“Greetings,” said one, surlily, and winked with ostentatious ridicule at his companion, who coughed loudly.
“I am Lucanus, a physician, and the son of Diodorus Cyrinus,” said Lucanus, and felt heat in his cheeks.
“Oh,” said one of the wrestlers in a heavy tone, indicating that he was not impressed. A physician. No doubt he was a former slave. Neither of the young men had ever heard of Diodorus. The other wrestler said, “You are here to attend us?”
“I am here as Caesar’s guest,” said Lucanus, coldly. Then his blue eyes flashed at the obvious insults which had been extended to him. He said, while they were dubiously recovering from his casual reference to Caesar, “You are good wrestlers, but clumsy. Your trainers lacked art. You could not compete for more than a moment with an accomplished athlete. You are amateurs. Doubtless, however, better training will transform you into mediocre wrestlers, if you work hard enough.”
They were silent, breathing quickly. They still could not believe that Lucanus, dressed like a countryman, was actually the guest of Tiberius Caesar. And they hated him for his criticism. “No doubt,” said one, “you are a much better wrestler.”
“So I am,” said Lucanus, leaning against the side of the door. He ate the sweetmeat in his hand, and pretended to be engrossed in enjoying it. Then he added, while their eyes blazed at him, “I was much superior even before I was trained in Alexandria.”
He went on, while they remained silent, “I could wrestle better than you when I was ten years old.” And he smiled at them sunnily.
One of them stepped forward, his eyes sparkling with rage. “My name is Hyacinth,” he said. “And I have ten sesterces which say that I can throw you in three seconds.”
The other echoed him. “My name is Oris,” he said, “and I have twelve sesterces which tell me I can throw you in two seconds.”
Lucanus lounged easily against the side of the door and licked his sticky fingers. Then he felt of the purse at his belt, and said, “And I have fourteen sesterces which have just whispered to me that I can take each of you in turn and throw you in one second.”
He wondered, justly, for a moment, if he should inform them that he had been instructed in a peculiar form of combat which had been imparted to him in Alexandria by a teacher from Cathay. No, he decided. They were too insolent, too insulting, too self-assured, and he disliked them. He suddenly straightened, threw aside Keptah’s toga, and then stripped the coarse blue tunic from his body. He stood before them like a column of white marble, and they stepped back, uneasily. But his body, after a moment, seemed too smooth and elegant to them. They laughed, and one of them half crouched and came towards him on arched legs. This was Hyacinth.
Lucanus waited calmly. He merely raised his right arm and extended it. The gesture was languid, almost limp, and he did not bend his body. Oris barked a single laugh. Hyacinth’s teeth glittered between taut lips. Then, like a corded snake, his arm lashed out towards Lucanus, and his curved hand caught Lucanus’ shoulder. Oris blinked, for something had blurred before him. Dumfounded, he saw Hyacinth lying on his back in the grass, his eyes protruding and fixed dazedly. Lucanus yawned. “Well?” he said to Oris, ignoring the other young man. “That was one second. And you?”
Oris moistened his lips. Hyacinth groaned from the grass, lying there like a fallen statue. Then Oris, who possessed much courage, leaped at Lucanus. It was as if a pliant thunderbolt had touched him. He felt himself hurtling into space, and he joined Hyacinth neatly on the grass, shuddering all over.
Lucanus pulled on his tunic, smiling. “You owe me twenty-two sesterces,” he said. “Remember to pay them.”
The two young men lifted themselves to a sitting position, carefully examining themselves. They shook their heads to clear their bemused minds. “You are not hurt, not even bruised,” said Lucanus, shaking out Keptah’s toga. “Of course, if you have brains, which I doubt, they are slightly addled just now. They will clear, however.”
“What did you do?” cried Hyacinth, tenderly rising to his feet. “I did not see you move! I felt nothing! Yet a second later I was flying through the air. It is magic!”
“Yes. Magic,” echoed Oris. “Who can resist magic?”
Rubbing themselves, they glared at Lucanus, who lifted his golden eyebrows at them. “Magic, nonsense,” he replied. “You are just amateurs. Did I not tell you?”
“I won a purse of gold at the Great Games!” shouted Hyacinth, coloring violently.
“And I won the second purse!” echoed Oris, grinding his teeth.
Lucanus laughed in their faces. “Then I should win two purses,” he said. “Come, what else can you do?” He was exhilarated, his strong young body eager for more exercise. “Discus throwing? Spear casting? Ninepins? Boxing? Running? Broad standing jumps? Fencing? Surely you can do more than this childish tugging at each other.”
He stepped back two paces, jumped forward, bent his legs, and launched himself into the air. Incredulously two pairs of starting eyes followed him. His feet rose cleanly high above their lifted heads. He dropped back to the earth like a white cat.
“Match that,” he said, without a hurried breath, “and you will owe me nothing.”
There was the sound of enthusiastic clapping at the door, and they turned and saw Plotius there, laughing. Then Hyacinth and Oris were frightened. They knew Plotius well, and the high esteem in which Tiberius held him for his courage and his discretion and military qualities. Plotius sauntered out onto the grass and put his hand on Lucanus’ shoulder. “What an exhibition!” he exclaimed. “My dear Lucanus, you could compete in all roles at the circus and have Rome at your feet! For my instruction, I beg you to engage me in fencing tomorrow.” He looked at the two young wrestlers. “Who are these children?” he asked.
But Hyacinth and Oris dropped their heads and slunk away towards the end of the terrace. Plotius said, “They needed a lesson, those pampered darlings of the Divine Augusta. Take care they do not try to poison you at the banquet the Augusta is giving tonight in honor of Cybele; she is devoted to the widowed goddess. Doubtless she would like to be a widow, too. By the way, I could not follow your movements when you wrestled those boys. You did nothing but extend your arm, then, as they seized your shoulder you bent backwards, and they were flying! Like Icarus, with the same result.”
“I took advantage of them,” said Lucanus, grinning happily. They went back into the room together, where Plotius inquired why the slaves were absent and playing music in the corridor outside. “They wanted to wash and smear me with perfumed oils,” said Lucanus. He took off his tunic and jumped into the bath, where he swam a few feet, tossing back his wet and golden hair and raising a sparkling spray of water. Plotius squatted on the brim of the bath and watched him with intense admiration. “Never have I seen such a body,” he said. Lucanus slipped through the water like white alabaster, and as smoothly. “Ah, but the ladies will love you!” Plotius added, shaking his helmeted head.
None of the young men had seen a lady at the distant end of the terrace who had emerged from her apartments at the sound of contentious voices. She had stood there, watching, her beautiful face expressionless in the sun. When Plotius appeared, she retreated back into her apartments, smiling. She went to her mirror and studied herself intently, and hummed a song under her breath.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Nemo assured Lucanus that he was as ‘radiant as a god’ after the bath and anointing, from which Nema was banished, and the garbing in the white and gold garments. Lucanus had dismissed the accolade, though not after a surreptitious glance in the mirror. He was obsessed with a curious excitement. He never admitted it to himself, but the world of men and strange new experiences now invariably stirred him, as though he were newborn. He was about to be initiated into an atmosphere of which Diodorus had spoken with raging contempt. What Lucanus had seen so far had reluctantly moved him to admiration, for his Grecian eye was not insensible to beauty, and his soul was not so stern as to be displeased by the
sight of loveliness and grandeur.
Now Lucanus stood alone in the sunset, looking down at the Imperial City from his height in the gardens outside his chambers. The city fell down before him like a dream, purple, gold and violet and white, swimming in a rosy mist through which occasionally ascended a winged statue on its high pillar, an incandescent dome, a snowy wall struck into light by the last beams of the sun, a carved and powerful arch, or the enormous stone fan of a rise of Olympian stairs. All that was unsightly in the city was hidden in that roseate mist which was beginning to flow not only in the skies but over the whole face of the city, so that it was like a diffusion of millions of roses melting into one vast drift through which emerged the shapes of visions. The winding Tiber curved in a vein of polished scarlet fire, pulsing through the soft pink fog, its bridges fragile, seemingly composed of silver and ivory. Even the distant hills flushed faintly and had no substance. And now the columns of the palace about Lucanus lifted in smooth and soaring pearl, their western sides blushing. The sound of near fountains muted to frail music; the birds’ voices murmured in pure reverie. A scent of blossoms and jasmine and lilies suffused itself in the sweet and colored and ethereal air. The leaves of the myrtles gleamed like metal; the grass became an amethystine glisten.
Beguiled, and caught up in the tinted mirage which was the colossal city, Lucanus leaned against a column and listened and gazed. Then he became aware of the voice of Rome, below and yet above the voices of the birds near him. It was like the turning of a giant wheel, a muffled, Titanic thunder, constant and unremitting. Slowly Lucanus became impressed by a very odd perception. Pervading though the voice of the city was, it lacked a certain strenuousness, a certain ardor, a certain intensity, a certain masculinity. Lucanus then remembered what Diodorus had once told him: “It is an angerless city now, a city without manliness or heroism.”
Diodorus, that most angry, heroic, and manly man, had spoken well. The hushed roar of Rome was a surfeited roar. Its imperial splendor and might was a fatness. Monstrous and cruel it might be in its many aspects. But it was the monstrousness and cruelty of an aging man who had gorged himself too well and had forgotten the strength of limbs and the eagerness of the heart. It lay in the center of the world like a bloated if still potent satyr, reclining on a couch of crimson silk and gold, his hand grasping a sword, his other hand wearily lifting another goblet of wine to his mouth, the garland slipping on his head, his heavy chins resting on a bosom swelling like a woman’s.
Angerless. Unmanly. That could be the epitaphium of Rome. It had fallen in no battles. It had won them all. It was the same. Triumph became death no less than defeat. If a man died valiantly in armor on some battlefield of principle or patriotism or in the protection of what he held most dear, then he had not lived in vain. But those who won battles for power and baubles lived ingloriously and died as ingloriously, the object of later satires or a warning to the ages. It was strange that empires never learned that lesson, thought Lucanus. It was strange that men never learned anything at all. All at once, gazing down at the rose-drifting city, Lucanus was filled with a tremendous uneasiness, an ominous surety. He felt that he stood on the abyss of something which he could not yet discern; it was as if something had changed, quickened, from the immense eternities.
The rosy mist over the city diminished. A lilac dusk, like a vast eddy, glided over Rome, flowed into the gardens where Lucanus stood. The moon lifted slowly into the hollow sky. The birds were silenced, the fountains clearer. Nemo touched Lucanus’ arm, and the young Greek started and turned to the slave. “It is the eighth hour, Master,” said Nemo. Lucanus glanced once more down at the city. He murmured, “No. It is the eleventh hour.” A flare of red torches licked up from the violet dusk below, thousands upon thousands of torches like quick and restless tongues. To Lucanus it resembled the beginning of a conflagration.
A few moments later he was part of a white-robed throng of men and women moving through the halls and the vast rooms, which were now lighted with hundreds of lamps. The women walked with hard assurance among their men, for Rome, as Diodorus had bitterly remarked, was now a woman’s city, with arrogant women directing their men in shrill and insolent voices. It was a covert matriarchy, corrupt, selfish, brazen-breasted, insistent, and greedy. It was for Roman women that Roman legions fought; it was for Roman women and their idle bodies that galleons streamed from every port with their burdens of luxuries and foods and silks and jewels. It was for Roman women that the banners burst over cities and towns and the trumpets blazed. They could not invade the Senate, but they were there in the persons of their husbands or sons or lovers. The marts and the markets, feverish with the exchange of gold and the fury of investments, might be sounding with the voices of men, but the strident echo was the echo of women. They owned the wealth of Rome. Their soft brutality sounded in the clangor of the chains of millions of slaves.
As Lucanus walked among the throng towards Julia’s court he was aware that those hastening to the festivities were becoming more numerous. It was as if the statues of gods and goddesses in togas and stolas were leaving their porticoes and niches and joining the men and women, and as if the few who remained in their places looked down with contempt or celestial indifference at the deserters. I have heard only of the world by hearsay, Lucanus marveled to himself. He looked at the beautiful, depraved faces of the women, overlaid with cosmetics; he saw their jewels, their black, brown, gold, or bronze hair held in jeweled nets or bound in ribbons, in the Grecian manner. A mist of perfume floated from their bodies and their garments. Their white or honey-colored necks shimmered with gems, and their glossy arms were circled with gold, and their fingers glittered. Among them were famous courtesans and former slaves freed by besotted masters, and notorious women. It was impossible to tell them apart from the ladies of great houses and of great names. The married women could be recognized only by their stolas from the unmarried, whose dress had a false simplicity, and whose faces were as worldly and as disillusioned as the matrons’ and the infamous women’s. There was not a shy eye, a wondering young smile, or a tender glance among them, only boldness and greed and a looking about to see if they were admired. A high hum of incoherent conversation hovered over them.
The men were no less ambiguous. The senators could be recognized by their red sandals, but Augustale was not distinguishable from gladiator, or freedman from patrician, merchant from men of brilliant name. Lucanus wondered if those who wore the haughtiest airs were not the basest, and if those who were the daintiest might not have risen through fortune from some gutter. Diodorus had often said that Augustus, Gaius Octavius, would never have permitted the lowborn into his palace, no matter his present wealth or position. But his degraded daughter, Julia, wife of Tiberius, frequently declaimed her democracy. To her, she had declared, a gladiator of fame was as welcome as a senator. She asked only that her women guests be amusing, and hinted that among concubines and courtesans she had frequently discovered more wit than among the wives and daughters of noble houses.
Her own father once exiled her for her strumpet behavior. Why he had forced her upon Tiberius remained an enigma, for Augustus had had some affection and admiration for the present Caesar. It was possible that Augustus had believed that Tiberius, cold, just, and noted for his lack of susceptibility to women, and his private virtue, might have a quieting effect on Julia.
The sound of hurrying rose above the strains of distant music. Lucanus caught glimpses of feet shod in silver or gold slippers or jeweled and brocaded material. The men laughed and murmured, staring about them insolently. The white river flowed up a low wide staircase and through long courts. Some of the ladies, in particular, looked at Lucanus curiously through lashes heavily coated with kohl, or smiled at him invitingly. Once he saw a pair of violet eyes startlingly like those of Sara bas Elazar’s, and he was suddenly shocked. Once a profile reminded him of Rubria, and he was shocked again. It angered him that any of these women could resemble the girls he had loved, and whom he st
ill loved. He bent his head so that he could no longer see them. The men darted suspicious glances at him and asked each other who he was. The lamps poured down their shifting light on the throng, and the jewels danced in it, and the predatory eyes.
Lucanus thought: Cicero had lamented that though the forms of the Republic were still celebrated the Republic no longer existed. Among these men and women there was no love for their country, no celebration of freedom, no honor for the mighty dead who had founded their nation and their institutions. Their mouths exhaled perfume from the lozenges they had sucked. To Lucanus they exhaled corruption. All at once he was profoundly depressed. He thought of his home longingly. He had the impression that he was naked in the throng, that every part of him was vulnerable.
A sweet wind blew in his face, and he looked up to see that he was being borne along a vast open portico, where, because the weather was so mild and fresh, the banquet had been laid. The portico looked out on a great garden, decorated with a tangle of shining lights which reflected themselves in the dew on the dark grass. The very statues had been illuminated in various hues so that they stood in colored waters like figures of pale fire. Flowers had been strewn upon the earth, or stood in tall vases, so that the warm air palpitated with their scent. The portico, also illuminated, shone like carved snow against the black sky, and about it had been erected artificial grottoes of mosses and flowers, in which stood the most exquisite statues, slyly beckoning, and glimmering in the moonlight. Musicians played unseen, with flute and harp and lute. The tables set in the portico were covered with crimson cloths, banded with gold, and elaborately embroidered with brilliant threads, and the divans about them were similarly decorated, and waiting. Far below lay the vociferous city, trembling with lamps, the red torches licking, and from it came a distant growling sound like a forest of beasts.
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