Venus in Pearls (2 page)

"It sounds heavy," I noted.

"Very. My girls and I weren't able to lift it onto her shoulders and had to ask some men to help."

"What men?"

"Some of the soldiers on guard outside."

"You allowed soldiers to handle this treasure?"

Already I saw trouble. Soldiers are acquisitive people.

"They were Caesar's men," she said, shrugging. Like my wife and the other women of his family, Chloe seemed to share the common misconception that Caesar's men worshipped him and would never steal from him. I knew better.

"Besides," she added, "there is treasure everywhere here. They would scarcely need the feel of pearls to excite their greed." That, at least, made sense.

"Were these the girls who were with you then?" I asked.

"Girls, attend," she said with quiet authority. The girls lined up, hands clasped before them, eyes downcast. Chloe gestured to each in turn. "Harmonia, Euterpe, Gaia, Leto, and Chrysis. Do you wish to question them?"

"What I would really like to know," I said, watching them closely, "is whether any of these girls has been on familiar terms with any of those soldiers." No one frowned, no one blushed.

"Of course not!" Chloe said heatedly. "I guard the chastity of my girls personally. They were raised in the house of the Pontifex Maximus."

"Quite so." Chloe had little grasp of the relevancies, but none of the girls showed the slightest sign of guilt. "When was the statue delivered?"

She thought a moment. "Two days before the breastplate arrived."

"And who delivered it?"

"Thyrsites the Alexandrian. He is a dealer in statuary. I believe he handled all the work on this one: commissioning the sculptor, the shipping and delivery. His men are amazingly skilled at the work. They arrived at first light and had it set up by midmorning, heavy though it is."

"And how did the pearls arrive?"

She crossed the tent and stooped over a long wooden box. This she opened, and it exuded a fragrance of fresh cedar. "It was in this box." She drew from it a long, tubular case of what appeared to be silk, a fabulous item by itself. "It was rolled up and covered with this case."

"And who handled this work?"

"The firm of Considius. He does all the finest pearl work in Rome. The women of my family deal exclusively with Considius."

"Did he perform the goldwork as well?"

"That I could not tell you. Is it important?'

"You never can tell what may prove to be important." I took one last look at the goddess as the girls readied to recover her. She truly was glorious.

The workers and dealers in precious substances were concentrated near the Forum, the pearl market being located at the northern end. The establishment of Considius seemed surprisingly modest for so great a merchant; little more than a booth crowded with beautifully crafted wooden cases. The whole place smelled sweetly of cedar. The cases were made of the same wood as the big delivery box in the goddess's tent.

"Welcome, Senator!" The man who came from the back of the tent wore citizen's clothes and the ring of an equites, but his features were subtly foreign, that Greek-Syrian mixture one encounters so often in the East. This made good sense considering the nature of his business. He was a balding, portly man perhaps forty-five years of age. "I am Considius. How may I help my distinguished guest?"

"I find that I must learn something about pearls."

His eyebrows went up. "I do hope the Senate is not considering new sumptuary laws."

"With Julius Caesar in charge? Not likely."

"Ah, excellent. How, then, may I enlighten you?"

"I know very little about pearls, and I've avoided learning lest my wife acquire too great a taste for them. How do they come to Rome?'

"Pearls come from the seas of the world, Senator, most of them from far, far to the east. Observe." He went to a long, narrow case, a miniature of the one I had seen in the tent, opening it to reveal a stunning series of pearls graded by color, from the common white on one end to silvery black on the other. They lay in a single row, nestled in silk and none of them was smaller than the tip of my smallest finger.

"Here," Considius explained, "we have black pearls from the Euxine Sea, rose-tinted ones from the Red Sea, yellow pearls from Arabian waters. The greatest number come from India and its numerous islands."

"I never knew there could be so many shades of white alone," I admitted. "Yours is a great and far-flung business."

"The trade is very ancient and very extensive," he said. 'Perhaps the only trade to compare is that in frankincense."

"Even among the white pearls," I commented, "I see here great differences not only in color but in— in brightness."

He smiled. "We refer to this quality as luster. Yes, there are wide differences. There is great art in matching the pearls in even an ordinary necklace because they must be matched not only in color and luster but also in size. All must be of the same size or very evenly graded." He opened a standing case to reveal at least a hundred neck-laces, from a tiny choker suitable for the neck of a girlchild to a massive rope that would have gone several times around the neck of a giantess. I made a mental note to keep Julia away from this place.

"That being the case," I said, "it must be a Herculean task to match a huge number of pearls as in the breastplate of Venus Genetrix, which I understand you undertook."

"Not truly," he said. "You see, in a very large piece such precision is not really necessary. Each pearl should be as close a match as possible to the
adjacent
pearls, but a small divergence from those farther away is scarcely noticeable. With a truly huge item like the pearl aegis Caesar commissioned, it is hardly necessary at all. The human eye cannot take in so many pearls at once. We graded them by size, with the largest at the collar, diminishing toward the hem. Differences in shade and luster were only roughly considered. With thirty thousand pearls, greater precision than that is not possible. Besides, these were freshwater pearls he brought back from Britannia."

"Is there a difference?" I wanted to know.

"Yes. Freshwater pearls are rarer than sea pearls, and Britannia is a faraway, exotic land, so people expect them to be extraordinary. Sadly, they are rather inferior to sea pearls, usually smaller, indifferent in color and luster."

"I see. And thirty thousand seems to me a rather great number for the pearl fisheries of Britannia."

He lowered his voice as if that were necessary. "Actually, and I tell you this in strictest confidence, Caesar returned with fewer than five thousand Britannic pearls. He did not actually conquer the island, you know."

"Then I take it you were forced to make up the difference."

"I was," he said with some satisfaction. "It was the largest single order I've ever had. If Caesar wants a thing, Caesar must have it. I had to assemble the pearls, and my craftsmen had to work day and night to pierce them all and string them on the golden chains."

"I take it you did not perform that task here."

"No, here I have only finished pieces on display. The actual work is performed in my establishment in the Trans-Tiber. I have twenty slaves under a freedman supervisor, all of them marvelously trained and skilled."

"And you do your own goldwork?"

"Oh no. That would be frowned upon by the guilds. Gemstones, precious metals, and pearls are separate trades. My chains and other goldwork are made by Demaratus. He's an Alexandrian Greek, and his craftsmen are the best gold-workers in the world. These are his." He threw open another case, this one containing samples of golden chain, some so fine they could scarcely be seen. They were graded by thickness, but none was too thick to go through a pearl.

"These also are his work," Considius raised a lid, revealing perhaps a hundred rings, all designed to have pearls set in them. There were also pierced golden beads of many shapes. "These beads are meant to be strung together with the pearls on necklaces and earrings. The customer may choose to match up pearls and settings and beads, but I provide what guidance I can. Some of my customers have the most ghastly taste."

"Did Caesar take a personal hand in designing the breastplate for Venus?"

"He let me know precisely what he needed, but he left the details of construction to me. Even a man like Caesar can't be expert at everything." He closed the cases. "Might I know why you are inquiring about these matters?'

"Just curious," I said, taking my leave. One of the best things about my position was that I didn't have to explain myself to anybody.

The goldsmiths' quarter lay in a block of houses and shops on the Via Nova, opposite the ancient Mugonia Gate, near the eastern end of the Forum. A bit of asking took me to a shop considerably larger than that of Considius. This one featured armed guards, for which the goldsmiths' and jewelers' guilds had special licenses. These men, who looked like retired Greek mercenaries, let me through without questioning. Apparently they thought a senator must be too dignified to steal. A fat lot they knew about it.

The doorway in the low wall opened onto a spacious courtyard where twenty or more craftsmen worked quietly. The ticking of their tiny hammers was like the noise of insects, and the bellows' feeding auto the furnaces was like the breathing of somnolent beasts. The heat from the latter was intense. From somewhere inside the sprawling building came a continuous, muffled thumping as of padded mallets, and someone was playing a pipe in time with the thumping.

Demaratus was a small dark man dressed, groomed, and bearded like a Greek, but one look told me his ancestors had worked gold for the pharaohs. He favored me with a smile full of dazzling teeth.

"Greetings, Senator! How may the firm of Demaratus be of service to the Senate and People of Rome?" He was a foreigner, but he could sling the old formula like a citizen.

"Actually, I am on a mission for Caesar," I told him.

"Ah! The gold leaf to adorn the new temple of Venus Genetrix? Please inform the Dictator that the leaf is being hammered out even as we speak. Come, I will show you."

This wasn't what I was there for, but I've learned far more by indirection than by asking questions directly. I followed him inside and saw some twenty men seated on the floor in a row. This was where the hammering noise was coming from. Before each man was what appeared to be a stack of sheepskin cut square, about twice the width of a man's hand on each side.

Before the men sat a woman playing a lively tune in the Lydian mode on a double tibia, keeping time for them like a ship's
hortator
. They were pounding these sheepskin cubes with big-headed wooden mallets. After each tenth blow the men turned the sheepskins over with a dexterous flip of the hand, then continued pounding on the other side. Apparently they could continue this monotonous labor forever, and they'd been doing it for a long time. Their arms, particularly their forearms, were tremendously developed although they were not otherwise muscular. At a trill from the tibia each man tossed his hammer in the air, twirling, caught it in the other hand as it came down, and continued to pound.

"Very impressive," I said. "What am I looking at?"

This is how gold leaf is made." He showed me how the gold was first hammered as thin as possible with a hammer and anvil, which is very thin indeed, then was cut into small squares and placed between layers of thin sheepskin, the skins bound into stacks of a hundred or more, then pounded for hours by these mallet-men. The pieces would treble or quadruple their size under this treatment and become so fine that they seemed to weigh nothing and would cling to any object one desired to gild.

"When the gilders apply the leaf to the new temple," he went on, "they will bond it fully to the stone, metal, or wood by passing a red-hot iron a fraction of an inch from the surface. No further treatment is needed save a gentle burnishing."

"He's not planning to gild the whole temple, is he?"

"Not at all. But the altar is to be gilded, the capitals of the columns, the details of the frieze and the pediment, all the interior pilasters, the base of the statue and the entire ceiling. It will be a most lavish use of gold leaf, worthy of a Ptolemy."

"Or a Caesar. This is wonderful," I told him, always happy to learn something new. "But alas, it is not gold leaf I wish to inquire about but gold chain."

"Chain? Has Caesar another project? I've already returned to him the gold left over from the aegis of Venus."

"Returned? Caesar himself gave you the gold to make the chains?"

"But of course. Why buy gold when you already have plundered gold in your possession?"

That made sense. "In what form was this gold?"

"When Considius undertook the pearl contract, he told Caesar that my firm would handle the gold-work. Caesar sent it in the form of six golden Gaulish cauldrons, all carefully weighed. These we melted down into bullion form. When the chains were completed, I returned the remaining gold to Caesar."

"But those cauldrons were part of Caesar's triumphal trophies."

"The cauldrons you will see in the triumph will be replicas of gilded copper."

"You simply can't trust anything any more," I said. He shrugged philosophically. "Was this the largest order you've ever undertaken?"

"The aegis of Venus? By no means. It required something less than five hundred sixty yards of fine chain. Just last year, the Cumaeans adorned their temple of Neptune by draping the interior with a great fisherman's net of golden chain. This required more than seventeen hundred yards of chain of a much heavier gauge than I used for the aegis. Pompey has consistently ordered wonderful golden chains, manacles, and neck-rings to bind the many noble and royal prisoners who adorned his memorable triumphs. At least he used to." We observed a moment of silence to acknowledge the passing of that great but difficult man.

This talk of chains called for another tour of the facilities, and I saw the workmen hammering gold bars into plates, then cutting the plates into thin rods with shears, drawing the rods into long wires, twisting the wires around mandrels of the requisite size and shape, snipping the coils thus formed into rings, linking the rings into chains, and then, the most difficult task of all, soldering all the links in glowing furnaces.