The Testimonium

by Lewis Ben Smith

  “I’m not a Moor, I’m an Arab-Italian,” al-Ghazi replied archly.

  “Notice he doesn’t deny the three-hour lecture he inflicted on me,” his friend shot back.

  “It was only an hour or so, and you asked for it,” the Arab replied.

  Simone smiled at their banter and walked over toward the head of the trail. As if on cue, she heard the voices of the two male archeologists approaching. They were engaged in a heated theological debate, ambling up the trail together. Josh had a large box under his arm.

  “I understand that traditions can be important,” Josh was saying. “Every church has them. But to allow human traditions to trump the clear teaching of Scripture has always struck me as dangerous. I mean, Paul clearly said that the pastor of a church should be ‘the husband of one wife and a good manager of his family.’ You know that most of the Apostles, including Simon Peter and the Lord’s brothers, were married. So why should the Church not allow men of God to also be family men?”

  “We do ordain widowers,” said Father MacDonald, “but the priesthood is a holy office, and those of us who undertake it must be willing to renounce the privilege of having a family for as long as we wear the cloth.”

  “But where does the Bible require that?” Josh asked.

  “It doesn’t,” Father MacDonald acknowledged. “But tradition and Church doctrine does.”

  They looked up and saw her smiling down at them from the head of the trail. Father MacDonald tipped his hat at her, and Josh gave a wave. “My apologies, dear lady,” said the priest. “This young rascal is determined to re-fight every battle of the Protestant Reformation with me!”

  “Not at all,” said Josh. “I am just trying to understand the Catholic position.”

  “Well,” she said, “the work is done. All the stone dust and debris are gone, and the chamber is just as Tiberius left it for us.”

  “I hesitate to ask how long it took,” said Josh.

  “I was in bed by midnight,” she said. “Or at least, in my bedroll. Tonight I claim one of those soft guest beds at Giuseppe’s house.”

  “I would say you have definitely earned it,” the priest said. “So, have we heard from our illustrious leader?”

  “Not yet,” said Simone. “Now, what is in that box?”

  “We have fresh pastries, and some sort of meat and cheese wrapped inside a light fluffy bread roll,” Josh said. “I don’t know the name, but it smelled wonderful!”

  “I had one of yesterday’s pastries,” said Apriceno, “but I wouldn’t mind something with a bit more substance.”

  They were eating breakfast when Father MacDonald’s phone rang. He picked it up and listened to the greeting from the other end. “Good morning, Dr. Sforza,” he exclaimed. “I trust you had a pleasant and productive meeting with the board?”

  “Productive enough,” she said. “We released a short press statement this morning, to let the world know that we have made a discovery up here. However, we are not yet letting anyone know what we have discovered. It mainly lets the public know why the Villa Jovis is closed. Were there any developments at the site last night?”

  “We did make a wee little discovery while you were away,” the priest admitted. “I think you will be quite pleased when you see it.”

  “I’m en route right now,” she said. “Send me a couple of pictures on my cell. Be there in about fifteen minutes.”

  The priest looked at the cell phone with a bit of distaste. “I haven’t even learned to take pictures with this thing, much less send them. Dr. Parker, can you lend your technical expertise?”

  “I took some shots with my iPhone as well as with the camera last night,” he said. “Let me shoot them to her. Do you have the number?”

  The priest read him the number, and Josh sent the digital files to Isabella’s phone. Moments later, he got a text back. Reading it, he let out a chuckle.

  “What does she say?” MacDonald asked.

  “‘I hate all three of you. Be there in ten minutes,’” he read.

  They finished their breakfast and walked to the upper level to watch the helicopter land. There were handshakes and high-fives all around when Giuseppe and Isabella climbed out of the chopper and joined them.

  The first order of business was to see the chamber now that it lay revealed. Dr. Apriceno unzipped the plastic doorway covering the entrance and all of them filed in together and stood with their backs to the front wall where the writing desk had stood. She waited till they were all in place, then plugged in the high-powered halogen lights she had rigged up the evening before. There was a collective gasp as the tableau before them was illuminated.

  Because of the slope of the stairs above it, the back of the chamber had a much lower ceiling than the front end. Where the ancient desk had been, the roof of the chamber was a good four or five feet above them. But the back, where the reliquary rested, was only a bit above five feet in height. The reliquary stood about four feet high and rested in the low end snugly, with about a foot of room on one side and somewhat less on the other. Because of the poor lighting and the shape of the room, not to mention the endless shower of stone dust from the steps above, the back of the chamber had been hard to see at first. The reliquary had simply been a large square object standing in the corner, coated with massive amounts of dust and dirt. The gladius had been so completely covered that Rossini and Sforza had not even noticed it on their initial inventory of the chamber’s contents.

  Now the walls, floor, and artifacts were cleaned of the dust of the centuries, and stood there as they had been left twenty centuries before. The reliquary was a magnificently carved wooden box, about a foot deep and five feet wide. Carved into the dark wooden doors was a finely detailed Roman eagle, with the inevitable SPQR engraved beneath it. Latin letters above the eagle, along the top edge of each door, read “Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, conservare dignitas de Iulii.”

  “Jupiter Greatest and Highest, preserve the dignitas of the Julii,” Josh translated. The cabinet was made of a very dark wood, and bore the nicks, scars, and polish of much use. It was obviously not a new piece of furniture at the time it was buried in this chamber.

  “Amazing,” Josh finally said. “To stand in the presence of so much history is —”

  “Humbling?” said Rossini. “If this box is what I think it is, it once held the funeral masks of Julius Caesar, his father and uncles, and perhaps even Augustus himself. Alone, without anything in it, this is the greatest discovery of Roman archeology since Pompeii was unearthed!”

  “And look at the sword!” said Isabella. “That weapon had seen much service before it was laid to rest here. One of the Caesars may well have carried it in Gaul, Brittania, Spain, or Egypt. Giuseppe, did you have any idea when you found this chamber what a discovery you were making?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Do you think Howard Carter knew what he’d found when he uncovered those two limestone steps leading downward, buried in the accumulated backfill of a later tomb in the Valley of the Kings? Do you think Heinrich Schliemann realized he had actually found Troy when he first sunk his shovel into the earth of Asia Minor? My friends, this is a discovery for the ages.”

  After a long look at the newly revealed artifacts, the five of them retreated out into the open air to confer. How to proceed from here?

  “First things first,” said Rossini. “Let’s begin with the leather purse we found. It should be sufficiently rehydrated for us to remove the contents without damaging it. Then, we remove the sword to the lab for study and preservation. The scabbard is leather and will deteriorate if not stabilized. After we have analyzed both those items, we will need to figure out how to deal with the reliquary. The first determination we need to make will be whether to move it unopened, or open it up, see what is in it, and then decide if we need to remove the contents first, and then move the reliquary itself, or move it contents and all.”

  Isabella nodded. “That seems to be a logical course of action,” she said. “Let’s re
pair to the lab.”

  Once inside, Dr. Apriceno set about organizing the hundred or more vials of dust she had gathered from inside the chamber. She would conduct a preliminary examination on the samples collected from each surface in the chamber, and then fly the entire collection to the mainland for more rigorous analysis after her initial report was made. The other four headed over to the rehydration tank and watched as Professor MacDonald donned a pair of elbow-length, acid-free rubber gloves and selected two pairs of forceps from a drawer. He pulled out a section of the tank’s bottom, laid the forceps on it, then reached through the rubber-lined opening on the side of the tank and picked them up.

  With great precision, he grasped one edge of the drawstring bag’s open end with the smaller pair of forceps, then took the other pair and gripped the opposite side of the bag’s mouth. He tugged ever so gently, and the ancient drawstrings, having regained a measure of their suppleness, slid through the holes, allowing the bag to open up a bit. He then used the larger pair of forceps to hold the bag open while he reached into it with the smaller pair. He gingerly lifted out the ancient key first. The actual key itself was made of iron, which was blackened from age but remarkably free of rust. The horse head effigy appeared to be carved from some soft stone, or perhaps very deeply stained ivory, inlaid with gold and gems. He laid it on the tray he had placed the forceps on, and then reached back into the purse again. The second item he brought out was the pointed object that had baffled them in the X-rays. Once it saw the light of day, though, its nature was apparent.

  “An arrowhead,” laughed Josh. “I’ve picked up a few hundred of these back in the States, although all of mine were stone, not iron.”

  “Why would Tiberius save a common iron arrowhead?” wondered Isabella.

  The priest was already back at work, probing the purse’s interior with the small forceps. In short order he extracted four coins—two gold, one silver, and one bronze. Further probing discovered no more items inside the purse, but to be sure, he released the mouth of the drawstring bag with his forceps and picked it up by the bottom, shaking it gently to see if anything else fell out. Only the fragile, desiccated carcass of a spider tumbled out. He pulled the tray out and transferred the metal items onto the table for study, then slid the original tray back into the tank with a fine pair of tweezers and a clear plastic box. The spider carcass was dropped into the box for later study—if it could be dated, it would be a clue as to how open the chamber might have been in ages past.

  After the spider mummy was placed in storage, the archeologists crowded around the items on the table. Dr. Sforza photographed both sides of each item from multiple angles, and each was measured with calipers and its dimensions recorded in field notebooks and on film.

  “Looks like two gold sesterces, a silver denarius, and a bronze drachma,” said Rossini. “All appear to date from the Augustan age, which is consistent with the time the chamber was sealed.”

  “Excellent preservation of detail, too,” Josh said. “These may be the most well-preserved Roman coins I have ever seen.” Everyone nodded in agreement.

  “What about this arrowhead?” he asked. “I am very familiar with the stone projectile points we find back home, but not so much with these Iron Age points.” The iron arrowhead was about two inches long, and nearly an inch wide at the barbs.

  “It’s not Roman,” said Isabella. “It’s way too big, plus the Romans poured theirs into molds in a mass production process. This one appears to be hand forged and hammered.”

  “Could it be Gallic?” said MacDonald. “Or German?”

  “It does look like some Gallic points I have seen,” commented Rossini. “Is that something scratched into the metal on one side?”

  Sforza plugged the camera into the computer and quickly downloaded the image, then pulled it up on one of the jumbo monitors. Rough Latin characters had been scratched into one side of the arrowhead’s wide blade. Although worn and faint, they appeared to read “G I C Alesia.”

  “Gaius Julius Caesar—Alesia,” said Rossini. “That was his most important victory, the one that broke the back of the Gallic resistance and made him the most famous military man of his day. Sixty thousand Roman legionaries, besieging fifty thousand Gauls in a walled city while simultaneously fighting off a relief army numbering in the hundreds of thousands. I loved reading that section of Caesar’s Gallic Wars as a boy.”

  “I remember that.” said Josh. “Although I’ll admit I read about it in Colleen McCullough’s novels first, and then Caesar’s own account later. He built a wall around the city, and another wall facing outward to protect his men—what did they call it? Double circumvallation?”

  “That’s it,” said Isabella. “But why would he keep a single arrowhead? And why would it be passed down to Tiberius?”

  “Just guessing,” said Josh. “But if he was wounded—or, more likely, if he suffered a near miss that should have wounded him or killed him and didn’t—he might have kept it as a reminder of his legendary luck.”

  “Fortuna’s favorite, that’s what they called him,” said MacDonald.

  Finally, they looked at the key. The barrel was just over an inch long, and the drooping metal end was distinctively notched. “Typical Roman effigy key from the first century,” noted Isabella. “I have seen a number of similar ones from Pompeii. We need to keep it handy, in case the reliquary is still locked.”

  Each item from the purse was catalogued, assigned a number, and placed in a padded tray, then placed in a cabinet where they could be stored until the entire mobile lab was returned to the mainland. There they would be taken to the brand new laboratory recently built to supplement the aging facilities at the National Archeological Museum in Naples. All the finds from the chamber would be rigorously tested to tease out every bit of information they contained, and to check for any evidence that the artifacts were not authentic.

  Once the examination table was cleared, Dr. Sforza looked at the team. “Are we ready to remove the sword from the chamber, or should we take a break?” she asked them.

  The four archeologists looked at one another, and MacDonald spoke. “It’s not nearly noon yet,” he said. “All of us had a decent breakfast, and I am a bit concerned about that leather scabbard now that it has been exposed to the air. I want to get it into a controlled environment as soon as possible.”

  “I guess that settles it, then,” said Isabella. “We carry it to the lab and begin the preservation process before we break for lunch.”

  Dr. MacDonald began preparing a tray to transport the sword on. He chose one that was a full meter in length, more than long enough to lay the shortsword and scabbard across. Then he laid a layer of acid-free fabric across the tray, taping it down at the edges to keep the breeze from blowing it away, and prepared a cover that would come down over the whole thing and snap into place on the sides, thus eliminating any chance of exposing the delicate, ancient leather to the destructive UV rays of the sun. When he was done, the four scholars walked from the trailer to the chamber entrance.

  “Josh,” he said, “I am going to stand here with the tray ready. I want you to don these gloves and very carefully lift the blade and scabbard onto the tray, and then snap the cover in place. Then you and I shall lift it through the opening and carry it straight to the lab.”

  Isabella began filming and narrating as Josh pulled the gloves on and studied the sword carefully. The leather scabbard was rough and cracked with age, but did not look as if it were in imminent danger of crumbling apart. Nonetheless, he gripped the pommel of the sword itself with one hand and grabbed the metal sheathing at the point of the scabbard with the other, not touching the leather at all, as he gingerly lifted it and placed it onto the tray. Isabella handed him the lid, and he lowered it into place and locked the latches down on either side. Then he put his hands solidly under the tray and helped guide Father MacDonald as he backed through the chamber entrance and across the small courtyard to the mobile lab.

  Within momen
ts, the tray was placed on the examination table, and the archeologists gathered around. The scabbard was made of what was probably, at one time, some very expensive and durable leather—perhaps from Corinth? It was black with age, but the golden trim that the leather was decorated with was as bright as ever. There was some silver there, too, but it had tarnished and darkened over the centuries. The artifact was measured and photographed, and then Josh carefully flipped it over so the other side could be examined. This side looked identical with one exception—there was a flat silver plate, about two inches long and an inch wide, sewn into the leather. The silver was faintly engraved. Once more, Josh zoomed in with the camera, snapped away, and downloaded the pictures to the computer. In less than a minute, they were looking at a magnified image of the inscription on the oversize monitor.

  “Ad Romae mundissimo filius, gerunt cum honore—Aurelia Cotta Caesar,” read Professor Rossini. “Roughly translated: ‘To Rome’s Finest Son, Wield It with Honor—Aurelia Cotta Caesar.’ Aurelia was one of the greatest matrons of the Roman Republic, and the mother of its greatest general. My friends, this removes all doubt. We are looking at the sword of Gaius Julius Caesar.”

  “I don’t understand,” Josh said. “This chamber belonged to Tiberius. Why did he place his adopted grandfather’s items here?”

  MacDonald replied, “Julius and Augustus were gods by the time Tiberius was an old man,” he said. “Not just in the sense of being deeply admired former rulers, either. They were genuinely worshipped by the people of Rome and by the many citizens of the larger empire. And Gaius Julius Caesar was in a league of his own. Many military men still regard him as the greatest general of all time. His sword, his lucky arrowhead, would have both been precious family heirlooms. Whatever his shortcomings as an emperor, Tiberius was a great general in his day. His conquest of Germany made him a hero to the people of Rome while his adoptive father Augustus was still alive. But at the time he wrote the letter we found, he was an old man, aware that his time was short. His only heir was a psychotic teenager who had never led men in battle—a spoiled brat, a ‘serpent’ as Tiberius called him. He probably thought that Gaius Caligula was unworthy to wield the sword of the Divus Julius, and so sealed it up in the chamber, along with the lucky arrowhead—and who knows what else?”