Roma

by Steven Saylor

  But on the day chosen for the sacrifice, Pinarius was absent. He had gone to visit relatives at a farm upriver, and had not yet returned. Potitius decided to begin the ritual without him.

  Dogs were driven off, and an oxtail whisk was used to banish flies. The ox was sacrificed, butchered, and roasted, and the offering placed upon the altar. A prayer of supplication was chanted, using phrases suggested by the Phoenician captain. Potitius summoned the members of his extended family to share in the feast. “We must eat it all,” he told them, “not just the meat, but also the organs and the entrails—the heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, and spleen—for that was the example Hercules set for us with his voracious appetite. To eat these parts of the sacrificed beast is our privilege, and we should begin with them. Here, daughter—to you I give a portion of the liver.”

  As Potitia ate, she remembered the first time she had seen Cacus, and the prayer she had uttered to Fascinus; she also remembered the terror she had felt when Cacus attacked her, and the gentleness of the man they now called Hercules. She was very near to giving birth, and subject to powerful extremes of elation and despair. She often laughed and wept at the same time. Potitius, watching her, seeing how pale and drawn she was, wondered if his daughter had been too delicate a vessel to receive the seed of a demigod.

  The feast was very nearly finished when Pinarius arrived, bringing his family with him.

  “You’re late, cousin—very late! I’m afraid we proceeded without you,” said Potitius. A full belly and a portion of wine, only slightly mixed with water, had put him in good spirits. “I’m afraid we’ve already finished the entrails, but there are some choice cuts of meat remaining for you.”

  Pinarius, angry at himself for missing the ceremony, grew furious at this further indignity. “This is an outrage! We agreed that I was to serve equally as a priest of the Altar of Hercules, and that the eating of the entrails was a sacred duty—yet you’ve left none for me and my family!”

  “You were late,” said Potitius, his good mood spoiled. “You’ll eat what the god left for you!”

  Their squabbling grew louder and their words more belligerent. Relatives began to gather behind each man. It seemed that the first sacrifice to Hercules might turn into a brawl.

  The argument was suddenly interrupted by a loud cry. It came from Potitia. Her labor had begun.

  The delivery took place before the Altar of Hercules, for Potitia was in too much distress to be moved. The labor was short but intense, and there was something not right about it. The baby was too big to come out; the midwives were thrown into a panic. Along with her physical pain, Potitia was in an agony of suspense.

  At last the baby emerged from her womb. It was a man-child. Potitia reached for him. The midwives placed him in her arms. He was big, very big, yes—but not a monster. All his limbs were intact, and his proportions were no different from any other baby’s. Still, Potitia was uncertain. She gazed into the baby’s eyes, as she had gazed into the eyes of Cacus, and also into the eyes of the ox-driver. She could not be sure! The eyes that now gazed back at her might be the eyes of either man.

  Potitia did not care. Whoever his father might be, the child was precious to her, and precious to Fascinus. Weak and exhausted, but filled with joy, Potitia lifted the necklace bearing Fascinus over her neck and placed it around the neck of her newborn baby.

  THE TWINS

  757 B.C.

  The day was an important one for Potitius—the most important day so far in his young life. From infancy, he had been a witness to the ritual. Later, he became a participant in the feast. Now, for the first time, at the age of fourteen, he was assisting his father in performing the annual rites of sacrifice at the Altar of Hercules.

  While the assembled family members of the Potitii and the Pinarii watched, Potitius’s father stood before the altar and recited the tale of the god’s visit, telling how Hercules appeared in the peoples’ time of greatest need and killed the monster Cacus, then just as suddenly disappeared. Meanwhile, young Potitius slowly circled the altar and waved the sacred whisk, fashioned of an oxtail with a wooden handle, to drive away any flies that might come near. His distant cousin Pinarius, who was the same age and was also performing for the first time in the ritual, circled the altar in a wider orbit, walking in the opposite direction; his job was to drive away any dog that might come near.

  Potitius’s father finished the story. He turned to the father of Pinarius, who stood beside him. For generations, the two families had jointly tended to the altar and performed the ceremony, trading duties from year to year. This year, it fell to the elder Pinarius to recite the prayer for Hercules’s protection.

  An ox was slain and butchered. While it was being roasted, a portion of raw flesh was placed on the altar. The priests and their sons searched the sky. It was young Potitius, with a cry of excitement, who first saw the vulture fly overhead and begin to circle above them. The vulture was favored by Hercules; its appearance was a sign that the god was pleased by the offering and accepted it.

  The priests and their families gathered to feast on the ox. In every other matter relating to the ceremony, the families shared precisely equal duties; but, following tradition, the eating of the entrails remained a privilege accorded solely to the Potitii. It had become a tradition as well for the various Pinarii to grumble good-naturedly about this—“Where is our portion? Why are we given no entrails?”—to which their cousins would give the traditional reply: “No entrails for you! You arrived late for the feast!”

  Young Potitius took all his duties very seriously. He even attempted to banter with young Pinarius about the entrails, but received only a sullen look and a grunt in reply. The two boys had never been friends.

  After the feast, his father took Potitius aside. “I’m proud of you, son. You did well.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “Only one more ritual remains to complete the day.”

  Potitius frowned. “I thought we were done, Father.”

  “Not quite. I think you know, son, although we seldom talk about it—no need to make the Pinarii more jealous of us than they are already!—that our ancestry can be traced back directly to Hercules himself.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “You also know that the ancestors of the Potitii include a god even more ancient than Hercules.” He reached up to touch the amulet of Fascinus which hung from a leather strap around his neck.

  Potitius could count on his fingers the times he had seen the amulet. His father wore it only on very important occasions. He gazed at it, fascinated by the luster of the gold.

  His father smiled. “When I was your age, I took part for the first time in the rites of the Altar of Hercules, doing just as you did today, whisking the flies away. When the feast was done, my father took me aside. He told me that I had done well. On that day, he said, I was no longer a boy, but had become a man. Do you know what he did then, son?”

  Potitius gravely shook his head. “No, Father. What did he do?”

  In answer, his father raised the leather strap over his head, then solemnly placed it around Potitius’s neck. He smiled and ran his hand over his son’s silky blond hair, a gesture of affection to seal the last moment of his boyhood.

  “You are a man now, my son. I pass the amulet of Fascinus to you.”

  Potitius might now be a man, but after the feast, when the day’s duties were done and he was at last free to do whatever he pleased, he reverted to behaving like a boy. There were many hours of midsummer sunlight remaining. He had promised to visit his two best friends after the feast, and he was eager to join them.

  Since the days of Cacus, the little settlement by the Tiber had continued to prosper and grow. The market by the river saw a thriving traffic in salt, fish, and livestock; these three commodities arrived separately, but after being treated with salt, the preserved fish and meat could be transported great distances, or traded for other goods that flowed into the busy market. The oldest and most prosperous f
amilies, like the Potitii and the Pinarii, continued to live in the original settlement near the Spinon and the market grounds, in huts not very different from those of preceding generations, though the number of huts had increased greatly and they were now built much closer together. Numerous other, smaller settlements, some consisting of hardly more than a single family, had sprung up across the ruma, some in the valleys and some on the hilltops. Well-worn footpaths linked all the settlements together.

  The word ruma itself, as a reference to the region of the Seven Hills, had changed subtly in pronunciation over the years and by repeated usage had acquired the status of a proper name, so that people now called the area “Roma.” The name had a quaintness and a coziness about it, conveying the sense of a hilly place that lovingly nurtured its inhabitants.

  With more settlements and more people had come the tendency to formalize the names of various locales amid the Seven Hills, often naming places for the trees which lived there. Thus the hill of oak trees came to be called Querquetulanus—“Oak Hill”—while the hill of osiers was the Viminal, and the hill of beeches was the Fagutal.

  Shepherds and swineherds now lived and tended their livestock atop the hill above the old cave of Cacus. That hill was called the Palatine, after the goddess whom the shepherds worshiped, Pales. Of gods, once unknown in Roma, there now were many. As the population of mortals had grown, so had the number of deities, and each of the little communities scattered across the Seven Hills acknowledged a local divinity to whom they paid homage. Some of these divinities retained the nameless, nebulous character of the ancient numina, but others had acquired names and well-defined attributes after the fashion of gods and goddesses. Among these deities, the primacy of Hercules was recognized by everyone in Roma, and thus his altar had come to be called the Ara Maxima, or Greatest of Altars. It was agreed that his father was the sky-god known locally by the name Jupiter. The role of the Potitii and the Pinarii in tending to the Ara Maxima gave them great status among the people of Roma.

  Potitius took pride in carrying on his family’s traditions; but now, his duties done, he was eager to join his two friends, who lived on the Palatine. He quickly returned to his family’s home, a compound of interconnected huts, where he threw off the finely woven woolen robe he had worn for the ceremony and put on an old tunic, more suitable for rough play. He kept the amulet of Fascinus around his neck, for he wanted to show it off to his friends.

  Potitius strode through the busy marketplace and crossed a wooden footbridge that spanned the muddy Spinon. He walked past the Ara Maxima, where a few of his wine-befuddled relatives still loitered at the scene of the feast. He continued on to the foot of the Palatine, where he scaled a steep stairway hewn from the rocky hillside. The stairway had been made long ago, after the demise of the monster Cacus, to remove the threat of what had been an inaccessible cave. The hillside was no longer unscalable, thanks to the stairway, and the cave itself, an accursed place, had been filled in with stones and dirt. Brambles and clinging bushes had grown over the spot, so that little trace of the cave remained—nothing more than a bare outline that could be discerned only by someone looking for it. Potitius knew the history of the Stairs of Cacus, as people called the steep trail, and his father had shown him exactly where the cave had been located; whenever he passed it, Potitius uttered a prayer of thanksgiving to Hercules. But the Stairs of Cacus also served a purely practical function; it was the shortest route to the top of the Palatine.

  At the top of the Stairs grew a fig tree. It was older than Potitius and, for a fig tree, very large, with branches that formed a wide canopy. After scaling the steps, Potitius welcomed the cool shade offered by its dense foliage. He paused to catch his breath, then gave a cry when something struck his head. The projectile was soft enough to cause no damage to his scalp, but hard enough to sting. Potitius was struck again, and then again.

  From above, Potitius heard laughter. Rubbing his smarting head, he looked up and saw his two friends sitting on a high branch, grinning down at him. Remus began to laugh so hard that it appeared he might fall from his perch. Romulus hefted a green, unripe fig in his hand.

  “Stop it, you two!” cried Potitius. He saw Romulus cock his arm to hurl the fig. Potitius dodged, but too late. He yelped as the fig struck his forehead. Romulus was known for a sure aim and a strong arm.

  “Stop it, I said!” Potitius jumped up and grabbed the end of the branch upon with the brothers were sitting. Using the full weight of his body, he swung back and forth. The soft wood yielded without breaking, and the motion was violent enough to upset the twins from their perches. With shrieks of laughter, they both came tumbling down.

  The two of them recovered at once, tackled Potitius, and used their combined weight to pin him down. All three were gasping, barely able to breathe for laughing.

  “What’s this?” said Romulus. He reached for the amulet of Fascinus and held it up, so that the leather necklace was pulled taut. A shaft of sunlight, piercing the fig leaves, glinted off the gold. His brother joined him in gazing at it.

  Potitius smiled. “It’s the image of the god we call Fascinus. My father gave it to me, after the feast. He’s says that—”

  “And where did your father acquire such a thing?” asked Remus. “Stole it from a Phoenician trader?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! Fascinus is our family god. My father received this amulet from his father, who received it from his father, and so on, back to the beginning of time. Father says—”

  “Must be nice!” said Romulus curtly, no longer laughing but still holding the amulet and gazing at it. Potitius suddenly felt self-conscious, as he sometimes did with his two friends. Potitius came from one of the oldest and most respected families in Roma. Romulus and Remus had been foundlings; the swineherd who had raised them was a man of little account and the swineherd’s wife had a bad reputation. Potitius’s father disapproved of the twins, and it was only behind his father’s back that Potitius was able to associate with them. Potitius dearly loved them both, but sometimes, as now, he acutely felt the difference between their status and his own.

  “And what does this Fascinus do?” said Romulus.

  Remus laughed. “I know what I’d do, if my manhood had wings!” He flapped his arms, then made a lewd gesture.

  Potitius was beginning to regret having worn the amulet. It had been a mistake to think that the twins could understand what it meant to him. “Fascinus protects us,” he said.

  “Not from flying figs!” said Remus.

  “Or from boys who are stronger than you,” added Romulus, regaining his high spirits. He released the amulet, reached for Potitius’s arm, and twisted it behind his back.

  “You are not stronger than me!” protested Potitius. “I can take either one of you, as long as you come at me one at a time.”

  “But why should we do that, when there are two of us?” Remus seized Potitius’s other arm and gave it a twist. Potitius yowled in pain.

  It was always thus with the twins: They acted in concert, as if they shared a single mind. Their harmony was one of the things that Potitius, who had no brothers, admired most about them. What did it matter if no one knew their lineage?

  The infant twins had been discovered by the swineherd Faustulus in the aftermath of a great flood. The Tiber often flooded, but that flood had been by far the worst than anyone could remember. The river had risen so high that it submerged the marketplace. The marshly lake that fed the Spinon became a little sea, and the Seven Hills became seven islands. After the water receded, the swineherd Faustulus had found, among the flotsam, two infants in a wooden cradle on the slope of the Palatine. Many people who lived upriver had died in the flood. Since no one ever claimed the twins, it was assumed that their parents must be dead. Faustulus, who lived only a stone’s throw away from the fig tree in a squalid little hut surrounded by pigsties, raised them as his sons.

  Faustulus’s wife was named Acca Larentia. An unkind joke told behind the twins’ backs claime
d that they had been suckled by a she-wolf. As a small boy, when Potitius first heard this joke—told with a leer and a wink by his cousin Pinarius—he thought it was literally true; only later did he realize that “she-wolf” was another term for a whore, and thus an insult to Acca Larentia. Pinarius had also told him that the names given to the twins by Faustulus were a rude play on words—Romulus and Remus referring to the two ruma of Acca Larentia, whom Faustulus delighted in watching when she suckled both infants at once. Because her favorite place to suckle them was beneath the shade of the fig tree, Faustulus had named it the ruminalis, or suckling-tree.

  “A vulgar, dirty man, hardly better than the pigs he raises!” That had been the pronouncement of Potitius’s father about Faustulus. “As for Acca Larentia, the less said, the better. They’re hardly fit to be called parents, the way they let those boys run wild. Romulus and Remus are none the better for it—a pair of wolves, raised in a pigsty!”

  But even those who most disapproved of the twins could not deny that they were uncommonly handsome. “Only Romulus is better looking than Remus,” went the local saying, in which the names could as easily be reversed. “And only Remus can compete with Romulus,” went the response, for the twins were by far the fastest and strongest of all the local boys, and delighted in any opportunity to prove it. To Potitius, it seemed that the twins were everything a boy could wish to be—good-looking, athletic, and unfettered by a father’s control. Even when they ganged up to inflict a bit of misery on him, Potitius found it exciting to be in their company.