by Ken Parejko
So, I did. I started bringing Lucius with me, and while Castor talked about his plants Lucius scribbled away. Little did any of us know that the seeds we planted in these days would one day grow into a great work that would last thousands of years after Castor’s lovely garden would be only a memory.
We chatted, one time, about how it was we were so fascinated with plants. We were sitting in the peristyle, by a lovely dark green serpentine table holding a delicate crystal vase from which rose a single large lily, as sweet to the eyes as it was to the nose. On the table Castor had put out three ripe quinces, for the piquant aroma they provided. Once again, as so many times before, our conversation circled around Theophrastus.
“He ate no meat, you know,” Castor observed.
“Like Pythagoras,” I interjected.
“Yes. Only, more rationally. Animals are of our household, Theophrastus said, using the word oikos.” Castor paused. Lucius, waiting for us at the doorway, shifted his weight impatiently. “Like us, all animals eat, drink and mate, and because they are hungry, and thirsty, and seek a mate, like us they are driven by their desires. But plants have no desires. Or, they have only one desire, and that is only to be; and how purely they sing that simple verb.” At that Castor turned slowly and headed towards his room to rest.
I joined Lucius, and we headed home. Castor’s words kept returning to me, but it would be years, in a far different place and time, before I would truly grasp their meaning.
Chapter 10
59 – 66 C.E.
In a dark time the eye begins to see...
Theodore Roethke, In a Dark Time
We had heard it panting in the bushes waiting to pounce, Claudius’ death. When it came we were not surprised. In public she acted the grieving wife. Behind the tears she was a gloating mother.
I’d encountered her several times, since the debacle at Lake Fucino. As her chariot sped past the very air seemed almost to warp with her charisma. Once, the year after Brittanicus died his suspicious death, I had to jump back or she'd have run me over. She showed no sign of having seen me, or if she did, of recognizing me. She was staring straight ahead, into her own destiny. Now as she passed bystanders no longer cheered but turned and waited til she was past, then threw rude gestures in her direction.
Vespasian, who despised Agrippina, was at the time procurator of Cyrenaica in north Africa. His brother Sabinus had been appointed praefect of the city’s cohorts. In Germany I'd met and befriended Vespasian's son Titus and now and then when I ran into him he filled me in on what he'd learned from Sabinus about life in the imperial palace. It wasn't pretty.
Almost since the day Nero was crowned, he said, mother and son were like fighting cocks in a cage. She'd born him, suckled him, and set him on the throne when he was only sixteen, and now he’d turned against her. His angry bellows could be heard far across the palace.
“Who is emperor?” Silence. “Who?”
Quietly she’d hand him the obvious. “You.”
“Who?” he’d demand.
“You are!”
“I didn’t hear. Louder!”
Now, her voice louder than his, “You!” Then, bitterly. “But without me, you would be nothing.”
The struggle to lift him to the throne had left her empty, emotionless, conscience-less. She pretended to feel, which was better than not feeling at all, and used the pretense of feeling to manipulate others. One moment she might lavish you with affection, the next squash you like an insect. In a world designed by and for men, she’d fought for every iota of her authority. But the more power she gained, the harder she had to fight to keep it. After a time the fighting and the controlling became ends unto themselves; then she proved herself to herself by lighting and fanning fires of anger and terror.
Month by month and year by year their relationship soured; from merely strained it became a kind of festering, mutual hatred. Nero was overtaken by an obsessive paranoia. He knew the part she’d played in Claudius’ and Britannicus’ deaths. He had all his food tasted before he let it touch his lips, never slept without his most trusted guards at his side. Living in constant fear unhinged his mind. At night he and his favorite cronies, the most depraved men in the capitol, were seen wandering the streets in beggars’ rags, robbing and raping. By any reasonable standard he was insane.
His wife Octavia -- Claudius’ daughter, sister of the murdered Britannicus -- was popular with the masses, but in far over her head. When he tired of her he packed Poppaea Sabina’s husband Otho off to the provinces and took Poppaea as a mistress. He decided to marry Poppaea, and began looking for excuses to divorce Octavia. But Agrippina wouldn’t have it – she distrusted Poppaea, brighter and more ambitious than Octavia. She told Nero she would never allow the marriage. They argued. Threats were exchanged. During the night the logic of the thing folded its wings and settled over his mind like a big black bird settling down to sleep. It is only a matter of time, he decided, before one of us kills the other. Then one will be dead, the other alive. Which will I be?
Nero had several tutors as a child. He and Seneca had been very close but the philosopher's scrupled Stoicism had since marginalized him out of the emperor's power-hungry court. But scruples were foreign to another of his tutors, the Anicetus who Nero had rewarded with an appointment as admiral of the fleet at Misenum on Naple’s lovely Bay. In return Anicetus promised Nero he would do anything for him, at any time. The time had come for Nero to call in the chits. He summoned Anicetus back to Rome where he was treated with the finest wines and most expensive courtesans. Whatever his feelings about matricide, Anicetus appeared neither surprised nor troubled. He assured Nero that it would be done, and done right. Only I must not be implicated, the emperor said, pressing a large diamond into Anicetus’ hand.
Anicetus now put his engineering skills, useful to him as admiral, to other use. A few days later at a naumachia he watched a ship come partially apart, release two hippos and some crocodiles, then through complex rigging cleverly put itself back together. No one would suspect foul play, or if they did, be able to prove it, should Agrippina’s ship end up at the bottom of the sea. He walked out of the naumachia beaming with his own genius.
Of all the months of the year none has more festivals than March. March fourteenth is the Equirria, with its horse-races dedicated to Mars. The next day of course is New Year’s Day, and with it the festival of Anna Perenna. On the seventeenth the city is hung with garlands and masks for the Liberalia, when boys put aside their toga praetexta and take up the toga virilis. Nero stayed in the capitol for the festivals, but the day they were over he was seen leaving in his gold and ivory chariot down the Via Appia towards Baiae, on the Bay of Naples.
His mother was at Hortensius' villa in Bauli, a favorite of hers on the Bay, with its many fish ponds and nestled next door to the villa Julius Caesar had built and where Cleopatra had lived for a while. Nero had invited her to join him for a night's entertainment at Baiae. We will have a wonderful time, he wrote. We’ll put our differences behind us, it will be like the old days.
Nero settled in at Piso’s villa where he was feted with festivities and lavish dinners. His mother joined him the evening of the 23rd. To entertain her he’d hired the best Alexandrian dancers and musicians. “Now, mother,” he said, rising to toast her to the crowd, “let’s promise to get along.” They drank and laughed, and like the old days, kissed and fondled each other. In the small hours of the morning, the great circle of stars wheeling overhead in the warm Campanian night, he walked her down to the boat he’d provided for her trip back across the Bay.
He gave her a final kiss and helped her onto the boat. She settled onto a soft couch, under the boat’s fluttering blue and gold canopy. She waved to him as the sailors, hand-picked from the fleet at Misenum, rowed away from the pier. The night was clear and moonless, the sea calm. Soon all he could see was the torch burning on the bow of the boat, and its wavering reflection in the water. He watched as Anicetus himself steered the boat farthe
r out into deep waters before turning it towards Bauli. Nero made his way back to his room, wine muddying his thoughts as much as it hampered his steps. He collapsed on his bed, tossing and turning.
Meanwhile as Agrippina, now far from shore, dozed off beside her servant Acerronia Polla, Anicetus quietly reached up and tugged a rope fastened to the boat’s canopy, which he’d had filled with lead. The collapsing canopy killed one of Agrippina’s guards but did not, as he'd planned, capsize the boat. Worst of all, the arms of the couch Agrippina slept on prevented the fallen canopy from crushing her. The sailors, hired actors in this little farce, now tried to capsize the boat by rushing to port. But those who hadn’t seen the script rushed to starboard. In the mayhem Agrippina and Acerronia slipped quietly overboard. With a few blows with an oar one sailor dispatched the woman they could hear in the darkness imploring their help, in the name of her son. But it wasn't Agrippina; it was Acerronia, whose quick wits had saved her mistress’ life. Agrippina swam through the dark to shore and crawled onto the beach just as several fishermen came down to start their morning’s work. She reached into the purse at her waist and paid them well to carry her to her villa at Bauli.
When word came to Nero that his mother had survived he had a tantrum. He had Anicetus brought to him, whose botched attempt had put both their fates in doubt, and ordered him to find and kill Agrippina. Anicetus hurried off to Bauli, where he and his troops broke into Agrippina’s villa. Rushing inside they searched every room til they found her, once the most powerful woman in the world, lying wet, cold, and bleeding on a soggy couch. A quick thrust of a sword and the emperor’s mother was no more.
Nero tried to sleep. But morning had already come, and the reveille trumpets from Misenum's barracks wafted over the Bay and woke him. He ordered his mother’s body burned, then hurried back to Rome. While he napped fitfully in his carriage, pulled by six horses shod in gold, his mother’s remains were unceremoniously cremated on the couch she’d been murdered on.
Now the artist in him came to the fore as he wove an elaborate fiction. He had a rumor spread that having been caught in a plot to assassinate him, she’d committed suicide. He asked Seneca to compose a note for him, which he sent to the Senate. Salvum me esse adhuc nec credo nec gaudeo, it began. “That I am alive I can neither believe, nor celebrate.” He used the letter to make public the evidence he'd fabricated that his mother had plans to assassinate him at Baiae.
As happy as we were to see his mother removed from the center of the capitol’s politics, no one believed Nero’s story. To us, her murder was further evidence of his madness. Though we'd become immured to Nero’s behavior, matricide was beyond the pale. People began noticing omens of his downfall. A woman, it was said, had given birth to a snake. Someone exposed an infant boy in the Forum with a note attached: I’d raise you, only then you might kill me. I myself witnessed a solar eclipse.
Nero declared the week after his mother’s death a week of official mourning. But at night this woman who’d birthed him and raised him to the pinnacle of power came to him in his dreams, and with a dozen Furies armed with torches and whips cackled to him of his own immanent downfall.
His madness gave birth to his dreams, and his dreams fed his madness. With Agrippina out of the way he was free to marry Poppaea. But first he must be rid of Octavia. He offered Anicetus a choice. Either I name you as the murderer of my mother, for which of course you'll be executed, though not before experiencing some very fine tortures, or you agree that you and Octavia have had an affair and plotted against me,. For that I”ll send you off to a comfortable exile on the island of your choice. Anicetus chose the fictional affair and lived out his life on Sardinia. Octavia was not treated so kindly. Her exile on the tiny island of Pandaterria lasted only a few days, before she was dispatched.
All this was behind us.
One summer day I sweltered in the heat of the afternoon, a heat like we'd never seen at Novum Comum, far to the north at the foothills of the mountains. What we needed was a breeze but the city’s air seemed hardly to move. My apartment – or I should say Lucius’ and my apartment – provided us a nice view of the setting sun, but in the summer that meant torpid evenings.
So I had myself carried up to the Palatine where there was often a breeze, and was relaxing under the tall pines there reading Varro’s Topics on Agriculture, from which I learned much about farming, a practice I had little experience of.
I’d stood up to stretch my legs and thought I’d take a look around where Augustus had claimed to have discovered Rome's first dwellings. I noticed someone coming up the walk from the Forum. His stride and body-build looked familiar. We recognized one another simultaneously.
“Pliny!”
“Vespasian! I thought you were still in Reate.”
“No, no, I’ve come to the city. Enough of selling used mules. There’s good money in it, mind you. We landed a nice contract for the army, but I’ve handed the business over to my partners. With Agrippina gone, it's safe to come back. And you?”
I sat again, and Vespasian beside me. “I’m well. My books, especially the German History, pay my bills...”
“Yes, I’ve read it,” Vespasian interrupted. “A fine work. Really fine. You’ve told that story so well I doubt anyone will try again.”
“Thanks.”
“So now?”
“Now I’m up to my neck in something no one in their right mind should try, a natural history, a kind of summary of everything we know about everything.”
“No one but you,” Vespasian smiled. “You’re right, no one else would even try it, and no one but you could possibly succeed.”
I put my finger on a passage from Varro. “I’m reading one of your fellow Sabines, Marcus Terrentius Varro.”
“Ah. His farm was just over the hill from ours. The Agriculture?
“Yes. What do you think of this? He warns us here against farming the lowlands, where tiny creatures too small for us to see breed and float in the air, and by breathing them in we and our cattle get sick. Can it be, that there are creatures too small for us to see?”
Vespasian shrugged. “My eyes have never been strong. They tell me there are things called fleas, though I can’t see them. So why not some even smaller?”
“Yes, I suppose,” I added. “But is there any limit to how small they can be? How many might be sitting here on the end of my finger?”
“Let’s not try counting what we can’t even see, shall we?”
“Right. So now tell me about Cyrene.”
“You heard about the turnips?”
I smiled. “Well, yes, the story was going around...”
“Have you read Aristippus?”
“You mean about turnips?”
Vespasian laughed. He was a tightly-wound man, and some made fun of that, but he had a lively sense of humor and his laughter was fervent and unique.
“Cyrenaica is just a thin strip of land along the sea, in the shadow of the Atlas mountains. Very pretty, really. Aristippus was born in Cyrene. His father had some kind of business there. The family was pretty well off. Aristippus went over to Greece to the Olympic Games. Unlike his father he wasn’t much of a business-man. In Greece he met Socrates, fell in with that gang for a while and when he returned to Cyrene found a way to make money from philosophy, by taking on students. It was a devilish kind of philosophy though, teaching that logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, and all authorities were useless. Instead they taught that pleasure is the highest good, and we should trust only our feelings. There were still echoes of him and his school in Cyrene, four centuries after he died. As proconsul there my fiscal conservatism didn’t go over well. I decided it was time to balance the province’s budget. That meant higher taxes, especially on the wealthy. I put a stop too to the grand banquets government officials were treating themselves to, and suggested they eat what I ate: boiled grain, bread, fresh fruits and vegetables, with only a little meat now and then. Well, they wouldn't put up with it, so one morning a
s I left the governor’s house I was greeted with a rain of turnips.
He smiled, shook his head. “And,” he added, laughing, “and, they had the gall to point out they were throwing fresh turnips! But I learned something from that. People are not that different from mules. Hit them hard and they put their feet down and won’t budge. You have to coax them, instead.”
A breeze came up, which cooled us nicely. We were mostly by ourselves, with only a few men wandering now and again past. I watched the sun going down over the Tiber Island. I loved these long, slow summer evenings. Some birds, I thought maybe some kind of blackbirds, started to sing up in the trees. Two cats got into a loud argument down toward the Capitoline.
“Let’s take a walk,” I suggested. “Tell me about Britain. When we first met, you’d just left there.”
Vespasian had written to me on and off while he was in Cyrenaica and then in Reate, and I remembered in one letter he’d told me how pleased he was at the marriage of his daughter Domitilla to Petilius Cerialis, an ambitious officer from a good, solid family. When Cerialis was appointed legionary legate to Britain, Vespasian was able to advise him on the Brits, who were once again stirring up trouble. Well, could you blame them? We were lending them money – and Seneca was as much to blame as any -- at exorbitant rates. We commandeered their harvests for our own use. British women were never safe from our soldiers. Cerialis needed as much advice as he could get to keep them in hand. With his son Titus posted as an officer in Britain, and his son-in-law in command of a legion there, Vespasian had reason to hope for a strong and successful Roman presence on the island.
So we set off, at a slow pace.
“It’s really one disaster after another,” he said. “I’ll make it as short as I can. We put the Iceni down...”
Marcus Flaccus, a senator up to his head recently in some complex financial legislation, appeared from around the corner of Augustus’ house. Flaccus took Vespasian aside for a few moments for a heated discussion. As they said goodbye, it appeared Vespasian had convinced Flaccus of his point of view.