Antonia smiled beneficently and with a trace of humour, and I realised that I must have been letting my feelings play on my face; I immediately blanked my expression and stared at her defiantly.
‘What are your names?’ she asked, sitting on a couch and placing her hands in her lap.
‘I’m Erminatz and this is my—’
‘Let the boy answer for himself.’ She looked at Chlodochar whose gaze fell to the floor.
‘Chlodochar,’ he whispered.
‘Speak up, child.’
‘Chlodochar!’ It was almost a shout.
‘Chlotgelar? No, no, that won’t do, no one will ever remember it.’
My brother raised his eyes and looked at her with apprehension. ‘The soldiers called me Flavus because of my blond hair.’
‘How very sensible of them; Flavus it is then.’ She turned back to me. ‘Arminetz is far too vulgar, Arminus … no, Arminius, yes, that will do, you will be Arminius in Rome.’
‘Yes, Antonia.’
Her eyes flashed. ‘You will always address me as domina.’
I nodded, dumb, aware of the power that those eyes had revealed and not wishing to incur her displeasure again.
‘Good. My husband writes that he wishes you both to be educated here in this house and that shall be so; we shall smooth out the barbarian wrinkles and make you presentable. But be warned, if you don’t apply yourselves to your studies or if you are unruly or disobedient, you will be punished and your status as guests will be reduced to hostages and you will find your freedom greatly curtailed and will be little better off than slaves. Do you understand me?’
To be honest I’m paraphrasing that speech as I had only understood the gist of what she had said but her tone and the words that I had understood were enough for me to nod again. ‘I will explain it to Chlodochar.’
Antonia’s eyes flashed again. ‘To whom, Arminius?’
‘Flavus, domina.’
‘Good, you’re learning.’ Her eyes then moved behind me. ‘I know you’re in there, so come out!’
I turned to see the curtains, which screened off an alcove, part and a boy, not much older than Flavus, stepped from behind them. He walked up to Antonia, with a confidence beyond his years, grinning as he did, and placed a kiss on her proffered cheek.
‘These two boys will be sharing your lessons,’ Antonia informed him, affectionately ruffling his hair.
He looked at us and scowled with a humorous twinkle. ‘They don’t look very clean, Mother.’
And that was how I met one of Rome’s greatest generals, Drusus and Antonia’s eldest son, Tiberius Claudius Nero, who would later be known as Germanicus.
Roman education is a series of hard-won lessons, each more difficult than the last and, having never had a formal lesson in my life, the first came as a shock to me. I had seen writing before – I knew, for example, that the runes engraved on my blade said ‘Erminatz’ – but I never thought that I would have to learn to decipher it; we had slaves who would do that menial job. But, nevertheless, at the beginning of my first lesson I was presented with a list of signs that I was told by my litterator were letters and I had to learn to recognise each one and what sound it represented in a language that I barely knew. As if that were not bad enough, I was sitting alongside two boys, three years my junior, one of whom, Germanicus – I will refer to him as such, although he had not gained the name as yet – had almost mastered this seemingly magical art. He would laugh at my halting renditions of alphabetical sounds and my humiliation at this would make my efforts even more stuttering and unsure so that eventually the litterator would have no option but to apply the rod, and my humiliation would be compounded by being beaten in front of my juniors and also by Flavus’ easy aptitude at what I found so elusive.
However, progress was made; the beatings died down and sitting on the hard wooden benches for hours at a time became bearable. As we improved we were rewarded with more masculine activities such as wrestling and sword handling; but as I was that much bigger than Flavus and Germanicus they were always paired together and I would be facing whomever was teaching us. The result was that I would never win at anything and Flavus and Germanicus became staunch friends. I began to feel very alone and that feeling grew as Germanicus asked his mother for Flavus to move out of the room that he shared with me and into his; which she acceded to and Flavus did with pleasure.
And so passed my first couple of months in Drusus’ house; but I will not linger any longer on them because something happened in late September that changed much.
We were sitting in the peristylium, the courtyard garden at the rear of the house, trying to get to grips with arithmetic, when a messenger, still covered with the filth of the road, was ushered through and into a room at the far end of the garden that was Antonia’s private domain. I thought nothing of it as the black lacquered door was opened to admit him. However, a very short time passed before Antonia appeared; she walked, strangely erect as if she was forcing herself not to collapse, over to our little group beneath a fully laden apple tree.
She looked at Germanicus, her eyes blank of emotion, and without preamble said: ‘Your father has died from injuries inflicted falling from his horse in Germania. You are now head of this household and will be expected to perform those duties at his funeral when his body arrives in Rome next month. Do not let the family down.’ With that she turned and walked as fast as she could, without losing her dignity, into the house. With hindsight I realise that it was to be alone with her profound grief as soon as possible; to have given way to it – or even have her eyes water – in public would have been unacceptable to her.
Flavus and I both looked at Germanicus; his face remained neutral. He placed his stylus and wax tablet on the stone bench beside him, stood and said to the litterator: ‘You will, of course, excuse me.’ He followed his mother, with the same poise, into the house and I had my first lesson in Roman reserve and self-control.
How Germanicus could keep his feelings about the death of his father so locked away at that young age amazed me; it was close to inhuman in my eyes. Flavus told me that, throughout the time that it took Drusus’ funeral cortège to reach Rome, he never once heard him cry at night. During the days he carried on with his lessons as if nothing was the matter and the only difference that I detected was that he did not laugh at me when I made one of my many mistakes; in fact he did not laugh at all.
And then the day came when Drusus’ body entered Rome.
In the few months that I had spent in the city I had not been allowed out of the house, but, on the day of Drusus’ funeral, Flavus and I were expected to join the family in their grief as guests of the household and so we were woken well before dawn. The house was full of sombre activity, quiet and ordered, as the slaves prepared for the return of their master. Flavus and I were fed quickly and then placed by the house steward in the far corner of the atrium with orders to follow the family at a respectful distance.
As the sun crested the eastern horizon, the doors were opened to admit Drusus’ clients, more than two hundred of them – although I found out later that these were only the most prestigious of the few thousand citizens who counted Drusus as their patron. Wearing dark grey togas – called, I soon found out, the toga pulla – they walked with almost theatrical solemnity into the atrium and took up position around the edge of the room. Then Germanicus appeared, leading his mother and sister, and I almost gasped in astonishment: Antonia was holding a baby. I had never heard of a third sibling, no one had ever mentioned it. My curiosity was short-lived; as we followed the family out into the cool morning, to wait for the cortège’s arrival on the steps of the house, a sound floated up from the city below, a sound that I had never heard before: the sound of tens of thousands of voices raised in communal grief. Gradually it grew, coming nearer and nearer until eventually the head of the procession came into view and Drusus’ body could be seen on a bier carried on the shoulders of six men. I looked over to Germanicus and Antonia; neit
her showed the slightest emotion as their dead father and husband was brought home for the last time.
The stench of decomposition preceded the bier but everyone affected not to notice; I had the presence of mind to push Flavus’ hand back down when he attempted to hold his nose.
Antonia gave Germanicus a tap on the shoulder as the procession arrived before the house and halted; he moved forward, bowed his head then turned and preceded the bier up the steps. I had to suppress a smile at the ludicrousness of the sight: the two bearers at the front were so mismatched in size that the bier rocked dangerously with each step. The man on the left was tall, even by our standards, with broad shoulders and a powerful chest; his understandably gloomy features and age – early thirties – suggested that he was Drusus’ brother. His partner on the right, however, was in his mid-fifties and far shorter and thinner; almost to the point that he could be described as spindly. As all the men were in grey mourning togas I had no way of judging the rank of the insignificant-looking man, but I sympathised with his fellow bearers as they struggled to keep the body on the bier.
Behind them came a woman, slightly younger than the spindly man; full cheeks, a prominent straight nose and large eyes that never for a moment left Drusus’ corpse. She held herself erect but walked as if in a trance and I guessed that she must be Drusus’ mother; but the identity of the younger woman following her, shepherding five children aged between twelve and three, shrouded by an air of sorrow, I could not begin to fathom.
The rest of the procession remained outside and Antonia led the family in with Flavus and me being the last people to pass over the threshold. I was not aware of it at the time but as the doors closed I was in the presence of the entire imperial family of Rome; I was at the very centre of Roman power.
The name of the deceased had been called many times by the mourners and the prayers had gone on for an age before a coin for the ferryman was finally placed in Drusus’ mouth and we left the house to make our way to the Campus Martius, to the north of the city walls, where the funeral pyre had been built. Crowds of people followed us and lined the route, putting on theatrical shows of grief: women tore at their hair and clothes, wailing shrilly, whilst men were unafraid to cry openly. I soon realised that grief in Rome was a public commodity and not something to be indulged in privacy and I understood Germanicus’ seeming lack of emotion over the death of his father. As we progressed, he allowed tears to flow freely, as did Antonia and all the other followers and bearers of the bier. An actor led us, wearing Drusus’ death mask and dressed as him in full military uniform, followed by others with the death masks of his forebears; professional mourners whipped up the crowd with heated displays of almost self-flagellatory grief. The atmosphere grew darker and darker as we neared the pyre and the height of the buildings along the route seemed to encase the wails and howling, trapping them so they reverberated around, unable to rise to the heavens.
Such was the infectiousness of the mourning that by the time we reached our destination my mood was black, as if I had lost my own father, and tears were trickling down my cheeks for a man whom I hardly knew and who had defeated my people and taken me hostage. The bier was positioned atop the square pyre of regularly placed logs that looked like a building and the family mounted a large rostrum next to it; my brother and I remained at the foot of the steps. The professional mourners raised their volume to beyond what I thought possible and the wearers of the masks stood still in poses of grief whilst the tens of thousands that looked on howled as if it were their own deaths that they lamented.
As the noise grew to a pitch that left my ears ringing, the spindly man stepped forward and, with a single gesture, silenced the huge crowd in an instant. And then he started to speak and I realised, with a shock, who he was.
‘Today we mourn a son of Rome; a man as dear to me as my adoptive sons, Gaius Julius Caesar and Lucius Julius Caesar, the natural sons of my daughter, Julia.’
The spindly man was the most powerful man in the world: Augustus, the Emperor of the Romans. He pointed to the two eldest boys of the family of five.
‘I pray that when the time comes for their sons to speak their funeral orations that they will have achieved as much honour in Rome’s name as Drusus, a man that I considered to be no less my heir than those two boys.’
It seemed amazing to me that a man so lacking in physical presence, a man who would not stand out in a crowd, a man easily overlooked, could rise to the pinnacle of this martial race; and, as Augustus carried on his eulogy for the next hour, I examined him, curious to find a clue to his power. Although short and slim, he was perfectly proportioned so that if you saw him on his own you would have no idea of his size and would naturally assume him far taller than he really was; he was evidently aware of his stunted stature as I noticed his shoes had thick soles and heels, adding at least two thumb breadths to his height. At home a man would have been mocked for such vanity. His complexion was pale, his hair untidy, sandy curls and his nose Roman, crowned by eyebrows that met at its bridge. I saw nothing in him that could make me believe that he could master men, until his eyes turned in the direction in which I was standing and for a moment they met mine; and then I understood: they were bright and clear and so blue as to be almost grey. They were the eyes of a man of tremendous will, they shone with such intensity that it was almost impossible to endure their gaze for more than a few moments. With eyes like those a man could command others to do whatever he wished.
Augustus gestured to Antonia and to Drusus’ mother and brother to step forward; he presented them to his audience who remained spellbound. ‘I ask you, fellow citizens, to share the grief of Antonia, his wife, and their three children; share the grief of a mother, Livia Drusilla, my wife; and share the grief of a brother, Tiberius Claudius Nero.’ All three held out their hands, beseeching the people of Rome to join in their grief, which they did without reserve.
Augustus allowed the lamentations to go on for a good while before once again gesturing for silence, which was immediate. He looked over to a group of some five hundred men standing on the steps of a building on the other side of the pyre – I later found out that this was Pompey’s Theatre. ‘Conscript Fathers of the Senate, help to assuage our grief, honour Drusus in death in the way that I should have begged you to honour him in life. The fault is mine for not petitioning you to award him the title that he deserves; I take the blame, Conscript Fathers, and I feel the guilt of inaction. For his victories in Germania Magna and the peace treaties that he forged there, the proof of which stands before me.’ He looked directly at Flavus and me and then pointed at us. ‘The sons of Germanic chieftains are here in Rome, not only as hostages to the good behaviour of their fathers but also to make Romans out of them. Drusus has forged for us a new province, securing our borders far to the east; I implore you, Conscript Fathers, honour him and his descendants with the name that he has surely earned: confer on him posthumously the name Germanicus, and let his eldest son be known as such in memory of his father.’
Such was the emotion in his voice and such was the fervour of his request that the Senate, almost as one, shouted: ‘Germanicus!’ The cry was taken up by the people of Rome and, as the chant grew, Augustus walked across to the pyre and took a flaming torch from a slave and thrust it into the oil-soaked wood. The flames leapt high, licking at the bier, sending dark smoke and a shimmering heat-haze skywards. Next to the pyre, men with togas pulled over their heads, covering their hair, sacrificed an ox, ram and boar, removing their hearts to throw into the fire. As the heat intensified, crackling the wood and sizzling the dead flesh, so did the chant, until it must have been audible to every god, both Roman and Germanic.
The Senate and the people of Rome did not stop honouring their beloved son until the fire began to die down and the body was nothing but charred bones; only then did they start to disperse and begin an official period of mourning that would close with the funeral games nine days later.
We returned to the Palatine and life ca
rried on as normal with two exceptions: we were now occasionally allowed out under supervision to join the other boys doing gymnastics, wrestling and training in arms and on horses on the Campus Martius. The second thing was far less enjoyable: although I have referred to Germanicus by that name throughout my story so far to avoid confusion, it was only now that we had to call him that rather than Nero. So every time I spoke his name I was reminded of the defeat of my tribe and, although he did nothing to wrong me, I began to hate him just because of his name.
Rome became my life over the next few years and, although I was never comfortable with being taught in the Roman way, I began to excel in the physical training and managed to achieve adequacy in the schoolroom. My thighs, chest and shoulders developed and I could read and write Latin and Greek as well as speak both languages with little trace of an accent. By the time I was past puberty I was, to all appearances, no different from the boys with whom I trained on the Campus Martius: in short, I was becoming a Roman. My hair was cut regularly, my wispy beard was shaved every day and I had not donned a pair of breeks for five years. I understood the workings of government, the rigidly hierarchical social system and knew the command structure and drills of the legions. But, despite all this, I still kept hidden in my heart a deep love of the Cherusci and a fierce hatred for the people who had forced me to abandon their ways.
This was not true for Flavus; his friendship with Germanicus had grown to the point that the two were inseparable and his love of all things Roman had come to dominate his life to the extent that, even when we were alone, he refused to speak our mother tongue with me. His memory of our homeland grew dim and he began to be contemptuous of the Cherusci’s ‘rustic’ way of life, as he put it, and berated me for not seeing the magnificence that surrounded me or understanding the power that it represented. He became truly Romanised: worshipping their gods, enjoying their spectacles in the arenas or the Circus Maximus and taking pleasure in their food.
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