by Jeremy Reed
He kept up with his thoughts, and instinct guided him in the direction of home. It was starting to rain again, bittily, but without persistence. He hurried on, taking in nothing and seeing nobody, elated by the night air and in his mind determined to be free.
3
Rome was everything Heliogabalus had anticipated it would be. After the long haul through violently changing seasons and countries he was welcomed at the capital by shocked crowds who threw flowers. He had arrived, flexing the muscle on the way of six white horses which conveying the image of his god and was given an ecstatic reception. He had dismounted to pick up a rose coloured a particularly deep burgundy and had held it out to a youth who had caught his eye by reason of his perfect looks. The boy’s archly camp expression and dyed hair had him assume he was rent or else the adopted heir to an older benefactor. He was determined to find out more and mentally put the youth’s image on file.
With his minders looking on apprehensively, he had repeated the gesture, again stopping to present a flower to a boy made up like a butch cabaret artist. He could sense the suspicion on the part of the spectators who observed the incident. They were clearly passing judgement on his sexual preferences and categorizing him as a fag.
The sun was starting to break through a low-cloud ceiling, spotlighting him in his moment of triumph. His only thought was for his mother and that she should be appointed his principal adviser. It was she who had guided him all along and prepared him stage by stage for the role of emperor. All the preliminaries of his education in rhetoric, the part he had played in the Emesan priesthood, the tangy introduction to hedonism that she had encouraged, her choice of tutor, all of it had formed the baseline to her plan to see him rule over the Roman Empire. The whole thing seemed unreal as the city crowded in on him with its mad celebrations. He could feel the sun on his face, and he thrilled at the prospect of coralling pretty boys from all over the city. It occurred to him that, of course, he would be forced to go through the pretence of marriage, but he knew as he stood there picking out faces in the crowd that a woman could never offer him the intense emotional high that came of a same-sex union. He knew this from his chemistry and from the encouragement given him by his mother, who had pointed him towards liaisons with his own sex.
Already in his mind, as he confronted the excitement of the crowd, he had decided to build a high-rise temple to his god on the south-eastern edge of the city, in what were the lowlife suburbs. The building would face the rising sun and attract solar energies to its heliocentric god. He had planned it after having seen maps of the city while en route, and now he gave his attention over to the musicians who were accompanying the procession. The band played a variety of instruments ranging from castanets to barrel-shaped drums called tambours, to Egyptian rattles used in the worship of Isis, to silver trumpets known as hasosra, as well as the kind of large harp known as nebels. He worked with the music, its rhythm building in him to the pitch of frenzy. He was fizzy on decibel-clusters and engagement with the beat. He knew that even on first sight he was a scandal to the people, not only because he had the audacity to wear jewels on his shoes but because he appeared openly to celebrate a marriage with death. He may only have been sixteen, but his upbringing had distanced him from everyday life. He knew the score only too well. He was a weirdo. A shaman. A ritualist. A religiomaniac. A magician. A pretty boy. A mythomaniac. A quasi-eunuch. But he was emperor.
He had also been told by his advisers that there was the belief common amongst the people that Nero would return and that, no matter the murdered emperor’s abuse of power and his atrocious crimes, he still remained an idol to the masses, who remembered him by placing roses on his grave. There was some hazy notion amongst the collective that Heliogabalus, as the newly appointed caesar, was in fact Nero’s reincarnation.
The palace, as he had been instructed on the road, was surrounded by a dense area of cultivated parkland. As they came within sight of the grounds he could see how a profusion of blossom had turned the park into a cerise blizzard of bitty petals. He felt himself caught up in the pink choreography of spring, as if nature’s regenerative energies were also his own. He insisted on stopping under an arrangement of cherry trees, and for a brief moment Julian’s image returned so blindingly it was as if he had hallucinated him back into existence. He remembered Julian’s warning that he would come to nothing and die young. It came back to him now like a hex frying in his blood. For a second he was afraid before he let the reminder go.
As the procession approached Nero’s restored Golden House his mood brightened again. That he was to occupy a palace built proportionally to house a mad emperor’s ego was an impossible reminder of his chosen destiny. He knew from reading Suetonius that Nero, prior to torching Rome, had announced, ‘While I yet live, may fire consume the earth.’ And that written all over the city’s walls at the time were the graffiti pronouncement: Alcmaeon, Orestes, and Nero are brothers. Why? Because all of them murdered their mothers.
As he stepped into the entrance hall of the palace, originally built to accommodate a 120-foot statue of the emperor, he felt the full ferocity of Nero’s mania rush at his throat. He started to choke in a sudden paroxysm, which he explained away as a tendency to asthma. But the incident had come as a shock. No matter the emperors who had walked its blood-stained floors, something of Nero’s hysterical presence remained in the achingly empty rooms, spread out like the vast complex of an abandoned hotel. He took it as a sign and one that he would submit to his temple priests.
He knew from his reading that the place had been built with the illegal gains Nero had listed out of his subjects, promising in return the security of newly discovered gold from Ethiopia. Some of the walls were still studded with jewels, and most of the rooms were done out in red and gold, with the added detail of black marble floors. The kitsch, the hieratic, the looted and the mindlessly exotic were all scrambled together by generations of bad blood, who had fed in turn on the equally corrupt exploits of venture-capitalists.
As he journeyed deeper into the palace he noticed that the dining-rooms had fretted ivory ceilings and that the main dining-hall was circular, its ceiling revolving slowly, day and night, to match the movement of the earth’s tilt. There was a sophisticated ventilation system that dispensed hot or cold air and a library stocked with Greek and Latin works as the core of modern knowledge.
He resisted the impulse to be tempted by too much too soon. It was as if he had been offered a box of candies the size of a swimming-pool and been asked to choose. Inwardly he wanted the lot, but he professed a lack of interest so as to conceal his inordinate need for kicks. He would like to have been left alone with his mother to enjoy the freedom of the place without being under the close scrutiny of an officious entourage. He was forced to conceal his nervous irritability. The exhaustion of having been on the road for almost a year was starting to tell. He had lived without a home ever since leaving Syria, and no matter the luxury of the villas he had used for short-lived stays he felt time-lagged from lack of a place to call his own. He had also been seriously ill and had come close to sweating out his life en route to Rome as doctors worked around the clock to lower his fever. He had hallucinated violent endings in his delirium and still remembered the fire that had ripped through his dreams like the fins of a torched city.
His body was road-mapped by the ups and downs of life. Getting to Rome had involved a transcontinental journey, so debilitating in its wear and tear that ruling the Roman Empire would seem small by comparison. That Nero had never left the popular imagination fitted well with his intentions. From his first infatuation with the idea of becoming emperor, he had taken aspects of Nero’s biography as the role-model for his future lifestyle. It was the decadent and sensational in Nero, rather than the vicious and homicidal, with which he empathized. It was the Nero who had gone through a marriage ceremony with the boy Sporus, liquidated the economy in the interests of self-indulgence, been the dedicatee of Seneca’s work ‘On Mercy’ and whose
religious sympathies were also directed towards a Syrian cult who continued to colour his imagination. Again, as Heliogabalus stood looking at the suite of rooms he was personally to occupy he could feel Nero’s presence invade his system. It was like an interference with the electric noise in his body. He wondered if others could detect the disturbance when it came up in him and was careful to conceal his thoughts. Nero, he knew, had worshipped the Syrian goddess Atargatis, until a fit of temper had him urinate on her image as a means of expressing his superiority. Nero’s inflation of ego was something of which he knew himself incapable. He made a silent promise, as he stood looking at his reflection in the marble floor, that he would never outgrow the influence of his god. If the union he celebrated of the divine pair Ishtar-Tammuz was to him a way of life, then he was determined to maintain the distinction between the divine and human.
Already, despite his exhaustion, he was beleaguered by requests, sycophantic compliments, bitchy asides and the naked intrigue of those hoping to gain office. He despised them for their scheming. He was only too aware that the empire he was inheriting was itself responding to a tropism of decay, a sort of ideological AIDS in which a pernicious retro-virus policed a declining organism. The problem, as he had been briefed on his circuitous journey to Rome, lay chiefly in the uneven distribution of wealth. He had learned of how both Tiberius and Caligula had attempted to solve the problem of big estates and dispossessed peasantry by a radical redistribution of land, but both had been frustrated in their attempts by the oligarchs, and the senatorial class had resumed its sway. He had been told that the wealth of the empire rested on looting, on slavery in the plantations and on provincial labour and that the contrast between the hedonistic pursuits of the aristocratic landowners and the abject misery of an institution of slaves was at its most acute. Living largely from a wealth derived from the land, the senatorial class were the opponents of any economic expansion which challenged its own position.
He had been warned that his hands would be tied from the start, and he had agreed to announce an amnesty for all the slanderous things said about both Caracalla and himself by every division of society.
People kept coming at him until he felt he had been put through a juicer. He disliked them all and intended to stick with his own. He would rather appoint rent boys from the docks to positions of power than the unscrupulous individuals who queued for his ear. He wondered, anyhow, what they thought of him choosing to wear a Persian tiara and makeup for his entrance to Rome. He felt sure that no other Roman emperor had ever presented himself in this way, and that word would soon be out all over town about him being a pretty boy.
Although he considered state affairs of secondary importance to religion, he knew himself to be suitably well informed of the problems facing Rome to hold his own with his advisers. The damage done to the empire was largely irreversible, and he could see it in the people and smell it in the air. The city was imploding like a quasar. History had told him that the great plague of 167 had made permanent inroads on productivity, and this, combined with Commodus’ extravagance, the ambitious enterprises of Severus and Caracalla’s desperate liberality to the Army, had radically depleted the economy. Macrinus had exacerbated the issue by way of his unsuccessful war with the Parthians. Unable to defeat the enemy, he had burdened the state with the double expense of maintaining an offensive as well as buying peace from the enemy. The impostor who he had defeated had done further irreparable damage by abolishing the taxes which Caracalla had imposed on inheritances and manumissions and so had further depleted resources. Heliogabalus felt like he was the principal performer in a burning theatre and that he would be lucky to escape the flames. Emperors, he knew, were always in the spotlight. The power invested in being caesar carried with it the downside of being vulnerable to the assassin’s mark.
All he wanted to do was to withdraw into the privacy of his rooms and discuss the day’s events with his mother and intimate circle. He felt a victim of overexposure to the crowds. Reading Seneca had taught him in advance of his years that everything had been said before and done before and that all human aspirations were cut short by death. Mortality provided no re-entry routes, only a very clearly lit exit sign. He understood that being in his teens differed little in terms of absolute values from the problems common to every age in life. He had dared to take himself on to a stage where the price of survival was usually paid for by murder.
Complaining of exhaustion, he eventually won the right to withdraw. There was a naked youth, lying face down on the couch, but he wasn’t in the mood, and he threw the boy out, telling him to come back later. His head felt like it was about to explode.
Symiamira, he noted, was delighting in the attention given her by a train of hangers-on. She was being looked over by women and by boys half her age. Food had been prepared in abundance, and a bronze donkey stood on the sideboard holding panniers of green and black olives. There were delicacies, such as dormice rolled in honey and poppy seed and supported on little bridges soldered to the plate; there were hot sausages laid on a silver grill and under the grill damsons and pomegranate seeds.
He amused himself with the chichi hors d’æuvres, preferring to look rather than taste. He was attended by servants and a personal valet who fussed over his needs. The sheer volume of food presented seemed sufficient to feed an entire tenement in the suburbs. He found it like tasting the concept of empire: an addictively ruinous obsession.
When the second entrée arrived, its novelty quickly won his attention. A round plate was carried in with the twelve signs of the zodiac set in order, and on each one the artist had laid food proper to the symbol. Over the Ram, ram’s head pease, a slab of beef on the Bull, kidneys over the Twins, seafood over the Crab, African figs over the Lion, a sow’s paunch over Virgo, muffins and cakes in Libra’s scales, sea fish over Scorpio, a bull’s eye over Sagittarius, lobsters over Capricorn, a goose over Aquarius and grey mullet over Pisces. It had all been prepared with loving attention to detail for his eye. Never before had he been presented with such an inexhaustible variety. He went for the fish in blue sauce, preferring, ever since he had read the teachings of Pythagoras and his disciple Apollonius of Tyana, to avoid meat. It was something he used in sacrifice but abstained from eating. But more interesting by far than the food laid on was his valet. The young man was tall, well defined, possibly Ethiopian and without a doubt gay. His eyes were attentively kind and seemed without the capacity to be duplicitous. There was a sensitivity in his manner that set him apart from the other servants, most of whom seemed downright obsequious. He could see that the man was artistically inclined but probably lacked the education to promote his talents or simply was denied the encouragement that Heliogabalus himself could supply.
He picked at the food like a seasoned gourmet. The mélange continued to excite and reminded him of much that he had learned from Apicius in his book De Re Coquinaria. Reading the celebrated author on the subject of food had been the trigger to cultivating his own culinary tastes. At home he had learned to cook and was, despite being warned away, a regular in the kitchen. There was no occupation too feminine for him, and he intended to continue with his love of cooking, even if he was emperor.
Wines from Marseilles and the Vatican were served between courses, as well as a Falernian with a label stating the vintage. Given his exhaustion, he felt drunk by the time the roasts were carried in. The well of the dish contained peacocks and sows’ bellies and in the middle was a hare given wings to look like Pegasus. Fish done in a blue, spiced sauce created an overlapping fringe. He was unusually slim amongst a company used to gorging on multi-decked courses and was determined to keep his figure. Already guests who were physically exhausted from cramming down an overload of food were being conducted to red-hot baths or to chill-out rooms where they continued drinking.
He sat there conscious of his isolation in the room. Nobody expressed interest in him as a person or seemed the least curious about his opinions. He realized that what he had
brought with him from Syria was a condition of acute loneliness and that, rather than diminish on arrival at Rome, it would in all probability grow worse. He wondered if it was his appearance put people off or the more obvious reason that he was a foreigner and lacked connections in the capital. He was quickly learning that people were almost wholly self-interested and that the Roman aristocracy excluded even an emperor thought to lack patrician blood.
After the roasts had been demolished, the chef sent in the dessert. The confectioner had made a figure in the form of Priapus, holding up every kind of fruits and grapes in his wide apron. The colour-coding was an achievement in itself, and Heliogabalus was shocked by the rapacity with which the arrangement was so quickly shredded. There was not the slightest observance of the chef’s meticulously constructed objet d’art, only the greed of the privileged stoppering their mouths to excess. Most of the women invited into his company had quickly realized he was gay and had given up any attempts at attracting his attention. Instead, they had regrouped into a gossipy, competitive list of rivalries, concerned with their hair and the line of an expensive gown.
All he wanted to do was sleep and to bury the memory of his illness and the year-long journey. He was also anxious to wipe out the faces of the anonymous lovers he had known at every stop of the journey. The memories when they returned were too painful and hallucinatory. The awareness that he would never encounter any of these boys again rooted in him with a deep sense of loss. And there was the undiagnosed virus he had caught, which his doctors suspected was sexually transmitted. It still recurred some nights in the form of high fever, with lumps occurring in the lymphatic region under his arms. He had heard it rumoured that gay people all over the empire were going down with a form of plague said to have come out of North Africa. He hoped he was free of it but couldn’t be sure.