Across the Waters of Time- Pliny Remembered

by Ken Parejko

  The air was clear, the pavement smelled fresh, the sun shown once again. I walked aimlessly up the narrow streets beneath the shade of the Capitoline. Though once I knew this part of the city as well as the backs of my hands, in a few moments I was completely lost, a spiritless anonymous body in the crowd, bumping into others without apology, the exertion of walking and the vague rising panic together constricting my lungs so that as I walked I wheezed like a dying horse. Now not only could I not find my place in this city I knew so well neither could I find myself. All I had been and done had somehow disappeared, leaving me with no foothold on reality. I stopped at a street corner, hectic with the morning crowds hurrying about their business, all going somewhere while I had nothing, nowhere to go to or come from. The buildings of the Capitol, once so familiar, seemed to swirl around me. I stumbled back, leaned on a wall and caught my breath. The center of my being seemed to have given way.

  Lucius meanwhile must have noticed me gone and headed into the crowd surrounding the market trying to find me. After asking beggars and stall-keepers one after another at last one told him, yes, not long ago, headed off that way. Thankfully at last he found me resting in the shade of a pottery shop, vacantly watching the people stream by. He offered me water, then took me by the hand and led me back to the market where the litter we’d brought from Josephus’ awaited me.

  On the way back I told Lucius about Vespasian’s visit. To him this was a bad omen; if Vespasian’s spirit was free to wander he must be close to death, indeed.

  A hand nudged me awake. It was time to stand and join the procession to the Campus Martius. Cremation of the wax effigy was a public ceremony and great crowds awaited there. Everyone lives two lives, a public life and a private life. The crowds had come to witness the cremation of the public Vespasian, his career and his principate. The funeral pyre of dry oak was twenty feet high. Carefully the effigy was hoisted to its top. To the sound of dirges, equites pranced around the pyre on their steeds.

  Titus nodded and the pyre was set aflame. The flames crawled into the pile, then upward towards the wax. As the heat of the flames reached the effigy Vespasian’s face distorted and melted, then the rest of his body, the molten wax feeding the flames which devoured them.

  Meanwhile Vespasian’s body was being prepared for another pyre, near Augustus' mausoleum. There his real body would be cremated, which was his private life, in a ceremony limited to friends and family. I sat uncomfortably on my horse, which backed away from the growing heat of the pyre. The effigy was no longer recognizable. I turned the horse through the crowd toward the private services.

  Inside the coffin Vespasian’s body had been wrapped in asbestos cloth. When the fire was done with him his ashes would be recovered and placed in an urn in Augustus’ mausoleum, beside those of the great Augustus himself, and of Tiberius and Claudius.

  As I approached Vespasian’s coffin was being placed onto the pyre. Life seemed to have gone thin. There had been too many deaths lately. Our generation was passing the fire of life on to Titus’.

  The sound of our lives was now the clattering of hooves on a stone street, as the horses slow to a stop.

  Things happen, I thought, and you can’t make them un-happen. Aulus’ eyes floated before me a moment, and the eyes of the dead I’d seen on battlefields from Germany to Egypt.

  Even God cannot remake the past, I thought. At best, He can forget. Can God forget?

  The journey from Rome to Misenum had never seemed so long. I was going back to a different world than the one I'd left.

  Life seemed filled with loss. Aulus, the big, kind Aulus killed in Germany. Aulus, brother, for whom I wasn’t allowed to grieve. So many colleagues in the cohorts, from Germany to Judea, Spain to Cyrenaica. That was hard. Bassus, a good dear friend, whose widow lived on at the villa in Herculaneum. Plinia’s husband Cilo, that was hard. But none as hard as this. Is there an equation, can Pythagorus or Euclid formulate the sum of grief? How many Aulus is one Vespasian? Or is it the other way. Is any friend, even an emperor, worth a brother?

  For the first time in many years I felt alone again. I felt as I had forty-five years before when I’d first left Comum for Rome, and again when I left Rome for Germany. Only this time without the excitement and adventure of youth, the promise of what was to come. Instead, only a dull, aching loneliness. I’d made my life-friends, who now were being taken from me one by one.

  What would be left when they were gone?

  I’d always been a self-sufficient kind of man, not afraid to venture to a foreign land and start anew. In this way I'd filled my life with friends and experiences far beyond anything I’d ever imagined. But self-sufficient as I was, a part of me was those relations with others. Now, as the others slipped away, I felt myself diminished.

  This was new. This needed attending to.

  Vespasian, my friend, you are the fortunate one. You rose as high as any man can rise, and took us with you. Now we’re left behind, to find our own way.

  This was new.

  There was a strange silence in the air, as we headed down the Appian Way towards Misenum, an elegiac silence, the silence of the tomb and of the dead. Villages passed by, tall bluffs decorated with cascading waterfalls, temples already old and half-ruined. Orchards, vineyards and fields. Fields of wheat and barley and fields of rye, ripening in the summer heat, their heads bowing and waving in the gentle wind coming off the sea. Fields and fields. Fields of grain, fields of time and anger, fields of joy, fields of unhappiness.

  Who was left? Walking beside me, faithful old Lucius. Though Lucius, too, was drifting from me, had become one of those inscrutable Christians. That was something I couldn’t understand: Lucius seemed otherwise such a sensible man. But I had to accept it. Well, Plinia and Publius were waiting for me at home. And Titus. Yes, there was Titus, good old Titus.

  None, however, were Vespasian; none so close, none with whom I’d shared so much or gone so far. How many mornings I’d risen before the sun to share the morning’s first light and a hearty breakfast with good old Vespasian. Day after day after day; it seemed they wouldn't end.

  But the days had ended, as they will for all of us. They have ended already for Vespasian. And some day for me.

  There was something here which needed attending to.

  I took with me into a light sleep my full awareness that there was indeed something, important but yet un-named, to attend to.

  Chapter 20

  Misenum,

  July 6, 79 C.E.

  All this would justify us in saying that man,

  who is supposed to be the cleverest

  of the animals, may with good reason

  be called the least intelligent.

  Polybius, Histories, Book XVIII. 15.14

  A lonely beach, the sea unsettled, a swirling wind, a funeral pyre. Heavy logs feed hungry dancing flames whose feet have scratched an opening to the underworld.

  An old man lies washed onto the beach, his beard and long sea-matted hair dripping with the harvest of the deep, one hand still clinging to an oar. High on the cape a wild-haired Triton, conch to lips, angrily stirs a storm-tossed sea.

  Fire and sea swirl and dance, storm-mad and devouring.

  On the beach an infant, silent, naked, cradled in Helios’ warmth. Through the infant’s forgiving eyes, like a bark on a bucking sea, time rides its inexorable course.

  I tried, when I woke, to understand the dream. The marble frieze on Misenum's Temple to Augustus, which I passed almost daily. Yes. The old man Misenus, Aeneas’ oarsman lying drowned on the beach, brought down for challenging Triton to a trumpeting contest. And on the Temple frieze Helios, bright and harsh.

  Misenus, yes, for pride. But Aulus?

  So many times I’d tried to imagine the course of the sun through Aulus’ few days. And all my life it shivered there, in the shadows, that it was I, the precocious one, who was nature’s freak not he, and Aulus, sweet little Aulus was nature’s counterbalance to me. And always it was his e
yes I remembered most clearly, eyes though distant yet in a deep blood-tie way gently intimate, eyes whose depth and beauty somehow lightened the weight of my guilt. But there was more to it, hovering temptingly near comprehension. My dreams I knew were scripted of their own logic, from disparate elements of my life, and attending them, I knew, could open doorways into awareness. I lay back on my pillow, closed my own eyes to the world, walked back down into the dream. There I found Vespasian’s death and funeral: time’s inexorable arrow, the blazing pyre. Beneath that, like the swirling smoke of Hades, my growing anger at mankind’s pride and callous treatment of nature. And anger too at technology, with which we’ve conquered the known world, brought the snow of the Alps to chill our drinks, the cool waters of the mountains into our gardens, gems and metals torn from the earth’s bosom or the ocean deep. Yet what fools we are, like Misenus, to think we can overcome the sea.

  With my mind I worked the dream as though translating an exotic verse scratched in uncial Greek onto a faded papyrus, unearthing gems of meaning.

  Helios' son Phaeton rode the chariot of the sun with his father as day after day it coursed across the sky. To them the earth and her inhabitants, far below, seemed but trifles. One day Phaeton begged his father to hand him the reins. “Father, please, I can do it.” Helios demurred; Phaeton entreated. At last he has the reins in hand and proudly directs the horses through the sky, admiring the view and his own skill. But suddenly he loses control. Now the horses run wild, veering dangerously near the earth, scorching good lands into desert. Zeus, aghast, intervenes, and with a bolt of lightning strikes the chariot. Phaeton plunges to earth by the river Eridanus, where as poplar trees his sisters Circe and Pasiphae still cry over him, in tears of amber.

  But amber, I knew, comes not from poplar but from pines – rub it and it smells like pine; burn it and it smells like pine. So I knew the story was just that, a story.

  But there is another knowing, a dream-knowing. Misenus' death, Phaeton’s death, Aulus’ death.

  Yes, I thought. Amber eyes: Aulus’ amber eyes, his weeping soul, like a petrified bee, forever caught within.

  So Aulus has come to teach me.

  To teach me what? Of the price we pay for pride and overblown confidence. Of Fortune, the great adjudicator, watching from the wings, ready to intervene at the violation of natural law. Of the price we pay for awareness of our own mortality, of time and relentless fate.

  Elysium, then, I conjectured as I slipped out of bed and stared down at my feet, grown fat and coarse with age, Elysium truly is the fountain of forgetfulness.

  Once again in good hands the chariot of the sun climbed the sky into another glorious Campanian day. From below in the barracks came the daily trumpet-calls, mustering the men to their stations. Time, I sighed, time to leave the world of dreams, time to step, one old swollen foot at a time, into the mundane world of the dutiful praefectus classicus.

  As I rose from my bed Lucius swept into the room with my clothes.

  “Good morning, master,” he beamed. “God has granted us another day.”

  “And what has he given us to adorn it?” I asked, slipping the tunic over my head, which Lucius carefully tied behind.

  “The sun, the clear air to breath, a healthy breakfast, a meeting of the general staff…”

  “General staff? About what? Ouch! Too tight!” I complained.

  “What we need is a longer belt, or you to eat less...About the new ships.”

  “Ah, yes. The new ships. Thank you, Lucius.”

  Breakfast began with a glass of diluted Falernian in my favorite goblet, blown in Ara Agrippinensis, a gift from Vespasian, its faintly aqua surface embossed with precise diamond facets and inset with a careful rendering of the Museion at Alexandria and its spiral labyrinth. Though it was priceless I used it on an everyday basis. Every time it touched my lips it reminded me of Vespasian's friendship and our adventures together.

  With the wine I enjoyed a small wheat bread and a poached egg, gently touched with garum. Plinia brought me a slice of melon. Caecilius wasn't up yet, she reported, but if I wished she would wake him.

  “No, let him sleep. It’s but the first hour. Give him til the second. Then after breakfast he can try his teeth on this Theophrastus.” I slid a papyrus across the table.

  Plinia picked the papyrus up, read quietly. “Oikeios,” she said. Not many women could read Greek; I was proud of her for it. “He says we are more akin to the animals than Aristotle admits. Oikeios. It means we belong to the same household.”

  “Yes. And do you agree?” As children we'd played together but as we grew up our lives took us apart, to move in different worlds which barely touched. But now living together again I'd come to know her better, marveled at her intelligence, saw aspects of myself in her, though nurtured in her own way and stamped with her unique personality.

  “Of course. We all live on earth,” she said.

  “True. But would you invite a cow into the kitchen?” I teased.

  “There’s men I wouldn’t invite into the kitchen...Regardless, that’s not what he means,” she objected. “We share desires, thoughts...”

  “You mean that animals have thoughts? Or reason?”

  “Of course. When I bring milk for the cats, I do it every time with the same pitcher. If they see me pull the pitcher off the shelf, even before I’ve filled it, they come running.”

  “Aristotle calls that phronesis,” I observed, “a kind of simple technical knowledge of the how the world works. You pick up the green pitcher, they get milk. Theophrastus, as you see, goes farther, grants animals a kind of logismoi, a true reasoning ability. If this is true, he says, then it is a cruel and stupid superstition to sacrifice animals to our gods, and equally cruel to eat them. So, like Pythagoras, Theophrastus was vegetarian.”

  “Phronesis, logismoi,” Plinia said, setting the papyrus down. “I wonder if either of them, Aristotle or Theophrastus, ever fed their cats?”

  I smiled. “Who knows. Only let’s see what Caecilius can do with it. Tell him I’d like a good translation, by dinner-time.”I rose from the breakfast table and stepped outside the front door, looked across the harbor towards Monte Prochida and the isles of Ischia and Pithecoussia. There was plenty of activity on the Mare Morte and the beach of Miliscola, where new recruits were being trained. The morning was calm, the surface of the lake mirror-smooth. A recently-repaired trireme was being rowed across the lake and toward the harbor. From this vantage the morning light accentuated the fine, tapered wake the ship carved onto the surface of the water. My eyes followed that wake to the very tip of the ship and I realized something I’d never noticed before. At the front of the ship, where the keel rose to meet the surface of the water, the prow was pushing the water ahead of it. I watched closely where the water, at that very foremost part of the ship, seemed to rise slightly before falling back along into the transverse waves of the wake. I was embarrassed. Here I was, admiral of the fleet, and I knew almost nothing about the subtle negotiations between a moving ship and the sea beneath it. Surely the resistance of the keel against the water must slow the ship down.

  Just then the navarch Quintilius came up the path. “A fine morning,” he said.

  “Yes, yes. Here, I want you to see something. Look at that trireme on the lake.” I pointed to the ship.

  “The Isis of Actium,” Quintilius said. “We’ve laid her a new keel and scarphs, rebuilt the beams where they meet the sheer-strakes, refitted her all around.”

  “No, I mean look at the wake she’s making on the water.” I held my hands in front of me, into the shape of the ship's hull. “Here, at the very point of the ship, see how she raises the water. If she were cutting through the water perfectly, would she make a wake? If she were moving faster, would the wake be wider? If the Isis herself,” here I brought my hands together, “were very narrow, would she push less water, and be faster? Does a wide-beamed ship,” I opened my hands, “does a wider ship cut a wider wake?”

  “Of
course,” Quintilius answered, “we would want a very narrow, sharp-prowed ship, built like a lance. A ship like that would be extremely fast, on calm water, but unstable and incapable of turning. We shorten the ship and widen its beam to make it stable and maneuverable. Most of our warships are built one to seven. We've tried one to eight, or even longer, which work well when running down the wind, but they will not turn. The larger the surface of sail, the faster it goes, but the more she wants to lean over. Ship-building, like getting along with a wife or the Senate, is all a matter of compromise.” They watched the trireme carefully negotiate its way through the narrow canal connecting the lake to the harbor. “Annius, our master shipwright, is the man you should talk to. But I warn you, once you get him going he's hard to stop.”

  As the Isis, like an infant slipping out of the birth canal, made its way into the larger harbor and the company of its sister ships, we turned and entered the admiralty. I led Quintilius through the atrium, still decorated with flowers and greenery in memory of Vespasian’s death, into the reception room.

  “I am humbled,” I said as I sat, motioning Quintilius into the chair beside me, “by how much I don’t know.”

  “And we,” Quintilius added, “we are all humbled by how much you do know.”

  I smiled. “Well then, what bad news do you bring me today?”

  “Bad news? Why do you expect bad news?”

  “I don’t expect it, but I often get it. Well?”

  “Well.” Quintilius unfolded the wood cover of a wax tablet on which he’d scribbled some notes to himself. “The grain supply is of some concern. Valerius Pollo, our Pompeian supplier, promised us ten thousand modii by the kalends of August.”

  “Pollo? I thought we’d given up on him.”

  “He underbids everyone, half a sesterce less per modius.”