by Ken Parejko
I bent down to where a single marjoram bloomed bravely in the dying sun. I picked the flower, turned it around and examined it, its innocent beauty thrown so courageously out into the world. I held the flower gently for a moment, then lay it on the very rocks where Aulus had lain. As the lake turned blood-red beneath me, I rose and started off downhill, the first steps of my next journey, out of the family and into the larger world.
The road to Rome lay clear.
Chapter 7
Rome
April, 52 C.E.
After five years off and on I was nearly done with my History of the German Wars. I had to think that if Drusus wasn’t too busy chasing spirit-skirts to pay attention, he’d be pleased with how things had gone.
Army life, gratefully, was behind me. The camaraderie of camp-life broken by the occasional excitement of battle hadn’t been nearly enough to make up for the hard beds, long cold nights, stale food and sour posta. I’d always seen my countrymens' obsession with luxuria as one of the least palatable of our qualities. Still, a warm bed, hot bath, and good libraries weren’t to be scoffed at. Back in Rome again when I wasn’t scribbling away at the History, I allowed myself time in the bath, reacquainted myself with fresh seafood, vegetables and fruit, and as I’d never quite done before, lingered over meals with friends, chatting and enjoying recent vintages. My reputation had preceded my arrival so I was given access to private libraries and government archives. One unusually hot April afternoon just as I was about to leave Augustus’ library on the Palatine I stopped to chat briefly with the ex-consul Veranius Nepos who, learning I was finishing my German history, brought up Marcus Velleius Paterculus' name. The two of them had been friends til Paterculus' death some twenty years ago.
Paterculus had celebrated his appointment as praetor by dashing off a history of Rome, which he cast among the flood of histories pouring out on an almost weekly basis from the capitol. Velleius had been in Germany as commander of the cavalry under Tiberius, and had personally known both Varus and Arminius. By blaming Varus for the catastrophe his version of the massacre adhered to the party line and so was not particularly interesting to me.
But political intrigues surrounding his friendship with Sejanus led eventually to Paterculus' suicide. That afternoon in Augustus' library Nepos mentioned to me that in private Paterculus believed Augustus was really to blame for the debacle, for giving command of the legions to Varus. The implication that the security of the empire rested not on the good fortune granted by the gods, nor on the bravery and skill of our heroic army but instead on the sometimes inept whims of a petulant emperor was not the kind of thing one wrote of openly.
But, Nepos said, there was a rumor that Velleius Paterculus had written his private thoughts about the Teutoberg horrors into an unpublished memoir which, Nepos quickly added, if it even existed would not be easy to find. He suggested I try calling on the dead general's widow, and provided me the most recent address he had for her. With any luck she might still have a copy of the memoir. My book was almost ready for the public. But here was a new trail I thought deserved following. So the very next morning Lucius and I set out to find Velleius' widow.
On our way to Testevere we passed a slave market where scattered shoppers scanned a few men and women on sale, brought in from who knows where. We hurried past the empty teraton agora, the monster market, where the rich came to buy dwarves, mutants and hunchbacks, displayed for the amusement of their dinner-guests, a practice I despised. Recently a senator had paid 20,000 sesterces for an idiot who turned out not to be an idiot at all. Who then, everyone asked, was the real idiot?
My countrymen were as fascinated as they were repelled by nature’s sports. Sallust had put on display the seven-foot skeletons of Pusio and Secundilla, til their death the tallest men in Rome. Claudius had recently acquired an Arab named Gabbara, said to be more than eight feet tall.
While some tried to explain away these monsters as God’s mistakes, I felt that no God worthy of the name would make such mistakes. Some looked at this in another way, that these very sports of nature were evidence of God’s power: like rains of frogs and water catching fire they demonstrate that God, unlike us, is not bound by natural law.
And Aulus? Was my little brother God’s way of showing off? What kind of God would do such a thing?
We paused for a few moments in the Forum Boarium, the cattle market on the shores of the Tiber, rich with earthy, rural sounds and smells. The diversity of cattle gathered here was astounding: huge white oxen brought from Egypt, tiny dun cows down from the Alps, their udders dripping milk, big red and white long-horned Dacian cattle, Scythian boars and sinewy long-furred aurachs from Caledonia, not to mention all the kinds of sheep, goats and fowl mewing, bellowing and squawking across this raucous farmyard planted in the middle of the capitol. We watched a half-dozen Sicilian bulls just brought up from Ostia, whose sudden bellowing in unison caused all the other animals to fall silent. The largest of the bulls, a magnificent animal, fought against the dozen strong men pulling him down a plank. As he fought, the wilds of the hills from which he’d been plucked flashed in his eyes.
“Headed to the arena,” I sighed: the loveliest and wildest of all would die for the pleasure of the crowds.
A lictor walked one by one up to the other bulls, blessing them before they headed off to their destinies at designated temples. Temple bulls were trained to be docile, to without complaint suffer the slitting of their throats so their blood and first cuts could be burned as offerings to the gods and their flesh shared among the gathered crowd. If the empire faced great danger the entire animal would be burned in a holocaust whose putrid smoke would rise up into the un-answering heavens in dark and heavy clouds.
"The night I had the Drusus dream,” I mused, watching the big Sicilian bull fight its fate, “I wondered, didn’t I, if we should go quietly to the sacrifice of our lives, or struggle like this bull against the forces that drag us onward. Some say that’s what the gods expect, that we struggle against our destiny."
"Do you think so?” Lucius said. “It seems to me gods like that are made in the image of the blood-thirsty mobs.”
My countrymen had many gods and found no contradiction in embracing every latest superstition that made it’s way into the city. Within a five-minute walk we could enter temples not only of all the official gods and goddesses, but of Isis, Mithras, Cybele, Attis, Capona, Jahweh, all the many gods of all the many peoples of the empire: Jews, Egyptians, Syrians, Thracians. Augustus it was said played all sides. In case the Jewish god had some powers the Roman divinities didn’t, he’d ordered sacrifices made in his name to Jahweh in Jerusalem’s temple. Unless these cults became overtly political officials ignored them. But when Augustus died and was deified, the exasperatingly monotheistic Jews in Judea refused to worship our gods, Augustus now among them. The clash of politics and religious fanaticism that resulted was already throwing off sparks threatening to ignite a larger fire which, though I didn’t then know it, would draw me into the very eye of a cataclysmic fire-storm.
And as yet unknown to me, too, Lucius had recently encountered one of the latest Jewish cults preaching on a busy street-corner, and finding their message of peace, understanding, and equality in the eyes of God attractive, began showing up at their services.
Actually what Lucius believed or didn’t believe was of little concern to me. To me, if there even was a divinity, this God was inherent in the universe and not transcendent to it. You could say that to me the universe itself is a kind of divinity. I’d shared my views with Lucius, and later, as he came to know the Christians, it seemed to him that aside from the prominence given their founder, a poor man executed in Jerusalem twenty years before, and a strong strain of other-worldliness, the beliefs of this new cult -- especially in their ethics and the stress they put on living a simple life of compassionate kindness -- were not radically different from my own more normative Stoicism.
“So one question we might ask is,” I continued o
ur conversation, “do the gods do more harm than good?” I’d not forgotten that it was in the very Forum Boarium we’d just left behind that more than once over the years the Senate, bowing to the prophecies of the Sibylline oracles, had insisted a Roman and a Gaul be bound together and buried alive. I shivered to think of it. When fanatic religion and blind patriotism dance together, the innocent pay the price.
As we walked along the Tiber my mind circled around the question of what to do next with my life. My History would soon be finished. I''d already had several patrons interested in paying for its publication. My father wanted me to study law, but I found the competitive prevarications of the court repulsive, where it wasn’t the truth but the emotional force or rhetorical subtlety of the arguments that won out. The truth mattered to me far too much to waste my time at that. That much I was sure of. But I really had no idea what to do instead. I would be thirty years old this year, and pass into full adulthood. As an equestrian I could hope for some kind of administrative appointment, with the long road of the Cursus Honorum lying ahead of me. It did not excite me.
I remembered instead the dream-image I’d had of Diana Efesina, of nature’s amazing abundance, just demonstrated in the diversity of animals in the Forum Boarium, and by the incredible variety of plants and animals pouring into the capitol every day from all over the empire. What was their history? How did they come to be? It was at that moment that I realized nature too has a history, and while histories of Rome and all her wars and conquering heroes poured out of the pens of ambitious men, nature’s history remained untold. Our citizens floated on a wide stream of life, mostly unseen and ignored, a sprawling spectacle of life and of the non-living natural world: the gems and minerals, the stars, moon, planets and sun, and the mountains and rivers which made up the world itself. Aristotle, half a millennium before, had put nature under the fiery light of his own vision, and Theophrastus had taken up where his teacher had left off. But the pax romana had revealed much of the natural world unknown to the Greeks. It was time someone wrote a modern Natural History.
This thought flared up like a vision of an exotic and lush island at the horizon of a sun-swept sea, then disappeared again in a haze. With the thought came an intimation of how Herculean a task it would be. But I was never known to turn away from challenges. Today we would find Velleius’ widow and put my German History behind me. Who knows what stones I would walk tomorrow.
We crossed the Tiber at the Fabrician Bridge. Through the milling crowd a haruspice and two of his assistants approached. The city was infected with so many priests of different cults: the augures, who as official soothsayers read the future in the flight of birds; the haruspices, who studied the entrails of birds and beasts; the flamines, recognized by their white conical hats; the fetiales who specialized in rituals of war; the fratres arvales, the country’s oldest college of priests whose specialty was the crop- harvest; the Augustales, epulones, Salii, and luperci, to name only some.
They all, of every kind, wore along with their own recognizable uniform an attitude of other-worldliness, which seemed to give them an excuse to ignore and even belittle the real world. It was said the main job of their assistants – and they always had assistants -- was to prevent their masters from hurting themselves by walking off a cliff or off-handedly insulting some important person. Tucked under the haruspice’s arm now approaching us, nervously watching the world pass it by, was a sacrificial chicken whose liver and entrails would soon be torn out and exposed to the light of day.
I followed them with my eyes as they passed. They seemed surrounded by a kind of dark cloud, a tang of prevarication and corruption: the most practiced opportunists of a society pandemic with that disease. In their eyes I read a dull cynicism. Cicero had said it well: it was a wonder that when two priests passed each other on the street they didn’t burst out laughing.
On the bridge over the Tiber healers of every kind and shape hawked their arts. We found ourselves in a crowd of the one-legged and the blind, the victims of leprosy, cancer, tuberculosis, and just plain old age. We hurried through this bedlam into Testevere where, like a sudden squall on the sea, a procession swept past us, noisy with cymbals, flutes and drums and accompanied with a flurry of thrown bright flower-petals.
A statue of Cybele hurried past on a decorated litter, marking this as a procession of Galli. Today was the height of the Megalesia, the annual festival in honor of the earth-mother Cybele, whose dark face symbolized raw creativity, and like Diana Efesina, the mother of all things, was a goddess of wild fertility. Cybele was a favorite of the city’s women, and both Tiberius and Claudius, under the influence of their wives, had fostered the cult. Cybele’s priestesses were female shamans who claimed to have learned the arts of spirit-travel and communication with the dead and whose rites involved frenetic music and ecstatic dances. The Galli we were watching were priests of Attis, Cybele’s consort. According to the legend, driven to madness by a jealous Cybele Attis castrated himself. The twenty or so young men who led the procession down the street and now around a corner and out of sight had, I knew, according to tradition used primitive flint knives to do the same.
But we did not set out this morning to encounter the diversity of the empires cults or natural life. We were after a remnant of Gaius Velleius Paterculus' memoirs, only rumored to exist. I knew the basics of Paterculus' life. Born into a well-off Campanian family he’d had a successful career in the military, fighting alongside Tiberius in Germany and Thrace before becoming senator and praetor, so his History of Rome focused on Tiberius’ reign. But the brightly-shining star of his career, on a seemingly steady rise, was yanked out of the sky by his ties to Sejanus. Tiberius had named his only son after his brother, the Drusus of my dream. Sejanus, commander of the praetorian guard, was the empire’s second most powerful man. A struggle for power arose between Sejanus and Tiberius' son, who stood to inherit the throne. When Drusus, healthy and strong, died suddenly in his mid-thirties, it was rumored that Sejanus had him poisoned. Tiberius, grown tired of the throne and the struggles that came with it, withdrew to a permanent vacation at Capri, leaving the struggle for power to others. The elder Agrippina, mother of Claudius’ new empress of the same name, being of the bloodline of the Julio-Claudians, had her own designs on the throne. In the emperor’s absence Sejanus’ star was too bright, too high. Agrippina convinced Tiberius to have him condemned. Sejanus and all his children were brutally executed, and his close circle of friends came down with him. Having flattered his old tent-mate Tiberius in his History of Rome could not save Velleius: as Sejanus’ friend he too was forced into suicide.
Velleius’ widow Cornelia survived by slipping quietly out of the maelstrom at the center of imperial politics into an anonymous plebeian life. She pawned the remnants of their former wealth -- the furniture, jewelry and expensive clothes -- to buy food and pay the rent. Eventually she found work as a seamstress, living in a working-class tenement no different from the hundreds of others encircling the city.
That was where we found her, in a third-floor Testevere apartment, down a decrepit hallway littered with rags and the skeletons of rats. She was old and ill, and her arthritic fingers having worn out, had run out of the last of her money. I told her we’d come to buy her husband’s memoirs. She stopped chewing the gristly meat she lifted from an old wooden bowl into her near-toothless mouth, pushed herself unsteadily back from the rough table and hobbled past a dirty straw mattress to an old chest, which after long struggle she forced opened. She bent over the chest, coughed, pulled out a papyrus.
She spoke, her voice thin and weak, like the sound of wind in the reeds. “My husband loved Tiberius. I warned him about Sejanus. But he wouldn’t listen. Nothing to worry about, he’d say. Nothing to worry about.” Her head shook. She coughed again, caught her breath for a few moments. “But Tiberius was fickle, and when Sejanus fell, he brought my husband down.” She paused, looked us over carefully. “But before he died he put his thoughts down.” She pointed the pa
pyrus at us. “How much?
Her husband's reputation as an historian was never high, and over the years memory of him had faded. Surely she knew that over time the manuscript had lost much of its value.
“How much do you want?”
She held the dried and dusty memoir close to her chest, stared hard into my eyes. Her hand slid over the papyrus affectionately. “Five aurii,” she said.
I blinked, looked away. It was a lot. Father’s small allowance, supposedly supporting me in law school, was not much.
“No.”
“Then how much?” She moved a little toward me, handed me the roll. “Look!”
I untied the papyrus, the dust of the years falling away in tiny clouds. Slowly I unrolled it, wincing as it crackled. The ink was good, the writing clear. The passage my eyes first fell on described Tiberius’ efforts to pacify the Germans, painting the emperor as a competent soldier darkened by his character as a man petulant, unpredictable and unforgiving. When a man knows he is near the end of his life, I thought, the truth takes on new value.
I let the manuscript roll itself back up. “One aureus,” I said. It was still a lot. I regretted the offer the moment it was out of my mouth.
“Three, then.”
I handed her the papyrus, turned to leave.
“All right then, one,” she said, her voice cracking. She’d waited twenty years for this moment and likely would be dead before another offer came in through the door. She handed me the papyrus. I passed it on to Lucius, untied a purse from my belt, and handed her the gold coin. She studied it, then clasped it tightly in her fist.