over the railing and squinted. He thought he could make out a lone figure walking slowly along the shoreline, gazing out to sea. It piqued his poet’s imagination. Could it be Domitilla—she whose letter to Verpa had set in motion all that followed? Still there? Conveniently forgotten and likely to remain so forever. Did she miss her old life or was she content to remain alone with her strange god, the one who forbade his worshippers to make images of him? This made Martial think fleetingly of the familiar Roman gods, nourished with the blood and smoke of sacrificial meat. And that made him think of the Roman Games, although he would rather not have. They had been enacted once again since the fall of Domitian. He had done his best to ignore them; they left a bad taste in his mouth. The Roman Games, he thought morosely: lies, murder, hypocrisy, betrayal. These are the games we Romans play best.

The wind was turning cold. He shook himself and went below.