Roma.The novel of ancient Rome r-1

by Steven Saylor

  On a terrace of the palace with a splendid view of the harbor and the famous lighthouse, Lucius was summoned before Octavius. The commander dispensed with greetings and got straight to the point.

  “You have a long association with the queen. She knows you, cousin. She trusts you.”

  “Not anymore. I betrayed her.”

  “Even so, you stand a better chance of coaxing her out of her lair than I do. I want Cleopatra alive, not dead. Go to her. Talk about Antonius and the good old days, and what might have been. Flatter her. Cajole her. When you’ve regained her trust, say whatever you have to say to convince her to surrender to me. Assure her that I intend to treat her with all the respect due to her rank and lineage. She will appear in my triumphal procession, but she will not be mistreated.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  Octavius laughed. “Of course not. I intend to see her completely broken and humiliated before she dies. Roma demands nothing less than the complete destruction of the Egyptian whore. She’ll be raped and beaten, kept in chains, starved, and tortured. When people see her crawling naked behind my chariot, they’ll wonder how such a wretched hag ever seduced a man like Antonius. Then she’ll be strangled in the Tullianum, but not before she sees the boy Caesarion killed before her eyes.”

  “He’s only fourteen,” said Lucius.

  “And he shall never be fifteen.”

  Lucius had no choice. He agreed to act as Octavius’s emissary.

  Through the trapdoor, in whispers, he negotiated with the queen’s handmaidens, Charmion and Iras. Cleopatra agreed to see him the following day, but only if he arrived alone, with no other Roman in sight.

  The next day, Lucius arrived at the appointed time. He brought a gift for the queen. She had expressed a craving for figs. The basket that Lucius lifted up through the opening was full of plump, ripe figs nestled atop a bed of fig leaves. Iras accepted the basket. A little later, Charmion lowered a rope, and Lucius was allowed to climb up.

  He had expected to find the three women cowering in a squalid little room, but the chamber was magnificent. Small openings high in the walls admitted beams of sunlight. The floor was black marble. The columns were red granite. The walls were painted in dazzling colors. Cleopatra sat on a magnificent throne in the shape of a vulture with its wings spread, ornamented with gold, silver, and lapis. She wore a cobra-headed diadem and a robe encrusted with jewels. Iras sat at her feet with the basket of figs.

  “Will you not change your mind, Your Majesty?” said Lucius.

  “Too late for that,” said Cleopatra. In one hand she held a fig. On her wrist were two puncture marks-the bite of the asp, which Lucius himself had obtained from one of the queen’s agents and hidden beneath the fig leaves. “Thank you, Lucius Pinarius. When I see Antonius in Elysium, I will tell him of the great favor you did me.”

  Her eyelids fluttered and closed. Her head fell to one side. The fig dropped from her hand.

  Lucius’s eyes filled with tears. “Was this a fitting end? Was this worthy of your mistress?” he demanded of the handmaidens.

  Iras was silent. She had already joined her mistress in death. Charmion, beginning to stagger and sway, was using her final moments to straighten the queen’s crown, so that in death her appearance would be perfect. “It was very worthy,” she whispered, “as befits the last of all the Pharaohs.”

  Lucius wept, but only briefly. He braced himself to deliver the bad news to Octavius….

  To his grandson, Lucius merely said, “The queen submitted to the bite of an asp. The emperor wanted her for his triumph, but she cheated him of that victory, at least.”

  “But even so, they say it was the greatest triumph of all time,” said the boy.

  “So it was. A very great triumph, indeed. On that day, my cousin Gaius, who had been born Octavius but had become Caesar, took the name Augustus, to celebrate his elevation to divinity. The whole world was made to see that the emperor was worthy of worship-not just a king, but a god on earth.”

  Lucius gazed at the statue of Cleopatra for a long moment, then reached for the boy’s hand and led him away.

  As they were leaving the Temple of Venus, there was a stir of excitement in the square.

  “The emperor! The emperor!” men shouted.

  A litter appeared, splendidly appointed with purple and gold and surrounded by a veritable army of attendants. Onlookers fell back in awe. Within the litter, Augustus could clearly be seen, reclining on purple cushions. To Lucius, despite the jowls and wrinkles and all the other ravages of age, Octavius still looked like the callow boy who boldly laid claim to Caesar’s legacy, rode the whirlwind to greatness, annihilated every rival, and never looked back.

  The ways of the gods were capricious and impossible to predict, thought Lucius, and their methods were often maddeningly obscure; and yet, surely, steadily, the story of mankind progressed. After many convulsions, the world had at last attained a state of stability and peace, perhaps even of perfection: one empire, ever expanding, to be ruled by one emperor, from one city, Roma.

  Men like Romulus or Alexander or Caesar could seemingly arise from nowhere and change everything. If men could become gods, anything was possible. Might the older gods, like men, someday perish altogether? Who could say what might be occurring at that very moment somewhere else in the world-perhaps in some obscure backwater at the empire’s edge-where the birth of a certain man or movement might alter the world’s destiny once again? Perhaps Jupiter himself might be thrown down, to be replaced by another king of heaven! Not only one empire and one emperor, but one god: Might such a world not represent an even greater state of perfection?

  Lucius banished the blasphemous thought, and concentrated instead on the earthly splendor of the receding retinue of Caesar Augustus, emperor of Roma, surely the greatest of all men who had ever lived or ever would live on earth.

  But Lucius had almost forgotten the most important thing! He reached inside his toga and removed the necklace he was wearing.

  “This is for you, my boy. I should have liked to wait until your toga day to present it to you, but I think you’re ready for it.”

  “What is it, Grandfather?” The boy gazed at the amulet in his hand.

  “Its origin is uncertain. I don’t even know the name of the god it represents. But when I received it, I was told that this talisman is older than Roma itself. It’s been handed down in our family for many generations, since before the days of Romulus.”

  Young Lucius peered at the object curiously, unable to discern what it was meant to represent. After so many years and so many wearers, the details of the winged phallus had worn away. In outline, the shape appeared to be little more than a simple cross-not dissimilar, the boy thought, to the crucifixes upon which the Romans executed criminals.

  “As it was handed down to me,” said his grandfather, “so I now hand it down to you, my namesake. You must vow to do the same thing yourself, in a future generation.”

  The boy gazed at the pendant, then solemnly placed the necklace over his head.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The origins and early development of Rome represent one of the most exciting areas of historical study in the world today. Through most of the twentieth century, it was fashionable to dismiss the foundation accounts of the ancient sources as fabrications, but recent archaeological discoveries have given fresh credence to stories once dismissed as legends. Thus the epigram from Alexandre Grandazzi’s The Foundation of Rome: Myth and History that opens this book: “Legend is historical, just as history is legendary.”

  I began my research for Roma by reading and rereading T. J. Cornell’s The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000 to 264 B.C.) (Routledge, 1995). If you want to know the specific sources for this period, and to understand the state of current Roman studies, read Cornell’s book.

  In its opening pages, I was struck by the author’s comment that “all history contains an element of fiction,” and his o
bservation that ancient historians, as opposed to their modern counterparts, openly practiced certain techniques in common with modern historical novelists. In the historical novel, Cornell notes, “and in pre-modern historiography…writers are permitted to reconstruct, from their own imaginations, the feelings, aspirations and motives of persons and groups, to conjure up plausible scenes-on the battlefield, on the streets, or in the bedroom-and even to put their own words into the mouths of persons in the drama. These conventions were accepted without question in antiquity, when history was at least in part a rhetorical exercise.”

  R. M. Ogilvie (as quoted by Betty Radice in her introduction to Livy: The War with Hannibal) explicitly compares the great Roman historian to a writer of fiction: “Like a novelist,” Livy “subordinated historical precision to the demands of character and plot. He indulged freely in invention and imagination in order to present a living picture.” Even so, as Radice wryly notes, Livy “never falls into the error of trying to create atmosphere by lifting pages from Baedeker-George Eliot and Lord Lytton earnestly did their best with Florence and Pompeii, but the dead stones never speak. Instead, he keeps descriptions to a minimum and recreates the spirit of Rome by entering into the feelings of the people of the time…”

  Titus Livius, known in English as Livy, lived in the reign of Augustus. His monumental history, Ab Urbe Condita (From the Founding of the City), is our principal source for the first several hundred years of Roman history, from its mythic origins to the beginnings of its Mediterranean empire. For sheer pleasure and escape, reading Livy straight through is an experience comparable to reading Tolkien, Tolstoy, or Gibbon; in other words, it is one of the great reading experiences of a lifetime.

  Other ancient sources for early Roman history include the biographies of Plutarch, Cicero’s De Republica, the Geography of Strabo, the histories of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus Siculus, Cassius Dio, and Polybius, the plays of Plautus, and the Fasti of Ovid, a lesser-known work by the great Latin poet that gives fascinating details about the practice and origin of various Roman customs and religious rites. Our sources for the later Republic include the history of Appian and Suetonius’s biography of Julius Caesar.

  Books by modern authors which I found especially stimulating included Augusto Fraschetti’s The Foundation of Rome (Edinburgh University Press, 2005; first published in Italy as Romolo II Fondatore in 2002), T. P. Wiseman’s Remus: A Roman Myth (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Jacques Heurgon’s The Rise of Rome to 264 B.C. (University of California Press, 1973), Nigel Bagnall’s The Punic Wars 264–146 B.C. (Osprey, 2002), and Keith Richardson’s Daggers in the Forum: The Revolutionary Lives and Violent Deaths of the Gracchus Brothers (Cassell, 1976).

  I also found inspiration in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, an imaginative nineteenth-century “reconstruction” of ancient Roman ballads, Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus, and Shakespeare’s long narrative poem “The Rape of Lucrece.”

  William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (I own a copy of the 1869 edition, as well as Smith’s three-volume Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology from 1870) and Samuel Ball Platner’s A Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (mine is the 1928 edition) were my daily companions. Both books can be found online, along with many other texts, maps, and additional information, at a Web site called LacusCurtius maintained by Bill Thayer; during the research and writing of Roma, my visits to this extraordinary horn of plenty were too numerous to count. When I needed to borrow a “real” book, I visited the libraries at the University of California at Berkeley.

  Readers who want to know the precise location of monuments and landmarks should consult the book Mapping Augustan Rome (Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series, 2002), largely produced by scholars at the University of Pennsylvania. The large-scale maps that accompany their book are works of prodigious research and exquisite design. For sheer pleasure, readers may want to have a look at the map Roma Arcaica (a publication of the Museo della Civilita Romana available from the American Classical League), a bird’s-eye view of the city as it might have appeared in the early days of the Roman Republic.

  This novel has been the largest and most complicated project I’ve ever undertaken, and I’m grateful to those who’ve helped me along the way. The earliest origin of Roma can be traced to Nick Robinson of Constable, my publisher in the U.K., who proposed that I should attempt a novel beyond the scope of my Roma Sub Rosa series; it was at Nick’s flat in London that I first put forth the idea that became this book. It was during a walk along Barton Creek in Austin, Texas, that I further discussed the idea with my editor at St. Martin’s Press, Keith Kahla, who understood at once what I was attempting to do; a few years (and roughly 200,000 words) later, I gratefully received Keith’s insightful comments on the first draft. Krystyna Green, my editor at Constable in the U.K., also played an active role in following the book’s development. I’m also grateful to Gaylan DuBose, teacher of Latin and author of Farrago Latina, who read the galleys and gave me valuable feedback.

  Special thanks, as always, to my partner, Rick Solomon, and to my agent, Alan Nevins, both of whom never fail to buoy me up when I need it.

  The sometimes uncannily familiar political struggles and partisan machinations in Roma are not my invention, nor have I done much to modernize the terms of the debates. The long tug of war between the patricians and the plebeians, the cynical tactic of the war-mongering ruling class to exploit religious rhetoric and fear of outside threats to their own advantage, the political shift of the descendents of Appius Claudius from far right to far left, the witch-hunt that eradicated the “subversive” Cult of Bacchus, the appeal of the high-born Gracchi to the disenfranchised rabble-each of these incidents is given to us in explicit detail by the sources. The republic of the Romans endured almost twice as long as has our own, so far, and they confronted the paradoxes and paradigms of class struggle long before we did. Whether the American republic will end with the rise of an all-powerful executive, as did that of the Romans, remains to be seen.

  Was Fascinus the first deity of the Romans, as recounted in Roma? According to Pliny’s Natural History (28.7), Fascinus was the name of a god worshipped by the Vestal virgins, who placed his image (a fascinum, or phallus amulet) under the chariot of those who triumphed as a protection against “fascination” (what we would call the evil eye). Varro tells us that phallic amulets were often hung around the necks of Roman children to protect them; they were also placed in gardens and on hearths and forges. Anyone who visits Pompeii will notice phallic graffiti and sculptures, but few may realize that an image that may appear obscene to the modern eye was sacred to the ancients.

  The mystical phallus that rises from a hearthfire appears in the origin myth of the Roman king Servius Tullius, and, even earlier, in a variant of the origin story of Romulus as related by the historian Promathion. Early Greek authors like Promathion were the first to speculate on the beginnings of Rome, upon which they tended to superimpose their own myths; eventually the Romans themselves would link the foundation of their city with a Greek legend, the fall of Troy (the subject of The Aeneid by Virgil). “What is extraordinary” about Promathion, as T. P. Wiseman notes in Remus, “is that this early Greek author evidently reported a native Roman story. The phantom phallus is a totally un-Greek concept. Greek gods do not manifest themselves in such a way.”

  If Promathion’s depiction of the divine phallus is drawn from an authentic and very early Roman myth, and if this phallus from the hearth is the same deity that later became known as Fascinus, then it may indeed be that Fascinus was the first Roman god. Livy, I suspect, would understand my reasons for making it so.

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