by Mika Waltari
She made a mistake at first, for my father in his humble way had stood in the background to pay the bearers himself, and she stopped in front of Barbus, bowing a little and covering her head as if in prayer.
“Ah, Marcus, what a joyful occasion,” she cried. “You are much changed since your youth. But your stance is now better and your figure more powerful.”
My father burst out laughing.
“Oh, Aunt Laelia,” he cried. “You are as shortsighted as ever. I am Marcus. This good honest old veteran is our companion Barbus, one of my clients.”
Aunt Laelia was annoyed at her own mistake. She went up to my father, peered at him with glittering eyes and fumbled over his shoulders and stomach with shaking hands..
“It is not so strange,” she remarked, “that I no longer recognize you. Your face has swollen, your stomach sags and I can hardly believe my own eyes, for you used to be quite good-looking.”
My father was not offended by her words. On the contrary.
“Thank you for your words, Aunt Laelia,” he said. “A weight has fallen from my mind, for I have had nothing but trouble from my appearance before. As you didn’t recognize me, then hardly anyone else will either. But you haven’t changed a bit. You’re as slim as before and your features are just as noble. The years have not changed you in the slightest. Embrace my son Minutus too, then, and be as good and considerate to him as you were to me in the lighthearted days of my youth.”
Aunt Laelia embraced me with delight, kissed me on the forehead and eyes with her thin mouth and felt my cheeks.
“But Minutus,” she cried, “you already have the beginnings of a beard and are not at all a child to be hugged.”
She went on, holding my head between her hands and looked carefully at my face.
“You look more like a Greek than a Roman,” she said. “But those green eyes and fair hair of yours are certainly very unusual. If you were a girl, I should say you were beautiful, but with those looks you will certainly make a good marriage. Your mother of course was a Greek, if I remember rightly.”
Not until she had stammered and chattered away for some time, as if she herself did not really know what she was saying, did I realize that she was in a state of utter terror. At the entrance we were greeted by a bald, toothless slave, and at his side stood a lame and one-eyed woman. They both knelt in front of my father and called out a greeting which Aunt Laelia had obviously taught them. My father looked embarrassed, patted Aunt Laelia on the shoulder and asked her to go in before us as she was the hostess. The little room was full of smoke which made us all start coughing, for Aunt Laelia had had a fire lighted on the household altar in our honor. Through the smoke I could just make out our family gods in fired clay, and their yellowed wax masks seemed to move in the swirling smoke.
Nervously tripping, coughing and gesticulating, Aunt Laelia began verbosely to explain that according to the traditions of the Manilianus family, we ought really to sacrifice a pig. But as she had been uncertain of the day of our arrival, she had not acquired a pig and could now offer us only olives, cheese and vegetable soup. She herself had long since ceased eating meat. We looked at all the rooms in the house and I saw the cobwebs in the corners, the wretched couches and some other poor furniture, and I suddenly realized that our noble and much respected Aunt Laelia lived in the depths of poverty. All that remained of Manilius the astronomer’s library were a few rat-chewed scrolls, and Aunt Laelia was forced to admit that she had even sold his portrait bust to the public library below Palatine. Finally she broke down and wept bitterly.
“Just blame me, Marcus,” she said. “I’m a bad housekeeper because I have seen better days in my youth. I shouldn’t have been able to keep this household going if you hadn’t sent money from Antioch. I don’t know where the money has gone, but at least it hasn’t gone on luxuries, wine and perfumed ointments. I still hope that my destiny may change any day now. This has been foretold. So you mustn’t be angry with me or ask me for a careful rendering of accounts of the money you sent me.”
But my father assured her that he had not come to Rome as an auditor. On the contrary, he deeply regretted he had not sent more money for the maintenance and repair of the house. But now everything would be changed, just as had been foretold to Aunt Laelia. My father bade Barbus unpack and spread the rich Eastern cloths on the floor. He gave Aunt Laelia a silk robe and a silk cloth, hung a necklace of jewels around her neck and asked her to try on a pair of soft red leather shoes. He also gave her a handsome wig, so that she wept even louder.
“Oh, Marcus,” she cried, “are you really so wealthy? You haven’t acquired all these expensive things in some dishonest way, have you? I thought perhaps you had fallen victim to the vices of the East, as Romans so easily do if they stay there too long. So I was uneasy when I saw your swollen face, but it was probably the tears which dimmed my sight. When I look at you with greater equanimity I shall get used to your face, which perhaps doesn’t look quite so unpleasant as I first thought.”
In fact Aunt Laelia feared and believed that my father had only come to take over the house and send her away to a life of poverty in the country somewhere. This belief was so deep-rooted that she kept repeating that a woman such as she could not possibly like it anywhere else but in Rome. Gradually she became braver and reminded us that she was after all the widow of a senator and was still a welcome visitor in many of the old houses in Rome, although her husband, Gnaius Laelius, had died so long ago as in the time of Emperor Tiberius.
I asked her to tell me about Senator Gnaius Laelius, but Aunt Laelia listened to my request with her head on one side.
“Marcus,” she said, “how is it possible that your son speaks Latin with such a dreadful Syrian accent? We must put that right or he’ll sound very foolish in Rome.”
My father said in his untroubled way that he himself had spoken so much Greek and Aramaic that his own pronunciation was almost certainly strange.
“Perhaps so,” said Aunt Laelia pungently, “for you are old and everyone knows you’ve picked up foreign accents on military or other duties abroad. But you must appoint a good tutor in rhetoric or an actor to improve Minutus’ pronunciation. He must go to the theater and listen to the public readings by authors. Emperor Claudius is particular about the purity of the language, even if he does let his freedmen speak Greek on matters of State, and his wife does other things which my modesty forbids me to mention.”
Then she turned to me.
“My poor husband, Senator Gnaius,” she explained, “was neither stupider nor simpler than Claudius. Yes, Claudius in his time even betrothed his son, who was a minor, to the daughter of the prefect Sejanus, and himself married his adoptive sister, Aelia. The boy was as scatterbrained as his father and later choked to death on a pear. I mean that my departed husband Laelius in the same way strove for the favors of Sejanus and thought he was serving the State in this way. You,
Marcus, weren’t you in some way mixed up in Sejanus’ intrigues, since you vanished so suddenly from Rome before the conspiracy was revealed? No one heard from you for years. In fact you were struck from the rolls of knighthood by dear Emperor Gaius simply because no one knew anything about you. I know nothing either, he said jokingly, and drew a line through your name. Or that’s what I heard, although perhaps whoever told me wanted to spare my feelings and not reveal everything he knew.”
My father answered stiffly that he would be going to the State archives the next day to have the reason for his name being struck off the rolls investigated. Aunt Laelia did not seem all that delighted to hear this. On the contrary, she asked whether it would not be safer to desist from digging into what was now old and rotten. When Emperor Claudius was drunk, he was irritable and capricious, even if he had put right many of Emperor Gaius’ political mistakes.
“But I realize that for Minutus’ sake, we must do what we can to restore the family honor,” she admitted. “The quickest way would be to give Minutus the man-toga and ensure that he
comes before the eyes of Aelia Messalina. The young Empress likes young men who have recently been given the man-toga and invites them into her rooms to question them a deux on their descent and their hopes for the future. If I weren’t so proud, I would beg an audience with the bitch for Minutus’ sake. But I’m very much afraid she would not receive me. She knows only too well that I was the best friend of Emperor Gaius’ mother in her youth. In fact I was one of the few Roman women who helped Agrippina and young Julia give the remains of their poor brother a reasonably respectable burial after the girls had returned from their exile. Poor Gaius was murdered in such a brutal way, and then the Jews financed Claudius so that he could be Emperor. Agrippina managed to find a rich husband but Julia was banished from Rome again because Messalina thought she hung around her Uncle Claudius too much. Many men have been banished because of those two lively girls. I remember a certain Tigellinus, who may have been uneducated but who had the finest figure of all the young men in Rome. He didn’t mind about his exile much, but started a fishery business and is now supposed to be breeding racehorses. Then there was a Spanish philosopher, Seneca, who had published many books and had a certain relationship with Julia although he had tuberculosis. He has been pining away in exile in Corsica for several years. Messalina considered it unsuitable that a niece of Claudius’ should be unchaste, even if it was a secret. Anyhow, only Agrippina is alive now.”
When she stopped to draw breath, my father took the opportunity to say tactfully that it would be best if for the moment Aunt Laelia did not attempt to do anything to help me. My father wanted to see to the matter himself without interference from women. He had had enough of female interference, he said in bitter tones, so that it had choked him ever since the days of his youth.
Aunt Laelia was about to reply, but gave me a look and decided to keep quiet. At last we could start eating the olives, the cheese and the vegetable soup. My father saw to it that we did not finish the food but left some of it, even of the-small lump of cheese, for otherwise obviously neither of the household’s aged slaves would get anything to eat. I did not realize this myself, for at home in Antioch I had always received the best bits and there was always more than enough left over for the rest of the household and the poor who always gathered around my father.
The following day, my father appointed an architect to arrange for the repairs to the family property and a couple of gardeners to put the unkempt garden to rights. A hundred-year-old sycamore tree grew there, planted by a Manilius who had later been murdered in the open street by Marius’ men. A couple of ancient trees also grew near the house and my father was careful to see that they had not suffered any damage. The little sunken house he also left as outwardly unchanged as possible.
“You’ll be seeing a great deal of marble and other luxuries in Rome,” he explained to me, “but when you grow up you will realize that what I am doing now is the greatest luxury of all. Not even the richest upstart can acquire such ancient trees around his house, and the building’s old-fashioned appearance is worth more than all the columns and decorations.”
Fie turned back to his past in his thoughts and his face clouded.
“Once in Damascus,” he went on, “I was going to build myself a simple house and plant trees all around it, to live a peaceful life there with your mother, Myrina. But after her death, I sank into such complete despair that nothing meant anything to me for many years. Perhaps I would have killed myself if my duty to you had not forced me to continue living. And once a fisherman on the shores of Galilee promised me something which still makes me curious, although I remember it only as a dream.”
My father would not tell me more about this promise, but just repeated that he would have to be content with these ancient trees, for he himself had not been granted the joy of planting any and watching their growth.
While the building workers and the architect were about the house and my father was in the city from morning to night arranging his affairs, Barbus and I walked insatiably around Rome, looking at the people and the sights. Emperor Claudius was having all the old temples and memorials repaired for the centenary festivities and the priests and wise men were collecting all the myths and tales which belonged to them and adapting them to the demands of the present. The Imperial buildings on Palatine, the temple on the Capitoline, and the baths and theaters in Rome did not captivate me in themselves, for I had grown up in Antioch where there were just as magnificent and even larger public buildings. In fact Rome, with its crooked alleys and steep hillsides, was a cramped city to one who was used to the straight streets of spacious Antioch.
There was one building, however, which entranced me with its vast-ness and its associations. That was the enormous mausoleum of the god Augustus. It was circular in shape, for the most sacred temples in Rome were circular in memory of the days when Rome’s first inhabitants lived in round huts. The simple grandeur of the mausoleum seemed to me worthy of a god and the greatest ruler of all time. I never tired of reading the memorial inscription which listed Augustus’ greatest feats. Barbus was not so enthusiastic about it. He said that during his time as a legionary he had become cynical about all memorial inscriptions, for what was left out of them is usually more important than what is put in them. In that way a defeat can become a victory and political mistakes wise statesmanship. He assured me that between the lines of the memorial inscription on Augustus’ tomb he could read the destruction of whole legions, the sinking of hundreds of warships and the unmentionable deaths of civil war.
He was, of course, born at the time when Augustus had already established peace and order in the State and had strengthened the power of Rome, but his father had told him less of Augustus, who was considered petty and mean, and more of Marcus Antonius, who sometimes stood at the speaker’s platform in the forum so drunk that, inflamed by his own words, he was forced intermittently to vomit into a bucket beside him. That was at the time when they still used to appeal to the people. Augustus had won the respect of the Senate and the pea-ple of Rome during his all too long reign, hut life in Rome had, at least according to Barbus’ father, become considerably duller than before. No one had really loved the cautious Augustus, but the dashing Antonius was liked for his faults and his gifted lightheartedness.
But I was already familiar with Barbus’ stories, which my father would perhaps have considered unsuitable for my ears had he known about them. The mausoleum of Augustus delighted me with its wonderfully simple richness, and over and over again we walked right across Rome to look at it. But naturally I was also tempted to Mars field for the noble youth of Rome, where the sons of senators and knights were already busy practicing for the equestrian games at the centenary festivities. Enviously I watched them grouping, separating at signals from a horn and then regrouping again. I knew about all this and knew that I could control a horse just as well, if not better, than they.
Among the spectators to the equestrian games there were always several anxious mothers, for the noble youths were of all ages between seven and fifteen. The boys naturally pretended not to recognize their mothers, but snarled angrily if one of the smallest fell from his horse and the mother, frightened and with flapping mantle, rushed up to save him from the horse’s hooves. Naturally the smallest had quiet and well-exercised horses which soon stopped to protect whoever had fallen from the saddle. They were certainly not wild warhorses these Romans were riding. Ours in Antioch were much wilder.
Among the spectators, I once saw Valeria Messalina with her brilliant following, and I looked at her curiously. Of course I did not go near her, but from a distance she did not seem as beautiful as I had been told. Her seven-year-old son, whom Emperor Claudius had named Britannicus in honor of his victories in Britain, was a thin pale boy who was obviously afraid of the horse he was riding. He should really have been riding in the lead in these games because of his descent, but this was impossible because his face swelled and his eyes ran as soon as he mounted a horse. After every practice his face had turn
ed scarlet with rash and he could scarcely see ahead of him because of his swollen eyes.
Pleading that the boy was too young, Claudius named Lucius Domitius, son of his niece Domitia Agrippinas, as leader. Lucius was not yet ten but he was quite different from the timid Britannicus, strongly built for his age and a fearless rider. After the practice, he often remained behind alone and did daredevil feats to win the applause of the crowd. He had inherited the reddish hair of the Domitius family, so he liked to take off his helmet during practice to show the people this sign of his ancient and fearless family. But the people praised him more because he was the nephew of Emperor Claudius than because he was a Domitius, for then he had the blood of both Julia, the daughter of Julius Caesar, and Marcus Antonius in his veins. Even Barbus was spurred on to shout in his coarse voice both benign and indecent gibes at him, making the people howl with laughter.
His mother, Agrippina, was for her part said not to dare come and watch the riding practices as the other mothers did, for she was afraid of Valeria Messalina’s envy. Warned by the fate of her sister, she avoided appearing in public as much as possible. But Lucius Domitius did not need his mother’s protection. He won the admiration of the crowd unaided with his boyish conduct. He controlled his body well, moved beautifully and his eyes were bold. The bigger boys did not seem to envy him, but subjected themselves quite willingly to his command during the exercises.
I leaned against the worn polished fence and watched the riding longingly. But my free existence soon came to an end. My father found a dismal tutor of rhetoric who sarcastically corrected every single word I spoke and apparently deliberately made me read aloud from nothing but dull books on self-control, humility and manly deeds. My father seemed to have an infallible gift for appointing tutors who drove me out of my mind.
While the house was being repaired, Barbus and I had a room on the upper floor which was impregnated with the smell of incense and had magical symbols on the walls. I did not take much notice of them, for I thought they had been there since the time of Manilius the astronomer. But I began to sleep badly because of them and have dreams, so that I woke to the sound of my own screams, or Barbus had to wake me up as I whimpered in a nightmare. My tutor also soon tired of the noise and the sound of hammers, and began to take me to the lecture rooms at the baths.