“You want me?” asked Lucanus, who had never seen Plotius before though he had heard of him from Keptah’s letters.
“Greetings,” said Plotius, raising his right arm in the stiff soldierly salute. “You are Lucanus, son of Diodorus Cyrinus? I am Plotius, Captain of the Praetorians in Caesar’s household. You are to come with me for an audience with Caesar.”
Lucanus glanced at Keptah. Keptah said, “When Caesar commands, Caesar must be obeyed.”
“Very well,” said Lucanus. He brushed blades of grass from his tunic. He hesitated. “I have no grand apparel. I must come as I am.”
“You shall not insult Caesar by appearing before him like a crude shepherd,” said Keptah, with a smile for Plotius. “Here, my good friend, is a young man of considerable wealth. Yet he affects to be a poor countryman. Come, Lucanus, I have a fine toga, which I had made for myself, and for the arranging of the folds of which I have trained a very intelligent girl.”
He took Lucanus’ reluctant arm. The young man had colored with annoyance at the raillery in Keptah’s tone. Plotius watched them go into the house. Priscus, as usual, was wistfully fingering the hilt of the short broadsword.
“Ah,” said Plotius, “you will make a soldier as fine as your father.” He unsheathed the sword and gave it to the boy, who grasped it with his strong and brown little hand. His tanned cheeks glowed, and his eyes lighted. “Now,” said Plotius, “thrust like this, turning the wrist so.”
“I will serve Caesar,” said the child, thrusting and feinting at Plotius. “I will be a great soldier.” The other children returned to watch, and Priscus proudly ignored them, though watching them out of the corner of his eye. Aurelia clapped her hands and screamed in admiration as Priscus stamped like a fencer and mightily handled the heavy sword. The little girl’s hair was like a golden moon about her pretty face.
Keptah returned with Lucanus, who was clothed in a most regal toga now. A stableboy was bringing one of the household’s finest horses to the gate, an Idumaean stallion. When Lucanus mounted it and controlled it with expert mastery, Plotius thought of Phoebus, for the horse and the horseman stood against the passionately blue sky like statues suddenly embued with life.
Lucanus rode silently beside Plotius’ chariot into the city, the other Praetorians mounted behind them. He is very strange, thought the captain. He said to Lucanus after a while, “Rome is in a very festive mood today. The people are honoring Cybele, and her temple overflows.”
“I know nothing of Rome,” said Lucanus, curtly. “I passed only outside its walls on the way home.” Plotius shrugged, and the conversation died. But Plotius continued to admire Lucanus’ horsemanship and the way he sat on the stallion. He was certainly godlike. The ladies of Rome would go mad over him.
Long before they entered the city through the Asinara Gate, Lucanus could see Rome, white and bronze and golden on its Seven Hills, crowding against the cerulean sky. There she was, enormous, swollen not only with Romans but with men of many nations and many tongues, a city fierce and depraved, the mistress of all law, the mistress of the world, glorious in potency and color, the hub of her tremendous roads, fed by her great aqueducts which brought fresh clean water countless miles from distant streams and rivers, and by her ships from every corner of the earth. Here was Rome, the devourer, the destroyer, more terrible than her eagles, before whose fasces uncounted millions of Germans, Arabs, Gauls, Britons, Egyptians, Armenians, Jews, Spaniards, Sicambrians, Indus, Greeks, and Nubians, and myriad other peoples, bowed in terror. The sun blazed on distant walls and gleaming columns; it gilded far temples in blinding gold. All the wealth of the world was here, all its power, perversions, and evils, all its strange appetites and stranger gods, all its depravities and tongues and customs and lustings, all its beauties and arts and philosophies, all its intrigues and plottings. No wonder, thought Lucanus, that Diodorus had at once loved and hated his city.
The stone road, the pride of Rome, thronged with horses, chariots, wagons, and carts, loaded with merchandise and produce. An aqueduct ran alongside, its high waters gurgling in the warm spring sunlight. Fields of poppies and yellow buttercups blew on the borders; the air was filled with the ferment of the earth and with the sweat and effluvium of the caravans. Plotius ordered some of his lictors to surround him and Lucanus and to clear a passage. Lucanus, in spite of himself, was caught up in curiosity and fascination. He looked down at the teeming dark faces of his fellow travelers; he smelled the odor of spices and garlic; the air thundered with pounding feet and hoofs and the rattling and creaking of unnumbered vehicles. His eyes hurt with the shifting and vigorous color and the vivacious sun. “The traffic,” said Plotius, with disgust, “becomes worse every day. Every other road leading to Rome is as badly overcrowded. Yet Rome is never surfeited; she is like a vast mouth eternally open and eternally gulping. She is like Cronos, who devoured his children.”
Clouds of noisy cheeping swallows sailed over their heads and added to the furious din of men and vehicles and horses which seemed to shake the road. The cultivated fields on each side glistened with the almost unbelievable green of young crops set out in rows on the red and fecund earth. Infrequent copses of myrtle, oak, and cypress trees cast an occasional shade on the burning stones, and here and there, beside a blue and shallow stream, stood clusters of great willows drooping their frail jade hair downwards to their pale and mottled trunks and the shining water. The tumultuous road wound past white villas set in gardens, and pastures full of mild cattle, and groups of chained slaves raising new walls or repairing them.
Now the yellow dust thickened and became a bright haze over the travelers, and a powdering like gold appeared in the folds of Keptah’s precious toga which was so artistically draped over Lucanus’ light blue tunic. Lucanus attempted to brush it off, but it clung to the fine linen. His stallion sneezed and snorted. Plotius thought it ridiculous for a man in a toga to ride a horse. He had offered to return Lucanus to his home in his chariot, but this had been coldly refused by the young man.
As they approached closer and closer to the city Lucanus’ sense of excitement grew, and a very human curiosity. Rome was seven hundred years old, and old, now, with ancient sin. It was fitting that she had been founded on a fratricide. However, her decline had begun with the decline of the Republic into an absolute empire. Her world-flung banners rode with the whirlwind; her might was maintained by a hundred legions, and spies and informers and murderers by the multitude. Intrigue suffocated the once honest air of the Republic. But that inevitably was the course of empire, the course of power and ‘world leadership’. Lucretius’ poem, De Rerum Natura, which Lucanus had read, had a double meaning, one for the latrines of Rome and one for the latrines of the Roman spirit. In the physical latrines mothers frequently abandoned unwanted newborn children; in the spiritual latrines men had abandoned their faith and their character.
What did it matter that Gaius Octavius, Augustus Caesar, had boasted that he had found a city of brick and had converted it to a city of marble, which gleamed and glittered in the sun? Better, thought Lucanus, a humble city with justice than a marble sepulcher for the transcendent virtues. But still he was excited. The cavalcade stopped at the gate, and the incomers were scrutinized by the soldiers on guard, with their drawn swords. The top of the gate snapped with the banners of Rome, and the terrible stone eagles stared furiously down at the road and the restless crowds of men and animals and vehicles. Plotius and his entourage were admitted with salutes and rode through the gate, leaving behind them a deafening uproar of impatience. And now they were in the enormous city, enveloped and devoured by it.
If Lucanus had been dazed by sound and noise on the road, he was completely dazed now by the city. The rest period occurring after the noonday meal was over, and as they proceeded along the Via Asinara they were slowed to less than a trot by the multitudinous shopkeepers, clerks, and bankers on the way back to work. Though Gaius Octavius had declared that all Roman citizens should wear the toga, the major
ity of hurrying men wore the short tunic of many colors, blue, scarlet, yellow, white, brown, crimson, and green, and shades of all these hues. Most were afoot; a few of the more affluent were carried in litters. Chariots and horsemen tried to force passage over the flat or cobbled stones. The traffic was made more congested when groups of ebullient citizens insisted on halting in the very middle of the street to discuss business or exchange gossip. When forced to break up by the force of the traffic itself, they took refuge in the doorways of shops and taverns, there to shout and gesture and swear and laugh, or to conclude a bargain. The road was hemmed in by the tall houses, sometimes of as high as eight stories, where women leaned on window sills to scream at children who had escaped the courts in the rear and were adding their uproar to the general din. Here most of the buildings were built of the flat, long red brick of an earlier era. Men pushed carts on which smoky braziers stood, and on the top of these braziers sausages and small pastries sizzled. Other carts, propelled by their owners, were filled with cheap merchandise for the consideration of the women who stretched from their windows and shrilled down at the vendors and insulted their wares, or nodded at a held-up length of wool or linen or cotton of violent tint, and at other sundry offerings. To Lucanus the city reeked worse than Antioch and Alexandria, in spite of the endless sanitary laws, but it was a more gigantic reek, and almost awesome in consequence. His nostrils were stricken by foul odors, by the hot odoriferousness of cooking victuals, by oil and animal offal, by the pervading miasma of millions of latrines, by astringent dust and the smell of sun-heated stone and brick. Here the cool spring of the country had been lost in an immense and choking heat, as of midsummer. Eddies of hot air flowed from other streets as from ovens. And everywhere clamor, running, shouting, expostulating, and the pound of wheels and hoofs, and billowing clouds of pigeons and swallows. When the lictors of the Praetorians broke up a particularly large mob of merchants who were vociferously disagreeing with each other in the very center of the street, Lucanus was aware of scores of indignant black eyes turned upon him and his escort, and, because of the noise, he could only see writhing mouths emitting curses. The Urbs feared no one, not even Caesar.
What most impressed Lucanus, and dizzied him, was the height of the city, the tall buildings, the looming apartments, crowded together and thrusting against each other, contrasting in their colors of red and yellow tufa and grayish green peperino, their arches filled with eddying groups swirling like water. The city, contained by its walls and gates, had only one way to grow, and that was upwards. As a consequence all the streets boiled like impetuous rapids, and the citizens, forced to push shoulder or elbow into a neighbor for passage, were understandably irritable and were often given to blows or open quarrels because of blocked movement. As Lucanus was now approaching a wealthier quarter, this confusion and noise was compounded by walls, higher buildings, circuses, theaters, private homes, and government establishments, covered with marble of many colors, not only white, but golden and brown and red and occasionally a slab of dazzling black. Rome had absorbed all the gods of her conquered nations into one seething pantheon of religions, and temples jutted everywhere, through whose bronze doors poured endless conclaves of worshipers, those going carrying sacrifices and those emerging emanating the scent of incense. Many, awaiting friends, stood in porticoes, gesticulating, spitting, arguing. Now tall and fluted columns appeared, on which soared bronze or iron or white marble statues of gods and goddesses and mounted heroes, prickling up like giant pikes from the seething crowds and jostling buildings and temples, sometimes perched on each side of wide stairways leading to public buildings and places of worship, and sometimes leaping from a broadening of the road and in the center, surrounded by small circles of earth filled with brilliantly colored flowers in the midst of fountains, or gleaming with mosaics. And over it all — all the stunning clamor of millions of voices, hordes of vehicles and horses, all the power of Imperial Rome and her marbled hills — arched the hot blue sky like a domed and suffocating cover over a steaming and colossal pot.
Lucanus’ horse stumbled more than once in the chariot ruts of the road. He was sweating vigorously. As it was useless to try to make one’s self heard, Plotius lifted his hand and mutely pointed to the Palatine, on which stood the palace of the Caesars, built by Gaius Octavius. It and its surroundings appeared small and far from this distance, but Lucanus, in spite of the haze of yellow dust which hung palpably and with burning brightness in the air, could see the Imperial Palace surrounded by a grove of white columns, mounting up story by story in diminishing levels of smaller columns and ascending arches. Temples, green hanging gardens and terraces, and beautiful villas flowed down from the palace on the regal hill, surrounded by a profusion of arches, porticoes, fora, theaters, and huge and crowded monuments. He thought that in that great palace lived Zeus himself, with his children in lesser palaces descending about him, cool and apart in the midst of trees and flowered courts and perfumed fountains. It all stood against the sun, shining as if with white fire, this crowded separate little city of royal might and beauty.
For the first time Lucanus, who had been absorbed by all that he had seen this day, gave thought to his coming interview with Tiberius Caesar. He tried to recall all that Diodorus had said of this man, his cold caprice, his distrust of all Romans so that he stationed garrisons of soldiers outside the Roman walls, soldiers accountable only to him. Once he had been a more joyous and happier man, when married to his beloved Vipsania, but he had yielded to the demands of his mother and his Emperor and had divorced his charming wife for a woman who later betrayed him. Since then he had become a gloomy and quietly vindictive man, for all his declarations that every Roman should enjoy free speech and thought, including the Senate, to which he outwardly deferred and which he inwardly despised. But at least he had genius for delegating power, and his magistrates and proconsuls and procurators had freedom of action and judgment. If he was now showing some ominous signs of becoming tyrannical and intolerant, and if he was usurping more and more power belonging to the Senate and the people and the courts and displaying symptoms of desiring absolute despotism, no one opposed him. This, Diodorus had written reluctantly to Lucanus, was more the fault of the Senate and the courts and the people than it was the fault of Tiberius. Nevertheless, he was, at this time, still an able administrator, and just, and still a soldier at heart, even if he was frequently the target of the coarse wit of the Roman rabble, who scrawled obscene comments about him and his faithless wife, Julia, on the walls of Rome. Sometimes, in bolder hands there appeared, in red letters: “Where is our Republic? Long live the free men [ingenui]. Down with the tyrant!”
But the Republic had died, and no Caesar had put it to death.
The city, as Plotius had said, was festive today. But Romans were always festive, and always honoring either native or foreign gods. Anything was an excuse for a holiday, for sacrifices, for celebrations in the circuses or the theaters or in the countless public baths. Three circuses alone were advertising chariot races and combats between gladiators, and slaves poured through the populace shouting the news, including the information that some of the best and most ribald Greek plays were about to be performed in certain theaters. Hordes insistently struggled in the direction of these public spectacles, cursing at idlers who blocked them and shouting imprecations in many languages.
The young physician and his escort now began to ascend the Palatine, and, as they mounted, the air became cooler. Lucanus was delighted by the beauty around him, and momentarily forgot Tiberius. It was less crowded here, and those who were borne in litters and in chariots and cars were men and women of consequence, going either to the temples and theaters surrounding the palace or to their villas, and some to seek an audience with the Emperor. Lucanus looked into the eagle faces of the men, and at the painted faces of the lovely women, who smiled at him suddenly and with pleasure. In spite of their prettiness they appeared ravaged and strange to him, and somehow depraved. He saw gates of villa
s opening to admit those returning to their homes, and flashes of scintillating gardens beyond and the silvery restlessness of fountains, and white arches and porticoes crowned with mounted gods and heroes. Never in all the world was deity so beautifully and blatantly displayed, and never in the world, thought the young man, was there so little faith. Gods adorned the Imperial City; they did not rule it.
Now on a high level Lucanus looked down at the tremendous and predatory city filled with its rushing and colored rivers of humanity, at its bristling monuments and choked buildings, all finally disappearing into great golden distances. Again he was stunned by the very weight and potency of Rome, by its incredible vastness, its dynamic force, its millions of charged, grim, and excitable people, its fierce if prodigious and vulgar grandeur, its milling mobs, its furious uproar, its storm of banners, and, from this height, its rabid and incandescent beauty. He saw the green and sluggish Tiber and its carved bridges, and the buildings that rushed to its edges, and the white and rosy roofs fiery in the sun. Here and there a gilded dome blazed among pointed cornices, like a lesser luminary. His eyes smarted; his spirit was almost overpowered. And now he was vaguely frightened again. Small beads of sweat burst along his fair hairline.
The gates of the palace, manned by stern Praetorians, swung open for him and his escort. What if he should offend Tiberius? Would the Emperor, whom Diodorus had disdained in rough language, visit that offense on Iris and the children?
Dear and Glorious Physician Page 39