Venus in Pearls

There are worse things than being a dictator's flunky. Being a dictator's enemy is one of them. Thus, when Julius Caesar had a mission for me to perform, I was always more than happy to undertake it as long as it didn't mean killing anyone I really liked. Not that Caesar ever asked me to do anything so distasteful. It was just that, had he asked, I probably would have complied, within reason. There were a number of men in Rome I would not have minded putting from Caesar's path.

But Caesar was not vengeful, nor vindictive by the standards of the powerful and ambitious men of that time. Indeed, his death came about because he neglected to kill a few men he really should have.

Usually, though, he wanted me to do things suited to my peculiar talents. It always amused him to see how I solved the problems he set me. Then he would regale his dinner guests with a witty recounting of my deeds.

I was getting a reputation as Caesar's performing dog, but it was a reputation I could live with. Young Herod, Antipater's son, once quoted to me a prophet of his people who said that a living dog is better than a dead lion. At the time I thought this was a rather craven philosophy, but now that in old age I contemplate the dead lions of my past, I see the wisdom in those words.

Come to think of it, young Herod is now old Herod, a king in fullest command of his nation although a client of Rome, and sitting atop a whole heap of dead lions.

I received my orders at the end of a grueling senate meeting. These meetings were once leisurely affairs characterized by long, soporific speeches and attended only by those with nothing better to do, save when important issues occupied everyone's attention or at election time. This agreeable routine changed when Caesar took power. He had work for everybody, ambitious projects to accomplish and a whole empire to set in order after a destructive civil war. Not to mention that he had nearly doubled the size of that empire and the new territories had to be administered.

We kept our traveling kits packed in those days because you went to the Curia in the morning knowing that, before lunch, Caesar might dispatch you on an embassy to Parthia, or to Massilia to build a new aqueduct, or to Egypt to wheedle more grain from Cleopatra, or to take command of an army and go conquer India. And woe to the senator who failed to show up at the Curia without a good excuse. I witnessed the following incident personally.

We had taken our seats amid the usual buzz of conversation, which stilled when Caesar entered preceded by his twenty-four lictors. He seated himself in the curule chair and scanned the House. There were perhaps four hundred of us present that morning, the rest mostly absent with the legions or on foreign missions. Instantly Caesar knew that a man was missing. 'Where is Aulus Fimbria?" he demanded.

A friend of the man stood. "Caesar, Aulus Fimbria died in the night."

"Died?" Caesar said scornfully. "He was healthy enough yesterday."

"Nevertheless, Caesar, this very morning his widow told me that he had expired of some unknown ailment."

Caesar took a sharply pointed bronze stylus from the scribe who sat by him and handed it to a lictor. "Go to the house of Aulus Fimbria and poke him with this," he ordered. "If he twitches, haul him in here."

An hour later the lictor returned and reported that Fimbria was indeed dead. '"I'll let him off this time," Caesar muttered. The lesson was not lost on us.

But on this particular day all senators in residence were accounted for. Caesar spent the morning naming men to various commissions, instructing the senate concerning his foreign policy decisions, and generally behaving in the highhanded fashion that suited him so well. He got no argument. By that time the senate was made up of his supporters and his former enemies who were so relieved to be alive that they had to be restrained from voting him divine honors.

Toward the middle of the day, the traditional end of a senate session, I had escaped assignment to any committee or special duty and was looking forward to a late lunch and a leisurely bath, perhaps to be followed by a fine dinner at the home of a friend, possibly one of those recently returned exiles I hadn't seen in years. Caesar was famously magnanimous, and most of his former enemies were back home, only a few diehard Pompeians still holding out in remote corners of the empire. I was heading for the door with the others when this fond illusion was shattered.

"Decius Caecilius, attend me," Caesar said.

Uh-oh, I thought. He wants me for something unofficial. That's always a bad sign. I put on one of my best smiles and strode over to him.

"That is a singularly insincere smile," he noted.

"Nonetheless, I am informed that one must smile upon Caesar these days. It is said to be dangerous to appear too glum."

"Nonsense. I have a job for you, and you may frown and pout all you like while you carry it out."

"What sort of job?" I asked, resigned.

"A crime."

"Commit one or solve one?"

"Don't try my patience, Decius. The breastplate of pearls I gave to Venus has disappeared. I want you to find and retrieve it in time for my triumph."

"Pearls, Caesar?" I sighed.

"I'm afraid so." He grew conciliatory and put an arm around my shoulders. Presumably this semi-divine familiarity was supposed to reduce my humiliation. "Listen, Decius, I am fully aware that you are an ex-praetor qualified for high command and fit to govern an important province, and you shall do so soon. But," he gave my shoulders a comforting little squeeze, "your family's recent hostility toward me went beyond the merely politic. I can't very well shower you with honors before I've had a chance to properly reward my faithful supporters. Just be patient, and you'll soon be restored to the full honors of your birth and station. In the meantime, kindly go and find my pearls."

"Where were they last seen, Caesar?"

"Among my triumphal trophies. An image of the goddess will wear them at the head of the procession on the first day. You know where to look."

Indeed I did. The whole city knew of the preparations for Caesar's triumph. Since his return from Spain, where he had crushed Pompey's sons at Munda earlier that year, Caesar had been gathering the staggering loot to be displayed in his triumph in a field near the Circus Flaminius on the Field of Mars.

I took my leave of him and made my way thither. It wasn't a long walk. The senate was meeting that day in the Curia attached to Pompey's theater, which was handy to the Flaminius. This was because the ancient Curia Hostilia in the Forum was still in ruins, burned in the riots that followed the death of Clodius seven years previously. Also, it was customary for a general to remain outside the city proper until the day of his triumph. As dictator, Caesar could have dispensed with this ancient taboo, but he felt that as Pontifex Maximus he should observe it.

Perhaps these then-famous pearls deserve some explanation because the manner of their acquisition was so peculiar. When, in the course of his Gallic war, Caesar invaded the island of Britannia, his stated reason was to secure freshwater pearls, a product of that island, to make a breastplate for Venus Genetrix, the ancestress of his house. This was perhaps the silliest reason ever given for starting a war. I do not think we need to regard it seriously.

He did, however, get his pearls because he always got what he wanted, or at least that was what he claimed. Over whether they were truly freshwater pearls from Britannia there was some dispute. Some speculated that they might be common pearls from the East.

Not that pearls of any sort were exactly common. And about this time Romans had conceived a veritable passion for pearls. People paid the most extravagant sums for them. Caesar gave one said to be worth six million sesterces to Servilia, mother of his future assassin, Brutus.

The triumphal preparations covered a vast area, much of it protected by the largest awnings ever seen in Rome, even greater than the one that shaded the audience at the Circus Maximus. The whole area was guarded by a full legion of Caesar's veterans, another little reminder, were one needed, of who was master in Rome.

I was well known to Caesar's men, so they passed me through without difficulty. Beyond the guards were acres of loot: gold and silver in every form imaginable, from crowns to cooking pots, gems, precious woods, woven goods of all sorts, sculpture, painting, beautiful captives of both sexes, incredibly detailed models of cities and forts Caesar had taken, exotic animals, entire trees with their limbs trimmed and hung with arms and armor as trophies, images of all the state gods to be borne at the head of the procession, images of enemy gods to be borne in chains behind them, captives like their conquered worshippers.

As in everything else, Caesar intended that his triumph should outshine anything ever seen before. This one would stretch on for days and would commemorate his conquests in Gaul, Egypt, Pontus, and Africa. His most recent victories would not be acknowledged; there would be no trophies to celebrate his defeat of Pompey and his supporters. It was forbidden to celebrate a triumph for the defeat of Roman citizens.

A little asking led me to a tent stitched with gold thread and surrounded by protective herms. Before its entrance, incense burned on a small altar of finely wrought bronze. I passed within and found the interior illuminated by that ghostly glow that comes of sunlight passing through cloth, this time faintly tinged with gold. In the center stood the image of the goddess, now covered by a cloth of Tyrian purple—this pall alone worth a good-sized country estate.

The image stood beneath a frame of beams shaped like a doorway with a pulley in the center of the lintel. A few yards to the rear of the statue was a rope and windlass arrangement, with a ladder and a pile of heavily padded cloths. I had seen this sort of apparatus many times before. It had been used to raise the statue onto its pediment and soon would be employed to lift it onto a huge float that would be borne on the shoulders of Caesar's men at the head of the procession.

"May I be of assistance, Senator?" The speaker was a young woman whom I did not recognize at first, but some subtle cast of her features identified her as a member of Caesar's small family. She wore the spotless white robe of a priestess, and she was attended by a number of slave girls, also clad in white.

"Chloe!"I said.

She beamed. "I am amazed. The last time you saw me I was ten years old."

I now remembered the occasion. It had been at a wedding celebration during the consulship of Pompey and Metellus Scipio, so the girl was now about seventeen. Of course, her real name was Julia, like my wife and every other woman of that family, but the Caesars usually gave girl children Greek nicknames. Besides Chloe I knew a Thisbe, a Helen, a Circe, and a poetically inclined girl called Sappho.

My own wife had been called Briseis as a girl before she decided that Julia would remind everyone of who she really was.

"I would know you anywhere. You've only grown more beautiful." This gallantry was not entirely insincere. She was an attractive girl with huge eyes that were set just a little too close together, a common flaw in that family. But she had the grace and dignity that were drilled into the Caesars of both sexes from birth.

"You are very flattering." Then the smile disappeared. "You're here about the pearls, aren't you?"

"Your great-uncle has assigned me to investigate."

"I just do not understand it!" she said, showing her distress. "Yesterday we performed the evening sacrifice, closed the tent, and left. This morning we reopened the tent, and the pearls were gone! With all the soldiers guarding this place, how could it have happened?"

"Who was last to see them?"

"I suppose I must have been," Chloe said. "I dismissed my girls after the sacrifice and stayed behind to perform a rite that may be observed only by patrician members of the Julian family. That took only the time it takes for a spoon of incense to burn on the altar." A trifling time, not enough to accomplish anything seriously nefarious. "After that, I rejoined my girls, and we returned to Caesar's house."

"May I see the statue?"

She gestured to the slave girls, and they carefully drew the precious cloth away from the sculpture.

As might be expected from a man of Caesar's wealth and taste, she was glorious. The goddess was executed in bronze, an unusual thing, since Venus is usually sculpted in white marble. The metal was of the rare alloy called Corinthian in which the copper was alloyed not only with tin but also with silver and gold, which produces a paler color than the common red bronze and which does not turn green or black with age. It had been polished to a golden glow that truly looked like divine flesh. Her abundant hair was a separate casting of pure gold, her eyes formed of mother-of-pearl and sapphire. I recognized it as the work of Rhoton of Cyprus, one of the greatest sculptors of the day.

She was somewhat larger than lifesize and was without any of her usual attendants or attributes. She was not performing any of the subtly provocative acts one so often sees in sculptures of this goddess: wringing water from her hair after a bath, fastening her sandal, gazing into a mirror, and so forth. Instead she stood in the attitude of a deity bestowing a blessing, her weight distributed evenly on both feet, arms out with palms raised.

She was also nude, and this was the reason for that breastplate. In those days, unlike the Greek habit, it was not the Roman custom to portray this goddess entirely naked. Even when she was so sculpted, she was often painted with a symbolic golden modesty-garment. Caesar's "breastplate" was not the military sort but rather a mantle of pearls that would drape her from shoulder to thigh. It was inspired by the aegis, the magical mantle of the Greek Athena, usually depicted as a serpent-fringed goatskin but always described in sacred verse as a breastplate or shield.

"I haven't yet seen this garment," I told Chloe. "But I have heard that it is marvelous."

"It is sublime," she said. "More than thirty thousand pearls strung on something like two hundred eighty yards of fine golden chains. You can just see through it. To one entering her new temple, she will seem to be wearing the seafoam of her birth."