“You can’t be serious, Plautus. Can you imagine how busy Scipio must be, preparing to take the command in Spain? He doesn’t have time to entertain! I was probably the last person with whom he actually sat down and enjoyed a meal.”
“You should feel lucky, then, and honored.”
“I do. It will be a very long time, I imagine, before Scipio smiles again as he smiled that night—relaxed and contented and with hardly a worry. Now the weight of destiny is on his shoulders.”
Plautus nodded. “He’s set himself an arduous task. It will make him or break him.”
“Only time will tell,” whispered Kaeso. He mouthed a silent prayer to Jupiter to watch over his friend.
201 B.C.
Eleven years later, Scipio had fulfilled the vows he made to Jupiter, to the shades of his father and uncle, and to the people of Roma.
After decisive victories in Spain, Scipio took the war to Africa and proceeded to menace Carthage. This was done over the strenuous objections of Fabius Maximus, who told the Senate that Hannibal should be decisively defeated in Italy rather than lured away, and who warned against the uncertainties and entanglements of an African campaign. But Scipio’s strategy succeeded brilliantly. Panicked, the Carthaginians recalled Hannibal from Italy to defend their city. Just as many of Roma’s jealous allies and subjects had eagerly betrayed her, so did many of Carthage’s neighbors. Scipio pressed his advantage. At the battle of Zama, some one hundred miles inland from Carthage, the long war reached its climax.
Before the battle, in a final attempt at negotiations, Hannibal asked to talk with Scipio, and the two met face to face in Scipio’s tent. For a long moment, both men were struck dumb with mutual loathing and admiration. Hannibal spoke first, asking for peace despite the bitter taste of the word in his mouth. He offered terms advantageous to Roma—but not advantageous enough. Scipio craved a victory, not a settlement. Nothing less would satisfy his vow to Jupiter.
Hannibal made a final plea. “You were a boy when I began my war on Roma. You’ve grown up. I’ve grown old. Your sun is rising. I see twilight ahead. With age comes weariness, but also wisdom. Hear me, Scipio: The greater a man’s success, the less it may be trusted to endure. Fortuna can turn on a man, in the blink of an eye. You believe that you have the upper hand going into this battle, but when the bloodshed and the madness begin, all the odds count for nothing. Will you stake the sacrifice of so much blood and so many years of struggle on the outcome of a single hour?”
Scipio was unimpressed. He pointed out that Roma had proposed terms of peace on numerous occasions, to which Carthage had always turned a deaf ear. Negotiation was no longer an option. As for Fortuna, Scipio was well aware of her vagaries. She had taken those dearest to him, but she had also given him a chance to exact his revenge.
Hannibal was allowed to return to the Carthaginian camp unharmed.
The next day, the two most famous generals commanding the two mightiest armies in the world advanced to battle. The closely fought contest was a test of sheer endurance for both sides. Scipio had prayed for a rout; he achieved a bare victory, but a victory nonetheless. Defeated, exhausted, abandoned by Fortuna, Hannibal fled back to Carthage.
The Romans’ terms were harsh. Stripped of her warships and military stores and made to pay massive reparations, Carthage was reduced to little more than a client state of Roma. A war that had wreaked havoc on the whole of the Mediterranean for seventeen years had at last come to an end, and Roma emerged stronger than ever, a power poised to rival the fabled Egyptians or the Persians at the peak of their empires. The survivors who had fought and won the war could rightly consider themselves the greatest generation in Roman history, and the greatest among them, without question, was Publius Cornelius Scipio, forever after to be called Africanus—conqueror of Africa.
“He’s cut his hair short! When did that happen? I’ve never seen him without his long mane of chestnut hair.”
Kaeso spoke wistfully. Through the peephole beneath the stage, he gazed at the crowded bleachers of the Circus Maximus, where Scipio had finally arrived to take his seat of honor. The crowd stood and cheered him for a long time, crying “Africanus! Africanus!” Eventually the spectators began to take their seats, and Kaeso was finally able to get a clear view of the recipient of their acclaim.
“Are you disappointed, boss?” said Plautus, who was performing a last-minute inspection of the trapdoor. The simple task made him huff and puff; over the years, he had grown fat with success. “Does short hair not suit him?”
“Quite the contrary! It suits him very well indeed.” Kaeso squinted slightly; his eyesight was not as good as it used to be. “He no longer looks like a boy—”
“I should think not! He must be at least thirty-five.”
“But he’s more handsome than ever. Not so much like Alexander anymore; more like Hercules, perhaps. He used to be almost too pretty, you know? Now he looks so rugged, so—”
“By Venus and Mars, stop swooning!” Plautus laughed. “He’s just a man.”
“Really? Did you see the triumphal procession?”
“Some of it. It went on too long for me to watch the whole thing.”
“All those captives, all that booty! The splendor of his chariot, the magnificence of his armor! All those people shouting his name…”
“I’m only glad he decided to include an afternoon of comedy among the festivities—though I must admit I was a bit surprised when he requested that we revive The Swaggering Soldier for the occasion.”
“Why not The Swaggering Soldier? It hearkens back to his very first elected office; people still talk about the Roman Games of that year. And it’s a clever way for him to show people that he doesn’t take himself too seriously. The audience can see the play as an affectionate parody of Roma’s most beloved soldier, a man who’s earned the right to swagger, the invincible Scipio Africanus. Giving them a laugh at his own expense will only make them love him more.”
“While you, dear boss, could hardly love Scipio more than you already do.”
Kaeso made no reply. He was deep in thought, musing on Scipio’s spectacular success. His own life seemed hopelessly humdrum and shabby by comparison—a comfortable but loveless marriage, a daughter to whom he had never felt particularly close, an endless series of dalliances with actors and slave boys, and a merely adequate livelihood earned from his theater company and from his staff of scribes, who specialized in copying Greek books for sale to the literate upper classes.
Plautus slapped his shoulder. “Snap out of it, boss! You’ve been a shadow to Scipio all your life. You’ve admired him, desired him, idolized him, envied him—done everything, I suppose, except hate him.”
“That I could never do!”
“Ah, but there you differ from your fellow citizens. They adore him now—they worship him like a god—but they’ll turn on Scipio some day.”
“Impossible!”
“Inevitable. The audience is fickle, Kaeso. You alone are faithful, like the keeper of a shrine. Scipio should appreciate you more than he does! Has he invited you to dinner even once since we met to talk about putting on the play?”
“He’s been very busy.” Kaeso frowned. Then a flash of movement caught his eye; one of the actors had forgotten from which side he needed to make his entrance and was using the passage under the stage to get across. The actor was new to the company, and quite young; they seemed to grow younger every year. He was also uncommonly good-looking, with long hair and broad shoulders. He flashed a grin at Kaeso as he hurried past.
Plautus glanced over his shoulder, then looked back at Kaeso and smiled. “Ah, yes, the new boy, from Massilia. Scipio’s haircut notwithstanding, I see you haven’t entirely lost your appreciation for long-haired beauties.”
“I suppose I haven’t,” admitted Kaeso with a crooked grin.
Above their heads, the play began. The tromping of the actors across the boards was loud in their ears, but not as loud as the first roar of laughter from
the audience. Amid the din, Kaeso was sure that he could distinctly hear Scipio, laughing louder and harder than anyone else.
191 B.C.
“It seems we hardly ever run into each other anymore, except at the theater,” said Scipio. “When did I see you last, Kaeso? It’s must have been a couple of years, at least.”
The festive occasion was the opening of a temple on the Palatine, dedicated to a goddess new to Roma: Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods, whom the Romans called Magna Mater. Her cult was said to date back to prehistoric times, but was not native to Roma or even to Italy. It had been imported from one of Roma’s new allies in the East, the kingdom of Phrygia. Since the defeat of Carthage, Roma’s expanding sphere of influence had resulted in an influx of new people, new languages, new ideas—and new deities. Cybele was quite unlike any goddess previously seen in Roma. The statue in the new temple depicted her wearing exotic garments and adorned from head to foot with bull’s testicles. Along with her statue, the priests of Cybele had also been imported from Phrygia. They were called galli, and were also something new to Roma: eunuchs.
Games had been organized to celebrate the occasion, and a temporary theater had been erected in front of the new temple. The company of Plautus was about to put on a new comedy. For this performance, Kaeso had chosen to sit in the audience rather than remain backstage, and had invited Scipio to sit beside him. Before he could answer his friend’s question, a small commotion in the audience distracted them both. The galli had arrived in a group and were filing into their seats of honor, not far from Kaeso and Scipio. The priests were gaudily attired in red turbans and yellow gowns. They wore bangles on their wrists and paint on their cheeks.
“Can you imagine our grandfathers putting foreign-born eunuchs on the sacred payroll?” asked Scipio. “Our ancestors thought of eunuchs, if they thought of them at all, strictly as the sycophants of kings, half-men who could never breed, and so would never try to put their own progeny ahead of the king’s heirs. A republic has no king; ergo, no need for eunuchs. Yet now we have eunuchs in Roma, thanks to Cybele! Fascinating, aren’t they? I hear they cut off their testicles themselves. They work themselves into a such a frenzy that they don’t even feel it. Amazing, the acts to which religious devotion will drive a man!”
Kaeso winced at the idea of a man castrating himself, but found himself staring at one of the galli, a dark-eyed, exceptionally good-looking youth with full lips and skin like marble. He had heard that a man who was castrated in adulthood did not lose his erotic appetites. What sort of proclivities might such a young man possess, who had been willing to do such a thing for his goddess? Kaeso could not help being curious.
Aloud, he remarked, “If anyone should know about the Great Mother and her galli, it’s you, Scipio. After all, it was you who officially welcomed them to the city and accepted the gift of the black stone.”
The black stone, even more than the statue of the goddess, was the centerpiece of the new temple. It was said to have fallen from the sky, and its shape roughly depicted an even more primitive image of the goddess, an amorphous mass suggesting a massively pregnant female with no distinguishing features. The black stone, too, was unlike anything previously worshiped in Roma, but when the galli in the Phrygian city of Pessinus offered it as a gift, along with a request to establish Cybele’s worship in Roma, a verse had been found in the Sibylline Books that called on the Roman people to accept the gift and welcome the new goddess.
Whatever its religious function, the importation of Cybele possessed a political dimension as well. Men of vision, like Scipio, believed that Roma’s future now lay to the East. After Hannibal had been dealt with, the Romans turned their energies to defeating Philip of Macedonia, and had done so with help from Phrygia. Roma’s embrace of the Great Mother would strengthen her bonds with her new ally. When the stone arrived by ship at Ostia, the verse in the Sibylline Books required that only the greatest of the Romans could accept it. Naturally, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus was chosen for the honor.
Perhaps because he was thinking of the galli and their sacrifice, Kaeso touched the golden fascinum that hung from the necklace he wore. He had put away the heirloom many years before, and had virtually forgotten about it, until he happened to come across it while going through a box of old things. The glitter of the gold caught his eye, and on a whim he decided to begin wearing it again on special occasions, as had been the practice, so he had once been told, of his ancestors.
Touching the fascinum led to another train of thought. He cleared his throat and said to Scipio, in an offhand way, “All these new religions flooding into Roma—some official, some…not so official. What do you think of the so-called Cult of Bacchus? They say it offers initiation into secret rites that promise an ecstatic release from the material world.”
Scipio looked at him sidelong and raised an eyebrow. “The Cult of Bacchus is controversial, to say the least. Like everyone else, I’ve heard about it. It seems to be an offshoot of a Greek cult that worships a god of wine and madness. How much of what I’ve heard can be believed, or how widespread the cult’s become, I don’t know. I do know it has no recognition from the state.”
“So it’s not illegal?”
“Not technically, I suppose. But, from what I’ve heard, the cult’s ‘ecstatic’ rituals are nothing more than drunken orgies where every possible sexual act is encouraged. Also…” Scipio lowered his voice. “The initiation of men into the cult requires that they submit to anal penetration—as if they were slave boys! I’ve also heard that the cult is nothing more than a front for a group of ruthless criminals. The so-called priests and priestesses are forgers, blackmailers, even murderers.” Scipio took a deep breath. “I would advise you, Kaeso, to steer clear of any cult that has no official status, especially the Cult of Bacchus!”
“Yes, of course,” muttered Kaeso. He hurriedly changed the subject. “I’m a grandfather now!”
Scipio smiled. “So I’ve heard. Congratulations.”
“My daughter struck a lucky match when she married young Menenius. No man could have given her a more beautiful baby. I only wish my wife had lived to see little Menenia.”
“Yes, I was saddened to hear of Sestia’s death.”
Kaeso shrugged. “To be honest, I was never much of a husband to her. Nor was I much of a father to Fabia. But the role of grandfather seems to suit me. I dote shamelessly on Menenia, as I never doted on her mother or grandmother. And what about you, Scipio? You’ve just had a daughter.”
“Indeed I have! If you think you dote on Menenia, you should see me with Cornelia.”
Kaeso nodded. “Curious, that your daughter and my granddaughter should be almost exactly the same age.”
“Perhaps they can grow up to be friends, as you and I have been friends, Kaeso.”
“I should like that,” Kaeso said. “I should like that very much.” He gazed steadily at Scipio. His chestnut hair, kept short, was now mixed with silver. In his rugged features, all trace of the boy was gone, except in his eyes, which sometimes glowed with youthful exuberance when he laughed. This was one of the reasons Kaeso had invited Scipio to sit beside him in the theater that day, because it would give him such pleasure to see Scipio laugh.
They were distracted by the sound of applause and a flurry of movement. Many in the audience spontaneously rose from their seats. Plautus had just entered the theater and was making his way to the empty seat next to Kaeso. At the age of sixty-three, the Umbrian playwright was the grand old man of the Roman stage. The audience knew him by sight and gave him a standing ovation.
The galli alone failed to recognize him. They looked at one another in puzzlement, then stood and joined uncertainly in the applause.
Plautus embraced Kaeso, then exchanged greetings with Scipio. The three of them sat, and the applause gradually dwindled.
“So, my flatfooted friend, what’s the play today?” said Scipio.
Plautus shrugged. “Oh, a trifle I’ve titled after the main c
haracter, a wisecracking slave. It’s called Pseudolus.”
“A trifle? Your masterpiece!” declared Kaeso.
“Spoken with all the conviction one would expect from the owner of the company!” Plautus laughed. “Oh, the dialogue sparkles in places, I must admit; but not nearly so brightly as words may sparkle in real life. I refer, Scipio, to the dialogue you exchanged with your old enemy Hannibal when the two of you met face to face on your recent mission to the East—if one can believe the gossips. Can one believe the gossips?”
Scipio had already told the anecdote to Kaeso, when they met outside the theater, but he obligingly related it again. “It’s true. While I was in Ephesus, I learned that Hannibal happened to be there as well, and I arranged to meet him. Our spies say he’s been wandering the East for years, offering his services to any king willing to challenge Roma. It’s because of that accursed vow he made to his father; he can never stop plotting our downfall as long as there’s a breath in his body. So far, he’s had no takers. He’s become a bit of a joke, actually.”
“What did you two talk about?” said Plautus.
“This and that. At one point, I asked him which general, in his opinion, was the greatest of all time.”
“A leading question!” said Plautus. “What was his reply?”
“‘Alexander,’ Hannibal answered. And what commander would he place second? ‘Pyrrhus,’ he said. And third? ‘Myself!’ declared Hannibal. Well, I had to burst out laughing. I said, ‘And where would you rank if you had defeated me?’ Hannibal looked me in the eye and replied, ‘In that case, I would put myself before Pyrrhus and even before Alexander—in fact, before all other generals who ever lived!’”
Plautus slapped his knee. “Outrageous! Really, I could never invent a line like that, or a character like Hannibal.”
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