The Grove of the Caesars

by Lindsey Davis

  I pulled a face. If such a person existed, then my father was. “He says so. Will he be able to sell them?”

  “Of course!” exclaimed Donatus, as if speaking to an idiot. “Double the price—with added value for mysterious origins and notoriety.”

  XXXII

  So my scrolls were condemned as fakes.

  I knew something of counterfeiting from the auction house. There we encountered it mainly with statuary. When I had first started going to the Saepta Julia to help out, I was taught two rules. First, there are five big names in Greek sculpture: Myron, Phidias, Polyclitus, Praxitiles and Lysippus. Any piece that came in as one of those was definitely not by them. Not a big-bottomed Venus, a dying Gaul, a Boy taking a Thorn out of his Foot (whether left foot or right), a discus-thrower or two nude men with cloaks over their arms, brandishing daggers and earnest expressions, who were being called the Tyrannicides.

  I was warned that there were tyrant-killers from more than one Greek city, though all have the same foot-forward pose and there are always two. This is why Rome has Brutus and Cassius, yet the other sixty Liberators are ignored. “You cannot have,” my father declared once, “Brutus, Cassius and Ignoticus, their best friend from school. However much Ignoticus loathes dictators, he would make it one too many and would ruin everything.” (“Yes, but,” I said, “you know there are sixty and I can even name some.”

  “Go and annoy your mother,” answered my father.)

  Second rule: some statues are labelled, generally on their base. This is always helpful. It is intended to attract buyers’ interest, which it normally does. However, anyone can carve any name on a plinth, at any time in its history. The inscription you are looking at was probably chiselled last week. Falco knows a man who will do it for the price of a good fish-supper—though of course neither my father nor even his father before him (Geminus, the outright rogue) would ever be involved in such an enhancement.

  According to them, that is.

  One way to make sure a pedestal label is right is to ascertain that the lettering is of the period when the statue was made, using your knowledge of archaic alphabets (every auctioneer has this knowledge, apparently, though I was never shown the lists of letters); also, it must be in the right local dialect. Doubt will never stop an auctioneer pointing out the plinth label, though there are set phrases for implying caution. “We can only offer guidance, without guarantees. We can find nothing against it. You must make up your own minds, perhaps taking expert advice. It says, ‘Falsus made me’—and it is perfectly possible that Falsus actually did.”

  A phrase my father finds useful in the context of proof is “Corinthian Doric.” Occasionally, when deeply moved by the exquisite perfection of a piece, Falco even refers to that extremely rare variant, “Corinthian Doric Ionic.”

  Copies can be made for several reasons, not only the obvious one of fraud. True, a sculptor may make out that a piece of his own work is by a better-known man, in order to disguise its mediocrity and get paid more. Or, since a beautiful original can have only one owner, people may commission copies out of pure delight in its elegance.

  This has advantages. If the original is ever lost, damaged, destroyed by earthquake, fire or flood, or sunk in a shipwreck while being foolishly transported to Italy from Greece, at least copies still exist and hack carvers in Campania can run you up another based on a copy.

  In addition, a new version can be requested in the right size to fit its planned location—something that is beloved of designers, both interior and exterior. Awkward niche? Get yourself a scaled-down Athena Parthenos, two foot three with helmet. Don’t forget to allow for a base. As you were: call it two foot one.

  * * *

  Donatus reminded me that, alongside the growth of art galleries where real and doubtful statues thronged, Rome had acquired a rash of libraries. Some monumental porticos were designed to house both statuary and literature. The grandest had both a Greek and Latin Library, as at Vespasian’s Temple of Peace. Even our current emperor, Domitian, not known for cultural pursuits (apart from poetry competitions, which for me don’t count), was sending out emissaries through the civilised world to copy scrolls in order to replenish libraries that had been destroyed by fire. This would counter-balance the scrolls he had burned in the Forum because they were written by radical intellectuals who railed against one-man rule. We were to have all the knowledge in the world—unless it was anti-imperial.

  Munificence is how emperors hope to make the public love them. Private men had also created libraries, in order to show off their personal taste, appreciation of the arts and, let’s face it, wealth. Ex–provincial governors with years of service abroad would come home crammed with love for exotic cultures. The less moral ones brought booty to prove their enthusiasm for the lands they had plundered. Even since plundering had gone out of fashion after one or two famous court cases, private collecting had flourished. Retired imperial freedmen had to spend their bribes and pensions somehow. Senators wanted to beautify their villas more extravagantly than their peers, so they looked like bigger men. Men, or occasionally women, even built libraries from a genuine love of literature.

  This had led to what Donatus called bibliomania. Possessing literature for study was no longer enough. The goal, as with the monumental libraries at Alexandria and Pergamon, was to acquire all the literature in the world and stuff it into your book cupboards. A private individual of worth had to have shelves groaning with rare works, works his friends might never have heard of, works they would marvel at, drooling with jealousy, whenever he showed off his collection. People were purchasing ghastly scrolls they would never read, simply in order to own more than anyone else.

  This thirst for rare works had become quite refined. Collectors wanted to boast they had the only existing copy of some ancient piece that was significant in intellectual thought or, worse, they wanted an autographed manuscript that a well-known author had personally owned. They were desperate for scribbled annotations by Thucydides, a ring-mark where Sophocles had stood his wine cup, a bent stylus and the oil lamp Homer wrote by. (Oh dear, how irritating: Homer was blind, so better call it Aristotle’s.)

  Donatus said if maniac collectors made a mistake, they were never going to admit it after they had paid an exorbitant price. Doubtful scrolls managed to slip onto the market unchallenged. Other men, darker minds with murkier motives, enjoyed the thrill of owning unique scrolls secretly, gloating over their possessions in locked rooms that no one else ever entered, hoarding treasures no one even knew existed. These secretive types were exactly what forgers were looking for because whatever they bought would be hidden away, never subjected to critical scrutiny.

  “So where is this leading?” I asked, after Donatus described this background. “Bibliomania has created the environment for fraud. Are these scrolls of mine, you think, part of a deviant trade?”

  “I know they are.”

  “Is it widespread? Does it affect all kinds of writing?”

  “There are rich pickings for fakers, and the best of them have mastered everything: history, philosophy, poetry, drama, memoirs—intriguing memoirs, memoirs that should never have been written, hideous memoirs no one in his right mind wants to read. The older and more obscure the better.”

  I was ready to believe it. “So Epitynchanus and Philadespoticus would be good choices to forge because, like Dictys, whose tomb allegedly threw up memoirs, they are so little known. The materialist philosophers lived a very long time ago. No one even remembers who they are, so their scrolls are less likely to be challenged?”

  “True.”

  “So we end up that these scrolls of mine, roughed up and coloured by burial in the ground, are still likely to find buyers?”

  “Absolutely. First off, they do look like the real thing. Forgers are the most knowledgeable people in the book trade, Albia. These are very convincing—at least at the dirty end. If the burial experiment had worked better, they might be perfect. Of course, I know what your pro
fession is, so take my advice. If you have decided to find your counterfeiters and bring them to justice, you must search for people who really know their stuff. There is excellent craftsmanship in the hardware of your battered scrolls—indeed, there has been expert battering. They are damaged in ways that would really have happened over many years. And then somebody went to great trouble to invent the contents.”

  “It’s garbage,” I said frankly. “Who writes garbage?”

  “Most authors.” Increasingly, I liked his attitude.

  “But who reads garbage?” I persisted.

  “The bloody public!” Donatus was earnest, not letting out a smile. “Nobody has to read your scrolls, Albia. These will be rare things, items to be caressed and treasured. Exquisite antiquities that collectors’ friends don’t have. They were deliberately made, quite recently, that I guarantee. Made for the bibliomania market.”

  I rounded on him. “How can you guarantee it? Donatus, you have been making enquiries among your contacts. What did you find out that’s relevant? Stop holding back, man. Tell me the full truth.”

  We danced the dance informers must endure. He writhed. I pushed. He looked vague, pretended not to understand—and then he told me.

  After I visited his shop, something I had said to him resonated. About a year ago, there had been rumours of a scandal. A long-time collector, a sensible, knowledgeable man, whom Donatus would not name to me because he said the man was famously secretive (plus Donatus sold him scrolls occasionally), had been on the verge of buying a newly discovered manuscript of stunning rarity. Then came a buzz in the trade that the sale had gone wrong. At the last minute the buyer had withdrawn in acrimonious circumstances. The scroll’s veracity was called into question on expert advice. It had been offered to him by a highly regarded dealer of many years’ standing, which made it worse. The dealer then maintained he had been taken in too. There was talk of a compensation claim, but it came to nothing when, sadly, the dealer passed away—

  “Because of this dispute?”

  “No, it seemed to be normal illness. Mind you, the trouble won’t have helped.”

  “And what made you think of this when I came to see you? Anything particular?”

  “A name you mentioned. The expert declared the supposed author of the disputed scroll was entirely invented. Never existed. A complete wrong ’un.”

  Please, I thought, do not let this be Epitynchanus or Philadespoticus. Their work was awful, but I had become poignantly attached to them. Epi and Philly were mine now. For one thing, I must be the first person for hundreds of years who had read their stuff. Well, the first person since the forgers, if my supposed materialists were not real.

  The fraud might never have come to light, said Donatus, but the forgers had chosen a ridiculous name. They gave their author a birthplace, biographical notes and a list of his (supposed) other works on the title page, in the manner of Calimachus’s Pinakes at Alexandria.

  “Hades, that means nothing!” I burst out scoffing. “Even my pa is in the Pinakes, listed for some daft play he once wrote.” And his poems. We never talk about the poems.

  The scholarly expert, a specialist in the School of Miletus, easily discounted the ancient author’s background as a spoof. The scholar could distinguish between the writings of Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes on the basis of a few phrases, he could talk for hours about their metaphysical naturalism and, most importantly, he knew who had taught whom in their circle, plus who had become a follower of the Milesian School in later centuries. He had never once come across the alleged author of the problem scroll. He declared him to be a dastardly fiction and his supposed work to be pastiche. The buyer was furious; he lined up a judge to adjudicate and compensate, but after the dealer died the scroll could not even be found by his heirs so there was no case to answer.

  I gulped. “I need to know: who was the fictitious author?”

  “Well, I can’t believe you were fooled, Flavia Albia. It was Didymus Dodomos, the Dodecanese Doctrinalist.”

  I had to admit this had a loud ring of untruth.

  XXXIII

  Donatus left, finally off bar-crawling. I noticed my steward and cook slipped out to join him. They were entitled. Neither answered to me. Gratus might be a freedman, but he was not mine. Fornix appeared to be freeborn. They were at liberty to go out; my only regret was remembering how when I was younger I would have gone with them. Now, I was so whacked I had to be steered upstairs by my maid.

  In bed, my head spun. At first my brain churned with tumbling questions. I might have to go back to Donatus tomorrow, preferably while he had a hangover and might answer meekly. For now, I wanted to consider the implications for myself.

  Was the Doctrinalist truly dodgy? Having glanced at the fragment Larcius and the men had dug up, I could well believe that the one true thing about Didymus Dodomos was that he was contrived. If he was an invention, what of the rest, Epitynchanus and Philadespoticus, or the forlorn female poet Thallusa?

  So when you say you love me,

  I ask for definitions,

  Then when you try to give them,

  I challenge your traditions …

  Thallusa had promise. Thallusa must be the product of true imagination, coupled with genuine knowledge of unhinged, unrequited, rather youthful love. Thallusa could once have been me.

  Often, of course, that is why we read. To find ourselves. To exclaim, Yes, yes, that is exactly it! This author really knows …

  It was an attractive thought that even if the scrolls were blatantly put together for criminal profit, it could still be exploited by the Didius auction house. We would have to catalogue them honestly, but the beneficiaries would be Tiberius and me, as finders … One big feast for the workmen, in return for handing over the scrolls, then off to the reading-couch supplier for us—with no need to hold back on bronze fittings!

  I was learning that, even though I came from a remote province and had been adopted by strangers, I was the true child of a Roman family business. It gave me a warm feeling. Perhaps it was the warm feeling you experience when you have wet yourself, but never mind. Natural accident. Nobody minds, darling. Don’t worry.

  I did want to find out who was behind the fraud. My professional curiosity throbbed. Who had made these scrolls? Who had dreamed up the experiment of burying them? Who had written the mad words of the awful pseudo-philosophers? And did the perpetrators realise their artefacts had been found by others? Or would they still go back to collect their hoaxes? Whether they did or not, if I put the scrolls into auction, which must involve advertisement, how would the fraudsters react to me having them? They could not come forward to claim them, especially once we had labelled the scrolls “as seen: assessed as counterfeit.”

  I wondered what the legal situation was. Apparently, no one had yet been asked to buy these things as genuine, so no one had been defrauded. The pseudo-philosophers could never be charged with plagiarism, even if it turned out that their ideas were taken from real ancient authors. I had a feeling that when you’re dead you can’t sue. Or be sued. This is presumably definite if you’d never lived in the first place. Even so, as I lay awake, disturbed by wild turns of the brain, I imagined—or invented—a hack lawyer who might specialise in litigation on behalf of the deceased, and who might be induced to try his hand with the non-existent …

  Back to reality. Much careful work had gone into those scrolls. Exposing them publicly might ditch their makers’ hopes for fakes of this type, making collectors more wary. And if the forgers learned that I had dug up and kept their product, would it be dangerous for me?

  Would it avoid trouble if I tried to find a buyer behind the scenes? This might bring a lower price than the auction estimate, but would a private sale be safer? Even if that person later sold them on, with or without an honest description, the trail would become murky …

  I was thinking like a criminal. It showed that the line between straight- and double-dealing was as thin in the auction world as everyo
ne believes.

  Details about the original failed sale struck me as familiar. I knew one possible source for the scrolls. Donatus had refused to name the man who had nearly bought the so-called work of Didymus. He had never even told me which dealer was offering the forged scroll. But I knew of one who had died about a year ago, of a supposed natural disease, and who had been very highly regarded. Back into my head came Mysticus. Back, too, came Tuccia, who now owned his business. I could hear in my head how she had cheerily cried out to her staff: “Someone found some buried scrolls!” It had sounded like a warning for them to be discreet. If they had already encountered fakes, that made sense. If they themselves had produced them, it made even more. Had my buried scrolls originated in that shop?

  Tuccia and her staff had pretended to me that they thought those scrolls were genuine. She had spoken of Epitynchanus and Philadespoticus as authors whose work she knew, knew so well she had discussed their beliefs in detail. Perhaps she had been lying through her teeth—or was she innocent, and had she read through a lot of fake scrolls without realising? One thing was sure: when the old man holding the gluepot for mending scrolls had cried, “Go on, Tuccia! This is a previously unknown work!” I had thought it seemed like teasing even at the time. Maybe now I understood.

  That day in their workshop, I could have been standing in the very place where the scrolls were put together. Had the workers been tenderly gluing other fakes to bury? Had those skilled people at the Mysticus scroll shop written the wizened Greek and Latin letters I had struggled to decipher on the filthy papyrus I now had downstairs? Had they ripped sections to look like wear and tear, then attempted to stain everything with false antiquity by burying the collection at the sacred Grove? If I had allowed Tuccia to keep the first batch we found, as she had wanted, would she later have conveniently “lost” them? And if she believed I had identified her workshop as the source of fakes, what would she do about it?