by AM Kirkby
***
Neither Tarquinius nor Tanaquil had ever become accustomed to the Roman gods; Tarquinius believed in nothing but the power of the human mind, while Tanaquil maintained her devotion to the Huntress and the hidden gods of prophecy. It was, for her, an inward, not an outward devotion; there was no temple to the Huntress in Rome, and no opportunity for her to carry out the office of haruspex, since sacrifice was reserved to the King and the Flamen. But the skies were always open to her view; and when she hunted, she felt the god with her, always.
But there were few other believers in Rome. Some of the other Etruscans had started worshipping the Roman gods, claiming they were, after all, only the same gods under different names; Venus was Turan, and Tinia Jove. She told Tarquinius that, one evening, thinking he'd laugh at the romanizers' outrageous shoehorning of Etruscan gods into Roman clothes; but to her surprise, he thought there was more than half a truth in that.
For him, the gods were a polyglot crowd, like the outlaws of early Rome; Greek, Asiatic, Latin, even Gaulish, mixed like the tongues that named them. His gods had always been as confused as his blood, his father's Olympians, the gods of Tarchna and the hidden gods of Etruria, and his mother's hearth-gods that she'd brought with her, and would go with her oldest daughter when she died, like a pet tortoise or a long-lived servant.
“Father worshipped Dionysus. I never really knew much about it when I was younger, but when I was about fifteen he asked me whether I'd considered the initiation, and he seemed upset at my lack of interest. But you see, I'd always thought of Dionysus as Fufluns.”
She'd smiled at that; Fufluns, the spiteful prankster of the vineyards, the wild boy of the woods. No, you wouldn't worship Fufluns; you'd bribe him, perhaps, with a jug of wine and a couple of cakes left under a coppiced hazel, and you'd hope that would be enough to keep him from turning your wine sour, or striking your vines with a late flurry of sleet.
“Dionysus is more than that,” Egerius said. They'd almost forgotten he was there, he could be so quiet.
“He'd need to be,” she snorted.
“The old Etruscans, I think, didn't need Dionysus; they had the dance. They'd dance all night, till the trance took them.”
“The Greeks dance, in the theatre,” Tarquinius pointed out.
“Yes, but it's a very precise dance. Choreographed.”
“One of your Greek words?” Tanaquil asked; not one she'd heard before.
“Dance-drawing,” Tarquinius said.
“Dance-writing,” Egerius said, almost at the same moment, and looked apologetic at his correction of the older man. “The Etruscan dance isn't like that; it's spontaneous, danced for the dancer, not for an audience.”
“Have you ever danced it?” she asked. She never had; it would have been considered rather quaint and old-fashioned in Tarchna, if not rather low class.
“Once,” Egerius said, and smiled. “Just once, when I'd ridden out into the hills, and I found one of those little towns where the women still go to the sacred spring. The kind of place that hasn't changed in generations; straggling hilltop streets of pale yellow stone, with pigs rootling behind the houses, and naked children playing in the dust. Staties, I think it was called; a nice place.”
“Can't say I know it. The hills are full of places like that,” she said.
“When was this?” Tarquinius asked.
“It would have been the summer after I came to Rome.”
“Ah. When you disappeared after working on the saltings at Ostia. I always wondered where you'd got to.”
“I'd arrived late in the evening, when the sun was already pale, and one of the priests of the spring volunteered to put me up. She was good looking, with huge eyes and that half-blond, half-dark hair you get sometimes in the north, but I suspected she'd only invited me to be polite. Still, I hoped. Then as the sun sank in the west, the drums started. I'd forgotten what night it was. The moon was already high in the sky, pale in the deepening blue.
She took me to the dance after we'd eaten, and at first, we stood a little way from the drums, and talked. I've forgotten what we were talking about. I don't suppose it was important. Then after a while, I found my right foot was tapping out the rhythm; I hadn't even noticed.
It wasn't the drums so much as that halting rhythm of unshod feet on bare ground that captivated me. It's a sort of shuffle and hop, but that sounds all wrong; it's not funny, there's a kind of archaic dignity in it, and... and a kind of love, if that doesn't sound too pretentious.”
“And then?” Tanaquil asked.
“And then the priest took my hand, and we joined the dance.”
Egerius was silent for a moment. It wasn't shyness, Tanaquil thought, as it might have been if he'd been granted the priest's favours for the night; it was more a deep withdrawal, a taking of breath.
“Once you join the dance,” he said, “there's nothing else. You can't think, or talk, or stand apart. The dance is you, and you are the dance. And when I hear the Greeks talking about Dionysus, that's what I understand; the maenads' feet pounding the earth, the clouds of wine fumes swirling in their heads.” He looked at Tarquinius. “Were you initiated, in the end?”
“Yes.”
“You know what I mean, then.” His voice was low.
“Yes.”
There was an uneasy moment then, and Tanaquil broke it with a light slap of her palms, and a flirtatious smile.
“Not like Fufluns at all, then!”
Tarquinius grinned. “You can see why I wasn't really interested in being initiated. I thought Dionysus was some vineyard god. Instead, he turned out to be something much... different, anyway.”
He'd kept that side of himself well hidden from her, she thought; but she was not surprised that it was there.
“Still,” Tarquinius said, “Tinia and Jupiter are not so very different. They both have their thunder, they both have their rules.”
“So does Zeus.”
“Zeus has more fun with women,” Tanaquil said.
“And boys,” Egerius corrected her, and shook his head with laughter.
Tarquinius was obviously pretending not to notice their moment of complicity. “If you believe some of the Greek thinkers, we invented the gods anyway. So the gods are a reflection of our common humanity; you'd expect them to be similar.”
“And just how do you square that rational approach with your devotion to Dionysus?” Tanaquil asked.
“I'll admit, it's not easy.”
“It's illogical!”
He shook his head. “It's two different things. The initiation is - it's like what Egerius described, a sense of being, or becoming, something else. I don't literally believe in the panthers or the hunt or the feeding on human flesh, or the ritual chanting, or...” He stopped, suddenly realising he'd said too much. “I can look at it as a rational man and say it's like sex, or drunkenness; it has an effect that I'm aware of, that is nothing to do with a god.”
“But even so,” Egerius added slowly, “when you're there, inside the dance, it's different.”
“But neither of you go to the Roman ceremonies. Yet to hear you talk, it wouldn't matter if you did; they're the same gods, just figments of the imagination. It wouldnt make much difference.”
“Just as it doesn't make much difference if we don't go,” Egerius said.
“Of course I have to go to some of them,” Tarquinius said. “It's one of those things Ancus Marcius could never quite explain; I think it probably came in with the Sabine traditions under Numa. The king is also the high priest, and the high sacrificer. So I have to kill bulls for the good of the city, much good that it does anyone. There's no getting out of it.”
“Oh, I wouldn't be so sure,” Egerius said. “After all, you already changed the Senate.”
“What's that got to do with it?” Tarquinius was interested; Tanaquil could see the way he'd sat forward, one hand half raised.
“Rome's getting bigger. The city needs more governing; you bring new men into
the government.”
For once she was impressed by Egerius' reasoning. “The city needs more bulls, so get more butchers.”
“I might have put it more elegantly, but, effectively, yes.”
At least she knew now Tarquinius would understand why she needed to take time to visit the shrine of Diana at Aricia. She still wasn't sure that Menrva and Diana were one and the same; but some of what she'd heard about the cult of Diana suggested she might find it similar.