Before he bought a plane ticket or booked a hotel room he checked the internet again for a map of today’s Rome and the Rome of AD 80. He chose that date because it was when Emperor Titus opened the Coliseum, and he wanted to see some real gladiators at work.
Modern day Rome was far too built up to have any luck finding a good travel spot so he changed his strategy. He decided to cross a few things off of his agenda in one trip so he took a plane to New York then traveled back to 1936 there and bought a ticket to Europe on the Hindenburg. He chose a date closer to the beginning of the famous airship’s career so he wouldn’t have much of a worry about the whole blowing up thing.
The flight was amazing. He had a small room in the interior of the ship. It was little more than a bed and a closet, but it was comfortable. There was a dining room that served four-star cuisine and even a smoking room where you could enjoy a cigar and watch the world pass by a few thousand feet below.
There were over a hundred passengers on board for the two day flight to Frankfurt. Most of them were rather well off, an airship flight wasn’t cheap. His time in the bar in 1928 had made him pretty familiar with the way people talked back then and slang hadn’t changed much in the thirties so he didn’t have too much trouble striking up a conversation here and there.
He met a lovely young couple traveling to Europe on their honeymoon and when he heard how long they were staying he had to stop himself from telling them to not take the zeppelin back. He remembered all the time travel stories he had read and he told himself to take care not to influence people into doing or not doing anything for fear it might change history. He avoided thinking about what would happen if he somehow stopped himself from being born.
Campbell was out in the Smoking Room, leaning on the rail and watching the ocean pass by below him. He had on a thick wool jacket which he was thankful he’d had the foresight to purchase when he arrived in 1936 New York. Even though it was late spring the air this high up was freezing and the canvas skin of the ship didn’t little to help. Even inside it was cold. I suppose space heaters would probably be a bad idea on a giant ball of hydrogen, Campbell thought to himself, yet they still had a smoking room.
He was staring down at the water below, daydreaming. He was so distracted by the beauty of the moment that he didn’t notice the other man enter the smoking room until he heard the strike of a match.
Campbell turned around to see a tall slender man with short blonde hair and vibrant blue eyes. He wore a long black coat that almost hung to his ankles over a dark grey suit. A pair of small circular eyeglasses sat on his nose.
“Good afternoon,” Campbell said to the newcomer.
“Hello,” the man replied with a little nod of his head. He had a rough voice with a thick German accent.
“Returning home?” Campbell asked.
“To Berlin, yes,” the man answered.
The German offered him a cigarette with a little strip of gold paper around the butt. He took the cigarette and the German offered to light it for him as well. Up until the speakeasy Campbell hadn’t smoked since college, but when he tried to fit in back in the twenties it was almost necessary so he had become accustomed to it. He held out a hand to his companion.
“John Campbell,” he said.
“Hans Richter,” the other man said as they shook hands.
The two men talked for a few minutes. It was mostly idle conversation. The German didn’t speak much English but mentioned that he was glad for the practice. He said that he was a science professor and Campbell mentioned that he taught archaeology. Hans, it turned out, was a fan of history himself. They were getting along swimmingly.
“Well, Dr Campbell,” Hans said after a while, “Sorry to cut our conversation short, but I’d best get some rest and I’m to join my colleague for dinner.”
“I hope we speak again Dr Richter.”
“I’m sure we will.”
Hans headed back inside and Campbell spent a few more minutes watching the waves while he finished his cigarette. When he was done he decided to go hang out in the passenger lounge for a while and maybe meet some more people. It’s really nice to be able to walk around when you travel and not be stuck in a tiny, cramped seat for hours on end, he thought as he walked through the door.
Campbell chose a table by a window. The menu wasn’t very extensive and it was all in German. He ordered the Kongsberg dumplings which was pretty much meatballs made with beef, pork and anchovies. It wasn’t to his liking but the beer was good and he washed the food down with three bottles.
He saw Dr Richter at a table with another man dressed in the same black coat but with little swastikas on the lapels. I should have caught that, he thought to himself. It made sense that a German scientist in 1936 taking a trip on a zeppelin would likely be a Nazi.
They were at a table far away and there was a bit of noise from the propellers so he wasn’t able to catch their conversation, which was probably in German anyway, so he sat around long enough to finish his beer and then headed to his room. The excitement of time travel had kept him busy and he had forgotten to sleep for a while.
The landing field in Frankfurt came into sight early in the morning. Campbell was sitting in the passenger lounge at a table by the window. He had had another brief conversation with Dr Richter in the smoking room earlier but he cut it short because he wanted to get as a good a view as he could of the landing process.
They had spent the last hour or so gradually lowering in altitude until they were only about a hundred feet above the ground, then leveled out and glided slowly for about a mile until the mooring mast was in clear view.
The sky was relatively clear. There were very few clouds and only a slight breeze. A small army ran around grabbing the huge mooring lines as they were dropped from the belly of the zeppelin. The ground crew pulled on the ropes until the gondola on the bottom of the ship was only a couple dozen feet from the ground and they walked the huge craft forward until its nose was close enough to the eighty foot tall mooring mast where it would be secured.
It took about fifteen minutes to lock everything in place and prepare for the passengers and crew to disembark. Campbell took his place in line to climb down the ladder out of the belly of the massive ship and onto the ground in Frankfurt.
Campbell looked back at the zeppelin with a little sadness as he walked away. It was too bad that thing was going to blow up soon, ending the era of lighter than air travel. He turned around and walked toward the waiting taxis at the end of the airfield.
Back in New York he had exchanged some of the gold he’d brought back with him for enough cash to buy the airship ticket to Germany and then to get a train ticket to Italy. He saved the rest to trade for currency when he got to ancient Rome. The train ride would take a few weeks but he didn’t mind. It would give ample opportunity to examine the Europe of the nineteen thirties.
There was a car waiting for Dr Richter when he disembarked the zeppelin. It was long and black and had little red flags sticking up from the hood displaying swastikas. The driver took his bags and placed them in the trunk, but Richter kept the black leather briefcase with him in the back seat. Neither man said a word until they arrived at the train station where the scientist boarded a military train headed for Berlin.
There were a few thousand soldiers, mostly new recruits, on the train being carted off to Berlin and Richter chose to sit towards the back of the plush, much less crowded officer’s car where he could avoid being disturbed.
As the train began to move he pulled out his briefcase and opened it on the little desk between the seats. He had been in New York taking advantage of a lucrative opportunity. The famous Nikola Tesla was running very low on funds and had lost his big contract with Westinghouse to build his free energy device. In order to keep his bills paid and his experiments going he had offered for sale a few dozen of his patents and Richter was anxious to see what he could do with Tesla’s research.
He kept the patents locked in his briefcase bu
t it was the research notes he had conned out of the mad scientist that kept him busy for the long train ride to Berlin where his laboratory was located. He was flipping through the pages when he came across a drawing of what looked like a clock at first. It had internal gears that connected, perpendicular, to small dials with numbers on the edges. There was a small box inside that contained an intricate system of coils. There were very few words on the page and he spent most of the ride trying to decipher the image.
Campbell arrived in Rome in the late summer of 1936. He spent a few days walking around the city, viewing the landmarks and ruins. He made notes on what he thought the ruins would have looked like when they were built so that he could compare his assumptions to the real thing when he traveled back to AD80. For the first time in a very long time he was feeling like an archaeologist again.
Most nights he dined on four-star Italian cuisine. He had brought a significant amount of the gold with him, since he wouldn’t be able to use an ATM at any point on this trip. He found his new travel spot about ten miles outside of the edge of the city. It would be a long walk but it was his best option.
He unpacked most of the items from his suitcase and placed them in the dresser in his hotel room. He packed the Roman garb into the smaller duffel bag he had brought and left the rest in the room. When he arrived in AD 80 he would change clothes and then bury the duffel bag with his 1936 suit in it next to the travel marker so that he wouldn’t be conspicuous when he traveled back.
He took a cab to the edge of town and walked the rest of the way up the hillside. He found a spot where the tree line started that seemed like a good place. He set the dials to late morning in the beginning of the spring of AD 80 and twisted the disk.
When the lightning ball dissipated he was standing in a forest on a patch of scorched grass right next to a tall tree. He marked the base of the tree and dug a hole. After changing into his tunic, toga and sandals he placed the device and his leather bag of gold in the pouch at his waist and buried the duffel bag. Then he headed down the hill towards Rome.
He walked past farms and small villages. He found the paved road, made of stones laid into the ground to make a relatively even walking path that led toward the city gates, which came into view shortly after he started walking. He could see the coliseum towering above all the white stone and cement buildings.
It was early evening when he arrived at the northern gate in the massive wall surrounding the city. The markets had closed down and the merchants and farmers who lived in the outlying areas around the city were on their way home. He passed a group of men leading two oxen that were pulling a huge cage on wheels which housed about twenty or so people dressed in simple loincloths. They were slaves, mostly men who didn’t sell in the markets today. They would most likely be brought back tomorrow and if they didn’t sell then they’d be sold to a gladiator school at a massive discount, Campbell thought. He couldn’t help but try to connect what he saw with all of the history books he had read. He was constantly looking for things that archaeologists had gotten right, and what they had gotten wrong.
When he entered the tall gates he saw three and four story apartment buildings made of concrete and wood. The upper stories of most of the buildings hung out over the street and it reminded him a little of the French Quarter in New Orleans. There was a huge aqueduct to his left. It split into high troughs once it passed the walls to carry fresh water to every home in the city. Streets led in every direction and most of them were crowded with women heading home from the market with the ingredients for tonight’s dinner, refrigerators wouldn’t be around for a couple thousand years so everyone had to buy fresh groceries every day. Men were heading home from a busy day at the office, or off to work the night shift. Aside from the dress and the architecture, and the smell, it really wasn’t much different from home, Campbell thought. Daily life in a big city hadn’t changed much in two millennia.
His research had found him a tavern near the north gate where he should be able to find a meal and lodging for the night. Most taverns in this era were bar, restaurant and hotel mixed into one, so he headed in that direction. When he arrived he found the building empty. It was newly built, it seemed, and probably hadn’t been rented out yet. So his research found him a little off on the date apparently. He suspected he would run into that problem a lot.
Oh well, he thought, time to try out my knowledge of ancient Latin. He found a young man in a dark colored toga, probably a merchant or a business man of some sort, walking his way.
“Excuse me sir,” he said in Latin. The man paused and stared at him with a quizzical look, but said nothing. He tried again in Greek. A hundred languages were spoken in ancient Rome, after all. It was silly to assume that everyone would know Latin, he thought, how many people living New York can’t speak a word of English.
“Could you tell me where I could find some food and lodging?”
“Fucking foreigners,” the guy said and hurried off.
He tried another man, who was much more patient with him.
“You’re obviously not from Rome,” the man said.
“No, I’ve traveled a great distance and could really use something to eat.”
The man gave Campbell an odd look at the question but he told him to walk a few blocks down, take a left and look for a white building with a red roof. Campbell thanked the man and headed that way. When he found the red roof he paused and stared for a moment.
“I think my vocabulary may be a little off,” he said to himself after reading the menu posted on the wall that offered Claudia for two sestercii and Aria for four. He stopped a man leaving the brothel and asked where he might be able to exchange money. The man said there’s an exchange in the market down the street but it would be closed until tomorrow. They talked for a few minutes and when Campbell mentioned that he was in search of a meal and a bed for the night the man offered for Campbell to accompany him home.
The man introduced himself as Marcus. He was a few years older and a bit shorter than Campbell but was about average height for this time. He also had about forty pounds on Campbell and it was all muscle. They talked a bit as they walked the five blocks to Marcus’ apartment. Marcus had been in the Army fighting in Germany. He lied about his age and joined up when he was in his early teens to escape poverty in the city. After twenty-five years on the front lines and eighteen serious wounds, the scars from which he was eager to show off to his new friend, the army said goodbye and sent him on his way. Now he lived by himself in a third story apartment above a bakery near the city gates, on the not too well off side of town. The farther they got from the center of the city the less impressive the landscape became. The buildings had more and more stories and they seemed much more hastily built. A few of them had collapsed.
They continued to chat as they passed into poorer neighborhoods where more and more of the window signs and graffiti were in foreign languages. It wasn’t too difficult for Marcus to understand Campbell, his time in the army made him used to dealing with people who didn’t speak clear Greek or Latin, but he was curious where the newcomer was from. Campbell made up some story about growing up in Britain and heading to the mother city to try and make it rich, which Marcus bought easily enough. There was a constant influx of people from the provinces moving to Rome, thinking that everything in the city was gold and jewels for the taking.
They rounded a corner and came into a small courtyard with an elaborate fountain in the center. Campbell followed Marcus to a set of stairs on the outside of the building that led to a small balcony where there was a simple wooden door. Marcus opened the door, there was no lock, and gestured for his guest to go in first.
The first thing Campbell saw when the door opened was a large wooden statue of a man with a ridiculously large penis which he held in one hand while the other was set in welcoming gesture. Campbell knew from excavations of Pompeii that most Roman houses had a statue or picture of Priapus, the well endowed fertility god, in their entryways but the promine
nt figure caught him a little off guard.
“Nice,” he said, slipping past the enormous member.
“Thanks,” Marcus said. “It was my father’s.”
Once inside Marcus quickly lit an oil lamp that sat on a small table in the middle of the room. Aside from the statue in the entryway, and a few paintings of copulating couples on the walls, the apartment was rather plain. Most of the walls were unadorned. There were a couple of couches with high armrests and no backs on either side of a low table in the main room. No wall separated the little kitchen area in the back from the main room. There was one bedroom a little smaller than the main room, which was not large, off to the right. When they walked in Marcus offered Campbell a drink. He had chosen the name Caius since, according to the history books, it was very common name. He accepted some wine in a small ceramic cup and Marcus brought out a basket of large round loaves of bread and a cup of olive oil.
“Sorry, I don’t have much to eat,” Marcus said, holding out the basket to his new friend. “But the baker leaves leftovers on my doorstep every evening. They’re fresh from today.”
“Thank you,” Campbell said. He took a bite of one of the loaves. It had some sort of sweet glaze on the top and was a lot tastier than he was expecting. The wine as well was delicious and he saw that Marcus had no shortage of that. In the kitchen there was a small counter area and on it stood five large ceramic amphorae and each one looked to hold at least two gallons.
The two of them sat down and shared bread and wine until the wee hours of the morning. Campbell asked question after question and Marcus was quick to answer, he was thankful to have someone to listen to his stories and Campbell couldn’t believe he was hearing first hand accounts of the Roman wars. They were instant friends.
The next morning Campbell awoke to Marcus closing the door. He looked up from the couch where he was sleeping to see his host holding a basket full off vegetables and eggs. He had a big smile on his face, which came off a little creepy through all the scars.
Out of Time: A story of archaeology... sort of Page 6