by Mika Waltari
“Come with me as far as to the bridge over the Tiber,” she begged.
As we came down to the riverbank we saw uneasy clouds appearing low in the sky, reddened by the flares from the city. The rough autumn waters sighed invisibly below us and we smelled the mud and decaying reeds. The girl led me to the bridge which went over to the island of Tiber. In the temple of Aesculapius on the island, heartless masters left their mortally sick and dying slaves for whom they had no further use, and from the other side of the island a bridge went on over to the I4th department of the city, the Jewish Transtiberium. The bridge was not a very pleasant place at night. In the gaps between the clouds there glittered a few autumn stars, the river shone darkly, and the moaning of the sick and dying was carried toward us from the island on the wind like a dirge from the underworld.
The girl leaned over the bridge and spat into the Tiber as a sign of her contempt.
“You spit too,” she said, “or are you afraid of the River God?”
I had no desire to dishonor the Tiber, but after she had teased me for a while I spat too, childish as I was. Simultaneously a shooting star flew over the Tiber in a flashing arc. I think I shall remember until my dying day the swirl of the waters, the uneasy shimmering red clouds, the wine fumes in my head and the crystal star curving across the glossy black Tiber.
The girl pressed herself against me so that I could feel how supple her body was, although she was a head shorter than I.
‹cYour shooting star went from east to west,” she whispered. “I am superstitious. You have lines of happiness on your hands, I’ve noticed. Perhaps you will bring happiness to me too.”
“At least tell me now what your name is,” I said irritably. “I’ve told you mine and I’ve told you about my father. I’m bound to get into trouble at home for staying out so late.”
“Yes, yes, you are but a child,” sighed the girl, taking off her shoes. “I’ll go now, and barefoot too. My shoes have already rubbed my feet so much that I had to lean on you as we walked. Now I no longer need your support. You go home so that you don’t get into trouble because of me.”
But I insisted stubbornly that she should tell me her name. Finally she sighed deeply.
“Do you promise to kiss me on the mouth with your innocent boy’s lips,” she said, “and not be frightened when I tell you my name?”
I said I was neither able nor allowed to touch any girl until I had fulfilled the promise given to the oracle in Daphne, so she was curious.
“We might at least try,” she suggested. “My name is Claudia Plautia Urgulanilla.”
“Claudia,” I repeated, “Are you a Claudian, then?”
She was surprised that I had not recognized her name.
“Do you seriously mean to say that you know nothing about me?” she said. “I can well believe you were born in Syria. My father separated from my mother and I was born five months after the divorce. My father did not take me in his arms but sent me naked to my mother’s threshold. It would have been better if he’d thrown me in the sewers. I have a legal right to bear the name of Claudia, but no honest man either can or will marry me because my father, by his action, illegally declared me to have been born out of wedlock. Do you see why I read his books to find out how mad he really is and why I spit on his image?”
“By all the gods, both known and unknown,” I cried in astonishment, “are you trying to tell me that you are the daughter of Emperor Claudius, you silly girl?”
“Everyone in Rome knows it,” she snapped. “That’s why the senators and knights daren’t greet me in the streets. That’s why I’m hidden away in the country behind Vatican. But fulfill your promise now, I’ve told you my name, although of course I oughtn’t to have done so.”
She dropped her shoes and put her arms around me, although I resisted her. But then both she and the whole affair began to annoy me. I pressed her hard against me and kissed her warm lips in the darkness. And nothing happened to me, although I had broken my promise. Or perhaps the goddess was not offended as I did not even begin to tremble when I kissed the girl. Or perhaps it was because of the promise that I could not tremble when I kissed a girl. I do not know.
Claudia let her hands rest on my shoulders and breathed warmly on my face.
“Promise me, Minutus,” she said, “that you’ll come and see me when you’ve received the man-toga.”
I mumbled that even then I should have to obey my father. But Claudia persisted.
“Now you’ve kissed me,” she said decisively, “you’re bound to me in some way.”
She bent down and hunted for her shoes in the darkness. Then she patted my cold cheek and hurried away. I called after her that I felt in no way bound to her as she had forced her kisses on me, but Claudia had vanished into the night. The wind carried the groans of the sick from the island, the water swirled ominously and I hurried home as quickly as I could. Barbus had searched for me at the library and the forum in vain and was furious with me, but he had not dared tell Aunt Laelia that I had disappeared. Fortunately my father was late as usual.
The following day I asked Aunt Laelia in a roundabout way about Claudia. I told her I had met Claudia Plautia at the library and given her a quill. Aunt Laelia was appalled.
“Don’t you ever get mixed up with that shameless girl,” she said. “Better to run away if you see her again. Emperor Claudius has many times regretted not drowning her, but at the time he didn’t yet dare do such things. The girl’s mother was a big fierce woman. Claudius was afraid of the consequences if he had got rid of the girl. To annoy Claudius, Emperor Gaius would always call Claudia his cousin and I think he dragged her into his immoral life too. Poor Gaius even slept with his own sisters because he thought he was a god. Claudia isn’t received in any of the respectable houses. Anyhow, her mother was killed by a famous gladiator and he wasn’t even prosecuted because he could prove that he was only defending his virtue. Urgulanilla became more and more violent in her love affairs as the years went by.”
I soon forgot Claudia, for my father took me with him to Caere and we stayed there for a month in the winter while he saw to his property. The huge burial mounds of former Etruscan kings and nobles in their countless numbers on each side of the sacred road made a deep impression on me. When the Romans had captured Caere hundreds of years before, they had plundered the old tombs, but there were some large, more recent mounds untouched beside the road. I began to feel respect for my own ancestors. Despite everything my father had told me, I had not imagined that the Etruscans had been such a great people. From Emperor Claudius’ book one could not imagine the melancholy exaltation of these royal tombs. One has to see them with one’s own eyes.
The inhabitants of this now poverty-stricken city avoided going to the burial ground at night and maintained that it was haunted. But in the daytime, travelers walked here to look at the ancient mounds and relief carvings in the plundered tombs. My father took the opportunity to make a collection of old bronze miniatures and holy black clay bowls which the local people found when plowing and digging wells. Collectors had of course already taken away the best bronzes in the time of Augustus, when it was fashionable to collect Etruscan objects. Most of the statuettes had been broken off from the lids of the urns.
I was not interested in farming. Bored, I accompanied my father while he inspected the fields, the olive groves and the vineyards. The poets usually praise the simple life of the country, but I myself felt no more longing to settle there than they had. Around Caere one could hunt only foxes, hares and birds, and I was not very enthusiastic about this kind of hunting which required nothing but traps, snares and lime twigs, and no courage.
From my father’s attitude to his slaves and freedmen who looked after his property, I realized that farming is an expensive pleasure for a city man and that it costs more than it brings in. Only huge estates worked with slave labor can possibly pay, but my father was reluctant to farm in this way.
“I’d rather my subordinates liv
ed happily and had healthy children,” he said. “I’m glad they can be a little better off at my expense. It’s good to know one has a place one can retreat to if one’s fortunes go awry.”
I noticed that the farmers were never satisfied and always complaining. Either it rained too much or it was too dry or the insects destroyed the vines or the olive harvest was so good the price of oil fell. And my father’s underlings did not seem to respect him, but behaved unscrupulously when they saw how good-natured he was. They complained endlessly about their poor houses, their wretched tools and their oxens’ illnesses.
Occasionally my father grew angry and spoke harshly, in contrast to his usual attitude, but then they hurriedly produced a meal for him and offered him chilled white wine. The children tied a wreath around his head and played ring games around him until he was appeased and made new concessions to his tenants and freedmen. In fact, in Caere my father drank so much wine that he hardly saw a sober day there.
In the city of Caere we met several potbellied priests. and merchants who had folds in their eyelids and whose family trees went back a thousand years. They helped my father draw up his own family tree, right back to the year when Lycurgus destroyed the fleet and harbor of Caere. My father also bought a burial place on the holy road in Caere.
Finally a message came from Rome that everything was in order. The Censor had confirmed my father’s request to have his rank of knighthood returned to him. The matter would be put before Emperor
Claudius any day now, so we had to return to Rome. There we waited at home for several days, since we could be summoned to Palatine at any time. Claudius’ secretary, Narcissus, had promised to pick a favorable moment for the case.
The winter was severe; the stone floors in Rome were icy cold and every day people died in the tenements from fumes from ill-cared-for braziers. In the daytime the sun shone and predicted spring, but even the senators unblushingly had braziers put under their ivory stools during the meetings at the Curia. Aunt Laelia complained that the old virtues of Rome had gone. In the time of Augustus, many an old senator would have preferred pneumonia or a lifetime of rheumatism to such unmanly coddling of his body.
Aunt Laelia naturally wanted to see the feast of Lupercalia and the procession, too. She assured us that the Emperor himself was the high priest and we should scarcely be summoned to Palatine on that day. Early on the morning of Idus in February, I accompanied her to as near the ancient fig tree as it was possible to get. Inside the cave the Luper-calias sacrificed a goat in honor of Faunus Lupercus. The priest drew a sign on the foreheads of all the Lupercalias with his bloodstained knife and they all wiped it off again at once with a piece of holy linen which had been steeped in milk. Then they all burst into the ritual communal laughter. The sacred laughter which came from the cave was so loud and terrifying that the crowd stiffened with piety and several distracted women ran ahead down the route the guards were keeping open for the procession with their holy bundles of sticks. In the cave the priests cut the hide of the goat into long strips with their sacrificial knives and then danced their sacred dance down the route. They were all completely naked, laughing the sacred laughter and, with the strips of goatskin, whipping the women who had pushed forward onto the route so that they received bloodstains on their clothes. Dancing in this way, they circled the whole of Palatine Hill.
Aunt Laelia was pleased and said that she had not heard the ritual laughter sound so solemn for many years. A woman who is touched by the Lupercalias’ bloodstained strips of hide becomes pregnant within a year, she explained. It was an infallible remedy for infertility. She regretted that noble women did not want children, for it had been for the most part the wives of ordinary citizens who had come to be scourged by the Lupercalias, and she had not seen a single senator’s wife along the whole route. Some people in the tight-packed crowd of spectators said that they had seen Emperor Claudius in person leaping about and howling as he urged the Lupercalias on to the scourging, but we did not see him. When the procession had circled the hill and turned back to the cave to sacrifice a pregnant bitch, we went home and ate the customary meal of boiled goat meat and wheaten bread baked in the shape of human sexual organs. Aunt Laelia drank wine and expressed pleasure that the wonderful Roman spring was at last on its way after the miserable winter. Just as my father was urging her to take her midday siesta before she began to talk about things which were not suitable for my ears, a messenger slave from Narcissus, the Emperor’s secretary, came running breathlessly in to say that we must go to Palatine at once without delay. We went on foot with only Barbus accompanying us, which surprised the slave considerably. Fortunately we were both suitably clad for the occasion because of the feast.
The slave, who was dressed in white and gold, told us that all the signs were favorable and that the festival rituals had been faultlessly carried out, so Emperor Claudius was in a very good mood. He was still entertaining the Lupercalias in his own rooms, dressed in the robes of the high priest. At the entrance to the palace we were thoroughly searched and Barbus had to stay outside because he was wearing his sword. My father was surprised that even I was searched, although I was a minor.
Narcissus, the Emperor’s freedman and private secretary, was a Greek, emaciated from worries and his prodigious burden of work. He received us with unexpected friendliness, although my father had not sent him a gift. Quite openly he said that at a time which foreboded many changes, it was to the advantage of the State to honor reliable men who knew and remembered whom they had to thank for their position. To confirm this he rustled in the papers concerning my father and extracted a crumpled note which he handed to him.
“It would be best if you yourself took care of this,” he said. “It’s a secret note from Tiberius’ day on your character and habits. They are forgotten matters which are of no importance today.”
My father read the paper, flushed, and hastily thrust it into his clothes. Narcissus went on as if nothing had happened.
“The Emperor is proud of his knowledge and wisdom,” he said, “but he is inclined to fasten on to details and sometimes persists with some old matter for a whole day just to demonstrate his good memory, while forgetting the main point.”
“Who in his youth has not occasionally kept vigil in the groves of Baiae?” my father said in some confusion. “As far as I am concerned all that is in the past. In any case, I don’t know how to thank you. I have been told how strickly Emperor Claudius, and especially Valeria Messalina, watch over the moral conduct of the knights.”
“Perhaps one day I’ll let it be known how you can thank me,” said Narcissus with a bleak smile. “I am said to be a greedy man, but you must not make the mistake of offering me money, Marcus Manilianus. I am the Emperor’s freedman. Thus my property is the Emperor’s property and everything I do as far as I am able is for the best for the Emperor and for the State. But we must hurry, for the most favorable moment is soon after a sacrificial meal when the Emperor is preparing for his siesta.”
He took us to the south reception room, the walls of which were decorated with paintings of the Trojan war. With his own hand, he let down the sun-blind so that the sun should not glare too strongly into the room. Emperor Claudius arrived, supported on each side by his personal slaves who, at a sign from Narcissus, sat him down on the Imperial throne. He was humming the Faunus hymn to himself and he peered at us shortsightedly. When he was seated, he looked more dignified than when standing, although his head kept nodding in different directions. He was easily recognizable from his statues and the replicas of his head on the coins, though now he had spilled wine and sauce on himself during the meal. He was obviously cheered by the wine for the moment and was ready and eager to tackle matters of State before he began to feel sleepy.
Narcissus introduced us and said swiftly, “The matter is quite clear. Here is the family tree, the certificate of income and the Censor’s recommendation. Marcus Mezentius Manilianus has been a prominent member of the city council in Antioch a
nd is deserving of full compensation for the injustice that has been done to him. He himself is not an ambitious man but his son can grow up and serve the State.”
While Emperor Claudius mumbled about his youthful memories of the astronomer Manilius, he unrolled the papers and read here and there in them. My mother’s ancestry captivated him and he ruminated for a while.
“Myrina,” he said. “That was the Queen of the Amazons who fought against the Gorgons, but then it was a Trachian, Mopsus, whom Lycurgus had exiled, who killed her in the end. Myrina was really her divine name. Her earthly name was Batieia. It would have been more suitable if your wife had used this earthly name. Narcissus, make a note of that and put it right in the papers.”
My father reverently thanked the Emperor for this correction and promised to see to it at once that the statue the city of Myrina had erected in memory of my mother would bear the name of Batieia. The Emperor received the impression that my mother had been a famous woman in Myrina as the city had raised a statue of her.
“Your Greek ancestors are very noble, boy,” he said, looking at me benignly with his bloodshot eyes. “Our culture is of Greece but the art of building cities is of Rome. You are pure and handsome like one of my gold coins on which I have had a Latin text imprinted on one side and a Greek on the other. How can such a beautiful and upright boy be called Minutus? That is exaggerated modesty.”
My father hurriedly explained that he had postponed my day of manhood until my name could be placed in the rolls of knights in the temple of Castor and Pollux at the same time. It would be the greatest honor if Emperor Claudius would himself give me a suitable second name.
“I have property in Caere,” he said. “My family goes back to the days when Syracuse destroyed the sea power of Caere. But those are things you know more about than I, Clarissimus.”
“I thought your face was known to me in some way,” cried Claudius in delight. ‘Tour face and eyes I recognize from the murals in the old Etruscan tombs I studied in my youth, although even then they were being destroyed by damp and neglect. If you are called Mezentius, then your son should be named Lausus. Do you know who Lausus was, boy?”