The Uncertain Hour (13 page)

“He never did, I suppose?”

“No, never.”

Martialis spoke softly, venomously. “As you’d always known he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. Wasn’t it all finally just a form of cruel, subtle revenge, Lucilius? You may claim you were simply trying to be a moral exemplar of friendship, but you never really expected him to take the bait at all, did you? You knew he was constitutionally incapable of such a change. Instead, you could make a fool of him by showing him up as the hollow shell he always was, and then the whole world would see who the real wise man in the relationship was. This so-called loyalty you boast of, it was nothing more than an elaborate ruse to stake out the moral high ground. Perhaps you’re hoping they’ll call the book
Lucilius: The Rise and Fall of Seneca
instead of
Seneca: Letters to Lucilius
?”

Petronius could see quite clearly that Lucilius’s feelings had not been hurt by Martialis’s attack, as Martialis had surely intended them to be and as anyone else’s might well have been. But Lucilius was a seasoned lawyer, long immunized against oblique,
ad hominem
arguments, a solid Roman political man whose only vulnerabilities were ornamental, worn or left at home as the occasion demanded. Instead, Lucilius was struggling with the appropriate response. His instinct, Petronius knew, was to seize the offensive immediately with a cool, calculated violence of rhetoric, as he would in court. Moreover, in some uncertain way his honor had been impugned and must be defended. But he was a guest tonight, and a guest is bound by certain obligations to the host, one of which is to respect the rules of civility under the host’s roof. Martialis’s failure to do so did not exempt Lucil-ius from that duty. And tonight of all nights, of course, Lucilius would be especially sensitive to the need to keep the peace. As for Martialis, he seemed determined to take the opposite tack and pick every fight that came his way. Ultimately, Petronius knew, Lucilius was too clever to be baited so clumsily.

Lucilius sighed sadly and allowed his head to slump between his shoulders, like a man forced to concede that he has been bested in argument. “Perhaps you’re right there, too, young Martialis. We learn as Stoics that we know nothing until we know ourselves. I’m happy to admit I know nothing. You have done me the favor of revealing a weakness in my self-knowledge as well, for which I thank you.”

“And you can all go to hell, for all I care,” Martialis grunted, turning his attention to a grape.

A natural lull descended upon the diners as the slaves moved in to fill wine glasses and clear away the remaining platters in preparation for the next course. Petronius watched as each of his friends drifted into a temporary cubicle of solitary thought, as if they’d each wandered off for a moment into separate rooms to gather their wits. He thought perhaps that some were sad—sad for him? Sad for the dying season? Sad for the harsh words spoken?—and it grieved him that he was powerless to redirect the evening. Anything he could say now would be taken as an artificial attempt to revive their spirits, and thus as an awkward reminder of the purpose of their gathering, and he thought perhaps it would be best to leave them to their own devices for the moment. It was, after all, too soon to call for more poetry and music.

He turned to find Melissa’s familiar smile upon him. Had she been gazing upon him all along, or had she only just now focused on him as he turned? It was a look—part question, part mirth—that he had grown accustomed to from their very earliest days together, but its implied condescension, which once had endeared her to him as no sincere solicitude could ever hope to do, he now found irritating. She raised her hand to his face and stroked his cheek with her knuckles. Petronius ducked his head and gazed out across the terrace to the sea, where a gay argosy of pleasure boats, their lanterns blazing, was converging on the dock at Vatia’s villa.

“I wonder why Seneca is so much in our thoughts tonight?” Pollia, sounding just like a young girl. “I never even met him, and yet I find the idea of him disturbing me. Do you believe in ghosts, Petronius?”

“Of course.”

“Might his ghost be haunting us here tonight?”

“I don’t see why it should. Apart from Lucilius, none of us was especially close to him. This house meant next to nothing to him.”

“I’m thinking maybe it’s the occasion that’s brought him.”

“Pollia!” Fabius chided.

“No, that’s all right. Go on, Pollia.”

“Well, as you know, Petronius, Fabius and I live small lives, on the periphery of power and politics, but even we have heard the rumors about Seneca’s suicide. They say he botched several attempts and that he wavered in his resolve. They say that Paulina decided at the last minute not to go through with it—that is, she decided not to die alongside her husband, although she’d said she would—just so she could stay behind and engineer a false, heroic account of his final hour, because she understood that his entire life’s work would be held up to scorn and ridicule if it was known how he had died. Actually, I have no idea if it is true …”

“It is, substantially,” Anicius murmured.

“But if it is, I was thinking that perhaps he was here tonight as a kind of presiding spirit to ensure that what happened to him did not happen to someone he admired. Could that be, do you think?”

The entire company burst into merry laughter. Petronius, as he laughed, observed Pollia’s confusion and shame with deep affection, and found himself aroused once again by the girlishness that occasionally urged itself through the barrier of her womanliness.

“My dear, sweet Pollia,” Anicius chuckled, wiping a greasy tear from a crease in his flabby cheek. “First of all, Seneca’s death did not ‘happen’ to him. He’d rehearsed it over and over again, as we all have, and it was his responsibility and his alone to ensure that it went well. Nothing Seneca could possibly do or say from beyond the grave can help Petronius prepare for what he has to do tonight. A man can talk great words, as Seneca did, but dignity and poise cannot be summoned at will like a chaise. Petronius is solely responsible tonight for his actions. He is alone, he knows he is alone, and no one and nothing can touch him, beyond what we are doing now: making his final hours happy ones, to tide him on his journey and to leave a favorable impression with those whose duty it will be tomorrow to bear witness to the nobility, wisdom, and courage of his final act. Besides which, Seneca despised Petronius.”

“Did he? Whatever for? How could he possibly?” Pollia asked.

“Petronius was Nero’s right-hand man at the time Seneca fell from grace. Seneca always thought Petronius was to blame.”

Pollia and Fabius were ashen, speechless, as they turned aghast to their host. Petronius returned their stares calmly. His smile sought to convey an avuncular compassion for the young couple, to make them feel the weight of their own ignorance and see that he had nothing to hide and was not afraid of their questions, but of course he was. To discuss such matters would be a grave mistake, perhaps fatal to the prospects for the evening’s success. There was no time now for opening that sort of discourse—he was no Socrates, with days at his disposal to amble through the corridors of his life with these innocents. And suddenly he felt dizzy and disoriented, as the hours ahead, which only a few moments ago had seemed to yawn with promise, abruptly shrank within themselves, like a snail into its shell. He closed his eyes, but even as he did so he pictured how Pollia and Fabius would take it as a shame-ridden inability to meet their gaze, and he opened them again.

“I had nothing to do with Seneca’s downfall, but it’s true I was the emperor’s impresario.”

“But that was only a few years ago.”

“As governor of Bithynia,” Petronius began carefully, “one of my responsibilities was to plunder the province of its classical antiquities to stock a new palace being planned for the Palatine. I sent these back to Rome with long, eloquent letters describing their provenance and value, and I suppose as a result the emperor came to see me as the very embodiment of refinement and erudition. Later, when he summoned me back to Rome, I foolishly allowed myself to be drawn into his inner circle, from which there is no safe or simple way to extricate oneself. I can’t say exactly how it happened—some might call it a death wish, one that is only now bearing fruit. In any case, I was thoroughly ensnared. I made myself indispensable, Nero’s exclusive adviser on all matters aesthetic. He called me his ‘Arbiter of Elegance.’ When it came to the finer things in life, he did nothing without my say-so. At least for a short while.”

“No, no, no,” Fabius protested, sounding very much like a thwarted toddler. “That can’t be. He is everything you are not. He is your enemy. He is your murderer.”

“He was always my enemy and my murderer. I knew it even then. But he was nonetheless my patron, and I advised him to the best of my ability.”

Pollia spoke almost in a whisper. “I don’t understand, Petron-ius. How could you have allowed such a thing to happen? How could you?”

“Let’s just say I lost my moral bearings. It was a dark time in my life. But here is the fish. Let us talk about all this later.”

As the slaves descended upon the diners, bearing great bronze platters and crucibles, Petronius took the opportunity of the general distraction to watch Fabius and Pollia, who, with all attention focused on the arriving food, imagined themselves unobserved. Lying upon their stomachs, they were engaged in a furious, silent conversation with their eyes. Fabius’s face was concealed from Petronius’s view by a flop of hair, but Pollia was clearly pleading with him to moderate his emotion and remember his place in the party. Both, naturally, were deeply chastened by the revelation—information that was news to them alone—and further humiliated by Petronius’s abrupt interruption of their inquiries. Now he had three angry guests to contend with.

Had it been a mistake to invite them? It was true, they were not of his innermost circle of friends, although for Pollia’s sake they certainly would have come to be if circumstances had allowed. And it was also true, now more evidently than ever, that their youth and relative inexperience set them apart from everyone else present, not only in what they could and could not take for granted, but also in their bookish sense of honor and integrity. In that, Pollia was precisely the opposite of Melissa, whose only sense of right and good came from her heart, whereas Pollia was young and sheltered, her encounters with moral complexity and compromise limited to her genteel readings in history and philosophy. Petronius was sure that Pollia would learn from the experiences awaiting her, and probably even mature into the kind of woman Melissa could admire, but in the meantime they were—as Socrates might say—unlike and unlike, and Petronius could feel the older woman grow tense at his side every time the younger prepared to open her mouth.

Petronius had only wanted to balance the party between old and new, the tired and the vigorous, the past and the future, and perhaps, too, to provide Martialis with companions closer to his age, to sweeten what he had known would be a bitter draught to swallow. That, of course, had been a forlorn hope, and all the more misguided in that Fabius’s tutored morality was alien to everything that Martialis respected. It had been foreordained that they would have nothing to say to one another, and Petronius ought to have anticipated that. And now Fabius and Pollia were feeling excluded and foolish, and that was Petronius’s fault, too. In hospitality, as in poetry, every tension that arises must ultimately be resolved, and Petronius sighed wearily, knowing that he would have to revisit this whole sorry mess before the evening was out. A host can never relax, of course, but he would have wished tonight to be spared this duty along with all his others.

A silver charger was placed before him, burdened with fish: delicate fillets of sturgeon and red mullet, gleaming in their sauce of parsley and green peppercorns; a dome of Baian casserole; a disc of fried lamprey, dripping with black vinegar. Petronius glanced at it all disdainfully.

“Nereus, what are you doing?” Melissa said, quietly yet with severe matronly authority. “Petronius does not take his eel with sauce.”

Nereus bowed and moved to remove the charger. “Forgive me, madam,” he whispered.

“No, leave it, Nereus. Maybe something new tonight.” Melissa’s outrage was yet one more expression of ill-feeling that Petronius felt he could not endure, and he made show of pinching off a flake of the yellowish flesh and slipping it between his lips. The acid stung his gums, as if they had been chafed raw; but, vinegar or no, he had no hunger left at all. He sadly acknowledged its absence. He had somehow imagined, for reasons he could no longer fathom, that his appetites would be enlivened by the catalyst of their imminent extinction, as the colors of the sky are intensified by the setting of the sun. He recalled the hawk’s speech to the nightingale, learned by rote from his tutor some forty years earlier: “Miserable thing, why do you cry out? One far stronger than you now holds you fast, and you must go wherever I take you, songstress that you are.” Petronius must not cry out, nor even struggle in the raptor’s grip, but rather flutter his wings as prettily as he might until his neck was broken.

“What is this dish, Anicius?” Pollia asked. “I’ve never seen it before. It’s delightful.”

“That is Baian casserole, my dear. A local delicacy.”

“What’s in it, do you know?”

“Well, you’d have to ask Lucullo for the full list, but the main ingredients are minced oysters, mussels, and sea urchins, fresh from Orata’s ponds, or what’s left of them since they built the shipyards.”

Cornelia raised herself regally onto her left elbow. “If I’m not mistaken,” she said confidingly, “you’ll find it contains toasted pine kernels, celery, and rue.”

“Pepper, coriander …”

“Cumin, raisin wine, dates …”

“But they must be
caryota
dates …”

“The best Spanish
garum
.”

“And most important of all, olive oil from Venafrum. And only from Venafrum. Anything else would spoil the balance.”

“A hint of Corycian saffron?”