The Far Arena (33 page)

Sixteen

Fourteenth Bay - Petr
ovitch Report

Condition good. Brief periods of apparent consciousness, swallowed a mouthful of food, but did not chew. Blood pressure normal. Temperature normal. Heart normal. We await his arrival.

When the senators began appearing in groups and singly to question me, I realized Domitian's problem. In but three days, he had run out of time.

The city boiled, I was told. After the first day and night of riots, Domitian decreed I had committed maiestas, offending the gods of Rome. For this I would be tried by the senate, neatly focusing the mob's attention on the senators, instead of on him. He didn't get a decision, but a windy debate, while whole sections of the city declared war among themselves. The praetorians and urban cohorts huddled around the palace for their protection, not Rome's. Domitian had tried sentencing a whole area of the city to crucifixion, hoping stern measures would set an example. But he couldn't spare the men to seize them, assuming the likes ofthe urban cohorts or vigjles would follow a dangerous order, and he wasn't about to let the praetorians stray far from his body.

The senate leaped on maiestas like a dog on a kidney, scarcely realizing Domitian had forwarded his massive nuisance to them. Guilt hardly received investigation. It was the punishment that was debated. The noble senators surprised even me with their inventiveness. I should be blindfolded and set in a box with starving rats, with only my spatha for protection. This was rejected because a closed box would bide my agony.

Another senator, who had devoted his life to scholarly comparisons of the city-state and the empire, offered that this battle between rats and gladiator could take place in a pit. He suggested covering me with pork fat, lest the rats decline living meat.

There was a faction for crucifixion, but there is always a faction in Rome for crucifixion, as though hanging a person on two beams were an all-purpose governmental solution. It supposedly reduced crime, inspired morality, and made
slaves
more
productive.

They had faced, during those three days, what I thought confronted Domitian alone - the problem of showing my agony to enough people. It had to be most public.

There was a suggestion that I fight ten gladiators simultaneously, thus enabling the people of Rome to see the match to the death that I had denied them. When Domitian heard this, one senator told me, he threw chairs in rage.

'And what if he wins ? What then ?' the emperor was supposed to have demanded.

There was the suggestion that I be bathed in pitch and forced to hold a clean arm in flames. This was dismissed, because it had been done on the day that started the major riot - the one that came after my secutor's being killed, now called the minor one. Finally, I was told, Domitian sent word that the arena was out. He did not trust me there, having had two performances and two disasters already. Rome could not survive a third.

Factions within factions were forming with a good deal of basic, mindless fury that fuels any contention people deem to be a moral issue. A faction of freedmen armed with clubs wrecked goldworkers' shops when a rumour started that the goldworkers thought I should be allowed to fight for my life against a single gladiator chosen by the senate. It did not seem to impress the senate that it was the goldworkers who were attacked for their views and not poor people who were on the bread dole. This of course was not lost on Domitian, who knew that the most wealth was stored in his palace, thus his desire to get the matter before the senate and not himself.

Should Rome have been faced with a resurrected Hannibal marching again, there would have scarcely been a harsh word. The people would have prepared to defend the city and themselves, the only question being how. And that would sensibly be left to the generals. But given something that had absolutely no bearing on whether they would eat or be housed or live safely, the people tore at themselves with more passion than many men defend their very lives with. People I had known would say it was the Roman mind. But while Rome seized most of the world, it did not hoard all stupidity.

Witness men throughout all lands who freely squander their lives and fortunes to be remembered by history, seeking accolades from people they have never met or ever will meet, because by then they will be long dead. Such pain and deprivation so that unborn schoolboys will be forced at the end of a rod to remember their names, probably incorrectly.

As each senator came into my room - the praetorians had already removed the couch they had used in their little charade, real only for the unluc
ky man I had met in the baths -I
found out more and more about their position and Domitian's.

'You look tired. Were you delayed?
’
I asked of one who did not appear all that tired.

'No. Not tired, just saddened by an offence against our gods, gladiator,' said one senator.

'Ah so, the praetorians are back in the barracks and they did not delay you.'

'By Jupiter's balls, no. They are thick around the palace for what you have done, ungrateful Greek,' said the senator.

'You just happened to meet some on their way to the barracks. Things are not that bad.'

'Not that bad! They have not left their positions since your atrocity that day. And this, after all that Rome has given you. Taken you from a slave, Brought you into its homes. Made you wealthy. Made you famous. Made you fully Roman.'

I lowered my eyes in apparent shame. Domitian still felt himself under the sword. Things apparently were turning back in my favour.

Almost all the senators in their august, judicial process asked me why I did not slay Publius. To an old general I said I could not thrust my spatha into the armour of the legion that I knew protected me and my estates from the barbaric hordes. To another famous for his boy friends, I confessed Publius and I were lovers. One senator, whose children had him watched over constantly by slaves, was known to believe the sun was the robber of life. He wore a heavy brown tunic under his toga, and a slave bore a heavy parasol behind him. He asked why I failed to slay Publius.

'There was the brightness of the sun, and then the sun, and then the sun was taking me,' I said, 'and I thrust the spatha into Publius.'

'You did not thrust the spatha into Publius but into the sand.' 'Did I really?'

'Yes. Undressed you were to the fullness of the sun.' 'By the gods, this is a surprise to me. No wonder I have been charged.'

Unfortunately, this senator did not have much of a following. A full third of the senators who came to interrogate me trusted no Greekling. To them I was stone. Yet they told me which streets they could not travel, and how long it took them, and how many armoured slaves they brought with them. All this told me Domitian's problems with the city remained ominous, day after seething day.

Lucius Aurelius Cotta came, with several relatives and a small following of other senators. He told me how I disgraced the family, bringing shame to a name borne by two praetors and, in the ancient days, a consul. He turned to his following, his white hair so immaculately placed in small lines over his forehead, his toga white as the finest bread.

'I will take this offence we see before us from our family rolls. No longer will he bear our name. No longer will he share in the treasury of virtue which is the Aurelii. No longer will he enjoy our protection and influence.'

Several spoke approval. The old patriarch said he must disown me alone, however. Face to face. One man to one man, to show me how Romans did things, not with cunning helpers and spies, but alone.

When they were gone, fully gone, for one tarried and impatiently the patriarch motioned him from this room in Domitian's palace, Lucius Aurelius Cotta, who had once so publicly freed me, now privately told me I was no longer an Aurelius.

'And we lose the best blood we ever had, Eugeni. No. Do not embrace me. Things might be seen even though we do not see the seers. Thank you for not mentioning me to Domitian.'

"There was nothing to mention,' I said, still surprised that he thought me the best of the Aurelii. Petronius had only told me what I had felt before, which was why I had been sad that night. And now I discovered I was wrong.

'Many men in fear give Domitian what they think he wants. You could have sent me to the arena with a word.'

'I had other problems at the time, dominus,' I said.

'Your adoption by us was political. And you had few friends, but you were the first Aurelius who did not buy his honours. Today was the first day you did not look enviously at my patrician piping on the toga. Good for you. In my heart you will always be an Aurelius, the best of us.'

This shocked me, as though seeing a stone statue move. Did he mean it ? And if he meant it, why did he mean it ?

‘
They say you went first to your money and abandoned your wife and child. They laugh at you for your Greek mother. But I tell you, they would leave their wives and children and me, this I know, for their fortunes. You are cunning and brave and good. Thank you for being part of us for a while. We are the better for it. Not you.'

A sudden weeping seized me that I had not known since I was a child. So deep, the sobbing had a life of its own. I cried, and the tears were full upon my face, and I was not all that sure why I cried, only that it was as deep and true as anything I had ever felt.

'Good-bye,' he said, and then loudly, 'you may never use the name again.'

Domitian may have had as many problems as I had. I tried to concentrate on his situation to give me respite from thinking of Miriamne and Petronius. With good fortune and cunning, it now became apparent I might even be able to get back to them.

With me and my money the focus of Domitian, barring some chance misfortune, they would make their way to Jerusalem. There, she might be happier than in Rome. Although she loved me.

She would find another. I had given her all I could.

These thoughts again became tears. When another senator wanted to see me, I was relieved. This one grinningly told me he was himself going to vote for maiestas, for indeed the very gods roiled at my desecration.

'The gods, senator, are only offended by what the senate knows,' I said. When he left, I refused to allow any thoughts of Miriamne and Petronius to cut further. Rome had me. It would not look further.

Maiestas was a good charge. Domitian's problem was not the charge or the conviction, it was the punishment. I doubted that he feared me loose in the arena winning again. As his captive I could be sent in drugged. These things happened. No. Our divinity was unable to stage the games now, and probably for weeks. He could not get the animals through the city without dispatching armed men he kept around the palace. And even if he should be able to organize, games on such notice, which was impossible considering the tumultuous state of the city, the mob might riot immediately, just by seeing so many of themselves together.

Nor could he keep me here safely much longer. Those armed cohorts were not on the parade grounds of Campus Martius. He was not going to keep something that required that sort of protection much longer. He couldn't kill me safely, and he couldn't keep me safely. He might just publicly get rid of me. But how?

A princeps of the praetorians, one of the two commanders of that guard, interrupted my thoughts. His handsome face was well oiled, and his muscled cuirass must have cost a small estate.

'Lucius Aurelius Eugenianus, we have a fine showing of slaves for you,' he said. 'Come.'

If I had wanted to attract more attention to myself, I could have owned a palace like this with as many rooms as this, and, marching through this gigantic structure, I was glad I didn't. One does not own a home this big, but occupies a small piece of it, and hears only partial reports about the rest. I was lost by the time we reached the entrance to a vast peristilium with the natural opening to the sky almost as big as an arena. But this royal peristilium was a shock. Instead of the flowers and little trees and graceful statues and seats, there, inside Domitian's palace, was a scrounge of a slave market. I would have been less surprised to have seen oxen grazing here.

There was the wheel on which a slave was shown, and small stalls in which they were stored. There were poor wooden bowls for their meals and a few chains for the recalcitrant. Women, some with their legs chalked white to show they were fresh from the provinces, stood in the places of slaves.

But they were not slaves. They, wore coarse slave tunics, some with breasts bare, yet they were not slaves on sale. One only had to see the well-cared-for faces, the brightness of the stance to know these were not property. For a slave on sale has the expression and droop of a person telling himself he is not where he is. He is there as little as possible. And these women were all active in the sharp movements of their heads. Some even giggled.