The Last Stoic

by Morgan Wade

  “I’ll make some time,” he said, laughing, and Marcus laughed too.

  “Book One. From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper.”

  Sextus looked through the bars at him and smiled. Marcus felt his face get warm at the now familiar first line. He wondered about Sextus’ own family. Did he have a grandson? Commodus had executed his brothers, father and uncle. Was he the last of his line? Marcus pressed his palms hard into his sore eyes, but still the tears spilled out. He wished he could walk through the hateful bars and hug the old man.

  “From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character.”

  Sextus swung the words out in a gentle rocking cadence.

  “From my mother, piety and beneficence, and abstinence, not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich.”

  Marcus released his clutch of the bars. He curled up in the straw.

  “From my great-grandfather, not to have frequented public schools, and to have had good teachers at home, and to know that on such things a man should spend liberally.”

  He knew these words. They draped over him like an old blanket.

  “From my governor, to be neither of the Green nor of the Blue party at the games in the Circus, nor a partisan either of the Parmularius or the Scutarius at the gladiators' fights; from him too I learned endurance of labour, and to want little, and to work with my own hands…”

  Halfway through the first chapter Marcus was asleep. He slept for sixteen consecutive hours, waking only for a draught of water or a bowl of cold porridge. On the advice of the camp’s Greek physician the magistrate left him undisturbed.

  Just before dawn the next day he awoke refreshed. Immediately he roused Sextus and asked him to continue his recitation. By mid-afternoon they had finished the twelfth and final chapter of the journal. At supper time, after Sextus had napped, Marcus exhorted him to start again from the beginning. They talked until well after sundown.

  On the morning of the sixth day after leaving the infirmary he was prodded awake and blindfolded. They dragged him through the portico, across the atrium, and out to the yard. His mouth was jammed with damp, bunched cloth, smelling of ammonia. His arms were bound behind his back and he was suspended by his ankles. Blood rushed to his head. They pounded the soles of his feet with rods. He passed out. He came to. He clamped his jaws and howled primal noises into his gag.

  Later, when he was sitting, bound and blindfolded, and the cloth had been removed, Marcus invented fabulous stories for the magistrate. Tales of shadowy, underground organizations devoted to black magic arts, corrupted cousins of Mithraism, introduced from the East, by the Scythians, by the Hindus, by the Parthians, by the peculiar and suspicious-looking Nasir, cults rife with blood drinking ceremonies, and human sacrifices, and bestial sex, ritual suicides, and feasts of dung, and every other unimaginable horror. He described nefarious doings, of secret meetings, of amassing rebel armies, of assassination plots. The magistrate would notice a contradiction and his face would redden. The restraints would be re-applied and Marcus would be hoisted once more.

  The magistrate interrogated. Marcus fabricated.

  He was hauled back to his pen.

  “Tell me everything.”

  “Everything?”

  Marcus beseeched Sextus. The old man obliged. He started with Seneca, Epictetus, Chrysippus, and Cleanthes. When these had been exhausted, they moved on to the chroniclers; Pliny the Elder, Livius and Tacitus, Herodotus. Sextus recited every bawdy poem he knew, from Martial to Juvenal. He recounted his own times, the people he’d known, loved, and fought, what he’d witnessed, from the sublime to the ridiculous. For days they talked. Marcus questioned. Sextus told him what he knew.

  One afternoon, Sextus fell silent. He’d reached the extent of his memory. He’d gone months at a time without sharing one word. Every waking hour of these last few days had been spent speaking, remembering, and reciting. He was spent, snoozing lightly in the corner of his cage. Marcus was also weary, digesting all that he had heard.

  “Sextus?” he called.

  “Sextus?” he said, louder this time. “What happened?”

  “What happened when lad?”

  He sounded far away.

  “I don’t understand. All of those clever people, all of those clever ideas. A sage for an emperor, who writes this marvelous book…Why are we here? It’s not what I expected when I left Verulamium. It’s not what my grandfather described.”

  “How long has it been since your grandfather traveled?”

  “A long time.”

  “Aurelius’ journal is an epilogue. A lament.”

  Marcus leant in so he could hear the old man.

  “Two primary passions afflict us Marcus, Romans no less than any others. Appetite and fear. They are excessive impulses. Disobedient to reason. Ruled by these passions people become slaves to pleasure or distress. It’s the easiest thing to do; the passions are always there, beckoning. They can be held in check, but never can be eliminated. It takes a lifetime of study, training, and self-discipline to rule oneself. ”

  Marcus traced a finger along a welt above his ankle.

  “All things must change Marcus. Change is the only constant. The era of Rome is ending. It is becoming something else. You, too, have changed. Soon I must return from whence I came. And still, we can pass on memories and knowledge.”

  The two men looked at each other.

  “I’m very tired. I must rest. Perhaps we can talk more tomorrow.”

  Marcus nodded and they receded into their respective cages.

  A percussive, barking sound woke Marcus seven hours later. He thought it must be the mastiffs across the yard catching sight of a hare. His head began to clear. He rubbed the grit from his raw eyes and looked across the cage. Sextus was hunched into a ball, coughing ceaselessly, his body convulsing with every hack and wheeze. The old man reached out with a hand to brace himself against the bars.

  “Sextus! Are you ill? Take some of my water!”

  Marcus thrust his hand through the bars. Sextus, still doubled over, reached and Marcus pulled him near. Sextus drew his free hand across his thin, quavering lips and it emerged streaked with blood.

  “Good Jupiter, Sextus! What has happened?”

  Marcus passed his half-filled tin water cup through the bars and Sextus held it to his lips with trembling hands. He swallowed a mouthful between convulsions and the coughing abated. An ill-timed sip caused him to sputter.

  “Guards!” Marcus cried, “A prisoner is very ill! Come quickly!”

  “Hush. It’s no use. I don’t want to spend my last hours with them.”

  “Last hours?”

  “Marcus, I became quite ill this last time you were in isolation. I had a brief respite as you returned,” Sextus whispered. “Now I’m dying.”

  Marcus squeezed the old man’s gnarled hand.

  “I’m sorry Sextus. Why didn’t you tell me? I made you talk and talk. You should have been resting.”

  “No need for apology. What better way of spending my final days.”

  “You don’t know…”

  “I do. The other end of the hair’s-breadth. It’s been a good life.”

  Marcus bowed his head. Sextus had spent the better part of his life in exile or in hiding. Most of his family had been murdered before his eyes. He’d festered in prison camps for seven years.

  “Remember. Part with life cheerfully.”

  Sextus looked up and gazed deeply at Marcus. A smile spread unevenly across his face and he tightened his grip. His breathing slowed. There was a rumbling in the hollow of his chest.

  “It’s been my good fortune to meet you Marcus. I can’t imagine a better companion to have these last few weeks. I didn’t have a son in this life, but if I had, I’d have been delighted if he were like you. Thank you.”

  Marcus looked away to the cockroaches s
currying in the straw.

  “Would you like to listen to the emperor’s meditations again?”

  “Sure.”

  Sextus began. “Book One. From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper.”

  He managed just two paragraphs before another fit seized him. Marcus turned back, thrust his left arm through the bars and put it around the old man’s thin shoulders, pulling him close against the bars, still clutching his other hand. He held him there tightly, swaying slightly, as his breathing grew weaker and less regular. Marcus began humming an old Caledonian lullaby his mother used to sing.

  “What do I do without you?”

  “Be good, Marcus.”

  A day later, Sextus Condianus had been removed from his pen. The soldiers wouldn’t tell Marcus whether he had been buried, burned, or left for the buzzards. They interrogated him once more. They hoped the death of the old man had changed his attitude. It had.

  “Do you love the emperor?” the magistrate asked, beginning the interrogation with the customary first question.

  “No,” Marcus replied, “I do not.”

  THIRTY THREE

  “The Arab. Do you know how that noisy jackass died?”

  Mark shook his head.

  “Just stopped breathing one night. Hard to believe. A young guy like that.”

  The soldier paused and smiled.

  “How about you? You feeling alright? Let’s see, you’ve had two cell mates removed either dead or dying. The towel-head makes three. You a betting man?”

  The soldier left, laughing.

  Mark enjoyed the deepest sleep he’d had since arriving.

  In the middle of the night he heard the cell door open and soldiers enter. They placed a hood over his head, secured his hands behind his back with plastic ties, and led him out, prodding him forward. Brought to a small, empty room, he was thrown to the floor and stuffed into a sleeping bag. It was zipped up so that Mark was fully cocooned, like a pupa. They kicked and stomped and struck at him with batons. Mark remained quiet and still. Dissatisfied, the men removed him from the bag, wrenched his bound wrists behind his back, and attached them to a steel chain suspended from the ceiling. Still hooded, he could see nothing. He was hoisted to his knees.

  “Raise him to the roof.”

  Mark recognized the voice of the magistrate.

  The steel chain began winding from the wall, pulling up toward the ceiling along with Mark’s wrists and arms. He was fully suspended from his wrists, his arms and elbows pulling irresistibly at their joints. He’d never experienced such pure, blinding agony. Still he made no sound. He lost consciousness inside a minute. The soldiers lowered him again to his knees and threw a bucket of cold water over him.

  “No more questions. You’re useless. Absolutely fucking useless. This is just for fun now. Photo ops.”

  They laid him on his back and he could feel the hard boots of one of the soldiers on his chest. Another stepped on. Mark could feel his chest compress. His lungs flattened and his diaphragm constricted. This is what the soldier meant. Just stopped breathing, he had said. This is how Nasir died. Pressed to death. One of the soldiers stepped off again, and the other jumped up and down, cracking several of Mark’s ribs.

  “Easy. Not too fast. No marks.”

  The soldiers tenderized him like he was a cut of meat. They raised him into the air by his wrists or stretched him out on the ground, kneeling or standing on the pressure point at the centre of his chest, shouting and cursing at him. They resuscitated him and started again. The flash from a camera illuminated his hood. He understood this might be the end. A minor miscalculation on the part of the soldiers and unconsciousness would turn into heart failure or brain malfunction. It would be a lamentably undignified exit. But he was determined to part with life cheerfully. As the unforgiving boot ends continued to cascade into his already fractured ribcage and his lungs collapsed irretrievably, he concentrated on all the wonders and joys of his all too brief existence in his present form, as Mark, son of Luke and Paulina. He lost consciousness a fourth time.

  Shortly after dawn, the magistrate was back in the room, agitated and impatient.

  “No fucking more! I just got word. He’s off limits. He’s spoken for.”

  The soldiers were confused.

  “For Christ’s sake, someone high up is vouching for him, wants him out, unharmed. Get the doctor. Clean him up, make him presentable. This is a goddamn, fucking fuck up.”

  The magistrate was now at his ear.

  “You won’t be able to prove a word of what you think happened here. You were uncooperative when you first arrived and we had several altercations in which we had to subdue you. All within the reasonable bounds of proper procedure.”

  THIRTY FOUR

  Paulina breathed into his slender neck.

  “My beautiful heron. We missed you so much.”

  Marcus was silent. He wanted to tell her everything. Instead, he hugged her closer, enveloping her with sore arms. Still there was pain, lodged deep and entrenched, despite convalescing for a week before his release in the care of the best Greek physicians.

  “Where’s grandfather?” he asked, “I have a lot to tell him.”

  It was mid-afternoon and a yellow-grey shaft of light filtered palely into his modest cenaculum, illuminating the motes of dust suspended lazily in the stale air.

  “Vincentius is dead.”

  Marcus tilted his head down toward Paulina, as though hard of hearing. He parted from her, trying to reconcile the words with his last images of the man, cascading into his room on the dawn of his departure, vigorous and resolved.

  “Dead?”

  “Yes. He was with me,” Paulina continued, “the two of us made the trip together. He wasn’t well when we left.”

  Vincentius had contracted a vapour before leaving, she continued, he’d become feverish. They urged him to stay home but he’d insisted. It was his money and his acquaintances in Rome that would get Marcus out, he’d said.

  “I’m afraid the exhaustion of the trip and the worry…” she trailed off. “There was something else.”

  “What happened?”

  “An altercation. A young man called Patricius. Grandfather was convinced that he knew more about your disappearance than he let on.”

  “Disappearance? Didn’t you know where I was from the start? Isn’t that why you came down here in the first place?”

  “No,” Paulina replied, puzzled. “We had no idea. No-one had any idea. You were just gone.”

  “But didn’t Gus tell you? Didn’t he send for you? Paulus Cornelius?”

  “No. They were just as mystified as everyone else. They said you failed to show up at the worksite one day and assumed you’d had enough and had gone home or moved to another city.”

  Gus. Marcus recalled the events at the rally. Patricius standing nearby accusing them. Gus appearing suddenly from the woods. He sat down, thinking. Why had no-one from the firm come to bail me out? Why did they not contact my family? Gus caused my incarceration. What I saw that late night at the worksite was not the trickery of the shadows. My eyes did not deceive me. And Gus suspected as much. He wasn’t there to help. He was there to make sure the soldiers finished the job. He promised to take care of Sura. Jupiter! What has become of Sura?

  “This Patricius was a queer one,” Paulina continued, “he was right there, in your insula, when we arrived. Grandfather discovered from him that the Praetorians had taken you. The young man stabbed Vincentius with a knife before he could leave and then stabbed himself. To death. Grandfather was left bleeding on the floor.”

  The priests at the temple found Vincentius. When the bleeding was stopped and his wound was sealed, he insisted that they hire a litter back to Rome. He met with dozens of his associates on the Capitoline Hill and the Forum, in the tavernae and thermae around the city, many of them two or three or four times, often from his sick bed, or from the litter. The long hours, the sleeplessness, and the anxiety o
vertook him.

  “It meant everything to Vincentius that he get you back, Marcus. We can be thankful that he died knowing that he’d secured your freedom.”

  His old friend, the Senator Frontinus, assured them, just a day before Vincentius passed away that Marcus would be released and that it had all been a terrible mistake.

  “And he asked me to give you this,” Paulina said, putting a book on the table. Marcus turned it over and opened the first page. It was Vincentius’ parting gift, the intended traveling charm, the rare copy of Marcus Aurelius’ journal, signed by the emperor himself.

  Marcus stared at the book for a long time. Paulina watched him closely, wondering what horrors her boy had undergone in the distant prison camp, trying in vain to suppress the worst she could imagine. He thought of Vincentius, feeling all at once the disillusionment and distress his grandfather must have endured, learning that his grandson had been imprisoned. How humiliated he must have felt approaching acquaintances for their help in retrieving his grandson from a prison camp. Did he ever wonder if I might actually have been involved in an assassination attempt? Marcus flipped the page absent-mindedly, and read the first line of the journal.

  From my grandfather…

  He smiled.

  “Where is grandfather now?”

  “We arranged for a funeral for him in Rome, as was his request. Many of his former colleagues were in attendance. It was very tasteful. As a last favour, Senator Frontinus offered a space in the equestrian columbarium just outside the city walls where many of the Frontinus ancestors reside. He made the offer after Vincentius died so we don’t know his wishes. The senator graciously allowed us to postpone the decision until we had a chance to discuss it.”

  Paulina gestured toward a bronze urn sitting on a pedestal in the corner of the room.

  “Vincentius remains with us.”

  It pleased Marcus to think that Vincentius had been accorded such an honour. But to be interred far from his home in Verulamium? He stood and walked to the urn, laying his hand on the heavy, metal lid, quietly thinking upon it.