by AM Kirkby
***
Egerius probably didn't realise quite how much he annoyed Gaius by dropping in to Karite and Simonides' informal symposium every morning. He was every bit as enthusiastic about the stoa as he was about the philosophy sessions, but the stoa was getting built without his help; and what was he going to do, anyway, that the carpenters and masons couldn't do better without his interference? Whereas diffident as he was about his talents, he did feel he was contributing something to the philosophical discussion; and that was, albeit on a more abstract level, an equally important part of building the new city. Rome, he thought, had grown piecemeal, haphazard; whereas Collatia would be planned, its institutions as much as its roads and buildings properly constructed, its laws as precisely engineered as its temples.
Temples, of course, were for gods; and that was one difficulty they considered. Each nation had its own gods; the Punic Ashtart or Tanit, and Baal, the Greek Olympians, who both were and were not quite the gods of Rome; and the Etruscan gods, both those named (Tinia, Menrva, Turan) and those unnamed, who were, of course, the more important ones. Would the temples be erected to all the gods of the constituent nations?
"There's no need," said one of the Etruscans who had turned up today (no one could remember his name, later on, and as it turned out he never came again, though Melkart claimed to have seen him working in the kilns). "You only need to build a temple to the gods of the place."
Egerius nodded. To an Etruscan, that was obvious. Every god had a place; or rather, every place had a god. The world had come into being with its gods; they formed its landscape, its caves and promontories and sinkholes and rivers every one of them the home of a god, or rather, the god's integument, like a snake's sloughed skin. That was the way the world was.
"Gods of the place?" Karite had said. "Those would be Etruscan gods, then? Or Latin gods? So what would we do, those of us who don't worship those particular gods? Where would I worship Athene?"
"Isn't Athene just Menrva under another name?"
"Ah, see," Melkart broke in, "gods and names, that's a whole other subject – we were just talking about that the other day. So our gods, for instance, we have Tanit and Ashtart, or sometimes we call her the Lady -"
"Despoina," murmured Karite -
"- but Baal has no name at all."
"How does he have no name, if he's called Baal?" Simonides, as always, hot on the trail of illogicality.
"Baal simply means the Lord; or master, perhaps, you'd say. Not a name."
"So the Lady has a name. The Lord doesn't."
"Correct."
"That's just the reverse of the Romans!" Egerius was triumphant; but Melkart looked puzzled. "I mean, the Romans don't give women names at all; they're just numbers – Tertia, Secunda..."
"Not in that order," said Simonides.
"Or they have their father's names made into the feminine gender, Cornelia, Julia, Marcia, Horatia, but not names of their own. But in Carthage it's the god who doesn't have a name; the goddess is dominant."
Simonides nodded, sucking his lips in, squinting a little as he did when he was thinking hard. Melkart nodded too, slowly, then looked up.
"Of course," he said, "that doesn't mean we believe men and women are unequal. You can't take Roman society and just argue across that we're the opposite. People do try to do that, sometimes. As if all we do is to copy the Romans, but in reverse. Do you have any idea how annoying that is? Sidon, Sur, Sarfet were great cities when Romulus and Remus were still sucking a wolf's tit."
Egerius smiled. "Gently, Melkart, gently. After all, Collatia is even younger than Rome."
"So Tanit; does she correspond to Aphrodite? Athene? Artemis? Juno?" Karite asked.
"She's Aphrodite, surely," Simonides said.
"She is all goddesses," Melkart said.
"How can she be the mother and the virgin at once? It's not..."
"Logical, you were going to say?"
"She can't be a virgin and a mother at the same time." Simonides was obstinate.
"She is a goddess. She does as she pleases."
"It's interesting," Karite said, her voice quite cool but very clear with the careful projection of an actor, "that we are discussing the gods. Not worshipping them, but discussing them. Yet even when we discuss them in a rational way, or at least, I would hope trying to do so in a rational way, we fall into the old patterns of defending our own gods, our own ways of thinking. So you can explain how a man lives by the god he worships. And perhaps that is their real importance; look at our gods and you know how we live. We create our world by making our gods."
"The gods are real, though," Melkart said. Karite laughed.
"I'm not denying that. They're real enough – I know that. But you chose your gods, and the Greeks chose theirs, and the Etruscans chose yet another set, and it's the choice you made that tells us what we need to know."
They were quiet then for a while, as if frightened by the daring of their thoughts, till Simonides said, very quietly; "If we choose our own gods, I wonder if we don't make them... as we are making our own world here. Perhaps we need a new god for a new city."
"Why not all the gods?" said Egerius.
That was what they decided, in the end; a temple dedicated quite simply "to all the gods", no names, no images, just a simple round altar on which only grain and milk and honey and wine were ever to be sacrificed, and which was to remain untouched by the blood of any victim.
Only Karite held aloof from the decision. "Homer would say the gods were jealous of each other," she warned; "you know what happened to Paris after he dared to judge between the goddesses, even though they asked him to make the judgment."
"Well," said Kallirhoe, who had up to now remained silent; "if the gods are that petty, they don't deserve to be worshipped at all."